I watched these two Netflix documentaries back to back. The are remarkable for how much they reveal – and also how much they omit. They reveal more than the American public is prepared to accept. And they omit realities beyond people’s wildest imaginings.
I watched the documentaries because I’ve been aware of these “issues” since a long time but never believed anything would be done about them. Something has finally been done about some of those involved, that’s the good news. But nothing has been done about the root of the problem, which evades investigators to this day and causes similar “stuff” to continue.
Both documentaries are 4 episodes each and focus on the “Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of the Ladder Day Saints” (FLDS). Mainstream sources had you believe that this is an “offshoot of the Mormon Church”, “a more fundamentalist version of Mormons”, or at worst “a religious cult” and a “polygamist sect”. The two documentaries focus on events that transpired in Short Creek, a small remote village at the border of Utah and Arizona. It uses original documentary footage, witness testimony, law enforcement reports and troves of seized documents from the group itself.
Over the course of the episodes it becomes clear we’re not dealing with just another “religion” as such, but a large scale mind-control and pedophile sex-slave operation. Many groups operate under the guise of “religion” because it provides tax-exempt status and other “freedoms” where perpetrators can claim their “rights” when attacked. It’s what creepy people hide behind and in my opinion we need to change our laws around this.
The first documentary, “Keep Sweet and Obey” portrays the life of Warren Jeffs, the cult leader (“prophet”) who is now spending the rest of his days in a Texas Prison. In his cult, men were allowed to marry as many “wives” as they liked, also underage wives. The prophet himself had over 60 “wives”, including children as young as 12. The women were not allowed to choose who to marry, they were “assigned” men among his loyal collaborators. To achieve women outnumbering men by far, Warren Jeffs got rid of hundreds of boys by evicting them from the village (who then became homeless boys) or perhaps by means not disclosed in the documentary. If there are ten to sixty wives per man, the authorities and film makers should have probed more deeply into how this kind of imbalance was sustained, but they didn’t go there.
The entire town of Short Creek was under constant Camera Surveillance and anyone deviating from its tyrannical rules, was punished.
From a young age, the women were subject to a rigorous program of mind-control through promises of reward, threats of punishment and physical violence. Evidence of trauma-based MK-ultra style programming is sprinkled throughout the documentary, but the filmmakers and FBI didn’t want to touch on that subject either.
They weren’t allowed to read or view outside information, they weren’t allowed contact with the outer world (which they called “gentiles), they weren’t allowed to fall in love with anyone outside of arranged marriage. They were to function purely as sex slaves and labor. Warren Jeffs taught absolute obedience and that this would get them to “Zion” (their word for Heaven). Becoming sex slaves of the prophet was the highest goal they could achieve and their ticket to glory.
Even though polygamy, slavery (forcing people to work for free) and child sexual abuse are illegal in the United States, the local police did nothing. This is owed to the fact that the police were themselves members of FLDS. The women knew they couldn’t go to the local police because they were part of it. Another crucial item omitted from the documentary is this: Why wasn’t anything done about corrupt police? Why was only Warren Jeffs arrested and not complicit collaborates plus “police officers”?
It is only because nothing was done about collaborators, that the very same thing repeated itself after Warren Jeffs was arrested for child sex abuse, which is the topic of the second documentary. And even after the second documentary came out, still nothing was done about the corrupt structures surrounding the cult.
Warren Jeffs eventually changed the story of “Zion” being a reward in the afterlife to “Zion” being a place in Texas, to which only his most loyal sex slaves were invited. Such frequent changes to the “religion” to serve the leaders purpose should have been a telltale sign that there’s nothing legitimate about it, but the followers were (and still are) too far gone to notice.
Jeffs routinely got rid of any men who had an above average IQ or different opinions and he mostly took young girls to “Zion”. This is clearly documented. In Texas he built a gigantic Temple on a large piece of land. At the top of the Temple, atop an alter-like bed, he performed sex-rituals with underage girls, having them chant “in the name of Jesus Christ” before penetrating them. Jeffs himself recorded these rituals and apparently sold them (child pornography was one of the items he was convicted of).
Warren Jeffs seemed to possess endless funds to build housing and temples. His successor, Samuel Bateman owned a gigantic car park and liked driving his Bentley through the otherwise impoverished town. When Jeffs was in prison, collaborators, including his brainwashed harem, sent him one Million Dollars a month! The documentaries mostly omit where all this money came from. They should have followed the money trail, then they could have discovered much more. Netflix being Netflix, the focus is on the woes of “religion” rather than the money-trail. And: Why is it allowed to earn 1 Million a month and continue to allocate funds for other people’s sex-slave operation while you’re in jail? I don’t know much about the law, but it would seem that prison inmates shouldn’t continue to run the businesses they were imprisoned for.
The first documentary only drops one small hint and only once: Warren Jeffs was a contractor for NASA, Walmart and Amazon, using the males of his town as free labor. That’s where the funding came from. And yet, NASA, Walmart and Amazon and their contact-people to Warren Jeffs were never questioned by the FBI or by the filmmakers. That’s been typical of such cases: The Elite Players never get their hands dirty, they have fall guys to go down once they’re exposed. No, Warren Jeffs wasn’t innocent, on the contrary. But the people financing him from the shadows remain free to continue their next “project”.
The second documentary is by an intrepid woman who herself was victimized by FLDS and infiltrated the Short Creek community under false pretenses of wanting to show “their side of the story”. She managed to film countless women who ranged from painfully naive to utterly traumatized and terrified. I have rarely seen more naive people than filmed in these episodes, as expressed in their words and demeanor and can say without doubt: The primary cause of bad things happening is naivety.
To me it’s easy to see that the people operating this “religion” used trauma-based mind control on these women. You can see it in the empty, staring, unblinking eyes of some of the victims. It’s right there for all to see, but the documentaries act as if it isn’t there.
The second documentary features new cult leader, Samuel Bateman (image below) who simply left off with the exactly same behavior after Warren Jeffs was incarcerated. If the root isn’t pulled out, history repeats itself.
They’ve been so thoroughly brainwashed that many of them still consider Warren Jeffs and Samuel Bateman to be their “prophet” even after they went to prison. Only few were willing to testify, while others continue to pledge their loyalty to the “one man that can get them to heaven”.
Documentaries like this are shown out of context. The whole thing is presented as some rare oddball group out in the middle of nowhere, gone wayward by lone psychopaths. Never are hundreds of other groups like this, in other states, proclaiming other “religions” shown side by side. This is how similar groups can and will continue to operate, until law enforcement and filmmakers finally pinpoint the shadowy groups, funding and lower-astral realms it’s all coming from. Even the town of short creek continues to operate and the next cult leader there is already on the horizon.
When the FBI was confronted with mountains of evidence on child abuse, they took years to intervene. Why? They claimed the evidence wasn’t enough, that victims had to come forward. But the victims were terrified to speak to any outsiders. While Warrens Jeff and Sam Bateman were secretly living luxury lifestyles the moment they left the village (doing all the things they told their followers are “sins”), the victims were kept in a tightly surveilled community with fake police and psychopathic men. It took years of consistent and repeated pleas for help by normal citizens for the FBI to finally get involved. This, then, points to larger structural problems in the Governments themselves. Why does it always take citizen journalism and citizen lawsuits to get anything done?
Conclusion
We need a more robust citizens-movement, neighborhood-watch and citizen-investigators to ensure that “the land of the free” can actually be called that. Off-the-bat I could list about a hundred other, similar groups operating right-now in America. But of what use is that if we haven’t even put effort into countacting known groups? I remember “conspiracy theorists” blowing the whistle on these “Mormon-offshoot” groups all the way back in the 1980s. What was done? Nothing. The whistleblowers were ridiculed and attacked and it took another 30 years before the public accepted that the conspiracy-theorists were right all along. Most of these “conspiracy theorists” eventually give up because they endanger their own lives while receiving nothing but ridicule from the public. The conclusion is this: Listen to your local conspiracy theorists, they may be on to something.