Part Two: The 12 Tribes: The Worst Cult You've Never Heard Of

Robert is joined again by Alex Steed to continue to discuss The 12 Tribes cult.

 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ah, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the only podcast
that is that is still legal under the Joe Biden
HUNTA Robert.

Speaker 2 (00:10):
Did you uh get something that I just texted you?

Speaker 3 (00:15):
What was? What was?

Speaker 1 (00:17):
Is it?

Speaker 3 (00:17):
Is it? A screenshot that says Robert Evans podcast host
manager Sophie Lichterman.

Speaker 1 (00:25):
Wow, uh yeah? But it also says my location is
virtual pissed.

Speaker 2 (00:31):
That specific standard time you hack this is virtual?

Speaker 1 (00:34):
It says, I think I have to be no. I
think what it's saying because it's like virtual pissed comma or,
which probably means I have to be allowed to work
virtually or I will get pissed.

Speaker 2 (00:45):
I mean, fair enough.

Speaker 1 (00:51):
I love that you have access to my work email.
I haven't been able to log into it for months.

Speaker 3 (00:56):
Oh my god, so sorry. That was really personally fun
for me.

Speaker 4 (01:02):
Hi Alex, Hello, I just remembered a time. I don't
even know if this is worth telling, but I just
remember at a time that I was at a cafe
in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and I overheard someone talking about
listening to and loving Behind the Bastards, but that they
weren't quite sure if they could trust the show anymore

(01:22):
because of how rich podcasters are.

Speaker 3 (01:26):
There was once Robert what was that thing that there
was like an article that said how much Robert's networth was?

Speaker 2 (01:31):
How much was it?

Speaker 1 (01:32):
It was so much money, sixty four million dollars. This
is what the internet estimated.

Speaker 4 (01:40):
I just was. I was just hoping I would have
an opportunity to address that person. And this is the
perfect time because they may be listening.

Speaker 1 (01:48):
Don't, guys, if you're worried, don't because you'll know the
instant I'm a multimillionaire, because you will not hear from
me anymore. Like, Yeah, I've never understood guys like Elon Musk,
like you could be you could be hiding in the mountains,
you know, uh, you know, hunting your fellow man for sport.

Speaker 4 (02:10):
Yeah. It just shows how deep like just psychosexual compulsion runs. Yeah,
Eon is this wealthy and needs to uh have all
these ploys for attention every day?

Speaker 3 (02:22):
Same like fucking JK. Rowling, just shut the fuck up.

Speaker 1 (02:27):
Why are you doing this? Yeah, it just goes to
show how deeply broken so many, so many people are.
And I am also deeply broken, but not that kind
of deeply broken.

Speaker 3 (02:40):
Because because if we would, you would never hear from
us again.

Speaker 1 (02:44):
You'd be like absolutely not.

Speaker 3 (02:46):
I'd be okay, you remember those people and they'd be like,
oh did I dream that?

Speaker 1 (02:50):
It's like exactly, yeah, they got rich and they fucked
off the way people who aren't out of their minds too. Yeah,
it's like George R. Martin, what's George R. Martin up to?
He lives in a fucking like lighthouse. He bought a
lighthouse and now he doesn't go out in public anymore.

Speaker 4 (03:09):
He got so rich he's like, I'm not going to
complete the things that got me rich.

Speaker 1 (03:12):
That's admirable and it is. It is quite a flex Yeah, that.

Speaker 2 (03:16):
Also please could you please finish it, sir? Respectfully?

Speaker 1 (03:23):
Now at this point, at this point, I just enjoy
the standard he's set for all authors, Like, once you
sell your show to HBO, fuck off. Just go write
something right, literally, anything other than what people want from you.
All right, back to the episode at hand. So, in

(03:45):
part one we went into significant detail about what Jeane
Spriggs had to say about child abuse, and it was
a lot. This was not, as I noted, out of
step with other Jesus Movement churches. Where Jane really went
off though, was in the field of biblical racism. Now,
the religious right always has a solid grounding and being
racist as hell, the singular cause that it launched, like

(04:08):
the religious right in the United States became a political
entity as resistance to forced integration. Right, it was the
idea that religious schools would have to let black kids in.
Like that is where the religious right comes from. This
is not like debatable specifically, like yeah, anyway, the religious
right comes after the Jesus Movement right, which feeds into it,
but also like chunks of the Again, this is not

(04:30):
like a uniform set of beliefs because some of the
churches that come out of the Jesus Movement are extremely
anti racist. Right, that is a chunk of like who
comes out of this, And I should note that doesn't
mean they don't suck, because a really good example of
an anti racist church that sucks ass is the Westboro
Baptist Church. They were as hateful in their heyday as

(04:53):
hateful an abuse of a church as has ever existed
in this country. If you're not aware of them, if
you ever saw people holding up those God that hey,
you know, slur signs outside of like funerals for gay
people and stuff, that's the Westboro Baptist Church. They are
terrible people, but not racist. Founder Fred Phelps in fact,
got his start as a civil rights attorney. He was

(05:16):
like a very active and prominent lawyer fighting for equal
civil rights for black people in the United States. He
was an outrageous bigot and an extreme child abuser. It's
just proof that you don't have to be racist in
those things. Like, you know, I'm not saying this to
praise the man. He was a monster. It's just to
show you, like different people, like the kind of splinters

(05:39):
off of the Jesus Movement are not uniform in their
attitudes here. Likewise, Jim Jones is cult right, which is
definitely a part of this conversation. Also founded as like
a kind of a big part of what drew them
together was like resistance to the racism of like American
mainstream culture. A lot of members of his community were
mixed race relationships. He really recruited heavily from black people

(06:03):
and from like folks who were like ostracized and abused
by mainstream American culture. That was a big thing of
like what brought them together and why they eventually felt
the need to go to Guyana. So the Twelve Tribes
would seem to have a lot in common with Jones
on the surface, but Jean Spriggs is the opposite, like
were some of these other sort of cult movements that

(06:25):
form out of this, this this Jesus movement are very
much reacting to the Civil rights era, and Gene is
more on the side of, you know, what's going to
become kind of the mainstream religious right thing where you're
you're very one way or the other, very kind of
like Koily being a bigot. Jane does not have any
like he's not cloaking this in anything. He's not doing

(06:46):
this like, oh, we're against integration because it's you know,
the state taking over from the church and like what
is a religious you know, educational institution. He is just
outright hateful of black people, right, Like that is the
that is the teachings of the Twelve Tribes. And as
the tribes begin to spread out, first of Vermont and
then to locations in the Carolinas and then overseas to Germany,

(07:07):
France and beyond, Gene begins preaching more vehement strains of hate.
It starts with his lectures against homosexuality, which by the
late eighties had evolved from aids as God's punishment to
gay people need the death penalty. That's the official Twelve
Tribes teaching here. He also increasingly clamps down on the
freedom of his female followers. Women over the years are

(07:28):
banned from using birth control and then banned from giving
birth without painkillers, and his justification is women shouldn't be
using painkillers to give birth because they have to atone
for Eve's original sin. The only way for women to like,
you know, make up to God the fact that they
ate that apple, is to not use medicine when they
give birth. Wonder what Adam's atonement for original sin is?

(07:51):
Why does he get to take Do men get to
take painkillers? Still?

Speaker 4 (07:56):
Question, Well, Adam didn't come. It's not Adam's fault. Like
that's I think that's truly, that's the rationale, right, Like
Adam wouldn't have done it if Eve wasn't connising and
listening to the devil so forever, like you can just
do what you want.

Speaker 1 (08:10):
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. So the commonality between all
of this stuff, all of these different kind of things
that are really toxic about the Twelve Tribes is Jene's
obsession with obedience gay people, in his eyes are refusing
God's command, and so they have to be destroyed. That
is the penalty for disobedience women. Obviously, you can't destroy
women because you need them to make more cult members,

(08:31):
but they still have to pay for the sin of
Eve's disobedience. Right Like's, it was such a crime that
all women have to atone for it. Children who do
something as mild was pull away when they're a baby
being wiped also have to be beaten, because any kind
of disobedience to authority is the devil. Right, this becomes
Jane's favorite topic. He wrote often about Miriam, Moses's elder sister,

(08:54):
and Aaron, Moses's brother, who had opposed Moses when he
wanted to take an Ethiopian wife. God was livid at
their disobedience and cursed Miriam with leprosy. And this is
like one of Jean's favorite stories because it illustrates how
it illustrates in his eyes, how like sharp and immediate
and violent the punishment for any kind of disobedience has
to be. And Jean would often use the story of

(09:16):
Miriam and Aaron when he would talk about the responsibility
children have to obey without thought or question quote. This
is him talking about Miriam and Aaron. They did not
know our authority. They knew about it, but didn't know it.
Since the knowledge of authority seals mouths and settles matters
and many problems, doesn't it? Children in youth? Though Miriam
spoke against Moses, her words were restrained. Therefore she could, finally,

(09:39):
after being leprous and sent outside the camp, find repentance
and be restored. When Miriam turned white with leprosy, she
was ostracized and took it as discipline. But some rebellious
people were not restored to fellowship because they did not
or could not repent. Now, the people he's talking about there,
the rebellious folks who were not restored to fellowship because
they refuse to repent, are black people, particularly black people

(10:02):
who refuse to submit to white masters. Now, like many
racist denominations of Christianity, the scriptural justification for Jean's bigotry
is a biblical character named Ham or Cham. Both names
are correct. Apparently I'm not a Bible guy, but you
can call it either way. So the short version of
the story is that Ham's son Canaan, gets cursed by

(10:24):
Noah and people who suck have long interpreted this curse
as the darkening of Canaan's skin. So they're like, this
is how black people were created, right, this guy does
a bad thing, he gets cursed by Noah, and that's
where black folks come from. The Curse of Ham is
a frequent justification for the enslavement of black Africans. Probably
the best known modern example of this is the LDS Church,

(10:47):
the Mormon Church, which since the time of Brigham Young
has taught that black people were under the curse of
Ham as well as the curse of Cain, which justified
slavery and also meant they could not be members of
the priesthood. Church banned black people from being members of
the priesthood until nineteen seventy eight. So we are we
are not talking about like ancient history here.

Speaker 4 (11:09):
Yeah, it's like the other day.

Speaker 1 (11:11):
Yeah. Now, for reasons I don't like, that's the that's
how old Ron DeSantis is. That's how long that the
Mormons have been letting.

Speaker 4 (11:18):
That's when Superman won with Christopher Reeves came out in
the theater.

Speaker 1 (11:21):
That's right, that's right. Maybe that's what made them do it.
So for reasons I don't fully grasp and again are
not important. Gene always uses the name Cham for Ham,
which seems to be valid, although in more recent articles
when members of the Twelve Tribes are interviewed about this,
they always use the name Ham. I couldn't tell you why.
The actual story as to why Noah cursed Ham's sons

(11:45):
is incredibly funny, though, like it leads to a lot
of racism, or it justifies a lot of racism. But
it's very funny because the story is that Noah, if
you remember your Bible, like when we like depict Noah
in you know, popular culture, he's always just like austere
bearded wise man. He's a total fuck up in the Bible.
Like that's kind of Noah's thing is he's fucking up

(12:07):
all the time, you know. And so basically, as the
story goes, he gets housed one night, just absolute blackout drunk,
and he wakes up bare ass naked, and like Cham
walks in and like sees his dad with his fucking
dick out. And the first thing that occurs to Cham,
because he's disobedient, is like he runs to his brothers
and he's like, guys, guys, you gotta see this. Dad's

(12:29):
like fucking hanging grain right now. So he tries to
pull them in and they're like, no, you know it's
not You're not supposed to see your dad naked. That's disobedience.
Gene writes about this moment quote Cham was insubordinate of heart,
always expecting authority to fall. So he got his chance
to show what was in him. He revealed his father's fault,

(12:49):
and this proved that he was not at all in
subjection to his father's authority. His subjection to his father
was merely eye service or lip service. His submission was
only half hearted. So when the opportunity presented itself, seized
it to expose his father. There was a Satanic principle
working in him. So in Chan's in Cham's son, his
offering was cursed to bond slavery, an indentured servitude. For

(13:10):
this entire age, from the flood to the end of
the age, Cham's descendants only hope of recovery was through
submitting to their masters from the heart, not just giving
eye or lip service, but wholeheartedly serving. After the flood,
our father gave hope to mankind to be obedient to
the addition to the Second Covenant that there would be
no half hearted submission to anyone in authority in the world.

(13:31):
But Cham retained his sin of having a problem with authority,
submitting outwardly but still retaining his hidden rebellion. So afterward
Cham's descendants would be under the rod, and those who
received it learned submission to authority and loved their masters,
and were prepared for the eternal age, where many of
them will be kings among the nations. So what he's
saying here is that because of this sin of Cham,

(13:52):
all of his descendants black people need to be slaves,
right Like, it is their moral duty to be slaw
and love it. Right, that's the That's what his argument is.
That's what he believes, and that if they're good slaves,
if they're totally obedient, then they'll get to be kings,
you know, when Jesus comes back. Right Like, that's the
that's the argument. Pretty shitty, pretty bad guy, right Like,

(14:14):
that's that's fucked up stuff. We don't need to like
belabor the point.

Speaker 4 (14:18):
Not ideal.

Speaker 1 (14:19):
Yeah, I didn't.

Speaker 4 (14:21):
I didn't know. I I don't know any of that
background that this is how folks have reverse engineered rash. Yeah,
for slavery being.

Speaker 1 (14:30):
Time, Yeah, one of the web Yeah. Yeah. So in
Gene's theology, one of the things he writes is that
slave masters are actually the most burdened because of the
cursive ham because it's they have so much more response.
All the slave has to do is be obedient and happy. Right,
The slave master has so much to keep caught, like

(14:50):
to deal with. You know, you got all these slaves
to take care of, right, That's that's the real difficult job, right.

Speaker 4 (14:56):
It's more cultivating. You're cultivating as as they're is important. Obedience,
which is the most the most godly thing to yes.

Speaker 1 (15:05):
Yeah. And it's interesting because he talks about like the
responsibility that a slave master has, but it's a responsibility
to God. He has no responsibility to the human beings
that he holds in bondage. Lincoln, Gene taught, was an
evil emperor, damned by God for his refusal to accept
the holy order of slavery. Again, cruel and incompetent. Confederate

(15:25):
slave masters had no responsibility for like the fact that
they destroyed themselves. It's all Lincoln's fault because he's he's
usurping this like rightful order of the world. Likewise, the
apartheid government of South Africa bore no responsibility for its
brutality and corruption. Instead, the Black Africans who fought for
civil rights have damned all black people to endless generations

(15:47):
of suffering by removing apartheid.

Speaker 4 (15:49):
This is why they moved to Vermont, Like, I mean Vermont.

Speaker 1 (15:53):
They stay. I think that's part of why they pick it.
But they move all over the place, right, Like they're
going to be in call eventually, like twenty something states.

Speaker 4 (16:04):
Right.

Speaker 1 (16:04):
Wow, So yeah. I found a fascinating article published by
the Cult News Network in twenty twenty one, the year
Gene died that gives us an idea of how his
teachings continue to be carried on in the modern day.
The author set in sat in on a worship session
which included a lecture on sham slash ham from a
church teacher named Mevesser quote the Twelve Tribes. Teacher also

(16:29):
explained that all of the slaves before the Civil War
were happy and care free and grateful to be under
the tutelage of the white man. Meveser taught that even
if a slave was being whipped by his or her
master on some plantation, all of the other slaves were
happy that this errant slave received discipline and grateful that
their master had provided it. Meveser said once that the
evil Lincoln set the slaves free, poor Ham did not

(16:50):
know what to do since he was no longer under
the loving hand of Jaffeth, and so society in the
United States turned into a total mess, according to the
Twelve Tribes, because it devis from this divine doctrine. So
that's pretty cool. Nice nice folks. Now, the study group
here included one black woman, the only African American member

(17:13):
of that particular Twelve Tribes community, Bummer.

Speaker 4 (17:16):
I was just thinking about her, yeah, in the situation.

Speaker 1 (17:19):
Oh boy, Well, it's so I know who this person
is because of other articles I've read. But I do
want to read this quote about her from this article
because I find it like both very unsettling and sad
and kind of worth discussing. Mebser then called the only
female African American member of the community are Mammy and

(17:42):
praised her for being a humble Mammy servant. He stated
his conviction that the only way in the world that
shem Ham and Jayfath could truly live together in peace
and harmony is in the Body of the Messiah aka
the Twelve Tribes, not mixed up together in the Satanic
world where godly boundaries have been erased, where the races
will only fight amongst themselves. Ultimately, according to this Twelve

(18:03):
Tribes doctrine, Ham left on his own will only self
destruct unless he has Jfth to guide and protect him.
That's white people. At the meeting, one African American disciple
in the room thirty or forty people were there, stood
up and confessed hesitantly that he was feeling offended in
his flesh. He said, we're always talking about welcoming Ham
into the body of the Messiah, but most folks who

(18:24):
are aware of the nation of Ham would be very
offended by this teaching. He continued, Black folks were not
happy about their situation, and they certainly did not enjoy
being slaves. And I don't want to leave this room
with people thinking that it's true. So it's not like
especially now. And again this is twenty twenty one, which
I think may factor in why there was some resistance
to this, But that's they're still teaching the same things

(18:47):
that Spriggs was writing, you know, in the early eighties
about this stuff. It's pretty fucked up.

Speaker 4 (18:52):
I have a hard time wrapping my head around like
being like everything else than this is cool, but their
ideas of race aren't great, Like I and then to
speak and then to get up and speak about that
seems like it would take like a particular kind of bravery.

Speaker 1 (19:08):
It's strange, right, it is like it is. I think
about it a little bit like how you've got these guys,
you know, every now and then you get a Republican
who's into all of the other shitty stuff that the
right does. But like John McCain, they don't like torture,
right because, like they have, that is a personal thing
they've experienced with. So he's not going to be like, yeah,
people are amazing. Our capacity for compartmentalization is bitterly unmatched.

Speaker 4 (19:31):
I've gotten this far with a very well honed ability
to compartmental Yeah.

Speaker 1 (19:37):
Truly remarkable. As the Twelve Tribes continued to buy property
and create new communes around the United States and the world,
child abuse continue to be a regular fact of life.
In June of nineteen eighty seven, Patricia Jones, David Jones's wife,
had her fifth child, a daughter named Shoa Shua shuah,
I'm gonna guess. She recalls this as being a particularly

(19:58):
good time. For the most part, the colt was not
yet as extreme as it would become. They were able
to go like camping on the weekends, you know. They
families would do swimming trips to the lake. You know
there was the discipline was severe, but you also still
had something of a life. This gets clamped down on
as the years grow on and Jeane Spriggs gets older.
He starts to restrict his followers from more and more pleasures.

(20:20):
First he bans holiday celebrations, then he abans birthdays. After
several followers who had owned substantial property and loaned it
to the church left, taking their property with them, he
forbade members from owning any money or private property from
now on. As soon as you join, you are expected
to sign over your house, your car, your basic appliances,
you know, stuff like your refrigerators and stuff to the

(20:42):
Twelve Tribes. The former member who wrote that article in
the Chattanoogaan, who I cited last episode, recalled how this
process worked even for people who had very little to
sign over. All I had was an old, bashed up
car and seventy dollars. I had no problem giving them
my car, but I did not disc the money I
had because it was all that I had, which you know,

(21:04):
she does eventually get out, so that's this person does
eventually get out, so that's good for them. But like, yeah,
they'll take your like beat to shit old car. If
you've got a house, they'll take that. If you've got
a business, they'll certainly take.

Speaker 4 (21:15):
That, right And it seems like a very it's like
very popular cult behavior too. Yeah, with assets and then
put it into your real estate portfolio. Yes, because you
said what they had thirty six million dollars in.

Speaker 1 (21:27):
Yes, yes, they've done quite well for themselves. Spriggs commanded
ever more frequent punishments for his members. Shiwa recalls being
spanked for pretending a rolled up towel was a doll
because this was this is both she had violated their
prescriptions against private property because now she has a doll.
But also you're not allowed to imagine things like it's
a sin to imagine. So she gets beaten for pretending

(21:52):
that towel is a doll. She's also hit when she
doesn't eat enough. She's hit when she's taking caught taking
food from the refrigerator. She's hit from her parents and
from other adults when she's not respectful enough at communal dinners.
And this is the kind of thing where this Spriggs
encourages parents to abuse their own and other people's children.

(22:12):
And he also every time there's a gathering, he will
pressure the adults to hit their kids more. He'll tell them, quote,
you should be proud of these wounds that your children bear.
If you love your children, you will not be spare
be swayed by their screams, which is I don't know,
you could kind of sum up America that way, right,
Like you love your children, he will not be swayed

(22:33):
by their screams. Very very appropriate line for this country.
But not all parents go along with the escalating violence.
Mary Wiseman, wife of the second in command of the cult,
grew increasingly unhappy after Spriggs paddled her six year old daughter.
She threatened to take her kids and leave. Ultimately, she

(22:53):
decides not to go. I think it's just because doing
that would mean getting cut off financially and losing all
all of her family members right the whole everything she
knows at this point, she's lived here so long, like
you have to give up all of your connections if
you leave right, and so she doesn't take her kids away. Ultimately,
Wiseman is going to die very young at age thirty

(23:14):
nine of cervical cancer. She dies in part because Spriggs
will not let her receive modern medical care. When she dies,
he then tells his followers that her unconfessed sin of
bucking authority was what had killed her. Quote guilt and
unconfessed sin is how you get sick. This is why
people die young.

Speaker 4 (23:32):
Pretty cool, Yeah, I have I have such a like,
my feelings towards people who are in a cult for
a long time are complicated. Yeah, because like largely because
you're like, there is there seems to be a point
of no return for being able to get out in
a real way, And then you have kids and you
pass it on to them in one way or another,

(23:54):
and you're just like, ugh, like it's.

Speaker 1 (23:57):
Well, and it's also why if you talk to and
the whole field of like cult deprogramming is complex and
uh sure to a degree, pretty fucked up, but like
one of the things that is really durably true and
really maybe the only good advice I would give someone
who was like, I have a family member and a
cult is past a certain point, don't argue with them,

(24:20):
don't fight about it. Just tell them, hey, you know,
if anytime you want to talk about anything, like I'm here,
make sure they know they have a door open, like,
because you can't, you can't fight it out of them.

Speaker 4 (24:30):
Right, that's great almost everything, Yeah, that's great. It's just
like just be there. Yeah, functionally, if you're able to.

Speaker 1 (24:38):
Be, Yeah, don't fight them, you know, because again, past
a certain point. I'm not saying like, if they're early in,
don't try to warn someone, don't try to be like, hey,
I found this fucked up info. But like, if they
are straight up in the cult, the most important thing
is that they know they can talk to you, right,
because then maybe they'll be able to get out the stories.
When you read about stories people who escape from the

(25:00):
Twelve Tribes, it's generally like they'll wind up at some
family member's house who they you know, hadn't talked to
in years, but knew that they could you know, count on. Yeah,
and yeah. The people who never get out are generally
the people who don't have that right.

Speaker 4 (25:13):
Right, because like you, if you leave, you know, I
just can't imagine in a lot of ways, a less
forgiving society to be dumped off into. It's like you
leave the cult, you have nothing, and now you're just
in America with.

Speaker 1 (25:27):
Nothinghing, Yeah exactly, it's yeah, a desperate situation. Yeah, So
to be entirely so Gene, you know, Wiseman becomes kind
of this nexus of revenge against him. But luckily for Jean,
she gets cancer. He stops her from getting medical care.
And this is I think there's a degree to which
this was tactical for him, Like if she dies, he

(25:47):
loses a problem. But he is going to quickly extend
this rule across the entire flock, right, it is it
is pretty from a pretty early stage, like you are
not allowed to go to the doctor if you're in
this organization, especially children. Part because he doesn't want children
to go to doctors because doctors will report child abuse,
right the blue marks. Yeah, and the way he just

(26:07):
he's like, well, look, you don't need to go to
the doctor. If you're following God in your heart too,
you can't just is not just enough to do the
right things you have to. If there's rebellion in your heart,
then that's why you get sick. So if someone gets sick,
you can just say they must have rebelled in their
heart right, they must not have. Yeah. Now, if you're wondering,
did this policy cause any kids to die? Yes, it

(26:28):
sure did. And I'm going to quote from Pacific Standard
magazine here. Sorry, Sophie, we made it a long stretch
of that. I know, a bunch of dead kids.

Speaker 3 (26:36):
Last episode, when you started mentioning certain things, I was like, Okay, yeah,
said kids have died.

Speaker 2 (26:43):
Okay, but here here it is.

Speaker 1 (26:46):
Yeah, No, Sophie, this is this is going to be.
This is the high body count episode a medium medium
body count.

Speaker 2 (26:54):
Also take an ad break to prepare.

Speaker 1 (26:56):
Yeah, you know who won't force children to avoid life
saving medical care?

Speaker 3 (27:03):
God? I hope not the.

Speaker 1 (27:05):
Sponsors of the Unless it's the Reagan Coins people. We're
back and we're talking about our coins. Sorry, before we.

Speaker 4 (27:16):
Get into the before we get into the brutality of
this next phase. How genuinely professionally curious, How do you
too take care of your mental health and dealing with
what you deal with every day? Like I feel like
you talk you're really talking about some stuff like do
you do you go on long walks or do you
uh you have a therapist on retainer.

Speaker 1 (27:36):
I mean, I've been playing the boulders Gate the new recently.
That's been that's been great.

Speaker 2 (27:41):
We have animals and stuff.

Speaker 4 (27:45):
Yeah, it's fine, you know, that's very good. I just
want to make sure. I just want to make sure
you have an outlet.

Speaker 3 (27:51):
I produced the opposite of the show, which is cool
people who did cool stuff, And.

Speaker 4 (27:56):
Oh that's a cool.

Speaker 1 (27:58):
And I'm just fundamentally okens fine, h well all the time.

Speaker 4 (28:03):
Yeah, rob People who can't see Robert's just been lifting
weights this entire time, so I think that's probably how
he gets through it.

Speaker 1 (28:10):
It's nice.

Speaker 2 (28:10):
Yeah, you're not wrong.

Speaker 1 (28:16):
So okay, here we're back and we're going to talk
about all these dead kids. Here's Pacific Standard magazine. During
a whooping cough epidemic that swept the community in the
late nineteen eighties, Bruce Wittenberg grew alarmed when his fifteen
month old became sick. He had more than a half
dozen former and current members say he consulted the elders,
who told him if God wants her to live, he'll

(28:37):
save her. She died a few hours later. It was
the worst thing that happened to us, said Wittenberg, who
left the tribes in two thousand and one. During her
second pregnancy, another former member, Ruth Williams, developed placenta previa,
a dangerous condition in which the placenta blocks the birth canal.
She was told that if she prayed hard enough, God
would move the placina out of the way. Despite beseeching
God on her hands and knees, Williams started him when

(29:00):
she went into labor and lost consciousness, at which point
she was driven to a hospital, she says, and dumped
on the sidewalk outside the emergency room. She woke to
the news that her son had been stillborn. Another woman
who labored for days was only brought to a hospital
after her first child died inside her.

Speaker 4 (29:17):
So pretty bad, did the person who do we know
if the person who is dumped on the sidewalk left
the call or did she have to walk back? Did
she have to go back to the cult?

Speaker 1 (29:28):
Yeah? I think this is how she left, right, Like,
oh yeah, so Wiseman's brief spring of resistance had horrified
Sprigs right, so he clamps down like She is generally
seen as the dividing line between a lot of the
more like abusive and restrictive things that he puts in
for his cult. Like basically, before Wiseman, you're kind of

(29:50):
able to have some sort of a life even though
there's these very harsh rules about child abuse. And after Wiseman,
he doesn't want people doing anything that can give give
them even a second of happiness because that it's the
root of a disobedience. Right, if you have anything in
your life at all besides his teachings, you know that's
that's not going to work for him.

Speaker 4 (30:07):
I'm kind of I'm surprised in a way it ended
up making it as long as it did, because like
usually you have some like something like something to like
have people be able to have an outlet that goes
against all of your other authoritarian tendencies. But this person
just seems like, top to bottom, the worst authoritarian.

Speaker 1 (30:25):
I think there are. For one thing, it's different communities
are a little different, so they're not all as strict
as they're supposed to be on paper. A lot of
it is that the people who join, Like I read
one account of a dude who's like the father of
a kid who gets pulled into the cult and he's like,
it's a cult. I know that they've done bad things.

(30:46):
My kid is bipolar and troubled and was living on
the streets before he found these people, so like, I'm
not sure it was. I think net it's been a
positive for him because now he has like a place
in the structure. Like again, I'm not like commenting on that.
That's just what this guy said, And I do suspect
I think based on interviews I've read, there are a

(31:07):
number of people who are like, yeah, there's things that
are bad or fucked up or like you know that
you have to skirt around, but like, it is a community,
we have a life. You know, you're not exposed to
the vicissitudes of existing under capitalism as much. You get
to kind of hide from the hard parts of life totally.

Speaker 4 (31:23):
Like this is the out This is like one of
the outcomes of having next to zero social safety. Yes exactly,
yehople step in, people step in, and then it becomes
an alternative.

Speaker 1 (31:33):
There's a lot that's bad about this, But what am
I going to do, like find out how to make
like rent and stuff on my own? I've been in
this culture. I don't have like marketable skills. I don't
feel a lot of people I think that is kind
of where this goes for them. So by the early
nineteen nineties, law enforcement in several states had tried and
generally failed to investigate and act on allegations of abuse

(31:54):
in the cult. The only realistic threat to janes control
of these kids came from dis affected parents who had
custody of their children. In the years that followed Mary's death,
tribal elders started telling parents that they were not fit
to raise their own kids. Children were sent away to
other communes to be raised, and married couples were forced
to split up. One example of this particular horror comes

(32:16):
from a family at a Twelve Tribes community in nineteen
ninety two. Noah, Yoshia, and Ezra were three brothers aged
seven to twelve. One day, they were all playing in
a tree when an elder's wife told them they had
to stop. They made the mistake of telling her that
their dad had given them permission, and according to Spriggs,
this was an act of Satanic rebellion. So the elder

(32:37):
married to that woman came by and he grabbed them.
He locked Noah in the furnace room of a house
and told him to write down a comprehensive list of
all of his sins. This took a full week. Since
Noah was nine, he didn't have that many sins, right,
So he's going to keep locked in there until the
list is long enough, so he has to keep start
making up sins, right, So he's like writing about stealing
pennies and shit just to like fill paper while he's alone,

(33:00):
and he's being like starved here, right, He's in a
furnace room, he's shitting in a bucket, he's getting one
meal a day while he continues to expand this list
of sins until it's long enough for the elder. But
the elder is not willing to accept like this because
this is like a little nine year old church kid's
idea of sins and they're just not bad enough for

(33:21):
this guy. So this guy's like, no, I know what
you must have done. You must be having gay sex.
And Noah, being a nine year old who has been homeschooled,
is like, I don't know what that is. And so
this elder then sits down and explains in like very
pornographic detail, like you get the feeling this is like
a kink for this guy, right, Like you get stories

(33:42):
like this in these cults, we will be talking about
more of them. So after this whole experience ends, all
three boys are taken from their parents and sent to
different homes. Noah goes on like he's put in another
commune in another state, and he's like paired up with
other boy his age who are called his brothers, and
their main job is to beat the shit out of

(34:03):
him all the time because he's a corruptor, right because
he's gay. Now, according to Yeah, this one of the
elders in the church, he's not allowed to rejoin his
parents for more than a year. Spriggs was nearly as
concerned with the possibility of sexual contact between heterosexual kids
as he was with you know, the other kind. Eventually,
he forbade all physical contact between non married and non

(34:26):
related males and females. If children were caught in the
act of making any other kind of physical contact with
other kids of the opposite sex, they would be beaten.
If young adults or adults treated as such, had any
kind of sexual contact, which in the Twelve tribes included
holding hands and kissing, the punishment was marriage. Like if
you catch like a boy and a girl holding hands,

(34:48):
they have to get married now, right, do.

Speaker 4 (34:49):
You know, do we know like what their ORG chart
looks like? Like who is enforcing this stuff? Is there?
Is there like a mayer of the tribe or what.

Speaker 1 (34:57):
Is the each each commune has a group of elders
who seems like make decisions in common. And then Spriggs
is obviously Spriggs and his wife are are the big
overall leaders. Now there is a degree to which the
org chart is a little bit of a mystery. Still,
I think in coming years, as more and more people
leave and we get more detailed, we might will probably

(35:18):
know more. That's what I can tell from from what's
the research?

Speaker 2 (35:23):
You said young adults? But what's that? What is what
is that considered here?

Speaker 1 (35:28):
I mean it seems like thirteen to fifteen year olds
are not uncommonly getting married off. So I would say
when they say young adults, some of them are adults
and some of them are what we would.

Speaker 2 (35:39):
Call children, right, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (35:42):
Now sometimes they are being married to other kids their age.
But like this is a you know, it's not uncommon.

Speaker 2 (35:47):
For the other old hands.

Speaker 4 (35:49):
Yeah, exactly, I must be, I must I'm also I'm
sorry if I'm getting ahead of us here, but are
are these kids working like are they.

Speaker 1 (35:57):
Yeah, yeah, as soon as like you, they only do
a few years of school, you kick them out of that,
like you don't even really need him to.

Speaker 2 (36:03):
Read for punish Kids with marriage are also doing.

Speaker 4 (36:07):
Child Yeah yeah, yeah, I was. I'm curious if this
had to do with adding to their real estate portfolios.
These kids, these kids must be working for free problems. Yeah,
and a lot of situations.

Speaker 1 (36:20):
Absolutely so. In the early days, boys and girls could
at least socialize to some extent during the homeschool educations
that they received. But this also made Sprigs uncomfortable and
so he bans co ed education, which coupled with the
absolute lack of any sex ed for children, led to
some peculiar behavior from the young men of the community.

(36:42):
To be specific, they started fucking the farm animals. This
is This is a problem in Germany, in the United
States and multiple different like state communes. This is like,
there's like this outbreak of bestiality. Now it's Pacific standard
bag just say that, like, yeah, these kids start experimenting
with bestiality. It is unclear to me if they actually did.

(37:05):
For one thing, this cult defines two kids holding hands
as sexual content, right or kissing or whatever. That's not sex,
we can all say, right, reasonable people, because you know,
it's not sexual contact like kiss another kid or whatever
or hold their hand. So I don't know if actually
there's a lot of bestiality going on or it, Like.

Speaker 4 (37:24):
I do want to note. This just came up the
other day I reread The Last Picture Show, which I
hadn't read since high school, by Larry McMurtry about kids
in Texas. I was not prepared how much this, like
classic American novel had cow fucking in it, Like, oh yeah,
it was like pages pages dedicated to fucking guys.

Speaker 1 (37:48):
And look, that's accurate. I come from Texas. I grew
up on a cow farm. You know, that's just what
people know. But we don't know if I mean, maybe
it is what they do, right a group hysteria in
which were yeah, I don't yeah, And that's that's the thing.
I don't know if there's actually a lot of kids
having sex with animals or if this is like a
moral panic, because maybe they're like forcing kids to come

(38:08):
up with new sins that they've done, right, sure, and
so some kids like, yeah, maybe that's how it starts.
I don't know that it's not certainly not impossible, Like
there are like that a bunch of confused kids would
experiment with animals too, like it could happen. Right. The
main evidence that supports the idea that some abuse of
animals took place is although, honestly, when kids are this abused,

(38:30):
I don't know that i'd describe what they're doing to
the animals as abuse, like you have so fundamentally damaged
these children like I wouldn't. I wouldn't like want to
morally condemn them from for the sheer confusion that must
be growing up in this this circumstance. But in two
thousand and six, Spriggs ordered the young men accused of
bestiality to execute all of the animals they had allegedly molested.

(38:53):
This includes thirty sheep, multiple cows, goats, and chicken. So
you know, if it was something that was made up,
they went quite far in suppressing it. Now, God, it's
valuable to contrast the severity with which Spriggs treated these
allegations of bestiality to how he and his cult leaders

(39:13):
handled allegations that adult members had molested children. Right, Because
a lot less seriously as it actually turns out, Because
you know, fundamentally it is not necessarily a sin in
the same way in their eyes.

Speaker 4 (39:26):
Right, is it only a sin just because it's sex
and it's like extra not extra marital, Like I'm sure
it seems like having sex with children against Yeah, that's
not sex, Like raping children is probably like only bad
because of the carnal nature, because kids don't seem like
they're even humans in their eyes.

Speaker 1 (39:42):
Yeah, I don't. I think it also might be more
that like there's this the idea that a kid would
be able to turn down or stop an adult from
molesting them is kind of impossible within this belief system
because children are it cannot cannot disobey an adult. So
I think that I think that there is this like weird,

(40:03):
this situation created for Spriggs where there's a way in
which they cannot take this as seriously right because of this,
this this theology he's built of abuse. So one spring
morning in two thousand and two, cult member Kimberly Peck
noticed her husband, Jeff Leonard, who she had recently married,
heading into her daughter's tent early in the morning. Now,
Peck had joined the Twelve Tribes as a single mother.

(40:25):
Right She'd been married to Jeff after like he'd basically
been picked for her right, and they lived in she
had She had a quantcet style hut with Jeff, and
then her kids lived in another hut. And this is
on a Central Florida compound earned owned by the colt.
After several mornings of watching Jeff leave early to fetch
their daughters for the day, she decided to follow them.

(40:46):
She got suspicious, and I'm going to quote now from
an article in the Broward Palm Beach New Times. As
Peck watched in fear, forty five year old Leonard began
caressing one of the girls, kissing his stepdaughter intimately, and
rubbing his hands over praise the place as he shouldn't,
she told authorities later, when he was finished, he moved
her over to her younger sister, Peck claims. Peck says
that she would have tried to stop it if she
weren't so alone in the woods. Soon Peck would learn

(41:09):
how alone she was. Peck spoke to her children, and
all three of them, two daughters and a son, said
that they had been molested by their stepfather. Peck went
to the elders in twelve tribes. She wanted justice. Instead,
the tribe elders who claimed to be so strict about
cardinal relations that couples found holding hands are forced to marry,
covered up the abuse, and protected Leonard from the criminal charges.
They hid him at another of the Colt's properties in Georgia,

(41:30):
Peck says, with the concurrence of prosecutors and police. So,
you know, not an unexpected story, entirely very Catholic church
vibes in a lot of ways, like moving them to
another parish effectively, you know.

Speaker 4 (41:47):
Yeah, well, I feel like it's it seems like a
logical outcome of treating children like they're inhuman and like
they're only there to serve you and to serve God. Ultimately,
like you can't take it seriously because if you take
it seriously, it reveals that it was inevitable due to

(42:08):
like the structure of your organization anyway, So you ultimately
have to hide it. Like that's why this keeps happening.

Speaker 1 (42:13):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Now it is, like obviously, it's
hard to think of an environment more suited to predatory
pedophilia than the one that Spriggs has created here. Right.
Pedophiles thrive in environments in which children are isolated from
mainstream society so that there are not adults who might
notice and report their behavior. They also thrive in cultures

(42:35):
where children are punished for disrespect because then they're less
likely to try and fight back. So that you know, again,
by the everything that that Spriggs has done here has
created like an ideal place for predators to thrive.

Speaker 4 (42:49):
Right well. And in this case where there is a
concerned mother, where that mother has like no power or
recourse eye, oh yeah, like that's like this whole other
thing is that it's like you can, yeah do it
and if you get noticed, even if you get noticed,
those people don't have records.

Speaker 1 (43:04):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So Peck eventually left the cult because
this was the only way she could press charges against Leonard.
He was finally arrested and charged and convicted in two
thousand and seven, but he was far from the only
culprit of child abuse with it like child sexual abuse
within the cult. Around the same time as all this
was happening, another cult member, David Drew's, was charged with

(43:27):
fondling a girl at the colt's West Palm Beach compound.
Police and prosecutors in DeSoto County claim that cult leadership
ignored reports against both men and took steps to impede
their investigations, and there are numerous stories from similar behavior
within cult communes around the country. The Denver Post reported
on this case of abuse from twenty eleven. Sometimes a

(43:49):
man accused of sexual abuse will be kicked out of
the cult, ex members said, but sometimes he will be
forgiven and allowed to stay. How a case is handled
often depends on how much status the abuser has within
the cult. Frequently, children who report sexual abuse are not believed.
Some are punished and told the abuse was their fault.
Anderson said that as a small girl that she is
a small girl, told a woman she trusted about being

(44:09):
sexually abused. That woman brought it to other adults, and
Anderson was questioned by a male elder. She kept silent.
Another elder's wife then took her aside and questioned her.
She said, how do you have intercourse? And that's what
threw me off. I said, what is intercourse? And why
would I have it? And then she said is it
anal or vaginal? Anderson didn't know what those words meant,
and the elder's wife concluded that she was lying about

(44:31):
being abused in an attempt to get attention. Anderson said,
it's like make up your mind, like is this sinful
to teach people? And thus they shouldn't be expected to
answer questions about it or or are they lying if
they don't know what sex is? Like what is it's
I don't know. I guess you don't have to be
consistent if you're a fucking cult member whatever.

Speaker 4 (44:49):
Yeah, well, I mean I think that that's kind of
like one of just it's one of the ways that
the power structure works is like not giving you the
tools that you need in order to report and then
using the fact that you don't have the tools against you.

Speaker 1 (45:01):
Yeah, this is like a big thing with a lot
of Republican governance too, right, taking away people's tools to
have any kind of resistance to a lot of these
power structures. It is interesting to me that when they
have been forced to comment on these cases, representatives of
the Twelve Tribes tend to emphasize the importance of forgiveness
in their faith, a kind of mercy they rarely to

(45:22):
seem to extend to small children. Quote. The judge agreed
to set a two hundred and fifty thousand dollars bail
for Leonard tribe elder Nelson says members haven't decided whether
to post the bail since they would likely have to
put up some of the tribe's property as collateral. As
Nelson spoke, several members worked in the blazing afternoon sun
building what looked like a drainage ditch to the goat pen,
and a woman in an Amish style dress brought them

(45:44):
water in a bucket. Nelson said the tribe will help
members like Leonard face their sin. He had come to
the place where he had surrendered himself to God Yeshua,
and so we will always help him. Nelson said. It
seemed that he Leonard was being very upfront and honest
about his situation. So that's Nelson's this cult the elder,
and he's like, look, no, we'll support him through all
of his legal trials because he feels bad for repeatedly

(46:04):
molesting children. You know, that's all that matters. He's given
himself because again, it's not disobedient for an adult to
molest a child, because children have to be obedient to adults,
and it's not as long as his disobedience was to
God and as long as he's truly sorry about that
has repented to God. Then yeah, then he's still one
of us. Right, you know who's still one of us? Podcasters?

(46:27):
Not child Moleston cults. Here's ads.

Speaker 2 (46:31):
Wow, that was really bad.

Speaker 1 (46:34):
One of my better pivots. I feel thank you so much.

Speaker 4 (46:38):
Here's ads.

Speaker 1 (46:39):
Yeah, oh we're back. So by the early two thousands,
the Twelve Tribes had at least three thousand members, probably
closer to four thousand. They operated communes in twenty two
states and several other countries, including England, Spain, Australia, and Germany.
The latter state Germany is where they faced one of

(47:00):
their most serious acts of state. I don't know, I
wrote repression here, but like, I don't call it's not
really like it's one of the only times that a
state actually acted against them, right, in an effective way.
Corporal punishment is illegal in Germany, right, so all of
their teachings about hitting the shit out of kids, you
actually can't teach that, right, Like, you are breaking the law,
not but just by doing it, but by like spreading

(47:22):
this material. And so in twenty thirteen, a reporter for
RTLTV infiltrates one of the Twelve Tribes communes in Germany.
Now getting into these communities, is not hard. The cult
recruits by inviting people in. Right. A lot of journalists
have gone to other meetings of theirs. Right, you can
come in, you can stay for a worship session. This
journalist pretended that they were like interested in joining, right,

(47:44):
that basically they were one of these disaffected people who's
maybe looking for a cult. And they This journalist stays
in there for two days and in that brief, like
and she's filming undercover. Right, in two days captures on
video fifty individual incidents of child abuse. That's how frequent
this case, Like two that's not a lot of time.

(48:04):
It's hard to find fifty examples of anything in two
days filming, like, yeah, it's wild, Yeah, it's it's quite
quite an intense number. In one case, a little girl
is beaten for saying I'm tired because that's disobedient. Right,
So kudos don't say this often on this show. Kudos

(48:25):
to Germany. Here they seize all forty children and put
them in foster care. Right, they get those kids the
fuck away from their parents. This sparks a police raid
on another tribe's commune in France, where four children are
taken after evidence of abuse is uncovered. These rare prosecutions
and raids, while you know, kudos to everyone involved in
that in France and Germany, do not seriously harm the

(48:47):
overall structure of the cult. The Twelve Tribes were supported
primarily by the businesses they started in every New State,
in town where they bought property, the yellow Deli was
the model, and restaurants were always a profitable endeavor. Well,
we're always a profita little endeavor in that they bring
in people, right, Another yellow Deli is started in Boulder,
where it gets a reputation for serving really good food

(49:09):
and continuing to draw in troubled, hungry youngsters. There's a
lot of a lot of rail travel through Boulder, a
lot of like train hopping kids and stuff in that town.
Like it's a good place to recruit in this way.

Speaker 4 (49:21):
Yeah, for sure, you can get some you can get
some crust punks in.

Speaker 1 (49:24):
Your yeah, exactly. Yeah. They also ran a cafe called
Matte Factor, matt Factor, m ate Factor in Manitou Springs,
and these are again the profit from these businesses is
that they bring in recruits.

Speaker 4 (49:41):
Wellam that you can and that your dishwashers and waiters, etc.
Are probably working for free.

Speaker 1 (49:46):
Yeah, although you know, even if you want to know
how hard it is to run a restaurant, even when
you have pure slave labor doing all of the work.
Their restaurants like don't really run a profit usually, like
it's consistent loss lead for them, right, you have to
subsidize the restaurant because it's just it is fucking hard
to make money with a restaurant, like even if you're

(50:08):
this cult. Right, So these yellow Delis are basically their
loss leaders, right, while they make their real money, millions
of it through an industry that does not exactly fit
with the crunchy Jesus free kippie vibes that they put
on in public. I'm going to quote from Pacific Standard
magazine again here. Most of the Colorado Community's money comes
from construction companies, the ex members said. One business, Commonwealth Services, LLC,

(50:32):
was formed in twenty sixteen and registered to member Matthew
Morgan at the group's Boulder County compound on Elder Dorado
Springs Drive. According to records from the Colorado Secretary of
State's Office, the business uses the trade name CWS Excavating.
Its website says it's a family owned and operated septic
installation company. It's one of a number of construction companies
the Twelve Tribes is operated during the last five decades.

(50:54):
A Massachusetts based company, BOJ Construction LLC, pulled in several
million dollars a year at its height in the early
two thousands and drove the group's funding. X members said
young men in the cult would travel the country for jobs,
rent a little house for everybody, and work nearly around
the clock without pay until the job was done. So
that's how it's construction, right, They're like the fucking mob. Right,

(51:14):
They've got this gold The.

Speaker 4 (51:15):
Gold standard of the cult job is the Heaven's Gate
mid nineties web development.

Speaker 1 (51:21):
Oh, absolutely, groundbreaking web design. Got to hand it to
Heaven's Gate. They knew what they were doing.

Speaker 4 (51:28):
They had the best hearing this that it's like, it's
like uncompensated construction. Oh yeah, it's terrible.

Speaker 1 (51:34):
Yeah, that's fucking nightmare. Yeah. Now, if you'll remember, these
folks have a little bit of Judaism mixed in with
their fundamentalist Christianity, right, so they're.

Speaker 4 (51:42):
Not supposed to work, so probably still anti Semitic, right, Like,
I haven't.

Speaker 1 (51:46):
Actually run into that allegation. I don't know, get like.

Speaker 4 (51:49):
I imagine they're kind of like like Christian Zionists who
are like, yeah, we'll use the pieces that are important outwardly. Yeah,
like behind closed doors were still you know.

Speaker 1 (52:00):
I will say one of the things is interesting to
me about them because I've read they have a website
that I've been reading, and they do make a big
point of being like, we're actually not one of those
cults who believes everyone who's not a Christian goes to Hell.
They believe that there are the thing that they specifies
there are righteous people who are obedient to their conscience
even if they're not Christians, and those people get to

(52:21):
go to one of the heaven levels. They do kind
of this Catholic thing where I think there's a contributory.
I'm not an expert on their esk on the you know,
but like, yeah, I did. That is a little bit
of a difference from some of the other things I
found anyway, because there's this, you know, little sprig of
Judaism mixed into everything. They're not supposed to work on
the Sabbath, right, you know, right, so that that and

(52:44):
spring the fact that sprigs it's also mandatory to attend
two prayer meetings every single day. That gets in the
way of sweet Lady capitalism, right, Like, you're losing a
lot of work time if you're doing two prayers a
day and you're not working one day of the week.
That's just unacceptable if you're running a business in Spriggs's eyes, Right,
So they have to find some way. How do you

(53:04):
justify making people work on the Sabbath when, like God
was pretty clear. You know, if you're a Bible guy,
this is not there's not really like a lot of
fucking around room here.

Speaker 3 (53:16):
You know.

Speaker 4 (53:16):
There's like ten to twelve rules.

Speaker 1 (53:18):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's not a lot of them. Yeah,
this is a big one, but the two rules.

Speaker 4 (53:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (53:24):
Yeah. So Spriggs and other cult leadership were known to
declare pushes, and a push is like an exemption, a
temporary exemption for their working members from attending worship sessions
or from taking off the Sabbath. One former leader told
an interviewer, Geene would say, if it's for a good cause,
God will forgive us for working all the time. What
basically happened was everything became a push. Right, They're just

(53:47):
doing this all the time now because it's the money,
so good right, you're you would crease your profits by
so much. Businesses were held by the church or church
elders via a dizzying series of interlocking LLCs, which ensured
that no own members actually owned property or the means
to make a living for themselves. This means that there
are a lot of cases of like former cult members
who will like build a business that makes millions of

(54:09):
dollars for the cult and then they'll leave because it's
abusive and they've got nothing, right, like absolutely nothing, you know.

Speaker 4 (54:15):
Wild.

Speaker 1 (54:16):
Yeah, And again I should note here it is illegal
to have people work for free. It is illegal to
even be like, oh, well they're donating their time, right,
This is like like you cannot do that. It is
against the Now people don't get punished for it, right
because this is the kind of crime that rich people commit, right,
and these are rich people now, Sprigs is wealthy. This

(54:38):
is a multimillion dollar cult, so it never becomes a
prime And they also there's also some exemptions of like
if you're a business owner, you can if your kids
work to some extent, and like there are like but
like you can't make people work for free, which is
what the cult does. They have been in violation of
the law to a massive extent the whole time they've existed.

Speaker 4 (54:55):
This is like, I mean you you had said it
in reference to the construction thing that it's like the mob,
but like the other place where it feels like the
mob is like they had to have a lawyer help
them set up those outs. Yeah, for sure, they had
to have a lawyer and be like, here's how you
keep your money safe within a network of lls because
you don't one a layman does not know that. Now,

(55:16):
so they had they had like outside help in order
to set up this structure to work in this way.

Speaker 1 (55:22):
Is yeah bonkers. So yeah, this is very much illegal again,
but it's also the kind of crime the government has
very little interest in prosecuting because it's it would be easy.
I think part of why nothing happens is that it
would be pretty easy for a Christian themed cult like
the Twelve Tribes to cry religious persecution and pull ind

(55:43):
support from the mainstream evangelical right. That hasn't really happened,
but I think it's because the government never prosecuted them
for this kind of shit, you know. Pacific Standard magazine
talked to one man who used his considerable skills to
create a multimillion dollar construction business for the cult and
ran it for years or a massive profit of the church. Quote.
He ran a construction company that made three or four

(56:04):
million in revenue annually, he said, which paid for about
ten thousand dollars in monthly expenses for the community he
lived in at the time. He'd send whatever was left
to Hidden Nite, which is the cult headquarters. I started
that business and ran it all, but I was having
a hard time buying socks for my daughter. That's what
I mean about not paying labor. You're eating millet for
breakfast and you can't buy clothes for your kids. And

(56:25):
one of the black box things about this cult that
like I just don't have a satisfying answer for you,
was like, are they fucking living it up? Is there
like some leadership right in a separate location and they're
like living the high life. There are rumors that Spriggs
spent a significant portion of the aughts living in luxury
and the Mediterranean. I have not seen hard evidence of this, though.
He dies on a cult compound, right, or he's like

(56:48):
brought to the hospital from a cult compound or something
like that. So he's in the States near the end
of his life. I don't know, like, is he does
this all turn into a financial con Is this all
about the money? A little bit unclear to me. But
the money's going somewhere, right, Like a lot of money
is being made, and that somewhere is the headquarters of
the cult, right, they are getting everything so well.

Speaker 4 (57:09):
In some cases, the money is just the power that
allows you to do the thing that you get off on.
And that's what I mean, that's I don't know because
I only have what you've told me to this point.
But like that to me is what it sounds like.
Like this guy sounds like a true believer who also
is probably like really getting off on the power pieces
that he's able he's able to facilitate by way of

(57:31):
being in this position, and he's able to maintain that position.
To your point, like if you have that much if
you have that much money in ultimately in real estate,
no one can really touch you unless unless you're robbing
other people with money. Like that's when the government intervenes.

Speaker 1 (57:50):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 4 (57:51):
After Waco, the government doesn't really intervene in this sort
of thing.

Speaker 1 (57:55):
Now, I mean, I got that is one of the
tough things when it's like, what do you do about this?
Because obviously it's not okay to just let it happen,
But also the government has a terrible track record of
handling cults. I'm not sure that it's better for everywhere
right about these kids? Are you saying sending the FBI

(58:15):
in to rescue these kids as better? Well, that hasn't
always worked in the past. Sometimes they all burn to
death in a basement. So I don't know. I don't
know how we fix this with the long arm of
the law right and honestly, the thing that is ultimately
fixing it in the long run, like by some accounts,
basically all of the children raised in this cult over
the last twenty years have left, like the vast, vast majority,

(58:39):
like it is dying out according to numerous reports, just
as a result of how harsh it is. Like ultimately,
the thing that always ends this kind of shit is
not the cops, it's not the Feds. It's former members
and their support networks and family helping each other get
out and move on.

Speaker 4 (58:57):
Like that's just how it is, which is which is
absolutely the truth, and and I agree, I mean, it's
like the government doesn't have a great track record of
interviewing inn sh no, no, I know that well, but
it's it's so it's so disheartening because really the truth is,
if you want to start an abusive cult and gain

(59:17):
a lot of power and and be sort of horrendously
abusive to all the people around you, you can do
and get away with that for like a generation in
this country. Yeah, that's it's there's no recourse, there's no
way around it outside of just like it'll burn out
events and it's tough.

Speaker 1 (59:34):
Like obviously, I think there's a lot that could and
should be done in ri stuff, Like I think it
would be there's a lot to do about like how
what like there's probably presumably probably ways to like mandate more.
I don't know, Yeah, I honestly, legally, I don't know
how you fix this. Somebody else will have to solve

(59:56):
that for me, or if there is like realistically, can
you have a society that has religious freedom in the
way that we do and doesn't offer people a way
to basically drop out of society with their kids? Right, Like,
how do you how do.

Speaker 4 (01:00:14):
We simultaneously need a society that you do? There isn't
such a strong and realistic urge to want to drop
out of as well.

Speaker 1 (01:00:20):
Yeah, yeah, and yeah I anyway life, So as kind
of you get these stories about the later years, you
start to hear some more mixed things about Gene, including
the fact that like maybe he had stepped away from
direct control and was just kind of living out his days. Uh,

(01:00:42):
these are kind of mixed. Some former members will be like, no,
he was like holding on right up until the end.
I don't know who's right. A lot of the confusion
comes from the fact that in two thousand and eight,
Marcia Spriggs, Jean's wife is caught having cheating on him
like a bunch, Like she is. She is getting a
rad own that cult, which I gotta say, trailblazer for women,

(01:01:04):
right being the wife of the cult leader cheating on
him a bunch right now, that's groundbreaking, you know, I love, Yeah,
we we stand a feminist icon March's Are you getting away?

Speaker 4 (01:01:16):
I mean, I understand she was caught, but like I will,
like one time would be hard to get away with.

Speaker 1 (01:01:22):
Some people will say she was running things right, that
she was really the power, especially maybe Jeans getting kind
of like sick and old.

Speaker 3 (01:01:30):
Yeah, I was waiting for you to be like, yeah,
but like she's a she's she's the real she's the
real villain.

Speaker 1 (01:01:35):
I mean she may be. There's debate about this, like
different like and honestly, all of the formers they're not
they don't tend to be of like high leadership. So
I think it's, you know, to get a different perspective.

Speaker 3 (01:01:46):
If she wasn't the one calling the shots, how the
fuck is she going away with it?

Speaker 1 (01:01:50):
Right? Absolutely? No, No, I agree, She's definitely powerful. There's
no debate about that. It's a question of like, was
she basically doing running it for.

Speaker 2 (01:01:59):
Jane and aggressively horny?

Speaker 1 (01:02:03):
Yeah, apparently so, but a trailblazer nonetheless, So she gets
caught and this is earthshaking inside the colt One. A
former member later explained it wasn't that she was human
and had fallen into sin. It was that she had
personally been involved in sending away a lot of other
families from much less serious infraction. So people are pierced

(01:02:23):
and Jeanne this might be some evidence that like she's
the power behind the throne. Jean makes a big public
statement about how she's been forgiven for her sins and
a lot of folks are unable to accept this, and so.

Speaker 2 (01:02:35):
Whole families who forgave her for her sins.

Speaker 1 (01:02:39):
Oh he didn't and thus did God.

Speaker 2 (01:02:41):
Oh okay, I was like, how is this mathmthing?

Speaker 1 (01:02:45):
Yeah, so this is the straw that breaks the camel's
back for a lot of people. Whole families start to leave,
and it becomes quickly clear that the tribe is in
the process of losing. The tribes are losing most of
the people who had been born and raised there. Jean
respond by launching a raft of even more restrictive rules.
He bans his followers from eating chocolate, from hiking, from

(01:03:06):
going to the beach with their families, and from the
only music they've been allowed was traditional Irish music. Oh
but he bans them from this too, so you don't
get any more fucking h fucking fields of athern rye
or whatever. I don't know how traditional are getting.

Speaker 3 (01:03:23):
Yeah, is the rules that they're only allowed to walk
at a certain pace and definitely Noah.

Speaker 1 (01:03:29):
Hill only allowed to like work and worship. That's it.

Speaker 4 (01:03:33):
Oh my god, I can't just that impulse is so
bad where it's like we're losing everybody cut chocolate.

Speaker 1 (01:03:40):
We gotta be real pieces of shit. Yeah. I mean again,
the larger dynamics that play in our culture as the
Right loses power is like we have to make more
and more restrictibles. Yeah. Yeah. So there's controversy between a
number of formers as to how many of these new
rules our genes will and how much of this is
Marcia and maybe a council of other elites who are

(01:04:01):
ruling in his stead. The next decade in change have
been described as a total lockdown by one member, and
the Denver Post reports that some followers claimed Jan himself
started to express soft frustration with the changes. Quote In
twenty twelve, the year before Wiseman left the Colt, he
confessed to Spriggs, who used the name Yonick, that he
drank beer with his wife against the Colt's rules. He said,

(01:04:23):
just don't talk about it, Wiseman said. The ex member,
who left in his thirties, said he met one on
one with Eugene Spriggs as a teenager in the mid
nineties and told the man about horrific childhood abuse he'd
endured in the Twelve Tribes. He said the founder wept
silently as he shared details of the abuse, but after
just five minutes, Marcia Spriggs burst into the room and
sent the member out. She spoke to her husband briefly,

(01:04:43):
then cornered the member in the hallway. She comes out
and says, if you ever tell Yonick anything like that again,
I'll send you away that day, like make you leave
the colt. So years later, that member sneaked out of
a twelve Tribes commune in the middle of the night
with a duffel bag of his clothes. He waited in
the bushes for a write from a man who left
the colt years before, and that night he slept on

(01:05:04):
his friend's floor started his new life outside of the colt.
And that's what I mean when I talk about what
what is the solution to this? Well, the most durable
one is formers help other people get out, right, That's
what happens in this case. He makes contact with somebody
who's already made it out. That guy takes him to
let him crash in a friend's place. Like these are
the support networks that dismantle these cults. You know, it's

(01:05:26):
maybe not as satisfying as imagining the Feds rushing in
and freeing everybody, but like that doesn't happen. It just
doesn't realistically happen. You know, this is what actually happens.
Eugene Spriggs dies on January eleventh, two thousand, or January eleventh,
twenty twenty one. He was eighty three years old. According
to a death certificate issued by the state of he

(01:05:49):
lived way too long based on his skill. Yeah, there's
a lot. He's like, it's respiratory arrests that gets him.
Based on like the exact list of contributing causes to
his death, Yeah, they think it's it's probably COVID. He
probably gets COVID. Oh so, oh my god.

Speaker 4 (01:06:07):
I remember there was like a there was like a
race car driver from the town I grew up in
who was like real against all of it, you know,
who was like really against lockdowns and stuff. And he
got that like convenient pneumonia in yeah, the middle of
two thousand. It's like a lot of people just got
sneaky pneumonia. Yeah, that's what it sounds like here.

Speaker 1 (01:06:24):
Yep, yep, I think that is the case. So there
you go. At present, the Twelve tribes continue to hold
tens of millions of dollars in real estate and operate
multiple businesses. It is unclear how many members remain, although
the Denver Posts suggests most of the youth have already left.
More of the quotes that claimed Gene as something other
than a total dictatorial cult leader have come more recently,

(01:06:44):
and part of me suspects they may be encouraged by
some extent by the remaining leadership, who seem to want
people to feel as if Gene himself is not the
center of things. The truth of this will become clearer
in time, especially as more scrutiny is dedicated to the group.
For now, I want to by finishing that story from
the ex member. The Denver Post interviewed, who left in
his thirties after enduring terrible childhood abuse within the colt.

(01:07:07):
After spending the first free night of his life on
his friend's floor. Quote in the morning he woke up,
he drank a cup of coffee forbidden in the colt
and realized he was, for the first time in his life,
completely in charge of his own choices. I felt like
I could float away, he said that feeling. It's impossible
to describe that feeling of freedom, and honestly, I feel
that on some level every day.

Speaker 4 (01:07:28):
Hmm man. Anyway, he must taste so good.

Speaker 1 (01:07:32):
Oh my god, can you imagine that first cup of
coffee out of the colt.

Speaker 4 (01:07:37):
That's a banger right there, holding a hand, eating a
piece of chocolate, drinking some coffee.

Speaker 1 (01:07:43):
Yeah, listening to all the Irish music you want, you
take this fife and shove it up your ass. Yeah,
I've got an Irish Rover's record on repeat. Just listening
to the fucking Unicorn song for days.

Speaker 4 (01:07:58):
Oh my god, man, that's wild. That is that was
a journey.

Speaker 1 (01:08:05):
Yeah. Anyway, good cult, pretty good cult. I gotta say, Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:08:10):
I'm powerful. I haven't heard and I've heard not one thing.
Even though they started they they did start the fire.

Speaker 1 (01:08:17):
They did start this that fire.

Speaker 4 (01:08:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:08:20):
I think there's still an agree to which that may
still be being investigated, but at present, the states like
we're not pursuing charges because like authorities signed off on
the burn.

Speaker 3 (01:08:29):
Anyway, whatever, I do feel like they hit a lot
of the like the pillars of being like, well that's no,
that's a motherfucking cult. You're like, oh yeah, oh yeah,
blames Jesus child aboose fire.

Speaker 1 (01:08:44):
Yeah it's there.

Speaker 2 (01:08:45):
It's just h yeah, terrible, Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:08:49):
Out of money, tied up and tied up in investments.

Speaker 2 (01:08:52):
Yeah, sketchy businesses.

Speaker 1 (01:08:55):
Yeah, I don't know, yeah, but uh see it?

Speaker 2 (01:09:00):
What's not as terrible as you? Alex? Do you have
any Hell yeah, you'd like to plug here?

Speaker 4 (01:09:05):
I would love for people to listen to you are
good at Feelings podcast about movies where we talk about
feelings and therapy related stuff by talking about movies.

Speaker 1 (01:09:15):
Hell yeah, hell yeah absolutely. Anyway. I have a novel.
It's called After the Revolution. Buy it wherever books are sold,
or read it for free at atrbook dot com. It's
all free. You don't have to buy it, but you can.
You can also go to Hell I Love You.

Speaker 2 (01:09:33):
We also have a series I'd like to plug that is.

Speaker 3 (01:09:38):
Out now and depending on this when this drops, it
could be recently out or a couple weeks out that
Garrison Davis did on it could happen here, falling up
on the stop coop city movement in Atlanta.

Speaker 2 (01:09:49):
Check that out.

Speaker 1 (01:09:49):
Excellent, Yeah, and again go to Hell.

Speaker 3 (01:09:56):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from fool Zone Media, visit our website fool
Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
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