Behind the Bastards - Part One: The 12 Tribes: The Worst Cult You've Never Heard Of
Aired: 2023-09-05
Duration: 01:15:49


=== Trust Your Girlfriends (02:52) ===

[00:00:00]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[00:00:02]  Guaranteed human.
[00:00:04]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[00:00:13]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:00:15]  He is not going to get away with this.
[00:00:17]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:00:19]  We always say that: trust your girlfriends.
[00:00:24]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:00:25]  Trust me, babe.
[00:00:26]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:00:36]  What's up, everyone?
[00:00:37]  I'm Ago Mode.
[00:00:38]  My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
[00:00:42]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:00:45]  He goes, just give it a shot.
[00:00:46]  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.
[00:00:53]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:00:56]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:01:03]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:01:05]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:01:06]  There's a lot of life.
[00:01:07]  Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:01:15]  In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
[00:01:22]  You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
[00:01:26]  I doctored the test once.
[00:01:27]  It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
[00:01:32]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[00:01:34]  Greg Goespiece and Michael Mancini.
[00:01:37]  My mind was blown.
[00:01:38]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[00:01:40]  This is Love Trapped.
[00:01:41]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[00:01:43]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[00:01:47]  Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:01:55]  All right.
[00:01:57]  Can we, are we ready?
[00:01:58]  Yes, boss.
[00:02:00]  That was to me.
[00:02:01]  That was to me because you.
[00:02:03]  You could never be in charge.
[00:02:04]  Yes, employee.
[00:02:06]  Wow.
[00:02:06]  Wow.
[00:02:07]  What's the president of this podcast, my Robert Sophie?
[00:02:11]  That's right.
[00:02:11]  That's so good.
[00:02:12]  That's right.
[00:02:12]  You admitted it.
[00:02:13]  Who is the dictator overlord of this podcast, my Sophie?
[00:02:19]  I'm going to have Daniel cut that little bit out where you introduced me as boss, and then I'm going to play that like a I didn't introduce you as boss.
[00:02:28]  I introduced myself as boss.
[00:02:30]  No, I'm going to get a little two little buttons.
[00:02:33]  One of them has you introducing me as boss, and one of them has Garrison calling Reuters Rooters.
[00:02:39]  And that's going to be all I need.
[00:02:41]  That's very funny.
[00:02:43]  One of the weird things about being associated with iHeartRadio is that I have an org chart that literally shows you as my employee.

=== Climate Change and Cults (03:31) ===

[00:02:52]  So wow.
[00:02:54]  Wow.
[00:02:54]  This is the I don't know.
[00:02:56]  I'll have to ask Sophie of a minute and a half ago who's in charge because I seem to recall what she said.
[00:03:02]  Wow.
[00:03:02]  Anyway, this is Behind the Bastards, a podcast of vicious power struggles where we occasionally talk about some of the worst people in all of history.
[00:03:11]  Our guest this week, Alex Steed of You Are Good, the podcast and the general concept.
[00:03:18]  Yeah, both and thanks for having me.
[00:03:21]  Yeah, Alex, Alex pointed out that the one time we met in person was at Jamie Loftus' 30th birthday at medieval times where we were both extremely intoxicated and I've never felt more endeared to a guest in my life.
[00:03:36]  Now, Alex.
[00:03:38]  Yes.
[00:03:39]  How do you feel about cults?
[00:03:41]  Oh, cults.
[00:03:42]  I find them fascinating.
[00:03:44]  They're part of our part of our national history.
[00:03:48]  How do you, on a similar topic, feel about the largest wildfire in Colorado state history?
[00:03:55]  I have no feelings or knowledge, no feelings towards or knowledge about.
[00:04:00]  Pro-wildfires.
[00:04:01]  Got it.
[00:04:02]  I'm just taking notes here.
[00:04:04]  Thank you.
[00:04:04]  Okay.
[00:04:04]  So we're going to...
[00:04:05]  That's a New York chart.
[00:04:08]  We're going to be talking today about a cult that I'm going to guess most people had, I had not really heard of these guys until I started digging into them.
[00:04:17]  But it's a fascinating, real, real fascinating cult leader, real terrible journey.
[00:04:23]  We're just going to hear a lot of awful things this week.
[00:04:26]  Just deeply unpleasant.
[00:04:28]  So are you ready?
[00:04:29]  Are you strapped in to just have a very bad time?
[00:04:33]  You know, I've listened to the show before.
[00:04:34]  I know what we're in for, and I'm eager for the journey.
[00:04:37]  Yeah, well, this one's, it's been a while since we've had a good cult episode.
[00:04:41]  You know, that's our bread and butter.
[00:04:44]  So yeah, get ready for some bread and butter.
[00:04:46]  Get ready for like the carb equivalent of sorrow.
[00:04:51]  I don't know what that would be.
[00:04:53]  I'm sorry, Alex.
[00:04:55]  Existential depression, maybe.
[00:04:57]  So on December 30th, 2021, embers from an approved trash fire caught dry vegetation on fire in the suburbs between Denver and Boulder.
[00:05:05]  And Inferno followed, tearing through desiccated grassland in the Rocky Mountain foothills.
[00:05:10]  100 mile an hour winds meant that for quite some time, there was no feasible manner of fighting what became known as the Marshall Fire.
[00:05:17]  It killed two people and did around $2 billion in damage.
[00:05:21]  It is, to date, the most devastating wildfire in Colorado history.
[00:05:25]  Although give Colorado some time, I'm sure they'll break that record very soon, the way things are going for everybody, R.E. fires.
[00:05:32]  So after 18 months of investigation, state authorities concluded that the blaze had started likely due to smoldering embers from the aforementioned trash fire.
[00:05:41]  And it was like wood trash that was being burned.
[00:05:43]  The fire had started on the communal living property owned by a little-known cult called the 12 Tribes.
[00:05:49]  This sparked renewed interest in the group and the investigations that followed are what inspired these episodes.
[00:05:55]  I should note here that Colorado authorities opted not to charge the cult or its members with the blaze.
[00:06:00]  This may seem unjust, but the logic's actually pretty solid.
[00:06:03]  Like this was a trash burn.
[00:06:05]  The authorities showed up.
[00:06:06]  The fire department gave them the go-ahead.
[00:06:09]  It just was the driest it's ever been.
[00:06:11]  So I'm going to say the horrible fire this cult caused probably chalked down more to climate change than the cult, but we have to start there because it's kind of the biggest recent touchstone with this cult.
[00:06:22]  It is weird that...

=== Divorced Carney in Chattanooga (06:38) ===

[00:06:23]  If you're a cult, you don't want to remind people that you exist.
[00:06:26]  No, no, you really want to not start the largest wildfire in state history because it might start a Denver Post investigation indeed.
[00:06:33]  It's pretty good.
[00:06:34]  Quite good.
[00:06:35]  As a basically fair man, I think it's important to acknowledge, even as we dig into how the authorities have ignored decades of allegations of child abuse committed by this cult, that the fire that they got famous for, probably not their fault.
[00:06:48]  Today, the 12 tribes number about 3,000 members somewhere around there, although we have no insight into their actual numbers because they are a very shady cult.
[00:06:59]  We do know they own about $36 million in real estate in the United States, and they operate communes in 22 states.
[00:07:06]  So there's a lot of these communities, and they also operate a lot of businesses, which we'll be talking about later, mostly like little cafes and restaurants and enormous construction companies.
[00:07:17]  So one thing that interested me right away with this cult is that while it's got a charismatic founder who goes mad with power, it may have functioned in most of its history in a less like centralized manner, right?
[00:07:29]  Where the cult leader was kind of potentially usurped at some point by his equally sketchy wife.
[00:07:34]  It's kind of hard to say exactly because the life of the cult founder, Eugene Spriggs, is a little bit obscure, but we're going to do our best here to pull back the veil about this guy and what happens to him.
[00:07:46]  So Elbert Eugene Spriggs Jr. gets born on May 18th, 1937 to a devout Methodist family in Eastridge, Tennessee.
[00:07:56]  His childhood is mostly a mystery to us.
[00:07:59]  I can tell you his dad was named Elbert Sr., which is ridiculous.
[00:08:03]  And his mother was a Mabel.
[00:08:04]  So he's like very 30s kid, right?
[00:08:07]  Mabel and Albert.
[00:08:08]  Like, that's like, you can only be grandparents.
[00:08:11]  Like while you're, I think you get like skipped over straight to the grandparent stage if you've got old people names like that.
[00:08:18]  Yeah, and they're out of, they're out of Tennessee.
[00:08:20]  This is like a scene from Pearl.
[00:08:22]  Yeah.
[00:08:22]  Yeah.
[00:08:23]  Try and also just like try to imagine an 18-year-old Elbert.
[00:08:26]  Like, it's impossible.
[00:08:28]  You can't do it.
[00:08:28]  It can't like cannot be done.
[00:08:30]  It's a Benjamin Button situation.
[00:08:32]  Yeah.
[00:08:33]  I do, I want to, I'm never going to have a kid, but I want to like try and start a movement of like Gen Z kids to bring back some of these ridiculous old-timey names.
[00:08:42]  Like I want a bunch of Gin Alpha Mables, like a lot of little baby Mabel and Ethels like wandering around.
[00:08:48]  I did meet a very nice dog named Mabel once.
[00:08:52]  She was a corgi.
[00:08:55]  You can call dogs anything.
[00:08:56]  She was a corgi.
[00:08:57]  She was just doing she was sniffing and her name was Mabel and it and it worked.
[00:09:03]  So can we have a dog exception?
[00:09:06]  There's always a dog exception.
[00:09:07]  I knew I knew a Mabel named after Mabel Carter as a dog.
[00:09:11]  So yeah, I guess that's a that's a two of them.
[00:09:14]  That's a popular dog name.
[00:09:15]  That's very popular.
[00:09:16]  Yeah.
[00:09:17]  Seems like Mabel's the hot new dog name everybody's going with.
[00:09:20]  Why not name your kid Mabel?
[00:09:22]  You know what?
[00:09:22]  Bring it back.
[00:09:24]  That's how we get back some of those good 30s values, like smoking lots of cigarettes.
[00:09:29]  Putting kids to work.
[00:09:30]  Yeah, because like Elbert's a cigarette name.
[00:09:32]  Like Elbert's fucking like smoking the way people just can't smoke today.
[00:09:37]  Yeah.
[00:09:38]  That's what you know about him.
[00:09:40]  So very religious family.
[00:09:42]  Like again, hella Methodist.
[00:09:44]  They went to church three times a week on a pretty regular basis.
[00:09:47]  Just a nightmare life.
[00:09:49]  One bio I found notes that Eugene Spriggs was a football standout at Central High School.
[00:09:55]  So we can assume a handful of childhood head injuries.
[00:09:58]  He graduated and moved to Chattanooga to attend the University of Tennessee, where he got a degree in psychology.
[00:10:05]  Now, a paper I found on the Virginia Commonwealth University website describes his young life as unsettled in a number of ways as he held a succession of jobs, a pretty wide variety, everything from like labor jobs and stuff to he was a high school guidance counselor for a spell.
[00:10:21]  He was the tour director of a travel agency.
[00:10:24]  He did a stint in the army and he seemed to have unusual difficulty staying in relationships.
[00:10:30]  This is a, at this point, 50s guy who gets divorced three times.
[00:10:34]  Oh, wow.
[00:10:35]  Yeah, you don't run into that a lot.
[00:10:36]  That means you're really running through.
[00:10:38]  Like you got to be absolutely, and it seems like he is leaving them, right?
[00:10:43]  Like he has one kid and wife takes it.
[00:10:46]  I don't know.
[00:10:47]  It's a little unclear to me what happened in each relationship, but that's not a common story in this period of time.
[00:10:53]  No, not at all.
[00:10:54]  Although it feels like a common story with male cult leaders.
[00:10:59]  It does.
[00:11:00]  At this time, that there's like a couple wives before you find one who's like, let's, I like your zany ideas.
[00:11:06]  Let's move on it.
[00:11:07]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:11:09]  And he does, you actually have predicted where this goes because wife number four is going to be down to clown.
[00:11:14]  This already sounds a lot like, I forgot the name of the cult, but the Tony, Tony Alamo, the guy who makes the like beaded jackets.
[00:11:21]  This is almost exactly his story already.
[00:11:23]  Well, it's also, I mean, it's not L. Ron Hubbard, like he did everything, had extra panache, but he, he's, gets, is divorced basically two or three times before he, he finds the lady who's going to go to prison for him for infiltrating the FBI.
[00:11:37]  It's a high standard, really, to be like, will you go to jail if it comes to it?
[00:11:42]  Yeah.
[00:11:43]  So anyway, listeners, what you should take from this is that if you're looking to start your own cult, get divorced a lot.
[00:11:49]  I mean, I mean, because honestly, unless you're able to, unless you've got real experience abandoning families, then you're not going to have the kind of emotional distance that it takes to be a good cult leader.
[00:11:59]  It's just basic sense, you know?
[00:12:01]  You can, uh, you can learn more about this in my, uh, in my $4,200 weekend course, Divorce Your Way to Leadership Skills.
[00:12:10]  Yeah, I think Robert has a free PDF about this.
[00:12:13]  Do I get 10%?
[00:12:15]  Yeah, of course, Sophie.
[00:12:16]  Great.
[00:12:17]  You're my dealer, basically.
[00:12:19]  So by age 32, Spriggs is super divorced, the most divorced man in the 1960s and working as a carnie in Chattanooga, which is so funny.
[00:12:31]  Like he is living the most depressing divorce.
[00:12:34]  Like if you were doing that today, it would be the worst.
[00:12:37]  Oh, yeah, yeah.
[00:12:38]  So he's a divorced Carney doing divorced carny shit in fucking Chattanooga, which is a rough place to be a divorced Carney.
[00:12:47]  And then he hears the voice of God ask him a question.
[00:12:50]  Is this what I created you for?
[00:12:52]  Now, normally, that's like a you should go to the doctor experience, right?
[00:12:59]  Spriggs, Spriggs does not do that.

=== Hippie Jesus Movement (14:09) ===

[00:13:01]  In fairness, doctors didn't really exist back then.
[00:13:04]  So he would later claim that his time as a carnie had given him an intimate look into the most sinful and debauched aspects of life.
[00:13:11]  This is the only thing he says that I think is probably true because I've known some Carneys and they all report that.
[00:13:19]  Love them.
[00:13:20]  So he decides this is not what God has in mind for him.
[00:13:23]  And so he follows a large percentage of his generation and fucks off to California.
[00:13:28]  Now, the late 60s, early 70s are famous in this country for having been the age of the hippie movement and its disillusionment and collapse into what eventually became the soulless corporatism of the Reagan era.
[00:13:41]  Now, I think the fact that the hippie movement gets so much play in media in part because like the kind of people who made movies and shit were likely to be as kids, the kind of people who were into that social movement, there's this like belief among people that it was the generation that spawned that movement was much more radical than they were.
[00:13:59]  The boomers were always a very conservative generation.
[00:14:02]  Yeah, the whole like hippies were the way people are thing drives me nuts.
[00:14:07]  Yeah, it was not.
[00:14:07]  I mean, hippies weren't the way hippies are.
[00:14:09]  Like you talk to people, like for one thing, it was still a very homophobic, very like most people who were, who would have called themselves hippies held to some, what we would call very traditional values about sexuality and gender still.
[00:14:23]  And it was also just like most people like that, like the fringe who were super progressive, anti-war hippies were not anything close to a majority.
[00:14:33]  And one of the things that kind of makes this point is that at the same time that the hippie movement, you know, is kind of winding down, another major cultural trend is happening that tends to get left out of popular histories of the era.
[00:14:46]  Have you heard of the Jesus movement?
[00:14:48]  No.
[00:14:49]  Yeah.
[00:14:50]  So these are kind of a mirror of the hippies in that like most of the Jesus movement people who get swept up in this, they're like, they've got long hair.
[00:14:57]  They're kind of unkempt.
[00:14:58]  Most, many of them have dropped out of society.
[00:15:00]  It is a lot of the same kind of, you know, living in buses, traveling around, doing like handcrafts.
[00:15:06]  A lot of them, people are like pooling resources to, you know, start farms and stuff together back to the land.
[00:15:12]  And the thing that kind of separates them from the hippies is that the Jesus movement sees Christ as a counterculture hero.
[00:15:18]  So they are kind of Jesus.
[00:15:21]  Yeah.
[00:15:21]  Yeah.
[00:15:21]  Hippie.
[00:15:22]  There is like a bit of that going on, but it's still, it is, as we'll talk about, still quite conservative.
[00:15:27]  Now, when I went to church as a kid, like, this is how they sold me on Jesus.
[00:15:31]  It was like they were, it was clearly people who like got into Jesus in one way or another from, because I grew up in Maine, there were a couple different kinds of back to the landers.
[00:15:40]  There were like the hippie hippies and there were religious hippies.
[00:15:43]  And those were the ones who sold Jesus as like a social justice figure.
[00:15:46]  Yeah.
[00:15:47]  And this is because you get the Jesus movement, some of the, what splinters out of it is going to be kind of more progressive.
[00:15:54]  Jesus, you know, was fighting against these injustices that are still present with us today.
[00:15:59]  But a lot of it's going to lead to the religious right.
[00:16:02]  Like it feeds directly because you have kind of the Jesus movement is sort of late 60s through parts of the 70s.
[00:16:09]  And kind of that's also right around when, you know, in the late 70s, you get Jerry Falwell start to emerge.
[00:16:14]  You get the religious right welded into this political coalition for the first time.
[00:16:18]  Yeah.
[00:16:19]  So the people who get swept up in this generally called either Jesus people or Jesus freaks.
[00:16:24]  That is where the term Jesus freak comes from.
[00:16:28]  And yeah, it's a charismatic movement.
[00:16:30]  It's cross-denominational.
[00:16:31]  So there are Catholics who like sects of Catholics who are part of this Jesus movement.
[00:16:37]  There's Protestants in it.
[00:16:38]  And it's like a lot of different organizations, lots of different churches that you could just kind of like broadly call part of the Jesus movement, not because they're part of the same thing with each other, right?
[00:16:49]  Like if you have this sort of hardcore Protestant, you know, church that's that's Jesus movement, you know, they're not the same thing as Catholics who might also be swept up in it.
[00:16:58]  But the similarity they have is that like they're all adopting this really like charismatic kind of countercultural attitude towards their religious worship.
[00:17:06]  Followers would often speak in tongues.
[00:17:08]  That's a big part of like when that gets more popular in the United States.
[00:17:11]  And there's generally a big focus on what's called the gifts of the spirit, which is like restoring this kind of sense of a direct connection, personal connection to God, usually in a static connection, right?
[00:17:23]  Like, so this is part of why you get these like big tent revival worship ceremonies.
[00:17:28]  A really good documentary to watch if you want to understand the texture of this movement in time is Marjo, M-A-R-J-O-E.
[00:17:36]  It's about this kid, Marjo Gortner, who was like the youngest priest in the country.
[00:17:41]  It was kind of a carnival sideshow grift run by his parents, but he went back as an adult to film behind the scenes.
[00:17:47]  And it shows a lot of this period.
[00:17:50]  Are you aware of where this was happening?
[00:17:53]  Like, did it stick to spring out of one piece of no?
[00:17:56]  So, okay, it was all over.
[00:17:57]  I think it does start in the West Coast.
[00:17:59]  Like, I think that's where you started like California, but it spreads everywhere, as we'll talk about.
[00:18:05]  These guys are very much a Jesus movement story.
[00:18:07]  Eugene Spriggs is going to be a Jesus movement.
[00:18:09]  Like, that's when he kind of starts becoming a religious leader.
[00:18:13]  And they do embody to an extent a big wing of it.
[00:18:17]  And again, when we talk about the Jesus movement, it's not like a cult.
[00:18:20]  It's not like a one thing, right?
[00:18:22]  It's like a bunch of different, in some cases, very much like opposed different sort of religious organizations, traditions, communities.
[00:18:31]  They're just kind of bound together by certain similarities as a result of this cultural moment.
[00:18:35]  Yeah.
[00:18:36]  And it's also worth noting that like a lot of people who get pulled into the Jesus movement, there's a big focus on this idea of like returning to the lifestyles of early Christians, which is part of what convinces them of like why a lot of them do sort of the back to the land shit, right?
[00:18:50]  Like that's a big thing for them.
[00:18:52]  This helps them kind of blend in with the hippies, right?
[00:18:55]  And often Jesus freaks are people who had been hippies a few years earlier.
[00:18:59]  Their lives in a lot of cases collapse.
[00:19:01]  They get criminal charges or something, or they have, you know, they burn out, you know, as a result of drug use or whatever.
[00:19:07]  And then there's this kind of movement that has some aspects of values that are similar to the thing that had brought them in that they can, you know, that they wound up getting swept up in.
[00:19:16]  Not an uncommon story.
[00:19:18]  Yes, it's super common.
[00:19:19]  I mean, I did a podcast series a couple of years ago on Tony Alamo and the in his religious cult.
[00:19:26]  And this is, it's almost exactly beat for beat.
[00:19:28]  Like they started in like 69 in Hollywood and they were attracting just burned like hippies who were burned out on being hippies into Jesus.
[00:19:35]  Yeah, this makes sense.
[00:19:36]  Yeah.
[00:19:36]  Yeah.
[00:19:37]  And yeah, a lot of Jesus freaks wound up living in communes, practicing versions of religious aestheticism.
[00:19:43]  We see echoes of like modern trad culture in this.
[00:19:46]  A lot of it is this sort of reaction to especially like feminism and stuff.
[00:19:50]  There's this attitude of like the necessity of returning to traditional gender roles.
[00:19:55]  We're changing in the wrong direction.
[00:19:57]  Some of this is tied to the Cold War as well, particularly fears of nuclear war and how that merges with Christian apocalyptic prophecy.
[00:20:05]  One of the key books of the Jesus movement is Howl Lindsay's The Late Great Planet Earth.
[00:20:09]  And if you, if you grew up as an evangelical kid, you probably heard about that book.
[00:20:14]  It is hugely influential to these people.
[00:20:17]  We can't actually know if Spriggs had the vision he claims he had in 1969.
[00:20:23]  I kind of think he may have falsified that because it's an auspicious year for the counterculture.
[00:20:28]  You know, if you're going to talk about like that's the year you do it.
[00:20:31]  Part of why I suspect this is because some versions of the Spriggs story say that, you know, God came to him during his carney days in 1970, you know, a year later.
[00:20:41]  Whatever the case, after the late 60s, you know, as the 1970s start, he does start become very quickly like a player in the newly energized Christian fringe.
[00:20:51]  A write-up by the Times Free Press notes.
[00:20:53]  While in California, he devoted his life to creating a ministry, according to reporting at the time by the Chattanooga News Free Press.
[00:21:00]  Spriggs said he wanted to reach young people who were not going to church, particularly those turned off of faith from their parents.
[00:21:06]  That's interesting to me.
[00:21:07]  Like he's very much focusing on young people who, especially this kind of very staid, stolid Protestantism that's really turned of the century, these very quiet, austere churches that still have kind of some of these Victorian attitudes and worship is very much like channeled through the pastor.
[00:21:25]  A big part of what he's doing is like, no, we want like personal ecstatic connections.
[00:21:29]  And that's what'll bring these young people back who kind of got burnt out of these very authoritarian churches of their youths.
[00:21:36]  This is going to be ironic considering where Spriggs ends up.
[00:21:39]  It often is, isn't it?
[00:21:40]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:21:42]  In 1972, he gets hitched for the fourth time and what will be the final time to a woman named Marcia Ann Duvall.
[00:21:49]  By all accounts, Marcia shares his spiritual obsession.
[00:21:52]  The two move away from the sinful California coast and back to Chattanooga, where they found a Bible study group for young people that they call the Vine Christian Community Church, named after their home, the Vine House.
[00:22:05]  And they bring some California people with them.
[00:22:07]  The Jesus movement is appealing to disillusioned dropouts, to former war protesters and stuff like that.
[00:22:13]  And Gene realizes early on that these people are the easiest converts to his church because like dropouts, people with criminal records, they tend to be desperate.
[00:22:22]  And so he offers them what they need if they'll attend his services.
[00:22:26]  And he starts opening his house to worshipers, right?
[00:22:29]  Being like, if you're coming to church here, you can live with me, you know, like your food and whatnot will be taken care of.
[00:22:35]  And so by 1974, there are between 50 and 60 people living with the Spriggses in their house, which must have smelled fascinating.
[00:22:44]  That's too many people for one house.
[00:22:48]  Perhaps because of this, they start asking their followers to pool their resources.
[00:22:52]  And this is a limited affair at first.
[00:22:54]  They're kind of just asking for donations, right?
[00:22:56]  You know, if you do have money, if you've got family money or something, or you have savings when you come here, maybe give us some of it so we can pay for these other people who have nothing.
[00:23:05]  And this, they do well enough at this.
[00:23:07]  They're able to accrue a decent amount of money and they purchase three additional homes in Chattanooga and they buy a restaurant, which they call the Yellow Deli.
[00:23:15]  This becomes known as a place in town where if you're a runaway or a hitchhiker, you can get a free meal.
[00:23:20]  So a lot of people show up because like, you know, they're starving.
[00:23:24]  Yeah.
[00:23:24]  And when they're starving, that's a that's a really good way to just kind of pull people into what is becoming a cult, right?
[00:23:30]  You know, that's your little fishing lure.
[00:23:32]  Any move, like that's the tricky thing is like any movement usually starts with taking disillusioned people and giving them a reason and giving them some resources or making available some resources.
[00:23:43]  But it gets, it's usually just like, what happens after that step where you determine, is this going to be a cult or is this going to be a social movement?
[00:23:51]  Or is it going to be a little of both?
[00:23:53]  Yeah, that is, that is exactly the kind of situation here.
[00:23:55]  And it's got a lean cult spoilers because this is the show that it is.
[00:24:00]  Well, it's like if you think about just the commonalities of this and again, Alamo, and then just like Elijah Muhammad was sending people $5 bills in prison.
[00:24:08]  Like it's a great way to endear people to you.
[00:24:12]  Yeah, it's this, it's this thing that the win friends and influence people like influencer grindset talk about a lot, but it is a real factor, like the reciprocity effect, right?
[00:24:22]  Where like if somebody gives you something, you feel like a psychological need to give them something to return the favor, right?
[00:24:30]  Yeah, just the fact that just the fact that Manson loved that book and Dianetics just like makes all this.
[00:24:36]  That just explains it all for you.
[00:24:37]  It is, it is like exactly the books.
[00:24:40]  Like at some point, somebody's going to feed those books to an AI and we're going to have a real fucking problem on our hands because like you just they're just going to create L. Ron Hubbard the fucking chat bot.
[00:24:51]  Very much looking forward to it.
[00:24:54]  That's such a good idea.
[00:24:55]  Can I have 10%?
[00:24:57]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:24:58]  I do.
[00:25:00]  I am looking forward to when a bunch of like weirdo online influencer freaks like feed the right combination of books to a chatbot and convince themselves they've created a god.
[00:25:11]  But also, why hasn't Scientology made an L. Ron Hubbard AI?
[00:25:16]  Like that.
[00:25:17]  Oh, they will.
[00:25:18]  They will.
[00:25:18]  The LRH bot.
[00:25:19]  Like, why haven't they done that?
[00:25:21]  Because I would, you know what?
[00:25:22]  I would pay them money for that.
[00:25:24]  I want that on my phone.
[00:25:25]  I want to run all of my life decisions by the L. Ron Hubbard AI.
[00:25:29]  I mean, obviously it's because David Miscatcher wouldn't have power, but like, why haven't they done that in a strategic way?
[00:25:34]  It doesn't make sense.
[00:25:34]  Like, you're still putting the clothes out.
[00:25:36]  Like, why, why haven't you done that?
[00:25:38]  Well, I think they're probably not.
[00:25:40]  Don't take notes, Scientologists.
[00:25:42]  You're despicable.
[00:25:43]  But I feel like you gotta, no, like, what I would like is a robot in my pocket that when I'm like, what should I do in this situation says you should kidnap your own daughter and flee to Cuba?
[00:25:55]  Because I've been looking for an excuse to go have a nice vacation there.
[00:25:58]  You know, I've always wanted to see Cuba and I feel like this could make it easier for me, Sophie.
[00:26:04]  Yeah, I'll kidnap somebody's daughter.
[00:26:05]  Look, kids, you know, they're small.
[00:26:08]  Yeah, there's all sorts of kids all around.
[00:26:11]  So it's easy to find one.
[00:26:13]  Anyway, it's not your fault if the Scientology AI told you to do it.
[00:26:17]  Exactly.
[00:26:18]  That's exactly what I'm going to say in court.
[00:26:21]  And you know who else loves abduction?
[00:26:26]  Where are you going with this?
[00:26:28]  It's time for ads.
[00:26:29]  Yeah, but where are you going with this?
[00:26:33]  To Cuba, hopefully.
[00:26:38]  What's up, everyone?
[00:26:39]  I'm Ego Modem.
[00:26:40]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
[00:26:48]  It's Will Farrell.
[00:26:51]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:26:54]  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.
[00:26:59]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[00:27:02]  I'm working my way up through it.
[00:27:03]  I know it's a place to come look for up and coming talent.
[00:27:06]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.

=== Ego Modem's Next Guest (02:25) ===

[00:27:11]  Yeah.
[00:27:11]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[00:27:14]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[00:27:15]  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.
[00:27:24]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:27:26]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:27:34]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:27:35]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:27:37]  There's a lot of luck.
[00:27:38]  Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:27:48]  10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
[00:27:51]  A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
[00:27:55]  From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach.
[00:28:00]  Murder at City Hall.
[00:28:01]  How could this have happened in City Hall?
[00:28:03]  Somebody tell me that.
[00:28:04]  Jeffrey Hood did it.
[00:28:06]  July 2003.
[00:28:07]  Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
[00:28:12]  Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
[00:28:15]  And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
[00:28:24]  Everybody in the chamber deducts a shocking public murder.
[00:28:28]  They scream, get down, get down.
[00:28:30]  Those are shots.
[00:28:31]  Those are shots.
[00:28:32]  Get down.
[00:28:32]  A charismatic politician.
[00:28:34]  You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
[00:28:36]  I still have a weapon.
[00:28:38]  And I could shoot you.
[00:28:41]  And an outsider with a secret.
[00:28:43]  He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
[00:28:46]  That may or may not have been political.
[00:28:48]  That may have been about sex.
[00:28:50]  Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:29:03]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:29:07]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:29:10]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:29:13]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:29:16]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:29:20]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
[00:29:24]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:29:26]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:29:31]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:29:33]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:29:34]  The cops didn't seem to care.

=== Forced College Dropouts (15:52) ===

[00:29:37]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:29:40]  I said, oh, hell no.
[00:29:41]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:29:44]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:29:48]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:29:50]  Trust me, babe.
[00:29:51]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:30:03]  Oh, we are just having a great time here talking about the beautiful birth of what's going to become quite a cult.
[00:30:11]  So in one local news article about the yellow.
[00:30:14]  The spark, if you will.
[00:30:15]  The spark, yeah.
[00:30:16]  And really the start of the like the little campfire from which they're going to burn down all of Colorado is the yellow deli.
[00:30:25]  In one local news article about the deli's opening, Spriggs said, When people ask us who our interior designer is, we tell them we have the same one Noah had, which is an interesting, like basically saying like God helped us design the interior, which I think means they probably did not have fire escapes.
[00:30:42]  Seems like a thing God would miss.
[00:30:44]  Spriggs was not at this point openly describing what he was doing as separate from mainstream Christianity.
[00:30:50]  In fact, he and his followers were careful to maintain regular attendance at a local church, First Presbyterian, because it's, you know, like even if you're doing an ostensibly Christian movement, there's nobody who's going to get pissed at you faster than like old conservative churchgoers, right?
[00:31:05]  So you, if you're doing this weird thing, if you're living with dozens of people and like convincing all the dropouts and hippies to move in with you and buying up large amounts of real estate, you really want to allay their suspicions.
[00:31:17]  When he is asked by a journalist during this period of time about his plans for the future, Spriggs says this.
[00:31:23]  Can you imagine what a wonderful thing it would be to have yellow delis all over America, a restaurant with good food for everyone in the community, but it would be a place to reach all the runaways who are passing through or all the young people who are tired and mixed up.
[00:31:35]  These people are not going to church.
[00:31:36]  Sometimes they stop at shelters and guidance people beat around the bush.
[00:31:39]  They don't tell it simple like it is.
[00:31:41]  Jesus loves you.
[00:31:42]  You can be happy.
[00:31:43]  Let God run your life.
[00:31:45]  You know, with God helping them build that, I really hope they got flood insurance.
[00:31:50]  Oh, no.
[00:31:51]  God does not believe in flood insurance.
[00:31:53]  That's not having enough faith in him, right?
[00:31:55]  Yeah, heaven is the insurance, I guess.
[00:31:58]  Heaven is your flood insurance.
[00:32:00]  It's wild because this is the same time.
[00:32:03]  I mean, I know, I know how much is happening at this time, but I never really think about all of the individual pinpointed moments.
[00:32:09]  This is also the same time that they're opening the Source Family restaurant in LA in 69.
[00:32:15]  And they're like, that's their gateway into their cult.
[00:32:18]  So having like a branded hangout cafe spot was like the way to go.
[00:32:24]  You know, so Redding, California, where I used to live off and on for years, is run by a cult.
[00:32:31]  Like there's a big church in town that absolutely runs everything, the police, politics, like, and are increasingly like an iron grip on it.
[00:32:39]  And I used to, I used to work because like we had no internet for a long time in the trailer in the mountains that we lived in.
[00:32:46]  I used to have to go drive every day to this place.
[00:32:48]  I think it was called that's absolutely a part of this like fucking church thing.
[00:32:53]  All very like a lot of people having like evangelical conversations, like, you know, pulling in someone from off the street, some trimmer or whatever, and having very earnest talks with them about Jesus.
[00:33:04]  It was, that's where I wrote a lot of what became the first season of It Could Happen here.
[00:33:07]  It's like sitting in this cafe with all of these like hardcore Christian right fanatics who were very, very carefully trying to expand their little kingdom quite successfully.
[00:33:18]  You're like, in fact, it's happening right before his eyes.
[00:33:20]  It is in fact happening right here.
[00:33:23]  Yeah.
[00:33:24]  Fun town.
[00:33:26]  Don't go there unarmed.
[00:33:28]  Oh my God.
[00:33:29]  Oh, Redding.
[00:33:30]  So we're going to have like three Redding listeners laughing a lot at this.
[00:33:33]  I actually, my brother's college roommate's from Reading, so I look forward to asking him some follow-up questions.
[00:33:38]  Oh, yeah.
[00:33:38]  Yeah.
[00:33:39]  We may be covering them more in the future since I don't have to go back to that fucking town anymore.
[00:33:45]  So this stuff that Spriggs is saying about like, yeah, we want to use these cafes to find these young people who are tired and mixed up.
[00:33:51]  You know, this is the 70s.
[00:33:52]  This is the fucking easy writer era, right?
[00:33:54]  These like the fact that these, all these young people have kind of dropped out is a major like, it's not really a culture war touchstone, but it's like a major concern, particularly for like older, more conservative Americans.
[00:34:06]  And so this line plays well with them, you know, particularly well with people who might have been put off by the fact that he's kind of created a commune in their town.
[00:34:13]  But there are some signs from the beginning that Spriggs was heading in an unsettling direction.
[00:34:18]  In that same interview, he expressed that another one of his goals was to reach people who had dropped out of Christianity because they didn't like the faith that their parents had expressed.
[00:34:27]  And this line from him is really interesting.
[00:34:30]  You can't fool a dog or a child.
[00:34:32]  Kids see the hypocrisy and the phoniness in their parents' lives.
[00:34:35]  Their parents take alcohol, tranquilizers, cigarettes, or they disobey speed laws, yet they want their children to stay off drugs and obey all laws, which is not an inherently bad point, right?
[00:34:45]  That like there's this very like conservative backlash era happening in the particularly in the 70s, but it's being kind of perpetrated by these people who are on what we now call some of the most dangerous binzos in the world, right?
[00:35:01]  He also, that's also like a very like cool youth pastor thing to say.
[00:35:06]  Yeah.
[00:35:06]  And then you're like, you know who else disobeyed laws?
[00:35:10]  Yeah.
[00:35:10]  Exactly.
[00:35:11]  Well, I actually think Jesus would have would have been a fucking, well, anyway, we can talk about what drugs I think I may have bought from Jesus Christ, but that's, that's a separate story for another day.
[00:35:22]  This was such a success.
[00:35:23]  Please have me back for that.
[00:35:26]  This was such a success that they next opened a coffee house and started ministering to local kids who were disillusioned with mainstream society.
[00:35:33]  Sometimes the cults sent members out into the world to find new members in places where they thought people struggling on the fringe would congregate.
[00:35:40]  This culminated in them for years, they would send a bus to follow the Grateful Dead on concert tours, and handpicked members would offer first aid and food to fans coming up or down on the various substances.
[00:35:52]  Yeah, I do kind of, I have this beautiful image in my head of like the this cult bus crashing into the Nitrus Mafia's bus.
[00:36:01]  I don't know who would have won that fight.
[00:36:03]  So Gene Spriggs promises all of his recruits, you know, that if they work hard, he'll take care of them.
[00:36:10]  You know, they won't have any unmet physical needs.
[00:36:13]  All he needs is their labor and their unyielding religious devotion.
[00:36:17]  And he also promises you'll never be lonely again.
[00:36:20]  Everyone lives communally in the cult and they work communally too.
[00:36:24]  They start to call themselves the Light Brigade in this period of time.
[00:36:26]  They're not going to stick with that name very long because it's a dog shit name.
[00:36:31]  And it's one of those things.
[00:36:32]  You don't have any autonomy when you're in the light brigade, but you also, you're not exposed to capitalism, right?
[00:36:39]  And that like you don't have to worry about winding up on the street.
[00:36:42]  You don't have to worry about starving.
[00:36:43]  Like that is a huge part of the appeal, right?
[00:36:46]  Especially, again, this is a lot of these people are folks who had been swept up in the big social movements of the 60s.
[00:36:52]  And now they're kind of dealing with how a lot of that failed, how chaotic and scary the world seems in the 70s.
[00:36:58]  The promise that like you can forget all of that and forget interfacing with a confusing and chaotic world, like that's appealing, right?
[00:37:07]  That is objectively, that is appealing.
[00:37:09]  Like a lot of people, it's why all like folks in our generation idolize this kind of mythical idea of like living on a farm with your friends.
[00:37:17]  Oh God, yeah.
[00:37:18]  And then you live on a fucking farm.
[00:37:20]  Yeah.
[00:37:20]  And that's the downside.
[00:37:23]  Yeah.
[00:37:23]  Like I live on a farm, kind of.
[00:37:25]  It's a small one, but we don't like, there's no attempt to like make a living or survive purely by that because that's like a huge amount of work.
[00:37:33]  Exactly.
[00:37:34]  You get blight and no one eats for a year.
[00:37:36]  It's bad.
[00:37:37]  It's a bad time.
[00:37:38]  No, I think I do think that like the real sign of maturity, the eventual real sign of maturity is just like accepting no orientation or situation is going to be good and they're all going to suck a lot.
[00:37:50]  Yeah.
[00:37:50]  Yeah.
[00:37:50]  There's, there's like dog shit that you have to deal with no matter what you do.
[00:37:54]  You're going to eat shit somewhere somewhere in the journey.
[00:37:58]  I think the appeal to something like that, it's the inherent appeal of dropping out, right?
[00:38:04]  Of like realizing how complex the problems are and like, well, I just want an option that means I don't have to think about them because then I can pretend it's not happening.
[00:38:12]  You know, maybe I can escape.
[00:38:14]  Maybe I will be safe.
[00:38:15]  And obviously, the fact that all of Canada burned down this year is evidence that no, you can't be, but we don't need to, we don't need to harp on that.
[00:38:22]  Everyone is aware of that, right?
[00:38:24]  We're preaching to a large choir here.
[00:38:26]  So everyone has the vibe of people who know.
[00:38:29]  Yeah.
[00:38:30]  I wanted to provide some context from one of the desperate young people lured in by Gene's cult.
[00:38:35]  And I found it.
[00:38:36]  This is a later account from 2006, but I think it holds up.
[00:38:40]  It's from an issue of the local Chattanoogan paper, the Chattanoogan, titled I Escaped from the Yellow Deli.
[00:38:47]  Quote, you would have to understand my situation at the time to understand how I was influenced by these people.
[00:38:52]  I was 21 years old and just got out of a three-year abusive relationship, renting a room in a house in St. Elmo.
[00:38:57]  No direction and no family to turn to.
[00:39:00]  They told me what I needed to hear.
[00:39:01]  They loved me and God loved me and I could come live with them.
[00:39:04]  When I became convinced, two members moved me out of my little room at 3 a.m.
[00:39:08]  I was driven to their commune in Dalton, Georgia.
[00:39:10]  And like, yeah, I think that gets across like, yeah, I was in an abusive relationship.
[00:39:14]  I got out.
[00:39:15]  I've got no family.
[00:39:16]  I've got this apartment I can't afford.
[00:39:18]  It solves, they offer to solve all your problems as long as you want the Jesus.
[00:39:23]  At first, the Light Brigade and the Vinehouse Church were augments to the local Christian culture, not a wild new vision of worship.
[00:39:30]  This changes in 1975, uh, when first Presbyterian makes the decision to cancel a Sunday worship session so that their pastor can go watch the Super Bowl, right?
[00:39:40]  He's like, you know what, don't come in Sunday, like, we're all going to go to the game anyway, right?
[00:39:44]  This is kind of a cool thing to do if you're a 70s preacher, but this is like Gene finds this offensive, right?
[00:39:51]  You don't skip worship for any reason, especially not this like profane, worldly game.
[00:39:56]  So he uses this as an excuse to break his flock away from the church entirely and start hosting Sunday services in a local park instead.
[00:40:05]  This increases his hold over his flock, who now become they had been part of the community before, right?
[00:40:10]  You're going to church with everybody, you're somewhat tied to it.
[00:40:13]  From this point, now they're only socializing and working with each other, right?
[00:40:17]  This is kind of the they've he severed this like cord that they had to everyone else.
[00:40:22]  Um, this also brings Spriggs his first real opposition because once the cult kind of steps away from this church, locals start to be like, This does kind of seem like a problem, like this cult.
[00:40:34]  So, from 75 to 78, local churches register protests against the light brigade when Spriggs is spotted performing public baptisms.
[00:40:42]  Local papers start running the first articles accusing them of being a cult.
[00:40:46]  Two local colleges banned their students from eating at the Yellow Deli after enough former students had dropped out to join the Spriggs cult.
[00:40:52]  Like, it like it's become such a problem of them like poaching college students.
[00:40:57]  I'm guessing they're kids who are, you know, you're in college, you find that you don't like your major as much as you thought, or you get stressed out during exams, you, you, you're poor, so you go to the yellow deli for a free meal, and they're like, Boy, it seems like college isn't making you happy.
[00:41:10]  You know, it'll make you happy.
[00:41:12]  The difference in your where your life turns out could just be like one free sandwich, yeah, exactly.
[00:41:16]  Just there's so many times in my life where if I got the free sandwich from the wrong place, I would have been screwed.
[00:41:21]  Yeah, yeah, I mean, I know a lot of like former punk kids who are anarchists because the food not bombs people showed up and gave them sandwiches and things like that.
[00:41:29]  Food not bombs is how I same, it's how I turned from a libertarian uh kid to an anarchist uh punk kid.
[00:41:37]  Yeah, and this is always the case with cults, right?
[00:41:39]  Where like the things that let cults I'm not calling food not bombs a cult, I'm saying that like the thing that cults use is something that also has a good side, it's good to give people things, it's good to take care of people who are desperate.
[00:41:51]  If you're doing that because you like people and you want them to have an easier time, that's good.
[00:41:56]  If you're doing it because you want them to like feel a sense of obligation to you so that you can rope them into your cult, that's bad, right?
[00:42:03]  Yeah, to invest in your real estate scheme.
[00:42:05]  Yeah, the key, a big part of it, whenever somebody is like showing up and handing out free food, is like, yeah, who's behind this?
[00:42:13]  Is it just a bunch of people coming together to help out the community, or is there a guy?
[00:42:17]  Is there like a dude and this is his thing, you know?
[00:42:21]  Then, then maybe it's a cult.
[00:42:23]  Then maybe you should get your cult mace out.
[00:42:25]  So, oh my God.
[00:42:26]  I found one story from a student, actually, the student who was the author of that article in the Chattanoogan I quote earlier, who talks about like the process of being like recruited and forced to drop out of college by these people.
[00:42:38]  Quote, they believed that anything in the outside world was evil, and they drove me to Chattanooga State where I was attending to withdraw me.
[00:42:44]  When I told my counselor what I was doing, he just shook his head.
[00:42:47]  I told him I found Jesus and these people loved me and were going to take care of me.
[00:42:51]  So they have, they build over the years like a pretty steady process for like disenrolling kids from college when they convert them.
[00:43:00]  Like it's enough of a thing that like not only these schools try to ban their students from going to this cafe, but like everyone who works there knows like, oh shit, we lost another one to the fucking cult.
[00:43:10]  So in 1978, things come to a head because that's the Jonestown year, right?
[00:43:16]  Congressman Leo Ryan and several other people are gunned down in the jungle by a cult.
[00:43:20]  The cult then commits mass suicide.
[00:43:22]  This makes a lot of people very unhappy.
[00:43:25]  Really freaks out the country.
[00:43:26]  Yeah, it was the golden era to have a cult was, you know, was like 67 to 78.
[00:43:33]  Yeah, yeah, exactly.
[00:43:35]  With a little Yad and the Manson blip, but you could still get away with a lot in the 70s.
[00:43:38]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:43:39]  This puts an end to that, right?
[00:43:41]  This launches what Spriggs would later call anti-cult hysteria in the United States.
[00:43:46]  He says that like it's a bad thing.
[00:43:49]  Yeah, I don't feel like it's hysteria.
[00:43:51]  This is like clear evidence.
[00:43:53]  You know, Jonestown was clear evidence of a problem.
[00:43:57]  Yeah.
[00:43:57]  So by this point, Gene Spriggs is a scare.
[00:44:00]  Yeah.
[00:44:02]  Like 170.
[00:44:04]  Like a lot of people are dead now.
[00:44:06]  A little more than a scare.
[00:44:08]  They shot a congressman.
[00:44:09]  That's so wild.
[00:44:11]  Imagine if that happened today.
[00:44:13]  Yeah.
[00:44:13]  They like ran.
[00:44:14]  Oh my God.
[00:44:15]  Helicopters.
[00:44:15]  There was action.
[00:44:16]  It's wild.
[00:44:17]  Like, I cannot believe that that happened still.
[00:44:21]  Yeah.
[00:44:21]  I can, obviously, but it's, it's so specific in a lot of ways, Jill's like destined to be born of this country, even though it didn't happen here.
[00:44:32]  Well, I mean, the most unbelievable thing about it is that a congressperson actually did something, right?
[00:44:37]  Like heroically.
[00:44:39]  Yeah, pretty heroically.
[00:44:40]  Yeah.
[00:44:41]  So by this point, Gene Spriggs had developed a new name for his cult, the 12 tribes.
[00:44:47]  So named in honor of the fact that he was one of the first guys in the Christian fringe to start incorporating Judaism into his Christian cult, right?
[00:44:54]  And this is a very common thing now.
[00:44:56]  You might not think about it that way, but if you've ever seen, if you've been to one of these far-right gatherings where there's like a lot of religious right people and someone will bring like a shofar, which is like a horn made out of like an animal horn that you blow into.
[00:45:10]  That's like comes from Jewish religious observances, right?
[00:45:14]  That like some Christians have reincorporated back into evangelicalism.
[00:45:18]  I think because a shofar looks cool and they want that like, but yeah, he's like kind of the first guy to do this in a big way in the Christian right.

=== The 12 Tribes Origins (04:19) ===

[00:45:29]  And he's more extensive than this.
[00:45:31]  He brings the shofar in.
[00:45:32]  He also brings back bar mitzvahs, like kids in his cult celebrate, have their bar mitzvahs and bot mitzvahs.
[00:45:37]  And this, you know, is interesting.
[00:45:38]  It's certainly going to play into ways in which other far-right, like religious cults are going to move in the future, but it makes them seem more alien to the normies of Chattanooga, who by this point are in kind of a full-blown panic that the next Jonestown might be in their backyard.
[00:45:52]  Another thing that makes them seem alien to the normies is that by the late 70s, Spriggs had decided that separation was the critical precondition for his cult to reach the potential that God had set for them.
[00:46:03]  And I'm going to quote from that write-up by VCU here.
[00:46:06]  12 Tribes has concluded that adherence to a natural law standard will not be sufficient to create the conditions for the return of the Messiah.
[00:46:13]  Separation is critical for the 12 tribes because the absolute values of natural law are being lost in contemporary society.
[00:46:19]  The 12 tribes oppose the rise of a multicultural global social order, a single world government and world religion.
[00:46:25]  The former revitalizes values.
[00:46:27]  The latter undermines and compromises the values of natural law and promotes rampant materialism and acquisitiveness, feminism, the devise of the traditional patriarchal family and the legitimation of gay marriage.
[00:46:38]  The return of the Messiah is contingent on the gathering of a faithful remnant and the church being restored in its original form.
[00:46:44]  To pave the way for the millennium, the movement must expand from its present nine to 12 tribes, each of which must grow to at least 1,200 members, thus creating the 144,000 faithful who will be included in God's millennial kingdom.
[00:46:57]  Now, a lot of that's very modern.
[00:46:59]  Gene is a trailblazer in some of this stuff.
[00:47:02]  It's interesting.
[00:47:03]  I've seen it claimed that Gene's particular eschatology, he didn't just need 144,000 faithful to prepare for the way of the Messiah, but he had to build an army of 144,000 male virgins.
[00:47:16]  Yeah.
[00:47:17]  And tall order.
[00:47:18]  Yeah, tall order.
[00:47:20]  It is at this point, I should also note that according to the church, Gene was a scout master at one point.
[00:47:25]  They brag about this a lot.
[00:47:27]  So you hear about a scout master trying to get 144,000 male virgins together.
[00:47:32]  That's not a happy story, right?
[00:47:34]  That's going to end bad.
[00:47:36]  That is rough.
[00:47:37]  Yeah.
[00:47:38]  Yeah.
[00:47:39]  Also, too many male virgins.
[00:47:41]  Like, nothing good can happen with all that, all that pension.
[00:47:44]  Because then you need like 144,000 male non-virgins in order to have to counteract it.
[00:47:51]  Yeah.
[00:47:51]  So to stop it from exploding.
[00:47:53]  Yeah.
[00:47:55]  So Gene decided it was probably wise if his cult branched out and started picking up property and members in another state where they might be more welcome, right?
[00:48:02]  This is fine cult logic.
[00:48:04]  It's the kind of savvy maneuvering that made Scientology great.
[00:48:07]  But Spriggs underestimated the degree to which small towns Americans get scared based on news stories that they kind of skimmed.
[00:48:13]  He also made the mistake of having the mission to Vermont led by one of his longest serving members, a guy named David Jones.
[00:48:20]  David had joined the 12 Tribes back in 1973 as a traumatized Vietnam veteran fresh from the war.
[00:48:26]  He'd become one of Gene's most trusted lieutenants.
[00:48:29]  Unfortunately, his last name was Jones, and the provincial residents of Island Pond, Vermont started, like, as soon as they hear a guy named Jones has moved here with his like weird religious congregation, they're like, he has to be related to Jim Jones.
[00:48:41]  You can't Google it.
[00:48:42]  Yeah.
[00:48:43]  It's like, you know, you just got to take it on, take it on face value that he's not.
[00:48:48]  It's like, it is funny.
[00:48:50]  Like, it would be one thing if he had like some very complicated, rare last name, but being like, they're both Joneses.
[00:48:56]  Yeah, there's probably fucking 40 Joneses in town.
[00:48:58]  What are you talking about?
[00:48:59]  You fucking small town maniacs.
[00:49:01]  Like they're right to be concerned about this people, but they're still, they're still dummies.
[00:49:07]  So from the beginning, the 12 tribes attracted eyeballs in Vermont.
[00:49:11]  Now, the reason for this is dumb, obviously, like that they think this guy is related to Jim Jones, but they ought to be watching these people because there are absolutely good reasons to be monitoring the 12 tribes.
[00:49:22]  They just have nothing to do with Jonestown.
[00:49:24]  That's another just classic American story where it's like, you have good reason to be concerned about this.
[00:49:29]  And it just so happens that the reason you are concerned is not the right one.
[00:49:33]  Yeah, you picked the wrong one.
[00:49:35]  And the good reason to do this is the fact that by the late 70s, Gene had built his entire religious philosophy.
[00:49:42]  This is like the core of what he actually is teaching in the 12 tribes now around beating the shit out of kids.

=== Beating Kids in Small Towns (02:38) ===

[00:49:49]  Like, right?
[00:49:49]  This starts off as sort of this, you know, we're going back to the original Christianity.
[00:49:53]  And over the first decade or so, it exists, he kind of builds this religious philosophy where he decides the chief problems of the world are all caused by disobedience to God's law.
[00:50:04]  And so the only way to correct that is to raise up a new generation of kids by absolutely beating the piss out of them.
[00:50:12]  And that is going to be, that is the 12 tribes, right?
[00:50:15]  It is the let's hit the shit out of our kids cult.
[00:50:18]  Terrible way to go to ads.
[00:50:20]  But here they are.
[00:50:24]  What's up, everyone?
[00:50:25]  I'm Ego Moda.
[00:50:26]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
[00:50:34]  It's Will Farrell.
[00:50:37]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:50:40]  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.
[00:50:45]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[00:50:48]  I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
[00:50:52]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
[00:50:57]  Yeah.
[00:50:57]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[00:51:00]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[00:51:02]  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.
[00:51:10]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:51:13]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:51:20]  Yeah, it would not be right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:51:23]  There's a lot of luck.
[00:51:24]  Yeah.
[00:51:24]  Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:51:34]  10-10 shots fired.
[00:51:36]  City hall building.
[00:51:37]  A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
[00:51:42]  From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
[00:51:48]  How could this have happened in City Hall?
[00:51:50]  Somebody tell me that.
[00:51:50]  Jeffrey Hood did.
[00:51:52]  July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
[00:51:59]  Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
[00:52:02]  And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
[00:52:10]  Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
[00:52:13]  A shocking public murder.
[00:52:14]  I screamed, get down, get down.
[00:52:16]  Those are shots.
[00:52:17]  Those are shots.
[00:52:18]  Get down.
[00:52:18]  A charismatic politician.
[00:52:20]  You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
[00:52:22]  I still have a weapon.
[00:52:24]  And I could shoot you.

=== Terrifying Parental Control (15:31) ===

[00:52:28]  And an outsider with a secret.
[00:52:29]  He alleged you.
[00:52:30]  A victim of flat down.
[00:52:32]  That may or may not have been political.
[00:52:34]  That may have been about sex.
[00:52:36]  Listening to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:52:49]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:52:53]  Rule one: never mess with a country girl.
[00:52:56]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:52:59]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:53:03]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:53:06]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:53:12]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:53:17]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:53:19]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:53:21]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:53:23]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:53:26]  I said, oh, hell no.
[00:53:27]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:53:30]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:53:34]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:53:36]  Trust me, babe.
[00:53:37]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:53:48]  We're back.
[00:53:49]  Now, by this point in the story, Gene has also taken a new name for himself in the tradition of most great cult leaders, Yonek, which is Hebrew, comes from the Bible.
[00:54:01]  His followers called him an apostle.
[00:54:04]  And there's debate from former members as to whether or not Yonek was all-powerful or just a major source of charismatic authority.
[00:54:10]  But he certainly was not the only source of prophetic revelations for the group.
[00:54:14]  It does seem fair, though, to say that Yonek set the tone and focus for the church and that his primary concern was children.
[00:54:21]  In the early days, Spriggs had claimed his goal was to bring kids on the fringe, counterculture types who had like dropped out of the middle America Christianity of their parents back to God.
[00:54:31]  But now in the mid to late 70s, late 70s, early 80s, he starts to claim having a different goal, which is to build a church that it would be impossible for children to leave, right?
[00:54:41]  Like that is his, he goes from, I want to bring kids back to the church to I want to build, like break their little minds in such a way that they never disobey their parents, that they never leave us, you know?
[00:54:52]  Now, part of how he does this is isolation.
[00:54:54]  He starts mandating church kids are not even allowed to be born outside of the compounds, right?
[00:54:59]  You can't go to a hospital to have your kids.
[00:55:01]  You certainly can't have them educated in public schools.
[00:55:04]  They're never going to work a job on their own.
[00:55:06]  They'll be apprenticed within church businesses.
[00:55:08]  We have created our own parallel society so that they can't escape.
[00:55:12]  And to make any kind of deviation impossible, Spriggs devoted his biblical knowledge to creating a protocol of rigorous abuse.
[00:55:19]  Described in his brochure, when the spanking stopped, all hell broke loose.
[00:55:24]  Oh my God.
[00:55:25]  Yeah, that's a good one.
[00:55:26]  Yeah, solid name there.
[00:55:28]  Yeah.
[00:55:29]  I'm going to quote a description of this pamphlet from an excellent article in Pacific Standard magazine.
[00:55:34]  It cites Proverbs 13, 24.
[00:55:36]  He who spares his rod hates his son, but he who loves him disciplines him promptly to make the following argument.
[00:55:42]  If you love your child and if you love your child, you will take up the rod and discipline him when he's disobedient.
[00:55:48]  It's not optional.
[00:55:49]  It's a command.
[00:55:50]  The tribes argue that progressive childrearing practices such as timeouts or taking away treats or screen time have resulted in a spike in juvenile violence and crime.
[00:55:59]  The only way to reverse this trend, the tribes contends, is by using the proverbial rod early, often and hard enough to leave marks.
[00:56:06]  According to former and current tribes leaders I spoke with, infants raised in the tribes are hit with balloon sticks, thin wooden rods used to keep balloons from floating away for offenses as minor as resisting a diaper change or throwing a bottle.
[00:56:18]  Older children are whipped with bamboo canes.
[00:56:20]  Children are driven by their natural, innate nature to do what is wrong, the group's teachings state.
[00:56:25]  It is better to go to heaven with welts than go to hell without welts.
[00:56:29]  That's Gene Spriggs right there.
[00:56:31]  My God.
[00:56:32]  I can't.
[00:56:33]  Like, I can't imagine how they reconcile when kids eventually obviously leave the church.
[00:56:37]  Like, there must be, there must be, not mass defection, but there must be defection.
[00:56:43]  Yeah, later on, at this stage, again, it's all first generation converts having kids, right?
[00:56:48]  And the kids can't leave, you know?
[00:56:50]  Sure, sure, sure.
[00:56:52]  And they're trying, this is, this is largely being enforced so that that first generation of kids raised within the cult can't leave, right?
[00:56:59]  That's what Spriggs wants to set up.
[00:57:01]  Spanking is a technical endeavor within the 12 tribes.
[00:57:05]  There is arcana around it, right?
[00:57:07]  Depending on the era and the geographic region, they seem to prefer using these balloon sticks or bamboo sticks, but they also, for certain things, prescribed whipping kids with resin-tipped whips.
[00:57:18]  I don't even know where you get those.
[00:57:20]  Like, probably have to get a whip and just tip it in resin yourself.
[00:57:24]  Today, this is all described in detail in their 348-page child training manual, all of which is based on Spriggs' teachings.
[00:57:33]  Is it straight up called child training manual?
[00:57:36]  Does it have a name?
[00:57:38]  Okay.
[00:57:39]  That's what it's called.
[00:57:40]  You can find it online.
[00:57:41]  You know, I've been reading a bit of it.
[00:57:43]  Yeah.
[00:57:44]  Okay.
[00:57:45]  Yeah.
[00:57:45]  It includes the fact that children as young as six months old should be spanked for deviations of from proper behavior, particularly willfulness.
[00:57:54]  An infant wriggling during a diaper change is specifically listed as in need of physical punishment.
[00:57:59]  Oh my God.
[00:58:01]  You know, the thing that every infant does, which is what he's saying, right?
[00:58:04]  Children are inherently disobedient and touched by Satan, and you have to beat that out of them, right?
[00:58:09]  Right.
[00:58:10]  Quote, the pain received from the balloon stick is more humbling than harmful.
[00:58:14]  There is no defense against it.
[00:58:16]  The only way to stop the sting of the rod is to submit.
[00:58:18]  That is exactly what the child will do.
[00:58:20]  Submit to his parents' will and end his rebellion.
[00:58:24]  Now, that's fucked up and bad.
[00:58:27]  It is responsible to acknowledge that like smacking kids around is not all that far from normal in the 70s, right?
[00:58:34]  We are not talking about like that.
[00:58:36]  I mean, it still happens today, obviously.
[00:58:38]  A lot of parents use some form of physical coercion with their kids, and it's even more common back then.
[00:58:44]  Well, and just like institutional corporal punishment is not at all out of the norm.
[00:58:51]  My elementary school in the 90s spanked me, you know, public elementary school is not in like a Catholic school or anything.
[00:58:56]  This is in fucking Idabel, Oklahoma.
[00:58:58]  Yeah, so smacking kids with rods is unfortunately, yeah, not all that abnormal in this period.
[00:59:03]  But the 12 tribes engaged in numerous and much more creative abuse tactics than this.
[00:59:09]  Spriggs spends a lot of his time thinking up new ways to abuse children and justify it with the Bible.
[00:59:17]  One ex-member who grew up in the church during the 80s recalled a practice called scourging in which a child is stripped naked and beaten with a rod over every inch of their body.
[00:59:28]  Yeah.
[00:59:29]  Adults would also regularly withhold meals from small children as punishment.
[00:59:33]  Starvation is a really common punishment for them.
[00:59:36]  In some cases, food would be withheld for days at a time.
[00:59:39]  Children were also locked alone in dark rooms for days at a time in response to crimes like stealing food from a refrigerator.
[00:59:46]  And so this isn't getting outright because the kids are probably not in the school system.
[00:59:50]  They're no longer in a church.
[00:59:51]  So no one knows.
[00:59:53]  Some of it is being there are reports.
[00:59:55]  There are reports in Chattanooga and soon after in Vermont because like they have neighbors, people are like people can see them hitting kids in public sometimes, slapping them and shit.
[01:00:03]  So this is not like totally a black box.
[01:00:07]  One member later told the Denver Post, the one time that I was locked in the dungeon, it wasn't a real dungeon, but it felt like it.
[01:00:13]  I think it was for more than a day because we fasted every Friday.
[01:00:16]  So I was used to starving and it was longer than that, which gives you an idea of the bleakness of this.
[01:00:22]  Like I was pretty used to starving.
[01:00:24]  Like this was worse than normal starving.
[01:00:26]  Now, one of the things that's interesting to me is Spriggs never has a kid.
[01:00:31]  He does not have a child of his own.
[01:00:33]  In the cult, sorry.
[01:00:34]  He does have one boy with his first wife, but he leaves when the kid's young, which is for the best in this case.
[01:00:40]  That kid really dodged a bullet by not having his dad.
[01:00:43]  Yes.
[01:00:45]  Not always a win to have your dad in your life, especially when it's the how to hit children guy.
[01:00:50]  That makes your issues with like dad abandonment even all the more difficult where you're like, I just want him to love me, but I'm glad he didn't love me.
[01:00:57]  It's very complicated.
[01:00:58]  I want a dad to love me.
[01:01:00]  Maybe not this one.
[01:01:02]  Yeah, I think that's very real.
[01:01:05]  So again, he has no child in the cult.
[01:01:08]  And for what I can tell, Spriggs, he seems to have kept some contact with his family and his old friends through like the late 70s.
[01:01:17]  But by the close of the decade, even his close relatives had started to grow increasingly like concerned with the violent tone that his faith had taken.
[01:01:25]  His sister Joyce talked to the press and reported that like, you know, in the, when he, in the early 70s, when he starts ministering, when he starts like speaking to people doing these church services, I thought, well, maybe he started to figure his life out.
[01:01:37]  This is like, you know, good for him, probably a positive turn.
[01:01:41]  But by the end of the 70s, December of 79, she was like, I think he's gotten very negative.
[01:01:46]  And she, she mentions this to him.
[01:01:47]  She like goes to Eugene and she's like, I think the stuff you're talking about is like really aggressive and it's kind of scaring me.
[01:01:54]  And he just says, you know, all I'm doing is following the scripture, right?
[01:01:57]  Like you can't argue with this.
[01:01:58]  You can't argue with me because this is all the Bible.
[01:02:01]  Now, we will talk more about this in part two, but it's worth noting that while the 12 tribes' attitude on child abuse is extreme, it does not grow up in isolation.
[01:02:10]  The Jesus movement started out with serious countercultural elements, but it also fed directly into the birth of the religious right, which helped to unseat Jimmy Carter and became a major engine behind Reaganism and the revived cultural conservatism that followed.
[01:02:23]  When I read about Spriggs' teachings here, I think about a book called To Train Up a Child, which is a 1994 parenting advice book self-published by Mike and Debbie Pearl.
[01:02:34]  If you recall our episodes on the Duggars and the organization behind them, the Institute of Basic Life Principles, the IBLP endorses this book, right?
[01:02:42]  To Train Up a Child is common among homeschooling families.
[01:02:46]  It was for years the standard book in the Christian far right about how to raise kids.
[01:02:54]  I have multiple friends who were raised according to its teachings.
[01:02:57]  If you knew any people who were like Quiverful kids, this book was a presence in their house and childhood.
[01:03:02]  And one of the things, like, among other things, the book says that like you need to kind of as Spriggs taught, you have to be constantly using some form of negative physical reinforcement on your kids.
[01:03:13]  And it includes like sadistic shit, like spanking your kids like long enough to break their will, right?
[01:03:19]  It's not just like...
[01:03:20]  I'm not saying this is okay, but it's not just saying like, okay, you know, I'm, you did a bad thing, so I'm going to like, you know, spank you five times in the butt or something.
[01:03:28]  It's like you have to spank them until they stop being willful, you know?
[01:03:31]  Right.
[01:03:32]  Well, because there's, I mean, it's by no means is this an excuse, but like, I know that there were people who, who would spank their kids because they thought that that's a thing that they, you know, like, like my parents.
[01:03:43]  Yeah, it's pretty, pretty normal practice.
[01:03:45]  Yeah.
[01:03:45]  Right.
[01:03:45]  That they had to do, but they do it in passing.
[01:03:47]  And it was like more of an aesthetic and like scary thing.
[01:03:50]  And again, this is not a justification of those things, but this idea that you then take that to another level, which is like, you do it with will and you do it to like break will is the first one is terrifying, but like that's just, it's hard to even wrap fully wrap your head around.
[01:04:09]  Yeah.
[01:04:10]  It's difficult.
[01:04:11]  Yeah.
[01:04:11]  And it's, we'll talk about it more one of these days.
[01:04:14]  If you want to hear more, we do get into more of this in the Dugger episodes.
[01:04:18]  It is worth noting here, though, I bring this up to say that like Gene Spriggs is a trailblazer in child abuse, but he's not a lonely one, right?
[01:04:27]  Ideas close to the ones he promulgated are absolutely the norm among the religious right in the United States today.
[01:04:33]  His cult has stayed fringe, but his child beating tactics did not.
[01:04:38]  Anyway, when you build a church around slapping the absolute shit out of small kids, eventually someone's going to spot your members slapping the shit out of small children.
[01:04:47]  By 1979, several members had fled and taken stories to local Chattanooga papers.
[01:04:52]  Allegations of abuse, based on the fact that cult members absolutely were hitting kids, had also gone the old-timey equivalent of viral.
[01:04:59]  This problem followed the branch of the church, 200 members strong, that had moved to Vermont.
[01:05:04]  By all accounts, Spriggs maintained tight control of this breakaway segment, not breakaway, but of this like expansion of his church, writing regular letters to David Jones, encouraging him to ensure that children on the new properties were being beaten often enough.
[01:05:18]  Quote, if one is overly concerned about his son receiving blue marks, you know that he hates his son and hates the word of God.
[01:05:26]  Blue marks are Spriggs' turn for bruises, and he speaks of them as a positive thing, right?
[01:05:31]  Like you're not being a good parent if your kids don't have blue marks.
[01:05:34]  If you're not bruising them, you're not doing it hard enough, right?
[01:05:37]  That's what he's saying here.
[01:05:38]  He's just being a little bit more kind of biblical whimsy about it.
[01:05:42]  This is a frequent euphemism used by church leadership.
[01:05:45]  A reporter for Pacific Standard magazine writes more on this topic based on interviews with former church members.
[01:05:51]  I remember constant welts on my hands, thighs, and butt, a woman who was raised in the tribes told me.
[01:05:56]  Children are expected to obey on the first command without talking back or complaining.
[01:06:00]  They are not allowed toys or bikes and cannot engage in fantasy play.
[01:06:03]  They read only the Bible and the group's dogma.
[01:06:06]  The former members I spoke to claimed most children were beaten multiple times a day for transgressions as innocuous as forgetting to raise their hands at the dinner table and dissipation, the group's term for horseplay.
[01:06:16]  Responding to these descriptions, a current leader of their California communities, Wade Skinner, echoed the brochure I read in Blue Blinds.
[01:06:23]  That wouldn't be how we portray our life, he said, but we do believe that if you love your child, you will be diligent to discipline them.
[01:06:29]  And if you hate them, you will withhold the rod.
[01:06:32]  Cool, guys.
[01:06:34]  Love to see it.
[01:06:36]  The first serious trouble for the 12 tribes started in Vermont in 1983 when an elder named Eddie Wiseman whipped a child named Darlene with a balloon stick from her shoulders to her ankles for kissing a boy.
[01:06:48]  Darlene was 13 years old, and he whips her badly enough that she's like bleeding.
[01:06:52]  Do you know where in Vermont they landed?
[01:06:55]  Oh, yeah, we read the town name out a little earlier.
[01:06:58]  I don't have it right in front of me here.
[01:06:59]  I think it's, I think it's Barton, which is like a wild, it's like a still, still like a wild west town in Vermont.
[01:07:06]  Oh, that would not, yeah.
[01:07:08]  I, I, we've got it up there.
[01:07:09]  We read it out earlier.
[01:07:10]  People think about it.
[01:07:11]  Pond.
[01:07:12]  Is it Island Pond, Vermont?
[01:07:13]  Yeah, I think it's Island.
[01:07:14]  Oh, yeah.
[01:07:15]  So it's that area.
[01:07:16]  Yeah.
[01:07:16]  It's like a pretty, I don't know your familiarity.
[01:07:18]  I lived in Vermont.
[01:07:19]  I know very little about Vermont.
[01:07:21]  Yeah, it is.
[01:07:22]  Like people think of Vermont like, it's kind of like the hippies thing.
[01:07:24]  It's like they think of it like Burlington and hippies.
[01:07:26]  And it's like, no, it's like some of it is like libertarian wasteland.
[01:07:31]  Yeah, I definitely will talk about Vermont and New Hampshire libertarians more one of these days.
[01:07:36]  There's some fun stories up there that involve bears.
[01:07:38]  Yeah, that's where I'm from.
[01:07:39]  So I love it.
[01:07:40]  I know it and I love it.
[01:07:41]  It's in here.
[01:07:41]  Yeah.
[01:07:42]  So yeah, her father sees Darlin bleeding from the back after this whipping and he's outraged.
[01:07:48]  So he reports Wiseman to the authorities who charge Wiseman with simple assault.
[01:07:53]  But then something happens and her father drops the case.
[01:07:57]  He claims, actually, it wasn't that bad.

=== Pseudoscience and Assault Charges (04:15) ===

[01:07:59]  I was pressured by anti-cult activists to exaggerate the abuse.
[01:08:04]  So probably a very unpleasant story behind that.
[01:08:08]  Authorities continue to investigate in part because the 12 tribes had already been attracting concern for a while.
[01:08:14]  Now, investigating this cult is a really difficult job.
[01:08:17]  The children who were believed to be victims were homeschooled.
[01:08:20]  So they're not ever in front of teachers.
[01:08:23]  They avoid modern medical care.
[01:08:24]  So they're not ever in front of doctors.
[01:08:26]  They very rarely leave cult property, which makes it pretty much impossible to build a case, right?
[01:08:32]  You can't get a warrant when you don't know the number of children or their names, when you're just like, there's children there and we think they're being like, that's a tough legal situation to be in if you're the people trying to like do something about this, right?
[01:08:45]  Like they, because you have a lot of rights, obviously, especially on your own property.
[01:08:50]  And yeah, it's, it's tough.
[01:08:51]  Like the actual, like, how to, how to break into a situation like this is incredibly difficult when they have so successfully created an alternate world for themselves.
[01:09:01]  It's, it's rough.
[01:09:02]  I never, I never thought of that, that like one of the benefit, quote, the heavy quote benefits of, of absolute sort of separatism is it makes it legally difficult to intervene because there's not the data that you need in order to create a case.
[01:09:19]  Yeah, it's fucked up and it's going to be a real problem in this case.
[01:09:21]  So what they decide to do, what the authorities decide to do here is to summon seven cult leaders, including David Jones, to give basic information to the state on how many children live on the properties and what their names are.
[01:09:34]  Jones and his family refuse to do this.
[01:09:37]  They are jailed, but they're released in short order.
[01:09:40]  Three days later, though, an army of state troopers and social workers raids the 12 tribes' property with a mandate to do whatever is necessary to figure out how many kids are there and who they are.
[01:09:50]  They find 112 minors and they take them all away.
[01:09:54]  It looks initially as if maybe the authorities are going to do something to put an end to this.
[01:10:00]  That is not what happened.
[01:10:02]  While the parents of these kids wait nearby, prosecutors fail to get a court order to examine the children for signs of abuse.
[01:10:08]  The district judge in this case complains that their warrant is too broad, in part because it does not name the children they want to search.
[01:10:15]  All 112 minors are ordered released in very short order back to the waiting rods of their parents.
[01:10:21]  David Jones gloated that this had all been the result of an unhinged small town mentality, claiming the Fuhrer had come to a head like a boil with no pus, which is a weird way to describe being, in his eyes, exonerated for child abuse.
[01:10:34]  Like, yeah, we're just like one of those pussless boils.
[01:10:37]  Yeah.
[01:10:38]  Like, what a, what an odd, what an odd turn of phrase.
[01:10:43]  June 22nd, the day that...
[01:10:44]  It's the boil that you want.
[01:10:46]  Yeah, yeah, we're the boil you want to have.
[01:10:48]  There's not a, yeah, it's pussless.
[01:10:51]  June 22nd is the day that the raid gets aborted.
[01:10:54]  And this becomes the first religious holiday that the 12 tribes celebrate all to themselves.
[01:10:58]  They start calling it the Day of Deliverance.
[01:11:01]  They'll do Passover-style meals, right?
[01:11:03]  Like they call it, they kind of make it into their Passover, right?
[01:11:06]  Because it's the day that God miraculously extended his protection to them against the grasping hands of the state.
[01:11:12]  Gene Spriggs, after this, will only grow more convinced of the wisdom of his separation from society.
[01:11:18]  Another thing that plays into this is what's happening at the same time is the AIDS crisis, right?
[01:11:22]  Is starting to kick off.
[01:11:24]  This convinces him both that, like, of this kind of fallen nature of the modern world, that the only thing to do is separation.
[01:11:30]  And it also convinces him that God's justice is being delivered against the unrighteous, even as his hand shields believers.
[01:11:37]  He writes at this time: When parental authority is rebelled against, it opens the door to come against all constituted authority.
[01:11:44]  Honoring those who are over you, those who are honorable, especially parents, releases a special hormone from your brain, permeating your body that gives long life.
[01:11:52]  If you don't do this, that hormone dries up and your bones dry up.
[01:11:55]  The disobedient don't live long.
[01:11:57]  The lifespan of a homosexual is about 40 years.
[01:12:00]  That's not because of AIDS.
[01:12:01]  They die of a bad conscience.
[01:12:03]  And like, that's evil.
[01:12:04]  It is, I have to say, the idea that like obeying your parents releases a hormone that you die without is a pretty fun bit of pseudoscience for a cult leader.

=== God's Justice Against Rebels (03:33) ===

[01:12:15]  That's a good one.
[01:12:16]  Several people whose moms told them that if they like, if they, if you know, if they like cut their own hair or wore makeup or whatever, it would like give them cancer later in life.
[01:12:26]  Yeah.
[01:12:27]  So I feel like that, that, that's a very common bit of parenting psychological warfare that they took to a whole other level.
[01:12:34]  Yeah.
[01:12:34]  Yeah.
[01:12:34]  Quite, quite a, quite a new, yeah, a fancy, an impressive level.
[01:12:40]  Yeah.
[01:12:41]  So that's going to be all of it for part one here.
[01:12:44]  How we, how we, how are you feeling here?
[01:12:46]  How we doing, Alex?
[01:12:49]  That's dark, man.
[01:12:53]  It's, yeah, it's a, uh, I feel, I feel heavy with darkness and I hope that things go awry, but I bet that they won't.
[01:13:00]  It seems like these are people who have staying power.
[01:13:03]  Yeah.
[01:13:04]  Yeah.
[01:13:05]  Speaking of staying power, you got any pluggables to plug?
[01:13:09]  Um, I would just love people to listen to You Are Good, a feelings podcast about movies where we talk about uh feelings and therapy-related things by talking about pop culture because it's too scary to do head on.
[01:13:22]  Yeah, very scary.
[01:13:24]  You can find me uh at CoolerZone Media, where you can get this podcast without ads.
[01:13:29]  So do that and uh go to hell.
[01:13:33]  I love you.
[01:13:35]  Take it behind the bastards is a production of cool zone media.
[01:13:43]  For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzone media.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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[01:14:54]  Yeah, it would not be.
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[01:15:06]  In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
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