Cult-ish

ICYMI: Everyone (young, old and in-between) and, especially, #FoxNewsies, needs to read this piece by journalist Kara Swisher. Many journalists seem hesitant to criticize peers when they are wrong. That doesn’t help any of us — and it doesn’t help them either.

Imagine a person (or place or network or institution) that has more influence over you than your loved ones. It’s especially troublesome when the influencer has been disproven time and time again, but the loved one won’t hear it. That’s dangerous. That’s cultish. That’s deadly.

We are bombarded with lies and disinformation from this administration. Some people allow Trump and friends to lie. Thankfully, more journalists are challenging them real-time and they don’t like it. We need more citizens to do so as well. (Thank you Weijia Jiang.)

I wrote on this before, but, Ms. Swisher’s article floored me (and I’ve seen the cult members who sound crazier than their leader(s). Her momma rather listen to a pathological liar than her own children — including a dr.?!!!

We haven’t seen cultism of this scale funded in America, until media (wealthy influencers; political weaklings; civic ignorance; racism; polarization) became such influencing forces in our lives. In visiting the holocaust museum or having read about and viewed stories about Jonestown, I felt deja vu in seeing how quick folks dismiss rational thinking, when they even have recorded proof that their leader is a liar. Like COVID19, there is a sudden deluge, there’s a steady flow that sweeps the land and before you know it, it’s everywhere. This is how cultish power rises.

Cultish behavior by blind followers of a perceived “great” religious or political leader Isn’t new. We’ve reached a troubling low when a physician, committed to helping the public, is threatened, because he refutes (NICELY) the president who called this pandemic a hoax. We’ve seen cults in the past, and we see it today. Here is the phenomenon, #Explained.

We should all be aware of where loved ones are going for information. All news isn’t fact-based and we need to call out people who present lies as the truth. But, when a leader can lie pathologically and people don’t care, we are all endangered.

Now that there is a revelation that this pandemic wasn’t a hoax, maybe people will start to act responsibly. We don’t have to wait for a president or any elected official to tell us how to act responsibly. We also don’t need incompetent elected officials in office. We must always speak up to refute lies made by those who are supposed to work for us. Media has a moral obligation that we can’t allow them to forget, either. Boycott the bull. We must demand truth — always. We plainly see the global consequences that ignoring lies can produce. We must speak up. We must stop fueling/funding/following media & politicians who lie to us.