In my almost 40 years of writing about Cults & Anticults, the FrankReport.com was one the wildest lessons I’ve ever learned.
As an Ex-Scientologist for 23 years, I’d grown sick of the lack of federal law enforcement prosecution of the Church of Scientology. I’d seen dozens of “whistleblowers” engage in crowd management and information control of Exes – all designed to derail any attempt at law enforcement action.
So when I found out about the Keith Raniere NXIVM case, where that particular cult leader was sentenced by the federal government to 120 years in prison, I thought, “The FrankReport.com is the place where people know how to take down a cult – maybe David Miscavige could be taken down that way”.
I believed then that they’d have the resources, and the federal eyeballs, necessary to get criminal indictments on Scientology – if they only knew the details.
So I started commenting and posting the details there.
I soon realized I was in for a bodacious, mother-fucking, education.
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First, I realized, as a never-in, how little I knew about NXIVM. Not only did I not understand what the Executive Success Programs taught, I did not know what they did that was considered by everyone as “brainwashing”. I found that none of their materials are on the internet, forbidden to be there for our inspection by the federal government.
Second, the New York Times article which kicked off all the reporting on NXIVM, and as we later found out, also the entirety of the prosecution of NXIVM, was based on mischaracterizations and outright lies of what actually happened.
Third, in my nativity, I thought the people who read and commented on NXIVM on Frank Parlato’s the FrankReport.com, were sincere seekers of justice.
My god.
As I look back, I had such wet ears when I was born.
Since then I’ve learned a lot.
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1. It is almost impossible to understand someone else’s cult. No matter who you follow as your ‘sherpa’ into another’s cult, the amount of work and sweat-equity required is above everyone’s heads – without the discipline of ethnocentrism.
I’d studied anthropology in college so I knew, and lived, this discipline. As a student of cultural anthropology, I’d used that skill to put aside my own prejudices to understand indigenous sub-cultures in America, and traveling through Egypt, Israel and Morocco.
Those devoted to destroying ‘cults’ give no shit about this idea of ethnocentrism, nor seek to apply this discipline when approaching them. They are not capable of telling you why a minority religion should be destroyed.
2. I believed that the New York Times, and the power structure it makes news for, cared about telling the truth – especially where peoples’ lives would be destroyed, and their rights as citizens were at stake. I actually thought that the New York Times cared to get the facts straight on things that the US Government wanted executed.
3. I thought that people who fought against “cults” did so because they believed in freedom of speech, the freedom of thought, and the liberty of everyone to think and believe as they wished. I believed they wanted to see justice for the cult victims who had been wronged.
I learned that all these ideals were complete bullshit.
I was 60 years old.
How idealistic, and naive, should one be allowed to be at that age???
Well.
I learned my lessons on the FrankReport.
I’ll be telling you all that I learned there.
So please stay tuned.
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If you believe that you understand someone else’s everyday reality inside a “cult” like Scientology – to know enough to “take them out”, then you need to consider what I’ve learned.
If you believe that the catastrophe stories, the escape stories, and the other cult abuse stories you’ve been told through mass media and the Internet will ever get you close enough to the truth to legitimately decide that someone else’s religion needs to be “taken out”, then you need to consider what I have to say here.
If you have been whipped up into such a lather that you think you are part of an anticult “movement” which believes in the freedom of thought, the freedom of speech, and the freedom of anything, then you really need to hear what I have to say here.
Because, in my very long and deep experience, the anticult industry is the exact opposite of all those ideals.
This is the first of my series on Weird Times at the Frank Report.