The MAGA Civil War Over a Conspiracy Theory

Last week President Trump’s Department of Justice delivered a blow to one of the foundational beliefs of the MAGA movement, one that helped carry him back to the White House.

In an unsigned memorandum, the department declared that there was no evidence that Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced deceased convicted sexual predator, maintained a client list or that he blackmailed prominent individuals for various misdeeds. The memorandum also declared that Epstein committed suicide.

Most Americans saw this news (if they saw it at all) and barely raised an eyebrow. The Epstein story was part of the past; he died in 2019. But it detonated like a bomb in the MAGA universe. Pro-Trump influencers with vast audiences couldn’t believe what they were reading.

After all, they’d been told for years that there was an Epstein client list. Pam Bondi, Trump’s attorney general, told Fox News in February that the client list was “sitting on my desk right now to review.” (She later claimed that she was referring to the Epstein case file, not a specific client list.)

In October 2024, JD Vance, then a candidate for vice president, said, “Seriously, we need to release the Epstein list. That is an important thing.”

Before he was Trump’s director of the F.B.I., Kash Patel told Glenn Beck, a right-wing radio host, that the F.B.I. had Epstein’s “black book” and that it was “under direct control of the director of the F.B.I.” In 2023, Patel told Benny Johnson, a MAGA podcaster, that members of Congress should “put on your big-boy pants and let us know who the pedophiles are.”

In September 2024, Dan Bongino, now the deputy director of the F.B.I., told his listeners, “Folks, the Epstein client list is a huge deal” that would “rock the Democrat Party.”

Read the rest here.

When you spend years building a cult like mass movement based on fringe conspiracy theories and outright lies, eventually it's going to become difficult to hold it all together. That said, I think predictions of the collapse of the movement are highly premature. One of the traits of cult movements is that the true believers tend to reach a point where they become impervious to facts and reason, dismissing any claims that do not align with their beliefs as false. They typically live within an ideological exclusion zone that rejects and dismisses sources of information that do not reinforce their belief system. In this case many of the faithful would give far more credibility to Tucker Carlson, Glenn Beck and Alex Jones than the New York Times or CNN. Even in the face of glaring inconsistencies or revelations that cannot be simply ignored, members will go to extraordinary lengths to rationalize or explain away those facts and contradictions which do manage to penetrate their information bubble.

See also QAnon. 

The Evolution of the Republican Party Under Donald Trump

...During the time I served in three Republican administrations (Reagan and both Bushes), the party was hawkish and unrelentingly critical of the Soviet Union and then Russia. It was supportive of NATO. It condemned anti-American dictators and authoritarian leaders. It was deeply committed to “the common task of strengthening democracy throughout the world,” as Reagan said in 1982. And it argued that it was in America’s interest to provide global leadership.

The Republican Party championed free trade and fiscal discipline, though in practice it often fell short. It was welcoming of legal immigrants and refugees. Republicans argued that reforming entitlement programs was vital. Many of its leading figures insisted that moral character was an essential trait for political leaders and especially for presidents. Republicans warned, too, that a cruel, squalid political culture undermined a decent society.

Today, the Republican Party has jettisoned every one of these commitments.

Even on abortion, things have changed. The Republican Party has been pro-life for decades, including in its party plank. But this month that plank was removed. Princeton’s Robert P. George, a significant figure in the pro-life movement, pointed out that that plank has been replaced by the claim that abortion policy is entirely the business of states, which may, if they wish, permit abortion up to birth. Mr. Trump succeeded in overturning Roe v. Wade, but now that the abortion issue is a political liability, he has thrown the “pro-life cause under the bus,” Mr. George wrote on Facebook. Mr. Trump has succeeded where liberal Republicans long failed.

So how should we understand what it means to be a Republican now?

Jonathan Rauch, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and my sometime co-author, told me that to begin to understand what has happened, you have to understand the difference between a personal political machine and a traditional political machine. Unlike normally functioning parties and their political machines, like Tammany Hall, Mr. Rauch said, a personal political machine is dedicated to the interests of an individual and that individual’s family, loyalists and operatives. It accepts only one person as leader and requires submission to that person. Today, Mr. Trump is that person.

Personal machines are different from party machines, Mr. Rauch added, because they’re inconsistent with democratic politics. Even a corrupt party machine maintains institutional interests separate from those of its leader. It rewards and punishes behavior based on the electoral interests of the party, prioritizing winning elections over personal loyalty to the boss. A party machine thus rewards followers by getting them elected and then sustaining them in office. By contrast, a personal machine is willing to lose elections rather than share power with other leaders or factions. It puts the leader ahead of the party, and it would rather the party lose elections than the leader lose control.

“Because a personal machine puts loyalty ahead of electability, it must resort to authoritarian and anti-democratic measures like coercion and intimidation to preserve its hold on the party,” Mr. Rauch said. “It may physically threaten those who do not play ball. And it will use propaganda and the party organization to build up the leader as the one and only true expression of the party. That’s why Trump’s Republican Party is a cult of personality.”

Read the rest here.

This is one of the better pieces I have read on the topic. 

Quote of the day...

"If Republicans want to name something after him, I’d suggest they find a federal prison.” -Gerry Connolly (D VA) responding to a Republican proposal to rename Dulles International Airport after Donald Trump. 

This would be hysterically funny if they weren't serious. Trumpism is a cult. 

The RNC is now a fully absorbed part of the Trump cult

With members of his family now firmly in charge at the Republican National Committee, there have been some interesting changes. All donations to the RNC now go first to Trump's reelection campaign and then to the Political Action Committee that has been covering most of his legal bills. No word on what part, if any, is left for other candidates, campaigns or other issues down ballot. One of the first moves by Lara Trump on taking the helm at the RNC was to purge most of the staff with the understanding that they could reapply for their jobs. Among the questions being asked of all new applicants and reapplying purged staffers is "do you believe the 2020 election was stolen?"

Trumpism is a cult.

Blasphemy

“GOD MADE TRUMP” pic.twitter.com/l03fK9SSfC

— Donald J. Trump Posts From His Truth Social (@TrumpDailyPosts) January 5, 2024

Matthew 7:15

Wisdom

There are stupider things to do than arguing with a culty fundamentalist. As the late great Jim Croce reminded us, you don’t tug on Superman’s cape, you don’t spit into the wind, and you don’t pull the mask off the ol’ Lone Ranger. Arguing with a culty fundamentalist is, I admit, not as stupid as any of these things, but it is pretty stupid nonetheless, for it is a waste of precious time and utterly futile.

Read the rest here.

The Cult of Christian Trumpism

Well worth the read.

via Rod Dreher

Now broadcasting on station KULT

Scientology has its own TV channel.

Scientology's Moscow branch to be dissolved

MOSCOW (AP) — A Russian court has ordered the Church of Scientology in Moscow to be dissolved.

The Moscow City Court on Monday accepted arguments from the Justice Ministry that the term Scientology is trademarked and thus cannot be considered a religious organization covered by the constitution's freedom-of-religion clause.

Prosecutors also said the church carried out activities in St. Petersburg, though it was only authorized to operate in Moscow, according to the Tass news agency.

Several books by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard are banned in Russia for "extremist" content.

A church representative said the decision would be appealed, Russian news agencies reported.

Source.

What if Mormon Missionaries Were Honest About Their Beliefs?

Notorious cult leader Fred Phelps reportedly near death

The estranged son of the founder of the Westboro Baptist Church said his father is "on the edge of death."

Fred Phelps Sr. became famous for organizing picket lines of brightly-colored signs carrying hateful messages against tolerance during the funerals of military personnel and famous figures. His actions led to at least two federal and several state laws restricting protests during military funerals.

In a statement on his Facebook page, Nathan Phelps, who has been estranged from his father for 30 years, said the senior Phelps was dying in hospice care in Topeka, Kan., and that he had been excommunicated from his own church in August of 2013.

"I'm not sure how I feel about this. Terribly ironic that his devotion to his god ends this way. Destroyed by the monster he made," Nathan Phelps wrote.

Read the rest here.

Memo to Employers

No, you can't force your employees to join the Scientology cult.

Scientology is not a religion; it is a dangerous authoritarian cult

...In 1952, Hubbard decided to merge his bunk scientific claims with his science fiction and market the mixture as a religion. He called it Scientology, or, “the science of knowing how to know answers.” According to Church defectors, and now infamous thanks to South Park, Scientology’s theology is essentially a discarded Hubbard novel. Human beings are the composition of spirits (“thetans”) cast off from the bodies of space aliens detonated 75 million years ago in volcanoes on the planet Teegeeack (also known as Earth) by a galactic warrior named Xenu. Man’s problems today are attributable to “engrams,” or the mental memory of painful experiences caused by the presence of thetans on our humanly bodies, which one can get rid of only through a process of spiritual “auditing,” a sort of counseling session performed on a low-rent lie-detector machine called an “E-Meter.” Those who join Scientology often end up spending vast sums on auditing and other Church gimmicks, leading detractors to characterize Scientology as a pyramid scheme in which members pay ever-vaster sums of money to ascend the Church’s “Operating Thetan levels.” A typical story involves the grief-stricken, 73-year-old widow who took on a $45,000 mortgage to pay for auditing after Scientologists preyed upon her following the death of her husband.

A 1972 directive from Hubbard titled “Governing policy,” cited by the German government in its position against the Church, clearly characterizes Scientology as a commercial enterprise. “MAKE MONEY. MAKE MONEY. MAKE MORE MONEY. MAKE OTHER PEOPLE PRODUCE SO AS TO MAKE MONEY,” Hubbard wrote. In 1967, the IRS revoked the Church’s tax-exempt status, a decision reasserted by each and every American court to which the Church brought challenges over a subsequent 25-year-period. A 1984 U.S. Tax Court ruling, for instance, found that the Church “made a business out of selling religion” and that Hubbard and his family had diverted millions of dollars to their personal accounts. The Los Angeles Superior Court, meanwhile, deemed Hubbard “a pathological liar” driven by “egotism, greed, avarice, lust for power and vindictiveness and aggressiveness against persons perceived by him to be disloyal or hostile.”

Desperate for legitimacy, in 1973 Scientology launched Operation Snow White—a covert operation aimed at infiltrating governments. Scientology agents broke into IRS headquarters, bugged its offices, and dispatched private investigators to spy on individual agents—all in hopes of blackmailing officials. All this was permitted under Scientology’s “Fair Game” doctrine, which, according to Hubbard, demands that Church critics “be deprived of property or injured by any means by any Scientologist without any discipline of the Scientologist. May be tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed.” The plot was uncovered in 1977, and Hubbard’s wife and 10 other Church officials were sentenced to jail. Hubbard was named an unindicted co-conspirator.

But in 1993, Scientology finally did achieve tax-exempt status from the IRS—a massive victory in the Church’s quest for mainstream acceptance. It did so, according to the New York Times, only “after an extraordinary campaign orchestrated by Scientology against the agency and people who work there” that included the hiring of “private investigators to dig into the private lives of I.R.S. officials and to conduct surveillance operations to uncover potential vulnerabilities.” Scientology even set up a front group, the National Coalition of IRS Whistle-blowers, to battle the agency. As if to emphasize the capriciousness of the IRS’s decision, just a year before the agency’s reversal, a decision by the U.S. Claims Court rejected Scientology’s case for tax-exemption, citing “the commercial character of much of Scientology,” its virtually incomprehensible financial procedures” and its “scripturally based hostility to taxation...”

...Around the world, a handful of politicians have urged their governments to prosecute Scientology as a criminal conspiracy. Three years ago, a Paris court found the Church guilty of fraud and fined it $900,000. That same year, a member of the Australian Senate, Nick Xenophon, delivered a speech in which he described Scientology as “criminal organization that hides behind its so-called religious beliefs.” After calling for an investigation into the Church’s tax-exempt status during a television interview, he began to receive letters from ex-Scientologists across Australia detailing what he described as “a worldwide pattern of abuse and criminality,” including torture, forced confinement, and coerced abortions. (Xenophon’s call for a parliamentary inquiry into the Church was ultimately rejected by the Australian government.) In 2007, following a 10-year investigation, a Belgian prosecutor called for the Church to be labeled a criminal organization and recommended that up to 12 Church officials face charges for the illegal practice of medicine, violation of privacy, and use of illegal contracts. The State Department criticized the move, stating that the United States would “oppose any effort to stigmatize an entire group based solely upon religious beliefs and would be concerned over infringement of any individual’s rights because of religious affiliation.”

Read the rest here.
HT: T-19

When Scientologists Split

Though Katie Holmes has not addressed reports that Scientology was a reason she split with Tom Cruise, a former Church of Scientology spokesman said some families, including his own, were torn apart when one spouse wanted to leave the religion.

“My wife, my son, my daughter, my mother….they disconnected from me.  They will not communicate with me,” said Mike Rinder in an interview with Kate Snow airing on Thursday, July 12 at 10pm/9c on NBC's Rock Center with Brian Williams.

Rinder joined the church as a child in Australia and rose to be Scientology’s international spokesman before he left the church in 2007.

He said he had been unhappy inside the church for a long time, but was afraid to leave because he said the church encouraged members to cut ties with relatives who want to leave.

“Part of that environment is keeping track of how people think…it’s a crime to …think bad thoughts about what’s going on and people will turn you in. Even your spouse will turn you in or your children will turn you in and then you’ll be in trouble,” he said.

Read the rest here.

Scientology is a dangerous manipulative cult. Some of the things they have been involved in makes me wonder why a RICO investigation hasn't been done on them.

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day

Rupert Murdoch apparently tweeted that Scientology is a "creepy weird cult."

Feds Sue Towns Dominated By Polygamous Cult

The U.S. Justice Department filed a lawsuit against two towns dominated by a polygamous sect on Thursday, accusing officials of failing to protect nonmembers and enforcing the edicts of leader Warren Jeffs above the law.

The complaint filed in Arizona’s U.S. District Court accuses the twin towns of Colorado City, Ariz., and Hildale, Utah, of "operating as an arm of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints," for at least 20 years. It marks a departure for the federal government, which has until now steered clear of filing cases against FLDS members.

There are nearly two dozen allegations in the lawsuit, many involving the police agency the towns share. The earliest incident dates back to 2000, when attorneys say Colorado City town marshals confronted a sect member in an attempt to return an underage bride to her husband’s home after she fled.

Other accusations include police helping euthanize the town’s dogs at Jeffs’ order, keeping a woman in jail overnight on an inaccurate underage alcohol charge and threatening arrest of non-FLDS children if they continued to play at a city park.

The lawsuit also accuses town water and power utilities of refusing to provide housing permits and utility hookups to nonmembers or to allow them to move into homes.

Read the rest here.

Ex-Mormon wants to give Romney a headache

SALT LAKE CITY — Mitt Romney has major headaches named Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich.

This month, he also had Helen Radkey.

At 1:55 p.m. on Feb. 8, Radkey, an excommunicated Mormon who spends her days combing through databases at the church’s Family History Library, ­e-mailed Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, named for the famed Nazi-hunter.

“FYI, discovered today: Posthumous baptisms for the parents of Simon Wiesen­thal,” Radkey wrote. “I am collecting evidence, which will be e-mailed to you, if requested, as long as there is a public stink.”

The Wiesenthal Center obliged, and a week later, Radkey followed with the revelation that Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust survivor, was also listed in the private Mormon databases as “ ‘ready’ for posthumous rites.” This appeared to be a violation of the spirit of the Mormon agreement with Jewish groups not to posthumously baptize Holocaust victims and led to Wiesel’s public appeal to Romney to demand that his church stick to its word. All the reports credited Radkey, an independent researcher in Salt Lake City, as the force behind the revelations.

Radkey, an eccentric and familiar face at the church’s sprawling genealogical archive here, has a knack for notoriety.

Read the rest here.

When Jehovah's Witnesses get pushy

Rhonda Kalapach believes Jehovah's Witnesses have no place on her property.

When two of them came to her door, the 60-year-old Monroe County woman asked them to leave. Her husband saw the women from across the street and yelled at them, but they didn’t go.

That’s when her husband, William George Kalapach, came into the home and got his rifle. The women were walking to the car where three other people were waiting, when Kalapach said they weren’t moving fast enough, police said.

Police said he fired four shots into the ground about 11 a.m. Saturday near the car with all five people inside. He is now in county prison, charged with aggravated assault and related charges.

"This is a Catholic home," Rhonda Kalapach said. "This is a devout home."

She said the evangelists ignored repeated demands from her and her husband to leave, forcing her husband to react the way he did.

They were at her door about five to 10 minutes before shots rang out, Rhonda Kalapach said.

"I kept telling them this was a Catholic home," she said. "They were trying to convert me."

She said Jehovah’s Witnesses come to her door about three to four times a year. They visited last winter, she said. Every time they’re told to leave. She said her husband did what he had to do to defend their home, she said.

"He doesn’t think he did anything wrong," she said. "This is private property. If you drive in my driveway, you’re trespassing."

Read the rest here.

Definitely an overreaction.  But yea, I do empathize.

Yes, Mormonism is a pagan cult

I don't really spend much time addressing Mormonism or other weird pseudo Christian cults on here, but sometimes what should be obvious does bear repeating. Mormonism is a polytheist pagan cult. See Owen's post.

Breaking With Scientology

CLEARWATER, Fla. — Raised as Scientologists, Christie King Collbran and her husband, Chris, were recruited as teenagers to work for the elite corps of staff members who keep the Church of Scientology running, known as the Sea Organization, or Sea Org.

They signed a contract for a billion years — in keeping with the church’s belief that Scientologists are immortal. They worked seven days a week, often on little sleep, for sporadic paychecks of $50 a week, at most.

But after 13 years and growing disillusionment, the Collbrans decided to leave the Sea Org, setting off on a Kafkaesque journey that they said required them to sign false confessions about their personal lives and their work, pay the church thousands of dollars it said they owed for courses and counseling, and accept the consequences as their parents, siblings and friends who are church members cut off all communication with them.

“Why did we work so hard for this organization,” Ms. Collbran said, “and why did it feel so wrong in the end? We just didn’t understand.”

They soon discovered others who felt the same. Searching for Web sites about Scientology that are not sponsored by the church (an activity prohibited when they were in the Sea Org), they discovered that hundreds of other Scientologists were also defecting — including high-ranking executives who had served for decades.

Read the rest here.

I have just one question. Why are the leaders of this cult/scam not in jail?