Edited and Correct Transcript

Intro

Believe it or not, there are people out there who believe witches are real.

Although the term witch goes back to the Middle Ages, belief in witches, warlocks, and other people with magical powers is as old as humanity itself.

The ignorance and fear that shaped the lives of ancient humans, existing in a world that they fundamentally didn’t understand, gave rise to magical explanations for natural phenomena. And from these magical explanations came the idea that some people were able to tap into that magic and channel its power.

Of course, historically, witches are not just people who are able to tap into this magic. They have been people, usually women, accused of using that power to harm others.

In Europe, under Judeo-Christian influence, people accused of practicing witchcraft were claimed to consort with the devil, selling their souls to him in exchange for their powers. “Thou shall not suffer a witch to live”, claims the Book of Exodus in the Old Testament; and that godly order was used for centuries to justify the incarceration, torture, and murder of thousands of people accused of practicing the so-called dark arts. And although the bulk of this persecution happened during the Inquisition, European mobs were still hunting witches well into the 19th century.

Nowadays nobody would seriously defend the persecution of witches or the beliefs that led to that persecution. While it is true that neither Catholics nor Protestants have abandoned the superstitions and magical thinking that were behind the obscurantism that resulted in men and women burning at the stake, they no longer look at those superstitions as commanding them to kill witches.

Many of the people who participated in the Salem Witch Trials lived long enough to apologize for their involvement in that savagery, and even the Catholic Church, through Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, have apologized for the abuses of the Inquisition. While it’s obviously too little too late, all of these acts of contrition show that, at the very least, people have woken up to the illegitimate and nonsensical nature of the mindset behind witch hunts.

But witch hunts have never gone away. The fear of people who are different and who are suspected of possessing dark powers continues to infect the minds of many who are willing to do anything to destroy that supposed threat. Saudi Arabia still criminalizes sorcery, and people were beheaded for that crime as recently as 2012. In India, just in the 21st century, hundreds of women have been murdered over witchcraft accusations.

In Africa, in places like Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and Tanzania, people are routinely accused of witchcraft and assaulted, tortured, murdered, and banished. The African situation is especially concerning, not just because of the horrendous human rights violations affecting those given the nonsensical label of witches, but also because of the way in which some Western scholars have dealt with what is happening. The same scholars that would never justify or defend the horrors of the Inquisition or the hanging of young girls in Salem become moral relativists when the atrocities are perpetrated by Africans following their own customs and traditions.

Looking at Africans as noble savages, these scholars see them as almost magical creatures whose traditions, no matter how savage or nonsensical, should never be eradicated from their societies. They see a social function in the belief in witchcraft among Africans, and even in the witch hunts that necessarily come from this absurd belief. “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities”, and indeed, the absurd belief in magic and wizardry that underpins religion and superstition is the necessary precursor of witch burnings.

Once a society accepts that magical evil exists, that some people are consorting with the devil or with evil spirits, and that they are using evil powers to damage others, atrocities soon follow. After all, if you truly believe that your neighbor is possessed or working with the devil, why wouldn’t you do everything in your power to eliminate them?

Of course, not everybody who believes in magic or religion is bound to commit atrocities, but witch huntings are not isolated events. They are part of a continuum where faith, belief in the absence of evidence, remains the common factor. Once reason and critical thinking go out the window, all bets are off.

I know that as the United States launches another war of aggression and Israel continues to commit a genocide, it might sound silly to focus on something like witch hunts and superstition. But even in those events, we can see the damaging power of superstition and magical thinking as the non-existent divine promises to a chosen people are used to justify the murder and displacement of the Palestinian population, and radical Christian fascism is used to justify the criminal war of aggression launched against Iran rehashing nonsensical crusader narratives.

Religion and superstition might not be the root of all evil, but they can certainly explain a lot of it.

And that is why the situation in Africa is so concerning. Rightfully ashamed by the looting, raping, and genocide carried out by the European settlers, scholars are willing to sanitize and whitewash the atrocities carried out by Africans against each other in the name of their customs and beliefs. It’s a condescending racism of low expectations, treating Africans as less than human, as people who cannot be expected to move away from superstition and savagery, leaving the continent as an eternal zoo for scholars to observe and preserve obscurantist beliefs, knowing full well that the price of that acceptance, the price of that obscurantism, will be paid in the blood of Africans.

That is why I got in touch with Dr. Leo Igwe, a Nigerian human rights advocate, a committed humanist, and the founder of the NGO Advocacy for Alleged Witches. He holds a PhD from Bayreuth University in Germany, where he researched witchcraft accusations in Ghana, and works every day with people on the receiving end of witchcraft accusations.

[J]

Leo, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today.

[Leo Igwe]

Yeah, it’s my pleasure, and thank you for having me.

[J]

Tell me a little bit about yourself. How did you end up in this field?

[Leo Igwe]

Actually, it was not planned, and even as I speak to you, there’s no plan.

I was born in a rural community in southern Nigeria, shortly after the Nigerian Civil War, 1967-1970. I grew up in a typical African village, and when I say village I don’t want people to confuse that with a village in Europe or in the United States. When we talk about a Nigerian village then, not now, we talk about a situation where many people were living in huts, people moving around on footpaths. There were a lot of crickets in the evening, chickens crowing, goats moving along the streets, and all that. There was no tap water, no warm water, and we had to go to streams and rivers to fetch water in the morning and in the evening.

In terms of beliefs, people had a lot of beliefs in spirits living in nature. So you’d sometimes see people making sacrifices near some trees or forests or special places. They killed chickens or goats. The funny thing there is that when they killed the chicken, they’d go home with the meat, so they’d just put feathers there for the gods. So gods apparently eat feathers, while human beings will eat the rest of the chicken. The same thing applied to goats, since when they’d kill them they’d just sprinkle the blood, make some incantation, and then prepare the meat for the family.

When I was 12, my mother enrolled me in a seminary, in a Catholic seminary, where I trained to be a priest for 12 year. But very close to the ordination I decided to leave the seminary. During those 12 years in the seminary, living partly in the village, I’d also go to the communities to preach against traditional beliefs and trying to convert people to Catholic Christianity (I have to be very particular here, because it wasn’t just Christianity, but Catholic Christianity, because we were told that that’s the best one, while others were inferior.

After high school I was sent to study philosophy. I’m not sure why they did that, because immediately after you start studying philosophy, a lot of all those religious teachings just crumble. You will have to struggle to really make sense of them, because so much of those teachings are based on dogma, authoritarianism, orthodoxy, etc., so that if you want to really scrutinize, question them, philosophically analyze them, they just crumble, they can’t withstand scrutiny.

So I got into this philosophy training, and by the second year I was already having some problems with the teachings of Christianity and the Catholic faith. I started questioning some of those teachings, because they were not making sense to me.

My problem wasn’t just the Christian teachings, but that they didn’t have any good answers when you asked questions. Sometimes you’d be told that you needed to pray harder, whatever that meant. What does it mean to pray harder? Praying longer? Praying by beating yourself on the floor, rolling on the floor, like some African Christians do sometimes, screaming and shouting? Sometimes they’d say that you don’t have enough faith, so that your faith needs to be stronger… So there’s always the feeling that either you are not holy enough, you are not prayerful enough, or you just need to be more faithful in order for your prayers to be heard.

So at some point, as I was growing up, I realized that it was all being made up. In fact, I thought it was a scam. Religion is a scam. People who have not been to the “other side” come and tell us that how it is, that you’re going to wear white clothes, you’re going to be singing… they describe a place they have not been to, lives they have not actually lived, and asking you to give them money. And they don’t actually have a very strong argument whether that kind of life is possible. So it sounded like there’s something fishy about the supernatural narrative.

It’s not just the Catholic version, but all versions, because while I was training, I did comparative religion. And I tried to briefly study other religions, of course, like Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. And I now found out that these are just different versions of human effort to make sense of what they don’t understand, or what they don’t know, and try to come up with ethics of how to live, and things like that.

So that’s when I realized that it’s not just the Catholic faith, and I started moving away from religion, and seeing religion more as a problem. Because religion presents teachings as a dogma, as something that you cannot question, even when it is questionable. And religion is often deployed to justify harm, maltreatment, and abuse.

I realized that it wasn’t just that the teachings were false, or just superstitious, but that they were also used to justify and sanctify harming others. Children, women, elderly persons, and others. “Others” in the sense of religious others, or non-religious others.

I had a problem with it, and I felt that I needed to take a break from the training, and also take a break from religion as a whole. So, that was how I slowly moved away and found out that the humanist philosophy, the humanist outlook, presented me with something I could relate to, and something I could connect with, in trying to make sense of the world in a way that constructively, positively, and progressively took care of some of these issues that religion had failed to address, or that religion was actually addressing in a way I found unacceptable.

[J]

In the context of Africa in general, and perhaps Nigeria in particular, do you think that Christianity, and Catholicism specifically, have been a negative force for Africa? Because, obviously, Christians and Catholics would mention that they have built schools and hospitals there.

[Leo Igwe]

This is a very good question. First of all, I would not want us to throw away the baby with the bathwater. I will not come here to tell you that the influence of religion, or Christianity in particular in Africa, within the context of Christian missionaries, has been entirely bad or evil. But it’s important to put that into context.

Yes, the missionaries established schools, and we have them today. They also established hospitals, and a couple of other institutions that benefited the people, but there is a problem. Somebody presents a school where you get educated, but at the end of the day introduces something that also makes it impossible for you to be fully educated. In other words, yes, you become literate, you can read, you can write, but they’re also creating a situation where you have to use your education to serve a myth, a god, a deity, and a deity of a particular version. They hold you hostage while also claiming to be educating you.

That is why I think Africans are like hostages; they’ve been educated while being held hostage, and it is that hostage aspect that is largely responsible for the problems we have today. A lot of Africans will tell you, “I’m a professor”, but they cannot question the teachings of their religion. A lot of Nigerians will tell you, “I’m a scientist”, but also that it’s justified that anybody who says something critical of Muhammad should be killed, or that anybody who renounces a particular faith should be jailed or killed.

We have some good things, in terms of education and hospitals, but they are ideologically driven in such a way that it holds Africans mentally hostage. And my idea is that Africans should be intellectually free so that they can build their own hospitals. Don’t hold me hostage because you build a hospital for me. I can build a better hospital for myself.

Thanks, but no thanks. Thanks for bringing the hospitals, but can we now take over these hospitals and begin to make sure that the science at the hospital becomes paramount. Not that you build a hospital where in the morning the priest will go around and pray asking God to heal the sick. A lot of people in Africa leave the hospital confused. They don’t know who actually heals or helps in the healing or curing of diseases. Is it the doctors and the nurses who take care of them? Or is it the priest who comes around to utter some words and invoke God and all that?

Many of us Africans are confused because of the mixed bag influence of Christianity. And we need to begin to question this, unpack this bag and remove some of those ideas, the negative and harmful or mistaken ideologies that often do not allow us to make full use of the schools, full use of the hospitals or health centers, because they are tied to the string of religious dogmas and traditions that at the same time subsume these so-called scientific enlightenment institutions to traditions that are dogmatic, authoritarian and supernatural.

[J]

I know that Christianity has famously been a big obstacle in the fight against AIDS as they oppose the use of condoms and contraception, even though condoms are one of the most effective medical interventions against the spread of AIDS.

[Leo Igwe]

Yes. And that’s exactly the same thing. They build the hospitals and make you understand that you have to rely on medicine. But they also have a way of controlling what kind of measures, medical measures, therapeutic measures are delivered in this hospital. They give it to you, but they also take it back or they control it. That becomes a problem.

[J]

At some point in my life, I simply stopped believing in God. Nothing specifically happened. It just didn’t make sense to me anymore.

How did that happen to you? And probably more importantly, how was that experience for you? Because I assume that being an atheist in the African or Nigerian context is fundamentally different.

[Leo Igwe]

This is where the insider/outsider perspective is very important. From the outside, of course, it’s difficult. But from the inside people can negotiate their non-belief, especially as they grow older, as they become independent.

I was born in a rural community, so the socialization was mainly about the spirits that control our lives. And a whole lot of events are interpreted animistically, supernaturally and magically. So you see people invoke those things. But you also see people make fun of that. You see people express disbelief, ridicule it, dismiss it.

Let me just give you an example: There was an incident in my village, and one of the parties went to the shrine to report the case. Others said “I will not go, because I’m a Christian, and it’s not consistent with my faith.” Others said “he has gone to the shrine to use the priest to manipulate the outcome of the dispute.” So a lot of people are also irreligious, even though they identify as religious.

It is not just a very linear thing, with everybody being religious. Sometimes, when people are manipulating religion, people know. But sometimes they still identify as religious.

When I was growing up I noticed that people actually professed traditional faiths when it suited them. They’d go to the shamans or to the traditional priest when it suited them. Like in this case I was telling you about, the person who went to the shaman is a Christian who calls on God, but when he has problems he goes to the traditional priest to intimidate, to instill fear in his opponents. That’s what I noticed; that people practice traditional faith when it suits them, and practice Christianity when it suits them, or Islam when it suits them.

So people are irreligious. Anything goes. It’s a kind of religious anarchism, where anything goes as long as it can help them get what they want.

A friend of mine, who’s also an ex-seminarian, he left the training, he told me that, for he has a pragmatic approach to religion. This means that as long as faith gets him the results he needs, he identifies with it. If it doesn’t get him the result he wants, he doesn’t care about it.

So even though a lot of people see Nigerians or Africans as religious. I don’t see them that way. Yes, when you go around banging on people’s doors and calling them idiots because they’re Christians or Muslims, of course, you are looking for trouble. But you can be quiet about it, which is something that I do I have an issue with, because if you are religious and you are loud about it, you should also be able to be loud about not being religious. What is good for the goose is good for the gander.

So what I did, understanding my society, is that I tried to navigate it slowly with my family and never really told anybody. They did notice that I didn’t go to church and that I no longer prayed, so they started asking questions. Of course, I tied to give them some answers, although not all the answers.

And because you have to negotiate your independence, when you no longer depend on them, they are no longer in a position to ask you questions and sanction you. So when I left the seminary I moved to another part of Nigeria where Catholic faith is not as strong, so I could go around without people asking me why I left the seminary or why I was no longer a Catholic.

So what I did first of all was to change my location, move away from what you can call Nigeria’s Bible belt, and moved to the Southwest where people don’t care so much about religious affiliation. As long as you are religious, people don’t care a lot. Muslims and Christians and traditionalists co-exist, albeit with some tensions, but not as much violence.

I have worked so hard to be on my own, because also when you are part of somebody’s business, they also want you to be part of their faith, or at least respect their faith. And sometimes many of the offices and businesses, they start with prayers. So I run my own company, my own organizations, and my own projects. That has made it easier for me to not suffer a lot of persecution or oppression.

Did I ever believe? I used to tell people I never did, because before I could even understand what you call belief, they had already told me what to say and what to believe. So I did what my parents told me to do. I, “believed” what my parents told me to believe; “people are here, gods are here,” just like a child is taught.

When I started to think about those things myself, trying to find out the rationale behind it, the whole thing crumbled. I moved from believing what I was told to believe to not believing at all in terms of religion.

[J]

You said that your parents put you in the seminary at 12. Did they expect you to be a priest since you were a child?

[Leo Igwe]

Yes. Now, my mother told me that it wasn’t really that she wanted me to be a priest, but seminaries were among the best schools. Mission schools are still among the best, comparatively, because the state has not risen up to their duty in terms of making the public schools good enough because of corruption and mismanagement of public resources. Because of this, schools managed by Christian organizations or faith groups are often seen as some of the best. Many parents actually send their children to seminaries or Catholic schools or mission schools just so that they can get the best of education (although, of course, many do eventually end up becoming priests or nuns).

So that’s what transpired in my case. That was why when I told my mother that I was withdrawing, she had no objections, because she felt that if I wouldn’t be able to do the work of a priest, particularly a celibate priest (which I wasn’t in the position to do) it was an impossible task for me. I explained it to my mom and she said that that was fine. I didn’t have any issue leaving the training on my own.

[J]

Having now covered the issue of your religious upbringing and the change that came when you decided to leave the seminary, tell me a little bit about what happened then, because I know that you did your Ph.D. in religious studies in Germany, where you did some research on the issue witchcraft in Ghana. How, what was that process like?

[Leo Igwe]

While I was in the seminary, I noticed a lot of harm being done in the name of religion, and that people got away with that harm, with abuses and violations. The people who were most affected were poor people, elderly people, and people with disabilities.

Yes, Christian institutions established hospitals and schools, and even engage in charity and humanitarian work. But too often all these mechanisms or initiatives prevented the society from speaking out against the abuses committed in the name of religion. They were used to sanctify the religious privilege. It was hurting, deeply hurting, but a lot of people could not speak out, so we had to live with the hurt. We had to live with the trauma of religious violations. And I found that unacceptable.

And yes, I understood that it was going to be quite challenging, difficult, and sometimes dangerous to speak out against religious authorities, but I thought it was necessary. I was motivated not necessarily, not mainly, by the dangers. I knew about the dangers, but I realized that somebody has to, at some time, come out and stick out his neck, because otherwise change will not happen. I saw that my society needed a lot of change if they ever wanted to confront the excesses of religion and superstition.

What I did was that I started the humanist movement in 1996. I founded the humanist movement because I found that trying to protect, defend humanity, trying to promote the humanity of people could give me the anchor I needed to address the abuses, the excesses, the violations that are often committed in the name of religion. Then I noticed that some of those atrocities, some of those horrible crimes are often committed in the name of witchcraft.

“Witchcraft” here is as it was used by the English people that colonized Nigeria or many parts of Africa. But, locally, we also understand what it means. And that is why when I’m speaking about witchcraft I do so as I understand it and as it plays out in my society.

People here believe in the supernatural; they believe that there are supernatural agents, spirits and gods that you make sacrifices to. They could also be unhappy and actually be responsible for bad things that happen to you. But, at the same time, there is also the belief that there are some people that could use their own magical powers to harm, cause problem, cause accidents or death of others.

Too often, when people suffer misfortune, if they think that their misfortunes are not god’s will, they think it’s something somebody manipulated. So they go to places where people claim that they have the power to look into the supernatural world and find out whether this misfortune was actually caused by the gods or caused by those who supposedly have magical or supernatural powers. In many cases, they will tell them that there’s someone in their family who’s behind a particular misfortune, and then they’ll go and attack attack that person. They will beat them up or banish them from the community. This has been going for years. And, of course, Western scholars and anthropologists came and described what they saw as African witchcraft.

And because I got involved when I finished the seminary, I got into trouble with some pastors, particularly a Nigerian pastor who claims to be an ex-witch on a mission to eradicate witchcraft. How do you eradicate something that is not there? It just harms innocent people.

[J]

In the nineties, in the United States, there was a whole industry of supposed “ex-Satanists” that had become pastors and were also eliminating Satanism in the same way. Charlatans exploiting people’s ignorance to get their money.

This type of witchcraft that you are describing sounds a lot like the “evil eye”; something that, for example, existed in Italy side-by-side with Catholicism. Are these beliefs and accusations of witchcraft that you observe in Nigeria or in Ghana, a hundred percent from traditional animists beliefs, or are they also including Christian beliefs in them?

[Leo Igwe]

They are a hundred percent traditional beliefs. But Christianity came as a reinforcing mechanism. African Christian leaders appropriated it because they knew that there is some religious capital in witch hunting. They couldn’t leave it for the traditionalists, so they appropriated it.

That is why today, the witch hunters are mainly Christian pastors and, in some cases, Muslim marabouts and imams and sheikhs. Because they needed to address that spiritual problem for them to be religiously relevant. Because, like I said, Nigerians, and I might say Africans, are pragmatic in their approach to religion. They’re not just confessional in terms of “I profess Christianity and that’s it”. No; they want a religion that can bring results.

So if going to a marabout will get them the healing or the answers to their problems, they go to marabouts. They will come out and say that they still believe in Christianity, but that they’re just looking for solutions for their problem.

[J]

What are marabouts?

[Leo Igwe]

They are Muslim spiritual experts; Muslim diviners. It’s traditional divination, with a layer of Islam. Sometimes what they do is that they will write the verses of the Quran on a slate, then they’ll wash it, and give people the water as a healing solution or whatever.

So we have the Christian pastors and we have the Muslims. Islam and Christianity came with a lot of force, so a lot of Africans embrace this religion, without abandoning or discarding their traditional beliefs. So we have traditional beliefs layered with Christianity and Islam. Sometimes a mix of all of them.

Depending on where you live and depending on the problems you have and depending on the people you can assess. So a lot of Christians go to church during the day, and in the night they go and consult shamans and diviners in case they have problems. Or if they are traveling, they’re embarking on a business, all with a lot of uncertainty regarding the trip, they may not go to church, but to a local diviner for some kind of consultation and for preparation of some kind of talisman.

There’s also “charms”, sometimes against bullets. Many of them will have what they call anti-bullet charms. So they have in all forms, which they prepare and they give them.

So this is how the whole thing plays out with Christianity and Islam and traditional beliefs so fused that they are not as distinct, as compartmentalized as we see it and read about it in the literature.

[J]

To ask the question that I think is very common when we discuss superstition: What’s the harm? What is the harm that African people, Nigerians in particular, for example, believe that there is such a thing as witchcraft? What’s so bad about that?

[Leo Igwe]

The quest for truth is a natural thing. People want to know what is or isn’t real.

If, for instance, somebody is ill and someone says that it has nothing to do with microorganisms, but with their neighbors, and that they are responsible for this. It has nothing to do with your heart condition, your blood sugar level, your BMI; it has everything to do with your neighbors and their evil magic. Superstition can be used to victimize innocent people. It can be used to torture and kill innocent people.

Superstition is used to misinform and mislead people. And don’t tell me that something that misleads, misguides, misinforms people is not harmful. Superstition motivates people to deceive others. It makes people believe something that is not true. It makes people believe falsehoods are truths. But it does not just stop at that. They also motivate people to harm others, to commit atrocities.

This is exactly what has been the focus of my work and activism. I found out that a lot of people want to explain superstition, but they do not want to address, call out and address the harm, and hold those who harm others responsible and accountable. Let me give you a few examples.

In Nigeria there’s a belief that you can cut off somebody’s head, make an incantation with it, and money will start coming out from their mouth and eyes. There’s a strong belief in Nigeria that a lot of wealthy people became rich because they cut off the head of somebody, and they use that idea to make sacrifices. These are sacrifices, like the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, or the sacrifice of the goats and rams by Abraham, or Abraham who almost sacrificed his child. They use this terminology that legitimizes the atrocity.

Last year, a young boy murdered his girlfriend, named Adijat, who had come to stay with him. In the middle of the night he used stones and iron to hit her and drain her blood, for ritual purposes. People found out, and he fled.

A lot of people in Nigeria are murdered by ritualists, people trying to cut their heads off, cut their private parts off, or cut their intestines off. We have had cases in my organization where we ladies went to a nightclub, then went to a guy’s place, and then he killed them to take their intestines and private parts. For what? Because they believe that you can use the intestines and private parts to do a ritual sacrifice that will make you rich and wealthy. Superstition motivates people to commit atrocities.

Superstition also motivates people to victimize innocent human beings. We have a case where some young people had an accident some years ago. They were driving in the night with no headlights, and had a crash. Three of them died. We’ve been also told that they were drunk. But others went to consult about this, and were told that it was an elderly woman who was responsible for their deaths. So what they did is that they dragged that woman out, beat her to death, and dropped the corpse in the bush. In October an elderly woman living alone also disappeared, because a young man accused her of witchcraft, claiming that she was responsible for a lack of progress.

[J]

In medieval Europe, for example, single old women were often the target of these accusations. So I take it that in Nigeria it’s also more likely that old women are accused of being witches?

[Leo Igwe]

Yes, yes, they are targeted. Number one, because they are women, and women are seen as vulnerable human beings, in culturally and politically weak positions. You can always overwhelm them and overpower them.

Women who are also living alone and enjoying their old age, living longer than others, are sometimes assumed to have spiritual powers, so that when they’re about to die they exchange their soul with that of another person. It’s like, instead of me dying tomorrow, a child dies, or a young man dies in an accident.

So when people go to consult the traditional priests and ask them why young people are dying while some elderly ones are not, they claim that the elderly ones are exchanging their spirits or their souls with the young ones.

You can see what superstitious narratives can do. They mislead, they misinform, and they motivate people to commit atrocities. A lot of single women like that are murdered. And there’s somebody that manufactures these narratives, markets them to the people, because they have no real knowledge and explanation to offer them. So superstition becomes what charlatans use to justify the money they extort or they take from people who come to them for help.

[J]

And are these the witch hunters that you mentioned, or is that a different kind of figure in this society?

[Leo Igwe]

To become a witch hunter, you don’t need a special calling. You just need to make the society understand that you have some powers.

[J]

What I mean is: are these witch hunters part of the clergy, Catholic priests or imams, or are they just kind of random charlatans? I mean, I think that priests are charlatans too, but I mean, are they the same people? Like a Catholic priest who celebrates mass also does witch hunting, or would it be somebody else who uses Christian symbolism and traditional animism to talk about witchcraft?

[Leo Igwe]

All of them. Let me tell you why. There are traditionalists who claim to have divine powers. There are elders in the community who think that by becoming an elderly person you are supernaturally endowed with powers, like being able to see into the unseen world. These are the narratives they sell to justify being consulted when there are problems.

And when you are being consulted, they bring you money. It’s an economy. There’s always an economy around claiming to have supernatural powers, because you can help solve problems. And as you are “solving problems”, you’re also solving your own, because they give you money to take care of your needs.

A lot of people are self-styled witch hunters, so when there are problems they volunteer to help solve it. There are people who are more established as witch hunters, and you can go to them and invite them. They will tell you what it will take, how much money you’re going to pay. Then you pay them, and they will come and do that.

There are also priests who also come around. They are witch hunters, but they will not come and say “oh I am Reverend so-and-so, I’m a witch hunter.” No. They will come and say that we need to have a prayer and break the curse in this village. We need to have a prayer and remove spiritual blockage to progress of this community. Those prayer services are witch hunting services.

Two years ago we had to go against a pastor who was organizing what they call a deliverance session or a ministry service, where he said “that witch must die.” That was the title of the session.

[J]

Let’s remember that the Bible says “you will not suffer a witch to live.”

[Leo Igwe]

Exactly. So you can see how it is inspired by that.

But we already know that when you are identified as a witch in the community, because of how we are socialized, others will look at you with cruelty. They will look at you unkindly, without compassion. So this pastor was bringing all the people who suspected someone to come together to that service, so that he could help them identify such people or take measures against them. So witchcraft is like a religious mobilizer. It’s what you use to mobilize people, bring people together, get people to come around you and maybe seek solutions, seek answers to their problems.

That’s what people do, whether they are established priests, members of the clergy, elders in the community, or self-styled exorcists, who volunteer to provide their services if they are consulted.

[J]

When we discuss, for example, the Salem witch trials in the United States, or the burning of witches in Europe, we look at those events as demonstrations of the stupidity, perhaps superstition, lack of education and atrocities of the societies in which they happened. In other words, nobody looks at the witch burnings of Europe as positive in any way, shape or form. Nobody looks at the Salem witch trials and the hanging of those girls as a positive.

When anthropologists and sociologists look at witchcraft and these superstitions in the African context, based on what I’ve read that you have very kindly presented to me, it seems like the bar is different. In other words, they judge this superstition very differently when it’s “those Africans” doing it.

What is the situation there?

[Leo Igwe]

I’m one of those who grew up brainwashed and thinking that the white man knows it all. Just go to him and learn. Let him inform you about everything, including what is going on in your system.

That’s how we were brought up, looking up to white people and thinking that they don’t get anything wrong, so that if they say something, it is true. Even if you think something is true, if a white person says the opposite, you discard what you thought and take his version. There’s this kind of blind belief that if you are European, if you are white, you know it all. You are an epitome of wisdom.

I had a culture shock when I went to study abroad to do research on witchcraft in Africa. I was reading what they were writing and was like “what is this?!” I struggled with it because I came with this idea that these guys were doing the research to the anthropological test. They did the observation. They did all the methodologies. They had everything analyzed. They had a concept. All the words that make you understand that when a white person writes anything, it is the truth. Just take it all. Don’t question it.

So I had to really go through a process of discarding this kind of disposition towards the writing. And it was a struggle that lasted even to the end of my PhD, because I was trying to challenge one of the authorities, Western authorities, Peter Geshiere. I read what he what he wrote about the “modernity of witchcraft.” I had a problem even with that concept. What do you mean by modernity of witchcraft?

I thought that witchcraft and the idea of modernity should be in conflict, should be in contradiction. So what are you modernizing? What are you actually modernizing when it comes to witchcraft in Africa?

Again, I struggled with it. And a lot of people will tell you that you just don’t understand. But I realized in the course of it all that when they want to talk about witchcraft in the West, they speak about it differently than when they talk about witchcraft in Africa. This was a shock.

I had a German colleague in one of our classes, and he said that in the West witchcraft is a form of superstition. But for those of us in Africa, witchcraft is not just superstition. I was mad. I asked what it was, if it wasn’t superstition, but he didn’t tell me.

[J]

It’s the racism of low expectations. It is basically thinking, “well, you cannot expect more from Africans”.

[Leo Igwe]

Exactly. And they don’t want to say it. What I found it annoying is that they don’t want to come out openly and clearly and say “guys, you guys are still living in a primitive stage”.

And this became standard in writing about the topic when it comes to Africa. And when you read Adam Ashford, when you read Peter Geshiere, when you read a lot of the Western authors, you will see something like “oh, for those of us in the West, witchcraft, you know, is an irrational superstition. But for Africans, it is not. It has a logic and a reason. It is a consistent belief.” And they will go on and on about this rubbish.

You’ll finish a book or an article about witchcraft makes sense to Africans. Not to Westerners. They generalize. And that’s my problem.

This was what I noticed, and I started having issues as I read. I found out that it has always been there when I went back to Evans-Pritchard and his explanation of witchcraft among the Azande. It’s just the same thing. “for us in the West it is irrational. But for Africans it is a rational system of explaining.”

[J]

It looks like they’re saying “it’s as good as it’s going to get. We cannot expect more from them.”

[Leo Igwe]

And that is why people who do what I do are outliers. They claim that we are disturbing Africans, who’d otherwise be happy with this superstition.

It’s a disservice. It breaks my heart that people make a career out of writing about witchcraft in this way. And that’s what I told them when I went to the United States. I told them that they should shut down African Studies Department, because what they are doing there is just to recycle and legitimize stereotypes. This idea of talking about Africans in a very condescending way, as if we are different. And I told them that we are not. We just happen to live in one part of the world.

We have some different experiences that make things the way they are here. But I found out that they have made scholarship out of racism or racist explanation of this phenomenon. And it has become the norm, the academic norm. And a whole lot of Africans are now jumping at it because of the funding and financial security.

In a way, I don’t blame Western anthropologists. Because they only wrote what they know or what they think they know, or what they think they saw or what they think they are seeing. But what about Africans themselves? What stops us from challenging and disrupting this explanation?

If you ask me, I put the blame and responsibility squarely on African scholars, because many of them, because of concerns about funding, about jobs, academic jobs, especially when they have to work in the West, in Europe or America. If they want to head African studies department, be paid a good salary, they can’t say “guys, what we are doing here is just racist scholarship. What we are doing here is just rubbish.”

It could help people to rethink what they’re doing. But nobody wants that because they don’t want to rock boat, even though the boat is sinking.

Some African universities also rely on funding from European and American universities, so they don’t want to challenge them. In fact, I visited a director of an African Studies Institute here in Nigeria, and asked him why they are tolerating these things. He told me that these guys bring the funding and they dictate everything.

So African scholars are powerless. They’re just like toothless bulldogs. They just can’t speak.They can’t do anything. And as a result of that, this continues. So there’s a need for us, especially Africans, to begin to reframe, reconceptualize, reinterpret the way African and African cultural phenomena have been presented by the West.

I was disappointed because when I went to the university I noticed that there are sacred cows in terms of authors and books. And I was like “wait a moment. This is not a church.” And meanwhile, these are people who are not Africans, who barely lived here, and who, when they come, stay in the best of hotels, without t actually staying where the accusations take place, and then go back and write a whole lot about it.

That becomes the basis of understanding this. It is no longer about debates. It is no longer about evidence or experience. It’s not about, OK, oh, he’s European, he’s American, and he went to study in South Africa. He’s an authority on witchcraft. And when you read it, it’s so superficial

You can’t make a distinction between religion and witchcraft. In fact, there was a book I read some years ago. It was on traditional religion in Ivory Coast. And I was told that they now changed the title to “witchcraft in Ivory Coast.” So you can you cannot make a distinction between traditional religion and witchcraft, which is rubbish, complete nonsense. Because witchcraft is just like the way it is in Christianity. It is an item of belief within the umbrella of supernatural religion that is traditionally rooted. But for the Western outside observers, they don’t even know it. a challenge.

[J]

I do wonder to what extent there are a couple of things there. On the one hand, Western scholars don’t want to be accused of being racist by saying that African superstition is nonsense in the same way that superstition of any place is nonsense, coupled with a consolation price for a continent that has been looted, raped and destroyed by the West so that we can say, well, “it is true that you suffered all of those things, but there’s some magic in you. There is something about your culture and your tradition that you get to keep and that it has magic and community and all of that.”

Never mind the fact that we in the West have accepted that we need move on from that and that the key to progress comes from abandoning superstition and magical thinking.

[Leo Igwe]

First of all, regarding calling out African superstition and accusations of racism. The West is also founded on superstition! What is the Pope doing in Rome? What about the Archbishop of Canterbury? In fact, now that the Archbishop is a woman, there’s a whole lot of disagreement and Nigerian Anglicans are trying to pull out.

The idea of Jesus is a superstition.

The problem is a bit of racism and double standards. Keeping my own superstitions while calling out your superstitions. The Westerners who came to Africa were not free from superstition. They came with Jesus, with Christian teachers, with stories of turning water into wine or feeding 5,000 people with five fishes, and all sorts of nonsense. They were all magical ideas, but presented as if they were somehow better.

Of course, you can’t expect superstitions to play out the same way everywhere. But superstition is still superstition.

When you see an African priest pouring a libation, putting wine in a cup and pouring it on the floor to talk to to the gods, it’s no different from what the priest does in the church. It’s not different from what imams do in the mosque. But Western scholars have a background on superstitions that they’re familiar with. They come to this culture and observe superstitions they’re not familiar with, and they explain them as if one was better.

It’s not better. You went and wasted resources building a gigantic house to a spirit and called it a house of God, a church or a mosque. Just look at how much Africans waste going on pilgrimages to the Middle East!

[J]

I was recently talking with some friends who didn’t have a Christian upbringing, and they were surprised to know that most of the things that people visit in Israel are just fake. Nobody knows where the burial happened, nobody knows where Jesus was born. The so-called “church of the Holy Sepulchre” is just a church; there’s no reason to believe Jesus was buried there.

So it’s incredible to think of all of the waste that happens in connection to that. And we don’t even need to get into all of the amount of money that Muslims pay in order to go, at the very least, once to Mecca in their lifetime.

[Leo Igwe]

There’s also what they call the Wailing Wall, where people go—

[J]

Yes, supposedly a piece of the Second Temple where people go and do that headbanging thing.

I mean, talking to you I’m trying to play devil’s advocate and ask challenging questions but, frankly speaking, all of this mythology is nonsense to me. It’s ridiculous. And it’s particularly ridiculous when you see political leaders participating in this nonsense.

[Leo Igwe]

Yes. And you see Nigerian political leaders, who are Muslims, going to Saudi Arabia, wearing a white cloth and going to throw stones at the devil. It’s part of the ritual of the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, the stoning of Satan. And you see adults, picking stones from the floor like children, and claiming that they throw them at Satan. I mean, come on!

People who practice this will come back laugh at African superstitions. Give me a break.

[J]

I remember, years ago, having a conversation with some Catholics, where we were all talking about how silly Scientology is, because of their nonsense space opera mythology. But I mentioned that, at the same time, we needed to be clear on the fact that there were also no such thing as a virgin birth, or people ascending to heaven. They said, of course, that that was different.

[Leo Igwe]

Yes, exactly!

[J]

Whatever you grew up with is not superstition. It’s just true.

But in the African context I think that if people looked at African superstition as nonsense, at least that would be progress. Because, instead, they’re looking at it as an integral part of African culture, something that should not be removed or eradicated from African culture.

[Leo Igwe]

Exactly! Now that makes our work, the kind that I do, so difficult. And you hardly get support.

What we are doing is what has to be done. We are campaigning against witch persecution, trial by ordeal, jungle justice- In fact, I had a meeting with some U.S. officials, and of them was telling me that jungle justice was part of African culture.

I was shocked!

[J]

When you say jungle justice, it sounds like a TV show about lawyers who work in the jungle… So what exactly is jungle justice?

[Leo Igwe]

Mob action. For instance, if you catch a thief, you set them ablaze, or you beat them to death. It’s taking justice into your own hands.

So when this US official said with a straight face that this was part of African culture I was shocked. I used to tease them saying that suicide and gun violence were also part of American culture, so that they should make me a professor of American studies,since I’ve come up with a new theory.

[J]

But this “jungle justice approach” was part of every culture, everywhere in the world. That is why we developed a justice system. So it is it is obscene— I mean, it’s so offensive and obscene to look at this situation in Africa and think “oh, yeah, that’s their culture” It was also our culture! We just agreed that it wasn’t appropriate. Why would it be appropriate for people in Africa?

[Leo Igwe]

Yes!

[J]

I cannot imagine how it must feel for you, as as an African, because to me it is so insulting.

[Leo Igwe]

It is insulting, frustrating, annoying, and disappointing. Sometimes you look up to people and think that they will be of help. But in this work that I do, you often get a kind of surreal silence from people. They’re not interested in getting rid of this.

I came out with this idea of “Vision 2030.” Ending witch hunts in Africa. When I told one of my European friends, he just sent me a laughing emoji, like I was fooling myself. I’m saying that we have to stop killing our mothers, killing our elderly people, murdering our children in the name of witchcraft. Is that a wrong vision to set for yourself? It’s not!

And I expected that a lot of people would come on board, but they haven’t.

[J]

Because they think it’s racist to support eliminating a “part of African culture.”

[Leo Igwe]

Exactly! “How dare you think that Africans will get rid of witch hunting?!” That kind of thing.

That’s the impression that you get. And it breaks my heart. But there are also African scholars who have bought into this narrative. And I can excuse Europeans because they don’t know. This is not happening in their society. They didn’t grow up with it. They only read about Africa in books and magazines, and when they come here, they stay in the best of hotels and come around and look at “those Africans” out there.

But what about Africans themselves? Why is it that they have refused to lead the way? Because when we talk of African enlightenment, who will lead it but Africans themselves? But instead they are ready to play second fiddle.

[J]

Do you think that part of the reason why there is this resistance within Africa to give up on this superstition is the history of colonialism, dispossession and genocide that came at the hands of European settlers? Do you think that that history has made Africans want to preserve everything and try to be as protective as possible of their customs because they have lost so much already?

[Leo Igwe]

One thing about explanations is that if you are not careful, they becomes justifications. What do you want to preserve? Killing your mothers? Lynching innocent women, setting ablaze people who did nothing?

[J]

What is the organization that you are heading, and what is it that you are doing to help the, mostly women, in Africa who are being affected by this atrocity?

[Leo Igwe]

When I returned from my studies in Germany, in 2017, I came back disappointed, unhappy and almost demotivated because I was shocked by what was going on in the name of mainstream scholarship and African studies. I was seeing certain things that a lot of people seem not to pay attention to.

In fact, I felt that what goes on in the name of “African studies” should be stopped. They should disband African studies programs in Europe and America. That’s what I felt. Because when I go to African studies conference, I’m like, “wow, what is this? What’s going on here?”

There are a lot of Europeans and Africans, keeping this face as if there’s something special going on there. And I’ll go from one session to another, and see that they’re either are looking backward at Africans were living before any of them (or me) were alive, presenting how Africans were preserving water, or how Africans were doing one thing or another in the past. I noticed that everything about Africa was mainly about looking to the past, romanticizing the past.

We are making Africans think that academic excellence, the excellence of Africans, lies in the ability to recall the past, represent the past. And you see a lot of professors, white professors, European professors, moving around based on the ability to analyze and present Africa this way.

And I’m like “I’m sorry, this is nonsense, complete nonsense.” But, of course, they have the faculties, they provide the funding, the research grants and research guidelines. So most of the time, what they want me to research is not what I want to research. What they want me to write is not what I want to write.

There is this obsession now with “indigenous knowledge”. And I keep asking some of my friends, what is “indigenous knowledge”?

[J]

It’s the nonsense of “other ways of knowing”. Basically the rest of the world has managed to progress through the scientific method, but maybe gut feeling is going to work in Africa. It’s atrocious.

[Leo Igwe]

So they will now compel Africans to be looking for other ways of knowing, wasting energy that could have been used to contribute to scientific progress, which is always open for revision, re-invention and new discoveries. You don’t see Africans presenting cutting-edge research. In fact, I recently saw a PhD defense where an African came with fire on his cap, and people commented how amazing it was.

What is amazing about it!? They have a way of applauding Africans they present Africa as a place where primitive thought is glorified and celebrated and is topic for PhD theses. And they will "say “Oh, wonderful!”, but the people who are saying this, know better. They’re laughing at Africans.

And now a lot of Africans are falling head over heels trying to tell them how Africa is a bastion of indigenous knowledge. They will tell say that Europeans have all this science, while we need to rediscover the indigenous knowledge. And when they say that, they will put up this face as if you should take them seriously. Instead of telling them to leave the table and get out of the room because they are talking nonsense.

They are presenting Africans in a very racist way.

[J]

It’s not just that, of course .It also condemns the entire continent to being a servant of the West, because you’re never going to develop that way. It creates a new slave class.

[Leo Igwe]

Now I’m trying to roll out a program on critical thinking for African schools. I discussed it with one of my European friends, and they were asking where I got my ideas from. Apparently I can’t think of those ideas myself. I must copy them from somewhere else. I’m not intelligent enough to contribute ideas in terms of critical thinking. The same thing happened when I delivered a presentation in the US. If I talk about critical thinking, I must be getting it from somewhere.

I’m talking about critical thinking as it applies to the society where I grew up. Critical thinking that speaks to the curriculum that I studied, the schools where I studied, and the school programs I was a part of. And somebody who was not part of my society, who didn’t study with me, asks where I’m getting my ideas from. Because I can’t get those ideas on my own; I must be copying them from a white person. Because they know that, as an African, you can only have indigenous knowledge. You can’t talk about critical thinking.

But what about Africans themselves? Why can’t they challenge this? Why can’t they disrupt this? Why can’t they step out?

After I came back and started the advocacy for alleged witches, all my friends said, that I had to change the name because people would misunderstand me and think that I’m a witch. I said that I would not change the name, they they should get used to it, because there are no witches. I’m advocating for people who are being accused and who have been persecuted based on those allegations.

Witchcraft accusations are against the law in Nigeria. So our law allows us to advocate for alleged witches and against witchcraft allegations.

[J]

And what are you doing in this organization of advocacy for alleged witches?

[Leo Igwe]

What I do is I want to fill the gaps that have made it possible for accused persons to be treated with cruelty and denied access to justice, to be persecuted, tortured and killed.

There are gaps in our laws. In Nigeria, witchcraft accusations are a crime; but the law is not enforced. Even many of our police officers and law enforcement agencies do not even know that it is a crime. In fact, some of them are calling for witchcraft to be criminalized so that we can bring some of these witch hunters to come and present evidence in court.

So because of that ignorance, what we are doing is that we fill the educational and awareness gap. We organize seminars and let people know that a witchcraft accusation is a crime in Nigeria. We also try to help them get to safety, especially when they suffer persecution or attacks.

[J]

In the past, you’re referred to witchcraft accusations as silent killers.

[Leo Igwe]

You know why? Because accusers are often in stronger political position. So they can harm, they can kill, they can abuse, they can eliminate the accused and get away with it.

So that is why when I came back I said that we had to go against it, we had to move against the killers and the accusers. I was told that I was not going to succeed, but I told them that the law is against those accusations. So we have a mechanism we can use to fight. So what we are doing is that we try to fill in this gap, legal gap, human rights gap, educational gap, justice gap, policing gap, prosecution gap.

We hope that by filling these gaps, the accusation will slowly decrease, because people will get to know that there are consequences. Because right now there’s a lot of impunity. People think that they can get away with it. So we’re addressing that, so that when you make an accusation, you know that there will be consequences.

[J]

When I studied the issue of blasphemy accusations, for example, in an Islamic context, I remember that the Supreme Court of Pakistan, even though in Pakistan blasphemy is still a crime, issued a report where they mentioned that although there are some people who report others sincerely, meaning that they do believe the person committed blasphemy, blasphemy accusations are often used to settle scores, to try to get financial benefits. Is that the same with witchcraft accusations in Nigeria?

[Leo Igwe]

Yes, but I’m always pointing out that very often we get this kind “academic explanations”. And there’s a tendency to allow that academic explanation to minimize the severity, the force of accusation and the negative impact.

[J]

I mean, just to clarify my point. In the case of Pakistan, these are people who end up getting killed. It’s just that, for example, if I have a brother and we have an inheritance, accusing him of blasphemy and him getting killed means I get the entire inheritance. So I think that they recognize the impact; they’re just saying that often these accusations are used not for religious purposes, but for material purposes. And I was just curious as to whether that also happens there.

[Leo Igwe]

I get the point you’re trying to make. And I want you to understand this. People believe that others can harm them through supernatural means. We’re not discussing here whether it’s useful or not useful. People are brought up to believe that others can harm them through supernatural means. And, as you know, if you’re able to show that somebody harmed you through supernatural means, you can go against them.

In Nigeria, people are socialized to believe that people can harm them through supernatural means. They think that people can turn into snakes, dogs, insects or birds. So that, sometimes, when they see those animals, they see it as a sign that witches are around or that witches are operating. It is a belief system.

Now, do people use it? The answer is yes. But for them to use it, it has to be useful. It has to be forceful. It has to be credible. And that’s number one.

Number two, there are institutions that invest legitimacy on these beliefs or invest these beliefs with legitimacy. Like traditional priests or pastors. So, yes, people use witchcraft accusations to settle scores; but they do that within a society where they believe in the potency of those accusations.

Otherwise, why aren’t people using it in Europe to settle scores? Why are they not using it in America?

[J]

Because it wouldn’t work, of course. But it does work in the case of blasphemy, like in Pakistan, which is why they use it to settle score, because it works in that society.

And that why I was curious as to whether, accepting, of course, that there is this large superstitious belief in Nigeria, whether when you look at the accusations, you notice the sincerity of the accuser. Not the sincerity of the people who engage in the social punishment of the witch, who obviously believe in it, but rather whether people were doing the accusations because it helps them get a secondary benefit. But it’s not really an important distinction, because the important thing is what the outcome is, namely the human rights violation.

[Leo Igwe]

But do not forget that accusations are not always or often validated by the virtue of what the accuser says, but by the fact that the accusation has been certified by a priest or a witch hunter. So what comes from the accusers are just suspicions about someone else.

[J]

How come it would be illegal for me to say that you are a witch, but legal to be a witch hunter?

[Leo Igwe]

That’s an interesting question. The thing is that nobody goes with a badge calling themselves “witch hunters”. That’s the problem.

In fact, when you ask witch hunters if they are witch hunters, they will say that they are not. But you have a problem in your community, people are dying, and we’ve been brought up to believe that when people are dying this way, there must be somebody in the community who is responsible. Meaning we need to go and find somebody who can come and render the service and use his or her ability to help us find who is the one responsible for the deaths in the community. They never mention “witchcraft”.

You are the one putting the label “witchcraft” and “witch hunting” on it. The person is coming in as a spiritual service provider, as somebody who helps the society heal and get rid of sudden deaths. Who would not welcome that?

But that’s why I said that even the terms “witchcraft” and “witch hunting” are very controversial, and often presented in a way that misrepresents the whole thing. These people do not present it as witch hunting. It’s those who are victimized that can present it as witch hunting in order to prosecute, punish, and stop it.

The witch hunters present it as wanting to break a curse affecting a community. They want to get this house, this family, to experience a breakthrough. So they organize a community prayer, they don’t come to “hunt witches,” like you are saying. They come as community service, exorcism, deliverance, praying for the family or community, praying for prosperity, praying against enemies. That’s how it actually goes on.

But when people are identified, beaten up, they can now use witch hunting and witchcraft accusation as a way to frame as criminal what these people are doing in the name of religious service. And by so doing, go after them to try and punish them or let the law act against what they did.

[J]

Leo, as I mentioned to you before the first time that we spoke, I truly admire the work that you’re doing. I will make sure that there is a link to your organization so that people can support it and become aware of the enormous efforts that humanists in Africa in general, and you in particular, are doing to free Africa and Nigeria, in your case, of superstition and magical thinking in a way that allows Africa to develop in the same way that the rest of the world has developed, free from the chains of these manifestations of the same untruth, which is magical thinking and superstition.

As a humanist myself, and as a person who believes in human rights, the only thing I can do is to say I thank you so much for the enormous effort and the sacrifice and the work that you do to help these people free themselves from these chains and saving all of these people who are accused of this nonsense, idiotic term of witchcraft. Thank you so much for everything that you do.

[Leo Igwe]

I also thank you for your time and thank you for creating this platform. It’s not a lot of Europeans and Americans that understand how I am approaching this. And they think that you are not happy with them, or they think you are against them, or you are undermining their own scholarship and authority.

That’s not necessarily the case. But I think that there’s a whole lot of misinformation and misrepresentation out there. And thanks to people like you, and thanks to your platform, I hope that we can call out that misinformation and begin to relate to Africa and the African situation in the way we relate to it in other parts of the world.

For me, that’s humanism. Otherwise, the concept makes no sense if you have to let Africans make science out of superstition, while for the rest it’s something else. We are all human beings, and I’m happy that we can help advance the cause, not just for Africa, but for humanity at large.

In this wide-ranging conversation he reflects on the physical and mental toll of nonstop travel, and the strange balance between exhaustion and fulfillment that defines touring. He also looks back on Jinjer’s early days, his musical influences, and the band’s shifting creative roles, while looking ahead to new music, future tours, and the discipline required to keep pushing forward.

Don’t miss it!

J: Roman, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today.

Roman: Thank you for inviting me.

J: You are Ukrainian, a citizen of a country that since 2014 has been in a situation of war. How are you doing, and how is your family?

Roman: Family is somehow safe, and we’re safe.

J: You just did a tour in North America, opening for Babymetal. You are about to go on tour again in North America, opening for Trivium, and then in January you have a headlining tour in Europe. Are you very tired already?

Roman: Yes and no. It’s mixed feelings every time. When you’re on tour, you want to go home. When you’re home for several months, you miss being on tour.

J: I can’t remember who said this phrase but, basically, the idea is that when you’re a musician you play music for fun, and the real work is traveling. That travel is what really takes a toll on a performer and makes life very difficult. Has that been a very big challenge in your career?

Roman: Yeah, from the beginning. We traveled with our own van, different vans at different times. When we were driving ourselves it was harder than being in a nightliner. Now, with nightliners, tours are smooth for me; I feel great when I’m a nightliner, and it’s better than having a flight every day, and then a hotel, and then no sleep.

That is fucked up. If you’re doing this for like a month or a month and a half, flying almost every day or every two days, every day in a new hotel, that really affects your physical and mental health. It’s crazy.

J: If you’re flying, you’re also spending so much of your day at the airport!

Roman: I hate it. I hate it because if you have a two-hour flight you need to be there 3 or 4 hours before the flight, because you have a lot of gear, and a lot of things since you’re traveling with 10 or more people.

Also, the airport systems are not perfect. In some places they are really bad. Every time we fly I feel like the people who work there know less than me. We stand there for a couple of hours to check our bags, then the tags are wrong and everything is a mess. And it’s a mess like 50% of the time, and it’s a mess from their side, while we’re just standing there and waiting.

J: Did you ever have any major problems? Your stuff being left behind?

Roman: Yeah, for sure. It was before the Babymetal tour. We flew from Copenhagen to Chicago via Warsaw. The plane from Copenhagen was a small plane, and they didn’t put any of our luggage on the plane, so we landed without anything. We checked our airtags and saw that our stuff was still in Europe, so we had to wait until they brought it on another flight the next day.

J: It must be so scary because what you’re bringing are your work tools, basically.

Roman: It’s not the first time… and it won’t be the last time. Ask any band; they destroy cases, they lose luggage. I have stories for 40 minutes about these luggage situations.

In the summer of 2024 we flew to France, and arrived with zero luggage. Sometimes we’re missing just a couple of things, but this time it was was all our shit.

J: And how long were you touring on your own van? I have been in some tour vans and I’ve never got the impression that I would like to spend a very long period of time inside of them.

Roman: It was long. In the beginning we were touring on a Mercedes Vito, owned by our bass player Eugene. We were 5 or 6 people, plus the luggage in the cargo space… well, it’s not really a cargo space, so we just put everything inside.

Then we switched to a Renault Traffic. It had a bit more space, and we could go for longer distances because the Vito had some problems with the engine every time.

In 2018 we bought a Volkswagen Crafter, and took it to some guys in Ukraine where they completely customized the interior based on what we wanted. So they built cargo space, and we had some sleeping bunks, so that two people could sleep at a time. It had nine seats, so it was comfortable, and we toured like that for a couple of years.

Our first nightliner tour was in Europe, in 2019. But after that we would still sometimes just jump on the van and go do some summer festival shows, without nightliner and without flights, carrying all of our backline. We did this even during COVID. We sold it in 2022 to some guys who make funerals. I think they destroyed all our customization.

J: It’s good to know that it’s being used for something!
Speaking of tours, and as we were saying before, you were recently opening for Babymetal. This was a very interesting combination because, even though I’m not a fan of their music, it was obviously a huge opportunity for a band like Jijner, since they’re such a huge band. How did this tour come about?

Roman: We got an offer, It wasn’t anything special. Before this we had already played arenas and other big venues when we toured with Disturbed in 2023, and this time I was reminded of that because we played some of the same venues.

I enjoyed this tour. Also the guys from Bollywood were there, so that was nice. Not your typical tour package, mixing us with guys from India and Japan.

J: How were your merch sales?

Roman: Oh, they were good.

J: That’s excellent. And how did you feel Jinjer fans reacted to working with Babymetal? I saw some reactions online that seemed, well, not terrible, but definitely a bit surprised by this.

Roman: Personally, I don’t even check comments about what people say, because you get lost. You won’t understand what you’re doing wrong and what you’re doing right. There are a lot of opinions, and they don’t need to be in my head.

J: You’ve been with Jinjer since 2009, so pretty much since the band started-

Roman: Uh, 2010? I don’t remember because at that time my friend Dima (Dmitriy Oksen) was already in the band, and he invited me to play guitar before even Tati had joined. But I wasn’t one of the original members. I was with another band and he asked me to play, and then Tati joined. I think our first show was in December of 2009, and our second show was already the following year.

J: Your first album with Jinjer was in 2014, right?

Roman: No; Dima and I played and composed Inhale Do Not Breathe.

J: I got that wrong!

Roman: It’s not a problem. It’s confusing even for us sometimes.

J: What Jinjer is now, this sometimes thrashy sound with a lot of breakdowns… is that what you always had in mind for Jinjer, or has that been changing over the years?

Roman: It’s changing. At the beginning I was just playing with the guys in the rehearsals, just knowing their songs, as a second guitar player. Then Dima found someone else, but that person left, so they played their first show with just one guitarist with Dima, with Tati. So then Dima asked me to join as a member of the band.

I said yes, so we started to compose the Inhale, Do Not Breathe EP. I enjoyed it a lot. I recently spoke with Dima, and we were just remembering how cool it was… just sitting and composing songs in our shitty rooms, with bad sound, and bad equipment.

Since then it’s changed a lot because there are no original members left.

J: What music were you into when you joined Jinjer?

Roman: I listened to a lot of nu metal. Before I listened to a lot of Metallica, Slayer, Pantera, thrash metal… all kinds of metal, death metal, black metal, punk rock, and everything. Hip-hop, I listened to Cypress Hill, House of Pain, rap music…

When I started to play with Dima it was the era of Kill Switch Engage, Chimaira, Lamb of God... Then deathcore with Suicide Silence, All Shall Perish, Chelsea Grin… We also listened to a lot of Gojira. So, a lot of music.

J: I’m not a good musician by any definition, but when I started playing guitar the musicians I wanted to emulate were people like Adrian Smith or Dave Murray from Iron Maiden. Who did you have in mind when you started as a musician?

Roman: James Hetfield, for sure, for the rhythm. I was not a big fan of solo or of musicians like Joe Satriani or Steve Vai, who are guitarists who just play their own stuff. I like rhythm more than solos, so I was focused on good rhythm guitar players. Also, from nu metal, it was Slipknot guys, Jim Root and Mick Thompson. Wes Borland was also a big influence, as was Dimebag Darrell, someone who could play solos and rhythm and anything at an insane level.

J: And what is your role in Jinjer now? I know that you’re the guitarist, of course, but I saw that since 2016 it’s been Vlad who’s taken over the songwriting. So what role did you play in, for example, Duel, your latest album?

Roman: Vlad compose most of Wallflowers and Duel, our last two releases, but now I am stepping back into the composing. I’ve already prepared some riffs and ideas, and Vlad is doing the same.

For Duel I was focused on the pre-production and production. It was Vlad and me, sitting in our rehearsal studio, trying different drum heads, microphones, speakers, tubes, amps, pedals, etc. And we tried to find the sound we liked, and then we recorded everything, like a pre-pro, sent it to Tati, who loved the tones of our instruments, and then sent it to Max Morton in Kyiv, who was like “yeah, I can work with these tones.” And then we recorded everything again.

J: I know that you’re living in Poland, same as Vlad, and that Tati is in the US. Has that made working very difficult?

Roman: When we all lived in Kyiv Tati was the person who’d show up at the rehearsals and on the recording, but was not involved in composing. We prepare prepare the complete songs, pre-record them and then send them to Tati, who prepares the vocals. So from that perspective nothing has changed, except the distances. Eugene also records his parts at home so… it’s maybe a bit more difficult, but it’s doable. It’s not going to to destroy Jinjer.

J: Jinjer is probably the biggest metal band to come out of Ukraine. Compared to how things were when you started, how have you seen the changes in the Ukrainian metal scene?

Roman: There were some big Ukrainian bands in Kyiv, and we were fans of theirs. Some of them were some of my favorite bands in the whole world, not just in Ukraine. Vlad was in a band called Zlam, and I would listen to them even before I met him. There were about 5 bands that were composing, playing, and recording at a really high level, and even now, 15 or 20 years later, I can listen to their records.

I don’t really dig into the Ukrainian metal scene nowadays but for me the best were the Ukrainian metal bands was like from 2010s and 2000s.

J: In January you’re going to be doing a headlining tour in Europe.

Roman: Textures and Unprocessed are going to be opening. I like Textures, and I’ve never seen them live. They’re a really good prog band. And we kind of know Unprocessed already. We’re not friends or anything, but we know each other. Their guitarist Manuel is an insane guitar player, and the whole band is just great musicians.

It’s a really progressive tour package, so I think it’s my favorite so far.

J: What have been some of your favorite tours? I know that you played with Babymetal, Sepultura…

Roman: It was great when we toured with P.O.D. in the States. Suicide Silence were also great. Same with Sepultura. We did 8 or 9 shows with Slipknot, and that was really amazing.

J: I take it you’ve been able to meet some of your heroes then.

Roman: Yeah! When we played in the main stage at Download Festival in 22 or 23, 5 minutes before the show I saw that James Hetfield had showed up on the side of the stage. And he was looking at me! He stayed, I think, for the whole show. I couldn’t even turn my head because I was just… it was intense, but it was great.

Also with Limp Bizkit. John Otto and DJ Lethal. We hung out iwth them at Rock-am-Ring and at Rock im Park, two days in a row. I was a fan of Limp Bizkit in the 2000s, so this was amazing. Like… “Wow.”

J: You mentioned earlier that you already have some ideas for kind of songwriting in the direction of Jinjer’s next album. Do you have a timeline for this? Do you work on this while on tour?

Roman: I think we will collect some ideas while on tour. Maybe some riffs… we will see. I never feel like I have to do this by a certain date. It’s not about inspiration; you need to work. Sit and work on the music, and the inspiration will come.

J: Roman, thank you so much for the time that you gave me today.

Roman: Thank you!

See you soon 🤘

Transcript:

A few days ago I published a short video about the murder of Charlie Kirk and about how, even though I don't think he was a good person or had good opinions, I completely reject the idea that his killing was good or justified.

Around that same time, Lucien Greaves, the co-founder and spokesperson of the Satanic Temple, also published an article condemning the murder in particular and political violence in general. I noticed that there was a very interesting reaction to his article because, even though most people understood where he was coming from in terms of his commitment to freedom of speech, some saw his condemnation of the killing as a tacit support for Charlie Kirk.

I hope I don't have to explain it but, no, the spokesperson for the Satanic Temple did not in fact support a fanatical Bible-thumping Christian nationalist.

In any case, seeing this strange reaction to Lucien's article, I thought that it would be interesting to have a conversation about political violence and the murder of Charlie Kirk.

Though I think it's pretty obvious that Lucien and I come to this topic from the same side, rejecting the use of political violence against somebody like Charlie Kirk, I don't think that it would useful to just pat each other on the back and congratulate each other for agreeing on this. To this end, during the conversation, I sometimes try to play devil's advocate, no pun intended, and look at the question from the perspective of people who disagree with us, either because they think political violence was justified in the case of Charlie Kirk, or because they think that people like him should be silenced by any means necessary. I think that this attempt at steelmanning the argument against our position created a very interesting discussion, and I hope that it can at the very least shed light on the points Lucien made in his piece, as well as, to some extent, my own views on the topic.

I know that I say this as someone who is looking at it from outside, but America seems to be going down a very dangerous path. The separation of church and state is being eroded day after day by an administration that has draped itself in Christian nationalist rhetoric. Whatever the future holds for America, Christian nationalism, this fascist doomsday cult, will only make things worse, not just for America, but for the entire world.

If you are interested in the Satanic Temple, an organization that I am not affiliated with, you can check my previous conversations with Lucien, or just visit TheSatanicTemple.com.

If you want to support what we do, you can start by liking this video and subscribing to the channel. And if you want to support it even more, or stay up to date with what we're doing, you can sign up to the newsletter on Substack, which is free, but you can also donate money, or subscribe for a paid tier of the Substack, basically saving us from having to start an OnlyFans.

Enjoy this conversation, and until next time, Non Serviam.

J: The reason why I wanted to have this conversation with you was because we both published something connected with the untimely death of Charlie Kirk, his recent assassination in the United States. And although now that the perpetrator has been arrested, there are, I would say, questions about motive, I think we both started from the assumption that the killer was motivated by the things that Charlie Kirk said. In other words, it was an attack against Charlie Kirk because of the opinions that he held.

So, considering that that was the baseline from which you started, what was your main thesis? What were you arguing in your piece?

Lucien: It doesn't really matter to me what the overall motive is of the person who pulled the trigger. I was speaking to the general reaction to the shooting, and a lot of the people who were celebrating his death or advocating for that kind of violence. When I said political assassination, I was speaking generally of things that are motivated killings against people of a different ideological viewpoint. Whether or not that turns out to be the case, or the killer had just random scattered motivations, was looking for attention, or is willing to attach whatever political ideology sounds good in the moment, doesn't make a whole lot of difference, and isn't even really worth speaking upon, unless there's some point in generalizing and speaking to the audience about what we can expect to come next from this.

I feel like when people are celebrating this kind of violence there's a lot they're missing. What they're missing is any real sense of what the practical outcomes of this will be. I was seeing people make these comments like “one less fascist,” and even though that seems like a straightforward equation to many, I don't think that’s an accurate analysis of what's going on. I think it's less a matter of subtraction and more a matter of multiplication at this point.

I see a lot of people speaking to this idea that it's a natural outcome for somebody who fomented so much controversy. “A fellow like Charlie Kirk can only expect to get shot.” And I think it's weird that they'll make that argument for his assassination being something of a natural force, while also ignoring the very natural human reaction of sympathy when somebody sees someone get shot in public in front of their three-year-old daughter. It's not at all surprising that the outcome is a general sympathy for him and a general willingness to ignore what may have been some of his more extreme or odious ideas, a tendency to look instead at some of the revisionism of some of his own statements and reveal how they were maybe overblown, overstated.

And I say this as somebody who I feel I had a legitimate beef against Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk wrote a Newsweek op-ed stating directly that he felt that the Satanic Temple should be denied First Amendment rights. And, to be clear, I don't think that's benign. I believe in free speech, but I also believe that speech can be harmful. But I think that him saying that about the Satanic Temple isn't something I think we should legislate further restrictions on free speech for. We have to be on the defensive.

And I get infuriated when people suggest that I'm looking at this “from a vantage point of privilege”, and “I don't understand how harmful these words can be.” Because we've been bombed. I get death threats all the time. We had an arsonist come light our headquarters on fire. And Charlie Kirk was a conservative Christian. And he reflects the views of a lot of conservative Christians. And it's a scary thing. But I don't think killing Charlie Kirk changes anything about that movement. I don't think it does anything to tame these radical notions. If anything, it further galvanizes them and makes people feel more militant.

So I felt more in danger from him getting shot rather than less in danger. And I got all these asinine comments from people saying, “well, you don't talk about all these other murders, deaths, public events, current affairs.”

J: Like the assassination of those Democratic representatives in Minnesota.

Lucien: When Democrat politicians are murdered, it's tragic. But I don't necessarily comment on that because I feel like that has almost zero chance of negatively affecting the Satanic Temple. I don't think anybody's going to look at that and say, “oh, the killer was probably radicalized by the Satanic Temple!” But when somebody like Charlie Kirk dies, on the other hand, I feel very strongly that there's some plausibility to the notion that people will take this as a carte blanche to act more militantly against groups like the Satanic Temple or, to be honest, to take a shot at me because I'm a public speaker as well. My concern is that people will take this as the floodgates being open.

it’s s not only a concern for myself, but it's a concern for the organization generally. We have people who run after school clubs. We have people who speak at school board meetings. We have congregations who go into public spaces in order to represent us, to endorse pluralism, to endorse diversity, and uphold that notion of government viewpoint neutrality when it comes to religious expression in the public square.

And we get threats, we get hecklers, we get people all the time who we have to be very concerned that they might try to take a violent action against us. We have people writing irresponsibly about how it's their duty to try to shut us down from public forums. And again, I don't think they should be prevented legally from saying these things, but I think we have to make our case very strongly in defense of these democratic values and have people understand the value of them. And when something happens, like we start shooting controversial characters who are expressing views that we deeply disagree with, that endangers all of us. It endangers all of us who are part of this discussion.

I honestly feel like the people who are saying that it takes somebody like me having a vantage point from privilege to be able to decry the death of Charlie Kirk, I honestly think they're not seeing their own privilege. They're not seeing themselves as being positioned in a place of privilege where they don't have to worry about the backlash of these kinds of things. They are so used to these things being several levels removed from them, where everything is one and the same in their newsfeed, that they don't even understand why this is more relevant to me and the Satanic Temple than some of the other things they were complaining that I haven't spoken about. They don't understand the elevated risk that this puts us in. And I think that is a major failing on their part

I don't say this ironically, just in a way of trying to turn the tables: I really think that they are coming at this from vantage point of privilege, because they are so far removed from the idea that this could ever come back and harm them. But, believe me, it can come back and it can harm us.

We have already seen the New York Post published a piece yesterday where they were very clearly trying to draw a tenuous link between the satanic temple and the murder of Charlie Kirk, by mentioning that some fast food chain in the Midwest fired an employee who, they stated, had asked people on his social media account to the satanic temple, and celebrated the death of Charlie Kirk. They did nothing to say anything about what our organizational response to the murder was, which was of course to denounce the violence.

It seems very clear that they're trying to draw a link between the Satanic Temple and that kind of extremism that will resort to violence like this. And I don't think this is the last we're going to see of that, because we've had Republicans who've had a hard-on for the Satanic Temple for some time now. Ron DeSantis invoked us when he was running in the primaries against Trump. We've had Kari Lake, who is now in the Trump administration, also echoing Charlie Kirk's response to our SatanCon conference in Arizona, by saying that we should have been prevented from having this conference. Mind you, this was a private, ticketed event. We rented a space, and here was somebody calling for government intervention to prevent us from doing that. That's in the Trump administration right now. That's the kind of administration we have right now. So who in their right mind thinks it's a good idea to start with the political violence and start with demands to diminish free speech when the ultimate arbiters of public policy now are on that extreme end of the spectrum?

J: OK, but these are all just pragmatic criticisms. In other words, you’re saying “it's wrong to kill Charlie Kirk because now things are going to get worse for us.” Is that where your criticism begins and ends? If you had a government or a system that didn't have this hard-on for the Satanic Temple, would the murder of Charlie Kirk be okay?

Lucien: I don't see any scenario in which murdering Charlie Kirk is good for anything. I don't see it as being a greater moral good. I don't look at these things as a matter of “what's an appropriate punitive action?”. I don't believe in just raw punitive action that doesn't bother to resolve anything. And Charlie Kirk, I don't think, had elevated to that level where you could say that assassinating him was really a benefit to anybody, and that the good would outweigh the bad.

We would be having a different conversation right now if, say, Prigozhin and his Wagner crew had marched into Moscow and actually managed to kill Putin. Then you wouldn't hear me saying “oh, this is a horrible thing” or “this is never the answer”. And I made that distinction in the piece that I wrote. I don't make blanket proclamations in favor of pacifism, because I'm not one of those who feels like we should have never entered World War II, or that there's no circumstances in which what we call “political violence” might be necessary. But the situations in which I think you can make an argument for it are entirely dependent on a greater good for the population, the broad population. And I think that equation of “one less fascist” is really simple minded.

In the case of an actual dictator, the concept is that there isn't agreement with the dictator so much as there's forced conformity with the dictator. People live in fear under the dictator. People might disagree with the dictator and probably do, but out of fear they don't say so. They can't say otherwise. They're in fear of the state power that can have them thrown into prison, that can perhaps have them killed. And the idea is that if the dictator is removed, these people who weren't in support of him to begin with are now liberated from that. Charlie Kirk had no such power.

J: There is also an issue of principle because, for example, in my case, I am somebody who has sided with the staff of Charlie Hebdo. They were executed by a group of people who considered their cartoons, their mockery of Islam, of religion, to be so hateful and offensive and dangerous that they deserved to be killed for it. I have to extend the same sort of rationale to the murder of somebody like Charlie Kirk, a person who I'm not going to even try to enter into the hagiographic understanding of him. I think he was a bad person with terrible views. But I cannot defend or justify that murder for that principle, the idea that you don't get to kill people because you don't like their views.

Lucien: People have been so unable to distinguish those things though. I wasn't telling anybody to mourn Charlie Kirk. And I immediately started getting these messages from people like “why are you telling us we should be crying for this guy?”

I never had a circumstance where so many times I could respond to people's responses by just saying “what did I say in the article that you're asking me about?” Because I had so many people ask me-- even though in my second piece, I confronted the question directly, “why did you write about this?” And I talked about the danger I felt it put us in. And then I would just be able to reply to them by saying “why did I say I wrote about this?” People are jumping to these conclusions right away. But if I see people saying things “Rest in Piss you piece of shit,” I don't necessarily take that to mean that they endorse future violence or that they would have pulled the trigger themselves.

There's a real balance between saying somebody is a piece of shit, but also saying that you wouldn't have seen them get shot to death in public. It's not that blurred, I don't think so, to the point where people seem really bizarrely incapable of separating these things. It's not one or the other. “This violence doesn't do us any good, and this is wrong” doesn't mean “hey, I thought about it and now, all of a sudden, I, as the spokesperson and co-founder of the Satanic Temple, agree with Christian nationalism.” Does that sound like a logical leap to make in the least? I think it defies credibility.

J: It’s kind of a strange situation, because people who support Charlie Kirk, who read your piece would be very angry because you're not praising him. You're not saying the usual, “he was, first of all, a father and a husband. Nobody who ever met him had anything bad to say about him…” You're not engaging in any sort of praise of Charlie Kirk.

Lucien: Oh, I’ve pissed off both polarized extremes.

J: Precisely. Because you’re also “you shouldn't have killed this guy.”

Lucien: Nazi sympathizer is what I was called! And if you read my pieces, there was nowhere I expressed sympathy.

J: Well, you have been criticized in the past for supporting an idea of freedom of speech in the United States that is kind of unique internationally, an idea that I support wholeheartedly, that the state shouldn't be able to punish people for hate speech. And the argument in those cases is precisely that you're speaking about it from a position of privilege.

Lucien: I think it needs to be said that within the past 24 hours the viewpoint you and I have been putting forward has been vindicated by the fact that now we see the Trump administration talking about cracking down on hate speech. And they're contextualizing hate speech as being this kind of speech that celebrates the death of Charlie Kirk, that they claim led to the radicalization of people to the point that somebody shot and killed Charlie Kirk. So I think what you and I have been saying all along was that once you start going down that route, it's always going to be used against the minority voices that you meant to protect. If you're really talking about defending the marginalized, when you put further restrictions on free speech it's always going to end up serving power in some way.

And, therefore, we want to keep that openness to the “marketplace of ideas,” to use that tired terminology. But here, now, I think we're seeing exactly that. We're seeing people screaming for this radical reform during an administration that can be counted on to take those ideas in an ideological direction that they never wanted to go.

J: I was surprised to see Pam Bondi, the Attorney General of the United States, say that the whole weight of the Justice Department is going to go against those who spew hate speech… defined in this case as attacks on Charlie Kirk or expressing glee at the death of this person. This by the same people that for years have been talking about the importance of free speech, “facts don’t care about your feelings”, and “people shouldn't be canceled or fired for their words,” but that’s what they’re explicitly pushing for. I mean, they are creating databases.

Lucien: I made that argument so often, though, but this situation is exactly what I was talking about. I wasn't saying that I feel really uncomfortable with the idea of people not being able to be openly racist to others. But this has to be a social prohibition. You start giving the government that authority, it's not as cut and dry as people think.

"Think of the concept of “anti-religious hate speech.” If you're looking at that from a simplistic point of view, as a self-identified satanist in the Satanic Temple, you might think, “oh, that's a great idea! People are always threatening us. People are always saying they wish we would die or that we should be denied our rights. Charlie Kirk was saying we should be denied our rights. And if only this were considered anti-religious hate speech and was outlawed, things would be so much easier for us.”

I never had the illusion that that's what would happen. You start allowing for anti-religious hate speech and, guess what? The Christian Nationalists consider everything we do to be just an insult against them. Everything we say, they consider anti-religious hate speech. Our very presence, they consider anti-religious hate speech because they refuse to recognize us as an actual religious identity. And they go with this narrative that even though we're always advancing our own affirmative values, we are simply an expression of hatred against Christianity. Just watch. Just watch it happen. I feel like we are going to bear some of the brunt of this.

I think they're talking about hate speech now, and if they try to more narrowly define it at any point in the near future, it's going to be in such a way where they invoke us directly. I don't think it's an anomaly that we came up so soon in this in a New York Post article. I think the way we've been fighting our battles is something that very much disturbs the Christian Nationalist politicians, because we don't just simply grandstand. We don't just hold up signs. We don't just try to start hashtags on social media. We actually go to courts and show the hypocrisy. We actually show that the law is on our side. We actually force them to confront the fact that they are on the wrong side of constitutional law. And that's a very uncomfortable place for them to be. And I think it really makes us targets in this, and it really makes the whole situation more palatable to our opponents to believe that we're just this radical group that is spouting out all kinds of these absurd cries towards violence and things like that. And I think if they have the opportunity to silence us to the point where we can't make a defense of our actual position, they'll do so.

J: I agree with you on the fact that if they could silence the Temple, they would. Particularly because you're such an easy target.

Lucien: Who's going to defend us? We've already found that on either side we have people willing to believe the most extremely off-base things about us. We're very much unprotected.

J: You're an easy target and you are very easy to hate, Not you personally, but— I was very surprised to see the level of real belief in Satan that exists in the evangelical Christian community in the United States. That for them, the existence of the satanic temple is indeed something that they perceive as a real spiritual threat. For me as an atheist, and for you as a non-theistic person, I am sure that this seems laughable. But it is significant enough and you know that you can get points with that kind of mouth-breathing community by just targeting the Satanists.

But, on the other point that you mentioned, that they have a problem with the Satanic Temple because you’re doing these significant legal challenges. Don’t you think that it is maybe a bit naive to believe that they care at all?

Lucien: I don't think so, because they have demonstrated that they care. We've seen those kinds of assaults on us enough to show that they care. I just think we haven't gotten enough recognition for the fact that they care, because we have these mealy-mouthed, spineless news outlets on the left that refuse to even cover us because they don't want to be associated with us.

Everybody bundles everything into either right or left, so they feel like if they point out our plight that they are defending Satan and Satanists and therefore they're on the wrong side, so they don't want to touch it. I think it's worth mentioning that Russia clearly takes us very seriously, or at least they claim to, and they use us a lot for propaganda purposes, and it's hard to know whether the things they say about us, any of the things they say about us, they believe.

I've written about this quite a bit. Western press doesn't write about it at all, but in fact, Russia invoked us specifically, the Satanic Temple, when they decided to declare their invasion of Ukraine in 2022 a “holy war.” They talked about how the Satanic Temple was, according to them, helping finance the military in Ukraine, and that we had some kind of close connection with the American government overall, and I guess the idea is feeding that conspiracy theory that Democrats are working with us or whatever, and that therefore this is very clearly a holy war. And that was terrifying to me, and I thought, of course, that I was going to get interviews all over the cable networks and everything. Not a word.

Then we were declared undesirable in Russia. And Russia's undesirable list includes a bunch of nonprofits, a lot of NGOs, and things like that. And undesirable might sound like a fairly benign rating to give somebody where it just means they're in bad taste kind of thing. But in fact, being part of an undesirable organization in Russia means you can go straight to prison for it. If you're affiliated with an undesirable organization, you're illegal in Russia, and you can be thrown in some kind of prison camp or whatever. So if you're part of the Satanic Temple in Russia, you can go to prison just for that affiliation. But when they deemed us undesirable, they essentially claimed that we were a terrorist organization that was trying to overthrow their government.

A lot of the things they said did show that they did know something about us as an anti-autocratic organization. So there is the possibility that they actually feel that a growing religious movement that is explicitly anti-autocratic does present some type of threat to them. Or it could merely be the propaganda that they want to use to create these conspiracy theories about Satanists in order to bolster this image that they are defenders of this global Christian movement and that they're defending Christendom. It could be many of these things.

It could be more than one thing. But the fact of the matter is, I think, when people get invested in these notions of having some kind of license given straight from the hand of God to rule over others or to spread their empire or whatever else, a movement like the satanic temple could be a threat, or it could be just good, as I said, to use for propaganda purposes. But that said, I don't feel for a moment that there aren't at least some people, some Charlie Kirks, some Pam Bondis, some Kari Lakes, and some of the others who genuinely also feel that the Satanic Temple, beyond propaganda purposes, does pose a spiritual threat and needs to be stopped.

I say this because we have such a lowered bar now on political representatives. Some of the political representatives we have, I feel, strongly are not just using these notions to manipulate people, but they're true believers, right? And that's scary.

J: Well, right now the ambassador of the United States to Israel, Mike Huckabee, is a dispensational far-right evangelical Christian, basically an accelerationist. They want Israel to succeed, beyond their hatred for Muslims and Palestinians in particular, they want to do it because they think that they can get the end of the world going. So they do believe in a big part of this magic and wizardry and all of the devils and stuff like that, to a point that they do believe there is a holy war going on and that you are an opponent within that holy war.

There is another representative called Randy Fine, who is constantly parroting a lot of shockingly aggressive anti-Palestinian stuff. So I have one here of, “May the streets of Gaza overflow with blood. There is no suffering adequate for these animals.” And it's all based on this extreme fundamentalist reading.

Lucien: Right. And I think you have to look at whether or not there's real political gain to them saying these things. In a lot of cases now, there isn't. They're saying these extreme things, I think, because they believe them. And when you have a guy like Mike Huckabee… I do think that man has a certain type of sickness in the head. But would it do us any good if one of us went out and shot him? Absolutely not. We would absolutely be putting a target on ourselves. And for anybody to think that they have such an advantage, that shooting an opponent like that is going to get the other side to say, “okay, I'm out. You're good. Take what you want.”— Then, I have to say, you have a completely privileged point of view, where you think you have the weight of majority support, so secure, that you can do something like that, and gain that type of advantage from it.

The fact of the matter is, people's natural reaction is revulsion. And that's not something to decry. People are very much put off by actual violence like that, by people getting killed. And they should be. That's something we shouldn't numb people to. It's not something we should normalize for people.

J: I think that when many people who are chronically online- and I think that the comments that you received often come from the chronically online as well- forget that the majority of people probably didn't really know who Charlie Kirk was.

Lucien: They all suddenly seem to be experts on this guy. But the thing is, I do think the majority of his market were people who disagreed with him. And it looks to me like he played that very well. It looked to me like that was his entire game. He went out to debate people on the other side. He would go to these college campuses, and I think even at the one he got shot, the whole notion was that the woke left would come and debate with him. They'd ask a question or whatever, and they would have a two-minute exchange, and he'd post these videos or whatever. What if nobody showed up? I'm always amazed when people are always telling me about some of these characters, some of these right-wing influencers, some of these right-wing journalists or whatever.

And they'll say “well, do you know what he said?” “He also said this,” and “he said this.” And it's like, I don't think these guys are as important as you think they are. I don't think you should be putting all your time into seeing what these guys are saying.

And to a certain degree, I feel like you're feeding this machine. This outrage against some of these guys does a lot more to legitimate them than to tear them down. The outrage against them fuels their campaign.

That said, when he wrote the article saying that Satanists should be denied their First Amendment rights, we did reach out to his organization. We reached out, and I would have debated him, and I am convinced I would have torn him a new asshole in a debate. And I feel like the fact that they ignored my offer to debate him, when his whole schtick was supposed to be that he was willing to debate anybody, change my mind, prove me wrong kind of thing.

I feel like there was some kind of tacit acknowledgment there that he was definitely on the wrong footing with that argument, and that there was no way under scrutiny that he could hold to this idea. I don't think that the First Amendment is good only insofar as Satanism is concerned. I don't think he would have been able to defend that point of view.

I was willing to debate him because he had talked about us directly, but I would have never gone up to this random thing where it's like, oh, throw at me some random topic, and let's debate the culture war. I really feel like if he had done any of these events, and nobody bothered to show up, he would have tried to spin it like, “I'm so correct, nobody's willing to debate me.” But believe me, that would have been the ultimate humiliation for him. If nobody had bothered to show up and nobody was expressing offense.

There was a thing in Boston one time where they did a “heterosexual men's march” or something like that. Something ridiculous.

J: It's remarkable how gay that sounds. [laughs]

Lucien: Yeah, but it was very clearly put together just to bring out the opposition. And even the materials they put out beforehand seemed like just manufactured to do that. And of course, when the time comes, 20 guys show up representing that thing, but it's a huge success to them because they have like 600 protesters or something like that.

At a certain point, your outrage against these characters is really what creates the entire market for them, really expands their market overall, makes them entertaining to others. It's more entertaining, I think, for the ones who want to own the libs, to see the idea that a lib is getting owned, rather than to see some monologue from somebody when they're hardly literate to begin with half the time. So the viewer, they don't want to just hear some kind of philosophical exposition. Deny them that. I just feel like people should have better targets in mind. I think people think a guy like Charlie Kirk is really dictating these opinions to people in a way that I don't think they are. I think they're reflecting opinions a lot of times. I think they've got a ready-made market willing to listen to this. But I don't think anybody's changing a whole lot of minds right now. That's what the nature of polarization is.

J: What I was trying to say before is that if you're not chronically online, you only know Charlie Kirk because, for example, he appeared at CPAC, at the Trump nomination, so that your exposure to him is not based on the hours and hours of podcasts that these people do, and in which they spew the majority of the nonsense that they say. So if you only experience is that, your view of him getting shot is “that young man who was very well-spoken and who is also from the same political side as me got shot by the others.” So I think that the majority of people are experiencing the murder of this person from that perspective.

Now, on the issue of the things that he's saying that there was already a ready market, I think that he was, and this is connected with not just the Trump movement, but other developments around the world, part of this expansion of the Overton window to allow for crazy things that we were supposed to have moved past. Charlie Kirk went back to just wax poetic about the idea of stoning homosexuals.

Now, on that point, the issue of Charlie Kirk showing up and talking about the Bible and Leviticus and the treatment for homosexuals— I think that if it was just about owning the libs, it's very easy to ignore him. But one of the arguments that I have seen against him, and I in favor of hate speech laws is “Why should I have to tolerate the idea that somebody is actively debating my right to exist?” “Why should I accept that as part of society?” “Aren't we supposed to have moved past the point in which my existence and my ability to live as a normal human being should no longer be a point of debate?”

Lucien: I feel like I have an answer to that. But first, I feel like I have to say that my understanding is that since this has happened, that Charlie Kirk said that homosexuals should be stoned actually wasn't true, and that's another thing.

J: I disagree. I saw the video.

Lucien: But I heard that the full context was that he was actually talking about the dangers of picking and choosing passages from the Bible. So he was saying that in Leviticus, it says, you should stone homosexuals. But then Stephen King tweeted some kind of apology where he said, “I was wrong about him advocating for stoning of homosexuals.”

J: I can give a bit of context because I used it in the video that I made: There’s this woman that I happen to admire a lot, Miss Rachel, who has been very outspoken in her support of the children of Gaza, and Palestinians in general. One of the people she works with in her children's show is a person who I think is non-binary. And so, since she's a Christian, she made a video where she said that her reading of the Bible, which I think is incorrect, shows that the most important commandment that appears in the Bible is “love thy neighbor.” It is not “love thy neighbor except…”. So, in her understanding of Christianity, you are supposed to love everyone, so that everybody is welcome, everybody is loved, etc. And Charlie Kirk is asked in his podcast about that use of Scripture by Miss Rachel.

So he is, if not advocating for the stoning of homosexuals, certainly endorsing a nonsense book that calls for the stoning of homosexuals, at least according to his reading of that passage in Leviticus.

So I think that I get why Stephen King would apologize for that. But Charlie Kirk 100 percent did say that.

Lucien: OK, well, I hear conflicting reports every day now. There's people saying “he didn't say that”, and then people saying he did or whatever. And it's beside the point.

I don't really want to start parsing the life and times and the statements of Charlie Kirk. Your original question was about why somebody should tolerate somebody making arguments against somebody else's existence. And my feeling is that we shouldn't look at it as tolerating that.

On a social level, we shouldn't tolerate that. When we say that that shouldn't be outlawed, that's not to say we think it's morally correct or that we should shut up about it or that that's acceptable. We should point out that that's depraved thinking, that that's odious, and to make sure that people know why.

But I also think that you do it in the way that we're doing it. We do these kinds of criticisms. We're not advocating for shooting anybody we disagree with, you know, regardless of how much we disagree with their point of view. And I think at a certain point, society has some kind of responsibility. We have a responsibility as citizens to do the heavy lifting, to set the tone of moral prohibition and things like that in ways separated from the idea of legislating these things, right? I think we should—I mean, in this way, I have a certain point of view about limited government interference, strictly based on the fact that governments can be very irresponsible. And the fact that we have a democratic balance of powers, which I think is a good thing, I think it keeps things in check. I think you can start running too far in one direction or the other, if there isn't that kind of balance, right? You really do have to take account for a variety of opinions and points of view.

And once you throw in the towel and say “this is outlawed, you're going to prison,” you really don't change people's minds on these things. It's better if people are able to say these depraved things than to have a government that can take action or make subjective evaluations about harms of these words, because I feel like that always inevitably leads to people being marginalized, to power being used against people who do not have power. And I feel like that will always end up eventually going in the wrong direction.

I feel like we are seeing that change in the flow of moral prohibition, the weight of moral condemnation, going the other direction since the shooting of Charlie Kirk, and now you have Pam Bondi talking about regulating hate speech and things like that. I think that is the predictable pattern of things. Once you open the door to saying “this person is arguing against my existence, therefore the government must intervene,” you are allowing the government to take a place of authority that I think is just too dangerous to give it.

J: I agree with you on that point. But when I say that they deserve to be ignored, it's very easy for me to say it because, as far as I understand, nobody's calling me a sin, nobody's calling my existence a sin. Nobody's saying that there is a book that says that people like me should be stoned, so that there is to an extent a certain privilege in knowing that my existence is not being called into question. So how do you deal with somebody like Charlie Kirk, like Stephen Crowder, like Jordan Peterson, and all of these people who sometimes cannot be ignored? Because by ignoring them, you are perhaps letting them off easy, when they are actually calling for an understanding of society that excludes people who are not necessarily like you or me, but who do exist.

Lucien: You may think you're looking at this from a place of privilege, but I don't think I am. I know I'll get shit from that, and people will say things like “what do you know about being part of a marginalized group?” But I'll say, well, what do you know about directly being singled out by Charlie Kirk, or being held as a status of a lower citizen without specific rights? He may have said that about other groups, but he certainly said that about the Satanic Temple. And we may have membership who can walk away from this tomorrow and not be recognized as part of it, but I don't have that. I am this forever now. I will be recognized always as the face of the Satanic Temple and modern Satanism. And Charlie Kirk was saying that we should not have First Amendment rights; we should not be able to congregate as a religious organization, not be recognized as such, and not have the same First Amendment, the free expression privileges afforded to normal citizens of the United States.

I think that it's very unfortunate he had those points of views and were advocating for them. I don't think that it's a benign thing by any means. But I think the only avenue we're left with is to argue our case otherwise, and to argue for classic liberalism. The notion that we actually all deserve to have equal footing in society, and we need to put forward the better case, and I think we do have the better case. We should be clear that this notion of debating these points on a college campus for five minute clips isn't sufficient to really make a clear and cogent point for a better organized society. That's ridiculous. I think there's a lot of work to be done that goes beyond just Charlie Kirk in the whole way that we consume media, we consume news now, the way we engage with each other online, the little epistemic bubbles that we're all kind of caught in, and those all go well beyond Charlie Kirk.

At the end of the day, shooting a character like him doesn't do anything to break anybody out of those little epistemic bubbles. It just further entrenches them. And that's why, as somebody isolated by Charlie Kirk, as somebody not deserving of rights, I worry for our safety in light of this having happened.

J: I agree that this sort of TikTok version of politics is terrible. I think that the “debate bros” (from the right or the left) have been damaging in the sense that they transform politics into a spectator sport. You go just to see if your side wins.

But the problem is that that's how politics is being done now, even if that's not how it should be.

Lucien: Oh, I'm not saying it's good. I'm saying the alternative is worse. You start shooting people or you start silencing people, it makes martyrs. It makes people feel like the other side is being suppressed because it's presenting a greater truth. It really shuts people off.

J: There are people right now in the United States who believe the country is descending into fascism, that there is a real possibility that Trump won’t leave— I think that nature is going to take care of that on its own, but that at the very least, the Trump movement is not going to abandon the White House. So isn't it a little bit like putting a noose around your neck to say, “well, we should just let everybody say whatever they want and just hope for the best. I'm sure that our ideas are going to win.” Doesn't it feel like sending editorial letters on the eve of the Nuremberg Laws? Doesn't it feel like you're just doing something knowing that it's not good enough, simply for an attachment to Aristotelian values, if you will, that are not going to help the people who need help?

Lucien: But there's only a certain amount of things you can do. And I think the things we can do is try to manage that discourse like that and stand our ground in those ways. To be public and advocate for an open society, for open debate, and for people being equal in the eyes of the law.

Fortunately, in the United States, there's still this veneration of the founding fathers and constitutional law, which at this point runs totally contrary to the direction we're going. And I feel like it doesn't bring us back to go further in the direction of trying to silence opposition, because it just reaffirms this notion that those values never existed to begin with, and that the only way is to match the way which we feared was going to be put in place to begin with.

People are justifying the shooting of Charlie Kirk sometimes from an argument for irony. “Well he said this about the Second Amendment, and therefore it's okay to shoot him.”

I'm not willing to take Charlie Kirk's view to justify the shooting of Charlie Kirk. I'm against the shooting of Charlie Kirk, even if Charlie Kirk was for political murder, because I don't agree with Charlie Kirk. And I feel that there's a certain inevitability to what's happening, and the idea is that we're just watching it go by and not doing enough. That is a very real concern. But that also seems to imply this belief that to do enough means being willing to go out and shoot our opponents, being willing to commit acts of violence in order to stop it. And my feeling is that even if we feel that debate is insufficient, even if we feel that making our case isn't working, even if we feel that the weight of the discourse we have and the way we consume media and the algorithms of how we interact with the internet now are such that we find ourselves inevitably on this course to fascism, unless there is some intervention, I don't feel that that intervention includes shooting people like Charlie Kirk or that that gets us any closer to mitigating this challenge ahead of us. Because I think if we're on this course, the shooting of Charlie Kirk, as I said in the piece I wrote originally, was certainly going to do more to justify authoritarian action. To be clear, I don't feel like it actually justifies it, but it will be used to justify these actions rather than to mitigate this decline.

I feel like these past 48 hours have vindicated that point of view. We already see that. We already see this notion that it's time to crack down against these extremist liberal groups and that we need to do more now from Pam Bondi's perspective to “mitigate hate speech,” which, again, is going to be viewed in a very self-serving manner as to what constitutes hate speech and what does not.

So I predict that their view of hate speech is going to end up being rather religion-centric, and I feel like they're going to really focus on what they're going to consider religious hate speech. And fuck, I honestly think the Satanic Temple is going to be invoked a lot sooner rather than later as a ridiculous fall guy in this thing. It's going to be completely ignored by a lot of people that we immediately and unambiguously condemned violence before this happened, and came out immediately after the killing to reaffirm our position against the use of violence. I think what we're going to end up seeing something that can't really be distinguished from anti-blasphemy laws.

J: This might not be the first time I bring this up, but isn't that just kind of an own goal on the part of the Satanic Temple? In the sense that because it is a non-theistic organization, meaning that your use of Satan or Lucifer or Baphomet and all of that are symbolic and not literally religious, you did choose to do something that you knew for a fact was going to create more problems for you than you needed to have. You didn’t “need” them in the sense that it is not something that you actually believe in. It is like choosing Mohammed or Buddha, but without being a Muslim or a Buddhist. You fear the targeting of the satanic temple by Christian fundamentalists because you have an organization called the Satanic Temple, using satanic symbols that you chose despite not having a “religious imperative” to use them, since you don't believe in them, theologically speaking.

Lucien: We don't believe in them as theists, but I think you misunderstand non-theistic Satanism.

For us, it is just as important. It doesn't matter that it is not taken literally. It is just as important, we feel, on a metaphorical plane. Jesus himself spoke in allegories, and yet the followers of Christianity insist that everything must be taken literally, which I think is a bizarre irony. But to us, I don't feel like we could have just chosen other symbols. Insofar as religious raw material goes, this speaks to us for a real reason. I think a lot of us grew up in religious environments that impose these supernaturalistic ideas on us about an all-powerful dictator above, and that there is a certain sense of transcendence that came with our disbelief in our ability to engage in blasphemy.

And that ability to engage in blasphemy came with the introduction of satanic symbols and things like that. It wasn't something we could just replace with different iconography or sit around and develop different drawings and symbols and things like that. I think it is meaningful to us and something we couldn't just turn our backs on and say “that's too inflammatory to other people.”

But to the point of knowing that we would be considered inflammatory and bombastic and provocative to believers in the Christian faith, we were aware of that, but it was never something we were doing just to insult them, and something that we thought that we could never get beyond. And we always wanted it to stay this dangerous and provocative thing. For us, it's better that people understand what it is for us, and that it's neutralized in that way.

We feel like this idea of Satan's servants on earth and people acting on at the behest of the ultimate evil, and these symbols holding this power of evil, rather than just having the malleability of symbols in the way that words have a certain malleability, which is to say that, to a certain degree, we choose how offended we are by words or symbols. And words and symbols can mean different things to different people in different contexts. You have to really get down to the core of what people mean when they're saying what they're saying, what people actually do in the real world. Give people the best kind of benefit of the doubt. And I feel like, with Satanism, we're not trying to just constantly provoke people, but we want people to come to that kind of understanding.

We didn't really feel that we were compounding and contributing to the militancy of the culture wars. I feel like, if we were naive, it was in that we felt that we could actually mitigate these feelings of distress, these feelings of militancy, these feelings of absolute division between one or the other, by letting it be seen by people, that people can have these different beliefs attached to different iconography, symbols, and mythologies.

J: I have a little Baphomet here and everything, so I'm not going to pretend that “I don't get it,” but it seems a bit… maybe dishonest to say “we were not trying to be inflammatory.” You put your dick on the grave of Fred Phelps' mom.

Right. We realized that was inflammatory, but it's not in a way where it's like, we're not looking to reconcile anything here. We're not looking to be understood. That's what I mean. We are against that kind of dogmatism, that unshakable, malicious dogmatism. I think we are ultimately looking for a peaceful society in which we can be accepted into doing pro-social things.

And, yes, I did put my dick on Fred Phelps' mother's grave, but that was one of the earlier things we did when there were like five of us doing this kind of thing, and now it's an organization. We have these kinds of organizational standards where we are very much focused on just putting forward our affirmative values and making sure that people understand that this is what we believe, and these are the things we do, and this is why to us it's attached to these symbols, and we don't really care if other people have these kinds of pro-social interests.

It doesn't bother us if to them they attach it to Christian symbolism or whatever. To be honest about that, there's a wide spectrum of Christian identity; you'll have an end of the spectrum of self-identified Christians whose ultimate views of the properly ordered society is probably very much in alignment with a lot of what members of the Satanic Temple would believe as well, and then on the other side you have these fundamentalist Christian nationalists who are for a new authoritarianism.

J: I love the Temple’s Baphomet statue, but I think that to say “we want to put our Baphomet with two children next to it on a public park” (which I think is a cool thing)… I mean, think you need to be very naive or dishonest to say “we're not trying to provoke anybody.” I understand it as a kind of protest to show the hypocrisy of the state in the sense of picking and choosing which sort of religious symbols get to be used. I support what the Satanic Temple has done in that regard, but I think that you're not being completely honest with yourself if you think “we were not trying to be provocative or to incense Christians.”

Lucien: No, we know it's going to be provocative at its inception, right? Because we didn't ask to just put the Baphomet monument in a public space, we asked to put the Baphomet in a public space where they put a Ten Commandments monument, and we know it'll be provocative to put the Baphomet monument there. But the hope is that people can understand and see past the fact that they disagree with this symbolic concept, with the notion of being a non-theistic follower of Satan, and that they will see the greater benefit of allowing for pluralism on public grounds. That they will see the greater benefit in upholding government viewpoint neutrality.

We felt like we were in a position at this point in time in the United States where people were really losing a sense of that kind of First Amendment interpretation. I mean, it's not even an interpretation. I don't even think it's contorting the letter or the spirit of the law to say that we have the right to do this. And if they open up public grounds as a public forum for religious expression, and they put up a Ten Commandments monument that's privately donated, then they're actually obligated to accept the religious monument of somebody else. The provocative end of that is actually beneficial, because we thought that it draws people's attention, and the hope is that this will draw some kind of understanding to that higher ideal.

J: But for you it is equally a success if you want to put a Satanic nativity scene for Christmas, if they say “okay, you can put yours next to the other ones”, or if they say “nobody puts any religious stuff in public forums,” right? Either of those would be successes for you.

Lucien: Well, we started out more with that perception, but as time went by, when people started just pulling the plug from public forums and saying “well, because you guys are going to be here, we're not going to have the public forum anymore,” I've kind of soured to that idea myself, and have weaved more in the direction of, “I wish they understood the benefit of allowing the pluralism and people didn't feel threatened by these things.”

And that's what I mean by not just looking to be provocative. We know it'll be provocative, but I think the overall hope is that it grows to be less provocative because people grow to understand that they live in a society that encompasses a wide range of opinions and diverse views and diverse belief systems, and that that's okay. It's okay so long as we can have a common set of understandings about how we treat one another and what we allow from one another.

I've never argued that people need to love and accept us. I think on the left a lot of times people need to give that up. I think when it comes to people decrying our lifestyles and things like that… Fine; you don't have to like it, you don't have to be part of it. But so long as you understand the value in our ability to do it, even if you think it's wrong, if it's not outside of the law, and if it's not hurting you, you have to allow people the ability to commit errors if you think they are indeed in error. We don't think we are. But we also know for a fact that if we were just told, “you can't identify this way, you can't have these symbols, you need to have your tattoos covered,” it's not going to change how we believe. We're going to go underground or something. We're going to believe all the more in the face of that persecution. I think that's an instinct. I think that's the natural reaction people have.

I think that's the ultimate folly in doing things like killing a spokesperson for a different point of view, or invoking the government to suppress viewpoints that we strongly disagree with. I think we should be arguing for a certain set of principles in which we can all live our optimal life without impeding on each other's happiness.

J: From the outside, the United States looks like such a pluralistic society, with all kinds of people, all kinds of religions, etc. And it’s been so shocking to see that, for example, Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim, is running of mayor of New York, and that there’s this extremely anti-Muslim rhetoric coming out of politicians and people in Congress. I was surprised to see that in a country like the United States, with such diversity of religions, it would still be acceptable to say something like that. So I completely understand why you think that simply saying seeing the closing of public forums isn’t an acceptable solution anymore, because pluralism is indeed a value that every society needs to have at some point.

Lucien: Honestly, I think we started losing our way as soon as people grew seemed reticent to argue that we are not a Christian nation. And I feel like we really lost our way when Democrats seemed to buy into this idea that they needed to give lip service to their Christian faith. Every politician, and even the voters, liberal voters, were always arguing with me “well, they have to say that.” No. They didn't fucking have to say that. That was a real choice. And they decided to let things cascade in this direction.

The idea that we were a Christian nation had so many negative ramifications, and I think that was something that needed to be confronted immediately. And every time it was said, people should say “no, we are a pluralistic nation.” You can say what you want about the virtues of Christianity, but it has no place in governance. These are separate domains. And we are a nation that accepts people's ability to hold varying religious beliefs, and we don't believe that anybody is legitimately of a faith if they're of that faith by coercion. And you would think good Christians would recognize that too.

If your followers are followers because they're afraid that they're going to lose their rights if they're not, how much faith can you have in their faith? I mean, who wants followers on those grounds? And, that said, if you're coming from a particular political viewpoint, do you want your followers answering the question of why they subscribe to certain political beliefs to be because if they believe otherwise they fear they’ll get shot.

J: It is very concerning to see that the United States, a country that I think many people who believe in free speech and civil liberties have, historically, admired, is going down what seems to be an extremely dangerous path of repression, conservatism, and just outright Christian fascism.

Lucien: Well, the bizarre thing about it is that the law is on our side. The law supports our view. The law in the United States is philosophically aligned with what we're advocating. But the fact that so many people on either polarized extreme claim otherwise, and so many are just accepting that as their rote understanding of things now, brings it to a point where it's going to be so much easier, I think, for our fundamental liberties to actually be codified in a different direction, that they're going to be able to take them away with very little resistance because people don't even realize that these rights were there.

And I feel like, in that sense, the Satanic Temple has been kind of a canary in the coal mine, because our rights are so flagrantly violated and denied so often, and in ways that I think are egregious and obvious. But it's not obvious to others because they never understood our basic constitutional liberties at all. And this goes much further back to things we can't fix right away, and we can only start on an incremental level from ground zero if we want to reform them. But I think it shows that, on a certain level, we've really failed in this category of education.

J: Part of it seems kind of a normal consequence of the way in which people are consuming information now. And even the fact that I use the word “consuming” says a lot. That people are losing more and more the ability to process nuances, and that has affected the way in which they interact with different viewpoints. We have developed this ability to submerge ourselves in these extremely siloed information centers online, so that encountering somebody who thinks differently feels almost unnatural. And the consequence has been very, very negative.

The last time that we saw the kind of nonsense (in regards to speech) that is currently happening in the United States was with the death George Floyd. And it was the people who are being victims of repression right now who were saying that failure to adhere to the official level of mourning demonstrated that you were a racist or a Nazi or whatever, and that you needed to be fired. And I think that it was that sort of Faustian bargain that they engaged in, of saying, “it is okay to do it when you're hurting people's emotions,” that ended opening the door for these chucklefucks to do it now.

Lucien: I think that if we had a competent political representation right now, this would have been a real opportunity to bring down the temperature. Because I've spoken a lot about the hate mail I've received and a lot of the extreme idiocy of people calling me a Nazi sympathizer for denouncing the violence and things like that. But it has to be said that, by and large, the overwhelming majority was supportive of my message.

I think there's a certain population of the biggest loudmouths that kind of hijacked the conversation. And I think most people are hoping for the temperature to come down. They're hoping for rationality and reason. And they want peaceful resolutions to the problems we have now. They're not eager to see our rights stripped away. But I do fear that we needed an actual leader in place who wasn't going to just simply take advantage of this situation.

It was one of the easiest situations ever, I think, in which somebody could have come out and really had the fully aligned support of the vast majority of the population by simply saying some conciliatory things that spoke to that majority of people across the divide, you know, just on the very basic agreement that we don't want to resort to violence and that we do want to coexist together peacefully. And I think it was an opportunity in which to really assert those kinds of classical values of pluralism and everything else. But, disappointingly, we have the dumb fuck as president that we have now, who's never proven competent to do that type of thing. And this was not the moment in which to do it either.

J: Even if you compare it with somebody as incompetent and criminal as George W. Bush, a person who objectively deserves to be put on trial for war crimes after 9-11—

Lucien: And he didn't even say it articulately either! It was just the tone. It was just that most basic message of like, “look, we are one country and we need to be united on these certain basic things.” That's like the bare minimum you can do in that job. And, currently, we don't have people competent to do the bare minimum.

J: It's insane to see how the administration is really treating this as a Reichstag fire. That they're using it as a way to see how far they can push it. How much can they benefit from this atrocity. It's really creepy to observe.

Lucien: It was also a bit predictable, knowing the disposition of this administration. And with that, I feel like I can rest my case on why it was a bad idea to shoot a character like Charlie Kirk.

J: Lucien, before I let you go… How is Lucy, the dog?

Lucien: Oh, she's great. I love her.

It was bizarre because I got the canine dog on the recommendation of law enforcement, because apparently they were seeing all kinds of and things like that to try and come kill me. So I got this protection dog. She's a Dutch Shepherd Malinois mix, highly trained. And in the anxiety of the moment I didn't really think of the idea that I'd be getting as good a friend as I did. I was thinking very practically about this dog as a weapon, but she's been one of the best companions I've ever had.

J: In your Substack you mentioned that you encountered a lot of people who see the dog, want a dog like that, and that they perhaps don't understand the challenge that that type of dog represents.

Lucien: Yeah, absolutely. I hate running into people who are like, “oh, I've been thinking about getting a dog like that!” It's a full time job of its own. She has a lot of energy. That's part of her power. She can, from a sitting position, just jump over my head. And she can scale walls. When she is in her training sessions she's absolutely relentless, and she won't be distracted, even if you throw raw meat in front of her or whatever. Her highest motive is to protect me. So if the guy in the bite suit is pushing me or screaming at me, or pointing a fake gun, she wants nothing more than to neutralize them.

So with that kind of power you have to exercise her energy every day, constantly. I’m m always walking her, always working off her excess aggression and things like that. So if somebody's thinking like it's seems like a cool idea to get that dog, and they'll deal with it after work, you have to you have to realize that you're going to have that dog with you all the time, and that you're not going to be able to do certain other things like go to a movie theater or things like that. Because the dog's interests have to be taken into account too.

J: I understand that it's not a service animal but, because it's a protection animal, do you get to go to a supermarket with her, for example?

Lucien: She actually is a service animal. I'm kind of a special case in that regard. People sign off on these things for me because a lot of public officials in the United States are government employees who aren't attached to the Trump administration. The police department in Salem are very much protective of our presence, our neighbors very much recognize us as just a business in town. And we hold events and things like that for locals, and people bring their kids to the Satanic Temple.

They don't think a whole lot about it. We do things where we have things set up outside, for kids to play and for families. So in Salem it's a whole different story if you're talking about the Satanic Temple. So when it comes to things me getting signed off on a service dog for a protection animal, people recognize the kind of danger I'm in and the threats I'm exposed to. I don't know how that works for people in normal circumstances, but my life is far from normal at this point.

And that's another point when it comes to the dog. I wouldn't be going to movie theaters anyways. I don't go out into crowded places, at least not where I can’t bring the dog. So I'm not necessarily missing out on a whole lot, but I think it would be a seismic shift in a lot of people's lifestyles to get the kind of dog I did.

But she's remarkably perceptive. I was coming out of the headquarters one day, and she started barking at a car across the street, like a block over. I was looking at it, but I couldn't see into the car. It seemed like she was alerting at a car, but it's a fairly busy street with people walking around. So I couldn't figure out why she was focused on this car. And then the car came rolling up… and Lucy was right. The guy had something out for me, was yelling stuff at me and things like that. And I have no idea how she knew that this guy had bad intentions down the street. But that does make you feel a whole lot more confident being able to walk around. I was always looking over my shoulder, I now know that the dog always has my six. So it's good.

J: Lucien, thank you so much for the time you gave me today. It has been a really interesting conversation. Most importantly, I think that we've established very clearly that there is a principled rejection to political violence in the way that it happened to Charlie Kirk, and that even if you don't want to accept the principled reasons why these type of acts are bad, there is also a pragmatic understanding of how actions like the murder of Charlie Kirk are bound to only increase repression and increase the downward spiral into fascism that, regrettably, we are witnessing in the United States.

Thank you so much for your time today.

Lucien: Thank you!

All articles and videos are—and will always be—free to access. No paywalls, no locked content. But if you found this material useful or insightful, please consider supporting my work by becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

Not up for a monthly commitment? You can also send a tip via Buy Me a Coffee.

Transcript

Let's talk about the killing of Charlie Kirk.

Charlie Kirk was a conservative, far right influencer, and the founder of Turning Point USA, a youth organization bankrolled by a bunch of billionaires, and which gave him quite a bit of political clout in the United States.

He was murdered a few days ago as he was carrying out one of his usual "conservative DESTROYS liberal 17 year old kids."

He was a "debate bro", one of those unfuckable hate mongers that go to colleges and try to own 17 year old kids and who, I think, have been extremely damaging to the debate, because they have transformed political discussions, not into a search for truth, but instead into just an opportunity to own your opponents. They have to transformed politics into a spectator sport in which you just go see if your side wins.

Of course, that doesn't mean that there wasn't any bravery in what he did. As someone who has, sometimes faced opposition in person, not just online, I know that it is challenging to be in environments where people do not want you. So there's no question that this guy had the testicular fortitude to go and show up and and engage in this sort of thing, even if I think that it was an idiotic pursuit.

Nevertheless, I don't think he was a good person.

I have heard a lot of defenses of him saying that, despite everything, he was, first and foremost, a father and a husband. But a lot of people who die are fathers and husbands. Reproduction is not in and of itself, any kind of a testament as to whether or not you're a good person. Cockroaches reproduce, bacteria reproduce, amoebas reproduce... the fact that an individual has managed to have kids does not mean that they're a good person. Of course, Kirk might have been a good father. In fact, there doesn't seem to be any indication that he did not love his wife or his children, and I am sure that his family misses him deeply. I feel sincerely sorry his kids in particular, as well as for his wife and his parents, because it is not easy to lose somebody that you love.

But, of course, the fact that somebody is good or nice in their private life says nothing about who they are in public, particularly in those spaces where they have an influence. For that judgement we need to look at what Charlie did, which was to push forward the extremely damaging and dangerous ideology of Christian nationalism, extreme, far right capitalism, and racism and homophobia. That doesn't mean that every take he ever had was wrong, or that every view that he held was mistaken; but it shows that all of his position seems to have been underpinned by a number of terrible philosophies.

Charlie Kirk did not believe in freedom, certainly not freedom from the state and, in fact, he believed in an authoritarian government that could repress people, waxing poetic about the possibility of public executions.

So no, he was not a good person.

But let's go back to the immediate aftermath of Charlie Kirk's murder, and to the initial understanding that he had probably been killed by a left winger because of his views. What I saw online were people celebrating his murder, saying that freedom of speech did not mean freedom from consequences.

The people who claim "freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences" are, as a rule, absolute imbeciles. And I don't mean that, figuratively. I mean that that if you say "freedom of speech does not mean freedom of consequences," you are an imbecile, and someone who probably did not get enough oxygen at birth. The reason why I say this is because it's a completely meaningless phrase, since it leaves out the most important part: What are those consequences?

Are they trying to say that freedom of speech doesn't mean that you shouldn't get to get killed for your speech? Because, if that is the argument, then the murder of people like Martin Luther King, the massacre of the staff of the Charlie Hebdo magazine, the attempted assassination of Salman Rushdie, the decapitation of Samuel Paty in France, the murder of the of Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands, as well as the assassination of dissidents in China, Russia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and every other place, are somehow justified because their freedom of speech didn't free them from "the consequences" of their speech.

This is why I say that it's an absolutely stupid take that deserves mockery whenever you see it. Whenever somebody says this, call them a fucking idiot and then prod them as to what exactly they mean.

Do they mean that there are certain types of speech that justify murder?

Because if they believe that speech justifies murder, then they probably also believe that you should be imprisoned for your views. After all, being in prison for a year is better than getting shot in the fucking neck. So if you believe that people should be shot for their views, you are probably okay with the idea of punishing them by sending them to prison, silencing them, or censoring them, or letting the government decide what can or cannot be said.

So, yes, it's true that speech can have consequences, but we need to be clear as to what consequences are legitimate. Murder and violence cannot be considered legitimate consequences, particularly when the speech is coming from a person with no actual political power. Although it is true that Charlie Kirk was an influential far right conservative in the United States, the fact remains that he was not part of the government, he was not in charge of an army, he was not carrying out the genocide in Gaza (although he supported it), and he was not carrying out the brutal repression of immigrants in the United States (which he also supported). So killing him did absolutely nothing to stop any of those things. This wasn't Operation Valkyrie. It was just the murder of a person because they didn't like the things he had to say.

There has been a sort of hagiographic analysis of Charlie Kirk, bordering on religious fanaticism, that I think should be a subject for some sort of psychological study, showing Charlie Kirk standing next to Jesus. Insane takes from a bunch of people who are openly against empathy, who justify the genocide of the Palestinians, and who somehow also believe in the magic and wizardry of a poor peasant who asked people to turn the other cheek. But without entering into that hagiography, or even into fake lamentations over the death of someone that I did not think was a good person, I still think that it is important to not celebrate the killing of Charlie Kirk.

This isn't just because murder, in general, is not OK. It's not just because, unquestionably, his wife, his children, his parents are all people who are suffering enormously at the loss of somebody that they loved. Because even if you didn't care about his family, and even if Charlie Kirk had no children, no family, and had just been a lone nut who somehow managed to amass a large internet following, his murder would have still been wrong.

Political violence like the killing of Charlie Kirk only increases repression. So if you thought that killing him would lead to positive changes in the United States, the answer is the exact opposite. Killing him only empowered the base of those people whose views you already consider to be bad and dangerous and who, more importantly, are now going to use his death to justify more and more repression. In fact, we can already see that move, as people are openly calling for the social death of those who have expressed joy or glee at the death of Charlie Kirk, and even calls for dismantling the opposition to the Trump administration.

There are some historical precedents for this. Just to use it as a parallel (and not as a direct comparison with Kirk), when Horst Wessel, a member of the Nazi SA, was murdered by a Dutch communist, the Nazi Party used his death as a propaganda tool and as a way to increase repression against their opponents. This violence is bound to come back so, from that perspective, a purely pragmatic understanding of the consequences of your actions, doing something like the murder of Charlie Kirk serves no useful purpose. On the contrary: It only makes things worse.

But pragmatism isn't the only reason. At some point in your life you need to reach first principles. You need to reach the understanding that certain things are wrong, regardless of the people to whom they happen. So you cannot then justify the killing of somebody on the opposing side as a result of their views, because, regardless of what you might believe in, there are people who think that your views are hateful, aggressive, violent, and a justification for your killing. So if you're willing to give yourself that right to use violence in order to silence others, you need to understand that that same argument will be used to repress you. And in that never-ending escalation of violence we will see the end of civilization and the death of society as we know it.

We don't need to actually hypothesize on this point: One of the arguments that are often used against freedom of speech is the rise of the Nazis, arguing that their hateful speech is what made their rise possible, leading eventually to the holocaust. However, that is an incorrect historical reading. As Nadine Strossen notes in her book "Hate: Why we must oppose it with Free Speech not Censorship", explains how the rise of the Nazis, despite popular misconceptions, was not made possible by their hate speech, but by the unchecked use of political violence.

"“The major problem with Germany’s response to rising Nazism was not that the Nazis enjoyed too much free speech, but that the Nazis literally got away with murder. In effect, they stole free speech from everyone else, including anti- Nazis, Jews, and other minorities. As Aryeh Neier commented in his classic book about the Skokie case: “The lesson of Germany in the 1920s is that a free society cannot be . . . maintained if it will not act . . . forcefully to punish political violence. It is as if no effort had been made in the United States to punish the murderers of Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr. . . . and . . . other victims” of violence during the civil rights movement.”"

You have to understand that violence like this is a Faustian Bargain will be used to justify your destruction and your repression. You need to stick to these first principles of believing in freedom of speech without loopholes for violence or for governments.

“Music chose me when I was ten years old.”

If you prefer to watch this video on Youtube, you can watch it here

J: Before we talk about your new album, the first solo record that you've done in 13 years... I gotta say, this is the first time that I get to speak with a knight!
Back in April you were granted the title of Knight on the order of the Netherlands Lion, the second highest civilian decoration granted by the Kingdom of the Netherlands, usually given to people who have contributed significantly to the arts and sciences. So, obviously, first of all, congratulations for this recognition. It's fantastic to see that the country has recognized the enormous contributions that you've made to music and to the arts more broadly.
How did this happen? Did you know that it was going to happen?
Arjen: I knew nothing, to quote Manuel from Fawlty Towers. Really, I knew nothing. It was a normal day, and I was expecting a package, so when the doorbell rang I thought “Great! That’s my package!”. So I went to the door, and there was this guy wearing this big metal chain and I thought “well, that’s a weird postman”. Then I saw that there were all these people behind him and…I knew them! They were my friends and family. So I was like “What is going on?”
I know nothing about these things. I know nothing about Knights, Prinsjesdag, King’s Day… I don't even know when it is, so I had no idea. So they all came in, and I still didn't know, and then he started his speech.
I don’t like surprises. It’s not my thing. But when he started telling me about how many fans supported me and wrote letters that I should be a Knight, and how many friends… it gets you. It’s like “oh, my God, this is special.” Not the fact that I'm a knight or whatever, but the fact that all these people really worked hard to get me that decoration.

J: It's also such a beautiful thing because, on the one hand, yes, there is the recognition of friends and fans, but that is not exactly a surprise. I mean, every time you tour the Netherlands, the shows sell out instantly. But now it's not just fans, but the country, the Kingdom (we should be a republic but, whatever), saying that you've contributed to the nation, that you are an asset, not just to heavy metal, but to the people of the Netherlands. Did that feel different?
Arjen: People call me humble and shit but… it feels weird, you know. I can't say “Yeah! I earned that”, or “Yeah, I understood it”. Because there were actually only seven decorations of the Order of the Netherlands Lion, and the other six were like Grootmeesters (Translation: “Grand Masters”, people at the top of their discipline), scientists and teachers, people who are way more important than me and who do way more for the country than I do. So I'm going to quote Wayne's World: I'm not worthy.
For me it's just weird. I don't feel any different. I’ll feel different when I’m on stage in September when we play with Ayreon in front of 15,000 people… which is weird for me because I'm a recluse. I don't notice these things. I don't tour, I'm always at home. I never meet people. I don't have a social life. I don't have a family. Nothing. So it's all very surreal, that’s the right word for it. It's very surreal for me.

J: The second thing that struck me as beautiful, something that I even mentioned to some friends, is that the event seemed like such a demonstration of Dutch society and culture. The fact that you had the mayor, the Burgemeester, there, while you’re just wearing a t-shirt with your hand over his shoulders like “Hey! look what I got! To me, that felt like such a quintessentially Dutch move.
Arjen: True. But the guy was cool. The mayor was just… he was one of us. He was a cool guy, and told me “Yeah, I listened to Kiss when I was growing up, so I know this kind of music!” I didn't tell him that Kiss is kind of different from my music [laughs] But he was a really nice guy.
And the funny thing is that I didn’t know that he was coming, so I was wearing really old clothes with big holes in them. And I felt terrible, because there were three cameras, and all these friends and the mayor, and he was gonna put that medal on this torn t-shirt, you know?
So, for fun, I said “Well, specially wore this, t-shirt with a big hole in it, but I'll make it bigger!” So I ripped it even more, so I was standing there, half naked with a torn t-shirt on… Oh my god [laughs]… It was the combination of feeling awful and feeling honored.

J: It is such an interesting contrast with, for example, the knighting of people in the UK, which is this huge ceremonial thing at Westminster Abbey. And here it was just so chill.
I was happy to see that, separate from my thoughts about monarchies in general, this was such a nice recognition of not just of your work, but also of how relaxed this society can be.
Arjen: I know, I know! But, of course, they wanted to surprise me. If I would have had to go somewhere, I would have known or guessed, or I would have found out about it. So this was the way to surprise me. But… don't ever do it again.
And I knew who was behind it! Firstly, I think it's the director of 013 [a venue in Tilburg, NL] where we play with Ayreon and where we sell out every year, so he was like “let’s arrange something for this guy! Let’s get him a statue!” [laughs] And Joost [van den Broek], the keyboard player in Ayreon, and who’s also the production leader. He arranged it all, so I grabbed him and said: “I hate you, man, I hate you. I will love you tomorrow when I walk you through the village with my medal (which I’m allowed to do), but right now I hate you… So much.”

J: I understand that although you appreciated it this recognition, you don't particularly care about it, nor do you let it get to your head. But now that you've received this, and especially when we see reactions to things like the passing of Ozzy Osbourne, when people inevitably start to think about legacy (not that I think you’re about to kick the bucket). But is that something you think about? That your music will live on long after you’re gone?
Arjen: Rarely. Again, I'm such a recluse, I don't see these people. They're invisible to me until I'm in the venue. When I started Ayreon it was like “let's do an album that I like… And that everyone else is going to hate because it's going to have all these different styles, like prog, metal, rock, classic, folk, pop and everything. People are going to hate it.” So I never expected this to happen.
But yeah, when stuff like this happens or, of course, when I see my fan mail and I see people telling me things like “I was really down and thinking about ending it all, but then I dived into your music, and it inspired me and gave me hope”. That's why we do it. That's why we musicians do it. I guess that's why the Rolling Stones are still on stage at 80. That feeling is the best there is.

J: It must be a powerful emotion to know that you've had that effect on someone, that someone's life has been changed by something that you created.
Arjen: Powerful might not be the word for it. I like it because it gives purpose to what I do. I think that's the most important thing. I want to get up and create, and I want to make people happy. I want them to enjoy my music. I'm not one of those musicians who says stuff like “I make music for myself, and I don't give a shit what people think of it.” No, I want to see people happy. So, that's what’s really important for me. So I don't know if that's a feeling of power—

J: To clarify, I didn't mean that it makes you feel powerful over them. What I meant is that the experience itself must be powerful, in the sense that you realize that you've had such a profound effect on the people who listen to your music.
Arjen: Oh, totally

J: On the topic of creating music.. it's been 13 years since your last solo album, Lost in the New Real. What motivated you to return to making music under your own name rather than within another project?
Arjen: I always try to do that with every album, because it's a luxury. I can do everything on my own. I don't have to invite singers, I don't have to pick singers up from the airport. I don't have to write for other people. There's hardly any logistics. Every day I just step into my studio and whenever I feel like singing, I start singing.
I start every album like that, but then there are parts I can't sing. And then it's like “I need Devin Townsend for this.” or “I need Mikael Akerfeldt for that” or “I need Floor Jansen for this”. And before you know it I start inviting singers and it's not a solo album anymore.
The last few years I did a lot of projects for other people. Like, I did the Simone Simons solo album, Vermillion, which I basically wrote for her. We talked about it a lot, about what direction we were going in, and we were on the same wavelength, but I still I wrote it for her. Then there's the Plan Nine album, which was 30 year old songs that never saw the light of day because we couldn’t get a deal, and the singer, Robert Soeterboek, asked me if we should we record those old songs, and I did it for him, so that he could play live, which he is doing now as he’s touring with Plan Nine.
So I did a few other projects, and all for other people, and it was like I was empty after that. Totally empty. I had no more inspiration. I call it my black hole period. And I was like “damn, I got a I got to take it easy, do something for myself, and just let the ideas come in and see what happens.”
When I start an album I usually have no idea where I'm going with it or what project it's going to be. But this time I wanted to be egomaniac, and do a solo album.

J: You mentioned this issue of not having other singers, but in this case you are working with, for example, Irene and Floor Jansen, who sing in some of your songs. So, from that perspective, what's the difference between a solo album and an Ayreon record, where you also bring other people?
Arjen: Well, Ayreon is a rock opera. And what is a rock opera? It's an album or a play with lots of characters, all portrayed by different singers. So if I do a solo album it's not a rock opera; instead, I would call it a concept album. I sing 80% of the vocals, and I think that if I released it as an Ayreon album people would be disappointed, because… I mean, on 01011001 I had no less than 17 singers. They’re all some of the biggest names, and they're all interacting with each other, and this time I don't have that.
Yes, I have some guests on vocals, because I am a limited singer. I can't sing powerful, I can't sing high. And some parts of my music need that. So I invited Irene, and she can do anything. She can do the powerful stuff and she can do the soft stuff. Her accent is amazing, her acting is amazing. So I definitely needed her for those epic parts, but I would say that I sang, 80% or 90% of this album myself.

J: I remember the first time that I met Irene. It was at a festival somewhere, and from far away I thought, “that’s Floor Jansen!” because they look so similar. Then someone told me that it was her sister and it made perfect sense. Listening to her sing on your album, she has an amazing voice. What are the odds that those parents produced two world class singers, two virtuosos in one family?
Arjen: I know! It was funny because the first time I worked with Floor was during the Star One tour. Her parts were kind of layered on the first Star One album, so we needed one extra female singer. Floor was around 20 at the time, and I asked her if she knew someone who could sing those backing vocals with her. And I jokingly asked her if she had a sister or something. She said she did, so I asked “Well, can she sing?”. And she said yes. Irene was 19 at the time, and they came in and they sang together and it was like these two Amazon women; these tall, powerful women singing these backing vocals on my Star One tour, and ever since that moment I've worked with both of them because they're equally good. I mean, don't ask me to choose. They're really equally good.

J: Do you have any siblings that are good musicians?
Arjen: Not at all! My brother is terrible. That's why I tease him on every album in the liner notes. There's always something where I tease him because he's my older brother. He's three and a half years older than me, so he used to tease me like crazy when I was a kid, and when I started with music and I was unsuccessful. But now I tease him back. So in my liner notes you will always see something jokingly insulting my brother.

J: How did your brother take your knighthood?
Arjen: He was there! And he was proud. He loved it. I mean, we're the best of friends now, but we still love teasing each other. We talk a couple times a week. We have the same interests; he likes rock music and television series, so that’s our favorite subject, recommending each other what to watch. But he was a proud brother.

J: You mentioned how your brother teased you when you were unsuccessful in music. Let's talk about those early days. Young Arjen, the failed musician. How was that beginning?
Arjen: I’m going to leave now [laughs] Well, for me it was a challenge. My brother teasing me… I had a signing session and only two people came, and he was there. I needed that challenge. “One day there will be 2000 people!”
I saw it as a challenge. When I started making music I did it for myself. I did it because I was such a huge music fan. Ever since I was ten years old, my hobby was going to record shops and listening to music, so at some point I wanted to create the kind of music that I would like to hear myself.
I think it's so important to be a music fan. Not just to be a talented musician. Being a huge music fan is more important than having a lot of talent.

J: Perhaps connecting it with the title of your upcoming solo album, Songs that No One will Hear… When you were starting out I guess that these were indeed songs that you thought nobody was ever going to hear.
Arjen: Totally! The whole of Ayreon was a project that I thought no one would hear.

J: Did you ever think about quitting?
Arjen: No, no, no. Absolutely not.

J: So there was no plan B?
Arjen: There was no plan B… Maybe jumping off a building was plan B [laughs]

J: Well, we all have that retirement plan [laughs]
Arjen: [Laughs] But no… The music chose me already when I was ten years old. I didn't know I was actually going to make music myself; I wanted to but I was too lazy. I was in a cover band… well, not even a cover band. We were just miming to glam rock. It was 1971, the glam rock days, so Alice Cooper, David Bowie, Slade, Sweet, etc.
We played at schools, and I was wearing my mother's wig (I don't do that anymore [laughs] and her jewelry and stuff. I was the singer, of course. That’s what I wanted to do, to be the man, to be on stage. But then some older kid told me “all that glam rock is nice, but listen to this!”, gave me Deep Purple’s Made in Japan. Then I heard Ritchie Blackmore play… and I was like “mom, can I have a guitar, please?”

J: It's interesting that you mention doing those early performances in a glam rock style, miming along to playback… because there was obviously this desire to be on stage, but from what I gather that's no longer the motivation. The motivation now is just making music.
Arjen: The moment I said it, I knew that you would circle back to that. Yeah, it's true. I loved playing live, and I loved touring, when I was 20, until I was 30, I think. And then I started to find it repetitive and it was not creative or productive at all. The same songs each day… there was no feeling in it. I felt like an actor on stage, and I just wanted to be back home, in the studio making the next album.
It was also the 80s, and it was a rough time. There was a lot of drugs, alcohol, sex, and rock and roll. Sex is fine, of course, but I had problems with drugs and being aggressive, and there was a lot of shit going on, and that didn't help. That’s why at some point I just felt like I didn’t want to do this anymore, since I wasn’t good at it.
I mean, we're gonna do these Ayreon shows, and I'm going to be the man, you know. But I'm the worst musician on stage. The rest are all talents. My power is to recognize talent; that’s what I’m really good at. But I'm not a huge talent myself, I really have to work for it. I can't go on stage and show off. I don't think I'm really good at performing, basically.

J: Did you ever think that you, that you were.
Arjen: Yeah, of course. In the beginning I was the best, you know? At least I thought I was. Until the likes of Yngwie Malmsteen came around and made me realize that I couldn’t actually do that. And it doesn’t really matter, of course, because you don't have to play like Malmsteen.
At some point I realized that other people were really much more talented than me. I don’t think I’ve ever told this to anyone, but I was living in some little village somewhere, thinking I was the best, and then my neighbor, some 15 year old kid, started playing guitar way better than me. I thought I was the best in the world, and my neighbor, in that little village, was better than me. So I thought I had to find another way.

J: When you say better, you mean in the sense that they are able to play faster or more complex things?
Arjen: The timing was better, they could play faster, with more technique. They did all the stuff that I couldn’t do. Which doesn't mean that they wrote amazing songs or came up with amazing riffs, which for me is way more important and which I think I am good at. So I'm not trying to be humble.

J: Something that always fascinated me about music and art is that sometimes talent alone isn't enough. For example, you mentioned Yngwie Malmsteen and, sure, he's a technically brilliant guitarist, and he has been successful, but he hasn't connected with large audiences in a way that many less technically gifted musicians have connected. Is that ever a frustration for you? That quality alone doesn't guarantee an impact?
Arjen: Quality alone is definitely not enough. And especially these days; you have to give them a little extra. For example, my new video clip came out, and I really loved that one. I worked on it for a month… but how do you get people to listen to it? It's not doing well, it doesn't have many views, and that annoys me.
It must be even worse for new bands. How are they going to get that recognition unless they put on masks or do something weird that other people haven't done. And, to an extent, it's always been that way, of course. I was thinking of bands like Ghost, Sleep Token, and stuff like that, and there's nothing wrong with it.
I mean, saying that I grew up in the glam rock period… it was all gimmicks. Alice Cooper was all gimmicks, but he had the songs to back it up. And you really need that. And, of course, a band like Ghost has that too. They have really strong songs.

J: On the topic of your new album, since I know we gotta move some copies… where does the title, “Songs that no one will hear”, come from?
Arjen: It's a line in the lyrics. The album is about what would people do if they only had five months to live. that. Everyone would do something different, and this album is about Sanctuary Island, the place where the asteroid will hit Earth, and where a lot of people want to be.
I would want to be there too. I’d like to be on Sanctuary Island. I wouldn't want to be in a world that's slowly dying of tsunamis or famine or whatever. I would want to be there, have the meteor fall on my head. And in this story, I don't know if I would really do that, I'm just sitting there on the beach, like I am on the cover of the album, sitting with my doggie, doing what I do best, which is writing songs. And that asteroid is behind me, you can see that asteroid coming down, we have minutes left to live, but I'm still writing songs that no one will hear.

J: To be honest, I think that's such a beautiful thing, and the mark of a successful life. If you only had five months to live, and what you want to do is exactly what you're already doing… you’re successful. I'm glad to hear that you feel that way, that you're doing exactly what you came here to do.
Arjen: Exactly. And that's the message of the album. You really got it. It's about the end of the world and asteroids, we’re all going to die, etc. But it's actually about how if you only had five months to live, you’d probably want to contact someone you’ve been having a fight with… do it anyway! Whether you have five months to live, or five years, or 50 years. And there’s this song called “Just Not today” which is about how we're all gonna die, just not today. So, basically, carpe diem.

J: Obviously, I have to ask about the five sold out shows coming up in September. What can fans expect there?
Arjen: Well, it's getting harder now. Of course with every Ayreon show (we’ve now done 4 or 5) you have to come up with something new. And some of the openings of the shows are totally amazing. In the previous show we had all the band members come on stage with black coats and people and introduced them, and then they turned around and you’d see the title of the album, 01011001. Very simple, but very effective.
Every year I have to come up with something new. I think I've got it for this year; we’ll see. This time it’s the 30th anniversary of Ayreon, so what we're going to do is use the first half of the show to play songs we’ve never played before. I’m actually really looking forward to that, because you don't know how people are gonna react. And then in the second half we will play the songs that we know people like. The “classics”, if you want to call them that, although it sounds a bit arrogant.
Apart from that we also have amazing LED screen with amazing visuals, and we worked on it for one and a half years, so I really look forward to it. I won't see it, because I'm behind the stage, but I’ll see how it all goes down live.

J: I saw that Live Beneath the Waves will be screened in cinemas in the Netherlands. Tell me about how that cinematic presentation of your work came about. Was it your idea?
Arjen: Well, my music is very visual. It’s not “just” music. There's an extra dimension, with all the singers and all the effects on stage. So we make sure to film every show, and it's quite a bit of work to really make it perfect, working on the audio, the editing, and all of that.
Fans are coming from 65 countries. They're coming from far away. So they don't just come for one day. So we want to make sure that people have a special week. The whole week Tilburg turns into Ayreon City, with cinema, Ayreon burgers, Ayreon beer, Ayreon karaoke. There's Ayreon flags all over the city, and there's a lot of places with stuff to do. And at some point I was like “wouldn't it be cool if we showed the whole 01011001 movie?”. And as a little extra Joost and I are going to dress up like Quiz Masters, with top hats and golden jackets, and we're going to do a quiz with everyone who's there, and the winner will get something. So lots of stuff to do there.

J: I think that in this interview it's been clear that you fascinate me as an artist, because you still engage in so much performative stuff with your fans, even though, as we’ve said, you're not really a fan of socializing.
Arjen: Well, on my previous album I have a song called Social Recluse. And that's actually me. I’m very reclusive, but I'm very social… I just don’t like going places or meeting people. So it’s weird for me that I'm doing this, and I would never do it if we didn’t have this production team that arranges everything, because I'm not good at that at all. I come with ideas like “let's do cinema!” or “let's do this for the show!” and stuff like that, but I have these people arranging all of it for me.
I shouldn’t say this, but that week itself is going to be torture for me because, as I said, I'm insecure on stage. “Is everything going to go well?” And I don’t sleep very well, but I know that I've done it a couple of times now, and after every show I know that everything has gone well and I'm so proud of all the singers as I stand on the side of the stage. I see them all go out, I start crying, and I know it’s worth all the aggravation and all the nerves leading up to the shows.

J: Will you have opportunities to interact with fans more directly, like signing sessions and stuff like that?
Arjen: Thing is, we did that, and it was really, really tiring. And I'm so busy already, with two shows a day, which is already very heavy, of course. And then there's the Quiz Master stuff and all of that. It takes too much out of me. And then, of course, it’s never just signing things; I wouldn't want that. You want to talk with people, take a picture with them… at one of the last shows I did that, and the next day I had COVID. So at that point, I was like "I can’t risk it. I just can’t”.

J: And before I let you go, since I know that, besides sharing our social reclusiveness, we also share a passion for cinema. What have you been watching lately?
Arjen: I love TV series. Now I’m watching Silo. It's cool. Do you have some recommendations?

J: I don't know if you like horror, but there are a couple of new films, Weapons, and Bring Her Back, that are pretty good.
Arjen: I love horror movies! As a kid I liked the Omen and The Exorcist. Oh my God I loved it.

J: I was terrible with horror films as a kid!
Arjen: Me too!

J: I think I managed to watch a horror film on my own when I was 12 or 13… before that I was terrified! Just watching the commercials for Stephen King’s It, with Tim Curry as Pennywise, gave me nightmares!
Arjen: But that's why we like horror. I'm sure about it. I went to Ben-Hur with my parents, and it wasn't even a horror movie. But at some point a wagon drives over a guy, and he's covered in blood, and there were also lepers Oh my God! I had nightmares for weeks!
But it scares you so much that you still want to go. And then I went to The Omen, and then I went to The Exorcist. And I survived it. And that was really a victory. And I think that's why we like horror movies.

J: Arjen, thank you so much for the time that you're giving me today. It's been such a pleasure talking to you. I look forward to seeing you perform on stage, and I am so happy to know that if you only had five more months on this planet, you know that you're doing exactly what you came here to do.
Arjen: I'll be there looking at the asteroid saying “Bring it on!”

Transcript

The Metal Blast page is now banned from Facebook. We were suspended first. Then after I appealed, the page was confirmed suspended. It says that it's going to be unpublished. I don't know what that means exactly. I don't know when that is going to happen, but it's very likely that there will no longer be a Metal Blast presence on Facebook.

I started Metal Blast over 10 years ago, simply with the goal of talking about heavy metal and heavy metal culture. Because of that, I spoke often about issues of freedom of speech affecting, for example, Adam Darski, the singer of Behemoth in Poland, when he was being persecuted and prosecuted by the neo-fascist PiS government; the persecution of Salman Rushdie by the Iranian system of the Ayatollahs, the Islamic Republic, for his publication of The Satanic Verses; the massacre of the Charlie Hebdo staff in France; the attacks against Cannibal Corpse in Russia; the ridiculous and unfounded attacks against Soziedad Alkoholica and other Basque activists in Spain over supposed "support" for terrorism—and many, many more.

One of the other topics that I care a lot about, and that I have mentioned in the past many times, is that of the systematic violation of human rights committed against the Palestinians by the state of Israel. It's something that appears in my writing sporadically. I got into a kind of infamous exchange of open letters with Kobi Farhi, the singer of Orphaned Land, a band devoted to running defense for the genocidal regime of Israel. And now that there is a full-blown genocide, a full-blown war crime in which Israel is using hunger as a weapon of war, I have been very outspoken about it. I have been very critical of what is happening. Not because I believe my opinion is so important that everybody needs to know it, but instead because I think that having a platform, I have a certain responsibility to bring attention to important things.

Since I started doing it, I started to notice some strange behaviors on Facebook. I would get a lot of interactions from fake accounts. I would get a lot of password reset attempts. So somebody was trying to access my account. And yesterday I received a notification that the page had been suspended. I appealed that, and the appeal was rejected within 10 minutes.

Now, the reason for that suspension is “inauthentic behavior,” namely, "pretending to be a local or domestic voice whilst commenting on or trying to influence a local or domestic issue." I have no idea what is the local or domestic issue that I am pretending to be affected by or commenting on. For example, if I speak about Israel, I’ve never claimed to live in Israel. I’ve never claimed to live in the occupied territories or in Gaza. I’ve never claimed to live anywhere where I don’t live. So I don’t know what that means.

It is kind of fascinating though, because I would have expected that I would get taken down, as other people have, for posting pictures of the children that have been starved by the Israelis. But it wasn't for that reason. On the contrary, it still says that my page has not violated any community standards. So I have no idea what it means to impersonate anybody or what local issue I am supposed to have commented on.

Now, of course, you could say that commenting on the genocide is a local issue, but I would argue that a crime against humanity is by definition not a local issue—because we're all part of humanity and we should not be okay with that happening.

The page was pretty small and it doesn't generate any revenue. So what really sucks is just losing the community that had developed on that page. So I hope that they, and you, of course, will follow me on Substack, where everything is also free—but at the very least, I no longer have to hope not to get banned by one of our tech overlords.

On the ban itself, I think it is important to say that I am not silly or megalomaniacal enough to believe that my ban had anything to do with me being a very important voice, because a page with 5,000 or so followers is not influential by any definition. Instead, it just has to do with the fact that the elites of our world, governments and the ultra-wealthy, have decided that certain views cannot be shared. One of them in this case being what is being done to the Palestinians, because they have realized that there is an increasing amount of pushback against it.

More and more people are speaking out against the atrocities being carried out by the Israelis, not just in Gaza, but also the pogroms and the apartheid that is being inflicted on the Palestinians in the West Bank. They’re doing this because they’re terrified, and they’re terrified of the truth: that Israel is a settler colonial state that is carrying out a genocide against the people of Palestine.

This is a training ground for what they'll do to us when we step out of line. State actors who have realized it is possible to commit a genocide that is being livestreamed, that we can watch every day on our televisions, every day on the internet, that we can see is happening, and that they can get away with it.

The ability to keep your eyes closed to what is happening is disappearing, and you can make a choice. Will I be silent about this atrocity or will I actually speak up against it?

The kind of repression that has been exercised against supporters of the Palestinian struggle, people who oppose the genocide, is enormous. And yes, it is not nice to know that you can lose a Facebook page, but people are losing their jobs, people are being arrested, and people are being deported for supporting the liberation struggle of a people that are being subjected to the greatest genocide we have seen in the 21st century—the deliberate starvation of a civilian population.

So you need to make this choice. Are you going to stand on the sidelines and look at this atrocity? Or are you going to stand up and loudly say that this has to stop?

Non serviam.
Free Palestine.

Sources:

On genocide and starvation

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/07/gaza-evidence-points-to-israels-continued-use-of-starvation-to-inflict-genocide-against-palestinians/

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2024/10/29/amos-goldberg-what-is-happening-in-gaza-is-a-genocide-because-gaza-does-not-exist-anymore_6730881_23.html

https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/8668/2024/en/

https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/12/19/israels-crime-extermination-acts-genocide-gaza

https://www.btselem.org/press_releases/20242022_israel_is_committing_the_war_crime_of_starvation_in_the_gaza_strip

https://msf.org.uk/issues/gaza-genocide#:~:text=Last%20updated%3A%2010%20July%202025

https://www.fidh.org/en/region/north-africa-middle-east/israel-palestine/israel-s-genocide-and-occupation-threaten-palestinian-self

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/15/opinion/israel-gaza-holocaust-genocide-palestinians.html (without NYT paywall: https://palestina-komitee.nl/omer-bartov-im-a-genocide-scholar-i-know-it-when-i-see-it/ )

https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2025-04-28/ty-article-opinion/.premium/invoking-never-again-as-more-children-die/00000196-7bb2-d41c-a7ff-fff765000000

On the censorship and repression of Pro-Palestinian voices

https://advox.globalvoices.org/2025/05/12/digital-erasure-how-social-media-platforms-are-silencing-palestinians-in-2024/

https://www.euronews.com/next/2024/10/07/human-rights-ngos-say-social-media-platforms-continue-to-censor-pro-palestine-content

https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/systemic-censorship-palestine-content-instagram-and

https://jacobin.com/2025/03/germany-schweizer-speech-israel-palestine

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/4/14/germany-orders-deportation-of-pro-palestine-activists-what-you-should-know

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jul/24/uk-police-detain-pro-palestine-protester-80-almost-27-hours-search-house

On the pogroms in the West Bank:

https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/editorial/2025-06-30/ty-article-opinion/.premium/quiet-west-bank-pogrom-in-progress/00000197-bd2b-d013-a5b7-bd7fb4440000

https://www.btselem.org/publications/202309_the_pogroms_are_working_the_transfer_is_already_happening

https://www.timesofisrael.com/settler-extremists-sowing-terror-huwara-riot-was-a-pogrom-top-general-says/

All articles and videos are—and will always be—free to access. No paywalls, no locked content.

Subscribers ($5/month) get access to video transcripts and the comment section.

Subscribe now

Not up for a monthly commitment? You can also throw a one-time tip my way via Buy Me a Coffee.

On September 4, 1942, Chaim Rumkowski, head of the Jewish Council (Judenrat) of the Łódź Ghetto, gave the most infamous speech of his life:

“They are asking us to give up the best we possess – the children and the elderly. […] I never imagined I would be forced to deliver this sacrifice to the altar with my own hands. In my old age, I must stretch out my hands and beg: Brothers and sisters! Hand them over to me! Fathers and mothers: Give me your children!”

Driven by delusions of grandeur, Rumkowski printed his own signature on the ghetto’s token currency, seeing himself as a saviour of the Jewish people. He zealously exploited the power that came from his collaboration with the Nazis, threatening with deportation anyone who opposed him. Despite the systematic killing of his people, Rumkowski had convinced himself that cooperation might secure some form of modus vivendi with the killers. That’s why, on that day in 1942, he begged the prisoners of the ghetto to surrender their children for deportation.

Unsurprisingly, Rumkowski’s collaboration achieved nothing. Like most of the inhabitants of the ghetto, he was eventually deported to Auschwitz, where he was reportedly killed by Sonderkommando inmates seeking revenge.

Much has been written about the ethical and moral dilemmas surrounding the role of the Judenräte during the holocaust. Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt, and Raul Hilberg, among many others, have all examined this question. Entire books, like Rab Bennet’s Under the Shadow of the Swastika: The Moral Dilemmas of Resistance and Collaboration in Hitler's Europe, have sought to analyze, contextualize, and sometimes even partially defend figures like Rumkowski.

Less controversial than the ethics of collaboration are its outcomes. No collaborationist Judenrat ever managed to stop or derail the machinery of genocide. Like Rumkowksi, many of their leaders were eventually murdered by same people they were trying to appease. “In order to save even a small part of the Jewish people, I alone had to lead others to their deaths” said Jacob Gens in 1942. As the head of Judenrat in the Vilna ghetto, he hoped collaboration would at least allow some to survive. He died the following year, after the ghetto was liquidated.

The wages of collaboration are death. And anybody who advocates for it, for the victims’ peaceful acceptance of the horrors imposed upon them, is asking them to walk willingly to their own destruction.

Which brings us to Kobi Farhi.

Inaccurately portrayed as an advocate for peace in the Middle East, Kobi Farhi, the singer of Orphaned Land, is a tireless apologist for the genocidal Israeli regime. He perpetuates the historically illiterate notion that the Palestinian conflict is rooted on religious hatred, rather than what even Zionist historians like Benny Morris described as “the fear of territorial displacement and dispossession." This distortion transforms the conflict into an endless religious war, an eternal battle over invented deities, rather than a brutal struggle over land, colonization, and survival.

His disregard for Palestinian survival, and his cowardly subservience to the Israeli state he never dares criticize, have long been evident. In Kobi’s universe, the problem isn't the Israeli military exterminating Palestinians, but the resentment those Palestinians feel toward their exterminators. If they could only find it in their hearts to do the work, check their privilege, and forgive, forget, and love the people raping and bombing their families, the conflict would be instantly solved. Everyone could hold hands, sing Kumbaya, and worship at the altar of the apartheid state.

Back in 2014, Kobi publicly stated that “the positive side” of Israel’s assault on Gaza was the artistic inspiration it gave him for new songs. That grotesque remark prompted a public exchange of letters between us. As expected, Kobi limited himself to regurgitate the usual Zionist talking points, while patting himself on the back for having once toured with a Palestinian band, and managing to be in the vicinity of Arabs without flinching. The Israeli equivalent of “some of my best friends are black.”

What Kobi did not address was the vast and well-documented record of Israel’s crimes: the apartheid regime enforced in the West Bank by racist and violent settler zealots, the systematic torture of prisoners, or the extrajudicial killings of Palestinians. Instead, Kobi offered syrupy platitudes, calling for people to get along and find love in their hearts. A Hallmark card response to a genocidal campaign.

Soundbites of “love and peace”, especially coming from an Israeli wearing a kufiyyeh (which he’s quick to remind us he wore before it was cool) might offer good vibes to some, but functionally they only serve to whitewash the genocide. Just as an Afrikaner embracing Black South Africans without opposing apartheid would have done nothing to dismantle that system, or a white Southerner declaring affection for African Americans while supporting segregation would have been no ally, Kobi’s professed love for Palestinians, absent any opposition to the crimes of his government, is, at best, shockingly idiotic. It reflects the kind of historical and legal understanding typically found among high school stoners, albeit without the charm or self-awareness.

As a useful idiot for Israeli war crimes, a Mitläufer in the Zionist project of Palestinian erasure, Kobi never questions the actions of his government. He conveniently forgets that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has perpetrators and victims. In his fantasy version of the world, a captive population enduring what every major human rights organization now calls a genocide is expected not to resist, but to smile, forgive, and build a “peaceful future” alongside their executioners.

In a desperate bid to stay relevant while his country, led by a fugitive from the International Criminal Court, continues committing genocide, Kobi recently penned an open letter to Bob Vylan and Kneecap. In it, and not missing the opportunity to remind us yet again that he has Palestinian friends, he condemned the artists’ statements at the Glastonbury festival. According to Kobi, Bob Vylan’s chant of “Death to the IDF” and Kneecap’s call to “Free Palestine” do nothing but sow division and make peace harder to achieve. He warns against being “aggressively one-sided” in what he describes as a “war” that has lasted a hundred years.

In Kobi’s version of history, there was no Nakba, no ethnic cleansing during the founding of the Israeli settler-colonial state, and no clear aggressor. The Palestinians who lived on the land, and whose descendants now languish in refugee camps, are, in his eyes, just as culpable as the US- and EU-funded machinery that is bombing, starving, and dismembering them.

Perhaps even more so.

That the assault on Gaza has become the the deadliest conflict for children in modern history (including Ukraine, Iraq, and Afghanistan), —that Gaza now has the world’s highest number of children amputees, and that Israel is deliberately withholding food and water from its population, all seems to fall below Kobi’s threshold for moral concern.

Kobi’s war against “one-sidedness” never extends to his own countrymen. Not to the genocidal rhetoric casting Palestinians as Amalek to be exterminated. Not to the Israeli mobs marching through Jerusalem chanting “Death to Arabs.” Not to the parliamentarians who justify the rape of Palestinian prisoners , or the national reverence for war criminals. Kobi reserves his outrage only for obscure artists with no military power, saying allegedly offensive things on a distant stage.

Would Kobi have demanded love, compassion, and understanding for the Nazis from the starving Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto? Would he have condemned the “one-sidedness” of those who fought to liberate them during the 1943 uprising?

For Kobi, one-sidedness is only a problem when Israel is the side being called out. Unable to defend his country on the merits, yet unable to stop spewing pro-Israel propaganda, he falls back on the classic move of every genocidal regime: tone-policing its critics.

Kobi wants everyone to be Rumkowski.

And he hopes they’ll bring their children.

Share

If you want to help the people of Gaza, please consider donating to organizations like UN Crisis Relief, or Doctors Without Borders.

An edited transcript (accounting for the absence of audiovisial material) is below.

I’ve supported the Palestinian struggle in the face of Israeli aggression for a very long time. I don’t say that to suggest that I have some sort of moral superiority over anybody else. I just say it so you understand this is a topic I’ve thought about for a very long time.

There’s a question I keep seeing online that I think is worth exploring: "How can you support Palestine when so much of the ideology coming out of Palestine—or Muslim-majority countries more broadly—isn’t exactly welcoming to someone like you?"

I mean, I’m not just an atheist. I’m an anti-theist. I think religion isn’t just wrong—I think it’s harmful. And yeah, I wouldn’t exactly be welcome in a place like Gaza. Not that there’s much left of Gaza now, because Israel has turned it into rubble. But even before that, when Hamas was still governing what was left of the civilian population, I wouldn’t have been exactly warmly received: I’ve republished the cartoons of Charlie Hebdo (not that they'd know, but you get the point) so they probably wouldn’t be thrilled to see me there.

So how can I support the struggle of these people?

Especially when you consider that, for someone like me, living in Israel—a supposedly secular state—might be more comfortable than living in Gaza before its destruction. There's no doubt that if you’re a secular, Western-minded person with liberal values, you’d probably be more at ease in Tel Aviv than in Gaza.

But that’s irrelevant. Or at least, it should be.

The fact that we relate more to a society, or think their values align more with ours, doesn’t mean they get a free pass to do whatever they want. And yet, with Israel, that’s often the assumption: that their “Western-ness” grants them moral carte blanche.

We don’t generally think the decency of a genocidal society is enough to justify what they do. So the fact that Palestinian society is Muslim doesn’t justify the atrocities committed against them. We don’t condition the right to live on whether we like the people being victimized.

So it’s been really frustrating to watch these "gotcha" questions pop up—mocking the very idea that anyone would care about the atrocities being committed against the Palestinians.

The best response to this kind of trolling came, weirdly enough, from an Italian drag queen. He gave an incredible explanation of why someone like him—who would absolutely not be celebrated in most Muslim-majority countries—still supports the Palestinian people. He embodied the commitment to civil liberties and human rights that we all claim to care about.

What Israel is doing is a genocide, and one day it will be remembered in the same way we remember the Rwandan genocide or the holocaust.

[Holocaust Survivors clip]

Earlier this year I went to the Czech Republic, to Lidice—or what used to be Lidice. The Nazis wiped it off the map as punishment for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, one of the highest-ranking Nazis and one of the architects of the Final Solution.

The people of Lidice had nothing to do with Heydrich’s assassination, and the Nazis knew that. But that didn’t matter. Lidice was razed as a message. A terror tactic designed to reassert control.

[Lidice clip]

When we think of Lidice, it’s impossible not to think of Gaza: its destruction, its martyrdom, the mass killing of its children. All in the name of punishing October 7th.

[Clip of genocidal rhetoric in Israel]

Whenever the Israel-Palestine conflict comes up, it’s framed as too complex and ancient to be solved.

That’s a lie.

Every human rights organization working in the region agrees: Israel is committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. Genocide. Use of hunger as a weapon. Torture. Human shields. All being inflicted on the mostly civilian population of Gaza.

Since the October 7th attacks, over half a million Palestinians have been killed—most of them women, children, and the elderly. Children are starving—literally starving—while aid trucks are being blocked by Israel.

Omar Al Akkad, a Palestinian writer, recently published a book called "One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This". People look back at atrocities and say, “Of course I was against that.” Even though they did nothing at the time. They imagine themselves as having been part of the "resistance", despite their passivity.

The good news? There are things you can do.

You can help organizations like UN Crisis Relief, or Doctors Without Borders. Please donate generously.

If you live in one of the many countries supporting or enabling this live-streamed genocide, write to your MP, your congressman, your president, or shout it from your fucking window.

Tell them to stop supporting this genocide. Tell them to stop enabling the liquidation of this people.

Free Palestine.

I. Creatives for Genocide

“Join me in advocating for the revocation of Kneecap’s work visa.”

With those words, Sharon Osbourne torched what little remained of her husband’s legacy, all in the service of defending a genocide.

To be clear, Ozzy, who is now wheelchair-bound (likely from the weight of his entire family riding on his coattails), isn’t a victim. He’s been a willing accomplice in shielding Israel from criticism, happily lending his name to pro-Israel front groups.

Ozzy and Sharon’s ties to these groups go back years. Chief among them is the paradoxically named “Creative Community for Peace” (“CCFP”), a far-right Zionist outfit that uses celebrities to deflect criticism of Israeli crimes. As Jewish Voices for Peace reported:

“CCFP carefully hides from artists that it is actually a front group for StandWithUs (SWU), a long-established anti-Palestinian, pro-Israeli settler lobby group with close ties to Israel’s hardline government. Registration and tax documents show that StandWithUs and Creative Community for Peace are simply alternate names for a single IRS-registered non-profit, ‘Israel Emergency Alliance.’”

“Examples of SWU and CCFP’s partnership with the Israeli government include convening an organizing meeting with Israeli government officials and music industry executives, and producing a pro-settler video series with Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. SWU even announced they were awarded a grant from Israel’s Prime Minister’s Office.”

It’s propaganda, plain and simple, and Ozzy and Sharon are willing participants. In fact, it was in that spirit that back in March they signed a letter denouncing the BBC for its allegedly “anti-Israel bias” after airing a documentary about the situation in Gaza (and which the BBC pulled almost immediately after airing). These accusations were especially grotesque, given that every serious analysis of BBC coverage shows a consistent pro-Israel bias, something that even the BBC’s own staff have complained about.

Despite Ozzy and Sharon’s repugnant views about the situation in Palestine, however, they have the same right as anyone else to be fundamentally wrong. And given Ozzy’s undeniable, years-long intellectual deterioration, it never seemed worth dignifying their comatose geopolitical takes with attention.

But then came Coachella.

II. If You’re Not Calling it a Genocide…

Kneecap are an Irish hip hop trio known for weaving Irish language, culture, and Republicanism into their music. As an anti-colonial movement, Irish Republicanism has a long-standing history of solidarity with Palestinian liberation—and Kneecap have carried that torch proudly (1, 2, 3, 4).

It was this solidarity that led them to cancel their appearance at last year’s SXSW festival, publicly denouncing its close ties to the U.S. military. Given America’s role in enabling the genocide in Palestine, they refused to perform at a festival bankrolled by the same war machine that made it possible.

Through their actions in solidarity with the Palestinians, Kneecap did more than just remind people about the genocide. Instead, they exposed the media’s pro-Israel bias.

Take, for example, their appearance last year on Ireland’s Late Late Show, when they were attacked for allegedly breaking an agreement not to wear any pro-Palestinian symbols. The potential backlash was so significant that the host felt compelled to remind viewers that even though “our thoughts are with everybody in that conflict“, when it came to Palestine, there was “also another side.”

That kind of performative “balance” is never demanded when condemning Russia, Iran, China, or any other designated enemy. But when it comes to Israel—a state under investigation for war crimes by the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice— asking “but what if the victims had it coming?” becomes mandatory.

The double standard applied to Palestine is deeply-rooted, shaped by ignorance, idiocy, and imperialism. Support for Palestine isn’t seen as solidarity, being instead framed as dangerous, antisemitic, and even criminal.

Take Cornell University’s recent cancellation of Kehlani’s performance at Slope Day. According to the university, the R&B singer was injecting “division and discord” by expressing “antisemitic, anti-Israel sentiments”—which is to say, publicly supporting Palestine in the face of a genocide.

Now compare that to last year’s commencement at Duke University, where Jerry Seinfeld gave the keynote address. There the scandal wasn’t Seinfeld’s questionable history with minors, or that he’s a rabid Zionist who even visited an “Anti-Terror Fantasy Camp” in the Occupied Territories to roleplay murdering Palestinians.

No. The scandal was that students dared to walk out of his speech. According to front groups like CCFP, that wasn’t just a protest. It was “antisemitic” and “pro-Hamas.”

This double standard was on full display at Coachella, where Kneecap performed on both weekends.

During their first set, elements were quietly censored. So the second time around they came prepared.

"The Irish, not so long ago, were persecuted at the hands of the Brits. But we were never bombed from the fucking skies with nowhere to go. The Palestinians have nowhere to go.

If you're not calling it a genocide, what the fuck are you calling it?"

---

III. War is Peace.

Kneecap’s act of solidarity might have made the biggest splash, but they weren’t alone. Other artists—including Bob Vylan, Blonde Redhead, and Green Day— also spoke out for the victims of the genocide. And no matter how small the gesture, they all caught hell for it.

Green Day’s “crime” was microscopic: a minor lyric tweak during Jesus of Suburbia, changing “running away from pain when you’ve been victimized” to “running away from pain like the kids from Palestine.” They’d done something similar in Mexico the year before, but Coachella’s size and reach made it impossible for the propagandists to ignore. Acknowledging the genocide on stage became the real offense.

Mainstream American media reacted exactly as you’d expect.

Fox News compared the artists to Nazis, while others mourned the supposed pain and suffering caused by a handful of musicians daring to remind people of the existence of the Palestinians. Some even claimed that artists like Green Day and Kneecap had attacked Israel and the US by even mentioning the genocide.

“Let’s be clear: this isn’t about artistic freedom. I’m a First Amendment near-absolutist,” wrote Lee Trink, former president of Capitol Records, in an editorial for The Hollywood Reporter.

He then backtracked immediately, declaring that this time those principles could be tossed aside because “this is about enabling hate speech.”

Since getting fired for virtually bankrupting an esports media company, Lee has used his time online to rail against trans rights, woke ideology and DEI initiatives. Despite his apparent dislike for the speech-stifling effects of “wokeness”, however, when it came to shielding Israel from criticism, he had no problem resorting to the same language he normally mocks:

“This is about retraumatizing Jewish attendees — many of them teenagers.”

“The audience was forced to participate in a display that wasn’t just offensive — it was dangerous.”

“What does accountability look like when a $600 ticket buys you fear instead of joy?”

For Lee, October 7 is a wound that never heals. It expands day after day, affecting not just the victims and their families, but anyone who shares their religion or nationality.

And of course, using the conservative’s favorite manipulative trope: “Won’t somebody please think of the children?!” What horrors might these poor souls endure if their $600 weekend of culturally sanitized rebellion is soiled by overhearing an Irish band saying “FUCK ISRAEL,” or middle-aged punk rockers acknowledging that Palestinian children are suffering?

In Lee’s worldview, the wicked organizers of Coachella must be punished for “bringing fear instead of joy.” Violating Zionist safe spaces is a crime graver than mass starvation or slaughter.

And yes; Zionist safe spaces. Because Lee’s moral outrage is reserved exclusively for one cause.

He shows no such concern when denying the existence of Palestine and Palestinians, using “Palestinian” as a slur, joking about Israel booby-trapping kitchen utensils to murder its opponents, or insisting Israel has no obligation to let Palestinians feed themselves, even though international law demands it.

Trink’s hatred for Palestinians makes anything screamed by Coachella bands look tame. But in his world, different rules apply, because, to him, Palestinians and their supporters aren’t human.

Nothing justifies October 7, but October 7 justifies anything.

IV. Stolen Valor and Pink Hairbands

David Draiman, the fanatically Zionist frontman of Disturbed, also joined the pile-on against the artists who dared acknowledge Palestinian suffering.

This 52-year-old man—who never served in the Israeli army that would have gladly taken him—posted a photo giving Kneecap the finger, while calling them “virtue signaling morons” (a phrase he clearly doesn’t understand). Naturally, he praised himself for his “uncensored message” delivered through a stunning and brave sleeveless selfie.

You see, David is a very tough boy. That’s why, even though he always found a reason not to enlist, he made sure everyone knew that he supported the troops “with every fiber” of his being during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Clearly, he has a thing for supporting the wrong side, even if only from a safe distance.

He is the kind of person who fetishizes combat, blood, and sacrifice, not to risk anything himself, but to ingratiate himself with those who do. Like many of the chickenhawks who love wars in which other people fight, he has convinced himself that fellating the military and posing for photo-ops gives him some kind of military cred.

It’s David’s shameless bootlicking that made Disturbed’s cover of The Sound of Silence the quintessential cop funeral music.

Just like he totally could have been a soldier, David Draiman is also on record claiming he totally could have been a lawyer. He says he dropped out of law school because he couldn’t “lie for a living and protect criminals.” However, seeing his record on Israeli and American wars, it’s clear the problem wasn’t lying or defending criminals. He just wanted to do it for free.

Draiman’s subservience to Israel isn’t new and, in fact, goes back all the way to his childhood. Alongside artists like Gene Simmons, he’s long collaborated with Zionist front groups like CCFP—virtue signaling for “peace” while sleevlessly autographing artillery shells used to murder the mostly underage, civilian population of Gaza.

Demonstrating the kind of bravery that gets people medals, Draiman allows no disrespect of Israel’s genocide. His bootlicking has earned him a permanent frontline position, bravely tweeting against anyone who fails to celebrate the slaughter.

Kneecap’s “Free Palestine” and “Fuck Israel” offended him, naturally. But even Green Day’s microscopic lyric tweak was too much for his delicate sensibilities. In response, Draiman publicly invited Billie Joe Armstrong to a totally chill and informal meeting to explain “the Israeli/Jewish side of this horrific war”. Then, sounding less like a tough guy and more like a scorned lover, he added “I’m available to discuss whenever you are. No judgment, nothing preconceived...”

Or at least as few preconceptions as you can expect from a man who signs artillery shells and fellates war criminals like it’s his job.

But Draiman isn’t unique. His desperate need to punish even the slightest deviation from pro-Israel orthodoxy is part of a broader pattern.

In the abusive relationship the West maintains with Israel, even acknowledging that Israeli actions cause harm is seen as problematic. Israelis weaponize their own historical suffering to bully and destroy, treating any criticism as an attack.

Ms. Rachel, the beloved children’s YouTuber, found this out after daring to express sympathy for Israeli and Palestinian children. For her empathy, she landed in the crosshairs of StopAntisemitism, a Zionist front group that petitioned the DOJ to investigate her for “disseminating Hamas-aligned propaganda.”

StopAntisemitism also named Ms. Rachel “Antisemite of the Week,” a title she gets to share with Ayatollah Khamenei, Greta Thunberg, Dave Chappelle, Ken Roth, Nick Fuentes, Mark Ruffalo, Francesca Albanese, Joe Rogan, and Kanye West.

In the moral wasteland of genocide propaganda, there’s no meaningful difference between a self-described anti-semite saying “I LOVE HITLER,” a holocaust denier, a UN Rapporteur accusing Israel of war crimes, and Ms. Rachel saying “We can’t let children starve.” All of them are equally antisemitic and damaging to the security of Israel.

Israel and its accomplices have a long history of panicking at any shift in public perception. Israeli political scientist Avner Yaniv even coined the term “Palestinian Peace Offensive" to describe Palestinian attempts at a peaceful resolution, and which threatened Israel’s ability to control the narrative.

The war propaganda depends on dismissing Palestinians as “terrorists” and “antisemites.” If Palestinians are seen as human beings seeking peace, or as victims of Israeli crimes, the entire justification for endless violence collapses.

In a culture this hysterical, even a handful of slogans at Coachella couldn’t be tolerated. And, for some, angry editorials wouldn’t quite cut it.

V. The Red Queen’s Revenge

In 1988, Geraldo Rivera aired his infamous Satanic Panic special, Devil Worship: Exposing Satan’s Underground—a masterclass in obscurantism and manufactured hysteria.

Starting from the false premise that Satanists were committing murder and abuse all across America, Geraldo assembled a cast of self-proclaimed “experts” to spin lurid tales of ritual sacrifice and demonic possession.

It didn’t take long for heavy metal to be dragged into the conversation. Geraldo warned viewers that even if most fans weren’t Satanists, “there’s an undeniable connection between obsession with the really hard stuff and the occult.”

By then, heavy metal had been in the moral panic crosshairs for years, accused of promoting Satanism, suicide, and occultism. Black Sabbath had already been smeared as “Satan Rock” in the early ‘70s, and by the late ‘80s, the PMRC was even selling $15 “Satanism Research Packets” to desperate parents trying to save their kids from the dark magic of guitar solos.

Ozzy Osbourne, appearing via satellite, was trotted out as heavy metal’s representative, tasked with defending artists, fans, and himself during Geraldo’s Torquemada Holiday Special.

And yet, despite living through a full-blown moral panic, the Osbournes learned all the wrong lessons. They treated free expression not as a principle to defend, but as a tool to use and exploit. Their interest is exclusively financial, with value extraction as their lodestar.

This view of civil liberties as something that matters only if they can profit from them is a family value for the Osbournes. Case in point, when Kelly Osbourne, Ozzy’s daughter, “defended” Latinos from Trump’s racism in 2015, she did so by asking:

“If you kick every Latino out of this country, then who is going to be cleaning your toilet, Donald Trump?”

She said the quiet part out loud: In her gilded world, entire communities aren't seen as people first, but as a permanent servant class. She later apologized, blaming the gaffe, as celebrities often do, on anxiety, depression, and addiction, and explained how she had educated herself, and “done the work.”

Then, in the same interview in which she expressed regret for her view of Latinos as perpetual toilet cleaners, this nepo baby, with millions in the bank and not a single day of work behind her, still felt qualified to lecture the poor, explaining it was time for white people to “take a long hard look, check their privilege, and be a little bit more open-minded."

The patronizing, Marie Antoinette vibes would almost be funny if they weren’t so grotesque. Living in a Versailles bubble, Kelly Osbourne is the last person on earth who should be giving moral sermons…

Although, maybe not.

Turns out that the Osbourne’s life is not privileged at all. If anything, it’s dangerous. Uncertain. Practically Dickensian.

Even though both Ozzy and Sharon grew up facing real hardship, apparently nothing could have prepared them for the unimaginable suffering they now endure. As Sharon tearfully explained last year, her and Ozzy were in the process of fleeing the virulent antisemitism they encountered in the famously Jew-hating wasteland of Hollywood.

Following in the footsteps of Jewish refugees who fled Germany with nothing but the shirts on their backs, the Osbournes began planning their Exodus, armed only with the $4.3 million from selling their LA apartment, their multi-million dollar fortune, and their modest collection of mansions.

Tragically, their journey to safety was delayed when Ozzy suffered a fall, leaving them stranded in their $18 million Beverly Hills hideout.

Thoughts and prayers. 🙏🙏🙏

Needless to say, Sharon’s claims about fleeing American antisemitism were lies. So were the claims of their ghost-hunting failson that they were leaving because of rising crime and Americans no longer being “nice.”

Ozzy had already admitted they were moving to dodge a tax hike. The victimhood narrative came later, cooked up only to deflect criticism of Israel.

For Sharon, antisemitism isn’t just hatred of Jews; it’s criticism of Israel. She’s long weaponized that distortion to attack pro-Palestinian voices like Roger Waters, while cozying up to front groups running defense for an apartheid state.

Kneecap were no different.

She wanted them gone. And she knew exactly how to make it happen.

In her crusade against pro-Palestinian speech, Sharon found a perfect ally in Donald Trump.

A fanatical supporter of Israel, Trump is on the record advocating for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, saying the United States can, and will, seize the entire strip and forcibly remove its population.

He even shared a bizarre AI-generated video of what he imagines “American Gaza” would look like, trivializing a crime against humanity in a way that would have made Goebbels blush.

Not content with threatening ethnic cleansing abroad, the Trump administration has also weaponized immigration laws at home to crush dissent. To that end, they’ve violated due process rights, illegally deporting people to rot in Salvadoran gulags, while also clamping down on anti-Israel speech, especially that of non-citizens—despite the fact that the Constitution forbids it.

That’s the power Sharon Osbourne tried to recruit to go after a band.

She was more than happy to call on the same authoritarian president she once criticized (and whose toilets Kelly feared would go uncleaned if they got rid of the Mexicans) and beg him to use his fascist powers against an Irish hip hop band she didn’t like.

Even though she knew that Kneecap’s speech was unquestionably protected by the First Amendment, Sharon asked the U.S. government to break the law in order to silence a handful of Irish rappers that said “Fuck Israel” and “Free Palestine”

And so, to their role as cheerleaders for genocide, the Osbournes can now add a new badge of shame: Becoming Mitläufers in Trump’s descent into fascism.

At least for as long as it suits them.

VI. The Fall of the House of Osbourne

Although Sharon tried to sound magnanimous when it came to Green Day merely mentioning Palestinian children, she was hurt.

“At a time when the world is experiencing significant unrest” she explained “music should serve as an escape, not a stage for political discourse.”

This was a strange position for someone married to Ozzy Osbourne, a man who built his legend on anti-war anthems like War Pigs, Electric Funeral, and Children of the Grave. As Ozzy himself notes in his autobiography, using music to confront real-world horrors wasn’t a side project for Black Sabbath; it was the point. Especially for Geezer Butler, the band’s primary lyricist.

Even Ozzy’s heavily ghostwritten solo work has leaned political when convenient, posing in photo-ops with the US military, and releasing special editions to benefit Ukraine in their war with Russia.

Clearly, "political discourse" is only a problem when Sharon doesn’t like the politics.

Despite how repulsive Sharon’s behavior has been (along with that of every other useful idiot facilitating genocide) their desperation is something to celebrate. Because it shows that change is coming.

The Palestinian people have endured 77 years of ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and the slow grinding cruelty of occupation, while America and Europe sent guns, bombs, and blank checks. For decades the suffering remained under the radar.

But not anymore.

The destruction of Gaza is so total, so obscene, that even the most obedient media outlets struggle to spin it. Social media has shattered the censors' monopoly, and we have seen the horror with our own eyes.

The propagandists know it.

The war pigs know it.

Their hysterical shrieking isn’t strength. It’s panic.

They know exactly what’s coming.

Because nothing—not weapons, not armies —is more dangerous than an idea whose time has come.

And it’s time for Palestine.

Additional sources

Selected readings exploring moral panics, propaganda, and the politics of genocide:

• Finkelstein, Norman G.
  The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. Verso, 2000.

• Finkelstein, Norman G.
  Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History. University of California Press, 2005.

• Finkelstein, Norman G.
  "This Time We Went Too Far": Truth and Consequences of the Gaza Invasion. OR Books, 2010.

• Carter, Jimmy.
  Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Simon & Schuster, 2006.

• Pappé, Ilan.
  The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oneworld Publications, 2006.

• Victor, David. (Ed. Kier-La Janisse and Paul Corupe)
  Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s. Spectacular Optical Publications, 2015.

• Osbourne, Ozzy, with Ayres, Chris.
  I Am Ozzy. Grand Central Publishing, 2010.

Full transcript is below.

Read more

Amid discusses the threats he has received, the challenges of navigating Norway’s immigration system, and how music has become his lifeline. This is a powerful story of resilience, freedom of expression, and the fight for survival against oppressive regimes.

(Paying subscribers will have the full transcript later today!)

Read more

Recorded in December of last year, a conversation with Tony Kakko about his new solo project, Himmelkraft.

Transcript coming soon.

10 years ago, the Charlie Hebdo attack shook the world. In this video, we dive into the events of that day, the battle for free speech, and the lasting impact on how we talk about religion, censorship, and tolerance. Let’s unpack the hypocrisy, the bravery, and why this fight still matters today.

Transcript:

10 years ago today, 12 people were killed in Paris at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical magazine that, following a proud French tradition, likes to mock everything and everyone.

They died because, in the eyes of extremists, Charlie Hebdo had done the ultimate crime: They had treated Islam like any other idea.

Some minimal background. According to some Muslims, images of Mohammed, let alone mockery of Mohammed, are absolutely prohibited.

You probably think that now I’m gonna say something about why this reading of Islamic rules is incorrect. After all, the Quran doesn’t say anything about portrayals of Mohammed, and Islamic scholars debate the extent and meaning of the rules contained in the Hadiths.

But I’m not going to.

Because it doesn’t matter. Who cares if Islam actually prohibits pictures of Mohammed? It’s like debating Santa Claus’ favorite cookies.

These rules are only relevant for the people who want to be subjected to those rules because they are members of that particular faith.

If you consider yourself a Muslim, and you think god prohibits drawing pictures of Mohammed, don’t draw pictures of Mohammed, don’t buy magazines that include pictures of Mohammed. The rules of a religion should only dictate the lives of the people who voluntarily want to follow them.

So, the attack against Charlie Hebdo was wrong not because the murderers had the wrong understanding of Islam, but because they demonstrated an expectation that everyone should follow the same delusional rules that those extremists embraced for themselves. And this isn’t a guess. Because the massacre wasn’t exactly unexpected. It didn’t happen in a vacuum.

For years Islamic extremists had tried to present themselves as THE representatives of Islam, and dictate how people talk about their religion. That’s why Salman Rushdie spent years in hiding after the publication of the Satanic Verses (I made an entire video on the Satanic Verses affair, there’s a link in the description), and why Danish embassies were attacked after the Danish magazine Jyllands Posten published cartoons of Mohammed. Or why Theo Van Gogh was stabbed to death in the streets of Amsterdam, after making a short film that criticized the treatment of women in Islam.

So this is something that went back decades. And in that time, plenty of people sided NOT with the writers and artists who were being targeted, but instead with the fundamentalists that kept attacking them. Seeing themselves as virtuous and tolerant, people came up with the idea that mocking the beliefs of Islam was the same as having a problem with Muslim human beings.

“Islamophobia” was used to discredit any criticism of the human rights violations in Muslim-majority countries, the situation of women immersed in Muslim societies, or the illiberal values that were being pushed by extremists embedded in some of these communities.

As European and American cities saw people marching with signs calling for the beheading of those who disrespected Islam, useful idiots came out to help them, weaponizing accusations of “racism” to silence critics of this religion, even though the vast majority of the victims of Islamic fundamentalism, are other Muslims.

And so we ended up in a situation where a leftist magazine like Charlie Hebdo, used to attacks from the French far-right, suddenly found itself also being attacked by so-called leftists who, focusing only in identity politics, could not conceive immigrant values and ideas being mocked and satirized in the same way that French and European values and ideas were mocked and satirized.

The massacre in 2015 wasn’t even the first time that they were physically attacked. Back in 2011, after years of dealing with the kind of pathetic lawsuits and criminal complaints that are possible under France’s absence of true free speech, the offices of Charlie Hebdo were firebombed. They had just published an issue criticizing the treatment of women in Islamic nations, and mocking fundamentalism. Their cover showed a picture of Mohammed saying “100 lashes if you don’t die of laughter!”… so obviously the reasonable response was to burn down their offices.

Because when somebody calls you a violent zealot, a Molotov cocktail definitely shows that they’re wrong.

It is with that background in mind that we need to go back to the morning of January 7, 2015, as the staff of Charlie Hebdo gathered for an editorial meeting.

They were at their offices located at Nº10 Rue Nicolas-Appert. Unless you knew what you were looking for, you wouldn’t have known that Charlie Hebdo were there. After the firebombing, and finding a new location, it was unthinkable to have sign. That’s why the two cowards first went into the wrong building, before finally making their way to Charlie Hebdo.

They ran into Coco, one the cartoonists at the magazine, and who was right outside with her daughter. At gunpoint they forced her to type in the code, and opened fire through the door as soon as it opened.

It’s a testament to their pointless savagery that the first person they killed was a completely innocent bystander.

Frédéric Boisseau, a 42 year old father of two, a maintenance worker sitting at the reception, and who probably didn’t even realize what happened.

The two shooters then took Coco upstairs, and went with her to the meeting room.

They first shot Franck Brinsolaro, the police officer tasked with protecting Stephane Charbonnier, better known as Charb, and who was the editor of Charlie Hebdo.

Then they called 5 cartoonists by name: Charb, Cabu, Wolin, Tignous, and Honoré

And shot them one by one.

Then they just kept shooting.

They killed columnists Bernard Maris and Elsa Cayat. Copy editor Moustapha Ourrad,and Michel Renaud, who was only visiting the offices as a guest.

By sheer luck, hiding under a table during the chaos of those 5-10 minutes of constant shooting, some of the people present, Coco included, survived.

As the shooters were leaving, a police car showed up. That’s when they killed their last victim. A Muslim. Police officer Ahmed Merabet.

A couple of days later the scum who shot up the Charlie Hebdo offices, died like cowards, hiding behind hostages.

Parallel to all of this, an associate of theirs had also gone into action.

He murdered Clarissa Jean-Philippe, a 27-year old policewoman who had been on the job for two weeks.

Then he took hostages at a Kosher supermarket, where he went on to kill 4 more people after he identified them as jews:

Philippe Braham, a 45 year old sales executive.

Yohan Cohen, a 22-year old student who worked at the supermarket,

Yoav Hattab, a 21 year old student from Tunisia,

And Francois-Michel Saada, a 64 year old retiree.

Then, for the first time in his life, the scum who killed these four innocent people did the first useful thing he ever did. And died.

Right after the attacks, people pretended to unite around the cause of free speech.

And I say “pretended”, because they didn’t really mean it.

While people were marching through France with “Je suis Charlie” signs, others were being arrested for facebooks posts in which they expressed support for the attacks. The French comedian Dieudonné, who is very pro-Islam, and a huge critic of Israel, sometimes offensively so, was charged with “supporting terrorism” for making a joke on Facebook at the expense of the victims of the attack.

Now, as someone who supports Charlie Hebdo, and who has shown the drawings of Mohammed in this video, it’s not nice to know that, before the bodies were cold, there were people justifying what happened, or mocking the victims. But the idea that their expression of those views should get them imprisoned is obscene. And any system that tolerates these punishments for speech, simply doesn’t have freedom of speech.

And the French government wasn’t unique in this hypocrisy. In fact, the private photo-ops done by government officials after the massacre, supposedly in support of free speech and diversity of ideas, were filled with representatives of countries that had no respect for free speech whatsoever before the attacks, and who didn’t exactly suffer a dramatic change of heart after the massacre.

Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Russia, Algeria… even Turkey was there. Which is funny when you consider that that same government would later start a criminal process against Charlie Hebdo for mocking Erdogan, the president of Turkey.

And that’s not all. When in 2020 Samuel Paty, a French school teacher, was beheaded for showing his students a cartoon of Mohammed during a class about free speech, what the Turkish and the Pakistani governments did was to blame the French. Not because they cared about Muslims (after all both of them have no problem with the genocide of Uighur Muslims carried out by China) but because, like all authoritarians, they could exploit religion for political gain.

And let’s not forget many of the “classical liberal”, “free speech warriors”, “facts don’t care about your feelings”, gaggle of assholes, who love to talk about “cancel culture”, censorship and “wokeism”, but who have openly embraced and promoted the silencing and censorship of people criticizing the ongoing Israeli genocide against the Palestinians. And that’s because, for them, free speech only mattered when the things they wanted to say were in jeopardy.

So with the benefit of hindsight, what can we learn from what happened in France?

Considering my dislike of religion in general, and Islam in particular, you might think that I see it as a confirmation of all of my thoughts about religion. And to an extent it is, after all, you don’t get religious killings without religion.

Religion is always going to make people believe irrational things. By definition; I mean, faith is belief in the absence of proof. So it should never be the business of the government or society to protect those beliefs at the expense of those who don’t share them.

If I worship my dog, and believe that he is a holy and should never be insulted, I shouldn’t have the right to demand that you also comply with that belief.

But that’s exactly what’s pushed by the people who support censorship and “hate speech” laws protecting “religious feelings”.

Because these laws, and their supporters, elevate religion into a special category of ideas that cannot be challenged, or ridiculed.

If you’re a Marxist, there is NOTHING you can do if I write an entire book attacking Marx. I can call him a rapist, racist, pedophile, war criminal, and nobody who’s offended by that can do anything… except explaining why or how they believe I’m wrong. And I say Marx, but you can replace that with Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Darwin, or Jefferson. Basically nobody is under an obligation to protect your feelings about your own ideas.

But if you call Mohammed a pedophile, even by referencing the widespread belief that he married a 9 year old, there are Western nations where you can be convicted of a crime. Like Austria, which convicted a woman for saying precisely that. And then the European Court of Justice confirmed that horrendous decision.

I guess telling extremists: “Don’t worry guys. We’ll take it from here” is one way to deal with extremism.

Because what they’ve done is to allow the punishment of blasphemy.

And it’s not just Islam.

It’s the same thing done by the Catholic Church in Poland against “blasphemers”.

BUT… it’s not just religion. At their core, many people, many of whom are not religious, share the totalitarian idea that some things just cannot be said.

It’s a widespread understanding, not only in the Arab world, but everywhere, that we simply should not have freedom of speech. More and more people, from all races and creeds, from all political stripes, support the idea that sometimes speech = violence, so that censorship and repression are the only solution. And even though Americans have the 1^st Amendment to the constitution guaranteeing Free Speech, they definitely shouldn’t take a victory lap here. US politicians propose, and often pass, incredibly restrictive, laws against freedom of speech, and it’s only thanks to litigation that many of those laws end up being struck down. They’re not even unpopular laws.

The upcoming Trump administration has already expressed their desire to criminalize flag burning, and him, and many other US politicians, both from the left and the right, have supported laws against expressions of so-called “anti-semitism”, in an attempt at shutting down pro-Palestinian activists.

In fact, it’s really fascinating to hear how the same people who criticized the censoring or banning of images of Mohammed, scoffing at the idea that they were racist or “Islamophobic”, and who feign indignation at the idea that someone would be criminally convicted for insulting Mohammed, use almost the exact same arguments to justify punishing people who call Israel an apartheid state, or who argue Zionism is a racist ideology.

Let me tell you about Zineb El Rhazoui.

She is a former member of the Charlie Hebdo staff, and she avoided the massacre by coincidence, because she was on holiday that day. After the massacre, because of her activism for human rights, particularly for Muslim women, the French government gave her the Simone Veil Prize, in recognition for her fight for women’s rights.

In 2023, when Zineb’s commitment to human rights made her focus her attention on the situation of Palestinians in Gaza, and she used her social media presence to expose the extent of the war crimes committed by Israel, the award was withdrawn.

And it’s not just about losing awards. People in the UK, Germany, France, Australia, and, of course, the United States, have all been targeted either legally, or through harassment, for expressing opinions about Israel that some believe NOBODY should have the right to say. And they want to make sure that the people who do express those views, act as a warning for the rest.

Because FEAR is what is all about.

The cowards who carried out the massacre knew full well that they would never be able to kill EVERYBODY who mocks Mohammed, or who draws pictures of him. They just knew that they needed to kill enough people to scare the rest into submission. .

But violence isn’t the only way to scare people into silence.

Even in countries where you have a good chance of not being convicted for these “speech crimes”, or where the sentences are small, the process itself is the punishment. It keeps other people in line. They know that you can beat the wrap, but you can’t beat the ride, and nobody wants to risk spending years of their life, and thousands of Euros in attorney’s fees, just to have a Pyrrhic victory at the end telling them that they were right all along.

And I know that you might think that this is different, because the legal process and a criminal sentence are not the same as a terrorist act or a murder. And yes, obviously, being shot is worse than being incarcerated, but at that point we’re only debating about how drastic the punishment should be, and not about whether the punishment should exist to begin with.

That’s why what the surviving staff of Charlie Hebdo did after the massacre was so important. They had been on the receiving end of lawfare and warfare, and they knew that once #JeSuisCharlie was no longer fashionable, they’d be once again left at the mercy of extremists. But they refused to bow down.

With Mohammed in the cover, saying “All is Forgiven”, the staff of Charlie Hebdo showed that while rebels might die, rebellion will not.

They poked fun at the killings, and even called out the fact that this small massacre had received much more coverage than the deaths of hundreds of Nigerians at the hands of Boko Haram.

They couldn’t overlook the fact that, in the eyes of the world media, the lives of a handful of lefty French cartoonists dying at the hands of Islamic extremists, was much more tragic than the deaths of hundreds of Nigerian civilians, also at the hands of Islamic extremists.

In her famous essay on the Russian Revolution, criticizing the abuses she witnessed in the Soviet Union, Rosa Luxemburg wrote the most concise and straightforward explanation of what our understanding of freedom should be:

“Freedom only for the members of the government, only for the members of the Party — though they are quite numerous — is no freedom at all. Freedom is always the freedom of dissenters. “

And that’s really the lesson that we have to learn not just from that savage attack 10 years ago, but also from all of the repression that continues to this day, even if it’s not always as bloody.

When you accept censorship, restrictions on your ability to receive or express ideas, you are sharpening the blade of your own guillotine. Because even if you dislike the ideas that are being censored, it is only a matter of time before that repression targets something close to you.

But there is hope.

Nothing destroys authoritarians like laughing at them. Laughter demolishes the house of cards that supports tyranny. And although violence and repression are powerful weapons, they are nothing compared to the will of a free people.

If we look back in history, one of the things that were most shocking about the rise of the nazis, long before the war and the extermination started, was their embrace of obscurantism. By publicly burning books, they were showing the world that from that point on, only one view of the world would be accepted, and everything else would disappear. Heinrich Heine’s famous line from Almansor, “Where they burn books, they will end up burning human beings”, written in 1823, ended up being truly prophetic.

So in 1942, in a letter to the book sellers of America, in the midst of the bloodiest war the world has ever seen, FDR used those demonstrations of barbarism to explain why, in the end, the barbarians were doomed in their crusade.

“People die, but books never die. No man and no force can take from the world the ideas that embody man’s eternal fight against tyranny of every kind.”

Books are weapons in the war of ideas.

A must-watch for any Opeth fan. The full transcript is available below!

Read more

“I'm going to be me here. And if that's something that people don't enjoy, or have perceptions that are based on their own perspectives, then that's their fucking problem.”

In this new interview, Devin discusses experiences that shaped "PowerNerd," the first part of his "Moth Quadrilogy." He reflects on his early disillusionment with the industry, the need for authentic social media engagement, and how tumultuous times can influence powerful art. He also shares details about the ambitious "Moth" project, including his upcoming sold-out performance in the Netherlands.

The full transcript of this 1hour+ interview is available below!

Read more

In this interview, Francesco Cavalieri, singer and founder of the Italian dwarven-themed power metal band Wind Rose, talks about the band's musical evolution, their upcoming album Trollslayer, and their unique blend of power and folk metal.
We discuss the influence of J.R.R. Tolkien, the shift from progressive to bombastic metal, and their success on platforms like TikTok and Instagram. He also shares insights into their partnership with the game Deep Rock Galactic, and how Diggy Diggy Hole became a fan favorite.

A transcript of the interview (edited for clarity) is below, as well as a track-by-track of Trollslayer.

Read more

Acclaimed multi-instrumentalist Leila Abdul-Rauf (Vastum, Cardinal Wyrm, and lots more) discusses the evolution of her solo project, from its ambient origins to the more ambitious, conceptual direction of her latest album. She shares insights into her diverse musical background, the emotional and philosophical influences that shape her dark, boundary-pushing sound, and her developing connections with the Arab American community.

You can watch the interview, or read the transcript below!

Read more

In this interview Karl covers the realities and challenges of being a professional musician, how the band (including two new members!) had to perform without him at Hellfest, and the financial impact of cancelling shows.

With just days to go before the release of Nile’s new album “The Underworld Awaits us All”, this death metal mastermind also explains some of the mythology that inspired the album, and reflects on the possible existence of a “ceiling” for his technical talent.

You can read the transcript of this interview below!

Read more

A new conversation with Lucien Greaves, founder and spokesperson of the Satanic Temple, about the theocratic pushes in the US an Europe.

You can read the transcript below.

J: The last time we spoke someone had tried to burn down the temple in Salem, and this year somebody threw a pipe bomb. I think that a lot of people see TST as a trolling organization, without thinking that, regardless of anything else, there are many people who take it seriously enough to want you all dead.

Lucien: This is just the reality I've had to internalize. Even getting a K-9 dog... I probably wouldn't have gone through that kind of seismic lifestyle shift if this wasn't the case. Fortunately for me, I always anticipated this kind of thing. It was never a joke to me. I felt that democracy was under threat and that we had a real theocratic movement trying to execute a coup in the United States, and they've made great gains toward that end.

Read more