Ah, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the only podcast that is that is still legal under the Joe Biden HUNTA Robert.
Did you uh get something that I just texted you?
What was? What was?
Is it?
Is it? A screenshot that says Robert Evans podcast host manager Sophie Lichterman.
Wow, uh yeah? But it also says my location is virtual pissed.
That specific standard time you hack this is virtual?
It says, I think I have to be no. I think what it's saying because it's like virtual pissed comma or, which probably means I have to be allowed to work virtually or I will get pissed.
I mean, fair enough.
I love that you have access to my work email. I haven't been able to log into it for months.
Oh my god, so sorry. That was really personally fun for me.
Hi Alex, Hello, I just remembered a time. I don't even know if this is worth telling, but I just remember at a time that I was at a cafe in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and I overheard someone talking about listening to and loving Behind the Bastards, but that they weren't quite sure if they could trust the show anymore because of how rich podcasters are.
There was once Robert what was that thing that there was like an article that said how much Robert's networth was?
How much was it?
It was so much money, sixty four million dollars. This is what the internet estimated.
I just was. I was just hoping I would have an opportunity to address that person. And this is the perfect time because they may be listening.
Don't, guys, if you're worried, don't because you'll know the instant I'm a multimillionaire, because you will not hear from me anymore. Like, Yeah, I've never understood guys like Elon Musk, like you could be you could be hiding in the mountains, you know, uh, you know, hunting your fellow man for sport.
Yeah. It just shows how deep like just psychosexual compulsion runs. Yeah, Eon is this wealthy and needs to uh have all these ploys for attention every day?
Same like fucking JK. Rowling, just shut the fuck up.
Why are you doing this? Yeah, it just goes to show how deeply broken so many, so many people are. And I am also deeply broken, but not that kind of deeply broken.
Because because if we would, you would never hear from us again.
You'd be like absolutely not.
I'd be okay, you remember those people and they'd be like, oh did I dream that?
It's like exactly, yeah, they got rich and they fucked off the way people who aren't out of their minds too. Yeah, it's like George R. Martin, what's George R. Martin up to? He lives in a fucking like lighthouse. He bought a lighthouse and now he doesn't go out in public anymore.
He got so rich he's like, I'm not going to complete the things that got me rich.
That's admirable and it is. It is quite a flex Yeah, that.
Also please could you please finish it, sir? Respectfully?
Now at this point, at this point, I just enjoy the standard he's set for all authors, Like, once you sell your show to HBO, fuck off. Just go write something right, literally, anything other than what people want from you. All right, back to the episode at hand. So, in part one we went into significant detail about what Jeane Spriggs had to say about child abuse, and it was a lot. This was not, as I noted, out of step with other Jesus Movement churches. Where Jane really went
off though, was in the field of biblical racism. Now, the religious right always has a solid grounding and being racist as hell, the singular cause that it launched, like the religious right in the United States became a political entity as resistance to forced integration. Right, it was the idea that religious schools would have to let black kids in.
Like that is where the religious right comes from. This is not like debatable specifically, like yeah, anyway, the religious right comes after the Jesus Movement right, which feeds into it, but also like chunks of the Again, this is not like a uniform set of beliefs because some of the churches that come out of the Jesus Movement are extremely
anti racist. Right, that is a chunk of like who comes out of this, And I should note that doesn't mean they don't suck, because a really good example of an anti racist church that sucks ass is the Westboro Baptist Church. They were as hateful in their heyday as hateful an abuse of a church as has ever existed in this country. If you're not aware of them, if you ever saw people holding up those God that hey, you know, slur signs outside of like funerals for gay
people and stuff, that's the Westboro Baptist Church. They are terrible people, but not racist. Founder Fred Phelps in fact, got his start as a civil rights attorney. He was like a very active and prominent lawyer fighting for equal civil rights for black people in the United States. He was an outrageous bigot and an extreme child abuser. It's just proof that you don't have to be racist in those things. Like, you know, I'm not saying this to
praise the man. He was a monster. It's just to show you, like different people, like the kind of splinters off of the Jesus Movement are not uniform in their attitudes here. Likewise, Jim Jones is cult right, which is definitely a part of this conversation. Also founded as like a kind of a big part of what drew them together was like resistance to the racism of like American mainstream culture. A lot of members of his community were
mixed race relationships. He really recruited heavily from black people and from like folks who were like ostracized and abused by mainstream American culture. That was a big thing of like what brought them together and why they eventually felt
the need to go to Guyana. So the Twelve Tribes would seem to have a lot in common with Jones on the surface, but Jean Spriggs is the opposite, like were some of these other sort of cult movements that form out of this, this this Jesus movement are very much reacting to the Civil rights era, and Gene is more on the side of, you know, what's going to become kind of the mainstream religious right thing where you're you're very one way or the other, very kind of
like Koily being a bigot. Jane does not have any like he's not cloaking this in anything. He's not doing this like, oh, we're against integration because it's you know, the state taking over from the church and like what is a religious you know, educational institution. He is just outright hateful of black people, right, Like that is the
that is the teachings of the Twelve Tribes. And as the tribes begin to spread out, first of Vermont and then to locations in the Carolinas and then overseas to Germany, France and beyond, Gene begins preaching more vehement strains of hate. It starts with his lectures against homosexuality, which by the late eighties had evolved from aids as God's punishment to gay people need the death penalty. That's the official Twelve Tribes teaching here. He also increasingly clamps down on the
freedom of his female followers. Women over the years are banned from using birth control and then banned from giving birth without painkillers, and his justification is women shouldn't be using painkillers to give birth because they have to atone for Eve's original sin. The only way for women to like, you know, make up to God the fact that they ate that apple, is to not use medicine when they give birth. Wonder what Adam's atonement for original sin is? Why does he get to take Do men get to
take painkillers? Still?
Question, Well, Adam didn't come. It's not Adam's fault. Like that's I think that's truly, that's the rationale, right, Like Adam wouldn't have done it if Eve wasn't connising and listening to the devil so forever, like you can just do what you want.
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. So the commonality between all of this stuff, all of these different kind of things that are really toxic about the Twelve Tribes is Jene's obsession with obedience gay people, in his eyes are refusing God's command, and so they have to be destroyed. That is the penalty for disobedience women. Obviously, you can't destroy women because you need them to make more cult members, but they still have to pay for the sin of
Eve's disobedience. Right Like's, it was such a crime that all women have to atone for it. Children who do something as mild was pull away when they're a baby being wiped also have to be beaten, because any kind of disobedience to authority is the devil. Right, this becomes Jane's favorite topic. He wrote often about Miriam, Moses's elder sister, and Aaron, Moses's brother, who had opposed Moses when he wanted to take an Ethiopian wife. God was livid at
their disobedience and cursed Miriam with leprosy. And this is like one of Jean's favorite stories because it illustrates how it illustrates in his eyes, how like sharp and immediate and violent the punishment for any kind of disobedience has to be. And Jean would often use the story of Miriam and Aaron when he would talk about the responsibility children have to obey without thought or question quote. This is him talking about Miriam and Aaron. They did not
know our authority. They knew about it, but didn't know it. Since the knowledge of authority seals mouths and settles matters and many problems, doesn't it? Children in youth? Though Miriam spoke against Moses, her words were restrained. Therefore she could, finally, after being leprous and sent outside the camp, find repentance and be restored. When Miriam turned white with leprosy, she
was ostracized and took it as discipline. But some rebellious people were not restored to fellowship because they did not or could not repent. Now, the people he's talking about there, the rebellious folks who were not restored to fellowship because they refuse to repent, are black people, particularly black people who refuse to submit to white masters. Now, like many racist denominations of Christianity, the scriptural justification for Jean's bigotry
is a biblical character named Ham or Cham. Both names are correct. Apparently I'm not a Bible guy, but you can call it either way. So the short version of the story is that Ham's son Canaan, gets cursed by Noah and people who suck have long interpreted this curse as the darkening of Canaan's skin. So they're like, this is how black people were created, right, this guy does a bad thing, he gets cursed by Noah, and that's where black folks come from. The Curse of Ham is
a frequent justification for the enslavement of black Africans. Probably the best known modern example of this is the LDS Church, the Mormon Church, which since the time of Brigham Young has taught that black people were under the curse of Ham as well as the curse of Cain, which justified slavery and also meant they could not be members of the priesthood. Church banned black people from being members of
the priesthood until nineteen seventy eight. So we are we are not talking about like ancient history here.
Yeah, it's like the other day.
Yeah. Now, for reasons I don't like, that's the that's how old Ron DeSantis is. That's how long that the Mormons have been letting.
That's when Superman won with Christopher Reeves came out in the theater.
That's right, that's right. Maybe that's what made them do it. So for reasons I don't fully grasp and again are not important. Gene always uses the name Cham for Ham, which seems to be valid, although in more recent articles when members of the Twelve Tribes are interviewed about this, they always use the name Ham. I couldn't tell you why. The actual story as to why Noah cursed Ham's sons is incredibly funny, though, like it leads to a lot
of racism, or it justifies a lot of racism. But it's very funny because the story is that Noah, if you remember your Bible, like when we like depict Noah in you know, popular culture, he's always just like austere bearded wise man. He's a total fuck up in the Bible. Like that's kind of Noah's thing is he's fucking up
all the time, you know. And so basically, as the story goes, he gets housed one night, just absolute blackout drunk, and he wakes up bare ass naked, and like Cham walks in and like sees his dad with his fucking dick out. And the first thing that occurs to Cham, because he's disobedient, is like he runs to his brothers and he's like, guys, guys, you gotta see this. Dad's like fucking hanging grain right now. So he tries to pull them in and they're like, no, you know it's
not You're not supposed to see your dad naked. That's disobedience. Gene writes about this moment quote Cham was insubordinate of heart, always expecting authority to fall. So he got his chance to show what was in him. He revealed his father's fault, and this proved that he was not at all in subjection to his father's authority. His subjection to his father was merely eye service or lip service. His submission was only half hearted. So when the opportunity presented itself, seized
it to expose his father. There was a Satanic principle working in him. So in Chan's in Cham's son, his offering was cursed to bond slavery, an indentured servitude. For this entire age, from the flood to the end of the age, Cham's descendants only hope of recovery was through submitting to their masters from the heart, not just giving
eye or lip service, but wholeheartedly serving. After the flood, our father gave hope to mankind to be obedient to the addition to the Second Covenant that there would be no half hearted submission to anyone in authority in the world. But Cham retained his sin of having a problem with authority,
submitting outwardly but still retaining his hidden rebellion. So afterward Cham's descendants would be under the rod, and those who received it learned submission to authority and loved their masters, and were prepared for the eternal age, where many of them will be kings among the nations. So what he's saying here is that because of this sin of Cham, all of his descendants black people need to be slaves, right Like, it is their moral duty to be slaw
and love it. Right, that's the That's what his argument is. That's what he believes, and that if they're good slaves, if they're totally obedient, then they'll get to be kings, you know, when Jesus comes back. Right Like, that's the that's the argument. Pretty shitty, pretty bad guy, right Like, that's that's fucked up stuff. We don't need to like belabor the point.
Not ideal.
Yeah, I didn't.
I didn't know. I I don't know any of that background that this is how folks have reverse engineered rash. Yeah, for slavery being.
Time, Yeah, one of the web Yeah. Yeah. So in Gene's theology, one of the things he writes is that slave masters are actually the most burdened because of the cursive ham because it's they have so much more response. All the slave has to do is be obedient and happy. Right, The slave master has so much to keep caught, like to deal with. You know, you got all these slaves to take care of, right, That's that's the real difficult job, right.
It's more cultivating. You're cultivating as as they're is important. Obedience, which is the most the most godly thing to yes.
Yeah. And it's interesting because he talks about like the responsibility that a slave master has, but it's a responsibility to God. He has no responsibility to the human beings that he holds in bondage. Lincoln, Gene taught, was an evil emperor, damned by God for his refusal to accept the holy order of slavery. Again, cruel and incompetent. Confederate slave masters had no responsibility for like the fact that they destroyed themselves. It's all Lincoln's fault because he's he's
usurping this like rightful order of the world. Likewise, the apartheid government of South Africa bore no responsibility for its brutality and corruption. Instead, the Black Africans who fought for civil rights have damned all black people to endless generations of suffering by removing apartheid.
This is why they moved to Vermont, Like, I mean Vermont.
They stay. I think that's part of why they pick it. But they move all over the place, right, Like they're going to be in call eventually, like twenty something states.
Right.
Wow, So yeah. I found a fascinating article published by the Cult News Network in twenty twenty one, the year Gene died that gives us an idea of how his teachings continue to be carried on in the modern day. The author set in sat in on a worship session which included a lecture on sham slash ham from a church teacher named Mevesser quote the Twelve Tribes. Teacher also explained that all of the slaves before the Civil War were happy and care free and grateful to be under
the tutelage of the white man. Meveser taught that even if a slave was being whipped by his or her master on some plantation, all of the other slaves were happy that this errant slave received discipline and grateful that their master had provided it. Meveser said once that the evil Lincoln set the slaves free, poor Ham did not know what to do since he was no longer under the loving hand of Jaffeth, and so society in the United States turned into a total mess, according to the
Twelve Tribes, because it devis from this divine doctrine. So that's pretty cool. Nice nice folks. Now, the study group here included one black woman, the only African American member of that particular Twelve Tribes community, Bummer.
I was just thinking about her, yeah, in the situation.
Oh boy, Well, it's so I know who this person is because of other articles I've read. But I do want to read this quote about her from this article because I find it like both very unsettling and sad and kind of worth discussing. Mebser then called the only female African American member of the community are Mammy and
praised her for being a humble Mammy servant. He stated his conviction that the only way in the world that shem Ham and Jayfath could truly live together in peace and harmony is in the Body of the Messiah aka the Twelve Tribes, not mixed up together in the Satanic world where godly boundaries have been erased, where the races
will only fight amongst themselves. Ultimately, according to this Twelve Tribes doctrine, Ham left on his own will only self destruct unless he has Jfth to guide and protect him. That's white people. At the meeting, one African American disciple in the room thirty or forty people were there, stood up and confessed hesitantly that he was feeling offended in
his flesh. He said, we're always talking about welcoming Ham into the body of the Messiah, but most folks who are aware of the nation of Ham would be very offended by this teaching. He continued, Black folks were not happy about their situation, and they certainly did not enjoy being slaves. And I don't want to leave this room with people thinking that it's true. So it's not like
especially now. And again this is twenty twenty one, which I think may factor in why there was some resistance to this, But that's they're still teaching the same things that Spriggs was writing, you know, in the early eighties about this stuff. It's pretty fucked up.
I have a hard time wrapping my head around like being like everything else than this is cool, but their ideas of race aren't great, Like I and then to speak and then to get up and speak about that seems like it would take like a particular kind of bravery.
It's strange, right, it is like it is. I think about it a little bit like how you've got these guys, you know, every now and then you get a Republican who's into all of the other shitty stuff that the right does. But like John McCain, they don't like torture, right because, like they have, that is a personal thing they've experienced with. So he's not going to be like, yeah, people are amazing. Our capacity for compartmentalization is bitterly unmatched.
I've gotten this far with a very well honed ability to compartmental Yeah.
Truly remarkable. As the Twelve Tribes continued to buy property and create new communes around the United States and the world, child abuse continue to be a regular fact of life. In June of nineteen eighty seven, Patricia Jones, David Jones's wife, had her fifth child, a daughter named Shoa Shua shuah, I'm gonna guess. She recalls this as being a particularly good time. For the most part, the colt was not yet as extreme as it would become. They were able
to go like camping on the weekends, you know. They families would do swimming trips to the lake. You know there was the discipline was severe, but you also still had something of a life. This gets clamped down on as the years grow on and Jeane Spriggs gets older. He starts to restrict his followers from more and more pleasures.
First he bans holiday celebrations, then he abans birthdays. After several followers who had owned substantial property and loaned it to the church left, taking their property with them, he forbade members from owning any money or private property from now on. As soon as you join, you are expected to sign over your house, your car, your basic appliances, you know, stuff like your refrigerators and stuff to the
Twelve Tribes. The former member who wrote that article in the Chattanoogaan, who I cited last episode, recalled how this process worked even for people who had very little to sign over. All I had was an old, bashed up car and seventy dollars. I had no problem giving them my car, but I did not disc the money I had because it was all that I had, which you know, she does eventually get out, so that's this person does eventually get out, so that's good for them. But like, yeah,
they'll take your like beat to shit old car. If you've got a house, they'll take that. If you've got a business, they'll certainly take.
That, right And it seems like a very it's like very popular cult behavior too. Yeah, with assets and then put it into your real estate portfolio. Yes, because you said what they had thirty six million dollars in.
Yes, yes, they've done quite well for themselves. Spriggs commanded ever more frequent punishments for his members. Shiwa recalls being spanked for pretending a rolled up towel was a doll because this was this is both she had violated their prescriptions against private property because now she has a doll. But also you're not allowed to imagine things like it's a sin to imagine. So she gets beaten for pretending that towel is a doll. She's also hit when she
doesn't eat enough. She's hit when she's taking caught taking food from the refrigerator. She's hit from her parents and from other adults when she's not respectful enough at communal dinners. And this is the kind of thing where this Spriggs encourages parents to abuse their own and other people's children. And he also every time there's a gathering, he will pressure the adults to hit their kids more. He'll tell them, quote, you should be proud of these wounds that your children bear.
If you love your children, you will not be spare be swayed by their screams, which is I don't know, you could kind of sum up America that way, right, Like you love your children, he will not be swayed by their screams. Very very appropriate line for this country. But not all parents go along with the escalating violence. Mary Wiseman, wife of the second in command of the cult, grew increasingly unhappy after Spriggs paddled her six year old daughter.
She threatened to take her kids and leave. Ultimately, she decides not to go. I think it's just because doing that would mean getting cut off financially and losing all all of her family members right the whole everything she knows at this point, she's lived here so long, like you have to give up all of your connections if you leave right, and so she doesn't take her kids away. Ultimately, Wiseman is going to die very young at age thirty nine of cervical cancer. She dies in part because Spriggs
will not let her receive modern medical care. When she dies, he then tells his followers that her unconfessed sin of bucking authority was what had killed her. Quote guilt and unconfessed sin is how you get sick. This is why people die young.
Pretty cool, Yeah, I have I have such a like, my feelings towards people who are in a cult for a long time are complicated. Yeah, because like largely because you're like, there is there seems to be a point of no return for being able to get out in a real way, And then you have kids and you pass it on to them in one way or another, and you're just like, ugh, like it's.
Well, and it's also why if you talk to and the whole field of like cult deprogramming is complex and uh sure to a degree, pretty fucked up, but like one of the things that is really durably true and really maybe the only good advice I would give someone who was like, I have a family member and a cult is past a certain point, don't argue with them,
don't fight about it. Just tell them, hey, you know, if anytime you want to talk about anything, like I'm here, make sure they know they have a door open, like, because you can't, you can't fight it out of them.
Right, that's great almost everything, Yeah, that's great. It's just like just be there. Yeah, functionally, if you're able to.
Be, Yeah, don't fight them, you know, because again, past a certain point. I'm not saying like, if they're early in, don't try to warn someone, don't try to be like, hey, I found this fucked up info. But like, if they are straight up in the cult, the most important thing is that they know they can talk to you, right, because then maybe they'll be able to get out the stories.
When you read about stories people who escape from the Twelve Tribes, it's generally like they'll wind up at some family member's house who they you know, hadn't talked to in years, but knew that they could you know, count on. Yeah, and yeah. The people who never get out are generally the people who don't have that right.
Right, because like you, if you leave, you know, I just can't imagine in a lot of ways, a less forgiving society to be dumped off into. It's like you leave the cult, you have nothing, and now you're just in America with.
Nothinghing, Yeah exactly, it's yeah, a desperate situation. Yeah, So to be entirely so Gene, you know, Wiseman becomes kind of this nexus of revenge against him. But luckily for Jean, she gets cancer. He stops her from getting medical care. And this is I think there's a degree to which this was tactical for him, Like if she dies, he
loses a problem. But he is going to quickly extend this rule across the entire flock, right, it is it is pretty from a pretty early stage, like you are not allowed to go to the doctor if you're in this organization, especially children. Part because he doesn't want children to go to doctors because doctors will report child abuse, right the blue marks. Yeah, and the way he just he's like, well, look, you don't need to go to
the doctor. If you're following God in your heart too, you can't just is not just enough to do the right things you have to. If there's rebellion in your heart, then that's why you get sick. So if someone gets sick, you can just say they must have rebelled in their heart right, they must not have. Yeah. Now, if you're wondering, did this policy cause any kids to die? Yes, it sure did. And I'm going to quote from Pacific Standard magazine here. Sorry, Sophie, we made it a long stretch
of that. I know, a bunch of dead kids.
Last episode, when you started mentioning certain things, I was like, Okay, yeah, said kids have died.
Okay, but here here it is.
Yeah, No, Sophie, this is this is going to be. This is the high body count episode a medium medium body count.
Also take an ad break to prepare.
Yeah, you know who won't force children to avoid life saving medical care?
God? I hope not the.
Sponsors of the Unless it's the Reagan Coins people. We're back and we're talking about our coins. Sorry, before we.
Get into the before we get into the brutality of this next phase. How genuinely professionally curious, How do you too take care of your mental health and dealing with what you deal with every day? Like I feel like you talk you're really talking about some stuff like do you do you go on long walks or do you uh you have a therapist on retainer.
I mean, I've been playing the boulders Gate the new recently. That's been that's been great.
We have animals and stuff.
Yeah, it's fine, you know, that's very good. I just want to make sure. I just want to make sure you have an outlet.
I produced the opposite of the show, which is cool people who did cool stuff, And.
Oh that's a cool.
And I'm just fundamentally okens fine, h well all the time.
Yeah, rob People who can't see Robert's just been lifting weights this entire time, so I think that's probably how he gets through it.
It's nice.
Yeah, you're not wrong.
So okay, here we're back and we're going to talk about all these dead kids. Here's Pacific Standard magazine. During a whooping cough epidemic that swept the community in the late nineteen eighties, Bruce Wittenberg grew alarmed when his fifteen month old became sick. He had more than a half dozen former and current members say he consulted the elders, who told him if God wants her to live, he'll
save her. She died a few hours later. It was the worst thing that happened to us, said Wittenberg, who left the tribes in two thousand and one. During her second pregnancy, another former member, Ruth Williams, developed placenta previa, a dangerous condition in which the placenta blocks the birth canal. She was told that if she prayed hard enough, God
would move the placina out of the way. Despite beseeching God on her hands and knees, Williams started him when she went into labor and lost consciousness, at which point she was driven to a hospital, she says, and dumped on the sidewalk outside the emergency room. She woke to the news that her son had been stillborn. Another woman who labored for days was only brought to a hospital after her first child died inside her.
So pretty bad, did the person who do we know if the person who is dumped on the sidewalk left the call or did she have to walk back? Did she have to go back to the cult?
Yeah? I think this is how she left, right, Like, oh yeah, so Wiseman's brief spring of resistance had horrified Sprigs right, so he clamps down like She is generally seen as the dividing line between a lot of the more like abusive and restrictive things that he puts in for his cult. Like basically, before Wiseman, you're kind of able to have some sort of a life even though
there's these very harsh rules about child abuse. And after Wiseman, he doesn't want people doing anything that can give give them even a second of happiness because that it's the root of a disobedience. Right, if you have anything in your life at all besides his teachings, you know that's that's not going to work for him.
I'm kind of I'm surprised in a way it ended up making it as long as it did, because like usually you have some like something like something to like have people be able to have an outlet that goes against all of your other authoritarian tendencies. But this person just seems like, top to bottom, the worst authoritarian.
I think there are. For one thing, it's different communities are a little different, so they're not all as strict as they're supposed to be on paper. A lot of it is that the people who join, Like I read one account of a dude who's like the father of a kid who gets pulled into the cult and he's like, it's a cult. I know that they've done bad things. My kid is bipolar and troubled and was living on the streets before he found these people, so like, I'm
not sure it was. I think net it's been a positive for him because now he has like a place in the structure. Like again, I'm not like commenting on that. That's just what this guy said, And I do suspect I think based on interviews I've read, there are a number of people who are like, yeah, there's things that are bad or fucked up or like you know that you have to skirt around, but like, it is a community, we have a life. You know, you're not exposed to
the vicissitudes of existing under capitalism as much. You get to kind of hide from the hard parts of life totally.
Like this is the out This is like one of the outcomes of having next to zero social safety. Yes exactly, yehople step in, people step in, and then it becomes an alternative.
There's a lot that's bad about this, But what am I going to do, like find out how to make like rent and stuff on my own? I've been in this culture. I don't have like marketable skills. I don't feel a lot of people I think that is kind of where this goes for them. So by the early nineteen nineties, law enforcement in several states had tried and generally failed to investigate and act on allegations of abuse
in the cult. The only realistic threat to janes control of these kids came from dis affected parents who had custody of their children. In the years that followed Mary's death, tribal elders started telling parents that they were not fit to raise their own kids. Children were sent away to other communes to be raised, and married couples were forced to split up. One example of this particular horror comes from a family at a Twelve Tribes community in nineteen
ninety two. Noah, Yoshia, and Ezra were three brothers aged seven to twelve. One day, they were all playing in a tree when an elder's wife told them they had to stop. They made the mistake of telling her that their dad had given them permission, and according to Spriggs, this was an act of Satanic rebellion. So the elder married to that woman came by and he grabbed them. He locked Noah in the furnace room of a house and told him to write down a comprehensive list of
all of his sins. This took a full week. Since Noah was nine, he didn't have that many sins, right, So he's going to keep locked in there until the list is long enough, so he has to keep start making up sins, right, So he's like writing about stealing pennies and shit just to like fill paper while he's alone, and he's being like starved here, right, He's in a furnace room, he's shitting in a bucket, he's getting one meal a day while he continues to expand this list
of sins until it's long enough for the elder. But the elder is not willing to accept like this because this is like a little nine year old church kid's idea of sins and they're just not bad enough for this guy. So this guy's like, no, I know what you must have done. You must be having gay sex. And Noah, being a nine year old who has been homeschooled,
is like, I don't know what that is. And so this elder then sits down and explains in like very pornographic detail, like you get the feeling this is like a kink for this guy, right, Like you get stories like this in these cults, we will be talking about more of them. So after this whole experience ends, all three boys are taken from their parents and sent to
different homes. Noah goes on like he's put in another commune in another state, and he's like paired up with other boy his age who are called his brothers, and their main job is to beat the shit out of him all the time because he's a corruptor, right because he's gay. Now, according to Yeah, this one of the elders in the church, he's not allowed to rejoin his parents for more than a year. Spriggs was nearly as concerned with the possibility of sexual contact between heterosexual kids
as he was with you know, the other kind. Eventually, he forbade all physical contact between non married and non related males and females. If children were caught in the act of making any other kind of physical contact with other kids of the opposite sex, they would be beaten. If young adults or adults treated as such, had any kind of sexual contact, which in the Twelve tribes included
holding hands and kissing, the punishment was marriage. Like if you catch like a boy and a girl holding hands, they have to get married now, right, do.
You know, do we know like what their ORG chart looks like? Like who is enforcing this stuff? Is there? Is there like a mayer of the tribe or what.
Is the each each commune has a group of elders who seems like make decisions in common. And then Spriggs is obviously Spriggs and his wife are are the big overall leaders. Now there is a degree to which the org chart is a little bit of a mystery. Still, I think in coming years, as more and more people leave and we get more detailed, we might will probably know more. That's what I can tell from from what's the research?
You said young adults? But what's that? What is what is that considered here?
I mean it seems like thirteen to fifteen year olds are not uncommonly getting married off. So I would say when they say young adults, some of them are adults and some of them are what we would.
Call children, right, yeah, yeah.
Now sometimes they are being married to other kids their age. But like this is a you know, it's not uncommon.
For the other old hands.
Yeah, exactly, I must be, I must I'm also I'm sorry if I'm getting ahead of us here, but are are these kids working like are they.
Yeah, yeah, as soon as like you, they only do a few years of school, you kick them out of that, like you don't even really need him to.
Read for punish Kids with marriage are also doing.
Child Yeah yeah, yeah, I was. I'm curious if this had to do with adding to their real estate portfolios. These kids, these kids must be working for free problems. Yeah, and a lot of situations.
Absolutely so. In the early days, boys and girls could at least socialize to some extent during the homeschool educations that they received. But this also made Sprigs uncomfortable and so he bans co ed education, which coupled with the absolute lack of any sex ed for children, led to some peculiar behavior from the young men of the community. To be specific, they started fucking the farm animals. This is This is a problem in Germany, in the United
States and multiple different like state communes. This is like, there's like this outbreak of bestiality. Now it's Pacific standard bag just say that, like, yeah, these kids start experimenting with bestiality. It is unclear to me if they actually did. For one thing, this cult defines two kids holding hands as sexual content, right or kissing or whatever. That's not sex, we can all say, right, reasonable people, because you know, it's not sexual contact like kiss another kid or whatever
or hold their hand. So I don't know if actually there's a lot of bestiality going on or it, Like.
I do want to note. This just came up the other day I reread The Last Picture Show, which I hadn't read since high school, by Larry McMurtry about kids in Texas. I was not prepared how much this, like classic American novel had cow fucking in it, Like, oh yeah, it was like pages pages dedicated to fucking guys.
And look, that's accurate. I come from Texas. I grew up on a cow farm. You know, that's just what people know. But we don't know if I mean, maybe it is what they do, right a group hysteria in which were yeah, I don't yeah, And that's that's the thing.
I don't know if there's actually a lot of kids having sex with animals or if this is like a moral panic, because maybe they're like forcing kids to come up with new sins that they've done, right, sure, and so some kids like, yeah, maybe that's how it starts. I don't know that it's not certainly not impossible, Like there are like that a bunch of confused kids would
experiment with animals too, like it could happen. Right. The main evidence that supports the idea that some abuse of animals took place is although, honestly, when kids are this abused, I don't know that i'd describe what they're doing to the animals as abuse, like you have so fundamentally damaged these children like I wouldn't. I wouldn't like want to morally condemn them from for the sheer confusion that must
be growing up in this this circumstance. But in two thousand and six, Spriggs ordered the young men accused of bestiality to execute all of the animals they had allegedly molested. This includes thirty sheep, multiple cows, goats, and chicken. So you know, if it was something that was made up, they went quite far in suppressing it. Now, God, it's valuable to contrast the severity with which Spriggs treated these allegations of bestiality to how he and his cult leaders
handled allegations that adult members had molested children. Right, Because a lot less seriously as it actually turns out, Because you know, fundamentally it is not necessarily a sin in the same way in their eyes.
Right, is it only a sin just because it's sex and it's like extra not extra marital, Like I'm sure it seems like having sex with children against Yeah, that's not sex, Like raping children is probably like only bad because of the carnal nature, because kids don't seem like they're even humans in their eyes.
Yeah, I don't. I think it also might be more that like there's this the idea that a kid would be able to turn down or stop an adult from molesting them is kind of impossible within this belief system because children are it cannot cannot disobey an adult. So I think that I think that there is this like weird, this situation created for Spriggs where there's a way in which they cannot take this as seriously right because of this,
this this theology he's built of abuse. So one spring morning in two thousand and two, cult member Kimberly Peck noticed her husband, Jeff Leonard, who she had recently married, heading into her daughter's tent early in the morning. Now, Peck had joined the Twelve Tribes as a single mother. Right She'd been married to Jeff after like he'd basically been picked for her right, and they lived in she had She had a quantcet style hut with Jeff, and
then her kids lived in another hut. And this is on a Central Florida compound earned owned by the colt. After several mornings of watching Jeff leave early to fetch their daughters for the day, she decided to follow them. She got suspicious, and I'm going to quote now from
an article in the Broward Palm Beach New Times. As Peck watched in fear, forty five year old Leonard began caressing one of the girls, kissing his stepdaughter intimately, and rubbing his hands over praise the place as he shouldn't, she told authorities later, when he was finished, he moved her over to her younger sister, Peck claims. Peck says that she would have tried to stop it if she weren't so alone in the woods. Soon Peck would learn
how alone she was. Peck spoke to her children, and all three of them, two daughters and a son, said that they had been molested by their stepfather. Peck went to the elders in twelve tribes. She wanted justice. Instead, the tribe elders who claimed to be so strict about cardinal relations that couples found holding hands are forced to marry, covered up the abuse, and protected Leonard from the criminal charges. They hid him at another of the Colt's properties in Georgia,
Peck says, with the concurrence of prosecutors and police. So, you know, not an unexpected story, entirely very Catholic church vibes in a lot of ways, like moving them to another parish effectively, you know.
Yeah, well, I feel like it's it seems like a logical outcome of treating children like they're inhuman and like they're only there to serve you and to serve God. Ultimately, like you can't take it seriously because if you take it seriously, it reveals that it was inevitable due to like the structure of your organization anyway, So you ultimately have to hide it. Like that's why this keeps happening.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Now it is, like obviously, it's hard to think of an environment more suited to predatory pedophilia than the one that Spriggs has created here. Right. Pedophiles thrive in environments in which children are isolated from mainstream society so that there are not adults who might notice and report their behavior. They also thrive in cultures where children are punished for disrespect because then they're less
likely to try and fight back. So that you know, again, by the everything that that Spriggs has done here has created like an ideal place for predators to thrive.
Right well. And in this case where there is a concerned mother, where that mother has like no power or recourse eye, oh yeah, like that's like this whole other thing is that it's like you can, yeah do it and if you get noticed, even if you get noticed, those people don't have records.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So Peck eventually left the cult because this was the only way she could press charges against Leonard. He was finally arrested and charged and convicted in two thousand and seven, but he was far from the only culprit of child abuse with it like child sexual abuse within the cult. Around the same time as all this was happening, another cult member, David Drew's, was charged with fondling a girl at the colt's West Palm Beach compound.
Police and prosecutors in DeSoto County claim that cult leadership ignored reports against both men and took steps to impede their investigations, and there are numerous stories from similar behavior within cult communes around the country. The Denver Post reported on this case of abuse from twenty eleven. Sometimes a man accused of sexual abuse will be kicked out of the cult, ex members said, but sometimes he will be
forgiven and allowed to stay. How a case is handled often depends on how much status the abuser has within the cult. Frequently, children who report sexual abuse are not believed. Some are punished and told the abuse was their fault. Anderson said that as a small girl that she is a small girl, told a woman she trusted about being sexually abused. That woman brought it to other adults, and Anderson was questioned by a male elder. She kept silent.
Another elder's wife then took her aside and questioned her. She said, how do you have intercourse? And that's what threw me off. I said, what is intercourse? And why would I have it? And then she said is it anal or vaginal? Anderson didn't know what those words meant, and the elder's wife concluded that she was lying about being abused in an attempt to get attention. Anderson said, it's like make up your mind, like is this sinful
to teach people? And thus they shouldn't be expected to answer questions about it or or are they lying if they don't know what sex is? Like what is it's I don't know. I guess you don't have to be consistent if you're a fucking cult member whatever.
Yeah, well, I mean I think that that's kind of like one of just it's one of the ways that the power structure works is like not giving you the tools that you need in order to report and then using the fact that you don't have the tools against you.
Yeah, this is like a big thing with a lot of Republican governance too, right, taking away people's tools to have any kind of resistance to a lot of these power structures. It is interesting to me that when they have been forced to comment on these cases, representatives of the Twelve Tribes tend to emphasize the importance of forgiveness in their faith, a kind of mercy they rarely to
seem to extend to small children. Quote. The judge agreed to set a two hundred and fifty thousand dollars bail for Leonard tribe elder Nelson says members haven't decided whether to post the bail since they would likely have to put up some of the tribe's property as collateral. As Nelson spoke, several members worked in the blazing afternoon sun building what looked like a drainage ditch to the goat pen, and a woman in an Amish style dress brought them
water in a bucket. Nelson said the tribe will help members like Leonard face their sin. He had come to the place where he had surrendered himself to God Yeshua, and so we will always help him. Nelson said. It seemed that he Leonard was being very upfront and honest about his situation. So that's Nelson's this cult the elder, and he's like, look, no, we'll support him through all of his legal trials because he feels bad for repeatedly
molesting children. You know, that's all that matters. He's given himself because again, it's not disobedient for an adult to molest a child, because children have to be obedient to adults, and it's not as long as his disobedience was to God and as long as he's truly sorry about that has repented to God. Then yeah, then he's still one of us. Right, you know who's still one of us? Podcasters? Not child Moleston cults. Here's ads.
Wow, that was really bad.
One of my better pivots. I feel thank you so much.
Here's ads.
Yeah, oh we're back. So by the early two thousands, the Twelve Tribes had at least three thousand members, probably closer to four thousand. They operated communes in twenty two states and several other countries, including England, Spain, Australia, and Germany. The latter state Germany is where they faced one of
their most serious acts of state. I don't know, I wrote repression here, but like, I don't call it's not really like it's one of the only times that a state actually acted against them, right, in an effective way. Corporal punishment is illegal in Germany, right, so all of their teachings about hitting the shit out of kids, you actually can't teach that, right, Like, you are breaking the law, not but just by doing it, but by like spreading
this material. And so in twenty thirteen, a reporter for RTLTV infiltrates one of the Twelve Tribes communes in Germany. Now getting into these communities, is not hard. The cult recruits by inviting people in. Right. A lot of journalists have gone to other meetings of theirs. Right, you can come in, you can stay for a worship session. This journalist pretended that they were like interested in joining, right, that basically they were one of these disaffected people who's
maybe looking for a cult. And they This journalist stays in there for two days and in that brief, like and she's filming undercover. Right, in two days captures on video fifty individual incidents of child abuse. That's how frequent this case, Like two that's not a lot of time. It's hard to find fifty examples of anything in two days filming, like, yeah, it's wild, Yeah, it's it's quite quite an intense number. In one case, a little girl
is beaten for saying I'm tired because that's disobedient. Right, So kudos don't say this often on this show. Kudos to Germany. Here they seize all forty children and put them in foster care. Right, they get those kids the fuck away from their parents. This sparks a police raid on another tribe's commune in France, where four children are
taken after evidence of abuse is uncovered. These rare prosecutions and raids, while you know, kudos to everyone involved in that in France and Germany, do not seriously harm the overall structure of the cult. The Twelve Tribes were supported primarily by the businesses they started in every New State, in town where they bought property, the yellow Deli was
the model, and restaurants were always a profitable endeavor. Well, we're always a profita little endeavor in that they bring in people, right, Another yellow Deli is started in Boulder, where it gets a reputation for serving really good food and continuing to draw in troubled, hungry youngsters. There's a lot of a lot of rail travel through Boulder, a lot of like train hopping kids and stuff in that town. Like it's a good place to recruit in this way.
Yeah, for sure, you can get some you can get some crust punks in.
Your yeah, exactly. Yeah. They also ran a cafe called Matte Factor, matt Factor, m ate Factor in Manitou Springs, and these are again the profit from these businesses is that they bring in recruits.
Wellam that you can and that your dishwashers and waiters, etc. Are probably working for free.
Yeah, although you know, even if you want to know how hard it is to run a restaurant, even when you have pure slave labor doing all of the work. Their restaurants like don't really run a profit usually, like it's consistent loss lead for them, right, you have to subsidize the restaurant because it's just it is fucking hard to make money with a restaurant, like even if you're
this cult. Right, So these yellow Delis are basically their loss leaders, right, while they make their real money, millions of it through an industry that does not exactly fit with the crunchy Jesus free kippie vibes that they put on in public. I'm going to quote from Pacific Standard magazine again here. Most of the Colorado Community's money comes
from construction companies, the ex members said. One business, Commonwealth Services, LLC, was formed in twenty sixteen and registered to member Matthew Morgan at the group's Boulder County compound on Elder Dorado Springs Drive. According to records from the Colorado Secretary of State's Office, the business uses the trade name CWS Excavating. Its website says it's a family owned and operated septic
installation company. It's one of a number of construction companies the Twelve Tribes is operated during the last five decades. A Massachusetts based company, BOJ Construction LLC, pulled in several million dollars a year at its height in the early two thousands and drove the group's funding. X members said young men in the cult would travel the country for jobs, rent a little house for everybody, and work nearly around the clock without pay until the job was done. So
that's how it's construction, right, They're like the fucking mob. Right, They've got this gold The.
Gold standard of the cult job is the Heaven's Gate mid nineties web development.
Oh, absolutely, groundbreaking web design. Got to hand it to Heaven's Gate. They knew what they were doing.
They had the best hearing this that it's like, it's like uncompensated construction. Oh yeah, it's terrible.
Yeah, that's fucking nightmare. Yeah. Now, if you'll remember, these folks have a little bit of Judaism mixed in with their fundamentalist Christianity, right, so they're.
Not supposed to work, so probably still anti Semitic, right, Like, I haven't.
Actually run into that allegation. I don't know, get like.
I imagine they're kind of like like Christian Zionists who are like, yeah, we'll use the pieces that are important outwardly. Yeah, like behind closed doors were still you know.
I will say one of the things is interesting to me about them because I've read they have a website that I've been reading, and they do make a big point of being like, we're actually not one of those cults who believes everyone who's not a Christian goes to Hell. They believe that there are the thing that they specifies there are righteous people who are obedient to their conscience even if they're not Christians, and those people get to
go to one of the heaven levels. They do kind of this Catholic thing where I think there's a contributory. I'm not an expert on their esk on the you know, but like, yeah, I did. That is a little bit of a difference from some of the other things I found anyway, because there's this, you know, little sprig of Judaism mixed into everything. They're not supposed to work on the Sabbath, right, you know, right, so that that and spring the fact that sprigs it's also mandatory to attend
two prayer meetings every single day. That gets in the way of sweet Lady capitalism, right, Like, you're losing a lot of work time if you're doing two prayers a day and you're not working one day of the week. That's just unacceptable if you're running a business in Spriggs's eyes, Right, So they have to find some way. How do you justify making people work on the Sabbath when, like God
was pretty clear. You know, if you're a Bible guy, this is not there's not really like a lot of fucking around room here.
You know.
There's like ten to twelve rules.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's not a lot of them. Yeah, this is a big one, but the two rules.
Yeah.
Yeah. So Spriggs and other cult leadership were known to declare pushes, and a push is like an exemption, a temporary exemption for their working members from attending worship sessions or from taking off the Sabbath. One former leader told an interviewer, Geene would say, if it's for a good cause, God will forgive us for working all the time. What
basically happened was everything became a push. Right, They're just doing this all the time now because it's the money, so good right, you're you would crease your profits by so much. Businesses were held by the church or church elders via a dizzying series of interlocking LLCs, which ensured that no own members actually owned property or the means
to make a living for themselves. This means that there are a lot of cases of like former cult members who will like build a business that makes millions of dollars for the cult and then they'll leave because it's abusive and they've got nothing, right, like absolutely nothing, you know.
Wild.
Yeah, And again I should note here it is illegal to have people work for free. It is illegal to even be like, oh, well they're donating their time, right, This is like like you cannot do that. It is against the Now people don't get punished for it, right because this is the kind of crime that rich people commit, right,
and these are rich people now, Sprigs is wealthy. This is a multimillion dollar cult, so it never becomes a prime And they also there's also some exemptions of like if you're a business owner, you can if your kids work to some extent, and like there are like but like you can't make people work for free, which is what the cult does. They have been in violation of the law to a massive extent the whole time they've existed.
This is like, I mean you you had said it in reference to the construction thing that it's like the mob, but like the other place where it feels like the mob is like they had to have a lawyer help them set up those outs. Yeah, for sure, they had to have a lawyer and be like, here's how you keep your money safe within a network of lls because you don't one a layman does not know that. Now, so they had they had like outside help in order to set up this structure to work in this way.
Is yeah bonkers. So yeah, this is very much illegal again, but it's also the kind of crime the government has very little interest in prosecuting because it's it would be easy. I think part of why nothing happens is that it would be pretty easy for a Christian themed cult like the Twelve Tribes to cry religious persecution and pull ind support from the mainstream evangelical right. That hasn't really happened, but I think it's because the government never prosecuted them
for this kind of shit, you know. Pacific Standard magazine talked to one man who used his considerable skills to create a multimillion dollar construction business for the cult and ran it for years or a massive profit of the church. Quote. He ran a construction company that made three or four million in revenue annually, he said, which paid for about ten thousand dollars in monthly expenses for the community he lived in at the time. He'd send whatever was left
to Hidden Nite, which is the cult headquarters. I started that business and ran it all, but I was having a hard time buying socks for my daughter. That's what I mean about not paying labor. You're eating millet for breakfast and you can't buy clothes for your kids. And one of the black box things about this cult that like I just don't have a satisfying answer for you, was like, are they fucking living it up? Is there like some leadership right in a separate location and they're
like living the high life. There are rumors that Spriggs spent a significant portion of the aughts living in luxury and the Mediterranean. I have not seen hard evidence of this, though. He dies on a cult compound, right, or he's like brought to the hospital from a cult compound or something like that. So he's in the States near the end of his life. I don't know, like, is he does this all turn into a financial con Is this all
about the money? A little bit unclear to me. But the money's going somewhere, right, Like a lot of money is being made, and that somewhere is the headquarters of the cult, right, they are getting everything so well.
In some cases, the money is just the power that allows you to do the thing that you get off on. And that's what I mean, that's I don't know because I only have what you've told me to this point. But like that to me is what it sounds like. Like this guy sounds like a true believer who also is probably like really getting off on the power pieces that he's able he's able to facilitate by way of being in this position, and he's able to maintain that position.
To your point, like if you have that much if you have that much money in ultimately in real estate, no one can really touch you unless unless you're robbing other people with money. Like that's when the government intervenes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
After Waco, the government doesn't really intervene in this sort of thing.
Now, I mean, I got that is one of the tough things when it's like, what do you do about this? Because obviously it's not okay to just let it happen, But also the government has a terrible track record of handling cults. I'm not sure that it's better for everywhere right about these kids? Are you saying sending the FBI in to rescue these kids as better? Well, that hasn't always worked in the past. Sometimes they all burn to
death in a basement. So I don't know. I don't know how we fix this with the long arm of the law right and honestly, the thing that is ultimately fixing it in the long run, like by some accounts, basically all of the children raised in this cult over the last twenty years have left, like the vast, vast majority, like it is dying out according to numerous reports, just as a result of how harsh it is. Like ultimately, the thing that always ends this kind of shit is
not the cops, it's not the Feds. It's former members and their support networks and family helping each other get out and move on.
Like that's just how it is, which is which is absolutely the truth, and and I agree, I mean, it's like the government doesn't have a great track record of interviewing inn sh no, no, I know that well, but it's it's so it's so disheartening because really the truth is, if you want to start an abusive cult and gain a lot of power and and be sort of horrendously abusive to all the people around you, you can do and get away with that for like a generation in
this country. Yeah, that's it's there's no recourse, there's no way around it outside of just like it'll burn out events and it's tough.
Like obviously, I think there's a lot that could and should be done in ri stuff, Like I think it would be there's a lot to do about like how what like there's probably presumably probably ways to like mandate more. I don't know, Yeah, I honestly, legally, I don't know how you fix this. Somebody else will have to solve that for me, or if there is like realistically, can you have a society that has religious freedom in the way that we do and doesn't offer people a way
to basically drop out of society with their kids? Right, Like, how do you how do.
We simultaneously need a society that you do? There isn't such a strong and realistic urge to want to drop out of as well.
Yeah, yeah, and yeah I anyway life, So as kind of you get these stories about the later years, you start to hear some more mixed things about Gene, including the fact that like maybe he had stepped away from direct control and was just kind of living out his days. Uh, these are kind of mixed. Some former members will be like, no, he was like holding on right up until the end.
I don't know who's right. A lot of the confusion comes from the fact that in two thousand and eight, Marcia Spriggs, Jean's wife is caught having cheating on him like a bunch, Like she is. She is getting a rad own that cult, which I gotta say, trailblazer for women, right being the wife of the cult leader cheating on him a bunch right now, that's groundbreaking, you know, I love, Yeah, we we stand a feminist icon March's Are you getting away?
I mean, I understand she was caught, but like I will, like one time would be hard to get away with.
Some people will say she was running things right, that she was really the power, especially maybe Jeans getting kind of like sick and old.
Yeah, I was waiting for you to be like, yeah, but like she's a she's she's the real she's the real villain.
I mean she may be. There's debate about this, like different like and honestly, all of the formers they're not they don't tend to be of like high leadership. So I think it's, you know, to get a different perspective.
If she wasn't the one calling the shots, how the fuck is she going away with it?
Right? Absolutely? No, No, I agree, She's definitely powerful. There's no debate about that. It's a question of like, was she basically doing running it for.
Jane and aggressively horny?
Yeah, apparently so, but a trailblazer nonetheless, So she gets caught and this is earthshaking inside the colt One. A former member later explained it wasn't that she was human and had fallen into sin. It was that she had personally been involved in sending away a lot of other families from much less serious infraction. So people are pierced and Jeanne this might be some evidence that like she's
the power behind the throne. Jean makes a big public statement about how she's been forgiven for her sins and a lot of folks are unable to accept this, and so.
Whole families who forgave her for her sins.
Oh he didn't and thus did God.
Oh okay, I was like, how is this mathmthing?
Yeah, so this is the straw that breaks the camel's back for a lot of people. Whole families start to leave, and it becomes quickly clear that the tribe is in the process of losing. The tribes are losing most of the people who had been born and raised there. Jean respond by launching a raft of even more restrictive rules. He bans his followers from eating chocolate, from hiking, from going to the beach with their families, and from the
only music they've been allowed was traditional Irish music. Oh but he bans them from this too, so you don't get any more fucking h fucking fields of athern rye or whatever. I don't know how traditional are getting.
Yeah, is the rules that they're only allowed to walk at a certain pace and definitely Noah.
Hill only allowed to like work and worship. That's it.
Oh my god, I can't just that impulse is so bad where it's like we're losing everybody cut chocolate.
We gotta be real pieces of shit. Yeah. I mean again, the larger dynamics that play in our culture as the Right loses power is like we have to make more and more restrictibles. Yeah. Yeah. So there's controversy between a number of formers as to how many of these new rules our genes will and how much of this is Marcia and maybe a council of other elites who are
ruling in his stead. The next decade in change have been described as a total lockdown by one member, and the Denver Post reports that some followers claimed Jan himself started to express soft frustration with the changes. Quote In twenty twelve, the year before Wiseman left the Colt, he confessed to Spriggs, who used the name Yonick, that he drank beer with his wife against the Colt's rules. He said,
just don't talk about it, Wiseman said. The ex member, who left in his thirties, said he met one on one with Eugene Spriggs as a teenager in the mid nineties and told the man about horrific childhood abuse he'd endured in the Twelve Tribes. He said the founder wept silently as he shared details of the abuse, but after just five minutes, Marcia Spriggs burst into the room and sent the member out. She spoke to her husband briefly,
then cornered the member in the hallway. She comes out and says, if you ever tell Yonick anything like that again, I'll send you away that day, like make you leave the colt. So years later, that member sneaked out of a twelve Tribes commune in the middle of the night with a duffel bag of his clothes. He waited in the bushes for a write from a man who left the colt years before, and that night he slept on his friend's floor started his new life outside of the colt.
And that's what I mean when I talk about what what is the solution to this? Well, the most durable one is formers help other people get out, right, That's what happens in this case. He makes contact with somebody who's already made it out. That guy takes him to let him crash in a friend's place. Like these are the support networks that dismantle these cults. You know, it's maybe not as satisfying as imagining the Feds rushing in and freeing everybody, but like that doesn't happen. It just
doesn't realistically happen. You know, this is what actually happens. Eugene Spriggs dies on January eleventh, two thousand, or January eleventh, twenty twenty one. He was eighty three years old. According to a death certificate issued by the state of he lived way too long based on his skill. Yeah, there's a lot. He's like, it's respiratory arrests that gets him. Based on like the exact list of contributing causes to his death, Yeah, they think it's it's probably COVID. He
probably gets COVID. Oh so, oh my god.
I remember there was like a there was like a race car driver from the town I grew up in who was like real against all of it, you know, who was like really against lockdowns and stuff. And he got that like convenient pneumonia in yeah, the middle of two thousand. It's like a lot of people just got sneaky pneumonia. Yeah, that's what it sounds like here.
Yep, yep, I think that is the case. So there you go. At present, the Twelve tribes continue to hold tens of millions of dollars in real estate and operate multiple businesses. It is unclear how many members remain, although the Denver Posts suggests most of the youth have already left.
More of the quotes that claimed Gene as something other than a total dictatorial cult leader have come more recently, and part of me suspects they may be encouraged by some extent by the remaining leadership, who seem to want people to feel as if Gene himself is not the center of things. The truth of this will become clearer in time, especially as more scrutiny is dedicated to the group. For now, I want to by finishing that story from
the ex member. The Denver Post interviewed, who left in his thirties after enduring terrible childhood abuse within the colt. After spending the first free night of his life on his friend's floor. Quote in the morning he woke up, he drank a cup of coffee forbidden in the colt and realized he was, for the first time in his life, completely in charge of his own choices. I felt like
I could float away, he said that feeling. It's impossible to describe that feeling of freedom, and honestly, I feel that on some level every day.
Hmm man. Anyway, he must taste so good.
Oh my god, can you imagine that first cup of coffee out of the colt.
That's a banger right there, holding a hand, eating a piece of chocolate, drinking some coffee.
Yeah, listening to all the Irish music you want, you take this fife and shove it up your ass. Yeah, I've got an Irish Rover's record on repeat. Just listening to the fucking Unicorn song for days.
Oh my god, man, that's wild. That is that was a journey.
Yeah. Anyway, good cult, pretty good cult. I gotta say, Yeah.
I'm powerful. I haven't heard and I've heard not one thing. Even though they started they they did start the fire.
They did start this that fire.
Yeah.
I think there's still an agree to which that may still be being investigated, but at present, the states like we're not pursuing charges because like authorities signed off on the burn.
Anyway, whatever, I do feel like they hit a lot of the like the pillars of being like, well that's no, that's a motherfucking cult. You're like, oh yeah, oh yeah, blames Jesus child aboose fire.
Yeah it's there.
It's just h yeah, terrible, Yeah.
Out of money, tied up and tied up in investments.
Yeah, sketchy businesses.
Yeah, I don't know, yeah, but uh see it?
What's not as terrible as you? Alex? Do you have any Hell yeah, you'd like to plug here?
I would love for people to listen to you are good at Feelings podcast about movies where we talk about feelings and therapy related stuff by talking about movies.
Hell yeah, hell yeah absolutely. Anyway. I have a novel. It's called After the Revolution. Buy it wherever books are sold, or read it for free at atrbook dot com. It's all free. You don't have to buy it, but you can. You can also go to Hell I Love You.
We also have a series I'd like to plug that is.
Out now and depending on this when this drops, it could be recently out or a couple weeks out that Garrison Davis did on it could happen here, falling up on the stop coop city movement in Atlanta.
Check that out.
Excellent, Yeah, and again go to Hell.
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