Cranks and Con-artists

Mark Honeychurch - 19 February 2024

Our ongoing plagiarism project is going well - thanks to the people who reached out and offered to help with running the text we have through TurnItIn. We’re now receiving reports from two different academics who are putting the documents through two different plagiarism detectors. Our evidence, and the website we’re building to showcase it, is coming together well. It’s been a lot of work so far, but there’s a lot still to do, so we’ll keep working until we’ve built the most thorough case we’re able to put together - we really want to make sure we do this well, as it involves serious accusations.

While working on the project, I’ve been watching documentaries about cults (Twin Flames and Shiny Happy People - both of which Bronwyn wrote about last year). I’m currently half way through watching a documentary series about a small, weird cult that I’d never heard of until yesterday. The series is called Stolen Youth and is about a charismatic, controlling and possibly narcissistic man who preyed on students at Sarah Lawrence college in the US, What’s really interested me is that the leader of this group, Larry, looks so familiar to me by now - yet another middle-aged man who starts off thinking he’s uncovered a revolutionary kind of therapy that can treat all kinds of psychological issues, and ends up controlling the lives of, and ruthlessly abusing, a group of people who have been conditioned to mindlessly accept anything he says. And, as there often is, this case involves a lot of story-telling, a made-up history of the cult leader that looks much more impressive than the dreariness of reality.

However, instead of looking into this compelling, fascinating story of abuse and control, in this week’s newsletter I’ve reviewed a very mediocre movie, The Mandela Effect. Katrina has reported on the demise of the Therapeutic Products Act, and I’ve responded to an ex-member who was unhappy with our submission back when the Act was still a Bill, and was going through the Select Committee process. Craig has written about his misunderstanding of crank magnetism (a term I’m not sure I’ve even heard of before), and Bronwyn has continued her series on channelers, focusing this week on Yasmeen Clark, who regularly channels “Pascha”.