Sarah and Mike return to Camp You're Wrong About for another Satanic Panic story hour. This time we're talking about Mike Warnke's 1972 "memoir" about joining a demonic cult and the California hedonism that made him do it. Digressions include thrift stores, "Firestarter" and unjust Best Picture winners.
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Sarah's other show, You Are Good
Mike's other show, Maintenance Phase
Sarah and Mike return to Camp You're Wrong About for another Satanic Panic story hour. This time we're talking about Mike Warnke's 1972 "memoir" about joining a demonic cult and the California hedonism that made him do it. Digressions include thrift stores, "Firestarter" and unjust Best Picture winners.
Support us:
Subscribe on Patreon
Donate on Paypal
Buy cute merch
Where else to find us:
Sarah's other show, You Are Good
Mike's other show, Maintenance Phase
Sarah: Actually, I guess what we've learned in the past year is that pants are weird, and we are the ones who are not weird for being uncomfortable in them.
Mike: Welcome to You’re Wrong About, the podcast of the century.
Sarah: Yes, we are that. And that statement is unrelated to our topic today, but it's still good.
Mike: Are we not doing OJ?
Sarah: Not today. We are returning to one of my favorite traditions that I made up and have decided to make it tradition by continuing to do it for a second year, which is the summer book club.
Mike: I love our summer book club. I love her camp outs.
Sarah: Me too.
Mike: So what are we talking about today?
Sarah: Mike, I'm so excited, because today we are talking about Mike Warnke’s, The Satan Seller.
Mike: Oh, this one.
Sarah: Yes. That's S E L L E R, not a cellar that you go to, to be with Satan, by the way.
Mike: Oh, really? I always thought it was.
Sarah: Oh, well that would make more sense, but no. It's someone who sells Satan. It's death of a Satan salesman.
Mike: Oh, that’s like deep seeded. It just makes no sense. Okay.
Sarah: I never thought of this before, but now that I'm explaining this to you, I'm imagining that Mike Warnke, with Dave Balsiger and Les Jones, went into his publisher, Logos International of Plainfield, New Jersey, and it was like, “Boy, have I got a book for you. The Satan Seller”. And they're like, “Oh, wonderful. It's very creepy, like a cellar where Satan is”. And it’s like, “No, someone who travels down country highways dealing in leatherette copies of Satan.”
Mike: Yeah. So it's like a Satan MLM. I am Michael Hobbes, belatedly.
Sarah: I am Sarah Marshall.
Mike: And if you want to support the show, you can find us on Patreon at patreon.com/yourewrongabout, where you can hear cute bonus episodes about stuff like Twitch drama and JK Rowling, which we talked about last month.
Sarah: Some parts of that where not as cute as others.
Mike: Yeah, that’s true. And you can also buy t-shirts, and you can also do nothing whatsoever and just still and let the rest of this episode wash over you.
So tell me about this book and this project. I know almost nothing about this.
Sarah: Okay. But the name is familiar to you. Like where have you heard this before? Because I know that it's come up in our conversations.
Mike: The only places I've heard it are on my own podcast, and other podcasts that mentioned the satanic panic will have a Mike Warnke section where they'll talk about… wasn't he like a standup comedian or something?
Sarah: Yeah. He went into comedy after he got Jesus. Which to me also kind of addresses another paradox that this whole story kind of touches on, which is what is Christian humor? Is it possible to be proselytizing and funny at the same time? Like I feel in my heart that it is not.
Mike: It's tough. As a guy who went to church camp numerous times, at which there were comedy and like punk rock shows, I can attest that they were not that funny.
Sarah: Yeah. And like this book also takes place in the church camp world, I think partly. And it was published and written for the church camp set. Like I honestly think that the kind of person I imagine this making the biggest impression on, I hope, would be like a 12 year old. It reminds me of a fan fiction I've read were just so many bizarre and off the wall things are happening that you're just like, this was obviously written by someone in sixth grade, and it's showing in a wonderful way. Like someone who's like, “I left school in my Ferrari, and went straight to my job as a teen lawyer.”
Mike: So where should we start with this book?
Sarah: Well, I would like to start by comparing it to Michelle Remembers. Partly because Michelle Remembers, I think, was so important as an inciting incident in the satanic panic, because it was a book that was published as non-fiction, and therefore used in things like social worker trainings.
Would you just give like a quick synopsis of the book, or just sort of what are the circumstances of its creation? Basically, what's the overarching frame story of it?
Mike: Well, as usual, I mostly remember the gross ethical violations. So it's this woman who comes in with sort of this like ill-defined problem. She feels weird. She's dealing with some stuff. And her doctor puts her under hypnosis. And through this process, unearthed her entire years that she spent in a satanic cult.
Sarah: It's funny, they don't mention hypnosis in the book, but there's like the language of hypnosis throughout, and it's her relaxing and being regressed. And it's like, I don't know how a psychotherapist would do that except with hypnosis. But he's regressing her to childhood and yeah, she's saying that in 1950s BC, she was given to a satanic cult by her mother, who was also a Satanist.
Mike: And as we learned through like press tours and like footnotes, not really in the text of the book, Lawrence Pazder ended up marrying his patient, Michelle, and they wrote this eventual book together.
Sarah: Yes. And it's like at some point in time, not long after they had these sessions and wrote this book ,where you just read it and you're just like ,these two are in love. It's all over the place. They're hiking and they're looking at flowers together, and they're writing letters to each other about their special friendship the whole time.
Mike: Just crackling sexual chemistry throughout the book. Loved it.
Sarah: Michelle Remembers came out in 1980, and The Satan Seller came out in 1972. After Michelle Remembers kind of set fire to the imaginations of Americans, it was very convenient that there was this book called The Satan Seller written by someone who claimed to have joined and risen swiftly within the management of a satanic cult.
Mike: Oh, it's a satanic middle-management story.
Sarah: Yeah. Yes. It's how to succeed in Satanism without really trying.
Mike: So did this become a bestseller after Michelle Remembers? Did people go back to this book, or was this a bestseller when it was published?
Sarah: I don't think that it was ever a bestseller in a secular sense. But this came out in 1972, which is the same year as Hal Lindsey's, Satan Is Alive and Well On Planet Earth. And so I think these books, they both did quite well at the time. Satan Is Alive and Well On Planet Earth is basically making the argument that The Satan Seller is telling via story, which is that the age of Aquarius is like leading Americans, especially young Americans, by the hand towards Satanism. That was an idea that understandably plenty of people were like, yeah, that sounds about right. But also, mainstream culture would become more conservative in the eighties, in a way that would allow this to jump into more of a mainstream ideology, the way that it did.
Mike: Humans are hard wired to believe that society is crumbling around them.
Sarah: It's because I'm getting older, and it feels bad and stuff.
Mike: I think that's just a belief that we need less evidence for than like almost anything else.
Sarah: Yes. To me, what's nice about The Satan Seller in comparison to Michelle Remembers, and one of the reasons that I wanted to do this series where we just kind of read it where I read the whole thing to you and annotated it heavily, was because I was like, this book is so important to understanding the satanic panic. And I don't expect people to force themselves to read it because it is really upsetting, and somehow also really boring at the same time. Like it's either upsetting or it's boring, and there are very rare moments where it's not doing one of those things in an intense way. It's going to get weird, but it's going to be fun.
Mike: I like weird fun.
Sarah: Can you like set us a little scene? It's nighttime at Camp You’re Wrong About. We're unrolling our sleeping bags and getting out KitKats.
Mike: We're sitting on logs around a fire. That's what we did in church camp.
Sarah: And instead of seeing a church camp comedian, we're going to hear from The Satan Seller, read by councilor Sarah. And nobody got poison oak today.
Mike: And nobody got sexually assaulted during a game of truth or dare. Which actually happened at church camp.
Sarah: Oh god.
Mike: Yeah. Where are we starting?
Sarah: Okay. Well, moving away from the scary camp, which is scary now, thank you. Here's the forward, this is like the mission statement.
“As deep as I got into occult practices and Satan worship, I never understood the inner reasons for people getting involved in occultism. Since my deliverance from the occult, I understand the deeper reasons for cult involvement beyond mere lust for power and the unlimited drug, sex, and affluence that go with it.”
Tell that to all the people I go to festivals with.
Mike: I know, it was worth the affluence.
Sarah: Where’s the affluence, baby?
“A person who does not have Christ on his spiritual side is consciously or subconsciously undergoing a search for spiritual fulfillment, wherever he can find it. In drugs, occult worship, or elsewhere.”
Mike: This sounds very much like the morality that I grew up with in the church. Was this idea that it's either God or debauchery, those are the only two options. And there's no like other moral traditions somewhere in between. Or like a way to lead a moral life without specifically like organized Christianity.
Sarah: Right. Like you can't be indifferent to God, like you were either glorifying God, or doing the bad thing.
Mike: Or just like snorting coke off of somebody's boobs.
Sarah: So the message, I feel that I guess imagine if I were a parent who wanted to scare the bejeezus out of my child, who I was afraid might be listening to Simon and Garfunkel records, I would give them this book. Because the opening premise is, if you don't feel the hole in your heart with Jesus, then you can't just keep it vacant. It's going to fill up with Satan.
Mike: If Jesus isn't the bridge over troubled waters, something else will be.
Sarah: Oh, that's a good one.
Mike: Thank you.
Sarah: “For all intents and purposes, and certainly for the intent and purpose of this book, the story of Mike Warnke begins in 1950, with me huddled in the corner of the big kitchen in our house in Manchester, Tennessee. I was 11 years old, and I had just been to my dad's funeral. The same people who were sniffling and crying all during the service were stuffing food in their mouth and having a ball, as if they were happy that I now didn't have a mother or a father. Oh, there was Millie, my stepmother. She had moved in with us three years ago soon after my mother died. She and dad went to Ohio a year later and she got him drunk and made him marry her.”
Mike: Ohio?
Sarah: Ohio. “As soon as Millie left, I heard the old lady from across the road say, “How are you two going to keep the boy from finding out about all the shady deals Whitey was mixed up in? Why just the last few months he was always carrying a sub machine gun around, and his big flashy automobile. I'm sure Mike must have seen those bullet holes in that car’.”
Mike: This is like the Dick Tracy section.
Sarah: It's 1958, famously the days of prohibition. I imagine that he's a moonshiner. Chelsey Weber-Smith, our friend of the show and host of American Hysteria, has also talked at length about this book on their show. To kind of give you a little bit of a twist ahead of time, one of the things we learned about Mike Warnke is that whatever he's claiming he was doing, he was doing something less cool at that time. He's telling a story where he's really debauched and Satan gets into his heart, but it's because he's so cool. That turns out to be untrue of most of the things he's claiming to be doing. And I don't have all of the research in front of me, but I suspect the thing of being raised on robbery with your dad's car all shot up, might fall in that category.
Mike: Okay. So far, we've learned that Mike's mother died when he was relatively young. His dad then shacks up with this harlot who sucks.
Sarah: Named Millie.
Mike: Named Millie. And then we get the backstory that his dad was some gangster, Tommy gun, Dick Tracy guy.
Sarah: Yes. “I was glad he was gone now. I didn't want her there. If they were going to talk about my real mother, she was the only one that ever cared about me. After she was hurt in the car accident, nothing was ever the same. Again, my dad was always running around with other women, and the day before mother died, I overheard them arguing and mother crying after he slammed out of the house. I can still remember what he said. ‘You go to hell. If I want to run around with cute little chicks, that's my business’.”
I hope that we've heard so far as amply demonstrating to you one of my favorite things about this book. Which is that the dialogue is incredibly expository.
Mike: What are you going to do, copper? See? Meh.
Sarah: “I saw dad and Millie in an alley, holding each other close. The next day I asked Joey, one of my friends at school, about her and I've gotten an earful. ‘You mean that 19 year old girl that had a baby two years ago?’”
Like if someone was like, “Hey, Mike, do you know a woman named Sarah?” And you'd be like, “You mean that 33 year old woman that started a podcast three years ago?”
Mike: That's like how in movies whenever two people are brothers, in the dialogue in the first five minutes they have to be like, “We're brothers.”
Sarah: Yeah. You’re my brother.
Mike: Apparently, it’s something brothers constantly say to each other.
Sarah: So after his dad's funeral, that's our establishing scene. Mike goes to live with his aunts. And this is his first exposure to the church.
And he writes, “They both belong to the local evangelical church, and they were staunch rock-hard members with an evangelistic streak that wouldn't quit. They beat me verbally, as hard as Millie had beaten me physically. And they made me feel that almost everything I did and thought was a sin, which it probably was. But I didn't mind. Matter of fact, it was kind of good having someone care that much about me again.”
Mike: So his aunts are abusive, but he's okay with it because at least they're sort of noticing that he exists.
Sarah: They're showing they care. I mean, I feel like there is also within the kind of status quo of Christian culture in the United States, often a very strong component of obedience. Just that children are required to be completely obedient to whatever their parents want them to do, because Christ believes in hierarchies, according to this approach, basically. And I just, I want to highlight that, I guess. Because I think that's part of what we're talking about as we talk about these culture wars.
Mike: I have nothing to add. That was very insightful.
Sarah: Oh, thank you.
Mike: I'm just like, yeah.
Sarah: See, I'm trying to set up little golf balls for you to take cracks at, because you know what you're talking about. Okay. So he's with them briefly, but then he’s sent to live with his half-sister and her husband. And we have two pieces of concerning news. First of all, they live in San Bernardino, California. So he's going out to the west coast, which is very dangerous.
Mike: The devil's direction.
Sarah: And they're Catholics.
Mike: Wait, why is that bad? I thought that would be lit. because they're all about Satan. No?
Sarah: Mike, you're a good Protestant boy. Don't you understand that according to some people, apparently Catholics are not worshiping God at all. They're just doing something else.
Mike: I feel like we don't have like ethnic whites on the west coast. I don't understand.
Sarah: This is why it's dangerous to go to California where these like offensive distinctions cease to have meaning.
Mike: That's the thing, I grew up Protestant, but I don't remember hearing anything about Catholics my entire upbringing, or anything about different denominations at all. My parents would just be like, oh yeah, they have like different administrative structures. They have like deacons instead of like archbishops. We never got any of this growing up.
Sarah: I feel like your parents are like genuinely good people, and that's the probably a big part of this.
So he's sent to live with the Catholics. “It was difficult to see that they were Christians because they didn't shout and clap their hands. And I never did make the connection with the Lord or his spirit, from which all the liturgical tradition originated, and to whom all of it was intended to direct the celebrants heart. No, I saw the rituals only for their own sake. And so they had a different effect on me. I dug the chanting and the outward appearance, and the emotional, almost sexual experience they created in me.”
He's getting, he's kind of dipping his toe in Catholicism. Which, and I feel like we're supposed to be feeling some trepidation around this.
Mike: Chekhov's Catholicism.
Sarah: “Gradually, my interest began to focus on the mysticism of the church. When I walked into the chapel, seeing the impressive appointments, the stained glass windows, the gleaming alter, the image of Mary, the images of the saints, the high ceiling, the dimness with candles flickering, the old dark plush carpeting, the polished woodwork.”
I feel like you're just like aging and shriveling and desiccated as I'm reading you this list of things in a church.
“And above all this, the finely chiseled feature of Jesus on the cross. And when I knelt as the others knelt in that utter silence, my skin prickled cold chills, trickled from my scalp and along my spine, and my heart thundered”.
Mike: He's making Catholicism sound a lot like Satanism. It's funny.
Sarah: That's what I think. I feel like this is supposed to, as a reader, I'm supposed to be like, oh my God, there's subtext here. What do you think of all this? To me, this is like pretty ballsy, honestly, to be this insulting to another denomination.
Mike: It's like somebody describing how they're like super into horse racing. I'm like, I'm really glad that that's really meaningful to you, but that doesn't do anything for me.
Sarah: Yeah. I do feel like this book is actually making Catholicism and Catholic ritual sound like really cool.
Mike: It's like a gateway drug.
Sarah: Yeah. He's saying Latin mass is the gateway to Satanism, because he can't enjoy people chanting around you in a language you don't understand without becoming a Satanist.
I feel like there's an idea prevalent in the kind of Christianity we're trying to delineate here that like, you can do the same action, but whether it's good or bad is decided by whether God is part of it. If you go see a jam band or if you’re at Catholic mass, than the sort of ecstasy of like being with people and sort of being part of a communal experience is like it's bad. But if you're having a Protestant Jesus ecstasy and speaking in tongues or whatever, then that's okay.
Mike: It's all attempts to lose yourself.
Sarah: Right. Like with disco. Like to me sort of having a world view where our ecstasy is good and their ecstasy is evil, kind of suggests and awareness on some level of the fact that you're just selling a ticket to ultimately the same place that the other places sell tickets to. And maybe that's causing some insecurity. Because it’s a sinister way of saying that, maybe God is all around us. And like really holy feelings and religious ecstasy want to happen inside of us, and you can't copyright that.
Mike: Or maybe drugs are all around us and we should all be doing them at all times.
Sarah: So he's going to Catholic church. He is experimenting. He's dabbling in ritual. It's very worrying. And then another downfall occurs. “During my first two years in high school, I remained religiously oriented. But I never did get properly grounded in the source of it all. And so when I finally fell, I fell hard. Around that time, I started to date girls quite a bit.”
Mike: Oh no, not during our pride month episode.
Sarah: “My parents were not against dating, although they did restrict me on school nights. They allowed me to go out on Thursday nights, however, to go to a gym. But most nights, this one girl and I would cut out right away and go somewhere and mess around. There were many hideaways in the mountainous area in which we lived, and this girl seemed to know them all. And they're not all she knew. She knew things that made me so excited. It was like being drunk. We tried that, too. It got so I couldn't think about anything else. And soon, all that was left of my religion was Monday nights at confraternity class.”
Mike: Yeah. Boners are nice. Women are fun. Drinking is cool. It's also so funny to me how he's like, “This girl. She knew things.” And it's, you were both 14. She probably knew hand jobs. That's what she knew.
Sarah: You were working on your night moves, trying to make some front page drive-in news.
Chapter two. “California isn’t a state, it's an experience. The incredible, scenic beauty lures people to move there from all over the country. But once they're there, sheer beauty isn't enough. And to keep from seeing the inner emptiness, most Californians keep moving. A network of freeways has sprung up, enabling them to drink in the beauty at 65 miles per hour.
Mike: Crash, best picture 2007.
Sarah: Oh, but they have freeways in other states at this point, like it's not just a California.
Mike: It's like when people from Minnesota are like, people here say ‘yes’, when they mean, ‘no’. It's like, they do that everywhere. That's a thing that people do in English.
Sarah: And in other parts of the country, people even all stand there staring at the last piece of pizza together, too.
Mike: You know in Washington, DC, when you meet somebody, they ask you “What do you do for a living?” Everyone's so high powered here.
Sarah: There's some try-hard writing in this that I enjoy.
Mike: You love try-hard writing.
Sarah: I do. I'm a try-hard writer, Mike. I respect it when I see it in the wild.
So there's this whole kind of overture happening where they're talking about Southern California, it was first settled by the missions, and now it's being settled by industry and by drugs.
“Mules, dope pushers, no the inland route to San Diego, as well as the coastal highway, which they call the ‘Kings Highway’ ,because south of San Diego is Mexico. And south of the border is the marketplace where marijuana, peyote, and heroin can be purchased.”
Mike: They call it the ‘Kings Highway’ because of a thing that has nothing to do with Kings. They call it the ‘King's Highway’ because it goes to Mexico.
Sarah: You know, you just got to keep moving. I got to get to the Satan parts. And it's very interesting that this book is, “I had access to drugs because it was near Mexico”. And I feel like you could deal drugs anywhere in America in the 1950s. I feel like drugs were at large.
Mike: It's like saying that Coca-Cola is more available if you're closer to Atlanta.
Sarah: “By the time I graduated from the rim of the world high school, I had a genuine, full-scale drinking problem.”
I love how he's, “It's a genuine drinking problem.” It's like Mike, like no one but you is accusing me of faking.
“And I had discovered a whole new world. A world of freedom, lots of girls, plenty of booze and no more nag, nag, nag from my parents.”
Where do you think he found this world, Mike? Are you ready?
Mike: Mexico?
Sarah: Oh God. It's so much better. Okay. “
“I started frequenting those coffee houses. These places played folk songs. You could go into these coffee houses, sit, relax, and meet people if you wanted. Otherwise, you could just sit there and listen to the sounds. “
Mike: This really reminds me of the kinds of messages that I got growing up where it's like, the minute you leave the Christian bubble of like safety and health, you're going to get offered drugs. As soon as you go to a coffee house, there's going to be like the seditious music playing. This really feels like it's written by somebody who has never been in that world and like he's only constructing the secular world from what he's hearing from other Christians.
Sarah: I really feel like that. And it feels like the kind of skits that we would write for like D.A.R.E. in fifth grade, and they've just been shown all these videos where it's like some Ricky Schroeder-type is like, “All the cool kids are getting high”. As opposed to just like people are passing a joint around and you're like, “Oh no, thank you”, or you just keep passing it. Or the peer pressure is not someone being like, I am peer pressuring you, but you're just sort of. Hi, I'm in a group of people and this is awakening a part of myself as a social animal that makes me want to partake in the thing that they're all doing together, basically. And then you have to talk back to yourself and not the bully character.
Mike: Exactly. Or you're really tired and this pill is going to help you stay awake.
Sarah: Yeah. And your parents need you to get straight A’s.
Mike: A lot of it does come down to like, how does this benefit you? Or you're really depressed, and smoking weed will make it easier for you to fall asleep.
Sarah: Stop spying on me, Mike.
Mike: A lot of people start using drugs for quasi-vaguely, self-medicating purposes. I don't think that was ever discussed. It was just like, “Hey kid, have this marijuana cigarette. No one would do drugs if that were the way you got offered.
Sarah: Right. And they never answer, like why is everyone desperate to share their drugs around, but they by definition have a finite supply? I mean, I got so many messages with such repetition as a young person, and I would have liked more repetition or just the existence of the message of, “Hey, you're under a lot of stress right now. And we, as the adults who are your teachers and like authority figures at the school are a major contributing factor to that”. And your parents were pressuring you to probably, and like it's kind of anxiety provoking to be the age that you are with the kind of importance that you and other adults have placed on your activities. And constantly being told that what you do today is going to affect your future forever. And maybe we're the problem. Like maybe we should go easy on you, and then you wouldn't have all of this unmedicated anxiety that you felt the need to make go away somehow. Like maybe it's our fault.
Mike: Every single moral panic about kids, is always about adults. That's like the rule. If people take anything from this show, that should be like the bumper sticker that you take with you.
Sarah: And then my bumper sticker would be, ‘bimbos are nice’. Yeah, nothing wrong with being a bimbo.
He goes to San Bernardino Valley College. “Before I started college, I went to the Salvation Army and the Goodwill stores and bought some clothes. My hair was down to my collar by now, and the outfits that I picked up went perfectly with long hair. I bought old 1920s suit, several spotted shirts, weird pants, and anything I could get my hands on that looked different. My favorite outfit was this blanket sewn up on either side, that really attracted attention. Most of the attention came from the chicks. And needless to say, I did not turn it down.”
Mike: Again, this sounds like what fundamentalists. Non fundamentalists do. It's like, I was looking for stuff that made me look weird.
Sarah: He like runs out of adjectives, too. He's like, a 1920s suits, spotted shirts, and just some weird pants. And you’re like, how are the pants weird, Mike? They were just weird. But like the idea is that the hippies go into the store and they’re like, give me some clothes that'll really freak out the squares. As opposed to being like, I am wearing this poncho because it is an expression of my personality.
Mike: Right. Or I want to wear something that makes me look cute, but I have a different definition of cute than you do. That's why most people wear the clothes that they do.
Sarah: Right. Or just because there's not too scratchy, which is honestly my main criterion. That’s why I'm wearing faux velvet lounge pants right now.
So we've reached another Rubicon. He's going to classes regularly at first, but his drinking is getting in the way, and he writes, “I was drinking so much by now it was starting to wreck my stomach. One morning after an especially bad night, I literally could not hold my head up. I had to leave class and barely made it out to the lawn before vomiting my insides up.
When I was through, sitting there trying to get my breath and forget about the awful taste, there was this guy looking down at me. ‘You know, you're killing yourself on alcohol’. He said to me. I frowned and tried to think of something to put him down with. But instead of going on with his lecture, he looked around and then said, ‘Look, I've got what you need.’ He sat down beside me and pulled out a pack of unlabeled cigarettes. Now this guy did not look like the dirty old man wearing a raincoat who molested little children on a bus.”
I don't know why that would come up.
Mike: Okay.
Sarah: “His name was Dean Armstrong. ‘What's that?’, I asked. ‘Marijuana.’ ‘Man, you must be nuts.’ Well I guess brushed him off, got up and split. Back in 1965, anybody that smoked a reefer had his hair slicked back, wore a black leather jacket with chains on it, and carried a switchblade. Ugh, that kind of jazz turned me off.”
Mike: Grease. He's doing Grease. This is Grease.
Sarah: I think Grease hasn't come out yet. But I guess, yeah, just yes, he's describing greasers for who would go on to star in Grease. This world view is so charming. I just, it's like dangerous and it's charming. I feel like I'm reading a play written by a 10th grader.
“I got to where I really liked marijuana. My stomach was much better when I laid off the liquor. And by substituting marijuana, I began to feel good again. I made a return to the salvation army and bought some black pants and freaky shirts. You know, weird people attract chicks. That's why you hear about more girls running away than boys.”
And in the margin, I just wrote, “Ha!” I like coming across what past Sarah thought and be like, yeah, I still can't help you. I don't know.
Mike: Citation needed.
Sarah: “It was not long before someone introduced me to peyote. By this time I was smoking pot like mad, turning on in the morning, at noon, and when I got home from classes. I was really starting to live, I thought. All these good looking chicks coming around, everybody listening to what I had to say. My days as an outsider were over.”
This idea that people are more interested in listening to you when you're high all the time. I’m like, sadly it is untrue.
Mike: Not true. As a person who does not drink or do drugs, I will say, people are not hanging on your every word when you're really dusted.
Sarah: You're not like desperate for me to call you when I'm high and be like, “Mike, the thing about Ready or Not is that it's in the horror vein in a way that inevitably hearkens back, blah, blah, blah”, for two hours?
Mike: As a perpetual designated driver, I can attest.
Sarah: “When we tried the peyote, we decided it was better and heavier than pot. We also started eating Mescalin in our food in increasing quantities. And from there we went on to reds.”
This is also a very Christian worldview that you do a drug, and then suddenly you're just doing every drug. I mean, it's like the sex thing.
Mike: I mean, after I started dating men, then I did immediately start dating a horse. So that’s when it was over.
Sarah: And you're a married man now, and I can't believe it's been four years since you and Claude walked down the aisle.
Mike: Yes, and Claude has a visa now.
Sarah: Oh, here comes the good part. Specifically, it was like, Mike's going to like this line. “The marijuana had been free to start with, then Dean started giving it to me at a buck a load. In San Bernardino there was not much of a market in those days, so most of the pushers practically gave the stuff away until they were sure someone was hooked, psychologically.”
Mike: Great business model. I'm just giving away my non-addictive substance, because eventually they'll come back and start paying for it.
Sarah: I just feel like this would be a better business model for heroin.
“When I went off to college, I was told that it would be the place where I could learn to expand my mind. College certainly did all of that. I was taking these new “ideas” and turning them the way I wanted them to go.”
Don't send your kids to college, they'll get new ideas.
Mike: Soon I was de-platforming racist speakers. You know, one thing leads to the other.
Sarah: To me it makes total sense that college is the place where we have these moral panics about the fear of the college students being censorious toward adults. That implies that the fear is not lack of freedom of speech, but about this idea that the kids aren't going to go someplace that will tell them that their ideas are worth being in conflict with adults about. And that would be awful.
Mike: I think I'm stealing this point from you, but I think there's a lot of just general anxiety on the part of parents sending their kids away to college. It makes sense that parents would have a lot of fears of that, that make them more prone to believing like wacky shit.
Sarah: Yeah. In the same way that the sate panic begins with, the fear of sending your kids to daycare.
Mike: I got that from a girl I know named Sarah.
Sarah: You mean Sarah who's 33, and three years ago started a podcast with Michael Hobbes. And her car is full of bullet holes.
Mike: You're my co-host, Sarah.
Sarah: Okay. So then this is another interesting and rather predictable thing that women are often the way that you are led astray, who could have seen that coming. So he “goes to a party where there’s a cute, blonde chick. She's sitting at a table with a burning candle that dimly lit the room. She looked me over and motioned for me to sit down. ‘Would you like to join the rest of the group?’, she asked. ‘Heroin?’ I questioned. ‘No’, she said, ‘Just speed.’ And so she injects him with speed. And he writes, “The expression on her face was something I'll never forget. Her eyes almost closed. And her mouth opened. It was as if she had received the fix right along with me.” Which I just enjoy as kind of an enactment of what I think is a worldview that you have to believe for this book to make sense. Which is that people kind of want to do drugs, but they really want to make you do drugs. That’s where the real fun is.
Mike: Yeah. And of course there's no shame on the part of addict or addicts who say, “I'm going to get clean just this one final hit”. Like none of that complexity.
Sarah: Like you just become an addict and you're like, “I'm an addict”. It’s like being a Satanist, there's this idea that you have kind of an agenda that involves world domination in some way. And the more we kind of have this fiction that people are shameless, they're shamelessly having parties where they inject everybody with speed. And if you accuse them of being a drug addict, there'll be like, “What of it?” You can get your speeding action for me.
And if you believe that sort of your conception of a group of people in your head is shameless by definition, and that will make you shame even harder than individuals who you encounter or who fall on your path. And then that will make it harder for them to get help.
Mike: It's like what they really need is more shame from me.
Sarah: Yes. And yeah, he's telling the story where basically the more drugs he does, the more popular he gets. And he's so speedy that he's forgetting to eat and he's like down to 125 pounds. He's this like skinny, constantly intoxicated guy. And just like, I don’t know, I've met some of those guys. They're not popular with me.
And then of course he becomes a pusher. He's pushing drugs. He's making big time deals for Dean Armstrong, the guy who got I'm hooked on marijuana. He's working in a hamburger stand, but then he gets fired. He's running low on money. He writes, “When I went to Dean to get my personal supply, he noticed something was wrong. ‘Boy, you're really strung out.’ He said. ‘I've been watching you and I think you have a lot on the ball, but right now you're so dependent on speed that when you don't get it, you're messed up for a bad dog’. “
You're messed up for a bad dog. That's what the words are. I don't know how to say that… ‘for a bad dog’.
Anyway. That's what greasers say. “I guess you're right”, I said, but what can I do about it?” “Well, I know some people and I know they would be willing to help you.” What could they do for me? What he had said so far did not make much sense. “Look, it's not wise to ask too many questions. I know you'll dig this bunch of guys, and there will be some good looking chicks. These people are into something a whole lot deeper than anything you've been playing around with.”
Mike: Satan!
Sarah: Satan! How could you tell, it was very subtle?
Mike: It's either that or Twisted Sister. I don’t think that exists yet.
Sarah: In A Gadda Da Vida. No, that doesn’t exist yet.
Mike: So he's literally proposing like drugs, sex, speed, as a gateway drug to Satanism. That's the literal text?
Sarah: Right. t's like this guy will come along. He'll notice you’ve been drinking. He'll give you some unlabeled cigarettes. And then you'll start smoking pot, and then you'll start doing peyote, and eating mescalin, and then you'll start doing speed, and then you'll start injecting speed. And then we got really hooked on speed. And then you're also going to start being a drug dealer for the guy who first gave you unlabeled cigarettes for free. And then one day, like when you've lost your main job and you're really addicted and you're dealing, he's going to be like, hey man, it seems like you're ready for Satan.
Mike: It sort of is a MLM.
Sarah: Except like Satan isn't profiting from you selling a little makeup palettes, so I don't understand how that fits in. But yeah. I mean, it is the idea that you are going to become a Satanist, and then you will make other little Satanists. And I think the argument is that Satanism is spreading like drugs, and it's not just sort of a thing that is happening because there are drugs around. And some are really dangerous, and some are really not. Drugs are spreading across America because someone is spreading them, and it's an agenda, and that person is Satan.
So Mike, you've read Michelle Remembers.
Mike: Vicariously, yes.
Sarah: What did you learn in that book about what Satanists do?
Mike: Oh, a lot of rituals, chanting, fires, sacrificing stuff, eating bugs. It's basically fear factor.
Sarah: Yeah. It’s very gross. You get an understanding that if you want to be a Satanist, you have to really enjoy gross things.
So, I don't know if it's because of the San Bernardino, chapter of Satanism is so different from the Victoria, BC one, but this is actually quite different than what Mike Warnke describes.
Mike: It's almost as if both people were making up their experience with Satanists. Hard to say.
Sarah: So this first page is quite intense, and not necessarily in a Satanic way, but in a what Mike Warnke trying to describe America way. And I’m just going to read it to you.
“1965 was a year of new and unsettling events in the world. It was the year of the first spacewalk by the Russians. Led by Dr. Martin Luther King, blacks marched peacefully in Alabama, but other blacks stirred up by radicals rioted in Watts, (Los Angeles).”
Mike: Antifa, run!
Sarah: I feel like the phrase ‘other blacks’ is like…
Mike: Aged, like fucking bread.
Sarah: I mean, I don't think at the time it was looking that great, either.
“A massive power blackout crippled the Northeastern United States and parts of Canada.“
Which is such a weird thing to say right after talking about civil rights.
“And for the first time in history, a Catholic Pope visited the United States, with New York welcoming Pope Paul VI.”
Mike: We didn’t start the fire. I feel like he's getting to the chorus.
Sarah: Here's the chorus, “One might see. And these events, a quickening of the conflict between good and evil, light and darkness, God and Satan.” I'm sorry. How are black people part of the conflict between God and Satan?
“The year 1965 overall seemed to be a downward turning point for the entire world. It was about them that the sale of narcotics suddenly accelerated.”
Okay. People gave heroin to babies in the Civil War, but go off. “The flower children blossomed from out of nowhere. Restlessness manifested itself in hundreds of thousands of senseless acts all over the planet. Rock music hypnotized, blanked out thinking, and stirred confused youth to defiance of old values and traditions. Evil seemed to be a foot on planet earth.”
Mike: The fascinating thing about this is that this is actually like identical language to the moral panic stuff that we have now. Here's a bunch of events that happened in the world that don't really have anything to do with each other, but I'm just going to cast them as evidence for the sort of overall narrative that I want to construct. What did he say? Senseless acts were happening in the world. Surely senseless acts happened pretty frequently in America. Like I do senseless things most weekdays.
Sarah: It's also even to the point, and I feel like now when people are kind of trying to throw a moral panic today, they will kind of list civil rights advances and then be like, so yeah, it's terrible. And you're like wait, let's go back to that original thing you said, what was that supporting?
Mike: I mean, it is interesting. The idea that like one of the sort of nails in this moral panic house that he's constructing is this idea of civil rights advancing too fast.
Sarah: Well, and again, I feel like what he's gesturing at, which is a phrase I learned in grad school, that's what you can say when someone's not successfully making an argument or doesn't know what they're saying. Is this idea of things are changing and like the social order, the sort of iron clad hierarchy that we have in this country, there are some pebbles being thrown at it. So that is the work of Satan. I feel like that's primarily what Satan gets accused of.
Mike: Yeah. And I also think that's probably on some level operating at a subconscious level, even for the writers. I don't know if anybody would sort of admit to being like, “minorities want rights, and that's part of evil.”
Sarah: Yeah. And that's Satanism. So don't do drugs kids, because for every drug you do, a black person will be allowed to vote.
Mike: There's just a general sense of anxiety that is sparked by those kinds of things. And that anxiety sort of has to go somewhere.
Sarah: And it's giving his audience a feeling. And then the people, if you're reading this and you're like, “I'm uncomfortable about civil rights, but I'm not comfortable identifying as an out and out racist.” You can be like, aha. But I am uncomfortable with Satan, and that's an appropriate fear for me to be having.
If you believe in this kind of Christian concept of Satan, as I understand it, then Satan is the seductive voice that's like, “But perhaps the ironclad prescribed ordered hierarchy of power that this worldview necessitates, could it have floss? Are there problems with it?” And if you make that voice, the voice of the most dangerous evil, you cannot follow him a single step without losing your soul type of monster figure in your faith, then you also essentially render sinful any act of questioning an ideology that could be being enacted in some pretty dangerous ways.
Mike: There's also, I feel like dominant groups can never admit their own dominance. Because the next step of that is humility. If you realize we control most political institutions, we control most cultural institutions, you then have to be like, well, maybe the people that are pushing back against us have a right to speak. That's the next step of that acknowledgement. So what you have to do as a dominant group is, you have to cast threats against you as existential, and cast things that are kind of harmless or low stakes or don't matter as threats. Christians do this, white people do this. This is the tool of dominant groups throughout time.
Sarah: To put yourself in a feeling of assumed vulnerability, so that you don't have to think about how dangerous you potentially are.
Mike: We're dominant now, but it could all come crashing down at any moment.
Sarah: Yeah. So we have to be like extra careful hoarding our resources.
Mike: Exactly. There's no event that can happen that would make you loosen your grip on power.
Sarah: Okay. So this is 1965 tensions are coming alive, and Mike Warnke is on his way to his first satanic ritual.
“The appointed night came. I was picked up and delivered to a really nice home on a hill in the plushest neighborhood of Redlands, California. It was a fantastically beautiful place, high up with a patio that overlooked the whole city. I could see the lights like a field of softly, glowing diamonds. The city of Redlands. The party guests were around 20 years old, but at first I hardly noticed them. I was gawking at the house, huge rooms, the best furniture.”
How weird were the pants, Mike, how nice was the furniture?
“When I did take time out to notice the people, there were 19 or 20 and they all looked as if they fit the place perfectly like jewels in a matching set. Confident faces, good poise, easy talking, clear, happy expressions. The world's problems were no big thing to them.”
Honestly, these people sound like Mormons to me.
Mike: Yeah, they really do.
Sarah: “So first thing is sit in a circle and smoke pot together. Soon, the fellows were snuggling up with the girls. And then they split off in couples. It was great because there was a girl for every guy, not like most places I had been where there was a chronic chick shortage.
As I was saying, they started pairing off in couples, only I do not mean going anywhere. They stayed and did it, right there. They were not engaged in just conventional lovemaking, either. They did things that even I had not heard about before, or even dreamed of in an LSD fantasy.”
Mike: What is he talking about? There's a finite number of things you can do. And most people have done all of those things.
Sarah: I think he means, and I've thought about this a lot, I think he means that they were touching each other's butts.
Mike: Be specific, Mike. One writer to another.
Sarah: This is how you write a conversion narrative. You have to implant the thought of weird sex stuff in the reader's mind, but not explicitly give it to them, because then you're still holy or something.
Mike: Yeah.
Sarah: “Come over here, Mike”, a blonde said near the beginning of the whole thing. I could hardly believe it. It couldn't be for real, could it? She initiated one thing after another, bringing others into it until there wasn't anything I wouldn't do or didn't. Needless to say, I started attending these parties regularly. And Dean Armstrong, who had introduced me first to drugs then to the parties, now started subsidizing my drug bill. He was keeping a hard eye on me at these parties. I could have cared less. I was on a sex bender that was greater than any bag I had ever tried before. No sick stomach, no shakes, no flashbacks, no weird freaky feeling of junk between your nerve ends on your bones. Just soft, pink sex.”
Mike: It's so boring. It's so boring.
Sarah: Okay. Well don't you love the phrase soft, pink sex. He’s pushing it.
Mike: We did drugs and then we had sex. It’s just this Christian fantasy of what Satanists are like. It's so boring.
Sarah: “Gradually, vaguely, I began to notice that at most of the parties, the conversation seemed to drift toward religion. For a while, I wondered what religion had to do with sex. And I came to realize that the kind of religion they were talking about was actual Satan worship. But in the pink haze I was in, that didn't bother me. In fact, it seemed kind of appropriate.”
Mike: God, this is such bad writing. He just like throws that in. He doesn't even do it in like dialogue or something.
Sarah: Yeah, you're right.
Mike: Like a twist somebody reveals to him in conversation after sex or whatever. By the way, we're all Satanists. He's just, oh, by the way, I eventually found out they’re all Satanists. That's a bad, that's not even a scene.
Sarah: “And so they brought me along, patiently, smilingly, bit by bit, taking their time. After a while, Dean began giving me little things to do, like delivering messages or money. It got to the point where almost anything I wanted was mine, as long as I did things for Dean.”
Mike: Goodfellas. It’s now Goodfellas. Okay.
Sarah: Goodfellas, oh my gosh. As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a Satanist.
And he says, “The secondary meetings were pretty mild. In fact, they were much like an ordinary church service, only being a mirror image with calculated blasphemy the outstanding feature. It dawned on me that the function of the secondary service was to act as a binding together, a fellowship or brotherhood type of get together. But a lot of show in socializing, but no honest to badness afflicting or even oppressing.”
I do like that he's implying that it's just like normal church in the sense that most of it is boring.
Mike: Yeah, exactly. And then there's like a coffee hour afterwards.
Sarah: Yeah. That feels honestly like the most realistic thing he said.
“Everyone talked big and gnashed his teeth at Jesus Christ and went through phony rituals that seemed pretty tame, and hardly resulted in anyone getting hurt or attacked or anything. But it was a good place to make contacts for dope and get ideas on drumming up business and trying new gimmicks. Yet I always felt the real scene was taken care of somewhere else, by secret committees or a super organization.”
Mike: Ooh, here we come to the org chart and the newsletter.
Sarah: Yes. “Who were all these people who were being bound together? There were several hundred of us, I estimate, spread out in the vast San Bernardino, Riverside, Colton area of Southern California. The witches were mostly 18 to 30 years of age.”
And then if you age out of being a witch, she just can't be a witch anymore. It's like being a Playboy bunny, kind of sucks.
Mike: Stewardesses back then.
Sarah: “We were mostly white and educated, but it was open to all comers. And we had an integrated ecumenical base at any institution would be proud of.”
Mike: He just really wants you to know that he wasn't in like a racist, satanic cult.
Sarah: Well antiracism is by definition, satanic, according to a previous page of this very book. So it doesn't make sense.
Okay. But then they decided that he is ready for the third stage. “Dean Armstrong behaved mysteriously as we got out of his car that night and walked into a barn located in an orange grove near Redlands. “You’ve been a good slave, Mike”, he said, pausing at the door. “You've been meeting the population and doing lots of right things for us. So I have a surprise in store for you.” He looked at me, ‘That is ,if he wants to go along with it.” “I've gone along with everything else.” I shrugged.”
This is also one of the problems with the writing is this protagonist has no agency. Who is he? What does he want? I really don't know.
“I'm going to tell you something.” I've never seen him look so serious. “I'm a master counselor and my two buddies and I run this group, but we lost a couple of members recently and we need a replacement who's really with it. We've been keeping our eyes on you, and we decided you're it.” “Let's go.” “Okay”, he said, opening the door. “You sit down while I robe up. If you join, you'll get robes, too.”
And all of our talk about the satanic panic, I'm always like, tell me more about the robes. Does everyone have them? Who's cleaning them? Who's in charge of cleaning them? Do you have to dry clean them? Where do you get them from? And I love that Mike Warnke, based on the fact that I think he knows no world except Christian fellowship, is yeah, you join on a provisional basis, and then if you decide to stick around, they do give you a robe. Like I like that he's answering that question.
Mike: Yeah. He has the same logistical concerns as you do.
Sarah: Yes. Well, sometimes he does. So they go into the barn. There are some dudes sitting on the floor around a nine foot in diameter circle. And he says, “In the center of the circle was the altar, a granite slab supported on two sawhorses. On the slab, a girl lay on her back, nude and waiting, inverted cross and an image of a goat's head stood at each end of the altar. The service was a black mass. All the traditional rituals were reversed and deliberately profaned. The sacraments were desecrated. Blasphemies took the place of prayers.”
So they have a black mass. And he says, “I suddenly realized that the smoke curling up from the crucible on the altar was fumes of deadly night shade, belladonna. When properly vaporized it gave off fumes that put you in the right frame of mindlessness.”
Mike: Let's throw some like weird date rape drugs in there, too. Why not?
Sarah: “When the unaccustomed initial effects of the night shade wore off, I was aware of Dean, who had finished drawing the pentagram on the girl's stomach saying, ‘Let those of grievances speak now, that we may all bind together at this hour to direct the power of our father Satan’.”
It's like how at the end of religion class, when I was in school, we would pray about our pets together. And for like softball victories and stuff.
“I was wide awake now. This was really where it was, no more of the phony experimenting. I sat there and thralled. My brain clear and my senses attuned. And then I felt it, the presence. I could almost make out the hazy outline as a demon spirit floated out of that pentagram and seemed to make a buzzing sound as it dissipated and presumably transferred itself to the locale where it would do its mischief.”
Mike: So Satan has arrived. Enter Satan.
Sarah: Yeah, I find it also ,like I think this book is sneakier than it's extremely amateurish writing would make you think it is. Because it is trying to incept you with some ideas and one of them is, wow, Mike has been trying to go to these Christian churches his whole life, but he hasn’t been able to feel the spirit of Christ enter him really. And now he's vulnerable to Satanism because Satanism comes through. Like they will show you the real Satan on day one. In Michelle Remembers, too, one of the key things is that actual Satan is there. God’s away on business, but Satan is a helicopter parent.
“Later, after Dean had changed back into a street clothes, I said, ‘This is for me, man. When can I get initiated?’ We got into the car. At the next full moon he said thoughtfully, ‘End of chapter, go to your bunks. Be back here at the campfire tomorrow night for chapter four’.” Mike: He's mixing in some like other mythology there. Like Satan and the full moon, those are like two separate clusters of myths.
Sarah: I mean, and in this case, it's just, and a lot of it is like, it was just like Christianity, but evil. I find this part interesting that there's this emphasis on everything that Satanists do is like a carefully studied version of what the Christians do, but bad. And most people, when they have a religion, they just go and have a religion. They don't spend all their time trolling other religions.
Mike: I also think it's funny where he says that instead of Christly incantations, they're just blaspheming. So they're just like standing at the alter being like, “God damn, shit”.
Sarah: Yeah. They're saying the seven words you can't say on television.
Mike: This doesn't even sound fun.
Sarah: The sex sounds fun. You get to have sex in front of Mike Warnke in a house in Redlands, California. That actually doesn't sound that fun. But yeah, this is, in the space of three short chapters we have gone from a kid not being raised in a specific religious in a way that captures his heart. Like we got shown how lack of devotion to Jesus can turn very quickly into a lifestyle of every drug and then Satanism. And that's why you should never go to college.
Mike: Can you give us a preview of the debunking? What do we know about Mike Warnke, his actual upbringing?
Sarah: Okay. Can I tell you just one very small thing? So there's a Christian magazine called Cornerstone, that in the early nineties starts investigating Mike Warnke’s claims, and ultimately debunks his story and The Satan Seller, And there's a lot to it. But one of the very basic facts that he turns out to be lying about, is that he never had long hair, he always had short, regulation length, early sixties, collegiate male hair.
Mike: It's such a weird thing to lie about.
Sarah: You can't be a Satanist without long hair. I mean, we’ll get more into it, but I feel like in many ways, this was a story he was able to tell where he could be someone who did all the things that he never got to do.
Mike: Yeah. I mean, on some level that's probably what a lot of fiction is. But at least it's labeled as fiction.
Sarah: Yeah. It's fine to write about, what if I were a Satanist. If I were a Satanist, as though that could be, I'd swim all day in a Satanist Sea. But yeah, just call it fiction. And I guess maybe this is part of the answer to the internal question of why the humanities might be good. That if people did more creative writing, they would feel less pressure to lie because they could get their lying out in a constructive way.
Mike: Can I tell you one last thing? I don't know if I've ever told you this. In Denmark, ‘Satan’ is an extremely common swear word. So when you stub your toe on something, you're like, ”Ow, Satan!” I feel like the way to denude this of all its power is to bring that to America and just start using ‘Satan’ as a catch-all swear word for it.
Sarah: Right. Because then if you subscribe to the belief that like you're summiting Satan by saying his name, then at a certain point in a nation of toe stubbing, Satan sayers, you're like, “No, I really don't think he's going to show up.” I think I made all this hot [inaudible] for no one.