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Rajneeshees: From India to Oregon (Parts 1-20)

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and his spokeswoman Ma Anand Sheela moved their commune and its thousands of followers from India to an Oregon ranch. The poisoning of a nearby town, election manipulation, and plans to murder government officials and the writer of this story soon followed.

The events chronicled in this original 1985 series are the basis for the Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country.

  1. Part 1

    How followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh came to Oregon from India, and transformed eastern Oregon’s Big Muddy Ranch into Rancho Rajneesh.

  2. Part 2

    How a small-town Indian boy became a religious guru that followers compared to Jesus Christ, Buddha and Krishna.

  3. Part 3

    Before coming to Oregon, the Bhagwan built his following in Poona, India, attracting disciples from around the world.

  4. Part 4

    What are the real reasons the Rajneeshees left India for Oregon? Rising tensions with the Indian government and police, and a lot of unpaid taxes.

  5. Part 5

    Tales of smuggling – gold, money and drugs – dogged the Rajneesh movement since the late 1970s, and continued when they arrived in the United States.

  6. Part 6

    Somewhere between India and Oregon, the life-or-death melodrama surrounding Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh’s failing health dissipated like a contrail against a summer sky.

  7. Part 7

    How Ma Anand Sheela used family ties to help purchase the land for the Rajneeshees’ Oregon commune.

  8. Part 8

    Ma Anand Sheela was much more than the guru’s personal secretary. She was a tigress of the two-minute TV interview, and wielded words like weapons.

  9. Part 9

    To turn Racho Rajneesh from farmland to a city, the Rajneeshees needed to incorporate. It was a blurring of church and state that caught the eye of Oregon Attorney General Dave Frohnmayer.

  10. Part 10

    While followers talked about free love, the Rajneeshees armed themselves with assault weapons, grenade launchers and submachine guns, turning Rajneeshpuram into one of the most-heavily armed places in the state.

  11. Part 11

    Followers of the Bhagwan saw their ranch as a place of peace, but the universal bliss was laced with threats of violence and threads of paranoia.

  12. Part 12

    Antics by the Rajneeshees during legal proceedings – including making faces and obscene gestures – confounded lawyers and judges.

  13. Part 13

    Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh hardly led a humble life, with his diamond-encrusted Rolex watches and fleet of 74 Rolls-Royces.

  14. Part 14

    The Rajneesh financial machine reached around the globe, and channeled millions of dollars to its Oregon headquarters.

  15. Part 15

    How a lust for money propelled the Rajneesh movements into the arms of Big Business.

  16. Part 16

    Ma Anand Sheela and other ranch officials kept a tight grip on followers.

  17. Part 17

    Rajneesh used various techniques – some of them strong-armed – to separate followers from their cash, property and jewelry.

  18. Part 18

    Rajneeshees bristled at the word “cult,” but it was clearly one according to religious experts.

  19. Part 19

    Of all the threats to the Rajneesh movement, an immigration fraud investigation that was four years in the making loomed the largest, and focused on arranged marriages and fake relationships

  20. Part 20

    The Rajneeshees took advantage of sleepy immigration officials to sneak followers into the United States. The government then bungled cases, and irritated potential witnesses to the point that they no longer cooperated.

Why My NFT Toad Brought Me Joy

But there’s one way that NFTs are profoundly different from the last generation of online disrupters. In terms of ownership, they actually move in the opposite direction of projects like Napster, BitTorrent and the software communities that destabilized the entertainment industry. Those were about reproducing data and sharing it for free, or eventually, a subscription fee. NFTs are about taking what should be a fully shareable image and sticking a SOLD sign on it.

Poison Prison

“If you’re a glass is half-full kind of person, you’d say they’re repurposing the abandoned coal mine” and using it to create jobs, says Wright. “And if you're a glass is half-empty kind of person, you'd say it's pretty unconscionable that you’re putting people in cages at gunpoint and putting them in toxic waste sites.”

Fantasies Made Fresh

Brooklyn, Illinois has one of the most dense clusters of strip clubs and rubdown parlors in the entire country, drawing patrons from nearby St. Louis and its suburbs. Inside the clubs with the dancers, a strip club scholar, the mayor, and the regulars whose dollars keep the depressed local economy afloat.

Laurel Braitman is a science writer, the author of Animal Madness: Inside Their Minds, and the founder of Writing Medicine. Her new book is What Looks Like Bravery: An Epic Journey Through Loss to Love.

“My life was becoming unmanageable, in a way. I was using success in many ways like a drug, and I’d say like an analgesic on the sorts of difficult feelings I hadn’t wanted to face truly since childhood. And we are rewarded in this culture for these kinds of outward forms of success that often have nothing to do with what’s going on inside of you.”

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Clarissa Ward is the chief international correspondent for CNN. Along with field producer Brent Swails and photojournalists William Bonnett and Scott McWhinnie, Ward won the 2022 George Polk Award for her real-time coverage of the rapid rise of the Taliban as U.S. forces withdrew from Afghanistan last summer.

“I used to come back from war zones and feel completely disconnected from my life—disconnected from my friends, from my family. I would look down on people about the conversations they were having about silly things. I would feel kind of numb and miserable. And then I realized that if you want to be able to keep doing this work, you have to choose to embrace the privileges that you've been given. And you have to choose joy and choose love and be kind to yourself and have a glass of wine and go dancing or run up a mountain—whatever it is that does it for you, embrace it. That is part of the tax you pay for surviving these things: You've got to continue to love life.”

This is the first in a week-long series of conversations with winners of this year's George Polk Awards in Journalism.

Magicland

On the oeuvre of Glenn Beck:

"The undisputed high point of Beck’s tenure in Baltimore was an elaborate prank built around a nonexistent theme park. The idea was to run a promotional campaign for the fictional grand opening of the world’s first air-conditioned underground amusement park, called Magicland. According to Beck and Gray, it was being completed just outside Baltimore. During the build-up, the two created an intricate and convincing radio world of theme-park jingles and promotions, which were rolled out in a slow buildup to the nonexistent park’s grand opening… On the day Magicland was supposed to throw open its air-conditioned doors, Beck and Gray took calls from enraged listeners who tried to find the park and failed. Among the disappointed and enraged was a woman who had canceled a no-refund cruise to attend the event." — from Alexander Zaitchik’s Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance

Wesley Lowery is a correspondent for “60 in 6” from 60 Minutes. He is the author of They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement and won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for "Fatal Force," a Washington Post project covering fatal shootings by police officers.

“The police are not, in and of themselves, objective observers of things. They are political and government entities who are the literal characters in the story. They are describing the actions of people who are protesting them. They have incentives.”

Thanks to Mailchimp for sponsoring this week's episode.

Casey Johnston is a journalist and editor who writes the column "Ask A Swole Woman," which now appears in her newsletter ”She's a Beast.”

”I feel more comfortable lately with a sort of beloved-local-restaurant level of success. What's nice about Substack is that we've come to this place, that I hope lasts, where we can have this sort of local-restaurant relationship with writers, or I can have that with readers, where I don't have to be part of this big machine in order to do something that I really like.”

Lewis Lapham, formerly the editor of Harper's, is the founder of Lapham's Quarterly.

"The best part of my job was to come across a manuscript. You never knew what would show up. ... I always had the sense of opening a present, hoping to be both delighted and surprised. Often I was disappointed. But when I wasn't, it was a lot of fun. And word got around that I was that kind of an editor, that I was willing to try anything if you could make it interesting."

Thanks to TinyLetter and GoDaddy for sponsoring this week's episode.