Salt City Sinner

REGULARLY UPDATED Posted on 1/9/2020  - UPDATED 2/4/2025 MY FULL-LENGTH   NONFICTION DEBUT! BLACK SUNRISE ON PISS EARTH: FASCISM, NIHILISM, AND THE 21ST CENTURY OCCULT Black Sunrise on Piss Earth: Fascism, Nihilism, and the 21st Century Occult is a nonfiction, anti-fascist, punk rock, and no-holds-barred look at the role that nihilism and the postmodern occult have played in the development of fascist movements in the United States, Great Britain, Germany, and elsewhere – a coordinated movement I call the Fascist Internationale. The manuscript’s title is a reference to Piss Earth 2025, a piece of fascist agitprop that I respond to, using my refutation as a framework for looking at the dangerous, deadly, and dumbass ideas undergirding everything from QAnon and Christian Identity to Nazi Satanist- worshipers the Order of Nine Angles and portions of the Asatru (Norse Pantheon worship) and chaos magick communities. HE LED US INTO THE WILDERNESS AND SPOKE TO US My fourth novel! No...

Posted on 11/23/2019 by the Salt City Sinner What does it mean to love God, what does it mean to love power, and what does it mean to love Donald Trump? Are these separate questions, or have they become scrambled together? Given that 81% of Evangelicals voted for Trump , it’s safe to conclude that the latter is the case. Unpacking the tangled webbing of fear, greed, superstition, and credulity that binds white Evangelicals to Donald J. Trump, the most profane and libertine President in United States history, will be the project of generations. Religious conservatives didn’t get here overnight, and it’s an odd place for them to have arrived at, but the journey isn’t as mysterious as it might seem at first glance. A good place to start is Believe Me: the Evangelical Road to Donald Trump , by John Fea . Fea’s book is an attempt to answer these questions in a serious way, and from the standpoint of one who shares many of the values and presuppositions of the average parish...

( This is part two of my review of Them: Adventures with Extremists, by Jon Ronson. You can read part one here .) Posted on 11/17/2019 by the Salt City Sinner Two decades are sprawled between our present moment and the time period captured by Jon Ronson’s Them: Adventures with Extremists . That represents a pretty substantial chunk of data that we can use to assess Ronson’s analytical prowess in profiling extremists. What did Ronson tell us about the Klan, about Alex Jones, and about Omar Bakri Mohammed? The edition of Them that I read contained a forward by Ronson, penned in June of 2002, that attempted to answer this question in the period just after 9/11, a time period in which billing one’s self as “bin Laden’s man in Great Britain” may not have been the wisest move (Omar was eventually arrested, released, deported… It’s a long saga, but it ends with him in a prison cell in Lebanon, where he languishes as of 2019). Ronson recalls a conversation he had with Mohammed...

Jon Ronson and Alex Jones, in happier times Posted on 11/13/2019 by the Salt City Sinner It’s telling that the debate over Bill Clinton’s conduct found the majority of both conservatives and liberals arguing not about consent, not about sexual harassment or workplace safety, but about libertinage. This allowed both tribes of elderly white men (with some younger white men and a few white women) to sidestep a number of thorny questions. Consent, workplace harassment, and the ever-hungry male gaze (a gaze not bounded on the left or the right, we discovered) – all of these issues were obscured by the prurient details of Bill Clinton’s sex life, the tawdriness of it all. Conservatives got to clutch their pearls, and liberals got to feel contempt for the prudes who did the pearl-clutching. That was always bullshit, of course, and both liberals and conservatives knew it. Conservatives never gave a toss for personal probity or morality in any real sense – only for the advanceme...

posted on 10/8/2019 by the Salt City Sinner I’ve been a fan of Batman and the rogue’s gallery of villains that regularly menace Gotham City for more than thirty years. Comic books, cartoons, the 1966 live-action version with Adam West, the current live-action show ( Gotham ), ten live action movies (if you count Bats’ cameo in 2016’s Suicide Squad ): I’ve consumed them all voraciously, even the ones that were directed by Joel Schumacher. While there are plenty of Batman fans out there older and/or more well-versed than me, that’s still quite some time to be devoted to a franchise. My relationship with Batman has been going even longer than I’ve been reading Stephen King, which is saying something. I’ve had a lot of time to think about this over the years, and have come to a few conclusions. First among these is that Bruce Wayne is a deeply troubling – and deeply troubled – character. To paraphrase Michael Caine’s Alfred Pennyworth in The Dark Knight, he’s one of the r...

Posted on 9/21/2019 by the Salt City Sinner By the pricking of my thumbs… something wicked this way comes. Or, at any rate, it might if we’re lucky! The Satanic Temple – an organization of which I am a proud member and about which I have written in the past – is holding something of a contest, you see. We’re raising money for the Temple’s Reproductive Religious Rights campaign. The state that raises the most money by midnight on Halloween will get to host the 2020 Reproductive Religious Rights Rally. Given recent attempts by some Utahns to restrict women’s access to legal abortion, the time to support bodily autonomy is now. I cannot think of a better place than Salt Lake City (with the possible exception of Vatican City) to hold the Satanic Temple’s rally. If you’d like to help make that happen, you can donate to Salt Lake’s efforts here , or you can attend our Unholy Congregation this October: It will be a family-friendly event, held at Crone’s Hollow (the ow...