Instructive bad reading, Part IV: Dissecting fascism with the help of “Might is Right”

Editor’s Note: This is part four of a four-part series on the white suprema­cist text Might Is Right and the his­to­ry of Amer­i­can fas­cism. This series looks at how ideas stat­ed out­right in that late nine­teenth cen­tu­ry text have con­tin­ued to have influ­ence into the present day, from Satanists and Chris­t­ian fun­da­men­tal­ists to pale­o­con­ser­v­a­tives and right-wing terrorists.

Jump to Part One | Two | Three | Four

In the pre­vi­ous install­ment, we explored how the author of Might Is Right was so anti­se­mit­ic and dis­mis­sive of any­thing con­nect­ed to Judaism, he was unaware that his crit­i­cisms of Chris­tian­i­ty were com­plete­ly irrel­e­vant to many Amer­i­can sects, then and now, because plen­ty of Chris­t­ian denom­i­na­tions enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly wor­ship pow­er and hier­ar­chy more than a cru­ci­fied Christ.

It’s not clear if this oth­er, unnamed and more mus­cu­lar strain of Chris­tian­i­ty was ever noticed by Anton LaVey when he cribbed so heav­i­ly from Might Is Right to make it the par­tial basis of The Satan­ic Bible. The mock­ery of Chris­tian­i­ty by name seems to have been attrac­tive enough to him to call it blasphemy.

With some mys­ti­cism and his own fla­vor of pre­ten­sion, some­times jok­ing­ly sum­ma­rized as “Ayn Rand with can­dles”, LaVey cre­at­ed the Church of Satan, which can be said to be the well­spring of all mod­ern Satanism.

Overt ref­er­ences to Jew­ish con­spir­a­cies and Negro sav­ages are gone, but he liked the parts about smash­ing your ene­mies instead of lov­ing them and he talks about “reli­gion” with a con­fi­dent uni­ver­sal­ism despite it not being espe­cial­ly rec­og­niz­able to a Recon­struc­tion­ist Jew or Quak­er, let alone a Bud­dhist or Shin­to follower.

LaVey, for his part, does not seem to have been a per­son for whom anti-racism was ever impor­tant. He cul­ti­vat­ed rela­tion­ships with Neo-Nazi occultists like James Madole whose work grew into strains of con­tem­po­rary ter­ror­ism like the Order of the Nine Angels (O9A), and LaVey raised Boyd Rice to a posi­tion of lead­er­ship with­in the Church of Satan despite, or maybe because of, Boyd Rice’s fond­ness for Mein Kampf and Amer­i­can Nazis.

Again, LaVey was born “Lev­ey”, but he grew up in San Fran­cis­co. His idea of rebel­lion and blas­phe­my had a blind spot for what sort of forces were still most pow­er­ful in the Unit­ed States, reli­gious and otherwise.

Writ­ing in the late 1960s, LaVey mused:

A black mass, today, would con­sist of the blas­phem­ing of such “sacred” top­ics as East­ern mys­ti­cism, psy­chi­a­try, the psy­che­del­ic move­ment, ultra-lib­er­al­ism, etc.

Patri­o­tism would be cham­pi­oned, drugs and their gurus would be defiled, acul­tur­al mil­i­tants would be dei­fied, and the deca­dence of eccle­si­as­ti­cal the­olo­gies might even be giv­en a Satan­ic boost.

In oth­er words, LaVey’s con­cep­tion of rebel­lion was to make the same appeals that Richard Nixon’s cam­paign would suc­cess­ful­ly use to gain the pres­i­den­cy two times. This ori­en­ta­tion of pseu­do-rebel­lion has con­tin­ued into the present day.

The Church of Satan’s present leader, Peter H. Gilmore, pro­vid­ed a for­ward to the 2019 “Author­i­ta­tive Edi­tion” of Might Is Right, and else­where explained the polit­i­cal posi­tion of the Church of Satan was open to all, mean­ing fas­cists, too.

It is up to each mem­ber to apply Satanism and deter­mine what polit­i­cal means will reach his/her ends, and they are each sole­ly respon­si­ble for this decision.

While this is sup­pos­ed­ly apo­lit­i­cal, LaVey had and his church still has a strict “no drug use” pol­i­cy, so it’s not as if they had no limits.

But when you say, “We’re okay with fas­cists,” the result is that lots of fas­cists will start to show up in droves any­where they’re tol­er­at­ed, mak­ing their tar­gets uncom­fort­able enough to leave until only fas­cists are left. The per­sis­tent lack of Satanists who are Black in the past half-cen­tu­ry may not be so sur­pris­ing, then.

This idea that “Satanism is rebel­lion and rebel­lion is being will­ing to embrace even fas­cism” ties back in to pro­gres­sive Satanist strains as well.

Although it did­n’t end up using The Satan­ic Bible or Might Is Right as a foun­da­tion­al text, The Satan­ic Tem­ple found­ed in 2013 and made famous by the 2019 doc­u­men­tary Hail Satan?  ties back more direct­ly to Might Is Right by two of its for­ma­tive fig­ures: Shane Bug­bee and Doug Misicko.

The film­mak­er Bug­bee did his own reprint of the book with orig­i­nal illus­tra­tions by Mis­icko, then going by the pseu­do­nym Doug Mesner.

Mis­icko is most famous now as The Satan­ic Tem­ple spokesper­son Lucien Greaves, and has made the pub­lic ori­en­ta­tion of the orga­ni­za­tion oppos­ing white suprema­cy, as in the August 2017 op-ed for the Wash­ing­ton Post, “I’m a founder of The Satan­ic Tem­ple. Don’t blame Satan for white suprema­cy.”

But as part of their col­lab­o­ra­tion on the 2003 re-print­ing, the two men and Bug­bee’s then-fiance Amy Stocky engaged in a twen­ty-four-hour live-stream talk­ing about their appre­ci­a­tion for Might Is Right’s mes­sage.

They also dis­cussed more recent pol­i­tics, like where they dif­fered on the mer­its of white suprema­cist Tim­o­thy McVeigh’s Okla­homa City Bomb­ing and whether killing chil­dren hurt McVeigh’s cause or they were just “cop kids.”

About three hours and twen­ty-eight min­utes in, Bug­bee lists off how his pre­vi­ous edi­tion includ­ed con­tri­bu­tions by white suprema­cist ter­ror­ist David Lane of The Order, George Eric Hawthorne of the band “Racial Holy War (RaHoWa)”, and LaVey, and how that led to oppo­si­tion from some Satanists against Nazis.

This tran­si­tions into a dis­cus­sion between a caller and Bug­bee about how Social Dar­win­ism was ruined by its asso­ci­a­tion to Nazis, which the caller extends to eugen­ics also, prompt­ing Mis­icko to chime in.

“Threw the baby out with the bath­wa­ter, so to speak,” Mis­icko says. “It’s just like, ‘anti­se­mit­ic’ to me isn’t a bad word. It just depends. Like, I think it’s okay to hate Jews if you hate them because they’re Jew­ish and they wear a stu­pid [exple­tive] fris­bee on their head and walk around think­ing they’re God’s cho­sen people.”

Mis­icko clar­i­fies that it’s not okay to hate non-prac­tic­ing Jews, how­ev­er, lead­ing to Bug­bee and Stocky to dis­agree while mak­ing increas­ing­ly aggres­sive claims about not lik­ing any­one with a drop of Jew­ish blood as well as argu­ing about who actu­al­ly died in the Holocaust.

When asked if he’s Jew­ish him­self, Mis­ick­o’s retort is, “I’m an Aryan king!”

As late as 2015, Mis­icko was using free­dom of speech to jus­ti­fy pub­licly step­ping away from a speak­ing pan­el in sol­i­dar­i­ty with the neo-Nazi August Sol Invic­tus, and in Jan­u­ary 2017, Mis­icko over­rode a local chap­ter in Cal­i­for­nia to tell the right wing media hate site Bre­it­bart that The Satan­ic Tem­ple opposed counter-protest­ing Milo Yiannopoulus, at least pri­or to Yiannopoulus’s pro-child rape com­ments com­ing out a month later.

This is not to say that Mis­icko is him­self a fas­cist or The Satan­ic Tem­ple is a cryp­to-fas­cist orga­ni­za­tion, any more than The Church of Satan was.

Bug­bee left The Satan­ic Tem­ple ear­ly on and the oth­er founder and co-own­er is Cevin Sol­ing, or “Mal­colm Jar­ry”, a self-described “sec­u­lar Jew.”

And yet, hear­ing some­one is opposed to reli­gious tyran­ny sounds a bit dif­fer­ent when they’ve admit­ted they includ­ed peo­ple who wear yarmulkes as being wor­thy of their ire, just as “free speech” ends up being lit­tle more than a euphemism when it’s used to defend white suprema­cists rather than fight non-dis­clo­sure agree­ments or pro­tect union organizing.

When, pri­or to found­ing The Satan­ic Tem­ple, Sol­ing went on Rus­sia Today to bemoan how pub­lic schools are more author­i­tar­i­an now and func­tion more like deten­tion cen­ters than edu­ca­tion facil­i­ties, a lot of left-lean­ing peo­ple would agree with that. But when Sol­ing’s expla­na­tion is that schools now have to enforce order on a het­ero­ge­neous pop­u­la­tion rather than a homoge­nous group of stu­dents, your ears ought to perk up a little.

Often we don’t hear any­thing because white lib­er­als are by some mea­sures more like­ly to jus­ti­fy their sup­port poli­cies result­ing in school seg­re­ga­tion than con­ser­v­a­tives when it involves their own children.

It is easy to see the racism in black and white pho­tographs of those “gap-toothed racists” in Mis­sis­sip­pi, but it’s much hard­er to rec­og­nize it in our­selves when we’re pay­ing for pri­vate schools, tutors, or mov­ing to school dis­tricts in places that were his­tor­i­cal­ly hos­tile to minori­ties while we vote to keep them that way in the name of “neigh­bor­hood character.”

Whether some­one uses a grotesque­ly racist slur to jus­ti­fy not want­i­ng to send their child to school with Black kids or dress­es it up in the nice pair of shoes of “giv­ing my child the best oppor­tu­ni­ty”, it does­n’t much mat­ter when the result is the same.

It would be nice if there were some uni­fy­ing short­hand for fas­cism and its suc­cubus twin racism, but there isn’t. We must pay close attention.

The book’s ideas are not imme­di­ate­ly iden­ti­fi­able by any sin­gle aes­thet­ic because as much as Satanism is cen­tral to Might Is Right’s his­to­ry per­sist­ing as a spe­cif­ic work, Satanism has no real pow­er in the world.

The preach­er who tells his con­gre­ga­tion to sup­port their “Wolf-King” in the White House is exhibit­ing the same ideas cham­pi­oned by Might Is Right despite the preach­er appeal­ing often to God and label­ing all his ene­mies the tools of Satan.

Again, the best thing that can be said of Might Is Right is that is bad­ly writ­ten. There is no dress­ing up of any­thing, just sheer big­otry shout­ed in the most odi­ous, pre­ten­tious, and art­less way possible.

Hav­ing seen the ur-fas­cism of a mediocre late nine­teenth cen­tu­ry white suprema­cist, misog­y­nist, anti­semite and ardent cap­i­tal­ist throw­ing racial epi­thets across sev­er­al hun­dred pages, it becomes much eas­i­er to rec­og­nize when the same argu­ments are being made with more abstract­ness or appar­ent kindness.

Might Is Right would argue Ariel Cas­tro — who kid­napped,  sex­u­al­ly assault­ed, and impreg­nat­ed three women for a decade in Cleve­land before one of his vic­tims escaped in 2013 — did noth­ing wrong except be found out, just as the author argued that slavers were right to take their kid­napped women as they would.

Read­ing Might Is Right, you should find it much hard­er to per­form apol­o­gism for the Unit­ed States’ own promi­nent slavers and slave-catch­ers see­ing where that same log­ic springs from and how far it goes.

If you ever attempt to read Might Is Right, its high­est virtue is that it is so unap­peal­ing it makes obvi­ous what sort of soci­ety it’s advo­cat­ing for: the rule of rich white men to do exact­ly as they please and the forcible sub­ju­ga­tion of all oth­er peo­ple in ser­vice to them.

It would be nice if that meant it had no appeal to any­one, but his­to­ry has shown time and again that it does, par­tic­u­lar­ly to young white men.

In that sense, it is dan­ger­ous. How­ev­er, the book is large­ly dan­ger­ous because it’s not received in a vac­u­um; it’s received in the con­text of a world already shaped by its ideas in their sub­tler, qui­eter, politer forms. This is fer­tile ground each time the ideas of hier­ar­chy and con­trol renew them­selves in their true forms with­in pri­vate con­ver­sa­tions, neglect­ed sub­cul­tures, and anony­mous Inter­net forums.

A year ago at the Gilroy Gar­lic Fes­ti­val, eighty miles south of San Fran­cis­co, a nine­teen year old man engaged in a mass shoot­ing, wound­ing sev­en­teen peo­ple, killing three, and result­ing in his own death. One of the last mes­sages he post­ed encour­aged peo­ple to read this awful book while decry­ing the “hordes of mes­ti­zos” and “Sil­i­con Val­ley white twats” that were mov­ing to the area.

We have to under­stand the mes­sage is just as seri­ous when it does­n’t include rude words, when it’s Tuck­er Carl­son decry­ing “diver­si­ty” and “wok­e­ness” to his mil­lions of view­ers while wear­ing a tie.

We have to pay close atten­tion. The real gift of Might Is Right is that it says what it does so bad­ly we have no rea­son to be con­fused by any­one else say­ing it even if they man­age to do it more polite­ly, art­ful­ly, or abstractly.

Jump to Part One | Two | Three | Four