Seriously

I watched this crazy documentary called Trust Me: I’m The Prophet. A mesmerizing and mind-blowing series. It is about Samuel Bateman, who arrives in Short Creek, Utah, with a group of young women, where a community of Fundamentalist Latter-day Saints lives. Their community’s past leader, Warren Jeffs, is in jail, and Bateman convinces everyone that Jeffs is talking through him and that he is the new prophet. Over time, every woman in the entire community becomes his wife, of all ages. The doc was shot over three years because cult expert Christine Marie and her videographer husband, Tolga Katas, embedded themselves in the community as a support system and began taping. The entire community is completely cut off from society, except, of course, the lord.

America’s high concentration of religious movements makes us the top in the world in cult creation. My first thought after finishing the 4-part series was “only in America”. Ends up I was right. Cults are real.

In cults, people stop making rational decisions on their own. Look at what is happening in America right now, particularly after last night’s shooting at the Correspondent Dinner. I wonder if any of those anti-gun law people in the room thought about all the children who have been killed in our country, and how scary that must have felt, because now they know. Whether it was staged or not, seeing women and men rush out of the room, or seeing Erika Kirk crying, before Trump called on the gun shooting as a reason to fund the ballroom for their safety. Seriously?

We have allowed too many (one is too many) children to be left with trauma from a school shooting. Parents who have lost their children. Schools have to go through security details every day, yet we should build a ballroom to protect those in the White House above all with our tax dollars. I have to believe that these people have a cult mentality, or maybe I need to, because it is just mind-boggling to me that these people in power are so awful. Their role is to protect us, not them.

At the end of the film, of course, some begin to see the light of day. A full break was game-changing for some of these women. We are starting to see some of the cult members of the MAGA party start to crack and find their own voices. Perhaps it is only because they see the ship starting to sink. Or they finally woke up to the fact that the emperor has no clothes, and couldn’t care less about any of them. Certainly unclear, but after watching that docu-series, I get the cult.