Behind the Bastards - Part Two: The Moonies Are So Much Worse Than You Could Possibly Imagine

Episode Date: March 10, 2022

Mia Wong is once again joined by Robert Evans to continue their discussion the many crimes of Reverend Sun Myung Moon and his family.   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. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, yeah, woot, woot. How is it hanging? Woot, woot, woot, woot. Yeah, you know. Yeah, what? Oh, gosh.

Yeah, yeah. It's fine. Here we are. Just go with it. It's the podcast that it is. What do you, what do you, what do we call this show? It's behind the bastards and clearly you're not qualified to host it today. So we'll let Chris handle that.

I thought, I thought this was this American life. Oh boy. Oh boy. I prepared the wrong. Boy, howdy. Well, yeah. That's okay. I have plenty of war crimes to go around.

This American life, my, my, my This American Life episode is way too horny to go on, to go on this, this podcast feed. Nobody would, that would not be welcome. Okay. Well, I will, I will send this back to NPR and Chris, you cool with taking over today? Yep. It's me, Christopher Wong, and we're back, we're back for Reverend Moon part two, the attack of the Nazi death squads. I mean, cool. It's, it's a good time. In 1980, Klaus Barbie, the butcher of Leon and Nazi torturer extraordinaire was getting nervous. French Nazi hunters were starting to close in on his bolt hole in Bolivia, where he tortured communists for the CIA and also the West Germans for decades.

Worse still, the possibility of a democratic government in Bolivia meant he faced extradition to France, who wanted his head on the platter for, among other crimes, killing 14,000 people and personally setting Jews to concentration camps. So when Barbie was approached by a group of cocaine producers to stage a coup against the elected government, Barbie was in. That coup, which saw Nazis rampaging through the streets, looting stores and warehouses and murdering people where they stood, put Generals Carlos Menza in charge of a military dictatorship. Klaus Barbie's coup was infamously known as the cocaine coup for its cartel backing. But Bolivian intelligence reports showed another further source of support, four million dollars from one Reverend Sung Myung Moon. Oh boy. Nazi death squad funder extraordinaire. Yeah, I mean, and I got to be honest, as a cult, getting in with the CIA, pretty, pretty smart move.

I will say this, there is actually no evidence that Moon ever directly worked with the CIA. This is really impressive. If you're working for the same goals as the CIA, it's one less thing that could fuck you up. I do think this is an important distinction to draw because there are a lot of sources that you will read that will claim that the Moonies are a CIA front and they're not a CIA front. Like, insofar as they're a front group for anything, it's the Korean CIA. And that's important because it means that, well, A, it means that there's a lot of other American intelligence agencies who are really mad at them. But B, it means that, yeah, their goals are very, very often aligned with the CIA, but they're not really a cut out for them. They have sort of their own thing going on.

And that own thing is overthrowing the government of Bolivia. Now, Bohi Pak, whose Moon is like invaluable aid and translator, visits La Paz that year and proclaimed, I have erected a throne for Father Moon in the world's highest city, which is great. Okay. Yeah. So the church also attempted to organize a 7,000 member, like 7,000 strong armed church similar to what they attempted to organize in Brazil. And, you know, this was there to support the coup. And after the coup, Carlos Meza and Moon like visited each other and they, this is like around the time that Reagan got shot. And so they spend the night praying together for Reagan's health.

Fortunately for Bolivia and unfortunately for Moon, he'd picked a loser in Meza, whose government collapsed in 1982 amid a hail of coups and protests. You know, you can't, you can't, you can't pick them all, you know. Yeah. Moon has a really bad track record with picking military dictators. It's sort of funny, but this, unfortunately, was just the beginning of Moon's career as a sponsor of international terror and Nazi death squads. Now, in 1980, Bohi Park and Kim Song-In, who's, Kim Song-In is the former Korean CIA station chief in Mexico City, founds an organization, the Confederation of Associations for the Unity of the Societies of America, and an absolutely nonsense name that they created.

Yeah, that's too long. Yeah, it's awful. It means nothing at all. Yeah. So basically they created just so that it could have the acronym CAUSA. Now, CAUSA rapidly becomes a meeting place for just the worst mass murderers in Latin America. They held their first meeting in the military, in, yeah, the military dictator Alfredo Strossner's Paraguay. Bohi Park said of Strossner, quote, I believe he's a special man chosen by God to run his country.

Strossner, like, did a genocide against the Ache people and also, like, did Operation Condor, among other things, that we will get more into Condor in a second. Yeah. Also attending CAUSA conferences was Domingo Montereyza, the head of El Salvador's Autocuttle battalion, who is best known for doing the El Mazote massacre. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, those are some war crimeers right there, for sure. So Montereyza, interestingly, is also trained by another member of the Walnuti Communist League, Taiwan, whose army also was training desk wads, like, sort of parallel. I mean, some of us are doing it through the league, some of us are doing it independently, but they're also training, like, desk wads across Latin America.

Now, it's unclear to me if Montereyza, like, actually received money from Moon, but, like, basically every other right-wing, like, large-scale right-wing organization in desk wad. El Salvador absolutely did. It seems like a pretty easy guy to get money from if you're making desk wads to go without desk wads. Yeah. And we're going to go through many, many desk wads. Yeah. And, you know, so he gives a bunch of money to right-wing groups in El Salvador, and they do atrocities with it. Now, we also need to talk about Operation Condor. So Operation Condor is an anti-leftist assassination network originally developed by Chilean intelligence in 1975.

Eventually, it has, like, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Brazil, and also, to a lesser extent, like, Ecuador, Peru in it. And Condor, like, if you count everyone who was killed while Condor was going on by, like, the governments doing it, it killed tens of thousands of people, the arrests and tortures, like, hundreds of thousands more. And so this is where things get complicated. A lot of Operation Condor is run out of a group called the CAL, which is the original Latin American section of the World Anti-Communist League. The CAL is founded by a group called Los Tecos, who are a Mexican neo-Nazi death squad who are famous for just, like, showing up and murdering leftists. The league basically, like, finds this group and they're like, oh, hey, you like killing communists. And so they test the Tecos with assembling just the most bloodthirsty Latin American death squads they can find and, you know, they go and do this. And this is the basis of the organization of, like, Latin America, like the Latin American part of the World Anti-Communist League.

Now, the World Anti-Communist League formally expels the CAL in the early 1980s because they're trying to go, like, slightly more legit, until they never get rid of, you know, like, the Ustasi people or the iron guard or any of the other, like, fascist groups in it. But, you know, so they expel the CAL because people are like, hey, these guys are, you know, doing Condor and assassinating people. But it's notable that Moon technically leaves the league in 1975 and he gives the speech about how the league is, he calls it, quote, a fascist organization, which is true. But the problem is that, like, this is all just political theater. Moon never leaves the league. Like, he makes this big speech about it, but his people still run the league's chapter in, like, they still run the chapter in Japan, they're heavily involved in the U.S. chapter, and Moon is, you know, like, Moon and his friend organizations are still just doing all of the, like, they're still running meetings with them, they're still organizing with them. And Moon also never actually disavows the CAL.

So the other thing that's worth noting is that, so Condor starts in 1975, right? The league doesn't disavow the CAL until the mid-80s, which means that there's a lot of time where the CAL is being actively funded by the World Anti-Communist League. And this is where it's kind of murky because it's difficult to tie Moon directly to Condor. Yeah, I mean, that's generally how it's going to be with the people who fund death squads and the death squads. You think that. Every other death squad I'm about to mention, we have direct evidence of him funding Condor. Okay, well, then maybe he didn't. You know what? Maybe he found his limit. So I say this. So there's two things that suggest to me that he did do it. One is that his money absolutely was going to the CAL, which was carrying it out, because him and Sasaka was, like, a Japanese branch of the World Anti-Communist League,

or one of the big funders of the organization. So he's the very least indirectly funding them. And also Moon and his organizations are, like, in tight with... They're either working with the government or the far right in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil, which means that weirdly, the only Condor government they aren't working with at Chile, and I don't know what's going on there because I kept expecting Pinochet to show up, and he never does. I don't know why. Pinochet's like, he's the one right-wing leader in all of Latin America who I cannot find any contact with Moon. It's very strange. It's like watching a movie without a heist and wondering where... What it is? The guy from ER. You know who I'm talking about. Jesus. I'm not good with names today.

Sophie, who's the guy? George Clooney. Clooney. Yeah. All right. Well, great. Pinochet never shows, but Moon is working with every single other Condor government. So there's a good enough chance that Moon is involved in this, that I think we have to mention it, because I don't know. I think my guess is there's... Other than his indirect stuff through the CAL, I think there's probably a two out of three chance that he's finding them because that's just who he's in with. What we do know for sure is that he's working with General Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, who was made the head of the armed forces in Honduras in 1981 to murder a leftist guerrilla group. Alvarez just immediately starts torturing, murdering and disappearing people.

He also trained, fund and equipped the Contras, which we will get back to in a second, because... Oh, good. Oh, boy. Yeah, you can see where this is going. This was a beautiful time and place to have tens of millions of dollars, because you really just could buy armies up wholesale, send them off to murder people in, you know, mountainous countries. It was a real, what a time to be alive. And the other thing about this, you know, the world is really your oyster, because the drug trade exists, right, but the drug trade is not bringing in quite as much money as it's going to by the late 80s and 90s.

Which means that you, your random cult actually has enough money to... You can outbid the drug dealers, basically. Yeah, so Moon looks at Alvarez's government and he's like, okay, I'm like, I have an in here. And so he goes to Cucigalpa to like start preaching about theologically resisting communism, which just means, you know, being the unification church. And there's an interesting thing here where... This is a period where a lot of Latin American right-wingers are turning away from Christianity, because they're washing the liberation theology turn in the Catholic Church.

And they see this and they go, okay, well, the Catholic Church is getting, you know, it's being infiltrated by communists, it's coming soft on communism. Like a lot of these sort of like leftist Catholic priests are, you know, running, like they're running through our militia groups. And so the right-wing in Latin America starts looking for like another, like another religious thing they can get into. And Moon is like, hey, it's me, look, I have a church, we're Christian, sort of kind of don't look too closely at the, I'm the Messiah behind the mirror.

Yeah, but this works pretty well. And, you know, he has Bohipac hand Alvarez at check for $50,000. Alvarez hilariously is forced to return the check after the Episcopal Conference in Honduras is like, hey, why are you taking money from a guy who literally claims to be the Messiah? And they get like, they get really mad at him. That would be, that is awkward. Like if you actually think about what he says about God and Jesus, it could be awkward to take money from this guy.

You know, and shout out, like, you know, okay, like, we have to get credit to the Hondurans here because in the U.S., this is not going to happen. Like in the U.S., the Christians are just going to like take, they're just going to take Moons, money, hand over fist. But the Hondurans are like, no, we're drawing the line at the Messiah guy. But, you know, this doesn't, you know, Moon keeps working with Alvarez. He just, you know, gives the check back. But unfortunately, Alvarez gets sacked by,

he gets sacked by the government after the FBI reveals a conspiracy by Alvarez and his allies to overthrow the government on the behest of drug dealers, which, you know, sounds suspiciously like another coup that we've talked about today. It's, it keeps getting involved in the same coup. And it keeps either, like, and it keeps just not working. It's just like, it's, it's, it's pretty incredible. Now, undeterred, Moon continues to spend an enormous amount of time and money in Honduras preaching anti-communism through democratization,

which is again, hilarious from a guy who has multiple times on record saying that democracy is favored by Satan. But, you know, welcome to the Cold War. I mean, true, but okay. Yeah. So, and now, now we come to the mother of all Cold War conspiracies, Iran Contra. Because yeah, it turns out Moon did Iran Contra. So, all right, to set the stage a little bit. In 1979, the U.S.-backed Somoza dictatorship was overthrown by a revolution

that left the left-wing Sandinistas in power. And the Sandinistas start doing things like, you know, nationalizing all of Somoza's land and, you know, like promoting public education. And the U.S. looks at this and goes, we need to murder literally every single person involved with this. Yeah, that scans. Yeah. So, you know, opposing the Sandinistas are this group called

the Contra Revolutionarios or the Contras. Now, even before Congress, you know, does Congress eventually starts banning, like, but puts a ban in on all U.S. funding of the Contras because the Contras are doing things like murdering babies, employing the silos to start with the population. Like, you know, death squad stuff. Yeah. It's good. They're really. Oh, like your death squads don't. Yeah, they're, you know, I will say this.

The Contras, well, okay. I want to say that Contras are bad by death squad standards, and that's true, but also, like, the other death squads are, we're going to get to the Guatemalans in a bit, and, oh my God, also, the Salvadorian National Guard is doing is. Yeah, I mean, when you're, when you're death squads, there's really, it's not necessary to, like, kind of apply the romance, or the moral differences between them.

They're all. Yeah. Once you hit that death squad level. You're a death squad, you know. Now, CAUSA, which is that front group, Moody Franco, I talked about earlier, starts contracting, like, a bunch of Contra leaders to offer them to, like, help unite the Contra factions. Fernando El Negro Chamorro,

who's one of the major Contra leaders, goes on a Moody-sponsored trip with other Contra leaders. And Chamorro, like, turns down the money because he's like, I don't want the strings attached with it. But a lot of other Contra leaders, including Stedman Fagoth, like, take tens of thousands of dollars in cash and just, like, tons of food and supplies from Moon. And the CAUSA basically keeps Stedman

and, like, the other Contra factions, like, in the fight, like, long enough, you know, because all these factions, like, they get the CIA money, like, turned off, right? And they're in a real crisis. And Moon keeps them in the fight until a rank Contra can kick in, which is horrifying because, like, Moon... like, Moon is directly responsible for everything that's going to happen in Nicaragua,

like, from this period on. Because if he's not funding these guys, like, these guys, a lot of these groups fall out of the war. But, you know, he's there to bridge the gap. And, yeah, before we fully get to a rank Contra, there's one more thing I should mention, which is that there's some evidence that people... American students from the, like, the church's student movement,

like, there's some evidence they fought for the Contras. I can't really confirm it. There seems to be credible evidence that, like, individuals went to go fight for them, but it's unclear if it's, like, a mass thing the church was promoting or if it was just sort of an individual thing. We do know the church claims we've been sending people into Nicaragua to, like, preach.

So, who knows? Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things if you raise a large group of people to believe that, like, this is a fight that they personally need to be involved in and, like, a bunch of them go over and fight, it's a great way to make that. It's the same thing we see with, like, Rhodesia, where it's like, well, did this organization send fighters?

No, but they created propaganda that convinced people to go fight there. Yeah, actually, this didn't make it into the cut of the episode, but his newspaper, The Washington Times, Big Rhodesia fans, also big apartheid South Africa fans. It was the shorts. Yeah, I couldn't find anything about him directly funding them, but, yeah, he's on their side in principle.

Okay, so now we need to talk about Iran Contra. I'm gonna do, like, the shortest version of Iran Contra anyone has ever done, so there's four parts. Part one is Oliver North gets $10 million from the Sultan of Brunei, who is the world's most feted-out monarch, and then his secretary puts the money into the wrong bank account and lights it on fire, so just some random Swiss banker gets $10 million, they can't get the money back,

and the Sultan of Brunei is like... Very funny. It's funny, because the Sultan of Brunei is... he is the most CIA guy, like, outside of the CIA that has ever existed, and even he was like, you just put $10 million in the wrong bank account, like, I'm not gonna give you anywhere money. Oliver North dipshit.

That's great. So part two, after that part plan fails, is Oliver North basically is secretly negotiating with the Iranian government to covertly buy American... to sell the Iranian government American missiles, and then they're gonna... Part three is they take the money they get from selling those missiles, and they put it in, like, a black ops slush fund,

and they move that money to the Contras. Now, part four is creating a cover story for where that money came from. And then Moon is neck deep in part four. Bohi Pak gives $100,000 to Oliver North's Nicaraguan Freedom Funds, a fund also backed by Potta Lum's Soldier of Fortune magazine to say, good time, and the Moonies also, like, they set up their own fundraiser for the Contras,

and they're also working with the Anti-Communist League's fundraisers and logistics networks, and the Anti-Communist League one is the big one that Reagan uses to go, oh, hey, see all this CIA money we're pouring in there? That's not from the CIA. See, this is a grassroots anti-communist campaign. And, you know, I mean, like, they do actually raise some money.

It's just that they don't raise Iran-Contra money. Now, not content to just do Iran-Contra, the Moonies sent a fake priest to testify before Congress claiming that the Sandinistas were dressing up as Contras and doing false flag massacres to discredit the Contras. That seems plausible. That's good to be what's happening, for sure. Absolutely, yeah.

So, this guy claims to be from the Catholic Church, and the Catholic Church is like, this is not one of our guys. And so, and he's like, no, no, no, I'm from the Orthodox Catholic Church, and everyone's like, what? And the Orthodox Catholic Church, apparently, is this like, it's this group in, like, Are they people you thought Vatican II went too far and, like, the Church has gotten cucked?

It's weird, they're like this really weird, like, very old, like, splinter faction with eight people in it in, like, Scotland, for some reason. And, like, it's unclear if he's even involved with them, but what they do find is a bank account with, like, a bunch of money in it that one of the French organizations that this guy was mysteriously paid. So, that was fun.

And the other thing that they do is, CAUSA produces a pro-Contra documentary film called Nicaragua Was Our Home that airs on PBS in 1985 to draw up support for the war. Lee Shapiro, who's the dude who made the film and a fanatical moon supporter who graduated from the Unification Theological Seminary, because, oh, yeah, the Moody's have a school now,

and I should mention, they have multiple schools. Like, there's just multiple colleges that they know. Yeah, I mean, yeah, you get a cold that big, and you do have to start directly training the children at some point, for sure. That's great. Absolutely. Lee is killed near Kabul while embedded

with Hezbollah's Lami to make a propaganda film about the Mujahideen. You know what? Go off, King. Absolutely. Get killed by Hezbollah in Afghanistan, or with Hezbollah in Afghanistan. Well, Hezbollah's Lami is, like, probably the worst of the actual Afghan Mujahideen factions. Yeah, it's not a good one.

Yeah, yeah, during the Civil War, just in the shelling of Kabul alone, they kill at least 25,000 civilians. It's interesting because Lee goes out into Afghanistan trying to find a Mujahideen group who will let him work with him, and all of the Mujahideen groups are like, no. Well, yeah. Yeah, because I don't know if you know this

about Mujahideen in general, but if you say, sometimes God's wrong, and I tell him, and he's like, oh, stupid me. This is why I go to you, buddy. If that's your religion, a lot of Mujahideen might have issues with you. And the only people who will take him are... Are the worst to do out there.

Yeah, are just literally the worst people in the entire Mujahideen. There's an angle here that I couldn't find direct evidence of. So he's embedded with the faction that's being backed by Pakistan, and there might be some kind of incredibly convoluted anti-communist angle there. I wasn't able to find it, but this guy's involved with literally everything ever. If you're sending guns to Afghanistan,

you're one of the bad guys. Now, does that mean that basically everyone involved in Afghanistan for the last 40 years have been the bad guys? Absolutely. Yeah, it's not great. It's a lot of shitty people sending guns to Afghanistan and sometimes soldiers, and usually for bad reasons, basically always for bad reasons.

That's Afghanistan. So yeah, of course, the World Anti-communist League is sending funding to them, and Lee Shapiro's death is literally the only thing that stopped CAUSA from just making another propaganda film and having it aired on PBS. Now, lest you think we're done with the death squads, CAUSA also did...

Oh, this is behind the bastards. The only promise we make is that we're never done with the death squads. There's so many. So yeah, CAUSA also did a propaganda media tour for Rios Mont's dictatorship in Guatemala. Oh boy, Carlos Rios Mont! Yeah! Yeah, Rios Mont is most notable for successfully doing a bunch of genocides against the indigenous population

of Guatemala. He definitely did, yeah. There are entire peoples who are just gone. They killed every single one of them. There are languages that don't exist anymore. Yeah, there are towns that still won't let the military back into the state because of the genocides. Yeah, I mean, it's horrifying.

One of my friends was an anthropologist who worked with a community who... So they managed to... Everyone else around them had been killed in the genocide. They managed to survive and they're the last people on Earth who speak their language and they survived by just running on foot through the jungle and they made it, but they live in this horrible slum

and they can't speak Spanish and they're the last people left of their entire people who have been around for thousands of years because Mont's fucking killed all of them and it's horrifying. Yeah, it's pretty bad. And Moon's doing propaganda tours for their desk wads and also funding them.

Yeah. I mean, are you really a right-wing shithead though if you're not backing Rios Mont? Are you actually... Do you deserve to even call yourself a violent right-wing extremist if you're not backing that guy? I will say, there are a lot of right-wingers

who back Rios Mont rhetorically, but Moon puts his money where his mouth is. You can never not say that... When there was a fight against communism and when there were babies to be killed, no one on Earth can say that Reverend Moon did not do his parts in murdering those babies. He made sure there's not as many babies.

And you know what? Every time you don't spend an extra 5-10 minutes in traffic, thank you, Reverend Moon. Thank you for making there be less people who are alive to drive cars and stop me from getting to the sparrow. You know what else makes there be less people alive to drive cars?

Products and services that support this podcast? Washington State Patrol. Washington State Patrol and Coke Industries and for sure, I mean, with their island where people hunt children, they really go out of their way to decrease the surplus population. Okay, here's ads.

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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. We're back. Chris, please go ahead. So Moon also has like another friend group that he uses that does basically the same thing as CAUSA, but like it just does media tours. And they run these like quote-unquote fact finding trips

that included interviews with the leaders of Renamo and Mozambique, Yudita in Angola, Swapo in Namibia, and Solidarity in Poland. Now, those of you who know your Cold War will realize that Yudita means Jonas of Imby. Not seen since the Manafort episode. The dawn of time is back on the pot. And yeah. Oh boy. Yeah. Yeah. Man, from fucking Guatemala to Angola all around. He's really hitting all of the hits of like right-wing fuckery in this period of time.

He's doing a whole fucking bingo. It's really incredible. It's very impressive. It's very impressive. I will say this. So I don't have any evidence that he directly funded either Solidarity in Poland or Swapo in Namibia, but through a web that is like elaborate even by moon standards. I'm not going to explain the whole thing because it's I turned into the like, I turned into the pinboards meme, like conspiracy meme, trying to like track all the funding sources down.

But he does seem to have funded both Renamo and Savimbi just like directly. So that's fun. And to finish off the desk, we need to talk about Cambodia. Oh boy. Wow. Man, that is honestly not maybe not one of the death squads I necessarily expected to see him get involved with. So throughout the late 1970s, Pol Pot's troops were busy making like a series of the worst military decisions in human history. They decided that they were going to launch a bunch of cross-border raids against Vietnam

and just like massacre a bunch of Vietnamese civilians. Now, the Vietnamese army by by by time between 1977 and 1978, they have beaten back to back at the French, the Japanese, the French, again, the U.S. And in one year, their B team is about to go blow for blow at China in a conventional war. Pol Pot's army does not have a centralized command and control structure. So Pol Pot's army looks at this and goes, no, no, no, we're going to be the ones who succeeded where every single other empire on earth has failed.

And they start this war with Vietnam and Vietnam invades in 1979. And they just blow the Cambodian army to pieces. But they they do a thing. I think everyone who lives in the U.S. knows well, which is they get stuck in a nation building quagmire, which, you know. Well, you know, it happens to everybody. It's like throwing your back out, you know, everybody. At some point, you know, if you're if you're funding death squads,

you're going to wind up locked in a quagmire of a war. You know, I will say I will say this for Vietnam, like, OK, if if there's one government ever that it was like, this is a good idea to go in and knock them off. It's Pol Pot like, oh, for sure. Yeah. And like, you know, but this becomes a problem with them because, you know, they're trying to set up a state and it doesn't look. Yeah.

Vietnam, Vietnam proves that there is something about being a state that makes you want to get involved in another state shit and start a quagmire. You know, not that, like, again, like you said, somebody needed to do something. Yeah, it is just funny to see Vietnam go do a Vietnam on Cambodia. Yeah. Yeah.

I don't know. There's no lesson there because the lesson certainly isn't let guys like Pol Pot continue doing Pol Pot things. Please don't. Please don't take this as me saying, haha, what fools the Vietnamese were. Yeah. It's just kind of funny.

Like, I will say this is that the lesson from this is that if you're going to go invade a country and knock off Pol Pot, you actually have to kill Pol Pot. Pol Pot, like, is able to escape. I would say killing Pol Pot is something in general more people should have done. Yeah. This is a problem because, you know, the everything happens is that a bunch of quagmire nationalist groups pop up.

And one of these is called the Quagmire People's National Liberation Front. Now, Moon does propaganda for and direct support to the Quagmire People's National Liberation Front. Now, there's one problem that, and he's doing this because, you know, this is an anti-Vietnam group, right? But there's one problem with the Quagmire People's National Liberation Group as an anti-communist group, which is, you know, other than the massacres, which they don't care about.

The problem is that the Quagmire People's National Liberation Front is part of the coalition government of Democratic Kempichia. Now, Moon is pushing for the coalition government of Democratic Kempichia. He's like they're trying to get, they're trying to maintain their seat, the Cambodia Sea of the UN. The problem with them is that the most powerful member of this coalition is Pol Pot. So Moon is directly funding, well, it's sort of indirectly, directly running propaganda for and indirectly funding Pol Pot. What a great anti-communist.

Yep, it's great. We love to see it. It's, yeah, it's real bad. Yeah. Yeah, he's funded Pol Pot. Now, well, I mean, look, Whomst among us has not given Pol Pot some money. I have not. I've never given money to Pol Pot.

Look, Chris, you can't say that because it could happen here is sponsored entirely by King Norodom Sehanuak, who funded Pol Pot. So in a way, you know, as we, as we sell the former king of. No. I don't really, I lost, I lost a handle on this. This is when you jump in. So this is when you jump in. No.

Okay. All right. Well, Chris, please continue. So, you know, there's kind of like a secular limit that you hit, right? Like there's a certain point at which just the amount of time you have, the amount of money you have is such that you can't like, you can't fund literally every death squad. Unless.

That is something I've often mourned in my own life. But, you know, you fund the death squad, you can. Yeah, but there's a way around this. And the way around this is you fund the American government. Well, yeah. Now, so. As a taxpayer, I do back a lot of death squads. Yeah.

Yeah. So, but then, you know, there's a political angle that lets you like, increase the bang for your death squad buck. So there's a guy named Richard Vigueri. I'm butchering his name because he's Italian and I also don't respect him. He is the man who basically created the modern right out of the wreckage of the Barry Goldwater campaign. He's famous for taking a list of 12,000 people

who donated more than $50 to the campaign in 1964 and using it to create a mailing list. Now, this is a revolution in American politics. Oh, God, yeah. That's the whole fucking 80s. 70s and 80s. Yeah. And he's doing this in the 60s.

And this allows him to fund, raise and mobilize activists at an unimaginable scale like this. This is basically before Facebook. And they're sending these old people letters that say things like, babies are being harvested and sold on the black market by Planned Parenthood clinics. Oh, cool. It's Twitter. Yeah, it's literally Twitter.

They invented Facebook. Yeah. They did in 1965. Yeah. And old people react exactly the same way old people react now to Facebook. And so Vigueri is just the absolute cutting edge of this. You have the cutting edge of the mailing list. He's using computers to like keep track of the mailing lists.

And he is building the infrastructure that will make the Reagan Revolution possible. Moon is funding him as early as 1965 through a scam that involves setting up radio towers to broadcast propaganda to North Korea. He also gives Vigueri $900,000 through a fake charity in 1977. And then bails him out again in the 80s by buying Vigueri's office building for $10 million and then putting him in charge of the accounts of the American Freedom Coalition, which is a Mooney group that's invented to like defend all of her north. Now, while this is happening, Mooney Point Man Gary Jarman was running an organization

called the Christian Voice, which was one of the first political organizations to put Vigueri's new fundraising system to the test. In 1980 and 1982, they outraced every single other conservative fundraising group. To put this into perspective, Jerry Farwell's like new moral majority pack raises $22,000 in his first year. That same year, the Christian Voice raised $494,722. And these guys, the Christian Voice is terrifyingly powerful. In the 1980 election, they target 32 races and they beat 22 incumbents.

Wow. Yeah, it's bad. This is the infrastructure that built the Reagan Revolution. And it is funded by Reverend Moon. Yeah, it's bad. And not content to simply fight at the ballot box, Moon runs anti-communist campaigns on college campuses, including a anti-communist newsletter, which is like newspaper thing that you know how every like trust gate group and every like weird communist group like passes out

newspapers on campus. Moon is like, what if we did our own, but they were anti-communist? So he has all of his like followers on campus like passing out these newspapers. And so he can all these like all of the cults are like lined up next to each other passing out newspapers. It's a fun time. I know you've talked about, but the just the outstanding amount, like it's just like unfathomable amount of money.

She's in everything. He funds so much. The outreach and funding is like. He's the first, he's the only real cult leader that I'm aware of that is on that L run Hubbard level where they hit this certain point early in their career where it's like, where did their money come? Well, they have infinite money. Yeah, yeah.

There's no, they have as much money as they need. And then Moon funded and then Moon funded and I'm like, how does he have this money? They have all of the money they could ever spend. Like, which is a scary thing for a cult leader to get to. God, it makes me miss LRH. He didn't fund any death squads. He just threw kids off of boats like a hero. Yeah.

Like a hero. Moon is like, what if you used L run Hubbard for just like pure evil? It's tragic to think of L run Hubbard's legacy being used for the evil. Yeah. And you know, and I will say like, so like part of how he's funding this is like, part of it is just, you know, the cult, like the cult is literally a pyramid scheme. Right. And then he has all of these businesses.

He also has Sasaka was like literally infinite Yakuza money from Japan. He's getting KCA money. He's getting money from all just like, he keeps, there's like a couple of times where he takes over banks in Uruguay and then just like takes all of the money from them and then the bank goes under. Like he does this like multiple times. He's always landed. There's never a thing that I didn't fit in the episode, but I think I should talk about

a little bit, which is that like, there's some evidence that like in the night in like the nineties, he got into the drug trade because he starts buying all of this land that's like on the border. What kind of drug? Well, like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's the cocaine trade.

He used to be like buying the border crossings that cocaine moves through and in like Bolivia and then yeah, it's, there's no hard evidence of that, but like no one else, but there's no other reason why you're buying all that land. If you are backing multiple death squads in Latin America, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. I'm sorry, but I don't, I can't believe you're not moving blow. Yeah. I refuse to accept that that's possible.

Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, it's one of those things that there's so many threads of moon where like, you know, some of the threads, like, like I pulled on the death squad thread and I found that he was funding Pulp Pot and some of them, like there seems to be a lot of investigative journalism like still to be done on this organization because like the cocaine thread is like, there's a lot of people all encompassing. Yeah. Like it's, it's hard to, it's hard to think, it's impossible to imagine that like people

know the bottom of this at the moment. Yeah. It's, it's, it's, it's bad. Yeah. So, but you know what's not bad, Chris, products and services, uh, that, that support this podcast. Um, products and services are always, uh, uh, you know, Chris, a lot of people say some of our products and services back death squads themselves.

I don't agree with that. I think one of the beautiful promises that the Raytheon corporation has for the world is a future without death squads because robots can kill those people from the sky, Chris. That's true. You don't have to send a bunch of soldiers who are fucked up on cocaine and methamphetamine to gun down a bunch of children in a village. You just bomb it from the air. Oh, so Robert.

With a drone. There's a real risk here, which is we're, we're cutting the legs out of the child soldier industry. I know, but you know, look, disruption has to come for every industry eventually. One day you and I will be replaced with a robot that perfectly mimics Joe Rogan's voice. Um, and like that, you know, child soldiers are going to be replaced by drones, but we can still honor the legacy of the child soldier industry by having little kids pilot those drones because they're better at video games.

That's true. It's Ender's game. We've proven it mathematically. Yeah. Ender's game, but entirely targeting poor people in the global south. That's the promise of Raytheon. All right. Here's some other ads.

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podcasts. Oh, boy, Chris, we get a lot of money for those Raytheon med-rolls. I mean, that's our salary for a while, my man. You want to continue on with this enlightening story of good times? Yeah. So the other thing that Moon's doing on college campuses is he's running a network of spies to spy on leftist activists and giving the information to conservative groups. This should be, for any other organization, the fact that you're running a network of

college campus spies to spy on leftists. And you might have gone through in a list like 20 things, each of which if a guy had done one that would make them a worthy subject of this series. This spy network has one sentence in my script, one. It's the second half of the sentence. It's just a spy network. Yeah. Oh, just my network.

It's like you got a breeze over Elron Hubbard summoning the anti-Christ with sex magic when you get his biography because there's just too much going on, man. So, one of the reasons why I'm brushing over this is that in 1982, Moon founds probably the single most important American institution he ever founds, the Washington Times. Here's Bohi Pock, the Times Corporate President, describing why the Times was created. Quote, it is a total war, basically a war of ideas, war of mind, the battle of the human mind. And it was a faux war.

This is the battle. This is where the battle is fought. Son, in this war, the entire thing will be mobilized. Political means, social means, economic means, and propagandistic means, and basically trying to take over the other person's mind. That is what the Third World War is all about, the war of ideology. Oh, so he's doing a fourth generation war thing. Yeah.

Yeah. He's very much kind of thinking, honestly, on the same side as William S. Lind. Okay. That scans. Yeah. Now, this is Reagan's favorite newspaper. He has his paper delivered to his office every single morning, and he reads it. Christ in Heaven.

Oh, God. An absolutely enormous number of right-wing journalists have passed through it over the years. Yeah. I mean, it's a name that's very familiar. Yeah. I'm sure everyone listening to this has run into a Washington Times article or something. They are run by a cult.

In fault. Like, half of their business is people on social media mistaking them for the post. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And there was a thing, I was saying this all this fairly, this is like a week or two ago. The Washington Times published an article calling, basically screaming about calling

the CCP, I think it was a termite infestation, and it was like, yeah, like, oh, there's these termites in our society that have to be eliminated, and I'm like, well, so this is like a genocide. That's great. That's a genocide. But yeah. I just looked at the Washington Post and the Washington Times website next to each other, almost identical fonts for the names, like deliberately almost identical fonts for the names.

Cool. Yeah. And I think people, I don't know, people look at the Washington Times doing stuff like that. They're like, oh my God, look at the genocide. It's like, yeah, these guys, like these guys are so much worse, like this is the newspaper of a cult. Yeah.

Much like the Epoch Times. Yep. Yeah. Except, yeah, I mean, this, you know, a lot of what's happening here, like this, like the Mooneys are just a better, like a more successful version of the Falun Gong in a lot of ways. Yeah. I mean, one of the big differences would be that the Falun Gong, as terrible as a lot

of things about them are, legitimately has suffered repression and stuff, like as opposed to these guys are fully, the state is on board with them. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I, okay. So the US state, we'll get to that in a second, but, you know, so I want to especially mention some of these people, David Brooks gets to start in journalism as a writing movie reviews for them.

Awesome. Like Patrick Cannon is an ex-Washington Times columnist. That makes sense. Yeah. And they basically like invent the modern style of writing journalism. Like these are the times when it's like some of the first people do the war on Christmas. Like they basically invent that and, you know, I want to, you know, they have a very disturbing analysis of this.

I want to read one of their, this is a poster that was made by one of their affiliate groups because they have about a trillion. News is available through more media than ever before and for 24 hours a day, yet much of it sounds the same. Our media giving people the facts they need in the 21st century is the media's traditional role of reporting facts, even still relevant, is it time for the media to become guide dogs instead of watch dogs? So.

Okay. And what they're guiding people to you is white nationalism. The Times is extremely racist, incredibly pro confederate, and they publish a bunch of literal Nazis. Francis Booth Coons. I mean, you just listed Pat Buchanan. So, yes. Oh, yeah.

But I mean, like people who are more explicitly Nazi than Pat Buchanan, which is fairly impressive. Yeah. Cause he's written a whole book defending Hitler. Yeah. So, Francis Booth Coons, who works at the Times, he was like one of their head publishers. And he frequently published his wife, who's the other main thing his wife writes for is Stormfront. Oh, good.

Awesome. It's amazing. So, here's from the Southern Poverty Law Center. In one opinion piece in The Times, Coons describes the whole of human history as, quote, the struggle of races, non-white immigration, she wrote in another column, is importing poverty and revolution that will end in the eventual loss of American sovereignty. In England, Muslims are turning life in this once pleasant land into misery for its native inhabitants.

Ooh. And this is just one example that I've pulled out. There are dozens of people at the Times who write stuff exactly like this. It's horrifying. I've talked a bit before about the defender of Asia. They're huge, huge defenders of apartheid in South Africa. They are, yeah, it's one of the worst institutions in the U.S. And in a lot of ways, it's like, they kind of serve a role sort of similar to what Infowars

does, right? Where like, you have this one, they'll do the Alex Jones thing, right? They'll pick a headline from another news source, completely misinterpret it, turn it into an outraged machine, and then they'll feed it to the rest of the right-wing press. And it goes through like Fox News. Yeah. But they're kind of more like Breitbart in that they camouflage themselves as more legitimate.

And then also, especially with Reagan, they just directly have access to the president because this is their favorite magazine. This is Reagan's favorite newspaper. And one of the other things they do is, so the Korean government, there's a pro-democracy uprising in the city of Gwangju, and they make this commune. It's one of the sort of incredible revolutionary moments in world history. And the Korean government just murders them, absolutely butchers them. And the Times does propaganda, like the Times runs cover for the Korean government.

And this is so bad that even like the other right-wingers at the Times just resign in mass because they're like, I won't be a part of the South Korean government literally murdering a bunch of pro-democracy protesters. Oh boy. That order to defend the South Korean government comes directly from the top, it comes directly from Moon, it comes directly from Bohipok. And they're trying to protect the South Korean government after the KCIA shot performer dictator Park Jung-hee in his bunker, which is a story that I will tell like another time on this

podcast. The dictators of South Korea deserve as much time as the dictators of North Korea. Yeah, I'm working on episodes. But yeah, we'll tell that later. But Moon is just directly running interference with the fact that like his bosses just murdered the president. Now, this right-wing media blitz isn't just an American affair, Moon is putting on newspapers across the world, including the Sergei Times in Korea, the Middle East Times in Cairo,

and Sekai Nippo in Japan. Now, Sekai Nippo is fun because they directly advocate for Japan invading Manchuria again, which yeah. Because it went so well last time. It's great. And you know, this is where I was talking about, you know, that whole thing about how the Moonies run that scam where they make people like pay indulgences for all the war crimes that Japan did in Korea.

Oh, boy, they're advocating for them to do it again. It's great. Well, I mean, God forgave them. So, kind of like Rasputin believed, you got to get back in there and start sinning again. Yeah. He's not going to have anything to forgive. I should specifically mention this. God does not forgive Tojo.

Moon forgives Tojo. Well, yeah. Because he needs someone a little more powerful than God for Tojo. And Moon is just much, much better than God. I think Moon would agree. Yeah. Now, Moon's increasing hold over the media was tested in Japan when Yoshikazu Shojima, a former churchman, attempted to fight like a full scale church takeover of Sakai Nippo

in Japan. Now, Moon sends in the Yakuza from the book Inside the League on the 1st of October, about a hundred people, including about 30 in special karate training groups barged into the paper's offices. They broke deaths, stole papers and beat up some of the employees. Okay. On June 2nd of 1984, Shojima was attacked outside his home in Tokyo and stabbed repeatedly according to police reports.

When the attack occurred, he was preparing an article critical of Moon. Man, can't one team of karate soldiers be sent into a place and not into the depressing thing? No, okay. I am going to do an episode at some point about karate because it's so fucked up. But one of the things that's important to note is that the World Karate Federation was founded by Sasakawa, the Japanese fascist and one of Moon's lieutenants. So yeah, all the karate people, like huge supply of bodyguards from South Korean dictators

are cool. Well, I guess I'm going to have to go to Krav Maga for an unproblematic martial art. Time to Google Krav Maga for the first time. It's bad. Now, while all of this is happening, this in some ways is Moon's moment of triumph. But there's two disasters that strike. One is the death of his 17-year-old son, Huang Jin. Now, this is a major problem for Moon theologically because he has written that people can only

reach the kingdom of heaven if they're married. What kills his son's debt? He's driving an SUV on an icy road and he crashes. He gets assaaded. Yeah. Well, he was a sports car, wasn't he? He's just like, he's a 17-year-old and he's not good at driving an ice. I mean, yeah.

Okay. Yeah. There's no evidence he got married. So naturally, Moon solves the problem of his son can't go to heaven because he wasn't married by marrying the dead Huang Jin off to Bohi Park's daughter Hoon Son Park. I mean, potentially a great deal because you don't have to deal with a lot of the traditional downsides of marriage. Yeah.

Hoon Son Park later said that the experience was, quote, like being emotionally raped. Oh, okay. So, yeah, not good. I'm going to wait an extra second before I respond to you in the future, Chris. Yeah. It's not good. Yeah. And this is like, while this is going on, like, while Moon's having his death squad

adventures, like, there's just still a bunch of horrible stuff happening interpersonally in the church. Yeah. I don't have a good segue from this and so what I'm about to read. So Moon also said about Huang Jin's death, if the sacrifice of Huang Jin Nim had not been made, one of either two great calamities could have happened. Either the Korean nation could have suffered a catastrophic setback, such as invasion from the North, or I myself could have been assassinated, which I think is incredible.

Look at his mind, where he's like, my son has died. How do I spin this? How do I spin this? And if he hadn't died, one of two equally bad things could have happened. I could die, or North Korea could invade, and I'm just like. He's consistently doing the thing that you're not supposed to do as a person, like say that God thinks that you're better than God, or say that, well, at least it was my son that died and not me.

Yeah. Like, these are like real big, but it's just cool. It's fine. Yeah. That's great. It's a good time. So Moon's other problem is with the law. Moon gets indicted in the US because it's indicted on a number of countries related to the fact

that literally everything he does is indescribably illegal, and the government is sort of trying to get him on tax charges. Moon loses this case and gets convicted of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury. And it's important to remember what he's convicted of, because even before Moon is convicted, he launches this massive advertising complaint, complaining that he's being religiously and racially persecuted by a government that hates religion, and there's like this cult obsession, and it's just that they just don't understand his new religion. And this works.

Dinesh D'Souza gives a speech defending Moon. God, that, look, you've brought up a lot of frustrating names, but that's the first one that made me angry. God damn it. Lawrence Tribe shows up to argue that this whole prosecution is an attack on the First Amendment, and the government is going after him for holding church money, his own money in the same account, which is like a standard practice for small churches. Tribe, oh, okay.

So the ACLU is involved in this. I've seen conflicting accounts as to whether it was just the New York chapter or the entire ACLU, but some of the ACLU, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the National Association of Evangelicals all argue that if Moon is convicted, the government will come after churches everywhere. So we have to defend Moon now. And of course, none of this ever happens. You don't.

Yeah, no. None of this ever happens. There's no persecution ever, because it's all a lie. Moon is put in prison, if you remember, for obstruction of justice, perjury, and conspiracy, not tax evasion. Right? Like, he's not, that's not what he goes down for. Like, he goes down because he's running an enormous money laundering operation that

is smuggling money in the socks of ballet dancers to move Yorkism money to Latin American death squads. Like, that's what he's actually doing with this. Oh, so that's a crime now, huh? We don't let that happen in America. But this is the thing, like, to this day, you can find conservatives on forum posts talking about how, like, the rational skeptic people will be like, ah, Moon was unjustly prosecuted.

It's like, no, he got off, like, so easy for the number of crimes. If a dude chainsawed hit him in half, it wouldn't have been an unjust prosecution. This guy ran Korean CIA influence operations on sitting American senators. Yeah, this is like a Dolos-level piece of shit. Like, just let it happen. Yeah. Now, nevertheless, Jerry Falwell and Tim Lehey, founders of the moral majority, joined a pop-up pro-Moon campaign.

And they argue that he's being persecuted by secular humanists, which is their version of cultural Marxism. It's great. Yeah, the original term was pagan statism, actually. Yeah. It's gone through a few permutations before we hit cultural Marxist, which seems to scan best now. Yeah.

Lehey takes $500,000 from Moon and creates the Coalition for Religious Freedom, which is, like, focused on defending Moon. Jerry Falwell, who had denounced Moon as a devil praying on American children in 1978, speaks at a banquet run by CIA USA in 1985, and sits on the Coalition for Religious Freedoms board. Yeah. I mean, it's... Okay.

Yeah. Like, prison turns out to have been, like, an incredible boon for Moon. Unless I'm, like, completely re... You know, because Moon in the 70s is, like, one of the most hated figures in America, because everyone's like, oh, he's the cult guy. And by the mid-80s, he's gone... He's completely rehabilitated his image, and he's now, like, fully integrated into the Christian right.

And it's incredibly... And all it took was crimes. And an enormous amount of money, and you can do whatever you can fund every desk on Earth. Now, back in the church, things had taken an extremely bizarre turn. In the summer of 1987, church leaders heard that Moon's dead son, Huang Jin, had returned to Earth in the body of a church member from Zimbabwe. Cleopas Cudiona was accepted by Moon as a reincarnation of Huang Jin, whose body, whose spirit possessed his body.

Moon, like, appoints him as, like, a church inquisitor, and so he would go around, like, beating church members until they, like, confessed to something they did wrong. And... Cool. It's apparently really brutal. He, like, beats priests and their wives unconscious. There's a story about him, like, he takes out a gun and just, like, starts shooting bullets into a pool, and then orders everyone to go, like, pick up the bullets from inside the

pool. Yeah, and he even beats Bohi Pock, like, so badly that Pock has to go to a hospital to have, like, fluid drain from his brain. And he's, this is the point at which Moon is, like, uh, I've had enough of this. Maybe you're not my son. Yeah, and he has, uh... My son beats one last guy than that. Yeah, and so he declares that his, Huang Jin's spirit has left the body of Cleopas.

Huang Jin comes back to life to just beat the shit out of some people and then goes right off to the spirit realm again. Yep. Incredible, David. It's wild. One of the funny things about this is, like, there are so many church leaders who are just, like, randomly showing up with, like, bruises on them that, like, one of their, like, American, like, pretty prominent American followers is, like, convinced there's a communist plot going

on to, like, disrupt the leadership of the church, and it's just... And the other thing is that they call him Black Huang Jin. Like, it's just... Oh, okay. Wow. It's bad. I mean, okay, fine. Yeah, I also...

That doesn't really scan as bad within the context of the episode. Well, so I should briefly talk about, there's like a... So Moon is, like, a big, like, racial unity guy, so, like, you know, he was promoting integration in the 70s and, like, 60s and 70s. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, there's actually a number of really problematic guys who during the conversations on integration were on the right side. Yeah.

We could talk about the fucking... Oh, you know, the Kool-Aid, what do you call it? Jim Jones. Jim Jones, yeah. But I will say... So Moon is lying about this. Moon does not actually believe in racial equality. He...

In his, like... So, inside the church, there's, like... Racism from the death squad guy? Yeah. There's this, like, internal hierarchy, basically, of, like, people in the church, and it's like, Koreans are on top, and then I think it's like Japanese people and then white people, and then, like, black people are on the bottom, and there's, like, there's some racism stuff going on there.

I... Yeah, I didn't write a normal-span about it because there's so many death squads, and we still haven't even gotten to the next thing we're about to get to, which is a Kim Hill song. So, yeah, Moon, Moon ironically lives to see the death of communism, like, and the triumph of the market economy literally everywhere except for North Korea. Well, yeah. Which is...

Yeah. They're still keeping on. Yeah. But, you know, Moon is convinced that, like, collapse is coming any day now, as, like, the Berlin Wall falls and the Ozarks imploding. So Moon begins secret talks with North Korea in 1991, and later that year, she's finally able to meet Kim Il-sung and return to North Korea for the first time since the Korean War.

Now, Kim Il-sung has, like, Moon's childhood home, like, refurbished, and Moon goes to, like, visit his home, and then they have this, like, meeting where they, like, they, like, they, like, hug it out, and Kim Il-sung says, let us forget the past. Most important now is the future. Yes. The Defense Intelligence Agency claims that Moon paid millions of dollars to a secret overseas bank account to get the meeting and secure future investment rights. I don't know if that's true.

The only evidence, the only source is the Defense Intelligence Agency, so they might just be lying. It might also be true. But whatever happens, it works. Kim Il-sung and Moon were now on business together. Moon invests somewhere between 50 and 60 million dollars into a joint North Korean, South Korean car company called Pyongkwan Motors, and was even allowed the extremely rare privilege of, like, putting up corporate billboards in North Korea for this company.

And here's a fun quote from, from Church Office. The North Korea stands are gonna, the North Korea stands are gonna love this one. Just wait, just wait. Fucking billboards in the socialist paradise. Yeah. So here's a fun quote from Church Officer Park Sung-kwan, who's the head of the joint venture. We are bound to succeed.

There are no unions, low labor costs. The workers are very clever, very quick to learn, and they are harshly controlled by their superiors. Mmm. The workers' paradise. The workers' paradise. Yeah. J.J. thought is the one true revolutionary ideology.

I've always said that. Sophie will tell you. I say that to her every day, sometimes I call her in the middle of the night, screaming it at the top of my lungs. Full volume. It's great. Uh-huh. He's also, like, investing in Vietnam and China for, like, similar reasons, neither of

whom seem to have any objections to taking money from a man who had their former comrades literally burned alive. I mean, look, once you get to the point where people have a lot of money, nobody actually believes anything. Yeah. It's great. It's great. So, yeah, the other thing Moon is able to do is he, the Washington Times gets the first,

like, the first interview with any North Korean leader in the Western press in 20 years. And the Times basically publishes, like, a puff piece praising Kim Il-sung. So, you know, you might be asking yourself, how does this dude who has literally spent his entire career being in fact full of communism, how is he justifying allying with Kim Il-sung? And the answer is that he justifies it by calling it a triumph of his sheer power to fuse together himself and his enemy, Kane and Abel, God and Satan, yin and yang. And even his own followers are, like, no, like, leave the church. Yeah, because he's basically saying, well, guys, the only problem with communism was that

they didn't like me. Yeah, yeah. But now they like me. And it's funny because he is, like, one of the largest, like, funders of the North Korean economy, like, to this day. He's, like, one of the big people putting money into it. It's incredible. And, you know, and this is, you know, but, you know, his followers leaving the church

is kind of a theme for Moon in the 90s. The 90s is kind of a rough time for him. George H.W. Bush, who was a big enough Moon supporter to tour Japan and Argentina with him, you know, loses the 1992 election. And Moon claims this is a result of Bush refusing to sign papers calling Korea the country of eternal peace supreme over all other nations. He's, like, yeah, you didn't make me king, so that's why he lost. But he starts pivoting to try to be, like, a civil rights leader and he forms this thing

called the Women's Federation for World Peace, which argues that women's liberation is submitting traditional gender roles. And then he also starts paying a bunch of old civil rights leaders to back him and, like, courting these, like, socially conservative black churches. And, you know, while he's doing this, he also bails out Liberty University for $3.5 million when he thinks no one's looking. It's great. It's great.

He's paying out Liberty University. But in 1999, Nansuk Hong publishes a book called In the Shadow of the Moons, My Life in the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Family. Nansuk Hong is the wife of Moon's first son, like, first son of his wife, Steve, who's Steve's last seen threatening to rape and kill another woman for having a child with Moon. Yeah, he's great. Steve Moon is a problem child.

He can't be disciplined. He drinks constantly and he just, like, wants to be a rock star in South Korea, which normally I'm on board with. Like, I don't know, son of a cult leader, I just want to be a rock star. Moon is mad about this because he's like, okay, well, my son needs to lead the church. So his plan is to get his successor back in line, is to marry him off to the 15-year-old Nansuk Hong, apparently on the logic that having a wife who's young enough to be easily controlled would turn him into a proper patriarch or something.

And so, yeah, it's bad. Hong is basically just, like, Steve treats her as a servant. She has to, like, make him food every morning and, you know, she talks about this time, like, basically, like, smiling and being cheery every day before crying herself to sleep every night. Hong gets pregnant, I think, for the first time at 17, and she eventually has five kids. While pregnant with the fifth kid, she can rent Steve, who's been doing literally millions of dollars of cocaine.

He is, like, defrauding the entire church. Oh, that is a good amount of cocaine to do, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. That's pretty rad. Look, no notes on that guy. Yeah. So the problem with this is that, you know, he is, like, not helping raise his sons and

daughters. And so Hong, like, confronts him about this, and she tries to flush some of the cocaine down the toilet. And here's how the New Republic describes what happened next. Steve, quote, smashed my face, smashed his fist into my face, bloody in my nose, Hong later recalled. He wiped my blood on his hand and licked it off. Tastes good, he said.

This is fun. It's, yeah, this is not good. What the fuck? That's so cute. Yeah. Like, he's just licking the blood off his hand and saying, this tastes good. This is fun. Like, what?

It's, yeah. I mean, yeah, it does. Yeah. Steve then threatens to kill her baby and, like, keeps on beating here. She was from an interview she gave the CBS's 60 Minutes. He beat me so severely, I thought he would kill the baby in my womb. He made me clean up the spilled white powder from the floor even as he continued to beat me.

Later, he would offer religious justification for beating me half senseless, a woman seven months pregnant. He was teaching me to be humble in the presence of the Messiah. Yeah. Yeah. That's unfortunately a really common line of, like, you talk to people who are in kind of like homeschooling colts and, you know, raised in sort of like to train up a child kind of bullshit.

Like, yeah, there's a lot of justifications for child abuse and special abuse and different Christian sects that are like, well, this is, I'm humbling you, but you have to be humble for God. And like, yeah. Yeah. It's horrible. And, you know, this is, but the reason this book and the interviews, like, Hong is actually like, she's actually, she's able to get away from Moon.

She's able to live her own life. I mean, like people, like church members like keep continuously calling her and like stuff like that happens. But she's able to get out. And she publishes his book. And this book does like enormous damage to Moon because, you know, here's this guy who's supposed to have been like, like, he's, you know, he's supposed to have been him. He's literally the Messiah and he's him and his children are like his children are supposed

to be the first generation of new, perfect children. And this is what they're doing. And this is really bad for the church. So Moon begins to change his strategy once again. His new plan is he's going to get the U.S. to crown him King. Okay. Okay. How did that go?

In 2004, 81 in congressmen, 26 ambassadors to the U.S. and like 500 other dignitaries gathered in the Dirksen Senate office building. According to one description of the events, Republican Roscoe Bartlett bowed before the couple and and Democrat Danny Davis carried out one of the two golden crowns that were placed on their heads. Wait, what? Moon then informed the audience that kings and presidents had declared him humanity savior and that Jesus, Buddha, Hitler and Stalin had been reborn as new persons through his

teachings. Wow. What? Moon, it turns out. Did that make it into anybody's like campaign ads trained on see these guys? That seems like, I feel like even today if somebody in Congress did that, a lot of folks would. Okay.

There was like one week where everyone was like, oh, hey, what would that all these senators went to a, went to a, a ceremony where they literally crowned this guy King. And everyone was like, he gives us money and just nobody care. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Look, it was a metaphor. Why are you asking?

He gives us money. So apparently he bribed a bunch of these people to be there by giving them gold watches. The congressmen show up and are like, wait, hold on, I thought we were just giving him an award. Why are we crowning him King? And like the American press is just like, ah, this is a curiosity. Okay. Whatever.

Yeah. Some senators crowned, crowned Reverend Moon King. I feel like the one thing we all want and clearly we can't, but the one thing Americans should generally agree on is don't crown people King. You would think that's like the whole thing that we were against. No. Like, this is, this is why, like, you know, this is only a tangible, this is why I get so mad about the fact that like, like the fact that we support Saudi Arabia, it's like

there's one principle. The fucking don't have Kings. One principle. Yeah. Can we not stick to one thing? They can't do it. They keep doing it. They're bad.

They keep making Kings. And so yeah. And this is, this is like, and this is an internally, this is an enormous propaganda coup from Moon. You know, here are like literally the leaders of the United States bowing to him and crowning him King. And so Moon like retreats to a palace model left the capital model after the capital building the years constructed in Korea after taking hundreds of thousands of dollars from Bush's

faith of government money, by the way, from Bush's faith based initiatives. Awesome. It's great. Now, you know, by the time you get to the mid late 2000s, Moon's health is failing. He has, I think he has cancer and his daughter, Injin Moon, starts to take over the church around 2010. She takes over through a bunch of incredibly complicated political maneuvering I'm not going to get into here, but she's able to take control of most of the church, but not

all of it. And this is important because her, so she's able to take control of like, like the organization that's the church, right? But she's not able to take control of the holding group that they, that they funnel all their money through. So the bajillions of dollars, she doesn't have access. Yeah. Yeah.

So the show company goes to her brother Preston, who has, yeah, why, I mean, he, I had, okay, like, he's not the worst of the family branch, but he like, he basically takes the money and he sets up like a new church with the same theology, except without the like the Moon family members as messiahs, Um, Injin calls him quote, a fallen Adam being controlled by Satan. And Preston says like, basically the same, like similar things about her. But this is the first of like a myriad of fractures that would consume the church as Reverend Moon's health decline, he lost control.

The good news is that if you're that guy, if you're the guy, even God is like this dude knows what's up. You're probably not going to have anyone who's capable of being that bold and they have to be after you. Yeah. Yeah. Although, you know. Your replacement's just almost certainly not going to be, not going to have that kind

of chutzpah. Yeah. I mean, they don't do that. Well, okay. Injin does terribly. The thing is, you know, so the problem is by the time you're in the Obama years, right? Like the golden age where there were no problems, not a single one. What I will say though, is that this is actually like, this is the first time that the church

hasn't been able to ride a cultural shift because, you know, like, like the, the, the more majority stuff, it like, as a politics kind of like, like, but I mean, Obama, like it's kind of dying. Like, I mean, it's still around, but like it doesn't, that's like that, that, that kind of right wing, like, like the, the, the Christian version of it, like it doesn't fully reemerge again until Trump. And, and then when it comes back under Trump, it's, you know, like, it's, it's, it's like a more fascist like version of it.

And while they're trying to write this transition, they screw up. Injin, like, attempts to like modernize the church. So she gets rid of all like the old hymns and chanting replaces them with like guitar hero and ping pong tournaments. And she also, she launches a rock band called Sonic Colt and, and she, she even, she even is like, oh, we should encourage kids to like have a role in choosing their partners. Um, this is an apocal disaster for the church internal church documents show that church membership in the U.S. dropped from 26,000 to 7,000 in two months.

Wow. Wow. That is like, yeah, that is, that is, that is a pretty, pretty quick fall. Now, when Moon finally dies in 2012, Moon's wife just like almost immediately ousts her by, so Injin had had a child at a wedlock. And that's like, that's like literally the worst sin you can possibly do in the church. And so she like reveals this and Injin just like disappears. Um, but, you know, even after this coup, the, the, the church continues to fragment.

And the most famous of these breakaway shards is Huang Jin, Sean Moon's breakaway faction, which is now known as the air 15 church for conducting rituals and marriages at air 15. We're going here. Yeah. Yeah. So it's interesting. This is an interesting faction because, you know, he doesn't have, like Sean doesn't have either the money of like Preston's breakaway church, nor does he have the connections

that like the main church has. Cause you know what I mean? The main church are the people who hold on to leadership in like South Korea and they hold on to it in, in like in Africa. They hold on to South America. They hold on to Japanese branch in particular. But what Sean's faction does have is car arms. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So, so he, he, yeah, so he chooses like, you know, with, with, with car arms and, you know, with, with, with this sort of like thing going on, he chooses like publicity sons to rebuild his membership. So, you know, he, he dons a crown of bullets and rallies around like Revelation two 27, which says he shall rule them with a rod of iron. It's very like, you know, this is a lot of knowing that the news like obviously it's

going to look so nutty that the news will go crazy over it. And then, you know, bada bing, bada boom, attention, economy, baby. Yeah. And you know, Sean isn't totally without connections and resources. Um, it's both Steve Bannon and Patriot prayer founder, Joey Gibson show up to one of his events in, in I think, I'll say Steve Bannon is a connection, Joey Gibson, not so much, not so much. I bring up Joey Gibson though, because well, Joe Gibson and the fact that he controls car

arms all make the fact that he shows up to the Capitol on his father's birthday, January six, and it helps storm it all the more disturbing. Yeah. That's good. That's, that makes sense that we were heading there. Yeah. At least they had another reason, you know. Yeah.

This is birthday party. It wasn't just, it wasn't just the Trump stuff. Look, there were a lot of reasons for me to be storming a thing today. Yeah. Now, a year later, Trump gave a 9 11 speech to a packed mainline unification church event led by Moon's wife. She said, quote, what, what they have achieved on the peninsula is just amazing in just a few decades.

The inspiration that they have caused for the entire planet is unbelievable and I congratulate you again and again. Yeah. So Trump, this makes Trump, I said, I said there were six presidents, right? Who've either met him or supported his organizations. So that's Eisenhower, Nixon, George Bush, George HW Bush, Joe Biden and Donald Trump. So this is a wonderful two-party system. Absolutely shocked that Clinton was not on there.

Yeah. Just completely stunned. This is because Moon hates Clinton. Moon like when Clinton, Clinton wins the election, Moon is like the U.S. has been taken over by Satan and like leave for a while. Okay. You know what? That does scan.

Yeah. Based on the time that does scan, I guess. Yeah. And actually, one of the other things that I didn't mention in this was that the Washington Times are like some of the people who like start the like. So when Hillary does the one good thing she's ever done her entire life, which was advocating for universal health care, they like that's when they start like a bunch of the like anti-Clinton like Asher turf stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. So to close this out, I'm going to end this episode by reading a list of prominent American conservatives involved with the Mooneys in some way or another, either writing for their magazines, working for a front group, giving speeches or taking their money. David Brooks, Elliot Abram, Papi Kennan, George Bush, George HW Bush, Donald Trump, Mike Pence, Mark Pompeo, Mark Esper, Newt Gingrich, Oren Hatch, Ronald Reagan, Grover Norquist, Jack Abramoff, Richard Vigieri, Ed Filner, Strom Thurman, DeLeste DeSousa,

Lawrence Tribe, Jerry Falwell, Steve Bannon, Tim Lehey, Ralph Reed, Beverly Lehey, Gary Bauer, Gerald Ford, Jack Kamp, and John Podhoritz. And this is an incomplete list. Like I, that's, that's, that's like, you just, you're just hitting the hits. Yeah. And this also does not include anyone from the 12 countries and Moone funded desk wads. So yeah, that's Reverend Moone. What a great guy.

Well, you know what? As a fair man, I'm going to give kudos to a guy who went for it, you know? He, like, Good, good for you buddy. Good for you. He, he got a bunch, he, he got a bunch of, of sitting U.S. congressmen and senator to crown him king. Yeah.

That is, that is an achievement. No one else has ever done this. That is an achievement. No one else. Yeah. Look, you know what, I got to just give one quiet salute in honor of this man's ambition and ability to somehow have an ass that could cash the kind of checks that he was writing. Yeah.

This, this man had one glorious dream and it was dead babies and he killed a lot of babies. He killed a lot of babies. He is going to be responsible for the deaths of a lot of babies in the future and he made some pretty mediocre handguns. Yeah. Don't buy a car. Get, get a number of other guns. Look, if you want a tiny handgun, get a, I don't know, Smith and Wilson bodyguard or

something. You know, you don't, don't, don't buy a car. Well, Chris, thank you for making me sad. I'm happy to question work. But I'm also happy because I didn't have to do as much work this week and I got to learn a story about a co-leader who is boy, howdy, got to be in our, got to be in our top five. Yeah. He's a, he's a real good gutter.

He is up there. I'm still, I, the money is just ridiculous. Yeah. Yeah. It's a birdie. So much money. It's, it's just, oh my God. Yeah.

Yeah. Thank you, Chris. Man. And listeners, give me that kind of money and I promise I'll fund so many death squads like way more death squads than this guy, Robert, none of this other distraction bullshit. I'm going to go peer in on the death squads, you know, or don't, that's the behind the bastards guarantee. That is not.

Chris, do you have any football books for us? I'm on Twitter at me, CHR three, go listen to it could happen here. We're going to do more about the world anti-communist league because I, I, I only scratch the surface of the horse. So yeah. All right. Well, that's the episode. Goodbye and go with Christ, um, who thinks that the Reverend moon is way smarter than

he is. He totally told me that at a dinner party, Jesus, 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 with like a lot of guns, but our 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 I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. 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 I heart radio app, Apple podcasts 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 and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price to death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.