Take Me To Your Leader (I Don't Have One)

I constantly find articles saying "Hollywood is a breeding ground for cults".

But - even after all of our insane, and deadly, interactions with Charles Manson, Jim Jones and the People's Temple, Heaven's Gate, The Family, Your Black Muslim Bakery, and more - I can't find articles saying America's doing anything to combat the nasty influence of cults, or cultism.

These NewAge Nazi followers are out-of-control, now, but been that way my whole life - I was born and raised in South Central, Los Angeles - right in Hollywood's shadow, so I know:

Cults are the unspoken "why", to why things are, the way they are.

 

The Understatement Of The Day On Trump (And Probably The Last Five Years)

"It's a mistake, and not helpful to anyone, to label Trump a 'cult leader' and say his supporters are somehow 'brainwashed'."

So said Rick Ross, the #1 cult expert in the world. It looks especially bad if that's a defense for the political party of Jim Jones and the People's Temple, One Taste, Heaven's Gate, NXIVM, Oprah, Marianne Williamson, Deepak Chopra, the Clintons, and more indefensible NewAge cult nonsense than a dowser could shake a stick at.

The Democrat Party also has a very serious "projection" problem. 

Why Everyone Lies But Me (I'm Not Involved In Cults)

These poor deceitful fools, I'm usually 5-10 years ahead - and, since they can't keep the truth quiet forever, even amongst themselves - eventually, I always win: 

“LIKE most children of the Reagan era, I grew up with a steady diet of media warnings about the perils of religious cults — the gurus who lurked in wait for the unwary and confused, offering absolute certainty with the aftertaste of poisoned Kool-Aid. From the 1970s through the 1990s, from Jonestown to Heaven’s Gate, frightening fringe groups and their charismatic leaders seemed like an essential element of the American religious landscape. 

Yet we don’t hear nearly as much about them anymore, and it isn’t just that the media have moved on. Some strange experiments have aged into respectability, some sinister ones still flourish, but over all the cult phenomenon feels increasingly antique, like lava lamps and bell bottoms. Spiritual gurus still flourish in our era, of course, but they are generally comforting, vapid, safe — a Joel Osteen rather than a Jim Jones, a Deepak Chopra rather than a David Koresh. ”

And that's the cult world I've been writing about for almost a decade - to massive denials from all quarters - only to have The New York Times now detail how the liars pulled it off:

They're all, collectively, still lying to anyone who will listen - which ain't ever going to be me.

Don't be surprised,...

 

You Were Worried About Your Weight

Description: Quite possibly the craziest cult ever, Heavens Gate was founded by Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles. Heaven's Gate members believed that the planet Earth was about to be recycled (wiped clean, renewed, refurbished and rejuvenated), and that the only chance to survive was to leave it immediately. While the group was formally against suicide, they defined "suicide" in their own context to mean "to turn against the Next Level when it is being offered," and believed that their "human" bodies were only vessels meant to help them on their journey. In conversation, when referring to a person or a person's body, they routinely used the word "vehicle". This documentary investigates an incident in 1997, where thirty-nine members of the San Diego-based cult "Heaven's Gate" committed mass suicide. They intended to reach an alien spacecraft which they believed to be following Comet Hale-Bopp, which was at that time brightly visible in the nighttime sky.

I Couldn't Agree More

"It's time to mix it up with some Heaven's Gate humor."

Blake, Listen To Crack: Go Back To Heroin. Now.

"Blake Fielder-Civil has turned to crackers celebrity cult Scientology in a bid to stay clean after rehab.

The ex-husband of AMY WINEHOUSE, who's back with her, is taking a big interest in the oddball organisation which counts TOM CRUISE, JOHN TRAVOLTA and WILL SMITH as members.

A friend said: 'He has been reading lots of Scientology books and researching it on the internet.

'He is seriously thinking about becoming an active member.

'Blake has been trying out all kinds of ways to readdress his life since doing rehab.

'He's been eating healthily. Then he got heavily into bikram yoga. Now it's Scientology.'"

-- The Sun

Portrait of a man who can't handle stimulants. (Kidding.) Wow. I never saw this coming. I thought he was smarter than this. But, if the photo above is any indication, they've really got the whole mind, body, spirit thing working on him something fierce. Oh well, I guess we'll have to wait and see. But we've seen this - the haircut, at least - before:

Here's before it all went so wrong:

Global Warming's Right Around The Corner

"There is a long and distinguished history of dooming. There has been preaching about the end of time since the beginning of time. The Apocalypse. The Rapture. End Times. Armageddon. Y2K. 2012. The possibilities are endless!

In order to be a doomsday prophet, you can't afford to be discouraged by anything. Especially not evidence.

Just treat every day like a close-out going out of business sale. Yes, this is your business as usual. It's a deadline! It's now or never! Everything marked down! Everything must go! Combat short attention spans with shorter timelines.

Oh sure, there have been some like Jim Jones and Heaven's Gate who have killed themselves and their flock, but you're not about discouragement. True doomsday prophets are tax-free and facts-free zones of stay-tuned-or-you'll-miss-something-ness. Doomsday prophecy is a riveting and exciting career where you learn to dodge and duck accountability with your charisma. You're like a charming, tax-exempt whack-a-mole.

When it comes to belief, hope floats but doom sells. Pastor John Hagee, a supporter of Senator John McCain for President, once told his megachurch, 'You could get raptured out of this building before I get finished preaching.' On the tape, you can hear the crowd cheer. 'Yay!' This is the kind of message that separates the megachurches from the meager churches.

The other character trait necessary is not caring that you're wrong. If being accurate is important to you, program calculators for a living. If being proved to be a fraud fills you with anxiety and make you want cower into a fetal position and hide from public life forever, then doomsday prophesy is not your bag. Either yarn rhetorically or go home."

-- Tina Dupuy, telling us everything we need to know about apocalyptic thinking - which the idiot believers fall for, again and again, because they're idiot believers - and doing it before we're all going to die, from reading The Huffington Post.

Just Another Part Of The American Landscape

"Cults are notorious for convincing people to do the unthinkable. In March, a member of the now-defunct One Mind Ministries pleaded guilty to starving her son to death. Allegedly, she and other cult members stopped feeding the 1-year-old because he wouldn't say "amen" at mealtime.

Back in 1993, David Koresh's Branch Davidian sect ended in a conflagration after a 51-day standoff with the FBI. In 1978, over 900 members of the People's Temple died at Jonestown, Guyana, in a mass murder-suicide; and in 1997, scores of Heaven's Gate followers killed themselves in California."

-- Krystle M. Davis, mentioning many of the stories we've covered in her review intro for Jayanti Tamm's ''Cartwheels in a Sari'' (see the tags below) - and only mentioning once that cults are "mainstream" now (but not a word about stopping the zombie invasion) - like, maybe, even in Forbes Magazine.

Everybody's Talking (But Nobody's Admitting It)

TMR just picked up a copy of the new U.S. News and World Report special edition, "Mysteries of History: Secret Societies," and is glad to report all the winners covered on this blog are in there: NewAgers, Buddhists, Meditators, healers, The Peoples Temple, Heaven's Gate, and many, many more - including mentions of the dreaded "personality cult" - without mentioning Barack Obama's, of course, because (nothing strange here:) he's the POTUS.

Everyone should pick this up, to get a superficial overview of the problem, and see how prevalent this phenomena is. It might help some of you out of your denial about what's right in front of your eyes ("One approach was to set up,...discussion groups which were not,...designated as related to [cultism] but for,...world peace and ecology." [Underline TMR's.] Wow - aren't all cultists lecturing on that?) You might even discover you're in a cult and not know it, which, as we've been telling you, is a very-real possibility.

Anyway, TMR is glad no one can claim it's just us talking about cultism in the West anymore. But our critics, of course, will continue claiming it's just us. Keep one thing in mind, though, smarty pants:

Nobody says that but cultists.

Turn Out The Light (More Cult Of Obama)

New Age America Is Entranced By Obama's Electoral Aura

The best-selling American new age guru Deepak Chopra* is fond of the word "quantum": reading his work, one begins to suspect that he has it set up as a shortcut in Microsoft Word, so that he doesn't have to type it out in full every time he wants to refer to "quantum health", "quantum healing" or "the quantum mind".

*Don't forget: this is the same Deepak Chopra who first came to our attention when he was busted for sneaking a Maharishi-backed paper full of bogus B.S. into the Journal of American Medicine - TMR.

This kind of thing makes physicists want to sob uncontrollably, so they've learned to ignore him. But not long ago, Chopra used the word in a new context that bears closer inspection: if Barack Obama enters the White House as president next January, he declared, "it will represent a quantum leap in American consciousness"*.

*Which has always been a goal of the American public,....

Chopra, it turns out, is far from alone. A curious side-story in this year's election campaign is that the new age movement in the US has embraced Obama even more fervently than most of his supporters. New agers are traditionally liberal, so it's no surprise that they're backing the Democratic candidate. But the question that's been gathering steam among them in recent weeks goes much further than that, and brings - shall we say - a whole other dimension to the race: could Obama be a "lightworker"?

"New agers are traditionally liberal,..."? You don't say! I always thought they were rock-ribbed traditionalists!

"Many spiritually advanced people* I know ... identify Obama as a lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who [can] actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet," wrote the San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford in a piece headlined "Is Obama an Enlightened Being?" On the higher astral planes of the blogosphere, the notion met with enthusiasm. "He may play a major role," one blogger wrote, "in bringing us to [what] the Hopi Indians call the Great Shift." The endorsement of Oprah Winfrey, increasingly involved in new age spirituality, underscored the point.

*And if these people are "spiritually advanced," what does that make you?

The cultish side of Obama-worship has been noted before: the online magazine Slate has been running an Obama Messiah Watch, as has a blog, obamamessiah.blogspot.com. Star Wars creator George Lucas said - perhaps facetiously - that he thought it "reasonably obvious" that Obama was a Jedi knight. But the Obama-as-lightworker notion is more than a matter of tone. We're talking about the dawning of the age of aquarius.

He's leaving out CNN, FOX, etc. - and, of course, TMR - but in a country known for burning David Koresh and his followers, jailing Charlie Manson and his, and the mass suicides of Heaven's Gate and the People's Temple, who can complain about the "cultish side" of anything in America?

New agers are often unfairly maligned*: look at life through a slightly different lens, and you instantly get associated with a tiny handful of crystals-cure-cancer maniacs. But if they want their preferred candidate to win, they might consider keeping quiet for now. Already, the right, in the form of unhinged pundit Michelle Malkin, has started exploiting the story to mock the Democrats. And Obama has quite enough to do to fight the threat of pigeonholing - as "the black candidate", "the elite candidate" - without becoming the kooky candidate too**.

-- Oliver Burkeman, catching TMR's vapors, in The Guardian.

*Who says it's unfair?

**Too late.

I Don't Know: He DID Mention "Recycling" (And He Said I Had A Gift,...) Such A Really Nice Man