Dr. Steven Hassan: MAGA is a Cult

Steven Hassan:

My prescription is mobilizing the millions of Americans who are former members of all types of cults and getting them to reach out to their community and empowering former MAGA people to be reverse engineering how they recruited all these people into believing in Trump in the first place.

Ken Harbaugh:

I'm Ken Harbaugh, and this is Burn the Boats, a podcast about big decisions. My guest today is Dr. Steven Hassan, a licensed mental health professional and recognized expert on cults. His book, The Cult of Trump, examines how Trump has built a base with fanatical devotion.

Dr. Hassan correctly predicted that there would be violence after the 2020 election if Trump did not win. Steven, welcome to the show.

Steven Hassan:

Thanks for having me on.

Ken Harbaugh:

You have said that the human brain is especially vulnerable to hacking. I want to start there because I think that idea is essential to the power of cults and it's going to inform just about everything we are talking about today. What do you mean when you say the brain is vulnerable to hacking?

Steven Hassan:

We are living organisms that are dependent on our senses for taking in information. And we have what's called system one and system two thinking. This is from the Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman's book, Thinking, Fast and Slow.

And what he was able to show scientifically is that we have a lot of unconscious scripts that we are using to make predictions. And most of the time we're working mindlessly, moving through our day, going through routines, and we only occasionally stop and really analyze data and evidence and challenge our thoughts and how we came to adopt beliefs.

And there is something in psychology that's critical to explain this. It's the single most important principle of social psychology. In fact, it's called the fundamental attribution error.

And it's a lot of technical words. But what it means is that when people are trying to understand other people and why they do what they do, we have an unconscious bias to over attribute dispositional or personality variables and underestimate social influence variables.

In other words, we like to walk around saying, “I'm independent, I'm thinking for myself.” It's the other person who's in the Moonies, which was the cult that got me recruited back in the 70s when I was 19, which caused me to get interested in this whole topic.

Anyway, people will assume there was something wrong with Steve. Instead of going, what was going on in Steve's life and what was going on in the recruitment and indoctrination thing. And what was going on was my girlfriend dumped me, three women were flirting with me, lying to me, claiming they were students saying they weren't part of a religious group.

And it was a step-by-step, incremental set of manipulations where I didn't understand there was a system being used to hack me. And I later became a leader and learned the system. I later wrote a book called Combatting Cult Mind Control about the system of how cults, destructive, authoritarian cults I should add, operate.

But I just want to state categorically that we are dependent on each other for reality testing. And the notions that been circulating about social Darwinism and selfishness is good, and altruism is bad, is just not true.

Historically, anthropologically, we have excelled as a species because we teach each other, “Hey, watch out for this over there. There's a tiger around that corner. Don't go out late at night by yourself without a spear or two.” We depend on each other.

And there's a book by two neuroscientists called The Knowledge Illusion, in fact, where they demonstrate that people walk around thinking they know how things operate, but when you ask them point blank, explain how a toilet flushes, they have no clue about what the mechanisms are that actually cause the stuff to go down.

So, it's this illusion. And now with Google and with internet, people are walking around thinking they have God-like powers to know anything. And that's where Q Anon and all of these conspiracy cults online are hacking people left and right because they're made artfully, they're made with certainty.

They're using names of people with authority backgrounds. “She was in the CIA.” Well, there's a lot of cleaners who sweep the floors at the CIA too, you know what I'm saying? So, that people can get hacked, but have the illusion that they're doing research and actually understanding stuff when they don't have a clue.

Ken Harbaugh:

I think the most important part of your story is not the fact that your brain was hacked, your words, but that it was debugged, that you found a way out. And I want to spend most of our time talking about that because I would imagine most of the people listening, this certainly applies to me.

No, people care about people who have been drawn in to the cult of Trump. And there isn't an easy way out. As you've said, the deprogramming is slow and it's incremental. And that was your experience too, right?

Steven Hassan:

Not exactly in my experience. So, I had a bizarre situation where I was recruited in February of 1974 at Queens College. And the Moonies were operationalizing on campuses around the United States. And I was one of the first to get recruited at that point and was told to drop out of school, et cetera.

And I went in so deep and hard. I literally dropped out of college, quit my job, donated my bank account, believed my family were satanic. And I come from a Jewish background. We don't believe in demons and Satan at all.

But I got so deep and so programmed by the top leadership that I don't think I ever would've left. I would be there today, except that I fell asleep at the wheel of a van. I should say I was sleeping three to four hours a night, normally seven days a week.

But I was driving a fundraising van. I was up three days straight, woke up as I was driving into the back of a tractor, trailer truck at 80 miles an hour, took emergency crew 30 minutes to prime me out of the wreckage while they thought it would blow up on the Baltimore Beltway.

And then I was in a hospital, and this was 1976 way before cell phones were invented. I'm in a hospital away from the cult, sleeping and eating. I was like really banged up. I needed two surgeries on my leg, but I was away.

And that is a key to helping people get out of mind control is to stop the constant reinforcement of the indoctrination, which is now being currently done on cell phones and tablets and computers. That's the enemy right now in terms of how our minds are being hacked remotely and at scale.

But basically, I was in this hospital needing surgery. The one person in my family and my friends that didn't say I was brainwashed in an occult, which made me have to designate them as Satan, was my sister Thea, who I was always close with. And she always said, “I miss you. How are you? I want you in my life.”

And I called her from the hospital. I told her I was in the hospital. She's like, “Come home, I'll take care of you. And you have a nephew. I want him to know his Uncle Stevie,” which is what she called me as a kid.

So, that was activating the real me that was below the cult programmed mind hack. And that's where, going back to your question about hacked is the best way to understand mind control is it's a dissociative disorder where the cult identity is programmed to control and suppress your real self.

You're tricked into believing you're following God or you're following your higher self, et cetera. And there's an equivalency to how a computer can get hacked. To take over your operating system by clicking on the wrong links. It's a parallel here where the real me got activated.

I was a leader. I was able to get permission to visit my sister. I made her promise not to tell my parents or my oldest sister Steph because they were evil. She promised but she did tell them.

So, there was Steve with crutches and a cast from the toes from my groin in my sister's living room sofa, my father shows up unannounced, takes my crutches away and says, “We're going to talk to you about your involvement with the Unification Church.” And I was like, “Satan.” But so, I was not voluntarily wanting to leave.

And it very quickly my story, I was told to call into the group, so they knew I was okay. Because there was a concern about forcible deprogramming. Even though I was a model member and a leader, they were still worried about that I would be brainwashed by the deprogrammers.

Long story short, I started asking to see my mom, who always would do whatever I wanted her to do growing up, being the only son, youngest child. I want to see mom. So, my dad was like, let's go drive and see mom.

Well, they were moving me to another location for the deprogramming. I get to another location; I'm thinking I'm going to snap my father's neck on the Long Island Expressway because we weren't getting off at the right exit. That’s again how programmed I was.

And then we arrive at this other location and a football player type bodied person starts walking to the car. And I said to my father, “If you think he's going to force me to go in, I will kill him and I will kill you because I am not going to betray God. I know the Messiah’s on the earth as some young Moon.”

And my father did the unexpected. He started to cry. And I was like — and he said, “What would you do if it was your son who met a group of controversial people, dropped out of college, left your life? How would you feel?”

And I'm watching my father was very old school macho man, never cried. And I could feel that he genuinely was worried about me. I was like, “Probably what you're doing now, thinking he's brainwashed by the communist media.”

I said, “What do you want me to do?” “Just talk to these ex-members for a few days. If you want to go back, I'll drive you there myself, but at least your mother and I will know that we did the responsible thing.”

So, at that point, it became voluntary, which is what led to meeting with ex-members, hearing their stories, learning about Chinese communist brainwashing. And it was indisputable that all eight criteria of Robert Lifton's book 1961 book, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism fit the Moonies. And I was still programmed.

And the thing that got me out of it was the last day they handed me one of Moon's speeches. And this is a key to helping people get out, is not trying to persuade them, “You're wrong, you've been brainwashed.” It's asking questions in a respectful way and waiting.

So, they hand me the speech and they said, “Read this and tell us what you think.” And I'm reading Moon's talk to congressmen and senators about how surprised he is that anyone could imagine that he, Reverend Moon, a Korean could brainwash American youth because he respects Americans so much. And he's surprised at the accusation.

I was like, “What a liar.” It was the first negative thought in two and a half years that entered my consciousness and as soon as it entered my consciousness, I'm like, “If he's a liar, then he can't be the Messiah. He can't be doing God's will. What the hell have I been doing?”

And I cried for three hours. But I'm describing a snapping moment that was very unique to the circumstances. That's different than what I teach family and friends, how to help people in the cult of Trump.

Ken Harbaugh:

Yeah, I definitely want to get to how that maps onto the cultish thinking in MAGA world that we're facing today. But I want to better understand the feeling of being inside that cult and thinking that everyone else are the crazy ones.

You describe being so deep into it, that even the incredibly unethical things you were being asked to do, lying to raise money, killing your parents, I shouldn't be laughing, but you described-

Steven Hassan:

No, it's crazy.

Ken Harbaugh:

It’s crazy. None of it seemed wrong to you because the ends always justified the means, especially if you were answering to a divine power.

Steven Hassan:

Yeah, exactly. My mind was taken over and I was no longer thinking as the extra honors student to skip eighth grade. I was no longer thinking for myself using my conscience and my values. My identity was no longer the son of Milton and Estelle Hassan of Flushing Queens, New York.

I was the son of Sun Myung Moon and Hak Ja Han Moon, the true parents of the universe, the true Adam and Eve who were sinless, who were going to do these mass weddings and help purify people to have sinless children.

Very racist cult by the way that owns the Washington Times, the Washington Times Foundation, and is at the center of climate science denial for 50 years, I learned recently.

But in any case, I want you to understand, I was sure I wasn't brainwashed, and I wasn't in a cult. I was doing God's will. This was Satan's world. And I'll add another piece that's very important, which is what I call phobia programming.

And phobias are irrational fears. And it's a new concept for people to understand. Phobias can be intentionally programmed into another human being in order to control them. But that is in fact a major mind control technique.

I have a model called The Bite Model of Authoritarian Control that stands for behavior control, information control, thought control and emotional control. And phobia programming is the single universal emotional mind control technique.

So, in the Moonies, I was taken to see The Exorcist with a hundred other moonies. We were bused up, we were taken a van actually to Tarrey Town to hear Father Moon who said, “God made this movie. And this movie is a prophecy of what happens to people when they lead the Unification Church.”

And at that moment, because I was so petrified from watching this movie, I was afraid of any negative thoughts or demons trying to invade my mind. And I was trained to do thought stopping, which is a behavior modification technique where I was taught to say to myself, “Crush seat, crush seat. Glory to heaven, peace on earth. Glory to heaven, peace on earth. True parents, true parents.”

So, you suppress the doubts because they're not from you, they're from demons. Except it was from me, except it got hacked.

Ken Harbaugh:

Is there a trait that people who are susceptible to this kind of recruitment have in common?

Steven Hassan:

Breathing. Breathing.

Ken Harbaugh:

Okay, well please expound because we know it's not a lack of intelligence. It's not a lack of education. There are smart, highly educated people. It's nothing demographic, it's not income based. Is there something that can identify risk factors? Is it loneliness?

Steven Hassan:

No, there's risk factors for sure. Like folks on the spectrum, the autism spectrum are often … it's hard for them to read social cues and feel comfortable with other humans. They're more comfortable with screens.

And then they get recruited online through video gaming with strangers who then swarm them, and love bomb them and make them part of their unique little club. And then it's one step after another. So, that's a vulnerability.

People who have been sexually traumatized as a child might be more susceptible if the recruiter knows that that's one of the historical things.

What else? High hypnotizable people are very creative. Hypnosis is not sleep, by the way. It's ability to focus your attention and be absorbed. So, if you are the type of person who goes to the movies and you're in the movie, you have a high hypnotizable quotient or reading a book and you're in the book, which is a superpower really for super successful people, successful athletes, musicians, artists, speakers.

But when you're in that state, you're more susceptible to be hacked because your critical thinking, which is your frontal cortex is offline. You're in a flow state, you're in a zone.

I want to just say situational vulnerabilities is the most common thing that I've come across in my 47 years. So, death of a loved one, divorce, moving to a new city, state, or country. I mentioned sexual trauma or physical assault or something like that.

Situational things like my girlfriend dumped me and three women were like, “Oh, Steve, how are you? You're so smart, Steve.” And I was 19-years-old and horny, guilty, it's like college student. Yes, guilty. But I had no interest in joining a group or changing my life or throwing my own poems away. I was a creative writing major.

But I want to say we're living in an age that humans have never lived in before. Computers and digital environments is new and our brains are getting rewired by being online so many hours. And the pandemic has supercharged things so that people are getting addicted, dopamine hits to likes and followers, et cetera. Doom scrolling.

And what's also different, I'll finish in one second, is that when I was in the Moonies, we had a talk to people to find out their background, to size them up, to find out how to best approach them. Now there are are 5,000 plus data points on every voting American that's in the dark web that AI can use to develop nudges to program people. People are oblivious to how sophisticated AI is now on scale through social media.

Ken Harbaugh:

Let's talk about the cult of MAGA because I see so many commonalities. I mean, the fact that it was the example of Chinese communism that helped deprogram you is just so richly ironic given the opposition or the professed opposition within MAGA to communism.

Yet it uses many of the same tools and techniques to recruit and in your words, brainwash its adherence.

Steven Hassan:

Yeah, so I mean I point out in The Cult of Trump that a lot of the techniques are projecting what they're doing wrong onto the enemy or to the other to misdirect and to confuse and disorient.

By the way, if you want to mind control someone, the first thing you want to go for is confusion. And the fastest way to confuse people is to overload them with information at a rate faster than they're able to digest it.

And what's happening with algorithms in YouTube, and this is all scientifically valid now, is YouTube through their algorithms were radicalizing people on the left and the right to get it more and more extreme by the autoplay suggestions because they were wanting more attention so they can make more money, but it was actually creating more polarization, et cetera.

I want to also say that, so in working to help people in the cult of MAGA working, talking about Chinese communist brainwashing is a very effective tool. But you have to learn what it is, what it isn't.

I have interviews with Lifton (he's 95-years-old), about his model. He is written a number of other books about cults as well as with Trump and pimps and traffickers talking about how they groom and mind control people. Trumpers will want to listen to that too. And I've done extensive work with sex trafficking survivors as well as labor trafficking experts.

So, my bite model really works for both of those things. But there's a set of what you don't do and what you can do. And family members and friends who have a loved one in the cult of MAGA, the first thing they need to do is educate themselves.

I have the influence continuum model, ethical to unethical, the bite model, learning about malignant narcissists like chapter three compares Trump to Jim Jones and Hubbard and Moon. So, educate yourself first.

And then you want to build rapport and trust again. So, if you've blocked your loved one or you've called them bad names, you want to start with your tail between your legs and say, “I miss you, you are my favorite uncle. I'm so sorry I blocked you. I want you back in my life. We can agree not to talk about politics, but I want you in my life.”

Build bridges because if we want to influence people in a cult, the last thing you want to do is call them morons, deplorables, idiots, et cetera. And that's what unfortunately people are doing because of their ignorance and because they don't understand the fundamental attribution error.

They don't understand mind control is a dissociative disorder. They don't understand people wake up, they really do get out of this, but they get out because you're respectful and you're asking them questions and waiting for an answer. Doing active listening.

And instead of attacking the leader, the doctrine, or the policies straight on with facts, you're asking them to go back in time before they ever heard of Trump, what was their first memory of Donald Trump? And often people when I ask that, they're like, “I thought he was a pervert. Or “I saw him on the Apprentice, and I thought he was an arrogant piece of work.”

And I'm like, “That's really interesting.” So, walk me through how you came to start thinking he was a good person to be president of the United States. But you're asking them to think through how their mind got hacked.

And so, the bottom line is being in the here and now present with somebody you care about acting out of love and respect, controlling your own reactivity because a lot of people just, they're like, “I can't talk to my brother, he makes me want to punch him in the face. I can't stand it.”

And I'm like, “You are not mind controlled. He is. You need to learn self-regulation. You need to talk to ex-MAGA people who've gotten out so you can have hope that this will actually work.” Because it will. But you have to have patience and you have to be in there in this person's life.

And then you can say, “Hey did you see this documentary on NXIVM, wasn't it interesting. They were doing branding near women's vaginas and they were thinking they were doing women's empowerment. “What are you talking about?” “Well, check out The Vow on HBO. I’d love your opinion. If you want we can watch it together. Come over, let's …

And you hit the pause button and you're educating people that brainwashing really exists. It's over there. You're not sticking it in their faces. And people don't want to stay in a mind control cult because there's dissonance between their real self that knows things are very screwed up and what they're constantly hearing on social media, through their cell phone and through Fox News and other channels.

Ken Harbaugh:

It sounds like your prescription really precludes the possibility of scaling this in a way that you can have mass deprogramming. I mean it takes one-on-one attention, in your case it took a room full of people confronting you, but it's not going to be the kind of thing that can be done with a PR campaign or a political ad.

It's a sustained effort by individuals who care about that person and there's really no way to scale it beyond growing the number of people who know how to do it.

Steven Hassan:

Well, that's what I was going to say. We start with all the family and friends who saw the radicalization have been frustrated as heck and realize, you know what, it's not hopeless. All these pundits that are saying people are brainwashed, they'll never come out of it are just plain wrong. They have no idea what they're talking about.

But I do think that there are ways to scale messaging, but it has to be customized to different audiences that are within the cult of Trump. So, in my book I talk about, for example, a massive network of cults called New Apostolic Reformation. Have you ever heard that term?

Ken Harbaugh:

I have. I'm going to ask you about it.

Steven Hassan:

Okay, well so these are misrepresented in the media as Christian evangelicals. Well, my friends who are Christian evangelicals are like this is not what Jesus taught. These people are self-proclaimed prophets or apostles who speak in tongues and supposedly cast out demons and do faith healings. And it's these people who prophesied Trump 1 in 2020.

And they are so programmed to be afraid of Satan just like I was in the Moonies that they're following their prophet and apostle, and they don't trust any media or any information that's different than what they're told God said.

But there are ex-members of New Apostolic Reformation. In fact, I've interviewed a former pastor of one of these churches, Andre Gagne, who has a book out about it. And there's a fissure that's happened in NAR, which is fascinating because there are some people who are sticking with, “Well God said Trump won 2020, Biden stole it.”

And there are others that are going, “Oh wait a minute. There seems to be overwhelming evidence that actually he lost it. So, maybe we should back off on that messaging.”

So, there's a fissure starting in the … but we're talking about 40 to 50 million Americans and some estimated 900 million worldwide in these groups.

Ken Harbaugh:

Can you talk about the importance of prophecy in that movement? You alluded to it with the unfulfilled prophecy of the election of Trump in 2020, but there are some very creative responses to that.

There are some who say, “Well, actually he is the president.” Others who link the prophecy unfulfilled to conspiracy theories and say, “It's just proof that the deep state is even stronger than we thought.”

And then there's this fissure which pits the somewhat sane people on one side looking at the facts of the election against the denialists.

But at the heart of it all is this belief in the power of prophecy with the epitomization of that being Donald Trump himself as the super prophet.

Steven Hassan:

Right. So, I'm Jewish, the Torah or what Christians call the Old Testament. I mean, they cherry pick things out of the Old Testament and use it as the inherent word of God, but they ignore other uses of words.

For example, they are typically homophobic, and they say it's an abomination to be gay, but they forget that the same word for abomination in the Torah is used for shellfish. But you don't see any of these folks not eating shrimp or lobster, because it's convenient to go after gays but not convenient to not eat shellfish, et cetera.

In the Torah it says very clearly that if you're a prophet and what you say doesn't come true, you should be stoned to death. It's really clear that if you're a real genuine prophet, then everything comes true because you're speaking for God. And if one single thing doesn't, you're dead.

Well, they conveniently forget that one too. And honestly the Jewish religion said, “We're done with the prophets, we've evolved. It's rabbinic interpretation. We do believe in God, but it's a very different God than presented by the New Testament image of Jesus.”

Ken Harbaugh:

The truth tellers face just an inherent disadvantage in the media ecosystem we now inhabit. You talked about messaging strategies that may be effective. I can't imagine anything more clickable or potentially viral than the ones that engender fear and paranoia. It just seems like that's how our brains are wired.

Steven Hassan:

Hate disgust also, it's going to the brain stem, the amygdala not our appealing to people's higher functions.

Ken Harbaugh:

Well, there's an evolutionary imperative for those kinds of reactions. There isn't as strong of an evolutionary imperative to hope and tolerance and caring about each other. I mean, in the long run I hope those will win. But the immediate reaction seems to always favor those types of emotions.

Steven Hassan:

Yeah, that's how our brain works. Evolution has said act extra if you think there's a danger. So, we are hardwired to react to fear or to what we perceive to be dangerous, hateful things.

But we've also evolved a lot. And so, the issue is — and I've talked to people who are in neo-Nazi groups, many of these hate groups and they leave because people treat them nicely and kindly and it creates dissonance because they want to be hated back because that's what they were taught.

Jews are all interested in money and they're selfish. And Arno Michaelis, who was a White power neo-Nazi way back when, talked about how he didn't have lunch and his boss who was a Jew gave him half of a sandwich. And that created such dissonance.

Or he went to McDonald's and there was a African American cashier who was smiling and treating him nicely. And he basically said, “It's hard to hate all the time. You want to have friends.”

And that's another feature about mind control cults is when you're in one of these the minute you start expressing doubts or you don't go along with exactly what the program is, people will turn on you and attack you viciously and then you realize they're not my real friends.

And I call it conditional love versus actual love. And that's where we go back to family, friends, neighbors genuinely saying, “I know you, you're a good person. I don't understand how you believe what you believe, but I'm curious. I want you to help unpack it for me. Because if it's true, I want to believe it too.”

That works. But you have to understand what you're doing and you have to have some training and coaching on it, which I attempt to do.

Ken Harbaugh:

How important is the cult leader or in the case of MAGA, the prophet to the movement itself? Because we can point to examples where the prophet goes away and the movement collapses, but we can point to plenty of others where the leader goes away, and the movement grows only stronger. How would you assess MAGA as a movement versus MAGA as a cult dependent on its leader?

Steven Hassan:

What I want to say is that the people following Trump see him as a King Cyrus figure, not a prophet. He's a sinful king that God supposedly uses. And why did I put Putin at the top of chapter seven of the puppeteers of The Cult of Trump? Because I believe that he is a weapon by a foreign adversary to usurp America.

And Putin is on an agenda. The Soviet Union fell, and he's committed to helping America fall and has used religious right activists a great psychological advantage because of our ignorance about the fact that psychological warfare is being waged on us.

I'll quote William Lind, 1980’s American military strategist who wrote a paper on fourth generation warfare who paired up with Paul Weyrich of the Christian Right. Met with Trump in the White House, William Lind.

Michael Flynn is part of this whole thing. And it's warfare aimed at causing confusion, uncertainty, doubt, overwhelming people, attacking experts, attacking science, attacking institutions. Because if you disorient people enough, they're going to be responsive to certainty of an authority figure who says, “Trust me, I'm going to make America great again.”

And again, it's a matter of who’s your circle that you identify with? If it's not your family and your friends from your real church and it's this group of strangers online and you're subjecting yourself for eight hours a day, your brain's going to follow them because they're messaging certainty.

So, to answer your question about what's going to happen with MAGA when Trump dies or if he's not elected or he goes to jail, psychological warfare is going to keep going. And the question is, will actual Christian scholars who understand the New Testament and the teachings of Jesus who talked about love and render unto Caesar what ‘s Caesar, he should not be involved with politics.

And it's harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven will challenge all the prosperity ministers that are like, “Give me money, more money. I need another plane. I need another mansion.”

If we can get customized messaging at scale, which involves not only documentaries but also podcasts, but empowering people locally as well as on platforms, then we have a methodology that can be developed.

But on the downside, the big social media platforms like Twitter or I should say X, Facebook, et cetera, the billionaires don't want regulation. They don't want to be held responsible for all the harm they're causing.

So, they're not going to cooperate with an effort to bring democracy back into full bore because they're in this Ayn Rand selfishness is good and altruism is evil or nihilism or transhumanism. We're all going to go to Mars, us wealthy people and to hell with the Earth because it's lost anyway.

We need to really get educated and figure out strategy for planetary survival. For all of us, including all the creatures that depend on humans.

Ken Harbaugh:

If the liars and the conspiracy theorists have as one of their tools that overload of information, I think Steve Bannon called it throwing shit against the wall. It's not like the truth tellers can respond in kind. It just seems like folks like us are at such a disadvantage in that we cannot generate nearly as much content if we care about the veracity of it, if we care about the integrity of it.

Whereas the other side can just churn out story after story and meme after meme. And the internet lends itself to favoring that kind of content. Your prescription for more podcasts and more positive content, I don't think gets us very far.

Steven Hassan:

I'm afraid. I agree with you largely, but there's a lot of very wealthy concerned people who do want freedom and want minority rights and women's rights to choose, and gay rights and children's rights, et cetera. But they seem to not be open to looking for out of the box solutions.

And my prescription is mobilizing the millions of Americans who are former members of all types of cults and getting them to reach out to their community, the people who knew them and knew them as radicalized people coming back and creating a public health emergency where we have inoculation, preventive education programs.

I've created an online course for clinicians and others for nine hours if they want to know the foundational stuff, aside from reading my books, I've done that. And empowering former MAGA people to be reverse engineering how they recruited all these people into believing in Trump in the first place.

The bottom line is, I'm an idealist, I feel like our job is to do everything possible that we can and hope that people will rise up aspirationally and out of love and out of a desire for survival versus the people who are the mass mobs that have the AR-15s, did you know my former cult has an AR-15 factory making them.

Ken Harbaugh:

I did not.

Steven Hassan:

Two compounds. One in Tennessee and one near Waco, Texas using vets to train people how to do civil war in the streets now.

So, but I have to be an optimist. I don't know. I don't know what else to do other than we need to teach everyone, mind control is real. It exists. Here's how to identify it.

I did a doctoral dissertation showing my bite model as a scientific construct. There was a content validity study that was just finished at Boston University. It helps people go, “Wait a minute. What I grew up in is an authoritarian cult.”

Once you can go, “Oh, it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, has feathers like a duck,” it's hard to pretend that you didn't know that in the first place.

Ken Harbaugh:

We're almost out of time. But I have to ask you about something I think I heard you say on a podcast, which is that ISIS used the movies, The Lord of the Rings and The Matrix as part of its recruiting and programming strategies for its members. Is that true?

Steven Hassan:

Yeah, absolutely. I did a whole research project in 2015 on ISIS recruitment. Malcolm Nance, by the way, wrote a book and used the bite model on ISIS as a cult. And most Q Anon people are use the Matrix, most authoritarian cults use movies to help recruit and indoctrinate people.

Why? Humans are storytellers. We make sense of reality from stories. And if you can get somebody to watch The Exorcist and then say, “God made this movie, this is what will happen if you leave,” and you accept that authority figure as God's agent on Earth, man, you're in deep doo-doo.

Ken Harbaugh:

Well, that I think helps explain part of Trump's appeal because he is such a performer. He is such a showman, and I would guess, tell me if I'm wrong, but his acts trigger the same kinds of responses that these adherence feel when they're watching one of those movies and feel like they're in it.

Steven Hassan:

So, let's go back for a minute. I know we're wrapping up, but I talked about NAR, New Apostolic Reformation. We should mention Christian Nationalism and Seven Mountain Dominionism, which are related cult groups, destructive groups. Mark Burnett, who did The Apprentice does Survivor, does Shark Tank. He's the head of media for the Seven Mountain Dominionism.

Ken Harbaugh:

Really?

Steven Hassan:

Think about that. Yeah. So, but educating people. They really want to take over the country and take over the world for their version of Jesus Christ that has nothing to do with the historical Jesus who is a Jew and taught love and helping minister to the poor and the weak and the widow and the sick.

This is power. And I think state powers are using religious groups as French groups to hack people's minds and do terrorism. And I know we're wrapping up, but I would've done terrorist acts if I was given an AR-15 and told to go to Times Square, would not have hesitated.

That's how programmed I was. And that's part of why I am so passionate to tell people. “Hello, this is real, and there’s a cure. You don't need to give up.”

Ken Harbaugh:

Well, Steven, Dr. Hassan, thank you so much for joining us. I feel like there's a ton more we could cover. So, let's book another conversation soon. It's been great having you on.

Steven Hassan:

Yeah. Thanks for your good work and having me on.

Ken Harbaugh:

Thanks for listening to Burn the Boats. If you have any feedback, please email the team at [email protected]. We're always looking to improve the show.

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Burn the Boats is a production of Evergreen Podcasts. Our producer is Declan Rohrs and Sean Rule-Hoffman is our audio engineer. Special thanks to Evergreen executive producers Joan Andrews, Michael DeAloia, and David Moss.

I'm Ken Harbaugh and this is Burn the Boats, a podcast about big decisions.