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Everything is a Cult

I've used the expression that I've learned much more from maintaining than building projects for quite some time now. It's definitely more true than ever but I wanted to make a note to myself regarding the use of artificial intelligence when building sites or doing pretty much anything else.

Over the last couple of days, I've been in a bit of a fog. It could be the abnormal weather patterns sweeping through the region with a couple of inches of ice last weekend and a half foot of snow predicted today 1. Needless to say, I've had some extra time on my hands indoors and I've also been trying to make sense of our political theatre with some daily doom-scrolling.

Never Tell a Lie​

Let me start by saying that the seminal moment in this essay happened when I was very young. Although I've retold this antidote more times than I can recall, I can't specify exactly how old I was at the time. I think I was eight or nine years old and I was riding in the car on the way to school listening to my dad on the radio. Dad did a morning radio show for the majority of my life - mostly music and comedy. This particular morning, just as we were pulling into the drop-off line at our school, he said "my family and I had a great dinner last night at wherever" ( I don't remember the name of the restaurant ). The thing is - we didn't have dinner last night at 'wherever'. I turned to looked at my mom with what I'm sure was an obvious reaction on my face. She just said "ask you dad when you get home".

I think it was mostly because the lesson that had been pumped into every crevice of my brain by my parents since I could remember is to always tell the truth. Dad would give me little antidotes and so on. Yet here he was lying to everyone. The first thing I did when I got home was bombard him with questions about what he said. He said something to the extent of "listen David - I try to tell the truth and you should as well. It's not lying because it's my job to promote these businesses - sometimes I have to fib the stories because we don't have time to support all of them". It stuck with me forever.

Suddenly everything around me became suspicious - my teachers, my friends, and their parents. I started to wondered who else is doing this. My brother and I even started creating games around it. We started making up coded words - one of the most obvious was 'SN-eak' which we would do regularly looking for clues. I found my dad's Playboy stash so I started reading the very adult essays before I was ten. I also found his guns and when I confessed, my mom made him trade them out for golf clubs. I'm sure my parents were aware that their seven and nine years had become old curiosity creatures. It wasn't all bad though - It helped drive my interest in academics because it all felt like a game.

The downsides were mostly innocuous like the time that we meticulously sliced the tape on our Christmas presents with razors and then resealed them after looking. Some more severe downsides of this were much more evident in my brother, who very later in life would take that mantra to the extreme bordering on mental health and substance abuse issues with paranoia and a nonconformist lifestyle. He wasn't wrong, just so far outside of society that it became harder and harder to function very well. That's a whole other story and I covered part of it in the obituary I wrote for him several years ago2.

I also cited this seminal event in a walk the other day with my neighbor when trying to explain why I was reading Nietzsche as a teenager. Even with academics, it wasn't just a quest for acceptance or good grades, it was still a game of 'SN-eak' - let me find the stuff y'all don't want me to read about. Let me find the hidden information or the information behind the information. I even learned how to lie fairly well myself. A good example is when I won the state science fair a couple of times with falsified data. I just made it up to be just barely believable but more importantly interesting. My presentation and wit have judges circled around and circling back to my booth. I still lie on occasion mostly for my audience benefit but I've also learned to prioritize sleeping well at night.

The Epstein files​

The skepticism has carried well on into adulthood too. This curiosity and suspicion is also likely why I have a bad habit of doom-scrolling the news looking for clues. In one of my group text threads, a old friend calls me Geraldo - yes after that Geraldo because I like to drop relevant news bits in the thread for discussion. I keep my finger on the pulse by following a lot of other people who have their finger on the pulse in one way or another. And I'm not afraid to look away. I've now read more Epstein emails and messages than I care to count.

I'm lucky I've been able to keep a level head on my shoulders about it all. I never dipped down the internet rabbit hole too deep as it's mostly been an avenue of experimentation and research instead of values of beliefs. I've also been more concerned with controlling the internet than aimlessly wondering the wasteland. One of the things that struck me was the 4chan forum /pol/3, which was the backbone of the QAnon4 and a lot of other crazy shite was started the day after the creator met with Epstein. This was 2011 and the fella who started it was named the Time Most Influential Person of 20085. And this isn't even all the files. It has been pointed out how many promptly disappeared after each release and they're purposefully in disarray. There are just too many coincidences to ignore and my little curious brain is trying to map it all out. It starts feeling real with local and regional testimony.

The shortlist of the org chart is obvious but the full extent is relatively mind blowing. I mean half of them work for the current administration. The alt-right and academics were on the foreign payrolls while they were busy rage-baiting everyone on social media. What I've learned is the entirety of the fascistic culture war from the 2010s onward was basically wholesale consolidated and incited through an anglosphere bourgeois old boys club network financed by a bunch of international mobsters. I so desperately want to remind the silent 'christian' majority in America that dumpy's great grandfather got started with a whorehouse6, he married a hooker, and has been shady dealing for years. Even the dude that made the Melania films is in the files and on the payroll7. Hundreds of billions of dollars being moved around between countries. I now think it goes back further and is even dirtier and more criminal than we now know or will ever really know.

We all know that some folks will take the bag of cash and lie about it. We all know that there are perverts, swindlers, hustlers, thieves, and criminals. I've read Crime and Punishment. I just can't imagine how folks might not see it in the folks they chose to elect into office. It's so RIGHT there in your face obvious.

Everything is a Cult​

My original stance and first stance take was 'duh' - a bunch of power brokers conspiring to take advantage of others. We've all got the predisposition for belonging, acceptance, and group think. The saying "It's just business" is rooted in ruthlessness but it's why a lot of votes were had. Even the SNL skit last weekend used the "but he's a good businessman" for the mom confessing her abandonment of dumpy8.

I've always kinds suspected this sorta bullshite and my parents were relatively honest with me growing up. I knew backroom dealings, bedroom blackmail, and other salaciousness before I really should have. I read that Jimmy Swaggart article9 in Penthouse a bunch of times and I knew Pee Wee Herman was on drugs before I was a teenager. It gave me the type of suspicious worldview that any group think starts to look like a cult weather is was the PTL Ministries or the our country club's card playing room hidden behind a locked door.

I even heard gossip about teachers at my elementary so school started to look like a little cult too and finding them true so many years later sealed the observation. It could be why I gravitated towards School is Hell 10 or "I'm not a joiner, I'm not a member of the John Birch Society"11. I go to church just sparse enough that they know better than to ask us to volunteer for the next event. I'll play on your team, but I'm not getting drunk with y'all. You don't want me on your board, because I'm not a 'yes man'. I remember one time taking a new job and the employer was trying to pimp out their new employees and I refused a photograph. You get the drift.

I'll check out your cult, but I'm not hanging out. That's the purpose of the massive bombardment of files - the hope that general consensus will be something along the lines of "we all know some hookers and backroom dealing going on, but I was just checking it out" - I wasn't actually part of the cult. But what if the cult had always been dealing in rape and murder on the side. What if the money coming down from the top was international crime? And what if a swath of individuals in our government are pawns on the take?

The benefits of the suspicious mind is that my bullshit detection is superior. There are just too many coincidences that these aren't related. It's all smelt it dealt it - every blame is a confession. Let's just hope the cult isn't strong enough that we drink the cool aid into international conflict just because some shitheads wanted fresh pussy, more power, and money. I'd like to say otherwise, but I'm not going to tell a lie and I'm just not sure. Brexit was just the beginning and "collapse is easier than finding a bargain" ( quote from Epstein emails with Peter Thiel12 ) .

A key component of cults is the suspension of disbelief. At this point I'd challenge anyone who might say otherwise about the cult of personality that is our current administration. In the kindest of terms I think we're all a little guilty. Isn't all of the problematic behavior just symbolic of the fact that reality shows get ratings. Aren't we all a little guilty. Even Apple news seems to think I want more Sports Illustrated Swimsuit editions in my 'news'. Isn't this all a symptom of some other more deep seated issues. And now it's our problem to deal with and we're gonna pay the piper.

Rehab for Everyone​

Leaving a cult is going to require rehab because It's needed to rebuild a fractured identity. I think that's what we'll need as a nation moving on. It's been done before. As of now it's still a shit show of denial and distractions. Folks have started lying to themselves and the slight of hand misdirection is getting more and more dangerous. Look here, we're breaking down centuries old international relationships. Look there, we're firing experienced career civil servants and replacing them with sycophants. It's a mess and has been since 2010 when Citizens United13 set the stage for a new type of politics dominated by dark money. Although I had thought it hit the crescendo in 2021, I think we've still got a little ways to go because It's a bit of a social disease of sorts with symptom of the bigger picture of capitalism off the rails and inequality that Mr. gold toilet so perfectly represents.

Here's what I believe for the record - there has been an ongoing centuries long coordinated attempt to disrupt American democracy primarily from Russia. Although I'm not going to cite all the references, I'll just say it's not a hoax and the disinformation campaign was more widespread and complex than is currently known. Although Epstein was just one little pawn in the game, his reach illuminated the shadow network moving billions around. His own pathology was his undoing but the other flunkies in the circle paraded out a slew of misled ideologies through our own little geopolitical manipulation game. It's a trap designed to create chaos and mistrust of democracy itself in which our current president is just heaping on so called evidence. I think the vast majority of the world is still in the suspension of disbelief and information overload.

I've ask my father a couple of times about the JFK assassination and he's rattled off several popular conspiracy theories. I pointed out that most of them were popularized by a fella being paid by the KGB and that there's a reason the word Russia appears in the Wikipedia article on Lee Harvey Oswald over forty times. Cults prey on those vulnerable to the predisposition to need explanations for the unexplainable. I'm a fan of Dostoevsky, Pushkin, & Tolstoy but I can't quite figure out the current Russian cult of personality.

The truth will eventually prevail - or at least be made into twenty more conspiracy movies. It almost always does and no effort to rewrite history is going to work. The first steps are going to be person to person and neighbor to neighbor and I think it's already begun. I have three text threads with old friends. It used to be one, but politics split it up. I can feel we're over the hump. I have neighbors who were adamant about the current administration and I'm not going to hold it over their heads. I have one that seems to be dodging me now and I honestly just feel bad for him.

I feel like this essay is kinda the wrap on a number of essays I'd previously written that I'll list below. I had promised several would be my very last on politics but it's been somewhat inescapable - like a cult. Something about these recent events now have me putting a little bow on it and turning towards the horizon. I'm gonna shake off the nastiness and I hope everyone else has the luxury of a bit of therapy and self reflection and correction on the parts of us that make up these cult of personality type of leaders.





Footnotes​

  1. A ‘Historic’ Snowfall Hits the Carolinas - https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/01/us/snowfall-north-south-carolina.html ↩

  2. Kristopher Roland Windham - https://davidawindham.com/kristopher-roland-windham/ ↩

  3. /pol/ - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki//pol/ ↩

  4. QAnon - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon ↩

  5. Christopher Poole - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Poole ↩

  6. Frederick Trump - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Trump ↩

  7. Brett Ratner - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brett_Ratner ↩

  8. Mom Confession - SNL - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wQhY5CMMl4 ↩

  9. Jimmy Swaggart Prostitution Scandal - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Swaggart ↩

  10. School is Hell - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Groening ↩

  11. True Stories - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Stories_(Talking_Heads_album) ↩

  12. Peter Theil - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel ↩

  13. Citizens United - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC ↩