Eco-Radical, Singer, Criminal, Cult Leader: Inside Carbon Nation

Eligio Bishop declared himself a God to a group of dedicated followers he led through Central America, Mexico, and the US before landing in the Atlanta area. Now he's serving life in prison

Rolling Stone/February 23, 2025

By David Peisner

It’s July Fourth, and Eligio Bishop is pacing his cell at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison, with a phone pressed to his ear, wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts. The 42- year-old is locked in his cell nearly 24 hours a day, seven days a week. His only company, he says, are rats and roaches that sometimes bite him while he sleeps. “If there was hell on Earth,” Bishop says, “this is it.”

Bishop’s cell is small and austere. The one indulgence he’s permitted are phone calls, in 20-minute increments, every few days. For someone who loves talking as much as Bishop, it’s a lifeline. A guard rolls the phone cart into his cell, and if nobody else wants it, Bishop can string together these 20-minute calls for hours, which is how I end up spending nearly four hours across two days talking to him.

Bishop is serving life without the possibility of parole after being found guilty in March of rape, false imprisonment, and revenge porn. He claims he’s innocent. In fact, it’s one of the first things he tells me on the phone: “I’m a controversial figure because what I stand for goes against the power structure.”

Since 2016, Bishop has led an itinerant eco-cult known for most of those years as Carbon Nation. Calling himself “Natureboy,” he’s promoted a grab bag of beliefs including veganism, polygamy, nudity, astrology, and sleeping and shitting outside. “What I stand for is very simple,” he says. “The human race needs to stop living the way we’re living — for our own survival. I promote living in tune with nature.”

Bishop contends that melanin, which produces skin, hair, and eye pigmentation, has almost supernatural powers enhanced by the sun. As such, he preaches the benefits of leaving the U.S. to live in the tropics, particularly for Black people. He traces issues plaguing Black Americans — racism, poverty, illness — to the fact that, as he puts it, “this isn’t our natural environment, but we’re still fighting for our rights within it.”

Between 2016 and 2022, Bishop and a rotating core of about 10 to 20 followers hopscotched through Central America, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, California, Nevada, and Texas, before landing in the Atlanta area. His role evolved from master teacher to tribal chieftain to God himself.

“I’m going to tell you this right on the phone,” he says during our July Fourth call. “I am the king of the Earth. I’m the Messiah. I’m God returning. I’m Christ.”

Bishop says things like this a lot. It’s part of what makes talking to him so disorienting. It’s less a conversation than a long, winding monologue. My efforts to steer it with questions aren’t ignored but rather incorporated into Bishop’s stream of consciousness. A didactic lesson about the biblical creation story (“In the beginning, God said what? Let there be light, yes. So, God thinks us into existence.”) incorporates references to Kanye West and the Christopher Nolan film Inception. There are cogent points about white supremacy and environmental destruction cheek by jowl with tangents on R. Kelly, ChatGPT, and the hair-root plexus. He tells me white people are “a virus on the planet” and Black men are “the immune system,” which is why “you throw us in cages.” When I ask where this particular theory will lead, he begins to rap the chorus of Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” then launches into an antisemitic tirade against Drake.

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!”).

Bishop’s message has resonated more widely than you might guess. Carbon Nation is part of an ecosystem of Black spiritualists, natural-living advocates, herbalists, alternative historians, motivational speakers, and backpack rappers known as the conscious community. Bishop amassed 94,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel, NatureboyTV, and more than 50,000 on Facebook and Instagram. At times, the cameras were running nearly round-the-clock, turning Carbon Nation into a sort of immersive, nonstop reality show.

All this attracted a steady churn of new members, most of them Black, creative, and relatively young. Several, including Bishop, fancied themselves rappers or singers; a few had worked on the fringes of the music business. As such, Carbon Nation produced lots of music — mostly hip-hop, some of it surprisingly listenable. Many members, christened with catchy names like Musa, Zoca, and Soular, became micro-celebrities. Dozens of YouTube channels and TikTok and Instagram accounts comment on the group.

They’ve rarely been starved for content. Since 2016, members of the self-described cult have coupled, uncoupled, argued, fought, been exiled, returned. Bishop has juggled a rotating cast of “wives,” encouraging them to battle — at times, literally — for his affections. There’s been lots of sex — in pairs, in groups — but make no mistake, this isn’t free love. Particularly in recent years, Bishop controlled the group with an iron fist, laying down rules about everything from when people can eat to who they can sleep with.

“Wherever Eligio went, chaos ensued,” says Chantelle Coleman, who runs the Tea, a YouTube channel that bills itself as “the TMZ of the Conscious Community.” One member died under murky circumstances in Mexico. Another was murdered in Canada. A woman who’d spent a few weeks with Carbon Nation in 2020 was arrested months later for killing her mother. Multiple followers have accused Bishop of rape and domestic violence.

Bishop maintains that the incident that landed him in prison was consensual and sees his prosecution as part of a larger story. In 2023, two other prominent figures in the conscious community, Rashad Jamal of the University of Cosmic Intelligence and Michael Noak, an author known as Brother Polight, were sentenced to long prison terms on sex charges. Dwight “Malachi” York, leader of the Nuwaubian Nation, a Black Muslim cult based in Georgia, was in 2004 sentenced to 135 years in prison for a variety of charges, including child sexual abuse and rape. Bishop contends the government is “targeting Black men that are teaching spirituality.”

“Anybody saying ‘I’m God’ or any kind of Black male that has been in tune is getting locked away,” he tells me. But this has only strengthened his self-belief. “I can’t regret anything because this is happening the way it’s supposed to happen. It has to be this way.”

Launching a Movement

Carbon Nation’s story begins in another small room nearly a decade earlier. In mid-December 2015, Bishop made a 14-minute YouTube video in his bedroom titled “Natureboy How I Live & why.”

The room isn’t much to look at. The walls are bare, save for a small corkboard where he’s tacked up a map of the United States and a menu from Tassili’s, his favorite raw vegan restaurant in Atlanta. There is no bed, just some blankets and pillows lying directly on the beige carpet.

If the overall aesthetic exudes the sad desperation of life on the margins, Bishop himself seems gleeful as he shows viewers his space. Five minutes in, he turns the camera on himself. He’s tall, handsome, with patches of wispy stubble framing his face.

“There was a lot of anger in the black community, and he was like, ‘we just gotta move.’ ”

“People talk about the injustices, white supremacy, and what are we doing about it,” he says. “I’ve decided to be the change that the planet needs.… This is my transition before I go into nature and move out of the country. This is the most efficient way to shut the system down. We don’t need to be violent.… All we need to do is go into nature.”  

That video garnered about 40,000 views, but in the Carbon Nation universe, it’s the Big Bang. Bishop continued making videos, expanding on his ideas, and laying out plans. In July 2016, he posted a video responding to the shooting death of Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old Black man, by police. He urged viewers to “leave America this year before you’re not even able to fucking leave at all.”

Erikka Carroll remembers that video. “There was a lot of anger in the Black community, and he was the first person I heard that was like, ‘We ain’t got to be angry. Just move away.’” Carroll, 38, had been working as an engineer and studio manager for rapper T.I. in Atlanta, but felt disenchanted: “I had everything I wanted, but I felt empty.” She’d just quit her job when Bishop’s video appeared in her Facebook feed. She reached out. He hadn’t yet left the U.S. but told her to stay in touch.

In late July, Bishop took the plunge, and traveled to Honduras. Among the small crew that joined him, one had access to a house there. “We get there, and his house is like a hole in the wall,” Bishop said on a podcast in 2017. “One thing about Natureboy, I don’t like bugs and nasty, creepy shit. I was like, ‘I’m not staying here.’” They settled instead at a rental property near Trujillo. Carroll arrived in September, by which time the group had grown to 10 people and was alternately calling itself Melanation or the Etherians.

“It was beautiful,” Carroll says. Behind the house, a trail led to a waterfall. “We’d get up, watch videos on certain things like melanin. Then we’d go for lunch, go to the waterfall.”

Bishop didn’t invent the idea of Black people quitting America. In fact, the urge is as old as the country itself. In the first half of the 19th century, the American Colonization Society worked to establish Liberia, a colony (and later a country) in West Africa populated by freed Black people from the United States. In the early 20th century, Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association in Harlem, essentially birthing modern Black nationalism and the Back-to-Africa movement.

“There is a long tradition of interest in leaving,” says Ousmane Power-Greene, a history professor at Clark University and the author of books on Black emigration. “It’s been rooted in the idea that outside the U.S., Black Americans can establish a place that will demonstrate Black capability to Black people in the diaspora and perhaps even to a European or American world.”

Bishop’s main innovation, if you can call it that, was pitching a divorce from America as both a wellness journey and the ultimate social media power play. An early video from Honduras feels like a tourist-board commercial, with Bishop and followers frolicking in the river. “This isn’t a vacation,” Bishop says. “This is where we live. You’re more than welcome to stay. You can camp out with us.”

Rah Xi, now a 32-year-old poet, dancer, singer, and songwriter, heard that message right when she needed it. She’d quit her day job as a bank teller and “really wanted to get out of America,” she says. “I just had so much anger towards America. They said all you gotta do is get a flight and we’ll provide housing and food. I saw that video on Facebook, and two weeks later, I was on a plane.”

Bishop was magnetic. But he chose his flock carefully. The group ate one meal a day, all together, at lunchtime. Xi recalls someone who resisted. “This person was like, ‘I want to eat at night.’ He’d make his own meal. He ended up getting kicked out.” When another member disagreed, they got booted, too. “That was the beginning of his ego taking control.”

Life on the Inside

Bishop soured on Honduras after he and several others were robbed at gunpoint. The group piled into a van and drove to Costa Rica, where they moved into a stunning hilltop rental house. In a video from February 2017, Bishop shows off the compound, pointing out fruit trees and a cluster of tents pitched on a knoll overlooking a green valley.

“We live away from everything,” he says. “We are a cult. I am a cult leader.”

Despite a supposed disdain for fossil fuels and modern society, Bishop bought cars, motorcycles, and computer equipment. “We were out there balling,” says Carroll.

Although Bishop claimed he brought some of his own money, the majority of the early funding seems to have come from Philip Goss, who was one of the original three who joined Bishop in Honduras. Several people I interviewed say Goss donated $300,000 to Bishop, and Bishop and Goss talked about it in a video from that time. (Goss didn’t respond to interview requests.)

Goss began to handle the group’s finances. When Alex Raposo arrived in Costa Rica in 2017, he handed over his debit card to Goss. “I should’ve thought that was a red flag,” says Raposo, a white Canadian bodybuilder who’d discovered Bishop’s videos on YouTube. “They used my card and bought a ping-pong table for $800.”

Among the major purchases in Costa Rica was a bevy of musical instruments and recording equipment. “I told him everything he needed for the studio,” says Carroll, the former studio manager. She spent time crafting beats under her cult name, Blueprint, with  tracks leaning into the bright, soulful, earnest vibe of early-2000s conscious hip-hop.

One night, Carroll says, Bishop was recording, and it wasn’t going well. “He wanted to rap and was thinking he can do everything perfect. It wasn’t coming out like that.” Carroll told him she was going to sleep. “He was like, ‘If T.I. said he wanted to record, you would’ve!’ I’m like, ‘Bro, I don’t work for you!’” The argument escalated. “He stepped to me, and I was on my tippy-toes, like, ‘I ain’t scared of you!’” Bishop backed down. Carroll left the group not long after.

Becoming a Cult Leader

Bishop was born in Harlem in 1982 and has said he was a “crack baby.” The story of his upbringing he lays out in his social media videos is troubled. Efforts to get in touch with family members were unsuccessful.

The childhood he describes begins with a void: He has no memory of his parents, who died when he was young. He and his younger brother bounced between foster homes, where, he has said, he experienced sexual abuse. When he was about 11, both brothers were adopted by a couple in New Jersey.

Initially, the new home, in a bucolic suburb, felt like a dream. “It was beautiful nature out there,” Bishop said.

But after the adoption was finalized, life there changed.  In his videos, he describes one adult in his life telling him “because I was dark-skinned, I was dirty,” being scared of his reflection because he was told he was a demon, as well as physical abuse.

As a teenager, Bishop repeatedly ran away from home. “I was in the streets, smoking weed.” Soon, he “had a rap sheet for doing a lot of crimes.” He says he was sent to a series of juvenile detention facilities, and at 16, was transferred to East Jersey State Prison, where he attempted suicide. After an evaluation, he spent time in the prison’s psych ward.

After his release, he enrolled in the military. He has said he completed basic training but was discharged when the Army learned of his psychiatric treatment. He found work as a model, then a stripper, which led to about 10 years in the sex industry. When a gay-porn video featuring him surfaced, he addressed it on a livestream: “I was young and did that for money, so I could survive in the world.”

Around this period, Bishop worked as a barber with his own shop in an Atlanta suburb. He had the gift of gab and would hold court there for hours. He kept a chessboard handy and promised that anyone who could beat him would get a free cut. “Nobody beat me,” he said.

In 2011, police were called to a house east of Atlanta and found Bishop on the front porch attacking Maisha Evans, who he lived with. “When I was hitting her, a cop came out of nowhere,” Bishop said years later in a video. “A cop pulls me off her because I’m trying to fucking murder her.” The police report notes Evans had “severe swelling over her left eye the size of a fist that appeared to possibly be a broken bone; a laceration behind her left ear, several marks on her upper body, and her pajama pants were torn.” (Evans did not respond to requests for comment by press time.)

Bishop was charged with aggravated battery. He faced 20 years in prison, but by the time the case was about to come to trial the following year, Evans and Bishop had reconciled. She wrote the judge a letter in his favor. Bishop took a plea deal that included probation and a $1,000 fine, but no prison time.

“After Maisha, I promised the universe that if you got me out of that time I was supposed to do for putting my hands on [her], that I would never hit another woman,” Bishop said on a livestream. “I lied.”

Looking for Their Place

In mid-October 2017, Bishop led his dozen or so followers on a road trip across Costa Rica. At a routine checkpoint, police detained the group when they discovered most didn’t have passports or had overstayed their visas. They were driven to the police station in the nearby city of Limon.

On the bus outside of the police barracks, most of the group seemed calm, resigned to their fate. Except for Bishop. He livestreamed on his phone, getting increasingly worked up.

“We live on Facebook right now!” he shouted. “Everybody bring their cameras out, make sure they record this, yo! Because if we gonna die, we’re gonna die just like this is going down!” 

An immigration officer boarded the bus and offered to let everyone go once they signed some paperwork.

“We not signing nothing!” Bishop yelled. “We’re standing up for humanity! If you don’t stand for something, you’re going to fall for anything.” Bishop insisted they wouldn’t get off the bus. “You’re going to have to use violence.”

Moments later, police did. Although video of the incident is dark, loud, and hard to follow, Raposo says some members “decided to fight back. They all got beat up. I got released the next day because I didn’t fight back. I had my passport. They stayed for two weeks in a hotel prison.” Most of the group was subsequently deported, but the live­streamed melee generated views.

“People were like, ‘Oh, my God! They arrested Natureboy!’” says Raposo. “That’s what got him a lot of attention.” At times, that’s what Bishop seemed to want most — views, clicks, likes, followers, engagement — even though attention often brought problems.

Before the group left Costa Rica, Bishop had posted a shocking video. “I wanted my son to be so pure that he’d never know he was naked,” says Bishop, who has four children. “I take baths with my kids. I’m naked with my kids. I have sex in front of my kids! My son be breastfeeding, I be making love to his mom! That’s how I get down around kids!” He goes on like this for a minute or so. “My son … I have sex with his mom. After I’m done, I’m laying there, chilling. He grabs my penis. He’s playing with my penis. I let that happen!”

“I promised the universe I would never hit another woman,” Bishop Said. “I lied.”

Bishop later tried to walk back some of these comments, claiming that when he said he had sex around his children, he meant when they slept. By then, though, the video had taken on a life of its own. In late 2017, after being deported from Costa Rica, Bishop was in Texas and got a visit from the state’s Department of Family and Protective Services, who, he says, “did an all-out investigation” and found him “not a threat or a pedophile.” (In response to an open-records request, a representative with the Texas DFPS said it cannot provide case records.)  

Early the following year, the cult had relocated to a property in the lush jungle near San Ignacio, Belize. On a visit to a nearby internet café, the proprietor recognized Bishop from the video and insisted he leave. Later that day, neighbors accused him of being a pedophile. The following day, the cult fled Belize.

“The video is haunting me and can be used to target me in the wrong way,” he said on a recording posted that February. “That’s OK because they do this to Black leaders, to anybody trying to organize anything.” He mentions Martin Luther King Jr. getting stabbed by a mentally-ill woman in 1958. “Anytime you’re a leader and you’re making an impact, there will be people that hate you.”

By this time, there’d been considerable turnover within the group, which now went by Carbon Nation. Most of the new members were in their twenties and thirties, and many felt disillusioned with American society. Several had struggled with depression. But one didn’t fit this profile. Magdalena Sevilla was a 59-year-old mother of adult children who’d been managing a men’s clothing store before she joined Carbon Nation in April 2018. In one video from June of that year, she describes her life as a “spiritual quest” and mentions having been involved with B’nai Zaken, a Black Hebrew Israelite congregation in Chicago, for a time. She’s a gentle presence, a heavyset woman with a soft voice and short, graying black hair. Her daughter, Iset Sevilla-Bazan, says her mother had always had a spiritual curiosity but only discovered she’d joined Carbon Nation when she saw her mom in one of the group’s videos. “It was definitely a shock,” Sevilla-Bazan says.

After an interlude in southern Mexico, Carbon Nation returned to Belize. Sevilla-Bazan struggled to keep in touch with her mother, who went by Mama Dia in the cult. She says that over texts, her mother claimed cell reception was spotty or that her phone battery was dead.

“We’re not sure it was even her responding,” Sevilla-Bazan says. She watched Carbon Nation’s livestreams hoping to spot her mom. When she did, “the rhythm of her speaking was changing. She looked not very healthy.”

By late June, the group had migrated to Palenque, Mexico, where they rented a gorgeous, modern stone house with a plunge pool and patios in the jungle outside of the city.

Most members pitched their tents on a soft, green lawn near the foot of a long stone staircase. In the mornings, they’d typically wake up then make their way inside the house. Sevilla was an early riser, but one morning, as everyone gathered, she was missing. Goss found her in her tent, unresponsive. Another member of the group joined him and noticed “her color had changed.” Sevilla was dead. The medical examiner in Palenque determined the cause as heart failure.

Sevilla had preexisting heart issues, but they’d been successfully managed for years with medication. In videos filmed before her death, Sevilla says she’d stopped taking her medicine. Many online blamed Bishop, who’d long preached that nearly any malady could be healed naturally, without pharmaceuticals. He has repeatedly denied counseling Sevilla against taking medication.

Velvet Marquez, an ex-member, has said Sevilla complained about leg pain in the days before her passing, which can be a symptom of heart issues. Marquez recommended she tell Bishop she needed to go to the hospital. She isn’t sure Sevilla ever did, but blames Bishop regardless. “He does not allow people to have medical attention,” Marquez said in 2020. “This is why Mama Dia passed away.”

Sevilla-Bazan believes her mother would still be alive if she never joined Carbon Nation. After her mother’s death, Sevilla-Bazan struggled to get an accurate sense from Bishop or his followers of what exactly happened.

“I just want to get answers,” she says.

Violence in the Group

At the end of 2017, Daylin Armstead, who goes by Musa, was 22 and in his final semester of college near Baltimore, about to graduate with a psychology degree. His passion, though, was music. He’d played instruments growing up, had done some rapping, and the previous year, he’d gone in with friends to buy a small studio, where he taught himself to engineer. Despite all of this, Musa felt a gnawing emptiness in his life. He found videos of Bishop on YouTube talking about living more sustainably, and it filled some of that void.

“I wasn’t as big on all the spiritual concepts,” Musa says. “I was more so on the system collapsing and really wanting to be self-sustainable.”

At the time, Musa was helping raise two kids. The more he watched Carbon Nation’s content, though, the more he was drawn in. He reached out, letting them know he made music. “I was trying to show I could contribute,” he says.

Musa had seen a video laying out the protocol for prospective new members to join. “He’d teach you to reprogram your subconscious mind,” he says.  

This meant aligning your social media accounts with the group’s accounts, reposting what they post, and following the group’s core principles wherever you were. “So, I stopped taking showers,” Musa says. “I was pooping in the woods. At the time, I was in Maryland, and it was winter.”

As Musa recounts all this to me, I get the feeling he knows it sounds crazy but isn’t willing to dismiss it as a joke. At the time, he felt like, “If I didn’t change the way I was living, I was going to suffer some type of consequence from the universe. So, I left in the middle of the night and didn’t tell anybody.”

This was just after Bishop and his followers had been deported from Costa Rica. Musa got in his car, left his life behind, and drove to meet the group in Texas. Musa slid into Carroll’s former role as engineer and producer of the group’s music. Working frequently with two other recent initiates, Armon Palmer, who went by Pisce, and Ishmael Goodwine, a.k.a. Caliber, the group’s musical output accelerated.

“Loving the money and hating the system/Is loving the warden and hating the prison,” Palmer raps with an eerie synth hook looping behind him on one song called “Negropean.” The song’s music video features Musa and Palmer shirtless, decked out in feathered headdresses, tribal jewelry, and face paint, stalking around vivid jungle landscapes.

“The message was a product, like cocaine,” Musa says. “We were there to package it and get it out.”

Bishop often wasn’t directly involved in writing and recording, but his presence always loomed. Songs that weren’t on message didn’t see the light of day.

Carbon Nation flooded the internet with content — music, lectures, cooking shows, livestreams. By this time, the group’s YouTube videos had a more professional sheen. Many feel like TV shows, complete with opening theme music and a recurring cast of young, beautiful characters. Behind the scenes, though, things were shifting.

“In Palenque, shit started getting more militant,” Musa says.

“We’d eat at the same time, get up at the same time, go to sleep at the same time,” says Aaron Dixon, who went by Tru. “Now, I know those are cult tactics, but at the time, I felt like, ‘This is a community.’” 

Dixon had first discovered Carbon Nation during his final year in the Army, in South Korea. His job was administrative, which left him with hours to fill. “I was on Facebook and YouTube a lot,” he says. “The YouTube algorithm was suggesting a lot of conspiracy videos, and those videos progressively got more intriguing and extreme.” (Bishop’s channel has since been taken down, “following off-platform behavior that is harmful to YouTube’s community,” a spokesperson says.)

Dixon grew up biracial in rural Georgia, estranged from his father, in a community where he “wasn’t white enough for the white kids and wasn’t Black enough for the Black kids.” His mother died when he was 15. After that, he bounced between living with relatives, couch surfing, and occasionally sleeping in his car. The military had given him stability, but he was discharged after being diagnosed with a “major depression disorder.” Dixon searched for something or someone to connect to, and he found Bishop online.

When he arrived in Belize, though, he was taken aback by what he saw. “Something happened between Eligio and Velvet Marquez, and he slapped her. Nobody reacted. It was almost as if it was normal.”

Marquez was in Carbon Nation for nearly four years and has a daughter with Bishop. She’s said she endured years of his abuse. During his rape trial, she testified about an incident on July 4, 2020. “He ordered everybody in the group to make a circle around me so he could beat me inside the circle,” Marquez said on the stand. “He picked me up and kept slamming me on the ground.” (Marquez declined to comment for this story.)

One member who witnessed it was shocked. “The man literally picked her up by the neck, strangled her, and dangled her until she dropped to the ground,” she says. “When she passes out, he starts kicking her in the stomach. Then he puts his knees on her shoulders and starts punching her all over her chest and face. She’s crawling, trying to get herself up. He beat her to a pulp. Then he buys Chinese food afterwards, and everyone eats like nothing happened.” The following month, at Bishop’s insistence, he and Marquez were legally married in Las Vegas alongside three other couples from Carbon Nation.

Other women also allege they suffered violent treatment from Bishop. As Musa recalls, “If you were his wife, you pretty much had an agreement: ‘If you disrespect me, I’m going to put my hands on you.’”

Courtney Townsend, who goes by Soular and joined up in Palenque, says Bishop constantly abused the women. “We’d end up having these meetings that would last six, eight hours, where he’s explaining why he’s locking Velvet in a room, why he had to slap her,” he says. “His explanation was that we’ve been programmed by European men to be weak little men, so our women will never respect us. The women will respect him, and he’s the guy slapping these girls, locking them in rooms.”

In a livestreamed conversation between Bishop and Marquez’s father in May 2019, her father asks why he hit her. “Because I was upset with her,” Bishop says.

“She made you bust her in her face, her nose bleeding profusely everywhere?”

“I’m going to tell you this, Pops,” Bishop responds. “When it comes to me, I’m a man.”

The group’s online viewers have consistently reported suspected abuse within the cult to local authorities. In March 2019, Mexican police visited the property in Palenque. Video of the encounter shows an investigator asking the group questions as they line up on the steps outside of the house. As Musa recalls, “The next day, we literally left and drove to Nicaragua.”

Not much changed in Nicaragua. In late June, police raided their house there and arrested Bishop. He was held for three weeks, then deported. He returned to Central America, this time to Panama, where the pattern repeated: Arrested. Jailed. Deported.

When Covid hit in the spring of 2020, the group relocated to the Big Island of Hawaii. It seemed perfect — tropical but without the threat of deportation. But soon after arriving, Bishop and 20 followers were arrested for violating the state’s quarantine rules. After a stint in jail, Bishop pleaded no contest and was sentenced to 90 days. The sentence was suspended as long as he and his followers agreed to leave Hawaii.

“So, we basically got deported from Hawaii,” Dixon says, “which is hard to do.”

The Modern-Day Cult

In many ways, Carbon Nation turns the traditional image of a cult — shadowy, operating outside of modern society — on its head. The group was all over the internet, battling it out with its critics on social media. But according to Steve Hassan,a psychotherapist and cult expert,[See Cult Education Institute disclaimer concerning Steven Hassan] they’re part of a new wave. “Cults have gone online,” he says. “That’s where they’re principally recruiting and indoctrinating.

Janja Lalich, a sociologist who specializes in cults and extremism, has seen the same trend. “Internet-based cults got a big boost during the pandemic,” she says. People can initially get indoctrinated quietly, staring at their phone or laptop, safe from others’ judgment. Many go no further, content to remain on the outer ring of followers, as so-called fringe members. At its height, Carbon Nation likely had hundreds if not thousands who fell into this category.

According to Lalich, there’s one consistent trait among those who join cults, online or otherwise: idealism.

“It’s people who want to make a better world, have a better family, find a better religion, make more money,” she says. In Bishop’s case, he packaged a lot of contemporary concerns and targeted a population uniquely poised to hear his message.

“Bishop is capturing an audience that’s starving for this type of spirituality.”

“He’s capturing an audience starving for this type of spirituality,” says Coleman, who runs the YouTube channel following the group. Over the past decade, she says, “within the Black community, a lot of us were going through a spiritual awakening. New Age spirituality was on the rise.” The broad sweep of Black history — marked by grave injustices and systematic discrimination — can make someone offering a way to explain and overcome that history appealing.

Greene. Carbon Nation’s message was a huge draw online. Coleman began following their exploits in 2018. Her channel, which now has nearly 40,000 subscribers, is part of a constellation of YouTube channels and social media hubs that track the conscious community. Many of the community’s prominent figures have built sizable platforms. Sa Neter, who frequently interviews conscious-­community leaders, has more than 200,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel, House of Konsciousness. Umar Johnson, an outspoken Pan-Africanist and psychologist, has more than a million Instagram followers. Rappers like Arcaze, Daylyt, and Fr33Sol have amassed hundreds of thousands of social media followers.

Of course, the vast majority of these conscious-community figures aren’t leading cults, breaking laws, or condoning anyone who is, but there’s an openness to unconventional beliefs and conspiracy theories that the more predatory characters take advantage of. Rashad Jamal, the former rapper who leads the University of Cosmic Intelligence and is now serving 18 years on child-molestation charges, has repeatedly cast his prosecution as persecution.

“The only law I’ve broken is speaking out against oppression,” Jamal said on the UCI’s YouTube channel last January. “They don’t like niggas that do that.… The only thing I’m guilty of is freeing the minds of my people and speaking out against this system.”

During my first call with Bishop, he lights up at the mention of Jamal. “You know COINTELPRO?” he asks. “That’s real. Stop the rise of a Black messiah. The idea of a Black man becoming intelligent, then grouping everybody together and making them turn against the system. Look at what I was doing: I had influence over people.”

COINTELPRO was, in fact, real. Between 1956 and 1971, the FBI had a covert program to undermine individuals and organizations it deemed radical that targeted Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Fred Hampton, among others. One explicit goal, as detailed in a 1968 memo, was preventing “the rise of a messiah” who could unify Black nationalists. Bishop has repeatedly leaned into this history, conflating his situation with those of vaunted Civil Rights leaders, and blaming criticism or law enforcement on shadowy forces colluding to silence him.

“What you see happening with all these Black leaders from that time is exactly in congruence with what’s going on with my chief today,” says Edgar Bright, who’s still loyal to Bishop and goes by Jax. “The powers that be designed a whole system to stop the rise of a Black messiah.”

Coleman says she understands the impulse to draw these parallels, but they don’t hold up to scrutiny. “It’s disingenuous to compare those guys to Fred Hampton or Malcolm X, because those guys don’t have sex charges. I know it’s hard for people because they’ve got to blame somebody for all these different men who have the ability to move large groups of Black people, so they say, ‘They took him down because he was too controversial.’ But the government didn’t set them up to commit these crimes. That’s their own doing.”

Fact Versus Fiction

As Carbon Nation bounced from Hawaii to California and then to Las Vegas in 2020, the ideological messages once so prominent in their videos were increasingly buried beneath a surreal, debauched montage: members slapping each other, a brawl on the beach between Bishop’s wives. Bishop would berate followers or stoke conflict on livestreams tagged as “Real Nigga Moments.”

He explains away some of the drama as part of a psycho-spiritual healing process. “What you’re watching is shadow work,” he says during one of our calls. Much of the rest, he claims, is a strategic bait and switch. “I utilized that to get people’s attention. Behind the scenes, the guys knew we were acting.”

There were financial incentives, too. The $300,000 Goss had donated years earlier was long gone, as was Goss. Money came in from other members. Dixon received a monthly disability check from the VA, which he gave to Carbon Nation. Another ex-military member also regularly donated disability pay. Others received Social Security or unemployment that went into the pot. Members also applied for food stamps and donated Covid stimulus payments. They solicited donations from online supporters, too. According to Townsend, many of the men regularly hit up women outside of the group for money. “Say we need to go somewhere and we’re short $200. I’ll hit up one of my girls and be like, ‘You got space for 600 this month? Just send me 200 right now.’ This is their way of proving their loyalty from a distance.”


The Singapore-based social media app Bigo Live paid members to stream over their platform. “That’s how we were eating — off the internet and donations,” says Shaka Calvin, a.k.a. Shaka Zulu, who spent several months in Carbon Nation. “That’s when it would really get bad because [Bishop] started becoming a celebrity. They were all having to do things to get attention, to get money.”

The line between reality and fiction blurred. “All the stuff, us acting crazy, being militant, the fights, we’d tell people it’s just a show,” Townsend says. “It wasn’t. That stuff was happening off camera, too. These women were actually getting abused. At a certain point, it was no longer acting. He never stopped.”

Beginning of the End

In early 2020, Jenaé Newell was 25 and working at Tassili’s, the same Atlanta raw vegan restaurant whose menu Bishop had tacked up in his bedroom when his journey as Natureboy began. She’d followed Carbon Nation online for years and had built her own small following, posting her artwork and music, offering tarot-card readings, and discussing many of the same spiritual concepts they did. The cult had recently relocated to the Atlanta area, and Newell connected with members at Tassili’s.

“I loved them,” she says. “I believed they were my frequency family, which was what he preached, people of like minds coming together on a common mission to elevate the consciousness of the Earth.”

When Newell first joined, she says, Bishop was “a teddy bear,” but she wasn’t attracted to him. Over time, their relationship evolved. “He was a teacher, then a friend, then after some time, he tried to make me his lover and wife.”

The night of March 27, 2022, there was a small party at the house the group was living in on a suburban cul-de-sac in Dekalb County. Newell testified that after Bishop chastised her for disrespecting him, one of Bishop’s wives, Jayon Marie Hamilton, who goes by Zoca, punched her multiple times. Bishop told Newell to leave. She packed her bags and when she walked out to her Uber, Bishop called to her from upstairs. She returned and joined him, alone, in a bedroom.

According to testimony at the trial, Bishop told Newell he wanted to have sex with her “one more time.” She repeatedly said she didn’t want to. At one point he said, “I’m not going to rape you.” She froze. “I didn’t want to be raped.… I said, ‘OK. I’m going to do this one last time.’” Early the next morning, Newell quietly left the house and never returned.

After her departure, Bishop reposted videos on social media of himself and Newell having sex. Newell reported this to the police as revenge porn, but made no mention of rape. In a later police interview, she said that “he made love to me” and that she “gave it to him” because she “still care[d] for him.”

Newell tells me she thinks about that night differently now. “When I heard the rape charge, I was like, ‘What? He never raped me,’” she says. “But then they explained, ‘Jenaé, this is what rape is.’ I never thought that power dynamic was rape. After researching cults and cult leaders, I was able to understand that all he did was rape us. It was a culture of rape in Carbon Nation.”

When Bishop stood trial for raping Newell, two other ex-members testified that he raped them too, though he was never charged. Bishop denies the allegations.

“He obviously didn’t think he raped me,” Newell says. “But he has been doing that for years. That’s what makes him dangerous. He doesn’t know the wrongs he’s doing and doesn’t admit to them. He thought because I said yes one time after a million no’s, it was OK. It wasn’t.”

Life After Carbon Nation

Bishop was arrested at the house outside of Atlanta on April 13, 2022. He was denied bond and remained incarcerated until his trial began last February. During that time, Carbon Nation began to crumble.

Townsend, Musa, and Palmer left within a week of his arrest. Dixon hung on until September, by which point he was living in his car, showering at a nearby Planet Fitness. His wife, whom he’d met in Carbon Nation, had already left with their child, but it took him time to reintegrate into society. “I’ve had to unlearn a lot of habits and belief systems I’d adopted,” he says.

That’s been true for many former members. Some have joined other groups, becoming what Lalich calls “cult hoppers.” Many still believe in Bishop’s teachings, even if they’ve lost faith in Bishop himself. Townsend and Marquez attempted at one point to relaunch Carbon Nation with themselves as leaders. “Why should we let one guy ruin what was changing the world?” Townsend says. The project didn’t take.

Musa currently lives in Puerto Rico and says that after taking psychedelics “that bleached my mind,” he’s been able to gain perspective. “The way I look at it, I’m not any different than him. I don’t see anybody in the group that’s different or better than him.”

The day I spoke with Newell, she’d just returned from applying for a job as a restaurant server. “I’m trying to get my life together,” she says. “I’m a single mother, so I’m doing what I have to do to get where I need in life.”

For others, the path out has been darker. Amaar Jawaid, who went by Loyal, left about a month after Bishop’s arrest and, according to Dixon, took with him money, cellphones, and hard drives that belonged to the group. Jawaid was a Canadian whose father had died when he was young. He’d spent much of his life searching for belonging and had joined Carbon Nation at 18.

“He looked at Eligio as a father figure,” Townsend says. On March 6, 2023, police in Oshawa, Ontario, responded to a house fire and found Jawaid’s body. The death was ruled a homicide. Three people have been charged with second-degree murder. “I watched this kid go from a neutral guy to thinking he’s a gangsta,” Townsend says. “This is what ended up getting him killed.”

By the time Bishop’s case went to trial, Carbon Nation’s core membership numbered barely more than a half dozen. On the trial’s opening day, Bishop wore gold-rimmed glasses and a blue paisley blazer over a white turtleneck and white pants. Before testimony began, the state offered Bishop a plea, 30 years, with the rape charge reduced to aggravated assault. He declined.

Over four days, the prosecution called ex-members to the stand, including Dixon, Townsend, Newell, and Marquez. Several Carbon Nation die-hards testified in Bishop’s defense, but didn’t seem to help his cause. One of his wives, Iyah, admitted under oath to posting revenge porn. Another member, Juliano Diaz, who goes by Juju, was ejected from the courtroom by the judge when he lingered on the stand after his testimony concluded to declare Bishop was being “maliciously prosecuted.”

The verdict came in on March 1, after a six-day trial: guilty on all counts. At the sentencing hearing later that day, Bishop stood in his orange prison jumpsuit, handcuffed, and addressed the judge directly. “I see what y’all are doing, and I want you to know I forgive you,” he said. “And I still love you.”

A few minutes later, just before announcing his sentence, the judge spoke from the bench, calling Bishop a “master manipulator” and “the classic definition of a narcissist.”

“I would’ve been inclined to show some discretion if Mr. Bishop had shown any remorse, guilt, or regret throughout this process,” she said. She sentenced him to life without the possibility of parole, plus 10 years.

Bishop claims he was maliciously prosecuted, and insists, at the very least, he was oversentenced. “That’s been happening to Black men for a long time,” he tells me.

In an email, Kay Levine, an Emory law professor who studies sentencing, described the sentence as “excessive to me for the crimes and the number of counts (and the lack of force); I’d be surprised if other rape defendants in Dekalb have received something so extreme under more severe circumstances.”

A spokesperson for the Dekalb County DA noted the potential punishments for rape in Georgia range from 25 years up through the death penalty. “Our office asked the judge for a sentence of life without parole. We believe that’s appropriate.”

As Newell sees it, “They put him away for the totality of everything. It wasn’t just for me. What about the other victims, the people that never came forward?”

In August, Bishop was transferred to Macon State Prison. On his first full day there, he was stabbed. He was briefly hospitalized then returned to his cell. Prison officials described his injuries as “non-life-threatening,” but Iyah tells me Bishop suffered a collapsed lung. (Georgia Department of Corrections officials didn’t respond to multiple requests for information.) Macon State curtailed Bishop’s phone access, and since then, he’s been largely incommunicado.

During a previous conversation, Bishop told me he has no money to mount an appeal. “I know I’m going to be exonerated, but I don’t know how. God isn’t going to let me sit in here. I’m too valuable to humanity.”

In recent months, the remaining members of Carbon Nation have rebranded themselves Imagine Nation, which feels oddly appropriate for a group that at this point merely reflects its leader’s warped psyche. As Dixon puts it, “Carbon Nation is over. We’re just waiting for them to realize that.”

The disillusionment Bishop tapped into remains very real.

“What Natureboy was trying to do is get these Black kids to see that the trick is being stuck here in America,” says Shaka Calvin. “Because I didn’t feel like America was giving me ­anything. They take, take, take, take, and take. I feel like I’m crazy if I’m in a situation where I’m trying to make peace and I’m getting took.”

But in the end, whether Bishop was ever earnest or was always running an elaborate con is beside the point for Dixon. He and many others bought in.

“It was very hard for me to accept that Carbon Nation was a joke,” he says, “and that for the last four years, I’ve literally been following behind a clown who has been putting on a show for people.