Behind the Bastards

There’s a reason the History Channel has produced hundreds of documentaries about Hitler but only a few about Dwight D. Eisenhower. Bad guys (and gals) are eternally fascinating. Behind the Bastards dives in past the Cliffs Notes of the worst humans in history and exposes the bizarre realities of their lives. Listeners will learn about the young adult novels that helped Hitler form his monstrous ideology, the founder of Blackwater’s insane quest to build his own Air Force, the bizarre lives of the sons and daughters of dictators and Saddam Hussein’s side career as a trashy romance novelist.

Part One: The Cult Behind Josh Duggar

Part One: The Cult Behind Josh Duggar

Tue, 03 Aug 2021 15:43

Today we dig into child molester Josh Duggar, and the Christian Dominionist cult that hid his crimes.

FOOTNOTES:

  1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2015/06/03/what-to-expect-from-the-fox-news-interview-with-josh-duggars-parents/
  2. https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/05/06/how-josh-duggar-kept-his-wife-from-discovering-his-alleged-child-porn-browsing/
  3. http://defamer.gawker.com/the-web-has-known-about-josh-duggar-for-years-when-did-1706258269
  4. https://archive.is/H1dO9#selection-1341.0-1349.220
  5. https://people.com/tv/josh-duggar-computer-had-software-that-would-report-his-internet-porn-usage-to-wife-anna/
  6. https://www.today.com/parents/jinger-duggar-vuolo-duggars-fled-arkansas-dead-night-t217943
  7. https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/people/2015/05/28/timeline-josh-duggar-19-kids-and-counting-tlc-sex-abuse-scandal/28066229/
  8. https://www.eonline.com/news/1268143/a-house-divided-the-secrets-josh-duggar-and-his-family-tried-to-keep-are-back-to-haunt-them
  9. https://www.webcitation.org/5iQIl6cSO?http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/121805dntexbigfamily.2bb5559.html
  10. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2015/05/21/josh-duggar-apologizes-resigns-from-family-research-council-amid-molestation-allegations/
  11. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/book-party/wp/2015/05/22/in-a-2014-book-josh-duggar-discussed-his-failures-temptations-and-wrong-thoughts-as-a-teen/
  12. https://churchleaders.com/news/396480-twisted-theology-josh-duggar-children-denhollander.html/2
  13. https://nypost.com/article/duggar-cult-enabled-sexual-abuse-former-members-say/
  14. https://www.thelist.com/220751/the-untold-truth-of-counting-on/?utm_campaign=clip
  15. https://www.salon.com/2015/05/28/i_couldve_been_a_duggar_wife_i_grew_up_in_the_same_church_and_the_abuse_scandal_doesnt_shock_me/
  16. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2015/05/22/the-duggars-dangerous-cult-of-purity/
  17. https://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2015/05/what-did-josh-duggars-counseling-look-like.html
  18. http://hsinvisiblechildren.org/2013/07/17/6-children-of-zion-and-glenda-lea-dutro/

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Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams, let's break or handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her impactful behavioural discoveries on chimpanzees. It wasn't until one of the chimpanzees began to lose his fear of me, but I began to really make discoveries that actually shook the scientific world. Survive on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Do you love movies? Well, I have the podcast for you. Hey there, this is Mike D from movie Mike's movie podcast Your Go to source for all things movies. Each episode explores a different movie topic plus spoiler free reviews on the latest streaming and movies in theaters. You'll also get interviews with actors and directors to take a look behind the scenes of your favorite movies. Listen to new episodes of movie Mike's movie podcast Every Monday on the Nashville podcast network. Available on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to behind the ******** the podcast that just got introduced properly because I ****** **. Ohh ****. It wasn't supposed to do it right. I was supposed to do it badly. I'm so sorry, Sean. Sean. Is here today because Sean donated a a very generous amount to the recall effort for the Mayor of Portland who sucks and and I wanted to introduce the podcast well for Sean by doing something incompetent shouting the name of a dictator. You know I was I all day all day I was going to I was going to shout chow chesco just just scream out chow Chesco's name but I forgot to at the last minute and I'm. I'm so sorry, Sean. That's OK. I mean it's it's you know, it's no ****** but you know. Well, we can talk about Puja. We can talk about but but we do have, we do have a different ******* today, although, yeah, all ******** lead one way or the other to Steven Seagal. I do believe that. Strong. Yeah, and I'm fairly certain you could connect today's bet. Well, let me let me double check here. Let me double check here, because we're talking about Josh Duggar today, and in in a broader sense, we're talking about aspects of the Quiverfull movement, and I kind of wonder. Can we can we the production company or something related to a movie made by Steven Seagal? That's that's their I I think I know how I can make this connection. OK, yes, we can make this connection. So Mike Huckabee went on the view in 2017 and denied that Joe Arpaio was a racist and says that he knows Joe Arpaio, they're friends, and he knows that Joe Arpaio was not a racist. Joe Arpaio has shown up at campaign events and campaigned with both Jim Bob and Josh Duggar. Joe Arpaio was connected directly to Steven Seagal. We did it. We did. So hey, hey, perfect. We should put it out there. Put out to the universe. Steven Seagal. The ********. Kevin Bacon. That's right. Yeah. I mean, I bet if we were to spend the time we could draw a connection between him and Hitler, but I would probably need to do a little bit more digging that I'm going to do right now while we're recording an episode. But or depressingly less amount of data. There's just a photo of him in an s s uniform. Oh, Oh no, he hasn't aged nearly that well, Sean, you want to tell the audience a little bit about yourself before we before we get into this episode? Yeah, as I was telling you, before we started up, I worked on the healthcare front lines during the during the pandemic and kind of sat on my hands. Well, watching and paying attention to Twitter and all that stuff. Of all the. Protest in the tear gassing and all that stuff going on in real time, being kind of like, oh, I'm at this, I'm at this front. Of all the crazy stuff going on, I don't want to bring COVID from one to the other. So I was like, when this auction came up, I was like, oh, I am willing to spend a surreal amount of money to to **** dead wheel **** Ted Wheeler. Yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm glad that you did. And for those of you listening who live in the city of Portland, if you go to totalrecallpdx.com you can print off the sheet that you can then sign and and and scan back in. You can also print off sheets that will allow you to sign up multiple people. It'll explain everything. There's like a whole process. It's more complicated than it should be and more of a pain in the *** than it should be because they don't want marriage to get recalled. But if you go to total recall PDX, they will explain the whole thing. If you're not in Portland and you want to support the the recall effort against Ted Wheeler, who is trash like Sean did, very generously, you can also go to total recall PDX and you can donate. They have paid people going out and who are helping to, who are helping to fund this. Like Timbers or thorns game. They're usually out there and it's, you know what? I there's there's a lesson I learned from all this and that is you know, there's a phrase that comes up a lot and all this podcast, too. It's called **** you money. And it it kind of it's usually people that are so super rich, you know, they have it's like, **** you. I have money. **** you. I have enough money to change your life if I want to, if you annoy me. Yeah. Yeah. And it's it's something most of us will never have never ever, nor should we ever have because it really kind of gallons up your smeagol. You know what I mean? That's a good way to put it. So, but hey, I just want everyone to know if I've learned nothing else from this, it's that if you have hope in your heart and even but a penny in your pocket, you have **** Ted Wheeler money. Yeah. And that's that's together we can have, we can have **** Ted Wheeler, a variety of things. Because it's not just money that you **** Ted Wheeler. It's getting out on the ground and signing people up. It's adding just your name or your name and people in your household to the sheet. All of that is is in an ephemeral. Defense **** Ted Wheeler money. Yeah, you don't even have to spend a dime. You could be sitting broke in a little in a little cafe in Louisiana again, just that little penny in your pocket. Just know that you do have **** Ted Wheeler money. Or if you're living in Portland, you got a good relationship with some neighbors. Go out & some people up. There's a lot of ways to **** Ted Wheeler. We could make a joke about the fact that he just got broken up with, but we won't, because that's not classy. The the very, very little known rule. 35. So, Sean, you, I asked you when you when you won the auction, who do you want to hear about? You gave me a couple of different names I did, and the name that I decided to go with because I've been wanting to cover this ************ for a while was Josh Duggar. And I'm curious, before we get into the episode, what do you know about Josh and why did you want to learn more about him? So Josh duggar. So what I know about him was the the OR J dougs, you know, the dig Duggar. Good God, I hope no one calls him that. Not interested if she's 19 and counting. Yes. Yeah, I know. I, you know, obviously there's the the violent child ****. Yeah. That came up the being on the kind of pushing that Quiverfull life through TLC's reality show 19 accounting. And he just seemed to be kind of like a celebrity spokesperson might not be the right way, but but like a represented, like, he mainstreamed stuff that was not that it wasn't like. Not that there wasn't a significant amount of it going around in the country like I grew up in. It was, it was real conservative Catholic, not not Quiverfull necessarily, but kind of towards that lines and then like terms of politics and stuff. So I, I kind of knew we had a thing with that. And for me, part of kind of growing up and and paying more attention to things and looking back on stuff, what got me interested in him was because this is. This is something that is what he represents I think is kind of not always mainstream, talked about as as a danger. A lot of like they cause some sometimes they're evangelicals or they'll call themselves evangelicals like I know people that have struggled with like coming out of that and trying. And so there's a lot of talk in those communities about it, but I think maybe the best way to think about it. For people who aren't familiar with it is you kind of you know you have your kind of maybe like your sovereign citizen type libertarians where it's like the government should just have defense and have this. So the kind of people he represents. I I would say the best way to put it is they say that and and the follow up to the government should just do like defense and like a couple civil things is and the rest belongs to Jesus. Yeah and so when you talk about separation it's it's one of those vocabulary things that's also purposely deceptive. I think where like when you talk about separation of church and state, they can say yes because they're defining the state in a completely different way. And I think that really kind of can hook people into it or have people not realize what it is. And I there's from a little bit of of dabbling and some of the history of like. Apocalyptic groups are knowing people that got out of like doom cults. There the vein of kind of fundamentalism, fundamentalism that he's in is one of those that's like, oh, Israel becoming a state is the sign of the end times. I'm not exactly sure if he personally is is within that. I mean, yeah, but I'm pretty sure we're gonna go into detail about the exact chunk of evangelical Christianity. You can't really, you can't really explain the Duggars unless you explain the Quiverfull movement. Yeah. And so we have, we have a bunch of that talk, and we're not going to go. We'll go deeper into the Quiverfull movement in another. So I have a friend who grew up in that particular cult and IRL. Umm, no, I mean, he is a friend of mine, though, as I say, I, I went to a traditional conservative Catholic college with his wife. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember. I was like, no, EVE, I eve has been a a friend of mine for years and years and years who's How I Met IRL. Stoller. Yeah. OK. So we, we actually know some of the same people who grew up in this cold. Well, some of this is going to be old news to you, but it'll be new to a lot of people listening, and it's important. I'm gonna I'm gonna get into it. From 1999 to 2002, Jim Bob Duggar was a state legislator in the Arkansas House of Representatives. He made a couple of failed bids that seeking national election, and during one of these campaigns he took his wife and his family, which at that point numbered 14 kids out to support him. On Election Day, he and his wife voted and then marched off with their sizable brood. An AP photographer spotted them and took a picture. The picture was purchased by the New York Times, and it went the early aughts version of viral. Now, at the time it was obvious that Jim Bob was a conservative Christian, but the enormous size of his family was seen as more of like a quirky personal choice than anything. That's how it really got portrayed a lot in the meat in the mainstream media. Parenting magazines reached out to Michelle Duggar, his wife, and asked her to write an article about child rearing. Somewhere along the line, a savvy producer at Discovery Health decided the Duggars would make fascinating reality TV fodder. They put out several hour long specials featuring the family whose fame rose. Consistently until in 2008 they got their own TV show 17 kids and counting. Yeah. I would like to interject real quick something that an analogy or not analogy but a comparison that came up is because I grew up we that was one of six kids. So and there's always like the oh it's such a big family like it's kind of a there's kind of that like remember from I remember from the Rush Limbaugh show you Rush Limbaugh episode you talking about how he was feted by the media. It's one of those things like oh this is interesting this is fun they don't dig and so then it gets. Spotlighted we're gonna we're gonna cover the we're actually gonna go deep into one of the the earliest article I've been able to find on the family. So for about 7 years after 2008, which is, you know, kind of when they they really hit the mainstream, the Duggar family grows steadily in fame. They become millionaires. I don't know exactly. It's, it's hard to tell, right, because those what are your net worth or what is this person's net worth is always kind of ******. But it seems like what I've heard is like 3 1/2 million for Jim Bob, which doesn't seem impossible. Yeah, he's been on TV a while. It's been a successful show. And as a result of their growing fame, they became increasingly plugged into Republican Party politics. Jim Bob and his oldest son. Josh did photo OPS with Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, who we now know is connected to Steven Seagal by just one degree of separation. And Florida Senator Marco Rubio, I guess is connected to Stephen, well, probably actually has direct connections to both, probably one step away now. It was hardly a secret that the Duggars were right wing, but most casual observers, including most people who watched their shows, were unaware of the sinister reality behind why the Duggar family had so very many children. On July 11th, 2021, the Washington Post. Published an article titled an American Kingdom. The log line was this and this. This showed up all over my Twitter because of the fiction book that I just wrote about this sort of thing. The log line was a new and rapidly growing Christian movement has openly political once a nation under God's authority and is central to Donald Trump's GOP. Now the article is this is what you were talking about is broadly accurate in a way that it sketches out the dimensions of the dominionist movement, which quote holds that God commands Christians to assert authority over the seven mountains of life. Family, religion, education, economy, arts, media and government at which after which time Jesus Christ will return and reign for eternity. Now, where that article gets things wrong is it classifieds this movement as new. It's not. Now you could argue that it's new that because these are, you know, there's two broad in kind of the this chunk of evangelical culture there's pre millennial and post millennial dispensationalists, right. And pre millennials were the guys who were like. It's going to like the, the, the the God is going to like come soon and and we're gonna have us a rapture and ****. And the post millennials are like, we'll talk about this more a little bit later, are like, well, no, we have to ready the world for God to come back, right. And one of those was dominant, like the the left behind books are kind of the old, the older way, and that's less dominant now because it didn't. I don't know if you're aware of this, but the the changing of the Millennium didn't really do much and there was a movie with Nick Cage, you kind of, he was a movie with Nick at that point. God, I want to know more about how they manage to make that well, because remember, he he he was so deep in taxes, but he had to sell his dinosaur bones and take any movie he collects. Too many dinosaurs and he had to be in a weird Christian propaganda movie. Nicolas Cage is about the only actor I could never be angry at for doing that because it's like, well, yeah, you gotta, you gotta keep your dinosaur bone addiction going, man. I don't blame you for that. Yeah, any movie Nicolas Cage is in, just keep the bones flowing. That that should have been the tagline. Nicolas Cage has to Bone left behind. So, yeah, yeah. So again, not a super new movement, although it is kind of new and in hat, being as dominant with an event like that, that has changed over time. The election of Donald Trump was, which was, you know, partly fueled by evangelical support. And so sorry I I framed that badly. Again, this is not a new movement and it's tied into everything that's been happening over the last 5-6 years that have really freaked out a lot of kind of liberals who maybe weren't paying as much attention or who wrote off. The Christian right is kind of just like, oh, they're just, they're just nuts, right? Like, they're lumped them all together. It's the same thing. It's the same. It was easy during the Obama era. It's like you you you could make fun of these people in the silly things they'd say online and like movies like Jesus camp and stuff. And yeah, it didn't seem like as much of a. It didn't seem like they were gaining as much power as they were. And everything we're seeing today, both the rise of Donald Trump, the current assault on trans rights in states like Tennessee and Arkansas, the president, groundswell of right wing Christian support for crackdowns on voting rights. All of these things have their origins in these same, very specific Christian subculture, and for more than half a decade, the Duggar family was the Trojan horse for bringing that subculture into the American mainstream. To understand the Duggars, we have to talk about the Quiverfull movement. The name comes from Psalm 127, like arrows in the hands of a warrior. Our sons, born in one's youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them. They will not be put to shame when they contend with their enemies at the gate. And the gist of this idea is that American Society has become hopelessly godless and sinful. And if you're going to bring the nation back to God, you need a new generation of holy warriors to fight for Christianity. So it's your responsibility as a true Christian to pop out several basketball teams worth of babies in order to fight. Build the Army of God, right? Yeah, that's the again, I we both have friends who were blue, who were raised to be soldiers. In God's army. Now, the Quiverfull movement evolved rather naturally out of several different strains of right wing Christian culture. One of these was the homeschooling community. Obviously parents can choose to home school kids for a lot of perfectly sane reasons, and in fact one of my old coworkers, Christy Harrison, it cracked. Who is not at all a Quiverfull type? You know, Christian homeschools her family, and is a perfectly reasonable person not ******** on the concept of home schooling. I was home schooled from first grade to through high school graduation. Wow, was your, but yours was pretty. I mean, it's hard for it not to be. So here's so here's the weird thing. So the background on that is it was more. There's there's family dynamics, which I won't go into for the sake of, but basically it was kind of a more of a it's a thing we should do. So it's kind of weird. Like we did a lot of the performative stuff without getting super into the culty stuff. It was more of, like, viewed as an obligation to life for the Community or like grandparents or whatever. So it worked for me. So I'm like. On the low end of the spectrum, and I can see like school or what used to be or maybe still is called Asperger's. Yeah. So, but I can see going to school given that. Given how aware of my given everything at home and family dynamics and issues and mental health and all that stuff, I could see that being a real bad time for me. Yeah. So it like, it's not a great time for most people. Yeah. So it I mean and I, my my dad had a restaurant so I worked at that. So I kind of had like 1 foot in the secular, 1 foot in the like insular, kind of sheltered. Yeah. That seems like a pretty lucky and it might vary. Yeah one of the thing. But if you're even if you're coming at it from a more reasonable perspective, if you're in home. Cooling, you're going to encounter a lot of weird Christian propaganda because it's so dominant. And homeschooling, right? Even if you're trying to be secular with it, it's just everywhere in that community and yeah, the practice. So this leads to what I'm saying. The practice of homeschooling has been heavily dominated by the evangelical Christian community for decades. the US Department of Education currently estimates that more than 1,000,000 school age kids are home schooled in the United States and the real number could be double or triple that because a lot of those families do not participate in the census or get birth certificates. For the children, that is very common in the Quiverfull movement if you like, especially in the fringes, not even the fringes of it. A lot of people in it like like maybe you get birth certific, maybe you get a birth certificate for your sons. You don't get them for your daughters cause birth certificate she could leave at some point. She's got a Social Security number. When you hear with a birth certificate and Social Security a passport, you use a passport to do yearly. You leave get get away from your weird family, you cut it off the roof. So we really don't know how many people kids. There are like this. And that's, I mean, there's a lot of other different subcultures. Sovereign citizens get looped into some aspects of this, but not all. Like, once you're at the once you're home setting in the middle of nowhere and not getting birth certificates for your children, you become you getting to come into contact with a lot of subcultures. It's like the white version of avoiding immigration to send by not doing the census. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which you you do not have. Well, I don't know. I'm not. I can't even say that you shouldn't worry about the census if you're an undocumented immigrant because. Some sketchy **** was tried to be done by the Trump administration. I don't know. It's a bummer. Yeah, the census should. It shouldn't. Yeah. Yeah, that's a whole other rant. So over the course of the 1970s and 80s, a backlash against feminism and the civil rights movement helped lead to the birth of the moral majority. The first organized upswell of what we now call the religious right. We did A2 parter on this. Jerry Falwell was the biggest man in that movement, but there were a lot of of. I mean, it's it was a huge movement, right? A lot of people were involved. Another prominent. Member of the early religious right in the moral majority was Howard Phillips, a Russian Jewish man who converted to evangelical Christianity. He broke off from the Republican Party in 1974 and founded the far right Constitution party. Now. Howard and his son Doug were two of the of the first prominent advocates of a very specific way of looking at the culture war in the United States. Like many in the religious right, they argued that the struggle between humanism and Christianity was a war. They went on to argue that this war could only be won by Christian. Women. And the only way for Christian women to fight was for them to die to themselves. This is the term they use, IE give up their personal ambitions and completely submit to their husbands. The basic idea, as the Phillipses and others preached it, was that Jesus was the general of a great heavenly Army. Soldiers in a real army are expected to follow orders whether or not they agree with or understand them. Unless you're in the German army now. Yeah, yeah, I remember that. Yeah. Women needed to submit totally to their husbands because that's what Jesus asked. So if they accept the utter authority of men over their lives, they would actually be taking agency and striking a powerful blow against the devil by giving up your life, that's that's you exercising agency. Yes, and and to put it in context again for the more secular people. You think about Umm or, you know, like war crimes that the United States gets away with. If you're in a heavenly Army, what are war crimes? You know, it's it's it's the same where it's like, yeah, you know, it's going to happen and it's going to get covered up and it's OK as long as you achieve the objective. It's that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of crimes that are fine with this. But, you know, who doesn't do crimes unless they're rad. I was going to say people who aren't Elon Musk, but then you said crimes. Yeah. So say crimes, not crimes. The products and services that support. This podcast, Sean, have never committed any crimes in the United States that have been documented by journalists who have not been car bombed. I was gonna say they have to be arrested for it to be a crime. Have to be arrested for it to be a crime. That's how I live my life and that's how our sponsors do too. Here's some ads. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. 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Com slash behind my name is Erica Kelly and I am the host and creator of Southern Freight true crime. There are so many people that just have no idea about some injustices in the world and if you can give a voice to them you can create change. To be able to do it within podcasting is just such a gift. I believe it was 18 months after I got on with Spreaker that I was making enough that I could quit my day job. It was incredible. I always feel like an ambassador for speaker. But that's because I'm passionate about podcasting. It's really easy to use. I always tell people I am so not tech. Took me 5 minutes to get comfortable with spreaker, and when I find a new friend that has an incredible show, I want them to make money. I want them to be able to do what I did. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Get paid to talk about the things you love. Spreaker from iheart this fall on revisionist history. Is there anything that we haven't talked about or or that I should have asked you or you'd like to add that seems relevant? You should have asked me why I'm missing fingers on my left hand. A story about sacrifice. I think his suffering drove him to try to alleviate suffering. And the shocking discovery I made where I faced the consequences of writing a book I thought would help people? Isn't that funny? It's not funny at all. It's depressing. Very depressing. Religious history is back with more. Listen to revisionist history on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I've never seen less enthusiasm for a great idea in my life. Ah, we're back. Sean, we're talking about Howard Phillips and we're talking about the birth of of the religious right, so. In speeches that Doug Phillips gives to packed his son Doug gives to packed audiences. He reads verse verses from the Bible like Ephesians 521. Wives submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body of which he is the savior. Now as the church submits to Christ so also wives should submit to their husbands and everything. Now. Doug calls this the quote best kept secret of modern Christian marriages. And then he says stuff like this, you are a help meet. The Bible says that man is not made for women, but women is made, but the woman is made for the man. If you have a problem with that, take it up with the Creator, not Phillips. I'm just quoting. Until we get comfortable playing those roles, we'll never be at peace. But if we accept those roles, who half the battle is diminished already just by the fact that we accept God's creation order. This philosophy has come to be known as complementarianism, IE women were created not as individual beings of their own with independent desires and talents, but as a complement to men, right? Yeah, it's the little known fact that was actually the original tagline for a GI Joe, submitting to your husband's is half the battle. Now, feminism. In this cosmology, moral cosmology is evil because it encourages women to seek their own lives independent of men, which robs men, who are again the only real people of the wifely support God intended for them to have. In his speeches, Phillips loves to quote Isaiah 312, which cites God's curse upon a sinful nation's children are your oppressors, and women rule over you. This is a God. Saying like, this is how I'm going to curse you if you if you don't follow my laws, I'll make your children oppress you. And you're with the women will be in charge. So he's saying that like if if that's what God is like feminism is a curse from God. If we if we don't obey his call, he'll curse us with feminism. Well, going back even further again from my upbringing, upbringing and a lot of some people in my upbringing and then just kind of a general Christian thing, it's the whole. Well Eve gave him the apple. So women has always been men's downfall and it's their place to be under foot because that's yeah because that's you know that's that was just how it worked because that's how the story. That's how the story started. Now, the nightmare for these people is a world in which Christian men do not have total control over their families. While mainstream culture filled with movies featuring strong female protagonists in the 80s and 90's, rock stars like Madonna, political figures like Hillary Clinton and Margaret Thatcher, Phillips and his ilk preached that women's liberation would lead to the collapse of civilization. He called the young Christians he preached to in the 1990s and early aughts the Rick Reclamation generation because their duty was to retake society. From liberal feminists, one of the through lines in this strain of evangelical culture is they have way more faith in the power of feminism than most feminists that I know. Like they are really bullish on its ability to to change society now. Home schooling was considered one of the necessary tools of reclamation. By having enormous families and teaching their children themselves outside of the sinful state education system, Christian families could keep their children free from the sinful secular world. One of the things I find most interesting about these people is the Shira. Amount of weight they give to feminism and I again, they have a lot of of they they they really think that it has a lot more influence in government than I think it does. Here's Mary Pride, editor of Practical Homeschooling magazine and one of the most influential figures in the home schooling movement. Quote Christians have accepted feminists moderate demands for family planning and careers while rejecting the radical side of feminism, meaning lesbianism and abortion. What most do not see is that one demand leads to the other. Feminism is a totally self consistent system aimed at rejecting. Odds role for women. Those who adopt any part of its lifestyle can't help picking up its philosophy and those who pick up its philosophy are buying themselves A1 way ticket to social anarchy. Feminism is self consistent. The Christianity of the 50s wasn't feminists had a plan for women, Christians didn't. And this is their explanation for why feminism was his was winning and they were, you know, Christianity is under siege and whatnot. Yeah, to be fair, there's, there's probably a, I mean, obviously a lot of people are like no feminism, but there's probably a good chunk that are that. You know, they have to pump it up to get people to keep as the boogeyman. And when I say, by the way, when I'm saying stuff like that, I think these people have an outsized idea of the impact feminism has had. That's not an anti feminist thing. It's just like there's still a lot of bias against women in our culture. I think they're overestimating. Yeah, the power that feminism has culturally now prides. Major contribution to the evolution of what became the Quiverfull movement was to provide a plan for women. She helped. And again, that's her ideas. Like Christianity hasn't had a plan. Women feminists did, and that's why we're losing. They had a vision for the future and we didn't. She helped to create a whole integrated lifestyle of biblical womanhood from the book Quiverfull by Catherine Joyce, which is a great way to get up to speed on all this. If you're interested, very good book the Biblical womanhood, encompassing homework, motherhood and wifehood as they were lived not in the 1950s, but in a notion of pre industrial, pre household appliance. Times is what pride calls a total lifestyle as comprehensive as the pervasive influence of feminism. Which has reached every part of women's work, lives, biology and thinking. And this time around, the anti feminists intend to be fiercely diligent, rooting out the worldly feministic ideas and influences in their churches, entertainment and own thinking, and making sure it doesn't come back. Now I'm leaving out a lot, and again, Catherine Joyce is Quiverfull is a great book for a more complete understanding of all this. Two other important contributors to this this what becomes the the the the ideologies of the Duggars follow are John Piper and Wayne Grudem. These are both Reformed Baptist preachers who headed up the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, where CBMW. In 1987, the year of its founding, the CBMW released something called the Danvers Statement, which was both a mission statement. Where the Council and a rallying cry to conservative Christian forces, the statement urged Christians to fight egalitarian influences in the Evangelical Church, particularly the scourge of Christian feminism. It argued that women should be barred from positions of authority in churches. Now, the Danvers statement was signed by some people you might know. Beverly Lahaye, wife of the author of left behind Tim Lehay, signed it. Pat Robertson also signed it. Dorothy Patterson and Paige Patterson signed it. You probably don't know those last two names. That page orchestrated the right wing takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention, the organization behind the second largest Christian denomination in the United States. We talked about this in the moral majority episode, but a lot of Baptists used to be completely fine with abortion. Up until like the 70s, it was not a super controversial. Now the Catholics have always had their whole thing going on about it, but every is saying I got in trouble when I was in second grade for leading a group of kids around to sing that song on the playground because I just. I couldn't watch like, Beavis and Butthead or The Simpsons, but for whatever reason, my family was like, well, Monty Python's smart, so whatever. You can watch as much of that as you want. And I watched meaning of life in that song, and I didn't really understand it, but I LED a March around the playground singing it and it it didn't go over well and superb in Texas. Now, was it because you sang it or because you sang it? At the end you went just hands? It didn't do that, but I didn't get what just hands was. This must been like, 3rd or 4th grade, but so yeah. So in 1998, eleven years after the Danvers statement, the SBC, the Southern Baptist Convention, released a statement of their own in which they urged wives to graciously submit to their husbands. Mike Huckabee was one signatory to the statement. The SBC, by the way, speaks for about 16 million Americans. So by the end of the 20th century, many of the ideas that are central to the Quiverfull movement had started to become mainstream on the right wing. You're not talking about a fringe ideology when the SBC is endorsing some of this stuff, right? That's well, this is was it the either the Falwell or the Reagan episode, I think. I think it was you that talked about it where it was like the evangelicals saw Reagan as an inn and then Reagan used them and then didn't give them what they wanted. So then they started going, oh, we need to start taking over and making our stuff we we need to instead of just giving them our vote and expecting stuff in return, we need to infiltrate and put our. People into is is the stuff you're seeing Q Anon guys try to do right now. And Christians continue to extremist. Christians continue to where it's like, well, we gotta get people on the school boards, we gotta get people. And in local elected positions, they've been doing this for a while and it works. Which is every time I see people on the left to be like, no, the thing to do is, is, is throw up a poster on Twitter and have a March. So like, well, that's good too. And I I get the frustration with electoralism, but they've gotten a lot of crazy **** done because they've been voting for decades. I don't know. We don't have the time anymore to, hey, this is that's a a longer you can make radical changes democratically in this society. It just takes decades of generations of people giving up their entire lives to the cause. But it worked for them. Now, obviously, most Southern Baptists are not out there having a dozen kids showing alcohol, forcing their daughters to wear sackcloth dresses, and refusing to get birth certificates for their children. If you want to view the struggle for Christian domination of the US as a war and these people. 2 The Quiverfull families are like special forces. Their sons, like Josh Duggar, are supposed to be trained from childhood to seek positions of influence in the government and culture. But I'm getting ahead of myself here. We've covered most of the ideological underpinnings of the Quiverfull movement, but the Duggar family are also members of a very specific cult. Within this chunk of the Christian right, they are followers of a guy named Bill Gothard. It's spelled got hard, and that'll be relevant in an unfortunate way later. Yeah, you know, Bill, you've you're familiar with Bill Gothard. I see how you erected that joke, yeah. Gothard founded the Institute in Basic Life Principles in 1961. So this is the religious rights, not a thing when he starts this right, not in a political way, right? So he's really on the bleeding edge of all this, and it was originally called campus teams, and its purpose was to recruit young people, obviously, and campuses for Christ. The IB LP was fundamentalist, from the Getco, and it was also male supremacist. Women were supposed to marry men chosen by their fathers and submit. Entirely to 1st their father and then their husband. Dating and flirting were forbidden so much as winking at a man is seen as lustful and morally equivalent to prostitution. In the early 1980s, the IB LP was racked by a sex scandal when it was found that Bill and his brother Steve were both having affairs with secretaries at the Institute. Yeah, weird how that keeps happening. Weird how none of these guys practice. Although actually you can say they are practicing what they preach because as we'll continue to talk about. The fault in this case was the women. Because they were being temptresses, well you know, and if they had gotten them pregnant, I mean bonus, he got an extra solar. There's an extra soldier. So Bill never married or had kids, which again interesting, but his I BLP became the center of education and philosophy for the Quiverfull movement. The BLP starting in the late 1980s ran what was effectively and when. So his brother has to leave the organization and bill steps down, but for like 2 weeks and if you want a much more detailed. Podcast series on Bill Gothard. Uh, the the podcast someplace underneath, which is part of the last podcast on the Left Left network did like a FOUR or five parter on this. That's very, very good. I was going to say too, there's one called Christian right cast. I haven't heard that, so that that's one. It's a couple ex evangelicals, or if that's how they're for themselves, but it's it's on Apple. I think it may have moved to flex or something like that, but there it goes like it goes into guys and like, there's there's a thing on Bill Gothard and thing, I don't know if you have it in there, but like his his rules for how women should dress. Yeah, talk a little bit about yeah. But yeah, check out both of those if you want more. This is really important stuff in some place underneath they go into less detail about. The stuff that I just covered, but they go into a lot more detail about Bill, yeah. So the BLP ran what was effectively a troubled teen facility that started up in the late 1980s, which was basically a forced labor camp for kids, and they also operated the Advanced Training Institute, or ATI, which created curriculum for homeschooled families. The Duggars were absolutely slavish devotees of Gothard ISM, and all of their children were raised on a TI curriculum from a write up by former cult member Deladier Bartlett, who grew up in the same community. The ATI curriculum teaches that the Bible, as the literal, infallible word of God, must be the center of every lesson, leading to some shockingly inaccurate lessons, particularly in science and history. The ATI curriculum also has a big focus on teaching students how they should behave. Immediate, unquestioning obedience to authorities is foremost, and ATI prescribes beatings to discipline children for even the most trivial of infractions, like failing to complete a chore on time or arguing with a sibling even more disturbing the Duggars participate in. Blanket training, where toddlers and small children are placed on a blanket and a toy is placed just out of reach. When the child reaches for the toy or moves off the blanket, the parents will slap or hit them in order to instill fear and obedience. And we're not going to talk about to train up a child, but that's very big in these cultures. Child abuse is like massive in this community. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I was going to say that that sounds almost sounds more like something you'd see on a Japanese game show then. Yeah, yeah, it should be fully grown, man. On a blanket. Like, still wearing a diaper? Yeah, still wearing a diaper. I would watch that show. They're adults. I don't like blanket training's fine. If that's like your kinker, whatever, more power to you now. I found another interview with the survival of Gothard cult on Salon. This person went into a great deal more detail about what kids were taught about sex through the this curriculum quote, the so-called wisdom booklets that form the backbone of ATI children's educations. Contained. Our Bible verses than they do information particularly lacking in a religious sect so obsessed with reproduction is any kind of sex education. This is especially true for young women who receive very little sex education because the church teaches us that women do not have sex drives. However, the opposite is believed of men. ATI teaches that men have nearly uncontrollable sex drives, ready to erupt at the mere sight of a pantleg or a perm. To illustrate this point, ATI families are encouraged to maintain a new computer rule for their sons, but not their daughters. Gothard also encouraged men to turn towards the wall. And dining at restaurants so as to not be tempted by a waitress or a stray attractive woman, you know, those stray attractive women just kind of out there tempting you by existing. Wondering, yeah. Wandering the streets. Yeah. Just just constantly. I mean, that is that is how they view it, though. Is that, like, when you are like, they that's an attack on you with a woman's out there living her life and you find her attractive, that's like an assault on you. Well, yeah, because if you're in an army, you're fighting another army. So that means it's it's a they're also a unified, trained force of the devil. So the sexy Taliban out there trying to steal your virtue? Yeah, it's like a Halloween costume, but as regular military gear. Now I'm going to continue that quote. Not that our supposed lack of a sex drive absolved us from sexual responsibility. ATI taught us that it is our job to keep men's desires from erupting into lust or sexual activity. We were taught that it was our sin if we cause a man to lust after us. I spent many nights as an early developed teenager crying and begging God to take away my large breasts because I noticed men's eyes had begun to linger on me during church. Modesty wasn't only about dress, it was also about behavior. Women were taught from a very young age that they are to be submissive in all things. Allowing men to open doors for us, even to get out of a car, never initiating conversations with a man, and never correcting a man when he was wrong. Essentially, a good ATI woman is sweet, silent, and obedient. This combination of 0 sexual knowledge and deeply ingrained submissiveness left many young girls in our church especially vulnerable to sexual abuse. As a teenager, I became aware that several of my friends were being molested by their older brothers or fathers. They would start stilted conversations with me about it, but none of us actually understood the concept of sex or rape or more. Molestation. Enough to actually discuss it. So it stayed on the level of furtively whispered hints. And this is, I mean, you can draw a line here between like, 1984. The idea behind new speak is that if you if you, if you limit the vocabulary of a community, you limit their ability to express certain things, like, that's what's going on here. You limit the ability of kids to understand sexuality in this way. You limit their ability to know when they've been wronged. Well, you take away communication. Exactly, yeah. And to kind of, to to draw to something recent. More recent as well to kind of go on the other side in terms of how. In terms of men blaming for women for stuff, there's the obviously don't know this for a fact, but the. The Atlanta, the spa shooter who was like, no they were, yeah, like I would not be surprised if it was just like basically they were immodest and so that drove me and my uncontrollable. Hormones to that's that shooting from what information we have so far seems to be the logical extent of, yeah, this this kind of thinking is like, they wouldn't stop tempting me. So yeah, I don't know. I mean we don't know. But just like it's they get to to give people like this isn't to bring it a little in from the abstract. It's like, yeah, this is this is recent stuff and it can go a variety of different ways because people are different. They're going to react differently and taken some of those reactions. Gonna be scary as hell? Yeah. So but you know what's not scary as hell? A bright summer day. I was gonna say capitalism, but I guess both capitalism and a bright summer day can be scary because capitalism is a part of the engine of carbon release. That is is causing our summers to be hotter and drier. So you can get this right darker direction than I wanted to. But a bright summer day, I mean, it won't pay you to to say that it's that's not a problem. So, I mean capitalism at least. You know, make a buck at least I'll make a buck by denying that there's any problem with it. Hey, here's yours. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that. 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To be able to do it within podcasting is just such a gift. I believe it was 18 months after I got on with Spreaker that I was making enough that I could quit my day job. It was incredible. I always feel like an ambassador for speaker. But that's because I'm passionate about podcasting. It's really easy to use. I always tell people I am so not tech. Took me 5 minutes to get comfortable with spreaker, and when I find a new friend that has an incredible show, I want them to make money. I want them to be able to do what I did. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Get paid to talk about the things you love. Spreaker from iheart this fall on revisionist history. Is there anything that we haven't talked about or or that I should have asked you or you'd like to add that seems relevant? You should have asked me why I'm missing fingers on my left hand. A story about sacrifice. I think his suffering drove him to try to alleviate suffering. And the shocking discovery I made where I faced the consequences of writing a book I thought would help people? Isn't that funny? It's not funny at all. It's depressing. Very depressing. Religious history is back with more. Listen to revisionist history on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I've never seen less enthusiasm for a great idea in my life. OK, we're back. So the Duggars didn't bring Bill Gothard or ATI up often on the show in ways that would have been immediately obvious. You could see books in the show, right? There's always there's a lot of like it. It's it's visible if you know what to look for, but they're not out there like talking about how awesome Bill Gothard is. The signs were there if you knew where to look at Duggar wedding celebrants would dedicate an entire cake to Bill Gothard, which is, again, cult ****. All the Duggar women had distinctively permed. There, because Bill believed that curly bangs brought out a woman's natural beauty. The antiquated dress codes that the Duggar family engaged in, particularly for women in the family, were also a major part of, like a result of Bill Gothard's influence over the years they were on TV. The Duggar family, particularly Jim Bob, were extremely open about the fact that their showbiz career was a ministry. They saw it as a way to recruit. With the help of the Discovery Camera crew, selective editing and scripting, they were able to portray what was really in reality and. The use of cult as a quirky lifestyle choice, perhaps even one viewers would want to emulate. Jim Bob liked to say that they were just trying to convince people not to get abortions, because by saying that, like, Oh well, this family can handle 141516 kids. Yeah, so obviously I should keep this one kid, right? It was a big part of, like, why he said they were doing it. But of course, the real purpose behind all this was to build a larger cultural space. For Gothard bism the Quiverfull movement and male supremacist fundamentalist Christianity in American culture, this is also part of a broader. Fundamentalist strategy. It came about as part of a split between pre millennial and post millennial dispensationalists. The former believed that the Rapture was coming any day and soon the faith will be brought up to heaven. The world would end. The latter belief that God wouldn't let Christ return until they established a godly world. In order to do that, they had to recruit, and it wasn't enough to get people to accept Christ. They had to convince folks to follow the rules their rules. Otherwise the world wouldn't be godly enough. Since those rules are very unpleasant and extreme, you have to lure people in. Gradually, by reaching them with something less extreme and drawing them in like a fish on a lure from Quiverful quote, Mark Driscoll's Mars Hill Church raided. The eighth most influential church in America relies on the fixtures of emergent or seeker oriented ministries, such as countercultural groups like bikers or skaters, for Christ to attract to attract its young urban congregation. But churches like Mars Hill, which espouses a deeply conservative ideology, recognize that such outreach ministries are meant to be transitional. Introducing a person to Christ where they are, then easing them into more serious study and graduating them to a traditionalist doctrine and Driscoll's case to a doctrine that places substantial weight on gender submission and a wife's role in marriage. So again, these are all this is just, it's how cults work. It's how it's how cute on works, too. You can see it in in in the fact that, like, there's elements of Q that are about the JFK conspiracy, that elements of Q that are about like, aliens and stuff, they're about vaccines. And it all leads back to this ur conspiracy. And that's how people get pulled in. And that's what makes it more it's syncretism, you know? It's it's how all this works. Isn't that the bill Cooper? Yeah, the Cooper that was the he was Speaking of. Yeah, queuing on anonymous. Just did an episode on Bill Cooper. I do love Bill. He really did everything right. One of these days. One of these days. But did you do one on? Oh yeah, I did a two-part. I was like, I remember listening to it. Did I fever dream? Like like Bill. I hope to go out. Gotcha. Yeah. Mountain top. Assault by law enforcement. Well, broadcasting nonsense on the radio. Umm, yeah. So the Duggars TV ministry worked the same way as like these kind of bikers and skaters for Christ at the at the Mars Hill Church. We're it's it's all the same idea to draw people in. You have to whitewash a lot of realities about their lifestyle, make it look good, and once people start to get in, you can start laying on some of the more heavy stuff. Here's one issue with their lifestyle. Here's one of the reasons why what they're actually doing is objectively bad. This is not just an I'm not just saying it because I'm not religious. I'm saying this because it's abusive. And one of the reasons is abusive is that 19 kids is way the **** too many for two parents to adequately care for in most situations. Almost. I'm gonna say any situation. The Duggars explain how they do this as using the buddy system. Every kid has a buddy, an older sibling who is supposed to help raise and take care of them. Moms. Buddy is the youngest baby. Well, she's nursing, but once that's done, she hands the baby off to the next youngest daughter, and the cycle goes on. Most Quiverfull families work this way. I've heard from my friend Eve. Her family works work this way. The daughters, as a general rule, are the ones doing most of the child rearing, because there's too many kids for the parents to do it all, and that's not great. Obviously, the siblings are supposed to you're, you know, older siblings moved to look at. For younger siblings, you definitely learn things from your siblings. You're they're not supposed to be parents. That that robs them of the chance to be a child. Whoa, whoa, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. So let me get this straight. You're saying the large family basically does a capitalism on its on its own structure, it's independent contract where the CEO's make middle management and the and the workers do all that? Wait a bit. You're saying that doesn't work? Yeah, I mean. The people I know who grew up in it have complaints. I'm too innocent for this. I don't know. I don't think so. Most Quiverfull families work this way. And again, it's usually the daughters who do most of the sun supposed to do some of it. But it's generally the daughters who are handling an awful lot of the child rearing, and this is a huge burden on them. It stops them from having a childhood. It also means that older siblings are often the only ones watching out for their younger siblings. This becomes a problem when one of those older siblings is a sexual abuser. And that brings us to Josh Duggar. Joshua James Duggar was born on March 3rd, 1988. He was born in Tontitown, AR to Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar when Josh was a baby. The family was much less extreme in their beliefs than they would become. Michelle had taken birth control before getting pregnant and she started taking it again after Josh was born. She suffered a miscarriage though, which she and Jim Bob blamed on the birth control. We obviously have no idea what caused miscarriages happened. You know, just a thing. Jump in real quick. That's that's. That's another thing I think that can get people sucked in. Like, my parents weren't very religious. They kind of wandered away. And then it's like, you have a kid and then all of a sudden, like, everything like it. It's something about having that makes you, like, kind of, I don't know if it's just that, that insecurity of like, am I doing things right or whether or not I think it makes you more pliable to get sucked into something. I yeah. I mean that totally makes sense. And it's it's all I think a lot of it is just like, you have a kid. It's really scary. Yeah. Because, like, there's no really, there's no map for how to have a kid and raise it right. And, like, sometimes people do everything right. And your kid, I don't know, murder somebody. Yeah. Like, it's terrifying having a kid. And I think a lot of people are like, well, this group says they have a perfect road map for everything. Even if I follow it, my kids will will turn out perfectly. So I'll just do that because this is terrifying. Hi, I'm doctor. Reverend priest. I have an answer. Yeah. Would you like to come worship with me? Yeah, all you have to do is put these weird dresses on your kids and have 30 of them and it'll be great. Here's a blanket you'll know what to do. So yeah, they blame that they're they blame their miscarriage on on birth control and like, that's the what causes them to, like, get much more into the into the fundamentalist side of things. They decided to let God choose the size of their family, and this led them to have more than a dozen children in a very short span of time. Now, the Duggar family was not poor. Jim Bob ran a used car lot, but prior to discovery coming into the picture. They were not wealthy, and by the early aughts the family of 16 lived in a 2200 square foot rented home. Most large, quiverful families live in fairly cramped environs. People who knew the Duggars before fame said their home was not a typical of the community. It was far too small. It often smelled gross because there's a lot of babies and a lot of diapers. It was dirty, filled with clutter and the kind of refuse that, again, all those kids create. Now, during Jim Bob's brief time as an elected state representative, he would bring Joshua with him to the state capital. The goal was to groom. Josh 4A political future and people who knew the family in this time tend to think that many goth artists saw him as the future of the movement. He was nicknamed governor by Republicans who worked with his dad. The first major news coverage I found of the Duggar family was a Dallas Morning News article written in December 2005. Two years after that New York Times photo brought discovery into the picture, and the Duggars were the subject of their own TV specials. The article is a fascinating piece of what I call complicity journalism almost every detail of the Quiverfull movement. Bill gothard. That was. It was easily available when this article was published. There was a lot of information that the Dallas Morning News could have accessed about what these people believed, but the author, Arnold Hamilton, did zero work to lay out anything about what the Duggars were actually into. Here's a quote. As a couple the Duggars approach to family planning is simple. They are born again Christians who view the Bible as their life's manual, and the Bible describes children as a blessing from God. They will cheerfully accept as many blessings as God ordains. The reality, of course, is that they don't. The Bible is not their only manual, ATI. Bill Gothard is their manual. And that manual says that women are not full autonomous people, but merely independence to men, and their rightful purpose is to serve with that question. But pointing that out would make this fun story about a big family sound more like a story of child abuse, so they don't talk about that. The author points out several times that the Duggars own their own business and home debt free. This is a big deal in that community, and there's a lot of kind of less extreme elements of this that are still wrapped up in this that. What is that? Guy who does those debt free seminars. That's like weird and rich dad. Poor dad. Yeah, the rich dad. Poor. I mean, that's one of them. There's a couple. Yeah. I mean, it's. And yeah, it's this whole idea that like you shouldn't have. It's immoral, kind of to have debt and a lot of which I'm not in favor. I think it's like a horribly ****** ** the way the system of debt and the credit and stuff works in this country. I'm not, but they're not as strong. But yeah, it's a system. It's not you that's ****** **. Yeah, and if you're like it, it's kind of impossible in a lot of ways to. They could be like, your life will be a lot harder if, for example, you're never able to build up enough credit that you can, like, try to buy a home or something because renting sucks ***. Yeah, and there's there's a lot of things, avenues that get closed off to you when you don't buy, and that's that's not great. I wish it didn't work that way, but this is a problem for a lot of people in the Quiverfull movement, because it leads to them not being able to access the kind of resources they need to properly care for families that are so large. Quote The Duggars live temporarily in a 2200 square foot rented house along a busy St not far from Interstate 540 in this town of about 50,000. They are building debt free a 7000 square foot house in nearby Tawna town. Now this is this. This gets to something that's kind of messed up here because again, a lot of these families are in in crushing poverty because they can't have debt. So they're often building their own homes in the middle of nowhere. They don't have access to indoor plumbing, in a lot of cases a lot of the again. You have families that don't have Social Security numbers. They are in the middle of nowhere. There's 15 kids living in what is essentially a shack like that's that's a significant element of this. It's not the way the Duggars live because the Duggars get a **** load of money from discovery to build a nice, very large new house and this is something they don't talk about. They talk about how they're doing it debt free. They talk about how and make it look like this. Well, because we're just we're scrimping, we save and we're we're very consistent our beliefs. And so we've been able to build this, this very large house and if you if you have the kind of financial. Discipline and listen to the teachers about financial discipline. We do. You too can build a house like we have and like have a giant family like we found. It's just not possible for most people. We did it with coupons. Yeah, we did it all with coupons and 10s of thousands of dollars from the Discovery Channel, which helps a lot. It's like, all those. It's like all those articles about, like, how I bought my first home at, like, 32. And it's like, oh, because your parents give you $150,000 for the down payment. Yeah. That would help. Yeah. I think a lot of people could afford a house with 150 grand from their parents. But that great Twitter, Twitter meme going around where it's like, on one-on-one side it's it's one of those articles where they're talking about it. And on the other side, it's, say, the line from The Simpsons where they're all around Bart waiting for him. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got it from my parents. Yeah. Yeah. There we go. Yeah. Now, the Duggars don't talk about any of like the the money they got from Discovery Channel. They talked about how their Christian financial counseling helped them establish a business and buy a property and build a 7000 square foot house debt free in their community, came together to help them build it. And it makes their lifestyle seem like not just a miracle, but a miracle that you 2 can have if you follow the same rules, right? Which again, most people who do the kinds of things the Duggars do live in very, very difficult circumstances in a lot of cases, and it's it's a great going back to synchronicity. Because it also reinforces the kind of. Calvinist prosperity, gospel, whole thing. Where we got it because we deserved it. We're blessed by God. If you didn't get it, it's your fault. Yeah, if you were doing the right thing, if you were doing the right thing, bless you with the Discovery Channel TV show. Yeah, it's the circle of life. Yeah. Now I want to quote again because I want to talk about. It's important to really lean into the fact that most Quiverfull families do not enjoy this level of of of financial comfort. So I want to quote again from that salon column. I'm a former member of the Quiverfull movement, titled I Could have been a Duggar wife. One key difference worth noting between the reality show of 19 kids and counting and the actual reality of a TI, though, is the relative affluence of the Duggars. Compared to most ATI families. The Duggars live in a spacious discovery networks funded home, but it was not unusual in my church for two parents and ten children to live packed into a single, wide trailer, these children usually wear threadbare handmedowns already passed through several rounds of siblings. Many of them look malnourished due to the abundance of starchy meals necessary. Wanna lean one parent income? Women and mothers working outside of the home is absolutely forbidden in ATI, no matter what the financial situation of the family. Some women are even required to get permission from their husbands if they want to obtain a driver's license. That affluence makes the constant growth of the Duggar family, their wildly exaggerated version of a large family upon which their TV fame is built, possible. So, again, in a lot of ways, not only is discovery mainstreaming this, they're enabling the Duggars to do this because they just couldn't afford to live like this otherwise. Now, that Dallas Morning News article does note that the family isn't getting Christmas gifts that year because the house they're building is their gift for everybody. And Jim Bob gives some quaint advice about eating out on the dollar menu to save money when the family goes out, but no attention is ever paid to the fact that this house they live in was made possible thanks to Discovery Channel money in general. That article, in all the early media surrounding the Duggars, made them out to be a quirky, strange, but ultimately relatable family living a different kind of lifestyle, but one that was fundamentally healthy and perhaps even healthier than the lives of many of their viewers. This is as close as that article gets to acknowledging the fundamentalist cult at the core of their beliefs. The Duggars may be swimming against societies tied with such a large family, but it's clear children, lots and lots of children are at the core of their social network. They are members of a home church that numbers around 100. They are active in a home schooling network. Their friends all seem to have lots of children. One family has nine, another six, and they're and they're almost seems to have evolved an unofficial loose knit network of large families that homeschool their children and attend in home churches. Some even have volunteered. Time to help the Duggars complete their home by mid January. An unofficial loose knit network? Not what I would describe this cult as. It's pretty tightly knit, yeah, and makes 10s of millions of dollars now. The reality of course. Yeah, they're members of a cult. The success of their TV show and the thoughtlessly positive media coverage of their unusually large brood disguised this for a while. But from the beginning there was a dark side to the Duggar story. And this brings me back again to Joshua Duggar. I had to really go into the weeks to do this one for you. In 2002, when Joshua was 14, he accosted his sister in the night and fondled her breasts and genitals. This sister eventually went to her father and told him what had happened. It is unclear whether or not Jim Bob acted on this information at first. He claimed on a 2006 police report, and again the abuse started in 2002, that it was not, and this report was not released until recently, that he disciplined Josh when he learned about the abuse. If he did, it did not stop the behavior. Between 2002 and 2003, Josh molested. Two of his sisters on at least four to five occasions. This evidently prompted Jim Bob Duggar to take more significant action. Not going to the cops, of course. Well, yeah, kind of, yeah. I mean, eventually, yeah, we will talk. We're we're getting there. Ohhh yeah, we're getting there. Twists. He went to the church elders who advised Jim Bob to send his son to a Christian training program. In an early report, Gawker described this program as involving quote hard work and counseling. And most coverage will be like, that's he went to. Like a physical labor, kind of like treatment program, it sounds like. I don't know, I don't know what the solution is like. Obviously, if you're a parent, even the best parent, this is like a a nightmare, impossible situation to handle. Like, there's no, there's no perfect way to deal with this kind of horrible thing. So I'm not going to say there's no, I'm sure there are treatment programs that are helpful. But Michelle Duggar has since admitted that when he was going to this treatment program, Joshua did not see a counselor. So what did his treatment involve? Thankfully, a lot has been written about how Bill Gothard's ATI Councils both victims and perpetrators of sexual abuse and that's who ran the camp. It was an ATI camp. I wanna quote from an interview with one woman who was sexually abused by staff at ATI for some context of how the process of dealing with sexual abuse within this cold works. From the New York Post quote, the organization did have a protocol for counseling sex abuse, a chart published in 2013 by recovering Grace, a resource for ex followers of IB, LP and ATI that the site claims was distributed at ATI. Counseling seminars for more than a decade. It explains how group leaders should help those who have experienced sexual assault. The onus for the attack is put on the victim for defrauding the abuser. Immodest dress, indecent exposure, being out from protection of our parents are all reasons that God let it happen, it reads. One marriage guide for women even includes a portion on what to do if your husband ever sexually handles your children's author Debbie Pearl, a minister whose books were sold by IBM LP, wrote in created to be his help meet although wives. To testify and pray that their husbands get 20 years in prison, they should also visit him there. Be an encouragement to him. Let him see the children three to four times a year and girls Bible study, Smith said she was told. You need to be very careful what you do, what you say, what you wear, how you act, because at any moment you could trigger a boy. Basically, there's absolutely no personal responsibility for the boys. Now. The source for that article, Miss Smith was molested while working at ATI's Training Center by a 21 year old staff member. He had a key to her. Room, and would come in every night and force himself on her. They did not have sex, but in her words, we did everything else. I didn't have the capacity to say hey, I don't like it. Which is key to the Duggar case, too, because one side effect of the lack of sex Ed is that girls don't grow up with any kind of vocabulary to describe what's happening to them. The reality of ATI, Bill Gothard, and the whole Quiverfull movement is that it is a cult, not just dedicated to bringing up Christian soldiers, but to providing the minute the top of it, with a constant stream of helpless victims, women they can molest and then. Named for it. Here's another quote from that article. When she returned home from the center, she and her father surprisingly received a call from Gothard, whose basically God said Smith, she assumes her friend had told one of the leaders about the incidents, although she was expecting to be reprimanded. Instead, Gothard wanted The Dirty details. He started asking the creepiest questions. He was like, what time did he kiss you and what time did he put his hands here and did he do this to you? Smith remembered, calling it gross. So. This is the guy who ran the treatment program that Josh went yeah, this is how he handles allegations of sexual abuse within his. His thing. So not an effective treatment program. I think it's fair to say, John, we're going to talk more about Bill Gothard, Josh Duggar and a lot of other very unpleasant people in part do, but for right now, how are you feeling? Ohh, you know, you you picked a heavy one. Yeah, it's a yeah, it's it's one of those like, it's heavy. Should be talked about. Yeah, it's it's nice. You know, it's, it's one of the few times I'm like, you know what? I'm glad I can look across the room and see Saddam Hussein and Saddam Hussein's. His friend and feel a little better about the world. They are right here. It does help talking about a horrible molestation cults when there's cats sitting on your legs and passed out. They've had a hard day of mostly sleeping, so they they need their rest. Sean well, yeah, that's gonna do it. For part one, we'll come back in Part 2 and have more uncomfortable conversations. Thank you for donating and helping to fund the recall effort against Mayor Ted Wheeler and those of you at home. If you're in the Portland area, go to total recall PDX. You can find out how you can sign up to recall Ted Wheeler, how you can sign your name on that, or even volunteer your time if you might want to donatealsototalrecallpdx.com, you can do it. There so. Ted Wheeler's not connected directly to any of this, but he does suck. And this sucks, too. So, yeah, I don't know. That's well, you know, it's kind of, it's it's hard to people that want to infiltrate and get into elected positions. It's kind of hard to fight against that when the mayor is someone like Ted Wheeler. Yeah. I mean, it does make it harder to deal with. It's all of the problems we have when the elected leaders that aren't weird cultists with dangerous male supremacist ideas are. Also in carpet, yeah, yeah. If you'd like to take a shot at someone that is a successful politician and that he knows how to get and keep power but is incompetent at anything else, you know, take it out on that Ted Wheeler today. Take it out on Ted Wheeler today and take it out on, I don't know, I don't know what, don't take other things out on other people. Be nice to the other people around you. Be nice to everyone but Ted Wheeler and ******* Bill Gothard and take it out, Duggar. It being the trash. For your friends. Because that's nice. Because that is nice. Yeah. Take out the trash. And then, you know, once it's out of your house, you can throw it anywhere. It doesn't matter. Yeah. Yeah, that's ethical, I think. All right. That's the. 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