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A Cult

Wednesday 04 March 2026

I grew up in a cult, and that means I grew up learning how to be adept at double-speak and managing cognitive dissonance in many areas but especially in questions of power. We were taught that God was unquestionably in charge and not to be questions -- nothing extraordinarily unusual about that since that's a fairly orthodox position. However, we learned that we had to transfer that kind of blind obedience to God's only true representative on Earth, Herbert Armstrong. Not only were we to obey him but we were also to assist him. Our job was not to proselytize or to try to win converts to our religion. That was God's job through Armstrong's preaching. Our job was simply to support him, and there was only one kind of support he wanted: fiscal. We weren't to question what he did with the money we sent him. We weren't to entertain doubts about the wisdom of his decisions even when they seemed to be causing problems members individually or the church as a whole.

The most wide-spread cult in America today is unquestionably MAGA with its unquestioning loyalty to Trump. Every now and then, I read something that seems so perfectly parallel to how members of Armstrong's cult used to talk that I feel I'm simply hearing a sermon from my youth.

I discovered this picture posted on social media recently, and combined with the poster's own thoughts, it fairly accurately mirrors all the destructive thinking patterns of Armstrong's own cult.

The most immediately obvious parallel of the hagiographic nature of followers' descriptions. This idea of Trump sacrificing so much to save America has been around in memes for a while.

This is one my own mother shared early in Trump's first term. It has much more blatantly messianic tones than this newer one, but the sentiment is the same.

The original post included the author's own thoughts about Trump's recent actions:

Yes! He is TRYING to save our whole world!! Trying to demand peace. The road to that is very rocky, but you have to be willing to do it and endure any roadblocks and hiccups along the way. But if you stay strong and stay faithful, you are doing your part.

Almost every sentence of this echoes the thinking that pervaded my cultic upbringing.

"He is TRYING to save our whole world!" This notion parallels notions that Herbert Armstrong and his organization were literally the only thing holding at bay the complete destruction of not just America but the whole world.

Additionally, Trump is "[t]rying to demand peace." This is in direct opposition to what we're seeing with our own eyes. This gaslighting is critical to cults. It allows followers to ignore their own experience and thoughts when they contradict the official story. He's not killing civilians in American cities, extra-judiciously attacking boats in the Gulf of Mexico, or initiating a completely unprovoked war. That's violence. That's not what he's about. He's about peace. He's said it himself countless times over the last ten years, and just because it seems to contradict his actions, we just have to listen to him and understand that he is trying to create peace through his violence. Doublethink at its best.

However, we must understand that the "road to that [peace] is very rocky, but you have to be willing to do it and endure any roadblocks and hiccups along the way." Again, don't pay attention to your own eyes. Ignore the reality you're seeing. These are just hiccups, roadblocks to our complete supremacy and world peace. Just remember that "if you stay strong and stay faithful, you are doing your part." Your part is not to think. Not to question. It's to support -- without question, without thought, without doubt. Our dear leader knows best. After all, look at all he sacrificed to reach this moment. Ignore the riches he's created for himself by using his position. He sacrificed because he said he sacrificed.

I intentionally retained the pronoun-antecedent ambiguity of the above paragraphs simply to illustrate the fact that one could use either "Trump" or "Armstrong" as the antecedent, and the result would be identical.

Delusion

Tuesday 30 December 2025

Breakup

Thursday 05 June 2025

Who could have seen it coming? Surely two rich megalomaniacal narcissists should be able to get along if they have the same goal: make themselves richer at the expense of the rest of us.

Who am I kidding: we all saw it coming. What we didn't anticipate was how fast everything would escalate. Trump remained uncharacteristically calm and approached the border of magnanimity at first, but then the cliche gloves came off:

  • Trump threatened to kill Elon's government contracts and subsidies.
  • Elon brought up the Epstein files and claimed (probably accurately) that Trump is in them.
  • MAGA diehard Bannon called for Elon to be deported and for the government to seize Space X
  • Elon retweeted a call for Trump to be impeached.

All this within a few hours.

There's a part of me that's absolutely gleeful about this. But most of me finds this just as horrifying as everything else Trump does. Think of what Putin and Xi are saying about this. Sure, Putin lost a lot of bombers this week, but he's looking at the long game, and a civil war within the MAGA party that could further destablize America -- what a gift for him.

Party Over Country?

Thursday 13 February 2025

A Response

Wednesday 22 January 2025

"What are the general impressions of our President?" someone asked me. My response:

Folks who are firmly entrenched in the Trump cult of personality are thrilled. They worship the man, fly flags with his name on it, put up huge signs in their yards proclaiming their worship of the man. They're positively giddy.

Folks who voted for him because they thought he’d accomplish this or that are taking a wait and see attitude.

Those of us who saw from the beginning that he was a narcissistic, racist, misogynistic idiot who knows next to nothing, cares about nothing other than himself, and acts and speaks most of the time like a petulant, spoiled child -- we pretty much know what to expect, and he’s delivering from day one: His attempt today to override the 14th amendment with an executive order demonstrates he has as little respect for the constitution now as he did in 2021 when he incited an insurrection, and those two facts (among so many others) should provide all the proof anyone not in his cult would need that he is exceptionally unfit to be president.

I left out the fact that he surrounds himself with people who do things like this:

Boxing Day 2024

Thursday 26 December 2024

Everyone has returned home; K returns to work tomorrow -- the 2024 holiday season is over. The timeless magical period of Wigilia and Christmas and all the time preparing for it disappears, and the worries that for a few days we put out of our minds come crowding back in.

Worry 1

I woke up this morning thinking of school. The students are great -- the best group I've had in years. The amount of micro-managing and mindless paperwork has increase so much over the last two years that it has me dreading a return. I'm left in a stressful quandary:

  • stay at the school where I have a reputation, where I am (by administration's own admission) the most frequently-requested teacher and put up with the increasing fiddling in every single decision I make while taking a little bit of comfort in the fact that that reputation serves as a bit of a buffer as I push back, or
  • move to a new school (preferably a high school -- I think all middle schools in the county are under the same micro-management stress: it comes from the district) where I am an unknown with no capital and no reputation, where it might in fact be even worse.

It's a difficult decision that I'll have to make very soon, and it entails a conversation with my school's administration that I don't really anticipate gleefully.

Worry 2

L is still recovering from surgery. It will take a couple of weeks. It's still stressful to us all, though. It's "Worry 2" instead of "Worry 1" because we know it's temporary. She'll recover; she'll be able to breath better; her sinuses won't be giving her constant headaches. So it's a short-term worry -- hence, "Worry 2." But it's our daughter we're worried about: even when it's a seemingly unfounded worry, we can't just shake it off.

Worry 3

We have a leak in our roof. It might be under warranty from the company that replaced our roof a few years ago; it might not be. We won't know until the company comes out and looks at it. But we've been on the list for over a week now. It took them forever to start the work in the first place. I'm not confident we'll see anyone here for a long time.

And it's supposed to start raining tomorrow afternoon and rain through the weekend.

I've got it tarped, but not sufficiently for a heavy rain. The location of the leak and the shape of our roof make it difficult to tarp. And we have no idea how long this will last.

Do we just call another company and take the hit?

Do we call insurance (they suggested calling the company that replaced it in the first place -- a company the insurance adjuster had recommended, for the wrote our current roof)?

Worry 4

We have elected as president a narcissist who's a convicted felon who tried to retain power by overthrowing the democratic process, a man who is, in every possible sense of the idea, completely unfit for the office. And some very worrying people will likely have an influence on him. People like Curtis Yarvin:

Yarvin, who considers liberal democracy as a decadent enemy to be dismantled, is intellectually influential on vice president-elect JD Vance and close to several proposed Trump appointees. The aftermath of Trump’s election victory has seen actions and rhetoric from Trump and his lieutenants that closely resemble Yarvin’s public proposals for taking autocratic power in America. (The Guardian)

When Trump takes office in a few weeks, it could conceivably lead to the end of America as we know it. Sure, the Republicans said the same things about Biden, but those fears were based on baseless conspiracy theories and good-old-fashioned hate-mongering. The people surrounding Trump aren't being conspiratorial about anything: they're saying it all aloud. They're not holding their cards close: they've laid them all out with the Project 2025 manifesto and rhetoric people like Yarvin are saying.

Given the post-election period and Trump’s preparation for a return to the White House, Yarvin’s program seems less fanciful then it did in 2021, when he laid it out for Anton.

In the recording of that podcast, Yarvin offers a condensed presentation of his program which he has laid out on Substack and in other venues.

Midway through their conversation, Anton says to Yarvin, “You’re essentially advocating for someone to – age-old move – gain power lawfully through an election, and then exercise it unlawfully”, adding: “What do you think the actual chances of that happening are?”

Yarvin responded: “It wouldn’t be unlawful,” adding: “You’d simply declare a state of emergency in your inaugural address.”

Yarvin continued: “You’d actually have a mandate to do this. Where would that mandate come from? It would come from basically running on it, saying, ‘Hey, this is what we’re going to do.’”

Throughout the 2024 campaign, Trump promised to carry out a wide array of anti-democratic or authoritarian moves, and effectively ran on these promises. Trump has suggested he might declare a state of emergency in response to America’s immigration crisis.

Trump also promised to pursue retribution on individually named antagonists like representative Nancy Pelosi and senator-elect Adam Schiff, and spoke more broadly about dispatching the US military to deal with “the enemy within”.

Later in the recording, Yarvin said that after a hypothetical authoritarian president was inaugurated in January, “you can’t continue to have a Harvard or a New York Times past since perhaps the start of April”. Later expanding on the idea with “the idea that you’re going to be a Caesar and take power and operate with someone else’s Department of Reality in operation is just manifestly absurd.”

“Machiavelli could tell you right away that that’s a stupid idea,” Yarvin added. (The Guardian)

This is, of course, a worry that leaves me thinking, "This is all out of my hands -- I can do nothing about it," and yet. And yet...

So when the holidays are over, it's not just a return to "normal" life. It's that with a few additional stressors (not even all mentioned here) thrown in. We'll get through it all, but it doesn't diminish the stress levels.

Reading

Thursday 07 November 2024

Here in South Carolina, we've grown paranoid about what books students might be reading in school. These books might be exposing our children to horrid ideas that could shake the very foundation of our state, of our country. Ideas like, "Gay people exist." Notions like, "White people in the past did some very bad things to black people." Ideas such as, "Horrible things like sexual assault happen," or "Teens sometimes commit suicide." We aren't quite to the point that the notion that "Jews suffered terribly during World War Two" is controversial, but just give us time!

To prevent students from being exposed to books that might in turn expose them to such awful, harmful notions, South Carolina teachers now have to make a list of every single book, article, poem, Power Point presentation, Excel spreadsheet, Google Doc, video clip, painting, sculpture, and any other artifact we haven't thought yet to add to that list. The list is to be available to anyone (not just any parent of a student in that class; to anyone in the state) so that if anyone has a problem with those materials, they can lodge a formal complaint and work to have that material banned. It's not just that parents of students in a given classroom can do this; anyone can protest a book, even if they don't have children in the school in question. Or children at all.

It's a wonderful time to be an English teacher in South Carolina.

Recently, parents presented three books to be banned. This happened at the State School Board office (none of those positions on the board are elected positions -- they're all appointees from the governor) at 11:00 a.m. on a Thursday. A great time to have an open discussion about the merits of this or that book.

The first book they were considering banning was To Kill a Mockingbird. This is not because of the growing complaint that it presents a skewed view of the African American experience by making it a story of "a white man saves the day!" It's always been curious to me how we could tell that story without the defense lawyer being a white man: African American lawyers deep in the Jim Crow South were not exactly that numerous. But that was not the potential-book-banner's complaint. The complaint is the sexual assault that occurs in the book. Except that it doesn't occur. And that's the whole point of the book. Still, they made their case before the board.

The second book that some wanted banned was Romeo and Juliet. This was due to the supposed sexual content and the suicide at the end. It is of course silly to suggest that he book in any way promotes suicide, but that was the complaint.

I was anxious about this: These two selections represent the majority of my second-semester work with my honors students. "They are banned, I have no second semester," I told anyone who'd listen. I decided if they got banned, I'd just do Lord of the Flies instead of Mockingbird. It's already on our vetted list for our school. (That's another joy: all novels we read in school must be vetted. Who does the vetting? The school district that recommends it? No -- teachers who are told to teach it. "That way," they cleverly explained, "if it gets challenged in one school, it's not necessarily challenged everywhere." I just think they wanted us to do their job for them.) As for Shakespeare, I thought I'd do a greatest hits type unit: I can teach excerpts without the vetting process (though I do still have to list it on my "List of things you might get nervous about" document).

The third book was one that I've never taught because our district reserves it for senior year in high school: 1984. That's right: they wanted to limit access to a book about a totalitarian regime that limited access to information. That's ironic enough, but one of the reasons someone protested was because -- you're probably not ready for this level of complete and utter ignorance -- it's pro-communist. That's right: 1984, banned in the Communist Soviet Union, is pro-communist. "Tell me you've never read the book without telling me you've never read the book," was the common response among English teachers in our school.

In the end, though, the board was reasonable and declined to ban any of those books. And I can't believe I just used the word "reasonable" to describe a very basic tenet at the foundation of our constitution.

But it is a temporary victory: those board members can be replaced, and as previously explained, they're not elected. They're appointed. And given South Carolinians’ current MAGA-happy political orgasm (a very deliberate word choice: you did see the footage of Trump simulating fellatio with a microphone stand at one of his final rallies, didn't you?), members of that board are likely to be increasingly conspiratorially minded and less reasonable with each appointment.

It's a wonderful time to be an English teacher in South Carolina.

Name-Calling GOP

Friday 13 September 2024

I was looking through old posts in the "random post" widget the other evening before heading to bed, and I saw this from 2008.

Playground Politics

Sixteen years later, and nothing has changed.

Maybe immaturity is just a GOP thing?

Signs 2

Thursday 18 July 2024

During our trips to Florida this summer, I noticed several interesting billboards. Many of them were theological; one was political:

Stolen elections have catastrophic consequences

This notion is perhaps the most loaded statement I've read in recent memory. It's certainly the most terrifying.

From the perspective of those who financed the billboard it is a statement about the 2020 election and the ever-persistent myth that somehow the Democrats committed election fraud. The complete lack of evidence for this is no matter: those who hold this view simply acknowledge non-facts as evidence. Those of us firmly grounded in reality are simply and willfully ignorant.

But just what are those catastrophic consequences? Again, from their perspective, it's multifaceted. First, there's simply the idea that an unelected individual is currently holding the nation's highest office. Were that true, it would be catastrophic. But there's a second notion hiding in that statement: what are people who believe this -- in their own eyes, good and God-fearing patriots, one and all -- to do about it? A recent article in Newsweek points out that there are renewed calls from the far right for civil war:

[Trump's post on Truth Social] warning that 2024 will be the new 1776 is in line with other threats of looming civil wars in the U.S. made by Trump supporters following the New York jury verdict on Thursday which found the former president guilty on all 34 counts of falsifying business records in a criminal hush-money trial.

Newsweek

In Boston University's BU Today, staff members write,

A recent Washington Post headline says: “In America, talk turns to something not spoken of for 150 years: Civil war.” The story references, among others, Stanford University historian Victor Davis Hanson, who asked in a National Review essay last summer: “How, when, and why has the United States now arrived at the brink of a veritable civil war?” Another Washington Post story reports how Iowa Republican Congressman Steve King recently posted a meme warning that red states have “8 trillion bullets” in the event of a civil war. And a poll conducted last June by Rasmussen Reports found that 31 percent of probable US voters surveyed believe “it’s likely that the United States will experience a second civil war sometime in the next five years.”

BU Today

The billboard, then, suggests to informed drivers that a civil war might be the necessary outcome of such Democratic duplicity.

The attempted assassination of Trump will only add to this.

What politicians need to be doing now is talking us back from this brink. Biden and the Democrats seem to be doing this. What will Trump do? Will he try to quell this anger or will he stoke it? I don't think there's any doubt about how the man will react.

Those of us who warned friends and family around us who supported Trump in 2016 that he is a dangerous man continually feel more vindicated, but right now, I'd rather be proved wrong.

Major Announcement

Wednesday 14 December 2022

Trump is set to make "a major announcement" tomorrow. "America needs a superhero," he declares in his announcement of the coming announcement. He's already said he's running for president again. All of us with any sense realize a second Trump term is the worst possible thing for our country. What could it be? Is he re-announcing because the first announcement was such a flop?

And what the hell is up with the imagery in this clip?