Manufacturing An Angry Young Man

Without me, one of MOVE’s most ardent supporters, Kevin Price, who recently wrote a fantasy piece on behalf of his cult for the Philly IMC, would likely have never joined up with the sect.

Long before this tragic figure became the epitome of manufactured dissent, addled by self-delusion, and a liar for MOVE, he was a promising young man.

In Virginia, where I met Kevin when he was a young teenager, he was already an activist of sorts and had already embraced a radical vision. However, after myself and others exposed him to MOVE and Mumia, what likely would have ended in just a phase of pubescent rebellion, has instead mutated into the horrific spectacle of another angry, young, white man, who may have just as well gotten caught up in the Aryan Nation as he did MOVE.

Even when I was in my most devoted phase of my involvement with MOVE, I had concerns that his young mind would be ripped to shreds by MOVE’s psychological barrages and that his critical faculties would be silenced before they had a chance to grow. And it appears that I was correct in my assessment. Yet another instance where I would rather be proved wrong than right.

It was several years ago that I remarked to another former MOVE supporter that if Kevin was told to go protest on behalf of Jeffery Dahmer or Timothy McVeigh that he would spring out without an ounce of doubt and do so with the same fervor that he does for Mumia and MOVE now. There are just some people who are just like that. And if they are caught up at a young enough age, the likelihood of their escape from the group becomes that much more of a question.

It is a known fact that cults, especially authoritarian ones, feed off of youthful naivete and the willingness of the young to subordinate their sense of self in order to please figures of authority at any cost. It is also a characteristic of such groups as MOVE to have no shame in their recruitment of young people as they encourage them to "drop out" of the "system" and abandon hopes for college and the relative uncertainty that plagues young people and replace it with an immediate sense of belonging, of family, and direction. And while time may reveal this kind of Faustian bargain for what it is, in the meantime the devotee gets more and more ensnared into the cult.

What began as devotion to fighting injustice turns into something far more malevolent.
But you do not see it at first, and some never see it, as the change is gradual. Today you are making regular trips to Philadelphia, than you go to live up there, you get into a relationship, and soon your life becomes routine. It matters not that your existence is rooted in a generic reality full of plagiarized emotions, supplications to an illiterate and likely insane, dead deity, and a world-view that simultaneously allows you a false sense of superiority, while in reality you are slowly sinking into the world of the worst of the worst. And the most sickening part of it all is that you don’t see it, and if you do, what can you do? Leave your family? Abandon what you think is everything and go back to being just another pebble on the beach? For those who have never been in that kind of situation, and be thankful you haven’t, it may seem like a no-brainer. But the reality is that it presents you with a situation that you know for a fact, will at least for a time, lead to immense difficulties.

That is why MOVE’s emotional brutalization visa vi their "meetings" are such an integral part of the sect’s existence. It is the consistent breaking down and building up of the self that leads to the death of self and a re-birth into a "hate the world" emotional cripple that Kevin Price has become. That is why they want cult members to live together, work at the same jobs, speak in the same way, and mouth the same lies.

Kevin can hardly string together a coherent sentence and he is full of false analogies and advances premises without anything in the way of proof to buttress his claims. But that is not really my point.

The first error he makes is the one that matters the most. For his argument is fully predicated upon the idea that MOVE members are, and were ,victims of an ongoing conspiracy to destroy the sect, kill their babies, etc...ad nauseam. That being the case, anything that follows his false premise is little more than a collection of fatuous non-sequiturs that are as empty and as devoid of meaning unintelligible rants that go on at a MOVE rally.

From my vantage point, this kind of article, no doubt written by Kevin at the behest of one of MOVE’s leaders is little more than evidence of the destruction of the life of a mind. As George Orwell pointed out, "the hardest thing to see is that which is right in front of your nose", Kevin could easily recite from memory a litany of charges made by MOVE against "the system".
However, if you were to query him as to what kind of negative role MOVE may have played in the cult’s many public relations disasters and confrontations, you will be lucky to receive a blank, dull, stare, as he has not been "programmed" by the cult for something like intellectual honesty.

For it is only a true cultist or a blinded ideologue, who could completely overlook the rape of girls as young as 11 or 12 and the many other criminal activities of the sect in order to sit straight faced at a computer to hammer out some kind of completely pointless screed so dreadfully crafted that it alone could be used as evidence that MOVE is exactly what the good folks down at the Guinness Book of World Records say it is.

As for Kevin and the other MOVE supporters that I left behind, I am hopeful. Statistically speaking, most of those around the sect will eventually abandon it. But I am reminded of the fact that long before martyrs go to their deaths in flames, they have already martyred their own power of reason and self-preservation as a form of supplication to the cult of death that is MOVE.

And so if Kevin and those who claim that May 13th 1985 was not a mass-suicide I would like them to explain what one should call you if you start shooting at what amounts to an army of heavily armed Police Officers after refusing to peaceably surrender. MOVE members did not have to act in a homicidal or suicidal manner, they chose to, and in doing so, they essentially murdered the children in their care as they caused their own deaths.

And no amount of mental gymnastics and false analogies can ever wash the blood that will forever stain the memory of what MOVE is, and will likely continue to be.

Kevin and the other MOVE supporters may have sacrificed their mental and critical faculties as they pledged support for, and paid obeisance too, MOVE’s leadership, but they are going to be hard pressed to convince too many more people to follow in their footsteps.