In my wider social circles, people often make weird groups, experiments, living situations, etc., and this is fine and normal
But one turned out to be pretty cultlike (at least to some of its subgroups), and maybe it's hindsight bias but before the expose, there were signs
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with this group, defenders often say there was longstanding beef with some of the more mainstream groups in my circles, and so people were biased, misunderstood and misrepresented. Idk how true this is, but I wasn't exposed to any of that; I didn't hear anybody say bad stuff
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I just remember in like 2018, having a conversation with at like 4am at a burn once and we were trying to figure out wtf was going on with this group, and without external influence we both agreed that the group was giving sus vibes
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imo there were 3 main flags
1: the group "ate" our friends. We'd refer to our friends as having disappeared into this group, we don't see them anymore, "oh we lost another one". The groups social life was very separate, which was not a feature of other communities
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2. we didn't know anything about the group. nobody in the group would tell us anything. it was a black box of ??? secrets. people in the group would laugh or change the subject when we asked what they were working on.
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3. when, rarely, small bits of info did escape, it was really bizarre. Someone in the group once got drunk and asked if we belived in demons, and that now he thought it was plausible because of the work he'd been doing in the group
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My point here is, independently of influence from ppl who already didn't like this group (I didn't associate with any of the more mainstream orgs who'd had conflict with them), me and friends independently developed wariness of the group based only on interaction with its members
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lol, talking to about this, he said he stopped by their booth at a conference in 2015 or 16, they said they could permanently raise IQ with their techniques, and Elliot felt red flags about them based off of this (before knowing anything else about them)
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I also have more anecdotes like this that I've been sworn to secrecy about, but in summary when people talk about bad blood between the cultlike group and the main groups I'm like wellllll I am not surprised the main group had allergies very early on
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If you want to discuss Leverage's past, you can just @ us😜
If people want to read about the history of Leverage, we think some more accurate sources are:
- Our inquiry following Zoe's post: leverageresearch.org/inquiry-report
- Another ex-employee account:
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