How Chris Bennett Became a Tool of CESNUR

 

Massimo Introvigne (head of CESNUR)

 

 

In the contemporary landscape of cultic religious propaganda, the most dangerous actors are not those working inside a coordinated organization—they are the useful outsiders who absorb and reproduce its narratives uncritically, often without realizing it. Such individuals become, for networks like CESNUR, the proverbial “useful idiots” of what can only be described as a transnational cult-apologist machine.

Few cases illustrate this dynamic more clearly than the recent writings of Chris Bennett. His articles follow, almost line-for-line, the apologetic playbook developed by CESNUR and its media arm, Bitter Winter:

• pathologise the critic,
• delegitimise their testimony,
• smear them as unstable or irrational,
• cite CESNUR-aligned narratives as authoritative,
• invert reality so that the accused becomes the victim.

Dr. Luigi Corvaglia—one of Europe’s leading analysts of cult-apologist rhetoric—has confirmed to me that Bennett’s prose directly reproduces the same template CESNUR has used to defend groups ranging from the Shincheonji Church of Jesus during the early COVID outbreak to the La Luz del Mundo, whose leader was subsequently convicted of multiple felonies.

Bennett does not need to be formally connected to CESNUR. He only needs to imitate its language—and he did so with remarkable fidelity.

The tragedy lies not only in the imitation itself, but in the real-world consequences of this mimicry. I have previously dissected this architecture in my analysis of the August Bitter Winter pieces in The Goal of the Wisecrack. For CESNUR’s broader machinery, the reader should consult Dr. Corvaglia’s masterful diagramming of its machine and operational logic,  whose tactics he documents.

But what is most revealing in all of this is not merely what Chris Bennett wrote, but how little he had to work with. If his recent screed is the strongest counter-narrative that the broader apologetic ecosystem around CESNUR can produce, then we are dealing with a network that has exhausted its intellectual ammunition. Bennett’s piece is not an aberration—it is a symptom. It shows that the CESNUR rhetorical machine has no meaningful ground on which to contest the facts, the history, or the scholarship, and so it defaults to its last remaining tactic: pathologisation dressed up as analysis.

Indeed, the very fact that CESNUR’s own senior voices—figures such as Massimo Introvigne and Rosita Šorytė—have stayed silent speaks volumes. If CESNUR had a stronger argument, they would not need to outsource their narrative work to a peripheral psychedelic writer with no grounding in Islamic studies, Iranian intellectual history, esoteric traditions, or the textual materials under discussion. Instead, their framework arrived second-hand, filtered through Bennett’s uncritical imitation. And imitation at this level is not a sign of strength; it is a sign of desperation.

Dr. Luigi Corvaglia’s assessment makes this dynamic unmistakably clear: Bennett’s entire approach is pure CESNUR boilerplate, repeated mechanically but without any of the sophistication, historical awareness, or contextual literacy that a real scholar would require. This is why his articles collapse under even minimal scrutiny—something the Brisbane Theosophical Society (to whom Bennett had sent his article unsolicited) recognized immediately upon reading it. They reveal not a coordinated intellectual rebuttal, but a hollow narrative template—a template that no longer works once exposed to daylight. If this is the best that CESNUR’s extended orbit can muster, then their rhetorical toolbox is empty.

In that sense, the Bennett episode inadvertently exposes the deeper truth: CESNUR’s strategy only works when its proxies operate unchecked and its tactics go unexamined. The moment someone shines a light on the machinery—the moment the template is named, mapped, and dissected—it loses its power. Bennett did not merely fail to refute anything; he demonstrated by his failure that there is nothing substantive to refute. What remains is only the echo of an aging propaganda model, now dragged into the open where its weaknesses can no longer hide. Yet what must be clearly understood is that Bennett’s work is not journalism. It is deliberate propaganda by contagion. And the record now reflects that fact.
 

Study these: THE CULT APOLOGIST MAFIA
https://www.luigicorvaglia.com/en/post/fascists-spies-and-gurus-the-cult-apologists-network-part-i

https://www.luigicorvaglia.com/en/post/fascists-spies-and-gurus-the-cult-apologists-network

https://www.luigicorvaglia.com/en/post/the-cult-apologist-mafia-part-iii