Cults, Culture & Coercion with Dr. Steve Hassan

Bölümler

• 
  Who Gains From The “Inevitability” of AI? Oxford ethicist Carissa Véliz on how AI prediction became a tool of influence and power 14.09.2026 1sa 2dk

  Human beings want to make sense of chaos. We want explanations, patterns, and some sense that we know what is coming next. However, wanting an explanation does not necessarily mean wanting what is true and factual. That was one of the ideas that stood out to me during my conversation with Oxford professor Carissa Véliz. Her latest book Prophecy, Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future: From Ancient Oracles to AI covers the ethics of AI, privacy, and the ways power and influence shape technology and vice versa. Her work takes a much longer view of prediction by tracing the human desire to know the future from ancient oracles to algorithms. Véliz states that as human beings, we do not necessarily prefer what is true but rather what is familiar. So, when it comes to outsourcing more of our thinking to Large Language Models (LLMs) and possibly future artificial general intelligence (AGI) – defined as a hypothetical computer system that matches or exceeds human cognitive abilities across any domain – this is an important consideration. Prediction itself is not inherently bad; it's a core part of the scientific process. A hypothesis is a type of prediction itself. Within this process, we expect to observe something, but are open to it being challenged. This kind of prediction is something we carefully test, taking care that outside factors do not confuse the results and understand that it may not prove to be accurate or true. Yet, when it comes to predicting human behaviors and social dynamics, problems emerge. People are, inherently, impacted by predictions themselves, which can have an effect on future behavior, whereas something like a molecule or even the weather would not respond the same way.
• 
  The Power of Us: Dr. Jay Van Bavel on Social Identity and The Power of Dissent 07.09.2026 1sa 9dk

  Social identity, or how the portion of our identity we derive from participating in our social groups can expand our mind or limit our ability to embrace complexity and nuance. Why should this matter to someone who has never joined a cult? Because every one of us moves through families, workplaces, political communities, faiths, fandoms, and online networks. We are constantly being influenced, day in and day out, by every single person we meet.Social identity belongs at the center of a conversation about freedom of mind, connecting the intimate pressure to fit in with the public systems that reward some voices while punishing others.That tension guided my conversation with Jay Van Bavel, author of The Power of Us: Harnessing Our Shared Identities to Improve Performance, Increase Cooperation and Promote Social Harmony. He is a professor of social psychology and director of the Center for Conflict and Cooperation at New York University. The Power of Us explores how we experience the world and what shapes our perception day to day. It asks why disagreeing with others has become so difficult, and what has driven such a rise in hostility. But understanding is a key to navigating the polarization America and other countries are experiencing. 
• 
  Carlos Castaneda's Cult of Witches with Ru Marshall: Fooling Millions and UC Press still sells his books as anthropology 31.08.2026 1sa 2dk

  Carlos Castaneda sold more than 10 million books to readers who thought they were buying anthropology. Real fieldwork. A real Yaqui shaman named Don Juan, teaching a real Westerner how to see. None of it happened. Castaneda made it up, and for years almost nobody in the press called him on it.I read all of those books as a teenager. Grew up on them, the way a lot of people my age did, right alongside Kung Fu reruns and books about Gurdjieff my neighbor suggested I read. So, when I heard that Ru Marshall, a nonbinary writer and artist I met years ago at a cult conference, had just published a full biography of the man, I wanted them on the podcast immediately. The book is called American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda, and it took Marshall almost twenty years to write it.Here's the part most casual fans never learn. While Castaneda was cranking out sequels, he was also running an actual cult, a small group of women out of a house in Westwood that he called his witches. That story ends with human remains found in Death Valley. This is a fascinating discussion and will be thought provoking for sure.
• 
  The Problems with America's Family Courts with Karen Winner: A journalist turned lawyer on custody, cronyism, and courts without oversight 24.08.2026 1sa

  A family court judge can reach into your family, single you out by name, and rearrange your life by dinnertime: where your child sleeps tonight, whether you're allowed to see them, whether you're even permitted to raise a concern about your spouse. Karen Winner told me that in the opening minutes of our conversation, and it's the line I keep coming back to. Winner is a journalist turned attorney and the author of Divorced from Justice: The Abuse of Women and Children by Divorce Lawyers and Judges, a book that started as a government investigation and became one of the few serious accountings of how family court actually operates in this country. Winner's path into this work began at the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs, where she investigated financial abuse of women by their own divorce attorneys under commissioner Mark Green. Three women brought her their stories, including Monica Getz, the ex-wife of saxophonist Stan Getz, and Peggy Hammond, ex-wife of blues musician John Hammond Jr. Winner went on to interview roughly a hundred people inside the system, insiders included. One judge pulled her aside in an empty courtroom to whisper how the wealthy get exploited by their own lawyers. The resulting report led to New York's Statement of Client's Rights, one of the first consumer protections written specifically for divorce clients, and still law today. What struck me most was Winner's explanation of judicial discretion. Family court judges, she said, "operate without any checks and balances." They decide behind closed doors, rarely have to explain their reasoning, and face almost no outside scrutiny because the whole apparatus runs at the state level. Custody evaluations compound the problem. Courts routinely appoint psychologists to assess parents, but "there's nobody reviewing the reviewers." Their reports are often sealed from the public and, astonishingly, from the parents whose children's futures depend on them. "It's not fair," Winner said. "It's not democratic. It's Kafka." A small, favored pool of evaluators gets reused case after case, regardless of credentials, because judges default to whoever they already know. That is the same undue influence dynamic I study in destructive cults: a closed information environment where the people affected by a decision have no way to question the process that produced it. When Bandy Lee joined me on this podcast, she described family courts as functioning like "a mini cult," advancing a false narrative that protects the wrong parent while the public stays in the dark.
• 
  Escaping the Moonies, and Rebuilding his Life: Ingo Michehl gave the cult his flute, his country, and six years of his life 17.08.2026 1sa 1dk

  Ingo Michehl spent six and a half years as one of the Moonies' most productive fundraisers, selling laser-etched foil pictures out of a Ford Transit van at a twenty-fold markup, sleeping five hours a night, and believing every dollar liberated God's suffering heart. Recruited off a San Francisco street corner at nineteen while visiting America from Germany, he came out the other side with a master's in counseling psychology and a career helping people leave high-control groups, playing music, traveling and working on his dream to make a film that is educational about cult mind control and liberation. LIke Ingo, I too was deceptively recruited by this Korean cult that still has great wealth and influence, including in world politics. He exited when a Chistian shared information with him that contradicted his beliefs in the Moonie ideology of the “Divine Principle.” Ingo was liberated from a mind control cult by a stranger who cared and warmly interacted with him and encouraged him to think for himself. This episode is valuable as so many people are beginning to wake up from their own information silos.
• 
  Escaping Shincheonji, Korea's Covid Cult with Chris Vishoot: A survivor of the Korean doomsday cult on lies, waking up and helping others break free. 10.08.2026 1sa 3dk

  Shincheonji recruits through what looks like an ordinary Bible study, and most people who walk through the door have no idea that it is a destructive cult. Chris Vishoot found out only after three and a half years as a devoted member. In 2018, a woman he met on a dating app invited him to what she called an innocent class on scripture. Within a year he was driving an hour each way to an unmarked building in Seattle, sleeping three to four hours a night, and reporting on Bible study students he had once sat beside as a recruit himself. Chris grew up in a Christian household that expected the world to end at any moment. He graduated from the University of Washington with two engineering degrees, and by his mid-twenties he found himself asking a familiar question: is this all there is to life? Two friends had died young, and Chris, an agnostic at the time, was searching for something bigger. That search is exactly what recruiters for the group are trained to find and use. Chris is now one of the more credible Christian ex-Shincheonji voices in the country. He runs Bible Vaccine Center, helps moderate the r/shincheonji subreddit for former members, and works with pastors whose congregations have been infiltrated by recruiters posing as ordinary Christians. In this internationally criticized group, we talked about how he got in, how he got out, and why he now helps other people leave the same group.
• 
  The World Mission Society Church of God (WMSCOG) with Anthony Forte: A decade inside the Korean doomsday cult WMSCOG, an arranged marriage, and the exit that followed 03.08.2026 1sa 2dk

  Anthony Forte spent more than ten years inside the World Mission Society Church of God, rising from a new recruit stopped on a Queens, NY, sidewalk to a leader who trained others to recruit the way he had been recruited. He joined at 25, during a stretch of his life when he felt behind everyone around him. He stayed through an arranged marriage. He left only after the research he did during the pandemic exposed cracks in a doctrine he had built a decade of his life on. The World Mission Society Church of God, known to researchers in this field as WMSCOG, teaches that Ahn Sahng-hong, a Korean man who died in 1985, was the second coming of Christ, and Zahng Gil-jah is “God the Mother,” a living deity based in South Korea. Members are told they must accept both figures, keep the Sabbath and Passover, tithe, and recruit new members to earn a place in heaven. Anthony rose through recruiting and teaching, eventually overseeing a team of members, before he found his way out. A year into membership, leaders promoted Anthony to team leader and turned the conversation toward marriage. His pastor pushed him toward a Korean member who would need a visa sponsor, framing marriage as a path to greater blessings. The wedding took place in October 2012; the same year the group had told members would mark the end of the world. “I only have two more months on Earth anyway,” Anthony remembered thinking. “Might as well do this big action and please God, so I have a better chance to get into heaven.” He and his wife communicated mostly by text for quite some time, since she spoke little English. “It was very difficult,” he told me, “to marry a stranger.” This is a very insightful interview and of great interest to folks who themselves with involved with a Bible group that claimed to have the “Truth.”
• 
  6,000 Images and No Idea It Was a Crime: Clinical psychologist Dr. Mary Riggs Cohen on why autistic people become both the victims and the unwitting offenders of the online world 27.07.2026 1sa 2dk

  A person on the autism spectrum leaves a file-sharing program running overnight because they want cartoons or anime. By morning, thousands of images have downloaded onto their hard drive, some of them child sexual abuse material they never chose and, in some cases, never even opened. Months later, the FBI is at the door. A judge stares at the download count and asks how anyone could not understand what they were doing. My guest Dr. Mary Riggs Cohen, spends her working life answering that question in courtrooms across the country. She is a clinical psychologist with thirty years specializing in autism spectrum disorders and has conducted forensic evaluations of autistic defendants since 2009. Her new book, co-written with defense attorney Elizabeth Kelley and digital forensics expert Michele Bush, is Cybercrime and the Autism Spectrum: How the Online World Creates Victims and Offenders. I met Dr. Cohen at the International Academy of Law and Mental Health Congress in Montreal, and I asked her on the show the moment her presentation ended, because so much of what she described maps directly onto the recruitment tactics I have studied for five decades. Dr. Cohen's first point cuts against the instinct to sort people into predators and prey. “Most people on the spectrum are both victimized and offenders at some point,” she told me. Cyberbullying, financial scams, and sexual exploitation run in one direction. Chat rooms that ask for “a picture of a child in your family” run in the other, quietly moving an autistic person into possession of CSAM they may never have sought out. Child sexual abuse material (CSAM) is not “child pornography.” It’s evidence of child sexual abuse—and it’s a crime to create distribute or possess. CSAM includes both real and synthetic content such as images created with artificial intelligence tools. Because many autistic individuals catalog and organize obsessively, agents who search a seized computer often find the material sorted into folders, which reads to an outsider as intent rather than what it frequently is: a hyperfocus trait turned against the person who has it. This is a justice issue and more people need to learn, please.
• 
  God, Law, and the Cult of Power: Marci Hamilton on what it will take to restore the rule of law in an era of authoritarian religion 20.07.2026 1sa 4dk

  The First Amendment gives you an absolute right to believe whatever you want. It has never given you the right to act on those beliefs in ways that harm others. That distinction, simple as it sounds, is the one that the religious right has spent decades trying to erase, and it is the distinction that Professor Marci A. Hamilton has spent her entire career defending. Marci is a Professor of Practice in Political Science and a Non-Resident Senior Fellow in the Program for Research on Religion at the University of Pennsylvania, where she specializes in constitutional law. Marci is an intellectual leader against extreme religious liberty. She is the founder of CHILD USA, a nonprofit academic think tank dedicated to protecting children from abuse and neglect, and a leading national expert on clergy sex abuse and child sex abuse statutes of limitation, which she ran for a decade. The core argument of God vs. the Gavel is one that sounds obvious until you see how hard it is to actually enforce: religious organizations, like every other institution, must obey the law. No mandatory exemption. No special carve-out because a leader claims divine authority. Marci put it plainly: the very first free exercise case in United States history established that belief is absolute, but conduct is not. Conduct can harm others, and a functioning democracy does not allow anyone to use religion as a shield against accountability for harm. The cases that matter, she told me, are always about harm. Psychological harm is real. You only need to sit with a child sex abuse survivor once to understand that. This is a most important conversation.
• 
  She Spent $115K in a Wellness MLM with Brandie Hadfield: A new mom, an autistic baby, and a decade lost to a commercial cult 13.07.2026 1sa 2dk

   A wellness MLM does not announce itself as a cult. It arrives as a smoothie recipe, a flyer of smiling mothers, and a promise of working from home while you take your health back. My recent guest on Cults, Culture & Coercion, Brandie Hadfield, lived inside one for a decade. She is a Registered Psychotherapist  and co-founder of the peer support nonprofit Flipping the Pyramid, and she spent roughly ten years selling supplements for a wellness MLM before she understood she had been recruited into a commercial cult. Brandie was a new mother in 2011, isolated and exhausted, when the pitch found her. I invite you to notice how ordinary the entry point was, because the same machinery now drives coaching programs, prosperity preaching, and the speculative frenzy around cryptocurrency, which I consider a form of multi-level marketing. A small group sells the dream, recruits everyone else to buy in, and the people at the top profit while almost everyone below them loses money. Her recruitment began with a parenting book by a famous pediatrician and a home-based coaching certification. She paid for the courses, the workbooks, and the materials. Then a package arrived in the mail from the pediatrician’s daughter, inviting her into the MLM the family sat near the top of. Brandie saw it later for what it was. A funnel. She is intelligent, devoted, and the kind of employee who gives more than anyone asks. Recruiters prize those traits. Her ADHD, undiagnosed at the time, sharpened her focus into something the group put to use. “My kind of tunnel vision and focus and tenacity, which can be a beautiful aspect of having ADHD, was really exploited,” she told me. Brandie was a mother with undiagnosed ADHD raising a son later identified as autistic. Isolation, a hunger for belonging, and a tendency to commit fully to a mission left her exposed. Her graduate research examined narcissistic leadership in commercial cults and its impact on neurodivergent people, and it filled a gap she had felt firsthand. She wants to help others now. A fascinating interview.
• 
  Crypto Is Buying Your Democracy: Molly White breaks down meme coins, stablecoins, Bitcoins, the shadow financial system, and the $200 million campaign to gut your consumer protections 06.07.2026 58dk

  I have been saying for years that cryptocurrency has the structure of a multi-level marketing scheme: a small number of people at the top make enormous sums, while large numbers of ordinary people are recruited to invest, almost always lose money, and then recruit more people. Molly is an independent researcher and writer who covers cryptocurrency and the broader technology industry. She writes the newsletter Citation Needed (citationneeded.news), runs the ongoing tracker Web3 Is Going Just Great, and operates influence.citationneeded.news , which is being relaunched as Tech Influence Watch to cover both crypto and AI campaign spending.  The crypto industry emerged as a serious political force starting around 2024. Fairshake, the largest cryptocurrency super PAC, raised over $200 million in the 2024 election cycle, making it the top-funded super PAC in the country, surpassing even the MAGA super PAC (OpenSecrets data, via multiple sources including Axios and CoinDesk). As of early 2026, Fairshake has $193 million in cash on hand for the 2026 midterms. The industry’s goal was explicit: remove legislators viewed as threats to crypto interests, install legislators who would promote them. Over a dozen enforcement actions against cryptocurrency companies were dropped almost immediately after the 2024 election. Get a grasp on the issue of crypto with this illuminating interview.
• 
  What the Watchtower Doesn’t Want You to Know with Australian whistleblower Lara Kaput: Child labor, financial fraud, and eight types of modern slavery inside the Jehovah’s Witnesses 29.06.2026 1sa 9dk

  When Lara Kaput was eight years old, she was required to clean bricks on Jehovah’s Witness building sites. She helped her father road-build on the church construction projects. She did cleaning, and gardening, and her childhood friends did this, and cleaning child-minding too. None of it paid, none very little of it optional. She did not recognize it as child labor at the time. Most children raised inside authoritarian groups do not. That is how it works. I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Lara on Cults, Culture & Coercion, and what she brought to this conversation is the kind of ground-level, decade-long investigative knowledge that is genuinely rare. Lara is a prominent Australian activist and whistleblower, a co-founder of the advocacy group Say Sorry (saysorry.org), and a former vice president of the Secular Association of New South Wales. For nine years she has provided testimony and submissions to governments, law enforcement, and royal commissions across approximately 10 countries, specifically concerning the Watchtower Society, theone of the legal names for the organization known publicly as the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Lara has made approximately 30 or more submissions to governments across roughly 10 countries around the globe. The allegations she has documented and reported fall into several categories, and she was careful throughout our conversation to frame these as allegations, as the matters are either under investigation or have not yet been adjudicated. They include: aiding and abetting child sexual abuse, high rates of domestic violence, intentional contract breaches, document forgery, evidence and records destruction, interference with members’ democratic rights, phoenixing of businesses (the deliberate voluntary dissolution of one company to restart another, shedding liabilities while preserving assets and customers), multi-billion-dollar global property liquidation she alleges constitutes financial fraud, modern slavery, and manipulation of privacy law, and perverting the course of justice.
• 
  Russian Disinformation From the Ground in Ukraine With Journalist Chris Sampson: An American journalist in Ukraine on active measures, AI pollution, and bottom-up resistance 22.06.2026 1sa 8dk

  Russian disinformation no longer feels like a foreign problem you read about in long articles. It shapes what you see when you open your phone, what your relatives believe about a war they have never visited, and what large language models tell you when you ask a sincere question about world events. My guest this week on Cults, Culture & Coercion, Chris Sampson, journalist, terrorism analyst, and extremism researcher, publisher of The Wiretap, has spent more than four years reporting from Ukraine. He wakes up to drones and missiles, then opens his laptop to read online claims about the country he lives in describing a place he does not recognize. Few people are positioned to explain this gap with the precision he brings. He sorts Russian information into three streams: state propaganda, general pro-Kremlin bloggers, and military-security bloggers. The third stream sometimes fractures, and analysts who watch carefully see fissures open. Living in Ukraine has given Chris a daily lesson in cognitive dissonance, the discomfort a person feels when they hold two contradictory beliefs and resolve it by changing one of them. He walks through a Ukrainian city the morning after Russian drones strike it, then opens a feed full of Russian disinformation claiming the strikes never happened or accusing Ukrainians of staging them. The flood of falsehoods is the point. Putin and the KGB long ago refined what researchers call the firehose of falsehood, in which an overwhelming volume of contradictory claims exhausts your ability to sort signal from noise. He warned me about a newer escalation. Russia has been seeding pseudo-academic papers and propaganda articles into the training data of large language models. Ask one of the major AI tools a sincere question about the war or about the kidnapped Ukrainian children, and the model has been trained on material with Russian framing baked in. Chris named Kateryna Rashevska, a leading Ukrainian expert on the abducted children, as one of those raising the alarm about academic-looking papers planted to muddy the legal and historical record. This is active measures, the Russian intelligence tradition of psychological and information warfare, applied to a new generation of tools. The mechanism is brainwashing, the systematic use of deception, repetition, and emotional manipulation to shape what a person believes. The kidnapped children case is one of the most painful expressions of this doctrine. 
• 
  What Detransition Taught Me About Identity: Alexander Linkowski on his detransition journey, informed consent, and the illusion of self 15.06.2026 1sa 10dk

  Detransitioning, a term for stopping, shifting, or reversing an initial gender transition, is a word that has been stripped of its human meaning by the political forces fighting over it. Last week, I shared my interview with Dr. Kinnon Ross MacKinnon, a trans researcher at York University whose landmark DARE study surveyed 957 people who had detransitioned. MacKinnon’s data show that the detransitioners he interviewed are not a single monolith with identical motivations, but rather four distinct groups with distinct sets of needs. Despite this emerging research, the Trump administration now attempts to justify banning care for everyone, a flagrant distortion of what the science shows we should do to support those who are both transgender and those who wish to detransition. During our discussions, MacKinnon recommended I speak with Alexander Linkowski, whom he described as a thoughtful voice from inside the detransition experience. Alexander is a 32-year-old philosopher, transhumanist, and YouTuber based in Norway. He lived as a trans woman for approximately three years before detransitioning and is currently completing a book on detransition and identity. He realized he was neurodiverse. Alexander’s story is not political ammunition for either side. It is one person’s vulnerable story, told with honesty and philosophical depth, and it deserves to be heard on its own terms. Alexander grew up in Poland, a deeply conservative Catholic country where 1950s ideals of masculinity and femininity shaped sex education. He described being bullied at school and told repeatedly he was “not a real man,” feeling profound discomfort in his body from early childhood, something he now understands as connected to his autism diagnosis, which he received as an adult. Living within a homophobic society, Alexander also described deep shame around his attraction to other males, buried for years. “Everything led me to believe that life would be easier, life would be better, if I lived socially as a woman.” He transitioned medically and socially at 19. Based on the DARE study, Alexander’s experience maps closely onto what MacKinnon describes as the first pathway to detransition. These are people who detransitioned with strong decisional regret, who often reported that their clinical care was not thorough enough, and fewer than half of whom felt they received adequate decision-making support before they began.
• 
  The War on Trans Healthcare Is Not About Science What a study of 957 detransitioners revealed, and why Washington gets it wrong, with Dr. Kinnon Ross MacKinnon 08.06.2026 1sa 5dk

  Trans healthcare is an evolving discussion, and the implications greatly affect those in the LGBTQ+ community. At its heart, this is a conversation about the science meant to inform transition-related healthcare care, and what happens when politics deliberately distorts it. On March 31, 2026, The Supreme Court handed down an 8-to-1 ruling that conversion therapy, a practice every major medical and mental health organization has condemned as harmful and without scientific basis, now qualifies as “protected speech” under the First Amendment. The case, Chiles v. Salazar, centered on a Christian counselor in Colorado who argued that a state ban on the practice violated her right to speak freely with her clients. Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority, declared that the First Amendment “stands as a shield against any effort to enforce orthodoxy in thought or speech in this country.” Only Justice Jackson dissented, warning that the ruling “misreads our precedents, is unprincipled and unworkable.” This decision puts laws in 23 states and the District of Columbia at serious risk. It tells LGBTQ+ young people that any licensed therapist with a personal ideological or religious agenda now has the constitutional right to try to change who they are. It arrived on a day meant to celebrate trans lives. This ruling lands in the same moment that Professor Kinnon Ross MacKinnon, a trans researcher whose work I deeply respect, published in the New York Times that the Trump administration has been weaponizing detransition research to justify bans on gender-affirming care. At the same time, his guest essay outlines the complexities of gender fluidity that can occur after accessing medical treatments for gender dysphoria. Early studies from the 1970s through the 2000s found detransition rates of roughly 1 to 6 percent, primarily among adult transgender women who had full surgical transitions. New research focusing on younger populations, though, identifies that between 2-17% [GU1] of young LGBTQ+ people may experience a detransition process. The field of pediatric gender-affirming healthcare, when it was rapidly scaled up in the United States and Canada over the last 10-15 years, was not prepared for the question of detransition and how to care for these experiences.
• 
  He Was Ordained by the Mormon Prophet: Former Mormon Bishop Ian Wilks on 37 years inside the LDS authoritarian cult 01.06.2026 1sa 4dk

  Ian Wilks was a high-ranking leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He is a former bishop, a former branch president, and a member of the stake presidency in British Columbia, with responsibility for shepherding twelve congregations and thousands of members. Then-apostle Dallin H. Oaks, now the 18th president and living prophet of the LDS Church, personally recruited him, interviewed him, called him, set him apart, and trained him into that role.¹ For 37 years, Ian devoted his entire life to his church. He paid tithing on his gross income. He sealed his marriage in the London Temple. He conducted hundreds of worthiness interviews. He trained bishops. He stood at pulpits and at altars. He made sacred covenants in the temple to give all he had, including his own life if required, for the building up of the kingdom on earth. In a snowstorm, the cost of those 37 years lands all at once. The thing he wanted most to be true, he learned was untrue. I spoke with Ian on my podcast Cults, Culture & Coercion and in a recent livestream. He is the co-host of the Inside Out podcast with Jim Bennett, son of the late US Senator Bob Bennett. What he told me confirms what former members of the LDS Church have been describing to me since my first book was published in 1988. The Mormon Church meets every criterion of an authoritarian cult under my BITE Model of Authoritarian Control™ and sits on the destructive end of my Influence Continuum©. Ian himself took the BITE Model self-test based on his decades of experience and scored the church at roughly 85 to 90 percent across the four dimensions of behavior, information, thought, and emotion. This group is one of the wealthiest, most influential groups in politics and its believers are over represented (compared to all other faith groups) in our FBI, CIA, Homeland security and faithful people will follow the direction of the Prophet over the Constitution (even though they swear an oath to uphold the Constitution) which should make all Americans worry.
• 
  Smart People Fall For The Cult Of Trump With Journalist Virginia Heffernan 25.05.2026 1sa 9dk

  From Richard Dawkins to Larry Summers, brilliant minds get pulled in. I sat down with the journalist Virginia Heffernan for a recent conversation on Cults, Culture & Coercion to talk about who falls for the Trump cult and why. Virginia spent time inside a group of academics and intellectuals sponsored by Jeffrey Epstein, called Edge, run by literary agent John Brockman. She wrote about involvement in the Epstein cult for The New Republic. She told me she was fortunately kept at arm’s length from the worst of it. “I was only there as a fig leaf because they didn't have any women,” she said. “They didn't want me at the parties or on the island.” She watched the dynamics around her. Edge included Larry Summers, former Treasury Secretary and Harvard president. The Epstein correspondence released by the House Oversight Committee in November 2025 documents a years-long stream of personal advice Summers sought from a convicted sex offender. In the messages, Summers asked Epstein for guidance on his pursuit of a younger woman he described as a mentee. Epstein called himself Summers' wing man and urged Summers to play the long game by keeping the woman in a forced holding pattern (Harvard Crimson, November 17, 2025). Virginia framed it bluntly: “I would venture to say someone you would least expect to fall under a spell. These are grown men who should know better.” Virginia writes the Magic and Loss Substack, hosts the Omni Shambles podcast, and contributes to The New Republic. The 10th anniversary of her book Magic and Loss has her circling back to a question she has carried since 2016. I thanked Virginia for reading my book and then being the first media person to bravely and publicly support what I wrote about. She wrote a Los Angeles Times op-ed that it was the “best explanatory framework” for what was happening politically. She then went on CNN to be interviewed about it. This led to Brian Stelter interviewing me about my book for his CNN show Reliable Sources. She put it plainly: “I was trying to solve a problem in my mind, which was, how did we get here? And you came along with your book; The Cult of Trump and you did me the favor of giving me a framework.” This is a fascinating interview with a crack journalist.
• 
  He Was 18. Scientology Put Him in Charge. A former Scientology executive in Scotland on recruitment, control, and getting out with Amir Essalhi 18.05.2026 1sa 1dk

  Scientology recruitment rarely looks the way people imagine. There is no shadowy figure pulling you into a back room. The process is warm, and, for a curious young person, entirely easy to be “handled” and sucked in. Amir Essalhi was 18 years old and studying film when he first walked into the Edinburgh organization in late 2022. He had never heard of Hubbard. He did not know who David Miscavige was. He knew one thing: He was into being an aspiring filmmaker, and loved Tom Cruise. When he was shown a Scientology recruitment video with Tom Cruise his curiosity to know more was the tool used to manipulate him. Less than two years later, Amir was running the group's social media strategy across TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram, delivering public lectures, and serving as one of the senior executives of the only Scientology organization in Scotland's capital. He was 19. I spoke with Amir twice, first on a live stream, and then on my Cults, Culture & Coercion podcast. What he shared in both conversations is something every young person, and every parent of a young person, needs to hear. Scientology has been all over some social media channels as some people were running into Scientology buildings and posting the video of their illegal trespassing. I have been vocal criticizing this as has Leah Remini- whose original show I was on as a guest. Many of the platforms Scientology uses to reach young people carry no Scientology branding at all. Amir confirmed that promotional materials would sometimes run under names like "Dianetics" or localized event names, with "Scientology" buried in fine print or absent entirely. The group also uses front organizations, including Narconon (drug rehabilitation), the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, and Drug Free World, none of which disclose their Scientology ties in their public-facing materials. Destructive authoritarian cults know that if they give fully informed consent, no one would ever get involved.
• 
  Why filmmaker Deeyah Khan sits with extremists demonstrating how listening matters! 11.05.2026 1sa 6dk

  She Sought Out the People Who Threatened Her Deeyah Khan was editing a film when the BBC called. The threats were serious enough the police were already on their way. “Stay where you are,” they told her. “If there are windows in the room, move to a different one. Wait for us.” She had given an interview saying Britain would never be all white again. White supremacist sites in the United States picked it up and ran with it. One of those sites had been frequented by Dylann Roof, the man who murdered nine Black parishioners in Charleston in 2015. Now their followers were sending death threats by the hundreds, telling her to be afraid, telling her she should not exist. The police gave her a personal alarm and a security briefing. That night, sitting alone, she made an unusual decision. She would not hide. She would seek out the people threatening her, sit with them face to face, and try to understand who they were. I had the privilege of speaking with Deeyah recently on Cults, Culture & Coercion. She is a BAFTA and two-time Emmy winning documentary filmmaker. Over the past fifteen years, she has done what almost no one in journalism has been willing to do. She has interviewed convicted anti-abortion terrorists from the Army of God, the leader of America's oldest and largest neo-Nazi organization, and pro-Trump militia members plotting violence against refugees. She has done it warmly, with genuine curiosity, while also holding strong positions of her own about human rights, women's rights, and the basic dignity of every person. She is an inspiration and she has, but being respectful snd curious and asking questions without attacking, has been able to help deradicalize a major figure in the hate cult. Please read this blog on Substack and listen to this amazing interview.
• 
  The Cult That Helped Shape Christian America: The Community of Jesus child abuse and Christian Nationalism with Ewan Whyte 04.05.2026 54dk

  The Community of Jesus was founded in 1970 by two housewives, Cay Anderson and Judy Sorensen. They told members they were "God's anointed" with a direct line to God. Any authority figure they appointed carried that same divine authority. Members were taught to obey without questioning the leadership’s authority. I spoke with former member and award-nominated writer Ewan Whyte. His fifth book, Mothers of Invention: Essays on the Community of Jesus and Grenville Christian College, details life inside this cult and its affiliated boarding school in Canada. Ewan was raised in the group from childhood. He knows this organization from the inside, and what he shares deserves your full attention. The Community of Jesus is one of three surviving original covenant communities founded in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The other two are the Word of God, founded in 1967 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and People of Praise 1972, - founded around the same time and known today as the community Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett is closely associated with. Of the three, the Community of Jesus has been, as Ewan argues, is historically, the most politically influential in shaping American evangelical culture of today. Here is something that stops most people cold: the most important best-selling book of Christian nationalism, The Light and the Glory, was secretly written inside this cult. As Ewan documents in his book, this revisionist version of American history, which argues that God intended the founding the United States to be a Christian nation, was produced by Community of Jesus members David Manuel and Peter Marshall Jr. Their work became a cornerstone text for the Christian nationalist movement and has shaped the beliefs of millions of Americans. Come listen to this enlightening interview.