Upsetting Day: Fourteen Things Witches Hope Parents Never Find Out

Hi, parents. Witches are tricky, and they have fourteen secrets. Several of them is the television show, Smurfs. Luckily, I have found the book and "Unique Audio Experience" cassette to stop them.

God gave David Benoit mild purpose and dried leaves for brains, and in 1994 he used these gifts to try to write a guide to witchcraft using only his grandson's toys. Fourteen Things Witches Hope Parents Never Find Out is a beautiful disaster. It's a collection of impotent shower arguments retold to be about troll dolls in order to defeat The Devil, and I understand that won't make any sense yet. Let's start at the beginning.

David is an idiot liar whose one true love is defeating He-Man, but besides being exactly Skeletor, David's most evil trait is that he thinks he's cute. Look at him claw for cleverness– "hard to rear a 'Cleaver family' in a 'Bart Simpson society.'" That's garbage. That's a license plate holder for a Mormon whose top five hobbies are TV. That's a cute mug for a nurse who kills her assisted living patients. The Preface is for us to get to know you, David. Your first and second sentences shouldn't be "I'm an insufferable nerd" and "the three words I use to describe Bart Simpson are: violent, godless, sensual."

One thing I do like about David is that he asks himself ridiculous questions and immediately answers them. For example, does God protect homes containing ninja turtles? Absolutely not. They had their chance. This would be an evil policy for an insurance company, but it is fucking crazy for a God. It's also weirdly confident. Most people like to leave some ambiguity in their religion, but David is reading straight from God's HOA regulations.

It's also immediately clear that David doesn't have a lot of ideas. He has laid out his book into four parts. The first is categorizing witches, the second is categorizing witches, the third is a list of toys God will forsake you for owning, and the fourth is a list of toys God will forsake you for owning. Also, the book itself is the fourth part, I hope all this is clear. We'll start with the first of the 14 secrets witches hope parents never find out, which is the very simple thing he already said.

Each chapter starts with a cartoon poking fun at the dangerous situations that exist only in David Benoit's paranoia. This one is a witch babysitter, and the caption is "Hi, I'm a witch babysitter." I don't get it, and not in a comedy way. I mean, his readers are just now hearing about door-to-door witch babysitting and David thinks they're ready for jokes about it? This is like saying, "The knife murderer behind you is a real sharp dresser!" It implies that at least on some level David knows witch crime is a little silly. It's not real, it's more like a reverse Santa Claus for adults, or a reverse Jimmy "Superfly" Snuka for Hulk Hogans.

You might be asking yourself, "How is David so certain God won't protect you if your parents bought a lamp from a witch?" Well, the answer is going to sound obvious once you hear it.

The Bible never mentions it, of course. If God forgave people for buying He-Man, His book would have said, "I might forgive you for buying He-Man." It's honestly that dogshit stupid, so it's hard to react to this book without sounding like a sarcastic 1995 atheist. If you're bringing good faith to an argument with an anti-Smurf activist who cites not-in-the-Bible as his source, you've done something wrong. But, in good faith, let's hear more of David's evidence.

Oh no… did he say bus captains are giving out Smurfs for bus promotions!? If even a fraction of this is true I owe David an apology. I'm man enough to admit I was wrong. Witchcraft, such as the hit animated film The Little Mermaid, has killed God.

When you lay the facts out like this it's pretty convincing, but it takes a good story to reach understanding. Luckily, David has many good stories.

This rules. David Benoit met a woman who tried an exorcism on a three-year-old boy for enjoying toys! And that was the ending! The power of Christ lost to the tagline of a He-Man commercial! Like, okay, I get we're all grown ups here. But imagine for a second demons and exorcisms were real, like David presumably does. If you were him, would you share this story? "One time my bitch ass Lord lost a fight to Mattel marketing and we left a toddler to die. Swear to God."

As anyone familiar with Christianity knows, the whole book is filled with definitely fake but still embarrassing stories like this. Let's do another one.

"Dear David, I am an Alabama fifth grader and a real person. I am sad because my new friend's mother is a witch, like from the movies. Could you please say the dumbest goddamn thing anyone has ever heard?"

Fucking incredible. This 10-year-old's parents told her not to listen to rock and roll or watch TV, and then she did. And when she got caught, she blamed it on the time she went to school with the daughter of a witch! And with no hesitation, her parents and David Benoit bought it. David could have made up any story he wanted and he accidentally wrote himself into an I Think You Should Leave sketch. "You say you found drugs in my room? How–? Oh, you know, it's probably because someone on the school bus rented Leprechaun 2. Unless… you're not suggesting witches are make-believe, right?"

There are a lot of types of witches. Maybe. David doesn't really get into it. Instead, he talks about how fortune tellers aren't technically predicting the future. Only God can do that. That being said, Satan can do a pretty good imitation…

So, okay, here's how it works. For a small fee, a psychic says "you will get hit by a red car." Satan hears this and gets to work. He looks through your neighborhood for someone vulnerable, someone who got a Smurf from their bus captain, and takes control of them. Or their car, maybe. And now the dead woman believes in psychics. It's almost too easy. Yep, we're going to be seeing a lot of these turnin' up.

David Benoit has a coherent philosophy with a consistent internal logic, and it is this: if it involves wizards, he will believe anything you tell him about anything. But he is no dummy. He knows this news is shocking and his readers are now terrified of witches, seers, and sorcerers. But should they be? No. Hold on, did you say sorcerers? That's complicated.

Sure, any one of them can ask Satan to throw a car at you, but we don't need to worry about witches and seers. Sorcerers, on the other hand…. Webster's defines them as "wizards" and not all of them are sober. I think part of David's writing process is getting kicked in the head by a horse. I am so happy to tell you he never gets his thoughts together on sorcerers. He rambles like this for a bit, never explains how they're different from seers or witches, and then forgets to explain how afraid we should be. If you are a parent who sincerely bought this book to fight witches, you're fucking long dead. You brought a third grade book report to a demolition derby.

Chapter Three is more hairsplitting about the different kinds of magic, which doesn't matter since everything Care Bears and above counts as Demonism, and I'm not making fun of his religion. David literally names Care Bears as an example of dangerous magic. So let's move on to Chapter Four: Witches Actively Proselytize Children. The cartoon here has a witch and Satan in the park, reading a book called SPELLS to unattended children, including an infant. I love it. It's a wild exaggeration of a situation that hasn't ever existed. It's like warning families some snowmen are vampires by asking what the deal is with them all being named Clarence.

Maybe it's not like that. I have no fucking idea what's going on. Luckily, David includes some real world examples of witch proselytizing:

A Portland school banned Christmas and had the children perform a pagan ritual to Lucifer with full mark-of-the-beast forehead barcodes? I don't want to question the integrity of the guy who watched that three-year-old get his soul devoured by He-Man, but this story seems… unlikely. It has way too many details for a David Benoit anecdote. If this happened to David, a teacher would have come up to him at a service and said, "I had a student lay a cluster of eggs after touching a Sky Commander, good bye." It's also cited strangely. He says this happened last year? For all kinds of obvious reasons, "last year" is a weird way for a book to date an event. Did he copy and paste this from somewhere? And if so, where!?

It's not great news.

The only source I could find for this story is v20, #28 of Executive Intelligence Review (July 23, 1993), which is a maniac conspiracy magazine for readers who would only have a couple notes if you called them "white supremacists." This article about public school children being forced to summon Satan instead of Christmas was sandwiched between two other features called, and I quote, "Stop the spiritual child molestation in our schools" and "The child molesters in the classroom". It's not a great source. And he uses it as a jumping off point to complain for several pages about how public schools are hypocrites for allowing only the Satanists to perform religious rituals in schools. It's hard to explain. It's like saying you know walleye can grow up to six feet long because Hitler once told you about a fish, and it's not fair to your parents, who are trout.

In Chapter Five: Witches and Satanists Have Some Things In Common, David finally weighs in on this one episode of Phil Donahue he saw.

David, when there are Three Dangers Involved In Reincarnation and the most urgent one is "a lady on Phil Donahue got hypnotized and she mentioned light, no no listen, light may refer to Lucifer which a type of Satan," I have some good news: there is no danger involved in reincarnation. You might be onto something with the homosexuality theory, though. Gays definitely could be timelost women who died with unfinished dick. It would explain why they have the musky buns of a man, but the eager holes of Amelia Earhart.

Chapter Six dives deep into witch recruiting techniques, like how they're hotter than the witches you see on TV. This may not mean anything, but ever since the sudden mention of homosexuality in the reincarnation section, it's become very horny. At least hornier than you'd expect from a book about the dangers of children's toys.

Like the rest of it, it's hard to tell what he's talking about or why he's mad. Are real witches warty and green? Is the media lying when it portrays them as sexy teens? Is mentioning them at all failing to live up to the Lutheran God's expectations? I don't know and David doesn't say, because once he brings up the media it becomes an unhinged rant about how unfair everyone is to whites and Christians. Why do people keep bringing up Jim Jones or Jim Bakker or David Koresh!? Oh, so every church is a cult now!? And the FBI can legally execute every cult? Suspicious. Aiieee. Where are the stories about the godless left running megachurch scams!? Aiieee again.

In a way it's beautiful. This was years before right wing media rendered this kind of superstitious shrieking into English. This is raw, unfiltered maniac untouched by oil money. David Benoit is furious at the idea that anyone would mention Christian crimes, and ends the chapter by complaining people call him a bigot for killing witches; oh but murdering saints is fine whenever there's a Tribulation? Hypocrites. You're all hypocrites. Let's move on to Chapter Seven which is about the cosmic danger of trolls, like the little dolls. And if you were worried, David remains very horny.

David's very first point about troll dolls is there are two types of sexual demons. One is a woman who fucks men, and the other is a man who fucks women. It's going to sound like I'm skipping a few steps here, but toy makers know about the sex demons, and that's why trolls are marketed to little girls. I don't think I'm misunderstanding or misrepresenting David Benoit's point. You can check my work above– he goes from "you think the makers of trolls don't know about fuck demons!?" to "why else would they sell them to little girls!?" in one sentence. You have to have so much wrong with you to think you've made any point other than, "When I think of sex monsters, I think of only one thing: their marketing appeal to female demographics 9 and under." It's so truly insane. This is like asking someone what they think of trolls and they say, "Let me change the subject. I'm one thing and it rhymes with gangerous breadophile."

You thought this shit was off the rails before. You fool. You optimistic fool. Behold David Benoit after he's gotten warmed up:

The Bible gives us two possible interpretations of troll origins. The first is that they come from the mutated spawn of Christians breeding with the unclean. These dark unions hatched into giants. The only problem with this theory is we've seen non-Christians spawn with Christians and produce non-mutant offspring.

Which means we need to go with theory number two: sex demons. Sex demons, sex demons. Can a human woman become pregnant by the dripping, throbbing hog of an incubus? It's an interesting question debated by many experts, and remember we're talking about troll dolls. Some testing still needs to be done, but the main problem with the Unified Incubus Theory Of Troll Dolls is that it makes David Benoit think about sex demons, which as we've seen before, makes David Benoit immediately type a sentence about little girls.

I really, really hate that I'm saying speaking of young girls having imaginary sex, but this next story is a long and troubling one. Feel free to skip to the highlighted part.

I'm not an educator, but I'm certain that if a guest lecturer asked one of my 8th graders if she ever fucked Duran Duran, the very next thing he would do would be wonder why he's in an emergency room. This is madness. Why is he doing it? The ability to shamelessly lie about anything like this has value. Why waste that power on a story where he's sexually harassing children? Again, in a chapter about troll dolls! David Benoit could have told us about the toys he sent back to Hell or cartoons he defeated, but no. He's bragging about how his God detective powers almost caught a child having astral sex with Duran Duran. Great. And then what, you creepy fuck? You didn't do anything! The entire band remains at large, you piece of shit! What does any of this have to do with troll dolls!?

Oh, my bad. I guess the psychic Duran Duran sex story was to set up his final point that trolls have magic tummies. I should have trusted David. I'm sorry for losing my temper.

"Chapter Eight: Lucifer Is Quite a Charmer" is a couple pages about the danger of good luck charms, like the ones used in sports or sports. I've already explained it better than David, so let's skip to "Chapter Nine: Witches Do 'Knot' Play Fair" which is about knot magic. It opens with a letter from Jeff.

Jeff, real person, is a student of the occult, and has been for some time. He's heard of this new type of Satanic ritual involving ropes and knots, but can't find any information on it, despite him being a student of the occult for some time. "Great question. Let me look it up in the fucking witch dictionary for you, you stupid asshole," David says to Jeff. The rest of the chapter is David worried some knots are used for Devil sex rather than fastening. There's a meandering story where he gets upset at the instruction manual on a 6-year-old's toy ghost because it starts with "Dear customer." I genuinely think we'll be here all day if I keep trying to explain each new type of insane this man is inventing. So I'm going to skip past his chapter on Smurfs which is mostly about how Gargamiel's cat has the same name as a demon. Oh, wait. I guess this story is worth mentioning:

"While on the subject of Smurfs, the dogs called upon my killer, their barks a harbinger of my death."

- David Benoit

Oh no, I just realized how horny David is going to be after he starts thinking about The Little Mermaid. No. No, I'm sure it will be fine.

I was wrong. David Benoit has opened the chapter with a story of a trembling girl telling him she has the devil up her dress and him looking. The only rational response to that story is, "as your attorney, I advise you to say that was a joke," but David follows it up with the words "That's not a joke!"

If there's any truth to this lunatic's story, he looked up a girl's skirt and found a tattoo, and that was enough for him to conclude The Little Mermaid was made by witches. It's nuts even for him. It's another sex crime confession followed by, "As a churchgoing (mer) man of the cloth, I do a lot of amateur teen gynecology. Yet despite a lively performance from Buddy Hackett, this undersea romp flounders with its decidedly pro-witch messaging! Like the back of a teen's jeans in my church, I give The Little Mermaid two clammy thumbs down! It tried to make a splash, but Disney's latest animated feature is all wet!"

Hold on, David. Why would it be dangerous for someone to think mermaids are good? Is there a danger of Christian children… t-trusting mermaids? How would that come up? I'm not sure why I'm asking this, maybe because we saw how weird racists got when they remade The Little Mermaid, but… could this be some kind of race thing? Sorry, no. I'm being ridiculous.

Holy shit, I can't believe I was right.

David Benoit has a problem with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, kind of because they're probably Buddhists, but also because ninjas do little spells with their fingers. Maybe. He barely knows anymore. He opens with a story about a time he was shooting fireworks into sewage and telling his children he was killing the ninja turtles. And they "laughed uncontrollably" because his children, unlike everyone else's, know the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles aren't real.

David, what? What the fuck, David. Where are you going with this, David.

David cites "an article found in USA Today" about kids who were playing ninja turtles and got trapped in a culvert. And then, the troll fighter who cracked the Case of the Secret Astral Duran Duran Fucker, accuses those little dummies of not knowing the difference between fantasy and reality. This kind of teeth-grinding irony can be frustrating, but I can't stay mad at David. He was a confused man fantasizing about children, and now he's a certain man confused about fantasizing children. A world champion dumbfuck, a stupidity unmatched in its elegance.

As if posing as real wasn't bad enough, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles also vaguely promote Buddhism. Don't think that's a problem? Tell that to Stephen Nichols, formerly of Days of Our Lives, who played a Buddhist on NBC's Santa Barbara. Or tell it to the ruins of civilization after Zen therapist Schyler Gates on NBC's Santa Barbara has burned it to the ground.

The next chapter is all about the Simpsons, a favorite of local witches. Who can forget the notorious "one November episode" where Bart dishonors his father? Can you imagine? David can. In fact, David is imagining his children dishonoring him right now as he types. The next two pages are all about how he wished they would– he'd show his kids if they tried that shit on him. In fact, he should beat them anyway. In fact, maybe it's a moral imperative to beat them anyway. What were we talking about? Oh yeah, Bart Simpson.

David Benoit makes an excellent point about parents needing to inoculate themselves against beating their children by microdosing violence. After all, child abuse is on the rise according to an unnamed source in a madman's rant about Bart Simpson. Aiieee, how does this tie into fertility deities in pagan worship? Aiieee once again.

David absolutely has no idea where he was going with that fertility worship shit, so he wraps up the Simpsons chapter with two more examples of sitcoms where the father is dishonored. And it's weird. David's mediocrity has festered into such misogyny and insecurity that he took it personally every time Bill Cosby lost an argument to Felicia Rashad. I feel like this would be less pathetic if he wrote, "Every Friday, Reginald VelJohnson reaches out from the television and holds his hands at the exact shameful length of my penis. How would he know if Stephen Nichols, formerly of Days of Our Lives, didn't tell him? Thus concludes my essay on why Bart Simpson's insults are based in witchcraft."

Let me stop you there, Dave. You smug fucking idiot. You think you outsmarted the child in the story you made up, but He-Man didn't have ectoplasm. He-Man had a guy named Hordak, who did not fucking live in Castle Grayskull, who had an "evil pit of gruesome ooze" called the Slime Pit action playset. Not ectoplasm. "Slime." You're thinking of Ghostbusters, dipshit. The popular movie about ghosts which apparently didn't promote occult beliefs enough to make it into your book. You dumb son of a bitch, you spent two pages complaining about Cliff Huxtable hanging bookshelves while 84 million moviegoers laughed along with the dead rising from the grave. You're terrible at this. The next thing out of your mouth had better be another hilariously dumb story about meeting a lady who knows a toddler who got possessed by He-Man or I'm going to fill a red car with troll dolls and park it in your neighborhood.

Oh hell yeah. This kid played He-Man so hard he got locked in a Power of Grayskull loop. What a happy ending. I can't believe we made it through the full boo– oh god damn it, it's still going.

I guess David got mad at a few more TV shows after he wrote his main book, but it was too late to change the title to 18ish Things Witches Hope Parents Never Find Out. So he added appendixes. His first one is about environmentalism, his second is about Beauty and the Beast, and his third is about Barney. David knows God wants him to hate Barney, but has a lot of trouble figuring out why.

David eventually lands on how Barney is a witch ally because his use of imagination is sort of like a form of New Age guided meditation, but before he gets there he mostly gets mad at Barney for his audacity of being a dinosaur. His very existence disproves creation, and while he never brings it up, he could. At any moment this prehistoric bastard could tell children, "I'm 300 million years old, kids, making your human God… a lie!" It's not fair, none of this is fair, types a sane and reasonable David Benoit. I'm not crazy, I'm not crazy, explains David Benoit.

See? He knows Barney isn't going to read the Satanic Bible. He knows Barney doesn't work for the devil. You're being silly. All he's saying is that Barney could work for the devil. The fourth appendix is about the contextualism of the cartoon Aladdin, but David is as much of an idiot on accident as he is on purpose. He understands situational ethics about as well as he understands Hordak's gruesome ooze, so we're going to skip to the one on Beavis and Butthead.

David's problem with Beavis and Butthead isn't their connection to witchcraft. His biggest problem is with their network's president, Judy McGrath, and her… public statements against violence? It's the first time he's brought up any executives involved in these shows, but I have no idea what makes her, this female woman, different from the others. He calls her a liar in the most 1994 way possible, with a David Letterman topical comedy list. Oh, Jesus fucking god damn it, are you going to hate this:

The entire joy center of this man's brain has been eaten by right wing politics. Do you have any idea how hard this was to do in 1994? There was no Facebook or FOX News. Once you finished listening to Rush Limbaugh, there were still 23 hours left in the day. In 1994, you had to go to the library and put in the work to be this isolated and unhappy. And you're not going to like this– he's not done.

Eleven tries and the closest thing he came to a cute observation was a Madonna abortion joke. I'd say this is as sad and stupid as I've seen a person be, but David ends his book with Seven Things Parents Can Do to Prevent Their Children From Getting Involved in Witchcraft, and oh boy. Oh, man.

So it has all come down to this– the leading expert on preventing childhood He-Man possession and his "seven" tips on doing so. The first two are to, you know, keep an eye out for He-Man. The third is to keep an eye out for He-Man, and the fourth is to watch out for witches. The fifth is to be suspicious of their teachers, the sixth is to be suspicious of their friends, and the seventh is how your children will slip away. They'll slip away and die. The seventh step is your children will slip away and die.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: OrneryWeevil, who will use Satan's arcane secrets to wage a war that will destroy 50% of humanity. "Knowledge is half the battle!" They warn us, plainly.

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