Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Cult Behind Josh Duggar
Aired: 2021-08-03
Duration: 01:18:20


=== Clayton Eckard's Hoax Twins (01:31) ===

[00:00:00]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[00:00:02]  Guaranteed human.
[00:00:04]  In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
[00:00:11]  You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
[00:00:15]  I doctored the test once.
[00:00:17]  It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
[00:00:22]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[00:00:24]  Greg Goespie and Michael Mancini.
[00:00:26]  My mind was blown.
[00:00:27]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[00:00:29]  This is Love Trapped.
[00:00:30]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[00:00:32]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[00:00:37]  Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:00:44]  10-10 shots five, city hall building.
[00:00:47]  How could this ever happen in City Hall?
[00:00:49]  Somebody tell me that.
[00:00:50]  A shocking public murder.
[00:00:52]  This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
[00:00:58]  They screamed, get down, get down.
[00:01:00]  Those are shots.
[00:01:02]  A tragedy that's now forgotten.
[00:01:04]  And a mystery that may or may not have been political.
[00:01:07]  That may have been about sex.
[00:01:09]  Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:01:18]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[00:01:26]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:01:29]  He is not going to get away with this.

=== The Forgotten City Hall Tragedy (07:01) ===

[00:01:31]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:01:33]  We always say that.
[00:01:35]  Trust your girlfriends.
[00:01:38]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:01:39]  Trust me, babe.
[00:01:40]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:01:50]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
[00:01:54]  This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:01:58]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
[00:02:05]  An in-depth conversation with the man who's shaping our future.
[00:02:09]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:02:12]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:02:21]  Welcome to Behind the Bastards, the podcast that just got introduced properly because I fucked up.
[00:02:28]  Oh, fuck.
[00:02:29]  I wasn't supposed to do it right.
[00:02:30]  I was supposed to do it badly.
[00:02:32]  I'm so sorry, Sean.
[00:02:34]  Sean is here today because Sean donated a very generous amount to the recall effort for the mayor of Portland, who sucks.
[00:02:44]  And I wanted to introduce the podcast well for Sean by doing something incompetent, shouting the name of a dictator.
[00:02:50]  You know, I was, I, all day, all day, I was gonna, I was gonna shout Ceaușescu, just scream out Ceausescu's name, but I forgot to at the last minute.
[00:03:00]  And I'm, I'm so sorry, Sean.
[00:03:02]  That's okay.
[00:03:03]  I mean, it's, it's, you know, it's no Punani, but, you know.
[00:03:06]  Well, we can talk about Punani.
[00:03:08]  We can talk about, but, but we do have, we do have a different bastard today, although all bastards lead one way or the other to Steven Seagal.
[00:03:16]  I do believe that strongly.
[00:03:17]  Oh, yeah.
[00:03:17]  And I'm fairly certain you could connect today's bet.
[00:03:20]  Well, let me double check here.
[00:03:21]  Let me double check here.
[00:03:22]  Because we're talking about Josh Duggar today.
[00:03:24]  And in a broader sense, we're talking about aspects of the Quiverful movement.
[00:03:28]  And I kind of wonder, can wegal?
[00:03:35]  That's their...
[00:03:36]  I think I know how I can make this connection.
[00:03:39]  Okay.
[00:03:40]  Yes, we can make this connection.
[00:03:41]  So, Mike Huckabee went on The View in 2017 and denied that Joe Arpaio was a racist and says that he knows Joe Arpaio.
[00:03:50]  They're friends.
[00:03:50]  And he knows that Joe Arpaio was not a racist.
[00:03:53]  Joe Arpaio has shown up at campaign events and campaigned with both Jim Bob and Josh Dugger.
[00:04:00]  Joe Arpaio is connected directly to Steven Seagal.
[00:04:02]  We did it.
[00:04:03]  We did it.
[00:04:03]  So hey, perfect.
[00:04:05]  We should put it out there, put it out to the universe.
[00:04:07]  Steven Seagal, the bastard's Kevin Bacon.
[00:04:10]  That's right.
[00:04:10]  Yeah.
[00:04:12]  I mean, I bet if we were to spend the time, we could draw a connection between him and Hitler.
[00:04:17]  But I would probably need to do a little bit more digging than I'm going to do right now while we're recording an episode.
[00:04:23]  Or a depressingly less amount of digital.
[00:04:24]  Or to ruin it immediately.
[00:04:26]  Like there's just a photo of him in an SS uniform.
[00:04:33]  Oh, no, he hasn't aged nearly that well.
[00:04:35]  Sean, you want to tell the audience a little bit about yourself before we get into this episode?
[00:04:40]  Yeah, as I was telling you before we started up, I worked on the healthcare front lines during the pandemic and kind of sat on my hands while watching and paying attention to Twitter and all that stuff of all the protests and the tear gassing and all that stuff going on in real time.
[00:05:02]  Being kind of like, oh, I'm at this front of all the crazy stuff going on.
[00:05:10]  I don't want to bring COVID from one to the other.
[00:05:14]  So I was like, when this auction came up, I was like, oh, I am willing to spend a surreal amount of money to fuck Ted Wheeler.
[00:05:24]  Fuck Ted Wheeler.
[00:05:26]  Yeah, I'm glad that you did.
[00:05:28]  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 scan back in.
[00:05:38]  You can also print off sheets that'll allow you to sign up multiple people.
[00:05:40]  It'll explain everything.
[00:05:41]  There's like a whole process.
[00:05:42]  It's more complicated than it should be and more of a pain in the ass than it should be because they don't want Marys to get recalled.
[00:05:49]  But if you go to Total Recall PDX, they will explain the whole thing.
[00:05:52]  If you're not in Portland and you want to support 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.
[00:06:03]  They have paid people going out and who are helping to fund this.
[00:06:07]  Timbers of Thorns game, they're usually out there.
[00:06:10]  And it's, you know what, there's a lesson I learned from all this, and that is, you know, there's a phrase that comes up a lot and on this podcast too.
[00:06:17]  It's called fuck you money.
[00:06:19]  And it kind of usually people that are so super rich, you know, they have, it's like, fuck you, I have money.
[00:06:26]  Fuck you.
[00:06:27]  I have enough money to change your life if I want to, if you annoy me.
[00:06:30]  Yeah.
[00:06:31]  Yeah.
[00:06:31]  And it's, it's something most of us will never have.
[00:06:33]  Never, ever.
[00:06:34]  Nor should we ever have because it really kind of golems up your sneakle.
[00:06:38]  You know what I mean?
[00:06:39]  That's a good way to put it, Sean.
[00:06:41]  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 fuck Ted Wheeler money.
[00:06:51]  Yeah.
[00:06:52]  And that's that's together.
[00:06:54]  We can have fuck Ted Wheeler a variety of things because it's not just money that can fuck Ted Wheeler.
[00:07:00]  It's getting out on the ground and signing people up.
[00:07:02]  It's adding just your name or your name and people in your household to the sheet.
[00:07:06]  All of that is in an ephemeral sense, fuck Ted Wheeler money.
[00:07:10]  Yeah, you don't even have to spend a dime.
[00:07:12]  You could be sitting broke in a little in a little cafe in Louisiana.
[00:07:19]  Again, just that little penny in your pocket.
[00:07:21]  Just know that you do have fuck Ted Wheeler money.
[00:07:23]  Or if you're living in Portland, you got a good relationship with some neighbors, go out and sign some people up.
[00:07:27]  There's a lot of ways to fuck Ted Wheeler.
[00:07:31]  We could make a joke about the fact that he just got broken up with, but we won't because that's not classy.
[00:07:37]  The very little known Rule 35.
[00:07:41]  So, Sean, you, I asked you when you won the auction, who do you want to hear about?
[00:07:46]  And you gave me a couple of different names.
[00:07:48]  I did.
[00:07:48]  And the name that I decided to go with, because I've been wanting to cover this motherfucker for a while, was Josh Duggar.
[00:07:53]  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?
[00:08:00]  So Josh Duggar, so what I know about him was the, or J Doug's, you know, the Dig Dugger.
[00:08:07]  Good God.
[00:08:08]  I hope no one calls him that.
[00:08:10]  Not interested if she's 19 and counting.
[00:08:17]  I know, you know, obviously there's the violent child porn that came up, the being on the kind of pushing that quiverful life through TLC's reality show, 19 and Counting.

=== Separation of Church and State (14:58) ===

[00:08:32]  And he just seemed to be kind of like a celebrity spokesperson might not be the right way, but like a representative, 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.
[00:08:49]  Like I grew up in, it was real conservative Catholic, not quiverful necessarily, but kind of towards that lines and then like terms of politics and stuff.
[00:09:02]  So I kind of knew he had a thing with that.
[00:09:05]  And for me, part of kind of growing up and paying more attention to things and looking back on stuff, what got me interested in him was because this is something that is what he represents, I think is kind of not always mainstream, talked about as a danger.
[00:09:28]  A lot of like they call some sometimes they're ex-evangelicals or they'll call themselves ex-evangelicals.
[00:09:33]  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.
[00:09:44]  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.
[00:09:58]  So the kind of people he represents, I would say the best way to put it is they say that.
[00:10:04]  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.
[00:10:10]  Yeah.
[00:10:11]  And so when you talk about separate, 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.
[00:10:26]  And I think that really kind of can hook people into it or have people not realize what it is.
[00:10:32]  And I there's from a little bit of dabbling in some of the history of like apocalyptic groups or knowing people that got out of like doom cults.
[00:10:48]  The vein of kind of fundamentalism that he's in is one of those that's like, oh, Israel becoming a state is the sign of the end times.
[00:10:57]  I'm not exactly sure if he personally is within that.
[00:11:00]  Oh, I mean, yeah, we're going to go into detail about the exact chunk of evangelical Christianity.
[00:11:06]  You can't really explain the Duggars unless you explain the quiverful movement.
[00:11:10]  And so we have a bunch of that talk, and we're not going to go, we'll go deeper into the quiverful movement in another episode.
[00:11:16]  I have a friend who grew up in that particular cult.
[00:11:18]  And I met R.L.
[00:11:21]  No, he is a friend of mine, though.
[00:11:24]  I went to a traditional conservative Catholic college with his wife.
[00:11:29]  Yeah, I remember.
[00:11:30]  I was like, I don't know.
[00:11:31]  Eve.
[00:11:32]  Eve has been a friend of mine for years and years and years.
[00:11:35]  Who's how I met R.L. Stoller?
[00:11:37]  Yeah.
[00:11:38]  Okay.
[00:11:38]  So we actually know some of the same people who grew up in this cult.
[00:11:41]  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.
[00:11:46]  So I'm going to get into it.
[00:11:47]  From 1999 to 2002, Jim Bob Duggar was a state legislator in the Arkansas House of Representatives.
[00:11:54]  He made a couple of failed bids at 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.
[00:12:05]  He and his wife voted and then marched off with their sizable brood.
[00:12:08]  An AP photographer spotted them and took a picture.
[00:12:11]  The picture was purchased by the New York Times, and it went the early aughts version of viral.
[00:12:16]  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.
[00:12:26]  That's how it really got portrayed a lot in the mainstream media.
[00:12:29]  Parenting magazines reached out to Michelle Duggar, his wife, and asked her to write an article about child rearing.
[00:12:35]  Somewhere along the line, a savvy producer at Discovery Health decided the Duggars would make fascinating reality TV fodder.
[00:12:42]  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.
[00:12:52]  Yeah, I would like to interject real quick something that an analogy, or not an analogy, but a comparison that came up is because I grew up, I was one of six kids.
[00:13:02]  So, and there's always like the, oh, it's such a big family.
[00:13:04]  Like, it's kind of a, there's kind of that, like, remember from, I remember from the Rush Limbaugh show, you, or Rush Limbaugh episode, you talked about how he was feted by the media.
[00:13:13]  It's one of those things you're like, oh, this is interesting.
[00:13:15]  This is fun.
[00:13:16]  They don't dig.
[00:13:17]  And so then it gets spotlighted.
[00:13:20]  We're going to cover the, we're actually going to go deep into one of the earliest article I've been able to find on the family.
[00:13:26]  So for about seven years after 2008, which is, you know, kind of when they really hit the mainstream, the Duggar family grows steadily in fame.
[00:13:33]  They become millionaires.
[00:13:35]  I don't know exactly, it's hard to tell, right?
[00:13:37]  Because those, what are your net worth or what is this person's net worth is always kind of shitty.
[00:13:41]  But it seems like what I've heard is like three and a half million for Jim Bob, which doesn't seem impossible.
[00:13:47]  He's been on TV a while.
[00:13:48]  It's been a successful show.
[00:13:51]  And as a result of their growing fame, they became increasingly plugged into Republican Party politics.
[00:13:56]  Jim Bob and his oldest son, Josh, did photo ops with Arkansas Governor Mike Huckapi, who we now know is connected to Stephen Cigar.
[00:14:03]  Just one degree of separation.
[00:14:05]  And Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who I guess is connected to Stephen Cigar.
[00:14:08]  Well, probably actually has direct connections to Joe.
[00:14:11]  Oh, yeah.
[00:14:11]  They're both probably one step away.
[00:14:13]  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.
[00:14:25]  On July 11th, 2021, the Washington Post published an article titled An American Kingdom.
[00:14:31]  The log line was this, and this showed up all over my Twitter because of the fiction book that I just read about this sort of thing.
[00:14:38]  The log line was, a new and rapidly growing Christian movement is openly political, once a nation under God's authority, and is central to Donald Trump's GOP.
[00:14:47]  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.
[00:15:03]  After which time, Jesus Christ will return and reign for eternity.
[00:15:07]  Now, where that article gets things wrong is it classifies this movement as new.
[00:15:11]  It's not.
[00:15:12]  Now, you could argue that it's new that, because these are, you know, there's two broad in kind of this chunk of evangelical culture.
[00:15:19]  There's premillennial and post-millennial dispensationalists, right?
[00:15:22]  And premillennials were the guys who were like, it's going to like the God is going to like come soon and we're going to have us a rapture and shit.
[00:15:33]  And the post-millennials are like, we'll talk about this more a little bit later.
[00:15:36]  Are like, well, no, we have to ready the world for God to come back, right?
[00:15:39]  And one of those was dominant.
[00:15:41]  Like the left behind books are kind of the old, the older way.
[00:15:45]  And that's less dominant now because it didn't.
[00:15:47]  I don't know if you're aware of this, but the changing of the millennium didn't really do much.
[00:15:51]  Well, there was a movie with Nick Cage.
[00:15:53]  You kind of was a movie with Nick at that point.
[00:15:56]  God, I want to know more about how they managed to make that happen.
[00:15:59]  Yeah, because remember, he was so deep in tax route.
[00:16:02]  He had to sell his dinosaur bones and take any movie.
[00:16:05]  He collects too many dinosaurs.
[00:16:07]  And he had to be in a weird Christian propaganda movie.
[00:16:11]  Nicholas Cage is about the only actor I could never be angry at for doing that.
[00:16:16]  It's like, well, yeah, you got to keep your dinosaur bone addiction going, man.
[00:16:19]  I don't blame you for that.
[00:16:21]  Any movie Nicholas Cage is in.
[00:16:23]  Just keep the bones flowing.
[00:16:25]  Hey, that should have been the tagline.
[00:16:26]  Nicholas Cage has to bone.
[00:16:28]  Yeah.
[00:16:28]  Left behind.
[00:16:34]  So, yeah.
[00:16:36]  Yeah.
[00:16:36]  So again, not a super new movement, although it is kind of new and hat being as dominant within Event like that.
[00:16:41]  That has changed over time.
[00:16:42]  The election of Donald Trump was, which was, you know, partly fueled by evangelical support.
[00:16:48]  And so, sorry, I framed that badly.
[00:16:52]  Again, this is not a new movement, and it's tied into everything that's been happening over the last five, six 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 as kind of just like, ah, they're just, they're just nuts, right?
[00:17:04]  Like they lumped them all together as the same thing.
[00:17:07]  It's the same.
[00:17:07]  It was easy during the Obama era.
[00:17:09]  It seemed like you could make fun of these people and the silly things they'd say online and like movies like Jesus Camp and stuff.
[00:17:14]  And it didn't seem like as much of a, it didn't seem like they were gaining as much power as they were.
[00:17:20]  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 present groundswell of right-wing Christian support for crackdowns on voting rights, all of these things have their origins in the same very specific Christian subculture.
[00:17:34]  And for more than half a decade, the Duggar family was the Trojan horse for bringing that subculture into the American mainstream.
[00:17:40]  To understand the Duggars, we have to talk about the Quiverful movement.
[00:17:43]  The name comes from Psalm 127.
[00:17:46]  Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one's youth.
[00:17:50]  Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them.
[00:17:52]  They will not be put to shame when they contend with their enemies at the gate.
[00:17:56]  And the gist of this idea is that American society has become hopelessly godless and sinful.
[00:18:01]  And if you're going to bring the nation back to God, you need a new generation of holy warriors to fight for Christianity.
[00:18:06]  So it's your responsibility as a true Christian to pop out several basketball teams worth of babies in order to fight it, build the army of God, right?
[00:18:14]  That's the again, we both have friends who were raised to be soldiers in God's army.
[00:18:21]  Now, the quiverful movement evolved rather naturally out of several different strains of right-wing Christian culture.
[00:18:26]  One of these was the homeschooling community.
[00:18:29]  Obviously, parents can choose to homeschool kids for a lot of perfectly sane reasons.
[00:18:34]  And in fact, one of my old co-workers, Christy Harrison at Cracked, who is not at all a quiverful type Christian, homeschools her family and is a perfectly reasonable person, not shitting on the concept of homeschooling.
[00:18:47]  I was homeschooled from first grade through high school graduation.
[00:18:51]  Oh, wow.
[00:18:52]  But yours was pretty reliable.
[00:18:54]  I mean, it's hard for it not to be.
[00:18:56]  So here's the weird thing.
[00:18:57]  So the background on that is it was more, there's family dynamics, which I won't go into for the sake of, but basically it was kind of more of a, it's a thing we should do.
[00:19:08]  So it's kind of weird like we did a lot of the performative stuff without getting super into the culty stuff.
[00:19:14]  It was more of like viewed as an obligation to like for the community or like grandparents or whatever.
[00:19:21]  So it worked for me.
[00:19:22]  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.
[00:19:32]  Yeah.
[00:19:33]  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 can see that being a real bad time for me.
[00:19:47]  Yeah.
[00:19:48]  So, it like, I mean, and my dad had a restaurant, so I worked at that.
[00:19:55]  So, I kind of had like one foot in the secular, one foot in the like insular kind of sheltered.
[00:20:01]  Yeah, that seems like a pretty lucky, very, yeah.
[00:20:04]  One of the things, but if you're even if you're coming at it from a more reasonable perspective, if you're in homeschooling, you're going to encounter a lot of weird Christian propaganda because it's so dominant in homeschooling, right?
[00:20:14]  Even if you're trying to be secular with it, it's just everywhere in that community.
[00:20:19]  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.
[00:20:27]  The U.S. Department of Education currently estimates that more than 1 million school-age kids are homeschooled in the United States.
[00:20:34]  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 their children.
[00:20:42]  That is very common in the quiverful movement, especially in the fringes, not even the fringes of it.
[00:20:48]  A lot of people in it, like maybe you get birth certificate, maybe you get a birth certificate for your sons.
[00:20:53]  You don't get them for your daughters because birth certificate, she could leave at some point.
[00:20:57]  She's got a social security number.
[00:20:58]  What do you get with a birth certificate and a social security?
[00:21:00]  A passport.
[00:21:01]  What do you have a passport to do?
[00:21:02]  You leave.
[00:21:03]  You leave.
[00:21:04]  Get away from your weird family.
[00:21:05]  You cut it off the root.
[00:21:07]  So we really don't know how many kids there are like this.
[00:21:12]  And that's, I mean, there's a lot of other different subcultures.
[00:21:15]  Sovereign citizens get looped into some aspects of this, but not all.
[00:21:19]  Like, once you're at the, once you're homesteading in the middle of nowhere and not getting birth certificates for your children, you become, you get to come into contact with a lot of subcultures.
[00:21:29]  It's like the white version of avoiding immigration by not doing the census.
[00:21:34]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:21:35]  Which you, you do not have, well, I don't know.
[00:21:38]  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 shit was tried to be done by the Trump administration.
[00:21:47]  I don't know.
[00:21:47]  It's a bummer.
[00:21:48]  The census should, it shouldn't.
[00:21:50]  Yeah, that's a whole other rant.
[00:21:53]  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.
[00:22:04]  We did a two-parter on this.
[00:22:05]  Jerry Falwell was the biggest man in that movement, but there were a lot of, I mean, it was a huge movement, right?
[00:22:11]  A lot of people were involved.
[00:22:12]  Another prominent member of the early religious right and the moral majority was Howard Phillips, a Russian Jewish man who converted to evangelical Christianity.
[00:22:21]  He broke off from the Republican Party in 1974 and founded the far-right Constitution Party.
[00:22:27]  Now, Howard and his son Doug were two of the first prominent advocates of a very specific way of looking at the culture war in the United States.
[00:22:35]  Like many in the religious right, they argued that the struggle between humanism and Christianity was a war.
[00:22:41]  They went on to argue that this war could only be won by Christian women.
[00:22:45]  And the only way for Christian women to fight was for them to die to themselves.
[00:22:50]  This is the term they used, i.e., give up their personal ambitions and completely submit to their husbands.
[00:22:56]  The basic idea, as the Phillipses and others preached it, was that Jesus was the general of a great heavenly army.
[00:23:03]  Soldiers in a real army are expected to follow orders whether or not they agree with or understand them.
[00:23:09]  Unless you're in the German army now.
[00:23:12]  Yeah, no, I remember that.
[00:23:14]  Women needed to submit totally to their husbands because that's what Jesus asked.
[00:23:20]  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.
[00:23:26]  By giving up your life, that's you exercising agency.

=== Two Golden Rules for Men (03:55) ===

[00:23:31]  Yes.
[00:23:32]  To put it in context again for the more secular people, you think about war, you know, like war crimes that the United States gets away with.
[00:23:41]  If you're in a heavenly army, what are war crimes?
[00:23:43]  You know, it's the same where it's like, yeah, you know, it's going to happen and it's going to get covered up.
[00:23:48]  And it's okay as long as you achieve the objective.
[00:23:50]  It's that.
[00:23:50]  Yeah.
[00:23:51]  There's a lot of crimes that are fine with this, but you know who doesn't do crimes?
[00:23:57]  Unless they're rad.
[00:23:59]  I was going to say people who aren't Elon Musk, but then you said crimes.
[00:24:02]  Yeah, so crimes, not crimes.
[00:24:05]  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.
[00:24:15]  I was going to say they have to be arrested for it to be a crime.
[00:24:17]  They have to be arrested for it to be a crime.
[00:24:19]  That's how I live my life, and that's how our sponsors do too.
[00:24:23]  Here's some ads.
[00:24:28]  In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
[00:24:34]  The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
[00:24:40]  This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
[00:24:43]  You doctored this particular test twice, Ms. Owens, correct?
[00:24:47]  I doctored the test once.
[00:24:48]  It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
[00:24:51]  I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
[00:24:55]  Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
[00:24:58]  They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
[00:25:00]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[00:25:02]  Greg Oespi and Michael Marcini.
[00:25:05]  My mind was blown.
[00:25:06]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[00:25:08]  This is Love Trap.
[00:25:10]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[00:25:12]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[00:25:16]  Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
[00:25:23]  This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
[00:25:28]  Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:25:37]  10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
[00:25:40]  A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
[00:25:45]  From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach.
[00:25:50]  Murder at City Hall.
[00:25:51]  How could this have happened in City Hall?
[00:25:52]  Somebody tell me that.
[00:25:53]  Jeffrey Hood did.
[00:25:55]  July 2003.
[00:25:57]  Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
[00:26:02]  Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
[00:26:05]  And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
[00:26:13]  Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
[00:26:16]  A shocking public murder.
[00:26:17]  I screamed, get down, get down.
[00:26:19]  Those are shots.
[00:26:20]  Those are shots.
[00:26:21]  Get down.
[00:26:21]  A charismatic politician.
[00:26:23]  You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
[00:26:25]  I still have a weapon.
[00:26:27]  And I could shoot you.
[00:26:30]  And an outsider with a secret.
[00:26:32]  He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
[00:26:35]  That may or may not have been political.
[00:26:37]  That may have been about sex.
[00:26:39]  Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
[00:26:43]  Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:26:52]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:26:56]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:26:59]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:27:02]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:27:06]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:27:09]  I'm Anna Sinfield.
[00:27:11]  And in this new season of The Girlfriends.
[00:27:13]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:27:15]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:27:20]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:27:22]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:27:24]  The cops didn't seem to care.

=== Feminists vs. Fundamentalist Control (15:43) ===

[00:27:26]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:27:29]  I said, oh, hell no.
[00:27:30]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:27:33]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:27:37]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:27:39]  Trust me, babe.
[00:27:40]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:27:50]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[00:27:56]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:28:02]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
[00:28:09]  From power to parenthood.
[00:28:11]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
[00:28:14]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[00:28:17]  From addiction to acceleration.
[00:28:19]  The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
[00:28:23]  You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
[00:28:30]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[00:28:32]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
[00:28:39]  Find out on Mostly Human.
[00:28:41]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:28:44]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:28:55]  Ah, we're back.
[00:28:56]  Sean, we're talking about Howard Phillips, and we're talking about the birth of the religious right.
[00:29:04]  So in speeches that Doug Phillips gives to packed, his son, Doug, gives to packed audiences, he reads verses from the Bible like Ephesians 5, 21.
[00:29:17]  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.
[00:29:25]  Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.
[00:29:31]  Now, Doug calls this the quote, best kept secret of modern Christian marriages.
[00:29:36]  And then he says stuff like this, you are a helpmeet.
[00:29:39]  The Bible says that man is not made for women, but women is made for, but the woman is made for the man.
[00:29:45]  If you have a problem with that, take it up with the creator, not Phillips.
[00:29:48]  I'm just quoting.
[00:29:49]  Until we get comfortable playing those roles, we'll never be at peace.
[00:29:52]  But if we accept those roles, whew, half the battle is diminished already just by the fact that we accept God's creation order.
[00:30:00]  This philosophy has come to be known as complementarianism, i.e., women were created not as individual beings of their own with independent desires and talents, but as a complement to men, right?
[00:30:13]  Yes.
[00:30:14]  It's the little known fact.
[00:30:15]  That was actually the original tagline for G.I. Joe.
[00:30:19]  Submitting to your husbands is half the battle.
[00:30:23]  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.
[00:30:38]  In his speeches, Phillips loves to quote Isaiah 3.12, which cites God's curse upon a sinful nation.
[00:30:44]  Children are your oppressors and women rule over you.
[00:30:47]  This is God saying, like, this is how I'm going to curse you if you don't follow my laws.
[00:30:51]  I'll make your children oppress you and the women will be in charge.
[00:30:55]  So he's saying that, like, if that's what God is, like, feminism is a curse from God.
[00:31:00]  If we don't obey his call, he'll curse us with feminism.
[00:31:03]  Well, going back even further again from my 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 underfoot because that's because that's, you know, that's that was just how it worked because that's how the story started.
[00:31:24]  That's how the story started.
[00:31:26]  Now, the nightmare for these people is a world in which Christian men do not have total control over their families.
[00:31:33]  While mainstream culture filled with movies featuring strong female protagonists in the 80s and 90s, 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.
[00:31:47]  He called the young Christians he preached to in the 1990s and early aughts the reclamation generation, because their duty was to retake society from liberal feminists.
[00:31:58]  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.
[00:32:05]  I know.
[00:32:06]  They are really bullish on its ability to change society.
[00:32:11]  Now, homeschooling was considered one of the necessary tools of reclamation.
[00:32:16]  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.
[00:32:25]  One of the things I find most interesting about these people is the sheer amount of weight they give to feminism.
[00:32:30]  And again, they have a lot of they really think that it has a lot more influence and government than I think it does.
[00:32:38]  Here's Mary Pride, editor of Practical Homeschooling magazine and one of the most influential figures in the homeschooling movement.
[00:32:45]  Quote, Christians have accepted feminists' moderate demands for family planning and careers while rejecting the radical side of feminism, meaning lesbianism and abortion.
[00:32:53]  What most do not see is that one demand leads to the other.
[00:32:56]  Feminism is a totally self-consistent system aimed at rejecting God's role for women.
[00:33:00]  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 a one-way ticket to social anarchy.
[00:33:09]  Feminism is self-consistent.
[00:33:10]  The Christianity of the 50s wasn't.
[00:33:12]  Feminists had a plan for women.
[00:33:14]  Christians didn't.
[00:33:14]  And this is her explanation for why feminism was winning and they were, you know, Christianity is under siege and whatnot.
[00:33:21]  Yeah, to be fair, there's probably, I mean, obviously a lot of people are like, no, feminism, but there's probably a good chunk that are, that know they have to pump it up to get people to keep the boogie message.
[00:33:34]  Yes, and when I say, by the way, when I'm saying stuff like that, I think these people have an outside idea of the impact feminism is having.
[00:33:40]  It's not an anti-feminist thing.
[00:33:41]  It's just like there's still a lot of bias against women in our culture.
[00:33:45]  I think they're overestimating the power that feminism has culturally.
[00:33:50]  Now, Pride's major contribution to the evolution of what became the Quiverful movement was to provide a plan for women.
[00:33:57]  She helped, and again, that's her idea, is like Christianity hasn't had a plan for women.
[00:34:00]  Feminists did, and that's why we're losing.
[00:34:02]  They had a vision for the future and we didn't.
[00:34:05]  She helped to create a whole integrated lifestyle of biblical womanhood.
[00:34:09]  From the book Quiverful by Catherine Joyce, which is a great way to get up to speed on all this if you're interested.
[00:34:15]  Very good book.
[00:34:16]  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.
[00:34:35]  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 owned thinking, and making sure it doesn't come back.
[00:34:47]  Now, I'm leaving out a lot, and again, Catherine Joyce's Quiverful is a great book for a more complete understanding of all this.
[00:34:53]  Two other important contributors to this, this, what becomes the ideologies that the Duggars follow are John Piper and Wayne Grudem.
[00:35:02]  These are both Reformed Baptist preachers who headed up the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, or CBMW.
[00:35:10]  In 1987, the year of its founding, the CBMW released something called the Danverse Statement, which was both a mission statement for the council and a rallying cry to conservative Christian forces.
[00:35:21]  The statement urged Christians to fight egalitarian influences in the evangelical church, particularly the scourge of Christian feminism.
[00:35:29]  It argued that women should be barred from positions of authority in churches.
[00:35:34]  Now, the Danver statement was signed by some people you might know.
[00:35:37]  Beverly LaHaye, wife of the author of Left Behind, Tim LaHaye, signed it.
[00:35:41]  Pat Robertson also signed it.
[00:35:43]  Dorothy Patterson and Paige Patterson signed it.
[00:35:46]  You probably don't know those last two names, but Paige orchestrated the right-wing takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention, the organization behind the second largest Christian denomination in the United States.
[00:35:56]  We talk about this in the Moral Majority episode, but a lot of Baptists used to be completely fine with abortion.
[00:36:01]  Up until like the 70s, it was not a super controversial.
[00:36:04]  Now, the Catholics have always had their whole thing going on about it.
[00:36:08]  Every spirit 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 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.
[00:36:26]  And I watched Meaning of Life in that song, and I didn't really understand it, but I let them march around the playground singing it, and it didn't go over well in suburban Texas.
[00:36:36]  Now, was it because you sang it or because you sang it at the end, you went, Jazan's.
[00:36:40]  It didn't do that, but I didn't get what Jazz Hance was.
[00:36:45]  It must have been like third or fourth grade.
[00:36:47]  But so, yeah.
[00:36:50]  So, in 1998, 11 years after the Danver statement, the SBC, the Southern Baptist Convention, released a statement of their own in which they urged wives to graciously submit to their husbands.
[00:37:01]  Mike Huckabee was one signatory to the statement.
[00:37:04]  The SBC, by the way, speaks for about 16 million Americans.
[00:37:08]  So, by the end of the 20th century, many of the ideas that are central to the Quiverful movement had started to become mainstream on the right wing.
[00:37:16]  You're not talking about a fringe ideology when the SBC is endorsing some of this stuff, right?
[00:37:21]  That's well, this is was it the either the Falwell or the Reagan episode?
[00:37:27]  I think it was you that talked about it, where it was like the evangelicals saw Reagan as an in, and then Reagan used them and then didn't give them what they wanted.
[00:37:36]  So then they started going, Oh, we need to start taking over and making our stuff.
[00:37:41]  We need to, instead of just giving them our vote and expecting stuff in return, we need to infiltrate and put our people into it's the stuff you're seeing QAnon guys try to do right now, and Christians continue to extremist Christians continue to, where it's like, well, we got to get people on the school boards, we got to get people in local elected positions.
[00:37:57]  They've been doing this for a while, and it works, which is every time I see people on the left be like, no, the thing to do is throw up a poster on Twitter and have a march, it's like, well, that's good too.
[00:38:10]  And I get the frustration with electoralism, but they've gotten a lot of crazy shit done because they've been voting for decades.
[00:38:16]  I don't know.
[00:38:17]  We don't have the time anymore to, hey, that's a longer.
[00:38:21]  You can make radical changes democratically in this society.
[00:38:26]  It just takes decades of generations of people giving up their entire lives to the cause.
[00:38:32]  But it worked for them.
[00:38:33]  Yeah.
[00:38:34]  Now, obviously, most Southern Baptists are not out there having a dozen kids eschewing alcohol, forcing their daughters to wear sackcloth dresses and refusing to get birth certificates for their children.
[00:38:43]  If you want to view the struggle for Christian domination of the U.S. as a war, and these people do, the Quiverful families are like special forces.
[00:38:50]  Their sons, like Josh Duggar, are supposed to be trained from childhood to seek positions of influence in the government and culture.
[00:38:57]  But I'm getting ahead of myself here.
[00:38:58]  We've covered most of the ideological underpinnings of the Quiverful movement, but the Duggar family are also members of a very specific cult within this chunk of the Christian right.
[00:39:08]  They are followers of a guy named Bill Gothard.
[00:39:11]  It's spelled got hard, and that'll be relevant in an unfortunate way later.
[00:39:17]  Yeah, you know Bill.
[00:39:19]  You're familiar with Bill Gothard.
[00:39:21]  I see how you erected that joke.
[00:39:25]  Gothard founded the Institute in Basic Life Principles in 1961.
[00:39:30]  So this is the religious rights not a thing when he starts this, right?
[00:39:34]  Not in a political way, right?
[00:39:36]  So he's really on the bleeding edge of all this.
[00:39:39]  And it was originally called campus teams, and its purpose was to recruit young people, obviously, in campuses for Christ.
[00:39:45]  The IBLP was fundamentalist from the get-go, and it was also male supremacist.
[00:39:50]  Women were supposed to marry men chosen by their fathers and submit entirely to first their father and then their husband.
[00:39:58]  Dating and flirting were forbidden.
[00:40:00]  So much as winking at a man is seen as lustful and morally equivalent to prostitution.
[00:40:05]  In the early 1980s, the IBLP 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.
[00:40:13]  Yeah.
[00:40:15]  Weird how that keeps happening.
[00:40:17]  Weird how none of these guys practice.
[00:40:19]  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.
[00:40:27]  Well, you know, and if they had gotten them pregnant, I mean, bonus, he got an extra soldier.
[00:40:31]  There's an extra soldier.
[00:40:32]  So, Bill never married or had kids, which again, interesting.
[00:40:37]  But his IBLP became the center of education and philosophy for the Quiverful movement.
[00:40:42]  The IBLP, 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 two weeks.
[00:40:52]  Yeah.
[00:40:52]  And if you want a much more detailed podcast series on Bill Gothard, the podcast Someplace Underneath, which is part of the last podcast on the Left Network, did like a four or five parter on this.
[00:41:04]  That's very, very good.
[00:41:06]  I was going to say, too, there's one called Christian Right Cast.
[00:41:09]  Oh, I haven't heard that.
[00:41:10]  So that's one.
[00:41:13]  It's a couple ex-evangelicals, or I forget if that's how they're for themselves, but it's on Apple.
[00:41:21]  I think it may have moved to Flex or something like that, but it goes into guys and like there's a thing on Bill Gothard and a thing.
[00:41:30]  I don't know if you have it in there, but like his rules for how women should dress.
[00:41:35]  Yeah.
[00:41:35]  Talk a little bit about that.
[00:41:36]  Yeah.
[00:41:37]  But yeah, check out both of those if you want more.
[00:41:39]  There's really important stuff.
[00:41:40]  And someplace underneath, they go into less detail about the stuff that I just covered, but they go into a lot more detail about Bill.
[00:41:46]  Yeah.
[00:41:48]  So the IBLP ran what was effectively a troubled teen facility that started up in the late 1980s, which was basically a forced labor camp for kids.
[00:41:57]  And they also operated the Advanced Training Institute, or ATI, which created curriculum for homeschooled families.
[00:42:04]  The Duggars were absolutely slavish devotees of Gothardism, and all of their children were raised on ATI curriculum from a write-up by former cult member Delanier Bartlett, who grew up in the same community.
[00:42:17]  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.
[00:42:29]  The ATI curriculum also has a big focus on teaching students how they should behave.
[00:42:33]  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.
[00:42:45]  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.
[00:42:54]  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.
[00:43:01]  And we're not going to talk about to train up a child, but that's very big in these cultures.
[00:43:06]  Child abuse is like massive in this community.

=== Massive Child Abuse in Cults (04:55) ===

[00:43:09]  Oh, yeah.
[00:43:10]  Yeah.
[00:43:12]  Yeah.
[00:43:12]  I was going to say that that sounds almost sounds more like something you'd see on a Japanese game show than To be a fully grown man on a blanket.
[00:43:22]  Still wearing a diaper.
[00:43:23]  Yeah, still wearing a diaper.
[00:43:25]  I would watch that show.
[00:43:26]  Oh, yeah.
[00:43:26]  They're adults.
[00:43:27]  I don't like blanket training's fine.
[00:43:28]  If that's like your kink or whatever, more power to you.
[00:43:31]  Now, I found another interview with a survival of Gothard's cult on Salon.
[00:43:36]  This person went into a great deal more detail about what kids were taught about sex through this curriculum.
[00:43:42]  Quote: The so-called wisdom booklets that form the backbone of ATI children's educations contain more Bible verses than they do information.
[00:43:50]  Particularly lacking in a religious sect so obsessed with reproduction is any kind of sex education.
[00:43:55]  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.
[00:44:02]  However, the opposite is believed of men.
[00:44:04]  ATI teaches that men have nearly uncontrollable sex drives ready to erupt at the mere sight of a pantleg or a perm.
[00:44:10]  To illustrate this point, ATI families are encouraged to maintain a no-computer rule for their sons, but not their daughters.
[00:44:16]  Gothard also encouraged men to turn towards the wall when dining at restaurants so as to not be tempted by a waitress or a stray attractive woman.
[00:44:25]  You know, those stray attractive women just kind of out there tempting you by existing.
[00:44:32]  Just wandering, wandering the streets.
[00:44:35]  Yeah, just constantly.
[00:44:37]  I mean, that is how they view it, though, is that women are caught, like they, that's an attack on you.
[00:44:42]  If a woman's out there living her life and you find her attractive, that's like an assault on you.
[00:44:47]  Well, yeah, because if you're in an army, you're fighting another army, so that means they're also a unified trained force of the devil.
[00:44:54]  So they're the sexy Taliban out there trying to steal your virtue.
[00:44:58]  Yeah, it's like a Halloween costume, but as regular military gear.
[00:45:02]  Yeah.
[00:45:03]  Now, I'm going to continue that quote.
[00:45:05]  Not that our supposed lack of a sex drive absolved us from sexual responsibility.
[00:45:09]  ATI taught us that it is our job to keep men's desires from erupting into lust or sexual activity.
[00:45:14]  We were taught that it was our sin if we cause a man to lust after us.
[00:45:18]  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.
[00:45:26]  Modesty wasn't only about dress, it was also about behavior.
[00:45:30]  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.
[00:45:41]  Essentially, a good ATI woman is sweet, silent, and obedient.
[00:45:45]  This combination of zero sexual knowledge and deeply ingrained submissiveness left many young girls in our church especially vulnerable to sexual abuse.
[00:45:52]  As a teenager, I became aware that several of my friends were being molested by their older brothers or fathers.
[00:45:58]  They would start stilted conversations with me about it, but none of us actually understood the concept of sex or rape or molestation enough to actually discuss it.
[00:46:06]  So it stayed on the level of furtively whispered hints.
[00:46:09]  And this is, I mean, you can draw a line here between like 1984, the idea behind New Speak, is that if you limit the vocabulary of a community, you limit their ability to express certain things.
[00:46:21]  Like, that's what's going on here.
[00:46:22]  If you limit the ability of kids to understand sexuality in this way, you limit their ability to know when they've been wronged.
[00:46:29]  Well, you take away communication.
[00:46:30]  Exactly.
[00:46:30]  Yeah.
[00:46:31]  And to kind of 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 Atlanta, the spa shooter, who was like, oh, they were.
[00:46:50]  Like, I would not be surprised if it was just like basically they were immodest.
[00:46:56]  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 this kind of thinking.
[00:47:10]  It's like they wouldn't stop tempting me.
[00:47:12]  So I don't know.
[00:47:14]  I mean, again, we don't know about just like it's to Give people like this is a to bring it a little in from the abstract is like, yeah, this is this is recent stuff and it can go a variety of different ways because people are different.
[00:47:26]  They're gonna react differently and take it.
[00:47:29]  Some of those reactions are gonna be scary as hell.
[00:47:32]  Yeah.
[00:47:33]  So, but you know what's not scary as hell?
[00:47:36]  Uh, a bright summer day.
[00:47:39]  I was gonna say capitalism, but uh, I guess both capitalism and a bright summer day can be scary because capitalism is a part of the engine of uh carbon release that is causing our summers to be hotter and drier.
[00:47:53]  So, yeah, you can take it in a darker direction than I wanted to.
[00:47:57]  Um, but a bright summer day, I mean, it won't pay you to say that it's that's not a problem.
[00:48:02]  So, I mean, capitalism, at least, you know, make a buck.

=== Making a Buck by Denying Problems (03:56) ===

[00:48:04]  At least I'll make a buck by denying that there's any problem with it.
[00:48:08]  Hey, here's yours in 2023.
[00:48:17]  Former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
[00:48:22]  The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
[00:48:27]  This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
[00:48:30]  You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
[00:48:34]  I doctored the test once.
[00:48:35]  It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
[00:48:39]  I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
[00:48:43]  Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
[00:48:45]  They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
[00:48:47]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[00:48:49]  Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
[00:48:52]  My mind was blown.
[00:48:54]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[00:48:55]  This is Love Trap.
[00:48:57]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[00:48:59]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[00:49:03]  Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
[00:49:10]  This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
[00:49:15]  Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:49:25]  10-10 shots fired.
[00:49:26]  City Hall building.
[00:49:28]  A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
[00:49:32]  From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach: murder at City Hall.
[00:49:38]  How could this have happened in City Hall?
[00:49:40]  Somebody tell me that.
[00:49:41]  Jeffrey Hood did.
[00:49:42]  July 2003.
[00:49:44]  Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
[00:49:49]  Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
[00:49:52]  And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
[00:50:00]  Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
[00:50:03]  A shocking public murder.
[00:50:05]  I screamed, get down, get down.
[00:50:06]  Those are shots.
[00:50:07]  Those are shots.
[00:50:08]  Get down.
[00:50:08]  A charismatic politician.
[00:50:10]  You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
[00:50:12]  I still have a weapon.
[00:50:15]  And I could shoot you.
[00:50:18]  And an outsider with a secret.
[00:50:20]  He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
[00:50:22]  That may or may not have been political.
[00:50:24]  That may have been about sex.
[00:50:26]  Listen to Rorschach.
[00:50:27]  Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
[00:50:30]  Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:50:39]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:50:43]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:50:46]  If you play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:50:49]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:50:53]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:50:57]  I'm Anna Sinfield.
[00:50:58]  And in this new season of The Girlfriends.
[00:51:00]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:51:02]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:51:07]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:51:09]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:51:11]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:51:13]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:51:16]  I said, oh hell no.
[00:51:18]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:51:20]  He's gonna get what he deserves.
[00:51:24]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:51:26]  Trust me, babe.
[00:51:27]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:51:37]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[00:51:42]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[00:51:47]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[00:51:53]  Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy.

=== The Duggar Family Financial Lifestyle (16:10) ===

[00:52:01]  Really too many to name.
[00:52:02]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[00:52:08]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:52:11]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:52:14]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:52:15]  That's so funny.
[00:52:17]  Shari, stay with me each night, each morning.
[00:52:25]  Say you love me.
[00:52:28]  You know I.
[00:52:30]  So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:52:40]  Okay, we're back.
[00:52:42]  So the Duggars didn't bring Bill Gothard or ATI up often on the show in ways that would have been immediately obvious.
[00:52:49]  You could see books in the show, right?
[00:52:51]  There's a lot of like, it's visible if you know what to look for, but they're not out there like talking about how awesome Bill Gothard is.
[00:52:59]  The signs were there if you knew where to look.
[00:53:00]  At Duggar weddings, celebrants would dedicate an entire cake to Bill Gothard, which is, again, cult shit.
[00:53:06]  All the Duggar women had distinctively permed hair because Bill believed that curly bangs brought out a woman's natural beauty.
[00:53:13]  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.
[00:53:23]  Over the years they were on TV.
[00:53:24]  The Duggar family, particularly Jim Bob, were extremely open about the fact that their showbiz career was a ministry.
[00:53:31]  They saw it as a way to recruit.
[00:53:33]  With the help of the Discovery Camera crew, selective editing and scripting, they were able to portray what was really, in reality, an abusive cult as a quirky lifestyle choice.
[00:53:42]  Perhaps even one viewers would want to emulate.
[00:53:44]  Jim Bob liked to say that they were just trying to convince people not to get abortions because by seeing that like, oh, well, this family can handle 14, 15, 16 kids.
[00:53:51]  So obviously I should keep this one kid, right?
[00:53:54]  It was a big part of like why he said they were doing it.
[00:53:57]  But of course, the real purpose behind all this was to build a larger cultural space for Gothardism, the Quiverful movement, and male supremacist fundamentalist Christianity in American culture.
[00:54:09]  This is also part of a broader fundamentalist strategy.
[00:54:12]  It came about as part of a split between premillennial and post-millennial dispensationalists.
[00:54:17]  The former believed that the rapture was coming any day and soon the faith will be brought up to heaven, the world would end.
[00:54:22]  The latter believed that God wouldn't let Christ return until they established a godly world.
[00:54:26]  In order to do that, they had to recruit.
[00:54:28]  And it wasn't enough to get people to accept Christ.
[00:54:30]  They had to convince folks to follow the rules, their rules, otherwise the world wouldn't be godly enough.
[00:54:36]  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.
[00:54:46]  From Quiverful, quote, Mark Driscoll's Mars Hill Church, rated the eighth most influential church in America, relies on the fixtures of emergent or seeker-oriented ministries, such as counter-cultural groups like bikers or skaters for Christ, to attract its young urban congregation.
[00:55:03]  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.
[00:55:18]  In Driscoll's case, to a doctrine that places substantial weight on gender submission and a wife's role in marriage.
[00:55:25]  So, again, these are all, this is just, it's how cults work.
[00:55:29]  It's how QAon works too.
[00:55:30]  You can see it in the fact that like there's elements of Q that are about the JFK conspiracy, the elements of Q that are about like aliens and stuff, that are about vaccines.
[00:55:40]  And it all leads back to this er conspiracy.
[00:55:43]  And that's how people get pulled in.
[00:55:45]  And that's what makes it more, it's syncretism, you know?
[00:55:48]  It's how all this shit works.
[00:55:49]  Wasn't that the Bill Cooper?
[00:55:52]  Yeah.
[00:55:52]  The Cooper.
[00:55:53]  That was the...
[00:55:54]  He was making a great at that.
[00:55:55]  Yeah.
[00:55:56]  QAnon Anonymous just did a episode on Bill Cooper.
[00:56:00]  I do love Bill.
[00:56:01]  He really did everything right.
[00:56:04]  One of these days.
[00:56:05]  One of these days.
[00:56:06]  But didn't you do one on?
[00:56:07]  Oh, yeah.
[00:56:08]  I did a two-year-old.
[00:56:08]  I was going to say, like, I remember listening to it.
[00:56:10]  Did I feverdream though?
[00:56:11]  Like Bill, I hope to go out to a mountaintop assault by law enforcement while broadcasting nonsense on the radio.
[00:56:23]  Yeah, so the Duggars TV ministry worked the same way as like these bikers and skaters for Christ at the Mars Hill Church.
[00:56:30]  It's all the same idea.
[00:56:32]  To draw people in, you have to whitewash a lot of realities about their lifestyle, make it look good.
[00:56:36]  And once people start to get in, you can start laying on some of the more heavy stuff.
[00:56:42]  Here's one issue with their lifestyle.
[00:56:44]  Here's one of the reasons why what they're actually doing is objectively bad.
[00:56:48]  This is not just an I'm not just saying it because I'm not religious.
[00:56:52]  I'm saying this because it's abusive.
[00:56:53]  And one of the reasons it's abusive is that 19 kids is way the fuck too many for two parents to adequately care for in most situations.
[00:57:00]  Almost any, I'm going to say any situation.
[00:57:03]  The Duggars explain how they do this as using the buddy system.
[00:57:06]  Every kid has a buddy, an older sibling who is supposed to help raise and take care of them.
[00:57:11]  Mom's buddy is the youngest baby while she's nursing.
[00:57:14]  But once that's done, she hands the baby off to the next youngest daughter and the cycle goes on.
[00:57:18]  Most quiverful families work this way.
[00:57:20]  I've heard from my friend Eve, her family work this way.
[00:57:23]  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.
[00:57:30]  And that's not great.
[00:57:32]  Obviously, siblings are supposed to, you're, you know, older siblings are supposed to look out for younger siblings.
[00:57:36]  You definitely learn things from your siblings.
[00:57:39]  They're not supposed to be parents.
[00:57:42]  That robs them of the chance to be a child.
[00:57:44]  Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.
[00:57:46]  So let me get this straight.
[00:57:48]  You're saying if a large family basically does a capitalism on its own structure, it's independent contracts.
[00:57:56]  Where the CEOs make middle management and the workers do all that.
[00:58:02]  Wait a minute.
[00:58:02]  You're saying that doesn't work?
[00:58:04]  Yeah, I mean, the people I know who grew up in it have complaints.
[00:58:09]  I'm too innocent for this.
[00:58:10]  I don't know.
[00:58:11]  I don't think.
[00:58:13]  So most quiverful families work this way.
[00:58:16]  And again, it's usually the daughters who do most of the sons supposed to do some of it, but it's generally the daughters who are handling an awful lot of the child rearing.
[00:58:22]  And this is a huge burden on them.
[00:58:24]  It stops them from having a childhood.
[00:58:26]  It also means that older siblings are often the only ones watching out for their younger siblings.
[00:58:32]  This becomes a problem when one of those older siblings is a sexual abuser.
[00:58:36]  And that brings us to Josh Duggar.
[00:58:39]  Joshua James Duggar was born on March 3rd, 1988.
[00:58:43]  He was born in Taunatown, Arkansas to Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar.
[00:58:47]  When Josh was a baby, the family was much less extreme in their beliefs than they would become.
[00:58:51]  Michelle had taken birth control before getting pregnant, and she started taking it again after Josh was born.
[00:58:57]  She suffered a miscarriage, though, which she and Jim Bob blamed on the birth control.
[00:59:01]  We obviously have no idea what caused it.
[00:59:03]  Miscarriages happen, you know, just a thing.
[00:59:05]  Jump in real quick.
[00:59:06]  That's that's that's another thing I think that can get people sucked in.
[00:59:10]  Uh, 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's something about having that makes you like kind of, I don't know if it's just like that insecurity of like, am I doing things right or what or not?
[00:59:26]  But I think it makes you more pliable to get sucked into something.
[00:59:31]  Yeah, I mean, that totally makes sense.
[00:59:32]  I mean, um, and it's it's all I think a lot of it is just like you have a kid, it's really scary because, like, there's no really, there's no map for how to have a kid and raise it right.
[00:59:43]  And like, sometimes people do everything right, and your kid, I don't know, murders somebody or something.
[00:59:48]  Like, it's terrifying having a kid.
[00:59:50]  Um, and I think a lot of people are like, Well, this group says they have a perfect roadmap for everything.
[00:59:56]  Even if I follow it, my kids will turn out perfectly.
[00:59:59]  Um, so I'll just do that because this is terrifying.
[01:00:02]  Hi, I'm Dr. Reverend Priest.
[01:00:03]  I have an answer.
[01:00:04]  Yeah.
[01:00:05]  Would you like to come worship with me?
[01:00:07]  Yeah.
[01:00:07]  All you have to do is put these weird dresses on your kids and have 30 of them, and it'll be great.
[01:00:13]  Here's a blanket.
[01:00:13]  You'll know what to do.
[01:00:15]  So, yeah, they blame their miscarriage on birth control.
[01:00:19]  And like, that's what causes them to get much more into the fundamentalist side of things.
[01:00:24]  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.
[01:00:31]  Now, the Duggar family was not poor.
[01:00:33]  Jim Bob ran a used car lot, but prior to Discovery coming into the picture, they were not wealthy.
[01:00:38]  And by the early aughts, the family of 16 lived in a 2,200 square foot rented home.
[01:00:44]  Most large Quiverful families live in fairly cramped environs.
[01:00:47]  People who knew the Duggars before fame said their home was not atypical of the community.
[01:00:52]  It was far too small.
[01:00:53]  It often smelled gross because there's a lot of babies and a lot of diapers.
[01:00:56]  It was dirty, filled with clutter, and the kind of refuse that, again, all those kids create.
[01:01:00]  Now, during Jim Bob's brief time as an elected state representative, he would bring Joshua with him to the state capitol.
[01:01:07]  The goal was to groom Josh for a political future.
[01:01:10]  And people who knew the family in this time tend to think that many Gothardists saw him as the future of the movement.
[01:01:16]  He was nicknamed governor by Republicans who worked with his dad.
[01:01:20]  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.
[01:01:29]  And the Duggars were the subject of their own TV specials.
[01:01:33]  The article is a fascinating piece of what I call complicity journalism.
[01:01:36]  Almost every detail of the Quiverful movement and Bill Gothard that was easily available when this article was published.
[01:01:42]  There was a lot of information that the Dallas Morning News could have accessed about what these people believed.
[01:01:47]  But the author, Arnold Hamilton, did zero work to lay out anything about what the Duggars were actually into.
[01:01:53]  Here's a quote.
[01:01:54]  As a couple, the Duggars' approach to family planning is simple.
[01:01:57]  They are born-again Christians who view the Bible as their life's manual, and the Bible describes children as a blessing from God.
[01:02:02]  They will cheerfully accept as many blessings as God ordains.
[01:02:06]  The reality, of course, is that they don't, the Bible is not their only manual.
[01:02:10]  ATI, Bill Gothard, is their manual.
[01:02:12]  And that manual says that women are not full autonomous people, but merely an appendage to men.
[01:02:17]  And their rightful purpose is to serve without question.
[01:02:19]  But pointing that out would make this fun story about a big family sound more like a story of child abuse.
[01:02:24]  So they don't talk about that.
[01:02:25]  The author points out several times that the Duggars own their own business and home debt-free.
[01:02:31]  This is a big deal in that community.
[01:02:33]  And there's a lot of kind of less extreme elements of this that are still wrapped up in this.
[01:02:38]  That what is that guy who does those debt-free seminars?
[01:02:40]  That's like weird and rich, dad, poor dad?
[01:02:43]  Yeah, the rich dad, poor.
[01:02:44]  I mean, that's one of them.
[01:02:44]  There's a couple of people.
[01:02:48]  And yeah, it's this whole idea that like you shouldn't have, it's immoral kind of to have debt in a lot of which I'm not in favor.
[01:02:55]  I think it's like horribly fucked up the way the system of debt and the credit and stuff works in this country.
[01:03:01]  I'm not sure if I can do it.
[01:03:02]  But they're not as strong.
[01:03:03]  Yeah, it's the system.
[01:03:04]  It's not you that's fucked up.
[01:03:05]  Yeah.
[01:03:06]  And if you're like, it's kind of impossible in a lot of ways to take advantage.
[01:03:12]  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 ass.
[01:03:22]  And there's a lot of things, avenues that get closed off to you when you don't buy.
[01:03:27]  And that's not great.
[01:03:28]  I wish it didn't work that way.
[01:03:30]  But this is a problem for a lot of people in the Quiverful 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.
[01:03:42]  Quote, the Duggars live temporarily in a 2,200 square foot rented house along a busy street, not far from Interstate 540 in this town of about 50,000.
[01:03:50]  They are building debt-free a 7,000 square foot house in nearby Taunatown.
[01:03:54]  Now, this is this gets to something that's kind of messed up here because again, a lot of these families are in crushing poverty because they can't have debt.
[01:04:05]  So they're often building their own homes in the middle of nowhere.
[01:04:08]  They don't have access to indoor plumbing in a lot of cases.
[01:04:10]  A lot of the, again, you have families that don't have social security numbers.
[01:04:14]  They are in the middle of nowhere.
[01:04:16]  There's 15 kids living in what is essentially a shack.
[01:04:18]  Like that's, that's a significant element of this.
[01:04:21]  It's not the way the Duggars live because the Duggars get a shitload of money from Discovery to build a nice, very large new house.
[01:04:29]  And this is something they don't talk about.
[01:04:31]  They talk about how they're doing it debt-free.
[01:04:32]  They talk about how, and make it look like this.
[01:04:34]  Well, because we're just, we're scrimp and we save and we're very consistent in our beliefs.
[01:04:38]  And so we've been able to build this very large house.
[01:04:41]  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.
[01:04:49]  And it's just not possible for most people.
[01:04:51]  We did it with coupons.
[01:04:53]  Yeah, we did it all with coupons and tens of thousands of dollars from the Discovery Channel, which helps a lot.
[01:05:01]  It's like all those, it's like all those articles about like how I bought my first home at like 32.
[01:05:06]  And it's like, oh, because your parents give you $150,000 for the down payment.
[01:05:10]  Yeah, that would help.
[01:05:11]  I think a lot of people could afford a house with $150,000 from their parents.
[01:05:15]  That great Twitter meme going around where it's like on one side, it's one of those articles where they're talking about it.
[01:05:21]  And on the other side, it's say the line from The Simpsons where they're all around Bart waiting for him.
[01:05:26]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:05:28]  I got it from my parents.
[01:05:30]  Here we go.
[01:05:31]  Yeah.
[01:05:31]  Now, the Duggars don't talk about any of like the money they got from Discovery Channel.
[01:05:37]  They talked about how their Christian financial counseling helped them establish a business and buy a property and build a 7,000 square foot house debt-free and their community came together to help them build it.
[01:05:46]  And it makes their lifestyle seem like not just a miracle, but a miracle that you two can have if you follow the same rules, right?
[01:05:51]  Which again, most people who do the kinds of things the Duggars do live in very, very difficult circumstances in a lot of cases.
[01:05:59]  Well, and 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.
[01:06:10]  We're blessed by God.
[01:06:11]  If you didn't get it, it's your fault.
[01:06:13]  Yeah, if you were doing the right thing, God would bless you with the Discovery Channel TV show.
[01:06:19]  It's the circle of lies.
[01:06:22]  Now, I want to quote again because I want to talk about it's important to really lean into the fact that most Quiverful families do not enjoy this level of financial comfort.
[01:06:34]  So I want to quote again from that salon column from a former member of the Quiverful movement titled, I Could Have Been a Duggar Wife.
[01:06:40]  One key difference worth noting between the reality show of 19 Kids and Counting and the actual reality of ATI, though, is the relative affluence of the Duggars compared to most ATI families.
[01:06:51]  The Duggars live in a spacious Discovery Networks funded home, but it was not unusual in my church for two parents and 10 children to live packed into a single wide trailer.
[01:07:00]  These children usually wear threadbare hand-me-downs already passed through several rounds of siblings.
[01:07:04]  Many of them look malnourished due to the abundance of starchy meals necessary on a lean one-parent income.
[01:07:09]  Women and mothers working outside of the home is absolutely forbidden in ATI, no matter what the financial situation of the family.
[01:07:16]  Some women are even required to get permission from their husbands if they want to obtain a driver's license.
[01:07:21]  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.
[01:07:30]  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.
[01:07:40]  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.
[01:07:46]  And Jim Bob gives some quaint advice about eating out on the dollar menu to save money when the family goes out.
[01:07:51]  But no attention is ever paid to the fact that this house they live in was made possible thanks to Discovery Channel money.
[01:07:57]  In general, that article and 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.

=== Handling Sexual Abuse Allegations (08:14) ===

[01:08:11]  This is as close as that article gets to acknowledging the fundamentalist cult at the core of their beliefs.
[01:08:16]  The Duggars may be swimming against society's tide with such a large family, but it's clear children, lots and lots of children, are at the core of their social network.
[01:08:24]  They are members of a home church that numbers around 100.
[01:08:26]  They are active in a homeschooling network.
[01:08:28]  Their friends all seem to have lots of children.
[01:08:30]  One family has nine, another six.
[01:08:33]  And there almost seems to have evolved an unofficial loose-knit network of large families that homeschool their children and attend in-home churches.
[01:08:40]  Some even have volunteered time to help the Duggars complete their home by mid-January.
[01:08:44]  An unofficial loose-knit network.
[01:08:46]  Not what I would describe this cult as.
[01:08:50]  It's pretty tightly knit and makes tens of millions of dollars.
[01:08:55]  Now, the reality, of course, yeah, they're members of a cult.
[01:08:58]  The success of their TV show and the thoughtlessly positive media coverage of their unusually large brood disguised this for a while.
[01:09:05]  But from the beginning, there was a dark side to the Duggar story, and this brings me back again to Joshua Duggar.
[01:09:10]  I had to really go into the weeds to do this one for you.
[01:09:15]  In 2002, when Joshua was 14, he accosted his sister in the night and fondled her breasts and genitals.
[01:09:21]  This sister eventually went to her father and told him what had happened.
[01:09:24]  It is unclear whether or not Jim Bob acted on this information at first.
[01:09:29]  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.
[01:09:39]  If he did, it did not stop the behavior.
[01:09:42]  Between 2002 and 2003, Josh molested two of his sisters on at least four to five occasions.
[01:09:47]  This evidently prompted Jim Bob Duggar to take more significant action.
[01:09:52]  Not going to the cops, of course.
[01:09:54]  Well, kind of.
[01:09:56]  Yeah, I mean, eventually.
[01:09:58]  We will talk.
[01:09:59]  We're getting there.
[01:10:00]  Oh, yeah, we're getting there.
[01:10:02]  He went to the church elders who advised Jim Bob to send his son to a Christian training program.
[01:10:08]  In an early report, Gawker described this program as involving, quote, hard work and counseling.
[01:10:13]  And most covers will be like, that's he went to like a physical labor kind of like treatment program.
[01:10:19]  It sounds like, I don't know, I don't know what the solution is.
[01:10:22]  Like, obviously, if you're a parent, even the best parent, this is like a nightmare impossible situation to handle.
[01:10:27]  Like, there's no, there's no perfect way to deal with this kind of horrible thing.
[01:10:31]  So, I'm not going to say there's no, I'm sure there are treatment programs that are helpful.
[01:10:35]  But Michelle Duggar has since admitted that when he was going to this treatment program, Joshua did not see a counselor.
[01:10:42]  So, what did his treatment involve?
[01:10:45]  Thankfully, a lot has been written about how Bill Gothard's ATI counsels both victims and perpetrators of sexual abuse.
[01:10:51]  And that's who ran the camp.
[01:10:52]  It was an ATI camp.
[01:10:54]  I want to 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 cult works.
[01:11:03]  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 IBLP and ATI, that the site claims was distributed at ATI counseling seminars for more than a decade.
[01:11:18]  It explains how group leaders should help those who have experienced sexual assault.
[01:11:22]  The onus for the attack is put on the victim for defrauding the abuser.
[01:11:26]  Immodest dress, indecent exposure, being out from protection of our parents are all reasons that God let it happen, it reads.
[01:11:34]  One marriage guide for women even includes a portion on what to do if your husband ever sexually handles your children.
[01:11:39]  Author Debbie Pearl, a minister whose books were sold by IBLP, wrote in Created to Be His Helpmeet.
[01:11:46]  Although wives should 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.
[01:11:55]  In 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.
[01:12:05]  There's absolutely no personal responsibility for the boys.
[01:12:09]  Now, the source for that article, Miss Smith, was molested while working at ATI's training center by a 21-year-old staff member.
[01:12:16]  He had a key to her room and would come in every night and force himself on her.
[01:12:20]  They did not have sex, but in her words, we did everything else.
[01:12:23]  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 ad is that girls don't grow up with any kind of vocabulary to describe what's happening to them.
[01:12:34]  The reality of ATI, Bill Gothard, and the whole Quiverful movement is that it is a cult not just dedicated to breeding up Christian soldiers, but to providing the men at the top of it with a constant stream of helpless victims, women they can molest and then blame for it.
[01:12:48]  Here's another quote from that article.
[01:12:50]  When she returned home from the center, she and her father surprisingly received a call from Gothard, who's basically God, said Smith.
[01:12:57]  She assumes her friend had told one of the leaders about the incidents.
[01:13:00]  Although she was expecting to be reprimanded, instead, Gothard wanted the dirty details.
[01:13:05]  He started asking the creepiest questions.
[01:13:07]  He was like, What time did he kiss you?
[01:13:09]  And what time did he put his hands here?
[01:13:11]  And did he do this to you?
[01:13:13]  Smith remembered, calling it gross.
[01:13:16]  So this is the guy who ran the treatment program that Josh went to.
[01:13:20]  This is how he handles allegations of sexual abuse within his thing.
[01:13:25]  So, not an effective treatment program, I think is fair to say.
[01:13:30]  Sean, we're going to talk more about Bill Gothard, Josh Dugger, and a lot of other very unpleasant people in part due, but for right now, how are you feeling?
[01:13:38]  Oh, you know, you picked a heavy one.
[01:13:42]  It's heavy.
[01:13:44]  It's one of those like, it's heavy.
[01:13:45]  It should be talked about.
[01:13:46]  Yeah.
[01:13:47]  It's nice, you know, it's one of the few times I'm like, you know what?
[01:13:51]  I'm glad I can look across the room and see Saddam Hussein and Saddam Hussein's best friend and feel a little better about the world.
[01:13:57]  They are right here.
[01:13:58]  It does help talking about horrible molestation cults when there's cats sitting on your legs and passed out.
[01:14:04]  They've had a hard day of mostly sleeping, so they need their rest.
[01:14:09]  Sean, well, yeah, that's going to do it for part one.
[01:14:13]  We'll come back in part two and have more uncomfortable conversations.
[01:14:18]  Thank you for donating and helping to fund the recall effort against Mayor Ted Wheeler.
[01:14:23]  And those of you at home, if you're in the Portland area, go to Total Recall PDX.
[01:14:29]  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.
[01:14:35]  If you might want to donate, also TotalRecallPDX.com, you can do it there.
[01:14:40]  So, Ted Wheeler's not connected directly to any of this, but he does suck, and this sucks too.
[01:14:46]  So, I don't know.
[01:14:48]  That's well, you know, it's kind of hard to people that want to infiltrate and get into elected positions.
[01:14:54]  It's kind of hard to fight against that when the mayor is someone like Ted Wheeler.
[01:15:00]  Yeah, I mean, it does make it harder to deal with all of the problems we have when the elected leaders that aren't weird cultists with dangerous male supremacist ideas are also in copy.
[01:15:12]  Yeah.
[01:15:13]  Yeah.
[01:15:13]  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 isn't competent at anything else, you know, take it out on Ted Wheeler today.
[01:15:25]  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.
[01:15:34]  Be nice to the other people around you.
[01:15:36]  Be nice to everyone but Ted Wheeler and fucking Bill Gothard and take it out.
[01:15:41]  Duggar.
[01:15:41]  It being the trash for your friends because that's nice.
[01:15:46]  Because that is nice.
[01:15:47]  Yeah, take out the trash and then, you know, once it's out of your house, you can throw it anywhere.
[01:15:51]  It doesn't matter.
[01:15:52]  Yeah, that's ethical, I think.
[01:15:55]  All right, that's the episode.
[01:16:00]  In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
[01:16:07]  You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens.
[01:16:10]  Correct?
[01:16:11]  I doctored the test once.
[01:16:13]  It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
[01:16:17]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[01:16:20]  Greg Gillespie and Michael Rancini.
[01:16:22]  My mind was blown.
[01:16:23]  I'm Stephanie Young.

=== Lori Siegel's Ethical AI Warning (01:55) ===

[01:16:25]  This is Love Trapped.
[01:16:26]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[01:16:28]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[01:16:33]  Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:16:40]  10-10 shots five, City Hall building.
[01:16:43]  How could this ever happen in City Hall?
[01:16:45]  Somebody tell me that.
[01:16:46]  A shocking public murder.
[01:16:48]  This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
[01:16:54]  They screamed, get down, get down.
[01:16:56]  Those are shots.
[01:16:58]  A tragedy that's now forgotten.
[01:17:00]  And a mystery that may or may not have been political.
[01:17:03]  That may have been about sex.
[01:17:05]  Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:17:14]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[01:17:22]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[01:17:25]  He is not going to get away with this.
[01:17:27]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[01:17:29]  We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
[01:17:34]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[01:17:35]  Trust me, babe.
[01:17:36]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:17:46]  I'm Lori Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
[01:17:50]  This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[01:17:54]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
[01:18:01]  An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
[01:18:05]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[01:18:08]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[01:18:16]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[01:18:19]  Guaranteed human.