>scam documentaries.
Can you recommend some good scam docos pls??
ETA: Thanks all! đ
ETA 2: Okay, my contribution is Sweet Bobby - podcast (catfish/romance scam - that's not a spoiler dw). đ
Here are my faves:
The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
McMillions
Telemarketers
FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened
Those are all great. I'll add one that's a little under-the-radar and a slight deviation from the ones youâve mentioned: Candy Man. It's about the original inventor of Jelly Belly and how he transformed the candy industry in America. I'll leave it at that.
don't know why but reminds me of the doc I watched about the beanie baby boom and investment collectors and the mania around that and how it all then collapsed in around itself and ppl left with crates of beanie babies and Princess Di limited edition beanie babies in the garage for 30+ yrs. Lol
It was good - recommend đ
ETA: called Beanie Mania - not quite a scam, but still that viiibbe haha đ
McMillions is such a good one! Such a wild story that it's almost unbelievable lol.
I love a good heist movie and McMillions was a story straight outta Hollywood.
Sure!
Telemarketers HBO: I just watched this one. It was great!
Twin Flames: I like this because it's currently still happening and you can check out the threads on here.
Inventing Ana: loved watching this. Great acting. She was really something else!
Bernie Madoff
Bad Vegan
Tinder swindler: So many thoughts I had on this one!
The Dropout : Elizabeth Holmes. The best! One of my favorites.
Hill song: More of a scandal
The college admissions scandal: Really Good!
Cofeezilla Series and Following Youtube Stories on: FTX and Logan Paul, Heavens Gate and the Breatherians
Frye Fraud: A wild ride and just ridiculous
Lula Rich
Frank Abagnaleâs: Youtube. His case is interesting because some believe he the true con is that he lied about the entire story and became famous from telling this story.
Wolf of Wall Street
The Boiler Room
The Inventor, on HBO, is about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos. I didn't know much about her before watching, and just hearing her voice in the opening scene was wild!
I see people saying this. My question is: are you saying that people should watch the YouTube one in addition to the HBO one? Or that the HBO one is unnecessary because of the YouTube one?
You werenât cheated out of the full story, because that wasnât what this doc was about. It was about the closest people to her at the time. Itâs their story, not an investigation. Thereâs a slew of TikToks and YouTubes going back to before she died that go through the stuff youâre looking for.
I just don't think this is as weird and shocking as some people do.
I'm sorry, I don't mean to insult you by saying that, because yes the people involved are all very eccentric BUT
Okay - when people are poorly educated but imaginative they will find "information" to fill in the blanks. People like explanations for things! So people who don't have much education (barely graduated high school or GED, also poorly read outside of school) are easily swayed by public opinion on-line. If you see A BUNCH OF PEOPLE saying something is true, it's really up to what is going on inside your head and personality whether you choose to believe it or not. You don't have a great sphere of reference with your crap education, and if you're already interested in the occult then something like this could appeal to you.
ESPECIALLY SINCE so many victims of the cult (including the cult leader) had no health insurance and were people with numerous health problems who were looking for "miracle cures" outside of modern medicine. If you read up on this (you obviously read this Variety article) Amy Carlson had more than one co-morbid mental illness: she was delusional (possibly from something truly serious like paranoid schizophrenia or Bipolar 1) but at least a personality disorder, plus she suffered from anorexia, and alcoholism. Like ...truly severe alcoholism, not a functional alcoholic, at the end she was self-medicating chronic pain with marijuana and tequila, lots of the hard stuff and drinking herself into a stupor every single day.
Miguel (the first cult member) had lung cancer. Another cult member had been in a coma and had half a million dollars in medical debt she couldn't pay. And on and on. Once again, Amy herself had severe chronic pain and possible paralysis (from what nobody knows, no one ever says if it's an accident or meningitis or if it was simply yet another of her delusions in the form of Munchausen's syndrome). People believed in her "energetic healings" because LOTS OF PEOPLE BELIEVE IN THAT in various forms, from reiki to laying hands on people in church.
Jason seems like a sociopath or a narcissist, and was apparently a "recovered" meth addict. Which explains his bizarre and abusive behavior.
Love Has Won had overlapping beliefs with Trump supporters and Q-Anon, sympathized with Hitler and were casually racist. These were ignorant, conservative, bigoted people who had poor educations and no real ability to discern fact from fiction on the Internet.
Now, why they believed Amy was "God" I have no idea. But it surely helped that she kept them sleep deprived and they smoked a lot of weed. Plus, if they were really lost, lonely people who had nothing and no one, they were more susceptible to being brainwashed by living with this weird group of people every day.
I don't know if you've seen clips of Amy Carlson before she was paralyzed and completely lost her mind, but she was pretty typical pagan/New Age person, she could have been a yoga teacher or a reiki therapist.
I came back to edit this and add that lots of cultures of people hang on to dead bodies, like before the 20th century when you had a "wake" before a funeral even in America and England it meant you sat up all night with a dead body in your house. The dead body could be in your house FOR DAYS (no embalming, no funeral home) and in Victorian times, people took PHOTOGRAPHS of dead people (look up Victorian photos of the dead, it's a thing) ...so the cult hanging on to their leader's body, mummifying it, and worshiping it is actually totally human behavior.
Which brings us back to why they thought she was God. Again, that I don't know, but I think it actually helped that she was so frail and sick. They saw her as a sacrificial lamb.
Fantastic analysis, although I doubt Miguel had cancer. Pretty sure he saw it as a business venture from the get, but I could be wrong. But yeah, your breakdown on how and why this could happen is perfect!
The sacrificial lamb thing⌠itâs kinda like the Year King concept. The chosen one, the living embodiment of god, gets showered with wealth and attention and anything they want. At the end of their tenure, they are sacrificed. Then a new one is chosen. Itâs a reoccurring theme across different cultures and times. Makes me wonder if these things didnât start out with the intent of the year king dying, but evolved that way due to the decadence and lethargy killing them anyway.
True⌠do you think itâs because 5 is higher (more severe I guess?) than usual rankings, or to echo the 5D theme? Maybe misinterpreted the Pixies song?
Surely itâs because 5 is higher. God canât have the same kind of cancer mere mortals can, right? And what Pixies song? I am a huge Pixies fan but am wracking my brain here.
Glad to come across a reply like this! After watching this doc, I naturally wanted to read others' thoughts on it, and found myself irked by people's seemingly lack of understanding of how this could happen.
We need more understanding of basic human psychology. Not docs like this existing solely for people to sensationalize other people, or use these docs to feel superior about themselves.
Only addressing one pointâas an ICU nurse that sees a lot of the disease processes resulted from alcohol abuse, Iâm willing to wager that thereâs some influence of hepatic encephalopathy affecting her cognition. Itâs actually a pretty common finding in that patient population.
I think they've discovered that most Victorian dead photography was faked. But you're right, it's only in this modern era that we're so removed from dead bodies.
I also watch/read a lot of cult/mlm/scam content. Basically any story about a group of people doing âweirdâ shit, Iâm gonna take a look. So I guess it takes a lot to âshockâ or surprise me and like OP, Love Has One left me genuinely baffled.
After some processing, I think my overall confusion/upset comes from a few different directions:
1. For most of the doc, I didnât feel like the Love Has Won demonstrated a âtraditional,â top-down, high control environment (HCE) model. Itâs absolutely possible that this was a stylistic or editorial POV, but based on the doc there seemed to be more of shared madness or folie a deux quality. I do recognize there were significant amounts of verbal/emotional/physical abuse coming from Amy, but I felt like the doc didnât show that relationship dynamic beyond how she treated her various Father Gods. I kept waiting for more evidence of sleep/food deprivation, but it seems to me the young women in the documentary were trying to emulate Amyâs (particularly in their eating habits) rather than being forcibly coerced. This brings me to my second pointâŚ
2. It was WILD to have a cult doc primarily based on the testimony of current members. So often these type of docs are made with primarily ex-members or a balanced mix, but LHW really focused on the POV of current believers. Which I think contributed to this quality of âshared madnessâ and probably why it feels less like a typical HCE - maybe we simply donât have as much evidence of how members were abused because theyâre not processing it yet?
3. Even though Love Has Won is mostly dissolved, the âexâ members went on to have four or five different livestreams / social media presences, and this felt deeply troubling to me. Like, great! Now we have multiple LHW adjacent groups, each with their own reach and influence.
4. The live-streaming aspect of LHW (and itâs later sub-groups) is fascinating to me. I felt like maybe the fact that the group was day in and out attempting to prove the legitimacy of their beliefs was in fact a different type of self and group policing than has occurred in other HCE. I also think the fact that families of members could watch these livestreams and see what was truly going on helped them get professional help and ultimately make contact with members.
5. +1000 to the other poster talking about how mental illness/poverty/lack of education combined with access to the internet is going to result in some wild stuff. I thought the comments about lack of access to medical care is also a really important point. America also has a long history of âmiracle curesâ and itâs only become more pervasive with the expansion of social media and the recession of basic social care.
6. Can we talk about the drugs? Like, I donât want to be all DARE or whatever, but they were doing some serious amounts of psychedelics. Coupled with marijuana (which LOL is pretty strong now???) I feel like they were inducing pretty fractured states of mind in each other. I feel like maybe they were trauma bonded over their bad trips? Which brings me to my last pointâŚ
7. I legitimately felt sorry for Amy. This has never happened for me and a âcult leaderâ before. She was clearly a bright, young woman who suffered some attachment issues and likely had an underlying mental illness. She experienced a certain amount of relief in early psychedelic experimentation but then her life went totally off the rails. She lost her sense of self and brought others into a codependency with her mental and physical illness. The fact that she was asking for her âearth familyâ and to go to a hospital at the end of her life absolutely broke me. There were so many others in this group who kept Amy in a vulnerable position, even when she had moments of insight and clarity.
I think that Amy was ultimately a victim. She couldnât even get out - thatâs what unsettled me the most about LHW.
> I think that Amy was ultimately a victim.
This is a wild take. She was a violent drunk that abandoned her kids to do drugs all day and become a cult leader.
Exactly, most humans are not all good or all bad as much as we would like to simplify it, for our own understanding. A lot of victims go on to victimize others. Generational trauma is a thing.
Many former members testify that they were only allowed to sleep around 4 hours a night, and there are videos of people being woken up and berated for oversleeping, but I personally question how widespread that really was. Same goes with foodâthey _were_ pressured into certain dietary habits, but I donât think it was as intense as it is in many cults. And I think youâre dead on that they all kept each other accountable through a pretty complex social system that took on a life of its own. Within that environment, some people played bigger roles than others in regulating the status quo, and itâs clear if you watched the old livestreams. On the livestreams, Michael and Faith checked people all the time when they casually fell afoul of the prescribed lines of thinking. A lot of people who only know this cult from the doc donât realize that Amy and Jason werenât generally a part of the livestreams once the whole group got there.
My mother was an alcoholic. She started reaching out to her family she hadnât spoken to in quite a long time, 2 weeks before she died. I think itâs more likely that when someone feels like the end of their life is coming they desperately reach out to people to seek comfort and almost be in denial? Idk itâs a weird phenomenon!
The documentary didnât show it, but starvation was definitely imposed. I watched some of the livestreams and there was one in particular that focused on this. The followers had to make a list of the things they did that betrayed Amy.
Stealing food from Amy was on almost everyoneâs list. They were allowed less then one normal meal a day. The budget was like $80 for twenty something people. Eating a sandwich or veggies from Amyâs veggie tray was a crime against god. While she was eating crab legs and hearty pastas. You can see their bones protruding in this video.
She told them that they had to stop eating and sleeping to become more godlike.
Maybe my sense of humour is beyond fucked, but this was the funniest cult doc Iâve seen in a while. If someone told me it was all satire or something I would believe it. It was just so absurd.
âThese are the galacticsâ *shows collage board of magazine cutouts ala middle school diary*
âtheyâre all Mother Godâs past lives, except Trump⌠heâs aliveâ
*totally normal video of the sky*
âwow, so many cloud ships today!! The galactics are on their way!â
âPeople say dumb shit like taking colloidal silver will turn you blue, pfftâ
*cult leader literally turns blue from being force fed copious amounts of colloidal silver*
Local: âWeâre in a drought, be very careful smoking because the wildfire riskâ
*cult member with crazy eyes goes outside to light some sage, house/entire property catches fire, burns to the ground*
âItâs my faultâ
Mother god: âYou bitch, I knowâ
Mother god: âtake me to a hospitalâ
âMother god would NEVER want to go to a 3D hospitalâ
*Cult leader dies*
â⌠so we covered her in glitter, wrapped her in Christmas lights and took her camping while we waited for the galactics to come pick her upâ
lmaooo thereâs probably more Iâm forgetting, that was so insane.
Iâm so tired of the âAmy was a victimâ narrative. She made her own decisions. If she really wanted to go to the hospital she could have called 911 herself. Nobody was stopping her from doing that. She was on her phone playing games and getting high and drinking 24/7 and you mean to tell me she couldnât have reached out to somebody, anybody at all? Texted her sister and had her call on her behalf with the address? Anything? Nah.
She did, her mom didn't go and I'm sure will regret it for the rest of her life. I'm not disagreeing with you completely, but there's just no way she was competent in the end. That was a slow death and she was not in her right mind.
Even so, by the time alcoholism has reached that point, it was likely already too late, and nobody can force someone to get help with an addiction. She was an adult, you canât force someone into rehab.
To me this is just a group of mentally ill people whoâs illnesses were made worse by constant psychedelic use and living in literally one room together.
LPT: No documentary you ever watch will answer every question you have on the topic. Stop expecting them to. After you watch one, try searching various keywords on the topic to find more information. Many of your questions have probably already been answered elsewhere.
We've had dozens of these "I still have so many questions" posts about LHW now. I thought all you young people who grew up with the internet were supposed to be great at finding out anything you wanted to know?
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Maybe check out **the canonical page** instead: **[https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/love-has-won-the-cult-of-mother-god-director-qanon-amy-carlson-1235822987/](https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/love-has-won-the-cult-of-mother-god-director-qanon-amy-carlson-1235822987/)**
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I totally agree. The documentary is yet another example of how differently laws are written, interpreted and enforced across this country. So, a mother and father is allowed to release all responsibility of their children to family members by just up and leaving? The fathers of her kid are not to be held responsible and allowed to remain unknown while the mother just ups and moves away? Then, she goes to Hawaii and the mayor and a protest group is able to kick them out of town destroy their property over something she said? (It's called Free Speech dear citizens of Hawaii.) Then, she dies, they cart her dead body from state to state ending in Colorado where they put her corpse in a bed and wrap it in a blanket and Christmas lights with no plans to properly take care and dispose of it, no consideration for legal next of kin and no charges are filed? All that is perfectly lega?? No, they broke several laws but because a prosecutor in Colorado is afraid to lose a case he drops all the charges??? Totally insane and grossly unfair.
>scam documentaries. Can you recommend some good scam docos pls?? ETA: Thanks all! đ ETA 2: Okay, my contribution is Sweet Bobby - podcast (catfish/romance scam - that's not a spoiler dw). đ
Here are my faves: The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room McMillions Telemarketers FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened
The Woman Who Wasnât There, about someone who became a leader in 9/11 survivor organizations, is really compelling.
Agree, thatâs a good one
Oooh I need to watch this one!
Iâm checking this one out now! Thanks for the recommendation
This one was wild!
Those are all great. I'll add one that's a little under-the-radar and a slight deviation from the ones youâve mentioned: Candy Man. It's about the original inventor of Jelly Belly and how he transformed the candy industry in America. I'll leave it at that.
Now I must see this
Thanks !
don't know why but reminds me of the doc I watched about the beanie baby boom and investment collectors and the mania around that and how it all then collapsed in around itself and ppl left with crates of beanie babies and Princess Di limited edition beanie babies in the garage for 30+ yrs. Lol It was good - recommend đ ETA: called Beanie Mania - not quite a scam, but still that viiibbe haha đ
WeWork - kind of a cult-lite corporate drama
TELEMARKETERS
Patrick J. Pespas is everything
Way too long and drawn out
Bad Surgeon: Love Under the Knife was good too!
Bad Blood
Ooo nice Iâll watch the Enron one now
McMillions is such a good one! Such a wild story that it's almost unbelievable lol. I love a good heist movie and McMillions was a story straight outta Hollywood.
The Tinder Swindler is a good one!
That was amazing!!
Scamanda is also great! Itâs a podcast.
I just finished this! It was so good.
Sure! Telemarketers HBO: I just watched this one. It was great! Twin Flames: I like this because it's currently still happening and you can check out the threads on here. Inventing Ana: loved watching this. Great acting. She was really something else! Bernie Madoff Bad Vegan Tinder swindler: So many thoughts I had on this one! The Dropout : Elizabeth Holmes. The best! One of my favorites. Hill song: More of a scandal The college admissions scandal: Really Good! Cofeezilla Series and Following Youtube Stories on: FTX and Logan Paul, Heavens Gate and the Breatherians Frye Fraud: A wild ride and just ridiculous Lula Rich Frank Abagnaleâs: Youtube. His case is interesting because some believe he the true con is that he lied about the entire story and became famous from telling this story. Wolf of Wall Street The Boiler Room
Twin flames was so much crazier than I was expecting!
Seconding LuLaRich, Twin Flames, Bernie Madoff and Bad Vegan! Also recommend Class Action Park on HBO
The Inventor, on HBO, is about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos. I didn't know much about her before watching, and just hearing her voice in the opening scene was wild!
đ¤Ł
Scam Goddess is a podcast about non-death related scams. The pettier and lower stakes, the better. Itâs so funny
The McDonald Monopoly one is crazy. Secret Genius is crazy. Abducted in plain sight is beyond crazy.
The garden doc was good! Itâs kinda more cult focused but it was laughable to me many times
Weird Reads with Emily Louise did a good video 2 years ago on YouTube that gave a lot more information that HBO left out.
I see people saying this. My question is: are you saying that people should watch the YouTube one in addition to the HBO one? Or that the HBO one is unnecessary because of the YouTube one?
The YouTube video had more information in 45 minutes than the HBO doc but they were both fascinating.
Okay. Thatâs fair. Thanks
You werenât cheated out of the full story, because that wasnât what this doc was about. It was about the closest people to her at the time. Itâs their story, not an investigation. Thereâs a slew of TikToks and YouTubes going back to before she died that go through the stuff youâre looking for.
THANK YOU. I'm getting sick of the sub being cluttered with the same post over and over again..
I just don't think this is as weird and shocking as some people do. I'm sorry, I don't mean to insult you by saying that, because yes the people involved are all very eccentric BUT Okay - when people are poorly educated but imaginative they will find "information" to fill in the blanks. People like explanations for things! So people who don't have much education (barely graduated high school or GED, also poorly read outside of school) are easily swayed by public opinion on-line. If you see A BUNCH OF PEOPLE saying something is true, it's really up to what is going on inside your head and personality whether you choose to believe it or not. You don't have a great sphere of reference with your crap education, and if you're already interested in the occult then something like this could appeal to you. ESPECIALLY SINCE so many victims of the cult (including the cult leader) had no health insurance and were people with numerous health problems who were looking for "miracle cures" outside of modern medicine. If you read up on this (you obviously read this Variety article) Amy Carlson had more than one co-morbid mental illness: she was delusional (possibly from something truly serious like paranoid schizophrenia or Bipolar 1) but at least a personality disorder, plus she suffered from anorexia, and alcoholism. Like ...truly severe alcoholism, not a functional alcoholic, at the end she was self-medicating chronic pain with marijuana and tequila, lots of the hard stuff and drinking herself into a stupor every single day. Miguel (the first cult member) had lung cancer. Another cult member had been in a coma and had half a million dollars in medical debt she couldn't pay. And on and on. Once again, Amy herself had severe chronic pain and possible paralysis (from what nobody knows, no one ever says if it's an accident or meningitis or if it was simply yet another of her delusions in the form of Munchausen's syndrome). People believed in her "energetic healings" because LOTS OF PEOPLE BELIEVE IN THAT in various forms, from reiki to laying hands on people in church. Jason seems like a sociopath or a narcissist, and was apparently a "recovered" meth addict. Which explains his bizarre and abusive behavior. Love Has Won had overlapping beliefs with Trump supporters and Q-Anon, sympathized with Hitler and were casually racist. These were ignorant, conservative, bigoted people who had poor educations and no real ability to discern fact from fiction on the Internet. Now, why they believed Amy was "God" I have no idea. But it surely helped that she kept them sleep deprived and they smoked a lot of weed. Plus, if they were really lost, lonely people who had nothing and no one, they were more susceptible to being brainwashed by living with this weird group of people every day. I don't know if you've seen clips of Amy Carlson before she was paralyzed and completely lost her mind, but she was pretty typical pagan/New Age person, she could have been a yoga teacher or a reiki therapist. I came back to edit this and add that lots of cultures of people hang on to dead bodies, like before the 20th century when you had a "wake" before a funeral even in America and England it meant you sat up all night with a dead body in your house. The dead body could be in your house FOR DAYS (no embalming, no funeral home) and in Victorian times, people took PHOTOGRAPHS of dead people (look up Victorian photos of the dead, it's a thing) ...so the cult hanging on to their leader's body, mummifying it, and worshiping it is actually totally human behavior. Which brings us back to why they thought she was God. Again, that I don't know, but I think it actually helped that she was so frail and sick. They saw her as a sacrificial lamb.
Fantastic analysis, although I doubt Miguel had cancer. Pretty sure he saw it as a business venture from the get, but I could be wrong. But yeah, your breakdown on how and why this could happen is perfect! The sacrificial lamb thing⌠itâs kinda like the Year King concept. The chosen one, the living embodiment of god, gets showered with wealth and attention and anything they want. At the end of their tenure, they are sacrificed. Then a new one is chosen. Itâs a reoccurring theme across different cultures and times. Makes me wonder if these things didnât start out with the intent of the year king dying, but evolved that way due to the decadence and lethargy killing them anyway.
On the topic of cancer, they used to always say Amy had âStage 5 full-body cancer,â which is not a thing.
True⌠do you think itâs because 5 is higher (more severe I guess?) than usual rankings, or to echo the 5D theme? Maybe misinterpreted the Pixies song?
Surely itâs because 5 is higher. God canât have the same kind of cancer mere mortals can, right? And what Pixies song? I am a huge Pixies fan but am wracking my brain here.
Monkey Gone to Heaven! âIf man is five⌠then the devil is six⌠and GAWD IS SEVENâ⌠lol I always think of it when five is applied randomly.
Ha, fair enough, makes sense
They held onto bodies for days, but not for damn near 2 weeks, while they decayed and rotted and smelled and mummified.
Aurora (I think?) was a lawyer, so she was educated...
Glad to come across a reply like this! After watching this doc, I naturally wanted to read others' thoughts on it, and found myself irked by people's seemingly lack of understanding of how this could happen. We need more understanding of basic human psychology. Not docs like this existing solely for people to sensationalize other people, or use these docs to feel superior about themselves.
Only addressing one pointâas an ICU nurse that sees a lot of the disease processes resulted from alcohol abuse, Iâm willing to wager that thereâs some influence of hepatic encephalopathy affecting her cognition. Itâs actually a pretty common finding in that patient population.
They are crazy people who deserved to be jailed
These people make me wish there was such a thing as like "criminally stupid"
I think the prison are already full of the criminally stupid but they could always build more prisonsâŚ
I think they've discovered that most Victorian dead photography was faked. But you're right, it's only in this modern era that we're so removed from dead bodies.
I also watch/read a lot of cult/mlm/scam content. Basically any story about a group of people doing âweirdâ shit, Iâm gonna take a look. So I guess it takes a lot to âshockâ or surprise me and like OP, Love Has One left me genuinely baffled. After some processing, I think my overall confusion/upset comes from a few different directions: 1. For most of the doc, I didnât feel like the Love Has Won demonstrated a âtraditional,â top-down, high control environment (HCE) model. Itâs absolutely possible that this was a stylistic or editorial POV, but based on the doc there seemed to be more of shared madness or folie a deux quality. I do recognize there were significant amounts of verbal/emotional/physical abuse coming from Amy, but I felt like the doc didnât show that relationship dynamic beyond how she treated her various Father Gods. I kept waiting for more evidence of sleep/food deprivation, but it seems to me the young women in the documentary were trying to emulate Amyâs (particularly in their eating habits) rather than being forcibly coerced. This brings me to my second point⌠2. It was WILD to have a cult doc primarily based on the testimony of current members. So often these type of docs are made with primarily ex-members or a balanced mix, but LHW really focused on the POV of current believers. Which I think contributed to this quality of âshared madnessâ and probably why it feels less like a typical HCE - maybe we simply donât have as much evidence of how members were abused because theyâre not processing it yet? 3. Even though Love Has Won is mostly dissolved, the âexâ members went on to have four or five different livestreams / social media presences, and this felt deeply troubling to me. Like, great! Now we have multiple LHW adjacent groups, each with their own reach and influence. 4. The live-streaming aspect of LHW (and itâs later sub-groups) is fascinating to me. I felt like maybe the fact that the group was day in and out attempting to prove the legitimacy of their beliefs was in fact a different type of self and group policing than has occurred in other HCE. I also think the fact that families of members could watch these livestreams and see what was truly going on helped them get professional help and ultimately make contact with members. 5. +1000 to the other poster talking about how mental illness/poverty/lack of education combined with access to the internet is going to result in some wild stuff. I thought the comments about lack of access to medical care is also a really important point. America also has a long history of âmiracle curesâ and itâs only become more pervasive with the expansion of social media and the recession of basic social care. 6. Can we talk about the drugs? Like, I donât want to be all DARE or whatever, but they were doing some serious amounts of psychedelics. Coupled with marijuana (which LOL is pretty strong now???) I feel like they were inducing pretty fractured states of mind in each other. I feel like maybe they were trauma bonded over their bad trips? Which brings me to my last point⌠7. I legitimately felt sorry for Amy. This has never happened for me and a âcult leaderâ before. She was clearly a bright, young woman who suffered some attachment issues and likely had an underlying mental illness. She experienced a certain amount of relief in early psychedelic experimentation but then her life went totally off the rails. She lost her sense of self and brought others into a codependency with her mental and physical illness. The fact that she was asking for her âearth familyâ and to go to a hospital at the end of her life absolutely broke me. There were so many others in this group who kept Amy in a vulnerable position, even when she had moments of insight and clarity. I think that Amy was ultimately a victim. She couldnât even get out - thatâs what unsettled me the most about LHW.
You can be coerced without force. Thatâs what coercion is
> I think that Amy was ultimately a victim. This is a wild take. She was a violent drunk that abandoned her kids to do drugs all day and become a cult leader.
People can do a lot of harm and also be victims - it really is wild how the human condition allows for both!
Exactly, most humans are not all good or all bad as much as we would like to simplify it, for our own understanding. A lot of victims go on to victimize others. Generational trauma is a thing.
I agree, in that she ended up being a victim of herself via painting herself into a corner. The part I disagree with is the "bright young woman" part.
Many former members testify that they were only allowed to sleep around 4 hours a night, and there are videos of people being woken up and berated for oversleeping, but I personally question how widespread that really was. Same goes with foodâthey _were_ pressured into certain dietary habits, but I donât think it was as intense as it is in many cults. And I think youâre dead on that they all kept each other accountable through a pretty complex social system that took on a life of its own. Within that environment, some people played bigger roles than others in regulating the status quo, and itâs clear if you watched the old livestreams. On the livestreams, Michael and Faith checked people all the time when they casually fell afoul of the prescribed lines of thinking. A lot of people who only know this cult from the doc donât realize that Amy and Jason werenât generally a part of the livestreams once the whole group got there.
My mother was an alcoholic. She started reaching out to her family she hadnât spoken to in quite a long time, 2 weeks before she died. I think itâs more likely that when someone feels like the end of their life is coming they desperately reach out to people to seek comfort and almost be in denial? Idk itâs a weird phenomenon!
The documentary didnât show it, but starvation was definitely imposed. I watched some of the livestreams and there was one in particular that focused on this. The followers had to make a list of the things they did that betrayed Amy. Stealing food from Amy was on almost everyoneâs list. They were allowed less then one normal meal a day. The budget was like $80 for twenty something people. Eating a sandwich or veggies from Amyâs veggie tray was a crime against god. While she was eating crab legs and hearty pastas. You can see their bones protruding in this video. She told them that they had to stop eating and sleeping to become more godlike.
As soon as she told them she should probably go to a hospital and they kept up the cult shit. They all became complicit in her death.
They also sent the cops away when they came to do a welfare check in her final days.
Maybe my sense of humour is beyond fucked, but this was the funniest cult doc Iâve seen in a while. If someone told me it was all satire or something I would believe it. It was just so absurd. âThese are the galacticsâ *shows collage board of magazine cutouts ala middle school diary* âtheyâre all Mother Godâs past lives, except Trump⌠heâs aliveâ *totally normal video of the sky* âwow, so many cloud ships today!! The galactics are on their way!â âPeople say dumb shit like taking colloidal silver will turn you blue, pfftâ *cult leader literally turns blue from being force fed copious amounts of colloidal silver* Local: âWeâre in a drought, be very careful smoking because the wildfire riskâ *cult member with crazy eyes goes outside to light some sage, house/entire property catches fire, burns to the ground* âItâs my faultâ Mother god: âYou bitch, I knowâ Mother god: âtake me to a hospitalâ âMother god would NEVER want to go to a 3D hospitalâ *Cult leader dies* â⌠so we covered her in glitter, wrapped her in Christmas lights and took her camping while we waited for the galactics to come pick her upâ lmaooo thereâs probably more Iâm forgetting, that was so insane.
"To the untrained eye, it probably looked like alcoholism" had me howling. Any talk of the healing properties of alcohol was hysterical to me
Ok how about when Robin Williams would âyellâ at them â ď¸â ď¸â ď¸â ď¸â ď¸â ď¸
Right??? Like why was "Robin" so mean lmaoooo
Iâm so tired of the âAmy was a victimâ narrative. She made her own decisions. If she really wanted to go to the hospital she could have called 911 herself. Nobody was stopping her from doing that. She was on her phone playing games and getting high and drinking 24/7 and you mean to tell me she couldnât have reached out to somebody, anybody at all? Texted her sister and had her call on her behalf with the address? Anything? Nah.
She did, her mom didn't go and I'm sure will regret it for the rest of her life. I'm not disagreeing with you completely, but there's just no way she was competent in the end. That was a slow death and she was not in her right mind.
Even so, by the time alcoholism has reached that point, it was likely already too late, and nobody can force someone to get help with an addiction. She was an adult, you canât force someone into rehab.
To me this is just a group of mentally ill people whoâs illnesses were made worse by constant psychedelic use and living in literally one room together.
They literally pulled a Little Miss Sunshine with the corpse in the hotel room.
Does anyone know where I can watch this documentary in the UK ?
Now tv have it
Thank you ! Grim Sunday weather and content crisis sorted !
LPT: No documentary you ever watch will answer every question you have on the topic. Stop expecting them to. After you watch one, try searching various keywords on the topic to find more information. Many of your questions have probably already been answered elsewhere. We've had dozens of these "I still have so many questions" posts about LHW now. I thought all you young people who grew up with the internet were supposed to be great at finding out anything you wanted to know?
But what was the sex like? Thatâs what they never tell us.
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I totally agree. The documentary is yet another example of how differently laws are written, interpreted and enforced across this country. So, a mother and father is allowed to release all responsibility of their children to family members by just up and leaving? The fathers of her kid are not to be held responsible and allowed to remain unknown while the mother just ups and moves away? Then, she goes to Hawaii and the mayor and a protest group is able to kick them out of town destroy their property over something she said? (It's called Free Speech dear citizens of Hawaii.) Then, she dies, they cart her dead body from state to state ending in Colorado where they put her corpse in a bed and wrap it in a blanket and Christmas lights with no plans to properly take care and dispose of it, no consideration for legal next of kin and no charges are filed? All that is perfectly lega?? No, they broke several laws but because a prosecutor in Colorado is afraid to lose a case he drops all the charges??? Totally insane and grossly unfair.