> Ted Patrick was a black guy from Tennessee who was a civil rights
> activist.  He organized pickets for black people.  He was selected by Gov.
> Ron Reagan of Calif. to be some kind of county coordinator down near San
> Diego.

> Once a year he went out to the beach with his family for a vacation.  One
> year a couple of his nephews didn't come back when they were supposed to.
> When they did get back, they were all glassy-eyed.  Patrick assumed they
> had been drinking or smoking pot, which was a popular pastime back then.
> They had been with a group called "Children of God" (If you ever saw one
> of them, you couldn't miss them.  Those were the hippy types who used to
> stare all spacey-eyed and say things like "Do you want to die and go to
> HELL?")

> So one time a lady complained to Patrick in his civil service position
> about how her son didn't come back from the Children of God (COG).
> Patrick would have just blown her off as paranoid, except for the
> experience with his nephew.  So he decided he was going to join the COG.
> He went down to the park near San Diego and told the COG that he believed
> in Jesus.  He was put on the COG bus and was driven out to some estate.
> There were piles of stereos and cars etc all over the lawn, from where
> people had donated all their earthly goods to COG.

> He was amazed that 100 young people were brought in, but before the night
> was over, it was more like 300 taken off the streets.  There was no way to
> leave since they had arrived by bus.  The preaching started and everyone
> had to listen.  Nobody was allowed to be by themselves.  Sleep or food was
> not an option.  He was even preached to when he was in the bathroom.

> Part of the preaching was that parents were said to be evil and
> also they were supposed to be soldiers of Satan.  Like on ars, critics are
> said to be evil and minions of Minton.  This went on and on with little or
> no sleep and no food for a day or so until people started to turn
> glassy-eyed and repeat back what they were told.

> People who tried to leave had their way blocked and their indoctrination
> intensified.  To get out, Patrick told the COG he had a paycheck at home
> which he wanted to donate to the church.  That worked for him.

> As part of his job, he checked into what could be done to keep kids from
> being picked up off the streets as the COG was doing.  He ran into the
> same problems we have in America today.  No government agency will help.
> He checked everything he could, but could find help nowhere.

> So he looked at the law to see what he could do.  He ended up helping the
> lady get her kid back and put the kid in a room and questioned the kid. He
> did the same thing the COG did to him in that he would not let the kid get
> away, but he did it to get the kid to start thinking again instead of what
> the COG did, which was to stop people from thinking.

> It is a good thing he did it the COG way at that time.  Imagine the
> trouble he would have gotten into if the COG were like Scientology and had
> made everybody do the Purification Rundown until they "felt good" about
> giving their money to COG! Then deprogramming would have meant sitting in
> the sauna.

> Eventually, Patrick came to recognize various mental and physical signs of
> someone who was under the influence of a cult-like group.  To him, it was
> as plain as the difference between drunk and sober.  The purpose of the
> cult-like groups was to disable individual critical ability while claiming
> legal rights for the individual to have his critical ability disabled.

> Cults are still doing that successfully, calling it "religious conversion"
> while saying there is no such thing as brainwashing.  That was the strange
> thing about reading the deprogramming accounts.  If you have been in a
> cult before, you can recognize the situation and understand, with clarity,
> why cults hate deprogramming and why cults hate ars.  ars is also
> deprogramming to the extent that it makes you think about cults which use
> brainwashing under the guise of religious conversion.

> Patrick was not at all secretive about his methods and did his best to get
> congress to investigate the situation.  However, he was only one man with
> no organization and no resources, and the cults were forming alliances to
> make a "Willy Horton" out of Ted Patrick and were paying a lot of money to
> influence congress.

> Government did nothing about cults when people were losing their children
> to cults, but when cults started losing income due to parents wanting
> their children back, protection of cults became a bigger issue than
> protection of families.

> If you get a chance, find the book and read it yourself.  It's old and
> outdated, but it provides some good, basic information about how cults
> work from back when they were simpler than they are today.

> Joe C., escaped Scientology white slave.
>    If you think the problem with Scientology is bad now,
>    just wait until we find out what it is.
> http://members.tripod.com/cic_ops/counter_warfare