Cult News

Lenora Fulani, follower of alleged “cult leader” Fred Newman, is a pivotal player within New York’s Independent party. This has given Fulani and her mentor some political clout, which critics say has led to favors.

Visible evidence of Fulani’s political connections and influence could be seen at a recent NYC fundraiser attended by US Senator Charles Schumer and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg reports NY 1.

Schumer spoke at the event as Fulani stood behind him.

Critics say Fulani is little more than a front for Fred Newman. And that her involvement in politics is a way of gaining attention and gathering favors for the controversial group often called the “Newmanites,” such as a $8.5 million tax-free bond issue for the All Stars Project Inc., another one of Fred Newman’s interests.

Last year NY Attorney General Elliot Spitzer claimed he would investigate All Stars for reported financial irregularities.

Fred Newman is the founding father of something called “Social Therapy,” which critics say is little more than “brainwashing.”

Newman says, “The proletarian or revolutionary therapist is a leader. Proletarian therapy is not leaderless. To say the leader is non-authoritarian is not the same as saying it is leaderless. The identification of leader with authoritarian is a bourgeois identification. The revolutionary leader leads the suffering and struggling worker from the bourgeois ego to the proletarian ego, through an authoritarian act of violent overthrow. For as Engles pointed out, ‘A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is…’ But it is proletarian authority–the dictatorship of the proletarian rather than bourgeois authority. Revolutionary therapy involves an act of insurrection; of overthrow. The therapist is not a substitute conscience; the therapist is another worker who has been through the insurrection and is still working and struggling during the long period of withering away of the proletarian ego.”

Huh?

But in New York’s last very close mayoral election Bloomberg needed every vote he could muster and the billionaire businessman may not have won without the devotion and grass roots organizing provided by Newman’s faithful followers.

The mayor later donated $50,000 to the All Star Project.

Some elected officials are said to have a “cult following,” but this analogy just might be literally true for Mayor Bloomberg.