A. Sausage Says Brainwashing Not an Excuse for Allison Mack

By Aristotle’s Sausage

Brainwashing would make a great excuse and absolve Allison Mack of responsibility for her rotten and criminal actions.

MK10ART’s Allison Mack

The problem is, there’s no such thing as brainwashing.

 

Keith Raniere on camera drying the brains of three of his students’ after washing them..

“Brainwashing” was invented by journalist Edward Hunter for an article he wrote in the Miami Daily News in September 1950. The idea took root in the Red Scare era of the Korean War (how else to explain the spread of Communism?) and through popular fiction like The Manchurian Candidate (the book and the movie). J. Edgar Hoover believed in it.

For the origins and history of brainwashing,

“Beginning in the early 1950s, the CIA and the Defense Department conducted secret research for twenty years, attempting to develop practical brainwashing techniques. The research was a complete failure.”

https://www.cesnur.org/2003/brain_conv.htm

“The key issue relative to the scientific standing of brainwashing theory is whether the transformation of self and commitment (whether to a new or to a pre-existing worldview) has been coercively imposed in a way that contradicts the free will of the individual, and whether that claim of coercive influence has been confirmed or disconfirmed by scientific research… That core brainwashing theory has been conclusively disconfirmed.”

So much for brainwashing. 

As for NLP, it’s pseudoscience. It does not work. People can’t be “programmed”. They can’t be mind-whammied. They can, of course, be convinced, pressured, or coerced. That’s what Raniere was doing. He was using high-pressure sales tactics, and he was good at it.

But that’s all it was. Sales tactics. He was no Svengali. He had no special diabolical power to erase free will.

High-pressure sales tactics only work on certain people. Gamblers call them “marks.” Mack was a mark (ha! That alliterates!)

mk10 art paintings of Raniere and Mack

Mack and Raniere had a fucked up relationship. They were both getting exactly what they wanted. He liked bossing people around and being top dog, and she wanted to be told what to do and what to think. She thought she was stupid, and she was right. Judging by her actions, Mack seems to be a weak-willed person with a vicious streak that Nxivm / DOS liberated.

Painting by MK10ART

I’m sorry, is that too harsh? It’s a conclusion based on factual evidence at Raniere’s trial and victim testimony at Mack’s sentencing—her wanton cruelty to her slaves and her employee Tabitha Chapman when Raniere was nowhere around.

And that’s the other thing. At any point during Mack’s years – years! – with Raniere, she could’ve hopped in her BMW and gone home to California. She wasn’t forced to stay in Knox Woods.

She wasn’t forced to abuse Tabby Chapman. She wasn’t forced to actually make those 2 am alerts to her slaves. It could’ve been, “let’s not and say we did”.

She didn’t have to be so mean.

She wasn’t forced to starve herself. Raniere didn’t have her locked in a room.

She could have said “no” to any of it or all of it. Other people did. All it would have required was an ethical sensibility and a backbone. Evidently, she lacked either.

Oh, but it would’ve cost her?

Raniere had those embarrassing photos, that compromising “collateral.”

So instead, she fucked over all those people to save her own ass? Real noble. That’s not what I call “having a good heart.” I have no respect for people who let themselves be kicked around. I have even less respect for people who kick others around when told to do so.

Which Mack did. Eagerly and with considerable relish. 

 

Allison Mack and Keith Raniere have a great deal in common. That’s probably why they hit it off so well from the start. They both are in prison, and it’s where they belong.

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  • “One of the surprising things to me when I started writing this book, and meeting Temple survivors, is that so many of them are really intelligent, capable people,” Guinn explained. While the handful of young people who followed Manson hoped to rule the world by Charlie’s side after a race war called Helter Skelter, Jones was the rare demagogue who attracted followers by appealing to their better angels.

    “Nobody joined Peoples Temple to get anything,” Guinn says. “They were willing to give up material things to try to make it a better world for everybody, and that, to me, is the definition of tragedy.”

    https://www.salon.com/2017/04/08/the-myths-of-jonestown-jim-jones-was-who-charlie-manson-wanted-to-be-says-author-of-new-book-on-1978-tragedy/

  • .. Aristotle’s model of comprehension involves the description of a phenomenon and identification of its efficient causes (triggers), material cause (substrate), formal cause (models of structure), and final cause (function).

    This causal analysis provides a framework for understanding hypnosis and the hypnotic state. States are constellations of parameters within specified ranges; they name, but do not explain, a phenomenon.

    Concerns about reification of states are matters of semantics and pragmatics, not ontology. Isolation of efficient causes (e.g., procedure, context, social variables) is but one component of understanding. Experimental, technical, and conceptual advances have carried us into a century where the substrates and functions of hypnosis may be represented in synoptic theories that comprise all 4 causes of hypnosis. ..

    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12934841/

    For example:
    How susceptible are 20-something-year-olds to peer pressure?
    What does an extremely low-calorie starvation diet do to young female brains?
    Does sleep deprivation, the startle response and being “READY!” 24/7/365 create slaves and/or zombies?
    What did Nancy’s Neurolinguistic Programming program, exactly?
    How persuasive was the blackmail?
    Is crowd mentality persuasive?
    How important was it for Allison to be a successful “movie star” in “Hollywood”?
    In what ways did Richard Branson, the Bronfman sisters and the Dalai Lama influence her thoughts?

    What brainwaves and behaviors did Dr. Porter detect, chart and share?

    Keith and Nancy weren’t the only cowboys riding that rodeo. Extremely influential international contacts and millions of dollars can feed a lot of cattle and buy a lot of whips.

    • “What did Nancy’s Neurolinguistic Programming program, exactly?”

      The answer is simple: nothing.

      When NLP was first developed as a theory it received a lot of attention in the field of psychology and there were many studies exploring it.

      NLP carries no weight in academic psychology now because these studies revealed it was empirically powerles and conceptually confused. Now it only lives on in bubble-gum pop self-help gurudom.

      NLP is as powerful as the tooth fairy.

      • Alan never hypnotized people as Bandler did — or, did Bandler never hypnotize anyone either?

        “… Stand up comedy is one form of rapid induction.
        When you break some pattern of expectation on people mind.
        Other ones are; repetition (if you expose yourself to a specific content for a long period of time), tone of voice (making mocking, mimic an authority voice, poetry tone of voice, etc), nested loops (little stories inside each stories), embedded commands (generally within a story when a character tells something), etc. …”

        https://youtu.be/hAKqEkYXJMo?t=700

        • Did Keith and/or Nancy follow Scientology, Aleister Crowley and/or L. Ron Hubbard?

          35:29 … Bandler told that audience he’s “the one that nailed Jesus Christ to the cross”.

          49:26 … He believes in magic.

          56:33 … “Freedom is absolutely everything and love is all the rest.”

          Aleister Crowley:
          “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Love is the law, love under will.”

          “Aleister Crowley’s essay “The Revival of Magick” was originally published under the pseudonym “The Master Therion” in a four part series in The International: A Review of Two Worlds from August through November 1917. Crowley’s affiliation with The International occurred during his five-year stay in America from 1914 through 1919. Not long after his arrival, Crowley found himself in financial straits and found a partial solution in the form of George Sylvester Viereck, a writer and editor who owned two journals, The Fatherland and The International.

          … Crowley began by writing pro-German articles for The Fatherland and soon began writing for The International as well in July 1915. Over the ensuing years he contributed various articles and poetry and became managing editor of The International in August of 1917… ” https://www.100thmonkeypress.com/book_store/revival/revival.htm

          “The aim of Parson’s ‘Babalon Working’ was first to identify a female partner who would serve as his partner in esoteric sexual rituals; the partner would then become the vessel for the ‘magickal child’ or ‘moonchild,’ a supernatural offspring that would be the embodiment of ultimate power… According to Parson’s account of March 2–3, 1946, Hubbard channeled the voice of Babalon, speaking as the beautiful but terrible lady…“ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babalon_Working

          Why did Alison post a photo of Marina Abromovich on social media at 4:00 AM?

          Keith was impressed with “Scientology”.
          L. Ron Hubbard was involved in hidden practices.
          Nancy and Keith were impressed with Richard Bandler.
          Bandler seems to have been involved in occult religious beliefs.
          The Dalai Lama told followers to think and feel the most horrible thoughts in their hearts.

          Dark thoughts, physical and sexual abuse, blackmail, brainwashing and torture are dark activities. Some call NXIVM “a sex cult”. Was it an MLM cult? A Neurolinguistic Programming Scientology “tech” cult? Or, were NXIVM leaders involved in a hidden religion?

      • “the consensus scientific opinion is that NLP is pseudoscience[d][e]”
        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming

        “The last thirty years of research have simply shown that NLP is bunk.”
        https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/neurolinguistic-programming-and-other-nonsense/

        “New ideas in applied science (like health care or counseling) are evaluated in two ways – are the basic science premises of the idea valid, and does it work… In the case of NLP it has failed every test of both its underlying theories and empirical tests of its efficacy. So, in short, NLP does not make sense and it doesn’t work. In science you don’t get three strikes, those two and you’re out”
        —Neurolinguistic Programming and Other Nonsense

        “In the early 1980s, NLP was advertised as an important advance in psychotherapy and counseling, and attracted some interest in counseling research and clinical psychology. However, as controlled trials failed to show any benefit from NLP and its advocates made increasingly dubious claims, scientific interest in NLP faded.[63][64]”
        —Wikipedia

        “According to Bandler and Grinder, NLP can treat problems such as phobias, depression, tic disorders, psychosomatic illnesses, near-sightedness,[3] allergy, the common cold,[a] and learning disorders,[5][6] often in a single session”

        NLP, like brainwashing, is trotted out to “explain” how people join cults, and to make excuses for people we like who commit heinous acts in said cults. Problem is, neither brainwashing nor NLP are real. They perform the same role that demonic possession filled in a previous age. And they are just as illusory.

  • When I read Tabby Chapman Victim statement I felt so bad for her. Body shaming. I hope Allison never has any body issues.

    I can’t agree though with Aristotle. She has laid a price. She went to prison. That’s a lot for body sharing.

    Don’t we see that Keith had total control of her?

    • Tabby is just another NXIVN who left NXIVM with less money, more debt and more psychological trauma. She was humiliated and used by Allison Pimp Mack.

  • During the Smallville days, Mack was an experienced actress but was cast below the neophyte Kristin Kreuk. However very quickly at Nxivm, Mack finally saw her chance to outshine Kreuk by being Kieth’s favorite star.

    • No offense but that would show nothing more than how dumb Mack was because being Keith’s “favorite star” ranks well below practically everything on the totem pole except for maybe being a cockroach, and what she had already achieved on her own without the “help” of one of the biggest charlatans in the world already far surpassed anything she could achieve with it as was proven during her time in NXIVM and its end result – her humiliation in the public eye, the probable loss of her career, fines, jail time, and the loss of all of her own potential she wasted while in the cult.

  • I know what she was involved with was so horrible but I would like to meet her in person to see if there is any humanity left in her.

    • Brainwashing and innate stupidity are very real. The proof is that people continue to vote for politicians believing that they will solve their problems. If voting was useful for something, it would be prohibited.

    • Lydia, you are responsible for the evil you have committed and continue to perpetuate.

      Stop making lame excuses.

      Grow up and act like an adult.

    • It might have something to do with a stories or sermons about “Phyllis and Aristotle”. says:

      Wikipedia says: “The story is said by the Louvre to derive from the German work by Jacques de Vitry in the 13th century. The French work Le Lai d’Aristote (The Lay of Aristotle) is known from manuscripts dating from as early as 1220, attributed by scholars to either Henri d’Andeli or Henri de Valenciennes.”

      “After I had been at the Curia for a while, I encountered a great deal that was repugnant to me. They were so occupied with worldly affairs, with rulers and kingdoms, with lawsuits and litigation, that they hardly let anyone speak of spiritual things.” — Jacques de Vitry
      https://franciscantradition.org/francis-of-assisi-early-documents/the-saint/related-documents/writings-of-jacques-de-vitry/1026-fa-ed-1-page-579

      “Henri de Valenciennes was born around the year 1170 and died about 1230. He seems to have been a clerk or a professional writer attached to the court of Count Baldwin IX of Flanders and VI of Hainaut.”
      https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/media/livacuk/modern-languages-and-cultures/liverpoolonline/Aristote.pdf

      Some see it this way: “Aristotle’s devotion to study, to inquiry, was no self-denying abstinence from satisfaction; it was the most satisfying of all life’s opportunities. He was prepared to accept the probability that this ideal would not be equally attractive to all, but he did propose that society would be better governed if those in charge were of a character that loved to study problems and alternatives, to comprehend the true relationship of things before grasping at conclusions.” https://iconics.cehd.umn.edu/Aristotle/Lecture/default.html

  • I hope she’s considering a witness protection program and there are still a few good feds left to help her.

  • In the UK about seven years ago the coercive control defence began to gain traction in the courts. Women specifically being manipulated in sometimes subliminal sometimes ways, dominated in relationships. The coercive control is often times not overtly violent, but the control is mental, toxic and insidious. Over time it breaks a persons spirit and has long term negative effects on a person detrimentally. It’s a form of torture.

  • Allison you’re so cute I think I love 💕 you. When do you get out?

    Do I have a chance?

    I could meet you at the prison gates to pick you up. I’ll come with a 18 roses.

    I want it be the man who shares the joy of your first few minutes of freedom we can take our time driving home and feel the wondrous nature of love if you ❤️ love me half as much as I love 💗 you I will be the happiest man in the whole USA.

    Or I can come to your house to meet your parents. I will be polite and respectful.

    Just give me a chance.

    You walk in beauty, like the night
    Of cloudless climes and starry skies so clear.

    And where are the sunny days of yesteryear?

    • Maybe start instead with a few questions for Allison so you can get to know her better and tell her a little about yourself so she can get to know you better.

      Are the phrases “cloudless climes” and “sunny days of yesteryear” from the last century or Ireland?

    • Looks like “Thomas S.” is Alanzo’s new moniker.

      I can smell the Ring Dings through my screen.

  • One of them, Mack, is unfortunately in prison for far too short a time. Why, really? Mack loves being pushed around, having others think for her, and having others tell her what to do, as Raniere did. Why not linger longer in prison when it is so cruel? Fits Mack’s cruel nature of torturing others, doesn’t it? Why not let Mack get a little of that too. Mack loves it. For herself and even more so with others. But women’s prisons are not the same as men’s prisons, unfortunately. Too bad, actually.

    • Allison is of average intelligence, nothing more. She is not creative nor authentic. Keith even told her that in their first meeting. Prior to meeting him, Allison overcompensated for her lack of sophistication by going to museums and art galleries. She thought this would make her a more uncultured, enlightened version of herself. She was wrong.

      Fast forward a few short years: Allison is whipping, paddling and is a full blown Slavemaster for Vanturd. It is what she always wanted and dreamed about: her own slave pod to torture, day and night. She had the potential to be a modern day Delphine LaLaurie. Luckily the authorities stopped her. Keith did not brainwash Allison, he unlocked a sadistic force inside of her, and she fulfilled her desires.

      Allison will always be nothing more than Keith’s First Line Slavemaster. I fo not feel sorry for her. She knew what she was doing. She carried out her assignments with glee and gusto.

      • Who gives a shit what Keith told her? He’s a proven liar, deceiver, and manipulator. Any so-called fault that was found by the ranking members of this organization should be figuratively tossed onto the garbage heap of worthless for its likely lack of any sincerity in “diagnosis” or actual existence in reality.

  • Keep in mind that one of the primary characteristics of a sociopath is to act without a conscience or empathy. That pretty much hits every member of leadership and ALL of DOS.

    • So true Mr.Peritoneum.

      The upper echelons of every cult are filled with sadistic narcissists and NXIVM is no exception.

      Allison Mack enjoyed what she was doing. Unlike the Bronfman sisters she doesn’t have the impunity is effectively infinite wealth, so she was smart and changed her tune.

      Allison desperately misses being Keith’s right-hand enforcer.

      She’ll be up to more evil when she’s released from prison, but she’ll likely be far more covert.

About the Author

Frank Parlato is an investigative journalist.

His work has been cited in hundreds of news outlets, like The New York Times, The Daily Mail, VICE News, CBS News, Fox News, New York Post, New York Daily News, Oxygen, Rolling Stone, People Magazine, The Sun, The Times of London, CBS Inside Edition, among many others in all five continents.

His work to expose and take down NXIVM is featured in books like “Captive” by Catherine Oxenberg, “Scarred” by Sarah Edmonson, “The Program” by Toni Natalie, and “NXIVM. La Secta Que Sedujo al Poder en México” by Juan Alberto Vasquez.

Parlato has been prominently featured on HBO’s docuseries “The Vow” and was the lead investigator and coordinating producer for Investigation Discovery’s “The Lost Women of NXIVM.” In addition, he was credited in the Starz docuseries 'Seduced' for saving 'slave' women from being branded and escaping the sex-slave cult known as DOS.

Parlato appeared on the Nancy Grace Show, Beyond the Headlines with Gretchen Carlson, Dr. Oz, American Greed, Dateline NBC, and NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt, where Parlato conducted the first-ever interview with Keith Raniere after his arrest. This was ironic, as many credit Parlato as one of the primary architects of his arrest and the cratering of the cult he founded.

Parlato is a consulting producer and appears in TNT's The Heiress and the Sex Cult, which premieres on May 22, 2022.

IMDb — Frank Parlato

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Parlato,_Jr.

Contact Frank with tips or for help.
Phone / Text: (305) 783-7083
Email: frankparlato@gmail.com

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