Grubstakers - Episode 153: Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church

Episode Date: April 1, 2020

On this episode we discuss founder of the Unification Church, the Washington Times, North Korea’s Pyonghwa Motors, and Humanity’s Savior/first parent/successor of Christ Himself Sun Myung Moon. We delve into his teenage experience of being visited by Jesus, his time in a North Korean prison camp, building a fortune investing his followers’ candle sales, and his work spreading love through mass marriages as well as spreading hate through the Washington Times. To help anyone who needs their Grubstakers fix we have chosen to make all the episodes on our paywall free for a month. It's not a April Fools joke, but it is 4/20 all month.

It's the kind of thing that makes the average citizen puke. I look at this system and say, yeah, you know, what's going on? I don't know anything about this man except I've read bad stuff about him. And I don't like, you know, I don't like what I read about him. We are more than just one coin. We create the world around this coin. Cop. Invention. Cop. Cop. Okay.

In five, four, three, two. The evil has gone. Hello and welcome to Grubstakers, reporting from the coronavirus capital of the world, New York City. I'm Andy Palmer. I'm Yogi Poyol. I'm Sean P. McCarthy. And today we are talking about Sun Myung Moon, a deceased messiah and leader of the holy unification church uh one of probably one of the greatest figures in humanity who um has delivered us uh from our sins and from

the fall of man but before we get into him and his amazing works i just want to check in with everyone steven by the way could not make it um but uh how are you guys doing? How's your Corona situation checking in? How's the quarantine? Yeah, Steve was complaining of a cough before he got here. I don't know what that means, but he couldn't be here with us. Yeah, I think he got my Rona. I think we had a little roommate Rona exchange going on over here at Crab Staker South. Steve was like, sorry, guys, I can't make it to the podcast today.

I just I can't smell or taste anymore. And my breathing is labored. I have a fever. And we were like, well, then you're not getting paid this week, buddy. Yeah, that's coming out of your PTO. I've been OK. I've been doing a lot of cooking a lot of uh biting my tongue when talking to friends and family about why i have to leave the phone call when i want to uh a lot a lot of lying to myself and others to maintain sanity has been going on for me nice nice wait what what are your top lies what kinds of lies are you talking about here i mean like everything's gonna be okay i think that's one of the biggest ones

uh we're i'm gonna i'm gonna go back i'm gonna be better than i was when all of this is over that's another big lie that's been that's been circulating um i think uh lies about uh my perceived relationship with material goods and how i'm trying to transcend them and enjoy the thoughts and fruits of labor that is my friendships and kindness and not buying new watches on sale on ebay like that's i think i think a good chunk of my life has been denying myself the pleasures of uh retail therapy to try and enjoy the moment more and more and that's the lie that's the lie yeah the lie is yeah i'm gonna read a book and eat a pear but in reality i'm just gonna buy a piece playstation 4 and hope that it doesn't have coronavirus on it i've been playing chrono cross again i got it on my psvita

i started a new game you know we're gonna we got final fantasy the seven the remake coming we're gonna we're gonna get a lot of gaming going i fired up the old gamecube i'm playing wind waker trying to experience being outside though that is kind of you're you're on an open ocean so even even in my video games i'm socially isolating did you guys hear they're gonna release the new fallout game directly outside our windows actually i had to go to um i had to go to the vet on sunday i mean you guys know this but that was a surreal experience. My cat peed blood on my coat to let me know that she was peeing blood and had to take her to the vet and then hand her through an open door

and then hang out in this little vestibule, like temporary awning outside of the vet. Well, they did all the stuff inside because i couldn't go inside and was it just your cat's time of the month um cats don't have a time of the month uh she had a uti um so i guess she's getting laid but that's why steven was sick today oh wow sean that's low uh but yeah she's gonna be okay it i mean it's always uh disconcerting when your beloved cat starts peeing blood but i think she's gonna be fine uh on a happier note though um we were talking about a couple episodes ago uh how by the end of april it's going to be a 9-11 per day uh what are the numbers well there's an update uh america has already blown past the 9-11 number which means

that within the week or so we're probably going to see a 9-11 per day in the united states wow and uh probably a 9-11 per day in New York within the next couple weeks. So that's, I think we're done using 9-11 as a metric for mass death. Wow. The days of forgetting 9-11 are soon to begun. Finally, finally. I was going to say, Wisconsin Senator johnson has written an op-ed where in usa today where he basically makes the argument that uh in the u.s 2.8 million people

die every year so this isn't actually a big deal which uh i love just taking that to its logical conclusion and being like look we're supposed to care about the darfur genocide when more than twice as many people die in the u.s every year compared to this one historical event they're just blowing up to make president clinton look bad next year he'll be like sure like 11 million people died of the coronavirus but 13 million people died in the united states last year it's these this is just a normal number i'm actually i'm drawing inspiration from my uh hall's cough drop wrappers they have little um little pep talks on them one of them says put your game face on and then another another one, fire up those engines.

Be resilient. And then my favorite one is, you've survived tougher. Oh, wow. Which I can imagine someone eating a cough drop that says that, getting some inspiration from that. And then two weeks later on the ventilator. Guess I haven't survived tougher. It is like an interesting contrast between like the people whose lives are being just totally destroyed by this. And then us who are just like, hey, I'm playing Chrono Cross again.

You say us like you're not the only one playing that game bragging about it on our show right now well i'm having the best experience because i'm playing the best jrpg what's the j stand for is it like japanese japanese yep well in a moderate amount of lighter news uh for the month of april the Grubstakers LLC has decided to take down the paywall, Mr. Gorbachev, and release all of our patron episodes for a month to try and ease your corona woes

with more financial ills of the elite. Per our Discord, I think that we're going to release the most recent patron episodes a week after to the public. Yeah, maybe we're going to release the most recent Patreon episodes a week after to the public. Yeah, maybe we'll pay well like the most recent month. And then everything before that,

which is a good chunk of episodes. You're not going to need to pay us money to listen to them. They'll be free to listen to. Yeah, just for the month of April. We're releasing our Patreon episodes free for the one month that it will be impossible for a process server to find us and serve us with a lawsuit i will say on the

last patreon episode i definitely tested how much uh copyright music i could play because i was like there's no way the lawyers that usually shut this shit down are operating in the same facilities they were a few months ago yeah we're definitely taking advantage of the fact that patreon doesn't have the same um united music group uh search algorithms built into it that soundcloud does uh oh another another announcement that i forgot to make last time is uh we now have a website grubstakers.net so if you uh want to want to find a particular billionaire in the patreon episode it's got a little search feature you can type that in

uh we have three uh bios written as well of billionaires and then um we're going to be adding to that but yeah that's that's the thing i've been working on for a couple months now now i have to find a job now that i'm done with that but we have a we have a whole website easy it's just the great depression andy yeah yeah i found the perfect i was like all right i got this i'm gonna i'm gonna make a website to demonstrate that i can code in django and then you know what we're even though even though we are on the precipice of um just historic economic atrocity right now we're at record low unemployment numbers and then we went off that precipice and uh now we're here i do love how like andy's life is like the arc of a Curb Your Enthusiasm season.

He gets fired by his like shitty job that was destroying his soul. And he's like, finally, I have peace. I can take, you know, a month, recuperate, find my next job. And then the fucking Great Depression hits right out of nowhere. Oh, man, it's going to be exciting. Navigating, navigating that sea. I do have one other thing I should just mention for the listeners. Actually, my wife and I did manage to get tested through our primary care practitioner because at my day job, one of the janitors tested positive.

And, of course, they had us coming in for two weeks after that and didn't tell us anything because this is how companies operate uh but um anyway so my wife and i got tested my wife uh thank god tested negative but uh that was two days ago they have not called me to give me my results and i assume if my wife had it i would i would have it as well so i assume i'm i'm negative but I do just I'm imagining the doctor like working up the courage for two straight days to give me my results so there's a chance that you have it Sean uh I mean there's a chance but I really don't think so just because you know Pamela and I have not been living in separate rooms you know if one of us have it both of us have it i thought that was your typical arrangement you in separate rooms i thought that's how you and your wife got down

yes we have a quarantine marriage uh two years now you guys also decided you have to live in manhattan so it you're essentially in a box yeah like with a bucket in the corner for a toilet. It's pretty great. This building, you will never find less solidarity for the idea of a rent strike. Just from the fucking aristocrats who live here. If I was in Flatbush right now, I might not have to pay rent, but we're going to try and figure it out. Yeah, before I moved here, when it was just Steven and we came here to record episodes, people were putting up little flyers on every floor with a picture of the Rent is Too Damn High guy saying,

fix the elevator or we're going on a rent strike. Is it fixed? It did get fixed yeah nice uh just in time for someone to use it as a urinal every day and um it is something we'll probably cover maybe later in the week or next week but there are estimates that something like 40 of new yorkers are not going to be able to pay their rent tomorrow. So this would have extremely wide reverberating consequences for property values and everything else in the city. So, I mean, this is just another little slow-moving boulder about to hit the economy. And we'll see what happens, but best of luck to all our listeners out there. And, you know, this is why we're giving you the episodes for free. To try and brighten your spirits as neoliberalism crushes down upon you.

Yes, as you're being kicked out of your apartments for something you do not control. Please enjoy our drops on episodes on billionaires not worrying about the exact issues that are kicking you out. In fact, making money because they're kicking you out. Look, you can listen to our episodes on mobile. You don't have to be in your home in order to appreciate our podcast. You can, if you're sitting in a parking lot in your designated parking space

with a tarp on it that you live in now, you know, it's a good time to listen to Grubstickers on headphones or just share them with your neighbors go to your local library type in soundcloud.com slash grubstakers plug in your bluetooth speaker and just let everyone in the library know what free media is all about we're gonna have to reduce the episode length to like a hard cut off at an hour because that's when our listeners library computer time expires so like we got to get the episodes down so our fans can get the whole thing in before they get kicked off for the next person waiting for the library computer are there even libraries open right now i don't think so yeah i imagine at the states where they don't have libraries closed are also the states where they massively defunded all their libraries.

Yeah, that's true. But anyways, we're going to brighten you up. And what's brighter than someone who has both sun and moon in his name? So Sun Myung Moon is primarily known as the leader, Messiah, and first parent of the Unification Church, which is an international church that was started in the 1950s and grew worldwide. He's also the owner of the Washington Times, which is a semi-influential newspaper. We'll talk quite a bit about that. His net worth is hard to pin down because all of his assets are private and also generally confined to the church itself. His widow, who is taking on leadership of the church, the other first parent, Hak-Jah has uh controls assets in the range of about

3.1 billion yeah his net worth is hard to pin down because it's a difficult to value illegal north korean properties and uh the proceeds of arm sales are generally not reported to tax authorities. Well, it's not God's will. But yeah, he ran a cult for the last three to five decades. Religious movement. Through that, he has amassed a net worth that has infiltrated the United States right-wing conservative movement that truly has funded so many things that it's surprising that he's not more known in this country in this era. Yeah, I was going to say, like, I think American listeners might know him or at least his movement, not as the Unification Church, but just as the Moonies. Like a lot of people have heard of the Mooney cult or the Moonies,

but the Unification Church, not as many people are familiar with, with, uh, the, the common name they give themselves. Yeah. I, I personally actually came to know them, uh, in 2012, actually right before he died, where I, uh, ended up as a kind of glorified extra on this play called love bomb. My life is a bad Mooney, uh, by this guy by the name of Andrew Ritzinger. And it was, the play was directed by uh seattle comedian kathy sorbo actually i think yogi you pointed me to this back when it happened i don't know if you remember that i don't remember this at all yeah it was this guy's story of like in the 80s how he kind of drifted into the moonies just because he was bored and um kind of tagged along with him until his family his family abducted him and forced him into a deprogramming regimen,

that actually occurred to about 400 different church members from 1973 to 1986. Wow. Pretty sure that's a side mission in Red Dead Redemption 2. Or no, it's the main story. And let's not forget the most famous Mooney, Richard Pryor's writing partner, Paul Mooney, one of the most famous Mooney cult members. I said, don't get too fond of me because white folks come in and take me. A mass wedding with no white women. Oh yeah, they're also known for mass weddings. Some of the mass weddings include, they had one at Madison Square Garden.

And they're bizarre. Like they are hundreds, if not almost thousands of people all together in their bride and groom, traditional Christian garb. So suit and white dress. And they are all getting married at the same time. And at some places, they were arranged. They never met before. But as time went on, that became more and more through the parents of the people getting married.

But originally, our man, Sun Myung Moon, would hand-choose everyone getting married for the longest time. Well, Yogi, and this is true, Jesus failed in his mission to purify mankind because he was crucified before being able to marry and have children. And so Moon is, as the new Messiah, restoring Jesus's mission on Earth and completing the task that Jesus himself was unable to complete in returning man from his fallen state. Ah, gotcha, gotcha. My apologies to the- He's restoring humankind to a state of perfection by producing sinless children and blessing couples who would produce them.

And in 1982, actually, that included 2,075 couples who were married at Madison Square Garden, where the men all wore identical blue suits. The women wore lace and satin gowns. And many of the couples that only, as you mentioned, Yogi, met weeks earlier and could only speak to each other through an interpreter. And many also had to remain separated for years after they got married, doing church work before actually being allowed to consummate their unions. And then in 2009, 10,000 couples either were married or exchanged or renewed vows before Mr. and Mrs. Moon, a university near sale. Yeah. So like most of my research this week was focused on the Washington Times, the paper.

It was founded in 1982. But kind of a running theme of that was just their entire deal is claiming they are not a Mooney cult organ. So this relates to the weddings because I just found some articles saying that basically the staff there gets extremely embarrassed every time there's a mass wedding by the Moonies because it promotes a round of press speculation about this weird cult that owns and runs the Washington Times. Just imagine being a copy editor and being like, God damn it, they're marrying people in the garden again. They're selling it out like dice clay. It's one of those things where if somebody wants you to work 24-7, marry someone, and have kids for their benefit, you want a cult.

All these various billionaires and cult leaders and religious movement speakers we've covered on our show are often very charismatic. They're often loaded with money, and they carry themselves with an air of, if you don't follow me, your life's going to suck. And it's a very, very charismatic message that they share. Okay, well, let me ask you this, Yogi. Is it a cult if its leader was crowned humanity's savior? Yes. Actually, I would say that.

Is it a cult if this person who had himself crowned humanity's savior did it in 2004 in front of members of Congress at a Capitol Hill luncheon, and the crown was presented on a pillow by Representative Danny K. Davis, an Illinois Democrat wearing white gloves. These are adults. These are adults that we're talking about right now. Adult humans carried a crown. Is it a cult if the leader at the banquet says that emperors, kings, and presidents

had declared to all heaven and earth that reverend sun myung moon is none other than humanity's savior messiah returning lord and true parent and he also said the founders of the world's great religions along with figures like marx lenin hitler and stalin had quote found strength in my teachings mended their ways and been reborn as new persons yes that sounds very much like a cult it's like what was that last one uh stalin wait did you say hitler no i said mittler that was a totally different guy beat off mittler i just want to say you know dnc if you're listening to this uh forget subbing out joe

biden for andrew cuomo let's get this danny k davis guy on the phone because i think this should be the democratic nominee 2020 yeah a bunch of a bunch of the um the people who attended were like we just thought it was a normal luncheon. We had no idea he was associated with it. But Danny K. Davis, like, doesn't really have an out like that. Like, being the one with the gloves presenting the crown. Like, then again, like, if I were a representative and I was just on my way out and wanted a good story i'd totally volunteer for that um though i don't i don't know what he went on to do let's talk about some bio guys um let's do that bio our messiah sung myung moon was born january 6 1920 in a small rural town in what is now the democratic People's Republic

of Korea. When he was 10, his family actually joined the Presbyterian Church. And when he was... Before that, his family was Confucius, before they became Presbyterian. Well, that's interesting, because the Unification Church actually combines teachings of Confucianism and Christianity and Korean folk religion. But when he was a teenager... There was an explosion at the cult factory. You got your Confucianism on my Christianity. No, you got your Christianity on my Confucianism. And the elves are like, like well turns out this is

actually the one true religion yeah when he was a teenager around the easter of 1935 and this is also true jesus appeared to him and anointed him god's choice to establish the kingdom of heaven on earth and uh with that knowledge he then went to waseda university in japan in 1941 to study electrical engineering uh which is uh got to be an interesting life path as the i guess that's that's kind of the modern carpenter um but then two years after that he returned to korea and married his first wife uh a son killed choi but not his last wife huh but not his last wife uh she was not his last wife he abandoned her in 1946 um and this is kind of scrubbed from official church doctrine and official official biographies is that he abandoned his first wife and found his first church, the Quang Ya Church in Pyongyang, which was a predecessor to the Unification Church.

But the communist authorities were not crazy about that, and they actually imprisoned him and, according to his autobiography, tortured him. And also, according to his autobiography, the day before he was going to be executed by the communists, the UN forces broke into the prison and freed all the inmates, and Sung Myung Moon was allowed to walk free. And so he says he walked 320 miles to busan which is on the southern tip of the korean peninsula and there he built a church with united states army ration boxes lived in a mountainside shack officially divorced his wife in 1952 and then uh moved to busan to um uh build out his church and it said that he had uh in his early church he had affairs with several of his disciples even even it said that in his early church he had affairs with several disciples uh even fathering a child outside of wedlock in 1954 uh so then in 1960 he married uh hak john ha when she was 17 and anointed her the true parent which i think is a way of saying hey if um if i uh nutted in your mom and your mom's

not hak ja han uh your parents your mom's not a true parent right uh and so then after that he embarked on world tours and um and in 1972 he moved to the united states to kind of build out his church and so he he started making a lot of money early on from church donations. The first kind of thing he did was he got donations from getting members of his church to paint pictures of servicemen and their families in order to sell those pictures and earn some money. And apparently that made enough money that he was able to start this company called the Tongil Group, where Tongil is Korean for unification. Yeah, you'll notice a theme with our boy Moon that he certainly uses the military of any government he's a part of to embellish and grow his net worth. Yeah, yeah.

Well, the Tongil Group, they then invested in construction, resorts, and weapons. And that became a growing part of their business to the point where in 2012, Tongal assets were said to total about $1.5 billion. Jeez. Yeah, I do just want to back up because he tells his autobiography about being tortured in this North Korean camp. And I guess this is probably what gives him his sort of lifelong animosity towards communism,

which becomes a big theme of his life throughout the 80s and until the fall of the Berlin Wall. Yeah, he's a staunch anti-communist. At the same time, he definitely has a k kinship with north korea being that he you know he was born and raised there um and he thinks that he should be uh the ruler of the reunified koreas as well as the entire world as well as the entire world as the messiah and humanity's savior and uh he had a he had a quote from his his 2009 autobiography that is best pronounced with a voice which is uh money accumulated through business is sacred money i just imagine you pick up his 2009 autobiography then you flip it over and you see blurbs on the

back from jesus and Confucius. Man, he got all the heavy hitters to blurb this thing. Quark from Deep Space Nine. So let's talk about the Unification Church. As we mentioned, they were founded in the southern port city of Busan in 1954, and within a year, about 30 church centers sprung up their beliefs are a combination of christianity confucianism uh korean folk religion and anti-communism um the ideas were largely laid out in this book called the divine principle which was uh written largely by one of his disciples based on his notes like he he's stated as the main author, but it's mostly like, you know, someone who worked for him, uh, just took a bunch of things that he scribbled on pieces of paper and told him

in interviews and actually wrote a book, uh, detailing it. Um, the main ideas are that God's purpose is in creating human beings. Uh, then there was the fall of man and the restoration, which is to restore humanity to its true unfulfilled state. Members of the church recognize Moon's messianic status, agree to contribute to the payment of personal indemnity for human sinfulness. And one interesting way that he's used that is that he's kind of tapped into Japanese guilt for their crimes towards Korea during World War II, saying that donations to the Unification Church count as—can kind of cleanse you of the sins of Japan during World War II. So he made some money doing that. He also, in Japan, had some sort of scam going where he reinvented church indemnities,

where he was sending his salesmen around to Japanese widows and saying that, if you give us money, your husband will not burn in hell. And apparently he got in a bit of trouble in Japan for doing that. But something we should just mention as well. It's not false advertising, though. Something we should just mention as well is Christianity in South Korea became very prominent, particularly after the liberation from Japan and then the Korean War, where, you know, Christianity and the Catholic Church and various Christian churches have a big foothold in South Korea, but he was actually kind of able to get in on this as well,

because the Unification Church is, you know, a cult, but it preaches, you know, some mixture of Jesus and Confucius. So it kind of appears to be a Christian sect and recruited from the similar or the same pool after the war. There's a The Moonies Untitled documentary on YouTube, and it describes the conditions that cult members were facing at the Moononey's compounds all around the world. And from what they describe, the members are saying that every minute of your day was planned. So from 6 a.m. to 1 at night, you would have every minute you're doing something. They would go into ERs and find people to take. And one gentleman, they would go into hospitals

and find people that were needing help and shelter. And they found this one guy who said that he became just entranced with what they were teaching after eating a meal. And he was having a really spiritual experience, and he thought maybe they had poisoned the food potentially. But through a combination of excessive work, charisma-based tactics of, of no we're all your friends come on over and potentially according to this this untitled documentary on youtube they may

have been uh poisoning their members to get them to become the slave army you need to amass a billion dollars well actually this is the that's kind of interesting because it reminds me of so when i did that play um it was it was the first run so the the guy who wrote andrew ritzenger is like part of the play and kind of narrating it and my role was to play a mooney and he said that what we would do is uh the thing that we did was we would give people love bombs which was the name of the play and what that was was you would basically we what we would do is we would give people love bombs, which was the name of the play. And what that was, was you would basically, what we would do is we would walk through the audience and lock eyes with people and then just say, like, kind of extravagant compliments, like,

you are the most beautiful person to be touched by God. You know, things like that. Right, right. And just to kind of emulate, you know, what the Moonies were doing when he was involved with that. And so I think that's like a lot of it is just like this kind of intensity that the Moonies would project on people to basically make them feel like they belonged. Yeah, it's programming.

It's I need you to think that you need my adoration to become the best version of yourself i mean love bomb is what sean called his sex life so um yeah and a lot a lot of the work that the moonies did was uh they would sell just flowers and candles on the streets and then that was all they were all basically doing free work for sun young moon and the church to build up its profits and build up its money because this was all meant to build up the message of the church and it claimed in um that the church has claimed that it had 3 million members worldwide. Estimates put that closer to maybe 500,000 at its peak in the 70s. Oh, really?

Yeah, yeah. I read somewhere it was between 500,000 and a million, but they think it's only about 500,000 people, huh? Yeah, it looks like it. I mean, it's really hard to it could have been as many as a million it could be also you know they could have counted people like um the guy who did the play uh ritzinger who sure didn't really believe but was just kind of tagging along to see what would happen but man that's so fucking wild that if you could control 500 000 to a million people you can amass this amount of net

worth and fucking have people in congress give you crowns and shit like i'm not saying i'm going to start a cult or nothing but like that is fucking insane because theoretically in my head you it's like oh you need like you know 40 to 50 million people to do something like this like no you need fucking 500 000 to 100 million people selling candles that's fucking insane yeah they have uh 500 000 to a million members and then another 500 000 who won't answer their cell phones anymore i i mean it's it's crazy that people would do this and um with that little money but if you want to go to patreon.com slash grubstakers. Look, we know 40% of you can't make rent next month,

but we love you. We're giving you a love bomb of content right now. You have the power to move the mountains that can get us to pay rent. And quoting from encyclopedia.com, the philosophy and religion section on Moon here, he talks about members were required to remain celibate for a minimum of three years and often longer after joining the movement members openly spoke of problems coping with sexual desires

and quenching them through a combination of frequent prayer prayers and cold showers thus marriage became the most important part of a unification life so yeah you can't fuck for three years if not longer and then the guy goes hey you got to marry this person that you can fuck and you'll be like i don't care who this person is i'm trying to get my nut on yeah but in fairness like nobody has been more excited to go to madison square garden than his followers who haven't had sex for three straight years another aspect of life in the moonies is that um people were forced to sever ties with their families which explains a lot of the uh forced deprogramming. Because parents were in the Moonies' lore, they were to become exchange for the true parents of Moon and Han.

Right. Very similar to Scientology, where you're discommunicated if you choose to go against the Church's wishes, and you're signing a billion-year contract with the religion in Scientology. If you haven't seen the Leah Ruremini Scientology show on A&E, go check that shit out, because that shit is wild. The distinction, though, is that Scientology is a cult, and the Unification Church, if I may quote, the Unification Church is actually run by a man who has said, and I quote, God is living in me and I am the incarnation of himself.

The whole world is my hand and I will conquer and subjugate the world. And if you think that that quote comes from someone who is a heretic, then another quote is i don't blame those people who call us heretics we are indeed heretics in their eyes because the concept of our way of life is revolutionary we are going to liberate god so um we're we're not supposed to like the subjects of our episodes you know especially not if they're're pedophile cult leaders. But on some level, you do have to respect making members of Congress put a crown on your head while wearing white gloves, as opposed to like these Jeff Bezos people who have all these platitudes about democracy and how it dies in darkness and how we trust our representatives that they own. Like,

at least this guy is like, yes, I own you. Put a crown on my head in public. There's no evidence that he's a pedophile other than the fact that he groomed his wife from the age of 14 and separated her from her family before marrying him. I was going to say, like, if you can go to be a Korean and go to study in Japanese university at the height of imperial fascist Japan and its attitudes towards Koreans as subhumans, if you can come through that experience, perhaps you will think that you are some sort of demigod who is destined to rule the world. Yeah, and if you survived a North Korean prison camp, probably. probably um so going over a brief uh list of church assets um they've the church has grown to own a number of small companies um uh their american assets are worth about 1.5 billion

this includes the washington times which we'll talk about in a minute as well as the new yorker hotel which is probably worth a lot less than it was when that was reported um and then also the manhattan center soon to be the new yorker coronavirus hospital yeah um the uh he's got some other commercial interests which include commercial fishing jewelry fur products construction and real estate and then in korea he has uh 13 businesses in south korea worth about 1.6 billion um that range from construction hospitals schools ski resorts newspapers auto parts pharmaceuticals beverages and uh wants a professional soccer team uh our boy moon is also fairly active in politics he immediately urged that uh nixon be forgiven for his role in watergate

he uh held god loves richard nixon rallies in Yankee Stadium, Madison Square Garden, and the National Mall. And then according to a House subcommittee report in the 70s, Moon worked with the Korean Central Intelligence Agency to push a movement against Nixon's impeachment. Apparently, the KCIA proposed massive Capitol Hill demonstrations held by Moon's followers just before the House Judiciary Committee recommended Nixon's impeachment. And Moon denied any connection with the South Korean government, stating that he is an agent of God and not of any temporal regime, which, by the way, is true. So he has also been involved in diplomacy. He met with Gorbachev as well as Kim Il-sung. When he met him, he said, we were like brothers who are meeting for the first time after a long separation. And I guess it's worth noting that Kim Il-sung has also used messianic imagery to build his cult of personality. Yeah. kim il-sung has also used uh messianic imagery to build his cult of personality yeah um but we had a we had a brotherly quarrel when he uh tortured me in that prison camp in the 50s but you know

family you squashed that beef yeah he i mean they definitely squashed that beef because he went on on to um uh open the only joint venture with the uh dprk government which was the uh pyonghwa motors which is also the only joint venture to put up billboards in pyongyang it's a it's a car company in north korea that even managed to make a profit in 2009 and uh for moon's 80th birthday kim jong-il sent him a greeting card with an unspecified amount of wild ginseng he which i could just imagine like these forced laborers in north kore Korea sent out to pick the only wild ginseng, like the only edible food in North Korea in the 90s, just to send to Sun Yung Moon as a birthday present. Well, it's an interesting thing with the Washington Times,

and again, we'll get more into this in a minute, but it's really like projecting his influence in Washington by saying, I have this paper that's like really important for the conservative movement, allowed him to build his way into North Korea, where the Washington Times publishes the only Western newspaper interview with Kim Il-sung in 1992. And it's interesting where, you know, essentially his executive editor, a guy named Wesley Pruden, is like a typical, you know, reactionary anti-immigrant conservative. He's not the editor anymore, but he was at the time. And he was basically sidelined where Moon came in and was like, we're going to do the interview my way. It's complete softball questions. And then, you know, it kind of goes on from there where he's showing Kim Il-sung that I have this paper. I have the ear of, you know, the Republicans in Washington, so you can do business with me. And they've also gotten some other kind of shady arms deal like transactions as well. We'll talk about in a minute.

Yeah. Oh, he was also able to build the Potonggang Hotel, which is one of the nicest hotels in the country that's open to foreign visitors. And he was able to build a unification church in north korea um he also acted as an emissary to north korea for uh the second bush administration um he he he was considered one of the bush administration's uh secret links to north korea this is from a daily beast article with that title um one of the uh chairman of the washington times douglas dongmoon ju uh it's j-o-o uh he he met with dprk officials um and kim jong-il as well as top level american national security officials uh discussing north kore Korea's military developments, leading personalities, government trends, and diplomacy. And it was generally one of the track two, quote, envoys that the Bush administration used to talk to Kim Jong-il.

I think now we could probably talk about the washington times and and all their stuff yeah well so the washington times is uh very interesting to me uh again he founds it in 1982 um it's it's kind of funny where he founds it to be you know a conservative answer to the washington post so there's a lot of animosity between the Washington Post and the Washington Times because, you know, before the Times, it was just the Washington Post in terms of daily Washington, D.C. newspapers. And so, of course, it's just kind of funny reading, like there's this piece in the Washington Post in 2002 by Frank Arends, and it's writing about how in 2002, the 20-year anniversary of the Washington Times, the Reverend Moon gives a speech at the 20th anniversary celebration. And just quoting from

the paper, he gave an hour-long evangelical sermon in Korean, saying he established the newspaper, quote, in response to heaven's direction. During the sermon, he set the course for the Times' next 10 years, quote, the Washington Times is responsible to let the American people know about God, unquote. He added, the Washington Times will become the instrument in spreading the truth about God to the world. And apparently many Washington Times staffers began to leave throughout his speech, because as we mentioned, a big part of the Washington Times staffers began to leave throughout his speech because, as we mentioned, a big part of the Washington Times is playing down that they are acting at the direction of the Mooney cult and claiming they have total editorial independence and such. But just from

the same Washington Times piece, we get the same estimate that in the 20 years between 1982 and 2002, he spent at least $1.7 billion dumping into the Washington Times because this thing doesn't make any money. That's right. They claimed one profitable month, I think, in 2015. But other than that, they've been in the red $ you know, 40 or 50 million, however many dollars every month. So it is just something where he made a small fortune, and then he used that to establish this newspaper in 1982, which kind of launders his reputation, but also buys him influence within the conservative movement. And then just an example of that is in 1997, another one of their anniversaries, Ronald Reagan sent a message. And, you know, I don't know if he was just flattering them, but he claimed that when he was president,

he read the Washington Times every day. And Ronald Reagan said, quote, the American, in 1997, Ronald Reagan said, quote, the American people know the truth. You, my friends at the Washington Times, have told it to them. It wasn't always the popular thing to do, but you were a loud and powerful voice. Like me, you arrived in Washington at the beginning of the most momentous decade of the century. Together, we rolled up our sleeves and got to work. And oh, yes, we won the Cold War. What year did he say this again? 1997.

Reagan is saying that the Washington Times and him won the Cold War together. And part of how they did that was funding the mass murdering Contras in Nicaragua. Also, I'm pretty sure he probably couldn't read in 1997. But, you know, so it's very interesting to me where before the Berlin Wall came down, the Washington Times very much reflected the Mooney line and that it was like rabidly anti-communist but then since that time it's been you know uh it's more just been he wants to go where the grassroots of the conservative movement is so that he can use that to peddle influence in other areas like it'll be you know a typical anti-immigrant um paper but it will you know and it'll be belligerent and support the george w bush foreign policy but it'll kind of carve out an exception for North Korea, where they have like specific business interests in North Korea, where it goes a little softer than

the mainstream neoconservative line, or at least it did throughout the Bush administration. But it's also peddled, you know, global warming denial, coronavirus denial. It published two articles in, I believe, January of this year, quoting an unnamed Israeli intelligence agent who said that coronavirus was a weapon, a bioweapon developed by the Chinese government. So, you know, it's this kind of typical conspiracy rag. It's questioned secondhand smoking, said that the hole in the ozone was made up by scientists, these sorts of things. Did they also fund Penn & Teller's bullshit? Because I'm pretty sure several of those lines were taken in that show.

And so one other thing to note about The Washington Times, in 2013 it worked with Herring Networks to create the conservative cable news channel One America News, which is pretty relevant for the Trump presidency, because whenever he thinks Fox News is biased against him, he'll cite, you know, One American News. It's an even more in-the-tank conservative news network. So, you know, the Washington Times and its affiliates continue to have influence in the Trump administration, because, you know, they have the, the moons have this small sliver of issues they really care about. And then the rest of them, they just kind of go where,

if we parrot this line, we will have power within the conservative movement broadly. In the early 80s, things kind of took a turn for the worse for Man Moon. He, along with his accusations of working for the KCIA, he also faced accusations of influence buying, including allegations that he was involved in efforts by the South Korean government to bribe members of Congress to support President Park Chung-hee. And then in 1981, he was named in a 12-count federal indictment, accused of failing to report $150,000 in income from 1973 to 1975,

which was the interest from $1.6 million, which had been deposited in New York bank accounts in his own name. So he's on his way to becoming a billionaire, and he ends up spending 18 months in prison in Connecticut, over $150,000 of tax evasion. His quote on this was, I would not be standing here today if my skin were white and my religion were Presbyterian. I'm here today only because my skin is yellow and my religion is unification church. And. Oh, he also called it a government conspiracy to force him out of the country. And then he basically he had kind of a decline in his in his financial investments and stagnant growth in the church membership.

And in the 90s, he finally abandoned America and went back to Korea. He branded America as a repository of immorality, quote, Satan's harvest, and repositioned his movement as a crusade for moral values. He said the country persecuted him and he also made statements attacking homosexuals and american women and then uh he came he came back to get his crown yeah he came back to get his crown um he like he still he still dabbled in america like he had a he has a compound or had a compound in irving new york uh which was described by his son's ex-wife as having a ballroom uh two dining rooms one with

a pond and waterfall a bowling alley upstairs and a kitchen with six pizza ovens six pizza ovens. Six ovens? Why do you need six? You gotta cook the pizzas so they don't fucking narc on you. So, Yogi, you had some stuff about his family then. Yeah, I want to mention a few of the sources that I used for this episode. First one being

tragedyofthesix Marys.com. This is a book that was written by a gentleman named Pak Chung-hwa. He was born in 1913. He was a member of the North Korean Army, and he has an account on our boy Moon and everything about him, including the fact that in the early days, he would sleep with the women that were joining his church as like a ritual blood cleansing thing.

So it was like, if you want to be a part of our church, I got to fuck you. So then you guys are then clean, and then the kids you have will be okay to be in a part of our church. So the- Great choice of words blood cleansing that is that is what that's how he describes it i mean this this book is translated from japanese into english but yeah uh there are photos with him during the pike areum which is the origin

basically and the first 36 wives on this website i you i use that as well as the YouTube channel Slave Obeys has the PBS documentary on the moon resurrection where I quote some of these stuff. Basically, a few of the members of the Unification Church left because they saw that the family themselves that was running

the entire organization were not following the rules of being in the church, namely being don't do cocaine, don't be drunk, all those type of things. But Jesus came in a vision and he said it's okay if you do blow. One of the sons of moons

Jesus said it's okay if you do it off a hooker. Boy, you guys are going to hate these jokes when I finish my sentence here. One of the first ones, One of the wives of his sons wrote an account on her marriage where her husband, who was cocaine addicted and abusive, beat her up while she was pregnant. And from the Frontline documentary,

we have a quote of her saying her account right here. But worse than the affairs, she says, the reverend's eldest son would be here one awful night she told us he pummeled her while she was pregnant with their fifth child he was doing his cooking the show august my better judgment i went and said i'd have to talk to you i said uh... isis cannot live like this.

And I took his cocaine, and I tried to flush it down the toilet. And that's when he started hunting. And I did get black eyes, and I got bloody nose. And he, but the big fear was that he's going to kill the baby. That you were carrying. I was carrying.

I was seven months pregnant. I was pretty big. And he kept saying, I'm going to kill the baby. I'm going to kill the baby. And that's the worst fear I had. He might punch and then something would happen. And then more is written on In the Shadow of the Moons, My Life in the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Family. And people in the reviews on Amazon talk about how they were a part of Unification Church and how because of this, like a book like this, they realize how poisonous the cult was. Now, for some moderately juicy dirt, he does have a daughter named Solbi, and she is a

Korean K-pop singer, and she's been in the Korean TMZ with Tex Chains to BTS, and like all billionaires, they've got to have some sort of fail child that chooses to go into artistic endeavors instead of being somebody who's a decent person. That's also like one form of slavery into another. Oh, yeah. Oh, certainly. Now, the reason I'm mentioning this is because Colby, she grew up like a chubby kid. And so she's gotten plastic surgery to become a K-pop singer and so on and so forth. But as of this article's writing from 2015,

she had a sex tape revealed. And although my wife was really mad at my research this week, in it, there are screenshots where she's eating butt. So I don't know about Moon, but Sol B, the granddaughter, does eat butt, ladies and gentlemen. Ladies and gentlemen, we got him. Yeah, if you think the cult conditions are abusive in the Unification Church, just wait until you read about K-pop.

There was a disagreement. And Yogi, did you have the source on that picture? I do have that source on that picture. I can DM it to you as soon as you want. Are you sure she got uh plastic surgery to become a k-pop star and not just to become any citizen of south korea i it's a good question uh i put out the research uh that i just mentioned in our slack andy so if you want to look at that feel free um our slack is now compromised but you know the reality is is that i'll start with the discord if you you still have to pay to go to the discord

uh the moon family is a sex occult uh purification machine and because of that they have you know griffed their way to billions of dollars and convinced the conservative right wing of america that they're the conservative right wing of korea and the rest of the unification church will follow the way of the will of god and it's fucking terrifying because this motherfucker just shows up out of nowhere and it's just like fuck presbyterians chirps nonsense i can do this better and then just starts and you know similar to tiger king a guy just buying tigers and then owning a zoo how the fuck is this shit happening it in his defense it's not that hard to do things better than presbyterianism it's a low bar spoken like a true wasp buzz buzz i just want to back up so some of the best like i mentioned earlier some of the best investigative

journalism of the mooney cult is done by the washington post because they have this vicious animosity towards the washington times and just that was Washington Post piece that I quoted from, several paragraphs of it are devoted to dick measuring about who has bigger circulation. Like they spend several paragraphs going through how the Washington Times like has far fewer subscribers than the Washington Post does. And they do like exhaustive audits to they spend like three paragraphs on this. I just found it funny. That's like when Yahoo was shitting on Groupon after Groupon decided that getting bought out by Yahoo was beneath them. But one other thing I wanted to mention is just this great piece in American Prospect by John Gorenfeld in 2005. And it just goes through the North Korea connection a fair bit that I could quote a couple paragraphs from. But basically, just an American prospect investigation revealed that throughout the 1990s, as Western observers predicted at the Kim dynasty that rules North Korea would collapse for lack of hard currency, The Moon Organization invested tens of millions of dollars, which apparently included payments before U.S. sanctions eased in 1991, or sorry, 1999.

They also did that with the University of Bridgeport, Connecticut. Interesting. There was apparently, just quoting from the same piece, Moon's connections with the Kim regime have long been a matter of active concern for the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, the DIA. So this American prospect piece gets these declassified under Freedom of Information Act DIA cables, which, again, kind of relitigate these accusations that he's funneling tens of millions of dollars to this rogue state. And, you know, it goes through, there's an organization called the International Federation for World Peace, which the Moonies run.

And it was headquartered at the same building as the Washington Times. So, you know, there's very clearly a connection there. And I guess we did forget to mention earlier that apparently Strom Thurmond, the South Carolina segregationist senator, was instrumental in helping Moon. Oh, Biden's friend. Yeah, he was instrumental in helping Moon enter the United States in 1971. But what I wanted to mention here is two things. One is that his number two, Moon's number two, is a South Korean named Colonel Bo-hee Park, is kind of like his number two things. One is that his number two, Moon's number two is a South Korean named Colonel Bo-hee Park, is kind of like his number two man. And apparently he remained loyal to him even after

in 1987, he received a beating so severe it left him with permanent brain damage. And the story of this is kind of odd where apparently Moon's second child his second son die it was a guy named hyung jin moon he dies in new york state in an automobile accident in 1984 um at the age of 17 and then a zimbabwean member of the unification church meets with moon and convinces him that he is or he has the spirit of his deceased son within him. And just according to just the Wikipedia article, they called him Black Hyeong-jin. Might as well be black.

The Zimbabwean who claims that he has the spirit of his son within him. The answer to that, I guess, is that he is black. But apparently after he manages to meet with moon and convince him that he is the re his reincarnated son and then moon authorized him to travel the world preaching and hearing the confessions of unification church members who had gone astray and then it was him in 1987 who uh beat his uh second in command so badly that he was hospitalized for a week in georgetown hospital and then uh had you know he underwent surgery in south korea to repair a blood vessel in his skull uh and suffered permanent brain damage but remained loyal to the end uh so that's a very odd story about how this place operates.

Another just kind of odd story, and we can cut this if it doesn't go anywhere, but I mentioned the University of Bridgeport, Connecticut. They actually rescued them from bankruptcy by an organization with ties to Moon. And this is pretty common for Unification Church stuff is that it's not often the church itself that throws all this money around to buy influence it's it's a bunch of subsidiaries with ties to the church um but they gave the university of richport connecticut 110 million in subsidies over a decade uh moon received an honorary degree from them and uh the church denies influencing the schools but students are lured into the church with the promise of scholarships um the church also opened a boarding school on campus for members children and the church allegedly used the university to import money in the form of tuition as well as followers uh in the form of many foreign students

who had attended there guys i got bad news apparently solby's fake sex tape was a fake sex tape so now we don't know whether she eats butt or not but we do know that a solby look-alike did eat butt i'm still gonna need that link i can't believe they used plastic surgery and CGI. What are you going to do? What are you going to do? The individuals behind Sobe's fake sex tape were arrested. Those brought into custody stated that they had spread the 30-minute video for fun.

But from the same American prospect piece, the DIA cables say that Moon pledged, quote unquote, tens of millions of dollars into an overseas account as a down payment for business ventures within North Korea. A Japanese press account said he pledged $350 million. So basically he meets Moon in like in like 91 92 and then the washington times does this interview in 92 and then he puts probably 350 million dollars into an account as a down payment for him and um again from this same article there's a there's this story in 1994 uh four men who had married into moon's true family were uh possibly operating

on his behalf when in 1994 they emerged as the agents behind a controversial sale of decrepit russian submarines to north korea supposedly as a scrap metal and then uh you know they claim there's no real link but they were the principles of tion trading, T-O-E-N. And then one of Tion Trading's directors was an accounting director for the church's quote-unquote spiritual sales campaign, which was the campaign we mentioned earlier where his agents were going and approaching Japanese widows and saying that they could pay him astronomical sums to, quote unquote, free their deceased husbands from hell. That's right. Yeah.

And so it is just interesting where, you know, he's probably behind this submarine deal, which also likely helped North Korea advance its missiles and weapons technology, just having access to these old Russian submarines, while at the same time, you know, just kind of using this newspaper to parrot Republican Party talking points and get his message across, well, you know, the neoconservatives look the other way at this because he's an influential person within Washington. Yeah, what are the bad things he did?

The boy loves to fuck. He loves to control people's minds. He loves to go to giant rooms full of people dressed like brides and grooms and tell them that he's blessing them. The man sounds like a saint. Honestly, you know, he's definitely touched by God

because in 2008 he survived a helicopter crash. Where which, you know, I'm not going to make a parallel, but yeah, there were actually no fatalities in the crash, but Moon and 15 others were injured. Well, with that, I will say that in 99, his 21-year-old son was found committing suicide jumping off of a hotel in Reno, you know, where people commit suicides when they're rich and kids of dictator-like people off the roof of hotels in Reno. That commonplace where the kids of billionaires just deemed that life is not good enough. He was almost stopped, but then the cast members of the state

just fumbled it. And yeah, like one last thing I wanted to mention here was there's this Max Blumenthal article in The Nation from 2006, and it goes into the Washington Times, the editorial board linked to white supremacists, basically. The editor until 2008 was Wesley Pruden, we mentioned earlier, and his subordinate was a guy named Francis Combs. And this article goes through a bunch of different allegations.

We don't have time to get into all of them, but just a couple of the the things or a couple of the relevant details in 2001 prudent issued an edict that uh reporters stopped using the term illegal immigrant and instead use illegal alien uh for all things and uh apparently according to this piece, Pruden kind of checked out of the office throughout the 2000s into the mid to late 2000s and left his number two Combs in charge. And Combs, according to a staffer, will literally scan websites and look for anything that's anti-Hispanic, that's immigrant bashing, and he will order the editors to go with it. According to another former staffer, George Archibald, he said that when he showed Combs a photo of his nephew's African-American girlfriend, Combs went off like a rocket about interracial marriage and how terrible it was. He actually

used the phrase, the N-wordification of America. He said, not in my lifetime. If my daughter went out with a black, I would cut her throat. He apparently... The first part of that sounded cool the second part sounded scary uh yeah so apparently combs another staffer says that he used racial slurs and including spic and towelhead inside the times uh you know he sent reporters out to

jared taylor's american renaissance conference to do fawning profiles. He hired, as his national assistant editor, a guy named Robert Stacey McCain, who belonged to the League of the South, a neo-Confederate hate group. You know, he's apparently described as, quote unquote, a complete animalistic racist by another former staffer of the Washington Times, which is a conservative paper. So it's not like these are liberals or the SPLC calling them this. This is, you know, actual dyed-in-the-wool Republican conservatives. So it's just this, like, really, you know, radical right-wing organization of a newspaper, and it takes that kind of anti-immigrant, anti-minority editorial line.

And the reason, at least according to this piece, that they get away with it is we mentioned earlier, Douglas D.M. Zhu, the then president of the Washington Times, who had, you know, interjected himself into US negotiations with North Korea. He kind of lets them get away with this basically, because Wesley Pruden, the again, the editor who's allowing all this, had connections to the Bush administration, or he would at least say, like, again, the editor who's allowing all this, had connections to the Bush administration, or he would at least say, like, I'm the guy who can get George W. Bush on the phone, you know, make that claim. So the president of the Washington Times was looking the other way because he only cared about the North Korean diplomacy aspect, and they just

kind of let them do their own thing beyond that. And this went to the point where in 2004, Combs was accused of sexual harassment by a subordinate, basically forcibly trying to kiss her after previously inviting her up to a nightcap, and then later retaliating against her. They waited until the—she apparently complained to the Times' human resource department. The paper's lawyer didn't do anything. They waited until the statute of limitation had expired, and then they fired her without explanation. And apparently this was reported to the President Joe, Douglas Preston Moon, the Reverend Moon's son, quote, I don't fucking care, unquote, about this sexual harassment allegation. So it is just something where they, and then since that time, Preston Moon, you know, managed to kind of reshuffle the deck of the editorship and reassert his control over it. But at least for a time, the paper was being run in a direction where they don't really

care what they're doing with it as long as it's buying them influence within the broader conservative movement. It sounds to me like you're trying to smear the successor of Jesus Christ, humanity's savior and Lord God on earth. Yeah, Sean, I thought you loved religion. Yeah, that's true. And, you know, you could spend all day going through the Washington Times and how they, you know, distorted coverage of, say, the Clarence Thomas sexual harassment accusations, which one reporter resigned over, having her work chopped up over that.

But you could spend a million hours on all this. But it's all just quite, I guess, fascinating and disturbing what people are willing to overlook in the people who are the power brokers behind the scenes of Washington. And with that, this has been Grub Snickers. I'm Yogi Poliwal. I'm Andy Palmer. I'm Shampi McCarthy thanks for listening I also want to thank before we head out here Violet Vibration on Twitter

where the L is the number one for suggesting Sung Myung Moon and getting him on our radar as an actual billionaire so thank you Violet Vibration And getting him on our radar as an actual billionaire. So thank you, Violet Vibration. Yeah, you're not going to be invited to Madison Square Garden anytime soon, buddy.

All right. Everyone turn your shit off. Barbershop is a smart comedy about a day in the life of a black barbershop on the south side of Chicago. It is owned by Ice Cube and inhabited by a colorful cast of characters who bicker with one another in various hilarious ways. Recently, a sequel was made. You know it's just a front. They sell drugs at the barbershops. Uh... The Last Samurai centers around Tom Cruise, a Civil War veteran who goes to Japan and teaches the Emperor's troops how to fight.

Mr. Mooney? No, no. Another movie that I was offended by. I mean, Hollywood is crazy. The Last Samurai starring Tom Cruise? He's the last samurai? Give me a break. That movie was offensive.

I mean, Hollywood is crazy. At first they had The Mexican with Brad Pitt, and now they've got The Last Samurai with Tom Cruise. Well, I've written the film. Maybe they'll produce my film. The Last Nigga on Earth starring Tom Hanks. How about that?