peale, norman v

<p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">see magical thinking,&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">a winner b/c you THINK/declare you are? earth2 facts # do not matter not real?</span></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></span></p><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-april-6-2023/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-april-6-2023/</a></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">04.06.23 - 10:00AM</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Century Long PR Campaign to Connect Capitalism to Democracy</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Guest: Naomi Oreskes is professor of the history of science at Harvard University. Her books include, The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, and her latest with historian of science and technology&nbsp;<b>Erik Conway, The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market.</b></font></div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">child labor pew sunoco NAM dupont paid for von mises and hayek to come to US u chic; the free mkt pjt blueprint (rewrite road to serfdom, milton does it; lect series wm volker fdn)</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">little hse on prarie</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style=""><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">xian econ, norm v peale; billy g; $ sign of god favor (recycled the gospel? of wealth); commies are godless, thus god likes capitalism</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">hollywood&nbsp; no more grapes of wrath motion pix assoc w ayn rand; wrote censorship codes not crit bank rich ppl; [sinclair EPIC? ]; CoC</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">RR: ike ltr to bro sec secure ~ sm# and stupid; GE NY (convicted rig elec mkt) , horatio alger, very pop pgm; RR sends the speech to nixon; libtard bk list ; RR unites social and fiscal conservatives? xian?</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">1929 ~ libtard</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" /></font></p><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></div><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">an 9 22</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">We can thank the late economic justice warrior for her groundbreaking contribution in showing that “positive thinking” is part of a whitewashing of economic inequality.</font></strong></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Although the late&nbsp;<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Barbara Ehrenreich</span>&nbsp;was best known for her 2001 bestselling book&nbsp;<em>Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America</em>, which chronicled the real-life impacts of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, she made an equally great contribution to economic justice with her subsequent book exposing the cult of positive thinking.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This article was produced by&nbsp;<a href="https://independentmediainstitute.org/economy-for-all/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Economy for All</a>, a project of the Independent Media Institute.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ehrenreich, who passed away on September 1, 2022, at age 81, had started her professional life with a PhD in cell biology. She didn’t relegate her journalism to mere facts. She delved as deep as she could—to a microscopic level—to make sense of the world. We concluded from&nbsp;Nickel and Dimed&nbsp;that people were not making it in America. But we realized through her book&nbsp;<b><a href="https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/external/title/9780312658854/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America</a>&nbsp;that the economy was proceeding unimpeded by this fact because we were putting a smiley face on inequality.</b></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Great Recession began in 2007. Two years later, in 2009, Ehrenreich published&nbsp;<em>Bright-Sided</em>. Two years after that, in 2011, the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests began in New York’s Zuccotti Park and spread throughout the country. OWS participants called damning attention to the stark economic split between the haves and the have-nots, in this case the wealthiest “1 percent” of Americans and the rest of us—the “99 percent.” There was no putting a smiley face on the economy in that moment.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It was during this period that I had the honor of&nbsp;<a href="https://risingupwithsonali.com/remembering-barbara-ehrenreich-in-her-own-words/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">interviewing Ehrenreich</a>. She explained that “there is a whole industry in the United States that got an investment in this idea that if you just think positively, if you expect everything to turn out alright, if you’re optimistic and cheerful and upbeat, everything&nbsp;<em>will</em>&nbsp;be alright.”</font></span></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ehrenreich, who survived cancer, said she began her investigation into the ideology of positive thinking when she had breast cancer, roughly six years before&nbsp;<em>Bright-Sided</em>&nbsp;was published. That’s when she realized what a uniquely American phenomenon it was to put a positive spin on everything, even cancer.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When she looked for online support groups of other women struggling with cancer, what she found was, “constant exhortations to be positive about the disease, to be cheerful and optimistic.” Such an approach obscures the central question of, “why do we have an epidemic of breast cancer?” she said.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>She applied that idea to how positive thinking was obscuring questions of economic inequality.&nbsp;</b>And she found that there was an entire industry built up to assure financially struggling Americans that their poverty stemmed from their own negative thinking and that they could turn things around if they simply visualized wealth, embraced a can-do attitude about their bleak futures and willed money to flow into their lives. Central to this industry are “the coaches, the motivational speakers, the inspirational posters to put up on the office walls,” and more, said Ehrenreich.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">She also connected the rise of the American megachurch to the rising cult of the positive-thinkers. “The megachurches are not about Christianity. The megachurches are about how you can prosper because God wants you to be rich,” she said.</font></span></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Joel Osteen, the pastor of a Houston-based megachurch, is perhaps one of the best-known leaders of the so-called prosperity gospel.</b>&nbsp;In one of his sermons—conveniently&nbsp;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hybbKSS_Ul4" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">posted online as a slick YouTube video</a>&nbsp;to reach a maximum audience—Osteen claims that according to “the scripture,” “the wealth of the ungodly is laid up for the righteous,” and that “it will be transferred into the hands of the righteous.” His congregants may be tempted to imagine bank transfers from wealthy atheists magically pouring into their accounts.</font></span></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Osteen has been the beneficiary of serious wealth transfers from his own congregants into his pockets, so much so that he can afford to live in a&nbsp;<a href="https://houston.culturemap.com/news/real-estate/07-04-10-after-move-to-river-oaks-joel-osteen-wants-to-sell-tanglewood-land-for-11-million/#slide=0" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">$10 million mansion</a>. There’s no conundrum here, for Osteen is living proof to his followers that the power of positive thinking works.</font></span></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ehrenreich pointed out that the whole point of these churches is to create a positive experience for their congregants and to project a notion of exciting possibilities. The megachurch phenomenon is centered on “the idea that the church should not be disturbing. You don’t want to have a negative message at church. So that’s why you won’t even find a cross on the wall.”</font></b></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Perhaps this is because the image of a bloodied, half-naked Jesus Christ nailed by his hands and feet to a wooden cross is just too painful to bear and might detract from dreams of future Ferraris and private jets. “What a downer that would be!” exclaimed Ehrenreich.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Where did the cult of positive thinking originate? “American corporate culture is saturated with this positive thinking ideology,” especially in the 1990s and 2000s, said Ehrenreich. “It grew because corporations needed a way to manage downsizing, which really began in the 1980s.”</font></span></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Businesses that laid off masses of employees had a message that Ehrenreich encapsulated as, “you’re getting eliminated… but it’s really an opportunity for you. It’s a great thing; you’ve got to look at this positively. Don’t complain, don’t be a whiner, you’re not a victim, etc.”</font></span></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Such sentiments percolated into the mainstream. Americans internalized the idea that losing one’s job has got to be a sign that something better is coming along and that “<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/everything-happens-reason-dont-let-layoff-get-best-you-klebart/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">everything happens for a reason</a>.” The alternative is to blame one’s employer, or even the design of the U.S. economy. And that would be dangerous to Wall Street and corporate America.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Another purpose of fostering positive thinking among those who are laid off is, as per Ehrenreich, “to extract more work from those who survive layoffs.</b>” Indeed, we have an ugly culture of overwork in the U.S., with corporate employees having normalized the idea that they need to work insanely late hours, work on the weekends, and take on exhaustive amounts of responsibilities. After all, those who remain employed, unlike their laid-off former colleagues, ought to feel lucky to have a job—more positive thinking.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">There may be a breaking point now, one that Ehrenreich thankfully lived to see, as a newer set of phenomena began emerging since the COVID-19 pandemic began. They include the “<a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/03/09/majority-of-workers-who-quit-a-job-in-2021-cite-low-pay-no-opportunities-for-advancement-feeling-disrespected/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">great resignation</a>,” a term for masses of Americans quitting thankless jobs. And, more recently, “<a href="https://www.ajc.com/life/opinion-quiet-quitting-is-a-call-for-workplace-change/P3PCYST66NFEJCN73DHEU4NNPM/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">quiet quitting</a>,” which is a new name for an older union-led idea of “work to rule” as workers are starting to only put in the hours they are paid to work and no more. How novel!</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">We owe Ehrenreich a debt of gratitude for shining a light not only on the perversity of the U.S. economic system but also on the gauzy veil of positive thinking that obscures the obscenity. Ehrenreich may not have lived to see her ideas of economic justice be fully realized. But, as she&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/02/books/barbara-ehrenreich-dead.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">once told the New Yorker</a>, “The idea is not that we will win in our own lifetimes and that’s the measure of us but that we will die trying.”</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong>Author Bio</strong>: Sonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host and executive producer of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.risingupwithsonali.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">“Rising Up With Sonali,”</a>&nbsp;a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. She is a writing fellow for the&nbsp;<a href="https://independentmediainstitute.org/economy-for-all/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Economy for All</a>&nbsp;project at the Independent Media Institute.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" /></font></p><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></span></p><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">related to kushner absolute faith in own ability vs constant fails?</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="outline: none;"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/leading-cult-expert-explains-how-trump-trained-his-followers-to-believe-no-one-but-him-and-why-his-mind-control-cult-now-faces-an-existential-crisis/">https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/leading-cult-expert-explains-how-trump-trained-his-followers-to-believe-no-one-but-him-and-why-his-mind-control-cult-now-faces-an-existential-crisis/</a></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style=""><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Leading expert explains how Trump trained his followers to believe no one but him — and why his ‘mind control cult’ now faces an ‘existential crisis’</b></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Written by Chauncey DeVega / Salon April 7, 2020</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">During the 1970s, Steven Hassan was a senior member of the Unification Church, an offshoot Christian sect led by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Hassan was so loyal to the Unification Church that he pledged to die or kill at Moon’s command.</font></div></div><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">related to kushner absolute faith in own ability vs constnt fails?</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/leading-cult-expert-explains-how-trump-trained-his-followers-to-believe-no-one-but-him-and-why-his-mind-control-cult-now-faces-an-existential-crisis/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/leading-cult-expert-explains-how-trump-trained-his-followers-to-believe-no-one-but-him-and-why-his-mind-control-cult-now-faces-an-existential-crisis/</font></a></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Leading expert explains how Trump trained his followers to believe no one but him — and why his ‘mind control cult’ now faces an ‘existential crisis’</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Written by Chauncey DeVega / Salon April 7, 2020</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">During the 1970s, Steven Hassan was a senior member of the Unification Church, an offshoot Christian sect led by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Hassan was so loyal to the Unification Church that he pledged to die or kill at Moon’s command.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After escaping the Unification Church, Hassan dedicated his life’s work to freeing other people from mind control organizations and destructive cults. He is now one of the world’s leading experts on mind control and cults.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hassan is a direct personal witness to the way cult leaders are defined by their use of money, power, greed, sex, lies, charisma and violence to control their followers and empower themselves. In 2016 Hassan saw those traits personified in the form of Republican nominee Donald Trump. He then tried to alert the public to the danger that a cult leader would become president and that ruin and despair for the United States would be the inevitable result. Hassan’s new book “The Cult of Trump: A Leading Cult Expert Explains How the President Uses Mind Control” attempts to explain how this all came to be.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">While many pundits and others have remained in denial about the existential threat posed by Donald Trump and his movement, Hassan warned early on that Trump’s followers were effectively cult members and would not be swayed from supporting their leader for any reason. With the coronavirus pandemic, Trump’s power over his followers is on full display, as he and his spokespeople are now suggesting that older and other vulnerable Americans should be willing to risk their lives in order to “save the economy” — and of course to aid Trump’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>I recently spoke with Steven Hassan about Trump’s death cult</b>&nbsp;and the power the president has over his followers. Hassan also explains how Trump resembles notorious cult leader Jim Jones and why Trump’s followers remain in love with him even as his decisions are literally making them sick. Hassan also explains how Fox News and other parts of the right-wing disinformation machine are key elements of Trump’s mind control powers over his political cult.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hassan also warns that Trump’s followers are capable of committing acts of great violence against their fellow Americans, should their leader command it.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">You can also listen to my conversation with Steven Hassan on my podcast “The Truth Report” or through the player embedded below.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As usual, this conversation has been edited for clarity and length.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Donald Trump continues to make ridiculous statements, such as claiming he was the first person to call the coronavirus a “pandemic,” or that there will be a magical flash of light and all will be well. It is clear he is mentally unwell. How do you make sense of his behavior?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>Trump grew up in the church of Norman Vincent Peale</b>. Peale taught magical thinking and that if a person just believed something 100%, God will magically make it come true. Trump was trained to be a<b>&nbsp;magical thinker as a child</b>. It’s been described as a type of solipsistic reality where Trump defines his own world and what is real or not. That is a type of thinking which is very common to cults.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In this way of thinking, if Trump says the coronavirus pandemic is just going to somehow get better then it is going to happen. And when that does not happen, then Trump can deny ever saying such a thing, blame the Chinese, the Democrats or anyone else, instead of just saying he was wrong.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">How does Donald Trump fit the profile of a cult leader?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Donald Trump fits the stereotypical profile of all destructive cults.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">&nbsp;</span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">These traits include malignant narcissism. Trump can easily be compared to Jim Jones, Sun Myung Moon, and other cult leaders. Trump always had a cult of personality around him in terms of his businesses and his social interactions with people. But once Trump attained the presidency, he took over the Republican Party and instituted a fiefdom where he rewards loyalty and punishes anyone who displeases him.</span></font></div></div><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></p><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AN the conversation? 10/18</font></div><div><h2 style="font-weight: normal; margin-top: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2. Christian movements and their legacy</font></h2><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A question that could be asked is: What appeal does President Trump hold for an evangelical Christian base, given that, as Boston University’s&nbsp;<a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/christopher-h-evans-334735" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">Christopher Evans</a>&nbsp;<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-you-should-know-about-the-new-thought-movement-72256" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">says</a>, he “does not demonstrate any of the beliefs that have historically characterized evangelicalism.” Trump, for example, “does not speak about the centrality of the Bible or, like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, of being ‘a born again’ Christian.”</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A 19th-century movement known as New Thought, argues Evans, might provide an answer. According to Evans, New Thought ideas about individual happiness and wealth were later brought together in a movement called the prosperity gospel.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">&nbsp;The<b>&nbsp;prosperity gospel&nbsp;</b>spread the belief that religious faith can lead one to personal health and material wealth.</span></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Norman Vincent Peale, who Trump cites as his “major religious influence,” further fused some of these beliefs. Peale believed that only in a free-market society could Christianity thrive.</span>&nbsp;In this view of Christianity, Evans says, “personal weakness or failure,” is not an option. Peale also believed in a pro-Christian nationalism – all of which are also at the heart of Trump’s beliefs, Evans argues.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As Evans points out, Trump’s minister, Paula White, a prosperity gospel preacher, said in her invocation at the president’s inauguration, “We recognize that every good and every perfect gift comes from you and the United States of America is your gift, for which we proclaim gratitude.” These assertions, as Evans notes, are consistent with Trump’s faith.</font></p></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Joel Osteen has faced a storm of criticism since Hurricane Harvey hit Texas.</font></b></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Houston televangelist came under fire after the hurricane dumped 27 trillion gallons of rain on Texas, leaving tens of thousands homeless. Commentators slammed Osteen for delaying the opening of his 16,800-seater megachurch to flood refugees until four days after the storm made landfall.</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Much of the anger focused on Osteen’s own wealth, which has been estimated north of $40 million.</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But Osteen was not fazed. The 54-year-old preacher said he had been a victim of a “misinformation” campaign and encouraged victims of Harvey to turn to their faith for solace.</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As pastor of the United States’s biggest church—Lakewood reportedly has a weekly attendance of more than 40,000—Osteen is used to coming under scrutiny. And as one of the best-known proponents of a controversial brand of Christianity known as prosperity theology, or the prosperity gospel, Osteen is no stranger to receiving flak, both from inside and outside Christian circles.</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Joel Osteen</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Joel Osteen, the pastor of Lakewood Church in Houston, conducts a service as the city starts the process of rebuilding after severe flooding during Hurricane Harvey in Houston, Texas, on September 3.</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">JOE RAEDLE/GETTY</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Prosperity theology has been characterized as the theological equivalent to the American Dream.</b>&nbsp;The essence of the prosperity gospel is simple: Faith brings rewards, not only in the afterlife—as taught in all mainstream forms of Christianity—but also in the earthly life. These rewards can take the form of health, career success, and, most controversially, wealth.</font></span></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Read more: “We’ve got the White House on speed dial.” How evangelicals are influencing Trump]</font></span></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The movement grew out of 20th-century U.S. televangelism, among other influences. Preachers such as Oral Roberts and William Branham led major revivals across the country in the mid-1900s. The revivals would be spectacular events, including healings and promises of well being. John Osteen, the father of Joel, was part of this movement and founded Lakewood Church in 1959; Joel would succeed his father as pastor.</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Osteen has previously denied being a prosperity preacher in the sense of wealth. “If prosperity means God wants us to be blessed and healthy and have good relationships, then yes, I’m a prosperity teacher. But if it’s about money, no, I never preach about money,” said Osteen in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN). Newsweek reached out to Lakewood and Joel Osteen Ministries for an interview with Osteen, but received no response.</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Joel Osteen</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">?</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">@JoelOsteen</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;You don’t grow in the good times, you grow in the tough times. Watch this encouraging message from Joel: http://ow.ly/h5Mw30eV3TK&nbsp;</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">5:46 AM - Sep 5, 2017</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">6,517</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But experts disagree. Kate Bowler, an expert on prosperity theology, tells Newsweek that Osteen falls into the category of “soft prosperity preachers,” who focus on positive thinking as a means to achieve one’s life ambitions, including wealth. But, according to Osteen’s theology, “life’s circumstances still depend on a believer’s use of faith,” says Bowler, a professor at Duke Divinity School in North Carolina and author of Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel.</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Anthea Butler, associate professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania, is more forthright. “At best he’s a&nbsp;<b>motivational speaker. He’s in the line of Norman Vincent Peale&nbsp;</b>and others who tell you how to live your best life now, God’s going to bless you if you do certain things. He’s prosperity gospel through and through,” Butler tells Newsweek.&nbsp;</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Perhaps Osteen should not be shy to admit his fondness for prosperity theology, since it appears to be<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">&nbsp;popular with believers. While evangelical leaders have renounced it—a 2011 Pew Research Center report found that 90 percent of global evangelical leaders rejected the notion that God would grant health and wealth to those with enough faith—that does not appear to be the case among ordinary believers</span>. A 2006 Pew survey found that 46 percent of U.S. Christians agreed that God grants believers material prosperity, while 56 percent thought believers would be rewarded with good health. Among Pentecostal Americans, the figures were even higher, at 66 percent for wealth and 68 percent for health.</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Lakewood Church</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Parishioners of Lakewood Church led by Pastor Joel Osteen pray together during a service in Houston, Texas on September 3. The bill, released today, would allow churches to endorse political candidates by curtailing the so-called Johnson Amendment.</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">JOE RAEDLE/GETTY</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">One person with whom the prosperity gospel appears to have found a home is President Trump. The Trump family attended Marble Collegiate Church in New York City, where the pastor was Norman Vincent Peale, author of The Power of Positive Thinking, a 1952 book that sold millions and was translated into more than a dozen languages.</span>&nbsp;Trump has cited Peale as a mentor, telling the Iowa Family Leadership Summit in 2015 that he could listen to Peale “all day long. And when you left the church, you were disappointed it was over. He was the greatest guy.”</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The presidential board of evangelical advisers, convened by Trump in 2016 to help him (successfully) court the religious right vote, also comprises of several high-profile prosperity preachers.&nbsp;<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Trump’s closest spiritual adviser, Paula White, the pastor of a Florida megachurch and popular Christian commentator, is one. White told an audience at a 2007 event:&nbsp;<b>“Anyone who tells you to deny yourself is from Satan</b></span><b>.”</b></font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></b></div><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="http://billmoyers.com/story/self-help-guru-shaped-trumps-worldview/">http://billmoyers.com/story/self-help-guru-shaped-trumps-worldview/</a></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px; max-width: 80%; margin: 0px auto 1em; position: relative; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Taking stock of the first official year of Trump in power means withstanding a multifront assault on reality. Presented in a relentless barrage of Make America Great Again hyperbole, the president’s crushing failures are magically transformed into unprecedented successes, and all expressions of dissent become the work of petty ingrates, ideological fabulists and privileged elites. His signature initiatives — the shameful&nbsp;<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/12/the-7-myths-of-the-gop-tax-bill/547322/" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;">tax bill</a>&nbsp;and the mercifully stalled Obamacare repeal —&nbsp;become historic windfalls for the very middle- and working-class constituencies they deliberately set out to beggar, to say nothing of how Trump and his apparatchiks have disfigured basic and hitherto settled facts of history, such as the notion that&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/31/us/john-kelly-civil-war.html" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;">the Civil War was fought over slavery</a>.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px; max-width: 80%; margin: 0px auto 1em; position: relative; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">At one level, these mind-bending pronouncements are the rancid fruits of a concerted assault on basic categories of meaning and signification. To the scattered forces of the anti-Trump resistance, the ongoing appeal of such bald lying is dumbfounding: Shouldn’t the truth win out — or at least count for&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px;">something</em>? But such befuddlement stems mainly from a key element of the Trump phenomenon, one that lies firmly outside their cultural frame of reference. Trumpism has taken root in our public discourse because it is squarely in the mainstream of American spiritual life. It is the most extreme, and perversely logical, application of the positive-thinking gospel.</font></p><div class="pullquote right " style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px; border: none; width: 392px; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-stretch: normal; line-height: 1.3em; margin: 40px auto 40px 1em; padding: 26px 0px; text-shadow: none; position: relative; float: right; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the president’s al</font></div><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px; max-width: 80%; margin: 0px auto 1em; position: relative; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the president’s biography and business career, the role of positive thinking is hiding in plain sight. From childhood on, Trump worshipped in the temple of the movement’s prophet, Norman Vincent Peale: Manhattan’s Marble Collegiate Church. Indeed, Peale presided over Trump’s first wedding in 1977. Trump’s father was a die-hard adherent of Peale’s preachments, as is his daughter Ivanka, who wrote in her 2009 self-help tract,&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px;">The Trump Card</em>, that “perception is more important than reality” and you shouldn’t “go out of your way to correct a false assumption if it plays to your advantage.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px; max-width: 80%; margin: 0px auto 1em; position: relative; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Peale’s midcentury self-help bible,&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px;">The Power of Positive Thinking</em>, is, at its core, a distillation of the message of the Christian faith into a series of achievement-minded axioms. “Picturize, prayerize, actualize” was Peale’s mantra, and he applied this simple formula to every facet of the believer’s life — but most especially to the sphere of material advancement, which was the surest sign of divine favor in the hermetic social world of Pealeism. The implacably right-wing Peale cheerfully described himself as a “missionary to American business” and made good on that by waging a relentless campaign against the New Deal, unions and other affronts to true-blue individual achievement in the pages of his popular self-help magazine,&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px;">Guideposts</em>.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px; max-width: 80%; margin: 0px auto 1em; position: relative; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So long as an earnest, aspirational Christian duly intoned the Bible’s maxims of lavishly rewarded personal faith, he (in Peale’s gospel, the achiever was almost always a man) was on the path to amazing worldly success. Keep incanting the scripturally sanctioned slogans of upward mobility, and a world of wonders will open before you:</font></p><blockquote style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px; margin: 0px auto; padding: 0px 1.5em; border-left: 4px solid rgb(119, 119, 119); width: 725.188px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px; max-width: 100%; margin: 0px auto 1em; position: relative; width: 663.594px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This process will change you into a believer, an expecter, and when you become such, you will in due course become an achiever. You will have new power to get what God and you decide you really want from life.</font></p></blockquote><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px; max-width: 80%; margin: 0px auto 1em; position: relative; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><em style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px;">The Power of Positive Thinking</em>&nbsp;remained on the&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px;">New York Times</em>&nbsp;best-seller list for 186 consecutive weeks and helped launch the modern self-help industry; more than 5 million copies remain in print today. Peale’s gospel became the success creed for a newly corporatized and prosperous American social order. Rather than harping on the dreary demands of socioeconomic justice and the hard work of equitably distributing the unprecedented mass bounty of the postwar American scene, the positive-thinking faith simply rejected personal failure as spiritual weakness. When Arthur Miller sought to sum up the cruel, fact-averse nature of our country’s unique brand of possessive individualism in&nbsp;<a href="http://www.pelister.org/literature/ArthurMiller/Miller_Salesman.pdf" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"><em style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px;">Death of a Salesman</em></a>, Willy Loman’s career credo was an outburst of pure Pealeism: “He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px; max-width: 80%; margin: 0px auto 1em; position: relative; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This same process of magical thinking drives the Trump presidency. In the president’s alternate-universe Twitter feed, the polls continue to ratify his amazing and historic legislative successes, and it’s Hillary Clinton, not the scores of shady Trump campaign cronies, who has been colluding with the Russians. The twisted, incantatory logic of Peale’s positive-thinking gospel now drives the federal agenda. Take, for example, Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement, the quasi-fascist office within Immigration and Customs Enforcement devoted to addressing the nonexistent epidemic of violent crime committed by undocumented immigrants. It is testament to the White House’s collective will to reshape reality into its preferred dream image; immigrants are actually&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px;">less likely</em>&nbsp;to commit crimes of any kind than the homegrown US population,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/26/us/trump-illegal-immigrants-crime.html" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;">as study after study has shown</a>.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px; max-width: 80%; margin: 0px auto 1em; position: relative; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The office bears that nonsensical title just so it can be rendered in press reports as VOICE — that is, the thing that it, just as nonsensically, pretends to grant to victims. In reality, as a recent&nbsp;<a href="https://splinternews.com/this-is-what-it-looks-like-when-the-president-asks-peop-1819077393" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;">Splinter report</a>&nbsp;on the program has documented, VOICE is chiefly a vehicle by which informants enlist federal law enforcement to bring the hammer down in pursuit of petty personal vendettas.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px; max-width: 80%; margin: 0px auto 1em; position: relative; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Empirical facts can never penetrate this carapace of fantasy. Positive thinking works for its adherents because it makes them act and feel as if they can do no wrong. As Trump himself recounted in his 2015 book,&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px;">Crippled America</em>, “Rev. Peale was the type of minister that I liked, and I liked him personally as well. I especially loved his sermons. He would instill a very positive feeling about God that also made me feel positive about myself.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px; max-width: 80%; margin: 0px auto 1em; position: relative; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">To fact-check each and every truth-demolishing utterance of the Trump administration and return the public’s gaze to the actually existing historical record remains essential and indispensable work for journalism, and for the political foes of Trumpism. Unfortunately, it does nothing to dislodge the larger message of the positive-thinking cult of personality surrounding the president: the irrational, tribal faith that he alone can fix the many ills assailing the republic,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/07/trump-rnc-speech-alone-fix-it/492557/" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;">as he famously announced</a>&nbsp;from the podium of the 2016 GOP convention in Cleveland.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px; max-width: 80%; margin: 0px auto 1em; position: relative; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The little-noted corollary proposition of the Pealeist creed is that the forces of negativity can never be permitted to gain serious purchase in the believer’s mind; at that moment, all the hard work of retraining your brain to achieve in the face of all seeming adversity simply unravels, as weakness and defeat swamp the poor beleaguered soul of little faith. This is why the dogged media reports on Trump aren’t simply repudiated, per the standard conservative critique, as the bad-faith distortions of a biased, elite-ridden journalistic establishment. No, in the Trump gospel, such reports are always and forever “fake” — that is, a metaphysical affront to the way that reality can and should be ordered. Opponents can’t be interlocutors who honorably dissent — they have to be warped “bad actors.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px; max-width: 80%; margin: 0px auto 1em; position: relative; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">All of this magical thinking works to systematically blind Trump and his followers to the raging hubris, racism, xenophobia and dishonesty that Trumpism breeds daily. But as the stout Cold War reactionary Norman Vincent Peale himself would likely preach if he were with us today, that blindness is a feature, not a defect, in the wonder-working hydraulics of the positive-thinking creed. The best hope is that the Peale gospel is also spectacularly ill-equipped to confront and process adverse truths that prove to be more powerful than it is. November 2017’s Democratic sweep in the bellwether&nbsp;<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/nov/07/virginia-governor-race-results-ralph-northam" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;">Virginia elections</a>proffered a rare, and hopeful, indicator that Americans can still recognize raging bullshit for what it is. After all, in the end, things didn’t exactly work out for Willy Loman, either.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">==</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/believe-it-or-not-new-age-and-occult-underpinnings-trump-and-bannons-ideology</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Wh<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">en my book “Occult America,” a history of supernatural religions in the U.S., appeared in 2009, I was surprised to receive an admiring phone call from a conservative documentarian and financier. He professed deep interest in the book’s themes, and encouraged me in my next work, “One Simple Idea,” an exploration of positive-mind metaphysics in American life. His name was Stephen K. Bannon.</span></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Although the media have characterized Bannon as the Disraeli of the dark side following&nbsp;<a href="http://www.salon.com/2016/11/19/steve-bannon-bolshevik-maybe-donald-trumps-alt-right-svengali-really-is-a-leninist/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">his rise to power in the Trump administration</a>, I knew him, and still do, as a deeply read and erudite observer of the American religious scene, with a keen appetite for mystical thought.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ronald Reagan, a hero of his, was not dissimilar. As&nbsp;<a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/political-bookworm/2010/04/reagan_and_the_occult.html" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">I’ve written</a>&nbsp;in the Washington Post and elsewhere, Reagan, from the start of his political career in the 1950s up through the first term of his presidency, adopted phrasing and ideas from the writings of a Los Angeles-based occult scholar named Manly P. Hall (1901-1990), whose 1928 encyclopedia arcana “<a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/id/33349767/ns/dateline_nbc-newsmakers/t/read-excerpt-occult-america/#.WOrWMlPyu3U" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">The Secret Teachings of All Ages</a>” is among the most influential underground books in American culture.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">President Trump himself has&nbsp;<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/how-trump-got-religion--and-why-his-legendary-ministers-son-now-rejects-him/2016/01/21/37bae16e-bb02-11e5-829c-26ffb874a18d_story.html?tid=a_inl&utm_term=.31c0a13eb328#admiringly%20recalled" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">admiringly recalled</a>&nbsp;his lessons in the mystic art of “positive thinking” from the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale, the Trump family’s longtime pastor, who popularized metaphysical mind-power themes in his 1952 mega-seller “The Power of Positive Thinking.”</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What in the cosmos is going on? New Age and alternative spirituality are supposed to be the domain of patchouli-scented aisles of health food stores and bookshops that sell candles and pendulums, right? Well, not exactly.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">There is a long-standing intersection between mysticism and conservatism in America. This marriage extends back to the late 19th&nbsp;century when globetrotting occultist and Russian noblewoman Madame H.P. Blavatsky depicted America as the catalyst for a revolution in human potential in her 1888 opus “The Secret Doctrine.” “It is in America that the transformation will take place,” Blavatsky wrote, “and has already silently commenced.”</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Generations of occult writers echoed Blavatsky’s theme of America as a Holy Grail among nations, possessed of a “secret destiny,” as Manly P. Hall put it, and thus married esoteric spirituality to patriotic ideals. This partnership has flourished out of view of most mainstream observers—and significantly impacted American culture, including the look of our currency.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In 1935, then-Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace, a former Republican and mystical seeker who went on to become Franklin Roosevelt’s second vice president, approached FDR with a novel idea: mint a coin with the mysterious reverse side of the Great Seal of the United States—the eye-and-pyramid surrounded by the Latin maxim “God Smiles on Our New Order of the Ages.” Both men were Freemasons with a taste for portentous imagery—and were on the lookout for epic, unifying symbols for the recovering nation. (Wallace had spoken of the need for a “New Deal of the Ages.”) Roosevelt was so taken with the 1782 image, with its&nbsp;<a href="https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2009/09/14/masons-and-the-making-of-america" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">Masonic undertones</a>&nbsp;and message that worldly achievement is incomplete without higher ethics, that he&nbsp;<a href="https://www.state.gov/documents/organization/27807.pdf" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">personally supervised</a>&nbsp;its installation on the back of the dollar bill, making a previously arcane insignia into an indelible symbol of the republic.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">President George H.W. Bush brought new attention — and unintended infamy — to the concept of a “New World Order.” In his Sept. 11, 1990,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=18820" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">speech to a joint session of Congress</a>, Bush sought to celebrate the possibilities of international trade and cooperation that could follow a swift victory in the first Gulf War: “Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective—a new world order—can emerge … An era in which the nations of the world, East and West, North and South, can prosper and live in harmony.”&nbsp;Little was he aware that his use of the term would inspire a generation of conspiracy theorists to notions of a hidden, sinister global plan.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Conservative metaphysics extend beyond geopolitics. One of Richard Nixon’s confidants — in addition to the Rev. Peale, whose church he also attended—was insurance magnate&nbsp;<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/05/business/clement-stone-dies-at-100-built-empire-on-optimism.html" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">W. Clement Stone</a>, a right-wing activist,&nbsp;<a href="http://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/findingaids/paralab/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">benefactor</a>&nbsp;of the famous ESP lab at Duke University, and collaborator to Napoleon Hill, author of the mind-metaphysics classic “Think and Grow Rich<em>.</em>”</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Most liberals and centrists find these kinds of associations jarring and a bit creepy. Thoughtful people are suspicious of mixing Rasputin-like intrigue with American politics. And with good reason. As Vice President Dan Quayle&nbsp;<a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/74620/roboflop" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">once put it</a>—and he was specifically referring to Rasputin — “people that are really very weird can get into sensitive positions and have a tremendous impact on history.” (It should be&nbsp;noted, however, that the “mad monk” soberly cautioned the tsar against getting entangled in World War I.)</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Critics fear that a sense of spiritual preordainment can produce reckless or dangerous policy choices. Yet such episodes in American history have traditionally had less to do with religious impulses than the kinds of hubris that once drove “the best and the brightest” into Vietnam, or moved senators from both parties to support President George W. Bush’s tragic rush into Iraq, based on the cynical calculus that a quick and tidy war would net a political victory.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rather than fomenting secrecy or subterfuge, America’s embrace of esotericism is often characterized by a chin-out earnestness, something that many observers and conspiracy-mongers miss. “You can call it mysticism if you want to,”&nbsp;<a href="http://reagan2020.us/speeches/City_Upon_A_Hill.asp" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">Reagan told</a>&nbsp;the Conservative Political Action Conference in 1974, “but I have always believed that there was some divine plan that placed this great continent between two oceans to be sought out by those who were possessed of an abiding love of freedom and a special kind of courage.” In announcing his candidacy in 1979,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.reaganlibrary.archives.gov/archives/reference/11.13.79.html" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">Reagan declared</a>: “To me our country is a living, breathing presence, unimpressed by what others say is impossible . . . and that man is capable of improving his circumstances beyond what we are told is fact.” Reagan&nbsp;<a href="http://www.salon.com/2014/01/05/ronald_reagan_and_the_occultist_the_amazing_story_of_the_thinker_behind_his_sunny_optimism/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">often returned</a>&nbsp;to such themes, echoing Hall’s 1944 book “The Secret Destiny of America.”</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This rhetoric may sound flighty, but that, too, is part of our heritage. Historically, I prefer the cadences of offbeat idealism to the rampant ugliness of our current president’s Twitter insults, or the low-octane, visionless speechmaking that burdened Hillary Clinton’s campaign.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Conservative presidencies have not cornered the market on the otherworldly. During the 2016 campaign, I was surprised that no one revisited an episode from Bill Clinton’s first term, when then first lady Hillary Clinton&nbsp;<a href="https://mobile.nytimes.com/1996/06/25/us/performing-seances-no-just-pushing-the-membrane-of-the-possible.html" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">was accused of</a>&nbsp;holding “séances” in the White House—a term misapplied to her visioning sessions with New Age teacher Jean Houston, a pioneer of the human-potential movement. Houston, whom I’ve published, didn’t quite know how to explain to reporters that when she guided the first lady in dialogues with her political hero Eleanor Roosevelt, they were not summoning spirits but rather conducting creativity and value-defining exercises. President Clinton was cool toward these tête-à-têtes. Houston told me that the president once sat in on one of their sessions. When the guru told him he was an “undeveloped shaman,” he stood up and left the room.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Bill Clinton took a similarly dim view of parapsychology. During a period of post-Cold War cost cutting in 1995, he&nbsp;<a href="http://www.newsweek.com/2015/11/20/meet-former-pentagon-scientist-who-says-psychics-can-help-american-spies-393004.html" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">eliminated the CIA’s</a>&nbsp;budget for its psychic-spying program. Jimmy Carter, by contrast, admired the “remote viewing” operation. The year of Clinton’s cuts,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.cnn.com/US/Newsbriefs/9509/9-21/am/index.html" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">Carter told a group</a>&nbsp;of Emory University students that during his presidency, clairvoyant spies helped identify the coordinates of a crashed Soviet spy plane in Central Africa, netting a significant intelligence gain.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Off-the-grid practices should come as no surprise to students of politics. People in power always import values, customs and attitudes from their backgrounds—sometimes the religious conservatism of a Mike Pence and other times the Southern Californian vibes of a Ron and Nancy Reagan, with their enthusiasm for astrology, psychics and UFOs (Reagan reported sightings as both an actor and governor). Reagan alone was at ease swapping stories with New Age neighbors at Hollywood pool parties, while simultaneously maintaining a sincere, and mutual, affection for evangelicals. He was the model American religionist.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Even conservative evangelicals today borrow from American mysticism. When Pat Robertson speaks of the “Law of Reciprocity” (did you miss that in Scripture?) he is reprocessing the “Law of Attraction,” a concept popularized by the book and movie “The Secret,” but rooted in an American mystical tradition extending back to 1854, when a spirit medium named&nbsp;<a href="https://medium.com/galleys/the-man-who-gave-us-the-law-of-attraction-f832c6a48054" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">Andrew Jackson Davis</a>&nbsp;coined the term.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Davis’ career illuminates how historically deep these entanglements go. Called the “Poughkeepsie Seer” for his Hudson Valley, New York, hometown, Davis was naturally controversial—with one prominent defender, who attested that his channeled trances were an authentic telegraph to the spirit world. The medium’s advocate was a Rev. George Bush, a first cousin, four times removed, to the Bush presidential family. The Rev. Bush caused a stir in 1845 by leaving the Presbyterian Church to become a minister in the Church of the New Jerusalem, an ecclesiastical body based on the ideas of Swedish mystic-scientist Emanuel Swedenborg. Bush wrote admiringly of Davis, and attended his séances (a term Davis also coined in its occult sense) along with a dubious journalist named Edgar Allan Poe.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Today, cable television producers and radio hosts often urge me to postulate some kind of occult “pact” between the Bushes and the dark side (cue up Skull and Bones). But such things are fantasy. The truth is, Americans have always been, well, a little strange. As a historian, I feel affection for that aspect of American life. Shadowy figures have long hung around the fringes of power in many nations; but rarely have they done so with the ingenuousness and transparency of those I’ve been considering.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">If there is a central principle in American life, one valued across our political spectrum, it is a belief in the protection of the individual search for meaning. The presence and persistence of esoteric and unusual religious ideas in our political culture, including in its most conservative quarters, serves as evidence that that core principle is still working. In the U.S. military, religiously observant service members and veterans can now choose among more than 65&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cem.va.gov/hmm/emblems.asp" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">“emblems of belief,”</a>&nbsp;including pentagrams, druidic symbols and every variety of mystical insignia. We are truly one nation under many gods — a fact that unites us across our fractured political divide.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></p><div wibbitz="embed-main-player" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="bio-new body_news-politics" style="width: 630px; font-style: italic; line-height: 22px; height: auto; border-top: 3px solid rgb(223, 223, 218); clear: both;"><div class="author-bio" style=""><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mitch Horowitz is the PEN Award-winning author of books including "<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Occult-America-Seances-Circles-History/dp/0553385151/ref=pd_sim_sbs_b_2" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">Occult America</a>" and "<a href="https://www.amazon.com/One-Simple-Idea-Positive-Transform/dp/1510707905/ref=pd_bxgy_14_img_2?encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1510707905&pd_rd_r=X94CDS9FMSQ1P4WGVFR7&pd_rd_w=mh3DY&pd_rd_wg=7BhRN&psc=1&refRID=X94CDS9FMSQ1P4WGVFR7" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life</a>."&nbsp;</font></p><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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