Robert Evans and Chris Chan dissect Reverend Sun Myung Moon's rise from a 1920s North Korean heretic to a global political force. They expose the Unification Church's origins in forced sex rituals, its anti-Semitic theology blaming Jews for the Holocaust, and its exploitation of followers with grueling labor demands. The hosts detail how Moon infiltrated the Korean dictatorship, partnered with Yakuza bosses, and bribed U.S. politicians like Strom Thurman to fund a global theocracy. Ultimately, the episode reveals how this cult weaponized American fishing industries and political scandals to seize economic power, transforming religious extremism into a dangerous geopolitical entity. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:02:35
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When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
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He's going to get what he deserves.
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What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modern.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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What do you, it's, what, what is it?
It's behind the bastards.
Behind The Bastards00:15:10
That's what it is.
So what do you got?
What are you complaining about?
Come on.
Come on inside Behind the Bastards town and hear about bad people.
I'm Robert Evans.
This is my podcast.
Sophie.
How did this become a town?
What are you doing?
It's always been a town.
What are you doing?
It's always been a town.
What are you doing?
It's like, you know, like Waco.
You know, it's a lot of people.
I knew it.
I knew it.
It's a safe little town where the ATF never rambles by.
Oh, Robert.
All right.
Well, I feel like that's all the work I should do today.
Sophie, do you have any way for me to not do anything but us to have a show this week?
Do you have any ideas?
I don't have a way for you to not do anything, but I do trust Chris.
Channel, put in a door opening sound effect here.
No.
Oh my gosh, Chris.
Hello, it's me.
I'm here.
I'm here to make sure you don't have to do any work by cooing the podcast once again.
Thank God.
Yeah.
Because let me tell you, I'm lazy.
All right, let's get started.
Robert, how do you feel?
What are we going to learn about today?
How do you feel about the Thompson submachine gun?
Oh my gosh.
Of the submachine guns, it's a pretty good one.
If I was going to fire into a bunch of gangsters at close range in like a parking garage, or if I was going to shoot into a bunch of Nazis in a trench at close range, Thompson submachine gun would be a high up on my list of things to do that with.
Yeah, unfortunately, you can't make the Thompson submachine gun really in the U.S. anymore, but there's a semi-automatic variant.
You could, yeah, yeah, yeah.
The semi-automatic variant is the rights to produce this is owned by a company called Car Arms.
They sure are, yeah, car.
They make a lot of lady-branded guns, like little pink carry guns and stuff, too.
I didn't realize they were the ones who owned the only Thompson submachine gun semi-pack.
And they also, so they famously also made a gun called the Car MK40 semi-automatic pocket rocket, which I'm mostly talking about because the pocket rocket just seems like an incredible name for a gun to me.
Yeah, this is a weapon.
You know, they make this pivot in the 90s when you start seeing some gun control regulations.
And one of the things they do is they make this gun and it becomes, you know, it's a compact 9mm handgun.
Well, the MK40 is a 40-millimeter hand, 40 Smith Wesson.
Is it?
Okay, this is where me not knowing maybe there are other versions, but yeah, the one I'm looking at right now is a 40, which would be MK40.
40 Smith and Wesson is a large caliber for such a small gun because it's a tiny little piece.
They have ankle holes for it.
Well, the NYPD, Illy Johnson NYPD, just like loves this gun.
This is their favorite gun.
The police department allows them to use it on duty.
And they call the Car MK40 the Mooney gun because it was designed by one Justin Moon, the son of one Reverend Sun Young Moon.
And that is who we're talking about today.
Oh, boy.
Sun Young Moon and his many, many, many, many.
And I cannot emphasize enough, he has like 20 of them sons and also daughters.
Great.
And one of them's making what I'm guessing is a really high-caliber handgun for scared middle-class moms who don't want to carry something heavy, but want to be able to shoot what they imagine to be a six and a half-foot-tall mugger with a gun.
Yeah, it's great.
And we are in the next part of this episode, we are going to find out a lot more about the guy who makes this gun and it is who owns this company right now.
And it is not good.
It is very bad.
Fucking dope.
And yeah, I just looked it up.
Those of you at home, if you're finding, it certainly seems like all of the semi-automatic Thompson submachine guns I'm able to find right now are made by auto ordinance, which was bought out in 1999 by Salo Enterprises Inc., which is the parent company of Car Arms.
And welcome to another theme of this episode, which is there are approximately 1 trillion front organizations and sub-organizations.
And they are founded by a man named Sung Young Moon, who was born on January 6th, 1920.
And hold the date, January 6th, in your mind.
We will be coming back to that next episode.
I've never heard of anything important happening on January 6th.
That's bizarre, Chris.
Now you freaking out.
It's the Messiah's birthday.
This is the day Messiah would be.
It would be like something significant happening on the day after September 10th.
I just can't get it in my head.
But okay.
So put a pin in this thought.
Right now, it is 1920.
It is.
Okay, I apologize to the Korean people for what I'm about to do to their language.
Pyongyang Pukto, he's born in a village, yeah, a small village in what is now North Korea.
And this is it's okay, Chris.
As angry as the Koreans are, I don't think their yelling will get louder than the yelling of English people, pissed that I can never get any of their street names.
I mean, correctly.
The problem is, though, that I have respect for the Korean people.
I have no respect for the Anglos.
And the Anglos can find me on Twitter at iWriteOK.
Yep, that's exactly your Twitter account.
And I will explain how it should be pronounced like Esther.
But anyway, continue, Chris.
Moon is from a pretty middle-class family in this sort of rural farming village.
And what middle class means is that he doesn't starve very much, but this is still a terrible place to grow up because 1920 Korea and Frieda Childhood, this place is occupied by Japan.
People are being enslaved and dragged off to go fight the wars.
There's this mass campaign that force anyone to speak Japanese.
So on and so forth.
So it's not a great place to grow up.
And yeah, it's a rough time to be in Korea.
It's pretty bad.
Now, Moon is a weird kid.
He's incredibly stubborn.
And I'm just going to read how he describes himself in his book as a peace-loving global citizen.
When I was a child, I had the nickname Day Crier.
I earned this nickname because once I started to cry, I wouldn't stop for the entire day.
When I cried, it was so loud that people would think something terrible had happened.
People sleeping in bed would come out to see what was going on.
Also, I didn't just cry sitting still.
I would jump around the room, injuring myself and creating an uproar.
Sometimes I would bleed.
I had this intense personality even when I was young.
So this is a weird kid.
So definitely like some parents who are pretty sleep deprived.
I think we can.
Yeah, and I think, you know, one of the sort of things with this early childhood is that it's very hard to find information that isn't from the church.
And I think part of why he's writing this is that a lot of his sort of early history has been sort of propagandized to sort of fall in line with church doctrine.
And I think this is one of those things, although it's also just like the fact that he's calling himself Day Crier.
It's very weird.
But, you know, one of the sort of church sacraments of the unification churches he's going to found in a little bit is crying, dream, prayer.
But you can see this sort of like he's already like, like he's projecting himself back into the story.
And, you know, part of the other, like, how this plays out is that when he's 10 years old, his family converts to Presbyterianism.
And they are.
Then what had they been before?
I couldn't find any records of it.
My guess is they were doing some kind of local Korean religion because there's a lot of...
Yeah, I don't know much about that.
But not Christian, probably.
As best I can tell, not Christianotho, there's not really records of it.
But when they convert to Christianity, they go hard.
This family is very religious.
Moon is incredibly religious.
And six years later on Easter morning, Moon claims that Jesus showed up to have a chat with him.
Now, that's nice.
Jesus tells him that Jesus had, in fact, failed to save humanity because people didn't believe in him.
And that Moon had to go finish the work that Jesus started.
Wow.
It's like a reverse Luke skywalker.
It's pretty wild.
And, you know, unlike Luke, Moon is like, no, like, no, I will not do this.
Like, this is no.
And so Jesus spends a significant amount of time just like wearing him down over like the course of days.
And then wow.
That's, that's, that's quite an ego when you're like, yeah, Jesus wanted me for this thing, but like, you know, my, I had work was really heavy this week.
And like, I hadn't been able to get to the gym.
So I didn't want to put that off anymore.
And like, wow.
Wow.
What a, what a, what an in-demand dude.
It's pretty impressive.
And, you know, there's some question here as to like whether this is something that Moon believed when he was 16 or if he's created it later.
And I'm not really sure.
My guess is that he's back projecting this because he stays in the Presbyterian church for like another decade, even though Jesus has showed up to him and like proclaimed him the Messiah.
What we do know is that Moon went to Seoul to study electrical engineering, where he and his followers claim that he joins the Korean independence movement and gets arrested for it.
And this is another one of those things where like almost every source will repeat it, but they're all going off of his church.
So it's sort of unclear.
Will say, though, Moon is very, very good at getting people pissed off at him and getting arrested.
So it is entirely possible he managed to do this because he's going to get arrested like six more times.
So after this, he spent some time in college in Japan during the war.
And while he's doing this, he decides he doesn't want to geological engineering.
He wants to become a missionary.
But he runs into a roadblock, which is that the Presbyterian church expels him for heresy in 1946 because he's going around claiming that he's the Messiah, which is.
And man, it's not the easiest thing to get kicked out of the Presbyterian church for heresy.
Like, one of the harder churches to be heretical against, I would suggest, based on my knowledge of Presbyterianism.
I will say the not a lot of heresy goes on within the Presbyterian church.
I will say the, I think the Korean branch is like slightly like Korean, Korean Presbyterianism, I think, is somewhat more intense than like American Presbyterianism.
But like, yeah, it's, you know, you have to go around claiming that you are the Messiah, basically, for them to be like, I mean, yeah, and if you are, if your whole thing is Jesus, some guy being like, oh, yeah, that's me, basically, is gonna, folks might have an issue with that.
I get it.
I get it.
You know, I understand the concerns they have.
Okay.
So he makes a decision that is somewhat baffling to me, which is, okay, so he decides he's gonna, you know, he's gonna decide he's gonna go found his own church.
But in order to do this, he goes to Pyongyang, North Korea, which is by this point under communist control.
Is that easier than?
I'm guessing it's easier because now you would have to like smuggle yourself, right?
You would have to break a number of laws in both countries to get in.
I mean, this is like right after the war, everything starts chaos.
It's much easier than it's going to be.
But, you know, he does this.
But also, still probably not like a normal decision.
And the communists immediately look at this like weird Christian cult preacher who shows up and are immediately go, oh, this guy's a South Korean spy.
And according to Moon, they like torture him and leave him for dead in the prison yard.
Now, the funny part about this is that this is the only part of Moon's entire career where he is not a South Korean spy.
Oh, which is so they suspect him for being a spy for the only period of time.
Yeah, that's fun.
That's funny.
It's sort of amazing.
And, you know, and yeah, and he, this is another thing.
So he claims that he's tortured in prison like a lot.
And it's possible.
I don't know.
I mean, North Korean prisons are not great, but he.
Yeah, South Korean ones probably aren't either then at that point.
Yeah, you know, about half of the story is about how just like an absolute, like horrifying basic military dictatorship South Korea is for like this entire period.
Yeah, for a lot for a decent chunk of the post-war period, you're doing better if you're up north than you are down south.
Now, so, so he, so, you know, he, his story about this is that like his followers, like come get him and like nurse him back to health.
And I have no idea if that's true.
What I do know is that like two years later, he gets arrested again for quote advocating chaos in society and gets sent to a North Korean prison camp.
That is a dope thing to get arrested for.
That is a sick thing to get arrested for.
Man, I would brag about that fucking rap sheet.
That's the coolest thing you could do time.
Yeah, it's pretty sweet.
I will say the person he gets sent to like sucks.
Like they're filling fertilizer bags, but like, you know, they're handling a bunch of just like raw ammonium nitrate.
And that's a bad time.
But luckily, instead of serving at his five years, he's bailed out when UN forces took control of the prison in 1950 during the Korean War.
And so they release him and he flees on foot with some of his followers to Pusan ahead of the communist advance in 1951.
And this is where in a tiny shack, he begins to write the, well, okay, sorry.
I should make this clear.
Okay, he begins to write divine principle.
There is another book called The Divine Principle, which is a separate thing.
They are not the same thing.
This is a source of enormous confusion.
Now, Divine Principle is called the Bible of the Unification Church.
It's slightly more complicated than that.
I mean, so the Unification Church, which is founding in this period.
It's like they have the regular Bible and they have their own interpretations of it.
And then they have Divine Principle, which is the thing that he wrote.
That's like their higher holy text.
But then there's also a bunch of other holy texts.
But this is sort of the main one.
He starts writing it.
And there was an amazing story about the writing of this from a later church preacher named Kevin McCarthy.
Even God said no to father three times when he presented the divine principle.
Father told God bullshit.
God knew he was right.
Okay.
Wow.
So this guy is, this is something new.
You know, I've done a lot of people who talked to God or Jesus.
This is the first cult leader I've heard of who's having like a back and forth where he's like giving as good as he's getting.
He's like, wait a minute, that doesn't make any sense.
You fucking crazy?
No, sir.
No, no, that's not how this is going to work.
He's basically ordering God around.
He's ordering God around because like...
Look, we stand an employee who's not afraid to talk back to management, you know?
Finally, humans are unionizing against God.
It's sort of incredible.
So in 1954, he finally was able to get to Seoul and he starts this new church, which is called the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity.
And this is what's known today as the Unification Church, or it's the cult called the Moonies.
Now, what's interesting about this church, though, is in the 1950s, it is a very different cult than it is in the 60s and 70s.
The Moonies Cult00:10:19
And the way it's different is that there's a bunch of extremely weird sex rituals where Moon has these like orgies to like purify the women in the cult because they're like the he has this whole sort of theological thing about sin that we'll get into in a second.
But basically his thing is like, well, because you have sin from Eve and demons and you can only be purified by like having sex with me.
And Moon starts forcing people to do this.
And one of these people is named Annie Choi, who joins the cult in the 1950s.
Now, Moon starts to force her to join these rituals when she is 17.
And oh boy is burying 15 to 17 year olds, a huge theme of this episode.
It's not great.
Oh boy.
Yeah, big, big pedophiles.
Now, Andy got pregnant from Moon's abuse.
But the second most important member of Moon's operation, a guy named Bohi Pak, who is a colonel.
Well, I think at this point he's a lieutenant colonel, but he's going to become a colonel in the Korean army, covers up the pregnancy and then literally, once Annie has the kid, Bohip literally steals the baby from her arms and then raises the child as his own, passing it off as like his own child because they don't want to, you know, they don't want to get out that Moon, you know, had this kid.
So they...
He's doing a little bit of an L. Ron Hubbard there.
He's hovering a bit.
That's good.
That's good.
Now, Annie describes how Bohipak's wife brings her some seaweed soup after, again, they steal her baby.
And his wife's just like, yeah, here's some soup.
And Annie, you know, well, it's better than not giving her soup and stealing her baby.
Look, if you on the moral chart of the universe, stealing baby, no soup.
Worse than stealing baby, but soup.
It's still pretty bad.
And she's stealing the baby.
And Annie's description of it was that she couldn't eat it.
And she, quote, she said, I just sat there crying with my tears falling in the pot.
Now, Annie, yeah.
That's the downside of soup as a gift after a baby attack.
Now, Annie follows Pac to the U.S. to stay near her son Sam.
And when Sam is 13, Annie tells him the truth that, you know, Sam is actually Annie and Moon's son.
And the Moon family, like, does not take this well.
Moon's oldest son, Steve, who, well, okay, so oldest legitimate son, Steve, who we're going to be talking a lot about later, points a gun at Sam and threatens to rape and kill Annie.
So this is going great.
Yeah, Steve is a real, real bad guy.
We will get into more of his shit later because it's bad.
And, you know, and the sort of consequence of this for the Moon cult is that Moon decides to just retool it because this whole sex cult thing is not working.
And it's not working because, you know, okay, well, there's all these kids now that, you know, you have to have your lieutenant steal from the mother, like the arms of the mother and stuff.
It's like, okay, so this is bad for Moon.
Yeah, that's not great.
Where do you get the gun?
Is it easy in South Korea to get a gun?
Well, this is later on.
And by this point, they're in the U.S.
Yeah.
And I will say, though, like, Moon's people, like, they have a, we'll get to this more than a second, but they have a lot of correct connections with the Korean army.
Like, Bohipac is in the army.
So they have a much easier time getting weapons than like a normal person would just because they're so heavily connected to the army.
Yeah, that's not great.
So a major part of this cult's belief is that Jesus had been sent by God to create a new Adam and Eve family.
And so Moon sets out to find a, quote, true mother to finish what Jesus started.
And he finds that true mother after an exhaustive search by his followers in the form of the 17-year-old daughter of his cook, Hakjahan.
Oops.
That's not great.
He immediately marries.
And keep in mind, Moon is 40 when he's marrying the 17-year-old.
Yeah.
And this is the, yeah.
It's also not great that my first thought when you said 17 was like, well, that is on the older side for cult leaders.
Yeah.
So at this point, this is where the unification church stops being the sort of weird sex cult thing that it was before.
And it starts looking like the modern unification church.
And this is when Moon conducts the first of the mass wedding ceremonies that the church becomes famous for, in which Moon, you know, Moon will just marry off sometimes thousands of couples.
How many folks are there in this cult at this time?
Especially in the early period.
I think in 1960, there's like a few thousands.
So the numbers of this are going to be extremely elusive all the time.
Partially just because like, so its biggest branch is going to be in Japan.
And the numbers on that is no one has any idea, basically.
So yeah, this is a, this is a constant source of contention.
It's like, how many people are in it?
A little bit of a black box.
Gotcha.
Now, it's this wedding ceremony, these sort of mass weddings that they're doing are very weird.
And to get into why they're so weird, we need to talk a bit about like what the Unification Church actually believes.
Now, the church is a, it's a mixture of essentially, like, it's mostly based on Christianity, but it has this sort of mixture of Buddhists, like Confucian, Taoists, and also sort of like local, like, shamanic Korean religious traditions that are all sort of mixed into it.
And the main difference from Christianity, other than, you know, Jesus being betrayed and not completing God's plan is that they believe that Eve cheated on Adam with Lucifer before they could be married, and that this is what the story of the fall is.
And it's really funny, too, because they have these weird, they have these weird interpretations of the Bible where they'll say things like, okay, they'll do this like hyper-scientific literalism.
Well, they'll be like, okay, so it is in fact impossible for the Garden of Eden story to have happened because snakes can't talk.
And they're like, so clearly this is a metaphor, right?
The snake can't talk.
Oh wow, that's an interesting line to draw like well yeah, there's a god with angels who's got magical powers and and there's a holy ghost and stuff, but like talking snakes, come on, it's an incredible line to have.
It's like believing Star Wars is a documentary, except for when you see it with it and you're like well, that that couldn't happen.
A big hairy man yeah, it is.
It's pretty incredible.
Um, and now, what one of the sort of one of the sort of consequences of this story about the fall is that?
You know?
So the fall is basically about, like having sex before marriage.
And you know the consequence of this is that like, humans all now live outside of God's law and live in the quote unprincipled realm where they serve Satan.
And this gives the church a incredible laser like focus on on the traditional family and defeating what moon calls free sex or sex outside of marriage.
And it's it's weird.
It's a weirdly straight-laced cult, especially for something that like literally started as a sex cult, it turns into this thing where there's no drugs, there's no sex, there's no alcohol, except there's one exception to this, which is the church has a sacrament that you drink at, like weddings and some events.
That's a.
It's a bunch of alcohol mixed together and it may or may not.
You what, what I don't know?
See this.
Okay, so this there's.
There's a whole debate about this because this, this thing, might have Moon's blood in it, and yeah, so the actual composition of this is is a secret.
Uh, like high-level members of the church don't actually know whether or not there's blood in it, like they have different opinions and they like sometimes they'll contradict each other.
Moon has both said that it literally is his blood and then also that it's there's not his blood in it.
So there's a whole running debate as to what is in this.
That's rad.
You know what?
That critical support, that's cool.
That's among the cult leader Flexes i've come across.
That's one of the better ones.
So yeah, i'm not gonna tell you if you drink in my blood.
You might be, we've got.
What's important is you drink whatever I tell you to.
That's what's critical.
So so yeah we we, we have Shroting, we have Schrodinger's vampirism.
But the other thing about this is that this this, is a very conservative sort of Christian cult, but there's also this like new edge thing to it, a new age like sort of edge to it and, and you know, for example, they call god's existence in the universe the universe, the prime universal force.
And i'm gonna read a passage from uh, the Divine Principles, not to be confused with Divine Principle.
These are two separate things.
Uh the Moody will get extremely mad if you confuse them, even though they have basically the same.
Okay, so in in in this golden age, the highly advanced uh, scientific achievement of the Occident will serve to make the eternal life of the new world convenient and pleasant, and the highly advanced religious and metaphysical achievement of the Orient will provide the philosophy of the new age.
Thus, the new age will see perfect harmony between the cultures of East and West.
The one unified world will be fulfilled horizontally between the Occident and the Orient, and also vertically between the spiritual and physical worlds.
In this unified world, all nations will live in harmonious association with all others and share a common religious philosophy.
Under god's direct guidance, this new age will no longer be regarded as the Christian era.
Instead, it will be known as the cosmic era, with the adoption of a cosmic calendar.
Okay.
And, you know, this is, yeah, but I think this is this is, you know, it like this is like one of Moon's strokes of genius because it lets him play both sides of the religious aisle.
For, you know, for when they're trying to convert Christians, they play up the sort of Christian family value side.
This lets him get in with the sort of the Christian, the sort of Christian family values, right?
When they're dealing with hippies, they play out the sort of new agey stuff.
It's genius.
It's, it's this, they've, they, they, they've synthesized sort of by accident, but they've synthesized basically this all of the sort of political and cultural trends of like the 60s all the way through the 80s.
And yeah, the other sort of important aspect of this faith is that everyone is born with like sin from a bunch of sources.
And I mean, there's, there's, there's a lot of different like things that give you sin.
Um, one of which is like, you know, you have Eve's sin.
And so in order to get rid of Eve's sin for, you know, like doing the fall, during your wedding ceremony, the wife and the groom take terms like beating each other with a giant stick, which what is this?
Sin And Baseball Bats00:05:13
What kind of what is this?
I don't know.
It's just a stick.
And it's like, it's just, it's just a stick.
Just any stick.
Yeah.
It's kind of, I think it's kind of baseball bat-esque.
It's great.
They beat each other with this.
And Robert, do you know who else will be will beat you with a baseball bat?
I mean, the Texas state juvenile justice system.
Yeah, they could sponsor us.
That's a thing that might happen.
Yeah, that could happen.
Fingers crossed.
God willing, you know, if Christ is with us, as he is with Reverend Moon, that will happen.
And yeah, we will have products and services eternally.
Amen.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modern.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach.
Murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach.
Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
A Deadly Pyramid Scheme00:04:33
Ah, yeah.
We're back.
People are getting whacked by sitting back.
We've been a bad influence.
Honestly, most of the weddings I've been to would have been improved if the bride and groom had to hit each other with a bat.
I'm just going to say it.
That would make most weddings better.
For the spectators, at least.
What?
No.
Especially if you can hit the priest, too.
Yeah, unfortunately, you don't dare do that.
What?
It's just you hit your wife and your wife hits you.
Oh.
Wow.
Yeah.
And unfortunately, it gets the sin stuff gets less fun from here because you also have to pay like Judas's sin, which means that in order to get married, you have to pay $120 to the church because that's, you have to, you have to repay 30-fold Judas's sin of the 30 coins.
Are you kidding me?
Are you kidding me?
That's what makes it okay.
That's what God is like.
I'm so pissed about this thing that I set up and engineered and knew was going to happen centuries before I ever did.
I'm so angry about it that you got to pay me.
To be fair, so their version in their version of the Judas betrayal, God's plan is not for Jesus to die.
God's plan is for Jesus to like found a family.
And then what happens is said is that he gets upgraded and that that's the origin of like that sin.
All right.
So it makes slightly more sense.
You know what?
But that makes more sense.
That does make more sense.
Good on you, guys.
Is that the $120 price?
It's also 120 yen.
It's also 100%.
It's just 120 of whatever the denomination of currency is.
Yeah, whatever currency converting it from like gold, Roman gold coins.
It's like, it's great.
Well, yeah, it was 30 pieces of silver or gold.
Yeah, because I'm going to guess 30 silver coins, whatever size they were back then, is probably like grand today.
Like, I always had the feeling in the Bible that like that wasn't nothing, you know?
That was, that was like a pretty good, pretty good pay for giving Jesus up.
Yeah, but so you know, you, you have, see, you have that sin, and and there, there's, there's also other sin, so there's there's there's demonic influence in your in your like historical bloodline, right?
And you know what?
They're not far off.
Uh, according to a random Wikipedia page on 30 pieces of silver, depending on you know, the size of coin and the value, the type of silver and whatnot that went into it, approximately 91 to 441 dollars.
Well, yeah, you're not paying for it 30-fold then, though.
Oh, someone else said 90 and 3,000.
I don't think anyone knows, Chris.
I don't think anybody has any idea how much.
Okay, please continue.
So, you also have this demonic sin.
And with the demonic sin, you have to pay the pay the church $1,400 per generation of your family to purge the bloodline from sin.
It's nice that they went with a flat raid.
It's like some families.
Like, I'm Italian.
My family has a lot.
You go back a couple of generations.
It's way more sins than the present generations.
Especially British people.
What a deal the British are getting.
If your fucking grandpa was with the East India Company or whatever, you're like, holy shit, $1,400, ain't bad.
You know, the thing is, you joke about this.
One of the things that they do is like they get Japanese women to like pay like pay the church like enormous amounts of indulgences as like a like payment for the comfort women in Korea.
So like they're legitimately doing this.
Oh, that's that's messed up I mean yeah that's a really complicated kind of horrible too.
Like you really have to sit down and think out the permutations of how that's a bad thing.
It's worse than it even sounds now for reasons that we will get into in a bit.
Yeah.
Boy, I don't like that very much.
The more you look at this, the more the church starts to look like a pyramid scheme, right?
Because in order to get married, you have to be part of the church for three years, convert three people to join the church, pay them money, and then moon or like later, originally it's just moon will pick who you marry, but later on, like there's like, there's like church committees that will like select who you're going to marry.
And, you know, you see how this process works, right?
In order to get married, you have to bring more people into the church.
And then in order to, you know, so that's the first process.
You bring in your new marks, and then your new marks start paying the church.
And so what you have in order to get men, you know, the whole thing of this, the church's whole ideology is you have to get married and that like if you're not married, you can't see the kingdom of God and you can't have sex.
So this whole cult is designed as a sort of pyramid scheme to like just bring bring more people in and pay them more money.
Like A Pyramid Scheme00:13:11
And so, you know, that's one way they bring people in.
The other way is through, you know, sort of like classic cult recruitment stuff.
So they have hundreds of friend groups and, you know, they'll have like a farm and they'll be like, hey, come to this farm.
It'll be a chill time.
And so, you know, they do these things where they make everyone chant constantly and they constantly move everyone back and forth between activities.
And suddenly there's this like enormous pressure to conform.
And, you know, when you try to leave, they'll be like, oh, well, we don't have any buses that can take you back to the city right now.
So it's really inconvenient for us where you stay for like a couple more days.
And they'll, you know, they, they sort of, a lot of times, like, so they, the way it usually works is they'll assign like a member of the cult that's like your person and they follow you around all the time.
And you like to become friends with them.
Yeah, that's a pretty common kind of thing.
Yeah.
And then when you try to leave, like your friend like emotionally blackmails you into stalate into staying.
And yeah, more of the more of the hits.
They're playing the hits now.
The old, the best, the top 40 of being a cult.
This is pretty classic cult stuff, but the scale, the scale here is incredible.
Now, Reverend Moon, or Father, Father Moon, as they call him, claims to be the literal Messiah bringing about heaven on earth, and he is trying to take over the world.
Like, that is the goal of the cult.
And it's what Moon, and he's very consistent about this.
It is what Moon and all of his organizations are dedicated to him taking over the world.
The goal is to crush communism, reunify Korea with Moon as its ruler.
And then after he's defeated communism and crushed North Korea and the others, there's one Korea, the U.S. will fall into subservience, in deference to the superior Korean states, and then they will take over the rest of the world.
That seems optimistic.
I'm going to be honest.
That seems optimistic.
He was never close to doing this, but he gets much closer to this than anyone should ever be able to do.
To having the United States bow to Korea's sovereignty?
Yes.
He gets closer to this than anyone ever reasonably should.
I'm going to read a quote about what his goal is here.
Quote: The whole world is in my hand, and I will conquer and subjugate the world when we are in battle against the whole of the nation of the U.S. If you truly are in love with the nation and if you truly love this nation more than anything else, this nation will come into God's possession and Satan will have nothing to do with it.
With that as a bullet, we can smash the whole world.
He just says stuff like this because he's trying to take over the U.S. because he realizes that if he takes over the U.S. and Korea and a few other, and like Japan, a few other countries, he can just seize control of the entire world.
And the other aspect of this is that he has the spiritual power that allows him to sort of walk in the spirit world with Leon.
Some of his most powerful followers can do this too.
And so he finds and gets, you know, he'll find world leaders in the spirit world and get testimonies from them.
So here's some of what they have to say.
This is part of Moon's message of endorsement from John F. Kennedy, which takes the form of a letter to the United Nations.
Those of you at the United Nations, I am John Kennedy.
I want to declare an extremely important thing to you.
The fact that Kennedy is sending a message from the spiritual world to the United Nations is something that cannot be imagined in your world.
And it is very significant news.
Through attending lectures of the new truth, divine principle and unification thought here in the spirit world, I have understood the direction and the goal that the world must take today.
I want to let the UN know the following: Reverend Sung Myung Moon is the Messiah, the Savior, and the true parent of humankind.
All humankind in the UN have to understand the ideology and works of Reverend Sung Myung Moon, and they have to accept his leadership and guidance.
So that's spirit world JFK giving their endorsement to Reverend Moon.
That's good.
I mean, that is very, honestly, very nice of him because, you know, it takes a lot.
You have a lot of ego to be the president and to really just bow down to this guy in Korea.
Yeah, good on you.
36 presidents give them give him his endorsement.
Wow.
Well, you know, that's turning me around on this guy.
It's actually worse.
So 36 presidents endorse him while dead.
Like five presidents have endorsed him while four presidents have endorsed him while they were alive.
So yep.
Really?
Well, endorsed him in what way?
Gone on tours with him, with his organizations and said they like or like given speeches for him and said that he was doing good work.
Yeah, yeah, okay.
Okay, that makes sense.
Not endorsing Korean sovereignty over the United States, but like, yeah, this dude's a cool guy because he's paying me.
It makes sense.
That sounds like one of them was Clinton, wasn't it?
Amazingly, no.
Wow.
Good for you, Bill.
Stunningly.
Stunning Bill Clinton, no.
George W. Bush, though, yes.
Yeah.
What about Carter?
Carter seems to have not liked him, which is good.
So good on Carter.
No, that doesn't have the best history with Korea, Carter, but at least he's got that right.
Yeah.
Now, there's a lot of these sort of expeditions to the spirit realm.
And in one of them, like, one of his followers is this guy named Lee.
And so Lee goes to spirit world, and he finds Marx.
He has to wander for like many days.
And he finds Marx in this like this, like incredibly shabby town yelling communist stuff at a bedraggled mass.
And Lee spends two days arguing with Ingalls there?
No, apparently.
Does Ingles get to go to heaven?
There's no mention of that.
Maybe Ingalls got tired of it.
I don't know.
Yeah, but Lee spends like two days arguing with him and it's like, yeah, I made a serious dent in him.
Like Marx was incredibly embarrassed at the fact that I disproven him.
Oh, wow.
He finds Stalin, who's like barricaded in this mud hut.
He's like, he was barricaded in a house and there's like mud huts all around it.
And when he tries to go find Stalin, Stalin has his guards beat him up.
So he never gets to see Stalin.
You know what?
That does sound a little like Stalin.
Absolutely.
He did love to have guards do that.
Yeah.
That also sounds like Mussolini, to be honest.
I mean, a lot of this is tracking.
Tojo is like living alone in a house that he created where he has like a Shinto shrine to himself.
Awesome tracks.
Again, it does kind of sound like Tojo.
Okay.
When he meets Lee, he cries and recants after hearing about Reverend Moon's teachings.
So, and then gets forward.
Now, that does not sound like Tojo.
That does not sound like Tojo.
Moon meets Jesus at one point, and Jesus is incredibly grateful that Moon has him married to some spirit.
And then he says that, like, he says that he doesn't, like, Jesus is like, yeah, I don't deserve Moon's love, but he's incredibly mad that people are focusing on the crucifixion.
It gets better.
That is so bold.
That is so bold.
He's mad that people are focusing on the crucifixion and not the Washington Times, which is actually the most important thing that God's doing on earth because the Washington Times is Moon's outlet.
Jesus.
Stop.
Stop the crucifixion of the crucifixion.
Guys, stop talking about my brutal murder by the state and start talking about this fucking tavern.
It's incredible.
It does.
I would love it if Christ came back and did so primarily to sell subscriptions to the New York Examiner or like the fucking, what do you call it?
What's the fake newspaper?
The famous one.
Shit.
This would have been funny if I had remembered the name.
James Max knows.
Yeah, whatever.
That wasn't the one in my mind.
National Inquirer.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, I botched it.
Please continue.
So the last person that he finds who's in.
I mean, he finds a lot of other people, but he finds Hitler.
And Hitler is tied.
Oh, wow.
Okay.
Good.
I was wondering.
Hitler is tied eagle spread to a tree with a sign pinned to his chest that says king of the Nazis.
And all the Jews that he killed are throwing bricks at him.
Now.
See, that doesn't sound like a great afterlife for all the Jews that he killed.
So Moon sees this and is like, no, stop this.
He's like, well, okay, so all these Jews can't move on with their lives, right?
Because of the Holocaust and because of Hitler.
I mean, that does sound like a bad situation.
It is kind of messed up for him to imagine that.
His solution to this is forgiving Hitler so that, quote, a Jewish virgin can go to heaven.
And yeah, he forgives Hitler.
What?
Because there's a spiritual drain in the sink preventing all the Jews from going to heaven.
And this is where I should mention.
Moon and like the unification church is like structurally anti-Semitic.
Like on a level.
That sounds pretty anti-Semitic to me, Chris.
Moon has said multiple times in multiple places that Jews are responsible for the Holocaust because they killed Jesus, which is like literally the oldest anti-Semitic attack.
I thought it wasn't as big a deal as the Washington Times.
Apparently it is.
It's enough of a deal that, yeah, he's blaming the Jews for the Holocaust because they killed Jesus.
And then, yeah, he says this a lot.
And he also, he has a lot of things that he said that are just like really bad.
Like he says that gay people are dung-eating dogs, will be exterminated by God.
So yeah, there's a lot.
There's a lot of like stuff like this.
He's also, you know, so in his actual cult, he has like one of the big things he does is he has all of his followers like spend 18 hours a day selling flowers for him.
And, you know, okay, so there's enormous pressure.
You know, this is all your normal cult stuff, right?
You have your normal pressure not to leave.
You have your like labor exploitation.
You have your, like, you're stuck in this cult.
You have your marriage stuff.
And so this is the story, you know, and, you know, they have their battle with the deprogambers in the 70s.
And when I was writing this episode, this is what I thought this episode was going to be about.
But it turns out that while all of this stuff is real and it's happening and it's important, this is not the real story of Seung Byung-moon.
That story, the story of how a Korean CIA influence operation and the fascist wing of the Yakuza helped turn a minor Korean cult into a world-class anti-communist political organization that funded death squads in 12 countries and built a modern religious right, starts with a coup in 1961.
Oh, boy, howdy, that was a lot.
It's taking a turn.
We'll get through all of it.
So in 1960, an uprising by Korean students and workers finally overthrew the horrific dictatorship of Segmund Rhee.
Now, their heroic struggle gets them exactly one year.
I think it's actually, I think it's less than a year of democracy before Park Chung-hee, an incredibly fascist military officer, like Nobusuke Kishi, met Park Chung-hee after, like after Pro Chun-hee took power.
And even Kishi was like, hey, you can't say that fascist stuff anymore.
Like you're, you're, he, he's so fascist that Kishi, like the arch Japanese fascist war criminal, was like, dude, you got to tone it down.
And so he takes power in this coup.
And this coup is, is, is masterminded in large part by an army officer and politician named Kim Jong-pil.
Pill.
His name is Kim Jong-pil.
Kim Jong-pil.
That does sound like a joke he would have made if Kim Jong-pil had gotten addicted to Doc.
He's one of the worst people in Korean history.
He's famous for, so he leads a political party after there's the revolution, you get democracy back.
And he manages to get himself installed as prime minister through a bunch of backroom dealing, even though he had a 4% approval rating.
So that sounds like he's incredibly widely hated.
Now, by 1961, Moon's church is firmly embedded in the army.
Bohi Pak, last seen stealing a baby from his mother's arms and raising him as his own son, has the same rank in the army as Kim Jong-pil.
Another Moonie is Kim Jong-pil's close lieutenant and translator and assistant.
And several other Moonies also become translators for Kim Jong-pil.
Now, it's unclear to me whether Moon knew this coup was happening.
There's no direct evidence that he did, but it seems kind of likely because there's so many people who are in Moon's inner circle who are also in the inner circle of the coup plotters in the army that there's a pretty good chance that he knew that this coup was going to happen.
What we do know for certain is that Kim Jong-pil founded the Korean CIA, which is like, it's like the regular American CIA, except they also, they're also the internal secret police, which is a role, the regular CIA normally delegates to the FBI.
But, you know, they hunt down dissidents, they kill them.
They're extremely bad.
And several very high-profile Moonies get jobs in the new military dictatorship.
That seems like a bad call.
I'm just going to predict that right now.
It's not great.
In 1962, Kim Jong-pil has a meeting with Bohi Pak, where he decides to use the Moonies, who by this point have spread to the U.S. as a way to run influence operations on American politicians.
Now, the results of this alliance is that the Unification Church gets legal status and recognition as a religion in Korea in 1962.
And a whole bunch of Moonies wind up in the Korean embassy staff in the U.S.
So this is going great.
Yeah, this is...
I mean, there's a level to which it is kind of nice because we talk so much on this show about influence operations that the United States ran in other countries to like fuck with their government and their media.
And, you know, some now people talk about like Russia doing that some, but we, this is good.
I love, I've never heard about much about creating influence operations in the United States.
Yay!
Robert, do you know who else is running an influence operation on the United States?
Influence Operations00:03:50
Is it the Washington State Highway Patrol?
Yeah, absolutely.
That scans.
Yep, it is.
But it's also the products and services that support this show, of which the Washington State Patrol is one.
Really, our main sponsor.
Yeah.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one: never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Yeah.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios.
This is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Uncovering Disturbing Patterns00:15:30
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did it.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Now everybody in the chamber is ducked.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach.
Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
Boy, howdy, I love supporting the Washington State Highway Patrol industrial.
You can't even say it seriously.
You can't even say it.
I know, I know.
Chris, please continue.
Okay, so when we left off, Moon has gotten embassy status by embedding a bunch of people in the Korean embassy in the U.S.
And they're able to use the status and recognition and the recognition of the Unification Church as a religion in Korea to start getting legal recognition in the U.S.
And once they established themselves in the U.S., they found something.
Moon in particular is directly involved in this.
They found something called the Korean Cultural and Freedom Foundation, or the KCFF.
The first of, well, I don't know if it's the first, but it's the first American version of the many, insufferable numbers of Unification Church friend groups.
Now, the KCFF does two things.
It acts as a slush fund and a friend group for the Unification Church, and it runs a Korean dance group called the Little Angels.
Oh, boy.
This is going to go a really bad place, isn't it?
Okay, so it's probably not as bad as where you think it's going to go, but it's not, it's weirder and not good either.
Now, a lot of the people in this Korean Cultural Foundation, they don't understand that it's a church front group, which is a common thing.
There's a lot of people in church friend groups who don't understand what's happening.
And with the KCFF, some of these people actually find out in the 70s and they all get purged.
But in the 1960s, this seems like, you know, this seems like an innocuous Korean cultural group running a Korean traditional dance group.
And, you know, for people who follow cults, like, yeah, this is basically the Falun Gong Shen Yu 40 years earlier.
But there's two important differences.
The Falun Gong is the cult that is responsible for all of those billboards in cities that are like China before communism.
It shows some lady dancing.
Yeah, it's a weird right-wing cult.
We'll get into one more.
So this is like the OG version of this, except there's two differences.
And one of them is that the Little Angels are directly sponsored by the Korean government.
So it's like the Blue Angels, but little girls instead of aircraft.
And the second difference is that Bohipuck is using the Little Angels to smuggle money from Korea and Japan into the U.S. by stuffing the kids' socks full of cash.
Just like the Blue Angels.
Every single Blue Angel flown by a child, just moving wads and wads of $100 bills across the world.
It's great.
So the cash that the Little Angels are smuggling come from two important sources.
One is Moon's Chaibol.
Chaibles are these Korean superconglomerates that basically dominate the Korean economy.
And she just has one.
And he has one of these conglomerates because Moon, he's able to set one up in 1963, presumably with help from his allies in the military dictatorship.
And this is the start of a massive economic empire that gets built up in Korea.
They have a pharmaceutical company, a stone company, a titanium company.
They make M16s for the Korean army.
They make Vulcan mini guns.
They make the M79 grenade launcher.
Ooh, that is a good one.
And they also make air guns that are used by Korean children for military training.
Yeah.
Because this is, yeah.
And this is.
Well, I mean, if you're going to train kids with guns, give them an air gun first.
You know, don't go right to a.
And this is just the that's just the early stuff in Korea.
Moon has literally hundreds of businesses across the world that bring in hundreds of billions of dollars a year, hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
Now, the other important source of funding is the rapidly expanding church in Japan, which is the financial empire of the cult.
And there's a lot of ways that they do fundraising in Japan.
One of the big ones is they run the seance scam.
So they have a bunch of lawyers and they target people who just got life insurance payouts.
And they have all these mystics around the country.
And the mystics pretend to be able to channel their loved ones who like inevitably say that like, no, the only way I can find peace is if you give money to this mystic or like the church or one of the friend groups.
And they make like hundreds of like they'll take an entire life insurance problem.
They'll make hundreds of thousands of dollars off of just individual ones, these scams.
And yeah, the other source of funding is actually an old friend of the show.
But before we can get to him, we need to talk about the World Anti-Communist League.
But yeah, they're one of the worst organizations in human history.
The World Anti-Communist League was founded in 1966 out of the fusion of two other anti-communist groups, the Asian People's Anti-Communist League and the Anti-Bolshevik League of Nations, a Block of Nations.
So the Anti-Bolshevik Block of Nations is basically an alliance of like the Romanian Iron Guard, the Croatian Ustazi, and then like a bunch of other Nazi collaborators and like people who do genocides in these countries.
Wholesome dudes.
There's a quote from the leader of the Ustachi who's like a true member of the Ustazi is the man who can carve a child out of a mother's womb with a bayonet.
So these are great people.
Yeah, the Estazi is like, of the Nazis, one of the worst kinds.
People say people say this a lot about Nazis, but it's like, these are the guys, even like the SS looked at them and were like, this is a bit much.
I mean, it's like it consistently happens.
Whatever is going on, when it gets out to the Balkans, that's when it finds its most like its ultimate form.
By the time anything makes cigarettes, fascism, by the time they hit the Balkans, they are the best version of themselves.
So that's one of the two groups.
The Asian People's Anti-Communist League is basically like a creation of the intelligence services of the military dictatorships of Taiwan and South Korea.
And in 1966, they do a fusion dance, and the World Anti-Communist League is born.
Now, in 1967, Moon has a meeting with two old friends of the pod from a Nobu Suki Kishi episode.
Yohei Sasakawa, the Yakuza boss who created the Japanese black shirt ripoff and then visited Mussolini before getting off in his war crimes tribunal and becoming the self-described quote richest fascist alive through his control of the underworld and monopoly on speedboat gambling.
And the other guy is Yoshio Kodama, the Yakuza boss who escaped his own war crimes tribunal, to fund the Liberal Democratic Party, Akishi's rise to power, and then also notably survived a kamikaze attack on his house in 1970.
Jesus, quite heroic scale.
This episode is like the Bastard's Pod Reunion episode.
Like everyone who's ever been on this show is going to be here.
So together with these two fascists, Moon creates the International Federation for Victory Over Communism and its Japanese branch, Shoko Rengo, which basically means victory over communism.
Now, Shoko Rengo is basically a combination of unification church members and dudes from the Yakuza with Sasakawa as its head and Kodema as an advisor.
And this alliance between the church and the Yakuza provides the church with, you know, enforcers for its Japanese operation.
It's also how they're able to do all these scams in Japan because like normally in order to, you know, if you're running scams that are like, you're taking $100,000 from someone, right?
Like you have to have Yakuza permission.
And this is how they get Yakuza permission to like... run crime in Japan.
And they also get access to Sasakawa's enormous stores of money.
And on the other hand, Sasakawa gets legitimacy on the political stage for his role as an anti-communist politician.
Now, Shokorengo almost immediately becomes the Japanese branch of the World Anti-Communist League.
And they hold the next one of the league's meetings at Sasakawa's boat racing range in Kyoto with full Moody supports.
Now, the Moonies move into a new office in Japan on land that they bought from one Nobu Suke Kishi, who also openly supports Shokorengo and is the guy.
I think this is like the last thing we said in our episode about him is he integrates the Unification Church into the Liberal Democratic Party.
So they're just like a part of the Japanese establishment now.
It's great.
It's a good time.
That's wonderful.
Cool.
It's only going to get worse.
Sounds fun.
Glad we're doing it.
I really just want to keep mentioning this, that this organization's goal is Reverend Moon taking over the world and establishing a global theocracy with him as the head of it.
Like that, that's what this thing is.
And they keep getting integrated into the ruling class of the political parties that run like major industrialized nations.
It's very cool and good.
Now, with these powerful backers, sophisticated organizational capacity, the Moonies spread like wildfire.
Moving into 1970s, Moon gives like probably my favorite Moon quote about his operations.
I really keep the FBI busy trying to keep track of me.
After the Washington Monument Rally, their biggest question was, what in the world I would do next?
Even Satan is saying, what is Reverend Moon's next move?
Where should I take my big guns?
But most important is even God is asking, where are you going next?
My plan is clear and simple.
I am inexorably moving towards the absolute center of the universe.
So this guy's got a little bit of an ego.
I mean, he's like, he's not just doing like the Beatles were bigger than Jesus offhanded thing.
He's like, no, let me explain to you the ways in which God is impressed and baffled by me.
It's really incredible.
No, the center, the inexorable, the absolute center of the universe turns out to be the U.S., where Moon moves to an 18-acre estate called East Garden in the Hudson River Valley.
Now, this place is nuts.
Here's a description of it from the New Republic.
His wife and children, who now numbered 13, had run of East Garden in its lavish manner, one of which contained a bowling alley, six pizza ovens, and a waterfall in the dining room.
You know, while in the U.S., Moon starts running influence operations for the Korean CIA.
One of those operations, it turns out, is funding the Heritage Foundation.
Oh!
Yep.
So Ed Folner, who's the Heritage Foundation's co-founder, writes for one of Moon's newsletters in the 70s.
And the foundation, at like the very beginning of its existence, gets $2.2 million of KCIA money through one of Moon's friend groups.
It rules.
Maybe this guy is the center of the university.
Moon begins to develop just like an incredibly sophisticated network of allies in the new conservative rights.
One of those figures is the infamously racist Strum Thurman, who solves one of Moon's spades, right?
Yeah.
And he solves one of Moon's visa issues.
So Moon's about to be kicked out of the country in 1974 because his visa is up.
And Strum Thurman, who had become a Moon supporter through a meeting of the World Anti-Communist League, is just like, nah, I'll just fix this for you.
And so he's able to stay in the U.S. Man.
Yeah.
And so, so Strum Thurban the one time you're not racist for this.
Now, Strum Thurban becomes Moon's, like, one of his first allies on Capitol Hill.
But Moon, Moon is not content with one senator helping him out.
With Watergate breaking, Moon sees his chance to get Richard Nixon on his side.
So, in 1973, Moon creates the National Prayer and Fast Committee to support Nixon during Watergate and stage protests.
And they bought a bunch of ads.
They do this pro-Nixon thing.
They have this protest.
That's always where it starts with these right-wing ghouls, too.
Like, that was the first time they did the thing that they had been doing for a while and actually faced consequences.
And they were like, well, we got to re-engineer the entire world so that that never happens again.
Yeah.
So they hold this protest outside of the White House and Nixon's giving a speech.
And they like storm the barricades and interrupt the speech to like shout support for him.
And this gets Moon in meeting with Nixon in 1974, which makes Nixon one of six presidents to either meet with or support Moon and his organizations, which, and again, I cannot emphasize this enough.
He's dedicated to taking over the world and crowning Moon as a theocratic God-King.
It's great.
Six presidents, most of whom are still alive.
The church also started running another series of KCIA operations, including staging protests to support the interests of the South Korean dictatorship and a wide-ranging operation to bribe hundreds of congressmen and infiltrate their offices by having pretty young women hang around their offices until they get a job.
And this like finally, like at the point where they're literally running intelligence operations on members of Congress is like finally where the government gets involved.
Okay, well, it's good to know they're salvage.
So Donald M. Frazier, who's the representative from Minnesota, launches an investigation into the KCIA, into KCIA operations in the U.S. through the subcommittee on international organizations.
Now, Frazier discovers just an enormous tangle of Mooney and KCIA money moving through friend groups.
He finds an attempt to buy out a bank and do money laundering, a bunch of people just like stuffing wads of cash in the briefcases, three senators' offices infiltrated, maxive tax evasion, and a plan by Moon to use his businesses and church to conquer the U.S.
Now, this scandal becomes known as Korea Gate.
And despite multiple requests by Frasier and the committee, and, you know, and this is the thing is, this is a bipartisan committee, right?
Like, and both the Democrats and the Republicans are like, hey, you need to do something about this guy.
And nothing happens.
Because, you know, South Korea, by this point, is too important of an American ally for them to, for the U.S. to do literally anything about it running influence operations in the U.S.
Yeah, I mean, what are you going to do?
They're all wrapped around our domestic politics, too.
Like, what would you actually do?
I don't know.
I mean, they could have put a...
Don't let people make cults anywhere, but that's not clearly not a reasonable thing to watch.
What does actually happen as a result of this is that Moon declares that Frasier is a communist and spends an enormous amount of money to defeat Frasier in his run for Senate, which Frasier winds up losing by a few votes.
Now, a few nights later, someone tries to burn down his house.
No one's ever caught for this.
Yeah, it's great.
The only thing that happens is that it's a senior investigation.
Yeah, so meanwhile, Moon is searching the entire world for investment opportunities and begins a massive rush into Latin America.
He poured over $100 million into Uruguay between 1977 and 1979, which resulted in Uruguay's military dictatorship signing a massive arms deal with South Korea.
And lo and behold, Moon's country companies in South Korea get a bunch of the contracts.
Now, it's fun.
We've talked about what the Uruguayan Uruguayan military dictatorship did during True Pumarrow's episode, so we're going to skip over that.
But Moon is a close ally of the dictatorship, a pattern that is so regular that you can literally track which countries have military dictatorships by when Moon starts getting close to the government.
Like, I have done this while researching episodes.
I'll be like, when does dictatorship start?
I have mood written down going there.
Taking Over The Fishing Industry00:06:56
I was like, oh, okay.
I know when this happened now.
Yeah.
And some of it's he's influencing the situation.
Some of it's he's a smart motherfucker.
And he's like, well, you look like you might be about to take over.
I should probably get in good with your ass.
We'll get into more of that next episode.
But right now, we need to talk about something extremely important.
Fish.
Yes.
Now, like the band, right?
That I followed for seven years during my youth.
In the sea that swim.
I'm not familiar with the concept of the family.
Something you are familiar with that you are well aware of is that all great cult leaders hear the call of the sea.
Yes, that is true.
And in 1980, Moon gives a speech called The Way of the Tuna, which I'm going to read a bit of.
Oh, hell yes.
Oh, this is this sounds good.
This is sounding good.
I have the entire system worked out, starting with boat building.
After we build the boats, we catch the fish and process them for markets and then have a distribution network.
This is not just on a drawing board.
I have already done it.
In the same speech, Moon calls himself the king of the ocean.
Dope, dope, dope.
I mean, you know, he's going to have to go pretty hard to beat the current owner of that title, our buddy L. Ron Hubbard.
But I'm willing to listen.
So this is the beginning.
Well, by 1980, it's already going.
But this is sort of the origin point of Moon's attempt to build an enormous fleet of boats to take over the American fishing industry.
So he buys a boat company.
Ah, see, I do.
I have to give him, I'm going to take points away for having such crash financial ends.
L. Ron Hubbard didn't take to the sea and build a navy to make money.
He took to the sea and made a navy in order to get 20-year-olds to search for gold he'd buried in a past life that he knew wasn't there.
Moon's like stated justification for this is that he wants to feed the entire world by getting a bunch of fish.
I think it is a lesser fishing expedition than Hubbard's, but it's still, I think, incredibly impressive.
That does show an amazing amount of faith in the ocean's ability to keep making fish.
It's pretty incredible.
Well, we'll get into a bit of what happens there.
So this, so he buys, he just like buys a boat company and then uses the boat company to make boats for this fleet.
And he puts a million dollars into it.
And this operation is the beginning of the Great Moody Fleet and it's called the True World Group.
And, you know, in classic cult fashion, its founders like sleep in these communal apartments and, you know, they work horrendous hours for like this fishing dream.
And it works.
You know, here's from the Chicago Tribune.
True World is so ubiquitous that 14 of 17 prominent Chicago sushi restaurants surveyed by the Tribune said they were supplied by the company.
Now, because this is a capitalist enterprise and a cult, they immediately start doing crimes.
So their Alaska branch gets convicted of a felony for going like enormously over the boat's carrying capacity and endangering the crew by having a boat that is like enormously too heavy to float.
I gotta say, I respect, though, we're not just going to endanger the ability of the ocean to continue to support life.
We're going to endanger our fishermen, too.
You know what?
Both at once, baby.
Not only that, they are also going to endanger everyone who eats this fish.
So when pot alumni's the Food and Drug Administration tried to inspect a warehouse in Detroit in 2005, they found, quote, gross and unsanitary conditions.
Now, the manager tries to keep the inspectors out and says that his supervisor is, quote, a great man, that he was part of a new religion.
And if we took advantage of him, then God help you from the Tribune again.
Later, according to that FBI report, an employee wearing a ski mask approached one female inspector, put his thumb and forefinger in the shape of a gun, pointed at her, and said, Pow, you're out of uniform.
Oh, it's amazing.
They're just threatening.
They're just threatening the FDA.
Oh, it's great.
I mean, I think most of what we know about the FDA is that they're probably going to just take it.
Basically, no.
So, you know, the FDA is a good thing.
Good for them.
Good for them.
Good for you, FDA.
done like an enormous number of terrible crimes, but they are not on the pig the payroll of big fish.
So they try to come back to inspect this facility again.
They think they get a court order and they're like, okay, we're going to come inspect this facility.
And the moonies are just like, okay, we'll just shut it down instead of dealing with this because they're doing so many crimes that they were like, yeah, okay, we will lose this entire facility rather than have the FDA inspect it one time.
Now, the other part of this scheme is that they're basically attempting to use, you know, those mass wedding ceremonies.
They're trying to use them to get the Japanese members of the church who are like the most committed members of the church citizenship.
So they can bypass American fishing restrictions about who can fish in American waters.
Now, this is kind of a problem because for a long time, like Moon's weddings weren't considered legally binding at weddings.
That makes sense because he's just a guy.
Because he's just a guy.
And like mass weddings that might not be recognized by like law because maybe the law is like, well, you have to, there's like papers.
I think eventually they start getting considered actual marriages, but like this, this plan doesn't really work.
Yeah, it seems like there'd have to be a process you would go through.
But the problem is that even without this sort of like the influx of Japanese fishermen, this works.
And, you know, you have this interesting mix of the, so some of the people who are working for this fishing company are like in the cult, and some of them aren't.
And, you know, there's this whole thing inside the company where like the people who are in the cult get promoted fast and the people who aren't in the cult kind of get like subtly or like, hey, take this like propaganda thing.
But this, like, this fishing group takes over the fishing industry.
Like, like, in, in, in 2005 alone, the True World Group made $250 million.
Yeah.
And not bad.
Again, like, like in 15 of 19 sushi restaurants that Chicago Tribune interviewed were like, yeah, no, we buy our fish from the Moonies.
It's like, yeah, I mean, that is Chicago.
That's true.
So they have operations in all 50 states, and it's very similar in everywhere else because they've seized control of the American fishing industry.
That on this somewhat happy note, with the great Mooney fleet thriving and Moon's call to the sea fulfilled, we're going to leave it today and we're going to come back next time to see Moon fund a horrific series of war crimes in the name of world peace.
Well, I gotta say, Chris, it takes a lot for me to be impressed by a cult leader.
But this guy is pretty good cult leader.
Gotta give it to him.
You haven't seen shit from Moon yet.
Like this is this, this, all of this is the warm-up intro to the actual moon.
He's laying the bones.
He's putting down the foundation so he can really, really do some crimes.
Oh, baby.
Yeah.
This is my favorite part when the cult leader's at the top of the fucking roller coaster and you just know they're about to go zero G, baby.
Oh, ah, Chris.
Thank you.
Do you have anything to plug?
What do you do?
Who are you?
Riding The Roller Coaster00:02:54
I work for Sophie at Fizzled Media.
I work on It Could Happen Here.
I do some other stuff.
I'm on Twitter at it mechr3.
I do that.
Yeah.
Robert, do you have anything to plug?
I have a novel.
You can pre-order it now.
If you Google After the Revolution on AK Press, you can go buy it.
And then you will have a signed copy of my novel that's printed on paper.
Wow.
Wow.
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