Talking to Red-Pilled Friends and Loved Ones with Dr. Steven Hassan
Brad welcomes Dr. Steven Hassan to discuss strategies for talking to red-pilled relatives who have gone down the rabbit holes of MAGA-ism, Q-Anon, and other forms of high-control religion and conspiracy. The author of the Cult of Trump and Combating Cult Mind Control, Dr. Hassan was member of the notorious Unification Church in the 1970s. Dr. Hassan experienced firsthand the devastating effects of undue influence and coercion. His escape from the church and subsequent recovery process inspired him to dedicate his life to understanding and exposing the deceptive tactics used by cults and manipulative groups.
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My name is Brad Onishi, and today I am joined by Dr. Stephen Hassan, who is an expert on cults and mind control.
And we had a great conversation about how to talk to loved ones and relatives and others who have been red-pilled, have been taken down, the MAGA rabbit holes, the QAnon rabbit holes, the Christian Nationalist rabbit holes.
And this is something that I think is really important because I get asked all the time wherever I go to speak, could be in a classroom, could be at a church, doesn't matter.
One of the questions will always be how are you supposed to talk to someone you love about these issues when they are so far down these conspiracy theory tunnels?
So, Dr. Hassan and I talked about that and I want to just preface our conversation with two comments.
One is, I think what I have always offered people and mentioned in this interview and discussion with Dr. Hassan is that one of the most important things for me is to allow people's emotional level to be the part that we engage and by that I mean talking to people about Their anger, their resentment, their grievance, their fear, their hope.
And by doing that, you get, I think, closer to the core of what is driving their willingness to join with a really extreme church or follow a prophet from the New Apostolic Reformation so closely or to believe QAnon conspiracies.
And what I've always contended there is that when you get to emotion, you're not attacking their beliefs, you're not calling them stupid, you're not telling them that they're idiotic for following this QAnon drop or New Apostolic Reformation apostle.
You're asking them in a genuine way what drives their interest or their belief in such things.
And if you do that, you might get them to give you the space to do that.
That you might become somebody that can express their hope, their fear, their anger, their anxiety.
And then you're two people who are talking in a way that is Human to human.
You're not the God-hating liberal Marxist they've been told to fear.
You're not the anti-American woke globalist that they've been told is out there ruining everything they love.
You're their nephew.
You're their friend.
You're their colleague.
And I guess for me, this approach can be really fruitful.
And what Dr. Hassan says from his view is that, yeah, attacking the leader they believe in or the group they're a part of head on is not going to help.
And there's very little evidence that that's going to change their mind.
I think for me the caveat with these things is always that you have to be safe to be in these relationships, that you can't have these kinds of conversations with people if you're not safe, if you have an identity that they think is somehow not okay or they don't approve of, whether it's a sexual identity, whether it's a religious or non-religious identity, a gender identity, and so on.
So, safety is important.
But this work is hard.
It requires investment.
It's just not easy.
I talked with a friend the other day who was like, I've done this with my brother and I've done hours of it and I just don't want to do any more because it hasn't gone anywhere.
And I understood what he was saying.
That it's just really hard to talk to a loved one once every two weeks on the phone and go through the same old kind of conspiracies.
But I do know that some of you out there do have people in your life that you do want to try this with and so I think that I hope at least this conversation with Dr. Hassan is helpful.
I do want to preface it with one caveat from my perspective and that is Dr. Hassan talks a lot about cults and mind control and I understand that and I appreciate where he's coming from.
Religious studies scholars often stray away from using the word cult and brainwashing because what scholarship has taught us is that it often leads to a kind of lack of agency on people's part, that they don't have any control in joining up with a group or that they've had no ability to direct their dissent into a conspiracy theory.
So I think there's always a need to balance how we understand people's choices, people's willingness to join groups, to believe in QAnon bits of information, so on and so forth, but also recognize the social forces at play that often are leading people into such decisions, the ways that they're preyed upon by leaders and prosperity gospel preachers and so on.
I think that what, for me as a religion scholar, I want to point out is that, and this is following Megan Goodwin, who's really a pioneer in this area and wrote a great book called Abusing Religion, and I've interviewed Dr. Goodwin on that, about that book, so you can check out our archive to hear our conversation.
But Dr. Goodwin really makes a great point, which is that if we use cult for a religion that we don't like, then we can be in a situation where people in power can label a group or a community, a cult, in order to discredit it.
So you can think of folks in Florida in the 1950s labeling what they called Santeria, which is a word that's not always used anymore.
A cult, or we can think way back when to when the Latter-day Saints, the Mormons, were called a cult.
If we're using cult as shorthand, according to Dr. Goodwin, for a religion I don't like, then that's probably not our best use of the term.
However, I do follow other scholars who would say that sometimes when we designate something a cult, what we're saying is we're identifying a religious tradition or a group or a movement that is dangerous.
That is dangerous to our public square, dangerous to public safety, dangerous to democracy.
And in that sense, I understand why we would use the word, because we want to identify groups and communities that are not just religions that the powers that be, the government or a dominant cultural group doesn't like, but rather say, hey, There are religious groups that certainly do have beliefs and practices and rituals and ideas that are dangerous to our public square.
And it's necessary to identify those.
And so I think that's a nice sort of division that for me, if we use cult, it's always going to be to identify what I take to be Religious traditions and conspiracy groups and so on that are dangerous and potentially a threat to democracy rather than simply a group that I don't like, rather than a group that is a minority group, a group that seems different, a group that has practices that I'm not used to.
If we're going to use cult that way, then it's not just not useful, but it's also a function of prejudice rather than a function of reflection on the kind of values we want in our public square.
So, a little bit of Religious Studies 101 to start, but just wanted to point that out as we get into this conversation with Dr. Hassan.
Now, I appreciate you all.
Thanks for listening, and I'll turn now to this interview.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco, joined today by a guest many of you will know and will be familiar with, and that is Dr. Stephen Hassan.
So, Dr. Hassan, thanks for joining me.
My pleasure.
Thanks for inviting me.
Let me tell folks about you.
You're a mental health professional and expert.
You specialize in the ways people use undue influence tactics and authoritarian leaders, destructive cults.
Your expertise It comes from personal experience in various high-demand religions and cults.
You discuss widely religious and political movements, human trafficking, extremists and terrorist groups, and you're a widely known podcaster and author, author of four books, including Combating Cult Mind Control, Freedom of Mind, and The Cult of Trump, which that book and that issue is something we'll get into today.
Yeah, so thank you for having me on.
And I guess I'll start by just saying for your listeners who aren't familiar with me that I was deceptively recruited while a college student into a front group of the Moonies cult in 1974.
In fact, the same month Patty Hearst was abducted by the left-wing Symbionese Liberation Army.
I got seduced by women flirting with me because my girlfriend had dumped me into a front group, became a right-wing fascist, came to believe that democracy was satanic and that we needed a theocracy, we had to infiltrate the government, and we basically would convert everyone to unificationism and kill everyone who didn't want to join us, and we would send them to the spirit world and save them later.
So, I was in the room with Sun Myung Moon when he discussed this, taking power, etc.
And my story is I fell asleep at the wheel of a van after three days of no sleep and nearly died, and that led to a voluntary deprogramming.
So, I come to this expertise from this perspective of what happened to my mind, my values.
I came from a very stable, loving, middle-class family.
I skipped eighth grade because I was an honors student.
I was not a joiner.
So, I became fascinated and also for my own therapy to understand things like social psychology and persuasion and Chinese communist brainwashing and hypnosis.
So, I just wanted to set the table for those listeners that may have not heard my story.
There's a lot of folks who listen to the show who have personal experiences in high demand religion.
So, I think they're very, they understand where you're coming from and how that can happen.
So you're meeting me 47 years later.
I've done a doctoral dissertation on how to update the law regarding undue influence using my BITE model of authoritarian control, controlling behavior, information, thoughts, and emotions to make a new pseudo-identity that's dependent and obedient.
Here's what I want to do today.
A year ago, you wrote about the insurrection.
And you checked in on the insurrection two years out.
Well, we are now three years out from the insurrection.
So I want to check in with you and say, hey, here's what you said a year ago.
It probably looks worse now, I'm not gonna lie, but you tell me how.
So, in a talk you gave, you discussed how Trump was the kind of leader that you predicted would never cede power.
You have expertise in leaders like him, authoritarians, and those who try to use undue influence on others.
I guess one question would be, What has happened in the years since you wrote that to convince you that if Trump gained power again, he would never leave and it might be worse than we ever imagined?
When I was asked to write The Cult of Trump by my book agent, I said, I don't want to do this.
It's going to alienate all the believers.
And to which he said, they're not going to read your book anyway.
Explain it to the rest of us.
And all I really had to start with, being a New Yorker who grew up one mile from Donald Trump's childhood home, Was an experience of Donald Trump as a womanizer, as a braggadocio, and what we call in the biz, the cult leader playbook.
You know, the malignant narcissistic personality type where everything's about them, grandiosity, need for attention, self-entitlement, lack of empathy, all the standard stuff.
Plus the psychopathological stuff, thinking you're above the law, pathological lying, sadistic, paranoid, threatening, harassing, etc.
So there's a whole playlist.
And I wrote Chapter 3 comparing Trump to my former cult leader, Sun Myung Moon, Hubbard of Scientology, and Jim Jones.
I concluded the book, by the way, which I handed in the manuscript in the spring of 2019.
I said, if he's not reelected in 2020, remember Jim Jones when Leo Ryan went down there?
They assassinated him and everyone died.
I said, expect violence if he loses the election.
And people were like, how did you know?
And I'm like, because when you have an insecure ego and you're a malignant narcissist, everything revolves around you.
And if you don't get your way, everyone that is a believer is an extension of you.
So you think nothing about taking everyone else out on a bigger scale.
So to answer your question, forgive me for the setup.
What's different about now is several things.
One is global climate warming has gotten extremely worse, causing incredible uncertainty disruption.
Even though we still have COVID, which was a major susceptibility factor, it's now heightened and the threat of immigrants is heightened because a lot of people are being displaced.
So that's worse.
What I also see is the development of open AI and chat GPT and AI and deep fakes and a lot of manipulation through social media platforms by China, by Russia, by Iran, by North Korea.
By Christian extremists.
I'm seeing Michael Flynn, who is associated with QAnon and his digital soldiers and him celebrating occultism and the Ascended Masters and QAnon and his rallies around the country.
My former cult has a gun factory making AR-15s.
There's an actual cult called the Rod of Iron Ministries.org by Sean Moon.
Sean Moon was at January 6th.
brought busloads of Moonies there and was tweeting that it was Antifa that was attacking the Capitol.
The Moonies newspaper, The Washington Times, was likewise uttering the disinformation.
So what I'm afraid is happening is there's a more extremism is happening.
Hi, my name is Peter and I'm a prophet in the new novel, American Prophet.
I was the one who dreamed about the natural disaster just before it happened.
Oh, and the pandemic.
And that crazy election.
And don't get me wrong, I'm not bragging.
It's not like I asked for the job.
Actually, no one would ask for this job.
At least half the people will hate whatever I say and almost everyone thinks I'm a little crazy.
Getting a date is next to impossible.
I've got a radio host who is making up conspiracies about me, a dude actually shooting at me, and an unhinged president threatening me.
But the job isn't all that bad.
I've gotten to see the country, and meet some really interesting people, and hopefully do some good along the way.
You can find my story on Amazon, Audible, or iTunes.
Just look for American Prophet by Jeff Fulmer.
That's American Prophet by Jeff Fulmer.
One of the things that I think about a lot is that we have so many of the challenges that you mentioned, so I think about climate change all the time.
And I think to myself, we as a species are in this space, especially in this country, and there are other countries facing this as well, where so much of our attention, so much of our resources is going to fight the rise of authoritarianism, is going to ward off the narcissists trying to become our leader again, that we
We don't have the bandwidth, we don't have the collective attention to give to something like the climate crisis that is here, is affecting millions and millions and tens and hundreds of millions of people right now.
So I think about that all the time and I appreciate the fact that You put a second Trump term in those kind of planetary frames.
It's not just a matter of what will happen the day after he's inaugurated, although I worry about that too.
It's also a matter of this is only going to accelerate crises like that of our climate and make it so we have no time, or not enough at least, to pay attention to those things.
I want to ask you a question I think a lot of people listening are going to be wondering and that's this.
We report all the time about the fact that more people than ever think January 6th was no big deal.
That they think as Republicans or as Christians that January 6th was something that is being made too big a deal out of.
More people than ever think Trump should not be held responsible.
It's only gotten worse since the insurrection.
I cited a statistic the other day that said that something like two-thirds of Republicans think that Donald Trump is a man of faith, and only 13% think that Joe Biden is.
Now, whatever we feel about Christianity, Catholicism, whatever, that's a startling statistic given the fact that Joe Biden is always at mass and talking about his Christianity, and Donald Trump has never been a churchgoer, doesn't know the least thing about the Bible, and so on.
Here's my point.
People are wondering, how can you get into a psychological space as a human being, as a Christian, as a Republican, where you see Donald Trump in this kind of lens?
You know, as somebody who was part of the Unification Church, somebody who has a deep expertise in these things, what happens in the human psyche when they start to take on these goggles?
Where they see Donald Trump as a messiah, Donald Trump as the greatest Christian on earth, Donald Trump as the most virtuous man, Donald Trump as tough, knows more than the generals, more than the economists and so on and so on.
So I guess I want to say that the analogy of how you can click on a malware link on your computer and it can take over your operating system.
There's an analogy here about mind control and a lot of what I see happening is that people are, you know, they're watching a video and then an algorithm gives them another video and another video or they follow a person and then all of a sudden they have more followers who are maybe they're bots from a foreign government or from some extremist group.
But they're not aware there's a system that's happening to their mind with the goal of undermining their own critical thinking.
So, if you talk to me as a Mooney, I would insist I was not brainwashed and I wasn't in a cult and I was Doing God's will, I've never been happier in my life as a Mooney, even though I threw out my own original poetry, dropped out of college, separated from my family and friends and all the things that I love to do, including playing basketball, etc.
And so what happened in my mind was a programming of an alternate reality.
A new belief system was installed.
And if my family and friends had access to a Steve Hasen back then, I could coach them on how to talk to Steve Hasen to get Steve back to his original values, and by asking respectful questions, curious questions,
Being patient and waiting for an answer, and then doing follow-ups, and by basically taking the position, this is what I say to, you know, I wrote Chapter 9 of The Cult of Trump, taking the position of, hey, I respect you, you're smart, you're educated, convince me, convert me.
And mean it.
Like, I'll listen.
And as you're talking, you share something that was important to you in your conversion.
We'll just watch it together.
We'll discuss it.
Then it'll be my turn to show something and get your opinion on it.
But to have an agreement that we want to pursue what's true.
I often- And it does work, but it takes effort.
Well, that's the part I was going to get at, is I am asked this question a lot.
What should we do?
And my response is this, and I would love to get your feedback.
I say, look, when it comes to our civic square and our elections, our democracy, we have to realize the emergency we're in.
So we can't be patient.
I don't have any anticipation that a second Trump term would be anything but a disaster for this country.
And for the world.
Agreed.
Agreed.
So, whether that is the mayor race, the school board race, the congressional race, the presidential race, we have to be absolutely aware that we're in an emergency and take no other answer for truth.
However, when it comes to my friend or my colleague or my nephew who has become, you know, just a different person, they've gone down the rabbit hole, whether they are in the MAGA movement, whether they are in a white Christian nationalist church that is teaching them that Satan has taken over the country, taken over their neighborhood, whatever,
Whether they are a 24-year-old man who's gone down the Andrew Tate militant misogynist masculinity route, my response is, if you try to out-truth them preemptively, they will shut down.
If I show up and say, hey, here's why you and everything you do is wrong, all your answers to the biggest questions are idiotic.
And I have all the data.
Do you want to see the New York Times?
Do you want to see the statistics I have from these scientists?
You are dumb and I can tell you why.
And now it is so tempting to do that for me.
I am trained as a professor.
I love to argue and I want to win.
But my encouragement to people who ask me this question is, tap into the emotional level.
Okay, tell me about you and your worldview.
Tell me about, you know, the things that are so important to you.
How does that make you feel?
Are you afraid of the future?
Does this help with that fear?
Are you insecure about what might be next for this planet?
Does this help with that?
How does this help you feel less angry toward so-and-so or less grievance toward that movement?
And if I tap into their emotions, maybe they'll let me speak about myself as a human being, and I won't be that demon-possessed Satan, sulfur smelling, whatever they've been told by Alex Jones, I just might be a human being who's their uncle or their friend or their colleague who loves them.
And we're having a conversation while drinking a beer and cooking at the barbecue.
Does that hit for you?
Well, I validate that as a universal, and I wrote a whole book called Freedom of Mind, Helping Loved Ones Leave, Controlling People, Cults and Beliefs, by the way.
But what doesn't work is attacking the leader, the doctrine, or the policy head-on, because that activates a defensive reaction, the person feels persecuted, and will distance from you, and if anything, will deepen their involvement.
I like what you're saying about building rapport and trust on an emotional level, having curiosity, asking questions is great.
But what I add to my recommendation is you need to educate yourself first.
But the key point, Bradley, is establishing a case that they can relate to, identify with, and go, yeah.
Brainwashing exists, and then you get into their backstories, how bright they were, talented they were, successful they were before, and then we can then discuss how the mind can get hacked.
One of the things that I just was speaking about with Tim Alberta, a journalist who wrote a book that's out now, is in his reporting he's in the room with certain high profile Trumpian leaders, you know, Robert Jeffress or Ralph Reed or Jerry Falwell Jr.
And there are these moments where there's an opening, where they do regret going down the MAGA trail as hard and as far as they did.
They do sense that the Christianity that they conceived during and with Trump and Trump's years was toxic, was perhaps not what God wants and so on.
And I think for me, reading those chapters was a really good reminder that even those who seem the most committed, We're out of time.
moments of reflection where they are willing to think about their worldview, to think about how they understand things.
And so I think what you're offering is a really a good reminder of that as well.
We're out of time.
We could probably talk for the next three hours about these issues.
And I would love to talk more about your time as part of the Unification Church and, you know, everything else.
But I'll just say, you know, thank you for all your work where you have a lot of places, you're online, you know, people can connect with you in a lot of ways.
Can you tell us where those are and how they can do that?
I'm at freedomofmind.com.
I'm at CultExpert on most social media platforms.
I have an online course that's nine hours for clinicians and educators to take.
And I just want to encourage you, and I want people to get your books, and I want a movement of real believers to say, you know what?
Jesus didn't say making money was the route to heaven.
Jesus spoke for immigrants and poor and sick and we need to get back to basics.
I, uh, yeah, I have a lot of experience quoting the Bible to Bible believing people and having them get mad at me.
So that's, you know, I feel like I could just, that's a whole 1500 page book of, of just those encounters.
So anyway.
Well, so I would love to talk to you for a future webinar that we might do together where you can teach me and I can coach you on what I think you might try and we can tweak things till we come up with a formula that actually empowers people to get back in touch with their soul.
Yeah, no, it's good.
I always say you can't out-evangelical me, because I'm a pretty good expert, just like you were part of the Unification Church, and so people get upset when they realize you know their worldview more than they do, and they often get kind of frustrated.
So, anyway.
All right, friends.
As always, find us at Straight White JC.
Find me at Bradley Onishi.
We do this three times a week, best we can.
And you can learn all about how to support us in the show notes.
For now, we'll say we'll be back later this week with It's in the Code and the weekly roundup.
But for now, we'll sign off.
Thanks for being here.
Have a good day.
Thanks for listening today, y'all.
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