They couldn’t be more different: the self-made, self-help guru to the stars, the antisemitic Black-separatist, the blue-blood anti-vax lawyer, and the founder of a science-fiction religion. But in the cult-conspiracy economy, strange bedfellows are often the norm.Julian investigates how—underneath cultural, racial, political, and even religious differences—opportunistic grifters can always find common cause in the pursuit of wealth and influence. In the end, they’re all carpetbaggers dressed up as pharaohs.Show NotesThe Lies of RFK Jr’s Medical Racism DocumentarySamoan Measles OutbreakSomali Measles OutbreakMeasles Outbreak Amongst Brooklyn Orthodox JewsRFK Jr. At Berlin protest with Neo-NazisWeaponizing Racism for Anti-Vax ActivismWerner Erhard: Father of Self-HelpAnti-Vax Infiltrates Nation of Islam Scientology Money Project
-- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
It costs $5 a month for access, and the support helps to keep us ad-free and editorially independent.
You can sign up at patreon.com backslash conspirituality.
Thank you.
Before becoming a minister in the Nation of Islam, Tony Muhammad worked as the real estate executive for a fast food chain.
He also worked as a manager in Atlanta for Eastern Airlines, where he up-leveled his former business as a drug dealer to use his professional position to enable bringing shipments of cocaine in through airport security.
Werner Erhardt, as we already covered, was a kind of carpetbagger car salesman who abandoned his wife and four kids before making millions preaching to seminar participants about taking responsibility for their lives.
His empire was threatened by targeted attacks from Scientology, so what about their founder, L. Ron Hubbard?
Lafayette Ronald Hubbard was born in 1911 in Tilden, Nebraska.
With his Navy officer father, he grew up a military brat and lived in Montana, D.C., Seattle, Manassas, Virginia, and Guam, to name but a few places.
After struggling academically and financially, Hubbard eventually became a prolific and well-known writer for pulp fiction magazines during the 1930s.
Sadly, this still didn't pay that well.
In a perhaps trivial symmetry with Earhart and Muhammad, Alron Hubbard wrote under many pen names.
In 1938, he underwent a dental procedure and had a reaction to the anesthetic in a way that he described as a revelatory near-death experience.
This experience, in turn, brought on the grandiose self-perception that the book he would go on to write, inspired by it, was, according to his biographer Arthur Burks, more important than, and potentially more impactful than the Bible.
Now, none of the publishers that L. Ron Hubbard wrote to agreed.
This book, titled Excalibur, would later turn into his bestseller, Dianetics.
But not before Hubbard followed in his father's footsteps by joining the Navy, where a series of frustrated commanding officers shuffled him around from post to post, reporting that he was not suitable for whatever duties he was asked to perform under their command.
I won't detail the litany of almost comedic incompetence that led to almost continuous controversy and transfers until he eventually resigned.
But he had developed a vexing set of health complaints during his time in the Navy.
These included headaches, rheumatism, conjunctivitis, aches and pains, and hemorrhoids.
And I mention this only because his Scientology dogma would later include a lot of claims about physical health being all in the mind.
And, of course, about psychiatry in particular being an evil scam.
Next, Hubbard leaves his wife and two kids, there's a pattern here, and becomes friends with a rocket propulsion researcher and a cult magician who at the time was studying with Aleister Crowley himself.
This guy's name is Jack Whiteside and he lived in a Pasadena mansion that L. Ron Hubbard moved into, proceeding then to steal Parson's 21-year-old girlfriend A development which Parsons seems to have taken rather well.
That is, until Hubbard also swindled him out of a joint venture they were involved in and left him bankrupt and having to sell his mansion to pay his debts while Hubbard and the 21-year-old girlfriend sailed off on a yacht.
The twists and turns of his checkered life go on and on from there, but perhaps it is clear by now that Earhart, Muhammad, and Hubbard have plenty in common.
But the strange bedfellows effect between Scientology and the nation of Islam itself has yet another interesting overlap.
They are both UFO religions.
Yep, both Scientology and the Nation of Islam have extraterrestrial components to their mythology.
Nation of Islam doctrine states that UFOs are man-made machines piloted by humans that will be on hand on the Day of Judgment.
Eh, not so weird, right?
Well, here's a quick rundown of the very detailed theology of the Nation of Islam.
Are you ready?
God is a black man.
The moon was created when an ancient scientist tried to destroy the earth with explosives.
Dinosaurs are a hoax and evolution is false.
Numerology is the key to decoding the Quran.
A rebellious and precocious young black deity scientist named Yaqub created a degenerate subhuman race.
White people, who in turn created apes and monkeys by engaging in bestiality.
Allah has permitted the white race to rule the earth for 6,000 years ending in 1914, while the black race was enslaved in order to fully realize the evil of white people.
These evils include creating AIDS to exterminate blacks.
But we live in end times, awaiting the arrival of a mothership and several smaller baby planes that will arrive once race relations have deteriorated into an apocalyptic battle.
The mothership will then transport all non-Europeans who are righteous away from the earth, while the cute-sounding baby planes will bomb the hell out of everyone else.
The planet will then burn for 390 years, cool down for another 610, after which the righteous will be returned by Allah to live on Earth in a new black paradise.
