Madness Madness!

It had to happen eventually, folks: The Girl Scouts are squaring off against the Boy Scouts, and hooboy it is not gonna go well for the one with all the sexual abuse. (SNS for spoilers.) I mean, look: In the Boy Scouts' defense, is there anything inherently wrong with a crypto-militaristic, consistently right-wing group founded in the depths of British Imperialism? ... Yes! Yes. Of course the...

Sometimes you have choose between inherently evil and stupid organizations. Sometimes it's this week. The Greek System at U.S. Universities is known for just about every kind of baked-in racism, sexism, and classism; the John Birch Society is known for being a paranoid anti-Communist horse shit factory of the type that was generally laughed out of town back before we entered the stupidest tim...

Content warning: Part 1 contains some slurs against gay people, spoken by a gay person. Also CW for mentions of r*pe and abuse by police, and an unavoidable smidgen of pedophilia. If you’re gay and have a job, you’ll have a hard time choosing between this week’s clubs! The Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis provided safe and empowering places for LGBTQ folk during the early and mid 20...

You can have a shovel or a leather mug, but you can't have both. This week we determine whether 'tis nobler to White Savior into a recently semi-decolonized country and insist on capitalism, or to get shitty about the relative authenticity of other people's costumes. It's the Peace Corps, where the germ of an idea John F. Kennedy kind of swiped from Hubert H. Humphrey yielded a...

For reasons fully explained in a brief song, Erin and Amanda were unable to record an episode this week. Please listen to the song, and if you have any questions afterward please email us at madnessmadnesspodcast@gmail.com . We will definitely see you next week.

This week’s matchup hops the pond to England, where we get a look at a couple of longstanding social ensembles: The Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes and the Women’s Institute. One has hats and theater people; one has women who work in the home and get shit DONE. Also the segments are relatively short so there are a lot of pleasant digressions, from soap operas to Jesus’s visit to Glastonbury,...

So, sometimes you have to take a step back and have a look at what you're doing. Sometimes it turns out that what you're doing isn't actually what you want to be doing, or what you feel you should be doing, or, as the saying goes, "kind of sucks." It turns out that MLMs? All kind of suck. There's not gonna be a winner there, and we've accepted that and moved on....

Two giants of the field square off this week! One's a semi-beloved fixture of domestic life; the other is Amway. Not to tip our hand too much, but if you're a betting person, think about laying your money on the MLM that isn't a right-wing monstrosity shilling a bunch of goddamn garbage to keep the DeVos family afloat on an obnoxious yacht. 

IT'S SEASON TWO, SUCKERS!!! Now that we're wig-carrying Unarians, we need another income stream to pay for all these costumes and 8mm film. Time to start a small business and be our own bosses and definitely not wind up thousands of dollars in debt with a garage full of unsalable products! That's right, we're joining a Multi-Level Marketing scheme, and definitely not a pyramid...

Sometimes—OK, who are we kidding, literally all the time—you look down at the stuff you've had to cut from previous episodes due to time constraints, and you say to yourself, "There's no way I'm leaving this behind." And you're right, there's no way we'd let that happen. SO! This week, a fun little grab bag! A Special Listener Letter: Friend of the Program A...

It's all come down to this, folks: After grueling weeks of intense research, our intrepid hosts take on the final four contestants and determine which cult is the cult for them! IT'S REALLY HAPPENING!!! ... After a reasonable discussion of two more cults, of course. Spoilers: Neither fucked-up Jesus Power Cult "Ivanwald" or the alternating straight-up lies and batshit craziness...

As you might expect, we here at Madness Madness are constantly bombarded with fun, exciting, and horrific cult news at all hours of the day and night. We're picking it out of our hair; spooning particles of it off the surface of our morning coffee. And today we share some of that goodness with you! Join us for shorter-than usual discussions of Iglesia Maradoniana, Armstrong-ism, the GOP, the...

Sometimes you have to look your former spiritual mentor in the eyes and say, "Hey, buddy. I'm thoroughly plagiarizing your work so I can make some cash off this cult. And that's OK." Other times you have to sing over the Berlin Wall at an old East German woman who's been through both world wars about how you have to work hard for your freedom. It's a complicated life,...

Picture it: It's the '70s, you live in New York, you like getting screamed at, and you're really into humpin'. Bang! Welcome to the Sullivan Institute, pal! Or, alternately, picture it: It's the early 2000s, you're at your desk, and your three favorite things are incoherent garbage, constant antisemitism, and MDMA. Whoomp! There's your cult! It's Desteni, a...

This week it's Mankind United, a cult whose story includes a startling refutation of Chekhov's Tiny Man With a Metal Head rule; and EST, whose story includes reinforcement of Chekhov's Confused Boomers Entering the '70s Rule. Join us as we sniff through these grifts, overturning numerous tidbits of knowledge like so many cult-researching truffle pigs.

France! Australia! Oy! Hon hon! Today we go deep—down under, even—into the Raelians, France and French Canada's clone-happy UFO booster club, and see if it's a better fit for us than Kenja, Australia's sorta home-grown, sorta ripped off from Scientology cash vacuum. Raelism (not realism) is, at the very least, a cult where you're less likely to be burned to death for the knight...

Stadiumwide mass weddings! Questionable claims about organ harvesting! Richard Nixon! Al Haig! SHEN YUN!!! This episode's got it all, folks. The Rev. Sun Myung Moon and his absolutely third-grade-boy ideas about gay people fight for the elite eight against Falun Going, a relative newcomer with an omnipresent troupe of acrobats and a massive compound in the U.S. that you are not invited to. Al...

CONTENT WARNING: The story of Tony Alamo contains details of child abuse awful enough to inspire a person to dig up Tony Alamo's body and beat the shit out of it. The Solar Temple got pretty goddamn lucky when the randomizer put it up against Tony Alamo, let me tell you. But it does have some stuff going for it: Champagne! The Swiss Alps! Grail holograms! Arson! Meanwhile, Tony Alamo makes th...

We had plans, you see, to talk this week about the Children of God and Aleister Crowley's religion of Thelema. These cults turned out to be, respectively, far too awful and nowhere near awful enough to talk about for even part of a podcast. So we got way better cults! This week: The charmingly earnest weirdos of UNARIUS square off against the social media influencer who is totally not a cult...

Having your own cult is about not having to decide between being a wildly successful health-food restaurant pioneer or being White Human Man God. Or between telling your gaggle of model-like Californians that sex is ridiculous while also ... uh, look, no spoilers, but the dude pushing that notion may actually have had sex. The Source Family was a foundational southern California '60s cult; Bh...

At some point in their lives, everyone ends up asking themselves "Do I wear robes often enough? And should they be maroon? And why are all these pancakes different sizes? What the hell, Self!" Bearing that in mind, there is a 100 percent chance you'll find something relatable in this episode, when we compare weirdly touching space Jesus suicide cult Heaven's Gate to the salad b...

Some people like their cults real big and real ugly, and those people can fuck off! Hahaha, just not kidding. It’s the big one this week, folks. Scientology. The brain fart of L. Ron Hubbard, a man whose writing ability was only eclipsed by his Navy career, this multibillion-dollar jargon cesspit may finally answer the question: “What if I could be surrounded by insufferable batshit narcissists *a...

Sometimes your cult leader is a recovering drunk who's super into LSD. Sometimes he's a twerpy little sex pest coasting on a middle-school judo championship and a good result on an OMNI Magazine IQ test. And since we're all about making choices here, it's time to dig into both these weirdos and the cults they founded. This week's cults: Synanon, a rehab-turned-shaved-heads...

Yogurt rivers? Forfeiture of property rights? Why not both? 'Cuz that's not what this show's about! Our first episode pits the Temple of Krishna Consciousness (the Hare Krishnas) against the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) (the ones that still do polygamy). Turns out both groups are appropriated versions of existing religions! Who could have foresee...