The opinions expressed in this article are those of “Fred”, a frequent contributor to Frank Report, who believes that the concept of Rainbow Cultural Garden is flawed. However, it may be true that Rainbow has had positive benefits for the children in it. Frank Report would welcome the views of parents of Rainbow children to hear the results of their children’s participation.
By Fred
This is in response to Raniere Supporter: ‘His Words Have Been Twisted and His Life’s Work Has Been Stolen and Destroyed’.
The writer, referring to Rainbow Cultural Garden, writes of Keith Raniere, “He created a beautiful program for children.”
The Rainbow Cultural Garden schools were not just an illegal and uncontrolled experiment on small children. These schools went against all the evidence of proper language acquisition and its importance for future intellectual development.
In 1987, I got a master’s degree for a study of science classroom language. I recorded hundreds of hours of classroom discourse and spent thousands of hours transcribing it, including every “um” and “er…”.
I surveyed all the existing literature on classroom language at the time (there was amazingly little, especially actual classroom studies). I studied all the literature on language and language learning — from Sausurre, one of the founders of modern linguistics, through to Piaget, Chomsky and the like.
I was forced to wade through Foucault, Derrida and Lacan, etc., a total pile of crap in my book, useless for classroom investigation. To my great surprise, and putting me totally at odds with my thesis supervisor, I found that the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein with his concept of “language games” actually provided me with the most useful analytical tools.
Much of the research involved observing second-language speakers, so I made a special study of the influence of “mother tongue” language development and second-language learning.
I haven’t checked to see what the current orthodoxy says, but I can tell you that there was one and only one research finding that was of any relevance at the time. This finding was clear across the board. The more secure a child was in their mother tongue, the better was all their future learning, and all their future language development, including learning foreign languages. And everything I have seen since then confirms this finding. In general, a strong foundation in the mother tongue is the basis for all learning.
The idea that you teach a child in a different language every day — each different to the mother tongue — is one of the most stupid and abusive practices I’ve ever heard of in early education. I am 100% certain that every single child that went through this program will show clear signs of cognitive damage and language deficiency. How Raniere was able to get away with this appalling experiment on children is quite beyond me, and it really shows the power of cult thinking.
Get this straight: I believe deeply in freedom in education, that people should be able to teach their children as they wish, as long as the basic laws of the land are not broken, in terms of abuse, child labor, coercion, etc. Rainbow Cultural Gardens provide a really clear test case because there were multiple laws broken by this cult, including human trafficking, sexual grooming and rape of children, and savage mental torture and confinement of young victims.
When a school acts directly against the most basic tenet of learning — sound grasp of the mother tongue — there should be a very loud alarm bell that rings somewhere. How were these schools able to get away with this abuse?
Let me tell you: it’s not easy to keep a school going. The fact that RCGs were able to carry on as they did, shows me that there were other hands at work behind the scenes, other agendas at play. I am certain that Keith Raniere could not himself have managed such a school unaided for one day.
Just for comparison, take a look at this video from the Ramtha cult’s now-defunct school, Phoenix Rising. It all sounds slick and wholesome, but you’ll find the Ramtha exercises — including blundering around a field blindfolded looking for “your” card, and doing blindfold archery — feature strongly, from about 1:25 into the video. This is also abusive crap, in my view, but my real point here is that this school went bankrupt, despite the De Beers diamond heiress Rebecca Oppenheimer donating $170,000 a pop to keep it going. Even with this kind of support, the school couldn’t survive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hR9zOldqod0
How were the Rainbow Cultural Gardens able to carry on for so long? Was this part of a trafficking scheme, where the kids and “teachers” were all being brainwashed? There are still huge questions in my mind about this exercise, and there should be a proper investigation by the educational authorities in each country that hosted these schools.
But to call this a “beautiful program for children” is seriously deranged, if you know anything about education. These people are living in a world of total delusion.
Watch this important video where Raniere teaches his First Line slave Loreta Garza, who also headed the Rainbow experiment, about how to teach babies.
Frank Parlato’s work with Jerry Ianelli of the Miami New Times directly led to the closing of the Rainbow Cultural Garden in Miami, a month after Raniere was arrested.
Frank Parlato 
Janine Morrison 
J.J. O'Hara 
Richard Luthmann 
Marie White 
Paul Serran
I hope you see this, Fred. I covered your ‘existing literature on classroom language’ not during my initial teacher training, but on my Phil./Linguistics degree. I thought the ITT training was pretty poor and for me only redeemed by the presence of coaches from the Tavistock Institute, who serviced our Classroom Management module. That was solid gold. I’ve done, by now, a lot of CPD with the Tavistock, you might want to take a look at their courses. Another very fruitful avenue of my research came from the evolutionary biologist Bruce Charlton, esp. this paper on Lang.Acq. the most interesting and fruitful research on the subject I’ve ever read. Charlton, much like the Tavistock, seems to attract controversy, interesting. I hope you get something useful from this. I agree with your view of the RCG.
https://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/awconlang.html
Learning five languages is a positive goal to ascertain for anyone.
Teaching five languages, to toddlers and grade schoolers, using the Rainbow system is a tragic mistake.
https://frankreport.com/2017/12/04/the-sun-names-the-cult-in-rainbow-cultural-garden/
I can only give you a simple opinion. I remember vividly my childhood, in which a sense of security and familiarity was the strongest I received from my parents outside of love. I suppose for a child, the mother tongue is just as important as love. Every nuance, every nuance of thought and emotion is expressed in our mother tongue, they rightly look at this as our base. Of course, you can learn any language, but it’s never going to be like the base. Besides, the upbringing of a child ends until the age of 6. Not in the sense of the word, but because that’s when a child’s child’s child’s soul begins to close, and then it begins to slowly move into the adult world, through learning, perception, years of experience. My mom was an educator, and she was very concerned about this subject.
I get confused by all of the anonymous “Freds,” I assume this isn’t the 5G one. LOL
interesting where the Phoenix Rising School link ends up; https://www.yelp.com/biz_redir?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thephoenixrisingschool.org&website_link_type=website&src_bizid=HXDIZ0tend_N3xTAVyevmQ&cachebuster=1605364808&s=f1a0580436bd8102457f8a1fd9942dc3f877907f267d7a481391a572a9084632, it’s as if Raniere had his hand in it. The school failing is what happens when do-gooder Libtards think it’s a good idea to have kids in perpetual field trips. I think these kids will have a lot of rude awakenings in the future when they start to experience reality. LOL
Now we have video evidence of Raniere’s physical violence, at 1:30 in the above Garza video. LOL
“I surveyed all the existing literature on classroom language at the time (there was amazingly little, especially actual classroom studies). I studied all the literature on language and language learning — from Sausurre, one of the founders of modern linguistics, through to Piaget, Chomsky and the like.” No, you didn’t. you may have surveyed and studied all you could find, but there is too much information to claim you found all information. Such it is with many people, the “my truth” is thought to be “the whole truth,” and it isn’t. LOL
“I was forced to wade through Foucault, Derrida and Lacan, etc., a total pile of crap in my book, useless for classroom investigation. To my great surprise, and putting me totally at odds with my thesis supervisor, I found that the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein with his concept of “language games” actually provided me with the most useful analytical tools.” You weren’t forced to do anything, you did it to put together a solid and defendable thesis, and being at odds with others is part of the process and something that Frank likes to limit in his published stories and comments section. LOL
“The idea that you teach a child in a different language every day — each different to the mother tongue — is one of the most stupid and abusive practices I’ve ever heard of in early education. I am 100% certain that every single child that went through this program will show clear signs of cognitive damage and language deficiency. How Raniere was able to get away with this appalling experiment on children is quite beyond me, and it really shows the power of cult thinking.” Raniere got away with it the same way he got away with many other crimes for a very long time, people didn’t speak up about it, especially in the post-internet world. I am probably one of the few people who not only spoke up, but also contacted the California and New York authorities, but as others did not do the same thing, it went nowhere. LOL
“Let me tell you: it’s not easy to keep a school going. The fact that RCGs were able to carry on as they did, shows me that there were other hands at work behind the scenes, other agendas at play. I am certain that Keith Raniere could not himself have managed such a school unaided for one day.” The answer is that the other hands at work behind the scenes were the rest of the NXIVM infrastructure. LOL
“How were the Rainbow Cultural Gardens able to carry on for so long? Was this part of a trafficking scheme, where the kids and “teachers” were all being brainwashed? There are still huge questions in my mind about this exercise, and there should be a proper investigation by the educational authorities in each country that hosted these schools.” This was answered above. I think Raniere designed it to ensure there was a constant influx of young girls at his disposal, and there is no such thing as brainwashing, as it is not a generally accepted scientific term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainwashing
Ayn Rand is for Libertarians. Frank would sensor my opinions about them. But your opinions about liberals are enshrined. This was an objectivist cult, not liberal.
Enter into your search engine “Ayn Rand Sociopath”, enjoy.
I would not censor your opinion on libertarians if it related to the topics at hand.
I’m not a Libertarian or a Libtard, and didn’t bring up Ayn Rand, so what’s your point? LOL
I am very much the 5G Fred, there is also a Fred 2, nothing whatsoever to do with me. It’s a common and entirely honorable name.
Just one point: especially with language, there is indeed a vast literature, more than a lifetime’s work to cover. Have you ever looked at the mind-boggling terminology they use in “comparative literature”? I covered all the basic approaches to language learning. Where I was completely exhaustive was that I had ALL the classroom language studies, where they had actually recorded and transcribed classroom discourse, that were available in English in the world at the time. There were amazingly few of these — lots of people talked about classroom language, very few of them actually seemed to listen to it. And as I say, much of what I was watching was second-language English teaching, so I went quite deeply into that literature. I’m serious, the one consistent finding in this field was of the importance of a strong mother-tongue foundation.
For the rest, I read just about everything of prominence in the philosophy of science and the role of language in science, people like Hempel, Nagel, Popper, Feyerabend, Kuhn and his paradigms, Lakatos. One of the most insightful scientists was Neils Bohr, who said “Physics is not about how the world is, it is about what we can say about the world” — i.e., physics is really a language game, in Wittgenstein’s terms. Again, Wittgenstein is very profound, he was also quite nuts, so I really had to spend a lot of time trying to decode him and get something useful from his scattered thoughts. Ultimately, I feel it was worthwhile.
As the 5G Fred, I’ve pointed out elsewhere on FR that in this thesis I developed the only instrument in the entire academic literature to measure attention in the classroom. I can take a whole lesson, calibrate it, and give you a number at any stage of the proceedings to indicate the attention level of the class. I validated it and confirmed its reliability quite extensively. Go and look, tell me if you can find any other validated instrument to measure attention in the classroom. No kids can fool me, no matter how much they try, I am tracking their subconscious behavior.
OK: just to end, here’s a tune called “Fred” by the monster British guitarist Allan Holdsworth, there’s some very good bass playing here. To Freds everywhere, live long and prosper.
Fred, I’m going to ask you a question and by no means is it meant an insult in any way. Are you on the spectrum? You seem to excel at pattern recognition, clearly. This is one of my strengths as well, but I’m no where near your level.
Fred Frith is a very good Fred.
Are you sure you’re not Raniere? LOL
Your word salad is quite delicious. LOL
Interesting read, and I too was wondering if these kids will grow up either speaking ten languages or none at all.
My wife is literally perfectly bilingual. But in order to be a UN interpreter, you need a language from two different language groups: e.g., Germanic and Romantic.
And the section of the brain responsible for language closes off young. An abuse victim locked in a room as a child could not learn to speak years later when she was rescued. Fact.
My guess is “too much of a good thing”. I would personally never subject my own child to this.
I almost wonder if this is an unauthorized psychological experiment…
In addition to being an unauthorized psychological experiment that was “overseen” by the former doctor, Brandon Porter, Rainbow Cultural Garden (RCG) was both an unlicensed/illegal daycare center – and an unlicensed/illegal school. It also employed many immigrants who were in the U.S. illegally – and exploited them by forcing them to kick back some of their meager salaries to NXIVM.
The fact that RCG was allowed to operate for so long in Saratoga County underscores just how much influence and power NXIVM had gained over local public officials through bribery, blackmail, and intimidation. Unfortunately, it appears that none of those officials will ever be prosecuted for their malfeasance.
RCG being open for so long is also a sign of citizens not speaking up. LOL
KR, trust me, I know. That’s why they call it Smallbany. It’s pay to play. And step on the wrong toes, and you are one step away from character assassination.
I think another factor is the tolerance of the public in the area for ‘alternative’ ideas and lifestyles. It’s telling that the NXIVM was mixed up with the local Waldorf school – and that they were located in the sort of area that had a Waldorf school.
You get the same thing in places like rural Utah and Arizona, where the FLDS and other polygamous Mormons have long been not just tolerated, but left unchecked to perpetrate abuses. And there are all sorts of abusive or cultic Christian groups in small towns around the country and particularly the Bible Belt, which besides tolerance by locals, also largely slip under the radar because they’re in areas that get little media coverage.
To everyone:
If you happen to be critical or skeptical of Fred’s article, please read the following article that Frank Parlato penned a few years ago. The article is as relevant today as it was three years ago. It explains what’s wrong with the Rainbow program.
https://frankreport.com/2017/12/04/the-sun-names-the-cult-in-rainbow-cultural-garden/
“The more secure a child was in their mother tongue, the better was all their future learning. The idea that you teach a child in a different language every day — each different to the mother tongue — is one of the most stupid and abusive practices I’ve ever heard of in early education.”
Were the children allowed to return to their parents at the end of the day and on weekends? If so, wouldn’t they build that foundation in their mother tongue at home?
To reply to another commenter, I believe that the current advice for children in bilingual families is to have each parent speak to the child in their own native language; i.e., one speaks only Spanish, one speaks only English. It typically will take these children longer into toddlerhood to develop language skills on the level of a monolingual child of the same age, but after that initial delay, they quickly catch up.
The rules are the parents can’t talk to them unless they can speak the language of the day. LOL
That’s exactly what my neighbors do. I didn’t understand what was going on. Thanks for posting!
Thank you for obfuscating the purpose of RCG, the ‘moloch’ stage of nxium cult development, by offering a couple of highly generalised, uncontentious facts about day school v. boarding school, and language acquisition in the home, in this case a bilingual home.
RCG was certainly a very, very particular type of pre-k, in that it served the vision of a RICO cult enterprise, headed by an ageing perv with a penchant for kiddos,[but not child maintenance] and a harem full of women branded and starved to look like they had the bodies of kiddos.
BTW, Why would you think it OK to add x5 different languages, one each day, to your bilingual child’s L1/L1 process load?
Is there pedagogical research that sanctions this practice? If so, I’d like to peer review it.
Congratulations on the sobriety by the way.
The optimum program was 7 days – a different language every day. Parents were not supposed to talk to their child except in the language of the day while the Rainbow teacher was there.
I know as a fact, that some kids in Mexico are still in this program. Those kids whose parents still support KR.
This was very interesting to read. Thank you. Please share the research papers you mentioned. Would love to read your thesis. Thanks for the clarity
MK-Ultra Style Psychosis Training. The ‘Elite’ want their children to be psychotics and totally devoid of any altruism. They will keep everything within the family network. It is pretty easy to comprehend.
Nah. MK-Ultra methodology is to invoke deep disassociative states via trauma on the recipient.
This idea (of rotating languages learning by way of a different daily nanny) was just a stupidly horrible one by the “smartest man in the world” to make a disproportionate amount of money for pseudoscience and keep (and maybe bring in more) people and their families into the NXIVM fold.
Keith was all about glorifying himself, sex, and making money which he hid from others by pretending to not care about it: i.e., not buying fancy clothes, expensive cars, and houses as it would bring too much attention to his parasitic lifestyle. In the latter sense, he was cunning, like the billionaires who use their financial instruments to manipulate the tax systems of various countries to pay less proportionate taxes than the poor and middle class.
From the Miami New Times link above:
“ The midtown school isn’t the only odd Florida tie to Raniere. Fort Lauderdale political consultant and Donald Trump confidant Roger Stone also briefly worked for NXIVM. Stone told New Times yesterday via text message that the group hired him as a lobbyist after a “Republican state senator” in New York recommended him. NXIVM asked for help dealing with a former employee it claimed had stolen intellectual property, but Stone says he left after telling the group it needed a lawyer instead. Stone also said that NXIVM seemed to be pitched to “middle-aged housewives seeking to build their self-esteem” but that he declined to attend an NXIVM class himself, which bothered NXIVM members.”
Who is that New York State Senator, and is that Senator the reason NXIVM was protected from investigation and prosecution?
Did that State Senator turn the State Police officer that had previously helped KK? The one that went after her for a laptop?
It’s a limited pool of names from that time period. An intrepid journalist or ideally the DOJ should look further.
A Biden administration isn’t going to look into it, but Raniere may get pardoned. LOL
My father spoke 5 languages. He grew up in Rio de Janeiro, surrounded by many. It was English and 4 other Latin based languages with similar rules and words.
I speak only one, to my own disappointment. I just don’t think I’m wired for it. It’s an admirable talent, it’s too bad this wasn’t what it was sold to be. It’s very idealist and an understandable draw.
The aspiration is to be understood and understand a wide range of people. Taught within a system which teaches the opposite.
I speak 5 languages but I did not begin new language acquisition as a child. I have no idea if Rainbow Garden was useful or destructive but suspect the crucial variable might be if the children had positive, bonding relationships with their teachers.
Testing of the Rainbow children with comparison to a control group (or a comparison versus age-appropriate normative behavior) is necessary to prove the validity of your assertion of cognitive damage. Since you are presenting your claim as “science,” you should also stand behind it by using your full name, affiliations and credentials.
We’ll find out whether Rainbow was useful or destructive in a few years as these kids get older – however it won’t be a controlled experiment, as they were also f*cked up with NXIVM ideas. LOL
Yes, let’s experiment on human beings and see what happens. LOL
How can you form positive bonding relationships, when, as a very small child, you have a different teacher every day, each one talking to you in a completely different language? In Waldorf primary schools, the teacher often moves up the classes with the kids, so they have the same teacher year after year, it’s felt to be so important to keep this relationship stable. The work done establishing such a bond is very precious, it’s worth sustaining the relationship. If there is a particular personality clash between teacher and student, Rudolf Steiner also said it’s much better if they change to another teacher asap.
To quote from that Sun article on the RCGs:
“I have spoken to several parents who were bitterly upset because their children could not speak any other languages and in one case the child could not even speak his own language.”
It seems the results among these kids were not good, compared with their peers. Doing the tests you describe is experimenting on children, no question, and raises all kinds of ethical issues. Parents don’t want their kid experimented on, they want them educated by experienced, professional teachers who know what they’re doing. Minimum-wage trafficked nannies from all over the world do not fit the bill.
Just the fact that you suggest such experiments on children shows that you don’t really understand the ethical issues involved at all. I’ve been involved with curriculum design, it’s a really complex multilevel process that requires utmost sensitivity and a broad awareness. If you mess up, you can never recover those wasted years in all the kids’ lives.
I’ve explained on FR before that my 5G material put me very literally at risk of being jailed — just for quoting peer-reviewed scientific papers, you are now labelled a “conspiracy theorist”. So I’m staying anonymous for now, very reluctantly, I usually operate quite openly under my own name. I am fully intending to dox myself at some stage, when I feel it would actually be safer to have a more public profile.
As for my background, well, I have a master’s degree in education, so I am “Monsieur” Fred by title. My other post-graduate degree is a British-style first-class honours in applied mathematics, the academic equivalent of a professional engineering degree. I also majored in physics and lectured physics at a fairly prestigious university for five years, until I got fed up with the academic system and left to become a journalist, basically walking out of the classroom for good in 1994, although I’ve done some primary school music teaching since then as a survival thing.
My honours dissertation in 1979 was on the computer modeling of the evolution of ecosystems, what they now call “chaos” or “complexity” theory. I did special courses in biological modeling and epidemiology, which has become very useful in the 5G row, since many of the arguments in this field are about statistics and their interpretation.
I’ve also been a professional statistical editor for about eight years now, I’ve handled many hundreds of papers for journal publication. I edited a series of papers produced by the Japanese Cabinet Office on population demographics and their aging society, and the same for the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the military in South Korea. I also edited the book chapters containing the main model for the global carbon exchange system, with equations that ran over several pages and summations covering every country on earth. So I’ve paid my scientific dues, and I have about 15 years of direct classroom experience — believe me, I have the scars and still occasionally have the nightmares.
One thing I’ve found is that education research and teaching experience now marks you as a complete dolt and idiot in most forums, everyone knows that teachers are useless and the dumbest people on campus are in the education department. Nonetheless, I feel my research experience in education has given me invaluable insights into what’s really going on, especially with the cognitive damage being done to kids by microwave radiation, which literally destroys the cortex of the brain in young children, as a recent NIH study has shown. My 1980s investigation of “attention” in the classroom has turned out to be very relevant today. What are your qualifications to criticize me, may I ask?
Very little children need key figures with whom they bond, not different teachers every day and they certainly need to learn their first language well. I remember even here in the UK back in the 1970s we were never quite sure if it were better where one parent spoke a different language to allow the child to be bilingual (always talk to that parent in that language) or not. I still think the jury is out on that one but probably, on balance, that is fine, but a different language every day at school for very small children sounds a bit dangerous to me although not so bad that it should be banned as we do allow a full range of different kind of education and parents can choose.
In general terms, however, children learning another language is part of having a good education., I made sure mine at least at secondary school level all did at least one. I studied German to age 18 and French to age 16 for example.
I loved the Chalet School school stories about a boarding school as a teenage girl. That school (fictional) taught the girls in English, French and German, total immersion with days when it was French, and days German which I thought sounded very useful when I was at my own school struggling through my French and German classes.
—In general terms, however, children learning another language is part of having a good education. I made sure mine at least at secondary school level all did at least one.
Jane, with all due respect, these children learn 5+ languages rotating every day. The teachers only speak in their native language and the children do not see their parents until nighttime. The school was closed by the French government. The program was likely founded to damage the children’s cognitive development.
Please read the other articles regarding Rainbow.
I doubt the French government made that determination, all they had to know is that it was not licensed and it was associated with Raniere/NXIVM. LOL
I agree very much with the importance of a “key figure” in the young person’s life. In my master’s thesis, the only psychologist I mentioned was Donald Winnicott, a British pediatrician and psychoanalyst who did a lot of work with children during the Blitz, kids who were evacuated en masse and separated from their parents under sometimes horrendous conditions.
People forget how bad the Blitz was. I had a dear friend, a nurse who served in the Spanish Civil War. She actually saw Churchill during the Blitz, when he emerged from his bunker to tell a small crowd in a bombed area, “We can take it.” Margaret said that one of the women there cursed him out, saying it was fine for him to say we could take it, sitting safe in his hole. It wasn’t so bloody easy for them.
Winnicott studied and worked with Melanie Klein, so he had a critical grounding in all the Freudian bullshit. “Good breast, bad breast” was Klein’s signature line on motherhood. I wonder if that would be politically acceptable these days. Who knows. I just read a chick-lit novel by Sheila O’Flanagan in which a fictitious feminist author writes a book called Tit Power, maybe that’s the theory we need.
Winnicott was looking at the minimum a child needs to survive the experience of growing up more or less intact, and able to function more or less as an adult. He found that kids were generally very resilient, if they had at least one secure source of affection and care. He called it the “good enough mother” approach, and it was probably one of the more helpful psychological theories we’ve seen from this truly dismal science.
If you check Winnicott out, you’ll see he had an entire theory of democracy based on healthy family dynamics. He was very profound. You do occasionally hear a mention of his name, but I doubt that many Ritalin-totin’ shrinks of today would be aware of these ideas.
As far as multilingualism goes: I myself grew up in a thoroughly bilingual home. My father refused to allow any English newspapers in the house. He threw a fit when a page from a particularly liberal English paper was found in the kitchen. It had been wrapping potatoes — he said this was no excuse.
Code switching, language switching, occurs in particular contexts. Intuiting these contexts as a kid, understanding them at an emotional level, is key to beginning to understand what the words mean. In our home, the second language was always used for big decisions, so my father could understood everything that was said. My parents would speak in hushed tones and I always felt that things were under control.
Even in a truly bilingual home, where the parents speak different languages, you learn in relation to the mother tongue what’s going on and being said in the other language. Never underestimate the power of the mother’s voice. You spent six months in the womb listening to that voice and its overtones. There was a little fad a while back around the Mozart Effect, including the idea that Mozart’s music heard in the womb had a special effect. This followed from the work of Alfred Tomatis, who discovered that he could trigger what he called “sonic rebirth” in people, basically regressing them to the womb, through rhythms and tones.
http://www.tomatistherapy.com/why-mozart.html
Tomatis found there were two sounds that really influenced people: one was the very high harmonics of Mozart pieces, particularly the violin concertos — and the other was the sound of your mother’s voice, again, just the high harmonics will do the trick. These vocal harmonic patterns are completely unique to each person, hence the very advanced speech recognition technology we now have.
I encountered this harmonic treatment once, at a psychotherapeutic center. I put these headphones on and just heard some funny scratchy noises. I was very skeptical. I said I was into drumming and feeling the rhythms with the whole body, not just the ears. The guy smiled and assured me that this worked.
So as the linguistic codes shift and shift again, your primary filter for all meaning in the home is your mother’s voice. Even if you’re in someone else’s care, you will “read” their voice based on your prenatal foundation from the mother voice. I read a long treatise by an Italian academic, pointing out that hearing is the first sense we develop, and our entire identity is formed in relation to the mother’s heartbeat and voice.
You think Google haven’t thought about this? How they can put a scratchy little sound in your ear that you would hardly notice, and it will make you do almost anything the voice says? It would be easy to obtain
Once you’ve acquired a secure mother tongue or tongues, you can start having German days and French days. In teaching primary music, I used to insist that everything was said in Italian operatic style, especially tacet, “silence”. Also misterioso.
All of this is hopeless if the kid doesn’t have a good “home language” grounding. I’ve seen many kids at primary school level virtually unable to speak. By far the worst cases I ever saw were during a three-week observation period before teacher training began at the University of London. This was 1978, the great Winter of Discontent, a truly depressed and depressing time. I was at Princess May Primary in Hackney, a very deprived borough in East London. It was a big Victorian building with a headmaster cowering in the attic, I only ever saw him once.
There were kids who literally couldn’t count to “one” on their fingers because they wouldn’t stay still, others who were pathologically shy, some seemed hardly able to string two words together. And lots of other very cheerful and pretty normal kids, very talkative and observant.
But if you ever come across a kid who has a stunted social background, you’ll know, this is always an uphill struggle. You can check out the cases with feral children, the prognosis is not good. It’s not like there are scars that might heal. It’s that there was a normal growth and social development that failed to happen. It’s very difficult to come back from some experiences.
Every single thing that Keith Raniere did, was aimed at throwing people off balance, abusing them (often in the name of “ethics”), confusing them, gaslighting them, systematically traumatizing them at every turn. And I honestly think this Rainbow Cultural Gardens program may just have been one of the nastiest and most destructive parts of the whole enterprise. I think this guy was setting up a child trafficking network, with dazed and confused kids, and underpaid nannies who may themselves have been trafficked and who were told to use only their home languages. It’s using language as an isolation mechanism, rather than a means of communication.
No, no. This program was only designed to damage kids and make the vulnerable. In fact, for a program carried out in full public view, I can scarcely think of a worse way to scramble the brains of young children. If anyone thinks Keith Raniere had some kind of key that enabled him to spout this effortless line of profound bullshit, it was just that he was acting to confuse, unbalance, disorientate, isolate, traumatize, humiliate, just plain hurt people at every turn. And they came back for more. The more people trust you, the more you can hurt them. The deliberate shocks — oh boy, I just heard this “rapeable baby” line from Raniere in the Seduced videos — are all so calculated and vicious, this is a true sociopath at work.
Raniere really and truly is a vicious piece of work, and the world is much better off with him put away for life. There’s much more nasty stuff yet to emerge. But Rainbow Cultural Gardens really stand out for me.