1927: Rockridge scandalized by pagan love cult
Mary Ann Tharaldsen & Thomas Pynchon
Posted on August 30, 2013 by Royal Rosamond Press
I’m going to ask the elected leaders of the State of Oregon to put forth a proposal for a statue to be placed in the Capitol Rotunda, depicting Mike Pence emerging from a cloud of bear spray and tear gas with The Original Lost Love Child – GERTRUDE WRIGHT – who was arrested by Earl Warren! Gertrude fled to Mexico to escape the New Inquisition that launched a Dark Age that set out to destroy poets, artists, writers, Bohemians, Beatniks, Hippies – FOR POLITICAL GAIN! When Donald Trump was shown the secret of Right-wing SUCCESS, when he was shown the Sacred Image of Getrude – behind the curtain – he went HOG WILD and destroyed the really GOOD THING!
Let us find out what happened to Gertrude! I recommend Mike Pence for the Medal of Freedom because he stood by his principles and beliefs – as did Gertrude Wright! Side by side, they will be holding hands, Vice President Pence and Lady Religious Liberty. Let us make a law forbidding the making of a graven image of Donald Trump – that will be placed in any U.S. Government building, or, square.
Above is a photograph of my new wife singing Amazing Grace after our wedding, with my good friend, a born-again Christian., Mary Ann Tharaldsen lived with Tomas Pynchon in Mexico. Bryan MacLean of Love is an artist and was in love with my sister, a famous artist known as Rosamond. This song was inspired by Christine and I.
I want Mary Ann and I to work on the statue of Mike and Gertrude.
John Presco
Jan. 6 highlighted the dangers of Christian nationalism. But it’s bigger than that. (msn.com)
When describing these trends, their consequences for democracy, and their potential for fomenting violence, many scholars and critics have adopted the term “white Christian nationalism.” As a concept, white Christian nationalism does important rhetorical work: to emphasize the “deep stories” at the core of many far-right beliefs and to highlight how religious fundamentalism is driving millions to embrace anti-democratic ideals.
At the same time, the term has its limits for one basic reason: A great deal of what is described as white Christian nationalism is secular. Many of its most enduring talking points — even the ones that swirl through evangelical churches — originate from cable news outlets like Fox News. Prominent evangelists are cable television personalities and are propped up not by churches but by networks of dark money organizations. Centering Christian belief and identity also fails to explain how so many people who have never stepped foot inside an evangelical church end up with beliefs — most conspicuously those related to a stolen 2020 election — that mirror those espoused by “insurrectionist Christians.”
Chilling radio traffic reveals terror of Pence security detail in Jan. 6 attack (msn.com)
Sacred School of the Great White Brotherhood | Rosamond Press
1927: Rockridge scandalized by pagan love cult – Oakland North
The “Sacred School of the White Brotherhood” sounds like an offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan, but it was actually a 1920s cult–perhaps a “pagan love cult”–dedicated to racial peace, among other things, that had branches in several American cities.
The organization ran afoul of the law when it was said to have endeavored to “breed a Superman” with the help of a Berkeley coed and a 15-year-old boy. The pre-hippie hangout located in Oakland was raided in ’27 on the orders of District Attorney Earl Warren, with officers arriving before a baby could be made.
Of course, a very public scandal ensued, especially since numerous civic and business leaders were said to be among the members. Gertrude Wright, the so-called “High Priestess” whose bungalow doubled as cult headquarters was among those who fled to Mexico to escape a possible jail sentence. An article about the brouhaha appeared in the March 12, 1927 Brooklyn Daily Eagle.
Afflictor.com · Gertrude Wright
In May of 1927, one of the arrested society members, Russel Alley, was tried before a jury, and found guilty of contributing to the delinquency of minors. Unconvinced they could receive a fair trial, Wright and Gibbs jumped bail and disappeared across the border to Mexico. For two years there was no sign of either of them, until Wright sent an emissary back to Alameda County to negotiate her return to Oakland in 1929. Local authorities refused her permission to return, and Wright was never heard from again. Whether she was a pagan cult priestess or just a “romantic lady,” in the end she went down in history as a fugitive from justice.
Caroline Merwin was eventually released into her stepmother’s custody. Lloyd Alley was remanded into the custody of the Juvenile Detention Home and was later made a ward of the court. In May 1927, a jury deliberated for ten minutes before it found Russell Alley guilty of contributing to the delinquency of minors. Gertrude Wright and Irma Gibbs flew the coop before they could be tried; they remain at large.
http://www.ascension-research.org/gwb.html
In 1927, 17-year-old Thelma Reid had just begun her first year of college at UC Berkeley. She was living on 45th street in Oakland’s Rockridge district with her family and did many of the typical things a college coed did—went to class, helped around the house and did her homework. She never expected her studies would spawn one of the biggest scandals in Rockridge history. But then again, it wasn’t ordinary homework.
The collection of poems that would eventually set into motion police raids, arrests and a full-blown media circus was assigned to Reid not by any of her UC Berkeley professors, but by a neighbor, Gertrude Wright. Wright’s home, a few blocks away from Reid’s at 468 Forest Street, served as the international headquarters for a mystical society—called the “Great White Brotherhood”—that blended aspects of Eastern religion with notions of Christian love, racial harmony and communing with God through sexual acts. Reid had been attending one of Wright’s “Sacred Schools”—classes where Wright delivered her unconventional teachings and handed out writings advocating “sacred phallic laws” and “mystical marriages” in which both parties had absolute freedom to explore love in all its exotic forms. Reid’s mother discovered the poems in the family’s home, and referred them to the Oakland Police Department.
But it wasn’t until another mother, Margaret Merwin, concerned about her 18-year-old daughter Caroline, who was also attending brotherhood classes, went to the police that then-District Attorney Earl Warren decided to take action. Warren sent OPD officers to 468 Forest Street and what they found there sent a shockwave through the sleepy Rockridge community for months to come.
In Wright’s home, a full-fledged, old-fashioned pagan society had taken root. According to police records, the raid found an “effigy of a woman with a sword piercing her heart, incoherent messages, cards bearing linked names of males and females and other equally weird evidence.” The Rockridge bungalow had become headquarters for the brotherhood that also had branches in San Francisco, San Jose, Portland and Chicago. Members of the Rockridge society included city council members, schoolteachers and businessmen. Cult founder and high priestess Wright was taken into police custody, along with her disciple Irma Gibbs and three others, on charges of encouraging delinquency.
The media went to town. The brotherhood was dubbed a “love cult” by newspapers around the Bay Area, which painted Rockridge as the epicenter of sexual perversion. Articles spawned sensational tales of paganism and decadence. LA Times columnist Harry Carr had this to say about Reid and Merwin:
“The attempt to paint these girls—and their beef-fed sheiks—as innocent, wide-eyed victims of a freak religion is enough to make anybody laugh. Girls of this day and age are wise guys. And any one of them knows that a so-called religious cult that involves being ‘initiated’ in the presence of men with most of their clothes off is merely an excuse for a debauch.”
The only sympathetic voice at the time belonged to Oakland Tribune reporter Nancy Barr Mavity. “Whether the web in which [Wright] is intangled is one of wheels within wheels of enmity on the part of deserters from the order,” wrote Mavity, “Or whether she is the priestess of views not favored in Western society, she remains the romantic lady in a world where a white stucco bungalow easily becomes a temple.”
In May of 1927, one of the arrested society members, Russel Alley, was tried before a jury, and found guilty of contributing to the delinquency of minors. Unconvinced they could receive a fair trial, Wright and Gibbs jumped bail and disappeared across the border to Mexico. For two years there was no sign of either of them, until Wright sent an emissary back to Alameda County to negotiate her return to Oakland in 1929. Local authorities refused her permission to return, and Wright was never heard from again. Whether she was a pagan cult priestess or just a “romantic lady,” in the end she went down in history as a fugitive from justice.
March 11, 1927
Los Angeles
Fifteen-year-old Lloyd Alley, arrested today in Los Angeles, is said to have made statements “tantamount to a confession” of his involvement with the “Sacred School of the Great White Brotherhood,” an Oakland-based “love cult” with branches in San Francisco, San Jose, Portland, Chicago, and Texas. At the same time the teenager was spilling the beans in L.A., San Francisco police raided the cult’s Bay Area headquarters, where they found an “effigy of a woman with a sword piercing her heart, incoherent messages, cards bearing linked names of males and females and other equally weird evidence.” Cultists are said to have “encouraged free love in its most exotic forms” in its attempts to breed a “superman” and “superwoman.” “Mystical marriages” were arranged and “the sacred phallic laws” studied. Also in custody in Los Angeles is Russell Alley (Lloyd’s father, cult name “Omar”). Cult founder and high priestess, Mrs. Gertrude Wright (“Zareda” to her followers), is being held in Oakland, along with her disciple, Irma Gibbs (“Ermengarde,” a domestic in the Wright home). All were charged with contributing to the delinquency of minors: Lloyd Alley, plus two young women, Thelma Reid, 17, and Caroline Merwin, 18.
Lloyd Alley and Irma Gibbs both made confessions said to “be reeking with unprintable details,” though the paper managed to squeeze in a mention of two “new Messiah” ceremonials Lloyd performed with Caroline Merwin. Caroline (whose stepmother’s complaint set the raid in motion) was quite the little minx: when she appeared in juvenile court later in the week she relished telling the judge that she wore only “filmy underthings” during her initiation ceremony, and that her “vibration robes” were scanty as well. When she “admitted intimacies with Lloyd Alley,” the two of them laughed until the judge admonished them to be quiet.
Times columnist Harry Carr thought the juicy case was nothing but “Bunk”:
The attempt to paint these girls—and their beef-fed sheiks—as innocent, wide-eyed victims of a freak religion is enough to make anybody laugh.
Girls of this day and age are wise guys.
And any one of them knows that a so-called religious cult that involves being “initiated” in the presence of men with most of clothes off is merely an excuse for a debauch.
There is at least some hope for a girl who is frank enough to laugh.
Caroline Merwin was eventually released into her stepmother’s custody. Lloyd Alley was remanded into the custody of the Juvenile Detention Home and was later made a ward of the court. In May 1927, a jury deliberated for ten minutes before it found Russell Alley guilty of contributing to the delinquency of minors. Gertrude Wright and Irma Gibbs flew the coop before they could be tried; they remain at large.
The Oakland Seven are young, white, and full-time politicians. The night they were acquitted, two of the Seven were in jail. Jeff Segal, who used to be anti-draft co-ordinator for national SDS, was serving a four-year sentence for refusing induction into the army. Mike Smith was in jail for sixty days for committing trespass and being a public nuisance during a demonstration in 1966. In 1968 Mike Smith starred in a movie about himself called The Activist. He worked in the Free Speech Movement, and spent six months with SNCC in the South. Five of the Oakland Seven had been Berkeley students. Four, including Mike Smith, were suspended for political activities.
With the demonstration of ‘Black Lives Matter’ against the radical socialists, Bernie Sanders, this history is now very pertinent, because in the 60s ‘White Bohemian Lives Matter” in the fight against racism and oppression. These articles establish a historic culture that is not confined to the Flower Children, and thus deserves all the respect other cultures enjoy. There were no drugs involved. Moral Cops and Prigs were riding around in cop cars armed to the teeth. ISIS are Moral Cops who will cut off your hand if you are caught smoking a cigarette. Do the they gouge out the eyes of the people they oppress for reading a Western Poem? The goal was to destroys these young people’s lives as an example to other young people. One youth appears to have been sent to a orphanage.
I believe all spiritual events leave a ghost behind. What is the Holy Ghost, anyway? Christine and Vicki saw a blue angel standing at the foot of their bed. Kay saw a bright blue light fill her bedroom and showed me the circle of burn holes it left in her lace curtain. When Kay needed to go shopping or see a doctor, her father would send a squad car. A Oakland cop would drive Kay around town. Kay had Parkinson’s disease. Her father worked with Earl Warren to oppress Mario Savio, the Black Panthers. and perhaps Thelma Reid, a college student that was having a Pagan Party in Rockridge?
“Warren sent OPD officers to 468 Forest Street and what they found there sent a shockwave through the sleepy Rockridge community for months to come.”
Frank Coakley went after the Black Panthers, orginizers of People’s Park, and Mario Savo and the Free Speech Movement. Those arrested at the Forest Street house were charged with sharing lewd poetry. Thirty years later Ferlinghetti was arrested for pubishing the poem, Howl. Lenny Bruce was arrested for using lewd language.
On June 3 Shig Murao, the bookstore manager, was arrested and jailed for selling Howl and Other Poems to an undercover San Francisco police officer. City Lights Publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti was subsequently arrested for publishing the book. At the obscenity trial, nine literary experts testified on the poem’s behalf. Supported by the American Civil Liberties Union, Ferlinghetti won the case when California State Superior Court Judge Clayton Horn decided that the poem was of “redeeming social importance
http://articles.latimes.com/1986-05-04/magazine/tm-3972_1_ed-meese/5
Chilling radio traffic reveals terror of Pence security detail in Jan. 6 attack
Doug Cunningham – 14m ago
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July 22 (UPI) — Frantic Secret Service radio traffic on Jan. 6, 2021, revealed how close Vice President Mike Pence came to being engulfed by the violent mob attacking the U.S. Capitol.
1 of 2 Photos in Gallery©Pat Benic/UPI
Former White House deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews (R) told the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol on Thursday that former President Donald Trump’s tweet that Mike Pence “didn’t have the courage” to overthrow the 2020 election was like “pouring gasoline on the fire.” Photo by Pat Benic/UPI
House Jan. 6 committee testimony Thursday showed that less than a minute after Pence was rushed to an office 100 feet off the Senate floor, the mob breached the second floor of the Capitol.
Chilling audio revealed in the prime-time hearing included a witness testifying that Pence’s security detail transmitted goodbye messages to their families, fearing for their lives as they sought to clear an evacuation path for Pence.
“There were calls to say goodbye to family members, so on and so forth,” an unidentified White House security official said in audiotaped testimony with their voice disguised out of fear of retribution. “For whatever the reason was on the ground, the VP detail thought that this was about to get very ugly.”
The witness testified that as he monitored radio traffic from Pence’s security detail, he could tell the danger the vice president and Secret Service agents faced because the agents were yelling and screaming.
In an excerpt from one of the radio messages from Pence’s Secret Service detail played by the committee, an agent said, “We need to move now. If we lose any more time, we may lose the ability to do so.”
The mob had earlier chanted “Hang Mike Pence!”
Amid smoke and chaos as the mob moved inside the Capitol, agents guarding Pence searched for a safe evacuation route.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump was resisting calls from his administration officials and family members to send help.
A Trump tweet at 2:24 p.m. Jan. 6 inflamed the crowd further, former aides testified.
“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done,” Trump’s tweet said.
Witness Sarah Matthews, a former White House communications aide, testified Thursday that Trump’s tweet was like “pouring gasoline on the fire.”
WASHINGTON, D.C. — In response to Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz’ decision to “expose” the identity of a private citizen for operating a Twitter account that mocks the views held by many in left-wing corporate media, Noah Wall, FreedomWorks Executive Vice President, commented:
“Reporter Taylor Lorenz and The Washington Post’s decision to doxx the private citizen behind the Twitter account Libs of Tik Tok is shameful. It is an abuse of power by a major American newspaper of record that makes clear to us all that, for them, political activism and journalism are one in the same.”
“If anything, the newsworthy part of this story is why an account that highlights the opinions of the woke is so troublesome to media elites. Let it be known that if The Post chooses to go to these lengths over something so trivial as Tik Tok posts, they can absolutely do the same thing to you.”
Conservatives Must Lead the Country Out of Biden and Democrats’ Mess
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- By: FW Staff
- 10/26/2021
Everyday life is increasingly unaffordable and unpredictable in Joe Biden’s America. Inflation is at a record high, transportation costs continue to skyrocket, and a broken supply chain is making it harder for Americans to buy essential goods. An ongoing immigration crisis plagues the border, and, abroad, a botched withdrawal in Afghanistan created chaos and raised serious doubts about America’s status as a world leader.
The failure of this administration to take care of its citizens both at home and abroad should have Democratic voters jumping ship from S.S. Biden and demanding answers from party leaders. Independents have already come to their senses. But if you ask Democrats what it is that keeps them up at night, they point to Trump supporters and their unvaccinated compatriots as the monsters hiding under their beds.
In a national poll conducted by Scott Rasmussen, voters were asked what they consider to be serious threats to our country. Fifty-seven percent of Democratic voters identified Donald Trump supporters as a top threat to the nation. Though Donald Trump is no longer in office, fear of him and his supporters lives rent free in the minds of lefty media elites, who continue to project that fear onto their base. The previous president provides a convenient–though unconvincing for any person with a grasp on reality–scapegoat for the current one.
Coming in as Democrats’ second highest rated threat, at 56 percent, is unvaccinated Americans. This revelation, especially when paired up against Biden’s criticism of the vaccine on the campaign trail, should be stunning, but is instead unsurprising. Demonization of the unvaccinated and tyrannical executive mandates, like the recent vaccine requirement, have been adopted by the White House as legitimate strategies to hold onto those last scraps of goodwill voters feel toward their president. And as always, leftwing media showed solidarity with the White House by beating to death that same message for their audience. Those same sources, however, have been content to remain quiet about the fact that our vaccination rate among adults is steadily climbing to 80 percent and that cases are declining nationally.
This administration has made it clear that, as a rule, they operate two steps behind the American people. Across the country, Americans have moved on with their lives. People who wanted the vaccine have taken it; those who are vaccine hesitant will certainly not be encouraged by the White House’s current messaging. Donald Trump supporters are not the reason why families are struggling to afford groceries and supply chain issues are going unaddressed.
Would it be fair if Republicans blamed every single Biden voter for every lost job and closed business? Because that’s what it sounds like to me. In the Democrats’ eyes, Republicans are always evil, while we just think that they are wrong. We disagree with their policies while they believe that we are inherently bad people who hold an ‘incorrect’ set of morals. They’d rather discount us than try to work with us.
This is the fundamental moral difference that unfortunately makes up modern day politics. How can we expect to fix our nation’s problems when half of the country could never work with the other because they see them as evil, even when they themselves hold all the levers of power and are responsible for putting us in this mess? It’s crazy to think that Democratic voters spent four years calling people who voted for Trump evil. But now, with everyday Americans struggling more financially than they ever did in the Trump years, Biden supporters haven’t made a peep about their guy doing little in the way to alleviate these stressors.
The so-called empathy president has done little to make lives better for Americans like he promised on the campaign trail; he has a lot of explaining to do. But in the meantime, while journalists get to work on putting together his next alibi, conservative leaders need to band together with a blueprint for steering our country out of the chaos that Biden and Democrats seek to normalize. Since Democrats refuse to admit that their policies have caused needless struggles for millions of Americans and continue to turn their noses up at the thought of working with ‘evil’ Republicans, it’s up to the GOP to remind Americans what real leadership looks like.
Noah Wall is an executive vice president at FreedomWorks.
‘ve been aware of Ginni Thomas for years. When I researched the origin of the Tea Party, Freedomworks, Americans for Prosperity, Independent Women’s Forum, etc., her name often came up. She’s a vile, antifeminist zealot, and has her grubby fingers in every deplorable…
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