206. Putin's Geopolitical Satanic Panic

You can watch this program and more on the Satanic Temple’s very own streaming platform, TST TV. Subscribe today: https://thesatanictemple.tv/programs/wwp-207-satans-bible-studyWelcome back to Worldwide Panic. In this episode, Scott Whiteman from the Boys’ Bible Study podcast joins Lenny and Lucien for a deep dive into the bizarre world of Christian entertainment, beginning with Darren Wilson’s Finger of God, a documentary featuring miraculous healings, resurrections, gold teeth, and other alleged demonstrations of divine intervention.The conversation wanders through evangelical filmmaking, Christian rock, celebrity conversions, the peculiar logic of salvation, and the wildly inconsistent beliefs of American Christians. Scott discusses his fascination with religious media and what it reveals about the people who produce and consume it.Plus: Sid Roth, Kevin Sorbo, the problem with hell, and the pleasures and perils of watching terrible Christian movies.Check out Boys’ Bible Study wherever you get your podcasts.Boys’ Bible Study on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/boysbiblestudyLucien Greaves on Substack: https://luciengreaves.substack.com/Failed State Update: lennyflatley.substack.comTheme music: “Satanic Planet” by Satanic Planet

This is from Lenny's other podcast, The Inner Empire.In this episode, I read my recent article, “The Uses of Manson,” originally published in ⁠Failed State Update⁠.Charles Manson has been used to explain everything from the collapse of the 1960s counterculture to the supposed workings of a CIA mind-control program. But the stories people tell about Manson often reveal more about the storytellers than their subject. In that sense, his story gets at one of the central concerns of The Inner Empire: how beliefs are manufactured, circulated, and eventually mistaken for reality.Be sure to subscribe to Failed State Update at: ⁠https://lennyflatley.substack.com/⁠And be sure to listen to The Inner Empire wherever you get your podcasts.

Watch this episode on TST TV! https://thesatanictemple.tv/categories/worldwide-panicIn this episode of Worldwide Panic, we catch up after Lenny's launch of a new podcast, The Inner Empire, an investigation into why people believe what they believe, featuring cult members, magicians, and Christian evangelicals. Lucien discusses the value some Satanic Temple members find in tarot reding and other ritual practices they don't take literally. From there we turn to the main topic: a recent Open Global Rights report, "The Devil Wears Handcuffs: How Russia Invents International Extremist Movements," and Lucien walks through the surreal history of Russia's campaign against the Satanic Temple — from Putin's early digs at the Baphomet monument, to state media falsely tying TST to financing the Ukrainian military, to Russia's 2023 "undesirable organization" designation and the diplomatic scramble that followed.Subscribe to Failed State Update: http://lennyflatley.substack.com/Lucien's newsletter: https://luciengreaves.substack.com/https://luciengreaves.substack.com/

From Joseph L. Flatley, co-host of Worldwide Panic.THE INNER EMPIRE is a podcast that pulls together a lot of what I’ve spent years reporting on and thinking about: cults, the occult, conspiracy culture, and the platforms that have inserted themselves directly into our daily life.Here’s the simplest way I can put it: for five hundred years, people have known how to install a belief in someone’s mind: magicians did it with ritual and symbol, cults did it with repetition and isolation, ad men did it with images. What’s changed is that the same basic mechanism now runs automatically, every time you open an app, with nobody at the controls. This show is about tracing that mechanism across history and figuring out how it ended up running our lives without anyone deciding it should.Enjoy this introduction. Be sure to subscribe so you can hear new episodes when are released.Available wherever you get your podcasts.And be sure to sign up for my newsletter, Failed State Update: ⁠⁠https://lennyflatley.substack.com/⁠

Watch this episode on TST TV: https://thesatanictemple.tv/In this episode of Worldwide Panic, we discuss the oeuvre of Emma Katherine, host of the Imagination Podcast, an conspiracy influencer who platforms self-described survivors of satanic ritual abuse and MKUltra “programming.” Lucien recounts his own 2024 Twitter clashes with Emma and her followers, who accused him of being secretly connected to the Process Church of the Final Judgment — a defunct 1970s cult he’d researched and appeared in documentaries about — and who labeled him a “pedophile protector” for publicly debunking the Hampstead ritual-abuse hoax. Emma’s work is a case study in how conspiratorial communities validate one another’s claims through anecdote and mutual reinforcement rather than evidence, and how social media's format rewards volume and repetition of assertion over coherent argument.From there, the conversation widens into a broader discussion of media credulity around satanic panic and MKUltra mythology, including a detailed takedown of the Netflix Sons of Sam docuseries and its reliance on the late Maury Terry’s evidence-free theory linking the Process Church to the Son of Sam and Manson murders, Greaves’ own testy exchange with the documentary's filmmaker, and a shared frustration with credentialed figures like Mitch Horowitz lending unwarranted credibility to shaky claims in similar productions. Subscribe to Failed State Update: https://lennyflatley.substack.com/Lucien's newsletter: https://luciengreaves.substack.com/

Watch this program on TST TV: https://thesatanictemple.tv/Congress held hearings on the CIA's MKULTRA mind control program last week, but instead of uncovering new evidence, lawmakers mostly resurrected conspiracy narratives that have been circulating since the 1970s. In this episode of Worldwide Panic, Lenny and Lucien break down what actually happened during the hearing, who the witnesses were, why they were pretty fucking lame, and how documented government abuses have become entangled with decades of speculation about psychic assassins, mind-control slaves, and other enduring myths.Along the way, they examine the strange political incentives driving today's "declassification" movement, the difference between genuine historical scandals like COINTELPRO and sensationalized folklore, and why bad evidence remains bad evidence — even when it's used against bad people.Lucien Greaves on Substack: https://luciengreaves.substack.com/Lenny's newsletter, Failed State Update: https://lennyflatley.substack.com/Theme music: “Satanic Planet” by Satanic Planet

NOTE: We accidentally uploaded the wrong audio file before. This is the corrected version.This week: Lucien receives a “top secret” book exposing the coming ruling cabal (available on Amazon), as well as Lenny’s recent book on Timothy Leary. And we discuss an absurd documentary revealing that Paul McCartney died in 1966 and was replaced by a double.Next, we dig into academic papers by Colin Ross and Michael Salter, and recount some of Lucien’s run-ins with the ISSTD over the years.Also: Ted Gunderson, Stan Romanek, a self-styled psychic soldier who went by Omega Unit 193, and the time Lucien got stuck in an elevator with Warwick Middleton.Further Reading:-Subscribe to Joseph L. Flatley's Failed State Update newsletter: ⁠⁠http://lennyflatley.substack.com/⁠⁠-Lucien Greaves on Substack: https://luciengreaves.substack.com/Theme music: “Satanic Planet” by Satanic Planet

Watch this episode on TST TV: https://thesatanictemple.tv/programs/wp-202-a-therapist-a-search-warrant-and-a-coverupA prominent trauma specialist is accused of warning a patient about an impending police search warrant, a decision prosecutors say allowed evidence to be destroyed before investigators arrived. What begins as a bizarre criminal case soon opens onto a much larger story about recovered memories, dissociative disorders and ritual abuse allegations.From there, Joseph L. Flatley and Lucien Greaves talk about the ISSTD, a professional community that has spent decades defending claims many researchers consider discredited. Along the way, they explore the enduring influence of conspiracy thinking in therapeutic settings, the legacy of the Satanic Panic, and why certain beliefs continue to survive long after the evidence behind them has collapsed.Also: Feral House has a new series on TST TV! And Lucien catches fire while filming a video for Satanic Planet.Links:-Lucien Greaves on Substack: https://luciengreaves.substack.com/-Subscribe to Joseph L. Flatley's Failed State Update newsletter: ⁠⁠http://lennyflatley.substack.com/⁠⁠Theme music: “Satanic Planet” by Satanic Planet

Watch this episode on TST TV: https://thesatanictemple.tv/programs/wp201-is-it-disclosure-day-alreadyIn this episode of Worldwide Panic, Lucien and Lenny kick off Season 2 with a look at the recent wave of Pentagon UAP file releases and the decades-old "disclosure day" mythology that ufologists have built around the promise of a coming revelation.The conversation traces how thin, uncontextualized documents get inflated into proof through credentialed-sounding "whistleblowers," recycled tabloid sourcing, and sloppy AP-wire framing, drawing a direct parallel to recent Epstein files coverage, where a single ambiguous mention becomes a headline regardless of what it actually says.The episode closes with Lenny discussing his new book The Occult Timothy Leary, and Leary's own derisive take on UFO believers.Subscribe to Joseph L. Flatley's Failed State Update newsletter: ⁠⁠http://lennyflatley.substack.com/⁠⁠More info on Lenny's book The Occult Timothy Leary: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Occult-Timothy-Leary/Joseph-L-Flatley/9798888500842Lucien Greaves on Substack: https://luciengreaves.substack.com/Theme music: “Satanic Planet” by Satanic Planet

In this episode of Worldwide Panic, we examine Let the Devil In, a recent docuseries centered on a 1988 New Jersey murder-suicide that has been retroactively framed through the lens of Satanic panic and occult fear.The conversation interrogates how the series presents its material: the use of reenactments, graphic imagery, and speculative testimony to imply supernatural causation where evidence is fragmentary or altogether absent. What emerges is a critique of true-crime storytelling in the streaming era: not as entertainment alone, but as a belief-producing system that rewards implication over proof and atmosphere over accountability.Watch this on TST TV: ⁠https://thesatanictemple.tv/⁠Subscribe to Failed State Update: ⁠http://lennyflatley.substack.com/⁠Theme music: “Satanic Planet” by Satanic Planet