March 2, 2023 • 43 mins
Mind control, undue influence, brainwashing - that all sounds like some Hollywood fiction fantasy. But cult expert Dr. Steven Hassan says these are real and anybody could fall into the culty traps. He shares his personal story from the 70’s when he found himself dropping out of college, emptying his bank account and being trained to kill. His trap, he says, is that he thought he was too smart to fall for cult stuff. In fact, “cults” are everywhere - some harmful and some aren’t so much, but they all share elements. If you ever thought that yoga “guru”, invasive company, tight social club or even romantic partner has an awful lot of influence...maybe you’re right. In fact, Hassan says we are living in an age of influence and most of it is digital.
If you have questions or guest suggestions, Ali would love to hear from you. Call or text her at (323) 364-6356. Or email go-ask-ali-podcast-at-gmail.com. (No dashes)
**Go Ask Ali has been nominated for a Webby Award for Best Interview/Talk Show Episode! Please vote for her and the whole team at https://bit.ly/415e8uN by April 20, 2023!
Links of Interest:
Hassan Website: Freedom of Mind Resource Center
Hassan Podcast: The Influence Continuum
Hassan Books
The “Cult” at Sarah Lawrence College (The Cut, 1/23)
Who George Soros?
“The Family” Book and Documentary
The Rod of Iron Ministries (The Tennessean) (Rolling Stone) (SPLC)
Chinese Communist Brainwashing Techniques (WNYC, Archival Audio)
Credits:
Executive Producers: Sandie Bailey, Alex Alcheh, Lauren Hohman, Tyler Klang & Gabrielle Collins
Producer & Editor: Brooke Peterson-Bell
Associate Producer: Akiya McKnight
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Go ask Alli, a production of Shonda Land
Audio and partnership with iHeartRadio. Rolling on the full. Loafing
is a thing I can. I've seen We've all seen
people do it. I've done it. I've kiddies for me.
Now the work is to warrant what I have, even
kind of shinny stuff. You know, that's my work. It's imperfect.
So let me ask you a question about actors because
(00:23):
you are Yeah, me too. We are old, funny duddies.
We go to sleep at ten, we wake up at six,
we go to bed at eight, So there are more
funny duddies than you. You are the funny duddiest. Yes,
welcome to go ask Alli. I'm Alle Wentworth. I've always
(00:45):
been fascinated by cult. I think when I was in
college in Upstate, New York, the whole Moon cult was
living all around us, and I didn't understand what it
was and I was afraid I was going to be
kidnapped by them and had so many questions. And ever
since then, whenever I see a cult documentary or some
kind of a streamer about cults, I'm always tuning in.
(01:10):
So what is it about cults that were so fascinated
by Are we afraid of becoming engulfed in one, getting
lost in one, being brainwashed by one? There's no better
person to talk to about cults, about brainwashing, mind control,
all of it than doctor Stephen Hassen. He's a PhD.
(01:34):
He's a mental health professional and expert in an educator
in cult and undue influenced tactics. A former member of
the Moon Cult himself, doctor Hassen was d programmed when
he was twenty two. Doctor Hassen has been working in
the field of cults now for over forty years and
has developed models to identify control tactics. He's a founding
(01:55):
director of the Freedom of Mind Resource Center, and he's
the author of four books on cult and mind control,
and also hosts his own podcast, The Influence Continuum. Hello,
doctor Hassen. I there's a wealth of information in your podcasts,
(02:15):
in your ted talk, so I'm going to try to
hit your greatest hits. Thank you. So, doctor Hassen, it
is not every day that somebody wants to study brainwashing,
my manipulation cults. And there's a reason that you sort
of started delving into this world. So you have to
tell that story because you've walked a few miles in
(02:38):
the shoes of the cult, so tell my listeners about that. Sure,
So go back to February of nineteen seventy four. I
was nineteen. I was an upper junior at Queen's College,
studying creative writing poetry in particular, and my girlfriend dumped
(02:59):
me abruptly, and I was kind of blue, and the
new semester was starting, and three women came up to
me while I was sitting in the cafeteria and flirted
with me and asked if they could join me at
my table. And I was a nineteen year old, healthy
male who thought he got lucky that day. And they
(03:22):
said they were students. They said they weren't part of
a religious group, but it turned out they were recruiters
for the Moon Organization, Korean messiah who wants to take
over the world and thinks that democracy is satanic. But
I didn't know any of this. And I grew up
in a middle class Jewish family. My dad had a
(03:44):
hardware store, my mom was an art teacher. In eighth grade,
two older sisters extra honor student, and I was not
a joiner, but I was bright, and I want to
improve myself and didn't want to be closed minded, and
so they were flirting. They said, we lived together with
(04:05):
people from all over the world. You have to come
and meet our friends. And two and a half years
later I was waking up on the Baltimore Beltway driving
into the back of a tractor trailer truck at eighty
miles an hour due to sleep deprivation. And in between that,
I was made a leader in the Moon cult and
(04:25):
was recruiting and doing crazy things like fasting for Richard
Nixon during Watergate because God said he should be president.
And I had hated Nixon before I've met the cult
and been indoctrinated in mind control. Anyway, what happened in
nineteen seventy six was this near fatal van crash in
(04:47):
the hospital away from the group, sleeping a lot, and
I called my sister, who I was always very close with,
and she persuaded me to visit her and my nephew
and she said on him to know his uncle Stevie
come home. So I said, if you don't tell the parents,
and you don't tell Steph, my oldest sister, who had
(05:09):
all said I was in a cult and I was brainwashed,
and I knew that was evil and satanic. I did go,
and she did tell, and they had hired some ex moonies,
one of whom was a woman I had recruited myself
into the cult and I was very fond of and
I was program to kill rather than betray the Messiah.
(05:36):
And I actually almost snapped my father's neck while he
was driving in the Long Island Expressway, but I didn't
kill him, thank goodness. We get to the point of
the dprogramming place and a big burly guy is going
to come and help me go in there with my
big long cast and I basically said to my father,
(05:58):
who knew I was very very strong. I'm six feet tall.
I said, if you try to make me go in there,
I will be very violent and I will kill everybody
or they will kill me, and my blood will be
on your conscience forever. And my father cried and say,
what would you do if it was your son, your
(06:19):
only son? How would you feel? And it was the
tears that got to the real me, and I switched
into what I imagined was his perspective, thinking how crazy
it must have looked to him that I had dropped
out of college, quit my job, donated my bank account,
and was fasting for Nixon. So anyway, I said, what
(06:42):
do you want me to do? He said, just listen
with an open mind. If you want to go back,
at least your mother and I will be able to
sleep at night knowing we did the responsible thing. So
I wanted to prove I wasn't brainwashed or mind control,
and I wanted to show that I had free will
by the end, because they were showing me things like
(07:03):
Chinese communist brainwashing studies of Robert Lifton, and basically my
mind opened where I realized Moon was a liar. I
had heard him personally tell us to lie so many times,
and how could he be a man of God if
he's a liar if we're teaching that God is a
(07:24):
god of truth. So the wheels, the creaky wheels, started going,
and then it just felt like a house of cards
was going plap, plap pop, and I and I went.
I just cried for three hours, like what was I
been doing for two and a half years? And at
that point I just needed to understand what happened to me.
(07:46):
I bet because I'm you know, just a few minutes
that I'm looking at you and talking to you, You're
incredibly smart man, and I can't imagine you were any
less smart when you were a eighteen nineteen year old man. No,
I was reading postgraduate level when I was eight years old. Right,
(08:07):
You're not an idiot as a teenager. As my point,
you seem to have a caring, loving family. So definitely,
what is it that these women, Okay, aside from hormones,
how how did they infiltrate you in this way? How
could they manipulate your mind? I mean to me, it
reminds me of you know, I have friends whose children
(08:31):
were addicts, and they literally had to have somebody come
in at three in the morning and take them away
and kind of break them all down and rebuild them again.
And it sounds like you kind of have to do
that when somebody has been seeked in a cult. I'm
not a fan of the three AM boot camp interventions.
I'm sure some have saved people's lives, but also a
(08:54):
lot of them are run by people who are not
mental health professionals. Well, yes, I agree with you. The
bottom line is that I that people are situationally vulnerable.
Breakup of a relationship, death of a loved one, illness movie.
So your breakup is your vulnerability. The girlfriend that broke
(09:15):
up with it was the biggest vulnerability, if I can
be honest, allay was that I thought I was too
smart and only dumb people get into cults. I thought
I was too smart. I had bicycle cross country when
I was sixteen. My father taught me in the hardware store.
When he brought me in to train me, he said,
(09:37):
you can tell if someone's lying by their eyes. Steve
and I looked at their eyes and they were completely
convincing that they were sincere. They were students, they weren't
part of a religious group. And I later became a
top recruiter doing the same techniques to get people in
believing that the world was satanic and I needed to
(09:59):
save their souls and all their ancestors. Let me ask
you this very quickly. Sure, so let's define cult. Okay,
So what I'm my work is around authoritarian cults and
a way of thinking about it as a pyramid structured
organization with someone or some group or some ideology that's
(10:21):
controlling and the deceptive recruitment and the behavior, information, thought,
and emotional control to make a new identity where their
dependent and obedient on the group and some people say
you need a living guru or leader to have a cult,
and that's not my knowledge or research, because you can
(10:43):
have ideological cults right right. So, for example, the right
wing sovereign citizens, the racist, the neo Nazis, they were
doing leaderless resistance was the term. In other words, they
put an isis was doing this. Um. They put out
the ideology, they they they they give videos and for
(11:07):
people to indoctrinate, but they leave it up to people
to decide how they're going to act out right. Um.
And I went on to develop my own model based
on an influence continuum from ethical to unethical and what
I call the BITE model of authoritaring control. Yeah, behavior,
(11:29):
behavior control, information controls, and emotions emotional. Yeah. So if
you can control those four variables including where the persons
sleeping and eating, and their clothing and their language, and
give them rigid rules and regulations and put them through
a process where they're confused, disoriented, and hypnosis is a
(11:52):
major factor, but not the the watch kind of hypnosis.
It's a much more DVOS this kind of process level
of hypnosis. It's something that I've spent a lot of
times learning about because it helps me and my work
to coach families how to help love ones and to
help people recover from these types of cases. And it's
(12:15):
been a journey. I was persuaded to get my doctorate
a few years ago because I got involved with a
forensic think tank at Harvard Medical School, because I realized
the law is about a hundred years out of date
with understanding neuroscience and social psychology. And if you're young,
(12:36):
you can be unduly influenced automatically by your age. If
you're older and have dementia, that but the middle ground
is called a slippery slope, and for me, it's not
a slippery slope if you have these four components in
the context of a lack of informed consent and installing phobias,
(12:57):
for example, to make people rationally afraid to question the
leader or the group, or irrationally afraid to exit the
group because terrible things will happen to you. I was
literally taken to the Exorcist movie alley in nineteen seventy
four and Moon said, personally, God made the Exorcist movie,
(13:19):
this is what will happen if anyone leaves the Unification Church.
And at that point I had no critical thing you'll
start throwing up and spinning around. Wow, it was scary, yes,
of course, And so obviously I think about Patty Hurst.
She was made into Tania and she robbed banks and yeah,
and a lot of people didn't believe she was brainwashed.
(13:42):
They thought she was a wealthy little kid acting out.
And in my opinion, she was absolutely a victim of brainwashing.
She was put in a closet, she was sexually abused.
So for me, it was just bad legal defense and
lack of the public's awareness and understanding that it doesn't
(14:04):
just happen to stupid people, weak people, people from bad families, etc. Right,
the right conditions, almost everybody can be hurt this way,
and so and can you create those conditions, Meaning with
Patty Hurst, they locked her in a closet, they sexually
abused her. I'm sure they starved her. I mean, so
you can also as a cult leader, you can create
(14:28):
all those conditions with which to get people embedded in
your sort of philosophies and your agenda. Basically, Yeah, so
traffickers and pimps do this, And trafficking is illegal in
the US and most civilized countries of the world. It's
defined as fraud, force, or coercion, and most every mind
(14:54):
control cult has the fraud, the lack of informed consent,
and the coercion, which is granularly explained by the control
of behavior, information, thoughts, and emotions. And in fact, labor
trafficking experts are using my model, and sex trafficking experts
who are helping people get out of that type of
(15:16):
mind control are using it because it makes sense. So
with the sex trafficking and labor trafficking, it's very fear based, right,
It's much more about if you try to leave, you
will be killed or will kill your family or right, yes,
so that's where the force comes in. If somebody holds
(15:37):
a knife up, like Larry Ray of the Sarah Lawrence cult,
he was just convicted of trafficking, if he holds a
big knife up and starts to coerce you to make
a false confession, you repeated enough times, you start believing it,
because that's the way the mind works and memory works,
(15:57):
is you can reprogram people's memories and people can have
false memories of experiences that never happened. And so Charles
Manson was kind of the genius of this too. Correct. Well,
we don't want to give him that much credit. I
don't think genius is a right word. I don't think
it was a genius, but he was. He was definitely
(16:19):
involved with scientology and he also used psychedelics. So psychedelics
is another method that can be used to subvert people's
critical thinking and reality testing. If you're tripping on acid
and somebody is telling you we were married in the
past life, don't you remember, you know, we were walking
(16:42):
down the river of the Nile and we were fishing.
Don't you remember, and you're tripping, you know, it's going
to go in your head somewhere. Yeah, there's a lot
more to come after the short break and we're back.
(17:08):
It's interesting you think you equate sex trafficking with a cult,
because most people think sex trafficking is they go after
vulnerable children or women, They kidnap them, and then they
use threats and fear to keep them there, same with pimps.
But you're saying that it's it's more than that, No,
(17:30):
it's it really is a systematic social influence process where
people's behavior, information, thoughts, and emotions are manipulated to create
a new identity that's the pendant and obedient on the
pimp or the trafficker. So they frequently will change the name,
(17:50):
change the clothing, change the language system, and people have
an alternate life and belief about themselves. And so I
do want to clarify something. So I have something called
the influence continuum ethical to unethical, and this is all
(18:11):
on my Freedom of mind dot com website under learn
about undue influence. So I say there are cults along
the entire continuum, but the difference between healthy cults as
you choose. You can think you have your own critical faculties.
You can leave without threats or fear or harassment. You
(18:31):
can be fanatically into something, but it's your own choice
versus having a new identity. I mean, one could say
that there are abusive and horrific relationships that are that
model this cult thing. I mean, I have some friends
whose son has gotten involved with a woman and he
(18:53):
doesn't speak to his parents and he's moved far away,
and I keep saying to them, God, it's like he's
in a cult, But no one looks at it that
way because it's a relationship one cult to one. No,
you're right, yeah, you're one hundred percent correct. And men
controlling women and in fact, in the UK they have
a new law called course of control where a man
(19:16):
is controlling a woman and isolating her from her family
and controlling her finances. It's not yet recognizing women controlling men.
But in the United States I do a lot of
cases one on one controlling and they're typically malignant narcissists,
by the way, so it's another way of saying it
(19:37):
is a narcissist who's a psychopath who are isolating a
person and taking their money and wanting to exert power
over them and sex. So we can talk about political cults,
therapy cults, multi level marketing cults, psychotherapeutic cults, boot camp cults,
(19:59):
which you mentioned something about friends who brought their kids
who are addicts to a closed environment to break them
down and create a new identity presumably, but a lot
of those groups make the person dependent on the cult well,
especially because they get kickbacks, and that whole system in
(20:20):
Utah so corrupt, but yes, exactly, Utah is one of
the worst states for these systems, and Paris Hilton is
probably the most famous person who survived that. And so
when you talk about like communist China, brainwashing and some
of these techniques whether they're used on an educated adult.
(20:41):
When it comes to let's say, sex trafficking, isn't it
all fear based? Well, people don't understand. Most young people,
mostly women or girls rather or boys, are recruited around
twelve to fourteen years of age, and so it starts
(21:02):
with what's called grooming, and the right wing is now
using that term and flipping it on its head. But
the real grooming of perverts and pedophiles and traffickers is
giving food, buying a gift, walking with them, paying attention
to them, maybe playing video games with them online where
(21:25):
the person thinks they're their own age. And by the way,
neuroscience has now told us that when someone is playing
a video game online, the brain starts acting like it's
a friend, even though you have no idea who's on
the other side, and it could be a Chinese agent
or a Russian agent, or the porn industry. It's exactly.
(21:49):
It's typically a love thing where the young people think
that that's a boyfriend, and they step by step get
them involved with sex and do a favor for me.
My best friend is coming over. He's really lonely, he
needs attention. Give him a back rub, you know now
pull down his shirt and rub his back that way.
(22:11):
And it's just step by step. And and it's unfortunate
that everybody who walks around thinking it's only someone else's kid,
it's only weak people or stupid people. They're the most vulnerable. Really,
it's way better to be humble and go. It could
(22:33):
happen to me. And that's why you always want to
stay in touch with your intuition, your gut, and you
want to always have a red flag go off in
your mind. If someone is saying don't tell your parents
or don't don't share this with your husband or your wife.
That should be like an immediate information control, right, danger, danger,
(22:55):
you know what I've The bottom line is there's some
people who are exceptionally vulnerable. And it turns out that
people on the spectrum, very smart, high functioning folks on
the spectrum, are exceptionally vulnerable to recruitment by mind control cults.
Why because they're love bombed. They have an instant community
(23:20):
where they have meaning and everyone's saying, oh, oh, Allie,
you're so special, you're so smart, we're so glad to
have you. So I did a chapter for an Oxford
University Press textbook on loan actor terrorism, and mine was
the only chapter on online indoctrination. And I used the
case example of someone on the spectrum who was moved
(23:45):
to violence because they were manipulated to feel like they
have to act out either against women because women are evil,
because they could never get a girlfriend, or they want
to tear down America because America is evil, so they
want to create anarchy. So the thing that I want
(24:07):
so desperately, and why I'm so grateful that you asked
me to be on your show, is I want people
to step back and understand we're living in the age
of influence, and in particular digital influence. Yes, yes, I
want to talk to you about all of that because
it's very scary and COVID has sped everything up and
(24:27):
people are believing stupid, crazy conspiracy theories because they've been programmed.
Let's just throw qan on out there, let's take them.
That is, to me an authoritarian cult in itself exactly.
I did a bite model analysis actually of QAnon on
my website. I was invited by Dave Troy, who does
(24:49):
ted X mid Atlantic, to do a program called Dismantling QAnon,
and it was there that I learned for the first
time that QAnon was based on alternate reality gaming technology,
and I was I'm old, right, So I did pack
Man oh too? Yeah, yeah, I never did. I never did,
(25:10):
you know, video games like so many people do. But
this is based on the idea that you can go
on treasure hunts and figure things out and clues with
these bread drops and this and that, and it engages people.
And the other side of this that I want to
state for your listeners is this is a PSI up.
(25:31):
This is a psychological warfare operation. And we know for
a fact Michael Flynn, General Flynn did this for our
country against people in other countries for a long time.
And he's already proclaimed the digital Soldier oath and he's
(25:52):
definitely not a person who loves the rule of law. Okay,
And now I have to throw Trump out too, because
he's clearly was given a few handbooks and models for this.
So I wrote the book called The Cult of Trump
Simon and Schuster, and my thesis essentially is that they're
(26:17):
authoritarian cults whose leaders were directing people to believe in Trump.
And so chapter seven is all about the puppeteers as
I research them, including Putin. I put him first in
the list. The Family, which is a cult that used
to do the National Prayer breakfasts and everything, and Michael
(26:40):
Pence is in that group. So that's another cult. Jeffrey
Charlotte has written two good books and there's a Netflix
series about the Family, and that cult recruits Democrats and Republicans.
By the way. Then we have Opus Day, which is
a right wing cult in my professional opinion of the
Catholic Church that thinks the Pope is Satanic and they
(27:03):
want to break down the separation of church and state.
The biggest threat, and the media has missed this in
my opinion, is what's called new Apostolic Reformation churches and
what these are. The media said, these are white Christian evangelicals. Well,
(27:24):
I know white Christian evangelicals, and they're like, this is
not Jesus's teachings, this is not biblical. The leaders of
these groups, they say, I'm an apostle or I'm a
prophet of God. I talk directly to God and get
direct revelations, and I speak in tongues and cast out
demons like the Exorcists, and I can do faith feelings.
(27:46):
And their followers are called spiritual warriors because they're gonna
get rid of all the satanic libtards me and people
in the Cult of Sorrows presumably me, right, But there's
forty million in the United States in this body of
(28:06):
different cults, and an estimated six hundred and fifty million worldwide,
and people are reporting, oh their popularist movements around the world.
These are psyops by authoritarian governments or people who are
promoting fossil fuels to divert people from global climate crisis
(28:32):
legislation and action, and to keep the prices of oil high.
So we're in we're in a World War three type
information warfare. Of course, there's kinetic warfare in Ukraine right now,
as everybody knows so well. But we have to wake
(28:52):
up and realize if we love our country, if we
want rule of law, if we want human rights, women's rights,
gay rights, indigenous rights, we have to take action and
not just be reactive, but we have to proactively think
about how to reclaim and how to reinstitute laws that
(29:15):
have been systematically broken down over the last forty years.
Do you connect any dots with school shootings and cults?
Absolutely so. There's something called social learning theory and people
who study terrorism, it's a version of contagion effect or
(29:37):
copycat things, and they would literally, I believe bad actors
recruiting young vulnerable men to think that they will be
immortal if they go into a mosque and kill a
lot of people in live stream it or any number
of variables of that. And I actually put the NR
(30:00):
in the Cult of Trump because when I was researching it,
there were five million people. And this is a group
that is by the way, you remember, is it Marina Boutina?
Remember the Russian agent who's now in the parliament in Russia.
She infiltrated the NRA. She was at the national prayer
(30:22):
breakfast of a family cult. Putin doesn't allow citizens to
have assault rifles in Russia, but he wants us to
have twenty million AR fifteens. Why he wants us to
kill each other. And my former cult has a gun
factory making AR fifteens. The Moonees and another son of
(30:44):
Sun Young Moon has a crown of golden bullets, calls
himself the king and his cult is called the Rod
of Iron Ministry, saying that the revelations in the Bible,
it says that we should have ar fifteen. So he
has two compounds, one in Texas and one in Tennessee,
(31:05):
hiring vets to train people how to use these weapons.
And this is happening right now in our country. And
I have to believe that law enforcement, now that Biden
has come in, is trying to clean up the mess. Yeah,
that's been made in the Cult of Trump era. Well,
(31:26):
and there's also sort of small things we can do.
Certainly the media cannot, and they've started to stop showing
faces of shooters and not giving out their name and
not using any platforms so that they do feel immortalized
or sainted and focus on the victims, and focus on
(31:48):
the victims exactly. Yeah, and it's time for a short break.
Welcome back to go ask Galley. Technology. I mean that
(32:09):
is sort of the greatest enemy to trying to stop
all this because you know, I always say on my podcast,
it's it's just the wild West. I mean, you can
recruit extremists, you can create cults online without leaving your
living room now exactly. And to me, I mean that
seems like an incredibly difficult thing to fight to battle,
(32:30):
you know, because the laws for you know, all these
techno highways have not even been implemented. So how can
somebody like me take action? What should we do? The
problem was the the infiltration through the Federalist Society of
our Supreme Court and courts around the land. But we
(32:50):
need digital protection legislation because there's five estimated five thousand
data points on every voting American that's been collected, every
website you've gone to, everylike, every dislike what food you
like to eat. There are AI algorithms to understand which
(33:11):
buttons to push for which people in order to manipulate them.
And then the other part of it. I've been interviewed
by Tristan Harris and the Center for Humane Technology, the
person who is very involved with the Social Dilemma documentary,
which is a must see in my opinion for everyone.
So we need to understand that billionaires who have platforms
(33:36):
and their goal is money and selling ad by capturing
people's attention. The rule of thumb is if it's free,
then you're the product, right right, So you have to
understand that there are great benefits from virtual technology. You
can surgeons can do surgery remotely who are highly skilled
(34:00):
and save somebody's life. However, bad actors who want to
subvert America's power and prestige and subvert democracy. Are for example,
the second biggest owner of Twitter of the Saudis or
at least the Middle Eastern oil barrens if Elon musk
(34:21):
Is so into electric cars, an electric solar Why would
oil barons want to be on this platform. By the way,
QAnon's back, Neo Nazis are back on Twitter. It's really terrible. Yeah,
but there is hope. But we need to pass legislation.
And I've been saying we should have open hearings on
(34:45):
QAnon sy ops, information warfare, propaganda, brainwashing by top experts,
educate American citizens and the world for what we know
is being done right now. But there are all these
politicians who've been given donations and have other kinds of corruption,
(35:07):
maybe from Russia infiltration, and they're gonna undermine that effort.
So right now, it just feels like citizens like you,
Ali and me and others who genuinely care, we need
to think outside the box for how how to get
this done. So, doctor Hasson, does it really all come
(35:28):
down to money? Is it just greed? So in my
work when people ask me what's in it for cult
leaders or what's it all about. It seems to me
power is number one. Money is number two, which gives
you more power, and sex is number three, which can
(35:48):
also be used. Because you yes, because you hear about
authoritarian cults. You hear, I mean these are the ones
that are sort of on Hulu and Netflix, the political halts,
and then cults that are sort of built from the
base up by people that that it's just greed, they
just want money. Um, you know, I would say that
(36:09):
there are cults of people who you know, rip off
grandmothers because they have dementias. Right, So there's a difference
between con artists and cult leaders. The con artists just
want the quick in and out, get the money and
move on to the next victim. It's the people who
want to literally create slaves, right, people who want the
(36:30):
long controlled expansion of power. But I put them in
with the sex cults, the slave cults, so I put
I put them in the same category. And that's all power. Yeah,
I'm with you. I mean, the sex to me is power.
I find those to be the same. Not love. No,
it's not love. And I'm a love guy, I say too.
(36:51):
And I've been saying this for years. If you have
a friend or a family member who's gone down the
Magar road, you know, the qan On road. The worst
thing to do is cuttle off from them, or call
them names or say their brainwash, just like my family
did to me in seventy four. It just makes the
person dig in more and feel persecuted. The best technique
(37:15):
is a warm technique, inviting people to remember that you
were brothers and sisters or aunts and uncles or best friends,
and saying, listen, you're intelligent, I respect you. You seem
very fervent. I want to understand how you've come to
believe this. Please, let's spend the time. Go back in
(37:39):
time and tell me your first memory of QAnon, for example,
and what did you think? And they almost always ali
say I thought it was crazy or I thought it
was stupid, and then they say, oh, that's very interesting.
So tell me what was it if you can think back,
what was it that made you start taking it seriously
(37:59):
and made as one of these propaganda documentaries, or maybe
one of the girlfriend that they're with, the boyfriend that
they're with who they fall in love with, is into it.
But the point is is educating them, not saying you're
an occult, but educating them about other groups that use
mind control, Chinese communist brainwashing techniques, which is what was
(38:23):
helpful to me to get out of the Moone fascist
cult or traffickers, sex traffickers in particular of children. They're
very interested to learn about that. Yeah, So here's my
big question to you. How do you sleep at night? Truly?
Like how do you digest all the stuff all day long?
(38:44):
And how do you sleep? And do you take anything
to make yourself go to sleep? Because I would be
so anxious and so scared all the time. It's really
a burden. My wife of twenty almost twenty five years
has really been incredible support and she helped me in
(39:05):
researching and writing of the Cult of Trump. She's a
professional writer. But the truth is I often don't sleep
at night, and I don't like sleeping pills. My go
to self hypnosis and I've been to clinical interesting mental
health professionals trained and hypnosis and it helps me get
(39:28):
my agitation my cortsol levels down. And by the way,
I did have cancer, and my heart goes out to
Jamie Raskin. I had them FOMA two because I was
working too hard and traveling and not sleeping enough. My
heart goes out to Jamie. I hope he has a
fast recovery. But the bottom line is I really am
(39:51):
trying to train more people to understand how to help
these victims. That's why I created an online course plug
Plug No good for mental health professionals, but for anyone
who wants a deeper dive to understand how do you
help people heal from their identity being given an associative disorder?
(40:11):
Are you worried about the future. I mean for somebody
that is so immersed in this, but I mean really worried.
I was worried about the mid terms, whether I would
have to move to another country, honestly, but I was
so relieved when we saved the Senate that the bottom
line is I'm an optimist because there's no option but
(40:35):
to believe, have hope, inspire other people, and to educate
people how to protect their own minds, their friends and
families minds, but also to stand up against these authoritarians
and say no, we want human rights, we want rule
(40:55):
of law. Yeah. Oh, thank you so much for doing
this podcast. I said, there's so much, and we have
in our show notes all your books, and your podcast.
So I do direct all my listeners to everything because
it's so important and it's so informative, and at a
certain point we a lot of us have to do
(41:16):
some of the work that you're doing now as well,
because there are people in our friend world and our
family that need this. So thank you, thank you, thank you.
So can I ask you a question? Yes, I was
just going to get to that. What's your favorite cupcake? Oh?
(41:37):
What is my favorite cupcake? It's chocolate with vanilla frosting.
I'm a traditionalist. I can do that or I can
do vanilla with chocolate frosting. But it has to be
one or the other. I'm not a red velvet fan. Huh. Okay,
And you like milk with it or of course milk, yes,
and milk with my cookies, and yes, I'm all about dairy.
(41:58):
You dunk your cookies and do not do that. I
do it more of the way people who drink do
a shot and then they have a chaser. It's more
like that. I don't like to mix. So okay, okay,
there you go. That's great. Thank you your pleasure, Thank
(42:18):
you for listening to go Ask Alli if you'd like
to learn more about cults and undo influence. Check out
our show notes and visit Freedom of Mind dot com
to access tons of resources, services, and doctor Hasson's podcast,
The Influence Continuum. Be sure to subscribe, rate and review
Go Ask Alli and follow me on social media on
Instagram at the Real Ali Wentworth Now. If you'd like
(42:40):
to ask me a question or suggest a guest or
a topic to dig into, I would love to hear
from you, and there's a bunch of ways you can
do it. You can call or text me at three
two three three six four six three five six, or
you can email a voice memo right from your phone
to Go Ask Alli podcast at gmail dot com. And
if you leave a question, you just might hear it
on goo ascut. Go Ask Galley is a production of
(43:14):
Shondaland Audio and partnership with iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from
Shondaland Audio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Go ask Alli, a production of Shonda Land
Audio and partnership with iHeartRadio. Rolling on the full. Loafing
is a thing I can. I've seen We've all seen
people do it. I've done it. I've kiddies for me.
Now the work is to warrant what I have, even
kind of shinny stuff. You know, that's my work. It's imperfect.
So let me ask you a question about actors because
(00:23):
you are Yeah, me too. We are old, funny duddies.
We go to sleep at ten, we wake up at six,
we go to bed at eight, So there are more
funny duddies than you. You are the funny duddiest. Yes,
welcome to go ask Alli. I'm Alle Wentworth. I've always
(00:45):
been fascinated by cult. I think when I was in
college in Upstate, New York, the whole Moon cult was
living all around us, and I didn't understand what it
was and I was afraid I was going to be
kidnapped by them and had so many questions. And ever
since then, whenever I see a cult documentary or some
kind of a streamer about cults, I'm always tuning in.
(01:10):
So what is it about cults that were so fascinated
by Are we afraid of becoming engulfed in one, getting
lost in one, being brainwashed by one? There's no better
person to talk to about cults, about brainwashing, mind control,
all of it than doctor Stephen Hassen. He's a PhD.
(01:34):
He's a mental health professional and expert in an educator
in cult and undue influenced tactics. A former member of
the Moon Cult himself, doctor Hassen was d programmed when
he was twenty two. Doctor Hassen has been working in
the field of cults now for over forty years and
has developed models to identify control tactics. He's a founding
(01:55):
director of the Freedom of Mind Resource Center, and he's
the author of four books on cult and mind control,
and also hosts his own podcast, The Influence Continuum. Hello,
doctor Hassen. I there's a wealth of information in your podcasts,
(02:15):
in your ted talk, so I'm going to try to
hit your greatest hits. Thank you. So, doctor Hassen, it
is not every day that somebody wants to study brainwashing,
my manipulation cults. And there's a reason that you sort
of started delving into this world. So you have to
tell that story because you've walked a few miles in
(02:38):
the shoes of the cult, so tell my listeners about that. Sure,
So go back to February of nineteen seventy four. I
was nineteen. I was an upper junior at Queen's College,
studying creative writing poetry in particular, and my girlfriend dumped
(02:59):
me abruptly, and I was kind of blue, and the
new semester was starting, and three women came up to
me while I was sitting in the cafeteria and flirted
with me and asked if they could join me at
my table. And I was a nineteen year old, healthy
male who thought he got lucky that day. And they
(03:22):
said they were students. They said they weren't part of
a religious group, but it turned out they were recruiters
for the Moon Organization, Korean messiah who wants to take
over the world and thinks that democracy is satanic. But
I didn't know any of this. And I grew up
in a middle class Jewish family. My dad had a
(03:44):
hardware store, my mom was an art teacher. In eighth grade,
two older sisters extra honor student, and I was not
a joiner, but I was bright, and I want to
improve myself and didn't want to be closed minded, and
so they were flirting. They said, we lived together with
(04:05):
people from all over the world. You have to come
and meet our friends. And two and a half years
later I was waking up on the Baltimore Beltway driving
into the back of a tractor trailer truck at eighty
miles an hour due to sleep deprivation. And in between that,
I was made a leader in the Moon cult and
(04:25):
was recruiting and doing crazy things like fasting for Richard
Nixon during Watergate because God said he should be president.
And I had hated Nixon before I've met the cult
and been indoctrinated in mind control. Anyway, what happened in
nineteen seventy six was this near fatal van crash in
(04:47):
the hospital away from the group, sleeping a lot, and
I called my sister, who I was always very close with,
and she persuaded me to visit her and my nephew
and she said on him to know his uncle Stevie
come home. So I said, if you don't tell the parents,
and you don't tell Steph, my oldest sister, who had
(05:09):
all said I was in a cult and I was brainwashed,
and I knew that was evil and satanic. I did go,
and she did tell, and they had hired some ex moonies,
one of whom was a woman I had recruited myself
into the cult and I was very fond of and
I was program to kill rather than betray the Messiah.
(05:36):
And I actually almost snapped my father's neck while he
was driving in the Long Island Expressway, but I didn't
kill him, thank goodness. We get to the point of
the dprogramming place and a big burly guy is going
to come and help me go in there with my
big long cast and I basically said to my father,
(05:58):
who knew I was very very strong. I'm six feet tall.
I said, if you try to make me go in there,
I will be very violent and I will kill everybody
or they will kill me, and my blood will be
on your conscience forever. And my father cried and say,
what would you do if it was your son, your
(06:19):
only son? How would you feel? And it was the
tears that got to the real me, and I switched
into what I imagined was his perspective, thinking how crazy
it must have looked to him that I had dropped
out of college, quit my job, donated my bank account,
and was fasting for Nixon. So anyway, I said, what
(06:42):
do you want me to do? He said, just listen
with an open mind. If you want to go back,
at least your mother and I will be able to
sleep at night knowing we did the responsible thing. So
I wanted to prove I wasn't brainwashed or mind control,
and I wanted to show that I had free will
by the end, because they were showing me things like
(07:03):
Chinese communist brainwashing studies of Robert Lifton, and basically my
mind opened where I realized Moon was a liar. I
had heard him personally tell us to lie so many times,
and how could he be a man of God if
he's a liar if we're teaching that God is a
(07:24):
god of truth. So the wheels, the creaky wheels, started going,
and then it just felt like a house of cards
was going plap, plap pop, and I and I went.
I just cried for three hours, like what was I
been doing for two and a half years? And at
that point I just needed to understand what happened to me.
(07:46):
I bet because I'm you know, just a few minutes
that I'm looking at you and talking to you, You're
incredibly smart man, and I can't imagine you were any
less smart when you were a eighteen nineteen year old man. No,
I was reading postgraduate level when I was eight years old. Right,
(08:07):
You're not an idiot as a teenager. As my point,
you seem to have a caring, loving family. So definitely,
what is it that these women, Okay, aside from hormones,
how how did they infiltrate you in this way? How
could they manipulate your mind? I mean to me, it
reminds me of you know, I have friends whose children
(08:31):
were addicts, and they literally had to have somebody come
in at three in the morning and take them away
and kind of break them all down and rebuild them again.
And it sounds like you kind of have to do
that when somebody has been seeked in a cult. I'm
not a fan of the three AM boot camp interventions.
I'm sure some have saved people's lives, but also a
(08:54):
lot of them are run by people who are not
mental health professionals. Well, yes, I agree with you. The
bottom line is that I that people are situationally vulnerable.
Breakup of a relationship, death of a loved one, illness movie.
So your breakup is your vulnerability. The girlfriend that broke
(09:15):
up with it was the biggest vulnerability, if I can
be honest, allay was that I thought I was too
smart and only dumb people get into cults. I thought
I was too smart. I had bicycle cross country when
I was sixteen. My father taught me in the hardware store.
When he brought me in to train me, he said,
(09:37):
you can tell if someone's lying by their eyes. Steve
and I looked at their eyes and they were completely
convincing that they were sincere. They were students, they weren't
part of a religious group. And I later became a
top recruiter doing the same techniques to get people in
believing that the world was satanic and I needed to
(09:59):
save their souls and all their ancestors. Let me ask
you this very quickly. Sure, so let's define cult. Okay,
So what I'm my work is around authoritarian cults and
a way of thinking about it as a pyramid structured
organization with someone or some group or some ideology that's
(10:21):
controlling and the deceptive recruitment and the behavior, information, thought,
and emotional control to make a new identity where their
dependent and obedient on the group and some people say
you need a living guru or leader to have a cult,
and that's not my knowledge or research, because you can
(10:43):
have ideological cults right right. So, for example, the right
wing sovereign citizens, the racist, the neo Nazis, they were
doing leaderless resistance was the term. In other words, they
put an isis was doing this. Um. They put out
the ideology, they they they they give videos and for
(11:07):
people to indoctrinate, but they leave it up to people
to decide how they're going to act out right. Um.
And I went on to develop my own model based
on an influence continuum from ethical to unethical and what
I call the BITE model of authoritaring control. Yeah, behavior,
(11:29):
behavior control, information controls, and emotions emotional. Yeah. So if
you can control those four variables including where the persons
sleeping and eating, and their clothing and their language, and
give them rigid rules and regulations and put them through
a process where they're confused, disoriented, and hypnosis is a
(11:52):
major factor, but not the the watch kind of hypnosis.
It's a much more DVOS this kind of process level
of hypnosis. It's something that I've spent a lot of
times learning about because it helps me and my work
to coach families how to help love ones and to
help people recover from these types of cases. And it's
(12:15):
been a journey. I was persuaded to get my doctorate
a few years ago because I got involved with a
forensic think tank at Harvard Medical School, because I realized
the law is about a hundred years out of date
with understanding neuroscience and social psychology. And if you're young,
(12:36):
you can be unduly influenced automatically by your age. If
you're older and have dementia, that but the middle ground
is called a slippery slope, and for me, it's not
a slippery slope if you have these four components in
the context of a lack of informed consent and installing phobias,
(12:57):
for example, to make people rationally afraid to question the
leader or the group, or irrationally afraid to exit the
group because terrible things will happen to you. I was
literally taken to the Exorcist movie alley in nineteen seventy
four and Moon said, personally, God made the Exorcist movie,
(13:19):
this is what will happen if anyone leaves the Unification Church.
And at that point I had no critical thing you'll
start throwing up and spinning around. Wow, it was scary, yes,
of course, And so obviously I think about Patty Hurst.
She was made into Tania and she robbed banks and yeah,
and a lot of people didn't believe she was brainwashed.
(13:42):
They thought she was a wealthy little kid acting out.
And in my opinion, she was absolutely a victim of brainwashing.
She was put in a closet, she was sexually abused.
So for me, it was just bad legal defense and
lack of the public's awareness and understanding that it doesn't
(14:04):
just happen to stupid people, weak people, people from bad families, etc. Right,
the right conditions, almost everybody can be hurt this way,
and so and can you create those conditions, Meaning with
Patty Hurst, they locked her in a closet, they sexually
abused her. I'm sure they starved her. I mean, so
you can also as a cult leader, you can create
(14:28):
all those conditions with which to get people embedded in
your sort of philosophies and your agenda. Basically, Yeah, so
traffickers and pimps do this, And trafficking is illegal in
the US and most civilized countries of the world. It's
defined as fraud, force, or coercion, and most every mind
(14:54):
control cult has the fraud, the lack of informed consent,
and the coercion, which is granularly explained by the control
of behavior, information, thoughts, and emotions. And in fact, labor
trafficking experts are using my model, and sex trafficking experts
who are helping people get out of that type of
(15:16):
mind control are using it because it makes sense. So
with the sex trafficking and labor trafficking, it's very fear based, right,
It's much more about if you try to leave, you
will be killed or will kill your family or right, yes,
so that's where the force comes in. If somebody holds
(15:37):
a knife up, like Larry Ray of the Sarah Lawrence cult,
he was just convicted of trafficking, if he holds a
big knife up and starts to coerce you to make
a false confession, you repeated enough times, you start believing it,
because that's the way the mind works and memory works,
(15:57):
is you can reprogram people's memories and people can have
false memories of experiences that never happened. And so Charles
Manson was kind of the genius of this too. Correct. Well,
we don't want to give him that much credit. I
don't think genius is a right word. I don't think
it was a genius, but he was. He was definitely
(16:19):
involved with scientology and he also used psychedelics. So psychedelics
is another method that can be used to subvert people's
critical thinking and reality testing. If you're tripping on acid
and somebody is telling you we were married in the
past life, don't you remember, you know, we were walking
(16:42):
down the river of the Nile and we were fishing.
Don't you remember, and you're tripping, you know, it's going
to go in your head somewhere. Yeah, there's a lot
more to come after the short break and we're back.
(17:08):
It's interesting you think you equate sex trafficking with a cult,
because most people think sex trafficking is they go after
vulnerable children or women, They kidnap them, and then they
use threats and fear to keep them there, same with pimps.
But you're saying that it's it's more than that, No,
(17:30):
it's it really is a systematic social influence process where
people's behavior, information, thoughts, and emotions are manipulated to create
a new identity that's the pendant and obedient on the
pimp or the trafficker. So they frequently will change the name,
(17:50):
change the clothing, change the language system, and people have
an alternate life and belief about themselves. And so I
do want to clarify something. So I have something called
the influence continuum ethical to unethical, and this is all
(18:11):
on my Freedom of mind dot com website under learn
about undue influence. So I say there are cults along
the entire continuum, but the difference between healthy cults as
you choose. You can think you have your own critical faculties.
You can leave without threats or fear or harassment. You
(18:31):
can be fanatically into something, but it's your own choice
versus having a new identity. I mean, one could say
that there are abusive and horrific relationships that are that
model this cult thing. I mean, I have some friends
whose son has gotten involved with a woman and he
(18:53):
doesn't speak to his parents and he's moved far away,
and I keep saying to them, God, it's like he's
in a cult, But no one looks at it that
way because it's a relationship one cult to one. No,
you're right, yeah, you're one hundred percent correct. And men
controlling women and in fact, in the UK they have
a new law called course of control where a man
(19:16):
is controlling a woman and isolating her from her family
and controlling her finances. It's not yet recognizing women controlling men.
But in the United States I do a lot of
cases one on one controlling and they're typically malignant narcissists,
by the way, so it's another way of saying it
(19:37):
is a narcissist who's a psychopath who are isolating a
person and taking their money and wanting to exert power
over them and sex. So we can talk about political cults,
therapy cults, multi level marketing cults, psychotherapeutic cults, boot camp cults,
(19:59):
which you mentioned something about friends who brought their kids
who are addicts to a closed environment to break them
down and create a new identity presumably, but a lot
of those groups make the person dependent on the cult well,
especially because they get kickbacks, and that whole system in
(20:20):
Utah so corrupt, but yes, exactly, Utah is one of
the worst states for these systems, and Paris Hilton is
probably the most famous person who survived that. And so
when you talk about like communist China, brainwashing and some
of these techniques whether they're used on an educated adult.
(20:41):
When it comes to let's say, sex trafficking, isn't it
all fear based? Well, people don't understand. Most young people,
mostly women or girls rather or boys, are recruited around
twelve to fourteen years of age, and so it starts
(21:02):
with what's called grooming, and the right wing is now
using that term and flipping it on its head. But
the real grooming of perverts and pedophiles and traffickers is
giving food, buying a gift, walking with them, paying attention
to them, maybe playing video games with them online where
(21:25):
the person thinks they're their own age. And by the way,
neuroscience has now told us that when someone is playing
a video game online, the brain starts acting like it's
a friend, even though you have no idea who's on
the other side, and it could be a Chinese agent
or a Russian agent, or the porn industry. It's exactly.
(21:49):
It's typically a love thing where the young people think
that that's a boyfriend, and they step by step get
them involved with sex and do a favor for me.
My best friend is coming over. He's really lonely, he
needs attention. Give him a back rub, you know now
pull down his shirt and rub his back that way.
(22:11):
And it's just step by step. And and it's unfortunate
that everybody who walks around thinking it's only someone else's kid,
it's only weak people or stupid people. They're the most vulnerable. Really,
it's way better to be humble and go. It could
(22:33):
happen to me. And that's why you always want to
stay in touch with your intuition, your gut, and you
want to always have a red flag go off in
your mind. If someone is saying don't tell your parents
or don't don't share this with your husband or your wife.
That should be like an immediate information control, right, danger, danger,
(22:55):
you know what I've The bottom line is there's some
people who are exceptionally vulnerable. And it turns out that
people on the spectrum, very smart, high functioning folks on
the spectrum, are exceptionally vulnerable to recruitment by mind control cults.
Why because they're love bombed. They have an instant community
(23:20):
where they have meaning and everyone's saying, oh, oh, Allie,
you're so special, you're so smart, we're so glad to
have you. So I did a chapter for an Oxford
University Press textbook on loan actor terrorism, and mine was
the only chapter on online indoctrination. And I used the
case example of someone on the spectrum who was moved
(23:45):
to violence because they were manipulated to feel like they
have to act out either against women because women are evil,
because they could never get a girlfriend, or they want
to tear down America because America is evil, so they
want to create anarchy. So the thing that I want
(24:07):
so desperately, and why I'm so grateful that you asked
me to be on your show, is I want people
to step back and understand we're living in the age
of influence, and in particular digital influence. Yes, yes, I
want to talk to you about all of that because
it's very scary and COVID has sped everything up and
(24:27):
people are believing stupid, crazy conspiracy theories because they've been programmed.
Let's just throw qan on out there, let's take them.
That is, to me an authoritarian cult in itself exactly.
I did a bite model analysis actually of QAnon on
my website. I was invited by Dave Troy, who does
(24:49):
ted X mid Atlantic, to do a program called Dismantling QAnon,
and it was there that I learned for the first
time that QAnon was based on alternate reality gaming technology,
and I was I'm old, right, So I did pack
Man oh too? Yeah, yeah, I never did. I never did,
(25:10):
you know, video games like so many people do. But
this is based on the idea that you can go
on treasure hunts and figure things out and clues with
these bread drops and this and that, and it engages people.
And the other side of this that I want to
state for your listeners is this is a PSI up.
(25:31):
This is a psychological warfare operation. And we know for
a fact Michael Flynn, General Flynn did this for our
country against people in other countries for a long time.
And he's already proclaimed the digital Soldier oath and he's
(25:52):
definitely not a person who loves the rule of law. Okay,
And now I have to throw Trump out too, because
he's clearly was given a few handbooks and models for this.
So I wrote the book called The Cult of Trump
Simon and Schuster, and my thesis essentially is that they're
(26:17):
authoritarian cults whose leaders were directing people to believe in Trump.
And so chapter seven is all about the puppeteers as
I research them, including Putin. I put him first in
the list. The Family, which is a cult that used
to do the National Prayer breakfasts and everything, and Michael
(26:40):
Pence is in that group. So that's another cult. Jeffrey
Charlotte has written two good books and there's a Netflix
series about the Family, and that cult recruits Democrats and Republicans.
By the way. Then we have Opus Day, which is
a right wing cult in my professional opinion of the
Catholic Church that thinks the Pope is Satanic and they
(27:03):
want to break down the separation of church and state.
The biggest threat, and the media has missed this in
my opinion, is what's called new Apostolic Reformation churches and
what these are. The media said, these are white Christian evangelicals. Well,
(27:24):
I know white Christian evangelicals, and they're like, this is
not Jesus's teachings, this is not biblical. The leaders of
these groups, they say, I'm an apostle or I'm a
prophet of God. I talk directly to God and get
direct revelations, and I speak in tongues and cast out
demons like the Exorcists, and I can do faith feelings.
(27:46):
And their followers are called spiritual warriors because they're gonna
get rid of all the satanic libtards me and people
in the Cult of Sorrows presumably me, right, But there's
forty million in the United States in this body of
(28:06):
different cults, and an estimated six hundred and fifty million worldwide,
and people are reporting, oh their popularist movements around the world.
These are psyops by authoritarian governments or people who are
promoting fossil fuels to divert people from global climate crisis
(28:32):
legislation and action, and to keep the prices of oil high.
So we're in we're in a World War three type
information warfare. Of course, there's kinetic warfare in Ukraine right now,
as everybody knows so well. But we have to wake
(28:52):
up and realize if we love our country, if we
want rule of law, if we want human rights, women's rights,
gay rights, indigenous rights, we have to take action and
not just be reactive, but we have to proactively think
about how to reclaim and how to reinstitute laws that
(29:15):
have been systematically broken down over the last forty years.
Do you connect any dots with school shootings and cults?
Absolutely so. There's something called social learning theory and people
who study terrorism, it's a version of contagion effect or
(29:37):
copycat things, and they would literally, I believe bad actors
recruiting young vulnerable men to think that they will be
immortal if they go into a mosque and kill a
lot of people in live stream it or any number
of variables of that. And I actually put the NR
(30:00):
in the Cult of Trump because when I was researching it,
there were five million people. And this is a group
that is by the way, you remember, is it Marina Boutina?
Remember the Russian agent who's now in the parliament in Russia.
She infiltrated the NRA. She was at the national prayer
(30:22):
breakfast of a family cult. Putin doesn't allow citizens to
have assault rifles in Russia, but he wants us to
have twenty million AR fifteens. Why he wants us to
kill each other. And my former cult has a gun
factory making AR fifteens. The Moonees and another son of
(30:44):
Sun Young Moon has a crown of golden bullets, calls
himself the king and his cult is called the Rod
of Iron Ministry, saying that the revelations in the Bible,
it says that we should have ar fifteen. So he
has two compounds, one in Texas and one in Tennessee,
(31:05):
hiring vets to train people how to use these weapons.
And this is happening right now in our country. And
I have to believe that law enforcement, now that Biden
has come in, is trying to clean up the mess. Yeah,
that's been made in the Cult of Trump era. Well,
(31:26):
and there's also sort of small things we can do.
Certainly the media cannot, and they've started to stop showing
faces of shooters and not giving out their name and
not using any platforms so that they do feel immortalized
or sainted and focus on the victims, and focus on
(31:48):
the victims exactly. Yeah, and it's time for a short break.
Welcome back to go ask Galley. Technology. I mean that
(32:09):
is sort of the greatest enemy to trying to stop
all this because you know, I always say on my podcast,
it's it's just the wild West. I mean, you can
recruit extremists, you can create cults online without leaving your
living room now exactly. And to me, I mean that
seems like an incredibly difficult thing to fight to battle,
(32:30):
you know, because the laws for you know, all these
techno highways have not even been implemented. So how can
somebody like me take action? What should we do? The
problem was the the infiltration through the Federalist Society of
our Supreme Court and courts around the land. But we
(32:50):
need digital protection legislation because there's five estimated five thousand
data points on every voting American that's been collected, every
website you've gone to, everylike, every dislike what food you
like to eat. There are AI algorithms to understand which
(33:11):
buttons to push for which people in order to manipulate them.
And then the other part of it. I've been interviewed
by Tristan Harris and the Center for Humane Technology, the
person who is very involved with the Social Dilemma documentary,
which is a must see in my opinion for everyone.
So we need to understand that billionaires who have platforms
(33:36):
and their goal is money and selling ad by capturing
people's attention. The rule of thumb is if it's free,
then you're the product, right right, So you have to
understand that there are great benefits from virtual technology. You
can surgeons can do surgery remotely who are highly skilled
(34:00):
and save somebody's life. However, bad actors who want to
subvert America's power and prestige and subvert democracy. Are for example,
the second biggest owner of Twitter of the Saudis or
at least the Middle Eastern oil barrens if Elon musk
(34:21):
Is so into electric cars, an electric solar Why would
oil barons want to be on this platform. By the way,
QAnon's back, Neo Nazis are back on Twitter. It's really terrible. Yeah,
but there is hope. But we need to pass legislation.
And I've been saying we should have open hearings on
(34:45):
QAnon sy ops, information warfare, propaganda, brainwashing by top experts,
educate American citizens and the world for what we know
is being done right now. But there are all these
politicians who've been given donations and have other kinds of corruption,
(35:07):
maybe from Russia infiltration, and they're gonna undermine that effort.
So right now, it just feels like citizens like you,
Ali and me and others who genuinely care, we need
to think outside the box for how how to get
this done. So, doctor Hasson, does it really all come
(35:28):
down to money? Is it just greed? So in my
work when people ask me what's in it for cult
leaders or what's it all about. It seems to me
power is number one. Money is number two, which gives
you more power, and sex is number three, which can
(35:48):
also be used. Because you yes, because you hear about
authoritarian cults. You hear, I mean these are the ones
that are sort of on Hulu and Netflix, the political halts,
and then cults that are sort of built from the
base up by people that that it's just greed, they
just want money. Um, you know, I would say that
(36:09):
there are cults of people who you know, rip off
grandmothers because they have dementias. Right, So there's a difference
between con artists and cult leaders. The con artists just
want the quick in and out, get the money and
move on to the next victim. It's the people who
want to literally create slaves, right, people who want the
(36:30):
long controlled expansion of power. But I put them in
with the sex cults, the slave cults, so I put
I put them in the same category. And that's all power. Yeah,
I'm with you. I mean, the sex to me is power.
I find those to be the same. Not love. No,
it's not love. And I'm a love guy, I say too.
(36:51):
And I've been saying this for years. If you have
a friend or a family member who's gone down the
Magar road, you know, the qan On road. The worst
thing to do is cuttle off from them, or call
them names or say their brainwash, just like my family
did to me in seventy four. It just makes the
person dig in more and feel persecuted. The best technique
(37:15):
is a warm technique, inviting people to remember that you
were brothers and sisters or aunts and uncles or best friends,
and saying, listen, you're intelligent, I respect you. You seem
very fervent. I want to understand how you've come to
believe this. Please, let's spend the time. Go back in
(37:39):
time and tell me your first memory of QAnon, for example,
and what did you think? And they almost always ali
say I thought it was crazy or I thought it
was stupid, and then they say, oh, that's very interesting.
So tell me what was it if you can think back,
what was it that made you start taking it seriously
(37:59):
and made as one of these propaganda documentaries, or maybe
one of the girlfriend that they're with, the boyfriend that
they're with who they fall in love with, is into it.
But the point is is educating them, not saying you're
an occult, but educating them about other groups that use
mind control, Chinese communist brainwashing techniques, which is what was
(38:23):
helpful to me to get out of the Moone fascist
cult or traffickers, sex traffickers in particular of children. They're
very interested to learn about that. Yeah, So here's my
big question to you. How do you sleep at night? Truly?
Like how do you digest all the stuff all day long?
(38:44):
And how do you sleep? And do you take anything
to make yourself go to sleep? Because I would be
so anxious and so scared all the time. It's really
a burden. My wife of twenty almost twenty five years
has really been incredible support and she helped me in
(39:05):
researching and writing of the Cult of Trump. She's a
professional writer. But the truth is I often don't sleep
at night, and I don't like sleeping pills. My go
to self hypnosis and I've been to clinical interesting mental
health professionals trained and hypnosis and it helps me get
(39:28):
my agitation my cortsol levels down. And by the way,
I did have cancer, and my heart goes out to
Jamie Raskin. I had them FOMA two because I was
working too hard and traveling and not sleeping enough. My
heart goes out to Jamie. I hope he has a
fast recovery. But the bottom line is I really am
(39:51):
trying to train more people to understand how to help
these victims. That's why I created an online course plug
Plug No good for mental health professionals, but for anyone
who wants a deeper dive to understand how do you
help people heal from their identity being given an associative disorder?
(40:11):
Are you worried about the future. I mean for somebody
that is so immersed in this, but I mean really worried.
I was worried about the mid terms, whether I would
have to move to another country, honestly, but I was
so relieved when we saved the Senate that the bottom
line is I'm an optimist because there's no option but
(40:35):
to believe, have hope, inspire other people, and to educate
people how to protect their own minds, their friends and
families minds, but also to stand up against these authoritarians
and say no, we want human rights, we want rule
(40:55):
of law. Yeah. Oh, thank you so much for doing
this podcast. I said, there's so much, and we have
in our show notes all your books, and your podcast.
So I do direct all my listeners to everything because
it's so important and it's so informative, and at a
certain point we a lot of us have to do
(41:16):
some of the work that you're doing now as well,
because there are people in our friend world and our
family that need this. So thank you, thank you, thank you.
So can I ask you a question? Yes, I was
just going to get to that. What's your favorite cupcake? Oh?
(41:37):
What is my favorite cupcake? It's chocolate with vanilla frosting.
I'm a traditionalist. I can do that or I can
do vanilla with chocolate frosting. But it has to be
one or the other. I'm not a red velvet fan. Huh. Okay,
And you like milk with it or of course milk, yes,
and milk with my cookies, and yes, I'm all about dairy.
(41:58):
You dunk your cookies and do not do that. I
do it more of the way people who drink do
a shot and then they have a chaser. It's more
like that. I don't like to mix. So okay, okay,
there you go. That's great. Thank you your pleasure, Thank
(42:18):
you for listening to go Ask Alli if you'd like
to learn more about cults and undo influence. Check out
our show notes and visit Freedom of Mind dot com
to access tons of resources, services, and doctor Hasson's podcast,
The Influence Continuum. Be sure to subscribe, rate and review
Go Ask Alli and follow me on social media on
Instagram at the Real Ali Wentworth Now. If you'd like
(42:40):
to ask me a question or suggest a guest or
a topic to dig into, I would love to hear
from you, and there's a bunch of ways you can
do it. You can call or text me at three
two three three six four six three five six, or
you can email a voice memo right from your phone
to Go Ask Alli podcast at gmail dot com. And
if you leave a question, you just might hear it
on goo ascut. Go Ask Galley is a production of
(43:14):
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