The consequences for ousted former South Korean President Yoon Suk-Yeol’s fucking stupid December 2024 decision to impose martial law based on some bullshit he saw on YouTube continued to reverberate Monday as Han Hak-ja, the 82 year-old widow of the country’s very culty Church of the Unification – aka the Moonies – faces the clink in an investigation into allegations she bribed Yoon’s wife, now-jailed Kim Keon Hee, with handbags and jewelry, Reuters reports.

Han, called “True Mother” by followers, was married to Unification Church founder Moon Sun-Myung until his death in 2012. The Moonies’ tentacles reach deep into right wing parties across the globe, most notably in the US where their hardcore MAGA gun fetishist local branch run by one of Moon’s sons is called the Church of the Iron Rod and in Japan where former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was blown away with a homemade shotgun in 2022 by a man who blamed Abe’s thrall to the Moonies for his mother’s financial ruin to the cult’s extortionate tithing, leading to their dissolution by Tokyo.

Nowhere else is that less true than in their home country and as such South Korean President Lee Jae-Myung might want to tread carefully when dealing with the leader of a cult whose adherents number in the millions – especially when that leader is a frail 82 year-old woman who showed up to court in a wheelchair. You don’t need to be in a cult to at least recognize those sort of optics can be risky. Then there’s that the Iron Rod church sent at least 80 of theirs to the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. Who knows what they’re going to do in South Korea if their “True Mother” is locked up? Lee should be looking at how the Japanese government wiped the Moonies out systematically as his model instead of parading an old lady’s scalp over some chickenshit bribery charges.