I didn’t set out to watch a glorified snuff film when I turned on Max’s recent documentary series Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God. The death viewers witness was that of Love Has Won founder Amy Carlson, who called herself “Mother God” and was the self-proclaimed physical incarnation of God here on Earth. You’d think it’s bad enough to watch a person’s death livestreamed by her “disciples.” But it was that much more disturbing given that back in 1997—my freshman year at Occidental College—I was good friends with and lived in the same dorm as one of Carlson’s devoted cult members.
In those days he went by Gabriel Gomez—a handsome, wicked-smart, and sensitive soul who introduced me to the writings of James Baldwin, effectively blowing my 18-year-old mind. His room was right above mine. We used to talk about art and politics. He liked the poems I’d write on his and everyone else’s dorm room whiteboards. These were the analog days before cellphones, when we’d have dorm movie nights with a stack of Blockbuster VHS rentals.
People grow and change as decades pass, but few change as much as my friend Gabriel. Now, he’s “Commander Buddha,” and he is featured heavily in Hannah Olson’s three-part series both in the interview and footage portions of the development and dissolution of the Love Has Won cult. He still looks like the boy I once had a mad crush on. But there’s an enormous gulf between the person I knew and the “Commander Buddha” he’s become.
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Sometime between 2007—after she allegedly abandoned her children—and 2014, Dallas-born Amy Carlson decided she was the incarnation of God on Earth and began her own religion, which she called Love Has Won. Carlson didn’t just believe she was “Mother God,” she also thought that she was an intergalactic being from the planet Lemeuria sent to Earth to save people from the evils of “3D” society. Hers was “five-dimensional” thinking, and this wisdom is what she sold through her various online presences.
Carlson weaponized the internet to target vulnerable individuals who felt isolated, lonely, misunderstood, as they struggled with grief, addiction, and trauma, as well as an inability to access basic health care. Carlson’s anti-medicine message claimed you could heal yourself, even from cancer and other man-made diseases, touting colloidal silver as a cure for many illnesses including COVID-19, as well as positive thinking. She leveraged live streams and online social networking groups as well as blogs into a promotional hub for herself as “Mother God,” savior of the world.
Followers literally bought into her narrative, sending over cash donations online or handing over their entire life savings in person when joining her group that roved around Colorado, Oregon, California, and other places. Her ethos involving a council of Galactics who pass on messages to her—a group that includes both Robin Williams and Donald Trump—is delusional at best and dangerous at worst. Love Has Won also believed that the Holocaust, 9/11, the Sandy Hook massacre, and other horrific events were all hoaxes, and a secret cabal of reptilian people run the world, along with Carlson’s claims to have been Marilyn Monroe, Jesus, Joan of Arc, Cleopatra.
Carlson made it imperative for all her disciples to livestream, film, and otherwise document everything that was going on around her. This is how The Cult of Mother God ends up showing her slow and painful death on camera through collected footage from all the various Love Has Won members, including my old friend Gabriel.
The first major physical consequence of Carlson’s rock-and-roll spirituality of booze, drugs, no food, and no sleep came soon enough when one day she was unable to walk, paralyzed from the waist down due to complications from cirrhosis of the liver and kidneys. By the third part of The Cult of Mother God we see her being carried around by her fourth “Father God,” Jason Castillo, as her skin turns more and more blue—a side effect of the copious and toxic levels of colloidal silver she had been taking for years.
We watch Carlson’s extreme physical decline on screen, footage taken by a variety of members but all showing the same thing: Amy Carlson was dying in front of their eyes. Instead of helping her, her followers filmed it and encouraged her “ascension.” I’m haunted by one particular livestream in which two young women members express extreme annoyance that she hasn’t “ascended” already. They chastise the “Galactics” for not having arrived yet to fulfill “Mom’s” prophecy. No empathy. Just impatience.
These two young women also admit on camera that “Mom” had not only asked to see her family, but she had also requested they take her to a hospital. They laughed off the pleas, dogmatically holding on to Carlson’s previous requests that she never be treated by “3D” doctors. They also ignored Carlson’s moments of clarity when she openly doubted all that she had claimed, broaching the possibility that none of this was real and she was, in fact, a fraud. By that point, Amy Carlson stopped being a person to them. She was only “Mother God.” And the cult itself had a life of its own to maintain at her expense—even if “Mom” herself seemed to no longer believe in her own system.
According to the documentary, Carlson’s paralysis set in around September 2020, and by early April 2021 she had wasted away to a skeletal figure with purple-tinged skin. But she was still breathing. Until she wasn’t. These moments were shown on screen with no hesitation, either in the footage of her followers or the director of The Cult of Mother God who includes Carlson’s death in detail.
We watch the members manipulating her dead body for days after she passed, claiming that she was somehow exempt from rigor mortis. They claim that she had started breathing again three days later, just like Jesus. We see them using an EMF monitor to claim she wasn’t actually dead at all, overlooking the fact that the level of colloidal silver in her body would set off the contraption by itself.
For three weeks, they drove around the country, crossing state lines with her corpse wrapped in a sleeping bag. When stopped by police, they would claim she was sleeping. Ultimately they fashion her corpse into a shrine in Colorado, where it was eventually discovered by Love Has Won’s first follower and financial adviser Miguel “The Archangel Michael” Lamboy, who called the cops. During this time according to The Cult of Mother God he cleared out all the Love Has Won bank accounts, all of which were only in his name.
In the weeks since I watched The Cult of Mother God, I’ve struggled to reconcile the thoughtful, empathetic Gabriel I knew with the “Commander Buddha” in The Cult of Mother God, who was present when Amy Carlson “ascended.” The eventual autopsy discussed in the film identified alcoholism, starvation (anorexia), and colloidal silver poisoning as contributing to what appeared to be a slow and painful demise.
Through a series of circumstantial legal loopholes none of Carlson’s followers were charged, even with reckless endangerment or manslaughter. Ultimately, there was no accountability for the people who enabled Carlson, pouring toxic silver down her throat until she died, refusing to provide medical treatment, ignoring her dying wishes.
As the film came to a close I waited for their apology, for an acknowledgement that what they did was wrong. I was waiting for someone to say that they should have helped her, that they feel remorse for letting her die so terribly. But that did not come. Carlson’s followers continue to be fully locked-in to the alternate reality she created for them and are even using the documentary as a new opportunity to recruit.
Love Has Won has been rebranded “5D Full Disclosure,” and my old friend is one of its new organizers. In fact, after The Cult of Mother God came out, Gomez reached out to me via Instagram and over the course of our catch-up chat asked if I’d interview him.
Gomez and I used to have in-depth discussions about politics back in college, where I was constantly amazed by the way he articulated social justice concepts like someone much older than his 18 years. But now, I’m often left confused and troubled by how he speaks and writes to me in jumbled conspiracy-laden lingo that is often impossible to follow.
My first question about Love Has Won was whether he really believes that clouds are cover for alien spaceships, with an immediate follow-up about how Donald Trump figures into the Love Has Won plan. Gomez replied, “Yes, the cloak themselves with clouds. It’s interdimensional.” He told me “what we would consider magic” is “just 5d tech” and referred to Donald Trump as a “time traveler” who is “working with Q the Queen.” He spoke lovingly of “mom”—Carlson—who “came down” with “galactic team” to “deconstruct the 3d matrix.” And Gomez told me later that Carlson “taught us all heart telepathy and how to feel our communication with her although she is on the other side.”
As a pop-culture nerd, all of this reads to me like the melding of Jordan Peele’s Nope, Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko, and Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige. While it’s concerning on a number of levels, what’s particularly scary is that Gomez and his colleagues are still selling bottles of colloidal silver on his Instagram marketed as a cure-all. Even though according to the autopsy results presented in The Cult of Mother God it’s the stuff that helped kill Amy Carlson and the Food and Drug Administration itself issued a warning to the group to stop marketing the tonic as a COVID cure.
But it’s not just the Love Has Won members who have escaped accountability for their inhumane actions as Carlson died in front of them. I believe that documentarian Hannah Olson shoulders a great deal of responsibility here, too, for sharing this story when cult followers are still fully devoted to Carlson’s narrative. Not just that, but Olson has dangerously sanitized their message, leaving out the massive foundation of antisemitism that runs through their Holocaust denial and claims that Hitler was “working for the light.”
How many more people will be hurt, physically, psychologically, financially or otherwise? How can it be that the only real pushback about Love Has Won and Carlson’s godly claims we see in this film was from Indigenous Hawaiians, after Carlson set up camp on Kauai and announced she was the incarnation of the deity Pele?
Documentaries about cults have been increasing in popularity over the years with their often salacious and mystifying themes, garnering millions of viewers and sparking extended conversations online as audiences become fascinated with the hows and whys of these kinds of indoctrinations.
But in the case of The Cult of Mother God, showing an actual death on screen without any proper warnings, this documentary has crossed the line from innocent engagement to participation in an act many may not be prepared to witness, to the point of even triggering those with death-related PTSD. It’s time to ask ourselves if we’ve reached a saturation point with cult documentaries, a tipping-over moment where films like this do more harm than good—especially when the cult members still wholly believe in their alternate reality.
