Let me openly state my bias: I have no respect for the Dalai Lama. This has nothing to do with his faith or his standing as a spiritual leader. It has to do with the fact that this man, a lifelong refugee from the People’s Republic of China, which controls Tibet by force, has self-identified as a Marxist. That’s just wrong. What’s also wrong is something that happened in India the other day: He asked a little boy to kiss him on the lips and suck his tongue. Even Biden hasn’t gone that far (yet). What the heck is wrong with our world leaders?

My problem with the Dalai Lama begins with the fact that he has proudly identified himself as a Marxist on at least two occasions:

The Dalai Lama identified himself as a Marxist on Tuesday while addressing capitalism, discrimination and violence at a lecture on world peace in Kolkata, India. This is not the first time that the 14th Dalai Lama has spoken about his political leaning - in 2011 he said: “I consider myself a Marxist...but not a Leninist” when speaking at a conference in Minneapolis.

“We must have a human approach. As far as socioeconomic theory, I am Marxist,” he said to the audience on Tuesday, at the lecture entitled ‘A Human Approach to World Peace’ which was organized by Presidency University.

The Tibetan spiritual leader partly blamed capitalism for inequality and said he regarded Marxism as the answer: “In capitalist countries, there is an increasing gap between the rich and the poor. In Marxism, there is emphasis on equal distribution,” he said, adding that “many Marxist leaders are now capitalists in their thinking”.

He said that he regarded economic and social inequality in India as the reason for ongoing discrimination against women and low social castes, calling on the world’s youth to take the 21st century from a century of violence to a “century of peace”.

Image: The Dalai Lama. Twitter screen grab.

Those statements mean that a lifetime spent opposing the Chinese communists has failed to inform the Dalai Lama that Marxism is the ultimate inequality: A small cadre of powerful people control the rest of their nation through implicit or explicit violence—and, invariably, even as their population grows increasingly impoverished, they dramatically increase their own wealth. That cognitive lapse means that, entirely separate from his status as a religious leader, the Dalai Lama is not a man deserving of my respect. (I have the same feeling about Pope Francis. My respect for the office stops short of a man who is almost certainly a communist.)

And then there’s the 87-year-old Dalai Lama’s recent disturbing behavior in India:

The Dalai Lama’s office put out a tweet trying to explain away what he did as “innocent and playful.”

Perhaps I’m unduly puritanical, but I don’t think it’s innocent or playful when a powerful old man asks a young boy to suck his tongue. If anything, his “playfulness” reminds me of Joe Biden being “playful” with any little girl (and some big girls) he can get his hands on:

Powerful old men lose their inhibitions and start doing in public things that everyone must wonder whether they were doing in private. As the tweet about the Dalai Lama’s tongue-sucking indicates, I’m not the only one creeped out by what he did:

People are beginning to feel that they’re witnessing the shenanigans in Epstein’s Island (rich and powerful people sexually abusing children) play out on the larger stage of the world. And indeed, there is something very wrong in the world today.

One of the reasons QANON gained so much traction was that it shined a spotlight on the fact that, across the world, the rich and powerful are preying on children. For more evidence of this, just take a stroll through The Vigilant Citizen website. Or just check out this article for a popular photographers’ collective.

As for me, I’m re-reading Dennis Prager’s Rational Bible books. They make me feel clean after living in a dirty world.