6: Grappling with the Cult of Trump (w/Steven Hassan)
It can be as hard to talk with your well-meaning yoga-world friend about their COVID-conspiracy beliefs as it is to talk with a family member about their devotion to Donald Trump. This isn’t an accident — but it’s not exactly by design, either. Both figures can seem trapped in filter bubbles of jargon that hypnotizes and cancels critical thinking.
In this episode, we talk with pre-eminent cult researcher Steve Hassan about his new book, The Cult of Trump, and explore the overlaps between the cults of personality that destroy political, wellness, and spiritual cultures. We discuss changes in cultic technique in the age of lockdown, and how best to maintain contact with a person transformed by manipulation. The interview with Steven begins at the 37-minute mark.
Show Notes
Troy Casey video
UFO Conspiracy Theorists Offer ‘Ascension’ From Our Hell World for $333
The Prophecies of Q
How the ‘Plandemic’ Movie and Its Falsehoods Spread Widely Online
Anatomy of Delusion: How Otherwise Conscious People Descended into the Darkness — Stephen Dinan
Shift Network courses
Matthew on the Shift Network
The Cult of Trump Media Page
Steven Hassan’s BITE Model
Influence Continuum
“I Am Not Your Guru” — Tony Robbins documentary
“Hacking the Consumer’s Brain” — Moran Cerf
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This week, it's episode six.
And the title is grappling with the cult of Trump with Steve Hassan.
It can be as hard to talk with your well-meaning yoga world friend about their COVID conspiracy beliefs as it is to talk with a family member about their devotion to Donald Trump.
This isn't an accident, but it's not exactly by design either.
Both figures can seem trapped in filter bubbles of jargon that hypnotize and cancel critical thinking.
In this episode, we talk with preeminent cult researcher Steve Hassan, about his new book, The Cult of Trump, and explore the overlaps between the cults of personality that destroy political, wellness, and spiritual cultures.
We discuss changes in cultic technique in this age of lockdown or quarantine, and how best to maintain contact, how best to maintain contact with a person transformed by manipulation.
Yeah, so we'll start with this week in conspirituality and And as Derek said, there's always so much material to go through.
Just last night, I came across this essay, a long personal essay published by Stephen Dynan on Medium.
It's called Anatomy of Delusion, How Otherwise Conscious People Descended into the Darkness.
It's a really interesting piece.
Not so much for what it says.
I think it presents a passable critique of conspirituality.
But I find it interesting for who the writer is and what he confesses, and the accountability he kind of addresses but in some ways avoids.
Dinan is the founder and CEO of the Shift Network.
He's also a member of the Transformational Leadership Council that was founded by Jack Canfield, who you might know as one of the leading interview subjects in The Secret back in the day.
Okay, so if you don't know the Shift Network, you're probably not on any of the hundreds of wellness influencer newsletter lists that affiliate for it.
Shift Network describes itself as a transformational education company.
It's based in Petaluma, California, founded in 2010, which is like right on the cusp of the online wellness boom.
It's basically this love child of the human potential movement and the tech world.
It's become this super powerful content aggregator that looks like it prints money.
Now, key to the business model is the online summit.
Now, this is one of those things where you get invited to a three-day free event with a faculty list that's like as long as your arm, and you can't believe it's free.
These people look great.
They look great on paper.
Their bios are rich and fantastic.
Their headshots are beautiful.
And yeah, it's hard to believe that it's offered for free, but it's also hard to believe how efficient the events are at data collection and market outreach.
On the Shift Network homepage, they claim that they've had 1.3 million registrants from 177 countries for these events.
So going forward, I'm just going to imagine that their email list is at least 1.3 million members long.
Now, full disclosure, I was a Shift Network interviewee last year for one of these events because prominent yoga teacher Cindy Lee interviewed me about abuse in the yoga world, which I found was kind of like interesting juxtaposition.
I didn't expect to be on the Shift Network.
Now, they didn't offer any payment.
It's one of those, you know, it's good for exposure things like in indie music or something.
And I'm assuming that most presenters at these things don't get paid.
I can't see how the model would work with so many presenters.
But what do they do with all that contact info?
They use it to market the upgrade courses they produce with a selection of the same presenters.
And I would bet that these companies have a way of analyzing the attendance data for the summit presenters to see who's worth collaborating with.
Now the courses they bundle together consist of a few hours of video lectures, transcripts, interviews, maybe some extra readings, and the price range is anywhere from a hundred to three hundred US dollars.
This is all passive income for Shift Network and the presenters and for the affiliates.
And if you don't know how affiliates work, this is where anyone in the wellness field can apply for a dedicated trackable link for the course registration and they'll receive a portion of the sale whenever and however the user migrates back for the purchase.
Now that affiliate payout can be really high.
I've affiliated for a few courses, not with a shift network, but for people that I really support.
And the payout is like 50% of the course fee.
So I've made a few hundred dollars over the years through this content sharing model.
But I always feel the ethics are a little bit borderline because really what these companies are doing is that they're paying affiliates for access to their email lists.
And those newsletter recipients didn't sign up for cross-marketing.
And I'm talking about all of this because the shift network really is a network.
And if we're trying to understand how ideologies spread and how the groundwork is laid for pieces of garbage like Plandemic to go viral, We've got to know something about the networked economy of wellness, which relies on influence, affiliate linking, overlapping email lists, and all of this allows like astrologers, channelers, crystal healers, and yoga people to co-create enormous markets.
So what I'm saying is that conspirituality is a river that found a deeply carved bed.
Okay, so bear with me because I want to follow the money and do some numbers.
I haven't seen Shift Network's accounting, but I can speculate I believe in a reasonable way.
I might be off, totally open to correction, but I really believe what I'm doing here is uber conservative in terms of estimation.
When I scroll through their course page, I find 104 courses.
So let's say that the average price per course is 200 bucks, and through their 1.3 million member contact list, they sell only one unit of each course per month.
That would be like an extremely low conversion rate of their list.
Something like 0.008%.
Like a terrible conversion rate.
Like anybody with that conversion rate in this business should be fired.
So I think I'm being really conservative here.
Even with that lowball number, Shift Network is bringing in 20,000 gross.
Now at two units, 40,000 gross, three units, 60,000 gross per month.
And depending upon whether they're selling or going through affiliates, they're keeping between 25 and 50% of that cash, all passive income.
Their costs would be hosting, tech support, ads, future recruitment, And not much else, right?
And 104 courses are just the ones that are active.
On Glassdoor, they say that they have launched 500 courses.
Now, who are the presenters?
I can tell you that I was an oddball on that roster, and they didn't ask me to collaborate on any course, I think because my content isn't exactly inspirational.
There's a lot of presenters, and I can't analyze them all, but I'll just read out some of the course names for you.
So we've got Answering the Sacred Call of Mediumship, Becoming Shakti, Awakening Your Inner Goddess.
That seems to be taught by a dude.
Deeper dimensions of medical qigong, shamanic journeying, transforming your life through near-death experiences.
Do not try this at home.
Journey through the sacred tarot.
You can, I mean, that's what, that's the basic profile.
It just goes on and on like that.
Now, I'm not knocking any of these courses, but like, are we in evidence land here?
Are we in critical thinking land here?
No, I mean, is there a course on the Shift Network about logical fallacies or charismatic mind control?
I'm not seeing it.
And so has the Shift Network contributed to the anti-science hellscape of conspirituality?
I would say yes.
Let me go to Dinan's essay.
He would actually agree with me.
He knows it.
To his great credit in his essay, he writes, as the CEO of a large company in the space, the Shift Network, I include myself in this.
He's talking about the degradation of basic epistemology and discourse and the ability to, you know, read facts and collect evidence.
How, he asks, how have I been colluding in aspects of the problems in the new paradigm worldview that are now manifesting in people going into a land beyond reason?
It's a great question.
Then he adds a confession.
I confess that I've been saddened by the failure of our movement to meet this collective moment.
People I once counted as respected colleagues have become leaders in the conspirituality and now anti-mask movement, and it embarrasses me to think I once championed them in their work.
Right, like, that's an amazing confession, and I can really feel it.
I don't know.
I don't know what presenter he's referring to in particular, but if you go to the faculty page, Michael Beckwith is the first name that pops up.
And as we know from previous episodes here on Conspiratuality Podcast, Beckwith champions the whole, the real virus is fear mantra when he talks about the pandemic.
All right.
So back to that income estimate.
Beckwith has a course on Shift Network listed at about $200, but here's the thing.
On the page that it's listed on, it's endorsed by Deepak Chopra, Marianne Williamson, the late Ram Dass, and Hilary Swank.
Now, let's imagine they're all affiliating for this thing, because why wouldn't they be?
And if they are, how much cash are we talking about here?
How much reach are we actually talking about?
If in the initial marketing surge for Beckwith's course, Shift Network sold 1,000 units, and that's still a terrible conversion rate in relation to their main list, we're talking about $200,000 gross on one course.
Why am I talking about this?
Here's my lens.
For the last eight years, I've spent basically all of my time researching and writing about abuse in the yoga and Buddhism worlds.
And every time a crisis erupts, there'll be some leading figures in the organization that issue reform statements that are good in some ways, but also function to limit their liability.
And I've written about this in particular, and we'll post the link.
One thing in these statements I have never heard is, Hey, I made this amount of dollars promoting this method, teacher, or community, which I now understand to be harmful or abusive, and here's what I'm going to do with that money.
Here's how I'm going to support the survivors of the institution that I helped build up and that I profited from.
I've never heard that.
So let's just put Shift Network to the side for the moment and consider something like Shambhala Publications.
Like, although it's a legally separate entity from Shambhala International, it sold around a quarter of a million copies of Trungpa Rinpoche's books.
And those books functioned as propaganda for a cult-like organization with a decades-long history of abuse.
Trungpa family, Trungpa's family collects royalties, but how are we to think about the cash that Shambhala Publications has amassed by selling the core literature of a cult?
Why is this important?
Because the dozens, if not hundreds of victims of institutional abuse need more than apologies and reform platitudes.
And because we have to stop looking at disinformation as the responsibility of individuals to clean up or counter.
There are economic networks that allow disinformation to proliferate.
So here's my assertion, which I think Stephen Dynan might agree with.
The aiding and abetting of conspirituality is a form of cultural and systemic abuse.
And in the US, we're talking about a population where 50% of poll respondents are saying they'll refuse to be vaccinated against COVID-19.
So cultural opposition to public health is an ongoing, accelerating, life and death problem, disproportionately impacting the poor and the marginalized.
So, Stephen.
If you're listening, pretty good job on the essay.
I appreciate the effort.
I'm really wondering if you're able to do more.
I'm wondering what percentage of your Michael Beckwith income, for example, can now directly fund public education that pushes back against disinformation.
We know that alternative health and wellness networks have been key vectors for the spread of conspirituality.
In your article, you say that Mickey Willis's fake documentary, Plandemic, is a poorly researched conspiracy nonsense.
But I'm sure you know that it wouldn't have gone viral without the types of networks that you have helped build.
You've got a lot of power in that zone, a lot of privilege to now mobilize, and if you're as concerned as you say, maybe you'll use it.
I don't know what your finances or your commitments are.
You might be overextended, you might be broke.
And if so, I wish you all the support that you need.
But if you've built a nest egg of passive income on energy healing online courses, and money from that is still rolling in as people become more desperate during lockdown, and they turn to pseudoscience because of propaganda, or because their governments have abandoned them, that money has blood on it.
I'm sorry to say.
But you know, know better, do better.
And I look forward to the Shift Network 2.0.
Fantastic.
Matthew, this connection that I haven't heard many people make, and certainly not as well as you just did right now, between the reality of cultish situations And their connection to opportunistic capitalist enterprise.
Absolutely.
And then how, you know, it goes back to sort of one of my pet ideas, which is how beliefs matter and that the beliefs that you are sort of indoctrinating people into because they are appealing and generate a lot of income for yourself, end up having consequences.
And so here we are with the consequences.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Thanks.
Wow.
I'm going to go to my this week, if that's okay, if you're ready for the transition.
So I've done some deep background, and I say that partially tongue-in-cheek because I'm going to start by saying around 7,000 years ago, a unique religion called Zoroastrianism emerged in ancient Sumeria.
This is the earliest known form of a by now familiar type of mythology that pits the forces of light and dark against one another in a battle that will eventually lead to the end of the world.
I'm a huge fan of world mythology scholar Joseph Campbell.
I think both of my co-hosts are as well.
He would sometimes start a lecture by asking the audience rhetorically, what is mythology?
Answering his own question, he would say with a twinkle in his eye, other people's religion.
What is mythology?
Well, it's other people's religion.
What then is religion?
Followed by a long pause.
Misunderstood mythology.
This week, I noticed a resurgence of the overlap that started us in on this very podcast.
The gun totem far-right QAnon narrative being rebroadcast by the yoga mat totem, natural live-in New Agers.
Now that the Black Lives Matter political protests have died down a bit, I saw an alarming return on social media to this theme, and even an uptick.
And this is despite the fact that I, and many people I know, engaged in the Great Purge, where we started defriending and unfollowing people who were spreading this stuff.
Nonetheless, I saw an uptick, and it was fascinating, because it looks more and more to me like a new religion.
What I saw reminded me of Joseph Campbell's quip about religion as misunderstood mythology, as well as another quote from him.
That the mythic image, when it is functioning correctly, should be transparent to transcendence.
That it is a signpost, an energy-generating experiential device that points us in the direction of greater wholeness and greater aliveness.
But this is not what I saw or felt as I tracked the posts of New Agers who were copy-pasting QAnon stuff.
I did start to see some patterns, though.
Now listen, the interesting thing about digging into any cultish belief system or conspiracy theory is that learning how the magic trick is done, seeing where the hypnotic induction occurs, catching the clever sleight of hand where the peanut that was under the cup has been spirited away, all of this can itself start to sound a bit like a conspiracy theory.
But it isn't.
And that's the paradox.
Delusional beliefs and conspiracy theories are themselves forms of trickery, whether deliberate or unconscious.
They are ways of distorting reality, either for ulterior motive or capitalist gain, as we've heard, or as a psychologically defensive coping strategy.
So exposing those connections requires some of the same, perhaps dangerously paternistic curiosity.
The difference, hopefully, is that it leads to greater clarity instead of greater Confusion.
What I started to see as I looked into some of this during the week is that the identity, and I was looking at specific people who I was starting to see get some traction, the identity of being a light worker who has special quasi-paranormal powers already carries literalized, or as Joseph Campbell would say, misunderstood Mythology.
These lightworker figures, in lieu of other kinds of formal training or qualifications, rely on the authority that comes from saying that other entities, be they angels, ascended masters, or benevolent aliens, are either working through them or speaking to them in ways that dramatically, albeit indirectly, command a kind of unquestioning faith.
For the true believer and their teacher in this dynamic, the declarative proclamations about current events, the metaphysical timeline of the world, and the higher purpose of suffering, trauma, and healing, all of this becomes a shared, meaning-making hero's journey.
And it is precisely through that doorway of misplaced sacredness and concretized metaphor that more malevolent parallel mythologies can start to resonate.
It's not the content, but the structure, the style of storytelling, the conviction that the hidden truth is really about ancient secret societies and not about systemic abuse or racism or problems with capitalism.
It's really that future prophetic destinies are at play here.
And it's that same battle between light and darkness that captivated the human imagination for the first time in Sumeria 7,000 years ago.
It is the shared language in which this supposed trans channel supports the claims of that supposed alien abductee, which supports the interpretation of this ancient prophecy, which dovetails just neatly enough with that conspiracy theory, all in an elaborate house of cards built on epistemic quicksand, but conveying heroic status and longed for meaning.
It is no accident that this meaning transcends right or left.
Rather, it is a bold assertion that the real battle is not of this world and need not be logically coherent or tethered to any established political framework.
Even though, as one commenter observed, if you've gone so far down the rabbit hole that you come out thinking Trump is a light worker, you probably went too far.
It is not hard to see how the pressure of our times can lead to a compelling sense that surely This much crisis must mean the prophesied grand awakening is upon us, and the grotesque father figure in the White House is a masterfully disguised savior.
Wow, thanks.
Thanks, Julian.
One thing sticks out.
I'm wondering if we have a genealogy of the word lightworker.
Uh-huh.
When did we start hearing that?
I first heard the term Lightworker in Barbara Marciniak's work, which goes back probably to the mid to late 80s.
That's when I first remember seeing it.
It's a book that I read in the early 90s when I was very taken with New Age stuff.
Barbara Marciniak claimed to be channeling the Pleiadians, and she's the first one I heard talk about this cosmology where the Earth is at the center of this battle between light and dark alien forces.
Right.
I mean, it's such a compelling term and vocation, because it just implies by its very nature that It's mandated by the heavens, but it's also freely available.
The person's using something that shines on the rich and poor.
And it strikes some chords personally for me because light is one of the most used words in A Course in Miracles, into which I was indoctrinated for a number of years.
And there was kind of like an energetic healing aspect to The group dynamic and the rituals that we underwent every day that we spoke about in terms of allowing the light to enter.
Now, I always felt as though, I always translated the word into something more like grace.
I didn't think of sunbeams.
I didn't think of something spatial.
I didn't think of something coming from another place.
I translated it, but I know that there was a lot of people who had a very literal understanding of light as being this sort of penetrative, revelatory energy.
It's fascinating.
Yeah, and in a way, what I also find fascinating about it is it can be another one of these sliding signifiers, right?
It's whatever you want to imbue it with.
If you believe that you are on the side of good and light, then you're a light worker.
Whether you're fighting for, you know, fundamentalist Catholicism or some kind of new age prophecy.
Right.
Amazing stuff.
Matthew, I thought that the Awakening the Goddess Within workshop was yours.
Right, no, no, it wasn't.
No?
Okay.
No.
Okay, it was my fault.
No, he had a similar workshop with a slightly different title.
Well, thank you for invoking Campbell, though.
That always makes me happy.
My whole path was pretty much because of him.
This week, I want to cover a video I came across that was posted by a man named Anthony Collins in Sedona, Arizona.
He was walking into a coffee shop with two friends when a man outside said, What's with the masks, gentlemen?
Are you here to rob the place?
Now, with Anthony and his friends, two of the men were Mexican-American and one was Native American, and they felt really offended by this.
And, you know, they went inside, sort of triggered by that, and on the way out, the same man, instead of apologizing, handed them a book, a flyer for his book.
Now, and they just drove off in disgust.
But as they were going and everything that was happening around, they were really bothered by it.
So they decided to drive back and to confront the man about this.
And it was an hour later and they came back.
And this man, whose name is Troy Casey, he's on social media as Certified Health Nut.
He was still there holding an Instagram Live video for his 57,000 followers.
And the video that started was the two men in front and one behind was filming it and they approached him to discuss the incident.
I highly recommend watching it.
It's in the show notes.
Because they lay out the case very clearly.
They said, as minorities in this country, they felt discriminated by that statement.
Now, maybe Troy is just an anti-masker, and he would have said it to anyone.
That's totally understandable.
Not acceptable, but understandable.
But when he was confronted about it, it was his reply that I want to drill down on.
Now, before I get into that, let me note that Troy came onto their Facebook page after the video was posted and he apologized.
And it seems heartfelt.
Um, Anthony replied being like, good, I hope we can build from this.
So, you know, when, like with the dining thing, when somebody lives up and owns up to something, that's great.
So want to start with that.
Um, but it's the lack of apology when he was confronted by the two, the three men that I want to talk about.
Now, when I first started dating my wife, we often talked about how people apologize.
She's even posted on her social media rewrites of public apologies that would actually make the person being apologized to feel better.
Very often, apologies are sort of whataboutisms that actually make the person saying it feel justified or better.
They're not actually apologizing to the person, and that's what Troy does.
Well, actually, not even.
He doesn't even apologize in the eight minute video, but his whataboutism is rampant.
So as these three men are explaining their feelings on the topic, the first thing that Casey says is, they look like homies from LA.
And then he starts talking about how he grew up on the streets of LA and that he was incarcerated.
So think about it, these two Mexican-Americans and Native Americans approach this white guy and saying these things, and his first thing was, hey, I was incarcerated.
I get you.
So it starts there.
And he also references his love of hip-hop culture.
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
And then he launches into his career work, which is apparently doing men's work.
And that he wants to connect with strong men like you.
He wants to reunite the brotherhood of men around the fire.
And then he thanks them for returning and even throws out a namaste to them, at least with his hands.
Now wait, is his IG live still running at this point?
Yes.
Wait, so did he publish that?
Well, it was live, so apparently, yes.
I don't know if he published it, but they... Because Anthony and his thing says for about six minutes, he keeps the IG riot running, so not only are they filming it, it's going on his feed as well, right?
So, yeah, so there had to have been some form of, you know, just showing up for that, for his audience at that time.
For sure.
He even says that his mask comment was a form of respect.
Now let's go back real quick.
What's up with the masks, gentlemen?
Are you here to rob the place?
So this has become a form of respect.
And then so one of the guys asks him, well, if you really want to show us respect, why didn't you say something positive instead of assuming that we were criminals?
And again, he has this opportunity to acknowledge the problem, but like Matthew said, he just keeps digging.
He then goes on into a spiel about how he's worked with shamans from around the world.
Now, I can go on with where he goes, you can imagine, but you get the point by now.
But he then brings up at some point, Wanting to do ceremony with these guys now now I don't think he recognizes That being a white man on camera talking about doing psychedelic drugs is much different than being a person of color Admitting that they do psychedelic drugs, right?
These are very different levels of privilege that happen or that that's the level of privilege that I just don't think he's even aware of at this point and He then offers them a free copy of his book.
He does that at least twice.
His book, by the way, is called Ripped at 50, A Journey to Self-Love.
All right, so on his book's website, just to give some frame of reference here, he discusses wireless radiation promoting cancer and the health problems that come with wireless radiation, among some other conspiritually factors that are all in there.
Now, just yesterday, he posted on Instagram That, and this is regarding COVID-19, one of the most foundational facts are that in all caps, you are going to die.
And then he said, I won't add to the noise about what you should or should not do during COVID, but I will say that anything you do out of fear will hurt you.
Now, he also posted a video at Gold's Gym in Venice, so I guess he returned from Arizona.
And in the video, he's shirtless and maskless working out in the gym, and he's almost hyperventilating while he's lifting these light weights.
Now, I point that out because he's shirtless and maskless in one of the worst possible places, being indoors, where your chances of contracting coronavirus are 19 times worse than if you are outdoors.
And I mean Gold's has very high ceilings.
It's actually probably one of the safer gyms to be honest, but at the same time This is where this is how he's presenting himself like a couple days after this video is shot And then he goes on to a pitch for his men's coaching workshops, which you know, it's his feet.
That's that's totally fine But what this whole situation reminds me of is something Matthew pointed out, which is Kelly Brogan posting a Hopi quote Yeah, it was about the birthing process of the pandemic or the transformational opportunity, yeah.
Yeah, so she posts this Hopi quote, this very fluffy imagery behind it, while Indigenous Americans have the highest rate of COVID in the country right now.
And so here you have Troy Casey telling Indigenous men that they're being pussies for wearing a mask, because let's be clear, that's what it is.
It's either you're being a pussy or you're scared of the government or one of those things.
And he has this inability to see that the pandemic is ravaging communities of colour at much higher rates than whites, and that's just another sign of his privilege.
Now, interestingly, after I shared the video on my Facebook feed, a few people who have actually come across and worked with Troy or know him from the scene, the yoga scene, reached out to me and explained some stories.
But, you know, those are all anecdotes.
So I'm not going to share them.
That's not fair.
And I don't have confirmation, although I do trust these people.
Let's just say they don't paint him in a favorable light and everything keeps pointing back to his ego.
So that's important.
And then, A friend of mine, Josh Weiss, reached out and he shared a post that he had posted on June 1st about the same exact coffee shop.
And here's what he wrote.
Just got openly harassed for wearing a mask in Creekside Coffee in Sedona by some higher than now conspiritualist white privileged hippie prick.
And this was even after telling him that my girlfriend is going through chemo.
The cultural wars are real.
Fuming.
So I followed up with him.
I emailed him and I said, Hey, was this the same guy?
And he said, no, it was another guy at the same coffee shop.
And apparently when he confronted the staff about it, there's a systemic problem on the community there.
But again, that's anecdotes.
So I'll leave that there.
But I just thought that was interesting.
So, an apology means that you listen to what the person is saying.
You don't just think about what you're going to reply with.
And honestly, that took a long time for me to learn.
It wasn't until I met my wife that I really thought a lot more about how and when I apologize.
I don't always think that apologies are appropriate.
I mean, sometimes debates are really necessary.
That's something we do lose in social media.
We've talked about this before, where people put you in these impossible-to-win situations.
There's one example where a few weeks ago, the Democrats in the House wore kente cloths as a sign of respect for Black Lives Matter, and they got hammered on social media, right?
They took a battering for that.
But here's the thing.
The Congressional Black Caucus, who's led by my representative, Karen Bass, asked everybody to wear them as a sign of respect.
So, can you imagine if they said no and that got out, what people would have said?
So that's what I mean about an impossible to like, the optics might have been a little messed up, but it was coming from a place that that people in their in their Congress who thought that it was a good idea.
So from an optics perspective, it's impossible.
But when you get down, if you listen to what the Democrats said, and if you would have, you know, transfer this to this instance, if Casey would have listened to the words, and not got caught up in all of the optics, he could have just said, I'm sorry, I hear what you're saying.
But he said, hey, I'm from the hood.
I've been in jail.
Oh, and hey, here's my book.
And that's a very different lesson.
I think it's really important to point out.
He also likes hip-hop, so... He does.
Well, I guess one of the three guys was wearing a Soul Assassin shirt, and Casey points to him and says, you know, hey, how many people even know who they are, right?
Like, I'm down with you.
It was really awkward.
And I have to... I also have to finish with the three guys, like, when you listen to them, man, just what a mature and level-headed approach to it.
It wasn't emotional.
It was just like, hey, you...
This hurt us, so let's hear us out.
And I just don't feel like Casey ever really heard them.
Yeah, and I mean, the effort it takes to walk back in there with the phone and to do that is just like, it's not something I think we can ever really understand.
And to keep that level of composure and to try to communicate very directly a really needed message.
That was an it's an amazing moment.
It's an amazing moment and and he's the guy is completely incapable of communicating Maybe because he's on Instagram live along with the other stuff But following up again the last couple days, you know, you've just I just noticed this every time someone confronts him on his feed It's just a long response about his credentials and his feelings.
And he also very much, he takes, I think this is going to be a recurring theme in our show, the I'm just asking questions stance.
And that's a really dangerous and important thing to notice about what's happening with conspirituality and people and how they're framing the questions they just want to ask.
Well, here on Conspirituality Podcast for episode six, we're really, really pleased to welcome Steve Hassan.
He's a mental health professional who's been helping people leave destructive cults since 1976, after he was deprogrammed from Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church.
He's the author of four books, Combating Cult Mind Control, Releasing the Bonds, Freedom of Mind, and his most recent book, just published a few months ago, The Cult of Trump.
On a personal note, I'd like to say that Hassan's work has been really helpful and pragmatic in making my own cultic survivorship comprehensible.
And I'd also like to say that for our Patreon subscribers, we're going to be engaging in a little bit of conversation about this interview for subscribers.
And so you can hook up with that on our Patreon page.
So here's my interview with Steve Hassan.
Steve Hassan, thanks so much for taking the time today.
Yeah, my pleasure, Matthew.
Thanks for asking me.
Yeah.
Well, jumping right into it, in your new book, which I see there on your table behind you, called The Cult of Trump, you argue really persuasively for the application of cultic theory to understanding our current political landscape, especially Trumpism, of course.
In your opinion, why is this lens so important and what does it let us do?
So, essentially, the stereotypical profile of cult leaders that I've studied over the last 40 years, including my former cult leader, Sun Myung Moon, who I was involved with in the mid 70s, comprise a profile of what's known as malignant narcissism.
And it differs from regular narcissism in that it is antisocial as well, meaning that the person thinks they're above the law.
They think nothing about doing antisocial behavior, like ignoring congressional subpoenas, for example.
Lying pathologically.
Trump has lied over 19,000 times by a Washington Post fact checker.
Interpersonally exploitative, sadistic, harassing and silencing, violence or calling people to do violence, paranoia, inability to trust friends.
So that's the malignant side of narcissism.
I'm just going to read off narcissism.
And you'll see that Trump fits it to a tee.
And in fact, in chapter three of my book, I compare him with Moon, Hubbard, Jim Jones, David Koresh, and a whole bunch of other cult leaders.
So the narcissistic is the grandiose self-centered behavior, the fantasies of power, success, and attractiveness, the need for praise and admiration.
The sense of entitlement, and very importantly, lack of empathy.
The lack of the ability to step into other people's shoes and feel for them, to feel for their circumstances.
So, why is this important?
Because the most powerful person in the world is, uh, got incredible amount of media Uh, power at his disposal is a model, uh, for everyone to follow.
So if he thinks nothing about lying, he's unconsciously transmitting that it's fine to lie.
Right.
It's fine to deny reality.
I didn't say that even though there, there's 15 people were in the room and there was a recording.
Nope, never said it.
So, it's crazy making and in my book the subtitle is about mind control.
I feel like the country and the world has been subjected to this crazy, delusional, conspiracy thinking, paranoid, I create my own reality and it doesn't matter what the facts are.
Right.
And it's making people Confused, numb, disempowered, vulnerable, helpless.
And that's the precondition for being taken into a mind control cult of an authoritarian who says, trust me, I've got this a hundred percent.
And as we can see, there are millions of Americans who are loyal Trumpists who will be asked, has he lied?
No, he hasn't.
You know, is there anything you don't like about him?
Nope.
Love, love the guy.
And they seem to be genuinely believing it.
And it mirrors my own mindset when I was in the Moonies cult.
Especially, I was involved with the Moonies during the Nixon-Watergate period, where I was told to fast for Nixon along with hundreds of other Moonies, because God wanted him to be president.
And prior to being in the cult, I hated Nixon, and I used to fight with my father who voted for him, and I used to argue with him that he's a liar, and he's a criminal.
But I had the mindset of this is God.
God wants him to be president.
Who are we to question God?
And now, as I understand cultic theory from my own survivorship, my research, there's this key moment where at the point where the member, the follower begins to perform the function of the evangelist or the proselytizer or the recruiter.
You know, at that point, the indoctrination is said to be complete, when the leader no longer has to directly recruit new members, that he's got, you know, people doing that for him.
But, I mean, also, this is what happens in typical political campaigns and movements, that people are inspired by leaders, you know, they're inspired by their ideology, they go out and they try to canvas for support for the particular movement.
So, what's the dividing line between the political movement and the cult?
So, forgive me for holding up a sheet, but this is what's known as the influence continuum.
It's on my website, freedomofmind.com, and I laid it out this way to think about ethical influence and unethical influence.
It's not a binary, it's a continuum.
Here is informed consent, where you know what you're getting involved with.
There's no deception.
There's transparency.
There's accountability.
There's responsibility.
Here's about deception, outright lying, withholding vital information, or distorting information, or creating propaganda.
And you can go through the list and there are really distinct differences with authoritarian destructive cultism that apply to the Trump presidency.
Right.
And what people get confused a little bit about is The differences between religious cult leaders and political cult leaders, right?
But I think of mind control in terms of this influence continuum and what I refer to as the BITE model of mind control, which is on my website as well and in my books, all of my books, Behavior Control, Information Control, Thought Control, and Emotional Control.
And in my model there are specific behaviors that one can go through and see whether it applies or not.
Right.
So I use Lyndon LaRouche in my book as kind of the example of a political cult leader, but I really think we could use the leader of North Korea, we could use Kim, we could use Vladimir Putin, we could use other dictators as well.
But it's all about power, money, and sex.
Those seem to be the three universals about what malignant narcissists are about.
They want to be famous.
They want people to idolize them and remember their names and do what they want to do.
They want to be wealthy and they want to abuse people.
Well, and those factors, as you point out in the book, especially through your detailing of Lyndon LaRouche, really, they transcend political ideology.
And one of the things that we work on here on Conspiratuality Podcast is what we call, or what many people call, the horseshoe effect On display in the particular demographic of those who are attracted to both conspiracy theories, often associated with hard right or alt right mindsets, and also utopianism frameworks that we're more familiar with from the left.
So, conspiritualists, like, they not only defy left and right political divides, but they can actually blend extremes from both.
I'm wondering, how is it that cult dynamics just overwhelm a person's seemingly core political values?
I mean, the story about you arguing with your dad about Nixon while you're with the Unification Church is really telling.
That must have overturned decades, if not an entire lifetime, of political sentiment.
Yeah, totally.
In fact, I called my father from D.C.
thinking he would be happy that I was fasting for Nixon, and he was appalled.
He said, Steve, you are right.
He's a crook.
I'm like, Dad, you don't understand.
God wants Nixon to be president.
He said, now I know you're brainwashed, Steve.
The guy's a crook.
But what I want to say to you, Matthew, and your listeners is that it's really not helpful, from my vantage point,
To think in terms of content ideology, left, right, progressive, conservative, I think what I use is just understanding psychology and ethical influence and unethical influence, and it's my posture as a spiritual person that
That we need to grow up from infancy to adulthood and part of that development is having volition, having choices around what do we believe, what do we want to do, to have an internal locus of control versus looking outside to an external authority figure, which is more what little kids need to do with their parents.
No, we need to grow up And we need to be adults, and we need to think as well as feel, and we need to be in our bodies, and we need to understand the difference between predators and leaders and teachers.
We need to have that frame on, you know, am I being discouraged from asking critical questions?
Am I feeling a lot of pressure not to challenge If I see something that violates my conscience or what the facts are, and it's this internal warning system that I'm encouraging people to develop.
And for former members of cults, in my opinion, who haven't done their homework to learn about brainwashing of the Chinese communist system and what we've learned from MKUltra and everything else, If you haven't done your homework in social psychology, it's very confusing and former members of cults are very vulnerable to getting sucked into some other authoritarian version of what they were in.
Well, a number of points there.
First of all, I mean, I think that the three of us on this podcast have seen a very, like, tight Venn diagram where there's an overlapping population between people who've been involved in high-demand yoga and Buddhist groups, for example, and people who end up Going into this conspiracy rabbit hole.
So that's one observation that I'd like to make, but you know, as you were speaking about the, you know, the maturation process of, you know, not looking towards external authority as being a really, you know, salutary value, but on the other hand, feeling as though in order to do that, one has to develop a sense of, You know, critical thinking or the willingness to ask questions.
What's so infuriating about the material that we study is that people will mobilize both of those arguments in the service of a conspiracy theory.
So for one thing, they will look to, you know, an authoritarian type explanation of the world.
The deep state is controlling X, Y, and Z.
You know, Q is the true patriot who's supporting Trump and so on.
And so that's a very, you know, kind of infantile relationship to imagined authority structures.
But those same people will then go and say that they are thinking for themselves or they are asking questions or they are doing their research.
And it's almost as if the language that they use is impenetrable because it can co-opt the language of You know, of agency, of becoming, you know, a thinking individual who's making their own choices.
So I guess, I'm wondering if you've seen anything like this in a previous cultural milieu where, you know, there's a movement of people that can use the language of, you know, self-determination or agency in the service of their own conspiracy theories.
All the time.
You're just talking about destructive cults.
Right.
You're talking about the Moonies.
You're talking about Scientology.
You know, Hubbard had a conspiracy theory that Xenu, the galactic dictator from 75 million years ago, wanted to solve the overpopulation problem of the galaxy, flew beings to the planet Tigiac, now known as Earth, put them in volcanoes, detonated hydrogen bombs, and all these aliens are now part
Attached to our bodies and only through Scientology tech can we be liberated to our true godlike powers which includes moving objects with our minds, controlling the weather and all kinds of other magical thinking.
So this is normal.
You asked me the initial question when we started like why is the cult framework important and I started by talking about the framework of the cult leader and how deleterious and how malevolent that that profile is but then you get into the bite model right and for me Matthew the critical thing is the behaviors not the words
so when when a cult member from Scientology or from the Moonies or LaRouche or anyone else says oh I'm am thinking for myself I always like to ask questions that And I say, Matthew, good.
I'm glad to hear you're thinking for yourself.
Give me an example of something that you read in the last week from the group that you questioned and you disagreed with and you researched independently.
Now, you counsel people who are recovering and exiting, and when you pose that question and you pause and you wait, is there a typical response?
Well, I should add that I coach family and friends who are worried about people who are in these black and white, all or nothing, good versus evil cults.
And I do think conspiracy groups are cults.
They're ideological cults, not necessarily with a leader.
With Q, there's supposedly a leader.
We'll talk about that in a bit, yeah.
Yeah, we can talk about that in a bit.
But I coach them on how to incrementally and ethically influence the person to start thinking for themselves and it is a time-intensive project but it's worth doing because it works because deep down inside people want to know what the truth is they don't want to be lied to they don't want to be exploited they don't want to wake up one day going what the hell was I doing for those years and
Where I was working, you know, 21 hours a day for no money, seven days a week, and dropped out of college, which was my story, and I was following a demagogue who thought democracy was satanic, and we're going to establish a theocracy to run the world.
You don't want to be in a situation where you're waking up going, how did I ever Get into that rabbit hole.
And so, it really comes down to rolling up your sleeves if you care about a person, and building a relationship.
I mean, if you're an old friend or a family member, then you go tap into the old memories and the good times when you were closer, and you start taking the position, hey, if what you're saying is true, convince me.
But the burden of proof is on any ideology or group that's out of the mainstream or is considered to be a conspiracy theory.
The burden of proof is to give the evidence, not on us to disprove it.
And that's where a lot of people get into trouble because they think they have to shove the facts down the person's throat, not realizing it's actually going to reinforce their commitment to the belief system by that type of approach.
There's some key in there about recognizing the behavior and paying more attention to that than the words, because if part of the jargon that a person has been entrained by is to continually repeat that they are speaking with autonomy, or they're speaking as an independent individual, or You know, they're not going to wear a mask because they are sovereign or something like that.
It's almost as if the ideology has its own self-protective mechanisms that aren't really going to be addressed through head-on collision.
I would argue that it actually reinforces somebody's indoctrination to feel persecuted or to feel like someone's attacking you as stupid or crazy or whatever.
And that's why it's always good to have a humble attitude and, you know, help me.
You know, if this is so great, I don't want to miss you know, the greatest revolution in the world that's going to overthrow the Illuminati and this, I hate traffickers, that's going to erase this incredible pedophile ring, you know, I'm in.
Right.
Please, you know, educate.
Okay, well, let's put a pin in that because at the end, end, I want to come back with a couple of composite figures that I think we can recognize from our social landscapes now and the kind of therapeutic and relational approaches that you would suggest based upon your experience.
And I'm also going to ask you about this difference between public education and private discussion too, because on one hand, you know, you have this like...
book catalog behind you of laying out the, you know, the theoretical framework for how to understand these dynamics of social control.
And, you know, stating the facts plainly is one thing, but it's a very different thing to sit personally with somebody and to care enough not to At least.
use those same facts against them.
Like it seems like in your profession, you have to do a kind of flip.
You have to have two modes at least.
At least.
So it turns out my book from 1988, which had two Ts, by the way, had the British spelling.
It turns out this book is like a really useful tool for anyone who is wanting to help someone in a mind control cult.
because it tells my story of the Moonies And for those young people who never heard of the Moonies, you have to show them pictures of the mass weddings where people are lined up by the thousands wearing identical wedding dresses and suits.
Told to marry someone they don't know and maybe not even be able to speak the same language You have to kind of give them a little orientation go how could an intelligent guy?
Be in that group as a leader, you know Subverting democracy and then get into trafficking get into terrorist groups So you try to paint a picture of other groups not the one they're in that are destructive authoritarian and what people can do is is say, I read this book.
It really opened my eyes.
I, you know, all these, you know, people have read it and they said it really helped them too, all these experts as well.
Would you read this book and talk to me about it?
I'm willing to read one of your books and I'll discuss it too.
Okay.
And, but literally, you know, go chapter by chapter.
What do they agree with?
What do they disagree with?
And if they disagree, why?
Right.
Like, is there anything factually inaccurate?
Because sets of lawyers have gone through the book and everything is factual.
So, but a lot of people be like, yeah, I read this book.
There's nothing in it.
It's like, yeah.
But what'd you think about the phobia indoctrination?
Right.
What do you mean by phobia, Doc?
Well, it's in the chapter on mind control.
Let's read it together.
It's literally like that.
If people are so sure they're not in a cult, Let's unpack it.
And we can tell the world, we've read this book and it doesn't fit.
The problem for them is that they wake up and they go, wow, I never knew my experience matched Steve's experience from 40 years ago, even though it's a different group.
There were like so many things that I kept underlining.
That's what I keep hearing from people who've read it.
Right.
You know, this, this, the exchange that you're discussing, you know, I'm sure you could unfold in an entire course or, you know, Working on a course, actually.
I mean, yeah, like if it doesn't exist yet for therapists in general, I'm sure it would be very useful.
But one of the things that jumps out is that you're actually really having a conversation with a person.
And one of the things that you really make clear in Cult of Trump is that He is very effective at this use of language that has nothing to do with communication of ideas or internal feelings at all.
I would disagree.
There's a very emotional communication.
Yes, yes, but in the sense that I guess the lack of empathy piece means that the communication isn't about him listening or taking anything in.
Correct.
It's more about people identifying with the role that he's portraying.
Right.
And the more effective propagandists know how to paint a picture that people can project and identify with elements of it and ignore the other pieces that don't match their personal values.
And so when somebody isn't on board, their minds get blown when X number of women accuse him of rape, and that just kind of disappears from that side of the political ledger in terms of whether people are aware of it or care about it.
It's almost like the charismatic leader can create a phantasmic image of themselves in a way that where entire parts of the history, personality, behavior are made invisible, To the followers, but, and then it's very, very confusing for people who aren't following because they're like, this is obvious.
This is, you know, what he's saying to access Hollywood is obvious.
Exactly.
People would look at Moon or go to Madison Square Garden when Moon was speaking and go, this guy has zero charisma.
Right.
And I'd be there going, are you kidding?
He's the most amazing, powerful being in human history.
Right.
What's wrong?
You're just not spiritual enough to see how charismatic he really is.
Right.
There's so much to unpack here, but I want to get down to love is more powerful than fear.
Truth is more powerful than lies.
Human rights, in my model of reality, is more important than conformity and obedience to some authoritarian leader.
So if anyone's listening to this and goes, yup, love is real and important, truth is more important than lies, and human rights are more important than submission and obedience, We have a framework to talk about, you know, ethical spiritual groups and teachers and unethical spiritual groups and teachers.
Right.
Ethical theories of what is really going on in the world and unethical ones.
And I also want to state categorically, my interactions with Trump believers is they all agree Chinese communist brainwashing is a bad thing.
They all also minimize Russia as a dictatorship and as a mind control state.
So that, and so, in fact, I'm doing a blog on Russia right now with a Russian expert on propaganda and Putin, etc.
But you want to find areas where they will agree with you, where there's common ground, Brainwashing does exist.
China is doing it.
Let's unpack what does that actually mean.
Oh, the American military sent mental health professionals in the 50s to interview people to find out what was these programs being done by Chinese communists that were called brainwashing.
Lifton has his eight criteria.
Singer has his six conditions.
Edgar Shein has six aspects.
So let's talk about that.
Or they talk about the deep state, right?
We know that the CIA has black ops.
We know about MKUltra.
I think the Moonies were part, an extension of the MKUltra project.
So there's a lot of overlap where I can teach people factual stuff.
Right.
Things that were actually in Senate investigations and congressional investigations, legal processes.
And explain.
Yeah, there are such things as conspiracies, but that's different than conspiracy theories.
Right.
Like, for example, I'm just going to finish this one thought, if you don't mind, Matthew.
I write about the group that Mike Pence is involved with, the family, in Chapter 7.
This is a group that's 80 years old.
They started the National Prayer Breakfast.
They recruit Democrats, Republicans, atheists, libertarians, Muslims, dictators, and they've been a covert force influencing politics for 80 years.
And they need to be outed.
You know, groups that are infiltrating our government, our CIA, our FBI, our education systems, our media systems.
We need to out people with these kinds of agendas that aren't based on the Constitution, you know, the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights.
That's my posture.
There are structural things that really need to change.
But are you going to be part of the positive change or are you following a version that's going to bring us into a deep rabbit hole?
Right, well, and that version is plausible and it's attractive because it will contain elements that people either intuit to be true or that are actually true and so there's something additionally tragic but also abusive about, you know, facts around MKUltra or
Or, you know, other PSYOP efforts through American history, leaving people with the distinct impression and expectation that, you know, Tony Fauci is, you know, organizing vaccination surveillance through Bill Gates or something like that.
It's almost as if, it's almost as if contemporary Conspiracy theories are weaponizing a kind of cultural and intuitive knowledge that a lot of people who suffer from disillusionment with contemporary society and American politics already suffer from.
So people have already been made vulnerable by actual institutional abuse.
And so why shouldn't they see it everywhere?
So America has done a lot of great things and a lot of bad things.
When I say America, I mean individuals within the government have done some really nasty things.
Right now in the news, they're talking about Russia paying Taliban to kill American soldiers.
But we were Paying the Afghanis to kill the Russian soldiers.
If not, direct cash, give us, you know, a scalp and we'll give you cash.
We were funding that.
We developed, we, people in the CIA or whatever, developed roadside bombs.
It was our invention against the Russians.
So, you know, those people who say, but we do it too, they're correct.
But does it make it policy?
Is it good policy to encourage foreign governments to pay to kill our soldiers and not punish them for that?
No, that's where it goes over the line in a very bad way.
I want to state this categorically.
We're not living in the post-truth world, in my opinion.
We're living in the age of influence.
And we're living in a unique age where psychology and our understanding of the mind and how to influence and manipulate people emotionally, psychologically has never been heightened as advanced as it is right now.
And especially because we live in a digital world where we have smartphones that are influencing us as long as they're on, especially if we have notifications enabled.
And there's a concept that I learned in researching the cult of Trump called the fourth generation warfare, which is PSYOPS.
It was written about in the 80s by an American military strategist, William Lind, who later partnered with Paul Weyrich of the Christian Right.
And just to say it quickly, it's not psychological warfare to convert others to your way of thinking.
It's really to confuse them, disorient them, overwhelm them, to delegitimize leadership, to delegitimize institutions, to delegitimize science.
Yeah.
and any type of reality testing.
Why?
Because it weakens people.
It numbs people out, and it makes it easier to take over, pass bills, undermine foreign policy.
And we have been subjected to active measures by Russia for a long time, but especially they were absolutely involved in the Trump election and have been involved since.
But not only Russia, we have Christian right groups doing it from within America because they want to promote a Christian ideology, anti-gay, anti-woman's right to choose, and to put freedom to discriminate into law.
Put judges in place.
And as well as China, North Korea, Iran, ISIS, there are other, you know, state actors that want to see America weakened.
They want to see democratic institutions weakened so they can take over other countries, take over Hong Kong is what's also in the news today, China.
The government of China.
So it's absolutely vital to me that average citizens understand mind control and understand the techniques of fourth-generation warfare and develop reality testing strategies for what's real and what's true and what's trustworthy and what isn't.
Instead of allowing phobias and irrational fears and propaganda to confuse you to say, I'm out.
I'm going to watch, you know, Netflix, you know, binge watch Netflix videos, or I'm going to listen to music, or I'm going to game because the world's so screwed up and nothing's going to help it.
That's what the authoritarians want.
They want people to give up their, their citizenry, their power, To choose so they can have more than negative influence.
And I'm saying former members wake up to what's actually happening on a global scale.
Authoritarianism isn't just happening through Trump.
It's happening in the UK.
It's happening in India with the Modi government all over.
This is a worldwide problem of destructive mind control and people need to learn.
And the empowered.
Now, you know, one of the specific routes I'll just return to or techniques of the control that you're speaking of, I hear in, you know, both I hear personally, but also in your description of the use made by Trump and other leaders of repetitive but also in your description of the use made by Trump and other
And one of the things that we've looked a lot at on this podcast is how charismatic presenters of like COVID trutherism or COVID is a hoax, they'll do the same thing.
They'll use jargon.
They'll switch subjects and modes.
Sometimes they'll interrupt, you know, what sounds like reasonable, you know, scientific data, but is probably pseudoscientific.
But they'll interrupt that to break into full on sermons.
And so suddenly they're speaking about theology.
And then visually, we have these catchphrases that pop up in the form of memes.
So can you say a little bit, I mean, you've said that there's a kind of lulling or exhausting or discouraging effect upon listeners, but Is there more there?
Because folks end up repeating this stuff.
They end up becoming vectors of transmission for really bad information.
And I'm wondering if we know anything about the psychoneurology of it.
And how would somebody recover from being seduced by it and repeating ridiculous things that they've heard?
So I aspire to learn more about the neuroscience of what's happening, and I'm blocking on the name of a neuroscientist whose TEDx talk I loved, but I will email it to you later and you can get it as a link to this.
But where do I want to start with this?
I'm spacing out.
You know what?
I've got a question.
Yeah, ask me again.
Because I rambled a little bit there.
Okay.
How does a person know that they're being hypnotized by jargon?
What does it feel like?
So, when you are in a conscious awake state of mind, you're present, you're in your body, and your analytic mind is thinking about what's happening.
Okay?
When you're in an altered state of consciousness, and there's nothing wrong with altered states of consciousness, and it's a normal thing for a human to go in and out of altered states all day long,
But the characteristics of hypnosis or trance is where there's some force or some person who is inserting their voice into your head as if it's your thoughts and it feels Nice.
It feels floaty.
It feels like a flow state.
It feels natural.
You lose a sense of time.
You lose that critical voice of your own going, what is Matthew just saying or what's behind this?
And one of the things that I studied when I first left the moon cult, because of my deprogramming, not only did I read social psychology, but I wanted to learn hypnosis.
And my first introduction formally to hypnosis was in 1980 in Neuro-Linguistic Programming.
where I went to a workshop with one of the co-founders Richard Bandler and as I was listening to him talk I had the distinct reaction I used to do that in the cult.
And I don't know if you want me to do a short demo.
Oh yes, but let's give a, is there a safety warning we should issue for our listeners?
I don't, so here's the thing.
I've been studying hypnosis since 1980.
I'm in the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis and the International Society of Hypnosis.
I'm a mental health professional.
So I don't do hypnotic trances on people.
Because I'm a mind control expert, so what I do is I explain it to people.
And I actually taught a two-day workshop in Scotland to the British Hypnosis Society.
Two days of examples of cult leaders doing hypnotic techniques, and then I unpacked it and explained what they were doing.
Wow, great.
But the point that I'm trying to get to with NLP is NLP got picked up by Tony Robbins, who went and started training all the CEOs of all the major corporations and getting all these people to be his disciples, to teach NLP.
It was all based on the work of a psychiatrist, Milton Erickson, who was consulted by MKUltra people about hypnosis during the original CIA mind control stuff.
And what Erickson...
Contributed, and I think he was absolutely brilliant, is he shifted the hypnosis from an authoritative school where the hypnotist was giving commands and either people accepted the commands and obeyed or they resisted and then they weren't hypnotizable.
Erickson said people are going in and out of trance all day long.
You just have to pay attention and you have to learn how to elicit trance states.
Like if you ask someone to go back in their mind to some powerful moment, they're going to go into an altered state of consciousness to remember that.
Right.
So what NLP did was it made accessible to the masses naturalistic hypnotic techniques and why I got disillusioned with NLP in 81 was because I realized it's amoral.
That it really depended on the operators ethics to not abuse somebody and when the NLP people were teaching people how to how to go into a Store and give a $10 bill but do a confusion technique so you tell the person you gave them a 20 and get change for a 20 and This is unethical.
Right.
This is not okay to do or to get people to have sex with you when they would never give you the time of day by using these techniques.
We have the same theme here of the structure of the technique being confused with the content because somebody like Robbins will Talk about, you know, the use of the technique for self-empowerment, but actually he's using it on his marks, right?
Exactly, exactly.
And if you want to see the example of a large group awareness training in action, Go to the Netflix documentary, Tony Robbins, I Am Not Your Guru.
In fact, the title came from a moment in the documentary where a woman who was born in one of the worst cults I've ever worked with, the Children of God, where Moses David Berg had women out as happy hookers for Jesus and was ordering people to molest children.
Um, this woman, he said, I'm not your guru.
And by the end of the, of the documentary, he's inviting her to, to he'll mentor her and teach her how to be him.
It was like, ah, anyway, the reason I want to get back to Trump, because Trump was part of what's known as the pickup artists genre.
of womanizing when he was caught on tape saying you grab a woman by their crotch right that's not the word he used uh and you tell them you're they're beautiful it's a wonder you know they they love it etc this is in hypnosis what's known as a pattern interruption and it's so shocking to any normal woman that a strange guy would put their hand on their genitals right
and then say you're so beautiful i couldn't i couldn't stop myself you You know, let me kiss you.
It puts a person in such an altered state of consciousness and shock that their critical thinking is offline.
And unless the woman has been molested before and was traumatized and got therapy, who would react when somebody touched them in their genitals and punched the person in the face or slap or scream for the police?
Most women are so shocked they don't know how to react.
And then the predator is blaming them for making them do it. - Right, so that happens immediately. - That's another mind control technique.
But it's all out of the Ericksonian NLP pickup artist world.
And this is the world Donald Trump lived in, grew up in, was molesting and using these kinds of linguistic techniques.
I don't know if you remember when he was first elected, there was stories about him having handshakes and not letting people's hands go. - I think I recall that.
I do think I recall that.
That sounded weird.
- In hypnosis, it's called a handshake induction.
Why?
We often do things automatically, out of consciousness, like a gesture when you meet somebody.
You grab their hand, you grasp, you pump, and you release.
If you don't let go of someone's hand, People go into a momentary confusion state.
Like, why is this person not letting go of my hand?
But it's not even that conscious, that thought.
But it puts you in a confusion state where he's expressing his dominance and control over the person.
So there's so many things that he does which is out of the hypnotic mind control frame.
Projection onto others what his own thoughts and feelings and behaviors are.
Some of the tonality of his voice and people listening to it over and over.
It becomes what's known as an anchor.
For an altered state of consciousness.
Right, so while like a liberal progressive anti-racist analysis of him mockingly say China or something like that would focus upon the sort of the horrible politics of that.
As he gives those syllables to the crowd, there's actually some sort of somatic response that he's eliciting, where everybody will laugh right on cue, and then he'll roll into the next statement, and then he'll repeat something about the wall three or four times, and then he'll use Make America Great, and so yeah, there's...
Yes, absolutely.
He says racist, sexist, horrible things all the time, but that's not what it seems the crowds are picking up on.
I mean, those values are being cued, for sure, but in terms of hypnotic control, there's something else.
There's another layer of bondage.
So human beings, we're tribal, we're social, we have five senses, we're taking in information all the time.
We're very influenced by whoever's in our space.
Right.
So you get into a concert, a rock concert, And the band is playing.
The energy is incredible around you.
People are rocking, they're dancing, they're swaying, they're singing.
It feels great.
Why not?
Or a sporting event or any number of other things.
But what I want to say is one of the critical teachings of NLP and Erickson hypnosis is really about tuning in to other people's models of reality and paying attention to how they react to you and and responding to however they react.
So it's a pacing and leading type of exercise and so much of what Trump does Is to get a reaction, a strong emotional reaction, and then he'll try different things and he will read the audience and go with it.
And the problem right now for him is he's run out of any creativity.
Right.
And so he's trying to do the things that worked three years ago that isn't working anymore for him.
Well, I guess because the behavior has an extinction rate, even in terms of its social impact, right?
Right.
So once a person gets in touch with their core and their integrity and they go, that's wrong.
Like that's patently bad.
He's telling people not to wear masks or he's saying it's a hoax.
I believe in science.
Once you have that anchor, It's easier than to filter and criticize all the other messaging that's coming out of his mouth, etc.
Right.
And one of the really powerful techniques that I'm seeing done is reminding Trumpers of what they said before Trump got elected.
You know, playing Lindsey Graham's comments about what he thought of Trump and playing what he says now.
Do you think for the typical Trump follower that, I mean, it's not just that Lindsey Graham is contradicting himself in those clips, but that, I mean, when I watch that, You know, I don't know anything about Lindsey Graham, but it sounds like he's speaking from an internal place of integrity when he's talking about Trump being a, you know, a charlatan or whatever.
And when he's playing the sycophant, his voice is in a higher register, his face is blank.
Do you think that stuff registers as well?
Well, you're actually touching on back to the very first question you asked me about the cult framework.
One thing I haven't talked about yet is the dissociation effect of being in a mind control cult where your real self is being suppressed by a cult identity with the cult beliefs and everything else.
And how fast people can switch back and forth even when they're an active member of a cult if you're asking questions to elicit who they were before.
And it's a critical thing that I teach my families that hire me to help a loved one is to identify when they're being their cult identity and when they're being Being more normal and to not take it personally when the person's in their cult self saying nasty things like you were a terrible parent and then you abused me and you're trying to control me and all these other things.
So the dual identity is very powerful but here's something I absolutely want to get across to you also your audience and that is When I was in the moonies, when people told me I was in a cult, I was brainwashed, I'm crazy, I'm stupid, moons a phony, it just reinforced my cult identity.
Why?
Because my cult identity was taught The world was evil, it was filled with Satan and evil entities, and I was being tested and I was being persecuted, you know, for God to make this world a garden of Eden on Earth.
So, what I'm trying to convey is the worst thing, in my opinion, in terms of effectiveness of helping somebody who's a Trumper, is to attack them, call them names, call Trump names.
Or to cut off contact, like, I won't talk with you because you like Trump.
Like, for me, my messaging has always been the way to help people in cults is contact with the outside world, with people who treat people respectfully, curiously, asking good questions.
And positive interactions.
I interviewed my friend Arno who was one of the original American white power leaders.
He had a band.
He recruited hundreds of people into Neo-Nazism.
And when I asked him what were some of the things that led him to waking up and getting out of it, it was like the dissonance of having a Jewish employer paying him.
And when he was hungry, offering him half of a sandwich.
Right.
Right?
Being nice, because it contradicts the us versus them mentality, etc.
And so I've been, and in Chapter 9 of The Cult of Trump, I'm like, please, people, don't give up on your family and friends who are Trumpers.
They will come out of this.
I promise.
The more contact you have with them in a respectful way, not attacking, but asking questions, the more you're going to be able to help them.
Well, let me come back to that particular thing right at the end, but I have a technical question for you first.
Sure.
You know, and this is really about the longevity, the development, and the evolution of cultic theories.
Like sometimes, you know, I've got all of this material on board for my own research, and sometimes it feels like it was developed in, you know, an analog period, and now, as we know, we've moved into this strange digital world.
So, and now we've got lockdown as well.
So, you know, you're really clear in the book that Trump's in-person rallies are like this essential fuel for his malignant narcissism and the bonding of his followers.
But, you know, Tulsa just happened, 6,000 people turned out, you know, the wind is out of his sails, hopefully.
But it brings up this more general question about cultic activity in the age of COVID, but also the age of, you know, virtual communities.
And whether or not the curtailing of in-person events is going to make recruitment and retention of members harder to do.
What are you seeing with regard to that?
So let me just say that Tulsa was a shock to Trump that there were only 6,000 people.
And I'm told that his campaign actually was paying people money to show up and hold signs.
But then he went to a megachurch I think in Phoenix, where no one was wearing masks and it was packed, right?
And those were in the cult of Trump because they were in churches where they have apostles or prophets who get direct revelations from God, who are telling them the world is filled with Satan and God has chosen Trump, yada yada yada.
So, but to answer your question about online radicalization or conversion, the answer is yes.
People do not need to be physically met in person.
They do not need to be in isolated compounds anymore.
Things have evolved to the point where people can sit in their apartment, be on their computer screens, have their cell phones, and be completely surrounded By cult mind control.
Yeah, I mean, I work with people who are recruited into white supremacy, all kinds of other online cults.
Now, without the sort of bodily, in-real-life behavioral controls that have been so essential to so many of the cultic organizations that we know of from the late 20th century, like, you know, the ashram is where everybody's gonna live, everybody's gonna get up at the same time, everybody's gonna eat the same protein-poor diet, everybody's going to do the same yoga practices at the same time, like,
It seems like the bodily in real life control mechanisms that fit into the B side, the B column of the Byte model, it seems like they're undergoing a change.
Definitely.
And so being in a yoga cult is different than being in a white supremacy cult, right?
Right.
My understanding is there are sessions being done online where you got the teacher on your computer screen and you're doing all the postures and the speakers are, you know, beaming the music and the messaging where the guided visualizations are actually hypnotic Indoctrinations.
Right.
They're not guided visualizations.
It's hypnosis.
And again, depending on whether you have an ethical teacher who actually wants to empower you to be an individual and isn't wanting all of your money and all of your attention and all of your time.
But I also want to make the point that I was born in 1954.
Like, I remember when my family got a TV.
Like, we were listening to radio, right?
Right.
But young people today, they grew up with screens.
Like, this is normal for them.
So it's much easier for them to get recruited online and indoctrinated online.
Do you, I guess time will tell about retention rates and like how strongly these ideological online communities actually hold together, you know, because when something is leaderless like Q and it depends upon You know, these failed prophecies that are dropping every couple of days, and nobody's really, like, meeting each other in person.
I guess I have questions about, like, how fragile that is, and how consequential.
I mean, it's having enormous impact upon people's politics, but I wonder whether, you know, as groups, the edges are getting really frayed.
People are in these closed Facebook groups and closed dark web groups, and I want to just take a minute and tell you about a meeting that I went to in 2015 at the Aspen Institute, where there was a meeting to talk about ISIS recruiting online.
Right.
What are they doing?
Why does it work?
What do we do about it?
And a fellow had been hired to track recruitment online.
He had a very powerful computer system monitoring social media, et cetera.
And he used the analogy of STDs, sexually transmitted diseases.
He said, the more sex you have with someone who has syphilis, the more likely you are to get infected and then infect others.
He said, you can see the same phenomenon online.
You can track recruiters, swarms of true believers.
When I was in the Moonies, it was called Love Bombing, where we would go up to the person and tell them how great they are and, you know, thank you for joining our family and all that.
But that's being done online now.
Right.
And in the same way that the Moonies would have people who are in the cult pretend to be newcomers in order to make a stronger bond with the actual newcomers, The same thing is going on online, where people think someone is critical, but they're actually a member.
Wow.
Resurfacing doubts.
But it really comes down to incremental, step-by-step, breaking people down, disorienting, finding out about them.
That's another critical thing I want to just touch on briefly, is that when I was in the moon cult, And we were recruiting people.
We depended on them to tell us about their history.
Right.
Oh, my mother and father, you know, were divorced.
My father was an alcoholic.
You know, I got raped as a child, whatever.
Now there's so much information that's available to be purchased on the dark web, things that had been scraped by Cambridge Analytica for the 2016 election that
That wealthy cults and state actors who want to take over a country can do micro-targeted ads aimed at core specific groups depending on who you clicked like or dislike.
Right.
And so it the level of manipulation and surveillance as it we're really in another century of techniques and we are not doing enough legislatively to protect data.
We're giving way too much power to platforms, although I am heartened that Reddit just dropped the real Donald or, you know, the Donald Reddit subgroup.
And Facebook may be responding to people pulling ads to actually being responsible to its community.
But we have to go a long way to reality test.
There's one more thing I want to mention that's really concerning to me is called deep fakes.
Oh, yeah.
Right.
So the technology exists where very cheaply people can take people and make them say anything.
Right.
But it looks real.
And they don't have a system yet that everyone's agreed upon to either do a version of watermarking the thing to see, is this the actual footage or what?
They don't have a system yet.
Right.
And so what I want to say to all your listeners is that as we go closer to the election, there's going to be more and more extreme things that are going to be coming our way.
And I really want to encourage people to have the, you know, this guideline.
If it's crazy, if it's unbelievable, it probably is crazy and unbelievable.
And that the burden of proof is if, you know, if they say, you know, Biden, you know, is head of a sex trafficking ring, In Peru, it's like, okay, where's the sources for this?
Where's the fact-checking?
Right.
And to really get down to data, evidence, and trustworthy portals of information, I also really want to encourage people to not just hang out with people who have the same beliefs as them.
It's very unhealthy.
You want to watch Fox.
You want to listen to other points of view and consider the merits of what's factual, what's not.
And you want to have a circle of trust amongst your family and friends that if something comes your way, rather than believe it, you say, what do you think of this?
Well, on that note, if you've got a little bit more time, I want to run a couple of scenarios by you because we've got a lot of listeners who are dealing with colleagues and family members who are expressing various levels of commitment to either conspiracy theory groups or to ideologies that are just, you know, sort of in violation of their own values.
And, you know, in Cult of Trump, you do this great job of describing how cultic dynamics play out along Spectrums of intensity.
And you also, you know, and so when we're thinking about loved ones, sort of as a general category, you know, there's going to be this huge range of ways in which people have become entranced by certain modes of thought.
So I've got two, I've got two cult dynamics victims in mind.
They present different intensities of indoctrination.
And I'm just going to sort of present them.
These are not real people, but composites.
I think they're going to be recognizable.
And I just, if they came to you or if their families came to you, what would you say?
So number one, Rachel is a yoga teacher in a big city suburb.
She buys organic produce.
She votes Democrat.
She tries to learn more about social justice issues.
She's keenly interested in women's empowerment, self-help, and health advice.
And one of her idols, who's a prominent women's health doctor, starts posting COVID truth or conspiracy theories in.
And within a week, Rachel has changed her position on vaccinations.
She's declared that she doesn't believe in germ theory.
She's joined several Facebook groups that agitate against mask wearing, and her partner and her friends are at a loss.
They can't get her to provide reasons or evidence for her sudden shift in views.
What do they do?
What should they do?
So I'm a big advocate for plan and prepare before you act.
A lot of people want a quick knockout punch that often makes things worse.
And I would ask, you know, I would tell whoever's listening to this, do you understand the influence continuum?
Do you understand the bite model?
Do you understand the pyramid with the circles coming out from the bottom?
Because The people's experience will be very different depending on where they are.
So to really have a methodological framework of knowledge and not just try to do, you know, the quick knockout punch.
So to that end, I have a website.
I have like 200 free videos.
We've done this.
Read Combating Cult Mind Control as the foundational text.
This is actually the book I wrote to help people get out of cults and mind control, which is meant to be read after this one.
So for example, in chapter 10, I have a three-step phobia intervention.
I don't want to take the time to go into it, but really, there's a lot there.
Coming back to actually attempt to answer your question, what I would do is, not that I'm talking with her, but what I would recommend people do is say, go back in time And tell me when you started believing these things.
And if she says, oh, it's because I, you know, went to this prominent doctor's website.
And she's very convincing.
So you want to get the person back in time before they went to the website.
And what did they actually believe?
Right.
And why did they believe it?
So you want to access their pre-cult identity or their authentic identity first.
Because that's the grounding.
That's the part that's going to help them leave.
Not the cult identity.
Right?
Right.
And empowering the real person to think for themselves versus trying to critique and break down the cult identity by explaining why the beliefs are wrong.
This is not a great strategy.
It could be part of an overall strategy, but you've got to be doing this first, and you've got to be laying the foundation.
Like, what is a cult?
What is mind control?
What's a conspiracy that's proven, and what's a conspiracy theory that's unproven?
But then it gets into credibility of the source.
Like, let's look into this doctor.
I'm curious, when did she start teaching these things?
What did she believe before?
What were her influences?
And then you deconstruct it.
Because when I'm asked, you know, Steve, what do you think of so-and-so?
I want to know, were they in a cult?
Were they born in a cult?
Are they current members of a cult?
For example, people read Epoch Times and they've been banned from Facebook because they're part of the Falun Gong or Falun Dafa Chinese cult of Li Hongzhi, who was into space aliens and all that.
You have to kind of pull the curtain back.
You got this information in Epoch Times, Who is the Epoch Times?
Who is Li Hongzhi?
Right.
You know, let's unpack this.
You know, you're describing, you said before, it's an intensive and really deep caregiving process to have that conversation.
And, you know, I had this second composite figure, but I think your answer is going to be similar.
And it would be similar for somebody who's more deeply indoctrinated, somebody who's, you know, maybe even
More radicalized that that above all that the personal connection is going to be really important But given the fact that maybe I'll just end with this given the fact that you're describing a really intensive process Versus the speed with which people are indoctrinated and radicalized How do you how do you personally get hopeful or maintain hope because there just seems to be this huge disparity between
you know, how quick it is to really manipulate somebody and how difficult it is to start to try to help reverse that.
So, you know, goes back to my personal story.
People ask me, Steve, you were in two and a half years.
You've been helping people for 44 years.
Like how do you do it?
How do you keep going?
Right.
And it's because I feel so grateful that my family cared enough to rescue me after I almost died in a van crash due to sleep exhaustion.
That I feel like I have something to give back to help others and I remember how fanatical I was.
Like I said on the fourth day of my deprogramming and I'm Jewish.
I don't care if he's like Hitler!
I've chosen to follow him and I'll follow him to the end!
Wow.
And I believe that.
So I come back to that reference point and it makes it easy to work with the most fanatical cult members but You know, if someone's been in a cult for a year, don't think it's going to take a week to get them to start thinking.
Think it's going to take, you know, three to six months of continued effort.
And I have a whole approach in Freedom of Mind where I say, make a team, get family members, friends, coaches, neighbors, people who Care about the person get them back in the person's life and coordinate a strategy But the strategy isn't to get them out of the cult the strategy is to empower them to think for themselves and make their own decisions of what they want to believe and how they want to act and
And asking good questions is the single most powerful technique that I teach my clients.
But here's what the most common error is.
People ask a good question, They count, you know, in their mind to three, one, two, three, and then they go on to something else instead of being quiet and waiting for a response and actually wanting the person to answer.
And I say, wait five full 60 minute cycles, five minutes of silence.
And then if they don't have an answer, ask again.
I was asking you, Matthew, what would you need to experience for you to know that your yoga teacher is not who you want to spend the rest of your life with?
You know, wait.
Yeah.
And then follow up.
Silence and then follow up.
Yeah.
Follow up the next day, the next week.
It's almost like a prescription for the age, really, because if anything, people caught in these cycles really don't have space for their own internal decisions.
That's what it feels like.
And of course, it also feels like it's accelerating.
And I just want to thank you for connecting your drive forward to a sense of gratitude because that takes it out of the question of you know who's going to win And more into the question of well, what's the best thing to do?
And I really appreciate that because I struggle with that myself for sure And and I love that people helped me You know when I was you know, so confused and disoriented lifton was willing to meet with me He was very encouraging to me.
He said, you know, you know more than I know, because they did it to you and you did it to other people.
And what you're describing is so much more sophisticated than what I studied.
You should study psychology.
And my family and my friends weren't like, you know, Steve, you schmuck.
How could you believe this?
I told you he was a cult leader.
They were like, Welcome home.
My next door neighbor baked cookies.
Thank you everyone for listening to this week's Conspirituality.
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