Traversing the Land of Fanatics, Part II

"If you aren't careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing." Malcolm X

This is the 2nd in my series of “Inspirational Essays,” which I will now be publishing once a month. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to join this community of thoughtful readers and listeners. Everyone can read the first part of this essay.

You can listen to me reading this essay HERE

Without a doubt, the most inspirational change that has happened to me since the lie of COVID took over our lives has been my ever-strengthening commitment to uncover the truth. The people reading this who agree with my words will keep on reading. Those who take offense to “uncover the truth,” knowing it means that I doubt the state-sanctioned “experts,” will stop reading. They will immediately label me with two other words that have now become part of everyday vocabulary: “conspiracy theorist.”

Deriding people as “conspiracy theorists” because they disagree with the “experts” and get their information from “fake news” is a “triggered” response to anything the MSM labels “disinformation.” This has got to be one of the most successful indoctrination campaigns of our government, controlled as they are by the “New World Order” (oops, more triggering words that turn off the brains of millions).

What happened to all of the doubters? They are being silenced as surely as Malcolm X and so many others have been silenced.

I have been told many times I am a Doubting Thomas. I take it as a compliment.

Doubting Thomas by Caravaggio

It caused me a lot of trouble growing up. I asked far too many questions. Even at the age of 5, lying in bed at night I pondered why the world was such a terrible place. Why did so many children suffer and die horrible deaths? They didn’t deserve it. I learned about all those suffering children in Sunday school. Why was I so lucky and millions of other children were not? It didn’t seem fair.

It was okay to ask questions as long as I reached the right conclusions. By the age of seven, the age of reason, I should be filled with conviction, say the sinner’s prayer, and accept Jesus into my heart. Only then would I be saved. Anyone not following this pattern was going to hell. I struggled with this dogma well into my adult years. Just because I had been told it was true, how did I know? Lots of people believed differently.

During our family’s world travels, I had met many people of different faiths. Some of those encounters left lasting impressions on me, such as conversations with the mysterious professor in Fes, Morocco that I share in The Bloodsuckers and my encounter with the Nubian sailor in Luxor, Egypt, shared in Why I Stand with Israel. The world was a big place, filled with all sorts of amazing people. How did I know they weren’t right? I didn’t want to believe something just because I’d been raised in a certain way. How was it free will if I was told I had to do it or I was going to hell? I only found out years later those other religions put the same pressure on their followers. Even worse. When I returned to live in Luxor as an adult, I experienced first-hand some of those horrors, recounted in my recently published Egyptian Streets article, Tales of Eclipse: The Lost (Foreign) Women of Luxor.

How can any of us ever be sure we are really making up our own minds and not being brainwashed, intentionally or not, by childhood or media indoctrination?

Why I Stand with Israel was published on May 14, 2021, at the height of the Israeli—Palestinian crisis. At that time, I was just starting out on Substack and had very few subscribers. I knew it would be a controversial essay that might lose me subscribers. But the topic was important to me and “The Squad” was making such outrageous statements, I wanted it to be clear from the beginning of my writing journey where I stood on the matter.

Sure enough, there were those who did take offense. Not least of all, one of my liberal Jewish friends who emailed me that she was unsubscribing because of my support of Israel. I wasn’t surprised. Those were the days when mass psychosis was taking hold. A person might agree with everything else I wrote but that one thing was and still is enough to end any dialogue.

Gay pride participants can hold banners extoling Pfizer, despite its history of corrupt, heinous experimentation on vulnerable populations, while at the same time support Islamic extremists who commit atrocities like throwing gay men to their deaths off the top of a tall building. This instance happened in Iraq but as anyone knows who has lived in the middle east, there is no Arab country where it is safe to be gay.

Thanks for Ariel Pink for sending me this powerful video, showing how the lies of the media have convinced the gay community that Israelis do not support them while Palestinians do and their shock when they find out the horrible truth. Israelis or Palestinians--Who's more tolerant?

This irrational mentality grew like a plague worse than any coronavirus. Like robots, the populace began responding exactly as they were programmed to do by the media, repeating the propaganda of the state and vilifying anyone who didn’t join in.

I knew of NO ONE who thought that black lives didn’t matter, even if they didn’t support BLM. I knew of NO ONE who thought that Palestinian lives didn’t matter, even though they supported Israel. Yet, anyone who dared to say this was deemed a racist. A murderer.

There is now no room for debate. No room for even one teeny tiny discussion. We live in echo chambers. Yes, I’ve said it before, but it’s important we don’t forget. We must not get used to living like this. We must not start thinking this is normal. If we do, it will actually become normal, and we will forget there was ever a time when it wasn’t so.

People believe we are winning this war because all they hear are voices validating the same words that they have been saying. This has purposely fooled us into thinking the tide is shifting in our favor when all it is doing is making people passive. Living inside technology does weird things to the brain. The manipulations are quite insidious.

Let’s not be satisfied living in this echo chamber. All the best memories of my life are from surprising and unexpected encounters with real people who perhaps thought a little or a lot differently from me. Many of these people had knowledge beyond my own and I benefited from their teachings. This has become impossible in our present state.

How many of us at the end of our lives will look back and say, wow, my best memory is from the Metaverse, when I built the biggest mansion, or won a Gold Medal in ski jumping, or overcame my fear of heights and skydived?

But you know what? Those might the biggest moments of our grandchildren’s lives.

Meta Inc has just announced the launch of a designer clothing store for digital avatars called the “Meta Avatars Store.” As adults who remember a childhood free of such madness, you may laugh. “That’s ridiculous,” you say. “No one will fall for that.”

But if you have ever spent time around the average teenager, you will know it is not a laughing matter. They are being fed a constant diet of “trans” formation, where they are being led to believe they can be anything—just not themselves.

As Meta’s Zuckerberg explains:

An avatar in the metaverse is more than just a user-created face. It is your identity. Every avatar is unique with limitless possibilities. Avatars have humanoid features such as moveable limbs, upper and lower torsos, and a face capable of expression. Similar to the real world, you can buy clothes for your avatars as well. These digital clothing are essential and can be bought and sold on a marketplace.

We’re launching our Avatars Store on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger so you can buy digital clothes to style your avatar. Digital goods will be an important way to express yourself in the metaverse and a big driver of the creative economy.

That’s just the beginning of the things our children will be programed to buy with the credits they accumulate for having a small carbon footprint and being an obedient citizen.

Avatars are now 3D. Becoming familiar with this version of yourself brings you one step closer to losing your humanity and becoming an empty shell to be filled with whatever thoughts the Metaverse wants to implant in your mind.

This leaves your body free to be picked apart by the state for further experimentation, while you live in a virtual world. Eventually, freedom will mean being lost in a virtual world and making choices about how our fake selves will live. Humans will have no more personal responsibility for anything other than consuming while they are being consumed.

Finally, all these years later, I see the fulfillment of my Doubting Thomas spirit. That spirit is what propelled me forward in this fight to uncover the depth of the Covid lies and to share what I can with others. Like so many of you, I am sure, who are reading this, I have walked through fires, endured countless storms and traversed dark valleys of despair to reach this awakening. Real challenges that made me grow stronger. Not a fake delusion.

It won’t get easier. In fact, this battle to resist technology’s takeover and remain human, to acknowledge our Creator and live a life of fulfillment with grace, is only intensifying. Anyone who does not accept it will be cast out.

When I left my first husband, got on that plane and returned to Los Angeles with my 4-year-old daughter, I moved back in with my parents, a humbling experience. In order for me to be accepted back into the Plymouth Brethren church that my parents attended, I had to endure an interrogation by the elders. According to them, the only reason for divorce was infidelity. Because the Bible said nothing about abuse, they did not believe I was justified in leaving my husband for that reason.

Having finally found the courage to escape a physically abusive marriage and wanting to respect the rules of my parents’ home, I didn’t see any alternative but to subject myself to their scrutiny.

And so it happened that one night, I think it was 6 men came to my parents’ home. They sat in a semi-circle and interrogated me. They wanted to know the exact level of abuse, was I sure I had been obedient enough, had I done things to push him to abuse, wasn’t there a chance I could go back and by my example of being a submissive wife and confessing my sins, inspire him to do the same. Nothing in a marriage was ever just one person’s fault.

There was only one man, one of the younger ones and I don’t remember his name, who treated me kindly. In the end, I was allowed to attend the services, mostly thanks to the kindness of that man and my father’s high standing in the Plymouth Brethren community.

Sitting there surrounded by those men, my doubting, rebellious nature rose up within me, despite how much it had been beaten down. When I was 9 years old, my dad had been excommunicated by these same people for heresy. He had faced the same sort of scrutiny I was facing now. They had surrounded him, interrogated him and then thrown him out. My dad had even written a memoir about it, aptly called, “Confessions of a Heretic,” his most obscure book and long out of print.

Confessions was first published in 1972, years before we all had the words misinformation and its more dangerous cousin disinformation embedded into our brains. Attacking heretics is nothing new. Down through history, those who refused to follow the state-sanctioned religion, the purpose of which has always been to close people’s minds and control them bodily and spiritually, have been burned at the stake, tortured in prison, ostracized, and humiliated.

What is happening now goes beyond anything from the past—or anything that happened, certainly, to my dad or to me. But it all comes from that same source of wanting to displace our Creator and prove power by lording it over others.

How had my dad ended up excommunicated and why in the world had he returned after such an experience?

Like many evangelical Christians, my dad got caught up in the Jesus Movement of the late 60s and early 70s.

This was shortly before he gave up the business world to become a writer. We lived in a big house built by my parents, way up in the hills overlooking the San Fernando Valley. Our home was always filled with people, especially college-age students. They came in droves to meetings organized by Dad. One such meeting was called Co-Uni-Bus, a ministry for college students founded by a man named Bob Koerner. I enjoyed staying up late on those nights, listening in on the meetings.

Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, atheists, you name it, came to our home to engage in lively debate. Up to a hundred people, even more, would show up at our house. Weekends found hippy-types playing volleyball and swimming in our pool and my mom cooking casseroles and home-baked cookies and pies, Dad barbequing, always making sure everyone was well-fed.

Nobody feared interacting with people because they might give them the “plague” or fill their heads with dangerous “disinformation.” Nobody would have worn a mask or forced it on children 8 hours a day in school. Young people barely wore any clothes in those days!

Just yesterday, sitting in on the show my grandsons were doing at Vacation Bible School, 2 women sitting behind me were wearing masks (they were the only ones). I was holding my 10-month-old grandson and these very nice women started smiling at him and saying hello. He’s the happiest, smiliest baby ever, yet because he couldn’t see their faces he didn’t respond. It was jarring, creepy in fact.

That right there should have inspired those women to take off their masks. Yet, something blinded them, just like millions of others who cannot see, or refuse to see, the truth.

But that’s why churches, gyms, and other places of community are being attacked as dangerous plague spreaders and in need of being shut down. They encourage people to live in the real world, to interact with one another with smiling faces, to support their community. This is now viewed with suspicion as rebellion against the state. As selfishness. Which is the exact opposite of what it really is.

Here is a quote from my dad’s book that makes me teary-eyed because I despair that such thinking will ever again be considered as normal rather than dangerous:

“Racism was a big thing in those days. Students were off to Selma, Jackson…marching, sitting-in. The cause was good. ‘But don’t let all the hue and cry about racism make you think it’s the issue,’ I often told students as some of us would sit in the living room or kitchen after Co-Uni-Bus, talking into the early morning hours. ‘It’s only one evil symptom of a disease that lies at the root of all evil. Whites cheat, rob, hate and kill whites. And blacks do the same to blacks. If you could eradicate all racism—the world would still be full of hatred. Go ahead. Fight racial prejudice. But not as a thing in itself. Go beyond this particular symptom to the root cause of the disease.”

This makes sense and encourages love and acceptance. The current crazy push for “equity” breeds hatred.

I’ve come to believe that the root cause of this degeneration we are facing, this disease, has always been sin. Another triggering word. It’s never been more obvious to this Doubting Thomas than now. Never before has it been so apparent that the powerful of this world want to usurp their Creator’s authority. Never before have they been so close to attaining it.

Please, if you disagree with me, do not stop reading—if you’ve actually made it this far. Remember, we don’t all have to agree.

Let’s talk about it!

At least we can agree that there is something fundamentally wrong with human nature and if we do not fix that, no amount of overthrowing one government for another, or of shifting the blame from one group to another will ever make things right. This is the heart of where the conversation always stops. It is very hard for us to delve deeper than applying band aids. Yet, as we surely can see, beneath the band aids, wounds fester and grow. This is the real plague, not Covid or Marburg or Monkeypox, or anything else these liars come up with to distract us from seeking the truth.

My dad was excommunicated from the Plymouth Brethren internationally for the heresy of saying he believed in the “Gifts of the Spirit.” Besides the Jesus Movement, the Charismatic Movement was sweeping across America and my dad got caught up in it as well. One night, during his regular prayer session in his study he had an intense spiritual experience and found himself speaking in tongues. He was so overcome with the wonder and joy of this manifestation of God’s presence in his life, that he shared it with the Plymouth Brethren elders. The PBs believed that the Gifts of the Spirit had ended with Jesus’ resurrection and any present-day manifestation of such gifts was counterfeit and of the Devil.

According to them, Dad had been led astray and influenced by the Devil. He was a prominent member of the congregation and becoming well-known for his speaking abilities all over the world. He had to be silenced.

As a teenager, I attended many charismatic meetings where I witnessed people speaking in tongues and the laying on of hands, people being filled with the Holy Spirit and falling over as a result. Falling over was a major sign that you were filled with the Spirit. It could get pretty wild. Being a Doubting Thomas, I never really got into it. I tried speaking in tongues a few times, but I just felt ridiculous. I never fell over, that’s for sure. The last place I wanted to find myself was lying on the floor staring up at a bunch of strangers surrounding me.

Dad never started charismatic meetings in our home. For him, his one experience of speaking in tongues was deeply personal and as far as I know, it was never repeated. But because he refused to denounce the Gifts of the Spirit as of the Devil and admit that he had only imagined speaking in tongues, he was excommunicated.

Never one to take the easy way out, Dad decided that our family would keep on attending the meetings. They were held in a small, one-story building, furnished with the bare minimum, nothing flashy. Uncomfortable folding chairs, a raised platform at the front, a piano and a pulpit. Women remained silent during meetings. If they had anything to say, such as a prayer request, they whispered it to their husbands so their husband could then share it with the congregation. Women could teach children, so they taught Sunday School. They could never teach men. They should not enter the work force except as teachers and secretaries. Mostly, they should stay home and raise the children. Mom believed in and followed the rules, but not because she was weak. She was the strongest woman I know, and Dad always showed her love and respect. Without her practical side our family would have been lost. And when, in fact, our family did lose everything due Dad’s pursuit of his writing career, it was her salary as a teacher and then as the principal of a small Christian school that kept food on the table, until my dad achieved success.

Imagine everyone’s shock, especially the elders, when the next Sunday after Dad’s very public excommunication, we all showed up for service. What could the PBs do, though? Call the police? Throw us out themselves? They were far too polite for that. Sunday after Sunday we showed up to meeting, much to everyone’s discomfort—including my own—sitting at the back of the meeting hall, separated like lepers from the rest of the congregation. Dad was not allowed to participate in communion, so the bread and wine passed him by. The entire time, he sat with his head bowed in prayer. At the end of the service, where once we were surrounded by friends and happy chatter, no one talked to us. No one even looked at us. It was as if we didn’t exist.

This went on for I don’t remember how many weeks, until eventually my parents decided they should leave all together. I know this was very hard on my mom. That community had been her life. Years later, after Dad became a successful writer, the Plymouth Brethren invited him back into the fold. He forgave them and returned to the community.

And so, I ended up facing those elders just as Dad had. History forever repeating itself.

When will we break this cycle?

Here’s that artwork Dana Jumper asked for in the comments after Part I. Just to keep the inspiration going! This is from The Money Tree, a book my dad wrote, and I illustrated. Again, out of print although it would do well today as a lesson in economics.

My grandsons love this book. Another inspiration in my life. Being able to read the books I wrote and illustrated to my grandkids—and this one, written by their great-grandfather. It’s one small step towards keeping them out of the Metaverse. One day they will read my books to their kids and grandkids.

That’s a cycle I never want to break.