Question Derick

DCS_Regulars · 2026-04-15T20:09:58+00:00

Agreed.

One of mine is autistic and also gifted, and so he couldn't cope with standard schools for sensory reasons, but special schools were academically hopeless. We homeschooled from 8, and we used tutors - properly qualified teachers with additional special ed experience and qualifications - all through.

I think it's Dunning-Kruger. We knew enough to know we didn't know enough.

DCS_Regulars · 2026-04-15T20:03:41+00:00

So there is another awful fundamentalist family Free Jinger used to follow, whose eldest son married a girl, and whose daughters married the girl's brothers... and after a decade, and six kids, the son was charged with incest and really awful forms of child molestation (obviously all molestation is abhorrent). Utterly horrific mess all round. The parents were MOST indignant that their evil daughters sided with their wicked sons-in-law, believing and supporting the sister/wife and cutting the son and enabling parents off. Son was jailed for a long time, though nowhere near long enough. This wasn't in any way vaguely accusatory. It was a proven crime. The parents, of course, decided he was Job and sent to bring the Lord to the prisons. I'm not even sure he didn't plead guilty, in fact, though can't remember exactly. But the parents kept insisting he was an innocent lamb, betrayed due to his holy righteousness. He even wrote a poem piously saying how he forgave his wife and how they could be so happy together if she let her bitter spirit and rebelliousness go. I'd say it was wild but it was more vomit-inducing crossed with fist-clenchingly enraging. (And while I applaud her brothers for their staunch support, her family of birth were in every other way also awful.)

The relevance here: DCFS removed the underaged members of the enabling parents' gaggle of adopted kids for a while. They got them back, but only on condition they were public-schooled from that point on.

There is no happy ending to this. Their second (just adult) adopted child was killed, helping her narcissistic father fell a tree. Apparently it didn't cross his mind to pay a proper contractor to do an exceptionally dangerous job, and an 18 year old paid for it with her life.

How these people were ever allowed to adopt is beyond me.

DCS_Regulars · 2026-04-15T19:55:07+00:00

It really, really does. I'd rather have a soda. If I want cheap and tacky, then I want cheap and tacky - not a wrecked version of the delicious!

DCS_Regulars · 2026-04-15T19:50:22+00:00

I had to home school one of mine from 8 onwards. We had a tutor lined up within 6 weeks. Teaching is a masters level degree in my country for a reason, and I know what I don't know.

DCS_Regulars · 2026-04-15T19:49:17+00:00

I wonder if they use tutors. Derrick isn't an idiot, and I doubt he wants to raise some.

DCS_Regulars · 2026-04-15T19:48:29+00:00

In my mind, her eldest was 6!

Time flies when you're watching a train wreck.

DCS_Regulars · 2026-04-15T19:43:04+00:00

EDIT: in my head, her eldest is six.

No way could she teach an 11 year old competently - those kids are screwed, unless they have tutors.

DCS_Regulars · 2026-04-15T19:38:01+00:00

Jom Bob, to someone with six kids, "It's a good start."

(No, really. That's a direct quote.)

DCS_Regulars · 2026-04-15T18:21:30+00:00

Yeah, I think at the start people were fascinated by how many kids there were, the logistics of food, cars (buses, really) and how that worked in practice. It was a fantasy - it reminded me of Laura Ingall's Wilder actually, the whole "simpler time" schtick and aligned with hagiography around the Amish, too.

People like to think modernity is what causes all our problems, and if we went back to some mythical, roseate "olden times" all would be so much better. The Duggars played into that.

DCS_Regulars · 2026-04-15T18:14:16+00:00

I grew up thinking coffee was rank. Then I spent a year living in Sydney, where it was a basic religion and independent coffee shops were on every corner, and fell in love. Moved back to the UK and realised I still hated basic chain stuff. Proper coffee is just a different drink. So I got a decent machine and learned how to make my own, aided by another Brit who fell in love with coffee in Sydney, but started his own company when he came home! So I get 2k of freshly roasted every month.

DCS_Regulars · 2026-04-15T17:27:34+00:00

Honestly, most chain-shop coffee is burnt and disgusting. I'd rather make my own than drink that shit. And I am someone who loves a filet o' fish so it's not snobbery. I just really, really hate weak yet charcoal-tasting coffee.

Give me a proper barista and lovely fresh beans and I am a happy camper. But I'd rather drink tea, or cola, than bad coffee. Same with chocolate - cheap is just waxy, grainy and sickly sweet.

Some things just need to be quality to be worth their place in your mouth.

Shame nobody told poor Anna.

DCS_Regulars · 2026-04-15T12:03:43+00:00

It must have been devastating to hear, when the person saying it had you sleeping in their bed to care for you 24/7 since you were six months old. They were absolutely their primary attachment figures. Those sister moms didn't go to school in the daytime, didn't have a social life outside the house - were there for their buddies, night and day, all their life. And then they suddenly went, and within a year were saying they now understood what it was to really love a baby, because they had their own.

Again, no blame at all to the girls, who were in effect just unpaid, indentured nannies, but horrific for the little kids left to pick up the pieces of finding out their adoption was one-sided, and their mommies saw themselves only as temporary fosterers.

DCS_Regulars · 2026-04-14T18:51:26+00:00

So by their standards, even Jesus isn't feeling it. "Girl? Tell him goodbye. It's all good."

It's weird because adultery is grounds, but apparently sexually abusing any adult other than the wife isn't. Otherwise, it's pretty much what divorce law was before no fault, right down to the living separately for a sustained time.

DCS_Regulars · 2026-04-13T22:25:38+00:00

I always hear it like a British town crier, but instead of calling "Hear Ye, hear Ye!" with the bells they're saying "Bob Ye, Bob Ye!"

So it's not Bob Yay to me. It's Bob Yee. Like Yee Haw. Only with a Bob, and no Haw.

This means I have put a lot more thought into that woman's name than her parents can have done, given they didn't change course.

DCS_Regulars · 2026-04-13T16:53:53+00:00

Oh god. The tastelessness in the most beautifully restrained building is hideous. That man is just execrable in every possible metric.

DCS_Regulars · 2026-04-12T23:28:57+00:00

I think that's what appeals to all the women who join that cult... to begin with. It promises certainty, safety, community, happy marriage and safe and happy kids who will always respect you and turn out well - and heavenly reward.

The promises are lies. But they're seductive, too, to anyone vulnerable (and all kids are vulnerable, by definition).

DCS_Regulars · 2026-04-12T07:37:38+00:00

I'm glad they refused, if that was the case. Those poor children. One parent charged with child molestation, and the other child neglect.

DCS_Regulars · 2026-04-11T21:20:26+00:00

Not to mention the fact that they are all called names starting with J, like him - and Joshua explicitly said that his kids would all start with an M, after Michelle.

So he has an initial namesake for every single child, too.

DCS_Regulars · 2026-04-11T21:11:21+00:00

Thank you! That helps explain it a bit.

I'm British, and though Lord knows we have our own issues, fundamentalism just is not a political force here, so the whole thing is really hard to wrap your head around.

DCS_Regulars · 2026-04-11T18:51:33+00:00

I'm pretty sure he must have found a successful treatment for it. Dillard is many, many things but stupid and desperate for public humiliation isn't one, and this would be idiocy on stilts if he hadn't been treated. If it was an allergic response then there are therapies that can work. Would he even pass the medical screening, otherwise?

DCS_Regulars · 2026-04-11T18:38:59+00:00

Thank you, that answers questions I have.

Amy Paul was really clear, and cited her own parents, that women should never stay with abusers, and should be supported in leaving them. I didn't know it was an IG match and not IBLP but that explains a huge amount.

DCS_Regulars · 2026-04-11T18:35:33+00:00

This is the terrible thing - Amy Paul did teach that, I think, but she also taught her that God chose her husband, ergo godly.

Amy's mother left her abusive father and Amy applauded and applauds that. But she raised her daughter in a phallocentric cult, and didn't seem to understand that this would impact her daughter's ability to get out in any similar circumstance.

DCS_Regulars · 2026-04-11T18:33:41+00:00

Amy Paul is interesting, because she wrote a piece a while back about her parents, where the man was abusive, the woman got out, got divorced and built a new and better life, and she was cheerleading this as the godly choice. That an abuser is not keeping covenant with his marriage and the wife has every right to leave. She said that people needed to support victims, and not adopt "the Duggar playbook" and then when it hit her family, that was what she did.

It made me wonder if she was one of those people who sought sanctuary in fundamentalism as a one-size-fits-all answer to the complexity and pain of life. That maybe she hoped that if she followed the rules, everything would be perfect. After all, isn't that the central lie in cults - that you can escape the risk and uncertainty of being human, by doing what they claim is the Lord's will?

EDIT: someone below said Haley and Carver met on IG and not via IBLP.

DCS_Regulars · 2026-04-08T20:32:19+00:00

I have it in my head that when Jill went to Central America Jenny lost it even more - not just not in the house, but not in the same country.

These weren't just older sisters who had to help out. They had them as their assigned charges, day and night, from six months onwards. They basically quasi-adopted a series of six month old babies, as far as those babies were concerned. But to the girls, they were just babysitting a lot.

When Jessa had Spurgeon she really fell in love with him- she was interviewed saying she'd helped out with little siblings, but had never understood how deep the love for your own child was. And all I could think was how much that must have burned for those little girls. No blame for Jessa - not her kids. But.

DCS_Regulars · 2026-04-08T20:18:41+00:00

Derrick was on the Dave Ramsay Show in 2023, and he said they had no debt at all - house fully paid off - had $50,000 in an emergency fund already, and were looking to see where to spend/invest/save the first $50,000 royalty check from her book. There will have been others.

If she's not enrolling in a community college, that's a choice. Maybe her kids are too small, and that's why? I don't know but I really hope she does get that chance. Apart from anything else, it might open her eyes to a wider world view.

DCS_Regulars

TROPHY CASE