Reverend Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church allegedly funded Nazi death squads, Operation Condor, and right-wing terror groups across Latin America during the Cold War. Evidence suggests Moon provided $4 million to Klaus Barbie for Bolivia's 1980 coup, supported Jonas Savimbi's UNITA in Angola, and financed Richard Viguerie to build the modern American right. Beyond political manipulation, the church utilized the Washington Times for ideological warfare, employed spies on campuses, and crowned Moon "King of Humanity" in 2004 with support from Donald Trump and Mike Pence. Ultimately, these revelations expose a vast network of violence and influence that extends far beyond religious doctrine, implicating high-level political figures in global atrocities. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Operation Condor00:15:29
Oh, yeah.
Woot, woot.
How's it hanging?
Woot, I'm.
Woot, woot.
Yeah, you know.
Yeah, what?
Oh, gosh.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's fine.
Here we are.
Just go with it.
It's the podcast that it is.
What do you, what do you, what do you, what do we call this show?
Uh, it's behind the bastards, and clearly you're not qualified to host it today.
So we'll, so we'll, so we'll let Chris handle that.
I thought, I thought this was this American life.
Um, oh boy, oh boy.
Prepared the wrong boy, howdy.
Well, yeah.
That's okay.
I have plenty of war crimes to go around.
This American life, my This American Life episode is way too horny to go on this podcast feed.
Nobody would, that would not be welcome.
Okay.
Well, I will, I will send this back to NPR.
And Chris, you cool with taking over today?
Yep.
It's me, Christopher Wong, and we're back for Reverend Moon Part 2, The Attack of the Nazi Death Squads.
I mean, cool.
It's a good time.
In 1980, Klaus Barbie, the butcher of Lyon and Nazi torturer Extraordinaire, was getting nervous.
French Nazi hunters were starting to close in on his bolt hole in Bolivia, where he'd tortured communists for the CIA and also the West Germans for decades.
Worse still, the possibility of a democratic government in Bolivia meant he faced extradition to France, who wanted his head on the platter for, among other crimes, killing 14,000 people and personally sending Jews to concentration camps.
So when Barbie was approached by a group of cocaine producers to stage a coup against the elected government, Barbie was in.
That coup, which saw Nazis rampaging through the streets, looting stores and warehouses and murdering people where they stood, put Generals Carlos Menza in charge of a military dictatorship.
Klaus Barbie's coup was infamously known as the Cocaine coup for its cartel backing.
But Bolivian intelligence report showed another further source of support.
$4 million from one Reverend Sung Myung Moon.
Oh, boy.
Nazi death squad funder extraordinaire.
Yeah, I mean, and I gotta be honest, as a cult, getting in with the CIA, pretty, pretty smart move.
I will say this.
There is actually no evidence that Moon ever directly worked with the CIA.
And this is very impressive.
If you're working for the same goals as the CIA.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
But I think it's one less thing that could fuck you up.
I do think this is an important distinction to draw because there are a lot of sources that you will read that will claim that the Moonies are a CIA friend and they're not a CIA front.
Like insofar as they're a friend group for anything, it's the Korean CIA.
And that's important because it means that, well, A, it means that there's a lot of other American intelligence agencies who like are really mad at them.
But B, it means that, yeah, their goals are very, very often aligned with the CIA, but they're not really a cutout for them.
They have sort of their own thing going on.
And that own thing is overthrowing the government of Bolivia.
Now, Bohipak, who's Moon's like invaluable aide and translator, visits La Paz that year and proclaimed, I have erected a throne for Father Moon in the world's highest city, which is which is great.
Okay.
Yeah, so the church also attempted to organize a 7,000 member, like 7,000 strong armed church similar to what they attempted to organize in Brazil.
And, you know, this was there to support the coup.
And after the coup, Carlos Meza and Moon like visit each other and they, but they, this, this, this is, this is like around the time that Reagan got shot.
And so they spend the night praying together for Reagan's health.
Now, fortunately for Bolivia and unfortunately for Moon, he'd picked a loser in Meza, whose government collapsed in 1982 amid a hail of coups and protests.
Yeah, you know, you can't pick them all, you know?
Yeah, Moon has a really bad track record with picking military dictators.
It's sort of funny, but this, unfortunately, was just the beginning of Moon's career as a sponsor of international terror and Nazi death squads.
Now, in 1980, Bohip and Kim Song-in, who's Kim Song-in- is the former Korean CIA station chief in Mexico City, founds an organization, the Confederation of Associations for the Unity of the Societies of America, an absolutely nonsense name that they created.
It's too long.
Yeah, it's awful.
It is nothing at all.
Yeah, so basically, they created just so that it could have the acronym CAUSA.
Now, CAUSA rapidly becomes a meeting place for just the worst mass murderers in Latin America.
They held their first meeting in the military in the military dictator Alfredo Stroessner's Paraguay.
Bohipak said of Stroessner, quote, I believe he's a special man chosen by God to run his country.
Stroessner, like, did a genocide against the Ache people and also did Operation Condor, among other things.
We will get more into Condor in a second.
Yeah.
Also attending CAUSA conferences was Domingo Monterresa, the head of El Salvador's Atocato Battalion, who is best known for doing the massacre.
Yeah, those are some war crimers right there.
Yeah.
So Monterosa, interestingly, is also trained by another member of the World Anti-Communist League, Taiwan, whose army also is training death squads, like sort of parallel.
I mean, some of us are doing it through the league.
Some of us are doing independently, but they're also training like death squads across Latin America.
Now, it's unclear to me if Monterosa like actually received money from Moon, but like basically every other right-wing like large-scale right-wing organization and death squad in El Salvador absolutely.
He seems like a pretty easy guy to get money from if you're making death squads to kill him.
And we're going to go through many, many death squads.
Yeah, and so he gives a bunch of money to right-wing groups in El Salvador and they do atrocities with it.
Now.
We also need to talk about Operation Condor.
So Operation Condor is an anti-leftist assassination network originally developed by Chilean intelligence in 1975.
Eventually, it has like Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Brazil, and also to a lesser extent, like Ecuador and Peru in it.
And Condor, like, if you count everyone who was killed while Condor was going on by like the governments doing it, it killed tens of thousands of people.
The rest of tortures, like hundreds of thousands more.
And so this is where things get complicated.
A lot of Operation Condor is run out of a group called the CAL, which is the original Latin American section of the World Anti-Communist League.
The CAL is founded by a group called Los Tecos, who are a Mexican neo-Nazi death squad who are famous for just like showing up and murdering leftists.
The league basically finds this group and they're like, oh, hey, you like killing communists.
And so they task the Tecos with assembling just the most bloodthirsty Latin American death squads they can find.
And they go and do this.
And this is the basis of the organization of the Latin American part of the World Anti-Communist League.
Now, the World Anti-Communist League formally expels the CAL in the early 1980s because they're trying to go slightly more legit, although they never get rid of the Ustashi people or the Iron Guard or any of the other fascist groups in it.
But they expel the CAL because people are like, hey, these guys are doing Condor and assassinating people.
But it's notable that Moon technically leaves the League in 1975 and he gives the speech about how the League is calls it quote a fascist organization, which is true.
But the problem is that this is all just political theater.
Moon never leaves the league.
He makes this big speech about it, but his people still run the league's chapter in like they still run the chapter in Japan.
They're heavily involved in the U.S. chapter.
And Moon is, you know, like Moon and his friend organizations are still just doing all of the, like, they're still running meetings with them.
They're still organizing with them.
And Moon also never actually disavows the CAL.
So the other thing that's worth noting is that, so Condor starts in 1975, right?
They don't, the league doesn't disavow the CAL until the mid-80s, which means that there's a lot of time where the CAL is being actively funded by the World Anti-Communist League.
And this is where it's kind of murky because it's difficult to tie Moon directly to Condor.
Yeah, I mean, that's generally how it's going to be with the people who fund death squads and the death squads.
You'd think that every other death squad I'm about to mention, we have direct evidence of him funding.
Condor and maybe he didn't.
You know what?
Maybe he found his limit.
So I say this.
So there's two things that suggest to me that he did do it.
One is that his money absolutely was going to the CAL, which was carrying it out because him and Sasakawa was like Japanese branch of the World Anti-Communist League or one of the big funders of the organization.
So he's at the very least indirectly funding them.
And also, Moon and his organizations are like in tight with, they're either working with the government or the far right in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil, which means that weirdly, the only Condor government they aren't working with at Chile.
And I don't know what's going on there because I kept expecting Pinochet to show up.
And he never does.
I don't know why.
Pinochet's like he's the one right-wing leader in all of Latin America who I cannot find any contact with Moon.
It's it's very strange.
It's like watching a movie without a heist and yeah, yeah, wondering where what he is, the guy from ER.
You know who I'm talking about.
Jesus, I can't, I'm not good with names today.
Sophie, who's the guy?
George Clooney, Clooney.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, no, but so Pinochet never shows, but Moon is working with every single other Condor government.
So there's a good enough chance that Moon is involved in this that I think we have to mention it because I don't know.
It's like, I think my guess is there's like, I mean, other than his indirect stuff through the CAL, I think it's like probably like a two out of three chance that he's funding them because that's just who he's in with.
What we do know for sure is that he's working with General Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, who was made the head of the armed forces in Honduras in 1981 to murder a leftist guerrilla group.
Alvarez just immediately starts torturing, murdering, and disappearing people.
He also trained, fund, and equipped the Contros, which we will get back to in a second.
Because this was a beautiful time and place to have tens of millions of dollars because you really just could buy armies up wholesale, send them off to murder people in, you know, mountainous countries.
It was, it was a real, ah, what a time to win.
And the other thing about this, you know, the world is really your oyster because so the drug trade exists, right?
But the drug trade is not bringing in like quite as much money as it's going to by like the like the late 80s and 90s.
So and so which means that like, you know, you, you, your like random cult actually has enough money to like, you know, like, you know, you, you, you can outbid the drug dealers, basically.
Yeah.
So Moon like looks at Alvarez's government and he's like, okay, I'm like, I have an in here.
And so he goes to Techuchigalpa to like start preaching about theologically resisting communism, which just means, you know, being the unification church.
And there's an interesting thing here where this is a period where a lot of Latin American right-wingers are turning away from Christianity because they're watching the liberation theology turn in in the Catholic Church.
And they see this and they go, okay, well, the Catholic Church is getting, you know, it's being infiltrated by communists.
It's coming soft on communism.
Like a lot of these sort of like leftist, like Catholic priests are, you know, running, like running their own militia groups.
And so the right-wing in Latin America starts looking for like another, like another religious thing they can get into.
And Moon is like, hey, it's me.
Look, I have a church.
We're Christian.
Sort of kind of don't don't look too closely at the I'm the Messiah behind the mirror.
Yeah.
Yeah, but this works pretty well.
And, you know, he has Bohi Pak hand Alvarez a check for $50,000.
Alvarez hilariously is forced to return the check after the Episcopal Conference in Honduras.
He's like, hey, why are you taking from a money who, why are you taking money from a guy who literally claims to be the Messiah?
And they get like, they get really mad at him.
That is awkward.
Like, if you actually think about what he says about God and Jesus, it could be awkward to take money from this guy.
Yeah.
You know, and shout out, you know, okay, like, we have to give credit to the Hondurans here because in the U.S., this is not going to happen.
Like, in the U.S., the Christians are just going to take, they're going to take Moon's money hand over fist.
But the Hondurans are like, no, we're drawing the line at the Messiah guy.
But, you know, this doesn't, you know, Moon keeps working with Alvarez.
He just, you know, gives the check back.
But unfortunately, Alvarez gets sacked by, he gets sacked by the government after the FBI reveals a conspiracy by Alvarez and his allies to overthrow the government on the behest of drug dealers, which, you know, sounds suspiciously like another coup that we've talked about today.
It's, he keeps getting involved in the same coup and it keeps either like it keeps just not working.
It's just like, it's, it's, it's pretty incredible.
Now, undeterred, Moon continues to spend an enormous amount of time and money in Honduras preaching anti-communism through democratization, which is, again, hilarious from a guy who has multiple times on record saying that democracy is favored by Satan.
But, you know, welcome to the Cold War.
So, and now we come to the mother of all Cold War conspiracies, Iran-Contra.
Because, yeah, it turns out Moon did Iran-Contra.
So, all right, to set the stage a little bit, in 1979, the U.S.-backed Somoza dictatorship was overthrown by a revolution that left the left-wing Sandinistas in power.
And the Sandinistas start doing things like, you know, nationalizing all of Somoza's land and, you know, like promoting public education.
And the U.S. looks at this and goes, we need to murder literally every single person involved with this.
Yeah, that scans.
Yeah.
So, so, you know, opposing the Sandinistas are this group called the Contra Revolutionarios or the Contras.
Now, even before Congress, you know, does Congress eventually start banning, like, but puts a ban in on all U.S. funding of the Contras because the Contras are doing things like murdering babies and blowing up silos to start with the population.
You know, death squad stuff.
Yeah, yeah.
They're really like your death squads don't.
Yeah, they're, you know, I will say this.
The Contras, well, okay.
I want to say that Contras are bad by Death Squad standards, and that's true, but also like the other Death Squads are, we're going to get to the Guatemalans in a bit.
And oh my God, also the stuff the Salvadorian National Guard is doing is.
Yeah, I mean, when you're death squads, there's really, it's not necessary to like kind of ply the romance or the moral differences between them.
They're all once you hit that death squad level.
You're a death squad, you know?
Now, CAUSA, which is that Frank Group, Moody Frank group I talked about earlier, starts contracting like a bunch of Contra leaders to offer them to help unite the Contra factions.
Fernando El Negro Chamorro, who's one of the major Contra leaders, goes on a Mooney sponsored trip with other Contra leaders.
And Chamamoro turns down the money because he's like, I don't want the strings attached with it.
Funding the Mujahideen00:09:33
But a lot of other Contra leaders, including Stedman Fagoth, take tens of thousands of dollars in cash and just like tons of food and supplies from Moon.
And CAUSA basically keeps Stedman and the other Contra factions in the fight long enough, because all these factions, they get their CIA money turned off, right?
And they're in a real crisis.
And Moon keeps them in the fight until Iran-Contra can kick in, which is horrifying because Moon is directly responsible for everything that's going to happen in Nicaragua, like from this period on.
Because if he's not funding these guys, a lot of these groups fall out of the war.
But he's there to bridge the gap.
And yeah, before we fully get to Iran-Contra, there's one more thing I should mention, which is that there's some evidence that American students from the church's student movement, like there's some evidence they fought for the Contras.
I can't really confirm it.
There seems to be creditable evidence that individuals went to go fight for them, but it's unclear if it's like a mass thing the church was promoting or if it was just sort of an individual thing.
We do know the church claims to have been sending people into Nicaragua to like preach.
So who knows?
Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things, if you raise a large group of people to believe that like this is a fight that they personally need to be involved in and like a bunch of them go over and fight, it's a great way to make that.
It's the same thing we saw, we see with like Rhodesia, where it's like, well, did this organization send fighters?
No, but they created propaganda that convinced people to go fight there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Actually, this didn't make it into the cut of the episode, but his newspaper, The Washington Times, big Rhodesia fans, also big apartheid South Africa fans.
It was the shorts.
Yeah, I couldn't find anything about him directly funding them, but yeah, he's on their side in principle.
Okay, so now we need to talk about Iran-Contra.
I'm going to do like the shortest version of Iran-Contra anyone has ever done.
So there's four parts.
Part one is Oliver North gets $10 million from the Sultan of Brunei, who is the world's most feted-out monarch.
And then his secretary puts the money into the wrong bank account and lights it on fire.
So just some random Swiss banker gets $10 million.
They can't get the money back.
And the Sultan of Brunei Brunei is like a family.
Very funny.
It's funny because the Sultan of Brunei is he is the most CIA guy like outside of the CIA that has ever existed.
And even he was like, you just put $10 million in the wrong bank account.
Like, I'm not going to give you any more money.
Oliver North.
That's great.
So part two after that part plan fails is Oliver North basically is secretly negotiating with the Iranian government to covertly buy America to sell the Iranian government American missiles.
And then they're going to, they part three is they take the money they get from selling those missiles and they put it in like a black ops slush fund and they move that money to the Contras.
Now part four is creating a cover story for where that money came from.
And then Moon is neck deep in part in part four.
Bohi Pak gives $100,000 to Oliver North's Nicaraguan Freedom Fund, a fund also backed by Pot Alum's Soldier of Fortune magazine to say good time.
And the Mooney is also like they start they set up their own fundraiser for the Contras and they're also working with the Anti-Communist League's fundraisers and logistics networks.
And the Anti-Communist League one is the is the is the big one that that Reagan uses to go, oh, hey, see all this CIA money we're pouring in.
That's not that's not from the CIA.
See, this is this is a grassroots anti-communist campaign.
And, you know, I mean, like, and they do actually raise some money.
It's just that they don't raise Iran-Contra money.
Now, not content to just do Iran-Contra, the Mooney sent a fake priest to testify before Congress, claiming that the Sandineses were dressing up as Contras and doing false flag massacres to discredit the Contras.
That seems plausible.
That's got to be what's happening for sure.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
So those are funny things.
So this guy claims to be from the Catholic Church, and the Catholic Church is like, this is not one of our guys.
And so, and he's like, no, no, no, I'm from the Orthodox Catholic Church.
And everyone's like, what?
And the Orthodox Catholic Church apparently is this like, it's this group in like are they people who thought Vatican II went too far and like the church has gotten cucked.
It's weirder than they're like this really weird like like like very old like splinter faction with eight people in it in like uh in like Scotland for some reason.
And like it's unclear if he's even involved with them, but what they do find is a bank account with like a bunch of money in it that from one of Moon's friend organizations that this guy was mysteriously paid.
So that was fun.
And the other thing that they do is CIUSA produces a pro-Contra documentary film called Nicaragua Was Our Home that airs on PBS in 1985 to drum up support for the war.
Lee Shapiro, who's the dude who made the film and a fanatical moon supporter who graduated from the Unification Theological Seminary, because, oh, yeah, the Moody's have a school now.
And I should mention, they have multiple schools.
Like there's just multiple colleges.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, you get a cold dad across the world.
You do have to start directly training the children at some point.
Yeah, for sure.
So Lee is killed near Kabul while embedded with Hezbollah Islami to make a propaganda film about the Mujahideen.
You know what?
Go off, King.
Absolutely.
Get killed by Hezbollah in Afghanistan.
Well, he killed him with Hezbollah in Afghanistan.
Well, Hezbollah Islami is like probably the worst of the African Mujahideen of the actual Afghan Mujahideen factions.
Yeah, it's not a good one.
Yeah, yeah, during the Civil War, just in the shelling of Kabul alone, they kill at least 25,000 civilians.
Like, it's there, and it's funny.
It's interesting because Lee, like, goes out into Afghanistan, like, trying to find some, trying to find a Mujahideen group who will let him work with him.
And all of the Mujahideen groups are like, no.
Like, we will not work with you.
Like, yeah, because I don't know if you know this about Mujahideen in general, but if you say sometimes God's wrong and I tell him, and he's like, oh, stupid me, this is why I go to you, buddy.
You know, if that's your religion, a lot of Mujahideen might have issues with you.
Yeah.
And the only people who will take him are the worst people.
Are just literally the worst people in the entire Mujahideen who are...
And okay, there's an angle here that I couldn't find direct evidence of, but like, so this is, he's embedded with the faction that's like being backed by Pakistan.
And there might be some kind of incredibly convoluted anti-communist angle there.
I wasn't able to find it, but this guy's involved with literally everything ever.
If you're sending guns to Afghanistan, you're one of the bad guys.
Now, does that mean that basically everyone involved in Afghanistan for the last 40 years have been the bad guys?
Absolutely.
Yeah, it's not great.
It's a lot of shitty people sending guns to Afghanistan and sometimes soldiers and usually for bad reasons, basically always for bad reasons.
That's Afghanistan.
Yeah.
So yeah, of course, the World Anti-Communist League is sending funny to them and sending funding to them.
And Lee Shapiro's death is literally the only thing that stopped CAUSA from just making another propaganda film and having it aired on BBC.
I don't know BBC.
PBS.
Now, lest you think we're done with the death squads, CIUSA.
This is behind the bastards.
The only promise we make is never done with the death squad.
There's so many.
So yeah, the CAUSA also did a propaganda media tour for Rios Mont's dictatorship in Guatemala.
Oh boy, Carlos Rios Mont.
Yeah.
Now, yeah, Rios Mont is most notable for successfully doing a bunch of genocides against the indigenous population of Guatemala.
He definitely did.
There are entire peoples who are just gone.
They killed every single one of them.
There are languages that don't exist anymore.
Yeah, there are towns that still won't let the military back into this day because of the genocides.
Yeah, I mean, like, it's horrifying.
Like, there's, one of my friends, like, was an anthropologist who worked with a community who, so they, they managed to, everyone else around them had been killed in the genocide.
They managed to survive, and they're the last people on earth who speak their language, and they survive by just running on foot through the jungle, and they made it, but, you know, they, they, they're, they, they, they, they, like, you know, they, they, they live in this horrible slum, and they, they can't speak Spanish, and they're the last people left of, you know, their, their, their entire people who have been around for thousands of years because Monts fucking killed all of them.
And it's, it's horrifying.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's, it's pretty bad.
And Moon's doing propaganda tours for their death squads and also funding them.
It's.
Yeah.
I mean, are you really a right-wing shithead, though, if you're not backing Rios Mont?
Like, are you actually, do you deserve to even call yourself like a violent right-wing extremist if you're not backing that guy?
I, I, I will say, like, okay, there are a lot of right-wingers who like back Rios Mont like rhetorically, but like Moon puts his money where his mouth is.
Like you can, you, you, you can never not say that like when like when when when there was a fight against communism and when there were babies to be killed, like no one on earth can say that Reverend Moon did not, did not do his part in murdering those babies.
He made sure there's not as many babies.
And you know what?
Every time you don't spend an extra five, ten minutes in traffic.
Thank you, Reverend Moon.
Thank you for making there be less people who are alive to drive cars and stop me from getting to the Sparrow.
You know what else makes there be less people alive to drive cars?
The Outsider's Secret00:04:36
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Washington State Patrol.
Oh, well, yeah, the highways.
Yeah.
Washington State Patrol and Coke Industries and for sure.
I mean, with their island where people hunt children, they really go out of their way to decrease the surplus population.
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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 to come look for up and coming talent.
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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.
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10-10 shots fired.
City hall building.
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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.
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And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
Moon Funds Pol Pot00:13:14
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
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We're back.
Chris, please go ahead.
So Moon also has like another friend group that he uses that does basically the same thing as CAUSA, but like it just does media tours.
And they run these like quote-unquote fact-finding trips that included interviews with the leaders of Renamo and Mozambique, Udida in Angola, SWAPO in Namibia, and Solidarity in Poland.
Now, those of you who know your Cold War will realize that Unita means Jonah Savimbi.
Not seen since the Manafort episode of the Dawn of Time is back on the pot.
And yeah.
Oh boy.
Yeah.
Man.
From fucking Guatemala to Angola.
All around.
He's really hitting all of the hits of like right-wing fuckery in this period of time.
He's doing a whole fucking bingo.
It's really incredible.
It's very impressive.
It's very impressive.
I will say, so I don't have any evidence that he directly funded either Solidarity in Poland or Swapo in Namibia, but through a web that is like elaborate even by moon standards.
And I'm not going to explain the full thing because I turned into the pinboards meme, like conspiracy meme trying to like track all the funding sources down.
But he does seem to have funded both Reynamo and Savimbi just like directly.
So that's fun.
And to finish off the death squad gauntlet, we need to talk about Cambodia.
Oh boy.
Wow.
Man, that is honestly not maybe not one of the death squads I necessarily expected to see him get involved with.
So throughout the late 1970s, Pol Pot's troops were busy making like a series of the worst military decisions in human history.
They decided that they were going to launch a bunch of cross-border raids against Vietnam and just like massacre a bunch of Vietnamese civilians.
Now, the Vietnamese army, by the time you hit 1977, 1978, they have beaten back to back the French, the Japanese, the French, again, the U.S.
And in one year, their B team is about to go blow for blow with China in a conventional war.
Pol Pot's army does not have a centralized command and control structure.
So Pol Pot's army looks at this and goes, no, no, no, we're going to be the ones who succeeded where every single other empire on earth has failed.
And they start this war with Vietnam.
And Vietnam invades 1979 and they just blow the Cambodian army to pieces.
But they do a thing I think everyone who lives in the U.S. knows well, which is they get stuck in a nation-building quagmire, which, you know, well, you know, it happens to everybody.
It's like throwing your back out.
You know, everybody at some point, you know, if you're funding Death Squads, you're going to wind up locked in a quagmire of a war.
You know, I will say I will say this for Vietnam.
Like, okay, if there's one government ever that it was like, this is a good idea to go in and knock them off, it's Pol Pot.
Oh, for sure.
Yeah.
Like, you know, but this becomes a problem with them because, you know, they're trying to set up a state and it doesn't look that Vietnam.
Vietnam proves that there is something about being a state that makes you want to get involved in another state shit and start a quagmire.
Not that, like, again, like you said, somebody needed to do something.
It is just funny to see Vietnam go do a Vietnam on Cambodia.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't know.
There's no lesson there because the lesson certainly isn't let guys like Pol Pot continue doing Pol Pot things.
Please don't take this as me saying, ha ha, what fools the Vietnamese were.
Yeah, I mean, that's kind of funny.
Like, I will say this is that the lesson from this is that if you're going to go invade a country and knock off Pol Pot, you actually have to kill Pol Pot.
Pol Pot, like, I would say killing Pol Pot is something in general that people should have done.
Yeah, this is a problem because the other thing that happens is that a bunch of Khmer nationalist groups pop up.
And one of these is called the Khmer People's National Liberation Front.
Now, Moon does propaganda for and direct support to the Khmer People's National Liberation Front.
Now, there's one problem now, and he's doing this because this is an anti-Vietnam group, right?
But there's one problem with the Khmer People's National Liberation Group as an anti-communist group, which is, you know, other than the massacres, which they don't care about, the problem is that the Khmer People's National Liberation Front is part of the Coalition Government of Democratic Kempuchea.
Now, Moon is pushing for the Coalition Guard Democratic Kempuchea.
They're trying to maintain their seat, the Cambodia seat of the UN.
The problem with them is that the most powerful member of this coalition is Pol Pot.
So Moon is directly funding, well, it's sort of directly running propaganda for him and indirectly funding Pol Pot.
What a great anti-communist.
I love to see it.
It's, yeah, it's real bad.
Yeah.
Yeah, he's funded Pol Pot.
Now, well, I mean, look, who's among us has not given Pol Potter?
I've never given money.
Look, Chris, you can't say that because it could happen here is sponsored entirely by King Notre Dame Sahanowic, who funded Pol Pot.
So in a way, you know, as we as we sell the former king of no, I don't really, I lost, I lost a handle on this.
This is when you jump in.
So this is one, when you jump in.
No.
Okay.
All right.
Well, Chris, please continue.
So, you know, there's kind of like a secular limit that you hit, right?
Like there's a certain point at which just the amount of time you have and the amount of money you have is such that you can't, like, you can't fund literally every death squad.
Unless that is something I've often mourned in my own life, but you know, you fund the death squad, you can.
Yeah, but there's a way around this.
And the way around this is you fund the American government.
Well, yeah.
Now, so as a taxpayer, I do back a lot of death squads.
Yeah, yeah.
So, but, you know, there's a political angle that lets you like increase the bang for your death squad buck.
So there's a guy named Richard V. Grueri.
I'm butchering his name because he's Italian.
I also don't respect him.
He is the man who basically created the modern right out of the wreckage of the Barry Goldwater campaign.
He's famous for taking a list of 12,000 people who donated more than $50 to the campaign in 1964 and using it to create a mailing list.
Now, this is a revolution in American politics.
It allows you to- Oh God, yeah, that's the whole fucking 80s, 70s and 80s.
And he's doing this in the 60s.
And this allows him to fundraise and mobilize activists at an unimaginable scale.
Like this is Facebook before Facebook.
And they're sending these old people letters that say things like, babies are being harvested and sold on the black market by Planned Parenthood clinics.
And, you know, cool.
It's Twitter.
Yeah, it's literally a lot of people.
Invented Facebook.
They did this in 1965.
And old people react exactly the same way old people react now to Facebook.
And so Vigieri is at just the absolute cutting edge of this.
He had the cutting edge of the mailing list.
He's using computers to keep track of the mailing lists.
And he is building the infrastructure that will make the Reagan Revolution possible.
Moon is funding him as early as 1965 through a scam that involves setting up radio towers to broadcast propaganda to North Korea.
He also gives Vigieri $900,000 through a fake charity in 1977 and then bails him out again in the 80s by buying Vigieri's office building for $10 million and then putting him in charge of the accounts of the American Freedom Coalition, which is a Mooney group that's invented to defend Oliver North.
Now, while this is happening, Mooney Point Man, Gary Jarman was running an organization called the Christian Voice, which was one of the first political organizations to put Vigieri's new fundraising system to the test.
In 1980 and 1982, they outraged every single other conservative fundraising group.
To put this into perspective, Jerry Farwell's new moral majority pack raises $22,000 in his first year.
That same year, the Christian Voice raised $494,722.
And these guys, the Christian Voice is terrifyingly powerful.
In the 1980 election, they target 32 races and they beat 22 incumbents.
This is yeah, it's bad.
This is the, you know, this, this is the infrastructure that built the Reagan Revolution.
And it is funded by Reverend Moon.
Yeah, it's bad.
And, and, you know, not content to simply fight at the ballot box, uh, Moon runs anti-communist campaigns on college campuses, including a anti-communist newsletter, which is actually pretty, he has this like newspaper thing that, you know, how every like Trussgate group and every like weird communist group like passes out newspapers on campus?
Moon is like, what if we did our own, but they were anti-communist?
And so he has all of his like followers on campus like passing out these newspapers.
And so you get all these, like all of the cults are like lined up next to each other passing out newspapers.
It's a fun time.
I know you've talked about it, but the outstanding amount, like it's just like unfathomable amount of money that's in everything.
He funds so much.
And the outreach and funding is hit.
He's the first, he's the only real cult leader that I'm aware of that is on that L. Ron Hubbard level.
They hit this certain point early in their career where it's like, where did their money come?
Well, they have infinite money.
Yeah, yeah.
There's no, they have as much money as they need.
I'm like, I have to do that.
They have all of the money they could ever spend.
Which is a scary thing for a cult leader to get to.
God, it makes me miss LRH.
He didn't fund any death squads.
He just threw kids off of boats like a hero.
Yeah, like Moon is Moon is like, what if you used L. Ron Hubbard for just like pure evil?
It's tragic to think of L. Ron Hubbard's legacy being used for evil.
Yeah.
And, you know, and I will say, like, so like part of how he's funding this is like, part of it is just, you know, the cult, like the cult is literally a pyramid scheme, right?
And that he has all of these businesses.
He also has Sasakawa's like literally infinite yakuza money from Japan.
He's getting KCIA money.
He's getting money from all of just like he keeps.
There's like a couple of times where he takes over banks in Uruguay and then just like takes all of the money from them.
And then the bank goes under.
Like he does this like multiple times.
He has all these land.
There's another thing that I didn't fit in the episode, but I think I should talk about a little bit, which is that like there's some evidence that like in the night, in like the 90s, he got into the drug trade because he starts buying all of this land that's like on the border in Brazil.
Well, like, he's in the cocaine trade.
He's like buying the border crossings that cocaine moves through in like Bolivia.
And in, yeah, it's, there's no hard evidence of that, but like no one else, but there's no other reason why you're buying all that land.
If you are backing multiple death squads in Latin America to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, I'm sorry, but I don't, I can't believe you're not moving blow.
Like, I refuse to accept that that's possible.
Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's one of those things.
There's so many threads of moon where like, you know, some of the threads, like I, like, I pulled on the Death Squad thread and I found that he was funny Paul Pot.
And some of them, like, there seems to be a lot of investigative journalism, like, still to be done on this organization because like the cocaine thread is a lot of people all-encompassing.
Yeah.
Like, it's hard to, it's hard to think.
It's impossible to imagine that like people know the bottom of this at the moment, you know?
Yeah, it's bad.
Yeah.
So, but you know what's not bad, Chris?
Products and services.
Uh, that that support this podcast.
Um, products and services are always uh uh you know, Chris, a lot of people say some of our products and services back death squads themselves.
I don't agree with that.
I think one of the beautiful promises that the Raytheon Corporation has for the world is a future without death squads because robots can kill those people from the sky, Chris.
That's true.
You no longer send a bunch of soldiers who are fucked up on cocaine and methamphetamine to gun down a bunch of children in a village.
You just bomb it from the air.
Although, Robert, there's a real risk here, which is we're cutting the legs out of the child soldier industry.
I know, but you know, look, disruption has to come for every industry eventually.
One day you and I will be replaced with a robot that perfectly mimics Joe Rogan's voice.
And like that, you know, child soldiers are going to be replaced by drones.
But we can still honor the legacy of the child soldier industry by having little kids pilot those drones because they're better at video games.
That's true.
It's Ender's game.
We've proven it mathematically.
Yeah, Ender's game, but entirely targeting poor people in the global south.
That's the promise of Raytheon.
All right.
Replacing Child Soldiers00:03:37
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Murder at City Hall.
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The Spy Network00:15:27
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Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
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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.
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Ooh, boy, Chris.
We get a lot of money for those Raytheon mid-rolls.
I mean, we just, we just, that's our salary for a while, my man.
You want to continue on with this enlightening story of good times?
Yeah.
So, so the other thing that Moon's doing on college campuses is he's running a network of spies to spy on leftist activists and giving the information to conservative groups.
This is like, this is like, this is what this is like, this should be like, for like any other organization, the fact that you're running a network of college campus spies to like have gone through in a list like 20 things, each of which, if a guy had done one, would make them a worthy subject of this series.
This spy network has one sentence in my script.
Yeah.
One.
It's the second half of the space.
It's just a spy network.
No, it's just a spy network.
It's like you got to breeze over L. Ron Hubbard summoning the Antichrist with sex magic when you get his biography because there's just too much going on, man.
So anyway, one of the reasons why I'm brushing over this is that in 1982, Moon founds probably the single most important American institution he ever found, the Washington Times.
Here's Bohy Pak, the Times corporate president, describing why the Times was created.
Quote, it is a total war, basically a war of ideas, war of mind, the battlefield.
This is the battle.
This is where the battle is fought.
Son, in this war, the entire thing will be mobilized.
Political means, social means, economic means, and propagandistic means, and basically trying to take over the other person's mind.
That is what the Third World War is all about.
The war of ideology.
Oh, so he's, yeah, he's doing a fourth generation war thing.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
He's, yeah, he's, he's very much kind of thinking, honestly, on the same side as William S. Lind.
Okay, that's scans.
Yeah.
Yep.
Now, this, this is Reagan's favorite newspaper.
He has his paper delivered to his office every single morning and he reads Christ in heaven.
And an absolutely enormous number of right-wing journalists have passed through here over the years.
This is the same thing.
I mean, it's a name that's very familiar.
I'm sure everyone listening to this has run into a Washington Times article.
They are run by fonts.
Half of their business is people on social media mistaking them for the post.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, and so, you know, there's a thing, I was saying I saw this like fairly, it was this like a week or two ago.
The Washington Times like published an article calling, basically screaming about like calling the CCP like a, I think it was a termite infestation.
And it was like, yeah, like, oh, there's these termites in our society that have to be eliminated.
And I'm like, wow, so this is like, but yeah, I just looked at the Washington Post and the Washington Times website next to each other, almost identical fonts for the names, like deliberately almost identical fonts for the names.
Cool.
Yeah.
And I think people, I don't know, people, people look at the Washington Times doing stuff like that.
They're like, oh my God, look at the genocide office.
Like, yeah, these guys, like, these guys are so much worse.
Like, this is the newspaper of a cult.
Yeah, much like the Epoch Times.
Yep, yep.
Except, yeah, I mean, this, you know, a lot of what's happening here, like, like, like, this, like, the Moonies are just a better, like a more successful version of the Fallun Gong in a lot of ways.
Yeah, I mean, one of the big differences would be that the Fallun Gong, as terrible as a lot of things about them are, legitimately has suffered repression and stuff.
Like, as opposed to these guys are fully, the state is on board with them.
Yeah, yeah.
And I, well, okay.
So the U.S. state, we'll get to that in a second.
But, you know, so I want to especially mention some of these people.
David Brooks gets a start in journalism as a movie, writing movie reviews for them.
Awesome.
Like Pat Buchanan is an ex-Washington Times columnist.
That makes sense.
And they basically invent the modern style of right-wing journalism.
Like these are the Times are like some of the first people to do the war on Christmas.
Like they basically invent that.
And, you know, I want to, you know, they have a very disturbing analysis of this.
I want to read one of their, this is, this is a poster that was made by one of their affiliate groups because they have about a trillion.
News is available through more media than ever before and for 24 hours a day.
Yet much of it sounds the same.
Are media giving people the facts they need in the 21st century?
Is the media's traditional role of reporting facts even still relevant?
Is it time for the media to become guide dogs instead of watchdogs?
So and what they're guiding people to is white nationalism.
The Times is extremely racist, incredibly pro-Confederate, and they publish a bunch of literal Nazis.
Francis Booth Coombs.
I mean, you just listed Pat Buchanan.
Oh, yeah.
But I mean, like, like people who are more explicitly Nazi than Pat Buchanan, which is fairly impressive.
Yes.
Yes, because he's written a whole book defending Hitler.
Yeah.
So Francis Booth Coombs, who works at the Times, he was like one of their head publishers.
And he frequently published his wife, who's the other main thing his Reife writes for is Stormfront.
Oh, good.
Awesome.
It's amazing.
So here's from the Southern Poverty Law Center.
In one opinion piece in The Times, Coombs describes the whole of human history as, quote, the struggle of races.
Non-white immigration, she wrote in another column, is importing poverty and revolution that will end in the eventual loss of American sovereignty.
In England, Muslims are turning life in this once pleasant land into misery for its native inhabitants.
It's it's like and this is this is just one example that I've pulled out.
There are dozens of people at the time to write stuff exactly like this.
It's horrifying.
I've talked a bit before about the defender of DJ.
They're huge, huge defenders apartheid in South Africa.
They are, yeah, it's one of the worst institutions in the U.S.
And they, in a lot of ways, it's like they kind of serve a role sort of similar to what InfoWars does, right?
Where like you have this one sort of, they'll do the Alex Jones thing, right?
They'll pick a headline from another news source, completely misinterpret it, turn it into an outrage machine, and then they'll feed it to the right to the rest of the right-wing press.
And it goes through like Fox News.
Yeah, but they're kind of more like Breitbart in that they've camouflaged themselves as more legitimate.
And then also, especially with Reagan, they just directly have access to the president because this is their favorite magazine.
I mean, this is Reagan's favorite newspaper.
And, you know, one of the other things they do is, so the Korean government, there's a pro-democracy uprising in the city of Guangzhou.
And they make this commune.
It's one of the sort of incredible revolutionary moments in world history.
And the Korean government just murders them, just absolutely butchers them.
And the Times does propaganda.
Like, you know, Times runs cover for the Korean government.
And this is so bad that even like the other right-wingers at the times just resign en masse because they're like, I won't be a part of the South Korean government literally murdering a bunch of pro-democracy protesters.
Oh boy.
That order to defend the South Korean government comes directly from the top.
It comes directly from Moon.
It comes directly from Bohipok.
And they're trying to protect the new South Korean government after the KCIA shot former dictator Perk Chung-hee in his bunker, which is a story that I will tell like another time on this podcast.
Yeah, as much time as the dictators of North Korea.
Yeah, I'm working on episodes.
But yeah, we'll tell that later.
But, you know, Moon is just directly running interference to the fact that his bosses just murdered the president.
Now, this right-wing media blitz isn't just an American affair.
Moon is putting on newspapers across the world, including the Sergei Times in Korea, the Middle East Times in Cairo, and Sakai Nepo in Japan.
Now, Sakai Nepo is fun because they directly advocate for Japan invading Manchuria again, which this is where I was talking about that whole thing about how the Moonies run that scam where they make people pay indulgences for all the war crimes that Japan did in Korea.
Oh boy, they're advocating for them to do it again.
It's great.
Well, I mean, God forgave them.
So kind of like Rasputin believed, you got to get back in there and start sinning again.
Yeah.
He's not going to have anything to forgive.
I should specifically mention this.
God does not forgive Tojo.
Moon forgives Tojo.
Well, yeah, he needs someone a little more powerful than God.
Yeah.
And Moon is just much, much better than God.
I think Moon would agree.
Yeah.
Now, Moon's increasing hold over the media was tested in Japan when Yoshikazu Shojima, a former churchman, attempted to fight like a full-scale church takeover of Sakai Nepo in Japan.
Now, Moon sends in the Yakuza from the book Inside the League.
On the 1st of October, about 100 people, including about 30 in special karate training groups, barged into the paper's offices.
They broke desk.
They stole papers and beat up some of the employees.
On June 2nd of 1984, Sojima was attacked outside his home in Tokyo and stabbed repeatedly, according to police reports.
When the attack occurred, he was preparing an article critical of Moon.
Man, can't one team of like karate soldiers be sent into a place and it not ended?
I am going to do an episode at some point about karate because it's so fucked up.
But one of the things that one of the things that's important to note is that the World Karate Federation was founded by Sasakawa, that Japanese fascist, and one of Moon's lieutenants.
So yeah, all the karate people, like huge supply of bodyguards from South Korean dictators.
Oh, cool.
Well, I guess I'm going to have to go to Krav Maga for an unproblematic martial art.
Time to Google Krogma Kravmaga for the first time.
It's bad.
Now, so while all of this is happening, like this is, you know, this is in some ways is Moon's moment of triumph.
But there's two disasters that strike.
One is the death of his 17-year-old son, Huang Jin.
Now, this is a major problem for Moon theologically because he has written that people can only reach the kingdom of heaven if they're married.
So naturally.
What kills his son's dad?
He's driving an SUV on an icy road and he crashes.
He gets assaded.
Yeah.
Well, he wasn't a sports guy.
He just is a 17-year-old and is not good at driving an ice.
I mean, there's no evidence he got murdered.
So naturally, Moon solves the problem of his son can't go to heaven because he wasn't married by marrying the dead Huang Jin off to Bohi Pak's daughter, Hun Sun Pak.
I mean, potentially a great deal because you don't have to deal with a lot of the traditional downsides of marriage.
Yeah.
Hun Sun Pak later said that the experience was, quote, like being emotionally raped.
Oh, so yeah, not good.
I'm going to wait an extra second before I respond to you in the future, Chris.
Yeah, it's not good.
And yeah, and this is like while this is going on, like while Moon's having his death squad adventures, like there's just still a bunch of horrible stuff happening interpersonally in the church.
Yeah, I don't have a good segue from this into what I'm about to read.
So Moon also said about Huang Jian's death, if the sacrifice of Huang Jin Nim had not been made, one of either two great calamities could have happened.
Either the Korean nation could have suffered a catastrophic setback, such as invasion from the north, or I myself could have been assassinated.
Which I think is incredible.
Look at his mind where he's like, my son has died.
How do I spin this?
How do I spin this?
Yeah, if he hadn't died, one of two equally bad things could have happened.
I could die or North Korea could invade.
And I'm just like.
And he's consistently doing the thing that you're not supposed to do as a person.
Like say that God thinks that you're better than God or say that, well, at least it was my son that died and not me.
These are like real big.
But it's just cool.
It's fine.
That's good.
It's a good time.
Yeah.
So Moon's other problem is with the law.
Moon gets indicted on a number of, in the U.S., gets indicted on a number of counts related to the fact that literally everything he does is indescribably illegal and the government is trying to sort of try to get him on tax charges.
Moon loses this case and gets convicted of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury.
And it's important to remember what he's convicted of, because even before Moon is convicted, he launches this massive advertising campaign complaining that he's like, he's being religiously and racially persecuted by a government that hates religion.
And there's like this cult obsession.
And it's just that they just don't understand his new religion.
And this works.
Dinesh D'Souza gives a speech defending.
Damn it.
God damn it.
Look, you've brought up a lot of frustrating names, but that's the first one that made me angry.
God damn it.
Lawrence Tribe shows up to argue that this whole prosecution is an attack on the First Amendment and the government is going after him for holding church money and his own money in the same account, which is like a standard practice for small churches.
Tribe, oh, okay.
So the ACLU is involved in this.
I've seen conflicting accounts as to whether it was just the New York chapter or the entire ACLU, but some of the ACLU, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the National Association of Evangelicals all argue that if Moon is convicted, the government will come after churches everywhere.
So we have to defend Moon now.
And of course, none of this ever happens.
You don't.
Yeah, no, none of this ever happens.
There's no persecution ever because it's all a lie.
Moon is put in prison, if you remember, for obstruction of justice, perjury, and conspiracy, not tax evasion, right?
Like he's not, that's not what he goes down for.
Like, he goes down because he's running an enormous money laundering operation that is smuggling money in the socks of ballet dancers to move yakism money to Latin American death squads.
Like that, that's what he's actually doing with this.
Oh, so that's a crime now, huh?
We don't let that happen in America.
But this is the thing, like, to this day, you can find conservatives on forum posts talking about how, like, oh, like, like, like the rational skeptic people will be like, uh, Moon was like unjustly prosecuted.
It's like, no, they, they, he got off like so easy for the crimes.
If a dude chainsaw had hit him in half, it wouldn't have been an unjust prosecution.
Like, he, like, like, this guy, this guy ran Koreans, like, ran Korean CIA influence operations on sitting American senators.
Yeah, this is like a dullest level piece of shit.
Like, just let it happen.
Yeah, no, nevertheless, Jerry Farwell and Tim LaHaye, founders of the Moral Majority, join a pope.
That makes sense.
And they argue that he's being persecuted by secular humanists, which is their version of cultural Marxism.
North Korean Beating00:15:16
It's great.
Yeah, yeah.
The original term was pagan statism, actually.
It's gone through a few permutations before we hit cultural Marxist, which seems to scan best now.
Yeah.
LeHay takes $500,000 from Moon and creates the Coalition for Religious Freedom, which is like focused on defending Moon.
Jerry Farwell, who had denounced Moon as a devil preying on American children in 1978, speaks at a banquet run by CAUSA in 1985 and sits on the Coalition for Religious Freedom's board.
And, you know, prison.
Yeah, I mean, it's okay.
Yeah, like prison turns out to have been like an incredible boon for Moon.
It lets him like completely re, you know, because he, he, like, Moon, Moon in the 70s is like one of the most hated figures in America because everyone's like, oh, he's the cult guy.
And by the mid-80s, he, you know, he, he's, he's gone, he's completely rehabilitated his image and he's now like fully integrated into the into the Christian right.
And it's incredible.
Incredible it took was crimes.
Crimes and an enormous amount of money.
And you can do whatever you can fund every desk squad on earth.
Now, back in the church, things had taken an extremely bizarre turn.
In the summer of 1987, church leaders heard that Moon's dead son, Huang Jin, had returned to Earth in the body of a church member from Zimbabwe.
Cleopas Kudiona was accepted by Moon as a reincarnation of Huang Jin, whose body, whose spirit possessed his body.
Moon like appoints him as like a church inquisitor.
And so he would go around like beating church members until they confess to something they did wrong.
And it's apparently really brutal.
He like beats priests and their wives unconscious.
There's a there's a story about him like he takes out a gun and just like starts shooting bullets into a pool and then orders everyone to go like pick up the bullets from inside the pool.
Yeah, and he even he even beats Bohi Pak like so badly that Pak has to go to a hospital to have like fluid drained from his brain.
And this is the point at which Moon is like, I've had enough of this.
Maybe you're not my son.
Yeah.
And he has.
My son beats one less guy than that.
Yeah.
And so he declares that Huang Jin's spirit has left the body of Cleopatra.
Huang Jin comes back to life to just beat the shit out of some people and then goes right off to the spirit realm again.
Yep.
Incredible dating.
It's wild.
One of the funnies, like this is like there are so many church leaders who are just like randomly showing up with like bruises on them that like one of their like American, like pretty like prominent American followers is like convinced there's a communist plot going on to like disrupt the leadership of the church.
And it's just, the other thing is that they call him black Huang Jin.
It's just okay.
It's bad.
I mean, okay.
Yeah, I was also appreciating that.
Doesn't really scan as bad within the context of the episode.
Well, so I should briefly talk about a big like racial unity guy.
So like, you know, he like he was promoting integration in the 70s and the 60s.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, there's actually a number of really problematic guys who during the conversations on integration were on the right side.
We could talk about the fucking, oh, you know, the Kool-Aid.
What do you call it?
Jim Jones.
Jim Jones.
Yeah.
But I will say, so Moon is lying about this.
Moon does not actually believe in racial equality.
He, in, in his, like, so inside the church, there's...
Racism from the death squad guy?
Yeah.
There's this like internal hierarchy basically of like people in the church.
And it's like Koreans are on top.
And then I think it's like Japanese people and then white people.
And then like black people are on the bottom.
And there's like, there's, there's some, there's some racism stuff going on there.
I, yeah, I didn't write an enormous amount about it because there's so many death squads and we still haven't even gotten to the next thing we're about to get to, which is Kim Il-sung.
So yeah, Moon ironically lives to see the death of communism and the triumph of the market economy literally everywhere except for North Korea.
Well, yeah.
Which is, yeah.
They still keep it on.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But, you know, Moon is convinced that like collapse is coming any day now as like the Brilliant Wall falls and the Yodazar is imploding.
So Moon begins secret talks with North Korea in 1991.
And later that year, she's finally able to meet Kim Il-sung and return to return to North Korea for the first time since the Korean War.
Now, Kim Il-sung has like has like Moon's childhood home like refurbished and Moon goes to like visit his home and then they have this like meeting where they they like they like they like hug it out and Kim Il-sung says let us forget the past.
Most important now is the future.
The Defense Intelligence Agency claims that Moon paid millions of dollars to a secret overseas bank account to get the meeting and secure future investment rights.
I don't know if that's true.
The only evidence we need, the only source is the Defense Intelligence Agency.
So they might just be lying.
It might also be true.
But whatever happened, it works.
Kim Il-sung and Moon were now in business together.
Moon invests somewhere between $50 and $60 million into a joint North Korean, South Korean car company called Pyonggua Motors and was even allowed the extremely rare privilege of putting up corporate billboards in North Korea for this company.
And here's a fun quote from church officials.
The North Korea stands are going to love this one.
Just wait.
Fucking billboards in the socialist paradise.
Yeah.
So here's a fun quote from a church officer Park Sung Kwan, who's the head of the joint venture.
We are bound to succeed.
There are no unions, low labor costs.
The workers are very clever, very quick to learn, and they are harshly controlled by their superiors.
Workers' paradise.
Jujay Thought is the one true revolutionary ideology.
I've always said that.
Sophie will tell you.
I say that to her every day.
Sometimes I call her in the middle of the night screaming it at the top of my lungs.
Full volume.
That's great.
He's also investing in Vietnam and China for similar reasons, neither of whom seem to have any objections to taking money from a man who had their former comrades literally burned alive.
I mean, look, once you get to the point where people have a lot of money, nobody actually believes anything.
Yeah, it's great.
It's great.
So, yeah, the other thing Moon is able to do is the Washington Times gets the first, like, the first interview with any North Korean leader in the Western press in 20 years.
And the Times basically publishes like a puff piece praising Kim Il-sung.
So, you know, you might be asking yourself, how does this dude, who has literally spent his entire career being an entrepreneur full of communism, how is he justifying allying with Kim Il-sung?
And the answer is that he justifies it by calling it a triumph of his sheer power to fuse together himself and his enemy, Cain and Abel, God and Satan, yin and yang.
And even his own followers are like, no, like leave the church.
Yeah, because he's basically saying, well, guys, the only problem with communism was that they didn't like me.
Yeah, yeah.
But now they like me.
And it's funny because he is like one of the largest like funders of the North Korean economy.
Like to this day, he's like one of the big people putting money into it.
It's incredible.
And, you know, and this is, you know, but his followers leaving the church is kind of a theme for Moon in the Moon in the 90s.
The 90s were kind of a rough time for him.
George H.W. Bush, who was a big enough Moon supporter to tour Japan and Argentina with him, loses the 1992 election.
And Moon claims this is a result of Bush refusing to sign papers calling Korea the country of eternal peace, supreme over all other nations.
He's like, yeah, you know, he didn't make me king, so that's why he lost.
But he starts pivoting to try to be like a civil rights leader.
And he forms this thing called the Women's Federation for World Peace, which argues that women's liberation is submitting to traditional gender roles.
And then he also starts paying a bunch of old civil rights leaders to back him and like courting these like socially conservative black churches.
And, you know, while he's doing this, he also bails out Liberty University for $3.5 million when he thinks no one's looking.
It's great.
It's great.
He's bailing out Liberty University.
But in 1999, Nan Sook Hong publishes a book called In the Shadow of the Moons, My Life in the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's family.
Non-suk Hong is the wife of Moon's first son, like first son with his wife, Steve, who's Steve last seen threatening to rape and kill another woman for having a child with Moon.
Yeah, he's great.
Steve Moon is a problem child.
He can't be disciplined.
He drinks constantly and he just like wants to be a rock star in South Korea, which normally I'm on board with.
Like, I don't know, son of a cult leader.
I just want to be a rock star.
Moon is mad about this because he's like, okay, well, my son needs to leave the church.
So his plan is to get his successor back in line is to marry him off to the 15-year-old Nan Suk Hong, apparently on the logic that having a wife who's young enough to be easily controlled would turn him into a proper patriarch or something.
And so, yeah, it's bad.
Hung is basically just like just Steve treats her as a servant.
She has to like make him food every morning.
And, you know, she talks about this time, like basically like smiling and being cheery every day before crying yourself to sleep every night.
Hong gets president, I think for the first time at 17.
And she eventually has five kids.
While pregnant with a fifth kid, she can rent Steve, who's been doing literally millions of dollars of cocaine.
Like he is, he is like defrauding the entire church.
Yeah, for sure.
That's pretty rad.
Look, no notes on that guy.
Yeah.
So the problem with this is that, you know, he is like not helping raise his sons and daughters.
And so Hong like confronts him about this and she tries to flush some of the cocaine down the toilet.
And here's how the new republic describes what happened next.
Steve, quote, smashed my face, smashed his fist into my face, blooding my nose, Hung later recalled.
He wiped my blood on his hand, then licked it off.
Tastes good, he said.
This is fun.
It's, yeah, it's not good.
What the fuck?
That's so cute.
Yeah.
Like, come on.
He's just licking the blood off his hand and saying, this tastes good.
This is fun.
Like, what?
It's, yeah.
I mean, yeah, it does.
Yeah.
Steve then threatens to kill her baby and like keeps on beating here.
Here's from an interview she gave with CBS's 60 Minutes.
He beat me so severely, I thought he would kill the baby in my womb.
He made me clean up the spilled white powder from the floor even as he continued to beat me.
Later, he would offer religious justification for beating me half senseless, a woman seven months pregnant.
He was teaching me to be humble in the presence of the Messiah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's unfortunately a really common line of like you talk to people who are in kind of like homeschooling cults and, you know, raised in sort of like to train up a child kind of bullshit.
Like, yeah, there's a lot of justifications for child abuse and spousal abuse and different Christian sects that are like, well, this is, I'm humbling you, but you have to be humble before God.
And like, yeah, it's yeah, it's horrible.
And, you know, this is this is this, the release of this book and the interviews.
Um, like Hog is actually like she's, she's actually.
She's able to get away from Moon.
She's able to live her own life.
I mean like people like church members like keep continuously calling her and like stuff like that happens but she's able to get out and she publishes this book and this book does like enormous damage to Moon because, you know, here's this guy who's supposed to have been like like he's.
You know he's supposed to have been him.
He's the Mess, he's literally the Messiah and he's his.
Him and his children are like his children are supposed to be the first generation of new, perfect children, and this is what they're doing and this is really bad for the church.
Um, so Moon begins to change his strategy once again.
His new plan is, he's going to get the?
U.s to crown him king.
Okay, okay.
How did that go?
In 2004, 81 congressmen, 26 ambassadors to the?
U.s and like 500 other dignitaries gathered in the Dirksen Senate Office building.
According to one description of the event, Republican Rosco Bartlett bowed before the couple and Dan and Democrat Danny Davis carried out one of the two golden crowns that were placed on their heads.
Wait what?
Moon then informed the audience that kings and presidents had declared him Humanity's savior and that Jesus Buddha, Hitler and Stalin had been reborn as new persons through his teachings.
Wow, it turns out.
Did that make it into anybody's like campaign ads?
Trained on zeal, these guys like that seems like there was.
Like I feel like even today, if somebody in Congress did that, a lot of folks would have.
Okay, there was.
There was like one week where everyone was like, oh hey, all these senators went to a, went to a ceremony where they literally crowned this guy king and everyone was like he gives us money and just nobody cared.
Wow yeah yeah look, it was a metaphor.
Why are you asking, he gives us money?
Like so so, apparently he.
He bribed a bunch of these people to be there by giving them gold watches and the congressmen show up and are like, fair enough wait, hold on, I thought we were just giving him an award.
Why are we crowning him king?
And like the American press is just like, ah, this is a curiosity okay whatever yeah some, some senators crowned some crowned reverend Moon king.
Look, I feel like the one thing we all ought and clearly we can't, but the one thing Americans should generally agree on is, don't crown people king, you would.
That's like the whole thing that we were against.
But no, like this is, this is what like, this is all the attention, like this is why I get so mad about the fact that like, like the fact that we support Saudi Arabia.
It's like there's one principle, the fucking principles.
Can we not stand one thing they keep doing, they keep making kings, and so yeah like, and this is, this is like.
This is an internally, this is an enormous propaganda coup for Moon.
Um, you know, here are like literally, the leaders of the United States bowing to him and crowning him king, and so Moon like retreats to a palace modeled after the capital model, after the capital building that he has constructed in Korea, after taking hundreds of thousands of dollars from Bush's faith of government money, by the way, from Bush's faith-based initiatives.
It's great now, you know, but by the time you get to the mid, late 2000s, Moon's health is failing.
He has I think he has cancer.
Um, and his daughter, Injun Moon, starts to take over the church around 2010.
Um, she takes over through a bunch of incredibly complicated political maneuvering i'm not going to get into here, but she's able to take control of most of the church but not all of it.
And this is important because her, so she's able to take control of like like, the organization that's the church right, but she's not able to take control of the holding group that they, that they funnel all their money through.
So the bajillions of dollars she doesn't have access.
Yeah yeah, and and well yeah, so the the show company goes to her brother Preston who oh, does he suck more?
Yeah well, I mean, he, he, I had, okay, like, he's not the worst of the family branch, but he, like, he basically takes the money and he sets up, like a new church with the same theology, except without the, like, the Moon family members as messiahs.
Um, Injun calls him, quote, a fallen Adam being controlled by Satan.
And Preston says, like, basically the same, like, similar things about her.
And this is the first of like a myriad of fractures that would consume the church as Reverend Moon's health declined and he lost control.
The good news is that if you're that guy, if you're the guy, even God is like, this dude knows what's up, you're probably not going to have anyone who's capable of being that bold.
And they have to be after you, you know?
Trump and Apocalypse00:07:33
Yeah.
Your replacement's just almost certainly not going to be not going to have that kind of chutstaff.
I mean, they're not up to his level, but they don't do that well.
Okay.
Injun does terribly.
She, she, her, her thing is, you know, so the problem is by 2010, you're in the Obama years, right?
Like the golden age where there were no problems.
Not a single one.
What I will say, though, is that this is actually like, this is the first time that the church hasn't been able to ride a cultural shift because, you know, like the moral majority stuff, it like as a politics kind of like, like by the time you eat Obama, like it's kind of dying.
Like, I mean, it's still around, but like, it doesn't, that's like the, the, that, that kind of right-wing, like, like, the, the, the pure, like the Christian version of it, like, it, it doesn't fully re-emerge again until Trump.
And then, and when it doesn't, when it comes back under Trump, it's, it's, you know, like, it's, it's, it's like a more fascist like version of it.
And while they're trying to ride this transition, they screw up.
Um, Injun like attempts to like modernize the church.
So she gets rid of all like the old hymns and chanting, replaces them with like guitar hero and ping pong tournaments.
And she also, she launches a rock band called Sonic Cult.
And she, she, even, she even is like, oh, we should encourage kids to like have a role in choosing their partners.
Um, this is an apocalypse disaster for the church.
Internal church documents show that church membership in the U.S. dropped from 26,000 to 7,000 in two months.
She's like, wow.
Wow.
That is like, yeah, that is, that is a pretty pretty quick fall.
Now, when Moon finally dies in 2012, Moon's wife just like almost immediately ousts her by, so Injun had had a child out of wedlock.
And that's like, that's like literally the worst sin you can possibly do in the church.
And so she like reveals this and Injun just like disappears.
But, you know, even after this coup, the church continues to fragment.
And the most famous of these breakaway shards is Huang Jin Sean Moon's breakaway faction, which is now known as the AR-15 Church for conducting rituals and marriages AR-15.
We're going here.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it's interesting.
This is an interesting faction because, you know, he doesn't have, like, Sean doesn't have either the money of like Preston's breakaway church, nor does he have the connections that like the main church has.
Cause, you know, I mean, the main church are the people who hold on to leadership in like South Korea and they hold on to it in like in Africa.
They hold along to South America.
They hold on to the Japanese branch in particular.
But what Sean's faction does have is car arms.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, so he, he, yeah, so he chooses like, you know, with car arms and, you know, with with this sort of like thing going on, he chooses like publicity suns to rebuild his membership.
So, you know, he dons a crown of bullets and rallies around like Revelation 227, which says he shall rule them with a rod of iron.
It's very like, you know, this is all.
And knowing that the news, like, obviously it's going to look so nutty that the news will go crazy over it.
And then bada bing, bada boom, attention economy, baby.
Yeah.
And, you know, but obviously Sean Moon isn't totally without connections and resources.
Um, both Steve Bannon and Patriot Prayer founder Joey Gibson show up to one of his events in, I think, 2020.
I'll say Steve Bannon is a connection.
Joey Gibson.
Yeah, Joey Gibson.
Not so much.
Not so much.
I bring up Joey Gibson, though, because, well, Joey Hirsch and the fact that he controls car arms all make the fact that he shows up to the Capitol on his father's birthday, January 6th, and it helps storm it all the more disturbing.
Yeah, that's good.
That makes sense that we were heading there.
Yeah, it's his birthday school.
It wasn't just the Trump stuff.
Look, there were a lot of reasons for me to be storming a thing today.
Yeah.
Now, a year later, Trump gave a 9-11 speech to a packed mainline unification church event led by Moon's wife.
He said, quote, what they have achieved on the peninsula is just amazing.
In just a few decades, the inspiration that they have caused for the entire planet is unbelievable.
And I congratulate you again and again.
So Trump, this makes Trump.
I said there were six presidents, right, who've either met him or supported his organizations.
So that's Eisenhower, Nixon, George Bush, George H.W. Bush, Joe Biden, and Donald Trump.
So this is a wonderful two-party system to have here.
Absolutely shocked that Clinton was not on there.
Yes.
Completely stunned.
This is because Moon hates Clinton.
Moon, like, like when Clinton did, when Clinton wins the election, Moon is like, the U.S. has been taken over by Satan and like leaves for a while.
You know what?
That does scan.
Yeah.
Based on the time, that does scan, I guess.
Yeah.
And actually, one of the other things that I didn't mention in this was that the Washington Times are like some of the people who start the like.
So when Hillary does the one good thing she's ever done in her entire life, which was advocating for universal health care, they like, that's when they start a bunch of the like anti-Clinton, like Asher Turf stuff.
Yeah.
So to close this out, I'm going to, I'm going to end this episode by reading a list of prominent American conservatives involved with the Moonies in some way or another, either writing for their magazines, working for a friend group, giving speeches or taking their money.
David Brooks, Elliot Abram, Papua Kenneth, George Bush, George H.W. Bush, Donald Trump, Mike Pence, Mark Pompeo, Mark Espern, Newt Gingrich, Orin Hatch, Ronald Reagan, Grover Norquest, Jack Abramoff, Richard Vigieri, Ed Fulner, Strom Thurman, Delesha Souza, Lawrence Tribe, Jerry Falwell, Steve Bannon, Tim LaHaye, Ralph Reed, Beverly LaHaye, Gary Bauer, Gerald Ford, Jack Kemp, and John Pudhoritz.
And this is an incomplete list.
Like, that's you just, you're just hitting the hits.
Yeah.
And this also does not include anyone from the 12 countries or moon-funded death squads.
So, yeah, that's Referen Moon.
What a great guy.
Well, you know what?
As a fair man, I'm going to give kudos to a guy who went for it.
Good for you, buddy.
He got a bunch of sitting U.S. congressmen and senators to crown him king.
Yeah.
That is an achievement.
Has ever done.
That is an achievement.
No one else.
Yeah.
Look, you know what?
I got to just give one quiet salute in honor of this man's ambition and ability to somehow have an ass that could cash the kind of checks that he was writing.
Yeah.
This man had one glorious dream and it was dead babies and he killed a lot of babies.
He killed a lot of babies.
He is going to be responsible for the deaths of a lot of babies in the future.
And he made some pretty mediocre handguns.
Yeah.
Don't buy a car.
Get a number of other guns.
Look, if you want a tiny handgun, get a, I don't know, Smith and Wisconsin bodyguard or something.
You don't, you don't, don't, don't buy a car.
Well, Chris, thank you for making me sad.
I'm happy to question Mark.
But I'm also happy because I didn't have to do as much work this week.
And I got to learn a story about a cult leader who is, boy, howdy, got to be in our, got to be in our top five.
Yeah, he's a he's a real good letter.
I'm still, the money is just ridiculous.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's so much money.
Just, oh my God.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's.
Thank you, Chris.
Man, and listeners, give me that kind of money.
And I promise I'll fund this with so many death squads.
Like way more death squads than this guy.
Robert.
Don't Buy a Car00:02:58
None of this other distraction bullshit.
I'm going to go peer in on the death squads.
You know, or don't.
That's behind the bastards, guaranteed.
That is not.
Chris, do you have any Pokemon?
I'm on Twitter at MeCHR3.
Go listen to It Could Happen Here.
We're going to do more about the World Anti-Communist League because I only scratched the surface of the horse.
So, yeah.
All right.
Well, that's the episode.
Goodbye and go with Christ, who thinks that Reverend Moon is way smarter than he is.
Totally told me that at a dinner party.
Jesus.
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I'm an alcohol.
Without this probe, I'm a die.
Listen to Ceno's show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating While Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they've failed.
Listen to Eating Wall Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.