There are many ways we can come to define what compromises a Cult. There are a couple of podcasts on the concept of Cults and they fairly do a broad sweep of the subject which can include Bravo’s Housewives franchises to certain types of diets. My personal favorite: The Cult of Dolly Parton. I have to admit that while I respect fandom there is this point where you cross lines, but I am not sure I have heard of anyone altering their body physically and dressing like Dolly daily, relocating to Tennessee and taking up residence near Dollywood to be closer to their icon where her songs are on permanent playlist. The Cult of Kardashians however…..
But the point is that when you become obsessive to the point where all rational thought and all spare time and energy is devoted to a singular subject that you are willing to change your lifestyle, your appearance, donate your money or turn over your finances and independence in which to pursue and remain in the society in which you are a member, you are in a cult. There is the Sarah Lawrence Cult that was in the news of late and a subject of a Documentary and now a play. That is a cult.
There are cults around business, NXVIM is one that stands out as perhaps the most bizarre of those, but I would include Scientology as that is a publishing industry as well as a Real Estate Firm despite having the designation of a “Religion” enabling them tax breaks and exemptions. Nice work if you can get it.
And that is the biggest cult of all – Organized Religion. The idea that you can have a “house” as it is called for worship, draw people in to listen to someone read a version of a book, take that an interpret its meaning, then demand fealty, in turn submission of one’s soul to that and demand money in which to enable you to do it all again and then not pay taxes on earnings, that is to say a hell of a cult.
And like all Cults sex is the big tool, pencil in which to draw and of course the weapon to further the submission of now both body and soul. The Catholic Church really mastered that craft and with that there are more Revelations than in the Bible (pun intended) about other organized Churches that have similar problem, the Southern Baptists are one such example. With that the promises of investigations and repentance, the big tool of Churches that one there, in which to ostracize those who harmed others. In other words, like Police who get busted for shooting/killing/harming someone they are just moved to a new place on the Chess Board. They then spend their days hoping to not get caught again for doing the same or just at least not outed for something they did in the past and promise, pinky swear, to never do again.
When one thinks of Cults almost always you think of Religion. There are many and the cross the globe. The fill a Wiki page and include largely those centered on the concept of faith. But they are more than that. You really have to examine what a cult is, and despite the idea that they are some sort of thrown together crazies who are nuts is actually kind of right and wrong. Charlie Manson was an example of that but when you look at the Cult of Nike Shoes, aka Heaven’s Gate, they were not. They were highly organized, had a dogma, a Hierarchy and in turn financial records, established income and were to all their members it was a “religion.” If they had the appropriate tax documentation and legal registration filed that I cannot answer but I suspect they did. And yes there is a podcast about them too.
And with that the idea of Mass Suicide aka Homicide features in many cults. There was Jim Jones, the above mentioned Heaven’s Gate and this cult in Kenya that had members starve themselves while the founder managed to survive. This is not unlike the one in Tennessee, subject of another documentary The Way Down, about the Remnant Fellowship and their founding Minister, Gwen Shamblin, who died in a plane crash. Guess weight was not a problem in why that plane crashed.
And there is a debate that groups like Heaven’s Gate and many other established groups, almost all of them subjects of movies, documentaries, podcasts and books, such Wild Wild Country. And are they in fact organized religions that simply like Scientology have a different angle on historical canons or are they are a cult? Again, I think ALL and any of it are cults but again I will say that you are free to go in and out of a Church at any time and not feel compelled to shave your head, wear a costume, donate all your money and go live in social isolation dedicated to the faith. Oh wait? Never mind. Still love Audrey Hepburn in a Nun’s Story though.
I have found some similarities to cults, they are all started by Men and then they get Women involved to be the recruiters, the beards, the front faces to show the legitimacy of the organization. Even Jeffrey Epstein had Jizzehlda/Ghislaine or Beard, to pose as his companion in which to enable him to move among the movers and shakers of leadership and finance in which to gain trust, gain money and fuck young girls. The revelations of that family/cult/business is still coming to light. I love the denial by all those whose interests coalesced with Epstein in pursuit of more money (sure but really isn’t sex part of that?) I love that they never saw a “young” girl in his company or on his properties and planes. Really you didn’t? They seem to remember you.
Yes folks Money is a type of cult, where the Billionaires and Millionaires meet, greet, fuck and do it all again in pursuit of money and fame. And all of that comes or do I mean cum, in the forms of buying, planes, boats, art or homes in which to prove how your bank account and dick are the biggest. Look at Newport or Beverly Hills, the Hamptons, Manhattan where they have erect ones lining the sky. Islands or Ranches are another way to hide one’s crimes right in the open and with that they are telling us to fuck off as this is an exclusive cult where membership is closed.
There would be no NXIVM or many cults without the Multi Level Marketing one sees in other business oriented “cults” such as Amway and Herbalife. That is how that nut, Raniere, in NXIVM made a living prior to his founding of that cult. MLMs have been called many names, including network marketing, social marketing, pyramid schemes, Ponzi schemes, product-based sales, referral marketing, and direct sales. MLMs are pyramid schemes that focus on recruiting people to recruit others, presumably giving a cut of the income up the chain. Bernie Madoff anyone?
When you dedicate yourself to preserving a belief, a lifestyle, a type of faith falls in line. Without that you have well just life and free will, and cults do not want free will, they want submission and obsession. The idea that you will have a better life, maybe not on this planet or even when alive but later so keep on believing, starving, earning, worshiping or fucking. That last one is always the biggest element in most cults. Remember they are almost all started by Men. Gwen broke that glass ceiling literally and is now with her God so I assume she can eat now, you don’t need food in heaven. And that Men are well men and they are ruled by the Dick. Why do you think all are Warriors of God and carry a big Sword there?
There are many cults and many types of them. The John Birch Society, the KKK, the White Supremacy movements that have many extensions the same way the Southern Baptists have Churches. Where to you think White Christian Nationalism comes from? I often recall the Westboro Baptist Church. But think of all the Pro Life Movements, where they literally killed Doctors, so much for pro life. And Politics make for strange bedfellows and none are more strange than the obsessive histrionic belief in Donald Trump. I have long said he hit the boxes of having money and fame. We all know that both are due to bluster and production values that the show The Apprentice provided. Like all Churches, Businesses have the Front of the House and the Back of the House. The back runs it all, they collect the money, hide the money and disperse the money, to themselves. It is all a type of grifting, or the long con. And without a certain type of believers that continue to come through the doors there is no way a business can last and you need that door open 24/7. Thank GOD for the Internet as now you never are closed.
The rise of Social Media parallels the rise of White Supremacy as it enabled, permitted, tolerated and allowed it. There were always factions and groups who in their isolation found support but then you have a massive communication too to facilitate it. Fox News and Tucker Carlson became the de facto propaganda machine and in turn those incidents of violence prompted by racial and religious animosity were easily dismissed and the faux rise of “antifa” became the new warrior cry and ones to blame. In my day it was Hippies, before that Communists and so on. The same way the lay elections at Soccer Moms, Tea Partiers and other “groups” that will be the determining factor are just concocted by the Media in which to bring eyes to screens, now those screens are more than Televisions, they are Phones, Computers, IPads and any form of technology one uses to find like. And as in all Math equations, like likes like.
As I watched the recent film on Showtime on Waco and I began to realize the complex web of how Guns and how those with guns meet, interact and the individuals, almost all exclusively white men who are lost and misdirected and use often Religion as their expression of frustration it allowed me to learn more about the way we use whatever tool we have in our kit to become a weapon. McVeigh was prompted by Waco and led him to find an enabler or more than one (which we still do not know and never will) I do find it ironic that it was the current DOJ Head, Merrick Garland who Prosecuted him but I am not sure I agree that it was flawless as he failed to realize that others were involved to help him plan and act upon it. And when we look at many of the mass shootings they are prompted by far more than a lone wolf who did not get laid, were bullied, were Racist, were Homophobic, Misogynist, Anti Semitic or whatever “ist” you need to validate your rage.
Jeffrey Toobin has written a new book, Homegrown, documenting some of this history behind Waco and the fanaticism that grew out of the 90s. The culmination of that was in fact Columbine. I had read the great book by Dave Cullen on the subject and knew the boys were not in fact bullied or sad losers. They had been in fact arrested and with that they conned their Parents, the Authorities that they were not a problem. But the myths remain. The same way a Teacher called that trigger by the drawings by one of them, the same was true in Michigan and yet the Parents there did know and in turn took off running. Denial is the same as complicity in many of these young men who are enabled to get guns, to hide the second life in the same way a Man hides a Mistress. Talk about Cults again and its relationship to reality TV take a look at Scandoval. What a farce that took up hours of rage and mob mentality to denigrate an idiot on a “reality” show and his affair. Do you actually know these people? Why do you care? Apply that rationale to the angry white men/boys who for some reason seen others as enemy’s and wish to do them harm. And when I got into an online argument with someone who was convinced that Columbine was a standard school shooting (again are any?) I pointed to the facts behind their reasoning, how they were perceived in legal filings as “good young promising men” by Therapists and Law Enforcement. Their parents relieved and meanwhile they planned on. Their killing of most of the victims was in the School Library and they took pleasure while shooting them. It is not a pretty story but again we have a gun problem, we have a massive mental health problem and we have no way of stopping or circumventing any of it. Time and time again we have failed to see signs, ignore flags and in turn we are so afraid we in fact contribute to it by buying more guns. And I will write a post about the history of how guns became the most significant issue in America today, a type of de facto defense mechanism that has little to do with the 2nd Amendment but more about money and strategy by the NRA and Gun Manufacturers. As all things in life there is always history and a back story.
But without a leader, a type of person, either dead or alive, in which to draw members there is no cult. Think Jesus and that is the starring member of that cult. When one looks at many “cult” fanatics there are usually patterns of behavior and failed businesses that often push one to form a type of community and in turn prove the naysayers wrong. The intent may be benign, but usually it evolves and becomes grander in both scope and scale. They almost always do. But as Americans we are illiterate, we like to emote, we like to believe what we believe and refuse to spend anytime doing the homework, taking the time to ask questions, and expect that our “instincts” are right. Really? Your instincts? We have two: Fight or flight. And with that we have some with higher order thinking skills motivated largely by the biggest motivator – Money. Money is the only thing that matters regardless of Class, Race, Gender etc, etc etc. And anyone who tells you different is either a Charlatan aka a Cult Leader or a Pathological liar aka a Cult Leader. Some are better than others at manipulating people to BELIEVE and not all of it is about a belief but it is about money. See Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos on that one.
It all falls to those who are Believers, Followers and those who are Leaders. And they are distinctly different. It is the Cult of Personality.
I read an odd review about the movie, Woman Talking, and with that it compared it to the movie, Top Gun as the type of escapist film we should enjoy and appreciate for what they offer. Huh? I adored Top Gun and it was nostalgia that led me to see that film and to Val Kilmer acknowledged was something I was thrilled to see. But was it a great movie? I loved it and I loved Everything Anywhere as well. The end of that. But, I again go back to one of my favorite Actors who commented on Twitter about the film Women Talking with regards to failing to address Women of Color and their stories. I felt deep anger when I read that and then deep shame as he is an incredibly ignorant man who had no idea about the background or history of this story.
While the book which the film is based is Fiction it is truly what defines Creative Non Fiction as it was a real group of Mennonite Women in Bolivia where they lived and underwent this systemic abuse from where the Author took the story. She was a former Mennonite as well. Do you need to read that book in which to see the film? No but it is always interesting to see what a Director or Writer does to adapt an existing work, and this is not an exception and Ms. Polley did also win an Oscar for that work. But does this mean without that knowledge or history in place I assume you may believe it is the ultimate escapism as in the genre of Horror as who would really live like that? They do. The story is below. And do you need to be a Woman to understand it? A Mennonite? A Cult Member or formerly one? A Religious person? A Person of Color? Or just a Human Being? Everything everywhere is not always about you. Watch and learn. I don’t think Top Gun taught me anything about the Military but I can still just be entertained and sometimes I need to be informed.
The Ghost Rapes of Bolivia
For a while, the residents of Manitoba Colony thought demons were raping the town’s women. There was no other way of explaining how a woman could wake up with blood and semen stains smeared across her sheets and no memory of the previous night.
by Jean Friedman-Rudovsky
December 22, 2013, Vice
For a while, the residents of Manitoba Colony thought demons were raping the town’s women. There was no other explanation. No way of explaining how a woman could wake up with blood and semen stains smeared across her sheets and no memory of the previous night. No way of explaining how another went to sleep clothed, only to wake up naked and covered by dirty fingerprints all over her body. No way to understand how another could dream of a man forcing himself onto her in a field—and then wake up the next morning with grass in her hair.
For Sara Guenter, the mystery was the rope. She would sometimes wake up in her bed with small pieces of it tied tightly to her wrists or ankles, the skin beneath an aching blue. Earlier this year, I visited Sara at her home, simple concrete painted to look like brick, in Manitoba Colony, Bolivia. Mennonites are similar to the Amish in their rejection of modernity and technology, and Manitoba Colony, like all ultraconservative Mennonite communities, is a collective attempt to retreat as far as possible from the nonbelieving world. A slight breeze of soy and sorghum came off the nearby fields as Sara told me how, in addition to the eerie rope, on those mornings after she’d been raped she would also wake to stained sheets, thunderous headaches, and paralyzing lethargy.
Her two daughters, 17 and 18 years old, squatted silently along a wall behind her and shot me fierce blue-eyed stares. The evil had penetrated the household, Sara said. Five years ago, her daughters also began waking up with dirty sheets and complaints of pain “down below.”
The family tried locking the door; some nights, Sara did everything she could to keep herself awake. On a few occasions, a loyal Bolivian worker from the neighboring city of Santa Cruz would stay the night to stand guard. But inevitably, when their one-story home—set back and isolated from the dirt road—was not being watched, the rapes continued. (Manitobans aren’t connected to the power grid, so at night the community is submerged in total darkness.) “It happened so many times, I lost count,” Sara said in her native Low German, the only language she speaks, like most women in the community.
In the beginning, the family had no idea that they weren’t the only ones being attacked, and so they kept it to themselves. Then Sara started telling her sisters. When rumors spread, “no one believed her,” said Peter Fehr, Sara’s neighbor at the time of the incidents. “We thought she was making it up to hide an affair.” The family’s pleas for help to the council of church ministers, the group of men who govern the 2,500-member colony, were fruitless—even as the tales multiplied. Throughout the community, people were waking to the same telltale morning signs: ripped pajamas, blood and semen on the bed, head-thumping stupor. Some women remembered brief moments of terror: For an instant they would wake to a man or men on top of them but couldn’t summon the strength to yell or fight back. Then, fade to black.
Some called it “wild female imagination.” Others said it was a plague from God. “We only knew that something strange was happening in the night,” Abraham Wall Enns, Manitoba Colony’s civic leader at the time, said. “But we didn’t know who was doing it, so how could we stop it?”
No one knew what to do, and so no one did anything at all. After a while, Sara just accepted those nights as a horrific fact of life. On the following mornings, her family would rise despite the head pain, strip the beds, and get on with their days.
Then, one night in June 2009, two men were caught trying to enter a neighbor’s home. The two ratted out a few friends, and, falling like a house of cards, a group of nine Manitoba men, ages 19 to 43, eventually confessed that they had been raping Colony families since 2005. To incapacitate their victims and any possible witnesses, the men used a spray created by a veterinarian from a neighboring Mennonite community that he had adapted from a chemical used to anesthetize cows. According to their initial confessions (which they later recanted), the rapists admitted to—sometimes in groups, sometimes alone—hiding outside bedroom windows at night, spraying the substance through the screens to drug entire families, and then crawling inside.
But it wasn’t until their trial, which took place almost two years later, in 2011, that the full scope of their crimes came to light. The transcripts read like a horror movie script: Victims ranged in age from three to 65 (the youngest had a broken hymen, purportedly from finger penetration). The girls and women were married, single, residents, visitors, the mentally infirm. Though it’s never discussed and was not part of the legal case, residents privately told me that men and boys were raped, too.
In August 2011, the veterinarian who’d supplied the anesthetic spray was sentenced to 12 years in prison, and the rapists were each sentenced to 25 years (five years shy of Bolivia’s maximum penalty). Officially, there were 130 victims—at least one person from more than half of all Manitoba Colony households. But not all those raped were included in the legal case, and it’s believed the true number of victims is much, much higher.
In the wake of the crimes, women were not offered therapy or counseling. There was little attempt to dig deeper into the incidents beyond the confessions. And in the years since the men were nabbed, there has never been a colony-wide discussion about the events. Rather, a code of silence descended following the guilty verdict.
“That’s all behind us now,” Civic Leader Wall told me on my recent trip there. “We’d rather forget than have it be at the forefront of our minds.” Aside from interactions with the occasional visiting journalist, no one talks about it anymore.
But over the course of a nine-month investigation, including an 11-day stay in Manitoba, I discovered that the crimes are far from over. In addition to lingering psychological trauma, there’s evidence of widespread and ongoing sexual abuse, including rampant molestation and incest. There’s also evidence that—despite the fact that the initial perpetrators are in jail—the rapes by drugging continue tohappen.
The demons, it turns out, are still out there.
For a closer look at the ongoing scandal in Manitoba Colony, check out our documentary,The Ghost Rapes of Bolivia.
At first glance, life for Manitoba’s residents seems an idyllic existence, enviable by new-age off-the-gridders: Families live off the land, solar panels light homes, and windmills power potable water wells. When one family suffers a death, the rest take turns cooking meals for the grieving. The richer families subsidize schoolhouse maintenance and teachers’ salaries. Mornings begin with homemade bread, marmalade, and milk still warm from the cows outside. At dusk, children play tag in the yard as their parents sway in rockers and watch the sunset.
Not all Mennonites live in sheltered worlds. There are 1.7 million of them in 83 different countries. From community to community, their relationships to the modern world vary considerably. Some eschew modernity entirely; others live in insular worlds but allow cars, TVs, cell phones, and varied dress. Many live among, and are virtually indistinguishable from, the rest of society
The religion was formed as an offshoot of the Protestant Reformation in 1520s Europe, by a Catholic priest named Menno Simons. Church leaders lashed out against Simons’s encouragement of adult baptism, pacifism, and his belief that only by leading a simple life could one get to heaven. Threatened by the new doctrine, the Protestant and Catholic churches began persecuting his followers throughout Central and Western Europe. Most Mennonites—as Simons’s followers came to be known—refused to fight because of their vow of nonviolence, and so they fled to Russia where they were given settlements to live unbothered by the rest of society.
But by the 1870s, persecution began in Russia, too, so the group next sought refuge in Canada, welcomed by a government in need of pioneer settlers. On arrival, many Mennonites began adopting modern dress, language, and other aspects of contemporary life. A small group, however, continued to believe that they would only be allowed into heaven if they lived in the ways of their forefathers, and they were appalled to see their fellow followers so easily seduced by the new world. This group, known as the “Old Colonists,” abandoned Canada in the 1920s, in part because the government demanded school lessons be taught in English, and hinted at standardizing a country-wide curriculum. (Even today, Old Colony schooling is taught in German, is strictly Bible-based, and ends at 13 for boys and 12 for girls.)
The Old Colonists migrated to Paraguay and Mexico, where there was ample farmland, little technology, and most importantly, promises by the respective national governments to let them live as they wished. But in the 1960s, when Mexico introduced its own educational reform that threatened to limit Mennonite autonomy, another migration began. Old Colonies subsequently sprouted up in more remote parts of the Americas, with a heavy concentration in Bolivia and Belize.
Today, there are about 350,000 Old Colonists worldwide, and Bolivia is home to more than 60,000 of them. Manitoba Colony, which was formed in 1991, looks like a relic of the old world dropped in the middle of the new: a pale-skinned, blue-eyed island of order amid the sea of chaos that is South America’s most impoverished and indigenous country. The colony thrives economically off its members’ supreme work ethic, ample fertile fields, and collective milk factory.
Manitoba has emerged as the ultimate safe haven for Old Colony true believers. Other colonies in Bolivia have loosened their codes, but Manitobans fervently reject cars, and all of their tractors have steel tires, as owning any mechanized vehicle with rubber tires is seen as a cardinal sin because it enables easy contact with the outside world. Men are forbidden from growing facial hair and don denim overalls except in church, where they wear slacks. Girls and women wear identically tied intricate braids, and you’d be hard pressed to find a dress with a length or sleeve that varies more than a few millimeters from the preordained design. For Manitoba residents, these aren’t arbitrary rules: They form the one path to salvation and colonists obey because, they believe, their souls depend on it.
As all Old Colonists desire, Manitoba has been left to its own devices. Except in the case of murder, the Bolivian government does not obligate community leaders to report any crime. Police have virtually no jurisdiction inside the community, nor do state or municipal authorities. The colonists maintain law and order through a de facto government of nine ministers and a ruling bishop, all of whom are elected for life. Beyond being mandated by the Bolivian government to ensure that all residents have a state identity card, Manitoba functions almost as its own sovereign nation.
I covered the Manitoba rape trial in 2011 for Time. Haunted ever since my first visits to the Colony, I wanted to know how the victims were faring. I also wondered if the heinous crimes perpetrated on its residents were an anomaly, or if they had exposed deeper cracks in the community. Is it possible that the insular world of the Old Colonies, rather than fostering peaceful coexistence unmoored by the trappings of modern society, is perhaps fomenting its own demise? I was compelled to go back and find out.
I arrived late on a moonlit Friday night in January. I was greeted by the warm smiles of Abraham and Margarita Wall Enns who were standing on the porch of their small home, set back from the road by a manicured and tree-lined driveway. Though notoriously reclusive, Old Colonists are kind to outsiders who don’t seem to threaten their way of life, and that’s how I’d arrived there: I had met Abraham, a freckled, six-foot-tall leader in the community, in 2011, and he said that I should stay with him and his family if I ever came back. Now I was here, hoping to see Old Colony life up close while interviewing residents about the rapes and their aftermath.
Inside the spotless house, Margarita showed me to my bedroom, next to the two other rooms in which her nine children were already sleeping. “We had this installed for security,” she said, grabbing a three-inch-thick steel door at the bottom of the stairs. There had apparently been some robberies (blamed on Bolivians) recently. “Sleep well,” she told me before bolting shut the door that separated me and her family from the rest of the world.
The next morning, I rose before dawn with the rest of the household. On any given day, the two eldest daughters—Liz, 22, and Gertrude, 18—spend the majority of their time washing dishes and clothes, preparing meals, milking the cows, and keeping a spotless home. I did my best not to screw up as I helped with the chores. I was exhausted by lunchtime.
Housework is outside the domain of Abraham and the six Wall boys; it’s possible they’ll go through their entire lives without ever clearing their own plates. They work the fields, but since this was the farming off-season, the older ones assembled tractor equipment their father imports from China, while the youngest pair climbed the barn posts and played with pet parakeets. Abraham allows the boys to kick around a soccer ball and practice Spanish by reading the occasional newspaper delivered weekly from Santa Cruz; however, any other organized activity, be it competitive sport, dance, or music, could jeopardize their eternal salvation and is strictly forbidden.
The Walls told me that luckily no one within their family fell victim to the rapists, but like everyone else in the community they knew all about it. One day, Liz agreed to accompany me on my interviews with rape victims in the community. A curious and quick young woman who learned Spanish from the family’s Bolivian cook, she was happy for an excuse to get out of the house and socialize.
We set out in a horse-drawn buggy along dirt roads. During the ride, Liz told me about her memories during the time of the scandal. As far as she knows, the perpetrators never entered her home. When I asked her if she was ever scared, she said no. “I didn’t believe it,” she told me. “So I only got scared once they confessed. Then it became real.”
When I asked Liz whether she thought the rapes could have been stopped earlier if these women had been taken seriously, she just wrinkled her eyebrows. Hadn’t the Colony given the rapists liberty to attack for four years, in part, because people had blamed the crimes on “wild female imagination”? She didn’t reply but seemed lost in thought as she steered us along the dirt road.
We pulled into the pebbled courtyard of a large house, and I went inside for an interview while Liz waited outside in the buggy. In a dark living room, I spoke with Helena Martens, a middle-aged mother of 11 children, and her husband. She sat on a couch and they kept the window shades drawn as we talked about what had happened to her nearly five years ago.
Sometime in 2008, Helena told me, she had heard a hissing sound as she settled into bed. She smelled a strange odor too, but after her husband made sure the gas canister in the kitchen wasn’t leaking, they fell asleep. She vividly recalls waking up in the middle of the night to “a man on top of me and others in the room, but I couldn’t raise my arms in defense.” She quickly slipped back into a dead sleep and then the next morning her head throbbed and her sheets were soiled.
The rapists attacked her several more times over the next few years. Helena suffered from various medical complications during this period, including an operation related to her uterus. (Sex and reproductive health is such a taboo for conservative Mennonites that most women are never taught the correct names for intimate body parts, which inhibited certain descriptions of what took place during the attacks and in their aftermath.) One morning she woke in such pain that “I thought I was going to die,” she said.
Helena, like the other rape victims in Manitoba, was never offered the chance to speak with a professional therapist, even though she said she would if given the opportunity. “Why would they need counseling if they weren’t even awake when it happened?” Manitoba Colony Bishop Johan Neurdorf, the community’s highest authority, had told a visitor back in 2009 after the perpetrators were caught.
Other victims I interviewed—those who awoke during the rapes, as well as those with no memory of the night—said that they would also have liked to speak with a therapist about their experiences but that doing so would be nearly impossible because there are no Low German–speaking sexual-trauma recovery experts in Bolivia.
All of the women I spoke with were unaware that the greater Mennonite world, particularly progressive groups in Canada and the US, had offered to send Low German counselors to Manitoba. Of course, this meant that they also had no clue that it was the men in the colony who had rejected these offers. After centuries of tension with their less-traditional brethren, Old Colonist leadership regularly block any attempts at direct contact with their members initiated by these groups. They saw the offer for psychological support from afar as yet another thinly veiled attempt to encourage the abandonment of their old ways.
The leadership’s refusal likely had other underlying reasons, too, such as not wanting these women’s emotional trauma to stir things up or draw too much attention to the community. I had already been told that a woman’s role in an Old Colony was to obey and submit to her husband’s command. A local minister explained to me that girls are schooled a year less than boys because females have no need to learn math or bookkeeping, which is taught during the extra boys-only term. Women can neither be ministers nor vote to elect them. They also can’t legally represent themselves, as the rape case made painfully apparent. Even the plaintiffs in the trial were five men—a selected group of victims’ husbands or fathers—rather than the women themselves.
But while it was tempting to accept the black-and-white gender roles in Manitoba, my visit also revealed shades of gray. I saw men and women share decision-making in their homes. At extended family gatherings on Sundays, the women-only kitchens felt full with big personalities and loud laughter, while men sat solemnly outside discussing the drought. And I spent long afternoons with confident and engaged young women such as Liz and her friends, who, like their peers anywhere, see each other when they can to vent about the annoying things their parents do and get updates on who broke whose heart last week.
When it came to the rapes, these times of strong female bonding—and the safe space provided by such a segregated daily routine—offered comfort. Victims told me they leaned on their sisters or cousins, especially as they tried to adjust back to regular life in the wake of the trial.
Those under the age of 18 named in the lawsuit were brought in for psychological assessment as mandated by Bolivian law, and court documents note that every one of these young girls showed signs of posttraumatic stress and was recommended for long-term counseling—but not one has received any form of therapy since their evaluations. Unlike adult women who found at least some solace with their sisters or cousins, many young girls may not have even had a chance to speak with anyone about their experiences after their government-mandated assessments.
In Helena’s living room, she told me how her daughter was also raped, but the two have never spoken about it, and the girl, now 18, doesn’t even know that her mom is also a rape survivor. In Old Colonies, rapes bring shame upon the victim; survivors are stained, and throughout the community other parents of the youngest victims told me that it was all better left unspoken.
“She was too young” to talk about it, the father of another victim, who was 11 when she was raped, told me. He and his wife never explained to the girl why she woke with pain one morning, bleeding so much she had to be taken to the hospital. She was whisked through subsequent medical visits with nurses who didn’t speak her language and was never once told that she had been raped. “It was better she just not know,” her father said.
All the victims I interviewed said the rapes crossed their minds almost daily. In addition to confiding in friends, they have coped by falling back on faith. Helena, for example—though her clutched arms and pained swaying seemed to belie it—told me she’d found peace and insisted, “I have forgiven the men who raped me.”
She wasn’t alone. I heard the same thing from victims, parents, sisters, brothers. Some even said that if the convicted rapists would only admit their crimes—as they did initially—and ask penance from God, the colony would request that the judge dismiss their sentences.
I was perplexed. How could there be unanimous acceptance of such flagrant and premeditated crimes?
It wasn’t until I spoke with Minister Juan Fehr, dressed as all ministers in the community do, entirely in black with high black boots, that I understood. “God chooses His people with tests of fire,” he told me. “In order to go to heaven you must forgive those who have wronged you.” The minister said that he trusts that most of the victims came to forgiveness on their own. But if one woman didn’t want to forgive, he said, she would have been visited by Bishop Neurdorf, Manitoba’s highest authority, and “he would have simply explained to her that if she didn’t forgive, then God wouldn’t forgive her.”
One of the youngest victims to speak with prosecutors was as young as 11 during the time of the rapes. Most of the victims have had almost no psychological counseling and, according to experts, are probably suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Manitoba’s leaders encourage residents to forgive incest, too. It’s a lesson that Agnes Klassen learned in a painful way. On a muggy Tuesday, the mother of two met me outside her two-room house off a highway in eastern Bolivia, approximately 40 miles from her former home in Manitoba Colony that she left in 2009. She wore her hair in a ponytail and was sweating in jeans and a T-shirt.
I wasn’t there to talk with her about the rapes, but once inside her house, the subject inevitably came up. “One morning I woke up with headaches and there was dirt in our bed,” she said, referring to when she lived in Manitoba, as if remembering an item she had left off a shopping list. She had never thought much about that morning since and wasn’t included in the lawsuit because she saw no reason to come forward after the perpetrators were nabbed.
Instead, I had come to talk to Agnes about other painful parts of her past—namely incest—the origins of which aren’t even clear. “They kind of mesh together,” she said of her earliest childhood memories, which include being fondled by several of her eight older brothers. “I don’t know when [the incest] started.”
One of 15 children, growing up in the Old Colony of Riva Palacios (her family moved to neighboring Manitoba Colony when she was eight), Agnes said the abuse would happen in the barn, in the fields, or in the siblings’ shared bedroom. She didn’t realize it was inappropriate behavior until the age of ten, when she was given a stern beating after her father found her brother fondling her. “My mother could never find the words to tell me that I was being wronged or that it was not my fault,” she recalled.
After that, the molestation continued but Agnes was too scared to go to anyone for help. When she was 13 and one of her brothers tried to rape her, Agnes warily notified her mom. She wasn’t beaten this time, and for a while her mom did her best to keep the two apart. But the brother eventually found her alone and raped her.
The sibling assaults became increasingly commonplace, but there was nowhere for Agnes to turn. Old Colonies have no police force. Ministers deal with wrongdoing directly but because youth are not technically members of the church until they are baptized (often in their early 20s), bad behavior is handled inside the home.
Seeking help outside the colony would have never entered Agnes’s mind: From her first day on earth, she, like all Old Colony children, was taught that the outside world holds evil. And even if someone managed to reach out, there is virtually no way for a child or woman to contact or communicate with the surrounding non–Low German world.
“I just learned to live with it,” Agnes said haltingly. She apologized for her stops and starts, for her tears. It was the first time she had ever fully told her story. She said the incest stopped when boys began courting Agnes, and she filed it away in her mind as a thing of the past.
But when she got married, moved into her own house in Manitoba, and gave birth to two daughters, family members began molesting her children during visits. “It was starting to happen to them, too,” she told me, her eyes following the movements of her two young platinum-blond girls darting past the windows as they played outside. One day, her eldest daughter, not yet four at the time, told Agnes that the girls’ grandpa had asked her to put her hands down his pants. Agnes said that her father never molested her or her sisters, but that he allegedly routinely abused his grandchildren until Agnes fled Manitoba with her daughters (and still allegedly abuses her nieces, who remain in the Colony). Another day, she caught her nephew fondling her youngest daughter. “It happens all the time,” she said. “It’s not just my family.”
Indeed, for a long time now there has been a muffled yet heated discussion in the international Mennonite community about whether Old Colonies have a rampant incest problem. Some defend the Old Colonists, insisting that sexual abuse happens everywhere and that its occurrence in places like Manitoba only proves that any society, no matter how upright, is susceptible to social ills.
But others, like Erna Friessen, a Canadian-Mennonite woman who introduced me to Agnes, insist, “The scope of sexual violence within Old Colonies is really huge.” Erna and her husband helped found Casa Mariposa (Butterfly House), a shelter for abused Old Colony women and girls. Located near the town of Pailon in the heart of Bolivian Old Colony territory, they have a continuous influx of Low German–speaking missionaries ready to help, but the number of women who have made it there are few. Aside from the challenges of making women aware of this space and convincing them that it’s in their best interest to seek help, Erna told me that “coming to Casa Mariposa often means leaving their families and the only world they’ve ever known.”
While Erna admits that exact figures are impossible to calculate due to the insular nature of these communities, she is adamant that rates of sexual abuse are higher in the Old Colonies than in the US, for example, where one in four women will be sexually abused before the age of 18. Erna’s whole life has been among these groups—she was born on a Mennonite Colony in Paraguay, raised in Canada, and has spent the past eight years in Bolivia. Of all the Old Colony women she has met over the years, she says, “more have been victims of abuse than not.” She considers the Colonies “a breeding ground for sexual abuse,” in part because most Old Colony women grow up believing they must accept it. “The first step is always to get them to recognize that they have been wronged. It happened to them, it happened to their mom and their grandmother, so they’ve always been told [to] just deal with it.”
Others who work on the issue of abuse in the Old Colonies are hesitant to pinpoint incidence rates, but say that the way abuse is experienced within an Old Colony makes it a more acute problem than in other places in the world. “These girls or women have no way out,” said Eve Isaak, a mental health clinician and addictions and bereavement counselor who caters to Old Colony Mennonite communities in Canada, US, Bolivia, and Mexico. “In any other society, by elementary school a child knows that if they are being abused they can, at least in theory, go to the police or a teacher or some other authority. But who can these girls go to?”
Though it wasn’t by design, Old Colony churches have become the de facto state. “Old Colonists’ migration can be understood not just as a movement away from society’s ills, but also toward countries that allow the Colonists to live as they choose,” said Helmut Isaak, Eve’s husband who is a pastor and Anabaptist history and theology professor at CEMTA, a seminary in Asuncion, Paraguay. He explains that before Old Colonists migrate to a new country, they send delegations to negotiate terms with the governments to allow them virtual autonomy, particularly in the area of religious law enforcement.
In fact, the serial rapes stand as one of the only times that a Bolivian Old Colony has sought outside intervention regarding an internal matter. Manitoba residents told me that they handed the gang over to the cops in 2009 because victims’ husbands and fathers were so enraged, it’s likely the accused would have been lynched. (One man who was believed to be involved and caught on a neighboring colony, was lynched and later died from his wounds.)
The Old Colony leaders I spoke with denied that their communities have an ongoing sexual abuse problem and insisted that incidents are dealt with internally when they arise. “[Incest] almost never happens here,” Minister Jacob Fehr told me one evening as we chatted on his porch at dusk. He said that in his 19 years as a minister, Manitoba had only one case of incestuous rape (father to daughter). Another minister denied that even this episode had happened.
“They forgive a ton of gross stuff that happens in families all the time,” said Abraham Peters, father of the youngest convicted rapist, Abraham Peters Dyck, who is currently in Palmasola Prison, just outside Santa Cruz. “Brothers with sisters, fathers with daughters.” He told me that he believes his son and the entire gang were framed to cover up widespread incest in Manitoba Colony. Abraham senior still lives in Manitoba; he considered leaving in the period immediately following his son’s arrest because of hostility from the rest of the community. But uprooting his family of 12 proved too difficult, so he stayed put and says that over the years and despite his perspective on his son’s incarceration, he has been accepted back into the fold of Colony life.
Agnes thinks the two crimes are flipsides of the same coin. “The rapes, the abuse, it’s all intertwined,” she said. “What made the rapes different is that they didn’t come from within the family and that’s why the Ministers took the actions they did.”
Of course, leaders do attempt to correct bad behavior. Take the case of Agnes’s father: At some point, his fondling of his granddaughters was called out by church leaders. As procedure dictates, he went before the ministers and bishop, who asked him to confess. He did, and was “excommunicated,” or temporarily expelled from the church for a week, after which he was offered a chance to return based on a promise that he would never do it again.
“Of course it continued after that,” Agnes said of her father. “He just learned to hide it better.” She told me she doesn’t have faith “in anyone who after one week says they have turned their life around,” before adding, “I have no faith in a system that permits that.”
Younger perpetrators have it even easier; according to Agnes, the brother who raped her admitted his sins when he was baptized and was immediately expunged in the eyes of God. He now lives in the neighboring Old Colony, Riva Palacios, with young daughters of his own.
Once an abuser has been excommunicated and readmitted, church leadership assumes the matter has been put to rest. If an abuser flagrantly continues his behavior and refuses to repent, he is once again excommunicated and this time permanently shunned. Leaders instruct the rest of the colony to isolate the family; the general store will refuse to sell to anyone in the household, kids will be banned from school. Eventually the family has no choice but to leave. This, of course, also means that the victims leave with their abusers.
Yet it wasn’t sexual abuse that finally prompted Agnes and her family to abandon Manitoba, which they did in 2009. Instead, her husband had bought a motorcycle, after which he was excommunicated and the family shunned. When the couple’s toddler drowned to death in a cow trough, the community leaders wouldn’t even let her husband attend his own son’s funeral. That’s when they left Manitoba for good. In the end, driving a motorcycle was apparently a larger affront to the Colony’s leadership than anything Agnes, her daughters, or the rest of the women in the community had suffered.
Keeping a colony like Manitoba together is getting harder and harder in modern times. Agnes and her family aren’t the only ones who’ve fled. In fact, the nearby city of Santa Cruz is populated by Mennonite families who have become fed up with the Old Colony way of life—and the situation may be reaching a crisis point.
“We no longer want to be a part of this,” a young father named Johan Weiber told me one day when I visited him at his home in Manitoba. Johan and his family were one of 13 others still living in the colony but who had officially left the Old Colony’s church. For months, they’d been saying they wanted to leave—they even owned vehicles—but Manitoba Colony leaders refused to compensate them for the land they wanted to abandon. Now, instead, they’d decided to build their own dissident church inside Manitoba.
“We are [leaving the Old Colony church and starting our own] because we have read the truth,” Johan said. By “truth,” he meant the Bible. “They tell us not to read the Bible because if we do, we realize things like, in no place does it say a women’s hair has to be braided like that,” he told me, leaning on his white pickup truck as his ponytailed daughter played in the yard.
Curious about the specifics of religious instruction at Manitoba, one Sunday I attended a service at one of the colony’s three nondescript brick churches. I soon realized that the solemn 90-minute ceremony is not a priority. Heads of households might go two or three times a month, but many go even less frequently.
For children, the core school curriculum is based on selected Bible readings, but aside from a silent 20-second prayer before and after meals, there is no specified time or requirement for prayer or Bible studies in the adult Old Colony world.
“Many [people have] lost their biblical literacy,” said Helmut Isaak, the Mennonite historian. He explained that over time, as Mennonites stopped having to constantly defend their faith against persecutors, other more practical concerns took precedent. “In order to survive, they needed to spend their time working.”
This has created a crucial power disparity: The small cadre of church leaders have became the sole interpreters of the Bible on Old Colonies, and because the Bible is seen as the law, leaders use this control over the scripture to instill order and obedience.
Ministers deny this charge: “We encourage all our members to know what is written in the holy book,” Minister Jacob Fehr told me one evening. But residents admit in quiet that Bible-study classes are discouraged and Bibles are written in High German, a language that most adults barely remember after their limited schooling, while Low German versions are sometimes banned. On some Old Colonies, members face excommunication for delving too deeply into the scripture.
This is why Johan Weiber was such a threatening presence—he terrified the leadership and community at large. He also reminded them of the troubled past of the Old Colonies. “This is exactly what happened in Mexico and that’s why we came [to Bolivia],” said Peter Knelsen, a 60-year-old Manitoba resident who arrived from Mexico as a teenager with his parents. It wasn’t just the Mexican government that was threatening Old Colonies with reform, but also an evangelical movement from within that sought to “change our way of life,” said Peter, who explained that in his colony in Mexico dissenters tried to build their own church, too.
For more than 40 years, Bolivian Old Colonists had escaped such an internal rift. But with Johan Weiber’s attempt to build his own church—he also wanted land in Manitoba on which to farm and build his own independent school—Peter and others spoke of an impending “apocalypse.” Tensions nearly exploded in June, after my visit, when Johan’s group actually broke ground on their church. Soon after construction commenced, over 100 Manitoba men descended on the site and took it apart, piece-by-piece. “I think it’s going to be really hard to maintain the colony intact,” Peter told me.
If this rift continues to widen and the crisis comes to a head, Manitobans already know what to do. Centuries ago, the original Mennonites in Europe, faced with persecution, had a choice: fight or flight. Given their vow of pacifism, they fled—and they have been doing so ever since.
Manitoba leaders say they hope it doesn’t come to that. In part, this is probably because Bolivia is one of the last countries left that will let them live on their own terms. So for now, Minister Jacob Fehr says he prays. “We just want [Weiber’s group] to leave the colony,” he said. “We just want to be left alone.”
On my last day in Manitoba, I got a shock.
“You know that it’s still happening, right?” a woman said to me, as we drank ice water alongside her home. There were no men around. I hoped something was lost in translation, but my Low German translator assured me it wasn’t. “The rapes with the spray—they are still going on,” she said.
I peppered her with questions: Had it happened to her? Did she know who was doing it? Did everyone know it was going on?
No, she said, they hadn’t returned to her house, but to a cousin’s—recently. She said she had a good guess about who was doing it but wouldn’t give me any names. And she believed that, yes, most people in Manitoba Colony knew that the imprisonment of the original rapists hadn’t put an end to the serial crimes.
As if in a strange time warp, after dozens of interviews with people telling me everything was fine now, I didn’t know if this was gossip, rumor, lies, or—worse—the truth. I spent the rest of the day frantically trying to get confirmation. I revisited many families who I had previously interviewed, and the majority admitted, a bit sheepishly, that yes, they had heard the rumors and that, yes, they assumed they were probably true.
“It’s definitely not as frequent,” said one young man later that day whose wife had been raped during the first series of incidents before 2009. “[The rapists] are being much more careful than before, but it still goes on.” He told me he had his suspicions about the perpetrators’ identities as well, but didn’t want to give any more details.
On a subsequent reporting trip by Noah Friedman-Rudovsky, the photographer for this article, five people went on record—including three Manitobans as well as a local prosecutor and a journalist—and confirmed that they had heard the rapes are continuing.
Those I spoke with said they have no way to stop the alleged attacks. There is still no police force in the area, and there never will be any proactive element or investigatory force that can look into accusations of crimes. Anyone is free in the colonies to report somebody else to the Ministers, but crimes are addressed on the honor system: If a perpetrator is not ready to admit his sins, the question is whether the victim or accuser will be believed… and women in Manitoba already know how that goes.
The only defense, residents told me, is to install better locks or bars on the windows, or big steel doors like the one I slept behind each night during my trip. “We can’t put in streetlights or video cameras,” the husband of a victim of the rapes told me—two technologies not allowed. For it to stop, they believe they must, as before, catch someone in the act. “So we will just have to wait,” he said.
That last day, before leaving Manitoba, I returned to visit Sara, the woman who woke up with rope around her wrists nearly five years ago. She said she’d also heard the rumors of ongoing rapes, and breathed a heavy sigh. She and her family had moved to a new house after the gang of nine was captured in 2009. The old house held too many demon-filled memories. She said she felt badly if others were now living her past horrors, but she didn’t know what could be done. After all, her time on earth, like that of all her fellow Mennonites, was meant for suffering. Before I left, she offered what she considered words of solace: “Maybe this is God’s plan.
Last night I finally watched Women Talking. I debated on seeing it in the theater as well those places I used to love are kind of dumpy, uncomfortable and veering on absurd. The reserving deeply weird seats, the overpriced poorly made food and of course the cost of a ticket has made that experience one of another kind. I went to see Living, Bill Nighy, being well Bill Nighy, elegant, aloof, sprightly and charming worth seeing at the big screen. NO. That is a such a home movie that I was pissed I did not get a Senior ticket. The theater 3/4 empty meant that everyone literally had a row to themselves except me. I had taken the second seat in a vacant row and a woman walked in, said she needed to see the seat immediately to my left the empty one and despite numerous others decided she wanted that seat, are you fucking kidding me? Then she proceeds to come back with snacks and then began a prodigious set of coughing, hacking and sneezing. I moved all the way to the end of the row. The Theater was EMPTY for 10 other people but that seat in that row was the one she wanted. I knew she saw a woman alone and thought I was the perfect idiot who would tolerate and ignore the bullshit. Sorry folks this is Manhattan and when the film ended I jumped up and crossed over her and moved out of there toot suite. I have found Women in Manhattan both needy and stupid. Especially as they age there, the city does something to them to make them just nuts. I make every effort to note the stupid outfits, fur coats and glasses to ensure that I don’t somehow morph into that persona. And I don’t think any of this flattering or the least bit interesting but I don’t on any age, go figure.
So as I watched Women Talking it showed generations of Women in a Mennonite group aka Cult that were living in what is somewhere in the United States. Many of them are in fact located in parts of Kentucky, Pennsylvania lending the name Pennsyltucky to describe the rural outliers of that area. Amish are another cult that live in Tennessee and I met many during my time in Nashville, and they were really fabulous craftsman and bakers and yes I had a Lyft driver who was on his leave (Rumspringa) as they do for a year to join society and decide if that is what they want or to remain. Truly a lovely man. The story comes from book and it is based on an actual Mennonite Group living in Bolivia. The story is not for the faint of heart. Nor is the movie.
Once you understand the history and religion’s practice you can have a better understanding of how and why this may have happened. A lack of education, a lack of effective role models, the use of the Bible to both condone and excuse that behavior as well as actually inspire it. Read the Bible? It is full of gruesome imagery and violence directed at and about Women. And while the movie is in fact FICTION it is not fictitious in the least. With that one day I glanced at the sewer pit called Twitter and saw a Tweet from the Actor, Wendell Pierce. I love him as an actor and person as he has always been an Activist and unafraid to speak his mind on a subject so when I read the tweet about this film I was horrified. He said he saw the picture and while it was a fine film it was one that overlooked or ignored Women of Color and their experiences. WHAT? Are Black Women in Mennonite Cults? Where? Why? And there may well be but I have to ask what the fuck that offers them and the dominance of White members, the social isolation and the heavy dose of restrictions are all things I would hope no Black people would find it a way to express their devotion to faith and belief in Christ. And I wonder if Mennonites would even accept them, but okay then.
Right away I was incensed and disappointed that a Man of Color and a Man of Theater had not spent a waking minute to learn the history behind or the source of the film. What I read was an utter dismissal of the film and the subject matter. When you are subject to something outside of your familiarity it may be time to wear a different lens, not all things are through the prism of you. I am an Atheist for a reason as the debate in the film only confirms why I have no interest in partaking in a cult of fanatics who believe one fourth of this bullshit. But I have enough respect for others to allow them that belief system and have no desire to debate, discuss or address it other than through my own writing or with an individual of like mind. Nothing is accomplished nor will it change anything when it comes to a person’s belief system unless you are deeply involved and they have ASKED you for help. Otherwise it is this thing called – none of your fucking business.
Film is a way to learn and to play, to be entertained and to escape reality. There are those films, often Documentaries that are to inspire, to learn and of course enrage or engage. They are always again filmed with a slant, as I have discussed the writing format of Creative Non-fiction which allows one to stretch the truth to reflect one’s own perspective or see a moment through a lens that is not wide lens in the least. And there is nothing wrong with that as we are our own Editors when it comes to our life and we can red line whatever we want from our story. And we have a debate now about Journalism and objectivity and the idea to present a neutral voice in which to enable the reader to ultimately make decisions. As we can see from the Fox/Dominion lawsuit that concept went right out the window when it was about the Election results of 2022.
The idea that we are seeing truth on bodycams or in videos that are put on any public forum are not without missing information. What we are seeing is a singular perspective and viewpoint and often missing background if not alternative views of the same event. Life is not a singular moment in time. It is why even eye witness testimony is not all that and a bag of chips. And the listener ultimately hears or not what they want and makes their decision based again on their own belief system, their own biases and experiences. If you watch Women Talking the debate over their destiny is fraught with all of that, and the fear of the unknown, of making the wrong decision and of course their Faith dictates much of that thinking process. It is easy to dismiss it if you don’t share that ideology but understanding its significance is a key to understanding. So Mr. Pierce’s dismissal of that story says he is not open to hearing it and understanding it as what it was in that moment. So now reverse it and make it about you does it matter now or does it make it worse? Honestly the idea that something has to happen to you for you to fully grasp its meanings is tragic. Grim. Pathetic. And there is a vanity aspect as well that smacks of Narcissism. I am exhausted with the what about me mentality that came out of this pandemic. Yes, what about this is about you? Social Media, comments and even the News shows interviews with people who were not there, were fine and untouched by a disaster and yet somehow they link it to themselves. “What do you think about this flood here?” Asks the Newsman. The person responds, “Well had I been here 10 minutes earlier I could have drowned.” Wow that is some insight.
Read message or comment boards and endless responses are prattling on about their own lives and issues none of which have to do with the story or the issue listed. I often think, “Thanks for sharing.” Maybe we need to share less and read more. Nah, not going to happen.
Amy Coney-Barrett, the newest Supreme appointed by the former twice Impeached, recently raided, facing numerous lawsuits and State/Federal investigations President, recently was brought to the front pages when a leaked video surfaced regarding the sect of the Cult of which she belongs. I am sure at this point Margaret Atwood should sue, as Lin Manuel Miranda, has a Church for copyright infringement and unauthorized use of a book to promote the cult like teachings from this branch Davidian type of sect.
I am an Atheist and with that I have always allowed room for those who need organized religion in which to congregate and build community. That said much of it in the last 20 years since the rise of the Moral Majority is to the exact opposite and in turn build a Nation that is bound by Christian dogma and belief. That line between Church and State, what has always been a thin one would now be utterly eliminated and the GOP and the Supremes seem intent on doing such. This is the basic premise of The Handmaids Tale and where Gilead is born as nation state dedicated to a form of Theology all driven by men and their Misogyny. Margaret Atwood and Stephen King need to write a book together as The Stand was also not far off the mark.
The Supremes are composed of many members of the Catholic Church and are strongly influenced by the doctrine of said cult as we have seen in their supporting documents, be affirmative or dissents, regarding decisions they have made. The most recent Dobbs V Jackson, the one regarding Roe and the right to abortion is perhaps the most significant with that regards. The Praying Coach may be another as the one regarding Maine schools another as well. More is coming. And we know from texts of their varying speeches and other talks given to private groups their beliefs and personal feelings regarding highly charged subjects as Abortion, Gay Rights and other cultural battles that of late seem part of the landscape. The ones largely accepted by most Americans but still to many a combustible issue that runs against their beliefs. Ah yes their beliefs…..
I wrote in the last post about how many seem to think how one’s own personal opinion is wrong, the words used to express said opinion wrong and often will reprimand if not excoriate anyone who has the audacity to counter a held belief or experience to remind them they are just wrong. No room for discourse, the difference of experience or the reality that not all peas in the pod are the same. We really do fear others as they challenge all of it, as in our beliefs and our way of life. How can we have same sex parents, a person who elects to change gender, who expresses doubt about the existence of God, who simply does not look, speak or act like us? Then when countered further go for the jugular, attack them in a manner that is personal, their looks, their family, their own identity. Then when all else fails attack them for their grammar. That is the online world folks summarized in a nutshell.
And while all that is going on the righteous indignation and verbal retaliation under the guise of “he/she/it/shim hurt my feelers” the powers that be, a motley crew at best without big hair or instruments, continue their march to the Nation State, combo of Theocracy with a touch of Federalism. This way it allows some States the ability to retain civil rights and liberal leanings but ones that will implode when all Immigrants, Homosexuals and Liberals move there. Last Bus out of town to Seattle at 5 standing room only! Just this article on how Seattle is trying to document their homeless, whoops I mean unhoused, population will tell you there are problems in many of these “it” cities regardless of who is in charge of the Government. It is not a new problem but a long standing one, since I can recall growing up there we always had a large housing challenged group (I came up with that one on my own), only now as the world grows in population so does this problem. Sorry folks, Nashville Tennessee has the same problems just they don’t mention it much or hide it via more laws and restrictions, as it affects their plan to become the bestest red state that people will go get drunk, convene and fuck each other and leave and by leave, I mean money. NashVegas Baby! Meanwhile in the rest of Tennessee it is praise the Government, pass the Ammunition and Pray! The state is run by religious zealots and almost all of them end up in the slammer at one point and under investigation by the Feds. Hmm where I have heard that of late? I lived there and there are good people there but they are trapped and cannot leave and with that won’t as the South has a hold on them in ways that transcend policy.
Which brings me to the Supreme Coney-Barrett. I read this and my hair stood up on end. It is dystopian and bizarre which makes me ask why she is in fact a Judge, other than to bring pain and horror to others which women excel at. God must of chosen her as her working is contrarian to her beliefs. Well hypocrisy is a track well run by this group. Praise be… even the name is very Atwood. Call the Attorney’s Mags.
Revealed: leaked video shows Amy Coney Barrett’s secretive faith group drove women to tears
Wife of founder of People of Praise says members ‘were always crying’ during discussions about women’s subservience to men
Stephanie Kirchgaessner The Guardian 26 Aug 2022
The People of Praise, a secretive Christian faith group that counts the conservative supreme court justice Amy Coney Barrett as a member, considered women’s obedience and subservience to men as one of its central early teachings, according to leaked remarks and writings of the wife of one of the group’s founders.
A leaked video of a recent private People of Praise event, marking its 50th anniversary, shows Dorothy Ranaghan explaining how some female followers of the faith group cried intensely in reaction to the group’s early teachings on “headship” and the “roles of men and women”, in which men are considered divinely ordained as the “head” of the family and dominant to women.
Asked in an interview during the anniversary event about the years after the group’s members first made a “covenant” to join People of Praise in the early 1970s, Dorothy Ranaghan said: “Some of the women – who are still in my women’s group, as a matter of fact – were wearing sunglasses all the time, because they were always crying and would have to hold on to their chairs every time somebody started teaching, because ‘What are we going to hear this time?’”
She then added, as the audience and her interviewer laughed: “But it all worked out just fine in the end.”
The comment marks the first time a statement about some women’s negative early responses to “headship” teachings has been published. The leaked footage was shared with the Guardian by a source who asked to remain anonymous.
Former members of People of Praise, many of whom are critical of the group’s dominance over members’ lives, have described the group as calling for complete obedience of women to their husbands.
The Guardian has previously reported that one of the group’s former members described in a sworn affidavit filed in the 1990s that Kevin Ranaghan – a group co-founder and Dorothy’s husband – exerted almost total control over the former member when she was living in the couple’s household, including making all decisions about her finances and dating relationships. The group also embraces traditions like encouraging members to speak in tongues, and performing exorcisms.Women in my People of Praise group ‘were always crying’, says Dorothy Ranaghan in leaked video
Barrett, who lived in the Ranaghan household while she attended law school at Notre Dame, has never publicly disclosed or discussed her membership in the Christian charismatic sect, where her father had a leadership role and where she previously served as a “handmaid”. Barrett has said she is a “faithful Catholic” whose religious beliefs would not “bear in the discharge of my duties as a judge”.
But while Barrett’s personal faith-based opposition to abortion rights and Roe v Wade were known before her 2020 confirmation and before she joined a majority of justices in overturning the landmark ruling that protected abortion rights nationally, less is known about the culture in which Barrett was raised and its views on women and childbirth, suffering, and their role in society.
Barrett has never addressed how the reversal of Roe might affect a woman’s life. But during oral argument in Dobbs v Jackson, the supreme court case that ultimately overturned Roe, Barrett referred specifically in questions to the availability of so-called “safe haven” laws across the US, which allow mothers to abandon newborns in designated locations without the risk of punishment.
Barrett suggested that the availability of such legal protections for new mothers meant that while women might be forced to give birth if Roe were overturned, they would not necessarily be forced to become parents, or be burdened by parenthood.
The line of reasoning was decried as “cruel and dangerous” by pro-choice activists and writers, who said that seeing safe haven laws as a viable replacement for reproductive choice ignored real health risks associated with pregnancy and childbirth, and ignored women’s rights to bodily autonomy.
Barrett’s question also appears to echo the People of Praise culture in which she was raised and has chosen to remain a part of, which emphasizes the importance of childbirth, pregnancy and the abandonment of autonomy and privacy it supposedly entails, as a core part of what it means to be a woman.
In her early writings, Dorothy Ranaghan emphasized the need for women to be “self-giving, responsible and reserved”. In a 1978 article that appeared in New Covenant magazine, called “Fully a Woman”, childbearing is described as a “central reality of womanhood” that “determines our presence in the world”, even for those who “by chance or choice” did not have children.
“The child in the womb expands the mother’s body, changing its dimensions. As her body yields, so do the borders of privacy and selfishness. Her very existence gives to another.” Women who are most admired, she wrote, “are not private persons, but are surrendered and available to care for others”.
“Pregnancy teaches a woman that others have a claim on her very person for the service of life. Rather than annihilating her, pregnancy makes her a new person, radiant and strong: a mother,” she wrote.
Once women gave birth in the People of Praise, work to care for them is divided on gender lines, according to Adrian Reimers, a Catholic theological critic and early member of the People of Praise who was dismissed in 1985 and wrote about his experience.
Reimers’ book critiquing the group, called Not Reliable Guides, states that men in People of Praise “were quietly taught by their heads and leaders not to change or rinse out diapers” and that women’s emotions were “distrusted”. Pastoral problems were often addressed by asking a woman where she was in her menstrual cycle.
Women, Reimers wrote, played a “decidedly secondary role to men” and a married woman was “expected always to reflect the fact that she is under her husband’s authority” and under his pastoral care. A guide on the group’s approach to outreach in the Caribbean, Reimers said, explicitly stated: “We should probably deal with the Caribbean matriarchal system by quietly developing an alternate rather than encouraging a confrontation.”
Reimers has written that he believed that the People of Praise’s views on women were rooted not in the Catholic tradition, but rather in Kevin Ranaghan’s involvement in the 1970s National Men’s Shepherds Conference, which was co-sponsored by Protestant leaders and believed that men were ordained by God to lead.
“It is no surprise that all these communities see feminism as one of the principle [sic] ideological evils of our time,” Reimers wrote.
In a statement released after publication of this article, Dorothy Ranaghan said: “My remarks were meant as a joke as most of the people in the room understood. I would never be part of a group that oppresses women and I never have been part of one. But I have been proud to be one of the women leaders in the People of Praise for more than 50 years.”
She added: “I’ve been in the company of many strong women – lawyers, doctors, educators, businesswomen, wives and mothers, and we are in no way oppressed or dominated. We are responsible for our own decisions; we are free and happy. Furthermore, it is unconscionable to me that any of the more than 40 men and women who have lived with our family over the years would consider my husband an oppressor. As those who know him would agree, he is a kind, gentle man who listens carefully and respects the opinions of women and men and he always has.”
I think of the Church as that built on the foundation much akin to the Champlain Towers in Surfside Florida. Often they begin thanks to the well organized funding and messaging ambitions of the Corporation and continue on throughout regardless of who is the CEO and the doors are opened to anyone willing to pay the price of entry. And then it takes just one mistake of a member or leader that leads the Church as a whole to re-examine their history, their practices and their long term growth and stability. The Catholic Church is one such example.
Then we have the franchised religion. These are the ramshackle churches that align country towns, exist in neighborhoods, set up a temporary pop up shop on Sundays in a bar or community center to spread the word and that defines much of the Southern Baptist Organization.
All of them have factions and side groups that embrace a more hardcore view of the world, a script that follows the Book of Myths as if it is law with a traceable cohesive view that demands adherence and complete idolatry. Yes, beware of false idols.
I am writing a great deal about religion as I had not really understood its toxicity until I moved to Nashville. I was a live and let live believer in that you need what you need to be you and then I met the Christians of Nashville. And from that I learned of the Nashville Way which is to contradict themselves repeatedly and largely in jibberish. Here is a true real world current example over the issue of the Nathan Forrest, the founder of the KKK, whose bust sits in the Capital building. With the issue of removing Confederate Soldiers statues and markings throughout the country as they represent the most negative periods in America’s history. The Plumber Governor is going forth to finally remove it and have it sent to the State Museum. Meanwhile the State Legislator is going forward to prevent this. And this is what he said:
In 2020, Lee announced “represents pain and suffering and brutal crimes committed against African Americans,” Lee declared last summer, though on the campaign trail two years earlier, the future governor said he was against removing Confederate monuments.
However, Lt. Gov. Randy McNally, a staunch opponent of relocating the Forrest bust from the Capitol, and House Speaker Cameron Sexton have argued for months that the governor and his cabinet members on the Capitol Commission did not follow state law by failing to get a vote of concurrence from the State Building Commission before proceeding to the Historical Commission.
And here is where once again it goes all in circle of jerks who seem to be determined to be heard regardless that the outcome will be said it will just go around the infamous roundabouts that align the roads in the South to further confuse and frustrate drivers trying to go in a straight line.
Adam Kleinheider, a spokesman for McNally, on Thursday said the lieutenant governor expects the State Building Commission to vote on the matter at its next scheduled meeting July 22. The makeup of that commission is similar to the Capitol Commission and probably would result in the same outcome, barring the unexpected. McNally “continues to stand by his assertion” that the Building Commission needs to concur with the Capitol Commission vote — despite the fact the Historical Commission already has approved removal.
And with that the Attorney General Herbert Slatery stated both sides’ argument for the proper protocol are valid. Slatery opined that the speakers, who argued the Capitol Commission should have taken the issue to the Building Commission before the Historical Commission, and the Lee administration, which went straight to the Historical Commission, each had legitimate interpretations.
Got that? Good. Welcome to Nashville, that is the way and truth and the light. In other words cover your ass talk out of both sides of your mouth and inevitably deny responsibility, put it on others and good to go. I met many like that and all of them had asses in pews on Sunday which is where all of this is learned and reinforced.
And with that I have been sure that the Churches role in the insurrection of January 6th and the election of Donald Trump; the rise of the new right and all the varying hate bills regarding LGBQT rights, as well as removing the right to choose regarding a woman’s body is moving across state lines in a fast clip. They are a determined, focused and well funded group with regards to turning America into a Theocracy.
This is an article from the Post regarding another mega church that is determined to do just that. They are insidious throughout the Country. And they too have had their problems in the past decades the most recent was in Seattle, with the Mars Church leadership controversy. But this is like whack-a-mole, as there is another ready to step into their former mall space the next day. And just like a mall shop they have Yelp reviews in which to enable the followers to find the one that fits, like purple soled Nikes. Ah yes Heaven’s Gate is awaiting you, just get on the space ship and ride to God. So Aliens are Christians?
And below that article I have placed an opinion piece from the New York Times regarding the decline of the Evangelical Movement. Hmm which is it? I leave that to you to decide.
An American Kingdom
A new and rapidly growing Christian movement is openly political, wants a nation under God’s authority, and is central to Donald Trump’s GOP
FORT WORTH — The pastor was already pacing when he gave the first signal. Then he gave another, and another, until a giant video screen behind him was lit up with an enormous colored map of Fort Worth divided into four quadrants.
Greed, the map read over the west side. Competition, it said over the east side. Rebellion, it said over the north part of the city. Lust, it said over the south.
It was an hour and a half into the 11 a.m. service of a church that represents a rapidly growing kind of Christianity in the United States, one whose goal includes bringing under the authority of a biblical God every facet of life, from schools to city halls to Washington, where the pastor had traveled a month after the Jan. 6 insurrection and filmed himself in front of the U.S. Capitol saying quietly, “Father, we declare America is yours.”
Now he stood in front of the glowing map, a 38-year-old White man in skinny jeans telling a congregation of some 1,500 people what he said the Lord had told him: that Fort Worth was in thrall to four “high-ranking demonic forces.” That all of America was in the grip of “an anti-Christ spirit.” That the Lord had told him that 2021 was going to be the “Year of the Supernatural,” a time when believers would rise up and wage “spiritual warfare” to advance God’s Kingdom, which was one reason for the bright-red T-shirt he was wearing. It bore the name of a church elder who was running for mayor of Fort Worth. And when the pastor cued the band, the candidate, a Guatemalan American businessman, stood along with the rest of the congregation as spotlights flashed on faces that were young and old, rich and poor, White and various shades of Brown — a church that had grown so large since its founding in 2019 that there were now three services every Sunday totaling some 4,500 people, a growing Saturday service in Spanish and plans for expansion to other parts of the country.
“Say, ‘Cleanse me,’ ” the pastor continued as drums began pounding and the people repeated his words. “Say, ‘Speak, Lord, your servants are listening.’ ”
The church is called Mercy Culture, and it is part of a growing Christian movement that is nondenominational, openly political and has become an engine of former president DonaldTrump’s Republican Party. It includes some of the largest congregations in the nation, housed in the husks of old Baptist churches, former big-box stores and sprawling multimillion-dollar buildings with private security to direct traffic on Sundays. Its most successful leaders are considered apostles and prophets, including some with followings in the hundreds of thousands, publishing empires, TV shows, vast prayer networks, podcasts, spiritual academies, and branding in the form of T-shirts, bumper stickers and even flags. It is a world in which demons are real, miracles are real, and the ultimate mission is not just transforming individual lives but also turning civilization itself into their version of God’s Kingdom: one with two genders, no abortion, a free-market economy, Bible-based education, church-based social programs and laws such as the ones curtailing LGBTQ rights now moving through statehouses around the country.
This is the world of Trump’s spiritual adviser Paula White and many more lesser-known but influential religious leaders who prophesied that Trump would win the election and helped organize nationwide prayer rallies in the days before the Jan. 6 insurrection, speaking of an imminent “heavenly strike” and “a Christian populist uprising,” leading many who stormed the Capitol to believe they were taking back the country for God.
Even as mainline Protestant and evangelical denominations continue an overall decline in numbers in a changing America, nondenominational congregations have surged from being virtually nonexistent in the 1980s to accounting for roughly 1 in 10 Americans in 2020, according to long-term academic surveys of religious affiliation. Church leaders tend to attribute the growth to the power of an uncompromised Christianity. Experts seeking a more historical understanding point to a relatively recent development called the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR.
A California-based theologian coined the phrase in the 1990s to describe what he said he had seen as a missionary in Latin America — vast church growth, miracles, and modern-day prophets and apostles endowed with special powers to fight demonic forces. He and others promoted new church models using sociological principles to attract members. They also began advancing a set of beliefs called dominionism, which holds that God commands Christians to assert authority over the “seven mountains” of life — family, religion, education, economy, arts, media and government — after which time Jesus Christ will return and God will reign for eternity.
None of which is new, exactly. Strains of this thinking formed the basis of the Christian right in the 1970s and have fueled the GOP for decades.
What is new is the degree to which Trump elevated a fresh network of NAR-style leaders who in turn elevated him as God’s chosen president, a fusion that has secured the movement as a grass-roots force within the GOP just as the old Christian right is waning. Increasingly, this is the world that the term “evangelical voter” refers to — not white-haired Southern Baptists in wooden pews but the comparatively younger, more diverse, more extreme world of millions drawn to leaders who believe they are igniting a new Great Awakening in America, one whose epicenter is Texas.
That is where the pastor wearing the bright-red T-shirt, Landon Schott, had been on the third day of a 40-day fast when he said the Lord told him something he found especially interesting.
It was 2017, and he was walking the streets of downtown Fort Worth asking God to make him a “spiritual father” of the city when he heard God say no. What he needed was “spiritual authority,” he remembered God telling him, and the way to get that was to seek the blessing of a pastor named Robert Morris, an evangelical adviser to Trump, and the founder of one of the largest church networks in the nation, called Gateway, with nine branches and weekly attendance in the tens of thousands, including some of the wealthiest businessmen in Texas.
Morris blessed him. Not long after that, a bank blessed him with the funds to purchase an aging church called Calvary Cathedral International, a polygonal structure with a tall white steeple visible from Interstate 35. Soon, the old red carpet was being ripped up. The old wooden pews were being hauled out. The cross on the stage was removed, and in came a huge screen, black and white paint, speakers, lights and modern chandeliers as the new church called Mercy Culture was born.
“Mercy” for undeserved grace.
“Culture” for the world they wanted to create.
That world is most visible on Sundays, beginning at sunrise, when the worship team arrives to set up for services.
In the lobby, they place straw baskets filled with earplugs.
In the sanctuary, they put boxes of tissues at the end of each row of chairs.
On the stage one recent Sunday, the band was doing its usual run-through — two guitar players, a bass player, a keyboardist and two singers, one of whom was saying through her mic to the earpiece of the drummer: “When we start, I want you to wait to build it — then I want you to do those drum rolls as we’re building it.” He nodded, and as they went over song transitions, the rest of the worship team filtered in for the pre-service prayer.
The sound technician prayed over the board controlling stacks of D&B Audiotechnik professional speakers. The lighting technician asked the Lord to guide the 24 professional-grade spotlights with colors named “good green” and “good red.” Pacing up and down the aisles were the ushers, the parking attendants, the security guards, the greeters, the camera operators, the dancers, the intercessors, all of them praying, whispering, speaking in tongues, inviting into the room what they believed to be the Holy Spirit — not in any metaphorical sense, and not in some vague sense of oneness with an incomprehensible universe. Theirs was the spirit of a knowable Christian God, a tangible force they believed could be drawn in through the brown roof, through the cement walls, along the gray-carpeted hallways and in through the double doors of the sanctuary where they could literally breathe it into their bodies. Some people spoke of tasting it. Others said they felt it — a sensation of warm hands pressing, or of knowing that someone has entered the room even when your eyes are closed. Others claimed to see it — golden auras or gold dust or feathers of angels drifting down.
That was the intent of all this, and now the first 1,500 people of the day seeking out those feelings began arriving, pulling in past fluttering white flags stamped with a small black cross over a black “MC,” in through an entrance where the words “Fear Go” were painted in huge block letters above doors that had remained open for much of the pandemic. Inside, the church smelled like fresh coffee.
“Welcome to Mercy,” the greeters said to people who could tell stories of how what happened to them here had delivered them from drug addiction, alcoholism, psychological traumas, PTSD, depression, infidelities, or what the pastor told them was the “sexual confusion” of being gay, queer or transgender. They lingered awhile in a communal area, sipping coffee on modern leather couches, taking selfies in front of a wall with a pink neon “Mercy” sign, or browsing a narrow selection of books about demonic spirits. On a wall, a large clock counted down the final five minutes as they headed into the windowless sanctuary.
Inside, the lights were dim, and the walls were bare. No paintings of parables. No stained glass, crosses, or images of Jesus. Nothing but the stage and the enormous, glowing screen where another clock was spinning down the last seconds as cymbals began playing, and people began standing and lifting their arms because they knew what was about to happen. Cameras 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 were in position. The live stream was on standby. In the front row, the 85-year-old retired pastor of the church this used to be secured his earplugs.Advertisement
What happened next was 40 nonstop minutes of swelling, blasting, drum-pounding music at times so loud that chairs and walls seemed to vibrate. The huge screen became a video of swirling clouds, then a black galaxy of spinning stars. The spotlights went from blue to amber to gold to white. A camera slid back and forth on a dolly. Fog spilled onto the stage. Modern dancers raced around waving shiny flags. One song melded into the next, rising and falling and rising again into extended, mantralike choruses about surrender while people in the congregation began kneeling and bowing.
A few rows back, the pastor stood with one hand raised and the other holding a coffee cup. And when the last song faded, a worship team member walked onstage to explain what was happening in case anyone was new.
“The Holy Spirit is in this room,” he said.
Now everyone sat down and watched the glowing screen. Another video began playing — this one futuristic, techno music over flash-cut images of a nuclear blast, a spinning planet, advancing soldiers, and when it was over, the pastor was standing on the stage to deliver his sermon, the essence of which was repeated in these kinds of churches all over the nation:
America is in the midst of a great battle between the forces of God and Satan, and the forces of Satan roughly resemble the liberal, progressive agenda. Beware of the “seductive, political, demonic, power-hungry spirit that uses witchcraft to control God’s people.” Beware of “freedom that is actually just rebellion against God.” Beware of confusion. Beware of “rogue leaders.” Beware of a world that “preaches toleration of things God does not tolerate,” and on it went for a full hour, a man with a microphone in a spotlight, pacing, sweating, whispering about evil forces until he cued the band and gave instructions for eternal salvation.
“Just say, ‘Holy Spirit, would you teach me how to choose to obey you,’ ” he said, asking people to close their eyes, or kneel, or bow, and as the drums began pounding again, the reaction was the same as it was every Sunday.
People closed their eyes. They knelt. They bowed. They believed, and as they did, people with cameras roamed the congregation capturing peak moments for videos that would be posted to the church’s website and social media accounts: a man with tattooed arms crying; a whole row of people on their knees bowing; a blond woman in a flower-print dress lying all the way down on the floor, forehead to carpet.
When it was over, people streamed outside, squinting into the bright Fort Worth morning as the next 1,500 people pulled in past the fluttering white flags.
By late afternoon Sunday, the parking lot was empty and the rest of the work of kingdom-building could begin.
One day, this meant a meeting of the Distinct Business Ministry, whose goal was “raising up an army of influential leaders” across Fort Worth.
Another day, it meant the church hosting a meeting of a group called the Freedom Shield Foundation, a dozen or so men huddled over laptops organizing what one participant described as clandestine “operations” around Fort Worth to rescue people they said were victims of sex trafficking. This was a core issue for the church. Members were raising money to build housing for alleged victims. There were always prayer nights for the cause, including one where church members laid hands on Fort Worth’s sheriff, who sat with a Bible in his lap and said that the problem was “the demonic battle of our lifetime” and told those gathered that “you are the warriors in that battle.”
Another day, it meant the steady stream of cars inching toward the church food bank, one team loading boxes into trunks and another fanning out along the idling line offering prayers.
A man in a dented green sedan requested one for his clogged arteries.
A man trying to feed a family of seven asked in Spanish, “Please, just bless my life.”
A stone-faced woman said her mother had died of covid, then her sister, and now a volunteer reached inside and touched her shoulder: “Jesus, wrap your arms around Jasmine,” she said, and when she moved on to others who tried to politely decline, the volunteer, a young woman, gave them personal messages she said she had received from the Lord.
“God wants to tell you that you’re so beautiful,” she said into one window.
“I feel God is saying that you’ve done a good job for your family,” she said into another.
“I feel God is saying, if anything, He is proud of you,” she said in Spanish to a woman gripping the steering wheel, her elderly mother in the passenger seat. “When God sees you, He is so pleased, He is so proud,” she continued as the woman stared straight ahead. “I feel you are carrying so much regret, maybe? And pain?” she persisted, and now the woman began nodding. “And I think God wants to release you from the past. Say, ‘Jesus, I give you my shame.’ Say, ‘Jesus, I give you my regret,’ ” the volunteer said, and the woman repeated the words. “ ‘You know I tried my best, Jesus. I receive your acceptance. I receive your love,’ ” the volunteer continued, and now the woman was crying, and the food was being loaded into the back seat, and a volunteer was taking her name, saying, “Welcome to the family.”
Another day, the Kingdom looked like rows of white tents where a woman in a white dress was playing a harp as more than a thousand mostly young women were arriving for something called Marked Women’s Night.
“I feel the Lord is going to be implanting something in us tonight,” a 27-year-old named Autumn said to her friend, their silver eye shadow glowing in the setting sun.
“Every time I come here the Lord always speaks to me,” her friend said.
“Yeah, that happens to me all the time, too,” said Autumn, who described how the Lord had told her to move from Ohio to Texas, and then to attend Gateway Church, and then to enroll in a Gateway-approved school called Lifestyle Christianity University, where she said the Lord sent a stranger to pay her tuition. Not long after that, the Lord sent her into an Aldi supermarket, where she met a woman who told her about Mercy Culture, which is how she ended up sitting here on the grass on a summer evening, believing that the Lord was preparing her to go to Montana to “prophesy over the land” in anticipation of a revival.
“I don’t understand it; I just know it’s God,” Autumn said.
“So many miracles,” said her friend, and soon the drums were pounding.
They joined the crowd heading inside for another thunderous concert followed by a sermon by the pastor’s wife, during which she referred to the women as “vessels” and described “the Kingdom of Heaven growing and taking authority over our nation.”
Another day — Election Day in Fort Worth — hundreds of church members gathered at a downtown event space to find out whether their very own church elder, Steve Penate, would become the next mayor, and the sense in the room was that of a miracle unfolding.
“Supernatural,” said Penate, a first-time candidate, looking at the crowd of volunteers who’d knocked on thousands of doors around the city.
A candidate for the 2022 governor’s race stopped by. A wealthy businessman who helped lead the Republican National Hispanic Assembly drove over from Dallas. The pastor came by to declare that “this is the beginning of a righteous movement.”
“We are not just going after the mayorship — we’re going after every seat,” he said as the first batch of votes came in showing Penate in sixth place out of 10 candidates, and then fifth place, and then fourth, which was where he stayed as the last votes came in and he huddled with his campaign team to pray.
“Jesus, you just put a dent in the kingdom of darkness,” his campaign adviser said. “We stand up to the darkness. We stand up to the establishment. God, this is only the beginning.”
Another day, 100 or so young people crowded into a church conference room singing, “God, I’ll go anywhere; God, I’ll do anything,” hands raised, eyes closed, kneeling, bowing, crying, hugging. At the front of the room, a man with blond hair and a beard was talking about love.
“Everyone says they have the definition for what love is, but the Bible says, ‘By this we know love,’ ” he said. “Jesus laid down his life for us, and we are to lay down our lives for others.”
He dimmed the lights and continued in this vein for another hour, the music playing, the young people rocking back and forth mouthing, “Jesus, Jesus,” trancelike, until the blond man said, “It’s about that time.”
He turned the lights back on and soon, he sent them out on missions into the four demonic quadrants of Fort Worth.
One group headed east into Competition, a swath of the city that included the mirrored skyscrapers of downtown and struggling neighborhoods such as one called Stop 6, where the young people had claimed two salvations in a park the day before.
Another team headed west toward the green lawns and sprawling mansions of Greed.
Another rolled south toward Lust, where it was normal these days to see rainbow flags on bungalow porches and cafe windows including the one where a barista named Ryan Winters was behind the counter, eyeing the door.
It wasn’t the evangelicals he was worried about but the young customers who came in and were sometimes vulnerable.
“Maybe someone is struggling with their identity,” Ryan said.
He was not struggling. He was 27, a lapsed Methodist who counted himself lucky that he had never heard the voice of a God that would deem him unholy for being who he was, the pansexual lead singer of a psychedelic punk band called Alice Void.
“I never had a time when I was uncomfortable or ashamed of myself,” he said. “We all take care of each other, right, Tom?”
“Oh, yeah,” said a man with long gray hair, Tom Brunen, a Baptist turned Buddhist artist who was 62 and had witnessed the transformation of the neighborhood from a dangerous, castoff district that was a refuge for people he called “misfits” into a place that represented what much of America was becoming: more accepting, more inclined to see churches in terms of the people they had forsaken.
“It’s all mythology and fear and guilt that keeps the plutocracy and the greed in line above everybody else,” Tom said. “That’s what the universe showed me. If you want to call it God, fine. The creative force, whatever. Jesus tried to teach people that it’s all one thing. He tried and got killed for it. Christianity killed Jesus. The end. That’s my testimony.”
That was what the kingdom-builders were up against, and in the late afternoon, Nick Davenport, 24, braced himself as he arrived at his demonic battlefield, Rebellion, a noisy, crowded tourist zone of bars, souvenir shops and cobblestone streets in the north part of the city. He began walking around, searching out faces.
“The sheep will know the shepherd’s voice,” he repeated to himself to calm his nerves.
“Hey, Jesus loves y’all,” he said tentatively to a blond woman walking by.
“He does, he does,” the woman said, and he pressed on.
“Is anything bothering you?” he said to a man holding a shopping bag.
“No, I’m good,” the man said, and Nick continued down the sidewalk.
It was hot, and he passed bars and restaurants and gusts of sour-smelling air. A cacophony of music drifted out of open doors. A jacked-up truck roared by.
He moved on through the crowds, scanning the faces of people sitting at some outdoor tables. He zeroed in on a man eating a burger, a red scar visible at the top of his chest.
“Do you talk to God?” Nick asked him.
“Every day — I died twice,” the man said, explaining he had survived a car accident.
“What happened when you died?” Nick asked.
“Didn’t see any white lights,” the man said. “Nothing.”
“Well, Jesus loves you,” Nick said, and kept walking until he felt God pulling him toward a young man in plaid shorts standing outside a bar. He seemed to be alone. He was drinking a beer, his eyes red.
“Hi, I’m Nick, and I wanted to know, how are you doing?”
“Kind of you to ask,” the man said. “My uncle killed himself yesterday.”
“Oh,” said Nick, pausing for a moment. “I’m sorry. You know, God is close to the brokenhearted. I know it doesn’t feel like it all the time.”
He began telling him his own story of a troubled home life and a childhood of bullying, and how he had been close to suicide himself when he was 18 years old, and how, on a whim, he went with a friend to a massive Christian youth conference in Nashville of the sort that is increasingly common these days. A worship band called Planet Shakers was playing, he said, and deep into one of their songs, he heard what he believed to be the voice of God for the first time.
“The singer said if you’re struggling, let it go, and I halfheartedly said, ‘Okay, God, I guess I give it to you,’ and all of the sudden I felt shaky. I fell to the ground. I felt like a hand on my chest. Like, ‘I have you.’ I heard God say, ‘I love you. I made you for a purpose.’ When I heard that, I bawled like a baby. That was when I knew what I was created for. For Jesus.”
The man with red eyes listened.
“Thanks for saying that,” he said, and Nick continued walking the sidewalks into the early evening, his confidence bolstered, feeling more certain than ever that he would soon be leaving his roofing job to do something else for the Lord, something big. He had been preparing, absorbing the lessons of a church that taught him his cause was righteous, and that in the great spiritual battle for America, the time was coming when he might be called upon to face the ultimate test.
“If I have any choice, I want to die like the disciples,” said Nick. “John the Baptist was beheaded. One or two were boiled alive. Peter, I believe he was crucified upside down. If it goes that way? I’m ready. If people want to stone me, shoot me, cut my fingers off — it doesn’t matter what you do to me. We will give anything for the gospel. We are open. We are ready.”
Ready for what, though, is the lingering question.
Those inside the movement have heard all the criticisms. That their churches are cults that prey on human frailties. That what their churches are preaching about LGTBQ people is a lie that is costing lives in the form of suicides. That the language of spiritual warfare, demonic forces, good and evil is creating exactly the sort of radical worldview that could turn politics into holy war. That the U.S. Constitution does not allow laws privileging a religion. That America does not exist to advance some Christian Kingdom of God or to usher in the second coming of Jesus.
To which Penate, the former mayoral candidate, said, “There’s a big misconception when it comes to separation of church and state. It never meant that Christians shouldn’t be involved in politics. It’s just loving the city. Being engaged. Our children are in public schools. Our cars are on public streets. The reality is that people who don’t align with the church have hijacked everything. If I ever get elected, my only allegiance will be to the Lord.”
Or as a member of Mercy Culture who campaigned for Penate said: “Can you imagine if every church took a more active role in society? If teachers were preachers? If church took a more active role in health? In business? If every church took ownership over their communities? There would be no homeless. No widows. No orphans. It would look like a society that has a value system. A Christian value system.”
That was the American Kingdom they were working to advance, and as another Sunday arrived, thousands of believers streamed past the fluttering white flags and into the sanctuary to bathe in the Holy Spirit for the righteous battles and glories to come.
The drums began pounding. The screen began spinning. The band began blasting, and when it was time, the pastor stood on the stage to introduce a topic he knew was controversial, and to deliver a very specific word. He leaned in.
“Submission,” he said.
“We’ve been taught obedience to man instead of obedience to God,” he continued.
“God makes an army out of people who will learn to submit themselves,” he continued.
“When you submit, God fights for you,” he concluded.
He cued the band. The drums began to pound again, and he told people to “breathe in the presence of God,” and they breathed. He told them to close their eyes, and they closed their eyes. He gave them words to repeat, and the people repeated them.
“I declare beautiful, supernatural submission,” they said.
The Christian Right Is in Decline, and It’s Taking America With It
The presidency of George W. Bush may have been the high point of the modern Christian right’s influence in America. White evangelicals were the largest religious faction in the country. “They had a president who claimed to be one of their own, he had a testimony, talked in evangelical terms,” said Robert P. Jones, chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute and author of the 2016 book “The End of White Christian America.”
Back then, much of the public sided with the religious right on the key culture war issue of gay marriage. “In 2004, if you had said, ‘We’re the majority, we oppose gay rights, we oppose marriage equality, and the majority of Americans is with us,’ that would have been true,” Jones told me. Youthful megachurches were thriving. It was common for conservatives to gloat that they were going to outbreed the left.
Activists imagined a glorious future. “Home-schoolers will be inordinately represented in the highest levels of leadership and power in the next generation,” Ned Ryun, a former Bush speechwriter, said at a 2005 Christian home-schooling convention. Ryun was the director of a group called Generation Joshua, which worked to get home-schooled kids into politics. The name came from the Old Testament. Moses had led the chosen people out of exile, but it was his successor, Joshua, who conquered the Holy Land.
But the evangelicals who thought they were about to take over America were destined for disappointment. On Thursday, P.R.R.I. released startling new polling data showing just how much ground the religious right has lost. P.R.R.I.’s 2020 Census of American Religion, based on a survey of nearly half a million people, shows a precipitous decline in the share of the population identifying as white evangelical, from 23 percent in 2006 to 14.5 percent last year. (As a category, “white evangelicals” isn’t a perfect proxy for the religious right, but the overlap is substantial.) In 2020, as in every year since 2013, the largest religious group in the United States was the religiously unaffiliated.
One of P.R.R.I.’s most surprising findings was that in 2020, there were more white mainline Protestants than white evangelicals. This doesn’t necessarily mean Christians are joining mainline congregations — the survey measures self-identification, not church affiliation. It is, nevertheless, a striking turnabout after years when mainline Protestantism was considered moribund and evangelical Christianity full of dynamism.
In addition to shrinking as a share of the population, white evangelicals were also the oldest religious group in the United States, with a median age of 56. “It’s not just that they are dying off, but it is that they’re losing younger members,” Jones told me. As the group has become older and smaller, Jones said, “a real visceral sense of loss of cultural dominance” has set in.
White evangelicals once saw themselves “as the owners of mainstream American culture and morality and values,” said Jones. Now they are just another subculture.
From this fact derives much of our country’s cultural conflict. It helps explain not just the rise of Donald Trump, but also the growth of QAnon and even the escalating conflagration over critical race theory. “It’s hard to overstate the strength of this feeling, among white evangelicals in particular, of America being a white Christian country,” said Jones. “This sense of ownership of America just runs so deep in white evangelical circles.” The feeling that it’s slipping away has created an atmosphere of rage, resentment and paranoia.
QAnon is essentially a millenarian movement, with Trump taking the place of Jesus. Adherents dream of the coming of what they call the storm, when the enemies of the MAGA movement will be rounded up and executed, and Trump restored to his rightful place of leadership.
“It’s not unlike a belief in the second coming of Christ,” said Jones. “That at some point God will reorder society and set things right. I think that when a community feels itself in crisis, it does become more susceptible to conspiracy theories and other things that tell them that what they’re experiencing is not ultimately what’s going to happen.”
The fight over critical race theory seems, on the surface, further from theological concerns. There are, obviously, plenty of people who aren’t evangelical who are anti-C.R.T., as well as evangelicals who oppose C.R.T. bans. But the idea that public schools are corrupting children by leading them away from a providential understanding of American history has deep roots in white evangelical culture. And it was the Christian right that pioneered the tactic of trying to take over school boards in response to teachings seen as morally objectionable, whether that meant sex education, “secular humanism” or evolution.
Jones points out that last year, after Trump issued an executive order targeting critical race theory, the presidents of all six seminaries of the Southern Baptist Convention came together to declare C.R.T. “incompatible” with the Baptist faith. Jones, whose latest book is “White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity,” could recall no precedent for such a joint statement.
As Jones notes, the Southern Baptist Convention was formed in 1845 after splitting with abolitionist Northern Baptists. He described it as a “remarkable arc”: a denomination founded on the defense of slavery “denouncing a critical read of history that might put a spotlight on that story.”
Then again, white evangelicals probably aren’t wrong to fear that their children are getting away from them. As their numbers have shrunk and as they’ve grown more at odds with younger Americans, said Jones, “that has led to this bigger sense of being under attack, a kind of visceral defensive posture, that we saw President Trump really leveraging.”
I was frightened by the religious right in its triumphant phase. But it turns out that the movement is just as dangerous in decline. Maybe more so. It didn’t take long for the cocky optimism of Generation Joshua to give way to the nihilism of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. If they can’t own the country, they’re ready to defile it.
It is like Storage Wars where a bunch of skeptics, scholars and former members stand outside of a conventional church and decide which is a worse cult, one of the hybrid kind that evoke elements of faith and self healing, the other a sex slave kink cult and the the last the organized kind centuries old that have all of those and more thrown in to allow for a bigger draw.
When I look to organized Religion they all have the same components, a male figurehead, a sense of superiority, healing and prayer are co-joined at the hip and of course some sexual depravity thrown in there for good measure. The Catholics have that one covered, Evangelicals have a branch that includes Fundamentalism which has speaking in tongues and faith healing to add to the prayer as a cure for all ails, literally snakes and oils, if you look at their history. The differences between cults from Scientology to NXVIM seem to be religion as business with multi level marketing and a type of extortion or blackmail in which to further secure your loyalty and your checkbook.
During the pandemic I was listening to many podcasts regarding true crime and cults and with this I found a striking parallel, the idea that a need to be represented, to be seen, to be smarter than the average bear are traits found in both. Moral superiority often leads to serial criminality. And with that I have now finished the series on HBO Max, Generation Hustle, about some infamous Grifter’s to took it too new heights when it came to stealing from the poor to make themselves rich. Not all ended up in Jail and we are seeing the trial of Elizabeth Holmes coming up and she was not in that series as she had one of her own as Theranos broke that glass ceiling when it came to cons. But could Adam Neumann of We Work be counted in that category, he was profiled as was the company, he is a subject of a book and a podcast about how the glass walls came tumbling down around him but he walked away from it all the richer. So even those living in glass houses can come out without too many stones thrown back in their direction.
But one podcast stood out and that was the one with Glenn Close on Marc Maron’s podcast where she discussed her youth growing up in a cult. She had never discussed it publicly before that day where she opened up regarding her family, their lives in a cult and how she finally broke out and away. I often think that if you predisposed to this through either faux therapy, which often is cult based bullshit, or raised in one, you seek out alternatives that are equally as destructive but less damaging. I have personally seen individuals do this with regards to Yoga and have written about those cults that fall into the healing/wellness versions. I think this is like a stamp on your head a Scarlet Letter if must which often places the V for Victim and then once that moniker is affixed it enables those predators to find you easily and manipulate you in the same way. Ask serial rapists about this. No they won’t as no one wants to know why men rape but when they shoot guns in a crowd, that they want to profile. Same thing really, spreading your jizz every where is a form of genocidal rape, just with bullets.
While Men seem to be the largest founders and leaders of cults it seems that largely women are the ones who are the ones most victimized. The few men who have come out of NXIVM are interesting as one was in a cult before and the other is married to one of the more vociferous of critics who left the cult. The rest seem, well fine with that? I have no clue. We never do focus on the male aspect of these stories, as in the case of the Golden State Killer whose male victims were witnesses to his rapes and abuse and unable to help or save their female partners from his terror, even long after he left. We clearly have work to do on all levels with regards to sexual predatory behavior.
And with this I share another story of a woman who also left a cult and the scars they leave behind. If you have not watched Leah Remini’s story of Scientology you should as victim after victim share their stories and the parallels between those and R.Kelly’s are too similar than should. But this is where the fucking of the mind begins, and with that it opens up a universe of shit that Pandora should have burned to the ground and put only ashes in that box.
Guardian journalist helped me see a way out, ex-cult member recalls
Former Children of God member says simple question put to her by Walter Schwarz was life-changing
Bexy Cameron with Walter Schwarz. ‘I was intrigued by him,’ she said of first meeting the former Guardian journalist, who died in 2018, when she was 11. Photograph: Manilla Press
It was a simple question to a child, one routinely asked by adults: what do you want to be when you grow up? But for 11-year-old Bexy Cameron, who had never known anything but the strict religious cult she was born into, it was life-changing
Her brief encounter with the Guardian journalist Walter Schwarz in the 1990s led to her escaping the Children of God cult at the age of 15, leaving behind her parents and siblings. Now she has written a memoir, Cult Following, about growing up in a movement founded by a controlling sexual predator. The last line of her acknowledgments reads: “Eternal gratitude to Walter Schwarz (RIP). Who knows what would have happened without that ‘one simple question’?”
Cameron, 38, and her 11 siblings knew only a life dominated by Bible readings, exorcisms, physical and psychological punishments when Schwarz became the first journalist to be permitted access to the cult. Children of God had been founded in California in 1968 by the self-proclaimed prophet David Berg, who was known as Moses.
At its peak, Children of God had 10,000 adherents across the world who followed Berg’s strict instructions. It was a highly sexualised and abusive environment; women were sent out to entice men into the cult and daughters were sometimes forced to “marry” their fathers. By the time Berg died in 1994, he was wanted for questioning by the FBI and Interpol over allegations of rape, incest, incarceration and kidnapping.
Cameron as a child. Photograph: Manilla Press
Cameron remembers Schwarz’s arrival at the commune in Leicestershire where the family lived at the time as “a really big moment”. The cult had decided to “open our doors, to reveal ourselves a little more. But unknown to Walter, we [children] were trained for his visit to say certain things and not say other things.”
Cameron and her siblings and peers had no access to television or newspapers and never went to school. “We had no idea what was going on in the outside world, but we were told that the media was evil and people were out to get us.”
Schwarz’s stay at the commune came just after Cameron had ended a year of “silence restriction” when she was forbidden from speaking to anyone except her assigned leader.Advertisement
“I was excited that I’d been chosen to speak to Walter. I was completely intrigued by him – he was tall and had white hair and a gentle manner. He looked us in the eye. He didn’t ask any of the questions I’d been prepped for, just this mundane ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’
“It was the first time I’d ever thought about the concept of being grown up or becoming something. We were raised to believe that we were going to die in the ‘End Time’ wars, that we were going to be martyrs. So when he asked me that, it was an epiphany – that’s the best way that I can describe it. All of a sudden, there was a crack in the wall, potentially an escape route.”
A few years later, Cameron took that route, but it was more than a decade before she reached “the point where I needed to confront my past – and the first thing I wanted to do was to track down the man who had started the change in me”.
She had no idea of the journalist’s name, but knew he had worked for the Guardian. After digging around she concluded that Schwarz, the Guardian’s then retired religious affairs correspondent, was likely to be her interviewer.
In an extraordinary twist, it turned out that a friend of hers was Schwarz’s son. Cameron emailed Schwarz to say thank you for “opening a door to another world”. Within an hour he had replied, inviting her to visit.
“It was a really wonderful experience to meet him again, but there were complicated emotions on both sides.” Schwarz pressed her to write about her childhood, and showed her his original article about the Children of God. “He was a bit upset as he’d written quite a positive piece based on what he’d seen during his visit.”
She kept in contact with Schwarz until his death aged 88 in 2018. “I spent many weekends at his home. They made me feel like part of the family. He was such an insightful, beautiful man, and he has a wonderful place in my heart.”
I was not sure what the week would bring as with it came unrelenting heat and humidity, and in the Pacific Northwest it was truly a new level of pandemic catastrophes that have literally and metaphorically plagued the region. And being from there we thought Air Conditioning was for sissies and then this. For years they have been facing drought, fires that literally poisoned the air and once again proved that yes folks stupid does live in Liberal regions. They ran out of air conditioners and people being asked to turn off power to prevent surges, and even grocery stores had to stop selling perishables thanks to the issues with cooling. The irony was that Seattle, finally out of stage whatever level lockdown ends up with rolling blackouts, deaths and hospital overcrowding thanks to heat related illnesses. Portland was even worse and the irony is not lost as both cities took it upon themselves the last year to go batshit crazy over Black Lives Matter in ways that cities with way higher Black populations and incidents of Police related deaths and incidents did not. We saw some horrific displays of White Power in Kenosha and in Minneapolis where the Boys were proud to step it and up or whatever the fuck Trump said they did to basically make things worse; I did not see this in Newark or in Cleveland, Baltimore and Detroit that are by far more Chocolate cities. The South, however, well it is the South and even some Southern cities found themselves much calmer than the whitest cities in the U.S., Seattle and Portland. But again over 90% of the protests were in fact civil and peaceful. And with that the greatest threat to American safety is not urban crime or violence, but White Supremacy. Go figure. It is they who are suffering from White Fragility, not normal folks who simply are ignorant about race, as most folks are not actively oppressing those not of the same race, they are just as bubbled and self involved as our culture has permitted if not encouraged. That said, ignorance is not bliss it is ignorance and for many it took a pandemic where you forced into lockdown yourself to watch a man die and realize that this was not something new or unusual in the Black/Brown community. Yes we are now broadcasting Snuff films on national television and we watched, let the Gladiator games begin. Stephen King called it in The Stand, he is a prophet and now I am off to Maine to form a cult around him.
And with that we have the sentencing of Allison Mack former actress from a long ended series but who ended up with a new role as crazy recruiter for another angry sexually perverted white man, the head of NXVIM. Having watched all the documentaries on this subject, listened to the podcasts and read all I can I am trying to understand this as to why anyone would listen to this dude who looks like a Middle School Science Teacher, let alone get branded with his initials. I would not get a hand stamp from the man nor engage in what is multi level marketing, something this idiot did before turning it into a sex slave mindfuck cult. Hey, nice work if you can get it and my Stephen King one is going to be fantastic!
In more sentencing news, Derek Chauvin was also sentenced, the relative calm again surrounding it proves that Black Lives Matter and for many it was not long enough but it was enough as for years their tears went unrecognized. And the rest of the douches that sat there and watched the murder are up next. This may again prove that sometimes just sometimes Justice works.
Speaking of Justice the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell is getting ready to begin and this time I too am ready to finally photo bomb and become a MEME after Covid shut down the Harvey Weinstein trial which I had been prepping for days to attend. I actually find this more interesting as we seem to think Women are often just victims and yes many times they start out that way but to prevent further abuse they too become the abuser. And here we have two women who were never victims in any sense of the word, they simply joined the hideous lunatic in his pursuit of lurid sex and debauchery, and the examples are Allison Mack and now our dear Ghislaine. She too is the subject of her own documentary on Peacock which for the first time I will sign up, watch it and then immediately cancel, like I did Starz with the one on NXVIM.
And as one celebrity goes to jail another comes out and Bill Cosby was released as the Superior Court of Pennsylvania found that his prosecution was illegal. Who knew? Well half of the people currently in the slammer for crimes they did not commit. Ah yes but they aren’t famous and rich and have to wait for a non-profit to take up their case to dig that shit up. But hey Bill is free! And the only person happy about is Phylicia Rashad. Watch for her to get quietly written out of This is Us. Canceled!
In California they are trying to cancel the Governorship of Gavin Newsom and the contestants on this new reality show include a reality star from Orange County, the love tank filler of Vicky Gunvalson and formerly Bruce Jenner. This is again while a State reels from fire and drought and Covid and it appears that maybe all that glitters is not gold in California, home of Hollywood so that much is true, as the fire preparations were not what Newsom claimed. This could be the undoing as this has been a major problem in the region and with that a drain on the state in ways Covid could never be. And while the New York Mayoral race is plagued with issues it provides the cover for Cuomo that all the handy Covid art failed to do. Welcome to term three Andy!
And with that comes the last bit of the saga of Britney Spears who testified that it was abuse and imprisonment and promptly the new female Judge connected with her on a woman to woman level and retained the arrangement. Yeah, women our are worst enemies especially with little evidence to support Britney’s argument or the Conservators beliefs she is not capable, carry on! Really? And with that the Conservator is resigning leaving Dad to his trailer. But lawmakers are on it as they have never seen or heard a public lynching that didn’t require their intervention, just the type and kind have been debatable of late. Hi, Mike Pence! So they are beginning to look into these “arrangements” as it is a form of abuse and control that often enriches one and isolates the other held in non-covid captivity. Try to imagine that as permanent and even more restrictive. Again this is not about Britney bitch, but she brought this to light. One time White Fragility worked out and we got woke.
And talk about prisons, apparently Australia is one as it is now once again in big time prison bitch lockdown. Even residents are beginning to be come distressed as the costs and measures to make Australia number one in preventing Covid deaths is in fact killing people softly. Good on ya mate!
And with that the Trump Organization is facing its own type of inquiry and challenges and with that it will all I will say about he who should be nameless as it is time to move forward and onward with a new optimism and hope about the future. I never thought it would come in the form of an aging white man who has spent his entire life in politics and then yet again as I have long thought we are moving back in time and Biden is LBJ, which means Harris the JFK who will have a short term Presidency and be one that we will always look back with in fondness and go, “Wow we had a Black-Indian Woman as President and a Jew as her First Man.” Yes we go one step forward and two steps back, welcome folks to the late 60’s. Swing On!
I cannot stress enough that there will have to be a mandate for those American’s eligible to get a vaccine to do so. Yes we get it we really do but the reality is that this bullshit will go on for years if we don’t. There are some Covid hangovers I would like, such as Masks on Transit, working offsite, and of course better medical care and free! But the reality is that the anti-vaxx idiots are making everyone else do the heavy lifting at this point. Sorry you fucks we carried you through a pandemic and now you want us to continue to do so. You want to prepare and deliver my food and packages. You want to serve me in Bars and Restaurants and sit next to me in public forums such as Theaters and Stadiums. You want me to travel with you and you want me to teach your children, to acknowledge your presence. You actually are in the medical field and expect me to pay money for health care and you knowingly refuse to vaccinate. What the flying fuck! We should take those pots we were clanging for you and smack them upside your head.
I just passed the Covid denier/exposer standing with his kids up the street, and as I have truly mastered the Covid dodge and I boogied away before he noticed me. Then I returned home to the two Desk Agents who are anti vaxxers and I hooded up and boogied past them. Earlier going out to run errands the elevator stopped and a woman with a dog was waiting, I said, “I am fully vaxxed.” She said no thanks and turned her back. As the doors closed I go, “Oh so you just hate me then.” This is where we are folks.
We have largely faces of color and weird ass white trash refusing to vaccinate. I can assure you the Proud Nation of White Supremacy have all been vaxxed with every single one of them, and they are busy lying and hiding it while busy spreading misinformation as a way of getting that genocide plan they have long hoped for going. The big chief of the camp of hate, The Donald, has and that he continues to manipulate these white trash morons is for reasons I am unclear. If they are dead how can they Vote? As for the faces of color who refuse, I spoke with a woman who is working with an activist to get all the undocumented workers vaccinated with leftovers which requires no paperwork and there is no shortage of those who do want it. As for any of the rest well again the Proud Nation of White Supremacy have members who are of numerous races and sexual identities and self-hating is something we have all experienced at a time in our lives which may explain that. Or they figure that better to join them then get beaten by them. Who knows?
The issue about workplaces mandating their employees to get vaccines is about fear of lawsuits. Okay here we go. I don’t want to work next to a maniac with a gun so do they ban those? What other legal bullshit you sign to work. I don’t think anyone should have to sign a non-compete clause or and NDA but they do. Those don’t hurt anyone but a fucking contagious disease that can kill? Sure fuck that come on in! I would rather work with Scott Rudin and Harvey Weinstein as I can dodge a flying potato and avoid getting raped by never going to a hotel room, so hey what about a job?
I want you to read the story of a young man who grew up in an anti-vaxx household. He is now telling you that it is more dangerous than you think, as this is akin to a cult. And this is before Covid. Folks talk about serendipity. The sangfroid this kid displays is what we need right now. Seriously we have really failed ourselves as a nation with this bullshit.
There is no excuse. Anti-vaxxers put us all at risk
| March 12, 2019 By Gracie Bonds Staples, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Ethan Lindenberger
Let that name sink in a bit because something tells me we will be hearing from him again. Soon.
Lindenberger is the 18-year-old from Ohio who shared his story last week about growing up in an anti-vaccine household. He spoke at a U.S. Senate hearing on vaccines and the outbreak of preventable diseases.
His mother, however well-meaning, never took him to get the standard vaccines that protect against measles, mumps, chickenpox, rubella and other diseases
Her love, affection and care were used to push an agenda to create a false distress, Lindenberger told the committee.
He believes his mother’s misinformation and fear put children at risk.
Reasonable people will agree with him. For proof, look no further than the recent measles outbreak.
The culprit? Low vaccination rates.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, on average one person with measles will infect 12 to 18 people in a susceptible population, which is a population without prior exposure to the measles virus either through vaccination or natural infection.
The disease is highly contagious; infectious droplets can remain in the air for two hours, meaning that one can become infected during that time period even without skin-to-skin contact. Some 90 percent of susceptible individuals exposed to the airborne droplets will become infected.
Lindenberger grew up debating these points with his mother but to no avail.
You can lead a horse to water, as the saying goes, but you can’t make him drink it.
Dr. Austin Chan, an assistant professor of infectious disease at the Morehouse School of Medicine, believes vaccines are one of the greatest preventive tools that have ever been developed against disease.
Many people, however, still point to a 1998 study by Andrew Wakefield that showed vaccinated children had increased rates of autism, Chan said. Even though that fact was later retracted because Wakefield altered the facts to support his claim, Chan said, the idea stuck.
“I think the anti-vaccination movement is incredibly dangerous, but for some reason, they’ve managed to convince some very high-profile celebrities, who then sway public opinion,” he said.
That’s baffling beyond words. Why would anyone trust a celebrity when it comes to their health? There’s a big difference between an entertainer and a doctor, and it’s not just between the ears.
Heck, they don’t buy half the stuff they’re allowed to sell. It’s given to them. But I digress.
What’s important to remember here is the notion that vaccines might cause autism was refuted nine years ago, when a British medical panel concluded in 2010 that Wakefield had acted with “callous disregard” in conducting his research.
More recently, researchers examined data for more than half a million Danish children born between 1999 and the end of 2010 that show the MMR vaccine not only does not increase the risk of autism but is not likely to trigger the developmental disorder in susceptible populations. Their findings were published in the Annals of Internal Medicine the day before the Senate hearing.
Like the rest of you, I’ve been watching these outbreaks pop up across the country for months now. By last count, six outbreaks are ongoing in the United States, according to the CDC. Georgia health officials have confirmed three cases of measles, all within the same metro Atlanta family.
That isn’t just scary. It’s as preventable as the disease itself. All one has to do is get vaccinated.
The moment Lindenberger became an adult, he was done with the back and forth with his parents. He did his research and, armed with the facts, not the hysteria you find on the internet, he decided to get vaccinated on his own.
Not only is he smart, he’s a great role model.
One news story I read said that after the hearing, he told reporters he’d done his best to “address misinformation without demonizing people,” and that he and his parents are still working through their differences.
His advice to other youths experiencing debates about vaccines within their families? “Just maintain respect and continue presenting evidence.”
The Senate also heard from Saad Omer, a professor of epidemiology and pediatrics at Emory University; John Boyle, president and CEO of the Immune Deficiency Foundation; and John Wiesman, secretary of health at the Washington State Department of Health.
Washington has had three measles outbreaks over the past 10 years. As of March 4, the state Department of Health had confirmed 70 cases of measles in Washington’s Clark County.
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., expressed his opposition to mandatory vaccines during the hearing even though he said he vaccinated himself and his kids.
“For myself and my children, I believe that the benefits of vaccines greatly outweigh the risks, but I still do not favor giving up on liberty for a false sense of security,” he said.
I wish I could say I understand his line of thinking but I don’t.
People certainly have the right to choose, but do they also have the right to jeopardize the health of others? Please, you tell me.
I normally am up at 3 am to workout in the gym as it is one of the most unsafe places in which to spend time, next to restaurants and hospitals. The one thing good about my gym is it has windows and fans and I can open them while in there to secure ventilation and air circulation even when alone. And I have come to the realization that people act like freaks in the gym for whatever reason their behavior veers on the strange to the outright bizarre. But today I just slept in then got up to do live streamed yoga and even that got on my nerves and you can see that even online there were fewer attendees as there is nothing more boring than those classes day in and day out that do nothing but the same routine over and over again. We are already rats in a cage that does not help.
Then we have the daily news, as always it is dark, really dark. The reality is that is by intent and it serves to brings eyes, ears and clickbait to the masses. Who then quickly go online to their social media perch to rant, rave, reserve the same dish now ten times cold to their followers to get affirmations or stir shit, whichever is preferable to serve the rat in the cage and give someone a sense of purpose and identity that they matter, their opinions matter and they are right. Whatever that means. We are a lonely isolated nation and that was before Covid and now it is even worse. The Keyboard Warrior is as dangerous if not more than the crazed armed up Proud/Boogaloo/Keepers/Waffen maniacs that seem to think the bigger the gun, the bigger the dick. That may be true just not how they intended.
I am bored out of my skull. One more shot and I will have a moderate immunity to the virus. It doesn’t mean changing my behavior but it enables me to move somewhat more freely with less of a time clock/bomb on my head. I went to the play Blindness, which submerges you into that state as the Actress, Juliet Stevenson, reads the lines of the book as narrator and guide through the dystopian fiction that is the plot of the book. The New York Times gave it a moderate review but they are critics in a time when we need less critical analysis of anything frankly. I found it oddly inspiring and strangely affirming as the protagonist was a woman who was of a “certain age” and she had the foresight, the vision, and the cunning to manage it all. After years of watching most of these fall to the males of the pack, there was only one voice, hers and it rocked. We marginalize women even in fiction (and let’s get real women are not Wonder or Super nor are men either) and this was not the case. Brava!
Then we have the lack of a social calendar at all. Thankfully that prior to the play I was at Union Square Park and encountered to charming funny smart young people, they were not there together but as we sat physically on our own benches we met each other and did what people in New York did before the pandemonium, chatted and laughed about all things from politics to people and that is what satiated me in my life before and to realize that it can again means there is light and hope. And then the next day I commented on a Gentleman’s dapper outfit and whe chatted briefly as he was a character and bon vivant that I took in with great amusement not believing a word he said but enjoying all of it. Why not? We all take on the persona of whom we wish to be, want to be seen as and we wear costumes to compliment that, and masks now are just another addition to the ensemble.
And this brings me to friends and the reality of what a new world will look like once we reach a safe level of inoculations and the ability to meet herd immunity. And it appears that may be a long way out as the anti-vaxx community and fear factor heightened by the press and their ability to drone on about well nothing, such as the J&J site being shut down due to side effects that included the ones standard to most vaccines, nausea and dizziness. But this again may be due to the scandal regarding the J&J plant fuck up, a site with a history of problems, and a billion-dollar contract with the Government that went unregulated for decades.
I read the article below in Vanity Fair about the state of friendships once the restrictions are lifted. As I believe and still do that my lack of them was why I was safe despite all the traveling I was doing in the nascent days and that I can’t miss what I never had also kept me sane during the lockdown. Say what you want but independence is freeing on many levels; however, we all enjoy some human contact be that random and superficial or more intimate and deeper on however you wish to define it. But that is what the pandemic enabled me to do, inventory my relationships past and future, present was off the table as the acquaintances I had spent time with were the crew at my coffee shop and my building staff, not exactly a peer group in any stretch of the imagination. As I wrote about one of them the New Age Anti Vaxxer who is eventually leaving but I doubt will change my mind about that store and hence my transferring to another did enable me to meet the interesting character I met yesterday, superior to the Covid denier I had also met at the other shop. That one is fucking toxic, even the owners don’t hang out there anymore as I saw them at the second location and laughed. Not wrong, that much I knew as it was shades of Nashville and that is one place that is toxic on a much larger scale.
With my new approach, I decided that the year was one of NO COMPROMISES. We spend most of life trying to reconcile wants and needs and negotiating with ourselves how much we are willing to sacrifice in which to at least have some satisfaction of having some of those needs and wants met. And with that, I am done with it all. My way or the highway and having spent the better part of six decades not compromising but capitulating on it all, I am pretty fine as I am. Bitches I survived a pandemic on my own, what more proof do you need? It also does not mean I am not agreeable, amenable, or even willing to open up to new ideas or minds, far from that as those make me thrive and survive as well, it just means that I will only do so much, go so far and do only what I feel makes me feel good about it. The Vagina and checkbook are closed for business so that should allow one to understand how far that is. Not very.
Which brings me to men, again I see that there are going to be problems with this so ladies think about that. I suspect MeToo will take on a whole new meaning only in the affirmative as opposed to the cautionary warning it once represented. I see women and their Instagrams and the insatiable need to be liked for being “sexy” and wanting to show that you can be all that with little more than a bad costume and a willingness to pose with your mouth slightly open, all the better to suck cock with. Ladies did you not learn anything? No, apparently you didn’t. The super cute gal I met on Tuesday was adorable and she is smart in that she knows who she is and may not have needed a pandemic to figure that out but now was the time. So what did you do in the down time, there was a fuckload lot of it? I often asked the anti-vaxx new Ager at the coffee shop what did he do in the other four days he was not working. He was always vague. And the few times he ventured out they were failures as he has more issues than National Geographic, so I presumed he sold and did drugs. He claims to be working on his music, well where is it as that time you seemed to have again produced little. Mental health is going to be the biggest winner post pandemic that much is clear.
And when young man at my local wine store asked me to “hang out” post vaccination for both I said sure. I did not have any reason to say no as there was nothing to say no to. My only request was he get vaxxed, which he did and enable me to finish my two shot protocol and he had no problem with that. Again we had not made anything specific and I am not going down the dark road until the time comes and it came rather quickly. Again, given that our code reading and communication skills are rusty I am not sure within hours of agreeing to the parameters of “hanging out” post vacc period of building immunity, which is April 28, to text me and ask to come over with wine and have some light eats that night is not reading boundaries correctly. Then when I said no, it was an invite to go to the Liberty State Park and do it there. I countered with a coffee and he said he could pick it up at Starbucks and then go there. Again at night? Who is this, Ted Bundy? I said no, not at night but any morning before he goes to work at 12 we could do that and then it went crickets. Stopping by his work he seemed to push further with a day trip down to the Jersey Shore. Okay then and that became again another odd invite with me taking the train down, him meeting me at 4:00 pm and then we can walk the boardwalk and hang out on the beach and have a picnic. At night? And then we can stay overnight if we want. We can do what? As this venture escalated and I offered to say that I have been waiting to do the shore but that I was planning this any way he could come down and join me for dinner and if he was tired I would get a fold-up bed or a room that could accommodate him but that was only if he was willing to realize that it was strictly platonic and it was not going further. He kept at it and finally I said; “You realize there is nothing going on down at the shore and all venues are closed and I am not going to any of them regardless, so this is sort of all for nothing and an expensive pointless waste of time.”
I already knew all of this early on by reading his texts and his face when I suggested that he buy dinner when he comes down, he had no intention of eating in a restaurant. He seemed confused, asking me questions about food and what I eat, and I said, “Hey you come down its 5 pm and I have spent the day and would be wanting dinner and otherwise why are you coming down?” To fuck was the subliminal message. DEAR GOD and that was the trigger, not listening to a word I said, the lack of respect, and immediately knew what patterns I was doing, I call it Going Nashville, where I lead people down the garden path to fuck with their heads and then call them out. Well old habits die hard and trigger warnings were there and this past year I had not had to deal with them so I admit failure on my part to do better. However, this young man seemed to think he could manipulate, coerce, flatter, or talk me a woman twice his age into a sexual compromise. NO MEANS NO. I actually had to say that and of course, tell him that it was not about him but me and that I was now setting myself up to be a solo traveler in life and that while I find him a nice charming person I did not want to mislead him as he deserves a good partner, his age who wants all the perks and benefits of a fully realized friendship. I could not believe the bullshit but even my hairdresser is his age and she said all of it was odd as never once did he seem to want to do anything in broad daylight or in a public forum. All of it was, to say the least, sad.grim.pathetic. I still think some of it is the pandemic and the inability to develop healthy relationships when you have nowhere to take, do or establish them and now the endless isolation and sexual frustration adds to the confusion. So this is rocky roads and waters we are traversing here, so good luck and good travels. I am going solo.
What Will Happen to Friendships When We Crawl Out of Our Pandemic Hidey Holes?
A year of isolation has left our lives strewn with carcasses of friendships once held sacred—but can reopening revive them?
VANITY FAIR LAUREN MELCHAN APRIL 8 2021
Daisy Alioto’s pandemic experience has been a master class in self-optimization. Never mind that she was laid off in the early stages of lockdown. She found a fun-sounding new job, got married (via Zoom, on her couch), and signed with a literary agent. Most remarkably, she tells me, “I didn’t fuck up any of my friendships.” Not a single casualty, unless you count somebody named Karoline, who has an Android phone that can’t participate in group texts.
Alioto is all set for the “Roaring Twenties” we’ve all been promised, eager to trade in shivery park meetups for the sweaty, crowded parties she will roll up to with her pack of friends. “It will be so invigorating with other people to bump into and other people to talk about,” the 30-year-old said. More nobly, she plans to go on a “national tour of friendships,” a cross-country trip where she will visit the people she’s been unable to invite to come crouch on her picnic blanket. “We’ve got to get some of that time back,” said Alioto. “Because I did not want my world to narrow so much.”
Alioto’s tale is inspirational. It also shames me to my core. What I would give to have such a clear-cut social-reopening plan. My life is strewn with carcasses of friendships I held sacred but that seem to have withered in the glare of Zoom and the absence of gossip. Other relationships have come up from behind and flourished to a degree I never fathomed possible. It’s weird, almost scary. Even my best and most stable friendship, with a woman who lives across the country, has taken a wonky turn. We now speak for long stretches on the phone every day, and recently had a conversation in which we acknowledged the inevitable drop in communication once the pandemic is over, sounding like two teary parents sending their firstborn off to college.
Two years ago I wrote an op-ed in which I made the case for ending friendships. It had seemed a radical thing to say, that a person should feel free to walk away rather than wait for a bond to fade out on its own time. But that thinking rested on the assumption that there was a predictable rise and fall of a friendship, and we didn’t have the time or heart to wait out a yearslong degradation. This past year, just as we’ve seen our social muscles atrophy, many of us have witnessed our social networks warp into unrecognizable configurations. Thanks to the flattening effect of social media, casual acquaintances were upgraded to close confidants. Meanwhile, some of our tightest bonds came undone, submerged in a bath of equal parts boredom, anxiety, and sparkless group texts. What happens once we crawl out of our hidey holes?
“There is no reason to expect the world to be the same afterwards,” said Robin Dunbar, the British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist known for “Dunbar’s number,” a quantifiable limit to the number of close relationships the average human can handle. He argued that the changes that set in over the past year might not have been completely random. “It might have been an exacerbation of the natural order of things and speeded things up a bit,” he told me over Zoom, looking every bit the Oxford don with his thatch of white hair and afternoon mug of tea. “The movements wouldn’t have happened so soon but for the fact that you had this kind of interjection.” In other words, the pandemic acted like something of a platonic truth serum.
Dunbar’s number is actually a few numbers, figures that stack Russian-doll-like and express the capacity of our complex yet scientifically predictable social networks. The average human being, per Dunbar’s research, has the ability to maintain five super-close confidants. These five friends sit within a group of 15, the people close enough to regularly see at dinner parties. The next stratum includes 50 friends, those who might come to a barbecue or a birthday party. The final layer, of 150, is made up of those who can be counted on to show up for a bar mitzvah—“or a funeral,” Dunbar added with a mordant chuckle.
What typically happens, with particular alacrity in early adulthood, is our circumstances change and our friends move up and down the layers. When we move to a new city or switch jobs, the dear friend we used to see a few times a month can drift into the category of vague—but valued—acquaintance. Strangely enough, a year of absolute entropy has turned out to be the ultimate catalyst for our friendships. Just as many of us have aged beyond physical recognition, many of our primary relationships will emerge on the other side of this time warp as something altogether unrecognizable.
“Living in a bleak time requires a different tool kit,” said Sarah O’Dell,a 44-year-old content manager and mother of two who lives in Redding, Connecticut. The trauma of this past year, which included her husband having a stroke (he’s doing well) and her seeing certain associates exhibit less-than-prudent behavior when it came to masking, pushed her to “get real” and KonMari her friend list. “There used to be many people I would have put on pants for—not yoga pants, but the ones with buttons,” she said. “That number has definitely plummeted.”
If one is inclined to find a bright side of a year in hiding, think of how it has had an exfoliant effect, giving us an opportunity to slough off the social customs that might have lost their sheen. One of the new members of my Dunbar Five (she used to be in my Dunbar 50) is instituting a ban on saying yes to coffees with friends of friends. “The coffee dates are never so bad, but I could do without the weeks of dreading them with every fiber of my being,” she said. Now that she’s been vaccinated, my mother-in-law, as social an animal as any, has resumed her busy nightlife, except for one thing: “I’m done with eight-person dinner parties,” she told me.
It made no sense, but I completely understood what she meant. If there’s one thing this has taught us, it’s the needlessness of a middle ground. Make it wild, or make it meaningful. A party where I enjoy absurd conversations with strangers I will never see again? Yes. A return to those obligatory one-on-one drinks that used to litter my calendar? Sure, on the 12th of never.
“Maybe we got better at paying attention,” said Kat Henning, a 33-year-old freelance shoe and home goods designer who lives in Brooklyn. In the Before Times, she and her friends used to meet up at the same cool restaurants their other friends would frequent. They’d chat as fast as they could until the check came. These days the members of her pod come to her apartment for pasta (she lost her job during the pandemic, which put an end to $22 salads) and endless hours of talking. “There’s no such thing as the two-hour hang anymore,” she said. It’s a reality that she’s gotten used to, and she predicts it will carry on well into the future. “The summer is going to be wild, but after that the idea of FOMO will quiet down. Nights out are going to be less go-go-go, hopping from a restaurant to drinks to who knows what,” she said. “I never used to invite people over, but now home is my favorite place to be.”
There is no chance Starlee Kine’s social life will bounce back to what it once was. And that’s both okay and not okay. The past year has been illuminating and vindicating for Kine, a writer for HBO Max’s Search Party and a podcast host. “What I kind of thought about people in relationships before the pandemic turned out to be true in the pandemic, which is that they have friends who are single a little bit for…entertainment, I guess?” said Kine, who is in her 40s and single. “We’re kind of like seasoning to them.”
As soon as Los Angeles went into lockdown, her coupled friends closed rank, retreating into their homes. “It didn’t seem like any of them needed anything that was outside their households, and it didn’t seem to be much of a sacrifice,” said Kine. “I feel like I lost touch with almost every adult I know.”
She told of one morning last January, which might have been a scene in a Jordan Peele movie about podded people. Kine was walking her dog on the streets of the Silver Lake neighborhood when she heard cheers coming out of a house. It was then that she realized the election must have been called for Joe Biden. Apart from a male jogger and an older man outside his house, who said, “Ding-dong! The witch is dead,” Kine was the only person on the street. Noises of jubilation started to stream from all the other homes, and the street was suddenly a parade ground of people rejoicing with their loved ones, behind walls. In this moment, which should have been a communal celebration, Kine was left out in the cold. “I started to, like, burst into tears,” she recalled. “It’s going to be a long time before I want to spend time with a couple.”MOST POPULAR
It’s not without hope, said Dunbar, the Oxford professor. His studies of telephone data of the residents of an “unnamed European country” show that humans are wired to repair close friendships that have frayed. After disruptions in a pattern—say, a long vacation or a hospital stay—their phone calls tend to be twice as long. “It’s something we subconsciously do.” Still, he hasn’t studied people hit by a pandemic. What happens next is anyone’s guess.
On a recent evening, on what I can only hope was my last social Zoom, my fellow participants shared their new hobbies. The host told us that he had been studying a Wikipedia page devoted to missing persons throughout history. The other had started playing the flute under the tutelage of her teenage son. As she held up her sheet music, I wished I’d made better use of my pandemic.
The New Times will be my second chance. Even if I don’t get out as much as I once did, I vow to take for granted none of the moments of serendipity and hilarity, the petty slights and little frivolities that have been so absent from day-to-day life. I’m giving myself permission to duck the drinks with the people I’ve known forever and have had zero contact with over the past year. Not to get ahead of myself, but I might even ask a new friend to get coffee. Spring is in the air!
I had only tangentially engaged or knew of the “Q” movement as it made its way through mainstream media. It was apparent that many of the Trumptards seemed to believe that through this alias he communicated messages to them about the new American Revolution. Really? This escalated to the point where on January 6, 2021 the lunatics descended upon the Capital to throw out the rules of law and end Democracy. Okay, this is now where it gets weird? No it was weird way before that.
I am assuming, and this is not a wide reach that most if not many of the same Q-anon’s were folks predisposed to hate and fantasy. They are not mutually exclusive but when you look at wide range conspiracy movements and other ideological fanatics there is overlap. The McCarthy Communist hysteria of the 50s is perhaps the most insidious as that made its way into Government in the same vein as Q, with elected officials screaming paranoid rants during committee hearing the same way the two moronic women elected into Congress the Boebart moron and Marjorie Taylor Greene. This not new folks. The John Birch Society which was largely the backer of Goldwater for President is back in the far-right as that came from the roots of McCarthy and in turn came into the forefront of Johnson’s run for the Presidency and a way to stop the emerging Civil Rights movement; a movement which led to many of the policies and programs the GOP work overtime to overturn – voting rights, affirmative action, Medicare, Medicaid and other social service programs from food stamps to truly equal educational access. This is from The New Yorker discussing how the rise of the new GOP is the old GOP right down to the paranoid conspiracy notions that this “Q” has tapped into and a new day is born or an old one right down to the words and phrases used to rile up the masses. The phrase “into the storm” a “storm is coming” is all from WWII and beyond, says Woody to Buzz. Talking toys, what’s next?!!! But that is the point. Toys don’t talk unless you believe they do.
So I watched the documentary on HBO with no real idea or belief in any of it. And at times I did feel the young filmmaker was caught up in a storyline created by drama kings to fuel the myth and mythology of this Q bullshit. And with that I found myself utterly fascinated by the freaks behind this movement. The idea that Trump is that intelligent to code speak and send clues through varying channels in a forum that was founded by a deformed child who had rage issues, depression and of course sexual issues is not lost on anyone who follows gun violence of late. Not that mass murders are the sole expression of that as many if not most gun violence is under the count of four in which to qualify it for a mass shooting, we see repeatedly that most of it is domestically based, as the last two shootings have seemingly been. That is way to finally stop crazy Uncle Jim from ranting at the holidays about this conspiracy or about the coloreds. Hell we have had there was no Moon Landing to the Sandy Hill shooting was staged and the rest which again most of these Q-tards have been supporters/believers of. Case in point – Infowars and that fucktard. (I try not to use their names as it makes it less likely a fucking whackjob shows up with guns a blazing… metaphor hopefully) And like many cults you are usually predisposed if you have been involved in one prior to joining another. I can say that with NXVIM folks there were members who had been involved in others in the past or had been abuse victims or had been engaged with conventional religion or my personal favorite New Age philosophy. You don’t just jump into Scientology without the ability to suspend rational thought and critical thinking without prior exposure or education/training. Many were dragged in as children, many were cut away from society and reading about this Hillsong Church it appears that it was equally corrupt and bereft of rules and polices that were the ones they preached. You know that practice what you preach shit meant that you do as I say not as a I do.
So is Q some Government Cabal or agent within the Government transmitting coded messages to followers in order to restore White Power, end Democracy as we know it, save aborted babies or just fuck with people? I go with the last one and I suspect cabal is a word that would apply as it appears that Q has taken the form of many over time and like group sex everyone gets a turn at the G spot. And the last holders of the flame appear to be the Watkins family; a father and son who redefine the concept of the family that fucks together shames together. Those two are making me thing Matt Gaetz is just a round about normal asshole with massive issues and Epstein was still a fucker but at least he is dead. And that is when Q really became alive and the fantasy world grew. There are no coincidences and the entire sex trafficking concept with minors is one not lost who follows that story. Then his death in custody and the “he was murdered” by the cabal was another. True that the links to Trump are hilarious as Epstein worked for Bill Barr’s father as a Teacher, was fired by him, then gets money in ways we have never fully known (it was called a pyramid scheme, Bernie Madoff anyone?) and then courts Clinton the biggest nemesis the GOP have never let go of, and has all the cool toys and girls that incels, perverts and the like wish to have or be. And of course he also had entrance into Mar a Lago, the inner sanctum or the proverbial dream date. And not the least the former Cabinet Secretary who was involved in the Epstein case another clue in the code. Wow that is it!! No, what it shows that powerful stay powerful and they protect the powerful with money. That pretty much is the end of that story. And when you are a white man with money you can do anything and that day finally ended with Epstein in the slammer so he killed himself in a jail poorly run, it took two attempts but he was smart enough to wait it out. He was never going to stand trial as this was about him and not some secret Black Book with all kinds of shit and dirt on other white men. The book was found by a Mother Jones reporter and many called and they appear to have simply met him and spoke to him but many had no idea. In other words he just collected business cards with the idea that he may use them for his own needs. That is what scammers do, they just don’t use a phone book. What we have are common threads, that rich white men like fucking very young girls and taking them out of the country or away from watchful eyes, as who wouldn’t? Take a look at Seeking Arrangements as that is just that a fake scam site that exploits idiots willing to buy anyone for sex. If Q was so concerned about that why not tackle that one?
So far Q has been pretty much wrong on every point and now has folded tents as what can you say now or who can you rile up, the remaining few who would pretty much believe anything if you are willing to stay it long enough and loud enough. This is how cults begin and end.
The HBO documentary on QAnon was three documentaries’s rolled into one. There was the origins of Q and the followers and enablers, there is the story of this deformed kid who created the first hate site to enable others like him to spit out their rage and hate uncensored under the guise of free speech and the third was the story of the Watkins father and son. Those two alone were utterly hilarious in their constant need for attention and it explains the costumes, the cos-play, and pornography that dominates the philosophy that has become the current Q movement. Heck, even Star Trek comes into it.. Q anyone? And the filmmaker did his best to try to interweave the history and stories of all of them to make a six-part documentary that at some points had me spitting out my wine laughing. I did not know any of this and frankly did not need to but the idea that they are in fact the very cohort they were raging against was the best part. A cabal of freaks who are hate mongers and loved Trump as he was everything they wish they were is called projection and they managed to actually get the same losers to go along. The most salient moment in the doc was not the big “reveal” at the end but it was when the Watkins duo are eating with him playing their last cat/mouse game with him in a pizza parlor! Either the filmmaker did not get the irony or he was allowing himself to be a character in the movie they were doing. The next story is of course more ironic when the sad deformed boy/man who gets out of Manila only to return to his Mother’s basement was again not lost. The boy seemed angrier at the Watkins than all the rest of what resulted from his 8 Chan days and also was sad that he was no longer the star but cast now in their film as a secondary player. It was true revenge porn in every way. The gaming culture, anime, and of course conventional films were or are part of the story from set to stage and it takes one familiar with coding to see the much of the binary analysis used to cover, to throw false flags, and of course, create a long trail in which to make it all seem more complex and therefore intelligent than it truly was.
Perverts, pornographers, incels, and lost angry white men with raging misogyny and racist views are not to be ignored!! So the great reveal and the rest at the end was well like their erect dicks, premature ejaculators. I do not think it was one but I do think it was, in fact, a woman who started the whole train in motion given the subject matter, sex trafficking, and then from that it grew. I suspect she was or has been in the sex trade or abused and that started the idea, that the Watkins primary business was pornography and their odd Asian fetish (and again the son is bi-racial) makes sense that they would join an industry that is fueled on paranoia. Religion and cults use the same tools, they just use them in different fashions. Again the concept of FEAR GOD is the most absurd of them but the idea that a leader is a master and abuser is from where? BDSM. God (not that one) it is always about sex.
And with that I go fuck me.. not literally. No never seems to be enough for men. Trump is the hard on that they finally thought will get them laid. Well all the keyboard warriors in the movement were largely women and many of them heavily religious and the men that were also involved loners, drunks, frat boys who just wanted to get hard and stay that way without medication. The poor deformed child is now in his basement, his “wife” back home in Manila and the Watkins are creating a new story and hope to fund that to make their sequel. How sad, how grim, how pathetic. How very white male.
Off the Rack Publishing 