Trump's SCOTUS front-runner Amy Barrett is in a 'cult' -- according to an ex-member who 'experienced

Transcript
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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González, as we continue to look at the background of Judge Amy Coney Barrett, the apparent front-runner to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court. President Trump said he’ll announce a nominee on Saturday. Mitch McConnell appears to have the 51 votes he needs in the Senate to force a confirmation vote through before the election.

We’re looking at Amy Barrett’s membership in a secretive Catholic group with rigid gender roles and a lifelong loyalty oath. We’re now joined by a former of People of Praise who’s now speaking out against the group. Coral Anika Theill was a People of Praise member for five years, from 1979 to 1984, after being forced to join the organization by her then-husband. She documented her experience in her memoir titled Bonsheá: Making Light of the Dark.

Coral, thanks so much for joining us from Corvallis, Oregon. Can you describe People of Praise and what happened to you while you lived in the community?

CORAL ANIKA THEILL: Thank you for having me on your show, and I’m a fan of you and your show.

I was a member of the People of Praise — many call it a community, but I describe it as a cult — in Corvallis, Oregon. I experienced abuse and torture by my husband, Marty Warner, Independence, Oregon, and the cult leaders, as well as shunning, shaming and a smear campaign against me when I escaped and left. For safety, I legally changed my name, and I’ve lived under a state address protection program from my ex-husband for the past 20 years.

Even though I left the People of Praise cult, I didn’t have any rights, due to being married to my husband, who was a cult member. I was under the authority of my husband and his authoritarian head, Ed Brown. Under their authority, I was forced to attend meetings, but because I had defied leadership and their authority, I was forced to sit on the floor outside of their meetings in the hallway at the St. Mary’s Catholic Church. There’s dozens of witnesses that have seen how I was treated. What I would ask listeners to consider, even though they say this is a healthy group, to consider how I was treated and if this would be correct for Amy Barrett to be treated.

One time I had a miscarriage in 1984, and I had to have a D&C surgery. After I returned from the hospital, I was forced to attend a People of Praise women’s meeting, or handmaidens’ meetings. I had a head that was also woman, besides my husband. They wanted to go shopping, and I couldn’t, due to returning from surgery and feeling weak. I left the meeting to go home and rest, as my doctor had ordered. I was met by my husband and forced into the car, kidnapped against my will, where I was driven to the cult leader’s home. I was interrogated until wee hours of the morning and psychologically abused. The next morning, the community was informed to shun me. I would never allow anyone to treat me this way today, and it traumatizes me to admit this was my life at that time.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Coral, I wanted to ask you — in terms of some of the hair-raising descriptions in your memoir of what happened to you, I wanted to ask you if you could talk about some of those. You talk about the situation where the head, that was assigned to you and your husband, wanted to see the family budget, that he told you how many hours per day you could spend on particular chores, including two to four loads of laundry a day, this meddling directly in the day-to-day — in your day-to-day life and affairs with you and your family, and that you also mention that once you decided that you wanted to leave, that they threatened to try to have you committed to a mental institution?

CORAL ANIKA THEILL: They would call me mentally ill. And there was a time they had me under special counseling, under Father Charles Harris, who was the head leader of the Corvallis People of Praise branch. He was from South Bend.

But basically, there was just cruelty and bullying, and it was not much difference than the Jim Jones cult. I shared with Heidi that my story is very much like The Handmaid’s Tale series and the Netflix series 10-part documentary The Keepers.


Other things, yeah, there was always a list on my wall, a schedule, and men from the community would come unannounced to check on me to make sure I was on schedule and had done my chores. There was basically no privacy. And all of your personal — anything personal was given to your husband’s head also. I wasn’t allowed contraceptives and was supposed to have all the children God intended for me, no matter what my health was. I had had eight children and three miscarriages and D&C, often when my health was failing.

Chris Murphy and Brian Schatz are trying to raise funds for Cal Cunningham (NC)

ActBlue has raised over ONE HUNDRED MILLION dollars in 36 hours

Starting tomorrow, articles on the biggest leak of financial data ever -the FinCEN Files

ActBlue records were broken last night in donations

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Donors broke the record again in the 10 p.m. hour giving $6.3 million, more than $100k/min


https://twitter.com/amy_siskind/status/1307168080074809344?s=21

Trump Blames Protests on 'Radical' Lessons About Slavery, Racism

President Donald Trump on Thursday denounced school curricula that emphasize the impact of slavery and racism on American history and blamed “left-wing indoctrination” for nationwide protests against police brutality.

“Patriotic moms and dads are going to demand that their children are no longer fed hateful lies about this country,” Trump said in a speech at the National Archives in Washington.

The president claimed U.S. schoolchildren are taught that the U.S. was “founded on the principle of oppression, not freedom” and that they should “feel ashamed of their own history,” a curriculum he called “radical.”

The president on Thursday criticized as “toxic propaganda” the “1619 Project,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning public school curriculum developed by the New York Times that orients American history from the date that the first slave ship arrived in what later became the U.S. He equated certain racial teachings with “child abuse” and argued that the focus on historical sins threatened “to impose a new segregation.” Trump announced he would soon create a “1776 Commission” in an apparent effort to rebut the 1619 Project. The commission will “promote patriotic education,” Trump said.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-17/trump-plans-to-denounce-focus-on-slavery-racism-in-schools?utm_source=twitter&utm_content=business&cmpid=socialflow-twitter-business&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic

JFC.

Trump's Doral Hotel to Host a Confab of Anti-Vaxxers and Leading QAnon Champions

But next month, as the COVID-19 virus could very well be entering an expected second wave, one of Trump’s hotels will become a hub for anti-vaccine activism. Some of the most notorious figures in the anti-vaccine movement are set to converge on the president’s Trump National Doral Miami resort in early October for a MAGA-world conference.

The anti-vaccine figures won’t be the only fringe GOP movement represented at Trump’s property during the American Priority Conference or “AMPFest,” which runs between Oct. 8 and Oct 11. They’ll be joined by top QAnon conspiracy theory promoters, including one with a history of anti-Semitic remarks.

Anti-vaccine heavyweights Robert Kennedy Jr. and Del Bigtree are scheduled to appear in early October at Doral Miami for the MAGA-heavy AMPFest, a conglomeration of Trumpworld personalities now in its third year that was started by a handful of conservative internet activists as a more explicitly pro-Trump alternative to the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Kennedy, who has become perhaps the leading anti-vaccine figure in the country while being denounced by other members of his own family, appears near the top of AMPFest’s program. So does Bigtree, who once donned a Nazi-style Jewish star in opposition to government mandates for people to take the measles vaccine. Kennedy even qualifies as a headliner on AMPFest advertisements online, pictured alongside other scheduled speakers like Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), former Trump adviser Roger Stone, former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, and conservative pundit Dinesh D’Souza.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-doral-hotel-to-host-a-confab-of-anti-vaxxers-and-leading-qanon-champions?ref=home&utm_source=web_push


A secret cabal is taking over the world. They kidnap children, slaughter, and eat them to gain power from their blood. They control high positions in government, banks, international finance, the news media, and the church. They want to disarm the police. They promote homosexuality and pedophilia. They plan to mongrelize the white race so it will lose its essential power.

Does this conspiracy theory sound familiar? It is. The same narrative has been repackaged by QAnon.

I have studied and worked to prevent genocide for forty years. Genocide Watch and the Alliance Against Genocide, the first international anti-genocide coalition, see such hate-filled conspiracy theories as early warning signs of deadly genocidal violence.

The plot, described above, was the conspiracy “revealed” in the most influential anti-Jewish pamphlet of all time. It was called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It was written by Russian anti-Jewish propagandists around 1902. It collected myths about a Jewish plot to take over the world that had existed for hundreds of years. Central to its mythology was the Blood Libel, which claimed that Jews kidnapped and slaughtered Christian children and drained their blood to mix in the dough for matzos consumed on Jewish holidays.

https://www.justsecurity.org/72339/qanon-is-a-nazi-cult-rebranded/

Navalny, Awake and Alert, Plans to Return to Russia, German Official Says

BERLIN — Aleksei A. Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who is recovering from being poisoned, has spoken to a German prosecutor about the attempt on his life and says he plans to return to Russia as soon as he has recovered, a senior German security official said on Monday.

Mr. Navalny had been in a medically induced coma at the Charité hospital in Berlin and it was not clear what condition he would be in once he regained consciousness. But the security official, who was briefed on his condition, said Mr. Navalny seemed mentally sharp.

“He’s fully aware of his condition, he’s fully aware of what happened and he’s fully aware of where he is,” said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity to talk candidly about the case.

The news came hours after the German government announced that laboratories in France and Sweden had confirmed that the substance used to poison Mr. Navalny was a form of the nerve agent Novichok, results that match Berlin’s own findings and provide additional confidence that the Russian state was involved.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/14/world/europe/navalny-novichok.html

What in the hell is the Bay of Pigs award?

The group that published the Panama Papers is getting ready to drop some more articles