Cult Leader Quotes

The monster's bride at his door. Magnus could not stop staring. [Jocelyn] was staring too. She seemed transfixed by his pajamas. Magnus was frankly offended. He had not invited any wives of crazed hate-cult leader to come around and pass judgement on his wardrobe.

Granuaile:"So why don't cult leaders achieve godhood?" Atticus:" Because they're megalomaniacs drenched in douche juice.

Now i'm home again and none of my usuals methods of escape are doing the trick. I tend to watch a lot of movies. Ideally, documentaries about loners, outcats, pioneers. Give me a cult leader, obscure historical figures, dead musicians. I want to see a misunderstood person who someone is finally taking the time to understand.

Ultraviolence" He used to call me DN That stood for deadly nightshade Cause I was filled with poison But blessed with beauty and rage Jim told me that He hit me and it felt like a kiss Jim brought me back Reminded me of when we were kids With his ultraviolence Ultraviolence Ultraviolence Ultraviolence I can hear sirens, sirens He hit me and it felt like a kiss I can hear violins, violins Give me all of that ultraviolence He used to call me poison Like I was poison ivy I could have died right there Cause he was right beside me Jim raised me up He hurt me but it felt like true love Jim taught me that Loving him was never enough With his ultraviolence Ultraviolence Ultraviolence Ultraviolence I can hear sirens, sirens He hit me and it felt like a kiss I can hear violins, violins Give me all of that ultraviolence We could go back to New York Loving you was really hard We could go back to Woodstock Where they don't know who we are Heaven is on earth I will do anything for you, babe Blessed is this, this union Crying tears of gold, like lemonade I love you the first time I love you the last time Yo soy la princesa, comprende mis white lines Cause I'm your jazz singer And you're my cult leader I love you forever, I love you forever With his ultraviolence (lay me down tonight) Ultraviolence (in my linen and curls) Ultraviolence (lay me down tonight) Ultraviolence (Riviera girls) I can hear sirens, sirens He hit me and it felt like a kiss I can hear violins, violins Give me all of that ultraviolence

You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.

She'd seen a documentary once, on cult leaders, and the traits that made them so effective. One of the most important features was a commanding presence. Too many people thought that meant being loud, but in truth, it meant someone who didn't need to be loud. Someone who could command an audience without ever raising their voice.

A cult leader alone in his beliefs is just a crazy dude with a beard.

And that's us. No demagogues having to harangue the crowd, no self-interested cult leader talking everyone into servitude. Just a group acting together for everyone's best benefit. Even mine.

Origins Of Cptsd How do traumatically abused and/or abandoned children develop Cptsd? While the origin of Cptsd is most often associated with extended periods of physical and/or sexual abuse in childhood, my observations convince me that ongoing verbal and emotional abuse also causes it. Many dysfunctional parents react contemptuously to a baby or toddler’s plaintive call for connection and attachment. Contempt is extremely traumatizing to a child, and at best, extremely noxious to an adult. Contempt is a toxic cocktail of verbal and emotional abuse, a deadly amalgam of denigration, rage and disgust. Rage creates fear, and disgust creates shame in the child in a way that soon teaches her to refrain from crying out, from ever asking for attention. Before long, the child gives up on seeking any kind of help or connection at all. The child’s bid for bonding and acceptance is thwarted, and she is left to suffer in the frightened despair of abandonment. Particularly abusive parents deepen the abandonment trauma by linking corporal punishment with contempt. Slaveholders and prison guards typically use contempt and scorn to destroy their victims’ self-esteem. Slaves, prisoners, and children, who are made to feel worthless and powerless devolve into learned helplessness and can be controlled with far less energy and attention. Cult leaders also use contempt to shrink their followers into absolute submission after luring them in with brief phases of fake unconditional love.

Law and order is a social service. Crime and the fear which the threat of crime induces can paralyse whole communities, keep lonely and vulnerable elderly people shut up in their homes, scar young lives and raise to cult status the swaggering violent bully who achieves predatory control over the streets. I suspect that there would be more support and less criticism than today's political leaders imagine for a large shift of resources from Social Security benefits to law and order - as long as rhetoric about getting tough on crime was matched by practice.

The thing to understand here is that gang rapes and gang or cult killings in times of peace and war are not “senseless violence.” They are instead powerful acts of group bonding and criminal enabling that, quite often, have a hidden purpose of promoting the wealth, power, or vanity of a specific leader or cause…at the expense of the innocent.

A dismal omen: ...this morning a woman handed me a dollar bill that was translucent from age, as soft and warm as living tissue.

Durable political systems ultimately rely on institutions, not individuals.

All cults are personality cults. All cults are really extensions of whoever the cult leader is. So, whatever the prejudices, the worldview and the ideas of the cult leader are they will be chanted back at him by the crowd. Until massive social and economic inequality as well as the betrayal of the country by the elite are confronted and remedied, this yearning for a cult leader will not go away. Desperate people are looking for somebody to save them.

Through one method or another, each established an emotional link to the crowd and, like the central figure in a cult, brought deep and often ugly feelings to the surface. This is how the tentacles of Fascism spread inside a democracy. Unlike a monarchy or a military dictatorship imposed on society from above, Fascism draws energy from men and women who are upset because of a lost war, a lost job, a memory of humiliation, or a sense that their country is in steep decline. The more painful the grounds for resentment, the easier it is for a Fascist leader to gain followers by dangling the prospect of renewal or by vowing to take back what has been stolen.

In my opinion, phobia indoctrination is the single most powerful technique for keeping people dependent and obedient. I have encountered numerous individuals who had long ago stopped believing in the leader and the doctrine, but were unable to walk away. They were psychologically paralyzed with indoctrinated fears which often functioned subconsciously.

...Akhenaton is the king who allows us to see the invention of one-god worship for what it really was: a patriarchal cult leader´s tactic, the modern manifestation of which many of us still deludedly follow. I´m not saying that every practicing monotheist is an authoritarian. I´m saying that monotheism was specifically invented to support authoritarianism.

Never treat another in a manner which would make them feel small; not anyone, not even yourself.

The desire to be loved by him was so strong that I ostracized Mom with zeal, with the kind of blind allegiance reserved for a cult leader.

Mind control is the process by which individual or collective freedom of choice and action is compromised by agents or agencies that modify or distort perception, motivation, affect, cognition and/or behavioral outcomes. It is neither magical nor mystical, but a process that involves a set of basic social psychological principles. Conformity, compliance, persuasion, dissonance, reactance, guilt and fear arousal, modeling and identification are some of the staple social influence ingredients well studied in psychological experiments and field studies. In some combinations, they create a powerful crucible of extreme mental and behavioral manipulation when synthesized with several other real-world factors, such as charismatic, authoritarian leaders, dominant ideologies, social isolation, physical debilitation, induced phobias, and extreme threats or promised rewards that are typically deceptively orchestrated, over an extended time period in settings where they are applied intensively.

News items are excellent for eliciting fear and inculcating phobias. Cult leaders like to tell members about floods, earthquakes, fires, famines, plagues, and wars–as proof that the last days have arrived.

People who have extremely limited knowledge of The Bible or its implications may still choose to classify themselves as Christians on the basis that their parents do so—they may never even give it a second thought. This phenomenon of our nation’s children inheriting religion is often overlooked because the perpetrator guilty of indoctrination is not a dictator or cult leader, but instead it is most often their own parents or close family members.

Cult (totalistic type): a group or movement exhibiting a great or excessive devotion or dedication to some person, idea, or thing and employing unethically manipulative techniques of persuasion and control (e.g., isolation from former friends and family, debilitation, use of special methods to heighten suggestibility and subservience, powerful group pressure, information management, suspension of individuality or critical judgement, promotion of total dependency on the group and fear of leaving it, etc) designed to advance the goals of the group's leaders, to the actual or possible detriment of members, their families, or the community.

A narcissistic church leader will preemptively create under-educated, group-dependent followers. By contrast, Jesus admired independent thinkers, exampled at Mt 9:22, where the woman with an issue of blood bucked convention in favor of her Bible-trained faith. pg 38

Ants and neurons are democracies, that old political saw the Mandate works so hard to discredit. You have different groundswells of popular opinion gathering momentum, and picking up new adherents like a snowball, until one urge or impulse reaches a critical mass, after which the whole—the nest, the brain—adopts that tabled motion wholeheartedly. And here’s where the hive aspect comes in, because those elements which were rooting for the alternatives give in with good grace and wave flags for the winner. There’s no holdout of political grousers claiming someone else won the election. The whole institution acts in unison the moment that threshold is crossed. And that’s us. No demagogues having to harangue the crowd, no self-interested cult leader talking everyone into servitude. Just a group acting together, for everyone’s best benefit.

But there was a sense of something tipping out of balance. The times seemed out of joint. There was too much decadence. Too much intensity. Too much change. Too much happiness juxtaposed with too much misery. Too much wealth next to too much poverty. The world was becoming faster and louder, and the social systems were becoming as chaotic and fragmented as jazz scores. So there was a craving, in some places, for simplicity, for order, for scapegoats and for bully-boy leaders, for nations to become like religions or cults. It happened every now and then. It seemed, in the 1930s, that the whole course of humanity was at stake. As it very often does today. Too many people wanted to find an easy answer to complicated questions. It was a dangerous time to be human. To feel or to think or to care.

I dressed in another high school special from my closet: a long, shapeless floral dress with about twenty buttons down the front. Maybe that doesn't sound too bad, but let me assure you, it looked like the polar opposite of terrific once I'd tied my orange sneakers on. I looked like the least favorite wife of a cult leader.

Among [Applewhite's] other teachings was the classic cult specialty of developing disdain for anyone outside of the Heaven's Gate commune. Applewhite flattered his would-be alien flock that they were an elite elect far superior to the non-initiated humans whom he considered to be deluded zombies.[...]Applewhite effectively fed his paranoid persecution complex to his followers to ensure blind loyalty to the group and himself while fostering alienation from the mundane world. This paradoxical superior/fearful attitude towards “Them” (i.e., anyone who is not one of “Us”) is one of the simplest means of hooking even the most skeptical curiosity seeker into the solipsistic netherworld of a [mentally unbalanced] leader's insecure and threatened worldview.

My grandfather, like many leaders, was not content with just sharing his message; he had to control how people lived it. This is the line where even a good philosophy can become a violation.

Asian nationalism is driven by rising expectations; the West’s nationalism is driven by disappointed hopes. But the political outcome is surprisingly similar: a call to make the country “great again.

Most cult leaders are narcissists. They brainwash people. It’s done by intermittent reinforcement. Let’s say you kick a dog then give it a treat. The dog learns that to get the treat it has to first withstand the kick. Gradually the treats decrease while the kicks increase, but by then the dog has been conditioned to associate being kicked with receiving a treat so it will accept the punishment in the vain hope that one

Cults tend to follow similar patterns. First, there's financial exploitation where members hand over money and assets to increase the cult's power over them and make them dependent on it. Then the sexual exploitation begins. Finally, there's physical exploitation involving confinement, punishment, and isolation from family members. If the cult's leader has become delusional enough to think they have the God-like power of life and death over their followers, they may demand the ultimate sacrifice - mass suicide.

If ordinary citizens knew or ever really [understood] how our political leaders have allowed unemployment to be used as a tool for fine-tuning the inflation rate, they would throw the rascals out and demand a thorough purging of the ranks of government economists.

In most archaeological texts the female religion is referred to as a “fertility cult,” perhaps revealing the attitudes toward sexuality held by the various contemporary religions that may have influenced the writers. But archaeological and mythological evidence of the veneration of the female deity as creator and lawmaker of the universe, prophetess, provider of human destinies, inventor, healer, hunter and valiant leader in battle suggests that the title “fertility cult” may be a gross oversimplification of a complex theological structure.

In a sense, we can’t even claim to be growing “less religious” when social media’s job is explicitly to generate ideological sects, to pack people’s feeds with suggested content that only exaggerates what they already believe. As each of us posts, curating our individual online identities, the apps capture those personas via metadata and reinforce them through irresistible targeted ads and custom feeds. No “cult leader” takes advantage of our psychological drives quite like The Algorithm, which thrives on sending us down rabbit holes, so we never even come across rhetoric we don’t agree with unless we actively search for it.

In the Moonies, I was taught to suppress negative thoughts by using a technique called thought stopping. I repeated the phrase “Crush Satan” or “True Parents” (the term used to describe Moon and his wife, Hak Ja Han) whenever any doubt arose in my mind. Another way to control thoughts is through the use of loaded language, which, as Lifton pointed out, is purposely designed to invoke an emotional response. When I look at the list of thought-controlling techniques—reducing complex thoughts into clichés and platitudinous buzz words; forbidding critical questions about the leader, doctrine, or policy; labeling alternative belief systems as illegitimate or evil—it is astounding how many Trump exploits. As I have mentioned, one of the most effective techniques in the thought control arsenal is hypnosis. Scott Adams, the creator of the cartoon Dilbert, described Trump, with his oversimplifications, repetitions, insinuating tone of voice, and use of vivid imagery, as a Master Wizard in the art of hypnosis and persuasion.

It’s often said that Donald Trump has a cultlike following. But that’s far too benign. The film Star Wars has a cultlike following. Taylor Swift has her cult of “Swifties.” A political organization that has no platform other than loyalty to the leader is not a cult, it’s an autocratic movement. As Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism:

In the cult, the people in power dictate what cult members are to do. Children raised in cults are systematically stripped of their own autonomous power and forced to feel powerful only in the destructive context allowed by the cult, and always under the power of the leader. Ritual abuse survivors have had to learn to be outer oriented - to perceive what is expected of them and do that, whether it is healthy for them or not. When a therapist creates a context in which he or she is the leader, and the client is to listen, learn, and follow what the therapist says, the therapist has inadvertently replicated the power system of the cult. That is not to say that the therapist has no power; the therapist has a lot of power, but the power the therapist has resides in authority based upon his or her expertise, knowledge, training and sensitivity. The point is to use this authority in a way in which the client can also begin to feel his or her own authority, and begin to develop a healthy feeling of power. The word used quite often now is "empowerment." How do you empower a client?

There are some phenomena commonly found in both cults and religions (at least in their early days). These include a strict differentiation of leader and followers; rebellion against established authority; paranoia as the new movement seeks to establish itself; simplistic, dualistic thinking [...] (good/evil, believer/heretic, saved/damned); and a tendency towards utopian thinking.

Groupies and hangers-on somehow fancy themselves entitled to the narcissist’s favour and largesse, his time, attention, and other resources. They convince themselves that they are exempt from the narcissist’s rage and wrath and immune to his vagaries andabuse . This self-imputed and self-conferred status irritates the narcissist no end as it challenges and encroaches on his standing as the only source of preferential treatment and the sole decision-maker when it comes to the allocation of his precious and cosmically significant wherewithal. The narcissist is the guru at the centre of a cult. Like other gurus, he demands complete obedience from his flock: his spouse, his offspring, other family  members, friends, and colleagues. He feels entitled to adulation and special treatment by his followers. He punishes the wayward and the straying lambs. He enforces discipline, adherence to his teachings, and common goals. The less accomplished he is in reality – the more stringent his mastery and the more pervasive the brainwashing. Cult leaders are narcissists who failed in their mission to "be someone", to become famous, and to impress the world with their uniqueness, talents, traits, and skills. Such disgruntled narcissists withdraw into a "zone of comfort" (known as the "Pathological Narcissistic Space") that assumes the hallmarks of a cult. The – often involuntary – members of the narcissist's mini-cult inhabit a twilight zone of his own construction. He imposes on them an exclusionary or inclusionary shared psychosis, replete with persecutory delusions, "enemies", mythical-grandiose narratives, and apocalyptic scenarios if he is flouted. Exclusionary shared psychosis involves the physical and emotional isolation of the narcissist and his “flock” (spouse, children, fans, friends) from the outside world in order to better shield them from imminent threats and hostile intentions. Inclusionary shared psychosis revolves around attempts to spread the narcissist’s message in a missionary fashion among friends, colleagues, co-workers, fans, churchgoers, and anyone else who comes across the mini-cult. The narcissist's control is based on ambiguity, unpredictability, fuzziness, and ambientabuse . His ever-shifting whims exclusively define right versus wrong, desirable and unwanted, what is to be pursued and what to be avoided. He alone determines the rights and obligations of his disciples and alters them at will.

Sooner or later the Curse of the Cult blights every group that sets out to attain the heights. They close the circle, form a tight little mutual-admiration society, deify their leader (especially after the leader is dead), despise nonmembers as uninitiated barbarians, flatter themselves that they alone hold “the keys of the kingdom,” and turn into spiritual fossils while deluding themselves into thinking that they are High Initiates.

What we learned from the Manson interview was later applied to the bureau’s dealing with other cults with charismatic and manipulative leaders, such as Reverend Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple in Guyana, David Koresh and the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, and the Freemen militia movement in Montana. The outcome is not always as we would like it, but it is important to understand the personality of those we are dealing with so we can try to predict behavior.

Catarina hooked her hand around Magnus’s elbow and hauled him away, like a schoolteacher with a misbehaving student. They entered a narrow alcove around the corner, where the music and noise of the party was muffled. She rounded on him. “I recently treated Tessa for wounds she said were inflicted on her by members of a demon-worshipping cult,” Catarina said. “She told me you were, and I quote, ‘handling’ the cult. What’s going on? Explain.” Magnus made a face. “I may have had a hand in founding it.” “How much of a hand?” “Well, both.” Catarina bristled. “I specifically told you not to do that!” “You did?” Magnus said. A bubble of hope grew within him. “You remember what happened?” She gave him a look of distress. “You don’t?” “Someone took all my memories around the subject of this cult,” said Magnus. “I don’t know who, or why.” He sounded more desperate than he would’ve liked, more desperate than he wanted to be. His old friend’s face was full of sympathy. “I don’t know anything about it,” she said. “I met up with you and Ragnor for a brief vacation. You seemed troubled, but you were trying to laugh it off, the way you always do. You and Ragnor said you had a brilliant idea to start a joke cult. I told you not to do it. That’s it.” He, Catarina, and Ragnor had taken many trips together, over the centuries. One memorable trip had gotten Magnus banished from Peru. He had always enjoyed those adventures more than any others. Being with his friends almost felt like having a home. He did not know if there would ever be another trip. Ragnor was dead, and Magnus might have done something terrible. “Why didn’t you stop me?” he asked. “You usually stop me!” “I had to take an orphan child across an ocean to save his life.” “Right,” said Magnus. “That’s a good reason.” Catarina shook her head. “I took my eyes off you for one second.” She had worked in mundane hospitals in New York for decades. She saved orphans. She healed the sick. She’d always been the voice of reason in the trio that was Ragnor, Catarina, and Magnus. “So I planned with Ragnor to start a joke cult, and I guess I did it. Now the joke cult is a real cult, and they have a new leader. It sounds like they’re mixed up with a Greater Demon.” Even to Catarina, he wouldn’t say the name of his father. “Sounds like the joke has gotten a little out of hand,” Catarina said dryly. “Sounds like I’m the punch line.

Nothing irks a follower of the movement more than the next word: faith. The leaders have practically diagnosed it as the worst possible thing that a sapient creature can have, and yet we all cling to it in the end. We place our trust in people, places, things, both seen and unseen, and most of the time it has served us well as a species. Faith has been a cornerstone and foundation of our species, and other of the Hominidae taxonomy for millions of years. It is the foundation of good relationships, confidence, and even discerning wisdom and truth.

Describing the process of making her decision to leave, Patricia said: “It is as if there is a shelf where all your doubts and misgivings are placed while you are in that group. Over the months or years you observe so many things that may conflict with your original beliefs and values, or you see things done by the group or leader that are just not right. Because of the indoctrination and not being allowed to ask questions, you just put it on the shelf. Eventually, the shelf gets heavier and heavier and finally just breaks, and you are ready to leave" (p. 55).

I wish it had occurred to me in that moment to ask him one question: Who has spiritual authority over you? Such a simple and vital question to ask any leader - spiritual or otherwise. I didn't ask, though. Instead, I thought sincerely about who had invested the most in my life recently. Pam was becoming the warm, sweet mom I never had. Les was becoming the emotionally available father figure I always wanted. This whole group felt like the loud, fun, real family I had dreamed of. If anyone was going to help me figure out the right way to live, it would be them. - pp. 93

As I became older, I was given many masks to wear. I could be a laborer laying railroad tracks across the continent, with long hair in a queue to be pulled by pranksters; a gardener trimming the shrubs while secretly planting a bomb; a saboteur before the day of infamy at Pearl Harbor, signaling the Imperial Fleet; a kamikaze pilot donning his headband somberly, screaming 'Banzai' on my way to my death; a peasant with a broad-brimmed straw hat in a rice paddy on the other side of the world, stooped over to toil in the water; an obedient servant in the parlor, a houseboy too dignified for my own good; a washerman in the basement laundry, removing stains using an ancient secret; a tyrant intent on imposing my despotism on the democratic world, opposed by the free and the brave; a party cadre alongside many others, all of us clad in coordinated Mao jackets; a sniper camouflaged in the trees of the jungle, training my gunsights on G.I. Joe; a child running with a body burning from napalm, captured in an unforgettable photo; an enemy shot in the head or slaughtered by the villageful; one of the grooms in a mass wedding of couples, having met my mate the day before through our cult leader; an orphan in the last airlift out of a collapsed capital, ready to be adopted into the good life; a black belt martial artist breaking cinderblocks with his head, in an advertisement for Ginsu brand knives with the slogan 'but wait--there's more' as the commercial segued to show another free gift; a chef serving up dog stew, a trick on the unsuspecting diner; a bad driver swerving into the next lane, exactly as could be expected; a horny exchange student here for a year, eager to date the blonde cheerleader; a tourist visiting, clicking away with his camera, posing my family in front of the monuments and statues; a ping pong champion, wearing white tube socks pulled up too high and batting the ball with a wicked spin; a violin prodigy impressing the audience at Carnegie Hall, before taking a polite bow; a teen computer scientist, ready to make millions on an initial public offering before the company stock crashes; a gangster in sunglasses and a tight suit, embroiled in a turf war with the Sicilian mob; an urban greengrocer selling lunch by the pound, rudely returning change over the counter to the black patrons; a businessman with a briefcase of cash bribing a congressman, a corrupting influence on the electoral process; a salaryman on my way to work, crammed into the commuter train and loyal to the company; a shady doctor, trained in a foreign tradition with anatomical diagrams of the human body mapping the flow of life energy through a multitude of colored points; a calculus graduate student with thick glasses and a bad haircut, serving as a teaching assistant with an incomprehensible accent, scribbling on the chalkboard; an automobile enthusiast who customizes an imported car with a supercharged engine and Japanese decals in the rear window, cruising the boulevard looking for a drag race; a illegal alien crowded into the cargo hold of a smuggler's ship, defying death only to crowd into a New York City tenement and work as a slave in a sweatshop. My mother and my girl cousins were Madame Butterfly from the mail order bride catalog, dying in their service to the masculinity of the West, and the dragon lady in a kimono, taking vengeance for her sisters. They became the television newscaster, look-alikes with their flawlessly permed hair. Through these indelible images, I grew up. But when I looked in the mirror, I could not believe my own reflection because it was not like what I saw around me. Over the years, the world opened up. It has become a dizzying kaleidoscope of cultural fragments, arranged and rearranged without plan or order.

We cannot call ourselves anti-theist, like New Atheism, while creating even rainbow pantheons of gods to follow, chasing ideological spectres to the end of illogical rainbow arguments constructed and maintained artificially by ignorant leaders. When we do this we not only create strawmen, spectres, and artificial rainbows but pocket dimensions of subjective thought that can be likened to the Twilight Zone. In this place things will not be more real but be like a Marvel comics version of both biblical and Norse heroes that are created solely for the readers recreation and for corporate sales. We will end up selling our souls for ideological satisfaction.

Thought Control * Require members to internalize the group’s doctrine as truth * Adopt the group’s “map of reality” as reality * Instill black and white thinking * Decide between good versus evil * Organize people into us versus them (insiders versus outsiders) * Change a person’s name and identity * Use loaded language and clichés to constrict knowledge, stop critical thoughts, and reduce complexities into platitudinous buzzwords * Encourage only “good and proper” thoughts * Use hypnotic techniques to alter mental states, undermine critical thinking, and even to age-regress the member to childhood states * Manipulate memories to create false ones * Teach thought stopping techniques that shut down reality testing by stopping negative thoughts and allowing only positive thoughts. These techniques include: * Denial, rationalization, justification, wishful thinking * Chanting * Meditating * Praying * Speaking in tongues * Singing or humming * Reject rational analysis, critical thinking, constructive criticism * Forbid critical questions about leader, doctrine, or policy * Label alternative belief systems as illegitimate, evil, or not useful * Instill new “map of reality” Emotional Control * Manipulate and narrow the range of feelings—some emotions and/or needs are deemed as evil, wrong, or selfish * Teach emotion stopping techniques to block feelings of hopelessness, anger, or doubt * Make the person feel that problems are always their own fault, never the leader’s or the group’s fault * Promote feelings of guilt or unworthiness, such as: * Identity guilt * You are not living up to your potential * Your family is deficient * Your past is suspect * Your affiliations are unwise * Your thoughts, feelings, actions are irrelevant or selfish * Social guilt * Historical guilt * Instill fear, such as fear of: * Thinking independently * The outside world * Enemies * Losing one’s salvation * Leaving * Orchestrate emotional highs and lows through love bombing and by offering praise one moment, and then declaring a person is a horrible sinner * Ritualistic and sometimes public confession of sins * Phobia indoctrination: inculcate irrational fears about leaving the group or questioning the leader’s authority * No happiness or fulfillment possible outside the group * Terrible consequences if you leave: hell, demon possession, incurable diseases, accidents, suicide, insanity, 10,000 reincarnations, etc. * Shun those who leave and inspire fear of being rejected by friends and family * Never a legitimate reason to leave; those who leave are weak, undisciplined, unspiritual, worldly, brainwashed by family or counselor, or seduced by money, sex, or rock and roll * Threaten harm to ex-member and family (threats of cutting off friends/family)

My students remarked that the Fascist chiefs we remember best were charismatic. Through one method or another, each established an emotional link to the crowd and, like the central figure in a cult, brought deep and often ugly feelings to the surface. This is how the tentacles of Fascism spread inside a democracy. Unlike a monarchy or a military dictatorship imposed on society from above, Fascism draws energy from men and women who are upset because of a lost war, a lost job, a memory of humiliation, or a sense that their country is in steep decline. The more painful the grounds for resentment, the easier it is for a Fascist leader to gain followers by dangling the prospect of renewal or by vowing to take back what has been stolen.

A covert narcissist is in some ways a more dangerous abuser. I say this delicately. All abusers are horrific, and all abuse is deplorable; all victims of all types of abuse have been through a tremendous amount. I don’t want to diminish anyone’s pain. The point I’m trying to make is when someone is hitting you or yelling at you it is clearly abuse. Covert abuse is hidden and so subtle, it is far from obvious. Manipulative, covert tactics not only hurt you, they also chip away at your identity, your self-worth, and make you feel like this is all your fault. Covert emotional and psychological abuse is what happens in cults. Leaders who make you feel loved can also talk you into committing suicide. These people are powerful. Do not diminish what you have experienced. You have been controlled and manipulated for years.

To truly understand the Nazis,” Ulmstrom said, leading the way, “you have to stop considering them as a political party. They called themselves Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei—the National Socialist German Workers’ Party—but in reality, they were really a cult.” “A cult?” Gray asked. “They bore all the trappings, ja? A spiritual leader who could not be questioned, disciples who wore matching clothes, rituals and blood oaths performed in secret, and most important of all, the creation of a potent totem to worship. The Hakenkreuz. The Broken Cross, also called the swastika. A symbol to supplant the crucifix and the Star of David.” “Hari krishnas on steroids,” Monk mumbled. “Do not joke. The Nazis understood the inherent power of ideas. A power greater than any gun or rocket. They used it to subjugate and brainwash an entire nation.

If Fascism concerns itself less with specific policies than with finding a pathway to power, what about the tactics of leadership? My students remarked that the Fascist chiefs we remember best were charismatic. Through one method or another, each established an emotional link to the crowd and, like the central figure in a cult, brought deep and often ugly feelings to the surface. This is how the tentacles of Fascism spread inside a democracy. Unlike a monarchy or a military dictatorship imposed on society from above, Fascism draws energy from men and women who are upset because of a lost war, a lost job, a memory of humiliation, or a sense that their country is in steep decline. The more painful the grounds for resentment, the easier it is for a Fascist leader to gain followers by dangling the prospect of renewal or by vowing to take back what has been stolen.

The Messianic Wall and the Ultra-Loyal Base First published in 2019 There is much talk of Trump’s ultra-loyal political base, and rightly so. That base, or at least the most passionate element of it, consists of angry people who feel spurned by the political establishment. The base showed its psychological and political clout when Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, who claimed to speak for it, denounced Trump for “caving” to a unanimous Senate decision to keep the government running, which caused Trump to reverse himself and create a disastrous partial government shutdown. Yet that same base could play a large part in removing Trump from office. People who submit themselves to an omnipotent guru can be especially passionate in their support of all that he says and does. But this cultism can also be a source of vulnerability for both. Leaders and followers can become antagonists rather than mutual nurturers.

Once in power, Stalin’s campaign to succeed Lenin required a legitimate heroic career which he did not possess because of his experience in what he called 'the dirty business' of politics: this could not be told, either because it was too gangsterish for a great, paternalistic statesman or because it was too Georgian for a Russian leader. His solution was a clumsy but all-embracing cult of personality that invented, distorted and concealed the truth. Ironically this self-promotion was so grotesque that it fanned sparks, sometimes innocent ones, which flared up into colossal anti-Stalin conspiracy-theories. It was easy for his political opponents, and later for us historians, to believe that it was all invented and that he had done nothing much at all—particularly since few historians had researched in the Caucasus where so much of his early career took place. An anti-cult, as erroneous as the cult itself, grew up around these conspiracy-theories.

La Grande Terreur ne fut ni la première vague d’arrestations en Union soviétique, ni la plus grande : les précédents accès de terreur avaient été largement dirigés contre les paysants et les minorités ethniques, notamment ceux qui vivaient à proximité de la frontière soviétique. Mais elle fut la première à viser la haute direction du Parti, et suscita un profond malaise chez les communistes, au pays comme à l’étranger. Le moment venu, la Grande Terreur aurait pu conduire à une véritable désillusion. Mais, par un effet du hasard, la Seconde Guerre mondiale sauva le stalinisme – et Staline. Malgré le chaos et les erreurs, malgré les morts en masse et l’immensité des destructions, la victoire conforta la légitimité du sytème et de son dirigeant, en « prouvant » la valeur. Au lendemain de la victoire, le culte quasi religieux de Staline atteignit de nouveaux sommets. La propagande soviétique décrivit le leader soviétique comme « l’incarnation de leur héroïsme, de leur patriotisme et de leur dévouement à la Patrie socialiste »

In 2011 in Swansea, Wales, Colin Batley was found guilty of 35 charges relating to his role as the leader of a 'satanic cult' that sexually abused children and women, manufactured child abuse images and forced children and women into prostitution (de Bruxelles 2011). His partner and two other women were also convicted on related charges, with one man convicted of paying to abuse a victim of the group. The groups' ritualistic activities were based on the doctrine of Aleister Crowley, an occult figure whose writing includes references to ritual sex with children. Crowley's literature has been widely linked to the practice of ritualistic abuse by survivors and their advocates, who in turn have been accused by occult groups of religious persecution. During Batley's trial, the prosecution claimed that Crowley's writings formed the basis of Batley's organisation and he read from a copy of it during sexually abusive incidents. It seems that alternative as well as mainstream religious traditions can be misused by sexually abusive groups. p38

And what about Hillel’s famous dictum (which, like Pascal’s, has been beaten to death)? Did Hillel not ask, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” I understood, of course. I listened respectfully to the rabbis and hospital chaplains. But I remembered my old friend Benny Lévy, the French Maoist leader and personal secretary to Sartre who turned to the study of the Torah, inviting me to ponder the rest of Hillel’s saying. Yes, of course, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” But Hillel followed that immediately by asking, “If I am only for myself, what am I?”2 Notice that Hillel said “what,” not “who.” He wanted us to understand clearly that if I am “only for me,” I become a “what,” a neutral being without qualities, a half-being, a thing. If I graze in the meadow of this me, he insisted, if I confine myself within the me-substance and the persevering ego (a specialty of the West that Covid-19 has raised to the Pantheon), then I am not much of anything; I am a subject without a predicate, a thing without qualification. I place myself under the tyranny of the object. Did someone say “the cult of me”?

It is of the nature of war to increase the executive at the expense of legislative authority," the Federalist tell us. And modern commanders in chief tend to reflexively invoke the war metaphor when the public demands that they take action to solve the emergency of the month, real or imagined. "War is the health of the state," Randolph Bourne's famous aphorism has it, but Bourne could just as easily written that "war is the health of the presidency." Throughout American history, virtually every major advance in executive power has come during a war or warlike crisis. Convince the public that we are at war, and constitutional barriers to actions fall, as power flows to the commander in chief. Little wonder, then, that confronted with impossible expectations, the modern president tends to recast social and economic problems in military terms: war on crime, war on drugs, war on poverty. Martial rhetoric often ushers in domestic militarism, as presidents push to employ standing armies at home, to fight drug trafficking, terrorism, or natural disasters. And when the president raises the battle cry, he can usually count on substantial numbers of American opinion leaders to cheer him on.

Those captivated by the cult of celebrity do not examine voting records or compare verbal claims with written and published facts and reports. The reality of their world is whatever the latest cable news show, political leader, advertiser, or loan officer says is reality. The illiterate, the semiliterate, and those who live as though they are illiterate are effectively cut off from the past. They live in an eternal present. They do not understand the predatory loan deals that drive them into foreclosure and bankruptcy. They cannot decipher the fine print on the credit card agreements that plunge them into unmanageable debt. They repeat thought-terminating clichés and slogans. They are hostage to the constant jingle and manipulation of a consumer culture. They seek refuge in familiar brands and labels. They eat at fast-food restaurants not only because it is cheap, but also because they can order from pictures rather than from a menu. And those who serve them, also often semiliterate or illiterate, punch in orders on cash registers whose keys are usually marked with pictures. Life is a state of permanent amnesia, a world in search of new forms of escapism and quick, sensual gratification.

It was in postwar Paris that Mandelbrot began this quest in earnest. Uncle Szolem urged him to attend the École Normale Supérieure, France’s most rarefied institution of higher learning, where Mandelbrot had earned entry at the age of twenty (one of only twenty Frenchmen to do so). But the aridly abstract style of mathematics practiced there was uncongenial to him. At the time, the École Normale—dite normale, prétendue supérieure, says the wag—was dominated in mathematics by a semisecret cabal called Bourbaki. (The name Bourbaki was jocularly taken from a hapless nineteenth-century French general who once tried to shoot himself in the head but missed.) Its leader was André Weil, one of the supreme mathematicians of the twentieth century (and the brother of Simone Weil). The aim of Bourbaki was to purify mathematics, to rebuild it on perfectly logical foundations untainted by physical or geometric intuition. Mandelbrot found the Bourbaki cult, and Weil in particular, “positively repellent.” The Bourbakistes seemed to cut off mathematics from natural science, to make it into a sort of logical theology. They regarded geometry, so integral to Mandelbrot’s Keplerian dream, as a dead branch of mathematics, fit for children at best.

Soon all humane people would understand the need for a revolution from below, where those who worked and struggled and produced would be the ruling class. Those with eyes to see could detect this with ease, while those whose eyes had yet to be opened could always… well, it was thought that events would also assist in persuading them. I realize that this may sound slightly as if I had joined a cult. There actually was a rival Trotskyist group, later to make itself notorious by recruiting Corin and Vanessa Redgrave, whose depraved “leader” Gerry Healy did in fact teach us all we needed to learn about cultism and the mental and sexual and financial exploitation of the young and the credulous. (I learned a lot about “faith-based” movements from this early instruction.) But the “I.S.,” as our group was known, had a relaxed and humorous internal life and also a quizzical and critical attitude to the “Sixties” mindset. We didn’t grow our hair too long, because we wanted to mingle with the workers at the factory gate and on the housing estates. We didn’t “do” drugs, which we regarded as a pathetic, weak-minded escapism almost as contemptible as religion (as well as a bad habit which could expose us to a “plant” from the police). Rock and roll and sex were OK. Looking back, I still think we picked the right options.

Bannon thrived on the chaos he created and did everything he could to make it spread. When he finally made his way through the crowd to the back of the town house, he put on a headset to join the broadcast of the Breitbart radio show already in progress. It was his way of bringing tens of thousands of listeners into the inner sanctum of the “Breitbart Embassy,” as the town house was ironically known, and thereby conscripting them into a larger project. Bannon was inordinately proud of the movement he saw growing around him, boasting constantly of its egalitarian nature. What to an outsider could look like a cast of extras from the Island of Misfit Toys was, in Bannon’s eyes, a proudly populist and “unclubbable” plebiscite rising up in defiant protest against the “globalists” and “gatekeepers” who had taken control of both parties. Just how Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty figured into a plan to overthrow the global power structure wasn’t clear, even to many of Bannon’s friends. But, then, Bannon derived a visceral thrill anytime he could deliver a fuck-you to the establishment. The thousands of frustrated listeners calling in to his radio show, and the millions more who flocked to Breitbart News, had left him no doubt that an army of the angry and dispossessed was eager to join him in lobbing a bomb at the country’s leaders. As guests left the party, a doorman handed out a gift that Bannon had chosen for the occasion: a silver hip flask with “Breitbart” imprinted above an image of a honey badger, the Breitbart mascot. — Bannon’s cult-leader magnetism was a powerful draw for oddballs and freaks, and the attraction ran both ways. As he moved further from the cosmopolitan orbits of Goldman Sachs and Hollywood, there was no longer any need for him to suppress his right-wing impulses. Giving full vent to his views on subjects like immigration and Islam isolated him among a radical fringe that most of political Washington regarded as teeming with racist conspiracy theorists. But far from being bothered, Bannon welcomed their disdain, taking it as proof of his authentic conviction. It fed his grandiose sense of purpose to imagine that he was amassing an army of ragged, pitchfork-wielding outsiders to storm the barricades and, in Andrew Breitbart’s favorite formulation, “take back the country.” If Bannon was bothered by the incendiary views held by some of those lining up with him, he didn’t show it. His habit always was to welcome all comers. To all outward appearances, Bannon, wild-eyed and scruffy, a Falstaff in flip-flops, was someone whom the political world could safely ignore. But his appearance, and the company he kept, masked an analytic capability that was undiminished and as applicable to politics as it had been to the finances of corrupt Hollywood movie studios. Somehow, Bannon, who would happily fall into league with the most agitated conservative zealot, was able to see clearly that conservatives had failed to stop Bill Clinton in the 1990s because they had indulged this very zealotry to a point where their credibility with the media and mainstream voters was shot. Trapped in their own bubble, speaking only to one another, they had believed that they were winning, when in reality they had already lost.

In actual fact our Russian experience—when I use the word "Russian" I always differentiate it from the word "Soviet"—I have in mind even pre-Soviet, pre-revolutinoary experience—in actual fact it is vitally important for the West, because by some chance of history we have trodden the same path seventy or eighty years before the West. And now it is with a strange sensation that we look at what is happening to you; many social phenomena that happened in Russia before its collapse are being repeated. Our experience of life is of vital importance to the West, but I am not convinced that you are capable of assimilating it without having gone through it to the end yourselves. You know, one could quote here many examples: for one, a certain retreat by the older generation, yielding their intellectual leadership to the younger generation. It is against the natural order of things for those who are youngest, with the least experience of life, to have the greatest influence in directing the life of society. One can say then that this is what forms the spirit of the age, the current of public opinion, when people in authority, well known professors and scientists, are reluctant to enter into an argument even when they hold a different opinion. It is considered embarrassing to put forward one's counterarguments, lest one become involved. And so there is a certain abdication of responsibility, which is typical here where there is complete freedom....There is now a universal adulation of revolutionaries, the more so the more extreme they are! Similarly, before the revolution, we had in Russia, if not a cult of terror, then a fierce defense of terrorists. People in good positions—intellectuals, professors, liberals—spent a great deal of effort, anger, and indignation in defending terrorists.

You will promote harmony in your words and actions. You will not compete with other leaders or compare to them. You will work together with others to make meaningful changes. You will not measure success in numbers: dollars, followers, ranks, sales, reviews, Facebook likes. Rather, you will measure by people helped, connections made, and moments savoured. You will help people accept themselves by being real with them. You will not show up on the pulpit for attention or approval. You will show up because you have something important to say. You will build tribes instead of cults. You will see your followers as equals. You will learn with them, and they will trust you. And there is nothing like the trust of people who resonate with your most authentic, vulnerable self to push you, every day, to do your best. It will hold you to a higher standard of behaviour. As a self-aware leader, you can be honest. This is the missing element in so many ineffective and addictive doctrines. You can tell people the things that are true but hard to hear. Not everyone will be brave enough to sidestep idealism, but those who do will appreciate your honesty. If you do not describe the darkness and the light, the voyager who has followed in your footsteps will believe he is lost. He will blame himself or blame you for teaching him lies. By being honest about what the journey looks like—failures, warts, and all—your teachings will become sources of consolation rather than frustration. As that voyager travels down the crooked, lonely paths within him, he may find a dark, terrifying cave, but if you mentioned it, he will feel elated. Yes, he will think, it looks horrifying, but at least I’m on track if I’ve found this awful thing. Your honesty may be bitter medicine, but when it digests, it’ll provide such potent healing that its taste will become a distant memory.

Out of 1,016 study subjects who’d been involved with the Moonies, 90 percent of those who’d been interested enough to attend one of the workshops where this so-called brainwashing occurred decided that the whole thing wasn’t really their cup of tea and quickly ended their Moonie careers. They couldn’t be converted. Of the remaining 10 percent who joined, half left on their own steam within a couple of years. So what made the other 5 percent stay? Prevailing wisdom would tell you that only the intellectually deficient or psychologically unstable would stick by a “cult” that long. But scholars have disproven this, too. In Barker’s studies, she compared the most committed Moonie converts with a control group—the latter had gone through life experiences that might make them very “suggestive” (“Like having an unhappy childhood or being rather low-intelligence,” she said). But in the end, the control group either didn’t join at all or left after a week or two. A common belief is that cult indoctrinators look for individuals who have “psychological problems” because they are easier to deceive. But former cult recruiters say their ideal candidates were actually good-natured, service-minded, and sharp. Steven Hassan, an ex-Moonie himself, used to recruit people to the Unification Church, so he knows a little something about the type of individual cults go for. “When I was a leader in the Moonies we selectively recruited . . . those who were strong, caring, and motivated,” he wrote in his 1998 book Combatting Cult Mind Control. Because it took so much time and money to enlist a new member, they avoided wasting resources on someone who seemed liable to break down right away. (Similarly, multilevel marketing higher-ups agree that their most profitable recruits aren’t those in urgent need of cash but instead folks determined and upbeat enough to play the long game. More on that in part 4.) Eileen Barker’s studies of the Moonies confirmed that their most obedient members were intelligent, chin-up folks. They were the children of activists, educators, and public servants (as opposed to wary scientists, like my parents). They were raised to see the good in people, even to their own detriment. In this way, it’s not desperation or mental illness that consistently suckers people into exploitative groups—instead, it’s an overabundance of optimism.

I am little bit confuse about certain view and belief and i discover the most judgmental people are born again, i didnt know if this is right or accurate but in every forum i have seen, conversation in internet all people who called oprah joel osteen ellen michael jackson obama as cult leader and anti christ. All of them are born again they called oprah as sinner, cult advocate, anti christ i think there’s something wrong i need to pray for this hehehe la lang share lang ng thoughts

The ‘why’ of leadership is very rarely addressed: despite the trillions of words on the different forms leadership can take, and whether people are born to lead or can be schooled for greatness, few have paused to ask why we bother with leaders at all. Why is it that almost every social grouping – from countries to companies, councils to cults – has a figurehead out in front?

Manson had played guitar for years, and he spent time jamming with other musicians on his ward, developing the musical skills he would come to believe guaranteed him ultimate stardom. His unrealistic dream to become bigger than the Beatles, who were at that time at the height of their American invasion, was fueled by a fellow inmate, Phil Kauffman. Kauffman had some vague experience in the L.A. music scene and promised Manson that he would get him a session with a producer at the music division of Universal Studios. This casual invitation warped in Manson’s mind and he became convinced that there was a man in L.A. who was going to make him a superstar. While serving time at McNeil Prison, Manson also became embroiled with a quasi-religious group that had a major influence on his later role as a cult leader—Scientologists. Again, prison authorities encouraged Manson’s education. As with Dale Carnegie, the pimps, the Nazarene Church, and pop music, Manson took what he wanted from the information offered and used it to form a doctrine of his own. Manson’s main takeaway from Scientology was the belief that we are all immortal beings trapped in human bodies on this planet we call earth. Life on earth is just a sliver of our potential experience and so to die is simply to move on. Manson would later use this skewed Scientology-based moral perspective as justification to convince his followers to kill.

Charles Manson was a run-of-the-mill cult leader who used old-fashioned misogyny and racism to indoctrinate his followers. Far from being a hippie himself, Manson posed as a spiritual father figure to lure flower children into his cult and kept them there by using classic abuse techniques of isolation, manipulation, punishment, and reward. A notorious celebrity, instantly recognizable by his wild eyes and the swastika carved into his forehead, Manson holds a place in the cultural consciousness as the leader of all the cult leaders. Yet there was nothing at all extraordinary about Charles Manson.

Between the years of 1790 and 1840, an Indian cult leader called Thug Behram murdered nine hundred and thirty-one people in Avadh, India. The English word "thug" is derived from Behram's name.

the Branch Davidians’ theology is not so different from that of a large fraction of Americans. We call Koresh a “cult leader,” which allows us to file him away reassuringly as a one-off nut, like Charles Manson or Jim Jones. But it’s important to recognize that his church was a long-standing subgroup of a 150-year-old Protestant denomination that is one of the twenty largest churches in America, with six thousand U.S. congregations.*1

The most important thing was how faithful you were to the Great Leader. Teachers and every other adult I knew tried to brainwash us into becoming slavish members of their pseudo-religious cult. I played along. I learned quickly that in that sort of situation, if you want to survive, you have to stifle your critical faculties and just get on with things. I had to pick my battles carefully and not let myself get riled up by every little thing. But the trouble is that some people really do end up brainwashed.

Manifestly, a dynastic party puts personality and charisma at a premium and policy and programme at a discount. Ideology in such circumstances is reduced to populist slogans and vacuous shibboleths. Some articles in this collection are devoted to exposing the true nature of the dynastic beast and the pitiable obsequiousness of its followers. Absence of ideology and the cult of personality entails that the adherents of a dynastic party are not wedded to it on a matter of principle or precept. A dynastic party’s members are attracted by the opportunity of accumulating largesse that it affords them. Its regional satraps are leaders wedded to the patronage system. Public resources are thus allotted not on rational transparent criteria, but to crony capitalists. Auctions are the exceptions, and arbitrary exercise of discretion the rule. The economic advantage of the patronage system is shared between the ruler and the privileged class of people. This system, it is axiomatic, is inherently corrupt but is so entrenched that what objectively is tantamount to rampant corruption, appears to the party faithful to be a legitimate mode of governance.

Most kids who left or got kicked out of the FLDS ran into very real, very debilitating issues. Boys and girls who had lived all their lives to please their families, church, and Prophet were cut from family ties with no education. Ninety percent or more of them wound up heavily involved in drugs, alcohol, promiscuity, and prostitution, or as the victims of some kind of physical, emotional, or sexual abuse. I

cult leaders and authoritarian tyrants repeat their message endlessly. You may think it nonsense the first time you hear it, but if you hear it enough times, you may begin to think of it as the truth.   Can

High technology and the Internet, however, have a dark side, as far as China’s leaders are concerned. They now know that the Falun Gong adherents who surrounded Zhongnanhai, the Party’s leadership compound in Beijing, had organized themselves over the Internet. And through the Internet that group, now branded “an evil cult” and outlawed, has continued its protests. Observers wonder why China’s state apparatus is bedeviled by a group armed only with spiritualism and one another’s e-mail addresses.

Before long, the child gives up on seeking any kind of help or connection at all. The child’s bid for bonding and acceptance is thwarted, and she is left to suffer in the frightened despair of abandonment. Particularly abusive parents deepen the abandonment trauma by linking corporal punishment with contempt. Slaveholders and prison guards typically use contempt and scorn to destroy their victims’ self-esteem. Slaves, prisoners, and children, who are made to feel worthless and powerless devolve into learned helplessness and can be controlled with far less energy and attention. Cult leaders also use contempt to shrink their followers into absolute submission after luring them in with brief phases of fake unconditional love.

Sorry about the whole not-showingup-at-school-for-a-few-weeks thing, Chloe pictured herself saying to the principal. You see, I'm a cat person and had to hide with others of my kind in a gigantic mainson called Firebird that also houses a real estate firm while this ancient Masonic-like cult tried to hunt me down because they think I killed one of their assassins. Oh, also, I have nine lives and am apparently the spiritual leader of my people, who belive they were created by ancient Egyptian goddesses.

...There were dozens of construction projects where members were coerced into working in dangerous conditions for free...We were paying for the privilege of being forced to build for Sharon and others. The projects always involved impossible deadlines set arbitrarily by Sharon or other leaders...I'll never forget the sight of 65-year-old Joni, with her chronic illnesses, standing on a 10-foot ladder at 2:30 AM with a paint roller in her hand, furiously painting the ceiling before the 3:00 AM deadline.

I would tell you a tale, brother. Early in the clan's history, many centuries past, there arose, like a breath of gas from the deep, a new cult. Chosen as its representative god was the most remote, most distant of gods among the pantheon. A god that was, in truth, indifferent to the clans of my kind. A god that spoke naught to any mortal, that intervened never in mortal affairs. Morbid. The leaders of the cult proclaimed themselves the voice of that god. They wrote down laws, prohibitions, ascribances, propitiations, blasphemies, punishments for nonconformity, for dispute and derivations. This was but rumour, said details maintained in vague fugue, until such time as the cult achieved domination and with domination, absolute power. Terrible enforcement, terrible crimes committed in the name of the silent god. Leaders came and went, each further twisting words already twisted by mundane ambition and the zeal for unity. Entire pools were poisoned. Others drained and the silts seeded with salt. Eggs were crushed. Mothers dismembered. And our people were plunged into a paradise of fear, the laws made manifest and spilled blood the tears of necessity. False regret with chilling gleam in the centre eye. No relief awaited, and each generation suffered more than the last." "What happened?" "Seven great warrios from seven clans set out to find the Silent God, set out to see for themselves if this god had indeed blessed all that had come to pass in its name." "And did they find the silent god?" "Yes, and too, they found the reason for its silence. The god was dead. It had died with the first drop of blood spilled in its name." "I see, and what is the relevance of this tale of yours, however modest?" "Perhaps this. The existence of many gods conveys true complexity of mortal life. Conversely, the assertion of but one god leads to a denial of complexity, and encourages the need to make the world simple. Not the fault of the god, but a crime committed by its believers.

Mom drove us from our home on Cascade Way, in the Salt Lake City neighborhood of Mount Olympus,

Mormonism had given up polygamy in the late 1890s in order to secure statehood for Utah,

Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote, “Every now and then a man’s mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.

The birth of baby Zach marked my mom’s tenth child and my father’s nineteenth.

Warren Jeffs, known to us as “Mr. Jeffs.” The son of Rulon Jeffs, who was in the First Presidency with our Prophet, Uncle Roy, Warren had become Alta’s principal within a few years of graduating from Jordan High in 1973, despite having no college education. Mr.

was determined to be a good Priesthood girl and please Uncle Roy, my Prophet, as were my sisters and friends, so we started treating males as if they were, indeed, foreign, scaly, and reptilian in nature.

I made up my mind to grow to be the kind of person who would consider others’ needs even when the consequences were life-and-death. Otherwise, what was the point of life?

Little House on the Prairie and Disney Sunday Movie were safe. Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and Sesame Street were on the list, too, until the Prophet deemed them worldly and idolatrous because puppets, like cartoons, were an imitation of God’s creation.

However, our teachings stated clearly that the Prophet would be inspired with the knowledge of which man would be my perfect husband, the one to whom I would always defer and keep sweet.

Caroline has been sucked in by the cult. She is obsessed with Trump and adores him, as incommodious as that may seem. She’s the masochistic follower who feels a compulsion to be tested, abused, and forced to prove they are deserving of the leader’s love over and over and over again. And like many of our parents and grandparents and friends, she’s become unreachable, thanks to consuming petty grievances and an impenetrable media bubble.

She was his enemy, yes. She was the leader of a dangerous, deadly cult. But torture was torture. And what they had done to her was wrong.

He's our cult leader, clearly he thought this mad banquet of darkness would help our spiritual growth.

There are four cross-cutting characteristics that are common to the strongman style: the creation of a cult of personality; contempt for the rule of law; the claim to represent the real people against the elites (otherwise known as populism); and a politics driven by fear and nationalism.

Carl Schmitt was a member of the Nazi Party and based at Berlin University (now Humboldt University) from 1933 to 1945. He has been described as the “crown jurist of the Third Reich” and for decades after the defeat of Nazism, his ideas were widely regarded as beyond the pale. But in recent years, there has been a global revival of interest in Schmitt’s work. Chinese legal scholars, Russian nationalists, thinkers of the far right in the US and Europe are all drawing upon the work of the premier legal theorist of Nazi Germany.

Hers are pretty good!” he said, and proceeded to grab my breasts and begin fondling them. I pushed his hands away, trembling with shame and embarrassment, as everyone else at the table erupted in laughter. Weren’t these the same men who in conference on Sunday had been condemning people for their immoral desires? And yet my husband, the great “man of God,” had publicly humiliated me. I was sickened by the double standard the powerful benefited from.

fathers.

Over the next seven years, Rulon would take on forty-six wives after me.

To an FLDS man, if a woman was in any way rebellious, the solution was to get her married and keep her pregnant. Then all of that rebellion would be “bred” right out of her.

Our eighty-nine-year-old Seer and Revelator had prophesized to us that he would live for 150 years and be present to give the keys of the kingdom to Christ himself.