CAO Italia

Welcome to Mike Loves Ahsoka. I'm Nate. And I'm Mike. I'm sorry. This is Nice Ashes, not Mike Loves Ahsoka podcast. That was last episode. I was pretty salty for that one. Little bit. But you left no question on your true loyalties. So that was good, I guess, in that sense. We are smoking the CAO Italia. And this is kind of rounding out our little mini foray into the CAO Country series. We only had the, what was it, three? Three or four, Mike? We only had the three.

I thought I had a fourth, but we didn't. No big deal. But there are several more and I think that we should do more. I like these. Yeah, these are good. They've been all pretty good. So I'm just going to light up here and then we can start talking about the stick and the topic. All right. This one's, I don't know. I feel like Carmelee is kind of like what comes to mind. Not like a sweet Carmelee though. Not a sweet one, but like, I don't know. That's probably not the right word. It's good.

It's a pretty, I don't want to say typical startup, but a lot of cigars start the same, have the same starting notes. You know what I mean? And I'm pairing mine with a Lagunitas Hazy Wonder IPA. Oh, very nice. Very nice. I am drinking a Stone Fence and then after that I have a Nord East lined up if I make it through that. Perfect. I'm sure you will, Mike. I'm sure you will. Possibly. I have faith in you. I believe in you. You can do this. Oh, perfect. Heck yeah.

So if we do have any technical difficulties for all of our listeners, I do have my puppy in the room here with me. So she may need to go inside if she gets a little antsy, but we're hoping she'll be fine. She needs to take a nap. Yes. And on another technical note, this is our second recording using our new remote podcasting software. I was pretty pleased with the output from our last episode. So we are giving this another try. Heck yes.

So we have a wonderful episode known as a Mike knows episode and the topic is going to be the Amish. All right. Do you know anything about the Amish, Nate? I know a little bit about the Amish. My Sarah used to kind of, I guess directly but indirectly, directly worked with the Amish. She used to work at a farm hub and they used to get, I don't know if they still do, some produce from the Amish. So she would have to go and pick stuff up.

When people ask how Sarah and I met, I always jokingly say that, hey, we met online. It was AmishSingles.com and it was Roomsperga. And so it's kind of really that last little bit that makes people kind of pause and say, maybe they did meet on AmishSingles. So I guess I know that they allow technology up to a certain period of time, let's say like the late 1700s or something. I'm sure I'm wrong. And they don't do any modern technology.

And they do have when their children become of a certain age, just pulling numbers out of thin air, let's say 16, I don't know. They have something called Roomsperga where if the child wants, they can go for a couple weeks and experience what the rest of life is, but they have to choose to leave or stay. If they leave, the rest of their family, I think is shunned. And they're really good at putting up barns. So I think that's kind of my knowledge on the Amish in a nutshell.

I am so happy that you said that because everything you just said is a Hollywoodization of the Amish. It's part truth and part fantasy. Yes. So we'll get into that. So I remember watching Harrison Ford in The Witness and there's a lot of Amish stuff in there. And then for Richer and Poorer, I think it was a Tim Allen, Chris the Alley movie where they are hiding out in the Amish. So mostly that. And Kingpin, right? The documentary. That's right. That's right.

And it was Randy Quaid was a member of the Amish. So wow. Can you believe that everybody? We just listed off three movies that Mike has actually seen. I have seen all of them. Yes, I have seen all of them, which is fascinating. Next episode, I'm sure we'll talk about the movies I've been watching lately. So I'm going to do a quick breakdown of the history of the Amish and then we can talk about the particulars and why the Hollywoodization of the Amish is a manipulation and potentially a lie.

So the Amish are a split off of the Swiss Anabaptist movements of the 1700s. In Switzerland, there was the Anabaptists and there was this guy named Amon and he split apart from the other Anabaptists and they called them Amish as like a slur, I guess. And then in the United States, these Swiss groups moved from Switzerland to the United States in the early 1800s, late 1700s, and then a separate group moved in the later 1800s and early 1900s.

The Mennonites that we have here in North America came largely from the later group of Amish that moved here and then the Amish, as we would think of the Amish, came from the earlier group that moved. So the Amish have been here for 200 years, about, been here a long time. And of course they moved to Pennsylvania during the colonial period because Pennsylvania had religious freedom. In Europe, they don't have any Amish, but they do have Mennonites.

So the Amish are kind of the extremists of the Anabaptist world and even that's kind of a misnomer because we think of the Amish as a homogenous group, but they're not. So each church has their own church document called an Ordnung, which is just the ordinance and the families in that church vote on the rules that everybody else has to follow. Each church usually splits if they start to get over 40 families. Most of them have 20 to 30 families per church.

So in an Amish community, as we would think of it, like an Amish little area, there's really probably five or six or ten different Amish communities in that community and each one of those individual churches will have their own individual rules and they have rules on everything. So here in Minnesota, we have some Schwartzentruber Amish, which are hyper conservative.

We also have New Order Amish and then New Order Amish can drive vehicles and they can own cell phones and they have a few different religious beliefs. Some of them believe in Jesus, believe in Jesus saves you and all this other sort of things. Do you have any questions yet? Yes, I do have questions. I guess first, I'm glad you brought up the Mennonites because I was going to ask about the Mennonites.

And so it seems to me like this might be some sort of kind of evolutionary window because the early Amish or the first Amish that came over were then separated from the rest of the European Amish, let's say. And the European Amish seems to have continued evolving into the Mennonites and then they came over. So I guess it's kind of like interesting to have two stages of evolution along that path.

I guess my second question, and we'll probably get into this, is when I think of Amish, I do think of religion in some sense, but I don't know if religion is enough because it really is kind of like a full blown way of life. It's from, you know, like Hollywood stuff. And so I don't know if there's religious doctrine that backs like we shan't use anything manufactured beyond 1812 or something. That's how we view it. That's not how they view it. So that goes into the ordnance.

So let's say you're in a community and there's 30 families or at a church. There's a bishop for the church and then there's priests and there's probably like three priests, one priest for 10 people around there. Preachers is what they call them. And then there's deacons. So out of these 40 families or 30 families, only the men get to vote on the rules. And in the rules, they'll be like, okay, we're going to allow you to have a horse and buggy.

On the horse and buggy, you have to have black paint on the sides and white paint on the top or white paint on the sides and black paint on the top. Or you know, it gets, they're very concerned with appearances and fashion, hyper focused. I'm talking one group will say that the sleeve on your shirt, which is the length, you know, of your shirt cuff, has to be three inches long. It can't be two and a half. It can't be three and a half. It has to be three on the nuts.

And then the community next door will say, no, it has to be two and a half. And then you have to follow the rules, right? So the buggies, some of the new order Amish, and there's a gradient going all the way from hyper conservative, which is the people who allow the least number amount of technology all the way to there's Amish that can drive tractors and other motorized vehicles, as long as they don't have vehicle tabs on it. And they've designed trailers that hook up to a PTO shaft.

And these guys will hook this tractor up to this trailer and the PTO will run the trailer and they'll go like 45 miles an hour down the road in a frigging tractor because they're running it off the PTO instead of the actual engine. Yeah. So there's workarounds for all this stuff for the Amish. You know, it's all a matter of what rules does your church have in their ordnance and you have to follow those rules and everybody votes on it.

So like, for example, there's an Amish, a device called an Amish telephone. It was made, it was designed to made in the seventies and some of these Amish communities allow it. And it looks like an old, old style telephone with the handle. And then instead of having buttons, they have round holes. And then you take a metal rod and you short out the holes because certain, certain ordnance will allow you to have the phone as long as it doesn't have a button mechanism in it. See what I'm saying?

It's all what rules did they set? So some of these groups will have, you're allowed to wear denim, but it can't be tribal in denim. It has to be single, single origin cotton denim, stuff like that. Like they're fashion police. They're obsessed with how you look and you know what I mean? Okay. So they have rules on the hats, you know, like how long is the brim of the hat and married men have to have a different length of brim.

How far can you roll your sleeve up your shirt when you're at work, you know? Lest we tempt the ladies. Do they have rules on married men have beards? Yes. That all varies. The exact rule varies by the ordnance. Okay. The, like Kenton and Swartz and Schroober old order Amish types, the real conservatives, if you're not married, you shave. Once you get married, you have to have a beard, but you cannot have a mustache. And there's a reason for not having a mustache. And then you can't shave.

You cannot cut your beard at all. And the hairstyle of men is determined. The real old school ones say you have to have a bowl cut. And then the new order say you have to have hair down to your shoulders if you're a man. Okay. Yes. For the most part, again, every ordnance varies, but all of them say you can't have a mustache more or less because mustaches were associated with militarism in the 1800s. So it's just a goal that goes back to those days.

And the women are never allowed to cut their hair for the most part. Oh yes. So what if they got into like a weird kind of like thresher accident and they needed to cut the hair to save somebody who was being solely pulled in? Well usually women don't work on threshers. I understand that. Or like a weird spinning wheel type of situation. I don't know. Most likely they would cut the hair and then the bishops would find out and they would get shunned. Okay. Shunning isn't necessarily permanent.

It's like a set amount of punishment time. And then if the church, the men in the church feel that you changed your ways, they vote on whether or not they're going to allow you back into the church. Okay. And so I feel like in a freak spinning wheel accident, the shunning probably wouldn't be because the hair had to be cut to save them, but because they were careless in their work. It would be because they cut their hair. Oh, it wouldn't be because they're careless in their work?

Like how do you change your ways from not cutting your hair? I'll tell you a story. So I got into this because I started watching this Eli Yoder makes videos online. He's done a ton of interviews with ex-Amish and he's from Kenton, Ohio, which is generally considered to be the second most strict Amish order in the country. They had a kid get into a terrible accident while they were doing, like they were haying, I think something like that. They're not allowed to bail their hay.

They're like cutting it down and piling it in and then carrying the hay into the barn loose. And this kid was up in the barn and fell out of the barn and was dying. So they called the English and they brought out a helicopter and they chopper this kid to the hospital and he survived. Okay. So the parents of the kid were shunned because they allowed their son to go through the air and being in the air is considered horribly and a sin.

So they shunned his parents for allowing him to be flown in a helicopter to the hospital to prevent him from dying. Okay. But one, you said it's not necessarily permanent and then two, just to clarify for our listeners, the English is what the Amish calls anybody who's not Amish, right? Anybody who's not Amish, yes. Well, you got to remember. Anybody who's white that's not Amish. Right. So the Bingo began during the colony days. So they were all English largely in Pennsylvania at the time.

So a lot of their terms come from that old timey sort of stuff. And yes, the length of the shunning is determined by the bishop who's like the head of the little church that runs these 40 families. And then it's for whatever. And they have, we'll get into it later, but they have some pretty serious issues with various abuses in these communities. Things that we would consider to be unforgivable.

And that's a lot of these Amish people are talking about, ex-Amish are talking about it because now they're being exposed to the English world and it's like, oh, oh, that's not good. Things aren't 1800s anymore, huh? So it's very, very interesting. So how much awareness do these, let's just say the more conservative Ordnungs, how much awareness do they have of like the strides in social justice and equality and technology that us English have done? There's a gradient.

The super conservatives are called swarchantrubers. They are not super aware of what's going on in the outside world. And the women especially are, they don't vote, they don't leave the house for the most part unless it's to go to church. They don't interact with people from outside of their immediate family. So they don't know a whole lot. The men in the swarchantrubers largely do not work outside of farming and Amish-y type of stuff.

The more liberal you get, the more these guys are getting into construction, the more the women are allowed to participate in the churches. There are some new order Amish that allow the women to vote in the churches. So there's a wide gradient, but the more conservative you get, the less they're aware of what's going on. Do the more conservative ones sell their produce to the English at all or is that kind of more liberal? They all sell stuff to the English, all of them.

That's how they make their money. It's a matter of level of exposure to the English. The real conservative ones would have an appointed person to deal with the English. They're not going to be selling jars of jam out of the front of their house in the summer. So if you drive around certain Amish communities in Minnesota, especially, there's a lot more liberal Amish here. It seems like the farther west you go, the more liberal they become because they're newer communities.

If they sell stuff right in front of the house, you drive up there and buy some produce or jam or whatever. Those people have cell phones. These are allowed cell phones for work because a lot of them do construction and a lot of them are allowed to use power tools, own and use power tools for work, stuff like that. So some of them own trucks. Like, yeah, it's very interesting.

The more conservative ones will still get rides, but they'll have like an Amish ride service and people's full-time job is just going around picking Amish up, like a cab system. I know I've seen Amish families in like Walmarts and things. And I imagine those would have to be more liberal groups. No, the older order Amish would go to Walmart. They wouldn't bring their kids and stuff though. You know what I mean?

It'd be like the father and maybe one of the sons would go and get supplies from Walmart. Yeah. So let's talk about that. What supplies are they getting that they can't make on their own, I guess? They don't make their own underwear. Some of the Amish- I mean, they could though, couldn't they? They buy underwear for the most part. They could though, yeah. They buy cloth.

So a lot of the Walmarts, especially in the rural parts, sell cloth and they buy the cloth to sew the clothes, the women sew all the clothes. Okay. Okay. Yeah, yeah. And they buy- But I mean, but they could make their own cloth, but that'd be a whole like operation. Right. That'd be a whole operation. They don't make their own cloth. They interact with the English world. The schools use toilet paper and some of the houses have toilet paper in them.

The standard stuff, disposable diapers, a lot of times they keep disposable diapers on hand, even though they're like emergency use only type of thing. Okay. What do you- And I know I could look this up, but you might just happen to know because this is kind of your area of expertise is what did we do before toilet paper? I know some cultures use like a hand, but- Yeah, they wash it off with water. Okay. Wash it off with water. Like an Amish bidet?

Weeds and all sorts of things like that, but yeah. And that's also interesting is that the more conservative you get, the less the Amish people bathe because they have more restrictions on what kind of water they're allowed to use. So if you're in a no-water Amish, you're allowed to have running water in your house, but if you're an old order Amish, you're not.

So in order to bathe, you have to warm up the water on the stove and pots, pour it into a tub and then drain the tub and stuff like that. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Yep. So it's very interesting. And they don't have terribly good teeth either from what I remember. They avoid going to the doctor and the dentist because they don't believe in insurance. Yeah. Yes. I mean, I guess I don't believe in insurance just because healthcare should be free, but- That's a totally separate issue.

Yes. Not Amish related issue. I mean, there's beliefs and then there's real world stuff, at least for you and I. Right. I would love universal healthcare, but until then I got to take care of myself. So you said rum shrink up. So in some liberal communities, the kids are allowed to have, they don't leave home, but they're allowed to have some English, what are they called? Luxuries. Okay. So the new order Amish, they'll allow their kids to get driver's licenses and pickup trucks.

And the new order Amish, those kids have social security numbers and things like that when they're born. Okay. And they'll exploit that by the way. So in a new order Amish home, let's say the dad does construction and he has a son that's 16, he'll have that kid drive him around in his pickup truck and go to job sites and work with them and you know what I mean? And until the kid turns 21, they're not allowed to keep any money for the most part in the Amish.

They'll have some money that from 14, which is when they're done with school until they're 21, every dime that kid makes working goes to their parents. Okay. So let's say you're running, you're doing construction and you have five kids between the ages of 14 and 21, they're all working for you and you're taking all their money. But rum shrink up for the old order Amish, you don't leave home, you don't go and join the English for anything.

They hold, they call them sing alongs, which are basically like Amish dances for teenage youths to go and meet dates. Right? Okay. That's your rum shrink. So you get to go hang out with other Amish kids and do like a dating type scene. Like we were teenagers, you know, you go to like a school dance, they have like Amish dances and stuff. The biggest rule is that if you're an older Amish, you're not allowed to go on a date with somebody from a different ordnance that has less strict rules.

So your Bishop gets to tell you which communities you're allowed to date from. You can pick any of the girls or boys. Yep. You're allowed to pick any individual person you want, but the Bishop tells you this church, this church, this church, and this church are good. This church, this church, and this church are off limits.

So you're not allowed to date, you know, the girl across the street because she's part of a church that's more liberal because they allow the men to have a three and a half inch brim hat instead of a three inch brim hat. It's that sort of narrow ruling. You know what I mean? They're not much different, but they're different enough. Yeah. And do they have, are there many like homosexual Amish? Very interesting.

So depending on the family, they may not know about how a baby is born until after they are married and the Bishop explains to them that penis and vagina means baby. So the girls are not allowed really to work outside the home unless there's no boys. So they never see the animals breeding. They never see babies born on the farm or any of that. The boys are the only ones that ever get to see that. They don't talk about homosexuality. They don't talk about sex at all until they're already married.

So no, there are no homosexual Amish. They don't even know how babies are born until after they're married. And I mean, I get that, but wouldn't they have to experiment with masturbation and that kind of stuff just as a teenager, just thinking out loud here? You don't have to necessarily know all the details. You have to know certain things feel good, right? We would think that they would have those issues.

I know that a lot of them say, a lot of the ex-Amish say that it's pathetic that they don't have some sort of sex education when these kids get to puberty. That relates to a lot of the abuses that are becoming more known about in the Amish community. Let's put it that way. That's rampant, I guess, rampant because of the churches. We can talk about that later or we talk about it now, but that's a direct consequence of the church and the way the shunning rules work.

Okay. I guess then my question is, do you have more in the way of kind of general insight before you want to leap into some of these abuses and other things? I'm just thinking we should probably do a cigar check. Oh yeah. I'm not quite halfway, but pretty close. It's good. I'm liking it so far. I like it so far. It's pretty steady. I wouldn't say overly complex. Good flavor. Good flavor. No, really simple. Yep. I've had one of these before. Yeah. It feels like it's well-made too.

Yeah, I like to see cigars. They're good for the price point for sure. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I guess before we get into that stuff, we can have some more rules or more information. The way you get baptized is generally when you're 18, you have to go through like a version of catechism for them and then the whole community, all the men have to vote that so-and-so is being a good person according to our rules. They're allowed to be baptized after you go through this process.

If one person says, no, they're not ready, you have to wait to be baptized until everybody says you're ready to be baptized. Then they do the whole ritual. Then to seal the deal, you have to do all this ritualistic chanting type of thing, going back and forth. Then the men have to kiss the bishop on the lips and the girls have to kiss the bishop's wife on the lips. That seals their commitment to the ordinance for life.

Okay. Yes. I thought that was a very interesting detail, the kissing on the lips thing. That's fucking weird, right? They have to kiss the bishop on the lips every time they get done with the shunning or the bishop's wife depending on it's a man or a woman. You said there weren't homosexuals in the Amish, but what you're telling me kind of sounds like there might be and it's the bishop. It reminds me of India.

In India, there aren't homosexuals because they don't know about homosexuality because they don't have sex education there. It's not even thought about. I'm sure there are definitely homosexuals in the Amish community just like they're everywhere, but there's no method for them to act out on it because there's no knowledge of what's going on. You know what I mean? The thing is so strict too that it's hard to act out on something that you may or may not be sure of or that isn't talked about.

It's hidden on purpose a lot of it too. We'll talk about that as well, but the bishops in most Amish communities, you're not allowed to spy or sell a home or move or anything without permission of the bishop. The bishop is the guy who's the interpreter of the ordinance and he enforces the ordinance's rules and if you want to do anything, you have to get approval from that guy and he's the one that's going to get you in trouble.

If you shine your buggy too many times and it's too shiny looking, you get in trouble from the bishop. You get shunned. Or if you're drinking liquor or if your hat brim is too long or if your hat brim is turned up or down or your shirt collars, whatever. If you're a woman and you have too many pleats in your hat, one story was a woman had her hat on and her strings on her hat were tied tight enough and she got shunned. Stuff like that.

They're fashion police and your neighbors are watching you because there's an incentive to turn each other into the bishop and get each other in trouble. That's the culture. You know what I mean? Yeah. It's like you and I would say they're piddly nonsense rules, but to them, they're very important. I don't know. It sounds kind of like my workplace. Right. Except I don't have to kiss my boss on the lips every time I get written up. Right. Every community is different.

The New Order, the majority of people leaving the Amish are Old Order Amish because it's restrictive and people get really frustrated with the hypocrisies and with the judgment and with the bullying and with the sort of corruption that's involved and they leave. The New Order Amish and the Swartz and Trouber Amish, which are like the ultra conservatives, they don't leave very often at all because the Swartz and Troubers are so isolated. They don't know what the outside world is like.

The New Order Amish are like the women have rights and they can use modern stuff and it's all about the lifestyle of being an Amish person. It's not about like your jacket has to have snaps and your shirt has to have clear buttons and there can only be three of them six inches apart. They have very specific rules about how you're supposed to look and about what things are supposed to be and if you don't follow them, you're in trouble.

And like the New Order Amish, they're allowed to have LED lights on their buggies and they have all sorts of differences. Like the Old Order Amish have to have like candles. It all depends on the community and like I say, if you go to like Kenton, Ohio, there'll be New Order and Old Order Amish mixed in with each other. We don't know as outsiders, but they know internally who they are.

So I guess the Swartz and Troubers, they're so conservative that the women have to walk behind the men when they go to places, when they go to church. Like the woman, the wife and the man can't stand next to each other. The woman has to walk behind her husband and her sons. That's how conservative they are. So let's bring it back to some of the more conservative ones don't have social security numbers. No. So that's not a law of the land that you have to have a social security number?

No, they have a religious exemption to that. Just like they have a religious exemption for schooling past the eighth grade. The United States government considers religious freedom to be very important. It's part of our constitution. And the Amish are exempted from social security numbers because the Amish consider any social sort of governmental plan like that to be worldly. So they're against license plate tabs.

They're against that Swartz and Troubers will not put orange triangles on their buggies because it's too worldly. So they only put reflective tape on them, but they won't put the orange triangle on it. Right. And they won't put lights on the back. Like the old, like the real conservatives will not put lights on the back. Yep. So for how they got these religious exemptions then, I'm assuming it was a long time ago.

Did they have to go to court and plead their case to keep these religious exemptions? They go to court. They allow themselves to be arrested. They refuse to get themselves bailed out of jail and they go to court. And the United States government typically pays their court costs because they refuse to accept the sentences basically. And it's not even that long ago.

In the sixties and seventies and eighties, in the early 2000s, or the 2000s, they were going to court over triangles, safety triangles on the back of buggies and stuff. Okay. Now that being said, like in Western Minnesota, those bishops are working with MnDOT and the federal agencies to make the road approaches wider, to make their buggies safer. And they're new order Amish. So they're like very aware of what's going on and they want like, they don't want the people to get hit on the road.

So they're working with the government to make it safe for their own people. I mean, I guess like liberal or conservative, that sounds like a good idea to not have your people hit on the road, but I'm sure the conservative ones find ways to. What's in your ordnong? You know what I mean? What's in the ordnong? Like they have rules about everything. You know what I mean?

Men, if you're outside, you have to have a hat on and the hat has to have this big of a brim and it has to be made out of this material and you have to wear this hat with this brim with this material on Sundays only. You know what I mean? And you have to have a vest with this many buttons and they're fashionistas. They're like fashion police. Some of them ban using armor on your buggy. You know what I mean? They determine the colors on the buggies and where the colors are. You know what I mean?

The kind of bridles you have to use on your horses, everything. I mean, I guess like some of that stuff, like where are these other families in this ordnong going to get other paint colors? You know what I mean? Well, you go to the, they're going to the hardware store to buy it. They're not making their own paint. Okay. Well, yeah. But I guess like- So they can buy whatever color paint they want, you know? Yeah. If they want to kiss the bishop on the lips. Right. If they want to be shunned.

We have to talk about what shunning means, of course. Yeah. I mean, so like to me, like the shunning is like whatever, but I just don't want to kiss the bishop on the lips. Like that's the- Well, so shunning- Let's talk about shunning. Every family is different. Let's say that your wife is the daughter of a bishop or a former bishop. She's going to take shunning pretty seriously. But if your wife is like, wife or husband is kind of a rebel, then they don't care about the shunning.

So shunning means that no member of the church is allowed to come into physical contact with you. So let's say the man gets shunned. The wife is not allowed to make him food at home or touch him or anything. He cannot eat in the same room with the rest of his kids or his family. He has to cook his own food. And these Amish guys don't know how to cook. They have no ability to cook because the women do all the cooking. So now this guy is shunned. His wife can't make him food. He can't touch her.

He can't sleep in the same room with her. So now you're sleeping in the barn and eat in the corner basically and just work. And you know what I mean? But who's enforcing that? The people themselves enforce it. You know, like the wife is the one who has to enforce it because if the wife is a believer in this church, she's going to go to hell if she doesn't shun this man because the bishop told her she had to. They're part of a cult. I mean, it is a cult. For sure.

Yeah. And now you said there's incentives to tattle on others. So let's talk about that. There's incentives for the neighbors to tattle on their other neighbors. So if your Amish neighbor sees you doing something you're not supposed to do, they have a social benefit to turn you into the bishop, right? Because now they're the good person turning in the bad person. So their social status goes up in the church and your social status goes down.

And they're somehow then more pious than you because, you know, or a more true believer. And it's everything. So you know, so and so is making too much money this year. They need to make less money next year. That's like the bishop can tell you to not make so much money because you're making more than you earned. That's what they're, you know, quote unquote, you're making more than you earned.

So if you're too successful at your farm, they can tell you, you have to be less successful of farmer or you'll get shunt. Or if you're running a mill, a wood mill, you have to be less successful at your wood mill or you'll get shunt. Okay. Yes. Oh yes. So what are, what are, what are kind of like, what are the extremes, like the two ends of shunning durations? Typically it's two weeks, starts at two weeks and then it can extend.

It can be extended until you've satisfied all the men in the church. Because at the end of your shunning, the bishop cannot, the bishop starts the shunning, but the bishop doesn't end the shunning. The shunning only ends when every man in the church says you've paid your price enough. So if one, like if you pissed your neighbor off, your neighbor can basically say you're shunned forever. He can, he can, that guy can say every week that his shunning's not done. Yeah. Right.

So you shouldn't phrase it that you're shunned until you satisfy all the males in the, in the church. Sicko. Maybe, maybe met the social obligations. Well, I mean, like it's weird because when the shunning ends, you have to kiss the bishop on the lips. So my, I'm sorry that my head is just right there. Kissing the bishop on the lips signifies the completion of the contract, signing the contract, the ordnung. Right? So I understand what it means. I'm saying it's fucking weird.

It's, to us, it's really weird, but to them it's just normal. Unless you're a woman. If you're a woman, you kiss the bishop's wife on the lips. What? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I got that part too. And the older, the more old order they are, the more these people rely on the bishop and the less they rely on English for anything. So like the fire department shows up to a burning building at an Amish place and their buildings burn down much more often than ours do because they use candles. I wonder why.

Right. Yeah. I wonder why. And the Amish will try to take the fucking firehose and stuff out of the Englishman's hands, the firefighter's hands, and try to put the fire out themselves. So one of these guys was talking about it and he saw an Amish guy break his nose and partially rip his ear off because he grabbed the firehose, he wrestled the firehose away from the fireman, lost control of it, hit him in the face and blew his ear off.

Yeah, but he won't go to the hospital because then he'll be shunned. Right, right. They're allowed to go to the hospital, they just have to go by a certain methods. Yeah, slowly. Slowly, that's right. The one guy, his dad committed suicide and that's like going to hell, right? So he's buried, they didn't even want to bury him in the Amish cemetery, but they eventually convinced him and then they wanted to put a fence around him.

But he got kicked out of the hospital because he didn't have the right clothes on because he was no longer Amish. So his family kicked him out of the hospital with his dying father because he didn't have Amish clothes on. Yeah. I mean, I guess to be fair, a lot of religions, suicide is a one-way ticket to hell. Yeah, it is. So that's not unusual in that kind of sense, I guess. No, it's not. The reaction of the guy dying wasn't the issue, it was the son not having the proper clothes on, right?

Yeah. Because it's all about appearances because they didn't want to get turned in by their neighbors saying that they allowed their son not to have his Amish clothes on because that would have been trouble. I guess my question is why would the son even have non-Amish clothes? He was no longer Amish, he left the Amish. I mean, you talk about leaving the Amish as well because that's a Hollywood myth that they're allowed to leave. They're not allowed to leave.

That is highly- Because I've only got about two inches and I know you're probably a little behind me on this episode because you've been doing most of the talking. Mm-hmm. But yeah, let's do the leaving the Amish and then I probably have more questions. Okay. Let me just talk about the abuses too at some point. But so leaving the Amish, girls do not leave the Amish nearly as often as the boys. The girls don't have communication with people outside of the Amish because they're stuck in the home.

The boys are the ones who deal with all the English. Yeah, by and large outside their family, right? Yeah, by and large outside of their family, they don't talk to anybody. So most of the girls that leave, they do it because one of their siblings is out or their husband wants to go out. You know what I mean? Okay. There's not a lot of options, but the boys, they're dealing with English people all the time. So they have friends that aren't Amish a lot of times by the time they're 18.

So they just call their friend and the old order Amish, the bishop does not want you to leave, right? Your family doesn't want you to leave. So they basically have to most of the time sneak out either in the day or the night and run away from home, more or less. They have to run away because they'll physically stop them. If they catch you, they're going to stop you and force you back into the house and kidnap you basically. So you have to sneak away. You can't just leave.

Is there some kind of incentive monetarily wise or something for the bishop to keep all these people there? It's religious largely. The bishop does live off of the dues that they're paying to the church, but the bishops aren't wealthy usually. We can talk about- Yeah. So it's more like religious power. It's more about religious power. We need to talk about Sam Mullet at some point because he's a very interesting guy, a famous Amish bishop. But yeah, it's about the power and control.

These guys have absolute authority over a lot of the stuff that these people are allowed to do even in their own homes because the children will turn the parents in, the wives will turn the husbands in, vice versa. You know what I mean? So if your mother doesn't have her hair in the bun- And the bishops get kissed whenever they want, it sounds like. So not a bad gig. Sounds like, yeah. Or the bishop's wife, whatever they're into. Yeah. Whoever they're pressing this week. Right. Right.

So yeah, even like they all own guns and they hunt, right? Well, they don't wear blaze orange and they don't buy hunting licenses. They don't follow the English rules. But they're also limited on the type of guns they can have. And that's in the ordinance. Yeah, I would think. Oh yeah. So you can't have like a 1022, let's say, because it has a removable magazine, but you're allowed to have a bolt action shotgun.

But it can only be these calibers because if you have this other caliber, that's a worldly caliber. So like they got one guy, 30 odd sixes were banned in his ordnance because that was a worldly caliber, but 30 30s were okay. So how often do these ordnance rules change then? Every year they vote on new rules. Yeah. Okay. So one year a 30 odd six could be fine and then next year it's not fine. So you have to what, sell it or destroy it? Yep. Get rid of it.

So this one woman was part of a fairly old order and they, one year they voted that they were no longer going to allow tri blend denim. You had to have 100% cotton denim. So the women had to scramble and sew all new clothes for all the men because none of the men's work clothes were allowed any longer because it was all tri blend denim. Yeah, I was going to ask if they had like, these are the rules, but they don't take effect for X amount of time to get everybody like a grace period to comply?

Well, the bishop does investigations and typically if they're not like a psycho, they'll give you like, all right, you need to change your way by next Sunday. You know, one of those kind of like finger wagers. Yeah. So if your haircut's not up to spec, be like, hey, by next Sunday you better have your haircut, right? Or by next Sunday you better go from that bowl cut to have hair down to your shoulders. Bunch of Amish buying hair extensions. That's right. So, oh yeah.

And the parents usually get punished for the actions of the children. So if your children are being naughty, the parents get punished for it, you know? All that wonderful stuff. Yes, indeed. All right, do you want to do abuses or the famous bishop first? We can do the abuses because that leads into it. So kind of like the Catholic church and kind of like the Mennonites and the Jehovah's Witnesses, these closed order religious groups cover up the crimes of members of their community.

But these crimes though, are they considered crimes in the eyes of the community or just – They are considered crimes in the eyes of God. Okay. And a lot of times, let's say there's some abuse of children going on, the bishop will be notified, the bishop shuns the abuser, they don't kick him out of the house, they don't turn him into the police, and they get shunned for two weeks as long as they're being good little Amish men or women or whatever.

Then their shunning is over and after your shunning is over, the sin you committed is no longer talked about because talking about past sins that you've already paid penance for is a sin itself. So they'll shun the abuse victim for still complaining about the abuse after the shunning is over. See what I'm saying? Okay. So as long as the abuser can stop abusing for let's say two weeks, then they're kind of free to pick it right back up again after they kiss the bishop on the lips? That's correct.

And the bishop will protect them and not allow other people to talk about it until they get caught. Okay. So it's kind of like a perverted double jeopardy thing. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Because like, so in let's just say the English world, you can't be tried for the same crime twice, but each new instance of a similar crime would still be, you'd still be able to be tried for it.

So if you abuse somebody and then you were found not guilty or you did your penance for that, you couldn't be tried for that same abuse. But if you abuse that person again at a later date, that would start a whole new abuse trial so it wouldn't fall under double jeopardy. But it seems like the Amish version is a little bit more abuser friendly. It's more abuser friendly because now you have to convince the bishop that it's still going on.

And the bishop has an incentive to brush it under the rug and stop you from talking about it. And this is an issue mostly with the old order and the swarch intruders, not so much the new order Amish, because the new order Amish are allowed to call the cops. Yeah. Largely. You know, they're more connected to the world. So a lot of them have telephones in their houses. You know what I mean? So they're allowed to call the cops and have that guy arrested or a woman arrested or whatever.

And there's like brother, sister, brother, brother. Like there's all these, you know, sexually repressed environment in which nobody's allowed to talk to anybody else about what's going on. This is the perfect environment for an abuser, you know, in an abuse situation. Yeah. Whether it's the grandfather or the father or brother or the mother or whatever. And especially since a lot of the kids don't get any information about sex ed. Right.

So to have somebody who's completely naive and unknowing, like it's just, it's ripe for that, it sounds like. They're like the perfect victim. A lot of these kids are physically punished. There's not a lot of differences when, from, to the mind of a child. Right? So like the next door neighbors getting their ass kicked by their dad for breaking a rule. That's allowed in the Amish. You can beat your kid. Yeah, of course. Cause it's old school. And you know, there's just not a lot of things.

And if it's your brother doing it or something and you sleep in the same bedroom, what are you going to do? You know, there's nobody to talk to. You can't talk to your parents. Cause they'll, you know, they're, they don't want to talk about that. You can't talk to the Bishop. Cause he doesn't want to talk to them. Cause they're going to get punished. They're going to get punished if you report it. That's right. As a kid, right? They'll get punished. The parents will get punished. So, oh yeah.

And there's victim blaming, of course. There's all the traditional tropes that our society has had to deal with and is still dealing with just on a much more focused scale because of the restrictions on those people. And it's rampant, I guess. It's very common. Okay. Which is no surprise really, especially like the beating. Well, yeah, that doesn't surprise me. When women beating is fairly common.

Cause these people, they might have been attracted to each other in the beginning, but there's no divorce. There's no couples counseling. There's no, you know what I mean? Like they're working all the time. Like people, a lot of these couples don't love each other. It's just the way that it is. You have to be married. So there's all sorts of shit like that that gets covered up by the Bishops who are in control of everything.

And they're very discouraged from going, I mean, you could get shunned for going to the police. Yeah. So it's very interesting. So do you have questions, Nate? You know, I have a lot of questions. I don't know so much Amish specific more so than like why, why, where, like there's, there's got to be a line somewhere, right? So like the Catholic church and their child abuse and everything the Amish do and like Scientologists and Mormons.

And it's kind of like, I understand religious freedom and I understand freedom of speech. Like we're free in this country to speak our mind and you and I can have a podcast and we can talk. But if we were talking and making threats on somebody's life, that is outside of the bounds of the first amendment. You know, libel and slanders outside of the bounds of the first amendment. You still have to prove that it's libel or slander and you know, you have to prove all this stuff.

Is the threat credible and is it this and is it that? But at some point, aren't some of these religious exemptions too much? You know, and that's the whole thing the Pastafarians kind of were fighting with wearing the colanders on their head for the driver's license photos, right? Is kind of pointing out some of the ridiculousness of some of these religious exemptions. I agree. I know when I was younger, I was a lot more aggressive about that.

Now I kind of, I'm a lot more open to allow people to destroy themselves. I think that's fine. It doesn't affect me directly. So there's always so much we can do. Yeah. And it's kind of like if you're an adult and you want to be Amish, like go for it. That's your thing. But when we have these religious organizations that are abusing children and abusing women and abusing people, and I know and I understand not every Amish community does this. Not every Catholic church does this.

Not every, right? That's not the point. But on some hand, if we're to be, and I think you and I have talked about this, maybe not even on the podcast, but we were talking about why America is pretty fucked up is because we don't have a common social bond anymore because we're too big. There's too many people, it's too big. And that's, I guess, fine. But when you have this whole group of people don't have to do social security because of a religious exemption.

This whole swath of people don't have to report child abuse because of a religious exemption. Like I mean, that's kind of, I think it's interesting. And we've talked about my right to swing my fist ends at your face before the podcast, I think. So I don't want to say let's go in and bust up all the Amish ordnungs, but I think old world or new world, there's got to be some things that just can't be religious exemption away. Right.

I should have mentioned it before, but the Amish are strict pacifists. And that plays into it too, because in a world full of pacifists, the one aggressive person is going to dominate. And that's what happens. Yeah. You know, the vast majority of this community are good, normal people, other than the fact that they're Amish being normal, not good. Now they're good, but they're trained to be pacifists. So they're not supposed to be aggressive. That's not supposed to be the way it is.

It's not like Frontier America. And if you read Frontier stories about some of these guys who were psychos, their neighbors that come over and take care of business, you know, they take care of the problem and there will be no Johnny law. There'd just be a lynching and that'd be the end of it. But they don't believe in that there. The Bishop is the one that has to decide.

And the Bishop has an incentive to forgive because forgiveness is big in the Amish community as well, even though they don't really forgive. They hold grudges, of course, forever and they're super judgmental, but they're supposed to forgive. Yeah. And then a lot of times when the kids say that the abuse is still going on, the Bishop says you sinned, you're not forgiving. That's, you know, that it feeds into itself. Yeah. And they're supposed to be passive.

So the Bishop is never going to tell the victim of the abuse to fight back or stop it. Right. Yeah. That's not godly. Right. So, okay. So do the, would you place the Amish in, do they believe in the Bible? Do they believe in another religious book? So it's very complicated. The Amish are all trilingual. So the majority of the Amish speak and read low German, which is not modern German. Modern German is quote unquote high German.

Low German is like a sub dialect of Germany that was popular in Switzerland when they moved over. Okay. They all are supposed to read high German, but the only thing that they ever read in high German is the Bible. They're not allowed to have Bibles in English and they all can read and write in English because that's what they're taught in school. That's the majority of their schooling is to learn how to read and write English so they can do business with out, like with English, with non Amish.

Yeah. So the Amish guys are all trilingual and their religious writing is all in German and a lot of them can't read German at all because it's like only used for that. So the bishops are the ones who have control over people's understanding of the Bible and them for the Amish following the ordinance, it supersedes the Bible. So they don't believe as Christ as a savior. You know, most modern Christians believe that belief in Christ is the only thing you need to be saved. They don't believe that.

Yeah. And I guess like, so my question is then are they only Old Testament subscribers or do they also read the New Testament? They believe in Jesus. It's just that because they are limited, their access to the Bible is limited, so they follow the ordinances and the bishops more than they follow the Bible. And a lot of these people that left, there's a couple of different groups or subgroups of ex-Amish.

A lot of the ex-Amish that leave are rebels and they don't want to follow the rules about having a half this three inches long. That's a group. And then some of them are survivors of abuse who get into contact with the English and they escape. And then some of them are actually fluent in German, high German, and they read the Bible and they were offended that the bishops were lying about the Bible and they left. So they're like Christians. They're actually legit, like hardcore Christians.

So I guess there's no way then for anybody that isn't the bishop to call the bishop out if they don't read high German, right? Like there'd be no way. Even if you do, it's very frowned upon. It's tough. Yeah. Even if you're the preacher, it's tough. As in a linguistic aside, is low German to high German similar to like old English to modern English? I think it would be closer to middle English to modern English. Okay. Because old English is like Shakespeare and then old English. Modern English.

Yeah. But on the cusp. King James Bible is a blend of modern and middle, right? Canterbury Tales is middle English. And then old English is like 25% of the words we use are old English or something like that. There's some percentage. It's a big number. And the most common used words that we have are old English, but it'd be very difficult to understand a conversation in old English. Middle English you and I can understand because we're fluent in modern English.

But old English, if you read it, you'd probably have a good understanding of what they were talking about because you could get like the base root of words and kind of put it together. Yeah. But I know that they had different letters and stuff that kind of morphed into our current alphabet and stuff. And I know that, and this has nothing to do with the Amish, but I do know that the only reason we say goodbye is because somebody once abbreviated God be with ye as like God be ye.

Portmanteaus are extremely common in English. Yeah. And people are so funny. This is not about the Amish at all, but people get so upset about the modern portmanteaus and it's like, dude, this is kind of how English is created. You know what I mean? Like we've always been doing this. It's just get over it. Yeah. Well, English is kind of like, I've heard it described as kind of like a melting pot of languages because we just kind of like take what we like. It is. We have a lot of French words.

Put our own pronunciations on it. Yep. Not even some of them, we just directly translate, especially a lot of the Spanish words. It's American English. Yeah. Has a lot of Spanish words used in it where like UK English doesn't necessarily have Spanish words in it. Yeah. We don't even think about it because we just have Spanish words because there's a bunch of Spanish people that settled in the United States. But yeah, you know, not that we can't speak to somebody from England, obviously, but.

Yeah, we can. We just, we choose not to. Right. Yeah. Because they're gutter people. Well, I believe the word is, I believe the English phrase, not American phrases, they're twats. So. Oh yeah. I was going to, I thought you were going to say the C word on that one. No, no. We're talking about Scottish or Australian. Australians. Yeah. Yeah. I did hear that technically all Australian food is prison food. I know I like kangaroo leather bowling shoes.

Yeah. So to bring us back to the Amish, my fingers are getting a little hot. This is a good cigar all the way down. Did you want to talk about that famous bishop or infamous bishop? Yes. Before we wrap up. Yes, I do. So the most famous, the most famousest bishops is ever as Samwise Gamgee would say. Was Rudolph. Yeah. Was Rudolph. His name is, and he's still alive, Sam Mullet.

And I have never heard of Sam Mullet two weeks ago or three weeks ago, but I listened to a couple of interviews by his daughter, Linda Shruck is her name. Okay. And he went to federal prison, I think he's out now, for a hate crime because they did some like Amish beard cutting. So him and his cronies, or he sent his cronies out to these other Amish people that crossed him. And he's a bishop.

And so he sent these Amish dudes, his cronies out to these other Amish people's houses, including another bishop and had them hold them down and cut their beards off, which they're not supposed to do. Because they're passive. These are pacifists. Well, they're pacifists and they're not supposed to cut their beards. So they sent his cronies out there. Yeah. Yeah. So it's like a double slap in the face. But the Sam Mullet- It's like toilet paper in a house, but actually a hate crime.

Yeah. Yeah. So this Sam Mullet, he's actually excommunicated now and they consider him to be a separate cult, but he's like Amish themed. And it's called the Bergholz community. And there was like 30 families and now there's like 13 or something. Most of the people left this community when Sam Mullet started to go off the rails. But yeah, he's got a sex cult. He sleeps with all the women.

Linda Schrock, his daughter left when not only her father, but her husband said that she needed to sleep with her father. He's sleeping with all the women. And they're all related to him. So that was going to be my next thing is like his little sector or cult or whatever is probably going to work itself out because if he's not going to allow his members to marry a less strict ordnong, it's just not going to happen. If he's the most, if he's the strictest, right? He's not the strictest.

He's like the cultiest. He's out of the Amish order. They kicked him out. They had like this big conference and the other bishops are like, no, this guy's a cult because he's sleeping with all the women. That's strictly forbidden. Well, yeah. You sleep with your husband or wife and that's it. And he's sleeping with the daughters and his granddaughters and his nieces and nephews and shit. Well, not nephews, but then all these women are carrying babies by him and he was in prison.

And his abuses are crazy. He would in church, if people were confessing to sins, he'd have them cover their face with ketchup and let it sit there for the whole service, which would burn your skin. You know what I mean? It's funny, but it's going to burn your skin. And as a punishment, a routine punishment, he would stuff people in chicken coops and they would have to sleep in dirty chicken coops and live in dirty chicken coops until he said they could come home.

So don't join the chicken coop cult is my takeaway from that. But that's the extreme end of the abuses. How crazy can these bishops get? He still has a lot of people under his control and they will not leave. And he's doing crazy stuff. I would never follow a religious leader that told me to sleep in a chicken coop, let alone sleep with my wife. You know what I mean? That's just not happening. Yeah. No, that's not a normal thing. Or should not be. It should not be a normal thing. No, it's weird.

Yeah, the beard cutting incident, which is what he went to prison for, to me was the least offensive thing that he did. You know what I mean? That gets weird and wrong, but it's not as weird and wrong as sleeping with your daughter. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. But I guess like the, and unfortunately, I'm sure the sentence for doing a hate crime versus sexual abuse, the hate crime is probably a heftier sentence. He was 16 years in prison. Yeah. He was in prison for 16 years.

His daughter went to prison too. And when she got out, she left. Okay. Yep. What did she go to prison for? The beard cutting thing? She was aware of the beard cutting thing and they put 16 members of that community in prison and she was one of them. Okay. Yep. She got two years for just being aware of what was going on and not calling the police is what they put her in jail for. Because her husband is like the right hand man of her father. Okay. Super interesting, like I say.

And they're on the appearance from the outside. You and I would not know they're not Amish because they still look Amish, but this guy says he's Jesus and you know, it's the typical cult. Like he says he's the second coming. So very interesting. Yeah. Well, and it's interesting too, because I think by and large, outside of what you, I mean, mostly outside of what you see in movies and I know they have the, what is it?

Like the Breaking Amish or the thing where like the Amish mafia like reality show. Yeah. And all that's just Hollywood fluff. That's super fake. Yeah, it's all fake. Yep. And all that's super fake. So like outside of all of that stuff, like if you just see Amish people, you're like, oh, those people are really docile and must have really like not complicated lives. But I guess the takeaway is humans who make anything complicated. Oh, absolutely.

Like I think that at least the Amish that we see, there are some Swartz and Trubers around here in Minnesota. I mean, not around me. I don't live by the Amish at all. They're South and West. And they're, they're so- Or they might be North and East because nobody knows where Mike lives. So- I live in North, Northern Minnesota and there's like a band of Amish that goes from Wisconsin to a metro area up to like Fargo and then there's Amish down in the South, Southwest as well.

And they're all South and West of me. So- Okay. But I try to ask sometimes. Yeah. And so I put my cigar down because I was burning my fingers, but it was worth the smoke all the way to the very end in my mind. And I still have an inch and a half left. Yeah. Because you've been, you've been, you've been flapping your gums and not smoking. So I guess kind of my last question then before we kind of wrap up for this episode then is, are Amish unique to the United States?

Yes. Not, not, there's Amish in Canada and there's some Amish in Central and South America, but their origins are out of the United States and they have direct ties to us. Okay. Yes. Yes, yes. So there's in the seventies, in the eighties and nineties, there's some of the Amish moved down to like South America and Central America. And they're all newer Amish that moved there. And then there's some in Ontario and some in Manitoba, I think.

Okay. Yeah. So there are some in Canada and some in South and Central America, but they are new world origin. Like all of the Amish as we think of them are in this hemisphere. Okay. And then the Mennonites kind of probably spread out most other places. There's Mennonites all over the continent and there's Mennonites in Europe as well. Okay. Yeah. And I think not the Mennonites and not the Amish, the other one. I can't remember what the heck they're called.

There's a third one that's similar to the Mennonites and the Amish, but they're not exactly the same. They're all off the same grouping of religious Anabaptist types. Okay. They had a television show about those people, not the Mennonites, the other ones. But anyway, it doesn't really matter. We were talking about the Amish. That is correct. And it was a very interesting topic and thanks for listening to Mike Knows and Nate is going to learn him some stuff. Be safe. Have fun. Click.