Chaya Raichik of Libs of TikTok calls the LGBTQ+ community a cult. Does this mean the term has lost all meaning?
Searching for the roots of Raichik's abuse of cult discourse leads Matthew back through a cursed gender critical message board to an ill-conceived Twitter thread by cult expert Steve Hassan.
A Conspirituality Brief on what happens when fascists seize control of highly-charged explanatory tools.
Show Notes
Libs of TikTok has become central to right wing politics - The Washington Post
Twitter account Libs of TikTok blamed for harassment of children's hospitals
The artificial growth of hate speech
The Happy-Go-Lucky Jewish Group That Connects Trump and Putin - POLITICO Magazine
Cross-Dressing - Parshat Ki Teitzei - Chabad.org
Secret LGBTQ Chabad Group Fills Void - Jewish Telegraphic Agency
'Social contagion' isn’t causing more youths to be transgender, study finds
Meet Chris Elston, the BC Man Taking Anti-Trans Hate On Tour Across Canada
Chris Elston: Woman followed by man demanding trans health 'education'
Study finds 2.5% of transgender kids go through detransition
Detransition Facts and Statistics 2022: Exploding the Myths Around
Hassan's main detrans Twitter thread
Hassan's other detrans Twitter thread
The BITE Model of Authoritarian Control: Undue Influence, Thought Reform, Brainwashing, Mind Control, Trafficking and the Law - ProQuest
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Hello listeners, Matthew here with the Conspirituality Podcast Brief.
Today I'm going to be looking at a narrow slice of Haya Reichick's disgusting interview on Tucker Carlson on December 27th, namely how she abuses the rhetoric of anti-cult discourse to target LGBTQ people, and what this means for those of us who use that same discourse to understand coercive control and extremism.
My question today is really, what should you do when fascists seize control of your explanatory tools?
Spoiler alert, you gotta look more carefully at your tools.
RightChick is the anti-trans propagandist behind the Twitter account of Libs of TikTok, which for the past 18 months has targeted low-follower LGBTQ creators who post TikToks about their political views.
RightChick clips their content to mock it for a far-right audience of 1.7 million Twitter followers, some of whom are provoked to stalk and harass the creators.
They stalk and harass organizations that serve queer people, And they harass hospitals that provide gender-affirming care.
Raychick has pretended to independently operate the account, but we now know it's owned by Seth Dillon of the right-wing satire outlet The Babylon Bee.
According to the excellent reporting of Taylor Lawrence, who first unmasked Raychick, she was a real estate agent in Brooklyn who beta-tested a series of right-wing satire accounts beginning in November of 2020.
Through these handles, Rychek promoted QAnon and stolen election conspiracy theories and disclosed that she was on the Capitol grounds during January 6th.
In March of 2021, she disclosed that she was an Orthodox Jew.
The current Libs of TikTok account was fired up in April of 2021 and then shot into viral incandescence when Joe Rogan started to obsessively boost it in August.
It's also been boosted by Meghan McCain and Glenn Greenwald.
Raychick, supported by Dylan and aided and abetted by Fox, Post Millennial and other right-wing outlets, has been mocking and terrorizing queer and trans people and organizations ever In one example, Raychick falsely claimed that the Boston Children's Hospital performs hysterectomies on children, and soon after the hospital received a bomb threat.
Now, what is Raychick's background?
Ex-members of the Chabad Lubavitch community suggest that Raychick is from that community given her hardline social conservative views and zealous enthusiasm.
The anti-Libs of TikTok account Chuds of TikTok has followed Raychick's digital footprint to link her to a prominent Chabad family based in Los Angeles.
Her heritage is only important to the extent that the close-knit, ecstatic, and evangelical Chabad movement, which dates back to 18th century Lithuania, has struggled to embrace its LGBTQ members in the long shadow of religious prohibitions against queer sexual activity.
One current article on the Chabad.org website points to laws in the Torah against cross-dressing and comments, cross-dressing can lead to promiscuous behavior.
Wearing the clothes of a woman would enable a man to mingle inappropriately among women and vice versa.
Now, this is particularly relevant in relation to bathroom laws.
In addition, the text states, for a man, simply putting on the clothes of a woman can lead him to have sinful thoughts.
Maimonides, in his Guide for the Perplexed, states that some of the ancient pagan rituals involved cross-dressing and that we must therefore distance ourselves from this type of behavior.
Our sages understood this prohibition to apply not just to clothing, but also to certain cosmetic activities which are considered feminine in nature and may therefore not be practiced by men.
And it goes on to reference, you know, shaving one's armpits and legs and so on.
Another article admits the naturalness of queer desires but then confirms that the Torah forbids all sexual activity that is not heterosexual.
So that's some relevant religious background.
On the political front, according to a 2017 political report, the American Chabad movement has had ties to the Trump empire for over 15 years.
That's the thumbnail on Right Check, and there's a lot there to look at through the various lenses that we've been grinding here at Conspirituality Podcast.
I'm pretty certain that Julian will be looking further into her scene as part of his study of crossovers between religious fundamentalism, conspiracy theories woven around moral and sex panics, and right-wing politics.
I'm gonna focus on something else.
Let's have a listen here to Rychick answer Carlson's leading softball question about LGBTQ people in general.
What is going on here, he asks.
Do you have any theories?
There's something so unique about the LGBTQ community has become this cult and it's so captivating and it pulls people in so strongly unlike anything we've ever seen.
And they brainwash people to join, and they convince them of all of these things.
And it's really, really hard to get out of it.
It's really difficult.
And there are studies on this.
There's been a lot of reporting on this about parents who are like, you know, my child is starting to say that they're non-binary or transgender or whatever, and what do I do?
How do I stop this?
And it's really, really difficult.
It's unlike anything we've ever seen, I think.
It's extremely poisonous.
Now let me be clear that Chaya Raychek using cult discourse is a niche problem against the acute threat of provoking bomb threats against hospitals that treat children.
But It is a problem I can speak to, and I think it's an important long-term problem, especially in the sphere of strategizing around anti-disinformation, anti-conspiracy theories, anti-extremism.
It shows that the effectiveness of cult studies is reaching the dead end of its own memification.
And I'm going to argue that this is not only because reactionaries and fascists are highly skilled at weaponizing terms against those they represent and protect, but also because the field itself suffers from vague, stigmatizing definitions that often add to rather than decrease polarization.
And this is made worse when those terms are prematurely used by theorists acting like hammers in search of nails, intent on extending their insights into every branch of the news cycle.
Now, let's look at Raychick's key phrases here and how she uses them effectively and provocatively even though she's full of shit.
The LGBTQ community has become a cult.
That's her opening and it's a contradiction right off the bat.
Communities are not cults by any definition.
But once she has said it, certain false assumptions are in place and you can watch Carlson swallow her hook.
The assumptions are that LGBTQ people have a centralized leadership with a singular agenda, a transcendent doctrine, and a hierarchical authority or financial structure that directs money and attention towards authoritarian beneficiaries at the top.
Not true.
The implication is that a community is somehow deceptive, whereas the LGBTQI people are in a diverse community because they have struggled to be honest about who they are, how they love, and what they want to do with their lives.
Rychick is suggesting that people are being deceived into being queer.
She also says, it's so captivating and it pulls people in so strongly, unlike we've ever seen.
So hyperbole aside, Here she builds the deception theme by suggesting that all members are recruited rather than waking up within or discovering their identification with LGBTQ identity through an often torturous process of overcoming stigma, ignorance, and heteronormative bias.
In this age of fire-hosed cult content, her phrase, unlike anything we've ever seen, plays on public perceptions of things like the Church of Scientology or the Unification Church.
We can start thinking, I think, about cult studies now as contributing to a moral panic.
She says, they brainwash people to join.
Okay, brainwashing is an outdated Manchurian Candidate Cold War term for the proposition that a person's thoughts and feelings can be overwritten by coercive influence to the point at which their original self disappears.
It's a very sexy term, but there's nothing scientific about it.
In other words, no real way of measuring the disappearance or overwriting of prior beliefs.
Brains are not hard drives, and thoughts and beliefs are not software.
And one reason for dropping this term is that it basically dehumanizes or zombifies the person you're talking about.
She says, uh, these people are convinced of all of these things and it's really really hard to get out of it's really difficult and there are studies on this like there have been there are studies there's a lot of reporting on this so here Chaya is likely referring to the debunked proposition of rapid onset gender dysphoria or the social contagion theory of transgender identity formation Popularized by people like Abigail Shire, which basically says that especially girls want to become boys based on social pressure and to seek relief from sexist marginalization.
This concept was coined by Dr. Lisa Littman in 2017 based on her interviews of, get this, parents of trans people, not the trans people themselves, and her findings were debunked by a follow-up study that actually did some fieldwork.
Now, the authors pointed to continued elevated rates of bullying and violence against trans kids to show the absurdity of wanting to transition to find social relief and safety.
So, Rychick is citing a study that doesn't exist, that she doesn't name, but that's good because she's dead wrong.
She's upside down wrong.
But she doesn't care, and neither does Tucker.
Now, here's her ultimate take on people that support LGBTQI rights.
Do you see, without getting too personal, but do you see a spiritual component to any of this?
You don't have to answer that if you don't want.
Yeah, I don't know.
Well, I do.
I do.
I don't think this makes sense at all.
No, it doesn't make any sense.
I think they're evil.
And sometimes we try to break it down a lot, and we discuss why this is happening, what's happening, and whatever.
And I think sometimes the simplest answer is, they're just evil.
They're bad people.
They're just evil people.
And they want to groom kids.
They're recruiting.
So let's be clear, she's gone from weaponizing cult language to spitting out bog-standard QAnon metaphysics.
Like a lot of reactionary assholes, Rychek is entirely unoriginal.
There's a guy named Chris Elston, he calls himself Billboard Chris, and he protests what he calls gender ideology outside schools and town halls, and he's called Billboard Chris because he wears sandwich boards that name various aspects of trans youth health as abuse.
Now, he said the same thing about three months ago.
These teachers, these woke teachers, are giving them a note.
And it's a social contagion.
Entire friend groups are transitioning.
And they get loved for it.
They get love-bombed.
Like in any cult.
And I do see this as a cult that has permeated our entire society.
So, extra points there for using love-bombed, which conflates the nurturance and support that queer and trans allies give non-binary or trans young people with the idea that high-demand groups cynically lavish love and attention on hopeful marks in order to convert them into zombies.
Now, this is a brief report, so I'm not going to go into the possible projection involved when a cishet guy who hangs out with QAnon folks assumes that love and support amongst queer allies is somehow fake.
I will leave it to suggesting that he should look in the mirror.
But talking about culty dynamics, Elton regularly makes a public nuisance of himself, as in March of just this year when he filmed himself stalking a worker at a sexual health clinic through the streets of Victoria, BC, demanding that she educate him on trans healthcare and getting right into her face.
He's not wearing a mask, of course, and she is, and she had to call the cops.
Okay, so Raychick, Elston, where does the cult rhetoric come from?
There are probably a thousand subtweets that I could follow.
They come from all angles.
There's probably a thousand subreddits to plow through.
I found a source that I'm going to focus on because I think it encapsulates the kind of vibe.
And this source drops on July 16th, 2021, about four months after RayCheck really gets going.
It appears on a messaging site called OverIt, which is a cute play on ovaries, and a subreddit-like board called Gender Critical.
The post is from a user named Nemesis and it's titled, The Trans Movement is a Destructive Cult, accompanied by academic resources to support this declaration.
Now, what are those resources?
Let's start with what they're not, which is solid fieldwork.
Raychick can shape her lips around the word studies while not referring to a single one, which begs the question of how much further removed she is from the possibility of talking Talking with a real trans person.
And likewise, Nemesis doesn't bother with anecdotes, rumors, or even link to what I believe or I understand to be the only real first person sources for this material, which are people in a detrans phase who post their stories to Twitter or get interviewed on YouTube by a guy named Benjamin Boyce, who seems to be a third tier Matt Walsh type.
Or by an extremely complicated dude named Buck Angel, a trans man who fiercely advocates against gender-affirming care, with at least the credibility of personal experience.
Through channels like these, there's a fair amount of poignant detrans stories out there, and there's a lot to learn from these stories, I believe, if they check out.
And they tell about inept or intrusive medical care, and that's important material.
But the emotionality of these stories can obscure the hard data we actually have around transition satisfaction.
For instance, a study by the Trans Youth Project showed that only about 2.5% of kids who socially transitioned between the ages of 3 and 12 re-transitioned.
A report from the International Society of Sexual Medicine says that in 2021, the journal Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery published a review of 27 studies concerning regret after gender affirmation surgery.
Overall, the studies included 7,928 transgender participants who had undergone any type of gender affirmation surgery About a third of the study subjects underwent transmasculine surgeries.
The remaining two-thirds had transfeminine procedures.
In the transmasculine group, less than 1% regretted their decision.
In the transfeminine group, the rate was 1%.
Now, finally, there's a sort of clearinghouse site called GenderGP.com and they've collected a number of studies that echo those results.
For instance, in the UK, a survey of 3,398 attendees of a gender identity clinic found
that just 16 of those attendees, which is about 0.47%, experienced transition-related
regret.
In the US, a survey of nearly 28,000 people found that 8% of respondents reported some
kind of detransition.
But this is crucial.
Of this 8%, 62% only did so temporarily due to societal, financial, or family pressures.
In other words, the detransitioning was linked to the same social stigmatization that may have led towards transitioning in the first place.
In Sweden, a 50-year longitudinal study on a cohort of 767 transgender people found that around 2% of participants expressed regret following gender-affirming surgery, although it is unclear how many of these participants were detransitioning as a consequence.
So, some numbers are good.
But getting back to Over It, Nemesis could be making her case by pulling emotionally charged quotes from the testimony of detrans subjects and then simply ignoring all of that data that I just read that shows that transition regret is very low.
But she doesn't even bother to do that, and why is that?
Could it be that the interest really isn't so much in trans people as it is in finding an ideological bludgeon?
And what, I ask you, provides more ideological certainty than a super succinct definition of the word cult?
And that's all we really get from Nemesis.
A bunch of copypasta quotes from cult theorists without even the vaguest attempt to stitch them together into an argument for why trans people and their allies are a cult.
Now, the minor theorists that Nemesis refers to on this page include Rabbi James A. Rudin, I'd never heard of him before, who'd co-authored a book called Prison or Paradise, The New Religious Cults.
This book is from 1980.
There's an essay by Egan Hunter called Adolescent Attraction to Cults.
It's in 1998 as the publication date.
There's a paper by Cynthia M. Clark from 1992 called Deviant Adolescent Subcultures Assessment Strategies and Clinical Interventions.
And then about two thirds of the post is taken up with long quotes from a book by friend of the pod, Steve Hassan, Combating Mind Control from 1988.
A lot of the verbiage on this page comes from Hassan's BITE model, Systems of Behavioral Informational Thought and Emotional Control, which I and countless others have used to understand our own experience and to study actual cults.
Now I'll return to Hassan in a moment, but first notice how the most recent source here is 24 years old, and how none of the sources are specific to gender issues, bioethics, feminism of any wave, or the space that is most feared by the preachers of social contagion, social media.
It's really like Nemesis is trying to make sense of her world by quoting an impressive scripture from another culture in another century.
And throughout her extremely boring post, she doesn't even attempt to connect the details of something like Hassan's bite model to specific incidences of behavioral, informational, thought, or emotional control.
It's just assumed that that's what's going on.
in the trans community.
There's no discussion of leaders, centralization, bounded choice, self-sealing ideology,
financialization or exploitation.
In the hands of Nemesis, cult theory becomes a kind of abstract spell
that will somehow discipline this terrifying gender fluid world into comprehensibility.
Nemesis really wants to understand why there is a coherent movement of LGBTQ allyship
that she hates and she's found a code that will prove to her that her opponents must be zombies.
So So,
Nemesis is posting in March of 2021.
What turned her on to Hassan and the rest?
I don't know.
But in July of 2020, Steve Hassan himself posted a now-famous Twitter thread that could well have sent gender-critical enthusiasts like Nemesis down the rabbit hole.
Here's what Hassan wrote.
I retweeted a JK Rowling tweet and weighed in as a mental health professional who has written four books on cult mind control and how to help those who have been harmed and their families.
I have spent over four decades in the field of research and helping those who have been harmed by undue influence.
My website is Freedom of Mind.
I've blogged for human rights, against conversion therapy, and for gay and trans rights.
A couple of years ago, I was approached by Lisa Marciano, a therapist who wanted to know my opinion on the phenomenon of young people being drawn into a cult-like situation where, all of a sudden, they thought they were the opposite sex.
I was very skeptical, as I have close friends who are gay and a few friends who are trans, but my philosophy is to be open-minded, and I started reading, watching documentaries, and asked to interview detransitioners to better understand their experience.
I became convinced that in these people's cases, they were indeed socially influenced, much of it online, to believe they must transition.
Some told me they were sleep deprived.
Some described the praise and support they got for saying they were trans made them feel loved.
But the most surprising and upsetting thing was that some told me that they watched hypnoporn.
I had no idea what they were talking about and asked for some URLs.
After my deprogramming from the Moon Cult in 1976, I became interested in mind control and in 1980 I went to my first workshop, an NLP workshop by Richard Bandler, and discovered the power of Ericksonian hypnotic techniques.
These are what Tony Robbins learned and marketed without saying it was NLP.
I did multiple trainings in NLP and even moved to Santa Cruz to apprentice John Grinder, the other co-founder of it.
It was powerful and provided a methodology to understand cult mind control.
I came to understand NLP was amoral, meaning the system of influence was entirely dependent on the ethics of the practitioner.
I distance myself from it as they marketed it to salespeople and corporate types.
I wanted to know about Milton Erickson, the psychiatrist who it was based on but needed a master's degree to receive ethical training and hypnosis from health professionals.
I have been attending workshops and giving them ever since.
What I watched in hypnoporn, in my opinion, was weapons-grade mind control and if a person watches it, especially if they were at a low point in their life, confused, stoned, are friends with a bunch of trans folks, they could be profoundly influenced to, for example, believe they were a woman in a man's body.
Let me be clear.
I am for human rights.
For gay and trans rights.
I am against conversion therapy.
But what I have come to learn is that young people are not getting good ethical counseling regarding their traumas, their body image issues, their gayness, especially if they are raised in homophobic environments.
They are being rushed to taking hormones, in some cases surgery, and then sometimes years later realize they have made a big mistake to transition.
For these people, detransitioners have told me they have been harassed, treated as traitors, exactly what cults do to defectors.
This is not right.
So I wish to add my voice to the mental health experts speaking up to say we need to stop the polarization and conflict and have a more educated, nuanced point of view when it comes to human beings.
Things are not binary, all or nothing, transition or die was the ideology, versus maybe transition, let me research, let me go for expert counseling, let me not be isolated from my family and friends by an all or nothing position, and let me do what is right for me.
Taking powerful hormones is not benign.
There are side effects.
Get second and third opinions.
Take your time.
Please visit my website and learn about the influence continuum and bite model and become a better listener.
We all need to heal and come together, not be further polarized.
This thread was retweeted over 1,000 times and it also reached 1.8 million Reddit users, according to CrowdTangle.
In the prior tweet, if you remember he referenced retweeting something from J.K.
Rowling, Hassan provided further context that he interviewed 12 detransitioners who had read his books.
So that's kind of a self-selected sample.
He repeated his idea that hypnoporn, which is a pretty common fetish category, is a sophisticated mind control medium.
Now he doesn't hypothesize as to who's designing the mind control or what it's directing people towards or how it connects to trans identification.
None of that is really stated.
And Twitter really dragged him for the hypnoporn stuff.
Now I want to say that Hassan's work with combating mind control has doubtlessly helped many, many, many people, including myself.
The BITE model and his ideas around the influence continuum are eye-opening for people first encountering the notion of group pressure, group control, high demand groups.
He has a big impact as a regular guest on media outlets, and he's got a website that reaches about a million users just through Facebook, according to CrowdTangle.
And I know enough about his politics to not believe that he is personally transphobic at all.
So, I reached out to Steve for clarification and he emailed me right back.
We've emailed each other for many years.
I asked, how do you respond to Raychick's usage of this language?
Response, horrified, repulsed.
Remember, I view reality on an influence continuum, so I talk about cults from ethical, benign, even constructive, all the way to authoritarian extreme types.
My concern is with the latter, which always involves dissociative disorders.
Do you regret wading into this complex territory given how in flux it is and how trans identity is now a central moral panic driving right-wing politics?
Response, yes and no.
I regret tweeting.
I am accused by right-wingers to be in the cult of Soros and Libtards, remember?
I wrote The Cult of Trump, he's referring to his last book.
My next question is, there are many ways to discuss and deconstruct possible ideological rigidity or excesses or abuses in transitioning culture.
Is cult theory a good tool, given that the language itself evokes extreme criminality, Jonestown, etc., or is it simply the tool that you have?
Response, I far prefer the legal term of Undue Influence.
See my doctoral dissertation title, and the title is The Byte Model of Authoritarian Control, Undue Influence, Thought Reform, Brainwashing, Mind Control, Trafficking, and the Law.
By the way, all of these links are going to be in the show notes.
Lots and lots of links.
So, thank you, Steve, for clearing that up, for answering those questions.
I think that that thread expressed a good-faith concern for the psychosocial pressures faced by trans people as they navigate crucial decisions in a culture of punishing binaries.
Given that the available numbers on transition regrets are very low, I don't think it is appropriate to use a discourse that carries such heavy stigma to issue warnings about an already stigmatized minority group and its quest for healthcare and dignity.
I don't know how to evaluate detrans stories in any systematic way.
That's above my pay grade.
But what I'm hearing so far suggests the same weaknesses and failures and oversights in medical care that we find in relation to all marginalized groups.
Clinicians who don't take good care of patients, who don't listen, who make snap decisions, who are ideologically driven, intrusive, entranced by their own powers and technologies, whose judgment is clouded by the weird financial pressures of insurance labyrinths and for-profit surgeries.
But where else does this turn up?
Well, how about women giving birth?
Are OBGYNs in a cult of love bombing that women can't run away from, that they're hopelessly hypnotized by?
If you listen to some fanatics in the free birth movement, certainly they are.
But of course not.
I'm going to end by broadening out my focus from Hassan's misstep into trans politics at this volatile time to give a meta-view of what I believe is happening in the cult discourse world, because I think it needs to sharpen up its tools en masse.
Remember that Nemesis was quoting sources that were 20 years old?
Why is that?
Because the golden age of cult analysis really exploded in the 1980s in the aftermath of Jonestown.
It picks up on threads from the 1960s concentration on Cold War ideological fears about political influence, but for those of us fluent in cult literature, the library is a little bit old.
It's a little dusty.
It's a little thin.
This is a niche subject that has not found a solid footing in academia or clinical psychology.
It has largely been rejected by religious studies as pseudoscientific and stigmatizing.
And this isolation means, unfortunately, that it has been dominated by a number of big fish in a relatively small pond.
There are a few academic journals with low distribution.
There's one annual conference put on by the International Cultic Studies Association.
But the main thinkers tend to be cult survivors themselves.
Now, I'm not a main thinker, but I'm in this category, and this is not a knock against people using their personal experience in their professions.
But it means that the discourse is heavy with poignant personal narratives and this trends the discourse away from the data of harm and the clear definition of terms.
The main thinkers are also mostly outside of academic funding, but many are trained as counselors and therapists, and so their cachet is additionally interpersonal within the demographic of interested people, and dare I say it, it is charismatic.
The ability to earn money as a therapist decreases the necessity of being academically competitive, and the result is a commentariat that has never really had to test its theories in the wild.
But those theories are super compelling, and they hold great explanatory power for people who have had pressurized group experiences.
Part of what makes them compelling is that they lump whole sectors of psychosocial experience together in identifiable ways.
And this creates, unfortunately, sloppy correlations between Jim Jones and Tony Robbins, between Scientology and MLMs.
It's a landscape in which everything, according to the very popular podcast title, can be a little bit culty.
And this lumping together quality leaves the discourse open to bad actors.
Now, what happens when you give this smallish group of thinkers a cultural moment?
When CNN calls you up about QAnon and HBO calls you in to talk about NXIVM?
You have had decades to refine and polish theories in academic isolation.
You can deliver punchy ideas in TED Talk format, or as a talking head on a streaming doc in a role that crosses over into group therapy, which you're probably very good at.
You have a language that speaks quickly and effectively, but also bluntly, to a universal anxiety of being controlled by something we don't understand.
You are able to provide almost instantaneous explanatory relief.
You have been taking care of a goose who can enter any barnyard of the news cycle and lay a golden egg, but that egg can be stolen.
There's a flashbang quality to the discourse which means that its explanatory relief can be easily co-opted and enjoyed by fascists, by those who would prefer that LGBTQ people or SJWs or the woke or whoever would just go away forever.
Accusing opponents of being an occult means that they can be dismissed, and this sets the reactionary, wounded heart at ease.
When Haya Reitschek thinks she knows what the word cult means, it shows us the bluntness of our own instruments, and that maybe when we use the word cult, we are simply expressing disgust, and Haya is picking up on that and just reflecting it back to us, the irony being totally lost on her, that as an Orthodox Jew, she is feeding discourses that rhyme with antisemitism.
And this is the bottom line.
Intentions aside, cult discourse is stigmatizing.
We've gotten this feedback for years.
I've gotten this feedback for even longer.
Thank you very much.
I'm finally starting to hear it.
Cult discourse also carries the unresolved grief of those who have theorized their way into a recovery from social trauma.
And this makes it very powerful and also compromised.
I don't think there's any turning back from the stigmatization.
The word cult is its own meme.
You cannot use the word in a public forum without creating a sensationalist sensation.
And guess what?
That's what people who wind up using fascist discourse are also doing.
The drive there is to stigmatize, to define an outgroup, to sensationalize disgust, to make it pleasurable.
So if we want to understand and de-escalate sources of coercion, we cannot feed this monster any more red meat.
Thank you for listening.
Please support us on Patreon through Apple subscriptions, and you can pre-order our book through the link in the show notes.
