Cold Open:

General Butt Naked. AKA Joshua Blahyi. AKA just one of the many, MANY warlords that would form child armies and battle for power during the tumultuous and bloody First Liberian Civil War, which lasted from 1989 to 1997.

During the nineties, most of Liberia was controlled by numerous and incredibly violent rival militias. In the bush, they battled for control of diamond fields and gold mines; in Monrovia, they fought gun battles in the streets.

Some of these warring factions were led by - or at least assisted by - brutal warriors and warlords who adopted outlandish names like Chuck Norris, One-Foot Devil, General Mosquito and his nemesis, General Mosquito Spray.

And of course - there was General Butt Naked. Perhaps the most brutal of them all.

Butt Naked was active for about three years, and he led several dozen soldiers—the Naked Base Commandos—who fought mostly in Monrovia.

Many of his soldiers were children - child soldiers fed a steady diet of cocaine and American action movies. Kids forced to kill - and also eat - other kids. Today’s story is so, SO crazy. Liberia in the 90s was so crazy.

General Butt Naked said he had a vision when he was eleven years old where he was told by a tribal god that he would become a great warrior and that he should practice human sacrifice and cannibalism to increase his power and become impossible to kill.

And he seems to have taken this vision VERY seriously. Or - maybe he made it to try and rationalize and justify all the atrocities he committed to others.

About ten after his first major vision - Blayhi claims to have experienced another vision - a divine Christian vision that transformed him from a mass murderer into a man of God. And ever since that event, he’s committed his life to trying to right the wrongs he made in the past.

But is he really a man of god? Or his is just a con man doing whatever he feels he needs to do in order to thrive in an extremely difficult place for someone with almost no formal education to just survive?

During times of war - he became a warlord. During times of peace - he’s become a man of god. Something about it all feels very convenient.

General Butt Naked is a complicated man. And Liberia is a complicated nation.

And we explore the man, the country he comes from, and more on today’s warmongering, death-defying, eye-opening, so much insane shit packed into this one, edition of Timesuck.

PAUSE

TIMESUCK INTRO

I. Welcome!

A.Happy Monday Meatsacks!

WELCOME to the cult of the curious. Work can Wait for this tale.

HAIL Nimrod, Hail Lucifina, Praise Bojangles, and Glory Be to Triple M.

I’m Dan Cummins, Suck Nasty, Optimus Suck, Suck Norris, and you are listening to Timesuck.

How do you all feel about skipping announcements today and getting right into SO MUCH SHOW???

All in favor say Hail Nimrod? Let’s do it.

Holy shit I got sucked in hard to this topic this week.

Let’s head to Liberia, on the west coast of Africa, to suck a Civil War - two of them in fact - the founding of a nation, and the life of brutal warlord who once went by the name of General Butt Naked, a man who claimed that fighting naked made him immune to bullets.

Pretty sure that’s not totally true. But maybe KIND OF true. Seeing a wild-eyed, naked dude - carrying a machine gun or a machete - running at you in an urban war zone might give a lot of people pause and throw their shot off.

Before we get to know Mr. Butt Naked - we first will familiarize ourselves with Liberia, where our story takes place - an extremely unique and fascinating and oftentimes completely horrific African nation. A nation that has been a living Hell for far too many of its people to live in.

Then, we’ll take a look at Liberia’s culture of warlords and how they operate - how the concept of warlords is not an African thing - it’s a world wide thing - before we then examine the interesting spiritual beliefs that gave Blayhi has said pushed him towards human sacrifice.

THEN - we’ll jump into this week’s Timesuck Timeline, following Liberia’s two Civil Wars - both were fought in the past thirty years - and we’ll also follow Joshua Blahyi’s life and get to know some other brutal military leaders.

I hope you find all this as interesting as I do today. Yip, yip, yaw!

PAUSE TIMESUCK INTERLUDE

II. Intro/Establish Premiss:

A. Liberia

This week’s info is going to take us across the Atlantic to a continent we don’t visit nearly as often as we probably should here on the Suck — Antarctica.

Kidding. We’re visiting Africa, of course.

We don’t visit Antarctica often and we never will! It is a frozen, barren wasteland - and I don’t care enough about Penguins and seals to talk about them for over two hours.

We don’t visit Africa enough! Lots of good stories in Africa. Loads of interesting people and history.

Specifically today, we head to Liberia, a smaller African nation along the continent’s west Atlantic coast - just south of Sierra Leone, just North of the Ivory Coast.

Liberia is perhaps the most unique nation on the entire continent in terms of its modern origin story. It’s the only Black State in Africa never to have been subjected to colonial rule. It’s also Africa’s oldest republic.

And the troubled nation has such a strange origin story.

B.Liberian Settlement and the ACS:

Liberia was established on land acquired for freed U.S. slaves by the American Colonization Society, which founded a colony at Cape Mesurado [mez uh rah doh] in 1822 - this Cape is located where the capital city of Monrovia sits today.

This Society - the ACS - also known as The Society for the Colonization of Free People of Color of America, was founded in 1816 in Washington DC, by one Robert Finley.

A Princeton grad - Finley was a Presbyterian minister who worked as a pastor for two decades in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, also teaching at a boys’ academy before becoming the president of the University of Georgia shortly before his death in 1817.

And Finley founded - along with Samuel John Mills - a Congregational minister from Connecticut and a Christian Missionary - the ACS in order to relocate free American blacks to a colony in West Africa.

The Society quickly gained support from some abolitionists and also from most slaveholders - for very different reasons.

Some white abolitionists truly seemed to have noble intentions when it came to African colonization. They believed that African Americans - due to both slavery in the South and discrimination in the North - would never find the happiness, freedom, and fulfillment in America that they could find in their own, new nation in West Africa.

Other, much less noble Americans in the North - and slaveholders in the South - just wanted free black Americans to get…. the fuck… out.

They feared them.

They were worried that - if left to their own devices in America - they might lead slavery rebellions and revolts. OR, they would want equal rights - to vote and own their own land - OR - heaven forbid - black men might want to romantically pursue white women! The horror! Oh my HECK!

This notion of the racially motivated exportation of free black people to Africa was actually NOT a new idea.

America took a page out of the playbook of its own former colonial masters - the British - for this one.

In 1787, Britain had founded the colony of Freetown in Sierra Leone.

They sent the “black poor” of London there. The organization that led relocation efforts was called the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor. Only 38 initial “settlers” were originally shipped off.

A few years later, in 1792, 1,100 former American slaves living in then British-controlled Nova Scotia - tired of both the weather and racial discrimination - sailed in 15 ships to Free town.

Then, in 1815 - Paul Cuffee, a successful American Quaker ship owner and activist based in Boston financed taking 38 American free blacks to head to Freetown as well. He’s the man who laid the foundation for the American Colonization Society.

And until 1961, Sierra Leone would be a British colony.

Despite similar beginnings, Liberia’s settlement history has been very different than Sierra Leone’s.

It was never REALLY a colony of the US.

It received some grant money from the US to get started - but it was never a proper “colony.”

More of an experiment, really run by the ACS.

The initial American settlement was named Christopolis in 1822.

Then, in 1824, the colony around Christopolis was named Liberia - as in Liberty - and the initial settlement was renamed Monrovia after James Monroe - the President of the United States at the time, who was a big supporter of the colony.

Monroe was all about sending freed Black Slaves and ex-Caribbean slaves to Liberia. He saw this as preferable to emancipation.

So - kind of fucked up that the city is named after him. And that it still is.

It’s named after a guy who did NOT want to have freed African slaves living in America - he wanted to ship them out of the States, and back across the Atlantic. https://history.state.gov/milestones/1830-1860/liberia

(Monroe) “Thanks for all the help in building our economy and making our nation strong enough to never have to worry about being brought to heel by the British my black brothers and sisters! Now - with all due respect - PLEASSSEEEE…. get the fuck out.”

In addition to Monroe - other early presidents - Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were big supporters of the ACS. Madison was the American Colonization Society’s President in the early 1830s.

You know who were not big supporters of the ACS and being shipped off to Africa?

African Americans!

At least not freed American blacks.

Almost none of them were real excited about this plan.

Famed abolitionist Frederick Douglas, commenting on colonization plans, summed up African American sentiment at the time, saying, “Shame upon the guilty wretches that dare propose, and all that countenance such a proposition. We live here - have lived here - have a right to live here, and mean to live here.”

Many African Americans viewed colonization as a means of defrauding them of the rights of citizenship and a way of tightening the grip of Southern slavery.

But - faced with dire economic and social prospects continually diminished by racial discrimination in America - away many of them would go anyway.

Over 2,600 freed American slaves would settle in Liberia in the first decade of colonization. Perhaps as many as 5,000.

And life for them was hard. The swampy land was rife with malaria and the natives were NOT overjoyed to see them take their land.

No local tribal leaders were interested in the settlement and armed conflicts were common in the early years.

But the new settlers were able to consistently fight off attacks.

By 1843 - 4,571 African Americans had settled in Liberia in Monrovia.

Four years later, on July 26th, 1847, the Americo-Liberian settlers, as they’d become known, took control over their colony from the ACS, and declared themselves independent from the society and from the United States. They modeled their flag after the US flag, and modeled their system of government, and their constitution, after the United States.

They quickly consolidated power and they would proceed dominate the nation for 133 years.

Another 168 settlers would arrive during the US Civil War. And almost 2,500 more in the first five years following the Civil War.

All in all, somewhere between 12,000 and 13,000 black settlers would arrive in Liberia from America.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Colonization_Society https://history.state.gov/milestones/1830-1860/liberia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_John_Mills https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Finley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Freetown#Province_of_Freedom_(1787%E2%80%931789)

And the way these settlers - these freed slaves - integrated with local tribes is…. pretty fucked up.

C.Liberian Apartheid: The Americo-Liberian settlers were, from the beginning, essentially American rather than African in outlook and orientation.

They retained preferences for western modes of dress, Southern plantation-style homes, American food, Christianity, the English language, and monogamous kinship practices.

The settlers held land individually in contrast to the communal ownership of the African population and their political institutions were modeled on those of the United States with an elected president, a legislature made up of a Senate and a House of Representatives, and a supreme court. They seldom intermarried with indigenous Africans and tried to influence the interior inhabitants primarily through evangelization and trade.

And this all makes sense to me! The settlers WERE American. American culture is what they knew.

Here’s the fucked up part.

These freed slaves from America treated the locals much like their former slaveowners had treated them.

Racism reproduced itself in the minds of the oppressed and they became the oppressors.

The former victims became the victimizers.

The Americo-Liberians saw the natives the way whites saw them.

Once the Americo-Liberians were rulers, they sadly mimicked white American rule in the worst of ways.

They justified their exploitation of the natives on the basis of cultural inferiority - just as whites used racism to justify slavery.

In America, race trumped all other considerations. In Liberia, culture trumped race as the classification of inferiority.

In an interesting book about all of this - Slaves to Racism: An Unbroken Chain from America to Liberia, the authors - sociologists and anthropologists Benjamin Dennis and Anita Dennis - refer to the way Americo-Liberians behaved as an “Imitation of Superiority.”

Many Americo-Liberians mimicked and retained the culture of the antebellum South because they derived their cultural superiority from it.

Ironically, they replicated what they despised – oppression and discrimination based upon “inferiority.” Natives were disparaged and ridiculed as “country people.”

The Americo-Liberians would set up all the Jim Crow laws of the American South in Liberia.

How fucking crazy is that?

They instituted social segregation in the capital city of Monrovia where almost all the Americo-Liberians lived.

Among other things, natives could not enter through the front doors of Americo-Liberian businesses. They could not vote. They could not even speak unless spoken to unless they wanted to risk punishment.

There were sexual restrictions. No native man could marry or have a sexual relationship with an Americo-Liberian woman. Many over the next 100 or so years would be put to work as forced laborers - as slaves, really.

Even when natives became educated, they were restricted from most government positions. Only a token few were allowed to participate for over a century of rule.

And decades of this type of discrimination and oppression would lead to the bloody civil wars of the recent decades - to the rise of ruthless warlords like General Butt Naked. https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/americo-liberians/ http://www.racismreview.com/blog/2009/01/04/global-impacts-of- white-racism-americo-liberians/

Fascinating, right?

Thinking about this led me to examining the psychological factors that create a cycle of abuse - where the abused becomes the abuser.

Not all victims of abuse will go on to abuse others, but studies do suggest that about one-third of them will. Pretty high number.

AND - studies have shown that certain factors have been found to worsen the long-term impact of abuse and make it more difficult to break the chain, including abuse that started early in life, abuse that lasted a long time, abuse in which the perpetrator had a close relationship to the victim, abuse that the child experienced as particularly harmful and abuse that occurred within a cold familial environment.

Think about those factors in the context of American plantation slavery.

Life for a plantation slave - particularly someone born into it - was nothing BUT abuse. Forced labor and beatings.

Abuse that started early life? Check. It started from birth.

Abuse that lasted a long time? Check. It never ended and there was no protection from it.

Abuse in which the perpetrator had a close relationship to the victim? Check! The abuser OWNED the victim. Pretty close relationship.

Abuse a child experienced that was particularly harmful? BIG CHECK. Beaten with whips. Raped. Super harmful.

Abuse that occurred with a cold familial environment? Check. Having your entire family owned by people who think you are intellectually and morally inferior - people who see you as less than human - that’s pretty fucking cold. Your owners were your family now in many ways - and they were cold as fuck.

Based on all of this - I can see how it was pretty easy, psychologically-speaking - for far more than a third of the former slaves shifting into a role akin to slaveowner.

That was the world they knew.

And what a fucked up world they would create in Liberia. https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/why-victims-abuse-become- abusers

Now that I’ve broken down how Liberia was settled and by whom - and how the seeds for so much modern strife were sown - let’s learn some of the basics about the lay of the land.

D.Geography: Liberia is composed, primarily, of four different geographical regions starting with the coastal plains. These plains are about 350 miles long and extend up to 25 miles inland. They’re low and sandy, with miles of beaches interspersed with bar-enclosed lagoons, mangrove swamps, and a few rocky promontories - the highest being Cape Mount - about 1,000 feet high in the northwest.

Parallel to the coastal plains is a region of rolling hills some 20 miles wide with an average maximum elevation of about 300 feet. None of the hills rise more than about 500 feet in elevation.

Behind the rolling hills, most of the country’s interior is a dissected plateau with scattered low mountains ranging from 600 to 1,000 feet in elevation - a few rise to over 2,000 feet. The tallest - Mount Nimba - reaches 5,748 feet.

And then there is the rainforest.

Liberia’s rainforest used be full of animals like monkeys, chimpanzees, small antelopes, pygmy hippopotamuses, and anteaters. However, these animals, along with the already threatened elephants, short-horned buffalo called “bush cows,” and leopards, were hunted for food during the civil war. Their populations are currently recovering.

There are also many reptiles, including three types of crocodiles and at least eight different poisonous snakes, including the world’s only flying snake - the Winged Bush Cobra.

This thing is insane!

It’s not super big, they never reach more than about five feet in length, but - similar to the parachute-like membrane that stretches from the wrist to the ankle of the flying squirrel, they have this membrane that lies on the outside of their scales on either side of their lung - and they can, basically, inflate it and create these two little wings.

Like the flying squirrel, they don’t REALLY fly - the glide from trees that they're surprisingly fast at climbing.

And that’s how they attack.

They slither up to the upper branches of a mangrove tree - twenty or thirty feet up in the air - and then they silently glide down - they can glide up to over a hundred feet away from the tree - and their prey typically never hears or sees them coming.

And they kill an estimated two hundred people a year in Liberia alone. They’re extremely venomous. They’re also found in over five other African nations.

And the venom from a Winged Bush Cobra - before it kills you - it will also make you hallucinate.

It can make you hallucinate so hard you’ll actually believe that all the bullshit I just made up about Winged Bush Cobras is true.

Get out of here! Snakes don’t fly! Or glide. Thank God.

That would be terrible to have to worry about flying fucking snakes.

Back to reality.

The climate, especially on the coast, is warm and humid year-round, dominated by a dry season from November to April and by a rainy season from May to October. In Monrovia, for example - the temperature varies between 74 and 88 degrees Fahrenheit, rarely dipping below 70 or rising above 91.

Sounds ideal.

The Liberian economy has been since the early days of its settlement - and still is predominantly agrarian.

Also - there’s a lot of shipping of goods in and out of Liberia.

It actually has the second largest ship registry in the world. Foreign ships registering under a Liberian “flag of convenience” have made Liberia one of the world’s foremost countries in registered shipping tonnage. https://www.seatrade-maritime.com/americas/liberia-becomes- world-s-second-largest-ship-registry-overtaking-marshall-islands

Raw materials, equipment, and consumer goods are imported.

Production for export is carried out on a large scale through foreign investment in rubber, forestry, and mining.

Despite all this shipping, Liberia remains primarily agricultural.

The distribution of wealth is extremely uneven, the coastal districts receiving a greater share of economic benefits than the hinterland - aka the interior - after which the administrative centers are the next beneficiaries.

Prior to recent civil wars, Libera was among the leading producers of iron ore in Africa.

It has sizable iron ore reserves. Other minerals include diamonds, gold, lead, manganese, graphite, cyanite, and barite [ bair-ahyt].

Now let’s also talk a little bit about the people of Liberia. Get to know more than just the American immigrants. Who were the natives the Americo-Liberians clashed with? Who their descendants STILL clash with?

1. People of Liberia

The people of Liberia are classified primarily into three major groups: the indigenous people, who are in the majority and who migrated from the western Sudan in the late Middle Ages;

The second group are the descendants of black immigrants from the United States - the Americo-Liberians we’ve talked about at length - and lumped in with them are the descendants of former slaves from the West Indies.

And the third group is other Black immigrants from neighboring western African states - many who came during the anti-slave- trade campaign and European colonial rule.

Liberia’s indigenous ethnic groups may be classified into three linguistic groups, all belonging to the Niger-Congo language family: the Mande [ mahn-dey ], Kwa, and Mel.

Kwa-speaking peoples include the Bassa, the largest group in this category and the largest ethnic group in Monrovia; the Kru and Grebo, who were among the earliest converts to Christianity; the De; Belleh [Belle]; and Krahn [crown].

Joshua Blahyi - Mr. Butt Naked himself - is a member of the Krahn [crown] people.

So many different ethnic groups in Liberia.

Altogether - there are AT LEAST seventeen different distinct indigenous cultures living in Liberia. And many of them don’t get along with each other any better than they’ve gotten along with the Americo-Liberians. These groups will all violently clash together for years during Liberia’s Civil Wars.

And I hope I’m pronouncing their names right.

If not - apologies.

Really hard to find pronunciation guides or even people saying all these words on Youtube. Especially in an American accent.

About four-fifths of Liberians are Christian, about one-tenth are Muslim, and a small number profess other religions—primarily traditional beliefs—or are nonreligious.

Demographic-wise, more than two-fifths of the population of Liberia is under age 15; only about 5 percent is older than 60.

How sad is that stat?

There has been so much murder - so much poverty and disease - that only FIVE percent of the population is over 60.

For comparison - 16 percent of the US population is over the age of 65.

https://www.prb.org/aging-unitedstates-fact-sheet/

Life expectancy in Liberia is about 57 years for males and 60 years for females. Life expectancy fell dramatically as a result of the civil wars and strife that began in the late 1980s and continued until 2003.

https://www.britannica.com/place/Liberia

In the US, the average life expectancy is 76 years for dudes - and 81 years for dudettes. That’s a LOT more life.

https://www.simplyinsurance.com/average-us-life-expectancy- statistics/

2. Life In Liberia Today

So what is life like in Liberia today for the average Liberian?

NOT good.

In short - really, REALLY not fucking good at all.

Roughly half of Liberians live in abject poverty - not just “poverty” - “abject poverty” - which means they are severely deprived of basic needs like food, clean water, shelter, sanitation and health care access.

Things have gotten a little better lately in some ways, but they’re still a long ways from good.

A recent report shows that roughly 64.7 percent of Liberians are literate, compared to 10 years ago when only 42 percent of the population could read and write.

Though the literacy rate has increased, the gender gap continues to highlight a lack of educational opportunities for women. While 77 percent of Liberian men can read and write, only 54 percent of Liberian women are literate.

Poor living conditions in Liberia has forced many families to send their children to work instead of school. As of 2018, 21 percent of children are engaged in child labor.

And that figure used to be much higher.

Disease continues to ravage Liberia.

The Ebola virus has killed more than 11,000 Liberians and in 2016 alone - Ebola hit Liberia harder than almost anywhere else in the world - and Liberia had 2,900 new HIV/AIDS infections added to the already 43,000 people living with the disease.

And of the 43,000, only 19 percent were able to access antiretroviral treatment.

And thousands still die from malaria every year in Liberia.

For comparison - about five people die each year from Malaria in the US - and all of them have brought the disease home with them from some other country. https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/resources/pdf/fsp/ cdc_malaria_domestic_unit.pdf? source=post_page------#:~:text=The%20U.S. %20was%20once%20a,annually%2C%20mostly%20in%20return ed%20travelers. https://www.who.int/malaria/publications/country-profiles/2010/ mal2010_lbr.pdf?ua=1 https://borgenproject.org/top-10-facts-about-living-conditions-in- liberia/ #:~:text=Half%20of%20Liberians%20live%20in,sanitation%20and %20health%20care%20access.&text=The%2014%2Dyear%20civ il%20war,has%20disproportionately%20affected%20the%20poor.

If you really want to get a feel for how terrible life can be in Liberia - I recommend you watch a Vice Documentary from from 2012 called the Cannibal Warlords of Liberia.

HOLY shit is it mind-blowing. At least it was for me.

One of the most intense docs I’ve seen in awhile. Just under an hour long.

Maybe don’t watch it if you’re already sad because it is one giant pit of misery and despair.

According to this doc, Liberia was the 4th poorest country in the world in 2012, with 50% of the population being illiterate.

Also - it was one of the WORST nations in the world for women.

They state that - at that time - an estimated 70% of the adult women were believed to be the victims of rape.

Seven out of ten. That is horrifying.

AND - 80% of the population was unemployed.

What… the… fuck?

Also - an unknown - but thought to be sizable percentage of the population had tasted human flesh.

Yup. Cannibalism was BIG in Liberia. Our mythical Kroll’s Cafe might have done very well there. It’s believed ritual cannabilism is still practiced in parts of Liberia.

General Butt Naked apparently ate human flesh regularly while fighting in the first of Liberia’s two recent Civil Wars.

One warlord, “General Rambo” - great warlord name! - talked about how during the Civil war, in Monrovia, people would collect fallen bodies and stack them on carts and push them around town and sell them to starving citizens desperate for meat.

Holy SHIT!

And this didn’t happen hundreds of years ago! The First Liberian Civil War lasted from 1989 to 1997. The second began in 1999 and lated until 2003.

RECENTLY - there were human beings walked down the street, pushing a cart full of human bodies, selling them for meat.

(Meat vendor) “Get your fresh neighBOR!

FRESH neighbor meat!

We got neighbor ribs! We got neighbor arm steaks! Leg steaks! You want to eat that tasty neighbor butt?? Bake it! Grill it UP! Slice it and toss it on the frying pan.

We got neighbor butts all day long!! Boil your neighbor’s head to make a nice neighbor-face meat soup!

So much neighbor meat!”

Unreal.

A Liberian journalist interviewed in the doc talks also talks about how there were still dead bodies all over the place in certain neighborhoods. And often times, their genitals have been cut off.

Why?

For good luck.

Not kidding!

He said that some dudes will cut off a woman’s vulva and basically taxidermy it in some way, and carry it around in a wallet, and “use it as a source of power.”

He’s saying this just EIGHT years ago.

Just dudes cutting off womens’ vulvas, tanning ‘em, and throwing ‘em in their wallets for a little extra power.

And based on the footage I saw in this doc from some of Monrovia’s worst neighborhoods - like West Point - I believe it.

Now - before I describe what the doc showed going on in West Point - I should point out that not everywhere in Monrovia is this bad. There are decent neighborhoods full of actual law enforcement, paved, clean streets, and thriving markets. Just not enough of them.

There are over 150 different neighborhood/communities just in the city of Monrovia - in a city of just over a million total people. And while not ALL of the neighborhoods are nightmares - many are.

Only 1/3 of Monrovia’s residents have access to actual toilets.

That means over half-a-million people don’t. In just this one city.

The people in the doc talked a lot about being overpowered by the smell of literal shit all the time.

There’s this huge part of the beach in Monrovia where everyone just literally shits in the sand. So much shit. Shit in the streets. Garbage in the streets. Sometimes they set fire to huge piles of garbage so that traffic can move past it.

The Monrovia slums exposed in this documentary are preposterously dystopian.

Forget 3rd world. This is 4th or 5th world.

It’s hard to process how bad it is.

The journalists talk to and film kids openly smoking heroin. Kids talking to them about recently doing shit like robbing and raping some woman at gunpoint.

You see a group of kids sing in the street about everyone they know dying of AIDS.

You meet kids - young kids - talking casually about murder, rape, and about doing as much coke and heroin as they can. Kids with no living family members and no homes. Kids literally shitting in the street and sleeping out on the ground. Kids doing whatever they feel they have to do to survive.

There are the saddest brothels you’ve ever seen in West Point - where young sex workers will do whatever anyone wants to do for less than a single US dollar. There are rooms in this West Point brothel that look like something straight out of a Saw or Hostel-type horror film.

Brothels with concrete walls and either no lights or just candles or maybe a single light bulb. Tiny, prison cell-like rooms with a concrete or dirt floor and only one tiny window with iron bars across it.

There’s literal blood on the walls. It looks like Hell on Earth.

Sex workers interviewed talked about being raped on a regular basis. How there were no other jobs for then. How they worked as prostitutes just to get enough food to survive. Some of them spoke about how they have educations - they were trained in some type of trade - used to have a different job - but now there was only this.

They talk about UN soldiers who are supposed to be protecting them and improving life in Liberia, instead beating and raping them. They talk about witnessing UN soldiers having sex with very young children.

Many of the sex workers are orphans.

SO many fucking orphans in Liberia. So many people with no job, no family, no hope - NOTHING. They have absolutely nothing good in their lives.

They live in a city surrounded by a jungle full of warlords. There’s no escaping this madness for many of them. Death is always nearby.

It’s Hell.

They live in Hell. In a dystopian fucking nightmare.

(Vice Doc): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRuSS0iiFyo

And what’s really crazy as far as today’s show goes - in this chaos - in this atmosphere of over-the-top violence and constant death - General Butt Naked STILL stands out!

He was SO ruthless and brutal - he stands out as one of the most feared butchers in a nation full of so much butchery.

After watching this doc - despite admitting to committing so, so many atrocities that we’ll get into later, despite committing so many blatant war crimes - I understand why General Butt Naked is still a free man.

He’s free because, if you’re going to arrest him - how many others must you also arrest?

You would need to arrest THOUSANDS!

He was born into a nation full of a silly amount of murder and rape - and therefore - it’s a nation full of thousands and thousands of murderers and rapists.

Where do you even begin if you try to clean it up? Would arresting General Butt Naked make a difference? Would it help anything? Would it be fair unless you arrest so many others?

Thankfully - things do seem to have gotten less violent since 2012.

Liberia did NOT make a recent “most dangerous nations in the world” list compiled by global security and medical specialists from around the world.

Still not safe though.

https://nypost.com/2020/12/03/these-are-the-worlds-most- dangerous-countries-for-2021/

The UK and many other nation’s governments and various travel advisory websites still state that while tourists aren’t targets of violence nearly as often as locals are in Monrovia and elsewhere in Liberia - you should NEVER travel anywhere at night.

After sundown in Monrovia - and in many other parts of Liberia - stay the fuck inside.

Now that we’ve laid out how terrible life can be in Liberia for many - let’s talk about the men who MABYE made life a little better there for some - and DEFINITELY much, much worse for many.

Liberia’s warlords.

General Butt Naked and his peers.

E.Warlords and Colonial Devastation Recap

While stories about modern warlords seem to have centered around Africa the past few decades, warlords have actually been around since Meatsacks started organizing themselves into society - in every place, culture, and time.

Warlords are definitely not an African phenomenon.

According to Merriam-Webster, a warlord is “a supreme military leader” or "a military commander exercising civil power by force usually in a limited area.”

They’re local strongmen who operate in their locales and take control when there’s a political vacuum.

Instead of someone like a politician, though, a warlord’s power is characterized by being self-interested - out for their own wealth and power and the wealth and power of their small circle - people who avoid acquiring fixed assets that they have to guard, and who fail to provide any public goods, e.g. security, infrastructure, and education.

So, they’re KIND OF different than a politician. Different than most.

Warlords need militias to support them, so a good deal of their energy and violence goes towards keeping their militia satisfied - and sometimes that militia is made up of people who can’t really split away without being in grave danger and who don’t need a lot of food or resources - like many of the children who fought for General Butt Naked.

Warlords have exercised power across the globe and in a variety of different times.

The feudal warlords of medieval Europe began as members of the landed nobility during the Carolingian [ kar-uh-lin-jee-uhn ] empire in the 8th, 9th, and 10th centuries.

As the empire gradually collapsed at the close of the first millennium, the social system of loyalty that characterized the old regime became less hierarchical and more fragmented, and the lords began to set separate policies for the administration of justice and taxation over the lands they controlled. Warlords levied arbitrary taxes on jurisdictions that often overlapped. Gone was a central government.

In its place - a smattering of war lords ruling over the fluctuating boundaries of their little fiefdoms. [[ feef-duhms ]

Some warlordism in China occurred much more recently.

It began after the fall of the Manchu Qing [ching] empire in 1911 and ending with the mainland victory of Mao's Communist revolution in 1949.

In 1911, the Qing [ching] Mongol dynasty collapsed during a revolution led by provincial armies, whose men were disgusted with the regime's inability to stave off the threat of foreign encroachment.

The warlords who emerged in the aftermath were mostly former imperial military officers. Successful warlords were good politicians who wooed local economic elites to gain control over provincial and municipal tax collection.

Since, geographical boundaries dividing warlord areas of rule in China were often nonexistent, the same warlord could sometimes act as a military governor on behalf of Beijing, and at other times as an anti-Beijing insurgent. For example, warlords collected municipal taxes on territory they controlled by government decree, but they also led local tax revolts if it was to their personal advantage. In addition, they extorted unofficial "taxes" from illegal checkpoints, including along railroad lines. Sometimes they also forced residents to grow opium poppies for them to sell, or pay a "laziness tax" for refusing to do so.

Sounds confusing and terrible.

In both Somalia and Afghanistan warlordism is a newer phenomenon.

Civil war in both countries gave men who controlled weapons and militias the power to subvert and displace traditional clan or tribal authorities and seize control.

In Somalia, the military took over the country in a bloodless coup when the last functioning civilian president was assassinated in 1969. Maj. Gen. Mohammed Siad Barre became the new state ruler, but he lost domestic legitimacy after an ill-fated military campaign against Ethiopia for control over the disputed Ogaden [ oh-gah-deyn ] region in the late 1970s.

He relied increasingly on support from his own clan and various sub- clan factions to retain power. Barre paid these clan members off from state coffers, packed government positions with his own people, and fomented inter-clan rivalries to divide his opponents.

As a result, the army fragmented into clan-based militias, each supporting its own interests with armaments left over from the competitive Soviet and U.S. assistance packages that had been offered to Somalia in the past. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4137507? seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents

Why we see a lot of warlords in Africa today is because African governments often fail to provide public goods and services to the entire country.

This is what happened in Liberia for sure.

Various ethnicities weren’t been taken care of by a government that had viewed them as second class citizens for over a century, and when warlords came along and took resources - even if they kept most of those resources and only gave them a little - a little was better than the nothing they received previously.

I covered the info in following section and more in a Suck I did in January of 2018 - The colonial devastation of Africa - episode #72.

Gonna give a brief recap of some of that info now since it’s relevant to what I’m talking about.

As we learned in that episode, the colonization of Africa really got going with the Berlin Conference that kicked off in 1884 when Otto von Bismark decided the leaders of Europe needed to sit down and figure out how to carve up another continent to fuck over.

By 1910, over 90% of Africa was under imperial control.

Only Liberia and Ethiopia remained independent.

Italy tried to take Ethiopia over in 1896 and got it’s motherfuckin’ ass kicked in the battle of Adwa [ ahd-wuh]

The Italians would later kick Ethiopia’s ass in 1936 and rule that nation for about five years before Ethiopia kicked them back out.

Africans were forced to fight for their colonial overlords in both WW1 and WW2, so, while the slave trade was abolished in the late 19th century, slavery in some form continued well into the 20th century.

And - before and after WW1 - when economic recessions and depressions hit in Europe, Europeans turned to Africa to rebuild their economies.

Europe’s growing interest in Africa's minerals led to her expansion into the interior. The Great depression that followed - Europe was also affected by the Stock Market crash of 1929 - worsened the already failing economies of Europe.

The mining of mineral wealth from Africa required the reorganization of colonial rule, which meant that the autonomy chiefs and kings in Africa had maintained over the years would be increasingly dissolved to make room for a more 'progressive' form of government. A form that would send a shit-ton of mining money back to European overlords.

Land was taken away from African tribes and residents and chiefs and local empires and given to white settlers and colonial companies like the British South African Company for farming and mining.

Parts of Africa are actually STILL being economically subjugated by former imperial rulers. The French still tax the shit out of 14 African nations - 12 of which are former French colonies - to the tune of roughly 500 billion dollars a year.

It’s too complicated to break down here WHY they’re taxing them. It has to do with these nations still using French currency. It’s also a bunch of bullshit that benefits France FAR more than it benefits these African nations. https://moguldom.com/229503/african-countries-still-pay-500b-in- colonial-taxes-to-france-each-year/

European leaders carved Africa up with no regard for what kingdoms already existed or which tribes lived where - or which tribes got along with what other tribes.

European colonialism did very little with African natives to educate and empower them. Instead - they mostly just used them with cheap labor. And when it was no longer profitable to keep using them - they left.

And they left a big fucking mess they largely created.

More than a quarter of the countries in sub-Saharan Africa are poorer now than in 1960 - and there is no sign that foreign aid, however substantive, will end the poverty anytime soon.

Aid doesn’t help much without a solid infrastructure to receive and distribute it.

In 2011, according to the OECD, the Organization for Economic Co- operation and Development - official development aid to Liberia totaled $765 million, and made up 73 per cent of its gross national income. The sum was even larger in 2010.

But last year every one of the 25,000 students who took the exam to enter the University of Liberia failed.

All of the aid is still failing to provide a decent education to Liberians.

This translates into many African states still being weak and plagued with corruption.

Typically, weak states lack presence in their border regions and rural areas, which then become ‘ungoverned spaces’ - spaces perfect for warlords to take power.

And that’s exactly what has happened.

Without a monopoly over the use of force in these areas, and with the exclusion of certain groups from the political realm, African nations become prone to insurgent groups and conflict.

Warlords emerge.

They have the opportunity to emerge when structure, authority, power, law, and civil order fragments, leaving a political vacuum to be filled.

And soon now - we will dig into the life one of Liberia’s warlords. General Butt Naked.

Before we learn a lot about his life in our timeline, let’s take a look at the tribe Joshua Blahyi came from.

F. The Sapro-Krahn [crown] Tribe

The Krahn [crown] are found throughout Liberia.

Though they are primarily found in Grand Gedeh and Nimba Counties, they are also found in Monrovia and elsewhere.

And Blahyi is a member of the Sarpo - one of several ethnic groups within the Krahn people.

And the Sapro clan consists of six different sub-clans: Kabadeh, Kimupoh, Putu, Seekon, Juarzon, and Wedja.

Blahyi’s parents were from Kabadeh sub-clan, the seat of an ancient god they supposedly worship - a god known as Nya-ghe-a-weh.

I says “supposedly” for reasons that will be made clear later. When it comes to his tribal religion - its hard to figure out how much of what he’s saying is real, and how much he’s made up.

Because Samuel Doe, the leader who held power in Liberia from 1980 through 1989, was Krahn [crown], many members of that ethnic group moved to Monrovia, the capital, during the 1980s.

And General Butt Naked was one of them. https://www.refworld.org/docid/3dee0c111.html

Once in power, President Doe instituted a blatant patronage system, rewarding the Krahn [crown], a generally rural and agrarian people who only make up about four percent of the total Liberian population - with a disproportionate number of senior military and Government positions.

And often the jobs were high-paying positions that didn’t require the person holding it to really do much. Mostly - they just got a cool title and a cooler check. The perfect gig.

Gradually, the Krahn [crown] were blamed by many Liberians for the brutality and corruption of the Doe years and for siphoning off the country's wealth. These tense dynamics will add some fuel on the fire that leads to the first Liberian Civil War. https://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/08/world/teobly-journal-the-once- mighty-cast-out-liberia-s-fallen-tribe.html

We couldn’t find much on the Krahn [crown] people’s traditional , tribal practices other than what’s in Blahyi’s memoir.

Like I mentioned - not sure I believe a lot of this - but it’s worth sharing because it’s interesting and, we get to know, lies or not, General Butt Naked a bit better.

Dude either had an EXTREMELY unusual childhood or he is a con artist with a fantastic imagination. Or some mix of the two.

The way Blayhi describes it, every first male child in his tribe is trained as a warrior and must pass through numerous traditional practices.

When a Krahn [crown] male first child turns eight, he is expected to contribute to his father’s house.

In return, his father doesn’t make any major decisions without the boy’s consent. He attends general tribal meetings and also fends for himself, being considered a laughingstock if he eats from his mother’s soup pot after he turns eight.

Totally! This sounds legit. And - how a boy should be raised.

I mean, what kind of WEAK-ASS MOMMA’S BOY lets his mom still feed him when he’s EIGHT? I was grilling steaks from various woodland creatures I’d killed by MYSELF by the time I was seven like the normal, strong, boy-man I was.

Blayhi says that Krahn [crown] fathers teach their sons to hunt with guns and traps on land, to farm, fell trees, build fences, and raise animals - all of this with the belief that these things will make the first- born boy mature enough to assume a priestly roll.

All of the fathers do these things with their first sons in the hopes that they’ll be selected for the priesthood by Nya-ghe-a-weh, the Krahn [crown] people’s reigning deity.

To avoid the stigma of having a weak or “useless” first born son, Blahyi says, fathers kill the sons they see as not being up to the job.

Again - feels fair.

I’ve never talked about him before, but, my son Kyler used to have an older brother, Ricky Dean - my true, first-born son.

BUT - I had to kill him.

I HAD TO.

I caught that little worthless nine-year old fuck asking his mom to make him mac n’cheese and to be given apple juice to drink and to be taken to a doctor sometimes.

NOT ON MY WATCH YOU LITTLE PARASITE!

At nine-and-a-half - he still didn’t have an after-school job! He hadn’t taken down a single Elk with a knife he’d made himself by rubbing an antler against a stone’s edge until it was razor sharp.

What was I supposed to do with that kid? LOVE HIM!?! NURTURE HIM!?! GIVE HIS STILL-FORMING BRAIN TIME TO DEVELOP!?!

No! I’m not a weak parent.

I killed him and made his younger brother Kyler eat him to absorb his strength. You get it.

You don’t get it, do you? I hope not.

That was savage nonsense. I hope Butt Naked is making some of this shit up.

According to Blahyi, his tribe would engage in battles with other tribes.

And when they’d win, he’s said that the victorious Krahn [crown] would then make their defeated opponents agree to the following, odd and repetitive declarations to nullify the spiritual control of the land’s gods and turn it over to their own gods.

1. One! Agree that the gods of our fathers that empowered us to conquer you shall have access into the hidden places of your gods, and even if you go there to take refuge, we are entitled to bring you back.

2. Two! Agree that the blood and water we used in conquering you and your land have nullified the blood and water you used in founding this land and its preservation.

3. Three! Agree that you will be our servants and everything that belongs to you by nature and achievement belongs to us.

4. Four! Agree that our blood and water used in conquering you have nullified the blood and water that was used in getting your crops and livestock

5. Five! Agree that our blood and water used in conquering you have nullified the blood and water that your parents used in bearing you.

6. Six! Agree that our blood and water used in conquering you have nullified the blood and water you used in bearing your children now and unborn.

7. Seven! Agree that as of now you shall come under the gods of our fathers and it shall render you useless if the blood and water from your body ever cease responding to us in the affirmative.

Huh.

That last declaration - number seven - is a little confusing. I feel like it got a little repetitive and convoluted and it ran on too long.

(Warlord) “Seven! Agree that as of now, and not of yesterday and not of two weeks ago or last year or of more years ago, you are under our gods and not your gods or any other gods but our gods, AND - you shall get to rendering and whoever is rendered is thusly no longer of the old ways but are of the new ways and your blood and water and the blood of others near you and their water and blood-water thenceforth, hitherto [ hith-er-too ] has agreed to be ours forever and ever even if you are dead or not in a good place where you can respond to the affirmative and not the non-affirmative but only the affirmative. Affirmative?”

(conquered dude) “Um… okay… sure. I agree?”

Blahyi claims this is how he was raised.

In a tradition where there is no room for weakness. Where first- born boys are killed for being soft. Where you conquer someone totally - you take everything from the defeated - their achievements, crops, livestock, body, blood, and soul.

And all of this might be bullshit.

As we’ll look into soon - a lot of expert cultural anthropologists doubt anything like the rituals Joshua describes ever took place.

Keep in mind that as we move through the timeline, a lot of our info about Joshua Blahyi’s childhood comes ONLY from his own memoir, The Redemption of an African Warlord: The Joshua Blahyi story.

While lots of parts of it are probably true, as we’ll see later, Blahyi will claim to have experienced a sudden conversion to Christianity - that God spoke to him - and now he wants to portray himself as someone avidly seeking forgiveness and repentance.

But is he?

It’s possible he really is a changed man. It’s also possible he’s just doing what he feels like he needs to do to make some extra dough.

With his newfound faith - he still has a militia of sorts - a crew of men loyal to him whom he protects - a crew he also might use primarily for his own financial gains.

Tina Susman, who was among the first Western journalists to write about Blahyi after his conversion, told the New Yorker, “I covered a lot of warlords. After a war is over, they have to reinvent themselves. That’s how they survive.”

If the war was still ongoing - would General Butt Naked return to battle? As ruthless as ever?

Let’s meet him and see what you think.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/03/14/general-butt- naked-the-repentant-warlord

Time for this week’s Timesuck Timeline…

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…after a quick sponsor break! Hope you like these deals.

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Thank you to our sponsors! We appreciate the support big time.

Now - Timeline time. Hail Nimrod!

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PAUSE TIMESUCK TIMELINE INTRO

III.Timesuck Timeline

https://www.loc.gov/collections/maps-of-liberia-1830-to-1870/articles- and-essays/history-of-liberia/1820-to-1847/ https://timelines.ws/countries/LIBERIA.HTML

We already went over the founding of Liberia - so no need to go over all that 19th century stuff again here. Picking things up now in the early 20th century.

1. 1926: In 1926, the Firestone Tire and Rubber Co created the world's largest plantation at Harbel, Liberia, and rubber became the backbone of the Liberian economy.

Firestone had signed a 99-year concession agreement with the Liberian government in the 1920s to grow and export rubber.

And thousands of native Liberians will be exploited mercilessly by Firestone and the Liberian government.

And this exploitation will, over sixty years, help push the nation into Civil War.

Harvey S. Firestone Sr., the Ohio born founder of the Firestone Tire and Rubber Co., had become one of the top industrialists of the gilded age.

He dreamed of finding a rubber source beyond the grasp of the British Empire, which controlled much of the world market.

In Liberia, he found a spot in the narrow band around the equator where rubber trees thrived – and a nation that was in debt and desperate for business.

After two years of negotiations, Firestone and Liberia announced one of history’s great sweetheart deals. Liberia gave Firestone the right to lease up to 1 million acres - roughly 10 percent of the country’s arable land… for six cents an acre. For ninety-nine years.

Liberia made a really, REALLY shitty deal.

And the Americo-Liberians running Liberia, to make some money off this deal - seem to have sold locals into, essentially, plantation slavery and forced them to work for Firestone.

2. 1930: In 1930, investigators from the League of Nations found that officials in the Liberian government had engaged in forcing indigenous villagers to work on private farms, including Firestone’s plantation.

They did NOT find evidence, though, that Firestone was complicit in this, and the rubber plantation exploitation continued.

https://www.propublica.org/article/firestone-and-the-warlord- chapter-2 3. 1943: 1943. William Tubman is elected president of Liberia. He promotes foreign investment and local participation in government. During his long tenure, Liberia experiences a period of prosperity… for some.

By the time of his death in 1971, Liberia had the largest mercantile fleet in the world, the world’s largest rubber industry, was the third-largest exporter of iron ore in the world, and had attracted more than US$1 billion in foreign investment.

During the 1950s, Liberia had the second-highest rate of economic growth in the world.

Also during the 1950s - Firestone and others continued to fuck over Liberia and Liberia’s poorest people.

Firestone was Liberia’s largest private employer and the largest exporter in the country during that decade. And Firestone’s profits after taxes amounted to three times the government’s total revenue for 1951.

And how was all this growth really possible? It was built on the poorly paid backs of the lower classes of Liberian society. The natives. People who were not descended from settlers. People who were not the Americo-Liberians.

ALSO - during the 1950s - Liberia became, for all intents and purposes - a dictatorship.

After a gunman attempted to assassinate Tubman in 1955, he brutally repressed the political opposition.

This so-called assassination attempt is widely believed to have been staged by Tubman in order to consolidate his power and go after his political enemies.

His administration had become increasingly authoritarian before the supposed assassination attempt.

Liberia's constitution did not have term limits, and Tubman did not volunteer to leave office.

He controlled the dominant political party and had created a wide network of sycophants [ sik-uh-fuhnts] through patronage appointments. Giving away more jobs that don’t require one to do anything other than be loyal to him. Cool title and cooler paycheck. He’s doing some warlord shit.

4. July 23, 1971: On July 23rd, 1971, President Tubman dies, and Vice President William Tolbert takes office.

Tubman had ran the show for 27 years. He’d turned Liberia into a dictatorship.

When Tolbert took over, he’d already been vice-president for 19 years.

Tolbert was a member of one of the most influential and affluent Americo-Liberian families.

He tried to institute some reforms, and they backfired on him.

He promoted a program to bring more indigenous persons into the Liberian government. But local tribes didn’t feel like he was doing enough. At the same time, most Americo-Liberians were staunchly opposed his reforms. They thought he was doing too much. He was accused of, according to one source, "letting the peasants into the kitchen."

He quickly makes enemies with both sides.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Tolbert

5. September 30, 1971: September 30th, 1971. Joshua Blayhi, the future General Butt Naked, is born.

His last name, Blahyi, comes from his grandfather, who was simply called Blahyi.

Blahyi married Joshua’s grandmother, Cherfani, and had three children: Kwetii, Joshua’s father, and two girls, Waihnyonoh and Wehyi, followed by another boy, Nnawyilee.

As was tradition for their tribe, Kwetii was trained as a first son - so he had to be doing man-shit by the age of eight unless he wanted to git kilt!

According to Joshua’s memoirs - his father WAS a tough dude and won some sort of prize as a child for being his tribe’s best hunter on two occasions and once rescued a cousin from a leopard.

If that leopard story is true - that is pretty impressive. I haven’t saved anyone from a raccoon or a squirrel - let alone a leopard.

Not sure you can save someone from a squirrel, actually. That would be a tough tale to sell.

(incredulous friend) “Wait. What was that? You saved your cousin from a squirrel? I don’t understand.”

(me) “Well - see, when I fired that sling shot - that squirrel was probably only five or six feet away from him. ACTUALLY - it was even closer. It had to be - because he was feeding it some bread.”

(incredulous friend) “What? He was feeding it? If he was feeding it - why did he need to be saved from it?”

(me) “Look. Okay - “Saved” might not be the best word. I’m not POSITIVE that the squirrel was going to kill him. Or even bite him. BUT - I WAS worried that the squirrel was gonna maybe take more bread than he wanted to give him. And that’s not cool. So, really, I guess I SAVED the bread. I saved my cousin from losing more bread than he may have wanted to.”

When one of his tribe’s priests died, Joshua’s father Kwetii was established as an “interim priest.”

Kwetii lived and worked in Monrovia but traveled back to his homeland to bless crops, perform rites, and offer various cures. At some point, Kwetii married Ma Saybah, a Lorma woman from Lofa Country in the northern part of Liberia.

And - again, according to Mr. Butt Naked, Lofians have their own traditional and cultural practices, primarily within the Poor and Sande secret societies, which are widespread throughout eastern Liberia and Sierra Leone.

And Ma Saybah was part of the Sande society and had a very high rank.

Ma Saybah gave birth to a boy, a child they named Benedict who would be instructed as all first sons were in the Sapro tribe.

However, when Blahyi’s dad Kwetii took Benedict to the elders to be introduced to Nya-ghe-a-weh, the oracle rejected him.

In Blahyi’s words, the oracle said “Benedict was from a mixed culture and already had the mark of the other culture. In frustration, the god Nya-ghe-a-weh placed a curse of inconsistency upon the innocent child, which is to this day affecting his life.”

The elders apparently didn’t want a child who wasn’t entirely Sapro.

So they decided to arrange a marriage between Kwetii and a woman they found suitable. A Krahn [crown] woman.

They chose Elizabeth Pantoe, who was Krahn [crown] - but was also already married with two children named Nelson and Harrison.

Elizabeth will be Joshua Blayhi’s mother.

She was a woman of high repute and her father, Nyepan, was considered a very powerful man.

According to Blahyi, Nyepan’s father - also named Nyepan - had “traditional powers that he inherited from a source I cannot perfectly explain, but he specialized in treating barrenness… The condition was such that a woman would first bear him a child, who remained with him when she returned to her father’s or husband’s house. This explains why the name Nyepan is such a common name among the Sapro.”

Did everyone just catch what Joshua is saying here?

He’s saying that his maternal great-grandfather was a man with magic powers. He could cure infertility by fucking various village women until they were pregnant.

Not sure that’s a “magic” power. Pretty sure he probably just had a high sperm count.

What a sweet gig!

Dr. Dick. Any hot village ladies having fertility problems? Dr. Dick is ON THE CASE!!! Any unattractive women having fertility problems? Dr. Dick will be HAPPY to refer you to a rival dick doctor.

One of the elders apparently observed that Joshua’s father Kwetii’s passion for women was “weak” so they assigned his paternal uncle, Tweleh Falley, to cast a spell on Kwetii to create a “sudden, burning desire” for Joshua’s mother.

There was still the matter of Kwetii’s wife, Ma Saybah, though.

Kwetii reassured Ma Saybah that as soon as Elizabeth Pantoe produced a suitable son, the marriage to her would be terminated.

Huh. VERY different culture we’re dealing with here.

That shit would not fly in America.

(Guy Who’s Met Someone Else) “Baby - I’ve met another woman. And I’m gonna marry her! But DON’T WORRY! As soon as she’s pregnant - you’re free to go. So, you know, everyone wins or something.”

And the baby Kwetii would have with Elizabeth would be Joshua Blayhi.

And according, again, to Blahyi, he was born weighing eighteen pounds, the heaviest baby ever born at St. Joshua’s Catholic Church in Monrovia.

HIGHLY unlikely. Even thirteen pound babies make the news.

The heaviest healthy baby ever born was 22 pounds and eight ounces born in Italy in 1955. There are a few other cases in recorded history of babies over twenty pounds being born. Like - three of them. After that, it drops off to sixteen pound babies.

Blayhi is never mentioned in any big baby articles.

Blayhi’s parent’s marriage was dissolved a few years later - lot of marriages being moved around - and at the age of four, Joshua went to live with his father and stepmother.

Joshua went to St. Peter’s School in Monrovia and claimed that when he was in the first grade, he could solve math problems that fourth graders couldn’t.

He’s super smart! You will soon see Mr. Butt Naked has a VERY hight opinion of himself.

As a child, Joshua says he had dreams about blood and hurting his friends.

Sometimes, he did hurt them, and then confusingly, his father would scold him in front of the people he’d hurt and give the victims money, but in private, Joshua’s father praised him and told him he was pleasing the gods.

He was strong! And sometimes strong man-boys had to hurt people.

If that’s true - no wonder he became a warlord. I’m guessing I would’ve turned out a little different if growing up, my dad would’ve been like, “Make me proud son - go hurt some kids today. Fuck ‘em up!”

Joshua’s father and stepmother “arranged” the birth of another child, Victor, but when Victor was presented to the elders to be a priest for some reason as well, they rejected him too, saying they would only have the “chosen one.” AKA Joshua.

Uh huh. So now he’s the “chosen one.”

Apparently, Kwetii liked Joshua so much that he didn’t want to hand him over to be a priest.

Sorry if this a little confusing.

Again - all of this is based on Joshua’s memoirs, and he is NOT a great author.

Now here’s some more shit he wrote that’s a little crazy but amuses me.

When he was in third grade, Joshua says he suffered from an illness that “deformed him” and “made him look like an ape.”

Sounds legit.

He looks nothing like an ape now, but, it’s not like that means this story is nonsense, I guess.

He probably just found the right priest. Some priest who specialized in ape-reversal transformation spells. For sure. That has to be it.

Joshua’s father took him from one doctor to another to cure his ape-shape situation, but they either refused or couldn’t cure him.

His stepmother decided to take him to a witch named Zogboa, who said Joshua “was born with a destiny that could not be destroyed by any mortal being.”

No word on whether or not this witch un-aped him. More “chosen one” shit here.

Joshua continued to be sick for the next four years, until apparently the god Nya-ghe-a-weh visited Joshua’s father at work.

Everyone else at the office fell into a deep sleep except Kwetii, and Nya-ghe-a-weh berated him for not turning Joshua over to the elders.

Kwetii agreed to do so, handing over Joshua to the tribe’s warriors — “muscular men with spears and daggers in their hands” that saluted him. They took him into the forest with a parade following them.

They left him with the elders, who bathed him and told him that Nya-ghe-a-weh was waiting for him.

Before the break of dawn, they put him in a leather loincloth, put pieces of leather on his left arm and right wrist, hung a bag of chalk on his shoulders, and led him to the town square for the ordination ceremony.

The town square was crowded with men and women as Joshua made his way to the elders’s box.

As he says it, he entered “the thick and heavy presence of Nya- ghe-a-weh” and could barely walk upright.

His eyes became dim and everything around him was blurry, but suddenly his ears opened to “the spirit world” and he heard strange laughter.

And here’s where shit gets REAL weird.

He says that a domineering voice commanded him to lick the chalk from the bag for strength.

He then arrived at a big rock, Nya-ghe-a-weh’s throne, at night, which he stood before for three days and three nights with only the chalk for food.

At midnight on the third day, he saw a stool appear and a strange voice directed him to stand on it. When he did, he was sucked down into the rock and met… Nya-ghe-a-weh.

According to Joshua, Nya-ghe-a-weh was twelve feet tall and wearing old rags covered in mud.

He had bruises all over his left side and his left wing was folded under his arm. He put his hand on Joshua’s shoulder and pointed at what looked like a screen.

And on this magic screen, Joshua saw various images from his childhood.

Lots of images. Days worth.

On the first day, he watched scenes from his first year of life; on the second day, he watched scenes from his second ear of life and so on.

Shit! He was down in that rock for a LONG time! I hope he brought enough chalk to eat!

Each scene revealed a wide shadow spread over Joshua and his mother whenever there was an attempt to harm them.

Nya-ghe-a-weh explained every moment from Joshua’s life to him and then revealed that HE was the shadow protecting Joshua.

According to Joshua, he told him:

“Yes, I have been the one protecting you all along, because you are my hero. You shall be the greatest in your time and admired by all. No human being can stand up to you or equal the status you shall attain as my priest. Men shall hold you in high regard.”

Haha! Get the FUCK out of here. No shortage of ego on this guy.

His GOD is telling him that he is GOD’S hero?? C’mon dude. Gotta tone down your vision!

It’s painfully clear here that he didn’t use an editor for his memoirs. That he should’ve had someone - or someone who wasn’t afraid of him - give it a little proofread. Maybe asked, “Are you SURE that GOD told you that you were HIS hero? Just want to be certain. Some people - maybe some sarcastic podcaster - might REALLY mock you for doing something that outlandish”

Back to this vision no part of me actually believes happened.

Jospeh wrote that on the eleventh day, Nya-ghe-a-weh told him how to maintain the powers and responsibilities of being a priest.

He told him:

“First, I want you to know that whatever transpires between you and me is highly confidential. If you reveal what transpires between you and me to others, you will expose the source of your powers. Be informed that these powers belong to you and the entire tribe before and after you. Any act of treason shall result in death.”

Ummm… dude. PRETTY sure that you writing all of this in your memoirs counts as you revealing what transpired.

You’re LUCKY to be alive, Joshua!

And then he says that this God, Nya-ghe-a-weh, told him - “You will not eat or have anything to do with kola nuts. Touching, not to mention eating, kola nuts is tantamount to playing with the covenant I made with the tribe, because kola nuts were the bane of that covenant.”

Huh. DID not expect his God to bring up Kola nuts.

Cool fact about Kola nuts. They come from the Kola tree.

Pretty cool, huh?

Kidding. Not kidding that they come from the Kola tree - they ARE the fruit of the Kola tree, a tree found in African rainforests.

But that’s not the cool fact.

The cool fact is - Coca Cola is partially named after these nuts. Like the coffee berry and the tea leaf - the contain caffeine. And in the 1880s, John Pemberton, a pharmacist in Georgia, took caffeine extracted from kola nuts and cocaine-containing extracts from coca leaves - and mixed that with sugar, some other flavorings, and carbonated water - and he invented Coca-Cola - the first cola soft drink.

One more piece of trivia about this Kola nut - Coca Cola took it out of the recipe in 2016. So if you thought it started to taste different - you’re right. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_nut

Back to Joshua’s very real vision now that for sure happened.

Next, his god Nya-ghe-a-weh told him:

“Since you are very young for the power you are about to use, you must make human sacrifices on a monthly basis at the appearing of the new moon. These will enable you to retain the powers you received. Failure or delay from your quarters shall result in your demise."

Interesting. Now - instead of eating some kola nuts to pep up - he has to eat people every month. Hmm. Bummer - so much easier to eat the Kola Nuts.

Blahyi will point to this vision for the rest of his life as to why he killed so many kids. HE HAD TOO! A god TOLD him too. He needed the magic!

Sweet rationalization.

Nya-ghe-a-weh then instructed him to swallow some cowrie shells. These shells come from sea snails. And they were once used as a form of currency in Africa and certain parts of Asia.

The cowry shells Joshua swallowed apparently served as remote controls to eleven different powers.

The two in his right hand would contact the supernatural knife and the stool of authority.

The three in his left hand were for disappearing and reappearing.

Two in his left thigh were for protection from bullets and knives.

One in his right thy was for hypnotizing and invoking spirits.

The last two, Joshua didn’t really know where they were.

Nice.

I like how he makes up all these details and then he just kind of gives up on those last two shells.

I don’t know - maybe he didn’t make all this up. Maybe he really believes this all happened. Maybe he had some kind of hallucination. Some kind of fever dream. Not impossible. As you’ll see later - this dude is FOR SURE fucking crazy.

Then Nya-ghe-a-weh then resurfaced Joshua and sent him back to his village. There, elders announced his return and Joshua entered the elders’ huts and, apparently, started giving instructions as to how the tribe should be led immediately.

And all of this supposedly happens when he’s eleven years old. He’s running shit now.

Joshua writes that he spends another six or seven days with the elders before his father takes I’m back to Monrovia.

In Monrovia, Nya-ghe-a-weh continues to visit Joshua “between midnight and four in the morning” via “soul trips on abstract planes.”

Sweeeeet.

I haven’t gone on, like, a TON of soul trips, but, the soul trips I’ve taken on abstract planes have definitely been my favorite. WAY better than the soul trips I’ve taken on actual, concrete, real, non-abstract planes.

And what about that sacrifice thing that Nya-ghe-a-weh told him to do?

Well. Joshua says he gets to it right away.

In his words: “Initially, my monthly human sacrifice was taken from Kotati’s yard, where I was brought up.

However, my conscience was greatly troubled after each sacrifice when I heard the victims’ parents weep for their loved ones. I decided to go far away to find my prey… However, if I did not succeed in securing a far-away victim on time, I resorted to offering any of the close residents.”

This part - sadly - I’m more inclined to believe than his crazy Kola-nut power-shell vision shit. He seems to have definitely killed and eaten a lot of children.

So this fits right into his wheelhouse.

He also said he started performing “blind witch recruitments” around this time by going to community wells and planting charms in them so anyone who drank the water would “become a medium to display his craft.”

What EXACTLY does that mean? I have NO fucking idea. I think it means he started building a little army of followers. He says so much crazy shit it’s hard to make sense of all of it.

Oh - and he also sold charms. Can’t forget to mention the sweet charms he sold.

a) Doubts:

So - can anyone corroborate all these claims?

No.

Not that I know of.

At least one family member has spoken up and said that a lot of it is bullshit, though.

According to one of Blahyi’s half brothers, his authority in the community maybe wasn’t QUITE what he claims.

Harrison Shine Challar, the half-brother in question, told a New Yorker profiler that he had been unaware of Blahyi’s life as a priest; as far as Challar knew, Blahyi was just a rebellious youth.

He said their mother would give him money to buy food for the family, and instead of going shopping - he would disappear into the streets of Monrovia for weeks at a time.

According to Challar, Blahyi left school after the third grade, and later - I love this - sold Kool-Aid and chicken soup at a local market, wearing “a purple necktie, purple shirt, purple trousers, and purple shoes” so people would recognize him.

Slightly different version of his childhood here. Haha! He either was a powerful priest who was god’s own hero - a man destined to be the most powerful man of his lifetime who started running his village at the age of eleven - OR - he was a kid wearing a purple outfit at the grocery store sellling Kool-Aid.

I laughed SO fucking hard when I first read all this.

This guy is so full of shit.

Challar said that Blahyi then moved on to drug trafficking and robbery. Sometimes, Challar said, he and Blahyi worked together.

Joshua DID seem to be into witch powers when he was a kid. He seems to at least pretended he had them.

According to Challar, a Nigerian soldier once asked young Blahyi to help him gain spiritual powers - and Blahyi prescribed a “witchcraft treatment” - an enema, actually - and while the soldier was indisposed having Blahyi pour some witch-liquid up his ass - Challar stole his money and ran off. b) More Doubts:

Challar isn’t the only person who doubts a lot of Joshua’s claims.

David Brown, a social anthropologist who has worked in Liberia since the nineteen-seventies, said that he had never heard of a secret society that matches Blahyi’s description.

Many other experts have agreed. One called Blahyi’s story “ludicrous.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/03/14/general- butt-naked-the-repentant-warlord

Okay - let’s back up now to 1979. We’ll reconnect with Butt Naked the Bullshit Artist in a bit.

6. April 14, 1979: On April 14th, 1979, Liberia’s "rice riots” begin.

A proposed increase in the price of imported rice, suggested in order to stimulate local growth, results in riots which lead to many deaths and enormous infrastructural damage to the capital city of Monrovia.

Liberian shoot and kill 41 protestors on the 14th, more than 400 others were injured, and riots cause over 35 million dollars in damage.

https://www.nytimes.com/1979/05/30/archives/after-liberias- costly-rioting-great-soulsearching-personally.html

President Tolbert, the day after the shootings, characterized the leaders of the demonstration as “wicked, evil and satanic men” who wanted “to bring chaos and disorder in the country with the eventual objective of overthrowing the Government.”

These “wicked men” were indigenous. As were those killed on behalf of the Americo-Liberian government.

More seeds of discontent are sown. A revolution is now brewing.

7. Apr 12, 1980: A year later - almost to the day - on April 12th, 1980, Master Sergeant Samuel K. Doe of the Krahn [crown] tribe stages a coup against the Liberian government.

Doe, a man with no prior political experience but a ton of military experience, and a few of his soldiers kill President William Tolbert and 26 of his supporters. There are conflicting accounts regarding Tolbert’s death. Most seem to suggest he was shot while still in his bed.

A week later - they publicly execute thirteen of his ministers for treason. These men were walked nude through the streets of Monrovia and then shot by a firing squad on the beach.

Hundreds of other government official flee the country.

Yeah, I bet. I’d be getting the fuck out of there too if I thought there was a chance they’d drag my naked ass through the streets and shoot me next. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ William_Tolbert#Accounts_of_Tolbert%E2%80%99s_death

Doe is an interesting character.

It seems as though his coup was backed by the CIA - that the US helped him kill Tolbert. Why would America do that?

Because Tolbert was friendly with the Soviet Union - and Doe was a big fan of US capitalism.

In August 2008, before a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Monrovia, Doe's former justice minister alleged the CIA had provided a map of the Executive Mansion, enabling Doe and the other rebels to break into it; and that it was a white American CIA agent who actually shot and killed Tolbert; and that the Americans "were responsible for Liberia’s nightmare.”

And I absolutely believe it.

This happened during the Cold War when the CIA was for sure toppling regimes with communist leanings or connections - and they were replacing their leaders with US-friendly puppet-regimes.

Once the Doe-puppet took over - Doe proclaimed himself the Chairman of the People’s Redemption Council and immediately severed any diplomatic ties Liberia had with the Soviet Union and he got real friendly with the US and our military. Of course he did. He basically worked for the US government.

He agreed to a modification of a mutual defense pact Liberia had with the US, and granted the US military staging rights on 24-hour notice at Liberia’s sea and airports for the US Rapid Deployment Forces, which were established to respond quickly to security threats worldwide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Samuel_Doe#Relations_with_the_United_States

Backed by the US, Doe would become a brutal dictator.

He would soon do shit like shut down newspapers, ban political activity, and at one point - impose a 6PM curfew for a little while, giving his soldiers the authority to kill anyone out on the streets after that time.

He was also the first native head of state in the country's history.

Samuel Doe will hold dictatorial power in Liberia for nine years. And this his reign will end very, VERY badly for him.

8. 1985: Five years later in 1985 - Liberia has an election. In theory.

Wanting to appear as an elected official and not a totalitarian dictator - hard to maintain US support, at least publicly, if you’re a tyrannical despot - Samuel Doe runs for the office he essentially already holds against Jackson Doe - not related - and he becomes Liberia's 20th president.

He wins! Or maybe not.

Doe claims victory under a cloud of controversy and widespread charges of vote-rigging.

I don’t want to go into a lot of details here but it appears that he for SURE rigged this election.

Doe had the ballots taken to a secret location and 50 of his own handpicked staff counted them. Foreign observers weren’t allow to witness the count. There were also all kinds of other allegations - like people watching his soldiers and their families vote for him over and over and over and voting booths.

Foreign observers thought that Jackson Doe won. In a landslide, actually.

Despite these troubling allegations, the United States accepts the results of the election and offers support to the President Doe. Wouldn’t be surprised if the CIA helped rig the election for him.

General Butt Naked, interesting, will later claim that HE won the election for Doe. The world’s most important man claims that he quote, “manipulated almost the whole nation to vote for him. I planted blind agents in all major restaurants and bakeries to sell his fame.”

Totally.

That sounds VERY legit.

If you want to win an election for someone - anyone who’s anyone knows that you need to plant “blind agents” in “restaurants and bakeries” to “sell their fame.”

That’s election winning 101!

The thing I hate the most about elections here in the US is getting hassled by these damn fame-sellers at bakeries.

Every four years it’s the same shit. I walk in to grab a blueberry muffin, or maybe a scone - and there’s some motherfucker in the corner yelling shit like “Trump’s super cool! Celebrity Apprentice was really popular. Super famous. Vote for him!”

And then some other motherfucker across the bakery is like, “No. Biden’s super cool! He’s been a politician since 1917. He has over twenty million followers on Twitter. He’s been on Ellen and the Tonight Show a bunch of times. Super famous. Vote for him.”

And I’m like, “Goddamn it you blind agents! Stop selling fame and let me eat my SCONE!”

9. November 1985: November 1985. Thomas Quiwonkpa, Doe's former second-in-command, is killed when he attempts to overthrow Doe's government.

This coup attempt leads to government-led violence against the Gio and Mano people of Quiwonkpa's native Nimba County.

Not good.

A Civil War is now brewing.

10. December 24, 1989: December 24th, 1989, The National Patriotic Front of Liberia - the NPFL enters Liberia - and kickstarts the first Liberian Civil War.

a) Liberian Civil War:

Let me give you a quick rundown on who’s fighting who in this war. It’s super confusing. If you can’t remember all these names - don’t worry about it. You’ll get the gist.

The NFPL - the group that kicks shit off - is a band of Libyan- trained military rebels led by one Charles Taylor - and they invade Liberia from the Ivory Coast.

Taylor had previously backed Doe’s coup - and after it was successful, he was appointed Director General of the General Services Agency - and his new job was to oversee government purchases. He was put in charge of a large amount of money, and he put a LOT of that money straight into his pocket. He got caught embezzling roughly a million dollars into foreign accounts for himself and then he fled to the US where he was arrested.

This guy’s story is so fucking interesting. His life story is Hollywood blockbuster waiting to be filmed.

After getting arrested in the US - he ends up in jail in Massachusetts. He’s detained in the US at the Plymouth County Correctional Facility awaiting a possible extradition back to Liberia - and then he breaks the fuck out of jail.

On September 15th, 1985, Taylor and four other inmates escape.

Two days later, The Boston Globe reports that they sawed through a bar covering a window in a dormitory room, after which they lowered themselves 20 feet on knotted sheets and escaped into the nearby woods after climbing a fence.

THEN - Taylor and two other escapees were met at nearby Jordan Hospital by Taylor's wife and sister-in-law who drove a getaway car to Staten Island in New York, and then Taylor disappeared. All four of his fellow escapees, as well as his wife and sister-in-law were later apprehended.

But not Talyor. He ghosted everyone.

He made it out of the US and all the way to Libya, where he met up with Libyan socialist leader Muammar Gaddafi - becoming his protege and receiving a ton of military training. He learns how to be a warlord. How to be a dictator.

Years later in 2009 - Taylor will claim at another trial that the CIA helped him escape from jail.

AND - the CIA DID confirm that Taylor was working with US intelligence at the time. Did they introduce him to Gaddafi? How deep does all this go?

Crazy shit.

Taylor’s rebel group the NFPL consisted mostly of Gio and Mano peoples from eastern Liberia.

The Gio and Mano people had long been opposed and persecuted by Liberian President Samuel Doe.

The NPFL was largely made up of former Liberian military men - AND - it was one of the first Liberian military regimes to actively recruit child-soldiers.

The NPFL would go on to clash with government forces and then other ethnic militias until mid-1993.

During three-and-a-half years of fighting all groups involved generated civilian causalities, but Taylor’s NFPL seemed to generate the most - they were responsible for the slaughter of thousands of Liberians, both military and civilians.

As the NFPL forces advanced toward Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, in 1990, they specifically targeted people from the Krahn [crown] and Mandingo ethnic groups who remained loyal to the Doe government.

And as the war continued, at least six other factions became involved the conflict, including the United Liberian Movement of Liberia for Democracy (ULIMO), the Lofa Defense Force, and many members of the Armed Forces of Liberia who were still loyal to Doe’s government.

https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/first-liberian- civil-war-1989-1996/

11. 1990: In 1990, Taylor’s NFPL troops capture most of the country.

12.August 24, 1990: On August 24th, 1990, three thousand ECOMOG forces arrive in Liberia. ECOMOG - The Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group - another one of the many armies fighting in this complicated and fractured Civil war.

During the same month, ECOWAS - The Economic Community of West African States - a regional political and economic union of fifteen countries located in West Africa - holds a meeting in Gambia, where Dr. Amos Sawyer is appointed as Liberian president of an Interim Government of National Unity (IGNU).

But Sawyer's Monrovia-based IGNU is not recognized by rebel leader Charles Taylor, who is now based just outside Monrovia and controls most of the rest of the country.

Liberia is now divided, with two effective seats of government and two effective currencies. It’s a land of blood and chaos. Roughly 620,000 will die in this first civil war. Over two hundred thousand of them will be civilians.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Liberian_Civil_War

13. September 9, 1990: On September 9th, 1990, Samuel Doe is tortured and then executed by Prince Johnson and his rebel group, the Independent National Patriotic Front of Liberia (INPFL) which had been waging a separate campaign against the government.

Yet ANOTHER military faction. The INPFL consisted of men who’d broken away from Charles Taylor’s NPFL.

Doe’s death was HORRIFIC.

He was taken to Prince Johnson's military base and apparently some of Johnson’s men thought that Doe was protected by black magic and they wouldn’t be able to truly harm or kill him.

To prove to his men that Doe was not protected by black magic, Johnson ordered that Doe’s ears be cut off in Johnson's presence, and then he chewed one of them.

I found a video online where you can watch one of this dude’s ears get cut off. I shouldn’t of watched it. I’m too curious sometimes!

THEN - some of Doe's fingers and toes were also cut off.

Finally, after TWELVE HOURS of torture at Johnson’s hands, Doe was murdered.

And then his corpse was exhibited naked in the streets of Monrovia.

The spectacle of his torture was video-taped and seen on news reports around the world.

The video shows Johnson sipping a beer as one of Doe's fucking ears are cut off.

You can tell that he and his men are just used to shit like this. They’ve known so much violence. They’ve become so incredibly jaded.

14. 1991: In 1991, now nineteen year-old General Butt Naked joins all this madness.

Hail Nimrod and here we fucking go.

He and other members of his tribe decide to join up with the Mandigo tribe to form yet ANOTHER military faction - the ULIMO United Liberian Movement for Democracy.

Like the Krahns [crowns], the Mandigos were also targeted by Charles Taylor’s NPFL because of their support for the Doe regime.

15. July 1991: In July of 1991, a family member of one of the victims of Butt Nakeds brutality witnesses something nightmarish.

She would later tell her story to Der Spiegel - a German news agency.

Faith Gwae was sixteen in July of 1991.

She and her family were living on the outskirts of a small town in eastern Liberia. When they tuned their radio to the BBC, they heard news about the war.

They wondered whether they should stay or leave.

A group from the Krahn [crown] tribe was searching for enemies in the area. And at this time - an enemy was any member of any other tribe.

Her older brother, Daniel, was hiding a nanny from the Gio tribe who had been working for the family for years.

Faith heard the screams outside the huts as men approached.

Suddenly she saw a naked man with only a machete in his hand— Joshua Blayhi.

“Why is the man naked?" she wondered. Then she saw the other men, about 25 of them, carrying guns.

Dude. What the fuck? Just walking around with nothing but a machete, leading a bunch of dudes with machine guns. How surreal.

Blayhi and his men had heard that there was a Gio woman in the village.

Daniel stood in front of the nanny to protect her.

"She is a human being, like you and me," he said to Blahyi.

And then Blahyi responded with an order, and one of the men - boys actually - one of his child soldiers - then stepped forward and chopped off Daniel's foot with a machete.

Then - after Daniel - blood now spurting everywhere - fell to the ground screaming - this soldier hacked off Daniel’s lower leg.

Then - while he is still alive - this dude hacks off Daniel’s his thigh and then his hip, methodically working his way up his body until, eventually, Faith’s brother fell silent.

Blahyi then told everyone to lie on the ground, and once they did, his men raped her mother and her sisters and the nanny, and then killed them.

In Faith’s words: "They didn't rape me, but they did things to me that I don't want to talk about. They left me with a blemish that I will always have."

At some point Blahyi said that things were moving too slowly, and that there were other military operations to attend to.

When she spoke to reporters in 2013, Faith wasn’t sure why they didn’t kill her.

Her best guess is that, by the time they left, they thought she was already dead.

https://abcnews.go.com/International/penitent-warlord- atoning-20000-war-crimes/story? id=20749940#:~:text=Blahyi%20was%20never%20punished%20f or%20his%20crimes.&text=The%20International%20Criminal%20 Court%20in,it%20was%20founded%20in%202002.

16. 1992: 1992. Taylor and the NFPL launched a large scale attack on Monrovia, called Operation Octopus. The siege of the capital lasts for two months and traps ECOWAS troops in this ongoing civil war.

Taylor’s men inflict massive casualties, but they are still unable to take control of Liberia.

https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/first-liberian-civil- war-1989-1996/

17. 1993: In 1992, there’s a split in ULIMO, the group Blahyi is fighting with.

Blahyi later writes that in-fighting in the group results in the deaths of several Krahn [crown] tribe members.

And that some Krahn [crown] people then wanted him to become their priest, because of COURSE they did. He’s GOD’S HERO!

Mr. But Naked turns them down and says he’ll fight as a warrior instead.

He also says he told them that because he was consenting to reduce his status from priest to warlord, he should be allowed to make as many sacrifices as he wants.

He needs to stay alive by making child sacrifices! If only he could just eat Kola Nuts to be bullet proof.

In his words: “This decision was pleasing to the military leaders, but not to the political leaders because my numerous killings would hinder their political ambitions.”

This shit is all so crazy.

Not sure how much of this believe. BUT - many, many, MANY people will later testify that Butt Naked did kill a lot of people - that he did eat a lot of people - that he did so much heinous shit in this Civil War.

So, while I doubt anyone was asking him to be some important priest - I do believe he told people he wanted to take a lot of sacrifices.

After this supposed meeting - Blahyi gets back to fighting.

Describing a typical battle, Blahyi said: “So, before leading my troops into battle, we would get drunk and drugged up, sacrifice a local teenager, drink the blood, then strip down to our shoes and go into battle wearing colorful wigs and carrying imaginary purses we'd looted from civilians. We'd slaughter anyone we saw, chop their heads off and use them as soccer balls. We were nude, fearless, drunk yet strategic. We killed hundreds of people—so many I lost count.”

What… the… FUCK??

Imagine that scene. I know this dude makes up a lot of shit - but after watching the Vice Documentary and other documentary footage of Liberian Civil War battles- I absolutely believe this insane Mad Max shit played out in real life.

Actually - you can find pictures online of Liberian child soldiers, dressed up like they’re going to Burning Man or some rave - with AK 47s and machetes in their hands - running wild through the streets of Monrovia.

It’s so nuts.

Can you imagine living in a war torn city like this?

You’re already afraid for your life. You’ve been hearing gunfire every fucking day for years. You’re used to it. You’ve acclimated as much as you can to life in never-ending war zone.

And then - you see THESE motherfuckers.

You see General Butt Naked. His only weapons are a swinging dick and machete.

You see him cut up a kid and drink the child’s blood. And pass the body around to child soldiers dressed up in crazy apocalyptic outifts. They cut some kids head off and then kick it around like a soccer ball. They’re drunk. They’re high. And they’re headed towards your house.

Do you hide? Run? Try and fight? Kill yourself to avoid the horror they’ll bring?

This sounds like a scene out of the Walking Dead.

Real life in the ‘90s in Monrovia was scarier than most horror movies. Real live Purge-type shit.

Time Traveling Karen would lose her mind if she saw this.

(Angry Karen) “Are you people SERIOUS??!

Fucking WHAATTT!?!

Oh... my GAWD. Who do you people think you are running around waving your guns and drinking kid’s blood??? How DARE you point that gun at me! Do you know who you’re talking to?

What kind of shit show Civil War Coup Attempt are you running??

Who’s your manager?? That guy with the machete swinging his dick around?? General Butt Naked??

Hey Mr. Butt Naked, I’ve got a bone to pick with you!

Get your hands off of me! I can’t believe you just cut my foot off, dick! That hurt!

Are you drinking my blood?? Seriously???

For reals seriously though -this whole notion of child soldiers. How tragic.

So many kids would fight in Liberia’s Civil Wars.

As many as twenty thousand child soldiers fought in the Liberian civil war, serving as spies, sentries, human minesweepers, and soldiers of all other types.

Many were forcibly conscripted, sometimes at gunpoint.

Others joined out of desperation, seeking food or physical protection.

Many of Blahyi’s “small soldiers,” as he called them, were as young as only NINE years old.

According to some accounts, Blahyi mashed cocaine into their food and showed them Jean-Claude Van Damme movies, trying to convince them that “war was just an act.”

He later said, “I tried to uproot the fear of death.”

Shoot those machine guns coked-up kiddos! This is all just a game! It’s all just (Albert Fish) “SHOWBIZ!” Just fun and games. Just pull that trigger - (Fish) “This is how they do it in HOLLYWOOD!”

In their intoxicated states, these boys would waltz into battle wearing flowing dresses, colorful wigs and carrying dainty purses looted from civilians.

They took ghoulish glee in displaying their trophies, doing shit like posting a victim's head on a table set in the middle on a Monrovia intersection.

And Blahyi committed even more ghoulish acts.

In his words, he describes how he selected random children to be sacrificed.

“Sometimes I would enter under the water where the children were playing. I would dive under the water, grab one, carry him under and break his neck. Sometimes I'd cause accidents. Sometimes I'd just slaughter them.” https://web.archive.org/web/20051029203402/http:// jetcityjimbo.com/awful_wonderful/50.shtml 18. 1993-1995: Between 1993 and 1995 - a series of peace treaties are signed in Benin, Ghana, and Nigeria to end this nightmare.

None of them stick.

There are just too many warring factions. The fighting and atrocities continue.

19. April 6, 1996: On April 6th, 1996, the Siege of Monrovia takes place.

An estimated 3,000 people are killed that day when five factions converge in an intense battle.

The crisis begins when the Council of State attempts to arrest Roosevelt Johnson, an ethnic Krahn [crown] and leader of the ULIMO-Johnson branch - yet ANOTHER FUCKING FACTION - on murder charges.

Johnson takes refuge in the military barracks of the former AFL.

The ULIMO-J, Liberian Peace Council - the LPC, and remnants of the AFL, all largely consisting of ethnic Krahn [crown] fighters, rally at the barracks and engage the combined forces of the NPFL and the ULIMO-Kromah branch.

Blahyi and his small soldiers are set loose on the city.

First he goes to Robert-sport for arms - a city a four hour drive up the Liberian coast.

There, General Butt Naked - did I mention he got that name because he fought naked? - picks up one rocket-propelled grenade, one M60 machine gun, two G3 machine guns, and one AK-47.

He has about sixty boys with him.

He decides to move on to some ECOMOG soldiers at the John F. Kennedy Hospital, the central government hospital in Liberia, and he and his boys find a dozen more weapons there.

From there, he brings his group to join forces with the fighting men of the Liberia Peace Council.

They still need more weapons, so Blahyi decides to hit up the Ghanian contingent guarding the airport.

One of the men on his side, Roosevelt Johnson, offers the commander of the Ghanian contingent 10,000 US dollars to turn over their arms.

The commander turns down the offer, and Blahyi responds by bringing out a POW, General Domingo, and orders his boys to cut the general into fifty pieces if they won’t give them weapons.

He doesn’t mention whether or not his men actually did it, but they apparently managed to take 72 weapons from the Ghanians.

General Butt Naked then continues causing chaos all across the city.

One bystander later reported witnessing Blahyi standing naked atop a truck during this battle - covered in blood - holding an assault rifle in one hand and a man’s severed dick in the other.

Had to get himself a little good luck charm!

In the ensuing days of chaos, he does all sorts of other evil shit.

He says at one point he even killed a baby. He grabbed some little baby less than a year old by its two legs and bashed it against a wall.

He said the baby’s brain and what Blahyi describes as “everything in the baby” was used to “cast the spirit of fear” on his enemies.

He thinks all this shit is pleasing his god and keeping him from getting killed in battle. At least that’s what he says. 20. 1996: Blayhi says it was shortly after the Siege of Monrovia that his conversion took place, sounding like a story straight out of the Bible itself.

He says he was about to fight in another battle, and that he was negotiating with the mother of a three-year-old girl to give him her daughter for sacrifice. She accepts the request for some reason - Blahyi says because of his “spiritual influence.”

GOD I hope a mom didn’t actually give him her three-year-old daughter to be sacrificed.

What a dark negotiation.

(Butt Naked) “How much for your daughter? I want to sacrifice her for protection in battle.”

(Mom) “Go fuck yourself you monster! Go to Hell!”

(Butt Naked) “I’ll give you a two hundred dollar Gap gift card and a case of Cherry Coke.”

(Mom) “She’s out back by the swing set. Good luck in your battle!”

Blahyi wrote that after a “negotiation” he took the little girl back to his soldiers and began his getting-ready-for-battle-sacrifice-ritual by opening up the girl’s back with a knife and literally ripping out her heart and cutting it into pieces.

The soldiers then proceed to eat the little girl’s heart and Blahyi commands his men to get him some water to wash his hands.

As he waits for them to return, he claims to have heard a voice behind him say, “My son, why are you enslaving yourself?”

According to him, he turns around to see a very bright white light and a ten-foot-tall man with clouds around his feet.

The mysterious man tells him again that he’s living life as a slave and says, “Repent and live, or refuse and die,” before he disappears.

And then the apparition disappears and during the battle that follows, for the first time, he’s afraid to die. He’s shaken by this new feeling of fear.

Some time later, Joshua says he was at his house on Camp Johnson Road when he got a knock at the door.

He opens it to see a casually-dressed man who says, “Jesus loves you, General.”

Apparently this guy is from the Soul Winning Evangelical Ministries, a group that was active in Liberia during the war. He persuades Joshua to attend a meeting.

A few days later, some missionaries come to bring him to this meeting.

On the way, as he’s crossing the road, who should show up but his old friend Nya-ghe-a-weh! His old god! The god that is such a big fan of his!

And this god tries to persuade him not to go to the meeting, saying he’s disobeying the gods of his fathers.

It’s then that Joshua says he discovers free will, and he goes to the meeting anyways - and he sees an angel standing by the door.

The meeting is presided over by Pastor John Kun Kun.

Once Pastor Kun Kun asks if anyone at the meeting wants to join their ministry, Joshua has another vision of an angelic person— the same figure he saw when he was alone by the river.

He listens to the figure, who tells him that he’s the protector of everything, but Joshua still isn’t fully on board until the figure asks him if he remembers how Nya-ghe-a-weh said not to eat kola nuts.

Joshua says he does, and the figure tells him that kola nuts are totally fine to eat or touch, proving that Nya-ghe-a-weh is a false god.

Haha! I thought we were done with the Kola Nuts! WAY too many Kola Nuts in this nonsense story. Again - really could’ve used an editor for his memoirs.

Finally, this vision says to Joshua, “Go and tell the world about the vision you have seen of Me, and tell them I truly exist.”

Joshua then jumps up and runs out of the house where this Christian meeting was taking place, and he runs down to a market, where he says he ate seventy Liberian dollars’ worth of kola nuts.

Nothing happened, and so he starts racing around singing, “If you think I’m crazy, I’m crazy for Jesus!”

Oh I think you’re crazy, Mr. Butt Naked. I think you are crazy for a lot more than Jesus you fucking maniacal psychopath.

I also don’t think any of this happened. I don’t believe this story any more than I believe that his old god told him he was that god’s hero.

21. August 17, 1996: As Joshua is becoming a Christian and kicking his nasty habit of eating children - the first Liberian Civil War winds to a close when the Abuja Accord Supplement is signed on August 17th, 1996.

The accord provides for an immediate cease-fire, disarmament of all combatants by the end of January 1997, reintegration, and nationwide elections scheduled for May 1997, with an elected government to be installed by June 15th, 1997.

The accord also provides for sanctions for any faction which does not comply with the terms of the peace accord; sanctions include travel restrictions, exclusion from the electoral process, and the establishment of a war crimes tribunal.

This accord FINALLY leads to a real cease-fire and elections.

22. July 19, 1997: On July 19th, 1997, after seven years of mayhem, Charles Taylor is elected president of Liberia, campaigning on the slogan “He killed my ma, he killed my pa, I’ll vote for him.”

Seriously.

The phrase was darkly ironic.

Taylor was claiming to be the only leader powerful enough to prevent another war.

Once in office, it’s just more of the same chaos.

Taylor uses the Liberian military to hound his enemies, including General Butt Naked.

Fearing for his safety, Blahyi flees to Ghana, where, for much of the next ten years, he lives in a refugee camp.

There - he learns to read and write, studies the Bible, and he delivers sermons in the camp and then later - throughout much of Africa.

23. 1999: In 1999, Liberia descends into Civil War AGAIN.

A new rebel group surfaces in Liberia. The Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy. And LURD’s only political goal is to force Charles Taylor out of office.

The group receives support from other exiled Liberian forces in other African countries, Europe and the United States, but especially from the government of neighboring Guinea [ ginn-ee ] when Taylor then invades Guinea [ ginn-ee ] in 2000.

Fighting between the LURD and Taylor’s forces will last until 2003.

24. Early 2002: In early 2002, LURD troops outmaneuver Taylor’s forces and end up only about twenty-seven miles from Monrovia.

Under leaders Conneh and Thomas Nimely, LURD troops mount successful raids that bypass government strongholds, and in May, they stage a bold attack on Arthington, less than twelve miles from Monrovia.

25. Early 2003: In early 2003, a second rebel group called the Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL), backed by the government of the Ivory Coast, emerges in the south to challenge the Taylor government as well.

So many fucking groups fighting. I’m so thankful I don’t live in the midst of continual, barbaric civil war and militia-violence led by warlords like General Butt Naked.

26. May 2003: By May of 2003, Taylor now only controls about one- third of Liberia.

Rebels are closing in on Monrovia from all sides.

27. July 2003: In July of 2003, LURD forces reach the outskirts of Monrovia and begin a siege of the capital.

In the subsequent shelling of the city, over one thousand civilians are killed and thousands more are made homeless.

28. August 11, 2003: On August 11th, 2003, President Charles Taylor resigns and flees to exile in Nigeria.

29. August 18, 2003: A week later, on August 18th, The Accra Comprehensive Peace Agreement announces the forming of the National Transition Government of Liberia with Gyude Bryant as president.

The second civil war is finally over after claiming around 300,000 more lives.

The agreement also scheduled Liberia’s first post-civil war national election for 2005.

30. 2005: In the 2005 election, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf becomes the twenty-fourth president of Liberia and the first woman to head an African nation.

31. 2007: In 2007, Butt Naked returns to Liberia and founds Journeys Against Violence, a rehabilitation program for young men who fought in the Civil Wars.

The J.A.V. rents a bright-yellow cinder-block house in a Monrovia suburb called Chocolate City.

It sounds so nice! I love chocolate!

No. You literally couldn’t pay me enough to live there or anywhere else in Monrovia.

Eighteen young men, all in their twenties or thirties, lives there, sharing three small bedrooms crammed with bunk beds.

Ernest Nelson, Blahyi’s half brother, is J.A.V.’s supervisor; Blahyi’s mother works as its cook. One of the program’s drivers is Blahyi’s cousin.

J.A.V. requires abstinence from drugs and alcohol, and enforces a regimen of daily prayer. On a sheet of paper taped to the wall of the common room are the Ten Commandments of the house. Stuff like, “No fighting”; “No food for lazy men.”

Is Blayhi a good dude now? I have my doubts. I think he’s just found a good way to make money. More on this later.

32. Early 2008: In early 2008, Blahyi confesses to a lot of the terrible shit he did when he testifies at the Liberian governments Truth and Reconciliation commission - formed to bring justice to victims of the first and second civil wars.

The proceedings were broadcast live, across the country, on radio and TV.

Blahyi was the first former warlord to testify.

At the beginning of the 132-minute hearing, they asked him a question: "How many victims were there?"

The footage from the hearing show Blahyi sitting there, dressed in white trousers, a white shirt and white shoes, pondering the question. How many had he killed?

He said, “If I were to calculate—if you’re talking about April 6th, or throughout the war, or every evil I have done, it should not be less than twenty thousand,” Blahyi said.

During the course of two hours, he described his role in the war. He said that he used human sacrifice and cannibalism to gain magical powers.

“I needed to make human sacrifices to appease the said deities, or the gods,” he said. “Every town I entered . . . they would give me the chance to do my human sacrifices, which included innocent children.”

The record of this hearing is kept on file in Liberia's national archive.

Here is some of what he said:

”'I recruited children who were nine or 10 years old.' Is this correct?

"Yes.

"'I planted violence into them. I explained to them that killing people was a game.' Is this correct?”

"Correct."

"'When I shot and wounded an enemy, I would rip open his back and eat his live heart.' Is this correct?"

"Let me be more precise…I also laid down the body and had my child soldiers cut the person to pieces, so that they wouldn't have any feelings for people."

"Are you the same Joshua Milton Blahyi they now call Blahyi the Evangelist?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Why did you decide, in light of this … past, to come to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission?"

"For my faith. I was told that I should tell the truth, and the truth will set me free.”

He then told the story of his conversion to Christianity, which took place shortly after the April 6th battle. The commissioners, apparently enthralled by Blahyi’s account, challenged few of his claims.

One of them commented, “You have a lot of good leadership qualities.”

Haha!

(Commissioner) “I like your story, dude! Not gonna lie - I didn’t really care for the parts about eating the kids - but other than that - other than some of the raping you did - and the torture and the coking up kids as young as nine to fight for you in battle - I really like what you’re all about! Under your monstrous, nightmare-from-Hell tough-guy exterior - I think there’s a really good dude in there. A solid leader! ” 33. 2009: In 2009, Liberia’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission issues a five-hundred-page report.

It called for the creation of a war-crimes court with the power to bring charges, and recommended the prosecution of a hundred and sixteen of the war’s “most notorious perpetrators,” including Prince Johnson.

The report suggests that forty-nine politicians who had supported rebel factions—including President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate—be banned from holding public office for thirty years.

Why her? Johnson Sirleaf admitted to providing ten thousand dollars to Charles Taylor early in the war.

Near the end of the report, the commission recommends pardoning thirty-eight people who, despite them having committed human-rights violations, those who “spoke truthfully before the Commission and expressed remorse for their prior actions.”

One of these pardons was recommended for General Butt Naked.

What the FUCK!?!

Nobel Peace Prize laureate who gave one shitty dude ten grand before he showed himself to be a REALLY shitty dude? Not fit to lead!

Guy who was the SHITTIEST of dudes who then found God? You’re super cool. You’re a GOOD leader. Keep up the great work!

34. 2011: In 2011, a documentary comes out called The Redemption of General Butt Naked.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1733679/ https://www.amazon.com/Redemption-General-Butt-Naked- Educational/dp/146311723X

After seeing this movie, Brenda Weber, a devout Christian from Walnut, Illinois, who managed a small pharmacy with her husband, contacted Blahyi on Facebook.

They then talked several times on the phone.

“I could just tell that he was genuine,” she said later. “I knew that he wasn’t the same person, that he was a totally different man.”

Shortly after, she founded a small nonprofit to support Blahyi’s work.

She provided most of the money to rent the house in Chocolate City, and to buy food, bunk beds, and supplies.

35. 2012: Beginning in 2012, Weber started sending Blahyi around eight hundred dollars a month.

Half is meant to cover food for his outreach program; the other half is for Blahyi.

Is she getting conned? Oh, I think she is. Big time.

Other American donors are ALSO now giving money that goes to Blahyi and his staff.

Weber’s money might not sound like a lot - but even just the four hundred dollars a month just for Blayhi and his family is a lot in Liberia. The average Liberian earns just thirty-eight dollars a month.

And she’d end up giving Blayhi a lot more than 800 a month.

After a year, Weber wiped out her family’s forty-thousand-dollar savings.

At one point, Weber took out a fifty-thousand-dollar line of credit and sold some of her Coach handbags at a garage sale to keep supporting Butt Naked.

“I know everything’s going to be fine,” she said later. “You can’t give and give like that and not get something in return.”

You can actually, Brenda. You can when you get conned.

36. April 26, 2012: April 26th, 2012. The Special Court for Sierra Leone finds Liberia's former president, Charles Taylor, guilty of aiding and abetting war crimes and crimes against humanity in the first-ever international judgment against a former head of state.

Presiding Judge Richard Lussick said Thursday the 64-year-old warlord-turned-president provided arms, ammunition, communications equipment and planning to rebels responsible for countless atrocities in the 1991-2002 Sierra Leone civil war.

Dude finally getting in lots of trouble - and not even for anything he did in Liberia.

Lussick called the support “sustained and significant.”

Taylor had pleaded not guilty to eleven counts, including murder, rape, terror and conscripting child soldiers.

Among the atrocities detailed was the beheading of civilians.

Victims' heads were often displayed at checkpoints.

On one occasion a man was killed, publicly disemboweled and his intestines stretched across a road to form another checkpoint.

FUUUUCK.

Taylor was the first former head of state to face judgment in an international court on war crimes charges since judges in Nuremberg convicted the admiral who led Nazi Germany for a brief period following Adolf Hitler's suicide.

Taylor was later sentenced to 50 years in prison.

72 years old, he’s still behind bars. In Britain. He’s incarcerated at HM Prison Frankland in County Durham, England.

And he’s still fucking with Liberia.

In January of 2017 it was found that he had been making phone calls from the prison to provide guidance to the National Patriotic Party and threaten some of his enemies

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/10/former-liberian- president-charles-taylor-british-prison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Charles_Taylor_(Liberian_politician)#Verdict

37. 2020: What about General Butt Naked? What’s he up to? An article in the New Yorker describes where Blahyi is now.

He preaches the Word of God and visits the families of his victims, seeking forgiveness.

He lives in New Georgia Estate, a suburb of Monrovia.

His house is mustard-colored and modest, with a flickering power supply and no running water.

And though he’s still running J.A.V., some of the people the reporter interviewed for the article seem to doubt that it’s as legit as everyone says it is.

They say Blahyi seems more concerned with the image than the residents’ actual problems.

One JAV resident of the house pulled the reporter aside and told him that Blahyi was misappropriating the program’s money for his own benefit.

Sometimes, the young man said, the residents of the house went without breakfast, or their meals consisted of plain rice with salt and pepper. When Western reporters arrive, “Blahyi and his staff say, ‘O.K., stand in front of this camera and tell the man, “We are Joshua Blahyi beneficiaries.”

And then he says, “But what have I benefitted?”

Is that guy telling the truth? I have no clue. But if I had to guess, I’d say he probably is.

Today, as far as we know, Blayhi is still preaching and - I do have to give him some credit here I guess - trying to apologize to his victims.

An article from March of this year reported that Blahyi urged the Liberian governments to take a more proactive role in punishing former warlords because otherwise the families and friends of the victims would come after them, creating a cycle of violence.

According to him, true and lasting freedom can only be actualized in Liberia if people are made to pay for their unlawful actions perpetrated against peaceful citizens.

He said, “I see the establishment of the war crime court as a support against violence. I am here to give me and my organization support for justice in this country. Many people may think that I am confused or crazy. But if this step is a step of confusion, then I will embrace it. I have a parable that I always project-If a man went out to steal and angry crowd is running behind him; if he had his wife and children home; running to his house is not the best place because the angry crowd will kill he and his children. The best thing is to give yourself so that the anger of the people you have hurt will not reach your children.”

And with that - maybe a little bit uplifting note? let’s hop out of this Timeline. https://frontpageafricaonline.com/amp/front-slider/liberia-former- rebel-leader-butt-naked-urges-former-warlords-to-embrace-war- crimes-court/ https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/03/14/general-butt- naked-the-repentant-warlord

PAUSE TIMESUCK TIMELINE OUTRO

IV. Possibilities For Justice:

What a crazy story.

So wild that Butt Naked is walking around free after admitting all that he did.

He has completely owned up to killing his fellow Liberians, many of them children.

Is there any chance that eventually Joshua Blahyi - and other warlords like him - will face any real punishment?

A.In Liberia:

Unfortunately, Liberia doesn’t even seem to be able to stick to the idea that former warlords shouldn’t be in politics, much less apprehended.

In 2011, Liberia’s Supreme Court ruled that the proposal to remove politicians involved in prior war crimes from office was unconstitutional.

Creating a war-crimes court in Liberia would require the approval of the legislature—in which Prince Johnson and other former warlords still serve—and would result in the prosecution of a sizable portion of the country’s rulers.

Soooo… it’s not gonna happen.

Many Liberians, now enjoying relative security compared to the civil war years, fear that such an overhaul could plunge the country back into chaos and conflict.

There’s peace but there is also so much poverty in Liberia that this peace is always fragile.

V. Child Soldiers: Where Are They Now?

What about Blahy’s former child soldiers - and other former Liberian child soldiers - what are they up to now? What does being a child soldier do to a meatsack brain that isn’t fully developed yet?

More than 38,000 children are estimated to have taken part in the Liberia’s wars as fighters, porters, ammunition carriers, cooks, and also… sex slaves.

What they saw and did still sticks with them today, when they’re somewhere between twenty-five and forty years old.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Liberia#Population

They are living with just about the worst memories one can have.

One study of the mental-health effects of the intertwined wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone found that the atrocities these child soldiers committed included "intentional hacking off of limbs, carving the initials of rebel factions into victims' skin, slaughtering pregnant women to bet on the gender of the unborn child, and use of young girls as human sacrifices. Numerous people have reported that they were forced to cut, cook, eat, and serve human flesh and internal organs, including those of their own parents and infants.”

Holy shit.

How does one EVER recover from some shit like that?

Countless numbers of children and teenagers were forced to watch the torture, rape, and brutal murders of their parents and siblings. In many cases, family members—including children—were forced to rape, murder, and mutilate each other.

During these acts, victims were forbidden to show any emotion, or, in many cases, were commanded to laugh. In some instances, people who shed tears in response to these atrocities were punished by being permanently blinded.

In the aftermath of the wars, the government and Western aid agencies created programs to help former child soldiers reenter society, but many have been unable to build normal lives - especially the girls and women whose soldier past is seen by sexist Liberian society as more of a social transgression.

While many male commanders negotiated government positions after the war, female combatants were largely excluded from this process.

Today many of the women who went to war are shunned and live in slums, scraping by for survival, often by prostituting themselves for a few dollars in terrible brothels like the one I described earlier.

Leena Kotilainen from the University of Turku in Finland, who is conducting a study on the reintegration of former girl soldiers, found that almost half of those she interviewed were involved in prostitution, most of them in ghettos throughout Monrovia. "Some of them are so destitute and disempowered that they don't believe they are human beings anymore," she says.

In a study on child soldiers in neighboring Sierra Leone, Theresa Betancourt, an associate professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, found that the psychological toll was greater on girls, who had significantly higher levels of depression and anxiety than boys did.

Violence against women was so endemic during the civil war that some surveys suggest that up to 90 percent of Liberia's girls and women were raped, even girls acting as soldiers.

In addition to their military duties, girls with the armed groups were raped and sexually enslaved by the fighters.

One girl who spoke with Human Rights Watch, fourteen at the time of her abduction, was raped by many fighters and later assigned to a warlord as his wife.

Girl fighters were collectively known as 'wives', whether attached to a particular soldier or not.

Some older girls were able to avoid sexual abuse, sometimes by capturing other girls and offering them up for sexual servitude.

Unreal. So crazy this shit was going on while I was having the time of my life in college. The world TRULY is not fair. Fuck books like the Secret and other bullshit about how you can just will good shit into your life.

The power of positive thinking is real. Hard work DOES increase your odds for success in life tremendously. But if you were stuck in Liberia during all this chaos as a child? You were just fucked.

So what psychological effects are many people in Liberia currently suffering from?

According to a paper published by the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University, causing children to fight in war is basically abusing a child in three different ways at once: corrupting them, terrorizing them, and isolating them.

The corruption of a child is a form of abuse, achieved by making the child engage in destructive and/or anti-social behavior - for example, encouraging him to engage in acts of killing, destruction, and sabotage.

As a consequence of corruption, the child becomes unable to engage in normal social experiences.

Another form of abuse is the terrorization of a child. The fear of running for their life, the feelings of hunger, thirst, and pain that children too often experience in armed conflict, also constitute forms of terrorization. Among military ranks, terrorization is often guised as a form of discipline.

Being subject to strict military discipline during childhood constitutes psychological abuse. Isolating a child from his/her normal social experience, or estranging him/her from normal family life and schooling also constitutes emotional abuse.

In the life of a child soldier, children constantly find themselves in a position that breaks down dichotomies between ‘civilian and combatant, victim and perpetrator, initiate and initiated, protected and protector’.

With these multiple, in between positions, child soldiers simultaneously bear multifaceted identities and develop the lack of a permanent, stable, and socially defined place.

Psychological consequences induced by these forms of abuse range from PSTD, major depression, pathological anxiety, and other forms of psychological distress. This makes child soldiers one of the most complex traumatized populations among children and adolescents.

It is VERY hard for them to reintegrate back into society after the fighting stops in any meaningful and positive way. Hard drug use is RAMPANT in Liberia today. Of course it is.

Anything to forget all these nightmares.

https://www.newsweek.com/2013/07/31/when-liberian-child-soldiers- grow-237780.html#:~:text=A%20big%20part%20of%20the,the%20futu re%20is%20still%20open. https://www.hrw.org/report/2004/02/02/how-fight-how-kill/child- soldiers-liberia#

VI.Recap:

Let’s wrap up all this insanity now.

General Butt Naked was a cannibal who preferred to sacrifice children and babies, because he believed that their death promised him the greatest amount of protection.

He went into battle naked, often only carrying a machete, because he believed that his sacrifices and fighting naked made him bulletproof -- and he was, in fact, NEVER hit by a single bullet.

He corrupt his small soldiers so badly, they’d do shit like make bets on whether a pregnant woman was carrying a boy or a girl, and then they’d slit open her belly to see who was right.

During the Liberian Civil War, reporters brought home photos of child soldiers wearing Halloween masks and women's wigs, eating human hearts and decorating streets intersections with bones.

Blahyi paid a big role in all this, and he’s never faced punishment for wat he did.

Few people in the world have ever even been accused of a similar number of murders as Blahyi.

And none of them have ever responded to the accusations against him in the same way he did. When he testified on Liberian national television, Blahyi has no problem admitting he did shit like eat kids.

Unsurprisingly, not everyone believes that Joshua Blahyi is truly the man of god he says he is today.

Nicholai Lidow, an independent scholar who wrote a doctoral dissertation at Stanford about Liberian rebel groups, says that Blahyi is “a brilliant self-promoter who translated his notoriety from the war into personal gain.”

He’s also clearly made a lot of stuff up to promote his story - including all that shit about being god’s hero.

Naw dude - god’s hero doesn’t put on purple clothes and sell kook aid at the grocery store.

Blahyi even told a few of his patrons that Steven Spielberg met him in Monrovia and offered him nine hundred thousand dollars for the rights to his life story - and that he had turned down the offer, because the director wanted to temper the religious aspects of his biography.

Later, a journalist fact checked this with Marvin Levy, Spielberg’s spokesman, and Levy staid, “Steven has never heard of it.”

Could he maybe be a good guy? A real redemption story? I doubt it, but maybe.

Blahyi does seem to using at least some of his resources to rehabilitate former child soldiers and help out.

But then again, he may be misappropriating a lot of those funds.

Personally, I think he’s just exploiting his former soldiers in a new way now.

I also think I might way a while before I ever visit Liberia. Parts of Monrovia do look beautiful - and I’m sure many live wonderful lives there - but after learning what we’ve learned today - might not add it to my travel bucket list.

Time for today’s Top Five Takeaways.

PAUSE TOP FIVE TAKEAWAYS INTRO

VII.Top Five Takeaways

1.Number One: Number one! Joshua Blahyi, AKA General Butt Naked, was just one of many warlords that terrorized Liberia during the First Liberian Civil War, which lasted from 1989 to 1997. With his army of cocaine-fueled child soldiers, he terrorized cities and towns, performing human sacrifices and eating human flesh and, of course, fighting naked, because he believed that it would make him immune to bullets.

Wha a world.

2. Number Two: Number two! Despite all the fucked up shit he’s done, Blahyi now claims to be a man of God. He’s been active in establishing a rehabilitation center and he gets money from Christian donors across the world. And it all might be a scam he’s running so he can keep getting recognized and keep making money.

3.Number Three: Number three! Warlords have existed long before Africa’s recent civil wars. You can bet that with meatsacks, whenever there’s a power vacuum, someone will be step up to fill it. By any means necessary. 4.Number Four: Number four! Blahyi and many other Liberian warlords will probably never face justice for the many thousands of people they killed and tortured. There simply isn’t the infrastructure for it in Liberia. And some of the people who would need to pass the laws to make that happen are former warlords themselves.

5.Number Five: Number five! New info! Mr. Butt Naked is far from the first man to put kids in his army.

During the Napoleonic Wars, so-called “powder monkeys,” boys as young as ten, helped arm cannons for the British Navy.

In 1863, Congress awarded the Medal of Honor to a thirteen-year- old Union soldier.

Kids have fought in battles for thousands of years.

It wasn’t until after the Second World War, that international norms began to really shift away from child soldiers.

By 1977, the Geneva Conventions prohibited recruiting anyone under the age of fifteen into an armed force.

Nevertheless, child soldiers continue to be used throughout the world. If you’re a warlord living inside the blood and chaos of a place like Liberia in the 90s - what the fuck do you care about Geneva Conventions?

Militia commanders continue to consider kids to be ideal fighters— cheap, nimble, and psychologically malleable.

PAUSE TOP FIVE TAKEAWAYS OUTRO

VIII. Final Announcements

A.Episode has been sucked!: General Butt Naked has been sucked!

This was one of the most fascinating topics we’ve covered all year for me.

Wow. Liberia - thank god it’s relatively calm now. What a crazy place it’s been.

B.Thank you to Timesuck Team:

Thank you to the Bad Magic Productions Team for all the help in making Timesuck! Queen of Bad Magic Lynze Cummins, Reverend Doctor Joe Paisley, the Script Keeper Zaq Flannary, Sophie “Fact Sorceress” Evans, Bit Elixir, Logan Keith - the Art Warlock running BadMagicMerch.com and the socials along with Liz Hernandez!

Thanks to all of those who’ve joined the Cult of the Curious private Facebook group - moving toward 25,000 members now who continue to make Timesuck a community. Praise Bojangles!

Thanks to Liz Hernandez and her All Seeing Eyes running the Cult of the Curious Facebook page.

And thanks to Beefsteak and the Mod Squad keeping our Discord Channel fun for the 8500 over there having a good time.

And thanks to all of your Space Lizards playing Timesuck Trivia on the app. Bodhi210 just won round five with 7700 points and he got a cool trophy, certificate, trivia champion tee shirt, and 50 merch gift certificate.

C.Next Episode Preview:

Next week, just in time for Christmas… another killer…

Awkward timing, I know.

Don’t blame me - blame the space lizards - they voted it in!

We’ll have a year end wrap up and a little inspiration the following week.

Next week we discuss the Craigslist Killer.

His real name was Phillip Markoff. And Phillip liked the Internet. Maybe a little too much.

On the surface, Phillip was a nice enough guy, a second-year med school student with a fiancée named Megan, a good family, and a bright future ahead of him. The six-foot-three straight A student— who’d finished undergrad in only three years— seemed like a decently well-adjusted, intelligent guy.

But his Internet browsing history would tell a very different story.

Behind the scenes, without Megan or his family knowing, Phillip was leading a secret life. He had an addiction to poker and gambling. He uploaded profiles to sexual fetish websites.

And he was using Craigslist to lure women working as sex workers into hotel rooms. He would rob two of these women and kill a third before authorities caught onto him and bring his secret life out into the open.

Calling him the Craigslist Killer - while a catchy moniker - might not be that accurate. Makes him sound like a serial killer and he wasn’t a serial killer.

We use his story to also dive into some of the other people who’ve perpetrated a relatively new genre of crime— “internet homicides.”

Just how unsafe is the internet? It seems like every year the old rules about keeping safe— like don’t give our your personal information, don’t get into a stranger’s car— go a little further out of the window. Not getting into someone’s car just isn’t as relevant in the age of Uber. Not meeting up with a stranger would mean that Tinder’s entire business model would flop.

Does this new technology make life more convenient? For sure. Does it also open us up to people who might not have the best intentions for us? Also true.

The story of Phillip Markoff’s life and misdeeds, internet homicide, and more next week on Timesuck.

D.Segue to Timesucker Updates: And now let’s head on over to this week’s Timesucker Updates!

PAUSE TIMESUCKER UPDATES INTRO

IX.Timesucker Updates

1. Let’s start off today with some good news from a marvelous meatsack working towards ending the current pandemic, Courtnie Kulas [Coo-liss]. Courtnie writes:

Hail master of all of Suckingdom!

Don’t know if this is the right place, but I just wanted to give a quick COVID update.

It is the right place, Courtnie! Thanks for sending your update to [email protected]

Courtnie continues: I work at a facility called Catalent in Indiana.

We mainly produce injectable medicines such as vaccines and various other drugs that would be injected directly into the patient via a syringe, or given intravenously. On top of all of that, we are also the only producer of one of the major COVID vaccines. It is so close to being released to the public, and the whole facility got put into a bunch of overtime so we can get this medicine out to all the meatsacks that need it.

I love my job because it allows me to work on something that actually helps people when they need it the most, and right now, the world reaaaaallly needs this.

Sending out all the good vibes, hope that I can get some in return, your fellow meatsack, Courtnie.

P.S, If this by some miracle makes it to the show, can you give a shout out to my boyfriend Seth? We don't see each other during the week as we both work different shifts, but we both listen to Timesuck whenever we can.

Seth, I love you more than anything. Also, if this does make it to the show, I know my name looks simple, and it kinda is, but I'm German and Polish, so its pronounced Cooliss, the iss is like kiss or hiss.

Thanks, love the show keep doing what you're doing.

Thank you, Courtnie!

You keep doing what YOU are doing. Thanks for the overtime. And it sounds like you’re a lucky man, Seth! Courtnie sounds fantastic.

Looking forward to having that vaccine role out soon. I’m sure we’ll be taking about anti-vaxxers again when many, undoubtably, will refuse to take it.

Oh - and everyone - please don’t write the word “Polish” in your messages. I set something up on my computer to have any message with that word go straight to Junk Mail.

You get it.

2. Now for some interesting thoughts on religion. An update to something I said on last week’s Dark Ages Suck, from Top Shelf Sack and Cool Ass Pastor Mike Moffitt. Mike writes:

Hey, since I know you have nothing better to do than to read my emails and think about how Tacoma is your favorite city of all time, and Timesuck makes me think about things like how Anton LaVey privately believed in God, and the nature of prophetic revelation, I wanted to add a quick thought to the question you asked on the Dark Ages suck: what if all of the ancient proclaimers of God‘s revelation were no different than modern cult leaders we so enjoy mocking and marveling at?

I learned a lot of this from teaching world religions for 11 years. A couple quick guidelines for this question.

1) When discussing world religions, always avoid the word always. Never say never. You get it: Avoid superlatives.

The reason is that there are just too many nuances and subtleties amongst world religions and philosophies to be able to sweep them all under one category. Could anyone with intellectual integrity actually place Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, etc. in the same category as David Koresh or the Alamos?

But comparing them is the right first step, because:

2) A tree is known by its fruit. OK, I show my bias on this one since that’s a quote from Jesus. But I have had students try to compare Mohammed to Jesus on the basis that they were both “founders” of new religions. Your excellent question about the criteria by which we judge such founders (or cult leaders, who saw themselves as doing the same) is basically doing the same. Consider:

- the human desire for power, - the human desire for wealth, - the human desire for fame, - the human desire for legacy.

Then weigh any religious leader, founder, or even cult leader against these criteria. How much do these human tendencies guide that founder? Your cult leaders? All guided 100% by them. But can we say the same for “all” the other religious trailblazers in history?

Again, my bias is that Jesus exemplified true witness to God because he was guided by none of those potentially destructive human tendencies. Check out his bio (aka the Gospels.).

I could be wrong but would love the dialogue. (By the way, the Buddha, one might suggest, is in the same category as Jesus on these criteria, but he’s different in that he didn’t bear witness to any sort of god or gods.)

So in the dark ages suck I think what you identified was the corruption of the church in the dark ages, and not the corruption of Jesus. The irony in suggesting Jesus might be no different from any corrupt religious charlatan is the fact that the only reason we can identify the Church’s corruption is by observing how far it strays from the character of God as revealed by Jesus himself.

Okay, I’m done. Annie Oakley warmed my heart. The Dark Ages cooled it right off again. “Shit Moats” had me laughing out loud; great name for a punk band.

Peace, Pastor Mike University Place, WA

Thank you for your thoughts, Mike! They are, as always, excellent.

You’ve laid out some great comparative criteria. I wish we had more info about Jesus and Muhammed then, primarily, the Gospels and the Koran, to make comparisons with.

I wish we had Dateline exposés on them, and Vice documentaries, and Netflix docu-series, and numerous biographies and interviews of them on to watch on Youtube.

It would make a comparison so much easier, right?

Did Jesus care about power, fame, wealth, and legacy? Not according to the gospels. But how much do the gospels really encapsulate all the years of the life he led?

I wish I knew.

I admire your faith, Pastor Mike. If it continues to give you peace and happiness - and make you the good, caring dude you’ve seemed to be when I’ve met you - I hope you always keep it!

Thank you for giving us all more to think about and consider.

3. Now for a funny story that the Dark Ages Suck made Super Sucker John Carney think about. John writes:

Suckmaster Flex.

The Middle Age's Suck reminded me of one our best family stories.

First off, this story could have been sent to Is We Dumb, but since it is about my in-laws Timesuck was a safer option. It could also have been sent to the Secret Suck for the immigration challenge.

My wife's family escaped from Vietnam in the late 70s. I shit you not that their boat was attacked by pirates. That is another story for another time.

Maybe cultural differences played a part in this story that we refer to as "Breakfast Soup".... My wife's parents don't get out much.

For our wedding they came out to visit and stayed at a local hotel near our home. They came from Arizona to California with my wife's sister and her husband.

In the morning my sister in law gets a phone call from her mom as she was enjoying the complementary breakfast at the hotel. There was an urgent tone in her voice. She said, "Quick! Come downstairs before it's all gone! They have breakfast soup! It's kinda like clam chowder but with little pieces of meat in it." My sister in law, still half asleep thought that it was strange to have such a thing at a breakfast bar.

As a dutiful daughter she got dressed and went downstairs. When she got there she saw that her parents had consumed several bowls of gravy and were enjoying another. Yes you read right, gravy, you know as in biscuits and gravy, but without the biscuits.

I could only imagine what the staff thought at the end of breakfast to see an empty gravy trough and a full basket of biscuits.

This story makes my wife and I laugh every time we hear the words "breakfast soup". Hail Nimrod. Keep on Suckin. Don't change a thing. 3 out of 5 stars. Space Lizard John Carney Yes ...Carney as in circus folk...at least I'm not Polish.

Haha! I love the picture you paint so much, John. Hilarious. They were just down there in the lobby, eating bowls of gravy for breakfast. Breakfast soup! Medieval peasants would’ve been overjoyed to eat that sweet gravy.

Sounds a bit heavy for me. I like biscuits of gravy for sure. But just a bowl of sausage gravy! Don’t think I’d get a lot done that day.

4. Now for some Timesuck Trivia advice from Super Sucking Trivia Wizard Bodhi. Bodhi writes:

Hey guys,

Space Lizard Bodhi here, wanted to drop Dan and Joe some pro- skills tips on how to get awesome trivia scores without needing to cheat.

I had been doing pretty well in the scoring when trivia began but started getting really serious about half way through October.

Things started getting close so i figured i needed to reevaluate my tactics which up until that point weren’t really anything.

I listen to the suck at work so on Mondays I would usually just listen to the episode and take the quiz but being at work my hands were usually wet and i wasn’t wearing my glasses. So i came up with a better way of doing things.... proskills time. I listen to both of the trivia episodes on Mondays like usual but i don’t worry about the trivia, when i get home i will usually listen to one of the episodes again on my computer with the show notes up so i'm reading along to reinforce the info in my head but now i can skip the ads, the jokes, and the tangents because i've already heard them and wont get distracted with the misdirects.

As soon as the episode is done i take the quiz on my phone, i make sure the phone is out of the case and flat on the table so it doesn’t wobble any and have a very certain hand position using both hands to select answers and press the next arrow. I'm a gamer so i have pretty fast reflexes in general and have always been able to read quickly so that just helps me more.

So thats how i do it, not really sure about anyone else's setup.

I’m not really writing this to be read on the podcast, just to share the info with you guys.

I'm also an Admin for Bojangles Pets so we have decided that we are going to adopt the cowboy pigeon trophy as the groups mascot and am going to be setting up a poll in the group to decide its name. Thought you would get a kick outta that and Joe I wish you could have seen just how badly my fiancee was totally fan- girling out when she found out it was actually Joe Paisley she was playing Call of Duty with last night.

I’ve never seen here lose her shit like that, it was so hilarious. Any ways, we love you guys keep up the work on all the podcast and we will continue to spread the suck. keep on sucking, Bodhi p.s. We are Dan has totally become a thing now

Thanks, Bodhi! HOLY SHIT, man. That is DEDICATION. You need to get on Jeopardy.

That’s awesome about Bojangles Pets. Hope that Cowboy Pigeon gets a sweet name. Terry Five Bucks, maybe?

And that Dan facebook profile pic is hilariously culty. So fucking weird. I love how ridiculous it is. You all are hilarious. And congrats on winning, Bodhi!

5. Now some wackadoodle madness and inspiration from Survivor Sucker Ashley Dixon. Ashley writes:

Firstly, I am so very sorry.

I was recently at a bar while visiting Savannah, GA and sat next to (as close as covid would let the bar sit us) a stranger.

He started talking to his friends about insectoids and reptilian people. I laughed a bit and asked him if he listened to Timesuck.

He said that he hadn't than I went on about how awesome this podcast was and how the HILARIOUS host talks about the lizard people that supposedly rule the world. This is where my encounter went awry.

He started to tell me how his doctors thought that he had moderate schizophrenia but now he knew the truth. He didn't need to be on the meds these people were giving him because he was really part lizard. It was then I turned to my boyfriend and eyed a "HELP ME!"

The strange lizard person asked me about the podcast again and I told him yes you had the name correct and he said he would check it out. That is where my apology comes in. You are probably going to get an angry email and a very damning review on which ever platform he listens to his podcasts on. Again, super duper sorry.

Secondly, I am new to the suck and I am listening to the back log to catch up. I hope I never do, because I hope this awesomeness keeps going. I recently listened to 'Triumph Over Unbelievable Tragedy' and it hit a cord. Three years ago I was diagnosed with lung cancer despite the fact that I have never smoked a day in my life.

I am the only person in my large family that doesn't smoke and I GET LUNG CANCER!

Life dealt me a shitty hand but it turned everything around for me. I took a long hard look at my life and in the middle of the physical and financial tribulations I turned my whole life around. I left an abusive relationship, published a book, and found a strength I never knew I had.

I'm three years away from cancer and still struggling with the after effects, you're done with cancer but it's not done with you.

I lost a job I love because I couldn't physically do the work anymore, had to drop out of college due to the reduced income, and dealing with physical problems. I did start a Gofundme at one point but had to delete it because I don't have social media to promote it.

But all the problems I am still struggling with aside I have found a life I greatly enjoy. I'm going back to school soon, so if you need research help this future history teachers got your back.

Found a man that loves me and shows it every day, and a job that appreciates the hard work I put in to it. Also, a couple awesome podcasts to listen to while I go about my day. CREEPER FOR LIFE!

What all these unnecessary words add up to is, Fuck cancer! and be glad each and every day you woke up.

Sorry for the long message but that one hit home. If you could please suck the healthcare system in this country and whether or not national healthcare would fix all our problems. Hail Nimrod! Thank you for all the fun! ps. What is the name of Joes band? I'm a little metal head and would love some new rock.

What a great message, Ashley! No apologies necessary. I hope your new lizard friend writes a hilariously negative review. that would amuse me greatly.

Congrats on kicking cancer’s ass and fighting to improve your life. How inspiring! So glad you’re in a good place. And thanks for the research offer. We’ve got good support at the moment - but never know when we’ll need more help.

Joe’s band is Moretta. Not for me but some people like it.

JK! Gosh Dang. You’ll love ‘em. And Big Pharma and the healthcare system is a Suck we have to do someday.

6. Now gonna end on some local love from a rural Northwest Meatsack like myself - Amanda Woods. Amanda writes:

Hello to the one with too many titles and nicknames, I've been slowly making my way through Timesuck, and all of Scared to Death.

I just wanted to say that it's really cool and honestly inspiring to listen to someone who is also from the area where I grew up. I'm from Baker, and hearing for the first time that you were from Riggins shocked me.

No one is from the middle-of-nowhere, all we have is guns and forest fires. Listening to someone pronounce things the same way I do has been way more fun than it should be. It's a small, inconsequential thing to be from the same general area, but it's a nudge of encouragement towards my own success during a time when every little bit of encouragement helps. Thank you for the inspiration and thank you for keeping my brain occupied while I work tedious overnights as an 'essential worker.' (I stock shelves, it's not exactly glamorous.) Most of all, thanks for sucking, 3/5, hail Lucifina, and shout out to the Queen.

Thank you, Amanda! From the metropolis of Baker City! Very similar culture to Riggins even if some in Riggins would consider you to be living in a big city. A whopping ten thousand people! I’ve driven through many times. SUPER cute town.

I’m glad you get why I talk like I do, and I’m happy you enjoy the connection.

Keep on stocking, Amanda and keep on sucking!

PAUSE TIMESUCKER UPDATES OUTRO

X.Goodbye!

A.Goodbye!:

More Bad Productions content coming the rest of the week.

Spooks with Scared to Death late Tuesday night.

Silliness with Is We Dumb Wednesday at Noon Pacific Time.

Please don’t recruit an army of coked-up child soldiers this week and pressure them eat other kids, it’s so much easier to just keep on sucking.