Bonus Episode: The Westboro Baptist Church with Chelsey Weber-Smith

It's a star-studded bonus this month as American Hysteria's Chelsey Weber-Smith tells Sarah about their research on Fred Phelps, the Westboro Baptist Church, and how we (sometimes) change our minds. And eventually, the whole thing turns into a feelings fest. Editing by the irreplaceable Miranda Zickler.

Note: due to the subject matter of this episode, the f-slur appears multiple times.

Listen to American Hysteria's Westboro Baptist Church episodes here 

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Transcript:

Sarah: Welcome to You're Wrong About bonus, breakout room, VIP something, something. I am here with beloved, scary clown, friend of the show, Chelsey Weber-Smith. Chelsey, hello.

Chelsey: Hello, Sarah. You know, I'm so happy to be here as always, especially with this topic. Nothing hot about this topic. Not a scary thing to talk about at all. Oh boy.

Sarah: Yeah. We've moved from scary clowns into, I presume like scarier clowns.

Chelsey: Essentially. That's a great way to put it.

Sarah: Yeah. Chelsey, you are the host of our beautiful sibling show, American Hysteria. And for people who haven't had the pleasure, tell us about that program.

Chelsey: Oh, well, yes, it is quite similar to You’re Wrong About in a lot of ways, but it's a scripted show, so you will just listen to me. But yeah, we cover similar stuff, lots of a moral panics and urban legends and conspiracy theories, but more and more, we're moving into what we're calling like fantastical thinking. So it could be really anything. Westboro was one of them, that was more of an outrage. We like to talk about outrage or anything that lights up Americans and makes us act weird. I think you probably get a good idea of our show from this episode today, if you don't listen to it, from what you're going to hear today.

Sarah: Yeah. It's a show that does the wonderful thing of giving you a clear picture of what is going on in the world you live in, but to me makes it less scary by telling you why.

Chelsey: Well, that's what you do, too.

Sarah: Trying to.

Chelsey: Well you do, absolutely.

Sarah: One of my personal favorite You're Wrong About episodes, you came on a little over a year ago and explained the killer clown phenomenon. And that just like, I'm so happy that piece of media exists in the world that I got to be part of it.

Chelsey: I know, so much fun.

Sarah: What are we talking about?

Chelsey: We are talking about the one, the only, Westboro Baptist Church. You guys don't remember the Westboro Baptist Church. They are most well-known for their very inflammatory funeral pickets where they hold signs that say either, “Thank God for dead soldiers” or the other also very inflammatory, “God hates fags”.

I may say that ‘F’ word sometimes on this show, it's hard to talk about it without dropping the F bomb. So, yeah, that's the basic, and just in case you don't know who the Westboro Baptist Church is, and of course we'll get into the details.

Sarah: Yeah. That makes me think of the profile that they've had over time, because this to me really takes me back to the mid aughts. Like I think when you and I were both finishing high school, starting college thereabout, and I actually, there was a student at my college freshman year who wrote and was producing a play called, Fred Phelps, The Musical. Which I remember being pretty great. And yeah, just that I feel like we talked about this a ton for a while. And I don't know, has culture moved on? Have we swallowed this pill and used it to become more awful or what's the timeframe of this?

Chelsey: Yeah. Yeah. That was my conclusion. Yeah, that was definitely my conclusion. Cool. Yeah. No, I think the conclusion, I mean, I don't know if we can start with the end here, but the conclusion essentially is when you have a group this inflammatory, this cartoonishly outrageous, it can be really dangerous because people at the time like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson were able to be like, “Those are the bad guys”. Although they were working for the exact same goals and using essentially the same rhetoric without swearing. It's like the gays are the reason America is falling, AIDS is God's punishment for gays. These are all things that the very mainstream, Christian establishment was saying. And then they also had this sort of scapegoat. So I see them as obviously a loathsome group, but 60 people who were able to capture our attention and play this role that is very interesting and a lot more wild. And a lot more centered in pop culture than I remembered it being, you know.

Sarah: So where does our story begin?

Chelsey: Well, I think we got to start with Fred. We‘ve got to start with Fred Phelps. Actually, you know what, let's just get a quick sense of who we're dealing with here and what the personality of this what's been called a ‘cult’. I don't feel particularly like that's quite the right word, but you know, cult is an abstract term.

Sarah: We could be here all night if we're going to get into cult versus religion.

Chelsey: It's not good for that ‘new religious movement’, as they say, new religious movement. So they are what we have determined to be the mean girls of the kingdom of Christ, is what we're calling them. So they are so much like mean queen bee popular girls in movies with their insults.

So forgive some of my swears here and some of my slurs, but they're just so quippy and snarky and bullying. They've got “The Pope is a lying whore”, these are all on their signs that they hold in various locations outside of schools, outside of any pop culture event, they were there. So we'll get into that too, but they will say “The Pope is a lying whore”, “Mickey is a fag”, “Mickey Mouse is a fag pimp”. Don't really know what that means. The city council woman that he's speaking of is “Jezebelian and a switch-hitting whore”. But it's not a baseball term.

Sarah: Switch-hitting? But isn’t that a baseball term?

Chelsey: I think that’s a bi-sexual…

Sarah: Oh, okay, I was like, why are they insulting her baseball playing?

Chelsey: So the next one, “The DA is a forked tongue she-devil, a dirt dumb butt ugly demon, possessed Vixen.”

Sarah: That's all for one person?

Chelsey: That's all for one person.

Sarah: That’s a big fucking sign.

Chelsey: Yeah, I know. Big sign. That actually might not have been on a sign. These are just things they've said. Some of them are signs, some of them are quotes from the media. But this is a great one, “Mr. Rogers is a sissy Pied Piper from hell.”

Sarah: I mean, that sounds like a compliment.

Chelsey: Yeah, I think so. I think so. These are things that the Westboro Baptist church say are fags. So this list is of fags. Okay. The Marines, Santa, America, the court, the flag, Halloween, the media, the Oscars, just school in general, and the NBA.

Sarah: What?

Chelsey: So we've got a very equal opportunity hatred that happens with this group. And that's really important to understand as we move forward, is that they hate every… well we'll get into that. They believe that God hates everyone and everything, but the Westboro Baptist church, essentially, is what we get down to. So that's the vibe I want to get like kind of this, because that's the most important thing is just sort of this like snide, smirking cruelty that they cultivated.

Sarah: It's like Beavis and Butthead Calvinism.

Chelsey: Yep. Yep. That's a great way to put it. And it is Calvinism. And I want to talk about what that is. Do you want to talk about Fred Phelps first though? Should we get into him?

Sarah: I mean, yeah. I would love to say what I don't know or might know.

Chelsey: Please tell me what you remember.

Sarah: Yeah. I understood him to be the ringleader in charge, essentially, of the Westboro Baptist Church. I assume he founded it, and I feel like that's all I know. I feel like Fred Phelps is like a very unsexy name to have, and anyone who says such cruel things, you just have to imagine an ugly heart. And then if you don't know what they actually look like, then you can sort of picture that. And yeah, I was thinking when we were about to get started, I was like, I don't know if he's alive or dead. And so it's really kind of  a blank slate.

Chelsey: Well, I got all the news. He's dead. He's dead as fuck. So he's gone. And his death is a very interesting story as well. So, do you remember what he looks like in your mind's eye? Can you conjure anything?

Sarah: It's funny cause like, I don't know if I'm picturing a person or if I'm picturing the person I would imagine going with that name. But I picture someone who's looks like he's in one of those Ansel Adams photos of people in the American west, and he's got a crappy suit and like just hair and skin, all the same. Sallow color and just a small, unhappy looking person. Is that correct at all?

Chelsey: He wasn't small. So not too far off. Clean cut looking guy, white cowboy hat, almost always. He has very dull, blue eyes that are really odd and clouded over with like years of horrible behavior. There's just something that is distanced and missing in all of his videos. And I mean, his ranting and raving is outrageous, they're very quippy. They know how to outrage people immediately. And that's just what they're so good at.

So he started at all, but it wasn't always that way. Just so we like to start a lot of these stories, because he wasn't born this person. That's the interesting thing is everybody else, aside from like the freaks that joined the Westboro Baptist Church, which are not, they didn't want people to join, which is really interesting. They weren't trying to convert anybody, but everybody else throughout the years has been born into this church. So I find personally if you're going to understand how a cult operates, you're going to be able to cultivate a little bit more empathy or understanding around the people who grew up in it. Which is definitely what I found just through completely trying to embed myself in this family and really wanting to get beyond just the easy reaction of these are horrible people, right. That can stand, you know, that can still stand, but there are a lot of reasons why people are the way they are.

Sarah: But why are they horrible? How does one get so horrible?

Chelsey: So the thing about Fred Phelps is, no matter what he does, he has a great work ethic.

Sarah: Same with Jim Jones. Great example of how that's not necessarily a positive thing.

Chelsey: No, depends on what you put it toward. And he was going to be a very successful young man. Because here is a little list I have made for you of all of the things that he was in high school before he became this hyper-Calvinist man.

So he was a first rank Eagle Scout, a track star on the high hurdle, a bass horn player in the band, a reporter from the high school newspape, and a member of the high school fraternity. And he was also in the Young People's Department of the Central United Methodist Church. He was with the American Legion, and they officially recognized his superior courage, leadership, scholarship, and service. He won more honors for leadership in the Mississippi Junior State Guard, he was a literal big time boxing champion in high school. He won state two years in a row, and the whole town would talk about how he was going to go to Madison Square Garden and he was a Golden Gloves boxer. And this was before he turned 16.

Sarah: Wow. Oh my God.

Chelsey: Right? So he's crushing it all over the place. He's just like nailing it. Then he gets accepted to West Point, which is his dream. Oh, and by the way, we're situated right now in the forties. He's in high school in the forties, so there's a lot going on. Obviously, we're just coming out of World War II and he's trying to go to West Point. That was his dad's dream for him. But then something happens.

So now I will tell you the change that occurred. There are different stories. There are rumors, there is innuendo. But what we know for sure is that the summer after graduation, Fred's flying high, he's doing great because he's gotten his best life in front of him. But then him and his friend, John Capron, which I have a whole sort of like fanfic thing that they were seeing each other, and something happened. But everybody said that they were just best friends. They were going to the movies all the time. They went and did Methodist Church activities together, just having a wild time Methodism.

Yeah, they did. They did the Methodism, and you know, everything's going great having a great summer. And then they go to this really fiery, flamboyant tent revival. Those were coming back into style in the forties. And it was just like this old school, Calvinistic preacher who was very harsh in what he said. And we don't know, Fred tries to explain what the message was that kind of got him to suddenly convert. He just had a total religious experience and converted to Calvinism on the spot. And so did John Capron. And then they did this like Heavenly Creatures thing where they like created their folleaux  ado. Together they just had this weird - and that's where this seems romantic - it's very like young lesbian movie thing where it's like, we created this young, lesbian world together and can't last for very long, but there was no murder.

Sarah: Someone's parents are going to get murdered.

Chelsey: Someone’s going to get a brick in a stocking. But no, that didn't happen. But John did go on to basically say, okay, I'm out, this has gotten too intense. Because they were losing people. And like, they were already cutting people out of their life because they weren't hardcore enough. And then John marries Fred's sister. Could that have caused his lifelong hatred of homosexuals? I don't know. I wasn't there. So I have that idea in my head that perhaps it was related. So that's the start.

Sarah: I mean, it does feel like young men historically have had these very romantic friendships, that no one would think to call romance based on the culture of the time. Or like these relationships with your friends and your pals and you like jack each other off sometimes, but it's just a thing you do. I don't know if I'm making a point here. I just think that no one has to have the language for what's happening, and it can still be happening. It can still be a positive part of your life until you go to a tent revival.

Chelsey: Yeah. You know, they were just going to the movies and then this happened. And that's, I don't know. I'm interested in this moment in life where everything changes. Like this crack down the center of your life. That happens in a moment. Like it's honestly my greatest fear is that can happen. It's amazing and it's terrifying. But it's, that was that moment where it was like this lightning strike experience separates two Fred Phelps’ from each other, and the first one never comes back.

Sarah: (singing) And they never knew nothing of love.

Chelsey: That’s nice. You have a nice voice.

Sarah: Oh, thank you. I had that song stuck in my head yesterday and I actually started crying just from thinking about it.

Chelsey: I understand. So since this has been Fred's big conversion experience, maybe we should talk a little bit about Calvinism. Do you want to tell me like what you think of when you think of Calvinism?

Sarah: Totally. Yeah. I mean, I think this was a concept I learned about when I was relatively young for some reason, and I don't know why. But I remember always having the thought of like what an amazing concept. Because my sense of it basically is that the animating idea of Calvinism is almost everyone is completely fucked. Like almost all of you are going to hell, and a very few - I think the elect - or maybe that’s Jehovah’s Witnesses. So the very few elect are not going to hell, and also, it's like you can't affect that, you're just doomed or you're not. My impression is that if you're a Calvinist, you like have to believe that you just are going to make it. Which is an amazing thing to think about yourself. I think.

Chelsey: Well, that's a very good summary. And that is essentially exactly what my impression was coming into Calvinism. And it's not far off at all, but I think it's really easy to think that you would say, okay, predestination is that thing where you are either going to heaven or you're going to hell. And the idea is that God, a zillion years ago before Adam and Eve, has planned every single thing out to the very most tiny detail that there could ever be.

Sarah: Right. My God is less organized than that, I’ve got to say.

Chelsey: Chaos, but that doesn't work for Calvinists. They want everything to be exactly right. But Calvinism was actually pretty radical in its time, even though it doesn't sound like. It is because what it was is the first time that somebody pushed up against the Catholic church who were saying we can decide who goes to heaven and hell by taking money or taking whatever. And then John Calvin was, “No, God is the only one who decides these things.” So whatever you take from that. I mean, it's better in a lot of ways. It takes the power away, it was an equalizer, for sure. Which is cool. It's not great now, but it's easy to think okay, why wouldn't you just do whatever the fuck you want, if you're either damned or you're not and nothing you do. That's a big part of it. Like you said, there's nothing you can do to get into heaven. If you're pre-damned, there's nothing you can do. And that's insane, right? What an insane way to live. And it's not that people who are Calvinists are convinced that they are certainly one of the elect. They are in constant fear that they are not. So it is a very scary life to live.

Sarah: And stressful. It reminds me, have you ever seen The Decline of Western Civilization, Part II: The Metal Years?

Chelsey: I haven't seen that.

Sarah: You would love it. It's this lovely documentary about just the metal scene in LA in like the mid-eighties, mid to late eighties, I think. And they interview all these kids in bands and bands that are trying to make it. And there's this whole montage of them being asked, like, “What are you going to do if you don't make it, if you don't become a star?” And they're like, “I'll make it.”

Chelsey: It's not even a question.

Sarah: I don't know. It reminds me of that because it's like, you don't know if you're going to get it, but you're just like, I have to live in this constant attitude of manifesting this and believing it, because otherwise I really don't have a chance.

Chelsey: Yeah, absolutely. And that's part of why it's really important in Calvinism to put on airs and to not break. Because the only evidence of your election that you can possibly expect to have, is that you are living by the code of the Bible. And if you're living by the code of the Bible, you can assume if we're going to compare someone like Fred Phelps, who believes he's living by the word of the Bible, to someone like you or I, you could see that probably Fred Phelps by his estimation would be going to heaven, whereas we would be going to hell. So there's evidence and you know, the Westboro Baptist Church certainly believed they were the one, true church of God and all that kind of stuff. But if you listen to interviews, they will say, well, we can't be sure that we're going to heaven.

Sarah: I want to see a church that's like, there's a one true church of God, and it's not us. We're doing okay.

Chelsey: We're fine.

Sarah: But we're not the greatest or anything. We're trying, but no, the real guys are in like Arkansas.

Chelsey: It's the Westboro Baptist Church. So I think another really important thing that separates them from other Calvinists is that they're hyper-Calvinists. And this is great. So the difference between those two. Calvinists think that God just sort of stands by and lets everyone go to hell. Right? He's just like, all right, you're not elect. I'm just going to look over here. I'm going to wash my hands of it. You're all going to fall into hell. Whereas hyper-Calvinists believe that God takes joy and pleasure in damning people and torturing people. So, yeah. And I mean, to be quite frank with you, I read a lot of the Bible for this episode and God is mean and scary in the Old Testament.

Sarah: In the bible? Yeah, it’s true. He's such an asshole.

Chelsey: And we've kind of revised a lot of it to be like, God is love and everything. And I'm reading this and I'm like, oh, I don't know. That's not true. There are some nice parts, but even Jesus is like, oh, there's just so many mean things.

Sarah: Well even the Jesus part. Like I know that Jesus did some great work, but at the end of the day, it's like, okay you guys, I'm going to save you all from your original sin by murdering my child in front of his mom, by the way. And it's like, really couldn't have done it another way.

Chelsey: I know. And then he apparently comes back with a giant sword and just murders everyone at the end of days. So it's just sort of like, that sounds nice.

Sarah: I’s a fun time the whole way through.

Chelsey: Yeah, just a great time. Just covering me with sores and turning my ocean to blood and, you know, thank you. Yeah. So that's like where we're at ideologically in the Westboro Baptist Church.

Sarah: People complain far too much about Stephen King, I think. I mean, there's many things to complain about re: Stephen King, but in terms of like the violence and the gore and the scary stuff, it's like, it's very wholesome in comparison to the foundation of America's favorite religion.

Chelsey: Jesus, with all these book bannings, people have been getting up and reading like sex stuff from whatever queer, graphic novels and try taking it all of context and reading just the most graphic sex that they can find in any book in the library. And I just want any oppositional force to get up there and be like, “I agree with all of this. And now let me read to you another book”, and just straight up open the Bible and start reading like the scariest stuff. Because it is so fucking scary. There's so many, Sarah, the satanic sacrifices in the Bible. They're not satanic, but they are exactly the same thing. It's just they’re constant slaughtering animals and just doing all this stuff, it sounds so satanic.

Sarah: God that never occurred to me. The Old Testament. It's just all animal sacrifices to the finish, right? Oh, and then the one, who's the guy who like, this is why I'm convinced that God is a dick, at least based on many of these stories. He's like, okay God, if I win this battle, I'm going to kill the first animal I see. And God is like, great, fine. And then he's coming home and he sees his daughter, and so he kills her because he doesn't welch on deals.

Chelsey: Everybody's always having sex with their dad or it just it's baffling to me. Everything I read, and it was just like, God's always like, and then all of us, the elect us, and you can just get together and burn all the sinners and we can stomp on their ashes. He’s like, come on, we're gonna all stop on their ashes. Like, he's not good.

Sarah: You know what God, maybe some of us want to like run around in a meadow. One of the meadows that you made, by the way?

Chelsey: No, he was like, Eve ruined that for you.

Sarah: That's such a bummer, dude.

Chelsey: Just the fact that anything is based on this book is just completely…

Sarah: Like there's already too many adaptations with The Great Gatsby, you know? And like there's only a couple that I know of and that's already extreme. So you can imagine.

Chelsey: Yeah. Okay. So let me tell you then a little bit about what happened to Fred, really briefly. Things are totally wild. It’s 1954 and Fred is about to move to take his first job as a pastor, because he just immediately dropped all the West Point stuff and went straight to school to be a pastor. Including he was at Bob Jones for a bit.

Sarah: That's the place where you still can't have sideburns or anything, right?

Chelsey: Yeah, exactly.

Sarah: Because the Bible doesn't like sideburns.

Chelsey: Nope. And you definitely could not be in an interracial relationship until the year 2000.

Sarah: I’m honestly shocked they made it that far, I guess.

Chelsey: They can still kick you out for being gay. Yeah, they wanted their tax exemption back. So, but this is very interesting. So they happened to move to Topeka, Kansas. Brown vs. Board of Education had just gone through. So he also had been in law school for a while. So very surprisingly his big thing throughout his legal career, starting in the early 1970s, was that he went to bat for black people who needed a lawyer. So he was very into civil rights, like a big part of his preaching was how racism was not biblically sanctioned.

One example is he represented a 10-year-old black girl named Evelyn Johnson against the Topeka Board of Education in 1973. And he was arguing that despite all of these changes that had been apparently made, she still was not getting an equal education based on the fact that the school in her area was made up mostly of minority students, so of course was not given the same funding that other schools in the area were given. So that case received national attention. And he was kind of known for a second. It put pressure on the us Department of Health. They ended up implementing a bunch of new practices to fix some of these issues. And by the end of his career, he was honored by the NAACP and the greater Kansas City chapter of Blacks in Government. So it's like what the fuck.

Sarah: We’re still talking about Fred Phelps, right? I didn’t have a stroke, did I?

Chelsey: Fred Phelps. No, you did not have a stroke. Fred Phelps was a civil rights lawyer, and a well-respected one at that. And the families divided, I would say most people err on the side of this was a genuine thing that he was doing. And then one particular son who has expressed a worse experience than a lot of people so I'm not quite sure if he had a different proximity to Fred or a different relationship, but this was one of his sons. And he said that Fred was a closeted racist who was trying to profit off of the civil rights movement in the age that kind of came after that. But other people, I don't know. It seemed pretty genuine because there's not a ton of evidence. There are little things here and there that maybe, but it just, it wasn't enough for it to really seem like a con.

Sarah: Right. There are so many better cons that you could have at that time. And not to sound like a broken record, but like this also reminds me of Jim Jones, because one of the things I find really interesting about him is that he was quite important in the desegregation of Indianapolis. And I think that's an example of like, you can have a terrible person and they can still be inhabiting a part of American society that is terribler.

Chelsey: Yeah, absolutely. I don't know. I, it just goes to show how complicated people are. I mean, that's part of, I think, why both of us like doing the work that we do, because we really appreciate the fact that there are simultaneous truths happening at any given time about a person.

Sarah: I just had an image of the part in Jurassic Park where Laura Dern finds the sick triceratops and she gets so excited. She's like putting the gloves on, she's like reaching into this giant mound of triceratops dung and digging around, and everyone else is grossed out. And she's just totally in her element. And I feel like that's the feeling I think that you and I get from this kind of research where you're just like, look at this human psyche. And everyone's like, why would you want to put your hands in that? And you're like, how could I not put my hands on this?

Chelsey: I know. And then I feel like in the movie, I feel like I remember - and tell me if this is a false memory - that is there some sort of dinosaur that kind of purrs on her at some point, is that completely insane? Like not a purr but like that fucking sound they make.

Sarah: Well the one that gets Wayne Knight kind of makes a purr before he gets scary. But like, that's my mental image now is Laura Dern with a little dyno snuggling up to her. That's what happened in my heart.

Chelsey: It's nice. It's nice. Yeah. And they just announced that the cast is coming back, did you see that, for the new Jurassic Park. Oh my God.

Sarah: Wait. I am very wet for all those senior citizens.

Chelsey: Dude. No kidding. Everyone looks amazing. They really do. Fuck. Okay. So what happens next? What happens next?

Sarah: Actually Fred Phelps, who would hate this tangent, which I love.

Chelsey: He would hate it. Fuck, Sarah. They were allowed to consume any popular culture they wanted. They loved Goosebumps. One of the granddaughters was obsessed with Stephen King. They were allowed to do a lot more than you would think.

Sarah: I would not have guessed that.

Chelsey: Because they felt that they were like immune to pop culture. Right?

Sarah: Oh yeah. That's why I'm allowed to read all those chick tracts. Because I’m fine. I'm not going to be persuaded.

Chelsey: I want to do a Jack Chick episode so bad.

Sarah: Yeah. I think that would be good trauma processing for a lot of listeners.

Chelsey: I think so, too. I think this was actually, for a lot of people. I didn't grow up religious, so I don't care. No, I can't imagine.

Sarah: It's easy to revisit a lot of shame without God being involved in any of it. So like, yeah, like it seems like taking a natural human inclination to another level.

Chelsey: Yeah, absolutely. I got plenty of human shame. So he ends up, despite what I had said before about him getting disbarred, that had a lot to do with just like his behavior in the courtroom. Which I'm sure you could imagine from his personality was not always respectful. And he was shitty to judges, and he was basically I feel like they were just like, we're done with this man. And he got disbarred. Again, conflicting stories about that. But that led to this kind of, as we know about Fred Phelps, he needs an activity. He needs something to focus on. And he suddenly didn't have this in his life.

He's got grandkids at this point though, so he's getting older. And what happens, he's still living in Topeka… sorry, this is a large ‘allegedly’ here. Him and his grandson biking through the park, it's a beautiful day, and out from the bushes - keep in mind this is 1991 - out of the bushes appears who, but a gay man. And what is he doing? Trying to get his grandson to come into the woods with him.

Sarah: Like the clowns.

Chelsey: We’ve got shades of clown panic, we've got stranger danger, we've got shades of gay panic. It's pretty much an intersection of all these different things. So he's playing on these moral panics, and that's when he starts his first protest. And that is the Gage Park Decency Drive. And apparently there was a cruising spot in that park, which I do believe is true, but it wasn't really like a park where you ‘hang out’. You know, there's like a lot of parks where you're like, this isn't like the family park that we're hanging out in today, which is fine. There are many kinds of parks, but he was very upset. Nobody would listen to him. The city council wouldn't do anything apparently.

And so this is when he took the crusade into his own hands and started bringing out family, his kids, his grandkids, who are probably young teens to being like babies at this time. So they're pretty young, but they're out there holding signs that say like ‘gays an restrooms’. So they haven't got their slogan yet.

Sarah: They're saying ‘gays in restrooms”? Like, hey, there are gays in your restrooms.

Chelsey: Right? Restroom panics. Yeah.

Sarah: It's funny because obviously what they ended up with is so awful that you wouldn't want it to exist, but you're like, oh, come on you guys, you're not even trying at that point.

Chelsey: No, they're not. But you can't say they don't try later, I guess. So at this point, like in addition to this, they just start just sending faxes to everyone that they possibly can. They're just, it's like that way urban legends traveled through fax machine. It was very similar. But they would just like send the most lude, descriptive, horrible faxes about their enemies and basically imply that people were gay a lot. Whether it be a council person, or some other lawyer that he hates, or just anyone who's stepping on Fred's toes, to the point where these people would have to like publicly assert that they're straight. Like there would have to be speeches. So they're already affecting the politics and the world around them.

Sarah: You don't want to be on the defensive about that in the early nineties. Like, I feel like that could end your career at that point.

Chelsey: Yeah. I think ignoring things can be really helpful sometimes. Maybe people could have seen that this person is unhinged and perhaps not saying the truth. It's hard to say

Sarah: But like, it seems like he gets positive reinforcement for this. It's like, this is an absurd tactic for trying to discredit your enemies that people, I imagine, were very receptive to.

Chelsey: Yeah, I think so. I mean, they were definitely always seen as like Looney Tunes, for sure. There wasn't really a time where after this point they were seen as anything other than fringe. But it took a lot for them to become the center of kind of our attention. Which I think you remember. I mean, they were everywhere.

Sarah: Right. I feel like they popped a bit. Like these stories, they can be building for years or decades, and then suddenly somehow. And I'm really curious what you think of this, why did mainstream America start paying so much attention, and secular America for that matter?

Chelsey: Right. Well, the first thing that they really did that got them on the news was the Matthew Shepard funeral. So they went to his funeral, protested, and this is where they start going to funerals to protest. That's what they're known for. They're the funeral protest church. Right? So they're standing outside, and not only that, but they're creating websites. They were tech savvy early on.

Sarah: Good for them.

Chelsey: Yeah. Great. Right. I know, just put it in their hands.

Sarah: They're on the list serves and all thought newsgroups. I mean, again, we have in common that we talk about people doing a lot of awful stuff, and I feel like it's always interesting to try and break it down. and I'm like, you know, why would a teenage girl smother her newborn baby in a bathroom? Well actually, if you backtrack, you can really understand he would, a person would end up in that place. Or at least I could. But like, this was the kind of thing where I'm like, can you imagine doing that? Because it's very. I don't know if I can access that headspace, because it's not like you're in the heat of the moment. I think that a heat of the moment crime makes so much more sense than like - and maybe this is because I'm a disorganized person – but the work and the effort and the planning that goes into doing something so cold bloodedly horrible and abusive.

Chelsey: Well, would you like to know how they make themselves the good guys? Because what do we know about bad guys? They usually don't think they're not the bad guys. Right? And they usually think they're acting from a place of love. So the Westboro Baptist Church believes that the most loving thing you can do is tell the truth. So they believe that by telling everyone they're going to hell, they are both telling the truth of God and giving people a chance to change their ways, which is confusing, based on predestination. But it's basically, maybe you can prove that you are one of the elect by changing, but don't come to our church because you're never going to be good enough. Right.

So this is fucking key. They will never, and not in anything I watched - and I watched a lot - do they say ‘I hate gay people’, never. And they will say that hatred is a sin. Human hatred is a sin. They're known to be quite nice to people who come into their church and sit down. It's very odd. Nice, I know. Please just follow me. Like I wanted to give so many disclaimers on the episode. Like you guys, I don't like them. I don't think it's okay.

Sarah: Yes. But you know, the sun time disclaimer. It's ‘nice isn't good’. It's yes.

Chelsey: Yes. Our motto is, ‘empathy is not endorsement’.

Sarah: I love that. Yeah. Let's make sure it's of that.

Chelsey: Yes, because did I want to feel empathy for this family in any way? No. But it ended up different than I thought.

Sarah: So, but look at what happens to Will Graham, you know.

Chelsey: Who’s Will Graham?

Sarah: He's the guy in Hannibal who's like, I have super empathy. I empathize with all these serial killers who we are trying to catch, and it's very painful for me. And that's why I have all these [inaudible].

Chelsey: Yeah. That’s me. So basically, they think what they're doing is loving. They are at Matthew Shepard's fucking funeral, and obviously that created a lot of outrage. But it was also the AIDS era, and there was so much silence around anything having to do with anything gay. And there wasn't a ton of extra sympathy in the mainstream for queer people, no matter what happened to them, right?

So it takes something else for them to really pop. And that is a post 9/11 situation. Let's keep in mind, they did protest 9/11, by which I mean, they went there and said, thank God for 9/11, we love 9/11. 9 /11 is the best thing that ever happened. And this is when they start developing, here's where it comes. I understand every function they were thinking, you said, read so much. But they think that God kills American soldiers because he's punishing America for accepting homosexuality. So he's striking down America for accepting homosexuality, but he's doing it through killing troops. Which is a very, very inflammatory thing to say in 2006. It's obviously inflammatory always, but…

Sarah: This is the only episode we've ever done where I wish this was a show that came with a video, because I cannot even articulate a response to any of this.

Chelsey: I know.

Sarah: Like, all I can do is make Muppet faces at you.

Chelsey: And there’s no, like, it gets so wild. Because if you compare this to pat Robertson, as I said, Jerry Falwell, these are not things that they are not saying, they're just keeping their airs on about what they're saying. They're like, they're staying in the post 9/11 nationalistic vibe, and they're very much following a script.

Whereas the Westboro Baptist Church is like, fuck it. We hate troops. We hate gays. We hate America. Equal opportunity outrage. And that's something I found, that's why I wanted to talk about them. Aside from reading Megan Phelps book, who is a defector who's fucking amazing, but that's the thing is like how many things unite us in outrage. Very few, right?

So after this point, if you were to go to a Westboro protest, which again could be anywhere. They're literally always traveling to any kind of event, the Oscars, football game, any funeral of any celebrity, they're there. They're like these little Forrest Gump's. That's how I see them as in every major news story over that time, there's just a little Westboro Baptist Church just affecting their little histories.

Sarah: So it's like, again, it's like Pennywise. You look at all these old photos and you're like, there he is. There's Pennywise. He's always been with us.

Chelsey: He's cartwheeling out of the newspaper. So you go to any picket they're doing, and you're going to see both roller skating drag Queens throwing glitter on them. And you're going to see giant trucks with huge American flags burning out to cover them with smoke.

Sarah: That’s kind of nice.

Chelsey: In a very weird way. But I don't know what it's like between those two groups. So I don't know. Maybe they keep their distance, but at the same time, it's like, well, you're on the same side for once, I guess.

Sarah: Are there any truckers who are like drag curious and they sidle over and they're like, “So, how did you learn how to do your eyebrows… for my wife?”

Chelsey: Yeah, for my wife. And there's gotta be some crossover between the two groups. Right. There's gotta be some like American bears out there.

Sarah: Oh yeah. There's gotta be some Peterbilt driver who's like, “Hey Shannon. Oh, I didn't recognize you.”

Chelsey: Not in front of the guys.

Sarah: We laugh to keep from crying,

Chelsey: We do. So then they go to court over this particular funeral, Matthew Snyder's funeral. That was the big one that got everybody's attention and really started getting the right involved. Because before they were like, okay, well, like the God of the Calvinistic religion, we're just going to let you fall into the sea of fire.

So they were taken to court from this soldier's father. And at this time the conservative media was like, fuck free speech. There's this great clip between Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter that are getting really upset about the Matthew Snyder case. Because what happened is they let it stand because of free speech, because they were far enough away.

Sarah: And is this someone who was killed in war, in combat?

Chelsey: Yeah, he was killed in combat, I believe, by an IED. And that's something that later the Westboro Baptist Church would actually claim they had a small pipe bomb set off at their place in the nineties, kind of as a reaction to guys who were pissed off about their anti-gay rhetoric and stuff. And they were caught, and it really wasn't a very big deal. But later Fred Phelps claimed that the IEDs that were going off in Afghanistan in Iraq were directly related to God punishing people for what they had done to the Westboro Baptist Church. So things definitely start getting very like group narcissism, right?

Sarah: It's getting progressively more loopy.

Chelsey: Yeah. It's almost like people get crazier as they get older

Sarah: And also acquire more power, which hi maybe not the best model, but like whatever.

Chelsey: Yeah. He's got 11 children, so many, just dozens and dozens of grandchildren, and they're all indoctrinated at this point completely. I mean, there's like seven, eight-year-olds.

Sarah: It's always creepy when men bear their own little town. Like they just create their own universe and make themselves in charge of it. It's really an abusive of that privilege.

Chelsey: That’s pretty much what it is. And at this point they do have, because they buy up all these houses on a block. It's a little Mormon-y, like they create their own little compound, but it's just very normal. It's like all these suburban houses, and in the middle there's just this lawn, and they have their pool and their trampoline. And they don't take donations, like their church. It's not a scam. It's just, I thought it was going to be a scam. I thought there was going to be a scam element because they're so outrageous that I thought that there had to be an economy behind the outrage, and there just isn't.

Sarah: How are they making money doing this? How does that work?

Chelsey: They're all lawyers. They all want a law school. It’s so weird. They either work for the state, they're lawyers and they have their own law firm. So they defend themselves against all of these different things. And so there's a little bit of like, they would sue people, but they would sue people who assaulted them at rallies. So it's not a scam. And that's just, it blew my mind, it just blew my mind. And it's just, they don't believe in that. They are very into what they believe, but all the grandchildren at this point right after this are coming of age. So I mean, if you watch the Louis Thoreau documentaries, I recommend them so, so, so much. There's three and they goes about over 10 or 15 years and the changes.

The last one is Surviving Westboro, and that's when people have left and talk about it. And it's the same people who were telling Louie, like when you look at these young women there, a lot, I think they're over 18 at this point, like in pop culture, they're going on Howard Stern. They did family feud on Howard stern. And that is a point I cannot make enough is that they would take any attention they could get, which included these iconic pop culture moments. They were on every talk show. They were everywhere. They were celebrities, and not in a good way. But they were like, they took up so much like majority of religious news coverage those years that they were famous.

Sarah: We do love big, creepy families in this country. I mean, look at the Duggar’s, that's a whole other show.

Chelsey: I was really into the Amish shows. Where people go on Rumspringa and decide if they're going to go back and, good stuff.

Sarah: I didn't know that there were shows about that. And just this, like the Duggar’s thing is so funny to me because it was like they were in the spotlight so many years past the point of no return. And it seems like they've finally been shoved off. So I guess 10 years is the maximum number of years to know that someone in this famous family is a child abuser without like, you wait 10 years and then you take the TV show away. All right, yeah.

Chelsey: Yeah. I know it. Just something about the way that they relate to each other, these families, I guess in a way that… Again, when you have a family, there's something like humanity that you see because you see the dynamics play out versus just like an individual person. So you see in these Louis Thoreau documentaries, you start to feel for them because you see their personalities. And even when they're horrible, there's something about watching a person and seeing their mannerisms and not just hearing about them or not just seeing a news clip. Like watching them in their house in their life. Like all the girls do is get together and make up dance routines to like pop songs. It's so normal. They also write pop songs. Do you remember this, Sarah?

Sarah: No! Oh my God. Where was I? What was I doing during these years? I was fixated on something else. Tell me about the pop songs.

Chelsey: They just take popular songs, there's hundreds, and they make parodies about God. Something like, Santa Claus Will Take You To Hell, is one of my favorites.

Sarah: I wouldn't put it past him.

Chelsey: Yeah. Yeah. And like, but it gets real bad. It's like their graphic. Like their 12 days of Christmas is like, the last one is a tub of KY jelly and 4 gerbils and like, really bad. And these girls are just like enjoying writing these songs together and they all sing together and it's really fucking bizarre.

Sarah: No one is more obsessed with sex than anti-sex crusaders, it seems like.

Chelsey: It seems like. And you can see it. I mean, in the documentaries, Louis Thoreau will be to particularly Jael - who did not leave the church, which is a big bummer - because several of her other siblings and cousins did, but she ended up getting married to this just awful man. But Louie will ask them and just be like, “Well, don't you ever want to have a boyfriend or anything?” And they'll spit, “Oh my God, no, I never have thoughts like that. “Like, it's very clear that they're trying to, and then when you read the memoirs of the people who left, you get the story and it's like, jail was, they were all wearing booty shorts, belly dancing. Like it's just, these memoirs are so good to read. They're just so fascinating. And you really do see that they're just teenage girls and they're young women at the same time. And until they're talking about their beliefs, you can forget that there are these people and it's fucking strange. And it really screwed with me.

And especially who we haven't talked about yet is Shirley Phelps-Roper. She was, maybe you would remember her because she was the one in our time who was in the limelight. So this is Fred's daughter. You don't remember her? I feel like you'd remember if you saw her.

Sarah: I hope something comes back. Should I maybe I'll look her up.

Chelsey: Look her up. Look at her face.

Sarah: Yeah. It's a face. Oh, she's got a hyphen.

Chelsey: Yeah. So what do you think of Shirley?

Sarah: I don't recognize her. I'm like, what the hell was I doing in the mid aughts? Oh, here a photo comes up where she's wearing a big headband that says, “Thank God for cancer”.

Chelsey: Very cute. Love it.

Sarah: She reminds me of the lady in Donnie Darko who doubts people's commitment to sparkle motion. She has a little bit of that kind of facial intensity when you see her making expressions in these pictures.

Chelsey: She’s such a bitch. And she knows it. I mean, that's the thing, they are so snide, that's the best smirking. Everything is just a fucking joke and everybody's a joke to them. Right. So anytime Louie would be like, “Well, do you think I'm going to hell?” They'd be like, “Well, of course they're going to hell, you're dirty sinner.” But then you watch Louie, and they form a bond. And then you learn that they were so sad when he left, and they missed him terribly. And it's like, it's just so sad. And Shirley never has left. Shirley is still there, but her daughters keep leaving. A lot of the familial relationships, people who've left her. Like I miss my family. I wish I could go back without all this other stuff, because it was like so much of their time was like, Shirley would put on Fleetwood Mac, and they'd just dance around together. And it was just like really normal and functional. If Megan or someone had a question, she would like go and they would talk about it. But then other parts were like, there was obviously physical abuse, obviously spiritual, mental abuse, all those different things. But like, it doesn't take away from the fact that you watch this family just being broken hearted.

In the last documentary you watch Shirley, who has just been horrible, you've just been like, oh my God, you're awful. But then you just see her after her beloved children have left and she tries to keep going. You know, she tries to just be like, well… because they say when you leave, like any other cult, it's like you're gone, I'm not going to talk to you ever again. But you watch her finally, like Louie is like, “How do you feel? Like, are you okay essentially?” And she just like is like, well, they made their choice. And then all of a sudden, she breaks, and she just starts crying, and she's just like, they were my children. Like it's so heart wrenching.

And if Shirley Phelps ever leaves the church, that'll be a great day. I'm going to be really happy. I know. You'll make your own sign. My partner Miranda has been on this whole journey with me and it's just like the amount of times that we've cried over this. I just, and I'm sure you were like this a lot with your episodes, we were like, this topic will be fine.

Sarah: Serious. You're like, I'll take a shortcut through these brambles. You're like caught and the thorns are like pricking your eyeballs and weeping and like thrashing around. And you're like, oh no.

Chelsey: That’s exactly how I felt. And every once in a while, there's some blackberries you can eat that are like fun facts. And you’re like, well, that's funny. That's a nice berry, the audience will love that.

Sarah: I’ll give that berry to my friend. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And especially the kind of, this is a tangent, but like occasionally over the past few years I've seen people suggest that I do a Melania Trump episode. And I'm just like, maybe in like 55 years. But I do think that they're like touching on an area that I think is interesting, which is what does it mean to be the wife essentially, of a powerful, scary man, and to become powerful and scary in your own, right? Because of that and the kind of degree of moral agency that you do or don't have. Like, I just think I don't have anything to say about Melania, but like there are many other women who I do think are fascinating and troubling in that way. And I think it's not the argument that… I throw out the argument that women are somehow better because Winona Rider herself rejected that concept in Little Women should have the right to vote, not because we are angels, but because we are human. But this thing where, you know, men who are horrible often are horrible in some kind of a patriarchal way and therefore are likely to be stakeholders in that concept. And so if you're a woman attached to a man who has the power to do terrible things, then the power that you can cultivate through that is just, by definition, a little bit less direct probably than the men in your life or than your husband or significant other. And that, I don't know, that just makes it more interesting, I guess.

Chelsey: Yeah. Men are gateways to power, right. So it's we wonder how many women out there who are Republican voters. It's just like, you have this gateway to power and there's not a lot of them. And so you hold on, which means voting in not your own interest a lot of the time, right?

Sarah: Yeah. It's the My Big Fat Greek Wedding argument, I think. It's the man is the head of the household and the woman is the neck. I think a lot of conservative women believe. Yeah.

Chelsey: Yeah, definitely. So let's see. Right now, you know, they're in their prime where everybody's going on TV, they're on local news all the time. Everybody's so interested in them. And then we get to the kind of end of Fred Phelps. Because he dies not too long after the verdict that allowed him to not be sued by Matthew Snyder's father. So they threw that out because of free speech, and then so he of course thought he won.

Sarah: I mean, I love free speech, but there are moments when you're just like, God damn it free speech. This is a lot.

Chelsey: I know. I know. I just find it so interesting what they are okay with in terms of complete radical free speech and what is not okay. I mean, it's same story. It's nothing new. Okay. So just a couple of years later he’s sick, dementia is setting in for him. He's not himself. He's saying things that people are surprised by, and that includes being nicer.

Sarah: Allegedly, he must have a tumor, the size of a golf ball.

Chelsey: That's pretty much what happens. But, oh God. So Shirley, his daughter, who we've been talking about, Shirley Phelps-Roper is very clearly like the person who should replace Fred. But, she's a woman.

Sarah: Right, salic law.

Chelsey: I know. So this man named Steve Drain, which I wish we could get into, there's so much. I know I have to shorten myself here.

Sarah: The guy’s name is Steve Drain. I mean, how can you tell me that and then not tell me about the guy?

Chelsey: Fucking Steve. I hate Steve Drain more than Fred Phelps. And I don't think that's appropriate. I don't. But I hate this person. I just, I don't even know. I should say dislike them equally. Maybe that would be more appropriate, but he was one of those people who just got like 10 master's degrees, not really 10, but he just kept racking up debt with his family. Just like, what am I going to do? Maybe I'll be this. Maybe I'll be this, you know, and never really settling on anything.

Sarah: He's a Buster Bluth type.

Chelsey: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. But really mean.

Sarah: Just a mean Buster Bluth.

Chelsey: So he decides that he wants to a documentary about the Westboro Baptist church called, Hate Mongers. He's like these people are horrible. I'm an expose them as a hate group. It's pretty early on, I think like late nineties. And he shows up to make the documentary, converts. So he's just one of those people. That's just like the tides of life. Just toss him around until he lands somewhere.

Sarah: God, Steve, get a hold of yourself.

Chelsey: So he forces his wife and his teenage daughter. Can you imagine being a teenage girl and your dad's like, “We're going to the Westboro Baptist Church, pack your bags.”

Sarah: I'm running away.

Chelsey: No kidding. No kidding. But Lauren got out. The daughter got out. Now she is a very cool bodybuilder. So, who knows?

Sarah: Oh, awesome. Good for you, Lauren.

Chelsey: Life's long as we say life is long.

Sarah: Run, Lauren, run. Yeah.

Chelsey: Spread your wings, girl. So basically, Steve had always been hungry for power, for sure. He was trying to be a mouthpiece trying to be in the limelight. So when Fred starts to fade out, there's obviously a sort of like this vacuum that's left is like, what's going to happen. Like any cult, right? So this group of shadowy, literal like internal Illuminati, in the Westboro Baptist Church gets together. Several husbands, brothers, just like a group of men led by Steve Drain, who essentially usurp surely by creating this shame campaign. And whenever anyone in the Westboro Baptist Church makes an accusation, like everybody comes together. They decide whether there'll be ex-communicated, whether they can make up for it, whatever. So it's kind of crazy because anybody can throw something out there and it's like the internet, you could just throw something out there and then people can jump on it.

And this is the point at which her daughters starts to realize that they need to defect because they're like, this is wrong. Like they're starting to see. Some would be treated wrong and they're like, this is not what we believe in. So it's interesting because they didn't necessarily leave out of empathy but out of lying, because these people started faking protests by they started Photoshopping themselves into protests and it made everybody really upset.

Sarah: Like into Westboro Baptist church protests, the usurpers did?

Chelsey: So for example, they weren't allowed to go to Europe because they were banned, but they would Photoshop themselves into something to do with the Queen. Like one of her birthdays or some shit, they were protesting that, and it wasn't true. So people just started saying like, oh, maybe we're not perfect. Maybe we're not the one true church of God, because these people are not acting the way that we believe. It's so interesting because you're like, you want to think like, oh, there was a change of heart, but it was more like, no, you're now doing something I don't believe in. And then slowly it was the empathy kind of came in for people as they left. And Twitter ends up saving Megan, who is Fred's granddaughter. And she ends up starting to leave because she meets people on Twitter who challenge her. She's the mouthpiece on Twitter, so she's just firing off.

Sarah: Twitter did something right?

Chelsey: Dude, Twitter did something right. It was like hundreds of tweets a day and she'd get these onslaughts of people responding. And then Kevin Smith gets involved with a campaign called #saveMegan. He was like, just flood her inbox, basically try to deprogram this person. And he was not mean to her. He was very understanding. He's like, you are from a cult, you don't know what you're doing. And he ended up making Red State about the Westboro Baptist Church. And this is a horror movie you should watch.

Sarah: Is that like a girl and a man on a killing spree, or is that something else?

Chelsey: I think it was something else. And it might be because we couldn't watch it. But here's the thing. We couldn't watch it because it's nowhere on the internet. It's nowhere on the internet. Conspiracy, probably.

Sarah: You’ve got to go to a Best Buy in Walla Walla and dig to the bottom of the DVD bin.

Chelsey: Yeah. Just go to the dump with a shovel until you find it.

Sarah: Good job, Kevin.

Chelsey: I know. And so, like, I know I'm going off in a few different directions, but it's going to come back together. So she is questioning things. Fred is dying. Her mother is humiliated. She's on Twitter all the time. She's also on Words with Friends with a man she met on Twitter.

Chelsey: Well Words with Friends, if it didn't exist, things might not have turned out this way. Because she fell in fucking love on Words with Friends on Twitter, with this man, who was like, didn't let her know who he was. He was like, I don't want you to know who I am, because I probably shouldn't be doing this. Like, people would be mad at me for being empathetic toward you, which I think is really interesting and not untrue, and something I struggle with a lot. I was like, are people going to be mad at me that I've liked developed care for these people? And then I was like, you know, I've been called the ‘F’ word and I've times in my life that I think it's okay for me to like investigate this type of thing. I am someone. I was like, I had to remind myself, you're one of the people that they think are horrifyingly going to hell. So it was just a very interesting experience. And I know I was always really excited to talk to you about it because it's just been such a confusing thing for me. And I know it was for this person, who's talking to Megan and just really willing to challenge her. It was not like he was like really nice. He was like, what are you doing? Like, you're smarter than this. You're kinder than this. He would be like, I know you, and this is not who you are. And just like, how can you do this shit?

But at the same time, just being like. Here's a bunch of indie music. Like she's literally like Megan in the Westboro Baptist Church, I'm picturing her in the scene, all I can see is Garden State where she puts headphones on and she's listening to The Shins. And I'm like 16 at that point, just being like, this is the deepest thing I've ever seen in my life and weeping. But yeah, it's definitely like, because they were, I wish I could remember the bands, but they're sharing music and sharing like all the things they love about pop culture.

And she writes in her book, which is fucking beautiful, she writes about, I just cannot recommend it enough, but you will cry a lot. Oh yeah. But you know, every time they started to fight or anything, he would like really tactfully start to like bring it back to something that they had in common. So he just like over like months, they had breakups, they weren't talking about their feelings for a long time. You can imagine it's that tension that we have but times 10, where you're like falling in love with someone and you want to be careful, but then you're like, I'm in the Westboro Baptist Church really careful, or I'm going to burn. We've all been there.

Sarah: We've all been there. You’re trying to get deprogrammed by the very person you're having feelings for. It's a lot. It happens to everyone.

Chelsey: It happens to the best of us. And so she, at the same time, because of this partially because of the Steve programming that's happening from him, from Kevin Smith, she became good friends with this Jewish man who ran a blog called Judicious. And they became, I mean, she was becoming friends with these people. She's caring about what they think, she's still believing, but she's just like little cracks, right. There was like those little cracks, when you realize something and you repress it, but you have that like twinge in your stomach. It's like that starting to happen. And her description of it, of the moment where she knows she has to leave is just like, she's just painting a wall and someone says something and it's that's it. And she gets dizzy. She almost puked. She almost passes out. Like, she just is like, oh, I've made a terrible mistake. Like I've made a terrible mistake,

Sarah: Which is amazing. We’re able to turn a corner like that, especially if that's been your whole world since birth. I mean, my God, like how do you begin to even know what it's like to be anyone else?

Chelsey: How do you begin? So her and her little sister, Grace, who they're both so cool. Now Grace is like a party girl. She's out there kissing her friends on Instagram, her girlfriend's on Instagram. You know, your friends just like kiss a Moroccan. It love it. Yeah. Just looking great. Just amazing.

So anyway, she's going to get kicked out, long story. We're not going to go into it, but she's getting kicked out for basically being a slut that she wasn't. And so they were like, everything's fine, I'm leaving too. And so they go to gather. She goes to Fred, Shirley's like, please don't leave me. Like the mom is just like cry. They're just like, it's just this horrible thing where you're like, I'm going to leave my mother, I'm going to leave everyone that I loved.

In the book she goes to each one of her siblings. One of them is a computer geek, like a little boy who's a computer programmer who makes something that's like, “Please don't leave, Megan.” Like, we love you. Don't you know? And it is heart breaking, but they leave. And the last-ditch effort is Shirley takes her to see Fred, and Fred who is always described by her as just loving. So many of the grandkids, other ones, like it depends on the person, it really does. Because Fred was also definitely super abusive to his kids. Granted, he's like, you know how parents. Really awful, but then when they become grandparents, they're suddenly nicer. Yeah. It's like that kind of thing. It's very weird. It's just, there's enough distance where you can be like, you're not about me. Like my daughter is about me, but you're just, we're old now. So she goes there and so like I mean, imagine your grandfather, like your beloved grandpa, he's like, “Oh, you're going to leave.” And she's like, yeah. And he's like, “Well, don't do that to your mother.” She just can't speak. She's crying. And like, when he realizes that she's not going to change her mind and she reads the audio book and she does the voice and it's so, oh God,

Sarah: See, why do we need any kind of demon stuff in horror movies? It's just like, show me a family. But like I thought Hereditary was going so great until they were like, it is a demon. And I was like, oh fuck you guys. Yeah, I know.

Chelsey: Oh, God, he's like really sweet. And then his voice just changes immediately into just like a disgusted tone. And he says, “Well, I thought we had a jewel this time, Shirl. Looks like we got it all wrong.” And it's just like, that's it. And then she turns, and she just runs up and just runs into her cousins and just runs. And she's just packing and leaves. They go on a grand adventure. Please listen to our episode about It if you're interested, it's a long story. Very beautiful. Read her book. Don't even listen more.

Sarah: So just read the episode, read the book. Yeah.

Chelsey: Do both, get some more detail. They go on a very indie movie adventure. The sisters didn't find themselves out in the world. It's amazing. But they come back when Fred's dying, because as Fred's dying, this shadow group I had mentioned, that's trying to usurp power, starts to cordon him away slowly. So they start to take him out of limelight, out of the spotlight, farther and farther away because his dementia is developing. And this is the story that everybody tells. And I think I have figured out that there's enough people telling it that it might be true, but it seems too beautiful. Like, it seems like one of those, like you wrapped it up with a bow, the story ended, and they galloped off into the sunset.

And that is like, apparently Fred had been begging this break not to happen with the elders and everything. Like he saw what was happening. And he was like, no, it's about family, all this stuff, whatever. So obviously they're mad at him about that. But then one day he's in his home, and apparently he walks out onto the lawn. And across the street for the last few years with something called the Equality House, which was set up in direct protest. So it's like an organization that helps gay rights, and they do a bunch of different stuff. But the Equality House is, they painted it rainbow. If you're Fred Phelps and you're looking out the window, you're going to see the Equality House. So it's this kind of fun thing that they did to just be an oppositional force at all times in their neighborhood. So apparently Fred walks out on the lawn and just calls out up to the Equality House and just starts saying, “You're good people. You're good people.” And then after that, they put him away in a hospice center and he died alone in this hospice center. But Megan went to see him just for one nice thing. And she did say he had changed. I wouldn't say that he was like, I love gay people, you know, but he had changed and he had said like, “I love you” before he died. And he just kept calling people “good”. You know? And of course he's got dementia, so it's not necessarily… like, it's too pretty, right. It's too pretty. But a lot of people say it happened, you know?

Sarah: Well, I mean, I personally, what do you think?

Chelsey: I don't know. Yeah. I don't care, to be honest. Yeah. I don't really care about Fred Phelps, something weird happened to him. I don't know what happened, but he made these choices a lot more than anybody else. He also, by most accounts, had a really normal childhood. Like it's really confusing with him. I still think he has had human moments in his life. You know, I think he probably got hurt in some way that we don't know about, and all those different things, but the rest of them are very human and it's really weird. And the rumors about whether this happened with Fred, you know, it'd be like, well, I heard it from this person and I heard this and everything. But I trust Megan's sort of work in terms of figuring out if this was true, and she didn't present it, you know, nobody presents it in this way where it's easy and like, oh, he changed. I mean, let's just say the media outlets did when this happened. It was like Fred Phelps change of heart. Like he loves gay people now. And it just, you know, we'd love that. We would love that and that'd be great. But again, it's a little too late.

Sarah: Although my God would accept him. My God has no hell. So that's not really much of a statement, but yeah.

Chelsey: God, hell is so stupid. It's such a con. Ultimate con.

Sarah: Yes. I mean, when I think about the utility of hell, I'm like, how else do you get little kids to obey? You know, if you don't have stories about hell or physical punishment, then you're just stuck negotiating and doing timeouts for years. And like, you can see why nobody wants to do that. And yet you have to. So sorry.

Chelsey: Yeah. He’s the Boogeyman. He’s just the Boogeyman.

Sarah: He's the Candyman. Yeah.

Chelsey: It's very sad. And I would like to put out in the universe how grateful I am that I didn't have to deal with religion growing up. And you didn't, you weren't religious growing up, right? Secularish family?

Sarah: It’s funny, my parents were very secular, and then they sent me to Episcopalian schools for 10 years, I think just because they were like, it's the best school you could get into. I know about Bible stories, and I know all the songs from Sister Act, but that is it.

Chelsey: Yeah. I just, I don't know what it would be like. So listeners that have done this, very impressive to me. And I can't imagine you ever fully get out of your fear of hell. Like, it's just, I imagine it lurks like somewhere inside you because of your conditioning. It's just so fucked up. And I mean, Santa Claus is just similar to it in a way where it's like you're being watched all the time.

Sarah: And like, I mean, I do still believe in Santa. I think that is a good metaphor. Because I mean, I don't literally, but like every year I'm like, “Oh, Santa is in his workshop. This is a present from Santa. Where’s Santa on the Santa tracker?” It's just like a pleasant thing to like believe in. I don't know. I guess it's like, right. Like these ideas that you have in early childhood are very sticky and they can remain very dear to you ,or they can stay in the driver's seat of your entire life in a way that is not helping anyone.

Chelsey: Yeah. You know, this is sort of like the end in a way with them. I mean, as you know, of course when the cult leader dies…

Sarah: Things get weird.

Chelsey: They get really weird for a period and then they just like taper off, peter out. And I mean, how long has it been since you've heard anything from the Westboro Baptist Church? A) we're not interested anymore, we've moved on. Because I mean, we have Westboro Baptist Churches on Fox News, essentially at this point. We’ve got the alt-right, we've got provocateurs everywhere. And so I don't think that provocations would be as extreme today. I'm sure they could do it.

Sarah: So this is like a Charlotte's Web situation. Tell me what you mean by that. Fred Phelps dies, but he leaves behind like thousands of horrible babies.

Chelsey: But the thing I think like dozens and dozens of people have left. There's not that many people left.

Sarah: Oh yeah, no. I'm thinking of like the Fox News, the alt-right, his spiritual babies. It seems like his actual babies have mathematically done a lot better, which is telling.

Chelsey: I know. I know. So once he's gone, even Steve Drain who usurped has been ex-communicated. He's gone.

Sarah: It's like, is it just one person and a fax machine at this point?

Chelsey: Honestly, I'm not sure at this point. The only real kind of evidence, or not even evidence. You know, you go to Reddit when you don't know anything and you want rumor, and you want you go to the Louis Thoreau. Actually they have a lot, they do a lot over there with the Westboro Baptist, trying to figure out what's really going on.

So, I mean, it's the death knell for sure. I think I want Shirley out. I just want Shirley to leave. But it sucks because she would be leaving other children in there. So I think she's ready to go. She barely speaks any more. And I think that's her fear is the elders. And it's so funny because it's like, they've silenced this woman who was like previously saying horrific things about people. But you still, you start to be like no, but it's so that's where it gets really confusing again is just this. It’s so bizarre, but she's still there. So I don't know. I know she wants to go. I don't know that. I can't say that I know she wants to go. I have personified that quality into her, but yeah. I just hope that they all get out eventually.

Sarah: But if your children are leaving, you know, one by one or in two’s sometimes, I don't know. It's like if you're able to commit to a belief system that your children are ex-communicated from your life because of leaving, then like, oh man, I don't know. This is, I feel like this whole story is about like how extreme of a corner can a human being turn in their lifetime.

Chelsey: Yeah. And I mean, in the case of Megan, she does talks on extremism and talks on, she has a Ted Talk. She does stuff about how empathy was what allowed her to change. Like there was never going to be hope for her if people weren't willing to try to understand.

I guess that's what I wanted to do in this episode was like, I don't know. I've been trying to think - and I bet you are, too -like what's my fucking mission statement in my work? What is my mission statement now? And for me, I just keep coming back to like demystification. And I think by trying to demystify these people and take them out of the realm of super villain, which they've been in for so long, you see that they're not anything powerful and we've like imbued them with so much power, but they're just ranting and raving on a street, not to say that, you know, whatever.

I don't know what I'm saying, but that's the thing is, it's just like, we give so much power to our villains. When a lot of times they're just sad, broken, pathetic people. And that feels important because there are villains out there to choose from. And I think shows like this, too, just the idea of there are so many slights of hand, like in the case of moral panics, you're looking over here at some extreme situation so you're ignoring stranger danger. You're looking at this sensationalized, stranger villain who's going to kidnapped children in his van - or maybe he's a clown – then you're not looking at what's happening in families. You're not looking at what's happening to your direct community members and things like that.

So it just feels like they were this really great sleight of hand for the Christian right at the time to stack themselves against as well. They're a scapegoat, essentially. They're a scapegoat for people like Jerry Falwell, people like Pat Robertson, Jim Bakker, whoever you want to say. Not our girl, Tammy Faye, never.

Sarah: Not her surviving ex who's still selling fake COVID cures in Branson. I don't like that guy.

Chelsey: C’mon, I know. Fucking loser. And again, I think I landed on the whole just struggling with what's okay to be empathetic over. I really struggle with that because I don't like people being mad at me. And so of course, I struggle with like, are people are going to be fucking mad at me. Hi. Do you understand that Sarah, are you scared of people being mad at you?

Sarah: I think that like it, I mean, to get into that, there's like, there's so much that you can never articulate, but that people can feel you're articulating that can also be part of that. And I feel like something that I try to express, and it probably never hurts to express more, is that if I’m trying to experience empathy with somebody or to try and think my way or feel my way into, like I've been accused of on You're Wrong About being like, this person had a sad childhood, so whatever they did is fine. And it's like, no, I don't, I'm not passing moral judgment on these people. That's not my job. Like nobody cares what I think. Like, I don't have any authority here but like, if I'm going to talk about, you know.

I mean, again, Jim Jones, who I keep bringing up is a good example. Because you can look at his early life. He had a very neglectful childhood. He was sort of a toddler who has seen like wandering around town on attended at a very young age, even for the time. And like that doesn't excuse anything, but you're like, oh, that's interesting, so like maybe that's one of the factors that goes into someone developing the way that he did. I mean, and then speaking of taking power away from a villain, because I think if you see someone as having all this malevolent power, then it makes the destruction they cause seem inevitable for one thing, as opposed to this depressing domino effect. And like I'm really fascinated by the fact that Jim Jones - an objectively awful human being - was convinced that his bisexuality was the worst thing about him. The most shameful thing, appeared to feel immense shame about it. And the people's temple was building Jonestown down in the jungle. Like their original plan was like, yes, we're building this tranquil compound, but we'll move people down gradually. And we won't make everyone move down there. Most of our parishioners being senior citizens who can't really work in the fields, like we won't move everyone there at once. That would be nuts. And then Kim Jones was arrested for soliciting sex with a male cop in a bathroom. And he was like, everyone go to the jungle right now. No infrastructure, doesn't matter, no one can know that I'm queer. And it's like really Jim, like really? Like, that's the worst thing about  you?

Chelsey: That's the problem I'm here. I know. And I'm like, are you a fucking socialist? Aren't you like, God, I thought you were a cool Jim, but he was not cool.

Sarah: The least cool, one could say, yeah. If you take a story where you're like this force of human malevolence, Jim Jones was broadened to humanity and Indiana one day. And it's like, no, he's just like a guy from Indiana who gradually accrued way more power than he ever should have, because he was a white guy who cleaned up nice and then felt such unbelievable. self-loathing over his sexuality that he murdered almost everyone he knew because of it ultimately. Like that's not a story where it was set in stone from the beginning. That's like society failed a lot of people who he then took over because nobody else wanted anything to do with them. And just, yeah, I think that it's important to me to take away this idea, that being dangerous equates with being powerful, because I think that often the opposite is true.

Chelsey: Yeah, I love that. Like, of course we have to figure out how people got that way. Like the fact that that's how you prevent things.

Sarah: It's like, ideally we have fewer cults and we understand how they work. And then we also look at, you know, what draws people into these situations? What hungers are they meeting? And then how can they meet them in a way that is less awful for everyone?

Chelsey: Yeah. Yup. Absolutely. I have been thinking about that idea of like empathy is not endorsement, right? Like you saying, here are the reasons that this person is probably like this. That's not you saying that it's okay that this person's like it Also for me, empathy is not a choice that I make. And I think that's something that we should start talking about more where it's like, it's involuntary. Oh, I'm going to make fun of these clowns. And I'm going to talk about the pop. You know, I did not go in there thinking I'm going to bawl my eyes out, even remembering scenes of Shirley Phelps-Roper. You know, I did not want that, but it happened. And that means something important about something. And I don't know what it is, but I want to err on that side of things, even if it feels scary, I guess.

Sarah: Yeah. And that's a ride that I think if people don't want to come on that ride, then they don't have to. You shouldn't come on any ride that is not safe for you. That's what I learned at Disney World.

Chelsey: Don't stand up on Space Mountain.

Sarah: Don't go on the motion simulator if you're pregnant.

Chelsey: Seriously, you'll have the baby right there. And I think what you say is so, so important, and that is one of my big caveats that I think I tend to forget to say. Which is, nobody needs to have empathy for the Westboro Baptist Church. Let's be very clear. But I think that the space needs to exist for those who feel the capacity to do that, or feel like they can take that on, right? Like there are people who we need to take on those types of things, where the person being targeted, which could have been me. Sure. You know, like the person being targeted does not need to be the person who is trying to help deradicalize a person or something like that, but it should be okay to do that. Also there's a mixture of things that can help somebody. And I don't know, I just can't help it, man. I'm such a sappy person.

Sarah: You’re an acknowledged feelings haver. Yeah. I mean, I feel very blessed by my personal God that A) you're doing this work, and B) that we get to talk about it. Because I think that it's making my heart and brain bigger just to be having this conversation with you. And I think it's, I don't know it's nice to talk about shared goals in this kind of like, what are we doing? What is this all about? And this also gets to me to the whole concept of victims’ rights hinges in the kind of cynical way that we often see it deployed today. And the idea that like, however, a victim's family feels about the person who harmed or murdered their loved one, that's how the state should react.

Chelsey: No. You're not going to like the way that's applied in other ways.

Sarah: Yeah. Right. It's not the job of a victim to forgive their abuser and it's not the job of a bite, his standard to take on the feelings of the victim. Like nobody has to be someone they're not, you don't have to.

Chelsey: Yeah. And, you know, I will say that I expected more backlash to the episode than I got. I think that people are starting to feel this way and it really just, I mean, I couldn't help but think about people in my life that are gone the Q route or gone a route where you're just like, slowly that person is just getting farther and farther away from you. And you still love them. And it's so sad. And there's like, you don't know what the line is. You don't know how to like deal with this complicated person and feelings and realities. Right. You're like, oh, it's just, I don't know, mostly more and more. I'm just heartbroken over most things, you know? And it's just, everything is so very sad. And I thought I would be more angry making this episode, but I just kept walking away being like, man, this is all so sad. Everybody's just so busted. And you know, all we can do, I guess is try to make people feel less busted. I don't know.

Sarah: Yeah. Just whatever we can, there's a lot of ways to do it that have to happen. This is our way. And other people have so many other ways.

Chelsey: Before we finish, though, will you say what you've been thinking about as your mission statement? Because it seemed like you've been thinking about like, do you have thoughts on that?

Sarah: I have been trying to think about it lately, because I feel like the show is in this interesting growth period where it's sort of like exploring. I picture it as like a little baby bunny or something is sniffing around, figuring out what's out there, because when you're reborn into a transitional moment, it's like, you have to think of stuff that wouldn't have occurred to you in the past. And then it comes back to like, what am I trying to do as a person? Because to an extent, the show and I are not the same entity, but there's a lot of overlap. And this is probably something I do to make myself feel more in control, but I've really been focused on the fact that I feel like I can reliably be funny. I can't reliably be smart or right. Or as hardworking as maybe I need to be to, to fair it out. The truth, that's like underneath whatever layer of bedrock I got stuck at, but like, I can be funny. And I think that essentially, I feel like we're all on this big backpacking trip, trying to figure out what's going on and how to relate to the world that we're in. And I feel like I will walk with you, and I will tell you jokes, and when it gets dark, I will hold the flashlight. And if you need some gorp, I'm going to give you some gorp. And I feel like I want to help take people through a scary trail that they have to go down, and just be a kind of a cheerleader and a hand-holder through it.

Chelsey: I love that. I think that's perfect. And I think we can also find some geocache fun facts along the way.

Sarah: we’ll spot some in the woods, and we'll be like, we never would have found this hen of the woods if we weren't out today.

Chelsey: If we hadn't gone down this dark trail, which is like, I think a beauty and the beast, right. Where Felipe, the horse is choosing between. And it's like, no, let's go this way. No, we won't go that way. But then you fucking idiot.

Sarah: Felipe was the smartest character in that movie.

Chelsey: Icon, man. Well, you know, I mean, I feel the same way, and your words are always so nice, kind. And I don't know, knowing you're out there doing the same type of thing and probably having similar struggles is very comforting. And I always love whenever I get to talk to you because. I feel very lost a lot of the time, even with the show. And I think you probably feel just like, what am I really doing? Even though it seems like maybe we know what we're doing. I don't know what I'm doing.

Sarah: Oh yeah. I mean, there was this clip that went viral probably like six years ago. Something like that, where it was this band that was like one of those like hot girl bands, like the Robert Palmer backup singers. And they were performing on some European TV show, and they had a guitar player or a bassist who just could not even fake putting her hands in the right place. She just was like awkwardly holding it.

Chelsey: An Avril Lavigne, yeah.

Sarah: I mean, I know next to nothing about like what it looks like to convincingly play a stringed instrument, but I was like, she's really not playing that thing and she's not even convincing me. And she just had this face of just like, I don't know what I'm doing and yeah. That's the vibe. And like, I would love to see the person who is existing in the world today and gets up every morning and is like, I'm doing my part. I'm satisfied with the impact I have. I feel like I am being helpful in the face of the situation. Because yeah, it just feels like bobbing around, holding on to little life preservers and singing little songs. But I like to sing little songs with you.

Chelsey: I love singing a little songs with you, it’s the best thing. And, you know, I mean, if there's anybody out there who felt like they were getting up and doing the right thing every day, it was Fred Phelps.