Transcendental Meditation Wikipedia Scandal Heats Up

Readers may be aware of the ongoing scandal at Wikipedia surrounding Transcendental Meditation—related pages.

TM Org members, including employees of Maharishi University of Management, are being investigated for working in tandem to subvert Wikipedia's generous, volunteer editing policies. The charge indicates TM editors are motivated to remove information neutral or critical about the TM Org and replace it with standard Movement propaganda.

This article first broke the scandal. (Hats off to a wonderful blog!) My article updated the Wikipedia information—and added other examples of TM astroturfing.

Apparently the saga continues! The investigation has moved on to the next stage. All editors involved—including TM Org editors—present their evidence here. Really worth reading!

The list of allegations against the TM Org editors will sound tiringly familiar:

Attacks, threats, plagiarism, disruption, distraction, lies, bias, abuse, vandalism, harrassment, false outrage, intellectual dishonesty, intimidation, inuendo, legal scare tactics, dishonesty, ad hominem attacks, McCarthyism, being secretive, inflammatory speech, passive aggression presented as pseudo-civility, cherry-picking favorable research results,...

Transcendental Meditation Marketer$ may actually have an agreed upon playbook.

As we know Tom Ball and Keith DeBoer have organized a group of "enlightened bloggers" to drown out any negative comments posted anywhere on the Internet critical of TM. Given that so many of the TM faithful use precisely the same techniques over and over and over, it seems likely that a playbook of some kind has been circulated among them by TM Central:

How to Stop a Known Critic

1. Begin by accusing the critic of having a conflict of interest.
   
2. Attack their character as unethical, immoral, mentally ill, insensitive, cruel, ethnically prejudiced, etc.
   
3. Repeat steps 1 & 2 until everyone else tires of the conversation.
   
4. Very Important: Make sure you have the last word!

How to Stop a New Critic

1. Suggest they do not have sufficient knowledge about TM to make intelligent criticisms—no matter how applicable or impressive their credentials.
   
2. Deny the credibility or veracity of any report or research not approved of by TM Central.
   
3. Attack the intelligence of the critic.
   
4. Feign false outrage over a trivial detail of the critic's argument or language—frequently claiming the critic is bigoted.
5. Feign ignorance of serious questions in order to circumvent changes to the article, such as when a critic asks about the basis of Hagelin's quantum-based ideology.
   
6. Feign ignorance of well-known principles in research, such as peer-review not being equivalent to acceptance.
   
7. Invoke a special status as a "victimized" minority, whom society doesn't understand.
8. Accuse the critic of being a "sock puppet" or in the employ of an "enemy" organization. [None exist to my knowledge. If one does, hey, I'm for hire!]
9. As the critic is now "known," attack them as a "known" critic. See "How to Stop a Known Critic" above.

Well-known TM critic Andrew Skolnick reports he has been harassed by TM legal and other representatives since 1991 because he wrote a critical article about TM research and researchers in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). His words about "TM's attack dogs" summarize the situation neatly:

If there is one "superpower" achieved through advanced TM training it is the power to tirelessly lie through one's teeth, as this shameless example demonstrates.... As long as TM's attack dogs are allowed to keep rewriting Wikipedia articles, this battle will continue ad nauseum and drive away contributors who decide to spend their time on more constructive projects.

Unfortunately, that is the TM Org's precise goal.

“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

—Edmund Burke

J.

Transcendental Meditation Astroturf Campaigns

Readers may be aware that the Transcendental Meditation Org is being investigated for "sock puppetry" in editing Wikipedia articles on TM, the Maharishi, and related topics. (Linked article is great. Great blog!)

Wikipedia pages are edited by "volunteers" who debate additions and changes, then vote on changes to be made. Apparently Wikipedia believes that TM true believers and employees are trying to ram through changes that favor the TM Org's agenda—to sell more expensive used mantras—by packing the editorial community with TMers.

So when it comes to a vote, TM sock puppets allegedly vote unanimously for the changes they want. Until recently, this has meant that TM pages reflected the sanitized history and marketing objectives of the TM Org.

But it appears, TM's day may be at hand.

In the past, Scientology was banned from Wikipedia for this kind of "sock puppetry." Although Wikipedia investigations move at a glacial pace, a decision on whether TM is cheating—and what the consequence for them should be—may be coming soon.

Wikipedia is only one battlefront in the fight to stop TM Org spam.

As TMFB editor Mike Doughney discussed in this great post, Transcendental Meditation Marketers—remember when we called them "Initiators"?—Tom Ball and Keith DeBoer have organized "Enlightened Bloggers" to jam the comments of every article published on the Web about TM with positive talking points—and to drown out any comments they do not agree with.

On Twitter, Transcendental Meditation Marketers post quotes and ads and then busily repost each other's posts to make it look as if there is a crowd of TM true believers. Try a Twitter search on @TomMcKinleyBall, @TMadvocate, @MeditationAVL, @TMChicago, or @TMQuadCities and you'll see what I mean.

But their use of the Internet to bamboozle the public has been going on for years. Authors from deep within the TM Org have been broadcasting articles that they write to as many free publishing sites as will take them.

Then they list these articles as "sources" in further articles, posts, and tweets that tout the benefits of TM—and its superiority to other meditation techniques, such as mindfulness.

This tweet crossed my TweetDeck this morning:

@MeditationAVL Please Retweet: Major W.G. Klokow encourages South African military to adopt Transcendental Meditation for peace http://bit.ly/61B387

Which was then dutifully reposted by Transcendental Meditation Marketer$ across the Internet.

Two seconds with the Google reveals that the article was written by a TM employee, David Leffler, director of Maharishi U's Center for Advanced Military Science, and Major W.G. Klokow, a long-time TMer from South Africa.

Using a little Google trick that Mike Doughney taught me, I searched to find how many times the first sentence of the article appears on the Web. ("The term Invincible Defence Technology (IDT) has been around for some time now." Remember to click on "repeat the search with the omitted results included.")

More than 30 times. They've published the same article over 30 times—and now feel confident in referring to it as a "source."

This kind of "publishing" "research" or "opinion" then citing your own article as a "source" for further articles is essentially a form of "astroturfing."

They're right. Transcendental Meditation is not a religion.

They're a multi-billion-dollar business with paid employees backed up by PR, Sales, Marketing, and PsyOps divisions.

Peddlling freely available "techniques" at extremely expensive prices.

Is it any surprise they use an MO perfected by politicians, lobbyists, tobacco companies, and marketing consultants like Karl Rove to spread their advertising message?

J.