PUBLISHED: Against the Postmodern Germ: Essays on parapolitical disinformation architecture and the CESNUR–Bennett–Cannabis Culture Controversy PUBLISHED
I am pleased to announce the official publication of Against the Postmodern Germ: Essays on parapolitical disinformation architecture and the CESNUR–Bennett–Cannabis Culture Controversy.
Downloadable, here,
https://archive.org/details/against-the-modern-germ/
and here
https://www.academia.edu/145340372/Against_the_Postmodern_Germ_Essays_on_parapolitical_disinformation_architecture_and_the_CESNUR_Bennett_Cannabis_Culture_Controversy
Against the Postmodern Germ examines the architecture of contemporary disinformation, sectarian influence, and reputational warfare through a detailed case study involving CESNUR (the Center for Studies on New Religions), the Canadian writer Chris Bennett, and the Cannabis Culture media ecosystem. Drawing on archival research, media forensics, digital ethnography, and historiographical analysis, the book reconstructs the genealogy of a coordinated cross-border smear campaign directed at the author—one that reveals far broader patterns of manipulative discourse, institutional laundering, and psychological framing within the modern information landscape.
This work argues that CESNUR’s long-standing “counter–anti-cult” methodology—rooted in pathologisation, narrative inversion, and selective historiography—has migrated beyond the academic domain and now circulates freely in alternative subcultures, journalistic platforms, and online communities. The Bennett–Cannabis Culture controversy becomes the entry point for a larger examination of parapolitical discourse: how sectarian networks leverage pliable intermediaries, how reputational targeting functions as a tool of ideological containment, and how pseudo-academic templates are repurposed to discredit dissenting voices. The analysis also situates this episode within the broader dynamics of Western psychedelic culture, exposing its susceptibility to epistemic capture, orientalist projection, and strategic infiltration by actors whose agendas diverge sharply from its public rhetoric of liberation and openness.
Beyond its specific case study, the book offers a theoretical framework for understanding contemporary disinformation ecosystems—how they are structured, how they interface with institutions, and how they rely upon the psychological grammar of taboo, anathema, and “blasphemy” to suppress dissent. Through the lens of personal narrative, intellectual history, and cross-jurisdictional documentation, Against the Postmodern Germ illuminates the mechanisms by which narratives are manufactured, disseminated, and defended, and provides scholars of new religious movements, information warfare, and digital subculture studies with a unique longitudinal analysis of an emerging, understudied field of conflict.
In tracing the continuity between CESNUR’s internal archives, its historical treatment of Bayānī dissent, and Bennett’s 2025 publications, the book demonstrates that the controversy is not an isolated event but the visible surface of a deeper and more enduring apparatus of misinformation. The result is both a chronicle of a personal ordeal and a structural critique of a globalised disinformation pipeline—one whose implications extend far beyond the immediate actors and into the evolving landscape of parapolitical influence, epistemic warfare, and the struggle for narrative sovereignty in the twenty-first century.
