Page By Category
Blogs - Clock - Page 5
Users that have been posting for a while can create their own articles on the fly by using our built-in blogging service. Below are the most recent entries.
Confessions of a Disinformation Agent! Chapter 4
Author: Clock
Date: Jul 03, 2013 at 13:59
****ATTENTION*****
I am not Muertos and I do not know him. I am simply reposting these articles because I had found them on the Internet Wayback Machine. Do not contact me when it comes to this blog, I am not its author and my views are not necessarily his. REPEAT: I AM NOT MUERTOS.
Enjoy.
-Clock
******************
Chapter IV: The Heart of Darkness--The Conspiracy Cults.
By 2007, when the insidious Zeitgeist: The Movie reared its ugly head, I'd deleted my MySpace profile. Blogspot was now my main platform. I churned out a couple of blog posts a week, some of them about debunking, but many about politics and other subjects too. Invariably, the debunking posts were the most popular and got the most comments. It bothered me a little bit that my conspiracy audience wasn't really transferrable to other subjects. All people wanted to hear from me, it seemed, was arguments with Truthers.
In 2007 another conspiracy movie began to seep into the underground. At first I thought Zeitgeist was just another Loose Change clone. Most of the buzz I heard about it in the early days centered around its assertions that 9/11 was an inside job--all the same tropes that were debunked long ago and debunked again when Loose Change came out. But Zeitgeist had another element. The anti-Christianity section predictably freaked out the very religious, but it struck an even deeper chord in the conspiracy underground, many of whose members were hard-core atheists. I was a hard-core atheist too, at least at that time (I have since become religious), but Zeitgeist's egregious inaccuracies about religion and ancient history were galling, especially when the Truthers, who were the movie's first core audience, accepted them as gospel truth. Loose Change, as insidious as it was, had been about one main conspiracy theory. Zeitgeist upped the ante by wrapping several conspiracy theories together and selling them as a package. That made it resonate more among the paranoiacs in the conspiracy underground, and thus, made it far more dangerous.
I didn't appreciate the impact of Zeitgeist at first. For one thing, it was a terrible film, poorly made and shamelessly manipulative. No rational person could possibly take it seriously. It was junk food for the woo crowd, a bag of high-carb potato chips soaked in Jolt Cola being eagerly gobbled up by gluttons ravenous for conspiracy nonsense. How naïve of me to think this would limit its appeal! I should have known better. It wasn't until I saw fans of the movie beginning to appear with regularity on the heavy metal forum I posted on that I realized we were dealing with something new.
2008 was probably the low-water mark of my debunking years. Now that MySpace was dead and its replacement, Facebook, was less conducive to hard-core debunking, I didn't do as much of it, and in any event most of my attention, blogging and otherwise, was focused on politics. I still argued with the occasional Truther, but I didn't really return to debunking until 2009. By then Zeitgeist had spawned a sequel--the dreadfully talky Zeitgeist: Moving Forward--and, more ominously, a movement.
The rise of the Zeitgeist Movement was, to me, deeply alarming. By 2009 Truthers were in full retreat. Barack Obama's birth certificate was the big conspiracy theory that year, and that one didn't have quite the same legs that 9/11 Truth had. Yet these Zeitgeist people kept popping up everywhere. They spammed YouTube. They spammed Huffington Post. They spammed the Steven Colbert forums. Everywhere you looked they were splattering their dogma all over the Internet like paint on a Jackson Pollock canvas, shrieking that Jesus never existed and 9/11 was an inside job, and prattling on about something called a "Resource Based Economy." A friend of mine who was exasperated by seeing Zeitgeisters troll the Internet remarked that they were like fundamentalist Christians. They embodied Winston Churchill's definition of a fanatic, who is someone who can't change their mind and won't change the subject.
The Zeitgeist Movement at once astonished and fascinated me. Here was an entire social movement driven by conspiracy theories. Peter Joseph--he managed to keep his real name secret until 2010, when it came out that his true name was Peter Merola--had channeled his inner Dr. Frankenstein to patch together a bizarre gene splice between a conspiracy theorist fan club and an activist political organization. Evidently sometime in 2008, while I was busy blogging against John McCain and Sarah Palin, he had become enamored with an obscure neo-utopian organization called the Venus Project, which wanted the world to be run by robots and computers, and which existed nowhere except in the mind and the Florida garage of 90-something-year-old Jacque Fresco.
Merola sold the archaic Venus Project ideology of circular cities and magical robots to the fans of his movie as the supposed "cure" for all those terrible conspiracy theories that had scared the shit out of his audience. You must appreciate how alarming this was. This was more than just a couple of Truthers posting on MySpace and YouTube. Here was a veritable army of conspiracy theorists, who decided they were going to remake the world in their own image--or at least Peter Merola's. Now you not only had conspiracy nuts who were convinced they were right, but who had convinced themselves they were saving the world. For a high-commitment debunker, could the stakes get any higher?
Furthermore, the Zeitgeist Movement illustrated in stark detail the next frontier of conspiracism: the founding of conspiracy-based cults. Using the viral Internet movie as bait, the Zeitgeist Movement slyly advertised itself to disillusioned youngsters who were already predisposed to reject anything mainstream by stressing the traumas that mainstream society had caused them. "Hey, we know the truth about religion, 9/11 and evil bankers. Join us!" Join them they did. In 2009 Peter Merola boasted the Zeitgeist Movement had 500,000 members, obviously a grotesquely exaggerated figure evidently based on the number of raw registrations on their Internet forum. In truth, only a tiny fraction of those people who registered ever had anything significant to do with the movement, and the turnover rate was very high--few Zeitgeisters lasted more than six weeks. From my own admittedly unscientific observations I estimated the strength of Zeitgeist at about 2,000 high-commitment members worldwide at its peak. Not a lot, but despite their tiny numbers these people made a hell of a lot of noise.
The one redoubt on the net for skeptics opposed to Zeitgeist was a forum I discovered in late 2009 called "Conspiracy Science," run by a fellow called Edward Winston who had compiled the most comprehensive debunking of Zeitgeist on the Internet. ConspiracyScience.com, as it was then known, sought to be a clearing-house of online conspiracy theories, and the Zeitgeist debunking was the jewel in the crown. I began posting on the ConspiracyScience.com forum. When I joined there had already been numerous ferocious and desperate battles with 9/11 Truthers and Zeitgeisters who simply couldn't accept that the rest of the world knew instantly that the movie was false and fraudulent.
ConspiracyScience.com certainly was not perfect. Some of its regulars were a little obsessive--a few were apostates from the Zeitgeist religion, who were naturally bitter and ax-grinding--but on the whole its heart was in the right place, and at least they were giving Zeitgeisters the what-for they so richly deserved. At this point I figured that the enemy of my enemy was my friend.
My first blog about the Zeitgeist Movement went live in March 2010. This blog was interpreted by the Zeitgeisters as a declaration of war, and immediately I was classified as a dangerous and mortal threat. Within hours after my blog's first publication high-commitment supporters of the Zeitgeist Movement descended into the comments section, deploying their canned rebuttals and accusing me of all manner of depravities. "Introducing the troll blog!" screeched one fellow. "Do wish you had some real information to share instead of spewing your rage and destructive nonsense!" The person who posted this called himself "Joseph Matthew," an obvious play on Zeitgeist leader Peter Joseph Merola's convenient (and ironically Biblical) truncation of his own name. I remember being so blown away by that. These people were so deeply under the thrall of their leader that they even imitated his name.
This tendency toward imitation got even worse. Once I joined Facebook and began hanging out among the debunkers there, I was routinely harassed by people I didn't know who had the word "Zeitgeist" in their screen names, like one guy I remember in particular named "Andrew Zeitgeist Gilberds." Was there no limit to how far these people would go to demonstrate loyalty to their leader, their cause and his movies? Did they not realize how utterly creepy they were, and how badly they frightened away normal and reputable people who might otherwise have embraced some of the tenets they purported to advance?
I did not, at the outset, believe that the Zeitgeist Movement was truly a cult. In 2009 and 2010 I didn't yet appreciate how much legitimate controversy there was over the definition of the word "cult" and how that word can be misused, both innocently and deliberately. Yes, Zeitgeist was certainly cult-like, but it wasn't really a cult, at least at first. When I posted on ConspiracyScience.com I was careful to maintain this distinction, as if it meant anything. I had no idea the channel that subsequent events would take.
In December 2010, after I'd been active in debunking the Zeitgeist Movement for nine months, a high-level member of the group--a moderator on their forum, and self-proclaimed spokesperson for the organization--issued a fatwa that listed numerous people as official enemies of the Zeitgeist Movement. My name was on the list. The ostensible reason for the enemies list was, according to the Zeitgeisters, a "warning" to their brethren that the people on the list were seeking to friend Zeitgeisters on Facebook and steal their personal information. I had never once attempted to friend anyone from Zeitgeist, much less steal any information from anyone. Yet, one day not long after the enemies list appeared, I saw a topic on the Zeitgeist Movement forum (which I monitored periodically) where a high-level Zeitgeister asserted, as if it was fact, that I had once been a Zeitgeist Movement member who had posted frequently on their forum and had subsequently become disgruntled for one reason or another, the obvious implication being that I was an apostate out to ruin them for revenge. The Zeitgeist orthodoxy was that critics of the movement frequently employed "sock puppet" accounts to infiltrate their forums and harass them. Nothing could have been further from the truth in my case. But no one cared about the truth. The Zeitgeisters had no regard for who I was or what my reasons were for debunking their movies or their movement. I criticized them, so therefore I was an enemy. Why I did what I did--my own history of debunking, my own motivations that had brought me into conflict with them--could not have been of lesser interest to anyone. This was the beginning of my realization that the world of conspiracy theories was quite a bit more depraved and dog-eat-dog than I'd previously appreciated.
A month later, in January 2011, Jared Lee Loughner, an insane conspiracy theorist, attempted to assassinate U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, Arizona, killing several people in the process, including children. As it turned out, Loughner's delusional worldview was heavily influenced by his favorite film--Zeitgeist: The Movie. Instead of trying to distance themselves from the negative publicity occasioned by the Tucson massacre, many Zeitgeist Movement members embraced it, assuming (erroneously) that there was no such thing as bad press. Not long thereafter, Douglas Mallette, yet another self-proclaimed spokesperson for the movement, was outed by an anti-Zeitgeist blog called Zeitgeist Movement Exposed (a blog I had nothing to do with) for an appearance on an Internet radio show where Mallette expressed--with evident and blood-chilling relish--his viewpoint that anyone who disagreed with Zeitgeist's "resource based economy" model should be "annihilated" and was a "waste of skin." Mallette retracted his bloodthirsty statements, but the reaction to his retraction among the rank-and-file Zeitgeist members demonstrated that very few of them saw anything wrong with what he'd originally said. My blog from February 2011 about this incident expressed my astonishment at this development. I had bent over backwards to avoid labeling Zeitgeist as a destructive cult, but here they were validating the most shrill criticisms leveled at them. By the end of the first quarter of 2011, I had no hesitation in labeling the Zeitgeist Movement a cult.
Just at the point when the Zeitgeist Movement started to become dangerous, they quite fortunately committed seppuku, validating Napoleon's old maxim: "Never interfere with the enemy when he is in the process of destroying himself." The Zeitgeist Movement, headed by Peter Joseph Merola, and the Venus Project, headed by Jacque Fresco, fell out in April 2011 in an acrimonious dispute over how the group's feeble trickle of donations should be used. Either organization without the other was largely useless. Venus went on to try to achieve some modicum of respectability, while Zeitgeist descended into the depths of radical, frightening paranoia; in August, for instance, one of their members publicly aired a plot to assassinate 1,000 of the conspiratorial "elite" that they blamed for screwing up the world. By then no one cared. Zeitgeist: The Movie was old news. Everyone had already seen it, and it had been debunked many times over. Most of the movement's high-echelon members, many of whom seemed intractable when I'd argued with them a year before about their devotion to the group, jumped ship and never looked back. Merola, tired of debunkers seizing upon every stitch of dirty laundry aired publicly on the group's forum, shut down the forum entirely, whilst hissing vituperatively that his detractors (including me) were "paid disinformation agents" out to ruin him. By November 2011 the Zeitgeist Movement had, for all intents and purposes, ceased to exist. A tiny burned-out core of true believers remained, smoldering faintly into the blogosphere, but Zeitgeist in 2011 was a pale and feeble shadow of the conspiracy juggernaut it had been in 2008.
In the spring of 2011 a friend of mine, active in debunking circles, forwarded me some links to YouTube videos generated by another organization called Desteni. Whatever naïve notions I'd once had about conspiracy theorist cults melted away in the first few seconds I heard the raspy accented voice of Desteni founder and guru Bernard Poolman, a (white) South African ex-cop who worshipped Adolf Hitler and had founded a Charlie Manson-like nucleus of twenty-something chicks, most with shaved heads, who milled about on his South Africa ranch ready to do his bidding. If Zeitgeist was mildly disturbing, Desteni was deeply alarming. Desteni's main shtick was reptilian conspiracy theories, such as those promoted by world-class nutbar David Icke. Desteni sought to recruit new members mainly through YouTube, where the cult carpet-bombed potential recruits with endless hours of videos jammed-packed with conspiracy propaganda, New Age tropes and utter incomprehensible nonsense so impenetrable it could only be unraveled by the sage gospel of Bernard Poolman himself. You could waste away for years listening to recordings of Poolman's prattlings or watching videos of the "portal," cult member Sunette Spies, who looked like Anne Heche circa 1998 and pretended to channel the spirits of everything from L. Ron Hubbard to a piece of toilet paper. As I stated in my first blog about the group, Desteni was so wack-job out there that they made the Zeitgeist Movement look like the Rotary Club.
In addition to being stunningly bizarre, Desteni was incredibly aggressive at retaliating against its critics--far more so than even the criticism-averse Zeitgeist Movement. It took me ten months to get on Zeitgeist's enemies list; I was on Desteni's within two weeks. In addition, one of Desteni's high-profile members created a blog specifically dedicated to refuting, line by line and word by word, my first article about the group. Sadly that blog was only active for a few weeks.
In addition to being a cult, Desteni was also a scam. Poolman's main means of financial support appears to have been a very crude multi-level marketing outfit called the "Desteni I Process." This fascinated me because it brought me full-circle back to the starting point of my fascination with conspiracy theories, that being "organized deception." To me there are three kinds of organized deception: scams, cults and conspiracy theories. The Zeitgeist Movement was an organization that embodied two out of the three types of organized deception, but Desteni, by using an MLM scam, hit all three. Poolman's bizarre New Age conspiracy religion was the perfect subject for my study--the living embodiment of deception in the 21st century.
In August 2011, Desteni and its main officers were banned from YouTube, which prohibits the use of its service to advance multi-level marketing scams. This essentially atomized Desteni, at least insofar as recruiting new members, but unlike Zeitgeist they did not effectively meet their extinction. I checked back in on Desteni a couple of months later and found them, if not thriving, at least recovering from the YouTube fiasco. This group was never very large; even the most generous estimates of the cult's membership never put it higher than about 200. But unfortunately they're still out there. Desteni's image is far too tarnished and strange to attract any sort of meaningful mainstream support, but they continue to exist as a particularly noteworthy example of what happens when New Age and conspiracy theories cross-breed with one another.
As I researched Desteni I began to be bothered by the great darkness that lay at the heart of these conspiracy cults. The deeper I plumbed these waters, the more cynical I became. The core membership of Zeitgeist and Desteni consisted of disillusioned young people, most in their twenties, who yearned for a better world and honestly wanted to make it happen. But their optimism and enthusiasm had been hijacked and manipulated by others with far less pure motives. I saw in these groups and their members a mirror of the classic social narrative of the 60s, where the hope and youthful promise of the hippie generation was soured and squandered by a series of epic bummers like Vietnam, Altamont, Charles Manson and Watergate. What I saw in Zeitgeist and Desteni was the cancer of conspiracy theories eating away at an entire generation of young people. This profoundly depressed me. It got to be that I dreaded switching on my laptop in the morning. How much farther into this darkness could I go?
The ticket to my final foray into the darkness of conspiracy theories arrived by email one evening in November 2011. "Hey, have you heard of this new movie that's about to come out?" said one of my debunker friends. "It's called Thrive."
I am not Muertos and I do not know him. I am simply reposting these articles because I had found them on the Internet Wayback Machine. Do not contact me when it comes to this blog, I am not its author and my views are not necessarily his. REPEAT: I AM NOT MUERTOS.
Enjoy.
-Clock
******************
Chapter IV: The Heart of Darkness--The Conspiracy Cults.
By 2007, when the insidious Zeitgeist: The Movie reared its ugly head, I'd deleted my MySpace profile. Blogspot was now my main platform. I churned out a couple of blog posts a week, some of them about debunking, but many about politics and other subjects too. Invariably, the debunking posts were the most popular and got the most comments. It bothered me a little bit that my conspiracy audience wasn't really transferrable to other subjects. All people wanted to hear from me, it seemed, was arguments with Truthers.
In 2007 another conspiracy movie began to seep into the underground. At first I thought Zeitgeist was just another Loose Change clone. Most of the buzz I heard about it in the early days centered around its assertions that 9/11 was an inside job--all the same tropes that were debunked long ago and debunked again when Loose Change came out. But Zeitgeist had another element. The anti-Christianity section predictably freaked out the very religious, but it struck an even deeper chord in the conspiracy underground, many of whose members were hard-core atheists. I was a hard-core atheist too, at least at that time (I have since become religious), but Zeitgeist's egregious inaccuracies about religion and ancient history were galling, especially when the Truthers, who were the movie's first core audience, accepted them as gospel truth. Loose Change, as insidious as it was, had been about one main conspiracy theory. Zeitgeist upped the ante by wrapping several conspiracy theories together and selling them as a package. That made it resonate more among the paranoiacs in the conspiracy underground, and thus, made it far more dangerous.
I didn't appreciate the impact of Zeitgeist at first. For one thing, it was a terrible film, poorly made and shamelessly manipulative. No rational person could possibly take it seriously. It was junk food for the woo crowd, a bag of high-carb potato chips soaked in Jolt Cola being eagerly gobbled up by gluttons ravenous for conspiracy nonsense. How naïve of me to think this would limit its appeal! I should have known better. It wasn't until I saw fans of the movie beginning to appear with regularity on the heavy metal forum I posted on that I realized we were dealing with something new.
2008 was probably the low-water mark of my debunking years. Now that MySpace was dead and its replacement, Facebook, was less conducive to hard-core debunking, I didn't do as much of it, and in any event most of my attention, blogging and otherwise, was focused on politics. I still argued with the occasional Truther, but I didn't really return to debunking until 2009. By then Zeitgeist had spawned a sequel--the dreadfully talky Zeitgeist: Moving Forward--and, more ominously, a movement.
The rise of the Zeitgeist Movement was, to me, deeply alarming. By 2009 Truthers were in full retreat. Barack Obama's birth certificate was the big conspiracy theory that year, and that one didn't have quite the same legs that 9/11 Truth had. Yet these Zeitgeist people kept popping up everywhere. They spammed YouTube. They spammed Huffington Post. They spammed the Steven Colbert forums. Everywhere you looked they were splattering their dogma all over the Internet like paint on a Jackson Pollock canvas, shrieking that Jesus never existed and 9/11 was an inside job, and prattling on about something called a "Resource Based Economy." A friend of mine who was exasperated by seeing Zeitgeisters troll the Internet remarked that they were like fundamentalist Christians. They embodied Winston Churchill's definition of a fanatic, who is someone who can't change their mind and won't change the subject.
The Zeitgeist Movement at once astonished and fascinated me. Here was an entire social movement driven by conspiracy theories. Peter Joseph--he managed to keep his real name secret until 2010, when it came out that his true name was Peter Merola--had channeled his inner Dr. Frankenstein to patch together a bizarre gene splice between a conspiracy theorist fan club and an activist political organization. Evidently sometime in 2008, while I was busy blogging against John McCain and Sarah Palin, he had become enamored with an obscure neo-utopian organization called the Venus Project, which wanted the world to be run by robots and computers, and which existed nowhere except in the mind and the Florida garage of 90-something-year-old Jacque Fresco.
Merola sold the archaic Venus Project ideology of circular cities and magical robots to the fans of his movie as the supposed "cure" for all those terrible conspiracy theories that had scared the shit out of his audience. You must appreciate how alarming this was. This was more than just a couple of Truthers posting on MySpace and YouTube. Here was a veritable army of conspiracy theorists, who decided they were going to remake the world in their own image--or at least Peter Merola's. Now you not only had conspiracy nuts who were convinced they were right, but who had convinced themselves they were saving the world. For a high-commitment debunker, could the stakes get any higher?
Furthermore, the Zeitgeist Movement illustrated in stark detail the next frontier of conspiracism: the founding of conspiracy-based cults. Using the viral Internet movie as bait, the Zeitgeist Movement slyly advertised itself to disillusioned youngsters who were already predisposed to reject anything mainstream by stressing the traumas that mainstream society had caused them. "Hey, we know the truth about religion, 9/11 and evil bankers. Join us!" Join them they did. In 2009 Peter Merola boasted the Zeitgeist Movement had 500,000 members, obviously a grotesquely exaggerated figure evidently based on the number of raw registrations on their Internet forum. In truth, only a tiny fraction of those people who registered ever had anything significant to do with the movement, and the turnover rate was very high--few Zeitgeisters lasted more than six weeks. From my own admittedly unscientific observations I estimated the strength of Zeitgeist at about 2,000 high-commitment members worldwide at its peak. Not a lot, but despite their tiny numbers these people made a hell of a lot of noise.
The one redoubt on the net for skeptics opposed to Zeitgeist was a forum I discovered in late 2009 called "Conspiracy Science," run by a fellow called Edward Winston who had compiled the most comprehensive debunking of Zeitgeist on the Internet. ConspiracyScience.com, as it was then known, sought to be a clearing-house of online conspiracy theories, and the Zeitgeist debunking was the jewel in the crown. I began posting on the ConspiracyScience.com forum. When I joined there had already been numerous ferocious and desperate battles with 9/11 Truthers and Zeitgeisters who simply couldn't accept that the rest of the world knew instantly that the movie was false and fraudulent.
ConspiracyScience.com certainly was not perfect. Some of its regulars were a little obsessive--a few were apostates from the Zeitgeist religion, who were naturally bitter and ax-grinding--but on the whole its heart was in the right place, and at least they were giving Zeitgeisters the what-for they so richly deserved. At this point I figured that the enemy of my enemy was my friend.
My first blog about the Zeitgeist Movement went live in March 2010. This blog was interpreted by the Zeitgeisters as a declaration of war, and immediately I was classified as a dangerous and mortal threat. Within hours after my blog's first publication high-commitment supporters of the Zeitgeist Movement descended into the comments section, deploying their canned rebuttals and accusing me of all manner of depravities. "Introducing the troll blog!" screeched one fellow. "Do wish you had some real information to share instead of spewing your rage and destructive nonsense!" The person who posted this called himself "Joseph Matthew," an obvious play on Zeitgeist leader Peter Joseph Merola's convenient (and ironically Biblical) truncation of his own name. I remember being so blown away by that. These people were so deeply under the thrall of their leader that they even imitated his name.
This tendency toward imitation got even worse. Once I joined Facebook and began hanging out among the debunkers there, I was routinely harassed by people I didn't know who had the word "Zeitgeist" in their screen names, like one guy I remember in particular named "Andrew Zeitgeist Gilberds." Was there no limit to how far these people would go to demonstrate loyalty to their leader, their cause and his movies? Did they not realize how utterly creepy they were, and how badly they frightened away normal and reputable people who might otherwise have embraced some of the tenets they purported to advance?
I did not, at the outset, believe that the Zeitgeist Movement was truly a cult. In 2009 and 2010 I didn't yet appreciate how much legitimate controversy there was over the definition of the word "cult" and how that word can be misused, both innocently and deliberately. Yes, Zeitgeist was certainly cult-like, but it wasn't really a cult, at least at first. When I posted on ConspiracyScience.com I was careful to maintain this distinction, as if it meant anything. I had no idea the channel that subsequent events would take.
In December 2010, after I'd been active in debunking the Zeitgeist Movement for nine months, a high-level member of the group--a moderator on their forum, and self-proclaimed spokesperson for the organization--issued a fatwa that listed numerous people as official enemies of the Zeitgeist Movement. My name was on the list. The ostensible reason for the enemies list was, according to the Zeitgeisters, a "warning" to their brethren that the people on the list were seeking to friend Zeitgeisters on Facebook and steal their personal information. I had never once attempted to friend anyone from Zeitgeist, much less steal any information from anyone. Yet, one day not long after the enemies list appeared, I saw a topic on the Zeitgeist Movement forum (which I monitored periodically) where a high-level Zeitgeister asserted, as if it was fact, that I had once been a Zeitgeist Movement member who had posted frequently on their forum and had subsequently become disgruntled for one reason or another, the obvious implication being that I was an apostate out to ruin them for revenge. The Zeitgeist orthodoxy was that critics of the movement frequently employed "sock puppet" accounts to infiltrate their forums and harass them. Nothing could have been further from the truth in my case. But no one cared about the truth. The Zeitgeisters had no regard for who I was or what my reasons were for debunking their movies or their movement. I criticized them, so therefore I was an enemy. Why I did what I did--my own history of debunking, my own motivations that had brought me into conflict with them--could not have been of lesser interest to anyone. This was the beginning of my realization that the world of conspiracy theories was quite a bit more depraved and dog-eat-dog than I'd previously appreciated.
A month later, in January 2011, Jared Lee Loughner, an insane conspiracy theorist, attempted to assassinate U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, Arizona, killing several people in the process, including children. As it turned out, Loughner's delusional worldview was heavily influenced by his favorite film--Zeitgeist: The Movie. Instead of trying to distance themselves from the negative publicity occasioned by the Tucson massacre, many Zeitgeist Movement members embraced it, assuming (erroneously) that there was no such thing as bad press. Not long thereafter, Douglas Mallette, yet another self-proclaimed spokesperson for the movement, was outed by an anti-Zeitgeist blog called Zeitgeist Movement Exposed (a blog I had nothing to do with) for an appearance on an Internet radio show where Mallette expressed--with evident and blood-chilling relish--his viewpoint that anyone who disagreed with Zeitgeist's "resource based economy" model should be "annihilated" and was a "waste of skin." Mallette retracted his bloodthirsty statements, but the reaction to his retraction among the rank-and-file Zeitgeist members demonstrated that very few of them saw anything wrong with what he'd originally said. My blog from February 2011 about this incident expressed my astonishment at this development. I had bent over backwards to avoid labeling Zeitgeist as a destructive cult, but here they were validating the most shrill criticisms leveled at them. By the end of the first quarter of 2011, I had no hesitation in labeling the Zeitgeist Movement a cult.
Just at the point when the Zeitgeist Movement started to become dangerous, they quite fortunately committed seppuku, validating Napoleon's old maxim: "Never interfere with the enemy when he is in the process of destroying himself." The Zeitgeist Movement, headed by Peter Joseph Merola, and the Venus Project, headed by Jacque Fresco, fell out in April 2011 in an acrimonious dispute over how the group's feeble trickle of donations should be used. Either organization without the other was largely useless. Venus went on to try to achieve some modicum of respectability, while Zeitgeist descended into the depths of radical, frightening paranoia; in August, for instance, one of their members publicly aired a plot to assassinate 1,000 of the conspiratorial "elite" that they blamed for screwing up the world. By then no one cared. Zeitgeist: The Movie was old news. Everyone had already seen it, and it had been debunked many times over. Most of the movement's high-echelon members, many of whom seemed intractable when I'd argued with them a year before about their devotion to the group, jumped ship and never looked back. Merola, tired of debunkers seizing upon every stitch of dirty laundry aired publicly on the group's forum, shut down the forum entirely, whilst hissing vituperatively that his detractors (including me) were "paid disinformation agents" out to ruin him. By November 2011 the Zeitgeist Movement had, for all intents and purposes, ceased to exist. A tiny burned-out core of true believers remained, smoldering faintly into the blogosphere, but Zeitgeist in 2011 was a pale and feeble shadow of the conspiracy juggernaut it had been in 2008.
In the spring of 2011 a friend of mine, active in debunking circles, forwarded me some links to YouTube videos generated by another organization called Desteni. Whatever naïve notions I'd once had about conspiracy theorist cults melted away in the first few seconds I heard the raspy accented voice of Desteni founder and guru Bernard Poolman, a (white) South African ex-cop who worshipped Adolf Hitler and had founded a Charlie Manson-like nucleus of twenty-something chicks, most with shaved heads, who milled about on his South Africa ranch ready to do his bidding. If Zeitgeist was mildly disturbing, Desteni was deeply alarming. Desteni's main shtick was reptilian conspiracy theories, such as those promoted by world-class nutbar David Icke. Desteni sought to recruit new members mainly through YouTube, where the cult carpet-bombed potential recruits with endless hours of videos jammed-packed with conspiracy propaganda, New Age tropes and utter incomprehensible nonsense so impenetrable it could only be unraveled by the sage gospel of Bernard Poolman himself. You could waste away for years listening to recordings of Poolman's prattlings or watching videos of the "portal," cult member Sunette Spies, who looked like Anne Heche circa 1998 and pretended to channel the spirits of everything from L. Ron Hubbard to a piece of toilet paper. As I stated in my first blog about the group, Desteni was so wack-job out there that they made the Zeitgeist Movement look like the Rotary Club.
In addition to being stunningly bizarre, Desteni was incredibly aggressive at retaliating against its critics--far more so than even the criticism-averse Zeitgeist Movement. It took me ten months to get on Zeitgeist's enemies list; I was on Desteni's within two weeks. In addition, one of Desteni's high-profile members created a blog specifically dedicated to refuting, line by line and word by word, my first article about the group. Sadly that blog was only active for a few weeks.
In addition to being a cult, Desteni was also a scam. Poolman's main means of financial support appears to have been a very crude multi-level marketing outfit called the "Desteni I Process." This fascinated me because it brought me full-circle back to the starting point of my fascination with conspiracy theories, that being "organized deception." To me there are three kinds of organized deception: scams, cults and conspiracy theories. The Zeitgeist Movement was an organization that embodied two out of the three types of organized deception, but Desteni, by using an MLM scam, hit all three. Poolman's bizarre New Age conspiracy religion was the perfect subject for my study--the living embodiment of deception in the 21st century.
In August 2011, Desteni and its main officers were banned from YouTube, which prohibits the use of its service to advance multi-level marketing scams. This essentially atomized Desteni, at least insofar as recruiting new members, but unlike Zeitgeist they did not effectively meet their extinction. I checked back in on Desteni a couple of months later and found them, if not thriving, at least recovering from the YouTube fiasco. This group was never very large; even the most generous estimates of the cult's membership never put it higher than about 200. But unfortunately they're still out there. Desteni's image is far too tarnished and strange to attract any sort of meaningful mainstream support, but they continue to exist as a particularly noteworthy example of what happens when New Age and conspiracy theories cross-breed with one another.
As I researched Desteni I began to be bothered by the great darkness that lay at the heart of these conspiracy cults. The deeper I plumbed these waters, the more cynical I became. The core membership of Zeitgeist and Desteni consisted of disillusioned young people, most in their twenties, who yearned for a better world and honestly wanted to make it happen. But their optimism and enthusiasm had been hijacked and manipulated by others with far less pure motives. I saw in these groups and their members a mirror of the classic social narrative of the 60s, where the hope and youthful promise of the hippie generation was soured and squandered by a series of epic bummers like Vietnam, Altamont, Charles Manson and Watergate. What I saw in Zeitgeist and Desteni was the cancer of conspiracy theories eating away at an entire generation of young people. This profoundly depressed me. It got to be that I dreaded switching on my laptop in the morning. How much farther into this darkness could I go?
The ticket to my final foray into the darkness of conspiracy theories arrived by email one evening in November 2011. "Hey, have you heard of this new movie that's about to come out?" said one of my debunker friends. "It's called Thrive."
Deconstructing Desteni: A Critic Serves Me Word Salad.
Author: Clock
Date: Jul 01, 2013 at 10:22
This is a post from Clock's Muertos Blog on Skeptic Project. If you have any questions, check out the Disclaimer
By Muertos
(muertos@gmail.com)
As I mentioned in the update to my first blog about the conspiracy theory cult known as Desteni, I've recently attracted the negative attention of self-appointed Desteni spokesperson Darryl Thomas. On May 13, Darryl started a topic on the Desteni forums entitled "Deconstructing MUERTOS Every Day Project," where he refutes my first Desteni blog paragraph by paragraph. He also started a WordPress blog with this same title where he copies-and-pastes the same text as in the topic on the Desteni forums.
Darryl writes a great many words, but it's somewhat difficult to follow his main arguments because they aren't very concise. Mostly he throws a lot of colorful pejoratives my way--vapid, insipid, tiresome, trifling, sloppy, etc.--but his main points are lost in the word salad. To the extent I can discern a few main themes, Darryl appears to be asserting the following:
If these arguments were coherently expressed, there might be grounds here for legitimate debate. Unfortunately, Darryl merely asserts these arguments as conclusions but doesn't do much to flesh them out. For example, in denying that Desteni is a cult, Darryl tries to set up the argument by citing the Oxford Dictionary definition of a cult, which has four main points, but then goes off on a tangent about Zeitgeist and never gets around to explaining why Desteni doesn't fit the definition. Similarly, when he claims I'm a conspiracy theorist, he just posits the accusation and moves on. (Incidentally, conspiracy theorists, who generally hate being called conspiracy theorists, will do anything to try to twist the definition of "conspiracy theorist" to fit whoever is criticizing them. For more on this issue, see this article and scroll down to point number 8).
A key point of Darryl's responses seem to revolve around making distinctions between things I argue about Desteni and what he claims Desteni really is. The problem is that he never makes the distinctions clear. For example, Darryl says I'm wrong to claim that Desteni believes in conspiracy theories involving reptilian overlords similar to those advanced by David Icke, but he doesn't establish why there's any meaningful difference between David Icke's imaginary reptilians and the imaginary reptilians that Desteni believes in. With regard to the "Interdimensional Portal," Darryl doesn't make clear what the difference is between this and "channeling"--the difference, if there is one at all, is totally semantic.
In short, there's very little of any substance in Darryl's responses. If I may go so far as to suggest a way to improve his supposed daily refutations of me, I would advise Darryl to start by making cogent, well-constructed arguments and sticking to the point. For example, if he wishes to argue that Desteni is not a cult, he should proceed point-by-point through a definition of what a cult is and demonstrate why Desteni does not meet those points. Incidentally, while there are many definitions of cults, I like the definition used by Operation Clambake which has five main points:
1. It uses psychological coercion to recruit, indoctrinate and retain its members.
2. It forms an elitist totalitarian society.
3. Its founder/leader is self-appointed, dogmatic, messianic, not accountable and has charisma.
4. It believes "the end justifies the means" in order to solicit funds and recruit people.
5. Its wealth does not benefit its members or society.
If Darryl wishes to argue that Desteni does not meet these five points, let him do so; or, conversely, if he wishes to challenge me to argue that these points do fit Desteni, that is an entirely reasonable basis for a rational debate. What he's posted, however, falls far short of this standard.
Incidentally, I don't believe Darryl is really that interested in "deconstructing" me "daily." Not only has the "Deconstructing MUERTOS Daily" blog not been updated in five days, but he's already moved on to "deconstructing" another Desteni critic in much the same rambling and incoherent manner. Darryl's response is the classic conspiracy theorist form of pseudo-argumentation: meaningless generalizations, conclusory statements not backed up with argument, and lack of any logical coherent structure. While he probably will respond to this blog, I doubt that his response will be much different than what he's already said.
Thanks for reading.
By Muertos
(muertos@gmail.com)
As I mentioned in the update to my first blog about the conspiracy theory cult known as Desteni, I've recently attracted the negative attention of self-appointed Desteni spokesperson Darryl Thomas. On May 13, Darryl started a topic on the Desteni forums entitled "Deconstructing MUERTOS Every Day Project," where he refutes my first Desteni blog paragraph by paragraph. He also started a WordPress blog with this same title where he copies-and-pastes the same text as in the topic on the Desteni forums.
Darryl writes a great many words, but it's somewhat difficult to follow his main arguments because they aren't very concise. Mostly he throws a lot of colorful pejoratives my way--vapid, insipid, tiresome, trifling, sloppy, etc.--but his main points are lost in the word salad. To the extent I can discern a few main themes, Darryl appears to be asserting the following:
Desteni is not a cult.
My comparison of Desteni to Zeitgeist is unfair because Desteni opposes Zeitgeist too.
I have not investigated Desteni extensively and don't know what I'm talking about.
Desteni does not subscribe to conspiracy theories such as David Icke's reptilians.
I am a conspiracy theorist.
Desteni does not advocate "channeling," but rather an "Interdimensional Portal."
The Desteni I Process is not a multi-level-marketing pyramid scam.
Adolf Hitler wasn't such a bad guy.
If these arguments were coherently expressed, there might be grounds here for legitimate debate. Unfortunately, Darryl merely asserts these arguments as conclusions but doesn't do much to flesh them out. For example, in denying that Desteni is a cult, Darryl tries to set up the argument by citing the Oxford Dictionary definition of a cult, which has four main points, but then goes off on a tangent about Zeitgeist and never gets around to explaining why Desteni doesn't fit the definition. Similarly, when he claims I'm a conspiracy theorist, he just posits the accusation and moves on. (Incidentally, conspiracy theorists, who generally hate being called conspiracy theorists, will do anything to try to twist the definition of "conspiracy theorist" to fit whoever is criticizing them. For more on this issue, see this article and scroll down to point number 8).
A key point of Darryl's responses seem to revolve around making distinctions between things I argue about Desteni and what he claims Desteni really is. The problem is that he never makes the distinctions clear. For example, Darryl says I'm wrong to claim that Desteni believes in conspiracy theories involving reptilian overlords similar to those advanced by David Icke, but he doesn't establish why there's any meaningful difference between David Icke's imaginary reptilians and the imaginary reptilians that Desteni believes in. With regard to the "Interdimensional Portal," Darryl doesn't make clear what the difference is between this and "channeling"--the difference, if there is one at all, is totally semantic.
In short, there's very little of any substance in Darryl's responses. If I may go so far as to suggest a way to improve his supposed daily refutations of me, I would advise Darryl to start by making cogent, well-constructed arguments and sticking to the point. For example, if he wishes to argue that Desteni is not a cult, he should proceed point-by-point through a definition of what a cult is and demonstrate why Desteni does not meet those points. Incidentally, while there are many definitions of cults, I like the definition used by Operation Clambake which has five main points:
1. It uses psychological coercion to recruit, indoctrinate and retain its members.
2. It forms an elitist totalitarian society.
3. Its founder/leader is self-appointed, dogmatic, messianic, not accountable and has charisma.
4. It believes "the end justifies the means" in order to solicit funds and recruit people.
5. Its wealth does not benefit its members or society.
If Darryl wishes to argue that Desteni does not meet these five points, let him do so; or, conversely, if he wishes to challenge me to argue that these points do fit Desteni, that is an entirely reasonable basis for a rational debate. What he's posted, however, falls far short of this standard.
Incidentally, I don't believe Darryl is really that interested in "deconstructing" me "daily." Not only has the "Deconstructing MUERTOS Daily" blog not been updated in five days, but he's already moved on to "deconstructing" another Desteni critic in much the same rambling and incoherent manner. Darryl's response is the classic conspiracy theorist form of pseudo-argumentation: meaningless generalizations, conclusory statements not backed up with argument, and lack of any logical coherent structure. While he probably will respond to this blog, I doubt that his response will be much different than what he's already said.
Thanks for reading.
Desteni's Enemies List: An Inherent Contradiction.
Author: Clock
Date: Jul 01, 2013 at 10:07
By Muertos
(not by Clock)
So far I've posted two blogs about the strange South Africa-based conspiracy cult known as Desteni. After only two blogs, audio versions of which I posted on YouTube, I found my YouTube account listed in a topic on the Desteni forums entitled "Suggested Ban". The purpose of this list is obvious: these are users who the Desteni cult wants banned from YouTube for criticizing them. Plain and simple, it's an enemies list.
Desteni also has a Facebook enemies list. I'm not on it yet, but I expect I will be soon enough.
I was introduced to the phenomenon of conspiracy cults' enemies lists last fall, when my name suddenly appeared on a similar list maintained by the Zeitgeist Movement. (It's here). That list was largely the brainchild of former Zeitgeist spokesperson Neil Kiernan Stephenson, "VTV." VTV and other Zeitgeist boosters consistently denied that it was an enemies list--according to them the reason for the list was to warn Zeitgeist members about people who would try to friend them on Facebook and steal their personal information. Not only did I never do this, but I've never once attempted to "friend" a Zeitgeister on Facebook at any time. My only crime against the Zeitgeist Movement was speaking out against them, pushing back against their conspiracy theories, their ideology and their reflexive attacks against anyone who criticizes them.
I've wound up on Desteni's enemies list for doing far less than that. My residence on the Zeitgeist enemies list came almost eight months after I posted my first blog highlighting the primacy of conspiracy theory ideology to the Zeitgeist Movement. By contrast I've been publicly critical of Desteni for barely two weeks. Yet, not only is my YouTube channel listed on Desteni's roster of users they want to try to ban, but I am the specific subject of a topic on the Desteni forums where prominent spokesperson Darryl Thomas has announced that he intends to refute one paragraph of my anti-Desteni blogs each day.(http://deconstructingmuertosdaily.wordpress.com/) The charge the Destenians level against me, predictably, is "hate speech." I challenge anyone to find a single example of "hate speech" as that term is defined by any jurisdiction where "hate speech" is prohibited by law. It's very clear that Desteni is totally and deliberately misunderstanding the concept of "hate speech" by construing it as encompassing any statement about their group that they don't agree with.
At least I have good company. Desteni's enemies list is literally hundreds of entries long and growing by the dozens every time it's updated. As I stated in my first blog about them, they are extremely aggressive in trying to silence their critics. Unlike Zeitgeist, who cloaks their enemies list in paragraph after paragraph of bold-faced disclaimers about why it's supposedly not an enemies list, Desteni makes no such attempts. They're very forthright about going after their critics, going so far as to have a stickied topic on their forum with instructions to cult members about how to get people banned from YouTube.
There are two points I want to make about enemies lists. The first is that the very existence of these lists is wholly incompatible with the notion of friendly movements based on social justice that preach prescriptions for a better and more harmonious world--which both Zeitgeist and Desteni profess to do. Destenians supposedly value doing "what's best for all" and insist that their program will help the entire earth enjoy newfound respect and the maximization of human potential. The very notion that a group with those professed goals would keep--much less make public--a list of enemies to be retaliated against for their viewpoints is totally inconsistent with the reasons these organizations say they exist. Simply put, any group preaching peace, love and a better world that also has an enemies list should be automatically suspect.
The second point is that enemies lists seem to be yet another hallmark of cults who seek to control what is said about them, and more importantly, what their own members hear. The paradigm example of a cult's enemies list is Scientology's practice of labeling detractors as "Suppressive Persons" or SP's. Most SP's are family members of current Scientology members who don't support the group and are likely to encourage their loved ones to leave--hence Scientology's doctrine of "Disconnection," where a cult member is ordered to sever all ties to the SP. Naturally this practice is believed to inure to the benefit of the cult member, who will no longer receive negative feedback from the critic.
Exactly the same dynamic is at work in both Zeitgeist and Desteni. Zeitgeist's enemies list is specifically promoted as being for the "protection" of cult members, with the transparent fiction of preventing evil trolls--the word Zeitgeist uses to refer to critics--from stealing members' personal information. Much of Desteni's advice to followers similarly seeks to minimize criticism--Destenians call it "backchat" and urge their followers not to pay attention to it, despite the obvious hypocrisy that they pay a great deal of attention to it. Desteni, however, also seems interested in lashing out at those non-members who criticize them. A common tactic is to pretend they're "protecting copyrighted material," which is why unfounded DMCA claims are a favorite tool of the Destenians to target materials, especially videos, that they don't like.
Two weeks ago, I venture to say no one in Desteni had ever heard of me. The fact that I have been targeted so swiftly and vehemently is itself, I believe, a piece of evidence that tends to indicate the controlling and authoritarian nature of this group. I'm taking precautions to make sure my blogs and videos will be mirrored and continue to be available, in the event that Desteni pursues their threats to ban me. Should they decide to make an attempt to silence me, rest assured that that attempt will fail. In the meantime, it's worth thinking about why a group that claims to be for the benefit of mankind goes on the attack so quickly and with such gusto. I propose that Desteni's attack is inherent in the nature of its organization and ideology. This is a group that cannot permit dissent, and which profits from the effort to push back against dissenters. It's easier to maintain cohesion within the group, after all, if its members can be united in the struggle against a common enemy.
Thanks for reading.
(not by Clock)
So far I've posted two blogs about the strange South Africa-based conspiracy cult known as Desteni. After only two blogs, audio versions of which I posted on YouTube, I found my YouTube account listed in a topic on the Desteni forums entitled "Suggested Ban". The purpose of this list is obvious: these are users who the Desteni cult wants banned from YouTube for criticizing them. Plain and simple, it's an enemies list.
Desteni also has a Facebook enemies list. I'm not on it yet, but I expect I will be soon enough.
I was introduced to the phenomenon of conspiracy cults' enemies lists last fall, when my name suddenly appeared on a similar list maintained by the Zeitgeist Movement. (It's here). That list was largely the brainchild of former Zeitgeist spokesperson Neil Kiernan Stephenson, "VTV." VTV and other Zeitgeist boosters consistently denied that it was an enemies list--according to them the reason for the list was to warn Zeitgeist members about people who would try to friend them on Facebook and steal their personal information. Not only did I never do this, but I've never once attempted to "friend" a Zeitgeister on Facebook at any time. My only crime against the Zeitgeist Movement was speaking out against them, pushing back against their conspiracy theories, their ideology and their reflexive attacks against anyone who criticizes them.
I've wound up on Desteni's enemies list for doing far less than that. My residence on the Zeitgeist enemies list came almost eight months after I posted my first blog highlighting the primacy of conspiracy theory ideology to the Zeitgeist Movement. By contrast I've been publicly critical of Desteni for barely two weeks. Yet, not only is my YouTube channel listed on Desteni's roster of users they want to try to ban, but I am the specific subject of a topic on the Desteni forums where prominent spokesperson Darryl Thomas has announced that he intends to refute one paragraph of my anti-Desteni blogs each day.(http://deconstructingmuertosdaily.wordpress.com/) The charge the Destenians level against me, predictably, is "hate speech." I challenge anyone to find a single example of "hate speech" as that term is defined by any jurisdiction where "hate speech" is prohibited by law. It's very clear that Desteni is totally and deliberately misunderstanding the concept of "hate speech" by construing it as encompassing any statement about their group that they don't agree with.
At least I have good company. Desteni's enemies list is literally hundreds of entries long and growing by the dozens every time it's updated. As I stated in my first blog about them, they are extremely aggressive in trying to silence their critics. Unlike Zeitgeist, who cloaks their enemies list in paragraph after paragraph of bold-faced disclaimers about why it's supposedly not an enemies list, Desteni makes no such attempts. They're very forthright about going after their critics, going so far as to have a stickied topic on their forum with instructions to cult members about how to get people banned from YouTube.
There are two points I want to make about enemies lists. The first is that the very existence of these lists is wholly incompatible with the notion of friendly movements based on social justice that preach prescriptions for a better and more harmonious world--which both Zeitgeist and Desteni profess to do. Destenians supposedly value doing "what's best for all" and insist that their program will help the entire earth enjoy newfound respect and the maximization of human potential. The very notion that a group with those professed goals would keep--much less make public--a list of enemies to be retaliated against for their viewpoints is totally inconsistent with the reasons these organizations say they exist. Simply put, any group preaching peace, love and a better world that also has an enemies list should be automatically suspect.
The second point is that enemies lists seem to be yet another hallmark of cults who seek to control what is said about them, and more importantly, what their own members hear. The paradigm example of a cult's enemies list is Scientology's practice of labeling detractors as "Suppressive Persons" or SP's. Most SP's are family members of current Scientology members who don't support the group and are likely to encourage their loved ones to leave--hence Scientology's doctrine of "Disconnection," where a cult member is ordered to sever all ties to the SP. Naturally this practice is believed to inure to the benefit of the cult member, who will no longer receive negative feedback from the critic.
Exactly the same dynamic is at work in both Zeitgeist and Desteni. Zeitgeist's enemies list is specifically promoted as being for the "protection" of cult members, with the transparent fiction of preventing evil trolls--the word Zeitgeist uses to refer to critics--from stealing members' personal information. Much of Desteni's advice to followers similarly seeks to minimize criticism--Destenians call it "backchat" and urge their followers not to pay attention to it, despite the obvious hypocrisy that they pay a great deal of attention to it. Desteni, however, also seems interested in lashing out at those non-members who criticize them. A common tactic is to pretend they're "protecting copyrighted material," which is why unfounded DMCA claims are a favorite tool of the Destenians to target materials, especially videos, that they don't like.
Two weeks ago, I venture to say no one in Desteni had ever heard of me. The fact that I have been targeted so swiftly and vehemently is itself, I believe, a piece of evidence that tends to indicate the controlling and authoritarian nature of this group. I'm taking precautions to make sure my blogs and videos will be mirrored and continue to be available, in the event that Desteni pursues their threats to ban me. Should they decide to make an attempt to silence me, rest assured that that attempt will fail. In the meantime, it's worth thinking about why a group that claims to be for the benefit of mankind goes on the attack so quickly and with such gusto. I propose that Desteni's attack is inherent in the nature of its organization and ideology. This is a group that cannot permit dissent, and which profits from the effort to push back against dissenters. It's easier to maintain cohesion within the group, after all, if its members can be united in the struggle against a common enemy.
Thanks for reading.
The Desteni Cult and Conspiracy Theories: Pandering to the Paranoid.
Author: Clock
Date: Jul 01, 2013 at 10:00
Written By Muertos
(muertos@gmail.com)
(Not by clock)
In this blog, I continue my investigation of the South Africa-based Internet cult known as Desteni. Specifically, in this blog I'll examine the degree to which Desteni espouses conspiracy theory ideology and uses conspiracy theories as a tool to recruit new members. In my analysis I'll examine six specific conspiracy theories as they relate to Desteni: reptilians; the "New World Order"; 9/11 Truth; HAARP; global warming denial; and anti-vaccination.
1. Reptilians ("Icketilians")
The conspiracy theory that seems to unite the majority of Desteni cult members is belief in reptilians. I spoke about this in my last blog. The basic idea is that a race of reptilian extraterrestrials secretly controls the world and has guided most of human history. I refer to these creatures as "Icketilians" because this theory was popularized by notorious British conspiracist David Icke in the 1990s, who created the theory as a science-fiction redress of the old "Jewish world conspiracy" theories from the early 20th century, with reptilian aliens standing in for Jews. These are also called "interdimensional reptoids" because supposedly they come from another dimension. Despite the fact that the entire idea is offensive and ludicrous, and there's never been a shred of evidence that these creatures actually exist, Desteni heavily promotes belief in reptilians. Here is Desteni leader Bernard Poolman ranting about "reptilian sleeper cells":
"They have placed sleepers into play to challenge any group that may in any way challenge the reptilian control and the control of the New World Order and the elite. And they will then claim to be anti-New World Order, anti-elite and anti-Zionist and all those things, but in fact they are just organic robots that act within their predesigned objective to stop any group from bringing about equality and what is best for all because that would break the control of the reptilian mind control."
Although we have here direct evidence of the cult's leader warning his followers about evil reptilians trying to control peoples' minds, Desteni does not endorse the work of David Icke wholesale. Here is Desteni spokesperson Sunette Spies espousing the cult's views on Icketilians:
"I initially studied David Icke's work, and was not satisfied with his presentation of [reptilians]. There was simply no proof. I mean, he suddenly made a big jump of assumption about Reptilians. And they were all bad....So whether the Reptilians are all bad or good, or whether they are aliens or whatever they are, I'm really not interested."
If you're familiar with the Icketilians theory, you know that one of the favorite things that believers in this conspiracy theory like to do is to watch videos on YouTube of celebrities and politicians--who are all secretly reptilians merely pretending to be human--and seize upon things such as eye movements, bulging veins or flaws in the low-quality videos as supposed "proof" that the person being observed is actually an alien. Here is an example, taken from the Desteni forums, of a conspiracy theorist doing exactly that (the embedded links are the "proof" videos the conspiracy theorist is referring to:
"These are some videos that make me think they [reptilians] exist... I cannot get past this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0cxmBuIKO0)...his neck at 2:55, 4:00... his very quick eye movement. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eaaubr3nnHI)...slits throughout... :35 is a strange area... (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQVfQCpYocQ)...the woman... just the first minute of the video (">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFBcjII3QAE)..."
The response by a more seasoned Desteni member:
"It's cool that you found Desteni through your interest in reptilians, but realize that this site is not about 'theory' on the reptilians but about a solution to this reality that is best for all. Within that the reptilians have shared perspectives through the portal which I suggest you check out if you havent already. You can search for them on youtube."
The "portal" being referred to is an "interdimensional portal." This is the portal through which Desteni members such as Sunette Spies claim to channel the spirits of various people and objects, including Hitler. This idea--minus the channeling--is borrowed from David Icke. In any event, it should be obvious from these examples that belief in reptilians is a key tenet of the Desteni cult, and that new members are attracted to the organization precisely because of this conspiracy theory.
Also notice another dynamic which is universal to cults that promote conspiracy theories: the cult itself is presented as the "cure" for the evils complained of by the conspiracy theorists--in this case, Desteni's way of life is explicitly advanced as the "solution" to the reptilians. I'll return to this point later.
2. Illuminati & "New World Order"
Closely related to the Icketilians is belief in the "Illuminati" and/or the "New World Order." In terms of sheer numbers who believe in it, this may be the most popular conspiracy theory in the English-speaking world (and a fair amount of the non-English speaking world as well). The theory has almost as many variations as it has adherents, but the basic gist is that a secret cabal called the "Illuminati" is planning to enslave the planet under a totalitarian one-world government. Naturally this hasn't happened yet, but conspiracy theorists insist that every action taken by almost any government or large corporation anywhere is a piece of the puzzle, and this grim totalitarian future, the "New World Order," must be resisted by all means necessary. Huckster Alex Jones, the most popular mouthpiece of conspiracy theories currently in the United States, has made his career pushing this ridiculous theory despite the absence of a single shred of evidence that the Illuminati or the New World Order actually exist.
Needless to say, Destenians believe in this too. Once again we have pronouncements from the leader, Poolman, clearly stating that the New World Order exists. Here he is warning his followers that marijuana is a tool of the New World Order. And yes, as with reptilians, the Desteni cult is viewed as the cure--Poolman explicitly says that his "Equal Money" system will end the Illuminati and forestall the New World Order.
Desteni followers internalize belief in this theory. Here is one follower expressing his fear of the Illuminati and their control:
"are we doomed to fall under this illuminati mind control or will we rise up and defend truth. Afterall is done, life will continue. Am i to remain obscure and declare freedom for myself?
Is part of the illuminati control to instill a feeling of undoubtable fear, and ultimate ruin unless one belongs to it[?]"
A more experienced member replies:
"There is nowhere to run to, Peter. The control is everywhere. The only thing you can do is to start working on yourself so you won't be effected by it and by others. That's why we offer the Structural Reesonance Alignment as a working tool to align self to be effective in this world."
So far as I can tell, belief in some form of the Illuminati and the New World Order is universal within this cult. If anyone can provide me with example of a Destenian who does not believe in this conspiracy theory, please let me know.
3. 9/11 Truth
Surprisingly, although conspiracy theories alleging that the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 were some sort of "inside job" is the sina qua non of modern conspiracy thinking, Desteni doesn't seem to hit "9/11 Truth" as hard as you might expect. They don't seem to talk about it that much. Perhaps their belief that September 11 was an "inside job" is so axiomatic as to be accepted without discussion--which is rather alarming. Nevertheless, I did find evidence that Destenians are 9/11 Truthers. Bernard Poolman seems to be. In a forum post, Poolman recommends to his followers a book called Shell Game by Steve Alten. Shell Game is a novel that uses the 9/11 conspiracy theory as its starting premise. One wonders why Poolman would advocate that his followers read this book if he didn't believe that 9/11 was an inside job.
Here is a quote from the Desteni forums which indicates followers believe in 9/11, and also illustrates how these conspiracy theories dovetail with each other in the minds of these paranoid people:
"After the demolition of the twin tower and the new project for the building there i came back to the excellent parts of [D]avid [Ic]ke's research, because in this field I think he is on the right track."
It should go without saying that David Icke, in addition to believing in interdimensional reptoids, also believes that September 11 was an "inside job."
4. HAARP
HAARP is a conspiracy theory whose believers think that a giant machine, built and controlled by the U.S. government, can manipulate weather patterns and cause earthquakes and natural disasters anywhere in the world at any time. HAARP takes its acronym from an actual U.S. government research project that--naturally--was not even close to what the conspiracy believers say it was, and didn't work anyway. This doesn't stop HAARP believers from pointing the finger at the U.S. government for every major natural disaster that occurs, such as this Destenian did after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti:
"Yes -- I have seen some of the facts, and the Haiti earthquake does look like Haarp had something to do with it -- but you must consider the fact that you/all contribute to the existence of Haarp technology in the first place. The world currently is f*cked! Ask yourself: how and where am I currently supporting such a catastrophic result like Haarp or the haitian earthquake?"
One wonders what "facts" this person saw, because none of them actually indicate that the Haitian earthquake was anything other than what it appeared to be. The notion that governments or secret societies can cause earthquakes is total science fiction, but the Destenians seem to believe it.
5. Global Warming Denial
Few conspiracy theorists believe that anthropogenic global warming is real, despite the undeniable scientific evidence that it is. Although global warming denial can take a non-conspiratorial form, the idea that anthropogenic global warming is a hoax or some sort of scam is very easily co-opted into various other conspiratorial mindsets. Destenians, as you might expect, love this conspiracy theory too. Here is Sunette Spies again--official dogma of the Desteni cult--directly asserting that global warming is a conspiracy:
"We have discovered that global warming is not caused due to natural causes, or even chemically induced causes such as pollution, but that global warming is actually a man-made manifestation in and of this world. There are devices that are being utilized of Tesla technology that manifest a magnifying glass formation in the atmosphere of this world over certain specific allocations in this world, which is causing the effect thereof as the ice melting."
The theories of Nikola Tesla are favorites of conspiracy theorists. Tesla technology is often asserted as the mechanism behind the magical machines that conspiracy theorists believe in, such as HAARP, or some of the more extreme 9/11 Truthers who believe the World Trade Center towers were destroyed by secret beam weapons.
Here is another Destenian parroting global warming denial conspiracy theories:
"I know that "CO2 related global warming" is a scam being used for many agendas, and relates to the carbon taxes being planned for humans. To get this information I had to research and connect dots and sort through the conspiracy... yet does this behavior contribute to the power of the conspiracy itself and does it engender other conspiracies to exist?"
Gee, what do you think this Destenian believes about whether global warming denial engenders other supposed conspiracies? Conspiracy theories are like potato chips. You can't eat just one. Usually you end up swallowing the whole bag.
6. Anti-Vaccination
The final example involves anti-vaccination rhetoric. Anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists--"anti-vaxxers," for short--believe that vaccines are a sham created by drug companies and governments, usually either to make money for drug companies, or, in more extreme versions, to deliberately cause diseases either to kill people or to render them easier to control. Anti-vaxxer rhetoric is extremely dangerous because it directly results in the deaths of innocent people, usually children. It's tragic and simple: parents fall for conspiracy theories about vaccines, then refuse to get their children vaccinated, and the children die of diseases that could be easily prevented. For example, a recent measles outbreak in Minneapolis has been tied to irrational fears about measles vaccines causing autism--a fear that is totally without scientific basis. The sad effects of anti-vaxx rhetoric are a prime examples of how conspiracy theories can hurt people.
It shouldn't surprise you that Destenians buy into anti-vaxx theories. In this brief quote you'll see not only evidence of anti-vaxx belief, but also New World Order and anti-Semitic "Jewish world conspiracy" theories:
"So.... the "elite" seem to be going through with population reduction and this is just the first step I am sure. I read an article dealing with the swine bullsh*t and it was said that this whole scheme originated out of new york city -- David Rockefeller was mentioned as orchestrator, and obviously the JEWS had to be in on it too (Orthodox, jewish elite, own/run NYC). The public schools are now going to hold mandatory vaccanations..... my sister 'fortunately', is aware of the propaganda and will not allow jabbing... my brother, on the other hand, is of sheeple-type, and willing-lie shall comp-lie.
"The word "sheeple" is a conspiracy theorist buzzword, used to refer to those who do not believe in conspiracy theories and are supposedly duped by the powers-that-be. The anti-Semitic aspects of Desteni's belief systems, clearly on display here, will be the subject of a future blog.
Why Does Desteni Use Conspiracy Theories?
These examples amply demonstrate that Desteni uses conspiracy theories very heavily in order to recruit and retain its members. This is not the only technique that the cult employs, but it's clearly an important one; the virtually universal belief in conspiracy theories by Desteni members, from cult leader Bernard Poolman down to the rank-and-file who post on the forums, shows that conspiracy theories are one of the cornerstones of this organization's belief system.
The question is worth asking: why would a cult rely on conspiracy theories to recruit and retain followers? I believe there are three main reasons.
First, conspiracy theories are very attractive to Internet-savvy young people who are interested in non-mainstream ideas. Years ago it used to be that conspiracy theorists were fringe geeks who traded newsletters by mail in a very loose-knit underground. With the Internet, belief in conspiracy theories has absolutely exploded, and the prevalence in these themes of distrust of government, media and other mainstream social institutions is tailor-made for disaffected and disillusioned young people--the key demographic of many cults.
Second, conspiracy theories attract people who think a certain way. All of these theories are profoundly illogical. In order to believe in nuttery like 9/11 Truth, HAARP or Icketilians, you must necessarily disregard common sense and logical thinking, and accept uncritically pieces of "evidence" that look and sound authoritative but are factually and rationally incorrect. These processes that conspiracy theories thrive in the absence of--critical thinking, rational inquiry, and insistence upon reliable evidence--are the exact same thought processes that would be required to recognize the characteristics of a destructive and manipulative cult. In short, conspiracy theories attract people who, by virtue of the way they think, are much more likely to fall for cults in the first place.
Third, as I stated earlier, cults that promote conspiracy theories universally advance themselves and their ideology as the "cure" or "solution" to the evils of these conspiratorial plots. If you're outraged that the Illluminati is cooking the books on global warming, tearing down the World Trade Center or putting bad things in vaccines, well, you can fix all that by joining the cult and advancing its ideology. Desteni's leader Bernard Poolman shamelessly and repeatedly emphasizes that Desteni is the answer to everything and will specifically end these conspiracies once and for all.
A Potential Objection to My Evidence
A potential criticism of this blog may be that some of the evidence I present for Desteni's involvement with conspiracy theories comes from their web forum. Someone could claim that characterizing Desteni's more or less "official" ideology by reference to what members say on their forum is unfair, or "guilt by association." In Desteni's case this criticism would be incorrect. The Desteni web forums are very heavily policed, and on the forum you can in fact find an explicit warning about expressing any form of opinion:
"WHAT HAPPENS IF I USE THIS FORUM TO EXPRESS MY OPINIONS?
YOU WILL BE BANNED! We have made it very clear that this forum is not there for people to express and validate their opinions. The Desteni forum is there for people who would like to discuss the DESTENI MATERIAL and share their Self-Honesty Processes within the DESTENI MATERIAL."
If Desteni insists, therefore, that any opinions on their forum are verboten, and their forum contains numerous and repeated references to conspiracy theories, it stands to reason that the Destenians believe the conspiracy viewpoints expressed there are not opinions, but facts. Furthermore, the sheer volume of conspiracy material on Desteni's blogs indicates that this is not a benign gathering of people who come together for some other reason, and some of them happen to believe in conspiracy theories independently of their Desteni connections. I believe I have amply demonstrated that, far from being incidental, conspiracy thinking lies at the very heart of Desteni's belief system.
I will deal with other aspects of Destenian ideology in future blogs.
Thanks for reading.
Disclaimer & Special Thanks
Author: Clock
Date: Jul 01, 2013 at 09:33
Hello people, if you are reading this is it maybe because you are reading the Muertos Blog that I have brought up here on Skeptic Project. I am here to tell you that I did not write any of these articles and that the original authors opinions are not necessarily mine. This blog was reconstructed here on this website to be used as a sort of reference page, or guide.In no means do I or Muertos intend to offend or bully anyone, either by me reposting these articles, or Muertos writing these articles.
When Muertos first wrote these articles, a claim, or a bunch of claims were presented to him. Following the presentation of these, Muertos did his research to find out if any of them were true. Muertos would then respond to his claims, by either saying that they are right or wrong, and explained why by the use of common sense/backup of proper evidence. Muertos was debunking mainly because it was a hobby that he had lots if interest in, and not 'to prove them all wrong!!!'
I am simply reposting them here because the original authors' website (Muertos) has been deleted. If you do have a question for him, his email is on some of these articles, and depending on if you are rude or polite, he may or may not respond to you. Also, do not bother sending me anything, because I am not the author of any of these blogs, nor do I know Muertos personally or made any contact with him.
REPEAT:
---------
SPECIAL THANKS
Now that this has been taken care of, it's time to thank the people that have made this blog possible on this website.
Thank you so much, in no particular order,
-Skeptic Project
-SP site owner Edward L. Winston, who allowed me to post these articles on the blog sections of this website in the first place. Without this, the project would have been an impossible mess.
-Thanks to [in no specific order!]Jim Jesus,anticultist, The Burger King, and other members for the support in my first steps into debunking. Things would have been alot harder without the community, and I thank you very much.
-Thanks to Metabunk.org, another great debunking website where I truly learned (and earned?) how to be a debunker. Those guys have been a nice help. Thank you so much!
-Concept stolen from SP member The Burger King for his archiving of the old anticultist blog. Read this excellent blog here! : http://conspiracies.skepticproject.com/forum/5539/archiving-anticultist-blog-on-sp/
When Muertos first wrote these articles, a claim, or a bunch of claims were presented to him. Following the presentation of these, Muertos did his research to find out if any of them were true. Muertos would then respond to his claims, by either saying that they are right or wrong, and explained why by the use of common sense/backup of proper evidence. Muertos was debunking mainly because it was a hobby that he had lots if interest in, and not 'to prove them all wrong!!!'
I am simply reposting them here because the original authors' website (Muertos) has been deleted. If you do have a question for him, his email is on some of these articles, and depending on if you are rude or polite, he may or may not respond to you. Also, do not bother sending me anything, because I am not the author of any of these blogs, nor do I know Muertos personally or made any contact with him.
REPEAT:
I AM NOT MUERTOS, AND HIS OPINIONS ARE NOT NECESSARILY MINE. THIS BLOG IS SIMPLY TO BE USED AS A REFERENCE SOURCE, A GUIDE, THAT'S IT, THAT'S ALL. WE DO NOT WANT TO OFFEND ANYONE, OK?????
---------
SPECIAL THANKS
Now that this has been taken care of, it's time to thank the people that have made this blog possible on this website.
Thank you so much, in no particular order,
-Skeptic Project
-SP site owner Edward L. Winston, who allowed me to post these articles on the blog sections of this website in the first place. Without this, the project would have been an impossible mess.
-Thanks to [in no specific order!]Jim Jesus,anticultist, The Burger King, and other members for the support in my first steps into debunking. Things would have been alot harder without the community, and I thank you very much.
-Thanks to Metabunk.org, another great debunking website where I truly learned (and earned?) how to be a debunker. Those guys have been a nice help. Thank you so much!
-Concept stolen from SP member The Burger King for his archiving of the old anticultist blog. Read this excellent blog here! : http://conspiracies.skepticproject.com/forum/5539/archiving-anticultist-blog-on-sp/