Blazing Eyes, Cult Ties, and New Age Vibes with Leah Sottile

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[00:00:29] This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be considered legal, medical, or mental health advice. The views and opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the podcast and are not intended to malign any religion group, club, organization, business, individual, anyone, or anything. I'm Sarah Edmondson. And I'm Anthony Nippy Ames.

[00:00:57] And this is A Little Bit Culty. Cults are commonplace now. From fandoms to fads, we're examining them all. We look at what happens when things that seem like a great thing at first go bad. Every week, we chat with survivors, experts, and whistleblowers for real culty stories told directly by the people who lived through them. Because we want you to learn a few things that we've had to learn the hard way. For example, if you think you're too smart to get sucked into something culty, you might be prime recruitment material. And who knows? You could already be in a cult.

[00:01:28] If you're not aware of your programming, you're probably being programmed. So keep listening to find out. We'll talk about all sorts of topics on the show, but be aware, this podcast might contain stories that could be alarming to some of our listeners. So please check our show notes for more detailed descriptions and take care of yourself. Subscribe to our Patreon for Thursday bonus episodes, Q&A, and all sorts of exclusive content. That's patreon.com slash a little bit culty. Welcome to season seven of A Little Bit Culty.

[00:02:07] Welcome back everybody to this week's very special episode of A Little Bit Culty. Today's guest is Leah Sotilli, an investigative journalist who's written for pretty much every major outlet you can think of. Her main focus is true crime, extremist ideologies, and fringe subcultures. So of course, we had to get her on the show. You might recognize her from a previous episode where she spoke to us about extreme Mormon prepper Lori Vallow in her fabulous book, When the Moon Turns to Blood.

[00:02:36] Her new book called Blazing I Sees All is about the rise of New Age culture in America, and it covers New Age cults you've probably heard of and some you definitely have not. One of those is Amy Carlson, a.k.a. Mother God, who founded Love Has Won. If you don't remember, Amy was the guru who was oddly obsessed with Robin Williams and turned blue from drinking colloidal silver. Yes, you all have been writing us to cover Mother God, and we finally are. We're also going to be covering something that is not so widely published, which is Amy's anti-Semitism.

[00:03:07] Leah will tell us all about her, including stuff that did not make it into the Love is One HBO docuseries. And we're also going to get into the appeal that New Age has for women in particular. And like many of you, we've been following the Lori Daybell case, so Leah will give us a quick update. Let's welcome her to the show.

[00:03:39] Leah, welcome back to A Little Bit Culty. Hey, thanks for having me again. I'm so excited. We just love your new book. How you been since the last book? How you been since when the, when the, oh, no, wait. When the moon turns to blood about Lori Daybell. So for those who heard our episode of Leah a couple, maybe over a year ago, what's been happening since then? Yeah, what's new there? And Lori, since like a bunch of stuff has happened since you finished writing the book, like she's been sentenced. Are you still following all that? Can you give us like a little update?

[00:04:08] Yeah, I'm not, I'm not following it as up to the minute as I was at a certain point. But yeah, since I was on the show, she was convicted in Idaho of murder charges for her children and for conspiracy to murder Tammy Daybell, Chad Daybell's wife. And then Chad Daybell was also sentenced in Idaho. He was found guilty and he was sentenced to death. Lori was not. So he is facing the death penalty in Idaho.

[00:04:36] And now Lori is getting ready to stand trial in Arizona for the death of her fourth husband, Charles Vallow. And for conspiring to also kill her nephew. So a lot going on. Lori will be representing herself in that trial. And she just did her first one on one interview with Keith Morrison from Dateline. That's right. Which was an interesting little interview. From prison, right? Yes. Yeah.

[00:05:06] That's because she lives now. No, no, no. Yeah. I didn't know you could interview people in prison, but I guess that happens. Thank you for the update. We were writing about that particular story in our forthcoming book, which we will check with you before we print, obviously. Make sure we have it right because we refer to the episode. I think she's under the cover, under the topic of extremism and spirituality meets prepper, which seems to be a big part of.

[00:05:31] So what's been happening since then and what led you to Love is One and Amy Carlson in this next book? Yeah, actually, it was several things. But for the purposes of our conversation, one of the things that led me there was actually Lori and Chad. So you may recall that when Chad Daybell had his small group spiritual meetings around Idaho, Utah and Arizona, that he actually would use a crystal pendulum during those meetings sometimes.

[00:06:00] I mean, there's a million ways to use it. But what I'm most aware of is kind of in new age spaces, people will use a crystal pendulum to sort of discern answers. If the pendulum swings one way, it might mean yes. And if it swings the other way or in a circle, it might mean no. And I think that just really surprised me because I felt like new age ideas were something that I'm really familiar with, having grown up and lived all my life in the Pacific Northwest. I think there's just a lot of that in the air here.

[00:06:29] So I was sort of surprised to hear these, you know, really ultra conservative, far right fringe Mormons deploying this really new agey tool. So I was just like, huh, that's weird. And so it started to kind of open my eyes to the idea that there was some interest in new age ideas within far right or extreme LDS circles.

[00:06:53] But also during my reporting of that book, there were rumors that maybe somebody who was associated with the Daybells was in Love Has Won. That completely was wrong. It didn't pan out. It was like a thing I read on a forum. But that's what put them on my radar. And that was pre 2021. So I knew that this group was there. I knew that they followed this woman who called herself Mother God and they were based in Colorado.

[00:07:18] So when some things happened with the group in 2021, I was like, oh, that's that group I heard about. And so I started looking into it more. Well, you did such a thorough job. And I think we both loved how you tied in her story with so much historical background that both of us had no idea about in terms of some of the spiritual, I don't know how the words shysters or. Suffice to say, she's not the first one. Yeah, she's not definitely not the first.

[00:07:48] For those who haven't seen the documentary or read your book yet. Can you summarize a little bit about like what the philosophy is or what she believes in or what her kind of doctrine is? Yeah, sure. I'm so glad to hear that you were learning things from the book because I found the topic to be so endlessly fascinating. And if that comes through and on the page, that's great. So Love Has Won was a group founded by this woman, Amy Carlson. She was from Texas.

[00:08:14] And at a certain point, she up and left her life and her identity as Amy Carlson. And she started kind of sinking further and further into her ideas around lightworkers and people who have ideas about aliens or extraterrestrial personalities being a part of their own personality. That was kind of her entree into kind of out there new age ideas.

[00:08:42] You know, years past, she starts mostly live streaming where she would kind of wear this cute little headset and give astrological predictions about, you know, the stars are saying this is happening. So she would be talking about that kind of thing. And she was sunk deeper and deeper into it where she eventually started to think of herself as a god. So she referred to herself eventually as Mother God.

[00:09:06] And when Love Has Won congealed is its final, I guess, form, she was at the center of the ideology. So what she and her deputies would tell people is that to commit an offense against Amy was really committing an offense against the Earth itself because Mother God was both Mother God and the embodiment of the planet. She was everything. She was the solar system.

[00:09:34] So they held her in very high regard as, you know, this divine being. She had a lot of ideas that I should say right off the bat, none of her ideas were unique. They were all pulled from like a hundred, you know, 100, 200 year legacy of new age ideas and spiritualism in America. None of her conspiracies were particularly new either. Right, right. Exactly. Up to current times, none of them were very, hurt them all.

[00:10:03] Probably one of her most unique ideas was so she she would say that she was reincarnated something like 574 times. It was this very specific number. She had lived as Joan of Arc and Mary and Cleopatra. But she also lived as the Queen of Lemuria, this lost civilization, sort of like Atlantis.

[00:10:27] And she preached to her followers that they kind of prayed to a variety of people that they called the Galactics. The Galactics were, in her case, dead celebrities. So chief among them, the most important to the Love Has Won belief system was Robin Williams. I know this sounds absurd. It's a good choice. It's a good choice. Right. At least you're laughing, right? Yeah.

[00:10:56] I mean, it's, I think that in all portrayals of Love Has Won, this Robin Williams thing is like, it's a joke. And in many ways it is. But in reporting the book, I really started to understand what an effective recruitment tool that was. So Love Has Won would bring people into the group by talking to people in Facebook comments on live streams.

[00:11:19] So when Robin Williams came up, specifically when I was talking to a woman who was in the group, she said like, oh, I love him. Oh, you guys love him too. It was, they started chatting about his movies and some of his comedy bits and TV appearances. And it was just like, this, oh, these people get me, they get my personality, they get things that I'm interested in.

[00:11:40] And so when Amy selected all these celebrities like Tupac and Chris Farley and Whitney Houston, these were all talking points that would allow them to find common ground on really just kind of normal things. When they were in the group, then they would say, we pray to Robin Williams, we ask him for help and things like that. So the belief system is really complicated, but these are kind of the big, the big parts. That is a key thing.

[00:12:10] And when you're saying that, it almost makes me feel like she piggybacked off of his and all of the Galactics' lovability. You know what I mean? Yes. It's good marketing. Yeah. They're super popular and loved and she can kind of be that for them. And it is hard to imagine like believing that, I have to admit. I try not to judge given everything that I believed. But when I try to step back, normally, as you know, we follow a survivor's journey into these groups.

[00:12:36] But from your perspective as a journalist, what did people sign up for? Like what was the hook you think for most people when they were either listening to the live streams or then taking the next step, which is to come be on the team? Go on mission, I think is the term, right? Yeah. Go on mission. I think that it was a couple of things. It was common ground and an escape from a world where people felt misunderstood.

[00:13:03] So of the people I spoke to, some people were really struggling with, you know, personal issues in their life. They were struggling with addiction issues. They had in the past been a part of maybe a high control religion and were looking for something else that felt like a relief from that. But then there were also people who were like, I just need a break.

[00:13:27] Like I had this great, great interviews with a woman who was like, you know, I was working at Starbucks and everybody was so angry all the time. And it was just like I was just bummed out. And I found on Facebook this group that was talking about all these ideas that I was really interested in. They were talking about spirituality. They had this beautiful woman at the center of their ideas who preached about love and higher consciousness.

[00:13:54] And that was really appealing for people. So not everybody went on mission. There was a distinction. In fact, very few people went on mission. So going on mission with Love Has One meant moving to Colorado to live near Amy Carlson. And that was a pretty exclusive group of people that did that. So the vast majority of Love Has One followers were online.

[00:14:21] And, you know, that was a really interesting thing for me to learn as a journalist, because I think there's this stereotype that cult groups are all like wearing white and meeting in the desert to live in a compound or something like that. Like the Rajneeshis back in the day. This was super instructive for me to learn. Like, yeah, of course, a cult would be online because that's the easiest way for people to get donations.

[00:14:46] And like in Love Has One's case, I mean, they sunk their claws into people so deeply where they were. They didn't need to be there in person. They were already there basically in their minds. Mm hmm. You know, Sarah and I were watching it and I had this feeling like this is reality TV, except you're interacting with it and you know the characters. Like it was a real weird like the line is being blurred of like what's entertainment and interactive and you don't know how indoctrinated they are.

[00:15:14] So it was a real fascinating like, well, this is like entertainment as well. That's such an interesting way to think about it. I think you're right. The live streams were such an integral part of Love Has One, right? Yeah. And it's just people, two people talking. I mean, they would live stream for like six hours a day and, you know, multiple different episodes, I guess. And those conversations were always hosted by two people. Sometimes they get in an argument. Sometimes they'd be crying. But it was like people felt like they wanted to watch it.

[00:15:43] But then they were participating in the conversation through the comments. So you're right. It was very much like, you know, and then sometimes the people hosting the show would be speaking to the people in the comments. And that would have the effect of those people in the comments being like, oh, I matter. I'm like a part of this here. So, I mean, it's fascinating. It's such an interesting study. I caught myself being entertained. And I was like, oh, this is why people, this is why they would do it.

[00:16:10] And I always try to ask like what was good at first. And it was very clear. And what you just said, even if they're just staying on line and not going on mission, but the people who did go on mission, almost every single person said as soon as they connected with Amy or Mother God, that she would say something like, you're brilliant. You're special. And that was her gift. That was her gift. And I think it was her gift or manipulation, whatever, however you want to call it.

[00:16:38] But it's something that we're trying to like really show people in our next book is like what is the thing that gets you? What's your susceptibility? What's your vulnerability? And it really seemed like the people who went on mission, tell me if I'm wrong here, weren't just looking for escape and joining online, but like really had nothing else or ready to give everything else up, you know, drain their 401k to do this wild thing and then really committed.

[00:17:04] And those are the people that seemed the most, I don't want to say broken because it's not, it's, we've really like in our book, we tried to say like, yeah, we really try to say not just broken people joined cults, but the people who really committed had a lot of childhood trauma is what I'm trying to say. It seemed like, or a really hard past. And here was a place where they felt accepted and it was, and you got to party. Right. It's a frat house at one point. I mean, talk about that.

[00:17:31] If Amy wanted to stay up all night drinking, you had to stay up all night drinking. Definitely. There was that party vibe. I spoke to people who were a part of the group at all its different stages. I spoke to one of the people that was her father God. So as a part of the love has one belief system, there was mother God and her not equal, but her, well, whoever she was with at that point was called father God.

[00:18:00] So there were like five or six different father gods over a period of maybe 10 years. And one of those father gods told me, you know, when I came there, I had just lost my job. I'd connected with Amy online. She had told me how special I was. So I came to Colorado. I was very shocked at what I saw there. She was a mess in person. She looked very different, you know, in person than she did on the, on the internet.

[00:18:27] But, you know, once I sunk into the flow of things there, it was like we were all working towards a cause. And that cause was in their minds, spreading love into the world. The way they did that was through online chats and forums and creating content for their website and that, that sort of thing. But I spoke to other people who lost people to the group.

[00:18:49] So I thought that was also really interesting was to hear from people who were closest to Amy that I couldn't personally talk to because they never responded to my interview requests. But their friends and family who said, it made no sense for this person to join. They specifically, one of the people closest to Amy was an attorney who had a like very promising law career. She was from a really well-to-do family in the Miami area.

[00:19:19] She had tons of friends. She had everything going for her. And all that they could understand was that the stress of it all, of keeping it all together, just broke her. And she just decided to make this clean break from her life and leave everyone behind, which is exactly what Amy Carlson did. So I don't know specifically that that woman had childhood trauma, but certainly something that just kind of flipped a switch and made her just say, I'm done. I'm going to be a different person now.

[00:19:49] Hmm. And that is something that really chaps my ass about this particular group. And I always try to think about this segment as like, what's the thing that just is really not right? And we would hope that somebody in it would see it and go, you know, that doesn't actually line up. Right. I'm going to circle back to that thought in a second. I'm sorry. I'm tangenting. Here we go. I was watching it happen.

[00:20:12] Like one of the sort of classic things about this group, even though it's not like religious, is that as soon as people accept that she is God or mother God, she can get away with whatever the fuck she wants. She can be a raging biatch and yell at people, which is the opposite of being loving. But because she is God, she's doing what she needs to do to relieve her pain, whatever, however they justify that. Right? So that happens. That's a like trademark cult tactic, going back to the thought I just had, which was. It's your mind.

[00:20:42] What was I just saying? Oh, yeah. But the inconsistency that I would hope would maybe snap somebody out of this is she's mom. I was shocked at how everyone's calling her mom. You know, mom did this, mother God, blah, blah, blah. Mom wants us to mama. She left her three children. Like as a mom of two boys, my heart is broken hearing how she just literally walked out on them.

[00:21:06] You hear in one of the interviews with Dr. Phil, she begged her angels not to let that happen, but she had to because if she wasn't going to go on mission, who would? That's how she justified it to herself. Do you think that that inconsistency helped anybody snap out of it? Or what do you think got people to wake up out of the fever dream of mother God? I don't know. I mean, in the reporting that I did, I don't think that that's hypocrisy of calling herself mother while leaving her own children in Texas.

[00:21:35] In fact, I think it gave people permission to do the same. And I think that specifically one of the people I talked to a lot for the book, she was ready to do that. And it shocks her that she was in that mindset, that she was like ready to just leave her family behind for mother God. So, yeah, I think one of the most enlightening things I did was speak to her, two of her children. One of her children was so young when she left that they told me he has no recollection of her at all.

[00:22:04] So this is just like a weird thing in his life that's kind of not in his life. But her eldest son, Cole, he was amazing. And his clarity on the situation. Yeah, it was very well put. He was like she was a weird person. Like what I remember of her was a very unstable person.

[00:22:23] And if anything, he's more angry that our culture allows for people who are clearly in crisis to somehow build themselves up as a spiritual guru. Because it was so clear to him what was happening, that she had severe mental health issues that were untreated, that she maybe felt that she couldn't treat because of stigma or whatever. But then also she had severe substance abuse issues.

[00:22:51] And she found a way to surround herself with people who would just allow that to endure. And she called it a part of her spiritual system. Yeah, I was going to ask you about that because that seemed to be, from my perspective, that seemed to be a pretty powerful presence in all of her behaviors and not just superficial drugs. Like some pretty mind-altering and probably permanently so, I would imagine. Yeah, I mean what I know of is her alcohol abuse issues.

[00:23:21] As a part of their belief system, that was part of what made her a spiritual being. I mean, I've heard her followers say, you know, if you were the living embodiment of the planet, can you imagine how much pain you would be in all the time? This was just her way of being able to deal with that, was to take these substances or drink. So, yeah, with everything, they had a way of justifying it.

[00:23:46] And Sarah, I wanted to say to your point about her raging at people and getting angry and having these drunken rants. That was something that they would say, well, that's not Mother God. That's actually Robin Williams speaking through her and being a tough, you know, being that voice of tough love. Right. So they're creative. Yeah. Yeah, they're creative. Yeah. I mean, they're a way of justifying just about anything. Hey, Culty listeners.

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[00:26:26] Now let's get back to a little bit Kulti, shall we? And, you know, we've done over 200 episodes now. There's not a lot of female cult leaders out there, as you probably know. How did gender shape the way that she led Love Has Won and how did that affect the power dynamics with her followers and then the various father gods? Maybe you should explain who the father gods are. There's a few of them. Yeah. It's hard to keep track.

[00:26:50] I had awareness of at least, you know, a few other women who had found some sort of power and cachet for themselves within the new, you know, wide new age world. But it was Amy Carlson that was the first person I'd heard, you know, use the term mother god and say God was a woman.

[00:27:07] And I spoke to people who were in the group who that was the most exciting thing that brought them to Love Has Won in the first place because they would just very clearly proclaim on, you know, posters and on social media, God is a woman. And people were like, yeah, that's what I've always thought, too. So it so it was really effective. She certainly when I did the research for this book, she certainly was not the first leader, female leader of a group.

[00:27:37] I think that over time, there have been a lot of female leaders like I talk about Elizabeth Clare Prophet. I talk about Jay-Z Knight. I talk about Helena Blavatsky, who, you know, really was a founder of spiritualism in America. They were all just really disregarded during their time and continue to be. So I think that they've always been there.

[00:27:59] It's just that they've been kind of relegated to this talk show fodder and this like kooky joke instead of what I think is more important is for us to ask, like, why are these women starting these groups and why are hundreds or thousands of people coming to them? And we're not paying attention to the reasons for why that's appealing to people. Right. Because we can sit here and talk about how this is so weird, but it was really appealing for people.

[00:28:27] And it was that exact element of God being a woman and Father God being kind of in service to Mother God. So, you know, she would sort of preach this. It seemed I think the feminism of Love Has One, though, was totally skin deep. It's this idea that, you know, this group is largely led by women. It has Mother God at the center where this Father God figure is really in service to her.

[00:28:53] But that's pretty much where it ended, because when you look at some of the ideas that Amy preached, they were just about as like patriarchal as anything that I can think of. You know, she would deem that there were different kinds of conditioning that would lead you to be living in like a negative energy or to be living in 3D when she was trying to ascend people into a spiritual, you know, fifth dimensional plane.

[00:29:24] And I guess this is the sort of one irony I see is that when she was in her rage state, that was her channeling Robin Williams to yell at her followers like like an abusive father, I guess. So so I think that there's just like a real irony there that there was not much beyond Amy being at the center of things. And that's pretty much where the feminism ended. Why do you think so many women connected with her?

[00:29:51] Why do you think the new age is so appealing to women generally? It is a stereotype, right? I think it's true. So the research I did looked back into the 1850s and sort of trotted forward in time to try and understand these various movements and leaders. And what I started to find was that when you look at some of the world's largest, most mainstream religions, there is not a lot of place for women in positions of power. There's a lot of power.

[00:30:19] There's a lot of dictating to women how their bodies are used or what their place in the home is or what their role in society is. And I think the new age in general offers solutions to that. It offers a way for people to find their own place and to say the spiritual power is inside of me. And in fact, I'm special in a way that I may be able to talk to God in a way that's different than other people.

[00:30:48] I might be able to, you know, like channelers, people who channeled spirits and continue to do so. That is something that's almost entirely women who do that with a few big notable exceptions. There's a sense of personal power. And when it came to Love Has Won, the way that they marketed themselves was really brilliant.

[00:31:08] They would use these old photos of Amy when she was super healthy and looking, you know, just like this kind of hippie Instagram personality. And the people that they put on screen on their live streams generally were young, good looking, fit. But then they would bring in people to show the diversity of their followers. They would bring in older members. They would bring in members of color to kind of have a wider appeal.

[00:31:35] And I think that that's what is enduring about Love Has Won. There are still people around the world that believe that Mother God ascended and that this belief system goes on without her here in the 3D. Okay. For those who don't know, she did ascend. What does this mean in reality or in their reality, depending on how you want to look at it? What happened? So in our reality, it means that she died. Yeah. Okay.

[00:32:04] In 3D, she died. Yes. In 3D, she died. Bento box land. Yeah. In April 2021, Amy Carlson passed away. And her followers knew that she was dying. She was very, very sick. She was unable to walk. And she had major health issues. It was clear that she was going to pass away. What they saw that as is that for a long time, Amy had been talking about that we are trying to ascend.

[00:32:31] We are trying to ascend out of this plane of existence into the fifth dimension, which is a more spiritually realized, you know, beautiful dimension. So when she died, they were like, the ascension is happening. The UFOs are coming. She's going to go up there. So I think there was some confusion when she died that they weren't really sure had she ascended. You know, if she ascended, should they have her body still? What to do with that?

[00:33:00] So there was a lot of confusion around that. But, you know, in the aftermath, they came to believe, yeah, she had ascended. That was a good thing. It enforced all of their ideas that Amy had been saying, you know, we will ascend. I will ascend. I think it just then left a sense of brokenness within the group about what to do next because they kind of needed Amy to be at the center of their belief system. So you saw some real fracturing of the group into a lot of different splinter groups, all of which are still, to my knowledge, talking about Mother God.

[00:33:30] And they're also sitting on a cash cowl. Right. There seemed to be that awareness. Yeah, they continue to do that. Like if we're going to preach the gospel of Mother God, for lack of a better term, they continue to do live streams, do podcasts, do sell products predominantly. That's a big thing of theirs, which is candles and paintings, but colloidal silver. Salves. Lots of salves. Yeah. Right. Right. That would be my hook. I love a good salve.

[00:33:59] Sarah and I were commenting because we got obviously seeing footage of her younger and all that stuff and having kids so young. Like it did seem that she was on a pretty positive trajectory and just had three kids with three guys. And I think that in combination with drugs, it was such a tragic story because it felt like if she had kind of like gotten through that struggle of whatever it was, she was working anyway. She was building something anyway.

[00:34:24] Like it seemed like she was beautiful when she was younger before she did what she did to herself. It just seems like that could have been a pretty bright light of a person had it continued on that trajectory. And then that bleak turn was really, oh, so sad. Such a sad story. It really is sad. Like that was the thing I kept thinking about as I was working on this. It's like this did not have to happen. And in fact, it is surprising that it happened because she came from such a supportive family.

[00:34:54] She came from the kind of family that like when she was 16, she got a new car. They really like set her up for a good life. And the way that her son explained it to me was that Amy had aspirations to be something great and to be famous. And she always thought she would be a famous singer. And that didn't happen. She had kids young. She was a single mom. She worked at McDonald's, but she was like a manager. So she managed several McDonald's. But, you know, she had a career for herself.

[00:35:23] But it wasn't enough. And that's what he said. It just wasn't a life befitting of what Amy Carlson thought she should have. She should have something where she was revered and admired. So she built that for herself. What an unfortunate cocktail of things. But it still required the work to build it for herself. That's what's so like, like if she had applied herself. In a different direction. In the direction. It may have happened. I mean, who knows? I don't. It's conjecture, but it just feels like she still did build something.

[00:35:53] It just wasn't. It's sad. Yeah, it's really sad. What did you think of the documentary? The HBO doc? How do you feel about it? Yeah, I thought it was interesting. The documentary filmmaker got access to some of the people I wasn't able to get access to. That inner circle that was really interesting to hear a lot of their kind of unfiltered thoughts about Amy, about her being God, and what those days looked like around her death.

[00:36:22] The issue I did take with the documentary is that the takeaway was that the healthcare system failed her in some way. And I think that that is to an extent true. But I did, you know, as somebody who has reported for so long on political and religious extremism in America, that was completely glossed over.

[00:36:43] You did not get a sense of their politics and how that became such an important part of the group was to preach how Donald Trump was Amy's father in Lemuria. And so they were huge Trump supporters. But also they preached extremely anti-Semitic ideas. Anti-Semitism was so big that it actually was a recruitment tool for some people who are like, I love what you're talking about, you know, about Jewish people controlling the world. I think that's, you know, in this... That's in vogue now.

[00:37:13] Yeah, but, you know, as a journalist, I feel like it's really a huge oversight and a disservice to your audience to say not include that this is an anti-Semitic group. I don't know. I couldn't understand that. To me, there's a dereliction of duty as a journalist there. So, but I do think, you know, it's an unfiltered look at Love Has Won with some convenient editing. Well put. Yeah. Well said. I was wondering why they didn't go there.

[00:37:43] But yeah, incredible access. Yeah. They got definitely incredible access. Totally. But let's jump from there to some of the other things in your book. You talk about that as a through line with the anti-Semitism. Why do you think that's so prevalent in New Age cults? I think it's been there since the beginning in some ways. You look back to the early 1900s. Some of the people who took spiritualism and ran with it were some of the most prominent anti-Semites at the time.

[00:38:12] I talk in the book a lot about a guy named William Dudley Pelley. He's most famous for his work founding a group called the Silver Shirts, which is essentially America's first anti-government militia. It's the Oath Keepers of the 1900s. And, you know, his anti-government extremism was because he believed that Jews were running the government and that this was all a big plot. And, you know, I won't get into all of him, but he did go to prison at one point.

[00:38:39] And part of his agreement and being released was that he couldn't talk about his anti-Semitism in a political way anymore. So he started a religion of his own called Soulcraft. And through Soulcraft, he did continue to talk about anti-Semitic ideas. But he also talked about aliens. And he talked about a lot of things that would then be picked up with the next generation of the New Age movement and carried forward.

[00:39:06] So we have him to thank, I think, for a lot of the perpetuating of longstanding anti-Semitic ideas that have been around for centuries. But the New Age movement has always entertained those in a big way. Hmm. That's bizarre. And yet not. Well, I mean, I just think it's strange. Like, how did they become at odds with one another?

[00:39:30] Like the Jews run the world conspiracy that kind of goes around and and then they see that as the establishment and New Age is anti-establishment. So that's the. I think you just got it right there. Like, I think that's this is this is what's interesting, I think, about when you go this far to, I guess, some people would say the left.

[00:39:51] There's a real questioning of the systems of society, of the health care system, of the government, of patriarchy and all these things where that finds common cause with the far right is trying to blame someone and trying to find someone that you can put it on. And I mean, I would argue that in the last, I don't know, four centuries, no group has been blamed more than Jewish people.

[00:40:19] And this comes out of, you know, Russian propaganda. Sure. From a long time ago about how Jews were to blame for everything that was going wrong. It's a fear based strategy. I have my rant on all that. I have a baby TED talk that I do to Sarah. I love it. Because by the way, I am Jewish and Nippy's not Jewish, but he's very supportive and I'm not religious. It's not even like I'm overtly supportive.

[00:40:44] I just go, you're blaming them because a lot of Jews thrive and it's an easier target to make yourself a victim to someone who's thriving than punch down. Sure. Sure. So they become the perpetrator and you can make up whatever you want at that point. I call Nippy the anti-anti-Semite. We could probably do a whole episode on that. Anti-Semitism? Yeah, on that. Yeah.

[00:41:09] And then also how then, you know, how rampant it is and then I might cut this later, but just then how anti-Semitism is then used as a shield for criticism, say like what's happening in Israel. Like it's very complicated. It's not. Yeah. People want a black and white scenario and it's just never going to be. You're never going to get it. Yeah. You're going to go, oh, I agree with this. Oh, hmm. Or, oh, I didn't know that. And that's kind of the disposition that you have to take.

[00:41:40] But I do find it really interesting what you just said about where the left and the right, you know, if you look at the sort of continuum left to right where they sort of circle back around and meet each other, they do have that connection. Yeah. And that was the connections that you wove in through the book. Like I said at the beginning, I found fascinating. What did you feel like was the most shocking thing that you learned or what were your main takeaways as a journalist? You're like, oh, I really see this differently now. Yeah. I've always lived in the Northwest.

[00:42:07] This is a place that I am very steeped in and, you know, grew up here in the 90s in the punk scene and going to environmental protests and stuff and being around people who were, you know, like, yeah, what's wrong with being anti-government? There's a lot of, you know, an anti-establishment in a lot of ways. So in a way, I was sort of raised kind of friendly to these ideas that institutions should be questioned.

[00:42:32] I think what surprised me about this book was to lean further into the cultures of the Western United States, for example, and to see how quickly a lot of this questioning of institutions becomes blaming people, becomes blaming the Jews. And sort of these ideas that as a journalist, I've researched on the far right, kind of filtering into the culture that I'm really familiar with. And I think that was that was bothersome to me.

[00:43:01] I mean, like anything in any of the work that I do, I'm always surprised what the thing is that brings people in. And I'm surprised at the lack of research that people do. Right. Like, if you look at Love Has Won, they were talking about the cabal. They were talking about reptilians. Like, these are all old anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. A simple Google search would find those things for you. But people want to believe.

[00:43:28] And I'm always so struck by how vulnerable people are and that they don't know it and that they're really willing to hook themselves to a thing that kind of answers a lot for them. And I think one of the most powerful people I talked to in the book is a woman named Kim. And she talked about how she was just really struggling personally before she got into Love Has Won.

[00:43:52] And when she eventually left, she was like, everything that I had been looking for an answer for was still there. And now I had to deal with, on top of that, this trauma from being in this online cult group that really took so much from me. I had to figure that out and why I was sucked in and then everything else that I needed to figure out before I was there.

[00:44:19] So it was very sad for me and really sobering to me, the history of all of this. That was the one whose husband went undercover? Mm-hmm. Yeah. I love that, that he pretended to be a joiner so he could help her. I thought it was just so amazing. It was amazing that he did that. Wow. You know, and he was like, my interviews with John were amazing because he was just like, I was at work and I was like listening to these live streams all day.

[00:44:47] And it's just mind numbing to listen to this, but I have to listen because I know she's listening. And so I have to be ready to talk to her about it. Totally. And to engage her. And it was just, what an act of love. That is a serious act of love. Yeah. Yeah. I did listen. I did that. Yeah, you're absolutely good. I go undercover for you. Thank you. I would do it for you, babe. I listened to one of the podcasts. I don't even know what it was. I just Googled Love Has Won and, or not Googled, searched Love Has Won on my podcast app and listened to one of them.

[00:45:14] And I always listened to everything at like one and a half or two, two point speed just for time. Yeah. But this particular episode, sped up, sounded so nutty because it was just a lot of like, ee. Oh yeah, there she is. Mother girl, ee. Ba ba ba ba ba da. Mother girl, ee. Like they were just, because they're giggling the whole time because they're high, right? They're just like high as fuck. And they're so, yeah. It's a frat party.

[00:45:36] And then going on about like dimensions and, and, and ironically, and it's hard for me not to like compare every cult to our experience, but a lot of the sort of basic spirituality or tenets of attachment and joy were like straight out of NXIVM as well. Not so much that. Yeah. Not the new age stuff so much, but the sort of like happiness and joy and like getting out of the matrix and like looking at your indoctrination and all that stuff. There was a lot of overlap.

[00:46:05] There was other, one other thing I was going to share with you that was, you know, a little, a little tidbit for our NXIVM nerds. They would have to be a little bit anti-establishment. Otherwise you wouldn't leave the establishment. Yeah. But just, they probably all stole from the same place. But the other sort of through line that I saw was just like how all of these gurus or people in these positions, they get people around them just to take care of them. And I remember Nancy was always having her feet massaged. She'd just be laying back on her couch and people coming in and like bring them tea or whatever.

[00:46:33] Like if you have a boss and you're their assistant, of course you're going to bring them tea. But like the feet rubbing, what's with the feet rubbing across the board with these people? I mean, if I was doing that, I wouldn't mind getting my. I mean, I wouldn't mind a foot rub, but what were you going to say? I mean, look, if I was to recruit people to follow me, I could think of a lot of other things I'd have them do than like rub my feet and brush my hair. But I mean, you know, I started to think of the people closest to Amy Carlson as like her handmaidens. Like, you know, they were there to address her.

[00:47:01] And, you know, at a certain point she needed somebody to carry her around. So, you know, she had a father God that was, you know, muscular and couldn't, you know, physically lift her and carry her everywhere. It was, yeah, she was living like a queen. For more context on what brought us here, check out my memoir. It's called Scarred, the true story of how I escaped NXIVM, the cult that bound my life. I narrate the audio version and it's also available on Amazon, Audible and at most bookstores.

[00:47:29] And now a brief message from our little bit culty sponsors. And remember, when you support our sponsors, you're supporting this podcast. We're Teresa and Nemo. And that's why we switched to Shopify. The platform, the before Shopify used, has used regularly updates, which sometimes led to the shop that didn't work. Our Nemo Boards shop makes so much more of the mobile devices a good figure.

[00:47:54] And the illustrations on the boards come now much clearer, what is important to us and what our brand also makes us out. Start your test today for 1€ per month on shopify.de. Break time's over, people. Let's get back to this episode of A Little Bit Culty. It's a good one. I want to ask about, what is it, spiritual emergencies? Is that the term? I never heard that before.

[00:48:23] Can you explain what it is first for those who don't know? Yeah. So much of this book, like, I did not plan to get into. I was just kind of following where the reporting led me. And so at a certain point, I heard about spiritual emergence or spiritual emergencies. And it's this moment where people start to have, like, an overwhelming spiritual experience. A lot of the common traits are, like, believing, like, oh my God, I was Jesus.

[00:48:52] Or I was a prophet. I can talk to God. I can hear voices. I can, you know, hear what's, I can perceive what's going to happen before it happens and that kind of thing. I think that it was important for me to understand that because I started to attend this. I went to a couple meetings of this group called Spiritual Emergence Anonymous, which is a group getting people together who have had common experiences like this so they can talk about it and work through it.

[00:49:21] And I think a lot of the people who are familiar with Love Has One that are in that group started to wonder if maybe Amy Carlson had had a spiritual emergency, but she just didn't have anybody around her to say, you need to go to therapy, you might need to, like, have an inpatient treatment program or something like that. I think that that's one thing that made me start to think of a lot of these leaders of

[00:49:47] groups a little bit differently was, was there a moment that they could have been helped or found community with other people? So, you know, I recall one of the meetings I went to in this and how people were talking, like, one woman said, I thought that I was Jesus at a certain point. And another woman in the meeting pipes up and says, no way, so did I. Like, I believe that I was the savior of the world. It was interesting to see people had had common experiences.

[00:50:15] And it made me just start to think of this idea of cult leaders really differently. Like, maybe there was a moment where people could have been pulled back a little bit spiritually. I think what also kind of contradicts that is that a big common trait of a lot of cult leaders is that they then prey on other people and take their money and things like that. I'm not sure that that is something that you could excuse away by saying there's a mental health issue there.

[00:50:44] Because I think that there's like an, you know, an intent there to support one's lifestyle by taking from other people. Yeah. Yeah. So how do you think that somebody like Joseph Smith, who is sort of like the Amy Carlson of, I don't know, when did Joe Smith get started? The 1800s. Yeah. Joe Smith. Joe Smith. Yeah, like 1830s, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So how did, like, how did that happen? It does make you wonder, right?

[00:51:13] Like that somebody like Joseph Smith was emerging from a very specific region of the country at a very specific time when all of a sudden everybody was having their own really unique spiritual ideas and an angel came to me. No way. An angel came to me too. So you do kind of wonder like what was a trend, what was hot at the time, and what was like a valid spiritual emergence that was happening that was making someone believe like, no,

[00:51:41] no, no, I got to start my own religion where I'm at the center of it and that kind of thing. It's hard to say. And what's your personal take now? Like, even when watching the documentary, I was like wondering if, I have this with everybody, even like Teal Swan or Ventino Massar, like, are they total grifters? Do they have any abilities? Do they have some abilities and they're grifters? Or do they have some energetic thing that they can do, but they also are narcissists?

[00:52:08] Do you have any sense after doing the deep dive on this book, was there any truth to her abilities as a spiritual leader? That's hard for me to say, because I think like with spirituality, if something is real to someone, it's not, might not be real to me, but it's real to somebody else. So from the people I spoke to, it was very clear to me that Amy was a real spiritual force to them. Personally, you know, through all the research that I did, like I looked at Elizabeth Clare

[00:52:36] Proffitt, I looked at Jay-Z Knight, I looked at Helena Blavatsky, I looked at the I Am activity in California. Some of those people, specifically Elizabeth Clare Proffitt, who was around in the 80s and 90s, like you watch some of her sermons and it's like, that lady really believed in what she was doing. She's working hard up there. And that's interesting. And you could see the appeal a little bit. And even to an extent with Jay-Z Knight, like there's a conviction there that's really interesting and appealing. Amy Carlson, I don't really get it.

[00:53:06] I don't. I can't say that I do. I see a woman who is like many people that I have encountered in my life where it's like, whoa, this person's a little bit out there and has got some ideas. I think if there had been a cohesive message beyond this group is about me, then there might have been more there that I would have seen the appeal of. But yeah, it wasn't apparently interesting to me.

[00:53:34] And I think a lot of my reporting was trying to figure out like, how did this lady get all these followers? I don't quite understand that. Wow. I agree. I didn't see it. I felt like it was someone I just felt badly for. And she went off and probably made a series of bad decisions and then got overwhelmed and couldn't handle it. Had three kids. And it was like, saw that maybe her grandmother could have taken care of them and it was deuces. Then drugs.

[00:54:03] I think the drugs probably. Yeah. It sounded like she had maybe even a bit of a nervous, I don't know, like a break or something when she did ecstasy or some drug that sort of put her into this other, you know, they might say dimension, but just, I don't even know what it is, but just a different reality for her. What little I know about those drugs and experience I have them, I know they can be probably pretty powerful. And she was at the wrong place at the wrong time and took it. Who knows? Sure. I think that- It's just sad. It is sad.

[00:54:30] And, you know, I think I started to think of Love Has Won and a lot of these new age groups as kind of like a spiritual D&D game, like Dungeons and Dragons, where there's like a person who's kind of the dungeon master who's sort of like dictating the rules of the game. And like, you are my players in this game. We're kind of like playing it the way that I want. And in Love Has Won's case, it's like with her, there was a moment where she asked her

[00:54:57] followers to take her to the hospital that she was sick and she needed help. And they were like, no, no, no, no. We would never take you to a 3D hospital. We're not going to do that. And to me, that was a really sobering moment because it was like, oh my God, she wants to stop playing the game. But these people have kept her in the game and they will keep her there until she dies. And that was so scary to me that that could be possible. I wonder if she knew that.

[00:55:23] Well, I'm also wondering as a mother, why none of those people who basically killed her aren't held accountable either, like for letting her just die there and like drowning her in colloidal silver, like buckets of silver. So some of her followers did face charges for the way her body was treated. They transported it over several state lines and, you know, it was like a felony abuse of a corpse, things like that.

[00:55:50] Eventually, all the charges were dropped in that case. So those people didn't face those consequences. The case was sealed by a judge, which I thought was really interesting because I, you know, as a journalist, I always am looking at public records and what those can tell me. And you can't get records on this case. I'm not quite sure why that is. But yeah, I think her family, that was a big thing that Amy Carlson's family has a big problem with is like that was the only form of recourse that they saw was possible and it just fell

[00:56:20] apart. So now they have to try and understand what happened. That's brutal. Yeah, it's sad. Do you know if anyone that was like featured in her circle has anyone gotten out since then? Are you sort of following it now or is it? Yeah, I keep my ear to the ground for what's happening. But as far as I'm aware of, there have been several groups that have splintered off and of the people who are on mission with Amy that were in that inner circle, I think they're all kind of still in those groups. Yeah, they're probably double down.

[00:56:50] They're still selling a lot of stuff I saw. A couple of them. Yeah. Yeah, they're still selling. That's all they have. Sessions and podcasts and yeah, all kinds of things and colloidal silver. Ironically, the only time I've ever had colloidal silver was in a smoothie at Erewhon back in the NXIVM days. It probably actually was with you, Nippy, or Mark Vicente, which through line here, you mentioned in your book because as we know and he's talked about publicly, he was in

[00:57:18] Jay-Z Knight's group with Ramtha before NXIVM. Yeah. And we will save that for a whole other episode because I feel like I need to do a little more research on- Yeah, there's an episode there. There's definitely an episode there, but just a little teaser for that episode and a little tidbit for you. I just have to tell you, one of my earliest memories of NXIVM, so it's like my first year at V-Week and they got us there, my boyfriend at the time, not Nippy, the guy I was dating

[00:57:44] when I started at NXIVM, who was a filmmaker, to V-Week on what's called an exchange. In other words, we didn't have the money to attend, but like, oh, you can come and work it so you can get it for free. Basically free labor, which is how they did everything, right? They didn't pay anyone to do anything, but they'd get it on exchange. So my boyfriend was filming and I was like, I don't know, holding the mic or like writing the tape. I was basically his assistant. And our job was to follow Keith around wherever he went and film his conversations.

[00:58:12] And I remember at one point he was teasing Mark for being in Ramtha. And he's like, this is Keith Raniere talking about Ramtha. Remember this? Oh, we weren't there. I hadn't met you yet. And he's like, it's just like the name of it. Like Ramtha. Ramtha, like dumpster. And he was like, he was like teasing Mark for believing in Ramtha. Shaming him. Yeah. Shaming him. Like, how could you have believed a name?

[00:58:42] Like Ramtha. Sounds like dumpster. That is what I remember. Oh, funny. That is crazy. And also so funny because Ramtha endures while NXIVM does not. I know. That's so wild. Outfoxed. Outfoxed. Outfoxed by Ramtha. The dumpster. The dumpster. Allegedly. Allegedly. He keeps racking up those L's, huh? Hey, I'm always down to talk about Ramtha. I like to think of myself as a little bit of a scholar of Ramtha.

[00:59:11] So I'm very, very interested in Jay-Z Knight's life and trajectory. Yes. And I actually have been to the town of Yelm because when I first joined NXIVM, yeah, Nancy was speaking in Tacoma and we stayed in Yelm because Mark Vicente's mother still lived there. She lived, she was also a Ramtha student. Yeah. So we were, I didn't go to the compound, but I remember being in Yelm and like staying at their house and like seeing all the books.

[00:59:39] And so like, I was, I was like adjacent and I heard about the blindfolds and I heard about those things. Yeah. It's a whole thing. It's a whole thing. So we will save that episode as a little tease. Save that for another time. It was a tease. Back to your book and we'll try to wrap up. Tell us just a little bit like why the title, what, how did this title come to be? Blazing Eye Sees All. I wanted to reflect the idea of like third eye knowledge through the title of the book.

[01:00:06] So, you know, a big part of new ageism is chakras and this, you know, system of chakras and how energy flows through the body. And this third eye that people can have on their, you know, in their minds or on their foreheads. It also is a hint to some of the ideas about Lemuria that, you know, there's been all kinds of people who talk about this lost civilization of Lemuria and the Lemurians. And some people would write about that they had an eye on their forehead and things like

[01:00:35] that. And then also when you look at American money, you know, we've got the pyramid with the eye on it. So I was kind of, you know, teasing a little bit of conspiracy theory, a little bit of third eye stuff there. I love the colors. It's funny because we have the mood board for our book has a very similar color palette to yours. Nice. Well, it was funny when my publisher was like, what should the cover of this book like? And I was like, I want it to look like Dianetics.

[01:01:05] Yes. And I think that they went with it. Wait, Sarah, didn't you go to a cacao ceremony that opens up your third eye chakra? I did. I went to a cacao ceremony and it was supposed to open up my third eye chakra. And I don't know. How did you feel? I felt great. I was just sort of like light and floaty. I mean, here's the thing. I dabble in a lot of this stuff. I actually wore this dress because I thought it was sort of love has won-ish. I should put some gold and some like Lemurian princess-esque vibe. I got a crystal right here, right?

[01:01:33] Like this was given to me by a Mormon witch, in fact. But, you know, I mean, it's like, what's the harm in a lot of this stuff? That's where I think like new age, it's like, what's the harm of a cacao ceremony where you might like meditate and think of a thing or yoga or even a wellness retreat. There's so much good that can be found in this world and so much refuge from controlling religions. I think I was just really concerned with the places that it turns hateful and toxic and predatory. Yeah.

[01:02:04] I feel good that you said that. Some people just needed a break. It was really good. Yeah. Because sometimes you do. You just need to pause. I actually am going to take a break. I'm not in a second, but next week I'm going on a health retreat with my mom. And, you know, even when you just look at a website, you're like, oh, it's a little bit culty. But like, what's culty about it? Well, because it's health and wellness and new agey, that's not the problem. It's exactly what you just said. When does it turn toxic? When does it turn problematic? When does it get extreme? Yeah. When does it get extreme?

[01:02:34] And we'll probably include this episode on Love is One under just online cults in general because we haven't really talked about that too much in the book yet. At some point we're going to have to stop writing the book, stop including episodes. But, you know, I feel like we'd be remiss to not include your book, Blazing Ice, Hazel, and also Love is One just in terms of the cult du jour, the TikTok dance cult, and all the things that have come out recently. Yeah, that's the audience that needs it. Yeah. We've decided. Yeah. Gotta make it current.

[01:03:03] I'm so excited for your book. Like, you are such a wealth of knowledge on this topic. Like, it's going to be essential text for journalists like me who are, like, looking to try and understand it all. Oh, that's so great. Well, maybe... We want to put it... I want to get it in schools. And we are actually leaning towards a more younger audience. It's not an academic approach. There's no footnotes. It's... We even say the word brah in it. Gotta relate to everyone. Gotta relate to the young people. You know? To the young people. We drop Riz in it too. Yeah.

[01:03:33] We drop Riz. The chapter on Charisma is called Riz. Amazing. Yeah. Actually, we can cut this if you want to say no, but will you consider blurbing us on the book? Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Yes, I'd love to. That'd be amazing. Awesome. I would be so happy to. Yeah. I mean, I really mean that. You've interviewed so many people and taken such a victim-centered approach. I think it's just... You're sitting on, like, such a wealth of information. That's great. Thank you. Leah, thank you so much for your time. We really always love catching up with you.

[01:04:02] And really appreciate you using your journalistic energy towards shining a light on these things. She's a double interviewer. Thanks for having me. Second time. I appreciate it. Yeah. We haven't had many people on twice. And maybe we'll even have you third for Ramtha. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. You're welcome. Yeah. See you soon, Leah. Thank you. Thank you. If you like the show, please consider supporting us by giving us a rating, a review, and subscribe on iTunes.

[01:04:31] Cults are commonplace now, and we're looking at them all, and every little bit helps. Hit that subscribe button so you don't miss an episode. Thanks for being here, Leah. We cover so many New Age cults on the show, and it was awesome to get a journalist perspective, unbiased, dare I say. Make sure to pick up a copy of Leah's book, Blazing I Sees All. It's a really fascinating deep dive into New Age, all the history, and especially the love has won cult.

[01:05:01] You can find Leah's other work at leahsotilli.com. Thanks for listening, everyone, and see you on the next episode.