Timesuck with Dan Cummins - 363 - NATLFED: Communist Cult Hiding in America
Episode Date: August 28, 2023In the early '70s, a man presenting himself as Eugenio Mario Perente-Ramos creates the Eastern Farmworkers Association  - an organization purportedly aiming to help migrant workers on Long Island, Ne...w York. He then quickly goes national with the National Labor Federation, aka NATLFED, and develops other groups purportedly aimed at helping the poor around the US in other ways. Meanwhile, in the background, all of these groups end up funneling money to a militant communist group in Brooklyn known as Communist Party, USA, Provisional Wing. And THAT group.... was a cult where Eugenio, but really Gerald Doeden (his birth name) slept with teen girls, abused followers, and exploited everyone around him while they tirelessly worked towards a communist takeover of America that was supposed to happen on February 18th, 1984. MAN do we have a weird one for you today!  Wet Hot Bad Magic Summer Camp tickets are ON SALE!  BadMagicMerch.com Get tour tickets at dancummins.tv Watch the Suck on YouTube: https://youtu.be/P2i7xKymQLYMerch: https://www.badmagicmerch.comDiscord! https://discord.gg/tqzH89vWant to join the Cult of the Curious private Facebook Group? Go directly to Facebook and search for "Cult of the Curious" in order to locate whatever happens to be our most current page :)For all merch related questions/problems: store@badmagicproductions.com (copy and paste)Please rate and subscribe on iTunes and elsewhere and follow the suck on social media!! @timesuckpodcast on IG and http://www.facebook.com/timesuckpodcastWanna become a Space Lizard? Click here: https://www.patreon.com/timesuckpodcastSign up through Patreon and for $5 a month you get to listen to the Secret Suck, which will drop Thursdays at Noon, PST. You'll also get 20% off of all regular Timesuck merch PLUS access to exclusive Space Lizard merch. You get to vote on two Monday topics each month via the app. And you get the download link for my new comedy album, Feel the Heat. Check the Patreon posts to find out how to download the new album and take advantage of other benefits
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Do you like to volunteer?
Enjoy giving back?
Or maybe at least wish you had more time to do so.
Well, you are not alone.
The 2021 Volunteering and America report
found that 60.7 million adults,
over 23% of the adult population here in the US,
volunteered 4.1 billion hours.
Now, I was out for some positive news.
Maybe humanity isn't garbage.
And at least a few of these volunteers were working for a Shady organization called the National
Labor Federation.
Natal Fed.
Natal Fed as a network of local community associations run exclusively by volunteers that in theory,
organized workers excluded from collective bargaining protections by U.S. labor law, specifically
under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.
That 1935 act guarantees the right of private sector employees
to organize into trade unions,
engaging collective bargaining,
and to take collective actions such as strikes.
Like the one going on right now in Hollywood
with the WGA writers and the SAG after performers.
For decades, again, in theory,
the National Labor Federation focused on helping
some of the country's most vulnerable workers,
people who were essentially the American equivalent of what we explored in the banana
massacre episode.
Like exploited migrant laborers and their families, people who didn't have reliable access
to food, legal protection, and medical attention.
Volunteers for various natal fed satellite organizations were told that they were improving
the world doing all this, but were they?
It doesn't seem so.
Many, many people have alleged for decades now that Nattlefed and all of its related networks
are really just one massive front for a cult based in twisted communist ideology.
Former Nattlefed cadre Robin Spellman-Falberg, who was an operations manager with an upstate
New York EFWA for a decade, set in 2004 that in
addition to doing some helping in the most disenfranchised communities, there was also a hidden
for want of a better description evil side of natal fed.
When I was there and from what I've heard continues to be the case, there were manipulative
people in powerful positions.
Full-timers was subjected to an increasingly severe mental abuse and subjugation. They felt the only way to help poor people was through natal fed, that there
was no possible success for them after leaving and or they were subject to physical threats
if they did. And this has been going on and worse things have been going on all around
the country with this organization since the mid 1970s. Yes, still going on. Though
natal fed shady founder, a man who called himself a Eugenio Parente, would die in the
1990s after the revolution he predicted to take place in 1984 did not happen.
His cult would still limp on.
Surviving two major raids, a plethora of legal troubles and internal power struggles
that did seem to set the code back, but never entirely destroyed it.
Today the group seems to still be limping along.
It's mostly decentralized, it appears,
but that doesn't mean they're not still dangerous.
People have posted online as recently as two years ago.
In 2021, about family members and loved ones,
a green devolunteer with an organization
that sounded like it was doing so much good.
And then disappearing into a shady conglomerate
for months, sometimes years,
where they lived below the poverty line, slept on dirty mattresses, and were regularly abused, or even sexually preyed upon.
Is the organization at the tipi top of this odd cultic pyramid, a mysterious group that called themselves the Communist Party USA provisional wing still around?
Are they still armed? Still hoping to take over the US government. A lot of interesting ground and unintentional comedy
to explore in today's back to the 70s.
Here comes the revolution, you capitalist swine.
Cult, cult, cult, edition of Time Suck.
This is Michael McDonald and you're listening to Time Suck.
You're listening to Time Sun. Well, happy Monday and welcome to the cult of the curious.
I'm Dan Cummins, the suck master, suck nasty, former White House plumber apprentice, world's
leading expert in authentic Scottish accents, professional tricky day impersonator, and you
are listening to Time Sun. in authentic Scottish accents, professional tricky-dicken personator, and you are listing two times a hell,
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Before I say anything else today, huge congrats to my son,
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So fucking proud of you, Bubba.
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never let you move away. We could just play FIFA together, you know, just, you know, you'll be in your 40s, and I'll you because part of you, which is I can just lock you in the basement and never let you move away.
We can just play FIFA together.
You know, you'll be in your 40s
and I'll be in my 70s and it'll be fine.
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All of this advice is based on questions we've received from some of you Meet X.
Now back to a time and place, we actually know quite well.
At least if you've listened
to our exploration of other similar topics in the past, the Eugenio Parente, the eventual
founder of Natal Fed, would get his start in a time and place. We've already been to
many, many times San Francisco in the 1970s, home to many quasi revolutionary groups like the
Symbianese Liberation Army that we covered in our episode on the kid napping of Patty Hurst.
Much like the Symbianese Liberation Army, you Hennie O'Parente's original group was a
small American, very far left militant organization, at least they pushed that image that also
wanted to, you know, bring down the US government and capitalism.
He called it Largo Liberation Army Revolutionary Group Organization.
Definitely sounds communist. but Largo, Liberation Army Revolutionary Group Organization.
Definitely sounds communist.
As in, it's a dumb fucking name.
Fill with a lot of unnecessary words.
You really need to add the word organization
after the word group.
Sounds redundant as hell to me.
We are CFGDBS, the FLAVOR, the combat of fighting guy dudes,
battling and clashing for independent self-government,
sovereignty and autonomy.
So you're you're freedom fighters in. Uh, yeah, I guess you can also say it that way in addition to
the way that I said it. That would also suffice. But aside from sending a few weird letters,
Largo never really got anything off the ground. So many pretenders, ultimately, in the let's fucking go, be with the revolution, killing in the name of kind of game. While the Symbianese liberation
army was also definitely full of pretentious fox cosplay as revolutionaries, they actually
did do some wild shit. They rob banks, held a shootout with police and Los Angeles, murdered
at least two people. By comparisongo was a it's pretty pathetic
There most militant act was to send a letter to many state authorities that stated the day of the coming revolution the day that California's government will be overthrown get ready motherfuckers you will rule the day that you heard the name Largo
Get ready to bow down to a new world order and then they uh they knew shit
The police and FBI get involved
Largo was so pathetic. They didn't really do much to them.
They were just more like, you fucking dumb,
comedy dingleberries.
Thought you would overthrow something.
That's rich.
You dirty hippies in the Che Guevara,
Graphic Teas, Military Surpless Cargo Pants and Sandals.
What do you think you're gonna just chant your way
into the Capitol?
Talk us into laying down our guns by lecturing us on the evils of capitalism with the hunger strike
or something. Get the fuck out of here. Go back to the library. Read some more Karl Marx,
David and about doing shit. You'll never have the nuts to pull off and suck a bag of dicks.
If the symbionese liberation army was cause plane revolutionaries,
Largo was cause plane people who were cause plane revolutionaries, a sad copy of a sad copy.
When Largo never took off like he hoped, old Gino, Eugenio resurfaced about a year later
in Long Island in New York City, a place in time we most recently visited with the
Sullivanians cult.
Namelesshead would actually share many similarities with the Sullivanians.
Much like how Saul Newton and his therapist used therapy, use psychoanalysis to keep everyone under the group's thumb,
you honey a parent day would hold the ideal of saving the poor
and downtrodden from exploitation
through commitment to volunteering over people's heads.
Weird, right?
I never even considered a non-religious non-spiritual organization
based primarily in volunteering,
volunteering with the eventual goal of transforming America into some kind of communist utopia to be where a cult would
live.
Right?
You have time to volunteer?
Okay.
All right, volunteer then.
Wait, wait, wait, you have to go home?
You have time to go home.
Oh, okay.
All right.
I guess you're not really dedicated like a thought.
Like I guess you like capitalism.
I guess you like seeing the working class get their fucking backs broken by modern day
robber barons.
If you were truly dedicated to saving America, you would spend all your time volunteering.
You would live in this brownstone 24-7 with a dozen other people.
That's what a good person who truly wants to change the world would do.
Much like the Sullivanians, Natal said Fed prayed on people's desire to be good.
While the Sullivanians targeted introspective people
already in therapy, trying to achieve self-actualization,
Natalie Fed targeted young idealistic people
already on college campuses, sometimes with the direct support
of the college, and like pretty much all cults,
people who are to difficult juncture in their lives.
Young mothers trying to figure out how to make it
as a single parent, a recent graduate, looking lives. Young mothers trying to figure out how to make it as a single parent, a recent graduate's
looking at the world, struggling to figure out
where their place in it was gonna be, et cetera.
Like the Sullivanians, Natalie Fed also sprinkled
a good bit of Marxist communist rhetoric
into everything they did.
Back at the leadership's headquarters,
a series of brownstones and crown heights, Brooklyn.
You, Hennie Apparente gave long, rambling lectures
about Marcus, Marcus theory, Marxist, there we go. crown heights brooklyn you any apparent they gave long rambling lectures about marcus uh... marcus theory
marxist there we go uh... linking revolutions abroad to their movement trying
to convince the gaggle of people that he had under his thumb that they were
true revolutionaries
about to take down the men the system
they would soon some birthday dominant paradigm and bring about a new and
better world order
instead of the truth
which was that they were being brainwashed,
controlled and exploited by a cold leader who ran as called almost
exactly like some false profit doomsday preacher.
Nathlete wasn't about bringing about a revolution.
It was about feeding Parente's ego, giving him young women and
teen girls to sexually use and control and other people to worship him.
Like he was a Che Guevara reincarnated.
Despite these similarities,
Natal Fed was also very unique,
and maybe still is,
if they are in fact still around
in the same way they used to be,
they had a very interesting, very strange structure,
something like we've never seen before.
So stick around, let me tell you all about it.
So much silly, interesting, and weird shit
to explore today.
[♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ A ranging information about Natal Fed weird shit to explore today.
A ranging information about Nattle Fed was a bit tricky for this one. Nobody's done a full length book on them. And so much the organization has been and still is shrouded in a lot of confusion
and secrecy. That's what they like. Several X members have thankfully kept a blog dedicated
to Nattle Fed history. Some X members and journalists have written a few lengthy articles about their experiences
with the group, but again, no definitive source.
Without that main source in order to piece together what this group actually is, was we
had to rely on blog posts, interviews, bunch of old newspaper articles, and this is uncommon
for what we do here, but modern day posts on message boards like Reddit.
Not necessarily ideal, but also I like it. It's some fresh information.
And what emerges from all these different sources
is gloriously fascinating.
When we put all the pieces together,
we get a picture of a group that formed
during the last gasp of America's counterculture revolution
in the early 70s,
claimed to be affiliated with legitimate labor movements
and revolutionary movements abroad, but wasn't, and used that as a front to control and manipulate members.
One of the ways they did this was to have a confusing and complicated structure to the
organization in which it was unclear who reported to who, what organizations were associated
with one another, who was at the very top, but I think we were able to break it all down
and expose it today.
It'll feel confusing in moments, but just remember, it's not important to remember all
of the acronyms I'm going to throw out at you, or even what the satellite groups did.
That doesn't really matter to the big picture.
It doesn't matter what they claim to do.
What is important to understand is that they were all connected to natal fed.
And they all funneled certain members up the chain to natal fed, and that natal fed
was a front for a group called the Communist Party USA, Provisional Wing.
And this group was at the top of the strange little cult pyramid.
It was headquartered in Brooklyn, New York, the Brownstones where Eugenio Parente would give his long lectures almost every night.
And this inner circle group was the true cult inside of Nattle Fed.
Some of the various satellite groups also treated volunteers like cold members,
but the group at the top, 100% was a cult,
and very likely still is in some form.
What's also interesting to think about
as we wind through all of this
is how eerily similar this cult is,
this cult that for bid religion,
this cult guided by communist principles,
how it ended up feeling damn near exactly like
a Doomsday cult, founded in religious extremism.
Just replace false prophets with phony revolutionary leader.
Replace knowing when the end times will be upon us with knowing when a government takeover
will happen.
Replace needing to follow a false prophet in order to be guaranteed a special seat at the
table in the coming days of a new kingdom of God, with needing to follow a revolutionary leader in order to be guaranteed a special
seat at the table in a coming utopian communist society.
Despite a lack of religion, a lack of any notion of God, in the end, it was all the same
shit when it came to why cult members hung around and how they were manipulated and exploited.
Today's story, more proof that you don't need religion
to form a cult, you don't need any sense
of a spiritual life.
At one point of my life, I thought that if you could somehow
eliminate all religion, you could rid the world
of this type of exploitation.
Nope.
If a con artist can't take advantage of your desire
to know God, they'll just find some other hope
of yours to fucking pray upon, which is a bummer.
So what was natal fed's doomed day, you know,
back when the cult was at the peak of its powers,
while all the members of the provisional wing
were preparing for a revolution,
that parental promise,
just like a false prophet with promise,
you know, with a specific date,
it was gonna kick off February 17th, 1984.
Remember that crazy revolution back in 1984?
When America was taken down
by an elite communist, domestic terrorist organization?
Not all members of Natal Fed were provisional wing members though, just the best of the best,
or sometimes the hottest. To become a member of the provisional wing, it seems like you likely
started by working in one of Natal Fed's many shell organizations around the country. They called
them local branches, have many different names, they would obscure intentionally their real
connection to Natalil Fed.
These organizations named things like,
and here's a bunch of the acronyms I mentioned
were coming that you don't need to remember,
but it's interesting just how many of them there were.
The Alaska Workers Association,
Alianza Campacina, Association of Financial Aid Students,
Ashland Community Service Center, Bay Area Alternative Press,
Berkshire Community Fuel Community, Boston Community for Community Arts,
Carroll Street Properties, Citizens for Migrant Workers, Citizens Relief Committee,
Coalition of Concerned Legal Professionals, Coalition of Concerned Medical Professionals,
Commemoration Committee for the Black Panther Party. Commission on voluntary service and action.
Committee for community health and safety.
Committee for safety and health of attendance and domestics.
Committee for South African solidarity.
Committee for friends and relatives of prisoners.
That is literally just the A to C groups
that we've been able to like piece together
while that other investigative journalists
have been able to piece together.
These fuckers had the whole rest of the Alphabet's worth
of other tiny little cells of people
involved in some way to natal fed in the provisional wing of this communist party.
There were dozens if not hundreds more.
And some of these organizations still around in some form.
These organizations would spring up around the country, some of them kind of legitimate,
doing some good, but doing a lot of, you know, funneling money up the chain to natal fed,
some of them not doing much good at all.
All their members, you know, being exploited in some way, raising money for something they
may not, you know, even have known existed, probably didn't know existed for many of them.
And members who wanted to dedicate themselves to the revolutionary cause, even further,
these elite revolutionary cause players might then head to New York, where they would become
Natal Fed members. And then some of the Natal Fed members, if they did really well, might then head to New York where they would become natal fed members and in some of the natal fed members if they did really well might be
invited to join the provisional wing right the inner circle of fake fighters the best of
the not so best you're the best around nothing's gonna ever keep you down except reality
this complicated structure is what makes these slippery fuckers hard to pin down.
It's made it hard for people volunteering for these various acronyms to know what they're
really helping to make things even more confusing.
The Communist Party, USA Provisional Wing has had many different names over the years.
You've called themself the Communist Party, United States of America, Provisional, the
Provisional Communist Party, Provisional Party, Provisional Party of Communists, and even
just the Order of Lenin.
Some natal fed literature claimed to make sense of all of this intentionally confusing
structure for members who needed some questions answered about it all.
The training manual slash tracked slash shut the fuck up already with this bullshit called
the essential organizer written by you, Henio, Gino Parente.
A manual you could argue was there a biblical equivalent or Bible equivalent. Describe their structure like this. An
organization does not just happen. Sometimes a catalyst or disaster of sufficient
proportion disturbs mass conscious, conscience, to the extent that experienced
individuals with experience relating to the disaster can form a group
dedicated to aid in a disciplined manner.
This created the American Red Cross.
Sometimes membership groups are merely organized.
In this case, an organizer or organizing entity
will seek a solution in an area of concern.
He or they will outline a solution method
to remedy the situation,
outline the geographic confines of the problem,
and approach individuals of similar concern within the area, explaining their concept of solution and unfinding agreement asking the
individual to join in the effort.
Eastern Farm Workers Association, a natal Fed group, is an example of this, a pre-planned
organized entity.
It then remains for the organization to define itself structurally and philosophically
in regard to its operation.
In some, a Board of directors handles decisions.
In others, a plebiscite of membership is relied on.
In the case of most organized entities where the duty of the organization lies in the arena
of building another organization and the majority of strategic questions were pre-planned,
the Cadre system is established.
Under a Cadre system of decision-making, trained individuals capable of, a cadre system of decision making, trained individuals capable
of cadre of both operating the basic mechanics of the group and training other individuals
to perform the tasks, agree to tactical solutions regarding strategic goals by the consensus
approach. That is submitting positive information from key areas within the organization to
approachable leadership and then confers on policy evolving from the leadership analysis. The criterion of approval lies in
obviating a denial of correctness from any of the
participants. In this case, the participants are
cadre. Leadership is furnished by either the
operation structure of the organization or the
originator of the approved strategy. Anyone else
fucking hate the way this dipshit writes about all
this could be any more boring. And this asshole would give lectures like speaking like this,
that would sometimes drone on for 12 fucking hours. Imagine listing to this asshole,
like talk like that for noon to midnight. Geno subscription of organizational structure continues.
Eastern Farm Workers Association is then a cadre-based organization as a pre-plant entity of an
original committee approval. It is dedicated to raising a membership plebiscite of farm workers
who will at the time of the plebiscite determine the structure of the final entity. A cadre is either
an individual of the type described above or a collection of individuals within the organization,
dealing with a specific task in unison, cadres come from two areas.
They are either exterior cadre or interior cadre.
Interior cadre come to the organization from the ranks of sympathizers, supporters, members
and other associates who in continuing their association with the group, subscribe to
the methods and goals espoused by the organization to the extent that they both desire to abide
by all pre-plant policy and discipline.
And second, they fulfill the standards of participation subscribed to by the participating cadre, at least to the extent that cadre consensus does not exclude them. Fuck me.
Codraids are goal-motivated. The end, the final solution offered by the organization is the
primary concern prior to participation. If the solution seems correct, the structural facets of the group and respect to flexibility
and strategic dexterity must be correct. Leadership, 12 hours
of this, leadership should exhibit approachability, awareness
and a logical, dispassionate ability and analysis. A goal
motivated individual considering the cadre status within a
group is concerned with solutional analysis, structural
correctness and leadership understanding. Does this sound
anyone else?
Like the writings of someone who actually is not very smart,
but who desperately wants to sound very, very smart.
Like he's so bad,
he wants to be seen as a true intellectual.
Anything so you can just string enough academic terms together,
he can make his word salad fuckery sound profound.
How about this guy's the source?
Just never left his side.
Leadership should be magnanimous and exceptional.
No, no, magnanimous and unsurpassable
in its effort to present solutionally based,
no, expositionally centered feedback
that incentivizes workers, no stimulates operatives
to accelerate or expedite their veritable
and uninitiated potential or aptitude
Yeah, sure that doesn't make sense if you break it all down
But you could also just not be a pretentious dick and to say something much more understandable like we need solid leaders to get most of our workers
To get the most out of our workers by providing good feedback and you know empowering them
Anyway, Mr
Check out how many fucking scrabble words I know continues with a
Potential exterior to cadre examining an organization
as a potential host for personal goals is interested only in ascertaining. If any condition
exists currently that proves conclusively, the attempt will not work. The cadre is aware of,
and unconcerned by, the fact that the vehicle currently won't work. One thing is lacking,
individuals of sufficient skilled determination, discipline, and devoid of ulterior motivation or interest to operate the vehicle of organization by God
In short, the organization must fit only two descriptions
It must have correct goals and it must not be structurally incorrect
Success from that point is determined by cadre motivation ability and training
It is the basic concept of the cadre oriented activists that a reasonable plan with no logical flaw and no basic structural imperfection
will eventually try and
then struggle with struggle with a strongly entrenched adversary processing even the minimal minimal faults needed to qualify as an
oppressor contradictions and practice of performance and divided areas of self interest. The basic rule of cadre is not one of position, but one of power within any position.
within any position. Okay, so I guess what he said here is that because poor people in different areas are working different kinds of jobs and being exploited in different ways, it makes sense
for different organizations to serve those different populations. And also, what you need to be
to help create real change and when a revolution is to be someone who can just be flexible,
go with the fuck flow and stay dedicated to ideology, regardless of what group you find yourself working in,
and what task you end up doing. I think that's a decent snopsies. I also think Geno may have written
the way he wrote intentionally trying to keep people of confused. In some other literature,
Natal Fedha addressed its national structure much more succinctly thank God.
The only thing that really makes sense is the local community based associations
that reach unrecognized workers,
and unite them with current and former union workers, retired workers,
local business leaders, professionals, and others who share a common concern
for the long term future of our communities.
Fuck it, boom!
We're all working our same goal, trying to help the working class. But as we'll see in the timeline, Natal Fed didn't give a fuck about that goal. They weren't about protecting communities. Fuck it, boom! We're all working on the same goal. Trying to help the working class. But as we'll see in the timeline, Natal Fed didn't give a fuck about
that goal. They weren't about protecting communities. They were about giving Gino, and I'm sure
the people around him, money and power. And, you know, to that, and members were abused
physically and sexually. They were kept away from their pre-cult social circles and
given demanding rigorous schedules that better left time to sleep and confusing tasks that kept them mentally off balance. And with that context
established, let's get into the weeds. Cult, cult, cult. It's timeline time. Right
after today's sponsor break. And we're back to show now back to me actually
hitting this fun little timeline button.
Shrap on those boots, soldier. We're marching down a time,
sub timeline.
Let's begin in the year 1937. That year, the man who
will become Eugenio Mario, Parente Ramos.
Ramos was born in Crion, Minnesota, November 21st.
He grew up around Ubicity and Mary's Ville in California.
His family would originally from Idaho, well, fuck yeah, bro.
And had moved to Minnesota sometime in the early 1950s.
In his obituary, years later, his mother was described as a domestic worker, while his
father would be described in newspapers as a man active in the industrial workers in the
world.
Okay, sounds a little bit like some more comedy speaker.
We're telling this dad was a blue collar worker.
Gino's birth name was not quite as revolutionary as you,
he or Mariel, Perente, or almost.
It was Gerald Dodon.
Fucking Jerry D, baby.
Jerry Bear, the revolutionary.
Jerry Guevara, Chase, very disappointing little brother.
Jerry would become a man of many names.
Gino Parente, Gino Parente, uh,
Eugenio Parente, Mario, Eugenio Parente, Mario, Eugenio, uh,
Parente Ramos, uh, Eugenio Mario, Parente Ramos,
Gino Savo, uh,
Kazoo, and I'm a Zalati, and I'm about to do it.
Gino Toro Banderas.
You get it. And Claude, just Claude for that one. Some sort of say Claude was a
a Shakespearean actor before he turned to labor organization to revolt or not to
revolt to accept the status capitalist pig quo that has not the question. There is no
question. There is only the truth. The revolution has begun. The cost will be
paid in blood, but the sacrifice
will be worth it. For the only outcome is victory. Tyranny shall fall and the great Claude shall
reign over the dawn of a new humanistic era. Q thunder applause in panties getting toss
near. If true Claude's theater training would certainly come in handy for all the bullshit
roles he'll play going forward in his con artist base life. But before that while in college Jerry Claude was injured in the car accident
that would leave him with the limp for the rest of his life. I'm sure he told people he got
fucking shot and fucking revolutionary struggle. Doctors apparently wanted to amputate but
refused and had his leg in a cast for several years developing a chronic infection of the bone
and giving him too much time to think about his future bullshit cons.
Gerald will later claim that he spent much the 1950s doing a bunch of labor organized
organized labor organizing. However, others would disagree with this. According to a lot of
people, he was a small town DJ. He didn't do a whole lot of anything when not at the radio
station. Everyone in town knew Jerry in the late 1950s said one U of city resident Bill Mick Junkin
That's a fucking great name Mick Junkin a local machinist
He worked at the radio station and hung out at Andy's driving. I'll tell you one thing about him
He never did an honest days work in his life
There reminds me a grandpa ward there and if so many older guys around Rick and GrownUp
I've heard numerous guys described as never having done a honest day's work in their life. And that description brings up
a very specific visual in my head. Some do with the firm handshake and a million dollar smile,
a guy who's maybe always dressed up a little too nice, a little too well for the occasion,
a little too slick, a little too put together. Guy with no calluses on his hands who will look
you right in the eye and tell you nothing but lies. A guy who even though you might not have any
proof when you first meet him that what he's
saying is nothing but a bunch of lies and exaggeration, how do you almost know as you're talking
to a bullshit artist?
Some slick golden tongue motherfucker.
According to another U.S.
city resident, Frank Cartacelli, Jerry spent five years working as well-liked local disc
jockey.
He was a damn good one in popular.
I said, Cartacelli, he was a sharp guy who spent a lot of time in the library I like the guy who's always nice to me
the next review not as glowing or maybe mixed is the better description a woman
who said she was very close to Jerry described him as an extraordinarily sensitive sad
crippled genius with an enormous amount of anger she said that once while
out drinking coffee at an all-night
Mary'sville restaurant, a fellow customer called him uncouth.
What do you mean uncouth, supposedly replied Gerald, who then proceeded to recite from memory,
entire sections of Shakespeare's play as you like it?
Holy fucking dorks, Batman.
Whether you're a crippled genius or just a melodramatic theatrical weirdo?
Others describe Jerry as a man always running the con.
Bingo!
That one feels correct.
Several of Jerry's old friends recalled a tale of how when they all once went out drinking
together with Gerald, he actually paid for drinks with a check he signed as Jesus
Age Christ.
Okay, alright, though he had odds as a humor. I can relate.
Jerry was never prosecuted for that, apparently,
because the merchant did not wish to appear in court
and publicly admit he'd accepted such a check.
That's pretty funny, if true.
One of his favorite cons included printing
and selling raffle tickets for prizes he never bought.
Prizes that were then never given to winners
who didn't exist.
Jerry would also bill himself as a wedding photographer,
except an initial down payment and then, you know, just never show the fuck up and take any pictures.
So what an asshole. This revolutionary grifter clearly didn't give a fuck about helping people.
Sounds like he was just ripping people off left and right. Ripping off working class people as well.
1960, I assume. 1960, Gerald at the age of 22, he
marries Ruth Mikkelson and the two have a daughter together,
Catherine. Early in the marriage, Ruth tries to figure out how the brilliant
person she fell in love with became this lazy person. She was now married to.
Later she would describe him to journalists saying he was brilliant.
He would read 15 books a week. He was always at the library. He wanted to reform
the world. He had a vision. But did he? Did he read 15 books a week? I
Seriously fucking doubt it. That's a lot of books. I
Mean if you was reading books written for toddlers like Good Night Moon, maybe
I'm guessing the grifter the professional liar just went to the library and then told his wife
He read 15 books a week and used enough big words to make his wife think he was a genius in
Addition to his legendary knowledge absorption and a visions and shit, she said he also just
laid around a red poetry instead of working or helping around the house, experimenting with
drugs, talks a lot about organizing labors into a union, but never seem to take any real
steps towards doing that.
So, you know, in short, he was a fucking bum deadbeat.
And when he reportedly fathered another child outside their marriage,
Ruth called it quits and filed for divorce.
By the end of the 1960s, Jerry would be in jail for failure to pay child support.
One of many co-leaders, we have covered now who failed to pay child support
before sharing their incredible vision and powers with their adoring followers,
such strong character and integrity with these motherfuckers.
By 1970, Jerry D. now 32 years old
was spending much of his time at the Little Red Bookstore.
Sounds commy.
In San Francisco, a funky little Bay Area shop on 3191 Mission Street
that offered Communist Party literature
and was the de facto headquarters for an organization
Jerry put together called Largo.
This is great.
These Largo revolutionaries were training for fucking war you guys.
The biggest war America would ever know.
That's what they said anyway.
Currently, it looks like there's a tattoo shop underground tattoo and nail salon in this
building.
Tattoo shop looks dope.
One of the know what used to go down in their building.
And full Largo's name was the Liberation Army Revolutionary Group Organization.
That group organization redundancy still kills me.
And March of 1970, Largo mailed...
It's one of my favorite parts of the episode.
And March of 1970, Largo mailed Mimigraff's proclamations to several California County governments,
declaring that a fully trained, equipped and manned army of revolution
will be operated in northern California
beginning March 15th.
Each and every one of those County commissioners,
I wonder if they just sent a memo back
to just said, cool story, bro.
I don't know if they sent anything,
but I know I love this proclamation.
Please enjoy the glorious, nonsensical false provado of what follows here.
The letter sent to the government described Largo as a fighting force dedicated to the overthrow
of the United States government by the use of force.
Plans and training procedures for this organization have been conducted within the confines of
California, and we motivate a national uprising during the months that follow.
We will offer the public more material as to our benevolent purpose toward the people of the world.
You will notice that our material is badly printed. This is due to the fact that printing devices,
even those operating within private premises, are traceable by the federal police state
necessitating the disguise of any mass-procured material. Okay, I already have to interject.
I love these clowns are saying,
are saying they won't use a decent printing device because that could lead to their whereabouts
being uncovered, but they will give the government their planning to attack a big heads up like when
they're going to fucking attack them. That's very much a mixed message. I mean, if you're so
serious about your revolution that you're not going to use a conventional printing device,
over fears of being tracked, wouldn't you also maybe not warn your enemy about your revolution that you're not gonna use a conventional printing device over fears of being tracked wouldn't you also maybe not warn your enemy
about your fucking master plan also can all printing devices be tracked by the
government fucking doubt it back in nineteen seventy
a largo continues with
i do not know what path the federal force will follow
to keep to keep civilian casualties to a minimum
we are establishing a set of qualifications
with casualties to a minimum, we are establishing a set of qualifications with which we will
unswervingly follow to regulate the war against the oppressive federal government.
In the revolution, all those who bear, I picture like at the coffee shop when he's like
shares people, oh, fuck yeah, yes.
Oh, fuck it.
Where are they going to get it?
And he's fucking bummed.
It's just like drinking coffee and just getting high and not doing shit.
In the revolution, all those who bear arms and service of the established government to
be deposed are considered members of the federal forces because of their ability and orders
to destroy, apprehend, kill, and detain soldiers of the national liberation front.
This includes members of local police forces, the California Highway Patrol, California
Border Patrol, members of county sheriff departments,
uniformed arm members of the National Guard and all federal troops on duty in uniform and
armed.
This shit is so entertainingly dumb and amateurs to me.
What kind of revolutionaries feel the need to a tell their oppressors they plan to attack
them sometimes soon and then be make it very clear that they'll only be attacking people
dedicated to attacking them
and a long-winded convoluted explanation. To be clear when the revolution begins and the blood of
the tyrants floods the street, that blood will not be the blood of unarmed housewives or school
children or for example elderly people with dementia,
anxiety and assisted living facilities, or jugglers, buskers,
and other assorted street performers who are neither in favor of nor opposed to the current regime,
but are merely trying to put some food in their bellies with tip money earned by moderately
entertaining civilians passing by, the blood of the revolution will also not include professional baseball players
who are trying to kill or not trying to kill anyone but instead are doing their very best to
hit safely or make great defensive stops or lower their earned run average to proper pitch
election and likely also exceptional velocity and movement whatever it takes within the confines of the existing rules, to win the sporty match.
You get it. Largo continues.
Soldiers of the revolution will be dressed
in a military manner uniformly with other members
of the striking force to which we belong.
In case of an emergency, when a soldier of Largo
must bear arms without notice, he will identify himself
throughout the action with a red arm band on the left arm.
Civilians coming into contact with soldiers of the revolution should immediately identify
themselves their location and non combat and status. Do not identify yourself as a sympathizer
unless this is a true statement. Your rights will be honored and your safety taken into primary
consideration regardless of beliefs. I can't believe this is fucking real. This feels more like a will-fairil character in an old SNL sketch
or like a Danny McBride, just kind of like one of those arrogant, idiot characters instead of real life.
I find it so fucking entertaining when cult leaders this unbelievably stupid are able to succeed
on some level. Just so you know, our soldiers will be dressed like soldiers and another important thing if you want no quarrel with us
Please just tell us that you are a sympathizer and therefore we will not riddle your body with bullets and flood the streets with more blood of the revolution
But please do not tell us that if you are not in fact a sympathizer and thus
Tricking us by deception into letting our guards down for us then to be literally stat or shot in the back or something
That would fuck that would not be cool
And that would be harmful to our revolutionary objectives in a most unpleasant and upsetting manner
And then the last thing they wrote in the leaflet was our
And then the last thing they wrote in their leaflet was our war against federal forces will be conducted on a program of gradual acceleration as efforts to eliminate Largo increase at each step of the escalation a statement of
Procedure will be published in order to ensure the safety of war zone residents power to the people
We shall not fail
So good so fucking good
I wish that ever the topic we covered had some source material like that,
just a fucking gift wrapped in waiting to be unopened on the internet.
One last thing, the more federal forces that try to stop us,
the harder we will fight just so you know,
we will accelerate our war gradually in order to match more fighting,
being directed against us.
I hope I just made it clear that if you fight more hard against us,
we will not start fighting less hard in return.
Understand?
That would allow us to be defeated and defeat is not part of our strategy.
We very much would like to win.
So please do not think you can defeat our revolution by fighting more hard over and out,
power to the people.
The legendary letter, we've sent out on March 11, 1970.
I bet by March 12, when letters started to arrive places.
Oh God, just fucking officials, county officials across California were having a real good laugh
over this shit.
And also this keeps getting better.
Despite these idiots not using a conventional trackable printing device. These fucking idiots were tracked down within 13 hours
of the first letter being opened. Oh, I got to love it. 13 hours in the revolution is already
over. Took the FBI that long to trace Largo's written threats to Jerry D. Who by this time was
going by the a list of Genino Salvo and the FBI was
not even a little bit worried about this dork. An agent for the State Department of Justice said
as anarchists and revolutionaries go he is strictly small potatoes like that's a quote. He's small
potatoes and then the agent added while he boasts of having hundreds of automatic weapons and talks
of his legions now undergoing gorilla training in the hills. The fact is he has scarcely half a dozen dedicated followers and most of them can be classified
as kooks.
We do have true anarchists and revolutionaries in our midst, but he is one of them.
I laughed so fucking hard when I first read that.
Kooks, that's the word you don't hear enough of.
Not here enough anymore.
Agency also had intelligence that Gerald was considered a persona non-grata,
even within revolutionary circles. One source told him that Gerald recently attempted
to form a coalition with heads of the Red Guard and revolutionary union in the Palo Alto area,
and these guys essentially told him to beat it.
Come on, get, Jerry D.
Yeah, yeah. We got real revolutionary work to do. You fucking ding dong.
You cook.
Also, some of the five or six cook followers,
he's supposed to have may have been invented.
One person who claimed to be a member of Largo
was a guy who went by Claude.
Former downtown art store clerk who wrote
into newspapers claiming to be an authority on bombs.
Claude sent pictures of crude bombs.
He said he perched on the open market,
but then agents determined later that you know
He didn't buy him. He made them and they didn't fucking work
So Geno Salvo was caught
Finally citing Charles
amateurism no charges were filed against him for this which is so sad
Dude threatens county officials with a bloody revolution and the FBI's responses just like
I said the fuck up, Jerry,
get out here. We're not even gonna rest you. You fucking dark. Go get a job. You cook.
Following month in April of 1970, Jerry does get into some actual trouble.
Uh, Sutter County Sheriff's deputies arrest him on charges failing to pay child support.
And he spends 30 days in jail. Following his release, he will never go by the name of Jerry
Dodon again. Jerry is dead. Jerry was a chump.
He's genome now.
Primo genome.
Fucking revolutionary.
And what I have to imagine was an effort to keep not paying child support and also to
not get arrested.
Now he changes his name to, yeah, you.
Henny O'Gino Parente moves to New York State where he will start building a cult.
So sad that this guy was able to build a cult.
1971 Parente works briefly for the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee.
The predecessor of United Farm Workers of America, UFW, in his New York office,
might learn some more lingo, make some contacts. After taking charge during a power vacuum,
he is quickly fired for reasons unknown. Later, labor activist, a real labor activist, Delores Huerta,
will remember him during this time period as a colorful biker type,
who played a small role in the boycott
for about nine months or a year.
He created a lot of problems for the union,
attacking us in the press,
then he went and formed his own group.
Printed began to organize a new group in November of 1971,
working among nursery and greenhouse workers
in New York Suffolk County.
Couple months later, he started organizing vegetable growers
in Northport and agricultural workers in Bellport, Long Island. By June 1972,
Perentay and some early volunteers moved into Southhold town. Later that summer, they moved
to Riverhead Township, the heart of Long Island's migrant community. There, he founded the Eastern
Farm Workers Association. An organization purported the aiming to help migrant workers on Long
Island. This is how it all really starts the EFWA
Received press attention in its early days for attempting to organize farm workers at the I am young company a potato grower
By this time newspapers were reporting that Perente was a former associate of Caesar Chavez an actual
Labor organizer of note a true revolutionary born in 1927 Chavez grew up in Arizona and the small Adobe
home where Cesar was born in was swindled from his family. Chavez's father had agreed
to clear 80 acres of land in exchange. He would receive the deed to 40 acres of land that
adjoined his home, but the agreement was broken. And that land was then sold to a man named
Justice Jackson. Chavez's dad went to a lawyer who'd vise into borrow money and buy the land
from Jackson. Later when Chavez's father could not pay the unreasonably high interest on the loan,
the lawyer then bought back the land for pennies on the dollar, sold it back to the original owner, and it was all a setup. It was all fucking scam.
Shavez learned about injustice early about, you know, people being taken advantage of and vowed to do something about it.
He dedicated his life's work to improving conditions for the legions of farm workers who kept fresh food on the tables across America,
while they often went hungry themselves living and laboring in abysmal conditions being
paid unlivable wages and generally just exploited. Chavez modeled his methods on the non-violence
civil disobedience of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Employing Strikes, Boycotts,
Marches and Fasks, to draw attention to what he called la causa.
The Valley Religious, he also drew inspiration
from the social teachings of the Catholic Church
and from the life of St. Francis,
an Italian nobleman who lived in the 12th century
and 13th century, Francis of Assisi
renounced his wealth after a period of captivity
during war and illness, became a champion of the poor,
living his life in solidarity with them.
1962 Shabbat founded the National Farm Workers Association later became United
Farm Workers and this would pave the way for landmark legislation in 1975 that codified
and guaranteed agricultural workers rights to unionize bargain collectively with their employers
and vote in secret ballot elections in California.
Cedar Shavas was the real fucking deal.
Parente was not highly unlikely.
He ever worked with Chavez, probably never even fucking met him.
But with so much activism going on in the early 70s, it was easy for
Parente to scam his way into some shit, replicating some of Chavez's methods,
claiming to be his associates, making himself seem like he had Mexican
heritage, just like the people he was supposedly helping when he didn't.
So Parente organized 800 farm workers
with 30 full-time EFWA staff and 70 volunteers
in December of 1972 when the EFWA let a strike
of potato workers.
Strike was called on December 4th,
after nearly five weeks of work interruption,
while many farmers were holding potatoes off the market,
hoping for a price raise.
Their aim was to get 289 an hour in wages
and 10 cents an hour for hospitalization insurance.
At the time, they were earning two bucks an hour,
but not paid for so-called own time periods
when they were required to be at their places of work,
but not actually operating potato-grading machines.
And they didn't receive any hospitalization insurance
or other benefits.
During the strike, the migrant farmers were given no wages
but had to pay for food and lodging in the camps
owned by the young corporation, the migrant workers along with the EFWA,
March for 15 days in front of the factory.
The farm workers' association provided them with food and gas for their rudimentary heating
units.
And although this was somewhat historic, this was the first union of agricultural workers
on the East Coast.
But that didn't mean it was recognized, and a court decision the Department of Labor determined
that the EFWA was not a labor organization as defined by federal law.
Unclear if the actions also of the EFWA actually helped get those workers and the extra money
or benefits or if it just costs some money by keeping them out of the workforce for a
while.
But it gets his name out.
All this gets, you know, Geno's name out.
And soon his bands of followers will grow.
1973 parental still leading the EFWA,
attends the Philadelphia Convention of the National Unemployed
and Welfare Rights Organization, Nuro.
Nuro was a similarly shady group that had tried to destroy
and replace the National Welfare Rights Organization,
so same acronym, but without the U.
A legitimate national organization,
which at its height in early 70s had chapters nearly every state in the nation. At the conference, Parent legitimate national organization which at its height in the early 70s had chapters
nearly every state in the nation.
At the conference, Perente is thought to have somehow
partnered with a new row which brought criticism
but others did defend him.
Most rushed to defend what was now being called
natal fed, the National Labor Federation.
Is he trying to take his, you know,
New York-based little organization to the national level?
Here we fucking go. Most of the defenders were thought to be natal fed know, New York-based little organization to the national level. Here we fucking go.
Most of the defenders were thought to be
natal-fed members, make sense.
Social worker, familiar with natal-fed work,
and possibly also a natal-fed member,
said, they are doing the work state agencies
should be providing.
If they were interested in feeding or clothing people,
it's the state they should press, not themselves.
By 1973, natal-fed informed volunteer run
benefit programs, which include
in its words, free dental care for members and their families. Also, by 1973, other organizations
under the Natal Fed umbrella popping up around the country like CHA, the California Homemakers
Association, a group that claimed to provide free legal aid, free emergency food, and clothing
also supposedly collected by CHA, and provided
to members in severe need. Around this time, Natal Fed explained its goals with all of these
groups and a publicly released document titled Sociology and the Unrecognized Worker.
They also, in this document, seem to try and set the world-fucking record. For the most
time, somebody uses the word Stratta in a single paragraph. They wrote,
Our Stratta is made up of people who circulate through many statuses during the course of uses the word strata in Poverty programs, educational systems, etc. have generally pulled from our strata, the
most beautiful, intelligent, or healthy.
Others have fallen into our strata, leaving the basic statistical contours of the strata
pretty much untouched.
It is our aim to raise our strata as a whole.
This demands the organization of the entire strata.
Seven times, by my count, seven strata and six senses. It's a fucking outstanding
strata ratio. And strata in this context means a level or class to which people are assigned
according to their social status education or income. Despite their claims, some New
York journalists would note that by the mid 70s, natal fed had only been involved in
a few union recognition battles and wasn't organizing labor according to their claims.
Though they've entrusted a lot of people, another social worker explained, the members
don't do anything.
Nattles fed doesn't build anything.
While they're doing something, stockpiling an untold amount of money, money that although
we don't know exactly when this happened led to the transformation of Jerry D from a very
fucking Meyer Bush league con artist, playing the part of a left-leaning
labor organizer to a cult leader, masquerading as a communist revolutionary. This might maybe
not really do anything natal fed claim to have 40,000 members by the end of 1973, places
like Sacramento, New Brunswick, Philadelphia, Long Island, Binghamton, New York, Western
Massachusetts, did they? I mean, Jerry, he previously claimed to have hundreds
of revolutionary fighters training in the hills
when he had maybe two or three fucking dorks.
So I doubt he now had 40,000 members,
dedicated members of Nattle Fed,
but maybe he had hundreds, I don't know.
They get into their old literature,
whatever members he did have,
were the fifth outer ring of the Nattle Fed system.
Yes, it's intentionally confusing show game
of various offices and organizations now divided into into rings.
Uh, the fourth ring was volunteers or vols. Vols were engaged in organizing other members going out to raise money
Either by organizing bake sales or passing the donation can and shopping centers
At this level the recruits were essentially uh essentially or usually young naive college students who once
inside the group would be expected pressured to leave college and be placed into the cadre,
cadre, sort of elite organization or the CDR level. The CDR level was then classified into two types,
tabular on the third ring, viable on the second. Oh, this fucking code. The tabular third ring members
will be almost completely occupied with clerical work, which
largely entailed phoning, typing, filing out index cards for each contact made by Akadre.
A card would be made out in triplicate, one for the master file, another for the FF, or
excuse me, F-I-N or financial input file.
I don't know why there's two eyes, then acronym, maybe I added that.
And the third in the VOL file. Viable CDRs on the other hand were considered candidates for out of that and the third in the wall file
viable CDRs on the other hand were considered candidates for the inner circle
the provisional wing a group typically referred to cryptically by assume
members like parental to keep viable cadre candidates intrigued
keeping hoping they would if they play the card right if they were dedicated enough
to the cause and willing to lay down their lives the revolution they'd be
invited into the inner sanctum where they can really change the world.
These young student candidates for supposed inner circle membership would be told of
gun stockpiles for a coming revolution, and they were expected to be ready to let go
of any personal plans to join said revolution at a moment's notice.
Any second comrades, we will soon initiate a show of force, a tornado of domination will
be unleashed, unprecedented in the history of the world, in terms of revolutionary scale
and scope.
It will make the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 look like a children's game.
We will bring our noble fight to all those who bear arms in service of the established
government to be deposed, to those considered members of the federal forces because of their
ability and order to destroy apprehend kill and obtain our freedom fighting
soldiers. No, that kind of that kind of shit. And the other were many
organizations as we heard about up top with all the different acronyms,
organizations with different names and different ways they claim to be helping
seems like they all work just about this same way as far as structure.
Each time Natalie Fed entered an area to set up Ops, aka operations,
an organizer's first duty was hassling a key activist or activist for the names of all
the people they knew.
And in some cases, without prior approval, they began to use the activist name, thereby boosting
credibility.
Immediately, they started creating files, names, addresses, schooling activities, and political
backgrounds, excuse me, of potential allies or enemies.
The master file cards were then sent
to the main branch of Perente's Brownstone in New York.
One member, even later remembered,
seeing cards with social security numbers on them.
They knew exactly how to target
with their phony communist revolutionary bullshit.
Once natal fed central operations sent the following memo to a regional operative. We request that you conduct an inquiry into the groups
and or individuals who are working in either the Joanne Chessmar Defense Committee or the
Phil Shinnick Defense Committee. Any information that you can find out about these people would
be very useful to us at this time. What we want is an overview of who is involved and
where these groups are moving. This will enable us to get an idea of other forces moving
in the New Brunswick entity. Thanks. Now, if it also wouldn't hesitate to resort to outright
theft to get what they wanted, real water gates, shit. If no one cared about water gates,
because no one important was involved in the stakes were very low. Over a year period,
the New Brunswick area, there were 10 break-ins of organizations, offices,
and homes of activists.
Nattle Fed members were behind all of them.
And during the fifth break-in,
a key Nattle Fed field organizer,
organizer was caught in the act.
The only physical thing they stole was a TV, one TV.
And why were these revolutionary masterminds
still on a TV? and intel on random activists?
They wanted to recruit or intel on opposing activists.
They wanted to harm somehow.
It was all done in preparation for the master plan, a master plan that members constantly
referred to as the master plan, a plan that mostly revolved around discussing a supposed
massive gun stockpile somewhere in Sacramento that in all likelihood never existed. One ex-member later told reporters, Perente told us there was a plan to surround
and take over police stations as part of some sort of romantic revolutionary plot.
New members quickly found themselves sucked into this, you know, lifestyle. Fuelled by cigarettes,
very little sleep, canned food, a 24-hour day packed with commitments that gave them no time to reflect on whether or not they were actually helping vulnerable communities
or doing any revolutionary shit.
And if a member criticized Perente's plan, there was retaliation.
There would be brutal, unthinkable torture carried out.
Kind of.
One ex member explained on several occasions as punishment.
She had to sit on the floor for 12 hours straight,
forced to listen to Geno read shit that he wrote.
How is that real? Oh my god, I love how absurd all this is, how laughably pathetic.
But also listening to that motherfucker drone on with his pseudo intellectual babble,
his revolutionary talk for 12 hours, I mean, that would be torture.
I can see somebody just be like, enough! enough! Just stick some shit out of my fingernails already!
Water poured me or something.
If I hear you say straddle, one more time,
I'm gonna bite off my own tongue so I can drown
on my own blood.
Another member shared a bit of insight
into the inner workings of this group saying,
this is how they get you to stay.
It's like the moonies, which is a group of,
we are gonna suck down the road here.
First, they give you a meal with meat.
I get it back up.
I forgot I would take this as a quote.
This is how they get you to stay.
It's like the monies.
First, they give you a meal with meat, which is real special.
Genose three women then make you comfortable, put you in a room.
When you're tired, he comes in and reads and talks to you.
After this long process, I felt trapped.
I just knew that.
What? You would trap because he read to you and And after this long process, I felt trapped. I just knew that. What?
You would trap because he read to you and gave you special meat. Like, what's happening?
And yes, Jerry Gino is sleeping with these three women, of course, he is. Cult, cult, cult. Professionals they'd managed to recruit such as doctors, lawyers,
college professors would be allowed to keep their well-paying, influential jobs while turning over
money in contacts to Nettle Fed, cult, cult. Most of the rest will be told to quit their jobs leave their old lives
behind and devote all of their time and energy to the party. And many would by 1977,
Natal fed somehow actually seem to have, you know, a bunch of members torn all over the
country. People operating as organizers and also spies on other organizations. In article
written by investigative journalist Harvey Khan for a political watchdog magazine
called the public eye would describe these touring members.
Harvey wrote, couples of organizers, one male and one female have been touring the country
over the last several years trying to set up cadres to aid and organize unrecognized farm
workers and the unemployed.
America's poor.
They represent the National Labor Federation.
These organizers then hustle to gather up contacts, lists of key activists and academics.
All are pressured to lend their names, host organizers in town and give more names of local
people to contact. According to some, a typical, though aggressive, organizing drive.
But before long, the organizers who appear fatigued from overwork and under nourishment
have assembled files complete with three by five index cards, which show personal data on most drive. But before long, the organizers who appear fatigued from overwork and under nourishment
have assembled files complete with 3x5 index cards, which show personal data on most of
the community's activists. While Harvey was skeptical of why they were doing this, he also
couldn't solve that mystery. He wrote,
The true political basis of the National Labor Federation, Nattle Fed, itself in umbrella
for locals like Eastern Farm Workers Association, California Homemakers Association,
Eastern or Western Service Workers Association, and Western Massachusetts Labor Action is a mystery.
Local NettleFit organizers tend to tease potential cadre with informational tidbits
only to retreat while muttering about a loose coalition somewhere. Later, the same organizer,
whispers of a party, then smiles and responds to a battery of questions, verifying that no leadership actually exists.
Natal Fed members have also aroused curiosity by claiming to have large gun stockpiles. They promise to deliver all this and more.
Despite no one seeming to understand exactly what the fuck these guys were up to, Natal Fed seemed to be recruiting more volunteers than ever, especially colleges.
guys were up to, natal fed seemed to be recruiting more volunteers than ever, especially colleges.
Some college administrators even paired up with natal fed organizations and offered up
their students, right?
All kinds of dipshit, the educated and uneducated alike teachers and students want to become a part
of this mysterious revolution.
Like give my life meaning, Jeri Gino.
At Sacramento State College, California, students were assigned by school administrators to work with the California Homemakers Association
for Class Credit.
Friends World College in Huntington Long Island
assigned students to the Eastern Farm Workers.
Not surprised about Friends World College.
Now known as L.I.U. Global,
this college with a student body of less than 100 students
was extremely radical.
A quick glance at some of its history,
it made Berkeley look conservative.
Not sure what the vibe is now.
Antioch college and Ohio sends students for a time
to the California Homemakers Association for course credits,
but then canceled the arrangement
when charges of cult-like conditions at CHA
started to surface way back in the mid-late 70s.
When questioned by reporters,
one Antioch school administrator remarked,
much of what you're telling me about this group
I've already heard from students,
we canceled the program due to the lack of truth
and advertising.
Canceled the program after getting scammed
by revolutionaries.
So how was this group so successful as colleges?
Well, the very short answer is it was the mid-1970s.
The little bit longer answer is, it was the end of the biggest cult formation era in American
history.
As we've discussed so many times before in previous episodes, the counterculture was breathing
its last dying breaths.
Kids across America were still rejecting the conservative ideals of their parents.
Kids questioning the integrity of their government, the ideals of capitalism, maybe more than
they even had a few years prior.
Thanks to the Watergate scandal and subsequent congressional hearings revealing that their
government had in fact lied to them over and over and over, including lying to them about
why the US entered the fight in Vietnam, a fight that had killed many of these college
kids older brothers.
Also many of these students were dreading, graduating into the crashing economy of the
mid-70s, felt to them like if there was ever a good time
to dedicate themselves to changing the fucking world,
it was right now.
Nathil Fett prayed on these feelings
of uncertainty and idealism.
Nathil Fett made these kids feel like they could join
and become a part of something so much bigger
than themselves, a revolution.
Get it on the ground floor.
So that when the existing regime is toppled,
you will have special status in the new world order.
A lot of these kids probably felt like they could become
the types of revolutionaries.
They'd only read about history books.
Now, if it also used the good old fashioned allure
of joining an Illuminati type secret club,
one that claimed to trace its history decades back
to some real revolutionaries who really did shit.
Now, if it's made up history,
written about in a document they titled Genesis,
traced to fake trail from the old Communist Party of the 1930s through the progressive
labor groups, uh, guerrilla training in Cuba during the early 60s, guerrilla struggles
in Guatemala around 1966, the Bay Area Revolutionary Union, United Farm Workers Union,
and just prior to forming the Eastern Farm Workers, the, uh,
Vince Aramos organization.
All this mythology worked on a lot of young people.
Now let's meet one of them.
Let's deviate away from our timeline to get to know a young woman named Sonia Larson.
Sonia would go on to write a memoir about her time in the cult.
Red Star Tattoo, my life as a girl revolutionary, published in 2016.
So thankful that she shared her story.
This kind of insight for me is what made this story
we're telling this week.
A Hill Nimrod and Hilsanya or Stonia.
Before she ever joined the group,
Stonia's life was far from ordinary.
As a young child, she lived with her parents
and older sister on a hippie commune
outside Montreal, Canada, called the sweet grass commune.
Where the adults were so poor, they sometimes ground up
acorns and
to some sort of copy substitute never heard about that before and smoked cigarettes rolled
with sage leaves holy hippie sony's mother was born on an a do American reservation where
her mother's father bud was stationed at a mission he was a Texas born preacher for the church
the Nazarene just like his father before him he preached stuff like women weren't supposed
to wear makeup and dancing was forbidden.
He was very socially conservative and when Sonya's mother got pregnant at 16, Bud was completely
ashamed of her.
Almost disowned her, made her get married outside of town so it wouldn't be listed in
local papers so it wouldn't embarrass him.
The marriage lasted less than two years and then Sonya's mother met Sonya's father, a
smart funny guy, played the guitar, born in a working class neighborhood in Milwaukee. He told her he would be happy to adopt her daughter,
Sonya's sister Patty, so they got married. And nine months later, Hayles-Duffina, Sonya was born.
Soon the family would move, spurred on by the Milwaukee race rights of 1967. First, they went to Hawaii,
eventually they'd make their way to the sweetgrass commune in Quebec. In some ways, Sonya had a
nidilic childhood with the sweet grass people singing and sweet grass
blues bands and old folks homes and high school dances selling wildflowers,
daisies and golden rod tourists in the city. In other ways, her early life was
all about indoctrination made her a perfect revolutionary cult candidate
later in life. As a child, Larsen was taught about the duality of existence.
A comrade explained dialectics to her as the struggle between opposing forces, night and
day, hot and cold communism and capitalism.
Her mother told her when the revolution comes, everyone will have to pick a side.
So she's been hearing about that shit her whole life.
Sony was taught that God wasn't real nor was Santa Claus.
Kids didn't need more than a couple toys.
All needed was to work hard on the commune.
Be a good, mindless, industrious,
soulless, insignificant little worker aunt.
Care not for yourself,
but only for the communist colony.
I continue to truly struggle
when it comes to seeing the appeal
of the communist lifestyle.
It sounds so fucking bleak and horrific to me always.
I guess I'm just an individualist at the very core of my being.
After a few years, the frigid Quebec windards quickly lost their appeal for the sweet
grass crew and the commune splinter.
With most members packing up for the warmth and bounty of California, many of them were
Americans having previously dodged the Vietnam draft by heading up to Canada and now it's
time to head back home.
As age eight, Sonya would join them in barking on a cross country trip
with a man in his early 20s because,
as she put it in her memoir,
everyone knew that a kid was better than a dog
or a woman for hitchhiking.
What the fuck were her parents thinking,
sending their eight-year-old daughter off with some dude
in his early 20s across the country?
That was fucking gross.
Sonia packed her possessions and do a cannabis backpack,
a sleeping bag, a drinking cup,
that collapsed flat into a little case, two matching wooden bowls, her sport, her teddy
bearers, some clothes, a toothbrush, her traveling papers, and pounds of homemade granola.
And she made it to California where she reconnected with her mother.
Eventually her parents split up her dad moved back to Montreal to pursue work as a in the
field of a low level drug dealing while her mother volunteered with the innocuous sounding
California homemakers association, right?
A clandestine recruiting wing for fucking parent days bullshit.
Sonya stayed with her mother hanging out with the CHA.
Sony did see some good coming out of the group she was working with, even though the outside
world seemed to disagree with them.
She would describe seeing it in new recruits faces saying, a eureka moment when they understood
that being poor wasn't only
about bad choices and bad luck.
What happened to people the way they ended up poor and powerless was not
an accident, but an essential product of the system itself.
But the real discovery was that someday it was going to be different.
If it motivated people to get up and start advocating for themselves,
it couldn't be that bad, right?
Well, unfortunately, we could, it could because someday would never come
because there was not gonna be
some bullshit revolution as promised, right?
There's been lied to.
All those other lives would likely be so much fucking worse
if the revolution came.
Overall, citizen happiness,
not exactly off the charts in Mother Russia at this time.
Soon, Sonya would find out that the California Homemakers
Association was one organization
under the larger umbrella of the newly opened Redding Branch of the National Labor Federation.
Fucking natal fed, right?
Sonya spent a lot of time in the Redding Natal Fed office.
Occasionally, that branch was called the Western Services Workers Association.
The Sacramento and Oakland branches were the California Homemakers Association.
The Oregon Branch was the Northwest Service Workers Association, all connected to finds out.
Stony knew her local chapter was affiliated with a variety of other organizations, like the Coalition of Concerned Medical Professionals,
Coalition of Concerned Legal Professionals.
A part of Nattle Fed before she was even adult, before she was even a teen,
Stony worked at a food and clothing bank in the office and a soup line in the park.
She participated in food drives and shifts
handing out leaflets around town.
Slowly and steadily, natal fed became her whole life.
While she was spending most of her time
with her mother's friends, hippies from the old
sweet grass commune, the women's center
and the rape crisis center, now these women
were being replaced by people from natal fed.
No more random hippies and liberals,
only people truly dedicated to the revolution. Members' apartments began to be called safe houses.
When she missed a volunteer shift, her maturity and commitment to the upcoming revolution
would be questioned. Sonya has moved around with her mother, living in these apartments. I mean,
safe houses with dozens of other people, some of whom she knew, some of whom she did not.
When she turned 13, members of the California Homemakers Association made her a birthday card.
Happy birthday, Sonya, a company by a paper cut out figure holding a gun.
Revolution!
By 8th grade, Sony had dropped out of school to help her mom with the California Homemakers
Association to help with the revolution.
Around that time, she was also molested by her mother's boyfriend.
Happened several times once when Sonya fell asleep in her mother's bed, another time
on the couch in the living room,
and because her child was so fucked up because she was surrounded by so much crazy,
she didn't even realize the time that she was being molested, or that it was wrong to be molested.
She didn't know what had happened to her was actually bad, or just something that the straight world would condemn,
you know, like skinny dipping her, or smoking weed.
By the time she was 13, she had been surrounded by casual sex for months, uh, sex for months, if not years, walking in on people, fucking, it becomes somewhat normal
in this strange little cosplay, cosplay comedy community. Um, members might even ask you
if you wanted to watch, right? Cult, cult, cult. So he was careful not to say anything about
her mother's boyfriend. She was worried that if she did, it wasn't only her mother that
would lose him. It was the revolution itself. And he was too important to this revolution that would never happen.
But after she'd been assaulted several times, she did want to leave.
She left for Montreal, made it to a welfare agency who started investigating her, or
I'm sorry, she made it to, left for Montreal around the time a welfare agency started
investigating her mother for some kind of fraud.
Now so young, she's on her own.
1981, when she's
16, she makes it to Brooklyn, still alone. Soon ends up taking residence at the natal fed headquarters,
right? The heart of the beast. We're a row of unassuming brown zones in Crown Heights,
secretly housed the operations of at least 100 people preparing for the Revolutionary Day,
or Revolution Day, which was February 18, 1984. Sony was told that within 40 hours, starting on that date, the US government would come
under the party's control as the group organized a general worker strike, jam telephone
lines and carried out aggressive nationwide military action.
Oh, fuck yeah.
Be ready, comrades.
The hour of action draws near.
Soon we strike at the cold heart of the bourgeoisie. We will jam their phone lines all of them.
Or at least the ones that we do not need to use ourselves for communication. So we will jam some of them.
There are a lot of phone lines in America. So we will probably need, as I am talking this out, to dramatically increase membership
for the specific purpose of simultaneously disabling thousands of phone lines.
Shit, there might be tens of thousands of phone lines.
The more I think about the phone lines, the first order of the revolution is going to
be getting an accurate assessment of the totality of America's phone lines.
Sony said that the man giving out orders at uh... hq was a slick leader
so described in his having the oily sex appeal of jim jones
and the rob magnetism of trills manson
under the guys of the impending revolution old man as he was called
exerted total control over his followers
old man of course being perinting
no longer a small time dipshit con artist run raffle scams and reciting Shakespeare to fucking nerds at diners. He was now a fully formed
cult leader with the height of his weird powers. Sony also heard that Jerry Gino, now in his
mid 40s, referred to as oldy field commander, Vincent Ramos, Vic Elder, you Hennie a parent
day or Gino. She threw herself into preparing for the revolution the phrase after the revolution
was now being commonly used as a prefix for many conversations between comrades and
in letters exchanged with her mother.
Right, it was a certainty February 18th, 1984, per on your fucking calendar, Dave America's
reckoning.
Sonya, like other members lucky enough to work at HQ attended nightly classes with the
old man for these classes.
Geno cool guy would wear dark aviator sunglasses indoors
and a hells-angels bike or vest with a black t-shirt
underneath the red.
Yay, do I walk through the valley of death?
I shall fear no evil.
For I am the meanest motherfucker in the valley.
Like you actually wear a shirt that said that.
Oh fuck yeah, but no more dorky Shakespeare recitations
for this motherfucker.
He's basically like a commie, just a, you know,
MC one percent or now.
He's the poor man's, a two smartinus.
Hey, two smartinus here.
Founder Godfather, original charter president
for the Cleveland Steamers Motorcycle Club.
I just wanna say, I never had nothing to do
with fake ass, Gerald Dote, fake ass Mexican,
fake ass revolutionary.
And speaking of ass, you should remember,
because I'm still be misunderstood.
My nickname of Dudes is in regards to the sound
of my first bike used to make when I started up as a kid.
It is not a reference to any sort of flatulence.
And Steamers still not to a
newty dead body, to steam coming off a said body, not to an act of defecation.
Anyway, take care and happy writing. And remember our motto, the Cleveland steamers, when
there's barbarians at the gate, you gotta drop a news.
Been a long time since Tutes won by. Fucking love Tutes.
Anyway, the last confusion, don't even fucking love Tuts. Anyway, that was confusing.
Don't even fucking worry about it.
Anyway in the early hours of the morning, students like Sonia, sat on folding chairs,
on the couch, on the floor, and the hallway.
Most added clipboards in front of them taking meticulous notes.
My God, it's on G-nodes, fucking nonsense.
As he droned on and on.
Can you imagine taking notes on G-nodes speeches?
Did he just say strata again or was it cadre?
Well, these classes took place at the National Office Central or NOC or during daylight hours.
Volunteers have been 12 to 14 hour shifts, typing directives to local branches, directives
explain in painful detail how to hold more profitable bake sales, how to recruit doctors,
how to run food banks and winter clothing drives, how to recruit members, both to Nattle Fed and to the secret brands that Sonya had only
just learned about after being around Nattle Fed members for years, communist party USA
provisionally. There were three apartments at National Office Central, a main one where
the old man taught and the members had their dinners and classes. In that apartment, there
was a sleeping room where everyone slept on a pile of mattresses. Beside that room,
well, almost everyone, because beside that room was the cave, a small room where everyone slept on a pile of mattresses. Beside that room, well, almost everyone, because beside that room was the cave,
a small room where the old man slept and where he fucked details on that soon.
The bedroom detail, I do find funny in a true communist society in theory, right?
Everyone is equal only one strata.
All for one and one for all a classless social system with one form of public
ownership in the means of production and with full social quality of all members of society
but communist leaders do they ever truly live like everybody else or do they at the very
least get their own private fucking room with your own mattress. Well, everyone else sleeps
next door packed in like sardines. The organization owned three four story brownstones at this
point on Carroll Street, 24 units
altogether.
Most of the units they rented out to raise money for the revolution, but they kept apartments
in two separate buildings and had the entire basement for their cause.
And that basement spanned the length of all three buildings.
There was also a small additional walk up apartment in the Lower East Side at another apartment
in Park Slope.
Sonia moved from place to place, sleeping on spare beds, couches, and gym mats on the floor. But back to the lessons. Old man, aka Perente
had two assistants, Polly and Mary T, who changed tapes in these tape recorders, lit his cigarettes,
refilled his coffee as he gave long, rambling lectures on revolutionary history and sucked
his dick and stuff. Not kidding. Both women were recruited to the teenagers, Polly, when she
was just 15, Mary, when she was
17.
Typical collider shit.
At these classes, the old man would say things like, truth is the collision of an objective
and a subjective reality inside your own mind.
For a revolutionary, the truth of the revolution is impossible to deny, since it corresponds
to the objective reality of the oppression of the working class and our subjective
concept of justice. In other words, kids, there ain't no justice. There's just us. I don't think
he's necessarily wrong there, but also he's making it clear that, you know, ethics are subjective,
which can definitely create a new reality that is very good for a cold leader, very bad for the
followers. He told a group that young people had fought in revolutionary struggles throughout the
world, Spain, Cuba, China, Russia, and Vietnam.
And he told them it would be their job on the mornings, after-night classes, to go pick
up donations around the city.
They'd be on the road eight hours on a bad day, 10 to 12 on a good one.
And these donations would not be made to the Communist Party provisional win.
They were donations to the coalitionation of concerned medical professionals.
A branch organization that claimed to be giving low income people and migrant workers access
to healthcare.
They took food donations as well, supposedly for low income and migrant workers.
But what really happened to that food?
Well, they ate it themselves.
Fueled themselves for the war ahead.
The donated food fed everyone back at the Browns Sons, even when they told people given
it to them that they were given the cheese and milk and fruit to malnourish migrant kids on Long Island.
They also solicited telephone donations called calling people for money and did so much clerical work.
They had to type fundraising pitches for recruitment pitches drafts of new leaflets.
They don't take a break for dinner eating in front of the TV as they watch PBS.
They'll be back to work sometimes on watch duty making sure there weren't any capitalist pig threats lurking in the blocks as they watch PBS. They'll be back to work. Sometimes on watch duty, making sure there weren't any
capitalist pig threats lurking in the blocks
around the brown stones.
If there was no class, they'd be in their assigned sleeping
spots by 11 or 12.
Sonya often slept on a mat underneath a drafting table
in one of the organization's actual businesses,
a design studio in Park Slope.
Sounds fucking lovely.
She also wore the underwear that the organization bought in bulk for its members and
towed it around the same style of vinyl overnight bag from a bankrupt travel agency.
All these kids being kept tired, overworked, confused, or individuality stripped, cult,
cult, cult.
And though members were permitted to roam the city to do their jobs, there were so many
rules they had to follow as they did so.
No watching TV or movies or reading books
that were non-political for one.
No discussing organizations, business in public places,
secrets, secrets, secrets.
Everything about the organization had to be referred to in code.
Code words came from that manual, the essential organizer,
the FIN committee, it is just one I.
Raised money, the pro short for procurement department,
got stuff, food, clothes, anything and everything.
B-E-N-E or benefits.
Benny distributed out to people who needed it
as in people in the cult, not starving kids
or migrant workers or anything.
Transportation was the TRX department.
There was a name for fucking everything in the organization.
Proper way to do things.
A right way to ask for donations or rides. a right way to sort clothes and the free clothing
closet, everything. And I mean, everything had very specific instructions with too many words.
Every hour of every day was mapped out and color coded on a large whiteboard back at HQ.
When members arrived back after a long day, there would be new colors on the board, new tasks
next to their names. For much of the first year, Sonia was happy
to do her job, to get Pride in.
I felt like she was contributing
to something important, something bigger than herself.
Jerry Gino feeding on her youthful idealism.
On Christmas, she and the other members,
eight turkey took half the day off and on New Year's Eve.
They took the whole day off, drank whiskey and beer,
sang until the early morning.
Same Patrick's Day was the same, but you know,
sang Irish songs.
Then on Sonya 17th birthday, Parenti.
Jerry D, the old man, called her down to his office.
Huh, wonder where this could be going.
Jerry had on a Western shirt with a band
Dan tied around his neck,
because I guess he's cause playing
being a fucking ranch hand now.
And he motioned to a small route box on the coffee table.
Inside the box was a Pelican fountain pen,
black with a gold band around the center.
Pen, that probably would cost about a grand now.
Weird that he wasn't using the basic, not fancy, right?
You know, proletariat pen, just like his fellow comrades.
It's almost like he doesn't walk the walk.
He offered her a bourbon, but said that he didn't drink himself.
Then put on a Roy Orerson record, started telling her about his past with Largo, how
they once hatched a plan to blow up the shasta dam and flood the whole valley around Redding,
California, fucking capitalist pigs.
Before she knew it, Sony was telling him about the boyfriend of her mother's who had molested
her.
She was crying.
She was drunk on bourbon.
And then she left the meeting, feeling closer to him than ever.
And at 17, Sony would now be accepted as the youngest full member of the Communist Party USA
Provisional Wing.
As a party member and not just a volunteer member, she could hold an office in the local
cell, put forward motions for discussion.
She could now join something called the military fraction.
She was important in this little micro-environment.
The explanation was that fractions were all the parts you needed to have a whole thing.
The mutual benefits society were part of a labor fraction.
The organizations that mobilized lawyers and doctors, part of a professional fraction.
And now there was a fighting fraction.
You know, for the definitely gonna happen revolution coming up quick.
The big one, with these fucking ding-dongs, take over America.
Other cadres now taught Sonia how to take apart and put together an M1A1,
which she did using a dime that she had to keep under a tongue when not news.
She learned how to slide the eight clip into the gun, studied military
manuals, diagrams of guns, ready-and-herself for eventual fight. They actually did have some
weapons out in New York. Being on military duty also meant other things like being an example
to everyone else. Sonya was instructed to volunteer first when people were needed to bring in the
food or the laundry or to not complain about stuff like cooking dinner two days in a row. Sometimes she didn't see how folding 60 pairs of pans constitute
a revolutionary work, but she did it. She reminded herself like she'd been brainwashed.
That this doubt was the remnants of her capitalist way of thinking, her own silly ego getting in the
way. But even to her, the lines between the provisional wing and the national labor federation remained
blurred.
Despite being in the inner circle now, she still didn't fully understand the structure
of all this.
She found out stuff that left her feeling more confused like how the chair of the provisional
wing, a woman they called Struggler, not Perente, was the field commander for the upcoming revolution.
By this time, there was less than two years to go until Revolution Day.
Sony was seen Perente more than ever, listing to his conspiracy theories,
such as how the newly reported AIDS virus
was really a CIA experiment.
I mean, I wouldn't actually be shocked if that was true.
The old man also gave her weird fucking tasks
like translating a Haitian newspaper,
writing the song lyrics out from an Edith P off record.
I also started getting a little handsy. This is 1982 right. He's 44. She's 17. Sorry to touch her on her back,
stroking her hair, you know, telling her about how he'd already slept with the two
girls who worked for him as secretaries. She remembered him once saying, I fucked her
on the desk. Made her go back to filing while her knees were still shaking. So cool,
you know, cool guy, not cringey. Soon that girl would hand Sonya non-volved with burst control pills by that point, parente,
the old man, the horny coat leader was calling Sonya all hours of the night, asking her
her thoughts on politics, motherhood, life in the field offices, what she liked about
rock and roll, how tight her pussy was, you know, that kind of stuff. When she went to
his office, he sat down on the couch, he put his hand on her knee, her thighs grooming
her. Before long, he's asking her, you know, what got her off?
Call her a pretty little girl and young son, you liked it.
She hadn't felt safe in a long time.
Not since her mother's boyfriend had molested her, but she felt safe now with
printing and how fucking sad, right?
The predator mask grading is the nurture, not uncommon, actually.
Soon, I think we all saw where this was going.
The two start sleeping together.
Print a frames are sexual escapades as him helping her.
He's helping her figure out how to orgasm,
how to be less frigid, how to enjoy sex.
That's what he's a giver.
Oh, fucking Jerry Gino.
And then he gets possessive.
When Sonya starts developing a crush
on a young coder named John,
old man immediately sends him away.
Within week, Sonya was not on any kind of revolutionary
duty anymore. Her only job now was to get parentheses close out, dust his guns, fill his pens,
make him sandwiches, you know, fucking every which way, but Sunday, he was a controlling
and demeaning asshole, typical cold leader. Once he made her make seven eggs for him before
she got exactly the way he wanted it. Nightly now she would sleep outside his office on the floor like he was like she was a fucking
dog.
In case he needed anything like sex.
But sometimes he would get that itch scratched from someone else even when she was sleeping
right outside the door.
Once she heard him spanking his secretary Polly with a riding crop for the revolution.
Hi all, Susperina!
Away! He went full fucking captain Whiskler horn honoured. Crop for the revolution high all Susperna away
You have full fucking captain whisper horn honor if you know you know
Like she been told Sonny kept her mouth shut about all this shelter all sceptre mal shot when parentheses started fucking another new member young woman named Jane
Honor 18 birthday parentheses still also fucking Sonia gives her a sheer pale yellow blouse, asks her to model it for him, brawless, which she does.
He's always doing shit like this for him now.
Soon as late March 1983.
Revolution only 329 days away.
Members start getting more and more stressed out like one woman, Barbara, who began praying
at all hours and constantly washing her hands.
And that annoyed the fuck out of Jerry D.
So the old man now asked Sonya for a small teensy tiny favor. Just a little favor
He asked her to straight up murder Barbara. He said it happens in war all the time no big deal
Right she's probably gonna die in the revolution anyway. We cannot win the revolution com rats
If some of us are too busy washing their hands to grab their guns and kill capitalist pigs
We cannot overthrow the factory owners. If someone
look at you, Barb, keeps giving away our location thanks to loud cry prayers. Sonya actually agrees to
off Miss washes her hands and prays too much. Why is she praying, right? The commies have no god.
She chooses print a silver 45 pistol to do the deed. Then just two days after where she tells the
old man,
she'll do it. But then when she looks for a bar, she can't find her. Barbs gone. Sony still
doesn't know what happened to barb. Maybe someone knows Kilder. Maybe she got wind of having
a target on her back and fled. Or maybe she just got too stressed out to continue.
Following her exit, more comrades vanish. At the beginning of the fall of 1983, there were 80 elite
revolutionary comrades in the safe house in the surrounding area. fall of 1983, there were 80 elite revolutionary comrades in the
safe house in the surrounding area.
By the winter, they were down to 63, almost a 25% drop of membership.
To deter more members from leaving, some women caught trying to escape are now beaten.
Others still escape, though.
People say stuff like they're going to go to the basement to get some potatoes and then
just, you know, head out the back door and never come back.
Despite this trend of members exiting Parenting Parente has more women
under his sexual thumb than ever. The plans for the revolution may be collapsing, but he still has
a peck of it is not going to suck itself. Jane Susan, a woman named Beth, Sonia, maybe more
or satisfying the old man. One day Sonia finds these other women's underwear tucked into the folds
of Parente's couch and a tub of fucking Vaseline. He had none of the cushion.
Remnants of an orgy perhaps. Cult, cult, cult. Then there's another new girl,
Tanya and Tanya truly is just a girl. Sani thought she was 14, maybe 15. She'd originally,
she had originally come to the brownstone to visit her grandma, then got roped in by the old man
who then made her another one of his sexual pets. So, you confronted Prentay about this, but the old man dismisses her and then punishes her.
Resigners heard to work alone in a small dark room organizing everybody's schedules hour by hour.
No more sleeping outside the old man's door either. Be gone now, Jessabelle.
Soon after this, Prentay starts beating Struggler, the woman who's ostensibly the chair of
the provisional wing, his field commander, shits breaking down, devolving, getting weirder,
like it always does in these cults especially in doomsday cults
Right, and this is a doomsday cult
Instead of an apocalypse instead of a second coming there is the revolution and just like false prophets know their prophecies
Aren't gonna actually come true and they might lose their followers and all the sex and stuff when the promises go unfulfilled
You know false revolutionaries now. there's actually not a revolution coming.
So it seems like Jerry Gino is getting all the fucking in he can before this big fantasy world.
He is built comes crashing down around him.
Nine days before the revolution was supposed to begin.
Parenta makes a surprise announcement.
Nobody's going to work that day instead.
They need to regroup.
Take a day, figure out exactly what the fuck they're doing.
Everybody gathers into one big room trapped really, supposedly to regroup, but really just being held hostage. They have to ask the old man for permission
to go to the bathroom, to feel real jones town all of a sudden, right? He's fucking droning on
and on with his weird lectures. Next day another curveball. Parentate declares that the man he'd had
working as a bouncer just the day before an escaped murderer named Harold needs to be killed.
Parentate tells Struggler his field commander, she has to kill him.
Why? Because everything that had happened,
the recent steady disintegration of the group,
it was all her fault.
Sony now waits in terror for Harold to be killed.
She says, get wild in the cult, cult, cult.
Now let's shift focus away from Sonya
and reconnect with the overall cult in the timeline.
Not that we're not already doing that a bit.
Just one day before the professed revolution is supposed to begin
Friday, February 17, 1984, the cult's brownstones are rated
by the federal joint terrorist task force.
Fuck an FBI agent storm the compound.
How convenient for Jareber.
Also, check out how truly pathetic this next scene is.
After nearly a decade of rallying the
troops around a big game-changing world power shifting revolution.
How delusional for all these people, by the way, to think that was possible.
Jerry Gino goes down like to silly little bitch. He always was.
Has armed FBI agents entered the compound. Jerry Gino brave fearless brilliant communist revolutionary leader
Yelps out in pain after throwing himself down the dumb waiter shaft in a desperate attempt to escape
Instead of escaping this dumb fuck breaks his leg and then lays helpless at the bottom of the shaft and
waits for agents to come help him out. The agents of tyranny are descending upon us, brothers.
They fear our strength.
These capitalist pigs cannot defeat us comrades
as long as our solidarity remains unbroken.
We must stick together.
He then lifts up the door to the downweaters shaft.
Be brave comrades, show strength.
He starts to climb inside.
I will be right back to lead us.
I just forgot my machine gun down in the basement.
Ah, just fucking brace the leg.
I had to be dragged out by agents.
Jerry Jane was carted away in an ambulance.
Ah, other members are then detained in the courtyard
as the FBI agents bring out boxes of possible evidence
to examine.
And the harsh winter lights,
Son, you can see how pale everybody is
in comparison to the cops and FBI agents, right?
They never get out.
There's trapped in weird work all the time. The FBI and a prepared statement that
night said the raids were based on information received by the FBI in August, 1983, which
alleges that the provisional party of Communists had planned a series of violent acts to be committed
within the United States said the FBI's goal was to interdict a terrorist action prior
to violence and destruction of property.
No arrests were actually made, but agents did take papers from three locations, two in Brooklyn, one in Manhattan.
And then I guess a arrest weren't made later because again, the FBI hadn't no respect to these clowns once they really looked into things.
They weren't going to do shit, right? Just pretenders, phonies, cause plain, and being revolutionaries.
The next day, Saturday, February 18th, the day of reckoning
that Gina had been preaching about for 10 years, almost. The old man instead of bringing
America to her knees will instead wind to journalists about how he suffered four compound
fractures on his right leg during the raid. He said the raid was preposterous. And he
had no idea why authorities might have staged it. Asked about the provisional party of
comedy, he said, I've never heard of it before.
Unless it's something new.
Oh, man, some fearless leaker.
Meanwhile, the members try to pick up the remnants
of their old lives back at the Brown Sons, right?
They're still making dinner, brewing coffee,
smoking cigarettes, watching the street,
you know, looking for FBI agents,
vans parked across the street,
did surface occasionally with men
staring at the Brown Sons with binoculars.
Back at the Brown Sons after his hospital stage, Jerry Gino lives for a while in a haze of pain killers that some of his ex medical students got formed by four gene doctors names
And this pathetic fuck shouted new orders about shit like you know newsletters that had to be written calls to action and
Everyone was like, I guess though. Everyone was moving sluggishly now any sense of urgency was lost, right? Of course
Everyone seemed to know now in some level that the revolution, you know, it was just a force. Morale is very low. They've been
building towards February 18th, 1984 for years, sacrificing their time and energy and finances,
their fucking lives. Some of them literally getting fucked by this douche and now the revolution
is not happening. You know, what are they doing now? I'm sure many of them wanted to leave, but sunk cost
fallacy, right? They'd already given so much to the cause. Many still weren't ready to admit to
themselves. It had all been for nothing. They don't want to face that embarrassment. So like cold
members do over and over again when the writing on the wall makes it so painfully clear that they
have done nothing but allow themselves to be exploited and wasted their time. Many still stayed.
Hang around. Wait to see what's gonna happen next.
They live on the same delusion and hope that they've been living on this entire time.
Old man is embarrassed, he's stewing in this shame, he's cruel to the never now.
Right, he fucks with Sony now by giving her impossible tasks and slapping her if she
corrects him.
After about a month of that shit, she had enough and she leaves for good.
It was just a few days before her 19th birthday.
She initially stayed at her father's house in his guest room, then got a job as a telephone
solicitor for summer time shares.
Later, turned out that the whole summer time share is saying, also a scam.
Yet again, she found herself helping some dickhead, pull some bullshit.
She must have been like, are you fucking kidding me?
Again?
She leaves, gets a job as a waitress of the sports bar next,
and finally moves on to a much more normal chapter of her life.
Sars to heal a bit from all the bullshit she had gone through
for her entire life.
Meanwhile, the FBI has wondered exactly what it was.
They had on their hands with Natalie Fed
and their provisional party of communists.
Later at California resident would tell the FBI
about Jerry Gino's cult-like authority,
but there just wasn't enough evidence, I guess, to make any arrests.
Few months later, July of 1984, a woman named Mia prior escapes from the group, gives
authorities a bit more info that will lead to something at least.
She tells police that several members had resorted to fraud and forgery to siphon thousands
of dollars from her trust fund.
When she escapes, she left behind checks for a bank in New York account that held her
$30,000 a year trust fund.
Two members of the group, including Harold Jones, that escaped murderer from Massachusetts,
forged prior signature on one of the checks and stole 700 bucks.
Jones was arrested in charge, but the case against him was dismissed so he could go back
to prison for the whole murder conviction.
No idea who he murdered, by the way.
Looking for info on him is tricky because there's another much more notorious murderer with the exact same name.
Daniel Foster and Amanda Reed, both members of the group, are sentenced to 1986 to six
years in prison on charges based on priors allegations.
Despite being down a few members, life of the brown stones continues for many other comrades.
Not the same thing that fall apart, but it continues.
1995, Jerry Gino, now in hiding somewhere dictates documents that rails against the current
members of the organization.
Document kind of shows us the general direction.
Things were heading in after the raid.
This little excerpt says, because of recent flooding of our entities by boozers, users,
born losers, police agents, informants, spies, quizzlings, traders, turncotes,
wayward internal cadres and probationals.
The following procedure is to be used in the cases of multiple AWOLs, internal cadres with
legal alcohol, financial drug problems, history of insubordination or breaches of discipline.
And then it goes on to talk about, you know, how to get rid of undesirable members.
But that wouldn't really happen because no one really respects him like they used to.
Also who says quizzlings?
It is a real word.
It means a traitor who collaborates with an enemy force occupying their country.
So it's a real word used correctly.
But also, it sounds like something out of a Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings movie Comrades we must purge our ranks
Quizlings orcs halflings hobbits elves dragons ring rates goblins and more have infiltrated our cadres
According to ex members the organization did suffer a big influx of such persons after the FBI raid
uh, you know with it With real dreams of a revolution now dead or dying,
members who were actually once excited
by the Cold's Communist ideology largely left
and they were replaced, it seems,
by bottom of the barrel opportunists,
you know, just looking for a free right.
The NLC, for example, had a resident alcoholic
who had run off,
it completely drunken somewhere,
then returned to pass out on the front lawn,
but still be accepted back into the group because they were desperate for members.
One of the pilot bureau staff was an addict who would run off for several days at a time
and then return when he ran out of drugs.
You know, be allowed back in.
That wouldn't have happened a couple of years earlier, several recruits that came to
N.O.C. were previously homeless persons that appreciated good food and a place to sleep.
But would always wiggle out of various duty assignments.
Various bedrooms were no longer viable as work spaces, always filled with cadre, who were down
because they were sick. Rumors of traders and spies abounded. But somehow, despite HQ being a
shit show, Mattel Fed keeps making money. In 1996, it was reported that the Eastern Farm Workers
Association profited from an auction of art donated by esteemed painters and sculptors.
Right? Because the outside world, a lot of these groups have not been connected still.
They still aren't today.
In August of that year, a woman named Viola Mitchell was introduced at a farm workers
dinner as the new director of the National Labor Federation.
She said the organization's goal was to end the conditions that cause poverty, but refused
to answer any other questions from the press, declaring that they were welcome to learn more of the first volunteer to work for the organization.
Cut to eight years later.
January of 1994, sitting in a wheelchair, ultimately breathing oxygen from a machine and chain smoking
lucky strikes, Jerry Gino, the old man, only 56 years old, but looking like an unhealthy
80, gives the last lecture we have a record
of to a room packed with you know, devotees, but probably is that word loosely. He wore
fringe black leather and sunglasses at two in the fucking morning because he's cool.
Some women still were around him. Yes, he still has cold women. They'll crush out a cigarette
stove's wife sweat from his brown chin and he'll drone on for hours. Many of the listeners
will fall asleep. The whole thing is pretty pathetic.
In a tape recording of the lecture,
Perente's droning is interrupted by long pauses,
disconnected to the sides and hacking, coughing, and spitting.
And here's some of the dumb, comi shitty set.
This is a continuance in the historical chronology
of dislocations, phenomena that deals with the cracks
in the floor.
Trotsky and his related writings give Stalin a next to invisible role in the history chronology of dislocations, phenomena that deals with the cracks in the floor.
Trotsky and his related writings give Stalin a next to invisible role in the process that was
taking place there, saying he was a mere minister of minorities. During the Civil War,
there was 24 other armed struggles going on inside what was the Soviet Union. Socialism retreated
from a single state, single rule of socialism. He says his coffee breaking sense.
And when I think of war, I think of war again. Oh boy. Those who are for the revolution before,
from time to time, none needed more space in order to actually go and set up administration or
leadership in one place to another. They find themselves unrepentant. They find themselves revealed
and confused. At the end of the lecture,
he declares, patria omuerde, because he's fucking hack, uh, that is Spanish for country
or death. Che Guevara or a fidel Castro, one of them said it first in the 60s in Cuba.
Both would end speeches with it and it would become the model for communist Cuba. Sometimes
uh, vents areamos would be added to the end, which means we will prevail, right?
Country or death, we will prevail.
Well, it was left of his followers.
Now they now jump to their feet.
They echo the shouts.
Then his wheelchair is rolled away with, quote, military precision.
What a fucking sad clown.
His one chance true revolutionary confrontation and he falls down the fucking dumbwatershaft,
breaks his leg and cries about it.
But you know, a fever in the revolutionary country or death.
Jerry Gino is like, if there was an action figure of Che,
he would be the generic toy version of that.
Just the Kami Guru.
New from the makers of fighting man, atomic man, flying guy, warrior woman, attack cat, and
profit jeffery.
It's Kami Guru.
Do you want to revolution?
Do you want to overthrow the capitalist pigs cosplay?
Do you want so many quadricks, Kami cosplay?
Do you want only one strata, Kami cosplay?
But also don't want to actually fight?
Comic, Comic cosplay
But also might need to slide down a dumb later, Shaft
Comic, Comic cosplay
You need
Comic Guru
Comic Guru can talk the talk cosplay
But Comic Guru don't walk the walk
It's just talk
It's just comic talk Comic, comedy cosplay, comedy guru will rant about
Settling the score, but you'll never have to fight
In any war, it's just talk, it's just comedy talk
Cosplay, cosplay, comedy guru
Revolution, comedy, comedy talk, cosplay, comedy talk
Comedy, talk, complete your action hero people said today.
Fighting man, flying guy, warrior woman, attack cat, atomic man, profit jeffery, and now comi guru.
Still maybe coming soon, karate lady and spy person.
Anyway, don't even worry about what just happened, that was jarring.
Just put that in your mind.
Put it out to your mind. A little over a year after that lecture, March 18th, 1995,
Jerry Gina will pass away at the age of just 57. He dies in the Colts Crown Heights apartment
of congestive heart failure. He was buried in Oak Hill Cemetery in Stony Brook, New York
by the organization he founded and his grave stone. Oh, wow, it's full of lies. It reads, you Hennie O. Mario Perente Ramos, not his real name.
November 21st, 1935 through March 18th, 1995. World class revolutionary fighter. Nope.
Internationalist soldier literally never fought. Son of the American working class, maybe.
Theologian philosopher, historian, teacher,
writer, broadcaster, machinist, farm worker,
labor and community organizer.
Maybe.
Gentlemen and friend, no.
Beloved, comrade, maybe.
He fought at Armageddon and his armies will march forever.
Oh, fuck now. With body in love and solidarity.
Holy shit, I want to piss on that fucking grave so bad.
The delusion.
That's, that second shit was a world class revolutionary,
just like I was once a world class dunk contest competitor.
I've never been able to dunk.
He was a world class grifter.
I'll give him that.
The New York Times printed his obituary
and then a correction, the initial obituary
relied primarily on information
from two close associates, Daniel Fisk and Christopher Day,
called him an organizer of migrant and seasonal laborers
and a close associate of Caesar's shopheads
in the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee.
The Times was then contacted by his former wife,
the woman he never paid child support to,
some former colleagues and longtime critics of Jerry Gino
to which there were many.
And after fact checking the initial obituary,
the times issued a correct obituary the next day,
that one stated that he was actually Gerald Dodon,
the leader of a group that has been characterized as a cult.
Bingo.
Sadly his cult would outlive him,
yet we have more to talk about.
But you knew that.
Based on how much time has left in this episode,
damn you podcast players.
After Jerry Gino died, a struggle emerged out of the sad pathetic power vacuum.
His death left between East and West Coast factions of his group still blown away.
That this guy was leader of any group, let alone a group with East and West Coast factions.
The leader who emerged was a woman named Margaret Rybar.
We don't actually know a ton about her.
During the first year of her leadership, she aggressively operated a campaign of better,
fewer, but better, aka the purges.
Many cadres were forced out of the organization, several by violent means, I guess, while
most were forced out to psychological or emotional abuse.
She then changed the agenda of the group from initiating an armed struggle against capitalist pigs to a quote passive revolution.
And she would say about the revolution, kind of like the motto, I guess, the new motto, when it comes, it comes.
Dear God, just when I thought this couldn't get more ridiculous, that is the most uninspiring revolutionary motto I have ever heard.
What do we want? A revolution revolution and when do we want it?
Um, I guess whenever it's fine when it comes when it comes it comes.
Uh, right away in the summer of 1995 Margaret began sending persons from national out to the field
entities, start rebuilding. Uh, she built up the few organizations that were still recruiting heavily
for natalfed, like
Suffolk Eastern Farm Workers Association.
They continued to recruit coderies regularly.
Women's press collective in Brooklyn also was doing well with recruiting.
The main headquarters was moved to the offices of the Western Services Workers Association,
a front group in the San Francisco area.
The former Brooklyn headquarters still housed members and some of those members got
into some trouble on November 12, 1996 when police raided the Brooklyn brownstones. This raid was
triggered after a concern neighbor, a spot of two girls, eight and 10 year old sisters who never
seemed to leave the apartment complex. They're also seem to be more children at least five that never
seem to go outside and play or go to school, concerned, a neighbor called authorities. The girls were taken to Kings County Hospital, placed into foster care.
Sources don't say about the other five kids. Police identified the girl's mother as Lisa
Burns, 27, said she would be charged with assault and child endangerment as well as weapons
counts. Authorities also discovered 16 handguns, 26 rifles, five shotguns, two Thompson
sub machine guns, one air gun, 13 knives,
three black jacks, and five pounds of explosive powder.
And that was, you know, obviously concerning approximately 30 people would eventually be
taken into custody, six of them charged with possessing legal weapons and one who was
said to be beating a child with a belt, charged with assault and endangering the welfare of
a child. Otherwise, Brooklyn police said they did not know of any illegal acts committed
by the group.
In fact, they didn't know the group had existed,
very long prior to the raid.
As 30 people were arrested,
other members sat on the stairs and sang amazing grace.
Police inspector Michael Collin,
not long after the raid said,
we're looking into whether they're a cult
and we're looking into exactly what they were doing
with all those weapons.
No further arrests were made,
but the press now ran with stories of ault existing in the middle of Brooklyn. The publicity
would make its way to several ex-members who would then provide the public with more info
on this secretive group. Jeff Wittnack, an ex-member living in California who had joined
the group back in 1981 was one of those ex-members, who was diving to another focus on one
person's view of all this nonsense again now. Prior to joining, Jeff worked hauling garbage for six years in Chico, Fairfield, and Richmond,
California. He was good at it. He'd run through the route four to five hours, still get paid for
an eight hour a day. He liked to work outdoors, liked the fact that he could go anywhere in the country
and without too much trouble finding a job to make a living wage. In addition, he'd also been taking
nursing prerequisites at a local community college. Think of that he might someday enter a nursing program.
One day on the job, he lifts a particularly heavy can, throws that as back,
then descends into a hell of trying to get workman's comp,
waiting for months for late checks from the insurance company, constant and demeaning visits
to various doctors and lawyers to insinuate he's faking his injury.
Finally, after a year, he has to admit to himself that he can't go on hauling garbage for living. He starts a rehab program, opts for a career in respiratory
therapy, learning the high-tech practices of ventilator management in an intensive care
unit. And there he sees many people being kept alive, quote unquote, on ventilators after
every organ except their hearts had failed. And he's witnessing capitalistic medicine
he feels being carried to the extreme.
What is the point?
Is just family's being charged for nothing.
He decides he's being trained for bizarre and cruel situations
that often make the hospital money
at expense of the patient's health
or the expense of the patient's family's financial health.
He gets into activism now,
but it feels like the Bay Area activist scene is a bit stale.
She's a bunch of trendy short- term support groups for like LGBT rights,
the third world prisoners, whales, and in his view, they don't accomplish much.
He finds himself in a state of personal, economic and ideological crisis.
As he would put it, I used to joke to my friends that I should sue over my back
injury for developing a secondary disease called Paul Pitatis or Pitatis or Paul Pitatis. I don't
know, just made up work affecting the politically sensitive areas of the brain and leading to chronic
outbreaks against the bourgeoisie and the professional henchmen. While this crisis leads him right
to natal fed. Jeff had previously been involved with the political group collecting medical supplies
from the East Bay to be sent to aid Nicaragua. One afternoon in early 1901, he'd been busy sorting
through some of the supplies in a Berkeley church when he ran into an old acquaintance and they caught
up. By the end of the day, the guy pulled him aside and said he had something to talk to him about.
Jeff's intrigued. As soon as the sorting is done for the day, they walk out to the back door
or walk out the back door and go sit in his friend's new Volkswagen rabbit to talk. On the way out of
the church, he asked Jeff if Jeff was a codray to any organization, when Jeff said, no, he seemed relieved. The
friend talked for two hours to him. The friend started out by referring to the recent
trip he had made to Nicaragua. He then moved to a on depending the picture of the Nicaraguan
revolution as one instigated by a super clandestine group, the Sandinistas, who operated helpful
associations to aid the poor in Nicaragua,
like Mutual Benefit Associations, or Benefits Associations, then he said there was a group
a lot like that, acting in the US right now, and he gave Jeff two phone numbers. One was for
the California Homemakers Association. The other was for the Coalition of Concerned Medical
Professionals, right? We referred above them. He was to call either number and use a special code word to signify he had the
introductory lecture.
He was supposed to say that he was a friend of Carlos and asked to speak to
a woman named Brooke, right?
How mysterious and exciting this all is.
Is a new revolution of brewing?
Looking back on all this later, Jeff would, well, I guess it was be the same
revolution we went over before.
Jeff would look back on this. We come to believe that this rigmarole was not done for any kind of security purposes
It was theater
It was to prove that a new recruit was willing to buy in and play the cosplay game
The next Saturday he tours both the CHA and CC MP offices and is impressed
Signs of immediately to canvas neighborhood for dues
Everyone there seems sincere, dedicated, interested in their projects.
There was a vast array of activities, canvassing, house meetings, outreach, phoning, bucket
drives, general medical sessions, well-child sessions combined with the vast membership base
and low income areas from coast to coast.
All this seems legitimate to him.
The thing they really impressed him was the coalition of concerned medical professionals
since he had been studying respiratory therapy.
CCMP held weekly general medical sessions
and bi-weekly well-child sessions.
At these sessions, community members received free
comprehensive medical care for medical professionals,
supplies and volunteers that have been organized
by NattleFit.
So they did do some good, while they're also doing shady shit.
And it seems like this is all exactly what Jeff was looking for.
After a few weeks of volunteering with natal fed,
Jeff is invited to attend a huge revivalist style meeting
called the National Labor College now.
A thing carried out for recruiting purposes.
Potential recruits are given a speech
on the secretive nature of the meeting.
They're given envelopes with a secret address
to go to another place,
told not to open their envelopes
until they are in their vehicles.
More mystery, more theater.
Right, these assholes really went all in
up pretending to be important revolutionaries.
Jeff gets an envelope, opens it,
and his car drives across the bay to San Francisco,
enters a hall with the UCSF campus,
where he had to sign in.
The speaker is Dr. Marcus Saline, a former sociology professor from a college in Ohio, a man
later given the title of Western Regional Political Commissar, right?
Such an important guy on par with Fidel Castro, really.
At one national labor college meeting, Dr. Saline claimed to the audience that a provisional
party member had just recently been killed in El Salvador after having been sent there on assignment from the provisional party to fight
alongside their purported sister organization, the FMLN of El Salvador.
This lends an error of importance and seriousness, you know, to the group, there's some credibility.
Over the following months, Jeff goes to a bunch more silly bullshit meetings like this
and here's a bunch more lies.
All of this designed to make, you know,
dipshits feel like they're part of something
so fucking important.
Whenever he can, Jeff now works full time for Natal Fed,
which is often over 18 hours a day, cult, cult, cult.
Then at the end of his spring break
from respiratory therapy school, he drops out
as requested by Natal Fed and goes to work as an organizer
full time. At this
point, they clue him in on the history of the organization, right? Genesis again included
in Genesis is the claim that Jerry Gino's group is the officially recognized representative
of Cuban solidarity in the US, supposedly through another group, the organization of solidarity
with the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America in Havana, Cuba. The provisional, it's a Ospaul.
The provisional wing told us members that Ospaul was now the centralized Western Hemisphere
communist clearinghouse.
All this fucking terminology, uh, based in Cuba.
They further claimed that their sister organizations in Ospaul included the Cuban Communist Party,
the Nicaragua and Sandinistas, El Salvador's FMLN and Chile's MIR, and then a bunch more,
right?
They're the real deal, everybody.
But just two months after he joins, Jeff leaves the group.
As he would put it, one day while returning from taking some new volunteers out on a canvas,
I asked a woman volunteer to pull her car over.
Whereupon I opened the door and got out.
I walked to and here by a bar at station and escaped and never went back.
City left because he was angry that he was expected to accomplish 10 times the work
he could in 18 hour shifts already way too long to be working.
He'd slowly be done to suspect that the whole situation was purposefully set up to create
a pressure cooker boot camp style atmosphere.
Obviously, nobody could engage in intellectual discussions in that atmosphere, confused
and fucking exhausted all the time.
And Jeff started to think that was on purpose, right? That is what cult leaders did to members. That's some Jim Jones shit.
Also witnessed how provisional wing members passed themselves off as actual members of
foreign military forces when they weren't. Began to dawn on him that being a cadre in
their organization was a mixture of being a con artist and a hitman or a con artist who
dresses up like a hitman like he's going to a Halloween party except it's not Halloween and there's no party. And what's more the deadline for revolution that
1984 date seemed utterly ridiculous to Jeff. Like did they not know how powerful the US military was?
So one day he spoke up right before he don't left and went to the bar station. He said,
while I'm impressed with this organization and his potential for growth, I don't expect to see
us holding power that soon.
He told that to his Oakland leader during a meeting he had where just the two of them were
present.
Seeing Jeff skepticism skepticism, she replied that the deadline was definitely definite,
was rather an adjustable guideline to keep them from being too complacent.
But then a month and a half later, Jeff was at a National Labor College meeting and one
of the National leaders blusters out the 33 month deadline is real.
The leadership of this organization
has their theoretical and real necks on the line.
So if you've been,
so if you've been just an irregular volunteer
or some half fast schedule, get real.
Jeff made up his mind right then and there he was quitting.
This is madness.
Soon he'll begin talking to other ex members
and he finds out just how much bullshit
he'd listened to over the past couple months. Just about everything he had heard was fucking lies.
As one ex-member who helped found CHA in Sacramento 1973 remarked to him,
heard people claim that they were in a venceramose when I knew they weren't. I don't doubt they
would lie if they thought they could use it to their advantage. Everyone he talked to said that natal fed had no international ties, no legitimacy,
the whole thing was a sham. One former volunteer wrote to him, at first sight, the work here
seems ideal. Low income people have an organization, which is working in their interest. You read
about this positive impression in my previous reports. After three months of experience with this
project, however, I must report that reality is very different. Members are told that this is their organization. To the contrary,
most members outside New York do not even know about the National Labor Federation.
The structure is ambiguously organized from top to bottom. Members are at the bottom of the hierarchy.
No decisions are made collectively. Members do not have any power of decision. It is a lie if they
are told that they themselves are deciding about the organization. I have been told that volunteers
are not supposed to be thinking about what they are doing. Volunteers and members are not
taken seriously, but are being used. They are being lied to. If it is useful to the organization,
I have experienced these lies often. Financial matters are totally obscure. Some money goes
to the top, but almost nobody knows where to, particularly not to the members. As soon as the volunteers criticizes anything, he will be interviewed by a trained
co-worker. It appears to be just like an interrogation. Systematically, he will be driven into
defense. Nobody will listen to the problem. He is just a stupid volunteer. I have never
known criticism to be really listened to. Contacts to the outside are severely limited.
I do not know anything but work.
You may ask why I do not face my conflicts here.
The militarist structure and the way in which conflicts are dealt with are incompatible
with raising criticisms internally.
It is assumed that anyone who does not like the way things as they are leaves, all who are
of different opinions are stupid and ridiculous.
One who does not cooperate is a murderer because he allows poor people
to continue to starve. I am told that the only way for real change is through this organization.
I do not want to cause any panic, but this organization is dangerous. Yeah, man, no room for descent.
Cult, cult, cult. And Jeff concludes that Natal Fed is indeed a cult. And he starts writing about
that and he gets some stuff published over the next decade. He'll come into contact with more and
more ex members and hear their stories, you know,
a Brooklyn high school student who saw the community service credit, but vanished for
three years instead.
Beatings, imprisonments, tribunals.
He'd heard that female members were warned that the streets in Brooklyn were dangerous
and that they should never venture out alone.
Seetling the cults members inside the walls of the brownstone where some would be sexually
used and abused by Jerry Don and others.
After 1996 raid, Jeff would comment again, warning people of just how persuasive this
organization could be.
It's like this overwhelming current that sucks you in.
He said, a lot of really good people got deflected into this for years.
Jeff also talked about how the 1924 raid saved the group, saying that it actually probably
gave parental handy excuse as to why the group wasn't in power by that year
It actually seemed to serve his purpose to have a raid. Why didn't we have a revolution? Well, we got attacked Jeff theorized
At a time when it may have been dying out the raid breathed new life in it
Cutting away from Jeff now back to New York
November 13th
1996 district attorney Charles Heinz announces that six of the arrested
cold members will appear before a grand jury, three members in their mid 40s or a rain done
felony weapons charges. Two others of 46 year old and an 84 year old issued summons
is for trying to sneak past police back into the building after it's evacuated and charged
with endangering the welfare of a child is 27 year old lease and burns mother of the child
taken into foster care. All the others
would let go. At a news conference at one police plaza made a mayor, Rudolph Giuliani,
hides and several top police officials presided over display of items taken from one of the
three townhouses owned by the group at 1107 Carroll Street. The display included weapons
badges, bulletproof vests, a pair of yellowed organizational
flow charts that resembled childlike drawings of spaceships. Yeah, why not? Firearms and seized
included shotguns and a semi-automatic Tommy gun replica. More damning stories would come
up in the days following the news conference. One of them would belong to a former member
named Irene Davidson. One day years later, Irene, excuse me, one day years earlier, Irene and her 18-year-old
daughter were walking through a festival in Prospect Park.
When they noticed a table covered with progressive slogans, manned by a group calling themselves
the Women's Press Collective.
If they signed up, the members told the two women they would get to write progressive
things for their newsletters.
Irene's daughter would live with this group for three years now. Startles members and Cessna Lee, Connor daughter convincing her to visit the group's headquarters
on Carroll Street. Once there, the young woman subjected to painfully long lectures.
Right. I picture someone a less gifted with public speaking than Jerry Gino, maybe reading
his old gibberish if it wasn't Jerry himself. As comrade Jerry Gino, father,
Claude once proclaimed, when the revolution begins, the blood of the tyrants will fill the streets,
and that blood, this is important. That blood must not be the blood of unarmed housewives or
school children or elderly people with dementia residing in assisted living facilities, the blood.
This is also important. It will not be the blood of jugglers or buskers, other sort of
street performers, or neither in favor of nor opposed to current regimes, but merely trying to put
food in their bellies with tip money earned by moderately entertaining,
are you listening, Peyton, moderately entertaining civilians passing by just like that for hours.
Within months, this young woman would be living there full time.
They really confused her.
It was impossible to have a conversation with her because she only talked about the cult
and their goals Irene would remember.
Almost three years past before the group shipped the daughter to a small field office upstate
and there luckily the young women got depressed and finally left and best depressive episode
ever.
Thank you depression for saving my ass.
Meanwhile, other ex members and ex volunteers were now telling the press about another planned
revolution.
Mm hmm.
All right.
Former volunteer of the group speaking to a reporter working for the new Jersey star ledger said,
the revolution was supposed to start in New Jersey after they set up temporary employment
agencies paid the workers more money than they usually earn and one millions of supporters.
This is a plan that they didn't get to carry out because the 1984 rate. Oh yeah, totally. I mean,
if that 1984 rate wouldn't have happened, they for sure would have gotten millions of supporters.
Following this bit of press in 1996,
Info on the group becomes scarce again for quite a while.
It's unclear what the group was up to
for much of the 90s and early 2000s.
Still difficult to know what's going on now.
As persons recruited after 1995
or especially reluctant to talk about experiences
after leaving the organization,
many, they still believe the organization
will come after them.
Or maybe, excuse me, maybe they still believe, maybe they're just waiting for the right moment to
step forward. Maybe they were, you know, just so few that were recruited, the only handful
of people know what actually happened. But we do know is that struggling, right, the field
commander who would go by the alias Mary Struggler on a blog dedicated to ex natal fed experiences
was kicked out of the group at some point and eventually died of leukemia.
And poor polysasparilla, former secretary of J.R.E.D who sometimes got a bare bottom
spanked, show it.
With a riding crop, died of untreated breast cancer.
Also many of the regional organizations seem to have continued operations, perhaps independently,
perhaps not, definitely still recruiting college kids, organizing volunteering committees
and so on.
Also still creating new front organizations. 2003, a poster on a website called
indibay.org warned be careful. Referencing something called the commemoration committee for the Black
Panther Party. CCBPP. The CCBPP is a front organization for the National Labor Federation,
Natal Fed. There are very creepy outfits, more like a cult than a
political organization, the poster wrote. Natal Fed gains
members to innocuously named fronts recruiting through street
fares, canvassing door to door and by phone, giving free holiday
dinners targeting the poor and posting flyers, the fronts are
choir volunteers who may be given work to help the poor
directly, and are definitely given work to support the
operation to the front itself, in the name of helping the pour indirectly. Other front groups include the California Homemakers
Association, Western Service Workers Association, Western Farm Workers Association, and National
Equal Justice Association. Please become educated about this group. They have already fucked up a lot
of lives. I know because I watched people who should have known better get sucked in by these charlatans. 2004, Nate Leskovich, now editor of
Performer Magazine in Boston, infiltrated the Northeast to
and service workers association as an independent journalist.
This was the only way I saw getting any information about them. He said, I
went in his volunteer, did a couple of events with them and went door to door
with them, tried to get a sense of how they ran things. He came away with an impression of an organization obsessed with its own version of Communist
doctrine.
Despite some accounts that the group had mellowed under Margaret Rybars leadership, a 1996
village voice story said that she loosened some of the restrictions that prevent members
from visiting their families.
Less cubic was still troubled by the sheltered lives of the group's young volunteers.
He wrote, these kids had given up all their family and friends.
They were living in poverty, working and living at the office and doing nothing else and living
off of food donations.
They always had the same clothes on.
It's this kind of taking lives away from people.
You could argue that, well, that's their decision they could do what they want with their
lives, but being around these kids, it seemed like there was more to it than that.
It seemed like it was not their decision.
They were never happy at all.
There was not much laughter, never any smiles and the work,
and they were always running around doing work.
None of them seemed to have anything to enjoy in their lives.
Despite these occasional warnings, you know,
overall, after being around for over, you know,
25 years now, their largely still flying under the radar
and because of that, able to even get grant money
for their little comic cult.
The John Templeton Foundation gave $6,000
to a natal fed organization in 2004,
another six in 2005,
the Halcyon Hill Foundation
gave $20,000 to Eastern Service Workers of America
in 2005 and 2006. The Daisy Marquis Jones Foundation gave $20,000 to Eastern Service Workers of America in 2005 and 2006.
The Daisy Marquis Jones Foundation gave 50,000
to ESWA Rochester in 2004.
Illinois Bar Association gave 7,000
to the Midwest Workers Association in 2002.
And then 5,000 in 2003, 2004 and 2005.
The Long Island Unitarian Universalist Fund
gave 12,500 to each and farm workers of America
in 2004, and all that money believed to have been funneled up to Natal Fed leadership.
According to ex-natal Fed members, all operations mandated to submit a minimum of 10% of all
money to the National Office that included all these little acronyms.
2006 Dan Roche, then a UMass Boston student and reporter for the Mass Media, wrote an article
detailing his experience
volunteering for ESWA.
Started when he saw a few college students
tabling for the organization at his school.
Nobody here makes a salary, the volunteer explained.
As a full-time organizer, I remember explain it
that his housing needs were met through our benefit program.
I spoke with people who had long been separated
from their families, Roche recalled.
When Roche attempted to go home after 12 hours of volunteering
and ESWA members stood in front of the door,
I almost had to use physical force, said Roche, right, to get out.
When he phoned them to break his tie to the organization he was told,
I have your address here in front of me,
and Roche considered that a veiled threat.
Around that time, articles about ESWA,
other natal fed affiliates began to be compiled
and now defunct blog at politicalcultz.blogspot.com.
The comments on the posts were often by ex-members, or the desperate parents of current members.
One mother wrote,
My daughter is planning to move there this summer, please advise.
I notice they do not even have beds for these volunteers to sleep.
Another comment read,
My brother got recruited by my
brother got recruited at an on campus table at Stony Brook University down on Long Island
by a group called EFWA. Eastern Farm Workers Association, which is part of Nattle Fed,
same as ESWA. He ended up dropping out of school to devote his life to these
commy bastards. He was going to be a dentist, but that never happened. He ended up living in
poverty with these leeches, working 18 hours a day for no pay until he finally left
on his own. He didn't come back to our family because he was ashamed of what he had done
with his life because of these people. I ended up tracking him down and bringing him back
home. You can't allow them to continue to recruit people on your campus. The damage
these people did to my brother to our whole family is enormous. And for what purpose?
They're not helping anyone but themselves. Fortunately, I got my brother a really good therapist who has
turned his life around. But not all ex-natal fed people recover from their brainwashing.
A third comment read, point blank, natal fed is occult. I can't believe Williams will
continue to allow natal fed to recruit UMass Boston students on campus. He can be mindful
all he wants, but the damage will be done without him realizing it.
My sister was taken in by them in 1984, forced to work long hours with little sleep and
was constantly barraged with communist dogma.
I remember trying to talk to my sister and tell her that she should leave the group, but
the damage had been done.
She would have a blank look on her face when I talked to her and she would talk about
her love for the organization.
Through their brainwashing, she was convinced that her family was evil, and she cut off
all contact with us
to live with them permanently in Brooklyn.
Natal Fed eventually shipped her to the West Coast,
where she was ultimately tossed out by the organization.
Because she had cut off all ties with us,
she never contacted us for help when this happened.
She suffers from crazy delusions about our family
and refuses to contact any of us to this day.
Feel free to contact me for a family member's point of view
about the evils of natal fit, right?
Cult, cult, cult.
How sad.
A one-star review on Yelp of the Eastern Service Workers
Association posted in 2012 reads,
I volunteer with them for four months.
I found them to be deceptive to say the least.
Many times I was asked to donate money,
while already donated my time.
Volunteers
are deliberately made to do unnecessarily manual tasks that could be automated with the database
in a matter of minutes. This overly senseless labor is a deliberate tactic. The intention
is not to actually manage the information, but to break down the volunteers mentally
and emotionally. Insurmountable tasks lead to feelings of desperation. This creates emotional
vulnerability into which influence of political and economic doctrine are inserted. The whole time, there is no external
validation of the information they provide. As of 2009, they deliberately avoided using the internet,
orgs that avoid external influence only do so to control the internal discourse.
Please note, my original comment was flagged for removal. But as I said, do not donate money to
these people. They will manipulate you.
Worst off, they manipulate their benefit recipients.
There are numerous reputable orgs in the area.
Go there, not to ESWA.
While staying off the web since 2009,
to avoid scrutiny, these weasily motherfuckers.
Anything this group or groups are still brainwashing people,
still ruining lives today, decentralized, disorganized,
no apparent leader in charge,
but still ruining people's lives.
2015, an ex-member of the Etern Farm
or Crit's Association, Robin Falberg,
shared some of her experiences with the group
in an interview posted to YouTube.
When I was 18, Robin said,
I decided I wanted to do something good for the world.
I decided I wanted to volunteer for a year
within an organization before going to college with an organization. She ended up on Long Island
with EFWA and would be there for 15 years. It was a 24-7 immersion in this philosophy that
was held up by untruth lies. Eventually, she left and she did end up doing a great thing
of her life. She got an engineering degree and then I got a law degree
2021 a Reddit user took to the R
Slash cult subreddit with a post titled natal fed is alive and well
And it they explained that their sister was deep in the natal fed labor cult only six months earlier working for a group called the Coalition of
Concerned legal professionals. He wrote a
Professor who maybe didn't know the harm of the work
had recruited my sister from her community college.
She was in a very vulnerable position at this time
as nearly any college student is.
Struggling with her place in the world,
feeling like college was useless,
to the suffering she saw, etc.,
very valid, existential human social crisis.
They pretty much told her that they have the answer
to the ills of
the world, to capitalism, and it would never be solved outside of their theory and practice
of politics. Six months later, she had quit her job and was about to quit college to give
herself fully to this organization. They were tracking her emotions and crying, grooming
her for sex in the group, man, still with that shit. Making her shower and volunteer's
house, even though she could shower at home, keeping her up late, working constantly for no money at all, sleeping on the floor, feeding
her poor nutrition, etc. God, there was so much to be honest. But when my family tried
researching New York, she was in, my mom couldn't find anything because their 40 plus year
old organizing strategy has been operating under front groups scattered across the country.
So hard to stop these slippery fuckers.
I got down to business researching and I collected everything I could on the internet into
one document. They have been using the exact same strategy and organizing for years and
have achieved so little in their grand bastardization of communism. In the end, gentle prodding
with critical thinking questions and empathetic listing while she slowly confessed the things
she was uncomfortable with this whole time, got my sister out. Hail Nimra! I promised her any true revolution against capitalism
would not be exploiting those trying to break us all free. She was courageous enough
to get out and she went through intensive therapy to deal with trauma from them
from the manipulation. I know sometimes they do help people, my sister did connect
a few people to lawyers and helped manage cases, but you don't need to give up everything to do this.
Essentially the cult is self perpetuating.
These folks give up everything to follow the ideology
and they must keep recruiting people
in order to sustain their basic material substance
like housing, living on the floor, and food,
can food drives and dollar store meals.
I feel for these folks, I think they all got sucked in
because they wanted to see a better world. And now to question their beliefs will be to question their entire life.
If they left these orgs shut down, they would be homeless. Yeah, if they left these orgs
are done. Often stranded in new cities to them with zero communities support them because the
cult has alienated and isolated them. Anyways, I just wanted to share that this group is still out
there praying on folks and I wanted to tag some more on the front names for easier research. That's great post.
And also, one, I would not understand or be that scared by if I didn't know all the backstory.
Finally, just as recently as June of this year, June 2023, people still warning about the
dangers of natal fit and its many front organizations posting in the Brooklyn and New York subreddits, a poster warns, hoping to spread some awareness about
this group and help other folks avoid getting involved with an exploitative organization.
I was approached by volunteers of the coalition of concerned medical professionals at a
grocery store in Brooklyn and ended up volunteering with them for about a month.
Long story short, they pressured me to give more and more of my free time up to 12 hours a day before revealing that they are staffed by full-time volunteers
who worked their 12 hours a day, seven days a week with no pay. Perspective full-time recruits
are encouraged to drop out of school, quit their jobs, and move into CCMP dorms, where they
have no safety net nor outside support system. The CCMP does offer a legit service to the New
York City community in the form of free
preventative healthcare benefits and health advocacy. I know they work with doctors who volunteer
part-time by offering free medical sessions, usually in their normal clinics, and I've helped
them schedule blood work appointments in the light. However, they spend far more their time and
resources on recruitment, canvassing door-to-door and eGro's restores, farmers markets, college
campuses, and churches. If anyone else has worked with them or received a benefit from them, I'd love to hear your opinion. I
can't say my personal experience was entirely negative, but the exploitation and inefficiency
I witnessed was in line with how former members have described their abusive practices.
Wow. That fucking post is what Brothas grouped our attention. One of our producers, Sophie
Evans, the fact sourceress, who has been with us for six years now,
she lives in Brooklyn, came across that on Reddit,
was like, what the fuck, did a little digging,
and then texted me, and here we are, right,
these sneaky bastards.
I truly hope this episode can maybe keep at least
one other person from falling for their bullshit.
If you see a member of some Communist-esque
community outreach program out and about,
maybe really look into exactly what they're all about.
Maybe pass up the opportunity to volunteer if you run into anything that reminds me,
it reminds you of the shit we went over today.
Find some other group to be a part of.
One where you can actually make a difference.
One that doesn't abuse and manipulate his volunteers.
One that doesn't want you to work fucking seven days a week, 12 hours a day.
Fucking Jerry Gino, that pathetic rat clown, might be one of the most successful cult leaders.
We've come across yet. Dude created a slippery system of organizations that do to its changing
names and difficulty in connecting regional offices with national leadership who work
under organizations of more different names. So hard to stamp these fuckers out once of Raw. Good job, soldier. You made it back. Barely.
Natal Fed, the National Labor Federation, for a wild one, the
Communist Party, USA, Provisional Wing, all these acronyms, all different tentacles,
the same damn cult octopus.
How do you kill an organization like this?
One where even as members are often confused as to exactly what organizations are tied together,
how like they're connected to everything, who the current leader is, how the money flows.
Was Jerry Geno crazy like a fucking fox?
Did he mastermind this system?
Why is there apparently still around?
Still doing cultured almost 30 years after their leader died, almost 40 years since their
big revolution did not happen, almost 50 years since forming.
Though the group has been active since the mid 70s, it's only fairly recently that other
than a few ex members and journalists, the group has been recognized widely as a cult. Or at least in organization practicing cult tactics. They can say that
the organization has become less cult likes since the days of you, Henny, or Parente and
Sonia Larson, it's clear that from testimony found online, it still uses many of the same
tactics and Zepa have the same basic effect when it comes to destroying the lives of its
members.
Reg Oliver, the executive director of the Chicago-based cult awareness network, said his group
continues to classify the National Labor Federation as a cult, because it employs classic techniques
used by religious sects such as the Moonies and the Harry Christian movement.
Psychological manipulation is essential.
Says Mr. Oliver, they use deception to keep members unaware of true goals. Information
is purposely withheld. Under the guise of having a mission, they create an authoritarian
environment laced with mythical jargon. The purity of their doctrine is under attack
by an evil outside world. There are indications of protein deprivation, according to our
files. Right? Keep people hungry, and tired, and confused. Give them shit to do constantly.
Don't leave them time to talk to old friends and family.
Don't tolerate descent.
Make them financially dependent on continuing with membership.
Maybe fuck them for good measure, right?
That's a cult.
Your Honeo Parentane is successors that control
their cult members in a number of ways.
But perhaps biggest of all is appealing to the desire
to be good people and improve the world.
After all, don't you want to be a good person? Don't you want to help those in need? It is important to the desire to be good people and improve the world. After all, don't you want to be a good person?
Don't you want to help those in need?
It is important to help people, but not at the expense of your own health and the destruction of your finances.
Then you're going to just going to end up becoming another person who will need
someone else to help them.
Want to help volunteer with an organization, you know, help a friend and need
directly.
Do some research and provide financial support or your time to an organization
that has a reputable background.
Pay attention to how they treat you.
No organization you're volunteering for should bully you.
It shouldn't shame you.
Constantly demand more and more of your time.
You're helping them and you don't have to.
If they start giving you a bunch of shit,
how about fuck them?
Toss your clipboard or whatever in the trash.
Just walk away.
I mean, what are they gonna do?
Fire you from a job you're not being paid for?
There are plenty of other places to help.
And this one's gonna stick with me for a while.
I did not know proud of this week when it came to cults.
You had to watch out for non-religious volunteer organizations.
Makes sense though that a communist group
would be behind this all and morph into a cult, doesn't it? Well, Jangle sinks it does. As a political ideology, isn't communism inherently very
culty? I mean, so many of its leaders historically, a scene is some sort of father figure, Godlike,
cult of personalities routinely developed in communist societies, leaders are worshipped
by followers brainwashed by continual propaganda.
Followers afraid to voice any dissent because dissent strictly punished.
Miles Dung, right?
Kim Il Sung.
Weren't they really cult leaders?
Wasn't Stalin a cult leader?
Stalin would receive ovation that his public appearances that would last 15 or more fucking minutes.
So many statues of him, he was worshipped and feared like a cult leader.
Communism doesn't allow its followers to own their own shits, right? They're dependent on the
state and the state is almost never truly run by a group. It's run by a worship leader. So
followers are depending on father, their cult leader for survival. I don't know. I just made that
connection now. It feels real in the moment. Agree, disagree, sentence me
males. Bojangles agrees passionately. Now let's head to today's takeaways. Time, suck, tough,
five takeaways. Number one, natto fed as a slippery as fuck organization that unfortunately still exists.
It was started in 1973 by line Dickhead you hennie a parent a real name
Gerald Dodon
Gerrigino
Who basically failed to be in a revolutionary in California and then decided to shoot his next shot in New York and his pathetic as it was he
He did succeed. He didn't start a revolution, but holy shit that he created cult
The Communist Party USA provisional wing
created cult, the Communist Party USA provisional wing. Number two, people are still being lost to this predatory collection of shady organizations today. Be careful. Number three, Nado Fed goes
by so many other names, we talked about a bunch of them here, right? The California Homemakers
Association, the Eastern Service Workers Association, Coalition of Concerned Medical Professionals
on and on and on.
If you're going to volunteer for some organization, any organization, do your research.
If they seem shady, fucking tell them to fuck off.
Number four, it's unclear who leads Nettle Fed now.
Perhaps it is a decentralized organization that inherited many of the tactics and manipulative management styles of its predecessor, or perhaps it just appears
decentralized and there's some new Gerrigino
in charge. Number five, new information. Remember how we talked about you, Henny O'Parente,
going to that conference in Philadelphia in 1973 for the national unemployed and welfare rights
organization, Newrow. Right around the time he formed Nathanael. Well, Newrow was also a front
group for its own crazy leader, a man named Lyndon LaRoch. Also being
he's also was accused during his lifetime of being a cold leader. Not sure he was, but he was for sure
a cook. Maybe Jerry Geno learned a thing or two about how to form a cult from this fuckhead.
LaRoch was born in 1922 in Rochester, New Hampshire, created the foundation of the LaRoch movement
in the 1970s. Over the course of that decade decade he would swing from the far left to the far right
advocating some of the most insane conspiracy theories out there
he denounced Walter Mondale is a k gb agent
queen Elizabeth is a drug smuggler
and the mid eighties presented a statewide ballot prep proposition in
california
which would mandate quarantines for all persons testing positive for hb rates
he alleged that he had been targeted for assassination by Queen Elizabeth,
Zionist mobsters, and associates of his who had been drugged in brainwashed by CIA spies.
Despite being batchit crazy, also had a lot of power. Former author and political activist Robert
Jay Alexander wrote that LaRouche first established an intelligence network composed of people weirdly devoted to him in 1971.
Members of his mysterious movement all over the world would send information to the movement's
headquarters, which would be distributed via briefings and other publications.
LaRoch organized the network as a series of new services and magazines, which critics
say was done to gain access to government officials under the guise of being a member of the
press.
It seems like he did gain that access.
US sources told the Washington Post in 1985 that the Roche, uh, the organization had
assembled a worldwide network of government and military contacts.
And that is researcher sometimes supplied information to government officials.
Norman Bailey, formerly with the US National Security Council, said in 1984 that the Roche
staff comprised one of the best private intelligence services in the U.S. National Security Council said in 1904 that the Rocha staff comprised one of the best private intelligence services in the world.
They do know a lot of people around the world.
They do get to talk to prime ministers and presidents.
It is estimated that the Roche movement never exceeded a few thousand members, but had
outsized political influence, raised more than 200 million, and ran candidates in more
than 4,000 elections in the 80s.
Noted for disguising candidates as conservative Democrats and harassing opponents, Lerosh
even ran in every presidential election himself from 1976 to 2004 as a candidate for his
organization's various third parties.
He peaked in at 78,000 votes in the 1994 presidential election.
Thank God he wasn't actually elected
and i can't run you know because he's because he's dead
uh... he died in 2019 the age ninety six i could say a lot more about him
maybe someday he'll get his own episode
for now let's uh...
wrap this up
time
uh...
top five
take away
natal fed the communist cult
still hiding in amer America has been sucked.
Thank you to the team here at TimeSuck.
Thank you to producer Sophie Evans for such a great find.
And for the initial research today, thanks to Tyler C. the suck range of recording and editing
again on this episode.
And again, you can watch it on YouTube in addition to listening and you can watch the
special, right?
Trying to get better out there right now. Next week on Time Suck, we get historical.
So quit bitching about the lack of history sucks.
I don't even know if anybody's bitching right now.
We learned about the library of Alexandria.
Yet another topic I've heard about,
practically my whole life, but don't know shit about.
Let's get curious.
The library of Alexandria was one of the largest
and greatest libraries of the ancient world.
The mysterious contents of the library have fascinated writers, historians, dipships like me, and scholars for centuries,
a fascination fueled by the potential permanent loss of priceless works of literature and
knowledge about the world. Library was founded by Tallahmei I Sodor,
King of Egypt, and his son Tallahmei II, based on the idea of a universal library, a place
that would contain all the written knowledge in the world.
taught me the first and the second.
seemingly made this dream a reality.
the king's hired scholars to live and work in the library making copies of original works,
teaching, debating, researching.
people traveled from far and wide to experience a library of Alexandria for themselves.
library was a place where people of different scholarly backgrounds or philosophical beliefs
could come together to learn and debate.
And it is estimated that the library housed somewhere between 40,700,000 scrolls.
The library gathered its massive collection largely by seizing original manuscripts from
ships that would come to the harbor of Alexandria.
And many believed that the library was tragically completely destroyed in a massive fire around 2000 years ago.
However, conflicting records cast some doubt on that theory.
So what really happened?
Well, next week we'll discuss the history of Alexandria
and his founder, Alexander the Great,
the Toulamaic Dynasty,
featuring some familiar names from previous episodes,
what we know about the ancient library
and a timeline of its destruction.
Right now, let's head on over to this week's
Time Sucker Updates.
Updates, get your time sucker updates.
I love this first update so much.
Starting off with some great fucking news, meat sacks.
Remember when I shit all over,
Numerid Ridman's to Sippy?
In the Emmett Till episode, and I was worried
that I'd lost all of my Numerid listers. Well, I still have at least one of those idiots.
New Madrid meets Sack Landon writes, Dearest Father Dan, as a new Madrid resident, I would
just like to let you know that the local dollar general is in fact shit. ProPizza's mediocre
at best and we pronounce it new Madrid because the Spanish pronunciation
is too fancy for our tiny little no good peckerwood brains to comprehend.
Long time fan and continualist near landed landed he killed me this message.
I'm still loving the word peckerwood.
I find it so funny.
Also I just came across a new racial slur for white folks I'd never heard before.
A mayonnaise monkeys.
Whoever came up with that one.
Kudos. Clever stuff. Sorry I don't have better pizza. Before a mayonnaise monkeys Whoever came up with that one kudos clever stuff
Sorry, I don't have better pizza. You know it still isn't too late. Just start walking out of town and never look back
Now for some insights on the Dennis Nielsen suck from someone who didn't think that my Scottish accent was very fucking accurate
fucking Todd writes in
With a subject line of nice accent fuck face
Fucking Todd writes in with a subject line of nice accent fuck face
Hail King Cummins magnificent the subject line has nothing to do with his email I just hope do we get your attention even though that attempt to Scottish or whatever the fuck it was
Was more like a creepy crocodile hunter than anything else
Now that's that's fair. I'm actually pausing this week's episode because something really hit home with me
That's the conclusion of the part of
The timeline where you discussed in eelsons almost victim Carl Stodder you informed us that due to his trauma because something really hit home with me. That's the conclusion of the timeline
where you discussed Nielsen's almost victim Carl Stodder.
You informed us that due to his trauma,
it nearly being murdered, it became an alcoholic.
You further elaborated that his alcoholism
is almost surely the reason behind his eventual death.
That is why I would like to speak,
or that is what I would like to speak on.
While over the years alcohol and weed have been called
gateway drugs and gateways to addiction,
I don't have to tell you that's completely false.
You see, the real gateway to addiction is trauma. Trauma can be many more things than people realize.
Sure, it can be nearly becoming a murder victim, being sexually assaulted or abused in some way.
It can also be things like being ignored by your parents, bullied at school, or even going to
be a bit hungry, but I also draw the line at how your bathes and wash by mom and grandma for fuck's sake.
to be hungry, but I also draw the line and how your bays and washed by mom and grandma for fuck's sake.
Trauma is real and its path to addiction is real.
Many people ask for shoutouts for love when our friend, but I would like to request one
for the cult of the curious subgroup, the cult of the recovering.
It's full of amazing meat sacks trying to better themselves and help each other to do the
same.
Anyone there who reaches out for help always gets responses and offers to assist in any
way that we can.
I don't exaggerate when I say that it can and probably does save lives.
I bet you don't.
You do not have to keep my name anonymous because while I'm not proud of many things I did
in active addiction, I'm proud to be a person in recovery.
September 22nd will be two years Nimrod willing.
And closing off for no apologies for the length of this email.
If you don't like it, you can fuck all the way off.
JK Gosh dang. Plototically love the length of this email. If you don't like it, you can fuck all the way off. JK Gosh dang.
Plototically love the fuck out of you.
You mushed me out tongue tied,
rape your witted, beautiful bearded bastard.
He'll fucking never run forever.
Todd Hartman.
Plotot, great message.
Sounds like that private Facebook group.
The cult of the recovering.
It's fucking awesome.
And yeah, yeah, you can just find it
for anybody wanting to find it.
Get me just going Facebook.
You go to the cult, the curious page,
and then there's like a little search column, you know, for the groups, and it's just, yeah, again,
the cult of the recovering. And yeah, man, trauma, trauma and the shame and hurt and anger that
can come from it, not wanting to talk about it, not wanting to deal with it in the therapeutic way.
Hell yes, that can lead to an unhealthy relationship with alcohol or drugs, right? Anything to numb the pain. Uh, thank you for sharing that.
And congrats on almost two years of being a recover.
You beautiful bastard.
And now for a very special shout out request from a very special sack, race Phillips.
How do I have my name is race Phillips.
I'm a long time listener of STD and time suck recent space lizard, Hill Nimrod.
My eight year old son even started listening to STD with me last year and absolutely loves
it.
Man, he's braver than I was that age.
I let him listen to certain times of episodes with me, always the historical ones because
he has a thirst for knowledge.
My oldest son, racer Eli Phillips, passed away, August 28th, 2012.
I know he would love to stand up and podcast.
If it's not too much could I ask you to give my son a a happy heavenly birthday shout out on the August 28th time, so get a set. Well, you got this message in on time,
race. Well done. Yeah. Hell yes. Race or Eli Phillips can get a heavy or a happy heavenly
birthday. A racer shine shine a lot, you know, a little light on on your dad down here
from time to time and let him know that you're out there ready to join him down the road
in some plain of love and light. And I don't know. Everything's just fucking amazing. on your dad down here from time to time and let him know that you're out there ready to join him down the road and some
Plainum love and light and I don't know everything just fucking amazing. I don't know what it is
But I do believe strongly that something's out there. I believe we continue to
Carry on in some sentient form. I don't have proof and I don't care if you think this is all bullshit, but I believe it
So see you out there someday racer Eli. I'll fill you in on all the silly shit your dad
laughed at.
Hail fucking Nimrod.
And now time for the BetterHelp portion of the special edition of Time Sucker Updates.
Big thanks to BetterHelp for partnering with me on this special segment.
I'm going to share some advice given to me by Courtney Cope, licensed marriage family
therapist and principal clinical operations manager at Better Help and David Yaddish, Licensed Therapist and Senior Clinical Operations Manager at Better Help.
I chatted with both Courtney and David at Great Length to ensure this advice is in line
with healthy practices for better mental health.
And just like last time, this is not me playing therapist.
Okay, in this episode, going to answer some questions around relationships from our listeners.
Let's get into it.
First question.
How do you handle the stress of your child being away at college?
I feel this one.
My son Kyler is heading off to college right now, and there have been so many emotions associated around this for me.
So much happiness for him, but also I'm going to miss the hell out of him, not being around
all the time.
One of my favorite people on earth, and one of the only two people I have literally
loved since their birth.
It's such an exciting time for both of you.
You want to be cautious, not to have your emotions dictate this experience for them.
If you are feeling anxious and stressed, you don't want to pass that on to them.
Try to find some peers who are going through this as well so that you can normalize how
you feel because I promise you you are not the only parent who has ever felt this way.
Especially if you have friends with older kids who have already done this, seek them out.
Set some ways to stay in touch with your child.
Share new things with them.
Can you create a routine that will work for both of you to connect without being overbearing?
For me, we have a family text thread that we share music in.
I would suggest finding some commonality like that.
Can you text about movies or TV shows or books or hikes?
We also have set some guidelines with Kyler as he's about to head off to college.
We talked to him about understanding his need for independence,
while also balancing his commitment to his family.
So for us, we told him that if we text him, he must reply to us within 24 hours, simply out of
respect for us. We also shared with him that he's not allowed to turn off his
find-my with the understanding that we won't be tracking him through his phone
daily. We just want to know he's safe. If he were to not reply to us in that
24-hour window, we want to know that we should probably be calling somebody.
We know it's tricky to balance a new life of independence.
We suspect that the first few months, there's going to be a lot of missteps on both ends.
And that's okay.
We think of your honest with your child about your expectations and ask them what their expectations
are.
You can become collaborators and find a system of communication that will work for both
of you.
It's normal to cycle to the emotions of fear, concern, excitement, joy, and so on.
This is an accomplishment for both of you.
So celebrate it.
Give them space to grow.
They can process on their own.
Revisit your interests and pour back into yourself as well.
Okay, now that was a lot.
And now for one more question.
Another big one and a common one, how to deal with traumatic divorce, being separated from
kids and ex-speaking ill of me.
Even when things are amicable with divorce, there is still so much to process.
So first of all, make sure you're seeking help and support to manage all of these new
divorce-related feelings.
And be sure if you choose to seek the support of friends and family,
you choose your support wisely.
It's easy to choose people who will side with us.
If you aren't going to seek therapy,
you want to make sure that you're not picking support from people
who are going to fuel your flames.
Be careful not to put yourself in some echo chamber full of angry, bitter,
divorced people.
There is a time and place to event, of course,
but just recognize it can be easy to fall into a negative pattern.
Remember, you are only as good as the company you keep.
And right now, you need especially good company.
Try to find ways to connect with things that make you happy
and feel good, that distract you from the mess of things.
It can be easy to think that what your ex is saying about you is true,
even if you know it's not, be sure to have bright spots in your life that will help you remain grounded
in your truth, even if you messed up, even if your ex is saying ugly truths about you.
These mistakes you may have made do not have to define who you are going forward.
If your child is asking you why your former partner is saying specific things about you,
consider replying with, I don't know why, my mom or dad is saying that about me.
And leave it at that.
Keeping the kids out of the middle is so important.
And not getting defensive in the face of your child is also very important.
Your child is going to feel torn between two people they love.
It's only natural.
It's a complicated and confusing time for everyone.
When possible, even when not amicable, can you come together to support and love your
child, even if you can't personally get along?
If you are going to share a sensitive information with the kid or kids in order to defend yourself,
you of course can share it with them honestly, but make sure it's on their level.
If you can say things with kindness and thoughtfulness, it can also be very helpful in diffusing the situation. At the end of the day, no matter what the truth
is, always remember that the person you are speaking about is still the child's mom or
dad. We don't want to be the reason that our children have an issue with their other
parent. So much good advice. At wraps up this special edition of Time Sucker updates,
a big thank you to our sponsor BetterHelp. And to Courtney Cope, Principal Clinical Operations Manager at BetterHelp, and David Yadish,
Senior Clinical Operations Manager at BetterHelp. Courtney Cope and David Yadish's input is General
Psychological Information based on Research and Clinical Experience. It's intended to be general
and informational in nature. It does not represent or indicate an established clinical or professional relationship with those inquiring for guidance. Their feedback
is in response to a written question and therefore there are likely unknown considerations
given the limited context. Also, just because you might hear something on the show that
sounds similar to what you're experiencing, beware of self-diagnosis. Diagnosis is not
required to find relief and you'll
want to find a qualified professional to assess and explore diagnoses. If that's
important to you, if you or your partner are in crisis and uncertain of whether
you can maintain safety, reach out for support. Crisis hotlines, local authorities,
have a safety plan, that can be done with the therapist too. Next time suckers, I need a net.
We all did.
Thank you for listening to another Bad Magic Productions
podcast, scared of that, time suck each week,
a secret suck for each week for space lizards.
Please don't become a fucking communist this week.
And then also started cult.
One of the guys have been a labor organizer organizer who also launches a bunch of other fake labor
and community support and advocacy organizations that all funnel cash to some collection
of brownstones.
We're a guy who wears sunglasses too much inside who fucks teens who sleeps outside his bedroom
door.
Sounds like a lot of work and it's naughty.
Don't be naughty.
Keep on sucking.
You silly cuck's. And magic productions.
Hello mates.
Did you guess what voice I'm doing?
Blowkey used to say things like,
what have I been doing? Just w used to say things like, what have I been doing?
Just wanking off a couple of chimps.
Blowkey used to be fond of fake passing out
in front of his mates, hoping that they'd bugger him.
That's right, serial killer Dennis Nielsen.
How'd you know?
Was it the very accurate, Scottish accent?
Fucking nailed it again.
You fucking wankers, you bloody bastards.
It's fucking uncanny.
How I sound exactly
like that Scottish creep in it. I'm a man of many talents. An accurate Scottish accent
is goddamn one of them.