Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 469: Mike Warnke Part II - Welcome to Satanville

Episode Date: October 9, 2021

On part two of our Warnke series, we discuss how exactly Mike Warnke sold his Satanic high priest story to the Evangelical crowd for 20 years, and how his influence helped to kickstart the Satanic Panic of the eighties and nineties.Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0

I think it's really important for me to get vocally warmed up in a style of music that is only appropriate for Mike Warnke. It's important for me to get in the bucket with getting right in there with an, I've been wrong. I've been wrong. I've been wrong. In the bottom of the rim battle. In the bottom of my head.

You've been in everybody. I said, Oh, we're having fun. Yeah. No, actually, you're a very annoying lead singer who was way too hammered to go on stage. It's quite miserable. It's the only way I can sing is if I forget I'm there. Welcome to the last podcast on the left, everyone. I am Ben hanging out with Henry.

I've been wrong. I've been down to the bottom of the rim battle. It's not even possible. I saw a bottle at the liquor store yesterday and you weren't there. And Marcus as well. Hi. Hi. Hi.

So why the Christian linguistics? To start. They need it. They deserve it. Mike Warnke deserves Nickelback. He deserves it. But it's actually maybe slightly too good for him. All right.

We are on to part two. And this is really going to explore the crazy world even further of Mike Warnke. So on our previous episode in this series, we explored the story that made Mike Warnke famous. Namely, his experiences as a high priest in a Satanic cult that took orders from the mysterious Illuminati, all of which were false, all of which were false because we now know if you are you follower of any type of Satanism, we mostly like getting hammered. Honestly, we like a meat buffet.

I love a charcuterie board as a Satanist. Do not forget all the conversations about gout. If you're a Satanist and you haven't had at least one bout with the gout, are you really a Satanist? I'm working towards mine. I can see the swelling in my arch and I cannot wait for it to get to the ultimate righteousness of it. But on this episode, we'll be discussing exactly how Mike Warnke sold his story to the Evangelical

crowd for 20 years and how his influence helped the kickstart the Satanic panic of the 80s and 90s. So when we last left Mike Warnke, it was the early 70s and he just returned from Asia after doing a few months in Vietnam and a few months in Japan as a member of the Navy. He must have been such a slippery little fuck on that boat. Oh yeah. I can't imagine. He seems a little too big for the Navy, doesn't he?

No, he's my... We are, you know, very similar in size. Very similar in shape and technically the smaller man is great for the Navy because you can fit inside of a sub and still have room. I know the pesky world of the seaman. You got to be a swab. You got to get close to the deck. It's mostly clean.

And if you're too tall, the wind can't hit the top of your head, knock you off the side of the boat. I don't know, man. I'm not a recruiter. I know you're not. Eventually, Mike began giving talks at a non-denominational Jesus movement church in Anaheim called Melody Land, and it was there that his lies about his involvement in Satanic cults first gained traction.

This is what's like. It was like his Satanic open mic. Yeah. Welcome to Melody Land. No, I'm not going to invite you to the eighth grade dance. I'm Melody. Hey, dude. My name is Robinson Grumpkin.

I'm the lead singer of Nickelback. I love to be enjoyed. Can I please be a part of Melody Land? Because I'm a singer as well. I don't know if you've heard some of my songs. Can you sing any? Oh, we're having fun, yeah. We don't.

You're so cute. That's all I got. That's the only lyric I remember. You got any ever clear? No, I'm not. You're so cute. Now, Wonky didn't go for the jugular right off. At first, he leaned on lies about his time in Vietnam, claiming that he'd backslid into

drugs and drink because of his horrific, nonexistent experiences in country. But once the Satan's stuff caught on, Mike and his first wife, Sue, began building an anti-occult ministry. The more I listen to this mustachioed fuck, the more I understand. He doesn't know what the term occult means. Not really. He has no clue what he's talking about. He's making it up as he goes.

As a matter of fact, I read a really interesting master's theory about the origins of satanic ritual abuse. And again, it goes all the way back to the 1300s. It's the same shit. Right. And I'm the first group of Christians. So we're originally, like this is literally before the 2000s in BC times, the Christians were labeled as baby eaters.

Yeah. Oh, baby eaters. Yeah. Baby eaters comes back again and again and again. Because it's the scary, it's the worst thing you can do. The worst thing you can do is eat a baby. What's worse than eating a baby? Sneeze while you're making a left on a yellow light.

That's a good point as well. I would call them crocodiles for Christ. We're baby eaters. Oh. Honestly, because a baby doesn't even know what's fucking missing yet. Oh, no, babies wouldn't love to be eaten, buddy. Killing a 37-year-old man would be such a waste, a waste of that whole man's life, this whole life ahead of him.

It was prime. Yeah. This is the hill you want to die on. Yeah, okay. That's fine. And because the Jesus movement was bringing so many young people into evangelism following the disillusionment with the stickier bits of the hippie movement, the audience at Melody Land was growing and therefore Mike's audience was growing as well.

Mr. Warnke, I saw my wife Pamela fuck every one of my friends in front of me after I told her. Well, you wouldn't be alone there, son. That's how it is. Yeah, that is just what is a part of the ministry is that your wife needs to be shared by the congregants. Oh, you're going to do that two or two? Oh, no.

I don't know if Mike Warnke can fuck. No, we'll prove that Mike Warnke can and does fuck. Basically, the premise being the amount of broken human beings that filled the human body, the rose at these places can never be really understood. Yeah. But while Mike was growing his audience in Anaheim, a Pentecostal evangelist named Morris Sarulo was building a ministry in San Diego called the World Evangelism Headquarters, complete with what they called a youth action center.

It sounds fun, but it seems like at a youth action center, the youth get a lot of unwanted action. Yeah. It's like a punishment to be like, you got to go to the yak, but I don't really go to the yak. You got to go to the yak. Yeah. We were the yab, the youth advisory board.

Oh, isn't that nice. I painted a mural of Superman. Oh, good. Was he a Christ-like Superman? No, no, no, no. Very secular Superman. But we were allowed to put on a sketch show for all of the kids in the library. Oh, good.

What was the sketch that you wrote? I'm very curious. It was Jeff Nitzberg was on a piano pretending to be the only way I could really describe it is mentally handicapped with two fake hands. Like he got two plastic hands from the Halloween store and was like pretending to play the piano with it. And then I did an act out of my mom buying longer burger baskets, which was a longer burger basket.

Longer burger baskets are some of the, these are untouchable objects in my home. They are $100. What's a longer burger? Or was it longer burger baskets? No, it's longer. Like they were longer than the previous ones. I believe it is a GE, longer burger, right? It is one word.

It is a part of, only wait, it's a precious basket. Ah. It would go on to finance me and my sister's post college lives and guess where those baskets are? Where? In my mom's home filled with shit. There you go. I don't know if that's Warnke material.

No. Well, through contacts in the Christian scene, Cerulo connected with Mike Warnke and the two began working together, focusing on an anti-accult message. Soon after, they began traveling the country side by side, warning against the dangers of the occult in a mobile home that doubled as an occult exhibit. They called it the witchmobile. What? That's so fun.

They're fucking, they're dragging, they're digging the ditches and burning the witches man. They're fucking doing it. Honestly, that song might be based upon the witchmobile. So they basically have to create an antagonist so they can be the protagonist, the binary world. It's so classic and that's why it's always important for me, I try not to complete the circuit.

I don't even say I hate, I say, okay, you do you, I'm gonna love you, but I just, everything you do is wrong. But I will not complete the circuit. Now while the witchmobile was a decidedly Christian enterprise, it sounds like the presentation was metal as fuck, which is usually how shit like this goes. Because all of the metal like imagery you're showing, right, the fucking devil shit, all the occult paraphernalia, which a lot of the times is exaggerated versions of the stuff that we would normally use in actual occult rituals.

It attracts people, they do more for Satanism and the occult than anybody else. Because even Mike Warnke, like I was listening to a speech of him talking about his origins of getting into the occult actually sounds a lot like my origins in getting into all of this shit. Because the same thing, you were fascinated by the imagery first. And then you start to learn about it, and then you realize like, oh, this gives me this edge. You're the Warnke of podcast.

We've said this last episode. In addition to books on spirits, a Ouija board, and various occult knives and amulets, the witchmobile was also in possession of a human skull to demonstrate how bones were used in occult rituals. You know what else has a lot of human skulls? Every fucking high school in the country. It's not exactly that macabre. We all currently are living in one.

Wow. Think about that, bro. And my friend, you just got Warnke. You got Warnke. But while Trape's in around the country talking about the occult like an evangelical A-team was obviously Warnke's calling, he still had the small matter of still being enlisted in the Navy for a further six years. Oh, I'm supposed to be on a boat.

Not in the witchmobile. Now while it appears as if these people were goofy nobodies, Morris Cerulo had real contacts with power. Morris and a street preacher from Melodyland named Dick Hanley called up a California state representative named Del Clausen, who was oddly enough Mormon. So he's bored. Yeah. He was bored and sitting around waiting for a call.

I actually disagree. I have to push back, Mr. Zabralis. No Mormons are very busy. They're very enterprising. They're a little too busy. A little too enterprising. Yeah. I also think they're constantly excited.

Oh, they are. You imagine if you don't do anything and you see anything, it's got to be quite a shot. Do you remember the Mormon man who picked us up in the party bus when we left from Salt Lake City to go to the airport with the big bow tie? You basically looked like a young man's version of Orville Reddenbier, but he was there fucking bright. I had to push it to L16. Being like, heard you guys do a bit of a comedy show.

I'm a person who gets really into jokes myself and you're like, I'm going to fucking kill you. There is something about someone who is unnervingly nice. Yeah. And happy. You don't know. I think it's suspicious. Mm-hmm.

Well, Morris Cerullo and Dick Hanley told Del Clausen about Warnke's predicament, most likely given some grand speech about how Warnke could do a lot more good in the witchmobile than he could ever do in the Navy. I would love to see the his commanding officer's reaction to this. Yes. I would love to see the witchmobile in the Cuban Missile Crisis be like, we are armed and ready to go. So Del Clausen made Warnke's enlistment disappear.

Oh my God. And Warnke was free to participate in a witchmobile tour that had stops in 45 cities. He canceled his Vietnam experience so that he could go on tour. And that's selfish. Now, from how it seems, Warnke used the time that he spent on the road in the witchmobile fully constructing his menagerie of satanic tales. Because by the time the tour was over, he was telling his tales of bleached white hair, the Illuminati, and a coven involving 1500 Satanists.

You know, you do have to learn the craft on the road. Yeah, you do. So he technically did it right. He did. He did. He knew how to talk to the common man. Yeah. So he picked up early, I can use my fun personality to engage people.

It's not always easy. I mean, even Lindsey Graham is having a hard time when he talks about vaccinations. He's getting booed quite a bit. And that man says it's charming as anything. Yeah, he's like if Piglet was a senator. So through Dick Handley, Warnke was introduced to the public relations consultant for Melodyland, a guy named Dave Balsiger. Balsiger also had a particular interest in occult research.

And in addition, Balsiger was also helping to build the more conspiratorial side of Christianity, which had been steadily building throughout the Cold War. Wait, okay. We're separating the conspiracy side of Christianity? That was a separate wing. Yeah, that's it. Yeah. What's the...

Well, the separate wing, really the wing that Balsiger was most interested in was the idea that the godless Marxists and communists were coming to take over the country and kill all the Christians. Yeah, nice. That was his... But he also started to get interested in the occult thing, because by this point, like, the Russians hadn't come for like 20, 30 years. It wasn't...

It wasn't... It hadn't come yet. Yeah, they're not here yet. Yeah, so they had to find a new enemy. And that new enemy was Satanists. So the conspiracy wasn't about that big, breasted, beautiful gilf that was... Mary, the version of Mother Mary, because definitely God was looking to fuck her big and old rubbery uterus.

What was the name of the first... Adam and Eve. Yeah. Eve, yeah, she talked to that snake and stuff. That's all real, but they were like, that's 100% true. That's fake dead. And in the original chapters of the Bible, that snake had arms and legs, is in fact much closer to a reptilian.

That's right. Oh my God. So in addition to being an expert at advertising, marketing, and promotion, Balsiger was also adept at political campaigning. And he wrote the dialogue for various low-budget Christian documentaries that always seemed to shoehorn something about the dangers of Marxism amongst tales of, where's the real Noah's Ark? It's in Cleveland.

I've got it right here. Can you listen to me? It's here. In Cleveland. In Cleveland. I believe it. You bought an ad that says it. No, his Noah's Ark documentary, eventually the tale tumbled into some guys in the 90s

and they were like, yeah, bro, we got a fucking piece of Noah's Ark right here and people believed him and they went on tour with it. And then eventually they admitted that it was a fucking railroad tie that they'd covered in barbecue sauce and baked in an oven to make it look old. We will do the mysteries of the Bible at some point in the very, not that close future, but yeah. Right. Yeah.

They're always talking about this Noah's Ark. I don't know if they're ever going to find it, but you can go to the Wisconsin Dells Noah's Ark. It's not real. That water park is real, my friend. You're supposed to listen to it. You're supposed to learn from it because they don't know that water park has at least three people drowning it every year.

I think it's pretty freaking real. Okay. Noah's Ark. Wonderful place. Eventually, Balsinger became a producer. I don't know. It's just his name is Balsinger. It sounds like he's going to be a wedding singer for testicles.

I can't. I mean, I'm my balls aren't getting married. My balls need to remain single. Well, this guy, Balsinger became a producer and strangely enough, he produced a paranormal show called Encounters of the Unexplained featuring Jerry Orbaugh. Where are my eyes? Who's got my eyes? Jerry, remember you gave the gift of sight to two New Yorkers.

I hate that I did that. Yeah. I remember he was bragging about it a lot. And this Balsinger guy also directed a fawning documentary in 2004 called George W. Bush, Faith in the White House. I love you. Great. So happy to have that recent history.

Yeah. But the point here is that Balsinger had the ability to build a narrative. And in the early 70s, Balsinger and Warnke worked together co-authoring Warnke's breakout book, The Satan Seller, and thereby laying the foundation for Warnke's career for the next 20 years. In a weird, obviously less violent way, this reminds me of the system that slowly started building towards getting Timothy McVeigh ready to do the Oklahoma City bombing, where you start to see like, oh, all of these forces coalesced and saw interest and kind of a future

in each other. And they're like, we can combine anti-Marxist thought with anti-Satanic thought. At one point, we can just mash them all together and get the nationalist stripe going as well, mixed with this like emotional hot key that you can hit every single time you say the word Satanist. I mean, great diversity when it comes to hairstyles, though. Very different. All sorts of.

I think I heard Michael Warnke's hair was actually, he's technically classified as having a Tennessee waterfall, I believe is the term. And then the rest of these guys, it's mostly bowl cuts. Also, Satan's cellar would be a great name for a speakeasy. Oh, the witches are there. I hate speakeasies, just have a door. Well, okay. Now Warnke had already gained a large live following off his stories of being an ex-Satanic

priest, but when he wrote that story down, it took Balsiger three months to edit and rewrite Warnke's first draft into something readable. I mean, that makes, that fucking tracks because every single one of Warnke's like storytelling bits has no structure. No. It's all over the place. It has no beginning, middle, or end, because say what you will about Bill Cosby. He could tell a story.

Well, that's for sure. So this, this Balsinger guy, he was. Balsiger. Balsinger. Balsiger. Balsiger. Gotta say with some respect, he, without him, maybe Warnke never gets off the ground at all.

Never, because the book is what put Warnke up into the fucking rafters when it came to the Christians. Otherwise, he would have just been a live guy, you know, maybe he would have done an album, but he never would have gained the traction. Okay. But even though Warnke's writing skills were limited, Warnke also contributed quote unquote writing to other anti-accult books at the time. For fellow witchmobiler, Morris Cerulo, Warnke wrote a chapter called Secrets of a Satanic

Priest, which nicely rounded out Cerulo's book, which was hilariously titled The Backside of Satan. Oh yeah, take a look at that. I think it's important for us to remember or I remember that Satan has a secret side. Well, it's just why I've named my brand new book Satan's Asshole, where you don't want to find your nose. Well, the thing about Satan is he doesn't realize there is no job at the end of the audition.

Okay, Satan. Why don't you turn around and bend over at the waist and just grab the cheats. What if I told you as a matter of fact, this is the job? No. Satan, you've made me come again. Now Warnke was not the only person selling the more pessimistic and fearful side of Christianity in the early 70s. This was when the evangelical movement was on the rise and they were primed to believe

just about anything just so long as it made them afraid and gave their otherwise dull lives a little bit of meaning and a little bit of adventure. That's what you said before, Castle, the idea that you create a villain. You create somebody that you all hate, which is why the Anton Levesque, the maxim, the idea of we kept the church in business all of these years, because that was kind of the original impetus for the parody religion that was the church of Satan, version of Satanism. Well, just look what the cows are doing when they're talking about eating more chicken. First of all, first of all, Matt, and also second of all, who taught these cows how

to do graffiti? Because that's what it is. It's graffiti. Some people say Banksy is art. That's fine, only because he's got a stencil. Yeah, that's true. Well, it goes even further than just creating an enemy. It's also placing themselves in the middle of the story.

It makes everyday life a lot more interesting if any person you see could be a Satanist. And you are a knight for the Lord, a royal in a fight to the death of the dark side. Just not, though. No, you're Brenda. Just be you. Life is pretty exciting in many ways. Yeah, it really is. You're 67 on the highway with the windows down.

Yeah, man. Jerk off outside. Not where anyone can see, but just outside. Again, if you're looking, you complete the circuit. We've been talking about this. Your definition of public masturbation has changed. Don't look at me. The onus is now seemingly on the people who see it.

Mind your business. Well, in 1970, you had the release of the late great planet Earth by Hal Lindsey. This book brought the ideas of the Rapture and the Antichrist to the mainstream, while also interpreting the book of Revelation to fit current events, thereby claiming that the end was near. People didn't talk about the Rapture or the Antichrist before the late great planet Earth. I imagine that it came up in certain ways, but he made it pop savvy. He brought it to a huge audience.

You have an idea how difficult it is to make Jimmy Carter look like the Antichrist. He put in solar panels, he grew peanuts, he's the frailest man in the world to smoke weed. Although the only insult they'll say about him, he also rode the Christian wave into office. Yes, he did. But the late great planet Earth was Lindsey's most well-known book. The year before Warnke released the Satan seller, Lindsey released a follow-up to the late great planet Earth called Satan is Alive and Well and Living on Planet Earth.

That's the most descriptive title I have ever heard. Satan is Alive and Well and he's coven over my house Friday for barbecue. Now Lindsey was no fringe author. His first book was the biggest selling non-fiction book of the decade. Wait, Satan is alive and on planet Earth is a non-fiction? His first book, the late great planet Earth, that was considered a non-fiction book. And with quotation marks, as far as the non-fiction bestseller list went, number one for the decade. It seems like it might be fiction.

So when Lindsey told evangelicals that Satan was a concrete entity with earthly agents who were coming for you and your children, people listened. And a bolsterers claims people like Mike Warnke were coming out of the woodwork, claiming that they'd been these agents of Satan. Which of course gave people- It completes the circuit! It completed the circuit and it gave people an answer as to why everything seemed to be falling apart around them in the 60s and 70s. You know what?

Maybe actually Facebook is better than this. I don't know. At least it keeps them at home. I don't know. It's not. It's just worldwide now because it's the same fucking thing, man. I mean, it's always when life is bad, when everything seems completely up in the air. When life is life?

Yeah, when life is life. Even culturally, when everything seems to be falling apart, that's when these people they shoot the gap and they get in there every fucking time. It comes to us. We'll provide a system of comfort for you, of support for you. An answer. An answer. But there are no answers.

We live in a world of gray. Well, Satan is alive and well and living on planet Earth also introduces this concept, which these guys will do. The other thing about all of this is the recruitment side. Which comes up again and again and again. They're looking for butts in seats because butts in seats put money on the plate. Butts in seats will pay for you to go visit the holy land. You have a fucking private jet.

All this kind of bullshit, right? And so they have one hook in Satan is alive and well and living on the planet Earth, which they keep talking about again and again. This whole concept of once you're saved, you're saved for life. So all we got to do is get you the one time and then you're on the rosters for forever. So that's this concept always. It's just been like, just let us get you, let us save you one time. Yeah.

Let me save you one time because then I got you and then they think, oh, now you're on call for the rest of your shitty little life. And I was really trying to find something positive here. I was going to praise, perhaps they had a good potluck on Sunday. But to be honest, I don't think the food was very good. No, no. No. Now, Mike Warnke was certainly the most popular ex-Satanist.

And there are reasons why he was number one. First, while Mike's stories can be gruesome, they're not too gruesome. He did talk about cutting the pussies off of little girls, but he didn't say cutting pussies. No. He said carving the sexual organs. And he didn't hit, like that was, it was not as bad as, compared to some of the other satanic shit, it is fucking, I mean, it is tame.

I've seen the documents. I mean, Halloween we carve pumpkins, but normally we sit for Christmas, we normally do our carving of the sexual organs of little girls. One year I did this incredible slay. It was amazing. Very ornate. It's pretty much the same principle as to why everyone knows who Ted Bundy is, but only the most fervent true crime fans know Richard Chase.

With Bundy, his more gruesome acts, they can be smoothed over. They can even be ignored entirely, as they've been in fucking recent history. But with Chase, you can't really gloss over the blender. Cause then he's like, what are we writing about, what are we even doing appropriately? Yeah, you can't gloss over the actual baby that he killed. You can't gloss over the family that he killed, like it's all, you can't gloss over the yogurt cups. It's all there.

Man, I really wish they would have addressed all of this with like a big mental health initiative or something like that. But I guess. Fuck you. Sweep, sweep, sweep, sweep, sweep, sweep, sweep, sweep, sweep. And the only thing Richard Chase ever identified as in sort of a denomination was an independent voter. He actually was actually really incredible.

Swing voter. You never get a new where he's going to be that day. He was a purple guy. I like that. Okay. The other reason why Warnky rose to the top was because while every person who claimed to be an ex Satanist had some mental health issue or another, Warnky was the only one who could keep his shit together and he kept it together for large crowds because he had

the superpower of being a little bit weird and a pathological liar. Yep. One of the other alleged ex Satanist was Herschel Horatio Smith, who was a seven fingered former satanic acolyte who told people that he'd given his missing three fingers to Satan. That's a little bit too gruesome. That's a great pitch though. It's a great pitch. That's a great pitch.

Because honestly, because you got the visual and be like, that's why I only got the shocker. He just shows it at all times. Like Phil Schneider, who the big reveal is that he lifts his shirt so you can see the scars from where the grays zapped him. But that makes people uncomfortable. They like hearing about someone losing three fingers to Satan, but they don't like seeing a guy up there missing three fingers. You're not me, I guess.

No. They're not us either. They're assholes. You never actually see anyone with any kind of deformity or disability actually in Hollywood. Yeah. Because it makes everyone a little uncomfortable, doesn't it? So they have to be beautiful. And then when they go to the awards show, they're beautiful and you're like, how they, they

have the audacity to get ugly for us. They had that one guy with elephantitis that was in under the skin with Scarlett Johansson. That's a great movie. But he, but I think they made him this, he was there cause he looked strange. Yeah. Yeah. No, that was specifically why. I want to see a movie where he fucks.

But he had a big hard dick in that. You remember that? Did he really? Oh yeah. It was honestly kind of sturdlingly big and hard. Yeah. Good for him. Good movie.

Nice. And there was also the aforementioned Laurel Rose Wilson. We talked about her last episode. She had massive emotional issues in addition to wildly bloody claims. So she's out too. But perhaps the most fascinating out of this group of so-called ex Satanists and also the most criminal was John Todd. I only need two first names.

You got it, John. John Todd. John for Todd. John for Todd. All right. John Todd claimed that he was an ex witch who had been born into a witchcraft family that was a part of a larger organization of witches whose plot for world domination was quickly gaining steam.

It's gaining steam. And that was called Safeway. Well, John Todd was great because he introduced a sense of urgency into all of this. He said that these witches had influence over the most powerful people in the world, claiming that JFK was not only still alive, but when he was in office, he had actually hired John Todd to be his personal warlock. Hey, Dad, John. I need you to make some kind of spell to make Marilyn Monroe's bussy small again.

Why the obsession with having the Kennedys alive? I never will understand it. It's still happening as Marcus talks about it in our live show to this day. He's still talking about like, one Kennedy being alive, he is dead. We really can't understand the trauma that the president getting shot in the fucking head had. How much trauma it really put the whole country through. People couldn't fucking believe it.

I mean, enough. It wasn't his grandson, the one who died in the helicopter or plane crash and they still think he's alive. Yeah. Yeah. Well, they just all fit very nicely into conspiracy. Okay. According to Todd, witches and Satanists were conspiring with the Illuminati to torment

Christians. Yes. They claimed that the most well-known Christians of the day, guys like Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, they were all in on it. Yeah, they were. This is where I do get caught. Pat Robertson, he retired from the 700 Club the day we released our episode last week. That is amazing.

That is amazing. It's the first time it's happened in 55 years. He won't be on television. That old sack of potatoes. That fucking Satanist. Now, John Todd did have a slight occult background. In 1974, he factually opened an occult bookstore in Dayton, Ohio. Cool.

And he began recruiting for a Wiccan coven. That's right. So, he was the talent, like, coordinator for a coven, which means a man who molests women in Stevie Nicks dresses. Let me smell your breath. Let me smell your breath. Oh, yeah. You're good.

But by 1976, John Todd had been arrested for allegedly involving underage girls and sexual initiation ritual. What? What? Was he on the cover of Forbes, like that one asshole, too? But that didn't seem to matter to the evangelicals, because, of course, evangelicals like to rail about the immorality of people who live differently from themselves, while at the same time sheltering actual sexual perverts like John Todd just so long as said sexual

perverts believe in their bullshit. It's almost like it's not a bug. It's a feature. Yeah. It makes me think of Warren Jeffs, that disgusting crooked smile, man. By 1977, the year after John Todd was arrested for sexual crimes against underage girls, he was in the thick of the evangelical community, claiming that he'd been a member of the Illuminati who'd given $8 million in seed money to kickstart the Christian rock industry.

Oh, my God. He gave it to any. He could have given it to anybody else. This all led to DC talk. What is happening? Do you remember Carmen? Do you remember Carmen? Remember Carmen?

Oh, you remember Carmen? Well, I vaguely remember Carmen from the couple times that I hung out with the kids who listened to DC talk and Jars of Clay. Jars of Clay, they were a little bit more French and some Christians didn't think they were in it enough. Yeah. That was okay because they did have a mainstream pop song. Also, let's not forget Amy Grant, that song, Baby Baby, once Christians found out it wasn't

not about an actual baby and may have been about a boyfriend or her husband, she was out. Yeah, because it sounds like she's making the baby eat her pussy. No. She was pushing an orange in the music video with her nose. Is Collective Soul a Christian band? No. No, no, no.

They tried to say that there was themes in Collective Soul. There might have been. It's a big market, man. It's the Midwest market. No, I know. Because that's what we learned about. Who are the potheds? Panheads?

Panheads. Skillet. Skillet. Skillet again. I think people say it's not Christian rock. It's inspirational, positive rock. Oh. Meanwhile, I think Ghost, who is technically Satanic rock, is also very inspirational.

Oh, yeah. Sugar. I also don't need to get a lot of inspiration from my rock. No. I can also just listen to it and be like, that sounds like a fun song to get hammered to. And people listened when John Todd made the claims that Jimmy Carter was the Antichrist. Oh, my God. And of course, you know, that's an antecedent to Barack Obama being called the Antichrist

because he was being called the Antichrist by the exact same people that were calling Jimmy Carter the Antichrist fucking decades earlier. Literally. He could not be more middle of the road. Oh. Tansuit. That's all I gotta say is tansuit. Oh, yeah.

He's not the Antichrist. Center right. He dressed like the peanuts here or in the middle. They are so... Oh, God. I wish that they stood for anything. No, they're both center right. Easily.

And people also listen when John Todd said that Atlas Shrugged was the Illuminati's blueprint for the planned satanic takeover that was soon to come any day now. I mean, broken clock is right nine times. I forget when you said it is correct. Four times a day is what he says that's wrong. No, six times a day. Because, again, I just take into account the minute hand and the second hand of the hour. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You separate it by two. I actually, sometimes I, in Rand, I do wish that she could see some of the people that used her literature for such ways because I think it was a bit bastardized because her point of view, of course, been a Holocaust survivor. That was, she had a whole nother kind of reason for all of it. But no, it's interesting that they turned their back on her. It's interesting they turned their back on her because wouldn't that be something opposite from someone like a Timothy McVeigh?

No, because it's about personal objectives. Since that was the objectivism, it's about the idea that you believe yourself as like an ascended master amongst other people, like of your father and stronger than those that the strong must take. Yeah, but they're anti-Marxists and communists, theoretically, so they should say that that's not good. They should say that's good then, right? Objectivism is, like, when you take objectivism and compare it to, like, what are the true

tenets of Christianity, they're the exact opposite. Yeah, they are. Real Christians are supposed to live in a communal society, they're supposed to be humble, they're supposed to... Synchronized periods. I mean, those are witches. We've already talked about it in the live show. But the person who listened to John Todd the Closest was Jack Chick.

Oh no. Yes. For those of you who don't know, Jack Chick was a cartoonist who published comic books called Chick Tracks that were small in size, but big on fundamentalist Christian fear-mongering. Yes, they were. And besides, his extraordinarily anti-Catholic stance, which was strong enough to get him banned from many Christian bookstores, Jack Chick also had quite a bit to say about what he believed was the reality of Satanism and Satanic cults.

It's so funny. I still... I love the infighting. I love how they all hate the other denominations, especially with the Catholics, right? They think that they're cultists and crazy. I mean, they're right. They're completely correct. Of all of the groups, they are the most gothic and evil.

Oh yeah. Here in two old bitties argue, my grandmother was Lutheran and I went to Catholic school. She had a lot to say about the Catholics. Oh yeah. It's called cannibals. Yeah. Well, specifically, Jack Chick published comics about all the insidious ways that Satanism found its way into the brains of the youth, from the aforementioned Christian rock to

something as innocent and nerdy as Dungeons and Dragons. Now with all of this sounds ridiculous, right? We talked about this on the show, especially like I think the last Satanic ritual abuse episode we did was probably about eight years ago. Even then, there was still a little bit of that. Now that Dungeons and Dragons and all has become IP for everybody to use, and now superheroes and all this kind of shit have become so mainstream, for a long time, it was French. Yeah, absolutely.

Because most of the big superheroes were made by Jewish people, right? It was all decidedly very on the outside of certain things and they were disregarded and they were told that they were a poison on society for so long. Dungeons and Dragons was viewed as an incredibly dangerous tool to create a generation of schizophrenics. Remember that shit? Yeah. I'm schizophrenics and occultists. Yeah, absolutely.

And Jack Chick was not afraid to go big. In one comic, in one comic, he portrayed a town that was controlled by organized Satanists who participated in ritual murder and taught witchcraft to their children in their schools. Yes, welcome to Satanville. And once you're the one getting your ritual, the murder. No, man, I'll be on the fucking other side of that, bro. Don't fucking show up here if you have a pure soul or if you don't like a pizza buffet. Yes, most evil.

Indeed. The Chick Tracks are some of the goofiest, most fun, anti-occult artifacts out there if you want to go for the ironic stance. I fucking love Chick Tracks. Yeah. Those hit ironic pretty hard for me, thank God, early on, because they were everywhere in our church. We just used to get them by the bundle.

Yeah. It was very powerful. And of course, parents did read them to their children as fat. Oh, yeah. People took them seriously. At least one South Dakota detective used a Chick Tract in a presentation about Satanic crimes. Every single time you think we're just talking about goofy shit, remember they had a door

straight to the police. Mm-hmm. They were talking about police. They raided the occult crimes units across the country. The FBI had an occult crimes unit. It is wild how big this got. Yeah. Absolutely.

It was such a strange day for the judge to be like, officer, you brought a comic book in, huh? Mm-hmm. That's your defense? Meanwhile, he's just going, ma-la-la, and it gets saved. He just runs it around after reading it. But part of the reason why Chick Tracks about Satanism had that air of reliability was because Jack's information supposedly came from an ex-grandruid priest, who Chick always made

sure to thank at the end of each Satanism issue. That priest, of course, was John Todd. Yeah, I'm a bit of a co-producer. Wow. Yep. By the way, thanks to everyone who bought Soul Plumber. Yeah! The response has been amazing.

This is a good plug. This is a great plug. It's bigger than Chick Tracks. Yeah. So that's number one. That's a big victory right there. Not yet. Soon.

Well, physically, in size. That year, local comic book store. Absolutely. Support the small business. Always. Now, in 1979, John Todd bugged out and moved to rural Montana, claiming that the Satanic takeover had begun. Urging Christians everywhere.

Stockpile food! Stockpile weapons! The Satanic uprising is here! Me more unfamiliar. All of the Satanists are hanging around being like, they just invented this thing called Nintendo. Oh, yes. Yes.

Get your cloak on, Marcel. We shall play some Mario Brothers. Also, Marcus, you mentioned rural Montana, as opposed to that superpopulous urban Montana. Oh, yeah. One going Monday. And for a while, John Todd kept to doing limited speaking engagements. Interestingly, he brought his Satanic government takeover talk to Cedar Falls, Iowa at the invitation of Randy Weaver, who of course was at the center of the Ruby Ridge Massacre,

which partly inspired the Oklahoma City bombing. We're not fucking around here, man. This is all connected. The movement's touch tips. They all come from the same spots. There's something about it, and I don't know why. One fuels the other. It's any way.

Fear. It's all brought together by fears. Because you're cramping something up, right? Like, I don't want to get too political, right? Or whatever about this bullshit, but you could see how events that happened this year, right? Were led up to by a bunch of people innocuously saying, like, building shit up past a point. There was a strong psychic energy. Yes.

And it's the same shit. They tried it. That's what they do. Because then they aren't personally culpable, because they were like, well, I was just organizing a speaking group. I just had a training center. I just built an entire white supremacist city. And that's it.

That's all I did. And if you want to see everyone do everything wrong, watch the documentary on Ruby Ridge. Every mistake that could be made from law enforcement, and of course, in Weaver's case, from a family man perspective, was made. Yep. Yep. Great documentary. Really sad.

But in 1987, John Todd was arrested for the rape of a University of South Carolina student and was additionally charged with sexually molesting kids at a karate school where he worked. I don't know. And kids trains and martial arts. No, exactly. Right. Wow.

He was convicted of rape in January 1988 and was sentenced to 30 years in state prison. Oh, they got him. Yeah, they got him. He was released in 2004 and placed into a mental health facility, which is presumably where he died four years later. Okay. And of course, John Todd and Mike Warnke, they were contemporaries and often spoke at the same engagements.

Predictably, these two liars didn't like another liar on their turf that might contradict their narrative. Oh. And in one backstage confrontation, Todd openly accused Warnke of stealing his Illuminati story. This is literally just a macro game of Dungeons and Dragons, isn't it? They literally had the Carlos Bencia Joe Rogan fight, but it was with Christian bullshit. Yeah. Yeah.

With Christian conspiracies involving Satanists. She'd be like, that's my shit, the blood of Virgin Mary on your face, the blood of Virgin Mary on your face. Now once the Satan seller was released in 1972, Mike Warnke became an immediate bestselling author, although a good chunk of those sales were thanks to Warnke's front and center presence at religious bookstores, because the religious bookstores had also figured out real fast that Satan sells. Yeah, he does.

Yes, he does. Once the book became popular, Warnke began getting calls from churches all over the country to perform his ever-evolving act. And before long, Mike was performing to crowds 10,000 strong, opening for Jesus People, USA, or J-PUSA. J-PUSA. J-PUSA. I'm actually very happy you used the term act, because that's exactly what this is.

It's not a sermon. No. Even though all of that is very theatrical as well, but this is a 100% stage show act. Yes. Founded as an offshoot of the Jesus movement in 1972, J-PUSA was a cool pastor of Vangela. A local group made up of Christians who wanted to return to a biblical understanding of Christianity, and they also believed in the supernatural nature of the apostles. Interestingly, J-PUSA were also the publishers of Cornerstone magazine.

Who would, 20 years later, write the expose that proved Mike Warnke was a fraud and a liar? Now J-PUSA was not without its own problems. In the early 70s, the head pastor stepped down after it was said that he had a pattern of chronic sexual misconduct involving underage members of Jesus People USA. Jesus People USA started as a complete antithesis to the same groups that Mike Warnke was doing. They were the opposite sides of the coin, where Mike Warnke was a part of the Jesus Rick movement. Mike Warnke...

He's a little bit weird. He's a little bit weird. Which is why the weirdos come to make. His whole thing was that we bring a rock and roll sensibility to church, and that's what we do. We're cool pastors, right? He brings people in that way. J-PUSA viewed that as inherently, entirely wrong.

They hated the rock and roll aesthetic of... Of Mike Warnke? Yes. I mean, truly. They viewed Mike Warnke as too heretical, right? And they viewed that his style of music, they incorporated and remade Christian rock for themselves. They made it...

Because they didn't want anybody confused, right? Mike Warnke does this bit about how the first big Jesus freak meetup he held, he basically had rock bands play, but he had them change the words of popular songs to pro-Jesus words. What I want to do, I want to hug and kiss you. Yes, yeah. He was doing that shit. If you see Salt and Peppa now, that's what they do as well, because one became very religious and she'll only tour if they don't sing like the one song about sex, or they change it

to about God. Oh, let's talk about God, baby. Kinda. Do they do Push It, at least? Push It, but as you saw... Worship it. It's more about... No, it's more about lawn mowing.

That was a commercial for Push It. There needs to be more lawn mower rap. I agree. I agree. But it is... Japusa, though, was started by a guy named Johnny Herron, and yeah, Johnny Herron turned out to be... He was pedophile, practicing pedophile.

Jesus Christ. Okay. What is happening? What you do is... But that group is also a... It's very interesting, because I got some emails, people saying like, they pro-Japusa and deeply anti-Japusa, because what they do is, they bring you whole families in. They're communal living style things, right?

Oh, that's great. It's communal living. So, whatever you do is, you have to bring them money, and whatever it is that you have and shit, and then you work through businesses through Japusa. Right? Now, they're only in Chicago. They have, like, a supermarket, and they have something else, very similar to the Anhill Kids, where you go, you put in hours working, you also can live there for free if you do

shit there for the place, or give you clean it, if you do that kind of shit. But it's a holy, communistic kind of idea, or it's a socialist kind of idea, where it is all done by the group, where everybody contributes. But the thing that they do that's incredibly bad is that they strip families apart, right? They take the kids away from the parents, they put them in a separate area. Those kids are then raised by other kids, what is called essentially an older brother or an older sister, and at first, it sounded like it was interesting, right, where they really were trying to bring people that were trying to live this very simple life in the

name of Jesus Christ. But then the problem is that you sort of bring in active pedophiles and criminals into the environment, where they then work their way into being in charge of these little kid groups. So you basically give your kids to a group of wolves, then they're surrounded by a bunch of other kids, and then no one is there to give an eye. No one cares about looking at it, right? So it creates this world of abuse that they're all stuck in. Well, I remember my older brother remembers when we were growing up in Daystar, which

I wonder if that has anything to do with Japusa, that was a religious cult as well, Daystar. And he has a memory, I was just a baby, but he has a memory of my mom crying because she wanted to get his ice cream, and she had to go like ask for it, ask for the money. Yes, everything has to be old. Because it was all community-only then. Then we went on to Illinois, and then we went on to Wisconsin, and look at us now. Now concerning Mike Warnke's story, the more he told it, the more elaborate it got. He was soon telling crowds of enthralled Christians how he could use demonic powers to create

fireballs with his bare hands. Do it! Do it! Do it! Let me see it, dude! Oh, he's left all that behind me. I don't do that no more. God damn it!

Whatever! And he also said that he drank human blood, and he ate human flesh during satanic ceremonies. Seriously, bro, you can't drink blood right now? This is my thing. What we talked about this last time, right? Why is it cool now to talk about it? Yeah. Right?

You're a cannibal. Cannibal. You're a murderer and a serial rapist. Now we're supposed to act like this is hilarious? Well, he's going off of the whole Christian principle of forgiveness, you know? He's testing them. You already got me once. I got saved.

Yeah. I thought, like, isn't part of forgiveness not monetizing your sense? Like, he made a lot of money off of eating human flesh. I mean, he didn't eat any human flesh. He ate a lot of tacos. You're just not going to make the, in the evangelical business world, you're not going to make 50 under 50 in the evangelical Forbes. God damn it.

But even though Warnke never told the same version of these stories twice, and even though he seemed to remember a new gruesome detail every time, like any good liar, Mike Warnke never contradicted himself. Hmm. See, Warnke had kept all of the timelines in the Satan cellar purposefully vague, later claiming after he'd been exposed that he'd muddled the facts to protect the innocent and to prevent the Satan cellar from becoming a guidebook for the occult. But you were a satanic priest.

How are you protecting the innocent? There were none of them were innocent around you. It's like that TV show Dragnet. The names and places have been changed to protect the innocent. Remember? Yeah, I remember that. Yeah. And also remember the movie which had a decidedly occult element.

It did. Yeah. It was a, that was a whole fucking satanic cult thing too that probably, I mean, I was one of my favorite movies. Oh, I love that movie. Dead acroid. He brought that in. Yeah.

I love the best. But as Mike Warnke shows got bigger and bigger, so too did Warnke's crimes. On stage, he confessed to assault, inciting a riot, armed robbery, breaking and entering, rape, murder, car theft, and the sale of weed, heroin, cocaine, peyote, and meth. And this is just getting him stamped in ovations by all of our mothers? What's happening? And look, and now he's just a regular dumpy. He's a little bit weird.

He's a little bit weird. Well, that was his whole thing. He was like, I'm guilty. I'm guilty of everything. That's what I am. I'm guilty because it gave him sympathy. Because he painted himself as a victim. It wasn't his fault that he raped women and ate flesh and assaulted.

He was in trans by Satan. Yeah. It was used in trans by Satan. But that's the things that made them feel good because they said, oh, look, this person who did all these awful things, it made them feel better about themselves and it gave them a sense of superiority because they can say, oh, look at what the power of Jesus Christ can do. Someone who's so awful comes over to our side.

My sins are nothing in comparison to his. And so that means I too can be saved. But as it goes with bad boys, even pathetic boys pretending to be bad boys, there's a certain stripe of woman who just can't help herself. I mean, look at him. I don't even understand. I am looking at the human poodle. He's got the body.

I'm going to lift him up. No, look, look at him. He looks like an avocado that you walk by at the grocery store being like, it is way overdone. Nope, nope. He's got the hair. He's got the mmm. I don't. He does the mmm.

He's got no chin. He has nothing. He's got the. He's got buck teeth. I just don't. Look at him. I'm a little charming. Look, that's the kind of face you just want to sit on, huh?

I've never seen a human being look more like a big fat rodent like that's his whole fucking thing. That's his vibe is rat. It really is. Yeah. Don't see the sex appeal, but it was the 70s and 80s, I guess. Hey, man, he's Cogsworth with an erection. I guess.

Groundhog. That's what he is. He's a big. He's a big groundhog of a man. I could see it. Well, according to Jay Pooce, a member, Tim O'Connor, women were constantly throwing themselves at the dumpy, bespectacled troll that was Mike Warnke, and Mike Warnke obliged each and every one.

Who is he to refuse the needs of a woman? Come on. Think about his little hands. There's consent involved in this situation, so that's. These little hands. Look at my little hands. I am looking at your little hands. You surprise what they can do.

I am not surprised what they can do. And while Warnke was lying about most of his crimes, assault was not one of them. Oh my gosh. You see, Warnke had a temper, and on one occasion, Warnke reached out and grabbed his friend Tim O'Connor by the throat for something so small, Tim doesn't even remember what the fuck it was. Of course. It would be amazing if any one of these stories were true back in the day, where he could just

turn on this satanic priest and be like, how did you defy me? And then just like psychically zap them. That would be incredible. Yo, bro, if he could make ball widening with his hands, yeah, it would be pretty cool. But the woman who would experience Mike Warnke's temper at its worst was his second wife, Carolyn Alberti. She, like Warnke, was a liar and told everyone that she was third generation mafia with a father who ran gambling houses and a mother who ran brothels.

It's not a nice history either. But he can't just have a fucking regular old wife. He needs a cool cryptic wife. Yep. In Warnke, Carolyn's wild past was impossible to corroborate, but she had definitely been arrested on prostitution charges under many different names on multiple occasions. That's the coolest fucking part about her. And perhaps it was this kernel of truth that brought a rise to Warnke's ill-fitting pants.

Someone's got to. She's a saucy number. I'm looking at her right now, man. No, she looks a billion times better than him. It's insane. Carolyn and Warnke began an affair while Warnke was still married to Sue. And Mike and Carolyn consummated their relationship. Ben, you're going to love this.

Two bottles of Annie Green Springs wine, two packs of Paul Maul Golds, and a package of peanut butter crackers. That's romance. I am not a pelican. I don't know if I do love that. No, that's called a La Fontaine, Wisconsin, honeymoon package. I'll take it. All right.

So at this point, he's supposed to be totally reformed, right? He's supposed to be. So does he not see this as a sin? Not at all. Oh, geez. Oh, you might be surprised to find out that he's a fucking hypocrite. Yeah, he's an asshole. On top of everything else.

But you know, when it comes down to it, kissle, dog meat, Mayan's just flesh and blood. A man. It's just flesh and blood. Only I can be transmuted through the power of Christ. I can't wait until you show up after you try to tell Natalie that. I'm just a... You know that bones are just dirt and blood is just wet and you're just living in a hotel now.

Well, Warnke demanded a divorce from his first wife so he could marry Carolyn. But the problem was that in the evangelical community, the only way a person can come from a divorce clean is if the other spouse is guilty of infidelity. So Warnke told people that he'd walked in on Sue in the midst of having sex with another man. Self cocking. And by 1975, the lie worked when Warnke was free from his first wife and then he moved to Nashville with his second.

I mean, that's as easy as it gets. No, that's what he always said. They said about Nashville is that like, there's more Christians that get turned by Nashville than Nashvillians that get turned by Christians. I don't even know what it means. That means nothing. No, it means that Christians come to Nashville thinking that they're going to convert people and they end up getting converted by Nashville.

They listen to all that unbelievably satanic Loretta Lynn music. Where's the Satan in Nashville? You fucking joke. But that song, The Pill, people did think that that was a satanic song. They thought that everything was fucking fallen apart. These people are much worse than you believe them to be. They're very dense. Now by this point, Warnke was only selling his books and doing live shows, but by the

mid-70s, Warnke had made connections with Christian music labels through his contacts in J-Poussa. And since his performances drew large crowds hanging on his every word, an album was the next logical step. So in January of 1976, Warnke released his first album, Mike Warnke Alive, with an exclamation point. That's a great name for an album, honestly. It really is.

Yeah. And also, he didn't even mean to record it. They were recording some other band, his record label, Mer Records. They were recording some other band, and Mike Warnke went on after them and they just forgot to turn the tape off. And you can tell that because it's stumbly. It is not prepped. It's not tight.

He is just making shit up as he goes. But even so, by the end of the year, number one selling religious album of 1976. It likes the raw quality of his conversational. An inspirational album of the year. Record World magazine bestowed that upon him. Record World magazine was a big fucking deal. They were one of the big free trade magazines along with Billboard and Cashbox. Damn.

Okay. Well, Carolyn claimed that during those heady days, they were making $5,000 a day on the road. But they were also spending two to three grand every single day. On what? On where they wanted and doing what they wanted. They still live in Nashville. Like literally, how much fried chicken can you eat?

That Tennessee waterfalls gotta keep flowing. That's true. You think that fucking astro glide he puts in his fucking head is free, buddy? You think those mustache gets trimmed by his dainty little fingers? No, sir. Look at his clothes. You can tell these clothes are hand woven by some of the least talented seamstresses in the world.

Oh my goodness. A year later, Warnke released his second album, Jester and the King's Court, where he added more detail to the Satan story, claiming that he had a three-inch scar on his arm where his Satanist friends would bleed his blood into a cup and drink it. But remember, Mike Warnke was a pathological liar, which meant that his lies didn't stop with his stage show. And that's how you know he did it for the love of it. He lied because he loved it.

Okay, good point. When he and Carolyn got married, Warnke claimed to be quote unquote, part Indian. And he sealed his relationship with his new wife by cutting their wrists and mixing their blood. That's intense. What is with the boomers? And then wanting to steal more of Native American culture by literally saying that they are Native American?

I don't know. I don't fucking get it, man. Warnke claimed that this was a Native American ceremony, but of course didn't bother the name which tribe this ritual came from. It's because it's not one. It's just absolutely not one. He probably did the same thing that all fucking white people do when they claim Indian heritage. It's like, oh yeah, it's a Cherokee, Cherokee ritual, it's called Cherokee.

Like a Jeep Cherokee. I'm thinking of part of the Nissan Camry crowd. That is in direct, direct opposition to my tribe, the Chevy Wrangler crowd. Oh, and also speaking of that, I want to thank the wonderful Dene family who gave me the amazing artifacts at the Phoenix Show. It was so cool. It was so fucking cool. Unbelievable.

Unbelievable. Unbelievable. Thank you very much. Out there in Tuba City. Go to their store. Thanks to everyone who came out to our most recent live shows. Y'all were just incredible. Well Mike Warnke also insisted that people call him many horses.

Many horses? Many horses. That was supposed to be his Indian name. And also because he owned many horses. His name is, yeah, many horses. And when you go to Mexico, it's actually mucho-horses. Mucho-horses. Wow.

Mucho caballo. Mucho caballo. Yeah. What a great name. Mike Warnke would also switch to different personas in regular conversation, talking as the Scotsman, or sometimes you get the Jew. Sometimes you get the Catholic priest. Sometimes you get the black guy.

You know what? Let's just not have Henry do any of those impressions. It's different. Time to change. Well Warnke defended himself. He defended the black guy impression because he said that he was part black because a gospel singer once told him that he had soul. I tell you what, man, you know where it doesn't hold?

At the Apollo. Yeah. That's where stuff like that doesn't work. Now Warnke wasn't on the road alone. His opener was Christian musician Mike Johnson, who is best known in the Christian world for his work with psychedelic Christian band Excursions, which is spelled with an X and a K. Hey, let's not get too cool here.

Yeah. That's pretty cool. That's getting a little secular. That's also one of my favorite fucking cars, the Excursion, which is literally a car. Now, Johnson said that sexual temptation was never a problem for him until he started traveling with Mike Warnke. Oh, he got the Warnke rub. What are you going to do, man?

You're in the center of the fucking, you're in the high of the hurricane. The Warnke verse, man. Yeah, when you're in the Warnke verse, you do Warnke things because while Warnke claimed to be a reformed man, he would still go out to discos and drink to excess every night when he was on tour. Hey, hey, I couldn't help but notice you were dancing there. Do you want to come back to my hotel room and praise the Lord? That's the nickname for your dick?

No, them's my balls. Oh, okay. But the P and Mike's pod on tour was his road manager, Bill Fisher. He and Warnke wore matching gold chains and carried long barrel revolvers in their suitcases because as Mark Warnke put it, the Satanists were always after him. Oh, always. Then you probably want to have it on you, to be honest. No, no, it's in the suitcase.

It's in the suitcase, so if I jump you in the middle of the street, you'd be like, hold on, now I got to get my Warnke gun. No, he wants to do the thing where he just sees the Satanist and he pops open the suitcase. He's like, you might be careful, they are Satanists because I'm armed. Oh my God, like the world's fattest desperado. You know what I just realized? Why didn't he ever do a, you might be a Satanist routine? Because I think that Jeff Foxworthy would have sued him.

Was Foxworthy around yet? No, but you might be a redneck because he's always just been a part of the collective unconscious of our society. I remember, I bought the album. So Mike jumped from woman to woman behind his wife's back until he finally met Rose Hall in Hazard, Kentucky. They started a relationship and Warnke threw away his second wife, Carolyn, ending their marriage with a serious physical assault.

By Carolyn's own testimony, she and Mike were fighting and he threw her into a wall splitting her head open. He told her that if she went to the hospital and told them what her name was, he'd kill her. That does remind me of Antelkid's and Rockterio. And he also added that he had the ability to do it from another room or another state. Yeah, so he threw his Satanist shit in there against her. He's going to zip Zapper from Tennessee?

Yes. Is this the same story where he said a demon possessed him? No, this is a different story, different wife. Yeah, because he's had a couple of these where he says, see a demon jumps into his body and controls hands. Oh, is that right? Now we've established that Carolyn, his second wife, was also a liar, but the story was later corroborated by a good Samaritan named Tom Carruthers, who bumped into Carolyn Warnke

immediately after the confrontation at a convenience store. And he later told the story to Cornerstone Magazine. From Tom's memory of the event, Carolyn had a big gash on her head and was covered in dried blood. He took her to the hospital, but miraculously, Mike Warnke didn't use his magical powers to kill his ex-wife. Oh, he didn't. No.

It's hard on tour. It's been a full fucking story to Cornerstone Magazine and called Mike Warnke the best con man she ever met in her life. I tell you what, man. He said a compliment or insult. He can't do magic all the time. He's got to be focusing on the next hour, man. He's got to put that hour together, dude.

They're waiting on him. You know, that just requires him to sleep all day. I love that birdie Matt quote where he was talking about how his girlfriend was getting upset with him for sleeping until six p.m. He's like, that's me working. Yeah. I'm sure I could see Warnke saying the same thing. But Carolyn did get her pound of flesh.

As a part of the alimony settlement, she received 15% of royalties from Warnke's second album, 10% of any advances or royalties Warnke got from performances sponsored by his label, and 15% of any future revenue from a character they created together called J. Fred Wiggles. I don't want to hear about their inside sex jokes. You know that that is a thing when you come in with like, are you ready, here comes J. Fred Wiggles. And he's been like, yeah, my wiggle dump is ready for the wiggle, man. And he comes in sauntering in his dick through his very big boxer shorts.

Jesus, it's a horrible name. Wiggles is cute. J. Fred Wiggles. J. Fred on top. It was like Sally Wiggles, I mean like Sally's probably a great person, and J. Fred Wiggles. It sounds like a guy who runs an ice cream company that turns out to be a jobless. Yeah, and he's never sold ice cream before. But as it was before, Warnke left that life behind and started a new one with his third

wife, Rose Hall. Jesus. Now as opposed to the last two wives who had behind the scenes roles, Rose Hall appeared on stage with Mike singing songs. And that was due to her pressure saying, you're wasting my talents, I need to be on stage with you Mike. Okay, kind of a Tammy Faye, Jim Baker situation. Yeah, but they were good, you know what I mean?

Anyways. Together, they released Mike's fourth album, Higher Education, which featured a song from Rose that I know makes Henry's fucking blood boil. I say it's not without its charm. Alright, I'd love to hear it. Let's hear it. Let's just hear a clip. Just a little bit.

Yeah, I would love to. And so on and so forth, I want to fucking throw a chair through a window, man, because you can't see any video of it. So she's doing some shitty ass song that's about Joseph and Mary, like that is what they are too. They are about Joseph and Mary waiting to find out when the baby's gonna come and makes me want to blow my brains out. Sure.

But then you hear these little laughter points and you know it's because that fat fuck Mike Warnke is doing like little bits. He's doing act outs. Yeah, where he's going like, I'm making this fucking face. That's our live show. You can see it. I know. That's why I'm triggered.

It's why I'm triggered. No, I actually will. I have decided. It's a democracy here. And Henry, you are correct. It's, it's disgusting. Oh, thank you. That sound, I almost got sick.

It's just, it's the. Oh, yeah. Yeah. If it wasn't so unbelievably hindered by my thinking of a serial killer singing that song to them as he wears the scalp, of course he just killed that to me. I like that. Yeah. I'd rather that.

Yeah. Now to go along with the cap and gown, Warnke wore on the cover of higher education. He added another lie saying that he'd earned a doctorate in philosophy by doing college courses by mail. So now he's Dr. Mike Warnke. Oh yeah, man. You can always become a doctor through an envelope. Wasn't that the name of the Method Man movie?

Higher education. Yeah. No. Higher learning or get high. That was high. And still, even though he's walking around saying I'm Dr. Mike Warnke, you got a fucking philosophy doctorate through the mail. No one question him.

No one question. Anything. He could kill you with lightning, bro. Yeah. Now Rose seemed to have a keener eye than the other wives for bilking money out of gullible evangelicals. Yeah. They would have turned it up a notch.

She saw the game. Soon after they got married, she and Mike established Warnke Ministries in Kentucky. And while they took a lot of donations, nobody was really exactly sure what Warnke Ministries actually did. What do you mean? Do you mean it? Do you mean it? It sounded like there's no way.

It's some kind of mansion that they bought that they then said was like a teaching facility that they use as a tax shelter. No way. That doesn't happen today at all. I don't know. They told people that they were helping runaways, drug addicts, and former victims of Satanism. But nobody ever met any of these people or heard their stories apart from vague references to them by Mike Warnke on stage.

See like I mentioned last episode, Mike always told his audiences that these weren't the top people who come to straight Christians, but for some reason they were attracted to a fat man wearing Coke bottle glasses and a pink fucking shirt. Well he's a little bit weird. He is a little bit weird and you know he makes this muffin top look good. He opens up every single show with that shit too. I hate it when he walks in and this whole thing be like, now if you met me outside here ain't none of y'all would want to talk to me because man I'm a little too wacky.

I'm a little too on the other side. I mean well like it's just the people be like no, they are here though. You see how like they paid to see you though. They all look just like him. Yeah. The fun is maybe the hair. He doesn't look weird. He looks like an enormously irritating person.

That's why I wouldn't want to talk to him. Of course. But the overall pitch was that Warnke wanted to establish a counseling hotline and a satanic recovery center, so former satanist like himself would have some means of escape. And if people gave enough, Warnke might be able to prevent these terrible satanic events from even occurring in the first place. Pretty soon, even Mike's wife Rose was getting into the game. She published a book called The Great Pertender that was so fast and loose with the facts

that Rose got her own wedding date wrong. What's a wedding date? It's more of a wedding feeling. Sure. In this rambling tome, Rose put forth Spinal Tap as an example of a satanic rock band. Smell the glow. Oh my God. You should have seen the cover they wanted to do.

What do you think? Real talk. Real talk. We've been gistled. Oh no. Oh no. Let's wait till the after last podcast for that. Do you think they didn't realize Spinal Tap was ironic, or do you think they just straight

up were like, our audience isn't going to watch it anyway, so let's just fucking use this term? I think they just saw the word Spinal Tap. They saw a promo. It's a medical procedure. It's a parody of metal, yes. They didn't watch Spinal Tap. I don't think they watched the fucking, I don't think they truly believe that it was a rock

umentary. No, they just chose a name, they just chose whatever was at the top of the pile. And after putting forth Spinal Tap as a satanic rock band, she segwayed into an alarm alarmist report on child abuse that somehow got connected to memories of her potty training one of her daughters. Hate that. Hate that. Well, when people talk about potty training their kids, it's fine if it's a book about

potty training. Yeah, it's about how it all hangs together. Yeah. Now, even though Mike Wonky didn't know it, he and his ilk spent the entirety of the 1970s laying the groundwork for the great satanic panic of the decade to follow. Now, while Mike was too goofy and too Christian, honestly, to break into the mainstream, a book that seemingly had a scientific angle was released in 1980 that blew the lid off the whole movement.

That book, again, nonfiction, was Michelle Remembers. Yeah. Now, if Mike Wonky was the granddaddy of the satanic panic, this book was the daddy. In Michelle Remembers, a girl uncovered so-called repressed memories involving forced participation in bloody perverted satanic rituals, which involved bizarre sexual practices and child sacrifice. Basically, she said that those memories had been repressed by those satanists who would use sophisticated techniques of hypnosis and psychological manipulation to make her forget.

And then you'll find out, honestly, most of the time those memories came from the egging on of police and various psychiatrists that were interested and involved in this whole world. Echo chamber. And there's a term for it that I believe it's like Iogenetic. I forget the name of the memory. It's like maybe Iogenetic, but the idea is that it's caused by doctors and it's caused by subtle facial cues, where you sit and you watch somebody kind of like maybe subtly nod

or subtly frown and shake their head as you say something slowly leading a child into saying whatever it is that they want them to say, or they're put a lot of times put into group settings where they will hear other people talk about real assault they got and then they will incorporate those memories into theirs. Yeah. So especially the children who talked a lot during the satanic panic, they found that they would get rewarded if they said that they had been flushed down the toilet in their day care and shit like that.

If they didn't say anything, they wouldn't get anything. But if they said that I was abused, they'd get ice cream. I mean, to be fair, when you're flushed down the toilet in your day care, it's like, oh my god, do we still have to do googly themed Thursdays or so over being in this toilet? They have to be a toilet cake today. But today, the phenomenon of repressed memories has been thoroughly discredited. But back then, the fact that a psychiatrist named Lawrence Pazder signed off on everything, that meant that these outlandish claims were taken as truth and the satanic panic truly

began. And if you want to have a fun YouTube hole, watch police interrogation footage and watch them use some similar techniques. Oh yes. When it comes to facial cues. Yeah. Oh yes. And remember, this is the time period.

At this point, that there were covenants of satanic groups, that there were satanic groups all over the country, right? And they said that they believed that at one point there was up to a thousand cults, right? And then they said that each... Not a thousand members, a thousand cults. Sure. And each one of these cults subsisted at a minimum sometimes, 1500 people. And apparently, what they then did all of these sort of math about how like, well, in

order to get into the cult, you had to kill somebody to get in, right? Like someone, each one had needed a human sacrifice. So they started, you run the numbers, the fake satanic ritual abuse numbers, and this is a legit average that the cops called upon. So they said, they believed that up to 500,000 people per year were being sacrificed by Satan. That's just so many people. It's a lot. I feel like it would have been big news.

Gigantic news. And I did definitely, when I really looked up, I try to like get into like, where are their examples of children being abused by any of these groups? Cause the only other like, there's the church of Satan, which specifically said, we don't fuck kids. We don't believe in fucking kids, right? But then there was the Bravestones. Bravestones.

Bravestones. That was like a thing that they said. They kept saying like, they believed in consent, the temple of set, which was created by the... He was so mad about the cult of personality that was built around Anton Leveille. It was created by the personality free Michael Aquino, who honestly, the only thing about him that was awesome was his eyebrows. Yeah, his eyebrows and his widow's peak. Yes.

He looked like Eddie Munster, but he worked for the government, right? He was a Psyhops guy, he worked for the government. He broke off from the church of Satan and he created the temple of set, which created this idea of, they didn't worship a deity version of Satan, but they, he had a automatic writing experience where he was given a thing, much like the book of the law. He wanted to bring Satanism closer to Alistair Crowley, right? So he wrote a thing called the book of coming forth by night, which is, he said it was an automatic writing and a channeling that he experienced where Satan appeared to him and

he said, I'm actually this creature called set. I'm an ancient Egyptian God, which is like, my job is, I illuminate people, I give people a certain amount of information. That dog head, right? Yeah, that's Horus. Oh, yeah. Yeah. No, wait.

No, I'm wrong. They had Seth. I can't remember. I don't know. But the idea is that, but even they are like, it's aspirational. Anubis, that's the one with the dog head. Anubis. But they were aspirational.

The whole point was to build lives based upon something else, but again, no kid fucking. Yes, indeed. Yeah. Now, Michelle remembers was an instant bestseller and Mike Warnke liked the guy who buys property in a neighborhood right before it's gentrified. He was perfectly set up to be the go-to guy for daytime talk shows and news pieces. This is his time, man. This is like when punk breaks.

And isn't the Venn diagram here also the beginning of what we consider like daytime television? Wasn't this starting out? I mean, this is like, yeah, I guess, yeah, daytime television, I think started in the 70s. The talk shows really did start in the 80s. So yeah, everyone's, in other words, everyone is fucking fighting for ratings. Exactly. And these producers are like, get me anyone who says anything that's mildly interesting.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's listen to Mike Warnke. It wasn't just the daytime talk shows. He fucking did a testimony in a 30 minute long prime time piece for 2020 news organization called the devil worshipers. And to think this might be a fake fucking television show. Let's check it out.

See these guys, they were to leave him alone. Mike Warnke is a former Satanist. Today, he's a successful comedian preaching Christianity in the form of humor. But back in the 60s, he was one of Satanism's high priest. The things that you would see in the satanic altar. He showed us what a satanic temple might resemble and typical implements used to worship the devil. The bones usually are used in a ceremony that calls for telling the future with the bones

or a part of the deceased person. He also explained what attracted him to Satanism. It was basically drawn into it when I was young, just wanting to be somebody special. I just wanted to be different than everybody and have something that was special that everybody looked up to. Well, I mean, pay attention closely to the words that the news report is using. They're not saying Mike Warnke claims to be a former satanic priest. It is like definitive fact, Mike Warnke was a former satanic priest.

It's all very, very definitive. And so they're doing the lying for him in a way, because then he can just add to it. Now, FBI investigator Ken Lanning wasted a decade of his life searching for the so-called baby sacrificing networks of Satanists that Mike Warnke and the others had supposedly ran. All right, let me see your tooth. Get a little toothpick if I see any baby in there. This baby's like, no, I had eggs this morning.

All right. It's kind of baby though, isn't it? But after investigating 300 cases, Ken Lanning found not a single shred of evidence, much less a single fucking body. But that's not to say a lot of people didn't get their lives ruined. There are still people in prison today for satanic ritual abuse crimes that were completely fabricated. But perhaps the most interesting of these cases was the Thurston County Ritual Abuse

Case. In 1988, the Republican Party Chairman and Chief Civil Deputy of the Sheriff's Department in Thurston County, Washington, a guy named Paul Ingram, he was accused by his daughters of sexual abuse. One of those daughters accused Ingram of satanic ritual abuse, meaning that she was being abused as a routine part of the rituals that satanic cults were supposedly performing across the country every day. And there's actually, there was an interesting thing in that master's thesis I was reading

that talked a lot about how like, because one of the main defending points of satanic ritual abuses, how could these kids possibly come up with this imagery, right? But to be honest, they did a survey of a bunch of kids and asked them to draw pictures of what they thought of Satanist. TV has done it. Yeah, right. TV has created enough imagery for kids to see, if you want to write something and create a story about people who are scary, you talk about guys with the big fucking cloaks on

and Bill Clinton, who must have been very frightening to a small child. It was a saxophone. No one trusted it. Yeah, well. No kids filled in the blanks all the time. That's exactly what happens here. The kid begins with something very small and everyone else around them fills out the story for them.

Now, while Paul Ingram could have easily hired a lawyer, he was already in the thrall of the satanic panic by the time the accusations were made. He was a believer in the satanic panic. This motherfucker is the he is such a, this is the epitome of self-own, I'm like anything I've read before in my life. See the Ingrams were members of a Pentecostal church that taught the idea that Satan could and did control the minds of Christians. Once Satan gained mastery, he could compel them to commit satanic crimes, then remove

the memories. Could he compel them to like make better bridges? Oh no, infrastructure is for dweebs. And so Paul Ingram, with a head full of garbage already installed, he called the pastor instead of the lawyer after his daughter accused him, and he began regression therapy, a la Michelle remembers to see if he was one of those Christians secretly controlled by Satan. Because by his reckoning, he didn't remember molesting his children. He didn't remember being a part of a satanic cult, but he also said, I didn't raise my

daughters to be no liars. Well, this is a conundrum, isn't it? And since they were so convincing, there had to be another explanation. Can you imagine that just happened to show up just being like, now listen, right now pastor Dave, Don say I've always taken your, your, your insight and I've taken your wisdom too hard. Am I a Satanist overlord? Do you know me as one?

Have you seen me? I don't know, but why don't you go to bed and take your pants off and go to bed for me? Would you just sleep right here on the couch? Thank you. So the pastor basically guided Ingram into creating increasingly elaborate SRA scenarios. And before long, not only was Ingram convinced that he'd participated in satanic rituals, but he was convinced that multiple members of the sheriff's department were in on it

as well. Two more guys got arrested. I did what? That would be my response. I did what? Yeah. I know we had just got six pounds of jelly up here, as Henry often says, but I just got it.

You got to trust your brain sometimes. I don't know, man. These guys got so wrapped around and so turned around. They had no fucking clue, man. They started to really... It was 1988. It wasn't 1300. This is crazier than Salem.

It is weird, right? Because the whole thing, all of these motherfuckers, Mike Warnke included, have been watching his new videos and they always talk about this thing, being like, you know, they lie to you. They try to tell you that Satan's all-powerful, but God, it's the most powerful. We've got Jesus is the prince of knights or whatever, bullshit, and it's been like... But you also believe that Satan is so powerful, even though you have this all-powerful God at your side who watches over you at all times whatsoever, but Satan is so powerful

that he could outsmart the omniscient one who created Satan to begin with. I hate to do this to you, but you're thinking about it? Yeah, I know. It's just the thing where it's like, no, we know. We know at this point. We know that. We know. Yeah.

It's crazy. Welcome to my childhood. Welcome. Welcome. Well, what's Ingram got going? The daughters contributed more false details, claiming that they'd been raped in more than 800 satanic rituals. That's a lot.

It's just a lot of events. Honestly, again, for satanists, that's a lot of meetings. That's a lot of meetings. 800. Oh, my God. One daughter even claimed that she was given an abortion during one of these rituals. Because, of course, since she got fucking raped 800 times, she's going to get pregnant a couple of times.

She claimed to have been pregnant five, six, seven times. She said during one, she got an abortion and was subsequently forced to eat the chopped up remains of her own dead baby. You should be allowed to do that if you want to, though, and I do believe that you can. And that was just her baby. The daughters claim to have witnessed the murder and burial of over 30 people. And there's no evidence for any of this. No.

There's never been once. I'll get into that in a second. That included 25 babies. And they claim that 25 babies. 25 babies. Honestly, it's hard to find a baby's grave. Yeah. Unless you're really looking for it.

Well, we don't have to talk about Ireland, do we? They claim that their own bodies were so scarred up that they couldn't change in the school locker room for fear of being discovered. It's like that Crash Test Emmy song. Mmm. I think they're talking about the weird alparity of the Crash Test. No, no, no, no. That's not real.

No, she had purple spots on her body. Oh, I thought it was just about getting caned in Singapore, like that story from like 1993. No, she had purple spots all over her body. There were caned marks all over his bottom, couldn't buy it. Weird Al is still the best. Still the best. Still the best. Now, the entire Ingram property was searched for the supposed graves.

But the only bone recovered belonged to a cow. And concerning the scars, the only one found was an appendectomy scar on one of the girls. And the most evil appendectomy. I guess so. But that didn't matter to the church or to the police. And remember, Paul Ingram is a cop. He is a cop. And they seem much more interested in listening to the worst possible scenario.

And eventually Ingram pled guilty. This is freaking insane. To spare his daughters the indignation of a trial. I tell you what, man, at least he stopped being a cop. I guess so. What's he up to now? He was sentenced to 20 years in prison for a crime that he not only didn't commit, but a crime that never even happens.

May I say this though? If we are living in a world where people think it's true, 20 years is quite light. Yeah, right? Because it sounds like there was 800. It should have been. Moment. It would have been light. I mean, if it is real, it's definitely light.

He should have put it in a glass prison like he's a magnet. Right. It's like everything is stupid. Well, he realized what he'd done after doing a couple of years in fucking prison. He realized, oh my God, none of it ever happened. Judge, judge, can we do a reset? Yeah. Honestly, I've been looking through those law books and I went straight to M for mulligan.

You see, maybe can I get one of those? Yeah, he tried reversing the story, but no one listened. And for his participation in the Satanic Panic, Paul Ingram served the majority of his 20-year sentence. Good. He was let out in like 2003-2004. He deserves it, Mike. He fucking deserves it.

I don't. Jesus. Now, obviously, the Satanic Panic bullshit being sold by Mike Warnke and his cohorts was highly destructive and highly dangerous, but it was also highly profitable. Money. Money. Money. And the novels about Satanic ritual abuse topped the Christian bestseller list for years.

Just like Christian novels about the Rapture topped the charts around the turn of the millennium. And Quetzalcoatl became a thing that everyone learned how to spell with. I loved when he returned in 2012. Oh, thank God. I'm just so happy in 2020 we don't have the internet anymore because of all the things that happened with that. We're too advanced. Yeah.

On the secular side, raiding skyrocketing, each and every time a piece on Satanic cults got aired, I mean, arguably, this is how Geraldo got famous, you know? The whole Satanic, he was the one that was screaming and yelling about Satanic cults from day one. He screamed and yelled about a lot of stuff. He did. This one just happened to stick unlike Jello to a wall. How does it get there?

Really? Seriously? Clean up your house. And the more famous Warnke got as an authority, the more people tried jumping on his bandwagon. Oh, my God. People started claiming that they'd been a member of Warnke's 1500 member cult and Warnke only added to the overall story because he had to sweat. He had to kind of side swipe some of these fucking claims.

Absolutely. You see some guy show up. He's like, oh, shit. It is shorty Dave. What's going on? Are you still evil? Staying evil? Come on.

Let me steal your hands, man. Let me steal your hands. Let me steal your hands. Go watch them before you come back in here. All right, you're fine. Oh, my God. Well, you know, there's the question. You know, Henry was talking about the numbers, 500,000 murders, where are the bodies?

Yeah. That's the big question. Where are the fucking body? They eat them, Marcus. Oh, no. They don't eat them. They cremate them. That's what Mike Warnke started saying.

The reason why there's no bodies is because Satanists cremate the bodies. And also, there's Satanists in every fucking coroner's office. There's Satanists in every funeral home. They're all in on the cover up. That I agree with. Yeah, it might be right about the funeral home corner. 50-50. I think it helps.

I don't know, man. We've gotten a lot of emails from coroners over the years. We really have. A lot of emails. We do. We do. And I can't wait to one of you and turns my body. Yeah.

And you just go like, fuck yeah, too real. And then you just fucking put a joint in my lips and like, one last time, play with my dick. Yeah, sure. Yeah. We'll flip it and flap it around. Oh, yeah. We'll put that fucking hydraulic pump in that dick so we can fuck one more time.

Make it huge, man. Come on. Do it for me, man. Who is he? Okay, Marcus. Come on. October is Polish Awareness Month. That's true.

Also, they also said they had breeders. That was the other reason why they said the reason why. That was Laura Rose Wilson. Yes. That you don't notice the 500,000 people that go missing each year is because they come from inside the house. Yeah. So that they have their own breeders, that they have sex with.

They make the babies that they use as bullets for sale. We don't litter like cats. It's like a lot to have a baby is only a lot. Nah, you just shoot it out. Yeah. We know all about it. Yeah. As far as profitability went, Warnke owned by 1991 three homes worth $600,000, $241,000

and $340,000. Spiritual centers and retreats. That's 1991 money. But then came the return of the divorce monster. Oh, where that comes from? The devil is real. And when Rose left in 1991, she took most of the property, the Cadillac, their horses, and $100,000 in payments.

But Warnke got to keep the motorcycle and had visitation rights to said horses. My name is too many horses. No, now your one may visit horses. But since the business was just too good to walk away from, Rose and Mike kept working together at Warnke Ministries, which had infuriatingly been enjoying tax exempt status since 1984. So Browski learning ministries, honestly, is also going to be some incredible weight. You see the facilities we have, we're going to have a dry sauna, we're going to have a wet sauna, we're going to have a medium sauna, absolutely.

That's just so you can get closer to the good Lord Jesus Christ, who wants you to be dry, but also wet. So this is a church, this isn't a, it's a research center for the Lord. I think you actually found a tax loophole that works. This country will never truly be free until we start taxing the fucking churches. Drain them. I drink your milkshake. By the early nineties, Warnke Ministries was almost solely focused on fundraising.

To gain sympathy and money, Warnke would trot out the Jeffy story. Jeffy, Warnke claimed, was a little boy who'd become a vegetable because he'd been abused by Satanists so much. I don't know how you turn a boy into a carrot, but you know. Is Warnke with us? Wow. Why do you drive in a parkway? Teflon.

Teflon. Air purge. Teflon question that he asked, but there wasn't very little results. It's just a plastic that they put on top of something else, actually very easy for Teflon to stick to something else. Yeah, you melt it and decode it. And then it dries. Yeah, it dries.

Yeah, yeah. That was basically the assessment I got. Well, Warnke said, just a single donation to Warnke Ministries. Just one? Just one. That would help Jeffy and all the other little Jeffys around the world. Honestly, and if I was them, I would get a puppet of Jeffy, or you have somebody acting as Jeffy who comes out and be like, oh, everybody, oh, show me something, you could give some

money to my Warnke. You know, I can wake up. Don't you want me to wake up? I mean, something like, Ron O'Regan. Jeffy, if the story was real, I would be very empathetic towards you. Yeah. But to demonstrate that Rose was just as canny as Warnke, she'd keep an eye on donations. And when donations got a little low, Rose would say, why don't you go out there, do

the Jeffy story. Oh my God. Calling in the big guns. And I'd be like, call out Megatron. They have to keep coming in and taking his bed out of the hospital and just being like, are you sure this is healthy for Jeffery? Yeah, it's healthy for Jeffy, all right. It's helped for Jeffy's fucking awareness.

Get out of my fucking way. Get out of here. This is my vegetable. Now, not surprisingly, Warnke and Rose used Warnke Ministries as their own personal piggy bank. What? They billed $21,000 in what they called stage clothes to their own church. I've seen the clothes.

You should see the receipts I write to myself for my own corporation. Well, I mean, the costume we did wear at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. That is a deductible. That is a deductible. That's a pretty penny, I'm sure. That's stage clothes. That's stage clothes. All right, true.

Was that $21,000? No. Okay. And from what I've seen of Mike Warnke, how did he manage to spend that much money and still look that bad? I don't think he did spend that much money. I think they spent it on a whole series of other things. Honestly, you know what I'm seeing on him?

What it is, it's the jewelry. Yeah. He's lost a lot of money because he's got an earring. He's got the chain that definitely cost money. He's got the Bolo. He's probably, it's got gold in it. You're looking at it. He's got a nice watch.

That's probably where it is. And then it's probably all custom clothes. This is another person who is shaped like fucking Wario in order to look like you are a normal person. You have to get all your clothes tailored. But he failed. He failed so miserably. That's as far as his body can go.

He muffin tops everything. The only reason why you don't see my body just roving around all the time is because you like me. That if you didn't like me, the whole time you'd be like that, full little fucker. I hate every single thing about me, full of females, tiny hands, pastries, eyebrows. By the early nineties, both Mike and Rose were drawing salaries of almost a quarter of a million dollars per year. And members of the Warnke and Hall families were both put on the payroll for doing nothing

more than picking up their paychecks. They weren't doing, like, what were they doing? It's like when one day I'll hire, like, my oldest sister or hire your cousin to be your social media manager. You know what I mean? Where they show up and they just, like, look at Instagram for you. You mean what was Warnke Ministries doing? Yeah, what were they doing?

They were telling people that they were helping people, like, that's what... But they weren't doing anything. They were doing nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. Now, Warnke did finally build a so-called recovery center that was supposed to be for refugees of Satanism, but when construction was complete, the center was more of a museum for Rose and Mike's respective families. So they can go and they can be, when they show up on their rafts from the Satanist islands deep in the Caribbean, they can go right there, man.

They go right to them. They can see, oh, this is a life well lived. Yeah. And naturally, all of this dirty pool caused animosity. When a minister named John Cooper was fired from Warnke Ministries in 1989, he filed a lawsuit for half a million dollars. Soon after, he began getting obscene phone calls, which escalated to threats of physical violence.

Excuse me. Is Mr. Cooper there? Yeah. Why do you park on a drive? Damn it, Warnke. I'll fuck your mother. I'll fucking have sex with your whole fucking family. I know that's you, Warnke.

Fuck you, bitch. Warnke, God dang it, Warnke. I couldn't help but do material. Finally, O'Connor's tormentors fired a shotgun into his front door, then sent a car that said, did you get the message bang bang? This is from his own, this is to a minister that he taught himself how to minister. Yeah. Oh, God.

It seemed obvious that the Warnke's were behind it. Yeah. Because it's all so freaking stupid. Yeah. Now you wonder why Teflon doesn't stick to Teflon. Why? Because it's Warnke. Because nothing sticks to Warnke.

I see. Nothing sticks to Warnke and you're Teflon. I get it. But the police could never prove it. And the lawsuit also failed. Now, six weeks after Mike divorced from his third wife, he remarried his first wife. Wow. What the fuck is going on?

Then Rose and Mike afterward wrote a book called, Recovering from Divorce, which contains some of Rose's poetry, which Henry will now recite. I composed and played and sang songs into microphones to him. He told funny stories to a lady somewhere who never sang to him. It's awful. Yeah, technically it's the, the, I want a girl who laughs on no one. Oh, weezer. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, you know, she's, she's at least bringing something to the book though, isn't she? Yeah. A little bit of poetry. But honestly, what's weird is that they're kind of doing, can I go as far as to say that was her lemonade, like Beyonce's lemonade? Yeah, kind of. Yeah, I'd say so.

Or they kind of understood. They kind of understood together. We kind of like, like we can also make double the money if I play up the divorce angle too. Okay. Now there had been people in the Christian community who'd had their suspicions that there was something rotten about Warnke for years. Partly because he was an unpleasant person. Partly because anyone who had a personal interaction with him knew that he was a liar.

And partly because he was flashy with his money. And Cornerstone magazine, who were one of the more progressive publications, they'd been discovering that every person who claimed to have been a part of a satanic cult was lying. And they'd done exposés on each one. Warnke was just the big fish they had to work their way up to. He was a big old fish. We're going to hook that Warnke one day. And sometimes the Christian community, they do clean house.

Sometimes. Although they've been doing a damn piss poor job of doing it in recent years. But it seems a lot of times. I mean, that huge Falwell Jr., he's out of Liberty University, he's gone I guess. But a lot of times I think the reason why, I mean obviously I'm biased and I'm a little bit negative about it, is that I think the reason why they clean house, because it seems to be when they clean house, it's because they're trying to point attention towards somebody who's not them.

Maybe. I mean, maybe. I know all the time. I understand. It's a very good take down. This was a very good take down. Yeah, no, no. At some point you have to wonder.

This was Christians trying, this was Christians looking at a fraud and saying you don't belong here. Yeah, but. You have to wonder like, how did you bring all of these creeps and like, what house did you build? Yeah. Where all of these people wanted to rent a room. Yeah.

I mean, honestly, and then you know, you got Warnke who, at least he didn't molest anybody. At least there's that. I don't want to tell you. At least there's that. Yeah. All right. Silver lining. But nevertheless, Cornerstone magazine began an investigation into Mike Warnke in 1991.

After interviewing over a hundred friends and acquaintances, going back to Mike's childhood, and after examining his tax records, it became unbelievably clear that Mike Warnke was full of shit in every way possible. It is pretty thorough. Like they come at him because that's how we got all of the shit that we got. Yeah. They were the ones that fucking dug deep because Joe's, if you give them a little bit of motive, what they can do.

Yeah. After the article was released, though, Warnke stuck to his story, saying in a statement that the article was malicious. But while he gave the protect the innocent song and dance, he also reiterated that the events in the book absolutely happened as described. Even though there, I mean, he's a perfect pathological liar. There is a long form article with interviews with over a hundred people all saying that he is a fucking liar and he just says, no, I'm not.

He also does the thing, the slightest little wiggle he does is that he tries to then say, it's exaggerated a little bit. I did that. I put things out of sequence and a lot of it was like, I'm trying to get a point across here. Yeah. Like how Zabrowski's tell stories. Yeah.

Sure. And also again, going back to the binary nature of having opposition, he can also have the I'm being crucified complex. Of course. Of course. Milk that for all it's worth it. Give you another couple of years of money, probably another good fundraising tip. He fucking milked that for a long time.

That was the only utter he had left to milk. Get me going now, I guess we're getting to the last utter. That was my emergency. Oh man. The only thing he walked back was his claim that he commanded 1500 satanists in an interview with Christianity today. He claimed there's really only 13 in his coven and they were 13 total, 13 total. They were in contact with 1500 satanists.

They had 1500 satanists phone numbers. That's huge. Like a Rolodex? Or like a. Yeah, I guess. They must have. Wow. That's a lot.

Unfortunately though, eight of those 13 were dead and the other five were scattered to the winds. Okay. Now, concerning the accusations of fraud, Mike and Rose set up their business manager, Neil Hall, as the fall guy. Great. It was Rose's fucking brother. Oh my God.

These people are such scumbags. Oh yeah. But in the world of Warnky, in the Warnky verse, everyone was expendable. The only one who is non-expendable is the fucking, the sweet, sweet cream of Mike Warnky. You're getting rid of it, man. It holds the center. I guess. It's like, yeah, Cadbury egg without the gush in the middle of it, chocolate fucking,

whatever bullshit. It's like a circle. That's sad. Yeah. To clean his own image, Warnky set up a board of accountability made up of Kentucky Baptist ministers. So that'll be totally healthy and pure and in no way full of corruption. Yeah.

They recommended that Mike acknowledge his marital failures. Oh, that's what it is. It's the forces of the problem. And they asked him to publicly apologize. But Warnky did no such thing. Instead, he stood by his testimony of former satanic involvement and confessed only to some exaggeration and embellishment in the Satan cellar. You've been Warnky'd.

Yeah, you've been Warnky'd, you fucker. I thought I was Teflon. Now, some organizations did cut ties with Mike Warnky. His record label dropped him. And the year after the expose, Warnky lost his title of America's number one Christian comedian to a man named Mike Lowry, who described himself as the poster boy for hopper activity. He's just a little weird. He's a little weird.

He's a little weird. That guy's also a little weird. That's a thing, man. These guys are just a little weird. It feels like there's a massive group of grifters going on within the Christian entertainment community. As far as Warnky's career went, the Cornerstone article was a setback leading to the closing of Warnky Ministries.

But despite proof that he is a vindictive, greedy, unrepentant, wife-beating liar, he is still welcome in many churches across America. Oh yeah, he's getting fucking recruits every day. According to his YouTube page, he's got new people every fucking week. He come in and they get saved by him. In 2002, he published a book called Friendly Fire, a recovery guide for believers battered by religion, in which he complains that Christians unfairly eat their own while claiming that he was the real victim in all this.

Oh, what a shocking approach he has. Today, he has a barely watched YouTube channel still wearing that dumbass fucking earring and still complaining that he's been treated unfairly. Hey, listen. That was the one thing he was allowed to keep. The earring. That was the divorce number four. That was huge.

He was allowed to have that. Actually, the divorce number four, he's still married to Sue. That one worked out. Okay. That was the divorce number one. That was divorce number one, so yeah. But he also abandoned the humor, I will say. He's not doing the shtick anymore.

He's very serious now. How would you put it? Cowed? Would you put it like this? Yeah. He no longer tries telling jokes. He's just this dead-faced, droopy dog motherfucker. He looks tired.

He looks very tired. He lies. Wear you down. But thankfully, even though some churches still book Mike Warnke for engagements, he never fully recovered from the cornerstone scandal. And thankfully, even stays out of the modern satanic panic known as QAnon. I mean, we haven't gone to his church. If you go to his church, I don't know what he'll say in his sermons and shit.

At least his YouTube channel doesn't talk about it all the fucking time. He actually could have put himself forth as a figure in QAnon saying, I saw this. I saw that. This is around. This is the Illuminati. Yes, these people. Yeah. I saw Hillary Clinton at a meeting in 1986.

What of it? He is going for the reasonable preacher now. Yeah. But even so, even though he doesn't talk about QAnon and all that shit, I think that Mike Warnke is one of those secret architects of culture that we sometimes discuss. A man that's ironically in the same league as actual occultists like Aleister Crowley and Madame Blavatsky when it comes to how much influence their actions had on the future. Because in his own way, Mike Warnke, through all of this, has become a student of the occult.

Yeah. He created his own reality. And he really did walk the walk. He did it. He transformed people's minds. He entranced people. This is not unlike what people do across any one of these, not just like in the occult, L. Ron Hubbard, these type of people that go and like he has a capital C, a charismatic

ability about him, and people are attracted to him, and he uses it both for, I guess there has to be some vague goodness for some people, like people who got recovered out of like, oh, heinous drug addiction, that kind of stuff like, if you think Warnke helped those ones because I think he just took all their money. I mean, I doubt it. I fucking doubt it. I'm just trying to like, I get it. I get it now.

I understand what you're thinking. Both sides it a little bit. But yeah, honestly, when it comes out. So this is not about, and this is not, again, you do whatever you gotta do in this world to survive. Oh yeah. Yeah. They're all trying to, they're all trying to grow and change.

Geoposas, like, they created, again, another accountability bureau, and they split it up, they split up the top, and they started looking to make sure that they're trying to do what they say, they're putting more of an effort to make sure that kids aren't being mistreated by the system. Yeah. Don't tread on me. I won't tread on you. A lot of people with the don't tread on me flags literally tread on people as they have

their caravans lay down in the middle of your street, like, that's a car tread. Can you please stop? I still also believe that any group that tears apart your family is not trying to do a single fucking thing good for you. Absolutely. You need to keep your kids. Unless you're being taken by CPS for a specific reason, man, when it comes down to it, no one's supposed to fucking split up your family and then give you a new name and a new life

and act. That's cult. Yeah. Well, without Mike Warnke, the satanic panic would not have had that air of reality from the perpetrator side, instead of just the victim side. And therefore, it might not have caught on so hard. And had the satanic panic not caught on, we might not have had QAnon. And QAnon is undoubtedly the most influential conspiracy narrative since the protocols

of the Elders of Zion. And Oprah would not have had a television show. Yeah. She loved it. But what that means is that culturally, this dumb, dumpy dickhead may very well be one of the most consequential negative figures in modern American history. And it all came about because one little boy wanted to be anyone but himself. Wow.

That's how it is sometimes, isn't it? The tale of Mike Warnke. There, but for the grace of Satan, go I. Sure. Very, very, very positive message there. Use your powers for good, because that's one of the sad things when it comes to all of this stuff. He did have a talent, honestly, to be able to orate and be able to stand on that stage

for as long as he did. He did have some skill. He had a skill set. And he could have used his powers for something that was good, as opposed to being a complete and utter con man. Amen. Go ahead. You know, if you want to just get nerdy about it, you want to do some self transformation

shit. Read the cabalion. Yeah. Like read anything about the actual rituals or the order of the golden dawn. There's stuff in there that you can, it can inspire you to grow to be a different, better, more effective person. Same thing, like even the nerdy shit within the temple of set, someone a long time ago sent me a book of their rituals and there's a lot of really interesting stuff in there

that he stole from Alistair Crowley and he made into his own Eddie Munster style preaching. You know what else is just a book of rituals? A cookbook. Yeah. A dinner by yourself. Cook, do something. Have fun. All right, everyone.

Well, thank you so much for listening to this unique series. I don't think anyone has given Warnky this amount of time in probably 40 years. Yeah. Yeah. Not since 1992. Yep. So it's been a while. It means a lot though.

You guys were here as a part of this journey. We're up fucking. And next week, we're getting some fucking blood. Yes. Hope everyone is having a great October so far, watching some horror movies. It's just so fun. I am such a sucker for all things horror. It's my favorite.

Whenever I see a scary commercial, I'm like, oh, that's a fun scary commercial. I love October. I just love everything about it. Yeah. Yes. Also, go to your local comic book store and buy Soul Plumber, get all the variants if you want to. Tom Neely's got a wonderful variant out there.

So if you can't get to a comic book store though, you can go to DC Universe. And get a month subscription for free using the code Soul Plumber. Yeah. And only if you cannot make it to a local comic book store, if you have a local comic book store, go support these small businesses and pick up other great fucking horror comics while you're there for October. Absolutely. Pick up Ice Cream Man, Department of Truth, Immortal Hulk.

Pick up the first trades. All those, they're fantastic and genuinely scary. Absolutely. And thanks to John McGrath for all of his unbelievable work. And PJ Holden, who did an also incredible work too. And Mike Spicer did all the great coloring. It's pretty wonderful. And guys, also, support Spring Hill Jack Coffee.

Spring Hill Jack Coffee. Go down to that Mothman blend. Go down there. Those boys, oh, they've roasted them beans so fucking long. Yeah, out there, they're four years of raging. What a great ad you've given them. Get them beans inside your fucking mouth. Yes, indeed.

It is the definition of a family business and we're so happy to help out whenever we can. It just goes to show you, do something, do it with quality and things can work out. And again, a shout out to another small company, Nike. Yeah. You can get out there and help these kids, like these kids are working so hard. Show them that you appreciate their work. Buy some of these shoes.

Buy some Nikes. Absolutely. And of course, our weed, speaking of small businesses, get it wherever it's sold in the stores. Oh, and next week, the season two of No Dogs in Space is released on Tuesday. So that's going to be available wherever podcasts are available and it's going to be the start of a five-part series on the Velvet Underground. All right.

Can't wait for that and keep on supporting all the shows here on The Last Podcast Network. Okay, everyone. Hope you're happy and healthy out there. Hail yourselves. Hail Satan. How are you doing? Delicious? Today's one of those days where I really feel the Hail Satan.

Yeah. Yeah, you feel it? Yeah. You're inspired. Warranty inspired. You got warrantied. I did. That's the thing, man, is that he's going to be so happy that one Satanist finally came

for him. Yeah, like one. It's here for you. It's here for you. This is it. I'm sorry. I wish it could be scarier for you. You guys should do a body off.

We'd like to see it. This show is made possible by listeners like you. Thanks to our ad sponsors. You can support our shows by supporting them. For more shows like the one you just listened to, go to lastpodcastnetwork.com.