Speaker 1: Welcome to Behind the Bastards, the podcast that just got
Speaker 1: introduced properly because I fucked up. Fuck. I wasn't supposed
Speaker 1: to do it right, I was supposed to do it badly. Um.
Speaker 1: I'm so sorry Sean. Sean is here today because Sean
Speaker 1: donated a very generous amount to the recall effort for
Speaker 1: the mayor of Portland, who sucks uh And and I
Speaker 1: wanted to introduce the podcast well for Sean by doing
Speaker 1: something incompetent shouting the name of a dictator. You know,
Speaker 1: I was I all day, all day. I was gonna
Speaker 1: I was gonna shout chow Chessco. Just just scream out
Speaker 1: chow Chessco's name, but I forgot to at the last minute.
Speaker 1: And I'm so sorry, Sean. That's okay, I mean it's
Speaker 1: it's you know, it's no Punani. But you know, well,
Speaker 1: we can talk about Poonani. We can talk about but
Speaker 1: but we do have we do have a different bastard today.
Speaker 1: Although all bastards lead one way or the other to
Speaker 1: Steven Seagal, I do believe that strung and I'm fairly
Speaker 1: certain you could connect today's bet Well, let me let
Speaker 1: me double check here, let me do check here, because
Speaker 1: we're talking about Josh Dougger today, and in a broader sense,
Speaker 1: we're talking about aspects of the Quiverful movement. And I
Speaker 1: kind of wonder, can we here with the production company
Speaker 1: or something related to a movie made by Steven Seagal.
Speaker 1: That's that's there. I think I know how I can
Speaker 1: make this connection. Um, okay, yes, we can make this connection.
Speaker 1: So Mike Huckabee went on the View in two thousand
Speaker 1: and seventeen and denied that Joe R. Pio was a
Speaker 1: racist and says that he knows Joe R. Pio their friends,
Speaker 1: and he knows that Joe R. Piot was not a racist.
Speaker 1: Joe R. Pio has shown up at campaign events and
Speaker 1: campaigned with both Jim Bob and Josh Dugger. Joe R.
Speaker 1: Pio was connected directly to Stephen Seagal. We did it,
Speaker 1: We did it, hey, perfect, We should put it out there,
Speaker 1: put out to the universe. Steven Seagal, the bastards, Kevin Bacon.
Speaker 1: That's right, Yeah, we could. I mean, I bet if
Speaker 1: we were to spend the time, we could draw a
Speaker 1: connection between him and Hitler. Um, but I would probably
Speaker 1: need to do a little bit more digging than I'm
Speaker 1: going to do right now while we're recording an episode,
Speaker 1: but for a depressingly less amount of there's just a
Speaker 1: photo of him in an s S uniform. No, he
Speaker 1: has an age nearly that. Well, Sean, you want to
Speaker 1: tell the audience a little bit about yourself before we
Speaker 1: before we get into this episode. As I was telling
Speaker 1: you before we started up, I worked on the healthcare
Speaker 1: front lines during the during the pandemic and kind of
Speaker 1: sat on my hands while watching and paying attention to
Speaker 1: Twitter and all that stuff of all the protests and
Speaker 1: the tear gassing and all that stuff going on in
Speaker 1: real time, being kind of like, oh, I'm at this,
Speaker 1: I'm at this front uh of all the crazy stuff
Speaker 1: going on. I don't want to bring COVID from one
Speaker 1: to the other. Uh. So I was like, when this
Speaker 1: auction came up, I was like, Oh, I am willing
Speaker 1: to spend a real amount of money to to did
Speaker 1: Wheeler fuck Ted Wheeler? Yeah, I'm I'm I'm glad that
Speaker 1: you did. And for those of you listening who live
Speaker 1: in the city of Portland, if you go to Total
Speaker 1: Recall PDX dot com, you can print off the sheet
Speaker 1: that you can then sign and and and scan back in.
Speaker 1: You can also print off sheets that will allow you
Speaker 1: to sign up multiple people. It will explain everything. There's
Speaker 1: like a whole process. It's more complicated than it should
Speaker 1: be and more of pain in the ass, and it
Speaker 1: should be because they don't want Mary's to get recall UM.
Speaker 1: But if you go to Total Recall pd X, they
Speaker 1: will explain the whole thing. If you're not in Portland
Speaker 1: and you want to support the recall effort against Ted Wheeler,
Speaker 1: who is trash like Shan did very generously, you can
Speaker 1: also go to Total Recall PDX and you can donate.
Speaker 1: They have paid people going out and who are helping
Speaker 1: to um, who are helping to fund this. Timber is
Speaker 1: a thorn's game. They're usually out there and it's you
Speaker 1: know what, I there's there's a lesson I learned from
Speaker 1: all this, and that is you know, there's a phrase
Speaker 1: that comes up a lot and on this podcast too.
Speaker 1: It's called fuck you money, and it kind of it's
Speaker 1: usually people that are so super rich, you know they
Speaker 1: have It's like, fuck you, I have money. Fuck you
Speaker 1: I have enough money to change your life if I
Speaker 1: want to. If you've annoy me. Yeah, and it's it's
Speaker 1: something most of us will never have, never ever, nor
Speaker 1: should we ever have, because it really kind of gollums
Speaker 1: up your Sniegele, you know what I mean. That's a
Speaker 1: good way to put it. So, but hey, I just
Speaker 1: want everyone to know if I've learned nothing else from this,
Speaker 1: It's said, if you have hope in your heart and
Speaker 1: even but a penny in your pocket, you have fuck
Speaker 1: Ted Wheeler money. Yeah, and that's that's together we can have.
Speaker 1: We can have fuck Ted Wheeler a variety of things,
Speaker 1: because it's not just money that fuck Ted Wheeler. It's
Speaker 1: getting out on the ground and signing people up. It's
Speaker 1: adding just your name or your name and people in
Speaker 1: your household to the sheet. All of that is in
Speaker 1: an ephemeral sense, Ted Wheeler money. Yeah. You don't even
Speaker 1: have to spend a time. You could be sitting broke
Speaker 1: in a little uh in a little cafe in Louisiana. Again,
Speaker 1: just that little pen in your pocket. It just know
Speaker 1: that you do have fun Ted Wheeler money. Or if
Speaker 1: you're living in Portland, you've got a good relationship with
Speaker 1: some neighbors, go out and signed some people up. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of ways to fuck Ted Wheeler. Um, we
Speaker 1: could make a joke about the fact that you just
Speaker 1: got broken up with, but we won't because that's not classy.
Speaker 1: Um the very little known rule thirty five. So Sean,
Speaker 1: you I asked you when you when you won the auction,
Speaker 1: who do you want to hear about? And you gave
Speaker 1: me a couple of different names, And the name that
Speaker 1: I decided to go with because I've been wanting to
Speaker 1: cover this motherfucker for a while was Josh Dugger. And
Speaker 1: I'm curious before we get into the episode, Um, what
Speaker 1: do you know about Josh and why did you want
Speaker 1: to learn more about him? So Josh Dougger. So what
Speaker 1: I know about him was the uh, the or j Dougs,
Speaker 1: you know, the dig dugger. Good God, I hope no
Speaker 1: one calls him that. Not interested if she's nineteen and counting? Uh,
Speaker 1: I know, you know obviously there's the uh, the violent
Speaker 1: child porn that came up, the being on the kind
Speaker 1: of pushing that quiverful life through tlcs um reality show
Speaker 1: of nineteen accounting, and uh, he just seemed to be
Speaker 1: a kind of like a celebrity spokesperson might not be
Speaker 1: the right way, but but like a represented like he
Speaker 1: mainstreamed stuff that was not that it wasn't like not
Speaker 1: that there wasn't a significant amount of it going around
Speaker 1: in the country. Like I grew up in it was
Speaker 1: it was real conservative Catholic, not not quiverful necessarily, but
Speaker 1: kind of towards that lines. And then like terms of
Speaker 1: politics and stuff, um, so I kind of knew we
Speaker 1: had a thing with that. And for me, part of
Speaker 1: kind of growing up and and paying more attention to
Speaker 1: things and looking back on stuff what got me interested
Speaker 1: in him was because this is this is something that
Speaker 1: is what he represents. I think is kind of not
Speaker 1: always mainstream talked about as as a danger. A lot
Speaker 1: of like they cause some sometimes they're ex evangelicals or
Speaker 1: they'll call themselves ex evangelicals, Like I know people that
Speaker 1: have struggled with like coming out of that and trying
Speaker 1: and so there's a lot of talk in those communities
Speaker 1: about it. Um. But I think maybe the best way
Speaker 1: to think about it for people who aren't familiar with
Speaker 1: it is you kind of you know, you have your
Speaker 1: kind of maybe like your sovereign citizen type libertarians where
Speaker 1: it's like the government should just have defense and have this,
Speaker 1: So the kind of people he represents, I would say,
Speaker 1: the best way to put it is they say that
Speaker 1: and and the follow up to the government should just
Speaker 1: do like defense and like a couple of civil things
Speaker 1: is and the rest belongs to Jesus. And so when
Speaker 1: you talk about separate, it's it's one of those vocabulary
Speaker 1: things that's also purposely deceptive. I think, where like when
Speaker 1: you talk about separation of church and state, they can
Speaker 1: say yes because they're defining the state in a completely
Speaker 1: different way. And I think that really kind of can
Speaker 1: hook people into it or have people not realize what
Speaker 1: it is. And I think there's from a little bit
Speaker 1: of of dabbling in some of the history of like
Speaker 1: um apocalyptic groups are knowing people that got out of
Speaker 1: like doom colts Um. They're the vein of kind of
Speaker 1: fundamental fundamentalism that he's in is one of those that's like, oh,
Speaker 1: Israel becoming a state is the sign of the end time.
Speaker 1: I'm not exactly sure if he personally is is within that. Oh,
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, I'm pretty sure we're gonna go into
Speaker 1: detail about the exact chunk of evangelical Christians. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: can't really, you can't really explain the Duggers unless you
Speaker 1: explain the quiver full movement. Um. And so we have
Speaker 1: we have a bunch of that talk and we're not
Speaker 1: going to go We'll go deeper into the quiver Fule
Speaker 1: movement in another episode. I have a friend who grew
Speaker 1: up in that particular cult and I R l uh No,
Speaker 1: he has a friend of mine though, um as I said, yeah,
Speaker 1: I went to a traditional conservative Catholic college with Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I remember. I was like Eve, I Eve has been
Speaker 1: a friend of mine for years and years and years.
Speaker 1: Who's how I met R. L. Stoler. Yeah? Okay, so
Speaker 1: we actually know some of the same people who grew
Speaker 1: up in this cult. Well, some of this is going
Speaker 1: to be old news to you, but it'll be new
Speaker 1: to a lot of people listening, and it's important. So
Speaker 1: I'm gonna I'm gonna get into it. From nine to
Speaker 1: two thousand to Jim Bob Dugger was a state legislator
Speaker 1: in the Arkansas House of Representatives. He made a couple
Speaker 1: of failed bids at seeking national election, and during one
Speaker 1: of these campaigns, he took his wife and his family,
Speaker 1: which at that point numbered fourteen kids, out to support
Speaker 1: him on election day, he and his wife voted and
Speaker 1: then marched off with their sizeable brood, and ap photographer
Speaker 1: spotted them and took a picture. The picture was purchased
Speaker 1: by the New York Times, and it went the early
Speaker 1: odds version of viral. Now. At the time, it was
Speaker 1: obvious that Jim Bob was a conservative Christian, but the
Speaker 1: enormous size of his family was seen as more of
Speaker 1: like a quirky personal choice than anything. That's how it
Speaker 1: really got portrayed a lot in the media. In the
Speaker 1: mainstream media, parenting magazines reached out to Michelle Dugger, his wife,
Speaker 1: and asked her to write an article about child rearing.
Speaker 1: Somewhere along the line, a savvy producer at Discovery Health
Speaker 1: decided the Duggers would make fascinating reality TV fodder. They
Speaker 1: put out several hour long specials featuring the family, whose
Speaker 1: fame rose consistently until in two thousand eight they got
Speaker 1: their own TV show, Seventeen Kids in Counting Yeah, I
Speaker 1: would like to interject real quick, something that uh uh
Speaker 1: an analogy or not analogy, but a comparison that came
Speaker 1: up is because I grew up with that was one
Speaker 1: of six kids. So and there's always like the oh,
Speaker 1: it's such a big family, like it's kind of a
Speaker 1: there's kind of that like remember from I remember from
Speaker 1: the Rush Limbaugh Show, you Rush Limbaugh episodes, you talked
Speaker 1: about how he was fitted by the media. It's one
Speaker 1: of those things like, oh, this is interesting, this is fun.
Speaker 1: They don't dig and so then it gets spotlighted. We're
Speaker 1: gonna we're gonna cover We're actually going to go deep
Speaker 1: into one of the earliest article I've been able to
Speaker 1: find on the family. Um so for about seven years
Speaker 1: after two thousand eight, which is you know, kind of
Speaker 1: when they really hit the mainstream. The Dugger family grows
Speaker 1: steadily in fame. They become millionaires. UM. I don't know exactly.
Speaker 1: It's it's hard to tell, right because those what are
Speaker 1: your net worth or what is his person's networth is
Speaker 1: always kind of shitty. But it seems like what I've
Speaker 1: heard is like three and a half million for Jim Bob,
Speaker 1: which doesn't seem impossible. Like he's been on TV a while,
Speaker 1: it's been a successful show. Um And as a result
Speaker 1: of their growing fame, they became increasingly plugged into Republican
Speaker 1: Party politics. Jim Bob and his oldest son Josh, did
Speaker 1: photo ops with Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, who we now
Speaker 1: know is connected to Stevenology just one degree of separation,
Speaker 1: and Florida Senator Marco Ruby, oh, I guess is connected
Speaker 1: to Stevens well, probably actually has direct connections to both,
Speaker 1: probably one step away. Um. Now, it was hardly a
Speaker 1: secret that the Duggers were right wing, but most casual observers,
Speaker 1: including most people who watched their shows, were unaware of
Speaker 1: the sinister reality behind why the Dugger family had so
Speaker 1: very many children. On July eleven, one, the Washington Post
Speaker 1: published an article titled an American Kingdom. The logline was
Speaker 1: this and this this showed up all over my Twitter
Speaker 1: because of the fiction book that I just read about
Speaker 1: this sort of thing. The logline was a new and
Speaker 1: rapidly growing Christian movement is openly political, once a nation
Speaker 1: under God's authority, and is central to Donald Trump's GOP. Now,
Speaker 1: the article is this is what you were talking about?
Speaker 1: Is broadly accurate in a way that it sketches out
Speaker 1: the dimensions of the dominionist movement, which quote holds that
Speaker 1: God commands Christians to assert authority over the seven mountains
Speaker 1: of life, family, religion, education, economy, arts, media, and government,
Speaker 1: and which after which time Jesus Christ will return and
Speaker 1: reign for eternity. Now where that article gets things wrong
Speaker 1: is it classifies this movement as new. It's not. Now.
Speaker 1: You could argue that it's new that because these are
Speaker 1: you know, there's two broad in kind of this chunk
Speaker 1: of evangelical culture. There's pre millennial and post millennia old
Speaker 1: dispensationalist right, and Premillennials were the guys who were like, um,
Speaker 1: it's going to like the the God is going to
Speaker 1: like come soon and we're gonna have us a rapture
Speaker 1: and ship. And the post millennials are like, we'll talk
Speaker 1: about this more a little bit later, like, well, no,
Speaker 1: we have two ready the world for God to come back, right,
Speaker 1: and one of those was dominant, like the left behind
Speaker 1: books are kind of the old the older way, and
Speaker 1: that's less dominant now because it didn't. I don't know
Speaker 1: if you're aware of this, but the the Changing of
Speaker 1: the Millennium didn't really do much. And there was a
Speaker 1: movie with Nick Cage. He kind of was a movie
Speaker 1: with Nick At that point, God, I want to know
Speaker 1: more about how they managed to make that because remember
Speaker 1: he uh, he was so deep in text for what
Speaker 1: he had to sell his dinosaur bones and take any
Speaker 1: movie too many dinosaurs and he had to be in
Speaker 1: a weird Christian propaganda movie. Nicolas Cage is about the
Speaker 1: only actor I could never be angry at for doing that,
Speaker 1: because it's like, well, yeah, you gotta you gotta keep
Speaker 1: your dinosaur bone addiction going. Man, I don't blame you
Speaker 1: for that. Any movie Nicolas Cage is in, just keep
Speaker 1: the bones flowing. That that should have been the tagline
Speaker 1: Nicolas Cage has to bone left behind. So yeah, um yeah.
Speaker 1: So again, not a super new movement, although it is
Speaker 1: kind of new and being as dominant with an it
Speaker 1: like that that has changed over time. The election of
Speaker 1: Donald Trump was which was you know, partly fueled by
Speaker 1: evangelical support. Um, and so sorry I framed that badly. Again,
Speaker 1: this is not a new movement, and it's tied into
Speaker 1: everything that's been happening over the last five six years
Speaker 1: that have really freaked out a lot of kind of
Speaker 1: liberals who maybe weren't paying as much attention or who
Speaker 1: wrote off the Christian Right as kind of just like
Speaker 1: they're just they're just nuts, right, like they all together.
Speaker 1: It's the same thing. It's the same. It was easy
Speaker 1: during the Obama era. It seemed like you you could
Speaker 1: make fun of these people in the silly things they'd
Speaker 1: say online and like movies like Jesus Camp and stuff,
Speaker 1: and it didn't seem like as much of a it
Speaker 1: didn't seem like they were gaining as much power as
Speaker 1: they were. And every we're seeing today both the rise
Speaker 1: of Donald Trump, the current assault on trans rights, and
Speaker 1: states like Tennessee and Arkansas, the present groundswell of right
Speaker 1: wing Christian support for crackdowns on voting rights. All of
Speaker 1: these things have their origins in the same, very specific
Speaker 1: Christian subculture, and for more than half a decade, the
Speaker 1: Dugger family was the trojan horse for bringing that subculture
Speaker 1: into the American mainstream. To understand the Duggers, we have
Speaker 1: to talk about the Quiverful movement. The name comes from
Speaker 1: Psalm one seven, like arrows in the hands of a warrior,
Speaker 1: Our sons born in one's youth, blessed as the man
Speaker 1: whose quiver is full of them, They will not be
Speaker 1: put to shame when they contend with their enemies at
Speaker 1: the gate and the gist of this idea is that
Speaker 1: American society has become hopelessly godless and sinful, and if
Speaker 1: you're going to bring the nation back to God, you
Speaker 1: need a new generation of holy warriors to fight for Christianity.
Speaker 1: So it's your responsibility as a true Christian to pop
Speaker 1: out several basketball teams worth of babies in order to
Speaker 1: fight it build the army of God. Right, that's the Again,
Speaker 1: we both have friends who were who were raised to
Speaker 1: be soldiers in God's army. Um. Now, the quiver full
Speaker 1: movement evolved rather naturally out of several different strains of
Speaker 1: right wing Christian culture. One of these was the homeschooling community. Obviously,
Speaker 1: parents can choose to home school kids for a lot
Speaker 1: of perfectly sane reasons. Uh. And in fact, one of
Speaker 1: my old co workers, Christie Harrison at Cracked, who is
Speaker 1: not at all a quiver full type you know, Christian,
Speaker 1: home schools her family um and is a perfectly reasonable
Speaker 1: person not shipping on the concept of home school. I
Speaker 1: was homeschooled from first grade too through high school. Graduation
Speaker 1: was yours, but yours was pretty reliou. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: efet not to be so here's so here's the weird thing.
Speaker 1: So the background on that is it was more there's
Speaker 1: there's family dynamics, which I won't go into for the
Speaker 1: sake of but basically it was kind of a more
Speaker 1: of a it's a thing we should do, so it's
Speaker 1: kind of weird, Like we did a lot of the
Speaker 1: performative stuff without getting super into the CULTI stuff. It
Speaker 1: was more of like viewed as an obligation to life
Speaker 1: for the community or like grandparents or whatever. Um So
Speaker 1: it worked for me. So I'm like on the low
Speaker 1: end of the spectrum, and I can see like school
Speaker 1: or what what used to be or maybe still is
Speaker 1: called Asperger's um so, but uh, I can see going
Speaker 1: to school given that, given how aware of my given
Speaker 1: everything at home and family dynamics and issues and mental
Speaker 1: health and all that stuff, I can see that being
Speaker 1: a real bad time for me. So it's like it's
Speaker 1: not a great time for most It's so I mean,
Speaker 1: and my my dad had a restaurant, so I worked
Speaker 1: at that, so I kind of had like one foot
Speaker 1: in the secular, one ft in the like insular kind
Speaker 1: of sheltered. Yeah, that seems like a pretty lucky and
Speaker 1: it might very yeah, one of the things. But if
Speaker 1: you're even if you're coming at it from a more
Speaker 1: reasonable perspective, if you're in home schooling, you're gonna encounter
Speaker 1: a lot of weird Christian propaganda because it's so dominant
Speaker 1: in schooling, right, even if you're trying to be secular
Speaker 1: with it, it's just everywhere in that community. Um, and yeah,
Speaker 1: the practice. This leads to what I'm saying. The practice
Speaker 1: of homeschooling has been heavily dominated by the evangelical Christian
Speaker 1: community for decades. The U s Department of Education currently
Speaker 1: estimates that more than one million school age kids are
Speaker 1: homeschooled in the United States, and the real number could
Speaker 1: be double or triple that because a lot of those
Speaker 1: families do not participate in the census or get birth
Speaker 1: certificates for their children. That is very common in the
Speaker 1: Quiverful movement, if you like, especially in the fringes, not
Speaker 1: even the fringes of it. A lot of people in
Speaker 1: it like like maybe you get birth to maybe you
Speaker 1: get a birth certificate for your sons, you don't get
Speaker 1: them for your daughters because birth certificate she could leave
Speaker 1: at some point a social Security number with a birth certificates,
Speaker 1: security passport, do you leave, get get away from your
Speaker 1: weird family, cut it off through So we really don't
Speaker 1: know how many kids there are like this um and
Speaker 1: that's I mean, there's a lot of other different subcultures.
Speaker 1: Sovereign citizens get looped into some aspects of this, but
Speaker 1: not all. Like once you're the once you're home setting
Speaker 1: in the middle of nowhere and not getting birth certificates
Speaker 1: for your children, you become you're getting the co into
Speaker 1: contact with a lot of subcultures. It's it's like the
Speaker 1: white version of avoiding immigration to by not doing the census. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: which you you do not have. Well, I don't know,
Speaker 1: I'm not I can't say that you shouldn't worry about
Speaker 1: the census if you're an undocumented immigrant because some sketchy
Speaker 1: ship was tried to be done by the Trump administration.
Speaker 1: I don't know. It's a bummer the census should it shouldn't. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a whole other rand. So over the course of
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventies and eighties, a backlash against feminism and
Speaker 1: the civil rights movement helped lead to the birth of
Speaker 1: the moral Majority. The first organized up swell of what
Speaker 1: we now called the religious right. We did a two
Speaker 1: parter on this. Jerry Folwell was the biggest man in
Speaker 1: that movement, but there were a lot of of I
Speaker 1: mean it's it was a huge movement, right, A lot
Speaker 1: of people were involved. Another prominent member of the early
Speaker 1: religious right in the Moral Majority was Howard Phillips, a
Speaker 1: Russian Jewish Man who converted to evangelical Christianity. He broke
Speaker 1: off from the Republican Party in nineteen seventy four and
Speaker 1: founded the far right Constitution Party. Now. Howard and his
Speaker 1: son Doug were two of the of the first prominent
Speaker 1: advocates of a very specific way of looking at the
Speaker 1: Culture War in the United States. Like many in the
Speaker 1: religious right, they argued that the struggle between humanism and
Speaker 1: Christianity was a war. They went on to argue that
Speaker 1: this war could only be won by Christian women, and
Speaker 1: the only way for Christian women to fight was for
Speaker 1: them to die to themselves. This is the term they use,
Speaker 1: I give up their personal ambitions and completely submit to
Speaker 1: their husbands. The basic idea, as the Phillipses and others
Speaker 1: preached it was that Jesus was the general of a
Speaker 1: great heavenly Army. Soldiers in a real army are expected
Speaker 1: to follow orders whether or not they agree with or
Speaker 1: understand them, unless you're in the German Army. Now, ye,
Speaker 1: women needed to submit totally to their husbands because that's
Speaker 1: what Jesus asked. So if they accept to the utter
Speaker 1: authority of men over their lives, they would actually be
Speaker 1: taking agency and striking a powerful blow against the deevil.
Speaker 1: But giving up your life, that's that's you exercising agency. Then,
Speaker 1: to put it in context again for the more secular people, uh,
Speaker 1: you think about war, you know, like war crimes that
Speaker 1: the United States gets away with. If you're in a
Speaker 1: heavenly army, what are war crimes? You know, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's the same where it's like, yeah, you know what's
Speaker 1: gonna happen, and it's gonna get covered up and it's
Speaker 1: okay as long as you achieve the objective. It's that yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of crimes that are fine with us.
Speaker 1: But you know who doesn't do crimes unless they're rad
Speaker 1: I was gonna say people who aren't elon Musk, but
Speaker 1: then you said crimes. Yeah, I'd say crimes, not crimes
Speaker 1: the products and services that support this podcast. Sean, have
Speaker 1: never committed any crimes in the United States that have
Speaker 1: been documented by journalists who have not been carboned. I
Speaker 1: was gonna say, they have to be arrested for it
Speaker 1: to be a crime. Have to be arrested for it
Speaker 1: to be a crime. That's how I live my life,
Speaker 1: and that's how our sponsors do too. Here's some AT's. Ah,
Speaker 1: we're back, Sean. We're talking about Howard Phillips. Uh, and
Speaker 1: we're talking about the birth of of the religious right.
Speaker 1: So in speeches that Doug Phillips gives to packed his son,
Speaker 1: Doug gives to packed audiences, he reads versus from the
Speaker 1: Bible like Ephesians five one, Uh, wives submit to your
Speaker 1: husband's as to the Lord. For the husband is the
Speaker 1: head of the wife, as Christ as the head of
Speaker 1: the church, his body of which he is the Savior.
Speaker 1: Now is the church submits to Christ. So also wife
Speaker 1: should submit to their husbands and everything. Now. Doug calls
Speaker 1: this the quote best kept secret of modern Christian marriages.
Speaker 1: And then he says stuff like this, you are a
Speaker 1: help meet. The Bible says that man is not made
Speaker 1: for women, but women is made for but the woman
Speaker 1: is made for the man. If you have a problem
Speaker 1: with that, take it up with the creator, not Phillips.
Speaker 1: I'm just quoting. Until we get comfortable playing those roles
Speaker 1: will never be at peace. But if we accept those roles,
Speaker 1: who half the battle is diminished already just by the
Speaker 1: fact that we accept God's creation order. This philosophy has
Speaker 1: come to be known as complimentarianism, i e. Women were
Speaker 1: created not as individual beings of their own with independent
Speaker 1: desires and talents, but as a compliment to men. Right.
Speaker 1: It's the little known fact that was actually the original
Speaker 1: tagline for a g I. Joe. Submitting to your husband's
Speaker 1: is half the battle. Now. Feminism in this cosmology moral
Speaker 1: cosmology is evil because it encourage encourages women to seek
Speaker 1: their own lives independent of men, which Rob's men, who
Speaker 1: are again the only real people of the wifely support
Speaker 1: God intended for them to have. In his speeches, Phillips
Speaker 1: loves to quote Isaiah three twelve, which cites God's curse
Speaker 1: upon us inful nation, children are your oppressors and women
Speaker 1: rule over you. This is a God saying like this
Speaker 1: is how I'm gonna curse you. If you if you
Speaker 1: don't follow my claws, I'll make your children oppress you
Speaker 1: and your the women will be in charge. Um. So
Speaker 1: he's saying that like if if that's what God is, like,
Speaker 1: feminism is a curse from God if we if we
Speaker 1: don't obey his call, will curse us with feminism. Well,
Speaker 1: going back even further again from my upgrading, upbringing and
Speaker 1: a lot of some people in my upbringing, and then
Speaker 1: just kind of a general Christian thing, it's the whole
Speaker 1: Well Eve gave him the apple. So women has always
Speaker 1: been men's downfall, and it's their place to be underfoot
Speaker 1: because that's because that's you know, that's that was just
Speaker 1: how it worked, because that's how the story started, how
Speaker 1: the story started. Now, the nightmare for these people is
Speaker 1: a world in which Christian men do not have total
Speaker 1: control over their families. While mainstream culture filled with movies
Speaker 1: featuring strong female protagonists in the eighties and nineties, rock
Speaker 1: stars like Madonna, political figures like Hillary Clinton and Margaret Thatcher,
Speaker 1: Phillips and his ilk preached that women's liberation would lead
Speaker 1: to the collapse of civilization. He called the young Christians
Speaker 1: he preached to in the nineteen nineties and early adds
Speaker 1: the Rick reclamation generation, because their duty was to retake
Speaker 1: society from liberal feminists. Um. One of the through lines
Speaker 1: in this strain of the evangelical culture is they have
Speaker 1: way more faith in the power of feminism than most feminists,
Speaker 1: and I know they are really bullish on its ability
Speaker 1: to to change society. Now, homeschooling was considered one of
Speaker 1: the necessary tools of reclamation. By having enormous families and
Speaker 1: teaching their children themselves outside of the sinful state education system,
Speaker 1: Christian families could keep their children free from the sinful
Speaker 1: secular world. One of the things I find most interesting
Speaker 1: about these people is the sheer amount of weight they
Speaker 1: give to feminism, and again they have a lot of
Speaker 1: of They really think that it has a lot more
Speaker 1: influence and government than I think it does. Here's Mary Pride,
Speaker 1: editor of Practical Homeschooling magazine and one of the most
Speaker 1: influential figures in the homeschooling movement. Quote. Christians have accepted
Speaker 1: feminists moderate demands for family planning and careers while rejecting
Speaker 1: the radical side of feminism, meaning lesbianism and abortion. What
Speaker 1: most do not see is that one demand leads to
Speaker 1: the other. Feminism is a totally self consistent system aimed
Speaker 1: at rejecting God's role for women. Those who adopt any
Speaker 1: part of its lifestyle can't help picking up its philosophy,
Speaker 1: and those who pick up its philosophy are buying themselves
Speaker 1: a one way ticket to social anarchy. Feminism is self consistent.
Speaker 1: The Christianity of the fifties wasn't. Feminists had a plan
Speaker 1: for women. Christians didn't. And this is our explanation for
Speaker 1: why feminism was was winning and they were, you know,
Speaker 1: Christianity is under siege and one. Not to be fair,
Speaker 1: there's there's probably ah. I mean, obviously a lot of
Speaker 1: people are like, no feminism, but there's probably a good
Speaker 1: chunk that are that No. They have to pump it
Speaker 1: up to get people to keep And what I say,
Speaker 1: by the way, when I'm saying stuff like that, I
Speaker 1: think these people have an outside idea of the impact
Speaker 1: feminism has had. It's not an anti feminist thing. It's
Speaker 1: just like there's still a lot of bias against women
Speaker 1: in our culture. I think they're overestimate, um the power
Speaker 1: that feminism has culturally. Um Now Pride's major contribution to
Speaker 1: the evolution of what became the Quiverfule movement was to
Speaker 1: provide a plan for women. She helped and again that's
Speaker 1: her ideas, like Christianity hasn't had a plan for women.
Speaker 1: Feminist did and that's why we're losing. They had a
Speaker 1: vision for the future and we didn't. Um She helped
Speaker 1: to create the whole integrated lifestyle of Biblical womanhood from
Speaker 1: the book Quiverful by Katherine Joyce, which is a great
Speaker 1: way to get up to speed on all this if
Speaker 1: you're interested, very good book. The Biblical womanhood encompassing homework, motherhood,
Speaker 1: and wifehood as they were lived not in the nineteen fifties,
Speaker 1: but in a notion of pre industrial, pre household appliance
Speaker 1: times is what Pride calls a total lifestyle as comprehensive
Speaker 1: as the pervasive influence of feminism, which has reached every
Speaker 1: part of women's work, lives, biology, and thinking. And this
Speaker 1: time around, the anti feminists intend to be fiercely diligent,
Speaker 1: rooting out the worldly feministic ideas and influences in their churches,
Speaker 1: entertainment and owned thinking and making sure it doesn't come act. Now,
Speaker 1: I'm leaving out a lot and again, Katherine Joyce, as
Speaker 1: quiver Full is a great book from more complete understanding
Speaker 1: of all this to other important contributors to this this
Speaker 1: what becomes the ideologies of the Duggers. Follow are John
Speaker 1: Piper and Wayne Grudom. These are both Reformed Baptist preachers
Speaker 1: who headed up the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood
Speaker 1: or c BMW. In nineteen seven, the year of its founding,
Speaker 1: the c BMW released something called the Danverse Statement, which
Speaker 1: was both a mission statement for the Council and a
Speaker 1: rallying cry to conservative Christian forces. The statement urged Christians
Speaker 1: to fight egalitarian influences in the evangelical church, particularly the
Speaker 1: scourge of Christian feminism. It argued that women should be
Speaker 1: barred from positions of authority and churches. Now, the Danvers
Speaker 1: Statement was signed by some people you might know. Beverly
Speaker 1: La Hay, wife of the author of Left Behind, Tim Lay,
Speaker 1: signed it. Pat Robertson also signed it. Dorothy Patterson and
Speaker 1: Paige Patterson signed it. You probably don't know those last
Speaker 1: two names, but Paige orchestrated the right wing takeover of
Speaker 1: the Southern Baptist Convention, the organization behind the second largest
Speaker 1: Christian denomination in the United States. We talked about this
Speaker 1: in the Moral Majority episode. But a lot of Baptists
Speaker 1: used to be completely fine with abortion up until like
Speaker 1: the seventies. It was not a super controversion of the
Speaker 1: Catholics have always had their going on about it. But
Speaker 1: I got in trouble when I was in second grade
Speaker 1: for leading a group of kids around to sing that
Speaker 1: song on the playground because I just I couldn't watch
Speaker 1: like Beats and butt Head or the Simpsons. But for
Speaker 1: whatever reason, my family was like, well, Monty Python smart,
Speaker 1: so whatever, you can watch as much of that as
Speaker 1: you want. And I watched Meaning of Life in that
Speaker 1: song and idn't really understand it, but I let them
Speaker 1: march around the playground singing it. And it didn't go
Speaker 1: over well in suburban Texas. Now was it because you
Speaker 1: sang it or because you're sang it at the end
Speaker 1: you went just hands? It didn't do that. But I
Speaker 1: didn't get what just hands was. Must been third or
Speaker 1: fourth grade, but so yeah, um so. In nineteen eleven,
Speaker 1: years after the Danver statement, the SPC, the Southern Baptist
Speaker 1: Convention released a statement of their own in which they
Speaker 1: urged wives to graciously submit to their husband's Mike Huckabee
Speaker 1: was one signatory to the statement. The SPC, by the way,
Speaker 1: speaks for about sixteen million Americans. So by the end
Speaker 1: of the twentieth century, many of the ideas that are
Speaker 1: central to the quiver Full movement had started to become
Speaker 1: mainstream on the right wing. You're not talking about a
Speaker 1: fringe ideology when the SPC is endorsing some of this stuff, right,
Speaker 1: that's um, well, this is was it there either the
Speaker 1: Fallwell or the Reagan episode. I think I think it
Speaker 1: was you that talked about it where it was like
Speaker 1: the evangelical saw Reagan as an inn and then Reagan
Speaker 1: used them and then didn't give them what they wanted.
Speaker 1: So then they started going, oh, we need to start
Speaker 1: taking over and making our stuff me. We need to
Speaker 1: instead of just giving them our vote and expecting stuff
Speaker 1: in return, we need to infiltrate and what our people
Speaker 1: into is the stuff you're seeing Q and on guys
Speaker 1: try to do right now. And Christians continue to extremist
Speaker 1: Christians continuity where it's like, well, we got to get
Speaker 1: people on the school boards, We've got to get people
Speaker 1: in local elected positions. They've been doing this for a
Speaker 1: while and it works, which is every time I see
Speaker 1: people are left to be like no, the thing to
Speaker 1: do is throw up a poster on Twitter and have
Speaker 1: a march. It's like, well, that's good too. And I
Speaker 1: get the frustration with electoralism, but they've gotten a lot
Speaker 1: of crazy shit done because they've been voting for decades.
Speaker 1: I don't know. We don't have the time anymore to
Speaker 1: that's a longer. You can make radical changes democratically in
Speaker 1: this society. Um. It just takes decades of generations of
Speaker 1: people giving up their entire lives to the cause. Um.
Speaker 1: But it worked for them now. Obviously, most Southern Baptists
Speaker 1: are not out there having a dozen kids is shoeing alcohol,
Speaker 1: forcing their daughters to wear sackcloth dresses, and refusing to
Speaker 1: get birth certificates for their children. If you want to
Speaker 1: view the struggle for Christian domination of the US as
Speaker 1: a war, and these people do. The quiver full families
Speaker 1: are like special forces. Their sons like Josh Dugger, are
Speaker 1: supposed to be trained from childhood to seek positions of
Speaker 1: influence in the government and culture. But I'm getting ahead
Speaker 1: of myself here. We've covered most of the ideological underpinnings
Speaker 1: of the quiver Fule movement. But the Dugger family are
Speaker 1: also members of a very specific cult within this chunk
Speaker 1: of the Christian right. They are followers of a guy
Speaker 1: named Bill Gothard. It's spelled got Hard And that'll be
Speaker 1: relevant and an unfortunate way later. Yeah, you know Bill,
Speaker 1: you've familiar with Bill Gothard. I see how you erected
Speaker 1: that joke. Um. Gothard founded the Institute in Basic Life
Speaker 1: Principles in nineteen sixty one. So this is the religious
Speaker 1: rights not a thing when he starts this right, not
Speaker 1: in a political way, right. Um, So he's really on
Speaker 1: the bleeding edge of all this. And it was originally
Speaker 1: called Campus Teams, and its purpose was to recruit young
Speaker 1: people obviously in campuses for christ. The ibl P was
Speaker 1: fundamentalist from the get go, and it was also male supremacist.
Speaker 1: Women were supposed to marry men chosen by their fathers
Speaker 1: and submit entirely to first their father and then their husband.
Speaker 1: Dating and flirting were forbidden, so much as winking at
Speaker 1: a man as seen as lustful and morally equivalent to prostitution.
Speaker 1: In the early nineteen eighties, the ib LP was racked
Speaker 1: by a sex scandal when it was found that Bill
Speaker 1: and his brother Steve were both having affairs with secretaries
Speaker 1: at the institute. Yeah, um, weird how that keeps happening. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're now none of these guys practice although actually you
Speaker 1: can say they are practicing what they preach, because, as
Speaker 1: will continue to talk about, the fault in this case
Speaker 1: was the women because they were being temptresses. Well you know,
Speaker 1: and if they had gotten them pregnant, I mean, bonus,
Speaker 1: he got an Next there's the extra soldiers. So Bill
Speaker 1: never married or had kids. Again interesting, but his ib
Speaker 1: LP became the center of education and philosophy for the
Speaker 1: quiver Full movement. The ib LP, starting in the late
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties, ran what was effective and when. So his
Speaker 1: brother has to leave the organization and Bill steps down,
Speaker 1: but for like two weeks. And if you want a
Speaker 1: much more detailed UM podcast series on Bill Gothard, the
Speaker 1: podcast Someplace Underneath UM, which is part of the last
Speaker 1: podcast on the Left Left Network did like a four
Speaker 1: or five partner on this. That's very very good. I
Speaker 1: was gonna say too, there's one called Christian Right Cast,
Speaker 1: so I haven't heard that, So that that's one UM
Speaker 1: it's a couple ex evangelicals or I forge if that's
Speaker 1: how they're for themselves. But it's it's on Apple. I
Speaker 1: think it may have moved to flex or something like that,
Speaker 1: but there it goes like it goes into guys and
Speaker 1: like there's there's a thing on Bill Gotthard and thing
Speaker 1: I don't know if you have it in there, but
Speaker 1: like his his rules for how women should dress. Talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about yeah, um yeah, check out both
Speaker 1: of those if you want more. This is really important stuff.
Speaker 1: In someplace underneath they go into less detail about the
Speaker 1: stuff that I just covered, but they're going to a
Speaker 1: lot more detail about Bill um so um. The ib
Speaker 1: LP ran what was effectively a troubled teen facility that
Speaker 1: started up in the late nineteen eighties, which is basically
Speaker 1: a forced labor camp for kids, and they also operated
Speaker 1: the Advanced Training Institute or a t I, which created
Speaker 1: curriculum for homeschooled families. The Duggers were absolutely slavish devotees
Speaker 1: of Gothardism, and all of their children were raised on
Speaker 1: a TI curriculum. From a write up by former cult
Speaker 1: member Delanere Bartlett, who grew up in the same community,
Speaker 1: The a TI curriculum teaches that the Bible, as the literal,
Speaker 1: infallible word of God, must be the center of every lesson,
Speaker 1: leading to some shockingly inaccurate lessons, particularly in science and history.
Speaker 1: The A TI curriculum also has a big focus on
Speaker 1: teaching students how they should behave immediate, unquestioning obedience to
Speaker 1: authorities is foremost, and a TI prescribes beatings to discipline
Speaker 1: children for even the most trivial of infractions, like failing
Speaker 1: to complete a chore on time or arguing with a sibling.
Speaker 1: Even more disturbing, the uggers participate in blanket training, where
Speaker 1: toddlers and small children are placed on a blanket and
Speaker 1: a toy is placed judge just out of reach. When
Speaker 1: the child reaches for the toy or moves off the blanket,
Speaker 1: the parents will slap or hit them in order to
Speaker 1: instill fear and obedience. And we're not going to talk
Speaker 1: about to train up a child, but that's very big
Speaker 1: in these cultures. Child abuses like massive in this community. Yeah, um, yeah,
Speaker 1: I was gonna say that that sounds uh almost sounds
Speaker 1: more like something you'd see on a Japanese game show.
Speaker 1: Then yeah, it would be a fully grown man on
Speaker 1: a blanket. Let's still still. I would watch that show.
Speaker 1: They're adults. I don't like blanket training is fine. If
Speaker 1: that's like your canker, whatever, more power to you now.
Speaker 1: I found another interview with a survival of Gothard's cult
Speaker 1: on Salon. This person went into a great deal more
Speaker 1: to tail about what kids were taught about sex through
Speaker 1: this curriculum. Quote. The so called wisdom booklets that form
Speaker 1: the backbone of a t I children's educations contain more
Speaker 1: Bible verses than they do information. Particularly lacking in a
Speaker 1: religious sect so obsessed with reproduction is any kind of
Speaker 1: sex education. This is especially true for young women, who
Speaker 1: receive very little sex education because the church teaches us
Speaker 1: that women do not have sex drives. However, the opposite
Speaker 1: is believed of men. A TI teaches that men have
Speaker 1: nearly uncontrollable sex drives, ready to erupt at the mere
Speaker 1: sight of a pant leg or a perm. To illustrate
Speaker 1: this point, A t I families are encouraged to maintain
Speaker 1: a no computer rule for their sons, but not their daughters.
Speaker 1: Gothard also encouraged men to turn towards the wall when
Speaker 1: dining at restaurants so as to not be tempted by
Speaker 1: a waitress or a stray attractive woman. You know, those
Speaker 1: straight attractive women just kind of out there tempting you
Speaker 1: by existing just wandering, wandering the streets, just just constantly.
Speaker 1: I mean that is that is how they view with
Speaker 1: those that are called like that. That's an attack on you.
Speaker 1: With a woman's out there living her life, uh, and
Speaker 1: you find her attractive, that like an assault on you.
Speaker 1: Because if you're in an army, you're fighting another army,
Speaker 1: so that means it's it's and they're also a unified
Speaker 1: trained force of the devil, So they're the sexy taliban
Speaker 1: out there trying to steal your virtue. Yeah, it's like
Speaker 1: a Halloween costume, but as regular military gear. Now I'm
Speaker 1: going to continue that quote. Not that our supposed lack
Speaker 1: of a sex drive absolved as from sexual responsibility a
Speaker 1: t I taught us that it is our job to
Speaker 1: keep men's desires from erupting into lust or sexual activity.
Speaker 1: We were taught that it was our sin if we
Speaker 1: cause a man to lust. After us, I spent many
Speaker 1: nights as an early developed teenager crying and begging God
Speaker 1: to take away my large breasts because I noticed men's
Speaker 1: eyes had begun to linger on me during church. Modesty
Speaker 1: wasn't only about dress, It was also about behavior. Women
Speaker 1: were taught from a very young age that they are
Speaker 1: to be submissive in all things, allowing men to open
Speaker 1: doors for us, even to get out of a car,
Speaker 1: never initiating conversations with a man, and never correcting a
Speaker 1: man when he was wrong. Essentially, a good a t
Speaker 1: I woman is sweet, silent, and obedient. This combination of
Speaker 1: zo uro sexual knowledge and deeply ingrained submissiveness left many
Speaker 1: young girls in our church especially vulnerable to sexual abuse.
Speaker 1: As a teenager, I became aware that several of my
Speaker 1: friends were being molested by their older brothers or fathers.
Speaker 1: They would start stilted conversations with me about it, but
Speaker 1: none of us actually understood the concept of sex or
Speaker 1: rape or molestation enough to actually discuss it, so would
Speaker 1: stayed on the level of furtively whispered hints. And this
Speaker 1: is I mean you can draw a line here between.
Speaker 1: Like nineteen eighty four, The idea behind New Speaker is
Speaker 1: that if you if you, if you limit the vocabulary
Speaker 1: of a community, you limit their ability to express certain
Speaker 1: things like that's what's going on here. If you limit
Speaker 1: the ability of kids to understand sexuality in this way,
Speaker 1: you limit their ability to know when they've been wrong. Well,
Speaker 1: you take away communication exactly and to kind of to
Speaker 1: draw to something recent more recent as well to kind
Speaker 1: of go on the other side in terms of how
Speaker 1: in terms of men blaming for women for stuff, there's
Speaker 1: the uh, obviously don't know it's for effect, but the
Speaker 1: um the Atlanta, the SPA shooter, who was they were
Speaker 1: like I would not be surprised if it was just
Speaker 1: like basically they were immodest and so that drove me
Speaker 1: and my uncontrollable hormones too. That's that shooting from what
Speaker 1: information we have so far, seems to be the logical
Speaker 1: extent of this. This kind of thinking is like they
Speaker 1: wouldn't stop tempting me, so yeah, I don't know, I mean,
Speaker 1: we don't know about just like it's to get to
Speaker 1: give people like this isn't to bring it a little
Speaker 1: in from the abstract is like, yeah, this is this
Speaker 1: is the recent stuff, and it can go a variety
Speaker 1: of different ways. Because people are different, they're going to
Speaker 1: react differally. Take it into some of those reactions are
Speaker 1: going to be scary as hell. Yeah, so, but you
Speaker 1: know what's not scary as hell? Uh, a bright summer day.
Speaker 1: I was gonna say capitalism, but uh, I guess both
Speaker 1: capitalism and a bright summer day can be scary because
Speaker 1: capital is um is a part of the engine of
Speaker 1: carbon release that is causing our summers to be hotter
Speaker 1: and dryer. So darker direction than I wanted to um,
Speaker 1: But a bright summer day. I mean, it won't pay
Speaker 1: you to to say that it's that's not a problem,
Speaker 1: So I mean catalism at least, you know, make a book.
Speaker 1: At least I'll make a buck by denying that there's
Speaker 1: any problem with it. Hey, here's okay, we're back. So
Speaker 1: the Duggers didn't bring Bill Gothard or a t I
Speaker 1: up often on the show in ways that would have
Speaker 1: been immediately obvious. You could see books in the show, right,
Speaker 1: There's always there's a lot of like it's visible if
Speaker 1: you know what to look for, but they're not out
Speaker 1: there like talking about how awesome Bill Gothard is. The
Speaker 1: signs were there if you knew where to look. At
Speaker 1: Dugger weddings, celebrants would dedicate an entire cake to Bill Gothard,
Speaker 1: which is again cult ship. All the Dugger women had
Speaker 1: distinctively permed hair because Bill believed that curly bangs brought
Speaker 1: out a woman's natural beauty. Uh. The antiquated dress codes
Speaker 1: that the Dugger family engaged in, particularly for women in
Speaker 1: the family, were also a major part of like a
Speaker 1: result of Bill Gothard's influence. Over the years they were
Speaker 1: on TV, the Dugger family, particularly Jim Bob, were extremely
Speaker 1: open about the fact that their show His Career, was
Speaker 1: a ministry. They saw it as a way to recruit.
Speaker 1: With the help of the Discovery camera crew, selective editing
Speaker 1: and scripting, they were able to portray what was really
Speaker 1: in reality and abusive cult as a quirky lifestyle choice,
Speaker 1: perhaps even one viewers would want to emulate. Jim Bob
Speaker 1: liked to say that they were just trying to convince
Speaker 1: people not to get abortions because by seeing that, like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: this family can handle fourteen fifteen sixteen kids, so obviously
Speaker 1: I should keep this one kid, right. Um. It was
Speaker 1: a big part of like why he said they were
Speaker 1: doing it. But of course, the real purpose behind all
Speaker 1: this was to build a larger cultural space for Gothardi
Speaker 1: is m the quiver Full movement, and male supremacist fundamentalist
Speaker 1: Christianity and American culture. This is also part of a
Speaker 1: broader fundamentalist strategy. It came about as part of a
Speaker 1: split between premillennial and post millennial dispensationalists. The former believed
Speaker 1: that the Rapture was coming in any day and soon
Speaker 1: the faith will be brought up to Heaven the world
Speaker 1: would end. The latter belief that God wouldn't let Christ
Speaker 1: return until they established a godly world. In order to
Speaker 1: do that, they had to recruit, and it wasn't enough
Speaker 1: to get people to accept Christ. They had to convince
Speaker 1: folks to follow the rules their rules, otherwise the world
Speaker 1: wouldn't be godly enough. Since those rules are very unpleasant
Speaker 1: and extreme. You have to lure people in gradually by
Speaker 1: reaching them with something less extreme and drawing them in
Speaker 1: like a fish on a lure from Quiverfull quote. Mark
Speaker 1: Driscoll's Mars Hill Church, rated the eighth most influential church
Speaker 1: in America, relies on the fixtures of emergent or seeker
Speaker 1: oriented ministries, such as countercultural groups like bikers or skaters.
Speaker 1: For Christ to attract to attract its young urban congregation,
Speaker 1: but churches like Mars Hill, which espouses a deeply conservative ideology,
Speaker 1: recognized that such outreach ministry are meant to be transitional,
Speaker 1: introducing a person to Christ where they are then easing
Speaker 1: them into more serious study and graduating them to a
Speaker 1: traditionalist doctrine and DRIs School's case, to a doctrine that
Speaker 1: places substantial weight on gender submission and a wife's role
Speaker 1: in marriage. So again, these are all this is just
Speaker 1: it's how colts work. It's out it's how cut non works.
Speaker 1: Do you can see it? And in the fact that
Speaker 1: like there's elements of Q that are about the JFK conspiracy,
Speaker 1: the elements of Q that are about like aliens and
Speaker 1: stuff that they're about vaccines, and it all leads back
Speaker 1: to this er conspiracy and that's how people get pulled in.
Speaker 1: And that's what makes it more. It's syncretism, you know,
Speaker 1: It's it's how it all work. Wasn't that the Bill Cooper? Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was the he was making a bread at that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Q and on Anonymous just did a episode on Bill Cooper.
Speaker 1: I do love Bill. He really did everything right. Um,
Speaker 1: one of these days one of these days. But oh yeah,
Speaker 1: I did a two part I remember listening to it,
Speaker 1: did a fever dream that like Bill, I hope to
Speaker 1: go out a mountaintop assault by law enforcement. Um while
Speaker 1: broadcasting nonsense on the radio. Um. Yeah. So the Duggers
Speaker 1: TV ministry worked the same way as like these kind
Speaker 1: of bikers and skaters for christ at the at the
Speaker 1: mars holtrage were it's it's all the same idea. To
Speaker 1: draw people in, you have to white wash a lot
Speaker 1: of realities about their lifestyle, make it look good, and
Speaker 1: once people start to get in, you can start laying
Speaker 1: on some of the more heavy stuff. Um, here's one
Speaker 1: issue with their lifestyle. He's one of the reasons why
Speaker 1: what they're actually doing is objectively bad. This is not
Speaker 1: just I'm not just saying it because I'm not religious.
Speaker 1: I'm saying this because it's abusive. And one of the
Speaker 1: reasons it's abusive is that nineteen kids is way the
Speaker 1: funk too many for two parents to adequately care for
Speaker 1: in most situations almost but I'm gonna say any situation.
Speaker 1: The Duggers explain how they do this as using the
Speaker 1: buddy system. Every kid has a buddy, an older sibling
Speaker 1: who is supposed to help raise and take care of them.
Speaker 1: Mom's buddy is the youngest baby, well she's nursing, but
Speaker 1: once that's done, she hands the baby off to the
Speaker 1: next youngest daughter in the cycle goes on. Most quiverful
Speaker 1: families work this way. I've heard from my friend even
Speaker 1: her family works that work this way. The daughters, as
Speaker 1: a general rule, are the ones doing most of the
Speaker 1: child rearing because there's too many kids for the parents
Speaker 1: to do it all. And that's not great. Obviously, siblings
Speaker 1: are supposed to your older siblings supposed to look at
Speaker 1: for younger siblings. You definitely learn things from your siblings.
Speaker 1: You're they're not supposed to be parents, that that robs
Speaker 1: them of the chance to be a chief. Well, well
Speaker 1: we'll wait a minute. Wait a minute, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: So let me get this straight. You're saying the large
Speaker 1: family basically does a capitalism on its straw and its instructure,
Speaker 1: where the CEO make middle management and the workers do
Speaker 1: all that. Wait, but you're saying that doesn't work. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean the people I know who grew up in
Speaker 1: it have complaints. I'm innocent for this. I don't know
Speaker 1: I don't think so. Most Cuivolental families work this way,
Speaker 1: and again it's usually the daughters who do most of
Speaker 1: the sun is supposed to do some of it, but
Speaker 1: it's generally the daughters who are handling an awful lot
Speaker 1: of the child ring and this is a huge burden
Speaker 1: on them. It stops them from having a childhood. It
Speaker 1: also means that older siblings are often the only ones
Speaker 1: watching out for their younger siblings. This becomes a problem
Speaker 1: when one of those older siblings is a sexual abuser,
Speaker 1: and that brings us to Josh Dugger. Joshua James Dugger
Speaker 1: was born on March third night. He was born in Tauntatown, Arkansas,
Speaker 1: to Jim Bob and Michelle Dugger. When Josh was a baby,
Speaker 1: the family was much less extreme in their beliefs than
Speaker 1: they would become. Michelle had taken birth control before getting pregnant,
Speaker 1: and she started taking it again after Josh was born.
Speaker 1: She suffered a miscarriage, though, which she and Jim Bob
Speaker 1: blamed on the birth control. We obviously have no idea
Speaker 1: what comes. Miscarriage has happened, you know, it's just a thing,
Speaker 1: been real quick. That's that's that's another thing. I think
Speaker 1: that can get people suck. Then, like my parents weren't
Speaker 1: very religious, they kind of wandered away. And then it's
Speaker 1: like you have a kid, and then all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: like everything Like it's something about having that makes you
Speaker 1: like kind of I don't know if it's just like
Speaker 1: that insecurity of like am I doing things right or
Speaker 1: what or not? But I think it makes you more
Speaker 1: a pliable to get sucked into something. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: that totally makes sense. Um. And it's it's all I
Speaker 1: think a lot of it is just like you have
Speaker 1: a kid. It's really scary because like there's no really
Speaker 1: there's no map for how to have a kid and
Speaker 1: raise it right. And like sometimes people do everything right
Speaker 1: and your kid, I don't know, murder somebody or something like.
Speaker 1: It's terrifying having a kid. Um. And I think a
Speaker 1: lot of people are like, well, this group says they
Speaker 1: have a perfect roadmap for everything. Even if I follow it,
Speaker 1: my kids will will turn out perfectly. Um, So I'll
Speaker 1: just do that because this is terrifying. Hi, I'm Dr
Speaker 1: Reverend Priest. I have an answer. Would you like to
Speaker 1: come worship with me? Yeah? All you have to do
Speaker 1: is put these weird dresses on your kids and have
Speaker 1: thirty of them, Um, and it'll be great. Here's a blanket,
Speaker 1: you'll know what to do. So yeah, they blame that there.
Speaker 1: Um they blame their miscarriage on on birth control, and
Speaker 1: like that's the what causes them to like get much
Speaker 1: more into the into the fundamentalist side of things. They
Speaker 1: decided to let God choose the size of their family,
Speaker 1: and this led them to have more than a dozen
Speaker 1: children in a very short span of time. Now, the
Speaker 1: Dugger family was not poor. Jim Bob Brandy used car lot,
Speaker 1: but prior to discovery coming into the picture, they were
Speaker 1: not wealthy, and by the early adds, the family of
Speaker 1: sixteen lived in a square foot rented home. Most large
Speaker 1: quiverful families live in fairly cramped environs. People who knew
Speaker 1: the Duggers before fame said their home was not a
Speaker 1: typical of the community. It was far too small. It
Speaker 1: often smelled gross because there's a lot of babies and
Speaker 1: a lot of diapers. It was dirty, filled with clutter
Speaker 1: and the kind of refuse that again, all those kids create. Now,
Speaker 1: during Jim Bob's brief time as an elected state representative,
Speaker 1: he would bring Joshua with him to the state capital.
Speaker 1: The goal was to groom josh for a political future,
Speaker 1: and people who knew the family in this time tend
Speaker 1: to think that many Gothard just saw him as the
Speaker 1: future of the movement. He was nicknamed Governor by Republicans
Speaker 1: who worked with his dad. The first major news coverage
Speaker 1: I found of the Dugger family was a Dallas Morning
Speaker 1: News article written in December two thousand five, two years
Speaker 1: after that New York Times photo brought Discovery into the picture,
Speaker 1: and the Duggers were the subject of their own TV specials.
Speaker 1: The article is a fascinating piece of what I call
Speaker 1: complicity journalism. Almost every detail of the quiver Full movement
Speaker 1: and Bill Gothard that was was easily available when this
Speaker 1: article was published. There was a lot of information that
Speaker 1: the Dallas Morning News could have accessed about what these
Speaker 1: people believed, but the author, Arnold Hamilton's, did zero work
Speaker 1: to lay out anything about what the Duggers were actually into.
Speaker 1: Here's a quote. As a couple, the Duggers approached to
Speaker 1: family planning as simple. They are born again Christians who
Speaker 1: view of the Bible as their life's manual, and the
Speaker 1: Bible describes children as a blessing from God. They will
Speaker 1: cheerfully accept as many blessings as God ordains. The reality,
Speaker 1: of course, is that they don't. The Bible is not
Speaker 1: their own manual. A t I. Bill Gothard is their manual,
Speaker 1: and that manual says that women are not full autonomous people,
Speaker 1: but merely an appendage to men and their rightful purposes
Speaker 1: to serve without question. But pointing that out would make
Speaker 1: this fun story about a big family sound more like
Speaker 1: a story of child abuse, so they don't talk about that.
Speaker 1: The author points out several times that the Duggers own
Speaker 1: their own business and home debt free. This is a
Speaker 1: big deal in that community. And there's a lot of
Speaker 1: kind of less extreme elements of this that are still
Speaker 1: wrapped up in this that what is that guy who
Speaker 1: does those debt free seminars that's like weird and dead. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the rich dead poor. I mean that's one of them.
Speaker 1: There's a couple. I mean it's um and Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: this whole idea that like you shouldn't have it's immoral
Speaker 1: kind of to have debt, and a lot of which
Speaker 1: I'm not in favor. I think it's like horribly fucked
Speaker 1: up the way the system of debt and the credit
Speaker 1: and stuff works in this country. I'm not You're not
Speaker 1: as wrong. Yeah, it's the system. It's not you. Yeah. Um.
Speaker 1: And if you're like it's kind of impossible in a
Speaker 1: lot of way is to take advantag like, your life
Speaker 1: will be a lot harder if, for example, you're never
Speaker 1: able to build up enough credit that you can like
Speaker 1: try to buy a home or something, because renting sucks,
Speaker 1: ass um. And there's there's a lot of things avenues
Speaker 1: that get closed off to you when you don't buy.
Speaker 1: And that's that's not great. I wish it didn't work
Speaker 1: that way. But this is a problem for a lot
Speaker 1: of people in the quiver full movement, um, because it
Speaker 1: leads to them not being able to access the kind
Speaker 1: of resources they need to properly care for families that
Speaker 1: are so large. Uh. Quote, the Duggers lived temporarily in
Speaker 1: suare foot rented house along a busy street not far
Speaker 1: from Interstate five forty in this town of about fifty.
Speaker 1: They are building debt free a seven thousand square foot
Speaker 1: house in nearby Taunta town. Now this is um, this
Speaker 1: this gets to something that's kind of messed up here
Speaker 1: because again, a lot of these families are in crushing
Speaker 1: poverty because they can't have debts, so they're often building
Speaker 1: their own homes in the middle of nowhere. They don't
Speaker 1: have access to indoor plumbing in a lot of cases,
Speaker 1: a lot of the again you have families that don't
Speaker 1: have Social Security numbers. They are in the middle of nowhere.
Speaker 1: There's fifteen kids living in what is essentially a shack.
Speaker 1: Like that's that's a significant element of this. It's not
Speaker 1: the way the Duggers live. Because the Duggers get a
Speaker 1: shipload of money from Discovery to build a nice, very
Speaker 1: large new house. And this is something they don't talk about.
Speaker 1: They talk about how they're doing it debt free. They
Speaker 1: talk about how and make it look like this, Well,
Speaker 1: because we're just we're scrimping, we save, and we're we're
Speaker 1: very consistent our beliefs, and so we've been able to
Speaker 1: build this this very large house. Um, and if you,
Speaker 1: if you have the kind of financial discipline and listen
Speaker 1: to the teachers about financial discipline we do, you two
Speaker 1: can build a house like we have and like have
Speaker 1: a giant family like we've. It's just not possible for
Speaker 1: most people. We did it with Kupin's Yeah, we did
Speaker 1: it all with coupons and tens of thousands of dollars
Speaker 1: from the Discovery Channel, which helps a lot um. It's
Speaker 1: like all those it's like all those articles about like
Speaker 1: how I bought my first home at like thirty two,
Speaker 1: and it's like, oh, because your parents give you a a
Speaker 1: d dollars for the down payment, that would help a
Speaker 1: lot of people can afford a house with a hundred
Speaker 1: fifty grand from their parents. But that great Twitter Twitter
Speaker 1: mame going around where it's like on one on one
Speaker 1: side it's it's one of those articles where they're talking
Speaker 1: about it, and on the other side it's say the
Speaker 1: line from The Simpsons where they're all around Bart waiting
Speaker 1: for him. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I got it from my parents.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, there we go. Yeah. Now, the Duggers don't
Speaker 1: talk about any of like the money they got from
Speaker 1: Discovery Channel. They talked about how their Christian financial counseling
Speaker 1: helped them establish a business and buy a property and
Speaker 1: build a seven thousand square halfwood house. Debt free in
Speaker 1: their community came together to help them build it, and
Speaker 1: it makes their lifestyle seem like not just a miracle,
Speaker 1: but a miracle that you two can half if you
Speaker 1: follow the same rules right, which again, most people who
Speaker 1: do the kinds of things that duggers do live in
Speaker 1: very very difficult circumstances in a lot of cases. And
Speaker 1: it's it's a great going back to synchronicity because it
Speaker 1: also reinforces the kind of UH Calvinists prosperity gospel. The
Speaker 1: whole thing where we got it beca as we deserved it,
Speaker 1: were blessed by God. If you didn't get it, it's
Speaker 1: your fault. Yeah, if you were doing the right thing,
Speaker 1: if you were doing bless you. With the Discovery TV
Speaker 1: show Ye the Circle of Life. Now, I want to
Speaker 1: quote again because I want to talk about it's important
Speaker 1: to really lean into the fact that most quiverful families
Speaker 1: do not enjoy this level of financial comfort. So I
Speaker 1: want to quote again from that Salon column from a
Speaker 1: former member of the quiver Fule movement titled I could
Speaker 1: have been a Dugger wife. One key difference worth noting
Speaker 1: between the reality show of nineteen Kids and Counting and
Speaker 1: the reactual reality of a t I though, is the
Speaker 1: relative affluence of the Duggers compared to most a TI families.
Speaker 1: The Duggers live in a spacious, Discovery Networks funded home,
Speaker 1: but it was not unusual in my church for two
Speaker 1: parents and ten children to live packed into a single
Speaker 1: wide trailer. These children usually wear threadbare hand me downs,
Speaker 1: already passed through several rounds of siblings. Many of them
Speaker 1: look malnourished due to the abundance of starchy meals necessary
Speaker 1: on a lean one parent income. Women and mothers working
Speaker 1: outside of the home is absolutely forbidden in a t I,
Speaker 1: no matter what the financial situation of the family. Some
Speaker 1: women are even required to get permission from their husbands
Speaker 1: if they want to obtain a driver's license. That affluence
Speaker 1: makes the constant growth of the Dugger family, their wildly
Speaker 1: exaggerated version of a large family upon which their TV
Speaker 1: fame is built, possible again in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1: Not only is Discovery mainstreaming this, they're enabling the Duggers
Speaker 1: to do this because they just couldn't afford to live
Speaker 1: like this otherwise. Now that Dallas Morning News article does
Speaker 1: note that the family isn't getting Christmas gifts that year
Speaker 1: because the house they're building is their gift for everybody,
Speaker 1: and Jim Bob gives some quaint advice about eating out
Speaker 1: on the dollar menu to save money when the family
Speaker 1: goes out, but no attention has ever paid to the
Speaker 1: fact that this house they live in was made possible
Speaker 1: thanks to Discovery Channel money. In general, that article and
Speaker 1: all the early and media surrounding the Duggers made them
Speaker 1: out to be a quirky, strange, but ultimately relatable family
Speaker 1: living a different kind of lifestyle, but one that was
Speaker 1: fundamentally healthy, perhaps even healthier than the lives many of
Speaker 1: their viewers. This is as close as that article gets
Speaker 1: to acknowledging the fundamentalist cult at the core of their beliefs.
Speaker 1: The Duggers may be swimming against societies tied with such
Speaker 1: a large family, but it's clear children, lots and lots
Speaker 1: of children, are at the core of their social network.
Speaker 1: They are members of a home church that numbers around
Speaker 1: one hundred, They are active in a home schooling network.
Speaker 1: Their friends all seem to have lots of children. One
Speaker 1: family has nine, another six, and there and they're almost
Speaker 1: seems to have evolved an unofficial, loose knit network of
Speaker 1: large families that homeschool their children and attend in home churches.
Speaker 1: Some even have volunteered time to help the Duggers complete
Speaker 1: their home by mid January. An unofficial, loose knit network.
Speaker 1: Not what I would describe this cult as UM. It's
Speaker 1: pretty tightly net um and makes tens of millions of dollars.
Speaker 1: Now the reality, of course, yeah, they're members of a cult. UM.
Speaker 1: The success of their TV show and the thoughtlessly positive
Speaker 1: media coverage of their unusually large brood disguised this for
Speaker 1: a while. But from the beginning there was a dark
Speaker 1: side to the Dugger story. And this brings me back
Speaker 1: again to Joshua Dugger. I had to really go into
Speaker 1: the weeds to do this one for you. UM. In
Speaker 1: two thousand two, when Joshua was fourteen, he accosted his
Speaker 1: sister in the night and fondled her breasts and genitals.
Speaker 1: This sister eventually went to her father and told him
Speaker 1: what had happened. It is unclear whether or not Jim
Speaker 1: Bob acted on this information. At first, he claimed on
Speaker 1: a two thousand six police report and again the abuse
Speaker 1: started in two thousand two, that it was not and
Speaker 1: this report was not released until recently, that he disciplined
Speaker 1: josh when he learned about the abuse. If he did
Speaker 1: it did not stop the behavior. Between two thousand two
Speaker 1: and two thousand three, josh molested two of his sisters
Speaker 1: on at least four to five occasions. This evidently prompted
Speaker 1: Jim Bob Dugger to take more significant action, not going
Speaker 1: to the cops, of course. Well yeah, kind of yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean eventually we're getting there. Yeah, we're getting twists. Um.
Speaker 1: He went to the church elders, who advised Jim Bob
Speaker 1: to send his son to a Christian training program. In
Speaker 1: an early report, Walker described this program as involving quote,
Speaker 1: hard work and counseling, and most covers will be like
Speaker 1: that's he went to a like a physical labor kind
Speaker 1: of like treatment program. It sounds like I don't know,
Speaker 1: I don't know what the solution is Like obviously, if
Speaker 1: you're a parent, even the best parent, this is like
Speaker 1: a nightmare, impossible situation to handle. Like there's no there's
Speaker 1: no perfect way to deal with this kind of horrible thing. Um,
Speaker 1: So I'm not gonna say there's no I'm sure there
Speaker 1: are treatment programs that are helpful. Um. But Michelle Dugger
Speaker 1: has since admitted that when he was going to this
Speaker 1: treatment program, Joshua did not see a counselor, so what
Speaker 1: did his treatment involve? Thankfully, a lot has been written
Speaker 1: about how Bill Gothard's A t I counsels both victims
Speaker 1: and perpetrators of sexual abuse. And that's who ran the camp.
Speaker 1: It was an A t I camp. I want to
Speaker 1: quote from an interview with one woman who was sexually
Speaker 1: abused by staff at A t I for some context
Speaker 1: of how the process of dealing with sexual abuse within
Speaker 1: this cold works. From the New York Post quote, the
Speaker 1: organization did have a protocol for counseling sex abuse. A
Speaker 1: chart published in two thousand third teen by Recovering Grace,
Speaker 1: a resource for ex followers of ib LP and A
Speaker 1: t I that the site claims was distributed at A
Speaker 1: t I counseling seminars for more than a decade. It
Speaker 1: explains how group leaders should help those who have experienced
Speaker 1: sexual assault. The onus for the attack is put on
Speaker 1: the victim for defrauding the abuser. A modest dress, in
Speaker 1: decent exposure, being out from protection of our parents are
Speaker 1: all reasons that God let it happen, it reads. One
Speaker 1: marriage guide for women even includes a portion on what
Speaker 1: to do if your husband ever sexually handles your children.
Speaker 1: Author Debbie Pearl, a minister whose books were sold by IBLP,
Speaker 1: wrote in Created to Be His help Meet. Although wives
Speaker 1: should testify and pray that their husbands get twenty years
Speaker 1: in prison, they should also visit him. There be an
Speaker 1: encouragement to him, let him see the children three to
Speaker 1: four times a year, and girls Bible study. Smith said
Speaker 1: she was told, you need to be very careful what
Speaker 1: you do, what you say, what you wear, how you act,
Speaker 1: because at any moment you could trigger a boy. Basically,
Speaker 1: there's absolutely no personal responsibility for the boys now. A
Speaker 1: source for that article, Ms Smith was molested while working
Speaker 1: at a t I S training center by a twenty
Speaker 1: one year old staff member. He had a key to
Speaker 1: her room and would come in every night and force
Speaker 1: himself on her. They did not have sex, but in
Speaker 1: her words, we did everything else. I didn't have the
Speaker 1: capacity to say, hey, I don't like it, which is
Speaker 1: key to the Dugger case too, because one side effect
Speaker 1: of the lack of sex set is that girls don't
Speaker 1: grow up with any kind of vocabulary to describe what's
Speaker 1: happening to them. The reality of a TI Bill Gothard
Speaker 1: and the whole Quiverful movement is that it is a
Speaker 1: cult not just dedicated to breeding up Christian soldiers, but
Speaker 1: to providing the men at the top of it with
Speaker 1: a constant stream of helpless victims, women they can molest
Speaker 1: and then blame for it. Here's another quote from that article.
Speaker 1: When she returned home from the center, she and her
Speaker 1: father surprisingly received a call from Gothard, who's basically God,
Speaker 1: said Smith. She assumes her friend had told one of
Speaker 1: the leaders about the incidents, although she was expecting to
Speaker 1: be reprimanded. Instead, Gothard wanted the dirty details. He started
Speaker 1: asking the creepiest questions. He was like, what time did
Speaker 1: he kiss you? What time did he put his hands here?
Speaker 1: And did he do this to you? Smith remembered calling
Speaker 1: it gross. So this is the guy who ran the
Speaker 1: treatment program that Josh went to. This is how he
Speaker 1: handles allegations of sexual abuse within his his thing. So
Speaker 1: not an effective treatment program. I think it's fair to say, Sean,
Speaker 1: we're going to talk more about Bill Gothor, Josh Dougger
Speaker 1: and a lot of other very unpleasant people in part do.
Speaker 1: But for right now, how are you feeling? Oh? You know,
Speaker 1: he picked a heavy one. It's uh, yeah, it's heavy.
Speaker 1: It's well, it was like, it's heavy, should be talked about.
Speaker 1: It's it's nice, you know, it's it's one of a
Speaker 1: few times I'm like, you know what, I'm glad I
Speaker 1: can look across the room and see Saddam Hussein and
Speaker 1: Saddam Hussein's best friend, and I feel a little better
Speaker 1: about the world. They are right here. It does help
Speaker 1: talking about horrible molestation cults. When there's cats sitting on
Speaker 1: your legs and passed out, they've had a hard day
Speaker 1: of mostly sleeping, so they need their rest. Show on. UM. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's gonna do it for part one. We'll come back
Speaker 1: in part two and have more uncomfortable conversations. UM. Thank
Speaker 1: you for donating and helping to fund the recall effort
Speaker 1: against Mayor Ted Wheeler. UH, and those of you at home,
Speaker 1: if you're in the Portland area, go to Total Recall
Speaker 1: pd x. You can find out how you can sign
Speaker 1: up to recall Ted Wheeler, how you can sign your
Speaker 1: name on that, or even volunteer your time. UH. If
Speaker 1: you might want to donate, also total recall pdx dot
Speaker 1: com you can do it there. So UM, Ted Wheelers
Speaker 1: not connected directly to any of this. But he does
Speaker 1: suck and this sucks too, So I don't know. That's well,
Speaker 1: you know, it's kind of it's it's hard to uh,
Speaker 1: people that want to infiltrate and get into elected positions.
Speaker 1: It's kind of hard to fight against that when the
Speaker 1: mayor is someone like Ted Wheeler. Yeah, I mean, it
Speaker 1: doesn't make it harder to deal with. It's all of
Speaker 1: the problems we have where the elected leaders that aren't
Speaker 1: weird cultists with dangerous male supremacist ideas are also incompetent. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you'd like to take a shot at someone that
Speaker 1: is a successful politician and that he knows how to
Speaker 1: get and keep power, but is incompetent in anything else,
Speaker 1: you know, take it out on Ted Wheeler today. Take
Speaker 1: it out on Ted Wheeler today. Uh, and take it
Speaker 1: out on I don't know, I don't know what. Don't
Speaker 1: take other things out on other people. Be nice to
Speaker 1: the other people around you, be nice to everyone, but
Speaker 1: Ted Wheeler and fucking Bill Gothard, And take it out
Speaker 1: it being the trash for your friends, because that's nice,
Speaker 1: Because that is nice. Yeah, take out the trash, and
Speaker 1: then you know, once it's out of your house. You
Speaker 1: can throw it anywhere. It doesn't matter. Yea, yeah, that's ethical,
Speaker 1: I think. All right, that's the episode