February 16, 2025 • 36 mins
Steven Hassan was once sucked into The Moonies. He broke free and has devoted the subsequent 50 years to becoming and expert on mind control and cults and then using that knowledge to help others escape cults and rejoin their lives. Cults take many forms, but their tactics are very similar. Which brings us to MAGA. Does it fit the definition of a cult? If so, how are people indoctrinated and how can they be supported in leaving?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'sha. I was a
CIA officer stationed around the world in high threat posts
in Europe, Russia, and in Asia.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East
and in war zones. We sometimes created conspiracies to deceive
our adversaries.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Now we're going to use our expertise to deconstruct conspiracy
theories large and small.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
Could they be true?
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 1 (00:26):
This is mission implausible. Today's guest is Steve Hasten. He's
an author and an expert on the issue of cults.
His latest book is called The Cult of Trump. He's
a former member of the Unification Church, associated with the
Reverend Moon and escape the church and then created a
(00:48):
group to help people leave the church and since then
become a real expert on cults and helping people leave cults.
Speaker 4 (00:53):
Welcome Steve, Thanks John, and I'm an admirer of yours
and all you're speaking out of the many years since
Trump's first election.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
Yeah, I don't know how much good it does, but
it's better than being complicit of.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
That's what I say.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
If you're an admirer of John, you've already sown some
bad judgment here, Stave s.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
But let's go back and start from the beginning. Tell
us about your experience with the Unification Church in the movies.
Speaker 4 (01:18):
I'm gonna just correct you and say, I don't think
it's fair to call them the Unification Church, because when
there was a Congressional subcommittee investigation into CACIA activities in
the US, the investigation said, there are so many front
groups of this group. Unification Church is one of hundreds.
(01:40):
We think it's fairer to call them the moon Organization
or the Moonees.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
And they own one of our newspapers in Washington, d C.
Speaker 4 (01:48):
Washington Times, which the founding editor was from the Council
for National Policy, was put into place. But back to
my story. When I got recruited, it was actually the
same month Patty Hurst got abducted by the Simonese Liberation Army.
It was February of nineteen seventy four. No one had
(02:08):
heard of the Moonies. I certainly didn't. I was a
student at Queen's College and my situational vulnerability was my
girlfriend dumped me abruptly and I was sitting in the
cafeteria waiting for classes to start and three women started
flirting with me. Later I learned it's called honey potting,
but I was just naive. I asked them, are you students, yes,
(02:32):
which was a lie.
Speaker 3 (02:33):
Are you part of a religious group?
Speaker 4 (02:35):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (02:35):
No, not at all.
Speaker 4 (02:36):
But within a few weeks, I was believing the Messiah
was on the earth, that I was selected to help
save the world from Satan. I was Jewish and I
didn't believe in Satan a few weeks earlier, and I
went in this rabbit hole of brainwashing. And I should
say I came from a very stable, normal upbringing. My parents,
(03:00):
ever divorced, didn't have affairs, they didn't drink, they didn't smoke.
We lived in the same house. I was an extra
honor student, and my vulnerability was I thought I was
too smart to ever fall for a scam or for
a cult. And for whatever reason, they selected me, Maybe
because I'm six feet tall and I was smart, I
(03:21):
don't know, but they selected me to be an American leader,
which meant I had no power. But I was a
front person who could recruit and indoctrinate people and be
a good face for the cult. And I was in
meetings with Moon personally, with the other leaders as he
was saying, we're going to infiltrate the government, and God
(03:43):
hates democracy. We're going to put a theocracy into place,
and when we take power, we will amend the constitution
and make it a capital offense if people don't accept
our rules around the mass weddings and the sexual things. Anyway,
I was a true believer, and I was sent to
Washington to fast for three days for Richard Nixon during Watergate,
(04:05):
and I hated Nixon beforehand, but I was like, but
God wants him to be president.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
Dad.
Speaker 4 (04:12):
But my story is I fell asleep at the wheel
of a Moonie van.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
I was sleeping three.
Speaker 4 (04:17):
To four hours a night, normally seven days a week,
but this occasion I fell asleep and woke up as
I drove into the back of a tractor trailer truck
at eighty miles an hour. And after getting Pride out
of the wreckage, having two weeks away from the cult,
sleeping and eating and nursing my wounds, I didn't.
Speaker 3 (04:37):
Have any continuous indoctrination.
Speaker 4 (04:39):
This was way before cell phones got created, but led
to me calling my sister, which led to her telling
my parents, which led to a deprogramming which I was
sure I wasn't brainwashed and I wasn't in a cult.
But my father cried and said, how would you feel
if it was your son who I met a controversial
(05:01):
group and disappeared from your life. Wouldn't you be worried?
And I could see he genuinely cared about me. I
thought he was brainwashed by the Communist media. That was
my mooney mind speaking, But I wanted to prove that
I was thinking, so I agreed to talk to the
ex members and learn about Chinese communist brainwashing, and it
(05:21):
was that that started turning the lights back on in
my mind. The following day was my wake up moment,
where the ex members handed me one of Moon's speeches
to congressmen and senators, and all they did was hand
it to me and say, read this and tell us
what you think. And that formed the basis for forty
nine years of my professional career. That said, the way
(05:44):
to get people out of these groups is not trying
to persuade them they're wrong, ask them what they think,
feed them questions in a respectful way that's strategic, that
gets them back to who they were before the group.
Everything I believe was based on the presupposition he was
the Messiah and he was going to save the planet
(06:06):
Earth from all the mess we're in. And once that
bubble popped, I was like, what happened to my mind?
So now you're meeting me having written four books.
Speaker 3 (06:16):
And I have a PhD.
Speaker 4 (06:18):
And how to use trafficking law to update and apply
to the legal system because it's not a slippery slope.
And my model that I did my dissertation on looks
at behavior control, information control, thought control, and emotional control.
I call it the Byte model of authoritarian control. I
say you can control those four variables. You can control
(06:40):
people's identities and make a pseudo identity that's dependent and
obedient on any person or ideology.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
We use words like culton religion, and there's the old
saw that the difference between the culton and religion is
an IRS ruling. Could you give us a working definition
that we can news for what is a cult or
a sect?
Speaker 4 (07:02):
Say there are cults along the continuum from ethical religious groups,
political groups, fan groups, whatever, all the way to authoritarian
mind control cults. People laugh and say, I'm in a
book called the Cult of Mac as a true believer,
because I only have used Mac since nineteen eighty two,
(07:22):
or I'm in the cult because I've done four teTeX talk,
so I joke about that. But there are groups that
are healthy and you can question them, you can leave
without fear or harassment. They're not remaking your conscience and
your identity. My definition is that it's a pyramid structured
authoritarian regime that uses deceptive recruitment, so no informed consent.
(07:49):
Does it have to be religious correct In my model,
it can be a one on one controlling relationship to
a bad therapist who's making the person dependent on them,
to a large group awareness training program, or a multi
level marketing. It applies to trafficking, sex trafficking, and labor trafficking,
(08:12):
which I call commercial cults, political cults, as I refer
to the cult of Trump, and I believe China is
a mind control authoritarian cult, as is Russia.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
Does it require a charismatic leader.
Speaker 4 (08:26):
No, some of my colleagues say that it does, and
that's not my experience. And there are many cults that
are ideological cults. They're mimetic indoctrination things. And then there
are cults that start with one person. They die and
the group morphs and their beliefs change and their practices change,
(08:49):
but you don't need a living leader. What I learned
starting in nineteen eighty when I started studying hypnosis, and
I should say during the MKO Trump days, I studied
NLP and then I learned Eric Sonian hypnosis. And that's
what I'm seeing everywhere on the internet, and I talk
(09:10):
about it in the book The Cult of Trump that
it appears Tony Robbins has taught Donald Trump some NLP.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
You mentioned mk ultra in the nineteen fifties when there
was such concern that somehow the Soviets had mastered mind
control because some soldiers were coming back from the Korean
War and other places that were saying what we thought
were crazy things and thought that they had been given
drugs that controlled their minds. So the CIA got involved
in experimenting with these things, looking to see if there
was some sort of and it's actually a shameful period.
(09:40):
You can understand why it happened, but so could involve
potentially drugs or some sort of thing like this as well.
Speaker 4 (09:48):
Absolutely, I'm a human rights guy, I'm a license mental
health counselor. So my leane is just I want people
to be healthy, I want them to control their own minds.
I want them to understand that it doesn't just happen
a week stupid, uneducated people, that bright people can have
their minds acted, and that we are wired as human
(10:11):
beings to follow who we think are legitimate leaders, and
we're wired as human beings to conform to people we
identify with. And we know this from the Ash Conformity Study,
the Milgram obedient Study, the Zimbardo prison study. People are
walking around thinking it can never happen to me. I'm
(10:32):
too smart, and it happens to them. They're even more vulnerable.
But on the other side of it is it's not permanent.
And even people born in these authoritarian regimes realize they're
being lied to, they're being exploited, and when they're given
an opportunity to have access to non members and leave
(10:53):
and go somewhere else, they want to come to the US.
They want to leave totalitarian regimes are they're born into
these extremist, authoritarian religious cults, and they realize, I don't
have to believe this. There are phobias that have been
put in my mind to make me dependent and obedience.
But if you use their critical thinking, you can analyze
(11:16):
this is a technique of emotional mind control.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
We'll be right back in a moment. John and I
when we were serving in the Agency, we've served in
authoritarian countries with authoritarian governments. So I was in Zimbabwe
and you would think when you were there that Mugabi
(11:42):
at the time was incredibly popular. They built a cult
around him, his family, his picture, his photograph was everywhere,
the legends that he was involved in during the war
of Independence from Rhodesia. And yet when Mugabi was dethroned
and eventually died, he was immediately forgotten about. And I
were both in Eastern Europe when the Brillin Wall was
(12:03):
starting to come down and people were leaving. So I
was in West Berlin and we were looking at the
East Germans and we would have sworn a month before
the wall came down that the East Germans were loyal,
that they believed in their leader. And yet really within
days millions of people finally said, yeah, we've just been
faking it this whole time. Talking to them afterwards, they
(12:24):
were saying no. At the time, we were sort of
hit two points of two notions at the same time.
We were both loyal and believed, but deep down in
our brain we didn't. So what's your sense of Trump beside?
But of political cults and when they're genuine and when
they're sort of enforced time people.
Speaker 4 (12:45):
You're describing the phenomenon that I have verified for forty
nine years of practice with clients from all types of
political and religious cults. And I should say my mentor
who's helped me get out of the Moonies.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
Robert J.
Speaker 4 (13:03):
Lifton wrote a book called Thought Reform in the Psychology
of Totalism in nineteen sixty one about his interviews with
people coming out of mao's thought reform programs in the
outlined eight criteria. He later wrote a book on the
Nazi doctors, and he described what he called doubling. Before
(13:24):
that book came out, I had described my subjective sense
is that there were two Steves. There was the real Steve,
who was born of Flushing Queens, New York, and then
the Steve, the Mooney, whose parents were moon and his wife.
Speaker 3 (13:39):
And when I got out, it.
Speaker 4 (13:40):
Was like a flip happened, like a switch happens, like
I was still indoctrinated, but the real me took executive control,
or like malware takes over your computer and then you
put software in it and get rid of the malware. Oh,
my operating systems back their key points. And for me
(14:01):
as a human being doing this where people had to survive.
So they had a public face because they didn't want
to be turned into the regime, they didn't want to
get tortured, thrown into jail or worse. But then they
had their private thoughts that was like this is bs
or they said the opposite last week that they're saying today.
(14:23):
And so there's what Lifton called the psychology of the
pawn while you're still in the environment. But once the
environment walls go away and you have access to non
cult people, you start to realize, WHOA, there's a whole
lot of colors. World is not black and white, and
follow the regime or don't. It's oh, there were all
(14:46):
these other options and choices. And so with political cults,
one of my theses in the Cult of Trump is
not only does Trump display the stereotypical cult leader and
I used Eric Frohm's definition malignant narcissist in chapter three,
(15:08):
and I compared Trump with Jim Jones of the People's
Temple and Moon, my former cult leader and Hubbard of scientology.
It is a cult of personality that he has had
his whole life, with his business and people he's work with.
And I should add Eric Frum came up with this
(15:29):
trying to understand Hitler, so that this was not coming
out of thin air. This was post World War two,
and like, how could we describe the mindset of somebody
like this?
Speaker 3 (15:41):
But then when I.
Speaker 4 (15:42):
Started researching it, I realized there were actual authoritarian cults
that comprise the cult of Trump. I talk about a
cult called the Family that's operated in DC for decades.
They do the National Prayer breakfasts, and they like to
recruit Democrats and Republicans to do their bidding. And then
I talk about Opus Day and William Barr was a
(16:04):
member of that. The Russians hacked our counter terrorist Anson
I should add with Opus Day, he was an Opus
Stay member. But there are bigger groups like what is
called the New Apostolic Reformation MEGAS. And these are the
people who say they're Christian, but in terms of their practices,
(16:26):
they claim to be a prophet or an apostle who
can speak directly to God and God told them. Trump
won the twenty twenty election and this is thirty to
forty million Americans who think, because their leader said so,
that Trump is being used by God. He's a king
Cyrus figure.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
I was just in Oklahoma and someone was telling me
a story about a family member who saw a picture
of Trump pulling someone from a flood, clearly a fake picture,
and this person was saying, that's why we need to
support him. He's such a good man and all this
kind of stuff. So there are real believers of this
fake stuff. But clearly these politicians that support him in Washington,
they go to Yale and Harvard and JD. Vance and
(17:09):
all of these guys, they are now saying, oh, the
twenty twenty election was stolen. In January sixth was a
day of love. They know that not to be true.
Can you be part of a cult when in fact
you know you're lying?
Speaker 4 (17:21):
The answer is, I'd have to study case by case,
and most people in a mind control cult, or what
I call fringe members, they really have no clue what
is actually going on inside the group, much less at
the leadership level. And so when people say, do you
think everyone who voted for Trump isn't a cult?
Speaker 3 (17:41):
It's like, how can.
Speaker 4 (17:42):
I say that a lot of people just vote whatever
party their parents voted, what they voted in the past.
Speaker 3 (17:48):
But you know better than most.
Speaker 4 (17:51):
You can turn someone ideologically, you can buy somebody off,
you can blackmail somebody.
Speaker 1 (17:58):
It's also in their interest. Ted Cruises and the jdvange
even if whether they believe it or not, they benefit
from it because they're at the top of that pyramid.
Speaker 4 (18:06):
I was at the top of the pyramid. I didn't
have power, but I was being promised my own mansions
and security guards and all the rest. I was twenty
years old, twenty one years old. It was crazy, but
I really couldn't think negative thoughts. It was deemed evil
spirits trying to invade me. So I was taught thought
(18:28):
stopping techniques to shut down any negative thought. And is
it possible that Elon Musk has been radicalized? I think
it is possible. Is it possible JD Vance has been radicalized? Yeah,
I think it's possible.
Speaker 3 (18:45):
I don't know. But my solution is to.
Speaker 4 (18:49):
Teach everyone about the influence continuum, the bite model, let
their family and friends who knew them before learn about it,
and let them interact and ask questions in a respectful
way to get at what's true and what's real.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
Whether it's true or not. There's also the punishment model
as well, so you know, cults obviously involved shunning or exclusion. Right,
So even if you know something's wrong, you still sit
there and think, if I say this and this goes
for religion, and yeah, I'll actually back this up with Trump,
even if you don't believe that the election was stolen
(19:28):
or you see no evidence for it. But the very
fact of you saying that out loud glued you because
it is totally in or totally up, which for a
little bit of both sides. Rism isn't like that. On
the other side, if you're a Democrat and you say, well,
I don't think Biden did that greater job, it's not
the end of you. But if you say I don't
think Trump did a good job, or this is a failure,
(19:50):
then you're out. It's an in or and out sort
of thing.
Speaker 4 (19:52):
It's a spot on and I interviewed David Weisman for
the Cult of Trump, who is a self per first magatroll.
He was an Army vet who would meet and be
sent out to harass libtards and people who were in
the Cult of sorrows, and he had an interaction with
(20:13):
the comedian Sarah Silverman, who instead of just blocking him
or calling him names, she said, I think it was
on Twitter. Oh you are a veteran, thank you for
your service. And he was like shocked that she even
recognized he existed. And he had been harassing her around
(20:34):
gun control stuff because of school shootings, and so she
asked him. She said, so you're a serviceman, what's your
solution to the gun problem where kids are being shot
up at school? And he realized he had never thought.
He doesn't have his own ideas about what would solve it,
(20:55):
but it changed his life because he started questioning it.
And the reason I'm sharing this is to confirm your point, Jerry.
As soon as he started questioning it publicly, everybody turned
on him in the Trump call, he was a pariah,
he was evil, and that confirmed for him there was
something wrong. Very recently, the humanist chaplain at MIT and Harvard,
(21:19):
greb Epstein, just published a book called tech Agnostic, saying
that big tech is now the new world religion and
outing these billionaires' ideologies of transhumanism and long termism and
accelerationism and crypto saying like they want to remake the world,
(21:41):
and I'm an agnostic. I don't believe that's like real,
That's what we should live our lives to go to
Mars and sacrifice humans for future ai androids that will
populate all the galaxies. And I'm with him on.
Speaker 1 (21:59):
That them on that job. So, based on your experience,
what is the best way to help people who want
to leave cults.
Speaker 4 (22:05):
I'm going to first say what you shouldn't do, and
almost everybody does. They try to argue with the person
with fact and persuade them, and they attack the leader
the doctrine or the policy which is guaranteed to reinforce
the cult identity and make them feel like you're persecuting them.
(22:26):
So that's what you'd never want to do.
Speaker 1 (22:28):
Which is what we do on that Pope.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
Yeah, it is, but this we can certainly tell you
it is ineffective.
Speaker 4 (22:33):
Yeah, it's effective for your base who want to listen
to you, but it's not going to help the people
that we're trying to rescue. And what we and what
most people have done with their family and friends who've
gotten into Mega world is block them. Er say, I
never want to talk to you about politics, like we
can meet for Thanksgiving, but we'll talk about sports or whatever.
(22:57):
And for me, that's the biggest thing we could be
doing is training people how to talk with people in
mind control cult respectfully, with curiosity, with active listening. But
the most powerful technique is what was done with me,
is to ask their a question that makes the think
(23:18):
and then follow up with another question, but not from
a I'm right, you're wrong, but I'm just curious how
you make sense of this. Then you can ask them
to go back in time to their first memory of
Donald Trump and they'll say, Oh, I saw him on
the Apprentice. What do you think I thought he was
an asshole. Oh that's interesting, you thought he was an asshole.
(23:40):
So tell me walk me through slowly how you came
to believe he should be president. Help identify in your journey,
because I'd like to step into your shoes and understand it.
But by asking it in a non threatening, non judgmental way,
people feel like you care about them. And I felt
like my father genuinely cared about me as much as
(24:03):
I didn't think he knew anything. That's what helped me
reality tests my own experience because I can tell you
Nobody wants to be in a cult. Nobody wants to
be lied to, exploited, made to do things that are
going to regret for the rest of their lives. And
here's the other technique, talking about other groups, not the group,
(24:25):
you're talking to the person. And what works best for
MAGA is Chinese communist brainwashing and pimps and traffickers. They'll
listen to that.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
And a lot of times when we're dealing with people
from authoritarian governments, the people who eventually end up working
with us as agents. These are people who want to
deprogram themselves from the societies that they're in. Is an
example in North Korean who doesn't buy what everyone else is.
You know, he's desperate for somebody to talk to who
(24:58):
doesn't do that. Quit the opposite, we're often looking for
people who in austhoritarian governments who secretly don't buy into
this and are desperate to get out.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
They want to get out of their cult that they're
already in.
Speaker 4 (25:09):
Yeah, I know, I'm more like recognizing their proxy groups.
The one that comes to mind, and I wrote about
it in Combat and Cult Mind Control was an Iranian
terrorist group called m e K that was based in
Iraq and they were anti Iran, and.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
We don't work with them. In fact, I think the
Israelis do.
Speaker 4 (25:31):
Though, you know, we get into this world of where
the Rand Corporation said, yep, they're a mind control called
but now we're not going to declassify them as a
terrorist group because they're working helps a lot.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
Of actually right wing Republicans like Rudy Giuliani and others
paid by these guys to speak and things like that.
The US government always said they were nuts and mind
control and dangerous. However, some people with political ties, mostly Republicans, frankly,
wish the government to take them off the list. Now
they probably did, but the national security part of the
(26:05):
government are the ones dead.
Speaker 4 (26:08):
More of this after a quick break. What we want
is for people to be invested in a system of
government where they show up the vote and they learn
(26:29):
what the issues are and they aren't just responding to
a social media channel or Sinclair Media because they bought
up the local free presses and such. Anyone who says
you create your own reality, or if it's true for you,
then it's true, it's like no, that's called the delusion
(26:51):
in mental health worlds. If you think you're Jesus. That
doesn't make you Jesus.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
What organizations that we don't normally consider cults nonetheless exhibit
cult like practices. I know you got a list of
what are things that are like, but perhaps maybe not
all the way.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
But let's not mention the Buffalo Bills fan clubs though
those are Oh it.
Speaker 5 (27:13):
Hurts today to the things sports fans are fanatical, but
they are not being lied to, and they're not being
forced to buy tickets or watch games.
Speaker 3 (27:24):
And as they.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
Are being lied to, I mean, we're the best team.
Speaker 3 (27:27):
We're going to win the super Bowl. That's so funny.
Speaker 4 (27:30):
Anyway, A lot of people are in Jehovah's Witnesses and
they don't think of it as an authoritarian mind control cult.
But my books have helped countless people exit and gratefully
from that where they're told that they can't salute the
flag and they can't go into another church because it's evil,
(27:50):
or they can't get a blood transfusion, or they're told
that they can't talk to their own children or family members.
You were saying before, Jerry about shunning, it's more extreme.
I've done a lot of work with the Mormons and
the Latter day Saints with John Delynn, who is excommunicated
for speaking up for gay rights. He's a former sixth
(28:12):
generation Mormon, and I understand that the Mormons are overrepresented
in our intelligence agency, yes, very much, which is concerning
for me because I would like everyone to learn about
brainwashing and cults, and when you have a living profit,
you may have a dual commitment of loyalty to your
(28:34):
profit and not necessarily to the Constitution. I would like
people to learn more about Chinese communists, brainwashing and pimps
and traffickers, sex trafficking and labor trafficking, because it's so
present and people understand that it's wrong and that it's slavery,
because the whole concept of brainwashing is you're creating slaves.
(28:57):
But they say they're happy and they did it on
their own when they didn't. Stevie is the next Mooney.
I found it really interesting how this church is split,
and especially this one element of the church now the
Rod of Iron Church.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
These are guys with gold ear and crowns of bullets
and violence, and yet they're also very much involved in politics.
So I was wondering, can you bring us in and
give us a sense of the Ander relationship or the
overlap of the ven diagram between and then let's just
run with the Rod of Iron group, which of course
(29:33):
Mike Flynn is associated with, not in it, but he's.
Speaker 4 (29:38):
They did this Rod of Iron Freedom Festival that Mike
Flynn was a featured speaker at and some of his people.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
Moon and tell us what the Rod of Iron Church is,
and then how it interacts with Trump World.
Speaker 4 (29:52):
Yeah. I kind of choke when you use the word church.
But so the Moon organization has hundreds of different entities.
When Onia mun died, the two sons who now live
in Pennsylvania, Sean and Justin Moon, co opted I think
a billion or two billion dollars from their mother who
had the main organization, and she was the figure had
(30:15):
taking it over. They battled it out in court and
I guess they lost.
Speaker 3 (30:20):
But there are these two brothers.
Speaker 4 (30:23):
One as a gun factory making ear fifteens and car arms, pistols,
et cetera. That's their company. And the other one, Sean Moon,
has the Rod of Ironministries dot Org. He's called the
King and he has on his website the new Constitution
when they take over the United State, as if the
(30:46):
Christian nationalists are going to let them. And they have
two training compounds, one in Tennessee one near Waco, Texas,
using veterans to train people how to use assault rifles
because they were expecting civil warn.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
What's the connection with right wing political groups. Is it
just this former anti communism thing right?
Speaker 4 (31:07):
Oh, though the Moonies have been right wing anti communist
major players for decades. They were involved with Irancontra and
Colonel North. I should also say The Washington Times has
been outed as the biggest purveyor of climate science denial.
But the movies are very much involved with politics and
(31:29):
wanting to make a theocracy, a one world, hierarchical authoritarian
regime where people are either part of it or they're killed, basically.
And what was so crazy is in the room with
moon when he talked about amending the Constitution and making
it a capital offense, and I thought it made all
(31:50):
the sense in the world because we would be taking
people's physical bodies away from them, sending them to the
spirit world, and we would save them later. Was the
moony mindset.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
My body's not is falling apart from me, So that
might be appealing.
Speaker 4 (32:05):
But it's I don't want your listeners to be just afraid.
I want them to understand. I believe as actually actions
we could be taking today to organize a resistance. But
as soun Su said, know yourself and know your enemy
and understand who's doing what. And we need to create
(32:27):
a strategy that's going to be more than one election
cycle or two or three one that's going to take
decades to rebuild what we want to rebuild and hopefully
make a system where power is has checks and balances
and where human rights and rule of law and the
(32:47):
constitution matters.
Speaker 2 (32:49):
Well. It's almost like biological organisms want to survive and
continue right, they don't want to die out. And one
way that they do that is they take over almost
like pers sites, they take over political organizations. So in
the eighties when I first came into the agency, there
was this organization called the LaRouche Organization.
Speaker 4 (33:11):
Lynday was behind the Cult of Suro saw the disinformation
about it, and Roger Stone was involved with LaRue.
Speaker 2 (33:20):
I didn't know that. And Laruche at the time was
I think he raised over two hundred million dollars, which
is a lot of money, and he was involved in
four thousand political races mostly as a Democrat, but also
as Republicans trying to take it over from the inside.
But another thing they were doing was they were trying
to get their followers into CIA so that they could
(33:43):
generally but that their followers would then acquire information to
give to Lyndon LaRouche to build him up. I'm really
concerned about trump Ism taking over, like the leadership of
the US military, the cultish elements of it, and inside
of CIA and FBI and Justice Department and some of
(34:03):
those things. You say, well, you're not allowed to say
what you think.
Speaker 4 (34:05):
I was literally in the room and Moon said, we
have to infiltrate the US government. We're going to send
people to volunteer for congressmen and senators.
Speaker 3 (34:14):
We're going to run our.
Speaker 4 (34:15):
Own people for me. This is a fifty year playbook
that I'm seeing implemented.
Speaker 2 (34:21):
And we certainly have Tulsea Gibbert who's been involved.
Speaker 1 (34:24):
Yeah, that's what I was going to bring up. Can
you talk about her Science of Identity foundation this, Hari
krishna O, Yes.
Speaker 4 (34:29):
So my understanding is that her family grew up with
Chris Butler, who had a cult, who then became subservient
to Propo pod who started Ari Krishnas and then they left.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
So you're saying the most important thing is people need
to listen to this podcast and read your book and
understand that there are tens of millions of ex cult
members who are not sharing.
Speaker 4 (34:52):
Their story because there's a stigma that people think you're
stupid if you are in a cult. But I'm saying,
share your story. I know there's a lot of very
highly educated, successful people running businesses who have PhDs. Share
your story. Let's normalize this and let's teach people how
to tell the difference, how to ask questions, how to
(35:15):
reality tests. It's not disinformation or critical thinking, it's teaching
people how to reality test.
Speaker 1 (35:22):
Thank you very much, Stephen for spending time with us
fascinating stuff and obviously not just fascinating but critically important
right now in our LISO show. Yeah, great to have
you on.
Speaker 3 (35:31):
Thank you for having me.
Speaker 6 (35:33):
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'Shea, John Seipher,
and Jonathan Sterner. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission
Implausible It's a production of honorable mention and abominable pictures
for iHeart podcasts
Speaker 5 (36:00):
OO
I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'sha. I was a
CIA officer stationed around the world in high threat posts
in Europe, Russia, and in Asia.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East
and in war zones. We sometimes created conspiracies to deceive
our adversaries.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Now we're going to use our expertise to deconstruct conspiracy
theories large and small.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
Could they be true?
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 1 (00:26):
This is mission implausible. Today's guest is Steve Hasten. He's
an author and an expert on the issue of cults.
His latest book is called The Cult of Trump. He's
a former member of the Unification Church, associated with the
Reverend Moon and escape the church and then created a
(00:48):
group to help people leave the church and since then
become a real expert on cults and helping people leave cults.
Speaker 4 (00:53):
Welcome Steve, Thanks John, and I'm an admirer of yours
and all you're speaking out of the many years since
Trump's first election.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
Yeah, I don't know how much good it does, but
it's better than being complicit of.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
That's what I say.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
If you're an admirer of John, you've already sown some
bad judgment here, Stave s.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
But let's go back and start from the beginning. Tell
us about your experience with the Unification Church in the movies.
Speaker 4 (01:18):
I'm gonna just correct you and say, I don't think
it's fair to call them the Unification Church, because when
there was a Congressional subcommittee investigation into CACIA activities in
the US, the investigation said, there are so many front
groups of this group. Unification Church is one of hundreds.
(01:40):
We think it's fairer to call them the moon Organization
or the Moonees.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
And they own one of our newspapers in Washington, d C.
Speaker 4 (01:48):
Washington Times, which the founding editor was from the Council
for National Policy, was put into place. But back to
my story. When I got recruited, it was actually the
same month Patty Hurst got abducted by the Simonese Liberation Army.
It was February of nineteen seventy four. No one had
(02:08):
heard of the Moonies. I certainly didn't. I was a
student at Queen's College and my situational vulnerability was my
girlfriend dumped me abruptly and I was sitting in the
cafeteria waiting for classes to start and three women started
flirting with me. Later I learned it's called honey potting,
but I was just naive. I asked them, are you students, yes,
(02:32):
which was a lie.
Speaker 3 (02:33):
Are you part of a religious group?
Speaker 4 (02:35):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (02:35):
No, not at all.
Speaker 4 (02:36):
But within a few weeks, I was believing the Messiah
was on the earth, that I was selected to help
save the world from Satan. I was Jewish and I
didn't believe in Satan a few weeks earlier, and I
went in this rabbit hole of brainwashing. And I should
say I came from a very stable, normal upbringing. My parents,
(03:00):
ever divorced, didn't have affairs, they didn't drink, they didn't smoke.
We lived in the same house. I was an extra
honor student, and my vulnerability was I thought I was
too smart to ever fall for a scam or for
a cult. And for whatever reason, they selected me, Maybe
because I'm six feet tall and I was smart, I
(03:21):
don't know, but they selected me to be an American leader,
which meant I had no power. But I was a
front person who could recruit and indoctrinate people and be
a good face for the cult. And I was in
meetings with Moon personally, with the other leaders as he
was saying, we're going to infiltrate the government, and God
(03:43):
hates democracy. We're going to put a theocracy into place,
and when we take power, we will amend the constitution
and make it a capital offense if people don't accept
our rules around the mass weddings and the sexual things. Anyway,
I was a true believer, and I was sent to
Washington to fast for three days for Richard Nixon during Watergate,
(04:05):
and I hated Nixon beforehand, but I was like, but
God wants him to be president.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
Dad.
Speaker 4 (04:12):
But my story is I fell asleep at the wheel
of a Moonie van.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
I was sleeping three.
Speaker 4 (04:17):
To four hours a night, normally seven days a week,
but this occasion I fell asleep and woke up as
I drove into the back of a tractor trailer truck
at eighty miles an hour. And after getting Pride out
of the wreckage, having two weeks away from the cult,
sleeping and eating and nursing my wounds, I didn't.
Speaker 3 (04:37):
Have any continuous indoctrination.
Speaker 4 (04:39):
This was way before cell phones got created, but led
to me calling my sister, which led to her telling
my parents, which led to a deprogramming which I was
sure I wasn't brainwashed and I wasn't in a cult.
But my father cried and said, how would you feel
if it was your son who I met a controversial
(05:01):
group and disappeared from your life. Wouldn't you be worried?
And I could see he genuinely cared about me. I
thought he was brainwashed by the Communist media. That was
my mooney mind speaking, But I wanted to prove that
I was thinking, so I agreed to talk to the
ex members and learn about Chinese communist brainwashing, and it
(05:21):
was that that started turning the lights back on in
my mind. The following day was my wake up moment,
where the ex members handed me one of Moon's speeches
to congressmen and senators, and all they did was hand
it to me and say, read this and tell us
what you think. And that formed the basis for forty
nine years of my professional career. That said, the way
(05:44):
to get people out of these groups is not trying
to persuade them they're wrong, ask them what they think,
feed them questions in a respectful way that's strategic, that
gets them back to who they were before the group.
Everything I believe was based on the presupposition he was
the Messiah and he was going to save the planet
(06:06):
Earth from all the mess we're in. And once that
bubble popped, I was like, what happened to my mind?
So now you're meeting me having written four books.
Speaker 3 (06:16):
And I have a PhD.
Speaker 4 (06:18):
And how to use trafficking law to update and apply
to the legal system because it's not a slippery slope.
And my model that I did my dissertation on looks
at behavior control, information control, thought control, and emotional control.
I call it the Byte model of authoritarian control. I
say you can control those four variables. You can control
(06:40):
people's identities and make a pseudo identity that's dependent and
obedient on any person or ideology.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
We use words like culton religion, and there's the old
saw that the difference between the culton and religion is
an IRS ruling. Could you give us a working definition
that we can news for what is a cult or
a sect?
Speaker 4 (07:02):
Say there are cults along the continuum from ethical religious groups,
political groups, fan groups, whatever, all the way to authoritarian
mind control cults. People laugh and say, I'm in a
book called the Cult of Mac as a true believer,
because I only have used Mac since nineteen eighty two,
(07:22):
or I'm in the cult because I've done four teTeX talk,
so I joke about that. But there are groups that
are healthy and you can question them, you can leave
without fear or harassment. They're not remaking your conscience and
your identity. My definition is that it's a pyramid structured
authoritarian regime that uses deceptive recruitment, so no informed consent.
(07:49):
Does it have to be religious correct In my model,
it can be a one on one controlling relationship to
a bad therapist who's making the person dependent on them,
to a large group awareness training program, or a multi
level marketing. It applies to trafficking, sex trafficking, and labor trafficking,
(08:12):
which I call commercial cults, political cults, as I refer
to the cult of Trump, and I believe China is
a mind control authoritarian cult, as is Russia.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
Does it require a charismatic leader.
Speaker 4 (08:26):
No, some of my colleagues say that it does, and
that's not my experience. And there are many cults that
are ideological cults. They're mimetic indoctrination things. And then there
are cults that start with one person. They die and
the group morphs and their beliefs change and their practices change,
(08:49):
but you don't need a living leader. What I learned
starting in nineteen eighty when I started studying hypnosis, and
I should say during the MKO Trump days, I studied
NLP and then I learned Eric Sonian hypnosis. And that's
what I'm seeing everywhere on the internet, and I talk
(09:10):
about it in the book The Cult of Trump that
it appears Tony Robbins has taught Donald Trump some NLP.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
You mentioned mk ultra in the nineteen fifties when there
was such concern that somehow the Soviets had mastered mind
control because some soldiers were coming back from the Korean
War and other places that were saying what we thought
were crazy things and thought that they had been given
drugs that controlled their minds. So the CIA got involved
in experimenting with these things, looking to see if there
was some sort of and it's actually a shameful period.
(09:40):
You can understand why it happened, but so could involve
potentially drugs or some sort of thing like this as well.
Speaker 4 (09:48):
Absolutely, I'm a human rights guy, I'm a license mental
health counselor. So my leane is just I want people
to be healthy, I want them to control their own minds.
I want them to understand that it doesn't just happen
a week stupid, uneducated people, that bright people can have
their minds acted, and that we are wired as human
(10:11):
beings to follow who we think are legitimate leaders, and
we're wired as human beings to conform to people we
identify with. And we know this from the Ash Conformity Study,
the Milgram obedient Study, the Zimbardo prison study. People are
walking around thinking it can never happen to me. I'm
(10:32):
too smart, and it happens to them. They're even more vulnerable.
But on the other side of it is it's not permanent.
And even people born in these authoritarian regimes realize they're
being lied to, they're being exploited, and when they're given
an opportunity to have access to non members and leave
(10:53):
and go somewhere else, they want to come to the US.
They want to leave totalitarian regimes are they're born into
these extremist, authoritarian religious cults, and they realize, I don't
have to believe this. There are phobias that have been
put in my mind to make me dependent and obedience.
But if you use their critical thinking, you can analyze
(11:16):
this is a technique of emotional mind control.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
We'll be right back in a moment. John and I
when we were serving in the Agency, we've served in
authoritarian countries with authoritarian governments. So I was in Zimbabwe
and you would think when you were there that Mugabi
(11:42):
at the time was incredibly popular. They built a cult
around him, his family, his picture, his photograph was everywhere,
the legends that he was involved in during the war
of Independence from Rhodesia. And yet when Mugabi was dethroned
and eventually died, he was immediately forgotten about. And I
were both in Eastern Europe when the Brillin Wall was
(12:03):
starting to come down and people were leaving. So I
was in West Berlin and we were looking at the
East Germans and we would have sworn a month before
the wall came down that the East Germans were loyal,
that they believed in their leader. And yet really within
days millions of people finally said, yeah, we've just been
faking it this whole time. Talking to them afterwards, they
(12:24):
were saying no. At the time, we were sort of
hit two points of two notions at the same time.
We were both loyal and believed, but deep down in
our brain we didn't. So what's your sense of Trump beside?
But of political cults and when they're genuine and when
they're sort of enforced time people.
Speaker 4 (12:45):
You're describing the phenomenon that I have verified for forty
nine years of practice with clients from all types of
political and religious cults. And I should say my mentor
who's helped me get out of the Moonies.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
Robert J.
Speaker 4 (13:03):
Lifton wrote a book called Thought Reform in the Psychology
of Totalism in nineteen sixty one about his interviews with
people coming out of mao's thought reform programs in the
outlined eight criteria. He later wrote a book on the
Nazi doctors, and he described what he called doubling. Before
(13:24):
that book came out, I had described my subjective sense
is that there were two Steves. There was the real Steve,
who was born of Flushing Queens, New York, and then
the Steve, the Mooney, whose parents were moon and his wife.
Speaker 3 (13:39):
And when I got out, it.
Speaker 4 (13:40):
Was like a flip happened, like a switch happens, like
I was still indoctrinated, but the real me took executive control,
or like malware takes over your computer and then you
put software in it and get rid of the malware. Oh,
my operating systems back their key points. And for me
(14:01):
as a human being doing this where people had to survive.
So they had a public face because they didn't want
to be turned into the regime, they didn't want to
get tortured, thrown into jail or worse. But then they
had their private thoughts that was like this is bs
or they said the opposite last week that they're saying today.
(14:23):
And so there's what Lifton called the psychology of the
pawn while you're still in the environment. But once the
environment walls go away and you have access to non
cult people, you start to realize, WHOA, there's a whole
lot of colors. World is not black and white, and
follow the regime or don't. It's oh, there were all
(14:46):
these other options and choices. And so with political cults,
one of my theses in the Cult of Trump is
not only does Trump display the stereotypical cult leader and
I used Eric Frohm's definition malignant narcissist in chapter three,
(15:08):
and I compared Trump with Jim Jones of the People's
Temple and Moon, my former cult leader and Hubbard of scientology.
It is a cult of personality that he has had
his whole life, with his business and people he's work with.
And I should add Eric Frum came up with this
(15:29):
trying to understand Hitler, so that this was not coming
out of thin air. This was post World War two,
and like, how could we describe the mindset of somebody
like this?
Speaker 3 (15:41):
But then when I.
Speaker 4 (15:42):
Started researching it, I realized there were actual authoritarian cults
that comprise the cult of Trump. I talk about a
cult called the Family that's operated in DC for decades.
They do the National Prayer breakfasts, and they like to
recruit Democrats and Republicans to do their bidding. And then
I talk about Opus Day and William Barr was a
(16:04):
member of that. The Russians hacked our counter terrorist Anson
I should add with Opus Day, he was an Opus
Stay member. But there are bigger groups like what is
called the New Apostolic Reformation MEGAS. And these are the
people who say they're Christian, but in terms of their practices,
(16:26):
they claim to be a prophet or an apostle who
can speak directly to God and God told them. Trump
won the twenty twenty election and this is thirty to
forty million Americans who think, because their leader said so,
that Trump is being used by God. He's a king
Cyrus figure.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
I was just in Oklahoma and someone was telling me
a story about a family member who saw a picture
of Trump pulling someone from a flood, clearly a fake picture,
and this person was saying, that's why we need to
support him. He's such a good man and all this
kind of stuff. So there are real believers of this
fake stuff. But clearly these politicians that support him in Washington,
they go to Yale and Harvard and JD. Vance and
(17:09):
all of these guys, they are now saying, oh, the
twenty twenty election was stolen. In January sixth was a
day of love. They know that not to be true.
Can you be part of a cult when in fact
you know you're lying?
Speaker 4 (17:21):
The answer is, I'd have to study case by case,
and most people in a mind control cult, or what
I call fringe members, they really have no clue what
is actually going on inside the group, much less at
the leadership level. And so when people say, do you
think everyone who voted for Trump isn't a cult?
Speaker 3 (17:41):
It's like, how can.
Speaker 4 (17:42):
I say that a lot of people just vote whatever
party their parents voted, what they voted in the past.
Speaker 3 (17:48):
But you know better than most.
Speaker 4 (17:51):
You can turn someone ideologically, you can buy somebody off,
you can blackmail somebody.
Speaker 1 (17:58):
It's also in their interest. Ted Cruises and the jdvange
even if whether they believe it or not, they benefit
from it because they're at the top of that pyramid.
Speaker 4 (18:06):
I was at the top of the pyramid. I didn't
have power, but I was being promised my own mansions
and security guards and all the rest. I was twenty
years old, twenty one years old. It was crazy, but
I really couldn't think negative thoughts. It was deemed evil
spirits trying to invade me. So I was taught thought
(18:28):
stopping techniques to shut down any negative thought. And is
it possible that Elon Musk has been radicalized? I think
it is possible. Is it possible JD Vance has been radicalized? Yeah,
I think it's possible.
Speaker 3 (18:45):
I don't know. But my solution is to.
Speaker 4 (18:49):
Teach everyone about the influence continuum, the bite model, let
their family and friends who knew them before learn about it,
and let them interact and ask questions in a respectful
way to get at what's true and what's real.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
Whether it's true or not. There's also the punishment model
as well, so you know, cults obviously involved shunning or exclusion. Right,
So even if you know something's wrong, you still sit
there and think, if I say this and this goes
for religion, and yeah, I'll actually back this up with Trump,
even if you don't believe that the election was stolen
(19:28):
or you see no evidence for it. But the very
fact of you saying that out loud glued you because
it is totally in or totally up, which for a
little bit of both sides. Rism isn't like that. On
the other side, if you're a Democrat and you say, well,
I don't think Biden did that greater job, it's not
the end of you. But if you say I don't
think Trump did a good job, or this is a failure,
(19:50):
then you're out. It's an in or and out sort
of thing.
Speaker 4 (19:52):
It's a spot on and I interviewed David Weisman for
the Cult of Trump, who is a self per first magatroll.
He was an Army vet who would meet and be
sent out to harass libtards and people who were in
the Cult of sorrows, and he had an interaction with
(20:13):
the comedian Sarah Silverman, who instead of just blocking him
or calling him names, she said, I think it was
on Twitter. Oh you are a veteran, thank you for
your service. And he was like shocked that she even
recognized he existed. And he had been harassing her around
(20:34):
gun control stuff because of school shootings, and so she
asked him. She said, so you're a serviceman, what's your
solution to the gun problem where kids are being shot
up at school? And he realized he had never thought.
He doesn't have his own ideas about what would solve it,
(20:55):
but it changed his life because he started questioning it.
And the reason I'm sharing this is to confirm your point, Jerry.
As soon as he started questioning it publicly, everybody turned
on him in the Trump call, he was a pariah,
he was evil, and that confirmed for him there was
something wrong. Very recently, the humanist chaplain at MIT and Harvard,
(21:19):
greb Epstein, just published a book called tech Agnostic, saying
that big tech is now the new world religion and
outing these billionaires' ideologies of transhumanism and long termism and
accelerationism and crypto saying like they want to remake the world,
(21:41):
and I'm an agnostic. I don't believe that's like real,
That's what we should live our lives to go to
Mars and sacrifice humans for future ai androids that will
populate all the galaxies. And I'm with him on.
Speaker 1 (21:59):
That them on that job. So, based on your experience,
what is the best way to help people who want
to leave cults.
Speaker 4 (22:05):
I'm going to first say what you shouldn't do, and
almost everybody does. They try to argue with the person
with fact and persuade them, and they attack the leader
the doctrine or the policy which is guaranteed to reinforce
the cult identity and make them feel like you're persecuting them.
(22:26):
So that's what you'd never want to do.
Speaker 1 (22:28):
Which is what we do on that Pope.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
Yeah, it is, but this we can certainly tell you
it is ineffective.
Speaker 4 (22:33):
Yeah, it's effective for your base who want to listen
to you, but it's not going to help the people
that we're trying to rescue. And what we and what
most people have done with their family and friends who've
gotten into Mega world is block them. Er say, I
never want to talk to you about politics, like we
can meet for Thanksgiving, but we'll talk about sports or whatever.
(22:57):
And for me, that's the biggest thing we could be
doing is training people how to talk with people in
mind control cult respectfully, with curiosity, with active listening. But
the most powerful technique is what was done with me,
is to ask their a question that makes the think
(23:18):
and then follow up with another question, but not from
a I'm right, you're wrong, but I'm just curious how
you make sense of this. Then you can ask them
to go back in time to their first memory of
Donald Trump and they'll say, Oh, I saw him on
the Apprentice. What do you think I thought he was
an asshole. Oh that's interesting, you thought he was an asshole.
(23:40):
So tell me walk me through slowly how you came
to believe he should be president. Help identify in your journey,
because I'd like to step into your shoes and understand it.
But by asking it in a non threatening, non judgmental way,
people feel like you care about them. And I felt
like my father genuinely cared about me as much as
(24:03):
I didn't think he knew anything. That's what helped me
reality tests my own experience because I can tell you
Nobody wants to be in a cult. Nobody wants to
be lied to, exploited, made to do things that are
going to regret for the rest of their lives. And
here's the other technique, talking about other groups, not the group,
(24:25):
you're talking to the person. And what works best for
MAGA is Chinese communist brainwashing and pimps and traffickers. They'll
listen to that.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
And a lot of times when we're dealing with people
from authoritarian governments, the people who eventually end up working
with us as agents. These are people who want to
deprogram themselves from the societies that they're in. Is an
example in North Korean who doesn't buy what everyone else is.
You know, he's desperate for somebody to talk to who
(24:58):
doesn't do that. Quit the opposite, we're often looking for
people who in austhoritarian governments who secretly don't buy into
this and are desperate to get out.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
They want to get out of their cult that they're
already in.
Speaker 4 (25:09):
Yeah, I know, I'm more like recognizing their proxy groups.
The one that comes to mind, and I wrote about
it in Combat and Cult Mind Control was an Iranian
terrorist group called m e K that was based in
Iraq and they were anti Iran, and.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
We don't work with them. In fact, I think the
Israelis do.
Speaker 4 (25:31):
Though, you know, we get into this world of where
the Rand Corporation said, yep, they're a mind control called
but now we're not going to declassify them as a
terrorist group because they're working helps a lot.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
Of actually right wing Republicans like Rudy Giuliani and others
paid by these guys to speak and things like that.
The US government always said they were nuts and mind
control and dangerous. However, some people with political ties, mostly Republicans, frankly,
wish the government to take them off the list. Now
they probably did, but the national security part of the
(26:05):
government are the ones dead.
Speaker 4 (26:08):
More of this after a quick break. What we want
is for people to be invested in a system of
government where they show up the vote and they learn
(26:29):
what the issues are and they aren't just responding to
a social media channel or Sinclair Media because they bought
up the local free presses and such. Anyone who says
you create your own reality, or if it's true for you,
then it's true, it's like no, that's called the delusion
(26:51):
in mental health worlds. If you think you're Jesus. That
doesn't make you Jesus.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
What organizations that we don't normally consider cults nonetheless exhibit
cult like practices. I know you got a list of
what are things that are like, but perhaps maybe not
all the way.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
But let's not mention the Buffalo Bills fan clubs though
those are Oh it.
Speaker 5 (27:13):
Hurts today to the things sports fans are fanatical, but
they are not being lied to, and they're not being
forced to buy tickets or watch games.
Speaker 3 (27:24):
And as they.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
Are being lied to, I mean, we're the best team.
Speaker 3 (27:27):
We're going to win the super Bowl. That's so funny.
Speaker 4 (27:30):
Anyway, A lot of people are in Jehovah's Witnesses and
they don't think of it as an authoritarian mind control cult.
But my books have helped countless people exit and gratefully
from that where they're told that they can't salute the
flag and they can't go into another church because it's evil,
(27:50):
or they can't get a blood transfusion, or they're told
that they can't talk to their own children or family members.
You were saying before, Jerry about shunning, it's more extreme.
I've done a lot of work with the Mormons and
the Latter day Saints with John Delynn, who is excommunicated
for speaking up for gay rights. He's a former sixth
(28:12):
generation Mormon, and I understand that the Mormons are overrepresented
in our intelligence agency, yes, very much, which is concerning
for me because I would like everyone to learn about
brainwashing and cults, and when you have a living profit,
you may have a dual commitment of loyalty to your
(28:34):
profit and not necessarily to the Constitution. I would like
people to learn more about Chinese communists, brainwashing and pimps
and traffickers, sex trafficking and labor trafficking, because it's so
present and people understand that it's wrong and that it's slavery,
because the whole concept of brainwashing is you're creating slaves.
(28:57):
But they say they're happy and they did it on
their own when they didn't. Stevie is the next Mooney.
I found it really interesting how this church is split,
and especially this one element of the church now the
Rod of Iron Church.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
These are guys with gold ear and crowns of bullets
and violence, and yet they're also very much involved in politics.
So I was wondering, can you bring us in and
give us a sense of the Ander relationship or the
overlap of the ven diagram between and then let's just
run with the Rod of Iron group, which of course
(29:33):
Mike Flynn is associated with, not in it, but he's.
Speaker 4 (29:38):
They did this Rod of Iron Freedom Festival that Mike
Flynn was a featured speaker at and some of his people.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
Moon and tell us what the Rod of Iron Church is,
and then how it interacts with Trump World.
Speaker 4 (29:52):
Yeah. I kind of choke when you use the word church.
But so the Moon organization has hundreds of different entities.
When Onia mun died, the two sons who now live
in Pennsylvania, Sean and Justin Moon, co opted I think
a billion or two billion dollars from their mother who
had the main organization, and she was the figure had
(30:15):
taking it over. They battled it out in court and
I guess they lost.
Speaker 3 (30:20):
But there are these two brothers.
Speaker 4 (30:23):
One as a gun factory making ear fifteens and car arms, pistols,
et cetera. That's their company. And the other one, Sean Moon,
has the Rod of Ironministries dot Org. He's called the
King and he has on his website the new Constitution
when they take over the United State, as if the
(30:46):
Christian nationalists are going to let them. And they have
two training compounds, one in Tennessee one near Waco, Texas,
using veterans to train people how to use assault rifles
because they were expecting civil warn.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
What's the connection with right wing political groups. Is it
just this former anti communism thing right?
Speaker 4 (31:07):
Oh, though the Moonies have been right wing anti communist
major players for decades. They were involved with Irancontra and
Colonel North. I should also say The Washington Times has
been outed as the biggest purveyor of climate science denial.
But the movies are very much involved with politics and
(31:29):
wanting to make a theocracy, a one world, hierarchical authoritarian
regime where people are either part of it or they're killed, basically.
And what was so crazy is in the room with
moon when he talked about amending the Constitution and making
it a capital offense, and I thought it made all
(31:50):
the sense in the world because we would be taking
people's physical bodies away from them, sending them to the
spirit world, and we would save them later. Was the
moony mindset.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
My body's not is falling apart from me, So that
might be appealing.
Speaker 4 (32:05):
But it's I don't want your listeners to be just afraid.
I want them to understand. I believe as actually actions
we could be taking today to organize a resistance. But
as soun Su said, know yourself and know your enemy
and understand who's doing what. And we need to create
(32:27):
a strategy that's going to be more than one election
cycle or two or three one that's going to take
decades to rebuild what we want to rebuild and hopefully
make a system where power is has checks and balances
and where human rights and rule of law and the
(32:47):
constitution matters.
Speaker 2 (32:49):
Well. It's almost like biological organisms want to survive and
continue right, they don't want to die out. And one
way that they do that is they take over almost
like pers sites, they take over political organizations. So in
the eighties when I first came into the agency, there
was this organization called the LaRouche Organization.
Speaker 4 (33:11):
Lynday was behind the Cult of Suro saw the disinformation
about it, and Roger Stone was involved with LaRue.
Speaker 2 (33:20):
I didn't know that. And Laruche at the time was
I think he raised over two hundred million dollars, which
is a lot of money, and he was involved in
four thousand political races mostly as a Democrat, but also
as Republicans trying to take it over from the inside.
But another thing they were doing was they were trying
to get their followers into CIA so that they could
(33:43):
generally but that their followers would then acquire information to
give to Lyndon LaRouche to build him up. I'm really
concerned about trump Ism taking over, like the leadership of
the US military, the cultish elements of it, and inside
of CIA and FBI and Justice Department and some of
(34:03):
those things. You say, well, you're not allowed to say
what you think.
Speaker 4 (34:05):
I was literally in the room and Moon said, we
have to infiltrate the US government. We're going to send
people to volunteer for congressmen and senators.
Speaker 3 (34:14):
We're going to run our.
Speaker 4 (34:15):
Own people for me. This is a fifty year playbook
that I'm seeing implemented.
Speaker 2 (34:21):
And we certainly have Tulsea Gibbert who's been involved.
Speaker 1 (34:24):
Yeah, that's what I was going to bring up. Can
you talk about her Science of Identity foundation this, Hari
krishna O, Yes.
Speaker 4 (34:29):
So my understanding is that her family grew up with
Chris Butler, who had a cult, who then became subservient
to Propo pod who started Ari Krishnas and then they left.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
So you're saying the most important thing is people need
to listen to this podcast and read your book and
understand that there are tens of millions of ex cult
members who are not sharing.
Speaker 4 (34:52):
Their story because there's a stigma that people think you're
stupid if you are in a cult. But I'm saying,
share your story. I know there's a lot of very
highly educated, successful people running businesses who have PhDs. Share
your story. Let's normalize this and let's teach people how
to tell the difference, how to ask questions, how to
(35:15):
reality tests. It's not disinformation or critical thinking, it's teaching
people how to reality test.
Speaker 1 (35:22):
Thank you very much, Stephen for spending time with us
fascinating stuff and obviously not just fascinating but critically important
right now in our LISO show. Yeah, great to have
you on.
Speaker 3 (35:31):
Thank you for having me.
Speaker 6 (35:33):
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'Shea, John Seipher,
and Jonathan Sterner. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission
Implausible It's a production of honorable mention and abominable pictures
for iHeart podcasts
Speaker 5 (36:00):
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Hosts And Creators
Adam Davidson
John Sipher
Jerry O'Shea
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