If you haven't listened to part one of our series, I highly recommend that you do that first.

Also, just a heads up, this episode contains content around sexual assault and abuse.

On this podcast, we explore fantastical thinking, moral panics, urban legends, conspiracy theories, hoaxes, and crazes, examine the forces that shape our culture, and tell the stories that create the realities we share and sometimes the realities we don't.

I'm your host, Chelsea Weber Smith, and this is American Hysteria.

Greetings in the precious name of our Lord Jesus Christ. This is Jack Chick speaking.

Now, in the Illuminati, the rock cows are not humans.

They're not just the richest family in the world. They are God.

That means that there is a conspiracy. I mean a real conspiracy.

We were literally in an Amnetyville situation because not only were the demons surfacing through Elaine,

the cult was attacking us

with everything they had. The reaction I got from my pastor friends, it was like those guys

were out there saying, gee, I wonder if chick's going to get iced. Welcome back to our series on Chick Tracts, where we're exploring the freaky fundamentalist comic books of chick publications, the cartoon kings of moral melodramas, of unbridled offensiveness, and of unintentional camp, so blown out that

they're sometimes mistaken for parodies when they're found out in the wild, left by believers in

random locations, so that sinners might stumble upon them

and be saved.

In the first episode of the series, we immersed ourselves in their hyper-real world, full of cloaked

Satanists and Illuminati witches, of Druid Halloween

sacrifices, of menacing homosexuals, New Age public school indoctrination, and of course, sky-eyed,

weeping salvation through the blood of Jesus Christ.

But Chick Publications didn't create this world all by themselves.

In fact, they owed a great deal of their success to the men and women who brought them their life stories,

who told them of their twisted pasts as witches controlling politicians, as spiritual warriors

...