(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Secretary Clinton was right, and we should unabashedly say so [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-10-09 In the wake of Secretary Hillary Clinton’s interview with Christiane Amanpour where Clinton suggested that members of Donald Trump’s cult of personality might need “a formal deprogramming,” Fox hosts and other right-wing fearmongers have pushed the idea that Clinton means for political opponents to be put into “reeducation camps.” This is sure to spawn many generations of conspiracy theories, on par with the idea of FEMA concentration camps of the Obama era. There is no reason for anyone of any position on the political spectrum to equate ‘formal deprogramming’ with ‘reeducation camps.’ They are diametrically opposed to each other. A reeducation camp presumably would entail forced indoctrination. This is the opposite of what deprogramming aims to do. Deprogramming is a way to jumpstart a person’s independent thinking again. It is about free thought and free action, the restoration of individuality in the face of conformity and intense group pressure, and a return to a person’s long-standing personality. One of the very first deprogrammers on the scene, Ted Patrick, was interviewed in 1977 by the authors of Snapping: America’s Epidemic of Sudden Personality Change. He described how he observed cult practices and techniques firsthand to gain an awareness of how they accomplish what they do, then he described how he approached his own admittedly controversial work: “When you deprogram people,” he emphasized, “you force them to think. The only thing I do is shoot them challenging questions. I hit them with things that they haven’t been programmed to respond to. I know what the cults do and how they do it, so I shoot them the right questions, and they get frustrated when they can’t answer. They think they have the answer, they’ve been given answers to everything. But I keep them off balance and this forces them to begin questioning, to open their minds. When the mind gets to a certain point, they can see through all the lies that they’ve been programmed to believe, and they realize that they’ve been duped and they come out of it. Their minds start working again.” Perhaps, if one is deathly afraid of the word ‘deprogramming,’ then one can think of ‘counterprogramming,’ because the point of deprogramming is to counter all of the accumulated effects that occurred to create the cult self in the first place. It’s a counter action; and for the person who is in the cult, like a boomerang, they come to rest at the place they began. What Fox & Co. are attempting to do is equate cult indoctrination with rescue from that indoctrination, which makes no sense on the very face of it. “Don’t perform that cancer treatment—you’re going to give the patient cancer!” But that’s the illogic Fox & Co. are pushing. If Clinton can be faulted for anything, it’s that she’s suggesting a cure that doesn’t quite yet exist. We don’t have massive methods of deprogramming. This stems from the fact that people are individuals of their own backgrounds, and each person has his or her own reason for joining the cult in the first place. Contrary to popular belief, the cult experience provides benefits in that it can meet certain psychological needs. So each person in the cult must be eased out on those very same bases of individual need. That’s why, during the first deprogramming era, the restoration came about through individualized, one-on-one (or small-group) counseling. We don’t have anything that can be scaled up to take on a task of magnitude. But Clinton does hit upon the fact that we need to start preparing to create spaces where cult escapees and apostates can find a safe place to land. Without these chutes through which these cult renouncers can find and learn ways to reenter regular society, they will feel that they have no other home, no other place where they feel they belong, than the cult itself. We need to prepare, like people standing below a burning building holding a blanket outstretched in preparation for the person trapped four flights up to jump. We have to show there’s something to leap towards, and that the leap itself is safety, not certain doom. That’s separate from what we must do in order to confront MAGA as a movement. We have much work to do on that front. But one thing we must do is not shy away from calling MAGA a cult. The manufactured affront from Fox & Co. is meant to get us to lament that Clinton said something impolitic about an actual state of affairs. No, we have to point out what we see in front of us, so we can accurately identify it and treat it with the seriousness it deserves. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/10/9/2198391/-Secretary-Clinton-was-right-and-we-should-unabashedly-say-so?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/