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Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Norman.
They call me Ben. We are joined as always with our super producer Andrew trefors Howard. Most importantly, you are you. You are here. That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. My fellow Americans, what do you think of when you hear the word abbish?
Barack Obama, Barack Hussein Obama.
That was like maybe a third Barack at the beginning, And then I just started, who.
Is cartoon Barack? And I'm here for it.
Wait somebody, it's somebody explain this. What does amish have to do with Barack Obama?
Oh, it's just my fellow Americans, is a thing President say?
Oh, he's just opening the floor for questions in common? You know, I'll tell you. There is this great documentary called The Devil's Backbone that I remember from many years ago, with an exclusively Aphex Twins soundtrack. It's got all this stuff from like selected ambient Works Volume two.
It's very beautifully used. He's not a guy that licenses at his music for stuff, and it's very well used.
It obviously describes the Amish practice of sort of allowing young people to go out into the world and live for I believe a year. Some of them come running back, and some of them, you know, stay and become kind of yeah, de amished.
I guess wait, wait, wait, Aphex Twin is one guy.
Yeah, so's Tame and Paula bro It's crazy. Yeah, Richard D. James is a fixed twin.
But wait, how many pilots are in twenty one pilots?
Only two? There's only two pilots, but really quickly.
This film is fascinating because a big thing that happens with a lot of these kids who will go out on this kind of like journey of self discovery is some of them become they get absolutely taken in by the corrupt the corruption of the world and become like drug addicts, and there's all kinds of horrible things that happen, and then some of them come back and live a pure,
you know, fully Amish life. It's very interesting phenomenon of the Amish culture that they have this whole kind of trial period called rum Springer.
Wow.
I was gonna say, guys, I have a very clear picture of a film, also not a documentary, a movie called Kingpin that came out in ninety six, all about kind of that like being corrupted by the world. I think it's Dennis No, Randy Quaid, Randy Quaid, I think that's right. I think is Randy Amish, Yeah, yeah, and amish like guy who doesn't know much about the world, but he happens to be excellent in bowling and then he gets taken in and he goes yeah, gets taken over.
Yeah, and that's a country mouse, meat city mouse kind of true.
Yes, exactly exactly, but with bowling at the heart of it.
Jeez.
I remember really liking that movie and thinking like quoting it a lot, but I don't know how well it holds up. So sorry if you go back and watch it now and there's problems, but I really liked it.
Well. You can hang out with us, folks. If ever you find yourself in our grand city of Atlanta, be you Amish or other, which will play into tonight's episode, you can always hang out with your fellow conspiracy realist. We will take you bowling. You will probably win because I don't know about you, guys, but I am terrible at that sport.
It's very difficult sport. I don't have the chops, I don't have the form. If I ever am good at bullying, it's the same way I'm good at darts, which is accidentally good.
Guys, I spent a lot of time in Ohio.
I won't you know.
I won't like take your money on purpose, but I'm sorry.
Ohio huge.
Okay, okay, bully is huge. Matt's got that shark elbow.
I love it.
Welcome back, fellow conspiracy realist. As you may or may not know, we have been on and off the road. As a result, we had some microphone shenanigans. We wanted to let you know you are not crazy. Uh, the audio is a little different at the beginning. However, we got everything in line with all prise due to our super producer Andrew rifles Howard. And now on with the show. Now, I'm not gonna get you into the personal bowling curse,
which is a story for another day. But we're we're talking about what we hear, what the word amish conjures in our minds. America as a continent or a series of continents and a country is, as we all know, far from perfect, but the idea is pretty fantastic. One of the biggest wins that ever happened in the history of the world was the United States idea of religious tolerance. The US has always, in theory, guaranteed residents the right to worship as they choose, so long as they don't
mess with other people. And Christianity Islam, Judaism, they're all these people book right, abramac panopolies of interpretation, doctrinal difference. I would argue Christianity is probably the most diverse umbrella group of those three big concepts, and for the past few millennia, since the time of Jesus Christ, guy who is famously known for, you know, bread and fish and being cool.
You know what, It's true.
There's a really great song with it's been called King Missile called Jesus is way cool, and it's true.
And I don't enough people give him credit for that. And I appreciate that.
Ben.
You always wanted to give credit where credit is due. And Jesus was way cool.
Jesus was our big lebowski. I don't know why kingpen is making me thinking of ye, that's for sure, he did. The dude abides so like. For thousands of years, people have been fighting about which interpretation of Christianity is woosh woosh correct. In tonight's episode, we are examining a particular group of Christian communities, largely in the United States. They're known for their separation from the larger secular world and
surrounding neighborhoods. In the US, we usually call these communities just the Amish, but as we'll discover, they are not a monolith, and there is unfortunately a positively unholy intergenerational conspiracy afoot in some of these places that don't really meet with the modern world. I guess before we close our cold open, we do have to give you a disclaimer. Tonight's episode contains at times graphic descriptions of assault, incest, and violence. As such, it may not be appropriate for
all listeners. Here are the facts, all right? What do we mean though when we say Amish? Aside from the documentaries, Aside from one weird out Yankovic song, who are the Amish?
Well, in the US, the term amish kind of as you mentioned, Beny who kind of tend to conjure a particular representation of what this might mean.
Some of that might be accurate, and some of that might be wildly off the mark.
But let's just start with maybe sort of the image that might be popping into one's head.
The idea of a.
Particular type of garb, you know, dark suits and broad brimmed hats, a bit more of a conservative kind of form of dress. The idea of farming horse drawn wagons. Probably thinking a bit of Middle America, you know, Pennsylvania is a big area for Amish communities today. These communities are often considered to be a bit of a mystery within our kind of more modern American life, and that's by design. Are a people frozen in time, essentially by
their own choice. The Amish live by choice without modern modes of transportation like automobiles or even electricity. If I'm not mistaken, Some of these communities may you know, still use outhouses and maybe you have like a well or
a pump, but not like indoor plumbing. And this is all in an attempt to live in a way that is more godly, that in a way that is more close to maybe the simpler times where people weren't as distracted by all kinds of you know, modern trappings like money and entertainment and all the kind of things that can lead to let's just be honest, guys, it can lead to the erosion of the soul.
Yeah, I would I would say one of the primary things about this group is the concept of removing yourself from anything that will make you less close to God, right, yes, less close to being an example of like for the world essentially of what Jesus' teachings were, or what the Bible's teachings were.
From the bishop to the child, you live in service of a higher power.
And maybe just to get it out of the way up front, because we are going to talk about some horrible things that happen within these communities at times.
But on paper, I think we would all love to be able to.
Remove ourselves from some of the stuff that we've gotten so deeply invested in and embedded in, you know, from social.
Media to politics to whatever.
I mean, there are these are things that can just really make you go a little crazy and kind of not be your truest, purest self.
And a good side note there, and I love that point, Noel, there are these things called blue zones. There are only a few throughout the entire globe, and a blue zone is a place where an extraordinaryunt of people live past one hundred years old. And one of the formative variables for a blue zone is an intense connection with community. Community is one of the earliest, if not the earliest human technology. It predates language right and it has very
real effects for good or for ill. The point about an Amish community, or a Mennonite or an Old Order Amish community, or a plain community as they're called. The point of it is to avoid things that distract one in theory from the pursuit of the service of God a higher power. As such, education is considered only a means to an end. It concludes around what we would
call eighth grade in the United States. In your life largely centers on the growth and maintenance of your community, which includes farming and includes participation in religious and social mores. When you hear law enforcement secular law enforcement, you'll often hear them refer to the Amish as a plane community p lai n. But the history is fascinating too, because the story of what we call Amish in the United States begins before the creation of the United States as an idea itself.
Oh yeah, and you can go The Anabaptist movement, which is part of basically the Protestant Reformation, goes way back. I think sixteenth century is when some of the concepts begin to arise, and then you get the Mennonites, which then splinter off into a couple different groups, which then become the Amish. The Amish is one of the splits basically that occurs.
It's interesting too, because you know where I grew up in Augusta, Georgia, there's quite a large Mennonite community, and I always associated them directly with the Amish. And while they have the commonalities, it's not the same. They were like part of a group that splintered and then became the Amish. They might share some beliefs and some lifestyle choices, but they are not the same am I Is that
about the shape of it. The Amish are an offshoot of the Mennonites, and the Mennonites are still around in their own capacity.
Yes, yeah, yeah, one hundred percent. Going back. As as Matt said to Anabaptist, the schism between the Protestants and the Catholics we got a shout out reluctantly. A guy named Jacob Ahmann amm a n He is an elder in the Mennonite Anabaptist movement, born around like the late seventeenth century sixteen nineties. He said that lying about anything is grounds for ex communication, and the Mennonites at the time had a different vibe on what was meant by
ex communication. We'll get into it, but essentially they meant shunning. If your community is your most important thing, then the way you punish people who violate your social morase is to remove them from that community, to remove them from communication, to put a fine point on it, to x communicate them. Also, this guy wanted everybody to wear similar clothing, wanted them to have similar facial hair, and wanted them to not
ever mess with the state church. Be that in Germany, be that in parts of France, be that in Switzerland. The term amish, I don't think a lot of us know this. The term amish was first used in the early eighteenth century. In seventeen ten as an insult and Noel, we're gonna defer to you as our former What do you say, we German boy?
I always what's a small German boy. Yes, it's true, and I'm no experts. My German knowledge remains at a kindergarten level. But I did come by it honestly, the word being shandanama, which is an insult. It's sort of like your ops, you know, but a shanda though. I
was just gonna mention this is literally an observation. I don't necessarily have too much data to back this up, but the Amish and the Hasidic Jewish community have some things in common in terms of their use of kind of this Yiddish type slang or this sort of German you know, kind of these German German sort of slang, but also in the dress, I mean, the beard and
the hats, and like the clothing and the simplicity. And I know they're they're coming at it from different places, but it does seem like there's a similar approach to being more godly by simplifying one's life and by.
Excluding secular community exactly very them versus us. Yeah, and we say that as a show several of us have Jewish heritage. And I love that you're bringing this up, Noll, because you can also see similar insular religious pursuits. Sure, for anybody unfamiliar with Judaism as a whole. There are branches of Judaism, orthodox Judaism that would not interact necessarily or not go out of their way to interact with people you might consider reformed, right, Reform Judaism is very different.
And I'm only laughing because there were this great bit Billy Crystal did. Do you guys remember Billy Crystal? Of course, yeah, from earlier. You could forget Billy Crystal from earlier. Yeah, yeah, City Slickers, Stone Cold Classic up there with vibes Curley's goal. Oh yes, thank you for mentioning vibes. Man, I appreciate that.
But yes, shanda nama is just a you know, a German word for an insult. So the term Amish initially was a term of abuse referring to folks who were opponents of Aman.
Yes of Jacob, and these groups, as you describe them, these kind of spinoffs or these franchises of this original schism, they start migrating to what we call modern day Pennsylvania in the early seventeen hundreds, and they come entirely because of two reasons. Religious tolerance, which was still a freshly
baked thing, and affordable offers on land. Between seventeen seventeen and seventeen fifty, about five hundred Homish people migrated to North America, and I believe they first went to Burks County, Pennsylvania, but then they had to relocate due to land disputes and the chaos of something called the French and Indian War, which is a weird name. And by the way, Native Americans and the French do not call it the French in Indian War.
No, it's the one that kind of stuck. But I've always found it a little perplexing. There are other related groups that immigrated in the eighteen hundreds to places like Ohio, Illinois, and Iowa, as well as more northern regions including the southern parts of Ontario in Canada.
A little later you would.
See communities started to spring forth in Kansas, Maine, Zira, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and even as far south as North Carolina.
Yeah, and still to the earlier point, these communities are incredibly insular. Interaction with the outside world is highly regulated. Matt Nol We were talking about this with Trifors a little bit before we we rolled. We were we were thinking through our own personal experiences with these communities, Matt, what's the what's the outsider word? What do they call it? Not the Dutch, but they call us.
Oh, I believe the term often is English. So if somebody who is more in the mainstream of society, there's a generalized term that's used. Like let's say you have a neighbor that has a home and does not live in a Mennonite or Amish lifestyle. Often that person be referred to as my English neighbor.
Yes, like guys, A lot of that terminology does come up in that documentary that I was talking about, The Devil's Backbone. So it really is a great view because there's parts of it that are completely set within the communities themselves, and then they follow the individuals they go out, you know, and their kind of adolescent journey into the wicked world.
And people are people. So just to be clear, I think we can all agree your Amish neighbors are not hauling you a jerk. They're not mad at you.
No, it's like being a gentile.
Right, yeah, it's just following a different path, right. No one's going to be rude to you, or.
They might not let their daughters date your son though, I mean.
Yeah, I want to make just one really quick point here about as we're migrating, we're imagining all of these different groups moving to different parts of the United States. One of the things that separates a lot of these faiths is that there's not some big central church. There's not a Vatican necessarily in most instances. Here some you know, there is a Mennonite church there. There isn't like a form of Amish church if you really start to break
down the different you know, offshoots. But often when you've got a group of families, let's say, moving out to Maine, you're going to have twenty forty families that move out together, and then that group of human beings becomes like the Mennonite church that's there, or the Amish church community that's right, right, and so they govern things on their own. Everything is insular, as we're saying.
Here, every centralized, right, Yes, So.
There's not there's not some other big organization that they're writing to or getting phone calls from, and all that kind.
Of stuff is just there's no pope.
Yeah, we handle our stuff here, yes.
And the which means that your end municipal authority, your mayor, your president, your pope will be someone called the bishop, and there is a strict hierarchy involved. Women and children, by the way, are at the bottom of that hierarchy. These communities. I love this point, Matt. These communities see such regulation in interaction with the English or the outside secular world that violating the terms of that outside interaction
is seen as sinful. It can be seen as a mortal sin, like if you betray a member of the community to the authorities, even when there is just cause, you are endangering your chance to get into paradise or the good part of the afterlife. I mean today, the historic Amish community is itself diverse an interpretation of doctrine which I think goes to that earlier point about decentralization.
It still holds to many of the precepts that mentioned earlier, created or discovered or realized by our pal Jacob back in the day. One of the biggest cultural touchstones is the concept of something we call ordnung, which is a codecs of unwritten laws of behavior. There are in these communities, again decentralized, there are written versions of this behavior, and
those written versions are called the ordinal. They guide all behavior for all members of the community and this is up to the interpretation of the elders and the bishop. The bishop is the top dog again, the mayor, the president, the pope, the comptroller, that guy is the guy in charge.
Yeah, Ordnung's just another German.
I mean, I guess there's the Dutch heritage, and there are some commonalities between Dutch and German. But it is interesting how many German like straight up German words they use to describe some of their concepts. Or um just refers to like order and kind of like finding a routine and sort of like an organized way of life.
Which the Germans are also quite fond of.
Oh yeah, Man Germany is the one place I almost got arrested for jaywalking at three in the morning local time because there are rules.
Yeah, bro, there's rules around here.
There's rules.
Speaking of rules, let's talk about that thing we were.
Gonna mention earlier, my dunge shunning, shut.
Yeah, shunning, excommunication, all that stuff. So this internal behavioral mechanism that exists, it is. It varies, let's say, from sect to sect, but one of the very one of the very common things that you'll find in these groups is the practice of going up in front of the church and professing your sins or your crimes, like literal, actual terrible crimes, and you go up in front of the by the church, I just mean the other members of your community, and you say the stuff out loud.
Then you are not allowed to eat with anybody. And the time here varies, but usually it's like six weeks where you can't go and eat communally with anybody. You have to stay away on your own. And the belief or maybe the order to it is that the rest of the community after those six weeks or however much time has passed, they everybody forgives you and is supposed to forget that you ever committed said crime or sin or whatever it is, and everybody just moves on and you rejoin the community.
It's in the past.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's a magic trick.
You're absolved, which could be an incredible thing if it was something like, you know, I lied about this thing that occurred, and like, oh dang, nobody likes that you did that. Go away for a while, come back where we can all live simpatico again.
Go in time out.
Yeah, but if it's something heinous, like we're going to be talking about today, I don't know how to express how underwhelming that punishment is.
Right, Yeah, the idea of my dongue or I'm sorry, my manner is coming out me I d u n g. The idea of shunning, we can call it we the English is, in theory, a way for the community to self regulate, to solve internal problems of largely obedience and compliance, and keep everybody not just in physical uniform, but an ideological uniform, which is even more disturbing. We should also know to the aspect of shunning, it is collective punishment
because women and children are largely considered property. If a dude gets in trouble in many of these communities, then the spouse and the children encounter shunning as well. It's not just people icing you out. These communities rely on each other for sustenance, right for continued survival. So these folks who are shunning you are also not helping you build stuff, They're not helping you harvest crops. You're not allowed to help them. I would imagine that's why there
is a window of time. Right, you simply cannot exist in this community. If you are shunned for life, there's no way to live without the village at that point.
Yeah, that's a really great point, man. The difference between going through a period of shunning and and being excommunicated from your church, which is effectively like you're saying, from your community, from your family, from everybody you've known for the past x years, perhaps your entire life. Right, that's a huge, huge potential punishment that can be enacted on somebody in the community.
Yeah, and look again, it's like any other thing in the United States. Cool in theory, right, sounds good on paper. However, increasing evidence shows that this internal regulatory system, in particular, has been used to maintain order at the cost of people's lives, at the cost of their well being and their safety. The idea of or nung, the idea of the ordinal, has been used repeatedly to cover up some serious,
deeply disturbing conspiracy. We're talking intergenerational sexual crimes again, fellow conspiracy realists. This is a warning. The rest of this show contains graphic depictions of unclean things. We said it at the top. We want to give you one more chance. The conspiracy is real. It may not be appropriate for all listeners. We will pause for a word from our sponsors. You can turn back now or learn the stuff the Amish don't want you to know years where it gets crazy.
Not all Amish communities hashtag not all, but many Amish communities have long records of intense intergenerational sexual abuse. And I will pause it that the larger what we call them at the English, the larger surround and communities knew about this. It had to be an open secret for more than two centuries now. However, as we all know, outside of these communities, more of the abuse came to light to the larger public, primarily due to the age of information. Would we agree with that?
Absolutely?
Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. And in particular, there was I would say, a helpful movement towards exposing this kind of stuff when we you know, what is referred to as the me too movement was in full swing and occurring where people began to be not as fearful to speak the truth out in a public setting as you're saying. It's social media primarily, but also people writing
about it in major publications. These kinds of incidents that would for a long time just be kept quiet out of you know, fear and.
For other whether it be fear of retaliation, or fear of not being believed, or just outright shame, you know, and to see others describing things that we ourselves perhaps have also experienced is incredibly powerful. So you know this, this applies to the Catholic Church and all of that stuff coming to light in a much larger way than it had in the past.
All of the crazy stuff with Hollywood, this is no different.
Yeah, multiple documentaries, multiple interviews, some of which were in print and sat in the back shelf of an editor's to do lists for many years, an unholy amount of years. We're also talking court cases depicting just how profoundly these people, often women, often children, were sexualized, objectified, assaulted, raped, and then forced to you know, forgive their accuser because they did a little had talk at the church, and then further forced to aid and a bet further crimes within
the community's larger ongoing system, a very real conspiracy. And with this in mind, there's a thing that we talk about in the world of academia and poetry, which is you find the universal via the specific. So let's dive into a couple of stories. We're going to meet Mary and Sarah. This is not pleasant. These are just very brave people. They knew that they were ending their lives in their community by coming forward. The first one we want to introduce you to is Mary Buyler.
Yeah.
Mary, from the age of four or five until she left the community at seventeen, was repeatedly sexually assaulted by many members of her very close knit Amish community in Wisconsin. This included blood relations, cousins and her biological brothers, even Johnny David and Eli Biler. Her biological father was also guilty of this behavior.
It's hard to even talk about.
When local law enforcement sent Mary back to her community wearing a wire. Johnny was caught on tape confessing to assaulting her at least two hundred separate times.
As a child. This was an elder brother again, as you said, the biological brother, including cousins, including a biological father. You can learn more about this in a documentary called Sins of the Amish. I believe the court cases went through in two thousand and four. They were undertaken when she was nineteen years old.
Well, yeah, and this is a really rare case where a trial actually went forward. The fact that Mary was given the chance to wear a wire and go in and get a confession is not the norm that occurs here, honestly, that she would even get the chance to do that.
And I guess we can talk about it more, but just this thing that occurs in often in these cases where the community itself often rallies around the family member that could be sent away to prison for a long time, rather than the person, the person who was abused, the person who's saying, hey, I need help, somebody is hurting me.
The community sees that, but I don't. I can't speak for the community, but my sense is that the community somehow believes we can take care of that person who was abused somehow, or we can show we alter that person still in our ways. We just can't lose to this other community member who is the actual abuser. And that makes sense.
Which are more important than women. That's part of it. That's a huge part of it, because women are Look and I don't want to ruffle any feathers here saying this, but it is clear in the structural social functions here that the hierarchy goes bishop and then elders, all dudes, and then dudes and then women. Oh yeah, and juvenile males are above women because they have one day the
chance to evolve into something past property. Women are taught in these communities and these abusive communities that if someone sexually assaults you, it is your fault because you should have done better, which is unclean. It's unclean. There's not there, There is no there is no moral parcore that can make that rational.
Yeah.
No, And you know, we talked a little bit about this off air, but I just wanted to bring it
up here. You know, when you hear about these types of situations and among communities or organizations where there is this like wholesale it's really like, you know, big picture attempt to separate oneself from the evils of the world, you know, or whatever, even the evils of humans, whether it be the Catholic Church or the Amish community or similar allegations of abuse happened in like the Mormon community.
You see this kind of stuff pop up, and you have to wonder, like, is it that attempt to kind of separate oneself that maybe it's almost like poking the bear or something, or like give it doesn't have an outlet. And then there's also just of course the inherent potential for evil in humans that can just kind.
Of fester in these situations. I don't know.
I don't want to draw any false equivalencies, but you see it a lot, and it seems like these situations arise in cases where there's this kind of almost prohibition type attitude. And I don't know, I don't want to overstate the case here, but I was wondering what you guys thought about that.
I dig it. Yeah, the call is coming from inside the house. It's something philosophy wrestles with and continues to. It reminds me a bit now that we're framing this and contextualizing it. It reminds me a bit of the horrors in Pitcairn Island. You guys know about Pitcairn Island. I have to refresh. Oh, it's a it's a world away. I imagine. Very few members of the Amish community have visited, but Pitcairn Island is notorious then and now for systematic
abuse of children. It's an archipelago out in I want to say, French Polynesia. It's in the middle of the ocean like picture Australia, right. If you're looking at US printed world map, picture Australia, and they go way to the right, like off the map, middle of nowhere.
So isolated by its geography already, and then I imagine that there's sort of like that, you know, by design kind of thing to maintain that isolation and to have sort of like a owned and operated culture and community. And yet these things spring up disconnected from all of the evils of like pop culture and whatever, television, entertainment, music, all of the trappings of kind of modern life that folks like the Amish are doing everything they can to
separate themselves from. And yes, this stuff kind of thrives without any of that influence.
Yeah, the argument that we're getting close to here would be very familiar to Jacoboman. We're positing the idea of call it opportunism, call it original sin, call it normalization. Thereof it's deep, it's deep stuff, and it's not good.
I know that's an understate the of the decade. But look, if we go to Mary Byler's case, as we said earlier, that you point out this is a very rare thing, right, and there's incredibly rare for this to go to the English court, and we see that her brothers were brought to account, all three of them pled guilty again, that's
Johnny Biler, Eli Biler, David Biler. David Biler got a four year sentence in federal prison, not because of what he did to his sister, Mary, but because of his conviction for second degree sexual assault against Mary's even younger sister. Eli Biler had a prior misdemeanor conviction, and as a result of that prior he got eight years in prison. Johnny Biler was examined pretty in depth in some of these documentaries. He was given what we could only call
a sweetheart deal. It's not the kind of thing that in any other context, it is not the kind of thing that you would expect a court to give a serial rapist. Can we talk about what his quote unquote sentence was.
Yeah, somebody who admitted to essentially two hundred separate counts of child sexual abuse. It reminds me of that deal that was given to Epstein when he was able to come over to the jail, the prison, whatever it was, spend the night there, and then in the morning wake up and go to work. Because you know, his work's really important, so he has to be able to go to work. But then he'll come back and he'll stay the night in the jail and we'll watch him.
He got the sleepover sentence. Let's not call this sweetheart deal a sleepover deal. Yeah, this is even weirder because Johnny Biler is spending nights at the county jail for what one year?
Man, And you know, I mean, you hear that, and you just have to wonder why, Like I just don't understand the slap on the wrist quality of this kind of sentence.
And we're going to find out why.
There was some support and within that patriarchal community that maybe led to a little bit of lenience in the court's decision. So let's take a quick break here from our sponsor and then come back with more on this disturbing case.
And we're back, and we're still in the aftermath the sentencing and trial of the abusers of Mary Buyler that we've been talking about. So as we spoke about before, a lot of the community members will show up in support of the person accused of something again to show support that they need that person in their community. They don't want that person to get a long jail sentence.
They want that person back with them. So in the case of Johnny Buyler, when he is being sentenced one hundred and fifty members of his community, and I guess that the Amish community at large traveled to the courtroom on that day he was going to get sentenced to do you support him, the guy that's accused of this stuff, the guy that just went through a trial about all this stuff. And it just shows you this thing. It shows you that thing.
Man.
I've learned a lot about this, and I think we all did from Sarah McClure, who wrote a piece in Cosmopolitan back in twenty twenty, and in that she talks She talks about a whole bunch of different cases and gives a lot of specifics about them that you cannot unread. But it is very good to read them. I just mean that it's harring to read them, and it will
not leave your mind for a while. But they She talks often about this very thing where even sometimes the initial accuser, the person who says he raises their hand and says, hey, you've been abusing me, ends up in the courtroom as a part of the trial or at some point in the trial and says writes a letter or something that says, hey, please don't send my brother or my dad to jail.
Right, and in this case, uh yeah, in this case a similar thing occurred. I do also because you guys know, I'm I do also want to point out that those Amish supporters went to that courtroom via greyhound, which is a internal combustion autopia.
Well, it depends on which sect they're in, because some of some of the more modern Amish scrims just but but the whole point in that, guys, is that the community will then convince or coerce and someone who is being abused to sit there and support the person who's abusing them out of a sense of community.
Yeah, they'll they'll show up and they'll say, actually, none of that happened. You're making it sound worse than it is. And it's pronounced jazz lighting.
Well, it reminds me of some of the correspondents that we've gotten from listeners, you know, around sexual abuse and these kinds of horrific experiences and so often. I believe it was one listener in particularly the Road, and it made the point that you know, kids or younger people or if they're isolated especially, they don't know that what's happening.
Is bad, Like they don't know it's not normal.
They don't, Yes, certainly, but it is possible to with that kind of iron fisted control over information, over a community, the lack of outside influence, to maintain these types of situations for a really, really long time before anybody will dare do what this young woman did in wearing a wire that is, to your point, been very out of the ordinary.
Yeah, it's it's something that feels with the benefit of being outside of an isolated community. It feels like a no brainer. Obviously, if you saw any child being abused, if you saw any person being abused, you would feel that is part of your social contract to assist that person right, to save them from adversity. And the issue here is that culturally it's a very different social contract.
If you have ever had the dubious privilege of being on the wrong side of the courtroom, then you will know that letters of support character carried great weight with judges. In the various legal proceedings pertaining to the decade plus assault of Mary Byler. There were letters that Matt is
referring to. One of these letters was written by Mary Byler's biological mother, statistically herself likely a victim of abuse at some point, and her mother wrote a letter disowning her daughter, but come on more so, saying that her daughter had always made things quote sound worse than they actually were, and that everybody involved regretted things had been confessed and forgiven by the community of matching your own parent doing that.
It would be heartbreaking.
I mean, I can't imagine just the level of betrayal that that would cause one to feel. Rightfully, so I have to mention though, been like these letters that you're talking about, you know, it's obviously up to the judges discretion to like determine like is this valid, Like what is the nature of this sentiment?
You know, And it.
Really makes me think of like some people that have gotten in real hot water for writing letters of support to pretty clearly guilty individuals, Like remember that case with I believe his name is Danny Masterson.
He was on that seventies show.
And Scientologist Scientology, but like he was a rapist, and I think Melak Kunas and Ashton Kutcher wrote letters of support to him for on his behalf that were read in the court room and they got majorly uh, you know, lampooned,
and and you know, borderline canceled for that. So I just you have to wonder, like where is the court of public opinion in this, Like where is the judge's discretion and saying I am here to protect this person, and yet I'm giving credence to these letters that seem coerced and of themselves.
I just don't get a sticky point to Matt to mass point earlier, you know, or these So intent is always one of the most difficult things to prove, right now. That's that's the reason why there are separate forms of punishment for crimes of passion versus premeditated murder or homicide. So in this, you know, it's it's very difficult to navigate the degree of consent or coercion toward the writing of these kind of letters, right of these sorts of
statements against your own child. And this is something that the judge in the case, in the Johnny Byler case brought up. And you can see multiple recordings of this courtroom recordings. The judge, Michael Rosebrow says, I see a lot of you. I'm paraphrasing here, but he says, I see so many of you here in support of the accused, and I see people weeping. You know, from the community, how many of you have ever cried for the victim?
How many of you have cried for Mary Biolet? And this guy clearly not amish, but he is asking a very valid question.
Yeah, yeah, but also seemed to give a lot of credence to those letters. That's why I'm confused because says what he just said, which seems to side with the victim, you know, and the duteons. I'm not supposed to take sides per se, but that sentence is insulting.
Yeah.
One of the things that Sarah McClure talks about is that often the accuser will be coerced to lessen the charge, essentially like seeking justice for something that would be considered a misdemeanor versus a felony. And that's often the case where again the abused is coerced by the community then to say, oh, well, he just he groped me, he didn't it. We're going to consider it, you know this rather than full you know, we'll call it sexual assault rather than rape, right.
Just aggravated molestation something like that.
It's horrifying. And Sarah, by the way, found fifty two official cases.
Yes, yeah, we're gonna. Sarah McClure, an investigative journalists, spent a year reporting on sexual abuse among the Amish. She did uncover fifty two cases of abuse, which include sexual assault and incest. And she found this across seven states over the past twenty years.
Yeah.
Yeah, And just to add to that there, like, here's a quote from somebody named Esther. This person isn't actually named Esther, their name was changed for this reporting. But this is a quote from somebody in one of the communities that says, we're told that it's not christ like to report, right. Uh's this is someone who was abused by her brother and a neighbor boy when she was nine years old.
But Christ's pook truth to power. Christ called people out. That was his whole time. I'm sorry. This is her.
This is her quote, and she also says, quote, it's so ingrained. There are so many people who go to church and just endure basically endure ongoing abuse.
I don't buy that depiction of Christ at all. Remember when he flipped over the money Changers table.
Over when he did a distrack essentially and cursed the tree because it didn't have figs. I can't remember which version of you guys book that makes it.
And yeah, he endured being you know the crucifixion where you know, there's all these biblical scholars or whatever who argue that he could have changed the course of his destiny if he chose, but instead he let.
It happen basically because it needed to happen.
Whatever, like, whatever your take is on the spiritual side, of the prophecy side of it or whatever. But you cannot say that Jesus was a good little boy.
You kept his mouth shut. That is not true.
Well, the money changers have entered the chat, I imagine. Here's what we know. The Amish community, time and time again, not just in the Biler case, has argued that they already meeted out appropriate punishment to these people who have provably done these monstrous acts. Their argument, really internally is
that there is a true sin. People make mistakes, they say, but the real sin is reporting it to the outside world, because that would endanger the community, the exclusivity, the insular nature, and the long term sustainability of the grand project. And this is far from the end of the story. There are many, many more cases of sexual abuse, community based and family based. There are children born as a result of these violent things.
And.
Some of those children are alive today. We could argue with validity that there is a high likely or a higher than average likelihood of this occurring in the insular community. Predators find opportunity, right, A predator is I don't know. It goes back to a conversation we're having earlier about the the nature of original sin and evil. We know, when outside accountability it self becomes the crime, right, then things get very skewed very quickly.
Well, and it's also just highly inconvenient for the status quo of a community like that, whether there be accurate allegations of this kind of abuse or it's just literally maintaining their way of life. To have a criminal case before the eyes of the public out in the secular world, that's about the worst possible thing they could imagine in terms of, like, you know, the hierarchy and then the control over that society.
Yeah, we want to point everybody over to another article that you can check out right now, and it spotlights this exact thing. Just how many examples of this exist?
Look up what they wore Amish Country exhibit spotlight's sex abuse and this is somebody's written in ap News by Peter Smith back in twenty twenty two, and it describes essentially an exhibit that was put on where there are the clothes of the girls like as young as four, the exact clothes or recreations of the clothes that these girls wore when they were sexually abused.
And very conservative, you know, we're talking like all the way.
Yeah, imagine imagine the traditional garb of a Mennonite or an Amish community.
Imagine like a house on the prairie. What's the name of that shop.
Yeah, that's a good way to think about it, for sure, for.
Not Amish in the audience.
Yeah, including bonnets, right, And they are strung up on a clothesline with a small piece of paper that just states how old the child was and what they were wearing. Basically, it describes the clothing when they were abused. And it is just a striking way to view how prevalent this is, and it is heartbreaking to see some of the tiny clothes that are strung up on that clothesline.
I'd like to also add the note from the documentary which is fairly recent, called Sins of the Amish quotation at the very beginning The odds of an Amish woman getting raped to buy a guy on the street are almost zero, but from a guy within their own communities it is one out of every six on a good day. Harrowing. We also know there are more non sexual crimes that
occur between these communities and the outside world. We're talking drug trafficking, weirdly enough, shaving, oh jeez, yeah, murder, Well, it's a big deal. It's a big deal.
There, I know.
But as a bearded a man who's been bearded for a very long time, I could personally attest that would be a crime against humanity if someone ever did that to me without without my consent.
No, I'm making light because.
That's the only thing I know how to do when it comes to heavy stuff like this. The drug trafficking stuff is also addressed in that doc that I mentioned the Devil's Backbone, because some of the kids that do take that sabbatical.
And go out into the real world.
There's a handful of stories that involve methamphetamines and bring that back into the community and that kind of stuff.
Yeah, I'm thinking in particular of Abner King Stoolfitz and Abner Stolfitz, not related. I'm thinking of a New York Times article back in nineteen ninety eight when they became the first two members of Pennsylvania Amish to be arrested for afficking cocaine and meth. This was in step with the Pagan motorcycle gang. We should probably do an episode on outlaw bikers as well, the original one percenters, right, And maybe the biggest takeaway is this conspiracy thrives in
a lack of transparency. In the Amish community, we witness clear misogyny, and we see with any community practicing this, the same horrifying stories over and over. Women is not quite people, not quite property, not given the same rights. And unfortunately, many of our fellow listeners, folks, some of us in the audience tonight, have experienced similar situations in
likewise insular communities. We already shouted out Sarah McClure, investigative journalist who has done so much tremendous work for people here. We also want to recommend the Plain People podcast, launched in twenty eighteen, which explores in depth more stories of sexual abuse and Amish and Mennonite communities.
For sure, we were talking for a while about you know, how could this happen? Why is this happening? And Sarah McClure in her piece again look it up right now. The Amish keep to themselves and they're hiding a horrifying secret. She explains it in a way that I think I understand, and I think we all understand at least a little better. She says, it's not one thing, right. You can't point to one thing. You can't point to a couple things that make these communities ripe for this type of abuse.
But she calls it a perfect storm of factors. I'm just gonna list these off really quickly because I think this. You can find these factors, sometimes separately in groups, and then when you see them begin to combine, that's where the real trouble begins, she says. One a patriarchal and isolated lifestyle in which victims have little exposure to police, coaches, or anyone else who might help them. An education system that ends at eighth grade and fails to teach children
about their bodies and about sex. A culture of victim blaming and shaming. Little access to the technology that enables communication for broader social awareness of what's going on about your body, about what others are experiencing and a religion that prioritizes repentance and forgiveness over actual punishment and rehabilitation. So really, in this episode, guys, what we've done is
outlined all of that stuff. I think Sarah just puts that into one concise thing where you can just kind of see it and go, oh wow, okay, if you've got all of those factors going at the same time, this leads to a place where it's a I think it's in that documentary that you mentioned, Ben. In the trailer for it, they call it a paradise for abusers.
Yes, they call it pedophiles paradise. And there's another I mean, there is a town called Paradise as well. And this is an interesting point here, Matt, because astute fellow conspiracy realist, we can already note the factors listed by McClure. The factors we explore here are not unique to any single ideology, to any single creed, to any single region of the human experience. And maybe we begin our ending with this. Obviously, not every person in any Amish or Mennonite community is
abusing children, like imagine any longstanding theocratic civilization. The majority of people in those civilizations. Then as of now and in the future, are people just like you. They do not wake up each day excited to hurt themselves or others. But the problem is the lack of transparency, that is the original sin, the insular nature of the them versus us mentality, This intense continual indoctrination right, the brainwashing of rules and also loopholes to that rules, that makes the
ordinal the Ordnung twist. And as we record to date, the most heartbreaking part is there is very little indication that the Amish community overall, being decentralized as it is, will take any serious action to address past abuse or to prevent future abuse.
Guys, the one thing we haven't talked about yet in this episode is something particularly horrifying which is a practice in several communities that was outlined in a couple of places we found online where women, young girls even sometimes are sent to a type of institution where they are
to receive treatment to get right with God. And the people who run those institutions often are a part of the church in one way or another, and they will medicate young girls and women with stuff like olanzapine, which is an antipsychotic medication.
It's a very heavy duty antipsychotic medication.
Yeah, it's generally a treatment for schizophrenia and is only recommended for patients above the age of thirteen for manic episodes and bipolar disorder and all kinds of stuff.
Very yellow wallpaper. To be honest with you.
That's a great way to describe it. It is people who have gone through the experience, young women especially report coming back as zombies or their friends coming back as zombies and just existing basically being told by the church via this or organization, you just need to be obedient. You just need to you know, comply exactly. To me, it's just another horrifying aspect of a way to control someone or an entire group of women.
I think it's a horrifying aspect to all of us. You know this, this this idea dates back to earlier. As you said, Matt control attempts right lobottomize, medicate zombie fie victims right of a system, rather than changing the system that produces these victims through active conspiracy. This is this is it, you know, the there are more things ahead. We were absolutely not spinning you a tail. These conspiracies
are real. They continue this evening, and for any fellow listeners with experience in these communities, having survived these things, we want to end by saying this, we very much hope you are safe. We are here to learn your stories. Please listen all the way to the end of this episode and thank you for being here with us. Folks. We are going to tell you how to contact us via social media, via telephone, via our direct email address,
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