Houston, We Have a Cult

As we look at some of the most extreme ideas being accepted in today’s society, many of us are scratching our heads as to how insanity has become the new normal and normal has almost become a criminal offense.

Look at what drives humans to actions and behaviors that demonstrate an utter lack of reason and understanding. Sarah Steel, author of the book Do as I Say, which provides an in-depth look at cults and how people get sucked into them, writes: “Cults prey upon vulnerabilities that are core to our species: our need for acceptance, to be part of a group, to connect, to feel safe. Cult leaders themselves manipulate, dominate and control because, sadly, those are also very human behaviors. If you know where to look, you’ll see cult-like behavior showing up in other parts of society, too.”

Generally we associate “cult-like behavior” with infamous groups like the Branch Davidians. David Koresh had large groups of people believing he was the final prophet of the Seventh Day Adventist religion, and in that dedicated belief he used the tactic of mixing religious text and ideas that were already familiar to his followers with just enough deception to convince them to view him as their savior.

The Jonestown cult, led by Jim Jones, pulled people in who were motivated by his promises of social justice, fixing racism, and building a utopia by implementing the ideas of communism and control that he had learned from early study of Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Vladimir Lenin.

Both Koresh and Jones demanded that the men in their groups sacrifice their wives to them and that the mothers hand over their babies to the community. The children were to be raised by people who were determined to be the most dedicated and qualified to ensure that every minute of every day would be spent enforcing and repeating only the ideology of the belief system to these young cult members.

As recently as 1998, a group called NXVIM (pronounced “nex-ee-um”) was established by narcissistic, sociopathic, sex offender Keith Raniere, who sold the idea of being a part of a women’s empowerment group to women from all kinds of backgrounds and cultures. They were heavily indoctrinated into his ideas of what truly gave women their value and strength in the world — only to find themselves demonstrating that empowerment by calling Raniere “master.” They joined an exclusive group within the organization called DOS, which stands for “Dominus Obsequious Sororium” and in Latin translates to “Master Over Female Slave.”

At its peak, NXVIM had over 700 active members — young women, many of whom were being starved and sexually preyed upon by Raniere himself and completely isolated from their families.

Yet somehow these women would preach to each other and potential cult recruits about how lucky they were to have found this community, attempting to inspire more of their peers to join.

From the rational perspective of spectators on the sidelines, we can observe the behaviors and actions that members of these groups are expected to perform. We see the harm that they seem to be willing to inflict on others, on themselves, and even their own children. We wonder how on earth people can be convinced to participate in things that are so obviously destructive, by people who clearly have no concern for their wellbeing, despite repeatedly and emphatically expressing otherwise.

Yet, in 2023, it doesn’t take familiarity with The People’s Temple or Heaven’s Gate to recognize the signs and symptoms of the “cult-like behavior” spreading through society as we speak.

The schools on Warren Jeff’s compounds were really hours-long, daily classes filled with teachings that affirmed him as a prophet. Similarly, some very bad apples in today’s public schools are slowly replacing actual academics with rooms filled with books that “affirm” that, as human beings, our gender is meaningless and that we can be whatever we want.

In place of the American flag, children are encouraged to pledge their allegiance to the Pride flag.

Instead of ideologically neutral clothing and goods that we expect to find in the local supermarket, shoppers are instead blasted with gender ideology in the form of Pride displays, clothing that supports queer theory ideas, and decor to encourage us to set up our own “Pride” shrines in our homes.

If you’re familiar with Scientology, children are taught and raised in an environment where even the entertainment they consume must be produced by a team of fellow members — which might sound reminiscent of the Disney movies, Nickelodeon cartoons, and ideology-friendly celebrities used to assist in creating a new reality for the next generation of devotees.

Maybe the most disturbing aspect of this rapidly spreading ideology is that the destruction of the body and mind is encouraged and reinforced by “experts” and proposed as the way to elevate human beings to some kind of mental and physical utopia. Parents readily hop on board, and as a symbol of their undying allegiance to the cause, they fight to be the first to offer their child to the hormone and scalpel lords.

As with all of the previously mentioned groups, dissent is punished, people are bullied and intimidated if they question ideas, and anyone who chooses to leave and discuss the realities of the inner-workings is immediately called a liar — by the same people who were their family and community just minutes before.

No matter how horrible the stories are, and how much personal destruction happens, the group is programmed to see what they’re told to see and ignore what they see with their own eyes.

A suffering and depressed child who has been denied an actual education has been convinced to be a victim of their own body. They’re told that the outside world hates them, even though they don’t interact with people who do not believe.

Individuals dealing with unaddressed trauma, anorexia, anxiety, or loneliness are diagnosed with “gender dysphoria,” and those around them refuse to acknowledge the harm of a one-size-fits-all assessment. That’s devastating, and potentially fatal.

I guess the old adage “actions speak louder than words” is easy for us to say when our brains haven’t been thrown into a blender and rebuilt into a mechanism for unquestioning devotion toward bizarre and alarming concepts.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/97875-houston-we-have-a-cult-2023-06-07

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Kathleen Stock and the rejection of gender reality

By Debbie Hayton (Deb is trans)

Last night, Professor Kathleen Stock told the Oxford Union that we need to talk about ‘reality’. She is absolutely right.

Make no mistake, Stock is a reasonable voice in a political debate where many appear to be living in some sort of fantasy world. Her views are what many would consider to be mainstream. For example, that human beings are sexually dimorphic, and it is sometimes appropriate to provide separate services for each sex.

But by voicing those ideas, Stock has been subjected to opprobrium. In 2021, she was hounded from her job at Sussex University. The scenes surrounding Stock’s talk last night were depressingly familiar. Young people – who seem to think that disagreement is hate – made lots of noise to disrupt the event. In an astonishing fit of petulance, student activist Riz Possnet (pronouns they/them) glued themselves to the floor directly in front of Stock and Union president Matthew Dick. Emblazoned across Possnet’s t-shirt was the slogan, ‘NO MORE DEAD TRANS KIDS’.

In a statement, Possnet added,

We will fight for trans rights and trans futures. We will not let the trans youth of the future suffer as we have. We will fight for justice for trans youth, healthcare for trans youth, dignity for trans youth, and joy for trans youth. No more dead trans kids.

Let’s be clear, Stock was addressing students at one of the most prestigious universities in the world. A place where ideas should be debated to deepen understanding and advance knowledge. In a remarkable intervention, Rishi Sunak asserted, ‘Agree or disagree with her, Professor Stock is an important figure in this argument. Students should be allowed to hear and debate her views.’ The Prime Minister added,

A tolerant society is one which allows us to understand those we disagree with, and nowhere is that more important than within our great universities.

Some debates can be contentious, and perhaps become heated, but children were not at risk from what Stock had to say last night. Amidst all the noise from the demonstrators, the focus on children is, in my view, the most worrying.

Words like justice, healthcare, dignity and joy might roll easily off the tongue, but what exactly is going on? Until very recently, the cohort of young people distressed with their sex was vanishingly small. In 2011-12 only 210 children were referred to the now-controversial Tavistock Clinic. Ten years later, that number had ballooned to 3,585.

But that is only part of the story. In 2022, the Pew Research Center found that around 5 per cent of young American adults identify as transgender or non-binary – whatever that means. To me, it sounds less like transsexualism and more like an attempt to escape from a mundane ‘heteronormative and cisnormative’ existence.

But fantasy is a poor foundation on which to build a life. The danger to young people comes not from Stock but influencers on social media and elsewhere who sell promises that can never be delivered.

Stock is right: sex matters and single-sex services and spaces are important. Hormones and surgery can perhaps give the impression of the other sex, but human beings can never change sex.

Despite that rather fundamental truth, the UK is an agreeable society in which to live as a transsexual. People are tolerant and accepting of me, and other transsexuals I know. They care rather less about our gender reassignment than our ongoing contribution to the communities in which we live and work. If, that is, they even notice.

However, that’s not the way some members of the Oxford University LGBTQ+ society see things. Zoë-Rose Guy (pronouns she/her), the society’s vice-president, told the BBC that it was ‘exhausting’ as a trans person to be ‘constantly expected to justify your existence’.

So it would be. I don’t suppose Guy will be keen to take advice from me, but nobody – trans or otherwise – needs to justify the fact they exist. It is self-evident. But I don’t think that’s what Guy means. Perhaps it is exhausting to require that everyone else believes that you are the other sex or thinks that your sex does not matter? Then, to make the fantasy work, you need to convince yourself that everyone else really does believe it and isn’t just paying lip service.

That futile endeavour is so much harder when an eminent professor of philosophy rocks up, armed with evidence, examples and reasons, which she can use them to adeptly argue her case. It might explain why Guy and Possnet were so worked up about Stock’s visit to Oxford.

They, and the rest of the rainbow brigade, need to get over themselves and find real meaning in life that extends beyond their transgender identities. Unless they go around imposing their implausible ideas on others, and influencing vulnerable children, nobody else really cares how they choose to identify.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/05/kathleen-stock-and-the-rejection-of-gender-reality

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They’re Conditioning Americans to Hate White People

Under the guise of good social medicine, liberals and leftists have poisoned the culture with the colossal lie that “whiteness” is the culprit behind a “400-year pandemic of foundational racism” that’s keeping America sick. It’s being perpetrated by whites through “antiquated systems of oppression.”

Whiteness, the creation of white people of European descent, they say, is a lopsided “system of privileges and advantages” that favors whites at the expense of people of color “through government policies, media portrayal, decision-making power with our corporations, schools, judicial systems, etc.”

To cure the country, people with big mouths, big money, and big plans are wildly swinging sledge hammers at America’s load-bearing walls to destroy what they see as a “white system,” to replace it with – God knows what.

With the most dehumanizing epithets against white people, they’re pushing anti-white government policies, anti-white media portrayals, anti-white corporate decision-making, anti-white curriculums in schools, and an anti-white oppression narrative onto the judicial systems.

Slithery politicians groveling in black grievance is nothing new. But what is new – and extremely dangerous – is a ruthlessly corrupt administration, wielding the immense machinery of American power, to demolish fundamental institutions by demonizing white people, while daring anyone – black or white – to disagree.

Never in my lifetime have so many institutions conspired, all at once, to slop twisted narratives onto imaginary issues to force free Americans into orgies of unwanted political intercourse against their deepest convictions. “If you don’t like what we’re doing, too bad,” they spit. “You’re going to lay there and take it, or else.”

This is not politics. This is not a revolution. This is political rape.

Just recently, the same guy who told a black audience that, if elected, Republicans “gone put ch’all back in chains” and launched his 2020 campaign on the provable lie that Trump called Nazis “great people,” told a black audience at Howard University that “white supremacy … is the most dangerous terrorist threat in our homeland.”

Biden’s transportation secretary sees racism in America’s infrastructure. His defense secretary sees it in the military. Outgoing Gen. Mark Milley wanted his “Milley-tary” to learn about white rage. Biden’s treasury secretary said “the U.S. economy has never worked fairly for black Americans.” A Biden education official once said that school discipline is part of a “racist system” of “whiteness,” especially for black girls.

“Black girls are more likely to be disciplined, frankly, because black girls experience race and sex-based discrimination in classrooms, and they are disciplined often for simply being black,” said Kayla Patrick, a special assistant, Office of Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development at the DOE.

Homeland Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told Al Sharpton’s group that “… the threat of white supremacy … is something that we are equipping law enforcement in better addressing.”

Does this stuff sound familiar?

How is it so different from the way anti-Semites conditioned Europe to hate Jews? Hitler’s horrors would never have been possible without people at the centers of influence, for decades, normalizing the demonization of the Jews.

Decades before Hitler’s Great Action and Final Solution, Lithuanians, for instance, were slowly being conditioned to treat Jews as expendable. And expendable didn’t always mean that Lithuanians hated Jews; it also meant that when bad things happened to them, people just didn’t care.

Over time, mass social conditioning wore down their moral inhibitions. When mass murders began – much of it by Lithuanian partisans sympathetic to Germany – a populace that was initially shocked by the butchery was numbed into collaborating with outright genocide.

“Only two days prior, we were free and equal citizens in our hometown,” wrote William W. Mishell in Kaddish for Kovno (1988) of his firsthand account of being rounded up by heavily armed Lithuanian partisans when Nazis took the city. “… and now suddenly, we were totally devoid of any rights, prey for any hooligan. … [W]e were suddenly more afraid of our neighbors yesterday's neighbors, people whom we had lived with for generations, than of the Germans.”

Of the roughly 30,000 Jews in Kovno, Lithuania, 90 percent were “liquidated,” many of them by former neighbors.

That’s the same poison being peddled by the Biden administration, Big Tech, and woke media propagandists, along with their organized mobs. Under the guise of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” they’re using intimidation and public ridicule to force-feed the illusion that “whiteness” – not behavior – is the culprit behind disparities in lagging groups. And if hating others were not enough, they’re institutionalizing systems that teach whites, and their children, to hate themselves.

This demonization garbage is not just a difference of opinion – it’s a crime. And Americans, panging for things to get back to “normal,” are being conditioned to become numb to it. We may not deal with the worst consequences, but unopposed, our children and grandchildren will.

“The greater the crime perpetrated by the leadership,” Hitler once wrote, “the less likely it is that the people will ever believe their leaders to be capable of perpetuating such an event.”

With the do-nothing responses to the Russian Collusion hoax, the calculated opening of the border, the overt censoring of free speech, the deadly suppression of early treatments to COVID, and the methodical demonization of the “white culture” for political ends, rotten politicians are banking on Americans to believe that their leaders may be bad, but too good to perpetuate outright crime.

That’s impossible. We’re not stupid.

Tens of millions of common-sense Americans – of every color – see the rhetoric of “whiteness,” “systemic racism,” and “equity” exactly for what it is: a concoction of social and political poison that’s being used to slowly kill America as we’ve known it.

And judging from the swift reactions to Bud Light, Fox News, and Target, there is a subterranean rage simmering beneath the Oz-like theater of today’s media, where patriots of all colors – battered and utterly betrayed by their elected “representatives” – are chomping at the bit to make their voices heard.

How or when, who knows? But as sure as gravity, Americans who are beyond sick of this stuff will sooner or later find a way. At some point, there will be no choice

https://townhall.com/columnists/willalexander/2023/05/29/theyre-conditioning-americans-to-hate-white-people-n2623801

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A Return to Fidelity: Princeton Professor’s Brilliant Move to Flip ‘Pride Month’ on Its Head

On June 1, businesses, government, and even churches will erect rainbow flags and publish proclamations about the importance of “Pride Month,” a celebration of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender identities. (Of course, the little plus sign means the list goes on and on, including queer, questioning, intersex, two-spirit, and more. One version even includes “friends and family.”)

This rush to celebrate LGBTQ+ lifestyles is both exclusionary and offensive to conservative Jews and Christians who follow the Bible’s teaching that God created humans male and female, that marriage is between one man and one woman, and that pride is a cardinal sin, not a virtue.

Rather than merely complaining, Princeton professor Robert P. George decided to do something about it. He launched an effort to flip “Pride Month” on its head—dedicating the month not to a specific interest group, but to a moral virtue, fidelity. (George is a member of The Heritage Foundation’s board of directors and The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news outlet.)

“Fidelity” derives from the Latin word “fides,” meaning “faith” or “trust.” The word implies “strict and continuing faithfulness to an obligation, trust, or duty,” according to Merriam–Webster.

George freely acknowledged that “absolutely no one” gave him any authority to declare June “Fidelity Month.” Nonetheless, he has done so, and I believe we as conservatives should join him in this effort.

George proposed dedicating June to “the importance of fidelity to God, spouses and families, our country, and our communities.”

I have often joked that June should be considered “humility” month because in the Western Christian worldview, pride constitutes the great sin of rejection of God in favor of yourself, while humility represents a great virtue. Humility entails surrendering yourself to God and reenacting in a small way the humbling of Jesus, who gave up the presence of the Father to take on human form and become a servant among us, even becoming obedient to the point of death.

The great Christian hope rests in the fact that God exalted Jesus after this great humility, and he will also exalt those who humble themselves in the way Jesus did (Philippians 2:3-8).

Yet humility carries a negative connotation. “Pride” has succeeded because the LGBTQ+ movement associates it with the message that human beings have inherent worth, and no matter your sexual orientation or gender identity, you can take ownership of yourself.

The proper response isn’t just to negate what the LGBTQ+ movement promises, but to take the positive view of humanity and ground it in something more noble.

Ownership of yourself means little without the ties that bind us to one another. Loneliness creeps into our hearts, whispering that social media or entertainment will satisfy us, but pleasures often ring hollow unless they are shared. The deepest friendships and relationships require a give-and-take, a context where each person loves and serves the other. These bonds are familiar to us because we experience them all the time—even if we don’t want to admit that the best word for them is “duty.”

“Fidelity” acknowledges your inherent dignity, but it forces you to consider the dignity of your neighbor as well. We must be faithful not just to ourselves, but to our families, our communities, our nation, and the God who created us.

The LGBTQ+ movement encourages people to take pride in their identities, but Fidelity Month encourages us to fulfill our obligations to one another. It recognizes the inherent dignity of all people and encourages us to love our neighbors as we love ourselves.

Pride views the world through the lens of self, and each person is indeed a magnificent image of the ineffable God. No person becomes himself without the help of others, however.

I can only take pride in my accomplishments because my mother and father raised me. My success relies upon the many who invested in my education and the country that established a culture of opportunity. My very breath relies upon the God who established an ordered universe and fashioned me in his image.

The “Pride” of the LGBTQ+ movement often entails a rejection of each of these obligations. The movement denies parents’ rights to educate their children on matters of sexuality, attempting to use gender and sexuality as a wedge to separate children from their parents. The movement denies the goodness of America, preaching that the United States is an oppressive place for people whose very notion of individual worth comes from a Declaration of Independence.

Of course, the pinnacle of “Pride” is the claim that God holds no authority over us—that we can choose our own lifestyles and even rewrite biology to tell the One who made us male and female that he placed “transgender” people in the wrong body.

“Pride” is all about infidelity, breaking vows and duties to spouses, to children, and to God. Sexual liberation rests on the idea that marriage only lasts as long as feelings of love do, and family courts will decide who takes care of the children.

Fidelity Month does not come with a political program. It merely represents a response to the endless barrage of rainbow flags as June approaches.

It offers representation for those who are tired of seeing a constant reminder that America’s institutions are in lockstep with the sexual revolution, for those who are tired of having their faith demonized as “anti-LGBTQ+,” for those who truly do want to live and let live, but who see any dissent from rainbow orthodoxy quashed in the public square.

Finally, it offers a subtle reminder that Christians are not to strut about as though we are holier than the “Pride” brigades. We are redeemed sinners, called to faithfulness—not a mean-spirited “Pride” of our own. As St. Peter urged us, we should make a defense, giving the reason for the hope within us, “with gentleness and respect, so that, when you are slandered, those who revile your good name in Christ may be put to shame” (1 Peter 3:15-16).

Let us strive to live out the fruit of the Holy Spirit this Fidelity Month, and thank God that Robert P. George has crafted a fitting answer to the world’s unfaithfulness.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/05/31/return-fidelity-princeton-professors-brilliant-move-flip-pride-month-head

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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