Episode 160: The Moonies Conquer DC feat Elgen Strait
A Korean cult leader with various sex crime allegations kicks off a relationship with Richard Nixon. Before you know it, a chain of Republican Presidents embrace the Unification Church (AKA "the moonies") and The Washington Times is born. Most recently, a splinter group of the cult — which has been manufacturing AR-15s — ends up participating in the January 6th storming of the capitol. Plus, we speak to Elgen Strait of the Falling Out Podcast about his life growing up in the Unification Church and ultimately deciding to leave it — and how the anti-communist, alt-Christianity promoted by "the moonies" is a blueprint for today's far-right media landscape.
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Welcome, listener, to Chapter 160 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the Moonies Take DC episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rogatansky, Julian Field, and Travis View.
The unification of all Christianity under a new messiah.
The restoration of the Garden of Eden.
The destruction of communism, and the manufacture of AR-15s.
This week's topic is great bedfellows with both the MAGA movement and belief systems like QAnon.
The Unification Church, also known as the Moonies, might be one of our most requested topics, which is unsurprising considering one of their wings has taken to performing mass commitment ceremonies while carrying semi-automatic rifles.
Not just a fringe organization, we'll trace how the Unification Church has made inroads within the GOP and just how far back they've been cooperating.
Which means we're going to have to talk about the cult's involvement somehow in the Iran-Contra scandal under the Reagan administration.
Our guest this week is Elgin Strait, host of the Falling Out podcast.
He was a member of the cult for years before departing from the organization and speaking out against it.
But before all that, QAnon News!
For my first story, massive trove of data hacked from right-wing web host Epic.
The hacktivist collective Anonymous reportedly leaked 180 gigabytes of data stolen from the online service provider Epic.
This includes reams of information about its clients and their domains.
News of the hack was first reported by Steven Monticelli, an independent journalist from Texas.
So this is a big deal because Epic has a reputation for providing web services to right-wing clients who have been turned down elsewhere.
Their clients have included the Texas GOP, Parler, and Gab.
Back in 2019, when 8chan was kicked offline because they were dumped by Cloudflare, Epic even briefly offered hosting to the site.
But then they reversed course because apparently hosting 8chan was too much even for them.
This hack will probably have a really huge repercussions for Epic's clients and Epic's owner, whose name is Rob Monster.
Literally, Rob Monster.
Great name for his job.
And I'm told that, I mean, the data is so big that researchers say that they're going to need a lot of time, like months, maybe even years, to like really comb through it to see what exactly they can learn.
So, I mean, the The fallout is going to come in the following months, probably.
For my second story, man behind QDrop aggregator site QAlerts revealed to be an app developer with ties to the Oath Keepers.
Now, perhaps you'll remember qmap.pub.
This was the largest QDrop aggregator site.
I went to qmap.pub for the first time, and it blew my mind.
I'm like, what did I just find?
And the team at Logically discovered that it was actually run by a Citibank executive named Jason Galinas from New Jersey.
But qmap.pub was just one of several Qdrop aggregators that helped deliver Qdrops directly to the people without actually having to go to 4chan or 8chan.
Another big site is called QAlerts.
Now, the identity of the man behind QAlerts was revealed to be a Florida-based app developer with ties to the Oath Keepers, which is huge because now we're seeing a, you know, a convergence between right-wing, you know, sort of militia groups and, you know, the online QAnon community, which has always been a big concern.
This story was reported by Claire Goforth for The Daily Dot, and earlier this week I spoke to her about what she found.
What did I just find?
Now you can catch me on that YouTube In the section where the sun don't set
I wrote anonymous like you Trade that blue for the red COVID
Q is the name We are the news
And the news ain't no game Did you pick up what I just laid?
You can catch me on that To talk more about Q-alerts,
I'm joined now by reporter Claire Goforth.
Her recent report in the Daily Dot is headlined, How an Oathkeeper Brought QAnon to the Masses.
Claire, thank you so much for joining us today.
Thank you so much for having me.
It's an honor.
Big fan.
Thank you.
Today we're talking about the QAlerts app and the person behind it.
There are a handful of QDrop aggregator sites that QAnon followers use to follow the QDrops without having to actually go to the sites themselves.
How popular was QAlerts in the QAnon community?
QAlerts was actually one of the biggest.
It's a crowded field, but there are only a few at the very top.
Q-Alerts certainly was at the top.
They were in the top not only for downloads, but also for web traffic.
I mean, right before the election, they were pulling in about 4.5 million hits monthly, according to our analysis, which had them even a bigger web audience than Acon, which is where the Q-Drops themselves are contained, as you well know.
Which that tells us that because of an app like QAlerts, it's enabling a lot more people to access this information, which I would argue is, you know, conspiracy Latin nonsense, and keep that conspiracy spreading and growing and kind of just keep them hooked to it.
Because every time they get that ping on their phone, ooh, exciting, Q said something again.
Like you mentioned, the man behind QAlerts appears to be a man named Kenneth Rucker.
So how exactly did you go about discovering this?
So I had written a story about the QAlerts app, the telegram account that they have now.
In August, I wrote a story about they had randomly predicted a potential false flag operation at this small-time gun rights rally in Florida's capital.
And I just thought that's really bizarre.
I couldn't find, it took me forever to find record of what this gun rights rally was.
And it turned out that it was just this tiny little organization and it was going to be, you know, at best a dozen or so people, probably like 90% dudes standing there in the heat, melting away, listening to someone rattle on about the doctrine of original intent.
But this was a little bit of a shift from QAlerts because originally they just were a megaphone for Q. But in the absence of Q, what has happened is that QAlerts has started to create up their own conspiracies to sort of keep it alive.
And so I did this story about this just random gun rights rally that they plucked out of the ether to suggest that potentially it was going to be a false flag, which based on the way that they referred to it, made it seem as though they were suggesting there was going to be some kind of a shooting there by people who wanted to make gun rights advocates look bad.
And after the story published, I did a Twitter thread on it.
And I hadn't noted this in the story, but in the Twitter thread I noted that they had found this gun rights rally on the tiniest little Facebook group that only had a couple hundred people and hypothesized that it's possible that whoever runs QAlerts, maybe they were a member of that group.
And so a researcher contacted me after that and said they had actually identified Kenneth Rucker of St.
Augustine, Florida as being the developer of the QAlerts app.
And then it was on, right?
Now we've got our tip.
And so through public records, through web archive records, through your basic Googling, um, and through a lot of online searching, I connected with a researcher by the name of Libby Shaw, who works with Aubrey Cottle.
And Libby had tweeted the name, she had tweeted that Kenneth Rucker was behind QAlert some months prior.
So I reached out to her, and that's how I ended up in touch with both of them, and they provided me with more information that confirmed what we were already seeing.
We confirmed that, what they told us, independently.
I mean, we have so many records from Sunbiz to various web archive records that were, like, the app, the other app that Kenneth Rucker created is walkthelot.com.
It sells cars, right?
And so there were innumerable records, far more than we even used, where it specifically said that walkthelot.com was the developer of the QAlerts app.
And some of these records contained his home address, multiple of them.
And then it's the same home address that we found on Sunbiz Records, where he was listed as a director of the Florida Oath Keepers, and then later Article 6.
And, you know, I mean, there was just so, there were so many ...records that linked him to this app and nobody else.
And we also looked and analyzed the Gab account of the QAlerts, which is a verified Gab account with, I believe, something around 70,000 followers.
And multiple times we found two posts in particular that were specifically photos that were taken in St.
Augustine, Florida.
It's not a very big town.
And, you know, these photos were not presented as if, hey, I found this online.
These photos were presented like, this is me taking this picture.
And, you know, when you have just so many different connections of not only the individual, but their business and their address and, you know, the town that they live in, I mean, we felt very comfortable running with the story.
And of course we did reach out to Mr. Rucker multiple times.
gave him everything that we had found, you know, screenshots and very detailed lists of information that we plan to report on him.
And he eventually did.
Um, I spoke with him on the phone and he said something sort of noncommittal that says, we'll walk the lot, sells cars.
And that was about the end of the conversation.
Then he's like, you know, I've got to go.
Um, the, he did finally reach back out to us because I had contacted, him through walk the lots contact me form and That was when he gave us an email response that basically had the same gist like this is a car lot development app But it didn't really deny that he was the person behind cue alerts
Yeah, I mean, I really recommend everyone go check out that article because it does list the comprehensive individual pieces of data that all point to this individual.
And one of them I thought was really interesting was an image taken from Google Maps that appears to show a car with a Where We Go One, We Go All sticker that is at the address listed.
Yeah, that was one of those moments where you're just like, aha, right?
You know how it is when you're doing research into stuff like this.
A lot of it's a slog where you're just analyzing all these records and then once in a while you get this like, bang, there it is.
And that was definitely one of those moments.
I mean, so were the two times that we identified those posts from that Gab account being in St.
Augustine.
Those were also amazing.
Like, okay, yeah, this is We already felt confident.
We knew we had him, but you know, you want to be as careful as possible.
Um, and then, you know, another thing that we reported on that was, um, unsurprising, but also a moment where you were doing the, you know, you're doing the work and you think, well, okay, was when, uh, the, uh, Kewlert's Gab account posted about being in Washington DC on January 5th.
And of course they, like many other QAnon mouthpieces had been, Calling on their followers to attend what ultimately became the Capitol Riot.
But then we saw, you know, these photos that were from D.C.
the day before.
And there were no posts from January 6th.
I don't know, and none in the archives either.
I don't know, but it is possible at least, that those posts were deleted as many people who attended the protests that became the riot and failed insurrection attempt Did later scrub their social media, but then two days after the Capitol riot, there were also posts on that QAlertsGab account from an airplane, you know, talking about how great it was running into fellow patriots, as they say, at the Capitol.
So that was another one of those moments where you're like, well, not only do we have this individual who runs QAlerts, you know, we've identified them, but also if they're the person running the Gab account which they had posted from St.
Augustine on December 31st of last year, then they also were at least in attendance in DC that day.
Perhaps the most intriguing component of your story concerns the ties between Kenneth Rucker and the Oath Keepers.
So what exactly did you find there?
We found that Mr. Rucker was a director of the Florida branch of the Oath Keepers as far back as 2017, including during the time when he developed the QAlerts app.
And he subsequently became a director of Article 6, which Article 6 has said on their YouTube page, as we reported in the Daily Dot, that they are now the Florida Oath Keepers group, that they've just sort of changed their name, because as most of your listeners probably already know, The Oath Keeper's oath is directly taken from Article 6 of the Constitution.
So, look, we've got the Oath Keepers.
People have called them many things.
They've been called, I tend to look at them as an anti-government militia.
Some people prefer paramilitary group.
Some would say domestic terrorists.
I don't know if that's accurate, but that is what, you know, there are many different ways of referring to them.
Bottom line is, this is an extremist group that is heavily into weapons, heavily anti-federal government enforcement, and now they've adopted a conspiracy theory that's been likened to a collective delusion.
This is a very alarming combination.
I mean, you look at the Capitol rioters who've been charged thus far.
So many of them, Oath Keepers.
So many of them, QAnon adherents.
How many of them are both?
I mean, Stuart Rhodes himself, who is the founder of the Oath Keepers, has very blatantly espoused QAnon conspiracy theories in recent months.
And I was, I mean, I've reported on this for the Daily Dot in the past, that these, these far-right militias, self-described militias, LARPing militias, whatever you want to call them, they are increasingly adopting this conspiracy theory that has so little basis in reality that it's frightening.
Yeah, it is really disturbing.
I mean, this is something that we noticed early last year before the pandemic really hit is we went to a Florida QAnon rally.
And while we were there, we got handed recruitment pamphlets directing us to join local militia groups.
Yeah, the same thing actually happened to me.
oath keepers, three presenters, these militia groups, they recognize that the QAnon followers
are their fellow travelers and they're a good recruiting ground for new members into their
organizations.
Yeah, the same thing actually happened to me.
I went to the Red Pill Roadshow in Jacksonville, Florida in the summer of 2020 and I saw a
flyer that was recruiting for a far-right militia at the Red Pill Roadshow, which is
a very QAnon heavy event.
I mean, it's a QAnon event.
There's no other way to describe it.
Now on the show, we often talk about how Florida seems to be a hotbed of QAnon activity.
And it was just reported recently that the person behind the QAnon telegrams, Ghost Ezra, which was this big anti-Semitic QAnon account, There's no denying that.
also from Florida. So I guess it's like why why this state is like Florida and
Arizona. They seem to be where the QAnon followers, they are more most active at
the very least. There's no denying that I live in Florida and I've been a
reporter here for over a decade. So I have some personal personal experience
I mean, if you want to go way, way back, you could say that because Florida was one of the places where we saw some of the most despicable pushback in the civil rights movement.
I mean, St.
Augustine itself was the site of the famous image of that white man pouring acid into a pool that black children were trying to get into during the civil rights era.
And Jacksonville, Florida, where I live, there was an event during the lunch counter sit-ins that is called Axe Handle Saturday, in which a mob of white men attacked young teenage black boys with axe handles and beat them bloody in the street.
And the local newspaper, which was at that time owned by a private company, You know some sort of railroad company or something like that didn't even report on it.
The National News reported on the local paper didn't.
So what you have is this sort of like cauldron of resentment in Florida that goes back that far.
And now fast forward to present day.
We live in a state that is at the bottom of the barrel when it comes to spending on mental health.
We're near the top when it comes to incarceration.
We have A terrible problem with the lack of representation of our minority communities.
And we have a lot of geographic segregation and all of these weird little, not weird, but all of these factors sort of contribute to an environment in which people are disaffected and they're angry and they're looking for something.
Enter QAnon, enter the Proud Boys.
I mean, the head of the Proud Boys is a Floridian and living in Florida.
It's a wonderful place to live.
I love it here.
Obviously I've made it my home.
There's a lot of great people here.
It's a very complicated state, but it's just really sad to see how much of a foothold these hate groups and conspiracy theory groups have made in the Sunshine State.
You know, it's really disheartening.
And then you see, of course, it doesn't help matters that Donald Trump has now made Florida his home.
And we've got people like Roger Stone, who's from Florida.
And these people are not helping matters by feeding these conspiracy theorists and far right hate groups.
you know, the attaboys that they want. I mean, "stand back and stand by," isn't that exactly
what Trump said to the Proud Boys on the national stage during a debate? They were listening,
and they showed up on January 6th. Speaking with Claire Goforth, who is talking about some of the
fantastic reporting that she's been doing for the Daily Dot, is there anything you'd like to
plug before I let you go? Well, I would like to say that I am not done reporting on the unsavory
figures in the QAnon world.
I'm working on a pretty big story I'm really excited about.
I can't share too much about it now, but we'll be moving forward with that in the next couple of weeks at The Daily Dot.
Just keep watching our space.
Follow us on social media.
Subscribe to our newsletters.
I'm part of a great team, and we have been on QAnon since the very beginning.
I mean, we were the first to ever report on it, and we will continue to follow it to the end.
Thank you so much, Claire.
So Donald Trump had a very busy day on the 20th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks.
He opted out of joining the other current and former presidents for a commemoration at the World Trade Center and instead visited a fire station and police precinct in New York.
Like we discussed in the previous episode, he provided a taped statement to an event organized by the evangelical leader, Sean Voigt.
He did color commentary for a boxing match featuring former heavyweight champ Evander Holyfield.
And he spoke at an event called the Rally of Hope, which is organized by the Unification Church.
This is a new religious movement, some might say cult, commonly known as the Moonies, after its late founder, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon.
During that speech, Trump praised the current leader of the church, Hak Jahanmun, calling her a tremendous person.
I want to thank the Universal Peace Federation, and in particular Dr. Hak Jahanmun.
A tremendous person for her incredible work on behalf of peace all over the world.
Her story of escaping from North Korea at five years old at the outset of the Korean War is an amazing example of the power of faith in Almighty God.
I also want to thank her late husband, Reverend Moon, for founding The Washington Times, an organization for which I have tremendous respect and admiration.
They have done an incredible job.
This is an incredible clip.
I mean, he really is, like, floating through the galaxy with, like... It's just full of stars.
I mean, honestly, it looks like the Simpsons, like, Mr. Sparkle commercial.
Like, it's that fucking dissonant in terms of the images that you see.
They should have given him like the TikTok filter, you know, where like the eyes get bigger and like the cheeks get red.
You know, the funny thing is that is that QAnon followers waited for years for Trump to praise QAnon.
It did come eventually, but apparently all they needed to do in the first place was just cut him a check and he would he would praise anyone.
Yeah, he's a sparkle pony for anybody.
That move from Trump surprised many people, but it did not surprise our guest today, Elgin Strait, host of the Falling Out podcast.
He is a second-generation ex-Mooney, which means that his parents were Moonies, he himself grew up in the church, and then he left it as an adult.
A few days before Trump gave the speech, Elgin sent me an email warning that Trump would speak at this event and told me that it was part of a long-running symbiotic relationship between the right wing in the United States and the Unification Church.
He also provided some assistance for research in this episode.
What he knew, and what I discovered, is that for decades the Unification Church had a surprising amount of influence on the conservative movement and U.S.
politics more generally.
But before we talk to him, I'm going to talk about how the cult got started and how it became a political powerhouse.
The Unification Church was founded by Sun Myung Moon in Korea.
While growing up in Korea before the war, he went to a Confucian school, but his parents became followers of the Christian Presbyterian faith.
He even taught Sunday school, but his religious mission started in earnest at 15 years old, when in 1936, he says he had a vision in which Jesus Christ himself appeared.
Moon claims that Jesus wanted him to complete the task of establishing God's kingdom on earth and bring peace to the world.
He studied the Bible, made his own interpretation, and by 1945 he had organized his thoughts into the teachings which became known as the Divine Principle.
He believed that Christians had interpreted the Bible all wrong.
They got the fall wrong.
They got the role of Jesus wrong.
They just got it all wrong.
It was his job to fix it.
The central pillar of Moon's theology held that Eve had a dalliance with Satan in the Garden of Eden and then slept with Adam, which is how human beings were burdened with original sin.
Moon also believed that people, movements, and even entire countries embodied these biblical figures.
He himself was the perfect Adam, and his mission was to help humankind reclaim its original goodness by foraging a new world order led by Korea, the Adam Nation.
America, which he viewed as the archangel nation, would play a key role in this mission by helping Korea to rout communism, after which America would bow down to the Korean-led regime, with Moon as its king and messiah.
He had some fairly distinctively anti-Christian ideas.
For example, he believed that Jesus had actually failed in his mission.
He wasn't supposed to be crucified.
Jesus, in his view, was supposed to start a family.
You got fucked up on that last level.
Yeah, exactly.
He was supposed to settle down with Mary Madeline or something and start a family, but that didn't work out.
Jesus, listen.
Great first run.
We'll take it from here.
As Moon preached his gospel, he ran afoul of the law several times in Korea for alleged sexual and marital impropriety.
He was first arrested in 1946 for causing social disorder for alleged sexual immorality.
The details are a little sketchy.
The details of his early life aren't very well documented, but this is like what we know.
In 1948, he was arrested a second time by the Ministry of the Interior for his coerced marriage with a married woman.
He was subsequently sentenced to five years in prison.
There are other reports that claim that he was imprisoned for allegedly spying for South Korea.
This might be a sort of a flattering kind of report.
It's very difficult to determine what exactly happened, but it sounds like he kept having encounters with young women and married women, which obviously made husbands and fathers not very happy with him.
A 2013 article in Mother Jones reported that some early followers of Moon say that his church actually started as an erotic cult.
According to early Moon follower Annie Choi, the initiation rites for early female devotees involved having sex with Moon three times.
She also alleged that Moon kept a stable of a half-dozen concubines, which were known as the Six Marys.
Choi says that she was inducted into the group when she was 17 years old.
According to Choi, Moon told her mother that their family played a special role in God's plan.
Just like Jacob from the Bible, who married two women and had children by them and their handmaids, Moon would marry both of her daughters and they would give birth to the world's first sin-free children.
What a deal!
In 1954, Moon established the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity.
By 1959, more than 30 churches had sprung up around Korea, and Moon's teachings started to spread to other countries.
In 1960, at age 40, he married his third wife, the 17-year-old Hak Ja Han.
Around this time, he started sending lieutenants to the USA to pave the way for his move over.
He first visited America in 1965 and moved there full-time in 1971.
Our guest today, Elgin Strait, he tells me that he can't prove this specifically, but he suspects that Moon was looking to make a fresh start in the United States because other criminal allegations of sexual impropriety were hounding him.
So he thought there should be a good way to escape those kinds of issues.
Now, it sounds crazy, but Moon very explicitly sought world domination.
He believed that everyone in the whole world, including all of the world's leaders, would bow down to him.
Of course, world domination had to start with the United States.
In a 1976 speech called The Price of Dispensation, Rev.
Moon explained why controlling all the nations had to start at home.
We must be desperate in saving this nation.
If we can move this nation, we can move the whole world.
Then we can reap the rest of the world in no time.
As for reaping individuals, I mean that you must be a perfected individual in order to reap other individuals.
reap other organizations and families, we must perfect our family in God's sight.
If we are going to reap nations, we must make our nation perfect.
The whole world will be restored in that way.
In his view, the United States was just the beginning.
The Unification Church should control all the political superpowers.
If we can manipulate seven nations at least, then we can get hold of the whole world.
The United States, England, France, Germany, Soviet Russia, and maybe Korea and Japan.
Oh yeah.
If you look closely at the world, they are being prepared for our work.
But God is preparing the outside world like that, so we must prepare ourselves to be qualified enough to absorb the world.
While you are witnessing to other people, you must cultivate the qualifications in yourselves.
And more than that, after saving the whole world, we have to reign over the whole world.
Do we have any time, any moment to lose when we think of that?
A lot of these people say they want to rule the world, but this guy made it his entire life's mission.
He just, he just, he focused on that for the rest of his days.
And guess what?
He couldn't even absorb North Korea.
You need to get your fucking room in order before you try to go out there and reap everyone else.
Moon's first major foray into superpower politics happened when he launched a campaign to support President Richard Nixon while he was embroiled in the Watergate scandal.
As part of that effort, Moon got 350 members of the church to gather at the steps of the Capitol to pray and fast for 72 hours.
Later testimony to the House International Relations Subcommittee revealed that this effort was part of a broader influence campaign designed to gain favor with both the President and Congress.
Representatives of the church were even in touch with the White House during this period.
This is from a 1977 Washington Post article about that campaign.
The purpose of the campaign, according to a December 29, 1973 memo,
was to "bring new life to the Archangel Nixon, hence to make him aware of our significance."
The Archangel Nixon!
Hence, to make him aware of our significance.
The project was a top priority of Moon, it added, because, quote, Master wants to give an address to a joint session of Congress.
Oh, just that.
The plan, therefore, was to impress the President, Congress, and the media through the use of mass rallies, full-page ads in major newspapers, and telegrams and letters to the editor.
Moon said that while visiting Korea in November 1973, God spoke to him, telling him to, quote, forgive Nixon.
Later memos in July 1974 outlined meetings planned with Bruce Hershenson, a White House aide.
Hershenson said yesterday that he met several times with church leaders, but denied that he ever discussed strategy with them.
Quote, The House Subcommittee on International Organizations, which released the testimony, has been investigating alleged ties between the church and Korean Central Intelligence Agency as part of a wider study of U.S.-Korea relations.
The Washington Post reported last year that U.S.
intelligence reports showed that the KCIA asked top Moon aide Bo-Hee Park to stage the anti-impeachment rallies on Nixon's behalf.
Yeah, this fits in with—they have this thing in the Unification Church called Heavenly Deception, which is like the practice of hiding basic knowledge or tenets or doctrines of the organization in a kind of onion of secrecy, which, you know, I mean, honestly, they were meant for Nixon, you know?
I think a very similar approach was happening for him, so...
Yeah, Moon's efforts to save Nixon from the Watergate scandal were obviously unsuccessful.
However, Nixon showed his gratitude by meeting with Moon in the White House on February 1st, 1974.
This brought the movement into widespread public and media attention.
And I think this kind of shows like how incredibly crafty and focused This guy was because he was just a weirdo cult leader and he was dead set, laser focused on two things, defeating communism and gaining power for himself and his organization.
And he just, he was able to like, like get a meeting with the president by staging this campaign.
In 1976, Moon established the media company News World Communications.
Their first newspaper was established in New York City and was called The News World.
Here's what the House Subcommittee report had to say about that paper.
"The News World served as a propaganda instrument of the Moon organization.
A casual reader would not detect its Unification Church affiliation on most days.
On issues affecting Moon and the Unification Church, however, the resources of the paper
were mobilized along with other components of the Moon organization to attack and discredit
critics and investigators."
To cite one example, when Moon was indicted in a tax evasion case,
one headline in the News World asked, "Why Reverend Moon, Mr. President?"
Why?
Why are you being so mean to our boy, Kent?
Why are you yucking our yum?
Why?
Let people enjoy stuff.
I mean, this guy ran afoul of the law just constantly.
He just did not give a shit.
Yeah, he's honestly like, with all the sexual stuff too, he's a lot like Scientology, you know?
A lot of these leaders end up, you know, in international waters or moving countries because, you know, they just cannot stop having sex with very young people.
To some observers, it may seem as though the Unification Church is more of a political organization than a religious organization.
I mean, they seem more focused on growing their own power and defeating communism than advocating any particular metaphysical worldview.
And in fact, in 1981, that was the perspective of the Appellate Division of New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan.
We conclude that political and economic theory is such a substantial part of petitioner's doctrine that it defeats petitioner's claim that its primary purpose is religious.
that owned in New York City exempted from city property taxes. Justice Harold
Burns wrote this for the three-judge majority. "We conclude that political and
economic theory is such a substantial part of petitioners doctrine that it
defeats petitioners claim that its primary purpose is religious. Although
religion is one of the petitioners purposes, it is not its primary purpose."
Owned. No.
Yeah, yeah, not owned.
However, that ruling was overturned in 1982 by the New York Supreme Court, and this has allowed the organization to operate tax-free ever since.
Owned.
Oh, no.
No, no.
We're owned.
America's owned.
That's right.
America's owned.
It is in fact America that is owned, sir.
No!
The Moonies win, baby!
The Unification Church newspaper that really made an impact was the Washington Times, which started publishing in 1982.
Now, this was the paper that explicitly positioned itself as a counter to the supposed liberal bias of the Washington Post.
So the New York State Supreme Court overturns the decision, and that same year they found this.
That's right, that's right.
They must have had a lot of money to pay off a lot of people.
Yeah.
When the Washington Times started, it employed 125 reporters, one-third of whom were church members.
According to a Washington Post story at the time, some journalists who worked for that paper had moral reservations.
For example, the Washington Times sports editor Doug Lamborn said this.
You'd have to be a brick not to go through some sort of moral convulsions.
I lost five pounds the first week.
We all had these twitchy sort of feelings.
Is what we're doing right?
Man, if you gotta ask that about your brand new job at a newspaper, you know, it's probably... probably worth, you know... Oh, I've been working for the Epoch Times.
Is what we're doing right?
Oh, I've been working for the Washington Post.
Is what we're doing right?
The founding editor of The Washington Times, James Whelan, quit two years after it was founded because he says its owners kept challenging the wall between the paper and the church because that wall never really existed in the first place.
The wall was one of those curtains where you can see someone get naked behind it.
I'll just be changing into something more comfortable.
Starting a newspaper is usually a bad business decision, even back in the 1980s, but money was never the point.
At the time, The Washington Times editor James Whelan said this.
These ventures have never worked anywhere else, and there's no reason to think it'll work here.
But that's not the point.
The point is that they want to publish a newspaper, and if the pockets of the church are deep enough and full enough, they can do it for as long as they want, says this podcaster in 2021 when the Washington Times is still going strong.
Yeah, it does not feel good.
And yeah, just a pure expression of the market.
Now, the church did indeed lose money on the newspaper for decades.
The first profitable month happened in 2015, 33 years after its inception.
Ah, it's the Uber model.
Yeah.
But by that time, the paper had accumulated over $1 billion in losses.
Oh no.
So it's irrelevant how much money it makes.
The point is that it's a propaganda mouthpiece that's useful to the church and others, as we'll soon see.
Shortly after the paper's founding, The Washington Times was a key supporter of President Ronald Reagan.
Reagan's director of communications said this of the paper in 1985.
in 1985.
"Everybody here in the White House gets it.
Everybody here reads it.
The Washington Times is taken seriously."
After Reagan was re-elected, the president granted his first exclusive post-election
interview to The Washington Times and said that he read the paper every morning.
"Our media still is composed mostly of these kinds of organizations where, you know, you
constantly ask yourself, 'How do they even make money?
Why does Quillette exist?
How does Breitbart exist?
All of these fucking questions.
The Federalist.
The Federalist.
Why?
All of these questions.
And the answer is just, well, if you have enough money, you can join the media.
You can take that media badge and put it right on your fucking chest and go right back to your propaganda.
Of course, the point isn't the money.
The point is the influence, which helps people with money in other ways.
Yeah, the model is not to make money off this.
It's to make money just like Uber.
It's to make money off, let's say, angel investments.
Rounds of angel investments.
The Washington Times was especially fervent in support of Reagan's policy towards the Contras in Nicaragua.
You know, it's so fucking weird how anti-communism seems to have mostly involved arming and making friends with fascists and religious extremists everywhere in the world.
Yeah.
I'm not sure why the Contras, who are of course the U.S.-backed rebel groups who oppose the socialist Sandinista government, keep coming up in this podcast.
I wanted to avoid it in this particular instance, but it's where the research took me.
In fact, two weeks after the House of Representatives rejected Reagan's request for $14 million for the Contras, the paper announced a fundraising campaign to send private money to the rebel group.
The Washington Times editor at the time said this of the fundraising effort.
People ask, how can a paper afford to do this when it isn't making money?
The answer is that on important moral issues, our corporate owners are willing to lend extraordinary assistance.
They come in clutch.
Because of this friendly stance, the Reagan White House often leaked information to the
paper.
For example, the Washington Times was the first publication to publish allegations that
then Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill effectively blocked an aid package to the Contras by manipulating
a vote date.
If that is true, then Tip O'Neill is a goddamn hero.
Now, here's an interesting thing I learned.
The Washington Times may have been used by the Reagan administration to protect Colombian cocaine kingpins who are possibly helping finance the Contras.
Apparently, a leak to the Washington Times for a 1984 story forced the Drug Enforcement Agency to cancel a sting that would have led to the arrest of four leaders of the Medellin drug cartel, which was founded by Pablo Escobar.
I mean, that's interesting because, as it so happens, a former cartel leader later testified that this cartel gave $10 million to the Contras.
This story was alleged in 1988 testimony to Congress by DEA agent Ernest Jacobson, who was in on the undercover operation.
The news agency UPI reported on the agent's testimony at the time.
Jacobson said the DEA sting began in early 1984 when Barry Seale, a convicted drug dealer, told the agency he would help nab the kingpins and seize up to 6,600 pounds of cocaine.
Seale then visited Colombia to arrange a deal, and Jacobson said Escobar told Seale the cartel had a paved airstrip in Nicaragua that could be a refueling stop.
However, CIA officials learned about the Nicaraguan airstrip, Jacobson said, and the spy agency got involved in the sting, later hiding cameras in a plane ultimately used for the June 1984 drug run.
Jacobson said the plane, loaded with cocaine, also carried more than $450,000 in cash to bribe Nicaraguan officials for the Colombians' use of the airstrip.
The plane did stop at the airstrip, and Jacobson said SEAL photographed the drug kinkpins with Sandinista officials in the background to aid the DEA's case against the cartel.
When the pictures were developed in the United States, SEAL learned CIA officials wanted to leak them to the news media to show that the Sandinistas were involved in drug smuggling.
Jacobson told his superiors the leak would destroy the sting and put SEAL's life in jeopardy.
SEAL was killed by three Colombians in 1986.
The CIA agreed to withhold the pictures, but a few weeks later the story appeared in The Washington Times.
Awesome.
Awesome.
So they got this guy killed?
Possibly.
In this case, it wasn't even someone who was working directly for the CIA.
It was working for someone who was working for a rival agency.
This is real deep state Civil War shit, where the DEA and the CIA had different goals, and so the CIA kind of overruled the DEA.
And also, of course, I mean, they were doing a bunch of the drug smuggling on a much bigger scale.
So, you know, framing the Sandinistas is so fucking funny, especially over 6,600 pounds, which isn't really that much compared to how much was being moved and continues to be moved.
I wonder if the Moonies leader realized that he couldn't be the ruler over the world because the CIA already kind of has that on lockdown.
Well, yeah, well he was like well, we can just I mean all he wants to really do is keep fucking teenagers So, you know, he's really enlisting the CIA for for his own, you know continued survival more than I think at some point He probably became a little more pragmatic and was like, you know what?
We can be in a perpetual state of this because I'm really powerful and really rich right now Yeah I should also mention that UPI, which published that report that you just read, Julian, happened to be purchased by Unification Church in the year 2000.
That may be a coincidence, though, I don't know.
Why the fuck would you do this to me, Travis?
You make me read the words of our enemies?
You put these satanic words in my mouth!
Years after this report was published, I want to be clear.
The Washington Times, however, was just one of many front organizations that the church used to push its agenda.
Another branch of Moon's operation was called CASA International.
This was supposedly an anti-communist educational organization that, by all appearances, was really a way for Moon to gain power in Latin America.
Here's how the Washington Post reported on CASA International in 1983.
CASA seeks to promote a philosophy called Godism, which CASA officials say is an alternative set of ideas for people likely to be
tempted by communism.
Although usually, but not always, openly financed and led by followers of Moon,
CAUSA claims to be completely ecumenical, and to have plans to put non-members of the Unification
Church in leadership jobs.
Oh yeah, at a later time, yeah yeah.
Founded in New York in 1980, CAUSA has had a rocky time in Brazil,
where only police intervention prevented mobs from destroying Unification Churches in nine cities,
and in Honduras and El Salvador, where Roman Catholic Church leaders denounced CAUSA as anti-Christian
for its links to Moon.
But in Uruguay, Paraguay, and Guatemala, and in 18 other nations, CAUSA literature says CAUSA operations are thriving despite opposition from the Catholic Church, to which the vast majority of Latin Americans belong.
CAUSA International has recently been most visible in Honduras, where PAC contributed $50,000 last March on behalf of CAUSA to a new exclusive group of businessmen and military officers called the Association for the Promotion of Honduras, or APROH.
The group is widely viewed as a vehicle for the political ambitions of its leader, Honduran military commander-in-chief Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, who is the defense minister.
Oh, so like a paramilitary that serves, like, top military command that can be used to do coups.
You know, the footprint always looks the same, boys.
It's obviously not shocking, but just disappointing.
Disheartening.
It sounds like, I mean, they just constantly set up, like, all of these organizations, the church, they set up all these organizations that sounded innocuous.
That you needed to do a little work to realize that, oh, it's all actually, it's all these different arms that lead out to one particular weird dude.
Yeah, like the National Endowment for Democracy or Air America.
Right.
For example, the church organized a political group called the Freedom Leadership Foundation.
In 1984, they paid for four Republican Senate staff members to fly to Central America where they met with government leaders and U.S.
embassy officials in Honduras and Guatemala and joined the official U.S.
Observer delegation to the Salvadoran election.
Yet another Unification Church Front organization was a think tank called the Washington Institute for Values in Public Policy.
They underwrote research and seminars at several educational institutions including Stanford University and the University of Chicago.
And they were able to get, like, real people to be part of these groups.
Like, the think tank's board of trustees included two former members of Congress, professors from Columbia University and the University of Maryland, and a former general counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union.
This is very unlike every other think tank.
During the 80s, the Unification Church's influence operations were so aggressive that it even spooked some conservative lobbyists.
For example, Neil B. Blair, who is the president of the conservative lobbying group Free the Eagle, told the Washington Post this.
The Unification Church is trying to buy its way into the conservative movement.
It's frightening.
Seldom have we had a group come into this country before and have this much money to spend.
Is the Cold War coming home?
Moon's top deputy was open about the purpose of this vast array of campaigns and organizations supported by the Unification Church.
He told the news station KQED this about the church's mission.
We want to awaken the world.
We want to turn the tides so that this totalitarian, godless system must go.
It is a total war.
Basically a war of ideas.
War of minds.
The battlefield of the human mind.
This is where the battle is fought.
So in this war, the entire things will be mobilized.
Political means, social means, economical means, and propagandistic means.
The media organization that we are setting up wants to be utilized as an instrument.
An instrument of our cause.
Instrument of our purpose.
The instrument to be used by God.
So Unification Church doing meme warfare back in the 80s.
Moon and The Washington Times continue to enjoy the support of Republicans through Bill Clinton's administration in the 90s.
During an event to celebrate The Washington Times' 15th anniversary in 1997, Senator Orrin Hatch and former President H.W.
Bush offered words of praise.
Normally, when I think of the Washington Beltway Press Corps, I think of, well, not gonna say it, wouldn't be prudent.
But, when I think of the Washington Times, I think of a publication that has brought much-needed balance to the way Washington is covered these days.
Now, shortly after this speech at this event, Moon himself gave a bizarre speech about sex to a group of well-dressed and confused Washington power players.
Now, it's kind of difficult to understand Moon in this clip I'm about to play for you, but what he says is, quote, absolute sex is centered on God and free sex is centered on Satan.
Historically, world literature and the media have often stimulated free sex, but from now on, you literary figures and journalists should lead the way to prevent free sex.
Free sex should completely disappear.
Absolute sex is centered on God.
And free sex is centered on Satan.
Historically, world literature and media have often stimulated free sex.
But from now on, you literary figures and journalists should lead the way to prevent free sex.
Free sex should completely disappear.
Again, this is the exact same event that Bush just gave the speech I played for you earlier.
Same event.
That's right.
Free sex should go away.
Everyone pays for it from now on.
Everyone pays.
Except for me, because I am some sort of god, so the rules are different.
I can see Bush just turning to someone and being like, you know, we all pay for it anyways, you know, wives.
Yeah, of course.
Our guest today, Elgin Strait, tells me he actually attended this event, so I'm eager to ask him about that.
Wow.
Fast forwarding a little bit, the church and the Republican Party continued to have a close relationship during the administration of George W. Bush.
Just before Bush was inaugurated, two administration officials attended Moon's inaugural prayer luncheon for Unity and Revival 2001.
And those two men were the policy adviser Stephen Goldsmith and Attorney General John Ashcroft.
At the luncheon, Goldsmith touted the Bush plan to give churches federal funds to offer social services.
The Bush administration even gave money directly to a church organization.
The Department of Health and Human Services gave a $475,000 grant to fund an organization called Free Teens USA, which is an after-school celibacy club based in New Jersey.
Free Teens?
Free Teens.
That's just like a sign you don't want to see in front of any establishment or house.
Yeah.
This, of course, was just another Unification Church front organization, and several people on the board of directors of Free Teens USA were current and former church members.
Perhaps the most bizarre incident of the Unification Church during the Bush years involved a coronation ceremony for Moon attended by lawmakers.
In March of 2004, several members of Congress sat in the Dirkinson Senate office building and watched as a crown was placed on Moon's head, after which he declared himself the Messiah.
The lawmakers in attendance, however, later claimed that they were misled.
You gotta hear this.
So here's how the incident was reported by the Washington Post.
More than a dozen lawmakers attended a congressional reception this year honoring the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, in which Moon declared himself the Messiah and said his teachings have helped Hitler and Stalin be, quote, reborn as new persons.
At the March 23rd ceremony in the Dirksen Senate office building, Democratic Rep.
Danny K. Davis wore white gloves and carried a pillow holding an ornate crown that was placed on Moon's head.
The Korean-born businessman and religious leader then delivered a long speech saying he was, quote, sent to Earth to save the world's six billion people, emperors, kings, and presidents, Amazing that our politicians are just available for rent.
Oh, you have a coronation coming up?
Yeah, we'll carry that for you.
We'll carry the fluffy pillow.
We'll carry the pillow and the crown.
Among the more than 300 people who attended all or part of the march ceremony was Senator Mark Dayton.
Democrat of Minnesota, who now says he simply was honoring a constituent receiving a peace award and did not know Moon would be there.
Quote, we fell victim to it.
We were duped, Dayton spokeswoman Chris Lissy said yesterday.
The event's organizers flew in nearly a hundred honorees from all 50 states to receive state and national peace awards.
The only, quote, international crown of peace awards went to Moon and his wife.
Some Republicans who attended the event, including Rep.
Roscoe G Bartlett said they did so mainly to salute the Washington Times a
conservative-leaning newspaper owned by Moon's organization.
"I had no idea what would happen regarding Moon's coronation and speech,"
Bartlett said yesterday.
I came here to celebrate the cult leader's propaganda mouthpiece, not the cult leader himself.
Total, total misunderstanding.
Look, look, look.
I liked the paper.
I had no idea that he was going to king himself in the middle of the serum.
Look, none of us knew that, okay?
We liked the paper.
We didn't know about the king.
But now I guess we gotta bow down to him.
We sure do like the paper.
It continues.
At the March 23rd event, Moon said, "The founders of five great religions and many other leaders in the spirit world,
including even communist leaders such as Marx and Lenin, and dictators such as Hitler and Stalin, have found
strength in my teachings, mended their ways, and been reborn as new persons."
*laughs* Just insane.
It's like the leaders of the United States, the legislators, sitting in a room watching a cult leader get crowned and then declare himself to say that Hitler has been reborn by my teachings.
Absolute insanity.
Hitler's ghost is what he's saying.
I mean, why even go that far?
It's like, you've got your paper, you've got your propaganda, you've got politicians who are showing up at your shit, you've got the president talking nice, you've got a crown on your head for you and your partner.
Why go as far to be like, On top of it all, you know the worst guys in the world?
Their ghosts were healed by me and have been reborn.
But as good people this time, so not to worry.
Just seems like going a little too far, you know?
I think this is a litmus test.
This is very useful.
I think that people should do this more often with our government.
See who will attend the most insane school play on earth.
And then you just know.
You can just throw those out.
They're like the bad egg in Willy Wonka.
Just, bah!
And you fucking go down the chute, buddy.
Moon died in 2012, having never achieved his goal of world domination.
But solid effort, solid effort.
After his death, the movement split into various competing factions.
His widow, Hakja Han Moon, is leader of the Mainline Unification Church and is considered by many in the movement to be a messiah and the mother of humankind.
Moon's eldest living son, Hyunjin Preston Moon, leads a group called the Family Peace Association.
Moon's youngest son, Hyunjin Sean Moon, started the Sanctuary Church in Pennsylvania.
Now, Sean Moon's church is perhaps the one that got the most press recently, even though it's a fairly small church.
And that's for a few reasons.
First of all, they are the most aggressively pro-Trump.
And secondly, his church has incorporated the AR-15 rifle into its teachings.
They believe that a Bible verse which states, quote, he shall rule them with a rod of iron, refers to the rifle.
During church services, congregants can be seen holding unloaded weapons, and Sean Moon himself wears a crown made of bullets, which is very theatrical, I gotta say.
Nice.
Yeah.
Try to assassinate him.
All the bullets in the room are in his helmet.
Sean Moon founded that church with support from his brother, Justin Moon.
And Justin Moon also happens to be the CEO of a gun manufacturing company, so...
Works out well.
There's a church that worships guns.
It partners with a gun manufacturing company.
Yeah.
I mean, didn't they start it?
I thought he founded it.
Yes.
Yeah.
He founded the company.
He makes guns.
Now, Sean Moon wasn't doing so great in the aftermath of Trump's loss in 2020.
Here is from a talk he gave in December.
They have to win the Senate.
Otherwise, the Democrats get the majority.
If they get the majority and they're able to sneak Biden in or force Biden in as the first Caesar of America, or Emperor Caesar of America, instead of actually elected president, they will effectively totally murder America.
They will make it into a socialist communist country and they will have all the legal means to do so.
And that's what they want.
That's what they aim for.
That's why you have the demon Chuck Schumer saying that he wants to take Georgia and then take America.
Now, while he's giving this talk, again, he's wearing a plated vest, crown full of bullets and sitting right behind
a gold plated rifle.
Unsurprisingly, the rod of iron ministries also had a role in
in the January 6 riots at the Capitol.
A video shared on Instagram by Sean Moon shows him and at least a dozen Rod of Iron Ministries members reacting to chemical spray from law enforcement officers on the plaza outside of the Capitol.
Moon later led members onto the scaffolding of the west side of the building.
One Rod of Iron Ministries associate, Robert Pickle, pushed against the line of Capitol Police officers in riot gear outside of the Columbus doors as other rioters pelted the officers with projectiles and bashed out windows with flagpoles.
Both Pickle and Sean Moon have not yet been charged for their participation, even though they're clearly there.
Don't know what's going on there.
Next month, Shawn Moon's church will host the third annual Rod of Iron Freedom Festival in Pennsylvania.
It will continue the 50-year tradition of the symbiotic relationship between the American right and the Moonies.
The event speakers include Steve Bannon, former NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch, and Joey Gibson, the founder of the far-right group Patriot Prayer.
To talk more about the Unification Church, we are now joined by Elgin Strait, host of the Falling Out podcast.
Elgin, thank you so much for coming on the show.
No worries.
My pleasure.
Yeah, really delighted to be here.
Thanks for the invite.
Now, before we really get started, I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about your background, about being raised and finally leaving the Unification Church.
Sure, yeah.
So both of my parents joined the Unification Church.
They were matched and married by Rev.
Moon in a mass wedding ceremony in 1975.
Incidentally, there were 1,800 couples at that mass wedding.
I, according to Rev.
Moon, I had the cosmic great luck to be born into this paradigm where As a result of that marriage, of my parents into that faith, I was supposedly born without original sin as a so-called second-generation member of the Unification Church.
Along with that came a lot of stuff, a lot of guilt and a lot of shame involved in it, and this feeling that, like, it's your job to save the world, basically.
Like, literally all of the pain and suffering in the world, it's on your shoulders to solve that.
And I remember I was told that from a very young age, basically around the age of four, as far as I can remember.
In general, I guess just to kind of paint the picture.
So in my early life, I was born in New York City and I lived in the New Yorker Hotel with a bunch of other families.
So the New Yorker Hotel is still owned by the Mooneys and it's a hub.
It was a hub of Mooney activity back in the day.
Now they've kind of leased it out to someone else to operate more as a standard hotel.
But back in the day, it was a hub of Mooney activity.
So I grew up in that hotel with a bunch of families until the age of about Four or five.
I moved to Queens, was there for a little while, but my parents were still working for the Unification Church, and then eventually I moved to the D.C.
area.
On the outside, had a sort of ostensibly normal suburban upbringing in the suburbs of Maryland, but I was going to Unification Church services every Sunday.
I was also waking up at 5 a.m.
to pledge my allegiance to Reverend Moon and his family, coupled with—sorry, that was every Sunday we were doing that—coupled with many prayers and songs and all kinds of sort of family-level indoctrination programs, all of this centered
or centering around Moon being the Messiah that we all had to bow down to and
worship in various ways. I attended, in addition to that kind of like week-in
week-out stuff, I attended a bunch of sort of, I would, now looking back, I would
characterize them as indoctrination programs. I didn't think they were at the
time, but we're talking summer camps, sort of spring break camps.
I attended Korean school on the weekends sometimes to learn about the Korean language and culture and heart, all this sort of stuff.
My life, whilst I was lucky enough to go to public school for most of my schooling, not everyone was.
Some of them went to church schools.
Yeah, I had a sort of theoretically normal upbringing on the outside but was doing all this crazy shit like on the sides.
One notable exception to the normalcy was spending a year in Korea at the age of 13 going to a full-time boarding school in Korea for so-called Western kids as well as Japanese kids to learn about Korean language and culture and indoctrinate us further into believing that Reverend Moon
was the messiah. That was my upbringing, pretty much. Did you get a sense that you were
different from kids who weren't in the organization at the time in America? Yes. And that
was intentional on a couple levels. Part of it is this sort of exceptionalism, you know, "we are the
chosen people" type of thing, layered with this built-in, I would call it like almost
like a built-in mechanism of xenophobia.
So we have created this sort of master race of people who have been born of Reverend Moon's lineage.
Therefore, they are sort of pure, and that splits across sort of racial lines.
So there's there is that component.
There's also a component of we sort of know that know the truth that no one else knows, you know, they wanted to inoculate us against the so-called negativity that we that they knew we were going to encounter living in the so-called outside world.
So they would tell us, OK.
You're going to hear things like, the Unification Church is a cult, but here's why it's not.
And of course, they had many reasons, you know, they, the people didn't, outside people didn't understand, they didn't have that perspective, all this sort of shit that I'm sure every cult tells, tells their members.
We were prepared for that from, from an early age.
So as a result, yeah, I did, I did feel like I was, I knew I was having a different experience than the average high schooler as a result of that.
And how did race work into it?
Because, you know, we know that Moon moved basically because he was increasingly having to confront some of the sexual allegations that were occurring, and so he moves to this new country.
You know, as you said, he had this idea of master race, but suddenly, you know, there's now, you know, mixed races in the Church.
So how did he process that, or how did you process that as a child?
So it was a good question.
Part of his theology on the outside was him telling people that, hey, by doing all these mass weddings, I'm going to intentionally create mixed race families.
And this is something that I'm doing to intentionally sort of alleviate racism in the world, was kind of how he was putting it.
If we do this enough, races just won't exist and then racism won't be a problem.
So that was part of his rationale for creating these mixed families.
I am not from one, but many people that I grew up with were from mixed families, a lot of them Japanese people and white people or Korean people and white people.
That was most of the mixing with some exceptions, but those were kind of like the biggest sort of sleeves of mixing.
And so they had this idea that they're trying to create racial harmony by creating these mixed babies, basically, and there are a lot of them.
And yet there's also this racial hierarchy within the church where it's very clear all the upper echelons of leadership are Korean.
No doubt anyone who's on top is Korean.
Anyone who's not Korean Is they just can't get those those top level leadership positions, and they won't be taken seriously by the leadership.
And there were a couple other there were other layers to sort of the racism equation there as well.
So Moon was very anti Japanese.
I think it's because he grew up in North Korea during the Japanese occupation of that of that country.
And as a result, Japanese were basically considered sort of the lowest of the races, effectively, to the point where they had to, when it came to tithing to the church, the standard for any family, if they weren't Japanese, was you had to tithe 10% of your pre-tax income, which my family did.
But if you were Japanese, you had to tithe 30% just because you were Japanese.
You had to pay the Japanese tax.
And so you, as a white person with two white parents, I mean, how much of that matching was happening?
Because all of this is arranged, right?
Did your parents know each other before?
Vaguely.
They knew of each other.
They had sort of seen each other around in various church settings over the course of their careers
before being matched, and then they had a brief sort of engagement period. We're talking days,
maybe weeks, I think, but an engagement period where there's a fuckload of pressure to say yes
to this marriage, basically. The Messiah has chosen this person for you, and the Messiah knows
that basically the idea is the Messiah can look back to all of your ancestors, and all those
ancestors, there's a little bit of those ancestors still in you today, and the Messiah can see all
that and pick your match based on that.
So if you say no to that, you're going to be looked down upon within the org.
So most people did not say no.
My parents did not say no.
There's a lot of pressure to say yes to those.
And how did that even get sorted out then?
Because I mean, even though he's saying this is how I choose them, obviously that's not how they chose them.
Was it just kind of a lotto or what the hell?
So that's a great question.
So in my parents' day, he would get a bunch of people in a room.
So for instance, the ballroom at the New Yorker Hotel in the 70s, he would hold these matchings.
And he'd have a bunch of women, he'd have all the women on one side of the room and all the men on the other side.
And he'd just walk up and like point to a man and point to a woman.
I mean, I do want to call out some of the racism that happened there as well.
They stood up, they were sitting down and they would stand up and like look at each other and kind of give each other
a nod.
And then they would like go off and have a chance to actually talk to each other.
I also do want to, I mean, I do want to call out some of the racism that happened there as well.
So Moon is on the record as in one of these matchings, pulling up a black man and saying to the women, "Which
woman is willing to make the sacrifice of marrying this black guy?"
Oh, no.
Yeah, that happened.
I think another layer too is the Japanese racism was like really clear-cut.
It's like Koreans were at the top, Japanese were like at the bottom.
But I do feel like between black and white, I think there was another level of racial hierarchy as well.
Certainly that comment would suggest that there's some of that happening in the org as well.
It may not have been as immediately clear, but that was definitely happening as well.
In the early days, that's how those matchings happened.
But then over time, as it got bigger, they moved to a paradigm where people would send in photos of themselves.
You'd submit an application form, submit photos, And then Mood would go down.
He would put hundreds of photos of people on these shelves, and he would go and just walk down and be like, OK, this photo is going with this photo.
And then you have an aide take the two info packs that go with them and then call the people.
And then there you were.
And so people would get matched from all different corners of the world as a result of that.
We talked in this episode a bit about how the Unification Church involved itself in the Contra scandal.
And you actually told me earlier that this affected your childhood in some way, in that your Disney tapes were mixed with tapes of Ollie North, who was the Reagan administration official who had diverted arms sale funds to the Contras.
So do I have that right?
You have that right.
Thank you for bringing that up.
So yeah, I remember, you know, I was a child of the 80s.
I had a very classic VHS collection with one glaring exception.
So it was like the Little Mermaid, you know, Aladdin, Sleeping Beauty, all the good stuff, the classic Disney kid stuff.
But we had this video of Oliver North's testimony before Congress, just amongst the Disney videos.
So it was like, and I can still picture the cover of it.
Yeah, it's him standing up, standing up in his full, like, military regalia with his hand up, you know, swearing the oath, basically.
As you all know by now, my name is Oliver North, Lieutenant Colonel, United States Marine Corps.
My best friend is my wife, Betsy, to whom I have been married for 19 years and with whom I have had four wonderful children aged 18, 16, 11 and six and that video was there and honestly I don't think anyone in my house ever watched it but I think my parents were just told to buy it from the church and this was one of their ways of trying to support Ali North throughout that whole scandal was like selling these videotapes and so it's actually I've spoken to other kids who grew up in the movement
We also talked about the organization CAUSA International, which meddled in the affairs of several countries.
Did you have this tape in your house, this Ali North tape?
And I was like, oh my God, I had that tape.
This is, and this is what it was about.
So yeah, that was definitely a thing for sure.
Wow.
We also talked about the organization, Kaza International, which meddled in the affairs
of like several countries.
You told me that your dad was actually involved in this organization some way.
My dad was an organizer for a couple of things.
So one of them was CAUSA.
He was also involved in something called ICUS, International Conference for the Unity of the Sciences, which is yet again another Mooney-front organization.
That one sort of focused on scientists and academics.
He spent more time with ICUS than he did with CAUSA, but I remember him talking at a young age about going to these CAUSA events, doing this, that, and the other.
I believe he might have traveled to Latin America at some point to go to these events because CAUSA was really focused on Latin America at the time.
But yeah, he was an organizer for these sorts of things and specifically with the ICUS conference, he would basically get these – he would try to get scientists to come To this event, it was all expenses paid by the Moonies at, you know, Japan, wherever, like anywhere in the world, right?
So if you're an academic or a scientist, you get this invitation to some conference, International Conference of the Unity of the Sciences.
Sounds kind of like, you know, whatever, like they're offering, they're paying you to go to, you know, flipping Hawaii or something for three days to go to this thing.
You're like, all right, cool.
You get there.
You don't and if you don't do your homework basically what happens is you're there with a bunch of other scientists and the program starts shifting gradually and gradually into Not about science, but about how Reverend Moon is there to unify the sciences.
And the sciences are there to unify around him.
And then they start talking more and more about the theology of the church and how he's going to take over the world and all this shit.
But I honestly think a lot of people were kind of duped into that.
And at the end of that process, what the Unification Church got out of it was a photo op with Moon at this conference with these supposed academics around him.
And they could then parlay that to all the to all the members and say, hey, look, we're making inroads in in politics and science and whatever, and they could use that as sort of like self-fulfilling proof of.
The aims of the movement being furthered, and that's a common theme time and time again of these front organizations sort of creating these events, and no one really knows what the hell they are until near the end or afterwards, and then they're like, what the hell is that?
Some people did know beforehand, but a lot of people I think were just kind of duped, and then that was shown to us as members as like proof, you know, we're making inroads here, we're making inroads there.
Right, like there's some also kind of validation to like, look, see, like, to anybody who says that, you know, from from the outside, who says that, like, we're crazy, or we're a couple look like we're with these legitimate people.
and here's the proof.
Yeah, that's exactly what it was.
And I think as a result, just kind of playing this out, they sort of – they targeted a
lot of like sort of like mid-tier former ambassadors to some country or like former presidents
of – I don't know, like probably Trinidad and Tobago would have been there.
Like these sort of, you know, not the superpowers, but they would go after these countries.
But the fact that people from these countries, maybe ambassadors or former presidents or prime ministers or stuff like that, they would try and get them to come to these things because just by having that little sort of, you know, cachet of being a public official, that would help them to say, hey, look, you know, The movement is spreading around the world.
Here's some credibility by being involved with these people.
You know, on a kind of macro scale, we've discussed how the Moonies were connected to the GOP and all of these things, and even you were talking about the Oliver North tapes.
But how did those politics express themselves in the domestic setting of your home?
Like, what were the discussions about politics that were occurring?
It was always just assumed that my house was going to vote Republican.
That was just always That was just a thing.
There was a lot of talk about family values.
I feel like that was a big thing that was talked about.
And, you know, the Republican Party is the party of family values.
I have to say, I feel like my experience might have been a bit more unique because although both of my parents worked for The Washington Times, They were not Washington Times readers.
We actually got the Washington Post delivered to our house, which in hindsight was a godsend to me because I could read it every day and just get a bit of like normalcy in my life.
But in a way, I think personally, personally, I think my parents were kind of like closet liberals.
But this cult that they had joined had all of this, this whole political machine aligned with the right.
And so I think they felt aligned with the family values talk.
And as a result, there's a lot of talk of that.
But the political talk beyond that didn't really didn't really go too much.
There was a lot of anti-communism, I have to say.
That was a big deal.
So the organization is part of that.
There's a lot of talk about how communism was effectively the work of the devil, and it was our job as followers of Reverend Moon to fight against that quite aggressively.
I was really young, I think I was five or six, but I remember going to some sort of pro-communist event.
I don't even know what it was, I was so young, but pro-communism, pro-socialism something in Washington, D.C.
My dad took me there and like as counter protesters to this to this thing basically at a very young age and I just remember this guy who in hindsight I would describe he kind of he looked he was dressed like a punk rocker basically and he was just there screaming at my dad.
And I had no conception of what was going on, except it was like, hey, communism's bad and that's why we're here.
To the extent that apparently when the Berlin Wall fell, you were made to believe that Moon predicted this event?
Oh, yeah.
That was a big deal.
So Moon, I mean, he'd been talking about the fall of communism for a long time.
That was like his number one goal.
As a result, like he kept talking about, you know, the Berlin Wall is going to come down and he actually sent a lot of people to Berlin Wall.
They did like marches and rallies along the Berlin Wall.
One of his sons, maybe more than one of his sons, but certainly I know one of them like.
He gave a speech there.
So the Berlin Wall is a big area of focus for them, at least on the outside.
And so yeah, when it came down, he took full responsibility for that.
He said that it was his – he had aligned spirit world to the point that the forces of evil could be crushed and then the Berlin Wall could come down.
That was a big deal.
My parents were like, oh my god, Elgin.
You got to watch this on TV.
This is amazing.
And that was pointed to, yeah, for sure, as proof that he was the Messiah and things were going the way he was saying.
And it would be remiss not to mention that the plethora of other unfulfilled promises along the way.
One of them that I love that this came with my podcast, which we can talk about later, So on my podcast, I think they were born in 1977, and they mentioned that the year they were born was the year that Moon said that the Kingdom of Heaven would be established on Earth.
That did not happen, evidently, and the goalposts continually moved afterwards over across a wide variety of initiatives.
In this episode, we played a clip of Moon talking about the evils of free sex during an anniversary event for The Washington Times.
That was very confusing to me, I have to say.
Do you understand what the hell he was talking about there?
I was in the room when that happened.
I grew up in the DC area.
My parents worked for The Washington Times.
It was a big deal when they had these anniversary ceremonies.
So that was on the 15th anniversary, held in the ballroom of The Washington Times.
I would love to ask your listeners if there's any other newspaper that has a flippin' ballroom and marble staircases internally.
I don't really know why that's necessary for a newspaper to have.
But anyway, I was in that ballroom.
And I guess to answer your question, the Unification Church is built on this idea that the fall of man was caused by sexual act and sort of antithesis and therefore for us all to get back on track with God, we have to live lives of abstinence before marriage and fidelity within marriage, specifically fidelity within a marriage ordained by Reverend Moon.
Anything outside of that at all, he christened free sex.
So anything, I guess you could think of it as analogous to promiscuity or just any sort of sex outside of the bounds of that, a man and a woman in marriage, preferably in a Mooney marriage.
And anything outside of that, he would call free sex.
He created this term to sort of encapsulate his vision of what sex should be, which is, you know, man and woman within the bounds of marriage, eternally, by the way, bound eternally.
And according to him, if they had sex within that, they would, like, I guess almost reached a sort of blissful almost like tantric like next level sexual experience that he christened absolute sex and it was almost like a device to it's like what's the opposite of free sex?
I guess it's absolute sex.
He, as you mentioned, was a sexual predator, probably a rapist at multiple times in his career.
He was just always talking about sex in all these weird, weird ways.
I would be in a room with him, just like that room.
Can you imagine being a 14-year-old kid and hearing this guy?
With my parents in the room, by the way, yelling about free sex and absolute sex.
But that happened to me many times throughout my life, and that wasn't even the weirdest shit that I heard.
Um, so he would say things like, um, like later on in life, he had this thing where he said that parents should fuck in front of their kids.
And that would be like a super beautiful thing.
If there were so-called blessed families, then it would be like a, it would like, It was meant to be some beautiful experience for kids to witness their parents doing that.
Now, I never witnessed that, but I remember vividly being in a room with my parents reading these words of Reverend Moon where he's talking about this, like, talking about the, you know, the virtues of parents fucking in front of their kids.
And I was kind of an older teenager at the time.
I remember, like, looking at my parents and being like, OK, well, this is your messiah.
Like, are you going to do it or not?
Because, like, that should be kind of weird.
But I'm kind of curious, what happens now, now that you've read that?
But thankfully for me, they didn't.
You also had this basically interesting theory that the Unification Church has had more of an outsized influence on the way we live now, our political media environment, than people usually recognize.
You say that the Washington Times is a precursor to Fox News, OAN, and the Daily Caller.
What's your broad theory about how the Unification Church created the way the United States and the media environment is today?
Intellectually, I left the Unification Church when I was about 18, when revelations of Reverend Moon's One of Reverend Moon's illegitimate children came to light.
So for a cult predicated on the idea that the top guy's infallible and would never do anything—anything that's not so-called absolute sex—and then all of a sudden, you know, he has a kid outside of marriage, like, that's a pretty—that's a smoking gun there.
Like, this is bullshit.
I looked at that, and I was like, yeah, I'm done here.
The cult, because it places such a huge, huge emphasis on this idea of blood lineage, there's a ton of pressure to marry within the cult.
People on my show have said, it was pretty clear to me that if I didn't marry someone in the cult, my parents weren't going to love me.
And that's very, very true, I think, for most people who grew up in the cult.
So for that reason, I I ended up accepting an arranged marriage within the Unification Church.
We were together for about 15 years, and we split up nearly four years ago now.
And during that time, I was kind of blissfully unaware.
I was kind of like, hey, that whole cult arranged marriage thing, that was kind of weird.
But look, I won the lottery.
Things are good.
I threaded the needle.
Let's just put it behind me and get on with my life.
But when that relationship ended, I just started thinking about my experience, and I was like, what the hell was that?
Why did I even—why did I say yes to that?
What was the driving force behind that?
And also, it was the first time in my life where I could actually examine that in a really neutral format, because if I tried to look at that before, I still had the shackles of this marriage sort of around my mind and trying to make it work.
Without that, I could just kind of take stock of my life and pause for a second, like, what the hell happened there?
And it was during that that I started really trying to think about and understand cults and how they operate.
So I started – I took a lot of courses and started talking to people who had left other cults, and I realized that there's kind of – a lot of people have this sort of penny drop moment when they hear about some other cult operating and they're like, oh my god, am I in a cult?
I kind of coupled that with speaking to some other people that had grown up in the same cult as me and realizing that actually everyone had quite unique experiences that led to them leaving, which is new information for me.
I kind of thought, like, everyone heard about the illegitimate child and then they're like, peace, I'm out.
But actually, everyone has a different answer to why you left the cult.
And I just thought that there would be a lot of value in trying to share those stories for people that are still in this cult or may still be in other cults.
As a result of that, I started this podcast called Falling Out.
And last year, I just started recording interviews with people about why they left, etc.
And I didn't really know exactly when I was going to release it.
And then two things happened, and this will bring it back to the political question.
So in late December of last year, I spoke to someone who told me that the Unification Church was sending kids out to go fundraising by knocking door to door, selling trinkets in the middle of the COVID pandemic.
So we're talking wanton disregard for the lives of these kids, effectively.
And that's a common pattern for many, many years in the Unification movement.
And then on January 6 of this year, we all know what happened on January 6, Sean Moon, one of the sons of Reverend Moon.
Was on the steps of the Capitol with some of the followers of his splinter group.
And then on January 7th, Matt Gaetz is in the U.S.
Senate, and he's referring to a piece in The Washington Times about making this claim that Antifa was to blame for the Capitol riots, which we all know is false.
And in that moment, I sort of thought, OK, all of a sudden, like all the stories that I've been trying to tell, all the times I thought I was just going to be talking about stuff that happened 20 years ago to people.
All of a sudden, it's current, and it's relevant, and it's right now.
That made me expedite my publication schedule.
I started publishing on the 25th of January.
I was like, fuck, I just got to get this shit out.
People need to know what the fuck is happening.
Across those conversations, I started talking to a lot of people about what happened to us as kids.
Basically, what happened to us as kids is our childhoods were sacrificed on the altar of The Washington Times.
Let's think about what happened there.
So Moon, he started The Washington Times to curry favor with Reagan and Bush, and that's literally on tape now.
And I remember there were times growing up, we talked about this on my show, where Rush Limbaugh, this is in the late 80s, early 90s, Rush Limbaugh will be talking about something and he would cite something
in the Washington Times.
I believe pretty strongly there the Times sort of created this symbiotic relationship between
itself and other right-wing broadcasters and over time they achieved their goal of shifting
the dialogue rightward and it started with the Times but then it went to Limbaugh.
It went to The Drudge Report.
It's gone to Fox News.
It's gone to OAN.
OAN, incidentally, as far as I know, they actually say today that they get their info from The Washington Times.
And if you look back, some of the stuff that The Washington Times has done, they printed the birtherism conspiracy theory.
I mean Oliver North was a columnist there.
Newt Gingrich has been a columnist there.
So there has been this, in my view, this incredibly symbiotic relationship that sort of started with The Times.
It almost – what The Times has done has given – has just given license to all of these other outlets to take what they say and almost just push it a little further, push it a little further.
But if they get in trouble, they can just point back to The Times and say it was there just like Matt Gaetz did.
On the 7th of January, and that's at the highest level.
But if you're running the Daily Caller or something like that, I don't know how much scrutiny is on you, but in my view, you're going to go for it.
If the Times gives you It gives you a tiny centimeter of a story.
You're probably going to blow it up into something that looks like it's a mile long, and that first centimeter is probably bullshit.
And so I think about that thread and that symbiotic relationship and how that leads us to where we are now with QAnon.
anti-vaccine. The Times has published things like, you know, COVID is a conspiracy back in the early
days. They've aligned themselves with like anti-climate science type of stuff. There's a long
litany of, you know, just all these right-wing talking points that are now turning into this
gigantic clusterfuck with COVID and QAnon. I want your listeners to understand where the money comes
Moon has gone on the record saying that he poured a billion dollars into The Times.
Where does that money come from?
It comes from a variety of sources.
One of them I would just kind of classify as labor trafficking, effectively coercing people within the Unification Church.
To believe that their spiritual salvation is dependent upon them fundraising for the church.
To give you some context there, certainly in the 70s and 80s, the Unification Church had teams of people in vans going out across the country in the U.S.
as well as in Europe, across the continent, and they were basically selling flowers and trinkets door-to-door, working six days a week, you know, sleeping on the floor of the van.
Working six days a week and some people had to do this for seven years, seven years before getting married.
And, you know, that was just that was the so-called formula course in in those days.
Now it's evolved a bit.
They have youth programs.
So, for instance, those COVID fundraisers that I mentioned earlier.
They are part of a youth program that does that.
This is all untaxed, untraceable cash, effectively.
I've done some back-of-the-envelope calculations with people on my show.
We estimated that a middle-of-the-road performer would make about $65,000 a year doing that.
At the higher end, people could be making a couple hundred grand on an individual basis.
You could easily be making a million a year from a single vanload of seven or eight people going across the country.
completely tax-free. That's still happening today. That's been
happening for a long time. Another source of funding is just the
tithing that I mentioned earlier. So every church member has to give
10% of their income. If you're Japanese, it bumps up to That's just baseline.
That's where your paychecks go in.
But then every month, they're like, we need money for this thing.
We need money for this campaign.
God needs you to donate this.
It's like a never-ending cycle of like, you got to donate more.
Another big one, and to me personally, this is one of the most heartbreaking things that happened in the Unification Church, is they have a complex in Korea And incidentally, this complex is right next door to the stadium that was the theoretical home of that event that Trump spoke at a few days ago, although it was all virtual, etc.
But in principle, it was broadcast from the stadium.
That stadium is next door to this Unification Church compound in Korea, which is another grift, effectively.
And what that is, is the Unification Church tells people that you are sort of responsible for the sins of your ancestors.
But hey, guess what?
Good news.
We can help you liberate those ancestors from their sins if you pay us.
They have these workshops in Korea where people pay thousands and thousands of dollars to come and liberate X number of generations of ancestors.
And then when they go there, you got to pay to go there, pay your own board, pay thousands to get there.
When you're there, the way that they, in theory, liberate these Ancestors is in these effectively mass beating ceremonies.
So they have these tents full of hundreds of people.
I've been there before.
They have people at the front singing and pounding a big drum and kind of getting everyone into this sort of group state effectively, like a frothy, almost like a riot or a mob type of mentality.
Kind of whipping people into a frenzy.
And people are then effectively beating each other.
So you're in rows of people, and you're beating the person in front of you for a couple hours at a time.
And they kind of instruct you, like, beat him on the back, beat him on the leg, beat him on the head.
And this beating is meant to get the evil spirits out.
So this has been happening for 15, 20 years, as far as I know.
That's another big source of funding, and I'm sure there are other grifts as well, but I just want to highlight some of the really fucking dirty money that's going into this because I think it's important for people to know that's the shit that's been propping up The Washington Times for the last, you know, three decades.
Fascinating stuff.
And I want to talk a little bit about your podcast because it's called Falling Out.
I recommend everyone go check it out because it's essentially interviews with other second generation ex-Moonies.
In general, I kind of, well, as I said earlier, I just felt like there's so much utility in sort of sharing the collective intelligence that we have as people who've left this movement and There's no good way to do that.
And in fact, the organization fights against that.
If you leave, you're excommunicated.
They don't want to hear from you.
So there's no real good way to transmit this disinformation of like, why'd you leave, basically.
And so for me, it was like, let me just talk to people about why they left.
But it quickly kind of morphed into, I would say, broadly speaking, like three topics.
One of them is like, let's paint a picture of how depraved and corrupt this fucking organization is.
We talk a lot about the neglect, the abandonment, all the abuse that people suffered when they were kids, just to get that shit out there, quite honestly, so people know what the hell is happening.
Then we talk about why they left, and everyone has a unique experience there.
And then we talk about, where possible, how do you rebuild your life after you leave a cult?
What does your life look like?
How do you define success after leaving a totalist ideology?
It's honestly, it's been a really rewarding experience for me.
I look forward to doing it more and look forward to introducing your audience to it.
It's been awesome.
Yeah, I would love to keep doing it for as long as possible.
Yeah, thank you so much.
This has been a really fascinating talk, Elgin.
Go check out, it's called The Falling Out Podcast, available at the same podcasting app that you're listening to this show.
So check it out.
Is there anything else you want to say before we let you go?
I'm on Twitter at FallingOutPod, Instagram at FallingOutPod.
It's pretty easy to find me.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
You can go to patreon.com slash QAnon Anonymous and subscribe for five bucks a month if you want to get a whole second episode every week, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes.
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For everything else, we have a website, QAnonAnonymous.com.
Listener, until next week.
May the Rod of Iron bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy, it's a fact.
And now, today's Auto-Q.
My only real regret is that I virtually abandoned my family for work during these years.
And that work consisted of my first few years on the staff as the project officer for a highly classified and compartmented national security project, which is not a part of this inquiry.
I worked hard on the political-military strategy for restoring and sustaining democracy in Central America, and in particular, El Salvador.
