A Grotesque Spectacle

Ramblings on In-Group Rituals, Alienation, and Exhaustion

‘The Third of May, 1808 in Madrid’ by Francisco Goya

“Lord, protect me from my friends; I can take care of my enemies.”

― Voltaire

For months I have been feeling a bit out of sorts, as if I am no longer in phase with the moment. This disconnection has been growing even as I find my spiritual path and community connection to The Satanic Temple strengthening. This feeling has recently come into focus after watching the responses to a triple shot of cultural shock waves; the murder of Charlie Kirk, Donald Trump and RFK Jr.’s unhinged announcement regarding Tylenol and autism, and the industrial scene drama around Dark Force Fest booking then un-booking Hate Dept. These three incidents and the posturing they’ve spawned have exhausted me, and in this exhaustion, it dawned on me how grotesque are all these rituals we are performing.

As I tend to write with the intention of putting distance between publication and the events themselves I want to quickly go over what happened in the event people have forgotten some of the details. Things move fast, intentionally so, therefore quick refresher is in order. Or maybe you never heard about one or more of these events. In that case you will need to be brought up to speed on what happened.

Turning Point .30-06

Before a bullet tore through his neck in Utah, Charlie Kirk was almost exclusively known by the chronically online. A provocateur and propagandist, the 31 year old founder of Turning Point USA made whatever name he had for himself “debating” undergrads across the United States then cutting together the best clips for YouTube and TikTok in a pastiche of free and open discourse. It’s the same tired script of Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder where billionaire backed, media trained pundits debate undergrads because debating actual peers tends to end poorly for them.

In more controlled environments, like podcasts or conservative rallies, Kirk was much more clear about his Christian Nationalism. Here are just a few quotes compiled by The Guardian so you can understand who Charlie Kirk was in his own words.

If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.
– The Charlie Kirk Show, 23 January 2024

Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.
– The Charlie Kirk Show, 19 May 2023

Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge.
– Discussing news of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s engagement on The Charlie Kirk Show, 26 August 2025

We need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor. We need it immediately.
– The Charlie Kirk Show, 1 April 2024

The great replacement strategy, which is well under way every single day in our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different.

– The Charlie Kirk Show, 1 March 2024

Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.
– Charlie Kirk social media post, 8 September 2025

There is no separation of church and state. It’s a fabrication, it’s a fiction, it’s not in the constitution. It’s made up by secular humanists.
– The Charlie Kirk Show, 6 July 2022

But his most famous quote is what turned internet fame into a true, cultural symbol on September 10th, 2025. “I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the second amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.” Of course Charlie never intended to sacrifice his blood to the Second Amendment, of that I am sure, but he did and now he is more important as a dead man than he ever was as a person. Charlie Kirk is now a symbol and symbols can live forever because they can be repurposed and reshaped by any and all for the cause. Me included.

Ah! See Da Minnow Fin?

Shortly after Kirk’s murder, Donald Trump, flanked by RJK Jr. and the conspiracy brained weirdos that he’s helped put into power at the FDA and CDC, announced that Tylenol, aka acetaminophen or paracetamol, is linked to autism when taken by mothers in pregnancy. This seems to be based on a meta-review done by the Harvard University’s Chan School of Public Health (an institution that Trump has previously labelled as “woke” and he now wants ‘nothing less than $500m’ from in an ongoing feud with the university) but even that review was very gentle in its guidance as Tylenol is the only over the counter pain and fever relief available to those who are pregnant.

This has resulted in significant drop in the manufacturer’s stock, which has rebounded, renewed hope for lawsuits against the manufacturer including thousands of new complaints calling to get the existing suits revived or institute new ones, as well as providing cover for the largely unregulated and unproved pseudo-sciences of herbalism and homeopathy. Unsurprisingly the MAHA crowd in Washington have or have had interests in various companies that will benefit from this policy change.

No More Minority - No More Suck Dry

The final bit of outrage I want to talk about is Dark Force Festival, an annual industrial festival run by the VampireFreaks crew, booking industrial legacy act Hate Dept. for the 2026 edition of the festival. Normally a band that falls somewhere between ‘Where are the now’ and ‘I didn’t know they were still around’ would be a pleasant surprise for the old-heads and a bit of a curiosity for the youths who maybe never heard of them. But not in 2025, and not in a scene so steeped in culture war lore.

Steven Siebold, Hate Dept.’s founder and only regular member, has decided that the best thing to do in this period of frayed nerves is to embrace contrarianism, cloaking it in irony and scene “values” by adding The Gothsicle’s Brian Graupner and Imperative Reaction’s Ted Phelps to his live band. Both Brian and Ted are formerly respected, one might even say beloved in Brian’s case, frontmen who have fully embraced MAGA’s hateful anti-trans rhetoric along with a number of other right-wing conspiracies and grifts. Steven’s choice of bandmates is the typical ‘I’m an enlightened centrist but I’m actually a libertarian poking the left but never poking the right’ schtick that 90s conservative talk-radio fans of his generation have done since I was 20. It’s the no attention as bad attention ethos of edgy Gen Xers. It’s all so boring yet way too effective.

Once Hate Dept.’s live members were announced, there was a massive reaction and counter-reaction amongst festival goers and the general industrial scene. Attendees, vendors, and others spoke out against Hate Dept.’s inclusion at the festival. While others, of the more right-wing bent which includes Siebold himself in an open letter, appealed to people to still attend and just leave during Hate Dept.’s set if you truly couldn’t stand the music or the people playing the music. Eventually Dark Force Fest caved to the pressure and removed Hate Dept. from the bill.

If things ended there it would have been fine but the industrial scene is basically middle school with facial piercings, tattoos, and pipe-cleaner hair so it did not. For a couple of weeks now both sides have been ramping up their rhetoric and in-group signalling. The right-wingers scream free speech while writing their own cancel lists while many of those opposed to Hate Dept.’s presence continue to push the promoters of Dark Force Fest because they should have known better. Having been on VampireFreaks, I would never expect that any hyper-user or administrator on that site would know better.

Ritualized Outrage and Signalling

Each of these situations resulted in what has now become a bizarre, craven ritual of tribalism and demonization. Each side rushed to generate memes, create Facebook groups, and capitalize on the situation with merch and viral videos.

After her husband’s bizarre hybrid memorial/rally Erika Kirk was targeted with a claim that she had launched a new dating app, Faith and Fellowship, and that she was already on it! While the dating app meme is a hoax and a lie, it is true that fundraisers for the multi-millionaire Erika Kirk have raised over $9.5 million dollars, ostensibly for her and her kids. The anti-Kirk side, on the other hand, has done everything they can to capitalize on his death, too. The most garish of the examples I have seen are the t-shirts of the still of Charlie holding his neck immediately before he collapsed to the ground but they are far from the only ones I’ve seen. Another example is a certain splinter group running off to immediately announce that they were leading a service entitled “No Sympathy for Fascist” in apparent response to The Satanic Temple’s statement against political violence which had no demand or request for sympathy for Charlie Kirk’s death, only a reminder that we stand against political violence as matters of principle and practicality.

The other two incidents that followed Kirk’s murder proceeded similarly. The MAGA and MAHA cultists celebrated across the internet while anti-cultists rushed memes to the internet and designs to their RedBubble shops. Others used this opportunity to insert aspie supremacy dog whistles into the conversation, getting them amplified by the uninformed and unwary. The Hate. Dept. drama immediately led to multiple new Facebook groups (a Gen X staple), calls for civility and boycott, DJs who I have never heard play Hate Dept. loudly proclaiming they’re dropping Hate Dept. from their sets, and a group of self-proclaimed free speech defenders drawing up a list of enemies to be silenced.

If only the world could be powered by irony and stupidity.

Of course, this isn’t just irony and stupidity. Irony and stupidity is at best a symptom of the cultural disease I am ranting about while me reducing and simplifying the complexities of this human foible to irony and stupidity is nothing less than me surrendering to this sickness. It’s all so exhausting, so alienating. I am so tired.

A Godless Hysteria

One of the best definitions of religion comes from Brit Hartley, paraphrasing Emil Brunner, who says that religion provides us orientation within the cosmos. Trying to understand why we are here and what we should do while here are ancient questions that still go unanswered.

For much of the last two millennia, at least in the West, Abrahamic religions have provided the default answer but in the shadows of 9/11, various religious abuse scandals, the role of the church in multiple genocides, and the reckoning with our colonial past has made relationships with God and His institutions impossible for many, even if one was not personally harmed by Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. The New Atheists offered thoughtful critiques and convincing rhetoric against Western theism but never truly found a suitable replacement for the good of organized religion. We’ve been unmoored from collective meaning and purpose to face the end of history devoid of direction, our spiritual compass smashed.

Even in calmest waters this mass spiritual deconstruction would have been culturally devastating but we’ve hardly been drifting in peaceful seas. Pax Americana has been beset by a loss of faith in democracy, multiple financial crises, technological disruptions, a growing wealth divide, a re-ordering of the world powers, and the start of the new epoch which promises mass extinction and environmental destruction throughout the 21st century. We’re being buffeted by storms far bigger than any one of us without a clear sense of direction or purpose. In many ways we find ourselves in post-modern neo-nature similar to the Hobbes’s state of nature from Leviathan. Life once again feels “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

It is out of the maelstrom of meaninglessness that new, godless religions have begun to form; at least that is the theory of Tara Isabella Burton in her book Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World. This is an argument that I find very compelling, partly because as a Temple Satanist I am an adherent to a godless religion, and partly because it provides the best explanatory power of anything I have read on the vile polemics of our times. I can see the zealotry of the new religions of wellness culture, conspiracy theories, and social justice playing out in the three incidents I laid out and in others, including the 2024 TST schism. This is why MAHA threw out the Tylenol they’ve been taking for years and rushed out to stock up on leucovorin from iHerb. It’s why a bunch of MAGA cultists who struggle to pay their bills will rush out to donate money to someone worth $12 million USD. And it is why a bunch of people who aligned themselves with an anti-authoritarian religion that is expressly non-violent felt betrayed when they realized that anti-authority doesn’t mean no authority or that we won’t make exceptions in our beliefs for people we find icky. All of these reactions are based on religious fervour rather than reflective thought.

It’s this godless, religious hysteria that makes this all so exhausting. Their rituals are not familiar, but their crusades are usually cloaked in an insider language that is both familiar and unfamiliar to the outsiders they are trying to bring into their cause as their words have secret, double meanings. The fact that these people are often trying to address real issues or needs that, if done with less zeal and more rational thought, I would not find objectionable, only adds to the propagandic allure. Eating better IS a good thing. Our political leaders DO favour the wealthy elite over us. Minorities SHOULDN’T be scapegoated. But somewhere, between eating more fruits and vegetables, and coffee enemas, there is a fuzzy line where one crosses from health conscious to health fanaticism, with the further over that line one goes the more improbable coming back to a consensus reality becomes. The same can be said with concerns about government corruption and social justice causes. I’m not sure where those lines are, but they’re definitely well before spewing conspiracies from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion or launching a years long harassment campaign because someone disagreed with your thoughts on what does or does not constitute arbitrary authority.

Material Horrors

The true horror of all of this is that this exhaustive signalling and pandering breeds apathy for real problems. Charlie Kirk advocated for unconscionably evil policies. MAGA and MAHA are actively going to get people killed with their anti-science vilification of medicine, women, and autistic people. No industrial act should be allowed to take the stage if they hold beliefs that would erase the queer, trans, sex-worker positive history of this music. Everyone who is mad at Charlie Kirk, Donald Trump, RFK Jr., Hate Dept. and even Dark Force Fest are right to be. MAGA, MAHA, and their supporters have unequivocally made the world less safe for all of us, but those who take the bait, give in to their worst impulses, also play a role in making the world less safe, too. Good intentions are not enough. Signalling you are on the right side of history is not enough.

What To Do About It?

Somehow people need to find the time, space, and personal will to engage in constant thoughtful negotiation with our spiritual beliefs. We need to find a way to extend, not retract, our circles of care. We must not give in to the nihilism of hopelessness and abandon what is right for what is easier; checking out or joining up.

I’m starting by sharing my reflections and asking you all to share yours, either with me here or with other people you care about. Surrounding yourself with doers, not fretters, certainly helps. LaVey’s energy vampires come in all shapes and sizes after all. Connect with your feelings and your friends in meaningful ways. Sit with your emotions until you can name them. Once named, at least you know what you are fighting against.