Amy Carlson’s metallic blue body was covered in glitter, wrapped in a sleeping bag, and draped in Christmas lights when police found her on the night of April 16, 2021. The 45-year-old leader of the “Love Has Won” cult weighed just 75 pounds; her eyes had been removed.
Carlson, known as “Mother God,” proselytized along with her followers by livestreaming around the clock, preaching a QAnon-themed spirituality that they monetized by selling colloidal silver and New Age tchotchkes. When her body was found, it was discovered that her inner circle had prepared for Carlson to be picked up by galactic starships from their Crestone, CO compound.
Julian and Matthew discuss HBO’s new docu-series, “Love Has Won: The Mother God Cult,” directed by Hannah Olson. They meditate on religious freedom, spiritual tragedy, and the ethics of big-budget cult documentary filmmaking.
Show Notes
Denver Post article with Rick Ross comments
Vulture Interview with Hannah Olson
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On the night of April 16th, 2021, police entered a mobile home in the tiny town of Crestone, Colorado.
There they found the 45-year-old, 75-pound body of Amy Carlson.
She appeared to have been dead for several weeks.
Her followers had wrapped her in a sleeping bag, draped her with Christmas lights, and covered her face in glitter.
They had removed her eyes.
Her skin was a metallic purplish blue.
Today we look at HBO's Love Has Won, the Mother God cult, and we wonder aloud about religious freedom, spiritual tragedy, and the ethics of the boom time in popular big-budget cult documentary filmmaking.
Hello everyone.
Welcome to Conspiratuality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
And this week, we should add how sometimes our hearts are just moved by desperately sad human stories.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
By the time she died of alcohol, anorexia, and silver poisoning, Amy Carlson had, for around seven years, been at the center of a spiritual group called Love Has Won.
They revered her as Mother God, professing to believe she was on the Earth to assist humanity in making the momentous transition to fifth-dimensional reality.
From around 2014 to 2021, the group developed a small inner circle of less than 20 people who were dubbed by her the First Contact Ground Crew and lived with her, moving around between Oregon, Florida, and California, and eventually settling in Colorado in 2018.
There was an ill-fated move to Hawaii in 2020 that lasted less than a month due to outraged protests from the locals at Carlson declaring herself to be Pele, the goddess of volcanoes and fire.
The group were escorted by the police to the airport.
Now, Carlson claimed to be the 19 billion year old creator of all the universe, and to have been reincarnated 534 times.
She said she had been Cleopatra, Marilyn Monroe, Joan of Arc, and Jesus Christ in her past lives, and that her mission was to lead 144,000 people into the fifth dimension.
So a real theosophical New Age apocalypse and rapture mashup here.
These beliefs seem to have taken root in concert with Amy's involvement with the Lightworkers.org website in the early 2000s, as well as with a man she met on that website named Amarith White Eagle, who also referred to himself as Father God.
Carlson was working at McDonald's at the time.
The two would go on to present themselves on Lightworkers.org as Twin Flames, who were ushering the world into the age of Aquarius.
This mission, as it turned out, would require that the freshly anointed Mother God leave her third husband and abandon her three children, each from different fathers.
At that time, the group which formed around the pair was officially known as the Galactic Federation of Light, which is oddly familiar.
Yeah, I was confused when we came across this because this somehow becomes the disembodied group that's cited by Lori Lodd and Elizabeth April and I think Magenta Pixie and people like that, right?
Totally.
So I don't know how to draw a straight line of succession here.
And of course, you know, we shouldn't expect to be able to, but the name comes to be used in reference to this fantasy group of alien spirit guides that several so-called channelers we cover claimed, especially during the pandemic and associated with QAnon, Great Awakening, 5D, Ascension, Hysteria, to be representing to their followers online, right?
It's that Lori Ladd, like I just, I just laid down and took a nap and the Galactic Federation came through and here's what they told me.
Right.
It always seems like there's, you know, IP or copyright issues here, you know, and maybe a problem of reconciling different messages from different parts of the Galactic Federation.
I don't know.
After the Twin Flame union with Amarith ended, Amy maintained the presentation of being Mother God, and she began gathering followers based on this conceit.
She would have a subsequent series of six male companions during her stint as a self-proclaimed deity, each of whom she would in turn declare to actually be Father God.
This is a real anomaly in this story, and it's a clue to something, I think, because the inner circle was surprisingly accommodating of this Father God train.
Often they would just welcome in each new guy and start calling them Dad.
So I found this very unusual in terms of cult organization.
I can't really think of another instance in which core group members are ordained overnight, you know, sight unseen, given huge amounts of power and influence over people.
I mean, in many cases, you know, the father gods are having a lot of influence over other women in the group.
And this is happening even though it's very destabilizing.
And to me, it's an indication that Carlson wanted boyfriends as much as she wanted power and control.
It was like she was choosing lieutenants on Tinder.
Now, her small inner circle established a quite lucrative business model, it seems, offering spiritual ascension sessions and long-distance etheric surgeries that they claimed could cure everything from cancer to Lyme disease, autism, depression, addiction, and brain tumors.
They also sold supplements that they would formulate in-house, including most notably colloidal silver.
Now, Love Has Won, which was registered as a 501c3 nonprofit, did live streams on Facebook
and YouTube, often two or three times a day, in which they repeatedly touted their products,
essential oils, candles, soaps, plasma sprays, oracle cards, and colloidal silver through
their now defunct LLC, which was called Gaia's Whole Healing Essentials.
And they also would offer up those services like the etheric healings.
But they also asked for donations via various GoFundMe pages, including one called Mother
God's Joy Fund.
Now, it's hard to verify exact numbers here, but members within the group in various places I've seen are quoted as saying that bank accounts worth around $600,000 existed.
at their peak and the group were living at that time on a quite spacious property and part of the documentary does seem to be that the money guy made off with those bank accounts.
And this is where I think things get pretty grim because the rapid monetization of the group through the selling of magical products really incentivized the followers to be hesitant about providing Carlson with medical care.
Even at the end of her life, there are indications that she was asking for it, maybe half-heartedly, maybe with a certain amount of internal conflict, but they really needed to believe that their products were working.
And I think what emerges is a kind of unintentional, you know, Munchausen by proxy situation in which they're actively making Carlson sick while insisting that they're saving her life.
It's a unique dynamic, isn't it, right?
Because at some point it turns from them being hostage to her, to her being their talismanic captive.
Yeah, we're going to get to that in a bit.
Now, the money that's being raised appears to, at that time, to have mostly been used to keep Amy Carlson entertained.
And that's through constant purchasing on Amazon.
Dresses, jewelry, knickknacks, gemstones.
In this interview that we'll post to the show notes, Hannah Olson, the director, remarks that the whole thing felt extremely American to me.
She also loved to play games on her phone as a form of entertainment.
And there's live stream footage of the Inner Circle members who are trying to get money into that fund to help her keep Buying apps for her phone, and they suggest that she's actually defeating the Cabal in a sort of multi-dimensional way via those game apps.
Talk about 5D chess, right?
Well, yeah, and this idea of Candy Crush against the Cabal is so... I mean, it's absurd, but it's very moving because I think we have a general cultural impression of that activity as being some sort of ultimately banal time-wasting thing.
But what if God is actually using their phone to do this thing that other people are simply
wasting their time on, but her phone is actually linked up with the tendrils of the universe
so that each time something goes splat, a bad guy dies or something like that.
I think what's happening is, and I think that this is a theme throughout the attractiveness of this particular story, is that very mundane things take on this kind of transformational glow.
They were also using the funds to provide her or to satisfy Amy Carlson's huge appetite for drugs.
But especially alcohol.
And her core group were deprived of sleep, they worked day and night, and they waited on her hand and foot.
The group, it seems, believed that their mother god was taking on the sins of the world, but also that she was being killed by the world's failure to surrender to her and recognize her divine identity.
They thought that conventional doctors would not know what to make of her.
A couple of them say that they believe she had three hearts.
I just want to underline that there's a sort of perpetual feeling of absolute chaos.
So, she is substance abusing throughout the length of this documentary, and as you say, the core group is deprived of sleep.
It doesn't look like they're eating very well.
It's clear that some of them have developed eating disorders, and that's a kind of mimicry of her, but I wanted to sort of flag that In these high-demand situations, there's sometimes a bi-directional sort of thing that begins to develop where the person who seems to have a lot of control is actually completely out of control, and that those who are taking care of the leader
are actually making it possible for the entire thing to carry on.
And I've seen example like this after example like this in the investigative journalism that I've done.
When you look closely at older school gurus like Yogi Bhajan or Swami Vishnu Devananda or Chogyam Trungpa, they're absolute wrecks of human beings.
And what has to happen around them is a kind of pious, officious activity in order to maintain the...
really, the illusion, the hologram that something functional is happening at the center.
And it's just not there.
During 2020, Love Has Won became proponents of certain aspects of the QAnon conspiracy theory.
They also falsely claimed on livestreams that their colloidal silver could cure COVID-19.
Oh no.
And that drew the attention of the FDA who demanded they stop making those claims on their websites.
True to the times, they also came to define Mother God's mission in terms of defeating the Cabal, as we've mentioned.
And in turn, many of their beliefs seem to have leaked, maybe just by intuitive osmosis, into how prominent so-called channelers, lightworkers, and conspiritualists talked about the Great Awakening, Ascension, the Galactic Federation of Light, and 5D reality.
Carlson claimed that a special collection of mostly dead celebrities served as spirit guides to her, chief amongst them being Robin Williams, but also that Donald Trump had been her father in a past life.
The group oriented themselves increasingly around right-wing politics, and there is some livestream footage of them ranting against Jews and blacks.
Yeah, really despicable stuff.
And there's also a thing that they do in the live streams that I find kind of fascinating, which is when they're presenting themselves and trying to be entertaining, they tend to go into African American vernacular.
Oh, really?
Quite a bit.
Which, yeah, yeah, there's a, there's a, there's a performative kind of adopting of those figures of speech, which I was just sort of is, yeah, cringey.
The many hours of tape from those streams show frequent intoxicated seeming angry outbursts and abusive behavior from both Mother God and her especially scary final Father God who's a big presence in the documentary that we're about to talk about.
That abuse is directed toward members but also towards one of their very young and very upset children who's being locked in a closet.
And Carlson also is shown being very physically abusive towards an apparently misbehaving pet cat.
The group knew that their leader was dying, and they say they believed that when it happened a portal would open, or that the Galactics, as they called them, would show up on starships so that she, and perhaps they, could ascend out of 3D reality.
After her death, several members of the inner circle also thought that she might resurrect.
None of those things happened.
But let's be honest, Julian.
I mean, if these things did happen, you just wouldn't have the spiritual insight to see or recognize them, right?
It's always the get-out-of-jail-free escape clause, right?
And we've seen it again and again with all kinds of different prophecies that when they don't happen well, perhaps they happened either in heaven as the Seventh-day Adventists have it, or in another dimension as the New Ages would have it, and it's only the awakened ones who can accurately perceive it.
Now, since then, the group has splintered into something called Joy Reigns, led by the final scary father god, Jason Castillo, and 5D Full Disclosure, which is led by other former members and seems to have a little bit more of a following, although it's hard to nail down the numbers.
one of those people does have a QAnon themed Telegram channel that has over 40,000 members.
So we're talking about all of this today, Matthew, because of the recent release of an HBO
three-part documentary series directed, as you've said, by Hannah Olsen.
It's titled Love Has Won The Cult of Mother God.
What were your first impressions?
I have to say that overall, it seems well-executed and fairly empathetic.
I think we're going to talk about the methodological and ethical dilemmas in a bit, including what it means to freeze-frame extremely vulnerable people in a moment in time on film and some of the excruciating choices that have to be made.
But I think if we give the benefit of the doubt and imagine that Olsen's depiction is accurate, For me, this is a story about how the very blurry phenomenon of spiritual cult can really quickly emerge as a spectacle that obscures extremely common mental health and substance abuse issues that are unfolding amidst just this immiserated gaggle of wanderers, dropouts, military vets.
and ex-cons longing for dignity. Plus, at least one real hustler named Miguel, who ran
the money side of things and allegedly made off with most of what was left in the accounts
after she died. Yeah, I do find the depiction quite plausible, given that perhaps even more
than NXIVM with the ever-present kind of videography of Marc Vicente trained on them at all times.
Perhaps even more than that, this group created a massive archive of livestream video footage.
It's mostly internet garbage, but it's there to be trolled through, and lots of people have done that.
In the documentary, the ostensibly still true believer members also do give an account that is consistent with the video materials that we're shown, even if it's rationalized by their distorted beliefs.
I think that the source material really backs the narrative and interview structure in this case.
And I think that Olsen was appropriately careful with Carlson, who, to be honest, came off during the viral firestorm around her that preceded and then followed her death.
She really came off like, you know, a kind of white trash, drunken, child-abandoning anti-hero of some David Lynch film.
But she was an incredibly tragic figure.
Early divorce in the family, a stepmother who allegedly locked her in a closet, you know, a scene that Carlson allegedly recreates years later with a child of a follower.
Carlson suffers from body dysmorphia and disordered eating in her teens and then drifts through a series of abusive relationships.
And these are all keynotes of her later spiritual LARPing and the way her followers understand her.
The alcohol becomes medicine.
For instance, you have to weigh less than 103 pounds to be picked up by the aliens in their ship, you know, who have luggage limits apparently.
And if you're in a divine relationship with an ex-con meth addict, it's not because you're paralyzed in disorganized attachment patterning, it's that you're transmuting the dark energy of the broken masculine.
So there's this direct line from the very commonplace suffering that's documented by any feminist social worker to its inversion in the grandiose performance of a spiritual martyr.
I think it's clear that Carlson is someone who could have really benefited early on from family therapy or some kind of skilled intervention.
And the proof of that is that at the end of her life, as she's turning blue and asking to go to the hospital, and this is where her followers refuse, Because they've bought into her own story.
And then there's this reporter that Olsen quotes in the documentary who remarks, and I thought this was brilliant, that Carlson created a lie that she couldn't get out of.
But through all of that, Carlson really did try to reach out and connect with her sister and her mother.
And her daughter Maddie, who she hadn't seen since the girl was five years old.
So it is a super common set of circumstances that are tragic and that are playing out all over America a thousand times a day.
And I think we have to ask, like, why do we know Amy Carlson's name?
Yeah, the family suffering, the addiction, the abuse, the social context that you're talking about, these are all familiar.
But I think we know her name because she presented herself to many thousands of people online as a god on earth.
She tapped into a new age zeitgeist that then translated into selling fake COVID cures and pseudoscience medicines.
And the story around her cult and especially her death at 45 is quite unusual and bizarre and of course tragic in a way that's not really commonplace if we look at the details, right?
Yeah, I...
I think you're right about all of that, but what I hear in that description is basically the internet.
The internet is what makes this story visible and possible.
Well, I'll say a little bit more about that in a bit.
In an interview with W Magazine, Hannah Olsen says this about her initial motivation.
She says, I was interested in how the internet was contributing to the breakdown of consensus reality politically and in how it was happening in smaller microcosms.
The questions I was asking about the relationship between class and the internet and reality led me to this organization.
And I think, personally, that instinct really helped Olsen nail something down.
Because it's pretty clear that what captured Amy Carlson wasn't therapy or community or meaningful work in the world.
But it was the internet.
And first, it was through these really wonky 2000-and-aughts New Age sites through which she learned and developed this language and a kind of theater of self-justification that hinged on her willingness to stand in front of a webcam in a sexy summer dress and say, yep, I am Mother God.
That was her pitch.
Like, that was the extent of her content.
It's really, really low effort.
Like, her whole hook is her willingness to stand in front of a webcam and say, yep, I am the mother of the universe.
So there isn't really anything there except that repeated grinning assertion.
And, you know, if somebody rebels against it or doubts it, she's like, well, you can accept it or not.
But if you don't, you're off the island, you know, and she'll take another slug of gin or vodka.
It really says a lot about this almost demographically fine-tuned lure of having that kind of Internet exposure that could draw people in.
Because there's no Chogyam Trungpa brilliant philosophizing.
There's no Adi Da level hypnotic charisma.
There's no Amici fanfare and theatrics and like very well organized production.
There's no actual practices or mystical states except they seem to be on drugs quite a bit in the beginning.
And then there's just starving and being in the house as servants to this dysfunctional alcoholic.
And when I say that, you know, Carlson is internet captured, I think it's almost kidnapped.
Like, there's this story that Olsen lets her family tell about the last time they saw Carlson, and it was at this family dinner at a restaurant, and Carlson gets up to use the bathroom and never comes back.
Middle of the meal, never comes back.
So, I'm watching this and basically blaming YouTube for about 90% of the rise and fall of Amy Carlson because... Wow.
This is not a spiritual leader with any vision, you know, not somebody who could even begin to write a book or pretend to create a system.
Like, can you imagine her coming up with something like Teal Swan's Completion Method with stages and numbers and...
No.
Various things to do.
She didn't even name her group.
What was it named before?
And then the tech guy, the tech father god came in and said, oh, that's not a good URL.
Let's go with Love Has Won.
And then, bing, it was changed.
Like, there was no vision.
Yeah.
She couldn't organize things like Teal Swan.
You know, rituals, housing in Costa Rica, artwork for sale, books.
Carlson got hooked by content.
And then content creators and her father god partners are like this, you know revolving door of opportunism spinning with this incentive to monetize.
You know starting with the late hippie content of Amarith and then one of the next guys is that money guy who steals everything and then one of the next guys is the tech guy as she gets closer to full online immersion and the pathway is Addictive.
It has to intensify.
She has to livestream more and then, you know, pull out all the stops and hook up publicly with the worst boyfriend ever who keeps relapsing into substance abuse himself.
It's really the breaking bad of cult stories.
And I think that that's a piece of its cultural appeal, that the Mother God Home Base looks so much like the rural meth lab, but with tchotchkes and twinkling lights and, you know, this live stream that mimics the home shopping network.
And it all creates this uncomfortably unboundaried intimacy.
And that becomes a central part of their brand and spectacle.
Like, they'll show everything on their live streams.
Like, is Carlson screaming in the background about needing more booze?
Don't stop the live stream!
Like, show that as well.
Let her be on the tape.
Show everything as evidence that Mother God is in the crisis of a high vibration and healing the world.
There's that one moment where she's screaming about how she wanted chicken parmesan and they brought her meatballs instead.
Amazing.
Now, none of them are going to have heaters in the middle of winter because they failed her.
And they put that on the live stream, didn't they?
I see to some extent in this the outcome of a lot of the cursed discourse within New Age circles that I witnessed over the last 30 years had this idea that any kind of judgment is in the way of your enlightenment.
Right.
And I've seen versions of this again and again.
And it's kind of like the dumbed down translation of that old crazy wisdom shtick that, for example, got Osho exempt from internal critique while he was huffing laughing gas and drinking brandy all day and, you know, really interfering with and violating the relationships of all of his followers.
And then and then he abdicated leadership to someone who poisoned the town's water supply.
But hey, you know, it's all part of the divine plan if you if you squint your eyes and don't judge.
The online world becomes so inseparable from Carlson's material substance abuse that even at the end, as she's in Kauai, turning blue with silver poisoning, she can hardly keep her eyes opening.
She's enraging the locals by claiming she's an indigenous goddess.
And all she's looking at is her livestream follower count, watching the hearts float up the screen, and then complaining about how low it is.
Yeah.
So, Olsen, like, does this great job of linking the fate of her online life with her, like, literal vital signs.
You know, it reminded me of Elf.
Julian, have you watched Elf with your daughter yet?
I have not watched Elf with Isabel yet.
You're talking about the movie from a few years ago.
Many years ago, with Will Ferrell.
Yeah.
You know, it's one of my wife's favorite movies.
I think she has shown parts of it to Isabel.
This is the year.
Anyway, Santa's sleigh is only able to fly if people believe in Santa Claus.
And so we can see the state of world belief on the Christmas spirit clausometer on the dashboard.
And when people get cynical and consumeristic, the needle goes down and the sleigh can't lift off.
And Carlson's fate as a human being and self-proclaimed God seems to be just like that.
That her followers are as earnest as Will Ferrell as Buddy the Green Cap, but they're online 24-7 begging people not only for money or for them to buy their supplements, but for people to believe in and endorse Carlson as God because when they do, her ultimate form will be manifest.
So when she ultimately dies, it's not from liver disease and anorexia, but because the world could not accept her ultimate reality.
So yeah, YouTube gave her this identity and then When it didn't reflect her grandiosity back to her, like, the god-o-meter went down on her spaceship, and it just couldn't take off.
Amy and some of the inner circle were part of a Dr. Phil episode in which they appeared via video calls, while Amy's mother and one of her sisters was live in studio, and another sister joined remotely.
Parts of this are shown in the documentary, but the whole thing is really worth watching.
It's such a shit show.
I have a lot of thoughts.
Included in that Dr. Phil episode was frequent cult expert Rick Ross of Cult Education Institute, who I know is one of your favorites, Matthew.
During that appearance, Ross confronts Coulson on her behavior and the structure of her group.
And I mention this because he's been critical of the documentary.
In the Denver Post, he's quoted as saying that he thought it was a mistake for them not to have any talking head cult experts like himself.
Instead, the story is mostly told by Love Has Won members who appear to be still be true believers.
And I noticed this right from the start of the documentary, Matthews, that the style, you don't really hear the questions that they're being asked.
You're just hearing it straight from them as they want to tell it and they're not challenged in any of their beliefs or their depictions of the story.
And this is praised by some media outlets like Time Magazine as their headline was the rare cult documentary that leads with empathy.
But one family member, this is also in the Denver Post, of someone who had been in the cult, Has said that they thought the documentary was too empathetic to Carlson, and they pointed out that it's somewhat enabling because there's apparently an Instagram account with 57,000 followers that's selling merchandise related to the show.
What do you think about all of this?
First of all, I think Rick Ross should go on sabbatical and have a good long think about what he's actually doing, and whether he needs to be interviewed by everyone about every single group, and whether over a 30-year career of cult-busting, we're any more the wiser.
I think it feels a little bit gross for him to complain about the absence of expert commentary when he's willing to collaborate with Dr. Phil, who's a total fucking ghoul, who lost his show finally after years of allegedly abusing his staff, and who reportedly baited guests with mental health issues.
So Phil invites this vulnerable Carlson family into the studio to stage a Jerry Springer-type ambush of Carlson and her followers.
And what did Rick Ross have to say about this particular group?
Well, the same boilerplate he says about every group he gets paid to talk about.
So, that whole scene, for me, is just the peak commodification of the cult commentariat.
Like, it's just really exploitative.
Phil is goading Carlson, shaming her, fully aware that she's an alcoholic and likely mentally ill.
and possibly being physically dominated by Jason, father God.
And he sits there and baits her for ratings.
And Ross is there to add, you know, this ass-covering veneer of expertise.
Isn't it fascinating that this kind of exploitive...
It's not reality TV, it's the daytime talk thing that we actually, we talk about it having its genesis
as a major contributing factor to the satanic panic back in the late 80s and early 90s.
It's a precursor of And Carlson's family didn't fucking deserve that.
They had stored up a lot of hope in the show.
the ratings and the clicks and the sensationalism and the interpersonal drama that gets very deliberately
positioned in front of the camera, and then lets light the fuse and see what happens, right?
And Carlson's family didn't fucking deserve that.
They had stored up a lot of hope in the show.
Carlson's mother talks about driving for 24 hours to get to the studio.
They said, they both said, -"Oh, this was our last hope." -♪ Mm-hmm.
They thought that Phil would be able to offer her some therapy or a way out, and instead he subjects them to this trauma porn smash hit.
And so the crushing disappointment of the family is clear.
And then, I think, I'm not gonna say this is causal, but right after this shamefest on national TV, there's a huge backlash against the group.
Carlson strikes out against her family en route to Hawaii, but because this TV show is now out there, Kauai Facebook groups start posting about the show and claiming that Love Has Won is a danger to the island.
Now, I can understand, you know, Local residents in Kauai not wanting to have this group around.
But danger to the island is simply something that is, well, it's obviously exacerbated by the show.
And so the cycle of escalation continues.
Carlson, obviously humiliated, responds, as you would expect her to, to the growing ire of the Hawaiians with his ham-fisted assurance that, well, she's actually Pele, who's the local goddess of the volcano.
And what she's saying is, oh, I'm here to save you as well.
I'm not a danger to you.
I mean, Carlson's life and group were on fire already, and, you know, Dr. Phil just sprayed on the kerosene.
Yeah.
How did you feel about Olsen opting out of the Talking Head convention?
Like, did you feel the viewers could have used more guidance?
I had mixed feelings, you know, because in watching the documentary, I did right away start to feel this is, there's a drama to this.
There's a way that it does feel a little bit like it could be a fictional kind of A show that we're watching.
There's ominous music.
It's it's the production is very glossy and very, you know, just well crafted.
And then the telling of the story does happen so much through the eyes of these former members who seem to still be invested in that belief system.
And the lack of interview Back and forth kind of discussion of the beliefs, the lack of having those moments where you say, but hold on a second, what about this?
Right?
I get what you're saying about the rotating, you know, usual suspects, cult experts who show up and perhaps say predictable things.
But I do understand the efficacy there of having some kind of expert who's able to give their opinion, their analysis, who's able to say, now look, this is what we understand about cults.
Because without that, I think you're kind of left with something that is very impactful emotionally but maybe there's some intellectual or cultural piece that or psychological piece that I'm just I'm just not sure most people
Well, that's the danger, right?
that I would like them to, perhaps, that's my bias.
And it just, it maybe just sits there as grotesque entertainment.
Well, that's the danger, right? And we know, we can call this the John Casby effect. We know from our
coverage of the deep end that when documentary narrative filmmaking relies upon a kind of...
untransparent cutting together of interview material from the subjects themselves,
that often you don't know what's going on behind the scenes.
You don't know what the actual order of events is.
You don't have access to perhaps framing bits of interviews that present faith claims in ironic terms I can imagine a lot of the things that people are saying about Amy Carlson in the aftermath of her death that are played as this is what we believed about her might have actually been uttered in the past tense.
What we would have said at the time was that she was transcending the material plane.
And so there are ways in which it's hard to trust documentary filmmaking in this particular era, especially when the influence of reality TV is so strong.
And I'm not saying anything about Hannah Olsen's integrity here.
I'm pointing out that it's hard to know.
It's hard to trust The process, because it's been fucked up so badly by so many people.
I second that in terms of Hannah Olsen.
It did make me wonder, like, okay, in terms of the current cult documentary, big streaming platform marketplace, are there certain pressures to have it be very suspenseful and, you know, to have a narrative that, like, makes you want to watch the next episode, you know?
In a way, I felt that we had to cover this.
I think it's the fourth cult documentary that we've done this year that we've covered.
I really felt drawn to it after I had watched a little bit because it is such a conspirituality story.
It's got that trifecta of cult spiritual dynamics.
COVID-era Q adjacent conspiracism and then pseudoscience alt health commerce.
So it's really it's it's so in our wheelhouse.
And it all combines into what is, of course, as you've pointed out, Matthew, a quite small tragedy.
But an intense one, and I would say it's indicative of some of the larger social ills that we've tracked on the podcast.
And, you know, I had a sense that you were initially reticent to get into it, right?
I was.
I mean, when you flagged it for me, I felt deflated.
I felt skeptical.
I've talked about some of those reasons already.
I also knew a little bit of the story.
I was worried about a number of things because, firstly, it's just gross.
It's a gross story.
And how Is a person not going to sensationalize it?
How are you going to avoid leaning into the super trashy reality TV vibe?
And then secondly, why should we really care about this tiny rural misfit group except for the voyeurism value or how pleasurably disgusted they might make us feel?
Like we're talking about a circle of 20 people who made scammy money through online prayers and donations and herbs and homemade soaps.
And how much money?
I mean, let's believe them when they say they had $600,000 in the bank at the top of their game.
And for the sake of argument, let's imagine that Miguel, the money guy, was grifting another $600,000 off the top for that year.
You know, at their peak, they might be bringing in 1.2 million.
That's, you know, the peak earning year of a seven-year campaign.
And the bulk of it is going to Carlson and Miguel, who are maintaining a household of free labor from followers who get room and board and gas money.
But who are gonna leave with nothing?
Like, it's a really bad situation, but it also sounds like, you know, pretty typical small business evil boss stuff, right?
Like, it's not out of bounds or unbelievable.
And then the other question I have is like, how impactful were they?
How impactful was their online propaganda?
Like, did they really distinguish themselves from the countless folks who became vectors for pandemic misinformation?
Did they add to, or did they just co-opt QAnon?
And here's what I thought, too.
Like, isn't it possible that they turned as many Facebook boomers off of QAnon as they red-pilled them?
Like, Christiane Northrup endorsed a lot of Galactic Federation ladies, but Amy Carlson was not one of them.
And don't you wonder why?
I mean, I think that class and respectability might have had something to do with it, because there is no way that Christiane Northrup would have Amy Carlson over for Lunch, or play her harp for her.
It just wouldn't happen.
And that's the class thing that Olsen is talking about.
Yeah, and some of that is the transparency, right?
Like with Lori Ladd, all that you're getting is the selfie sermon.
You know, little missives about what the Galactic Federation has told me, but you're not seeing her entire life and her messy bedroom and her outbursts in the way that you're seeing with Love Has Won.
And so I think clearly, I mean, many of the people wrapped up in Carlson's chaos wound up far worse off than before.
You know, they lost time, money, emotional labor.
Some really ruined their in-real-life relationships to carry on with Carlson.
But it's not like cult survivor memoirs, I've been thinking about this lately, it's not like these memoirs can offer differential diagnoses.
Like, we can say that the experience was really bad, but we can't be sure that other options for isolated and underserved people would have led to entirely different places.
And I think the premise that hooks the culture into Amy Carlson is this feeling of, oh, you really don't want to get sucked into the New Age meth house.
That would be terrible.
When in fact, it's hard for a lot of people to not get sucked into just regular old meth houses all over the country that HBO just isn't interested in filming.
So here's my main point.
I mean, maybe unpopular, you might disagree.
When stories like this become a part of a wave of trauma porn and true crime discourse, what do we gain?
This is the question I think we have to ask.
What do we gain in terms of empathy and education?
One of the ways I think about this is that the true crime genre of podcasts is like an extension of television police dramas that go back to the 80s and 90s.
And one of the cultural impacts of that genre is to fetishize and to applaud the policing and the carceral state.
Even as it's growing in real life, even as they're building prisons, they're making films about cool cops putting people into prisons.
And so what it does is it creates drama out of a social tragedy and then it punishes it in a satisfying way.
It's like Roman Colosseum stuff.
Now, cult documentarians don't punish cult members except through maybe exposure if they're callous, but the broader cultural catharsis going on around these things I think is important to note.
I think this material is doing a form of cultural labor that depends on stigmatizing people in extreme circumstances.
And that is meant to become symbolic of some sort of broader cultural rot.
And I think it can be distractive.
But as I said, Julian, these are all the thoughts that I had prejudicially before I watched this series.
I think Olsen actually kept things in perspective.
I think she turned the distraction and exploitation knobs down to low.
And a sign of how she did this comes out in that interview with W Magazine where she says something that I actually haven't heard any cult doc maker or even talking head theorist say.
she's describing cult recruitment as an aspect of class war.
So she says, El Moira's father, this is one of the guys who never became a father god,
but he's there faithful from beginning to end.
El Moira's father was prescribed OxyContin and ended up dying.
Andrew, who was one of the father gods, was himself trying to recover from an opioid addiction.
Especially in the case of opioids, it's very easy to connect the dots between Big Pharma and the government and the lack of resources for people suffering from addiction.
It's easier to believe that there is some conspiracy at play rather than the cold facts of capitalism.
And I think that really nails it for me.
Yeah, I really appreciated reading the interviews that she's done and we tried to get in touch with her.
She's very hard to reach.
It would have been great to talk to her because, yes, she brings a political, a socio-political lens to how she's thinking about this.
We don't really see much of it in the documentary, but it's clear that perhaps the lack of exploitation and the level of empathy that she has I'm with you on all that.
informed by this particular lens.
And that is really important, and it's often really lacking.
So yeah, I'm with you on all that.
For me, it's a story worth telling.
And I think there are layers to it that I'm not quick to dismiss in terms of just what
is fascinating and alarming about cult dynamics and the psychology of various kinds of beliefs
about the nature of reality.
But, you know, it's such a tragic story that I don't really want my engagement, my engagement anyway, with it to be ending on a depressive note.
I want to offer just a small bit of qualified, I don't know, I don't know if praise is the right word or just empathy for this group of people and how they faced something that, you know, many of us face.
Because once someone you love who is extremely difficult as a person and sick and has clearly been abusing themselves and others and has created both financial and social dependencies that support whatever out of control biochemical needs they have, there's a fork in the road.
You can cut bait and leave.
Or you can lean into the disaster with whatever flawed generosity you have.
Now, I'm not sure that the Love is One people really had a clear choice, but they did exhibit some kind of generosity in their care for Carlson at the end of her life.
The people who gathered around her They had a delusional story they were telling about, you know, who she was in the world, what they wanted to learn from her.
But even for the most devoted of them, the reality of her catastrophic decline and her morbid death, they couldn't ignore it.
So how did they deal with it?
I want to suggest that their capacity for spiritual bypassing, their willingness to wish on miracles, their faith in magical formulas, their rebellion against despair, it isn't really all that strange.
And maybe it's only different by a matter of degree from the stress responses of like lots of so-called normal people who are also in periods of existential crisis.
You know, like it's been three years since my mother died in home hospice.
Now, she did not say she was Mother God.
She didn't think that a spaceship was going to save her.
She didn't drink.
She had a devastating form of leukemia.
There were comorbidities.
But she also had this indomitable spirit.
And like every other, you know, normie, non-cult family, my family struggled mightily with all of the same questions that Carlson's father was had.
You know, how long should she continue to fight?
Could anyone help?
What will happen?
Are things resolved?
Has she completed her work in life?
So this is a normal everyday story in many ways when I think of Carlson.
And I think that our family came to a much more socially acceptable resolution.
And of course, we weren't also streaming it live on YouTube.
Yes, and the belief system that you had within your community wasn't actually the thing that was killing her, killing your mother.
No, it wasn't.
But I think, don't you think that her followers, at a certain point, the belief system becomes invisible to them?
And they're just acting on the premise of this person is really sick and I don't know what to do.
Well, it becomes invisible to them because underneath this person is really sick and I don't know what to do is also all of their metaphysical sort of priors about Why she's sick, about why we shouldn't get medical treatment, about who she really is, about what her work in the world is, about what my mission in life is as a result of being connected to her.
So it becomes invisible, but it's still very powerful.
I mean, I guess in the end, it's hard for me to really fault people who face the death of someone they love, like no matter how difficult or even abusive they are.
And people who feel things so deeply, even if that feeling is exacerbated by, you know, delusion.
Because, you know, these are folks who, I mean, they were very clear that they felt it would be inhuman, dissociative, cold, and mechanical to simply surrender her to the institutionalization of death.
To hand over Carlson's body to the authorities because of hygiene, right?
Like, this question of, you can't cross state lines with a dead body.
It was incomprehensible to them.
It would have meant that they gave up the vulnerability over, you know, where are we going to bring this person to rest?
And, you know, whether or not they can let them go at all.
So, I feel like this group of people is a story because they believed a bunch of strange things, and they said a bunch of strange and hurtful things, and they sold silver poison to people over Facebook.
But at the core of this story is something very normal.
It's as normal as the abuse, the bodily dysmorphia, the eating disorders, and the misogyny that scarred and ruined Carlson's life.
And that's that even when a person has become a disaster as a human being, There are going to be people around her or him that love them, who obsessively care for them, even if they're clueless as to how to go about it, and for whom they're slipping away into like nothingness is just as incomprehensible for them as it is for anyone else.
So, I don't know.
I think it's good to remember that regardless of how fringe and cringe and uncomfortable People like this might make us all feel, in some ways, they are fringe and cringe and uncomfortable because they are not hiding the chaos of human confusion and grief in the same way that many of us have learned to hide.
Everything is on a spectrum, right?
And so what makes a situation dysfunctional or delusional is to what extent the knobs have been turned in the direction, you know, all of us have dysfunction, all of us have false beliefs, all of us have things that we're committed to that are, you know, not consistent with perhaps our values or with the facts.
