Cults, Culture & Coercion with Dr. Steve Hassan

Cults, Culture & Coercion with Dr. Steve Hassan

Steven Hassan, PhD, is one of the leading experts on cults and undue influence in the world. A former member of the right-wing Moonie cult, Hassan was deprogrammed 45 years ago and has dedicated his life to helping people out of cults and destructive situations. Dr. Hassan is a licensed mental health professional and has written four books, including The Cult of Trump and the seminal book Combating Cult Mind Control. On this podcast, Steve will explain HOW mind-control works, and how to protect yourself from its grips. He will also address ethical influence as the podcast will address the entire Influence Continuum. He’ll interview the biggest names in this field.

Episodes

Escaping the Moonies, and Rebuilding his Life: Ingo Michehl gave the cult his flute, his country, and six years of his life

August 17, 2026 • 61 mins
Ingo Michehl spent six and a half years as one of the Moonies' most productive fundraisers, selling laser-etched foil pictures out of a Ford Transit van at a twenty-fold markup, sleeping five hours a night, and believing every dollar liberated God's suffering heart. Recruited off a San Francisco street corner at nineteen while visiting America from Germany, he came out the other side with a master's in counseling psychology and a c...
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Escaping Shincheonji, Korea's Covid Cult with Chris Vishoot: A survivor of the Korean doomsday cult on lies, waking up and helping others break free.

August 10, 2026 • 63 mins
Shincheonji recruits through what looks like an ordinary Bible study, and most people who walk through the door have no idea that it is a destructive cult. Chris Vishoot found out only after three and a half years as a devoted member. In 2018, a woman he met on a dating app invited him to what she called an innocent class on scripture. Within a year he was driving an hour each way to an unmarked building in Seattle, sleeping three ...
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The World Mission Society Church of God (WMSCOG) with Anthony Forte: A decade inside the Korean doomsday cult WMSCOG, an arranged marriage, and the exit that followed

August 3, 2026 • 62 mins
Anthony Forte spent more than ten years inside the World Mission Society Church of God, rising from a new recruit stopped on a Queens, NY, sidewalk to a leader who trained others to recruit the way he had been recruited. He joined at 25, during a stretch of his life when he felt behind everyone around him. He stayed through an arranged marriage. He left only after the research he did during the pandemic exposed cracks in a doctrine...
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6,000 Images and No Idea It Was a Crime: Clinical psychologist Dr. Mary Riggs Cohen on why autistic people become both the victims and the unwitting offenders of the online world

July 27, 2026 • 62 mins
A person on the autism spectrum leaves a file-sharing program running overnight because they want cartoons or anime. By morning, thousands of images have downloaded onto their hard drive, some of them child sexual abuse material they never chose and, in some cases, never even opened. Months later, the FBI is at the door. A judge stares at the download count and asks how anyone could not understand what they were doing. My guest Dr...
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God, Law, and the Cult of Power: Marci Hamilton on what it will take to restore the rule of law in an era of authoritarian religion

July 20, 2026 • 64 mins
The First Amendment gives you an absolute right to believe whatever you want. It has never given you the right to act on those beliefs in ways that harm others. That distinction, simple as it sounds, is the one that the religious right has spent decades trying to erase, and it is the distinction that Professor Marci A. Hamilton has spent her entire career defending. Marci is a Professor of Practice in Political Science and a Non-R...
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She Spent $115K in a Wellness MLM with Brandie Hadfield: A new mom, an autistic baby, and a decade lost to a commercial cult

July 13, 2026 • 62 mins
A wellness MLM does not announce itself as a cult. It arrives as a smoothie recipe, a flyer of smiling mothers, and a promise of working from home while you take your health back. My recent guest on Cults, Culture & Coercion, Brandie Hadfield, lived inside one for a decade. She is a Registered Psychotherapist  and co-founder of the peer support nonprofit Flipping the Pyramid, and she spent roughly ten years selling supplem...
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Crypto Is Buying Your Democracy: Molly White breaks down meme coins, stablecoins, Bitcoins, the shadow financial system, and the $200 million campaign to gut your consumer protections

July 6, 2026 • 58 mins
I have been saying for years that cryptocurrency has the structure of a multi-level marketing scheme: a small number of people at the top make enormous sums, while large numbers of ordinary people are recruited to invest, almost always lose money, and then recruit more people. Molly is an independent researcher and writer who covers cryptocurrency and the broader technology industry. She writes the newsletter Citation Needed (citat...
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What the Watchtower Doesn’t Want You to Know with Australian whistleblower Lara Kaput: Child labor, financial fraud, and eight types of modern slavery inside the Jehovah’s Witnesses

June 29, 2026 • 69 mins
When Lara Kaput was eight years old, she was required to clean bricks on Jehovah’s Witness building sites. She helped her father road-build on the church construction projects. She did cleaning, and gardening, and her childhood friends did this, and cleaning child-minding too. None of it paid, none very little of it optional. She did not recognize it as child labor at the time. Most children raised inside authoritarian groups...
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Russian Disinformation From the Ground in Ukraine With Journalist Chris Sampson: An American journalist in Ukraine on active measures, AI pollution, and bottom-up resistance

June 22, 2026 • 68 mins
Russian disinformation no longer feels like a foreign problem you read about in long articles. It shapes what you see when you open your phone, what your relatives believe about a war they have never visited, and what large language models tell you when you ask a sincere question about world events. My guest this week on Cults, Culture & Coercion, Chris Sampson, journalist, terrorism analyst, and extremism researcher, publisher...
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What Detransition Taught Me About Identity: Alexander Linkowski on his detransition journey, informed consent, and the illusion of self

June 15, 2026 • 70 mins
Detransitioning, a term for stopping, shifting, or reversing an initial gender transition, is a word that has been stripped of its human meaning by the political forces fighting over it. Last week, I shared my interview with Dr. Kinnon Ross MacKinnon, a trans researcher at York University whose landmark DARE study surveyed 957 people who had detransitioned. MacKinnon’s data show that the detransitioners he interviewed are not...
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The War on Trans Healthcare Is Not About Science What a study of 957 detransitioners revealed, and why Washington gets it wrong, with Dr. Kinnon Ross MacKinnon

June 8, 2026 • 65 mins
Trans healthcare is an evolving discussion, and the implications greatly affect those in the LGBTQ+ community. At its heart, this is a conversation about the science meant to inform transition-related healthcare care, and what happens when politics deliberately distorts it. On March 31, 2026, The Supreme Court handed down an 8-to-1 ruling that conversion therapy, a practice every major medical and mental health organization has co...
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He Was Ordained by the Mormon Prophet: Former Mormon Bishop Ian Wilks on 37 years inside the LDS authoritarian cult

June 1, 2026 • 64 mins
Ian Wilks was a high-ranking leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He is a former bishop, a former branch president, and a member of the stake presidency in British Columbia, with responsibility for shepherding twelve congregations and thousands of members. Then-apostle Dallin H. Oaks, now the 18th president and living prophet of the LDS Church, personally recruited him, interviewed him, called him, set him apa...
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Smart People Fall For The Cult Of Trump With Journalist Virginia Heffernan

May 25, 2026 • 69 mins
From Richard Dawkins to Larry Summers, brilliant minds get pulled in. I sat down with the journalist Virginia Heffernan for a recent conversation on Cults, Culture & Coercion to talk about who falls for the Trump cult and why. Virginia spent time inside a group of academics and intellectuals sponsored by Jeffrey Epstein, called Edge, run by literary agent John Brockman. She wrote about involvement in the Epstein cult for The N...
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He Was 18. Scientology Put Him in Charge. A former Scientology executive in Scotland on recruitment, control, and getting out with Amir Essalhi

May 18, 2026 • 61 mins
Scientology recruitment rarely looks the way people imagine. There is no shadowy figure pulling you into a back room. The process is warm, and, for a curious young person, entirely easy to be “handled” and sucked in. Amir Essalhi was 18 years old and studying film when he first walked into the Edinburgh organization in late 2022. He had never heard of Hubbard. He did not know who David Miscavige was. He knew one thing: ...
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Why filmmaker Deeyah Khan sits with extremists demonstrating how listening matters!

May 11, 2026 • 66 mins
She Sought Out the People Who Threatened Her Deeyah Khan was editing a film when the BBC called. The threats were serious enough the police were already on their way. “Stay where you are,” they told her. “If there are windows in the room, move to a different one. Wait for us.” She had given an interview saying Britain would never be all white again. White supremacist sites in the United States picked it up ...
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The Cult That Helped Shape Christian America: The Community of Jesus child abuse and Christian Nationalism with Ewan Whyte

May 4, 2026 • 54 mins
The Community of Jesus was founded in 1970 by two housewives, Cay Anderson and Judy Sorensen. They told members they were "God's anointed" with a direct line to God. Any authority figure they appointed carried that same divine authority. Members were taught to obey without questioning the leadership’s authority. I spoke with former member and award-nominated writer Ewan Whyte. His fifth book, Mothers of Invention: Essays on t...
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The Missionary Kids: Unmasking the Myths of White Evangelicalism with Holly Berkley Fletcher PhD

April 27, 2026 • 66 mins
Missionary kids often carry the weight of their parents’ choices. They are inculcated into the faith without opportunity for independent thought, according to author, historian, and former intelligence analyst Holly Berkley Fletcher, PhD. Her parents were Evangelical Christian missionaries in Kenya, and she speaks about that and the experiences of other children with similar backgrounds through her book, The Missionary Kids: ...
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The Olive Leaf Network: Public Testimony to the Parliament of Victoria on Children in Cults and High-demand Religious Groups with Psychologist Maria Esguerra

April 20, 2026 • 61 mins
As the United States remains stalled on full disclosure and holding Epstein file perpetrators accountable, the Parliament of Victoria, Australia, has launched an inquiry into the recruitment methods and societal impacts of cults and organized fringe groups. Maria Esguerra is one of the directors of The Olive Leaf Network who testified and presented a written submission at the public hearing of this inquiry in November 2025, alongs...
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American Dominion: The Rise and Radicalization of a New Christendom with Keri Ladner, PhD

April 13, 2026 • 62 mins
Tracing the roots of Christian Nationalism and the New Apostolic Reformation is no longer a fringe concern. It has become one of the most urgent forces reshaping American political life, and most people still do not understand where it came from, how it operates, or what it ultimately wants. Keri Ladner, PhD, does. A scholar of fundamentalist politics, she has spent years tracing the theological roots of movements like the New Apos...
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Holy Disobedience: Sex, Sin, and Secrets in the Biggest Church No One Knows with Melissa Duge Spiers

April 6, 2026 • 54 mins
Melissa Duge Spiers was raised as a several generations Seventh-day Adventist. It wasn’t until years later, when she discovered information about her father, who had been both a youth pastor within the Adventist church and a Loma Linda-educated doctor, that Melissa would be called to deconstruct her entire relationship with the organization. “In my early middle age, I found out that my father, during his youth Co-foun...
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