Churchhoney

I think it probably goes for most boys, too, actually. For one thing, MacArthur's well known for despising and casting away even any of the men in his seminary who have the audacity to question any of the stances he takes. He demands acolytes, not people who think. And I expect that the whole Covid thing and cultural changes like gay marriage and so on have them quite spooked about the danger that a whole generation -- male and female -- is ultimately turning against their most cherished beliefs -- which don't allow for any wiggle room. If a young guy goes to a non-conservative-Christian school he's likely to become acquainted with gay people and find out that he doesn't think they're immediately hellbound, for example.....And ditto for Jews, Muslims, atheists, Catholics, etc.....And they don't want that kind of tolerance in the heads of boys any more than they want it in the heads of girls. So while, yeah, misogyny remains rampant with them, I'm pretty sure this is more than just an attempt to control girls. It's an attempt to control a generation that they're terrified will slip away from them and destroy their power (not to mention their big incomes). When you look at opinion polls on social and cultural issues, the young as a group are tolerating and even embracing a lot of things that are absolute anathema to the MacArthur guys. And so their power structure depends on their keeping as many of the young generation as possible away from that shift, whichever sex they are, I believe. And since they've convinced themselves that their power structure is actually aligned completely with God himself, I'm sure they feel utterly justified and holy as all heck as they do whatever they can to defend it. Look at the Duggars, even. They don't educate boys any more than they educate girls. Boys have a bit more freedom and agency in some ways. But not when it comes to being encouraged to know things. or Learn things. That way apostasy lies.

Well, spread that amount of information and skills out over a 12-year period and you probably have as much education as MacArthur and company really want most kids to have.... .If they learn to do much more than that with their brains, they may start thinking thoughts that haven't been directly handed to them by TPTB. Preventing that is the main reason they're starting their "school," I expect. The fear of a younger generation in today's increasingly heathen world becoming less fearful and isolationist and more open-minded and curious scares the bejesus out of them. Raises the spectre of kids of their congregation actively questioning their misogyny, their homophobia, their anti-social-justice stances, their anti-psychology and anti-science leanings And if that happens, their congregation will dwindle more over time than it's already doing. And the Johnny Mac Gang's Bank Accounts Jesus would suffer from that! So gotta keep 'em locked up in a "school" where everybody's tightly indoctrinated by MacArthur devotees a few days a week and stuck at the dining room table with My Only Identity Is As a Christian-Wife Mommy the rest of the time. This doesn't have anything to do with education. It has everything to do with stifling critical thought, no matter what they pretend. Just a slightly more pretentious Southern Cal-tinged version of the Gothard-and-Duggar academy.

I still believe a lot of the early spouses mainly sought out Duggs to marry with the aim of being stars of some kind. Anna certainly thought she'd be the star of the cult (and whoever else it could influence) by marrying its golden boy. And Bin, Der and Jer -- the first three husbands -- all hoped to climb into some limelight. That was clear from the beginning with all of them. And why else would Lauren have married Josiah? I think at least some have largely given up their dreams by now, as reality has crashed into them -- Lauren and Der, notably. Bin I think may still be clinging to it a bit, and Anna may even have some delusional fantasies of a comeback onto a golden throne. But I don't believe Jer has given up the aspiration a bit. Prominence, fame and influence have been his dream at least since college soccer, and probably before, as he geared himself toward a pro sports career as a kid. And he has had a better return on it than any of the others, so with fewer discouraging results, his hope remains, I would bet. I doubt he has any thoughts at all about having to live like a regular non-famous person. He still wants to be and thinks he has a solid chance to be a "breakout star" of some kind, I imagine. And when you're a shallow, kinda ignorant putzing-arounder who doesn't really care about anything except the trappings of wealth and celebrity -- and doesn't even actually do anything that would make you famous, but just continue to ride on the coattails of your wife and her last name......well. He still thinks it is and is going to be all about him, so any celebrity-star=type trappings that come his way, he's going to grab. I just wonder how long he'll get enough perks to convince himself that his big ship will still come in. And whether he'll scale down his ambitions and be happy with just a job when he finally realizes that what he's got now is about as much as he's ever likely to get.

Here's how it looks to me -- and I do come from a situation where this kind of shit happened. If you're still in that situation by Jana's age, you've learned to simply rein in by yourself most of the passing desires you may have that your keepers would seriously disapprove of. So for the most part, you live like a combo of an underage fundie kid and a fundie grandmother, in slightly less youthful and less grandma-like clothes. And a lot of your being feels okay with it because you've repressed the desires and done it all to yourself to avoid warring with your parents (and, in the case of a Duggar, warring with God, too -- since God and your parents are tight). . Although you're not generally aware of having done it to yourself to keep out of trouble. You mostly repress that awareness too. Hence the overall impression Jana gives of being the dullest person on the planet. And the impression some people have of her being an angry old bitch. I expect she's a quietly angry bitch a lot because she made herself into the dullest person on the planet as her way of avoiding major conflict in the family. But she's not aware of any of that, either. We're organisms good at adapting to circumstances for survival's sake. She's kinda like a seriously bent tree, basically. At this point, it'll be just as well it none of this ever occurs to her. Because I've seen what happens when it occurs to somebody at age 80 or so that this is what their life has been. They aren't happier for the realization, really.

What a large blight upon the Earth they are. Bigger all the time.

They should do this. Cause they missed their chance on The Holly and the Ivy.

Yeah, I think that's exactly it. I know for a fact that some people do score a big upfront payment sometimes just because they have a big number of followers. But that's just one time. If the follwoers don't end up producing for a company, then you don't get that payment again. And they won't produce unless you work at it. And, as you say, JV doesn't shill, and shill effectively. And Jingle hasn't been good at working it, either, even when she's tried. She's made a ton of shilling blunders. So they're not getting what the long-term potential of those followers could produce.

I thnk what I -- we -- tend to overestimate is the effect that just your sheer numbers of followers can have on your earnings.....Although I think that for people who don't do much with it, it's more like numbers having a big effect on your earnings temporarily. Hardly anybody has followers numbering in the hundreds of thousands. And even fewer people have over a million, the way Jingle does. But if you do, then it seems companies will give you big bucks when they start working with you, just because your follower numbers mean it's possible they'll get a lot of exposure and sales from your followers. But if they don't see much return on what they're paying you, they probably won't go on paying you big bucks for multiple yars...... And something we don't know about the Vs is how far over 100,000 their earnings were that one year. It sounds like earnings "between 100,000 and 200,000" was a category they could pick from. So if you made $100,000.27, you're in that category. And I may be dead wrong about this, but I'm pretty sure she was talking about total income for a year -- and saying that social media was the biggest single source making up that income, not the only source of that income. And we also don't know whether they could or did sustain that for multiple years, especially after they were off tv and their two book advances. were history... .In future years, those two income sources were gone. And in future years, your social-media income might rise -- or dip considerably -- if the big income were an initial payment but investing big in you didn't pay off for a corporate partner..... With their multiple income streams, there are plenty of reasons to imagine that their income hasn't been steady from year to year, seems to me. So I do think that social media pays more than you think for little to no effort on your part -- if you have over a million followers or even in the mid to high hundred thousands, like Jer. But just because social media was the single biggest source of that stated one-year income, that doesn't mean that it provided the whole income. And it wouldn't have, given the year that it probably covered. They had tv and book income that year, too. Plus whatever Jer earns from his church job, and for the conferences and such as which he's been an invited speaker. I'm pretty sure a perk of Jer's being MacArthur's little darling is that he gets those multiple speaking gigs -- and gets some pay for them.

They've had the same business manager/agent? for a long time that I think they still have. But he/she has never been very good. That's the person who seems to have kept "helping" them hook up with businesses that were completely unsuitable for them. Time after time. With predictable results. Briefly, when things with the show were still going well, they had a really big-time manager because they'd signed with a really major agency -- I want to say it was CAA, but I'm not completely sure I'm remembering that right.....Some really major agency, at any rate. The agent they had there is the one who got them the multiple (well, two, at least....) book deal. I doubt they would have gotten the deal with such a significant publisher without him. But after the show went off the air, they seem either to have left -- or have been dropped by -- that agency.

It was. But the podcast had an affiliated youtube channel with the podcasts posted. Like this one -- (Jer, I don't think saying that your town is overrun by satanic Catholics constitutes "being kind like Christ," Not to mention a bunch of other things you've said (and preached and co-signed).)

Yeah, they'll definitely get followers. I guess this whole scramble they do with different "projects" always comes down to the same thing -- We have a TON of followers, compared to just about anybody else. How can we MONETIZE them? In the most passive-income way possible! These two ahve already found out that stores aren't passive income. You have to pack shit up and send it to the people who bought it. And if you don't, those people get pissed. Youtube's easier if you have low standards (as all the Duggars do). Just point the camera at yourself and blather or act the fool. And post it. They all love performing for the camera (even though they aren't a tv family). So here you've got REAL passive income. So I'm sure they'll make some money. But the followers who follow and make that passive money for them are certainly going to dwindle with time.

So....I'm guessing this would replace the youtube channel they already have....The one where they hold hope? And now they'll try to youtube more like Jill and Jessa? Can't say I hold much hope for that.

Well, I guess they need a new and different pursuit to fill up the newsletter. Whose working title should be "All the Stuff That's Fizzled (and Going to Fizzle)." Why does a megachurch outreach-staffer?/seminary lecturer/preacher want or need a side business in apparel, anyway? Who does that, unless it's somebody who's been designing clothes or graphics-for-clothes at home for years as a hobby to the acclaim of all their friends who beg to have stuff made for them? And that's certainly not these two.

i think just an annual Christmas letter would be more than sufficient.

I think a lot of people wanted something good for Jingle. And Jer seemed to be considerably better looking than Der, with all his jaw problems.....and not a child, like Bin..... So hope -- and the fact that nobody had yet seen a hundred pictures of him shoving fast food into his gaping maw -- increased Jer's attractiveness in the eys of many -- for a while....That's my guess anyway.

Yeah, I think so, too. From things I saw on the website a few years ago, I wondered whether it was one of those churches where most of the membership aged out, passed on and otherwise left....but where the congregation owns the building so some people are really determined to bring it back. At one point, they seemed to be renting out the building extensively to some local arts groups and such. And then they brought in Bin and some other young guys to preach virtual sermons for free or nearly free, and they started publicizing their growing online sermon collection a bit..... Maybe they've attracted a tiny bit of interest by their efforst and are trying now to see if they can make a go of the thing as a live church again or something.... I don't think the odds are very good for something like that. But I wonder whether they aren't trying that now....

They didn't list any services for a really long time. Just online recorded sermons. I got the impression that that might be partly because of the pandemic but likely also partly because the church was really struggling with membership numbers, money, or whatever..... Now, though, they have one live, on-site service a week, at 10:30 on Sunday morning. No other activities mentioned on the website at thie point, though, as far as I can tell.

Funny how masks "fall down" SO much more often when people who hate masks are wearing them.

I think that, luckily, it'd be about a million years before Jana (or any other Duggar that anybody in the public actually recognizes) did a thing like that...

And just think! They're all home-educating their kids!

They're still operating on automatic pilot as Teevee stars. Posting stuff for their adoring audience...... And I guess the audience deserves the attention, really, since Jer owes his free degree and his job to them and Jingle, Jill, Joy (a bit, anyway) and Jessa get influencer dollars solely because of their fan numbers, since none of them are worth a damn as actual influencers.

Well, I know there's some possibility that Bin has a good paying job somewhere.....But as far as we know, JB has provided Jessa with a lot more cash over the years....🙂 They sure do love 1955.

Well, I'd bet part of it is that they just don't really know anybody else or any other kind of life. They've been coached and shoved and endlessly harped at to see every other kind of life as terrible and dangerous and scary and ugly. Their parents, their church, their cult have all told them to shun everything that isn't their echo chamber. They don't read. They don't work for other people. They've never been to any kind of school. So to this day they've encountered absolutely no trustworthy references to tell them otherwise than the major major scare stories they got from JB, M and the Wisdom books. .... When they traveled, they traveled in a protected pack, and I have a feeling JB and M warned them every day of their travels to steer clear of all those strange people they've seen and pointed out the horrors of the foreign food they were encountering! And never get on a school bus! All those "other" people are going to hell! Plus, their bubble has been a very cushy place to live for many years now, too, with JB handing out cars and snowboarding and hunting trips. If it gets more financially wobbly over time, more of them may start wondering whether the outside world is so bad after all. And maybe some of them are even wondering now, post-trial. Jessa's one of the last who'd ever allow herself to wonder, I'd guess. She seems to be a person who's pretty uncomfortable with anything unfamiliar to her. And it seems she's quite dependent on Duggar Dollars. Anybody who's like that will just sing JB-and-M praises forever, probably.

I sure hope they're done having kids, since they clearly don't even have the energy to create a very good home -- and school!-- life for these four. ... But I expect I hope in vain.

Here's the shop owners' account of the storre, from his Yelp page -- No clue as to how he knows the Vuolos, but there are plenty of avenues, seems to me -- the church, the neighborhood, the fancy-shoe people that Jer knows. Etc. History Established in 2015. It all started as a Hobby of curating garments from the 90's and older, went from selling out of the trunk in high school, to selling at flea markets, in a pop up shop, and finally a store front. The owners and employees passion for high standards of individuality, quality, and reputation is what maintains this stores curation of inventory. Meet the Business Owner Business owner information Souren O. Business Owner Souren Ohanian started curating garments as early as 14 years old, his business ventures began when he sold his clothes straight out of his trunk in high school. Later, what started as a pop-up shop on Ventura has now matured into a 1,200 square foot store offering a selection of curated garments from all over the world. The store features a mix of American, European, and Japanese second-hand clothing, along with a selection of other local curators, and designers that focus on the up cycling aspects of sustainable clothing. https://www.yelp.com/biz/chance-vintage-studio-city#:~:text=Meet the Business Owner%3A Souren,his trunk in high school.