122. The Warlord (Kony 2012)

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This episode of Swindled may contain graphic descriptions or audio recordings of disturbing events which may not be suitable for all audiences.

Listener discretion is advised.

Only three days earlier, these same people were streaming out of the capital in their tens of thousands as the rebel forces neared the suburbs.

Despite the bloody cleanup on the streets, Uganda today has the best chance of instituting a stable government since independence.

This is a long, complicated story, so let's start here.

January 26, 1986, the day Yawari Museveni was sworn in as President of Uganda after a successful coup d'état sent the country's former leader, Tito Okelo, fleeing north to Sudan just six months after Okelo had staged a coup d'état of his own, the toppled President Milton of Bodi.

Museveni, a military officer and leader of the National Resistance Army, promised Ugandans a more stable government and a return to democracy.

The National Resistance Movement,

I think, is a clear-headed movement

with clear objectives and with good membership.

I think it makes a very big difference from the situation in which we were,

where the very people in power, where they themselves, encouraging evil instead of trying to combat evil.

I think this is a slightly different situation.

Not everyone was happy about the regime change, to put it mildly, especially the Acholi people in northern Uganda, and the feeling was mutual.

President Museveni blamed many of the country's problems on the Acholi, whom many considered less evolved than their southern compatriots.

The Acholi people had been resistant to authoritarianism and colonialism.

ever since the 19th century when the British attempted to quote, civilize them.

That resistance would continue.

Museveni's rise to power ended a six-year civil war, but started another one.

Numerous rebel groups began to emerge in opposition to the new government.

One of these was the Holy Spirit Movement, led by Alice Lackwana, a self-described spirit medium, who preached to her followers that they could overthrow Museveni's administration without firing a bullet.

Alice and her group would reportedly, quote, walk headlong into blazing gunfire, singing songs and holding stones they believed would turn into grenades.

Surprisingly, in 1987, the Holy Spirit Movement soldiers were mowed down by the Ugandan army 80 kilometers outside of the capital of Kampala as Alice Lekwana fled to Kenya.

Rising from the ashes of the Holy Spirit movement, however, was another prophet, a distant relative of Alice's actually, who pieced together his own rebel group that would develop into what would ultimately become known as the Lord's Resistance Army.

This self-anointed new liberator of the Acholi people was a former altar boy in his mid-twenties who could barely spell his own name, Joseph Kony.

But who needs literacy when you have magical powers?

Joseph Kony didn't need to read books because he could read minds.

It was rumored he could make himself invisible, control the weather, and cure disease.

Kony received premonitions from God via spirits who he said visited him in dreams.

Is Joseph Kony a god?

Is he a god?

Not god, not god, but he has a spirit.

How many spirits does he have?

Ah, three.

Three spirits.

Yes.

He's like a prophet.

He can see it.

He can see things before they happen.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

And are you suggesting that the spirit enters inside him and gives him knowledge?

Yeah.

Yeah.

He cannot be killed.

Yes.

It's impossible to kill Joseph Kony.

Yeah.

Kony's mission for the Lord's Resistance Army was to overthrow President Museveni and install a new government based on Christianity's Ten Commandments, all while violating every single one of them.

As his militia's resources and local support diminished, Kony began plundering the very people he claimed to be fighting for.

In the early 90s, he and his army retreated into the dense forest of northern Uganda and lived there, only to emerge without warning to instill terror in the villagers and take whatever they might need.

And what the Lord's Resistance Army typically needed or wanted was children.

They would raid the local schools and use a rope to tie students together in a single-file line, dozens at a time.

The kids would be led into the bush, forced to walk for miles, carrying an impossible load of loot the LRA had stolen from the burning village they had been forced to leave behind.

If the children refused or lagged, they usually received a swift machete between the eyes.

The even more unfortunate were carved into examples.

The LRA would use razor blades or knives to cut off noses, lips, or ears, and send the disfigured back home as a warning to anyone who dared to try.

Back at camp, the little boys were brainwashed, abused, and molded into soldiers.

They were handed guns they could barely lift and were forced to the front lines.

Sometimes this meant murdering their own mothers, raping their own sisters, or eating their own fathers.

The little girls abducted by the LRA were forced into sexual and domestic slavery.

The militia commanders would pick out their favorites and make them their wives, plural.

Any attempt to escape was punishable by a violent, sometimes torturous death at the hands of their loving husbands and his minions, a fate that many deemed preferable to the day-to-day LRA life.

When I was 14, I was given to a commander as his wife.

What was he like?

Was he good to you?

How was he to you?

He was bad.

When I didn't want to sleep with him, he'd beat me and he'd forced me to sleep with him.

It was the same for all the girls.

In response to the LRA's reign of terror, the Ugandan government rounded up the Acholi people and moved them into camps for their own safety.

An estimated 1.8 million people, or 90% of the entire Acholi population, were forced to live in one of these camps.

The living conditions were beyond squalid.

800 people shared a bathroom.

There was hardly any food.

No way to farm or support themselves.

Disease ran rampant.

The World Health Organization estimated that there were 1,000 excess deaths per week in the Acholi region during this time.

And yet for many, it still felt safer than sleeping at home.

In a day, we cannot fear, but in a night we can fear.

At night, we can fear those rebels.

Yes, or for meals, I fear to sleep at home.

Every night, a horde of children, later dubbed night commuters, would walk for miles to these camps or other public shelters to avoid being abducted by Joseph Kony and his army.

In some cases, this practice backfired.

As it turns out, a room full of children was an easy target for the Lord's Resistance Army and the Ugandan Army, who were actively committing many of the same crimes.

These unspeakable horrors continued for years, as Joseph Kony and the LRA wandered like nomads through the bush.

Clashes with the militaries hunting them would temporarily weaken the rebels, but they always regrouped.

And whether it was premonition or the practice of dressing up like a woman to blend in with his more than 50 wives, Kony would always slip away undetected to continue his war.

By 2006, the United Nations estimated that Kony's war had accounted for more than 10,000 murders and more than 60,000 abductions, including 30,000 children.

But after almost 20 years, not even Joseph Kony was sure what he was fighting for.

Overthrowing the Ugandan government was a pipe dream at this point.

The LRA was too small, too ill-equipped for that to be a realistic possibility.

In fact, Kony wasn't even in Uganda anymore.

He and his army started looting villages and poaching elephants in the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, and the Central African Republic, just trying to survive another day.

Maybe it was time to lay down the arms and walk out of the bush.

Southern Sudan's regional government is hosting peace talks between Uganda's government and representatives of elusive Ugandan rebels, the Lord's Resistance Army.

The UN say this is one of the world's most neglected humanitarian crises.

Peace talks between the LRA and Uganda's government began in the summer of 2006.

Joseph Kony showed his face in a public setting for the first time in years.

He denied being a terrorist.

He claimed all the evil things being said about him were government propaganda.

The LRA had never abducted, raped, or murdered innocent civilians.

Kony lied.

Because we are all brothers, we are all Christians.

We are all black.

We are all Africans.

That is why I'm also talking to you.

So I want you to know very well that we, the LRA we want peace and we agree for what you are going to say to us.

We agree of it.

We don't want to fight.

Kony said he wanted peace, but there was one little obstacle.

A year earlier, the recently established International Criminal Court in the Hague Netherlands had indicted Kony and four of his top commanders for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Kony demanded that these warrants be rescinded before he would sign any type of treaty.

The ICC refused.

So Kony abandoned the peace talks in 2008, and the Ugandan, Congolese, and Sudanese governments responded by planning a joint military operation backed by U.S.

intelligence and logistical support to search and destroy the LRA.

Operation Lightning Thunder took place on December 14, 2008.

It was a miserable failure.

Not only did the LRA survive the offensive, but the rebels ramped up their brutality, which culminated in a series of simultaneous heinous attacks in the Congo 10 days later on Christmas Eve.

The same tactics were used in each village.

They stripped and tied up their victims with cords and bicycle tubes, raped the women and girls, and then crushed their skulls with whatever blunt instrument they could find.

In two cases, the Human Rights Watch reports the LRA tried to murder three-year-old toddlers by twisting off their heads.

More than 860 innocent civilians were killed.

More than 160 children were abducted.

Entire villages were wiped out.

Those who survived did so by playing dead or hiding.

One man, a 72-year-old grandfather, told HRW researchers that he watched from a bush as the LRA systematically slaughtered 26 of his friends, family members, and neighbors, including his wife.

That night, I heard the LRA celebrating, the man remembered.

They ate the food the women had prepared and drank the beer.

Then they slept there among the bodies of those they had killed.

When the rebels finally left, that man was left alone to dig a mass grave.

A year later, the LRA celebrated the anniversary of the Christmas massacres by killing another 320 people and abducting 250 more.

The shade of a mango tree is home for these people for now.

They fled their village in southern Sudan after gangs of men with machetes went on a rampage.

Joseph Kony's Christian rebel group, the Lord's Resistance Army, or LRA, is being blamed for a series of brutal attacks.

Why was nobody stopping this affront to humanity?

Were we, as an international community, resigned just to look the other way and let this continue indefinitely?

We have the technology.

We have the resources.

We have the means.

However, according to Public Affairs Officer Dan Travis at the U.S.

Embassy in Uganda, neutralizing Joseph Kony was not as easy as it might have seemed.

As I said, in a jungle the size of France,

you know, that, um,

we we have interesting technology, but we don't have magic.

You know what I mean?

These things take a lot of coordinated work.

Magic might be a bit hyperbolic, but he's right.

Capturing Kony would require a special effort.

It was like looking for a needle in a haystack, as they say.

A haystack the size of France, in this case, and a nomadic needle with its own personal army of child soldiers and guns.

Unfortunately, magicians weren't stepping up to accept the challenge.

However, one musical theater kid and his surfer buddies from San Diego were willing to heed that call.

An African warlord becomes a viral sensation and in the process delivers lessons about fame, charity, and the ugly realities of the world to us all.

On this episode of Swindled.

They bribed government officials to find accounting for their violations of the AST law earlier they don't ethical pay to play against taxpayer dollars that were wasted.

They have tens of millions of dollars.

Support for Swindled comes from Simply Safe.

For the longest time, I thought home security meant an alarm going off after someone broke in.

But if the alarm is already blaring, it's too late.

The damage is done.

That's a reactive approach, and it leaves you with that awful feeling of violation even if the intruder runs away.

That's why I switched to Simply Safe.

They've completely changed the game with Active Guard outdoor protection designed to stop crime before it starts.

Their smart, AI-powered cameras don't just detect motion.

They can tell you when there's a person lurking on your property.

That instantly alerts Simply Safe's professional monitoring agents in real time.

And here's the game changer.

The agents can actually intervene while the the intruder is still outside.

Talk to them through two-way audio, hit them with a loud siren and spotlight, and call 911 if needed.

It's proactive security, and that's real security.

I trust SimplySafe because there are no long-term contracts, no hidden fees, and a 60-day money-back guarantee.

They've been named best home security systems by U.S.

News and World Report for five years in a row, and I can see why.

Get 50% off your new SimplySafe system at safe.com slash swindled.

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There's no safe like simply safe.

It has always been the dream of Paul and Cheryl Russell to raise a generation of children that love God with all of their hearts.

and use the arts to make a difference in the world.

And that dream is coming true with many CYT alumni entering the entertainment world.

Mariah Angelou, Mama Mia, Las Vegas.

Brian Crum, Next to Normal, on Broadway.

Jason Russell, filmmaker, Invisible Children.

Jason Russell was born to be a storyteller.

His parents, Paul and Cheryl, are the founders of San Diego's Christian Youth Theater.

an after-school program for kids that eventually became the largest theater arts training program in the U.S.

Jason grew up on stage there as a performer, appearing in at least 100 productions.

He also directed and choreographed dozens more.

That experience profoundly shaped who Jason became.

He even met his future wife Danica at CYT when they were both kids.

But when he got older, Jason Russell decided against joining the family business.

He went to film school at USC instead.

Jason had Hollywood aspirations and he was well on his way to achieving them, reportedly selling a musical to DreamWorks pictures and working with Disney.

Yet, the whole time, Jason couldn't shake the feeling that he could be doing something even more meaningful.

He kept thinking about Dan Elden, the young photojournalist who was beaten to death in Somalia in 1991.

He kept thinking about Africa.

Jason Russell had actually been to Africa once already, a few years earlier, as part of a Christian mission that spread the gospel through dramatic theater.

The whole experience had left a bad taste in his mouth, though.

All that old school proselytizing in the year of our Lord 2000.

Jason thought telling a story would be a more effective vehicle to inspire.

He had been reading about the Civil War in Darfur and the genocide that followed in 2003.

He felt compelled to do something.

So 24-year-old Jason Russell recruited two friends from San Diego, 21-year-old Bobby Bailey and 19-year-old Larry Poole, to travel to Sudan that spring to document it.

The trio raised $10,000 from family and friends, which they used to buy camera equipment and airfare, and off they went on on a life-changing adventure.

Larin Poole,

interview number one, Bobby and Bailey.

That's B-O-B-B-Y.

My name is Jason Russell, and so we are naive kids that haven't traveled a lot, and we are going to Sudan.

I really, I think it will be fun.

I do.

I'm not about fun as much as I am like deep, rich, meanie.

Once on the ground in Darfur, the boys found nothing but intense heat and boredom.

They recorded themselves vomiting, setting ant hills on fire, and chopping a snake in half before receiving word that refugees of the war had migrated south to Uganda.

The young filmmakers followed.

In one village, they met a woman named Jolie Ocott, who ran an organization that provided dance therapy to children in the war-torn region.

The boys say Jolie became their African mother and even volunteered to drive them to the city of Gulu, where they'd find exactly what they were looking for.

However, during that drive, the truck in front of them was ambushed by a group of men who seemingly appeared out of nowhere from the bush.

The two occupants of that truck were killed.

Fortunately, Jolie had turned the car around in time to escape danger.

Once in Gulu, Jason, Bobby, and Laren had so many questions.

Jolie explained the history of the Lord's Resistance Army and Joseph Coney, how they abduct kids and force them to become soldiers or sex slaves.

Jolie told them that she herself had been kidnapped when she was younger, but managed to get away.

And she said it was still happening.

There were places in the city that she could show them where the night commuters from surrounding villages came to sleep.

Needless to say, we found our story.

What they found was appalling.

Hundreds of children sleeping on top of each other, victims of a conflict much older than them.

The filmmakers were baffled that this situation wasn't household news outside of Uganda.

I really felt God was saying to me, Jason, you went on this experience for a reason, and I'm showing this to you because there is a story that I desire for you to tell, Russell told the San Diego Union Tribune.

Jason, Bobby, and Laren spent the next two months in Uganda.

They talked to everyone they could find who was willing, including Jacob Aceh, a 13-year-old boy who had witnessed the LRA slice his brother's throat.

Back in the States, the filmmakers spent the next year editing their trove of footage.

The result was a 55-minute documentary titled Invisible Children, Rough Cut, which, to quote the promo materials, exposes the effects of a 20-year-long war on the children of northern Uganda.

Jason and friends started hosting private screenings of their film in 2004.

In 2005, they started showing it at schools and churches and handing out free DVDs.

So we made this movie and we toured it throughout the world.

We go to high schools, colleges, engage millions of young people to get involved.

Invisible Children, the movie, garnered its fair share of publicity.

An estimated 5 million people saw it that year.

The filmmakers hoped it would be the catalyst that spurred people and lawmakers to end the crisis.

In our world, abducting children, cutting people's faces off, making children eat eat their friends, that just doesn't happen, Jason Russell told Time magazine.

We thought once people know about this, it's going to end in a year.

And he was right, at least in the sense that people were motivated after seeing the film.

Young people especially.

So many of these kids at the screenings would ask what they could do to help.

Who do they need to talk to?

Where do they send money?

Once again, the filmmakers were compelled to act.

There must be more they could do, something more organized.

What if we like raise money by making a t-shirt that says Africa is the new pink, Larry suggested?

You know, like Africa is so hot right now, or or something like that.

Anybody else?

Yeah, let's just start a non-profit.

Okay.

We did it because there's this guy.

His name's Joseph Kony.

He's a real bad guy.

He's actually the worst guy in the world right now, according to the International Criminal Court.

And we're trying to stop him from committing mass atrocities against children.

We're not talking about one child abducted.

We're not talking about 10,000 children.

We're talking about 30,000, 40, 50,000 children.

He's been doing it for 24 years.

We think it's time for it to stop and that's what Invisible Children is founded on, you know, is this war seeing it come to an end.

The mission of Invisible Children, a non-profit organization founded in 2006, is to increase awareness and hopefully in the barbaric practices of the Lord's Resistance Army and its leader, Joseph Kony.

In its early years, Invisible Children raised funds to rebuild schools in northern Uganda, pay for scholarships, and establish a village-to-village radio warning system.

At the same time, the organization continued to raise awareness among the Western youth by publishing videos on YouTube, which had recently risen to prominence, and by partnering with pop-punk and emo bands like Fallout Boy and Pierce the Veil.

Invisible Children also started organizing campaigns to inspire participation.

For instance, in 2006, they announced the Global Night Commute, where young people worldwide, in a show of solidarity, would simulate the Ugandan night commuters' struggle by walking through their own cities and sleeping in a park.

The Invisible Children co-founders promoted the campaign with a tongue-in-cheek song and dance.

We gotta do something, you guys.

What can we do to bring you away from this?

They bring a spot to like spectacle, something huge, big, flashy.

That's what we need to do.

Okay, you know, let's give them what they want.

Let's do what we always do:

dance.

We're on a mission for you, kinda, deep inside your mind.

It needs attention and a dance to make it sparkle and shine.

We gotta shake it up and break it up.

We'll let it warn without a gun.

We're not

water fun.

We need to congregate

The success of the Global Night Commute, which engaged 80,000 people in 100 cities, paved the way for future campaigns.

2007's Displace Me asked participants to build cardboard huts, subsist on water and crackers, and write letters to the government.

2009's Rescue Me campaign involved groups of teens marching to locations in their cities where they would wait to be rescued by a celebrity or public official.

The point is, we can have fun while we end genocide.

It's an adventure.

Invisible Children's most effective campaign, however, was lobbying the American government.

People in positions of power took notice and listened.

In 2010, bipartisan legislation called the Lord's Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act was introduced as a direct result of the efforts of Invisible Children and similar nonprofits.

The world's problems can seem overwhelming at times.

It is fashionable to blame conflict in Africa on poverty and other environmental factors, but sometimes just getting rid of one person does make a big difference.

President Obama signed the LRA Disarmament Bill into law on May 24th, 2010.

It called for increased comprehensive U.S.

efforts to help mitigate and eliminate the threat posed by the LRA to civilians and regional stability.

The three Invisible Children co-founders were on hand to witness the signing.

We have seen your reporting, your websites, your blogs, and your video postcards.

You have made the plight of the children visible to us all, Obama said in a statement.

That legislation led to a new U.S.-backed anti-CONI military mission, codenamed Operation Observant Compass.

In October 2011, Obama announced he was sending 100 American Green Berets to advise and assist the Ugandan army in tracking down the warlord.

The Americans would not be on the ground, but would provide intelligence, air, and logistics support.

Joseph Kony has successfully evaded capture for over two decades.

It remains to be seen what difference 100 American troops will make.

But if he is killed or captured, it will not only be a massive relief to the hundreds of thousands of victims, but also a great victory for both the Ugandan and American governments.

The initial results of Operation Observant Compass were encouraging.

The LRA's numbers were halved.

At least three of the militia's top commanders surrendered or were killed, including Kony's deputy.

But alas, Joseph Kony was nowhere to be found.

The small LRA platoons were spread across highly remote areas in three different countries, and they no longer used radios or cell phones.

Furthermore, there were rumors that the Ugandan army wasn't exactly motivated to find him.

A report in Foreign Policy magazine quoted a U.S.

official who claimed Ugandan soldiers often stopped short of ambushing Cony's army because they believed he had special powers.

There was also resentment in the ranks for having to take orders from U.S.

troops huddled together hundreds of miles away in air-conditioned offices while they were out in the bush swatting bugs.

So, like every preceding effort to catch Kony, Operation Observant Compass proved to be a failure.

Looks like we're running out of ideas, gentlemen.

Has anyone tried a TED talk?

I'm going to tell you how to murder someone.

And I promise you that you'll never be caught.

I'm listening.

My name is Jason Radical Russell.

I'm exactly who you think I am.

A middle-class kid from San Diego, California.

I like to surf and make movies.

I'm currently listening to Mumford and Sons and Lady Gaga.

And I'm a millennial.

Oh, God.

Never mind.

Actually, Jason Radical Russell did have one more idea to make Joseph Coney a household name.

It was another movie he directed and narrated.

It would be Invisible Children's 10th film, but this one was much more visually striking, especially at the time.

Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come, reads the initial sequence before cutting the footage of the birth of Jason's son, Gavin.

So the thing is, my son Gavin has never...

I've never really explained to him what I do he knows I work in Africa but he doesn't know what the war is about or who Joseph Kony is so I'm going to explain it to him for the first time for the next 30 minutes Jason Russell details the history of the LRA and Joseph Kony interspliced with footage from his trips to Africa and conversations with his now five-year-old son The film depicts the sharp contrast between the life Gavin Russell will be afforded versus the life of a child in northern Uganda for no other reason than where on earth they were born.

This has been going on for years.

If that happened one night in America, it'd be on the cover of Newsweek.

Russell also revisits the heartbreaking footage and story of Jacob Aceh, the Ugandan child the Invisible Children founders met on their initial trip to Africa.

Years before Gavin was born, the course of my life was changed entirely by another boy.

And who's this right here?

Jacob.

Jason says he made a promise to Jacob and everyone like him that he would do everything in his power to stop Joseph Coney and the LRA.

Everything in my heart told me to do something.

And so I made him a promise.

We are also gonna do

everything

that we can to stop them.

Do you hear my words?

You know what I mean?

Yes.

We are.

We're going to stop them.

It's obvious that Kony should be stopped.

The problem is 99% of the planet doesn't know who he is.

If they knew, Kony would have been stopped long ago.

The film ends with a call to action.

Make Joseph Kony famous.

Share the video.

Use the hashtags.

Spread the message to athletes, movie stars, politicians, and billionaires, and donate to the cause.

In exchange, supporters would receive a Kony action kit that contained two bracelets, a t-shirt, stickers, posters, etc.

And then on April 20th, 2012, they would cover the night, a mass awareness spreading campaign where volunteers would meet at sundown and blanket their towns and cities with Kony-related media.

And they wouldn't stop until justice was demanded on every street corner.

Start making Kony famous today, but all of these efforts will culminate on one day, April 20th, when we cover the night.

That video, simply titled Coney 2012, was published to YouTube on March 5th, 2012.

Not even Joseph Coney himself could have predicted what would happen next.

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Well, this next story is about the amazing effect of a simple click.

And tonight, nearly 10 million people know about the atrocities happening in a country in East Africa at a man named Joseph Kony.

Nearly 21 million people have watched it.

Seen nearly 40 million times.

It's a documentary that's taken viral to new levels.

Kony 2012 has gotten 50 million views on YouTube since Monday.

50 million and counted.

It's a stunning YouTube sensation, a true phenomenon.

The video details the alleged war crimes of Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda.

Joseph Kony.

Joseph Kony.

Joseph Kony.

African warlord Joseph Kony.

Now it's the campaign video that has swept the world thanks to the power of social media.

More than 70 million people have now seen Kony 2012.

100 million people viewed this film.

In less than a week, it's become the most viral video ever.

Also, make sure you tell us in the comments section how you plan to help out with this global crisis.

Within 24 hours of Kony 2012's release, the Invisible Children staff was popping champagne at its San Diego headquarters.

Expectations were high, but 1 million views in in less than a day was not something anyone had anticipated.

The organization's previous record for one of its videos was 80,000 views.

An extraordinary achievement became even more remarkable as the hours ticked by.

1 million views turned into 1 million views per minute at its peak.

Kony 2012 became the most viral video ever, surpassing Susan Boyle's famous Britons Got Talent video for the fastest ever to reach 100 million views.

Everybody was talking about it.

More than a million people left comments on YouTube, more than 11 million shares on Facebook.

A Pew research poll found that 58% of young adults aged 18 to 29 had heard about Cony 2012 within the first week.

That same research found that 66% of Twitter posts during that time period pertained to the anti-Cony campaign.

We wanted 500,000 views in the whole year of 2012.

We got 500,000 views in the first three hours.

It was online.

By the time we reached day seven, we had 120 million views around the world translated into every country in every language.

How did this happen?

Well, Invisible Children's Plan worked.

As instructed, viewers of the video flooded culture makers and policymakers with the link.

Many of them, including Rihanna, Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber, Emma Stone, Nikki Minaj, Bill Gates, and others, shared the link with messages of support.

Oprah was so moved that she donated $2 million.

Soldier Boy, apparently not a fan of boy soldiers, made a song.

The enthusiasm from supporters of the campaign to stop Kony was undeniable.

Millennials who had never previously donated to a non-profit changed their profile photos on social media and a show of support.

Some were getting Kony-related tattoos, unironically, which paired well with a finger mustache.

At the same time, the enthusiasm was practically immeasurable.

Invisible Children's website crashed due to traffic.

Its phone system overloaded.

Inboxes were flooded.

Our website wasn't built to maintain 35,000 concurrent viewers at one time.

So our website's crashing intermittently.

The only thing we could communicate through was Tumblr.

Invisible Children was also forced to shut down down its online shop.

There were only two people in the organization's fulfillment department, and there was a backlog of hundreds of thousands of orders for action kits.

The Cony 2012 campaign had literally sourced every blank red t-shirt in the country.

While interns and volunteers stayed behind in San Diego, drowning in the demand, Invisible Children's Public Face, Jason Russell, was crisscrossing the country, riding the wave of success.

By day three, I was in LA doing interview after interview after interview.

Took the red eye to New York, landed at five in the morning.

Cover of the New York Times, Above the Fold, Cony 2012 goes viral.

I'm on the Today Show, People Magazine, Reuters, on and on and on.

I was so excited.

Finally, someone was caring about these invisible children.

Yet, even Jason Radical Russell struggled to keep his head above water.

The days were long and began to blur together.

Interviews would start at 3 a.m.

and finish at 9 p.m.

But it was all worthwhile and relevant to Invisible Children's goal of spreading awareness about the atrocities taking place in Uganda.

However, at a certain point, Jason Russell realized that more often than not, instead of focusing on Kony, he was having to defend himself against a tsunami of criticism.

But the organization behind the campaign has come under fire over claims it lacks financial accountability and that it's oversimplified the story story of Kony and the conflict in northern Uganda.

So are we seeing a new form of social activism or is it all just a slick marketing campaign?

First off, no one disagreed that Joseph Kony was a bad person.

Evil, even.

That wasn't the issue.

The issue, as many described, was that the reason Joseph Kony was a bad person was rather complicated.

You can't just condense such a complex story into 30 minutes, add some spooky music, archival footage, and narration, and then ask people to donate to your Patreon, I mean, website, and act like the world's problems are solved.

It's not that black and white.

Invisible Children dismiss that criticism as myopic.

In fact, the organization took it as a compliment.

Their films were made for high school kids, not foreign policy experts.

Simplification.

was the whole point.

It definitely oversimplifies the issue.

This video is not the answer.

You know, this is not the answer.

It's just the gateway into the conversation.

And we made it quick and we made it oversimplified on purpose.

Steve Jobs

said,

simplicity is the highest form of sophistication.

And it's really hard to make something simple.

And we worked really hard to make it simple.

So we're proud that it's simple.

We like that.

Okay, Jason.

If you like that one, try the rest of these criticisms on Persize.

Many of those same foreign policy experts and journalists whose opinion Invisible Children summarily dismissed argued that the Kony 2012 video manipulated or exaggerated basic facts.

For starters, Joseph Kony and the LRA hadn't operated in Uganda in years.

His militia had been radically diminished, and those young night commuters like Jacob Aceh were practically non-existent.

In fact, most of the kids featured in the video were adults now, including Jacob, who in 2012 was studying to become a lawyer.

To call the campaign a misrepresentation is an understatement, wrote Ugandan journalist Angelo Izama.

The situation in Uganda had vastly improved.

The issues and terror described in the Cony 2012 video were from a bygone era.

The LRA was far down the list of the country's most pressing issues.

Unemployment, child prostitution, AIDS, a mysterious neurological disease that affected many children in war zones called Nodding Syndrome, even other warlords.

It would make more sense to focus on those.

Nice message, one Ugandan military official said about the viral video to CNN.

15 years too late.

Also, and this is petty, apparently the invisible children guys weren't even pronouncing the personification of the evil's name correctly.

Ugandans pronounce it Joseph Coyne, not Kony, as evidenced in this video response to the viral phenomenon by the country's prime minister, Amama Mbabazi, whose name I definitely did not just butcher.

The presentation in that video

gives a picture

that is not complete.

When you look at it and you listen to what they are saying, it's as if coin is still in Uganda, as if Uganda is still at conflict.

And yet, of course, we all know this is not true.

Speaking of the Ugandan government, that was another point of contention for critics of the video.

There's no mention of the Ugandan government's role in all of this.

Their strategy of forced displacement for the Acholi, the incompetent counter-insurgency, the corrupt leaders who perpetuated the war to keep military costs high and their pockets fat.

As Jane Bussman mentioned in her opinion piece for The Guardian, half of the country's budget came from foreign aid, and a sizable chunk of that was earmarked for hunting the LRA.

Western charities essentially enabled leadership to keep 2 million Ugandans in semi-starvation camps at gunpoint while they, quote, looked for Kony.

We need an enemy.

We need to know who the worst is.

And the world has already agreed we didn't make it up.

The International Criminal Court has said the first is Joseph Kony because he's the most perverse in the world.

He's just the most perverse.

No one makes...

anyone else

takes children, makes them kill their parents, and eat their parents.

Okay.

There was no incentive to catch the boogeyman.

Even worse, the Ugandan military was guilty of the same atrocities.

President Yauri Museveni came into power through the use of child soldiers.

And by the way, he's still the president almost 40 years later, despite allegedly rigging elections and murdering dissidents.

And this is who Invisible Children was partnering with?

What do you have to say for yourselves?

We do not defend any of the human rights abuses perpetrated by the Ugandan government or the Ugandan army, a statement read.

None of the money donated through Invisible Children ever goes to the government of Uganda.

Yet the only feasible and proper way to stop Kony and protect the civilians he targets is to coordinate efforts with regional governments.

Great.

Let's talk about those feasible and proper ways to stop Kony.

Invisible Children's main goal was to make Kony famous enough to convince international politicos to take a stand.

If you want to catch Kony, I can't think of a dumber thing to do, J.

Peter Phelm, an Africa expert at the Atlantic Council, told USA Today.

For one, it was insulting, like wearing an Osama bin Laden t-shirt after 9-11.

Two, an awareness campaign was a waste of time, money, and compassion.

Those resources could be better utilized at home and overseas by more mature organizations for more effective solutions.

rather than inspiring some teenagers to step over homeless people to hang Kony posters in the subway.

Most offensive, however, was invisible children's push for additional militarized intervention.

Historically, the LRA hadn't responded kindly to such threats.

The mere suggestion could have Cony sharpening his machete and putting additional African lives at risk.

But the way

the invisible children are campaigning to me is wrong.

I don't support military activities.

I don't support military action

to bring Kony out of the bush because of one problem.

Military action will bring a lot of problem to civilians themselves.

You know that if two elephants fight, it's the grass to suffer.

Civilians in Uganda and Central Africa may have to pay a steep price in their own lives so that a lot of young Americans can feel good about themselves and a few can make good money, wrote Adam Branch, a professor of international politics at the University of Cambridge.

In elevating Kony to a global celebrity, the embodiment of evil, and advocating a military solution, the campaign isn't just simplifying, it is irresponsibly naive, regional expert Alex DeWaal told the BBC.

To add more fuel to the backlash, a 2008 photo resurfaced of Jason Russell, Bobby Bailey, and Laron Poole posing with the Sudan People's Liberation Army while holding AK-47s and RPGs.

Admittedly, not a great look, but the Invisible Children founders said the photograph was a joke taken during a prolonged period of downtime during peace talks.

Whatever, the damage was done.

If you don't believe me, let's ask the northern Ugandans, the people most affected by Joseph Kony and the LRA, how they felt about the film.

For many people here, the video is simply puzzling, but as the film progresses, puzzlement turns into anger.

We wanted to see how our local people were killed.

So these are all white men, these are feelings different from northern Uganda.

That is the way sometimes.

Rocks are thrown, the screening comes to a halt and the crowd scatters into the night.

Kony 2012 may be the most watched video on YouTube this year, but it clearly doesn't resonate with many of the people it claims it's meant to help.

Invisible children were called every name in the book.

War-mongering narcissists who instrumentalized their own sons.

Misguided white saviors who infantilized those poor, helpless Africans.

Vice magazine said the organization was, quote, staffed by douchebags, solely based on how they looked.

Abercrombie's version of Jesus Christ.

Arrogant, misguided slacktivist, in love with commercialization, accomplishing nothing but selling the feeling of changing the world.

But you know what?

Business was good.

A viral video entitled Corny 2012, which is about stopping the Ugandan war criminal Joseph Korny, has been branded as a scam by some, insisting it's just a publicity stunt to make money.

While it's speculated only 30% of the money donated goes to Uganda, it says the majority of the other 70% goes to publicizing the charity.

Naturally, the spotlight shone on Invisible Children's finances.

The non-profit had generated $26.5 million from the Kony 2012 campaign in a matter of days.

So, where was all that money going?

Many wondered.

Analyzing the group's past finances did little to quell concerns about potential profiteering.

It was reported that historically, Invisible Children had spent a little more than 30% on direct services, meaning programs in Africa.

The other 70% was spent on staff salaries, travel, and production costs, which seemed far from ideal.

At the time, the NGO watchdog Charity Navigator awarded Invisible Children two out of four stars in its accountability and transparency category.

So what is this?

Some kind of scam or something?

It wouldn't be the first time the organization had been accused of fraud.

In 2010, Chase Bank announced a community giving contest on Facebook that would award a $1 million grant to a small charity that garnered the most votes.

When Invisible Children won the contest, there were accusations of voter fraud.

Change.org reported that many random users had been tagged in a photo claiming they had voted for Invisible Children, when in fact, they had not.

To make matters worse, a video leaked of Jededai Jenkins, Invisible Children's Director of Ideology, bragging about winning while taking pulls from a handle of vodka.

I don't know if you heard this or not, Jededai slurs in the video, but we want a million dollars.

$100,000 for Haiti, and $900,000 extra for me.

I don't know if you heard this or not, but

we want a million dollars so

there's it here a hundred thousand for haiti and nine hundred thousand extra for me for me

get on the bandwagon hey

africa is gonna come up in the world you guys

don't ever forget it

look i was obviously joking Jenkins told the website rumor fix quote who can drink that much vodka definitely not me I'd die.

It's clearly water.

Jededai said the video was a private joke for a co-worker who was out of town when Invisible Children won the prize.

He said that million dollars was used to fund school construction and scholarships in northern Uganda.

Probably true.

But when has truth or a sense of humor ever gotten in the way of a good smear campaign?

You're not becoming rich off of these donations.

Correct, yeah.

All of Kony 2012 is under our non-profit 501c3.

81% of our money last year went to programs.

And it's not our money.

We don't view it that way.

We view it as the children's money because the youth of the world have funded this.

Invisible Children resented the accusations of financial impropriety.

The organization claimed that almost all of its donations were used to fund its objectives.

It's true that its on-the-ground programs only comprised one-third of its mission.

but it never billed itself as a traditional aid organization.

Making movies and transporting volunteers to generate advocacy and awareness around the world were vital to its goals.

And those things cost money, you know.

Unorthodox, sure, but a scam?

Far from it.

This is Invisible Children's CEO, Ben Keesey.

I think I understand why a lot of people are wondering, is this just some slick, kind of fly-by-night, slacktivist thing, when actually it's not at all.

It's actually a really, it's connected to a really deep, thoughtful, very intentional, and strategic campaign.

I understand that people have questions about our comprehensive model and may question our strategy, but any claims that we don't have financial transparency or that we're not audited every year by an independent firm or that we don't have financial integrity just aren't true.

To pacify its critics, Invisible Children provided a breakdown of its finances and frequently asked questions on its website.

That information proved that 80% of the money raised was spent on its comprehensive mission, mission, while only 16% went to administration and management costs, which included the $90,000 salary of the organization's highest-paid employee, Jason Russell.

Not a bad living, but it's not like he was the CEO of the Susan G.

Kohmen Breast Cancer Organization, who made $684,000 that same year.

As for the low rating on Charity Navigator, Invisible Children attributed that to having four independent voting members on its board of directors instead of five, but they were working on it.

These types of growing pains were typical and should be expected of a rapidly growing non-profit.

Even with criticisms considered, it was difficult to argue that Invisible Children hadn't been successful in achieving its goals.

More people than ever knew the name Joseph Coney, especially among millennials who had never been this engaged about anything before.

That alone was a stunning achievement for such a small, grassroots organization.

Wait a second.

Grassroots, you say?

Some critics were not so sure.

Let's rewind to the early days of Invisible Children, before the viral sensation of Cony, back when Jason, Bobby, and Laren were producing the rough cut, their first documentary.

From who did they acquire their initial funding?

Remember, they claim they wrote letters to family and friends and received private donations.

Let's ask again, this time with more scrutiny.

According to Invisible Children's own website and financial statements, one of the organization's first and largest donors was the A1 Self-Storage Company.

Quote, A1 Self-Storage was one of the original donors who helped the founders of Invisible Children travel to Uganda and make the documentary Invisible Children, The Rough Cut, which led to the creation of Invisible Children Inc., the 510C3 nonprofit organization.

The contributions of A1 Self-Storage have been crucial to the growth and success of Invisible children.

Very interesting.

Why?

Because A1 self-storage is owned and operated by the Castor Group, a family-owned California-based development company with evangelical fundamentalist values.

The Castor family was one of the most prominent financial supporters of California's anti-same-sex marriage, Proposition 8, which passed in 2008, but was later overturned by the courts as unconstitutional.

The Castors, through its various entities, had had donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to invisible children in their early days.

They provided the initial funding Invisible Children needed to launch its school rebuilding program called School for Schools.

Many found it highly suspicious that the foundation focusing on the children in Uganda had ties to this evangelical group, even thanking Terry and Barbara Caster by name in its financial report.

But, as Bruce Wilson of TalkToAction.org and Wayne Besson of Truth Wins Out have exposed, when it comes to invisible children's links to religious fundamentalism, that was just the beginning.

In 2006, Invisible Children received $235,000 from the National Christian Foundation, a nonprofit that connects Christian donors to Christian causes.

That same year, the NCF also donated to the Discovery Institute, the Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, Harvest Evangelism, The Call, and others.

What do all of those latter organizations have in common?

All extremely anti-gay, creationist Christian fundamentalist groups.

What does this say about invisible children?

Not much that it wasn't saying about itself.

In 2007, the foundation submitted an application identifying itself as a ministry to join something called the Barnabas Group, a politically far-right Christian nonprofit that provides marketing, PR, and donor assistance for select cutting-edge Christian ministry efforts.

The Barnabas Group is an environment in which ministries can come in looking for collaborative leaders who are going to partner with them.

And the synergy that comes from those partnerships makes the contribution that they make go off the charts in terms of value and leverage.

It's the best use of your kingdom time that I can think of.

The Barnabas Group accepted Invisible Children's application that year, which listed its target audience as the youth of America, age 15 to 25.

Another ministry that the Barnabas Group worked with, all of which Barnabas claims on its website have been extensively screened, was the Family Research Council, which has been identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group.

Did Invisible Children have a hidden agenda, or were they just incredibly naive?

Let's keep digging.

The National Christian Foundation increased its donations to Invisible Children every year, and it was joined in its contributions by a growing list of fundamentalist groups, such as the Christian Community Foundation, Geneva Global Provision Circle Family Foundation, and more.

At one point, Invisible Children even partnered with a for-profit clothing company with deep religious ties called Apollos Global to capitalize on philanthropic cotton picking.

Uganda used to be supported financially by cotton until the war came in and destroyed their industry.

But there's a high demand in the world for organic cotton.

And that's where Invisible Children came in and saw a need.

And we now employ thousands of farmers to produce cotton as a cash crop and and export it for goods around the world.

That partnership is questionable for more than one reason, but let's focus on the fact that the founders of Apollos Global were alumni of the fellowship's National Student Leadership Forum.

The Fellowship is another name for an enigmatic conservative Christian group known as the Family.

There's a little-known organization in Washington with a worldwide reach and enormous and sometimes surprising political connections.

Family is a conservative Christian group that for decades used its proximity to power to influence policy.

It hosts small bipartisan prayer groups and has put on the national prayer breakfast since 1953.

The family also is known as the Fellowship and remains secretive by design.

The family has been called the most influential evangelical network on earth.

If you've never heard of it, That's by design.

Its members, which consist of international political and business leaders, have been quietly exerting influence on global policy from behind the scenes since 1935.

This is journalist Jeff Charlotte, who has written two books about the family, which he described as a fundamentalist threat to American democracy.

That's their terms.

The leader, longtime leader of the group, a man named Doug Coe, says the more invisible you can make your organization, the more influence it will have, which is true, which is why we have lobbying and disclosure laws, which over the years they have managed to evade.

Of course, the family has a vision for Africa too, one in which peace will sweep across the land once everyone there worships a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Jesus.

And one example of their handiwork, members of the family in the U.S.

Congress have been blamed for reversing Uganda's declining HIV rates by discouraging condom use in favor of abstinence and fidelity.

This is now deceased Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhoff, a member of the family, eulogizing Doug Koe, the family's leader, who died in 2017.

Doug once asked me, he said, if you were God, how would you help all those poor people in Africa?

I said, I'm not God, so I don't know what I would do.

But you seem to know, so you tell, if you were God, how should we help the poor people in Africa?

And Doug Coe said very quietly, I would change the hearts of their leaders.

What does any of this have to do with invisible children?

Well, at a certain point, invisible children's programs in Africa became intertwined with those of the family.

The foundation's Schools for Schools mentoring program was headed by a man named Paul Laquia.

He even appears in the background of one of Invisible Children's videos.

Paul Laquia was also the education director for a leadership academy run by the Ugandan branch of the family.

Another leading member of that academy was a member of parliament named David Bahadi.

who introduced a reprehensible anti-LGBT bill that criminalizes same-sex conduct in Uganda, including including potential life sentences and the death penalty for those convicted of, quote, aggravated homosexuality.

David Bahadi credited the family for the inspiration and technical support with the bill, which was signed into law in 2023 by President Yaori Museveni, also a member of the family.

The family also explains how Invisible Children, a young startup nonprofit, already had so much political backing in Washington, D.C.

in its early years.

Anytime the organization pushed for legislation, someone was listening.

And it wasn't just the big man upstairs.

Guess what?

Senator was one of Invisible Children's most vocal supporters.

When we heard there's a guy up there named Joseph Coney,

when I got up there, there are three guys who I really believe we would not be where we are today if it hadn't been for them.

They were the Invisible Children guys.

That's right.

Senator Jim Inhoff.

The problem with all of this isn't that Invisible Children is a fundamentalist Christian organization.

That's whatever.

The problem is that Invisible Children routinely denied being a fundamentalist Christian organization, even though most, if not all, of its leadership were devout Christians with deep ties to other fundamentalist groups.

We celebrate the fact that our staff is made up of people from diverse backgrounds and belief systems, IC wrote on its website.

The foundation even publicly disapproved of the anti-gay bill introduced in Uganda.

So again, were they being dishonest or woefully naive?

Some early interviews with Jason Russell appear to shed some light on this debate.

At a 2005 Christian conference in San Antonio, Texas, Russell referred to Invisible Children and its films as a Trojan horse designed to infiltrate secular institutions and surreptitiously promote his group's version of Christianity.

Coming in January, we're trying to hit as many high schools, colleges, and churches as possible with this movie.

We are able to be the Trojan horse in a sense, going into a secular realm and saying, guess what?

Life is about orphans, and it's about the widow and it's about the oppressed.

That's God's heart.

This vividly reveals Invisible Children's invisible agenda.

Truth Wins Outs executive director Wayne Besson told the Huffington Post, this group is not simply about exposing LRA leader Joseph Kony, but engaging in stealth evangelism.

Yeah, that about sums it up.

Invisible Children disagreed, quote, Invisible Children believes in the equality of all people around the globe and is in no way an anti-gay organization.

We are deeply saddened and troubled by recent attempts by some to associate Invisible Children with a pernicious anti-gay worldview.

We believe that hate in any form is detrimental to our mission and that the liberty of all human beings is bound together.

And then it deleted the question on its FAQ page, asking if Invisible Children was affiliated with any religious organization.

The conversation changed from Joseph Kony and the children who were victims of the war to who is this nonprofit?

Who is this filmmaker?

People thought we were getting rich off this.

That is not true.

People thought Joseph Kony was dead.

That is not true.

Some people even thought we were the propaganda arm of a government.

That's absolutely not true.

The pressure was getting to them.

Jason Russell found it frustrating that all the interviewers wanted to discuss was the methods of making a video go viral or the controversies that arose afterward.

What about Joseph Coney?

What about the children?

The film is changing the world, Russell told Time magazine, but at the same time, people are calling me the devil.

Jason was a hero.

No, he was a war-mongering blowhard.

Invisible Children was doing important work.

No, Invisible Children was a staunchly anti-gay covert evangelical mission.

The opposing views were difficult to reconcile in Jason's head.

Total fear.

Like fear, it's all in my head.

And it's been, and it's been so gnarling.

Again, man, it just, it's hard.

You just sound really different.

Like something's up.

Like, maybe we need to go and sleep.

And I know, I know, I can't sleep.

Yeah.

A few days after Coney 2012 went viral, Jason Russell went home to his wife and two kids to catch his breath.

He hadn't slept in days.

His mind was racing.

He felt like he had lost control.

The whole experience was giving him PTSD, bringing him back to his middle school days when the kids were throwing food at him because he was the weird homeschooled musical theater kid.

Danica suggested they escape to Palm Springs for a few days so they could recharge his batteries.

That trip proved to be far from relaxing.

Jason was immediately recognized at the poll and was asked for a photo.

Back home in San Diego, Jason says he started hearing voices.

They were telling him that he needed to get to New York in 12 hours to stop the war.

My mind couldn't stop thinking about the future, he later said in a TV interview.

I literally thought I was responsible for the future of humanity.

It started to get to the point where my mind finally turned against me and there was a moment that clicked.

I wasn't in control of my mind or my body.

Breaking news tonight on one of the filmmakers behind Kony 2012.

That's the viral video about Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony.

Well, the man behind it has been picked up by police and taken to the hospital today.

An official familiar with the case confirms that Jason Russell, who you see there just on CNN last week, was found in his underwear running through the streets of San Diego yesterday, screaming and acting irrationally.

And it appears it went downhill from there.

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Hey, get off my grass.

Hey, asshole.

Get out of here.

I thought he was just high on something.

I thought he was a junk, a druggie or something, you know.

He seemed like, you know, he might have been a little mentally unstable.

First, he was wearing underwear, but later that came off.

You can see how he repeatedly pounds the pavement and he got naked and then he started doing obscene things on the street naked.

On March 15th, 2012, at 11.30 a.m., San Diego police received reports that a white male was running through the streets in his underwear at the intersection of Ingram Street and Riviera Drive in the Pacific Beach neighborhood.

The man was reportedly ranting to himself about good versus evil, God and the devil.

He was flipping off cars, strutting around, snapping his fingers, and slapping his hands on the ground hard enough to dent his wedding ring.

Bystanders tried to calm the man down, but that only seemed to agitate him further.

I want to fuck your face, he allegedly screamed at a woman before performing some of the most aggressive downward dogs you've ever seen.

In the midst of all this, his underwear came off.

There were reports that the man began masturbating, spilling his invisible children all over the street.

Do you believe in world peace?

He asked a passing mail carrier.

Yes, the mailman replied, but put on your underwear first.

Eventually, the police arrived and took the man into custody.

He was later identified as 33-year-old Jason Russell of recent CONY 2012 notoriety.

Now, to be clear, what he did was technically against the law, so why was there no arrest?

Because of statements that he was making, there were questions about his

overall ability to

form a criminal intent.

So it was determined that medical evaluation and treatment was a better course of action than arrest.

Because of his mental state, Jason Russell was not charged with any crimes.

However, the incident would follow him around forever because a passerby filmed the breakdown and sold the footage to TMZ for 30 grand.

Jason Russell had done it again, twice viral in as many weeks.

The hashtag Horny2012 was trending.

But not everyone was laughing.

Jason told the Guardian he only remembers slivers that day, like the horror on his mother's face when the police handcuffed and led him away.

His wife wife Danica had called his parents for help while she shielded their children's eyes.

At the hospital, Jason remembers being convinced that the staff was trying to kill him.

He says it took eight people to hold him down to administer the drugs he was refusing to take.

Jason wasn't intoxicated at the time either and had no history of mental illness.

Early diagnosis suggested he was suffering from a brief reactive psychosis.

brought on by extreme exhaustion, dehydration, and stress.

Coney strikes

Danica Russell released a statement on behalf of the family.

We thought a few thousand people would see the film, but in less than a week, millions of people around the world saw it.

While that attention was great for raising awareness about Joseph Coney, it also brought a lot of attention to Jason, and because of how personal the film is, many of the attacks against it were also very personal, and Jason took them very hard.

He has a long way to go, but we are confident that he will make a full recovery, she added.

He is and will remain under hospital care for a number of weeks and after that the recovery process could take months before he is fully able to step back into his role with invisible children again it really it's hard to explain if people have never had an out-of-body yeah experience but it really wasn't me that wasn't me that person on the street corner

ranting and raving and naked is not me.

That's not who I am.

Months later, Jason Russell appeared on the Today Show and Oprah to try to explain what had happened.

There were all these other rumors, too, that you were gay.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I've heard those rumors.

Yeah.

That you were running in the streets, nude, and because you were gay.

Well, you know, in the video, I'm snapping my finger up and down, kind of like this.

So, and you know, I grew up in theater.

My parents started a large children's theater organization.

So I am, you know, animated.

I am.

Theatrical.

Theatrical.

Not exactly a denial, but anyway, Jason said the thing that sucked most about the breakdown is that it gave people an excuse not to do anything.

Quote, people are like, didn't that filmmaker take all the money and then go crazy naked in the street?

Yeah, a tough act to follow.

Fortunately, the rest of the Invisible Children staff picked up the slack.

Dear friends of Invisible Children, this has been Keesey.

Today

and these last two weeks have been some of the hardest of our lives.

And seeing what happened to my friend Jason today

was so hard.

Some of the personal attacks against him and his wife and his kids and family was hard for him.

It really took a toll.

And

that guy changed my life and

many other people too.

many of you watching this.

And

that's who Jason is, okay?

And

this mission is bigger than him.

We know that that's true.

So I just want to say right now, for the rest of us here, we're not stopping.

Please stand with us.

Thank you so much for your support.

It really means the world to us right now.

Thank you.

A few Kony-related things happened while Jason Russell was incapacitated.

Thanks to the buzz created by the viral video, on March 22nd, 2012, a U.S.

Senate resolution condemning Joseph Kony and the Lord's Resistance Army was introduced.

The legislation was spearheaded by Senator Chris Coons of Delaware and the family's own senator Jim Inhoff of Oklahoma.

On March 24th, 2012, the African Union announced that it was forming a brigade of 5,000 troops to hunt down Kony, but claimed it had nothing to do with the recent publicity.

As predicted, when the LRA became aware of these planned military actions, it stepped up its own attacks, which according to the UN, led to two deaths, 13 abductions, and the displacement of 4,200 people.

The LRA even responded to the Kony 2012 campaign, calling it a disguise for a U.S.

effort to expand its power.

On April 5, 2012, Invisible Children released its highly anticipated follow-up to Kony 2012.

It was called Kony 2012 Part 2, Beyond Famous.

The 20-minute video responded to many of the organization's criticisms, highlighted the group's efforts on the ground in Africa, and prominently featured Jolie Ocott, Invisible Children's Uganda country director.

It's narrated by Invisible Children CEO Ben Keese.

Jason Russell's name is nowhere to be found.

To date, that video has 2.9 million views.

or less than 2% of what Kony 2012 received in its first five days.

This was a bad sign.

Invisible Children was struggling to hold a place in the internet's short attention span.

And remember, the Kony 2012 campaign centerpiece was right around the corner.

Cover the Night was still planned for April 20th.

It was the opportunity to translate online activism into real-world change.

When that date arrived, as feared, Cover the Night was a complete dud.

Immediately, Cal State Fullerton students rallied together and created a Cover the Night event in which 240 students said they would attend.

However, when the sun went down on Friday, April 20th, the campus was empty and quiet.

Disappointing numbers trickled in from around the world.

Only 17 people showed up in Vancouver where 21,000 people RSVP'd to the Facebook event.

Only 25 in Sydney out of almost 19,000.

You get the picture.

The movement was dead.

But the United States government never stopped believing.

In 2013, the State Department offered a $5 million reward for any information leading to the arrest of the LRA's top three leaders.

In 2014, Obama announced he was sending additional aircraft and troops to the region to assist with the search.

Researchers of the LRA say the rebel group has split up into small units of about 10 to 15 fighters.

This strategy, they say, is to help them find safe havens in the thick jungles of the Central African Republic where they are believed to be hiding.

Yet again, they turned up empty-handed.

So in 2017, after its six-year, $800 million hunt for Joseph Kony, the United States declared mission accomplished and pulled its troops out of the area.

Though it failed to capture or kill the LRA's notorious leader, officials said the militia had been reduced to fewer than 80 soldiers, down from 2,500 at the height of the LRA's murderous rampage in the late 90s.

This operation, although not achieving the ability to get Kony himself, has essentially taken that group off the battlefield and for the last several years, they've really been reduced to irrelevance.

That number has dwindled even further in recent years.

Many of the LRA's top commanders have simply walked away, including Kony's eldest son and presumed successor, Ali Kony, in addition to two daughters, another son, and a wife.

It is believed that the LRA fighters, directly led by Kony, are the only active group remaining.

They're reportedly hiding out in Kafiya Kinji, a disputed area between South Sudan and Sudan.

The International Criminal Court has scheduled a hearing for September 9th, 2025 to confirm the 36 war crimes and crimes against humanity against Joseph Kony.

A lawyer will be assigned to him in his absence.

Of the four LRA commanders indicted by the ICC, three are believed to be dead.

The fourth, Dominic Ongwin, aka white ant, surrendered in January 2015 because he said Kony planned to kill him.

His trial in The Hague lasted three and a half years.

It was a unique case.

On Gwen had been abducted by the LRA when he was 10 years old and turned into a soldier.

He was both a victim and a perpetrator.

The 45-year-old pleaded not guilty, and his lawyers pushed for an acquittal, saying he was brainwashed.

While prosecutors and lawyers for thousands of victims say as an adult, he was a ferocious, enthusiastic warlord.

Dominic Ongwin was ultimately convicted of 61 charges, including murder, rape, and sexual enslavement.

Judges said White Ant personally ordered his soldiers to carry out mass killings of more than 130 civilians between 2002 and 2005 in which innocent people were burned alive or beaten to death.

He was sentenced to 25 years in prison on May 6, 2021.

Invisible Children popped champagne for a second time.

Or at least they would have if they had been around to see it.

A major announcement by the group Invisible Children, two years after the founder has this very public breakdown at Street Corner in Pacific Beach, the group famous for documenting the plight of children in Uganda is closing most of its U.S.

operations, including here in San Diego.

On December 15th, 2014, Invisible Children posted a statement on its website announcing that it would wind down its U.S.

operations by the end of the year and internationally by 2015.

We're firing ourselves, but we're not quitting, the statement concluded, because we won't stop until every captive man, woman, and child is out of the LRA.

In the years after its viral sensation, Invisible Children released more videos and launched new campaigns, none of them nearly as successful as CONI 2012, not that the group expected them to be.

Its core supporters had moved on to other trends like pouring buckets of ice water over their heads and doing the Harlem shake.

The non-profit raised more than $40 million in total, which, according to Ben Kesey, was virtually exhausted on its mission in less than two years.

No regrets.

That's what the money was for.

Was it a success?

That's a long, complicated story.

There's a lengthy list of accomplishments, but the main goal, capturing Joseph Kony, was never achieved.

Invisible Children still exist today, but in a much different form.

The organization doesn't focus on making videos or launching massive awareness campaigns.

Today, we are intently intently focused on supporting and expanding nimble community-based solutions that are making children and families safer from violence in some of our world's most remote and isolated regions, its website reads.

None of the three original founders are involved.

So, what's next?

Well, Jason Russell and his wife published a book in 2017 called A Little Radical: The ABCs of Activism for Kids.

But I have a feeling that he's itching to make a new movie.

So, Mr.

Radical, if you're listening, I have an idea.

A trail of blood allegedly leads to the Allied Democratic Forces, a shadowy extremist group with ties to ISIS that's preyed on both Uganda and the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo where they're based, and where soldiers have chased them for years.

In March, the jihadists hacked to death dozens of people in Congo's fragile east, authorities say.

Telltale tactics that these survivors in Uganda now know too well.

Okay, that's horrible, but actually, I had something else in mind.

Hear me out.

Hi, my name is Paul Russell, and I want to welcome you to Christian Youth Theater and Christian Community Theater.

We are the only children's theater arts program that combines Judeo-Christian ethics in every aspect of the world.

Tonight, multiple former students of San Diego's Christian Youth Theater are coming forward with stories of sexual assault and misconduct.

On July 14th, 2020, Landon Baldwin, a teaching artist and improv coordinator at Christian Youth Theater, publicly resigned from his position in a scathing letter posted to Facebook.

Landon, who had been involved with the El Cajon-based theater since he was 10 years old, wrote that he could no longer, in good conscience, devote his time and expertise to, quote, a company that trends toward values opposite my own.

Landon was referring to the fact that CYT's leadership had ignored his and others' concerns over the recent rehiring of a choir teacher who had been fired from a local school district for, quote, severe and pervasive sexual harassment of at least three female students.

Landon's resignation letter, even though he wasn't a victim himself, spurred a chain reaction.

In the comments, dozens of former CYT students and teachers came forward with their own stories of abuse, everything from sexual assault by some of the theater's employees to rampant racism and homophobia by the staff.

The victims included the hashtag CYTNew, alluding to the fact that many of them had gone to Paul Russell, CYT's founder and executive artistic director, who ignored their cries for help.

Baldwin says the culture of CYT, which he says included racism, homophobia, bias, and bullying, allowed this alleged abuse to occur.

CYT acknowledged the accusations and scheduled a press conference for 10 days later.

The organization's president, Janie Russell Cox, daughter of the founders, addressed the concerns inside the theater from which the sign had already been removed.

We are heartbroken and devastated about the experiences of former students of our program that were recently shared on social media.

Our first priority is the health and safety of these individuals who have come forward.

Janie said the company was investigating the allegations internally, even though all of the accusations had occurred before she was president.

Some dated back 25 years.

She said CYT was creating a diversity committee and that all six branches of CYT San Diego would be shut down indefinitely, which in this case meant about two months.

We are fully committed to the safety of every single child and we are grieving for every single individual whom we love and care so deeply for who are hurting right now.

We apologize

and love you.

A civil lawsuit followed.

Christian Youth Theater, whose motto was awkwardly closer than family, was not a safe haven for children, but rather rather a safe harbor for predators, the complaint reads.

The lawsuit alleges that at least 10 children, aged 8 to 17 at the time, were sexually abused by six adults who were employed by CYT.

The victims are suing the company for negligent supervision, alleging Paul and Cheryl Russell, who founded CYT in 1980, knew about the abuse as early as 1992, yet failed to do anything.

According to the lawsuit, the culture at the theater normalized and incentivized grooming behaviors.

Adults would co-mingle with the children at birthday parties, movie outings, and even sleepovers.

Directors would give preferred acting roles to their chosen favorites.

The specific details of the abuse allegations are disturbing, so be warned.

Not that it's a competition, but the worst offender by far was an extremely well-respected and beloved teacher named Rob Buse.

Buse would supply the children with alcohol, methamphetamines, ecstasy, and date rape drugs.

It'd bring porn to the sleepovers or encourage all the boys to get in the hot tub and take off their clothes.

One victim described laying awake listening to Rob Buse rape his friend in the same room.

Another said Buse posted a photo of his naked buttocks on a dating website without his consent and then invited interested parties over to take turns on the intoxicated 17-year-old.

This abuse went on for years in some cases.

These kids were afraid to admit what was happening.

Most had grown up in an environment where they were taught gay experiences and premarital sex meant a one-way ticket to hell.

It was best to keep a secret.

Those who did come forward weren't taken seriously.

They said Paul Russell would tell them it was just boys being boys or that it was harmless experimenting.

He would instruct them to forgive Rob and move on as, quote, good Christians do.

On the rare occasion when an angry parent showed up, Paul would assure them nothing happened or they would be stonewalled by the company's lawyer.

I kind of like to say I'm in the business of changing the lives of kids for the better.

Rob Buse was never disciplined by CYT other than a little Christian counseling.

Finally, one mother reported the abuse to a high school where Abuse was working as a guest choreographer.

That school notified the police.

Rob Buse was arrested and charged with sodomy in 2003.

He pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor.

and was sentenced to 14 days in jail while avoiding registering as a sex offender thanks to multiple employees from CYT writing letters to the judge begging for leniency.

Rob Buse was invited to the CYT reunion in 2019.

The statute of limitations has expired for most of the lawsuits' allegations, so additional criminal charges are unlikely.

The civil case will be tried by a jury on November 14th, 2025.

The victims referred to in the court documents by their initials will finally have their stories told.

Although one of them, J.R., has always had a knack for telling his own.

These abuse allegations go back almost as far and involve potentially dozens of alleged victims, including a close family member of CYT's president.

In an August 2020 post on Instagram, Jason Russell, the son of Paul and Cheryl Russell, wrote, I am a survivor of childhood sexual assault.

I was 13, 14.

and he was probably 22, 23, and a male director named Rob Buce of my parents' organization CYT.

He was my friend.

He really was, but I've since learned that it's almost always a friend or family member, right?

The same man also molested many of my closest guy friends.

It was our first sexual experience.

Imagine the irreversible damage.

At the time, I was so ashamed, because 14 was old, and I felt I should have known better.

I should have walked out of the room.

I should have screamed no.

I should have had the courage to speak up.

But the grooming and petting is real and paradoxical because if it might feel good, it must also be your fault.

After we finally came forward, we were immediately guided to forgive and move on because that's what good Christians do.

Jesus Christ, poor Jason, ignored by his own father.

Turns out, sometimes the most invisible child is the one in the mirror staring back at you.

Swindled is written, researched, produced, and hosted by me, a concerned citizen, with original music by Trevor Howard, aka Deformer, aka Radical.

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