The Jordan Harbinger Show - 823: Daniella Mestyanek Young | How to Disengage from a Lifelong Cult

Episode Date: April 11, 2023

Daniella Mestyanek Young (@daniellamyoung) is a survivor of the religious Children of God cult, a US Army combat veteran, an extremely advanced knitter, and the author of Uncultured: A Memoir. What We Discuss with Daniella Mestyanek Young: How the seemingly wholesome Children of God (later known by variations of "The Family") religious group centered around love, faith, and Jesus — and packaged to appeal to impressionable countercultural hippie types of the day — veered into true cult territory under the direction of its leader, David Berg. How female followers of Children of God were encouraged to use their bodies and sexuality to gain converts and money in a practice known as "flirty flashing." How child sexual abuse became a commonplace Children of God practice in an effort to raise "sexually liberated" children. What this cult and others do to cultivate credibility — and raise funds — among its followers and the outside world. The toll that life in a cult takes on those who are lucky enough to exit. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/823 This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger show. Cults become really popular in times of social confusion. And when systems were coming down and people are looking for guidance. And so globally, right, we saw it go, 60s and 70s was America's time of cult. 80s was Asia and then 90s was Latin America. And the children of God, the family, another creepy name, they followed sort of that trajectory just growing and growing in places that were friends. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with scientists, entrepreneurs, even the occasional war correspondent, arms dealer, neuroscientist, or hostage negotiator, and each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better thinker. If you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode's starter packs.

is a great place to begin. These are collections of our favorite episodes organized by topic that'll help new listeners get a taste of everything that we do here on this show. Topics like persuasion and influence, investing in financial crimes, abnormal psychology, negotiation and communication, crime and cults, and more. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. You can also use our AI chatbot on the website over at jordanharbinger.com slash AI to make your very own playlist based on what the AI bot thinks you'll like. All right, taking it easy this week, no Thursday episode, so don't panic.

Nothing is wrong with your podcast player. And no skeptical Sunday. Again, letting everybody sleep in a little bit this week. Now, today's episode is about a woman who grew up in a pretty gross, is an understatement, sex cult, called Children of God. And it's as creepy and as disgusting as it sounds. There's graphic sexual abuse, pedophilia disgust in this episode. Up to you if you want to have the kids in the car for this one, it's a little spooky,

but, you know, maybe they'll actually learn about what kind of people do this. I don't know. Up to you, folks. Just giving you the old trigger warning or kid warning. This is a really interesting episode. She went through a whole lot. She came out the other side. She's an amazing and brave person, and I think the story's incredible. So here we go with Daniela Mestanick Young.

I've heard a lot about cults, and I've talked to a lot of cult survivors on this show, but I do have to say that the cult you grew up in might take the cake for the most messed up craziness. the destructive nature of its practices. And I think maybe that's part of why we don't talk about it more, honestly. People get very, very uncomfortable when you start talking about beliefs that included, you know, religious prostitution and pedophilia for God.

And even when I was trying to sell uncultured, I had a lot of editors tell me, we don't do children of God because it's too hard for readers. Really? And, you know, it's an interesting parallel to we don't do. about women in the military because nobody reads them. And I was like, well, have I got a book for you? Yeah. It's about children of God and women in the military. Your favorite combination of hard to read and not interesting enough to read according to you, right? And I think it's, you know, bringing you behind those walls, right? We think we know what happens in cults. We think we know

what happens to the daughters of America when they disappear behind the common walls of the Department of Defense, but we're not actually getting those full stories very often. I did learn a lot from your book about both of those things. And first of all, let's just back up to your childhood, because that's kind of where we'll probably focus most of the show. Can you discuss the premise of the cult that you were in? I mean, you said pedophilia for God, and I think people were like, oh, come again? Because that phrase alone is pretty tough to swallow for, I think, most people. It's just like, you've got to be exaggerating. I think that's where most people probably start when they hear this. Yes. So it started in 1968, which, to put in

context, this was the time of the hippies, right, the free love movement and new religious movements were basically a dime a dozen. People were getting all into them. And so our leader, David Berg, was already this failed preacher who came out of evangelical Christian tradition and kind of found his spot with his teenage children recruiting hippies in California. And it started off Love Faith Jesus, very supposedly wholesome, right? Very much with this revolutionary, you know, this is the prophet of God. We are living in the end of days and we're on this mission to win the world for God. Over about a decade, it went from Love Faith Jesus to using his female followers as religious prostitutes. So based on this verse in Matthew, I will make you fishers of men.

They called themselves flirty fishing. They called themselves hookers for Christ. Wow. It was very deliberate. You are going out and you are using your body and your sexuality to gain converts and to gain money. And he, you know, first started with this concept of sexual control. And I think it's exactly what evangelical purity does, which is try to control you and your sexuality all through your life. And all he did was flip that and say, sex is love, love is God, and God loves everyone. And so the idea was free love. The result was forced polyamory, religious prostitution. And then when the kids came along, so my mother was one of the first children born into the cult, the kids got absorbed into this idea of raising sexually liberated children.

Oh, God. It's so, there's so much to unpack and all of it is kind of gross. But let's, and I sure you don't mind me saying that, right? But I think religious prostitution, people are still probably like, okay, but what is it really? So what is it really? Because it's just like it sounds, which it's so hard to believe. And I was listening to the audiobook and I'm like, I got to rewind this. Did she actually just say that this is what was happening? Because there was a lot of stuff that was so unbelievable that I just wanted to make sure I heard it clearly. Because I'm often multitasking when I read. You know, I'm working on a car or something. And I'm like, let me just, I got to, I got to rewind this. Did she say that you have to share your wife with other guys in the cult? Okay, that's kind of culty, very, not seemingly very Christian. And then it's like, but wait a minute, they are also literally prostituting themselves. And this is how they generate revenue or something for the cult. I haven't read the Bible recently, but I'm, it's probably a stretch to find that in there. You know, so the whole, I guess, thing with cults is it like, it hinges on your absolute belief in one concept, which in this case was that this man was the prophet of God. I think, honestly, this is why they couldn't break me because I never believed in this

concept. And so I was just like, my whole life, right, these people are crazy. But once he's put his followers through this process of a decade, right, of isolation and of self-sublimation, because the other big thing about cults is you are asked to sublimate. yourself, right? Lower your individualism, make sacrifices in order for the good of the group and the ultimate mission, at which point anything you start becoming asked to do seems reasonable because you're doing it for this mission for this purpose, right? The ends justifies the means. Right. And so, again, he walks his followers into it a little bit at a time. First, he sets his wife aside and takes a young wife and nobody says anything. Then he says everyone needs to

to start sharing sexually with each other. And then he says, well, what a great gift of love that the Lord has given us, right? These beautiful women and their beautiful bodies. And if this is God's way of bringing, you know, men and money into the group, then all the better. Right. And nobody ever called it religious prostitution. They called it their own thing. They gave it their own terminology, their own sort of thought-stopping cliche around it. And then it just became part of the fabric of the group. And so thought-stopping cliche, the term might sound familiar from other cult episodes that we've done, which is when something seems entirely insane or out-of-line, a cult would know,

wow, this person is going to run into this problem. Like your parents are going to try and get you out. They give you thought-stopping cliches in order to get you to drop logical thinking and just go into this sort of loop. And multi-level marketing companies or other sort of shady business ventures do it too, right? So when someone says, hey, you've spent a lot of money and you haven't made a lot of money

and I think you're being taken advantage of, it's like, oh, haters will say anything to get you out of the way of the success you're running into because they're jealous. There's this sort of program in there that's like, hey, when you run into this very obviously credible objection from people that you trust, go into this thought-stopping cliche.

So when your husband says, maybe I don't want my wife to be a prostitute because that was not something that we learned about at church. And also, I really hate the feeling and she hates the feeling and we're all upset about it. It's, well, I assume the thought-stopping cliche was something like God's going to make you uncomfortable, but he's testing you. And this is just part of the, if you're not willing to share the love, that's something about you and not about the doctrine or the fact that your wife is on the streets generating revenue. That's, it's a you problem, right? It's not a problem with what we're doing. We're always right, because I'm the prophet of God.

It's got to be something along those lines, right? I don't want to put boards in your mouth, but that's kind of how I would handle it if I was a cult leader. No, you pegged it exactly, right? They precede the field with, we have this big revelation. It's going to be really difficult, right? We had this concept of the old church and the new church, right? We've left the old church, and we are the new church of God.

We are going to have new revelations. You know, it's going to be hard for you, and they tell you that. And so, you know, one of the things, I've noticed is as adults, we buy into our own programming. You become the first one who shuts down your own doubts, right? You say, oh, I know I'm just going through doubts because it's so hard to share my spouse. And then the rest of the community like reinforces it. Yes, yes, you're right. You just got to pray. We've all gone through this, right? And this feeling of being surrounded by people that look just like you and are confirming that the mission, think just like you and are confirming that the mission

that you're on is correct, it's a really good feeling. And people like that, and they will do a lot to go along with their groups. When the cult leader, was he your grandfather? Is that kind of how that worked? No. So my, my great-grandmother, if you, like, research the children of God, you will find that they have this big commune out in Texas. It's always Texas. And it's called the Soul Clinic. and everyone lived basically in near poverty. And the prophet lived in a very nice house nearby. So my great-grandmother donated that house to him when her teenage daughter went off with my grandfather and joined the children of God. There were actually parents that thought this was great, right?

My troubled child has found religion and is doing good things. And my grandfather was one of the few college-educated people that joined. And so he quickly became kind of the CPA and in the finances right at the profits right-hand side. So then when my mother is 13 years old, she ends up in a group wedding to the prophet, who's in his 70s. Ooh, wow. And it's 14 girls that range from 14 to the age of three. No. It includes the prophets, granddaughter, and the three-year-old's mother is the one running the

ceremony. Like to just give you a range, right, of how it went from. What? Oh, this good group of faith to 13 years later, 14 years later, these things are going on. Okay. When something like that happens, I just want people to sort of pause and think about this. Because when you're in a call, right, you have thought-stopping cliches. You're doing things you wouldn't normally do.

imagine how far down the cult rabbit hole you have to be to be like, this is fine. A three-year-old is marrying a 70-plus-year-old man. A bunch of teen girls that probably look, I mean, of course still look just like children, are marrying this old man. This is fine. This isn't weird. You have to be so far down the brainwashing cult-thinking rabbit hole to not be like, okay, I'm drawing the line.

Prostituting yourself or your wife is weird and out there, but when you're starting to condone and give your own kids to a pedophile, you've really got to be fully enrolled. Like, you can't fake your way through that, right? Most 99% of people you'd think would draw the line somewhere before that, and they didn't. Yes, you would think. And that, you know, that is the thing I have come to find now

with a lifetime of studying extremism. is that people really do think that there is one line and you will know before you cross it. And it isn't like that, right? It is a series of incremental, this woman who ran the wedding ceremony. She was a Dallas cheerleader. She was a normal woman before she got associated with this, right? As a seeker, an idealist. So 50 years later, she still can't see the problem, right?

And this is the same woman that you will. read about in my book in Children of God history who when the prophet decides to formalize his ideology about how we are going to sexually raise children, he uses his own stepson for this process to be documented. And she is the nanny. She is the woman that does this and writes this 762 page book, the Davidito book. Oh my gosh. Which has been called the worst cult artifact of all times, which is this essentially manual on pedophilia for God. So kind of to your point of they really do, they go in so far, but it's increments at a time. It's a little bit at a time.

And it's with so much ceremony. It's with so much ritual. And it's with so many other good people right around you that everything is reinforcing itself. And of course, for us children, right? So a year after this at 14, my mom gets pregnant from the man who works with her father, who's older than her father. And, you know, they're all the lieutenants of the prophet. And, you know, that is with me. Right.

So when we start coming into this, my mom and me, like, we don't know anything different, right? So we are being programmed with this. And you go along with things because that's all you know. Because I think a lot of people are going, well, wait a minute. What did your friends at school think? Or what did the other kids that you grew up around think? You had to know from watching TV that this isn't normal. You just didn't have any of those influences.

None of it. So we grew up in really big communes. The one interaction that we had with the outside world is when we would be taken out to perform on the streets or to go to orphanages. I like to call it performing missionary work, right? So we would go to an orphanage. We would hand out toys. We would take photos. And then we would use those photos to raise more money. You know, we would go out singing and dancing on the streets a lot in the 80s and 90s when the children of God stopped with the sexual recruiting. They went headlong into the childhood

entertainment business. And so many of us were these little kind of child trafficked actors. You know, I call myself the little apocalypse Lindsay Lohan. And then we would sell these videos, millions and millions of them on the streets around the world. And so that was our only interaction with the outside world. We did not go to school. We did not see doctors except in the most emergencies. And we were, you know, very, very separated. The first time I would see live television on would be on 9-11 when I was 14 years old. Oh, wow. By the way, super creepy name. You know, you think, children are God, wow, this is going to be a creepy cult. And then you read about it, and you're like, wow, I did not sign up for that level of creepiness. It's really extra.

It's shocking that it's allowed to go on, right? That's, I think what people are going, well, wait a minute. How is this even allowed to go on? Well, it started in Texas, but you didn't grow up in Texas, right? You grew up. Where did you grow up? Right. So I was born in the Philippines, and I grew up mostly in South America, Latin America, Brazil, and Mexico. So right around the mid-70s, when you've had Jonestown massacre happen, you've had Charles Manson stuff go on, our prophet is starting to realize, like, oh, I need to get my people out of the United States. And so he conveniently gets revelations from God, you know, that we need to be going into these developing nations and recruiting people and saving the world. And in many ways on their part,

this was really genius because now you're going into countries where, you know, you're talking Brazil, right? The slums of Brazil, the slums of India. These are places where it's easy to recruit people into a better life. And even when they notice that things are really bad, in some ways, it's still not as bad as what they came from. So they're going to continue to stay. And because we're growing up not in our home countries, right, with no knowledge of the legal system, no contact with the outside world. For my first six years in Brazil, I didn't even speak the language. you know, we really are very, very isolated and also hidden just in plain sight all over the world. Okay. So are there Brazilians joining the cult or is it like, hey, we're going to move a bunch of

white people out here because they're isolated and the locals will just be like, eh, it's a weird group of white people. They live behind this barbed wire fence. Who cares? It was both. It was certainly, you know, mainly Americans moving. They spread to, like, first went into Europe, but cults become really popular. in times of social confusion. And when systems were coming down and people are looking for guidance. And so globally, right, we saw it go, 60s and 70s was America's time of cult. 80s was Asia and then 90s was Latin America.

And the children of God, the family, another creepy name, they followed sort of that trajectory just growing and growing in places that were friendly. Huh. Why the 80s in Asia and the 90s in South America? I think it just has to do with all the different political unrest and the things that were going on. I actually, that's a good question. Sure. I know that part, but I've only really studied American cults.

No, it makes sense because I'm curious, I'm thinking, okay, 80s in Asia, maybe there was a finance. I know there was some financial upheaval in the, there was like an Asian market crash. I just don't know exactly when it was. I want to say early to mid-80s. In 90s, I'm thinking end of the Cold War messed up Latin America a little bit more because all the creepy crappy governments the United States was propping up and the Soviets were propping up. We didn't have any need to do that anymore and the Soviets couldn't do that anymore. And it was like, oh, let's have a bunch of upheaval. And there was like the Sandinistas and there was the Senderro Luminoso in Peru and all these sort of terrorist organizations

and Marxist organizations that were kicking up dust to put a nice euphemism on things. So maybe that's why. Yeah, we would be right behind all of those political things. Like when the iron curtain fell and when the, when communism was coming down, the USSR and all that stuff, we were always some of the first ones in the country to the point that I was warning people to be on the lookout in Ukraine, right? Like this children of God is going to show up on the borders of these war-torn countries, right? Because this is where it's easy to sort of disappear people, right? To find people that are trying to leave whatever social system hasn't been working for them or hasn't been working for them and fit into yours.

I want to hear more about that because, first of all, spoiler alert, the cult still exists, right? and it's all over the place. And you're thinking they're going to go to Ukraine because the system has fallen apart. And if you've got desperate refugees and you've got a place that says, hey, look, you can live in our barbed wire compound and the Russians can't get you and we're going to feed you and your kids are going to go to school, you just have to ignore the fact that you're going to have to prostitute your 14-year-old daughter to a bunch of old dudes. It's probably tempting because your alternative might be to die of starvation or get attacked by enemy troops, essentially, occupiers. Exactly, exactly. And part of how the children of God supports themselves is by, again, performing charity work, performing public service. So I'm going to now, in the U.S., be telling people that, oh, my missionary group is over here doing all of these great work on the Ukrainian border.

They're raising enough donations, like 90% of the money and donations that we ever brought in stayed with us. Sure. And cults are always also out for political power, right? So the Children of God performed twice at the George H.W. Bush White House. Really? That's extra gross. And not to mention Donald Trump just spoke at the Mooney's Convention last year, right? So it serves two purposes of getting them funding and disciples, like on these war-tone political upheaval places. But it also helps them make connections into government and power. Right. So it's a credibility play to have the founder. I know the Mooney's, we talked to a former Mooney here on the show, Dr. Stephen Hassen, who's a cult expert, you probably, probably know him. They have like an arms factory. They're also a scary cult, right? Because they manufacture

weapons legally in Korea, I think, and they sell them. And it's like, that's a powerful group. They can be a voting block. They're an arms dealer. And worst case, you can pay a president or a former president to come and speak at your organization for, I don't know, 300 grand. And then you take video and photos and you just make it look like you're friends with whatever president is hanging out. And the cult, wow, the cult leader's hanging out with Barack Obama, Donald Trump, George Bush, he must be a very important man. They don't know that you can just cut a friggin' check to a speaking agency and have that guy roll in and not care slash not know. You would think they would vet a cult like this, but at the end of the day, if they don't tell you it's for children

of God and they say, oh, it's for this business organization and the cult founder just happens to be there and everybody who's a member happens to be in this cult, they're not going to dig that far. just don't do that. They wait for the check to clear and they book the flights. As far as vetting goes, right? I have a top secret clearance and I grew up in an anti-American cult. But you, you know, that's not how you brief it. You know, I'm like, I put down what I needed to put down and I hope you're going to go get your Portuguese translators and go to Brazil and ask these people if you're really afraid, right? Yeah. And so there's a reason the first line of uncultured is the first rule of cults is you're never in a cult, you know. It took me two years after I was out of the cult,

watching a murder, suicide on television, hearing Children of God cult over and over again for me to recognize. And most people just don't look that far, right? And the pretty well-spoken children singing and dancing all in a row like goes a long way to fool people about what is going on behind the walls and the closed doors. So even when you left the cult, you weren't thinking I'm in a cult, you just thought you were in a weird church? Yeah, it was, I mean, it was the family, right? Your whole life growing up, we were the family, we are the army of God, everyone else is wrong.

And the theory was, if you were born in the family, God has chosen you to grow up and to be a missionary. That's the only thing you were supposed to do. For me, actually, because I was so argumentative and so questioning, I would have of usually older teenagers. So older kids born in the call would like exasperatedly say to me, oh, you need to be a lawyer. So by the time I was six years old, I was like, okay, I'm going to leave the family.

I'm going to be a lawyer. And, you know, I was being abused pretty terribly at the age of six and seven and eight. And I was just like, I don't care if this is God or if I'm going to hell not being in the family. Hell is going to suck, but I'm not doing this. Right. So, yeah, to me, it wasn't that different than any teenager, I think, wanting to get out of home or wanting to leave their parents' church. It just encompassed our whole lives. And the way I briefed it to myself was just, I want to go to high school so I can go to college so I can be a lawyer, so I have to get out of here. And so it wasn't until I uprooted my whole life, got myself excommunicated two years later.

And, you know, the other part was not only did we not call ourselves a cult, we spent hours and hours and hours drilling on how to answer questions if we were a cult. You know, to the point that when I had this realization, oh, we grew up in a cult, my next thought was, well, that should be obvious if you spend that much time talking about how you aren't a cult. Tell us about what kinds of questions you were being drilled on and what this was for. I mean, is this, is this like, oh, Okay, when the police eventually raid this commune, we need you to be like, no, of course I've been to the doctor. Of course I'm not sleeping with a 72-year-old man. I'm only 12. I mean, is that where are we going with this kind of training that you had? Yes, that was exactly it. And actually, for listeners, the chapter three shows this, and it's published in Rolling Stone, a sample chapter. People can go check it out. And it was exactly, right, we had. So first of all, you have the concept of the persecution, right? The persecution is coming. It is out there. And we have proof because X, Y, Z, right, which when I was a child was this compound in Argentina gets raided. And so after that, it's they're really coming. They really are what the prophet said. They really are out to get us. This is the same time Waco has just, you know, the branched Divideons have erupted in Waco. So we are all terrified that they're going to decide we're a cults and come kill us all. Right. And we have this.

this doctrine called deceivers yet true, which is literally it's not okay to lie, but it is okay to lie for God to the outsiders. And there would be all of these examples from the Bible and from, you know, Christian history. It was a cartoon book that my stepfather illustrated that we would read and drill on and kind of exactly what you said about the touching and the sexual abuse, but also very similar to what they say in the movie Women Talking, which is we didn't talk about what happened, so we didn't have language for it. So in the Children of God,

there was no such thing as sexual abuse because you were supposed to give your body to whoever wanted it. We had a comic called Heaven's Girl that literally trained us how to give our body to multiple attackers in the end times, right? Antichrist soldiers, you know, training children and young teenagers about gang rape. You know, it wasn't until way later on when they put this charter of rules and responsibilities that I even had the language for, oh,

grown men are not supposed to have sex with young girls. The training that you got for relating to outsiders makes sense, right? And for people who don't know what Waco, Branch DeVittian was because you're maybe young or weren't watching the news, this was a cult in Waco, Texas. There was, of course, another prophet named David Koresh or, you know, self-proclaimed profit named David Koresh. They all lived in a compound. And I believe, I'm going off memory here, but they were stockpiling weapons, which is a great way to get attention from the FBI. And so they got attention, or the ATF and the FBI. And the FBI said, all right, we're going to go in there and we're going to get the weapons. And the cult said, come and get it. And then the FBI went in there and accidentally slashed through

gross incompetence, basically killed almost everybody who was in this house. They had let go of a bunch of women and children, but actually the FBI raided it, the place caught on fire, and they all burned to death. My friend who works at the FBI was saying it's basically known as the worst sort of low point in the FBI because they bungled it so bad that they just ended up murdering all these people and it was a complete accident. I mean, the accident through negligence and incompetence and not knowing what the hell they were doing. And there's all this footage of like an FBI tank running into the side of the building and the place is on fire and there's people on the roof. It's just a huge, a huge mess. So using that as propaganda for your cult and saying, look, they're going to come and kill us. They did this on purpose.

It's kind of, I hate to say a stroke of genius because that's probably laying it on a bit too thick. But it really was a gift from the FBI to every cult out there that, look, all these lies we made up about how people are going to come after us, they turned out to be true. And here's the proof. And it was perfect both ciderism on our part. It was we are not a cult. Waco was a cult.

he thought he said he was Jesus right he clearly is messed up our guy doesn't say he's Jesus our guy says he's the prophet right so we are not a cult but look what America will do to you if they think you're a cult right and that is the other thing is that we were trained to hate America we were trained that America was Babylon the whore it was going to be part of God's judgment this is why we didn't live in America, also because it's much, much easier to leave your cults if you live in the country that you are from or nearby it, as I would find out later. So all of these things in my mind when I'm six, seven, eight years old is I want the cops to come rescue me, but I don't want to be murdered. You know, I don't want to be here, but also the outside world is evil. We

aren't a cult, but we are like them, so we have to be careful. Oh, the double think is very 1984. Oh, yeah. Wow. Unfortunately, I think we do have to talk about the abuse because it's a big part of the cult, right? We talked about the sexually liberated children concept, which is gross, just even saying out loud. And it wasn't just sexual abuse, right? There was spanking babies as young as six months old. And there was a punishment culture. Can you speak to that a little bit? Yes. So, you know, in this way, I think it was very similar to many of the kind of strict evangelical churches that you have out there that are very into spare the rod, spoil the child's, one of the primary doctrines. You know, he says that babies should start being spanked at six months

old, but we also don't have any limitations on spanking or hitting, right? So it just becomes sessions of beatings. We had a lot of group discipline, which of course I would later also encounter in the army, because group discipline is a great way to, you know, control people. because you are creating fear and you're creating this dynamic of kind of North Korean prison camps, right? Like everyone's going to tell on everyone else. People don't want to be disciplined or people do. You know, you can get back at the group by getting everyone disciplined. So you also can never like bond and have good friends because of the discipline culture.

And then of course, you know, we would get separated. So there would be a lot of isolation. There would be this thing called silence restriction where they would just tell you. that you couldn't talk. A lot of times they would hang signs on you. I now have t-shirts that say don't talk to me. I'm disrespectful. Wow. But these are like signs that they would put on and you would go for a week and everyone in the commune essentially knew they were supposed to shun you. Wow. And then, you know, with the isolation. So there's a scene in uncultured where I go there, right, where I take you into 10 hours in the basement with a pedophile who, from the outside,

I have done something bad and I have been hauled away for discipline and I emerged 10 hours later and it's never talked about. Of course, you know, what is happening on the inside is very, very serious rape and abuse and beatings and neglect. But it's not talked about. But I know that everyone else goes through this. I know that even my own mother grew up in this and has been isolated. So I think everybody knows what is happening. And I think that this is, the raping is just another part of my punishment from God as the beating or the washing of the mouth out with. How do you know that everybody else went through that?

I mean, it was clear that they did. But if you didn't ever talk about it, did you just know that somebody was missing for a while? And you're like, well, they're probably going through the same thing as me because they went in the basement with creepy Uncle Jerry. Yes. And, you know, come to find out, everyone is, of course, not going through. the same thing, right? And this is another way that survivors sometimes don't support each other. You know, in the beginning, their sexuality stuff was very, very open. And then at some point, actually, when a 14-year-old got pregnant with me, they realized, oh, we can't have this evidence,

right? So we're going to put rules in place. And this is when a lot of the survivors seem to believe that telling the pedophiles to stop raping the children worked. And I find it surprising that people believe that, of course, but that's where we were. It was this culture of you don't question the uncles, right? Anything the uncles do, they are the hand of God. And when you know someone has been separated and then they come back, the last thing you want to do is ask them what happened because somebody else might tell on you, they might tell on you, or heaven forbid, I think you just have to face what happened. And again, we didn't, you know, have the words for that. So even you asking somebody else what happened would be considered you questioning the uncle's decision

to do sadistic stuff to kids. Oh, absolutely. And, you know, heaven forbid, you ask someone what happen and then you react negatively, right? Because that would really be judgment, right? I see. Something like rolling your eyes could get you isolated for days, right? So we absolutely walked on glass. It wasn't until decades later, I feel like, that we would all start talking about it. And this was another really interesting parallel to my time in the military, because I feel like it was the same thing. All of the women are going through the same mistreatment and the same kind of abuse, but we don't talk about it. That's the number one rule. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Danielle Messonick Young. We'll be right back. If you're wondering how we

manage to book all these amazing folks for the show, it's always about the network and warm introductions and people recommending it. And I'm teaching you how to build your own network for free, whether you use it for business, personal reasons, whatever, over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. The course is about improving your relationship building skills, inspiring other people to want to develop a relationship with you. It's not cringy. It's not cheesy. It's not awkward.

It's very easy and very practical. I want to make you a better connector, a better colleague, a better friend in just a few minutes a day. And again, the course is free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Many of the guests on the show, subscribe and contribute to the course. So come join us. You'll be in smart company. Now, back to Daniela Mastonick Young. Some of the punishment that you describe in the book, aside from of course,

course, I can't believe I'm saying this, aside from the child rape, some of the punishment was really sadistic. And it made me wonder, do you think the people that joined this cult were sociopathic pedophiles or were, did they become that way when they joined the cult? Because I'm trying to figure out, it's like, if you offer me to join a cult and have some power, I'm like, oh, that's kind of appealing from a human person. But if you're like, and you get to rape kids, I'd be like, Dude, I don't, what? Ew, gross. So I would imagine these guys join because they get to do that with impunity, but I'm like, how did they advertise that? How do you find people that are going to be okay with that? And then you're like, hey, I got a secret. You can join this cult and do this all you want. I don't understand that. It's got to be part of the selling point to have these creeps join in the first place, right? Yes and no, right? So what we know about rape is it's not about sex. It's about power, right? So men primarily, that get attracted to these patrarchial high-controlling abusive religions. I don't think they have to know what the version of what they're going to be allowed to do is.

It's just they're going to be given control. They're going to be able to exercise their will over people. And I think, you know, this is kind of what I call the difference between like the good uncles and the creepy uncles in the book. It's like there were some like Uncle Jerry, like, my biological father who were known to like young girls, right? And then there were many, I think, who went along with it when it was the thing to do. And then when it wasn't the thing to do anymore, they were like, okay, great, now we can get back to loving God. I've done shows on pedophilia,

or in part on pedophilia. And one of the interesting paradoxes, I guess if you can call it that, a lot of the guys, and it's usually guys, that offend, that are engaged in sexual acts with children, they're not actually attracted to children. It's just because they have access to children, and they are psychopaths or sociopaths or otherwise enjoy hurting other people. It has nothing to do in many, many ways with sexual attraction. There are adults, of course, who are attracted to kids, and it's a disorder, and many of them actually don't offend because they know it's bad. So a lot of the guys that do offend, they know that it's bad. That's what they like about it.

And they couldn't care less if it's a child or an adult woman or whatever. They just don't care. It's about hurting somebody else. Yes. And that's exactly the case. And one of the other things, like the concept that I set out to write about in this book is this group psychology concept that humans will do almost anything to fit in with groups that they've voluntarily chosen.

And the Children of God had this very long-term, like six-month onboarding process, very similar to how long it takes you to become a qualified soldier in the Army. You didn't get to know any of the creepy doctrines until you had, you know, already given up everything for six months. At that point, I think it becomes so much easier to justify things, to go along with things. And for all of the adults, you know, they tell themselves, I'm this good person. And I have a chapter in my next book called There Were Good People in the Sex Cult too. Because even the ones that aren't the ones doing the actual abuses, right? They're reading the literature with all the naked children in it. They are seeing the things that are being done.

They're seeing the children coming back out of the torture chambers, right? and they're not walking away. So, like, there definitely is a point where even the good people in really toxic environments are complicit, even though they might also be abused and coerced. Is there any element of blackmail? And I'm not trying to make this cult worse than it already is. But I would imagine, like, let's say I go and join some cult like this in South America, and I'm, like, horrified at what's going on.

And I realize that I'm complicit and I'm an accomplice to this horrible. stuff that's going on, I almost would think maybe I can't leave because what if I fly back to America is the cult going to be like, hey, this guy was around when all these bad things are happening. He's a criminal. I mean, I would, from a legal perspective, I have, I definitely have criminal liability as a result of being around that and not doing anything about it. So yes, what you're saying a little bit, right? So in 93, someone went on Larry King live and had this discussion, right? That he said, like, I didn't want to do this. They made me do it.

And, you know, he's talking about this 10-year-old girl that he was made to have sex with, who was the leader's daughter. And they did that to essentially have dirt on him. Yeah. The 10-year-old girl was my mother. My God. And he's trying to explain this and he's trying to explain the coercive thinking. And, you know, it stands out because Larry King just looks at him and he goes, and you did it.

Mm-hmm. You know, and a few days later, this man took his life. And I think the much more real threat here and the exit cost is not, like, legally you are going to be pursued. But it's just, you know, if you ever admit what it was really like and what was really done, nobody's ever going to accept you again. Right. And that's really the worst punishment people can have. And that's what so many of us survivors, even that grew up in it, deal with. It's like we live, you know, for 10 years, I didn't say people. about it because I thought people would judge me so hard just from coming from that environment.

How did the cult instill fear of the outside world? We talked a little bit about how they're going to persecute us, but what were some of the other lies maybe that you had in place before Waco? How do they keep you from seeing the doctor, for example? I mean, people need medical care. For God's sake, you have people having kids all the time. I think the biggest way they instilled the fear was just by absolutely not allowing us. access to any of it. It wasn't just like, oh, they're bad, right? So we feared sugar, right? So white sugar wasn't just bad for you. It was the literal antichrist. And we have, you know, a band member of Fleetwood Mac singing a song about how bad sugar is for you. So then you go out

in the outside world to perform to all these people and you're seeing these evil systemites eating sugar and eating dessert in front of you, right? This will reinforce that what they're saying is true. You aren't allowed to see the doctor until it's a really, really extreme horrible emergency. So the first time I'm taken to see the doctor, I have been bleeding for hours already. And so it is an extremely horrifying procedure. And so it reinforces to me, oh, doctors are evil. He did allow them to see doctors for having babies, although we did have both, like a lot of babies at home. But I don't think they wanted to get too complicated. But also we just had kids die a lot, as many cults do, just from neglect, medical neglect, and diseases that could have been prevented.

How did the cult bring in money? Because it sounds like they weren't able to do enough of that. Yeah, so nobody worked, quote unquote, nobody worked for a legitimate company bringing in a salary. everybody was expected to give 100% of their time and labor to what we called living by faith, which just meant go out and do it and God will provide. So what that really looked like, again, was, you know, let's say like half of the commune was keeping the commune going, cooking, taking care of children, cleaning, all of the things. And we children were hugely part of that as well. And then the other half would be pounding the pavement, right? begging at stoplights for money, performing.

Another thing in a lot of these developing nations is you'll have really big street markets. And so you have all kinds of food vendors with food that they need to get rid of by the end of the day. So it's the easiest thing to go buy and get them to donate like almost bad food to your big giant missionary organization. So that was, you know, just the situation. And I would say I grew up from that context better than many of the children in the children of God because we were in a leadership home that got money from the lower down home. So we were kind of like higher up on the MLM than a lot of people. And still there was just there was just never enough food. I know you got in trouble at some point for asking if the Bible was true.

Can you talk to us about that? Because that's that seems like one of the things that when you're in a cult you should probably not do. Yeah. I never got the memo of how to shut up. Yeah, so I'm about six years old and we're playing broken telephone with one of our older cult kid teachers, like an 18-year-old that's in charge of us. And so we go through, you know, it starts with a Bible verse that everyone knows. And I'm like, okay, how can this get screwed up?

And then it goes through 10 children and it comes out completely ridiculous as happens with broken telephone. And so we had been taught that the Bible was handed down by word of mouth from Adam for 500 years until I got to Moses, who then wrote it down, which is this very archaic, you know, evangelical train of thought. When we first learned to play broken telephone, I just kind of piped up with, well, then how could the Bible possibly be true if it was handed down for 500 years? Right. And we can't even do it for 20 minutes, right? That was your line of things. And that was basically just my logic brain saying, well, like, is some of this maybe, you know, but translated funny or things got twisted. And again, in a cult, like, that is not the kind of thing you can say. And so that was what led to the aforementioned, you know, basement punishment.

And these are the kinds of things that would happen just all the time. Did you ever meet the cult leader, the grandpa figure? Or was he kind of on the run? I couldn't really tell. It sounded like he was almost on the run at that point. Yeah. So ever since the point in the 70s, when the FBI was looking for him and he left the country, he never, he not only lived in hiding from his own followers, but we didn't even see his face.

So he communicated with all of us through endless written letters called the Mo letters, Moses David. And he always had over any picture was a cartoon lion's head that somebody like my dad would draw. I forget exactly why. Oh, he was the Lion of Judah or something. And the first time most of us saw his face was after he died. Again, it was the reinforcing of the persecution, right? He's so important. They're so out to get him. And one of the things that always made me feel really special was that my mom had lived with him and knew what he looked like and, you know, had even married him when she was a teenager. Where was he the whole time? If he wasn't living with you in Brazil, And they raided the Argentina place.

Where was he? So he was in the Philippines in the 80s, like 87 when I was born. He was nearby. I don't know here where he was. In the meantime, at some point they were in Mexico. And then the rumor is that he died of syphilis in Portugal. Oh, wow. And that his wife, when he got really bad, just left him there with one of his concubines to just die in pain.

and just went off and didn't tell anyone in the group. So I kind of hope that's the way he died because it seems like justice. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. How bizarre. It doesn't sound like he was exactly living it up. Because I sort of envisioned if you've got an international cult, you're doing it wrong if you're not touring around and enjoying the fact that you've got homes in multiple countries.

I mean, it seems like he should have figured that out. But I guess maybe the heat was up a little bit too high for cult grandpa. Yeah. And definitely, like, in the leadership homes, there's always a cult inside the cult, right? So the Children of God, that was the leadership homes and Scientology. This is the C.org and the U.S. Army, it's the special forces. But, like, the closer you get to the leader, like, it always gets more serious and more extreme. But I feel like he definitely had this double life that he had to keep from most of the followers

so that they would continue to sacrifice their lives and their children and send him all their money and live in poverty. And the other thing is just like nobody wins in power games. So like the patriarchy hurts women and children, but it hurts men too. You know, or like if you're going to keep a slave in the basement, you're still also tied to that house and that basement. So I think at some point, like his organization also held him almost as much of a prisoner as it did the other people. Well, that's fascinating. I hadn't even thought about that, but you're right. The slave metaphor, or in many cases, not metaphor, I guess, is really apt here. Some of the tales in the book are just so bizarre. Can you tell us about these weird, over-sexualized parties that you had? Because it's so odd to read about this. And on the one hand, it's the Bible. But on the other hand, it's like something out of the movie eyes wide shut. So, first of all, it wasn't just the parties, right? Our entire life was over-sexualized. And the reason they call it a sex cult was lived. literally because sex was just our number one belief.

Right. So every poster that we had of angels flying around heaven, the angels were all either naked or in transparent white gowns with boobs hanging out. You know, some of the survivors will be like, well, I didn't sort of specifically get sexually abused. And they won't understand that like everything in our vicinity was that. So, you know, I show this party. where there's adults walking around naked.

So it's instead of like a Halloween party, it's a heaven party. We dress up like people in heaven. And there are games, right? But it would be musical chairs. But when the music stops, you have to lose clothes. You know, and the kids are just around involved in all of this. You know, they had this doctrine of loving Jesus, which was having sex with Jesus, which turned into like these big public origin.

where they were all just making sex sounds and talking to Jesus. Again, in the middle of the living room, you know, where everyone can kind of hear this and know this. And again, it's one of those things that people ask, you know, how does nobody stop and question this? Yeah. But when that's what everybody's doing, you know, if you go to a nude beach in Europe and you're wearing clothes, you feel awkward. And so when everyone around you is naked and saying Jesus is love and, you know, saying that Uncle Jerry is the coolest thing, nobody's questioning it. And Uncle Jerry, this isn't just a random name that we made up. This is an actual guy. And he was what, like a rock musician who had somehow joined the cult? And he ended up with status because he had royalty checks coming in. So we had money. He sounds like a sadistic pedophile. Is that accurate? In my opinion, yes. You know, I think.

he was one of those ones that you talk about just like from birth or from a very young age was a sociopath. He wasn't only a pedophile. He was very violent in a lot of ways. And yeah, he was, you know, we were supposed to be in this society where there was no such thing as money. There was no such thing as rank. Everyone was equal. Everyone was the same. But somehow, the people that, you know, came in with a lot of money always seemed to get what. whatever they want it. And he was a very significant musician with royalty checks that would do very well for the children of God for the rest of his life. And he's still there. I was going to ask, where is this guy now? Is he alive still? Yes. As far as I know, he's self-publishing his own book

quite soon. I'm sure it's a fascinating read. I can't imagine you thought getting your book published was tough. I would imagine he self-publishing is the only way to go when you're a sadistic pedophile who runs a sex cult. This is the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Danielle Mestanick-Young. We'll be right back back. If you'd like this episode of the show, please do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which does not only share the episode, but take a moment and support one of our sponsors. All of the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show are all in one place.

Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. You can also search for any sponsor using the AI chatbot on the website as well. Again, over at Jordan Harbinger.com. Thanks for supporting those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Daniela Mestanek Young. The founder eventually dies, and I want to know how this changes things, but the morning of his passing kind of reminded me a bit of North Korea, right, where the leaders die and people go wild with this exaggerated show of mourning, because, in part because other people are

watching, but in part because they're so completely programmed and brainwash that the crying, people always ask me, the North Korean, oh, they're crying so hard because if they don't, they'll get in trouble. And I'm thinking they're crying so hard because they've been told their whole lives that this is actually a divine being that is responsible for their safety. They're actually really sad. It's real. It looks fake because nobody mourns like that. But you would if you thought your entire country was going to fall apart and everyone was going to die as a result of this man passing. What you're saying is so true, right? And we see this in a lot of ways with cults. Like the thinking is twisted, but the phenomenon that people are going through is real.

Right. Like when you chant in groups, you get into this hypnotic state, this suggestible state. Like, that feeling is real. It doesn't just happen in cults, but a cult can manipulate that, right? And so we, you know, we called him grandpa, right? The adults that joined called him dad and we children called him grandpa. That was the only thing we ever called him. And we were taught from birth that you didn't have your family. You had the family. Right. So exactly. what you're saying, right? So we are ushered into this room. There's a giant easel with this giant picture of this like super creepy old bearded white man that all of the aunties are just crying and wailing. And for us, it is a little bit like, well, we've lost the most important person in our family. We've lost our patriarch. We've lost the head of whatever. But I also think for the children,

And it was like, yeah, but we also didn't know him. And, you know, just it was more like, how is this going to change now, right? What's going to happen? Is the family going to be over? You did eventually get uprooted. What happened there? You know, so his wife takes over and she's her own kind of crazy who's been indoctrinated by this man since she was a young teenager.

And I think in some ways she tried to make it better for the children. And then in some ways, she just also standardized a lot of things. things that were horrible. But she decided, you know, we're not going to have these giant communes anymore. I think maybe she didn't want the work of, you know, running 10,000 people in large brigades in a military fashion. And so it was, you know, go out on your own, find three or four people that you can be in a home with and a commune with and go out and do your thing. And this is when we end up getting moved from the leadership home because my mom has had too many kids at this point, even though this is what you're supposed to be doing. And this, in a way, became like a

really good thing that happened to me because we got into a much smaller commune and we interacted more in the population. And this is when, you know, I remember I started learning Portuguese at 10 years old and I could speak before I was 11. I remember thinking like, okay, I can do it now. You know, like I'm closer to my freedom because I can speak the language, because I know where I am on a map, because, you know, I go outside the walls more often than I did before. When did you know you wanted to leave the call? Because it sounds like that happened really early. So when I was six, I was like, I'm not going to grow up and do this. I'm going to leave the family. When I was 11, I started trying to make my plans. So that's when I actively was like, I need to get out of here.

But because my whole family, including my grandparents, all my aunts and uncles, everyone are in the cult, I didn't have a lot of options and just thought I had to wait till 18. When I finally had my definite crack in the brainwashing moment was on 9-11. We've just come to the U.S. for the first time. I'm 14 years old. I'm watching live news on television. First, I have to understand what live news is because, of course, we've all. been taught to hate the news and mistrust the media, all the things that are going on in the country now. And, you know, my people around me are praising God, right? This is God's promised judgment on

America. This is what's been coming. This is what our prophet told us. Yikes. And I'm just watching this horrible cartage and destruction and wondering to myself, you know, are we the bad guys here? Yeah. And I hear the term religious extremism as they're talking about the terrorists. And that was like a moment that just stood out to me as probably the first time I questioned, not just is this for me, but like, is this actually bad? Are we actually not good people? And that from there, I was like, I'm done. And this became my 1.5 year campaign to get myself excommunicated. And this for me was really important before I turned 16. Because when you turned 16, you were now considered essentially old enough to get pregnant, right? So, yeah,

on adults. And women didn't usually stay pregnant for very long, girls, I should say, stay unpregnant for very long once they turned 16. Unpregnant, yeah. So I was like, I need to get out of here. And I realized, you know, if they think they can save you, they will try. And exorcisms are not fun. So you have to do the worst thing. So for me, this was literally climbing over the commune walls in the middle of the night and going and having sex with a boy that I had met in the outside world. Because, you know, they'd gone from being the religious prostitution cult to AIDS, close the doors because we all have sex with each other. The biggest sin is going outside. Oh, interesting.

So once I had done that, it was essentially, now you're untouchable. Now we just need to get you out of here before you infect anyone else. Yeah, literally. Interesting. Wow. The irony is rich with them being so afraid of getting a disease. I mean, there's where to even start poking holes in the logic that is cult thinking, right? How did you end up going to the United States? Because it seems like that would be a radical change. There's no walls. There's no guards with automatic rifles. You can read the signs. You know, people are speaking English around you. That must have been insane. Biggest culture shock I've ever had in my life. So we left Brazil. My mom wanted to get out of there, and she kept insisting. And we eventually left and we spent a few months in the U.S.

And it really was that, Jordan, right? It was like the walls came down. And I remember thinking over and over again, while in the eight months that we lived in a commune in the U.S., like, oh, this is why they don't want us in the U.S., right? Like, you cannot be panhandling on the streets in the middle of the day. an American will walk up to you and say, why aren't you in school? Right. That doesn't happen in Brazil. You know, people can't be walking around the commune half naked all the time when it's a house that you can see right into.

And so the walls coming down, like you said, I can speak the language, all of this stuff. And so for most of us, when we left the cult, we just went back to wherever we had ties to, which for a lot of people was like the U.S., Australia, the U.K., and I, I didn't have any of that, but I did have a stepfather with a daughter in Houston, Texas. I'd met her three times before. And, you know, she'd left the cult about three years before, 25-year-old living in Houston trying to survive. And they were like, hey, do you want a 15-year-old? And she said, sure.

Who was they? The cult asked her if she wanted it or the American authorities asked her. No, my parents, you know, my dad. Your parents were like, hey, take your crazy sister who's causing trouble. And this is kind of what we did, right? Her older sister had already taken the three younger sisters of my dads. And, you know, now it was her turn to take the next one. When my 16-year-old brother wanted to get out of home, he came and lived with me for a while while I was a lieutenant in the Army.

Like, this was kind of what we did, how we tried to help each other, I guess. Sure. This is life in high control religions, right? your parents just kick you out if you don't believe like them. And so I was, yeah, I was 15 years old, zero dollars for about three weeks, went to enroll in high school. I had a social security card and a passport. And they were like, so we can't enroll you because you don't exist. But also, now that we know you exist, we need to see proof that you're in school somewhere in five days, or else we need to call the cops. A little catch-22. You can't

to our school, but you need to be in school. Right. It was a process. It took me about a month to get enrolled in school. And, you know, and then after that, it was, I just, I went to high school. I worked. I got through it all. And fortunately, I had a counselor, like, see me, identify, I needed help and really changed my life in many ways. But also, tell me about your experience in an American high school after leaving a sex cult. That must have been freaking crazy, because you're going to an American high school and, you know, we're kind of a puritanical society, despite what a lot of people might say. And you're going in there and the people sitting next to you in language arts class are just not ready for Daniela Messanek at all. No. And neither was I

ready for it. Right. So it was I went from nothing, right, being no schooled, living in a commune to 4,000 students in an inner city Houston high school. Right. So it was the only thing I know about school came from like, she's all that, right? Or high school movies. And I remember, you know, I was worried about being bullied or not accepted. What I was not prepared for was you're just completely ignored, right? And you just cannot make contact with anyone, to your point, everything I say is, is wrong, it's messed up. You know, I don't have any classmates that I knew of that are living on their own, working 40 hours a week. just coming from a sex cult, America's so Christian. It still surprises me to this day because we were taught that you all were fire-breathing agents of the end of the world. And America's very Christian.

Yeah. And my version of Christianity was, like you said, like nobody, you know, you come up with your parents or missionaries, but also at 16, you're having sex. People don't know what category to put you in. Right. So you're the devil, but we're doing all the things that you guys say is bad, but then also we're, yeah, like you just, you can't add things together because you're not only does the math not work. You're trying to add fruits and vegetables into it. It's like this, you can't make it work. There's no assembly of anything that's going to fit. And, you know, for sure the hardest thing is just one of the first questions people say is where are you from? And it's still a hard thing for me on my life, right? Because I am from. this cult. Like, I am not from anywhere. I grew up in Brazil, but I didn't have a normal Brazilian life. I don't know hardly anything about America at this point. I was relieved six years later to find out that all of America was not like Texas. Texas isn't that bad. I mean, I guess it might be if you're in like a crazy rural area where nobody ever leaves, you know, the hills have eyes kind of place. But I feel like people throw a lot of shade on Texas. I even do it and people write

in and they're like, you should come down here. It's not that bad. It's not. It is not. It is like the rest of America. I'll give you that. It's an interesting place. You know, so it's interesting to have this very, like, evangelical experience of everyone you're meeting are these evangelical Christians, but you've been told, like, these people are evil. And, you know, honestly, one of the beliefs, I think that I absorbed the most from the call and that I've had to fight the hardest at throughout these last 20 years is this idea that the outside world is evil and writing uncultured for me, part of the process was kind of taking off all of this armor that I put on and realizing probably didn't need most of it. Yeah. You know, and that was the part I couldn't see through

their lives, right? It was the nobody out there is going to love you. You're never going to be long anywhere. And when you try to integrate and try to be like, I'm here. I want to be this normal kid. And everyone treats you like you're really, really strange. You're like, oh, maybe they were right. you know, maybe I don't fit anywhere. Well, first of all, you didn't even have time to fit in anywhere. You said you had three or four jobs at once. What kind of jobs were you working during high school? So in high school, I first got a job at Chick-fil-A.

Which is also somehow appropriate, right? Because it's run by the evangelical crowd. Interesting choice. It was one of the few places they would hire you before you were 16. Huh. There's a lot of interesting things about Chick-fil-A and control. Oh, I'm all ears. Wait, wait.

Don't just jump ahead. What are you talking about? Let's, I want to hear about this. Okay. So, so, you know, Chick-fil-A is known to pay people better than any of their competitors. I heard about that, yeah. And in return, you are expected to always be smiling, to always say, my pleasure. Anytime someone says, thank you. Basically, there's this whole code of ethics for working at Chick-fil-A, right? that is supposedly like this very strong culture. And I'm not necessarily saying it's bad, but it would result in things like my manager walking up to me and be like, why aren't you smiling today?

We hired you because you have a pretty smile. Oh, wow. And being like, I don't know why I'm not smiling today, right? But this sort of attitude policing just last year when that story about how Chick-fil-A was asking people to volunteer in return for free food. Did you hear this one? I did, but I don't remember what it was. Volunteer for what?

It was to volunteer to work at Chick-fil-A, like handing out samples or like advertising in return for food. Just like, we'll let you eat for free. And people were like, oh, yeah, this is like a great thing that Chick-fil-A is doing. And I was just like, I think Chick-fil-A has their hand a lot further in the power and control games than an ordinary fast food place. That's interesting. And you saw that right away because you're like, hey, this reminds me of the cult that I literally, like the literal cult that I grew up in has similar practices and they do these very specific things. And nobody else is really seeing it because they don't have, they didn't have the insane childhood that I did. Yes. And not only did I see it right away, but I was good at it. Right. And this is going to be the same thing in the military. Like, I am good at being attitude policed and just smiling no matter how I feel like and just saying my pleasure, even though I want to. to strangle you and, you know, doing all the things like the army is going to want you to do. So I, like, to me, this was my basic skill. I could do this. I could fit in wherever there was a law firm above the mall. And so I ended up getting hired by someone who knew me from Chick-fil-A and was like, you always have a

great attitude. We're looking for data clerks. And so, you know, then I got paid eight or nine dollars an hour and went to high school in suits, which didn't make me more popular. Right. No, that's not a great way to fit in with the other kids is wearing a pants suit. Yeah. And then in college, I got really creative and started actually using things that the cult taught me. So I could, you know, babysit for $10 an hour, but I could make balloon animals for $250 an hour at a child's party. And every once in a while, I bust them out at my own kids party now. And people are always like, how did you learn this? And I'm like, I was once a teenage carnival clown in Mexico, you know, in another life. One does. You know, could sing, could dance, ended up teaching chess, right? I get trained on how to play chess in college and end up teaching kids chess that pays a lot of money. And of course, waiting tables, you know, so all the things.

At what point did you start thinking, hey, maybe I should be a normal teenage girl? Do that ever even happen? Or were you like, hey, that's never going to happen for me. Why bother? No, there was no point. And I specifically was not trying to be a normal teenage girl. So a lot of my peers and siblings who left the children of God would kind of go wild. And I was very, very afraid. Looking back now, I know it's because I have an addictive personality and I had a lot of trauma. I went into perfectionism instead, right? So I just have to work hard. I just have to, you know, make perfect grades, do all the right things. things and kind of eventually my life's going to be good. Eventually, I'm going to outrun the trauma. Don't think about it. Don't talk about it. I didn't know how to be a normal teenage girl.

I just liked being in school. Really, once I got to college and I was able to major in reading books and writing about books, I was like, okay, this is, this is lovely. Yeah, I remember you wrote in your book that books were kind of a forbidden thing in the cult. You just longed for books, which no kid generally does, or few kids generally do, I guess you would say. It was, you know, one of the things with my imposter syndrome was, so now I'm in college, I'm studying literature, everyone around me has been reading whatever they can lay their hands on since they were three, and I have, again, no sort of knowledge to build on, except every literature class starts with the Bible. And I was good at that, right? And it turns out, like every story,

concept you can find in the Bible, right? And that we have been trained since birth on kind of micro-analyzing sentences and making up things about them. So, you know, one of the things we would have to do in the cult was read all the dribble from this quote-unquote prophet and then write these reactions and responses about how it moved us. So basically spiritual journaling. I was good at that, right? And this was how I passed a bunch of the tests I needed to pass in high school to get out of classes. This is, you know, I used to say in college, like when you don't know how to answer the question, you just write two more pages and the teacher forgets that you didn't answer the question. That's funny. I was always surprised that this worked, but I think sometimes they would be like,

well, you know, she writes this good. She's smart. That's funny. I was terrible at English class, which is interesting now because I read like two or three books a week. And back then, it's like, whose story is it? And I'm like, what do you mean? No, that's your whole prompt. And I'm like, I'm going to just fail this class now. But if you're used to reading into something where there is frankly nothing because it's the demented ramblings of an old pedophile, it's like, well, I got this. There's at least something to chew on here. There's a throwaway line in your book where you say, you started burning yourself with cigarettes and you say, well, oh, well, at least I felt something. I assume you had to work through that trauma in some way. Yeah. Um,

I'm still working through it. I say that I really connected with the term disassociation when readers told me that I described disassociation really well in my book. I was like, oh, maybe that's the thing. You know, I did a lot of self-harming kinds of things, things that we would consider actually self-harming, and then things I think for me that were doing it to myself, right? So running and running your body until you pass out or until you. you have barely any weight on you can be just as much of a way of punishing yourself as other things

that we would consider self-harm. And that was one of the things I think that I fell into. And I have had to work a lot now on staying in my body, staying with your emotions. When you go through this much, I think pain and trauma in your life, you survive it by going away, going out of your body. Most of us describe it in the same way, right? We're up in the ceiling, watching, feeling bad for this poor little girl. That was actually a big part of how I was able to write the book is that it doesn't feel necessarily like it happened to me. It feels like it happened to this character in my life, because that is how I survived it. And so a big part of my work today is staying in your body, feeling the feelings, being present. I know we all deal with that, just constant.

wanting to be busy. Yeah. I know we're running out of time here. The cult is still around. Where is it? Do you track this at all? Okay. So in 2009, they kind of fell apart from the form they had had. And this was really the realization of the people running it that all of their joiners were getting old. And most of the children that they had tried to bring up as the new army of God were not sticking around. So they just kind of were like, hey, all that stuff we've told you forever about dropping out of the world. Like, psych, go put your kids in school and go, you know, you have all these people like my dad who's 70 now and has been working for them for, or my stepdad, has been working for them for his whole life, you know, and what is he going to do? So most of the people that hadn't left

yet, my parents had already left, but most of the people that hadn't left yet kind of had their awakenings then. And they were like, no, we're just, we're going to go do our own thing. But there still is a core of about 1,500 members. My grandfather still runs the money. They still bring in about a million dollars a year. It's an online thing. I think most of their active members are in Thailand and Brazil and, you know, places that are not, well, places that are still easier to hide Coltson. Yeah. And maybe have a weaker rule of law and or corrupt because I'm guessing at some level, cops do knock and go, hey, what is this? Oh, we're definitely a bunch of white people doing sketchy stuff.

And it's like, if you want us to pretend we don't see this, you're going to have to pay a visit to the chief of police and maybe drop off a package every now and then. Yeah. And also drop off some beautiful women. Oh, gosh. The religious prostitution at one point got turned off. But somehow all of the women that were in relationships with police and politicians got the, got the special permission to keep those relationships going. So, like, there was a woman in Rio who had eight kids with a man who was very high up in the federal police.

And, like, had a wife, had his whole own life and just had eight kids, but, like, donated probably 15 giant properties to the children of God throughout Rio and different parts of Brazil. Right. So lots of power, lots of connection. And certainly in Brazil, they were very involved with trafficking and corruption in much more blatant ways than has ever really been talked about. How do they recruit now? And how large is it? Do you have any idea? I think now it's about 1,500 members. I don't honestly know that they are recruiting or what they are doing. I just, I think they tried to just become this online church. Please send us money. just the last of the people that can't really admit that's what it was. And then many, many of like our parents and grandparents just are still in whatever country they were in, just living on the economy, making balloons, doing their missionary work

or they've found other churches to fold up into, et cetera. Many people just are like, well, I can teach English and live in this country that's cheaper. And so that's what they do now. Does cult programming ever come out in your life now? Do you ever see some weird influence from the cult childhood pop up? And you're like, oh, that's the cult talking or that's the cult making me think this way? 100%. So I think all, first of all of the reasons that I joined the Army were probably the same reasons my grandfather joined the children of God. I hate to be idle, right? I have to remind myself that it is okay to just like sometimes lie around and watch television. Like I always. think I have to be productive and be doing something and be accomplishing something. That perfectionism, which is, of course, is the opposite of self-love, definitely is still in my life. And then something I've just recently realized is like, so it's 20 years exactly since I walked away from the cult.

And I've been searching for a mentor that will tell me, give me guidance, tell me exactly what I should do with my life. And I've only recently found out, like, that's a cult leader. Oh, Yeah. My kind of desire sometimes to find an expert or to not have to make my own choices. Like, that is a cult programming thing. You know, it wasn't until I had written uncultured. I was at Harvard studying social identity theory, group behavior theory, that I realized, oh, I never got to form a personal identity, right? That is what we're doing between the ages of one and six. You didn't forget. You weren't allowed to. Right. I went cult to perfect student in college to perfect soldier in the army to finally, I feel like I'm developing my own personality along with my daughter. You know,

and I say, for example, I love thrift stores because you have to go in and there's no messaging, like in a mall, they're messaging you what you should be wearing. In a thrift store, you have to look at this and be like, do I love this or do I hate this? I think one of the good things in my life is that losing everything you know at 15 has meant that I have to be very deliberate about every single thing in my life because I don't have any models to go on. So everything I bring in, every way we decide to raise our children, you know, anything. It's like I have to investigate it. I have to be open-minded. And then I have to go find people to like teach me the right ways to do things. And that's been kind of cool, like hard, but cool and a good way to connect with people too.

I assume your kids don't have any contact with anybody who's in your extended family because that family, they're still in the cult, right? Or have you been able to balance that somehow? So most of my family is not anymore. Okay. And like I have a very good relationship with my mom. She and I both have kind of done decades of work. I feel like on understanding what has happened and my mom left about a decade after me. So I've been a bit of a mentor in that process for them. And I have 25 siblings. So some of them I talk to and many of them don't want to have anything to do with me because they're not ready to have their background outed. So, you know, I think anytime you speak out about things that happened in your family, you're going to end up

losing some family. Yeah. Well, especially this kind of stuff. Well, Danielle, you're a fascinating person. this is a really interesting conversation. And I really appreciate how open you are about all this. I really enjoyed your book. And thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you so much for having me. And to any of your listeners, I am on TikTok. We talk about cult stuff and where it shows up in the regular world all the time.

So Danielle Amesdenek-Young on TikTok, would love to see you there. And yeah, check out the book. The New York Times says the audio is kind of good. Cult stuff showing up in the real world. Can you give us an example of that, actually? Yeah. So this would be a whole chapter of my next book, right? So every time a cult blows up on the news, there's always this skinny white woman who's right next to the cult leader, right? These are your G. Lane Maxwell's. These are your Alison Max of nexium. You know, our cult had the white woman that took over. And as I'm thinking about this, right, and it's because she, her presence, the stereotype of the white woman, the pure white woman and everything that entails is kind of white. whitewashing the sins of the leader, right? So she's always there. She's always dedicated. Her skinniness is about self-sublamation. And that's exactly who you want next to you in a sex cult is that woman,

right? She ran the marriage ceremony to the leader. You see this in regular organizations. You see, you know, I think I played this role unwittingly sometimes in the army of like, well, we can't be sexist because, look, we have Captain Messinaec up here, right? So, we see this woman, this stereotype in all these places around us. Another example would be, like you said about, or like we talked about earlier about the chanting, right? So we think of cults and we think of chanting. If we know the research that shows that it makes us susceptible chanting in groups, right? We see that in sports. We see that in political rallies. We see that in school when the children have to do the pledge. There's music that's like that. And so, So this is what my next book is called The Coulting of America. And I'm looking at all these different things about group behavior that I see in the cult, I see in the army. So I know they're sort of about programming and influence or power and control.

But a group doesn't have to be a cult for it to be using these toxic methods of control or for it to be having these influences on you. And sometimes I think it's so comforting for people to be able to say, well, that's a cult and my group is not. And, you know, that's not how bad stuff works. Right. Oh, my gosh. Well, we'll have to have you come back for that. When is that out? You're still writing it, I assume. Yes, still writing it. So no, no dates on that. But everybody does seem interested. So hopefully soon. Yeah, well, you know, cult stuff, cult of America. I mean, you're just, you're putting the pieces together in a way that's definitely really interesting. Thank you once again. And we'll link to all of your

work in the show notes so people can follow up. Thanks so much, Jordan. This has been great. You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger Show with Amanda Katarzi, who was raised in a cult and later sex and labor trafficked. The women were trained to be insanely submissive. Like, you could never say no to any man. And then the men were trained in a very military way. These people are well-armed and well-trained. And it's a whole group that thinks that the world is easy.

and they need to repopulate the world with their people to bring the kingdom of God. When you turn 13 in that culture, you're an adult. So to be 13 years old being courted by men twice my age, three times my age, to see if I would make a good wife, it was just kind of outrageous. So I moved to California to go to school and I start training MMA. And my trafficker was there. He was actually one of my boxing coaches. Then he's like, you know, I like you.

And so now we're dating. So this is my first adult relationship. He's twice my age at this point. And then he would always take me up to his cabin on the mountain, which was really far away from everybody else. No phone service, isolation. And it was on a Native American reservation. So whatever they wanted to do to me, they could.

Oops, you accidentally got getting raped. That was very common of going. to go train and then all of a sudden, now that you fought 12 rounds, now you're going to be right. A girl ran a red light and teabone my truck. So I pull out my phone and I text my trafficker and I say, hey, I almost just died a car accident. He said, is your face fucked up? And I'm like, no. And he said, well, you're still fookable then.

Something isn't right here. This isn't who I want to be. This isn't what I want. And it was like I was coming out of water. I had this moment of clarity, and I knew something wasn't right, and I knew this wasn't what I wanted, and I knew I needed to act fast in order to get out of that situation because I knew it'd get sucked back in. To hear how she escaped her dire situation, check out episode 631 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. Such a fascinating and horrifying tale.

She mentioned that she got really good at reading body language and nonverbal communication. because she used it to gauge the mentality or mood of the adults, which of course, were around her, abusing her at the time. I remember actually learning about this concept when I was younger because it was a guy who I worked with who was really, really good at reading other people and reading body language. And I just thought it was so cool. And one day my boss who worked with us later told me

that he had developed those skills because he had a really abusive family. And so he was always hypervigilant. So he developed the superpower of being able to read other people in an almost uncanny way. because his home life was so terrible. So, of course, I didn't think it was that cool of a superpower after that. It seemed really useful, but the cost of admission was just far too high.

This cult, man, crazy. Couples had to share their wives. They had to have children with other men. Couples were separated if they had too many children with the same man because they wanted to really spread around. This is really, 2020 hindsight. This is how the cult keeps bonds between people, weaker than the bond between the people and the cult,

if that makes sense. You don't want people to pair up and go, we should take our family and get out of here. You can't do that if you got 15 kids with eight different dudes, getting everyone on the same page, moving around, it would just be impossible. Oh, God, I can't even believe I'm about to say this out loud, but the children were not allowed to wear panties to bed. An adult named Uncle Jerry would go check at night, literally panty checks on children. Again, ugh, I need to go brush my teeth for even saying that out loud. Really, really horrifying way to grow up. And Daniela mentioned as well that They had previous prophecies from the so-called prophet, this creepy old guy, that had not come true. And the cult had lost a lot of followers.

But everybody else doubled down on their beliefs. And I just want to highlight how common this is in cults, especially apocalyptic cults, where prophecies, of course, never come to light. The world doesn't end. Some people leave, but the ones who stay, they end up committing even more to the cause because of cognitive dissonance, right? I couldn't have given up all my job possessions, family members for something that's not true, so you recommit, and now that anybody who's skeptical has bounced, because it turned out to be

a bunch of BS, you're now surrounded by other believers. The cost of being wrong was now too high, so they redouble and they recommit. Just a fascinating psychological study here that unfortunately took a lot of people down and created a lot of trauma in the process. Big thank you to Danielle Mestinick-Young. All links to Danielle's stuff will be in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com. You can also check out our AI chatbot to get anything from any episode of the show, Feedback Friday, review stuff, promo codes, Jordan Harbinger.com slash AI is where you can find it. And remember, no Thursday episode, no skeptical Sunday, taking a little bit easier around here now that we come into spring. Transcripts are on the show notes, videos are on YouTube,

advertisers, deals, discount codes, and ways to support this show, which we always appreciate. That's going to be at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter, on Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn, in, and I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage those relationships using the same software systems and tiny habits that I use every single day. That's our six-minute networking course, and the course is free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. I want you to dig the well before you get thirsty and build relationships before you need them.

Many of the guests on the show, subscribe and contribute to the course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company. This show is created in association with Podcast 1. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Millie Ocampo, Ian Baird and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. If you know somebody's into the cult stuff, definitely share this one with them. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen, and we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great podcast shouldn't be this hard, so let me save you some time. If you like the Jordan Harbour You'll probably like something you should know with Mike Carruthers. It's one of those shows that

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