Latest / Tales From Aztlantis / Episode 93: Cesar Chavez & The Cult of Synanon!

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Episode 93: Cesar Chavez & The Cult of Synanon! · Tales From Aztlantis

0:01
SPEAKER_13: You must excuse me.
0:03
SPEAKER_05: I've grown quite aware I this hasn't been easy, I know.
0:10
SPEAKER_05: But you've learned a lesson.
0:12
SPEAKER_05: A lesson in honesty.
0:15
SPEAKER_05: Honesty to yourself and honesty to others.
0:19
SPEAKER_05: That lesson will stand you in good step all your life.
0:23
SPEAKER_05: I think we've all learned a good lesson.
0:25
SPEAKER_04: I've always heard that honesty is the best policy.
0:29
SPEAKER_04: Now I'm catching on to why that's so and why that's so no why that's so no why that's so why.
0:33
SPEAKER_01: Santa Monica, California, 1966.
0:36
SPEAKER_01: Inside a large, dimly lit room, members of a controversial and increasingly violent group known as Cinnanon have gathered in a circle.
0:46
SPEAKER_01: At the center sits a single figure, alone on a folding chair, surrounded on all sides.
0:53
SPEAKER_01: Around the edges of the room, a few silent observers watch, waiting, and then it begins.
1:00
SPEAKER_01: One by one, the circle turns inward.
1:03
SPEAKER_01: Their voices rise.
1:05
SPEAKER_01: Insults sharpen.
1:07
SPEAKER_01: What starts as confrontation quickly escalates into something far more intense.
1:13
SPEAKER_01: Members unleashing a barrage of personal attacks, screaming accusations, cutting deep with words meant to break the person in the center.
1:24
SPEAKER_01: The assault doesn't stop.
1:26
SPEAKER_01: It builds relentlessly until the individual finally collapses under the weight of it all.
1:34
SPEAKER_01: Overcome with sobs.
1:36
SPEAKER_01: They call it the game.
1:38
SPEAKER_01: Framed as attack therapy, the game was a brutal exercise in psychological domination and public humiliation, part of confession, part of punishment, and entirely about control.
1:54
SPEAKER_01: The sessions could stretch on for hours, sometimes even days.
1:59
SPEAKER_01: Your loyalty was tested, weakness was exposed, and humiliation became a tool of obedience.
2:08
SPEAKER_01: On this particular day in 1966, among those watching from the sidelines was César Chavez, the renowned labor organizer, founder of the United Farm Workers, and a personal friend of Cinnanon's founder, Charles Diedrich.
2:26
SPEAKER_01: Some of the observers were disturbed by what they had witnessed.
2:30
SPEAKER_01: Others were unsettled and even horrified, but Chavez wasn't.
2:34
SPEAKER_01: Instead, he was inspired.
2:36
SPEAKER_01: You see, Cesar Chavez longed for the type of control over his membership that Diedrich commanded.
2:44
SPEAKER_01: Unflinching, loyal, and intimidated.
2:47
SPEAKER_01: The influence that Charles Diedrich and the Synonon cult had on Cesar Chavez cannot be understated.
2:55
SPEAKER_01: As their friendship grew, Chavez implemented more and more of Diedrick's leadership style into his own handling of the farm worker union, purging members who were perceived as disloyal, introducing harsh methods of psychological control, including forcing UFW members to participate in the game, and building a secluded headquarters, a compound where Chavez could operate out of the public eye, a compound called Nuestra Senora Reina de La Paz, or simply La Paz.
3:31
SPEAKER_01: Welcome to a special episode of the Tales from Aslantis Podcast.
3:36
SPEAKER_01: I am your host, Curly Tlapoyawa.
3:39
SPEAKER_01: Four years ago, my co-host, Dr.
3:41
SPEAKER_01: Ruben Ariano Tlacateca and I recorded a special movie night episode of the show.
3:47
SPEAKER_01: The idea was simple: pick a documentary that connects to the themes that we explore here on the show, press play, offer some running commentary, have a few drinks, and just generally enjoy the ride.
3:59
SPEAKER_01: That episode originally dropped back in February of 2022.
4:08
SPEAKER_01: For that particular night, we chose a documentary on Cinnanon, a group as bizarre as it was disturbing, and we used it as a lens to explore the complicated and overlooked relationship between its founder, Charles Diedrich, and the United Farm Workers under César Chavez.
4:30
SPEAKER_01: Given the recent allegations and renewed conversations surrounding Chavez's legacy, we've decided to make that episode available to all of our listeners.
4:42
SPEAKER_01: Because understanding the influence that Cinnanon and Diedrich in particular had on Chavez adds a crucial context.
4:52
SPEAKER_01: It helps us make sense of the climate of control, intimidation, and paranoia that came to define parts of the United Farm Workers during his leadership.
5:05
SPEAKER_01: So, dear listeners, I present to you Cesar Chavez and the cult of Cinnanon.
5:12
SPEAKER_01: Greetings, dear listeners, and welcome to the Cinnanon Cult episode.
5:18
SPEAKER_01: I am your host, Curly Tlapoyawa.
5:21
SPEAKER_01: And I am Ruben Ariyama Tla Katekaga.
5:25
SPEAKER_01: So tonight we're going to be checking out uh this documentary from a series called Deadly Cults.
5:31
SPEAKER_01: And this is episode 8.
5:33
SPEAKER_01: It's about the Cinanon cult from California.
5:37
SPEAKER_01: And the reason I picked this is I wanted to explore a little bit about just this cult in general and their bizarre and unique connection to Chicano history that not a lot of people knew about.
5:50
SPEAKER_01: That I didn't know about it until I picked up this uh this book that was recommended to me called The Crusades of Cesar Chavez, a biography.
6:01
SPEAKER_01: Who is that by?
6:02
SPEAKER_01: I'm glad you asked, because I was just about to say I need to figure out who wrote this book.
6:07
SPEAKER_01: Well, this is uh The Crusades of Cesar Chavez.
6:10
SPEAKER_01: It's a book, a biography by Miriam Powell.
6:14
SPEAKER_01: And I will also be referencing a book called From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Worker Movement.
6:28
SPEAKER_01: And let me see who that was really.
6:30
SPEAKER_01: I think that's Mike Matt Garcia, isn't it?
6:32
SPEAKER_01: By Matt Garcia, yes.
6:33
SPEAKER_01: So we're gonna be referencing these two books.
6:36
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, I've always been interested in in cults and weird beliefs and what draws people in to uh two organizations like this, and it was really shocking to me to to learn that Cesar Chavez was an adherent or quite a big fan of this particular cult Cynanon to the point that he even brought in some of their organizing methods and leadership methods into the UFW.
7:06
SPEAKER_01: Oh, but by the way, what are you uh what are you drinking?
7:09
SPEAKER_01: I've got myself a uh a Lobo IPA right here from the Rio Bravo Brewing Company for this movie night.
7:17
SPEAKER_09: I am drinking a little mix of tequila with OJ.
7:23
SPEAKER_09: That's it.
7:24
SPEAKER_01: Nice.
7:24
SPEAKER_01: All right, so let's get started here.
7:26
SPEAKER_01: Deadly cults, Cinnanon.
7:30
SPEAKER_06: Cinnanon started in 1958 as an addiction rehab place.
7:36
SPEAKER_06: Its founder, Charles Dietrich, was credited with saying, Today's the first day of the rest of your life.
7:45
SPEAKER_06: The name Cinnanon comes from Sin meaning S Y N coming together, and then the non from Alcoholics Anonymous.
7:55
SPEAKER_06: But as time went by, Cinnanon members weren't just alcoholics or drug addicts, other people who were clean started to join.
8:05
SPEAKER_13: In those days, there were a lot of cult-like communities being started and failing and falling apart.
8:14
SPEAKER_13: They didn't do anything except hang out together and mump on or something.
8:21
SPEAKER_06: The very first story I did on Cynum was a weird one.
8:28
SPEAKER_06: This guy's wife was walking on the beach in Santa Monica.
8:32
SPEAKER_06: Her name was Rances Wynn.
8:35
SPEAKER_06: She was kind of depressed.
8:37
SPEAKER_08: And she did have a history of psychosis.
8:41
SPEAKER_06: And these people started talking to her, and she left with them.
8:47
SPEAKER_06: And someone said, Oh, I think she was talking to some people from Cinnanon.
8:52
SPEAKER_06: And it turns out they took her and would not let her go.
8:56
SPEAKER_06: I had to call Cinnanon to see why wouldn't you let this woman go?
9:01
SPEAKER_06: Why won't you let her husband talk to her?
9:04
SPEAKER_06: But they didn't want to talk about it.
9:07
SPEAKER_06: Her husband went to the police and they said she's an adult.
9:11
SPEAKER_06: This is her choice.
9:13
SPEAKER_06: There's nothing we can't do.
9:16
SPEAKER_06: Then he went to Paul.
9:18
SPEAKER_09: So Paul's the attorney, Paul Morance?
9:21
SPEAKER_09: Paul Morance is a lawyer that uh he contacted.
9:26
SPEAKER_08: Paul Morance made a name for himself as a lawyer suing mental health organizations.
9:33
SPEAKER_08: And he told Cinnanon, Frances Wynn, we want her back now, or there's gonna be trouble.
9:39
SPEAKER_08: At that point, I think Paul Marance went to pick her up, and Morant says that when they went to pick her up, everyone was smiling, and they all had shaved heads.
9:52
SPEAKER_06: And he was telling me what was coming out of Cinnanon.
9:56
SPEAKER_06: Paul said, Narda, this is a much bigger story.
10:00
SPEAKER_06: I can only imagine how many people Cinnanon found wandering on the beach, who they got into their facility and never let out.
10:08
SPEAKER_08: Paul Morance got Francis Wynne back, but he wasn't quite done with Cinnanon.
10:14
SPEAKER_06: Frances Wynne and her husband sued Cinnanon for imprisonment and other charges, and they won a settlement.
10:23
SPEAKER_08: Morance won and got$300,000 judgment against Cinnanon.
10:30
SPEAKER_01: So basically, what what it looks like what happened, right, is they they send these busloads or these buses of Cinnanon members down to the beaches or just out into the wild and look for people who um were probably alone and probably lost in their thoughts, maybe look like they're having a hard time, and they probably just approach them and and ask them, hey, how are you doing?
10:52
SPEAKER_01: And then just recruit them.
10:53
SPEAKER_01: Maybe we hey we could help you with that.
10:55
SPEAKER_01: And then once they get them to their compound, they just don't let them go.
10:58
SPEAKER_09: But where does an organization like this at that time come up with$300,000 to just dish out for some lawsuit?
11:07
SPEAKER_01: Well, um, I think they cover it in this documentary, but basically, if you're a if you're a member, ostensibly you joined because you were trying to kick drugs, right?
11:16
SPEAKER_01: And you were gonna live on their compound until you got clean.
11:20
SPEAKER_01: But eventually what happened, I believe, is they just took all of your possessions and you were never allowed to leave.
11:28
SPEAKER_01: So you were like a full-on member of the cult and you just handed over all of your shit.
13:25
SPEAKER_08: Three weeks after the lawsuit, Palmarant wants to go home and drink a beer and watch game one of the World Series.
13:35
SPEAKER_06: It was in October of '78.
13:40
SPEAKER_06: It was the Dodgers and the Yankees, I believe.
13:43
SPEAKER_06: And he's a huge baseball nut.
13:46
SPEAKER_06: And he's looking forward to it.
13:48
SPEAKER_06: He gets home to his house.
13:50
SPEAKER_06: He had one of these houses where the mailbox comes right into the house, and you reach in and get a mail.
13:57
SPEAKER_08: He sees an object in his mailbox.
14:00
SPEAKER_08: But it's dark inside the mailbox.
14:05
SPEAKER_08: In there, he sees what looks like a weird-looking package.
14:10
SPEAKER_06: He didn't think anything of it, and he put his hand in.
14:14
SPEAKER_06: And then he had this steering pain.
14:19
SPEAKER_08: And he is bitten by a rattlesnake.
14:25
SPEAKER_08: Oh, it's uh damn.
14:29
SPEAKER_08: Rattlesneeve ran out of the house screaming, help me, help me, it's Cinnanon.
14:34
SPEAKER_08: Cinnanon got me.
14:37
SPEAKER_06: They immediately raised him and into the hospital.
14:40
SPEAKER_06: And the first thought I had in my mind was, I hope he's not dead.
14:50
SPEAKER_12: I went to work, and two Los Angeles police officers from major crimes told me that a rattlesnake had been put in the mailbox, and the occupant in the house had reached in to get his mail and been bitten.
15:07
SPEAKER_12: And I said, I said, what?
15:09
SPEAKER_12: I was very puzzled by that.
15:11
SPEAKER_12: It was such an odd way to do anything.
15:15
SPEAKER_12: Not a gun, not a baseball bat, but a rattlesnake.
15:19
SPEAKER_01: I wanna I want to pause it right there, and I want to refer to the book from The Jaws of Victory, the triumphant tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Workers' Movement.
15:29
SPEAKER_01: Um, just to give people a little bit of context um about the relationship to Cesar Chavez and Cinnanon.
15:38
SPEAKER_01: So the book states during the 1960s and early 1970s, this new way of thinking included an embrace of progressive ideas, such as interracial marriage and a practice Diedrich, Diedrich being the leader of Cinnanon, called hustling, encouraging the donation of products, food, and clothing to sustain the foundation.
16:03
SPEAKER_01: Cinnanon's success in attracting gifts led to surpluses that he shared with allied organizations, a process he deemed anti-hustling, which I don't understand why he called it that.
16:18
SPEAKER_01: Um he saw the work of Cesar Chavez and the UFW as worthy of help and directed much of the group's anti-hustling to the union in times of need.
16:31
SPEAKER_01: The donations created an enduring bond between the two men and opened Chavez to the possibility of incorporating some of Cinnanon's management practices into the union.
16:47
SPEAKER_01: I don't know if that included putting rattlesnakes in lawyers' mailboxes, but I would assume not.
16:53
SPEAKER_01: I would hope not.
17:02
SPEAKER_09: That's kind of an interesting thought though.
17:04
SPEAKER_09: Right?
17:06
SPEAKER_09: Seeing Chavez doing the snake dance.
17:10
SPEAKER_01: Like the healers out in the in the deep south.
17:18
SPEAKER_12: Because when the first responder showed up, Palmorance said, Cinnanon, Cinnanon, Cinnanon, Cinnanon.
17:27
SPEAKER_01: As police began piecing together their investigation, Paul Marance remained in the ICU clinging to law.
17:33
SPEAKER_12: As a criminal prosecutor, I knew that Mr.
17:36
SPEAKER_12: Morance filed a lawsuit against Cinnanon.
17:38
SPEAKER_12: So the question remained: did this motivate his attempted murder?
17:44
SPEAKER_12: In order to determine this, I needed to learn virtually everything about the relationship between Paul Moranz and Charles Diedrich, who is the president and the head of Cinnanon.
17:57
SPEAKER_08: Charles Diedrich was a heavy drinker.
18:00
SPEAKER_08: Diedrich goes to AA and he gets invited up to the podium to share.
18:06
SPEAKER_08: People listen to him.
18:07
SPEAKER_08: And when he's done, they applaud.
18:10
SPEAKER_08: And he is hooked.
18:11
SPEAKER_08: Because Diedrich likes to hear himself talk.
18:15
SPEAKER_06: But Charles Diedrich didn't think AA was doing its job properly of keeping people off their addictions.
18:24
SPEAKER_06: He wanted to start his own rehab, but unlike Alcoholics Anonymous, it took in drug abusers too.
18:34
SPEAKER_06: So Chuck Dieterick started Zin and On in Santa Monica.
18:38
SPEAKER_06: It started out being a rehab place where people would come to try to be cured of their addictions.
18:45
SPEAKER_06: By 1965, it was very successful.
18:48
SPEAKER_06: There was a lot of word of mouth about the success of this place by the beach.
18:54
SPEAKER_06: And then it grew.
18:59
SPEAKER_06: They had a facility in Tamales Bay.
19:02
SPEAKER_06: And they had one in Tulare County.
19:05
SPEAKER_06: They went to parts of California that were basically isolated.
19:10
SPEAKER_06: They needed space.
19:13
SPEAKER_08: By 1968, the organization has 1100 members.
19:23
SPEAKER_08: 2.9 million non-addicts start coming to Cinnanon.
19:34
SPEAKER_08: He's the comic relief, he's the lecturer, and of course, he's the ringleader.
19:41
SPEAKER_13: He convinced a great many people like myself that Cinnanon was accomplishing something great, and people trusted him.
19:52
SPEAKER_13: I trusted him.
19:58
SPEAKER_10: But one of the wisest persons that I've ever met in my life.
20:05
SPEAKER_09: But Cinnonon required its followers to participate in unorthodox methods of therapy.
20:14
SPEAKER_06: Is this the game evolved around this thing called the game?
20:17
SPEAKER_06: Yes.
20:21
SPEAKER_13: Chuck believed in his method of talk therapy.
20:25
SPEAKER_08: One person to another.
20:39
SPEAKER_06: The subject of the game would sit in the middle of the group, people around them, and they would hurl insults at these people.
20:48
SPEAKER_13: Primarily for indicting another person, accusing them of some transgression.
20:55
SPEAKER_13: They smelled bad.
21:01
SPEAKER_13: It was a little scary.
21:03
SPEAKER_13: Because there was a lot of yelling.
21:06
SPEAKER_13: It was difficult, painful, but it was part of the environment.
21:11
SPEAKER_13: That's what we did.
21:13
SPEAKER_13: So I did it.
21:38
SPEAKER_06: And that was considered to be therapeutic in some way.
21:42
SPEAKER_09: Sounds like mind control.
21:44
SPEAKER_09: Well, this might be a good place to pause for a second and and and sort of uh bring in what Matt Garcia has to say.
21:52
SPEAKER_09: Uh not in his book, he published uh a piece that you can find online if you search for it.
21:57
SPEAKER_09: It's called Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers' Movement.
22:01
SPEAKER_09: And uh this is what he says.
22:03
SPEAKER_09: So it's Chavez, on the other hand, questioned the value of a union.
22:07
SPEAKER_09: This is kind of in the middle of the 70s towards the the 80s when uh a lot of the problems with the union had already been, you know, going on with the Teamsters, uh, the issue with the uh the union losing membership, and uh also Chavez sort of becoming kind of an egomaniac himself, kind of uh similar to Dietrich.
22:30
SPEAKER_09: And so he goes on to say that um for Chavez um he questioned the value of the union and articulated a preference for organizing the poor and building a commune at the union headquarters in La Paz, which had been a different place from the Leno where they had originally been stationed, and so that was part of also the grievance from some of the older uh membership who were beginning to um disagree with Chavez.
22:59
SPEAKER_09: And so Chavez envisioned the community looking much like those present at Cinnanon, a drug rehab, uh with his friend Chuck uh Dietrich or Dietrich in 1977.
23:09
SPEAKER_09: He told the executive board, no sooner than we will have it built than we're going to be faced with other forms of poverty.
23:18
SPEAKER_09: He's talking about the union with mechanization and things coming up, it's going to be a small percentage of workers working, very well paid, a large majority of people in the rural areas still poor, you know, former farm workers and the rural poor.
23:33
SPEAKER_09: The way for me to go is to have a community like Cinnanon or close to that and start truly cooperative ventures.
23:40
SPEAKER_09: In other words, we start taking over the land.
23:42
SPEAKER_09: So he's beginning to think much like the coaliter, the same way that this guy Chuck was thinking in terms of different places.
23:50
SPEAKER_09: He was buying out.
23:51
SPEAKER_09: And then Matt continues, he says, In the months following this meeting that he had Chavez with his uh um the union uh officials, Chavez appealed to the executive board to support the implementation of the controversial group encounter exercise, the game practice at Cinanon.
24:08
SPEAKER_09: The game subjected members to the harsh interrogations from peers and sometimes Chavez to achieve greater conformity to the leader.
24:17
SPEAKER_09: The practice began with a small group of younger members, including Chavez's son, Paul Chavez and Dolores Huerta's daughter, Lori Huerta.
24:25
SPEAKER_09: The group met and played the game at Cinanon's headquarters, home place in Badger, California, before moving to La Paz.
24:32
SPEAKER_09: Chavez eventually demanded that everyone at La Paz play the game, though several members resisted.
24:38
SPEAKER_09: Outside of La Paz, staff members and volunteers working in boycott houses around the country questioned the practice and wrote letters of opposition to Chavez.
24:48
SPEAKER_09: So this is kind of towards the history of the UFW when it's losing ground, it's losing power, and Chavez begins to become kind of disconnected from the broader uh UFW movement and is more focused on being more of a co-leader for some reason.
25:08
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, and he was so this is from uh the book from the Jaws of Victory.
25:13
SPEAKER_01: Um apparently he first discovered the game, or his first exposure to the game was in 1966.
25:20
SPEAKER_01: Uh the book says uh during a visit to home place, which was what um Cinnanon called like their headquarters, yeah, during a visit to home place in 1966 to take advantage of Cinnanon's dental care for his children, Chavez exposed his own family to the game.
25:39
SPEAKER_01: His wife detested the practice, and one of his children told him, Daddy, I've never seen anything like it.
25:46
SPEAKER_01: They're so mean.
25:48
SPEAKER_01: Chavez showed no such ambivalence.
25:51
SPEAKER_01: During the restructuring of the Union and the rebellion of boycott volunteers, he maintained an open line of communication with Diedrich, although the content and extent of their conversations remain a mystery.
27:23
SPEAKER_01: Gilbert Padilla, who distrusted Diedrich, believed that the old man had advised Chavez to work toward the removal of movement veterans who challenged his authority.
27:36
SPEAKER_01: If your people don't follow you, Padilla recalled Diedrich saying to Chavez, get some new people.
27:44
SPEAKER_01: So that's definitely um these building blocks, right?
27:48
SPEAKER_01: To to kind of restructuring uh the people around him and using the the game as sort of like the means to weed people out.
27:58
SPEAKER_09: Well in this article on Matt continues, he says that and this uh and at first I didn't I didn't know what what he was referring to, but now you know after watching um the documentary now, I get it.
28:11
SPEAKER_09: He says when Chuck Dieterick fell into trouble with the law after plotting to kill a lawyer who sued him for the mistreatment of children at Cinnanon.
28:20
SPEAKER_09: I don't know if it's the same guy, because this is talking about children.
28:23
SPEAKER_09: Chavez defended him.
28:25
SPEAKER_09: Ultimately, his association with Dieterick and his experimentation with the game damaged the Esprit the Corps within the movement and produced questions about his vision for the union.
28:35
SPEAKER_09: He responded to his critics by canceling the boycott and purging members from the union.
28:40
SPEAKER_09: So he went he listened to Diderick.
28:43
SPEAKER_09: He he followed through with the plans to to what were you calling it uh at the beginning?
28:47
SPEAKER_09: I don't know if this is uh something we were discussing before we started recording, but um the the practice of removing people from your group was oh a haircut?
28:58
SPEAKER_01: Haircut that's right.
28:59
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
28:59
SPEAKER_01: Um we'll we'll get I've got a good quote from that that we'll get to a little bit later.
29:03
SPEAKER_01: All right.
29:04
SPEAKER_01: Let's continue with Cinnanon.
29:09
SPEAKER_08: This was seen as a very kind of hip form of therapy.
29:14
SPEAKER_08: So in the early 70s, Diedrich makes a conscious decision to morph into a lifestyle community.
29:23
SPEAKER_08: Pretty soon everyone was shaving their head.
29:28
SPEAKER_08: And if he started wearing overalls, everyone else was wearing overalls.
29:33
SPEAKER_08: And he was a trendsetter, he died and he remarried, and pretty soon everyone was getting divorced and getting remarried in a very large way.
29:43
SPEAKER_08: And it was in many ways.
29:48
SPEAKER_01: That's a cult right there, no matter how you paint it.
29:56
SPEAKER_13: I began to think about how we should take care of the children separately from the parents.
30:02
SPEAKER_13: So Senan decided to start a school, and children would live in a separate village.
30:09
SPEAKER_01: Okay, it was called the hatchery.
30:19
SPEAKER_03: And my mom said, You're gonna come with me, and we're gonna go to this place called Cinnanon.
30:28
SPEAKER_03: The way that my mom expressed it, it sounded like, Oh, I'm gonna take you to Disneyland.
30:35
SPEAKER_03: When we get to the dormitory, we walk in, and there's a group of children who have shaved heads and they're in overalls, and nobody says anything.
30:50
SPEAKER_03: And one of the first things that happens is a couple of the kids walk over and they start stroking my hair.
30:57
SPEAKER_03: Then this young woman says, Come with me.
31:01
SPEAKER_03: So she takes me down the hallway to this bathroom, and she says, You know, you're very lucky that you get to be here.
31:13
SPEAKER_03: And um, I didn't say anything.
31:19
SPEAKER_03: So she used some clippers and she shaved my head.
31:25
SPEAKER_01: Wow, that's so fucked up.
31:28
SPEAKER_03: I'm so traumatized at that point.
31:31
SPEAKER_03: I look very alien to myself.
31:34
SPEAKER_03: I couldn't look at myself.
31:38
SPEAKER_03: My mom wasn't allowed to talk to me or even look at me, and um, it was just really devastating.
31:47
SPEAKER_03: I was always wishing that I could leave and wondering when are we gonna leave.
31:54
SPEAKER_03: I just want to have a normal existence.
31:56
SPEAKER_03: I don't want to be here anymore.
31:58
SPEAKER_08: By 1974, Cynon is completely unrecognizable from the drug rehabilitation that it used to be.
32:07
SPEAKER_08: People are living there full-time, working, and the money goes to Cynadon.
32:15
SPEAKER_09: In 1974, Cynon had over 1700 members and 22 million in essence.
32:22
SPEAKER_09: 22 million.
32:23
SPEAKER_06: I think it was a lawyer who said, why don't we incorporate as a church?
32:27
SPEAKER_01: Because of course.
32:35
SPEAKER_06: Which meant all this money they were making, they didn't have to pay taxes.
32:42
SPEAKER_02: Jeez.
32:43
SPEAKER_02: Diedrick.
32:44
SPEAKER_01: Tax the churches.
32:45
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yes, absolutely.
32:48
SPEAKER_01: Um, so I want to read a little bit more from the jaws of victory, uh, the triumph and tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Workers' Movement.
32:54
SPEAKER_01: Uh, this this is talking about a conversation uh between Derrick and Cesar Chavez.
33:00
SPEAKER_01: He says, at home place, Derek Diedrich, I can't remember how to say his name impressed upon his friend the benefits that came with communal living, where residents pooled resources, regularly played the game, and respected the authority of the leader.
33:19
SPEAKER_01: Obedience included the containment of residents that sealed them off from the outside world from time to time.
33:27
SPEAKER_01: Male residents voluntarily had vasectomies en masse in accordance with Dietrich's teachings on the need to address the overpopulation in the world.
33:41
SPEAKER_01: Women voluntarily began shaving their heads in 1975 to effect a message of equality, but the custom quickly evolved into a symbolic act of allegiance to the Synodon lifestyle.
33:53
SPEAKER_01: Although these practices signaled an increasingly authoritarian bent to Diedrich's rule, Chavez saw only harmony between the leader and his followers.
34:05
SPEAKER_01: Harmony?
34:06
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
34:07
SPEAKER_01: At one point, Chavez and Dedrick brought a handful of Synonites, I guess that's what they call their followers, Cynonites together with union members for a meeting in the north unit of La Paz.
34:21
SPEAKER_01: Diedrich instructed his followers to set up the stage in preparation for the event while Chavez and a number of staffers looked on.
34:30
SPEAKER_01: One La Paz resident, Cynthia Bell, recounted what she saw.
34:34
SPEAKER_01: And this is a quote from her.
34:36
SPEAKER_01: All of a sudden, these bald-headed people, men and women, poured in with their white outfits.
34:41
SPEAKER_01: They worked in silence and in union and in unionism, setting up within minutes the sound system and stage.
34:48
SPEAKER_01: Cesar was smiling and also observing in silence.
34:52
SPEAKER_01: Then they left as quickly as they came.
34:55
SPEAKER_01: I was just sitting here and all these mixed emotions going through my mind, trying to figure out what this was leading to.
35:02
SPEAKER_01: Not once did these people make eye contact with us.
35:05
SPEAKER_01: After Diedrick and his group departed, Chavez informed La Paz residents, this is how I want you all to be.
35:19
SPEAKER_01: Privately, Bell and others expressed reservations.
35:23
SPEAKER_01: Well, no shit about Cinnanon.
35:26
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
35:26
SPEAKER_01: But did not make their concerns public.
35:29
SPEAKER_01: In the meantime, Chavez made plans to work more closely with Diedrich's team, inviting one of Cinnanon's game masters, Matt Rand, to prepare for experimentation with the game at La Paz.
35:43
SPEAKER_01: So it's uh yeah, they were pretty closely intertwined, the two, the two friends, I would say.
35:51
SPEAKER_09: You know, I'm I'm usually very critical of all these people on social media that go on these rants about they never taught me this in school.
35:58
SPEAKER_09: Like, we'll pick up a book.
36:00
SPEAKER_09: Yeah.
36:01
SPEAKER_09: And but like seriously, like when we talk about Cesar Chavez growing up, like none of this was ever mentioned.
36:07
SPEAKER_09: Like it was all news to me.
36:09
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
36:11
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
36:11
SPEAKER_01: I was pretty uh set back when I read the when I read these two books.
36:15
SPEAKER_01: I was like, no fucking way.
36:17
SPEAKER_01: This is wild.
36:18
SPEAKER_01: Because I had already known about the wet line, but this, the Cinnanon thing was entirely new to me.
36:24
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, I mean uh with Cinnanon, I don't know.
36:27
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, I'm gonna I think I think that he he probably went to his grave wishing that he had built something similar to Cinnanon.
36:36
SPEAKER_09: I mean he tried, but I don't think it got to the degree that Cinnanon did.
36:39
SPEAKER_01: No, and I I agree.
36:41
SPEAKER_01: I think he definitely wished that he was like in Diedrich's position where he had just all of these followers.
36:47
SPEAKER_01: I think he enjoyed that.
36:48
SPEAKER_09: Yeah.
36:48
SPEAKER_09: I mean, because you can even see that from from just going back and watching the the old footage of him, you know, fasting for how many days?
36:56
SPEAKER_09: Like he like it was almost like a month, right?
36:58
SPEAKER_09: That he fasted.
37:00
SPEAKER_09: A lot.
37:01
SPEAKER_09: And we he had uh Bobby Kennedy there before he was shot, and then you had um who else was there?
37:07
SPEAKER_09: He had celebrities that showed up uh supporting him, and I think he he really like I think that's when he started really noticing that you know with attention comes privileges, and he kind of developed this sort of martyr complex for himself.
37:23
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
37:23
SPEAKER_01: It's uh I just looked it up.
37:25
SPEAKER_01: His longest fast was it says 36 days.
37:28
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, six days wild.
37:31
SPEAKER_09: That's insane, yeah.
37:35
SPEAKER_06: Oops, them, the church of Cynon.
37:40
SPEAKER_08: The Church of Cynodon.
37:41
SPEAKER_08: And of course, Dietrich Hussein was becoming fabulously wealthy and lived in a big house.
37:48
SPEAKER_08: He was very open about that.
37:50
SPEAKER_08: He liked living a certain lifestyle.
37:55
SPEAKER_06: He saw himself as a sort of messiah, a leader that could make people do anything, and I think he got a kick out of it because he had such power over people.
38:06
SPEAKER_03: At one point, Chuck had been feeling the kids were costing a lot to raise us and take care of us.
38:21
SPEAKER_03: Chuck decided members couldn't have kids anymore, but some of the women were already pregnant.
38:30
SPEAKER_03: So they were told you need to end the pregnancies.
38:36
SPEAKER_03: These women that wanted to stay, they were forced to get these abortions.
38:46
SPEAKER_08: I think that shows his opinion of children in general.
38:51
SPEAKER_08: What an asshole.
38:53
SPEAKER_08: Popping a pimple.
38:55
SPEAKER_09: Uh well.
38:57
SPEAKER_03: But then it became mandatory that any man 18 years or over had to go in and get a vasectomy.
39:08
SPEAKER_13: In my case, I had a vasectomy.
39:10
SPEAKER_13: But getting a vasectomy.
39:12
SPEAKER_13: You know, many of them didn't, and then many people split because of that.
39:16
SPEAKER_13: Yeah.
39:17
SPEAKER_13: John would put a positive spin on it and say, well, they were not committed.
39:22
SPEAKER_13: They didn't want to be part of Cynodon.
39:24
SPEAKER_08: He's too nuts, fool.
39:26
SPEAKER_08: Yeah.
39:27
SPEAKER_08: Literature.
39:28
SPEAKER_08: The abortion edict.
39:30
SPEAKER_08: A lot of people started to think like, oh, this isn't quite right.
39:34
SPEAKER_08: This isn't just an experimental community.
39:37
SPEAKER_08: This is something a bit worse than that.
39:40
SPEAKER_08: This is sinister.
39:41
SPEAKER_06: I wrote about how it was unregulated by the state because it considered itself a religion.
39:48
SPEAKER_06: Being informed by Paul and being informed and interviewing people who had lived there, um, I found it to be a rather horrific thing that was going on.
39:59
SPEAKER_06: Paul never wavered.
40:01
SPEAKER_06: He wanted to bring down what cinema had become.
40:06
SPEAKER_12: The same car seen outside of our victim, Paul Morantz's house, was driving near Civic Palisades, and uh police officer noticed the license plate.
40:20
SPEAKER_12: So he pulled them over.
40:22
SPEAKER_12: Real quickly, he found the occupants, Joe Musico and Lance Kenton, were members of Cynanon.
40:33
SPEAKER_09: Now placed at the scene of the attack, Joe Musico and Lance Kenton were held on suspicion of involvement in the rattlesnake attack.
40:41
SPEAKER_09: Joe Musico and were at the lowest rank.
40:47
SPEAKER_12: Rattlesnake attacked vehicle, too.
40:50
SPEAKER_12: Should be the name of our band.
40:51
SPEAKER_12: Catna Musico.
40:53
SPEAKER_12: We're not masterminds.
40:55
SPEAKER_12: That'll be Joe Musico.
40:56
SPEAKER_12: And it was Charles Dieterick.
41:02
SPEAKER_12: If this is Charles Dieterick's doing, I wanted him as a defendant at the defense table facing these charges along with Canton Musico.
41:14
SPEAKER_12: And while this process was going on, we had now discovered this group called the Imperial Marines.
41:25
SPEAKER_01: It was Synodon's paramilitary group.
41:28
SPEAKER_13: A lot of paranoia and fear about being attacked by people from the outside who would come in, maybe even someday by law enforcement.
41:41
SPEAKER_13: It was the foundation of this group.
41:43
SPEAKER_13: Called the Imperial Marines.
41:47
SPEAKER_08: The Imperial Marines, which was a military force with its own form of martial arts called Sindo.
41:57
unknown: Sindo.
41:59
SPEAKER_06: There were many violent.
42:00
SPEAKER_06: They like Taekwondo involving the Imperial Marines.
42:06
SPEAKER_08: And Dieter was controlling them.
42:10
SPEAKER_08: They would do anything for him, including kill for him.
42:14
SPEAKER_09: In your um in your jujitsu days and your MMA days, did you ever encounter anyone uh practicing Sin Do?
42:21
SPEAKER_01: No.
42:22
SPEAKER_01: Fortunately, right?
42:23
SPEAKER_01: I who knows if I would have come out of the encounter alive.
42:27
SPEAKER_01: But I do want to read something from uh from that book again uh related to this.
42:34
SPEAKER_01: It says in December 1977, Time magazine responded to a growing chorus of former home place residents who had broken ranks with Diedrich over his changing partner's policy, which required couples to dissolve their marriages and take another partner.
42:51
SPEAKER_01: Diedrich responded in his typical bombastic fashion, denouncing the magazine and instructing his followers to and allies to harass time shareholders, taking a page out of the Union playbook.
43:04
SPEAKER_01: So now he's responding he's inspired by Cesar Chavez now, sitting the other way around.
43:09
SPEAKER_01: Diedrich ordered a boycott of the magazine and other media outlets that dared to paint Cinnanon in a negative light.
43:16
SPEAKER_01: However, unlike the UFW boycotts, Cinnanon's campaigns bordered on violence.
43:23
SPEAKER_01: In one instance, Cinnites picketed a stockholders' meeting of the American Broadcasting Corporation in New York for airing negative stories about Cinnanon.
43:31
SPEAKER_01: In the course of the protest, Matt Rand threatened ABC executives and their families with violence on their way home from work and at their residences.
43:40
SPEAKER_01: Another Cinnite spoke of the irrational rage among members and warned that the organization could not promise to control it.
43:48
SPEAKER_01: Meanwhile, news leaked that Diedrich had assembled a small paramilitary force at home place known as the Imperial Marines to do anything he asked to protect the organization.
44:03
SPEAKER_01: So people from the UFW are like, well, maybe we don't want to be affiliated with this.
44:09
SPEAKER_01: So attorneys from the UFW recognized similarities between the blind allegiance of Synonites to Diedrich and the culture of obedience Chavez was trying to impose on the volunteers.
44:22
SPEAKER_01: Some attorneys wanted to draw out the contradictions between Chavez's espoused belief in nonviolence and Diedrich's turn toward armed struggle.
44:33
SPEAKER_01: There was a small but vocal faction that advocated showing up at La Paz dressed and acting like Cinnanon's Imperial Marines, recalled Dalzell.
44:44
SPEAKER_01: Some wanted to do a full-scale protest by arriving with shaved heads and overalls, shotguns and chants of don't fuck with Cinnanon.
44:55
SPEAKER_01: So they were like they wanted a clown, they wanted to show how ridiculous this all was and how closely the UFW was becoming aligned with this by basically mocking it.
45:05
SPEAKER_01: And it says the attorneys had a laugh because they would have to, you know, for it for it to really work, they would all have to get vasectomies.
45:16
SPEAKER_09: You know, all this is reminding me of the Royal Chicana Air Force.
45:19
SPEAKER_09: I hope they had nothing to do with Yeah, me too.
45:25
SPEAKER_09: I hope they weren't inspired by the Imperial Marines of the C and Arms.
45:31
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
45:32
SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna read a little bit more from uh from this book.
45:38
SPEAKER_01: So the lawyers and members of the UFW decided that they were going to protest against these continued associations of Chavez and Diedrich and the UFW and Cinnanon, but they they wound up toning down their protest.
45:56
SPEAKER_01: It says in the book from the Jaws of Victory the group arrived wearing short-sleeved white shirts and skinny dark ties, a look that Dalzell described as an approximation of Mormon missionaries or LaRouche droids at the airport.
46:11
SPEAKER_01: The appearance captured the uniformity of behavior that derived from Cynanon, but had come to dominate the actions and thoughts of people living within La Paz as well.
46:23
SPEAKER_01: So here we're just seeing that within the UFW itself, uh, members were feeling they wanted to point out the inconsistencies of, you know, Chavez always talking about nonviolent struggle and uh working with people publicly, but yet adhering to the teachings of Cinnanon and Diedrich, and being this group that certainly advocated violence and wanted groupthink and complete control and authoritarian control of a people.
46:54
SPEAKER_01: So the things were um these two sides were seen as being incongruous.
46:59
SPEAKER_01: So let us continue.
47:10
SPEAKER_12: And then musical to kill Paul Morant.
47:15
SPEAKER_09: So wait, so he was killed.
47:20
SPEAKER_12: Musical Enchantment were interviewed.
47:22
SPEAKER_12: And as a result of that, we had now discovered both Joe Musico and I was muted.
47:30
SPEAKER_01: Answering your question, and I wasn't there anything.
47:34
SPEAKER_01: Basically, uh I don't know.
47:37
SPEAKER_09: Um, told us what happened to him.
47:40
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, they're not.
47:41
SPEAKER_01: It's kind of like a red herring.
47:42
SPEAKER_01: You know how these shows are.
47:44
SPEAKER_01: They put out all these red herrings to and they draw it out.
47:47
SPEAKER_01: I'm kind of curious now, though.
47:49
SPEAKER_01: I want to know what happened to Paul Morance.
47:54
SPEAKER_12: I knew that Charles Diedrich was a very powerful guy.
47:57
SPEAKER_12: We were informed that some of the people that had left the organization said Charles Diedrich had a sound system whereby they could all hear him, and then he would just expound on what he was thinking.
48:11
SPEAKER_07: When a person comes in the Cinnadon, we do not have a potentially violent person.
48:20
SPEAKER_07: We have a person that is looking for someone to tell him what to do.
48:27
unknown: Yeah.
48:28
SPEAKER_08: In Cynadon, they broadcast Charles Dietrich talking over the wire, and the wire was a very big deal for Cynadon life.
48:39
SPEAKER_13: Every facility and every public area of Cinnadon was wired into a system of leased phone lines.
48:50
SPEAKER_01: It's all very dystopian.
48:56
SPEAKER_08: I mean, people in Tamales Bay would never have even heard of the city.
49:00
SPEAKER_08: Tamales Bay, there's a big call in Santa Monica.
49:03
SPEAKER_08: But the wire was that connection.
49:08
SPEAKER_08: The wire helped communicate everything.
49:11
SPEAKER_13: Sit in on governance.
49:13
SPEAKER_09: He was a podcaster.
49:15
SPEAKER_13: I was thinking the thing.
49:18
SPEAKER_09: He was an innovator.
49:19
SPEAKER_13: He had a practice of writing down every word practically that truck said.
49:27
SPEAKER_13: Sort of a holy writ.
49:29
SPEAKER_13: And they were always recorded on brand new tapes.
49:32
SPEAKER_06: And we had every tape kept track of Chuck Dieterick rants about the enemy they were having on the outside.
49:41
SPEAKER_06: About, you know, we'll take care of them.
49:44
SPEAKER_06: We're gonna fight back.
49:45
SPEAKER_06: And we're gonna fight back on our terms, not on their terms.
49:50
SPEAKER_03: Paul Marantz was making some headway in letting the public know about what was happening with Cynanon.
49:58
SPEAKER_03: And Chuck decided that he wanted to do away with Paul Morant.
50:05
SPEAKER_13: And he began to rage against all lawyers.
50:09
SPEAKER_13: And he began to, you know, rage about we need to get rid of this lawyer.
50:15
SPEAKER_13: I feel like I'd like to rip off his own arm and beat him to death with it.
50:21
SPEAKER_13: Can you do us a favor?
50:22
SPEAKER_13: He was recorded on tape saying these things.
50:27
SPEAKER_13: Which is always smart.
50:29
SPEAKER_02: Mm-hmm.
50:30
SPEAKER_12: His words were thought to be so important that he was passing on after Watergate.
50:36
SPEAKER_12: It reminded me of people saying that, you know, God speaks to me and I'll tell you what he said.
50:42
SPEAKER_07: Until further notice, no member of the California Department of Corrections is permitted on Synadon property unless he has the permission of Charles Dietrich, Chairman of Cynanon.
50:58
SPEAKER_09: Chairman of the board, apparently.
51:00
SPEAKER_12: Charles Dietrich Peter expressed his strongly negative view of attorneys in general and Paul Morance specifically.
51:13
SPEAKER_12: If that was true, then I wanted to hear that.
51:17
SPEAKER_06: This one unit in the police department sent people to Central California as part of their investigation.
51:25
SPEAKER_06: It would have been the equivalent of a terrorism unit today.
51:43
SPEAKER_09: Compound and Waco, what do you call that place?
51:46
SPEAKER_09: Do you remember?
51:47
SPEAKER_09: I think you're still muted.
51:50
SPEAKER_01: God damn it.
51:53
SPEAKER_09: They were the uh branch dividians.
51:55
SPEAKER_09: There you go, the fucking branch dividians.
51:58
SPEAKER_09: God damn it.
51:59
SPEAKER_09: This is very reminiscent of that.
52:01
SPEAKER_09: Right?
52:01
SPEAKER_01: Like it could have totally gone that way too.
52:04
SPEAKER_01: Like it wasn't.
52:04
SPEAKER_01: And it it didn't.
52:05
SPEAKER_01: And and I mean, I don't believe so, but it it could have, right?
52:10
SPEAKER_01: Like everything was in place for this very volatile situation to just spill over and result in all these all kinds of deaths.
52:20
SPEAKER_12: We knocked on the door and said, here we are, gave them the search warrant.
52:28
SPEAKER_12: The search went very peaceably, and they made sure everybody in Cynon stood back.
52:35
SPEAKER_12: They did not interfere.
52:37
SPEAKER_12: So for all the bravado and shit talking.
52:39
SPEAKER_12: Major crimes investigating detectives.
52:41
SPEAKER_12: They folded pretty easily when law enforcement actually showed.
52:44
SPEAKER_12: That had this particular rant about lawyers that had broken arms, broken legs, cutting the arms off.
52:52
SPEAKER_12: Narrative.
52:54
SPEAKER_12: And we seized that.
52:56
SPEAKER_12: And that became the pivotal piece of evidence.
53:02
SPEAKER_09: So this guy didn't even have foresight to when we found the tape somewhere for me for the first time.
53:11
SPEAKER_12: I felt a tremendous sense of relief and vindication.
53:19
SPEAKER_12: I was sitting there listening to Charles Dieterick soliciting crimes, including everything that Paul Morance had been saying for all this time.
53:31
SPEAKER_12: I felt the first time that I 11,000 court and convict Chuck of conspiracy theory.
53:39
SPEAKER_09: 11,463.
53:43
SPEAKER_08: It was no secret that Charles Dietrich wanted to at least hurt Paul Morance, if not kill him.
53:49
SPEAKER_08: So Lance Kenton and Joe Musico thought up this plan and they went and found a rattlesnake.
53:58
SPEAKER_06: It was a four-foot rattlesnake put into this little tiny mailbox.
54:04
SPEAKER_06: Must have been crazy mad by the time Paul got there.
54:08
SPEAKER_09: Wait, so were these guys part of the Praetorian Guard too?
54:10
SPEAKER_09: Or were they the Praetorian Guard?
54:13
SPEAKER_01: No, they were.
54:14
SPEAKER_01: They were identified as members of the uh Space Marines or whatever they were called.
54:22
SPEAKER_01: So I I want to um you had mentioned a haircut earlier, and I I may I wanted to make sure to get to that quote.
54:29
SPEAKER_01: Uh it's related to the game and how they they started to crave like Chavez started to crave to play the game and just to be able to go off on his members.
54:41
SPEAKER_01: And I guess it says here, uh the differences in behavior in and out of the game narrowed.
54:48
SPEAKER_01: Chavez described an incident when he attended a fundraising dance in Bakersfield with a group of people from La Paz.
54:56
SPEAKER_01: Man, it's always Bakersfield.
54:57
SPEAKER_01: Right.
54:58
SPEAKER_01: They were drinking beer and got into a fight.
55:02
SPEAKER_01: Asked at a board meeting how he intended to deal with them, Chavez used the language of Cinnanon.
55:09
SPEAKER_01: So this is all Cesar Chavez here.
55:11
SPEAKER_01: That's where the chant starts, right?
55:13
SPEAKER_09: Since we've said weather.
55:17
SPEAKER_01: So here's uh Cesar Chavez.
55:20
SPEAKER_01: Brother, we're going to have a fucking haircut.
55:23
SPEAKER_01: We're gonna kick somebody out of La Paz, we'll bring some of our tough people, and we'll have a meeting in my office, and we just chew their fucking ass out, scream at them and point out their mistakes.
55:35
SPEAKER_01: If they don't want to admit it, we just ram it down their throat, you know, make them feel like fucking shit.
55:42
SPEAKER_01: It helps.
55:43
SPEAKER_01: You take one of those, you don't want to go through that fucking haircut again.
55:48
SPEAKER_01: Wait, who's who's dropping all the F-bombs here?
55:51
SPEAKER_01: Uh Cesar Chavez.
55:52
SPEAKER_01: That's Chavez?
55:53
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
55:54
SPEAKER_01: Get out of here.
55:55
SPEAKER_01: He had quite the potty mouth.
55:56
SPEAKER_01: If you uh What?
55:58
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so in keeping with Cinnadon, I don't know if he was doing this before he started hang hanging out with his buddy Diedrick, but they would record everything at their meetings and the game and and all these interactions at the UFW.
56:13
SPEAKER_01: So when they were doing research to write these books, they had this wealth of like tapes uh so they could just pull direct quotes from uh from the arguments that they were having.
56:25
SPEAKER_01: And if you get one of these books and you just do a search, like I have it on my Kindle, just do a search for like the word fuck, and like a hundred results come up of just Cesar Chavez like cussing up a storm.
56:40
SPEAKER_09: Wow.
56:41
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, meek and Meek and Mild Chavez cussing up a storm, dropping F-bombs left and right.
56:46
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, a little display.
56:48
SPEAKER_09: It's a little bit one of those lessons that comes with being part of the Imperial Guard, or what's it called again?
56:53
SPEAKER_09: Uh Space Force.
56:55
SPEAKER_09: Space Force.
56:55
SPEAKER_09: No, but but I'm thinking here, so Great Force.
56:58
SPEAKER_09: So if the terminology of hair doing haircuts and unions refers to thinning out and getting rid of people who are a hindrance and bringing the group down, I mean that's very coincidental to the fact that the Cynons were shaving their heads.
57:17
SPEAKER_09: Right?
57:17
SPEAKER_09: Like there's some kind of connection there.
57:19
SPEAKER_09: Think you're onto something.
57:21
SPEAKER_09: Hmm.
57:21
SPEAKER_01: That's a very interesting graduate students take it.
57:25
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
57:25
SPEAKER_01: I have good observation there, Dr.
57:27
SPEAKER_01: Arian.
57:28
SPEAKER_12: Charles Diedrich with conspiracy to commit murder.
57:32
SPEAKER_12: But now I needed to arrest him.
57:37
SPEAKER_12: We were informed by some of the Cynon they had a place in Lake Havasu, Arizona, and this chuck was there.
57:49
SPEAKER_12: Wait, but but but has Melbourne under the leadership of the local sheriff to the house.
57:56
SPEAKER_12: The one with the rattlesnake in it?
57:58
SPEAKER_12: When we got there, I said, I want to see Charles Dietrich, and they said that wouldn't be possible.
58:04
SPEAKER_12: He wasn't well.
58:05
SPEAKER_12: And I said, Well, I have an arrest warrant here, and I'm gonna see him, whether you guys like it or not.
58:12
SPEAKER_12: Send on if you're listening.
58:14
SPEAKER_12: They took me to where he was.
58:18
SPEAKER_12: He was laying down, he was responding, but I couldn't make sense of his words.
58:24
SPEAKER_12: He was babbling, he gave all the appearances of a man who was very, very drunk.
58:30
SPEAKER_08: When they arrested him, he was so drunk that he had to be carried out in a stretcher, and there was a bottle by his side.
58:38
SPEAKER_08: And so Dietrich, who his whole life really was premised on sobriety.
58:45
SPEAKER_08: That's king shit.
58:46
SPEAKER_08: Had been drinking for some time.
58:51
SPEAKER_12: Hey, wait a minute.
58:52
SPEAKER_12: We took to Los Angeles, they booked him into jail, and they gave him medical treatment.
58:57
SPEAKER_12: He needed some sort of way to detox.
59:00
SPEAKER_12: They should put him in Cynon to the time.
59:03
SPEAKER_12: Right.
59:03
SPEAKER_12: For Charles Dieterick to face trial.
59:06
SPEAKER_09: Or AA.
59:07
SPEAKER_09: Yeah.
59:08
SPEAKER_09: Back through the room.
59:10
SPEAKER_09: We're trying to do that.
59:14
SPEAKER_09: Not that I care for AA.
59:16
SPEAKER_12: He was examined by independent people.
59:17
SPEAKER_09: You better do better than AAM.
59:19
SPEAKER_09: When you're already at AA, it's like the trial might not continue to be able to do that.
59:29
SPEAKER_01: So no contest and was sentenced to five years probation with the$5,000.
59:35
SPEAKER_01: That's it.
59:37
SPEAKER_01: And he was banned from associating with Cinnanon ever again.
59:41
SPEAKER_01: So did Cinnamon survive?
59:43
SPEAKER_06: Lance Kenton Joe Music became for sentencing.
59:51
SPEAKER_06: Because Paul had learned what cults do to people.
59:58
SPEAKER_01: Lance Kenton and Joe Culped Contest to attempted murder and were sentenced to one year in LA County jail, three years probation.
1:00:08
SPEAKER_12: My principal goal was that the truth be known.
1:00:11
SPEAKER_12: And I felt that by this stage, the truth was known.
1:00:17
SPEAKER_12: Their reputation had turned.
1:00:19
SPEAKER_12: And the general public thought of them as a cult capable of very serious criminal activity.
1:00:28
SPEAKER_12: And that really was the end of them.
1:00:32
SPEAKER_09: Well, I mean, to be fair, the general public could have probably cared less about Cinnabon if it wasn't for this high-profile case.
1:00:40
SPEAKER_09: Yeah.
1:00:40
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, most people probably didn't even know who the hell they were.
1:00:42
SPEAKER_01: Right, who?
1:00:43
SPEAKER_01: Cinnabon?
1:00:44
SPEAKER_01: Cinnabon's Cinnabon.
1:00:47
SPEAKER_01: It says here, May 19th, 1982, the IRS revoked Cinnanon's tax exempt status.
1:00:54
SPEAKER_01: Good.
1:00:54
SPEAKER_01: Tax exempt.
1:00:55
SPEAKER_01: The church just taxed.
1:00:56
SPEAKER_06: They were forced to pay$17 million in back taxes.
1:01:00
SPEAKER_06: Nice.
1:01:01
SPEAKER_06: Actually bankrupted them in the end.
1:01:03
SPEAKER_06: Good.
1:01:04
SPEAKER_01: Fuckers.
1:01:05
SPEAKER_01: So there we go.
1:01:07
SPEAKER_01: Cynonon.
1:01:08
SPEAKER_09: The cult of Cynon.
1:01:09
SPEAKER_09: You know, one of my biggest fears is if you say Cynon three times in front of a mirror, Chuck Dieterick appears.
1:01:16
SPEAKER_01: He appears behind you and tells you to shave your head, have an abortion, and a vasectomy.
1:01:24
SPEAKER_01: But earlier you were talking about how um if this is really what Chavez wanted to create, right?
1:01:31
SPEAKER_01: Like if that was his end goal.
1:01:33
SPEAKER_01: And so I've got this quote from the Crusades of César Chavez.
1:01:38
SPEAKER_01: Um where they're having an argument about the UFW's close association with Cinnanon.
1:01:47
SPEAKER_01: And uh he and this guy, Richard, I don't have his last name here.
1:01:51
SPEAKER_01: I'd have to Richard Chavez.
1:01:54
SPEAKER_01: Um no relation to I don't know if they're related.
1:01:58
SPEAKER_01: Uh I I did a screen grab because my um my Kindle is all screwed up, so I didn't grab his name.
1:02:03
SPEAKER_01: But this is from the Crusades of Cesar Chavez, a biography.
1:02:07
SPEAKER_01: Richard is is arguing.
1:02:09
SPEAKER_09: Wait, wasn't Richard his brother's name?
1:02:11
SPEAKER_01: I think I I think so.
1:02:12
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think that was his brother.
1:02:14
SPEAKER_01: And uh you know, Chavez is telling him, like, you know, we we need to do it, and he's explaining stuff to Richard, and Richard is like, well then, you know, I'm kind of worried.
1:02:25
SPEAKER_01: I'm a practical man.
1:02:26
SPEAKER_01: I'm asking you a question because other people feel the same way, but they're afraid to say it.
1:02:32
SPEAKER_01: And this is about the close associations with uh Cynon and the UFW and the whole direction they're going.
1:02:39
SPEAKER_01: He says, I'm saying it because other people are thinking it, but they're afraid to say it.
1:02:45
SPEAKER_01: Encountering resistance, Chavez upped the ante with another familiar move.
1:02:50
SPEAKER_01: So this is Cesar Chavez responding to Richard.
1:02:54
SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna tell you something.
1:02:55
SPEAKER_01: It's not threatening, it's just plain fucking fact.
1:02:58
SPEAKER_01: If this union doesn't turn around and become a movement, I want no part of it.
1:03:04
SPEAKER_01: I'll help you and everything, but I don't want to be in charge.
1:03:07
SPEAKER_01: I want to do something else.
1:03:09
SPEAKER_01: I tell you, because that's the way I feel.
1:03:13
SPEAKER_01: So I think that's very telling of what um Chavez was hoping to get out of uh their continued relationship with Cinnanon and the direction that he wanted to take the US.
1:03:25
SPEAKER_09: I'm just trying to imagine a bunch of uh farm workers with shame hands.
1:03:33
SPEAKER_01: Well, and then if you read these books, you you you come to find out that Chavez just kind of he loves his compound in La Paz, right?
1:03:42
SPEAKER_01: Like he saw the Cinnanon compound and he's like, oh, we need our own version of that.
1:03:46
SPEAKER_01: And he seldom left.
1:03:48
SPEAKER_01: He wanted it to be like self-sustaining.
1:03:50
SPEAKER_01: How far was La Paz from from Deleno?
1:03:53
SPEAKER_01: Uh I don't I don't know.
1:03:55
SPEAKER_01: I'd have to look that up.
1:03:57
SPEAKER_01: But um I mean because La Paz is that like a like a town, like a or was it that's just the name that he did?
1:04:03
SPEAKER_01: I think La Paz is the name that he gave to the compound.
1:04:05
SPEAKER_01: Oh, okay.
1:04:08
SPEAKER_01: And uh he uh he basically he kind he sort of stopped talking to um farm workers.
1:04:15
SPEAKER_01: Like he wouldn't he wouldn't go out and interact with the the union members anymore.
1:04:21
SPEAKER_01: He had other people doing that.
1:04:23
SPEAKER_01: He wanted to remain in his compound and and try to turn it into uh his own personal version of Cynanon.
1:04:30
SPEAKER_01: So all of this stuff was new to me, man.
1:04:32
SPEAKER_01: It was pretty mind-blowing.
1:04:34
SPEAKER_01: The Imperial Farm Worker Movement.
1:04:41
SPEAKER_01: The United Imperial Farm Marines.
1:04:45
SPEAKER_01: Dun dun dun dun dun ding ding so uh any any last thoughts?
1:04:52
SPEAKER_09: I don't know.
1:04:53
SPEAKER_09: I mean this is kind of um tough digest.
1:05:00
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, there's definitely a lot to to uh cue on here because I mean as I was saying earlier, this is not something that's usually addressed when we talk about Cesar Chavez.
1:05:13
SPEAKER_09: And you know, I've made comments before uh about Cesar Chavez, like when when the so-called you know, quote unquote Hispanic month comes around and we're looking for figures that represent our community, like Chavez is one of those people, is like the one, right?
1:05:32
SPEAKER_09: And I'm thinking, you know, is that the only you know, person that we have in our especially even within the Chicano movement?
1:05:38
SPEAKER_09: I'm not even talking about within the whole broader Spanish-speaking, Spanish, uh last name, surname, Hispanic, Latino, Latinx, whatever you want to call it, community, right?
1:05:47
SPEAKER_09: Like, even just within the Chicano, Mexicano community, is he the only person that we have here that we can tout as someone who did something beneficial and positive for the community?
1:05:58
SPEAKER_09: Do we have do we not have other people in our community that we can also you know um focus on and and and share their stories?
1:06:10
SPEAKER_09: Um we absolutely do, we just we never hear about them, right?
1:06:13
SPEAKER_09: We never we never hear about them because people are just so focused on Cesar Chavez.
1:06:17
SPEAKER_09: Like he was the end-all be-all of Mexican-American civil rights, yeah.
1:06:22
SPEAKER_01: And it's funny because he really wasn't, right?
1:06:25
SPEAKER_01: Like he was a union organizer, that's what he was.
1:06:28
SPEAKER_01: He was a labor organizer who happened to be Mexican American.
1:06:32
SPEAKER_01: Like he wasn't an immigrant's rights personally like to be called a Chicano.
1:06:38
SPEAKER_09: No, I've never seen any record of him referring to himself as a whole the that whole um uh antipathy that a lot of Mexican Americans have towards the term because it's associated or you know, when it when it before it became what it became the political term and the identity term in the Chicano movement, you know, people used to um use the term kind of like in a playful way, like joking and um riffing on each other, and also kind of to look down upon people who were rural farm workers.
1:07:13
SPEAKER_09: And and so he kind of saw himself above that.
1:07:16
SPEAKER_09: He he didn't see himself as a Chicano.
1:07:19
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, when we talk about Chicano heroes, like Cesar Chavez is like if if if the school children, you know, in pre-K through twelve know any Chicano leaders at all, Cesar Chavez is the one.
1:07:33
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, even though he didn't call himself a Chicano or wasn't necessarily part of the broader Chicano movement, yeah.
1:07:39
SPEAKER_01: And I think that's the one lesson to take away from these revelations of um, you know, his involvement with this bizarre cult is we need to get away from this hero worship, this blind hero worship that we tend to have towards you know the icons of our communities, because once you start scratching at that surface and you find out all the ugly stuff, you have one of two choices, right?
1:08:04
SPEAKER_01: You can either accept it for what it is and and basically own it, or you can say, no, no, no, that never happened, or that's not important.
1:08:13
SPEAKER_01: And basically, I think when you do that, you're surrendering the narrative and you're giving it to like the right wingers who would love you know, they love to use stuff like this to discredit Chicanos and Mexican Americans and all that.
1:08:26
SPEAKER_01: And when we dismiss it and refuse to even acknowledge it, they're more than happy to jump on it and control that narrative.
1:08:35
SPEAKER_01: But if we at least recognize it and then okay, well, let's talk about the complexities of this, let's talk about what this actually means, what was going on at the time, why do we think this stuff happened?
1:08:45
SPEAKER_01: Because it's all fascinating.
1:08:46
SPEAKER_01: But for me, it's the ultimate lesson is you know, don't you know knock it off with the blind hero worship because it it it never comes out well, right?
1:08:57
SPEAKER_01: It it never ends well.
1:09:00
SPEAKER_01: Because you know what I like to say, my friend.
1:09:05
SPEAKER_01: The truth is like medicine.
1:09:09
SPEAKER_01: It doesn't always taste good, but it's always good for you.