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 Patreon
Donate on Paypal
Buy stickers, magnets, T-shirts and more
Where else to find us:
Sarah's other show, You Are Good
Mike's other show, Maintenance Phase
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 Patreon
Donate on Paypal
Buy stickers, magnets, T-shirts and more
Where else to find us:
Sarah's other show, You Are Good
Mike's other show, Maintenance Phase
Satan Seller pt.3
Sarah: What if Jesus is just like a Korean skincare routine.
Mike: Welcome to You're Wrong About the podcast that's cool, daddy-o.
Sarah: Oh, nice.
Mike: I was trying to do a Grease reference, but I've only actually seen that movie once.
Sarah: I don't know if anyone says Daddy-O in Grease, they say they're born to hand-jive.
Mike: Oh, I thought you were going somewhere different with that word. I am Michael Hobbes.
Sarah: I'm Sarah Marshall.
Mike: If you want to support the show, we are on Patreon patreon.com/yourewrongabout where you can also find t-shirts and other ways to support us, or you can do none of that at all.
Sarah: I think the fact that you're here listening is already something.
Mike: It's something. And today we are on chapter three. Of our Satan Seller trilogy, quartet, whatever it's going to be.
Sarah: Trilogy slash quartet. Unclear.
Mike: I was going to compare this to Rise of Skywalker, but then that's really insulting.
Sarah: Is that the most recent one that broke everyone's spirit right before Coronavirus? Yeah, well, first of all, will you catch us up for plot? What happened previously in The Satan Seller?
Mike: So basically, we met Mike Warnke, who is adrift after being orphaned. He finds Catholicism and thinks that's chill. Then he gets into drugs, and he hits this rock bottom, and that leads him to get in with this set of Satanists. Then he rises up through the ranks of like Satan, LLC and becomes this middle manager and very popular and very good at his job.
Sarah: Yeah. He's very diligent. He really seems like a self-starter, he's the kind of guy who has organized the Satanist cookout. What kinds of work does he do as a Satanist?
Mike: He recruits hippies was the biggest glimpse of this that we've seen. He also does logistics, like painting the backgrounds for various rituals and stuff.
Sarah: I think the most impressive thing about this book is that it makes Satanism sound really boring.
Mike: It’s so boring. Oh my God. It really is like your first job out of college.
Sarah: 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 he 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.
Mike: Ooh, the Radisson. Yeah. Give it to me.
Sarah: What is the role of women in Satanism?
Mike: Sandwiches. Providing Mike Warnke with sex and sandwiches and sometimes interior decorations.
Sarah: Yeah. It's unclear why Satanism is appealing to women. That's one of the mysteries here. I was thinking that we could start by experiencing Mike Warnke in his second act, because when the Satan seller comes out, it becomes highly popular within the world of Christian publishing. And then that helps long his career as a stand-up comedian.
Mike: It's such a weird epilogue to this book.
Sarah: And so I thought I would share with you some footage of Mike Warren P. And his standup comedy stylings.
Mike: Oh my God. Yes. I want to see his jokes so bad.
Sarah: Okay. So I've sent you a special called out of my mind. I would describe it as like an evangelical Jerry Seinfeld. It'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.
Mike: Fabulous. 3, 2, 1.
Recording: “These are pointed toed 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 and 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 a tall. If I had fallen forward, I’d snap 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, just kind of went blue right over the top, you know. 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 a day, a day ain't nothing like a little pain to throw you into a momentary backslide. You know what I mean? There was some lady sitting on the front row there at first Baptist to Austin. And I don't believe them ladies never 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? 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 were just getting down so they wouldn't get killed by no warranties, shrapnel. You know what I mean?”
Sarah: Outfit is incredible. Every part of it looks like it belongs to a different person. What is he, can you talk about how Mike Warnke is dressing at this time and his life?
Mike: Ah, I realized this is not the case, but it's very nineties Pacific Northwest.
Sarah: Yeah. He looks like he's wearing Birkenstocks with socks, even though he isn't.
Mike: He has a vest, like an outdoorsy vest, a purple button up shirt. And I have no idea what year this is, but the largest pair of jeans I have ever seen. Men used to just wear the biggest size pants they could find, that was like the style.
Sarah: Men used to style like Billie Eilish. Yeah, I guess someone describes rising through the ranks of Satanism, you picture them looking like less of a sincere dork.
Mike: He does look very dorky. He looks like somebody who would be behind the counter in a comic book shop in the stereotypical way. He has a mustache. He has a ponytail. He's a very, just round guy. He has a round face, like a very round body. He is just a happy dorky snowman.
Sarah: And it's such a lovely ponytail. 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 Christian entertainer.
Mike: I have to say this routine was significantly better than I thought it was. He has very good stage presence. He's telling a pretty funny anecdote. It's subversive, the audience is loving it. He's very charismatic.
Sarah: Yeah. I was really impressed by how enjoyable this is. I think there's a lot of alleged comedy where you're just cringing the entire time. He feels like someone who feels very comfortable on stage and who has the audience on a string and is his sort of comfortably walking the dog.
Mike: Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I can see why he was a very popular figure at the time.
Sarah: 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 as stilted and fan fiction-y as this book is, 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. This is the book that feels like it connects to big moral panics of our time and things that are very visible now. And that you've been talking about a lot which are 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.
Mike: Which is of course what all the other ones are doing too, but just like in much more subtle ways.
Sarah: Yeah. And 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 we have to vigilantly keep scaring them or else there is going to become Satanist overnight. And it's like, well, God, like, don't you think that you have a better religion though? Don’t you think there are incentives for people to not leave? 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.
Mike: Right? Why don't you compete in the marketplace of ideas?
Sarah: 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.
Mike: I want to hear the statistics.
Sarah: 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 how Lindsay 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.
Mike: So he does an exorcism on this woman who he meets randomly?
Sarah: 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, Blackmagic, 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.”
Mike: Another thing that I remember from my Christian upbringing was this idea that other ways of looking at the world or other sort of 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 it makes them happy, but as if you're toying with forces outside of your control. I think that that's like a big part of organized religion, that we're the ones that have access to the supernatural.
Sarah: And 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 knowing what's going on.
Mike: Because it's weird that this lady who says that she can predict the future, that seems like something a lot of like Christians say in various contexts.
Sarah: Well, and also, I have a theory that allegations of witchcraft have been inspired by all numbers 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 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?
Mike: And I'm the authority. And I get to decide that you're playing with demonic forces.
Sarah: And then another quote he says, “According to one report, there are as many as 6,000 witches meeting regularly in small groups throughout England.” And then a couple pages later, he quotes someone else who says, “Witches are everywhere. There are 10 million in the United States and almost 2000 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. Mike Warnke had a congregation of 1,500 by himself in the San Bernardino area, that just sounds wrong. And if it's 10 million in America and 6,000 in England, maybe the English are counting their witches. That just seems weird.
Mike: These things are so hard to debunk because you just look at it and you just like, no.
Sarah: 6,000 witches, how many villages can even have the workforce to make a single Wickerman?
Mike: I just feel like if there were 10 million of something, we would know, that's the biggest thing to me. This would actually be a huge news story. And there are problems with the news and there is bias with what gets covered and what doesn't, but 1 in 33 Americans is a fucking witch. There would be Newsweek cover stories and academic papers written about it. That would be a really big deal.
Sarah: It's very quickly random anecdotes. This is how so many conservative books that I've read are written, where you make an outrageous claim and then you tell three anecdotes. The goal is to treat the reader like a hockey puck and just keep them continually in motion. And by in motion, I mean continually in a state of moral repugnance or just fear, basically. 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, which of course, 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.”
Mike: It's such a funny self-own. Because he's like, ah, I could've been chill about this, but instead I'm going to choose to be a real dick.
Sarah: Well because he's in another time, when I was less afraid of the cult, I would have dismissed her but now I know she probably has a real witch, and we should be afraid of her and she’s probably 15.
Mike: 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.
Sarah: And I feel like this is the comfort offered by this world view, the Q Anon world view, too.
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, ah, 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 self-actualizing 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.
Mike: Ooh. What do you mean?
Sarah: Well, here's the ending of this chapter. “Witches and Satanists, 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 that's a scarier world for you to believe in then, my kids like weird music and they probably shouldn't take acid with speed mixed in. It's darker to be like there are literal representatives of Satan walking around, but it also gives you a sense of certainty about what your role is.
Mike: Yeah, because I'm on the side of good, because I'm not one of the witches and I'm helping to name and shame the witches. It puts you very firmly on team good against team evil, as opposed to maybe some things that I'm doing are actually part of the problem. Or like maybe it's complicated.
Sarah: And to say, maybe the counterculture is motivated in large part by the injustice of the Vietnam war. And that's a reasonable grievance.
Mike: If there's one thing, we knew by 1972, it's that the fucking hippies were right. This is what always drives me nuts, there's never any revisiting of these things. I was doing a lot of hippie-bashing of the dumb student protests of the late 1960s, et cetera. By this point, you can easily say, oh, those kids were right, and we probably should have been listening to them the whole time. And let's think critically about why we weren't listening to them? Because their beliefs have now been reified. Everything they predicted has come true. But instead of doing any of that, they're just like, well, you know, they're reading their horoscopes every day, so they must be Satanists.
Sarah: Only Satan would want to prevent continuing and unwinnable war. So we're back to the Satan seller and chapter seven starts with a celebrity cameo. So he goes to a conference in San Francisco. And who should he meet? But Anton LaVey.
Mike: Oh the church of Satan founder guy.
Sarah: Well, this is always like people writing satanic panic books have to address because Anton Levey found an organization called the character of Satan, which, on its face, 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 invoke Satan has a concept. And I think they define themselves as secular humanists. But secular humanists who like to have naked ladies lie on an altar.
Mike: It seems a little troll-y, honestly.
Sarah: It's totally a troll. It's a troll before that word existed. And that's totally Anton LaVey’s shtick. I think he’s dressed as what a Christian's idea of what a Satanist is, and this was a time when you could afford real estate in San Francisco. So he had a scary house there. And so Mike Warnke gets around the Anton Levey problem by being like, yeah, he was a lightweight. I was not impressed with LaVey. I detected a certain phoniness about him, but I admired his showmanship and decided I would show LaVey in 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.
Mike: 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.
Sarah: These posers.
Mike: Sell out ass Satanists.
Sarah: Okay. So during their meetings, they have a session, it sounds like, where if you need to hex somebody, you can bring up who you need to hex. This is because it's part of their thing. And so the tall gentleman that 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. 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 seized control of the wheel and made him crash his car and it burst into flames.
Mike: Satan takes a wheel.
Sarah: 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. At the next ritual he can't even stomach a human finger. The next day he’s with Paul, who's just a generic Satanist that exists for him to talk to. They're at a hamburger stand, which is 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 fixer.’ ‘What happened to the priest?’ I didn't ask.”
They'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 maybe displeased with him and he wants to stay in the good graces of everybody and prove that he's not gonna chicken out and stop being a Satanist anytime soon, he's like we got to up the ante. And so this is where we got a story of Mike Warnke orchestrating someone being raped.
Mike: Holy shit.
Sarah: Yeah. And it's weird too, because the book really kind of lets him off Scott free about it. He says “I've been thinking for a long time. Every time I think about our symbolic sacrifices instead of actually this unveiling, the altar girl, I got uptight, as Dean might say, we're shortchanging 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 a broad and go through the fertility scene the right way, you know, lay her on the altar and take turns. 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 clues 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 alter.
Mike: Very telling that he's excluding himself from all this.
Sarah: And he's like, I guess, told them to do it. So that's better. That's fine. This is the only part where I'm like, yeah, that sounds pretty evil, Mike. If Satan is the prince of evil, you're finally doing something evil.
Mike: We made it, we did it.
Sarah: And yeah. 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. 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.
Mike: Of being bad. Yeah. And where, to me it's uncomfortable because you're like Mike, are you aware of the gravity of what you're saying that you've done? Or is this something that seems difficult to come back from? If you're saying that this is a crime that you've committed.
Mike: It's a really baffling choice in a book that you're making up to add something this fucked up in it.
Sarah: And you could say I left when they started planning a rape. I think to publish this in 1972, I feel like, especially then you could publish this with the idea that 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.
Mike: Yeah. That's the overall context is that he knows on some level that this is not something that gets taken super seriously at the time.
Sarah: Yeah. I think that's what I find most disturbing about it. And then immediately after that, he starts feeling really poorly and then he's 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.
Mike: That's it?
Sarah: That's it for him and the cult. Yeah, he says “with Satan, everything is on a cash and carry basis. As long as you do it for him, he will do 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.”
Mike: She slipped me an overdose?
Sarah: I think she injected him and gave him an overdose. “All those people who loved me and took care of me, who praised me, who patted 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.
Mike: Yeah, don't overdo it, Mike, you didn't need to be naked for this.
Sarah: It didn't need to be raining.
Mike: So basically, he gets kicked out of this organization for the same reason that you would get fired as a regional manager of a Target. He's basically strung out and addicted to drugs and he can't do his job anymore.
Sarah: I think that's why I feel like they don't really explain it. Honestly.
Mike: It’s weird! He keeps skipping over the important parts of this story.
Sarah: Yeah. 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 screwed because he was also being supported financially. And now he's out having to take care of himself, and he decides to join the Navy.
Mike: Oh, what? Not the twist I was expecting. Okay.
Sarah: 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. 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.
Mike: Oh the rape victim.
Sarah: 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. Had what 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 rating that was beyond the sun's”.
Mike: I feel like her being hot is like, not that important right now, but okay.
Sarah: I feel like three weeks is a really short amount of time to go on this size of a spiritual journey.
Mike: I know that’s the thing. So he's hearing good stuff about this Jesus guy. And so he joins the Navy, and we have a little Full Metal Jacket interlude, they give him a haircut because his hair is super long. 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. And we're now into the how to convert people to Christ section, which is a lot easier than converting people to Satanism.
Mike: Because Christianity actually offers something to people and not urine soaked robes?
Sarah: Yeah. And because Christianity is a religion and not a fake religion invented by people who want to glorify their real relationships, as described getting your finger cut off. And so one of the Christian bunkmates, he 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.
Mike: “For God so loved the world that he sent his only son” or something along those lines.
Sarah: “That whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life.” And 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 bag says John 3:16 on it. What is that about?
Mike: As a guy who's read most of the Bible and many parts of the Bible numerous times growing up, I always thought that the Bible is actually not a very good recruiting tool because it's really long. It's really boring. It's super retributive and 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 begetting. A lot of the Bible is not that great for getting interested.
Sarah: Right. A lot of it is like an acquired taste. Jesus and Mary Chain.
Mike: And huge parts of it are ignored by most sermons. Growing up, you get sermons and discussions and like dissections of the same 12 parts of the bible.
Sarah: Let's talk about Esther again. I feel like reading it front to back, I feel like it would be like reading a cookbook in a way.
Mike: It's only slightly less cohesive than the Satan Seller.
Sarah: There's also a lot of long Bible quotes. We're getting into the part where Mike and his co-writers were like, we’re at 130 pages, got around this out to a whole book, got to hit that word count. And so he has an, Are you there? God, it's me, Mike Warnke moment. He prays directly to God. 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 sins 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 religion.
Mike: It makes sense that the book would get more interesting once he stops constantly lying. He's able to be more specific and draw upon memory at this point.
Sarah: 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.
Mike: Yeah. And like never did anything particularly bad and was never like, particularly un-Christian. 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 about people who grew up Christian, left for a while, did some like not that bad stuff, and then rediscovered God. A lot of them have the same kind of structure as this.
Sarah: It's like having a talk from a vegetarian who's like I ate a ballpark hot dog. 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 has she, and they have an interesting common now. Okay. So here's a question. So if 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 ruined as to you. Are you concerned about that?
Mike: It makes no sense for them not to kill him at this point.
Sarah: Yeah. And so having missed the boat to kill him, like, what might you do?
Mike: Not give him a reference?
Sarah: So what they do instead is they send Carmen, who is his former chattel, the best word for it, to bother him. And then they send Charlotte, who's the fourth level Satanist, who was the one who suggested they have acid rock at their events. But then Sue, who is living with her friend Laurie. 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.”
Mike: I love that Charlotte didn't even bother to make up a fake name. I love that her plan was to walk behind Mike's new girlfriend or new friend, hex her so she sprained her ankle, and stay in her line of sight. and then immediately apologized 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 Lori got up, I've got something to check out. I'll be back later when you two have decided what to do. In my concern over Sue, my true feelings had surfaced ,and Lori had seen it before we had. Even I was surprised at the tremendous feeling that came over me for Sue.”
Mike: I have no, no idea that this woman he introduces into the narrative would become his love interest.
Sarah: 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 and 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, Ouija, Cleveland, rent a witch, occult movie explosion, occult epidemic.” I will say, the chapter he describes being in Vietnam, he claims to have been wounded a different amount of times and different places. He says here, he was wounded twice. He describes having to execute a spy. Things like that happened, but I got the sense that Mike Warren, whatever reason he's citing for why he's traumatized, is maybe more interesting sounding than the real reason he's traumatized.
Mike: Just probably trumped us, cause it's just fucking camping in a foreign country for months. And that sounds really hard.
Sarah: This is the captor where you start to feel like every single thing isn't made up and where kind of the way that maybe he can get sympathy and empathy for complaining about how he suffered as a Satanist, maybe that answers the suffering that you experienced 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.
Mike: And that requires you to have political opinions, which I feel like a lot of this stuff is meant to go around anything that smacks a partisanship or these sorts of earthly concerns.
Sarah: Yeah. And so this book ends and 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 half acidly 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.
Mike: I guess he is writing this at a time when there's huge demand for something to reify these concerns about Satan, right? People needed stories like this at the time.
Sarah: Yeah. The marketplace certainly did. And then 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 just 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.
Mike: Just like Michelle.
Sarah: Yeah. This is a vulnerability in media, almost 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've got real money or real public regard or in any case, real power based on a fake credential.
Mike: It's also fascinating to me, how much Michelle cribbed from this book. The thing with the fingers I can't get over. 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 a Newsweek article about it. I wonder if that was somewhere in her brain.
Sarah: I also wonder if that could be planted there by Dr. Pazder, or it could be coming in through two directions. But if I'm Dr. Pazder and I'm like, oh my God, I have a patient who is a victim of satanic ritual abuse, the phrase, I just coined, then I have a very limited library of things to read for your 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.
Mike: Totally. Yeah. If he's asking her, did you ever see anybody get their fingers cut off? That might plant a seed that she's like, oh yeah, I do remember that.
Sarah: So we end with him having a press conference that also was exposition for why this book is necessary. He also defends the concept of witch hunts, which I really like. “In medieval times in the 17 century, the indiscriminate and widespread efforts to purge society of witches by which 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.”
Mike: My favorite thing is when you're in the middle of a moral panic and you're like, ah, 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.
Sarah: The witches have always been real. “Modern American, who do not know any better 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 orange cheese. They don't affect me. Even if witchcraft in the earlier days, which it was not, lots of occult groups now are fully justifying the fears of modern day witch hunts, drug pushers, and political revolutionists are using devil worship as a way to rake in millions of dollars, weaken the government and destroy a law enforcement.” He never explains how Satanism is profitable.
Mike: These are Fox news talking points from this week. Build the revolutionaries, they're making money, they don't even really believe these things they're saying.
Sarah: This book is almost 50 years old and yeah, this rhetoric has not changed. And I feel like Satan is 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 claimed also believe.
Mike: Isn’t this also just witch hunt logic? That 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. It's like rooting out a pandemic or something. You're like, no, no. We all know lockdown is super serious. But this is such an important issue that serious measures have to be taken.
Sarah: 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 narratively makes sense to us, like Satanists, that would be bad. But a virus lacks the ability to, just whatever narrative needs to mobilize people in that way if it apparently doesn't have it.
Mike: Or income quality or these other things have a lot more evidence behind them than fucking Satanist.
Sarah: And I guess the idea is that you have to feel personally threatened. And whatever name you give to that feeling of threat, the feeling has to be there. And I think that we assume that 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 turns out we don't, we can respond with total blithe acceptance or denial of things that really are going to be a problem for us. The fact that it keeps getting hotter and hotter. I really, I still, I don't understand it. I would really like to. Why is it that we can spend so much energy and so much time dealing with the threat of Satan, which is not real. 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 so easy to motivate for the fake thing and so hard to motivate for the real thing. Yeah. Well, why is that, Mike?
Mike: Food poisoning kills like 400 kids a year. It's the most boring fucking thing.
Sarah: I spent most of my life throwing out, probably fine dairy. So I do feel, yeah. How many people is Satan killing? Probably nobody because he's vapor in the hearts and minds of the scared. I don't know. I guess for whatever reason we prefer imaginary to long shot threats over endemic ones. And I guess it does make sense because we can adjust to living in a country that's 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 that 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 phonic, 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.”
Mike: It’s very funny to me that he ends with this victorious note of how to beat back the demons, but he didn't quit Satanism. They kicked him out. It's weird to make that up, to be like, I was so troubled by the rape that I left. 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. Well, you didn't do that in your own fake book.
Sarah: Yeah. And he could have written that he did that. He could have said I was so disgusted that I quit the satanic church because it was wrong. And he's like, no and then I just kept going and one of my girls injected a bunch of heroin into me and left me outside a hospital.
Mike: Even that he didn't have any agency, he just missed a couple days of work because somebody else did something to him. When I fake a memoir, I'm going to be the most active protagonist. I'm going to be making choices.
Sarah: What fake memoir are you going to write?
Mike: I was a critical race theory instructor.