Clara Luz Flores, Defending NXIVM Ties on Facebook, Accused of Buying ‘Likes’

Last week, she enjoyed hundreds of thousands of people giving her the horse laugh, after getting caught lying about Nxivm and Keith Raniere. She claimed she knew neither of them.

Yesterday, Clara Luz Flores Carrales, 47, the woman who is vying not only to become governor of Nuevo Leon but potentially for the title of “ass clown of Mexico,” enjoyed provoking additional guffaws when she was accused of purchasing “likes” on Facebook for a video she made defending her earlier lies about not knowing Nxivm and Raniere.

Buying Facebook “likes” is not expensive, fools buy them all the time for less than a peso per “like.”

For those who don’t know, “buying likes” on Facebook means paying some online company to use fake accounts or hoax accounts to push likes to the purchaser’s Facebook account. Sellers of likes use bots – a web of automated accounts appearing legitimate and sometimes they sell likes from real people, usually generated by click farms.

Click farms are schemes where a click farmer contracts and pays small sums to large groups of low-income people in poor countries to go to Facebook add click like as directed. Hence, they are likes from people who have no interest in the Facebook post or the person whose Facebook it is.

In short, poor people who don’t live in Mexico, and, unlike Luz Flores, never heard of Nxivm or Raniere, who probably cannot read Spanish and wouldn’t have a clue about the controversy, may have been paid to click “like” on her post.

If true, it is deceptive to people considering voting for her, but looked at another way, Clara Luz Flores may be helping to support indigent people overseas.

The controversy initially started when Frank Report, in 2017, exposed that Clara was once a coach for Nxivm, a fact she evidently wished to keep hidden. The story was published before Raniere was arrested, and Clara was then mayor of Escobedo, a municipality near Monterrey, and a coach for Nxivm in Monterrey. Being an elected official made her a VIP in Nxivm.

Now that she’s running for governor, Mexican media, led by journalist Julio Astillero, picked up on the news revealed in the three-year-old Frank Report story and questioned her about her ties to Nxivm. She chose to answer the controversy in a way not unlike politicians do in America:

She lied.

As for meeting the founder of Nxivm, Keith Raniere, she said she never heard of him.

Her opponent, Adrián de la Garza, apparently got his hands on and released a video where Clara is sitting at Nancy Salzman’s house, [the president of Nxivm] in Albany, NY, speaking with Raniere for more than an hour.

In it, she speaks Spanish.

Raniere pontificates in English, as she makes sheep’s-eyes at him and alternately laughs, smiles, giggles, looks admiringly, and appears wonderstruck at his profound statements, which she can’t understand, not only because she can’t speak English, but, possibly, as it has been said by some of his followers, because no one can fully understand the deeper utterances of the self-proclaimed “man with the highest IQ in history,” for they are either too deep for comprehension or they are, as has been described by critics, who call his “highest IQ” story deceptive, as “word salad with bullshit dressing.”

After being outed as an oafish liar, Luz Flores published on her Facebook account [see video here] her explanation of her innocent mistake.

[Excellent coverage of this can be found on Blogdelregio.com: Clara Luz responds to NXIVM video; admits knowing Keith Raniere’

In the video, she admits knowing about NXIVM and that she did meet Raniere after all.

Reading from sheets of paper, Luz Flores said, “It was only a meeting that I had before I found out about him. Just like thousands of other citizens and different religious leaders, business leaders, opinion leaders…we were surprised by the lies and deceptions by which NXIVM operated and for which its leader was rightly sentenced to 120 years in prison.

“My only mistake was to participate in a self-improvement course,” she said with a look of wounded innocence. “With deep regret, I accept my terrible fault.”

On a scale of one to 10, the video in and of itself might have been a “5”.  But it might turn out a zero, despite getting more than 55,000 likes on Facebook.

As reported in blogdelregio.com: Did she buy Likes? Clara Luz’s video again sparks controversy, people with Arab and Asian names seem to be among those liking her video, which raised the allegation that she might have purchased some of the likes.

To give her the benefit of the doubt, maybe Luz Flores has enough international appeal to attract the interest and approval of, for instance, people such as Ghulam M. Qureshi, Jeffrey Xu, Phan Vihn Khang, Aboo Nguyen, Khashayar Moradpour and even Phuc Vu, a man who would have a hard time in America when a policeman asked his name.

Did Phuc Vu and others care enough about why she did no wrong when she once met Raniere to like her video? It may be difficult to find out since some of them do not have a profile picture, never made a single post or have any Facebook friends.

As for Clara Luz Flores, an argument might be made that “Phuc Vu” epitomizes her entire attitude towards voters, the truth, and her campaign.

Frank Parlato