As in the 1988 film Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, in which a con man poses as a fake prince hailing from a presumably fake country, it’s the stuff of movies:
City officials in Newark, New Jersey, got scammed into signing a sister-city agreement with a country that doesn’t exist by a self-proclaimed “god-man” who’s on the run from the law.
The fellow who oversaw this stroke of genius is Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, the “son of the infamous anti-Semitic playwright and poet Amiri Baraka (formerly Leroi Jones),” informs American Thinker’s Thomas Lifson. He also has … ahem … a Master of Arts degree in “Education Supervision.”
But Baraka didn’t demonstrate much education or proper supervision in the embarrassing incident in question. Barstool Sports explains what transpired:
The scam was created by Nithyananda, a swami that is a fugitive from India, where he is on the run from rape charges. Nithyananda, a well-known scam artist, created the website for Kailasa in 2019 while attempting to apply for asylum in Sri Lanka. In January, Newark held a ceremony at City Hall honoring the fake country while signing a cultural trade agreement.
During the ceremony on January 12th, Mayor Ras Baraka and the Newark City Counsel [sic] invited officials from the phony nation and signed an agreement on cultural trade. The mayor made a statement that he hoped the deal would help political development and improve the lives of everyone in Newark and the fake nation of Kailasa. Newark would take six days to realize that the country did not exist, as the deal was voided on January 18th.
In truth, the deal probably would’ve helped political development and improved the lives of Newark residents as much as any of Baraka’s other efforts. And while the mayor and other city officials have been mocked and criticized for being suckered, let’s be fair. You’d have to go on something called the “internet” to investigate this matter, which entails booting up a computer and pressing them thar buttons. There’s also a concept known as a “point of diminishing returns,” and it could have taken at least 35 seconds to learn that Kailasa isn’t a real country. And, I mean, how much time can Baraka realistically spend on pesky job-related matters?
Below is news report that includes video of the sister-city signing ceremony.
Nithyananda’s phony website for his fake nation includes fabricated headlines such as “The United States of America signs bilateral agreement with the United States of KAILASA” and “United Nations publishes report on the persecution of…KAILASA’s children & women.” And as the India Times informs (as presented by Lifson):
[T]he United States of Kailasa (USK)…according to Nithyana[n]da, is a Hindu nation with its own flag, passport, and even a central bank system.
However, it has no geographical location. There are rumours of Nithyana[n]da buying an island off the coast of Ecuador and that his nation, indeed is in one of the Ecuadorian islands. However, the Ecuadorian administration has confirmed that no such nation exists. Very recently, the USK has launched its citizenship application, the USK also claims to serve as a nation for its population of “two billion Hindus.”
So it turns out that this Nithyananda is quite the narcissistic con artist; in fact, his prevarications make those of George Santos — and even Joe Biden — look tame. Among his claims are, wrote the Deccan Chronicle in 2018, that “he can make monkeys, cows and lions speak Sanskrit and Tamil.” Such transformational abilities may be believable, too, now that he’s made monkeys out of Newark officials.
Nithyananda has also reportedly asserted that he has discovered more than 400 paranormal abilities, can increase his height, can disprove Einstein’s E = mc2 equation, and can open anyone’s “third eye,” and that he once delayed the sunrise for 40 minutes. (I was wondering why it was so dark that morning.)
Returning to those who can make the sun set on civilizations (permanently), the Nithyananda affair isn’t Newark’s only embarrassment of late, Lifson tells us. The city also recently unveiled a statue of abolitionist Harriet Tubman — to replace one of Columbus torn down by George Floyd-riot miscreants — that looks incomplete, as if it’s just a framework awaiting a finishing (video below).
Lifson notes that such aesthetic outrages are common today, and it is reminiscent of what G.K. Chesterton noted in 1905. “Savages and modern artists are alike strangely driven to create something uglier than themselves,” he wrote — “but the artists find it harder.”
Getting back to the sister-city fiasco, in fairness, with it taking only six days for Newark officials to correct their error, at least they didn’t go the Covid policy route. Had they done so, they’d still be telling residents two years hence to visit Kailasa, that they’ve learned much from the Kailasans, and that if you dispute Kailasa’s value, you’re an un-American danger to society.
On a more serious note, as I pointed out in 2014 in “Why Obama is Uneducated,” Ras Baraka and other leftists are, almost to a man, ignorant. This is largely because, since left-wingers lack virtue and love of Truth, they aren’t conscientious about seeking the latter; related to this, they eschew facts because their agenda is all about fiction.
Thus should leftists not be entrusted with anything, least of all the reins of government. As for Ras Baraka, let’s just hope we don’t next hear that he sent a million taxpayer dollars to a Nigerian prince.
