A late arvo post dedicated to Liberal party cultists ...

 

Here's the problem.

Not a major problem, more molehill than mountain, but it's been torturing the pond.

The pond realises that the other place (aka the Nine rags) are a disgrace, what with their letting Wilcox go, but they've been running some very titillating material.

There's no way that the pond can so a segue from its lizard Oz herpetology studies to the material - the reptiles of Oz insist on filling the pond to the brim with their rantings and ravings.

And yet for context it's important to see what they omit from their jihads.

The only solution was a late arvo post, a very rare occurrence in the pond of late.

Some of the intrigue arises from the Nine rags' ongoing coverage of the ICAC saga.

If you stick to the lizard Oz, you'd be completely unaware of it happening.

And yet what a nest of vampires has been exposed to sunlight, what rats in the ranks are being uncovered ...

‘Untrustworthy, lying’: ICAC witness Chris Spence unloads on key Reformer

The rag boasts that it has "Sydney’s best coverage of the ICAC inquiry", but that wouldn't be hard, because rather like the government's feeble attempt at regulating betting advertising, it's been ghosted by the reptiles of the lizard Oz.

Even more intriguing for the pond has been the co-joining of two of the pond's favourite topics, a religious cult, and the beefy boofhead, not to mention the onion muncher and the Nazis.

The Nine rags have feasted on it ...

Angus Taylor organised taxpayer grants for Brethren charity backing Pollie Pedal (*intermittent archive link)

The beefy boofhead loves himself the religious zealots ...but no wonder he wanted to brush aside a discussion of the church.

As an institution, it's inclined to the barking mad ...

Who are the Brethren and what do they believe in?

Here's how to downsize a world of bigotry, prejudice and pain ...

...the group has traditional gender norms that dictate the roles of women and what jobs they can take. The moral behaviour expected of members is very high. And how they police their boundaries can be stricter and more punitive than other Christian groups.
Those who leave the Brethren have a very difficult and painful experience because they are essentially shunned, cut off from their families.

In a way worthy of a theologian, Bernard Doherty offered an alternative label for the cult ...

...I don’t consider the term “cult” to be helpful as a way of understanding the group. The Brethren could be classified, from a sociological perspective, as an “introversionist sect”, though essentially they are just another conservative, evangelical Protestant denomination.

Say what? “introversionist sect”?

Fancy words for a cult.

Nah, the pond is good with "cult", but does appreciate that attempt to water down the cult into just another brand of Protestantism ...

The pond supposes it's just like saying that the Inquisition was essentially just another conservative Catholic activity...

The beefy boofhead loves himself some cult ...

“We’re being supported by the Rapid Relief Team, and they are an extraordinary group of people,” Taylor said. “Rapid Relief supports state emergency services, state rural fire service organisations across this country, and they do an extraordinary job. And I’m very proud to have been served by them, and I saw them starting up in my own electorate after the Yass fires back in 2013.
Exclusive Brethren secretly paid far-right activists to perform stunts disrupting the federal election
“They have been there every time when there has been a flood, when there has been a fire. We saw Lily Hooper, the very tragic death of a girl in my electorate in the Nattai National Park [south-west of Sydney] just last week, they were out there.
“RRT was out there, supporting our emergency service organisations. That is an extraordinary organisation, and I am very sure many Labor members have been supported by that same organisation because of the great work they [the RRT] do.”
Records kept by the federal government show the Rapid Relief Team won dozens of government grants across the country, worth $680,000 between 2020 and 2023 under a program in which the local MP selected the recipients and invited them to apply.
In Taylor’s seat of Hume, the Brethren charity won its first grant, for $22,000 – the maximum available – to buy a coolroom trailer in 2021 to “facilitate the safe distribution of food to the community”. Two years later, the charity in Hume received another $11,000 for a coffee trailer to “support emergency services and the community”.
In its latest financial statement, the Rapid Relief Team reported a surplus of $263,105, and a retained surplus of $4.6 million.

Nice work if you can get it.

That reminds the pond of its Marxist friends, who somehow managed to acquire very tasty Sydney properties ...free the workers, and free the rental market.

The beefy boofhead's friends rallied to the cult ...

There is no suggestion that Taylor knew of or supported the Brethren payments to far-right figures. But after this masthead revealed these details of the Brethren campaign, Byron Fay, executive director of political funding group Climate 200, referred the church to the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission for investigation.
During a parliamentary hearing on Friday into electoral matters, Liberal MPs and Nationals leader Matt Canavan sympathised with the Brethren’s view that the questions they were being asked about the group’s role in the election were examples of religious discrimination.
Later, Coalition MPs published a dissenting response, accusing the Labor-helmed committee of running a “witch-hunt against people of faith and people who just happen to have the temerity to oppose Labor’s agenda”.

And that brings the pond to the Nazi splash.

How could the pond resist that sort of offering?

Brethren feed Angus Taylor, Tony Abbott days after Nazi revelations
Michael Bachelard (*intermittent archive link)

Talk about juicy ...

He fell off his bike on the first day?

Do go on ...and the pond will accept repetitions in the recitation ...

The pond misses so much stuff by sticking to the reptiles at the lizard Oz.

This was so rich the pond couldn't resist diving into the pool for a final splash, rather like Scrooge McDuck taking a swim amongst all the coins and the folding stuff ...

...Almost all their activities are directed towards helping their own members, not the public.
The church’s spokesman, Lloyd Grimshaw, on Friday denied before a parliamentary committee the church had anything to do with commissioning or paying for the far-right stunts, or election campaign canvassing in general.
Calling it “bizarre” that he was required to answer questions on the matter, he said the thousands-strong, co-ordinated effort at polling booths by Brethren members was simply a volunteering exercise by individual parishioners.
Climate 200 disagreed in its letter to the charities commission. “The synchronised scale, geographic uniformity, and organisational backing suggest institutional co-ordination rather than purely independent, individual volunteering,” Fay wrote in his complaint.
The chair of the Joint Select Committee on Electoral Matters, Labor MP Jerome Laxale, who is leading the grilling of the church over its election involvement, told this masthead that Grimshaw’s evidence before the committee “leaves me with more questions than answers”.
Grimshaw told the committee he represented a small charity called Plymouth Brethren Christian Church Limited, not the church fellowship itself. Laxale said this “puts huge limits around the church’s denials”.
“Hiding behind a narrow definition does not circumvent the requirement for all witnesses to answer questions truthfully,” Laxale said. “The giving of false or misleading evidence is a serious matter, and may be regarded as a contempt of parliament.”
However, after the hearing, the Coalition doubled down on its support for the controversial church. A group of seven MPs, including Nationals leader Matt Canavan, three shadow ministers and senators from five states issued a joint statement describing the inquiry into the Brethren’s activities as a “hyperpartisan witch hunt” by Labor.
The three-page statement described the inquiry as “persecution”, “madness” and a “disgraceful fiasco” and it called for Laxale to be sacked as committee chair.
“Labor’s attacks smack of religious discrimination and are an assault on the basic democratic rights of all Australians,” Canavan wrote.
NSW senator Jess Collins said: “We’re another step closer to Albanese’s communist utopia, where religious freedom is not tolerated.”

Religious freedumb? Two cheers for cults!

The pond expects a devotion to cults from the onion muncher, but the rest of the rabble shows just how much the Liberal party has been infested by barking mad far right religious fundamentalists ...

The Nine rags included that press release in full, and the pond decided it was a real winner. 

Each page had the full logo and list of names, but the pond settled for just the verbiage after the first two pages ...

All the pond needs now is for the Liberal party to mount a passionate defence of Scientology, and neo-Nazis, who after all, are leery of commie swine utopia, and just want the religious freedom to follow their beliefs ...

On and on they went, pleading for the freedumb to be in a cult ...

It's a cult ... and it's fair and right to call it so, in a way that's downright fair dinkum ...

Ex-Brethrens on breaking free
More than 50,000 people belong to a global religious sect that has restrictions around television, eating with outsiders and attending university. Some who’ve left the church say they still carry the trauma of what they experienced there.

That poorly formatted yarn told a couple of stories.

This is part of one victim of the cult ...

Homosexuality, she said, was a largely “unspoken” subject that was occasionally discussed “in a horrified whisper”.

“It’s considered one of the worst sins that a person can commit,” she (Tam) said.

It's a cult, and fear and repression are its stock in trade ...

For Tam, however, a future in such an environment was not something she could countenance.

Her departure from her family home was carefully planned. To avoid an emotional goodbye with their parents, Tam and her two brothers secretly packed their things.

“We planned it so … they wouldn’t see, because we knew that it would be very upsetting for all of us,” she said.

“We left early one morning, we sort of snuck out together.”

And that's what the Liberal party is trying to defend.

And speaking of cults...