Latest / The Dustlight Archives / NXIVM: Episode 12: Rainbow Cultural Gardens, The LeBarons, and Data Harvesting

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NXIVM: Episode 12: Rainbow Cultural Gardens, The LeBarons, and Data Harvesting · The Dustlight Archives

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_01: We are rounding the bend now, and before long we will finally be at the end.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: Or at least, every rock I can overturn for this moment will be flipped and laying in the sunlight for anyone who wants to look.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_01: In some ways, I have saved the parts most difficult and hopefully best for last.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's time to stare into the most hidden areas of this thing and see what can become apparent as our eyes adjust.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: This is an episode about two disparate stories that often get ignored when talking about Nexium, that I find to be some of the most revealing.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: The thread that ties these stories together is data collection.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: Two separate moments where a mountain of information is gathered that the right people would pay a lot of money for, whether that is in the commissioning of the gathering or the collection of the results, before the world pretended that it disappeared into the ether, if they in fact acknowledged it at all.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_01: If I were to sum up this entire Nexium series in five words, it would be money laundering and data gathering.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, this episode will be no different because things this secretive and expensive rarely exist for only one reason.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to the Deslate Archives.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I think the gap between how important it is to truly understanding this story, and how little has actually been reported on about it is massive.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_01: I think with enough information about the institutions and people around it, enough historical context, and enough logical inference and informed speculation, we might be able to get a pretty good idea of what exactly is going on here.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: First of all, I think it's important to understand it most likely served several different functions.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: The official story will tell you this thing, if it gets mentioned at all, was basically the logical endpoint of Keith Rainier's ego and the psychological hold he supposedly had over all of these wealthy aristocrats.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: It says that obviously, once he has these people under his control, his lust for power can never be satiated.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: And the next step for him is to take their children, create a multi-generational group of loyal international billionaire zombies at his behest, and also to get to try out his mind control techniques on the brain of a newly formed human.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: The thinking goes, if he can get Emiliano Salinas so committed to him that he is ready and willing to help Keith become president of Mexico and turn Naxium into an actual world state, something I cannot stress to you enough is actually speculated, might have come to pass if he hadn't been stopped in the fevered, true crime-riddled brains of some of the people who have actually written books commissioned and distributed by major publishers on the subject.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: The possibilities of what Keith Reneri could do to a brain that is prelingual are endless.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: Schools existing in places as far flung as Belfast, Ireland, or Madrid, Spain, with a tuition fee of$120,000 per year per child, obviously built from the parents of the ultra-powerful, would create a group of super geniuses that speak seven different languages, all as their first language, and are devoted to their leader, Keith Reniery, as if he is a god.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_01: The infant would be taught by a group of 14 nannies.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: Each day of the week would be devoted to a different language with two nannies a day and alternating 12-hour shifts, guaranteeing 24-7 monitoring and care.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: This would all be recorded and documented, with nothing that happens in the school not being under the watchful eye of a set of cameras.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: The patient zero for this project would be a supposed orphan named Galen that Nexia member Kristen Keith had in her care, and which would be revealed to be Keith Renier's child when she eventually escaped with him in 2014.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: We don't have any idea what Galen is like or how he is doing, because his privacy as a minor has been pretty strictly protected.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: But according to those who parrot the official story, the myth within Nexium was that he was a polyglot who could fluently speak seven different languages and was doing advanced math and physics by the time he was a toddler.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_01: Realistically, and something I think me and these various authors agree on, is that the most likely outcome for a child raised in those conditions is that they would be able to mimic basic phenomes or isolated words, but would not be fluent in any one language.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_01: They also would presumably have extreme attachment disorders.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: Either way, the schools were shut down sometime around 2018 when Nexium imploded, and that's more or less the typical story that is told as far as the history of rainbow cultural gardens and its reason for existence.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: The theory I will posit here is that this is woefully inadequate, and even with the limited information we have, we can put a lot more of the pieces together.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_01: First of all, there's absolutely no proof that the truly powerful families in Nexium were putting their kids in these schools.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: And really the idea they were just comes from the fact that it seems like the obvious conclusion, if you buy the whole Keith Rainier as genius supervillain, and everyone else as dupes theory, and the hefty price tag of$120,000 a year, which rivals the most expensive elementary boarding schools in the world.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_01: This idea starts to fall apart and the cracks start showing when we first realized that a lot of the wealthiest families were actually involved in the administrative side of these schools.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: Sarah Bromfman was the CEO, and India Oxenberg was an operational supervisor, for instance.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: Hilariously, yet again, our mastermind cult leader has absolutely no ownership or formal title regarding these schools that people will claim were his.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: I know I've pointed this out before in other contexts, but I will never be stop being shocked at the absolute intellectual and journalistic laziness necessary to claim that this is some sort of brilliant ploy to avoid legal culpability, as opposed to him just being a guy so untrusted and with so little leverage that nobody lets him put his name on anything.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: Another noteworthy aspect of all of this is that a shockingly small amount of children actually went to these schools.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: Like, as far as we can tell, based on promotional material, trial testimony, and legal filings, we're talking about maybe 30 to 50 kids spread out around roughly a dozen schools.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: And most of those kids were in these small handful of Mexican schools.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, the one group of high-level Nexium members who seemed to actually put their own kids into these schools were the Mexicans.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_01: Emiliano Salinas, Rosalora Junco, and Edgar Boone all had their kids enrolled.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_01: And I think this once again goes back to the aspect of Nexium in Mexico that was unique to it, where it functioned more like a fraternity or secret society than the US side did.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, Rainbow Cultural Gardens was always a weird behavioral modification institute, but as we covered earlier in our series when we were discussing boarding schools, it's not like the wealthy are opposed to submitting their children to psychologically destructive experiments, particularly when there's a boutique or exclusive element to it.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_01: I also think that in the same way the Mexican elite are in the habit of sending their children to Ivy Leagues in the U.S., that there would be a precedent for sending their young kids to something like Rainbow Cultural Gardens, which does have its roots in the U.S.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_01: as well.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: Like, it'll be less about whatever the actual curriculum is and more about sending your kids to a place that people like the Bromfmans and the Oxenbergs are promoting and running.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: But when you have a dozen international schools with 30 to 50 kids combined, it's obvious the main functional use here isn't as a school.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_01: So what is it?
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: One of the obvious answers that proves to be a returning theme is yet again as a front for money laundering.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: These schools make for particularly well-obscured invoice-based service transfers.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously, shell companies have existed for a long time, and they definitely still are a tool for financial crimes, but there are a few problems with them that invoice-based service transfers solve.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_01: First of all, shell companies are a comparatively crude instrument for financial crimes, because anybody doing a financial audit is going to want an explanation for what was bought with the money, and if you can't produce a clear line of ownership, you may be accused of financial fraud.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: But something like an education is a lot more abstract as a product.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: Second of all, at the price rate of$10,000 per month, it doesn't even require that many students in order to move large sums of money around.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_01: And the locations of these schools add more fuel to this idea.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_01: One, for instance, is in Belfast, Ireland, which is hard to square with the fact that Nexium didn't have a presence in the area.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_01: But when you consider Sarah Bronfman moved to the UK around 2012 and got involved in all sorts of shady financial and political schemes with her Libyan politician husband, Bosset Igtett, and the complex bridge between UK corporate law and the Republic of Ireland's banking and tax system, then combine that with Britain and Ireland's relatively decentralized early childhood regul education regulations, it all starts to make a lot more sense.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_01: And in case you were wondering, the Belfast location definitely piqued my interest, considering the history of something like Kincora Boys Home.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_01: But as far as I can tell, the connective thread really comes down to loose education regulations and the sort of legal gray zone the area exists in in many ways.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_01: Another location like Madrid, which also seems pretty random at first, starts to look less so when you examine the relationship of the Mexican elites to Spain.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's always been a natural, cultural, and English congruent ally, great for taking money from the Americas and moving it into the European economy.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_01: There's also a long history of Mexican aristocracy fleeing to Spain.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, three modern Mexican presidents in a row, Carlos Salinas, Enrique Peña Nieto, and Felipe Calderón, all left for Spain after ending their political career in scandal.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_01: That is to say nothing of the various corporate oligarchs and wealthy land barons that have done the same thing.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_01: Another aspect to this is the human trafficking of the nannies.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I think this can't be disentangled from the actual tuition itself.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_01: These women working for these schools were often victims of the exact sorts of trafficking schemes I highlighted in my earlier episode on Elizabeth Kara Georgievich.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_01: They were brought into the country through shady LLCs or hiring firms, placed into debt bondage, often with their visas stripped from them.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_01: So when somebody is paying this$10,000 a month to ostensibly have their toddler educated, they're also oftentimes getting live-in-house work in maid service as well.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_01: Also, the families doing the actual work of running Rainbow Cultural Gardens are able to harvest blackmail on the families paying for their services.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_01: I have already talked to you guys in earlier episodes about how untrustworthy Frank Harlato is and how deep his ties to the Bruntmans go.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_01: But I do think that given it's basically the only account that even purports to be a first hand account, it's worth looking at.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: So here we go.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_01: Hi there.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_01: I used to work for Rainbow Cultural Gardens as a nanny and to teach my native language.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: This method was very strange as we are not allowed to say no if a child wants to do anything.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_01: We have to let them do it.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_01: Even if a child wants to put their fingers on a hot pan or hit people or steal something.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_01: There were no teachings of limits or boundaries, and children were constantly exposed to different languages, and they looked so confused.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_01: A rainbow cultural garden child was only allowed to communicate with rainbow cultural garden children.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_01: I felt very sorry for the children.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_01: However, people whom were working at this company were very nice and positive.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_01: In parentheses, she puts too optimistic.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_01: And they were very secretive.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_01: That is my experience.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_01: I have worked for Rainbow Cultural Gardens.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_01: Pretty strange place, I have to say.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_01: Now, the one other place we can look to for any information on what was going on here is another school named Le Campus in France that was actually run by Sarah Bronfman and her husband, Libyan politician, Boston Igtet.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_01: And the time immediately after Nexium was shut down.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_01: Like, Claire Bronfman is currently being indicted, and she has the mayor in France, Sarah does, endorsing this school she's opening, that's operationally basically indistinguishable from Rainbow Cultural Gardens, down to the nanny rotations, the seven different languages, the 24-7 surveillance, and the extremely high price tag to enroll.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's an incredibly strange move, and it's interesting because Sarah was the CEO of Rainbow Cultural Gardens, and was she really trying to keep the grift going?
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_01: It's odd.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_01: It's also even more odd that it almost worked.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_01: Once press started coming out about it, she was too exposed and chose to shut it down.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_01: But I mean, she got the mayor to explicitly endorse the school and its curriculum as trials over Nexium were currently ongoing.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_01: She changed the name to Aethel Education Group.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: And as far as I can tell, it seems like she really thought she was going to be able to continue running this grift.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean, to her credit, she was almost right because it almost worked.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_01: I also think part of the answer may lay in her husband, Boston Igta.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_01: This guy was definitely a Western proxy who helped push regime change and was, in fact, the co-founder of a group called the Independent Libya Foundation.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: Right after the fall of Gaddafi in 2011, he became special envoy to the Libyan National Transitional Council and used Bromfman money to run for Prime Minister as well.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_01: He positioned himself as a Western educated tech and business modernizer who can manage Libya's pretty staggering amount of oil reserves.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_01: And things really start to click into place a little more when you realize the name of the company he used to manage those reserves was Aethel Energy.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_01: So Aethel Energy and the Aethel Education Group both exist under this same umbrella of the Aethel Corporation.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: Now, let's also throw in one more fact.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_01: I mentioned that Rainbow Cultural Garden School in Belfast a little while ago, and during the time that was open, Sarah and her husband were living in Britain.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_01: Combine that with the particularly unique and easy ability to transition money through various banking systems in the UK, as well as the looser regulatory frameworks for what constitutes early childhood education, and you got some sort of pretty wild money laundering stew going.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: It sure looks to me like she's collecting a vast amount of money offering these tuitions, something hard to trace with a very abstract value, moving it through networks with unique and relatively loose banking regulations like the Britain-Ireland border, and pushing this money into her husband's larger energy conglomerate, where it can be used for all sorts of things, from real estate to political campaigns to personally claimed profit.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_01: But okay.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_01: Now that we have all of that laid out, let's stop fucking around and let's get a little bit weird with it.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_01: Because the fact is, this school was explicitly created with extreme behavior modification as one of its main goals.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_01: And the neurologist we know that consulted on this school and helped craft it is Brandon Porter.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_01: The man I mentioned in my episode on Mark Vicente.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_01: If you recall, he was receiving videos from Mark Vicente of Mexican drug cartels torturing people to death and hooking electrodes to women's brains in order to measure their responses, like he was the doctor in a clockwork orange.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_01: More on that in the second half.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_01: And the main doctor overseeing Rainbow Cultural Gardens, evaluating, monitoring, and enforcing protocols on the children, as well as the nannies, was Dr.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_01: Danielle Roberts, who is the same physician who held down women and branded them in Dominus Obsequious Sororum.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_01: And this data they got didn't just disappear into the void.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: The Bronfmans almost certainly have some of it.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_01: So does the FBI.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_01: Also, almost certainly a place like Interfor.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't think necessarily that any of them are selling the data outright, or even directly referencing it, but these groups have their fingers in so many pies that the information they gathered has the ability to leak out all over the place.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_01: In government tests, in new age wellness groups or business seminars, in other schools currently operating right now.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_01: Whatever more grounded financial crimes and labor trafficking was going on, this was also a school for toddlers run by a group whose main psychologist and doctor are two complete psychopaths.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_01: And not just two complete psychopaths, but specifically ones who seem very much in the vein of a Jolly On West or a Ewan Cameron.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_01: And another who seems to be following in the tradition not too far off from something like what was happening in Abu Ghraib.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean, let's talk about the rainbow symbolism for a second, too, because I think anybody.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Who's spent any significant amount of time researching parapolitics knows it carries a heavy symbolic weight, particularly when it comes to behavior modification.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_01: This is symbolism that oftentimes represents the splitting apart of the mind into component parts, like light being refracted through a prism, full spectrum dominance, or forced dissociative identity disorder, all of which would absolutely not have been lost on these doctors or those familiar with neurolinguistic programming.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_01: And this is the part that drives me nuts, that I still rack my brain about even now.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_01: Like, I think I have a pretty good grasp on the more material-grounded elements of what is going on here, but there's this itch in my brain, something I can't get rid of.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: It tells me there's something deeper, more metaphysical, more esoteric going on here.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't know what to do with that information, other than present all of this as clear as I can, and let us just sit with it.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_01: Another thing that gets brought up in relation to Nexium that I don't think we can wrap up this series without addressing, and to be clear, we probably have one more episode after this, is the LeBaron family.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_01: Now, they are a Mormon family who lived in Salt Lake City, Utah until the early 1900s.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_01: They were devout members of the LDS until the Church of the Latter-day Saints banned polygamy, at which point the patriarch of the family at the time, staring down polygamy charges from the U.S.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_01: government, Alma Dair LeBaron Sr., escaped with his family to Chihuahua, Mexico, so they could keep practicing their own specific brand of Mormonism.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_01: In the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, they established a whole commune situation down below the border called Colonia LeBaron, and he had many children, most notably Joel Ross, Irville, and Verlan.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_01: The LeBaron family and their acolytes had their own little breakaway sect of Mormonism, which was questionable, increasingly diverting from the LDS, creating its own belief system and theology, but wouldn't spiral out into full-on nefariousness until 1951, when Almadea LeBaron Sr., the man who originally brought them to Mexico, died.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_01: For a while, the four brothers, seeking control over their father's religious inheritance, managed to exist with some level of unity.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, they even incorporated another church called the Church of the Firstborn in the fullness of times, and besides being an awful name that in no way rolls off the tongue, this managed to work over the next decade or so.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_01: Now, there's all sorts of stuff going on here that we're going to just kind of paper over to get to our point.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_01: And the basic story goes like this.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_01: Joel was the main prophet of the religion, and Irvil was the muscle.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_01: They had two different visions for the church.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_01: Joel's much more chill, and Ervil's considerably less so.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_01: Irv's writing and doctrinal beliefs over time got more stringent and militant and controlling.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_01: He specifically got obsessed with his own interpretations of Brigham Young's doctrines, and in particular, the idea of blood atonement.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_01: The basic idea behind blood atonement is almost exactly what the name makes it sound like.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_01: The laws of God supersede all civil, federal, and state laws, and anyone who committed apostasy, which could be defined pretty widely, whether it was leaving the church, refusing to hand over your property and money, or just generally disobeying him, their soul could only be cleansed if their physical blood spilled on the dirt.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_01: And not just that, but executing through blood atonement was actually an act of love for the person you killed because you were saving their soul from eternal damnation.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_01: Now I know this all sounds incredibly normal and like things are going to turn out great, but believe it or not, this turned into a weird, violent extortion racket to the point where Irvale built a paramilitary group of religiously motivated criminals around him and even began to extort his own brothers.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_01: At a certain point in 1970, Joel and his brothers Ross and Verlan decided they've had enough, and they excommunicate Irville, who breaks away with his gang of armed zealots and creates yet another church, the Church of the Lamb of God.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_01: One of the first doctrines passed were that his brothers were guilty of apostasy and all needed to pay with their lives through blood atonement.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_01: And Irville was not fucking around.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_01: In 1972, he sets up a meeting with Joel under the guise of ironing out some property disputes.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_01: And when Joel shows up with a few followers, Irville is nowhere to be found.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, being many miles away, establishing an alibi.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_01: But his thugs are there, and they proceed to viciously beat Joel within an inch of his life before shooting him point blank in the head, driving his body out to a vanket, garbage-strewn lot outside Ensenada, and dumping his body in the dirt.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_01: Now, Irville imagined that Joel's church would capitulate once their leader was executed, but instead they rallied around Verlin, who honestly just wanted to run his church and be left alone.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_01: Hoping to put some distance between him and his brother, he moved himself and his followers onto a small, desolate agricultural settlement outside Baja, California.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_01: But Irville, being an absolute maniac, drafted a decree declaring the settlement an enemy stronghold subject to complete destruction under the name of Blood Atonement.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_01: So, on the night of New Year's Eve, at the beginning of the year 1975, about a dozen men, armed with Molotov cocktails and a variety of guns sneak into the settlement while everyone is sleeping, and they just start lighting the place up.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_01: The main objective was obviously to kill Verwin, but he wasn't even there that night, and instead a few other members of the church die.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_01: This really freaked out everybody and let them know just how far Irville was willing to take this conflict, including attacking a settlement full of women and children that are really just trying to mind their own business.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_01: The heat in Mexico gets a little too much for Irvil at this point, now that his church is engaging in flat-out paramilitary warfare, and he sneaks back across the border, moving between a series of safe houses in places like San Diego, Salt Lake City, and Denver, and continues to just lose his goddamn mind.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I feel like there has to be more going on here than the story as it's typically told, but we really don't have time to get into the nuances of Mormandio politics, at least today.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_01: So, anyways, the story goes that in 1976, Irville moves on from just having a weird blood feud with his brothers and sends an extortion letter to Rulan C.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_01: Allred, a leader of a relatively huge Mormon offshoot with thousands of followers called the Apostolic United Brethren.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_01: Now, this is particularly batshit because the Apostolic United Brethren is much bigger than his brother's little group and tied into the larger Mormon ecosystem in a way neither of their offshoots were.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_01: When Allred gets these extortion letters demanding tithing and land, he understandably assumes this is the raving of a lunatic and ignores it.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_01: But this underestimation would unfortunately cost him his life.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_01: Irville sends two of his followers to a naturopathic clinic that Allred owns, and in broad daylight, as he's examining a patient, they shoot him in the head and chest before emptying the entire clip into his dead body and leaving.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_01: This is a bridge too far, and the Utah State Police, Texas State Police, and FBI create a task force dedicated to dismantling the Church of the Lamb of God.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_01: Over the next year, they round up several low-level followers, flip them, and get them to give up information on Irville.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_01: And eventually he is found and arrested in Mexico City before being extradited to Salt Lake City to stand trial.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I want to really just quick point out to you that episodes ago, when I mentioned how weird the circumstances around Reneri not technically being arrested in Mexico, but instead being deported and arrested at the border.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_01: This right here is a great comparison point.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_01: We have another cult leader fleeing a manhunt in the US, and when he is caught by Mexican police, he is extradited to stand trial, as is the normal process, and unlike the weird shit that went down with Rainier.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_01: So, he stands trial and he is convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_01: And insanely, several of Irville's children would actually hunt down a few of these people seven years later in 1988.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_01: They'd choose four people from the list and make plans to kill them all in a coordinated hit on June 27, 1988, at 4 p.m., the 144th anniversary of Mormonism's founder Joseph Smith's death.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_01: One was shot repeatedly in front of his employees at an appliance shop.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_01: Another had his eight-year-old daughter with him, and both were executed.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_01: Another was murdered in his home.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_01: And the fourth was also murdered in his home.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_01: The killers are all arrested, and this is more or less the last gasp of the children of the Lamb of God.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_01: Once things calm down, the less insane sect of Liberons move back to Chihuahua and start a peacon and alfalfa farm and become considerably wealthy over this time period.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_01: In 1981, Berlan died in a car accident, and Joel's sons are running the cult together.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_01: To be clear, when I call them the less insane sect, what I mean is that they're not creating hit lists and committing mass murder in broad daylight.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_01: They're still bastards.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_01: And in some ways, that colonialists are in general, and in other ways, they're running scams that are weirdly specific to Nexium.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_01: You know, on the one hand, they had a penchant for stealing water from the farmers around them to the point where multiple times they gathered outside Colonial La Baron, demanding they stop only to be held back by armed guards.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_01: On the other hand, they were engaging in human trafficking, including visa and labor violations and gun running back and forth across the border.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not going to claim that a Mexican drug cartel kidnapping 16-year-old Eric LeBaron in 2009 was the result of the way they were treating their neighbors and engaging in illegal and exploitative activity, but it didn't help.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_01: And look, I understand that by paying a ransom, you are hypothetically putting the entire community at risk because you are incentivizing the concept of kidnapping for ransom.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_01: But also, it's pretty cold-blooded to rally around the idea that your family is not going to pay a cent to get your 16-year-old out of the hands of a drug cartel.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_01: And that is exactly what they did.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_01: In their defense, they did take action, making it a public news story, engaging in protests and activism, and petitioning the government to help them.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_01: They did get Eric back, but not without a price.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_01: Shortly after returning Eric to the LeBaron family, the cartel dragged Benjamin LeBaron, who had spearheaded the drive to get Eric back, and his brother-in-law, Luis Viedmar, out of their home, savagely beat them, shot them in the head, and left a banner over their bodies with a message warning anybody else who would defy them.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_01: After this happens, Julian LeBaron steps forward as the next leader and spokesperson for the LeBaron family.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_01: And this family has some great PR.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_01: And a story that when viewed through a certain lens seems incredibly tragic.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_01: So it's not really any surprise that the vast majority of media on the subject will play them up as a naive, grieving family with a history of unwarranted violence against them being menaced by Mexican cartels.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_01: But I want you to think about two things.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_01: First of all, the story I've told you up to now is your average mainstream documentary story of the LeBarons.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_01: And frankly, at this point, I don't have the time or resources to dig through a hundred years of polygamist feuds, secret land deals, and border disputes.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_01: But what I will say is I do not believe the story I've told you is anywhere near the whole truth.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's just the one we have to settle for at the moment, because at the end of the day, this is a story about Nexium and not the Labarons.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_01: The second thing I want you to think about, and we've already touched on this a bit, is what we know of the Labarons in this moment we're currently at in 2009.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_01: Most media on the subject paints this family is kind of naive, and there's just no way that's true.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_01: You don't end up with a multi-million dollar pecan grove in a desert because you're naive.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_01: This is a very savvy family.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_01: This is also a colonialist family, which has been stealing Mexican water and labor on an industrial scale, as we already mentioned.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_01: They have a team of armed mercenaries guarding their compound 24-7.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_01: I guess what I'm getting at here is there's definitely another lens, a lens that I personally think is more accurate, where you can view all of this as a fight between two cartels.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_01: One cartel might be more inclined to systemic control or relatively legitimate money, and one cartel might be more inclined to overt crime and violence, but two cartels nonetheless.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_01: But okay.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_01: So this is about the time they connect with the Inlakek movement, which is spearheaded by Emiliano Salinas and his good friend Alex Bencourt, and believe it or not, also has layers to it.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_01: Inlakek, because nobody in this story today can just be chill about their names, is mine for I am another you.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_01: And on the surface, it is an anti-cartel peace movement.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean, we may get more into it next episode when we do Emiliano, Salinas, and Alex Bettencourt proper.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_01: But what's really kind of important to understand is that this group serves a couple of functions.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_01: It is an obvious political move to improve the reputation of the Salinas family, which is, I mean, absolutely toxic at this point.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_01: The current president, Felipe Calderon, is losing a drug war that is partly due to the policies of Carlos Salinas.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_01: But hey, that's no reason for his son to not use the cause of fighting it to superficially give the family a bump in popularity.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_01: Also, it was explicitly created under the ESP and Nexium umbrella, and it was drawing in a lot of the lower level members, including a lot of the Mexican women, that would end up being trafficked to Rainbow Cultural Gardens or Albany.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_01: It was the inlakek part of the Nexium umbrella, specifically, that ended up hooking up with the Liberan family.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_01: Now, this was a kind of mutually beneficial relationship with, on the one hand, the LeBaron family and their recent internationally reported attack at the hands of drug cartels that could help launder the Salinas reputation.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_01: And on the other hand, the Liberons got access to the wider Mexican elite that were all part of this exclusive club.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_01: Because even though they had made a lot of money and stolen a lot of land, the Liberons were still outsiders in a lot of ways.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_01: Being able to stand on stage with Emiliano Salinas and Rosalora Junco and preach nonviolence, even with the toxic Salinas reputation and the dark irony that the Liberons had a small mercenary army at their disposal, it wasn't that positive for the family.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_01: And this is how they eventually end up linking up with Mark Vicente doing his, I personally believe, totally fake documentary that was never going to be released, called Encendendio and El Corazone, or Lighting the Heart in English.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_01: We already covered some of the reasons, I am convinced of this in the Mark Vicente episode.
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_01: But to reiterate and expand on this a bit, I think the most damning bit of evidence for this idea is that it seems one of the only uses of the footage supposedly collected for the documentary was in Dr.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_01: Brandon Porter's fear experiments mentioned earlier.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_01: Besides the fact that collecting footage of Mexican cartels torturing and killing people for almost any documentary, much less a follow-up by the guy who made What the Bleep Do We Know, is a baffling proposition.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_01: The fact that Mark Vicente procured these videos and gave them to a doctor for nefarious experiments, if not an outright crime, is certainly incredibly suspicious.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_01: The one other use that actually manifested out of this supposed documentary was sizzle reels, also shown in some in-lock presentations.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_01: But this seems like the bare minimum necessary to even keep up the illusion you're working on a documentary.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean, according to court documents, hundreds of hours of footage were recorded by Vicente and his team.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_01: And when you consider that he received the snuff footage from the cartels themselves, it means almost none of what he actually shot has ever been seen publicly.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_01: Add in the fact that a fake documentary is a classic, long-lasting bit of spy craft, since it quite literally allows an outside entity to take cameras into a closed-off space and record.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_01: And Vicente's incredibly shady family and personal history.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_01: I just don't know how to read this as anything but an intelligence operation.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not like there isn't an incredibly direct, obvious reason why some sort of three-letter agency would want to send somebody into Colonial Liberan to gather information.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_01: This is a well-armed, highly funded, fanatically religious compound living almost entirely outside of any state or federal laws that keeps finding itself at the center of a lot of violence.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_01: There is incredible usefulness in mapping out the isolated locked-down compound, the specifics of the Liberon's ideology, exactly how many weapons they have, and whatever else you can think of.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_01: Also consider that the fact that he was apparently interacting with the Juarez cartel as well, at the point where they were hand delivering him murder videos.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_01: And if this isn't an intelligence operation, I'll eat my hat.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_01: It also is pretty well confirmed that Julian LeBaron went to Albany at the behest of Emiliano Salinas to do some exploration of meanings, which, to remind you, is a process almost indistinguishable.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: From a Scientology audit, which was one of their main methods for gaining blackmail on powerful people.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, one could read it as maybe the price of access to let the Liberons into the inner circles of the Mexican aristocracy, the same way we have seen people like Roy Cohn or Jeffrey Epstein facilitate similar voluntary blackmail for access to the club operations.
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_01: And it worked for a year or two.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_01: The Liberons did seem to be entering fairly seamlessly into the Mexican aristocracy.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_01: But at a certain point they hit a series of irreconcilable co contradictions, mostly coming down to the Liberons' refusal to give up operational sovereignty.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_01: This, combined with them getting creeped out by stories of Nexium, led to them parting ways sometime in 2012.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_01: And when they cut their ties with Nexium and the Mexican elite, they doubled down hard.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_01: They pretty massively expanded their farms, which included stealing much more water, this time from the Carmen River basin.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_01: This resulted in several violent clashes with local farmers.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_01: All of these events, colonialism, the hostile relationship with the local community, the rejection of the Mexican ruling class, and the tension with drug cartels culminated tragically with the Bavispe massacre in 2019.
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_01: Around 8 30 a.m.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_01: on November 4th, three SUVs carrying three mothers and 14 children, all from a settlement originating out of La Mora, a sort of related offshoot of the LaBaron clan.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_01: They were leaving La Mora and heading to Colonel LaBaron about 15 to 30 minutes apart.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_01: The first SUV hit something in the road and their tire blew.
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_01: When the vehicle stopped, gunmen from La Linia, the armed faction of the Warez cartel, showed up and opened fire on the vehicle, unloading over 320 bullets from heavy military-grade rifles into it, hitting the gas tank and burning the mother and her four children alive.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_01: The second SUV was traveling on the same route, driving with a mother and nine children.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_01: As her vehicle came under fire, she yelled at the children to duck, but the bullet still killed her eleven and two-year-old sons.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_01: Seven children survived, but they also experienced serious injuries from bullet wounds.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_01: Then, as the third vehicle showed up, about 20 minutes later, the driver, a mother with her seven-month-old baby in the backseat, saw the destruction and stopped the car exiting with her hands up.
• 46:50
  SPEAKER_01: She pleaded with the attackers, but it didn't help.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_01: They shot her in the head, and in a rare act of mercy, they placed the seven-month-old baby on the floor of the backseat and covered it from the sun.
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_01: The Liberans pleaded with the Mexican government to help them receive retribution for the crime, but they had burned that bridge a long time ago, and the Mexican government chose to rule it as a mistake and killing between what the Juarez cartel believed to be a rival drug cartel, and they could just kind of shrugged their shoulders.
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_01: The Liberons, being the savvy, wealthy land barons they were, that knew how to operate on both sides of the border, then turned to Donald Trump in the hopes they could get the U.S.
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_01: president's attention.
• 47:39
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, Donald Trump, always looking to exert any control over Mexico and the South American states, used this as a cause celebra.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_01: He actually at one point offered to send the U.S.
• 47:51
  SPEAKER_01: military into Mexico to fight the cartels, which of course would have been a geopolitical clusterfuck.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_01: This did, however, inspire the Mexican government to act, and over the next year, they arrested around 30 cartel members for the massacre.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_01: Currently, the Liberons are still in Mexico, still on their compound and growing their peacan and alfalfa fortune.
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_01: They have become increasingly isolated, militarized, and paranoid.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_01: Only time will tell what the future holds.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_01: Alright, that's gonna be it for this week.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you guys so much as always.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I just want to remind you once again that if you would like to support my work, please head over to my Patreon, the Dust Lake Archives on Patreon.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_01: Uh we are currently building up a library of premium content there, and a lot of it I'm pretty proud of.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_01: We've been digging through Sinister Forces by Peter Lavenda, and I think I think it's resulted in some pretty interesting finds, some pretty good episodes.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_01: And uh they're uh they're a decent size too, so if you like longer podcast episodes, if you're looking for something a little bit feefier, I mean they they hit about an hour and a half, I'd say, on a regular basis.
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_01: Uh also I mean like just I really appreciate anybody willing to give me some money to allow me to do this because it it does make a big difference.
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_01: If for some reason you absolutely cannot afford$5 a month and you would really like to hear these episodes, hit me up.
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, like, I want people to be able to hear it, so that is also important to me as well.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I will see you guys next week.