#and he's been recruiting cult members through his role of authority at the college

[lemonadecabaret]

🍋     the enormity of my desire .   accepting

@wickedlvst sent:         "we shouldn't - ah, we shouldn't be doing this" for tom riddle & lily evans

"And why is that, Miss. Evans?" He taunts her with both word and touch, continuing his teasing of the anxious little creature through the thin material of her panties. "Are you afraid your little boy will catch wind?" And that's all that James Potter is, isn't it? A tiresome child waving his fists in the air. Of course, Severus wouldn't be very pleased to know about this, but that was neither here nor there. A misanthrope like Snape would never allow himself to be happy in the first place.

"There is no one here but you and I," he reminded with wicked glee. He needed her - wanted her - enough to set up this little meeting personally. "Call it an engagement present."

[thewebofslime]

The cults never went away. They did, however, learn how to use the internet. Bill and Lorna Goldberg of Englewood have been dealing with cults for more than 40 years. It started when a relative of Lorna’s got involved with one back in the 1970s. “We had tried to get him out of the cult, and that failed,” Mr. Goldberg said. “We wanted to do something, so since we’re both clinical social workers, we started a support group.” Get The Jewish Standard Newsletter by email and never miss our top stories FREE SIGN UP He also teaches sociology of religion and other courses in the sociology department at Dominican College in Orangeburg. The support group, for people who have left a cult, still meets monthly. “We’ve had people from religious cults, from therapy cults, from science-fiction cults — UFO-type groups — to health cults that teach you the proper way to meditate so you can get the most nutrients from food,” he said. But while the teachings may differ, “the dynamics are all the same,” Mr. Goldberg said. What makes a group into a cult is “isolating an individual from their family, bombarding them with sensory input, giving them a pseudo-logical explanation as to why they have the answer and other people don’t. You’re told that ‘All your life you’ve been asleep — until we awakened you.’” “Cults have always been around,” he continued. “For the most part, they preyed on disaffected people, poor people. Middle-class America started to wake up to cults when it started being middle-class white kids who got involved. “People since time began have looked for answers, and that makes them vulnerable. Our society has become more and more cut off from each other, and cults offer a kind of love. It’s a pseudo-love, based on agreeing with each other, sharing a common purpose, and allowing oneself to be deceived in a common way by a charlatan. “People get hoodwinked.” Over the decades, the nature of the cults has morphed. At first, most of the people with whom he worked had been taken in by large, well-known groups. Now, “we’re getting people from a lot of smaller groups, with maybe 10 to 20 members.” Another change is that the Goldbergs now are working with people who grew up in cults and leave as adults. They’re second-generation cultists. How is a cult defined? For Mr. Goldberg, it’s based on the group’s impact, not on its ideology. People will call him up, concerned, generally, about a young adult child, though sometimes about an older parent. “‘Is that a cult?’” they’ll ask. “I say, that’s not the question to ask. The more pertinent question is that my child is involved in a group and I’m concerned about the changes I’ve seen in him or her, and my child is involved in the group in a cultic way,” he said. That’s a deeper involvement than spending a weekend eating vegetarian meals and chanting a bit. Often it involves “drastic and sudden personality changes. They’ll give up their aspirations for themselves. Give up their friends. They might leave school and move in with the group. That person is in trouble. For that person, that group is a cult. “There are certain red flags. For some families, it’s when they drop out of school. Or when they say they want nothing to do with their family, nothing to do with their friends. For others it’s when they empty out their bank account and give it to somebody.” So how does he help families concerned about a loved one entering a cult? “I try to help them to speak to the cult member in a way that’s going to be more likely to have the cult member re-examine their choice,” he said. “Don’t tell your son or your daughter what their experience is. Don’t say ‘You’re brainwashed, you’re in a cult.’ That doesn’t help. “What does help is saying to them, ‘You’ve had different groups you’ve been involved with in the past. At some point you’ve decided it’s time to move on. What will be the ways you’ll know it’s time to move on from this group you’re involved in? How will you know if this group is no longer meeting your needs?’ “One of the earmarks of a cult is that the person who’s involved can’t even conceive of ever leaving. They just see it as the answer for everything. If that’s the answer they give, I suggest the parents encourage their child to look at the dynamics of that. They should say, ‘In a period of X number of months, you’ve given up all your ambitions in order to follow a person. Maybe we need to look at how that came about.’ I also suggest they get in touch with somebody who left the group who can give the cult member a different perspective. I’ll talk to them about ways of getting the cult member to agree to speak to the person who left. The cults will always try to indoctrinate their followers to believe that speaking to somebody who left the group is the worst thing you can possibly do. They’ll use terms like ‘they’ll pollute your mind’ and ‘it’s like eating your own vomit’ to talk with them. They try to have cult members have these disgusting thoughts when it comes to somebody who left. “If the cult member doesn’t want to speak to somebody who left the group, then I advise the family to say, ‘Gee, that’s very upsetting to me, because you used to be so open-minded. Maybe that person has information you’re not privy to. And that’s what happens in cults — they say not to speak to anybody who left — so I see you acting in a cult-like way.” This line of approach doesn’t promise immediate results. “The thing is to keep the lines of communication open. Say that you and I can disagree about this group but the one thing I can’t ever tolerate is if we stop talking and I want you to promise me you’ll never stop talking even if we disagree. “In the early days of their recruitment, they’ll say, ‘Of course I’ll never stop talking with you. You’re my mommy.’ Because they don’t know what’s coming down the road, that the cult leader will tell them to cut ties with the people who will be most likely to get them to leave, which is the family. I try to help the family inoculate themselves by getting the cult member to say, ‘No, I will not stop talking to you even if we disagree.’ As long as they’re talking there’s hope.” Isolation is the central technique in cult recruiting. “They talk a person into isolating themselves. They say, this is a weekend or a week where you’re going to learn a lot of great things. Please don’t use your cell phones because you’ve got to experience it. You can’t explain to somebody what ice cream tastes like. You have to taste for yourself. Taste what we offer and see if it’s for you. “When they’ve got you in a place where you have no input from the outside world, they put you in a state of heightened suggestibility and narrow consciousness. Sometimes they use sleep deprivation. It’s a brainwash process. You come out feeling you have this sense of mission. “It’s an extreme part of the continuum of something like Birthright. You and I both believe Birthright is a wonderful thing. The kids come out of a Birthright trip to Israel — I’m not saying they’re brainwashed — with a heightened sense of being a Jew, with a feeling of kinship to Israel, which is exactly what we want our kids to have. It’s a very positive thing. These techniques can be used and made extreme by cults to completely change somebody’s ideology and personality. “The people who run Birthright are upfront about what they’re doing. They say the reason they’re doing this is because you’re a Jewish kid and they want you to have a good sense of Judaism. “Cults don’t do that. They use deception. They say they help mankind, and you end up fundraising so the guru can have another Rolls-Royce. One Jewish group that has straddled the line between religion and cult is Lev Tahor. The group, founded by Rabbi Shlomo Helbrans, who since has died, has become most notorious for cloaking women and girls over 3 years old in black, head-to-toe, burqa-like coverings — and for repeated brushes with legal authorities, most recently involving the arrest of a Lev Tahor member for kidnapping two of Rabbi Helbrans’ grandchildren, after their mother — his daughter — tried to remove them from the group after she objected to the forced marriage of her 13-year-old daughter. The group has divided the ultra-Orthodox community, with some anti-Zionist sectors taking Lev Tahor’s side in its struggles against civil authorities in Israel, Canada, and Central America. Rabbi Helbrans was convicted in 1994 for kidnapping, after helping a bar mitzvah student hide from his mother. He served two years in prison for that felony. “The mother had immigrated from Russia with her young son,” Mr. Goldberg said. “The son was taking bar mitzvah lessons with somebody from Lev Tahor. Suddenly, the son just disappeared. He said, ‘I’m going to study Torah, I’m not coming home.’ The mother contacted me. I met with her son. He was as starry-eyed and other-worldly as anybody from any cult I ever worked with.” Cults have lost their high profile as a Jewish communal concern. Once, both the New York and Los Angeles Jewish federations had offices devoted to raising awareness about cults, and helping families whose members had gotten involved. “I wish they were both still around,” Mr. Goldberg said. The Goldbergs’ support group plays an important role for its members. “It’s really helpful for people to be with somebody else who has gone through the same experience,” he said. “When people leave a cult, they feel they have a foot in two different worlds. They have to re-examine everything that happened to them in the cult and put it into a new light. That what we do in our group.” One big shift in Mr. Goldberg’s work over the past generation: Now, the majority of people in his support group are people who were born and raised in a cult, and left as adults. “They never joined. Their parents joined. It’s a different situation. “Those who were recruited and left have to regain their pre-cult personalities. Those who were born into the cult never had a pre-cult personality. “Some of them are really severely emotionally damaged. Others — you’ll just be amazed by how strong they are. They’re strong in certain ways. They learn how to delay gratification. They tend to do well in school. They’ve learned to be single-minded in terms of following a pursuit. The price they pay in the cult is too great, but it’s a good quality. Many of them have learned skills. Knowing how to approach strangers and try to sell them something is a marketable skill. So is knowing how to cook for hundreds of people. “Of course, I see a skewed sampling. I’m sure there are people who are really struggling who haven’t come to grips with the symptoms and never get to me.” So how can parents inoculate children against growing up to join cults? For Mr. Goldberg, it comes down to critical thinking. When his now-adult son was little, they used to watch television together. And Mr. Goldberg would debunk the advertisements. “Whenever we would watch a commercial that painted something as wonderful, I’d say, ‘It’s not that wonderful. You’re not going to be running through fields of roses because you use this laundry detergent. Tony the Tiger is not your friend. He’s a cartoon character trying to get you to eat this cereal.’ I tried to help him see that it’s good to have a critical eye. “We’re naturally intuitive and emotional. We’re born that way. We have to be taught to be critical. When somebody tries to sell you something, I think you’ve got do develop the ability to look at it critically. When you have something you really want to believe, you should be doubly critical. There’s a lot of propaganda and we do go along with things because they strike us on an emotional level. Just be wary. “Before we buy a computer, we go on the internet, we listen to what people have said about the computer. We look at that its qualities are. We’re very critical. But before we go away for a weekend with somebody who says they have the answers that are going to change our lives, we just say OK? You have to be critical.”

[theconservativebrief]

Clare Bronfman, an heiress to the Seagram fortune, and three others were arrested Tuesday and charged with racketeering for their role in a secret society that’s been frequently called a “sex cult” in news reports. Bronfman, alleged to be one of the senior leaders in the multi-level marketing organization Nxivm (pronounced NEX-ium), founded by entrepreneur Keith Raniere, is set to be arraigned in a Brooklyn federal court.

Earlier this year former Smallville actress Allison Mack, another senior member of the organization, was arrested and charged with sex trafficking, sex trafficking conspiracy, and forced labor conspiracy, as was Raniere. Mack faces life in prison.

Ostensibly a self-help group advertising “executive success programs,” Nxivm has been condemned by former members as a cult, in which female members are ritualistically branded and pressured to engage in sexual “master-slave” relationships with higher-ups in the program, and in particular with the group’s founder and leader, Raniere. Known to his followers as “Vanguard,” Raniere was arrested last month on charges of sex trafficking.

Raniere maintains his innocence, and the Nxivm website has posted a statement denying all allegations, saying, “We are currently working with the authorities to demonstrate his innocence and true character. We strongly believe the justice system will prevail in bringing the truth to light. We are saddened by the reports perpetuated by the media and their apparent disregard for ‘innocent until proven guilty,’ yet we will continue to honor the same principles on which our company was founded.”

Tabloids and mainstream media outlets alike have almost uniformly described Nxivm as a “sex cult.” And the allegations of sexual abuse, humiliation, and deprivation are chilling. But when you read more about Nxivm, what’s striking is how ordinary its marketing rhetoric seems to have been. Recruiting new members by promising feminist empowerment and anodyne self-actualization schemes, Nxivm took advantage of female insecurity — and capitalistic notions of being one’s own “best self” — to recruit members.

While Allison Mack may be the most notable member of Nxivm, the group has been in existence, and attracting wealthy and famous adherents, for almost two decades. The Albany, New York-based organization was founded in the late 1990s, peddling self-help seminars and “executive success programs” designed to, in Nxivm’s words, “help … people realize the potential that exists within them.”

Nxivm wasn’t Raniere’s first attempt at a multilevel marketing program; in 1993, he settled with the New York attorney general after being accused of running a pyramid scheme through an unrelated company. Nxivm was by far his most successful attempt, though. Attendees included Stephen Cooper, then acting chief executive of Enron, and heir to the Seagram’s fortune Edgar Bronfman Sr., whose two daughters would go on to become heavily involved in Nxivm.

A Forbes article from 2003 characterizes the seminars as an Ayn Rand-inspired glorification of selfishness:

Days begin at 8 a.m. with the “ESP handclap,” akin to using a gavel to open a court hearing. Students then go through sessions on “Money,” “Face of the Universe,” “Control, Freedom & Surrender” and more. They learn baffling and solipsistic jargon: “Parasites” are people who suffer, creating problems where none exist and craving attention. “Suppressives” see good but want to destroy it. Thus, a person who criticizes Executive Success is showing suppressive behavior.

A New York Times piece on the group reports that approximately 16,000 people have taken Nxivm’s seminars, although only a small fraction of them were inducted into Raniere’s inner circle, known as DOS (from the inaccurate Latin dominus obsequious sororium — “master over the slave women.”)

While it’s unclear when exactly DOS began, one ex-member recalls that Nxivm’s seminars started featuring a course called “Human Pain” in 2011 or 2012. The course encouraged members to engage in extreme forms of self-punishment if they “broke their word,” techniques that would be replicated within the DOS. That member, Sarah Edmondson, who joined Nxivm in 2005, recalls being recruited into DOS in March 2016.

According to ex-members quoted in the Times report, the DOS functions as a kind of master-slave pyramid scheme, in which “slave” members swear fealty to designated “masters,” who in turn are the slaves of their own “masters,” with Raniere at the top.

Ex-members have reported being forced to provide intimate photographs and video of themselves as “collateral” — which were later used to discourage them from speaking out. They report being forcibly branded with Raniere’s initials, being coerced into unpaid labor, and being kept on extremely low-calorie diets to maintain the physiques Raniere found most sexually attractive.

Members were required to text their “masters” every morning and evening and be available to answer their masters’ texts at all time. Minor transgressions were punished with ritual humiliation, such as being forced to wear cow udders or suffer extreme deprivation of food or heat.

One of the most striking elements of Nxivm was the contrast between its alleged internal “master-slave” dynamics and its public face.

Nxivm’s recruits, including Allison Mack, billed Nxivm as a chance for feminist empowerment. In January 2016, for example, Mack tweeted at actress Emma Watson, a known supporter of feminist causes, telling her that she wanted to give her more information about an “amazing women’s movement.”

.@EmWatson I’m a fellow actress like yourself & involved in an amazing women’s movement I think you’d dig. I’d love to chat if you’re open.

— Allison Mack (@allisonmack) January 24, 2016

Another actress, Samira Shoaib, recalls Mack attempting to recruit her by characterizing the gathering as “a bunch of women … [who] go on a retreat upstate, and we share our experiences and support each other.”

In the mid-2000s, one of the major recruitment efforts for Nxivm was through Nxivm-funded a cappella music concerts and gatherings popular with college-age women, at which Mack and her Smallville co-star Kristin Kreuk (who left the organization in 2012 and denies any knowledge of DOS’s use of “sex slaves”) would be present.

Meanwhile, Seagram’s heiresses Claire and Sarah Bronfman, who are believed to have taken over Nxivm after Raniere’s arrest, reportedly bankrolled the organization to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Sarah Edmondson, who shared her story with the New York Times and other outlets, says the DOS was pitched to her as an opportunity to transcend stereotypically feminine weakness like being “over-emotional” or having a “victim” mentality, encouraging women to develop their capacity for obedience and discipline through submission. In a personal essay for Vice, she writes:

Keith taught us that one of the strongest imperfections of the female gender—among other things—is that we’re weak and have no character, we’re indulgent emotionally, and we’re princesses … The tricky way I believe he got that indoctrination in, is he wasn’t saying these are his views, he was saying this is how women are perceived and this is why women aren’t equal in the world, because they’re perceived this way. This is how men see you.

Only by learning to master her perceived self-indulgent tendencies, Raniere implied, could Edmondson truly become empowered as a woman.

Likewise, Edmondson recalls that the language of feminism was used by other women in the group to convince her to perform acts that made her uncomfortable. When she was told to strip naked alongside other women during her DOS induction, for example, her co-DOS members characterized her “body issues” as something she had to work to overcome. “We’re a sorority,” Edmondson recalls other members telling her. “We’re a sisterhood — relax.”

Unlike many organizations termed “cults,” Nxivm does not seem to have any theistic or theological content. Members didn’t join because they believed Raniere was a representative of God on earth or that he had any particular spiritual powers.

Rather, Nxivm attracted the members it did by capitalizing not on spirituality but on culturally potent concepts like “female empowerment,” “executive success,” and “self-actualization.” Edmonson recalled feeling like she was initially being inducted into a “badass bitch bootcamp,” and that “The group was supposed to be women that were going to be a secret society, sort of like the Freemasons, as a force for good. We were going to be able to change the world.”

The tools used to recruit members — the same tools that characterize other controversial multilevel marketing schemes, like the “essential oils” phenomenon — are the building blocks of basic capitalism. Promise empowerment. Demand a down payment.

In a society in which religious “nones” are the largest single religious bloc, Nxivm is the perfect, chilling example of a “secular” religion: one that speaks to contemporary cultural neuroses and anxieties and capitalizes on them. It uses some of the same structures as (theistic) religion — a way to order the world and make it meaningful, a sense of ritual and community — but marries them with the cultural values of secularism: independence, self-improvement, and “empowerment.”

One of the most uncanny elements of so-called cults is how they’re able to leverage our wider cultural hungers — for success, for “wellness,” to be our “best selves” — to lure us in.

In that sense, Nxivm doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Dismissing it as a “sex cult” — something “weird” and “creepy” that exists outside the bounds of ordinary society — fails to take into account that Nxivm attracted members because it purported to offer something highly culturally potent: a “badass bitch bootcamp” in which women could self-actualize, and an Ayn Randian narrative of capitalist self-improvement structured around freeing oneself from would-be “parasites.”

Update: this story has been updated to reflect Bronfman’s arrest

Original Source -> Seagram’s heiress arrested for role in controversial “sex cult”

via The Conservative Brief