The Disturbing Rise And Fall Of Love Has Won, The First Internet Cult

Añadido: 2026-05-18

[00:00:05]On April 28th, 2021, officers from the Sawash County Police Department served a search warrant on a house in Creststone, Colorado. It was the headquarters of a new age spiritual group who believed that their leader was God. Her name was Amy Carlson. They called her mom.

[00:00:21]>> Mother is in breast.

[00:00:24]>> Amy Carlson's story started as a single mother searching for meaning and community online. It became a religion and a financial windfall and a worldwide audience of thousands. But somewhere in the worship and the adulation, things got away from her. She lost control of what she built and became one of the strangest and most tragic cult leaders in modern history.

[00:00:51]It's the story of the Love has won cult.

[00:00:54]A story that has a lot to say about internet culture, conspiracism, ambition, and what happens when the monster you create ends up destroying you.

[00:01:07]I've covered the topic of cults multiple times on this channel. It's a subject I just keep coming back to. Cults of the new Victorian age. I keep coming back to it because it's endlessly fascinating, uh, you know, just on a psychological level, but I think it's also super relevant to our day and age.

[00:01:21]Historically, people turned to cults in times of crisis and uncertainty, which there has been a lot of over the last 10 years. Combine that with the internet and especially social media, which is a technology that was specifically designed to connect people.

[00:01:36]Well, it's connecting people. People who are lonely, scared, rudderless, or just looking for meaning and stability in their lives. All driven by algorithms that wait for engagement, pushing them further and further down more extreme rabbit holes, leading to even further fragmentation, further isolation from reality, constant reinforcement that their view is correct.

[00:01:56]We're brainwashing ourselves. We're also social animals. We create validation and connection, and cults provide that. Of course, nobody joins a cult. They they join a group. They join a community.

[00:02:08]They join with other people that are just like them who make them feel good.

[00:02:12]Therapist Rachel Bernstein said, quote, "Sometimes people are just wanting to connect with people that they think they have something in common with. And a cult provides instant community and love bombing and a language that suddenly you all speak." You know, that's how these things start. It's just an island of misfit toys coming together, finding something in common, and then the spiral begins. Sometimes it's a deterioration in the group, the leader. Um, sometimes it's just sort of the social mechanics of the group that get away from the leader control. In the case of Amy Carlson and the Love is One cult, uh it was a little bit of both.

[00:02:45]Actually, a lot of both. So, today we're going to be talking about what happened to this group. And I'm happy to say we're joined by an expert on the subject, Leah Satilly, the author of Blazing Eye Sees All, Love is One, False Prophets, and The Fever Dream of the American New Age.

[00:02:58]>> I think what was really interesting to me as a journalist was, you know, writing about cults is a really interesting thing because there has been this evolution over time. And what I learned was that they are predominantly online. And that is what Love Has One is. It was mostly an online spiritual group that was on Facebook.

[00:03:19]They were doing live streams. They were selling spiritual healing sessions that people could purchase over the phone and, you know, >> psychic surgery or something like that.

[00:03:29]>> Yep. Exactly. Yeah. I should point out there's a great three-part documentary on HBO called Love Has One: The Cult of Mother God, and it's definitely worth watching. Uh we'll also be sourcing it quite a bit for this video. Anyway, Leah went on to talk about how they were kind of the first cult of the live streaming era.

[00:03:44]>> The thing that was really compelling about Love has one was that they were able to recruit people globally because they always were online in some way.

[00:03:55]>> They had a radio station.

[00:03:57]>> Exactly. her like always online. Amy would have her followers take that live stream link and just put it in the comments all over the internet, all over Facebook and Twitter and things like that. And so I spoke to several people who were like, "Yeah, I was just on Facebook. I was browsing these groups that I was in. I saw this link and I didn't know what these people were talking about, but they looked really happy and so I just started watching and I couldn't stop watching." Yeah.

[00:04:28]>> And that was really how they found their followers.

[00:04:31]>> Amy hijacked social media platforms to connect with lonely souls looking for answers. On one hand, she made promises to empower them, to help them achieve their purpose and feel everlasting joy.

[00:04:42]With the other hand, she exploited them to her own gain.

[00:04:46]Tale as old as time.

[00:04:50]Before there was Mother God, there was Amy Carlson, an outgoing young mom living in the middle-ass suburbs of Dallas. She didn't have a perfect upbringing. Her parents divorced when she was pretty young and she kind of got shuffled back and forth between Kansas City and Oklahoma City for a while. She eventually wound up living full-time in Dallas with her mom. Um, apparently she didn't get along with her stepmom very well. And she actually claimed at one point that she was abusive, but still she was popular in school. She was beautiful, big bleach blonde hair, bright personality, a great singing voice, and big ambitions. Big ambitions that never quite panned out. So, you know, Amy gets out of high school. She um has a child uh pretty pretty soon thereafter with a man. Her her job that she had when she was a teenager was working at McDonald's. And this ends up becoming like a career for her. She she's managing several McDonald's in the Dallas area. Has two more kids in her 20s from two other men. and, you know, sort of finds herself this this single mom um with kids that she's, you know, not as as everyone I spoke to around her said, she wasn't really um somebody who seemed like they wanted to be a mom. She wasn't extremely affectionate with her children. It wasn't like a point of pride for her. It seems like she found herself in a classic situation of like, you know, a talented kid with big plans whose life just never quite turned out the way she wanted. I think we can all relate to that a little bit. And from the outside, everything looked great.

[00:06:17]She had three beautiful kids. Uh she was rising in her career. But inside, she was struggling. And in 2007, she reached a breaking point.

[00:06:25]>> There's this moment where Amy goes out for dinner with her family. It's they're celebr it's right before Thanksgiving.

[00:06:33]They're celebrating several people's birthdays. She's there with her son, with her sisters, with her parents. And they all get together. And midway through dinner, she just pushes back from the table and says, "I got to go."

[00:06:46]And they're like, "Oh, okay. You got to leave." And so she does. What they didn't realize was that she was leaving her life. She was gone. And for a bit, they didn't know where she went.

[00:06:58]>> Yeah. For years, she'd been living kind of a double life. She would spend her days managing McDonald's and helping her kids with her homework, and then on her laptop in the evenings on forums and message boards talking about new age spirituality.

[00:07:11]uh energy healing, alternative realities. She got especially sucked into a site called lightworkers.org. Uh it was kind of an online forum for people seeking enlightenment outside of traditional religion. The site was full of thoughts on frequency, consciousness, and new earth. It attracted spiritual seekers or anyone looking for meaning in their lives. She found an escape there, an escape from a reality that was slowly crushing her spirit, and found an alternative reality, one where she felt empowered and loved and important. She made connections and friendships in the community there, including a specific user who went by the name Emmeth White Eagle. He was a prolific poster on the forums and on Facebook. He posted links and live streams like multiple times a day and described the community as quote a spiritual community connecting into higher vibrational frequencies of nature, the higher self. His real name is Robert Saltsgiver and he took a particular interest in Amy. He appreciated her passion for these topics and her ability to communicate the ideas. She had a presence that he felt connected to and he started describing them as twin flames, two bodies sharing one soul. The more they communicated, the more they started to believe that together they were like in tune with a higher consciousness, the the base reality that the rest of the world couldn't see. A sense of mission started to form and in a divine importance around what they were doing. And they started calling themselves father God and mother god. You know, typical meat cute. In one exchange, Amy wrote, quote, "My current life situation is living in a world of illusion." He responded by saying, quote, "We must be together in the physical." And just a few days after that, she walked away from that restaurant, leaving behind a bewildered family wondering where she went. Where she went was with Aramoth White Eagle.

[00:08:55]>> She's kind of migrating around the western United States, going to California, Oregon, Colorado. At a certain point, she meets some other folks and uh she is uh kind of creating an online community with them where she's sort of the central figure. She does what I like to call like astrology weather forecast. She wears this little headset and she live streams and she talks about all the things the stars are saying and she goes on and on.

[00:09:24]>> They're they're pretty goofy, you know, to me, but she's really compelling and people really really love listening to her.

[00:09:31]>> So, she gets a following online. They kind of prop her up as the center of this new community that they're building. And they're saying that Amy is Amy, but she's also mother God. That God is a woman. And that's Amy. She's God.

[00:09:48]God is right here on Earth in southern Colorado waiting for you to come join her if you want. If you, you know, want to come live there, if you want to pay money, that sort of thing. So, so it's sort of this slow build.

[00:10:05]Creststone, Colorado is a remote town at the base of the Sangra Cristo Mountains.

[00:10:09]It's a magnet for spiritual seekers. UFO lore, Zen centers, and yoga retreats populate the land. In Cristo, Namy let her blonde hair grow out and transition to a more bohemian natural look, complete with tie-dye and sandals. She and Amoris started a group that they named the Galactic Federation of Light.

[00:10:25]They created their own website called the Galactic Free Press, where they could publish their revelations unfiltered. And on January 14th, 2009, their first stream went live. Between the two of them, their output quadrupled, and they talked about everything. Higher dimensions, vibrational frequencies, crystals, aliens, lots of aliens. They would shoot video of clouds, convinced that the clouds were just cloaking devices for alien spaceships.

[00:10:47]>> Here's a long look at the ship. Hi, guys.

[00:10:52]Love you.

[00:10:53]>> So, yeah, they were they were already getting into Yikes territory. Amy and Ammeth streamed constantly, posted daily, used search terms like Awakening, ascension, and fifth dimension, and then just let the algorithm do the rest.

[00:11:07]People looking for meaning got funneled into their content, and a community began to grow. Amethy and Amy preached that everyone is God. God lives within you. You are divine.

[00:11:18]But eventually, the message narrowed.

[00:11:20]Yet suddenly Amy was God. Okay, angels.

[00:11:24]This is Mother God, Mother Gaia, Mother Earth, Mother of Creation.

[00:11:29]>> She was really good on camera. She was beautiful. She was charismatic, charming. It drew people in. And Amarith had been telling her for years that there was something special about her, that she had an aura about her. And over time, that message began to take over.

[00:11:42]He was still father god. They were still the twin flames, but she became the figurehead, the the main deity.

[00:11:49]>> This is mother god. It's uh Mother God, also known as Mother Earth, Divine Mother.

[00:11:55]>> Their message became God is real, God is a living person, and God was a woman.

[00:11:59]Amy began streaming exclusively under the name Mother God, the one and only for all eternity. Father God, um, turns out his role wasn't quite so eternal. Amy and Amoris split up in 2014. Their twin flames just stopped flaming. Amy then became romantically involved with a guy named Michael Lamboy. He was a follower who claimed that Amy had cured his cancer.

[00:12:25]But then he became father God. They also called him Archangel Michael, but he kind of became the new twin flame, her other half, the eternal masculine to her feminine. He also had a business background and was good with numbers.

[00:12:37]So, he got their finances in order and filed the 501c3 for the group.

[00:12:44]Things really took off from there. Uh they actually traveled around a bit at first but eventually they settled in Mafet Colorado and their followers began to congregate with them. The house grew to 20 people at any given time and they started calling themselves the first contact ground crew team. Their online followers numbered in the thousands and the donations poured in. With Michael Lamboy's help, they grew into a thriving legitimate business and Amy paid him back for those efforts by finding another father god. Yeah. Amy kind of went through several father gods. All of them were her eternal twin flame. Apparently, as the divine leader, she could pretty much just choose whoever she wanted to be with, and that person would become father god. The next father god after Michael Lamboy was a guy named Andrew Pathi. When Andrew joined the group in Colorado, he was struggling with an addiction and pain medication, and Amy singled him out, told him that he had a divine role in her plan. So, she kicked Archangel Michael to the curb and promoted Andrew to Father God so that he could fulfill his divine role.

[00:13:43]which I'm sure had nothing at all to do with the fact that he had a background in marketing and social media. I don't mean to be too cynical here. I know there's this video of her introducing Andrew to viewers. She clearly looks, you know, smitten by him and everything, but I can't help but notice that she tended to pick father gods who just happened to have things that could benefit her. Ameth was huge in the light workers community. Getting involved with him very much increased her profile and helped launch her following. Michael Lamboy knew business and money and gave her financial stability. and Andrew was a professional social media marketer and branding consultant and he went to work for her right away. The first thing he did was to point out that the first contact ground crew team was a mouthful and that they should change the name of the group and the name he came up with was Love has won. As a a former copywriter of 15 years, I can verify yes, that is a thousand times better.

[00:14:34]That is a way better name. This guy knew what he was doing. He created logos, did photooots, updated the website, sold merch, changed the names on the social media accounts, streamlined the funnels, and optimized post. He understood algorithms, and he helped boost engagement. And he turned this group into a content machine.

[00:14:51]>> The the group was always live streaming, so they would be live streaming when Amy was kind of >> talking and ranting. Go ahead.

[00:14:57]>> No, there there's a part of me that just respects the hustle, >> you know, as a content creator, I'm just like, "Wow, they really put in the work, you know."

[00:15:04]>> They really They really did. Yeah. kept the camera rolling at all times. Um, for, you know, for better or worse, >> uh, at a certain point, >> Amy kind of falls away from the camera.

[00:15:17]The camera really is pointed at the followers. So, so her followers take over live streaming duties. They take over selling their products. They're, you know, if somebody books a a a surgery over the phone, they're not going to be talking to Amy. They're talking to the to the followers. Love is One basically became the QVC of enlightenment. Their streams drew in tens of thousands of followers and they sold things like essential oils, crystals, body butter, candles, and hoodies. They offered awakening sessions that were paid spiritual consultations on the phone. They did spiritual surgeries where they claimed to heal people's bodies over the phone. They encouraged donations in repeating digits like $44, $77. These were angel numbers according to new age beliefs. Inside the house, members signed over their unemployment checks to quote, "Keep weed on the table." As Andrew put it, some people online even gave Amy their 401ks.

[00:16:07]These are people who truly believe that God is on earth and they want to help get their message out.

[00:16:14]So, what was the message again? Like, what exactly has she been preaching this whole time that made people want to follow her in the first place? Yeah, I I might invite you guys to take a moment to get comfortable because uh this is a lot. Amy claimed to be the 534th reincarnation of the divine being destined to move humanity from the 3D world into the 5D. Okay, so to way oversimplify it, to them, the 5D world is like base reality. It's where all the truth is found. And the 3D world uh that you and I experience, this is all just a facade. It's all fake. It's all just an illusion. So, they're all about moving beyond the illusion and finding the truth, which is 5D. And they use the term 3D very derissively, kind of like uh any 3D medicine, like they would mock the idea of going to a 3D hospital. Some of her past lives included Cleopatra, Jesus, Jonah Varc, Harriet Tubman, and Marilyn Monroe. And she was also Donald Trump's daughter in a past life. She also claimed to be the mother of Elvis Presley and the queen of Lamura. Now, if you're like me, you heard that last sentence and thought, "Lamia, where is that? I'm not familiar with that." But if you're not like me and you are familiar with Lamaria, then you heard that last sentence and thought.

[00:17:29]>> So, uh, a lot of people have heard about Atlantis, you know, this idea of a lost civilization that was once great. In the mid 1800s, there was this ornithologist, a bird a bird scientist who happened to write a paper where he was trying to understand lemur distribution. There were lemurs at that time that were found on the island of Madagascar and they were also found in India but not in Africa. So this this this guy Philip Lee Slater he was sort of theorizing well the only reason that that that would happen was this there was a huge continent that was between India and Madagascar that just sunk into the ocean and then if that was real I'm going to call it Lamuria. So this was probably about 50 60 years before the scientific community widely adopted theories around continental drift. By the time he died, Slater died, it had just the the genie was out of the bottle and and it had been picked up as actual science that there was this land mass called Lamaria that just sunk into the ocean, which is by the way not a thing that doesn't happen. And um what what was also sort of happening at the same time was there was this rise in spiritualism that was happening in specifically in America but around the world. So some really important people within the spiritualist community started to write about Lamuria that you know they were writing their own theories of how humans became spiritual beings.

[00:19:08]>> So yeah a long debunked theory about lemurs became the basis for an entire lost utopian civilization. A lot of people have claimed to be descended from Lamrians or claimed Lamuran past lives.

[00:19:19]In fact, one thing that I really liked about Leah's book was that she, you know, kind of goes through all these beliefs that I'm listing here that sound crazy to most of us. And she goes into the whole history of it and where it all comes from and the people who preached these ideas in the past and you realize that there was nothing really new going on here. They were just a grabag of beliefs and conspiracy theories that were already out there. Oh, and they believe that Lamria is now located inside of Mount Shasta. Again, taken from other conspiracy theories, they claimed she could cure people remotely by manipulating energy. Everything from cancer to Lyme disease, addiction, brain tumors, you name it. This is why they mocked 3D hospitals. Like to them, any illness or any bodily issue. That was part of the 3D illusion manifested from the 5D realm. So, Western medicines didn't work because it only treats the body. And that's just treating the illusion. See? Yeah. To really heal somebody, you have to fix the problem in the 5D world with energy and vibrations.

[00:20:14]And for that, of course, you need to buy their crystals and colloidal metals that help direct the 5D energies into the 3D body.

[00:20:21]>> So, are you ready?

[00:20:22]>> Yeah, hold on.

[00:20:24]I forgot to put in the crystals.

[00:20:27]>> This is of course uh whackadoodle, but it's a popular message. You know, people don't exactly love the healthcare industry. Calling them frauds kind of resonates. They also claimed that while she was, you know, the mother of creation and everything, she also reported directly to a council of angels called the Galactics. The Galactics were a spiritual advisory board made up of historical figures and celebrities.

[00:20:50]Among them were St. Germaine, Tupac, John Lennon, Gene Wilder, Prince, and Carrie Fischer. But her number one adviser, her main guy, the one that she seemed to get most of the instructions from, was Robin Williams.

[00:21:02]>> That's St. Germaine, and that's obviously Robin Williams. But Robin was mom's main ambassador. She signed over like the divine plan for him to make changes. Like he's a very very big part of this.

[00:21:15]>> They were obsessed with Robin Williams.

[00:21:17]She was always explaining all of her decisions away by saying, "Robin told me to do it."

[00:21:20]>> All I hear is angels and Robin and Germaine and Ashtar.

[00:21:27]They've been all talking to me today. I have no idea how Robin Williams comes into this, how she landed on him, or what his family feels about it, but she was constantly claiming that he was telling her what to do. But she communed with the Galactics daily and passed their words and their prophecies onto her followers who sent them out to the viewers in the live streams. And the way she communicated with the Galactics was she got blackout drunk. In fact, they called alcohol her medicine. Um, it was what she took to get into the receptive state that made her possible to hear the transmissions from the galactics. I'm sure they explained it as, you know, alcohol removes the barrier between the 3D body and the 5D realm, something like that. And in no way is it just, you know, a drunken hallucination. Amy was drinking a lot and smoking a lot of pot and taking mushrooms and so was everybody else. Don't get me wrong, I don't have a problem with any of those things, but in the context of somebody claiming to be God and that the world is an illusion, I think it is important to point out that there were a lot of drugs involved in this group. Andrew Pathy, uh, Father God number three, he would later claim that when he first got to Colorado, they gave him mushrooms and left him lost in the woods for a day.

[00:22:38]Maybe it was a an initiation ritual or something, but he later said that everybody there was high from the moment they got up in the morning till their heads hit the pillow.

[00:22:47]I mean, I guess that is one way to experience enlightenment. Amy was basically a raging alcoholic, and her rage could come and go at the drop of a hat. Many live stream showed her slurring words, screaming at followers for minor offenses like cooking her chicken parmesan when she really wanted meatballs.

[00:23:03]>> My vision was chicken parmesan. Chicken parmesan.

[00:23:09]>> There was one famous instance where she locked somebody's kid in a closet during a live stream because the the child wouldn't stop crying. Yeah. Behind all the love and positivity branding, the group had a definite dark side. Um, there were a lot of conspiracy theories in their belief system. Some of them were not pretty. Like they were pretty heavy into QAnon. In fact, they believed that Trump was one of the galactics even though he's still alive. They were obsessed with the cabal that secretly controls the world. And they claimed Sandy Hook was a hoax. They often used racial slurs. They were wildly anti-semitic. And they denied the Holocaust at times. Someone at some point, I wish I could remember who made this comparison of like a funnel cloud that you know the the widest part of the funnel cloud is like your your most basic entry point conspiracy theory.

[00:23:56]Maybe it's aliens. In in this case with Love Has One for Amy, it was aliens.

[00:24:02]>> The further you get down the funnel, the quicker it is to kind of fall into it and the more beliefs, more conspiracies you start to indulge. Over time, these crazier beliefs started to kind of take center stage in their live streams and whatnot, and the rhetoric became a lot more militant. The tone shifted in the group, and Amy started to deteriorate.

[00:24:21]She'd swing wildly from euphoria to tantrums in a matter of seconds. She started to become really abusive to the people around her. And in Leah's book, um, Andrew Profy, he later said, quote, "Amy was a wonderful person. Mother God was a delusional alcoholic." And I should point out the mental health of everybody around her was slipping as well. The social dynamics of the group encouraged a a spiral of them, you know, digging deeper, believing harder, proving their loyalty. This was their whole life at this point. Clarity was in short supply. And then right in the middle of all of this came the final father god, Jason Castillo. He joined in 2018 and quickly became Amy's new twin flame. Uh, but this was more like a a flame in a nitroglycerin plant. Other members would call him aggressive and doineering. He openly used meth. Um, after Amy would pass out, he would blast death metal and bark orders at others in the house. Like, he tended to sort of relish in the power that came with the father god role. Like some of the members took issue with him, but they, you know, respected mother god's choice, so they didn't say anything. But something definitely did shift in the group after he came on board. He kind of complimented all of Amy's worst traits and made her spiral even harder. And while it probably wasn't his fault, her health started to decline rapidly.

[00:25:38]After years of near constant drinking and smoking, Amy's body began to fail.

[00:25:43]Boils appeared on her back. She felt weak and stumbled when she walked. Now, for most people, that would be the signal to cut back on the alcohol and and, you know, get treatment.

[00:25:54]But these weren't most people. They had been proclaiming for years that Western medicine was a scam. They didn't believe in Western medicine. So, so they doubled down on what they knew, things like energy healing sessions and crystals and colloidal silver. We got to talk about colloidal silver for a second. So, it's well known amongst energy healers. Um, they claim that it can be pretty much used to cure anything because it's it's basically silver suspended in a solution and silver is conductive. So, they believe that it can direct and channel the the 5D energies and heal the body at a vibrational level. Now, there's not really any evidence of this outside of the placebo effect, although silver is antimicrobial.

[00:26:28]um silver ions, they basically disrupt the cell membranes of bacteria. Uh that's why you see it used in wound dressings and water purification, that kind of stuff. So, it is possible that it might have a mild antibiotic effect, but not likely. The problem is in its dilution. There's only a tiny tiny amount of silver in there. Like the amount of silver that you would need in your body to see a real difference at an antimicrobial level would be like so much that it would be toxic. Plus, the silver ions bind with a lot of things that are found in your digestive system, things like proteins and chlorides. So, by the time it gets to your bloodstream, it's it's totally inert. And any antibiotic effect that it would have would also affect your good gut bacteria as much as the bad stuff. So, yeah, it doesn't really do anything to fight germs in your body. But, it is popular amongst like alternative medicine types.

[00:27:14]In fact, I took colloidal silver once upon a time. Um, my mom gave it to me. I was a little bit sick and she thought it might uh help a little bit. It was kind of like a like a natural remedy, a folk remedy, that kind of thing. But the love is one people weren't using it to kill microbes. They were using it to channel energy. They were doing 5D medicine here. Microbes are 3D medicine. Like I feel like so much of their belief system relies on that first assumption, right?

[00:27:38]That the physical world that we experience isn't base reality. That there's another more powerful reality, a more fundamental reality beyond the veil. and and and like once you go all in on that idea, all this crazier stuff, it's it's it's just a logical extension of that. And the thing is a lot of that original assumption can be couched in the language of science. You know, um quantum mechanics describes a world parallel to our own that operates on completely different rules. String theory talks about how reality manifests from the vibrations of invisible strings across 11 dimensions. I mean, these are real scientific concepts that don't sound that far away from what they're talking about. Now, of course, those are vastly oversimplified explanations of some very complex phenomena, and but they're just mind-blowing enough to a lay person to cause a shift in perspective, and they're malleable enough to apply to pretty much any philosophical or spiritual dilemma. In fact, I'm going to out myself real quick. Um, some of you might remember a documentary from a while back that was called What the Bleep Do We Know? that was all about like the quantum world and what it means about reality. Um, I'll be honest, this this this might show how much I've changed since I've been doing this channel, but I I was really into that movie back in the day. It was just really mind-blowing to me as as someone who was like new to all these ideas, and it and it helped to kind of open me up to the quantum world and and what it all means and and it sparked an interest and a curiosity in me to look further into it, further enough to realize what a gross misinterpretation that movie was.

[00:29:05]But I can see how compelling that message is. Like, I was all about it. I I easily could have gone that way and many many people did go that way with this kind of information and it got incorporated into a lot of new age spiritual beliefs. Those people all found each other online. They reinforce each other's beliefs and echo chamber effect kicks in and yeah, here we are.

[00:29:27]Uh so back to Amy, her health keeps deteriorating uh despite all the energy therapy and the hard drinking continues unabated.

[00:29:35]I mean, after all, if she can't drink, she can't commune with the Galactics.

[00:29:38]And they had content to make.

[00:29:40]Eventually, she completely lost the use of her legs. Um, there are videos of of Jason carrying her around from room to room. She barely showed up in any of the live streams anymore. She clearly wasn't getting any better. But instead of acknowledging that what they were doing wasn't working, they did what all good cults do. They just folded it into their belief system. The fact that Amy wasn't getting any better to them was just further proof that she was God. Because clearly what was destroying her body was the bad energy of the world. She was absorbing and transforming so much of the pain of the world that it was destroying her body, sacrificing herself to save humanity.

[00:30:18]>> Can you hear mom screaming from the other room? Yes or no?

[00:30:23]She took on all of the pain for humanity and she's processing it right now.

[00:30:30]>> That was a new talking point. She was sacrificing herself for humanity. And at times the group would even like excoriate their viewers in live streams for not believing hard enough in Amy.

[00:30:39]You know, they needed the positive vibrations to offset the negative vibrations that were killing her. So, if she wasn't getting any better, it was because she clearly wasn't getting enough positive vibrations from the audience. It's not uncommon for creators to scold their audiences, but um you're killing God.

[00:30:56]It's pretty sier scold. Her illness became part of their pitch. Help save God. The group starts to tell a story at a certain point that she is um suffering from stage five cancer, which is not a thing, but that she's, you know, I think what they're trying to say is she's very sick. viewers noticed what was happening with her. There was definitely something wrong. She was emaciated. She was slurring her words. But the most alarming thing about her appearance was that she was turning blue. Yeah.

[00:31:28]Earlier when I was talking about colloidal silver, I'm sure many of you were already uh way ahead of me on this, but but yeah, colloidal silver has a very well-known uh side effect. It's called argeria.

[00:31:38]And yeah, it basically turns your skin blue. The sicker Amy got, the more colloidal silver they gave her and the bluer she turned. And it started to get some attention, you know, this this blue-kinned cult leader. It also got the attention of her family who reached out to Dr. Phil to get her on there as an interview and and try to get her some kind of help.

[00:31:56]>> You left those children when they were 2, seven, and 12, but yet you call yourself mother God. H how do you explain abandoning your children?

[00:32:08]>> Um for me, I did not abandon my children. I begged my angels not I didn't want to leave.

[00:32:15]>> Does it strike y'all odd that she drinks so much? You say that you're paralyzed now. You can't heal that.

[00:32:22]>> Yeah. Apparently Amy was hoping that her appearance on Dr. Phil would be like the big break she needed to really get her message out and fulfill her destiny.

[00:32:31]It didn't quite work out that way.

[00:32:33]>> I can tell you on my short list of considerations would be that of malignant narcissist. By 2020, she was paralyzed from the waist down. Her weight had dropped to nearly 100 pounds.

[00:32:44]And the messaging changed. They were no longer waging a war to to save her life.

[00:32:49]They were now preparing for ascension.

[00:32:51]Like the whole mission of Mother God, their whole message this whole time was that she was there to to help people ascend from the 3D plane to the higher reality of the 5D plane.

[00:33:02]And now it was her turn. They predicted that she would be ushered into the 5D by the Galactics, including Robin Williams.

[00:33:08]uh that they would literally come down to Earth in their spaceship and and carry her home. They even discussed how her losing so much weight was a good thing because it would make her easier to transport into the spaceship. The thing is though, she wasn't the only one losing weight. The group around her was spiraling out of control at this point.

[00:33:25]Everybody's activities were closely monitored and controlled. Food and sleep were framed as indulgences, attachments to the 3D illusion.

[00:33:35]>> You are welcome.

[00:33:36]>> Come home. Welcome everyone. Why are you here already? Let's go.

[00:33:40]>> I've taken mother's joy by making her the worst quesadilla in all creation.

[00:33:46]>> That's how I got down this quagmire. And I apologize mom and dad. Um I didn't realize that, you know, there is an infinite supply of things and if I wanted to create something beautiful like that, I could have just gone to mom and dad and ask for that.

[00:34:00]>> This is a common practice amongst cults.

[00:34:02]um people who have brain fog from sleep deprivation and lack of food, you know, they're they're easier to control. It was a form of like systemic abuse in the group. And they were still live streaming constantly and that abuse was starting to become noticeable to their family members.

[00:34:18]I'm sorry for what I've done and I see what I've done and I'm grateful to have these moments to be able to express myself.

[00:34:36]>> A mother of one of the members said that she could see her daughter's bones pressing out from under her skin during a live stream. more and more people were becoming, you know, alarmed at what was happening, which put more scrutiny and pressure on the group, which has happened many times before, only makes the group band together harder and become more toxic. What makes the story really interesting to me though uh personally is that the abuse kind of went both ways. Like the group dynamic u that had formed around her had evolved and and basically become a monster that she couldn't control. Now, apparently she did have moments of clarity where she she questioned whether any of this was true. And clearly, as her body was shutting down, she was suffering and, you know, probably started to think maybe that 3D medicine is worth a shot.

[00:35:19]And according to some reports, at one point she did ask to be taken to a hospital, but her inner circle refused to do it.

[00:35:27]>> No way that mom, you know, would go to a 3D doctor.

[00:35:32]They would be so perplexed by mom to begin with.

[00:35:37]>> I mean, to them, they kind of treated the whole thing like Amy had signed a DNR or something like she had said many times before. They were not to take her to a hospital for any reason. And now here she was dying, desperate, desperate enough to want to go to an actual hospital and nobody would do it.

[00:35:55]And besides, she was about to ascend.

[00:35:57]Isn't that a good thing? Isn't Isn't that what we want?

[00:36:00]So they talked her out of it. This basically made her downslide inevitable.

[00:36:05]She had created the monster that ultimately killed her.

[00:36:08]>> I think Amy's like a great example of sort of a a both and right like she's really benefiting from being a tyrant and a and a you know understanding her power and that by telling this story of her as a as a god and a central figure, she also had other people around her that I think were kind of propping her in that position. seeing like Amy as like a financially like a cash cow that they sort of needed to keep at the very center of the website and the center of the ide ideology. Um when she started to look sick, they're taking her off camera, right? Like and then she's just a mural on the wall that's sort of, you know, hands in prayer and looking like a spiritual being.

[00:36:50]>> In her final months, she reached out to her mom and her children that she had left behind 14 years earlier. U she tried to make amends anyway. At one point she was told by Robin Williams that she should be near water when it's time to ascend. So she and her inner circle moved to the island of Kauaii and Hawaii. They were there for a couple of months. Um the neighbors were a little I think understandably wary of this group that claimed that their roommate was God for some reason. Um so there was some immediate you know friction that developed right off the bat. And then Amy did, I'm sorry, the stupidest thing she could have possibly done in that situation.

[00:37:29]She claimed she was pale.

[00:37:31]>> Mom did announce to the island and humanity today that she is indeed the pelle goddess of fire and volcano and also the giver of dreams.

[00:37:40]>> And with that, they weren't living in Kawaii anymore. For some reason, the local natives found a suburban white lady claiming to be their revered goddess of fire to be highly offensive.

[00:37:50]Who knew? They descended on the group with signs, chanting through megaphones, pelted them with eggs, and even escalated to smashing their car windows.

[00:37:58]Eventually, the mayor had to intervene and escort the cult off the island.

[00:38:01]After that, they returned to Colorado, but the vibe had definitely shifted. Um, this incident in Hawaii left Amy pretty shaken and feeling like the world had rejected her. Um, she kind of seemed to be ready to go. In April 2021, Amy said that the Galactics told her to go to Ashland, Oregon. So, Jason and a couple of the members drove her to a mountain lodge nearby. In the footage from the HBO documentary, you can see them wheeling her into the room. She looks emaciated and nearly purple. She had lost all motor skills, was barely even reacting to people. Over the next few days at the motel, they did whatever they could do to keep her comfortable, moving her from the hot tub to the shower, always keeping her around water, and also still giving her doses of colloidal silver. Like literally just pouring it into her mouth. Online, the girls were ecstatic. The joyous moment was about to happen. Mom was about to ascend. It could happen any minute now.

[00:38:52]Their streams were dubbed Ascension Watch. They seemed genuinely excited about what was about to happen. Behind the scenes though, there were a lot of questions about like what is about to happen.

[00:39:03]None of them had seen an ascension before. They weren't totally sure. Was she going to get beamed up into a spaceship or is the spaceship going to literally like land outside for that matter? Should they take her outside so the ship and Robin Williams can get her more easily? Will she even go in her caporeal body or will she just like become a beam of light? Nobody knew what to expect. What happened was Amy drifted in and out of consciousness and then eventually didn't wake up and then stopped breathing.

[00:39:38]There was no spaceship, no beam of light. She was just gone.

[00:39:44]And they did a stream celebrating her ascension and her life. They they painted it as her fulfilling her mission.

[00:39:52]There was the one small problem of her body. Like they still weren't sure like were the Galactics going to come pick this up? Like do they do they need it for her to join them? Is she still in this body or is it like a Jesus thing?

[00:40:04]Does it take a few days? Eventually they became worried that the hotel staff were going to find her body in there and call the authorities and and they were worried first of all, of course, that they would, you know, get in trouble, but also, you know, if if the coroner took her body, would the Galactics be able to get to it if they needed it?

[00:40:19]They managed to sneak her body out of the hotel and checked out of there. They then drove to a campsite nearby and just kind of camped out for a few days just in case, you know, the Galactic showed up. Um, they wrapped her body in a sleeping bag, covered it with glitter and crystals in one of their tents. Um, they would gather around and have conversations next to her as if she was still there. Jason slept next to her.

[00:40:41]After a few days in the woods and still no galactics, they decided to head back to Colorado. They packed up the cars, putting Amy in the back seat. Uh they specifically u tried to make it look like she was just somebody sleeping in the back seat like just in case they got stopped. They drove over 12,200 miles back to the house in Creststone where they placed her in her old bed and built a makeshift shrine around her. They covered her in Christmas lights and painted her face. Uh they put crystals over her eyes. Um I guess they thought that maybe the Galactics would still come and they just didn't know what else to do. Only a handful of followers went with her to Oregon. Uh, the rest had stayed behind. And one of those that had stayed behind was Michael Lamboy, the previous Father God, the one that handled all the the money and the legal stuff and the deed to the house. And he knew that she had died or ascended. Uh, he didn't know that they were bringing her back to his house. They didn't tell him that. So, Michael Lamboy walks into his house and sees Amy's corpse in his bed and was like, "Yeah, I'm out.

[00:41:41]>> I'm sorry. I can't hear you.

[00:41:44]Just getting my bear inside.

[00:41:48]>> Okay.

[00:41:50]What's going on, man?

[00:41:57]>> It started yesterday.

[00:41:59]>> And you gave them permission to stay at your place?

[00:42:02]>> Not really. No, they just like came in and stayed and I was like, "Oh, okay." I I had no awareness that they were going to come. So, in case you were placing bets on which of this group would snap out of it first, it was Michael Lamboy.

[00:42:16]Police conducted a raid on the house and found several group members and a couple of children in the residence.

[00:42:21]>> Mother is in rest.

[00:42:23]>> Okay, she has arrested >> and they found the makeshift shrine in her body. And they had a lot of questions. Several arrests were made, but no charges were ever filed outside of a couple like corpse abuse charges.

[00:42:35]Michael Lamboy, meanwhile, cleaned out their bank accounts to the tune of $330,000 and just pieced out. Like the guy kind of disappeared. Nobody really knows what happened to him. The coroner's report determined her cause of death to be quote global decline in the setting of alcohol abuse, anorexia, and chronic colloidal silver ingestion. She was 45 years old. The group splintered in the following year, spinning off a couple of other groups. Uh, one called Joy Reigns and the other was called 5D Full Disclosure. And there are still some true believers out there who think that Amy really was God on Earth and she successfully accomplished her mission for the 534th time. And maybe somewhere out there is a 535th version of her that's just about to start kindergarten.

[00:43:19]Now, that is one way to look at what happened here. Um, another way would be to say that it was a group of people sharing the experience of watching a mentally ill woman drink herself to death. Amy Carlson was not okay.

[00:43:32]And like a lot of people, she got radicalized on the internet and social media to the point that she believed she was God. Is this something we're going to be seeing a lot more of? I mean, main character syndrome is definitely on the rise. When most of the information you consume is generated by an algorithm whose core job is to figure out what you like and then just give you more of what you like, it's pretty easy to start thinking that you're the center of the universe. I've always wondered how much of this story is just that, you know, Amy went crazy. She had a break from reality and then people joined her because, you know, well, I did a whole video about how weirdos rise to power.

[00:44:06]People are attracted to those who are, you know, different and see the world in a different way and think the rules don't apply to them. But like, how much of it is that and how much of it was just a grift? Like, I don't think it was totally a grift. I mean, she she had to have believed in this stuff pretty strongly. I mean, she turned blue and died.

[00:44:24]If not, that's some serious commitment to the bit. But I think all of that was a means to a very self-serving end.

[00:44:30]>> You know, at the end of the day, Amy was still a person and she >> um yeah, I think she saw a hustle that she could pull off and she got away from her, you know, she became a content creator and then it became that she had to be a god. She had to be this person.

[00:44:49]And I think that she had only people around her at the end of her life that saw her as that.

[00:44:54]>> Yeah. as that character.

[00:44:56]>> She was radicalized by the internet to believe that she was a god. She then used the internet to radicalize others and then those people became a group and that group became a monster she couldn't control. Sometimes I think there's a parallel there. Uh you know we kind of we created social media and then that became a monster that we can't control.

[00:45:12]Now there's this whole thing of people forming relationships and getting advice from AI chat bots. I wonder when the first AI cult leader will emerge. Oh hey look it's Mark Zuckerberg. Did you see this story about how Meta is building a virtual Zuck clone for their employees to interact with? It's trained in all of his mannerisms and videos and company memos and who knows what else. But it's it's a little Zuck for all the employees to talk to when they're having problems in lie of, you know, talking to a person. Just share your secrets with the little man on screen. I'm sure he won't tell anybody. I was reading about this on ground news, who, yes, is sponsoring this video. I've partnered with them since 2023 and I think they're the perfect partner for this topic because it's the perfect example of how dangerous online echo chambers can be.

[00:45:54]Ground News is trying to change all that by showing you all sides of every story and more info about the people telling the story. They're completely subscriberfunded and don't rely on corporate interest so you can come to your own conclusions without having narratives fed to you. First of all, their app and website aggregate news from over 50,000 sources all over the world in one place. Second, they show you the political leanings of those sources and show how they rate for factuality based on independent media watchdog groups. Let me show by diving deeper into that Zuck story. It has almost even coverage from the left versus the right, but how it's being reported is very different. The left points to AI Zuck as a means to an end to enforce company standards versus the right that sees this as a step into a deeper digital control. Two headlines that share a different narrative for the same story. I can dig even deeper by filtering by factuality and who owns the sources I'm reading. so I can focus on independently owned sources and avoid media conglomerates altogether if I want to. My favorite thing is their blind spot feature which shows you stories that aren't even being covered at all by different sides of the aisle cuz it's not just how the news is reported but sometimes it's whether it gets reported at all. Anyway, Ground News is awesome.

[00:46:53]I use it all the time and I partner with them to give you 40% off the same unlimited excess Vantage subscription that I have. Uh you can subscribe through my link at ground.new/jecott new /jo or click the link down below or scan the QR code right here on screen and you can access the transparency you're looking for in today's media environment. Seriously, to me it's like an investment in a better internet. So, go check them out. Links down below. But however you slice it, The Love is One Cult is definitely a cautionary tale about slipping down rabbit holes and how really lovely, wonderful spiritual ideas can become super toxic in a group setting. So stay safe out there. Uh big thanks again to Leah Satilly for her time and it was really great talking to her. There's a there's a whole extended interview I might put out on Patreon. Uh you can go check it out over there. Do go check out her book, Blazing Eyes All. It was really fascinating and there's just like so much that I couldn't possibly get into in this video. Uh, but with that, I'm going to wrap this up. Thank you guys for watching. You guys go out there, have an eye opening rest of the week. Stay safe and I'll see you next Monday. Love you guys. Take care.