Listen live Fridays 8 to 10 Eastern on Revolution.Radio later archived at https://kevinbarrett.substack.com
First hour: Radhia Gleis discusses her award-winning new book “THE FOLLOWERS: ‘Holy Hell’ and the Disciples of Narcissistic Leaders: How My Years in a Notorious Cult Parallel Today’s Cultural Mania.” The autobiographical volume describes the author’s 25 years in the BuddhaField cult led by Jaime “Michel” Gomez, an apparent narcissistic sociopath and homosexual predator-cum-hypnotherapist with a flair for plagiarizing spiritual books and trying out their tricks on unsuspecting seekers. (And as the Firesign Theater reminds us, there’s a seeker born every minute!)
Taking up where Will Allen’s documentary Holy Hell left off, Gleis systematically compares Jaime Gomez’s BuddhaField with Donald Trump’s MAGA movement…and discovers a long list of similarities. Though her core argument is convincing—yes, Trump is a narcissistic sociopath and de facto cult leader who manipulates rubes in many of the same ways that Jaime Gomez, Jim Jones, Rev. Moon, and other such con artists have—she drinks way too much Democratic Party kool-aid along the way. And though she ignorantly slanders the Qur’an, her post-BuddhaField spiritual/religious views are beautifully-expressed and uncommonly insightful. So though I don’t expect this interview to be as contentious as the Mona Shaikh meltdown, there will definitely be some differences of opinion on display.
Second hour: Philosophy and humanities teacher Thaddeus Kozinski, author of Modernity as Apocalypse: Sacred Nihilism and the Counterfeits of Logos, discusses his new essays “What Plato can Teach us about Covid 19” and “Covid 19: The Warning.”
Kozinski writes: “The last eighteen months is perhaps the demonstrative proof that Plato was right…” How so? As Plato knew, “the vast majority of us need a polis as well as a Church, one that unites us, not in the isolated and isolating ‘pursuit of happiness,’ but in the communal enjoyment of happiness, in the knowledge, love, and celebration of the Good in the Real.” But the post-Enlightenment secular liberal state explicitly takes no position on the Good and the Real…at least not until a contrived state of emergency panics the population into blindly submitting to the rulers’ Evil Illusion.
In “Covid 19: The Warning” Kozinski holds nothing back: “What I mean, then, by ‘the Covid-19 pandemic’ is the installation, under the cloud of a hoax pandemic and engineered ‘virus’ (in truth, as Dr. Judy Mikovitz has proven, a pandemic of retro-virus diseases caused by decades of poisonous, animal-DNA infected vaccinations, now being deliberately triggered through the unleashing of a bio-engineered pathogen under the name Sars 2-Covid) of a global religion of Satan-worship commanding our obedience to the Great Lie and the fear and hatred of all that is true, good, and beautiful, including psychotically fearful, masked zombies celebrating their forced isolation and torture…”