You're Wrong About - Summer Book Club: "The Satan Seller" (Part 3)

Episode Date: July 26, 2021

We finish our San Bernardino joyride through Mike Warnke’s 1972 “memoir” with a hex, a horrible crime and a Satanic celebrity cameo. Digressions include digressions include Billie Eilish, wicker men and today’s completely new and not at all throwback panic over critical race theory. This episode includes a wildly fake but nonetheless disturbing description of a sexual assault. Support us:Hear bonus episodes on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy stickers, magnets, T-shirts and moreWhere else to find us: Sarah's other show, You Are Good Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseSupport the show

What if Jesus is just like a Korean skincare routine? 🎵 Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast that's cool, Daddy-O. Nice. I was trying to do a grease reference, but I've only actually seen that movie once. I don't know if anyone says Daddy-O in grease. Oh, really? I would say they're born to hand-give.

Oh, I thought you were going somewhere different with that word. Okay. I am Michael Hobbs. I'm Sarah Marshall. If you want to support the show, we are on Patreon at patreon.com slash You're Wrong About, where you can also find t-shirts and other ways to support us, or you can do none of that at all. I think the fact that you're here listening is already something. It's something.

And today we are on chapter three of our Satan-seller trilogy, quadrilogy, whatever it's gonna be. Trilling G slash Quartet, unclear. I was gonna compare this to Rise of Skywalker, but then that's really insulting. Is that the most recent one that like broke everyone's spirit right before coronavirus? Yes. Yeah. Well, first of all, will you catch us up for plot? What happened previously in the Satan-seller?

So basically, we met Mike Warnke, who is sort of adrift after being orphaned. He finds Catholicism and thinks it's chill. And then he gets like into drugs and he sort of hits this rock bottom. And that leads him to get in with this set of Satanists. Then he sort of rises up through the ranks of like Satan LLC and becomes this like middle manager and very popular and very good at his job. Yeah, he's very diligent. Like he really seems like a self-starter.

He's the kind of guy you'd like have organized the Satanist cookout. Yeah. What kinds of work does he do as a Satanist? He recruits hippies was the biggest glimpse of this that we've seen. He also does logistics like painting the backgrounds for various like rituals and stuff. The most impressive thing about this book is that it makes Satanism sound really boring. It's so boring. Oh my God.

It really is like your first job out of college. And then and also like with the first job out of college thing, it's also like they're sending him to all these conferences and he's like, ooh, yay. Conferences, which is only a response you would have if you were very young and excited that people trusted you enough to make you do the stuff that no one else wanted to. Absolutely. Like, ooh, the Radisson. Yeah, give it to me.

What is the role of women in Satanism? Sandwiches, providing Mike Warnke with sex and sandwiches and sometimes interior decorations. Yeah, it's unclear why Satanism is appealing to women. That's one of the mysteries here. Yes. I was thinking that we could start by experiencing Mike Warnke in his second act because the Satan cellar comes out, it becomes like highly popular within the world of Christian publishing. And then that helps launch his career as a stand up comedian.

It's such a weird epilogue to this book. And so I thought I would share with you some footage of Mike Warnke and his stand up comedy stylings. Oh my God. Yes. I want to see this joke so bad. OK, so I've sent you a special called Out of My Mind. OK. Like, I would describe it as like an evangelical Jerry Seinfeld. OK.

He's like, what's the deal with faith healing? And so I'm showing you a part where he tells a story about getting injured and being faith healed when he was performing in a church. Fabulous. Three, two, one, go. These are pointed toe cowboy boots. They got to be pointed toe to be a cowboy boot. If you can't kill a cockroach in a corner with it, it ain't a cowboy boot.

All right. Now, I stepped off the stage there. My leg went down in that gap and that altar rail is being held up by these spokes like a banister on a stairwell. And my foot went between two of them spokes and got jammed and my leg came down in that hole and my thigh got jammed down in that place. My leg wouldn't move at all. If I had fallen forward, I'd have snapped my leg right off and you guys could have called

me stumpy the rest of my life, you know. But I didn't fall straight forward. Amen. I fell to my left, right. And I rolled off the platform. I fell down in there. My body tried to insert itself in that space between the altar rail and the platform. No possible way.

I just kept rolling. I mean, it kind of just kind of went right over the top, you know. I wound up with my ponytail touching the toe of my pointy boot, you know. Now I want you to know that the human body is not meant to bend in that direction. And when it does, it is the occasion for some severe pain, okay. Now I'm hanging upside down off of this furniture. I'm in severe pain. I remember my exact words at the time, but I have since repented, you know what I mean?

I've come to find that they, they ain't nothing like a little pain to throw you into a momentary backslide, you know what I mean, brother? And there was some, there was some ladies sitting on the front row there at First Baptist of Oosten. And I don't believe them ladies had ever been slain in the spirit before, but when they heard what was coming out of my mouth, honey, they hit the deck. You know what I mean? And I don't, I don't believe it was the Holy Ghost.

I just think that they were afraid that the Lord was going to hit me with the bolt of lightning and they, they were just getting down so they wouldn't get killed by no warranty shrapnel. You know what I mean? This outfit is incredible. Like every part of it looks like it belongs to a different person. What is he? Can you talk about how Mike Warnke is, is, is dressing at this time in his life? It's like, I realize this is not the case, but it's very like 90s Pacific Northwest.

Yeah. Like he looks like he's wearing Birkenstocks with socks, even though he isn't. Yes. He has like a vest, like an outdoorsy vest, a purple button up shirt. And I have no idea what year this is, but like the largest pair of jeans I have ever seen. Yeah. Men used to just wear like the biggest size pants they could find.

That was like the style. Men used to all dress like Billy Eilish. Yes. Yeah. I guess when someone describes rising through the ranks of Satanism, you picture them looking like less of a sincere dork. Yeah. He does look very dorky.

He looks like somebody who would be behind the counter in like a comic book shop. Yes. In like the stereotypical way. He has a mustache, he has a ponytail, he's a very just like round guy. He has like a round face, like a very round body. He just is like this, this happy dorky snowman. And it's such a lovely ponytail, like one of the things that's interesting about the Satan seller is that he didn't have long hair during the period he's writing about

when he's claiming he was a satanic priest, but he did have long hair as a, as a Christian entertainer. I have to say this routine was like significantly better than I thought it would be. He has like very good stage presence. Yeah. He's telling a pretty funny anecdote. It's like kind of subversive. The audience is loving it.

He's very charismatic. Yeah. Like I was really impressed by how enjoyable this is. Like I think there's a lot of alleged comedy where you're just like cringing the entire time. Yeah. He feels like someone who feels very comfortable on stage and who kind of has the audience on a string and is just sort of like comfortably walking the dog.

Yeah. I can see why he was like a very popular figure at the time. I guess I feel like it helps explain some of why this book did as well as it did and why Mike Warnke got away with, in retrospect, what seemed like a fairly obvious set of lies for so long because like as stilted and fan fiction-y as this book is, like, I think he's a very good storyteller. Mike Warnke is part of the particular history of thought that is very visible to us right now.

Like this is the book that feels like it connects two big moral panics of our time and things that are very visible now and that you've been talking about a lot which are like the satanic panic and also the panic over what's happening on college campuses. This is a book that dares to draw a straight line between campus activities and Satanism. Which is, of course, what all the other ones are doing too but just like in much more subtle ways. Yeah. And I mean, I know I keep referencing the insecurity that I see in this media, but I

do feel like it does suggest a lot of insecurity to be like people would just as likely worship Satan as Jesus Christ and like we have to vigilantly keep scaring them or else they're just going to become Satanists overnight and it's like, well, God, like don't you think that you have a better religion though? Like don't you think that there are incentives for people to not leave? Like if you think people need to be that tightly controlled to keep doing the thing that you're also saying should be entirely natural to them, then that's a conflicting set of beliefs. Right.

Why don't you compete in the marketplace of ideas? So I'm actually going to start by giving us some context. I mentioned Satan is alive and well on planet Earth by Hal Lindsey before. Yes. This is a book that came out in 1972 and talks about the alleged statistical realities of the occult epidemic. I want to hear the statistics. So he opens by giving an example story of how demonic forces take over people interested

in the New Age movement. He's at a conference in Indiana. He meets this young lady and she says, I've always been able to look into the future and foresee what is going to happen. I gulped my coffee and snapped to attention. I began to question her. She says, this isn't something new. I've had a gift of psychic power all my life.

I've always believed this power is from God. And Hal Lindsey says, this is not of God. And if you don't reject this power, it will destroy you. Then he suggests that he presided over basically an exorcism that got rid of the evil spirit. So he doesn't exorcism on this woman who he like meets randomly? Yes. He doesn't use the word exorcism, but he says she's under the influence of an evil spirit.

This incident awakened me to the widespread phenomenon of the occult. It alarmed me that the increase in astrology, extrasensory perception, witchcraft, black magic, fortune telling, and Satan worship, which you might expect among the youth of the West Coast was evident in other places. The occult influence went deeper into American life than I had imagined. Another thing that I remember from my Christian upbringing was this idea that other ways of looking at the world or other supernatural elements were fundamentally suspect. I do remember hearing about things like fortune tellers and astrology being not described

as a harmless thing that people do and makes them happy, but as you're toying with forces outside of your control. I think that's a big part of organized religion is that we're the ones that have access to the supernatural. Right. And it's like they can't have access to any kind of genuine religious or spiritual experience. They have to just be summoning Satan and playing themselves and not even knowing what's going on.

Exactly. Because it's weird that this lady who says that she can predict the future, that seems like something a lot of Christians say in various contexts. Well, and also, I have a theory that allegations of witchcraft have been inspired by all number of things, including financial independence. But I think historically, some people are more emotionally intelligent than others, and I think women tend to be required to learn emotional intelligence because of their positions in history and because that's often the only power available to them.

And I feel like calling the ability to understand a situation or maybe kind of guess where something is going is the easiest way to marginalize someone based on them possessing any power at all, even intuition, is to say that that's satanic. Right. And I'm the authority and I get to decide that you're playing with demonic forces. And then another quote, he says, according to one report, there is many as 6,000 witches meeting regularly in small groups throughout England. Sure.

And a couple pages later, he quotes someone else who says, witches are everywhere. There are 10 million in the United States and almost 2,000 in Los Angeles. And it's like, first of all, Los Angeles is a major population center. I feel like if there were 10 million in the US, there would be more. Like Mike Warnke had a congregation of 1,500 by himself in the San Bernardino area. That just sounds wrong. And then if it's 10 million in America and 6,000 in England, like maybe the English are undercounting their witches, like that just seems weird.

These things are so hard to debunk because you just look at it and you're just like, no. With 6,000 witches, how many villages can even have the workforce to make a single wicker man? I just feel like if there were 10 million of something, we would know. That's like the biggest thing to me. This would actually be a huge news story. And like there are problems with the news and there is bias with like what gets covered

and what doesn't. But like one in 33 Americans is a fucking witch. There would be like Newsweek cover stories and like academic papers written about it. Like that would be a really big deal. Yeah. And then it's like it's very quickly random anecdotes. I mean, this is how so many conservative books that I've read are written where it's like you make an outrageous claim and then you tell like three anecdotes.

The goal is to kind of treat the reader like a hockey puck and just keep them continually in motion. And by in motion, I mean like continually in a state of moral repugnance or just fear basically. Yeah. Yeah. So then he tells a story about meeting with a teen runaway named Cheryl who says I had something no one else had.

I had been doing a lot of reading about potions and chants and I knew that I had this power over people. I could burn a hole right through someone by just looking at them. So she's a teen witch, of course. Obviously. And he writes a few years ago, I might have listened to Cheryl and thought she was a cute teenager with a lively imagination. Not anymore.

It's such a funny self-own because he's like, I could have been chill about this, but instead I'm going to choose to be a real dick. Well, because he's like in another time when I was less afraid of the occult, I would have dismissed her. But now I know she probably is a real witch and we should be afraid of Cheryl. He's probably 15. It's like he's instructing the reader not to trust their instinct, right? Because your instinct is to be like, oh, it's harmless teenage stuff.

And he's like, no, no. This is a sign of something deeper and worse. Well, and I feel like this is kind of the comfort offered by this worldview, like the QAnon worldview too, where it's so uncomfortable to be in a realm of ambiguity where you have to assess each individual threat or perceived threat that comes into your life. And your kids are doing weird stuff and you're like, this makes me uncomfortable. But like, could that be because I'm feeling far away from my youth and I sense that my children are like self-actuating as adults and I have to swallow that pill?

No, it's because of Satan. I feel like people are motivated to believe in a really grim scenario as long as it removes the discomfort of ambiguity from their lives. Ooh, what do you mean? Well, here's the ending of this chapter, which is in Satanist spirits and demons have surfaced in our generation. But underneath is the cauldron of cults claiming for its victims, the gullible and the young. Who will be the victims and the victorious?

It's like, mind yourself, sheep, because there's wolves all around. And like, that's a scarier worldview to believe in and like, my kids like weird music and they probably shouldn't take acid with speed mixed in. It's like darker to be like their literal representatives of Satan walking around. But it also gives you a sense of certainty about what your role is in that. Yeah, because I'm on the side of good because I'm not one of the witches and like I'm helping to name and shame the witches. It puts you very firmly on like team good against team evil as opposed to like maybe

some things that I'm doing are actually part of the problem or like maybe it's kind of complicated. And to say like maybe the counterculture is motivated in large part by the injustice of the Vietnam War and that's like a reasonable grievance. If there's one thing we knew by 1972, it's that the fucking hippies were right. I mean, this is what always drives me nuts is that like there's never any revisiting of these things of like, I was doing a lot of hippie bashing and like the dumb student protests of the late 1960s, etc.

Like by this point, you can easily say like, oh, those kids were right and we probably should have been listening to them the whole time. And like, let's think critically about like, why weren't we listening to them? Because their beliefs have now been reified. Everything they predicted has come true. But like instead of doing any of that, like, they're just like, well, you know, they're reading their horoscopes every day, so they must be Satanists. Only Satan would want to prevent continuing an unwinnable war.

So we are back to the Satan cellar and chapter seven starts with a celebrity cameo. So he goes to a conference in San Francisco and who should he meet? But Anton LeVe. Oh, the Church of Satan founder guy. Well, I mean, this is always kind of something that's like people writing satanic panic books have to address because Anton LeVe found an organization called the Church of Satan, which on its face, like as part of its mission statement or whatever is like, we don't literally believe in Satan.

We're objectivists, but we think it's cool to like invoke Satan as a concept. And I think they define themselves as secular humanists, but secular humanists who like to have naked ladies lie on an altar. It seems a little trolley, honestly. It's totally a troll. It's like a troll before that word existed, and that's totally Anton LeVe's shtick. Like he's, I think, like dressed as like a Christian's idea of what a Satanist. And this was a time when he could afford real estate in San Francisco, so he had a scary

house there. Nice. And so Mike Warnke gets around the Anton LeVe problem by being like, yeah, he was a lightweight. I was not impressed with LeVe. I detected a certain phoniness about him, but I admired his showmanship and decided I would show LeVe and his cronies that Mike Warnke could put on quite a show, too. And be one up on the devil, even if my style was different from his. This is one of the few realistic things that we've had so far.

The idea that Satanists would be gatekeeping against other people who identify as Satanists. These posers. Sell out ass Satanists. Okay, so during their meetings, they have a section, it sounds like, where if you need to hack somebody, you can bring up who you need to hacks. Like this is, it's part of their thing. And so the tall gentleman who has been at the meetings before and seems powerful says, we have a problem we'd like you to take care of.

One of your members quit and he's making a lot of noise. We're afraid he'll divulge some embarrassing things. We'd like you to take care of it on your level if you can. Okay. Master, I said, when the demon's presence was evident, our former brother is straying. Convince him that silence is truly golden. Spare him no misery, master. Make him see his duty to Satan, our father.

Later we found out the demon had taken us at our word. In fact, the demon had really messed him up. And it turns out that the guy was driving and the demon sees control of the wheel and made him crash his car and it burst into flames. Oh, Satan take the wheel. And this kind of affects Mike. He has some nightmares about it. It seems like maybe his conscience is being awakened a little bit, although it's hard

to tell because he has no interiority as a character. Yeah, that's true. At the next ritual, he can't even stomach a human finger. The next day he's with Paul, who is just sort of a generic Satanist that exists for him to talk to. They're at a hamburger stand because one of the frequent settings in this book. So they're like, pulled in, sitting in the car, eating hamburgers, discussing Satanist business.

And Paul says, did you hear about that high priestess over in Gardena? She went berserk and was just about to blow their coven. What happened? I asked the higher up stepped in, spread a little bread around in the right places. You know, the fixeroo. What happened to the priestess? I didn't ask. Okay.

We're trying to escalate stakes and give a sense that like Mike is no longer stomaching Satanism and that because he's been more stressed lately and he feels that Satan is like maybe displeased with him and he wants to stay in the good graces of everybody and prove that he's not going to, you know, check it out and stop being a Satanist anytime soon. He's like, we got to up the ante. And so this is where we get a story of Mike Warnke orchestrating someone being raped. Holy shit. Yeah.

Whoa. And it's weird too, because the book really just kind of like lets him off Scott free about it. Yeah. He says, I've been thinking for a long time. Every time I think about our symbolic sacrifices, instead of actually disemboweling the altar girl, I got up tight as Dean might say, we're short changing the devil. Paul says, no man, that's too much. He says, I was only kidding.

What I was really thinking, according to the book, we're supposed to use an unwilling version. We're not doing it. Let's kidnap abroad and go through the fertility scene the right way. You know, lay her on the altar and take turns. Yeah. And so they do that. They kidnap a girl.

Mike does. Her name is Mary. He takes her to the barn and he says, get those clothes off now and hop up on that slab. And she says, you've got to be kidding. And he says, I'm dead serious. And someone starts to undress her. And he says, I was too doped up to try anything myself. But I would get my kicks watching.

And yeah, watches a series of Satanist rape Mary on the altar. Very, very telling that he's excluding himself from all this. And he's like, I just told them to do it. So that's better. Actually, that's fine. I mean, this is the only part where I'm like, yeah, that sounds pretty evil, Mike. Yeah. If Satan is the Prince of Evil, like you're finally doing something evil.

Yep, we made it. We did it. And yeah, and it just like, it's a very short scene and he drives her to the doctor. And then he says, for the next few nights, I could not sleep for some reason. Like I think that we get later to a sense of guilt, like that you've done something you shouldn't have done by orchestrating a gang rape and that God doesn't like that. But I don't feel like we ever get to a sense of like this rape being a crime that has a victim. Right, of like being bad.

Yeah. And where to me, it's uncomfortable because you're like, Mike, like, are you aware of the gravity of what you're saying that you've done? Or is this something that seems like difficult to come back from if you're saying that this is a crime that you've committed? Yeah. It's a really baffling choice in a book, in a book that you're making up to add something like this fucked up in it.

And you could say like, I left when they started planning a rape, but it like also I think to publish this, like in 1972, I feel like especially then you could publish this with the idea that like, you know, there aren't going to be any repercussions for me in the real world if I claim to have committed this crime that's barely regarded as a crime currently. I mean, that's the overall context is that like, he knows on some level that this is not something that gets taken super seriously at the time. Yeah. I think that's what I find most disturbing about it.

Yeah. And then immediately after that, he starts feeling really poorly and then he's like passing out, he feels all these hands lifting him up and carrying him and they leave him at a hospital, basically, and he's thrown out of the cult. Wait, what? That's it? That's it for him in the cult. Yeah. Oh.

He says, with Satan, everything is on a cash and carry basis. As long as you do it for him, he will do it for you. He will answer your prayers if you are useful to him. With Satan, there is always a payback, not just when you die, but right here on earth. I got mine in spades. My payback came when I least expected it from the source that I could not possibly believe would do me in because when I was so spaced out that I could not get out of bed to make my own fix and I had to ask Sandy to cook it for me, well, she fixed me up all right.

She slipped me an overdose. She slipped me an overdose? I think she injected him and gave him an overdose. Okay. All those people who loved me and took care of me, who praised me, who padded me on the back, who flew me to Salem, New York, and San Francisco for conferences, these same people threw me in a car, stark naked, drove me to the emergency entrance of a local hospital, and dumped me out on the pavement in the rain, like in Kill Bill.

Yeah, don't overdo it, Mike. You didn't need to be naked for this. It didn't need to be raining. So basically he gets kicked out of this organization for the same reason that you would get fired as like a regional manager of a target. He's basically strung out and addicted to drugs and like he can't do his job anymore. I think that's why I feel like they don't really explain it, honestly. It's weird.

He keeps skipping over the important parts of the story. I feel like he just didn't know how to end his Satan part. So he was like, and then I got suddenly fired, which like maybe that happens a lot to him. That would make sense. Yeah. This is an amazing part. Do not turn your back on them. Do not drop your guard.

Do not ever falter because everyone wants your job. They would even kill to get it. It's like the devil wears Prada. Yeah, he's kind of screwed because he was also being supported financially. And now he's like out having to take care of himself and he decides to join the Navy. Oh, what? Not the twist I was expecting, okay? Well, he has to join the Navy because the real Mike Warnke joined the Navy around this time.

So the fake Mike Warnke has to do that also. Okay. And then a turning point comes for him when he's walking down the street and he sees Mary, who is the girl who he kidnapped and helped assault. Yeah, the ripped victim. Yes. And he says, she smiled. She actually smiled.

That smile hurt more than anything my conscience had said in the past three weeks. Oh my God, it's only been three weeks. Yeah. She said, I don't want anything. I just came over to tell you I love you. What? You what? Had what had happened to her blown her mind?

I wanted to run, hide, die. I said, I love you. I've accepted Jesus as my savior and I love you. She was sane. More than that, she was beautiful. Shining with a radiance that was beyond the suns. What? Okay.

I feel like her being hot is like not that important right now, but okay. I also feel like three weeks is a really short amount of time to go on this size of a spiritual journey. I know. That's a thing. Yeah. So he's hearing good stuff about this Jesus guy. And so he joins the Navy and he, we have a little full metal jacket interlude.

They give him a haircut because his hair is super long. Oh yeah. And there are a couple of Christians in his basic training unit and he's like, I want what those guys have because they're also radiant. We're now into the like how to convert people to Christ section, which is a lot easier than converting people to Satanism. Because Christianity actually offers something to people and not your in-soaked robes. Yeah.

And because Christianity is a religion and not a fake religion invented by people who want to glorify their real religion, just describe getting your finger cut off. And so one of the Christian bunkmates he has has left his Bible out and has left it open to John 3.16, which from my understanding is like the silver bullet of all Bible verses. Yeah, man. For God so loved the world that he sent his only son or something along those lines. That whoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. And like this is the one that I feel like don't you see people waving John 3.16 signs

at golf courses and like the bottom of Forever 21 bags says John 3.16 on it. Wow. What is that about? I mean, as a guy who's like read most of the Bible and like many parts of the Bible numerous times growing up, I always thought that like the Bible is actually not a very good recruiting tool because it's like it's really long, it's really boring, it's like super retributive and like old school in the first half. The second half has some good stuff, but it's like it's a long slog to get through.

There's a lot of like begatting. A lot of the Bible is not like that great for getting people interested. Right. A lot of it is like an acquired taste. It's like the Jesus and Mary chain. And huge parts of it are like ignored by like most sermons like growing up, you get sermons and discussions and like dissections of the same 12 parts of the Bible. You're like, let's talk about Esther again.

Yeah. I feel like it's reading it front to back. I mean, I feel like it would be like reading a cookbook in a way. It's only slightly less cohesive than the Satanseller. There's also a lot of long Bible quotes like we're getting into the part where Mike and his co-writers were like, we were at 130 pages, we got around this out to a whole book somehow. How did that word count? And so he has an, are you there God?

It's me, Mike Warnke moment. He prays directly to God. I mean, this is actually, this is pretty moving, you know, because I feel like there's some, I don't know. He says, hey, God, I never did this before, but I'm willing to trust you, Lord. I don't know if I have the right to talk to you. It seems strange to turn to you now after everything Lord, I've got a lot of sense to confess, but I know you got time to listen.

And it's like he already knows Mike. He was watching. That's one of the key things about this relation. It makes sense that the book would get more interesting once he stops constantly lying. Like he's able to be more specific and draw upon memory at this point. Yeah. And also like it's, I feel like the thing that he's selling here is like God could forgive even me, the worst kind of sinner.

And that makes my story a great sales pitch because if God can forgive me, then he can forgive you too. And it's just less compelling. If he's like, God could forgive even me who's a dork. Yeah. And like never did anything particularly bad and was never like particularly un-Christian. You know, born again narratives are a big part of the church and like you'll have guest speakers at church services to come and tell their stories.

And a lot of those stories are like people who grew up Christian left for a while, did some like not that bad stuff and then like rediscovered God. Like a lot of them have the same kind of structure as this. It's like having a talk from a vegetarian who's like, I ate a ballpark hot dog. And at this point, the most important event is that he meets Sue, a girl named Sue, Sue Studer who he went to high school with and who dated the football heroes when he was in high school. But now she's interested in him because he's accepted the Lord and so is she and they have

an interest in common now. Okay. So here's a question. You're the Satanists and you've just gotten rid of Mike for nebulous reasons, but you're also concerned because he went to all your conferences and he's talked to your higher ups and he understands how your organization works and he can potentially be ruinous to you. Like, are you concerned about that?

It makes no sense for them not to kill him at this point. Yeah. And so having missed the boat to kill him, like what might you do? Oh, like not give him a reference. So what they do instead is they send Carmen, who is his former chattel, is the best word for it, to bother him. And then they send Charlotte, who's like the fourth level Satanist who was the one who suggested they have acid rock at their events.

Oh yeah. But then Sue, who is living with her friend Lori, one day, Sue has a sprained ankle. She says, it's nothing, Mike. I didn't see anything on the steps that could have tripped me, so I must have missed a step. Anyhow, I fell and sprained my ankle. Two girls helped me get to a place where I could sit down. This girl that was right behind me kept watching me and saying how sorry she was, like she had made me trip or something.

She thought for a moment then said, I think I've seen her around campus before. Her name is Charlotte or something like that. Charlotte? I guess so, but I'm not sure. She was a tall blonde girl, she said. I love that Charlotte didn't even bother to make up a fake name. I love that her plan was to like walk behind Mike's new girlfriend or new friend, hex her so she sprains her ankle, stay in her line of sight, and then immediately apologize profusely

to her. It's very satanic. And Mike says, it figures. I'm afraid this is just the beginning of Satan's work and the work of his demons. I took Sue's hand and mine again. If anything should happen to you because of my past, suddenly Laurie got up. I've got something to check out. I'll be back later when you two have decided what to do.

And my concern over Sue, my true feelings had surfaced and Laurie had seen it before we had. Even I was surprised at the tremendous feeling that came over me for Sue. I had no idea that this woman he introduces into the narrative would become his love and trust. I have just a one or two word summary of each page in this book. That's how I outline. And I'm just going to read you some of the one word summaries of the pages between here

in the end. San Diego, Tim LaHaye, Fountain Girl, Sunday School, Vietnam, Drinking Again, Walt Whitman, Fragged, Brendan, that's his son who's born while he's in Vietnam, Holy Spirit, Pentecost, The Occult Problem, 80 Occults. Luigi, Cleveland, RentaWitch, Occult Movie Explosion, Occult Epidemic. My God. I will say the chapter where he describes being in Vietnam, he claims to have been wounded a different amount of times in different places.

Like he says here, he was wounded twice. He describes having to execute a spy. Things like that happened, but I get the sense that Mike Warnke, whatever reason he's citing for why he's traumatized is maybe more interesting sounding than the real reason he's traumatized. He's probably traumatized because it's just fucking camping in a foreign country for months and that sounds really hard. This is the chapter where you do start to feel like every single thing isn't made up

and where the way that maybe he can get sympathy and empathy for complaining about how he suffered as a Satanist, like maybe that answer is the suffering that you experience as a soldier in a war that you're not really allowed to rebuke the way that you can rebuke Satan because war is something that the Christians are justifying at this time. That requires you to have political opinions, which I feel like a lot of this stuff is meant to go around anything that smacks of partisanship or these earthly concerns. This book ends in that classic way of like, I'm going to write a book about all the things I've learned and here it is, but it ends with him basically leaving the Navy because he

has decided to go full-time into the ministry because he is the perfect person to combat the occult epidemic by speaking about his experience leaving the Satanic church and them sort of half-assedly harassing him but not trying very hard. But that's his pitch. That's what he can offer within this culture. That's what his book can offer is that he has been inside the Satanist world and he knows and he's not just a concerned Christian who's going to make up statistics. He's going to make up an entire life story.

I mean, I guess he is writing this at a time when there's huge demand for something to reify these concerns about Satan. People like needed stories like this at the time. Yeah, I mean, the marketplace certainly did and then like he did like during the Satanic Panic, he became an expert who got to go on national media and talk about what he had experienced quote unquote and if you doubt it, you could be pointed at like, well, Mike Warnke was really there and maybe you don't read his book and see how absolutely absurd the dialogue is and how unbelievable it is.

You can see him on TV because he's been piggybacked there on the strength of this book that he's written that's established him as an expert. Just like Michelle. Yeah. This is kind of a vulnerability in media, almost like the process by which you can falsify a letter of surety or whatever it's called saying that you have these many funds accessible from this bank and get a loan based on that. But it's like the original letter wasn't real, but then you get real money or real public

regard or in any case, real power based on a fake credential. It's also fascinating to me how much potentially Michelle cribbed from this book. Like the thing with the fingers, I can't get over because Warnke describes cutting off fingers and then Michelle, eight years later, also describes cutting off fingers. People have probably described this book to her and maybe she read like a Newsweek article about it. Like I wonder if like that was somewhere in her brain. Well, and I also wonder if that could be planted there by Dr. Pazder, like could be

coming in through two directions, but if I'm Dr. Pazder and I'm like, oh my goodness, I have a patient who is a victim of satanic ritual abuse. The phrase I guess coined, I'm like, I have a very limited library of things to read for background on this and this is one of the only books available and it did well enough that I feel like it would be available in a Christian bookstore in Canada. Totally. And also, yeah, if he's asking her like, did you ever see anybody get their fingers cut off?

Yeah. Like that might plant a seed that she's like, oh yeah, I do remember that. So we end with him having a press conference that also was kind of exposition for why this book is necessary. Oh. He also defends the concept of witch hunts, which I really like. Nice. In medieval times in the 17th century, the indiscriminate and widespread efforts to purge

society of witches by witch hunters did more harm than the few genuine witches who dared to operate during such a reign of terror. Unfortunately, the modern liberated society we live in has been so disgusted with the witch hunters of former times, the modern sophisticated person finds it difficult to believe that witches are to be taken seriously today. My favorite thing is when you're in the middle of a moral panic and you're like, uh, it reminds me of this previous moral panic that turned out to be bullshit. And they're like, it wasn't bullshit.

We should have burned all those witches. The witches have always been real. A modern American who does not know anybody or hearing about today's witches would probably chuckle and imagine a bunch of nude freaks out under the full moon doing relatively harmless things. He means sex. Okay. So there are still witches today, he might say, but it's no big thing.

We're too intelligent in the 20th century to be frightened by misguided fanatics. Live and let live. Let them have their nude orgies. They don't affect me. Even if witchcraft in the earlier days was innocent, which it was not, lots of occult groups now are fully justifying the fears of modern day witch hunts. Democratic pushers and political revolutionists are using devil worship as a way to rake in millions of dollars.

Sure. Weaken the government and destroy law enforcement. He never explains how Satanism is profitable. No, and these are like Fox News talking points from like this week. Political revolutionaries, they're making money. They don't even really believe these things they're saying. This book is almost 50 years old and yeah, like this rhetoric has not changed. Yeah.

I feel like Satan is like most scary to me in terms of what the fear of Satan justifies. And this idea that you can get people to come together against Satan and against ideas that might help them in their lives because if you can paint them as Satanic, then you deprive people of the ability to disagree with you if they are devout about the things that you claim to also believe. Isn't this also just like witch hunt logic that like witches are so powerful and so evil that we need to over punish them? We need to be extra serious about rooting them out because the threat is so great.

Yeah. It's like rooting out a pandemic or something. You're like, no, no, locked. We all know lockdown is like super serious, but it's like this is such an important issue that serious measures have to be taken. Interestingly, people did not take that approach to a startling degree with the lockdown metaphor. I find that really interesting too that we're very good at being super vigilant in response to a threat that like narratively makes sense to us.

Like Satanist, that would be bad, but like a virus lacks the ability to just whatever a narrative needs to mobilize people in that way if it apparently doesn't have it. Or like income inequality or these other things that have a lot more evidence behind them than fucking Satanists. Yeah. I guess the idea is like you have to feel personally threatened and whatever name you give to that feeling of threat, like the feeling has to be there. And I think that we assume that like we are logical creatures, that's Assumption A, and

we will respond with a feeling of threat to things that are really threatening. And it's like, it turns out we don't. We can respond with total sort of life acceptance or denial of things that really are going to be a problem for us. Like the fact that it keeps getting hotter and hotter, I really, I still, I don't understand it. I would really like to. Like why is it that we can spend so much energy and so much time dealing with the threat

of Satan, which is just not real? Like even if you believe in Satan, you can't point to data that shows his existence the way you can point to data about climate change. And yet it's like so easy to motivate for the fake thing and so hard to motivate for the real thing. Yeah. Yeah. Food poisoning kills like 400 kids a year.

It's the most boring fucking thing. I mean, I spent most of my life throwing out probably fine dairy. So I do feel, yeah, but yeah, I mean, this is exactly, and it's like, how many people is Satan killing? Probably nobody because he's deeper in the hearts and minds of the scared. Yes. I don't know. I guess it's like, for whatever reason, we prefer imaginary to long shot threats over

endemic ones. And I guess it does make sense because like, like we can adjust to living in a country that's like corrupt and doesn't have a very good infrastructure in a way that we can't accept rock music, I don't know. And so it ends with Mike giving his press conference and explaining why he wrote this book and just stating his, you know, this is basically like this book is meant to establish his brand, I think, and it did a very good job with that. And he ends with a piece of advice about how do you help someone who you think has fallen

into the hands of the Satanists? He says, the main thing is for people who are troubled with demons or a cult bonnet to be willing to do something about it. The main thing to remember is that Jesus is always Victor. And he says, it was just a little frightening going after Satan where he lived until I remembered who was walking beside us and who dwelt within us. The end. It's very funny to me that he ends with this like victorious note of like how to beat

back the demons, but he didn't quit Satanism. They kicked him out. It's weird and they made up to not be like, I was so troubled by the rape that I left. Yes. It's like, no, they fired me because I was like a shitty employee. And then it's like, we must defeat Satan with Jesus. It's like, well, you didn't do that in your own fake book. Yeah.

And he could have written that he did that. Like he could have said, I was so disgusted that I quit the Satanic Church because it was absolutely, it was wrong. And he's like, no. And then I just kept going. And then one of my girls injected a bunch of heroin into me and left me outside a hospital. Even that he didn't have any agency in. He just like missed a couple of days of work because somebody else did something to him.

Yeah. When I fake a memoir, I'm going to be the most active protagonist. I'm going to be making choices. What fake memoir are you going to write? I was a critical race theory instructor. I'm Dr. Nade Sheldon in our school.