This eight-minute interview with Rose McGowan and my friend Tammy Bruce is destined to become a red-meat classic. The #MeToo activist and actor doesn’t identify with any political party (and neither does Tammy), but McGowan says only one of the two are a “deep cult.” Having grown up in the dangerous Children of God cult, McGowan tells Bruce she can see the signs — leaders who demand conformity while reaping all of the benefits for themselves (via Citizen Free Press):

McGowan told Fox News host Tammy Bruce that she used to vote for Democrats herself, but stopped.

“I am not here to make people feel bad about their political choices,” said McGowan.

“But I am here to say that you might be in a cult too if you don’t know the signs. And I do believe Democrats, most especially, are in a deep cult that they really don’t know about and aren’t really aware of.” …

“They’re against changing the world for the better and they’re for keeping a system in place that is for so few people and benefits so few but they masquerade as the helpers,” claimed McGowan.

“My persecution and awakening from being a Democrat was so much about what I do and what I say now and so much about realizing how hardcore of a cult it is,” she said.

McGowan became a passionate advocate for #MeToo after the exposure of her tormentor Harvey Weinstein. However, she quickly fell out of favor in the aftermath when McGowan became a little too non-partisan in her pursuit of sexual harassers and worse. When McGowan allied herself with Tara Reade after the former Joe Biden staffer accused him of a sexual assault, McGowan became persona non grata on the Left … or perhaps more thematically considered a “suppressive person.”

McGowan says she can respect Republicans for being more straightforward in their beliefs, but she’s not a conservative in the sense that Tammy is. (The GOP might still have a cult-of-personality issue to deal with, but that’s not the context in which McGowan is arguing here.) McGowan affiliated with Democrats based on their agenda, but her complaint is that they’re not operating on behalf of that agenda, at least not for everyone else. Essentially, McGowan is arguing from the George Orwell perspective — a person of the Left who got disillusioned after seeing who the Left really was and is.

In that sense, socialism usually works out to be akin to a cult in terms of distribution of benefits. Those get concentrated at the top, while everyone else has to deal with scarcity rationing, especially in economies without an overwhelming and lucrative set of natural resources, and it’s nearly impossible to opt out of those systems and their top-down control. Even with its limited shortcomings, scarcity issues are rare in capitalist systems — and usually afflict everyone equally. Which of these models more resemble a cult?