Further reading for Mike Warnke
Selling Satan: The Evangelical Media and the Mike Warnke Scandal by Mike Hertenstein and Jon Trott
The Satan Seller by Mike Warnke
Mike Warnke never killed anyone. He never led a cult. He was never abducted by aliens. On the surface he doesn’t seem to have anything about him that makes him relevant to Last Podcast listeners but what if I told you that without Mike there’s a solid 30% chance that Last Podcast wouldn’t exist? That Mike is every bit a factor as Aleister Crowley or Helena Blavatsky? He’s a dumpy gentleman with a crappy mustache, one earring, and a blow-dried mullet that you only ever seem to find on the for-profit ministry scene of evangelical Christianity and the sheer volume of misery that he and his shitty stand-up comedy are responsible for is hard to quantify.
Let me put it to you this way: If anyone in your family has ever posted something on social media about Donald Trump saving the world from Satan-worshipping cannibals who drink the blood of children AND also hold key positions in the American government, you have Mike to thank for the evolution of insanity that got them there.
Starting in the 1970’s, Mike published books and started touring the country doing a weird sort of performance art where he told jokes that were the diet store-brand version of George Carlin’s mildest bits before segueing into long stories about how he used to be a satanist and a high-ranking member of the Illuminati. During that time he murdered, raped, and cannibalized his way across the country dressing like a combination of Coffin Joe and Edgar Winter. It was all plainly bullshit but American Christians, being the desperate rubes that they are, ate it up and it snowballed into a multi-million dollar empire for Warnke that eventually landed an awful lot of people in jail for crimes they didn’t commit, crimes lacking any semblance of physical evidence but a whole shitload of anecdotal evidence cribbed from Mike’s scary stories of his former life.
Episodes: 468 & 469
