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Oklahoma woman files lawsuit against Narconon Arrowhead

November 2, 2018, 12:41 pm
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Wichita Eagle
Associated Press
October 30, 2018

An Oklahoma woman has filed a lawsuit alleging a drug rehab center linked to the Church of Scientology breached its contract.

Attorneys for Sefika Talic filed the petition Friday at the Pittsburg County Courthouse, The McAlester News-Capital reported . The lawsuit was filed against Narconon International, along with its flagship rehabilitation center, Narconon Arrowhead, and parent company Association for Better Living and Education. The association is owned by the Church of Scientology.

Narconon Arrowhead is a 200-bed facility near the tiny town of Canadian that promotes substance abuse treatment theories by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. The lawsuit alleges Talic was persuaded to enroll her son in a three-month program at the facility in 2016 for $32,500 through "misrepresentations, lies, deceit, and fraud."

The organizations have yet to file written responses to the allegations.

Talic alleges her son was forced to read literature that promoted Scientology, went through "bizarre punishments" as part of treatment and experienced physical and mental anguish from the facility's treatment. Talic withdrew her son from the program after three weeks "in fear of his health," the filing said.

The lawsuit also alleges the facility didn't have certified medical personnel. Talic is seeking damages between $10,000 and $75,000.

"The conduct of the defendants was in reckless disregard for the rights of the plaintiff. The defendants were aware, or did not care, that there was a substantial or unnecessary risk that their conduct would cause serious injuries to others," the lawsuit said.

Narconon Arrowhead has operated under scrutiny following four patient deaths in recent years. Oklahoma enacted Stacy's Law in 2013 after 20-year old Stacy Dawn Murphy died at the Narconon Arrowhead facility of an accidental drug overdose a year earlier. The law is intended to provide more oversight of drug and alcohol rehab centers.

Numerous lawsuits have been filed against the center, and Narconon Arrowhead has settled many of them under confidential terms.

https://www.kansas.com/news/article220838705.html
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(Cult)ivating Understanding

November 2, 2018, 12:52 pm
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What cults can teach us about the need for belonging
Keating Reid, Opinion Editor
McGill Tribune
October 30, 2018

Along with serial killers and Cold War conspiracy theories, few topics reliably elicit as much morbid fascination as cults. There’s a near compulsive readability to the Wikipedia entries for Jonestown, the Manson Family, and the Branch Davidians that, as far as midterm procrastination is concerned, can’t be substituted for more wholesome online histories. While their stories each combine a measure of conspiracy and murder, part of the allure of researching cults is the processes of indoctrination their members undergo. The actions of cult members make headlines, but the motivations behind joining such groups remain obscure.

If loneliness constitutes vulnerability to cults, university campuses are by no means safe havens from feelings of isolation. And of course, if one considers the average McGill student obtaining a vague degree en route to a vague future occupation, there’s something undeniably fascinating about the clarity of purpose exhibited by cult members.

In spite of these potential draws, cults are surrounded by a remarkably-durable mythos. The popular idea of a cult—a group of mesmerized followers, preyed upon by a preternaturally-persuasive leader—masks an even more uncomfortable reality: It doesn’t require ‘brainwashing’ for people to act in ways that outsiders find unthinkable.

Among the most unsettling cult histories bound for cable miniseries fame is that of the Branch Davidians, an apocalyptic Christian group led by David Koresh, whose two-month standoff with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) in 1993 was a flashpoint for cults’ prominent bearing in North American consciousness. The violent affair began with the ATF’s attempted execution of a search warrant at the Mount Carmel Centre ranch on Feb. 28. It remains unknown which side fired the first shot, but on Apr. 19, 50 days after the standoff began, the ATF made their final assault. Seventy-two Branch Davidians died in the chaos that ensued, including Koresh.

Though the Branch Davidians are a more recent example, no group has contributed more to the popular imagination of cults than Peoples Temple and its leader, Jim Jones. Jones started Peoples Temple in 1955, preaching an eccentric blend of pentecostal Christianity and Marxism. In 1977, facing allegations of physical abuse and fraud, Jones and several hundred Peoples Temple members fled the United States to establish a community in Guyana. When California Congressman Leo Ryan visited Jonestown in 1978 to investigate allegations of abuse, Jones ordered his security forces to kill Ryan before instructing the Temple’s members to commit mass suicide. Armed guards distributed fruit juice spiked with cyanide. Most members drank it. On Nov. 18, 1978, 909 people died, the highest single-day death toll for Americans until Sept. 11, 2001.

Decades before the Branch Davidians, the 909 deaths in Guyana horrified the United States. It was not just the huge death toll that made the Jonestown massacre so chilling; that one man could convince hundreds to commit suicide was unfathomable. The events stoked a prevalent Cold War anxiety: Mind control.

In the paranoid Cold War era, the idea of villainous Marxists brainwashing Americans was stewing in pop culture well before Jonestown. Over the course of the Korean War, thousands of American prisoners of war petitioned the government to cease the conflict, and 23 even refused repatriation. The appeal of communism eluded American officials, and a series of outlandish confessions obtained from captured American soldiers spurred suspicion of the North Koreans’ use of mind control tactics. The growing hysteria provided the fuel for the horrific MKUltra experiments that were conducted at McGill and elsewhere. Deviations from American ideological norms were censored at an unprecedented rate in the 20th century, and the politics of paranoia provided the basis for the attempted development of real psychological warfare.

The appeal of explaining subversive behaviour through brainwashing is that it draws a clear line between the ‘afflicted’ and everyday individuals, refuting the implication that we, in our normal mental states, are vulnerable to exploitation. The mind control explanation for cult behaviour risks obscuring the more pressing question of what these groups provide their members, as well as the power of less fantastical mechanisms of behaviour-shifting. According to Mike Kropveld, director of Info-Cult, sensational explanations like mind control underestimate the power of simple social pressure. Kropveld spoke with The McGill Tribune in Info-Cult’s office, located in Montreal’s Mile End.

“Some people like this brainwashing imagery, just because it tends to convey a simplistic formula,” Kropveld said. “At the same time, for some people, it also gives them the sense that ‘I’m not really responsible, I was brainwashed.’ Now what some people [think is] going on are ‘techniques of influence,’ which I lean toward, as well as socialization. I think sometimes [these are] not given credence, just because they don’t have that magical energy.”

Founded nearly 40 years ago, Kropveld’s group researches alleged cults—though Kropveld has reservations about the word given the gravity of its connotations and its broad scope of definition—and provides support services to former members. In 1980, students from Hillel McGill founded Cult Project, Info-Cult’s predecessing group, in response to the Jonestown massacre. It set out with the purpose of investigating young people’s specific susceptibility to groups like Jones’. Today, it is the only group of its kind in Canada.

Socialization—the process by which new members change their behaviour to conform to the norms of a group—can account for much of how group membership affects individual behaviour. Members adopt new ways of seeing the world by osmosis, and while it’s not the mind control seen in movies like The Manchurian Candidate or Zoolander, it can shape and limit how members make life decisions.

“[Socialization] is different,” Kropveld said. “The group doesn’t force you, it leads you […] down a certain path, but they’re only giving you one path to walk down. You’ve got choices, but you don’t have many options.”

The Branch Davidian tragedy at Waco points to a failure of the brainwashing theory for addressing the realities of extremist groups. Rick Ross, the self-described ‘cult expert’ and ‘deprogrammer’ consulted by the FBI during the siege, conceived of Koresh’s followers as victims of mental capture, rather than true believers in Koresh’s apocalyptic prophecies. Ross suggested that the FBI aggressively criticize Koresh’s personal shortcomings to break his brainwashing spell over his followers, which would lead the Davidians to surrender. The tactic proved totally ineffective. Ross failed to consider that the group, abusive as it was to many members, for others, fulfilled fundamental emotional needs; or that, even after the supposed end to the Cold War two years prior, his apocalyptic readings of the Bible might be intellectually persuasive. Members of the group were not forced or tricked into believing Koresh’s radical, apocalyptic reading of Christianity; they were drawn to it.

“The need to believe and the need to belong in something are very important, which can lead some people to get involved in groups that [have…] very closed and very extreme, simplistic views of the world and how people should be treated,” Kropveld said.

The needs to believe and belong can also inform an understanding of Peoples Temple. Racial segregation shut Black Americans out of civic life in late-‘50s Indiana. Jones was radically anti-racist for his time, railing against the evils of Jim Crow from the pulpit. He heavily recruited from Indianapolis’ black community and, importantly, he knew how to talk to politicians.

“White leaders continued agreeing to meet whenever black ministers asked, and, afterward, nothing changed—except when Jim Jones was involved,” Jeff Guinn wrote in his nonfiction account of the Peoples Temple, The Road to Jonestown. “White officials came to Peoples Temple and followed through on promises made there about minor issues like pothole repair or more up-to-date school textbooks, perhaps, but such things were significant compared to the complete failure of black ministers to get anything at all for their congregants [….] Far from mistrusting [Jones] because of his race, they considered it an advantage. He preached like a black man and got things done like a white one.”

Jones wasn’t just a charismatic leader or a con man—he provided meaningful support for people with legitimate needs. This was the key to his success: Jones identified a vulnerability and exploited it to his own ends. Imagining members as brainwashed automatons glosses over the fundamental reasons why groups like Peoples Temple exist.

CBC Radio One’s podcast Uncover: Escaping NXIVM explores the thorny nuances of why people join such groups. The series focuses on Sarah Edmondson, a former member of the self-help group and alleged sex-cult NXIVM. The group made headlines last year when The New York Times published an interview with Edmondson in which she recounted her experiences as a high-level NXIVM member. She was one of a select few NXIVM members invited to join Dominus Obsequious Sororium// (DOS), an all-female subgroup within NXIVM, whose rituals involved being branded with NXIVM founder Keith Raniere’s initials. Uncover follows Edmondson’s process of leaving the group behind, both physically and psychologically.

Josh Bloch, the show’s host, spoke to the Tribune about the fraught nature of ascribing blame in NXIVM’s nebulous and unusual world.

“It was really frustrating how people would jump to conclusions about people’s intentions or roles in the group,” Bloch said. “As a team, we would certainly debate stuff, change our minds, and learn new information [that] would take us off on a whole other course [….] If everything was too cut-and-dry, it might lack the nuance and the complexity that’s necessary when you’re doing a deep dive and a deep investigation. You should end up in messy places.”

Brainwashing explanations lack this nuanced approach. CBC’s podcast looks past the worn stereotype of cult members as glassy-eyed robots: When Edmondson discovered NXIVM, she was a motivated go-getter working as an actress in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Uncover dives into what NXIVM provided for Edmondson. NXIVM preached self-improvement as a vehicle to change the world. If their message reached a critical mass of followers, they claimed, it could usher in a new era of enlightened, compassionate thought.

“When there’s chaos and you feel like you want to make the world a better place, when somebody offers you that opportunity, it makes sense,” Kathleen Goldhar, one of the show’s producers, said in an interview with the Tribune. “It’s the same reason [why] I give to the women’s shelter in my community, because I want to do something for a cause that I feel like matters. They found people [for whom] that’s a high priority, and they convinced them that trickle-down humanitarianism made sense.”

The mixture of noble goals and life-shattering results makes Edmondson’s culpability a knotty issue. She was a high-ranking member, and a true believer in NXIVM. Like Bloch, Goldhar emphasized the importance of avoiding any pretenses to certainty. People and their motivations are too complex to draw any bright lines between victim and perpetrator.

"I think what I’ve figured out [is that] the reason [that] cults exist is the reason that religion exists, that groups exist, that political parties exist. It’s because we want to belong, and it’s just a stronger, more manipulative way of making people feel like they belong."

“The truth is, we never came to any final decisions about anybody. I never figured out Sarah fully [and] I never figured out Keith fully,” said Goldhar. “I think what I’ve figured out [is that] the reason [that] cults exist is the reason that religion exists, that groups exist, that political parties exist. It’s because we want to belong, and it’s just a stronger, more manipulative way of making people feel like they belong.”

For members, cults seem to fill the gaps of normative membership in society. Leaders prey upon the discontent and the lonely and provide them with a sense of belonging. As the overflowing registry at McGill Mental Health can testify, the typical McGill student is no stranger to feelings of displeasure and alienation. In providing a reassuring sense of community and purpose, cults hold a specific appeal for young adults. There are serious problems in the systems we inhabit, and, though enrolling in a cult is frequently a path to exploitation, examining their appeal can help illuminate these existing problems. In almost every case, however, these groups provide something lacking from conventional societal membership. Othering cult members as ‘brainwashed’ neglects to consider what exactly these groups are providing that society isn’t. As far as membership is concerned, Kropveld holds one hard and fast rule:


“Beware of anyone with easy answers.”

http://www.mcgilltribune.com/cultivating-understanding/
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CultNEWS101 Articles: 11/3-4/2018

November 2, 2018, 9:00 pm
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MLM, LuLaRoe, Amway, Mary Kay, Universal Medicine, Australia, Legal, Scientology, Germany, NXIVM, Transcendental Meditation, Taipan, 40th Anniversary Jones Memorial Events

"... Most MLM salespeople don’t make a ton of money — a 2017 report by the Consumer Awareness Institute found that 99 percent of MLM sellers actually lose money. The website Magnifymoney recently polled 1,049 MLM sellers across various companies and found that most sellers make less than the equivalent of 70 cents an hour. Nearly 20 percent of those polled never made a sale, and nearly 60 percent earned less than $500 in sales over the past five years.

This is a far cry from the success stories promoted by most multilevel marketing companies. To see how accurate the survey was, I talked to seven current and former MLM sellers about their experiences. They worked for 10 companies in total, including LuLaRoe, Amway, and Mary Kay. Some made thousands of dollars a month, a few managed to break even, and some ended up losing money. Some gave up on MLMs entirely after one experience; others hopped from one company to the next."
"FRESH warnings about a former tennis coach who preaches eating only foods with good “vibrational” values and recommends “treatments” such as esoteric breast massages have been issued after a court found he was running a “socially harmful cult”."

NY Times: 
"The following events are scheduled to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the deaths in Jonestown. 

November 7, at 6 p.m. 
In commemoration of the 40th anniversary of Jonestown, California Historical Society will present an evening public program on November 7th beginning at 6 p.m. about the complex ways Peoples Temple was interconnected and influenced by social, cultural, and political movements during its existence. Historians, thinkers, and survivors will come together to discuss how moments and movements of the 20th century, in California and beyond, effected and influenced Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple movement, and Jonestown. Speakers include Professor Russel Rickford, Professor Natalie Hopkinson, and Captain Yulanda Williams. It will be moderated by USF Professor James Lance Taylor.
The California Historical Society
678 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA 94105

November 18, at 11:00 a.m.: Memorial Service organized by Dr. Jynona Norwood, Cherishing the Children Foundation at Evergreen Cemetery, 6450 Camden Street, Oakland, CA 94605.

News, Education, Intervention, Recovery

Intervention101.comto help families and friends understand and effectively respond to the complexity of a loved one's cult involvement.
CultRecovery101.comassists group members and their families make the sometimes difficult transition from coercion to renewed individual choice.
CultNEWS101.com news, links, resources.
Cults101.orgresources about cults, cultic groups, abusive relationships, movements, religions, political organizations and related topics.

Selection of articles for CultNEWS101 does not mean that Patrick Ryan or Joseph Kelly agree with the content. We provide information from many points of view in order to promote dialogue.
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Psychic Healer Threatened To Kill Clients

November 4, 2018, 1:41 pm
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Psychic Healer Threatened To Kill Clients
Sam
Conspiracy Talk
November 2, 2018

A woman advertising her services as a ‘psychic healer’ has been threatening to kill her clients and forcing them to hand over large amounts of cash. The psychic also said she would harm their families if her victims did not bow to her demands.

The fake psychic healer has been named as thirty-seven-year-old Deborah Montes from Houston. She had been advertising her services as ‘Senora Diana’ on local radio for some time. It was through one of these advertisements that Montes’ victim contacted her.

Scammed Victim Approached Fake Psychic Because Of Health Problems


The unnamed client approached Montes as he was having health problems. Montes acknowledged his issues and said that she could cure him. The first step would be for him to withdraw all his money from his bank account and into hers, so that it could be ‘cleansed’.

Next, Montes ‘forced’ her victim to go to HUBLOT – which is a luxury watch store in the Galleria – and purchase two luxury watches for her. He was also persuaded to buy her luxury shoes from Saks Fifth Avenue. In total, the conned client was forced to shell out over $40,000.

Psychic Reading Fraud Threatened To Kill Victim If He Approached Police


When the victim pushed back and threatened to head to the police, Montes warned him that she would kill him and his family. She claimed to have relatives whom were drug dealers, and a brother who worked for Immigrations and Custom Enforcement (ICE).

Since Montes’ arrest, another person has come forward and told police that they too were duped by her. They were told that $6,000 of theirs needed cleansing and when they asked for it back, they were threatened. Police expect others to tell similar stories.

Via her defence attorney, Montes claimed that all reports against her are false, and that she is the victim of a conspiracy orchestrated by her psychic rivals.


https://www.conspiracytalk.info/psychic-healer-threatened-to-kill-clients/98112915/
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Consumers need protecting from UM: Health experts

November 4, 2018, 1:47 pm
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JASMINE BURKE
The Northern Star
November 1, 2018

IN THE wake of the defamation case involving Lismore-based Universal Medicine, members of Friends Of Science In Medicine said the organisation was considering firing a complaint to the Health Care Complaints Commission (HCCC) in order to "protect consumers” against illegitimate claims by the "non-scientific” based service.

A NSW Supreme Court jury recently found in a defamation case against blogger Esther Rockett, that UM leader Serge Benhayon was the "leader of a socially harmful cult”.

FSM president and UNSW Emeritus Professor John Dwyer said: "As the judgment came down in the court case the obvious thing for me as a president in Friends Of Science In Medicine...was to say Serge Benhayon and his acolytes should not be allowed to offer clinical services to patients for money given the criticism and the total demolition of any credibility as legitimate dealers.”

"The question is 'How can consumers be protected further from the harm the jury agreed this cult was doing?', and I think for non-registered health practitioners the instrument we have in NSW is the HCCC (Health Care Complaints Commission).

"My suggestion and feeling is they would be the first port of call to look into this and study carefully what happened in the court case and to decide whether a prohibition order should be issued to Benhayon to stop offering clinical services. If that was the case that would be extended to the acolytes he has trained.”

Prof Dwyer said concern lay with vulnerable people, especially those with "nasty illnesses”.

"My bottom line is having heard all the information on the totally unacceptable care being offered, the next step is protecting consumers from this group.”

The Northern Star has contacted HCCC and UM but neither responded before deadline.

Health Professionals Reform Association (HPARA) also noted the findings of the recent case in the NSW Supreme Court and chairman and director John Stokes said: "Any other provided health care and especially any care that is based on a mystical understanding of energy, spirits and any strange modalities of healing does not deserve acceptance and definitely does not deserve to be worthy of recognition”.

The directors of HPARA are science-based health professionals who represent HPARA members registered with the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA).

"Some members of Universal Medicine, an organisation unknown to HPARA at the time, joined the membership of HPARA, became for a short period involved in HPARA's committee structure and also became involved at HPARA national meetings,” Mr Stokes said.

He said it was their view that all health care needs to be scientifically based.

"Several of these members of Universal Medicine were registered with AHPRA.

"When these facts became known to HPARA the directors of HPARA used its constitution to ensure that HPARA concentrated on the aim for reform and remained a separate independent entity with no links at all to Universal Medicine.

"There were never any members of Universal Medicine on the HPARA Board and no current directors are members or have been members of Universal Medicine.

"All directors are foundation members of HPARA. Our committee structure has no members of Universal Medicine.
"We believe there are no members of HPARA who belong to Universal Medicine. Those that we knew to be, or we believed were members of Universal Medicine have not renewed membership of HPARA.

"All suspect and bizarre claims should be subject to rigid scientific analysis and query. Belief is not science. Healthy scepticism is our society's protection from such false prophets.

"HPARA remains steadfast in its intent to have true reform of registration and regulation by AHPRA so that all health professionals enjoy the right to procedural fairness, assumption of innocence, and prompt examination and resolution of notifications.

"The process of undergoing an examination of a notification to AHPRA should be conducted in a non- threatening and a just manner. Dishonest notifications should be considered
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Universal Medicine follower's daughter hopes jury verdict stops 'dangerous cult' recruitment

November 4, 2018, 2:02 pm
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PHOTO: Sarah McIntyre's mother Judith died from cancer in 2014. (Supplied)
Josh Robertson
ABC
November 4, 2018

VIDEO: Judith McIntyre being interviewed by Universal Medicine (ABC News)

A neuroscientist who tried in vain to claw back part of her mother's dying gift of $1.4 million to an unproven spiritual healer says she has been vindicated by a jury verdict that the breast cancer victim was exploited by a "socially dangerous cult".

Key points:
  • Breast cancer victim Judith McIntyre gave $1.4 million to Universal Medicine leader before she died
  • Her daughter Sarah unsuccessfully challenged the will in a Sydney court
  • She hopes the jury's findings its leader "swindles cancer patients" will stop new members joining
  • While Sarah McIntyre hopes the damning findings stop Universal Medicine (UM) founder Serge Benhayon from recruiting new followers, his group continues to charge breast cancer patients to attend "healing retreats" in a venue built with her mother's money.
A leading Australian medical school also retains links to UM despite a Supreme Court jury in Sydney last month finding its leader is a "charlatan who makes fraudulent medical claims" and "swindles cancer patients".
The University of Queensland medical faculty includes two associate lecturers and a health researcher who have endorsed UM, with the researcher — Christoph Schnelle — embroiled in an academic misconduct investigation that has run for more than six months.

Mr Schnelle was Judith McIntyre's financial planner and one of a number of UM followers involved with her before she died in 2014.

Others included her nurse, the witness to her will, the lawyer who drafted it and its executor.

There is no suggestion that Mr Schnelle persuaded Mrs McIntyre to give money to Mr Benhayon.

Sarah McIntyre and her brother Seth in 2015 unsuccessfully challenged the will, which left $600,000 — most of their mother's estate — to Mr Benhayon, in addition to $800,000 he received from Judith McIntyre a month before she died.

Mr Benhayon is a former bankrupt tennis coach who claims to be the reincarnation of Leonardo da Vinci and turned UM into a $2-million-a-year business.

His defamation lawsuit against a blogger backfired last month when a jury found 38 imputations to be true, including that he exercised "undue influence" on Judith McIntyre to inherit the bulk of her $1.1 million estate.

Sarah McIntyre told the ABC from Sweden, where she researches neuroscience, that the verdict was "vindicating because we felt we weren't able to make that argument ourselves".

"We sought advice from two different law firms and both of them said they would not be willing to take the case if we tried to argue it was undue influence," she said.

"Basically the reason that they gave us is that it is extremely hard to prove."

Instead their lawyers argued the $250,000 they each received did not adequately provide for them.

The judge, who viewed a video interview with Judith McIntyre made by another UM follower before her death, disagreed.

"I don't want to seem ungrateful, I realise a lot of people have a lot less," Sarah McIntyre said.

"[But] Serge Benhayon has a lot of money already and he's just used this to enrich his cult.

"Even if he actually used the money for what my mother wanted, I don't think that was a good way for the money to be spent in the world.

"I don't think Universal Medicine is a good organisation."

Mr Benhayon used $800,000 to build the "Hall of Ageless Wisdom" on one of his multimillion-dollar properties, where a $60-per-person "breast cancer care retreat" was held on Sunday.

 
An organiser did not respond for comment.

Distinguished medical professor John Dwyer, who gave expert testimony in the defamation case, said Judith McIntyre's donation was "in good faith" but had "enabled Universal Medicine to spread its dangerous nonsense even further".

"Here we have people whose view about cancer and breast cancer in particular is that it's caused by a lack of self-love, often compounded by sins in a previous life," he said.

"To think that that money's been used to promote such ideas and to call women together who may have had breast cancer, or who have a relative who's had breast cancer, and put forward these nonsense ideas is very unfortunate."

Professor Dwyer said the court findings about UM should have been a "catalyst in stirring [UQ] up and making them realise they were dealing with a serious situation" in its medical faculty.

"Six months on and they're still investigating it? I've been in academic medicine all my life. It should've taken no more than a few weeks," he said.

"All of those associates of Universal Medicine who are trying to gather academic credibility for the program should be stopped from publishing in peer reviewed papers and spreading the message of Universal Medicine, which has been so obviously revealed to be a sham.

"If a university is any way supporting the spread of this pseudo-science, that's reprehensible."

UQ pro-vice-chancellor of research Mark Blows said the investigation was "nearing completion".

Health researcher Christoph Schnelle declined to comment.

In September, the Supreme Court in Sydney heard Mr Benhayon taught followers their "kidney energy" could be harmed in their next life if their children misspent their inheritance, or if they set conditions on donations to Universal Medicine.

Mr Benhayon said "no comment" and hung up when contacted by the ABC.

Sarah McIntyre said she and her brother had "moved on with our lives and we're not going to get that money and we've made our peace with that".

But she said she hoped "more people know about it and that makes [Mr Benhayon's] life more difficult".

She sympathised with her mother's search for spirituality but found it "incredibly frustrating" as a scientist to see her fall under the sway of "teachings that are not just false but nonsensical".

Her mother, who had studied and loved literature, dumped her entire book collection because it clashed with Mr Benhayon's teachings, and filled her house with his books, she said.

She would switch off Sarah's music in the car and insisted her brother, a musician, spend her cash birthday gift on groceries instead of new drums because Mr Benhayon taught that non-UM music had negative energy, Ms McIntyre said.

"It's so easy to get drawn into these sorts of groups.

"They kind of hide the more weird and crazy aspects of the group when you're new to it and they present themselves as very reasonable," she said.

"But if you believe the teachings, you end up following a very strict set of rules, a very strict lifestyle, if you take that on. So my mother — the way she slept and what she ate and who she spent time with.

"It was really tough to see her changing so much as part of that group."

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-11-05/universal-medicine-cult-preyed-on-cancer-victim-jury-finds/10381432
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Potential draftees turning to Jehovah's Witnesses

November 5, 2018, 9:17 am
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Kim Hyun-bin
The Korea Times
November 6, 2018

The Supreme Court's ruling on conscientious objection to military service last week is bringing an "unexpected" side effect ― a growing interest in the Jehovah's Witnesses, a religion whose adherents refuse to perform the mandatory commitment.

Since the top court acquitted Oh Seung-hun, a Jehovah's Witness who refused to serve in the military, Thursday, questions on how to join the religion have been flooding internet portal sites.

In South Korea, all able-bodied men are required to serve in the military for at least 21 months as the country is technically at war with North Korea, but the ruling is believed to have paved the way for conscientious objectors, mostly Jehovah's Witnesses, to legally avoid military service. 

Many people are asking questions to beat the system by using the ruling.

"I am asking in a hurry because I can be exempt from military service. How can I register myself as a Jehovah's Witness?" a person wrote on a website. "Will I be exempt when I show a certificate showing I am a Jehovah's Witness at my military physical exam?"

Another online user also said he welcomed the Supreme Court ruling, hoping he could legitimately avoid military service by joining Jehovah's Witnesses. He later replied that the religion often stations recruiters near subway stations.

A woman also said she wants to raise her future son as a Jehovah's Witness.

In response, some university students who have not yet completed their military duty raise their voices against those trying to exploit the ruling.

"They are selling their conscience and religion to evade their mandatory military service. This is nonsense," a Yonsei University student surnamed Lim said.

On the other hand, Jehovah's Witnesses say there are obligations that need to be fulfilled to be part of the religion including spending 50 hours a week doing missionary work and not celebrating Christmas and other anniversaries. Someone caught violating the terms will have their religious status revoked. 

"There are other countries including Taiwan, where there are no cases of people registering as Jehovah's Witnesses to evade military service," said Park Jun-young, director of public relations for Jehovah's Witnesses. "The thought of more people joining the religion to evade military service is absurd."

http://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.asp?newsIdx=258119

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Disgraced self-help guru out of prison and promoting new book

November 5, 2018, 11:40 am
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James Arthur Ray
MARIA ARCEGA-DUNN
Fox5
October 30, 2018

VIDEO

SAN DIEGO -- He was once known as one of the country’s top self-help experts, but after spending almost two years in prison for the deaths of three people during a sweat lodge retreat gone wrong, James Arthur Ray is now out of prison and beginning a return to public life.

His attempt to rebuild his self-help career is now taking the form of a new book.

"Pain is the mother of all growth," Ray told FOX 5. “It really has been horrific in so many ways, and it’s so painful. And yet I’m incredibly grateful, because I’ve learned so much, I’ve grown so much and it gives me an opportunity to help people in a deeper way than I was ever able to before."

At one time, he was considered one of the country’s leading motivational self-help gurus, earning millions through self-help books and speaking events.

That came to an end when he was sentenced to six years in prison for felony negligence in the October 2009 deaths of three people in a sweat lodge ceremony that went too far.

“It’s been tough. And I understand that other people have been harmed and hurt by it, as well emotionally, as well as three people that lost their lives, and it did happen on my watch," Ray said. "So let me say one more time, I accept absolute responsibility and I always have,”

Ray served less than two years in prison for those deaths. He was released in 2013, and now he is out and talking about a new book.

“It was my lodge. It was my event. It was my choice to do a dangerous activity, and so therefore, as a leader -- which the new book “The Business of Redemption” is all about leadership -- as a leader when something goes wrong in your entrepreneurial business or in your large corporation, there’s one person who is in the cross hairs and one person who is responsible," said Ray.

The family of the victims Kirby Brown, James Shore and Liz Neuman say Ray is nothing but a cult leader responsible for the deaths of their loved ones. They have openly expressed anger at Ray’s attempts at a come back, saying his only care is  making money and they are disgusted by the book.

“I understand. I don’t expect the families to ever forgive me,” said Ray. “I’ve apologized. I've taken absolute responsibility. I’ve paid a tremendous price. I’ve taken care of everything that the law and the government asked me to do. All restitution has been settled. So you know, I’m sorry is not enough. I understand that and I’m not sure what else I could really do.”

When asked what he'd do differently, Ray said in retrospect he wouldn’t have participated in the sweat lodge ceremony, because it affected his judgement and assessment of the situation.

His book, "The Business of Redemption. The Price of Leadership in Both Life and Business," is set to be released early next year.
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What It's Like to Grow Up in a Cult

November 5, 2018, 12:05 pm
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In her new book, To the Moon and Back: A Childhood Under the Influence, Lisa Kohn describes her journey into and out of the infamous Unification Church.

Megan DiTrolio
Marie Claire.
October 31, 2018

Purchase Book

On July 1, 1982, the summer between her freshman and sophomore year of college, Lisa Kohn watched her mother get married. The wedding, held at Madison Square Garden, was not solely her mother's own: Mimi, as Lisa called her, was one half of more than 2,000 couples being wed in a mass ceremony, the pairings handpicked by Reverend Sun Myung Moon, the founder of the Unification Church. Lisa and Mimi were members. They were, as it’s known colloquially, "Moonies."

At this point, Lisa had already started pulling away from the organization that she had been a member of since childhood. But doing so after years of intense indoctrination wasn’t easy. In her new memoir, To the Moon and Back: A Childhood Under the Influence, she tells the tale of joining, living in, and eventually breaking free from what many believe was a cult.

Lisa and other church members.
Lisa and other church members.
Lisa entered the church in 1974 at age 10, a few months after Mimi first heard Reverend Moon preach. Initially, she liked the rigid structure, an escape from the life she had grown accustomed to at home, filled with nudity, drugs, and erratic behavior from her divorced parents.

“By the time my mom brought us to the church, it was a haven for me and for my brother, Robbie” says Lisa, now 55. “Both my parents were hippies. There was lack of structure at home, and my mom had an abusive boyfriend. It was not a safe environment.”

The church felt like asylum for Lisa and her brother, and they quickly began to idolize its leader. Reverend Moon, or “Father” as members called him, founded the church in 1954 in Korea after reportedly having a vision. In the vision, Jesus told Moon that he was crucified before completing his mission on earth and that the only way to erase original sin was to unite all the world's religions. According to the Unification Church's Divine Principle (written by Moon), God sent a second Messiah to Korea in the 1930's to lead this mission. A mission that Moon, who fit the bill, accepted. (Moon died in 2012 at age 92; the church, still active, is now formally called the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, and different sects have splintered off from that main branch. Moon's wife is generally now considered the leader of the Unification Movement.)

Jesus told Moon that he was crucified before completing his mission on earth. Moon accepted the challenge to finish it.

For Mimi, who had dabbled in spirituality and explored different religions her whole life, Moon’s preaching just “made sense,” Lisa claims. The trio would drive to the church's compound in Barrytown, New York, from their home in New Jersey on weekends to listen to Moon's sermons, sitting on a hard floor for hours. Soon Mimi went to work for the church full-time, leaving the kids with their grandfather and later their father, Danny, in a grimy apartment on the Lower East Side. Instead of furniture and toys, the space was filled with parties, baggies of coke, and sketchy men that would “jokingly” offer to buy Lisa, she recalls. Danny would even give his son marijuana—Lisa, being more straight-laced, always refused.

Lisa and Robbie’s only respite was visiting their mother on weekends—the complete opposite of weekdays with their father: At the Unification Church, there were strictly no alcohol, no drugs, no premarital sex, and limited physical contact between genders. Members were expected to live in “monk-like purity;” they made “no choices, no decisions,” according to the New York Times, and rarely had to think for themselves, instead fervently following orders and performing chores.

“In many ways, the church made me feel safer and more comfortable with my mom, and it made me feel more distant and scared of my father,” Lisa says. “I viewed him as evil and satanic. He was Satan trying to win us back.” Lisa and her brother spent their days running around with the “True Children” of the church (the offspring of Reverend Moon and his wife), who were revered at the compound and constantly under the watch of bodyguards. According to Lisa, adults considered it a blessing when the True Children—believed to be without sin—paid them any attention, even if it was negative, like teasing them or hurling stones in their direction.


The Barrytown Unification Church compound where Lisa spent many weekends growing up.
The Barrytown Unification Church compound where
Lisa spent many weekends growing up.

Lisa basked in her newfound family. “When I was in it, it was only good and true for me. It’s only looking back that I can see that it wasn’t,” she says now. She even traveled to Seattle one summer in high school to proselytize, and was Sunburst's (the church's band) number-one fan.

But soon, the pressure to be the perfect follower started to build. And as Lisa got older, her commitment to the church began to waiver. “It was a very difficult, there were very strict guidelines that kept you from the outside world,” she says.

Lisa suppressed her feelings for boys (dating was strictly prohibited), and first began questioning the church’s teachings when she was nearly 17 after attending a summer arts camp, where she made friends who were gay.

My mother kept saying 'you need to convert them or stay away from them.'

“I went to music camp and it was the first time I was ever on my own, not around the church, feeling very scared. Many of my friends were gay; I just remember being terrified and confused. I remember that I loved them and that they were wonderful, but it was a sin. My mother kept saying 'you need to convert them or stay away from them.' For the first time, it started to not make sense. For the first time, it started to crack everything in me.”

By the time her mother’s wedding rolled around two years year—a ceremony that Lisa once dreamed about being a part of herself—she needed out. “I no longer wanted to be there,” she says.


Lisa, Mimi, and Robbie.
Lisa, Mimi, and Robbie.


The choice to step away was not easy. “Leaving was so hard for me because I knew it was still right and I was not strong enough to carry it out,” she says.

Lisa struggled with feeling like a failure, and began on a downward spiral. She entered a string of abusive relationships, started using the drugs that once disgusted her, became anorexic, and even considered jumping from the bridge on her college campus. “My biggest sin was falling, getting involved with a boy, leaving the church,” she thought at the time.

It is only through hindsight, healing, and a 12-step program, that Lisa looks back and recognizes the church for what it is widely considered: a cult.

The healing process is ongoing, but Lisa, who now owns her own leadership consulting firm and is married with two children, looks to the future instead of living in her past. She has a solid yet guarded relationship with both of her parents (her mother eventually left the church), who are supportive of her memoir, and her relationship with her brother (who is also no longer a member) is ironclad.

With the release of her book, she hopes that readers will learn three things: “The first is that extremist beliefs are dangerous. There is nothing more intoxicating than knowing you have the truth. Secondly, I want to give a message of hope. And lastly, that the world needs more self-love, self-compassion, and acceptance of others.”

For Lisa, the decision to move forward, to reclaim her life, has finally helped her feel free.

https://www.marieclaire.com/culture/a23646127/lisa-kohn-unification-church-moonies-memoir/
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Hollywood star Tom Cruise introduced James Packer to Scientology — then they fell out

November 5, 2018, 12:22 pm
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The Price of Fortune: The Untold Story of Being James Packer
IT WAS the movie star Tom Cruise who introduced James Packer to Scientology. What happened after that ruined their close friendship.

Shannon Molloy
news.com.au
October 24, 2018

WHEN his business venture One.Tel ended in spectacular fashion and completely wiped out his personal fortune, billionaire James Packer fled to the United States.

It was 2002 and the son of media magnate Kerry Packer was in the midst of a complete breakdown, due to the very public collapse of the telecommunications company.

In the new biography The Price of Fortune: The Untold Story of Being James Packer, it’s revealed that Packer went to stay with his friend, Hollywood mega star Tom Cruise.

It was the Top Gun actor who introduced the Australian to the controversial Church of Scientology and the practice of dianetics.

The practice is the organisation’s take on treating mental health and Packer and then wife, model Jodhi Meares, were fascinated.

“There are some really insightful ways to view life and handle life, and that is really what Scientology is — particularly if you are going through a difficult time,” Meares told author Damon Kitney.

“It was interesting for me to go and look at Scientology. There was some really interesting stuff there and there were some really great people. It was quite helpful.”

As Packer struggled to cope with his world falling down around him, back at home his father Kerry — a notoriously stern and often fiery figure in his life — was curious about his son’s religious pursuit.

But as the book reveals, the old man received reassurances directly from Cruise himself.

“I went away for a couple of months in 2002 to America to do Scientology courses,” Packer told Kitney.

“I spent a significant amount of time with Tom Cruise and he was incredibly kind and generous to me. And he would actually ring my father … the biggest movie star in the world … would ring up dad and say, ‘James is a good person and he’s getting better.’”

During that dark period, friends of Packer feared he was at risk of taking his life, including former Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett.

“When One.Tel collapsed, I ran into James down at the Capital Golf Course. He was on his own. He was absolutely desolate. He said to me, ‘I feel like a general without an army’,” Kennett revealed.

“Those words have stuck with me. He got into an awful spot then. He was absolutely suicidal at times.”

Packer described Cruise as “as good a friend as a person could hope to have” during that tough part of his life and the pair quickly became inseparable.

When his married to Meares ended, Packer once again turned to his famous mate and Scientology.

Late in 2002, apparently furious at his son’s business failure, his father sold the family’s stake in online auction website eBay without telling anyone.

He pocketed $120 million for the deal, but the business went on to be worth billions. The younger Packer was beside himself.

Their relationship remained strained for many years, until an uncharacteristically “beautiful” call between them in 2005.

The elder Packer told his heir apparent to carve out his own path in life over the course of their one-hour conversation.

“Twenty-four hours later, his doctor rang me and said, ‘Get on a plane, he’s only got 24 hours to live’. I got home and held his hand and he passed.”

At this point, Packer was dating the model Erica Baxter and Cruise was dating actress Katie Holmes, and the two couples were extremely close.

“Most importantly, in 2002 (Cruise) put me back together. He came to dad’s funeral, came to my wedding to Erica, and Erica and I went to his wedding with Katie.”

But as Packer began to drift away from Scientology, his bond with Cruise waned. Apart from a visit in 2009, as his US casino empire fell apart in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, Packer has distanced himself from the organisation.

He and Cruise no longer speak after an abrupt end to their once-close friendship, which Packer had described as being like brothers.

“It’s his choice that we aren’t friends any more,” he told Kitney for the book.
 
James Packer has found a new spiritual adviser,
the maharishi Thom Knoles.

These days, following a highly publicised breakdown this year, Packer has once again turned to spirituality for guidance.

Packer has the maharishi spiritual guru Thom Knoles on speed dial to provide him with advice and alternative therapies to treat his depression.


“He believes in me. He tries to help me manage my emotions and find more happiness,” Packer said.

The Price of Fortune: The Untold Story of Being James Packer is on sale now.

https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/news-life/hollywood-star-tom-cruise-introduced-james-packer-to-scientology-then-they-fell-out/news-story/676548d18803e8a311b700a703dbf563
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U.S. Law Enforcement Failed to See the Threat of White Nationalism Now They Don’t Know How to Stop It.

November 5, 2018, 12:59 pm
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William Fears battling protesters during the Charlottesville rally in 2017. Credit Mark Peterson/Redux
For two decades, domestic counterterrorism strategy has ignored the rising danger of far-right extremism. In the atmosphere of willful indifference, a rulent movement has grown and metastasized.

JANET REITMAN
New York Times Magazine
November 3, 2018

The first indication to Lt. Dan Stout that law enforcement's handling of white supremacy was broken came in September 2017, as he was sitting in an emergency-operations center in Gainesville, Fla., preparing for the onslaught of Hurricane Irma and watching what felt like his thousandth YouTube video of the recent violence in Charlottesville, Va. Jesus Christ, he thought, studying the footage in which crowds of angry men, who had gathered to attend or protest the Unite the Right rally, set upon one another with sticks and flagpole spears and flame throwers and God knows what else. A black man held an aerosol can, igniting the spray, and in retaliation, a white man picked up his gun, pointed it toward the black man and fired it at the ground. The Virginia state troopers, inexplicably, stood by and watched. Stout fixated on this image, wondering what kind of organizational failure had led to the debacle. He had one month to ensure that the same thing didn't happen in Gainesville.

Before that August, Stout, a 24-year veteran of the Gainesville police force, had never heard of Richard Spencer and knew next to nothing about his self-declared alt-right movement, or of their "anti-fascist" archnemesis known as Antifa. Then, on the Monday after deadly violence in Charlottesville, in which a protester was killed when a driver plowed his car into the crowd, Stout learned to his horror that Spencer was planning a speech at the University of Florida. He spent weeks frantically trying to get up to speed, scouring far-right and anti-fascist websites and videos, each click driving him further into despair. Aside from the few white nationalists who had been identified by the media or on Twitter, Stout had no clue who most of these people were, and neither, it seemed, did anyone else in law enforcement.

There were no current intelligence reports he could find on the alt-right, the sometimes-violent fringe movement that embraces white nationalism and a range of racist positions. The state police couldn't offer much insight. Things were equally bleak at the federal level. Whatever the F.B.I. knew (which wasn't a lot, Stout suspected), they weren't sharing. The Department of Homeland Security, which produced regular intelligence and threat assessments for local law enforcement, had only scant material on white supremacists, all of it vague and ultimately not much help. Local politicians, including the governor, were also in the dark. This is like a Bermuda Triangle of intelligence, Stout thought, incredulous. He reached out to their state partners. "So you're telling us that there's nothing? No names we can plug into the automatic license-plate readers? No players with a propensity for violence? No one you have in the system? Nothing?''

One of those coming to Gainesville was William Fears, a 31-year-old from Houston. Fears, who online went by variations of the handle Antagonizer, was one of the most dedicated foot soldiers of the alt-right. Countless YouTube videos had captured his progress over the past year as he made his way from protest to protest across several states, flinging Nazi salutes, setting off smoke bombs and, from time to time, attacking people. Fears was also a felon. He had spent six years in prison for aggravated kidnapping in a case involving his ex-girlfriend, and now he had an active warrant for his arrest, after his new girlfriend accused him of assault less than two weeks earlier. On Oct. 18, the night before the event, Fears and a few others from Houston's white-nationalist scene got in Fears's silver Jeep Patriot for the 14-hour drive. Fears's friend Tyler TenBrink, who pleaded guilty to assault in 2014, posted video from their trip on his Facebook page. There were four men, two of them felons, and two nine-millimeter handguns. "Texans always carry," Fears said later.

Gainesville would be Spencer's first major public appearance since the violence of the Unite the Right rally two months before, and the city, a progressive enclave in the heart of deep-red north Florida, was on edge. Anticipating chaos, Gov. Rick Scott declared a state of emergency — prompting Spencer to tweet out an image of his head making its way across the Atlantic toward Florida: "Hurricane Spencer." A few days before the event, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement sent out a small, bound "threat book" of about 20 or so figures, most of them openly affiliated with Spencer or with anti-fascist groups, which Stout knew from his own research meant they weren't the people to worry about. Anonymous online chatter on sites like 4chan, meanwhile, described armed right-wing militants coming to Gainesville to test Florida's Stand Your Ground law. Stout envisioned 20 white supremacists with long guns. We're screwed, he thought.

By the morning of Oct. 19, a fortress of security, costing the University of Florida and police forces roughly half a million dollars, had been built around the western edge of the 2,000-acre campus and the Phillips Center for the Performing Arts, where Spencer and his entourage arrived that afternoon. More than 1,100 state troopers and local cops stood on alert, with another 500 on standby. There were officers posted on rooftops. Police helicopters buzzed the skies. The Florida National Guard had been activated off-site, and a line of armored vehicles sat in reserve. Hundreds of journalists from around the United States and abroad were in attendance, anticipating another Charlottesville.

Some 2,500 protesters had descended on the small area cordoned off for the event, where they confronted a handful of white supremacists, most of them Spencer groupies like Fears and his friends. "Basically, I'm just fed up with the fact that I'm cisgendered, I'm a white male and I lean right, toward the Republican side, and I get demonized," Colton Fears, Will's 28-year-old brother, who was wearing an SS pin, told HuffPost. TenBrink, also 28, told The Washington Post that he had come to support Spencer because after Charlottesville, where he was seen and photographed, he had been threatened by the "radical left." He seemed agitated by the thousands of protesters. "This is a mess," he told The Gainesville Sun. "It appears that the only answer left is violence, and nobody wants that."

But Will Fears told reporters he came to Gainesville to intimidate the protesters. "It's always been socially acceptable to punch a Nazi, to attack people if they have right-wing political leanings," he said. "We're starting to push back." He went on: "We want to show our teeth a little bit because, you know, we're not to be taken lightly."

The Spencer speech turned out to be a bust, thanks to an audience so determined to drown him out that at one point they erupted in a chant of "Orange! Blue! Orange! Blue!" as if at a Gators football game. Afterward, the crowd left the auditorium and flooded back onto Hull Road, the long avenue leading toward the center of campus. Thousands of protesters surrounded the small group of Spencer acolytes. TenBrink, a sinewy young man wearing a black T-shirt and jeans, was particularly overwhelmed and jumped a barricade to escape the angry crowd. The police put him in handcuffs and escorted him into a parking garage. Then, for reasons that remain unclear, they uncuffed TenBrink and walked him out of the garage and toward the parking lot, and let him go. Neither TenBrink nor his friends were in the threat book.

There are several versions of what happened after TenBrink was released. It was about 5:15 p.m. The Texans drove down Archer Avenue, the broad street bordering the south edge of campus, about a mile from the secured area. A group of protesters were sitting at a bus stop. The men in the Jeep started shouting "Heil Hitler!" according to the police report and several witness statements. "Do you know my friend Heil? Heil Hitler? Get it?" The men started throwing Nazi salutes.

One of the protesters had come to Gainesville armed with a retractable baton. When the Texans began to harass them, he grabbed his baton and struck a window of the S.U.V. "My life and the lives of those around me was at risk," he told the police. Will Fears jumped out. "I'm about to beat this dude up with his own fricking expandable baton," he later recalled.

Suddenly, witnesses said, a man later identified as TenBrink jumped from the vehicle holding a handgun. "Shoot them!" the Texans were heard yelling. TenBrink pointed the gun at the protester.

White supremacists and other far-right extremists have killed far more people since Sept. 11, 2001, than any other category of domestic extremist. The Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism has reported that 71 percent of the extremist-related fatalities in the United States between 2008 and 2017 were committed by members of the far right or white-supremacist movements. Islamic extremists were responsible for just 26 percent. Data compiled by the University of Maryland's Global Terrorism Database shows that the number of terror-related incidents has more than tripled in the United States since 2013, and the number of those killed has quadrupled. In 2017, there were 65 incidents totaling 95 deaths. In a recent analysis of the data by the news site Quartz, roughly 60 percent of those incidents were driven by racist, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic, antigovernment or other right-wing ideologies. Left-wing ideologies, like radical environmentalism, were responsible for 11 attacks. Muslim extremists committed just seven attacks.

These statistics belie the strident rhetoric around "foreign-born" terrorists that the Trump administration has used to drive its anti-immigration agenda. They also raise questions about the United States' counterterrorism strategy, which for nearly two decades has been focused almost exclusively on American and foreign-born jihadists, overshadowing right-wing extremism as a legitimate national-security threat. According to a recent report by the nonpartisan Stimson Center, between 2002 and 2017, the United States spent $2.8 trillion — 16 percent of the overall federal budget — on counterterrorism. Terrorist attacks by Muslim extremists killed 100 people in the United States during that time. Between 2008 and 2017, domestic extremists killed 387 in the United States, according to the 2018 Anti-Defamation League report.

"We're actually seeing all the same phenomena of what was happening with groups like ISIS, same tactics, but no one talks about it because it's far-right extremism," says the national-security strategist P. W. Singer, a senior fellow at the New America think tank. During the first year of the Trump administration, Singer and several other analysts met with a group of senior administration officials about building a counterterrorism strategy that encompassed a wider range of threats. "They only wanted to talk about Muslim extremism," he says. But even before the Trump administration, he says, "we willingly turned the other way on white supremacy because there were real political costs to talking about white supremacy."

In March 2018, a 20-year-old white evangelical Christian named Mark Anthony Conditt laid a series of homemade I.E.D.s around Austin, Tex., in largely minority communities. The bombs killed two African-Americans and injured at least four others over the course of several weeks, terrorizing the city, yet the local authorities preferred to describe Conditt, who committed suicide, as a "very challenged young man." Also last spring, another white man, 28-year-old Benjamin Morrow, blew himself up in his apartment in Beaver Dam, Wis., while apparently constructing a bomb. Federal investigators said Morrow's apartment doubled as a "homemade explosives laboratory." There was a trove of white-supremacist literature in Morrow's home, according to the F.B.I. But local cops, citing Morrow's clean-cut demeanor and standout record as a quality-control manager at a local food-processing plant, made sure to note that just because he had this material didn't mean he was a white supremacist. "He could have been an individual that was doing research," the local police chief said.

In this atmosphere of apparent indifference on the part of government officials and law enforcement, a virulent, and violent, far-right movement has grown and metastasized. To combat it, some officials have suggested prosecuting related crimes through expansion of the government's counterterrorism powers — creating a special "domestic terrorism" statute, for instance, which currently doesn't exist. But a report released on Oct. 31by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School argues that the creation of such a statute could easily be abused to target "protesters and political dissidents instead of terrorists," and that law enforcement already has ample authority to prosecute domestic terrorism: "Congress must require that counterterrorism resource decisions be based on objective evaluations of the physical harm different groups pose to human life, rather than on political considerations that prioritize the safety of some communities over others."

The report also calls out the Justice Department for its "blind spot" when it comes to domestic terrorism and hate crimes, which Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein conceded earlier in the week. During a conference on Oct. 29, Rosenstein said that according to the latest F.B.I. crime report, "88 percent of agencies that provide hate-crimes data to the F.B.I. reported zero hate crimes in 2016." The Justice Department was reviewing the accuracy of the reports, he noted. "Simply because hate crimes are not reported does not mean they are not happening."

In 2016, the latest full year of data available from the F.B.I., more than 6,100 hate-crime incidents were reported, 4,270 of them crimes against people (as opposed to, say, defacing property). And yet only 27 federal hate-crime defendants were prosecuted that year. "The F.B.I. knows how many bank robberies there were last year," says Michael German, an author of the Brennan Center report and a former F.B.I. agent, "but it doesn't know how many white supremacists attacked people, how many they injured or killed."

More concerning to German, though, is that law enforcement seems uninterested in policing the violent far right. During the first year after Donald Trump's election, protests and riots erupted across the country, often involving men with criminal histories who, by definition, were on the law-enforcement radar. During the so-called Battle of Berkeley in March 2017, for instance, a far-right agitator named Kyle Chapman became a hero to the alt-right after he reportedly pummeled an anti-fascist counterprotester with a billy club. Chapman was a 41-year-old who had two previous felony convictions. He proceeded to travel around the country, engaging in violence at other protests, now under the online moniker Based Stickman — a cheerful reference to the Berkeley attacks.

Chapman was one of a number of known white supremacists to align with the Proud Boys, a nationalist men's movement founded in 2016 by the anti-immigrant "Western chauvinist" Gavin McInnes, a founder of Vice Media. There was also the Rise Above Movement (RAM), an alt-right group composed largely of ex-cons, many with ties to Southern California's racist skinhead movement. Over the past two years, each group engaged in violent confrontations with their ideological enemies — a lengthy list including African-Americans, Jews, Muslims, nonwhite immigrants, members of the L.G.B.T. community and the progressive left — and generally escaped punishment. This changed to a degree over the past few weeks when, after a yearlong campaign by journalists at ProPublica and other media outlets, federal prosecutors filed charges against eight members of RAM, including two of its leaders. Similarly, after a pressure campaign on social media, the New York Police Department arrested and charged six members of the Proud Boys in connection with an assault after a speech by McInnes at a Republican club in Manhattan on Oct. 12. On his podcast, McInnes noted that he has "a lot of support" in the N.Y.P.D. (The police commissioner denies this.)

In at least one instance, the police have in fact coordinated with far-right groups. In 2017, a law-enforcement official stationed at a rally in downtown Portland, Ore., turned to a member of a far-right militia group and asked for his assistance in cuffing a left-wing counterprotester, who had been tackled by a Proud Boy.

"This is what public demonstration looks like in an era when white nationalism isn't on the fringes, but on the inside of the political mainstream," says Brian Levin, a former New York City police officer who now leads the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University-San Bernardino. During the run-up to some of last year's major events in places like Charlottesville or Berkeley, he notes, "there was an unending stream of violent themed chatter and an almost choreographed exchange of web threats between antagonists across wide geographic expanses" that earned barely a nod from law enforcement.

During a congressional hearing in the wake of Charlottesville, Christopher Wray, director of the F.B.I., told lawmakers last September that the bureau had "about 1,000" open domestic-terror investigations, roughly the same number of investigations the bureau had open on ISIS. The bureau has not provided information on how many of those investigations pertained to white nationalists or other far-right extremists, as opposed to left-wing or "black-identity extremist" groups, nor whether they are full-blown investigations, preliminary inquiries or "assessments." The F.B.I. has also responded to criticism that it has failed to address hateful or threatening messages on social media. The F.B.I. said in a statement: "The F.B.I. does not and cannot police ideologies under the First Amendment." But looking at prosecutions, German says, "it's clear that many of the people targeted for investigation for allegedly supporting the Islamic State were initially identified because of something they said online."

There are serious civil liberties concerns with any broad surveillance of social media, German says. What's also true, he notes, is that the volume of white-supremacist-related content is overwhelmingly high. "There are relatively few Americans voicing their support for ISIS online. But there are millions of racists, anti-Semites, Islamophobes, homophobes and xenophobes who engage in eliminationist rhetoric about the communities of people they fear and hate every day on social media and radio talk shows. Even if the F.B.I. wanted to monitor this hate speech, they wouldn't have the resources, or any way to distinguish between those who talk and those who act."

Levin believes that the Justice Department could be more flexible in pursuing these groups without violating First Amendment concerns. Just as they do with ISIS supporters, law-enforcement agencies would be within their legal rights to monitor, analyze and share any of the publicly available intelligence on white supremacists or hate groups that suggests violent confrontations. "The problem is not that we rightly scrutinize violent Salafist extremism," Levin says, "but that we do so while materially ignoring domestic white nationalists or those on their fringes who also represent a violent threat."

When we first spoke this August, Levin noted the continued ascendance of the far right, even after many of its members went underground after Charlottesville. "The rocket ship is still twirling," he said. Levin predicted that the next big wave of activity wouldn't be around mega-rallies but around what he calls "aggressive maneuvers" by loners or small cells. A series of violent outbursts in a single week in October made his prediction seem prescient.

In just seven days, a Florida man who lived out of a van plastered with stickers, including one of Hillary Clinton's face in cross hairs, is reported to have sent a series of pipe bombs to at least a dozen of Trump's critics. Two days after the first package appeared, a middle-aged white man, having tried unsuccessfully to break into a black church near Louisville, Ky., reportedly shot and killed two elderly African-Americans at a Kroger. "Whites don't kill whites," the man reportedly told an armed white man who confronted him. Then, at week's end, a man who posted on Gab, the alt-right's preferred social-media site, about a "kike infestation" interrupted services at the Tree of Life synagogue in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, armed with an AR-15-style assault rifle and several handguns; he was charged with murdering 11 people and injuring several more, including police officers. The Anti-Defamation League believed it to be the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in American history.

Law enforcement's inability to reckon with the far right is a problem that goes back generations in this country, and the roots of this current crisis can be traced back more than a decade. With violent political messaging emanating from the White House and echoed throughout the conservative media and social-media landscapes, Levin only expects more attacks. "What we need to worry about is the guy who is riled up by this rhetoric and decides to go out and do something on his own," he told me in August. "We have people who are ticking time bombs."

In April 2009, the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Intelligence and Analysis issued a report warning of a rise in "right-wing extremism." The department is the country's largest law-enforcement body, created after Sept. 11 to prevent and respond to various threats, most specifically those connected to terrorism. While most of its counterterrorism focus has been on preventing Islamist terrorist attacks, the department is also supposed to examine domestic threats, like those coming from violent white supremacists, antigovernment militants and single-issue hate groups, like radical anti-abortion activists.

The author of the report was a senior intelligence analyst named Daryl Johnson, who ran a small Homeland Security domestic-terrorism unit. Two years earlier, in January 2007, Johnson was sitting in his bland second-floor office when he received a call from a contact at the Capitol Police. A first-term Illinois senator named Barack Obama was planning to announce that he was running for president. "Curious if you've heard any threatening chatter," the officer said.

This was the first time Johnson had heard of Obama, and he didn't know about any threats, but that didn't mean there wouldn't be any. Though white-extremist groups had been fairly quiet in the years since Sept. 11, Johnson saw this as a temporary lull. These people never truly went away, he thought; they just needed the right motivation to energize them.

"What do you think's going to happen when the Ku Klux Klan and the neo-Nazis and other white supremacists get wind of this?" the officer asked.

Johnson didn't skip a beat: "I think it's going to be the perfect recruiting and radicalization tool for white supremacy."

At 38, Johnson spoke with the earnestness of an Eagle Scout, which he was. He was also a registered Republican who grew up in a small Mormon community in rural Virginia where millennialism, or end-times theology, was a core concept. During the 1980s, when Johnson was still in high school, far-right separatists took to the Ozarks or to strongholds in rural Idaho, where they stockpiled food and weapons and conducted paramilitary training in preparation for the biblical "last days." Some, like the Aryan Nations, whose members embraced the racist Christian Identity philosophy, spawned domestic terror cells like the Order, which waged a brutal campaign of bombings, armed robberies and murder, culminating with the June 1984 assassination of Alan Berg, the prominent Jewish radio talk-show host who frequently spoke of flushing out the latent anti-Semitism in Denver's conservative community.

Years of law-enforcement investigation and infiltration of right-wing terror groups commenced, and by the early 1990s, many of the movement's most violent members were dead or in jail. But the government standoffs at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Tex., energized a new generation of separatists, Patriot militias — the forerunners of today's antigovernment militia groups — as well as individuals like Timothy McVeigh, who made his way through various antigovernment and racist ideologies and organizations under the radar of law enforcement, before the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

The deaths of 168 people, including 19 children, at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building brought the threat of domestic terrorism by white Americans into stark relief. In the aftermath, the F.B.I. added many more agents to work domestic terrorism cases, and Attorney General Janet Reno created a special task force to investigate domestic terrorism. But by the end of 2001, the dominant business of the F.B.I., as well as every other federal law enforcement body, was international terrorism. Years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the supposed threat posed by Al Qaeda and other Muslim groups continued to drive policy, notably at the Department of Homeland Security, which Johnson, who started his career in Army intelligence, joined in 2005. At the time, he later recalled, he was the only analyst exclusively working on non-Islamic domestic threats. By 2007, he had put together a small team of analysts who began to scour extremist websites and message boards. What they found alarmed them.

The militant far right was enjoying a renaissance, thanks to the internet. Hundreds of militia recruitment and paramilitary training videos had sprung up on YouTube, along with promotions for weapons training and, to Johnson's horror, bomb-making manuals. Between October 2007 and March 2008, Johnson and his unit documented the formation of 45 new antigovernment militia groups, which he saw as highly significant given that before fall 2007, these sorts of groups had been on the decline. Some white-supremacist groups, seizing upon the anti-immigration rhetoric that was then fomenting, created violent video games aimed at exploiting public fear of "illegals" streaming over the border.

By the spring of 2008, Obama's candidacy, just as Johnson predicted, had become a lightning rod for white supremacists and other hate groups. As the campaign moved into its final months, law-enforcement agencies intercepted at least two assassination plots against Obama. Other threats and racist posts flooded the internet, where Johnson's team noticed a sharp increase in membership on Stormfront, the first major white-nationalist website. The site added 32,000 new users within the first three months after Obama's inauguration, nearly double the number it added in 2008.

Johnson and his team compiled their findings into a report, which they were still working on when Obama tapped Janet Napolitano, formerly the governor of Arizona, as the new secretary of Homeland Security. Napolitano "got it" when it came to white supremacy, says Juliette Kayyem, who served as the department's assistant secretary for intergovernmental affairs in 2009 and 2010. While serving as Arizona's attorney general, Napolitano coordinated the investigation of one of Timothy McVeigh's accomplices. Now, concerned that a reinvigorated white-supremacist movement could pose a threat to the country's first African-American president and to citizens, Napolitano began asking her intelligence analysts about a rise in lone-wolf "right-wing extremism," a term commonly used in the counterterrorism world to refer to the radical beliefs of fringe players on the right of the political spectrum.

In March 2009, Johnson says he and a few colleagues from the F.B.I. briefed Napolitano on their findings, theorizing that heightened stress because of the continuing financial crisis, coupled with the election of the first black president, created a "unique driver" for individual radicalization and antigovernment and white-supremacist recruitment. Military veterans, including those returning after multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, might be particularly susceptible candidates, they noted, a prediction based on a 2008 F.B.I. assessment that found 203 individuals with military experience who had joined white-supremacist groups since Sept. 11, 2001. It was a tiny number given the overall United States veteran population, which at the time was close to 24 million. It was also a small percentage of the thousands of white supremacists the F.B.I. estimated were active. But the "prestige" that those with military or tactical skills held within white-supremacist groups made their influence much greater, the F.B.I. argued.

Johnson remembers Napolitano, sitting at the conference table, soberly flipping through the PowerPoint slides and thanking the analysts for the presentation. A few days later, the Department of Homeland Security released its report, "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment," which was distributed across the government and local law-enforcement agencies.

On April 11, 2009, four days after his report was released, Johnson was at home in West Virginia when a PDF of the document was posted on the website of the syndicated conservative radio host Roger Hedgecock. A link to the PDF was also posted on a blog maintained by the Oath Keepers, the antigovernment group composed of numerous law-enforcement officials. "FORWARD THIS TO EVERY AMERICAN!" read the post, which Johnson suspected had been written by a member of the law-enforcement community. "YOU are now a dangerous terrorist according to the Obama administration."

By the next day, news of a "chilling" report from the department was making its way through far-right message boards and the blogosphere, where it was picked apart by conspiracy sites like Infowars, which deemed it evidence of a deep-state plot. More mainstream right-wing pundits like Michelle Malkin considered it, in Malkin's words, an "Obama D.H.S. hit job" on conservatives. Some progressives also had concerns about the report's "dangerously vague and speculative" nature, as a Mother Jones correspondent, James Ridgeway, wrote, warning that "civil libertarians of all stripes" should be nervous and raising the specter of government surveillance.

From the perspective of many people inside the department, the report was "exactly what the department is supposed to do, which is inform and educate our stakeholders about what we see as a threat," Kayyem says. "This was not a political document."

Congressional Republicans, answering to a nascent Tea Party movement and the American Legion, soon took issue with the label "right-wing extremism," which John Boehner, then minority leader of the House, charged was being used by the Department of Homeland Security "to describe American citizens who disagree with the direction Washington Democrats are taking our nation." Boehner was particularly bothered by the report's mention of veterans. "To characterize men and women returning home after defending our country as potential terrorists is offensive and unacceptable," he said in a statement. Several G.O.P. lawmakers called for Napolitano's resignation, as well as that of Johnson, who, in their view, equated conservatives with terrorists.

Johnson was appalled. "I never anticipated such an aggressive, vile backlash," he told me recently. It was puzzling: Just a few months before his April 2009 report was published, the department released an assessment of the cyber threat posed by "left-wing extremists," like the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front. Legislators, the media and the public at large — including progressives — had no objection to that terminology. But the political firestorm over "right-wing extremism" had caused such an uproar that the Department of Homeland Security ultimately avoided using ideological terminology like "right-wing." A few weeks after the report was released, Napolitano formally apologized to veterans, and after intense pressure from veterans' groups, the department withdrew the report.

Afterward, the administration tried to depoliticize the issue. Obama had been elected promising to improve relations with the Muslim world, though this soon provided an opening for conspiracy-minded Republicans like Representative Louie Gohmert, the Texas congressman who once insinuated that Mohamed Elibiary, an adviser to Obama's national-security team, was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. During the Bush administration, the word "terrorism" had become almost synonymous with Islam. Now, as one former policy adviser recalls, "the Obama people were adamant that it couldn't just be about jihadis."

They adopted a new, less ideological lexicon. Terrorism became "violent extremism," which suggested behavior. The administration also came up with a new paradigm of "ideologically motivated violence" that ostensibly could apply to any form of extremism, not just Islamic terrorism. The Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department would develop "countering violent extremism" programs that focused on outreach and community engagement, not warrantless surveillance, though in practice they were still an effort to identify and root out jihadist elements from American Muslim communities, just as they had been during the Bush administration.

At the same time, most of the work exclusively focused on domestic extremism stopped at the Department of Homeland Security. "I blame an entire political apparatus led by Republicans that made calling something 'right-wing extremism' a political statement," says Kayyem, who notes the paradox of G.O.P. leaders' attacking Democrats for refusing to use the phrase "radical Islamic extremism.""They'd say if you can't say it, you can't fight it," she says. "But it cuts both ways. If you're not allowed to say that white supremacy is a form of radicalization, then how are you going to stop it?"

Johnson's 2009 report proved prescient. In February 2011, the Southern Poverty Law Center said that in the previous year, the number of domestic hate groups in the United States had reached more than 1,000 for the first time. The antigovernment Patriot movement gained 300 new groups over the same time period, a jump of over 60 percent. Every sphere of the far right was being energized at the same time. There was also an uptick in so-called lone wolves, who held extremist views but associated with no specific organization. In May 2010, a year after Johnson's report was released, a father and son from Ohio, members of a little-known antigovernment movement called "sovereign citizens," shot and killed two police officers during a traffic stop in West Memphis, Ark. It was the 12th attack or foiled plot by white-extremist "lone wolves" since 2009, almost all of which received little publicity.

The United States attorney from Western Arkansas, Conner Eldridge, was one of a number of Justice Department prosecutors who felt the department had given short shrift to domestic terrorism. Quietly, Eldridge began to network with United States attorneys from states with a history of white-supremacist activity. They pressed the Justice Department for more resources. "Our thesis was, hey, let's focus on domestic terrorism at an equal level as we're focusing on international terrorism, because they're both terrorism," Eldridge told me recently. "But we consistently confronted, at every level, a sort of lack of attention to domestic terrorism. The day-to-day focus was on the next potential ISIS attack."

Back in Washington, weeks would go by with the daily national threat briefings rarely if ever discussing possible domestic threats from the far right. At the F.B.I., counterterrorism agents candidly admitted that domestic terrorism was seen as a backwater and that the only path to advancement was through international terrorism cases. In a recent report on law enforcement's evaluation of Muslim versus right-wing extremism, a team of researchers at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, noted that in 2008 and 2009 — the only years for which figures were made public — fewer than 350 of the F.B.I.'s 2,000 counterterrorism agents were assigned to domestic terrorism.

After a series of violent attacks by white supremacists, including on a Jewish community center and a nearby retirement home in Overland Park, Kan., Attorney General Eric Holder announced in 2014 that he was reconvening the Justice Department's Domestic Terrorism Executive Committee. The group hadn't met in 13 years. "It wasn't the same as it had been before, but it was something," says Eldridge, who was tapped to head the committee, which included representatives from about 15 law-enforcement agencies and five Justice Department divisions, including the F.B.I. and the U.S. Marshals. "But we had no budget, no staff, and we had no person whose sole job was to run the committee."

The ceaseless focus on ISIS and Al Qaeda filtered down to local law enforcement. The administration's much-touted "countering violent extremism" agenda was directed at various threats. But "the language heavily focused on recruitment and radicalization by ISIS and Al Qaeda," recalls Nate Snyder, a counterterrorism adviser to the Obama administration at the Department of Homeland Security from 2009 through 2017. As early as 2010, he says, his office was receiving calls from police officers asking for help in many Southern and Midwestern states. "They'd be like, 'Thanks for that stuff on Al Qaeda, but what I really need to know is how to handle the Hammerskin population in my jurisdiction,' " he says, referring to the white-supremacist skinhead group.

In 2011, the White House described the threat of Al Qaeda and its affiliates as the "pre-eminent security threat to our country." By 2013, a new threat had emerged: so-called homegrown violent extremists, or H.V.E.s, a category of people who, though born in the United States, were inspired by a nondomestic ideology to commit violence. H.V.E.s, who tended to be Muslim, were not to be mistaken for domestic terrorists, who by definition were not only Americans but also driven by a domestic ideology like white supremacy. And yet the two were often conflated, and therefore "homegrowns" were also perceived as domestic terrorists: the Tsarnaev brothers, responsible for the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013; the perpetrators of the San Bernardino massacre or the mass shooting at the gay nightclub Pulse in Orlando. Dylann Roof, born in South Carolina, whose homegrown racism was nurtured on neo-Nazi websites like The Daily Stormer, was not, in this context, a domestic terrorist, nor were any of his beliefs seen as indicative of "violent extremism." His shooting spree in a church in Charleston, in which he killed nine African-Americans, was interpreted as something else. What drove him, authorities said, was hate. He was a murderer.

This dichotomy plagued Representative Bennie Thompson, the Mississippi Democrat who served as ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee. For years, Thompson pressed both the administration and fellow members of Congress to be more outspoken on domestic terrorism. "The silence was almost deafening when it came to raising any of those issues in Congress," he says. "And the administration had this do-nothing approach. They kept telling us, well, we see that white supremacy is a problem, but there's no way we can get ourselves involved in this because they won't talk to us."

It was a curious response from an administration whose "C.V.E." agenda supposedly addressed all types of ideologically motivated violence. "I really suspect they did some polling and found out that there were certain things an African-American president couldn't talk about," one former adviser said. "I think they didn't want to poke the bear."

This approach was most evident with Obama's second Homeland Security chief, Jeh Johnson, who came to the department in 2013, after a three-year sojourn as general counsel to the Defense Department, where he provided legal authority for the drone-strike program. During Johnson's tenure, Nate Snyder says, his office received calls from evangelical pastors worried about far-right recruitment in their congregations. There was also concern about reports of white supremacy in the military.

Johnson, who told me that fear of another ISIS-style attack kept him up at night, held regular round tables with imams and other members of the Islamic community. He resisted the pressure from some members of his staff, and some in Congress, like Thompson, to make similar overtures to communities concerned about antigovernment or white-supremacist groups. He thought it would be absurd to hold round tables with sovereign citizens and white supremacists. "I didn't think that would have been a very effective use of my time to try," he told me.

Johnson never called Dylann Roof a domestic terrorist, a phrase commonly applied to Timothy McVeigh. "If there was ever an opportunity to define white extremists as domestic terrorists, Dylann Roof was it," Snyder says. "But people went back and forth, and it went down the same careful deliberation that happens with active shooters: Maybe it was a mental-health issue. Maybe he was 'disturbed.' Maybe he had a predisposition to violence."

When I spoke to Johnson, he felt it was not his place to call Roof a terrorist. There isn't a crime of "domestic terrorism" to charge someone with. "There is a certain type of violent extremism that is by nature more of a matter for law enforcement, and another that is about engaging communities at the local level," he said. But the country's chief law-enforcement official at the time, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, also didn't call Roof a terrorist — though she did note that his mass shooting, which she was prosecuting as a hate crime, seemed to meet the definition of terrorism. "Hate crimes are the original domestic terrorism," she said. James Comey, then director of the F.B.I., wasn't sure. Terrorism, he stated in June 2015, was "more of a political act," and he didn't see the Charleston shooting as political. Even after a racist manifesto Roof penned surfaced online stating his intent to "protect the white race" by instigating a race war, Comey still wasn't sure it met the definition. "I only operate in a legal framework," he told HuffPost.

The refusal to name the attack as "terrorism" was, in some critics' eyes, a crucial misstep that would have far broader implications. "I was very pleased when the Obama administration started and said, We're not going to use the phrase 'war on terror,' " says Erroll Southers, a former F.B.I. agent and now director of the Safe Communities Institute at the University of Southern California. "I think the Obama people decided, O.K., we're not going to call it 'terrorism,' thinking it was a good thing. The problem was they didn't realize how much it emboldened the other side and gave them political cover."

In the months following Donald Trump's inauguration, security analysts noted with increasing alarm what seemed to be a systematic erosion of the Department of Homeland Security's analytic and operational capabilities with regard to countering violent extremism. It began with the appointment of a new national-security team. Like their counterparts now running immigration policy, the team came from the fringe of conservative politics, some of them with connections to Islamophobic think tanks and organizations like ACT for America or the Center for Security Policy, whose founder, Frank Gaffney, was Washington's most prominent peddler of anti-Muslim conspiracy theories.

In addition to Gaffney, whose biased and statistically flawed data on the "Muslim threat" became the premise for Trump's so-called Muslim ban, there were other ideological fellow travelers like Sebastian and Katharine Gorka, the husband-and-wife national-security team. Sebastian Gorka became a senior White House adviser, and Katharine Gorka became a senior adviser to the Department of Homeland Security. During the transition, Sebastian Gorka predicted the demise of "C.V.E.," which he suggested was a fuzzy, politically correct approach to a problem — terrorism — that needed a better fix. Shortly afterward, Katharine Gorka, who once criticized the Obama administration for "allowing Islamists to dictate national-security policy," made it clear, Nate Snyder recalls, that she didn't like the phrase "countering violent extremism." From now on, the mission would be focused on "radical Islamic terrorism," the White House's go-to phrase, which, as Sebastian Gorka later explained, was intended to "jettison the political correctness of the last eight years."

A surreal scene, replicated in nearly every department and agency, soon began to play out inside the Department of Homeland Security. George Selim, a longtime national-security expert in both the Bush and Obama administrations who headed the Office of Community Partnerships, which worked with local government and civic groups on C.V.E. efforts, noted that as the months passed, "it was clear that there were fewer and fewer of the career civil servants at the table for critical policy decisions." Some political appointees seemed to have virtually no experience with the issues they had been tapped to advise on. Katharine Gorka, as her own LinkedIn biography notes, had never held a public-sector job before joining the department, nor did she seem to have any practical experience in national security, or law enforcement, or intelligence. Another new senior Homeland Security official, the retired Navy officer Frank Wuco, had made a career of lecturing to the military about the jihadi mind-set, often while role-playing as a member of the Taliban in a Pashtun hat and kaffiyeh. "That's who was trying to tell me he understands the threat," an official said dryly.

By February 2017, after the Trump administration issued its first executive order trying to ban citizens of Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States, several American Muslim groups decided to reject federal C.V.E. grant money they were awarded under the Obama administration out of concern over the new administration's framing of the issue. That March, the White House froze the $10 million the previous administration had allotted for the grants, pending review. While that review was underway, the Department of Homeland Security and the F.B.I. issued a joint intelligence bulletin, dated May 10, warning that white supremacists might pose "a threat of lethal violence" over the next year. The report, which some analysts said reflected a fraction of the actual numbers, said that white supremacists "were responsible for 49 homicides in 26 attacks from 2000 to 2016 . . . more than any other domestic extremist movement."

At the end of June, the Department of Homeland Security withheld grant money from several previously approved applicants whose focus was on studying extremists' online networks and helping both white supremacists and Muslim extremists leave their movements. Though the total budget for C.V.E. was minuscule given the department's overall grant budget, rejecting those programs nonetheless produced "a real chilling effect," as one policy analyst recalls. Some researchers withdrew from plans to brief lawmakers on far-right extremism.

In July 2017, Selim tendered his resignation. Not long afterward, a senior official on the interagency task force running C.V.E. efforts withdrew. More departures followed. The Department of Homeland Security renamed the Office of Community Partnerships the Office of Terrorism Prevention Partnerships. At the department's Office of Intelligence and Analysis, analysts specifically looking at domestic terrorism and coordinating with local law enforcement were reassigned as public-affairs liaisons, Snyder says. "So no one is looking at the intelligence and connecting the dots, which is what the Department of Homeland Security was created to do."

In the lingo of the counterterrorism world, the department's responsibility is anything "left of boom," meaning all the pre-emptive steps that might prevent an attack, from securing the borders to synthesizing and sharing intelligence to working with community leaders and local law enforcement to help them better identify risks. Today, at least for the federal government, Snyder says "left of boom is dead."

William Fears was born in 1987 and spent his childhood in Jasper, Tex., a tiny and deeply segregated town about 130 miles northeast of Houston. East Texas is Klan country, and Jasper holds a notable spot in the racist history of the region as the town where, in 1998, when Fears was 10, three white men lynched a black man named James Byrd Jr., chaining him to the back of a truck and dragging him to death.

Early in his life, Fears, searching for identity, cycled through a long list of ideologies. He was 14 on Sept. 11, 2001, old enough to absorb the patriotic fervor of that moment but too young to enlist. For a year or two, he was a Michael Moore-style populist, having been "red-pilled on 'Bowling for Columbine.' " Then, having spent a great deal of his spare time stoned and watching YouTube, Fears embraced the Sept. 11 "truthers" movement. As he spent more and more time on sites like Infowars, he was exposed to notions that the government, backed by the Illumi-nati, the globalists, the Freemasons — Jews, but not "the Jews" as he would later come to see them — had blown up the towers, crashed the financial markets and plunged the country into economic crisis. This led to his next great obsession: the candidacy of the G.O.P. presidential hopeful Ron Paul, a libertarian who had amassed a large grass-roots following of what The New York Times then called"iconoclastic white men."

But Fears eventually grew bored with Paul, just as he had grown bored with Michael Moore, and it was in this state of vague political disillusionment, and heavy drug use, that Fears kidnapped a former girlfriend in 2009 and stabbed her in the face, legs and neck before she managed to escape. In 2010, he was sentenced to seven years in prison.

Fears doesn't like to talk much about his sojourn in the Texas state-prison system, though like many young men who went from the penitentiary to the far right, he was introduced to the basic tenets of white supremacy there. "White guys got to stick together," he says, referring to an admitted friendship with members of the Texas branch of the Aryan Brotherhood, one of the most notoriously brutal white-supremacist gangs in the country. But he dropped those friendships after prison, he insists. "I didn't like the whole Nazi skinhead thing with tattoos on their face and beating up minorities for no reason," he says, implying that they represented an earlier generation: "They're like 1.0s."

Six years later, Fears was paroled and emerged from prison drug-free but otherwise largely the same. He was still a conspiracy theorist, though he was less obsessed with the government, his friend John Canales noticed when they reconnected that summer. "Now it was all about the Jews," Canales says. At home in the Houston suburb of Pasadena, Fears submerged himself in what to him was the new, hyperconnected world of the internet, where every YouTube video he watched algorithmically directed him to others with increasingly far-right political agendas. He was fascinated by men like Richard Spencer, who fashioned himself as the second coming of George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party. He was also intrigued by Donald Trump, the troubadour of a new generation of angry white men, the alt-right movement — white supremacy 2.0 — with its in-jokes and symbols that were mostly lost on U.S. law enforcement.

Fears believed in the power of memes, though alt-right memes, while dripping in irony, were also, in essence, hate speech, part of a propaganda war arguably intended to spread terror just as much as any ISIS execution video. Fears, his friend Canales says, was one of the first people Canales knew to understand this and promote the memes as broadly as he could, standing on street corners and "sieg heil-ing" at passers-by or waving a swastika-laden Pepe the Frog sign reading "Free Helicopter Rides," an allusion to the murder of political enemies, notably leftists.

In December 2016, less than six months after getting out of prison, Fears went to his first Richard Spencer event, on the campus of Texas A&M. More so-called free-speech events followed, where young white men in red MAGA hats and polo shirts descended upon college campuses or progressive enclaves in otherwise blood-red states: a clean-cut Trumpian army, marching in formation or hurling insults at activists who, outraged by their very presence, would try to fight them.

Sometimes the police would intervene, or not. Fears, for one, always felt safe with the police in Texas, though he said "they work for ZOG"— the so-called Zionist Occupied Government. "They'll take their paycheck over the country."

Cops would stand watch at events, sometimes on horseback, and while they might not have been ideologically aligned with the alt-right, they still tolerated them. Fears said the cops were far less forgiving of Antifa, a catchall term that has been used to describe dedicated anti-fascists and so-called anarchist extremists, as well as animal rights activists, immigration rights activists, members of the local Socialist movement, environmental protesters like those who had recently been blasted by water cannons and rubber bullets at Standing Rock, and Black Lives Matter supporters, whose protests have been met by dozens of cops in riot gear, as well as sometimes members of a paramilitary support unit. One Houston activist, who went to high school with Fears, recalls a rally where the police posed for pictures with members of the alt-right. "Very buddy-buddy," he says.

The same essential scenario played out across the country. At a rally in Sacramento in June 2016 organized by the white-supremacist Traditionalist Worker Party, a throng of counterprotesters showed up. "The police didn't step in really at all," a police observer and representative of the National Lawyers Guild later told The Sacramento Bee. "They basically just let people do what they wanted to do," the observer said. "In this case, someone made a decision just to let them fight it out." Ten people were hospitalized, at least five for stabbing wounds and other lacerations, most of them left-wing counterprotesters, some of whom were later charged with assault. Only one white supremacist was arrested, though court records originally acquired by The Guardian mentioned at least four T.W.P.-affiliated men who came armed with knives to the rally but were not charged. "We're looking at you as a victim," an investigator with the California Highway Patrol reportedly assured a member of the T.W.P. after the rally.

One domestic-terrorism expert who conducts hate-crimes training for law enforcement was baffled by the pushback she received from police officers who didn't seem to view white-supremacist groups as a law-enforcement problem. "They'd say things like, 'Why aren't you calling Black Lives Matter or Antifa a hate group?' The answer is, because they're not hate groups! But they didn't see it that way."

It was in this atmosphere that Fears made his progress through various protests. He traveled to Charlottesville with a backpack of dystopian gear: goggles, gloves and a helmet, though he disguised himself as a Trump supporter in a suit. It was war. It was also fun. By the summer of 2017, the media had begun to cover more far-right events, leading more people to show up in protest, which furthered the right's victimization narrative, which in turn led to more events and more violence, all of which was packaged into neat selling points for a movement whose actual real-life followers may have been far fewer than they appeared.

A person's willingness to brawl was a point of pride. Some of the most ardent fighters, many of them felons, became celebrities in their own right, offered speaking slots at rallies, where their V.I.P. status earned them police protection. The Rise Above Movement, led in part by a gang member who had gone to prison for an attack, turned beat-downs into an art form, which they promoted on YouTube, drawing recruits. Nathan Damigo, a former Marine who was incarcerated for five years for armed robbery, used footage of his punching a young woman in the face during a Berkeley protest as a recruiting video for his white-nationalist organization, Identity Evropa. The Proud Boys went as far as to create an entire culture around gang-style rituals, including initiation beatings.

On Facebook, various white men were stating their intention of going to Charlottesville for what they understood would be a huge gathering of the tribes, making plans of whom to meet up with and what to bring. Fears initially advised against carrying weapons, but he suggested keeping them close by. "It all comes down to police," he said on Facebook. "If they leave us to fight for ourselves like in Berkeley, we know to get ready for bricks to start flying."

In private communications on the chat service Discord, posted online by the progressive watchdog Unicorn Riot, organizers of Unite the Right spent weeks discussing tactics. The F.B.I. itself was limited in its surveillance capacity (though many left-wing groups argued that this did not prevent the bureau from monitoring their activities), and in the absence of comprehensive federal scrutiny, right-wing activists trawled through left-wing websites, shared photos of leading anti-fascist and racial-justice activists and infiltrated real-life gatherings. In advance of the event, leaked chats documented potential attendees openly advising their comrades to take note of any threats of violence so they could share them with the police. Erroll Southers later remarked on the sophistication of advising their followers not to bring cellphones, and sharing information among small cells of affinity groups: "From an intelligence perspective, it was very impressive."

From a law-enforcement perspective, it was chaos. Rarely did a white-supremacist event draw more than 60 people before 2016; 100 was remarkable. But Charlottesville was another galaxy, both in the sheer number of marchers and their diversity. Southers notes, "You had factions of white nationalists, white supremacists, Klan members, neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates — which was like having ISIS, Al Qaeda, Al Shabab and Boko Haram at the same rally. And they were all rallying together, shoulder to shoulder, while the police watched these people go toe to toe sort of like a modern-day 'Game of Thrones' battle."

"I put my baton on the ground and hands in the air," the protester later said of the moment when Tyler TenBrink pointed his gun directly at him. The man was terrified. TenBrink took aim and fired. One of the other protesters hid in the trees. Several more crouched behind a small wall, screaming. The bullet missed. The men jumped back into Fears's Jeep and, with Colton behind the wheel, sped away toward Interstate 75 — but not before a witness wrote down the license-plate number.

Lieutenant Stout learned of the shooting later that night, and while no one was hurt, his heart sank. In all his preparations, Stout hadn't considered that violence might occur outside the secure perimeter they had so carefully set up. That night, the Florida state police caught up with the Jeep on the highway and arrested the Texans. The city officials breathed a sigh of relief and lauded the day as a success.

Will Fears spent more than 40 days in the Alachua County Jail on $1 million bail. Depending on whom he is talking with, he and his brother and TenBrink, who both remain in the Alachua County Jail, were the "celebrities" of the jail, or maybe just Fears was. He portrayed his stay as fairly cushy, and one in which he was a very big deal, which of course he wasn't to the authorities who picked him up in December, after Texas ordered him extradited back to Houston to face charges in the supposed assault of his girlfriend last October. Along the way back to Texas, Fears tried to make conversation. "I was on the news, you didn't see that?" he remarked. When Fears arrived back in Houston, he spent two nights in the Harris County Jail, then appeared before a judge, who promptly released him on $5,000 bail.

Fears returned home to Pasadena and resumed the same life he had always led. Apparently unconcerned about exposure, he had posted his cellphone number on social media. Earlier this year, I called him. We met at a Belgian cafe in a rapidly gentrifying part of Houston. When I arrived, Fears was sitting at an outside table, drinking an Arnold Palmer.

Fears told me he had spent most of the past year celebrating the alt-right's covert domination of the news cycle. He seemed thrilled that Donald Trump tweeted about a so-called migrant caravan, which, like the supposed "white genocide" in South Africa, was mostly fiction. Yet it was effectively promoted by alt-right websites like The Daily Stormer and Breitbart, and now right-wing celebrities like Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson were talking about it. "This idea that the alt-right is falling apart and is going to go away, it's not true," he says. "The alt-right formulates all these ideas," he went on. "What Tucker Carlson talks about, we talked about a year ago."

It was a few days after the massacre of 17 people in Parkland, Fla., and Fears had been considering the spate of school shootings in America. He repeated the rumor, widespread on 4chan and Gab, that the shooter, Nikolas Cruz, was Jewish, and so were many of his victims. It's unclear if this is true. But if it were, it would make no sense to Fears, who, if he believes in anything, believes in the essentially tribal nature of all human beings. Jews, he said, "have a biological need to look out for their own." He had spoken a bit about what he called the J.Q., or Jewish Question, as successive generations of anti-Semites have referred to the debate over how Western nations should handle the presence of Jews in their societies. "I don't hate them for it, but I realize that their interests aren't the same as mine."

Fears's views aren't unique — roughly 22 million Americans call it "acceptable" to hold neo-Nazi or white-supremacist views, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll taken in the wake of Charlottesville in August 2017. Roughly the same number of people, about 10 percent of Americans, said they supported the "alt-right"; about half of those polled said they were against it. Driving around Fears's neighborhood one day, I saw Confederate flags, and American flags, and sometimes a Blue Lives Matter flag, and the black-and-white "Don't Tread on Me" flag waving from shiny new trucks. I also saw row after row of McMansions, many of them with swimming pools. There were new S.U.V.s parked in the driveways, and boats: signs of money made and money spent. One former high school classmate of Fears's described the culture as "wannabe redneck."

Fears says that unlike him, the bulk of the alt-right prefers to stay in the shadows. "I see a lot of people and talk to a lot of people that people would pay a lot of money to find out who they are," he says. Some of them, he suggests, take part in his weekly Thursday-morning "fight club," practicing mixed martial arts. Some have white-collar jobs or are veterans, groups that make up a large part of the movement.

Fears was wearing a baseball cap adorned with a red, white and blue patch known as the "whomster" flag. It's "kind of a racist joke," he said, albeit one that most people won't get, as they probably have no clue what "whomster" means (it's a common meme that refers to the supposed, if baseless, fact that African-Americans say "whomst" a lot). The flag featured the Texas lone star against a backdrop of 14 red and white stripes, an allusion to a signature white supremacist slogan addressing their goal of preserving the white race. The star is centered on a large blue sonnerad, or black sun, an ancient symbol favored by white supremacists, who see it as less obvious than, say, a swastika. In recent years, even longtime neo-Nazi groups like the National Socialist Movement have rebranded by dropping the swastika for less "triggering" symbols like sonnerads or runes. The meaning is the same.

Fears has said that he was upset that his little brother, who in September pleaded guilty to accessory to attempted murder, got in so much trouble. "He's not really a white nationalist that much," he said during an interview with a right-wing podcast. "He's really only involved in anything as a result of being my little brother."

It was a bit like the little brother-big brother Boston bombing duo, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, whom Fears identifies with. He agreed to meet with me, he said, because I had written about them. "I think it's easy for our generation, or the youth, the way society is now, to feel victimized. It's like with your back against the wall, you know what I mean?"

In the Tsarnaevs' case, this led to terrorism, and for Dzhokhar, the surviving brother, it led to a stretch on death row. Fears, drinking his iced tea-lemonade concoction, considered this. "Maybe he saw a lot of things in the world that bothered him and just didn't know how to deal with it," he said. "I can sort of relate to that."

Fears munched on some bread. "You're Jewish, right?" he said pleasantly.

In fact, I am. And while I happened to be sitting across the table from an admitted fascist who admires Adolf Hitler and has advocated (he says trollishly) "white Shariah," I didn't feel threatened by Will Fears. Like so many of the movement's vague anymen, he presented himself as polite, articulate and interested in cultural politics, and though his views are abhorrent, he stated them all so laconically you might forget that he actually believes in the concept of a white ethnostate. And that's the point: The genius of the new far right, if we could call it "genius," has been their steadfast determination to blend into the larger fabric of society to such an extent that perhaps the only way you might see them as a problem is if you actually want to see them at all.

The purpose of the F.B.I.'s Joint Terrorism Task Force is to investigate terrorism and share information from those investigations so that the law-enforcement community is able to identify the most dangerous individuals. State and local law-enforcement "fusion centers" were set up with this same goal in mind. There are perhaps half a dozen information-sharing and threat-assessment networks available to law enforcement. In an alternate universe, these networks would function efficiently. In reality, German says, "far-right violence remains a blind spot. It just isn't properly tracked or understood."

On Aug. 31 this year, his 25th anniversary on the force, Dan Stout retired from the Gainesville Police Department, in part because of the stress and fatigue he endured from the Spencer incident. "The level of resources and financial impact these types of events are now costing communities to prepare for and manage, it's just unsustainable," he says. "How much of our city do we literally turn into a quasi-police state to manage this?" Stout's study of the alt-right and left-wing movements made him an "expert," at least in the eyes of federal and state law enforcement, who, he says, began to invite him to visit their jurisdictions to share what he had learned. "They were soaking it up like a sponge," he says. And yet, in reality he feels that they had collectively dodged a bullet — "no pun intended," he says. "Just another inch to the right or the left and we'd have had a very bad situation."

In May, I called up the Harris County district attorney's office to ask why someone who had been in jail in Florida on $1 million bond had, upon extradition, been released on $5,000 bond. Joshua Phanco, a prosecutor who at the time was in charge of Fears's case, was alarmed by the call. He vaguely recalled that Fears had been in prison in Florida, but he wasn't aware that Fears had been charged with attempted murder, or that he had anything to do with white supremacy. "This is the first I'm hearing this," he told me. (Fears's charge in Florida has since been dropped.)

Phanco, who has since moved on to the district attorney's major-crimes division, spoke with me for two hours. He diagramed the byzantine system that is the Harris County criminal-justice system, one of the nation's largest, and a study in dysfunction. There is no central database, no way to share information among all the tiny police departments that feed into the clerk's office, which then divvies up crimes among 22 criminal courts, now scattered across the entire county. Basically, he said, unless someone tells him about a guy he's prosecuting, he has no clue.

"I mean, how come I didn't know what happened in Florida?" he said. "Is it my fault? Is it Florida's fault? How come there wasn't an officer in Houston watching this? How come he was on nobody's radar?" Houston has an aggressive gang task force whose investigators have deep knowledge of everyone from the street-level drug dealers to the cartel bosses. "If a fairly high-up guy from MS-13 sneezes, I get a call at 10 p.m.," he said.

If Fears were on someone's radar, Phanco doubted he would ever get off it. "But who's responsible for keeping track of these alt-right guys in Houston? Nobody. For me the question is, well, how come? If you want to look at these guys as terrorists — which I think it is when they're firing guns out of cars at protesters," he noted, "then the question remains: Who or what will prevent him from committing more crimes? And, from my chair, nobody," Phanco said. "Nobody's watching it, nobody's tracking it. And that's what's got me scared."

Janet Reitman is a contributing writer for the magazine who is working on a book about the rise of the far right in post-9/11 America. She is also a contributing editor for Rolling Stone.


https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/03/magazine/FBI-charlottesville-white-nationalism-far-right.html?nl=top-stories&nlid=65127729ries&ref=cta
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Cult founder’s ashes still being held 4 months after execution

November 7, 2018, 9:52 am
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Naoki Urano and Yukiko Sakamoto
THE ASAHI SHIMBUN
November 7, 2018

A family squabble over the remains of Aum Shinrikyo founder Chizuo Matsumoto have kept them and his belongings in a prison for four months after his execution amid fears they could become objects of worship.

Matsumoto, also known as Shoko Asahara, and six of his top disciples were hanged on July 6 for a mass murder spree in the 1980s and 1990s that included a sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system in 1995 that killed 13 and sickened thousands.

According to sources, Matsumoto left a few boxes of belongings, including clothing and books, at the Tokyo Detention House where he met his fate, as well as headgear he was wearing at the time of his arrest that cultists used for spiritual training.

When asked by a prison officer what he would like to be done with his body and possessions just before the execution, he named his fourth daughter as the recipient, according to the detention house.

However, Matsumoto's wife and second and third daughters have filed a formal complaint with the Justice Ministry, saying it would have been impossible for Matsumoto "to name a particular person as the receiver, given his mental state."

The fourth daughter has expressed her intention to scatter her father's ashes and remaining bones into the Pacific Ocean so the items do not become objects of worship and the place of interment does not turn into a "holy site." She has also asked authorities for assistance with doing so, as she is concerned that followers might try to take possession of their guru's remains.

"Among (Matsumoto's) belongings, there might be items of religious significance," said Taro Takimoto, the attorney of the fourth daughter. "We want the authorities to take care of the disposal."

The wife’s side declined to be interviewed on her husband's belongings by The Asahi Shimbun.

Under laws related to penal facilities, the remains and belongings of an executed inmate must be passed on to a person named by the prisoner. In the case of a family dispute, ownership is decided in accordance with inheritance provisions of Civil Law.

If the dispute between the wife's side and her fourth daughter continues, a legal case could be opened, with Matsumoto's last wishes likely being the point at issue.

The Public Security Intelligence Agency, an external bureau of the Justice Ministry, is closely monitoring the situation, as it is also concerned that the cult founder's remains, headgear and other articles could become symbolic objects of worship.

http://www.asahi.com/sp/ajw/articles/AJ201811070041.html

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Jehovah's Witness church elder jailed for sexually abusing girl, 12, in the 1970s

November 7, 2018, 10:13 am
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Brecon and Radnor Reporter
Brecon & Radnor Express
November 7, 2018

A Jehovah’s Witness church elder was jailed for five years today for sexually assaulting a “terrified” schoolgirl while preaching door-to-door in the Brecon area in the 1970s.

Brian Jenkins, 75, groped the girl during missionary work, at bible classes and at swimming lessons organised by the Jehovah’s Witness congregation.

A court heard Jenkins took advantage of the religion’s ban on females wearing trousers to force his hand up the girl’s skirt.

He sent her older brother to knock doors trapping the girl in the back seat of his car to molest her.

The court heard Jenkins tried to get his fingers inside her costume while pretending to teach her to swim at Brecon swimming pool.

The sex attacks happened while the girl and her family were members of the congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses near Brecon where Jenkins was an elder.

The girl reported Jenkins to two elders, a doctor and ex-police officer, but they just “grinned”.
Now, aged 58, she told the jury: “I’m angry at Jehovah’s Witness elders and the governing body for the lack of protection they provide to children.

“There is no safeguarding. They do not report it to the authorities because they want to deal with it in house.

“Then it doesn’t get dealt with.”
The victim was aged between 12 and 14 when Jenkins targeted her after her father died tragically.

She told the court: “I was terrified. I tried everything I could to get out of being round that person.

“My father wasn’t around and my mother didn’t listen to my pleas.

“I was a young girl, I felt ashamed and embarrassed. I didn’t have the power or the words to avoid it.”

The girl tried to leave the church to avoid Jenkins but was “reprimanded” by male elders for not attending meetings and bible study classes.

Married Jenkins, of Redditch, Worcestershire, claimed the girl made up the allegations because she had a grudge against the Jehovah’s Witness religion.

He described himself in court as “a helpful bloke who wanted to teach young people to swim”.

A jury at Merthyr Tydfil Crown Court took an hour to find him guilty of six charges of indecent assault.

The victim wept in the public gallery as the chairman of the jury gave the unanimous verdicts.

The court hears she has been left with a fear of public swimming pools and feels “cheap, dirty and worthless” because of the abuse she suffered at the hands of the senior Jehovah’s Witness.
Judge Daniel Williams said Jenkins had shown “breathtaking arrogance” in the witness box during the three-day trial.

He told him: “These offences are between 44 and 46 years old but they are not part of history as far as your victim is concerned.

“She lives with the consequences of your actions every day of her life.

“The contrast between her courage and your breathtaking arrogance when giving evidence could not have been greater.”
The court heard Jenkins was jailed for 21 months at Worcester Crown Court in 1991 for a series of similar sex offences.

Judge Williams said Jenkins would go on the sex offenders’ register for life.

http://www.brecon-radnor.co.uk/article.cfm?id=110103&headline=Jehovah%27s%20Witness%20church%20elder%20%27sexually%20abused%20girl%20in%201970s%27&sectionIs=news&searchyear=2018
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Tvind Alert

November 7, 2018, 9:29 pm
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Tvind Alert
"Tvind Alert is a journalistic inquiry into a political and non-religious [group] called the Tvind Teachers Group."

" ... A dossier on the Tvind Teachers Group. Are Humana People-to-People, Planet Aid, the Gaia Movement and DAPP siphoning off cash through tax havens? Is it a cult?"

https://www.tvindalert.com/alive-kicking/
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Supreme Being to be arrested, federal judge in KCK orders

November 8, 2018, 6:49 am
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TONY RIZZO
KC Star
November 05, 2018


A federal judge has issued an arrest warrant for the leader of a religious group ordered to pay $8 million to a human trafficking victim.

Royall Jenkins and his group, The Value Creators, formerly known as the United Nation of Islam, were the subject of a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Kansas City, Kan., by a woman who had been forced to work for years without pay.

In May, U.S. District Judge Daniel Crabtree, who described the group as a cult, entered the $8 million judgment for the years of “humiliating and degrading treatment” that the woman endured.

Jenkins, who has called himself “Allah on Earth,” “Allah in Person,” or “The Supreme Being,” started the group in the 1970s after he said “angels and/or scientists” escorted him through the galaxy on a spaceship and instructed him on how to govern earth.

After Crabtree issued his order in May, Jenkins did not cooperate with court orders to provide documents and appear for a court hearing.

http://amp.kansascity.com/news/local/crime/article221163345.html
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Ben Foster on Growing Up in a Cult and Finding Happiness: ‘I Feel Really Alive’

November 8, 2018, 6:59 am
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The ‘Leave No Trace’ star on how living in the woods, becoming a father, and finally embracing his ‘strange’ upbringing in a Transcendental Meditation community changed his life.

Kevin Fallon
November 8, 2018
11.08.18 4:58 AM ET

Ben Foster may be the first actor to actively, excitedly delete his own lines from a script.

He and director Debra Granik went through the Leave No Trace screenplay “compulsively” before the film’s damp shoot in the forests of Eagle Fern Park outside of Portland, Oregon, and put a red line through anything his character didn’t need to say. That character, Will, is a war veteran suffering from crippling PTSD that moves him to strip his life of all belongings, luxuries, and erroneous speech while raising his young daughter Tom (Thomasin McKenzie) off the grid, alone in the woods.

During prep Foster pointed out a key line in the script to Granik, who famously directed Jennifer Lawrence to her first Oscar nomination in 2010’s Winter’s Bone. Will and Tom are at the grocery store and Tom wants to buy a candy bar. “Is it a want or a need?” he asks her. “I said, that is the key to Will,” Foster remembers.

When we meet with Foster in early November, he’s doing a short sprint of press urging awards consideration for Leave No Trace, which was released this summer to raves, especially for Foster’s quiet yet seismic performance as a father caught in between his trauma-mandated lifestyle and doing what is best for his daughter. The script, even before he and Granik went at it with a hacksaw, was sparse. We laugh about the rare actor’s humility to prefer a performance given in silent stares and body language, rather than big dialogue moments.

But it also speaks to how much Foster has learned after two decades in the business. He knows what’s going to work.

“If Thom and I are listening to each other physically then maybe we could get away without have that third-act monologue,” he says. “When the tear drops at just the right point and it zooms in with the score. Maybe we don’t need that. Let’s see what we can get away with. And everyone was game.”
Not that Foster hasn’t performed those monologues before, or, as he says, won’t “climb that mountain joyously” again in the future. He’s had a career that’s spanned TV shows (Flash Forward, Six Feet Under) and big-screen blockbusters (X-Men: The Last Stand). He’s honed a reputation in recent years for a certain intensity—and intense commitment—yielding standout performances in Hell or High Water, The Messenger, 3:10 to Yuma and Ain’t Them Bodies Saints.

He’s the kind of actor who’s remained a tantalizing enigma while racking up a long resume, in the tradition of the business’s most appreciated “serious actors.” It’s not that he hasn’t been in the news, be it for his personal life—he was engaged, twice, to Robin Wright; now he’s married to Laura Prepon—or, more often, making headlines for the extreme method preparation he’s done for roles. He notoriously took performance-enhancing drugs to play Lance Armstrong in The Program, drilled out his own tooth for Hell or High Water, ate handfuls of dirt while shooting Lone Survivor, and slept on the streets before playing a homeless man in Rampart.

True to form, he actually built the camp his character lives in for Leave No Trace. Before filming he learned it all: how to gather water; how to make a fire pit; how to “range out,” which is finding resources for edible food; and how to read the birds, because, he says, “they are the gossips of the forest—they know what’s going on.”

The truth is that there’s something that feels different about Leave No Trace, both from an outsider’s purview and to Foster himself—that feels special, like it’s a moment.

In a piece timed to the film’s July release, Vulture wondered if the movie was “our first look at the real Ben Foster,” going so far as to ask if he’s “the best actor who’s never been nominated for an Oscar?” But it goes beyond a remarkable performance. The making of this film was more personal for the 38-year-old actor than most, if not all, of his earlier projects.

The opportunity to continue to explore how the trauma of war affects veterans was important to him, continuing what “felt like a triptych, or the way that some artists have periods musically or painterly” after playing military men in The Messenger, Lone Survivor, Rampart and on stage in A Streetcar Named Desire.
Committing to this character of a survivalist living in the forest triggered a bit of reflection of his time growing up in rural Iowa, where his parents raised him in a Transcendental Meditation community. It’s an upbringing he describes as “naturally strange” and has had a complicated, but ultimately formative impact on him. But it’s also one that informed his love for being outdoors “near the trees,” which he relished while filming.

Most powerfully, he found out that he and Prepon would be expecting their first child together right before shooting. Ella was born soon after Leave No Trace was released.

“It changed everything,” he says. “Or it simplified everything. Distilled everything is probably the word.” He says the timing of the project couldn’t have been better. Prepon went with him to Oregon for the shoot, though, “my wife doesn’t dig the rain,” he laughs. “She’s like, get us the fuck out of here. It’s beautiful, but it’s gloomy.”

Her presence, and that of the daughter they were expecting, became a part of his process while shooting. “I would put my hands on my wife’s big belly at night and feel our daughter kicking little kicks through her skin,” he says. “We actually had a device to put up so we could hear her heartbeat. We would listen to that before going to bed. Then in the morning I would get up early, go to the rainy woods and watch this being, this young woman [McKenzie’s character] find her own way and be so impressed by that.”

Granik does many things masterfully with her direction of Leave No Trace—channeling Will’s private feelings as he struggles through how to raise his daughter chief among them. But there’s something visceral in how she telegraphs the waterlogged chill of life in the Oregon forests. You feel the coldness when you watch. The extreme elements are almost tangible. For Foster, though, they actually were. It was freeing.

“I really have found great healing with the trees,” he says. He and Prepon currently live in Manhattan. He shudders when remembering a former life, more than 10 years ago, living in what he calls “The Other Place”—Los Angeles. “When I lived in The Other Place, I would have moments where I feel that I have to get out and it was always with one idea, which is go north,” he says. “I need to be around a tree. So I’d find myself needing a drive at 2:30 in the morning. Just jump in the car and go and end up in Big Sur or Marin near woods, and just go be with them.”

A brief Wikipedia factoid mentions that Foster was born in Boston, but moved with his family to “rural Iowa” when he was 4 years old after their home was robbed. We wondered how that upbringing contributed to that sense of security he had in nature, and his relationship to Leave No Trace and understanding of Will.

“It informs work in the way that I like big open spaces,” he says. “I like being near the water. I like being near trees.” But more surprisingly, he explains that his time in Fairfield actually helped him understand a different part of Will’s experience: being devout to beliefs or a practice that others have a hard time wrapping their heads around or are unable to understand. For Will, it’s raising a daughter in wilderness, cut off from society; for Foster, it’s being raised in a community described as “America’s Transcendental Meditation Mecca.”

“It’s a curious town that deserves more attention and longer conversation, which is based on the Transcendental Meditation community that my parents were involved in,” he says. “I don’t talk a lot about it in the press.” It’s true. He and Prepon, who has been linked to Scientology, are consistently private about their beliefs. “But you’re asking.”

Back on the East Coast, his father was a teacher in TM and his mother was a receptionist. “They were like, there’s this town that is going to raise evolved children and meditate twice a day, this old technique, and it’s going to be called Fairfield,” Foster says. So at age 4, Foster started meditating. He says it was a normal school, save for the 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes in the afternoon marked for silent meditation.

“There were some things that were naturally strange,” he says. “Culty, for sure.” He stopped practicing at one point as an adult, partly as rebellion, partly because he didn’t enjoy waking up before dawn. But now he’s back to taking that 20 minutes in the morning “of centering, so I can just hear my thoughts during the day.”

He understands that when you talk about it casually that “it sounds spooky,” and could be perceived as wacky. But he turns it back on me, and asks if there’s anything I do to clear my head during the day, like exercise. Sure, sometimes I run. That’s meditative, he says.

“I think that anybody who has a practice, there’s enough science behind that to say it’s good for you and it feels good and it’s restorative,” he says. “In a very crazy world with a lot of false urgency and manufactured momentum, you can get quiet inside and practice that, be it sports or walking, drawing, something—breathing, practicing mindfulness, whatever your deal is. I think it’s a great thing. So I take that that’s what I think about for Fairfield.”

After Leave No Trace, he was able to spend a year and a half at home raising Ella, changing diapers, and being a dad. When we finish talking, he’s going to go home to spend some time with his family before leaving the next day to go to Prague, where he’s shooting a big-budget project called Medieval. But he says he finally feels settled, and grateful for all of it.

“It’s really nice to miss somebody,” he says. “I miss my family when I’m not with them. I feel pretty settled. I think I was pretty ornery for a long time. You know, the young man disease of it all. I feel really alive right now, if that makes sense. It’s nice to have a job, but I do miss my family when I’m not with them. So today feels really good. Back to hard tomorrow.”


TRANSCENDENTAL MEDITATION Related Articles 




https://www.thedailybeast.com/ben-foster-on-being-raised-in-a-cult-and-finding-happiness-i-feel-really-alive
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RELIGIOUS PLURALISM IN A POSTMODERNAL CONTEXT

November 8, 2018, 7:16 am
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RELIGIOUS PLURALISM IN A POSTMODERNAL CONTEXT
[Google Translate]
To attempt the adventure of an encyclopedic review of religions - and of the spiritual ways that, although not religious, fall into a phenomenology of contemporary combinations of the sacred - present in Italy, in the current postmodern context, constitutes a fascinating challenge together a risk. The context, in fact, is a continuous mutation of the religious framework, which makes it impossible - in spite of all the care - an exhaustive treatment. Some data change frequently, literally, daily.While we are now grateful to those wishing to report omissions and additions, we are willing to report changes via the CESNUR website, the Center for Studies on New Religions, which has designed and promoted this initiative ( www.cesnur.org ). This work is not a mere update of our previous editions of the Encyclopedia of Religions in Italy - published in 2001, 2006 and 2013, respectively, on which much is based: it is rather a new tool, which includes a lot of new material, both in a partially different way. We invite you to address to CESNUR any report or request ( cesnur_to@virgilio.it ).

Religious minorities among Italian citizens (estimate CESNUR 2018)

Hebrews36,5001.8%
"Fringe" Catholics and dissidents25,0001.2%
Orthodox30670015.0%
Protestants47640023.3%
Jehovah's Witnesses (and similar)41160020.1%
Mormons (and similar)27,5001.3%
Other groups of Christian origin7,4000.3%
Muslim40530019.8%
Bahá'í and other groups of Islamic matrix4,4000.2%
Hindus and neo-Hindus45,2002.2%
Buddhists186,6009.1%
Osho groups and derivatives4,0000.2%
Sikhs, radhasoami and derivations20,0001.0%
Other groups of oriental origin5,6000.3%
New Japanese religions3,5000.2%
Esoteric area and "ancient wisdom"16,5000.8%
Movements of human potential30,0001.5%
New Age and Next Age organized movements20,0001.0%
Others13,7000.7%
Total2045900100.0%
https://cesnur.com/il-pluralismo-religioso-italiano-nel-contesto-postmoderno-2/
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Groomed for rape: sexual abuse by pastors back in spotlight

November 8, 2018, 1:30 pm
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Recent allegations that a 35-year-old pastor sexually abused at least 26 teenage girls in his youth ministry group have refueled the debate over the manipulative tactics of sex offenders in the clergy.
Lee Suh-yoon
The Korea Times
November 9, 2018

Recent allegations that a 35-year-old pastor sexually abused at least 26 teenage girls in his youth ministry group have refueled the debate over the manipulative tactics of sex offenders in the clergy.

On Tuesday, four of the alleged victims — masked and covered in black — spoke out against a pastor at their church in Incheon, claiming he "groomed" them into accommodating his sexual demands for years in their teens.

"Every time I said no, he told me he loved me, saying it was the first time he felt this way about someone," one of the victims said at a press conference held at a Christian meeting hall in Yeonji-dong, Seoul. "I trusted the pastor, so I never thought he could lie in God's name."

The pastor, surnamed Kim, approached young female students in the youth ministry of his church, buying them treats and gently counseling them on family issues. As the girls started to trust him more, Kim started making sexual comments or touching them. He convinced the girls they were in loving relationships that would eventually end in marriage. Gradually, he got them to have sex with him regularly, telling them he wanted to "purify" bad memories of being raped by his uncle.

"It was hard for the victims to even register their situation as sexual abuse while they were stuck in the continuous cycle of psychological brainwashing and rape," Chae Su-ji, head of the Christian Counseling Center for Violence Against Women, told The Korea Times, Wednesday.

"As the relationship deepens and the young person is forced to keep secrets, she is increasingly isolated from others, making it easier for the pastor to psychologically control her."

Kim, son of the head pastor, carried on this tactic with multiple girls at a time. His behavior was noticed by the church leadership, but went unpunished for the last 10 years.

His tactics are echoed in similar cases that have been pulled out of the shadows by the #MeToo movement earlier this year, like the notorious Lee Jae-rock, a senior pastor at the 140,000-strong Manmin Central Church now on trial for raping seven female followers.

Perpetrators tend to target the most vulnerable, using the victim's faith.

"The perpetrators approach the most vulnerable, or those who are alone and don't have friends or parent figures they can openly talk to," Chae said. "They also use the fact that young Christian girls, especially those with absent or abusive fathers, see a pastor as a second father whom they idealize and want validation from."

The Christian center has received over 400 consultations — triple the annual average — since January, when the #MeToo movement caught on in the country.

Over 680 religious leaders were apprehended for sexual abuse from 2010 to 2016, according to police records, but many more crimes went unreported, experts say.

Proper punishment is another issue. When a female pastor whom one of the victims confided in recently called out Kim's actions, the victims were threatened, bribed, and even accused of cult activities, the victims say.

Police said they will begin investigating the case, today.

http://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.asp?newsIdx=258375
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Germany proposes to compensate victims of Chilean cult led by ex-Nazi

November 10, 2018, 7:00 am
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Former leader of the secretive sect Colonia Dignidad, Paul Schaefer. Photo: Reuters
Today World
November 9, 2018

SANTIAGO/BERLIN - German lawmakers have proposed that former members of a Chilean cult established by an ex-Nazi in the 1960s be offered compensation by the German government, according to the parliamentary group of Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives.

The budget committee of the Bundestag, the lower house of parliament, said it had included a proposal in its budget plan to pay out a total 1 million euros ($1.13 million) to victims.

The cult and the community that housed it, called Colonia Dignidad, was a secretive sect founded in 1961 by former World War II German army medic Paul Schaefer in the foothills of the Chilean Andes.

Schaefer preached ultra-traditional values while sexually abusing and torturing dozens of youths. During the 1973 to 1990 dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, the community also served as a detention and torture site for enemies of the state.

Schaefer died in 2010, while serving a 20-year sentence for sex abuse.

In 2006, former members of the cult issued a public apology and asked for forgiveness for 40 years of human rights abuses in their community, saying they were brainwashed by Schaefer, who many viewed as a god.
"Across political groups and in the near future we want to achieve results with the 'Joint Commission to Assist Victims of Colonia Dignidad'," the parliamentary group's spokesman for human rights, Michael Brand, said in a statement.

The federal draft budget, which includes the proposal to compensate victims, still needs to be approved.

The budget committee was not immediately available for comment.

Colonia Dignidad continues to stir controversy in Chile. The community has been rebranded as a rustic, Bavaria-themed retreat, which victims argue is disrespectful. REUTERS

https://www.todayonline.com/world/germany-proposes-compensate-victims-chilean-cult-led-ex-nazi
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Humanists UK expresses alarm that inspections in some private schools are not being adequately monitored

November 10, 2018, 8:35 am
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Ofsted Chief Inspector Amanda Spielman
Ofsted Chief Inspector Amanda Spielman
Humanists UK
November 9th, 2018

Humanists UK has expressed concern that the education regulator still lacks the relevant powers to properly monitor inspections in some private schools. These include Waldorf and Steiner schools, which have recently been reported for serious safeguarding problems.



This week Ofsted’s Chief Inspector of Schools, Amanda Spielman, wrote to the Secretary of State for Education to request additional powers to monitor the way some private schools are inspected.

Every year, Ofsted is required to produce reports on the ongoing suitability of the Independent Schools Inspectorate (ISI) and the School Inspection Service (SIS). However, in the letter, Spielman claims that, for three consecutive years, the DfE has given Ofsted insufficient access to the activities of these private inspectorates. This means Ofsted simply does not have the evidence or information to ‘provide an objective assessment of the quality or standards’ of inspections by either body.

The Independent Schools Inspectorate is responsible for the inspection of approximately 1200 institutions with membership of the Independent Schools Council, this includes elite private schools such as Harrow, Eton, and Cheltenham Ladies College. The School Inspection Service is responsible for inspecting a smaller range of schools, including those which are part of the Focus Learning Trust, run by a Christian sect called the Plymouth Brethren, and members of the Steiner Waldorf Fellowship.

Last year, the Daily Telegraph reported that, in the four years leading up to 2017, inspectors had raised safeguarding concerns at nearly half of all Steiner schools in the country. Additionally, last month, it was announced that The Rudolf Steiner School Kings Langley (RSSKL) would shut permanently as the result of a slew of inadequate Ofsted reports relating to safeguarding issues.

Nevertheless, Spielman asserts that, over the past three years, the DfE has only commissioned Ofsted to monitor a total of four of these independent inspections (two by SIS and two by ISI). All other information on the activities of the inspectorates has been gathered by reviewing inspection reports without ‘access to the evidence bases gathered during these inspections’. She goes on to recommend that Ofsted be granted additional monitoring powers — including ‘unannounced on-site monitoring visits‘, ‘evidence base reviews’, and ‘termly safeguarding focused checks’ in schools where issues have been flagged — to ensure the safety and wellbeing of children.

Humanists UK has a long history of campaigning against poorly regulated Steiner schools. Alongside increasing evidence of serious safeguarding problems, these schools are subject to longstanding concerns about the inclusion of pseudoscience on the curriculum. In the past, civil service briefings have also raised concerns about racism, systemic bullying, and a lack of academic rigour at Steiner institutions.

Education Campaigns Manager Ruth Wareham commented: ‘It is unacceptable that the Department for Education has not responded to Ofsted’s concerns about the suitability of the SIS and ISI for three years in a row. The recent failings in Steiner schools represent one example of how serious safeguarding problems can arise in the private sector. But, without proper oversight, it is impossible to tackle such issues or even to know how prevalent they are. In order to protect the most basic interests of children, Ofsted must be granted the power to fully monitor the efficacy of private school inspections as a matter of urgency.’

NOTES:

For more information, contact Humanists UK press manager Casey-Ann Seaniger at casey@humanism.org.uk or phone 020 7324 3078 or 07 393344293.

For more information about our educations campaigns work, visit https://humanism.org.uk/campaigns/schools-and-education/

At Humanists UK, we advance free thinking and promote humanism to create a tolerant society where rational thinking and kindness prevail. Our work brings non-religious people together to develop their own views, helping people be happier and more fulfilled in the one life we have. Through our ceremonies, education services, and community and campaigning work, we strive to create a fair and equal society for all.

https://humanism.org.uk/2018/11/09/humanists-uk-expresses-alarm-that-inspections-in-some-private-schools-are-not-being-adequately-monitored/
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