How To Become a Cult Leader
Yuri's spicy analysis of 5 cults from the past and their modern equivalents
Comrades: Know your history. Don’t drink the kool-aid. Beware of sanpaku eyes.
Anytime I see the words “How To”, I will check it out. Netflix featured famous cult leaders in its show “How To Become a Cult Leader”, analyzing the techniques they used to control their followers. Today, I will draw the parallels between 5 cults of the past and the leftist cults of today. While older cults were limited in scope and all but one were unsurprisingly based in California, technology has enabled modern cults to spread everywhere including schools, hospitals, and workplaces.
The Manson Family = Trans Grooming
Manson targeted impressionable, insecure young women. He convinced them to abandon their families and join his “family”. During chemical drug binges, he love bombed them into obedience. His most devoted followers physically mutilated themselves by carving an X into their foreheads. It all ended in violent bloodshed. Sound familiar?
Jonestown = BLM/Antifa/DIE
Jim Jones was a preacher who was devoted to social justice. He cultivated a diverse flock, but his inner circle was predominantly white. Jones persuaded his sheep to sell their worldly possessions and live in his utopian commune in Jonestown, Guyana. While what he said sounded good, in reality it was a nightmare that made everyone’s lives worse. Jones killed Congressman Leo Ryan before taking almost a thousand people with him in a “revolutionary suicide”. That bodycount has since been eclipsed by a decade of collateral damage from Soros/BLM’s criminal justice reform and defund the police. A Bernie Bro shot Republican Congressman Steve Scalise, but it got memory holed.
I once saw a black stand-up comedian drop a hilarious one-liner: “I went to a BLM rally recently… just to pick up chubby white girls.”
Buddhafield = “Follow The Science” Faucism
Jaime Gomez called himself "The Teacher" and “Reyji” (“god-king”). He promised followers salvation through cleansing therapy sessions. Gomez led initiation ceremonies called “The Knowing”, during which he pressed his fingers on recipients' eyes to inject a "transfer of energy". After joining Buddhafield, members were ordered not to spend time around impure non-holy people including family. Gomez kept an information firewall and shamed his followers into compliance. He even used the AIDS crisis to frighten his gay male lovers into staying.
Gomez has never been charged with any crimes and continues to operate the cult to this day. Is it just me or does he look like Fauci?
Heaven’s Gate = Climate Alarmism ESG
Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles believed that the apocalypse was coming. They convinced followers prepare for it by transforming into "The Evolutionary Level Above Human" (TELAH), where transhuman residents live in pure bliss and nourish themselves by absorbing sunlight. The cult demanded a strict diet that offered little variety or nutrition, while banning sex and reproduction.
When Nettles died of cancer, the goalposts shifted. Instead of ascending to heaven in their own bodies, Heaven’s Gate members were told that the body was just a vehicle for the soul. We have gone from ice age to global warming to climate change to global boiling to extinction rebellion over the past 50 years. Will the climate alarmists permanently end their carbon emissions like the final ritual of Heaven’s Gate?
Moon Family (Unification Church) = Kim Family (North Korea)
Sun Myung Moon and Kim Il Sung are cult patriarchs. Unlike most cult leaders, they have extended their reigns over 3 generations spanning a century. Both were born in North Korea less than a decade apart and declared themselves to be Gods. Moon and Kim’s birth legend stories are almost identical.
Moon’s from the Divine Principle: “With the fullness of time, God has sent one person to this earth to resolve the fundamental problems of human life and the universe. His name is Sun Myung Moon. For several decades he wandered through the spirit world so vast as to be beyond imagining. He trod a bloody path of suffering in search of the truth, passing through tribulations that God alone remembers. Since he understood that no one can find the ultimate truth to save humanity without first passing through the bitterest of trials, he fought alone against millions of devils, both in the spiritual and physical worlds, and triumphed over them all. Through intimate spiritual communion with God and by meeting with Jesus and many saints in Paradise, he brought to light all the secrets of Heaven.”
Kim: “The Day of the Sun is an annual public holiday in North Korea on 15 April, the birth anniversary of Kim Il Sung, founder and Eternal President of North Korea. It is the most important national holiday in the country and is considered to be the North Korean equivalent of Christmas. North Koreans commemorate the holiday by visiting locations that have a connection with the leader's life, such as thousands of statues scattered across the country, or Mangyongdae, his birthplace in the capital Pyongyang. The most important observances take place in the capital, including visits to the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun, where Kim Il Sung's body lies in rest, and the Mansu Hill Grand Monument, which features a very tall statue of the leader. The now familiar Juche calendar, inaugurated in 1997, recalculated time from the year Kim Il-sung was said to have come to earth from heaven in 1912. Like some ancient creation myth newly minted, time itself began, or was renewed, with the birth of Kim Il-sung.”
Both Moon and Sun know how to put on a spectacles of devotion:
What other cults are out there, comrades?
Nice summary Yuri. A little backstory here from SF. When I was a teenager, my buddies & I walked past the Peoples Temple (right next to the Fillmore music venue) almost every day heading to baseball practice. We always wondered why there were two intimidating guards in red berets at the front door of the church. Fast forward a year or so & the guards had disappeared, and I guess the church did too. Once we found out what had happened in Guyana, news started trickling in about who was killed. We realized that one of the best friends of a good friend had perished, and about a dozen other boys who were all on the baseball team of an independent high school (which had a lot of Peoples Temple students) that I played against a half-dozen times were also gone. Fast forward to COVID times, where the largest cult of all time was initiated, and a surviving member of the temple became a big part of our freedom community here. She knew what was going on immediately, and did her best to fight here in Insane Francisco, but got herself to a free state, understandably.
Veganism