Where My Head Is At (Ain't On Your Neck)

So, I wrote up this nice little post (about Arianna Huffington and the Left's cultism) and sent it to various bloggers and media outlets, expecting it to get a little traction out there, and lo-and-behold, that's exactly what it got - one post by "Your Moral Leader", the very-Jewish, Luke Ford.

Now, before anyone gets the impression I'm disappointed, I want to tell you I'm not, because - while I know other smarty-pants types are laughing behind my back - it's mostly Jews (offline) who take my investigations into cultism seriously, which (I surmise) is because they've got a little experience with the phenomena. There are, also, many committed Christians who show a serious interest in NewAge beliefs (because NewAgers have long ago revealed themselves to be the mortal enemies of the Evangelical Movement on the Right) and I also hear from a bunch of doctors - psychologists, therapists, and the kind who sew folks up - because they have to clean up the messes these cultish bozos leave behind and would like a better understanding of how their patients got that way.

Most secular types - especially liberals - just say, "this guy's crazy for believing this stuff", which is naive and short-sighted, because I keep telling you A) I'm an atheist, so I can't hold any spiritual beliefs myself, and B) getting a firm grip on what other people believe - and how those (crazy) beliefs spur them to take (crazy) action - doesn't make me crazy but, rather, makes me more like Steven Levitt, the guy who wrote Freakonomics. In the epilogue to that book, he (and Stephan Dubner) wrote words which could sum up this website nicely. So nicely, I'm going to reprint their book's final words and replace them, where necessary, with my own [in brackets]. I hope they don't mind:

"[The Macho Response] has no "unifying theme."

But if there is no unifying theme to [TMR], there is at least a common thread running through the everyday application of [it's investigations into cultism]. It has to do with thinking sensibly about how [cultists] behave in the real world. All it requires is a novel way of looking, of discerning, of [listening]. This isn't necessarily a difficult task, nor does it require supersophisticated thinking. [TMR has] essentially [figured] out what the typical [person under the influence of NewAge thinking] figured out on his own (except [TMR] had to do it in reverse.)

Will the ability to think such thoughts improve your life materially? Probably not. Perhaps you'll put up a sturdy gate around your [mind] or push your [favorite celebrities and political leaders] to work [at explaining themselves] a little [better]. But the net effect is likely to be more subtle than that. You might become more skeptical of the conventional wisdom; you might begin looking for hints as to how things aren't quite what they seem; perhaps you will seek out a trove of data and sift through it, balancing your intelligence and your intuition to arrive at a glimmering new idea. Some of these ideas may make you uncomfortable, even unpopular. To claim that [the Democratic Party is, top-to-bottom, infiltrated by NewAge cultism] will inevitably lead to explosive [cultish] reactions [from those under it's influence]. But the fact of the matter is that [TMR-style] thinking simply doesn't traffic in [cultism]. As [TMR has] suggested [over and over again on this blog] if [cultish NewAge belief] represents an ideal world, then [TMR] represents the actual world.

The most likely result of reading [TMR] is a simple one: you may find yourself asking a lot of questions. Many of them will lead to nothing. But some will produce answers that are interesting, even surprising. Consider the [situation] at the beginning of this [blog]:

"I've been crying. I've been crying because I'm lost. I'm lost in a world I don't understand anymore. And a world that no longer understands me.



My tears started when I read this post about a guy who is tortured because his marriage was destroyed by a cult organization. 

I believe my marriage ended because of cult influences too.



This is a blog about how cultish influences negatively affect our lives,..."

O.K. - I'm back: See, you've got to imagine me - sitting in my apartment after my wife left to be with a quack I suspected of killing my mother-in-law - having just ripped our house apart and finding this duffle bag full of her diaries, address books, countless mind control tapes, and tons of receipts from the various NewAge seminars, "channelling" sessions, "psychic healings", and assorted whack-job gadgets she had purchased over the course of our 20-year marriage. You have to imagine my disbelief.

You've got to imagine me reading those diaries (and discovering she believed she had pulled "energy" from between a guy's legs, or, while driving, she had to pull to the side of the road because the dead were speaking to her so intensely). You have to imagine me wondering if this way of thinking was real.

You've got to imagine me calling the people in her address book, or looking them up online, and discovering they're all a bunch of criminals, and freaks, who weren't too happy to hear from the husband of a "believer". You have to imagine the hatred I developed for these people who prey on others.

You've got to imagine me crying, "Oh, baby, baby, baby, what the Hell have you gotten us into?" while listening to those mind control tapes and hearing people tell my wife she has, both, mystical powers and "brain damage" - and all for a fee, of course, which the receipts were a catalogue of. You have to imagine me trying to add up how much money was wasted because it went into the pockets of criminals.

Then you've got to imagine me starting to put it all together, while hearing the exact same things - first from friends of my wife and I - and, then, from Oprah Winfrey, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Madonna, Arianna Huffington, and on and on and on.

You've got to imagine me saying, "Now wait a fucking minute,..."

And years later, after I'd got a grasp on it, you've got to imagine me being contacted by the French authorities because my ex-wife, and the cultish quack boyfriend she ran off with, were busted for killing two more people in France. You've got to imagine me, after all I've learned since she left, not being surprised at all.

Very little about cults, and cultish thinking, surprises me anymore. We've got a president with a cult following - and no one who voted for him will acknowledge anyone else sees it. He can talk for almost two years and not say anything - and no one who voted for him will acknowledge anyone else sees it. He's already lied about, or totally reneged, on many of the campaign promises he ran on - and no one who voted for him will acknowledge anyone else sees it. Not even the media - though they didn't deny it when Mark Halperin called them on it. (It's "we the people" who can't expect the truth anymore,...)

I'm one of the few people in America who doesn't have to ask "What the Hell is happening here?" any longer.

Listen to me:

I was a committed Democrat; a liberal black man who was born and raised in South Central, Los Angeles, to question everything that came from conservatives and the Republican Party. I grew up to be a true Hell-raiser, in every sense of the word, except I thought - like so many others - I was doing it for some sense of what was right, and good, and positive, for myself, "my people", and (being a veteran and a patriot) my country.

But - like so many others on the Left - I had no idea what, or who, I was working for or why.

Now I do, and I'm proud to say, "I WAS WRONG." Today, because of my age, my lifetime of experience with (and intimate knowledge of) liberalism, and my ugly introduction to cultism - and it's "practitioners" - I'll never be capable of turning back, to make that mistake, again.

Now, I see it as my solemn duty, to myself, "my people", and (being a veteran and a patriot) my country - to all I hold dear - to do everything in my power to spread the word, as best I can, about what all I have found.

So go on - laugh it up! - ridicule me behind my back, send me nasty anonymous e-mails, and ignore my posts: it doesn't bother me.

Because, just as Christians and Jews are willing to look foolish - while taking a stand in their metaphysical battle against evil - I, too, am now an atheist willing to do so, but with all the real-world evidence of NewAge cultism I have at my disposal.

Now that I'm no longer bound, by the oath of my marriage, to keep what my wife was into to myself, this is what I've sworn my life to doing; and do it I will - because facing-off against the demoralizing laughter of evil is what gives me the strength to carry on - and, publicly, bringing this information (and battle) to the fore is the very definition of: