It Could Happen Here - CZM Book Club Presents: The Evolution of an Agitator, by Lizzie M. Holmes

Episode Date: July 6, 2025

Margaret reads you a story about the endless quest to find the roots of inequality. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. I'm Robert Evans and on my show Behind the Bastards this week, we have one of our worst subjects ever, David Byrd, founder of the Children of God cult, who we'll be talking about with special guest Ed Helms. He's not just like a weird religious cult leader. He was like fusing a bunch of hippie ideology in with this kind of like evangelical Christianity, Pentecostal preaching in the mid-century is a very weird guy. But yeah, I'll just get into it. Like nothing you just said makes sense. That doesn't say. But that's the beauty of cults.

Listen to Behind the Bastards on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Open AI is a financial abomination, a thing that should not be, an aberration, a symbol podcasts. with the greatest minds in the industry about all the other ways the rich and powerful are ruining the computer. Listen to better offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, wherever you happen to get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops. They get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. This is Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated.

I get right back there and it's bad. Listen to Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebene, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free. I'm Ebene and every Tuesday I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that will challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you. Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network. Tune in on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Cool Zone Media Book club, book club, book club, book club. Hello and welcome to the Cool Zone Media Book Club. The only book club where you don't have to do the reading because I do it for you. My name is Margaret Killjoy, and I read you stories every week. And also, big things are coming to Cool Zone Media Book Club. Big things that I can't tell you about yet, but it's going to be exciting.

I believe it in my heart. Anyway, this week I am bringing you more 19th century, well actually early 20th century in this case, anarchist fiction, because I am on a kick and I'm enjoying kind of looking at all the different ways that people did political fiction over the course of the years, and largely what I'm finding is that people wrote really bluntly about radical ideas.

And I don't know, I find the way that fiction as a form slowly shifts over the centuries to be fascinating. That said, today's story, it's very bluntly political, but it's still weirdly more nuanced than some other stories that I've read you. And it's by an early anarchist feminist named Lizzie M. Holmes. She's a second generation, like, feminist free love radical. She was born in 1850, making her one of the first second generation radicals that I've ever read about. But her mom was a free love advocate and she grew up partly in a free love commune and

her mother wrote for the magazine The Free Love, and I believe anarchist books, second guessing myself off the top of my head, newspaper called Lucifer the lightbringer, which is a name that goes hard for a 19th century newspaper Lucifer the lightbringer. That's what her mom wrote for Lizzie herself grew up to become One of the more important labor organizers in Chicago. She started off as one of the only women in the Knights of Labor, which was a more liberal organization

despite having a name that goes hard. And then later she met a woman that I talk about all the time, Lucy Parsons, who was born into slavery and became a prominent socialist and anarchist and a labor organizer in Chicago. And so she meets Lucy and Lucy's like, yeah, but check out anarchy and check out socialism. And Lizzie's like, yep, that sounds good to me.

Sign me up. And so she started working for a newspaper called The Alarm in Chicago, which the editor was Lucy Parsons' husband, Albert Parsons, who you might remember as one of the people who was hanged by the US government, literally just for being an anarchist. He was hanged in 1887. And so Lizzie's boss got hanged and Lizzie herself and her good friend Lucy Parsons spent a while in jail as a result of all this stuff. But she went on to live her life and she wrote a lot of fiction and other stuff over the years. And eventually she married this other anarchist guy and they moved to the southwest and sort of got to

live happily ever after in a way, kind of disappearing from public life in 1908, but not before in 1905, I think. She wrote this story called The Evolution of an Agitator. Some years ago, a young minister of the gospel was given charge of a good-sized church in the southwestern part of Chicago. He had shown such marked ability, such eagerness and enthusiasm in the care of a small-village pastorate that his superiors thought he must have a larger field on which to expend his power, and resolved to promote him. So they placed him over this church situated in one of the most populous districts in the

city, where people were nearly all poor. If plenty of work was promotion, Yonge de Wilt Stillman was certainly promoted. The neighborhood consisted of the so-called lower grade of workmen. They were indeed lower in point of pay, such as railroad grade hands, sewer diggers, stone breakers, and the cheaper sort of hucksters and peddlers, with a large circle of hangers on, men who had no trade or regular occupation, but did what they could find to do, honest or otherwise. Such a neighborhood promised plenty of work for an energetic and devoted disciple of the

Lord. His first great aspiration was for the saving of souls. To win souls from the sins of the world and have them sanctified for heaven, seemed to him the greatest and holiest work he could engage in. And from the day he was ordained, he sat in his study or paced the floor, day after day, searching for burning thoughts and burning words in which to express them. And here he renewed his efforts. He studied, he racked his brains, he wrestled with the

Lord for strength and wisdom to present in vivid form the truths of the gospel. And for three successive Sundays he gave the brilliant results of his travail to the small congregation of respectable, well-to-do people who were scattered over the body of his comfortable church that for all looked very big and empty. He was well-liked and well-praised as a bright and promising minister, but he was not satisfied. He felt that people he talked to did not need his passionate devotion of soul. He wanted to reach the really wicked, the sinful, the wretched, the degraded. He felt that he had a message for them, and if they would not come to him, then he must

go to them. He gave the subject a great deal of prayer and thought, and finally began to visit the most crowded, the poorest looking places in his district. It embarrassed him at first to intrude into these wretched homes with no errand which he could explain in the first few moments of greeting, the inmates gaped at him in wonder, as though expecting him to state his business and get out. But he was too thoroughly and earnest to be long at a loss. Gradually he began to find out what to say to them, how to get in touch with them, how

to encourage them to look upon him as their friend. They were a strange new people to him, a newly discovered race as it were, and he had their language to learn as well as to teach them his. And slowly, slowly, they began to talk to him, to let him into the tragic secret of their lives, their poverty, their ignorance, their helplessness

and the vortex conditions which surrounded and overwhelmed them and which they could not understand. It was like receiving new revelations every day, of a new world, of new sensations, new experiences, new conditions, things he had never dreamed of before. In the face of that, he learned, it seemed impotent to ask them why they did not come to church. How would they be received by them why they did not come to church. How would they be received by his congregation were they to come into church in their rags

as many of them must if they came at all? The railroad men worked on Sunday when they worked at all, for corporations do not lay off men for Sabbath. Factory women worked all day Sundays for themselves, or they could never be neat and whole. And many were too wretched and hungry to sit and listen to a sermon throughout the whole forenoon. He was literally appalled, almost paralyzed at the poverty he found, the universal, dragging, haunting poverty. He had never dreamed of such things. He had supposed, in a vague sort of way, that when people were overtaken by extreme poverty,

it was due to some unusual misfortune, or their own carelessness or shiftlessness, or perhaps to drunkenness and evil habits. For surely, he had thought, in this land of plenty, no one need remain in a condition of squalor if he tries to get out. But he had seen enough with his own eyes. He had seen strong men, able and eager to work, begging for a chance day after day in vain, growing more gaunt, more haggard, more desperate and less able to work as each one passed.

He had seen frail women with strained, emaciated faces, fighting the fierce specters of hunger for their little ones with a puny needle or washboard, almost in vain for the specters gnawed and snapped at their bodies and glared in at their windows at night despite their efforts. He had seen little children clawing over a slop barrel, searching for something that might be eaten. He had seen men and women sink down in their harness and die, with overwork and too little nourishment. He had not the face to go to such people and ask them to prepare for a future life. What chance had they in this one? It cannot be possible there was a future of torment for people

whose whole existence was a struggle against the sufferings of want. God was good. He believed that yet. And you know what else is good? Everything that advertises on this show, it's always good. No, I can't tell you that. It's really a crapshoot. Who knows? Who knows what's advertised? You'll find out. Or you won't. You'll press the skip button, or you'll have cooler zone media, in which case you just hear me cutting to ads and then no ads. But here are the ads if you have them. I'm Robert Evans and on my podcast Behind the Bastards,

we talk about the worst people in all of history. We've discussed a lot of horrible monsters in our time, but this week we have one of the very worst we'll ever talk about, David Berg, founder of a cult called the Children of God. We'll talk about all of his horrible crimes with special guest Ed Helms. He's not just like a weird religious cult leader. He was like fusing a bunch of hippie ideology in with this kind of like evangelical Christianity, Pentecostal preaching in the mid-century. He's a very weird guy. But yeah, I'll just get into it.

Like nothing you just said makes sense. That doesn't say. Right. But that's the beauty of cults. Listen to Behind the Bastards on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebene, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free.

I'm Ebene, and every Tuesday, I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that will challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you. On Pretty Private, we'll explore the untold experiences of women of color who faced it all, childhood trauma, addiction, abuse, incarceration, grief, mental health struggles, and more, and found the shrimp to make it to the other side. My dad was shot and killed in his house. Yes, he was a drug dealer. Yes, he was a confidential informant, but he wasn't shot on the street corner.

He wasn't shot in the middle of a drug deal. He was shot in his house, unarmed. Pretty Private isn't just a podcast. It's your personal guide for turning storylines into lifelines. Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network. Tune in on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. OpenAI is a financial abomination. A thing that should not be. or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. your job. I'm also going to be talking with the greatest minds in the industry about all the other ways the rich and powerful are ruining the computer. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, wherever you happen to get your podcasts.

I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops call this Taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that Taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, really bad. And we're back.

And these conditions of poverty were not due to any unusual emergency or catastrophe, something that would pass away and leave them in a normal, comfortable condition in time. No, these men and women and children were constantly living on the verge of death and despair. A hard winter was coming on. A great many men thronged the city who had no work and no homes, and were already crowding the police stations and the tunnels under the river for shelter at night. Something must be done. He could not bear it. He could not sleep at night. Something must be done. He could not bear it. He could not sleep at night for thinking of the misery.

The rich must give their abundance. These poor must be relieved. The wealthy must be made to feel the sufferings, if burning words could do it. And this from hence should be his life work, he resolved anew. Others might save their souls. He would devote himself to saving their bodies,

then their souls if he could. He sent out a general request to his members to attend the next Sunday morning services, and then he prepared his sermon. In agony, in stress of soul, and struggle of spirit, he built up his great sermon, and the next Sabbath morning he poured it over the heads of his hearers like lava from a volcano. They were aroused, astonished, thrilled, and moved until they were ready to do almost anything. He proposed a Friday evening gathering to which his hearers should bring food, clothing, money, anything which the needy could use, and he appointed a committee to go out among the poor and bring in the most destitute and to tell the people

that whenever they were in great need of any of the necessities of life and could not procure them by their own exertions, to come there on Friday evenings and their needs should be satisfied. The people responded with wonderful alacrity and spirit. On the next Friday evening, they came in throngs, bringing clothing, provisions, coal, and even money to the amount of several hundred dollars, until it would seem that no one need go hungry

and cold. Ah, he exclaimed joyfully. That was all that was needed, a warm appeal to those who have for those who have not. I knew the world was not hopelessly selfish. Presently the poor began to come, shirkingly, doubtingly, at first fearing some trap. So unused were they to such kindness. But when they found that the gifts were without condition except their need,

they came in throngs, some with tears, some with glad smiles, some humbly, and some boldly and defiantly, as though what they received was what they should have had long before. And the Friday evening meetings became an institution of the city that winter. People in other parts of the city heard of the movement and brought their gifts. And not from that district alone came the poor, but from every quarter of the city, homeless haggard men, worn, wan, women, neglected children, the worthy poor and the unworthy, and none were sent away empty-handed. Only in extreme cases was money given, and then the cases were thoroughly investigated.

Mr. Stillman believed he had his charities well systematized, and he had faith in the goodness and the usefulness of his work. Of course, now and then some came who did not need charity. The professional beggar, the habitual drunkard, the shrewd gammon of the street, were often in evidence, and many a pitiful story was trumped up to get a hold of some of the money. And of course, the Reverend Dr. DeWitt Stillman was severely criticized by the wiser ones. He was spoiling the poor. They would never try to help themselves as long as they could come to the church for

what they needed. And he was encouraging deceit and dependency. Mr. Stillman heeded criticism when he could. He organized a self-help club designed to help men out of unemployment into positions, and to show women and children what to do to earn a little money. And he instituted some lectures during the evening. While some were being waited upon in the rooms below, the audience room was thrown open for those who would listen to good speakers, encourage his hearers to sobriety, industry,

economy, etc. But these efforts seemed fruitless. There was simply no work to be had anywhere. The new vacancies that occurred occasionally were snapped up by men who could yet make a respectable appearance. They were not for the men from Stillman's Charity. Every possible means of making a little money for women and children had already been utilized by hungry men. And the poor people, who were so kindly

advised, only cried helplessly and murmured, Oh, sirs, we do as we can and as we must. We can't save when there is so little anyway. And as for the drop-o-beer of an evening, what else have we got to cheer us up? And worst of all, there seemed to be no end, no cessation, to this terrible destitution. For all their marvelous work, the stream of poverty flowed on without any decrease that he could see. The poor woman with her four children, supplied on one Friday evening, was there again just as cold and needy the next Friday night. The out-of-work men turned up week after week as miserable and gaunt as ever. The hungry children were as numerous and deplorable as in the beginning. Mr. Stoneman began to realize that charity was no remedy for poverty. It might be a little relief.

All he could pour into the vortex of misery that swirled round in the city affected it as nothing. But you know what he didn't try? He didn't try taking advantage of these sweet, sweet deals. That probably would have fixed all the problems. I can't come up with any reason why they wouldn't. Here's ads. I'm Robert Evans and on my podcast, Behind the Bastards, we talk about the worst people in all of history.

We've discussed a lot of horrible monsters in our time, but this week we have one of the very worst we'll ever talk about, David Berg, founder of a cult called the Children of God. We'll talk about all of his horrible crimes with special guest Ed Helms. He's not just like a weird religious cult leader. He was like fusing a bunch of hippie ideology in with this kind of like evangelical, Christianity, Pentecostal preaching in the mid-century. He's a very weird guy. But yeah, I'll just get into it.

Like nothing you just said makes sense. That doesn't say it. Right. But that's the beauty of cults. Listen to Behind the Bastards on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebene. The podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free.

I'm Ebene and every Tuesday, I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that would challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you. On Pretty Private, we'll explore the untold experiences of women of color who faced it all, childhood trauma, addiction, abuse, incarceration, grief, mental health struggles, and more, and found the strength to make it to the other side. My dad was shot and killed in his house. Yes, he was a drug dealer. Yes, he was a confidential informant,

but he wasn't shot on the street corner. He wasn't shot in the middle of a drug deal. He was shot in his house, unarmed. Pretty Private isn't just a podcast. It's your personal guide for turning storylines into lifelines. Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network. Tune in on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Open AI is a financial abomination, a thing that should not be, an aberration, a symbol of rot at the heart of Silicon Valley. And I'm going to tell you why on my show Better Offline, the rudest show in the tech industry, where we're breaking down why OpenAI, along with other AI companies, are dead set on lying to your boss that they can take your job. I'm also going to be talking with the greatest minds in the industry about all the other ways the rich and powerful are ruining the computer. Listen to Better Offline on the iHotRadio app, Apple podcasts, wherever you happen to

get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops call this Taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that Taser told them.

From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and And we're back. It was a larger subject than he had dreamed of when he began the work. It required deep thought and study.

What was the matter? This was supposed to be a great, rich, free country. The resources of nature were plentiful. Men were eager to work and turn these resources into wealth. Why could they not do it? Mr. Stoneman made a new resolution. He decided to bring the men who claimed to know all about these problems to come and speak on Friday evening, subject to criticisms and questions. Surely the truth could be reached at last in some way. As in temperance, so often had been blamed for the poverty of the people.

He asked a great temperance lecturer to fill the rostrum on the next Friday evening. He was very eloquent and brought tears to the eyes of many. But a critic in the audience showed that under the condition laboring men lived, either exhausted with toil or disheartened, hunting for a chance to toil, they were obliged to go to the saloon.

They needed some relaxation, and a nickel would bring them a little sociability, warmth and good cheer nowhere else as it would at the saloon. And back of the poor consumer was the army of men engaged in producing, distributing, and dealing with liquors in various ways. If the temperance caused should be effective,

what would become of these men? Was there room among the other wage workers for them? They all knew there was not. He engaged a single taxer who was likewise criticized and questioned, but he gave much food for thought and Stoneman was convinced that the earth not be held as private property of poverty were to be banished.

He invited some noted philanthropists with cooperative and colonization schemes to offer, and these also started some deep thinking. He had able trade unionists who ably and effectively advocated the universal organization of all laborers as a remedy for poverty and involuntary idleness. Socialists of all shades of belief, even anarchists occupied his platform at different times that winter and the next, while still the work of charity was continued in the rooms below.

Mr. Stillman became more and more interested in these radical, practical questions and almost gave himself to the study of them. But of all he heard, he could not immediately make up his mind, which was correct. But some of the fundamental principles that underlay all of them, he was ready to accept. But meanwhile, his congregation was becoming dissatisfied and uneasy. Where was he leading them?

What an amount of crazy, incendiary talk they had listened to in his lecture room, and how little of gospel doctrine he himself had listened to in his lecture room, and how little of gospel doctrine he himself had given them in the last year. They were compelled to speak to him about it, and soon Mr. Stillman found that he would probably be without a pulpit if he continued his present career. It was a serious problem to him, for he had not been brought up to do anything else but preach. He might find himself in the position of men he had tried to help, forced to hunt in vain for a job. But what else could he look to for real help to the poverty of stricken masses? He had not been able to find the answer to the question of why

poverty should ceaselessly exist in a world of plenty. Either in the religion he had loved so well, in the study of ethics alone, or in the charity or sympathetic sentiment, or in intellectual pursuits per se. In the field of economic research alone was any possible chance of an answer to be found, and he must not be afraid of the answer. It might upturn every preconceived idea he had ever cherished. It might topple over all his gods, smash all his prejudices, destroy much that he had worshipped as beautiful and good.

It would destroy friendships and loves, and he saw only a lonely, persecuted pathway ahead of him, saw himself maligned, misrepresented, neglected, and unloved. But he could not turn back. He gave up his honored position as a beloved minister of a popular conception of the gospel and went forth to preach what is more nearly the gospel that Christ taught and to receive more nearly the treatment accorded to him. But he is helping the world to find the answer." The end. Oh, there's so much in that story I like. Okay, like I said, it's a very plain political thing, right? There's like not really a lot of

characterization going on. There's actually only one character, Mr. Stillman, and he, you know, he has emotions and he has problems and stuff. And actually it does follow the try fail sequence of modern storytelling very well. The try fail sequence is this very normal way for stories to be written in which a character has a problem and he tries to solve it, but he doesn't succeed at solving it. And so then he tries again solve it, but he doesn't succeed at solving it. And so then he tries again to solve it and he doesn't succeed at solving it. And then he tries again and then he usually succeeds or fails. That's a very common storytelling method. And this absolutely follows that, which is interesting because it's from 120 years ago.

You know, he tries first by just, you know, doing the gospel and that's like not working. So he tries again with charity and that's not really working. And so he tries again by bringing in the like learned speakers to talk about all the things and and that's not enough either. And what he has to do is become a seeker. And that's what I like about this story is that it's not like, and then he brought in the anarchists and the anarchists were right and everyone was like, ah, yes, class war, that is the solution. The class war needs two sides.

But he's also not like, oh, those people had nothing to say. He's like, I'm going to go become one of those people. I'm going to go look. I'm going to go try and learn what's necessary to end the abject poverty that people live in. And, you know, and it avoids easy answers. And including avoiding the easy answer of anarchism, which I just, I feel like is like the most anarchistic way to write fiction, right? Like Ursula Le Guin taught us that with The Dispossessed.

And this is way the hell older than that. But I also find it interesting that this was written in 1905, three years before Lizzie kind of stopped living public life and stopped writing and just sort of lived in the Southwest with her husband and don't really know what she got up to then. Maybe someone does. I haven't read whole books on her or anything like that. You know, this idea that you spend your whole life looking for the solutions to these problems and you might not find them, but the searching has a real value.

And a thing that I keep running across when I read this older fiction, you know, this is absolutely in the no-gods-no-masters era of anarchism. This is absolutely in the era of like, you know, the church is this great evil. But even during that era, people are very aware of that often it's people who are interested in these questions who are within religious institutions as well, even if the institutions themselves are not the answer. And so, yeah, I just, I like the complexity of this simple story.

And I expect I'm probably going to try and read more of her stories in the near future. I'm also interested in how, you know, so far I've read you mostly men from that era, but that's not actually an accurate cross-section of the people writing radical fiction at the turn of the 20th century. Compared to literature in general, I would guess that women are overrepresented in radical fiction compared to regular literature. But actually I could be wrong about that because there is actually this thing where in some ways writing was one of the few jobs available to women, partly because you don't really have a boss in the same way.

You know, it's not a really traditional way of having a job. Speaking of women who have books, I have books. This is me moving to pivots. I'm done with talking about the story. I have a book called The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice that came out this very, nope, last month, it came out last month. I'll stop talking about it soon probably. Maybe or maybe I'll keep talking about it because I like it.

It came out from Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, which is a collectively run press that I'm part of. That press, Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, just put out a book, or is about to put out a book called Orso, and it is is Lorenzo Orseti was an anarchist who died fighting ISIS a few years back as part of the YPG in Rojava. And this is his journals that was smuggled out by comrades and first published in Italian. And the Italian publisher reached out to us and offered to let us publish it. And I'm really proud to have gotten to have a small part

in helping publish this book. And so if you look up this book or so, O-R-S-O, from Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, you can pre-order it. And it's real good, it's real moving. It's not written as a memoir, it's written as journals. And so there's a lot of pieces written by his friends and family and other people involved in that fight

to kind of help contextualize it all. And you might like it too. And you also might like checking us out next week when I bring you yet another story on Cool Zone Media Book Club. Beep, beep, beep. I probably won't do that again. Bye.

It could happen here as a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly, at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. I'm Robert Evans. And on my show behind the bastards this week, we have one of our worst subjects ever, David Byrd, founder of the children of God cult. We'll be talking about with special guest Ed Helms.

He's not just like a weird religious cult leader. He was like fusing a bunch of hippie ideology in with this kind of like evangelical Christianity, Pentecostal preaching in the mid century is a very leader. He was like fusing a bunch of hippie ideology in with this kind of like evangelical Christianity, Pentecostal preaching in the mid-century. He's a very weird guy. But yeah, I'll just get into it. Like nothing you just said makes sense. That doesn't say, but that's the beauty of cults. Listen to Behind the Bastards on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm also going to be talking with the greatest minds in the industry about all the other ways the rich and powerful are ruining the computer. Listen to Better Offline on the iHot Radio app, Apple podcasts, wherever you happen to

get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops. They get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. This is Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. Listen to Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or

wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebene. the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free. I'm Ebene and every Tuesday, I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that will challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you. Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network. Tune in on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

This is an iHeart Podcast.