21: Om-ed and Dangerous: Militant Wellness (w/Sarah Hightower)
We still can’t believe alt-health Bali retreat rockstar Sacha Stone called for the “evisceration” of public officials last week. Are conspiritualists really crossing over into militancy? Are the products of wellness so boring, and are the markets so saturated, that messianic influencers have no choice but to up the ante? Stone’s recent interview guest, Christiane Northrup, recently invoked the sacred power of the Sheriff as the highest law in the land for anti-lockdown folks who believe they’re being oppressed. That argument was first made by the white nationalist Posse Comitatus in the 1970s — the seed group for many of today’s militias.This week, we investigate the means by which religious cults and conspiritualists rattle sabers and poison people. Derek reviews Japan’s AUM cult as a prelude to Julian’s riveting interview with AUM expert Sarah Hightower. Julian reports on the Northrupian intersection between militia movements and alt-health ideas of “sovereignty.” Matthew discusses violence in ISKCON as the Hare Krishnas parade mask-free through Glastonbury.Show NotesRajneeshee leaders take revenge on The Dalles’ with poison, homelessCult Leaders & Psychopaths: Power Beyond the GraveWe Need to Talk about the Rise of White Supremacy in YogaEpic Yoga San ClementeAlan Hostetter playing a singing bowl in a Trump t-shirtReddit thread on Q Casualties Dating AppSex and Death on the Road to NirvanaAmy Coney Barrett uses her children in different waysWhat the Second Amendment really meant to the Founders
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Conspirituality 21.
Omed and dangerous militant yoga and wellness.
You know, we still can't believe Alt Health Bali Retreat rock star Sasha Stone called for the evisceration of public officials last week.
Are conspiritualists really crossing over into militancy?
Are the products of wellness so boring and are the markets so saturated that messianic influencers have no choice but to up the ante?
One of Stone's Line in the Sand prominent interview guests, Christiane Northrup, recently invoked the sacred power of the sheriff as the highest law in the land for anti-lockdown folks who believe they're being oppressed.
That argument was first made by the white nationalist Posse Comitatus in the 1970s, the seed group for many of today's militias.
This week we investigate the means by which religious cults and conspiritualists rattlesabers and poison people.
Derek reviews Japan's Aum cult as a prelude to my riveting interview with Aum expert Sarah Hightower.
I'm going to report as well on the Northrupian intersection between militia movements and alt-health ideas of sovereignty.
Matthew discusses violence in Iskand as the Hare Krishna's parade mask free through Glastonbury.
Om Shinrikyo was a Japanese doomsday cult founded by Chizu Matsumoto, the man who would become Shoko Asahara after a the man who would become Shoko Asahara after a religious conversion.
He was born in 1955 into a poor family of tatami mat makers.
Though he was born blind in his left eye and would suffer partial blindness in his right eye while still young, he became a bully at school.
He was known to beat up other kids at the school for the blind he went to as well as to extort money from them.
So already you see a cult leader in training right from a young age.
After graduating from school in 1977, he studied acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine.
He soon married and fathered a dozen children, so you can see where his career was heading, to founding a religion.
When you're desperate for money, there are a few profitable schemes to cook up.
And if you can pull it off, like Asahara did, you can make quite a living from religion.
He formed OM in 1984 by fusing esoteric Western philosophies, meditation, esoteric Buddhism, and Christianity.
Basically, he took a cue from the Theosophists.
Take the mystical or esoteric strains of several religions and pretend like you've combined them to make them even more mystical.
And if you do that, you have a sure winner on your hands.
He threw in some Chinese astrology, yoga, and Daoism for good measure.
OM officially became a religion sanctioned by the Japanese government in 1989.
Its doctrine is based on Vajrayana scriptures and biblical passages.
In 1992, Asahara went all in and wrote and published a book called Declaring Myself the Christ, which he did and his followers believed.
That was the title, Derek?
Yes.
That was the title and he He was basically saying he is the Christ, but Shiva became the official mascot of the group, so he really liked to mix things up.
He also created his own form of Shaktipat and then started yelling about the Jews, the Freemasons, the Dutch, the British Royal Family, and other Japanese groups.
He declared that a Third World War was imminent, and to help instigate that battle royale, he coordinated a series of sarin gas attacks in Tokyo's subways.
Most people know about the attack on March 20th, 1995, in which 13 people died and thousands more were sickened.
But there were others.
Asahara was arrested, and in 2018, 23 years after that date, he was put to death by hanging, along with six other members of his cult.
Now, you might think the story ends with the attack, but this is religion, so of course it doesn't.
The organization kept going, splitting into two in 2007, Aleph and Hikari No Wa.
And please, pardon me for my Jersey pronunciation of Japanese, I'm doing my best with it.
They continue to operate today, and they are considered terrorist organizations in numerous countries.
Now, one of my favorite novelists happens to be the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, who happened to write a non-fiction book on the Surin gas attack.
In Underground, The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, Murakami plays a bit of Studs Terkel by writing an oral history book told through the eyes of people who were either there or involved in some capacity, including a subway worker and a member of the OM cult who found the attack Horrendous, but still remain in the cult.
Now initially when planning this episode, I was going to read a few short passages from The Victims, but then I stumbled across this passage by Murakami about his interviewing process, and I found it too compelling not to share.
Simply put, our memories of experiences are rendered into something like a narrative form.
To a greater or lesser extent, this is a natural function of memory, a process that novelists consciously utilize as a profession.
The truth of whatever is told will differ, however slightly, from what actually happened.
This, however, does not make it a lie.
It is unmistakably the truth, albeit in another form.
During the course of my interviews, I endeavored to maintain the basic stance that each person's story is true within the context of that story and I still believe so.
As a result, the stories told by people who simultaneously experience the very same scene often differ on the small details, but they are presented here with all of the contradictions preserved.
Because it seems to me that these discrepancies and contradictions say something in themselves.
Sometimes, in this multifaceted world of ours, inconsistency can be more eloquent than consistency.
Oh wow, that's so great and so pertinent as we encounter just how many experiences people are having of both conspirituality and QAnon.
Yeah, that's why I had to include it.
Murakami, as a writer, he is not the strongest novel writer ever, and that could be the translations from Japanese, but what I've always loved about him is how simply he pulls you into his writing, and that's why I've read everything that's ever been translated.
Right.
To finish on this, on my feed the other day, a woman I'm connected with commented on one of my posts.
This is happening right now, not in 95.
She's had to leave her home and stay at a hotel because she's being threatened by white supremacy groups because she happens to be politically outspoken in her community.
One of these groups even left a KKK calling card for her.
Now she was commenting on an article I shared about white supremacy groups declaring that a civil war is imminent if Trump loses.
Read another way, racists are going to start killing people if democracy works.
And while most of the comments on that thread brush off these guys as impotent and boisterous, more bark than bite, I think if we've learned anything this year, it's that some of these people bite as well.
Not all the time, and maybe not even most of the time.
But when they do, I guarantee you don't want to be around.
Now, the OM cult isn't the only instance of this.
There are many others.
In June 2014, I wrote an article for Big Think about Osho's cult's poisoning of an inspector's drinking water on their Oregon ranch.
And that was actually just a test run for injecting the entire region's water supply with harmful bacteria, which sickened a lot of people when they actually did it.
Now my article was merely a summation of a great reporting by the Oregonian, and I still received hundreds of negative and threatening comments.
And this again is about six years ago, so we've seen an uptick in this.
Now more recently, An InStyle article, which we link to in the show notes, is called, We Need to Talk About the Rise of White Supremacy in Yoga.
It discussed QAnon and COVID conspiracy theories in the yoga community, stuff we've talked about and a lot of other publications have addressed.
But this one resulted in the author receiving threats on social media, and I'm talking dozens, probably hundreds by now, of serious threats.
Now, we've reached a point where honest and insightful criticism is being weaponized in the form of actual violence, and the border between online trolling and real-world violence is porous, and that boundary is not as thick as we might believe.
So those subway riders in Tokyo didn't expect to be attacked by nerve gas, just like I expected to return home to Jersey City on September 11, 2001.
So as we move into this very dangerous election cycle, and as we're seeing this proliferation of conspiracy theories in the wellness community and beyond that, we need to recognize that countries only simmer so long before an explosion occurs.
And we really do feel like we're at a boiling point right now.
I wanted to say two things.
One is going back just a little earlier to what you were talking about in terms of reading the accounts and in terms of Murakami's book.
You said something about the account of someone who found the gassing horrifying but didn't leave.
And I was digging into some of the history in preparation for my interview that we're playing today and People, there were people who tried to leave and were murdered, like way early on before any of the terrorist activity happens.
They were just murdered and their bodies were hidden and, you know, it wasn't found out for quite some time.
It was really that particular cult left a trail of dead and sickened people in their wake, as you said.
The other thing I wanted to add, just hearing what you were saying at the end there about your expectations on 9-11, what popped into my head was that the head of the sociology department at the university I was at in South Africa in 1989 did not expect to be shot on the steps of his house by an assassination squad sent by the South African what popped into my head was that the head of the
The propensity for this kind of stuff to just spiral out of control and become normalized and become part of the culture is very real.
I also really appreciate and, you know, I just got to say, flag for the listeners that Julian's interview with Sarah Hightower is just scintillating and she really puts a lot of things together and she's obviously an expert in OM and I think it's a really
really pertinent case in the sense that he really is a kind of, he was a kind of big tent cult leader in his appropriation and incorporation of as much material as he could possibly find.
So, in that, you know, old theosophical vein of, you know, combine and elevate, there didn't seem to be anything that he didn't feel he was an expert in or that he didn't feel he could speak to.
And I just found that fascinating.
The other fascinating thing about him is that he utilized anime as part of how he spread his message.
So there's all of this incredible animated film stuff with him as the hero performing paranormal feats.
No way!
That's incredible.
Were there manga comics as well?
That's incredible.
I'm not sure.
So you're talking about a leader who aspired to political office, at least philosophically, who thought that they knew about everything even though he didn't?
That sounds really familiar.
It's that interesting.
And the other piece that I think we haven't touched on yet is also that they were actively trying, just like Osho.
So all of the poisoning that went on around the, oh, I'm forgetting the name of the place in Oregon where they were, where they were.
The Dulles Valley.
Yeah, yeah.
Rochnishpuram was the name of the Osho town.
Yeah, there's a name, Antelope.
Antelope was the name of the town.
That's right, yeah.
So the poisoning that went on there was all around their attempts to gain control over local politics.
Right.
They were trying to poison the local, eventually, to poison the local population so they wouldn't be able to vote, so that they could get their people in.
Om Shinrikyo was trying to get their people voted into local government as well and failed terribly, which is when he made the pivot and said, okay, it's time to enact violence on random people.
One thing that always jumped out when I mentioned my Big Think article, I remember that a number of the negative comments that I received were from people saying, That Osho had no awareness of what was going on.
It was the people below him.
And it just baffles my mind.
Even right now, I was reading the other day, some of Keith Raniere's supporters have been going to the prison where he's being held and doing dances and protests outside of it.
So the idea that the leader of these types of organizations, these cults, would not know everything that's happening below them is completely ludicrous because they're orchestrating everything on a granular level.
There's another piece here that I'm sure Matthew can speak to, which is that so often these leaders have so much specialness projected upon them that there's a whole set of rationalizations about the difference between the divine Personage and even the things that they do that they do the things they do are part of the imperfection of the human vessel But the divine personage is still really really holy For sure so his
So his aspirations to political glory might have been noble, but he might have fallen into a patch of human weakness by ordering the sarin gas attacks.
But really, the arc of history is long and it bends towards apocalypse, right?
Right.
And enlightened figures, enlightened men, mostly.
And enlightened figures.
Yeah, just a little pushback, Derek, again, about the comment around the orchestration and granular detail.
I was in a group in which I don't think that was true at all, that it was much more of a sort of organic and headless thing with regard to how anything actually unfolded.
And it was more about how people were trained and trained each other to obey the ideology and idolize the leader who may or may not have been aware of all actions, but in some way it kind of worked all together as a big machine.
And I think that this strange depersonalized nature of the religious or the political cult is something that we also see in Shambhala International where it's very clear how the lieutenants of Chogyam Trungpa know exactly what they're supposed to do and yet he can be passed out drunk 18 hours a day and really not directing anything but he's instilled somehow the imagination
of whatever vision it is.
And Trump is probably, you know, in that ballpark as well, absolutely, completely, personally incompetent with just a kind of disorganized chaotic, but also well-oiled machines spinning out around him, carrying out an ideology that's less planned carrying out an ideology that's less planned than it is sort of the long-term accretion of, you know, every abject idea that humanity's come up with.
And it's also just the algorithm of, you know, self-satisfaction and narcissism and what's going to make me look good to my base.
And installing, I think in all these cases, right?
Installing people around you as your lieutenants who are very clear what the quote-unquote values are of that algorithm, right?
Right.
That said, Derek, I do think that Keith Raniere was pretty aware of all of the pieces that were moving.
He showed himself to be an incredible manipulator and business person, and it does seem like he was a bit of a robot that way, like a savant.
That's what I love about the documentary series, because you have all of these different groups that supposedly are led to believe that, and that's how it actually unfolded in reality, that he kind of set off and then allowed the members to take control of, but as you, and we're still not done with the documentary, but as you get deeper, you realize that he had orchestrated the entire thing.
And it didn't, it doesn't seem like it was his plan in the year 2000, but as it started rolling, but I think specific to Osho, Because the local official was poisoned at the ranch where he was that day, and then there were a couple other people who were poisoned until before they got to the actual regional water supply, I would have a hard time believing that he didn't know that that was happening.
And I just want to add that the function of the sannyasins who write in to tell you that, you know, Osho wasn't aware of it and his, you know, his intelligence and wisdom are unblemished, that, you know, it's The feeling that they're trying to carry forward is that he was never really living amongst them.
To associate mundane, everyday politicking and violence with who he was as a human being was just not part of their embodied experience of his charisma.
So, it's quite possible that he was completely Dissociated all the time and wasn't really giving clear orders, or he said, you know, a few vague things to lieutenants from time to time.
But really, you know, when you get those letters, you're getting the aftershock or the echo of, like, the intense amount of projection about the, you know, the leader's intentions and their will and their nature that really forms the experience of that collective.
Well, he had his whole fleet of Rolls-Royces to attend to, so I guess that was occupying a lot of his time.
Yeah, but he didn't even attend to them.
And probably if you talk to those letter writers, they would say, oh, he wasn't even aware.
He wasn't even aware that he had 100 Rolls-Royces.
He didn't know which one he was in from day after day, right?
His shtick was that the Rolls-Royces are just there to trigger you.
That if you have a reaction to him having Rolls Royces, that shows you what you need to work on because he's completely unattached.
It doesn't matter to him.
But what I know from that period is that he was super, super wasted all the time.
He was really into nitrous oxide.
He was really into alcohol.
Who knows?
Right, right, right.
article uh which will drop into the show notes and i'll just read the title out it's called we need to talk about the rise of white supremacy in yoga uh and it's by a woman named anusha wajayakumar and i hope that i'm pronouncing that correctly
and if i'm not i'm just going to use Anousha for the rest of my commentary.
You can read the article.
She makes a great argument about the problem of white supremacy in yoga culture and wellness culture in general, but also how it links up to the issue of cultural appropriation.
And I just want to begin by giving her all props for this, for taking this on.
And just to say that on a personal note, it was through the yoga space that I learned the term white supremacy and I started studying it a little bit in myself and in my culture.
And so I'm really grateful for the discourse out of which this emerges.
And, you know, in the broadest terms, you know, I'm totally on board with her argument and her politics.
I'm also super sympathetic as somebody who has been trolled and threatened with legal action multiple times over my career that, you know, to face the kind of backlash that she's facing is just really awful and I hope it goes away, like, right now.
And yeah, all of her points are awesome.
Yoga is white, demographically, politically.
Its urban spaces exist because of gentrification, we know this.
And that unexamined, it's an industry that supports cultural white supremacy.
Now, the thing is, is the controversy over the article has erupted because somebody that she identifiably refers to, and his name is Alan Hostetter, is very angry at her description of his behavior in relation to his position as a yoga leader within, is it San Clemente?
Is that where they are?
Right, so this has erupted in multiple social media feeds, and I just want to comment a little bit on the liabilities of pointing towards a figure like this.
So, just a little description, this fellow is obviously a Trump supporter, an anti-lockdown person, he calls BLM a domestic terrorism group, He conflates BLM with Antifa.
He's been a guest speaker at a QAnon event.
So, you know, if you feel that these views are harmful, that's, you know, all you gotta know.
And, you know, he also doesn't strike me as a guy who has betrayed his left-leaning yoga values.
But a lot of the article hinges on the premise of Betrayal and also a lot of the positive response to the article hinges on this feeling of, well, how could a yoga person be this way?
And so I just want to comment a little bit on that sense of betrayal because I believe, especially from the readers who are responding positively, the white readers especially, I believe it mainly comes from people who believe that yoga is progressive or anti-racist in its essence.
And we've covered this already on the podcast, but just a little review.
There might be progressive and anti-racist communities in yoga culture.
Some of them might have pre-modern histories, but as we've conclusively shown on this podcast, especially in early episodes, modern yoga as a confluence of early Indian nationalism and European physical culture has never been progressive or anti-racist.
Let's just remember that one of the biggest stars of Indian physical culture was a German guy named Eugene Sandow who believed white people should work out so that they don't get physically and reproductively wiped out by brown people.
And early Indian nationalists, whether through convenience or through expressing some kind of internalized conflict, they accepted premises like these, very fascist premises of bodily purity and strength.
For them, it was good for nation building.
And when you fast forward today, and yoga in India is a form of soft power for Modi's Hindu nationalist agenda, and we have leading yoga figures in Modi's party like Swami Adinath and Baba Ramdas promoting yoga as like a spiritual defense against Islam and also as a moral defense against things like homosexuality,
You know, we don't have a progressive picture and I think we should stop pretending that it is because that comes with some liabilities and it also comes with a set of false expectations.
In my opinion, you know, if you're white and you're progressive, it's not that yoga is that, it's that you are that.
And you might be trying to be anti-racist, and if you love yoga, your friends probably do too, and it feels so good that you conflate it with your social and political values.
And you stretch, and you breathe deeply, and you feel these warm surges, and you connect those two things together.
You feel that that's kind of like coherent with your political empathy.
And I also think that like, you know, there might be something else behind the conflation because it's really demoralizing to be a progressive in late capitalism because we're basically losing everything all the time and it feels really good to believe that your political views are blessed by something ancient and perfect.
Now, for Anusha, she might have, as a Desi practitioner, she might have inherited a moral center from the yoga of India.
But, you know, all of the white social justice oriented yoga people out there, who I know, who came to this practice as consumers, I would just like to say, Mother India does not need to bless your values for your values to be good and true.
Because they come from your backyard, Your potatoes, your neighbors, your local politics, and whatever church, for good or ill, you grew up in.
So you don't need yoga to feel better or spiritual about your spiritual values.
And the reason why this is important is because somebody like Alan is doing that too.
In his response, in his response to Anusha's article, very angry response, where he claims defamation, he cites Ahimsa as one of his organizing principles.
Okay so it's it's everybody's using this language which means it's it's not saying what you think it's saying or it's saying it's saying what you want it to say instead of something objective.
Now This brings me to, like, if this Alan guy isn't hiding what he says ever, I mean, he's going to, like, city council meetings and calling BLM domestic terrorists, right?
Like, he's on YouTube everywhere doing his thing, on social media everywhere.
He's a real activist, you know, he's a Trump activist.
So why is he so charged up about this article?
He's not shy about his views.
What's the big deal?
Were they misrepresented?
Now, he's claiming that the article defames him, but I'm going to speculate that one of the things that happens with the article is that it hits him in the tender spot of spiritual identity.
And also community identity.
Because in his response on Facebook, he spends a lot of words reaffirming that he gets along well with all of his former yoga employers.
Now we don't know how true this is, but it points to what he cares about.
But the bigger thing that points to what he cares about are his videos of him playing his singing bowls on Instagram.
So we'll link to one.
And this guy is playing singing bowls while wearing a Trump t-shirt.
Okay, so I'm just gonna say that again.
He's playing singing bowls, he's offering a sound bath while wearing a Trump t-shirt.
And he's good at it, right?
Like, I actually had it on today, on loop, and I was pretty relaxed.
Like, I think he has the best singing bowls.
Like, he does, he's got, he's the best.
You never heard better singing bulls.
Nobody believes it.
They bring these singing bulls to the singing bull doctor guy, or the singing bull expert, and they say, we've never heard anybody play singing bulls like this.
Tremendous.
Singing bulls, right?
Tremendous.
It's bigly singing bulls.
Anyway, it's like, I feel this article wanted to denounce his politics, which is fine and good, but I think that perhaps the article wound up humiliating his religious and community identity.
And I think that sharpens the backlash.
So, I want to say that it sucks for progressives to think that Alan is a yoga teacher.
But that's not where he's doing the most damage, if you don't agree with his politics.
I mean, you know, after all, the more time he spends playing his bulls, the less time he's out on the street protesting for his right to catch COVID.
Anyway, moving forward and hoping for everybody's sake that this conflict de-escalates and that Alan just puts on a damned mask, I think we have to—I'm speaking for listeners who are attracted to this podcast—we have to name and cop to this finger-pointing feeling that this article, I think, encourages and is actually praised for, which is, you don't get to use this sacred thing to feel better about your politics.
Only we get to do that.
I just, I mean, it's not consistent and I've just never met a problem that could ever be solved through inconsistent thinking.
Otherwise, like, Anusha, totally behind your politics and I'm there fighting with you.
Yeah, we're behind your politics and we also stand with you against being harassed and trolled and threatened.
That is absolutely unacceptable.
Absolutely.
And willing to, you know, support and denounce at all turns.
It also just reminds me of a point I've made in previous episodes, but the very early on actually is one of the inspirations for this podcast.
In general, this idea that how many of us have been in classes where you chant the mantra about freedom of every being and that we won't all be free until every being is free, and then the same people are completely on this anti-mask
Crusade and not understanding that those sentient beings they were singing about when they actually have to face them in real life and understand people who have immunodeficient disorders and different things that make them susceptible to COVID in a way that they might not be, that that mantra that they're singing is literally about those types.
It's about everything and not being able to put Those pieces together has always triggered me in some ways because it's just a blind spot.
It's so tricky though.
I mean, Matthew, what you're unpacking there is something I've really struggled to communicate as well over the years.
Part of it is essentially understanding that the argument from spiritual authority is anyone's to use.
Exactly, exactly.
And Alan deserves to use it, right?
It's like, why, if he's on his knees in that studio doing the bowls, and he's like, I think he's ex-military or ex-policeman, so, you know, maybe he's...
He's probably soothing himself in some way.
There's probably some self-regulation going on, like all awesome stuff.
And that is for him.
And, you know, but we associate it with some kind of, you know, spiritual, I don't know, translatable spiritual, translatable spiritual meaning into a particular kind of behavior or political orientation.
And, and that leaves us, and that leaves us open to just like not, Not acknowledging where our own values actually do come from, because they don't come from Patanjali.
That's right.
They don't come from, you know, that version of Ahimsa, that version of Ahimsa which was really actually about being anti-social, or, you know, him telling people not to have sex because, you know, if you did, you would forget that their bodies were actually disgusting.
Yeah.
I mean, our values just generally do not come from pre-modern India.
They come through lenses of our culture, and we've got to get clear on that.
As much as we want to romanticize and idealize, it doesn't really help.
ethical arguments for where our moral values come from.
They can't just be rooted in some notion that when you are in the state of true yoga, you recognize progressive values as being the correct values in some transcendent sense.
That's very tricky.
I don't want to appear to be having too much empathy for whatever the guy's name is and what he's doing.
But I do want to say that it's just a bad argument.
So if you want to link your yoga practice, your way of teaching, your community, if you want to link it to progressive values, that's wonderful.
I'm right there with you.
But the arguments need to be better than saying that there's something essential about yoga itself and about spiritual awakening itself that automatically translates into believing and acting upon progressive values.
That's a bad argument.
Shortly after moving to Los Angeles in 2011, I visited the Krishnamurti Foundation in Ojai.
I remember looking across the vast field next to the parking lot and imagining the philosopher reflecting on life while doing the same.
Having read at least six of Krishnamurti's books, I always appreciated his no-nonsense approach to philosophy.
Earlier on in my life, I had read the works of Helena Blavatsky, so I was aware of Krishnamurti's connection to an ultimate abandonment of theosophy.
Then I came across Pushkin's new podcast, Into the Zone, posted by Harry Kunzru.
It's a show about opposites, and how borders are never as clear as we think.
As a novelist with a keen eye for a good story, he takes the listener around the world to talk to philosophers and punk musicians, new-age gurus and space explorers, and investigates the gray zone between life and death, public and private, and black and white.
Really, he touches upon some of the same topics that we do here at Conspiratuality.
I highly suggest starting with The Guru of Ojai, where he talks about his family's own relationship to theosophy and how Krishnamurti effectively ended the organization.
I was also fascinated that as deep as a philosopher as he was, Krishnamurti was also a huge fan of spy novels.
Kunz re-humanizes him in a way that I had never yet heard.
You can subscribe to Into The Zone wherever you get your podcasts.
Northrop Log, Great Awakening, Stardate, October 7th, 2020.
Oh my, oh my God.
This is how she begins.
What's so great about the Midwest is that they don't know all the reasons people on the East Coast want to tell others not to follow us.
And then she goes on, because I guess that Kelly Brogan and I are what is called truthers.
That's funny.
I just thought we were in favor of informed consent and freedom.
On that note, she segues neatly here into, did you know the only boss the sheriff has is the people?
They are under no obligation to enforce the constitutional order of governors.
They take an oath.
To the sixth article of the Constitution.
Now wouldn't you know it, that sixth article is quite strongly associated with the oath that retired Lieutenant General, former NSA Director, and ex-jailbird who turned state's evidence in the Mueller investigation only to later be pardoned by Trump's AG, Mike Flynn, recited on Twitter on July 4th, which seems like a really long time ago in this shitshow of a year, but it's just a few months ago.
Along with the QAnon phrase that him and all of his family said directly to the camera, where we go one way we go all.
And with the hashtag, take the oath.
So she references this oath.
I want to share more of what she talks about in this section of her 10 minute IG video, but let me first just tell you that at some point she segues into listing all of the out of context statistics that we've heard, which paint COVID as being far less dangerous than the flu.
And then of course also into warmly sharing about a wonderfully appreciative letter she received from a fan who also sent her the most exquisite set of essential oils, which she then endorses and holds up to the camera because these are really lovely and the packaging even smells just delicious.
And then she talks about what ascension really means in terms of the evolution of consciousness and how this light casing that we have around us only lets things in if we let it.
And we let things in because of chronic fear or chronic anger that usually comes from childhood or past lives.
So she's making this argument for some kind of energetic spiritual immunity, right?
Then she follows that up with a lesson on discernment as truly being about discernment, about feeling the energy as a return to the heart, to the mother, to the right hemisphere of the brain.
Ignore the political party, ignore what anyone says or what their qualifications are, where they went to school.
And then she quotes Lori Ladd, a channel who talks about ascension, throw away everything except how it feels.
Homeschooling helps people move beyond.
She's really excited about what homeschooling is doing right now for the culture.
It helps people move beyond the left-brained scientific data focus that gave me migraines during my university years.
But let's back up, let's back up, because Northrop, without directly detailing what the case was, references Prince, P-R-I-N-T-Z versus United States, a case in which two sheriffs from Arizona and Montana challenged Bill Clinton's Brady Bill.
Which amended the 1968 Gun Control Act, which required background checks so that criminals could not purchase at gun shows.
Okay, so she doesn't talk about any of the details, but she talks about this in terms of why your sheriff is your friend.
These two sheriffs objected to state officers, such as themselves, being compelled by Congress to enforce federal law in prohibiting those not allowed to purchase firearms by the Brady Bill from doing so.
Northrop then goes on to quote Justice Scalia at length on his opinion, which is astonishing for a self-professed feminist, right as Scalia's former clerk, pro-lifer Amy Coney Barrett, awaits a confirmation that could set women back 50 years.
She never once mentions gun rights, but she weaves Scalia into her assertions that quarantine measures are unconstitutional and your sheriff does not have to enforce the will of the tyrannical governors of your state.
I know we don't offer video anymore on the podcast for a number of reasons, but I wish I could just show Matthew's face right now.
Well, I think I'm stuck on, I'm stuck on the casing of light.
That was five minutes ago now, but, um, cause I, I'm thinking about hot dogs and then, and then, but, but, uh, she doesn't.
So, so did you say that she quoted Scalia directly?
She does.
She quotes him for a little bit and then she starts to extrapolate on what she believes it means.
Does she look, does she seem to be reading from her screen or from a paper or something like that?
She's actually referring to an article that she's in the midst of writing herself and she's reading different sections to us, yeah.
Right, right, okay.
Wow, amazing.
And I wanted to say here what she also may not realize she is backing her aura up into is the gun lobby's love affair with the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which essentially limits the powers of the federal government to use the military in enforcing domestic policies and gives county sheriffs the authority to conscript any able-bodied person to assist in keeping
The peace, and this is hugely significant for our time, and it goes back to what Derek was talking about earlier, right?
The name Posse Comitatus was also taken on by a militia started in Oregon in the 60s who spread a conspiracy-minded, anti-Semitic, anti-government, white Christian message to counter what they believed were attacks on their rights, and held that there was no legal office higher than that of county sheriff.
But that if the county sheriff failed to enact the will of the people, the posse would hang him by the neck from high noon until sundown.
These guys practiced survivalism and played a significant role in the formation of the armed militias that emerged in the 90s, as well as the sovereign citizens movement founded in 71.
So this goes back to earlier podcasts as well.
Which the Southern Poverty Law Center estimates has a number of about 100,000 hardcore members and another 200,000 testing out the ideas with regard to identifying as not subject to statutory laws, but only to the Constitution.
And at the end of this video, Northrop talks about how she's bought up about 20 or 30 copies of the Constitution, pocket-sized, to give to her friends because we really need to start learning about what our Constitution says.
This is going back to the very beginnings of the United States.
And doesn't she in that post, doesn't she say that she just read it for the first time?
I think so.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it's it's just that I remember seeing that and just thinking like this is this is the it's it is very Trumpian.
It's like I learned something today and now I'm going to tell you all about it.
Well, all 450,000 of you on Facebook and Instagram, all at the same time.
Now, is this one of, this is within the Great Awakening series, right?
Yes.
Because you gave the star date?
Absolutely.
And is it like every other Great Awakening episode that I've sat through?
Is it about 12 minutes long?
So this one is 10 minutes, I actually watched it on Instagram, it was an IGTV video, and all of the other Great Awakening videos I've also looked at on Facebook, so they may have been slightly longer.
Yeah, there's just something about, it sounds like there's a little bit more of a coherent argument, because she's reading from these notes for her essay, but then there's gotta be a quote from Lori Ladd in there.
Who else does she cite?
I mean, because usually the 12 minutes are quite chatty and there's kind of like a shopping list of things that I'm thinking about today.
And that seems to be a really good point.
No, no, it's still that.
That's why I wanted to reference the different things she segues into before I return to this particular chunk.
This chunk is about the Constitution and sheriffs.
Right.
But she does do that lovely kind of friendly spiritual grandma thing where she goes back and forth between that and I got this wonderful box of essential oils.
And let me read the letter, this appreciative letter from someone about how much I've helped them in their lives.
And now let me talk about ascension and what ascension really means.
So I have learned about essential oils and ascension and the constitution this week.
So I'm going to tell you about it, right?
Right, but I'm also going to spend 12 minutes with my, with my gals, right?
Like I'm going to spend, it's, it's, it's really hangout time.
And that's the general feeling of it.
And it's amazing that the gentility of that is wrapping up this, you know, the point of the spear, really.
That's right.
That's right.
And it, and it really goes to what we're talking about this week and what came up in terms of Sasha Stone last week, right?
That within the context of this, This worldview that includes all sorts of flowery language and metaphysical kind of abstraction, then there is also this menacing underlying sort of message about how you can align yourself with essentially a super conservative civil war
You know, and it's funny because I think the way the pastel hue that Northrop's Great Awakening video gives to all of this stuff is yet another way in which the inner politics are plausibly deniable.
It's very, the number of people who are just mystified when this stuff starts getting unpacked and they can't believe that these are the messages that are coming from this beautiful, you know, manor house in Maine, you know, interspersed with videos of her playing her harp.
It's just, you know, it's just amazing.
It's amazing the work, the labor that this discourse is doing to dress up something that is actually really different.
But you know, it made me think of a movie idea that I wanted to run by you guys.
So here it is.
Clint Eastwood casts Christiane Northrup as his alt-health goddess love interest in a bucket list rom-com with a Bonnie and Clyde edge.
So they buy one of those big-ass RV buses and they drive across the country whacking evil vaccine scientists and searching for the mysterious Q So, Clint teaches Christiane how to shoot, and she teaches him how to connect with his higher angels through crystals and herbs, and they make tender boomer love while camping under the stars, and post-coital, they cuddle and murmur, where we come one, we come all.
That's terrific.
You just, you give away ideas like that for free, man.
Next week on YouTube, we're going to find this movie.
I know it's going to be up.
It's going to be up.
Somebody's going to do it in anime.
I don't, at one point I wanted to get across in this episode and actually the, the, there's a huge difference and it, It has to do with the disconnect about these calls for violence that are happening.
I don't really know much about Sasha Stone.
Somebody commented on our Twitter and tagged me and you, I think Matthew, in a discussion that he's been at this for a long time in some capacity, so I'll let that person's anecdote stand.
If I look at Hofstetter and he spent 23 years in the military and then police force, he's probably not someone I want to fight.
Like, really.
I mean, he has a lived experience of violence and protective violence.
That's very important to point out.
I remember Before I got cancer, I was practicing Muay Thai and the very last sort of sparring that I did before I stopped practicing to heal myself was with an ex-marine and even padded up.
I mean, I was like, oh, I would never want to fight this guy in real life.
And that kind of violence is real.
And I don't think when people like Northrop Talk about Second Amendment rights or talk about the violence that needs to happen in those capacities.
I don't believe they have a lived experience of what that sort of violence entails.
And I think it's really dangerous for these people to be talking about these things when if they were actually confronted with it, they would wither or freeze or run or get destroyed very quickly.
Yeah, you know, I have another thought about that.
I'm with you.
And at the same time, I feel like Northrop's world is also disembodied enough.
I'm not talking about her herself, but I'm talking about the yoga and wellness space is, has been looking for something, I think, real to grasp or to feel.
And the notion that, like, I think I I think we've been dealing with, in this culture, what I'd call the David-Avocado-Wolf problem, which is that, you know, how excited are you going to continue to get over the raw food and the goji berries?
Like, how much time are you going to spend talking that up?
Like, is that going to be the rest of your life?
It's hard to be messianic about that.
But the specter of actual You know, political movement or consequence, even if it involves, you know, physical violence, might be something that people in alt health and wellness spaces actually fantasize about because something would actually be happening.
I fantasize, yes.
I always think about Eric Schlosser's book, Reefer Madness, which is three different sections.
But the section on pornography, I thought, was so well done.
And this was written in 2002, 2003, somewhere around there.
But he talks about how when VHS came about, how pornography went from seeing flesh to To seeing organs, to seeing, you know, to missionary position, to oral, and it just kept going.
And because people get anesthetized to what they've seen and they need more and more to have any feeling whatsoever.
I think there's a huge difference between calling for rallies and protests, which is part of democracy and should be honored whatever side you're on, to now we are really seeing these people call for violence.
And I don't have much faith that most of them would have any idea what that entails or how to engage in it.
And that to me is problematic on another level.
Right.
Yeah, well and all of that is true and at the same time they're also flirting with a history of militias in this country that is very, very real and very, very dangerous.
And one of the things that jumped out at me here is that Posse Comitatus also pioneered the use of false and frivolous legal actions filed against government officials, right?
And this is what David Martin is He's talking about in line in the sand or like what he's really well known for.
He's a Virginia law professor and that's what he does.
He tries to hold the government accountable for how they're being unconstitutional with all this quarantine stuff.
And then Peggy Hall, who's that lady who Pam Popper was referencing multiple weeks ago, we talked about her.
She's doing something very similar.
She's trying to get people to file lawsuits against big grocery store chains, saying that them requiring that you wear a mask in the store is unconstitutional.
Oh, man, what a waste of time and money.
Oh, my God.
But it's really in the standoffs of the 90s, right, that we might remember Ruby Ridge, Waco, Texas, Justice Township, Montana, that we start to see the militias really getting national attention and being more active.
And then, of course, in the Obama years, it becomes even more of a thing.
And the big one is the Oklahoma City bombing.
Right.
One thing that I want to just finish that thought with is, and I don't want to give away too much with your interview, Julie, with Sarah, but when she points out that she grew up around right supremacist groups and what she actually fears in the coming months, that is a very real concern.
And again, that points back to why it really Just irks me that people who have no self-defense or training or history of violence whatsoever would be so irresponsible to call for it on these channels, not realizing that people in their orbit take that very seriously and will go through with it.
But isn't that exactly what we're focusing on in our project, is the unlikely allegiances between groups that would enact violence and groups that would not?
And isn't it, I'll take another angle, maybe as I said before, yoga and wellness people are itching to do something real with With their bodies and actually feel something, and maybe that's why they secretly watch MMA or something like that.
But on the other hand, wouldn't it be true that Northrop knows that she doesn't have to do that work?
Wouldn't it be true that Kelly Brogan and Sayer Gee, whatever they provoke, they're not going to I think that's absolutely right.
the same old sort of like trickle down, the workers are going to do what we provoke actually in the end.
I think that's absolutely right.
I wanted to close out this section just by saying that militias had this incredible part in the formation of the United States in the period between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, and then right after the Civil War.
And I came across this anecdote that right around the time that you were having the first elections after the Civil War in multiple southern states where black people were allowed to vote, you You had the first black militias.
Prior to that, the right to bear arms was only for white people.
What were the black militias doing?
And what were the white rifle clubs that ended up becoming the NRA?
What were they doing?
They were squaring off against each other at the polling places where those first free elections were happening.
One other bit here and bouncing off Julian's discussion.
We wrote a letter this week because our heads were still spinning over the quotes coming from Sasha Stone and his line of the sand event.
We wrote a letter on behalf of the podcast and all of you listeners and it says, we didn't sign your names of course, but it says We've become aware of several instances of you inciting political violence.
And then, if you remember some of the quotes that Julian read out, we presented those to him in writing.
But then I added as well, we added, in August you introduced an interview with two Australian anti-lockdown activists by saying, quote, I'm going to use blunt language.
What the fuck is going on in Australia?
That is called treason, people.
Treason.
Look the word up.
T-R-E-A-S-O-N.
It's punishable by death.
It always has been.
This is the time, friends, Antipodeans.
This is the time.
There was not going to be another time unless we shake this down.
Farnos, René, welcome.
These are guests that he's welcoming.
Let's speak very bluntly and very boldly.
Let's not couch our language in this broadcast because we've all been couching our sensitive language, paying attention to our syntax and to our deep desire to express the fire of rage that's in our bellies and what is going on to our brothers and sisters.
You guys live in Australia.
It's happening to you.
You are the sacrificial harvest.
Speak to us.
So yeah.
Then the letter says, We're reporting on rhetoric like this for our podcast and in other publications, especially in light of escalating political violence in the US.
Do you care to clarify your endorsement of political violence?
Specifically, when you call for legislators to be removed, eviscerated, and eradicated, who are you calling on to accomplish this?
Are you rejecting non-violent democratic processes?
And when you suggest that successful political violence is spiritually foretold, are you using an apocalyptic Christian framework?
It sounds like you're using the phrase domestic terrorists in jest.
Is that really appropriate?
Treason hasn't been punishable by death in Australia since 1914.
Is there some other law by which you would like to execute your opponents?
Regards, Derek, Matthew and Julian.
So we haven't heard back We'll let you know if we do.
We're also going to send a version of this letter out to every guest at Lying in the Sand.
And then lastly, before we get to Julian's amazing interview with Sarah Hightower, I just want to talk about the Hare Krishnas for a little bit in the light of this topic of cults that commit harm.
They are not outwardly militant, of course, although ISKCON has a history of internal violence.
There are several unsolved, unresolved murders, for example, within its history and hierarchy.
But they just staged, or at least one English branch of ISKCON staged, a mask-free march through Glastonbury, and we'll put the show link in there.
We have Some bright and shiny, bingly-bongly kind of folks indulging in mask-free, non-social distanced chanting.
And, you know, let's just remember that this apparently peace-loving cult takes as its Bible a book that basically opens with something like, listen, you little eunuch, go and kill those people Because God is taking care of everything anyway.
That's literally the opening pages of the Gita.
So here they're doing the Hari COVID celebration.
And for me, seeing it brought back a lot of memories, because I don't know about you guys, but one of my earliest contacts in the yoga world was through the Hare Krishna Temple in Toronto.
Is that true for you, Julian?
Absolutely.
The campus of the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, eating the vegetarian food, doing the chants, it was beautiful.
Now, was the vegetarian food like super protein poor?
Of course.
Yeah, was it super sugary?
Yeah, sugary and mushy and you know.
Totally, yeah.
Alright, so we share yet something else.
The temple in Toronto has this funny story.
The Hare Krishnas had been there since about the early 70s and they finally got up the money to buy the church.
And this building came up in the swankiest part of Toronto called Rosedale.
It was the old Avenue Road United Church.
And it was this gorgeous neo-Norman Gothic architecture, stained glass windows, the whole bit.
And the congregation had dwindled and it was going to move to a new location.
And ISKCON bought it, but they bought it through a shell company or a secret buyer because they knew that this old United Church congregation was not going to sell it to them.
So, it was controversial from the beginning.
But you know, they were a fixture for years and years and years in Toronto and they would sing and march and they would, you know, beg for alms and they would sell copies of the Gita, but their population dwindled.
You know, there was a point about five or six years ago that it seemed like it was actually always the same five or six guys getting more and more, like, tired, looking increasingly underfed.
Also really poor, like, you know, with broken flip-flops and stuff.
And so, you know, some of them just really looked in bad shape trying to maintain their mantra singing down the street.
It was really disheartening.
Later, I met people who were in the group who came out and they told me that, you know, actually they were totally impoverished while they were members and their labor was totally exploited and that they were undernourished and, you know, there was no protein and, you know, they were sort of put off or held off with a lot of sweets.
So, you know, what I remember most about walking into the building was feeling, however, this warm glow, really sweet incense, plenty of ghee lamps, and there was always some devotee who was assigned to the front door and they were supposed to greet you with the most welcoming smile in the world and usher you to sit down for the service or the kirtan or to bring you down to the cafe.
And the main feeling was that as welcoming as it was, it also communicated this instantaneous sense that you were in a different world.
So there was a simultaneous feeling of complete welcome, but also almost pervasive capture into a sacred space, a parallel universe.
And so I'm watching these guys Marching down the street in Glastonbury with their cymbals, and it's like they're carrying that feeling of the temple with them, that they're in another world, that their devotion to Krishna, that their music, that the cymbals, that the drums will somehow create a, I don't know, like a social bubble around them, and that means that they're Yeah, a casing, a casing of light, a vegetarian casing that means that they won't have to consider anything worldly like the virus.
So it's not surprising to me.
You know, and we know now that the ISKCON movement suffered terrible institutional abuse, intergenerational abuse.
And that, you know, the utopic promise of those environments was really never fulfilled.
So, when these guys walk out into the COVID-filled streets, they're already disconnected from a kind of consensus reality.
They're already high on Krishna.
They're already engaged in a kind of sing-song spiritual war.
And I'll just close with one of the most famous verses from the Gita, which is 2.22, which says, As a person sheds worn-out garments and wears new ones, likewise at the time of death, the soul casts off its worn-out body and enters a new one.
So in an ecstasy of a line like this during the time of COVID, I think it can carry with it the feeling of, you're going to die anyway.
Why not die singing?
And if you have a body that can die of COVID, isn't it worn out?
Shouldn't it be replaced?
And so there's an ecstasy of that chant unmasked that I think can actually allow for a kind of violence that really looks at first glance like love.
My guest today is Sarah Hightower.
She's an anti-cult activist and an expert on extremist terrorism, with a particular focus on the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo.
Sarah self-describes as having been yelling from the rooftops about the serious dangers of QAnon from the beginning.
Sarah, hi, thanks for taking the time to talk with us today.
Hi, I'm Sarah.
I'm here to talk with you today.
I love it.
Sarah, most people have some vague awareness, if any, of Aum Shinrikyo, and you can let me know if I'm pronouncing it correctly, as the cult that released sarin gas on the Tokyo subway in 1995, killing 12 people and severely injuring 50.
The group was founded and led by a former acupuncturist and herbalist calling himself Shoko Asahara, a kind of self-styled prophet in the vein of levitating yogi, enlightened Buddha, sign all your money over to me as we prepare for the coming apocalypse, you know the type.
What else can you tell us about this cult and do they share similarities with QAnon today?
Yeah, no, okay, so, uh, I don't want to be rude, but, um, some of the work I've done in the past is, uh, I've actually done some work, uh, with people, uh, with the, uh, Japan Society for Cult Prevention and Recovery, and, uh, you know, some, uh, some former members and some victims of Aum, so, um, It's a calm, serene attack on the subway.
The death toll is up to 40 now, and as far as the injuries go, there are still thousands of people who are suffering from PTSD and psychosomatic symptoms today, and the money is running out.
raise awareness of that situation.
So actually much, much, much worse than what you can just find by Googling.
Yeah.
And that's just from that particular seren attack.
There was another one before that and multiple mass murders and multiple members who were still technically only considered missing.
So when you talk about all these victims, it's I kind of like to get the accurate information out there because it's still kind of going on today.
Oh yeah, for sure, for sure.
I was hoping that you would mention the previous attack and the murders.
I mean, it's a really gruesome legacy that this group carries, huh?
Yeah, and then of course you just had, you know, the thousands upon thousands, tens of thousands of people who, you know, survived cultic abuse and spiritual abuse, physical abuse and things of that nature.
You think about the members, you know, like they were victims of shock loss.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
So very far-reaching.
And I believe I saw, tell me if this is true, that there was a period where he even had amassed more followers in Russia than he had in Japan.
Is that right?
Oh yeah, they were very successful in Russia.
The Japanese main branch had, I think, around 11,000.
And the Russian mission, the Russian branch, they had around 30,000 to 40,000 that we know of.
Unbelievable.
And so what are the correlations that you're seeing with QAnon?
Because I know you've been talking about some similarities there.
QAnon has shown the signs of being a cultic totalist group since at least mid to late 2018.
You don't always have to have a centralized hierarchy and you don't always have to have a physical compound Like, you know, Heaven's Gate or Waco or OM did, you know, at Mount Fuji, to be a cultic group.
So what's happening with QAnon is they're all amassing online in these digital spaces and these alternative influence, like these spheres of information, these little influence spheres or whatever, closing themselves off from the real world, much like the way someone would if they went to, you know, like a cultic sort of ashram or whatever.
Yeah, so you're describing a very insular kind of online community.
It's the, it's the, uh, no outside comms mentality, right?
Absolutely.
I mean, that's a quote from, yeah, exactly.
No outside comms.
That's what they say.
Like if it's not coming from, you know, this Q poster with this trip code on this message board, you can't trust it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so that tactic of, uh, of isolating, Members or participants from their families, from their friends, from any other forms of influence.
It's part of how you institute brainwashing.
Yes.
Okay.
Well, I wanted to ask you, a recent Atlantic article talked about pleasing looking mainstream homemaker and mommy blogger type Instagram accounts that you'd look at their feed and it's like, Oh, this is all really nice and benign.
And then you go to their stories or you go to their IGTV.
area and you find they're sharing QAnon content.
Marc Andre Argentino, the journalist, referred to this as Pastel Q, I think after that article came out in the Atlantic.
Yeah.
Yoga Journal just followed suit on the New York Times and Rolling Stone by referencing a group of our friends, friends of the podcast, who took a stand against QAnon in the online yoga community.
And we now see in all of these different sort of outlets that are reporting on this a growing recognition of what we've been referring to as conspirituality, which is the name of the podcast.
But you told me that when we talked earlier, when we were preparing for this, you said you had predicted Q spreading into the yoga and wellness space.
What gave you that punch?
Tell me more.
I don't want to use the word predicted because that makes me sound like you or Shoko Asahara.
You're a prophet!
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
No, no, no, no.
I'm just an idiot.
But, um, no, see, the thing is, if you look at who was pushing QAnon from the beginning, you had, what, Guy M, TV, You're open-minded.
It was already there in the yoga circles and wellness circles and stuff.
Like it was there from those information sources, those alternative information things.
It was like healing crystal ants and ancient aliens pet pups and stuff.
It was always right there.
And then the Falling Gong stuff, like that huge push from them.
So it's not so much that I predicted it, it's just like some of us were watching and we saw what was there and anyone could put two and two together.
Especially if you know how cults work.
Because yeah, they're going to disguise themselves and go past stoic QAnon.
Yeah, that's the thing.
I think that the main sort of response that we get from a lot of people is, but wait, how do these things go together?
And you're saying they've always been together, right?
Yes!
Yeah, it was interesting looking into Asahara and seeing how You know he was he was doing the the shtick that you can see from several different cult leaders like he was trying to do the yogic flying that uh that the Maharishi and TM would do.
He's definitely doing the premarawat like once you join you give me all your stuff and then I give you the divine knowledge but I get to him I get your car, I get your house, I get whatever your bank account holds.
Just incredible.
He amassed an extraordinary amount of money.
Billions upon billions.
Billions upon billions.
I mean, and they ran businesses too.
Like Asahara was good with money.
He was bad at everything else, but he was good at money.
And I guess, you know, manipulating people.
He was good at those two things.
I mean, it's, it's having, it's having some resonances as well with Osho and the whole...
That Wild Wild Country documentary and how they really they really saw it as a we're going to create this capitalist enterprise in which we generate all of this money so that we can gain power and influence, right?
And then we're going to carve out our own little place and it's going to be our land.
And Ohm tried to do the same thing.
Ohm was going to establish the Ohm Nation.
Yeah.
And we're also trying to gain control over various political areas.
Yeah, they ran 24 Candidates for the Japanese, let's just say like the lower house of representatives elections.
So basically like Japanese Congress, we'll just say.
So they ran, yeah, they ran 24 members, their highest ranking, best looking members.
And of course, no one was elected.
And that's when Asahara decided to switch it up to indiscriminate mass murder and terrorism.
Because he told everyone that it was a plot by, get this, if you've ever heard this one before, it was a plot by the Deep State.
Oh my.
It was a conspiracy.
And that's why they lost at the ballot.
That's why they lost and no one was elected.
So they had to go do tariffs now.
I don't know.
Kind of weird.
I don't know.
Thank God no one is around today saying that kind of shit and like acting like us, Sahara, because that would be such a relief.
Yes.
And the difference, I suppose, you know, a really unfortunate difference right now is that we have at least that many QAnon, either, you know, overt supporters or people who've given a nod and a wink to it running in the election that we have coming up here really soon.
Many of them look like they probably are going to get in.
Yeah.
Yeah, we're gonna have it, at the very least, Onya.
Now QAnon has surpassed all in a few ways, yeah.
If we're going to get some in government, we've already got some in the police forces and stuff.
And just in terms of just numbers, they've already surpassed all.
So I wanted to ask you this.
You've looked at QAnon through the lens of psychiatrist and thought reform expert Robert J. Lifton.
One of his key ideas is that totalistic, I believe he coined that term, totalistic groups are motivated by the fear and denial of death, channeled into violence against scapegoat groups that set up to represent a metaphorical threat to survival and a reactionary fear of social change.
How does this relate to QAnon as it exists right now, especially with regard to Lifton's eight criteria?
Where do you think they're at on that spectrum?
Okay, so with the eight criteria, you're talking about just the eight criteria of thought reform as it relates to ideological totalism, right?
Yes.
Thought reform in the psychology of totalism, yes?
Yes.
Okay, so I think towards the top of the show, we already touched on milieu control.
It's the rabbit hole of constant research, the alternate information ecosystem, and they keep the key followers in there.
That's the milieu control that Liston talks about.
And then, of course, you have your mystical manipulation.
So, like, the world of this high-level military intelligence op, I think they say it's the greatest military intelligence op the world has ever known, depending on which sect of QAnon you're talking to or what kind of believer you're talking to.
Some even believe that it, like, they started setting this up in the 60s and that there are info wars being waged in space.
These patriots, they've been awakened and it's presented as this absolute struggle of like good versus evil, which this will come up later.
But yeah, so you've got your mystical and then you've got your manipulation, which is when people say things like no outside comms or disinformation is necessary.
So when you look at the group activity, you bring it to the demand for purity.
So with the demand for purity, the Q&Q followers and these little Q-profits and gurus on Twitter with their high follower counts, they're intentionally ratcheting up the tension and they're raising the stakes so that any second guessing is some sort of moral failing on the part of the follower and then the other followers will come into the comment section or whatever and like they'll or Trump for help or whatever.
But then others will come in and they'll forgive the follower and this just reinforces the dynamic that's already there and it reminds them of their special place in the group and they're, you know, like they're placing the group's in narrative 'cause they're chosen, they're special, they've been awakened, right?
Yeah.
And that also plays into the cult of confession, which is another part that Griffin talks about.
So it's the extension of the purity tests, but like the cult of confession is when they just beg Trump or Q for help, which you've seen like that live stream, that one Q follower, I think they kidnapped their own child and they were running from the police and they're begging Q and Trump to help.
And then of course there's sacred science like followers are like they're special warriors of light you know they're they're warriors of truth they're true patriots and they're going to need to stick around to help explain things to their loved ones once you know the storm comes and these arrests and these tribunals and the mass executions finally happen because I think it's going to be televised right?
And I think that their loved ones that they're still holding out hope for, you know?
And I think their loved ones won't be able to spiritually or psychologically process it.
So these followers have this unique understanding of the true nature of the world.
They're serving at least one noble purpose in that regard.
Aside from the other stuff they're being told with this dynamic, this narrative.
Then you get to loaded language.
Now with QAnon, this is like a way of describing cult jargon.
So when you think about QAnon and you think about cult jargon, this is loaded language.
So let's see where we go when we go all.
That's a big one, right?
And, uh, nobody can stop what's coming.
And then we've already said, like, no outside comms and stuff.
And let's see, I think they say future proves past.
Mm-hmm.
Trust the plan.
Mm-hmm.
Trust the plan is another one.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, uh, yeah.
So they never thought she would lose.
There's a lot in there.
And these are like thought terminating cliches, different terms.
So, you know, instead of, you know, having to put the terms with the cognitive dissonance and stuff, they just rely on the loaded language and the cultic jargon.
jargon in it you know a kind of a kind of self-reinforcing defensive mantra if you will yeah yeah actually yeah that's a perfect way to describe it yes fascinating and then you have doctrinal person so this is pretty self-explanatory but it's also really evident in things like where we go one we go all okay so it's a group identity it's a group identity so once you get to there you get to the eighth part and the eighth part is called the dispensing of existence okay
so this is where the part where the lines between the in group which is you know the q stuff and the trump followers and other patriots and the out group which is i don't know Everyone who's not like them at this point right now, especially the leftists, BLM, Antifa, pedovores, celebrities, whatever dog whistles they're using for Jewish people, you know what I'm talking about, right?
Yep.
So these lines become so selectively and then severely reinforced that the group can label anyone outside as threatening.
And if you're threatening its doctrine or its mission, they can start to tell themselves and each other, you know, maybe these people don't deserve to live and it's okay if we do what needs to be done for the greater good as we understand it.
And that's where we're at with key people.
Not as a whole, but... Yeah, yeah.
I mean, it's alarming anyway just to notice that all of this language is about warfare, all of this language is about demons, and it's about dehumanizing
People who are, you know, slanderously being accused of all kinds of just outlandish things and the lumping in of anyone who is from a different political point of view as just all being part of the forces of darkness.
I mean, I think about how it goes back through time to ancient Sumeria, right?
to the battle between the forces of light and darkness and the, what is it?
Ahura Mazda and I remind you and how everything is going to, I mean, it's apocalyptic.
It's fascinating to me that there is this apocalyptic vocabulary that is just deep in the human psyche.
And we are so vulnerable to having it activated into feeling like, yes, now is the time.
And, and there is this momentous event that is about to happen and you better be on the right side of the battle.
All of the world's evils.
We've just discovered them in the modern age, apparently, and it's this.
Actually, no, let's not.
They don't want to hear that.
Wow, that was a great exposition of Lifton's work and how you're looking at this group through that particular lens.
I wanted to ask you, and I'm not sure how much you want to talk personally, but I know you grew up in Arkansas and That there was white supremacy around you and support for figures like Timothy McVeigh was the impression I got.
This seems to have been part of what spurred your early interest in the cult psychology of extremism.
What are you seeing now in terms of the overlaps between all of that stuff and the coming election?
It wasn't just the cultic stuff at first, I just wanted to know why they were doing it and why it was scary and why people were changing or whatever.
Why?
Wait, are you saying that people in your immediate surroundings went through some kind of change into becoming radicalized?
Yeah.
But I didn't know about that stuff because I was like a kid at the time, so I just thought like if you read the bad book, which was like Turner or something, or you know, you've read a bad pamphlet or talked to a bad guy, it just magically changed you.
Because it seemed like, you know, it just kind of changed overnight.
Into being a sort of race war preaching white supremacist?
Yeah, literal, violent, Rahula.
So yeah, that's why another thing like QAnon started to stand out to me, because a lot of their coded language, it's not too far from some of the stuff I recognized from my exposure, because I never believed it, but yeah, my exposure to Christian identity stuff.
But yeah, did McVeigh happen and the militias broke up?
You're asking about QAnon and how that might relate?
Yeah, well, I am curious about all of it, and then sort of where I was going with it was wondering what you're seeing around you in terms of the, you know, like the white supremacist militia, the Q mobilization, and the fact that we have an election in a little over three weeks time, right?
Yeah, okay, so the most radical Or white supremacists.
They hate QAnon.
They think QAnon is a Jewish psyop.
Sent to defame the more, like, just, I don't know, proto-fascist, or, you know, more nationalist types.
I mean, ultimately, they're all relying on a lot of the same racist and anti-Semitic shit, so yeah, you know, call it what it is.
But I'm also saying, like, there's a difference between Uh, someone with a skull mask trying to make ricin and like a proud boy, like they're both like, you know, two shades of the same very bad thing.
But you're seeing the QAnon types go more towards the, uh, the, uh, the hidden, I guess you could say, the deluded, you know, your proud boys and stuff.
We've seen like proud boys rallying with QAnon, but yeah, so.
And then you have, you know, your hardcore, hardcore ones that just, like, they absolutely despise QAnon because they think it's like a Jewish psy-op and then some of them will actually go and try to radicalize the QAnon people and the QAnon groups, which you'll see sometimes.
So yeah, you'll see some, like, some hardcore Rahuah 1488ers, like, they're kind of smart, they're kind of young, and then they'll go in there because they realize that their job's, like, half done.
So they'll go in there and do that.
Now, as far as what this might mean, like leading up to the election, every extremist expert, every whistleblower, everyone in my circles, like everyone sounding the alarms, everyone, even the government, expects the white nationalist, white supremacist, anti-government violence to just kind white supremacist, anti-government violence to just kind of coalesce.
Like something's going to happen.
I don't know like exactly what, because I'm actually not a prophet, like I said earlier, but it's isolated incidents can't be ruled out because you know you're going to have people betraying you.
patrolling, you're going to have some militias and you're also just going to have standard people who aren't in militias and don't really identify as the ultra-nationalist or white nationalist or whatever.
They're being told by the president to go keep an eye and say, thank you, they're going to be cheating or whatever.
That's going to ratchet up the tension even more.
I don't know how the election is going to go in Nobody knows.
It's not going to be pretty, no matter what it is.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I've seen people say it both ways.
Depending on how the election turns out, you're going to see different variations of reactions.
But, you know, who was it who said it?
Someone who we interviewed.
If Biden wins, once you've played the pedophile card, there's no unringing that bell.
If Biden wins, it's not like they're just going to shrug and walk away and go, oh, well.
Uh-huh.
Exactly.
I personally think Trump's going to serve another term.
I see things through, I guess, like the cultic lens, I guess, you know?
Yep.
And I mean, I say this a lot.
I don't know.
Everyone's going to have their own opinion of Trump or what's happening or whatever.
Just looking at some parts to the party.
Authoritarianism is inherently cultic propaganda.
Yes.
And it's all part of the same stuff.
I mean, the field of cultic studies started with Lifton and then before Lifton, it was Hannah Arendt.
And I'm sure you saw the beautiful little propaganda video that got dropped this morning.
by Trump of the, you know, with the Michael Bay style movie soundtrack and the arrival of the military helicopter and the Mussolini-esque figure on the balcony saluting.
Meanwhile, he's wheezingly out of breath.
I can monitor a lot of really bad shit and I can look at a lot of really bad shit or whatever.
You know, I mean, even before this, I tried my hand at monitoring, you know, like ISIS and DASH and stuff like that.
Some things I see them as disturbing, maybe in a different way than others will.
So some can like look at that and just laugh.
And all I could think of is like Radio Rwanda, you know, just Bosnia and... Yeah.
You have a lot of points of reference for how bad this stuff can get.
It could go to the Middle East or like, you know, some places in Eastern Europe.
It's like just videos like that playing constantly.
So that was a super intense interview with Sarah Hightower.
And I don't know anything about her personally, but I just want to say that I can hear in her voice how much it has cost her to learn this stuff.
And I also really value her incisive analysis of the impersonal social structure and pressures involved in this material.
But I'm going to close with something softer and more personal to leave things on a little bit of a brighter note.
And here I'm inspired by the fact that I've been able to interview, actually, a couple of QAnons for a feature that I'm writing.
And what I find with almost everyone I interview, it's hard to not feel a person's humanity and confusion and struggle and goodwill, no matter how misdirected it is.
And so I'm thinking about all of the people swept up into conspirituality and QAnon and also about what's going to happen to them and how they're going to come down from this and who will be there when they do.
Because that's the other interviewing I've done of people who have lost friends but who swear they will be there with open arms.
So, I want to share two personal things in this zone.
One expands on a post that I made to Instagram about how when I was in cults, the world was still out there, which meant that I could return to it.
But the other thing is a story about how love, at least for me, was also a sign that the cult doesn't necessarily take everything from you.
So here's what I posted.
If, for whatever reason, you got drawn into QAnon or soft-Q media, and you became active and advocated for it, sharing it to your feeds with earnest concern, and now you realize it is wrong and damaging, it's not too late to repair.
Nobody has ever seen an online radicalization brainworm like this.
People who study cult dynamics and even jihadism are awestruck at how quickly it has spread and how deeply people can commit to it, even at the expense of their relationships.
Which is all to say, it's not your fault.
Consensus reality didn't go anywhere in the weeks or months you felt overwhelmed by this intensely emotional content.
I spent six years in cults, and this almost fucked up my life in a permanent way, and I was very lucky it wasn't worse.
But do you know what?
During all of those six years, the world continued on in its way, waiting for me.
My family was still there.
Things had changed, but still there.
Old cafes, books that I loved and could return to.
The sky was there, capitalism was still shitty, and there were always children, and people played guitars.
And so I was intensely focused on a tiny sliver of manipulated reality, but the world continued on, waiting for me.
Now, in your Q participation, you may have disrupted some relationships, but chances are good that your people still love you and would like nothing more than to just chat with you again about what you really share.
Now, having been a vector for QAnon or SoftQ isn't an unfixable problem.
I think it's just like COVID.
If you stop exposing others to it, it will die out.
And you can stop at any time and be welcomed back into the whole, noble, sometimes boring, everyday struggle with friends and allies.
So that's that part.
So I'll preface this other story, which is about post-cult love, by saying that it was sparked by seeing a Facebook group that no longer exists after the great Facebook purge, and then a proposal for a group that should.
So QAnon Singles was a Facebook group Until it got removed.
And of course it was.
You've got to imagine that QAnons were looking to hook up and marry and so on.
But then on Reddit I saw a different post, a different proposal.
The post was titled Q Casualties Dating App.
And part of the post read, since a bunch of us may or already find ourselves newly single because of all this shit, maybe someone should develop a dandy community only for people not susceptible to cults?
I'm joking, of course, but I'd give anything for my husband to come back to reality and be my husband again.
I'm just thinking worst case scenario and how I can't go through this all over again with someone else.
So yeah, incredibly tragic.
And at the same time, what I love about subreddit is the jokes.
Someone said that you could call the app OKCupid, and I thought that was pretty funny.
But the whole thing reminded me of that other thing that still existed for me when I got out of the cults I was in.
And it's different from the books and the cafes that I mentioned.
It's more like a life force or just a way things go in the world.
It's very commonplace.
Put simply, it was the ability to fall in love with another person, without an ideology standing in the middle.
I'm talking about my partner, but I'll keep things both private and concise, because I'm sensitive about using family members as emotional props on the internet.
She's her own person, full and complete, also on a journey, and I love her, and I'm really lucky, and that's all I'll say.
Because the main point is that when I met her I felt something direct and unmediated.
You know, of course over time we had to make sure that we shared similar values, but I didn't encounter her through the haze of what I would call cult romance, in which a big reason you have for being attracted to a person is contrived and manipulated by the group or a mission or a series of projected needs.
In the cults I was in, this was modeled for us over and over again.
Couples were valued to the extent that they were positioned as either parental figures or as fuck-bunny energy cells for the group.
People assessed couples on whether they were aligned with each other and the group.
You couldn't have sex with your partner in the group without the leader, sometimes literally, but always figuratively, being in bed with you.
And in the worst modeling, you had things like our leader Michael Roach and Christy McNally vowing to be quote-unquote spiritual partners.
What that really meant was that they performed serving the great mission of Buddhism through pandering to each other while everyone around them wondered if their genitals glowed when they had sex.
Or consider the power marriage of Kelly Brogan and Sayer G. She said in a video, I joke that our relationship is our highest credential.
She means a credential for leading their COVID denialism thing.
But what a nightmare trap that sounds like.
Wouldn't it be nice to just have a relationship?
Something private?
And let's just think about Amy Coney Barrett for a moment.
Nevermind the mystery of how she gets where she gets while raising seven children.
Let's think about how that marriage is informed and possibly controlled by her arch-Catholic group, People of Praise.
Regardless of her beliefs, there's a lot at stake there.
Can you imagine a huge chunk of the meaning of your marriage falling apart if, say, the Catholic Church that made it so special was revealed to be a crime syndicate?
But of course that's happened.
So what does a person have to do internally to remain committed?
And who did they have those five babies for?
And why did they adopt?
A lot of folks pointed out the racism of describing her white kids as smart, her describing her white kids as smart, and her Haitian kids as plucky and resilient.
But beyond that, I also heard her talking about all of them like she was playing dollhouse.
I got that itchy feeling I get around ideologues that their closest relationships are set up to perform living proof of their virtue.
So I'm betting those kids are always well-behaved, because their job is to live in the dollhouse, and they each have their roles reflective of the parent's world of order, deference, approved pathways, and white saviorship.
Now I'm not saying that when I met my partner I was free of groupthink, social awkwardness, or certain relationship ideas and blind spots, and subtle misogyny, and all of these things got in the way.
And of course my partner brought her own life too.
But the post-cult difference was, I had to deal with those things on my own and in relationship with her, and within a context that was private and uninterrupted.
I didn't have a group intruding on me or to appeal to.
I never asked myself, what would such and such charismatic person whose life I wish I had do?
I was relating in a much simpler and more transparent way, because I believe that if you're really in love, you can be honest about not knowing what's going on.
You can be honest about learning and how personal learning really is.
So, I just wanted to describe a little bit of that, hopefully not too abstractly, to underline two main points.
One, when you're in the thrall of a high demand group, or a coercive ideology, or if you've gone down the QAnon rabbit hole, you simply cannot fall in love.
It just can't happen.
In fact, if it does, you're probably on the way out the door because a really secure attachment will show you beyond all doubt how you are being manipulated or abused.
Number two, if you find yourself falling in love after leaving a high demand group, it might be a good moment to ask, oh, am I finally free to have my own complex feelings?
Am I finally the source in conjunction with this other person of all this joy and mystery I feel?
So, I dedicate this little contemplation to a third dating group.
One was for QAnons, one was for their exes, but the third is the dating group for ex-QAnons.
Nobody has formed it yet, but it will come, I'm sure, and it will be very hard for these folks to overcome what they've been through.
But boy, I believe it will feel so good for them to find each other and just go for a walk in the woods and feel free to just hang out with each other, free of all of the things they had to believe in to feel like they were worthy of love and attention.
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