Driving Miss Amy

Documentary offers life lesson about what not to do with a corpse

Of all the things that stuck with me after watching Hannah Olson’s three-part documentary series about the Amy “Mother God” Carlson cult was that that house had to have smelled like hell even before they brought the corpse into it.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The series is called Love Has Won, and it’s a compelling account of how seemingly intelligent people can delude themselves into believing the irrational. Love Has Won is also the name of the cult, which of course like all cults doesn’t believe it’s a cult.

Among the highlights from the series:

* Amy Carlson managed a McDonalds in Texas and, despite a handful of bad relationships, had a pretty normal life until she began communicating online with an old hippie artist/musician named Amerith WhiteEagle. At some point around 2007 she left her children with their grandmother, moved in with WhiteEagle, and began referring to herself as Mother God in a series of videos for the Galactic Federation of Light.

By the way, this Galactic Federation of Light is not to be confused with the clothing company of the same name founded in 2020, even though the clothing company’s website includes blog entries on how to open your crown chakra and an explanation of the Kybalion and the Seven Hermetic Principles. Nor should it be confused with the group of “almost 200 extraterrestrial…and interdimensional groups” that call themselves the Galactic Federation of Light according to a June 2017 article by Artemis Pax at Medium.com.

So many galactic federations of light, so little time.

* In 2014 Mother God decided she needed a younger and more virile Father God, so she left WhiteEagle, started her own New Age thing deal called Love Has Won, and went through a number of Father Gods until she settled on Jason Castillo, who apparently did not own any shirts and who just might have done some tweeking once or twice in his life.

* The Love Has Won people made a living by selling healing sessions, clothing, and a variety of snake oils including colloidal silver, which figures rather prominently into the story.

* The group lived together in a house in Crestone, Colorado and spent most of their time live-streaming their lives and making videos to spread the word about Mother God and her mission to save humanity from itself. Lots of New Age buzzwords here: energy, fifth dimension, illusion, spirit, reincarnation, $39.95 plus tax, and so on.

* Most of the footage from the documentary came from the cult itself, and it would seem that when they weren’t making videos about healing energy and Mother God being six billion years older than the universe itself, they were having one hell of a party. Amy Carlson and her followers seemed to have an endless supply of booze and weed, and at one point in the series one of the cultists says Mother God was often blotto by the end of the day.

* All that drinking took its toll on Amy Carlson’s health and demeanor. There are a number of scenes where she acts just like your typical drunken dipshit. She laughs obnoxiously at her own jokes, she yells over people, she flips off nonbelievers during a livestream, and she berates one of the cult members for cooking her the wrong supper. She wanted chicken parmesan but got meatballs. “I didn’t say meatballs” she screams. “I like meatballs. But I didn’t fucking say it!”

* The group as a whole is under the impression that colloidal silver is a cure-all despite all scientific evidence to the contrary. They tout its alleged benefits on a livestream and tackle the inconvenient fact that taking it turns your skin blue. “It doesn’t turn you skin blue,” they insist. So when Amy Carlson began showing signs of liver failure the group began giving her colloidal silver many times a day and if they noticed that her skin was turning blue—which any sane viewer with correctable vision certainly did—they sure didn’t admit it.

* The Love Has Won people believed they were receiving guidance from the Galactics, or spiritual ambassadors. They showed a poster they’d made with pictures of the 48 Galactics, including Robin Williams, John Lennon, Michael Jackson, Patsy Cline, Chris Farley, John Ritter, Jerry Lewis, and, I kid you not, Regis Philbin. These 48 spiritual ambassadors offered advice from the great beyond, except for Donald Trump and Carol Burnett, who have not yet gone to the great beyond so I’m not sure how they’re passing their guidance along. They might only be honorary Galactics. As one Reddit user commented, “I know methamphetamine artwork when I see it.”

* When it got to the point where Mother God could no longer walk and her weight was down to a little over a hundred pounds, the group claimed Robin Williams told them to take her to Hawaii. When they settled on Kauai in 2020, Amy Carlson declared herself the Hawaiian volcano goddess Pele. This angered the locals to the point that they drove the cult out of town and back to the mainland. Don’t be co-opting our superstitions, stranger.

* The cult seemed to know Amy Carlson was near death but couldn’t say so because death only happens to ordinary people. They decided she was ready for ascension to heaven and believed the Galactics were going to swing by and pick her up in a starship. Apparently, though, there wasn’t enough room for all the Galactics in a single starship, because there’s footage of the cult members panning the sky and identifying a whole squadron of them. I thought they looked a lot like clouds but what do I know.

* In any event, Mother God did not ascend anywhere. She died in Oregon of organ failure related to alcohol abuse, anorexia, and ingestion of colloidal silver. The cult then wrapped her in a sleeping bag, decorated the bag with Christmas lights, drove back to Colorado, put her in bed, and built a shrine around her. Some of the cult members kept notes on Mother God’s condition during this time. Some of the notes seemed to indicate they thought she was breathing again, but they might have just been seeing wavy smell lines. They’d check again the next day but like Generalissimo Francisco Franco she was still dead.* The body was there for several days before the county sheriff got word of it.

* If you do any Googling at all about Love Has Won, you’ll see they were big believers in all the Qanon bullshit. Filmmaker Hannah Olson told Variety she downplayed this in the documentary because she “didn’t want to platform those beliefs.” I can understand that. Also, you wouldn’t want to make a bunch of people who decorated a corpse with Christmas lights seem kookier than they were.

Anyway, those are only some of the highlights and I highly recommend watching the series. In the meantime, From the Desk of John M Donovan has scored an exclusive interview with one of the cult members who didn’t get any screen time in the documentary. Harmony Cosmic Lightsaber, formerly known as Amanda Fudknuckler, graciously consented to answer some of my questions, although she did take offense to my use of the word cult.

Harmony: Please don’t call us a cult. The word cult makes it sound icky, like we’re a bunch of gullible people seeking affirmation and acceptance from a leader who took advantage of our gullibility. We are simply a group of smart, well-adjusted people who believe that a McDonalds manager from Texas created the universe and gets spiritual advice from the late Robin Williams.

Dono: My mistake. I guess I’m curious as to why the creator of the universe would need spiritual advice from Robin Williams.

Harmony: All divine beings can learn from each other. For instance, once Mother God asked Robin what to do when one of her followers made an unreasonable demand. Robin told her to simply say “Yes, and?”

Dono: But that’s just the standard rule of improv comedy.

Harmony: Exactly.

Dono: Did you ever see a disconnect between Mother God’s stated mission to elevate all of humanity and the group’s tendency to stay at home getting drunk and stoned every night?

Harmony: Saving the world is hard work. We all need time to relax and have fun after committing so much of our spirit to saving mankind.

Dono: Did you ever think that volunteering at a soup kitchen or homeless shelter might be a good way to save, if not all of mankind, some of the individual members of it?

Harmony: I think they frown on tripping balls at a soup kitchen.

Dono: Good point. Your group was selling colloidal silver as a cure for Covid-19 at one point, and there was a moment in the documentary when one of your colleagues was on a livestream denying the fact that taking too much of it makes your skin turn blue.

Harmony: That’s just an old wives’ tale.

Dono: Well, clearly it isn’t, because you people gave Amy Carlson a buttload of colloidal silver and you could see she turned blue.

Harmony: She did not turn blue.

Dono: She did turn blue. She was bluer than Bluey, bluer than Smurfette, bluer than the Blue Man Group, bluer than Mike Freakin Bloomfield’s guitar work with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.

Harmony: I’m afraid we’ll just have to agree to disagree.

Dono: Well, you surely agree that if you love someone—even someone who claims to be the creator of the universe—it’s not cool to wrap their corpse in a sleeping bag and sit around staring at them for days on end.

Harmony: But the lights were so pretty.

That pretty much ended the interview. Is there a lesson in today’s newsletter? A moral? I think there is, and I think it boils down to this: Drugs can mess you up and mental health treatment needs to be a hell of lot more accessible and affordable in this country.

* Holy crap, this joke from the first season of SNL is almost 50 years old.