Investigating Monterey Witches

Donald Trump's new acting Secretary of the Navy offered up a truly disturbing tale a couple years ago when running for Senate in Virginia. He apparently believes that communities across the country are under threat from witches who are trying to take over. How this is supposed to happen is anyone's guess, but he offered an anecdote about the renaming of a location in Monterey, California due to the dark and evil power of witchcraft.

Hung Cao, Trump’s newly appointed acting Navy secretary, apparently worries that witches and Wiccans are threatening to overtake communities nationwide. Cao replaced former Navy Secretary John Phelan, who was fired Wednesday by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. But in a 2023 interview, during Cao’s failed 2024 Senate campaign for Virginia’s U.S. Senate seat, Cao said he was worried that Wiccans and witches had “taken over” Monterey, California.

“We can’t let it turn like this,” he said during an interview with a Christian pastor. “There’s a place in Monterey, California, called Lovers Point. The original name was Lovers of Christ Point, but now it’s become — they took out the ‘Christ,’ it’s Lovers Point, and it’s really — Monterey is a very dark place now, a lot of witchcraft and the Wiccan community has really taken over. We can’t let that happen to Virginia.”

In the linked video, skeptic Rebecca Watson goes to investigate. She lives only two hours from Monterey, which makes it a short trip. She also is very familiar with the town and knows nothing about any witches. But as an evidence-based person, she does her best to give the witches a chance. Seeing as witches control no communities anywhere in the country, what would that even look like?

What she discovered was a group of Christians running a 5K marathon to raise money for the Good News Club Child Evangelism Fellowship, an Evangelical group that defies the separation of church and state by operating in public schools. She also encountered a group of Christian missionaries in white dress shirts who invited her to their church. But there was not a single witch in sight, no matter where she looked.

Now this seems really strange. Not only are the Christians pushing their religion in public schools, they are openly evangelizing door-to-door. If this is the town overrun by witches, I would like to see what was happening before. Can the Christians only run 5K's now when they used to be able to run 10K's? Are there only half as many missionaries now? Because the town sure sounds pretty Christian to me.

The location Cao mentioned in his interview does exist, but in the next town over. It was previously known as "Lovers of Jesus Point" and was shortened to "Lovers Point," so that bit is (almost) true. But there's no evidence that it had anything to do with witches. Sometimes place names just get shortened. It's not always some sort of deliberate attack.

Now here are the only two theories I can come up with that make any sense. First, Cao is lying his ass off and making the whole thing up. For a Trump appointee, that's pretty much par for the course, so it's not even remotely implausible. We do know that statistics show witches and pagans (all of them put together!) have nowhere near the numbers to threaten the country's most dominant religion.

The second theory is that the Christians Watson encountered are the witches, at least according to Cao. It is well-known that according to many strands of Evangelical Christianity, only their particular strand is really Christian. The others all worship the devil - that is, they're witches. This is a ridiculous trick that Christians desperate to be persecuted commonly employ so they can name an enemy that's more than 1-2 percent of the population.

The bottom line is that as the term is commonly meant and used by the alternative religious community, witches have not taken over Monterey, California. It's either a bold-faced lie or a bizarre attempt to paint a bunch of other Christians as pagans. Maybe the white-shirted missionaries were Mormons - many Evangelicals do consider Mormons something akin to witches, with their closed temple rituals and magic underwear.

The takeaway is the same as always - the Poor Oppressed Christians are losing it over nothing. All actual pagans put together do not remotely threaten any aspect of Evangelical Christianity. Even by conservative estimates, Evangelicals have more than ten times their numbers. But they're so desperate to feel oppressed that they are doing their best to find a way.