Forgetting What Happened

Summary

Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Episode 8 - "Forgetting What Happened"

Release Date: May 21, 2025

In the concluding episode of "Devil and the Deep Blue Sea," produced by Christianity Today, hosts Mike Kosper and Rebecca Sebastian delve into the enduring legacy of the Satanic Panic that swept through America in the 1980s and 1990s. Titled "Forgetting What Happened," this episode examines how the hysteria of that era not only devastated innocent lives but also laid the groundwork for contemporary evangelical movements and political dynamics.

1. Revisiting the Satanic Panic

The episode opens with a provocative exercise where Mike and Rebecca test each other's knowledge of historical quotes to distinguish between those originating from the Satanic Panic era (1981-1994) and other periods.

• Italian Scoda Case ([01:29–04:04]): Rebecca recounts the Scoda case from Italy in 1997, where Federico Scoda and his wife were falsely accused of leading a Satanic cabal. The fallout was tragic, resulting in the removal of 16 children from their families, the suicide of a single mother, and the wrongful imprisonment of Scoda for 11 years. Notably, Rebecca notes, "All of this on accusations that sound circumstantially, eerily similar to the McMartin case," highlighting the global reach and devastating impact of such unfounded allegations.

• Amanda Knox Case ([04:11–04:29]): The discussion shifts to the Amanda Knox case in Italy (2007), where an American student was wrongfully accused of murder, framed with satanic overtones. The media's sensational portrayal echoed the pervasive fears of the Satanic Panic, despite lacking substantive evidence.

2. Historical Blood Libels and Their Modern Echoes

• Geoffrey Chaucer’s Prioress's Tale ([04:42–05:54]): Mike Kosper introduces a historical perspective by referencing Geoffrey Chaucer's "Prioress's Tale," a medieval blood libel against Jews. He reads an excerpt demonstrating long-standing myths of ritualistic evil, drawing parallels to the unfounded allegations during the Satanic Panic. Rebecca observes, "This is just like the blood libels of the Middle Ages," emphasizing the recurring nature of such baseless conspiracies.

3. Maria Monk and Early Anti-Catholic Sentiment

• Maria Monk’s Memoir ([06:07–07:20]): Rebecca presents Maria Monk's 1836 memoir, "Awful Disclosures," which falsely accuses Catholic priests of horrific abuses. This narrative mirrors the Satanic Panic's themes, combining fictional religious conspiracies with exaggerated claims of supernatural malevolence.

4. The Rise and Fall of Mike Warnke

• Exposure of Mike Warnke ([12:20–16:31]): The hosts explore the downfall of Mike Warnke, a prominent figure who claimed to be a former Satanic high priest turned Christian evangelist. Mike Warnke reflects on his past in a 2024 interview, saying, "I'm a comedian. I can't help but hear echoes of what we see in the media today." Warnke's revelations, including financial misconduct and moral failings, underscore the deceptive narratives that fueled the Satanic Panic. Despite his decline, Warnke remains active in ministry, illustrating the lingering influence of such figures.

5. West Memphis Three and the Quest for Justice

• West Memphis Three Case ([22:37–27:23]): The episode revisits the tragic story of the West Memphis Three—Damien Echols, Jesse Misskelley, and Jason Baldwin—who were wrongfully convicted of murdering three eight-year-old boys. With new DNA evidence casting doubt on their guilt, the trio eventually entered Alford pleas to secure their release after 18 years of imprisonment. Damien Echols shares, "We are in a good spot now and we've got evidence even in the last two, three years that we believe will exonerate these kids," highlighting the ongoing struggle for justice and the deep scars left by the panic-induced convictions.

6. The Influence of the Satanic Panic on Evangelical Politics

• Connection to Political Movements ([39:26–74:02]): Mike Kosper and Rebecca Sebastian draw a direct line from the Satanic Panic to the rise of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) and the Christian Right. They discuss how figures like C. Peter Wagner and Lance Wallnau developed theological frameworks of spiritual warfare and dominionism, which were instrumental in shaping evangelical support for political figures like Ronald Reagan and later Donald Trump. Mike Kosper explains, "If you adopt a system that allows you to get around the plain teachings of scripture in one area, you are going to have a very hard time closing the door on someone else using your same argument on a different issue."

7. From Satanic Panic to QAnon: The Evolution of Conspiracy Theories

• Rise of QAnon and Pizzagate ([76:45–93:07]): The hosts analyze the transition from the Satanic Panic to modern conspiracy theories like QAnon and Pizzagate. Damien Echols likens QAnon to a “prophetic conspiracy movement” where clear delineations between good and evil are prevalent, similar to the narratives of the Satanic Panic but adapted for the digital age. Mike Kosper highlights the symbiotic relationship between deep-seated fears about child protection and the perpetuation of unfounded conspiracies, noting, "The conspiracy theory becomes a meme. They are the consequences that are out of sight, out of mind."

8. January 6th Capitol Attack: A Culmination of Deep-Seated Fears

• Capitol Riot ([93:07–105:26]): The episode culminates with a detailed examination of the January 6th Capitol attack, attributing its roots to the ideological remnants of the Satanic Panic and the NAR. Mike Kosper connects the participation of over 60 NAR leaders at the event, noting their belief in a spiritual battle to protect Donald Trump from perceived satanic forces. The use of symbols like the shofar and chants of spiritual warfare illustrate the enduring influence of these conspiratorial beliefs. Rebecca Sebastian reflects on the human tendency to craft narratives that simplify complex realities into battles of good versus evil, warning of the dangerous consequences when such myths are acted upon.

9. Reflections on the Enduring Legacy

• Consequences and Lessons ([105:26–112:12]): In the concluding segments, the hosts emphasize the real human costs of the Satanic Panic and its modern iterations. They juxtapose the mythic evil portrayed in conspiracies against the tangible suffering of victims like the West Memphis Three and law enforcement officers injured during the Capitol riot. Mike Kosper poignantly states, "We did reach out to Mike Warnke for comment. He didn't respond. ... But in January 6th, we saw the culmination of these fears turned violent." The episode ends with a somber reminder of the importance of discerning truth from myth to prevent history from repeating its most painful chapters.

Key Takeaways:

• Historical Impact: The Satanic Panic had profound and lasting effects on individuals and communities, leading to wrongful accusations and convictions.

• Political Mobilization: The fears and narratives from the Satanic Panic era were co-opted by evangelical leaders to galvanize political movements, significantly influencing American politics.

• Modern Conspiracy Theories: Contemporary movements like QAnon have evolved from the Satanic Panic, leveraging digital platforms to propagate unfounded conspiracies with real-world consequences.

• Human Psychology: The episode underscores a fundamental human tendency to create and believe in myths as coping mechanisms for fear and uncertainty, often leading to dangerous outcomes.

Notable Quotes:

• Rebecca Sebastian ([03:33]): "The thing I can't imagine is getting that knock at your door, and in the blink of an eye, your kids are taken away, your newborn baby gets taken away. And for what? For lies? For total fiction?"

• Mike Warnke ([14:12]): "I'm a comedian. I can't help but hear echoes of what we see in the media today."

• Damien Echols ([94:26]): "QAnon is a prophetic conspiracy movement that claims... Patriots were being informed of this through, I'm sorry, rhetorical questions."

• Mike Kosper ([10:57]): "But conspiracy theories and moral panics thrive on something more than just the reality of evil."

This episode serves as a critical reflection on how unfounded fears can morph into powerful societal forces, shaping politics and individual lives long after the initial hysteria has faded.

Transcript

[Mike Kosper]

This episode is brought to you in part by the Apologetics Guy show, the podcast that helps you find clear answers to tough questions about Christianity. Learn to explain your faith with courage and compassion. Join Moody Bible Institute Professor Dr. Michel Del Rosario@ apologeticsguy.com.

[Mike Warnke]

What if you could see firsthand how God's moving across the globe right right now? Christianity Today's global initiative shares powerful untold stories of faith from Latin America and Africa, Asia, Europe and elsewhere. Discover a fuller view of God's kingdom at one kingdom. ChristianityToday.com.

[Mike Kosper]

This is CT Media.

[Rebecca Sebastian]

A note to listeners, this story contains sensitive content, including sexual abuse, child murder, and dark spiritual themes. It may not be suitable for all listeners.

[Mike Kosper]

So you've made it all the way.

[Rebecca Sebastian]

To episode eight, our big finale.

[Mike Kosper]

Let's not say big just yet. We don't want to raise expectations too high.

[Rebecca Sebastian]

Forever the optimist. Okay, let's tell people who we are.

[Mike Kosper]

All right. I'm Mike Kosper.

[Rebecca Sebastian]

Rebecca. I'm Rebecca Sebastian. And we're the producers of Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.

[Mike Kosper]

And we wanted to start this episode off a little different. Rebecca and I have each found quotes.

[Rebecca Sebastian]

From both past and present, relative, present.

[Mike Kosper]

We're going to read them to each other and guess whether they come from the era of the Satanic panic, which is roughly 1981 to 1994, give or take a year, or if they come from some other time. Now, some of these are going to be word for word, some of these are going to be paraphrased. That'll kind of make sense as we go along. Rebecca, why don't you go first?

[Rebecca Sebastian]

Okay, here's the first one. And this is from a news report. A man and his wife were accused of belonging to a sprawling pedophile network that worshiped the devil and sacrificed children and animals in cemeteries at night.

[Mike Kosper]

I mean, that sounds very obviously like the Satanic panic, right?

[Rebecca Sebastian]

But when and where do you think it's from?

[Mike Kosper]

It sounds like the Austin case. We talked about this on an earlier episode. Fran and Dan Keller.

[Rebecca Sebastian]

No, it's actually the Scoda case, which took place in Italy in 1997, about three years after the panic had essentially died out in the US So Federico Scoda and his wife were accused of being part of a Satanic cabal. They became known in Italy as the Devils of Lower Modena. The case led to 16 children being taken away from their parents and sent to social services. One of the moms, a single mother, died of suicide after she was placed under house arrest. A priest who was falsely Accused and threatened with prosecution, dropped dead of a heart attack. And Skoda and his wife had their three year old and infant children taken away. His wife actually gave birth a few months later, and their baby was taken away from them in the delivery room. They never saw their kids again, and Skoda went to jail for 11 years. Another couple arrested in 98 were in a legal battle to defend themselves until 2014. And that husband, Covezi Morselli, died a few months before a court found them innocent. While all of this on accusations that sound circumstantially, eerily similar to the McMartin case, single social worker coerced confessions out of these children. One medical expert identifying one child as a victim of abuse, with several others saying there was no evidence of abuse whatsoever.

[Mike Kosper]

The thing I can't imagine is getting that knock at your door, and in the blink of an eye, your kids are taken away, your newborn baby gets taken away. And for what? For lies? For total fiction?

[Rebecca Sebastian]

Yeah. And one last note. In 2017, an Italian podcast called the Lino delved into this story and surfaced three child victims from the cases. All three now say they believe the accusations were false or coerced. And one was the daughter of the mother who died of suicide, and she said, quote, made everything up.

[Mike Kosper]

Okay, so that's awful. And it's a reminder that these stories have consequences that stretch very much to today.

[Rebecca Sebastian]

Right. And not just an American phenomenon. I mean, even more recent than that was the Amanda Knox story. An American in Italy who got accused of a murder in 2007. And in all of the papers and press around that, she was called a she devil, and they thought it was some kind of sexual, ritualistic killing when it wasn't.

[Mike Kosper]

Okay, here's my first one. This is a paraphrase of an eyewitness account. They conspired to chase the innocent child out of the world, hunting him, holding him fast, cutting his throat, and throwing him into a pit. Sheesh.

[Rebecca Sebastian]

Okay. I mean, we've literally read a dozen stories like this from the Panic. Which is why I'm going to say this is not the Panic.

[Mike Kosper]

Correct. Do you want to hear the original?

[Rebecca Sebastian]

I guess.

[Mike Kosper]

Okay, I have to do a voice for this. So here we go. From then forth, the Jews conspired this innocent out of this world to chase this cursed Jew, him hunt and held him fast and cut his throat, and in a pit him cast. O cursed folk of Herod all, what may your evil intent now avail. That's, of course, Geoffrey Chaucer, the Prioress's Tale, which is Part of the Canterbury Tales, published first in 1387.

[Rebecca Sebastian]

Amazing accent, Mike.

[Mike Kosper]

So, yeah, well, I watched a lot of Monty Python as a kid and I listened to. The rest is history. So, Tom Holland, that was for you. Anyway, this is all very much in line with the blood libels of the Middle Ages. In this case, the prioress is telling the story of a Christian boy who was overheard singing a Marian hymn, which incited an angry Jewish mob to murder him. Other blood libels, the more famous ones, have the Jews killing Christian kids, draining their blood and baking it into matzah bread. Hence the blood in blood libel.

[Rebecca Sebastian]

Oh, okay then.

[Mike Kosper]

All right, your turn.

[Rebecca Sebastian]

All right, this is a summary, and this is just awful. So even though we had the warning up front.

[Mike Kosper]

Warning again.

[Rebecca Sebastian]

Warning again. So the question for you is satanic panic, meaning 80s, 90s or some other time. In this case, it's the story of a woman accusing a group of Catholic priests of being part of a secret cult that was torturing and murdering children. They would also lure young women to become nuns, ritually sexually assault them, and upon the birth of their children, would baptize them and immediately murder them.

[Mike Kosper]

So, again, you have stories like this in the Satanic Panic. But this kind of sounds like something that might have happened during the Protestant Reformation.

[Rebecca Sebastian]

Almost. It is post Reformation, but a little more recent than Calvin and Luther. This is From Maria Monk's 1836 memoir, Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk. What's fascinating is that this memoir is kind of like Jay's journal or go ask Alice or Lauren Strafford's memoir. Complete fiction written out of anti Catholic sentiment. But it also has similarities to the ideas of the panic, the sense that this cabal of priests had supernatural powers. At one point, she writes, I really believe that the priests were acquainted with my thoughts and often stood in great awe of them. They often told me they had power to strike me dead at any moment.

[Mike Kosper]

You know, it makes me think. I remember seeing Mike Warnke as a little kid, and it absolutely terrified me. One of the things from that night, and this was like 35 years ago, one of the things that stuck with me was this story he told about a young woman who was seeking help at a church, and she was trying to escape a Satanic cult. They kept telling her that she was safe, and every time they said the word safe, she'd start screaming. Eventually, someone at the church got a hold of Mike Warnke, and he said he had to explain to them over the phone that Satanists, because they commune with evil spirits, they have A kind of supernatural knowledge of the present. They would know where this girl was. And they indoctrinate you into this when you're in the cult by teaching you that the word safe is an acronym standing for Satan always finds everyone.

[Rebecca Sebastian]

Acronyms are not just for corporations. That is really creepy.

[Mike Kosper]

Right? I mean, and again, just imagine hearing that at church when you're seven. At church.

[Rebecca Sebastian]

Yeah. Amazing. Love that. For you.

[Mike Kosper]

Anyway, it's that parallel again. The cabal, the evil group, the kind of shadowy, supernatural knowledge and power.

[Rebecca Sebastian]

Should we do a couple more?

[Mike Kosper]

Yeah, but let's go lightning round on the next two.

[Rebecca Sebastian]

Okay, go.

[Mike Kosper]

Okay, direct quote. They're in the habit of eating and devouring the children, for they offer to devils or otherwise kill the children that they don't devour.

[Rebecca Sebastian]

Okay, since we haven't had one yet, I'm going to say panic.

[Mike Kosper]

Actually, no. This is an excerpt from a witch hunting manual. Now, I was not aware that there was such a thing as a witch hunting manual. Found this out in the research. The manual was called Malleus Maleficarum. It was written by Heinrich Kramer and published in 1487.

[Rebecca Sebastian]

I have so many questions.

[Mike Kosper]

Lightning round, though. Okay, go.

[Rebecca Sebastian]

Okay. This is short, but needs a little explanation. It's an exchange from a trial transcript. The defendant's on the dock being questioned about exercising satanic influence. Now, what's interesting is that the judge's question implies the guilt of the defendant. The judge asks her, why do you hurt these children? And the defendant rejects the premise and says, I do not hurt them. I scorn it. And she says she is, quote, falsely accused. So, panic or not panic?

[Mike Kosper]

Well, again, I want to say panic because we haven't had one, but the word scorn sounds like the Puritans and I might have a cheat on this one. So I'm going to say not panic.

[Rebecca Sebastian]

You're right. Not panic. It's from the trial of Sarah Good, one of the defendants in the Salem witch trials of 1692. What's your cheat?

[Mike Kosper]

I actually played Hanging Judge Hawthorne in the Crucible at New Albany high school in 1998.

[Rebecca Sebastian]

And you remember that line, hey, I.

[Mike Kosper]

Won an award, Best Supporting Actor for our Drama Society that year.

[Rebecca Sebastian]

Of course you did.

[Mike Kosper]

Okay, so the point of all of this, though, is that while there's so much about the panic that's uniquely American and specific to that moment, there's an underlying theme that's so much broader.

[Rebecca Sebastian]

Save the Children.

[Mike Kosper]

Right. Which was the name of the campaign against Equal Opportunity Housing and employment for gay people in Miami in the 1970s, you know, the decade before this panic.

[Rebecca Sebastian]

Right. So today on the show, we wanna look at this idea that whatever the panic was, the undercurrents of the panic didn't start in the 1980s, or for that matter, the 1960s. It's perhaps as old as civilization, this idea that the most innocent among us are being preyed upon by some evil other that's out there in the shadows. But to be sure, evil, when it manifests in the world, does target children. Children get abused, they get trafficked. And when dictators, tyrants and totalitarians come to power, they do use children to punish their enemies.

[Mike Kosper]

Child predators are also real. But conspiracy theories and moral panics thrive on something more than just the reality of evil. They take our knowledge of evil, our natural fear of someone harming our kids, and they focus it on something, a shadowy cabal, a racial or ethnic group or a group of political outsiders, motivating us to their ends with fear and suspicion. The Satanic panic largely ended in the United States around 1994, but its undercurrents and consequences are still with us. Us. The ability to motivate the masses with this message, they're coming for our children continues to be a powerful political force in our world. And while most of us moved on from the stories of satanic ritual abuse, many others, child victims and the falsely accused, can't ever leave it behind from Christianity Today. I'm Mike Kosper and you're listening to Devil in the Deep Blue Sea. This season, we're looking at the Satanic panic and how chasing phantoms distracted us from real devils in our midst. Today's episode, the big finale. Forgetting what happened.

[Damien Echols]

Hold of me and.

[Mike Kosper]

Said, run, run, run away from the reaper.

[Rebecca Sebastian]

Join me. But you've spun around.

[Mike Kosper]

It didn't take long for the Satanic panic to fade from memory. Despite it being the obsessive topic of conversation on daytime television, late night news, and countless articles, most people quietly moved on, at least the ones who could.

[Mike Warnke]

What's interesting, with comets, they enter into the atmosphere, they flame, and you can see them streaking across the sky. But at the end, they just fall to the ground as a rock. So that's basically what happened to me.

[Mike Kosper]

That's Mike Warnke in a podcast interview from 2024. He sounds different, older. He's nearly 80 now, but more than that, his tone changed. It's reflective. It almost sounds like he's acknowledging his rock bottom. Warnke, of course, became famous after claiming to be a former Satanic high priest who turned into A Jesus freak. After decades of celebrity status, millions of dollars in ticket and album sales, he was exposed for falsifying his whole story in 1992 by journalists John Trott and Mike Hertenstein. Their investigation also detailed his moral failings and financial misconduct. Warnke's reputation, as he put it, like a comet hitting earth. And in this interview on the podcast One Degree of Andy, he reflects on what went wrong.

[Mike Warnke]

Well, sort of the thing about it is, is you get to the place where you think the rules don't, they don't apply to you.

[Mike Kosper]

Right.

[Mike Warnke]

You know, because I'm Mike Warking, so all of these, these, these, these pedestrian bougie kind of rules, they don't apply to me because I'm, I'm a comet. I'm different, I'm, I'm weird. I'm, you know, I've made an entire career out of being crazy as a loon. So, you know. Yeah, and so that gets you in trouble. You get, you get yourself into situations that a person who is preaching the gospel should never get themselves into. I live in a small house in, in Modesto, California. I basically live off my pension from the VA and, and, and Social Security. And you know, once in a while we have a couple of people, we have a couple of churches that send us something every once in a while. But the whole idea of that, I don't even touch money anymore. I don't even get a salary anymore, ever. At all. It's all handled by other people. I don't want, I don't want to know. So. Because I don't understand money anyhow, I don't get it.

[Mike Kosper]

If you didn't know he was accused of taking nearly half his ministry's revenue as income, or that the IRS revoked Warrenke Ministries tax exempt status, you might think he's just another celebrity who mismanaged sudden wealth and got a little too used to the A list treatment. He makes no mention of the alleged affairs, his multiple divorces, accusations of domestic violence, or allocating ministry resources that were meant for recovering drug addicts and ex Satanists to himself. And when he does talk about the past and the occult, the stories are vague, less demonic, more generic.

[Mike Warnke]

The switch from the Catholic Church to the things that I was involved in in Satanism and stuff. It wasn't that much of a leap because a lot of the terminology and a lot of the worship styles were the same. Yeah, because the enemy, the enemy is not creative. So the enemy doesn't come up with his own stuff. He, he, he, he twists and Perverts, things that are already there.

[Mike Kosper]

Yeah.

[Mike Warnke]

So. And we have the Catholic Mass, we have the Black Mass. Yeah, Communion in the Catholic Church. Then you have a, a twisted kind of communion in the, in the Satanic Church. Pagans, they have all these rituals and almost every occult kind of thing has rituals. Even New Age stuff has rituals, rituals, rituals. Because if you can touch a thing and if you can see a thing and if you can taste a thing, not just hear a thing, then you're you. The chances of you remembering that are much greater. And so using all the senses that became. That was a very important part of the occult. And I had learned to be open to that stuff.

[Mike Kosper]

You know, Satanism and stuff. Gone are the lurid tales of ritual abuse and blood sacrifice, the three inch scars, the six inch nails sharpened for fighting, which remains my favorite ridiculous detail of his story. Also gone are the dismembered babies, the wine and urine communion chalice. He now makes it all sound so distant, so blurry, so beside the point. Warnke never faced criminal charges, but he did face consequences. Most of his ministry partners, including most of his publishers and record labels, they cut ties with him. But while they quit him, Warnke wasn't ready to quit ministry. So in 1993, a spiritual advisory council formed to oversee his restoration. Internal reports followed in 95, 96 and 97. A 38 page document outlining this process is still available on his website, mikewarnke.org don't worry, we read it so you don't have to. And here's the TL doctor straight from the source on what they were trying to A board of spiritual overseers is recommended to guide his restoration. Mike's ministry is still seen as a voice worth hearing. That line raises the if multiple affairs, credible allegations of sexual harassment in the workplace, allegations of domestic violence, allegations of subject substance abuse, well documented financial misdeeds, and 20 years of lying about being part of the Church of Satan. If that's not enough to disqualify a person from ministry, what is? The restoration committee's document outlines steps for accountability, discusses his finance and his moral failings in detail, but it downplays the lies that built his platform. In fact, the council pushes back on Cornerstone's reporting, calling it less than fair in representing the truth and influenced by editorial bias. Warnke, for his part, doesn't exactly admit to deception, but he doesn't deny it either. Here's an excerpt from his own I stand by my testimony of former satanic involvement. I confess to some exaggeration and Embellishment in the Satan cellar. The book was meant to be a dramatic narrative, not an academic academic account. Some changes were made to protect people and memories are just that. My memories, just because they don't match someone else's doesn't make them false. I am guilty of some embellishing, but that doesn't make the facts untrue. While artistic license in memoir is one thing, Warnke wasn't just telling stories to sell books. He was telling them to convert people to shape belief, to cast out darkness in the name of Jesus. Regarding his stand up comedy, he also said, I also exaggerated in concerts not to deceive, but to entertain. I'm a comedian. I can't help but hear echoes of what we see in the media today. Comedians who don't want to be held to the same standards of truth that journalists are, who nonetheless take on the mantle of of being the new media and spreading conspiracy theories and misinformation of all kinds. When confronted, they smear their accusers, accusing them of credentialism. And they hide behind being just a comedian when you want your story to point to the way, the truth and the life. Setting the stage with lies is more than just embellishment. It's misdirection with potentially lasting consequences. When I read Morency's statement, I think about a comment pastor and writer Jared Wilson once said. He said, what you win them with is what you win them to. So what happens when a person discovers that they were won to the faith with a series of lies? I find myself asking the same question at the end of the Warnke story that I ask at the end of every pastoral controversy. Warnke's sins weren't that easily concealed. And as is evident in Trott and Hertenstein's reporting, many people knew about them. They knew there were serious issues and said nothing. So was their belief that his ministry was too successful to fail. That the ends, the record sales, the decisions made at his concerts, the public witness on Larry King? Did all of that justify the means? The lies, the affairs, the financial mismanagement? We did reach out to Mike Warnicke for comment. He didn't respond. If you want to, you can read all 38 pages of that document. We'll put it in the show notes. Warnke remains in ministry to this day. His life appears more modest than during his glory days. And while his actions may have cost him fame and fortune, it never cost him his freedom. The same cannot be said for others caught up in the satanic panic, including Damien Echols. Jesse Misskelley and Jason Baldwin, better known as the West Memphis Three. We introduced their story on our first episode. Recently, in a rare interview, Damian Echols appeared on the Truth and Justice podcast to talk about the current status of their case.

[Mike Warnke]

One of the things that really also breathed life into me in prison was a Zen master from Japan, Shoto Harada Roshi. He's the head abbott of this 300 year old temple in Japan. He used to fly back and forth from Japan to prison to visit me in Arkansas. And he's in his 80s now. You know, this is not a young man anymore. I think he's like 83, 84 now. Who knows how much longer he has left? I would very much like before this man dies to be able to go over to Japan and I'm not able to do that because I have a criminal record.

[Mike Kosper]

If you think back to episode one, we explored how the tail end of the satanic panic informed and shaped the narrative around the 1993 murders of three 8 year old boys, Stevie Branch, Christopher Byers and Michael Moore. We also described how with zero physical evidence, Echols, Baldwin and Misskelley were convicted. Baldwin and Misskelley were given life sentences. Because he was 18 at the time the crimes were committed. Echols was given the death penalty. They filed appeal after appeal and time and again their appeals were denied and their convictions upheld. By the mid-2000s, though, new DNA evidence had cast serious doubt on the original convictions. None of the evidence from the crime scene contained DNA matching Echols, Baldwin or Misskelley. It did, however, point to people who were never charged or seriously investigated by the police, including family members of the three boys. A series of documentaries about the case created a groundswell of public support. And by the late 2000s, the tide had changed and the public was now on their side. Celebrities, activists and legal experts joined the fight to free the West Memphis Three.

[Mike Warnke]

Almost 16 years ago, I believe I saw the documentary Paradise Lost that was on hbo. I got involved in the case thinking that there was maybe some way I could make a difference. I had no idea that 17 years later we'd even be at this point, but certainly had no idea that it would have taken this long. But we are in a good spot now and we've got evidence even in the last two, three years that we believe will exonerate these kids. And we're just asking, we're doing this kind of thing now just to bring notoriety back to the case and really impress upon the argument, Arkansas State Supreme Court, that we get a fair trial and a good look good, careful.

[Mike Kosper]

Look at this evidence that has been.

[Mike Warnke]

This case that has been so carefully prepared.

[Mike Kosper]

In 2010, the Arkansas Supreme Court ordered a new evidentiary hearing. This time, for the first time in the 17 year history of the case, that evidence would be heard by a new judge. For 17 years, they dealt with the same judge who'd sent them away for life and death. Several pressures collided in advance of that hearing. One was the economic pressures on the prosecutor's office. If a new trial was going to happen, it would be expensive. The West Memphis Three would have access to a much better team of lawyers and experts. On top of that, the evidence used to convict them the first time, thin as it was to begin with, was even thinner now. Witnesses had recanted. Forensic evidence wouldn't be interpreted now as it was then. At the same time, on the other side of the courtroom, the West Memphis Three had to deal with another pressure. Echols had run out of appeals for his sentence, and his date with lethal injection was approaching. So the prosecutors offered them a deal. In August 2011, the men agreed to enter Alford pleas, one of the most perplexing legal maneuvers in our criminal justice system. Essentially, taking an Alford plea allows an individual to legally maintain their innocence while also acknowledging that the state has enough evidence to convict them again, and therefore must enter a plea of guilty in court. If you're confused, you're in good company. Here's Dan Stidham again, we heard from on our first episode. And who represented Jesse Misskelley through his first trial, 1993 and 94.

[Mike Warnke]

It's an oxymoron in the law. It actually goes against everything they teach you in law school and jurisprudence. You either did it or you didn't. But an Alpha plea normally would occur when the state refuses to give up because they don't want to pay millions of dollars of reparations or they don't want to upset the legacies of the people who were responsible for putting innocent people behind bars for the best years of their lives. 18 years and 78 days.

[Mike Kosper]

While Echols, Ms. Kelly and Baldwin never wavered from maintaining their innocence, they simply could not endure the uncertainty of what was next. They accepted the deal, and with time served, all were released immediately. After 18 years behind bars, with Echols largely in solitary confinement and on death row, they were free to an extent. They were out of prison, but they were walking around now as convicted murderers, felons, with all the legal restrictions and travel restrictions that come with such a conviction. To this day, they haven't stopped working to prove their innocence. Right now, there's DNA evidence that hasn't been tested and new technologies that offer a much better ability to extract DNA than what was available even a few years ago. The Arkansas state prosecutor has approved the testing, but for reasons nobody quite understands, it's been postponed and delayed several times over the last couple of years. When we began working on this show almost a year ago, it was reportedly about to happen at any moment. If you feel compelled to learn more about this case and ongoing efforts to support the West Memphis Three, the Innocence Project has a page dedicated to their story and it's updated regularly. We'll link it in our show notes. Meanwhile, this case didn't end with their convictions nor with their release. The other side of falsely accusing three metalhead teenagers of satanic murder is that whoever did kill Stevie Branch, Christopher Byers and Michael Moore walked free, and may be walking free to this day that hangs heavily on the consciences of their families as well as the West Memphis Three. On a regular basis on X formerly known as Twitter, Jason Baldwin posts the boys pictures and offers his hopes that one day their true killer will be brought to justice. The boys families and many players in this case, including our guest Dan Stidham, are haunted by the 1994 outcome. To this day and again, many people who took in the talk shows, salacious memoirs, the tabloid news about the panic, they were all able to move on. But moving on turns out to be a luxury and a privilege that not all could afford. The panic didn't just destroy reputations and cost people years in prison. It left an indelible mark on children, too, children who were led to believe they'd been part of satanic ritual abuse. Some of those kids still believe it. I remember being in what felt like.

[Michael Fanone]

A tunnel and having pictures of what.

[Mike Kosper]

To me I thought was the devil on the wall.

[Damien Echols]

I don't know if it was a bull's head or the devil, but to.

[Rebecca Sebastian]

Me as a kid, it was the devil.

[Mike Kosper]

And there being like. Like candles off the side, like a.

[Damien Echols]

Light, you know, off the wall.

[Mike Kosper]

And it was dark. I remember going downstairs to get into it. That was Elizabeth Cioffi, a former McMartin student, recounting her memory in a 2019 Oxygen documentary. It seems the weight of those memories, real or imagined, are a brutal load to carry. And what about those lucky enough to be accused but were able to avoid a conviction? The main defendants, Peggy McMartin Buckey and her son Ray Buckey, from the McMartin Preschool case, were thrust into the national spotlight and accused of the most heinous acts imaginable. After the most expensive trial in American history, they and the other teachers were acquitted or had their charges dropped, but their reputations never recovered. They lost their homes, their livelihoods, endured years of public shame and lived under a cloud of suspicion that never fully lifted, to say nothing of the time that they'll never get back that was spent behind bars awaiting trial. Here's one of the McMartin teachers, Ms. Smith, in a 198760 Minutes interview.

[Rebecca Sebastian]

Where do I start? During the time I was in jail, the custody of my children were taken away from me. During my jail jail time, I called.

[Mike Kosper]

Them on the phone when what times I could because that privilege was not.

[Rebecca Sebastian]

Given to me very often.

[Mike Warnke]

Where were they?

[Mike Kosper]

With my brother, the McMartin Preschool, the West Memphis Three. Mike Warnke these are just a few standout stories that transcend the satanic panic and remain in the public consciousness. But there are plenty more. Our own listeners have sent us dozens of anecdotes and stories from their own towns and local churches. Most of these didn't make the national news. Some of them didn't even make local headlines. But they made an indelible mark on the minds of those who noticed them. Often the satanic panic shows up today as a punchline in Family Guy or the Simpsons, this weird moment in our history where someone, not us, of course, got caught up in a conspiratorial urban myth. But part of the reason we wanted to tell this story was because it had an actual gravity and there were many people who were crushed under its force. The falsely accused, the falsely convicted, the misled, the children. And here in 2025, with new fears, new platforms and new narrators, it's not hard to imagine it happening all over again. And one need not look far to see that in some ways it has. But this time we didn't need a devil to wreak havoc. We just needed a story and people willing to believe it. We'll be right back.

[Rebecca Sebastian]

This message comes from the Enneagram and Marriage Podcast. Have you wanted to improve your relationship, but you're running out of ideas, time or even interest? I'm Krista Hardin, the host of the Enneagram and Marriage Podcast, and I've dedicated the last two decades of my life and career on couples research, integrating healthy faith practices with the best of marriage research and nuanced personality typing, couples from all over the world are finding more value centered joy in bringing healthy desire, love and fun back into their bond together again. Or for the very first time as they work strategically and intentionally on repatterning their love in healthy ways. Join us on Mondays or Wednesdays to listen and learn more about how your life and relationship can truly think, thrive together.

[Mike Kosper]

I'm convinced the story of the West Memphis Three contributed to the end of the Satanic Panic. The story attracted a level of attention that simply didn't allow the theory of ritual abuse to avoid intense scrutiny. And under that scrutiny, the theory didn't hold up. I can't help but wonder if people in general, and the media in particular lost their taste for the narrative once it sent Damien Echols to death row, especially if they had doubts in their mind about the case in the first place. In Christian circles around the same time, Warnke was exposed shortly before him, Lauren Stratford was too. Their stories of covens meeting in graveyards and of a wealthy global cabal trafficking in drugs and human beings, it was suddenly much more dubious. In our last episode, you heard from Ken Lanning, the expert on these cases inside the FBI at the time, and he described how the fiction of the Panic was a problem for law enforcement. By distracting investigators and prosecutors with these stories, it hindered their ability to follow evidence, solve crimes and prosecute predators. In each of these instances, we see the same thing. The stories presented couldn't hold up to real scrutiny. But I think there's another reason the Panic faded from the mainstream. It had served its purposes perfectly. Now, to be sure, I'm not presenting this as a conspiracy theory, and I know that's what everyone says right before they hand out the tinfoil hats. But as they also say, before handing out the hats, hear me out for just a second. The panic erupts at a tenuous moment for evangelicalism. As we've pointed out earlier on the show, many evangelicals liked Jimmy Carter, liked having one of their own in the White House. And what followed in the election of 1980, with the rise of the Moral Majority and the Christian Right, was a reaction to Carter's election. In 76. Ronald Reagan deliberately courted evangelicals and managed to galvanize them, winning big in 1980. By then, Jerry Falwell Sr. Had founded the Moral Majority, America's largest Protestant denomination. The Southern Baptist Convention was in the midst of a reformation of its own, as conservatives sought to shift the balance of power in their direction inside the denomination's major institutions. One of the issues that strengthened evangelical ties to the GOP was the pro life movement. When Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, evangelicals had disparate ideas about abortion by 1976, the SBC had made the pro life cause part of their denominational platform, and Reagan used the issue to drive a wedge in his favor in his campaign in 1980. The panic then begins during the first year of his term. Now again, no tinfoil hats here. No one planned for this. No one reached back in time to make all of the things that preceded the panic happen so they could take advantage of it in the 1980s. Mike Warnke's first book came out almost a decade earlier. His first record was a hit in 1976. Jay's journal, the falsified memoir of a teenage Satanist, was published in 78. Michelle remembers. The book that made recovered memories of satanic ritual abuse plausible for hundreds of thousands of readers was published on November 1, 1980, three days before election Day. If all of this was orchestrated in some smoke filled room, well, a tip of the old tinfoil cap is due to whoever pulled that off. But it's hard to imagine that anyone not Bornke, not Michelle Smith, not Beatrice Sparks, author of Jay's Journal, no one could have predicted how much this narrative would grip the hearts of Americans in the years to follow. But while no one planned this moral panic, people certainly took the opportunity to ride its wave. So when the panic does erupt a few years later with haunting stories about the secret Satanist next door, evangelical leaders might not have fabricated the stories or coordinated their spread, but they certainly leaned into them, amplified them, used them to make clear that Christians were in a life and death cosmic struggle for the soul of their nation and their children. Inside the Southern Baptist Convention, Patterson and Pressler were pushing a back to the Bible agenda, pushing against theological drift around the inerrancy of scripture and women's ordination. When you listen to their speeches, read their sermons, or their memoirs about that time, it becomes clear that they made this argument not primarily by defending their own position, but by making a slippery slope argument. As Paul Pressler once put it, if you start saying there's an error in Scripture, where do you stop? Every moral concept, every doctrinal concept, is at the mercy of humanistic rationalist thinking. Specifically, as they saw it, if you cracked open the door for women's ordination, you were just a few steps away from endorsing homosexuality and gay marriage, an argument you can still hear prominent Baptists make to this day. Here, for instance, is the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Albert Mohler. The United Methodist Church years ago decided that it would ordain women as pastors and later as bishops. Now I believe that's contrary to Scripture. And yet you had conservative United Methodists who basically been at peace with the interpretation of scripture that allows them to look at certain passages that make very clear that the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture, and they found a way to get around those passages. I'm just going to suggest that what the liberals have done in the current.

[Mike Warnke]

United Methodist Church at its General Convention is apply pretty much the same kind of rule to the issue of gender, homosexuality, same sex marriage, you name it. If you adopt a system that allows.

[Mike Kosper]

You to get around the plain teachings.

[Mike Warnke]

Of scripture in one area, you are.

[Mike Kosper]

Going to have a very hard time closing the door on someone else using your same argument on a different issue. Regardless of one's views on women's ordination, it's not hard to see how in 1980, this argument was much more powerful than it is now. There was a cultural discomfort with LGBT folks that has changed dramatically in the past four decades. And Pressler, who has since been credibly accused of serial sexual harassment and assault of young men during this time, was preying on that discomfort to mobilize Baptists. That same strategy, tapping into fear, was present from the very beginning of the religious rite. Here's a pastor named James Robison speaking at a rally for Ronald Reagan in 1980.

[Mike Warnke]

I'm sick and tired of hearing about all of the radicals and the perverts and the liberals and the leftists and the communists coming out of the closets. It's time for God's people to come out of the closets, out of the churches, and change America. We must do it.

[Mike Kosper]

So, yeah, that's probably not a turn of phrase that would get used today. I wouldn't bet on seeing that on a Vance campaign t shirt in 2028. But hey, anything is possible. In any case, Robinson's speech is an interesting artifact. He is pleading with evangelicals because as a political entity, they're on the sidelines in the closet, as he puts it, not engaged with American politics, or at least not engaged as evangelicals as a unified voting bloc. The enemies he cites are the usual suspects for conservatives, the Marxists, the Communists, the liberals, the people driving the sexual revolution. And on one hand, it makes a ton of sense that Christians would mobilize against these things. Marxism and its descendants are, at their core, a materialist and atheist ideology. The sexual revolution destabilized the nuclear family and was especially bad for young, vulnerable women. Communism wasn't just threatening geopolitical war. It sought to undermine American prosperity and the call to action worked. Ronald Reagan managed to capture evangelical voters in 1980 and again in 1984. It was clear evangelicals loved him. 1988, then, was a real test for evangelicals. Were they capable of aligning with the party when Reagan, the man who brought them together, was no longer in the race? In the Republican primary, things looked a little uncertain. A televangelist, Pat Robertson, got in the race, taking potshots at George H.W. bush for not being conservative enough for evangelical voters. Robertson managed a surprising and impressive second place finish in Iowa, which got the party's attention. But he fell to lower standing in subsequent races and eventually withdrew, throwing his own support behind bush. That May, 80% of evangelicals followed suit, and Bush won in the fall. In 1992, though, that support was wavering. Disappointment with a lack of movement on social issues or abortion and breaking his no new taxes pledge sent evangelicals looking elsewhere. About 3% of them moved across the aisle and voted for Bill Clinton, and another 15% voted for the independent candidate, Ross Perot. The GOP came roaring back in 1994, though in fact the overall electorate was reshaped by evangelical turnout that year. Religious conservatives made up 24% of the electorate in 92 and only about 18% in 1988. But in 1994, they were fully one third of all turnout. The result, which became known as the Republican Revolution, solidified an alliance between evangelicals and Republicans, with both mainstream conservatives and religious conservatives realizing that they needed one another if they wanted to have a winning coalition. And they've been pretty much joined at the hip ever since. It's always struck me as interesting that right at the moment the satanic panic collapses after a decade of fantastical terror about the Satanist next door, a narrative that had utility when trying to motivate evangelicals to join the party of the so called Moral Majority and see the culture war as a cosmic battle between good and evil. That narrative fades from view right about the same time. Evans evangelical loyalty to the GOP was formed in concrete at the same time that that political revolution is unfolding. The Southern Baptist Convention was going through a revolution of their own. And that time also fits squarely on top of the other two. The Conservative resurgence, which began in 1979, achieved its goals in 1992 and 93, 92 with the election of one of their own as the head of the denomination's executive committee, and 93 with the election of Albert Mohler as the president of the denomination's flagship seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Again, no tinfoil hats. Are implied here. And full disclosure, I consider myself a political conservative in the mold of the Reagan years. I was a pastor in a Southern Baptist church, and last I checked, I'm still a member in good standing of one. I've benefited much from the positive changes of the conservative resurgence, and I kind of miss Reaganite conservatism. I don't think any of this was planned or orchestrated, but it's fascinating to me that these two movements essentially emerge and achieve their goals in parallel with the timeline of the Satanic panic. There's one more plot point worth drawing out from this part of the story, unfortunately. James Robinson is also an example of another theme of this show, how chasing phantoms distracts us from other death, other evils that are happening right under our noses. When we're convinced evil is quote, unquote out there, it seems to inoculate us from noticing evil when it's right in front of us, when our friends and our partners of ministry are guilty of it. I remember telling you, when I grow up, I want to be like you. That voice you hear is Robert Morris, founding pastor of Gateway Church in South Lake, Texas, talking with his friend and mentor, James Robison, on his television show Life Today. It was recorded in the spring of 2024. At the time, Gateway was one of the largest and most influential churches in the country, with more than 20,000 attending services and another hundred thousand streaming online.

[Mike Warnke]

Then you met me as a teenager and Betty, how old were you? 18 years old.

[Mike Kosper]

And Debbie and I came to our home. Got to come to your home.

[Mike Warnke]

Okay, now, then you started working with me. How old were you?

[Mike Kosper]

I was 20 then.

[Mike Warnke]

So that's how many years back?

[Mike Kosper]

Well, then they'll know my age if I say that. 42. 42 years ago.

[Mike Warnke]

All right, well, you and I have walked together because you went with me at all those big crusades and I couldn't do all the high schools. You know, there were times when I'd be invited in high schools when I just talk to kids about living with respect for authority, with respect for truth and respect for one another and their morality and drugs and alcohol and all the things sexuality, out of control. But you started going to the schools for me because I couldn't keep up with all of them, with all the. I'm speaking at every Kiwanis club at all the different, various lodges, the women's clubs. I'm going to leadership meetings, and I'm. And so you went to the schools and you would turn all the kids out. It was amazing.

[Mike Kosper]

Just a Few months after this interview, on June 14, 2024, a woman named Cindy Clemenshire went public with allegations that Morris had sexually abused her beginning in December 1982. She was 12 years old at the time. Morris was 21, married and had a child. According to Clemenshire, the abuse continued until she told her parents in 1987 when she was 16 and her father confronted Morris saying that if he didn't step down from ministry he would be forced to inform law enforcement. At the time, Morris was a pastor on staff at Shady Grove Church in Grand Prairie, Texas and was also doing ministry with the James Robinson Evangelistic Association. He stepped down from his pastoral role and according to reporting from independent journalist Julie Royes, Morris worked in a call center for James Robison's ministry from July 1987 to July 1988. He returned to ministry at Shady Grove two years later, 1989. Morris claims to have done so with the blessing of Clemenshire's parents, which Cindy Clemesher disputes. One wonders though, regardless of whatever blessing he might have had on return, how the members of Shady Grove would have felt if their pastors had been transparent about Morris nearly five year abuse of a minor and his restoration after a two year hiatus. Along with sharing the stage at various ministry events and on Robison's TV show, James Robison was a member of Morris's church. When Clemensar's allegations became public, his ministry, Life Outreach International, released a statement in which they said the in the late 80s, Robert Morris joined James Robison Evangelistic association as the morning supervisor in the call center. His role included overseeing the daily administrative tasks of the call center. During his employment at jrea, Robert Morris duties did not include public speaking, nor was James Robison directly involved in professional counseling or formal restoration to ministry for Robert Morris. Before the recent media coverage, James Robinson was not aware of the specific details surrounding Robert Morris departure from full time vocational ministry at Shady Grove Church. Obviously, the goal of such a statement is to distance Robison from Morris sins, but as the audio we played earlier indicates, the statement simply isn't true. Julie Royes was able to surface multiple News items between 1981 and 1986 identifying Morris not as a call center manager but as a staff evangelist. And of course, no one would call 1981 the late 80s. When Royes asked Robinson's ministry to clarify based on her reporting, they acknowledged that he was employed by the JREA from January to May 1982, but went on to claim that he was not an employee of the organization again until July 1987 when he went to work at the call center. This contradicts the many articles that identify him as an evangelist for jrea, but is perhaps an indication that this work was as a volunteer or as an independent contractor and not an employee, something common in Christian nonprofits. We reached out to Robison's ministry for clarification about this discrepancy, but did not receive a response in time to include here. If we get one, we'll make mention of it in the show notes and link to it there. There's yet another layer of the story worth mentioning. In reporting on Morris, Royes also surfaced a story originally reported about James Robeson in 1990. According to that report, Robison had an affair with a young woman in 1980 who was employed at the time by his ministry and had been living with Robison's family. In that story, Robison's defenders stated that he had, quote, dealt with the issue in 1982 when he was delivered from demonic oppression. It was around the same time that Robison had parted ways with the Southern Baptist Church, his denomination, and began a ministry that was more charismatic, including faith healing, demonic deliverance. This, of course, was of surging interest at the time. This is when the charismatic movement is exploding in Southern California. John Wimber, founder of the Vineyard, was teaching his class Signs, Wonders and Church Growth at Fuller Seminary, something we mentioned in a previous episode. Deliverance ministry was still relatively new among evangelicals, as was much of the language and literature about spiritual warfare. So to sum this up then, Robison, a prominent national evangelical leader who rallied evangelicals to support the GOP against the progressive post sexual revolution culture of the left, was at the same time engaged in an affair with a young woman who worked in his ministry in 1980, a woman who lived under his roof and received her paychecks from him. So a woman at the weekend of a serious power differential. Morris, who was employed by Robinson at least for a time, and associated with him for his entire career, allegedly sexual abused a 12 year old in 19701982 and continued to abuse her for four and a half years. Both managed to successfully conceal their sins from public scrutiny for a long time and continued to engage in the culture wars. In 2016, both served on the Spiritual Advisory Council for Donald Trump's campaign for the presidency, and both served on his Evangelical Executive Advisory board during that first term. Trump distanced from Robeson after Robinson criticized him in 2022, and he distanced from Morris after the allegations of sexual abuse surfaced in 2024. That said, Robinson is hardly the only pastor who encountered demons in the 80s and had ties to the Trump campaign. In fact, the movement that gave us the theological framework for that demonology played a significant role in bringing Trump to office and in the events leading up to January 6, 2021. And in a strange echo of the panic, many who rioted inside the Capitol that day were motivated by a conspiracy theory about a cabal, powerful evil actors preying on our children. That story and the conclusion of the series right after the break.

[Mike Warnke]

I hope Mike is going to do the right thing. I hope so. I hope so. Because if Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election. All Vice President Pence has to do is send it back to the states to recertify and we become president. And you are that happiest people. Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us. And if he doesn't, that will be a sad day for our country.

[Mike Kosper]

January 6, 2021. President Donald Trump has been working since Election Day to overturn the outcome of the election.

[Mike Warnke]

Now it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, first, we're going to walk down, and I'll be there with you. We're going to walk down. We're going to walk down anyone you want. But I think right here, we're going to walk down to the Capitol.

[Rebecca Sebastian]

And.

[Mike Warnke]

We'Re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we're probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them, because you'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.

[Mike Kosper]

Prior to January 6, Trump had tried a number of strategies to contest the election results, including direct pressure on state officials.

[Mike Warnke]

We have won this election in Georgia based on all of this. And there's. There's nothing wrong with, with saying that, Brad. You know, I mean, having, having a. Correct. The people of Georgia are angry.

[Mike Kosper]

This audio is from Trump's phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Trump, of course, had lost Georgia, and in this call, he's pressuring Raffensperger to sort of do his part to change that.

[Mike Warnke]

You should want to have an accurate election, and you're a Republican, we believe.

[Michael Fanone]

But we do have an accurate election.

[Mike Warnke]

No, you don't. No, no, you don't. You don't have. You don't have. Not even close. You got. You're off by hundreds of thousands of votes. So, look, all I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more that we have because we won the state.

[Mike Kosper]

In spite of assurances from people like Raffensperger and other election officials all across the country, Trump and his surrogates continued to insist that the outcome of the 2020 election couldn't be trusted. Here's one of those surrogates. Former New York mayor turned Trump campaign lawyer Rudy Giuliani at the Four Seasons. Wait, that's actually the Four Seasons Total landscaping in Philadelphia. You probably remember what happened here. Anyway, Giuliani is attempting to cast doubts on the election results in Pennsylvania.

[Mike Warnke]

The city gets no better. The crime goes way through the roof. The riots. You have the police stand by and watch it. Not because of the police, because you have a mayor that lets them stand by and watch it. You got a district attorney who lets people go free. You are poorly served, ladies and gentlemen of Philadelphia. And then you got a political machine, mayors, mayors who let riots take place, district attorneys who set criminals free. I don't think they're going to care much about ballot fraud. This is outrageous. An enormously important contest with a very, very suspect method of voting. There was no security zero. The people of this city, people of this country have no assurance at all that those ballots were actually cast. They would have to have been almost unanimously cast for Joe Biden in order to catch up.

[Mike Kosper]

Of course, Giuliani's claims were as baseless as Trump's. And these press conferences, and there were many of them, were essentially just theatrics trying to whip up support and form a narrative. Among his base, the real battlegrounds were the courts, which is where election procedures and election laws are rightly contested. The Trump campaign filed 62 lawsuits, losing all but one. The single case they did win was over a procedural matter. It involved the amount of time allotted for first time voters to provide identification and cure their ballots. And that ruling in the Trump campaign's favor did almost nothing to affect the outcome in the state, which he lost by more than 80,000 votes. So after 61 failed lawsuits, Trump turned to a last ditch effort, the January 6th certification of the vote, which for our country's entire history has basically been a ceremonial affair, a sort of liturgy to federalism, where the states submit their electoral results to Congress and make the results official. The only way for Trump's scheme to work, of course, was to mobilize his most loyal followers, both in order to get them to apply pressure on their representatives and to show up in Mass on the 6th as a show of solidarity and force. But January 6th wasn't the first such rally. Trump's Christian supporters had shown up in the thousands just a few weeks earlier on December 12, 2020, for an event called the Jericho March.

[Mike Warnke]

Take out your phone, please, and go now to the website Jericho March.org.

[Mike Kosper]

The voice you hear now is radio host and author Eric Metaxas, speaking on stage at that Jericho March.

[Mike Warnke]

While you're going to Jericho march.org I've got an exciting announcement. There's a helicopter, helicopter that's going to be coming right over us. It's fortunately for us, it's Marine One. And Marine One is going to be carrying somebody you all know. I believe you've heard of the actor Danny DeVito. He's not going to be on Marine One, but you've heard of him. All right, we couldn't get Danny DeVito. He's not in on this. But we got somebody who is all in on what is happening here, and I believe it's the sitting President of the United States, Donald J. Trump.

[Mike Kosper]

The whole thing is pretty bizarre to watch, especially as an outsider. It featured speeches from a variety of right wing religious leaders, politicians, activists and influencers, including Michael Flynn, Mike Lindell, Abby Johnson and Kimberly Fletcher. There was also lots of prayer, all of it using the language of spiritual warfare. Here's one example, Father Keith Bramlidge, a priest who specializes in exorcism and deliverance ministry.

[Mike Warnke]

You realize we are in a spiritual battle. This cannot be solved by human means. God says if we drop to our knees, if we pray to him in a spirit of repentance, he will bless our nation. Do you believe it? Amen. Come, Holy Spirit, with your ninefold gifts and anoint us with your divine light, wisdom and power. Come, Lord Jesus, anoint us with your precious blood, freeing us from every snare and stronghold of the principalities and powers of darkness. O Mother of God, glorious and immaculate and ever Virgin Mary, come now and crush the head of the ancient serpent. Great Father St. Joseph, terror of demons, come and annihilate the enemies of our souls.

[Mike Kosper]

Two things important to remember as you hear this prayer to God, Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the archangels. First, the spiritual battle he's referring to isn't about Satan's work generally, but the belief that Satan had somehow orchestrated the stolen election in 2020. Second, it's fascinating to me to see what people can get over when politics are on the line. Evangelicals here, including some of the more Pentecostal and charismatic ones, have real theological differences with the Catholic Church, especially when it comes to things like praying to mediators other than Jesus, and yet they can get over it for this cause. Suppose when it comes to returning Trump to the White House, will take whatever help they can get, even if that help comes from the Archangel Michael and the perpetual Virgin Mother. Along with this, there was a lot of charismatic praise and worship and a ton of shofar blowing. Now, if you don't know what the shofar is, it's not typically used in Christian worship. It's more common in Jewish synagogues, though Pentecostal and charismatic churches have used them for years. A shofar is sort of a trumpet made of a ram's horn, and in this case it's invoked as a reference to the trumpets that were blasted that tore down the walls of Jericho in the Hebrew Bible. For attendees, that was the metaphorical goal. They believed that a great spiritual war was going on, and they were there to battle it with spiritual tools. The speakers of the Jericho March included two charismatic pastors, Cindy Jacobs and Lance Wallnau. And it's here that we find the threads that connect once again to the Satanic panic. Because while we can't look at the conservative resurgence or the formation of evangelicals as a right wing voting bloc as having some direct connection to the panic, it's hard to imagine Jacob's and Wallnau's spiritual tradition emerging without it. We talked about this a few episodes back. All of the literature and theology that came out around spiritual warfare and demonic deliverance, most of it coming from Fuller seminary in the 1980s. It was that deliverance theology that changed the course of James Robeson's ministry. In 1982, C. Peter Wagner, the scholar who helped create that theological framework, continued to develop his theology to explain what he was witnessing in the church worldwide after the 1980s. In particular, he was fascinated by and personally deeply affected by the growth of non denominational charismatic and Pentecostal churches, which were having an enormous influence in spite of their lack of structure or institutional support. He came to believe it was because of the result of a historically unique work of God, an outpouring of God's spirit and blessing with the goal of renewing and revitalizing the global church. Here's Matthew Taylor, a historian who you heard discussing Wagner on one of our previous episodes.

[Michael Fanone]

And then, in 1989, Wagner meets this woman, Cindy Jacobs.

[Mike Kosper]

That's the same Cindy Jacobs who delivered a speech by video at the Jericho March in 2020.

[Michael Fanone]

She identifies as a prophet. She is part of this growing movement called Fivefold Ministry, or the Apostles and Prophets movement. It's Based on Ephesians chapter 4 and this in Ephesians 4, the author of Ephesians lists five ministry gifts that Jesus gives to the church. Apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers. And in these charismatic circles, there had been a lot of talk for several decades by that point of we need apostles and prophets. Again. There were apostles and prophets in the early church. We don't have those today. The Holy Spirit is going to commission new apostles and prophets. And so Jacobs and Wagner, they're very into spiritual warfare. They're very in. And I mean, right this is 1989, the Frank Peretti novels had just come out. Within the last few years, they start experimenting with these ideas of apostles and prophets and spiritual warfare. And they pioneer a whole new paradigm of spiritual warfare that Wagner winds up labeling strategic level spiritual warfare. He's very much getting these ideas from Jacobs and others in that circle. Jacobs believes that she's a prophet who is like a Hebrew Bible prophet, that she's a prophet who's called to nations. And in these charismatic circles, there was already a reinterpretation of the Great Commission that was underway, where of course, in Matthew 28, Jesus tells his apostles, go into all the world, make disciples of all the nations, baptize in the name of the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I've commanded you. And most Christians throughout history have interpreted that as go and reach the people groups of the world. Jesus is talking about the ethnic groups of the world. But Jacobs and some of these other charismatic thinkers come along and say Jesus told the apostles to disciple nations. And so the nation itself is the object. And so if you're going to reach nations, you need prophets who can prophesy to these nations like they did in the Hebrew Bible. And Jacob's comes to believe that, that that shift. She has been given a gift to discern divine strategy to combat satanic strategy. And she founds an organization called Generals of intercession in the 1980s that is trying to do this work of building up intercessory networks based on supernatural revelation to cast out national level demons. And Wagner builds all this together and says that right there, that strategic level spiritual warfare. And if we could get millions of Christians praying at the same time to cast out these territorial spirits, then the church can move forward, then church growth can happen.

[Mike Kosper]

We will.

[Michael Fanone]

And this was one of their phrases they really liked. We can conquer spiritual territory. It's a spiritual conception of the world, but it's mapped on to the physical world. It's not like Right. The demons can control literal territory. And so then they start picking up these ideas of spiritual mapping coming out of South America, and they start saying, well, you could go around and you could actually create a map of your city and identify which demon is over every neighborhood, and then design a strategy of prayer walks and worship gatherings and prayer and intercession to cast out these territorial spirits.

[Mike Kosper]

Wagner wants to develop a framework for revolutionizing the church through this kind of strategic spiritual warfare. He genuinely believes God's raising up a new generation of apostles and prophets to lead the way and that given time, they can quite literally fulfill the Great Commission to reach the nations, meaning strategically evangelize them, convert them, and make them in a kind of new, non denominational, charismatic Christendom. He comes to label this vision the New Apostolic Reformation.

[Michael Fanone]

Wagner, starting around 1996, kind of gathers a group of leaders, they coined the term New Apostolic Reformation, and really start kind of driving forward. We're going to change the life of the church through these apostles and prophets who are generals of spiritual warfare, who will lead the church into a global revival. And that's based on prophecies that they have where they believe that there will be what they call the Third Great Awakening, Global Great Awakening. They also sometimes call it the Billion Soul Harvest. And these are prophecies that are coming out of the Kansas City Prophets in these groups.

[Mike Kosper]

Okay, quick note. The Kansas City Prophets refers to a group of pastors affiliated with the New Apostolic Reformation. And C. Peter Wagner, the leader of the Kansas City Prophets was a pastor named Mike Bickle, who would later found the International House of Prayer in Kansas City in 1999. There's much that could be said about Bickle, but I'll avoid the detour here, except to mention that in December 2023, Bickle faced multiple allegations of sexual misconduct stretching back for decades. An independent investigation released in February 2025 reported that Bickle had engaged in sexual abuse misconduct involving at least 17 individuals, including minors, dating back to the mid-70s. The International House of Prayer severed ties with Bickle in December 2023. Once again, we're talking about chasing phantoms with devils in our midst. You get the drill? Okay, back to Taylor.

[Michael Fanone]

So they believe that charismatic spirituality is the future of the church, and the New Apostolic Reformation really begins as an ecclesiological reform movement. How do we change the governance of the church? Restructure the governance of the church around apostles and prophets so that this 21st century third great awakening can happen? And then in the early 2000s, this guy, Lance Wall, now comes along and he's also this independent charismatic, playing around with five fold ministry ideas. And he claims that he has a prophecy that God has revealed to him that in every society there are seven arenas of influence that he imagines as mountains. And those mountains, which are family, religion, government, education, arts and entertainment, media, business. Those mountains are either dominated by Satan and the demons or God and the Christians. And so Walnuts are saying we need to not only do spiritual warfare to take over the seven mountains, that's God is calling us to take over the seven mountains. We not only need to use spiritual warfare, but those mountains are real. Right? They're real in every society. And we need to put Christians into positions of influence at the top of every one of these mountains so that Christian influence can flow down into society. And when Wagner hears this idea of the seven mountains from Wall now, he falls in love with it and says that's the missing piece. And that is what transitions, I would say, in the NAR out of this ecclesiological reform movement. We're going to change and renew the church into we're going to take over the world. And it really pushes them more into politics, more into these paradigms of we need to take dominion. All of that was kind of latent in the movement already. And Wagner and his fellows, I mean, in the 2000 election, the new absolute reformation leaders came to believe that George W. Bush was God's chosen candidate in that election through their prophets. So they started after the 2000 election is right. There's all the confusion around hanging chads in Florida and recount accounts. And they believe that that's, that's a moment for spiritual warfare. And they start sending prayer and strike teams to Florida, to Tallahassee to go and combat against the, the demons that are behind the Al Gore campaign. And in order to bring about God's intended outcome. And they even send prophets to the White House to pray outside the White House, to make declarations outside the White House, to bar the doors of the White House to Al Gore and open them to George Javier. And then they claim that that is what swung the election. And as crazy as that sounds, Katherine Harris, the Secretary of State of Florida, who is the one who ends the recount and kind of drives things to the Supreme Court. She is a follower of a lot of these folks and pays tribute to Cindy Jacobs and Dutch Sheets and some of the other NAR leaders.

[Mike Kosper]

Two quick notes. First, that's the same Lance Wall now who was a speaker at the Jericho March. Second, as Taylor points out, this approach is actually a significant departure from other evangelical leaders we've discussed on this show. Those leaders were focused on grassroots mobilization.

[Michael Fanone]

So when I think about Jerry Falwell and Ralph Reed and these kind of Paul Weyrich, these organizers behind the rise of the religious right in the 1980s and 1990s, they are still playing within the rules of liberal democracy, right? And they're thinking about the mobilization of Christians through these kind of participation efforts within democracy. And so when they're talking about we are the Moral Majority, well, up until 1990, 90% or more of Americans identified as Christian. And so Ralph Reed actually gave an interview to Time magazine, I think it was in 1995, where he said, we just need to organize and organize and organize and mobilize and mobilize and mobilize. And if we do it right, we will have more voters than the Republican or the Democratic Party that are in our camp who are driving the agenda of American politics. And so there was this sense that if you can just get Christians to participate in democracy, we can Christianize society. And it's more of an evangelization from below, a kind of grassroots style of Christian nationalism. The Seven Mountains is not that the Seven Mountains is a top down strategy for social change, right? We need Christians to take over positions of influence, positions of power. We need to displace the demons that are now in power over American society. And if we can take those positions of power, then Christian influence will flow down. And if you think about this is more revolutionary approach, a vanguard approach, to use more Soviet terminology, right. And if you can just take power from the top, you can rule from the high places is, is the language that they would use. And this is a very different conception of the role of, of the church and society.

[Mike Kosper]

The NAR also incorporated some of the ideas of Dominionism, a reformed political theology that also emerged in the 70s and 80s, and aspired to a similar kind of top down, authoritative transformation of society into something more like Christendom. For the NAR, this started to coalesce in the early 2000s, and as Taylor describes, many at NAR saw George W. Bush as one of their own. But by 2008, some had grown disillusioned with Bush, feeling he didn't go far enough to embed their values and policy, failed to stop moral decline, and was too much of a globalist. That year turned out to be an important inflection point.

[Michael Fanone]

In 2008, Wagner publishes his book Dominion, his most controversial book. They're rolling out this campaign around the Seven Mountains and promoting the seven Mountains. And this really. There's all this energy behind that. And Sarah Palin hits the national political scene. And Sarah Palin had been mentored by an NAR prophet in Alaska named Mary Glacier. And so they see her as part of the movement. Whether she ever told them that she was in their camp is not totally clear to me. I'm not all certain on the communication among them, but they viewed her as an avatar of their movement. And they thought, in 2008, here, Sarah Palin is, we're going to take the government mountain through her. She's going to be our avatar to take over the government mountain, which in their view was the most important, the mountain that controls all these other mountains. And when. When McCain and Palin lost, the NAR went into a season of desolation. I mean, everything they're doing is growing overseas. But in the US they experience the Obama administration as. As a satanic organization that is. That is destroying America. And so they're primed. They're searching for a political savior who will deliver them from the satanic Obama administration. And in 2015, Donald Trump hits the scene, and they just go bonkers for him. The NAR becomes instrumental in building the theology of Christian Trumpism. And if you keep playing the tape out, these dominion theology, spiritual warfare, seven mountains and apostles and prophets ideas all culminate on January 6th. And most of the Christian expressions that we witness around the US Capitol are forms of charismatic spiritual warfare because there was a belief that the demons were trying to hijack the 2020 election. And the NAR leaders provided the spiritual complement to the Stop the Steal campaign. And many NAR leaders showed up on January 6th. In fact, I have found more than 60 independent charismatic leaders who are in Washington, D.C. for January 6th because they believed it was the culmination of this spiritual battle to protect Donald Trump.

[Mike Kosper]

Trump's primary spiritual advisor throughout his time in politics has been Paula White Cain, a televangelist and a close associate of the new Apostolic Reformation. She's also the person most responsible for bringing NAR leaders into Trump's orbit. White's reaction to Biden's win in 2020 was typical of NAR leaders. There was a sense of destiny for them, their place at the table with Trump, their influence over American politics was at stake, and they weren't going to take the loss lying down, which required a practical spiritual.

[Rebecca Sebastian]

It's done, the Lord says it is.

[Mike Warnke]

Done For I hear victory, victory, victory.

[Rebecca Sebastian]

Victory in the quarters of heaven in.

[Mike Kosper]

The quarters of heaven Victory, victory, victory, victory Victory, Victory.

[Mike Warnke]

Victory.

[Rebecca Sebastian]

For angels are being released right now.

[Mike Kosper]

Angels are being dispatched right now. Hamanda.

[Rebecca Sebastian]

For angels have even dispatched from Africa right now. Africa right now. Africa right now. From Africa right now.

[Mike Warnke]

They're coming here. They're coming here.

[Mike Kosper]

We're covering this on this series because it's hard to imagine the ideas of the new Apostolic Reformation emerging the way they did without the pressure cooker of the Satanic panic. Think of it this Wagner begins developing these ideas in an atmosphere of charismatic revival, the Jesus movement, the Vineyard, the sudden explosion of deliverance ministry and spiritual warfare. All of this happening in his own native California, the place where, a little more than a decade earlier, was the hotbed of experimental spirituality and altered states of consciousness. It was the backyard of the Manson family and the birth of the Church of Satan, just down the coast from where Jim Jones had set up shop in San Francisco. And within about an hour's drive from the McMartin preschool, the panic dies. But a certain kind of anxiety about demons and a certain demonology remains takes on a life of its own. And in 2020, leads a bunch of otherwise well meaning Christians to join the ranks of the Oath Keepers and the proud boys. Breaching the security barriers of the Capitol Building, beating up cops and ransacking offices. This is a mob that brought flexicuffs with hopes of detaining Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other lawmakers. A mob that brought a gallows and noose apparently meant for Vice President Mike Pence. Here's audio from footage that lawmakers played during the House Select Committee investigating the capitol attack on January 6th.

[Mike Warnke]

I'm telling you what I'm hearing. The Pence I hear in the Pence just caved. No. Is that true? I'm here, I'm hearing reports that Pence caved. I'm telling you, if Pence cave, we're gonna drag through the streets, you politicians are gonna get drugged through the streets. Yeah, I guess the hope is that.

[Damien Echols]

There'S such a show of force here.

[Mike Warnke]

That Pence will decide to do the right thing.

[Mike Kosper]

According to Trump, the Jericho march, with its charismatic oddities, the weird cult of celebrity around Trump, the eccentric characters, the melodramatic music and praying, all of it was a prelude to this. And NAR leaders and pastors believed that they were defeating the spiritual forces that had disrupted Trump's campaign, so that this effort, the effort to get Mike Pence and Republican lawmakers to overturn the election results would be successful. And if that sounds a little tinfoil hat for you, well, give this a.

[Rebecca Sebastian]

Listen, I need Court's support.

[Mike Kosper]

This is from a body cam worn by a Metro police officer guarding the Capitol building, and it documents the moment the entrance he was guarding was breached by the mob. In the video, you see a rioter shove him to the ground, take his nightstick away. In the background, you can see others punching and shoving cops before they take the stairs. And if you listen closely, you heard an odd sound rising above the din. Someone was blowing a horn. Specifically, a shofar. Here it is again. When you ask yourself, why is someone blowing a shofar here? Beyond the reasons we've already described, this theological and political movement that was birthed out of the panic, you think about that person somewhere out there in that crowd blowing the shofar. They're there because of a story they believe, not just about the election and not even about Trump, but about God, the devil, the responsibility of Christians and the world. That story, the one they've embraced and that's led them to this moment, has created a distorted vision of good and evil, such that despite how they might have reasoned otherwise, at other moments in their life, they've chosen to identify cops as villains and to justify violence. Whatever it takes to stop Biden and reinstate Trump. Somehow, we as Christians can read the Gospels. We can witness Jesus rebuking Peter when he picks up a sword to defend Jesus from an unjust mob of rulers and Roman soldiers. And yet, if the right people tell the right story, the right way enough times, people who will say their whole life is defined by their faith in the Jesus that submitted himself to injustice will embrace race violence for Donald Trump. And to be sure, it's much bigger than Trump. It's an ideology that imagines Christians taking over the reins of political power as though our religious leaders, our prophets and apostles, the Pauli whites, Cindy Jacobs and Lance Wallnaus, are the ones to be trusted with it. The Satanic panic operated similarly on the power of myth. Those who were close enough to any of these stories were once willing to set aside their reasonable judgment to embrace the mythology. The cops investigating the McMartin preschool would have normally been much more suspicious when they heard that teacher Ray Buckey could change forms, fly or levitate. But the story, the menace of the Satanist next door, was too intoxicating to see through. The cops investigating the West Memphis murders might normally have looked for physical evidence tying a triple murder to teenage suspects. But again, the narrative, the utter conviction that there was a covenant in every graveyard and a conspiracy in every daycare, eclipsed their rational judgment. Matthew Taylor has documented more than 60 independent charismatic leaders who are on the grounds of the Capitol on January 6th. When you look at the photos in the video, you see evidence of that movement everywhere. In the signs they carried in the worship, songs being sung by riots, they marched to the Capitol and the prayers prayed in the Senate chamber. And it wasn't the only symbolism that was prominent that day, nor was it the only tie to the satanic panic. If you go back and watch the footage or look at the photos throughout the crowds, you'll see signs that say things like the storm is coming or the storm is upon us. And you'll see the letter Q everywhere on clothing, hats and banners. And then, of course, there was this guy.

[Mike Warnke]

Thank you, heavenly Father. Amen.

[Mike Kosper]

This is Jacob Chansley, also known as Jake Njelly, but best known as the QAnon Shaman.

[Mike Warnke]

To allow us to exercise our rights.

[Mike Kosper]

To allow us to send a message.

[Mike Warnke]

To all the tyrants, the communists and.

[Mike Kosper]

The globalists, that this is our nation, not theirs. Depending on whom you asked, QAnon was either an absurd fringe conspiracy that no one was really paying attention to, or it was a glorified meme and an online joke, or it was an imminent threat to our democracy. Mike Rothschild wrote the definitive book on Q a few years ago titled the Storm is upon how QAnon became a movement, cult and conspiracy theory of everything.

[Damien Echols]

QAnon is a prophetic conspiracy movement that claims that a secret military intelligence team that was working with then President Trump in 2017 was using the message board 4chan to leak clues to an upcoming purge of the deep state that would be executed by President Trump and the military that would sweep away the global cabal that had been dominating politics for the last 5,000 years. And Patriots were being informed of this through, I'm sorry, rhetorical questions. I mean, you will see references to the, you know, Trump is finally standing up to the 6,000 year old Babylonian death cult.

[Mike Kosper]

So 4chan is basically a message board. But unlike most social media companies that normies like US use, 4chan's pretty unfiltered. It can be a breeding ground for pornography, racism, anti Semitism and conspiracy theories of all kinds and all manner of juvenile nonsense. So Q was supposedly this leaker deep inside the national security apparatus, and he somehow knew that if he wanted to get the message to the really good people of this country, to the real patriots, the best way to do it was 4chan. Not only that the trick was to drop not direct information, but these weird anachronistic posts they sometimes read, like magnetic Poetry. And for hardcore Q believers, the more anachronistic it was, the better. Here's an example. It's from November 12, 2017. Q posts online. Why would Saudi Arabia donate to the Clinton Foundation? What did they receive in return? Why is this relevant? Who has the servers? Who controls the servers? Goog, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, who has all the information? Nsa, Q. Now, the real catnip for Q afficionados here is the word goog, which one might be forgiven for thinking it's just obviously a misspelling of Google. But true believers understood misspellings, grammar errors, missed punctuation, all needed to be painstakingly analyzed, interpreted and debated with a kind of Talmudic level of attention to detail that's hard to describe. Here's Mike Rothschild again.

[Damien Echols]

All of it was letting people who were patriotic and loved children and hated evil know what was going to happen so they could prepare for it. And this played out over several years, over multiple different message boards, through a great number of prophecies that all failed and kept its followers on the hook with this ever growing ability to sort of pat people on the back and single out patriotic followers and try to predict and analyze news before it actually happened. So what you had was a sort of a classic kind of prophecy cult where great things were theorized by an all powerful guru. And when they didn't come true, it wasn't because the guru was a fraud, it was because, well, the conditions weren't right yet, or, you know, the deep state figured out what we were doing and they moved against us. And now it's going to have to happen in a different way. The sort of the classic disconfirmation justifications that you'll find with UFO cults or apocalyptic cults.

[Mike Kosper]

That's a key point. Nothing Q ever hinted at or promised really materialized. It was as though these efforts to derail the Deep State were simultaneously just thwarted and just about to be resolved. And it's important to understand the reason that the trap was about to spring. What the crimes these Democrats had supposedly committed. They weren't about the country. They weren't even about Trump himself. They were once again about children. Starting in late 2017, Q began making references to child trafficking in the Clinton Foundation. He also said many in our government worship Satan. These themes were expanded and elaborated, always in vague terms, often made explicit by bloggers and YouTubers whose channels became devoted to interpreting Q's posts, which became known as drops. It was an evolution of a previous conspiracy theory known as Pizzagate, in which the Clintons and Clinton Affiliates, plus the modern artist Marina Abramovich, for some reason were described as part of a cabal of satanic pedophiles. Here's Alex Jones, a right wing conspiracy theorist and one of the pushers of Pizzagate, talking about the theory at the resistance to tyrants. His obedience, a message to Hillary. It's Alex Jones.

[Mike Warnke]

You can run on. When I think about all the children Hillary Clinton has personally murdered and, and chopped up and, and, and raped, I have zero fear standing up against her.

[Mike Kosper]

Yeah, you heard me right.

[Mike Warnke]

Hillary Clinton has personally murdered children. Go tell that long.

[Mike Kosper]

I just can't hold back the truth anymore.

[Mike Warnke]

Hillary Clinton is one of the most vicious serial killers the planet's ever seen.

[Mike Kosper]

The center of this conspiracy was a pizzeria known as Comet Ping pong in Washington, D.C. according to the theory, it was a hub of child trafficking and pedophile activity, all conducted in the Pizzeria's basement. On December 4, 2016, a man drove from Salisbury, North Carolina to Washington, D.C. with an assault rifle, determined to put a stop to the trafficking going on in Comet's basement. The problem he discovered after arrival and after firing several rounds in the shop was that Comet didn't have a basement. He eventually surrendered peacefully to police, though In January of 2025, he was shot and killed by police when he refused to surrender to them and pulled out a gun during a routine traffic stop. The Comet Ping Pong shooting put a damper on Pizzagate, and even Alex Jones eventually issued an apology to the owner of Comet Pizza.

[Mike Warnke]

In our commentary about what had become known as Pizzagate, I made comments about Mr. Alifontis that in hindsight, I regret.

[Mike Kosper]

And for which I apologize to him. We were participating in a discussion that was being written about by scores of media outlets in one of the most hotly contested and disputed political environments our.

[Mike Warnke]

Country has ever seen.

[Mike Kosper]

But the outlines of this theory, the Democrats and their allies are running a child trafficking cabal resurfaced in QAnon. In this case, it went beyond trafficking and pedophilia. Children, including babies, were being tortured and killed in order to harvest adrenochrome from their brains. What's adrenochrome? Well, according to QAnon lore, it's a substance harvested from the brains of children. It's psychoactive and rejuvenating, allowing for abnormally long life and youth. And it's made more potent when the subject you harvest it from is scared when they die. Meaning that torturing children before you killed them made the adrenochrome stronger. In reality, adrenochrome is a basic biological substance, but it's not psychoactive or rejuvenating in any way. It's basically a byproduct of the body after it processes adrenaline, and it can be easily synthesized in a lab. If it were somehow the fountain of youth, there'd be no need to harm children to gather in. Fans of Hunter S. Thompson might know the word adrenochrome from his book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It seems that someone in QAnon adopted their mythology from Thompson, where he described it as the world's most powerful hallucinogen harvested from the brain of a baby. QAnon theorists took that entirely fictionalized conception and layered it with Q's drops and the Pizzagate hoax. And the result was, on one hand, absurd. But when this was your world, when you're completely consumed by it online, it's incredibly compelling.

[Damien Echols]

I think a lot of what drives some people to QAnon is the same thing that drives other people to Star Wars. It's good versus evil. You know, there's a good guy and a bad guy. The bad guy has evil plans, and the good people are going to band together to stop them. That's a. That's the basics of storytelling and Q. You know, for as incoherent and ridiculous as it was, it really could tell a very compelling story. You know, there's clearly a good guy, there's clearly a bad guy. And I think, you know, specifically to speak of Donald Trump, one of the earliest things that he did was this idea that, they're not after me, they're after you, and I'm in the way. And that is so compelling to a person who feels like automation and AI and immigration have taken their way of life. They're not allowed to say the things they used to say. They're not allowed to tell the jokes they used to tell. You know, everything is changing around them, and here's somebody who wants to make it better and wants to stop it, and. And then why would they devote so many resources to taking him down if he wasn't right? You hear that so much and so much of that messianic fervor, it doesn't come from the leader themselves. It comes from the people who depend on the leader.

[Mike Kosper]

I keep coming back to Joan Didion's line, we tell ourselves stories to live. We craft a narrative that makes sense of the scary, chaotic, and unpredictable world. A conspiracy theory, be it one about the Satanic panic or QAnon, offers us the allure of believing that we're in on a secret it, or perhaps even in on a joke. We know something that's hidden to everyone else.

[Damien Echols]

Anytime something really bad is happening, we're trying to figure out what is really happening, what, you know, who is lying to us, what is the real thing that is happening here. And with lockdown, all of a sudden you had the entire global population that suddenly was massively restricted in what they were allowed to do, who they were allowed to see. A lot of people lost their job, jobs. A lot of people lost their connection to the outside world. People were angry, people were bored. People looked for somebody to blame all of this on. And it was very easy to blame that on the politicians, particularly Dr. Fauci. It's very easy to blame that on, you know, Jewish cabals. It's very easy to blame that on other countries. And once you start getting angry and you go down those rabbit holes and you start finding other people who are angry and you get angry about the same things, and pretty soon it's the anger that takes over and everything is filtered through the lens of this wasn't just a once in a century pandemic that was exacerbated by certain political failures. This was an attack. This was an attack by the elites, by the globalists. And we need to get with the people who are helping us fight back. And that turns into the wellness influencers, that turns into the conservative politicians, that turns into the anti vaxxers, because now suddenly you have an outlet for your anger and somebody who can harness that and try to do some good with it. So I think so much of where we have landed in the last year and a half or two years is the sort of hangover from that post Covid anger, boredom and fear.

[Mike Kosper]

What's unique about our moment isn't the presence or even the ubiquity of conspiracy theories. It's the speed with which they move, the ease of access, and how easy it is to be drawn into them.

[Damien Echols]

It's very predatory. It's very ubiquitous right now. It really is everywhere for everyone. And, you know, conspiracies can really hit anybody. You know, left or right, well educated, not well educated, high income, low income. If the right piece of conspiracism or propaganda hits you in the right way at the right time, all it takes is for you to go, oh, that's interesting, I didn't know that. I wonder what else. I don't know. I wonder what else we aren't being told. So most of that stuff you're going to look at. And you go, that's ridiculous. That's stupid. That's crazy. I don't want anything to do with that. But that one time, let's just say you get a big medical bill that you can't pay, or, you know, something happens to a friend of yours, you lose your job or Covid or whatever it is, and the right thing finds you, and all it takes is for you to go, I didn't know that that explains what's happening. I wonder what else this person has to say. I wonder what other videos there are. And then the algorithm doesn't know anything other than, well, if you liked this video about, you know, Covid maybe being a bioweapon, maybe you'll like this video about the Holocaust being fake. And that's all it takes. And I've seen so many stories of it was just one night of just video after video after video. And then the next morning, you've been up all night, you've been mainlining all of this information that suddenly is like it was the forbidden truth. And now you know it. And that's really all it takes.

[Mike Kosper]

One minute you're everyone's favorite Bible study teacher, then you fall down the Internet rabbit hole. You start shutting out voices that might root you in reality. And then all of a sudden, you're convinced that you. That Hillary Clinton is regularly drinking children's blood with Huma Abedin, or that most of Washington is part of a Babylonian blood and sex cult. And then you blink and you're part of a mob beating a cop with his own nightstick or with a flagpole where the flag says, jesus is my savior, Trump is my president. And the only time you stop to think about how far you've gone, how you got there, is when something terrible happens. Someone gets hurt, your life gets upended as a consequence of your own actions. I'm still convinced that the vast majority of the villains in our world don't walk out their front door intent on being a villain. They think they're doing the right thing. And in the case of QAnon, Pizzagate, and the satanic panic, it was all in the name of protecting children. QAnon had the added advantage of a kind of utopian promise for the true believer. When. When Trump did his thing, all the evil people in D.C. would end up in shackles. And perhaps, as Tolkien might have put it, were he a 4chan troll, all the sad things would come untrue for America. If you believed that because Q told you so, or maybe because your pastor an apostle or a prophet told you this was going to happen. Couldn't that not only justify but motivate the kind of violence we saw in January? January 6th? One thing that separates qanon from the panic is that QAnon had a clearly delineated set of enemies. The Panic didn't. It was a shadowy cabal. And part of the power of the myth was that it could be literally anyone. The 80s were a strange time in American history. In some ways, the country was very united. Prosperity offered a little bit of reprieve from the culture wars. Holocaust education was surging in America as access to the death camps behind the Iron Curtain began to open up. So Americans had a kind of gut level reaction against antisemitism. The civil rights movement was still in recent memory as well, and a consensus had settled that while race relations weren't perfect and certainly some people wanted to roll back the clock, overall people liked the direction of the country. There were foreign enemies out there somewhere, but they didn't keep us awake at night. And yet the American imagination could still conjure up an evil other, a shadowy presence on whom we want to vent our bile, our grievance, our frustrations, even if the reason we have to label them as evil was wholly artificial. It's as though there's something in us that wants to project that evil outside of ourselves. Today, all kinds of sectarian grievance is back. And if we take anything away from the Satanic Panic, it should be that our capacity to manufacture reasons to hate each other is pretty limitless. And that alone should be a warning sign. For a lot of us, though, stories like the Satanic Panic or even Pizzagate or qanon are consumed as entertainment. And look, that does make sense. We're drawn not just to the macabre and grotesque elements, but to the comic absurdity, the flying witches and the absurd claims and accusations, the almost cartoonish violence of it. But the ability to laugh at these things is a privilege.

[Mike Warnke]

So the other option I thought of.

[Mike Kosper]

Was, you know, try to appeal to somebody's humanity. This is Michael Fanone in an interview with CNN. From 2001 to 2021, he was a member of the Metropolitan Police Department in the District of Columbia. He was assigned to the Capitol on January 6th. And I just remember yelling out that I have kids.

[Mike Warnke]

And it seemed to work.

[Mike Kosper]

Some people in the crowd started to encircle me and try to offer me.

[Mike Warnke]

Some level of protection. A lot of people have asked me my thoughts on the individuals in the crowd that helped me or try to offer some assistance. And I think kind of the conclusion.

[Mike Kosper]

I've come to is like, you know, thank you, but you for being there. Over 140 law enforcement officers were injured during the Capitol riot, suffering concussions, burns, fractures, and trauma from being beaten with flagpoles, batons, and other weapons. Some officers also sustained chemical burns and eye injuries from bear spray and tear gas, and still others experienced lasting psychological effects, including ptsd. Officer Brian Sicknick, who was sprayed with bear spray by rioters, died the next day of a stroke. The medical examiner said the circumstances of the riot played a part in his death. Four more officers died of suicide in the months and years that followed. These are the stories that we forget when the conspiracy theory becomes a meme. They are the consequences that are out of sight, out of mind. We move on because the show's over, but it's only over for us.

[Mike Warnke]

Mr. Echols, how do you wish to plead in this case?

[Mike Kosper]

This audio is from August 19, 2011, the day the West Memphis Three entered their Alford pleas.

[Mike Warnke]

Your Honor, I am innocent of these charges, but I'm entering an Alford guilty plea today based on the advice of my counsel and my understanding that it's in my best interest to do so, given the entire record. The same as relates to you. Mr. And Ms. Kelly, how do you wish to plead? I am pleading guilty on North Carolina.

[Damien Echols]

Vs Albert, New York saw rules. Although I am innocent, this is plea.

[Mike Warnke]

And this plea is in my best interest.

[Mike Kosper]

Leading up to that day, no one was quite certain what Jason Baldwin was going to do before his first trial. When he was just 16 years old, the prosecutor came to him twice and offered him a plea deal. All he'd have to do is testify against Damien, say that Damien killed the three boys, and he'd walk away free. Both times, Jason told the prosecutor essentially that would be a lie. His mom raised him not to lie, even to save his own skin. Now, after 18 years behind bars, the only way to walk free was to plead guilty to murders he didn't commit. While Damian and Jesse were ready to accept the Alford plea, Jason wasn't. His initial reaction was to say that he'd rather die behind bars than confess to a murder he didn't commit. But he changed his mind because he realized he wasn't in it alone. The state wouldn't accept the other Alford pleas without his. And so for the sake of Jesse and Damien, especially because Damien was out of appeals and on death row.

[Mike Warnke]

Your Honor, first of all, I'm innocent. And murdered Christopher, Byron, Michael Morris however, after serving 18 years entry for such, I agree that it is in the state's best interest as well as my own, that based upon North Carolina versus Alfred, that I plead guilty first. Rebirth all right. The court finds that there is a factual basis for the plea, that the pleas are voluntary and will be accepted in response by the court.

[Mike Kosper]

In many ways, this moment does mark a happy ending. All three got to walk out of jail, hug their loved ones, eat a real meal again. But in another way, they're still in shackles. They're convicted murderers, mostly because of the shadow of a lie that hangs over their heads. A lie that captured an entire generation, A lie that gave birth to more lies. A lie that became a punchline, but only to the people who never felt its sting. What all of these stories show us is that we want the devil to show up in dark hoods and robes with sharp teeth and blood stains in the corner of his mouth. And sometimes when we don't see that devil, we imagine that blood stained grin, that hood and robe on others. Maybe it's the teacher that lives in our neighborhood, or the cop down the street. Or maybe it's the former Secretary of State and a cabal of her friends that are coastal elites. Evil is pernicious and shape shifting. And maybe there are cabals of evil people lurking in the corners of our elite institutions. But those people are far less likely to gain access to your kids than their Sunday school teacher is or the babysitter or your neighbor or stepfather, brother or stepfather. None of them will wear a black hooded robe when they show up at your door. But that's what makes real evil so terrifying. We tell the myth because the truth is scarier, because reality is unpredictable, because the phantom is easier to live with than the devil in our midst. But when we play that game, when we indulge in the comfort of fantasies, we not only let our guard down in dangerous ways, we might be inviting hellish consequences to our own innocent victims. Thanks for listening. Stay tuned after the credits when I sit down with my co producer Rebecca Sebastian, and we talk about what's coming next for this show. Devil in the Deep Blue Sea is a production of Christianity Today. It's hosted and written by Mike Kosper, produced by Mike Kosper and Rebecca Sebastian with production assistance from Dawn Adams Sound design and mix engineering by TJ Hester Sound design, animation and video by Steve Scheidler Graphic design Nim Ben Rubin, Eric Petrick and Mike Kosper are executive producers of CT Media Podcasts. Matt Stevens is our senior Producer, if you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating and review wherever you listen. It'll help us more people find the show. Thanks for listening. Okay, episode eight. That is a wrap.

[Rebecca Sebastian]

Oh, Mike. But wait, there's more bonus episodes.

[Mike Kosper]

Bonus episodes. All right, so, yeah, this is the thing where we pretend the series is over. And actually we've been planning to do bonus episodes all along, so why don't we go ahead and tell the listeners a little bit about what's ahead?

[Rebecca Sebastian]

Yeah, so we've mentioned this on live streams and in exchanges with our audience. I'm on Facebook all the time talking to people, but there's just simply too many themes and topics to unpack inside our episodes. So we're going to explore some of them outside of the official eight episode season in the form of bonus episodes.

[Mike Kosper]

Yeah, it's an embarrassment of riches. And as we made the show, I regularly had to crawl out of rabbit holes to stay on topic with each episode.

[Rebecca Sebastian]

Yeah, and we really appreciated that. But now we're granting permission to dip down into the rabbit holes a little bit. And, like, what are you most excited to start with? Like, which additional bonus material are you most excited to share?

[Mike Kosper]

Well, let me say out of the gate that, you know, we mentioned it on this show. I think we mentioned it on the last episode as well. We'd still love to talk to Mike Warnke and hear how he's processing things. So, Mike Warnke, if you happen to hear this or if anybody who knows him happens to hear this, we'd love to hear from him. We'd love to hear where he is now and how he looks back on the past. Aside from that, you know, there's other people who are connected to this story that we'd love to hear from, and we've pursued some of those folks in particular, though one thing that I'm looking forward to is I'd like to do an episode where we sit down with some people who can talk about the nature of story itself. What is it about this particular story, this kind of archetypical story of they're coming for our children that has such power over the imagination? And then what is it about the topics, the, you know, the topic of Satanism, this idea of the Satanist next door, the coven, you know, sort of Dark shadows stuff. Why does that capture our attention as much as it does? I'm really looking forward to a number of conversations around that and perhaps packaging all that as a single episode or as a roundtable. We'll see. What about you?

[Rebecca Sebastian]

Yeah, there's so much there, especially with like the good and evil concept and which stories we sort of allow in versus which ones we don't allow. As Christians, this has been a through line, but we've gotten probably the most feedback around the topics of victims and trauma. So I'm really excited to sit down with a few women who are very well positioned to speak about this to give that a little more air time and that conflict that a lot of us feel between believing victims wanting to versus when a story is just completely made up and kind of just discerning some of the issues around that. So I'm really looking forward to producing and sharing that conversation. And like you, I'm holding space for Warren Key. I really want to make contact and I'm hoping that the DNA gets tested in the West Memphis three case. And if that happens in the near future, you know, obviously we'd love to maybe bring Dan back on to talk about it or somebody from the case. So that's what I'm hoping for.

[Mike Kosper]

And related to that, we've had some questions about how do we think about wrongful convictions and the justice system. We've already had some conversations about that that will be part of future episodes, so be looking for that as well. Well, I'm excited about all of this.

[Rebecca Sebastian]

Me too. So stay subscribed, keep following the show because there will definitely be more to come.

[Mike Kosper]

Yeah, we'll take a couple of weeks off here before you you see anything coming. So give us a week or two to catch up on sleep and get our notes organized and we will see you right here with bonus episodes in June.

[Rebecca Sebastian]

Can't wait.