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. Sometimes the connections between the church and university are less obvious.

Walker Tzeng, Chief Operating Officer of Olivet University, is pastor of Gratia Community Church in San Francisco. The word "Olivet" makes no appearance on Gratia's 2020 tax filings nor on the church's "about us" page, even though Gratia was incorporated by Andrew Lin, also known as Tony Lin, former chairman of the Olivet University board who pleaded guilty to a felony in Manhattan DA's investigation.

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Now, (Jenny) Odell has stumbled into a much weirder, much scammier, much murkier world, when she started investigating the parents of one of her Stanford students were receiving a steady stream of mysterious packages addressed to "Returns Department, Valley Fountain LLC."

Odell's investigation revealed a bizarre network of shitty, overpriced off-brand gadgets sold through thousands of Amazon stores, as well as through a mostly empty "department store" right in the middle of Manhattan, as well as through a network of "book stores" that mostly sold crappy gadgets, whose proprietor kept on changing his name.

This network is tied in with the religious cult that turned out to be the mysterious acquirers of Newsweek, whose subsequent shenanigans were revealed by Newsweek's own reporters,

[www.theguardian.com]

leading to police raids.

This cult — centered around Olivet University and an evangelical pastor named David Jang — is also implicated in the International Business Times, as well as weird spam- and clickbait-mills.

[www.motherjones.com]

After (Jenny) Odell's extensive investigation, it's still not clear what, exactly, the fuck is going on with all these businesses, LLCs, storefronts, online storefronts, stock-art shoops, and other mysterious practices. What is clear is that someone is making a lot of money, somehow — giant Manahattan department stores don't come cheap!

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Still harder for me to grasp was the total interpenetration of e-commerce and physical space. Standing inside Stevens Books was like being on a stage set for Stevens Books, Stevens Book, Stevens Book Shop, and Stevensbook — all at the same time. It wasn't that the bookstore wasn't real, but rather that it felt reverse-engineered by an online business, or a series of them. Being a human who resides in physical space, my perceptual abilities were overwhelmed.

But in some way, even if it was impossible to articulate, I knew that some kind of intersection of Olivet University, Gratia Community Church, IBPort, the Newsweek Media Group, and someone named Stevens was right there with me, among the fidget spinners, in an otherwise unremarkable store in San Francisco.

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Jang also has a history with Moon’s Unification Church. In 2013, a Japanese court resolved an almost six-year-long libel case that Christian Today, a Jang-founded website, filed against Makoto Yamaya, a Salvation Army major. Yamaya had claimed the Community was part of the Unification Church and that Christian Today had mind-controlled its employees; the court found that these charges had no basis. But it also found that Jang joined a Unification Church student group as a young man, eventually rising to the rank of executive director of another church-affiliated student organization. He then went on to a church-run theological institute, and helped manage the transition when it became Sun Moon University in 1993, subsequently leaving the church. Four former members tell me that Jang often spoke of his time in Moon’s church, including his marriage by Moon in a 1975 mass wedding, an event also affirmed by the Japanese court.

Jang now rejects the Unification Church. “They pray in their leader’s name,” he told followers in 2008. “They went wrong and went astray because they threw away Jesus and threw away the cross.”

Moon once vowed the Washington Times would “become the instrument in spreading the truth about God to the world.” But Jang’s interest in the media business stems from a vision of a new biblical deluge. The world has entered the period of a second flood, Jang explained to his followers in a 2002 message about Christian Today (not to be confused with Christianity Today, the evangelical Christian magazine founded by Billy Graham, which infuriated Community leaders when it ran a multipart exposé about the group). But instead of the rain that bedeviled Noah, Jang explained, humanity is being drowned in information. Information, he said, is everywhere, but “there is no water to drink.”

To solve that problem, Jang explained, the Community would build a new ark—a group of true believers that would gather up the people of the world and prepare them to enter the kingdom of God. This new ark would be divided into three types of ministries, representing the spirit, the soul, and the body of the church. The spiritual ministries are devoted to Bible instruction and include Apostolos and Young Disciples. Olivet represents the Community’s soul. The group’s moneymakers—businesses ranging from a shoe store to a web design firm—make up the ark’s body.