What is Grey Faction? with Lucien Greaves

 

This presentation is from the 2021 World Congress on Moral Panics,
presented by Grey Faction. This is a corrected version of a software based transcription of the TST TV video above. Thank you so much to Carrie Poppy for providing the draft of this transcript and to our caretaker Mary for working on it.

We wanted to provide a written version for inclusivity and accessibility for all that need it, primarily to assist the deaf and low hearing community as well as people getting overwhelmed by audio (mysophonia, hyperausis...)

Reading a text version of what is being spoken in the video helps many people. When the speech in the video is not clear, transcripts help to understand what has been said. But even when the audio is clear, transcripts are still important for non-native speakers of the language. They help the viewer to better understand and follow conversations and events.

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Evan Welcome to our first Congress on Moral Panics, we've been wanting to do a Grey Faction conference of our own for years, and it's fantastic to have the ability  to do that. So... without any further delay, let's hand it over so he can tell us about Grey Faction. 

Lucien Well, hello! Thank you, everybody, for coming. Whoever has come, I'm not...hum...it's not visible to me how many people are here, but I know there was an overwhelming response for this conference, and that's very gratifying! 

Having a Grey Faction conference is something we wanted to do from the very beginning, and we never had the opportunity to. But with the pandemic, we were able to spend some time putting together this Virtual Headquarters, which is a great platform for conferences. And...it remains to be seen whether in the future people will want to go back to flying out the physical environments for such things as conferences or if the preference will be online. 

But either way, I think you're going to be seeing more conferences in the future. And I think there's a really good function for that, and I think it helps educate people and keep people motivated. And also this conference is running parallel to the ISSTD conference, which is also taking place this weekend. And we've always kind of wanted to do that to put on a counter conference against the people peddling pseudoscience at the same time they were. 

But it's been a really, really a great year of growth for the Satanic Temple, not only with Virtual Headquarters, but our ordination program is now in place. We're switching from a chapter system to a congregation system. All Chapter Heads are becoming legally ordained. And... this restructure kind of addresses a lot of the exponential growth in the organization throughout all this time. And we've grown considerably just in this past year. And our ability to manage that, I think is starting to catch up. And it's really it's really...it's really nice to see. 

Also, we've filed new groundbreaking lawsuits, particularly for Religious Reproductive Rights this year and in Texas. And as I've said, we've really seen expansive growth and I'm seeing more and more people coming to understand the issues associated with Grey Faction and becoming interested in what Grey Faction is doing. And it's always been this kind of background campaign we've been running that's been obscured people in a lot of ways because it's a very ...it confronts very complex issues. And it's…

I’m also really happy to see people becoming more interested in that. So as the kind of opening for this conference, I thought it would serve us best to take a step back and go to the beginning and talk directly about what is Grey Faction. And so to that end, I think I need to talk about some of my history predating the Satanic Temple because my attachment to this issue predated the Satanic Temple. And in fact, you could say that Grey Faction in a way predated the Satanic Temple because I started working with some of the people I still work with now and Grey Faction on these issues prior to the inception of the Satanic Temple and started really exploring these topics and building an expertise about them well before becoming the co-founder and spokesperson for the Satanic Temple. 

And for me, it started really a while ago when I went to a conference in Windsor Locks, Connecticut, for an organization called SMART, an acronym for Stop Mind Control and Ritual Abuse Today. And when I initially went, I honestly thought it would be somewhat amusing because it was clear that it was a conspiracists conference and that these were a group of people who believed in the old mythologies of the Satanic Panic from the 80s and 90s about satanic ritual abuse, mind control and a massive cult conspiracy trying to initiate a global takeover. But they were also marketing this conference as a type of professional conference for clinicians and therapists who deal with people who have multiple personality disorder. So that kind of marketing was a bit confusing to me, at the time. And when I went to the conference, I could see the delusions and the paranoia on full display, raw conspiracism. And in the... at one of the vendor booths, at this conference, in the hotel, at a table set up, they were selling electromagnetic beam blocking hats and even socks. And the assumption was, I guess, is that the government is using mind control technology that utilizes electromagnetic beams, and that wearing this type of silverlined mesh hat, or these socks would somehow protect you from whatever mind control messages were being put out. 

Of course, dressing up the hat in this way doesn't change the fact that it's just an evolution of the tinfoil hat, the famed conspiracist bit of attire that imagines that the contents of their mind aren't confined within their head alone and are easily read by outsiders, or that messages might be beamed in to control their behavior. And it's often been a real signal of the unbalanced mind. 

Part of what really upset me about the SMART conference, however, was that the theories they were propagating and promoting weren't confined to their delusions alone. They were popularizing these ideas to people who had sought professional mental health treatment. And some of the people presenting at this conference actually were mental health professionals. And some of these people at the conference, I think, were clients of some of these people. And it was at some point I saw a lady who was in her later 70s, I think, talking about different symptoms she was experiencing, from memory loss to fatigue and other type of things. And seeing people who should have known better brushing these things off, as though they were just indicative of mind control or multiple personality disorder, when they could have been indicative of real problems that might have been...might have necessitated some type of medical care. So the level of incompetence and irresponsibility I was seeing at this conference was really jarring, and especially to know that some of the people there were licensed mental health professionals. 

I think at that conference as well, that there was the offer of continuing education units for mental health professionals coming to see these lectures being given. And by “continuing education units” I mean that professionals within the field of mental health are meant to maintain their education by going to different lectures and conferences and accredited conferences and lectures will be able to give these professionals, continuing education units to show that they've maintained their education. And, in part, that education can consist of hearing these bizarre theories about ritual abuse and mind control.

 The conference itself was headed up by a man named Neil Brick, who also runs an organization called Survivorship. And Neil Brick claims to be a  recovered addict, I believe. I believe he admits to having been alcoholic for a time and then, having coming out of it, and then coming out eventually from some drunken stupor and realizing that he just suddenly remembered...if I understand his story correctly, he did recover his memories, according to his narrative, at some point. But he claims to have recovered these memories of having been an Illuminati super soldier who was previously abused by Freemasons, Satanists, which caused his personalities to split. And, these different personalities were programmed to serve different functions as an elite government assassin. And he claims that he was recalled having gone overseas to have murdered different targets that the government wanted taken out. And because this conspiracy is so polite, instead of... similarly to how they might fake something like the Boston Marathon bombing, not by actually setting bombs and blaming it on somebody who didn't do it. But instead, hiring crisis actors, just pretend they got hurt. So nobody actually does have to get hurt. Really polite conspiracy in any case. 

But anyways, and, Brick believes that he is some kind of Illuminati super soldier and that they brainwashed him later and just set him out free into society. But, different things might be triggering, I guess, to bring him back to his old programing and that one of the conference's Grey Faction observed him, that he had a very difficult time with people touching their faces, which he said he felt was triggering and being trained to rape and kill...you wonder what exactly he was thinking he might be triggered to do. But in any case, that's a whole different story. 

But at the time, I was less aware of all the issues related to recovered memories and multiple personality disorder and how they tie in with the Satanic Panic. When I went to this SMART conference. And definitely wanted to learn more! It was very clear that at this conspiracists conference, they felt that everything they said was, or everything they claimed was justified by the theory of multiple personality disorder, which is now known as dissociative identity disorder. And the idea is that this is a diagnosis that indicates that somebody was intentionally abused, probably by Satanists, for the purpose of enacting a program of trauma based mind control. And that theory holds that some forms of abuse are so difficult for the conscious mind to comprehend that they become relegated to some unconscious corner of the mind and they then metastasize into individual distinct personalities that the conscious mind isn't aware of until they come into full consciousness independently, and discreetly, as a different personality under a different name. And sometimes these personalities are programmed to do different things. Programed by whoever initiated the trauma based mind control upon the victim. 

And I wanted to know, at the time, whether this was...this theory, this usage of dissociative identity disorder was something that real professionals, clinical professionals, credible, reasonable people, who study dissociative identity disorder, have confronted. And how was it that these theories of dissociative identity disorder, within this conspiracists camp, might differ from credible perspectives, dissociative identity disorder? And how was it being abused merely to justify these bizarre conspiracy theories? And I talked with people at this conference, this SMART conference, and they kept trying to direct me to a man named Colin Ross.

And Colin Ross, apparently had proven at all. The government connections to mind control programs in the creation of dissociative identity disorder. And he's also a respected professional and he is a past president of an organization known as the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation. 

Despite Ross's credentials, I looked into him, and found that he was every bit as much a conspiracist as Neil Brick. And he has books out,and I've gotten some of them. Some of them fetch a real high market value now for being out of print. But being Bibles essentially for some of the conspiracy theorists, like a book called “Bluebird” that he wrote, I think goes for hundreds of dollars on Amazon. Last I checked, there's others that are easy to come by, like “the Osiris Complex”, which you can go through any random page from that book…and I think that's what I did when finding the quotes that are on the slide associated with him...and find, on any given page, some of the most bizarre statements possible being made. And, also despite the fact that a Colin Ross is an often cited psychiatrist, he wrote “the Dissociative Disorders Interview Scale” by which clinicians measure people's dissociative tendencies. He also seems to have a very weak reality filter. And at one point he claimed to have the paranormal power to emit energy from his eyes. And he was seeking to win the million dollar challenge from James Randi, who was a skeptic who offered a million dollars to anybody who could prove that they possessed some kind of paranormal skill. Ross, in his intellectual incompetence, just didn't realize how electrodes work and that he was picking up noise from eye motion, eye movement, muscle twitches and other such things. And registering that in his mind is some kind of directed energy that he was able to emit from his eyes. 

In any case, I came into contact with James Randi because of this issue, asking him for more information. And James, Randi put me in touch with a former patient of Colin Ross, who was a patient of his in Manitoba, Canada, and her name was Roma Hart. And she had filed a malpractice lawsuit against Ross back in the early 90s or late 80s, I think and really outlined the bizarre regimen of treatment he had set out for her. And it's kind of rare to get somebody who's able to give this kind of open testimony to their mistreatment, because one thing Grey Faction is found while working on this is for the most part, egregious cases of psychiatric malpractice end up in a settlement. And with that settlement often comes a “gag order”. And the person accepting the settlement is no longer allowed to speak about the mistreatment they suffered. 

In Roma Hart's case, she had a really strong case. She had expert testimony from credible doctor witnesses saying that this was the most egregious case of malpractice they had ever seen. She was given such a high dosage of a regimen  of psychoactive narcotics to treat her or so-called illness at the time. And she was told that she had multiple personality disorder. And she was put under hypnosis and other techniques to help her recover memories of having been abused by Satanists. And even up to the point, she claims, of being told that she had at some point given birth to a hybrid extraterrestrial that was then taken from her. And she was in a very...a very vulnerable state, overmedicated and as an in-patient. By the time she got out and tried to wean herself off of these bizarre ideas fed to her by Colin Ross. But after that point, she had horrifically damaged her family ties, something common in this therapy when people are led to believe that they've suffered abuse that they can't remember. They often come to incriminate their family and friends in these notions that they had been previously abused. And so they kind of cut themselves off from their most familiar networks. And that was something Roma Hart, to her real regret, had done. 

There was also a filing from malpractice suit over Martha Antayo after Ross left Canada after this malpractice suit moved over to Texas and soon thereafter had a very, very similar malpractice suit from a Martha Antayo claim that she was made to recall things that had never happened. I believe she also claims she was grossly overmedicated and led to believe that she had been abused by Satanists and that her family was part of some intergenerational satanic cult. But Martha Antayo was somebody I never really talked to because...I think her case settled out and that was something she could no longer speak about anymore. 

But anyways, Ross was a past president of the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation, which is a professional organization that really propagates the notion of dissociative identity disorder, claims to study this as a side effect of trauma and looks for best empirical practices, according to them, to “treat extreme traumatic abuse”. And I was curious, of course, whether the ISSTD thought that Colin Ross's theories were accurate to what they think of when they're talking about dissociative identity disorder. So I look them up and they put on a very kind of credible looking veneer of “sciencey speak”. And a lot of the lectures you'll see that they're talking about in their  annual conferences deal with what seem to be mundane clinical issues. 

And then they also were harboring in the not distant background, a ritual abuse, mind control special interest group, which had some people like Ellen Lacter sitting on the...as a chair in that group. And I was already familiar with her because I had written, after attending the SMART Conference, a piece about the SMART conference after which I was...I had a ton of abuse hurled at me through the Internet from true believers in trauma based mind control and satanic ritual abuse. Ellen Lacter being one of them, claiming that my audacity, at calling bullshit against these claims, were revelatory to this, to the fact that I apparently had some hidden agenda to cover up for crimes of sexual abuse and human trafficking, which was...it's an appalling thing to be accused of! But this is the best defense the conspiracists have...As soon as somebody starts questioning the deeply implausible claims, the specific claims they're making, they suddenly broaden their territory and say that they're just victims advocates for people who have suffered severe abuse. And if you're questioning these narratives, you're questioning the claims of abuse victims and you're victimizing them...and clearly you have some kind of agenda to do them harm. 

And in that way, they really...they really have shielded themselves from too much criticism. A lot of people can't sustain the weight of that kind of defamation online. And at the time, I wasn't as widely known. So to have a whole bunch of things being written about how I'm trying to defend human trafficking is a very stressful kind of thing. And it's something that's really kept a lot of people from speaking out too loudly, especially within the profession itself, about this controversy, because it's very brutal and it's certain to to impact people's reputations. 

The only real organization, before Grey Faction, that was confronting this issue directly was known as the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. They shut down in 2011. And of course, you can see the extreme dishonesty when from the ISSTD when you see this tweet from Michael Salter talking about the False Memory Syndrome Foundation being shut down. Because the False Memory Syndrome Foundation was dedicated to the question of recovered memories, so-called repressed memories that were brought back into consciousness and recalled, to reveal something that had previously been hidden about somebody's past. And what we know about recovered memories now is that they're very likely to be confabulatory and have no correlate to reality. We've gotten from recovered memory testimony, claims of extraterrestrial abduction, as well as satanic ritual abuse. And people undergo hypnotic therapy to try to recall their past lives. And in this way, in this way, where people kind of collaborate with a therapist, or a hypnotist, talking about what could have happened in the past and then taking these ideas as absolute truths and kind of cultivating false memory about them is that...is that they are, in fact, false memories. And we know that a lot of these claims don't have any correlate to reality and they can be dismissed on the face of them because they include supernatural claims or, as I said, extraterrestrial abduction and other such things. In other times, false memories held by people were disproven by these people themselves. 

One of the founders of the ISSTD, Bennett Brown, lost a 10.6 million dollar settlement or was forced, his hospital was forced, to give a 10.6million dollars settlement to a client of his whom he had convinced had been part of an intergenerational satanic cult and, was led to believe that her family was in on this global conspiracy, along with the Illuminati in which they were committing crimes of cannibalism, infant sacrifice and all these other types of Satanic Panic things. And when she kind of separated from the drug regimen and from the hypnotic treatment and things like that, she was finding...not evidence to corroborate any of these claims, but evidence in her own life showing that these claims could not have been true at all...if that needed to be proven, just given the ridiculousness of the claims themselves. 

But in any case, the False Memory Syndrome Foundation was really focused on combating the notion that of recovered memory veracity, combating the notion that the mind acts as a type of recorder that really stores things and exact fidelity and then can recall them afterwards. Memory is very reconstructive and they did a lot of work to try to explain this to people, the unreliability of memory. And of course, Michael Salter summarizes merely as questioning claims of extreme abuse, when, in fact, the False Memory Syndrome Foundation was really only questioning memory, said to have been derived from recovered memory therapies.

Sometime after this conference, there was a book published called “Twenty Two Faces”, and again, I was brought into action on this whole issue because “Twenty Two Faces” seemed like it was trying to be the next “Michelle Remembers” and the book, “Michelle Remembers”, for those who don't know, is credited with kind of kicking off the Satanic Panic in 1980’s. It was a story written, supposedly...supposed to be a true story based upon the recovered memories of a woman called Michelle Smith in the book, in collaboration with her psychiatrist, a Catholic named Lawrence Pazder. And they recovered these memories of her having grown up in a satanic cult and having been abused by Satan himself. And at some point, Saint Michael coming to her and Jesus himself, descending from the clouds and removing the scars from her body and removing the corroborating evidence of the horrific abuse she said she had suffered. And, in ultimately telling this supernatural horror tale of satanic ritual abuse. Nonetheless, this  story was a bestseller. It was accepted uncritically by a lot of media. Lawrence Pazder and Michelle Smith were on programs like Oprah talking about this story that they had collaborated on together.And, an interesting part about the media coverage was that the book was often spoken of as a horrific tale of a poorly misunderstood psychological phenomenon; that psychological phenomenon being multiple personality disorder. Almost nothing was said of the supernatural claims in the books... in the book. 

And it was later when a...Christian publication actually, debunked even the mundane claims. Looking for medical records when Michelle Smith claimed things that happened, finding they weren't there. Looking at certain geographic locations that she had referenced and finding extreme discrepancies in her story. Finding just details, that certainly could not have been true and debunking the story in that way. 

In any case, “Twenty Two Faces” was also a supernatural horror story. And it had also, at the time, it had been published, been gaining press attention that failed to mention the key supernatural claims being made. And, this is really kind of like the nascent origins of Grey Faction, because a team of volunteers started working with me. 

Researchers started looking into the author and the author's claims, that she was working with the attorney general's office in Utah as a consultant for ritual abuse crimes. One of the people I was working with actually called the attorney general's office and got a statement saying they had no idea who she was or what she was talking about. She was a con and a fraud. And we started reaching out to some of the media that were covering her stories uncritically and asking them why they didn't bother to do any of this type of investigative work themselves. At one point, the...this...somebody from the family of the subject of “Twenty Two Faces”. And  “Twenty Two Faces” was written by an ex therapist who claimed to be telling the story of one of her clients. 

So Judy, or hum... I forget the name of the client, but in any case it was supposed to be her story. And one of the family members of the subject reached out, and they agreed with our position that the book was full of shit. And they were warning us that Dr. Phil was going to do an episode about this story and that, it looked like he was poised, poised to also cover this uncritically. And this family member gave us the producer's contact for Dr. Phil. And we began reaching out to Dr. Phil, or his producers, and letting them know the trouble with the stories that were being told in “Twenty Two Faces” and asking them to be sure that they also covered the supernatural claims being made in this book. And we weren't getting any reply. 

So eventually I published online an open letter to Dr. Phil just so we could have the time stamp there and we could let the public know what Dr. Phil's people already knew before they aired the episode in case they wanted to pretend that this was some kind of credible story and that it was and that it was somehow verified by their journalistic research. 

The episode got delayed by many months, and then when it did air, it was cut rather weirdly, and it didn't give a rather glowing review of the book, but it didn't talk anything about the supernatural claims or just the overall implausibility of it. 

But the question came to be whether the author was exploiting the subject, by taking all the royalties from the book, which she claimed is going to serve victims of ritual abuse, though she never answered the question of what exactly that meant for where the money was going. 

But anyways, after that, that kind of died away. But I still did have a group of people who are willing to put in that volunteer effort to do research for these kinds of topics to make the public aware when these kinds of flare ups were happening again. 

So then, forward in time a bit…

We're finally founding the Satanic Temple. And I always wanted this to be a part of the Satanic Temple, this fight. And, if it's not really clear to people, why this should be important to Satanists, I think it's a little obvious with a little explanation we see: what happened during the Satanic Panic and how self identifying as a Satanist was a potential danger at the time, and people were being accused of being Satanists under the assumption that identifying as a Satanist, also meant that you were committing acts of murder's murder, cruelty, cannibalism and other unspeakable acts. And so for anybody to self identify as a Satanist, you need to overcome that mythology, that witch hunter mythology, which to us is worth doing! Because we see how our witch hunts go, and how people are unjustly treated and how these are a recurring problem in the world, and how we're not really living in a free culture at all, if we can't identify in any way we see fit, and use these mythologies that are impressed upon us in any way we find appropriate without being demonized in this way. 

But I guess the most basic question people have is where did the name Grey Faction even come from? And the story, really just is that, at the very outset we started forming our nascent campaigns and somebody wanted to make different colored patches to go along with these campaigns. And we didn't have a name for Grey Faction at the time, but people working towards some of what would become our Religious Reproductive Rights campaign thought we should have purple logo patches to indicate that... and the question was, what should we do for patches that spoke to these issues of combating pseudoscience in Satanic Panic and conspiracy theories? And because we were dealing with these issues of psychiatric science in mind matters. So I thought grey was the only color that made sense for grey matter. And so, because we have these grey patches in grey associated with this campaign, we just started calling it Grey Faction without thinking much of it. And that's the whole story there. 

Anyways, Grey Faction's mission, as we define it now is that... “Grey Faction is an educational and advocacy organization whose mission is to protect mental health patients and their families from dangerous pseudoscience and discredited therapies, particularly in the area of so-called repressed memories”. Now, that's a very narrowly focused type of agenda right now for Grey Faction that, in the future, could open up to confront different types of conspiracies and different types of pseudoscience. 

But one thing I think is really unique about the Satanic Temple is that we do keep very narrowly focused on issues when I think the tendency of a lot of organizations is to try to be all things, to all people, and embrace all causes at once, and thereby spread themselves so thin that they become ineffective in confronting any one of them. And because this one, I think, is so specific to Satanists, but not only Satanists, but very important to us, I think it's a great kind of...starting point for what Grey Faction should do: to take on this particular issue. 

And it's a very, very slow going thing because the idea of multiple personality disorder and repressed traumas is very entrenched in our culture. It's often a plot device in Hollywood films and in fiction. And it's a very compelling narrative. And everybody knows it and thinks it's predicated on sound science. So it's an uphill battle to get people to realize otherwise. And not only that, the licensing boards, that should be kind of overseeing these things and making sure that therapists are engaged in best practices and doing their work in deference to the best empirical evidence, haven't done much to really prepare themselves for an outbreak of conspiracism within their profession. And a lot of times, we see, they seem to feel like their hands are tied when we bring complaints against some of the therapists who, in our minds, have done things that are really harmful; but as far as the licensing boards are concerned, having gone against any standards they have, because their standards haven't really caught up to the level of irresponsibility that some in their profession have shown...[traills off at the end of this sentence?]

So some things to know about Grey Faction is that we are not anti psychiatry or anti therapy. And so far as we feel that empirically based treatments that show positive results in clients, of course, should be utilized to help people through whatever they're dealing with. And especially people who really have been victims of extreme trauma, often need some kind of intervention, psychiatric intervention, therapeutic intervention to help them get through that. So we're not anti therapy by any means. We're simply anti pseudoscience and anti conspiracy theory. And when people are using pseudoscience to spread conspiracy theories to the mentally vulnerable, this can be very harmful to those people. This has ruined lives in the past. It's still ruining lives now. And at the very least, it threatens to give the clients themselves crippling delusions and unwarranted fears of the outside world and the people around them. And as I mentioned previously, it also stands to inspire people to step away from their family network and their friends under the air of suspicion that these people have been part of a plot against them and brainwash them to forget it. And that sounds way over the top. But we've seen again and again people who bought into that because they've undergone this type of treatment, the recovered memory treatment for dissociative identity disorder. 

Another thing to know about us, is that WE are victims advocates! Sometimes we're characterized as an organization that is questioning the claims of victims when they claim that they have been...that they had suffered a severe traumatic abuse. The fact of the matter is, the story is far more complicated than that. We see people as having been abused, in some cases by irresponsible therapists who have sold them a story of trauma. And even in cases where clients have had discernible, provable, actual traumatic events. It serves no positive function for them to go into a therapist's office and come to believe that what they know had happened to them is just the tip of the iceberg; and be made to cultivate false memories of other types of abuse surrounding that abuse. That has never helped anybody; and it's only put people down a path of dysfunctional fear and crippling delusions, as I said before. 

And, we've been approached by many people who have become retractors. And by retractor, we mean people who had believed false memories of abuse that had been cultivated in them by irresponsible therapists or clinicians. And that they then realized later on, were just false memories, and they were nonetheless traumatic and they nonetheless had a really severe impact on their lives. And these people were very much victims. And we are advocates for them. 

We are hoping to destroy the ISSTD. Actually, I had seen some discussion online at one point and somebody, in some misguided defense of us was saying to somebody else, “no, no, they're not actually saying they want to destroy the ISSTD”. Let me clarify: Yes, we want to destroy the ISSTD! I think they are irreparable at this point in their dishonesty. And it's not just a misinformed organization that needs the...credible evidence to be shown to them and walked through it to understand it. They know what the credible evidence is, but they're not willing to walk back on their claims, and they are habitually dishonest about presenting their materials. They're dishonest about who they are. We have been in receipt of a series of their internal dialogs, and now they are discussing changing their terminology, to make it less clear to outsiders that they speak about conspiracy theories at their conferences at all. And to our credit, they're doing that because of us, and they openly credit us, as being the ones who are forcing this change within their organization.

We do not claim that D.I.D. does not exist. And you may see some people who take the same standpoint as we do; saying D.I.D. does not exist in the same way that people will say “hypnosis does not exist” because, hypnosis by their definition is not a unique trance state, but it is just a set of conditions in which somebody is allowing themselves to be suggestible and avoiding...engaging in thought avoidance, and other types of things, to respond to the requests of the person who's supposed to be hypnotizing them. And just relaxing and allowing suggestibility to take over, but at any time, they could break the spell if it went too far, away from their moral grounding or their willingness to comply. 

That's just that's just putting a different definition onto what we mean by hypnosis. And I feel that, at this point, saying that D.I.D. does not exist because we find it to be iatrogenic, And by iatrogenic, we mean it's something created within the therapeutic environment. And that, it takes somebody compliance to contextualize themselves as dissociative, in the dissociative identity disorder context, and that the multiple personalities are a type of role enactment where people cultivate these multiple identities. 

To say it does not exist, is to suggest that we're saying that the people who suffer from dissociative identity disorder are just acting or they're lying. The experience of D.I.D. is very real to a lot of the people who have D.I.D.! It's just not necessarily something that they needed to suffer. And it might, in many cases, have been imposed upon them by a therapist who should have known better and tied it, of course, to recovered memories of abuse, and in some cases maybe abuse that never happened, including satanic ritual abuse or Illuminati mind control plots. 

And something to realize, that a lot of people don't necessarily seem to know, is that we are on the correct side of scientific consensus by far. If you look just at the memory wars controversy, whether recovered memory veracity has anything to say for it, or if false memory science debunks the idea of dissociative identity disorder is caused by repressed memories, you may think that there is not a real scientific consensus at a granular level about where the science resides on these different topics. But in fact, outside of this dispute, these studies on false memory are just taken for granted within the brain sciences. It's only in this issue where people claim that somehow the idea of “false memories are controversial” or that it's controversial to claim that recovered memories are often, if not always, grossly inaccurate to real world events. 

In fact, the chair of the DSM-4 committee, Allen Frances, admitted that, he, himself thought that the idea of multiple personality really should not have been in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual at all. And when I say he was the chair of the DSM-4 committee, I mean the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, which is used as the diagnostic Bible for people in mental health care. It lists the  conditions by which you diagnose somebody as having a certain disorder. And it gives an air of credibility to the idea that the disorder is a naturally occurring condition. Allen Frances didn't think it was. He also thought it was iatrogenic. But he wrote at length about the politics involved with having different diagnostics in the DSM and how he was outweighed. And that the politics were too much, that the DSM was kept in. 

There was a letter from professionals sent to the DSM committee for DSM-5 asking that dissociative identity disorder be taken out of the DSM-5, or that it be relegated to an appendix as something unproven, controversial or otherwise unestablished. But DSM-5 also moved ahead, and put D.I.D. within the DSM. So the idea that D.I.D. being in the DSM as it is, with its explanation as being something caused by extreme trauma that is repressed, is very much a controversial idea and does not have a scientific consensus behind it. Even though some of our detractors like to act like the DSM is the final word, that there is psychiatric consensus upon this, and that we are somehow outliers and conspiracy theorists ourselves to claim otherwise. 

Grey Faction in the media has served a function of helping to get the word out to a certain degree. But it's been a very uphill battle for us to try to get press coverage at all. And this is because it is a very complicated issue. And people, when they write about the Satanic Temple or Satanists, they really like...well, like when they're writing about anything, they really like the clickbaits stories that can be summed up in a sentence, in a headline and set the terms of engagement and the controversy up front.

Something like Grey Faction is...it questions, in some cases, respected psychiatrists like Colin Ross, organizations that ostensibly have professional sanction, like the ISSTD, and makes the claim that Satanists are questioning these organizations and in saying that the conspiracy theorists and that they're the cabal acting in an insidious way. And,some editors just don't want to deal with the potential legal liability of covering some of the claims we make. Nor do they want to spend the time doing the investigative work to substantiate the things we are saying. 

Nonetheless, we have managed to get some press that has really covered the things we're doing, and talked about the topics we're trying to bring into people's awareness. And even though that's been a real slow build, it's really served a positive function in the way that, now, when we see organizations like the ISSTD, more and more trying to hide their conspiracy theories and hide in the background, while speaking about these conspiracy theories and stay out of the public eye, because they just want to be seen as a credible professional organization, we're finding that as we do cumulatively gain this press.

The Google searches that come up for some of the people in the ISSTD we've been writing, about in the ISSTD itself, yield a lot of our material so that people can take a second look and realize more immediately what the problems are, and maybe confront some of the people the therapists are seeing or people within the ISSTD, and ask them to answer to the conspiracy theories they're spreading, and how they can claim that the science can support bizarre tinfoil hat claims of satanic ritual abuse and other debunked notions of Illuminati world takeover plots or other unsubstantiated things. 

Grey Faction has gotten some negative press, too, but the negative press is really most notable for its omissions recently, New York magazine's “The Cut”, put out an article entitled “The Memory War”, where it was talking mostly about the rise and eventual dissolution of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. And the article was such  dishonest hackwork. It was...it was unbelievable to us that an editor let it slip through. And I had spoken to the journalist about a year before she published the piece. And I thought that perhaps she was just a misled journalist who had been speaking to people in the ISSTD and just was not aware how steeped in conspiracy theories they were and how they tried to justify these conspiracy theories with their pseudoscientific claims. And that, because they’re pseudoscientific claims, we're so steeped in these conspiracy theories or would justify these conspiracy theories if they were true, you could take that as evidence that there was something wrong with what they were claiming about their science. 

She didn't say anything about that. And she characterized the False Memory Syndrome Foundation as merely an organization created to defend people who were accused of sexual abuse, and using the idea of false memories to call into question any claims of sexual abuse. Not just recovered memory claims, just apparently any claim whatsoever, specifically for this purpose of “defending abusers”, which is absolutely a mischaracterization of the of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. 

But then the piece went on to describe Grey Faction as the False Memory Syndrome Foundation's cult obsessed sons. Without mentioning, of course, that a real difference between the False Memory Syndrome Foundation and Grey Faction is that, nobody so far in Grey Faction, has been accused of severe abuse. 

In fact, the False Memory Syndrome Foundation was founded by people who were accused of abuse by false, or by recovered memory testimony. And that's why they got into that issue. So to say that they were merely people accused of abuse, and summarizing it that way, is dishonest enough as it is. But to also just claim that the False Memory Syndrome Foundation was just made to cover up for any claims of abuse is horrifically dishonest. And then to lump Grey Faction in with that, in with those claims, without mentioning the distinction between us, really goes beyond dishonesty into outright lies. 

New York magazine, of course, received a bunch of letters about this from various people who are very upset about the article. But Vox Media, who owns them, really just double down and decided they weren't going to retract the piece at all, much to their shame, I think!

And just the other day we saw that “Scientific American” published a piece claiming that forgotten memories of traumatic events get some backing from brain imaging studies. And this is the real insidious way in which proponents of ISSTD conspiracy theories try to regain credibility now. They are certainly not going to talk about claims of satanic ritual abuse, alien abduction or any type of things...things of that type...and try to explain to us why, if recovered memory therapies are credible, why people were recalling these things in the course of this type of therapy. And if people are recalling these types of things in this type of therapy, how can we take seriously, even mundane, claims being made from recovered memory therapies when we find that people's memories might be very easily contaminated through this type of therapy and they might be cultivating false memories, whether they seem plausible or not. They don't have any type of answer for that. 

So what we're finding more and more is that they're relying on extrapolations that go way too far from functional MRI data. And in this case, the claim being made by this author from...in “Scientific American” was that these brain scans in this study really gave credibility to the claim that people could repress traumas for many years and then recall them later, perhaps through some kind of recovered memory therapy or whatever else. 

Evan Hum, Hey Lucien?

Lucien Yeah?

Evan we only have about a minute left and we have to do...to go over to  Karl's presentation now to make sure everything goes smoothly there. Would you mind just wrapping it up? 

Lucien Yeah, yeah...no problem. 

Evan Thank you. 

Lucien But in any case, the core paper that the headline was based on actually was just meant to measure dissociative states. And if you're not claiming that D.I.D. does not exist, you might... as we're not ...it's not outrageous that you'll find neural correlates for it. So the paper. Absolutely made no claims about recovered memories. And I think people have to realize that when we're fighting the fights that Grey Faction fights we're fighting at this end, as well as the open conspiracy theorists who will make the most outrageous claims that we see. And in that way, it's a very difficult topic. And you have to be pretty educated on these issues, sometimes, to be able to tackle it. 

But that being said, Grey Faction is open to anybody who would like to join us, wants to begin learning about this battle and wants to help us as we put out more and more petitions, complain to the licensing boards and do the types of things that we can to make people aware of the problems we're dealing with. Thank you.