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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!
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