0:00

Welcome to Behind the Bastards, the podcast

0:03

that just got introduced properly

0:06

because I fucked up. Fuck. I

0:08

wasn't supposed to do it right, I was supposed to do it badly.

0:11

Um. I'm so sorry Sean. Sean

0:15

is here today because Sean donated

0:18

a very generous amount to the recall effort

0:21

for the mayor of Portland, who sucks uh

0:23

And and I wanted to introduce the podcast

0:25

well for Sean by doing something

0:27

incompetent shouting the name of a dictator.

0:29

You know, I was I all day,

0:31

all day. I was gonna I was gonna shout chow

0:34

Chessco. Just just scream out chow

0:36

Chessco's name, but I forgot to at

0:38

the last minute. And I'm so sorry,

0:40

Sean. That's okay, I mean it's it's

0:43

you know, it's no Punani. But you know, well,

0:45

we can talk about Poonani. We can talk about

0:47

but but we do have we do have a different bastard

0:50

today. Although all bastards lead

0:52

one way or the other to Steven

0:54

Seagal, I do believe that strung and

0:56

I'm fairly certain you could connect today's

0:58

bet Well, let me let me double check here, let me do check here,

1:01

because we're talking about Josh Dougger today, and

1:03

in a broader sense, we're talking about aspects

1:06

of the Quiverful movement. And I kind of wonder, can

1:09

we here with the production company

1:11

or something related to a movie made by Steven

1:13

Seagal. That's that's there. I think I

1:15

know how I can make this connection. Um,

1:18

okay, yes, we can make this connection.

1:20

So Mike Huckabee went on the

1:23

View in two thousand and seventeen and

1:25

denied that Joe R. Pio was a racist

1:28

and says that he knows Joe R. Pio their friends, and

1:30

he knows that Joe R. Piot was not a racist. Joe

1:32

R. Pio has shown up at campaign

1:34

events and campaigned with both Jim

1:36

Bob and Josh Dugger. Joe

1:39

R. Pio was connected directly to Stephen Seagal.

1:41

We did it, We did it, hey, perfect,

1:44

We should put it out there, put out to the universe.

1:46

Steven Seagal, the bastards, Kevin

1:48

Bacon. That's right, Yeah, we could.

1:51

I mean, I bet if we were to spend the time, we could

1:53

draw a connection between him and Hitler. Um,

1:56

but I would probably need to do a little bit more

1:58

digging than I'm going to do right now while we're

2:00

recording an episode, but for a depressingly

2:03

less amount of there's

2:06

just a photo of him in an s S uniform.

2:12

No, he has an age nearly that. Well,

2:14

Sean, you want to tell the audience a little bit about yourself

2:17

before we before we get into this episode.

2:19

As I was telling you before we

2:21

started up, I worked on

2:24

the healthcare front lines during

2:26

the during the

2:28

pandemic and kind of sat

2:30

on my hands while watching and

2:32

paying attention to Twitter

2:35

and all that stuff of all the

2:37

protests and the tear gassing and all

2:39

that stuff going on in real time, being

2:42

kind of like, oh, I'm at this, I'm at this

2:44

front uh

2:46

of all the crazy stuff

2:48

going on. I don't want to bring COVID

2:51

from one to the other. Uh.

2:53

So I was like, when

2:56

this auction came up, I was like, Oh,

2:58

I am willing to spend a real amount of money

3:01

to to did Wheeler

3:04

fuck Ted Wheeler? Yeah, I'm I'm I'm

3:06

glad that you did. And for those of you listening

3:08

who live in the city of Portland, if you go to

3:10

Total Recall PDX dot com,

3:12

you can print off the sheet that you can then sign and

3:15

and and scan back in. You can also

3:17

print off sheets that will allow you to sign up multiple people.

3:19

It will explain everything. There's like a whole process.

3:21

It's more complicated than it should be and more of pain

3:24

in the ass, and it should be because they don't want Mary's

3:26

to get recall UM. But if

3:28

you go to Total Recall pd X, they will explain

3:31

the whole thing. If you're not in Portland and you

3:33

want to support the recall effort

3:35

against Ted Wheeler, who is trash

3:38

like Shan did very generously, you can also

3:40

go to Total Recall PDX and you can donate.

3:42

They have paid people going out and who are helping to

3:44

um, who are helping to fund this. Timber

3:47

is a thorn's game. They're usually out there and

3:49

it's you know what, I there's there's a lesson

3:52

I learned from all this, and that is you know, there's

3:54

a phrase that comes up a lot and on this podcast

3:56

too. It's called fuck you money, and

3:59

it kind of it's usually

4:01

people that are so super rich, you know they have It's

4:04

like, fuck you, I have money. Fuck you I have enough

4:06

money to change your life if I want

4:08

to. If you've annoy me. Yeah, and it's

4:10

it's something most of us will never have, never

4:12

ever, nor should we ever have, because it really

4:15

kind of gollums up your Sniegele, you know

4:17

what I mean. That's a good way to put

4:19

it. So, but hey, I

4:21

just want everyone to know if I've learned

4:23

nothing else from this, It's said, if you have hope

4:26

in your heart and even but a penny

4:28

in your pocket, you have fuck Ted Wheeler

4:30

money. Yeah, and that's that's

4:32

together we can have. We can have

4:35

fuck Ted Wheeler a variety of things,

4:37

because it's not just money that fuck Ted Wheeler.

4:39

It's getting out on the ground and signing people up. It's

4:41

adding just your name or your name and people

4:43

in your household to the sheet. All of that

4:46

is in an ephemeral sense, Ted

4:48

Wheeler money. Yeah. You don't even have to spend

4:50

a time. You could be sitting broke

4:53

in a little uh in a little cafe

4:56

in Louisiana. Again, just

4:58

that little pen in your pocket. It just know that you

5:01

do have fun Ted Wheeler money. Or if you're

5:03

living in Portland, you've got a good relationship with some

5:05

neighbors, go out and signed some people up. There's a

5:07

lot of ways to fuck Ted Wheeler.

5:09

Um, we could make a joke about

5:11

the fact that you just got broken up with, but we won't because

5:14

that's not classy. Um the

5:17

very little known rule thirty five. So

5:20

Sean, you I asked

5:22

you when you when you won the auction, who do you

5:25

want to hear about? And you gave me a couple of different names, And

5:27

the name that I decided to go with because I've been wanting

5:29

to cover this motherfucker for a while was Josh

5:32

Dugger. And I'm curious before we get into the episode,

5:35

Um, what do you know about Josh

5:37

and why did you want to learn more about him? So

5:39

Josh Dougger. So what I know about him

5:41

was the uh, the or j

5:43

Dougs, you know, the dig dugger.

5:46

Good God, I hope no one calls him

5:48

that. Not interested

5:51

if she's nineteen and counting? Uh,

5:56

I know, you know obviously there's the

5:58

uh, the violent child porn that

6:00

came up, the being on the

6:03

kind of pushing that quiverful life

6:06

through tlcs um

6:09

reality show of nineteen accounting, and

6:12

uh, he just seemed to be a

6:14

kind of like a

6:16

celebrity spokesperson might not be the right way,

6:18

but but like a represented like he mainstreamed

6:22

stuff that was not that it wasn't like

6:25

not that there wasn't a significant amount of

6:27

it going around in the country. Like I grew up

6:29

in it was it was real

6:31

conservative Catholic, not not

6:34

quiverful necessarily, but kind of towards

6:38

that lines. And then like terms of politics and stuff,

6:41

um, so I kind of knew we had a thing

6:43

with that. And for me,

6:45

part of kind of growing

6:48

up and and paying more attention to things

6:50

and looking back on stuff what got

6:53

me interested in him was because this

6:55

is this is something

6:57

that is what

7:00

he represents. I think is kind

7:02

of not always mainstream

7:05

talked about as as a danger. A

7:07

lot of like they cause some sometimes

7:09

they're ex evangelicals or they'll call themselves ex

7:11

evangelicals, Like I know people that have struggled

7:14

with like coming out of that and

7:18

trying and so there's a lot of talk in

7:20

those communities about it. Um.

7:23

But I think maybe the best way to think

7:25

about it for people who aren't familiar

7:28

with it is you kind of you know, you have your kind of maybe

7:30

like your sovereign citizen type libertarians

7:33

where it's like the government should just have defense

7:35

and have this, So the

7:38

kind of people he represents, I would

7:40

say, the best way to put it is they

7:42

say that and and the

7:44

follow up to the government should just do like defense

7:46

and like a couple of civil things is and the rest belongs

7:49

to Jesus. And so when you talk

7:51

about separate, it's it's one of those vocabulary

7:53

things that's also purposely deceptive.

7:56

I think, where like when you talk about

7:58

separation of church and state, they

8:01

can say yes because they're defining

8:03

the state in a completely different way. And

8:05

I think that really kind of can hook

8:07

people into it or have people

8:10

not realize what it is. And

8:12

I think there's from a little bit

8:14

of of dabbling in some

8:16

of the history of like um

8:19

apocalyptic groups are knowing people that got

8:21

out of like doom colts Um.

8:25

They're the

8:27

vein of kind of fundamental fundamentalism

8:30

that he's in is one of those that's

8:32

like, oh, Israel becoming a state is the sign

8:35

of the end time. I'm not exactly sure

8:37

if he personally is is within that. Oh,

8:39

I mean, yeah, I'm pretty sure we're gonna go into detail

8:41

about the exact chunk of evangelical

8:44

Christians. Yeah, you can't really, you can't really explain the Duggers

8:46

unless you explain the quiver full

8:48

movement. Um. And so we have

8:50

we have a bunch of that talk and we're not going to go We'll

8:53

go deeper into the quiver Fule movement in another episode.

8:55

I have a friend who grew up in that particular

8:57

cult and I R l uh

9:00

No, he has a friend of mine though, um as

9:02

I said, yeah, I went to a traditional

9:05

conservative Catholic college with Yeah,

9:07

yeah, yeah, I remember. I

9:09

was like Eve, I Eve

9:12

has been a friend of mine for years and years and years.

9:14

Who's how I met R. L. Stoler.

9:16

Yeah? Okay, so we actually know some

9:18

of the same people who grew up in this cult. Well,

9:20

some of this is going to be old news to you,

9:22

but it'll be new to a lot of people listening, and it's

9:24

important. So I'm gonna I'm gonna get into it. From

9:27

nine to two thousand to Jim

9:29

Bob Dugger was a state legislator

9:31

in the Arkansas House of Representatives. He

9:33

made a couple of failed bids at seeking national

9:36

election, and during one of these campaigns, he

9:38

took his wife and his family, which at that point numbered

9:40

fourteen kids, out to support him

9:42

on election day, he and his wife voted

9:45

and then marched off with their sizeable brood,

9:47

and ap photographer spotted them and took

9:49

a picture. The picture was purchased by

9:51

the New York Times, and it went the early odds

9:54

version of viral. Now. At the

9:56

time, it was obvious that

9:58

Jim Bob was a conservative Christian, but

10:00

the enormous size of his family was seen as more

10:02

of like a quirky personal choice than anything.

10:04

That's how it really got portrayed a lot in the media.

10:07

In the mainstream media, parenting

10:09

magazines reached out to Michelle Dugger, his wife,

10:11

and asked her to write an article about child rearing.

10:14

Somewhere along the line, a savvy producer

10:16

at Discovery Health decided the Duggers

10:18

would make fascinating reality TV

10:20

fodder. They put out several hour long

10:22

specials featuring the family, whose

10:25

fame rose consistently until in two

10:27

thousand eight they got their own TV show, Seventeen

10:29

Kids in Counting Yeah, I would like

10:31

to interject real quick, something that uh

10:34

uh an analogy or not analogy, but a comparison

10:37

that came up is because I grew up with that

10:39

was one of six kids. So and there's

10:41

always like the oh, it's such a big family, like it's

10:43

kind of a there's kind of that like remember

10:46

from I remember from the Rush Limbaugh Show, you Rush

10:48

Limbaugh episodes, you talked about how he was fitted

10:51

by the media. It's one of those things like,

10:53

oh, this is interesting, this is fun. They don't

10:55

dig and so then it gets spotlighted.

10:58

We're gonna we're gonna cover We're actually going to go

11:00

deep into one of the earliest article I've been

11:03

able to find on the family. Um

11:05

so for about seven years after two thousand

11:07

eight, which is you know, kind of when they really hit the

11:09

mainstream. The Dugger family grows steadily in

11:12

fame. They become millionaires. UM.

11:14

I don't know exactly. It's it's hard to tell, right

11:16

because those what are your net worth or what is his person's

11:18

networth is always kind of shitty. But it seems

11:20

like what I've heard is like three and a half million

11:23

for Jim Bob, which doesn't seem impossible.

11:26

Like he's been on TV a while, it's been a successful

11:28

show. Um And as a result

11:31

of their growing fame, they became increasingly plugged

11:33

into Republican Party politics. Jim

11:35

Bob and his oldest son Josh, did

11:37

photo ops with Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee,

11:40

who we now know is connected to Stevenology

11:42

just one degree of separation, and

11:44

Florida Senator Marco Ruby, oh, I guess

11:46

is connected to Stevens well, probably actually

11:48

has direct connections to both,

11:50

probably one step away. Um. Now, it

11:52

was hardly a secret that the Duggers were right

11:55

wing, but most casual observers,

11:57

including most people who watched their shows, were

11:59

unaware of the sinister reality behind

12:01

why the Dugger family had so very

12:03

many children. On July eleven,

12:06

one, the Washington Post published an article titled

12:08

an American Kingdom. The logline

12:11

was this and this this showed up all over

12:13

my Twitter because of the fiction book that I

12:15

just read about this sort of thing. The

12:17

logline was a new and rapidly growing

12:20

Christian movement is openly political, once a nation

12:22

under God's authority, and is central to

12:24

Donald Trump's GOP. Now,

12:26

the article is this is what you were talking

12:28

about? Is broadly accurate in a way that it sketches

12:31

out the dimensions of the dominionist movement, which quote

12:33

holds that God commands Christians to assert

12:35

authority over the seven mountains of life,

12:38

family, religion, education, economy,

12:40

arts, media, and government, and which

12:42

after which time Jesus Christ will return and

12:44

reign for eternity. Now where

12:46

that article gets things wrong is it classifies

12:48

this movement as new. It's

12:50

not. Now. You could argue that it's new

12:52

that because these are you know, there's two broad

12:55

in kind of this chunk of evangelical

12:57

culture. There's pre millennial and post millennia

13:00

old dispensationalist right, and Premillennials

13:02

were the guys who were like, um,

13:06

it's going to like the the

13:08

God is going to like come soon

13:10

and we're gonna have us a rapture and ship. And

13:12

the post millennials are like, we'll talk about this more a little

13:14

bit later, like, well, no, we have two ready

13:17

the world for God to come back, right, and one

13:19

of those was dominant, like the left behind

13:21

books are kind of the old the older way,

13:24

and that's less dominant now because it didn't. I

13:27

don't know if you're aware of this, but the the Changing

13:29

of the Millennium didn't really do much. And there

13:31

was a movie with Nick Cage. He kind of was

13:33

a movie with Nick At that point, God,

13:35

I want to know more about how they managed to make

13:38

that because remember he uh, he

13:40

was so deep in text for what he had to sell his dinosaur

13:42

bones and take any movie too

13:44

many dinosaurs and he had to be

13:46

in a weird Christian propaganda movie.

13:50

Nicolas Cage is about the only actor

13:53

I could never be angry at for doing that,

13:55

because it's like, well, yeah, you gotta you gotta keep your

13:57

dinosaur bone addiction going. Man, I don't blame

13:59

you for that. Any movie Nicolas

14:01

Cage is in, just keep the bones flowing.

14:04

That that should have been the tagline Nicolas

14:06

Cage has to bone left behind. So

14:14

yeah, um yeah. So again, not a

14:16

super new movement, although it is kind of new and being

14:18

as dominant with an it like that that has changed

14:21

over time. The election of Donald Trump

14:23

was which was you know, partly fueled by

14:25

evangelical support. Um,

14:27

and so sorry I

14:30

framed that badly. Again, this is not a

14:32

new movement, and it's tied into everything that's been

14:34

happening over the last five six years that have really freaked

14:36

out a lot of kind of liberals who maybe weren't paying as much

14:38

attention or who wrote off the Christian

14:41

Right as kind of just like they're just they're

14:43

just nuts, right, like they all together.

14:45

It's the same thing. It's the same. It was easy during the

14:47

Obama era. It seemed like you you could

14:49

make fun of these people in the silly things they'd say online

14:51

and like movies like Jesus Camp and stuff, and

14:54

it didn't seem like as much of a

14:57

it didn't seem like they were gaining as much power as they were.

14:59

And every we're seeing today both the rise of Donald

15:01

Trump, the current assault on trans rights, and states

15:04

like Tennessee and Arkansas, the present groundswell

15:06

of right wing Christian support for crackdowns on voting

15:08

rights. All of these things have their origins

15:10

in the same, very specific Christian subculture,

15:13

and for more than half a decade, the Dugger

15:15

family was the trojan horse for bringing that subculture

15:18

into the American mainstream. To understand

15:20

the Duggers, we have to talk about the Quiverful movement.

15:22

The name comes from Psalm one

15:24

seven, like arrows in the hands of

15:26

a warrior, Our sons born in one's youth,

15:29

blessed as the man whose quiver is full of them,

15:31

They will not be put to shame when they contend

15:33

with their enemies at the gate and

15:35

the gist of this idea is that American society

15:38

has become hopelessly godless and sinful, and

15:40

if you're going to bring the nation back to God, you

15:42

need a new generation of holy warriors to fight

15:44

for Christianity. So it's your responsibility

15:47

as a true Christian to pop out several basketball

15:49

teams worth of babies in order to fight it build

15:51

the army of God. Right, that's the Again,

15:54

we both have friends who were who were

15:56

raised to be soldiers in God's army. Um.

16:00

Now, the quiver full movement evolved rather naturally

16:03

out of several different strains of right wing Christian

16:05

culture. One of these was the homeschooling

16:07

community. Obviously, parents can

16:09

choose to home school kids for a lot of perfectly

16:11

sane reasons. Uh. And in fact,

16:13

one of my old co workers, Christie Harrison at Cracked,

16:16

who is not at all a

16:18

quiver full type you know, Christian,

16:20

home schools her family um and is a perfectly

16:22

reasonable person not shipping on

16:25

the concept of home school. I was homeschooled

16:27

from first grade too through high school.

16:29

Graduation was

16:31

yours, but yours was pretty reliou. I mean, it's

16:33

efet not to be so here's so here's

16:35

the weird thing. So the background on that is it

16:38

was more there's there's family

16:40

dynamics, which I won't go into for the sake of but

16:43

basically it was kind of a more

16:45

of a it's a thing we should do,

16:47

so it's kind of weird, Like we did a lot of the performative

16:50

stuff without getting super into

16:52

the CULTI stuff. It was more of like viewed

16:55

as an obligation to life for the community

16:57

or like grandparents or whatever. Um

17:00

So it worked for me. So I'm like on

17:03

the low end of the spectrum, and

17:06

I can see like school or

17:08

what what used to be or maybe still is called Asperger's

17:11

um so, but uh,

17:14

I can see going to school given

17:16

that, given how aware

17:18

of my given everything at home and

17:20

family dynamics and issues and mental

17:23

health and all that stuff, I can see that being a

17:25

real bad time for me. So

17:27

it's like it's not a great time for most It's

17:30

so I mean, and my my dad

17:33

had a restaurant, so I worked at that, so I kind

17:35

of had like one foot in the secular, one

17:37

ft in the like insular kind

17:39

of sheltered. Yeah, that seems like a pretty

17:41

lucky and it might very yeah,

17:44

one of the things. But if you're even if you're coming

17:46

at it from a more reasonable perspective, if you're in home schooling,

17:48

you're gonna encounter a lot of weird Christian

17:50

propaganda because it's so dominant

17:52

in schooling, right, even if you're trying to be secular

17:54

with it, it's just everywhere in that community.

17:58

Um, and yeah, the practice.

18:00

This leads to what I'm saying. The practice of homeschooling

18:02

has been heavily dominated by the evangelical Christian

18:04

community for decades. The U s Department

18:07

of Education currently estimates that more

18:09

than one million school age kids are

18:11

homeschooled in the United States, and the

18:13

real number could be double or triple that because

18:15

a lot of those families do not participate in

18:17

the census or get birth certificates for their children.

18:21

That is very common in the Quiverful

18:23

movement, if you like, especially in the fringes, not

18:26

even the fringes of it. A lot of people in it

18:28

like like maybe you get birth to maybe

18:30

you get a birth certificate for your sons, you don't get them for

18:32

your daughters because birth certificate she

18:35

could leave at some point a social Security

18:37

number with a birth certificates, security

18:39

passport, do you

18:42

leave, get get away from your weird family,

18:44

cut it off through So we really don't

18:47

know how many kids

18:49

there are like this um

18:52

and that's I mean, there's a lot of other different subcultures.

18:54

Sovereign citizens get looped into some aspects

18:57

of this, but not all. Like once you're

19:00

the once you're home setting in the middle of nowhere

19:02

and not getting birth certificates for your

19:04

children, you become you're getting the co into contact

19:06

with a lot of subcultures. It's it's like

19:08

the white version of avoiding immigration

19:11

to by not doing the census. Yeah, yeah,

19:14

yeah, which you

19:16

you do not have. Well, I don't know, I'm not I can't say

19:18

that you shouldn't worry about the census if you're an undocumented

19:21

immigrant because some sketchy

19:23

ship was tried to be done by the Trump

19:25

administration. I don't know. It's a bummer the

19:27

census should it shouldn't. Yeah,

19:30

yeah, that's a whole other rand. So

19:32

over the course of the nineteen seventies

19:34

and eighties, a backlash against feminism

19:36

and the civil rights movement helped lead to the birth

19:38

of the moral Majority. The first organized

19:41

up swell of what we now called the religious right. We

19:43

did a two parter on this. Jerry Folwell

19:45

was the biggest man in that movement, but there were

19:47

a lot of of I mean it's it was a huge

19:49

movement, right, A lot of people were involved. Another

19:52

prominent member of the early religious right

19:54

in the Moral Majority was Howard Phillips,

19:56

a Russian Jewish Man who converted to evangelical

19:59

Christianity. He broke off from

20:01

the Republican Party in nineteen seventy four

20:03

and founded the far right Constitution

20:05

Party. Now. Howard and his son

20:08

Doug were two of the of the first prominent

20:10

advocates of a very specific way of looking

20:12

at the Culture War in the United States. Like

20:14

many in the religious right, they argued that the struggle

20:17

between humanism and Christianity was a

20:19

war. They went on to argue that this

20:21

war could only be won by Christian

20:23

women, and the only way for Christian

20:26

women to fight was for them to die

20:28

to themselves. This is the term

20:30

they use, I give up their personal

20:32

ambitions and completely submit to their

20:35

husbands. The basic idea, as

20:37

the Phillipses and others preached it was that

20:39

Jesus was the general of a great heavenly

20:42

Army. Soldiers in a real army

20:44

are expected to follow orders whether or not

20:46

they agree with or understand them, unless

20:48

you're in the German Army. Now, ye,

20:54

women needed to submit totally to

20:56

their husbands because that's what Jesus

20:58

asked. So if they accept to the utter

21:00

authority of men over their lives, they would actually

21:02

be taking agency and striking a powerful

21:04

blow against the deevil. But giving up your life,

21:07

that's that's you exercising agency.

21:10

Then, to put it in context

21:12

again for the more secular people, uh,

21:15

you think about war, you know,

21:17

like war crimes that the United States gets away

21:19

with. If you're in a heavenly army, what are war

21:22

crimes? You know, it's it's it's the same where

21:24

it's like, yeah, you know what's gonna happen, and it's

21:26

gonna get covered up and it's okay as long as you achieve

21:28

the objective. It's that yeah, yeah,

21:30

yeah, there's a lot of crimes that are

21:33

fine with us. But you know who doesn't do crimes

21:36

unless they're rad I was gonna say

21:39

people who aren't elon Musk, but then you said crimes.

21:41

Yeah, I'd say crimes, not crimes the

21:44

products and services that support this podcast.

21:46

Sean, have never committed any crimes

21:48

in the United States that have been

21:50

documented by journalists who

21:53

have not been carboned. I was gonna say, they have

21:55

to be arrested for it to be a crime. Have to be arrested

21:57

for it to be a crime. That's how I live my

21:59

life, and that's how our sponsors do too. Here's

22:02

some AT's. Ah,

22:09

we're back, Sean. We're

22:11

talking about Howard Phillips.

22:14

Uh, and we're talking about the birth of

22:16

of the religious right. So in

22:19

speeches that Doug Phillips

22:21

gives to packed his son, Doug gives

22:23

to packed audiences, he reads

22:25

versus from the Bible like

22:28

Ephesians five one, Uh,

22:31

wives submit to your husband's as

22:33

to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife,

22:35

as Christ as the head of the church, his body

22:37

of which he is the Savior. Now is the church

22:39

submits to Christ. So also wife should

22:41

submit to their husbands and everything.

22:44

Now. Doug calls this the quote

22:46

best kept secret of modern Christian marriages.

22:49

And then he says stuff like this, you

22:51

are a help meet. The Bible says that

22:53

man is not made for women, but women is

22:56

made for but the woman is made for the

22:58

man. If you have a problem with that, take

23:00

it up with the creator, not Phillips. I'm

23:02

just quoting. Until we get comfortable playing

23:04

those roles will never be at peace. But if we

23:06

accept those roles, who half

23:09

the battle is diminished already just by the fact

23:11

that we accept God's creation order.

23:14

This philosophy has come to be known

23:16

as complimentarianism, i

23:18

e. Women were created not as

23:20

individual beings of their own with independent

23:23

desires and talents, but as a compliment

23:25

to men. Right. It's

23:28

the little known fact that was actually the original

23:30

tagline for a g I. Joe. Submitting

23:33

to your husband's is half the battle. Now.

23:37

Feminism in this cosmology

23:39

moral cosmology is evil because it encourage

23:42

encourages women to seek their own lives independent

23:44

of men, which Rob's men,

23:47

who are again the only real people of the

23:49

wifely support God intended for them to have.

23:51

In his speeches, Phillips loves to quote Isaiah

23:53

three twelve, which cites God's curse

23:56

upon us inful nation, children

23:58

are your oppressors and women rule

24:00

over you. This is a God saying like this

24:02

is how I'm gonna curse you. If you if you don't follow my claws,

24:05

I'll make your children oppress you and your the

24:07

women will be in charge. Um. So he's

24:09

saying that like if if that's what God

24:11

is, like, feminism is a curse from God

24:14

if we if we don't obey his call, will

24:16

curse us with feminism. Well, going back even

24:18

further again from my upgrading,

24:20

upbringing and a lot of

24:22

some people in my upbringing, and then just kind of a

24:24

general Christian thing, it's the whole Well Eve

24:27

gave him the apple. So women has

24:29

always been men's downfall, and it's their place

24:31

to be underfoot because that's because

24:33

that's you know, that's that was just how it worked,

24:36

because that's how the story started, how the story

24:38

started. Now, the

24:41

nightmare for these people is a world

24:43

in which Christian men do not have total control

24:45

over their families. While mainstream culture

24:48

filled with movies featuring strong female

24:50

protagonists in the eighties and nineties, rock

24:52

stars like Madonna, political figures like Hillary

24:54

Clinton and Margaret Thatcher, Phillips

24:56

and his ilk preached that women's liberation

24:58

would lead to the collapse of civilization. He

25:01

called the young Christians he preached to in the nineteen

25:03

nineties and early adds the Rick reclamation

25:06

generation, because their duty was

25:08

to retake society from liberal feminists.

25:11

Um. One of the through lines in this strain

25:13

of the evangelical culture is they have way

25:16

more faith in the power of feminism than most feminists,

25:18

and I know they are really

25:21

bullish on its ability to to change

25:23

society. Now, homeschooling

25:26

was considered one of the necessary tools

25:28

of reclamation. By having enormous

25:31

families and teaching their children themselves outside

25:33

of the sinful state education system, Christian

25:35

families could keep their children free from the sinful

25:38

secular world. One of the things I find

25:40

most interesting about these people is the sheer amount

25:42

of weight they give to feminism, and again

25:45

they have a lot of of They

25:47

really think that it has a lot

25:49

more influence and government than I think

25:51

it does. Here's Mary Pride, editor

25:53

of Practical Homeschooling magazine and one

25:56

of the most influential figures in the homeschooling

25:58

movement. Quote. Christians have accepted

26:00

feminists moderate demands for family planning

26:02

and careers while rejecting the radical side of feminism,

26:05

meaning lesbianism and abortion. What

26:07

most do not see is that one demand leads to the other.

26:09

Feminism is a totally self consistent system

26:12

aimed at rejecting God's role for women. Those

26:14

who adopt any part of its lifestyle can't help

26:16

picking up its philosophy, and those who pick

26:18

up its philosophy are buying themselves a one way

26:21

ticket to social anarchy. Feminism

26:23

is self consistent. The Christianity of the fifties

26:25

wasn't. Feminists had a plan for women. Christians

26:28

didn't. And this is our explanation for why feminism

26:31

was was winning and they were, you know, Christianity

26:33

is under siege and one. Not to be fair,

26:36

there's there's probably ah. I

26:38

mean, obviously a lot of people are like, no feminism,

26:40

but there's probably a good chunk that

26:43

are that No. They have to pump

26:45

it up to get people to keep And

26:47

what I say, by the way, when I'm saying stuff like that,

26:49

I think these people have an outside idea

26:52

of the impact feminism has had. It's not an anti

26:54

feminist thing. It's just like there's still a lot of bias

26:57

against women in our culture. I think they're overestimate,

27:00

um the power that feminism has

27:02

culturally. Um Now Pride's

27:05

major contribution to the evolution of what

27:07

became the Quiverfule movement was to provide

27:09

a plan for women. She helped

27:11

and again that's her ideas, like Christianity hasn't had a plan

27:14

for women. Feminist did and that's why we're losing. They had a

27:16

vision for the future and we didn't. Um

27:18

She helped to create the whole integrated

27:21

lifestyle of Biblical womanhood from

27:23

the book Quiverful by Katherine Joyce,

27:25

which is a great way to get up to speed on all

27:27

this if you're interested, very good book. The

27:29

Biblical womanhood encompassing homework,

27:32

motherhood, and wifehood as they were lived

27:34

not in the nineteen fifties, but in a notion

27:36

of pre industrial, pre household

27:38

appliance times is what Pride calls

27:40

a total lifestyle as comprehensive

27:43

as the pervasive influence of feminism, which

27:45

has reached every part of women's work, lives, biology,

27:47

and thinking. And this time around, the anti

27:50

feminists intend to be fiercely diligent,

27:52

rooting out the worldly feministic ideas

27:54

and influences in their churches, entertainment

27:57

and owned thinking and making sure it doesn't

27:59

come act. Now, I'm leaving

28:01

out a lot and again, Katherine Joyce, as quiver

28:03

Full is a great book from more complete understanding

28:05

of all this to other important

28:08

contributors to this this what becomes

28:10

the ideologies of the

28:12

Duggers. Follow are John Piper

28:14

and Wayne Grudom. These are both Reformed

28:17

Baptist preachers who headed up

28:19

the Council on Biblical Manhood and

28:21

Womanhood or c BMW. In

28:24

nineteen seven, the year of its founding,

28:26

the c BMW released something called

28:28

the Danverse Statement, which was both

28:30

a mission statement for the Council and a rallying

28:33

cry to conservative Christian forces. The

28:35

statement urged Christians to fight egalitarian

28:38

influences in the evangelical church, particularly

28:41

the scourge of Christian feminism.

28:43

It argued that women should be barred from

28:45

positions of authority and churches. Now,

28:47

the Danvers Statement was signed by some people you

28:50

might know. Beverly La Hay, wife

28:52

of the author of Left Behind, Tim Lay,

28:54

signed it. Pat Robertson also

28:56

signed it. Dorothy Patterson and Paige

28:59

Patterson signed it. You probably don't know those

29:01

last two names, but Paige orchestrated

29:03

the right wing takeover of the Southern Baptist

29:05

Convention, the organization behind the

29:07

second largest Christian denomination in the United

29:09

States. We talked about this in the Moral Majority episode.

29:11

But a lot of Baptists used to be completely

29:14

fine with abortion up until like the

29:16

seventies. It was not a super controversion

29:18

of the Catholics have always had their going

29:21

on about it. But

29:24

I got in trouble when I was in second grade

29:27

for leading a group of kids around

29:29

to sing that song on the playground because

29:31

I just I couldn't watch like Beats

29:33

and butt Head or the Simpsons. But for whatever reason, my

29:35

family was like, well, Monty Python smart, so whatever,

29:38

you can watch as much of that as you want. And

29:40

I watched Meaning of Life in that song

29:42

and idn't really understand it, but I let them

29:45

march around the playground singing it. And it

29:47

didn't go over well in suburban Texas.

29:49

Now was it because you sang it or because you're

29:51

sang it at the end you went just hands?

29:54

It didn't do that. But I didn't get

29:56

what just hands was.

29:59

Must been third or fourth grade, but so

30:03

yeah, um so. In nineteen eleven,

30:06

years after the Danver statement, the SPC,

30:08

the Southern Baptist Convention released a statement

30:10

of their own in which they urged wives to graciously

30:13

submit to their husband's Mike Huckabee

30:15

was one signatory to the statement. The

30:18

SPC, by the way, speaks for about sixteen

30:21

million Americans. So by the end of

30:23

the twentieth century, many of the ideas that are

30:25

central to the quiver Full movement had started to

30:27

become mainstream on the right wing.

30:29

You're not talking about a fringe ideology

30:32

when the SPC is endorsing some of

30:34

this stuff, right, that's um,

30:36

well, this is was it there

30:39

either the Fallwell or the Reagan episode.

30:41

I think I think it was you that talked about it where

30:43

it was like the evangelical saw Reagan

30:45

as an inn and then Reagan used them

30:48

and then didn't give them what they wanted. So then they

30:50

started going, oh, we need to start

30:52

taking over and making our stuff me.

30:55

We need to instead of just giving

30:57

them our vote and expecting stuff in return, we need

30:59

to infiltrate and what our people into

31:01

is the stuff you're seeing Q and on guys try to do right

31:04

now. And Christians continue to extremist Christians

31:06

continuity where it's like, well, we got to get people on the school

31:08

boards, We've got to get people in local elected

31:10

positions. They've been doing this for a while and

31:12

it works, which is every

31:15

time I see people are left to be like no, the thing

31:17

to do is throw up

31:19

a poster on Twitter and have a march. It's

31:21

like, well, that's good too. And

31:23

I get the frustration with electoralism,

31:26

but they've gotten a lot of crazy shit done

31:28

because they've been voting for decades. I don't

31:30

know. We don't have the time anymore to that's

31:33

a longer. You can make radical

31:36

changes democratically in this society.

31:39

Um. It just takes decades

31:41

of generations of people

31:43

giving up their entire lives to the cause. Um.

31:46

But it worked for them now.

31:48

Obviously, most Southern Baptists are not

31:50

out there having a dozen kids is shoeing alcohol,

31:52

forcing their daughters to wear sackcloth dresses,

31:54

and refusing to get birth certificates for their children.

31:57

If you want to view the struggle for Christian domination

31:59

of the US as a war, and these people do. The

32:01

quiver full families are like special forces.

32:04

Their sons like Josh Dugger, are supposed

32:06

to be trained from childhood to seek positions

32:08

of influence in the government and culture. But

32:10

I'm getting ahead of myself here. We've covered

32:13

most of the ideological underpinnings of the quiver

32:15

Fule movement. But the Dugger family are also

32:17

members of a very specific cult within

32:19

this chunk of the Christian right. They are

32:21

followers of a guy named Bill

32:24

Gothard. It's spelled got Hard

32:27

And that'll be relevant and an unfortunate

32:29

way later. Yeah, you know

32:31

Bill, you've familiar with Bill

32:33

Gothard. I see how you erected that joke.

32:37

Um. Gothard founded

32:40

the Institute in Basic Life

32:42

Principles in nineteen sixty one. So

32:44

this is the religious rights not a thing when

32:46

he starts this right, not in a political

32:49

way, right. Um, So he's really

32:52

on the bleeding edge of all this. And it was originally called

32:54

Campus Teams, and its purpose was to recruit

32:56

young people obviously in campuses for christ. The

32:59

ibl P was fundamentalist

33:01

from the get go, and it was also male supremacist.

33:04

Women were supposed to marry men chosen

33:06

by their fathers and submit entirely

33:08

to first their father and then

33:10

their husband. Dating and flirting

33:13

were forbidden, so much as winking

33:15

at a man as seen as lustful and morally

33:17

equivalent to prostitution. In the

33:19

early nineteen eighties, the ib LP was

33:21

racked by a sex scandal when it was found

33:23

that Bill and his brother Steve were both having affairs with

33:25

secretaries at the institute. Yeah, um,

33:28

weird how that keeps happening. Yeah, we're

33:31

now none of these guys practice although actually

33:34

you can say they are practicing what they preach, because,

33:36

as will continue to talk about, the fault

33:38

in this case was the women because they were being

33:40

temptresses. Well you know, and if they had gotten them

33:42

pregnant, I mean, bonus, he got an Next there's

33:44

the extra soldiers. So Bill never

33:47

married or had kids. Again interesting,

33:50

but his ib LP became the

33:52

center of education and philosophy for the

33:54

quiver Full movement. The ib LP,

33:57

starting in the late nineteen eighties, ran what

33:59

was effective and when. So his

34:01

brother has to leave the organization and Bill

34:03

steps down, but for like two weeks.

34:06

And if you want a much more detailed UM

34:08

podcast series on Bill Gothard, the

34:11

podcast Someplace Underneath UM,

34:14

which is part of the last podcast on the Left Left

34:16

Network did like a four or five partner on this.

34:18

That's very very good. I was gonna say

34:20

too, there's one called Christian Right Cast,

34:23

so I haven't heard that, So that that's

34:25

one UM

34:27

it's a couple ex evangelicals

34:29

or I forge if that's how they're for themselves.

34:32

But it's it's on Apple.

34:35

I think it may have moved to flex or something like

34:37

that, but there it goes like it

34:39

goes into guys and like there's there's

34:41

a thing on Bill Gotthard and thing

34:43

I don't know if you have it in there, but like his

34:46

his rules for how women should dress. Talk

34:49

a little bit about yeah, um yeah,

34:51

check out both of those if you want more. This is really

34:53

important stuff. In someplace underneath

34:55

they go into less detail about the stuff that I just covered,

34:58

but they're going to a lot more detail about Bill um

35:01

so um. The ib LP ran

35:04

what was effectively a troubled teen facility

35:06

that started up in the late nineteen eighties,

35:09

which is basically a forced labor camp for kids,

35:11

and they also operated the Advanced Training

35:13

Institute or a t I, which created

35:15

curriculum for homeschooled families. The

35:18

Duggers were absolutely slavish

35:20

devotees of Gothardism, and

35:22

all of their children were raised on a TI

35:24

curriculum. From a write up by former

35:26

cult member Delanere Bartlett, who grew

35:29

up in the same community,

35:31

The a TI curriculum teaches that the Bible,

35:34

as the literal, infallible word of God,

35:36

must be the center of every lesson, leading

35:38

to some shockingly inaccurate lessons, particularly

35:41

in science and history. The A TI curriculum

35:43

also has a big focus on teaching students how they

35:46

should behave immediate, unquestioning

35:48

obedience to authorities is foremost, and

35:50

a TI prescribes beatings to discipline

35:52

children for even the most trivial of infractions,

35:54

like failing to complete a chore on time

35:57

or arguing with a sibling. Even more disturbing,

35:59

the uggers participate in blanket

36:02

training, where toddlers and small children

36:04

are placed on a blanket and a toy is placed judge

36:06

just out of reach. When the child reaches

36:08

for the toy or moves off the blanket, the

36:10

parents will slap or hit them in order to instill

36:13

fear and obedience. And

36:15

we're not going to talk about to train up a child, but

36:17

that's very big in these cultures.

36:20

Child abuses like massive

36:22

in this community. Yeah,

36:25

um, yeah, I was gonna say that that

36:27

sounds uh almost sounds more like something

36:29

you'd see on a Japanese game show. Then yeah,

36:32

it would be a fully grown man on a

36:34

blanket. Let's still still.

36:38

I would watch that show. They're adults.

36:40

I don't like blanket training is fine. If that's

36:42

like your canker, whatever, more power to you

36:45

now. I found another interview with a survival

36:47

of Gothard's cult on Salon. This

36:50

person went into a great deal more to tail about

36:52

what kids were taught about sex through

36:54

this curriculum. Quote. The

36:56

so called wisdom booklets that form the

36:58

backbone of a t I children's educations

37:01

contain more Bible verses than they do information.

37:03

Particularly lacking in a religious sect so

37:05

obsessed with reproduction is any kind of

37:08

sex education. This is especially true

37:10

for young women, who receive very little sex education

37:12

because the church teaches us that women do not have

37:14

sex drives. However, the opposite is believed

37:17

of men. A TI teaches that men have

37:19

nearly uncontrollable sex drives, ready to

37:21

erupt at the mere sight of a pant leg or a perm.

37:23

To illustrate this point, A t I families

37:26

are encouraged to maintain a no computer rule

37:28

for their sons, but not their daughters. Gothard

37:31

also encouraged men to turn towards the wall

37:33

when dining at restaurants so as to not be tempted

37:35

by a waitress or a stray attractive woman.

37:38

You know, those straight attractive women just kind

37:40

of out there tempting

37:43

you by existing just

37:46

wandering, wandering the

37:48

streets, just just constantly.

37:51

I mean that is that is how they view with those that are

37:53

called like that. That's an attack on you. With a

37:55

woman's out there living her life, uh,

37:58

and you find her attractive, that like an

38:00

assault on you. Because if you're in an army,

38:02

you're fighting another army, so that means it's

38:04

it's and they're also a unified trained

38:06

force of the devil, So they're the sexy

38:09

taliban out there trying to steal your virtue.

38:11

Yeah, it's like a Halloween costume, but

38:14

as regular military gear. Now

38:17

I'm going to continue that quote. Not that our supposed

38:19

lack of a sex drive absolved as from sexual responsibility

38:22

a t I taught us that it is our job to keep

38:24

men's desires from erupting into lust or sexual

38:27

activity. We were taught that it was our sin

38:29

if we cause a man to lust. After us,

38:32

I spent many nights as an early developed teenager

38:34

crying and begging God to take away my large

38:36

breasts because I noticed men's eyes had begun

38:38

to linger on me during church. Modesty

38:41

wasn't only about dress, It was also about behavior.

38:43

Women were taught from a very young age that they

38:45

are to be submissive in all things, allowing

38:47

men to open doors for us, even to get out of a

38:50

car, never initiating conversations

38:52

with a man, and never correcting a man when he was wrong.

38:54

Essentially, a good a t I woman is sweet,

38:57

silent, and obedient. This combination

38:59

of zo uro sexual knowledge and deeply ingrained

39:01

submissiveness left many young girls in

39:03

our church especially vulnerable to sexual abuse.

39:06

As a teenager, I became aware that several of

39:08

my friends were being molested by their older

39:10

brothers or fathers. They would start stilted

39:12

conversations with me about it, but none of us

39:15

actually understood the concept of sex or rape

39:17

or molestation enough to actually

39:19

discuss it, so would stayed on the level of furtively

39:21

whispered hints. And this is I

39:23

mean you can draw a line here between.

39:25

Like nineteen eighty four, The idea behind New Speaker

39:27

is that if you if you, if you limit

39:30

the vocabulary of a community,

39:32

you limit their ability to express certain

39:34

things like that's what's going on here. If you limit the ability

39:36

of kids to understand sexuality in

39:38

this way, you limit their ability to know

39:41

when they've been wrong. Well, you take away communication

39:43

exactly and to kind of to draw

39:46

to something recent more recent as well

39:48

to kind of go on the other side in terms of how

39:53

in terms of men blaming for women

39:55

for stuff, there's the uh, obviously

39:57

don't know it's for effect, but the um

40:01

the Atlanta, the SPA shooter, who was they

40:03

were like I would not be surprised

40:05

if it was just like basically they

40:08

were immodest and so that

40:10

drove me and my uncontrollable

40:14

hormones too. That's

40:17

that shooting from what information

40:19

we have so far, seems to be the logical extent

40:21

of this. This kind of thinking is like

40:24

they wouldn't stop tempting me, so yeah,

40:26

I don't know, I mean, we don't know about just

40:28

like it's to get to give people

40:31

like this isn't to bring it a

40:33

little in from the abstract is like, yeah, this

40:35

is this is the recent stuff, and it can

40:37

go a variety of different ways. Because people

40:40

are different, they're going to react differally.

40:42

Take it into some of those reactions are going to be

40:44

scary as hell. Yeah,

40:46

so, but you know what's not scary

40:49

as hell? Uh, a

40:51

bright summer day. I was

40:53

gonna say capitalism, but uh,

40:56

I guess both capitalism and a bright summer

40:58

day can be scary because capital is um

41:00

is a part of the engine of carbon

41:03

release that is causing our summers

41:05

to be hotter and dryer. So darker

41:09

direction than I wanted to um, But

41:12

a bright summer day. I mean, it won't pay you to to

41:14

say that it's that's not a problem, So I mean

41:16

catalism at least, you know, make a book. At

41:18

least I'll make a buck by denying that there's

41:20

any problem with it. Hey, here's

41:30

okay, we're back. So the

41:33

Duggers didn't bring Bill Gothard or a

41:35

t I up often on the show in ways

41:38

that would have been immediately obvious. You could see books

41:40

in the show, right, There's always there's a lot

41:42

of like it's visible if you

41:44

know what to look for, but they're not out there

41:46

like talking about how awesome Bill Gothard

41:49

is. The signs were there if you knew where to look.

41:51

At Dugger weddings, celebrants would dedicate

41:53

an entire cake to Bill Gothard, which

41:55

is again cult ship. All the Dugger

41:57

women had distinctively permed hair because

42:00

Bill believed that curly bangs brought out a woman's

42:02

natural beauty. Uh. The antiquated

42:04

dress codes that the Dugger family engaged

42:06

in, particularly for women in the family,

42:08

were also a major part of

42:10

like a result of Bill Gothard's influence.

42:13

Over the years they were on TV, the Dugger

42:15

family, particularly Jim Bob, were

42:17

extremely open about the fact that their show

42:19

His Career, was a ministry. They saw

42:22

it as a way to recruit. With the help of the

42:24

Discovery camera crew, selective editing and

42:26

scripting, they were able to portray what was

42:28

really in reality and abusive cult as

42:30

a quirky lifestyle choice, perhaps

42:32

even one viewers would want to emulate. Jim

42:35

Bob liked to say that they were just trying to convince

42:37

people not to get abortions because by seeing that,

42:39

like, oh, well, this family can handle fourteen fifteen sixteen

42:41

kids, so obviously I should keep this one kid,

42:43

right. Um. It was a big part of like

42:45

why he said they were doing it. But

42:48

of course, the real purpose behind all this

42:50

was to build a larger cultural space

42:52

for Gothardi is m the quiver Full movement,

42:55

and male supremacist fundamentalist

42:57

Christianity and American culture. This

42:59

is also part of a broader fundamentalist

43:01

strategy. It came about as part of a

43:03

split between premillennial and post millennial

43:06

dispensationalists. The former believed

43:08

that the Rapture was coming in any day and soon the faith

43:10

will be brought up to Heaven the world would end. The latter

43:12

belief that God wouldn't let Christ return until they

43:15

established a godly world. In order to

43:17

do that, they had to recruit, and it wasn't enough

43:19

to get people to accept Christ. They had to

43:21

convince folks to follow the rules

43:23

their rules, otherwise the world wouldn't be godly

43:26

enough. Since those rules are very unpleasant

43:28

and extreme. You have to lure people in

43:31

gradually by reaching them with something

43:33

less extreme and drawing them in like a fish

43:35

on a lure from Quiverfull quote.

43:39

Mark Driscoll's Mars Hill Church, rated the

43:41

eighth most influential church in America, relies

43:43

on the fixtures of emergent or seeker oriented

43:46

ministries, such as countercultural groups

43:48

like bikers or skaters. For Christ to

43:50

attract to attract its young urban

43:53

congregation, but churches like Mars

43:55

Hill, which espouses a deeply conservative ideology,

43:58

recognized that such outreach ministry are meant

44:00

to be transitional, introducing a person

44:02

to Christ where they are then easing

44:04

them into more serious study and graduating

44:06

them to a traditionalist doctrine and DRIs

44:08

School's case, to a doctrine that places

44:11

substantial weight on gender submission

44:13

and a wife's role in marriage. So

44:16

again, these are all this is just it's

44:18

how colts work. It's out it's how cut non works. Do you can

44:20

see it? And in the fact that like

44:22

there's elements of Q that are about the JFK

44:25

conspiracy, the elements of Q that are about

44:27

like aliens and stuff that they're about

44:30

vaccines, and it all leads back to

44:32

this er conspiracy and that's how people

44:34

get pulled in. And that's what makes it more. It's

44:36

syncretism, you know, It's it's how it all work.

44:39

Wasn't that the Bill Cooper?

44:42

Yeah, that was the he

44:44

was making a bread at that. Yeah,

44:47

Q and on Anonymous just did a episode

44:49

on Bill Cooper. I do love Bill.

44:51

He really did everything right. Um,

44:54

one of these days one of these days. But

44:57

oh yeah, I did a two part I remember

45:00

listening to it, did a fever dream that like Bill,

45:02

I hope to go out a

45:04

mountaintop assault by law enforcement.

45:06

Um while broadcasting

45:09

nonsense on the radio. Um.

45:13

Yeah. So the Duggers TV ministry

45:15

worked the same way as like these kind

45:17

of bikers and skaters for christ at the at the mars

45:20

holtrage were it's it's all the same idea. To

45:22

draw people in, you have to white wash a lot of realities

45:24

about their lifestyle, make it look good, and once

45:26

people start to get in, you can start

45:29

laying on some of the more heavy stuff.

45:32

Um, here's one issue

45:34

with their lifestyle. He's one of the reasons why what

45:36

they're actually doing is objectively bad. This is

45:38

not just I'm not just saying it because

45:40

I'm not religious. I'm saying this because

45:42

it's abusive. And one of the reasons it's abusive

45:45

is that nineteen kids is way the funk

45:47

too many for two parents to adequately care

45:49

for in most situations almost but

45:51

I'm gonna say any situation. The Duggers

45:54

explain how they do this as using the buddy

45:56

system. Every kid has a buddy, an

45:58

older sibling who is supposed to help raise

46:00

and take care of them. Mom's buddy is the

46:02

youngest baby, well she's nursing, but

46:04

once that's done, she hands the baby off to the next youngest

46:06

daughter in the cycle goes on. Most quiverful

46:09

families work this way. I've heard from my friend even

46:11

her family works that work this way. The

46:13

daughters, as a general rule, are the ones doing

46:16

most of the child rearing because there's too

46:18

many kids for the parents to do it all. And

46:20

that's not great. Obviously,

46:23

siblings are supposed to your older

46:25

siblings supposed to look at for younger siblings. You definitely

46:27

learn things from your siblings. You're

46:30

they're not supposed to be parents, that

46:32

that robs them of the chance to be a chief.

46:34

Well, well we'll wait a minute. Wait a minute, wait a minute,

46:36

So let me get this straight. You're saying

46:39

the large family basically

46:42

does a capitalism on its straw and its

46:44

instructure, where

46:47

the CEO make middle management

46:49

and the workers do all

46:51

that. Wait, but you're saying that doesn't

46:53

work. Yeah, I mean the

46:57

people I know who grew up in it have complaints.

46:59

I'm innocent for this. I don't

47:01

know I don't think so.

47:04

Most Cuivolental families work this way, and again

47:06

it's usually the daughters who do most of the sun is supposed

47:09

to do some of it, but it's generally the daughters who are

47:11

handling an awful lot of the child ring and this

47:13

is a huge burden on them. It stops them from

47:15

having a childhood. It also means that older

47:17

siblings are often the only ones

47:20

watching out for their younger siblings.

47:22

This becomes a problem when one of those

47:24

older siblings is a sexual abuser,

47:27

and that brings us to Josh Dugger.

47:30

Joshua James Dugger was born on March

47:32

third night. He was born

47:34

in Tauntatown, Arkansas, to Jim Bob

47:36

and Michelle Dugger. When Josh was a

47:38

baby, the family was much less extreme

47:40

in their beliefs than they would become. Michelle had

47:42

taken birth control before getting pregnant, and she

47:44

started taking it again after Josh was

47:46

born. She suffered a miscarriage, though,

47:49

which she and Jim Bob blamed on the birth

47:51

control. We obviously have no idea what comes. Miscarriage

47:54

has happened, you know, it's just a thing, been real

47:56

quick. That's that's that's another thing. I think that

47:58

can get people suck. Then, like

48:01

my parents weren't very religious,

48:03

they kind of wandered away. And then it's like you have a kid,

48:06

and then all of a sudden, like everything

48:08

Like it's something about having that

48:10

makes you like kind of I don't know if

48:13

it's just like that insecurity of like am I doing things

48:15

right or what or not? But I think it makes you more a

48:18

pliable to get sucked into

48:20

something. Yeah, I mean that totally

48:22

makes sense. Um. And it's

48:24

it's all I think a lot of it is just like you

48:26

have a kid. It's really scary because

48:29

like there's no really there's

48:31

no map for how to have a kid and

48:33

raise it right. And like sometimes people

48:35

do everything right and your kid, I don't know, murder

48:37

somebody or something like. It's terrifying having a kid.

48:40

Um. And I think a lot of people are

48:42

like, well, this group says they

48:44

have a perfect roadmap for everything. Even

48:46

if I follow it, my kids will will turn out

48:49

perfectly. Um, So I'll just do that

48:51

because this is terrifying. Hi, I'm Dr

48:53

Reverend Priest. I have an answer. Would

48:55

you like to come worship with me? Yeah?

48:58

All you have to do is put these weird dresses on

49:00

your kids and have thirty of them, Um,

49:02

and it'll be great. Here's a blanket, you'll

49:04

know what to do. So yeah, they blame that

49:06

there. Um they blame their miscarriage on

49:08

on birth control, and like that's the what

49:11

causes them to like get much more into the into

49:13

the fundamentalist side of things. They decided

49:15

to let God choose the size of their family,

49:17

and this led them to have more than a dozen children

49:19

in a very short span of time. Now,

49:22

the Dugger family was not poor. Jim Bob Brandy

49:24

used car lot, but prior to discovery

49:26

coming into the picture, they were not wealthy,

49:29

and by the early adds, the family of sixteen

49:31

lived in a square foot rented

49:33

home. Most large quiverful

49:35

families live in fairly cramped environs.

49:38

People who knew the Duggers before fame said their

49:40

home was not a typical of the community.

49:42

It was far too small. It often smelled

49:44

gross because there's a lot of babies and a lot of diapers.

49:46

It was dirty, filled with clutter and the kind of refuse

49:48

that again, all those kids create. Now,

49:51

during Jim Bob's brief time as an elected

49:53

state representative, he would bring Joshua with

49:56

him to the state capital. The goal was

49:58

to groom josh for a political future,

50:00

and people who knew the family in this time tend

50:02

to think that many Gothard just saw him as

50:05

the future of the movement. He was nicknamed

50:07

Governor by Republicans who worked with his dad.

50:10

The first major news coverage I found of the Dugger

50:12

family was a Dallas Morning News article written

50:14

in December two thousand five, two years

50:17

after that New York Times photo brought Discovery

50:19

into the picture, and the Duggers were the subject

50:21

of their own TV specials. The article

50:23

is a fascinating piece of what I call complicity

50:26

journalism. Almost every detail of the quiver

50:28

Full movement and Bill Gothard that was

50:30

was easily available when this article was published.

50:32

There was a lot of information that the Dallas Morning

50:34

News could have accessed about what these people

50:36

believed, but the author, Arnold Hamilton's,

50:39

did zero work to lay out anything

50:41

about what the Duggers were actually into.

50:43

Here's a quote. As a couple, the Duggers

50:45

approached to family planning as simple. They are born again

50:48

Christians who view of the Bible as their life's manual,

50:50

and the Bible describes children as a blessing from

50:52

God. They will cheerfully accept as many blessings

50:54

as God ordains. The reality,

50:57

of course, is that they don't. The

50:59

Bible is not their own manual. A t I. Bill

51:01

Gothard is their manual, and that manual

51:03

says that women are not full autonomous people, but

51:05

merely an appendage to men and their rightful

51:07

purposes to serve without question. But pointing

51:10

that out would make this fun story about a big family

51:12

sound more like a story of child abuse, so

51:14

they don't talk about that. The author points

51:16

out several times that the Duggers own their own

51:18

business and home debt free.

51:21

This is a big deal in that community.

51:23

And there's a lot of kind of

51:25

less extreme elements of this that are still wrapped

51:28

up in this that what is that guy who does those debt

51:30

free seminars that's like weird and dead.

51:33

Yeah, the rich dead poor. I mean that's one of them. There's a

51:35

couple. I mean it's um

51:38

and Yeah, it's this whole idea that like you shouldn't

51:40

have it's immoral kind of to have debt,

51:43

and a lot of which I'm not

51:45

in favor. I think it's like horribly

51:47

fucked up the way the system of debt and the credit

51:49

and stuff works in this country. I'm

51:51

not You're not as wrong. Yeah,

51:53

it's the system. It's not you. Yeah.

51:56

Um. And if you're like it's kind of impossible

51:59

in a lot of way is to take

52:02

advantag like, your life will be a lot

52:04

harder if, for example, you're never able

52:06

to build up enough credit that you can

52:09

like try to buy a home or something, because renting

52:11

sucks, ass um. And there's

52:14

there's a lot of things avenues that get closed off

52:16

to you when you don't buy. And that's that's not great.

52:18

I wish it didn't work that way. But

52:21

this is a problem for a lot of people in the quiver

52:24

full movement, um, because

52:26

it leads to them not being able to access

52:28

the kind of resources they need to properly care for families

52:30

that are so large. Uh. Quote,

52:33

the Duggers lived temporarily in suare

52:35

foot rented house along a busy street not far

52:37

from Interstate five forty in this town of about fifty.

52:40

They are building debt free a seven thousand

52:42

square foot house in nearby Taunta town. Now

52:46

this is um,

52:48

this this gets to something that's kind of messed up here because

52:50

again, a lot of these families

52:53

are in crushing poverty

52:55

because they can't have debts, so they're often building

52:57

their own homes in the middle of nowhere. They don't have access

52:59

to indoor plumbing in a lot of cases, a lot of the again

53:02

you have families that don't have Social Security

53:04

numbers. They are in the middle of nowhere. There's

53:06

fifteen kids living in what is essentially

53:08

a shack. Like that's that's a significant

53:10

element of this. It's not the way

53:13

the Duggers live. Because the Duggers

53:15

get a shipload of money from Discovery to build

53:17

a nice, very large new house. And

53:19

this is something they don't talk about. They

53:21

talk about how they're doing it debt free. They talk about how

53:23

and make it look like this, Well, because we're just we're

53:26

scrimping, we save, and we're we're very consistent

53:28

our beliefs, and so we've been able to build this this very

53:30

large house. Um, and if you, if you have

53:32

the kind of financial discipline and listen to the teachers

53:34

about financial discipline we do, you two

53:36

can build a house like we have and like have a giant

53:39

family like we've. It's just not possible for most

53:41

people. We did it with Kupin's

53:43

Yeah, we did it all with coupons and tens

53:46

of thousands of dollars from the Discovery Channel,

53:48

which helps a lot um.

53:51

It's like all those it's like all those articles about

53:54

like how I bought my first home at like thirty

53:56

two, and it's like, oh, because your parents give you a a d

53:59

dollars for the down payment, that would help a

54:01

lot of people can afford a house with a hundred fifty

54:04

grand from their parents. But that great Twitter

54:06

Twitter mame going around where it's like on

54:08

one on one side it's it's one of those

54:10

articles where they're talking about it, and on the other

54:12

side it's say the line from The Simpsons

54:14

where they're all around Bart waiting for him. Yeah,

54:17

yeah, yeah, I got it from my

54:19

parents. Yeah yeah, there we go. Yeah.

54:22

Now, the Duggers don't talk about

54:24

any of like the money they got from

54:26

Discovery Channel. They talked about how their Christian

54:28

financial counseling helped them establish a business

54:30

and buy a property and build a seven thousand square halfwood

54:33

house. Debt free in their community came together

54:35

to help them build it, and it makes their lifestyle

54:37

seem like not just a miracle, but a miracle that you two

54:39

can half if you follow the same rules right, which

54:41

again, most people who do

54:44

the kinds of things that duggers do live in very

54:47

very difficult circumstances

54:49

in a lot of cases. And it's it's a great going

54:51

back to synchronicity because it also reinforces

54:53

the kind of UH

54:56

Calvinists prosperity gospel. The whole

54:58

thing where we got it beca as we deserved it, were

55:00

blessed by God. If you didn't get it, it's your fault.

55:03

Yeah, if you were doing the right thing, if

55:05

you were doing bless you. With the Discovery

55:07

TV show Ye the

55:10

Circle of Life. Now,

55:13

I want to quote again because I want to talk

55:15

about it's important

55:17

to really lean into the fact that most

55:19

quiverful families do not enjoy this

55:22

level of financial comfort.

55:24

So I want to quote again from that Salon column from

55:26

a former member of the quiver Fule movement titled

55:29

I could have been a Dugger wife. One

55:31

key difference worth noting between the reality show

55:34

of nineteen Kids and Counting and the reactual

55:36

reality of a t I though, is the relative

55:38

affluence of the Duggers compared to most a TI

55:40

families. The Duggers live in a spacious,

55:42

Discovery Networks funded home, but it was not

55:45

unusual in my church for two parents

55:47

and ten children to live packed into a single wide

55:49

trailer. These children usually wear threadbare

55:51

hand me downs, already passed through several rounds

55:53

of siblings. Many of them look malnourished

55:56

due to the abundance of starchy meals necessary

55:58

on a lean one parent income. Women

56:00

and mothers working outside of the home is absolutely

56:02

forbidden in a t I, no matter what the financial

56:05

situation of the family. Some women

56:07

are even required to get permission from their husbands

56:09

if they want to obtain a driver's license. That

56:12

affluence makes the constant growth of the Dugger

56:14

family, their wildly exaggerated version

56:16

of a large family upon which their TV

56:18

fame is built, possible

56:20

again in a lot of ways.

56:23

Not only is Discovery mainstreaming

56:25

this, they're enabling the Duggers to do this because they

56:27

just couldn't afford to live like this otherwise.

56:30

Now that Dallas Morning News article does note

56:32

that the family isn't getting Christmas gifts that year

56:34

because the house they're building is their gift for everybody,

56:37

and Jim Bob gives some quaint advice about eating out

56:39

on the dollar menu to save money when the family goes

56:41

out, but no attention has ever

56:43

paid to the fact that this house they live in was

56:45

made possible thanks to Discovery Channel money.

56:48

In general, that article and all the early and media

56:50

surrounding the Duggers made them out to be a

56:52

quirky, strange, but ultimately relatable

56:54

family living a different kind of lifestyle,

56:56

but one that was fundamentally healthy, perhaps

56:58

even healthier than the lives many of their viewers.

57:01

This is as close as that article gets to acknowledging

57:03

the fundamentalist cult at the core of their beliefs.

57:06

The Duggers may be swimming against societies

57:08

tied with such a large family, but it's clear children,

57:11

lots and lots of children, are at the core of their

57:13

social network. They are members of a home church

57:15

that numbers around one hundred, They are active

57:17

in a home schooling network. Their friends all seem

57:19

to have lots of children. One family has nine,

57:22

another six, and there and they're almost

57:24

seems to have evolved an unofficial, loose knit

57:26

network of large families that homeschool their

57:28

children and attend in home churches. Some

57:30

even have volunteered time to help the Duggers complete

57:33

their home by mid January. An unofficial,

57:35

loose knit network. Not what I

57:37

would describe this cult as UM.

57:40

It's pretty tightly net um and

57:43

makes tens of millions of dollars. Now

57:45

the reality, of course, yeah, they're members of

57:47

a cult. UM. The success of their TV show

57:50

and the thoughtlessly positive media coverage

57:52

of their unusually large brood disguised

57:54

this for a while. But from the beginning there

57:56

was a dark side to the Dugger story. And this brings

57:58

me back again to Joshua Dugger. I had

58:00

to really go into the weeds to do this one

58:02

for you. UM.

58:05

In two thousand two, when Joshua was fourteen,

58:07

he accosted his sister in the night and

58:09

fondled her breasts and genitals.

58:11

This sister eventually went to her father and told

58:14

him what had happened. It is unclear whether

58:16

or not Jim Bob acted on this information.

58:18

At first, he claimed on a two thousand

58:20

six police report and again the abuse started in

58:22

two thousand two, that it was not and

58:25

this report was not released until recently, that he disciplined

58:27

josh when he learned about the abuse. If

58:30

he did it did not stop the behavior.

58:32

Between two thousand two and two thousand three, josh

58:34

molested two of his sisters on at least four

58:36

to five occasions. This evidently

58:39

prompted Jim Bob Dugger to take more significant

58:41

action, not going to the cops, of course.

58:44

Well yeah, kind of

58:47

yeah, I mean eventually we're

58:49

getting there. Yeah, we're getting twists.

58:52

Um. He went to the church elders, who

58:54

advised Jim Bob to send his son to

58:56

a Christian training program.

58:58

In an early report, Walker described this program

59:01

as involving quote, hard work and counseling,

59:03

and most covers will be like that's he went to a

59:05

like a physical labor kind

59:07

of like treatment program. It sounds

59:09

like I don't know, I don't know

59:11

what the solution is Like obviously, if you're a parent,

59:14

even the best parent, this is like a nightmare, impossible

59:16

situation to handle. Like there's no there's

59:18

no perfect way to deal with this kind of horrible

59:20

thing. Um, So I'm not gonna say there's

59:22

no I'm sure there are treatment programs that are helpful.

59:25

Um. But Michelle Dugger has since

59:27

admitted that when he was going to this treatment program,

59:30

Joshua did not see a counselor, so

59:33

what did his treatment involve?

59:35

Thankfully, a lot has been written about how Bill Gothard's

59:38

A t I counsels both victims and perpetrators

59:40

of sexual abuse. And that's who ran the camp.

59:42

It was an A t I camp. I want to quote

59:44

from an interview with one woman who was sexually abused

59:47

by staff at A t I for some

59:49

context of how the process of dealing

59:51

with sexual abuse within this cold works. From

59:53

the New York Post quote, the

59:55

organization did have a protocol for counseling

59:57

sex abuse. A chart published in two thousand third

1:00:00

teen by Recovering Grace, a resource

1:00:02

for ex followers of ib LP and A t I

1:00:04

that the site claims was distributed at A t I

1:00:06

counseling seminars for more than a decade. It

1:00:09

explains how group leaders should help those who have experienced

1:00:11

sexual assault. The onus for the attack

1:00:13

is put on the victim for defrauding the

1:00:15

abuser. A modest dress, in decent

1:00:18

exposure, being out from protection of our

1:00:20

parents are all reasons that God let

1:00:22

it happen, it reads. One marriage

1:00:24

guide for women even includes a portion on what to

1:00:27

do if your husband ever sexually handles

1:00:29

your children. Author Debbie Pearl, a minister

1:00:31

whose books were sold by IBLP, wrote

1:00:33

in Created to Be His help Meet. Although

1:00:36

wives should testify and pray that their husbands

1:00:38

get twenty years in prison, they should also visit

1:00:41

him. There be an encouragement to him, let him

1:00:43

see the children three to four times a year, and

1:00:46

girls Bible study. Smith said she was told,

1:00:48

you need to be very careful what you do, what you

1:00:50

say, what you wear, how you act, because

1:00:52

at any moment you could trigger a boy. Basically,

1:00:55

there's absolutely no personal responsibility

1:00:58

for the boys now. A

1:01:00

source for that article, Ms Smith was molested

1:01:02

while working at a t I S training center

1:01:04

by a twenty one year old staff member. He

1:01:07

had a key to her room and would come in every

1:01:09

night and force himself on her. They did not

1:01:11

have sex, but in her words, we did everything

1:01:13

else. I didn't have the capacity to say,

1:01:16

hey, I don't like it, which is key to the

1:01:18

Dugger case too, because one side effect

1:01:20

of the lack of sex set is that girls don't grow up with any

1:01:22

kind of vocabulary to describe what's happening to

1:01:24

them. The reality of a TI

1:01:26

Bill Gothard and the whole Quiverful movement is

1:01:28

that it is a cult not just dedicated

1:01:30

to breeding up Christian soldiers, but to providing

1:01:33

the men at the top of it with a constant stream

1:01:35

of helpless victims, women they can molest

1:01:37

and then blame for it. Here's another quote

1:01:39

from that article. When she returned home

1:01:41

from the center, she and her father surprisingly

1:01:43

received a call from Gothard, who's basically

1:01:46

God, said Smith. She assumes her

1:01:48

friend had told one of the leaders about the incidents,

1:01:50

although she was expecting to be reprimanded.

1:01:53

Instead, Gothard wanted the dirty details.

1:01:55

He started asking the creepiest questions.

1:01:57

He was like, what time did he kiss you? What

1:02:00

time did he put his hands here? And did

1:02:02

he do this to you? Smith remembered calling

1:02:04

it gross. So this

1:02:08

is the guy who ran the treatment program that Josh

1:02:10

went to. This is how he handles allegations

1:02:13

of sexual abuse within his

1:02:15

his thing. So not

1:02:17

an effective treatment program. I think

1:02:19

it's fair to say, Sean,

1:02:21

we're going to talk more about Bill Gothor, Josh Dougger

1:02:23

and a lot of other very unpleasant people in part do. But

1:02:26

for right now, how are you feeling? Oh?

1:02:28

You know, he picked a heavy one.

1:02:32

It's uh, yeah, it's heavy. It's well, it

1:02:34

was like, it's heavy, should be talked about. It's

1:02:37

it's nice, you know, it's it's

1:02:39

one of a few times I'm like, you know what, I'm glad

1:02:41

I can look across the room and see Saddam

1:02:44

Hussein and Saddam Hussein's best friend, and

1:02:46

I feel a little better about the world. They are

1:02:48

right here. It does help talking about horrible

1:02:50

molestation cults. When there's cats sitting

1:02:53

on your legs and passed out, they've had

1:02:55

a hard day of mostly sleeping, so

1:02:57

they need their rest. Show

1:03:00

on. UM. Well, yeah,

1:03:02

that's gonna do it for part one. We'll come

1:03:04

back in part two and have more

1:03:06

uncomfortable conversations. UM.

1:03:08

Thank you for donating and helping to fund

1:03:10

the recall effort against Mayor Ted Wheeler.

1:03:13

UH, and those of you at home, if

1:03:15

you're in the Portland area, go to Total

1:03:17

Recall pd x. You can find out

1:03:19

how you can sign up to recall Ted

1:03:21

Wheeler, how you can sign your name on that, or

1:03:23

even volunteer your time. UH. If you

1:03:26

might want to donate, also total recall pdx

1:03:28

dot com you can do it there. So UM,

1:03:33

Ted Wheelers not connected directly to any of

1:03:35

this. But he does suck and this sucks too, So

1:03:38

I don't know. That's well, you know, it's kind of it's

1:03:40

it's hard to uh, people

1:03:42

that want to infiltrate and get into elected

1:03:44

positions. It's kind of hard to fight against that

1:03:46

when the mayor

1:03:49

is someone like Ted Wheeler. Yeah, I

1:03:51

mean, it doesn't make it harder to deal with.

1:03:53

It's all of the problems we have

1:03:55

where the elected leaders that aren't

1:03:58

weird cultists with dangerous

1:04:00

male supremacist ideas are also incompetent.

1:04:03

Yeah, if you'd like to take a shot at someone that

1:04:06

is a successful politician

1:04:08

and that he knows how to get and keep

1:04:10

power, but is incompetent in anything else,

1:04:13

you know, take it out on Ted Wheeler today.

1:04:16

Take it out on Ted Wheeler today. Uh,

1:04:18

and take it out on I

1:04:21

don't know, I don't know what. Don't take other

1:04:23

things out on other people. Be nice to the other

1:04:25

people around you, be nice to everyone, but Ted Wheeler

1:04:28

and fucking Bill Gothard, And take

1:04:30

it out it being the trash for

1:04:33

your friends, because that's nice,

1:04:36

Because that is nice. Yeah, take out the trash,

1:04:38

and then you know, once it's out of your house. You can throw

1:04:40

it anywhere. It doesn't matter. Yea, yeah,

1:04:43

that's ethical, I think. All

1:04:45

right, that's the episode