Cults, Culture & Coercion with Dr. Steve Hassan

Social identity, or how the portion of our identity we derive from participating in our social groups can expand our mind or limit our ability to embrace complexity and nuance. Why should this matter to someone who has never joined a cult? Because every one of us moves through families, workplaces, political communities, faiths, fandoms, and online networks. We are constantly being influenced, day in and day out, by every single pe...

Carlos Castaneda sold more than 10 million books to readers who thought they were buying anthropology. Real fieldwork. A real Yaqui shaman named Don Juan, teaching a real Westerner how to see. None of it happened. Castaneda made it up, and for years almost nobody in the press called him on it.

I read all of those books as a teenager. Grew up on them, the way a lot of people my age did, right alongside Kung Fu reruns and books about ...

A family court judge can reach into your family, single you out by name, and rearrange your life by dinnertime: where your child sleeps tonight, whether you're allowed to see them, whether you're even permitted to raise a concern about your spouse. Karen Winner told me that in the opening minutes of our conversation, and it's the line I keep coming back to. Winner is a journalist turned attorney and the author of Divorced from Just...

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...

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 ...

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...

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....

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-Re...

 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 s...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 con...

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...

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 Ne...

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: ...

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 a...

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...