"There is the surge of interest in cults, likely driven by the fact that for four years America was run by a sociopathic con man with a dark magnetism..."

"... who enveloped a huge part of the country in a dangerous alternative reality. And there’s a broader drive in American culture to expose iniquitous power relations and re-evaluate revered historical figures. Viewed through a contemporary, secular lens, a community built around a charismatic founder and dedicated to the lionization of suffering and the annihilation of female selfhood doesn’t seem blessed and ethereal. It seems sinister." 

From "Was Mother Teresa a Cult Leader?" by Michelle Goldberg (NYT)(drawing attention to a new podcast, "The Turning," that portrays Mother Teresa in a negative light).

Viewed through a contemporary, secular lens, is anything blessed and ethereal?

This "surge of interest in cults" — if you want me to take it seriously — needs also to include looking inward, at yourself. What cults do you belong to? I ask this of Goldberg and of everyone who's choosing to characterize other people as belonging to cults. Some people — notably Rose McGowan — say the Democratic Party is a cult. But Goldberg, unsurprisingly, brings up Trumpsters as the cult here in America as she critiques a woman in a culture that is foreign to her.

What's the difference between "cult" and "culture"? Whether you look at other people through your "lens" and react to them as alien and defective? To be a serious thinker, you must critique your own lens. 

FOOTNOTE: According to the Online Etymology Dictionary entry for "cult":

1610s, "worship, homage" (a sense now obsolete); 1670s, "a particular form or system of worship;" from French culte (17c.), from Latin cultus "care, labor; cultivation, culture; worship, reverence," originally "tended, cultivated," past participle of colere "to till" (see colony).

The word was rare after 17c., but it was revived mid-19c. (sometimes in French form culte) with reference to ancient or primitive systems of religious belief and worship, especially the rites and ceremonies employed in such worship. Extended meaning "devoted attention to a particular person or thing" is from 1829.

Cult. An organized group of people, religious or not, with whom you disagree. [Hugh Rawson, "Wicked Words," 1993]

Cult is a term which, as we value exactness, we can ill do without, seeing how completely religion has lost its original signification. Fitzedward Hall, "Modern English," 1873]

Here's the entry for "culture," which comes from the same Latin root and originally referred to cultivating the land and growing crops.

The figurative sense of "cultivation through education, systematic improvement and refinement of the mind" is attested by c. 1500; Century Dictionary writes that it was, "Not common before the nineteenth century, except with strong consciousness of the metaphor involved, though used in Latin by Cicero." Meaning "learning and taste, the intellectual side of civilization" is by 1805; the closely related sense of "collective customs and achievements of a people, a particular form of collective intellectual development" is by 1867.

For without culture or holiness, which are always the gift of a very few, a man may renounce wealth or any other external thing, but he cannot renounce hatred, envy, jealousy, revenge. Culture is the sanctity of the intellect. [William Butler Yeats, journal, 7 March, 1909]

"As [Christopher] Rufo sees it, critical race theory is a revolutionary program that replaces the Marxist categories of the bourgeois and the proletariat with racial groups..."

"... justifying discrimination against those deemed racial oppressors. His goal, ultimately, is to get the Supreme Court to rule that school and workplace trainings based on the doctrines of critical race theory violate the 1964 Civil Rights Act.... Rufo insists there are no free speech implications to what he’s trying to do. 'You have the freedom of speech as an individual, of course, but you don’t have the kind of entitlement to perpetuate that speech through public agencies,' he said. This sounds, ironically, a lot like the arguments people on the left make about de-platforming right-wingers. To [Kimberlé] Crenshaw, attempts to ban critical race theory vindicate some of the movement’s skepticism about free speech orthodoxy, showing that there were never transcendent principles at play. When people defend offensive speech, she said, they’re often really defending 'the substance of what the speech is — because if it was really about free speech, then this censorship, people would be howling to the high heavens.' If it was really about free speech, they should be."

From "The Campaign to Cancel Wokeness/How the right is trying to censor critical race theory" by Michelle Goldberg (NYT). 

Here's a good comment over there: "The problem with your argument is that Critical Race Theory is presented at schools and workplace sessions as the TRUTH, not just an (unprovable) social science theory. And it would be very uncomfortable (if not career or social suicide) to question this theory in front of one’s bosses and peers."

That makes me think of Justice Jackson's famous line, one of the most important points about freedom of speech: "If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein." 

The problem is compelled speech. To be compelled to assert belief in what you do not believe is a severe intrusion on individual free speech, and that seems to be what is happening in these workplace training sessions. Is there some way to present the insights of Critical Race Theory as ideas to be understood and weighed against other ideas and debated instead of compelling attendance at events where the ideas are dictated and participants are forced to attest to the dictated beliefs?