Why They Cover Up The Cult Of César Chávez
From the People's Temple to 'born in the wrong body', it is all ersatz religion
César Chávez became a friend and imitator of Charles Dederich, founder of Synanon, during the 1970s. Dederich established control of his initiates through The Game, a regular practice of Maoist struggle sessions in which everyone engaged in verbal attacks on one another to break down egos and inculcate obedience.
Chávez was clearly impressed by the result because he followed Dederich’s advice when he moved the United Farm Workers headquarters to its final home in La Paz. With most of his political goals achieved, Chávez wanted two things as his labor rights movement culminated: money and obedience. He would shed followers freely to squeeze the most he could out of the remaining ones.
The motto Chávez gave his movement — Sí, se puede! (Yes, we can!) — was already a dark joke when he died in 1993. Lionized in the years since by every liberal and Democrat alike for uniting fruit pickers against the evil capitalist exploitation of kulak grape farmers, César Chávez was revealed as a cult leader in the 21st century. It did not affect his fandom among Democrats.
This week, The New York Times unraveled the cult of César Chávez. Intrepid journalists got clear answers from a woman who is almost one hundred years old, with receipts. They substantiated three solid accusations of rape, molestation, and sexual violence after five decades of silence.
Dolores Huerta is practically a cult figure on the left herself, so her account bears extraordinary weight. Moreover, because Chávez was a man who perpetrated his acts against ‘brown girls’, the intersectionality of his victims outranks his ethnicity. It is therefore not racist to cancel him, and so the statues have been covered up with alacrity.
Plans for renaming all the Chávez streets and Chávez buildings and Chávez plazas have already been announced all over blue America. Chávez parades are canceled. In California, César Chávez Day will become Farmworkers Day. The cult of César Chávez has fallen dramatically, catastrophically, as if to make future archaeologists wonder why his statures were suddenly torn down all over the country in a great purgation.
Ms. Debra Rojas recalls her experience with clarity. She uses the word “grooming” because it is the correct word for what women and girls endured to keep the jefe happy. While the family and union are expressing sympathy with the victims, the history of denial is consistent with their financial interest in his false sainthood.
A handful of Mr. Chavez’s relatives and former U.F.W. leaders have been aware for years about various allegations of sexual misconduct, but there is no evidence that they made efforts to fully investigate the accusations, acknowledge the victims or apologize to them. Instead, many of the women say they were discouraged from speaking out in order to preserve Mr. Chavez’s public image.
Americans have a duty to question their civil rights icons. Far from simply being flawed, César Chávez was a monster. Worse, even without knowing the allegations of criminal sexual behavior, the fact he was a cult leader should have been enough to raise red flags for everyone.
Should have been, because the left has a blind spot with cults.
Half of San Francisco is named for Harvey Milk, but none of the “Saint Harvey” plaques and inscriptions mention his relationship with Jim Jones and the People’s Temple. Milk was a regular speaker at the Temple, wrote frequent letters to Jones, lobbied on his behalf, and supported their activities in his weekly newspaper column even after stories of abuse began to emerge. Residents of Jonestown sent Milk more than fifty condolence letters after his lover took his own life.
The most prominent biographer of Milk, Randy Shilts, elides most of this history and tries to downplay the connection to Jones. He does however mention that Ann Kronenberg, Milk’s hand-picked successor, immediately blamed Jones for the Milk assassination while offering no evidence. The cult of Harvey Milk simply did not want to examine the issue at all after his death, and deflected from it immediately with a risible conspiracy theory.
Ask anyone with a casual knowledge of the People’s Temple what it was, and they will almost certainly tell you, incorrectly, that Jones was an evangelical Christian. In fact, visitors to the cult compound in Guyana noted a complete absence of Christian iconography or “outwardly religious trappings” because Jones had in fact been a Communist since the 1950s. From The New York Times in 1978:
Several survivors, like the former farm manager, Jim Boge, suggested that Mr. Jones’s attachment to religion was not to the substance but to the technique. Mr. Jones, he said, had found evangelical speaking, music, faith‐healing and other tent‐meeting techniques useful in attracting and controlling the many working-class members, particularly the aged, whose Social Security and Government support checks were an important resource.
Religious performance was a means of “attracting and controlling” people, for Jones, who wanted as many government checks as possible going into his communist pocket. His heroes were Stalin and Mao, not Jesus and Mary. The communist character of the Jones cult was minimized in the 1980 TV miniseries about Jonestown, Guyana Tragedy. Powers Boothe portrayed Jones as a religious man, while the script framed him as a social justice activist gone wrong.
Cults of personality are quite common on the left and may even represent a successful formula. Barack Obama, the community organizer who became president, built an entire campaign on the basis of his personal charisma. His motto, “Yes we can”, directly borrowed Sí, se puede! Even the famous Shepard Fairey “HOPE” poster features totalitarian graphic design. The ‘branding’ of candidate Obama intentionally mirrored the look of a communist cult — and he monopolized authority on the left.
It was unclear just what could replace Obama’s personality cult. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont still has a fanatical following that never could believe he was less popular than Hillary Clinton. For while her cult of personality was not as intense, more of it lived inside the Democratic Party, whereas Sanders primarily shaped his appeal towards new and disaffected voters from outside it. Not by coincidence, this is when Democrats started losing elections to the cult of Donald Trump.
Of course, there is a vast difference between political candidates using branding techniques to chase voters and cult leaders abusing their followers. My point is that this aesthetic — call it ‘communist cult chic’ — is actually very attractive to liberal Democrats. Imitate Jim Jones, and your temple will fill up with believers in the social justice gospel, so that you can squeeze them for votes and money. It’s a proven formula for success, on the left.
This is why I say that the left has a blind spot for cults. Reading the intellectual history of Lenin and Trotsky and Stalin and Mao, one comes away with the impression that Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were simply rival cults, and that all of totalitarianism is in fact a history of cults. Trotsky’s failure to play the intra-party game, and his eventual demise in Mexico City, resonates with Sanders disdaining the party super delegates and paying for it in 2016. But these are people, and it pays also to think of causes.
By now I am hardly original to point out that ‘wokeness’ is a cult, or else a ‘cult-like’ phenomenon, or to say that transgender ideology behaves like a cult. Nor am I the first to note that the phrase ‘born in the wrong body’ is patent religious speech. I have been asked why these strange beliefs seem to mesmerize Democrats, who cannot seem to give up on them.
The answer I have proposed elsewhere is that these beliefs form an ersatz religion among Democrats, for whom traditional Christianity is now anathema. I use the word ersatz to infer that these beliefs are poor substitutes for real religion, for they require the worship of weak gods.
Because these gods are weak, the cult must exert even stronger control over its believers. Misgendering, preferred pronouns, and phrases like “biological sex” become flashpoints for cancel mobs because the ideology of transgenderism is incoherent. The internal logic cannot survive five seconds of debate, therefore ‘this is not a debate’.
Notably, Democrats have redoubled their devotion to the cult of gender identity while largely letting go of the gods Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. To be sure, they expect to return to power in their glory, one day, and restore what Donald Trump has destroyed. They will also put him in prison, along with all of his friends and appointees, and also crush everyone who went along with him in any way, so that no one ever dares to smash their idols again.
So sayeth the cult of peace and justice.
César Chávez raped and molested with impunity because stopping him would have hurt the cause. Leftist political history is replete with men who did the same, and got away with it for the same reason. Feminism parted ways with the American left after the 1960s because women like Andrea Dworkin had had enough of leftist men, and the women who enable them. This is not really a new story at all.
Now the statues will be quietly removed from their plinths, the street signs will be changed, the plazas and buildings will be retitled, all in a single season. Watch them cover up the existence of the cult of Chávez, now, so that his sickening crimes do not damage the sacred cause.