Eco-Radical, Singer, Criminal, Cult Leader: Inside Carbon Nation
February 27, 2025 at 04:33AMIt’s good week for journalism about cult-like groups. Once you’ve finished with Evan Ratliff’s Wired piece about the Zizians, you’ll be primed for the wild tale of Eligio Bishop—a.k.a. Natureboy, a.k.a. the leader of an itinerant band of off-the-grid disciples known as Carbon Nation. Bishop is currently serving a life sentence without parole, but that ending is anything but a spoiler; the real payoff is Peisner’s dogged reconstruction of the web Bishop spun, ensnaring young men and women who were justifiably tired of America’s structural imbalances.
Even when you can’t follow the internal logic or don’t agree with it, the sense that there is a logic can be enticing. It feels like a puzzle you might be able to solve with a little more time, a little more insight, a little more something, that an important truth is just around the next rhetorical corner. At times, Bishop talks like he’s bludgeoning you into submission, but at other times, it’s a delicate dance. He flatters (“You smart, bro.”), he threatens to hang up (“Why would I talk to you if you don’t feel I’m innocent?”), then insists I’m fated to help exonerate him (“Dave, that’s why we’re on the phone! You’re gonna help me. I already seen it!”).
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from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/02/26/inside-carbon-nation/
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