When Amy Carlson’s mummified body was found in April 2021, it looked like a blue skeleton. It was also in a sleeping bag wrapped in Christmas lights. Her followers in the Love Has Won cult were apparently still waiting for the Galactics, a group of dead luminaries led by Robin Williams, to come pick her up in their spaceship. Somehow, this never happened. Instead, the cops came.
On planet Earth this could all easily pass for insanity. But the Love Has Won crew thought Earth was for suckers, as we learn in the riveting, deeply troubling new HBO docuseries Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God. Of the many documentaries and docuseries out there exploring the creation, beliefs and actions of cults, this one cuts closest to the beating heart of darkness. Director Hannah Olson approaches her subjects with haunting objectivity, letting them babble on about their fervent conspirituality passions until you start to feel something like sympathy. These are truly lost souls, convinced that plying their leader with lethal amounts of booze, drugs, and colloidal silver (hence her blue tint) will help her redeem humanity from… being human, I suppose. Carlson essentially drank herself to death, while her disciples poured the drinks, or, as they called it, “hew medicine.”
At least that’s how it looks to us squares, hopelessly stuck in a 3D mode of thinking. The Love Has Won folks were all about 5D living. Walking out of the prison of illusion. Final ascension. More conspiracy theories than a QAnon convention. Psychic messages from a dead comedian. In her new book, Doppelganger, Naomi Klein describes an increasingly prevalent sort of “mirror world” of alternative facts and Twilight Zone cosmology. Love Has Won was a hall of such mirrors, a series of distorted reflections, all created in the image of their divine goddess.
The series deftly cuts back and forth from the emaciated shaman Carlson became to the young woman she once was, the manager of a McDonald’s in Dallas who tried ecstasy and apparently just kept on flying. The product of a broken home, Carlson was drawn to abusive men, with whom she had three children. She abandoned them all when she decided she was, in fact, God, and that her father in a past life was Donald Trump, and built a sort of surrogate family of her own, made up of people called Commander Buddha, Archeia Hope, and a series of Father Gods, men who shared Carlson’s bed and did her bidding, the last of whom, Jason Castillo, was a power-drunk, meth-head, and career criminal. Yes, Father God has an ankle monitor.
There’s a bit of prosperity gospel involved here; the Love Has Won folks had a big internet presence that they used to hawk candles, elixirs, and other mumbo jumbo. They stockpiled a sizable war chest, managed and ultimately pilfered by a treasurer called Archangel Michael (Miguel Lamboy, for those scoring at home). But the money was mostly used to buy stuff for the woman they call Mom (even now), who very much liked stuff (clothes, jewelry, a new go-kart). What Mom wants, Mom gets.
But unlike, say, the craven hucksters behind Twin Flames Universe, the subject of two recent docuseries, Love Has Won comes across as a bastion of blinkered true believers. This is what makes the series both sad and scary. Imagine how alienated from reality one must become to seek comfort and meaning in a faith built around the rantings of a perpetually hammered narcissist. Sure, there’s a sucker born every minute, as P.T. Barnum allegedly told us, and gullibility will never be scarce. But these suckers chose to abandon families and society for a psychedelic pipe dream. They also enabled a woman’s death, convinced that they were helping to save a humanity otherwise beyond repair (she died for our sins). It’s hard to see how anything but madness has won here.