Truthers and the War on the Occult
Jan. 9th, 2023 12:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kimberlysteele
The person whose channel is referred to above is actually serious -- he conflates clown symbolism (pale skin, red hair, circuses) with Satanic conspiracy. His leaps of unexamined, random illogic and projection of the shadow are impressive even for a Truther. I have deleted the channel name and the link URL because he does not seem entirely there and I would not put it past him to personally target people who disagree with his views.
The Trouble with Truthers
One of the reasons I don’t care for non-mainstream social media alternatives such as Bitchute, Rumble, and Telegram is the amount of anti-Semitism tolerated on those platforms. Bitchute is especially guilty, with any random video playing host to astonishingly offensive comments about how Jews must be responsible for all the evils of the world. I’m not sure if the anti-Semitic comments that proliferate on Bitchute, Rumble, and to a lesser extent, Youtube are real or if they are posted by bots in order to tarnish the platforms in question and drive away intelligent conversation.
Truthers also like to target Freemasonry, insisting that every elite and well-monied person in history is and was part of an ongoing Satan-worshipping conspiracy to ruin the world of normies. They try to play both sides, taking their grandkids to see a Disney movie and buying its related merchandise and the very next hour ranting online about the grotesqueries of Christina Aguilera and her strap-on dildo performance. One of these things is the natural result of the other, and you cannot have your Disney princess cake and eat it too.
There is a person in one of my many online groups who posts Truther propaganda, usually in the form of black men exposing what they perceive as Satanism in the media, politics, and entertainment. These black men are uniformly American and either purport to be born again Christians or a long lost tribe of black Jews. I came at this person pretty hard and I have come close to outright banning her from my groups. Perhaps she will earn a ban in 2023. Sadly, she is far from the only one of her kind. Her post of a Telegram video attempting to smear Freemasons by revealing pentagrams, hexagrams, and a Freemason compass symbols as part of a Satanic plot earned this retaliatory screed from me:
"Do you know anything about the occult? Do you know that the word means "hidden"? Did you know that one of the main traditions of serious occultists like myself is the practice of discursive meditation, which comes from medieval Christianity? Do you know anything about Freemasonry that you haven't learned from Bitchute, Rumble, and Dan Brown novels? I'm getting VERY tired of seeing all of this unanalyzed projection of the shadow in this group. If you're looking for the evilly evil Satanists, you might try rooting out the Satanic crap in your own life first before casting stones at 80-something year old lodge members who donate huge chunks of their retirement money to charity. Let me guess: you're probably not fit to throw stones because you live in a glass house..."
Projection of the Shadow and Other Acts of Avoidance
I believe the Truther movement, as much as it claims to be about responsibility, prosperity, and faith, is actually about running away from hard limits, gaining and holding on to unearned wealth, and blaming other religions for the increasingly undeniable failures of Christianity. When leftists project their shadows, they are trying to avoid saying “I am full of hatred. When I get up in the morning, my thoughts are dominated by rage towards someone who i am convinced is oppressing me and people like me.” Truthers, for all their claims to the contrary, COULD SAY THE EXACT SAME THING.
Truthers think of themselves as the Good People just as frequently as their enemies think of themselves as the Good People. The truth is somewhere in the middle: there are good people and bad people on both sides, and actually most people are a mix of good and bad, present company included. The religious Christian Right forgets that it is just as elite and elitist as the atheist and pagan Left. Forty years ago it was the pathetic parents of Gen X who bought into Tipper Gore’s hysterical policing of dirty, profanity-laden music CDs. The Christian Right started the US down the path of thought police. Furthermore, Pray the Gay Away camps not only do not work, they are what led to the backlash we see today of Big Pharma getting in bed with its woke sympathizers to trick children into surgically mutilating themselves out of natural puberty. I may have only learned one thing from the study of The Cosmic Doctrine (hopefully there’s more than that but I will be the first to admit the inferiority of my brain to retain knowledge) but it is, like I say in my Ogham readings, a doozy. That thing is Dion Fortune’s statement that if you want to rise above hatred, you must hate the hatred more than you hate the object of your hatred. This means looking inward and recognizing the despicable enemy inside yourself before you project the shadow upon the evilly evil Freemasons, or the Big Bad Patriarchy/ whiteppl/ meanie deadnamers.
The Limits of Human Power
The amount of mysterious power attributed to Masons, occultists, Jews, and other random non-Christians would be very funny if it wasn’t used as reason to start the Spanish Inquisition reboot in the current millennium. Truthers who fetishize an Apocalypse that never arrives are prime candidates for the same sort of Stalinism they allegedly rail against. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is just as prescient a vision as George Orwell’s 1984, and both books had plenty of true historical situations from which to draw when painting their pictures of dystopian futures. The desperate urge to project villainy on That Drag Queen Over There is convenient for the former Tipper Gores and original Karens is psychologically interesting.
When we look at the lifestyle Truthers are protecting, a large number of them are comfortable suburbanites in enviable positions. Not all on the Right are in depressed areas in flyover states. Some are the same big boys with big toys who made the 1980s a living hell for anyone with less money, power, and influence. How many of them are still the clueless elite, throwing money willy-nilly at Big Pharma and its minions instead of taking responsibility for their health, buying Chinese made crap at Costco and enriching Jeff Bezos with their Amazon Prime memberships, and going to the big box church on Sunday so they can feel better about worshipping materialism in the company of other materialists?
Speaking of their churches, they’re mostly a sham. I don’t go into a place that looks like a corporate hotel to worship and I think it is a good guess that Jesus would also avoid such a place. If I have a demon, and I would argue I do, the last place I expect to get that demon cast out is a Christian church or any place of mainstream faith. They still wear masks at the Buddhist temple near me, in fact, they force that Satanic symbol on children. I don’t like places where religious leaders resent occultists like me for knowing what they are supposed to know. How is it that an ex-atheist (it has been fewer than 10 years) has more of a gnosis of the ecosystem of the non-material world than some religious nerd who purports to have spent their whole waking life in church or temple? Yet I am not trying to be arrogant here when I say I am more literate about those things than the average preacher. That said, when I compare myself to such an “expert”, it is like a kid who just learned to read in the first grade comparing herself to a deliberately illiterate adult who failed to learn to read out of ignorance and sometimes spite.
Bless You for Reading This, You Must Have Lots of Patience...
For those of you still reading this, I thank you, as my rants have taken on the seeping darkness of our times lately. On a more positive note, I saw something I never thought I would see last week. For those of you who do not know him, Mark Passio is a firebrand occultist who has a large following. He does livestreams and speaks in public. He also occasionally performs with his band because he is a musician. Mark has dedicated his life on lifting people out of ignorance and promotes the Great Work. For those who do not know what the Great Work is, in the occult vernacular, it is the term of the “many paths, one destination” a soul takes as it returns to the God who created it. As the term implies, the process involves a great deal of hard work on oneself and the world one occupies. I was shocked when Greg Reese, an intelligent and thoughtful contributor to Alex Jone’s Infowars, did a segment from Mark Passio on De Facto Satanism. De Facto Satanism is what John Michael Greer refers to as the sleepy, materialist trance that most people spend their day to day lives within. Greg Reese is a person who I would consider to be a Truther, and to see him promoting the diligence required for the Great Work instead of the same old lazy excusetarian, scapegoat-oriented Christianity was extremely refreshing.
Another strange and (I think) good sign was a performance of the Orphic Hymns I did in the odd setting of a burger bar in Naperville at an Open Mic. It was a foggy night and almost no people attended the Open Mic in the heart of Naperville, one of the most affluent and elite suburbs of Chicago. Because there were not enough performers, I somewhat reluctantly went on stage to fill in the blanks. The Orphic Hymns — my adaptations of the ancient Greek worship poems — were actually well received. Among the three or four other performers, they seemed to be the obvious favorite. People were tapping their toes, humming along, and a small group actually started dancing in the empty bar during the Orphic Hymn to Hermes and Apollo. I don’t think this had a snowball’s chance in hell of happening in the Naperville of 10-20 years ago. Of course it may mean absolutely nothing, but it certainly made me think twice.
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Date: 2023-01-09 08:11 pm (UTC)TBH, I avoid them, because when I run across those channels on YT, or those posts on whatever platform, there's a very strong whiff of mental illness there. Reminds me forcibly of people I've known in person who... while somewhat functional and not overtly schizos, there is definitely a screw or three loose there. Not even gonna judge whether they're right or not-- who the heck knows? If the secret societies are half as powerful as they're claimed to be, dumb sods like me will never, ever find out. And there's the rub, right? None of us ordinary schmos have the access or information to evaluate those claims.
What I can evaluate is the people making the claims, and... it's not encouraging. Granted, I don't know a lot of comfortable suburbanites: 100% of the truther types I know IRL would be doing 10000% better in life, if they stopped blaming all the world's problems on inscrutable, nefarious outside forces, and took some fracking responsibility for their own lives.
Blaming freemasonry, or satanists, or the illuminati, or cannibal child-raping cults for everything is extremely convenient for people whose personal lives are out of control because of their own poor decisions. It's a great way to escape into a fantasy world where you are some sort of uber-spy with secret intel, battling the forces of evil by... posting on the internet? It's the empty-nester version of spending 8 hours a day playing video games. Artificial excitement and adventure. I'm thinking of a woman, fifties, whose kids all grew up to be criminal addicts, who break into her house and steal her stuff for drug money, occasionally beat her up (but of course she doesn't press charges), who stays afloat working low-level jobs. That woman thinks she's gonna prepare for the apocalypse by spending all her spare change on MREs. I guess there are worse things to spend your limited resources on, but... pressing charges to keep her kids in jail would do a lot more for her current *and* future circumstances and wouldn't cost a dime. But prepping for the apocalypse gives her a sense of purpose and importance, I guess. It's like a soap opera you can play along with at home.
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Date: 2023-01-09 09:47 pm (UTC)YES.
For many, their lives are boring and miserable, so their resentment grows and they perceive any person who does not completely agree with them as having far more fun than they do. Of course since this person has to be evilly evil, their idea of "fun" has to involve ritual Satanic sacrifice of little kids. They'll make any incredible leap of faith to pin their misery and boredom on someone else and avoid looking inward, which is exactly what their Leftist counterparts do.
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Date: 2023-01-09 09:25 pm (UTC)Two things on that:
1) "Acquire a spirit of peace and a thousand souls around you will be saved." --St. Paisios.
This is a deeply, wonderfully, true thing. There's a whole Christian worldview wrapped up in that one sentence. It does not matter what other people are doing. It doesn't matter who is or isn't plotting against you. That's not what the Christian life is about. It matters what YOU do. Be a Christian. Mold your mind, your heart, your will, to God-- practice humility every second of every day, pray for those who persecute you, love your neighbor as yourself, all those things that make us Christians, DO that stuff, and you will save the world. It's that simple. That's what saints are, and that's how you change the world for the better: by becoming a conduit of God's grace into the world. This is the opposite of the Authoritarian Utopian left, AND the crazy-truther-right-- what they have in common is a profound sense of self-importance. Humility is what saves us.
2) From a basic nuts-and-bolts cultural-Christianity perspective: Christian morality is very practical. Wanna know a great way to avoid some very common financial disasters? Monogamy. What's one great way to control anxiety and get out of the rat-race? Stop coveting your neighbor's stuff. Wanna be healthier? Keep the fasts. Concerned about equity? Practice generosity. We've forgotten that we are sojourners in this world, that we're *supposed* to be a counter-cultural force. Instead, we get cowed into avoiding these very practical, essential topics, until people who've been in church all their lives have never heard such radical things... and here we find ourselves, with an entire economy based on greed, covetousness, and self-indulgence, afraid to say anything about it lest we offend someone... we've chopped off all the practical advice, until we're down to "God loves you" and we can't include the rest: "and He wants you to be like Him-- deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow Him. Here's how to get started on that..."
How much of the conspiracy BS would just go away, if professed Christians were simply focused on the basics of our own religion? All of it, I think. You don't need or have time for any of that stuff if you're working in the vineyard of Christ.
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Date: 2023-01-09 09:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-09 11:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-11 05:55 pm (UTC)When I realized this I wondered how I fell for the littlest cheapest stuff for so long
Erika
Oooh
Date: 2023-01-10 07:54 am (UTC)It reminds me of the concept that a repentant sinner is even better than a totally righteous person. Dont remember where I read that, probably Lewis, but that is certainly the basis of all great stories and journeys of catharsis. I need to go write something.
-Derpherder
Re: Oooh
Date: 2023-01-10 04:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-10 05:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-10 04:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-10 06:43 pm (UTC)I suppose that you are (indirectly) right though that a totally unmoderated comment section will always end up enabling the usual hordes of crazies, halfwits, trolls, and shills to run wild spewing things ad nauseum that would be censored or banned on more moderated platforms.
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Date: 2023-01-10 07:38 pm (UTC)On the "Truther" internet subculture, the whole thing seems to be rooted in American Protestant Christian tropes. I think your analysis is absolutely dead-on as far as Truthers wanting to have their cake and eat it too, particularly:
"I believe the Truther movement, as much as it claims to be about responsibility, prosperity, and faith, is actually about running away from hard limits, gaining and holding on to unearned wealth, and blaming other religions for the increasingly undeniable failures of Christianity."
It seems a lot of their collective mentality is a case of sour grapes over the more stable and prosperous era of industrial modernity being a thing of the past. This attitude dovetails with the American Protestant desire of wanting to worship Christ and Mammon at the same time. Thus the very confused value system its adherents always seem to display. These are the kind of people who believe that cheap gasoline and ample parking for their oversized cars is a birthright.
Mark Passio is an interesting case, though I have my reservations about what he's doing overall. While I definitely think it's admirable he's trying his best to present occult teachings in a positive light to a Truther audience (i.e. people who usually shriek in horror at any mention of the word "occult"), his overall presentation still falls into the usual trap of blaming all the world's problems on some shadowy elite. I think this type of view vastly overemphasis the role of individual human agency when it comes to how world events unfold. In my opinion, JMG has vastly more intelligent takes on these matters.
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Date: 2023-01-11 05:26 am (UTC)Yes, exactly. There is a happy medium. On one end, we have the old Twitter and current Facebook, where the government colluded/colludes with giant corporations to keep lockdowns alive and Big Pharma raking in profits. On the other side, there's Bitchute and sewers-for-brains who blame the lizard Nazi Illuminati for EVERYTHING.
I think quite a few modern Christians misunderstand prosperity. They confuse "prosperity" with "entitlement". Like Methylethyl said, why aren't they taking up the cross of Jesus and giving everything they have to somebody poorer than they are? Probably because you cannot do that when most of your dreams involve tropical vacations and new SUVs. Not long ago I sat down and had an interesting conversation with a Christian woman about why Joel Osteen is neither a good Christian nor (in my opinion) a good person. She did her best to defend him and his lifestyle with "he's Texan, they all live in big houses" and "he needs the security". At least she was willing to listen to me berate him a bit. Again, I should probably pick another televangelist as he isn't the only one.
Yeah, Mark is very smart, much smarter than I will ever be, but yeah, the whole fixation on the elite cabal is utterly tired. It is beneath him, I think, and he has yet to realize it. Yet another channel I tune into featured yet another occultist, this time a "pureblood" channel re-broadcasting Theoria Apophasis. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPiL18m7bkQ
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Date: 2023-01-11 11:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-12 03:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-10 09:29 pm (UTC)I remember those religious fundies very well. At least they followed some sort of rulebook though. That was sort of the whole point of fundamentalism, that the Bible was the final rulebook, the only rulebook, and it contained a certain and perfect world within its pages. Mostly as a kid, it involved the adults drilling the Bible into your head. I remember memorizing a whole book of the bible at one point in all of that. I remember memorizing it, I don't remember the book, even which one it was though :P Funny how memory works.
Compare to the blue haired fundies of today who seem to point to an endlessly random stream of rulebooks that all contradict each other. I'm sure somewhere in all of that is a certain and perfect world? If so, I can't see it. All I see is chaos. Maybe that's not bad? I don't know.
There's no certain or perfect world out there, I've concluded. I will say today's world is objectively worse, although not by as much as people would like to perceive. Mostly it's just different.
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Date: 2023-01-11 05:37 am (UTC)It has been my theory for a long time that the whole Woke movement is the karmic slap-back from the Evangelist craze of the 1980s.
The world is better in some ways, worse than others. In some ways, we are reasonably enlightened -- a good example is how I can make wonderful recordings in my home because of current musical technology. I can also go to a nearby store and get freshly squeezed orange juice... in January. In Illinois. In other ways, it is a new Dark Age of hideous, deep ignorance of natural law. Nobody in a village somewhere near Kyoto in medieval Japan had to worry about a nanobot containing bioweapon shot being forced on its citizenry. Nobody thought they were crazy or shunned them if they talked to their household gods and spirits, and despite working themselves to the bone, many of them lived better and happier lives than we do now.
no subject
Date: 2023-01-11 12:16 pm (UTC)Different world, different dangers, different frameworks for dealing with them.
Funny how the nukes did what the wishes of their inventors wanted - it ended conventional war. But what replaced it was worse. Now the world is full of plausible accidents instead. Weird weather, weird diseases, weird disasters, all plausibly caused by accident. Nobody ever declares war anymore, no it's a "special military operation" instead. And the pussyfooting continues.
As far as happy goes? I kinda doubt it. You'd have to ask them and that's rather difficult.
no subject
Date: 2023-01-12 04:03 pm (UTC)I look forward to future incarnations without nukes. I think that is where it is headed. Of course I won't be as happy about a mostly fossil fuel free future, which will probably mean plenty of heating water over a fire if I want to do nice stuff such as eat soup or wash my hair properly...
There's a book called Memories of Silk and Straw: A Self-Portrait of Small-Town Japan put together by Dr. Junichi Saga. In the 1980s, Saga interviewed octo- and nonagenarians who had seen Japan shift from a peasant economy into a modern one. Grinding, horrific poverty was commonplace, but equally commonplace were work ethic and camaraderie of a sort that has not been seen since the advent of industrialization.
Truthers & spiritual black holes
Date: 2023-01-10 10:30 pm (UTC)Re: Truthers & spiritual black holes
Date: 2023-01-11 05:49 am (UTC)They truly are their own version of the black pill. Nihilism on either side is poisonous.
I think the opposite of fear is equally bad, it is recklessness. In my Ogham system, this would be symbolized by Luis or Protection, which is also the card of the Holy Guardian Angel. To not care about Protection is to throw caution to the wind, party like it is 1999, snort all the cocaine (and whatever else is at the party) and hope your HGA and your long-suffering family will save your sorry butt like the last zillion times. The opposite is extreme fear. It is the Julianne Moore character in the film Safe, who locks herself away in a creepy cult camp for hypochondriacs and wastes away in a plastic bubble because she is afraid of germs and allergens. In the middle is Love, which means accepting fear and tempering it with a dash of recklessness, but like Apollo says, taking all things in moderation. Love is the appreciation and gratitude of both opposites (fear and recklessness) and taking those elements and combining them so they can hash it out in the ring of the crucible.
Re: Truthers & spiritual black holes
Date: 2023-01-11 06:13 pm (UTC)https://i.pinimg.com/originals/1d/ae/7b/1dae7b048cef3693f0fbf34b52beb5f4.jpg
no subject
Date: 2023-01-12 02:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-12 04:14 pm (UTC)My predictions for 2023:
--The oppressive governments of Canada and Australia (and some states in the US) will bring back masking and attempt to bring back more forced "vaccines", especially for children. This mainly has to do with the demons in charge being hungry and acting out as the glut comes to a froth.
--Excess mortality will swell and come to a head around mid-2023 worldwide, most of those deaths will be quax-related, despite the fervent denials of TV news watching normies and heads of corporations and states.
--This one is based on my recent experience at an Open Mic: folk music will start seeing some traction and will begin a massive revival, and styles that have been buried or obscure since the 1960s and 70s will make a comeback.
--Violent rap music and metal genres will see their audiences dwindle and many will be shoved to the wayside by their recording labels, and much of this will be because the average listener will implicitly or subconsciously understand it as Satanic.
--Traditional western occultism will see a massive influx of new interest and so will the Orthodox and Traditional Catholic Christian churches performing the Latin Mass.
--
no subject
Date: 2023-01-12 05:26 pm (UTC)As far as vax deaths, I think there will be two waves of that: short-term deaths probably mostly from cardiovascular and auto-immune issues and long-term deaths probably mostly from cancer. I can imagine the short-term deaths peaking either this year or next. I tend to suspect next year, though, because JMG's astrological forecast for this presidential administration sees Biden-Harris as being historically unpopular at the end of this term, and vax-deaths reaching their peak in 2024 a huge and severe way would certainly accomplish that.
no subject
Date: 2023-01-13 11:21 am (UTC)Your predictions for this year "resonate" with me.
Self-described Psychic Medium
no subject
Date: 2023-01-13 04:14 pm (UTC)