As the possibility of war in Ukraine gradually unfolded yesterday (as of the time of this writing, Russia has now invaded and declared war with Ukraine), with Russian and Ukrainian troops gathering in the eastern Ukraine after the sham “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk were declared sovereign states by Vladimir Putin, I caught a Twitter thread from a Finnish liberal (well, I suppose he much prefers the term “leftist”) named Janne M. Korhonen, who argued that Putin’s actions in Ukraine were part of a broader plan to undermine and ultimately bring down the European Union. Korhonen’s idea of “the left”, or what “the left” should be, of course boils down to support for Nordic social democracy, which is essentially just capitalism with a human face as guided by the ideals of an ideology of progressive welfarism, and to preserve this order he feels that Finland should join with NATO in the hopes of protecting Finland from the possibility of being drawn into a war with Russia. Suffice it say, as far as “leftism” goes this certainly is fairly weak.
I will say that there are a number of valid points that Korhonen raises when he’s talking about Russian actions within Ukraine and the reasons why Finland and the Baltic states would fear any hint of Russian aggression or even expansion in Europe. However, the part of Korhonen’s thread that I wish to bring into focus is his overall narrative that what’s happening represents a struggle between “democracy” (referring to the West, of course) and autocracy (referring to competing imperialist dictatorships such as Russia and China). I find this to merely be liberal version of a phenomenon found in some corners of the left that is referred to as campism. Campism is a vulgar form of anti-imperialist analysis that frames the world as divided between, as the name suggests, two geopolitical camps; one “imperialist”, the other one “anti-imperialist”. In contemporary Marxist or even some non-Marxist socialist movements (and honestly even some nationalist and fascist circles), this means seeing the “imperialist” camp as consisting of the West, particularly the USA and NATO, and the “anti-imperialist” camp as any nation that can be seen to actively oppose the US-NATO sphere of influence, such as Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, and Syria. The campist approach to anti-imperialist politics typically entails uncompromising support for the latter “anti-imperialist” camp of nations, often regardless of whether said nations could even be called socialist countries or even regardless of their actual imperialist actions (such as Russia’s actions in Ukraine, Georgia, and Chechnya). But of course, the liberal has their own version of campism in practice. From the liberal standpoint, if Russia is doing imperialism, then surely NATO is the anti-imperialist party in all this, regardless of the nature of Western imperialism and the atrocities involved in its continuance, and if Russia represents autocracy and authoritarianism then the West must be the party of democratic freedom, regardless of the oppressions that plague the Western world.
It is on this note that I would highlight an important and disturbing development from the so-called “leader of the free world” that is the United States of America, or more specifically the state of Texas. On February 22nd, Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced that, according to the Office of the Attorney General, gender affirmation surgery constitutes “child abuse” under Texas law, and further announced that the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services would be directed to investigate any reported instances of children receiving gender affirmation surgery in Texas, and investigate the parents of the children who receive them. All licensed professionals and even members of the general public are now required to report to the authorities on such surgeries, and those who refuse to report to the state will be subject to criminal penalties.
What this means is that it is illegal for trans children to undergo gender affirmation surgery in order to embody their real gender identity, since Texas law deems this to be “child abuse”, and that the parents of trans children can be arrested and investigated by the state for supporting the individuality of their children, along with any medical professionals who facilitate gender affirmation surgery. This is oppression. This is oppressing people for being trans. And it’s not like this is too big a surprise considering that the same state also implemented a law that allowed basically anyone to sue anyone for providing an abortion, thus oppressing reproductive rights through the incentives of the legal system.
Some may think “at least the US isn’t Russia!”. Maybe. Technically they’re right that the entirety of the US doesn’t work the way Russia does, and even in Texas there aren’t brutal crackdowns of LGBT protests, or at least none that I know of. But even then, such an objection misses the point. Oppression is oppression, and it does not matter what form your oppression takes. And besides, Texas is not the only US state that is oppressing trans children. In Florida, schools are permitted to carry out invasive “physical examinations” of children to make sure they aren’t trans, so as to enforce a ban on trans athletes competing in sporting events. Something similar has been proposed by Republican lawmakers in Utah, who want to ban trans students from competing in sports events and enforce that ban through a commission that would examine the bodies of children to make sure they’re eligible to compete (read: to make sure they’re not trans). And even outside the issue of LGBT rights itself, are we really going to ignore the fact that certain states are trying to ban books and make it practically illegal to protest against police brutality?
The United States of America is at this point an increasingly oppressive country. Its media can’t even acknowledge the issue of trans rights, without first pointing to how Russia banned trans people from adopting children, as though you’re supposed to be grateful that you don’t live in Russia, as if you’re not supposed to see that there is more than one oppressive country in the world. In this sense, just as pro-Russian campism obscures the real dynamics of imperialism as a global system by ignoring the way Russia engages in flat out imperialist aggression, and putting you squarely on the side of authoritarianism for as long as it means opposing the USA and NATO, so too does liberal pro-Western campism obscure or even sometimes excuse the nature of oppression as it takes place in the US and similar countries, such as the oppression of trans people that can be seen at present. Besides, the American liberal may whine that Russia is worse, but this is only because they cannot conceive the American conservative constructing a more systematic and equally brutal hierarchy of oppression than what exists in Russia. Oh, and for any British liberals who might be reading this, don’t fall asleep; Britain is much nicer to trans people than America is at the moments. You won’t see too many British conservatives gas on about the way God supposedly made you, but you will see even the Labour Party support the oppression of trans people – they’ve even tried to cover it up.
To return to Korhonen’s thread, which I used as a springboard for this much broader discussion, I will say straightforwardly that one of my disagreements with Korhonen is his belief that “violence cannot build a sustainable world”. To be frank, I think that Korhonen is simply wrong here. The entire geopolitical order of liberal-democratic that Korhonen so lauds was built and maintained through violence; whether that’s the revolutionary violence that inaugurated the age of bourgeois republics in the dawn of the Enlightenment, the war and revolutionary violence that was waged against chattel slavery in order to abolish it, the violence of the police force and system of incarceration that was created ultimately to defend the privilege of private property, the war that was waged to stop Nazism or fascism from taking over the whole world, and the conflict between the West and the so-called “communist states” that led up to the so-called “end of history”, culminating in the geopolitical order we see today. And not only is the world we live in built on some form of violence or another, so were all worlds before it, and so perhaps will whatever world succeeds this one – that may well be true for communists and anarchists, since how else is the capitalist state and the global system of imperialism to be defeated? Korhonen, thus, is wrong.
And the whole reason I raise this point is that in addition to creating new worlds, it is often necessary in order to preserve life and freedom. I have said before, not long ago, that the US left should consider being prepared for all-out war with the reactionaries that are increasingly threatening their lives. In the wake of the new Texas legislation, it is not unreasonable to see similar calls for militarization in order to resist the abject oppression being put forward. Only active resistance to oppression will lead to the triumph of liberation and the defeat of oppression. “Reform”, insofar as it still maintains the mechanisms of oppression, will still support oppression. Oppression and imperialism are global systems, and should be fought on those terms. Campism, thus, means consignment to an illusory perspective of the world, which serves only to hinder the struggle against oppression on behalf of one of the oppressors.
Janne Korhonen is thus only faintly correct in framing our situation in terms of democracy versus autocracy, if we refer specifically to Ukraine versus Russia, insofar as at least in Ukraine you could vote for Zelensky or someone else and vote out whoever’s in charge. That’s not much, but the same can’t be said for Russia. But if we’re talking about some bigger narrative of the democratic West, led by America, versus Russia, as a contestation between the principles of democratic freedom versus authoritarian autocracy, that’s just detached from reality when you look at the oppression being carried out right now. Whereas Janne Korhonen would say that the world is democracy versus autocracy, I prefer to see that the world is oppression versus oppression, and the real war worth fighting is the war against the global system of oppression.
It may seem strange to discuss both the thread, the war in Ukraine, and the mounting US oppression of trans people in the same post, but in a weird way it all kind of comes together, once we try to consider the claim that we’re dealing in the world that Korhonen would hope we do. Plus, all of this is going on at the same time, and neither can be readily ignored in favour of the other. Suffice it to say this has been an eventful timeline in more ways than we might prefer.
In closing: this should go without saying, but my solidarity goes to the oppressed trans people in the United States of America, to anyone in America who plans to fight this oppression, to the people of Ukraine escaping and fighting Russian invasion, to the Russian anti-war protesters who risk being brutally curtailed by Putin’s fascist thugs, and to the working class and anarchists in Ukraine, Russia, and Russian-controlled territories who are actively fighting imperialist war and oppresion in their lands!
One of the things that convinces me that Progress is ultimately a convenient fiction is the constant reinvention of the Satanic Panic. It was only back in 2015 that here in the UK we already saw the revival of the Satanic Panic in the Hampstead scare, in which several people were accused of abducting, trafficking, raping, and killing children, all in a school in Hampstead, and even though those charges were soon dismissed and proven false, the basic idea continued to live in for a pack of conspiracy theorists who continued to pursue the phantom of Satanic conspiracy. Then of course there was PizzaGate, the belief that Democratic Party elites were abducting and molesting children at the basements of Comet Pizza, which eventually gave way to QAnon, a much larger conspiracy theory in which “satanic” pedophiles were abusing and sacrificing children but also were in the process of being secretly arrested by Donald Trump, a belief that persists in the American far-right to this day. Then of course there was the Satanic Panic being concocted against Lil Nas X for his Satan shoes and the Montero music video they accompanied. And now, there’s a new Satanic Panic centered around Travis Scott, the rapper whose recent Astroworld concert ended in a riot in which 8 people died.
Let’s get into the background of what happened before we go any further. On November 5th, the rapper Travis Scott performed at the Astroworld Festival in Houston, Texas. Apparently his appearance was met with a surge of fans rushing to the stage, which the escalated into widespread panic and violence. As the crush was happening, multiple fans were pleading with the festival personnel and shouting out to Travis Scott to stop the festival and to alert them to people dying, but these pleas were ignored. As a result, eight people are known to have died and the cause of the crush is still under investigation. But that hasn’t stopped certain reactionary conspiracists from getting the wrong idea.
Christian TikTok users have claimed that the stage at Astroworld resembles an inverted cross leading to a portal to Hell, suggesting that Astroworld was actually a Satanic ritual, which Travis Scott supposedly set up to deliberately kill people. Another supposed piece of evidence consists of a shirt he wore of humans walking through a door and emerging with horns, apparently proving Scott’s “Satanic” inclinations. Some users on Twitter compared the Astroworld Festival to some Hieronymus Bosch paintings depicting Hell, even though they’re probably meant to just be based on the cover of his album, Astroworld. Some people took the presence of an apparently winged creature above the stage as proof that his destival is all about Hell. One person claimed that Astroworld was “666 months + 6 days after the founding of the Church of Satan”. Others have tied the Satanic conspiracy angle to anti-vaccine conspiracies, alleging that Covid-19 vaccines made people susceptible to demonic trances that Scott’s music supposedly caused.
All of this is obviously complete nonsense. Travis Scott is not a Satanist, neither is Drake for that matter, and even if they were, odds are they would not have planned mass sacrifice. If anything, if that was the idea, you’d think that the event would be more clandestine and the death toll would be much higher than eight people. Vaccines most definitely do not cause any trances, let alone of the kind that have been called “demonic possession”, and even if they did it seems nonsensical to think that the effect would require you to go to a music festival to manifest. People can get into vaguely ecstatic states all the time in music festivals without the help of vaccines, demons, or even drugs. We don’t really know what happened as far as causes are concerned, but the fact that people have constantly complained before the concert about a lack of security and exits allows us to suggest that the people organising the Astroworld Festival were cutting corners; not spending enough money or effort on the safety of the festival attendees. As for Scott himself, I honestly don’t know why he just straight up ignored pleas to stop the show, but it seems to me that you don’t need demons in your head to be an asshole. Humans have managed to be sufficiently horrible either without demonic influences or, if anything, with the full support of their “better angels”.
I will say, incidentally, that the whole concept of demonic trances being involved is kind of fascinating to me mostly because of my research into pre-Christian beliefs. Possession by spirits was not an uncommon concept in the Greek and Vedic cultures, and it wasn’t always seen as a bad thing. In fact, states of nympholepsy in Greece or being “mounted by the gods” in African indigenous traditions were holy experiences that transgressed the boundary between self a d the uncanny other and, in a way, united participants with the gods. More importantly, divine possession was a key part of the mysteries of Dionysus, which were often targeted by authorities of the state cults of Rome for their apparently subversive nature, with Dionysus sharing important traits with our modern Devil. These are important considerations for anyone seeking to embody the Left Hand Path in a Pagan context.
But, at any rate, none of the facts about Astroworld, Travis Scott, or supposed Satanic rites are going to stop people from continuing to believe in Satanic Panics. It doesn’t even have to involve real conspiracies, such as the kind that the Order of Nine Angles and Tempel ov Blood are at this point known for (and kind of open about if anything), because the Panic depends almost entirely on fictitious events and false narratives of conspiracy, as these are what manufacture legitimacy for reactionary outrages against the marginalized. I’d also argue that the prevalence of Satanic Panic is to a point where, even though The Satanic Temple is an exception in that they’re covered all too favorably by mainstream media, one of the only times the media can actually criticizes The Satanic Temple is if they can throw in a something about orgies being involved. The funniest part about all of this is that Travis Scott and lots of pop musicians can be accused of being part of an elite Satanic cult bent on human sacrifice, but with black metal or death metal bands, plenty of whom are explicitly dedicated to Satanism, aren’t really subject to the same conspiracy theory treatment, even when some black metal musicians actually do commit crimes. I wonder why that is, and to be honest it makes me think that this sort of shit never is actually about Satanism per se.
And if you think about it, subtle forms of this exist even outside Satanism. We were all mad about Cuties, but as bad as it might have been, I’ve seen anime on Netflix with some at least moderately fucked up stuff in it involving childlike characters, but you wouldn’t hear anything about that except for occasional defence because it was made by Japanese guys instead of a woman from Somalia. As much as I denounced Michel Foucault last year, I have to point out that more recent accusations of him having raped children in Tunisia were immediately debunked and then walked back in the absence of evidence, and yet nonetheless were and are still taken as unquestionable truth to this day, which I’m retrospect had me wondering just how much else levelled against him isn’t as it seems, even if still arguably questionable at the end of it. And we all like to talk about harm and abuse, but we’re never consistent about it because it’s never about that. Take the Foucault accusations again. At worst, he dated 17-year olds, which is still bad, don’t get me wrong, but remember when rock and early heavy metal musicians would date teenagers and for some reason nobody complained even though you could legitimately say that was suspect? Keep in mind, this was all around the same time Foucault was still alive (he died in 1984). In fact I’m willing to bet the same baby boomers who join the TERF bandwagon about queers and trans people being pedophiles didn’t used to have a problem with cis straight rockers fucking young groupies back when they were young.
We’re almost all victims of the fact that the lie travels half way around the world before the truth gets a word in, and the lie has a habit of appealling to a complex of instincts that even people who think of themselves as transgressive or skeptical still have a hard time overcoming. And maybe that’s because truth such as it can be called isn’t a revelation but a continuous learning curb. But of course, the broad contours of that are things I should like to explore another day.
Scene from Astroworld Festival; Failed rap concert or portal to Hell? Definitely the former, but you wouldn’t know it from TikTok.
With blatantly tyrannical laws on abortion set to be in place in Texas, and the state set to become the land where freedom dies in endless lawsuits, The Satanic Temple have predictably jumped at the opportunity to prove themselves fighters for reproductive rights and social freedom against Christian theocracy and authoritarianism, and many progressives have rushed to validate that image while the mainstream media portrays them as some sort of last hope against the Christian right. Oh, if only it were that simple. I too have contemplated seriously the idea that it might be necessary to join them in order to oppose theocracy. Bah! As if that would do any good!
I stumbled on an article written by Jinx Strange on Luciferian Dominion explaining that The Satanic Temple actually knows nothing about the law, especially on abortion. The Satanic Temple seems to think that by casting abortions as “Satanic rituals”, without any self-awareness of how compromises their own intentions, they can play the religious freedom card and demand the right to perform abortions and store and distribute abortifcacents as an exemption from Texas law on the grounds that, for The Satanic Temple, abortion is a religious right. The Satanic Temple seems to have ignored the fact that, in the United States, appeals to religious freedom do not protect you from state laws, meaning that TST would still be subject to Texas state law and would be denied the right to perform abortions and store/distribute abortifacents.
Strange goes through a lot of information showing us how bad and incompetent The Satanic Temple has been over the years, but for our purposes, the most important bit of information Strange mentions, and something that you definitely will never hear talked about in mainstream media coverage of The Satanic Temple, is that although The Satanic Temple now claims to want to oppose a law that would make it possible to sue abortion providers out of existence on religious grounds, The Satanic Temple themselves sued Planned Parenthood in Texas on “religious” grounds for not granting them the right to perform abortions as a religious ceremony, despite previously stating that they had no plans to sue clinics that would not provide abortions unless they defied a court order. And that was in February of this year! When someone named Caitlin Van Horn on Twitter drew attention to this, The Satanic Temple via their Twitter account asserted that the case in question was a filing for a temporary restraining order for the state to declare that Texas abortion restrictions do not apply to them. When Caitlin criticized TST for apparently dragging abortion providers into court, TST denied that charge and insisted that said providers can’t grant their desired exemption without the court order. When Caitlin pointed out that many other abortion advocacy groups have managed to fight TRAP (Targeted restrictions on abortion providers) laws without bringing abortion providers to court, TST dismissed this and asserted that they are fighting for religious exemption. The Satanic Temple also tried to place a gag order on someone who wanted to back out of a legal case that they were going forward with since 2016.
Suffice it to say, The Satanic Temple have been doing exactly the same thing that Texas wants to make normal, just that when TST did it they were trying to fight for themselves to have abortion ceremonies, and they seem to just treat lawsuits surrounding abortion rights as a way to accumulate fame and perhaps wealth, they don’t really seem to care about the actual people involved or their struggles. But again, you will not hear much about this in the media’s coverage of The Satanic Temple because the media is trying to portray them as crusaders for women’s rights and secular freedoms. Well that image might have been impactful, indeed sort of truthful, back in the old days of 2014 when they were actually taking on local governments with the Baphomet statue stunt, but it just doesn’t mean anything now, and is essentially nothing more than media bluster that obscures their true nature.
With the exception of Lucien Greaves defending Milo Yiannopolous or TST hiring Marc Randazza as their free speech lawyer, you will not hear anything in the mainstream media that contradicts TST’s image as a progressive secular advocacy movement bravely taking the fight to religious governments on behalf of reason and scientific enlightenment, because, quite frankly, the media wants a group like The Satanic Temple to represent the side of liberal values in a bourgeois culture war. To that end, you will even see outlets like Raw Story invent Satanic Temple quotes out of thin air to make them seem reasonable.
So, on those grounds, I can’t side with The Satanic Temple at all, I cannot in good conscience treat The Satanic Temple as being the right side of the fight for abortion rights, and I can’t say that they are anything other than a publicity racket propped up by opportunistic reactionaries who care more about their own vanity and self-created authority than the people they claim to be helping. Even with the Texas law set to take effect, The Satanic Temple have no leg to stand on in fighting it, and beyond that it seems like they are simply incapable of doing anything of substance, and apparently have been all along for years. Fuck The Satanic Temple and their skeleton goats.
You probably remember Tempel ov Blood, the extremist wing of the Order of Nine Angles which itself is already a violent neo-Nazi organization. A few weeks ago I talked about them in relation to E. A. Koetting’s possible involvement, as part of broader and ongoing conversation about E. A. Koetting and Become A Living God and their possible role in spawning far-right terrorism. Now it seems there’s another new development, this time concerning Tempel ov Blood’s founder, Joshua Caleb Sutter. You may remember him too. He was the guy that the DPRK hired to be one of their American spokespersons, and he was also a prominent white supremacist, member and sometimes leader of several white supremacist Christian groups such as Aryan Nations (for whom he served as their “minister for Islamic liasions”), who tried to form alliances between white supremacists and Islamic extremists after the 9/11 attacks, and then he spent some time as a Hindu priest before eventually entering the Order of Nine Angles. It turns out that the DPRK wasn’t the only power who made use of his services.
It has recently come to light that Joshua Caleb Sutter may have been on the payroll of the Federal Investigation Bureau, one of America’s primary intelligence and counter-terrorism agencies. A recent motion filed by Kaleb Cole, a leader of the Atomwaffen Division, to suppress evidence that was found during a search warrant of his house in Texas has yielded some indication that Sutter was an FBI informant. The motion mentions an informant referred to as “CI”, who is described as a convicted felon who owns a publishing company that distributes white supremacist writings. “CI” apparently served as an informant in the warrant against Cole, and according to the government he had worked for the FBI since 2003, for which he was apparently paid upwards of $140,000. Since February 7th 2018, he was apparently paid $78,133.20, as well as an expense advance of $4,378.60. “CI” is said to have begun his career as an FBI informant after being arrested for possession of a firearm with an obliterated serial number and an unregistered silencer, his services as an informant having been offered by Sutter and accepted by the FBI in exchange for a consideration of his sentence. The motion to suppress evidence is based at least part on the assertion that “CI” is not a reliable source, presumably because of him being an FBI informant.
The motion does not mention Joshua Caleb Sutter by name anywhere, but there are several facts we can point to that establish Joshua Caleb Sutter as the likely identity of “CI”. “CI” is said to have begun working for the FBI in 2003, and that his career began after he was convicted of illegal possession of a firearm. In February 2003, Joshua Caleb Sutter was arrested and convicted for knowingly possesing a firearm with an obliterated serial number and an unregistered silencer. It’s mentioned that “CI” owns a publishing company that distributes white supremacist writings. Joshua Caleb Sutter and his wife run Martinet Press, an “antinomian” publisher known for releasing material from Tempel ov Blood, including Liber 333 and Iron Gates. There is also a peculiar case where, in 2016, a man named William A. White wrote to the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania to request records on Joshua Caleb Sutter after learning of his arrest. White alleged that Sutter spent 22 months in prison following his arrest in 2003 and then became a deep cover informant for an unlawful FBI-JTTF counter-intelligence program and, as part of this, stole White’s identity and engaged in various other illegal activities. Sutter has also been suspected of being a “government snitch” in the past. In 2005, Morris Gullett, a pastor for Aryan Nations, accused Sutter of being exactly that, belieivng Sutter to be responsible for his arrest as well as that of Charles Thornton for conspiracy to commit bank robbery.
So, based on the information available to us, Joshua Caleb Sutter is very likely, if not undoubtedly, the identity of the “CI” referred to in the motion filing. This would mean that Joshua Caleb Sutter is an FBI informant, has been working for the FBI since 2003, and was paid tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars for his work. This would also mean that the FBI propped up Martinent Press, which we should keep in mind was founded in 2014, 11 years after Sutter is to have become an informant for the FBI. The money he made working for the FBI would no doubt have financed the operation of Martinet Press and allowed them to distribute all kinds of Nazi Satanist literature. Considering that Martinet Press is operated by Sutter and his wife during his career as an informant, Martinet Press could be seen as an FBI asset, at least in the sense that it is being operated by an FBI informant, which would mean in turn that the FBI is helping to distribute white supremacist Nazi Satanist literature, thereby contributing to countless people falling into the deepest and most extreme corners of fascism.
But should we be surprised? The Wolverine Watchmen, a group of far-right extremists who plotted to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, apparently had about a dozen informants in its ranks, who under the direction of the FBI were heavily involved in the kidnapping attempt from the beginning and worked to advance the plot. The leader of the Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio, was an FBI informant and long-time undercover operative who worked for investigators after being arrested in 2012, not unlike Sutter apparently becoming an informant after his own arrest in 2003, and Tarrio has claimed that over the years he has informed police about planned Proud Boys rallies. The United States government has aided neo-Nazi groups such as the Azov Battalion, a Ukranian neo-Nazi militia that has been incorporated into the country’s national guard, sending them millions of dollars worth of weapons and aid in order for them to serve as proxies against Russia, and whose personnel were even trained by the US military. The FBI has also protected Nazis in the past. In the 1980s and 1990s, the FBI sought to protect the Romanian right-wing propagandist Ferenc Koreh, who spent World War II calling for the persecution of Jews and then went on to work for Radio Free Europe, from investigations by the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) on the grounds that the case against him was supposedly forged by the Romanian “communist” intelligence agencies, despite Koreh admitting to much of his past. J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI for nearly 50 years, personally blocked investigations of former Nazis working as informants on similar grounds; he thought they were victims of a forging operation by the KGB. And, as far as clerical fascists go, for all the complaints directed at the ending of US occupation of Afghanistan, we should note that it was the US whose training and funding of the Mujahideen in order to overthrow the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan and fight its Soviet backers that gave rise to the Taliban who took over Afghanistan and now control it once again.
What do we take from all of this? Those in the Left Hand Path community should cultivate an intense distrust of US intelligence agencies on principle, on the grounds that we know that US intelligence has a habit of protecting and hiring Nazis for their own purposes – a fact that should not be lost on us just because the FBI seems to be publicly emphasizing the threat posed by white supremacists in recent years. In fact, when we consider the history of US intelligence agencies regarding fascism, this is just the pot calling the kettle black. The political left too should heed this basic lesson in mind. Of course, we shouldn’t need to emphasize this too much within the left, since the radical left is already well-attuned to the shady nature of US intelligence, but from what I can see it seems that there are some “leftists” who still haven’t taken that lesson to heart. In any case, we should consider Martinet Press as a vehicle for transmitting violent white supremacist fascism on the payroll of the FBI, and that US intelligence agencies are complicit in the spread and protection of fascism. Whether it’s the Left Hand Path or the left-wing, we should all take that information to heart as the basis for skepticism of US intelligence – not that we should need such a lesson, considering the last 20 years of them pulling the wool over our eyes on Afghanistan and Iraq.
The Jacob McKelvy saga has reached what could well be its conclusion. After several delays and trial dates kicked down like a can down the road, his trial date was eventually pushed to July 1st, and this time the court setting has been met. The judge ruled that Jacob was indeed guilty of sexually assaulting a child between age of 14 and 17, but instead of being sentenced to prison it seems his penatly is listed as a probation lasting until June 30th 2031. It seems he has been given what’s known as a “deferred adjudication of guilt”, which in Texas law is basically a form of probation that allows you to keep your conviction out of criminal record (though apparently you still have to declare that status). Below are the updated records for Case 154761501010 – 3 (Sexual assault of a child aged 14-17).
The other case, aggravated sexual assault against a child under 14, was apparently dismissed in court. The reason given for this dismissal is that Jacob was convicted on another charge, namely the charge we have already discussed above.
So what this means is that Jacob was convicted, he was determined to be guilty of sexually assaulting a child in a court of law, but somehow, instead of facing incarceration for his crime, he has been given yet another chance to walk free despite literally being a child molester! A person under deferred adjudication can avoid jail or prison, and if said person completes the probation given to them then their conviction can be completely overturned. In other words, all Jacob has to do is fulfill whatever the conditions of his probation are for the next ten years and he can stay out of the big house and eventually clear his criminal record, thereby he’ll be a free man and officially a law-abiding citizen, all while still having molested a child and having gone practically unpunished. At this point the only hope that Jacob’s victims and their families have of seeing justice is if he violates his probation somehow, because if he does then the judge could revoke his probation and sentence him to prison, or alternatively if he somehow winds up dead before that happens.
I’m not under any illusion that my efforts were to have much of an effect on his actual court outcome, but I did reach out to as many people as I could to ensure awareness of his crimes would spread off the back of the hope that maybe it would ensure that he wouldn’t go free for molesting a kid. I’m guessing all of that wasn’t enough. But hey, at least we have a huge dossier on Jacob McKelvy, his crimes, and his attempt to cover his tracks, along with several other articles on Jacob McKelvy. And just for the road, I’d like to bookend this article with the mugshot I managed to get from the Harris County Sheriff’s Office. This is a redacted mugshot that was taken when he was originally arrested in 2017. I want this to serve as a very public reminder of his offense and of his criminal status as a convicted child molester, who has walked free despite that only because of Texas’ corrupt and broken justice system that allows sexual predators to roam free if their attorney can bargain with the courts sufficiently. I would hope that this and everything else I’ve compiled finds its way somehow into the hands of anyone in a position to give Jacob a job or any sort sort opportunities to form connections or establish himself as an upstanding citizen. Yes, Jacob needs to be cancelled as thoroughly as possible. I know normally that’s rather low and unfashionable these days because of how eager everyone is to talk about “cancel culture”, but the cold reality of this case is that this is the best shot anybody has at ensuring that this vile predator doesn’t get any silver lining in life that he doesn’t deserve.
Until next time, Jacob. I’m sure your next grift lies just around the corner, and when it appears I’ll expose it. You may walk free now, but if I get any scent of malfeasance and chicanery from you, then I’ll expose it, and I’ll be on your case as many times as I need to be until you finally face justice.
Well, it looks like there’s been a rather pernicious development in the Jacob McKelvy case. Remember when I mentioned in my dossier that Jacob was suppoed to be tried on March 31st but his trial got delayed to April 16th? Looks like that happened again, right before the next trial date was supposed to happen. Now the trial is set to take place on May 19th, over a month from now.
To be honest, I have no real idea what happened to make this happen. Maybe his lawyers just in the nick of time managed to bargain with the court at Harris County to delay the trial yet again. Maybe there’s been some bureaucratic screw-up. But whatever happened it means that Jacob will continue to remain out of custody, and perhaps there will be headaches for anyone involved in the trial. Apart from waiting around for a new prosecutor, and maybe scooping up any lingering new leads on Jacob and making sure word continues to spread about his antics, there’s not much that can be done except hang on tight and maybe beat the drum some more while the court keeps kicking the can down the road.
As always, continue be on the look out for any new updates on the Jacob McKelvy case.
The latest lead relating to Jacob McKelvy concerns the “Empowerment” Conference. This conference seems to be run in CT Church, based in Houston, Texas, and is run by Pastor Don Nordin, who also runs CT Church with his wife Susan Hordin. The exact aim of these conferences is rather opaque, but from their website you can gather that’s essentially an expanded conversation on evangelical Christian teachings and give tips on how to run ministries. Their logo also seems to look like a rip-off of Enron’s logo for some reason. By an astonishing coincidence, both CT Church and Enron were based in Houston, Texas.
From what I have been informed, not much of Jacob’s involvement with the conferences remains, but there is some photographic evidence around. Below you will see a photo of Jacob at this conference, accompanied by Robert Hogan and Don Nordin.
It’s possible that this conference also contains a clue as to his activities following his arrest. Below you will see a close-up of the same photo.
The pair of pants or trousers that Jacob is wearing lift up towards the ankle area, as though portruding from the rest of the trousers. The possibility is that this would be suitable for concealing an ankle bracelet, which would have been fitted to Jacob’s leg following release from custody. After he was arrested, Jacob spent all of two days in jail before having $30,000 made by a bondsman, at which point he was released from jail pending trial and possible sentencing, which has since been delayed for four years now. Now, since he was in custody for only a few days, that would have been enough time for the evangelicals around him to have not yet figured out what we happening, for Jacob to come up with some sort of story to tell them about his misadventures and absence. But before long, Jacob would have needed attorneys to prolong his legal case in order to keep him out of prison, or eventually get his case dismissed entirely so that he can get that ankle bracelet off of him and be a free man again. This can become seriously expensive business, so Jacob would have needed money to keep paying the fees to keep his attorney’s services on hand. Eventually he would keep begging the evangelicals for money, and after giving him a chance at first they would eventually get sick of it and ask why he always seemed to be strapped for cash, at which point they may have figured out that he needed to keep paying attorneys to prolong a criminal case for his child sexual abuse charges, and then they would start shunning him afterwards.
There is, however, a problem. A close look at these screenshots shows a hashtag, #EC16, meaning Empowerment Conference 2016, the year before Jacob’s arrest, though I imagine not terribly long after his “conversion”, since these usually take place every September. Either they used an old powerpoint slide and forgot to update it for some reason, or this actually did take place in 2016, shortly after Jacob’s “conversion”. And to be honest, the latter date makes the most sense. If we go by the Empowerment Conference’s website, part of their enterprise involves supporting people in creating ministries. Jacob may have gone there to get some business tips before eventually incorporating the Jacob McKelvy Ministries proper. Not to mention, by September 2017, Jacob had already started the band Temple of Perdition under the name Ya’akov Nahash, and the evangelicals surely already scrubbed any references to Jacob some months after his arrest. Furthermore, if you look at the Twitter account for CT Church, they haven’t posted anything since August 2020 for some reason, but you’ll find promotional notices for Empowerment Conferences in 2017 and 2018, though 2019 and 2016 are absent from their feed. I can’t explain why the 2019 conference is absent, but the absence of 2016’s conference makes some sense. I’m told that all traces of the conference Jacob attended have disappeared. If I can still find evidence of the 2017 conference having been announced and taken place from CT Church media, but not the 2016 one, it’s logical to assume that it was the 2016 conference that was to be erased, not the 2017 one. Perhaps the trousers simply happened to be convenient for the ankle bracelet that would be fitted on him a year after the conference, and CT Church was simply doing what all the other evangelicals were doing in getting rid of all references to Jacob after the arrest, presumably after being contacted about the matter by either the Hogans or somebody else.
The last thing to note is that apparently there may be trolls coming from a website called “Our Spiritual Quest”, which features an article promoting Jacob’s conversion narrative and photographic evidence of the Empowerment Conference. If indeed there are trolls on that website, it would be best for me to use this archive link to refer to the article rather than draw their attention here with the real one.
Three months ago I wrote a post about the current status of the Jacob McKelvy Ministries for the purpose of inquiry. In that post, I noted that the Jacob McKelvy Ministries had ceased operations in 2019, having dissolved following the forfeiture of its tax franchise. I had no idea what could have happened for his ministry to just disappear like that. At the time, I thought that either he had committed some tax fraud, or some other crime, or just didn’t make enough donation money for his ministry to survive. As it turns out, however, McKelvy may have been up to much worse.
Someone by the name of Barthel Abraham alerted me to two criminal cases recorded by the office of the Harris Country District Clerk, whose records are publicly available to anyone who manages to log on to their website. It seems that, on April 13th 2017, little under a month after he incorporated the Jacob McKelvy Ministries, Jacob McKelvy received two charges of child sexual assualt; one charge was the aggravated sexual assault of a child under the age of 14, and the other seems to have been the sexual assault of a child aged 14-17. Yes, you heard that correctly. Jacob McKelvy, as of 2017, has been charged with raping minors. You can log in to the Harris County District Clerk office website to find out for yourself if you doubt me, but these are active criminal cases that are on public record.
The basic facts are that Jacob McKelvy was arrested in April 2017, he has had emergency protection orders placed on him (those are basically orders that can be placed upon an abuser of any kind at any time after their arrest to prevent any additional harm being done), he is still waiting for a new trial, which is scheduled for March 31st this year, and he even has a set bond worth $30,000 and a bondsman assigned to him, though it seems he is not currently in custody for the moment. I’m sure once he gets his next trial and if he’s found guilty he’ll be doing some serious prison time. The aggravated child sexual assault case is considered a first degree felony, while the other offence is considered a second degree felony, the former can get you sentenced between 5 and 99 years or even life in prison while the latter can get you between 2 and 20 years in prison, so, all told, if McKelvy is found guilty pending his new trial, there’s a chance he could be going to prison for a long time indeed.
As a side-note, as I keep looking for information on McKelvy’s criminal case, it turns out that Jacob McKelvy has a bigger criminal history than I thought. In 1999, he was arrested for the possession of marijuana. That itself I would not consider to be wrong (I don’t even think marijuana should be illegal but that’s neither here nor there), but it was considered a criminal offence according to Texas law, so he was arrested, served his time, and was released on a $1,000 bail. There’s also an apparent case where, in 2002, he was arrested for theft and later released on bail. Now that’s definitely more serious. Indeed, it’s actually quite striking how McKelvy managed to get himself incarcerated twice in succession, just three years after the first time. In fact, I’m certain that this pattern dovetails nicely with his noted history of con-artistry in relation to the Greater Church of Lucifer and other Luciferians, not to mention his apparently still being registered as a Mormon while being the leader of the GCOL, suggestive of his overall deviousness.
Curiously, Jacob McKelvy still has a Facebook page, where he used a photo of himself from a GCOL opening in Costa Rica as his profile picture but goes by a new name: Baal Ben Shem. It seems to be inactive and I can longer see his account or send anything his way, but before I wrote this post it went by another name: Ya’akov Ben Nahash. I know that Nahash means “serpent”, and given this I suspect that this identification with the serpent is a call back to his former days as the leader of the Greater Church of Lucifer, which is consistent with his GCOL profile picture. Ya’akov, of course, is a Hebraic way of saying of Jacob, his real name, and so his new handle would thus read as “Jacob, son of the serpent”. It is a name that easily calls back to his former days as a self-styled (or so-called) Luciferian, likely in reference to the serpent in the Garden of Eden. If this is supposed to be a clever way to mask his real name and thereby hide his real identity, it’s a very pathetic attempt to cover himself, but then that he uses the photo from his GCOL days suggests that he has no intention of hiding anything. The account seems to have been created in 2016, and as far as I can remember Jacob defintely did have an account before that time when he was leader of the GCOL. As a matter of fact, it’s the same account that was originally named “Jacob McKelvy”.
Check out this Facebook post from Janet Key Newman Lynchard, who was a congregant for the Spring First Church Assembly of God, and you will see a link on this post to Jacob McKelvy’s Facebook account; hover over that link, and you will see the bio that now says Ya’akov ben Nahash, which confirms that they are indeed the same person (have this screenshot for posterity in case Lynchard ever finds out and decides to go back and delete it). Lynchard’s post might also be one of the only available pieces of evidence, on social media at least, left for Jacob’s born-again Christian act from 2016-17. Apparently both Robert Hogan, who you will remember as the pastor of Spring First Church who was seen with Jacob McKelvy and his wife during their public “conversion”, and his son David Hogan, who was the executive pastor for Spring First, have removed all references to Jacob McKelvy from their social media accounts. You’ll still find videos from evangelical YouTube channels and articles from local news and Christian media outlets fawning over the story of the “ex-Satanist” Jacob becoming a born-again, but most evidence of any ties between Jacob and the Hogans seems to have vanished from the face of the earth. When I looked for the Jacob McKelvy Ministries website in December, I couldn’t find it anywhere.
It’s entirely possible that the Hogans eventually discovered that Jacob had been using their movement as another front for con artistry, as from what I’ve heard there are people who noticed that Jacob did a similar “born again” act at completely different churches, warning others that he is a phony, and Michael W. Ford himself was busy warning other churches that Jacob was fraudster and a con artist. It’s may also be equally possible that the Hogans did not figure it out at least at the time, and instead decided to disassociate from him after his arrest in April 2017. It’s very reasonable to expect that anyone, including Christian pastors, would not want risk their reputation by having someone accused of the rape of minors in their company, and it seems reasonable to assume that they would have discovered the fact that McKelvy was in jail and waiting for a grand jury trial not longer after his arrest, so they would have scrambled to remove any trace of association with a man now known locally as a criminal rapist. This would also have direct relevance to the fate of the Jacob McKelvy Ministries, since the commission of a crime is a cause for involuntary forteitfure of assets according to Texas law. Of course, that the ministry just sat there for less than two years anyway is a bit curious. I can only assume that either someone took over the ministry, or it was just left to lapse into death after his arrest.
What’s fascinating, and perhaps bewildering, is the fact that, if you look at the Ya’akov ben Nahash account as it stands today, you won’t see any trace of his conversion to Christianity left. Not only is his profile picture that photo he took for the GCOL, but the cover photo he uses is a blasphemous depiction of Jesus as a half-human and half-skeleton figure, brandishing a stang staff wreathed in serpents in one hand and the lower jaw of some dead animal on the other, wearing a robe that bears some esoteric symbols. It’s possible that this is not simply a call back to his former Luciferianism, but a signal to anti-cosmic Satanism, suggesting that he has since exited Christianity and converted to said anti-cosmic Satanism. How did this happen? I believe I can answer this question, and to do that I’d like to direct you another aspect of this whole saga, one where things take a somewhat interesting turn.
It seems that Ya’akov ben Nahash, or Yaakov Nahash, is also the name of a musician who played for a Christian black metal band called Temple of Perdition, where he was the main guitarist as well as backing vocalist and keyboard performer. In fact, there is a separate “Musician/Band” account on Facebook which goes by Kosem Ya’akov ben Nahash. To be honest, I’m utterly convinced that the Ya’akov Nahash from Temple of Perdition is in fact none other than Jacob McKelvy, the very same Ya’akov ben Nahash from before, and in the scope of this post I hope I can adequately demonstrate why that is.
First of all, there are few band photos of Yaakov Nahash, but if you look at them you’ll notice that in most of them he is wearing some sort of mask; a white mask that covers the top half of his face and sports some portruding fangs like those a vampire. But from the bottom half of his face you can see a beard that looks rather similar to the beard sported familiarly by Jacob McKelvy. I will attempt to demonstrate my point below through a gallery of images, showing both Jacob McKelvy from his GCOL and post-GCOL days and Yaakov Nahash’s band photos side by side for you to judge for yourself.
And if you needed further proof to identify Jacob McKelvy with Yaakov Nahash, there are other band photos of Yaakov were he just looks like a man made of stone, and you can clearly see the resemblance to Jacob McKelvy. There is even a poster on what it seems was once the website of Temple of Perdition where you can find a poster of Yaakov that very clearly gives away his likeness as Jacob McKelvy.
If this is not enough to establish that the two are the same person, then we should take note of the biographical details that Yaakov has given out. On the Metal Archives page for Temple of Perdition we see that the band is based in both the US and Finland, having been formed between American and Finnish musicians (Yaakov Nahash and Corey Sorrenti from the US and Joonas Heikinen and Benaiah from Finland). The bio for Yaakov Nahash that we find on Metal Archives tells us very little about him, but it states that his real name is Jacob and that he resides in the United States. Other sources state that Yaakov formed the band out of Texas, where Jacob McKelvy resided and was also arrested. In fact, there’s a Bandcamp page for Temple of Perdition that lists their location as Spring, Texas. This is the same place where the GCOL headquarters was established in 2015, and is the same location that is listed as Jacob McKelvy’s residence on his Facebook account, which now goes by the name of Ya’akov ben Nahash. In an interview for Metal Mofos, Yaakov mentions that he was raised Mormon. From Michael W. Ford’s statement for the GCOL on Jacob McKelvy, which Satanicviews has recounted on his blog, Jacob McKelvy was a Mormon before he met Ford and in fact was still registered as a Mormon even while he was leader of the Greater Church of Lucifer. The Christian Metal Wiki seems to refer to Yaakov Nahash as “a former Satanist”, which, albeit from their perspective, is consistent with the narrative presented by McKelvy during his supposed conversion at Spring First Church. In fact, in Temple of Perdition’s song “Homage to the Dead“, from their EP of the same name which was released in 2019, we see a clear lyrical reference to this narrative in their lyrics. Here is the relevant section of the lyrics:
I was once a Lucifer’s child
Worshiped only myself
Then I saw a blinding light
That brought me out of hell
It spoke to me in vision sight
As many night and days fell
see the world with his eyes
A God made flesh will prevail
This is clearly his reflection on his “conversion” away from Luciferianism from a Christian perspective. Furthermore, the song opens with the lyrics “I was dead inside, She was taken from me”, which references the death of McKelvy’s sister, which is brought up as inspiration for his supposed childhood path to Satanism. But what’s even more strange is that, despite this, Yaakov insisted that the band was never intended to be a Christian band, and not a “Satanic” band either, merely a band with edgy criticism of religion. This is despite not only their then-label, Vision of God Records (a US-based label for overtly Christian metal bands), advertising them as Christian, but also their lyrics displaying a clear Christian theme. Homage to the Dead, besides chiefly being about Yaakov/Jacob’s “conversion”, talks very explicity about Jesus having died “for me”, demons bowing before him, and having Yaakov/Jacob washed in his blood. “Mstr Hchvshm” is a song that seems to be song condemning certain Christian preachers who make money off of their believers through deception, a point that must surely seem ironic considering the fact that Yaakov Nashash appears in fact to be Jacob McKelvy, the same man who grifted both Luciferians and Christians for profit. “Betrayal of Eve” is very obviously about the story of Adam and Eve and their temptation by the serpent (ironically a serpent is also part of Yaakov Nahash’s namesake, though perhaps not the same serpent). “The Last Temptation”, which features Rotting Christ’s own Sakis Tolis himself as a guest vocalist, recounts the Biblical story of Jesus facing temptation in the desert by “Satan”, and ends in a monologue about the fate of the souls who died and went to Hell (very non-Christian content I’m sure). “Symphony of the Flesh God” appears to be an indictment of people who “wield Satan’s torch” while representing the name of God, committing atrocities and devoting themselves to Mammon while calling themselves men of God. “Adonai” is all about God, and specifically about coming to terms with God in your life, “finding him” as it were. Although some songs like “Priests of Perdition” and to an extent “Symphony of the Flesh God” can be seen in a broader context of religious criticism, it seems that a great deal of the band’s lyrical content, contrary to Yaakov’s assertion, can be described as explicitly Christian. The albums do not show who the main writer for lyrics is, but I’m fairly certain that Yaakov is the main writer, and “Homage to the Dead” is a good enough clue at least.
In this sense, Temple of Perdition established themselves as a burgeoning Christian black metal act. This no doubt was to be Jacob’s next grift, targeting Christians once again, but for a grift it seems to have had at least some success, and somehow Jacob managed to get the notice of some serious talent in the world of metal music. There’s Sakis Tolis, of course, who is a well-established household name in metal internationally, as is his band Rotting Christ, but also Joonas Heikinen, the drummer for the Christian death metal band Renascent. Later on they picked up Ronny Hansen, the lead vocalist for Antestor, Steve Reishus, a drummer who played in Crimson Thorn and Taking the Head of Goliath, Luke Renno, a vocalist from those same bands, and a female vocalist named Henna Ojala. The bands mentioned here are all famous, mostly within the Christian metal scene, but the fact that the band got Sakis Tolis’ attention enough for him to volunteer as a guest vocalist tells me that the band certainly wasn’t a complete waste of effort. In fact, after listening to them myself over the course of my investigation, I find that their actual musical output has been more than decent (“Adonai” for instance, stands out in particular). But despite all of that, the band was not to last, and it is here that we come to that part where Jacob/Yaakov went from born-again Christian to anti-cosmic Satanist.
When the band started in September 2017, it was clear that they were going to pursue Christian lyrical content, albeit with a tendency towards religious criticism. This is reflected in their first album, Tetragrammaton, which they released in 2018. Over time, however, the line-up for the band shifted significantly and frequently, with two of the original members leaving the band and being replaced with new ones in rapid succession. Supposedly it can be traced to disagreements over religion within the band. At some point in 2019, the band apparently ceased to call itself a Christian band, they parted ways with Vision of God Records, Christian musicians left the band while Yaakov continued to play under a more “secular” approach, an approach which somehow did not preclude Kabbalistic and Hermetic influences or the release of songs entitled “Ode to Yah” (very secular I’m sure). And then, something all the stranger occurred. In June 2019, it was announced that Nahash had disbanded Temple of Perdition, claiming that he could no longer manage the band, releasing two singles on June 3rd before calling it quits. Two months later, however, the band reformed with a new line-up and abruptly announced their intent to release a new album titled Inheritance of Lies. The album was never released, but the band did release a track promoting the album called “The Bornless“. The song’s content marks an unequivocal departure from their previously Christian themes, opening with praise of the angel Azrael “who is bathed in the thoughtless light of HVHY”, who is implored to “open the gates of Abaddon and hear the whispers of those who seek you”, with a reference to some group called Ordo Aeternum Noctis. The lyrics also contain references to Naamah, a demon who appears in Jewish mysticism, and to Tiamat as bequeathing gems from her earth. This looks like a pivot towards some sort of anti-cosmic Satanist doctrine. That pivot would soon realize itself on a deeper level.
Not long after Temple of Peridition’s abrupt reformation, they appeared to disband again. However, in 2020, it turned out that the band had changed their name to Sitra Achra, reflecting a focus on Qliphothic and anti-cosmic themes. The album that was going to be Inheritance of Lies ended up becoming Hymn to Azerate, with a new (and shittier) cover, a new (and more generically edgy) band logo, and some new songs alongside some material that was already released under Temple of Perdition. In addition, the Facebook page for Temple of Perdition was changed to Sitra Achra, and there’s a separate Bandcamp page for Sitra Achra which features not only Hymn to Azerate but also the previous releases from Temple of Perdition, namely Tetragrammaton and Homage to the Dead. All of the musicians from Temple of Perdition who came from Christian bands, like Ronny Hansen from Antestor, have since left the band and been replaced by non-Christian musicians. One of the songs also features Jacob McKelvy’s wife Michelle (fyi: I incorrectly referred to her as Jennifer in my previous post on the subject; that has since been corrected before this post was finished) as a lyric writer for the song “The Damned”, and she goes by the name Michelle Nahash. Yaakov also has an Instagram page which uses what was to be Temple of Perdition’s album (Inheritance of Lies) as a profile picture, and every photo on the account is an image referencing some aspect anti-cosmic Satanism, including an altar for ritualism and even the image now used in Yaakov’s Facebook account. There’s also Ordo Aeterna Noctis, which appears to be a new esoteric religious order created by Yaakov, probably some time in 2019, seems to affiliate itself with the anti-cosmic Current 218, and is consistently referenced in Sitra Achra’s content and social media. Stranger still, after Temple of Perdition became Sitra Achra, Yaakov was also doing a “dark pagan folk” side-project named Season ov the Witch (a.k.a. Emrys).
The order claims to advocate for what it calls “the middle path”, a way to “create a full balance between the light and the dark”, which honestly sounds a lot like what the Greater Church of Lucifer was already talking about but without the association with Current 218. The order’s web page even uses the term “black flame” to refer to “the thoughtless light”, referencing the dark side in some way, and this term clearly seems like an echo of his former GCOL days. The rest of that web page appears to be a mish mash of semi-doctrines and talking points inherited from a hodge podge of esoteric sources including Hermeticism (perhaps “For all is mind and the universe is mental” can be seen as an indication that he finally did read the Kybalion after all) that are somehow woven into the basic idea of Current 218 doctrine. It’s all not particularly coherent, and this honestly makes me suspicious that this is Jacob McKelvy pulling another fast one in the Left Hand Path movement.
It’s not really clear to me what made Yaakov decide to apparently convert to anti-cosmic Satanism, but there are aspects of the Temple of Perdition saga that remind me of what happened during Jacob’s time as leader of the Greater Church of Lucifer. When Temple of Perdition first split up in June 2019, Yaakov used the band account to state that he disbanded the band because of financial issues, saying the following:
There comes a time in life where things get so bad that one has to worry about their family before anything else. It seems We just cannot get out of our financial hole. (Please do not pray for money). I am about to lose my house, My wife is threatening to leave me and take the kids because of this money situation. I have been selfish in pursuit of my own dreams and did not see what they needed so I have to put it all aside and focus on them. I have 2 days to come up with $1200.00 for rent so I have to sale everything.
For those who saw this from the position of being fans of Temple of Perdition, this must have seemed tragic. But I’ve known Jacob McKelvy since 2015, and I was there for his departure from the GCOL leadership in 2016, so I recognize this like it was still fresh. When Jacob McKelvy resigned from his position in the GCOL and left the organization, he talked about how he couldn’t balance the responsibilities of leading the Greater Church of Lucifer with the needs of his family, coupled with the bigotry from local Christians directed towards the GCOL. Some time before this, GCOL members had complained about delayed purchases and orders from their website, and almost immediately after Jacob left it was revealed by Jeremy Crow and Michael W. Ford that Jacob McKelvy had appropriated the money that was supposed to go to the GCOL for himself, to spend on his own various recreational desires. And think about it: if Yaakov was in such dire financial straits that he couldn’t manage Temple of Perdition anymore, how come he was able to return to the band just two months after he announced its disbanding? Did God suddenly give him the $1,200 he needed at his darkest hour, did he receive an influx in donations right as he was about to call it quits, or could it be, as I suspect, that financial difficulty has nothing to do with this decision, if there were any such difficulties at all? On top of that, just like with his time in the Greater Church of Lucifer, when you follow the drama surrounding Temple of Perdition from 2019, you will find fans complaining about orders not being filled, such as a vinyl being ordered but with no updates after two months, and there have been some accusations of Yaakov not sending out T-shirts when he was supposed to, though these may or may not have been disproven as far as I can see. So it seems to me that there’s a familiar pattern that connects Jacob McKelvy with Yaakov Nahash, to the point that they are quite literally the same person.
Also, there is just so much bullshit involved with Yaakov’s project here that I feel it deserves a mention here. During his time in Temple of Perdition, Yaakov insisted that he was not really a Christian and that his band, though it consisted of predominantly Christian musicians and it featured Christian lyrics, was not a Christian band. If this was the case, why was Temple of Perdition signed on to Vision of God Records, an explicitly Christian label for explicitly Christian bands, for whom a lack of express commitment to Christianity would be incompatible? Why did he only part with Vision of God in 2019, when he decided it was time to make his music more “secular”? And if Yaakov never intended for the band to be Christian, why was there the need to “secularize” its existing songs? When Jacob McKelvy left the GCOL, he vitriolically denounced occultism in general as an “egotisical cumshot” before apparently converting to Christianity. So what was he doing as Yaakov Nahash talking about drawing inspiration from the Kabbalah and Hermeticism, apparently just months after converting to Christianity, and then eventually embracing Current 218 style Satanism and creating a new occult order, after previously having denounced things like occultism and the Left Hand Path? Furthermore, why is there another god damn ministry telling the story of Jacob’s conversion away from Luciferianism (with a giant load of added bullshit about how he was recruited by an “underground occult organisation” and being initiated by some “order of the 12 apostates” in Italy), alongside the Jacob McKelvy Ministries? Is Yaakov involved, and did he write a book for them?
OK, so enough with all of that. What does all of this have to do with the Jacob McKelvy Ministries, or the sexual assault charges against Jacob McKelvy? I can only speculate, but based on the evidence at hand I believe I can construct a theory. Below is what I think happened.
After Jacob McKelvy left the Greater Church of Lucifer once he realized it was only a matter of time before his shenangians would be discovered by the other leaders, and after he “converted” to Christianity, he started the Jacob McKelvy Ministries, likely intending for it to be another way to make money off of religious people, this time Christians. Then he got arrested by Texas police, who seem to have found probable cause and gotten a warrant to arrest him on charges of raping two underaged girls. At some point after his arrest, he was let out of custody pending a new trial, but now that he was known locally as a possible child rapist his newfound evangelical friends had already decided they wanted nothing to do with him and scrambled to try and forget he was ever involved with them, and some of the locals in Spring may have heard about his arrest and naturally shunned him as well. Jacob may also have decided that he couldn’t keep running the Jacob McKelvy Ministries anymore, but then it still seems to have existed for over a year after he got arrested. It could be that he just let it lapse into being broken up by the government. Jacob may have decided that he wanted a new grift, and at some point he may have decided to revisit an already present interest in metal music, so decided to form a new metal band, somehow getting the attention of well-established musicians in the process. He would continue to reference the whole conversion angle that he invoked at Spring First Church, but since his evangelical grift ended badly, he thought of a new angle involving Kabbalah that would allow him to expound Christian faith while acting anti-religious at the same time, all while signed to Vision of God Records. Because he’s waiting for a trial for child sexual assault, Jacob would have wanted to conceal much of his identity, so he creates a mask for himself and a new name, Ya’akov Nahash (or Ya’akov ben Nahash), giving away as few biographical details as possible, so his new bandmates and fans would have had little idea about who he really was, and they certainly must not have known about his arrest or else they might have refused to work with him in the first place. Eventually his old Jacob McKelvy Ministries expired as time went by, having been involuntarily dissolved and its website disappearing from the internet, and meanwhile Jacob was probably conning his fans and his bandmates, and by June 2019 he pulled the same grift that he did with the GCOL, that he was running out of money and needed to call it quits, only for him to restart the band in short order. The fact that he jumped towards “secularizing” the band’s content and leaving Vision of God Records after he started the band again suggests that this act may have been a ploy to begin his next move: to start a new Left Hand Path order, one where he would marry the ideas presented in the GCOL with some kind of anti-cosmic Satanism, and through this order make money off of gullible LHP-niks once again. As far as I know, there’s only a Facebook page for Middle Path Ministries, so it could have just been a prototype for the Jacob McKelvy Ministries since it was active a month before the Jacob McKelvy Ministries was incorporated. I can’t find any information about Middle Path Ministries outside of their Facebook page and that book on Amazon, so I have no idea if they were ever incorporated. In any case, his effort to cover his tracks probably worked, since Temple of Perdition fans who observed his rapid religious shifts can only guess that he was a lost soul, taken under the lord of confusion and going from faith to faith, when in reality everything Jacob/Yaakov did – his work with the Greater Church of Lucifer and encounters with occultists, his conversion to Christianity, his Kabbalistic spiel with Temple of Perdition, his newfound Current 218 project – was all part of a long line of hustles he had been orchestrating over the course of several years, and that the Christian metal scene was just his where latest victims were.
Personally, I don’t think Jacob/Yaakov believes in anything when it comes down to it. Michael W. Ford mentioned in 2016 that Jacob was a registered Mormon while he was still GCOL leader, and for all I know, that could still be true into the present, but then this might not be suggestive of his real convictions, and could simply be a vestige of his upbringing. I suspect that he will continue to find grifts, particularly as all of his efforts at starting organizations, including bands by the way, seem to keep falling apart. His hustles can seem to be effective in the short term, judging by the apparent success of the GCOL and Temple of Perdition, but they have a habit of not lasting for very long. Based on this we can surmise that Ordo Aeterna Noctis will likely die out within a year or so, in the same way that his other projects did, and he will likely seek out a new venture. Perhaps eventually he’ll decide that Islam is his next target, “converting” to Islam the same way he did for Christianity before and changing his name to reflect that (perhaps Yakub would be a predictable moniker for him). In such a situation whether he goes for the progressive moderate route or the radical anti-American Islamic fundamentalist route is just a matter of what the nature of his grift calls for, though I think the latter would get all eyes on him, which he would probably want but it might also prove to be his undoing. Of course, all of this assumes that he isn’t found guilty of sexual assault after his upcoming trial. Indeed, he can’t do much conning and grifting while sitting in prison for what could be the rest of his life.
The only mystery in my view is why the lack of media coverage? Think about it: when Jacob McKelvy was there to open up the Greater Church of Lucifer for their first physical headquarters in Texas, the organization was all over local news, thanks in part to Jacob’s own efforts to reach out to journalists. When Jacob left the organization, his conversion to Christianity was widely publicized with the help of evangelical media outlets eager to spread word of a real-life ex-Luciferian conversion to the faith. But when I look for news articles concerning his arrest on child sexual assault charges, I can’t find a single thing. I know he was arrested because there are active criminal cases against him recorded in the Harris County District Clerk records, but despite that his arrest has not received any media attention. Nor has the collapse of Jacob McKelvy Ministries, which he founded after his conversion. And like I said before, I’m fairly certain that nobody who worked with him in Temple of Perdition knows about the arrest either. That’s why I decided to write this expose, so that I could play some role in getting all of this out there to anyone who might see it.
The last thing I will say, and I will say it for posterity, is that Jacob McKelvy/Ya’akov ben Nahash/Baal Ben Shem would rather that all of this not be brought to public attention. In fact, yesterday he sent some direct messages to the Facebook page of this blog, which read as follows:
I would be happy to tell you the truth about all that has happened. There was no scam ever committed on my end and I kind of sick of seeing this false stuff being posted. So I will set the record straight if you really want to hear it. If not then I guess that old world I left can continue to believe the false narrative.
I do not have anything to hide, So if you really want to know what evet happened to me then you can hear from me rather than second hand hearsay and people who are frightened to lose their dark image.
Keep in mind I am not interested in make this a self pity party of self defense. I know when I screwed up and can and have admitted to it many time over yet this narrative still plays out like I was some sort of devious scam artist. So I will leave it at this.
While this looks like a plea for the chance to open up about the past, it seems rather more likely to me that he had somehow been made aware of my plans to publish this post and tried to change the “narrative” being put forward in his favour. After I rebuked his efforts and challenged him to explain to all those Luciferians from the GCOL where their money went, he changed his account name to Baal Ben Shem and then seemingly disappeared. I think he knows that he can expect to be damned in full view, and with his new trial just a week away, there is little point in trying to stop the truth from coming forward.
Anyone who ever dealt with Ya’akov ben Nahash during his Temple of Perdition days should come and read this to see who he really was. If, like me, you knew Jacob McKelvy during the GCOL days and more or less stopped following him after his “conversion”, come and read this so you can be brought up to speed with everything that happened since. Everyone else, come read this anyway in order to learn the truth about Jacob McKelvy, or Ya’akov ben Nahash, or Baal ben Shem. I hope as many people as possible stumble upon this article, so that they can be innoculated against any lies that Jacob might be trying to spin now.
Remember Jacob McKelvy, a.k.a. Jacob No, the Mormon con artist who helped start the Greater Church of Lucifer (now called the Assembly of Light Bearers) as a front for his own embezzlement and then left in order to start the Jacob McKelvy Ministires? Well, after some time, I had been wondering exactly how those ministries had been doing since started hearing about them in 2016. There are still videos going around about how he was an ex-“Satanist” who converted to Christianity, and his YouTube channel still exists, though it hasn’t uploaded anything in three years. Meanwhile, I can’t seem to find the website for the Jacob McKelvy Ministries that was being spread around in 2016. And that’s when I stumbled on something interesting.
It turns out that, as of last year, the Jacob McKelvy Ministries is no longer active. On January 25th 2019, two years after officially incorporating in 2017, the ministry seems to have dissolved and forfeited its tax franchise, thereby surrending its right to perform transactions and operate as a corporation. In other words, the Jacob McKelvy Minsitries no longer exists. According to the database of the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts, the franchise for the ministry was involuntarily ended. This process, from what I understand, seems to occur as the result of either failure to meet certain financial obligations or the comission of a crime. But other than the ministry’s corporate records that are publicly accessible, there doesn’t seem to be any information about just what happened. There are a bevy of news articles and videos have reported on the foundation of the Jacob McKelvy Ministries, no doubt springing the spectacle of a prominent Luciferian converting to Christianity, but absolutely none covering the dissolution of these minsitries, not even on any Christian websites.
So then, what happened? Was Jacob McKelvy doing tax fraud of some kind, did he commit some kind of corporate malfeasance, or did his ministry simply not make enough money to meet its financial obligations?
I suspect that it may be the result of another scam that Jacob pulled, given his history of conning people, with his antics in the Greater Church of Lucifer as the apogee of this trend. Hell, even the whole “Luciferian converts to Christianity” angle can be a seen as a scam because, if Michael W. Ford is correct, Jacob was still registered as a Mormon and never changed his registered affiliation to Luciferian in alignment with his supposed change to Luciferian, and this was all while he was in the Greater Church of Lucifer. On the other hand, it might indeed be possible that the ministry simply didn’t make enough money to stay afloat, especially if there is no buzz surrounding such a closure. But even then, surely the “ex-Satanist” as he was erroneously called running a Christian ministry would have remained an item in itself, and you’d think the dissolution of that minsitry would be notable enough.
But what do you think? Is anyone able to shed light on this development by telling me something I don’t know?
Jacob McKelvy, seen here with his wife Michelle and Pastor Robert Hogan
Last month I had heard about a guy called Robert Morrow who had just been elected in Travis County, Texas as the chair of the Travis County Republican Party, and how he has already had a reputation for being, in his own words, “Donald Trump on steroids”. He’s been known for a series of tweets where he talks about outrageous conspiracy theories surrounding Barrack Obama, the Clintons, the Bush family and other politicians such as Rick Perry, accusing them of bizarre sexual activities and various abuses, and he particularly accuses Hillary Clinton of abusing various women. He’s also tweeted about how much he loves breasts and at least once he bragged that “if you Google ‘Robert Morrow 11 inch penis confirmed’ you get over 11,800,000 hits I’m just sayin'”.
For some reason I decided to check in on his Twitter feed after my brother joked about that time he told Time Warner Cable News to “get ready to have some fun reading my Twitter feed”, and what I found was truly a surprise. Apparently, his Twitter feed is filled with pictures of anime girls, and he spends his time rating “waifus” that people send to his Twitter account. Just look at it, if you dare. At first it might seem his account got taken over by a horny anime fan (not that I’d be complaining), but nope, that is actually Robert Morrow posting.
Robert Morrow depicted in what is apparently fan art
When I found that out I just thought, “Wow. I never thought I’d see the day”. No really, I never thought I’d see an American politician (let alone one of the Republicans) actually have an anime-filled Twitter account, and we’ll never see another politician like him again. That’s the only reason I took the time to write about this guy. It’s such a shame that Morrow himself is basically a troll let loose in political office, what with his braggart tendencies combined with his obsession with scandalous conspiracy theories, because if he was just a guy who liked sex and anime and didn’t like the political establishment I think he’d be alright. But since this is a guy who thinks he’s Donald Trump, and sort of acts like the bastard offspring of Trump and Alex Jones, it’s no wonder the Republican establishment wants to get rid of him so badly.
Aleph's Heretical Domain 
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