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. And it doesn't make any difference how much money
you had, as the Hearst family found out.

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