Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Cult Behind Josh Duggar

Episode Date: August 3, 2021

Today we dig into child molester Josh Duggar, and the Christian Dominionist cult that hid his crimes.FOOTNOTES: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2015/06/03/what-to-expect-from-the-fox-news-interview-with-josh-duggars-parents/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/05/06/how-josh-duggar-kept-his-wife-from-discovering-his-alleged-child-porn-browsing/ http://defamer.gawker.com/the-web-has-known-about-josh-duggar-for-years-when-did-1706258269 https://archive.is/H1dO9#selection-1341.0-1349.220 https://people.com/tv/josh-duggar-computer-had-software-that-would-report-his-internet-porn-usage-to-wife-anna/ https://www.today.com/parents/jinger-duggar-vuolo-duggars-fled-arkansas-dead-night-t217943 https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/people/2015/05/28/timeline-josh-duggar-19-kids-and-counting-tlc-sex-abuse-scandal/28066229/ https://www.eonline.com/news/1268143/a-house-divided-the-secrets-josh-duggar-and-his-family-tried-to-keep-are-back-to-haunt-them https://www.webcitation.org/5iQIl6cSO?http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/121805dntexbigfamily.2bb5559.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2015/05/21/josh-duggar-apologizes-resigns-from-family-research-council-amid-molestation-allegations/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/book-party/wp/2015/05/22/in-a-2014-book-josh-duggar-discussed-his-failures-temptations-and-wrong-thoughts-as-a-teen/ https://churchleaders.com/news/396480-twisted-theology-josh-duggar-children-denhollander.html/2 https://nypost.com/article/duggar-cult-enabled-sexual-abuse-former-members-say/ https://www.thelist.com/220751/the-untold-truth-of-counting-on/?utm_campaign=clip https://www.salon.com/2015/05/28/i_couldve_been_a_duggar_wife_i_grew_up_in_the_same_church_and_the_abuse_scandal_doesnt_shock_me/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2015/05/22/the-duggars-dangerous-cult-of-purity/ https://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2015/05/what-did-josh-duggars-counseling-look-like.html http://hsinvisiblechildren.org/2013/07/17/6-children-of-zion-and-glenda-lea-dutro/ Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Behind the Bastards, the podcast that just got introduced properly. Because I fucked up. Oh, fuck. I wasn't supposed to do it right. I was supposed to do it badly. I'm so sorry. Sean is here today, because Sean donated a very generous amount to the recall effort for the mayor of Portland, who sucks. And I wanted to introduce the podcast well for Sean by doing something incompetent. Shouting the name of a dictator. All day. All day.

I was going to shout Chao Chescu. Just scream out Chao Chescu's name. But I forgot to at the last minute, and I'm so sorry, Sean. That's okay. I mean, it's no punani, but you know. Well, we can talk about punani. We can talk about, but we do have a different bastard today. Although all bastards lead one way or the other to Steven Seagal. I do believe that strongly. And I'm fairly certain you could connect today's... Well, let me double check here. Let me double check here. Because we're talking about Josh Duggar today.

And in a broader sense, we're talking about aspects of the quiverful movement. And I kind of wonder, can we... Oh, I'm sure there's a production company or something related to a movie made by Steven Seagal. I think I know how I can make this connection. Okay. Yes, we can make this connection. So, Mike Huckabee went on The View in 2017 and denied that Joe Arpaio was a racist and says that he knows Joe Arpaio. They're friends, and he knows that Joe Arpaio was not a racist.

Joe Arpaio has shown up at campaign events and campaigned with both Jim Bob and Josh Duggar. Joe Arpaio was connected directly to Steven Seagal. We did it. We did it, hey, perfect. We should put it out there, put it out to the universe. Steven Seagal, the bastard's Kevin Bacon. That's right, yeah. I mean, I bet if we were to spend the time, we could draw a connection between him and Hitler. But I would probably need to do a little bit more digging than I'm going to do right now

while we're recording an episode. Or a depressingly less amount of digging. Or when it won't be immediate. There's just a photo of him in an SS uniform. Oh, no, he has an age nearly that well. Sean, you want to tell the audience a little bit about yourself before we get into this episode? As I was telling you before we started up, I worked on the healthcare frontlines during the pandemic and kind of sat on my hands while watching and paying attention to Twitter

and all that stuff of all the protests and the tear gas, again, all that stuff going on in real time, being kind of like, oh, I'm at this front of all the crazy stuff going on. I don't want to bring COVID from one to the other. So I was like, when this auction came up, I was like, oh, I am willing to spend a surreal amount of money to fuck Ted Wheeler. Fuck Ted Wheeler. Yeah, I'm glad that you did. For those of you listening who live in the city of Portland, if you go to TotalRecallPDX.com, you can print off the sheet that you can then sign and scan back in.

You can also print off sheets that'll allow you to sign up multiple people. It'll explain everything. There's like a whole process. It's more complicated than it should be and more of a pain in the ass than it should be because they don't want mayors to get recalled. But if you go to Total RecallPDX, they will explain the whole thing. If you're not in Portland and you want to support the recall effort against Ted Wheeler, who is trash, like Sean did very generously, you can also go to Total RecallPDX and you can donate. They have paid people going out and who are helping to fund this.

Timbers of Thorns game, they're usually out there. And there's a lesson I learned from all this and that is, there's a phrase that comes up a lot. And on this podcast too, it's called Fuck You Money. And it kind of, it's usually people that are so super rich, you know, they have, it's like, fuck you, I have money. Fuck you, I have enough money to change your life if I want to if you annoy me. Yeah. And it's something most of us will never have. Never ever.

Nor should we ever have because it really kind of golems up your smiggle. It does. You know what I mean? That's a good way to put it Sean. So, but hey, I just want everyone to know if I've learned nothing else from this, it's that if you have hope in your heart and even but a penny in your pocket, you have fuck Ted Wheeler money. Yeah. And that's, that's, together we can have, we can have fuck Ted Wheeler a variety of things because it's not just money that can fuck Ted Wheeler.

It's getting out on the ground and signing people up. It's adding just your name or your name and people in your household to the sheet. All of that is, is in an ephemeral sense, fuck Ted Wheeler money. Yeah. You don't even have to spend a dime. You could be sitting broke in a little, in a little cafe in Louisiana. Again, just that little pen in your pocket. Just know that you do have fuck Ted Wheeler money.

Or if you're living in Portland, you got a good relationship with some neighbors. Go out and sign some people up. There's a lot of ways to fuck Ted Wheeler. We could make a joke about the fact that he just got broken up with, but we won't because that's not classy. The very little known rule 35. So, Sean, I asked you when you won the auction, who do you want to hear about? You gave me a couple of different names. I did.

And the name that I decided to go with, because I've been wanting to cover this motherfucker for a while, was Josh Duggar. And I'm curious before we get into the episode, what do you know about Josh and why did you want to learn more about him? So, Josh Duggar, so what I know about him was the, or J-Dugs, you know, the Dig Duggar. Good God. I hope no one calls him that. Not interested if she's 19 and counting. I know, obviously, there's the violent child porn that came up. The being on, the kind of pushing that quiverful life through TLC's reality show, 19 and counting.

And he just seemed to be a kind of like, a celebrity spokesperson might not be the right way, but like a represented, like he mainstreamed stuff that was, not that it wasn't like, not that there wasn't a significant amount of it going around in the country. Like I grew up in, it was real conservative, Catholic, not quiverful necessarily, kind of towards that lines and then like terms of politics and stuff. So I kind of knew we had a thing with that. And for me, part of kind of growing up and paying more attention to things and looking back on stuff, what got me interested in him was because this is something that is what he represents,

what I think is kind of not always mainstream talked about as a danger. A lot of like, sometimes they're ex evangelicals or they'll call themselves ex evangelicals. Like I know people that have struggled with like coming out of that and trying. And so there's a lot of talk in those communities about it. But I think maybe the best way to think about it for people who aren't familiar with it is you kind of, you know, you have your kind of maybe like your sovereign citizen type libertarians, where it's like the government should just have defense and have this. So the kind of people he represents, I would say the best way to put it is they say that

and the follow up to the government should just do like defense and like a couple of civil things and the rest belongs to Jesus. And so when you talk about separate, it's one of those vocabulary things that's also purposely deceptive, I think, where like when you talk about separation of church and state, they can say yes, because they're defining the state in a completely different way. And I think that really kind of can hook people into it or have people not realize what it is. And there's from a little bit of dabbling and some of the history of like apocalyptic groups or knowing people that got out of like doom cults.

The vein of kind of fundamentalism that he's in is one of those that's like, oh, Israel becoming a state is the sign of the end times. I'm not exactly sure if he personally is within that. Oh, I mean, yeah, we're going to go into detail about the exact chunk of evangelical Christians. You can't really explain the duggers unless you explain the quiverful movement. And so we have a bunch of that talk and we're not going to go, we're going to go deeper into the quiverful movement in another episode. I have a friend who grew up in that particular cult.

Is that RL? No, I mean, he is a friend of mine, though. I went to a traditional conservative Catholic college with his wife. Oh, with his wife? Yeah. I remember. I was like, yeah. Eve has been a friend of mine for years and years and years.

How I met RL Stoller. Yeah. Okay, so we actually know some of the same people who grew up in this cult. Well, some of this is going to be old news to you, but it'll be new to a lot of people listening and it's important. So I'm going to get into it. From 1999 to 2002, Jim Bob Duggar was a state legislator in the Arkansas House of Representatives. He made a couple of failed bids at seeking national election.

And during one of these campaigns, he took his wife and his family, which at that point numbered 14 kids out to support him on election day. He and his wife voted and then marched off with their sizable brood. An AP photographer spotted them and took a picture. The picture was purchased by the New York Times and it went the early aughts version of viral. Now, at the time it was obvious that Jim Bob was a conservative Christian, but the enormous size of his family was seen as more of like a quirky personal choice than anything. Yeah.

That's how it really got portrayed a lot in the mainstream media. Parenting magazines reached out to Michelle Duggar, his wife, and asked her to write an article about child rearing. Somewhere along the line, a savvy producer at Discovery Health decided the Duggars would make fascinating reality TV fodder. They put out several hour-long specials featuring the family, whose fame rose consistently until, in 2008, they got their own TV show, 17 Kids and Counting. Yeah.

I would like to interject real quick something that an analogy or not an analogy, but a comparison that came up is because I grew up, I was one of six kids. So, and there's always like the, oh, it's such a big family, like it's kind of a, there's kind of that like remember from, I remember from the Rush Limbaugh show, or Rush Limbaugh episodes, you talked about how he was feted by the media. It's one of those things like, oh, this is interesting. This is fun. They don't dig.

And so then it gets spotlighted. Yeah. We're going to cover, we're actually going to go deep into one of the earliest article I've been able to find on the family. So for about seven years after 2008, which is, you know, kind of when they really hit the mainstream, the Duggar family grows steadily in fame. They become millionaires. I don't know exactly.

It's hard to tell, right? Because those, what are your net worth or what is this person's net worth? It's always kind of shitty. But it seems like what I've heard is like three and a half million for Jim Bob, which doesn't seem impossible. He's been on TV a while. It's been a successful show. And as a result of their growing fame, they became increasingly plugged into Republican Party politics.

Jim Bob and his oldest son, Josh, did photo ops with Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, who we now know is connected to Steven Seagal by just one degree of separation. And Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who I guess is connected to Steven Seagal, well, probably actually has direct connections to Joe Arpaio. They're both probably one step away. Now, it was hardly a secret that the Duggars were right wing, but most casual observers, including most people who watched their shows, were unaware of the sinister reality behind why the Duggar family had so very many children.

On July 11th, 2021, The Washington Post published an article titled, An American Kingdom. The logline was this. And this showed up all over my Twitter because of the fiction book that I just read about this sort of thing. The logline was, A new and rapidly growing Christian movement is openly political, once a nation under God's authority and is central to Donald Trump's GOP. Now, the article, this is what you were talking about,

is broadly accurate in a way that it sketches out the dimensions of the Dominionist movement, which, quote, holds that God commands Christians to assert authority over the seven mountains of life, family, religion, education, economy, arts, media, and government, after which time Jesus Christ will return and reign for eternity. Now, where that article gets things wrong is it classifies this movement as new. Now, you could argue that it's new that, because these are, you know, there's too broad in kind of this chunk of evangelical culture, there's premillennial and post-millennial dispensationalists, right? And premillennials were the guys who were like,

it's going to, like, the God is going to, like, come soon and we're going to have us a rapture and shit. And the post-millennials are like, we'll talk about this more a little bit later, are like, well, no, we have to ready the world for God to come back, right? One of those was dominant, like the left behind books are kind of the older way, and that's less dominant now because it didn't, I don't know if you're aware of this, but the changing of the millennium didn't really do much. Well, there was a movie with Nick Cage, you kind of peek at that point. There was a movie with Nick Cage.

At that point. God, I want to know more about how they managed to make that happen. Oh, well, because remember, he was so deep in tax, he had to sell his dinosaur bones and take any movie he could. He likes too many dinosaurs and he had to be in a weird Christian propaganda movie. Nicholas Cage is about the only actor I could never be angry at for doing that, because it's like, well, yeah, you got to keep your dinosaur bone addiction going, man. I don't blame you for that.

Yeah. Any movie Nicholas Cage is in, just keep the bones flowing. Hey, that should have been the tagline. Nicholas Cage has to bone, left behind. Yeah. Yeah. So again, not a super new movement, although it is kind of new and being as dominant with an event like that. That has changed over time.

The election of Donald Trump was, which was, you know, partly fueled by evangelical support. And so, sorry, I framed that badly. Again, this is not a new movement and it's tied into everything that's been happening over the last five, six years that have really freaked out a lot of kind of liberals who maybe weren't paying as much attention or who wrote off the Christian right as kind of just like, ah, they're just, they're just nuts, right? Or lumped them all together is the same thing. It was the same. It was easy during the Obama era.

It seemed like you, you could make fun of these people and the silly things they'd say online and like movies like Jesus Camp and stuff. And it didn't seem like as much of a, it didn't seem like they were gaining as much power as they were. And everything we're seeing today, both the rise of Donald Trump, the current assault on trans rights in states like Tennessee and Arkansas, the present groundswell of right-wing Christian support for crackdowns on voting rights, all of these things have their origins in the same very specific Christian subculture. And for more than half a decade, the Duggar family was the Trojan horse for bringing that subculture into the American mainstream. To understand the Duggar's, we have to talk about the quiverful movement. The name comes from Psalm 127.

Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one's youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them, they will not be put to shame when they contend with their enemies at the gate. And the gist of this idea is that American society has become hopelessly godless and sinful. And if you're going to bring the nation back to God, you need a new generation of holy warriors to fight for Christianity. So it's your responsibility as a true Christian to pop out several basketball teams worth of babies in order to build the army of God, right? That's the, again, we both have friends who were raised to be soldiers in God's army. Now, the quiverful movement evolved rather naturally out of several different strains of right wing Christian culture. One of these was the homeschooling community.

Obviously, parents can choose to homeschool kids for a lot of perfectly sane reasons. And in fact, one of my old coworkers, Christy Harrison, it cracked, who is not at all a quiverful type, you know, Christian homeschools her family. And is a perfectly reasonable person, not shitting on the concept of homeschooling. I was homeschooled from first grade to through high school graduation. Oh, wow. Yes. But yours was pretty, I mean, it's different not to be. So here's the weird thing.

So the background on that is it was more, there's family dynamics, which I won't go into for the sake of. But basically, it was kind of a more of a, it's a thing we should do. So it's kind of weird, like we did a lot of the performative stuff without getting super into the culty stuff. It was more of like viewed as an obligation to life for the community or like grandparents or whatever. So it worked for me. So I'm like on the low end of the spectrum. And I can see like school or what used to be or maybe still is called Asperger's. Yeah.

So, but I can see going to school given that, given how aware of my given everything at home and family dynamics and issues and mental health and all that stuff. I could see that being a real bad time for me. Yeah. So it like. It's not a great time for most people. Yeah. So I mean, and my dad had a restaurant. So I worked at that.

So I kind of had like one foot in the secular one foot in the like insular kind of sheltered. Yeah. That seems like a pretty lucky. Yeah. Very. Yeah. One of the things, but if you're, even if you're coming at it from a more reasonable perspective, if you're in homeschooling, you're going to encounter a lot of weird Christian propaganda because it's so dominant in homeschooling. Right. Even if you're trying to be secular with it, it's just everywhere in that community.

And yeah, the practice. So this leads to what I'm saying, the practice of homeschooling has been heavily dominated by the evangelical Christian community for decades. The U.S. Department of Education currently estimates that more than one million school age kids are homeschooled in the United States. And the real number could be double or triple that because a lot of those families do not participate in the census or get birth certificates for their children. Yeah. That is very common in the quiverful movement. If you like, especially in the fringes, not even the fringes of it, a lot of people in it, like maybe you get birth certificate, maybe you get a birth certificate for your sons. You don't get them for your daughters because birth certificate, she could leave at some point.

I was going to say. She's got a social security number. What do you do with a birth certificate and a social security? A passport. What do you use a passport to do? You leave. You leave. Get away from your weird family.

Yeah. You cut it off the route. So we really don't know how many kids there are like this. And that's, I mean, there's a lot of other different subcultures. Sovereign citizens get looped into some aspects of this, but not all like once you're at the once you're homesteading in the middle of nowhere and not getting birth certificates for your children. You become, you get into contact with a lot of subcultures. It's like the white version of avoiding immigration to send by not doing the census. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Which you, you do not have. Well, I don't know. I'm not, I can't even say that you shouldn't worry about the census if you're an undocumented immigrant because some sketchy shit was tried to be done by the Trump administration. I don't know. It's a bummer. The census should, it shouldn't.

Yeah. Yeah. That's a whole other rant. So over the course of the 1970s and 80s, a backlash against feminism and the civil rights movement helped lead to the birth of the moral majority. The first organized upswell of what we now call the religious right. We did a two-parter on this. Jerry Falwell was the biggest man in that movement, but there were a lot of, of, I mean, it was a huge movement, right? A lot of people were involved.

Oh yeah. Another prominent member of the early religious right in the moral majority was Howard Phillips, a Russian Jewish man who converted to evangelical Christianity. He broke off from the Republican Party in 1974 and founded the far-right Constitution Party. Now, Howard and his son, Doug, were two of the, of the first prominent advocates of a very specific way of looking at the culture war in the United States. Like many in the religious right, they argued that the struggle between humanism and Christianity was a war. They went on to argue that this war could only be won by Christian women. And the only way for Christian women to fight was for them to die to themselves. This is the term they use, i.e., give up their personal ambitions and completely submit to their husbands.

The basic idea, as the Philipses and others preached it, was that Jesus was the general of a great heavenly army. Soldiers in a real army are expected to follow orders, whether or not they agree with or understand them, unless you're in the German army now. Um, yeah. That's that. Yeah, yeah, I remember that. Uh, women needed to submit totally to their husbands because that's what Jesus asked. So if they accept the utter authority of men over their lives, they would actually be taking agency and striking a powerful blow against the gupple. By giving up your life, that's, that's you exercising agency.

Yes, and to put it in context again for the more secular people, uh, you think about war, you know, like war crimes that the United States gets away with. If you're in a heavenly army, what are war crimes? You know, it's, it's, it's the same where it's like, yeah, you know, it's going to happen and it's going to get covered up and it's okay as long as you achieve the objective. It's that, yeah. Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of crimes that are fine with this, but you know who doesn't do crimes? Uh, unless they're rad. I was going to say, uh, people who aren't Elon Musk, but then you said crimes. Yeah, I could say crimes. Not crimes.

The products and services that support this podcast, Sean, have never committed any crimes in the United States that have been documented by journalists who have not been car bombed. I was going to say they have to be arrested for it to be a crime. They have to be arrested for it to be a crime. That's how I live my life and that's how our sponsors do too. Here's some ads. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy.

Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and not on the gun badass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Ah, we're back. Sean, we're talking about Howard Phillips and we're talking about the birth of the religious right. So, in speeches that Doug Phillips gives to his son, Doug, gives to packed audiences, he reads verses from the Bible like Ephesians 5-21. Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body of which he is the savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Now, Doug calls this the quote, best kept secret of modern Christian marriages. And then he says stuff like this. You are a help-meet. The Bible says that man is not made for women, but the woman is made for the man. If you have a problem with that, take it up with the creator, not Phillips. I'm just quoting. Until we get comfortable playing those roles, we'll never be at peace. But if we accept those roles, whew, half the battle is diminished already just by the fact that we accept God's creation order.

This philosophy has come to be known as complementarianism, i.e. women were created not as individual beings of their own with independent desires and talents, but as a complement to men. Little known fact, that was actually the original tagline for G.I. Joe. Submitting to your husbands is half the battle. Now, feminism in this cosmology, moral cosmology, is evil because it encourages women to seek their own lives independent of men, which robs men who are again the only real people of the wifely support God intended for them to have. In his speeches, Phillips loves to quote Isaiah 312, which cites God's curse upon a sinful nation. Children are your oppressors and women rule over you. This is how I'm going to curse you if you don't follow my laws. I'll make your children oppress you and the women will be in charge. So he's saying that feminism is a curse from God. If we don't obey his call, he'll curse us with feminism.

Well, going back even further again from my upbringing and a lot of some people in my upbringing and then just kind of a general Christian thing, it's the whole, well, Eve gave him the apple. So women has always been men's downfall and it's their place to be underfoot because that's, you know, that was just how it worked because that's how the story started. That's how the story started. Now, the nightmare for these people is a world in which Christian men do not have total control over their families. While mainstream culture filled with movies featuring strong female protagonists in the 80s and 90s, rock stars like Madonna, political figures like Hillary Clinton and Margaret Thatcher, Phillips and his ilk preached that women's liberation would lead to the collapse of civilization. He called the young Christians he preached to in the 1990s and early aughts the reclamation generation because their duty was to retake society from liberal feminists. One of the through lines in this strain of evangelical culture is they have way more faith in the power of feminism than most feminists that I know.

They are really bullish on its ability to change society. Now, homeschooling was considered one of the necessary tools of reclamation. By having enormous families and teaching their children themselves outside of the sinful state education system, Christian families could keep their children free from the sinful secular world. One of the things I find most interesting about these people is the sheer amount of weight they give to feminism. And again, they have a lot of, they really think that it has a lot more influence and government than I think it does. Here's Mary Pryde, editor of Practical Homeschooling Magazine and one of the most influential figures in the homeschooling movement. Quote, Christians have accepted feminists' moderate demands for family planning and careers while rejecting the radical side of feminism, meaning lesbianism and abortion. What most do not see is that one demand leads to the other.

Feminism is a totally self-consistent system aimed at rejecting God's role for women. Those who adopt any part of its lifestyle can't help picking up its philosophy, and those who pick up its philosophy are buying themselves a one-way ticket to social anarchy. Feminism is self-consistent. The Christianity of the 50s wasn't. Feminists had a plan for women. Christians didn't. And this is our explanation for why feminism was winning and they were, you know, Christianity is under siege and whatnot. To be fair, there's probably, I mean, obviously a lot of people are like, no, feminism, but there's probably a good chunk that know they have to pump it up to get people to keep it as a boogeyman. And when I say, by the way, when I'm saying stuff like that, I think these people have an outsized idea of the impact feminism has had.

It's not an anti-feminist thing. It's just like, there's still a lot of bias against women in our culture. I think they're overestimating the power that feminism has culturally. Now, Pride's major contribution to the evolution of what became the quiverful movement was to provide a plan for women. She helped and again, that's her ideas like Christianity hasn't had a plan for women. Feminists did and that's why we're losing. They had a vision for the future and we didn't. She helped to create a whole integrated lifestyle of biblical womanhood from the book Quiverful by Catherine Joyce, which is a great way to get up to speed on all this if you're interested. Very good book. The biblical womanhood, encompassing homework, motherhood and wifehood as they were lived not in the 1950s, but in a notion of pre-industrial, pre-household appliance times, is what Pride calls a total lifestyle,

as comprehensive as the pervasive influence of feminism, which has reached every part of women's work lives, biology and thinking. And this time around, the anti-feminists intend to be fiercely diligent, rooting out the worldly, feminist ideas and influences in their churches, entertainment and own thinking and making sure it doesn't come back. Now, I'm leaving out a lot and again, Catherine Joyce's Quiverful is a great book for a more complete understanding of all this. Two other important contributors to this, what becomes the ideologies of the duggers follow are John Piper and Wayne Grudem. These are both reformed Baptist preachers who headed up the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, or CBMW. In 1987, the year of its founding, the CBMW released something called the Danvers Statement, which was both a mission statement for the Council and a rallying cry to conservative Christian forces.

The statement urged Christians to fight egalitarian influences in the evangelical church, particularly the scourge of Christian feminism. It argued that women should be barred from positions of authority in churches. Now, the Danvers Statement was signed by some people you might know, Beverly Lehey, wife of the author of Left Behind, Tim Lehey, signed it. Pat Robertson also signed it, Dorothy Patterson and Paige Patterson signed it. You probably don't know those last two names, but Paige orchestrated the right-wing takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention, the organization behind the second largest Christian denomination in the United States. We talk about this in the Moral Majority episode, but a lot of Baptists used to be completely fine with abortion. Up until like the 70s, it was not a super-controversial.

Now, the Catholics have always had their whole thing going on about it. But every sperm is sacred. I got in trouble when I was in second grade for leading a group of kids around to sing that song on the playground. I couldn't watch like Beavis and Butthead or The Simpsons, but for whatever reason, my family was like, well, Monty Python's smart, so whatever, you can watch as much of that as you want. And I watched Meaning of Life in that song, and I really understand it, but I let them march around the playground singing it, and it didn't go over well in suburban Texas. Now, was it because you sang it, or because you sang it at the end, you went, just hands.

I didn't do that, but I didn't get what just hands was. It must have been like 34th grade. But in 1998, 11 years after the Danvers' statement, the SBC, the Southern Baptist Convention, released a statement of their own in which they urged wives to graciously submit to their husbands. Mike Huckabee was one signatory to the statement. The SBC, by the way, speaks for about 16 million Americans. So by the end of the 20th century, many of the ideas that are central to the quiverful movement had started to become mainstream on the right wing. So you're not talking about a fringe ideology when the SBC is endorsing some of this stuff, right?

Yeah. Well, was it either the Falwell or the Reagan episode? I think it was you that talked about it, where it was like the evangelical saw Reagan as an in, and then Reagan used them, and then didn't give them what they wanted. So then they started going, oh, we need to start taking over and making our stuff. We need to, instead of just giving them our vote and expecting stuff in return, we need to infiltrate and put our people into, yeah. Is the stuff you're seeing QAnon guys try to do right now, and Christians continue to, extremist Christians continue to do, where it's like, well, we got to get people on the school board,

so we got to get people in local elected positions. They've been doing this for a while, and it works, which is, every time I see people on the left to be like, no, the thing to do is throw up a poster on Twitter and have a march. Well, that's good too, and I get the frustration with electoralism, but they've gotten a lot of crazy shit done because they've been voting for decades. I don't know, we don't have the time anymore to, hey, that's a longer, you can make radical changes democratically in this society. It just takes decades of generations of people giving up their entire lives to the cause, but it worked for them.

Now, obviously, most Southern Baptists are not out there having a dozen kids eschewing alcohol, forcing their daughters to wear sackcloth dresses and refusing to get birth certificates for their children. If you want to view the struggle for Christian domination of the U.S. as a war, and these people do, the Quifferful families are like special forces. Their sons, like Josh Duggar, are supposed to be trained from childhood to seek positions of influence in the government and culture. But I'm getting ahead of myself here. We've covered most of the ideological underpinnings of the Quifferful movement, but the Duggar family are also members of a very specific cult within this chunk of the Christian right.

They are followers of a guy named Bill Gothard. It's spelled got hard, and that'll be relevant in an unfortunate way later. Oh, yeah. Yeah, you know Bill. You're familiar with Bill Gothard. I see how you erected that joke. Gothard founded the Institute in Basic Life Principles in 1961, so this is, the religious right's not a thing when he starts this, right? Not in a political way, right? So he's really on the bleeding edge of all this, and it was originally called Campus Teams,

and its purpose was to recruit young people, obviously, in campuses for Christ. The IBLP was fundamentalist from the get-go, and it was also male supremacist. Women were supposed to marry men chosen by their fathers and submit entirely to first their father and then their husband. Dating and flirting were forbidden, so much as winking at a man as seen as lustful and morally equivalent to prostitution. In the early 1980s, the IBLP was wracked by a sex scandal when it was found that Bill and his brother Steve were both having affairs with secretaries at the Institute. Weird how that keeps happening. Weird how none of these guys practice.

Although, actually, you can say they are practicing what they preach, because, as we'll continue to talk about, the fault in this case was the women, because they were being temptresses. Well, you know, and if they had gotten them pregnant, I mean, bonus, he got an extra soldier. There's an extra soldier. So, Bill never married or had kids, which, again, interesting, but his IBLP became the center of education and philosophy for the quiverful movement. The IBLP, starting in the late 1980s, ran what was effectively, and so his brother has to leave the organization, and Bill steps down, but for like two weeks. And if you want a much more detailed podcast series on Bill Godford, the podcast Some Place Underneath,

which is part of the last podcast on the left network, did like a four or five parter on this. It's very, very good. I was going to say, too, there's one called Christian Rightcast. Oh, I haven't heard that. So, that's one. It's a couple ex-vangelicals, or I forget if that's how they're for themselves. But it's on Apple. I think it may have moved to Flex or something like that.

But it goes into guys, and there's a thing on Bill Gotthard and a thing. I don't know if you have it in there, but his rules for how women should dress. Oh, yes. We'll talk a little bit about that. Yeah. But yeah, check out both of those if you want more. This is really important stuff. In Some Place Underneath, they go into less detail about the stuff that I just covered,

but they go into a lot more detail about Bill. Yeah. So, the IBLP ran what was effectively a troubled teen facility that started up in the late 1980s, which was basically a forced labor camp for kids. And they also operated the Advanced Training Institute, or ATI, which created curriculum for homeschooled families. The Duggars were absolutely slavish devotees of gothardism, and all of their children were raised on ATI curriculum, from a write-up by former Colt member Delaney Bartlett, who grew up in the same community. The ATI curriculum teaches that the Bible, as the literal infallible word of God,

must be the center of every lesson, leading to some shockingly inaccurate lessons, particularly in science and history. The ATI curriculum also has a big focus on teaching students how they should behave. Immediate unquestioning obedience to authorities is foremost, and ATI prescribes beatings to disciplined children for even the most trivial of infractions, like failing to complete a chore on time or arguing with a sibling. Even more disturbing, the Duggars participate in blanket training, where toddlers and small children are placed on a blanket, and a toy is placed just out of reach.

When the child reaches for the toy or moves off the blanket, the parents will slap or hit them in order to instill fear and obedience. And we're not going to talk about to train up a child, but that's very big in these cultures. Child abuse is like massive in this community. Yeah. I was going to say that sounds more like something you'd see on a Japanese game show then. Yeah, but it would be a fully grown man on a blanket. Still wearing a diaper.

Yeah, still wearing a diaper. I would watch that show. If they're adults, I don't like blanket training is fine. It's like your kink or whatever. More power to you. Now, I found another interview with a survival of Gothard's Colt on Salon. This person went into a great deal more detail about what kids were taught about sex through this curriculum. Quote, The so-called wisdom booklets that form the backbone of ATI children's educations contain more Bible verses than they do information,

particularly lacking in a religious sect so obsessed with reproduction, is any kind of sex education. This is especially true for young women who receive very little sex education because the church teaches us that women do not have sex drives. However, the opposite is believed of men. ATI teaches that men have nearly uncontrollable sex drives ready to erupt at the mere sight of a pant leg or a perm. To illustrate this point, ATI families are encouraged to maintain a no computer rule for their sons, but not their daughters. Gothard also encouraged men to turn towards the wall when dining at restaurants so as to not be tempted by a waitress or a stray attractive woman. You know, those stray attractive women just kind of... Out there tempting you by existing...

Just wandering the streets. Yeah, just constantly. I mean, that is how they view it, though. That's an attack on you if a woman's out there living her life and you find her attractive. That's like an assault on you. Well, yeah, because if you're in an army, you're fighting another army, so that means they're also a unified trained force of the devil. They're the sexy Taliban out there trying to steal your virtue. Yeah, it's like a Halloween costume, but as regular military gear.

Now, I'm going to continue that quote. Not that our supposed lack of a sex drive absolved us from sexual responsibility. ATI taught us that it is our job to keep men's desires from erupting into lust or sexual activity. We were taught that it was our sin if we cause a man to lust after us. I spent many nights as an early-developed teenager crying and begging God to take away my large breasts because I noticed men's eyes had begun to linger on me during church. Modesty wasn't only about dress, it was also about behavior. Women were taught from a very young age that they are to be submissive in all things,

allowing men to open doors for us even to get out of a car, never initiating conversations with a man, and never correcting a man when he was wrong. Essentially, a good ATI woman is sweet, silent, and obedient. This combination of zero sexual knowledge and deeply ingrained submissiveness left many young girls in our church especially vulnerable to sexual abuse. As a teenager, I became aware that several of my friends were being molested by their older brothers or fathers. They would start stilted conversations with me about it, but none of us actually understood the concept of sex or rape or molestation enough

to actually discuss it, so it stayed on the level of furtively whispered hints. You can draw a line here between 1984, the idea behind Newspeak, is that if you limit the vocabulary of a community, you limit their ability to express certain things. That's what's going on here. You limit the ability of kids to understand sexuality, and this way you limit their ability to know when they've been wronged. You take away communication.

Exactly. And to draw to something more recent as well, to kind of go on the other side in terms of how, in terms of men blaming for women for stuff, there's the, obviously don't know this for effect, but the Atlanta, the spa shooter who was like, oh, they were, like I would not be surprised if it was just like, basically they were immodest, and so that drove me and my uncontrollable hormones to...

That shooting, from what information we have so far, seems to be the logical extent of this kind of thinking, is like they wouldn't stop tempting me. Yeah, I don't know. We don't know, but just like it's to give people like this isn't, to bring it a little in from the abstract is like, yeah, this is recent stuff, and it can go a variety of different ways because people are different.

They're going to react differently. Some of those reactions are going to be scary as hell. Yeah. So, but you know what's not scary as hell? A bright summer day. I was going to say capitalism, but I guess both capitalism and a bright summer day can be scary because capitalism is a part of the engine of carbon release

that is causing our summers to be hotter and drier. So... Yeah. But you know, you can't get... ...a darker direction than I wanted to. But a bright summer day, I mean, it won't pay you to say that it's not a problem. So, I mean, capitalism at least, you know, make a buck.

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So the Duggars didn't bring Bill Gothard or ATI up often on the show in ways that would have been immediately obvious. You could see books in the show, right? There's a lot of, like, it's visible if you know what to look for, but they're not out there talking about how awesome Bill Gothard is. The signs were there if you knew where to look. A Duggar wedding celebrants would dedicate an entire cake to Bill Gothard, which is, again, cult shit.

All the Duggar women had distinctively permed hair because Bill believed that curly bangs brought out a woman's natural beauty. The antiquated dress codes that the Duggar family engaged in, particularly for women in the family, were also a result of Bill Gothard's influence. Over the years they were on TV, the Duggar family, particularly Jim Bob,

were very open about the fact that their showbiz career was a ministry. They saw it as a way to recruit. With the help of the Discovery camera crew, selective editing and scripting, they were able to portray what was really in reality an abusive cult as a quirky lifestyle choice. Perhaps even one viewer would want to emulate. Jim Bob liked to say that they were just trying to convince people

not to get abortions, because by seeing that, like, oh, well, this family can handle 14, 15, 16 kids. So obviously I should keep this one kid, right? It was a big part of, like, why he said they were doing it. But of course the real purpose behind all this was to build a larger cultural space for Gothardism, the quiverful movement, and male supremacist, fundamentalist Christianity and American culture.

This is also part of a broader fundamentalist strategy. It came about as part of a split between premillennial and post-millennial dispensationalists. The former believed that the rapture was coming any day, and soon the faith would be brought up to heaven, the world would end. The latter believed that God wouldn't let Christ return until they established a godly world.

In order to do that, they had to recruit. And it wasn't enough to get people to accept Christ. They had to convince folks to follow the rules. Their rules, otherwise the world wouldn't be godly enough. Since those rules are very unpleasant and extreme, you have to lure people in, gradually, by reaching them with something less extreme and drawing them in like a fish on a lure.

From quiverful, quote, Mark Driscoll's Mars Hill Church, to attract its young, urban congregation. But churches like Mars Hill, which espouses a deeply conservative ideology, recognize that such outreach ministries are meant to be transitional, introducing a person to Christ where they are,

then easing them into more serious study and graduating them to a traditionalist doctrine. And Driscoll's case, to a doctrine that places substantial weight on gender, submission, and a wife's role in marriage. So, again, these are all, this is just, it's how cults work. It's how QAnon works, too.

You can see it in the fact that, like, there's elements of Q that are about the JFK conspiracy, the elements of Q that are about, like, aliens and stuff, that are about vaccines. And it all leads back to this Ur conspiracy. And that's how people get pulled in. That's what makes it more, it's syncretism, you know? It's how all this shit works.

Wasn't that the Bill Cooper? Yeah, Bill Cooper. That was the... He was speaking of Q. Great at that. Yeah. QAnon Anonymous just did a episode on Bill Cooper. I do love Bill.

He really did everything right. One of these days. One of these days. Well, didn't you do one on? Oh, yeah, I did a two-parter on Bill. I remember listening to it. Did I fever dream that? Like Bill, I hope to go out

in a mountain top assault by law enforcement. Well, broadcasting nonsense on the radio. Yeah, so the Duggars TV ministry worked the same way as like these kind of bikers and skaters for Christ at the Mars Hotel Church. It's all the same idea. To draw people in, you have to whitewash a lot of realities about their lifestyle, make it look good.

And once people start to get in, you can start laying on some of the more heavy stuff. Here's one issue with their lifestyle. Here's one of the reasons why what they're actually doing is objectively bad. This is not just, I'm not just saying it because I'm not religious. I'm saying this because it's abusive.

And one of the reasons it's abusive is that 19 kids is way the fuck too many for two parents to adequately care for in most situations. Almost, I'm going to say any situation. The Duggars explain how they do this as using the buddy system. Every kid has a buddy, an older sibling who is supposed to help raise and take care of them. Mom's buddy is the youngest baby.

Well, she's nursing, but once that's done, she hands the baby off to the next youngest daughter and the cycle goes on. Most quiverful families work this way. I've heard from my friend Eve, her family work this way. The daughters, as a general rule, are the ones doing most of the child rearing because there's too many kids for the parents to do it all.

And that's not great. Obviously, older siblings are supposed to look out for younger siblings. You definitely learn things from your siblings. They're not supposed to be parents. That robs them of the chance to be a child. Wait a minute. Let me get this straight. You're saying the large family basically does a capitalism

on its own structure. It's independent contract. Where the CEOs make middle management and the workers do all that. Wait a minute. You're saying that doesn't work? Yeah, I mean, the people I know who grew up in it have complaints. I'm too innocent for this. I don't know. I don't think.

So most quiverful families work this way. And again, it's usually the daughters who do most of the son is supposed to do some of it, but it's generally the daughters who are handling an awful lot of the child rearing. And this is a huge burden on them. It stops them from having a childhood. It also means that older siblings

are often the only ones watching out for their younger siblings. This becomes a problem when one of those older siblings is a sexual abuser. And that brings us to Josh Duggar. Joshua James Duggar was born on March 3, 1988. He was born in Tonitown, Arkansas to Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar. When Josh was a baby, the family was much less extreme in their beliefs than they would become.

Michelle had taken birth control before getting pregnant and she started taking it again after Josh was born. She suffered a miscarriage though, which she and Jim Bob blamed on the birth control. We obviously have no idea what caused it. Miscarriages happen, you know, it's just a thing. Jumping real quick, that's another thing I think that can get people sucked in.

My parents weren't very religious. They kind of wandered away and then it's like you have a kid and then all of a sudden everything, it's something about having that makes you kind of, I don't know if it's just that insecurity of like, am I doing things right or what or not, but I think it makes you more pliable to get sucked into something.

Yeah, I mean that totally makes sense. And it's all, I think a lot of it is just like, you have a kid, it's really scary, because like there's no really, there's no map for how to have a kid and raise it right and like sometimes people do everything right and your kid, I don't know, murder somebody or something, like it's terrifying having a kid.

And I think a lot of people are like, well this group says they have a perfect roadmap for everything, even if I follow it, my kids will turn out perfectly. So I'll just do that because this is terrifying. Hi, I'm Dr. Reverend Priest. I have an answer. Would you like to come worship with me?

Yeah, all you have to do is put these weird dresses on your kids and have 30 of them and it'll be great. Here's a blanket, you'll know what to do. So yeah, they blame their miscarriage on birth control and like that's what causes them to like get much more into the fundamentalist side of things. They decided to let God choose the size of their family and this led them to have more than a dozen children

and a very short span of time. Now, the Duggar family was not poor. Jim Bob ran a used car lot, but prior to discovery coming into the picture, they were not wealthy. And by the early aughts, the family of 16 lived in a 2,200 square foot rented home. Most large, quiverful families live in fairly cramped environments. People who knew the Duggars before fame

said their home was not atypical of the community. It was far too small. It often smelled gross because there's a lot of babies and a lot of diapers. It was dirty, filled with clutter and the kind of refuse that again, all those kids create. Now, during Jim Bob's brief time as an elected state representative, he would bring Joshua with him to the state capitol.

The goal was to groom Josh for a political future and people who knew the family in this time tend to think that many gothardists saw him as the future of the movement. He was nicknamed governor by Republicans who worked with his dad. The first major news coverage I found of the Duggar family was a Dallas Morning News article

written in December 2005, two years after that New York Times photo brought discovery into the picture. And the Duggars were the subject of their own TV specials. The article is a fascinating piece of what I call complicity journalism. Almost every detail of the quiverful movement and Bill Gauthard that was easily available

when this article was published, there was a lot of information that the Dallas Morning News could have accessed about what these people believed. But the author, Arnold Hamilton, did zero work to lay out anything about what the Duggars were actually into. Here's a quote. So they don't talk about that.

The author points out several times that the Duggars own their own business and home debt-free. This is a big deal in that community. And there's a lot of kind of less extreme elements of this that are still wrapped up in this. What is that guy who does those debt-free seminars? That's like weird and... Rich, dead, poor, dead?

Yeah, the rich, dead, poor. I mean, that's one of them. There's a couple of those. And yeah, it's this whole idea that like you shouldn't have, this immoral kind of to have debt and a lot of... Which I'm not in favor. I think it's like horribly fucked up the way the system of debt and the credit and stuff works in this country. I'm not...

But it's the system. It's not you that's fucked up. Yeah. And if you're like... It's kind of impossible in a lot of ways to take advantage... Like your life will be a lot harder if, for example, you're never able to build up enough credit that you can like try to buy a home or something. Because renting sucks ass. And there's a lot of things, avenues,

that get closed off to you when you don't buy... And that's not great. I wish it didn't work that way. But this is a problem for a lot of people in the quiverful movement because it leads to them not being able to access the kind of resources they need to properly care for families that are so large. Quote, Now, this is...

This gets to something that's kind of messed up here because, again, a lot of these families are in crushing poverty because they can't have debt. So they're often building their own homes in the middle of nowhere. They don't have access to indoor plumbing in a lot of cases. Again, you have families that don't have social security numbers. They are in the middle of nowhere. There's 15 kids living in what is essentially a shack.

That's a significant element of this. It's not the way the Duggers live because the Duggers get a shitload of money from Discovery to build a nice, very large new house. And this is something they don't talk about. They talk about how they're doing it debt-free. They talk about how... And make it look like this. Well, because we're scrimp and we save

and we're very consistent in our beliefs and we build this very large house. And if you have the kind of financial discipline and listen to the teachers about financial discipline we do, you too can build a house like we have and have a giant family like we have. And it's just not possible for most people. We did it with coupons.

Yeah, we did it all with coupons and tens of thousands of dollars from the Discovery Channel, which helps a lot. It's like all those articles about how I bought my first home at 32 and it's like, oh, because your parents give you $150,000 for the down payment. Yeah, that would help. I think a lot of people could afford a house with 150 grand from their parents.

That great Twitter meme going around where it's like on one side it's one of those articles where they're talking about it and on the other side it's say the line from The Simpsons where they're all around Bart waiting for him. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got it from my parents. Yeah, here we go.

Now, the Duggers don't talk about any of the money they got from Discovery Channel. They talked about how their Christian financial counseling helped them establish a business and buy a property and build a 7,000 square foot house debt-free and their community came together to help them build it. And it makes their lifestyle seem like not just a miracle but a miracle that you two can have if you follow the same rules, right?

Which again, most people who do the kinds of things the Duggers do live in very, very difficult circumstances in a lot of cases. Well, and it's a great going back to synchronicity because it also reinforces the kind of Calvinist prosperity gospel whole thing where we got it because we deserved it, we're blessed by God. If you didn't get it, it's your fault. Yeah, if you were doing the right thing,

Paul would bless you with the Discovery Channel TV show. It's the circle of life. Now, I want to quote again because I want to talk about, it's important to really lean into the fact that most quiverful families do not enjoy this level of financial comfort. So I want to quote again from that salon column from a former member of the quiverful movement titled I Could Have Been a Duggar Wife.

One key difference worth noting between the reality show of 19 kids and counting and the actual reality of A.T.I. though is the relative affluence of the Duggers compared to most A.T.I. families. The Duggers live in a spacious Discovery Networks funded home but it was not unusual in my church for two parents and ten children to live packed into a single wide trailer. These children usually wear threadbare hand-me-downs already passed through several rounds of siblings.

Many of them look malnourished due to the abundance of starchy meals necessary on a lean one-parent income. Women and mothers working outside of the home is absolutely forbidden in A.T.I. no matter what the financial situation of the family. Some women are even required to get permission from their husbands if they want to obtain a driver's license. That affluence makes the constant growth of the Dugger family,

their wildly exaggerated version of a large family upon which their TV fame is built, possible. Again, in a lot of ways, not only is Discovery mainstreaming this, they're enabling the Duggers to do this because they just couldn't afford to live like this otherwise. Now, that Dallas Morning News article does note that the family isn't getting Christmas gifts that year because the house they're building is their gift for everybody

and Jim Bob gives some quaint advice about eating out on the dollar menu to save money when the family goes out because no attention is ever paid to the fact that this house they live in was made possible thanks to Discovery Channel money. In general, that article and all the early media surrounding the Duggers made them out to be a quirky, strange, but ultimately relatable family living a different kind of lifestyle

but one that was fundamentally healthy and perhaps even healthier than the lives of many of their viewers. This is as close as that article gets to acknowledging the fundamentalist cult at the core of their beliefs. The Duggers may be swimming against society's tide after a large family, but it's clear children, lots and lots of children, are at the core of their social network. They are members of a home church that numbers around 100.

They are active in a homeschooling network. Their friends all seem to have lots of children. One family has nine, another six. And there almost seems to have evolved an unofficial, loose-knit network of large families that homeschool their children and attend in-home churches. Some even have volunteered time to help the Duggers complete their home by mid-January.

An unofficial loose-knit network. Not what I would describe this cult as. It's pretty tightly knit and makes tens of millions of dollars. Now, the reality, of course, yeah, they're members of a cult. The success of their TV show and the thoughtlessly positive media coverage of their unusually large brood disguised this for a while.

But from the beginning, there was a dark side to the Duggers story and this brings me back again to Joshua Duggar. I had to really go into the weeds to do this one for you. In 2002, when Joshua was 14, he accosted his sister in the night and fondled her breasts and genitals. This sister eventually went to her father and told him what had happened.

It is unclear whether or not Jim Bob acted on this information at first. He claimed on a 2006 police report, and again the abuse started in 2002, that it was not, and this report was not released until recently, that he disciplined Josh when he learned about the abuse. If he did, it did not stop the behavior. Between 2002 and 2003, Josh molested two of his sisters

on at least four to five occasions. This evidently prompted Jim Bob Duggar to take more significant action. Not going to the cops, of course. Well, kind of. Yeah, I mean, eventually. We will talk, we're getting there. Oh, the twists.

He went to the church elders who advised Jim Bob to send his son to a Christian training program. In an early report, he described this program as involving, quote, hard work and counseling, and most coverage will be like that's, he went to like a physical labor

kind of like treatment program. It sounds like, I don't know, I don't know what the solution is, like obviously if you're a parent, even the best parent, this is like a nightmare impossible situation to handle like. There's no perfect way to deal with this kind of horrible thing. So I'm not going to say there's no,

I'm sure there are treatment programs that are helpful, but Michelle Duggar has since admitted is going to this treatment program. Joshua did not see a counselor. So what did his treatment involve? Thankfully, a lot has been written about how Bill Gothard's ATI counsels both victims and perpetrators

of sexual abuse. And that's who ran the camp. It was an ATI camp. I want to quote from an interview with one woman who was sexually abused by staff at ATI for some context of how the process of dealing with sexual abuse within this cold works from the New York Post, quote,

did have a protocol for counseling sex abuse, a chart published in 2013 by Recovering Grace, a resource for ex-followers of IBLP and ATI that the site claims was distributed at ATI counseling seminars for more than a decade. It explains how group leaders should help those who have experienced sexual assault.

The onus for the attack is put on the victim for defrauding the abuser. A modest dress in decent exposure being out from protection of our parents are all reasons that God let it happen, it reads. One marriage guide for women even includes a portion on what to do if your husband

ever sexually handles your children. Author Debbie Pearl, a minister whose books were sold by IBLP, wrote in Created to Be His Help Meet. Although wives should testify and pray that their husbands get 20 years in prison, they should also visit him there, be an encouragement to him, let him see

the children three to four times a year. In Girls Bible Study, Smith said, she was told, you need to be very careful what you do, what you say, what you wear, because at any moment, you could trigger a boy, basically. There's absolutely no personal responsibility for the boys. Now, the source for that article, Miss Smith,

was molested while working at ATI's training center by a 21-year-old staff member. He had a key to her room and would come in every night and force himself on her. They did not have sex, but in her words, we did everything else. I didn't have the capacity to say, hey, I don't like it.

Which is key to the Duggar case, too, because what we have the lack of sex at is that girls don't grow up with any kind of vocabulary to describe what's happening to them. The reality of ATI, Bill Gothard, and the whole quiverful movement is that it is a cult, not just dedicated to breeding up Christian soldiers, but to providing the men at the top of it

with a constant stream of helpless victims, women they can molest and then blame for it. Here's another quote from that article. When she returned home from the center, she and her father surprisingly received a call from Gothard, who's basically God, said Smith. His other friend had told one of the leaders

about the incidents. Although she was expecting to be reprimanded, instead, Gothard wanted the dirty details. He started asking the creepiest questions. He was like, what time did he kiss you and what time did he put his hands here and did he do this to you? Smith remembered, calling it gross.

So this is the guy who ran the treatment program that Josh went to. This is how he handles allegations of sexual abuse within his his thing. Not an effective treatment program, I think is fair to say. John, we're going to talk more about

Bill Gothard, Josh Duggar, and a lot of other very unpleasant people in part do, but for right now, how are you feeling? Oh, you know, you picked a heavy one. Oh, yeah. It's, uh, yeah, it's heavy. It's what I was like, it's heavy. You should be talked about.

It's nice, you know, it's, it's one of the few times I'm like, you know what, I'm glad I can look across the room and say, and Saddam Hussein's best friend feel a little better about the world. They are right here. It does help talking about horrible molestation colts when there's cats sitting on your legs

and passed out. They've had a hard day of mostly sleeping, so they need their rest. Sean, um, well, yeah, that's going to do it for part one. We'll come back in part two and have more uncomfortable conversations. Um, thank you for donating

and helping to fund the recall effort for Ted Wheeler. And those of you at home, if you're in the Portland area, go to Total Recall PDX. You can find out how you can sign up to Recall Ted Wheeler, how you can sign your name on that, or even volunteer your time.

If you might want to donate also TotalRecallPDX.com, you can do it there. So, um, Ted Wheeler's not connected directly to any of this, but he does suck and this sucks too, so. I don't know. It's hard to, uh,

people that want to infiltrate and get into elected positions. It's kind of hard to fight against that when, uh, the mayor is someone like Ted Wheeler. Yeah, I mean, it does make it harder to deal with all of the problems we have when the elected leaders that aren't

weird cultists with dangerous male supremacist ideas are also incompetent. Yeah. Yeah. If you'd like to take a shot at someone that, uh, is a successful politician and that he knows how to get and keep power, but isn't competent at anything else, you know, take it out

on Ted Wheeler today. Take it out on Ted Wheeler today, uh, and take it out on, I don't know, don't take other things out on other people. Be nice to the other people around you. Be nice to everyone but Ted Wheeler and fucking Bill Godford and

Douger parents. Take it out, it being the trash for your friends because that's nice. Yeah, take out the trash and then, you know, once it's out of your house you can throw it anywhere. It doesn't matter. Yeah. Yeah, that's ethical, I think. Alright, that's the episode.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns.

But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian

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