Timesuck with Dan Cummins - 234 - The Elan School, the Cult of Synanon, and the Troubling Troubled Teen Industry

Episode Date: March 8, 2021

Founded in 1974 by a man named Joe Ricci, the Elan School was supposed to be someplace where you could send your troubled teen so they could be rehabilitated and put back on the right track. But in reality, it was a cruel and chaotic nightmare where students were constantly being pressured to confess to things they’d done “wrong,” called “guilts,” which often were things as silly and not-wrong as having a crush on someone or smiling too much. At Elan, student was pitted against student in insane psychological mind-games and also pitted against each other physically. And most all of this was perfectly legal. It was considered healthy rehab! And the Elan School wouldn’t close until 2011. Today we use the Elan School as an excuse to explore the rise of the troubled teen industry in the US and how it all sprung out of a cult called Synanon. We also explore how the notion of childhood and parenting has been constantly changing for centuries in an attempt to rationalize why anyone would send their kid to the living Hell of a place like Synanon. Thanks for helping Bad Magic Productions give $12,500 this month to the USC Shoah Foundation. Click the link to learn more: https://sfi.usc.edu/ Watch the Suck on YouTube: https://youtu.be/ha4MAnii1Yo Merch - https://badmagicmerch.com/ Discord! https://discord.gg/tqzH89v Want to join the Cult of the Curious private Facebook Group? Go directly to Facebook and search for "Cult of the Curious" in order to locate whatever current page hasn't been put in FB Jail :) For all merch related questions/problems: [e-mail] (copy and paste) Please rate and subscribe on iTunes and elsewhere and follow the suck on social media!! @timesuckpodcast on IG and http://www.facebook.com/timesuckpodcast Wanna become a Space Lizard? We're over 10,000 strong! Click here: https://www.patreon.com/timesuckpodcast Sign up through Patreon and for $5 a month you get to listen to the Secret Suck, which will drop Thursdays at Noon, PST. You'll also get 20% off of all regular Timesuck merch PLUS access to exclusive Space Lizard merch. You get to vote on two Monday topics each month via the app. And you get the download link for my new comedy album, Feel the Heat. Check the Patreon posts to find out how to download the new album and take advantage of other benefits.

The Alon School. Did you have a rough and high school? Did you have to deal with bullies? Get beat up, get made fun of, called names. Have to deal with clicky cool kid crowds. It made you feel alone, like a loser. Did a particular teacher have it out for you? Even if you had it real, real bad, you probably did not have it anywhere near as bad as all of the kids who went to Alon School, how they had it. I don't think I'd be alive today if I hadn't been sent there, but I have nightmares to this day about it," said Sarah Levesque, who was sent to a lawn by her parents in 1996 at the age of 14 for two years.

I wake up crying at least once a week, she says, a lawn saved my life, but I feel haunted by it. The lawn school may have saved lives, but at what cost? It certainly destroyed some lives, and even took some, both directly and indirectly. Founded in 1974 by a man named Joe Richie, the Alon School was supposed to be some place where you can send your troubled teen so they could become rehabilitated

and get put on the right track. But in reality, it was a cruel and chaotic nightmare where students were constantly being pressured to confess to things they'd done wrong, called guilt. Which often weren't things that were wrong. Having a crush on someone was a guilt, smiling too much, or not enough, or guilt. At a lawn, you'd be pressured to share your deepest, darkest secrets, then those secrets would be used against you.

The administration pitted students against students in insane psychological mind games, even pitted them against each other physically. And all this was perfectly legal, all considered healthy rehab. And the Elon school wouldn't close until 2011. And none of the administrators involved have ever been brought to any kind of justice. This is such a strange story. There's so much to it. Four-minute lunches, menial labor, having feces dumped on your head, having to wear literal

dunce cap, something called the ring. What kind of person found a place so horrible? What kind of person works there? Why would parents ever send their kids to a place like this? What terrifying tactics did the Elon school inflict on children as young as 12? What other rehabilitation centers across the country used or still use?

Similar behavior modification methods. How is a strange narcotics rehab program called synonym that morphed into a cult behind a lot of this? All this and more on today's true crime, Big Brother is watching, not a cult, but still pretty much a cult edition to Time Suck. You will be staying to talk some. Happy Monday, motherfuckers. It's right, coming in hot today. Hill N'Rot, hell Lucifina, praiseable jangles, glory be to triple M recording in the suck

dungeon out of Cordillane Idaho as almost always where the sun is out right now and it feels so good I'm Dan Cummins the master sucker chaser of curiosity Walker Texas dad tracker and you are listening to time suck Interesting show today and stick around for the time sucker updates at the end a lot of differing opinions about how I approached this past week's topic of black Oh my gosh, it's, I'm totally blanking on it right now. Black, white, it's black water. Okay, I started to say it, I didn't have a written in my notes. I'm like, is that right?

Sure is. A lot of different opinions about what I got right, what I got wrong, and I love it. A lot of great minds in the cult of the curious with a lot of different perspectives. Hopefully by the time you hear this, our private Facebook group, Cold to the Curious, is out of Facebook prison.

Gotta mention that. We got zucked again. I know this is redundant for you, Patreon Spacelessers, since I already address this on the secret suck, but worth addressing here as well. I won't go into the same depth here today, but Facebook has chosen to crack way, way down on content lately.

It feels as questionable as a free speech advocate and unlike that, but as a run your business, how you see fit advocate, I do have to respect it. Hate it and respect it. Not my business. Feels like Zuck and co have caved too much to cancel culture, which hunters, in my opinion, but that's unfortunate. The world we live in now. God forbid some sensitive soul who chooses to enter a private social media group. So he's content to trigger them. We've explored building out our own social media interface on the app. We are expanding and rebranding the app this year, but it would literally cost tens of millions of dollars, not even exaggerating. It's a build to maintain something that works as well as Facebook does.

They have an army of programmers. We're looking into alternative platforms. Some with deep pockets will build out a market disruptor to Facebook eventually. That is uncensored and also doesn't fill your feed with non-stop political extreme, like extreme political posts. And when that happens, we'll start a new group there. In the meantime, I know how much the Coltley Curious means to many of you. We are working with Facebook, their thought police, to clean up our site.

We need to create some kind of pin post breaking down what the new rules are. Once we hopefully get it back. If they do shut the group down, we will launch a new group with a very similar name soon and just try to keep popping back up. Sorry for the headache, not allowed we can do to keep changing the rules on us. So stay tuned on what's going on with Colt the Curious. In the meantime, we still have Discord, Instagram, the regular Times Look Facebook page, May Luciferina seduce the zuck into chilling fuck out a bit.

Super sweet beach dream and long sleep, bad magic time suck tea. Now in the store at badmagicmerch.com, old zucker bird can't suspend our store. Thank God. Sure it looks incredible. Getting pumped for spring. Well done Logan.

And last thing before today's story time. Launching a fun new time suck app feature. We're very proud of Reverend Dr. Been overseeing Biddle Xer with this for a while. The order of the suck society of the understanding of critical knowledge, X, Quo, Uberbus, we are inviting time suckers to head to badmagicmerch.com starting March 15th. Sign up to receive one of our time suck free mace and type stickers. The cost you five bucks that just cover shipping and handling, we make nothing on these. Then you can put it up in your business. So fellow meat sacks can come support your

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Really excited to get this out with the economy, finally opening up more and more across the country, small businesses need as much support as we can give them right now. All right. Excited about that? Excited about today's show. Bingo Bingo.

Let's get into it. For this week's episode, we dive into the what the shit world of the Alon school. Not necessarily a cult, but an institution that sure as hell operate a lot like a cult on a lot of levels. Alon student slash prisoners were forced to comply with draconian, often arbitrary, sometimes downright, absurd, ass-in-line, contradictory rules, like how you shouldn't smile too much, but you also shouldn't not smile. And when they broke bullshit rules like that, they faced punishments to much from strict,

corporal to abusive to just fucking cruel and dangerous. Failure to comply could lead to timeouts in the corner that might last for literally months to public humiliation like being forced to wear degrading costumes or getting your ass beat raw with a paddle by other students to getting punched in the fucking face, quite literally and repeatedly by other students to getting literal shit dumped on you, all this while being aggressively verbally abused, all in the name of therapy, developed and carried out by people with little

to literally no psychological education, no therapeutic training. All this was carried out in an incredibly expensive teen rehab center that was more of a communal torture chamber than was a psychiatric treatment facility. The abuse you'd received along was curated by administrators and then largely carried out by your peers. To get out of a lawn, you'd have to become an abuser as well, it's so fucked up on cell-e levels. To be properly rehabilitated, you had to play the role of prison guard essentially

in a sick version of the Stanford prison experiment in the middle of nowhere main that was the Elon school. What a tale we have for you today. Let's dig into this all too recent modern madness. To understand how anyone could allow the Elon school to ever open, it's nut house doors. We need to first look at what it was like to be a teenager in America in the late 70s when the Elon school first opened. When parents thought Elon was the place to save their troubled team, after that will walk through a little bit of history regarding how we adults have viewed children over the years, how notions of how to raise them and discipline that have changed so much over the

years, so much change over the right quote unquote way to parent will help explain how some parents thought it was okay to send their kids to a lot. There's still a lot of differences in how people should parent as far as thoughts today. Then we'll take a look at synonym. This therapy organization slash cult, really, I think definitely a cult that kicked off the troubled teen industry a lot would become a part of. I'm also examined a few other a lot type troubled teen programs. Some still in existence

today to illustrate how a lawn is sadly not an isolated example of what we're talking about. So let's get started. Yeah, yeah, yeah, time for some learning. The wayward youth who would become a lawns first students were between 12 and 18 when the school was founded in 1974, meaning they were born between 1956 and 1962. These first students came at the tail end of the wars over. All the young dudes are home, so let's get to fucking in nestin, baby boom generation, the directly followed World War II. Hail to Savannah. In the late 60s, when the first lawn students were kids,

the counterculture we've talked about so many times here on TimeSuck, was going strong. Ambitious and original, the counterculture youth, with the new heroes and heroines who would help propagate a new era of kick-ass tunes, funky anything but a suit and tie clothing, so much more drugs, so many less haircuts than their predecessors. And they're comparatively straight-laced parents, many of whom had sacrificed so much for God in country, they didn't understand or frankly care for these goddamn hippies. Urban dictionary defines goddamn hippie. I love that they have a definition, not just for hippie, but for

goddamn hippie, as an individual who proceeds to sit on their lazy liberal asses, smoke and marijuana and philosophical, philosophizing on Marcus, Angleon ideas and the power of the working class whilst doing jack shit worked themselves. Sounds more or less how my grandpa defined them. Pop award. It was not a big fan of the hippies. He didn't care for me having tattoos, even though one of the tattoos I have features him, or not being clean-shaving. I just have a long hair.

He really didn't care for that. Glad he never learned how YouTube worked. Never saw my tale about drop and weight too much acid. One night in Vegas, he would have been thoroughly disgusted. I feel like the urban dictionary description is more or less how a lot of parents from the generation proceeding the hippie saw their kids. They bought their houses in the suburbs

with the white picket fence, right? They had their two kids, they bought a station wagon, boat, dog, they expected their kids to get a real job like they did so they could replicate. They'll leave it to beaver, father knows best, steady as she goes lives. And then their kids heard some Zeppelin,

smoke some joints, drop some acid, maybe connected some unmarried D with some birth controlled unmarried P and the empty back bedroom of a house party and they were like, fuck that noise. Why get a house in the suburbs when you can get a Volkswagen bus? You can turn on, tune in, drop out and follow the dead.

One of the former students of the lawn who talked about why his parents shipped him off, actually said that's a part of why his parents were worried. Love getting stoned and skipping school to leave town because the dead were always on tour somewhere. That was pretty funny. Members of the greatest generation, those born from 1901's, 1927, and those are the following silent generation. Both generations were the parents of the baby boomers. They'd seen war. They'd come out of the Great Depression. They didn't take any security in life for granted.

Their values were shaped not by a desire for self-expression, but by the ability to endure tough times, to be prepared for any more tough times ahead. Their lives were largely defined by self-sacrifice, hard work, faith and authority and religion. They needed both the government and God to get them through rough times. They were generally pro-establishment. And many of their kids, like kids, are want to do, rebelled against their parents' beliefs. They saw frugality as boring. They saw not security, but corruption in the government in the church.

Working for the man to make a steady paycheck, settle down with a fellow square and kick out two kids. Uh-uh. How about sell some weed, get as much ass as possible? Why settle down in the suburbs when you could hitch, or hitch hike to LA or San Francisco and live there, right? Live free. Rather than eagerly serve their nation

and war like their parents had in World War II and Korea, many of these hippies protested US involvement in Vietnam. They traded, signed up for the service for organizing picket lines, petitions and protest marches. The times they were a change in and change, they can be scary. And a lot of parents got scared. And not all of their fear was unfounded.

Sex, drugs and rock and roll does not work out for everyone. For every Mick Jagger, Robert Plant, and Stevie Nicks. Now there were always thousands and thousands of young dudes and hippie chicks who partied and partied and partied and did not get famous, or ever make any money in the counterculture revolution. Ended a broke, eventually too old to still be a rebel without a cause, cool. When the party was all over, they ended up with drug addictions, jobless burnouts, sitting

in the park, high as fuck, jamming on your guitar with only a hundred bucks to your name, plays out a lot better at 20 than it does at 30 and it looks downright depressing at 50. Comes across or can as romantic when you're young And it often looks fucking foolish when you're older. The end of the flower child era would bring with it a harsh reality. Many of the young people who had once camped at Woodstock and flocked from all over to Berkeley for the summer love were now living on the streets addicted to drugs, engaging in various criminal activities to support their habits, a relentless dedication to self expression and living in the moment, a perpetual carpe, DM lived for today and not tomorrow attitude had eventually stopped

working out when tomorrow showed the fuck up and the bills were due. The piper finally arrived and dammit, they wanted to get paid. Kids who grew up in the 70s, those first lawn students were kids who'd watched the counterculture movement turn from a free spirited celebration of self-expression to burn out young adults with few prospects. And many of their parents did not want that shit to happen to them. And I'd say that's fair. That's a fair concern.

And when these parents caught their more rebellious kids ditching class to find authority, screwing around with the opposite sex, doing drugs, rebelling against them, etc. Some of them got more than worried, they got really scared, they didn't want their kids to end up like so many of those goddamn hippies. And they made the drastic and terrible parenting decision to send their kids to a place like a lawn. Let's talk about parenting decisions for a bit. This episode kind of hinges on terrible parenting decisions since the overwhelming majority of the lawn students were not sent there by the state, but were paid to be placed there by parents. Parenty man, it is hard.

I have a 13 to 15 year old now and they both really fucking suck and they're hard to get rid of. I can tell you that personally. I've tried pushing both of them out of the tree fort at various times. Not only have they lived, neither of them have even broken any bones or anything. I've greased the stairs that lead up to the room. Neither have taken an unfortunate and untimely tumble. You know, they're crafty and they're resilient.

And I'm kidding, of course. Gosh dang. I love my kids. I got lucky. I have two great kids. Fantastic young meat sacks, but it still is hard to parent them. Lindsay and I constantly wonder if we're doing it the right way. You don't really know what you're in for until you're in the thick of it. The old cliche is true. Like you're not given a handbook, no guidebook. You know, there are only suggestions of other parents and so-called parenting experts and what they say you should do is basically continually changing. The way parents were being taught to parent was changing dramatically in the 60s and 70s of the 20th century, leading up to those kids getting sent to a long. The way we meet Zach's have reared children has changed substantially over the past century. The very concept of childhood has changed so, so much

over the last few hundred years. We've suck so many historical figures who were out there working full time and helping to support their families when they were the age of grade schoolers today. Stuff's just constantly blows my mind, Harry Houdini. All right, early times like episode, found out he left Milwaukee and searched a better work

to more properly help out his family when he was fucking 12 back in 1886. 1910, over two million children in the US under the age of 15 were employed. Kids in America, under the age of 10, were working 12 hour shifts in factories at that time. Can you imagine yourself working a 12 hour factory shift? Sometimes a graveyard shift, overnight shift.

When you were eight years old, nine, can you imagine your nine year old, putting away your legos, 3 p.m. So they give some shut eye, if we're heading over to the horse glue factory, whatever shit it was, midnight. Mommy has some extra spice of bolognese, so I don't get why I headed

at the glue factory tonight. Mommy, wake me up, my foot's is a web, so I don't get white headed at the glue factory tonight. Mommy, wake me up at my foot. See the web when I come home for no factory at one time tomorrow. He helped me watch the toxic, constant, wadginic chemical health my health, Mommy. Maybe we can have a picnic soon, Mommy. When my arm heals from falling in the bottling machine, I don't deny the defacto-y. And burning my arms, you know, off, Mommy. It's outrageous.

It's outrageous. Can't believe it happened so recently. Going back a little earlier, in 19th century Great Britain, one third of poor families were without a breadwinner. As a result of death or abandonment, obliging many children to work to feed the family. In England and Scotland in 1788, two thirds of the workers and 143 water powered cotton mills were described as children. High number of children at that time were described as working as prostitutes. I mean, let the fuck. Famous English author Charles Dickens worked at the age of 12, put labels on bottles

of shoe polish and a factory. And certain less developed parts of the world, millions of kids work in sweatshops right now. An estimated 218 million kids, as young as five years old are employed worldwide. At least 152 million are enforced child labor according to basic facts about child labor published by the child labor coalition. Almost half these kids are between the ages of five and 11. Listen to one girl's story from a small village in India, just a couple years ago. My sister is 10 years old. Every morning at 7am, she goes to the bonded labor man.

And every night at 9, she comes home. He treats her badly. He hits her if he thinks she is working slowly, or if she talks to the other children, he yells at her. He comes home looking for her. If she is sick and cannot go to work, I feel this is very difficult for her. I don't care about school or plane. I don't care about any of that. All I want is to bring my sister home from the bonded labor

man. For 600 rupees, I can bring her home. That is our only chance to get her back, but we don't have 600 rupees. We will never have 600 rupees. You know how much 600 rupees is worth? Eight fucking dollars. Eight dollars. This kid, her whole family can't put together $8 to get her a little sister out of a labor camp. It's, oh my God. Most modern attitudes towards children in the developed world did not emerge until the past century. Previous to that, many cultures going back to ancient Rome

and the Greeks, women could be married at 12 men at 14. They still got married that young less than a hundred years ago here in America. Wasn't necessarily the norm, but totally legal. And it did happen often on certain parts of the country, especially in ancient and medieval civilizations. It was a regular practice to give girls away and marriage as soon as they reached puberty if not earlier. This practice continued throughout the Middle Ages and most girls were married by the age

of 15 back then instead of families worrying about troubled teens, wondering whether or not they should send their team to a place like the Alon school, teens were already out of the house most of the time, married, working full time, had fucking families of their own. They didn't send a teen to rehab. If you sent them anywhere,

you just sent them out into the real world, defend for themselves. Let's talk about childhood discipline now. The way childhood is viewed has shifted so, so much over the years. The way to discipline kids has shifted substantially as well. On colonial America, Puritan beliefs shaped the way early Americans viewed the needs of children. The term Puritan came to mean against pleasure.

Fun, we've talked about Puritan's before. Not a fun love and group. For America's early Puritanans, too much play was considered sinful. Italans being the devil's workshop, kind of mentality. Puritan parents wanted to raise obedient children, so they provided religious training to their children, taught them to memorize scripture. Family life was very patriarchal. You did what dad said or dad beat the shit out of you. And you do what mom said or dad beat the shit out of you. Spare the rod and spoil the child. The rod in the original Massachusetts Bay colony was a

birch rod, which was not actually a single stick. It was a bundle of leafless twigs all tightly bound together. Enough weight to do some damage, pliable enough to really be whipped. Typically, you were whipped with this bundle of sticks on your bare ass until it was red, swollen, and often a bit bloody. That'll teach you not to memorize your hymns, or drop an egg, or look at Dad Cross, or whatever. Little Care was given to the Puritan child's individual desires, almost no care, or emotional needs. Puritan's discipline equaled love. Authority and obedience described the relationship between parents and children. Puritan discipline was based on spiritual concerns. A breakdown in family rules symbolized a breakdown in God's own order.

And as many know, religion was essential for Puritan's. Little Jebediah didn't get the cow milked when his parents had told him to milk the cow. Little Jebediah got his ass whipped so that his wanton careless, listless ways didn't erode the moral fiber of the entire family. Puritan parents thought they were quite literally beating the devil out of their kids when they discipline them.

They were taught that all of us are born and sin, wicked from birth, righteous beatings could save souls. Children were wild horses that needed to have their spirits broken and tamed. Children were often whipped in public, forced to make public confessions at meetings. Matters such as the rights of children were fucking laughable, but not considered. And in the early days of America, parents were far from the only adults who were up and on the kids. Teachers, hit kids, a lot with sticks that you shit like a whispering stick as a punishment

for, you know, whispering. Disciplinarians in this example would tie a wooden gag with holes in it onto a child's tongue. Many children had a cleft stick, a stick split at the end placed on their tongues for quote ill words or untimely words in school. Just get tortured. We're talking to our school. All these weapons were going on the 17th century when kids by and large outside of the children of nobles and the wealthy were seen as little more than savage beasts. But it'd be taught molded sometimes literally beaten into a civilized form of some kind of animal.

All of that would get child protective services and or the police called it on you today. But in 1650, you could put a cleft stick on your kid's tongue all fucking day long. You wouldn't get in trouble. You whip him with that birch stick as much as you wanted. It was to firm God fear and parent. Today, probably going to jail.

The modern notion of childhood with its own autonomy and goals only began to emerge in the Western world during the 18th century enlightenment. The 17th century English philosopher John Locke was particularly influential in defining this new attitude towards children, especially with his theory of tabularasa, meaning blank slate. Locke theorized that people's minds at birth were a blank slate without rules for processing data, and that data was added and rules for processing were formed

solely by one's sensory experiences. According to his theory, a child's mind was a blank slate, it was blank and it was the duty of the parents to give it the correct sensory experiences. Shape it the right way. Lock himself emphasized the importance of providing children with easy, pleasant books to develop their minds rather than just beatings. Writing, children may be cousined, cosened into a knowledge of the letters, be taught

to read without perceiving it to be anything but a sport, and play themselves into that, which others are whipped for. And this was, for most of the world of the time, a novel idea, like Peel's Minds were blown. Wait, what? You don't have to constantly bait your children to develop them into adults. You can let them read books. Are you shitting me?

How are we paying supposed to get our work out, see, if we're not constantly chisening, whipping our children? Loxidea's applied to child rearing, gain traction following his death in 1704, building on the ideas of John Locke and other 17th century thinkers, 18th century French philosopher John Jacques Rosal, described childhood as a brief period of

sanctuary before people encountered the perils and hardships of adulthood. He thought, and I know this is crazy, that childhood was a beautiful period of innocence that should be protected. Okay, funny guy. Well, books and set of beatings, right. And we're supposed to shelter children from the harsh realities of the world. What next?

So we tell kids that they're loved. Should they be nurtured and made to feel special? Should they not work? 12 hour graveyard shifts and factories? No, no thank you. I'll stick to the old Bertrod. I'm not trying to raise a sissy. If an apple a day keeps a doctor away,

I guess constant fucking beatings or we'll keep that doctor employed. As a century war on, the new insane notion of childhood as a time of innocence led to the first campaigns for the imposition of legal protection for children. In the 19th century in Victorian England, the genre of children's literature also took off with a proliferation of humorous, child-oriented books attuned to child's imaginations. This was new. Lewis Carroll's fantasy book, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,

published in 1865 in England was a landmark in the genre, regarded as the first English masterpiece written for children. It's publication opened the first gold age of children's literature. And before this, don't give a fuck about kids, like books for kids get out of here. The latter half of the 19th century

saw the introduction of compulsory state schooling for children across Europe, which decisively removed children from the workplace into schools. Now poor kids, not just nobles, now we're supposed to learn and shit and rich themselves instead of just being expendable cogs on the wheel of industry, goddamn hippies.

And a lot of places this happened in a latter half of the 19th century. Took a while for all the kids to be taken out of the factories though. Actually, what am I talking about? Like I just talk about millions of kids still in factories. 1916 federal legislation was finally passed in the US regulating what kind of work kids can do in factories, what age they had to be, how long they could work, etc. Two years later, that law was repealed thanks to the successful lobbying efforts of wealthy and influential industrialists. How dare Uncle Sam stand in the way of my livelihood, my telly me I can't hire able-bodied

children to work long hours doing grueling work for little pay. In a dangerous factory, completely free of any and all safety regulations with no legal recourse, should said conditions bring about the death of disability. Anti-child labor legislation would begin to be firmly passed in the US until 1937. That's pretty recent. Meanwhile some Western kids are still working factories, the same industrial revolution that gave birth to those factories. Also is given birth to a new and lucrative children's toy market.

With the birth of toys being produced in mass and factories, childhood now seen as a profitable industry. And this will help us run a new age of letting kids, be kids, and maybe not work and be beaten all the time. Don't just beat them. Now you can sell them toys and candy and Halloween costumes and children's programs and make a lot of money off them. By the mid-twentieth century of America, an intense interest in using institutions to support the innate creativity of children develops more nurturing. New institutions help reshape children's play, the design of suburban homes, schools, parks and museums.

Dad's drinking then has turned into a family room. God damn hippies! A room in America! Toys were designed to promote creativity. Art was now included in school curriculums for the first time. It was okay for the kids to play. And the ethos of let the kids play has remained in the West and much of the world until the present day.

Now let's look at how parents were being instructed by experts in the 20th century when it came to having and raising these kids. I think this helps the existence of a lot in similar institutions make a bit more sense, like how could parents think it was okay to send their kids to a law? Well, because they had a different perspective on how they're supposed to raise kids than we do now, because they've been fed all sorts of crazy ideas regarding how you're supposed

to raise kids. The way many of us think we should raise kids now, how we should parent, a very different than the way many of our parents were taught to raise their kids. And that was way different than the generation before and so on and so on. The rules, like I said before, they just keep changing. Some of this stuff is so fascinating. Back in 1910, moms to be in the US were told that in order to have a beautiful baby, they must refrain from thinking ugly thoughts.

Like they actually thought that if you thought about ugly stuff, they'll make your baby ugly. My God, Carol! Look at beautifulfort's BDIs and tiny chin. What were you thinking when you were pregnant? Literally, what were you thinking? Just constant thoughts of monsters, dog droppings, and toilets. Did you even give birth to Beaufort? Or did you just ship this BDI'd gremlin turd out of you? Which is cold run?

On 1910s, experts encouraged parents to put a baby in an oversized shoe instead of holding them. They believed that handling your baby, as little as possible was the best way to do it. It's a good thing. Not holding them nurtured their independence. They're talking about tiny ass babies. We now know, hopefully, not good to ignore your baby.

That would be called neglect. Neglect is no longer in style. That's no longer, uh, friendly accepted. You're supposed to give your kids attention and all kinds of stuff now. Extreme emotional neglect can actually do something really terrible called failure to thrive. When babies literally get so sad, they stop growing.

And in very extreme cases, they can actually die from neglect. This is like the saddest thought of a destiny. Two decades later, a lot of parenting experts weren't even smarter when they came to babies. A pamphlet published by the US government in 1932 really not that long ago. Suggested that one should start toilet training their baby immediately after birth, like a newborn baby. Uh, what? Clearly doctors did not yet have a firm understanding of the timeline for babies motor skill development.

Now we know that the average baby potty trained somewhere around 27 months, not at birth. Newborn babies, they can't even control what their fucking arms are doing. They're just like, wait, their arms, they don't, they have no more control of their arms than you have control of their arms. Like they, they can't hold their head up, let alone sit on a toilet and wipe their own asses, or people thinking back then. This illustrates why modern, large sample size control group, well designed, scientific studies are so important. This is why science is so important. Without proper research and analytics, we just do what we think sounds like the right thing to do. And that is often absolutely not the right thing to do, because we're a highly emotional and often

very irrational species. Come on, new arm baby. You're a tiny little person, act like it. Why can't you do little person things? Stupid baby. You have little legs. You're going to walk around baby. You have tiny little arms and hands. You're going to wipe your tiny little bohole, you stupid little tiny baby. Three decades later, the stupidity continues. In a 1962 book, Dr. Walter Sackett, a parenting expert of the day.

This is 1962. Recommends giving black coffee to babies. Starting at six months of age to stimulate them. Drink your coffee and drink a black app. Drink a pipe and hide you stupid little baby. Uh, y'all still recommend serving bacon and eggs to babies. Starting at six weeks old. Oh, baby.

Guess I'll help you to your bacon again. Oh, no, I have teeth. I can't control my arms. I'm a stupid little born baby. You can't even eat bacon, I'm so dumb. I lay out this out to show how much the concept of childhood and the right way to parent has changed so much over the years. And it keeps changing.

People have very different opinions right now about how children should be parented. Some parents view spanking, for example, as necessary and fair, some view it as abuse. According to a 2018 psychology today article, and according to the websites of a few law firms, the legal spanking of a child involves smacking the buttocks with an open hand. If you apply excessive force, which is subjective, it is not considered reasonable or moderate

discipline. If you leave a bruise, scratch, or cut with your open hand, it is now considered legal child abuse. 100 years ago, though, open hand, close hand, hand with the fucking stick in it, you can just go to town legally on a kid. Now likely to be charged with a felony or two. Outside of discipline, so many different ideas of how a kid should be parented,

some believe that children should not have any worries and should not have to work. Life should be happy and trouble free. While others think that children should have to develop certain responsibilities and childhood to prepare them for adulthood. Most people fall somewhere in the middle, balancing the need to create good meat sacks

with the desire to create a better life for one's children, let them be a kid. Some parents think that their kids should be able to run a muck and a fucking restaurant and bother everyone around them without repercussion. Some parents think that their kids should be allowed to sit in the movie theater and talk as if they're at home. Some parents think that their kids should never ever get a swat on the bottom, even if they spit in their face or hit the neighbor kid or trying to gouge the family dog's eyes out. And this parent thinks that those parents should be beat with that old Puritan birch dick. And that my kids should be able to take a couple swings on them as well. So many different ways to parent.

To remain focused on today's topic, let's talk about how parenting shifted in the 70s and 80s. And how someone could possibly send that a child that they presumably loved to a place as terrible as the Elon school. Time to dig into the troubled teen industry and the theory of tough love. The Elon school's methods would go unchecked for so long because of the pervasive idea at the time

that rehab centers could use any means necessary to get people back on the right track. It's just tough love. The ends justified the means. That was the logic. If a kid didn't send to prison or died or in their time at a lawn or shortly thereafter, if they didn't end up out on the streets doing all kinds of illicit shit,

the moment they were released, well then the program was a smashing success, regardless of how much psychological damage it may have actually done. A lot of parents were afraid that the subculture was ruining their kids' lives, and a lot of predators prayed on that fear. Some people saw families fear for their children's well-being as a way to make a lot of predators prayed on that fear. Some people saw families fear for their children's well-being as a way to make a lot of money. Spawning what has been called the troubled teen industry. Trouble teen facilities come in a variety of shapes, horrible sizes, boot camps, behavior modification facilities, wilderness therapy retreats, gay conversion centers, my God, and

all their marketed parents who feel like they desperately need to change their children to behavior in some way before they die, ruin their lives, go to hell, whatever. These services claim to be able to fix anything parents think is a problem, being disrespectful, staying out too late, drug use, entitlement, criminal activity, playing too many video games, whatever. If the parents decide to heed the program's advice, their children are trapped in a highly unregulated and often secluded camp with no means of defense or outside contact, which is terrifying.

Now, and sometimes, make no mistake, trouble teens do get the help they need at these places, for sure. There are a lot of great programs, a lot of great counselors, a lot of success story testimonials you can find all over the place. However, the way these camps are set up,

the set up is a great recipe for these kids to be abused, molested, taken advantage of, in so many different ways. And that happens as well. There's just not enough regulation regarding who can work in these places. And what kind of therapy quote unquote, they can dole out. Many of these counselors are called counselors. Then I have a fucking degree in counseling. A lot of them don't have any degree. Many of these places are basically completely unregulated. Sometimes these organizations like Alon, they would add humiliation and physical assault as a form of treatment. They just have to make up their own treatment.

These facilities therapy can include food and sleep deprivation, vigorous labor, verbal and physical abuse, psychologically scarring humiliation. In some extreme cases, young people have experienced solitary confinement, sexual abuse have been killed at these places. And this unregulated $1.2 billion a year industry. As a 2020 between 50 and 100,000 adolescents currently spending at least part of their year in these facilities.

I'm sure COVID has changed those numbers, but outside of COVID. There are, I found out doing some extra research, a whole bunch of these places around the Suckdunch within like two, three-hour drive. So many in Western Montana, Montana has a lot of these places because of a very extreme lack of regulations. Some reporters in Missoula have been doing some investigative journalism, right now, kinds of troubling stories about these places the past few years. 16-year-old Carly Newman, whose 2004 suicide spurred a largely unsuccessful push for meaningful regulation of Montana's teen treatment centers,

was put in isolation nearly 30 times in six months. At Spring Lodge Academy in Thompson Falls, this is a two-hour drive from where I sit. Christopher Balanchie, a Harvard-affiliated board-certified psychiatrist who testified as an expert witness in a lawsuit stemming from Newman's death said such methods don't teach young people helpful skills for navigating their emotional issues. He told the bazillion, sure, I mean, you can coerce people to behave. That's what jails do. A lot of troubling shit has gone on. It's spring-log academy over the years.

A lot of weird creepy shit too. Like cuddle puddles. This is so fucking ridiculous to me. This one on, probably still goes on in a lot of these places. A former teen resident, Tori Jane, who was there in 2004 in 2005, described this cuddle puddle, says, everyone would pile in the common room and cuddle. We weren't really allowed to touch each other otherwise.

So that was like allowing them to release it all at once. Staff participated in it. Everyone would be rolling around on the floor and snuggling. Rebecca Mormon, a teen there in 2004 and 2005 as well, described it as Lane in a huge cuddle puddle. And there's almost always staff involved. There would be a situation where a male staff member in his 40s or 50s would be in a cuddle puddle with 14 and 15 year old girls lying there, spooning them. Just the way you would lay with someone that you're in an staff member in his 40s or 50s would be in a cuddle puddle with 14 and 15 year old girls. Line there, spooning them, just the way you would lay with someone that you're in an intimate relationship with.

She said there would be encouraged to scratch each other's backs, rub each other's hair, etc. What the fuck? Would you be okay with your teen daughter? Being told she has to participate, mandated, in a cuddle puddle with some middle aged dude or she'll be punished. I wouldn't. I would want to get a hold of Captain Cuddle puddle with some middle-aged dude or she'll be punished. I wouldn't. I would want to get a hold of Captain Cuddle puddle and introduce him to Lieutenant

fist in the face party. Maybe trade the cuddle puddle for a fucking baseball batman soon. That shit is outrageous. Punishments often over the top of these places at the recently closed New Horizons youth ranch in Rexford, Montana near the Canadian border just under 200 miles from the suck dungeon here. Teen boys forced to stay there, caught masturbating, will be sentenced to a week and a half of rigorous all day manual labor for beating off.

And not like loudly beating off in front of other residents or staff. I mean, if you're whipping your dick out and you're beating your meat in the middle of a group therapy session, and they be screaming at the counselors while you do so, just fuck all you lose. Hey, look at, hey, look what you mean, just a dick. In that case, maybe some serious punishment is needed, some strong behavior modification. But these kids, they would get severe punishment

for like quietly beating it in their beds, you know, if they got caught or in the bathroom, they got caught. That's just being a teenager. You might as well punish them for breathing. Long days of being basically on a chain gang, because you listen to your God-given hormones. Other punishments included having nearly all your food taken away.

If you tried to run away, you would lose most of your clothes for a while, and walk around your undies for a week or more. You could cut beaten off and run away, well, I guess you're doing manual labor and your whity tides for a week or two. And these punishments are nothing compared to what would go on at the lawn school, but went on. So where does all this shit come from?

Ah, these programs can trace their treatment philosophically. What did I just say? Philosophically? These programs can trace their treatment philosophy directly. I kept trying to combine philosophy and directly into one word. We're indirectly to an anti-drug called synonymon. I'd never heard of this before.

Founded in 1958, synonymon sold itself as a cure for hardcore heroin addicts who could help each other by breaking new initiates with isolation, humiliation, hard labor, and sleep deprivation. A synonym was found in Santa Monica, California back in 1958 by Charles Dietrich. In 1968, they would open their membership up to non-addicts, and that's when synonyms slowly changed to a cult. The time was right. How many times have we traced cult formations

to California in the late 60s or like early 70s? Father Yode, source cult, Manson family, David Berg, children of God, God, fuck, creepy ass bastards. Jim Jones and the People's Temple, more to call him Jimmy. Jimmy Jones, let's really get our minds around the craziness that was synonym. It'll help us understand a lot and all in a sound, it's just fascinating.

I'm going to dive a little deeper into this institution that I normally would on a side road. There's so much to it, we may have to do a full suck on synonym day. We're now a little half suck, a little mini suck, a little suck within a suck, I have to do. Born in 1913 in Toledo, Ohio, founder Charles Dietrich, was only four when his alcoholic father died in a car accident. His mother soon remarried, raised him as a devout Roman Catholic.

Dietrich later recalled, I believed literally that I would go to hell if I didn't go to church on Sundays. When he was 14, he read his stepfather's copy of HG Wells, the outline of history, and quote, became a militant atheist almost overnight. Soon after that, he began drinking a lot, a lot, a lot. He drank his way right into dropping out of college, then Charles bounced from job to job, marrying, divorcing, marrying again over the next many years. Desperate to stop drinking, he took part in an experiment at UCLA testing LSD as a cure

for alcoholism in 1957 when he was 44. He'd later say that this one trip changed him forever, big time. He apparently had quite the trip, so he transformed into a totally different person. Sounds like he got his hands on some really, really good shit, some really fun stuff. He was done with drinking. He now became a voracious reader of philosophy and psychology. He especially loved the non-conformity espoused by Emerson and self-reliance The utopian notions put forth by a thorough BF Skinner

Dietrich living on $33 a week unemployment checks the time stopped going to his AA meetings after this trip When other recovering alcoholics checked up on him He engaged them in these impromptu meetings that were equal parts grad school symposiums and combative group therapy sessions. And these sporadic get-togethers soon became regularly scheduled affairs three times a week with more and more alcoholic showing up each week to scream at each other. Here we go! One day a young heroin addict named Wide Walker. That's a great name. That's like a name out of a book. Wide Walker. Fresh out of prison joined in on one of these sessions and you liked it. And he told his addict friends. Now soon other narcotics addicts started showing up in the session started to get heavier, darker, more intense. Dietrich loved the gritty realness of it all. He felt like he was getting to the bottom of human nature. The sessions became known as synonyms,

a portman two of symposium and anonymous. Dietrich who let some of these addicts crash on his couch, came to believe that addicts were not full-fledged adults because of their addictions, and therefore they should not be treated as adults. The younger addicts started calling him dad, you know, he just got countable in this role of being like their father, right? Cult, cult, cult. When the gatherings grew too large for Dietrich's apartment, he leased a storefront on Ocean Park for a hundred bucks a month. When the gatherings grew too large for Dietrich's apartment, he leased a store front on Ocean Park for a hundred bucks a month. Beautiful part of Santa Monica where they were.

The same year, 1958, Santa Non-Incorporates, uh, incorporates a non-profit. Uh, convinced that his new group, Derby Creation, was a groundbreaking innovation on par with the creation of the alphabet, he said. No shortage of ego, like a lot of cult leaders. Dietrich predicted it would soon be as famous as Coca-Cola. Uh, it would not be. famous as Coca-Cola. It would not be, but it would become pretty damn successful. The city of Santa Monica did not like Dietrich or his new nonprofit. And before the first year was up, city inspectors declared the building

they took their meetings and was not up to code. They had it bulldozed. Dietrich then moved his growing devoted flock of 65 or so members at that time to an old national guard armory building on the beach in Santa Monica, that pissed off his neighbors. 10 days after moving there, Dietrich and three others were arrested for treating drug addicts without a license and operating a hospital in a residential zone according to the Los Angeles Times.

Apparently they had better regulations back then than they would have years later in Maine. He spent 25 days in jail and all that Stin did was help his cult grow. He got him a bunch of publicity. Word got out, the Charles was getting addicts to come clean and stay clean. The Los Angeles Times ran a two-part feature on him

as group shortly after his rest. The Los Angeles Mirror published a four-part series, a 14-page photo spread in Life magazine followed Haley and Sinanon as a tunnel back into the human race. Then there was a glowing right up in Time magazine, which repeated Dietrich's claim, which is probably not true. The 80% of addicts treated by Senon stayed clean. Reporters loved Dietrich. He gave them a rugged feel good piece to write on. He was very quotable. He's the guy credited with pointing that saying, today is the first

day of the rest of your life. He told the New York Times, crime is stupid, delinquency is stupid, and the use of narcotics is stupid. What Sinanon is dealing with is an addiction to stupidity. Q laughter. I'm pretty sure addiction a bit more complicated than that. Membership grew and grew and within 10 years after its founding, Sinanon boasted at least 1100 members was receiving $2.5 million a year in donations.

It now owns $7 million worth of real estate in Santa Monica, West LA, San Diego, San Francisco, Reno, Detroit, New York City, Puerto Rico, and more. It's grown quick, right? Typical cult shit. People are just giving them their houses, their fucking all their money. Businesses, they own a number of gas stations, they ran a million dollar a year specialty advertising business soon, and then shit started to get real weird. True believers started shaving their heads,

wearing overalls, living together. It's synonym compounds. They started popping up all along California coast. Patients started professing in almost, you know, Slavic obedience to Dietrich. People started joining who were not addicted to anything. They just liked the lifestyle, the discipline. Phil Ritter entered the Bay Area branch of synonym 1970

as a non addict or a square in Sinanon speak. He was in search of an alternative lifestyle. He sold his car, moved into the eight story, Sinanon building in downtown Oakland where he shaved his head. He getting your head shaved started out as a punishment actually in Sinanon, a way to haze newcomers, then it just morphed into the norm for adherence. You can find these weird pictures of these guys always like the shaved head.

Sometimes a little patch of hair in the back. 1969, the organization gets even culture when they drop their early goal of graduation for addicts who have completed various steps. The program gets more and more developed all the time as the saying goes forward. Now Charles preaches. Sinanon is for life, baby. He preached a addiction would be treated only by keeping addicts within the fold. IE, stay on the compound. Cult, cult, cult. And then Sinanon began only by keeping addicts within the fold. IE stay on the compound.

Cult, cult, cult. And then Sinanon began to welcome non addicts, right? Like Ritter Dietrich began telling people he wanted to create a utopian society. That was their goal now, you know, compound where everyone was free from drugs, crime, where he was the one true God, that kind of shit. He also got into the business of rehabbing kids for a bit. He created what he called the punk squad, a sort of boot camp devoted to disciplining juvenile delinquents, sent to synonym by their parents in the courts.

This is the very beginning of America's troubled teen industry. Synonym on rebranded itself in the 1970s from a drug treatment program to a psychotherapy program and started attracting middle class people through the synonym game, says sociologist Richard Offschee, who spent time in the organization studying it as a non-resident square.

The game that he talks about here became the core of Sinan's philosophy. The game was played by two players sitting across from one another. Each would have two grids, both hidden from their opponent's view. One grid represented your opponent's shit that they were dealing with. And then the other grid represented your shit. And you had to place your shit somewhere on the grid. You had to come up with five different types of shit you were dealing with. Each shit took up two to five spaces.

And then was your turn, you would call out a grid square, like a A5 where you thought your opponent's shit might be. And then your opponent would either say, you just called me on my shit, and that would be a hit, or that's not my shit, man, and that would be a miss. And when you covered your opponent's shit with hits, they had to say, you just made me deal with my shit. And then they'd take the shit off the board like if it was completely covered.

And whoever made their opponent deal with all of their shit first would win. And that game, does it not ring very familiar? It sounds like, like some other game I've heard of that I just cannot fucking remember the name of it. It's like a battle, like a battle game, like battle, battle of stars, or, oh, I don't know. JK, ha, come on.

No, I basically just laid out the rules for battleship, but change a few words around. Oh my heck, that was not the game they played at all. It'd be weird, if all this cult, this whole cult just revolved around like a janky battleship. You just suck my battleship. The synonym on game was a therapy session where one member would talk about themselves but reveal intimate details, personal problems.

And then endure intense criticism by their peers who would fucking scream at them and prepare them with verbal abuse. The game, it's preposterous. You can find videos of people doing this. And it's just, it's outrageous. The game was the core of Sinanon, who was the center of everyone's life while in rehab.

The game was played by adult addicts, adult squares, trouble teens, a mandatory part of anything Sinanon was involved in. According to Charles Dietrich, the game was the seed of Sinanon. He said, first was the game. And the game's always capitalized, we talk. Everything came from the game. There was no thought of a foundation or giving any kind of name to the community or group when we started to have meetings back in 1958. The game produced the

beginnings of the community. On the date of the first game, there was nothing that looked like it would lead. There was nothing that looked like. It would someday be the ancestor of the community. I was occupying a little apartment in the ocean park. There was nobody who lived there that I knew and very shortly after I began to moderate these games, people began to move down and a community formed. No one formed the community, the community formed itself, the community formed because of the game by the early 1970s. Some 3400 squares in California, New York and Detroit are paying

cash money to participate in these games or paying to be yelled at. They think it's therapy. Also in the early 70s, Dietrich starts to declare that sit-in-on is an experimental society now. Not just a program, it's a society. It moves to Marin County, starts wearing these overalls, only overalls, soon as followers, those with the shaved heads living together in these mini compounds, constantly playing the game. Now they all start wearing overalls. Soon as followers, those with the, you know, shaved heads living together in these mini compounds, constantly playing the game. Now they all start wearing overalls, right? They all dress alike now, cult, cult, cult. When Dietrich quits his three-pack of day habit, he now gives a decree that everybody else in Sinon has to quit too, and they do, he's really becoming a cult leader. In 1974, the organization has granted religious status by the federal

government. Being a religion means Sinon will not need to be licensed anymore so they can get a lot fucking weirder eliminates number of questions like uh... when do synonym adherence graduate and why do they have to obey detrick synonym adopts the slogan the people business now the business is good by the end of seventy six they have assets worth twenty two million dollars eight million in annual revenue coming large you from specialty advertising this division they had as well as a mortgage business. The one member had donated to them cult, cult, cult. It had an untold amount of cash contributions coming in from squares playing the game. Synod on own 5500 acres of property, including the sixth story, Del Mar Club in Santa

Monica, now the Castell Del Mar Hotel. A cluster of nearby apartment buildings, three large compounds in Marin County, another in Badger, California, which also had an airstrip for them to use. Sinanon eventually owned a fleet of 200 cars, 400 motorcycles, 62 freight trucks, 20 boats, 12 airplanes, along with a million plus invested in the stock market. By 1977, Dietrich was drawn in annual salary of 100 grand, roughly 400 grand in today's money. He also received a half a million dollar pre-retirement bonus, synonymized group of private security force.

In the late 70s, former paramilitary group, the Imperial Marines, developed their own type of martial arts called Sindo. By 1978, had amassed an arsenal of hundreds and hundreds of automatic guns. We're concerned about the rising crime rate. A synonym newsletter explained, if trouble should occur, we're prepared to handle it. The cult now has its own little private army. Now it's going to be alarmed about just a cult with an army. Echoes of David Kuresh there, Dietrich began to deliver endless monologues, broadcast

the synonym facilities over the wire they called it, their own FM radio station. Dietrich preached act as if, which meant do not try to reason as to what synonym asked you to do, as thinking got them in trouble in the first place. Just trust that, you know, to do what you are told and act as if it is right. Don't think for yourself. He's saying here, let me do all the thinking for you. Cult, cult, cult. Dietrich had designed an efficient program of individual emotional breakdowns, followed by a

mass group before you all designed to reeducate individuals into the synonym philosophy and lifestyle. Dietrich said, at the end of this rainbow, there will be a pot of gold through dissipation or long hours of activity without very much sleep. We hope to bring about in you a conscious state of inebriation. We want to get you loaded without acid. You will learn more about yourself, your fellow man, the world, the nature of reality, in one weekend than you would in four years. Let your ego go. Let things happen to you.

It's a feeling of closeness to each other. We are after the death of the ego. A reference point for the rest of your life. You may change your value system, notions about life and viewpoints about people. It will produce a new breed of human beings with greatly expanded potentials. If you do your best, you can't fail. Let go of your value system. Let go of your ego become one with the group.

It's exactly what you're doing. Uh, members were now being told their lives depended on stain in the synonym program, stain in the centers, contacts with family. Now we're prohibited. Right, their families helped them get in this addiction mess. Stop talking to your family. Only talk to the cult.

System of rewards and punishments were applied for good and bad behavior. Then also in the late 70s, Dietrich decided he didn't want followers to have kids anymore. Families got in the way of a lifelong devotion to the cult. He gave a no children mandate. Women were encouraged to have abortions. Dietrich once said, having an abortion is like squeezing a boil.

Nothing more. A yeek. Men were pressured into getting bisectamies. They were literally endless, ongoing, intense attack sessions going on. Focused on males who refused to get the sector's one former member says. As soon as they gave in, they'd walk into the next room and there were doctors waiting to give them the sector's.

Dietrich was running his followers lives with an iron fist and he justified it all as being a price worth paying to stay clean off of the drugs. Away from the vice of the outside world. Coat, cult, cult. When his wife Betty died in 1977, Dietrich, who was then 64, had female followers applied to be his new bride. He told reporters, I sent up a flare like any monarch of old times would have done.

He actually fucking says this to the media. I lit the word out I was available. He chose Ginny Shoren, a 31- old teacher at one of Sinanon schools to be his bride. Yeah, these fuckers have schools now for what kids the members do have. Shortly they're after Dietrich decides that marriage no one can be permanent. I mean, he likes Ginny, but it doesn't always with her. He couples are now told to split up and form new three year long, quote unquote, love matches within days of this decree, 230 couples filed for divorce. Not everyone was down for all this shit, though. And more days of this decree, 230 couples filed for divorce. Not everyone was

down for all this shit, though. And more and more members are starting to speak out against Eatrich as he gets crazier, they're starting to leave Sinanon and they would often get punished. On late 70s, allegations of revolting members being violently attacked began to surface. On March 20, 1978, a former member of Sinan synonym Tom Cardano was severely beaten for being in a ledge spy while tied to a post during his honeymoon. Honeymoon. Synonym members also beat a neighboring rancher to one of their little compounds. This man was last name of Gambioni, who was helping children in synonym teen treatment center,

a treatment center there run away and return to their parents. One day as a fellow, a former follower, Phil Ritter, whose wife and child were still in the cult, as he was returning home from the supermarket, two young men from Sinanon approached him without saying a word, just beating with wooden mallets. They left him on the ground bleeding with a fractured skull. That attack among at least 18 that the California Attorney General's Office linked to Sinanon and its imperial marines. We really may have to do a full suck on these fucking weirdos someday.

Three declarations written in 1983 by three Sinanon officials in exchange for immunity from prosecution stated that Imperial Marines prepared a hit list of Sinanon enemies approved by Dietrich's assistant, a man named Walter Lubel. The hit list included former Sinan on President Jack Hurst whose guard dog was later found hanged and Phil Ritter, guy we just talked about. According to the declarations, Imperial Marines traveled to Los Angeles and planted a rattlesnake in the mailbox of an investigative journalist and lawyer, Paul Moran's, who've been filing lawsuits on behalf of ex members.

That snake would bite him and he would be hospitalized for six days. He'd almost die. He thinks there was an article I read where he was talking recently about how he thinks like his health has never been the same. He thinks it like messing up pretty much permanently. What a fucking snake in a mailbox. That's like some of a cult movie. A month later Los Angeles prosecutor John Watson and 30 law enforcement officials descended on Citonon's new million dollar compound in Lake Havasu to arresttrick on the charge of conspiracy to commit murder for the rattlesnake thing.

They found him according to Watson in a stupor staring straight ahead an empty bottle of Chivas regal in front of him. He was so drunk he had to be carried to jail in a stretcher. The man who built a forge on a business that started out focused on getting people clean got so fucking hammered knowing that authorities were going to bust his ass and shut all that shit down. A 1980 Dietrich pleaded no contest to conspiracy to commit murder. He was fined $10,000 which seems very light. Since the five years of probation, I guess Miranda agreed to let Dietrich avoid prison

time because he was in very poor health and barred from having any affiliation with Sinonon. Absent, it's charismatic leader of the group than floundered. The IRS revoked its tax exam status or to Sinanon to pay $17 million in a lengthy court battle that ensued. Moran's provided hundreds of documents he'd under the implicated detrick and other Sinanon officials and all kinds of criminal acts. The court finally ruled against Sinanon in 1984, finding that it had a policy of terror and violence and a practice of diverting corporate resources

for the enrichment of individuals. And then sit on declared bankruptcy in 1991. But by the time sit on that shutdown, his model had already been widely copied and generally applied to kids. The troubled teen industry was up and running. After being convicted, Dietrich moved with his wife, Jenny, into a double-wide mobile home in Viselia.

He died in 1997, a few weeks shy, was 84th birthday. Crazy story, right? I had never heard of synonyms, prior to, again, research for this talk. Synonyms ended up spawning together, an entire troubled teen industry that would include the Elon school. In 1971, the federal government gave a grant to Florida, to a Florida organization called the Seed, which applied synonyms methods to teenagers, even though they were not necessarily suspected of trying drugs.

Kids were still forced to play the game, though, and much more. In 1974, Congress opened an investigation into such behavior, modification programs finding that the Seed used methods, quote, similar to the highly refined brainwashing techniques employed by the North Koreans. The bad publicity led some supporters of the seed to create a copycat organization under a different name, straight incorporated. By the mid-80s, straight was operated in seven states. First lady Nancy just say no Reagan declared it her favorite anti-drug program, more kids,

constantly being screamed at in the game, subjected to harsh and unnecessary punishments, isolation, sleep deprivation, as with the seat abuse was omnipresent, you know, beatings, kidnappings at these places, facing seven figure legal judgments at close in 1993. Another synonym off-shoot was CEDU Educational Services Incorporated, which operated from 1967 all the way to 2005. The average time a student spent at a CEEDU school was two and a half years. School year was year round.

The original CEEDU program did not believe in using medicine to fix students problems. Instead, three times a week for four hour students would attend reps. Sudo psychology group sessions led by untrained staff. Students and staff were incentivized to indict students from minor rule infractions in the name of emotional growth. Yelling was appropriate and expected.

So, you know, they were just fucking screaming kids for hours. Just scream away all the problems, right? Discipline out those problems. Medicine is bad, medicine is drugs, and drugs are bad, we should scream and said, man, the blanket beliefs, like, you know, drugs are bad. Medicine is bad, I fucking hate them. Some drugs, like, you know, drugs are bad. Medicine is bad. I fucking hate them. Some drugs are bad, you know, meth is bad.

Highly doubt anyone's life is improved off of meth. Weed though, weed to drug that has been aligned in mainstream culture for decades until recently. I'm sure a lot of kids were sent to a lot in similar schools for weed. Cannabis is fucking great for a lot of people. It's given me the best leave of my life. Some of my friends who smoked a ton of weed in college

who still smoked so much weed have, you know, become very successful people. What works for one doesn't work for all. CEDU education was sold to Brown schools in 1998. Brown schools operated 11 boarding schools and educational facilities in California, here in Idaho, Texas, Vermont, Florida. Facilities in Austin, Texas and San Marcos, Texas sold to psychiatric solutions incorporated in 2003.

This is bullshit. Some of these places they can call themselves like psychiatric solutions but not have any psychiatrists. In March 2005, Brown School declared bankruptcy and part because of legal costs related to lawsuits by the families of several former students. But there are still so many schools like this that haven't shut down out their operating today. Loopholes and state laws, lack of federal oversight

has allowed many shuttered programs to just simply change their names and reopen when they get in trouble. Often with the same staff in the same state, many of these programs operate in Utah and Montana. You know, we mentioned Montana earlier, why those states, because they have the least regulations

for how these programs are required to run. And this is how it was for the law school. They were located in Maine, Maine at the time did not regulate much of anything when it came to these schools, not really. They'd go inspect them, but they'd always tell them when they were coming by beforehand. No surprise inspections that might actually lead them to catching them, doing some shady shit. For years, the government in Maine just completely ignored what was going on at Alon. And that's let's get exactly into what horrors were going on in today's time-suck timeline. Right after today's sponsor break. Thanks for listening, curious meat sex, allow me to now hit the timeline button. soldier. We're marching down a time, time, time line.

Elon's founder guy. I really don't think you're going to like for much. Joseph J. Richie born on August 29th, 1946 to an Italian-American family in the town of Portchester, New York. Richie's father abandoned his pregnant wife before his son was born. Richie ended up being raised by his maternal grandparents after his mother signed away Custie. According to family from a young age, Richie proved to be an intelligent and very charming person. He was friendly and talkative, always maintaining a cool headed attitude around others. He was a born leader, not a follower. But beneath Richie's friendly exterior, some troubling tendencies were developing. From an early age, those who knew him said Richie developed an insatiable greed for money. He didn't care how you obtained it. From police reports and the tales of, you know,

maybe those who didn't seem to care for him as much, seemed to also showed early signs of sadism. While most kids have found recreation in games like baseball or basketball, Richie found pleasure in harming animals and engaging in acts of theft, theft, robbery and burglary. When he was 12, 1957, 1958, Richie began dating his middle school science teacher, I.e. he was molested by his middle school teacher, since he was a teacher and he was middle school, a source wrote that they were dating.

I doubt they would have written it that way if it was a male teacher and a female middle schooler, kind of a fucked up double standard there. He became sexually promiscuous by the time he entered high school. In the, you know, end of the 50s or the 60s, he would often skip class, commit acts of vandalism, break into park cars, steal food from restaurants, just for the fun of it. He himself was a troubled teen. And he'd lean on this when selling his program to parents later. He knew how to help trouble teens because he'd been one.

Right? Who cares? No accredited psychological associations. Really were thrilled about his treatment methods. He was trouble team. Now that's all the experience you needed. You went to the school of Hardenocks. When he was 15, 1960, 1961, Richie was seriously injured in a car accident, spent months in the hospital recovering. He was given a massive amount of painkillers, which became, you know, turned into an addiction, and this soon turned into a heroin addiction. And then Richie started stealing to buy heroin. After Stint of juvenile prison after getting caught for some kind of burglary, he dropped

out of high school in 1966. Never went to college. For the next several years, he worked a series of odd jobs. In 1967, 20-year-old Richie was arrested again this time for robin' a mail truck. A skilled charmer, manipulator, was able to talk his way out of a prison sense. Instead, he was sent to a rehab center in Connecticut, as part of his plea bargain. This would change the course of his life. 1969 off-drugs, either away from crime or at least not getting caught, Richie married,

moved to Quincy, Massachusetts, where he started up his own rehab center, called Survival Incorporated. And this business earned Richie a small fortune. Low overhead, a lot of clients, he was good at it. The rampant drug use in the 1960s produced a whole host of addicts seeking treatment. Richie center soon became flooded with more patients than he could handle. Then came the kids. The youth of America were consumed by the rebellious hippie subculture as we discussed earlier.

Kids openly revolted against the strict system they've been raised in, challenging, conservatively held traditions, vying for more social freedom. A lot of kids are running into trouble with the law becoming involved in drug use or sexual promiscuity, engaging in truancy from school, and all this created a moral panic among the older generation, right? They start to repress that behavior among the youths. As we discussed earlier, parenting techniques, attitudes have constantly been changing and generally softening a lot of our time and back at this time, a lot of parents still thought the best way to run things was with a heavy hand, a lot of tough love.

And many adults believe that the best way to combat this new rebellious, troublesome attitude amongst teens was to forcibly correct their supposedly deviant behavior, often by enrolling them in controversial alternative schools for troubled teens. It went real hard on corporal punishment. And Joe Richie had a light bulb moment with all this. He saw a huge opportunity. And he shifted his focus from troubled adults who could leave his program whenever they wanted to and often did to troubled teens who he could legally run down when they ran away and dragged their asses back to his center, keep getting a fat paycheck from mom or dad of the state, whoever'd place them there.

You know, there was both private money and state grant placement money to be had. Richie could control the team population much more effectively than adults. 1970 Richie meets a child psychiatrist named Gerald Davidson, Dr. Davidson, who specialized in adolescent behavior modification programs, especially in regards to drug abuse and criminal versatility. Davidson, interesting character, real mixed back. He had his doctorate at Stanford, currently a professor at USC, he was once a dean at a bachelor's from Harvard,

also practiced conversion therapy, trying to make gay kids become straight through behavior modification, reward, and punishment systems. He's authored psychological textbooks. He's gotten some things right, He's gotten some things right. He's got some things very wrong. I'm guessing he regrets.

Hopefully regrets what went on in the lawn. I don't know. Davidson may have been motivated by a genuine desire to help steer troubled kids back under the right path. That's what a lot of the sources seem to indicate. It seems as if he moved on away from the school not too long after co-founding it. Richie Sharers has thoughts about working with teens.

And he and Davidson decided to go into business together established their own alternative school for trouble teens. Richie chooses the state of Maine because they had the least laws regarding such facilities in the entire Northeastern region of the U.S. He'd be able to create his own totalitarian empire with little worry of the state taking any action against him. Now, we, where money

and control his primary motivations, did he really want to help kids and was excited about the money he'd be able to make doing so, you know, and be able to do it his way. I can't stay for certain based on watch the documentary and reading a lot about him, watching a lot of interviews of him. I think he was definitely in this just for the money. I also think he got off on being sadistic. He seems like a real piece of shit. May 30th, 1971, Richie and Davidson set up camp outside the small rural town of Poland, Maine. About 6,000 now, only 2,000 in 1971.

And in the middle of the dense main wilderness, Richie purchased a 33 acre area of land with an old hunting lodge. He clears out the property, constructs a series of trailers and buildings to serve as this new school. Richie names the institution Alon, a word meaning energy style and enthusiasm. That's a pretty good name actually. Richie builds a veil of legitimacy

surrounding this school with his, painting it as a source of salvation for troubled children. The last stop for them, only he can save them. Richie builds Alon's school as a radical new treatment center that would correct rather than punish bad behavior by teens. That's a fucking joke. All they did was punish. Richie painting himself as a caring mentor who would guide troubled kids back into the right path towards productive, better lives. Everything in a lawn Richie said was geared towards helping troubled teens reintegrate into society. Richie sales pitch was very successful. Within

a year, a lawn's enrollment grew from just four children when it first opened to more than 100. Parents of trouble teens, as well as juvenile court judges, began sending youngsters to Alon from all across the US to be rehabilitated. But did the Alon school actually rehabilitate them? Some former students think it did actually, but in a very unnecessary way, right?

At what cost did the rehab come? Alon students usually between the age of 12 and 18 came from all sorts of different backgrounds. Some were orphaned sent by guardians, you just couldn't take care of them, that's especially sad to me. Kids who didn't even fucking do anything wrong. It was just like the best option

somebody thought for them to go be raised. Others were juvenile offenders ordered to enroll in a lawn as part of a criminal sentence. Some were the heirs of multi-millionaires who were enticed by the idea of a boarding school in the middle of the woods. Some were kids, you know, just having academic trouble. If a parent is willing to pay the cost, their kid got in. There was no real vetting process for kids whose parents were willing to pay the tuition

cost, which makes all this extra fucked up. Right? These kids are just, you know, put in constant therapy even if they weren't having any problems at all. At a lawn, there were kids who didn't fuck around with drugs, or struggle in school, or screw around with the opposite sex. There were kids who were just, you know, depressed, suicidal, simply misunderstood,

or just simply just not wanted by asshole parents, or there was just nowhere for them to go. There were also kids suffering from mental illness, kids who were on the autism spectrum. There were kids sent to a lawn solely because they were just different because they couldn't or chose not to fit in with others. Maybe they were just shy. Whatever the reason, if you were unlucky enough to be sent to a lawn, the horrors of a lawn often began before

a student ever entered the institution's campus. The parents of a supposedly troubled teen or whoever, some kid needed to go there. Typically, a herd of a lawn by coming across one of their many advertisements, often in a newspaper, maybe they got a pamphlet in the mail. The parents of this teen would read about how a lawn's revolutionary style of therapy was designed to radically change a troubled teen from a social deviant to an upstanding citizen. The parent appearance would then contact the staff at a lawn and arrange to send their children there in order to undergo this behavioral therapy. It wasn't cheap, tuition costs between 50,000 and 60,000 a year. More than a year

at Harvard, oftentimes the teens themselves would not be notified of the decision for them to go to Lawn. They would not be taken by their family to Lawn. They would be kidnapped. And Lawn's controversial enrollment process hinged on the element of surprise for many. And the school would use some pretty extreme methods to ensure that teens made it on the campus. Once parents had enrolled their kid, everything was in place. A long, if the parents wanted, would hire a teen escort company, also known as a youth transport firm,

to literally abduct the teen in the middle of the night from their bedroom and bring them to the school. This is fucking crazy. Companies that did this were not, within their legal rights to that then, but they were within their legal rights to this then and but they, I'm sorry, they were, they were within their legal rights to this then. And still are today. So crazy. Men, almost always big dudes would break into the teen's bedroom, physically subdue them, tie them up with plastic

handcuffs, throw them in a van, drive them to Polenmain, where they would then be handed over to the Alon school, so crazy. And then the use of such services, pretty controversial. You know, these services, kind of like a lot of these schools, subject to little or no government regulation in many states. For teenagers, seeds in the middle of the night by strangers, being abducted by a teen escort company can result in permanent mental trauma. Of course it can.

For all the teens being taken to a law knew, in some cases, even kids as young as 12 again, they were taken by criminals to be held for ransom, tortured or maybe killed. You know, girls were terrified. Some girls later recalled that they believe that they're going to be raped, sexually assaulted, murdered by the Arab doctors. I know what the fuck was going on. And looking in some extreme cases, in some extreme cases, I do get this. Like, if you just can't get your teen to commit to treatment, they're really out of control. They're like addicted to heroin. They've really out of control. They're addicted to heroin.

They've tried committing suicide before. It looks like they're gonna die very soon if something is not done. Something drastic and desperate. The whole desperate time is calling for desperate measures kind of deal. For whatever reason, you just cannot get them committed involuntarily to a psychiatric hospital.

Then, okay, I guess in this scenario that I don't even know for sure if it exists, but I'm willing to say maybe exists, having them legally kidnapped better than having them die in that extreme situation And I would think extremely rare situation, but damn what if they just have a shitty attitude Right is that really a good option just let dudes bust into the room at midnight wrestle them to the ground Hall them out to a van drive them off. I just can't see myself ever doing that to Kyle or Irman Rowe. I mean, outside of a donut is a joke, right?

I mean, is a joke, yeah, yeah, but only is a joke. Only if it's for some JK. Can you imagine how fucked up that joke would be, right? Like that to your kid. Like the night before they're 16th birthday, have abductors, break into their fucking room, grab them handcuff them, you them, throw them in a van, drive them around, take them to a dark warehouse,

make them think they're gonna kill them, maybe like time to a chair, threaten them for a while, and all of a sudden, he's turning all the lights, all their family and friends are surrounding them, he got presents and cake. Surprise! Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, you're not gonna killed by strangers.

Happy birthday to you. Love you buddy. Oh, come on, look at this guy. Oh man, we surprised him. Look at all Peepance McGee. Come on, come on buddy. Come on, come on, stop, stop ugly crying. Come on, you're 16.

Fucking man up. Uh, no. Along with psychologically brutal, even former residents who said that they think I might have saved their life, still thought it was super fucked up. Along was located down a long dirt road, middle of the main wilderness completely cut off from the rest of the society, away from civilization, school itself, and not much more than some dilapidated trailers and buildings, cheaply built, looked menacing, intimidating, evil even. Many former students still recall some of them several decades removed from a lawn, the

feeling of extreme dread that came over them when they first saw the school. Many times these teens would try to run away immediately upon arrival, but then burly guards waiting in the woods around a lawn, you know, would capture them. These dudes just, you know, waiting to aggressively seize any escapees. Joe Richie, when interviewed by NBC News in 1979 said, at a long, the first thing you learn is that you're not going to get out of here. No matter how many times you run away, we will go and get you. And he was right, almost no one ever escaped.

Once a team was brought to a long, the first phase of their dehumanization would begin. The student will be forced into a shower where with no privacy, he or she would be forced to undress and give all their clothes and valuables to the school. Then they'd be presented with no image clothes. Blanned, colorless clothing. They're raised, you know, any sense of individuality. Surely after arriving at a law in students,

had to write a guilt letter to their parents explaining why they deserve to be at a law and not at home. These letters would be inspected carefully by staff. Again, think about the kids who didn't have anything wrong. They still have to go through this bullshit. Usually students have to write four or five revisions, the letter before it would be approved to be sent home. Much like the cults of Om Shinrico and Heaven's Gate,

Alon School sought to erase the past lives of his students, mold them into mindless, obedient servants, permanently cut them off from the outside world. Kind of, cult, cult, cult. Each new initiate would be assigned a big brother or big sister upon arrival, an older student who would act as sort of a guide. This older sibling would help the new student into their life in a lawn, but also act as sort of a jailer, enforcing rules, reporting infractions to a lawn leadership.

A big brother or sister would educate their partner about why a law and program was good for them. And if they were, why they were a failure, they did not accept it. Big brother was not a friend of their partner. On fact, big brothers would often play cruel tricks on their companions, pretending that they wanted to run away and then swiftly reporting them to administrators once they're a companion agreed to escape with them. Much like what was seen in the infamous Stanford prison experiment, the big brothers

often took sadistic pleasure out of using their superiority against lesser students. They were encouraged to act like this. If they ratted you out, they were rewarded. If not, they could get in trouble. Lawn had a very bizarre strict social hierarchy. Everything from when you could eat, you know, to who you could talk to, depended on your position within this hierarchy. Lawn was divided into two basic classes of students,

strength students and non-strength students. Non-strengths were not permitted to talk to other non-strengths, unless the conversation was monitored by a strength. Then, overlaid on top of these two classes, were various positions. You had to work your way up this privileged ladder to achieve and to do a good job at each and every level of this program to graduate and get the hell out of a lawn.

Each a lawn house, and there were several different houses on the property, had five different offices. There was the service crew, aka the janitors, then the kitchen crew, handled the food, the business office, filed paperwork, the communications office brought news from the outside world, and the expo-diders, group number five, they enforced security. Each office had a specific hierarchy of positions, each resident had to work through. Now, when you showed up at a lot, you were a non-strength worker in the service crew. You cleaned and cleaned and cleaned. Get down, start scrubbing that floor. The focus was on humility. You did what you were told.

You did a good job with no attitude or you kept cleaning, clean all night if necessary. If you did a good job for long enough as a worker, then you can move up eventually and become a Ramrod, another non-strength position, where you supervised the work of the workers, the janitors, took detailed notes on how well they cleaned, instructed them to clean more if they didn't clean well enough,

because it was your ass, as well as theirs, if they didn't do a good job. Above the Ram rods were the expeditors. Now you are a strength position for the first time. These were students put in charge of enforcing house rules. Their job to monitor other kids, wrath them out for infractions, reach, consider them a lawns, lawn enforcement. They continuously recorded the names and actions of every kid in every room, different

expeditors assigned to different rooms, usually stationed by a door to make sure you didn't run away. Expeditors who worked the graveyard shift were called night owls. They made sure no one escaped at night. Expeditors also monitored phone calls. They listened to your phone calls. They went over your mail, incoming mail was read before you got to read it. Outgoing mail was censored. You know, try and tell your parents are you're being abused, trying to cry for help. That mail goes right in the fucking trash. Now you're in more trouble.

Very cultish practice there. Very unethical. All phone lines in a lawn. First went through a switch board inside a trailer within the complex. An operator controlling the switch board, would connect the student with their parents on the other end of the phone line.

Students were given only a short amount of time on the phone and the entire time the student would be talking expertiders and or staff, you know, listening on the call. If the students had anything bad about a lot or tried to inform their parents of the abuse, the operator would immediately disconnect and the student would be severely punished. How disturbing is that, right? What if you're being abused and many were? They made it so hard for you to report that to the outside world. Above

expeditors were department heads, department heads were managers and strengths. They ran one of those five offices I mentioned earlier, right? Like you could be a department head in charge of the kitchen kind of. Above the department head was the shingle. A shingle would be your boss if you were a department head. A shingle would check in on other department heads, make sure shits run smooth. And then above the shingle was the coordinator on duty, the COD. The COD was during their shift pretty much boss of the house. They would talk with adult paid staff, report things. They were accountable for everything that went on in their house.

Above that was reentry. You went to work in reentry as a junior staff. The staff were divided into directors, assistant directors, and just staff. And teens could graduate to staff and essentially work for free at Alon until they either went home or turned 18 and left the program. Or turned 18 and stayed around.

Sometimes for years, sometimes for decades. Many did this. Cult, cult, cult. Quite often apparently, when Alon kids became staff and turned 18, they stayed, became paid staff. A lot of people who worked at a lawn were former lawn students, just troubling because literally none of those staff had ever received any formal therapeutic education at all. Okay, now they have a little bit of the lay of the land.

Let's back up, talk about what life was like here overall. Every freedom from win-1 could use the bathroom to whether you know, you could look outside or not You know to when one could speak sit down shower eat look at someone else was taken away when you arrived at a lawn You were left utterly powerless and subservient to a lawn system of draconian tyranny Violating any of the lawns many rules was called guilt a guilt no matter how small or insignificant was punished severely often A guilt, no matter how small or insignificant was punished severely often. A law on list of forbidden activities was often arbitrary subjective and ridiculous, set up to make sure that you always could be punished. Guilts included, but by no means were listed limited to, talking to quietly, talking to loudly,

talking to someone without proper authorization, talking to a non-strength, while being a non-strength, talking too much, not talking enough. Sex, which did not necessarily mean without word implies. Talking to or even looking at someone of the opposite gender in a way perceived as flirtatious could be considered a sex guilt. Looking directly at someone of the opposite sex for any reason could be interpreted as a guilt. Being thought to be attracted to someone or admitting being attracted to someone having

to crush on someone, guilt. Looking outside, when you should be focusing on some exercise, guilt, looked at the floor, guilt, having negative body language, guilt. Reacting to insults being dished out while playing that stupid fucking insane synonym game, guilt. You just have to sit there and take it or stand there and take it slouching, yawning, guilt. Reading or writing, drawing, not falling asleep, sleeping too long, laughing at a joke made by someone of a higher rank, doing poorly on academics, feeling tired, eating after designated meal times, not eating, rolling your eyes, attempting to run away, smiling without permission, not smiling enough, making any sort of physical contact, even shaking hands, having bad thoughts,

showing or voicing dissentent on and on and on. I did not add any of my bullshit to that list. This is all so fucked. So much bullshit designed to break you down to make you fail to train you to ask permission for everything. Train you to be mindless and subservient. These rules were of course impossible to follow and that was the point. Alon was big on punishing you, a lot, breaking you down.

Just like the Puritans, they wanted to beat the devil out of you, Alon wanted to break your teen spirit, beat your personality out of you, remold you into something different. Maybe just break you, it feels that way sometimes. Oftentimes, students will be ordered to write down their guilt on paper. Guilt, such as being attracted to someone,

or feeling reluctance to completing tasks. Residents had to write down every thought, show it to the administration, who would use this sensitive information to humiliate, or blackmail them later with. Cult, cult, cult! Reminds me of accusations of Scientologists doing the same thing with sensitive information revealed during auditing sessions. Expertiders carefully observed individual students for signs of guilt and would write down every infraction in a notebook and turn it over to the administration. The clipboards were always full of infractions committed by students. Nobody went today without committing at least a few guilt.

In fact, if an expert added to not report enough guilt to satisfy the administration, they themselves would then be severely punished. Highly incentivized to just say that you were doing a bunch of shit wrong. If they could be punished by getting knocked down to a worker doing a bunch of shit, you know, wrong. If they could be punished by getting knocked, uh, you know, by, uh, down to a worker, they have to, you know, or sorry, if they were punished, you know, these various levels, you could be knocked down to lower levels. Right? Maybe you're an expediter.

You don't report enough people. Then you get knocked down to work. You got to work your way back up to expediter. People are constantly like in this cycle of, you know, they go up a few levels and get knocked down. They try and go up a few levels and they got knocked down all guilt, no matter how seemingly insignificant or small was punished. Punishments for guilt were called learning experiences or L.E.S.

They were built usually on abject humiliation. Are you want being punished? No, come on, it's just a learning experience. For instance, those who tried to escape from a lawn were designated split risks and split risks. They didn't even have to actually attempt to escape. Being sad, looking outside, you know, having someone think that you're thinking about escaping. That's, that could get you deemed a split

risk. Teens who were designed split risk were given shoes without laces and forced to wear bright yellow shirts and skimpy little pink shorts to embarrass them and to have them stand out. One of the many degrading costumes along kids forced to wear. Students who did poorly on their academics were forced to wear a dunce caps or humiliating signs, listing their offenses, where these things all day long, they were subjected to verbal abuse by their peers and teachers who would call them stupid,

lazy, whatever, vile shit came to their minds. You know, classic and powering therapy. The student cried too much, they'd be forced to wear a diaper, a baby bonnet, it's not kind of binky. One girl on this alone doc I watched this really good documentary called The Last Stop. It's free on YouTube. Had to wear a headdress made of tampons, color to look bloody because she admitted to having

sex and therapy and getting syphilis. So they shamed the fuck out of her. I'm sure that really helped turn this quote unquote trouble teens life around. How do you twist your mind around to consider that to be therapy? It's beyond me. If a student is something terrible like a smile without permission, he or she would sometimes be relegated to a shutdown duty. It was called. They'd be forced to do medial jobs all day long, such as mopping floors, scrubbing trash cans, washing dishes, cleaning urinals, maybe doing that for like six, seven,

eight hours nonstop with nothing but a toothbrush. Then there were general meetings. Oh, here we go. One of the worst forms of punitive humiliation at a lawn, these meetings were held all the time. These meetings 100% derived from synonyms, you know, the game. When a student committed a guilt,

a school administrator could have the option of yelling general meeting. And then the entire student body would convene in the dining room in front of the unfortunate student. They would bring the student, they'd have to stand in this designated place, they'd put a little broomstick directly in front of them, just inches in front of their toes.

And then behind on the other side of that broomstick, all the other students would gather facing them. And then the administrator would yell, get your feelings off. Then each and every student in the room, right, other than the person being yelled at, would launch into a screaming, shrieking, deafening, torn of abuse at this unfortunate teen mocking, degrading, insulting, just, you know, vile, vulgar, whatever, just right into their face, inches away from their face. They would scream in groups of four or five. However many could squeeze

into the length of the broom. It was to. It's close to the broom is possible. Now, they'd scream for several minutes, then they'd go to the back of the line and a new group would start screaming at them. 50, 60 kids would scream at you. Numerous former students talked about this in the documentary, how terrifying it was, especially the first time they saw it. When the administrator yelled for the kids to get their feelings off, kids would like jump out of their desk, chairs, or falling over the pandemonium.

They're running from wherever they're standing, running right up to the offending students, standing right behind that broomstick, just screaming the worst shit they could think of with this kid. And this would go on uninterrupted for like 40 minutes. Didn't matter if the teen broke down crime, beg for them to stop, which they often did. Dental meetings happen according to the former students I listen to every single fucking day, usually multiple times a day. And not participating in a general meeting

was considered a guilt, and then you would be on the receiving end, the general meeting, right? It was a highly punishable offense. You had to join in on the abuse or you got abused. You know, you had to scream much horrible shit at your fellow residents every day. It could add months to your state to not do this.

Liz Arnold, who was a student in 1979 remembered watching a Houseful of Teens berate a weeping girl who would just wet her pants one day. The girl's name was Kim. Moments before, she'd been spanked with a paddle in front of all her fellow students, by her fellow students. She encircled into a ball and then students began to berate her, as the general was called, you know, called into order. Just saying stuff like, I'm not making this up, just, you know, just screaming stuff like you fucking bitch, I hope you die, you fucking whore, you fucking fuck up. These are quotes from this, nothing was off limits. When it came to screaming at a student in a general, I hope you fucking die, you worthless slut, fuck you, you piece of shit.

No wonder your family hates you, you ugly whore, like just the meanest shit. Nothing was off limits. Picture Lord of the Flies. If there were some adults, you know, with those lost kids on the island, and the adults were fucking evil, and just wanted the kids to be more savage. Kids would have legit, nervous breakdowns while being screamed at. Liz Arnold, the new resident,

joining it on the screaming, had arrived in 1978 after a suicide attempt because her parents, you know, caused her parents to seek professional help. Liz soon joined in on the student screaming. Some of the people in the mob were dressed in tinfoil diapers, shirts that read hooker, some had signs around their neck, that read, I'm an emotional vampire,

or ask me why I'm a baby, or confront me as to why I'm a whore. So fun! What a great thing for a young woman self-esteem. What great therapy? Another costume talked about in the doc was that teen girls had to wear, they a dress up like quote unquote streetwalkers when they would admit to having a sexual past. Many of the girls forced to dress like this had been raped or molested in their past, often by family members, prior to being committed in

a lawn, and now they're being slut shamed, right? What great therapy, great victim shaming, what a great way to retraumatize these poor kids. Within a few minutes, Kim, the girl being screamed out with semi-catatonic. She just stared off into the distance, wearing those urine soaked pants, butt throbbing from being paddled, and just waited for it to all be over.

What a fucking nightmare. Now let's talk about how your day was structured at a lawn. Typical day a lawn was divided into three parts, school, sleep, and the program. The name for Elons, unique brand of therapy. Unlike most American schools, which run between 8 a.m., 3 p.m. roughly, a lawn school classes would last from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m.

after a long day of abuse and chores. It was not by accident. Joe Richie understood that teenagers could be much more susceptible to suggestion and easier to control if they were constantly sleep deprived. Cult, cult, cult. I wonder if Richie studied up on Jim Jones, right? That cult leader knew all too well. Do you remember how powerful sleep deprivation could be when it came to controlling people? Also, actual education was not prioritized at a long. Teachers had no more accreditation there than the counselors.

It was like being homeschooled by idiotic, sadistic monsters. not prioritize at a lawn. Teachers had no more accreditation there than the counselors. It was like being homeschooled by idiotic, sadistic monsters. Numerous residents talked about coming out of a lawn, being way behind their peers, education-wise. Like maybe a freshman level high school education. That's awesome. Go in because you're likely struggling, get verbally and physically abused for a couple of years, then come out totally unprepared for life in a good career. Way to go, Joe Richie, you fuck-and-dush! I wish you weren't dead. Only so I can fantasize about you hearing me shit on in your life's work. Back to a long, daily life. According to a former student,

non-strengths had a shower at night. Strengths were able to shower in the morning. Most showers were between two to four minutes long per person. Any longer, you know, you get in trouble. You have to scrub shower toilets for a sponge or with a sponge for hours as a punishment for not washing yourself fast enough. A person called the razor rabbit was responsible for getting everyone's shower, shave, teeth brush, et cetera, and the given amount of hygiene time

that'll clipboard, everything's monitored. First one was called the razor rabbit because along with being in charge of the bathroom, you know, they're also in charge of razors. They would hand them out, collect them when you're done. They would hand out the toothpaste, toothbrushes, they would dull you out of tiny little squirt shampoo, conditioner, etc. Every aspect of your life was controlled in a lawn. You couldn't even hold a shampoo bottle. You used like a normal person. You get in trouble. You know, if you asked for more shampoo, a lawn head designated meal times called meal kicks for students and these meal times ludicrously short.

Officially, you would get five to eight minutes to eat your meal, but often in practice, you'd get like one to four minutes. Students were served food according to rank, so many times new students wouldn't even get a chance to receive their food before the meal time ended, eating after meal times was considered a guilt. Now you can be punished again, everything's punishment.

Many students would have to go to class hungry, exhausted, sleep deprived, just the way Richie liked it. And students, it seemed for the most part, worked really hard to not rebel against all this because they just desperately wanted to graduate. They wanted to go through all the levels and just get the fuck out of there, but almost no one ever did. Most never left until adulthood. Contrary to what Alon's marketing materials implied, sources

say that less than 10% of residents ever graduated, less than 10% of residents ever completed the program in the marketed average time of 24 months or earlier. After school ended at 11 p.m. students would be sent to their rooms, which were military style barracks with bunk beds. The night owls would wait outside. They would monitor the dorm rooms. They would shine flashlight to cross the bunk beds, count and owls would wait outside, they would monitor the dorm rooms, they would shine flashlight to cross the bunk beds, count and recount students all night long to ensure them that no one ran away. If you fell asleep as a night owl, you'd be,

guess, that's right, you'd be punished. You'd be punished, you'd be, you'd get it. I was talking about some other needless forms of a law and punishment. If the administration felt that object humiliation suffered through general meetings was unsatisfactory to punish a kid, the school would add some physical punishment, often did, like with general meetings

that I mentioned, the school forced students to administer physical punishment to each other. Sometimes the team would be told to bend over. And then every other student would spank them as hard as they could with a clipboard or maybe like a ping pong paddle. Some administrators would drill holes into paddles, use those, you know, blood would spill during spankings. It was fucking sadistic.

A student who, quote, acted crazy, could be forced to wear straight jackets, sometimes for days, maybe locked in a small room for weeks, even months called the corner, where there would be forced to sit up, straight, or be physically beaten. They could only urinate or defecate in a bucket in the room,

a bucket which would sometimes be emptied onto their head. So much great therapy going on here. It all makes so much sense. It reminds me of when I went to therapy as a kid. And my therapist was like, Danny, if you don't feel comfortable talking about the feelings, you know, you're having about your parents' divorce, then I'm, Danny, I'm gonna need you to shit in that bucket

and I'ma dump that shit in your head. And if you don't wanna do Danny, I'm gonna need you to shit in that bucket. And I'm a dump that's showing your head. And if you don't want to do that, I'm just gonna have to shit on you. At least one kid, according to last stop, Doc, I watched spent six months straight in the corner. Sometimes the teens will be subjected to something even more disgusting called electric sauce, a treatment, this electric sauce that consists of having a bucket filled up with trash, urine, cigarettes, mustard, dirty of water,

ketchup, rotten food, human feces, animal feces, fucking whatever, and then they'd pour that on their head. What school of psychiatric thought did that come from? Was that a Victor Frankl's local therapy? Maslow's School of Humanistics Psychology? B.F. Skinner, behaviorism, yeah, probably, it must be it. Pretty sure these, you know, more insane forms of punishment evolved after that co-founder, Dr. Gerald Davidson was long gone, a guy, I hope.

The worst, most dangerous punishment a student could be subjected to was known as the ring. The ring, the most feared punishment in a lawn, as it should have been, if a student really drew the wrath of an administrator, they would be forced to physically fight other students. As in multiple other students, sometimes a team would even have to fight their big brother, big sister. Along was careful to ensure that teens were angry, itching for violence when they competed in the ring, right?

For instance, if a non-strength was caught trying to escape, his big brother or sister would be punished by being forced to do manual labor. This was part of an effort to anger the big brother or sister so that they would be more willing to fight their companion in the ring later. A lot made sure that all the rage the teams felt that having to live in this fucking insane asylum was directed at each other and not the administrators who were literally torturing them. In the ring, fights were advertised as entertainment for the house. Moderators and ump. We give play-by-play updates on the matches as if they were fucking sportscasters covering a football game

some administrators even cast bets place bets on individual matches wager money on how many opponents a punish student could fight through before being beaten themselves in a typical match the punish student known as the bully whether or not they were actually a bully will be giving boxing gloves at a mouth guard be surrounded by the entire student body of a lawn, who will be jerrying and salting them, right, screaming at them, degrading them with vial comments. The bully would be forced to literally fist fight numerous other opponents in front of their peers as many as it took until until they were beaten into total submission. Right.

The bully was never given time to rest. They would fight an endless stream of fresh opponents. If one opponent got tired or got beaten up, like if he knocked one opponent down or out, another opponent would just immediately step and take their place and start swinging on you. Pretty soon the bully would be bloodied, beaten, senseless. Even then the match is still would not end. The bully would continue being pummeled and pounded by numerous angry, repressed, rage-filled

opponents, go to the bottom by the administration and other students. students if they were unable to stand other students would sometimes hold up the bully so that they could keep getting punched repeatedly by other opponents again real life lord of the fly shit but more evil. It's like fucking fight club if the number one rule of fight club was that no one wanted to be in fight club. The ring was by no means limited to boys, girls, even some allegedly who were pregnant forced to fight as well. Sometimes the other boys be beaten just as badly. The brutality of the ring took a terrible toll toll on the students. Some reported these suffered

permanent brain damage from these fights. Up to 39 former Alon residents later committed suicide, at least one kid literally beaten to death in the ring, more on him later in the timeline. Another insane punishment employed at Alon, you know, was one we already talked about. Yeah, the corner, that was when, you know, a kid not conforming with the general population, they wouldn't be alone for that.

They would have a support person placed with them, the support person would be expected to physically restrain them if they tried to leave the corner. My God, they'd have to put the rest of the kid to the floor if they needed to, put plastic restraints on them if needed to. According to the survivors, usually there was at least one student in the corner at all times.

If the support person took their eyes off this person in the corner, if the student's self-harned when they weren't looking, the support person will be held responsible and then punished, often put in the corner themselves. Just constant insane over the top punishment That was the long way As I mentioned earlier when a student turned 18

They were finally given the option to sign out to leave but a long would not make that process easy Even when they were adults since the student was legally under their own custody at the age of 18 in the US They could choose to leave a lot of you know under their own free will at that time But the staff would try to convince them that signing out made them a coward, afraid of change. They would not give them the papers they needed to get out. They would not offer them to take them out. You know, just constantly have other students guilt trip them into stain, very culty again.

If you demanded your papers too much, they would send you to the corner, even though you were adult, or an adult who was free to leave, was all of this illegal as fuck, yes, but it still happened. Now they have a taste of what a lawn was all about, the insanity, all the shit being done to students, some of whom were only there because they had shitty intolerant parents or nowhere else to go.

Now, let's jump back into the timeline, 1975. Illinois State officials finally removed some kids from Milan. They remove 11 kids from Milan, alleged mistreatment, Illinois courts would stop ordering youth to attend a law in that year, though main health officials performed or when main health officials performed their own investigation, they ruled that the therapy was innovative, appropriate, and beneficial though. Innovative? Yes. Appropriate? No.

Beneficial? Merkied best. Some kids did later say that they thought Alon saved them, but it can. They didn't need to be saved this way. 1977. 15-year-old Steven Smith is sent to Alon. He'll later recount his experience from the main state prison, where he served a 10-year sentence for burglary.

He recalled his experiences for Mora Curley, curly was writing the biography of Joe Reggie. Stephen had been awarded a state since the age of six when his father signed over custody of Stephen and his sisters after their mother was sent to prison for robbery. At 15, he was sensitive with drawn red books all the time, hated school because the other kids had perfect families, you know it seemed childish and immature to him. Circumstances led him to going to a lawn involved in altercation with the neighbor. He shot a neighbor in the butt with a BB gun after the neighbor, supposed he kicked his dog.

A social worker then gave him the choice to go into jail or a lawn. He chose lawn because he thought it sounded like a summer camp in the main woods. And he later said, when I first got there, I couldn't believe it. Everybody was screaming and beating on each other. I had to sit in these groups. I didn't want to talk to anybody. I felt that I was misdiagnosed. One thing, I didn't have a drug problem.

Most of the kids that were in there, I guess were in there for drugs because I'd be sitting in these groups and they'd want me to talk about what drugs I was doing, what I was hooked on. And I would say, listen, I don't have any of that. And they'd all say, oh, yeah, sure. As if I was denying it, they'd ask me if I hated my mother, they'd take out my file,

read it in front of everyone in the group, say things about my mother, talk about her criminal record. I didn't dig that so I just didn't say anything back. Then when I shut up, they accused me of intimidating the group, so that I was doing some violent act against the group members for not opening up. I was making people hostile at me. So every once in a while, they set up a general meeting and then throw me in the boxing ring sometimes until I lost. So I just used to try to run away all the time. It's the only thing I ever did try

to run away every chance I got. I tried about seven times, but they always caught me because they had this posse that would go out. If they caught someone, they'd be rewarded by Richie. The first time I met Joe Richie was at a general meeting that was called by a guy named Jeff Gottlieb. I tried to run away again and Joe Richie came in. I'll never forget it because he made me feel really worthless, you know, like I was an absolute nothing. He came in and I was called up along with the girl named Nancy and another girl named Marie,

two guys named Ray and Johnny and another kid named Sean. So when Joe Richie came into the house, we were all sitting down around the table and he announced we have some cancer in this house. And any good surgeon knows the best way to get rid of cancer is to cut it out before it spreads. Then he called all of us up to the front of the house, asked everybody else if they had any feelings for us. And then we all got screamed at. Then they put us in the boxing ring, you know. Then at the end of the meeting. Joe Richie says, now we're going to put you upstairs in one of the rooms. It was a room about six feet by 10 feet.

They boarded up the windows, boarded up the door, and locked us in. And then Joe said, whatever goes on and there goes on. What the fuck? And he continues. It was July. I know it wasn't July because it was my 16th birthday the next day. It was horrible.

Six of us all stuck in there together. The guys, Ray and Johnny would take turns beating each other. Ray would pound his head until he got tired. And then they'd take turns having sex with the two girls. One of them didn't care, but the other girl didn't want to, but they made her. Sean and Ray would keep her food and that's how they got to her. The day I turned 16, I was sitting in the corner and I mentioned it was my birthday and Sean picked me up and said, Oh, it's your birthday.

I have something to give you. He started to hit me in the face and stuff and then well, he raped me in there. After Sean did that stuff with me, he made me do it with the others. Between that time and one other time, I think it had a lot to do with me not having normal relationships with girls. It really screwed me up. And during the past years, I've gone from blaming my mother or my social worker Mrs. Daily for what happened to me at a lawn,

but I realized it was really Joe Richie's fault. He didn't care what happened to us in the room or anywhere else. He was just in it for the money and he didn't care about kids. He was running the business and that's all it was. Holy shit, he wasn't just running the business. He was getting off. What a fucking sadistic motherfucker. Just lock a bunch of teens in a room, tell them whatever happens, happens.

You know, anything goes, just ignore them. And the doc I watched a former staff member talks about how she thinks that she really did a lot of good for these kids working there. She worked there for years and years. And it came off as such a rationalization. Like it was just too hard for her to admit that she was a piece of shit, that she'd been a monster amongst many other monsters running some type of teen pain factory

And Joe Richie and literally every interview I watched of this guy just comes across as a vile arrogant douche the most punchable face I Just looks mean if you told me was a serial killer. I'd be like, oh, yeah, I believe that Steven detailed other punishments in this interview saying I'd have to push this wheelbarrow down to the lake in the summer, about a mile while wearing a winter coat. And I'd have to get rocks out of the water, fill up the wheelbarrow, bring it back up again, then empty them out, then fill the wheelbarrow back up, go back down to the water. Other times I dig ditches, fill them up again, the whole time there'd be one or two people watching and hollering for me to hurry up. It was totally meaningless.

This was all just because I wouldn't talk in groups or I tried to run away. This is like a Siberian fucking gulag shit. Uh, one time Joe Ritchie was there and he said he was sick of my shit trying to run away and stuff. I tried to talk to some people came up from Chicago to do some kind of investigation. And I think that's why he was pissed. I never talked to them though. Anyhow, I got a cowboy ass kick then. That was when they took you and threw you from room to room, bouncing you off the walls.

All the residents would drag you around, digging you with their hands, punching you, spitting your face. It was worse in the ring. It was really vicious. The shit is insane. And it's not just Steven saying this. This is the one person after another, after another saying this.

When he was asked about the differences between maximum security prison and a law of Steven said, a lot is much, much worse. Here, there's a lot of shit, but I get a chance for some solitude to read. I'm going to college. I've also gotten to learn woodworking and make some money in the prison store. At a lot, there was nothing positive. It was pure hell. You know, the worst thing is the judge that sends me here, lectured to me saying, I blew the opportunity I had at a lawn. I don't understand how the courts can legitimize

a guy like Richie, who has harmed so many mixed up kids. Yeah, Joe Richie, man, made millions off a lawn. Rumors that he bribed a lot of judges, paid a lot of people off. After a few years of his success, he'd strut through a lawn and leather coat, fedora, avid or sunglasses, his new silver Mercedes parked out front.

Apparently love to play the role of big man on campus. Have students look at him. He's poor students, residents, whatever. Like he was a rock star. Yeah. 1978, 1978. My dad was away from my mom for several long chunks of time. And I have to wonder if he was working at a lawn

as one of those statistics staff members. Now listen, I don't have any proof for anything. It's just, I don't know, just putting the store together just resonated with me in a weird way. You know, I just, I put it together that he wasn't around that whole year. It just wouldn't shock me if I found out he's behind, you know, part of this.

I just, I just wish I could verify his 1978 wearabouts. I really do. If any of you listening, can pin down where Daniel Neil Cummins, born April 2nd, 1954 in Los Angeles County, if you can just let me know where he was, was he at the Elon school, please let me know. Pfft.

Running dad gag, if you're confused, by the way, don't think too much about it. And actually while we're on the subject of my dad, I've already derailed the narrative a bit. I needed a break from all that fucking abuse. I think now's a good time to toss in one final sponsor. Sorry about that. A new organization of mine actually,

gonna use my show to sponsor my own kind of organization you know that I'm pretty proud about. Today's time soak is brought to you by DadWatch. A 501 3C non-profit dedicated to solving dad-related crimes. DadWatch stands for Dad's or disappearing where all the corpse is hide. Hi, Dan Cummins, Dead Watch Founder. Did you know that roughly 50,000 people go missing in the US each year and are never found?

And that many dads conveniently can't remember exactly what they were doing even last week. That coincidence? We here at Dad Watch, we don't think so. Where was your dad last year? Last month. Where was your dad in July 2nd, 1937, when Amelia Earhart went missing? Dead? Hmm, convenient. No? Not born yet?

Whatever? Where's your dad on Monday? May 30th, 2005, when Natalie Holloway disappeared. You don't know? That's troubling. I don't know where my dad was at date. Literally, no idea. Idaho, Aruba.

I don't know. And he's not talking. Where's my dad in the night of September no idea, Idaho, Aruba, I don't know, and he's not talking. Where was my dad in the night of September 7th, 1996, when Tupac Shakur was shot in Las Vegas? I don't know, but I do know that my dad used to live in Las Vegas, and that he didn't like me listening to quote, gangster rap. Look, I'm not saying my dad killed Tupac,

but I can't say for sure that he didn't. Like a lot of people with dads at the end of the day, I just want answers. We here at Dad Watch are just trying to do what's right. And what's right, probably putting dads behind bars where they belong. And I'm back. That's so funny for me.

My dad now knows about my accusations. I think it's just kind of funny, I think. He definitely thinks I'm insane. Back to the lawn, 1978, the dismembered body, Mike of Michael J. Little Joe, Napoleon Tano, a new England underworld figure, is found in the trunk of a car in New York City. Killing was later tied to the Patriarcha family,

the very same organized crime outfit in New England that had a big investment in Scarborough Downs. Joe Richie would soon be buying Scarborough Downs, rumored to be connected to the Patriarcher family. Several people who were known to have come into contact with Joe Richie during the 1970s, later turned up dead under suspicious circumstances with a Richie had any involvement in the Poliotanos demise,

still unknown, but the FBI considered him a person of interest. Seeing there was evidence that Richie had set up the Poliotano for a hit. The big bank of Wells Fargo would deny Ritchie the ability to bank with them because they suspected his involvement with organized crime. This is a Joe Ritchie. 1979, 33-year-old Joe Ritchie buys Scarborough Downs at a horse racing track for just under a million dollars. Around this time allegations from his employees that Ritchie was abusive, both physically and emotionally start to surface, I also get sued three times by female employees

for sexual harassment and also for death threats, more accusations of mob connections tossed around. A lot of accusations about him bribing various people in the state to not investigate Alon, to place kids in Alon. The extent of Richie's connections to the criminal underworld will never be fully known. When the FBI first publicly links Richie to the mafia,

that causes Keybank to cut off his line of credit and then he sues them for defamation. And then he wins fucking $15 million. The number of life is not fair. The jury rules in his favor, I have to thank, like did he bribe him? There's a lot of evidence that he did that kind of shit. Maybe the mafia bribed him. 1979 NBC News broadcast a special report about a lawn

and business the campus to talk to staff, students, and even Joe Rich himself. Though the news outlet voiced some concern regarding the tactics used by a lawn on students, NBC also constantly reassured his audience that these treatments were intended to help not harm. In fact, they titled the report for the child's own good. Jesus Christ. And painted reaching along as mentors and teachers seeking to rehabilitate trouble teens.

60 minutes would also air a segment about Joe Ricci and his lawn school like the NBC report, 60 minutes painted a lawn and it's found in a positive light. Calling them practitioners of a revolutionary new type of therapy that could steer trouble teens back into the right path. Dude must have felt above the law about this time, right? All the media exposure is great for business, more parents than ever before, sitting there teens to be fucked up in this weird ass fight club, fucking Thunderdome. But also 1979, the tides would also would start to turn against the law. Finally, bit by bit. District of Massachusetts, the first to ban sending any children to a law, citing abusive and cruel treatment. In Illinois state officials pull a teen out of a law another teen from a Illinois gets pulled out and responds to allegations of mis-treatment.

They caution parents about sending their children there in 1982. The ring takes the life of 15-year-old Phil Williams. Williams had come to a lawn from a broken family. When Williams was nine, his father was sent to prison after beating his wife for the pipe, leaving her brain damaged and in a vegetative state. As a result, Williams grew up in foster care with his sister, and then he was sent to a lawn because of his constant fits of rage. And a lawn Williams drew the wrath of the administration for talking back to staff, and then on December 27th, two days after Christmas, 1982, he's put in the ring and beaten so badly,

he is actually beaten to death. The school tells the Williams family he died of a brain aneurysm, no charges ever filed against administrators. Despite the horrific death of Phil Williams-Lon continues to use the ring as a form of punishment for more than two decades, for two more decades, excuse me, until 2001.

In 1986, Joe Ritchie puts himself into the political spotlight, running unsuccessfully thank God for governor of Maine, as a Democrat. This piece of shit would run again, also unsuccessfully in 1998. Ritchie painting himself as an outsider who spoke up for the working people

against the influence of big business. Probably better than painting himself as a mobster who made millions torturing troubled teens. What would those campaign ads have looked like? You know, if he's a little more truthful. Hey, my name's Joel Rishi. I'm a Democratic Goobin' on the Toyle candidate for right here in Maine, the Pine Tree State.

And if you want big business to take a beaten, I'm your guy. I'll beat down big business harder than I force some of the kids to factor my school prison to beat down other often smaller kids. I'll stand for the working man. Longer than I make isolated, confused teenagers stand in the corner covering the normal feces as punishment for smiling too much. But perhaps taking an extra dollop of shampoo.

I don't reach you below a Texas. I'll lower them even lower than the self-esteem of the many kids. I forced to wear degrading costumes to be screamed at and be beaten on a daily basis. All in the parents dying. Can Joe reach you for governor? If I can't beat my Republican opponent, I guess I'll just have to beat some more kids or something. Ah, forget about it.

It's just choice. What's wrong with me? I'm back now. January of 2000. Lawn finally gets exposed for the heinous shit show it was that month, the state of Connecticut charges Michael Scegel with the murder of 15 year old Martha Moxley. Scegel was in nephew of the late Robert F Kennedy and the case made national headlines. Scegel was also a former Alon student who had admitted to killing Moxley during some group therapy session.

Slash, we're going to scream at you If I can tell you your pieces of shit session at a long years earlier. Michael, prior to this confession, allegedly bragged about killing Moxley, telling two other long students to be a bludgeon the 15-year-old girl to death, pulled off her clothes, touched her sexually, masturbated near her body.

The crime had taken place 25 years earlier, 1975. On the night before Halloween, hanging out with friends, and then she was found dead the following morning. Why hadn't Alon reported the confession? Probably because they didn't want any follow-up questions to uncover all the horrific abuse going on there. The case against Skagel almost entirely based off the testimony of his classmates at Alon,

so Skagel and his attorneys put Alon in the spotlight. Although it was Skagel, not Alon on trial, Richie saw his school gain a lot more national attention and not good this time. For the first time, the abusive history of a lawn publicized reported on by the media, the public learned of the living hell that was a lawn via Michael Sceagal's story. He'd spent two years there. He'd been beaten, abused, forced to compete numerous times in the ring. He'd run away twice, been captured both times after which he was humiliated, severely punished, while the defense was using these stories in an attempt to gain sympathy for

scagal. It had the secondary effect of raising public awareness about all the shit going on in the lawn. This was all being broadcast in the age of the internet, and former lawn classmates started to take notice. Former students at lawn found in the internet a platform from which they could tell their stories to the whole world, on chat rooms, websites. These survivors published their unique stories about the systemic abuse they'd endured at the hands of Joe Richie and Alon's administration. Suddenly, the ugliness of Alon being revealed in a massive impossible to ignore way. The abuse no longer a secret. In the face of mounting suspicion, Richie publicly denies that Skagel had ever confessed to the murder while at a lawn dismissing it as an absurd accusation.

Two classmates of Skagel's from a lawn, however, testified that Skagel did in fact confess to the murder while at the school and that administrators for sure knew about it. Would all of this get Richie finally sent to prison? No. But good news, he would die. Less than six months later in June of 2000, Ritchie is diagnosed with stage four lung cancer. Couldn't happen to a better guy.

The ego maniacal, sadistic multi-millionaire who had once appeared invincible, now suddenly bedridden with a terminal illness. He's put on aggressive chemotherapy, doesn't help. The cancer spreads throughout his body. Nothing doctors could do. And on January 29th, 2001, barely six months after his diagnosis, Joseph J. Ritchie dies

in a hospital in Bangermain from complications due to lung cancer at 54 years old. His death, a miserable end for an even more miserable man. After Ritchie's death, his second wife, Sharon Terry, takes over as the head of a lawn. Terry had inherited quite a mess from Ritchie. And now she has to deal with the wrath of dozens of former alone students Hell bent on publicizing their stories putting an end to a lawn for good as people keep testifying at Michael Skegels trial in late 2001 Stories of the horrific abuse endured at a lawn keep piling up

Sharon Terry needs to reform the school. She abolishes the use of the ring Corporal punishment, however, still used it a as our general meetings, other forms of mental torture. Even after scagal is convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison for the moxley murder, that was conviction, well not stick, we'll get into that in a bit. The controversy around the lawn does not die. On June 7, 2002, scagal found guilty of murder in moxley, sentenced to those 20 years to life in prison. Then in 2007, the New York State Education Department produces a scathing report that criticizes a law on use of physical punishment and sleep deprivation. Although they had once paid tuition for special education students to attend the school,

now New York decides to withdraw funding from a law on due to the abuse about fucking time. 2011 is taken forever. At a law on public notoriety reaches its peak thanks to dozens of Reddit users detailing years of abuse and more and more interviews come out from former students. Despite all of this despite petitions and demands from

the public to shut down the institution the schools accreditation is actually renewed by main officials. And again, former residents speculate that these officials have been bribed people have been bribed for years to look past all the abuse of the institution. Keep sending teens there. March 23, 2011, just 22 days after being reacredited by the state of Maine, Sharon Terry does announce that a lawn is closing down. Despite the license for a new all the bad press finally dried up enrollment, parents finally started to think thanks to a

lot of advances in parental education, that may be sent in their kids to a place to be continually verbally abused, degraded by uneducated, sadistic psychopaths, was not an awesome plan. That's not actually therapy. Sharon Terry continues to deny any and all allegations of abuse,

maintains that she in the school were innocent victims of a public frame up. She said the school has been the target of harsh and false attacks spread over the internet with the avowed purpose of forcing the school to close. Or your piece of shit, your monster you self-righteous fuck or that. April 1st, 2011, April Fool's Day, Alon School closes its doors for good. For more than 41 years, Joe Richie then Sharon Terry, the school administration had been able to keep Alon safe

from law enforcement, state agencies and legal action. But the scrutiny, the public scrutiny finally too much. On October 23rd, 2013, Michael Scagal, whose original trial for murder had brought Alon into the spotlight, granted a new trial by Connecticut Judge Thomas A. Bishop, who ruled the Scagal's original attorney, Michael Sherman, failed to adequately represent Skagel when he was convicted. November 21, 2013, Skagel released on a $1.2 million bond.

The Connecticut Supreme Court in 2016 in December re-instates Skagel's murder conviction with a four three majority decision. Riding his conviction was a result of overwhelming evidence presented by prosecutors and that his legal representation had been adequate but scatle families lot of money uh... two thousand eighteen the connect it's supreme court changed his mind yet again vacates scatles conviction orders a new trial

then on october thirty of two thousand twenty not the long ago uh... forty five years exactly to the day after martha mox's murder, chief state's attorney, Richard Colangelo, and formed a superior court that Michael Scagal would not be retried after the Connecticut Supreme Court vacated Scagal's murder conviction two years earlier on the grounds that his attorney had rendered an ineffective assistance when he failed to contact an alibi witness whose name had been provided by Scagal. So he's officially cleared of Martha Moxley's murder and no justice for anyone at a

lawn. Not even for the kid who confessed to a murder there. Today the lawn school is no more the 33 acre property where the school was once located now consists of little more than abandoned buildings, decaying trailers, overgrown dirt roads, but even today the trauma that a lawn induced still very much alive knows who wants to live there. At least 39 former students of a law that committed suicide since 1975, many others live with the lifelong repercussions of the abuse they endured.

Several former students have been convicted of crimes ranging from arson to murder. Other suffer from mental and social problems, they attribute to the hell on earth they endured a law. Even those who did manage to lead successful, productive lives still suffer from the mental trauma that a lawn inflicted upon them, Ben Weasel, of the founder of the influential punk rock band Screech and Weasel was sent to a lawn as a teen where he endured more than two years of abuse and dehumanization. He says he still suffers from chronic anxiety, panic attacks, and agoraphobia due to that experience. The administrators who ran a lawn in sanctioned the brutal abuse of its students,

never punished. Nobody, no staff member, no teacher, no administrator, administrator, ever faced any criminal charges in connection with all the shit we talked about. And as we learned the troubled teen industry, spawned from Sinanon that gave birth to a law and far from dead. Even though a law in school has gone for good,

there are many other similar behavioral institutions still operating across the US across US right fucking now. Let's get out of this time-step timeline. The alarm school, a private co-ed residential behavioral modification program in Poland, Maine, one of many similar schools, one of many members of the national association of therapeutic schools and programs, because we as a society still can't agree on how to parent our kids, abusive shit holes

like Alon still around. Life at the Alon school was fucking horrific. Insane rules, governed students' lives, while students and staff took advantage one another, left every moment of every day open to the possibility of more humiliation and degradation. The top of it all was Joe Richie, former heronatic with potential organized crime connections, we found a cash cow in capitalizing off of parents fears for their children found a population to exploit. The Elon school just one of many organizations under the umbrella of the troubled teen industry This industry includes a variety of accredited and non-accredited programs the tactics of these tough love institutions ever work I don't think so not really not overall. I don't think this particular end does justify the means are some kids saved in these programs from an overdose or a Suicide or a lifetime of drug abuse. I mean probably actually yes

But could they be saved in a much, much, much more humane way? Yes, I think so. I don't think there's any way you can justify making a girl who has been molested or any girl or any person dressed like a prostitute or wear and I'm a whoresign. I don't think you can justify dumping literal shit on some teen's head or having a room full of 60 kids

scream horrific insults at them for 40 minutes The ring the beatings fuck the game fuck Sinanon fuck Jill Richie and Alon Are better much more humane ways to go about all of this there are numerous living treatment centers around the world Where trouble teens or help with medication actually educated professionals talk to them They're treated with both firm rules and also dignity if you're parents struggling with your son or daughter You have better options than sending them to a living hell like this. First off, just toss some advice out there.

Consider the scope of the problem. Catching your kid drinking a few times does not mean they're an alcoholic. Catch them doing some blow. Doesn't mean they're drug addict. If they do need help, there are so many resources, either in your community or online, you can go to now. Good ones. Licensed therapists who charge on a sliding scale, free counseling services,

offered through the state in many places, so many resources. I love one that happens to be a sponsor of this show, you know, betterhelp.com. But there are others too. In the US, you can start with S-A-S or S-A substance abuse, excuse me, and mental health services, administration, it's Sam Shia. You can call their hotline [phone]-HELP. 1-800-662-HELP. They have a treatment routing service, one of so many options out there right now. You can also go to their website, S-A-M-H-A-S.gov.

If you decide to go with the therapeutic boarding school, there are good ones, just be fucking careful. There's still a serious lack of regulation and accountability for therapeutic boarding schools. Even ones where poor living conditions and harmful therapeutic practices have already been reported. There's a lack of standardized treatment, data on how students do after boarding school,

federal oversight. Some states, again, like Montana, Utah, or whatever reason, real fucking relaxed. When it comes to what goes on, these places maybe don't send them to a place in Montana or Utah, or at least really scrutinize those places. A place that could be a living hell. However, many therapeutic boarding schools can and do work. You just have to do your homework. With the right combination of exercise, therapy,

emotional growth, people can lead behind troubles past grow up to become amazing meat sacks, the Alon School clearly not one of the places that helped them do that though. I feel like sacks. The Alon School clearly not one of the places that helped them do that though. I feel like survivors who left the Alon School and became successful persevered in spite of everything they endured, not because of it. So let's maybe try our best to be good to the world's kids, okay? If the robots are not in production yet, who else is going to take care of us when we're

old and helpless? Let's head on over now to today's top five takeaways. Number one, the Lawn School was founded in 1974. It ran until it closed its doors voluntarily in 2011. None of its practices ever got it shut down. It was never shut down. It just closed. Oh my god. Number two, the abuse perpetrated on the students of the law school was nothing short of horrific. Students were punished for insane infractions. It couldn't have been measured and were encouraged to both verbally and physically assault their fellow students and report them to the administration, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Number three, Joe Richie was an entrepreneur, wannabe politician,

maybe mafia adjacent person, definite piece of shit, new fullie was an entrepreneur, wannabe politician, maybe mafia adjacent person, definite piece of shit, knew full well what was going on at this school. And you must have liked it, right? He never stopped abuse, never tried to. For years, he insisted the outside world of the Elon school was the best thing for trouble teams. They didn't discipline,

this provided learning experiences. He had to have known, it was not a good place, right? Joe never had to see the school he found in his shuttus doors, He died of lung cancer in 2001. Number four, the Lahn School has a connection to a very talked about unsolved murder case. The 1975 murder of 15-year-old Martha Moxley. Last year in the night before Halloween, hanging out with friends, found dead the following morning.

Michael Scagal, former Lahn student, charged with the crime in 1998, trial began in 2002. He brought a lot of bad press to Lahn, which would eventually shut down in the face of mounting public criticism. On June 7, 2002, Skagel found guilty of murdering Moxley, then to 20 years to life in prison, then his conviction vacated in 2018, then announced he would not be retried in 2020, making him officially innocent of the Moxley murder, but a lot of judges legal experts seem to disagree strongly. A confusing case became even more confusing considering the testimony of so many abused

teenagers, it may not have put a possible, probable murderer behind bars, but at least it got a law in school on the map and started exposing. A number five new info. You like the author, David Starris? I do. I think he's very talented in his books. I think are so funny, so funny. A laugh out loud funny, such a clever intelligent dude. Do you like his sister, Amy Sideris? Very funny as well, I think. The star of the Comedy Central cult classic, strangers with candy, the voice of Princess Carolyn and Netflix's Bojack Horseman, creator and star of true TV's at home with Amy Sideris, been

in a ton of movies, very recognizable, successful. Do you know their sister of their sister, Tiffany Cideris? She was an artist, also very talented, and she sadly tragically took her own life on May 24, 2013 at the age of 49. Many years earlier, she had run away as a teen, and her parents responded by sending her to Ilan, where she spent two years between 1978 and 1980 dealing with all the shit. We laid out here today being abused in the same ways and it haunted her for the rest of her life After she died David Sidaris wrote in the New Yorker about how she told everyone it was a horrible place He wrote she returned home in 1980 having spent two years there and from that point on

None of us can recall the conversation in which she did not mention it. He said she blamed her parents for Alon for the rest of her life, demanded they apologize for it over and over and over. She was never able to get over it. Tiffany Sidaris, another tragic victim of the Alon school. Time, suck, tough, five, take away.

a lawn school. Time, suck. Top five takeaways. Oh, the troubling teen industry has been sucked. Ah, I guess the troubling troubled teen industry. Man, hope you learned a lot today. You curious, beautiful bastards. I did put this together with Sophie and Zach. We all did.

Thank you to the Bad Magic Productions team for all the help in making this episode and every episode of Time, suck. Queen of Bad Magic, Lindsey Cummins, Reverend Dr. Paisley, the Script Keeper, Zach Flannery, Sophie, Fact Source for Sevens, BiddleLixer, Logan Keese, the Art Warlock, running BadMagicMarch.com, posting the socials, thanks to Lister and Andes trying to please the Zuckerberg Thought Police and get our Facebook page out of jail. Thanks all the wonderful weirdos having fun on Discord. Our Discord channel is still up.

You'll see how you have beef steak. Thanks to all you space-sistered plane time, so trivia on the app congrats to round eight winner, big pharma, aka John Myers. Round nine started this last week, get in there and play. You have some fun. Next week, the space-sistered surprised me

and voted in the topic of my grandfather, Papa Ward. Gonna look into a small town life. Gonna look at the man who helped shape much of who I am today. Gonna look into what it must have been like for my family to homestead out in Idaho, eat out a living in a very rural place. Gonna share a lot of life lessons. My grandpa taught me that I think you're just good for everybody to hear. And learn about, you know, some Idaho history, very different kind of episode. I hope you listen, I hope you like it. I think it's going to be pretty special. And then we'll get back to our bread and butter soon. After a little break from true crime as far as serial killers,

we do have a couple fascinating and very dark dirt bags coming up. Right now, let's head on over to this week's Time Sucker Updates. Updates, get your time sucker updates. All right, a lot of black water, suck updates, say, as I said earlier, uh, first update regarding black water coming in from military meat sack Isaac. Last name redacted. Isaac writes, shares a lot of information writing, if you wouldn't mind, dump my last name if you're using, I'd hate to piss off a potential employer. Done.

Okay, just discovered your podcast. I've been just about four episodes so far while effectively under quarantine in a safe house and Phoenix sleeping on an air mattress and eating from Amazon fresh. Praise both angles for capitalism as finest. With any luck I'm out soon back to Seattle, totally not relevant to my comments.

Some of the negatives you listed are specifically why black water, KBR, and numerous other agencies get hired. If a civilian or government protect T is under the guard of the army, the army is fulfilling two missions. Protect a principal, A, and then B, win hearts and minds. While winning hearts and minds during contained eating dates, and my waste is due to a ton of dates, lamb and sweet mint T, plus age, they aren't effectively focused on threats to a

protect T and are potentially letting people into the close protection zone Regular army and US Marine Corps contain a high number of people in a given unit that are fresh out of boot and AIT Think trade school for the military on their first deployment While they are well trained and learning incredibly fast. They are fresh PMCs contain a ton of retirees Left the service Soldiers that have many times a ton of deployment experience and training They also have more maturity than 19 year year old PFC on the first overseas tour. They're trained in close protection and close protection specialists are by their very

nature trained to aggressively move a protect in and out of a danger zone. There are four problems with what happened in the last 20 years though with PMCs. One, Prince is a demagogue and it potentially makes decisions including use of force and acquisition of military gear to fulfill his personal political goals. Two, we surge PMCs to such a level under W to encourage PMCs to take on lesser trained soldiers in order to serve their God of the most honorable dead presidents. Three, PMC teams were deployed with little to no tactical support, things went wrong. And this has a direct and exponential impact on the mental state of contractors. One be heading video of Joe from team three is enough to encourage you to move from safe

to burst on your M4 more freely. Four, we as Americans are obsessed with movies like Rambo and the Expendables, where a few good men retired from the service do with the government and law can't. This I think allows a wide degree of automatic excuse for bad behavior. That's a very interesting thought that I was kind of thinking about, I see a digression, potential mitigation. Start paying a bounty to retain operators in the military

and expand our teams in units like CID, close protect units, USMC, embassy security teams, diplomatic security service. And then there's the Delta, and then there's Delta, the Army Rangers, the Marines in general, and any other component of special operations command not mentioned. Let's take me. I dropped out of college to enter the service during the test war for this current mess. I came out with a paramedic for a minute, moved to Seattle, having to take a job in telecom, which became IT, which

paid way better than the army with 20 years of service as a colonel. Now, thought I was going to be one and also way better than a paramedic. Combined a ton of information tech, IT certs with happens to be a paramedic and one hell of a range score with an M16 and M4 and M9. And as a PMC, I can make insanely more than I would make at a tech job. I'm not gonna name the company in case

you wanted that redacto too. Government services, roles that pay close to my salary require at least a masters and don't recognize industry certification. Even if I had the degrees necessary for senior GS roles, I'd start at half of my salary. As a contractor to the government, I can get state side my full to a superior salary for the same role. If this role happens to be overseas in a danger zone, there's hazard or

combat pay on top of that. Why not just align government hiring practices to the rest of the freaking industry? Not that I'm a government contractor now, but isn't it cheaper to pay me my real rate versus paying say, Siemens, $300,000 a year for me and aggression, right? Because then you wouldn't, yeah, you're not gonna get that $300,000.

That's the drive you really didn't know. Leadership wanted people doing things they couldn't order CIA officers and the military to do no matter how bad the uninformed issues were the PMC issues are worse because the pesky Geneva Convention and the USCA gets in the way. If you grant immunity and offer someone $400,000 a year to hook jumper cables to someone's nipples for national security, I'm, excuse me, I'm guessing there's quite a few takers. I've worked in and out of the Middle East and Europe throughout this clusterfuck, and depending on who was present,

I felt safe, embarrassed, or highly concerned, and wanted exfiltration ASAP. The people in the Middle East, widened far, are gentle kind and hospitable people. It's unfortunate that some of our behavior had resulted in radicalizing the same people we wanted as friends. I've sat with more than one herder on a hill

and loafers slacks than a dress shirt without body armor and felt perfectly safe, except for Santa much use. At the same time at two in the morning after six weeks of having bombs go off and bullets fly by your suburban, it's understandable what happens next. Safety, what safety?

Lock and load, QACDC highway to hill. I don't have a fix other than to safely perform information security audits in the States until I retire now. Anyway, thanks again for the entertainment and the mind yoga, your new listener and Phoenix bookan Seattle wherever I land next. Well, thank you for all that info. Isaac, that was a great information dump. Yes, there was so much I didn't cover despite it still being a pretty big episode and not having any military service. There's just inside I can't offer it so much I just I can't

really know. Great point about why contractors, you made or paid, excuse me, just directly. Why can't you pay military with lots of experience directly instead of having to go through a PMC that then takes a lot of their money and doesn't give them as much, and then they can still be under governmental control and have a lot of those advantages. And yes, interesting thoughts about how, yeah, people use the, you know, the government's use private military contractors to get around Geneva conventions and stuff. I appreciate the thought out message

and good luck to you going forward. Now an email from the Sony MeatSack, Jacob Palmer, who like a lot of others, not happy with me leaving some Eric Prince information out of the episode last week. Jacob writes, I got a lot of these similar emails. Hey, suck master, absolutely love the show. I've been a time stucker since June. Binging your show helped me get through some long lonely days doing field research in the weird times

of COVID. I'm writing to ask you why you left out the fact that Eric Prince was cheating on his dying wife with his kids, nanny. I mean, come on. Not only is that info super easy to find, but a critical thinker like yourself should have totally found someone marrying their nanny right after their wife dies suspicious. Given what you've said about people who cheat on their significant others in the past, I'm really surprised you decided Eric Prince deserved to pass from any criticism on this. Yes, that info is easy to find Jacob. And it was in the original draft of the notes from Sophie and from Zach.

I did consciously take it out. I thought about putting it back in. Here was my rationale for taking it out. It shows up a lot on the web. Eric Prince never tried to hide it. He admitted it openly. His dying wife knew before she died. The affair shows up on a lot of lists, sites,

like Eric Prince, five fast facts. You need to know kind of stuff. And it usually comes across as a smear piece to me. In this suck, I didn't want to do a biopiece. I wanted to focus on the industry of PMCs and how black water fit within that industry. How black water was founded, you know, that led obviously to our prints and his life and do his controversial family. But I didn't want it to be the episode's focus. I did address several things I don't like about the princes. And I just felt like if I went further in that direction, now instead of a suck

on black water in the PMC industry, it's more about a piece on, uh, on prints. I don't like about the princes. And I just felt like if I went further in that direction, now instead of a suck on black water in the PMC industry, it's more about a piece on prince. I don't really care about Eric Prince, to be honest. I care about what he represents. I find black water less interesting also than the overall industry it sits inside. I took out the affair because if I left it in, I felt that I would need to address it.

And there's a lot of additional info out there about it that I can't access. Like, why did it happen? Had their marriage been crumbling for years? If you and I had not been dying, would they have gotten a divorce before the affair? What was her side of it? I just, I don't know.

It just seemed like a big distraction to a story that already had a lot of moving parts. That being said, I should have let it in. On hindsight, I wish I would have let it in. I do take things out of research every week. And I add things, you know, last minutes to try and make the stories understandable and interesting as possible in a week, because I can.

Sometimes I get that process right. Sometimes I get it wrong. Always get wrong to some degree. And I think in this case, I got that detail wrong. So thank you for calling me out. Thanks for the message, Jacob. Another Blackwater message. More PMC food for thought.

From FineSack, Will Last Name Redacted. Will Rines Dear Master, Sucker Jokeslinger and Champion of Truth. Jacob, another black water message. More PMC food for thought. From fine sack, will last name redacted? Will writes, dear master sucker jokes, when you're in champion of truth, but you're not considered myself an official space lizard. But I'm a tremendous fan of your podcast and longtime fan of your standup. Oh, you thank you.

Your jokes kept me cheerful and laughing when we were lucky enough to have fast internet and Afghanistan. Then he writes, thank you for what you do. I was gonna say, thank you for what you do. Above all, I commend you for applying scientific methodology, evidence-based arguments and collecting evidence to observation. I hope you're times like audience absorbs this lesson and realize any common person can become a critical thinker and evaluate information

beyond base value. Also, the application jokes is your best new monic device. I can't make a sandwich anymore without referring to peanut butter as peanut butter. I thoroughly enjoyed your recent Blackwater episode is a former intelligence officer that received training from the academy worked with black water staff in the Middle East and witnessed unintended consequences of their work. I found the podcast pretty fair in full of context. Ultimately the main difficulty with PMCs is the lack of authority and accountability for which they operate.

PMCs are not subject to any sort of judicial review or oversight from elected officials. The US military is subject to the US or UCMJ uniform code of military justice, covering the rules of land warfare that dictate military conduct and rules of engagement. The intelligence community receives presidential findings directing intelligence activities and is subject to congressional oversight, no such structure for PMC's. The difference between an armed vigilante and public servant, soldier, law enforcement officer, involved in violence of action is the direct tasking, recall, and permission of said force by the people through their elected representative and the rule of law.

An ex-Navy seal may have tremendous personal capabilities, but without that legitimate charter to operate, their actions can become criminal. I've heard many over the years in the IC and SOF communities complain about the ROE making it harder for them to succeed as warriors. But it is those constraints set by the government of the people that legitimize what they do. That set, as you point out, PMCs are a way for elected officials to avoid attribution and accountability, and in many cases look for a quick fix. This tactic still used to this day

to reduce official boots on the ground, troop numbers, and divert the tough job to results oriented contractors. It's critical for all of us to hold our elected officials responsible for the actions of PMCs, the military, intelligence services, and law enforcement. Keep practicing those pronunciation guides.

You do better than you think. Hope to see you live on stage post COVID. All the best to Lindsay, Kyler, Monroe, Will Barker, PS, here come the spoons mother fucker. Great advice to live by. Well, thank you Will. Yeah, thanks for pointing out how it is important. The PMC's be given properly to oversight.

I do think, yeah, there's, it needs to be some overhaul that way. You know, if not, they can both end up doing what their country asks them to do and doing it well. And simultaneously, be blamed, shamed for illegal actions, you know, they've committed, again, on behalf of our government.

As you know, the day, we do need to hold elected officials responsible for sometimes using PMCs to sidestep international protocols to need a convention, human rights violations. Unless we don't care, as a nation, about looking just as bad as many of the so-called bad guys, we go to battle against. So that is a very important food for thought. One more little black water related message, a baby one from Outstanding Veterans Act, Colin Evans. Colin writes, Hey, suck nasty.

Just finished the suck about black water and you brought up the flying tigers. My great-granddad was a crew chief of them, Leon P. Colquitt. Never got to meet him, but he was one of the originals. I don't know what he did after, but I know his service inspired me to enlist. Though I joined in peacetime, I made a lot of buddies, two of which became contract operators, one for triple canopy, the other for academy. One was deployed to Afghan for a stint, told me he made 150K that year. The other did not deploy, told me he made about half that, just some stuff I've heard,

and failed in history. Keep on stuck in my guy. Well, thank you, Colin. Flying tigers in your blood. That's very cool. Cool connection. Good for you and in my guy. Well, thank you Colin flying tigers in your blood. That's very cool cool connection Good for you and in your service, you know wartime or peacetime always impressive keep on sucking dude and I will end on some laughs with the silly sucker Joe Grindel Joe I thought this was very funny Joe writes Dear Dan, I've been catching up on nilder sucks. Just started the Vlad the Impaler episode from July Dear Dan, I've been catching up on Nilder Sucks, just started the Vlad the Impaler episode from July 14th, 2017. That's crazy. In the opening updates, you dismiss the idea that H.H. Holmes

may have also been jacked to Ripper. You stated that the idea was solely based on Holmes' whereabouts, not being confirmed during the Ripper murders. And this was simply not enough evidence. I immediately was reminded of the fact that your dads' whereabouts were likely unknown at this time as well. Could he have been the ripper? Love the shows, hope you enjoyed the idea that your dad joke is retroactively making his way

into past sucks. Joe, I love my dad getting added to the bat catalog. And yeah, no, I think my dad very well may have been the jacks of ripper. You know, Dan, Dan the ripper, it's possible. It's very possible. I don't know where he was. He doesn't know where he was that time.

Thank you for the laughs and thank you for the message everyone. Look forward to next week's Time Sucker Updates. Thanks, time suckers, I need a net. We all did. Well, thanks for listening to this Bad Magic Productions podcast, Meet Sacks. If your team is troubled, do not send them to any Alon-esque hellhole this week. You know, and also, maybe keep them away from my dad, you know, just to be extra safe.

And keep on sucking. Oh god damn it, that was supposed to be done early. Hey Joe, get in the ring! Logan, put your gloves on, start punching it! Sorry! Punch it! Oh, harder! Hard!

Ow!