"How Were You Able To Justify Putting Patients In Harm's Way?"

The Wall Street Journal's investigative reporter, John Carreyrou, is asking this bizarre question of Theranos' Elizabeth Holmes, though the answer is provided in his own reporting on the Silicon Valley start-up:

"Visibly angry, Holmes told the gathered employees that she was building a religion. If there were any among them who didn’t believe, they should leave. Balwani put it more bluntly: Anyone not prepared to show complete devotion and unmitigated loyalty to the company should 'get the fuck out.'"

What could be more clear - or less unexpected from the San Francisco Bay Area?

"Three hours south of San Francisco,...essentially everything that became known as New Age was invented, developed, or popularized at the Esalen Institute. Esalen is a mother church of a new American religion for people who think they don’t like churches or religions but who still want to believe in the supernatural. The institute wholly reinvented psychology, medicine, and philosophy, driven by a suspicion of science and reason and an embrace of magical thinking...It was a headquarters for a new religion of no religion, and for 'science' containing next to no science."

Is that not the very definition of Theranos? Is it not also obvious why - in 2007 - I once wrote:

"Whether it's the racism (which I've spoken about for years) the adulterous white bullshit mayor, or the adulterous white bullshit mayor's love for cults, or the general lack of respect for morals, or the general lack of any good sense - or, really, anything else - personally, I'm sick of the bullshit 'no one wants to touch' in San Francisco. That city's been hiding the fact that it's a sick, evil, and toxic place - filled with cults that are spreading their corrosive magic-thinking ('you can believe whatever you want to believe') and making normal people miserable - for a long, long, time.

It's no wonder blacks have been leaving, like Jews from Nazi Germany, for years.

San Francisco (the home of est and the Landmark Forum) is filled with white cultish bastards, and living there - especially with that sick, sick, woman - almost killed me. I'll never get over the horror. And I'll never stop talking about it. And why should I?"

And I'd never even MET Elizabeth Holmes!!! But I'd married a woman who also risked lives for the cult's beliefs - and I'd lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for 30 odd years - so, I'm more-than-willing to accept NewAge as their reasoning, when I hear it so clearly expressed.

How others miss the spread of American cultism is, now, the only "how" I need an answer to.