# The Religious Right's Tactics Haven't Changed in 2,000 Years

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Genetically Modified Skeptic
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gf0xhf0GYc0
- **Источник:** https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/41338

## Транскрипт

### Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00) []

There's a chapter in your book, I believe it's the longest one, called the Jonestown Death Tape. I probably should not have listened to this in the middle of the night before I was about to go to sleep because it was incredibly disturbing. But I will say that the thing that struck me the most about this is a I should say a transcript of a uh a tape recording of Jim Jones addressing his congregation just before they endearing them taking the flavor. uh rather than Kool-Aid. Something that struck me is Jones is not ultraarticulate. He is just speaking in half concocted thoughts and in sentences and phrases. And there are elements there of him scaring people like saying that there are armed gunmen that are just 20 minutes away or something like this. But I suppose I had always thought that Jim Jones must have put on this incredible flawless performance of charisma in order to get people to not just drink flavor aid themselves that was poisoned, but also inject their own children with things like this. But that just wasn't true. He got up there and spoke and rambled and the whole thing happened anyway, — right? and he was on quite a lot of speed and other drugs at that point. And I mean without kind of belittling the gravity of the situation, he sounds a little bit like, you know, droopy dog or something like this, right? He can't speak properly because the muscles in his mouth are too relaxed. So I talked about how brainwashing doesn't really mean anything and high control group is sort of this nebulous term. — The word charisma is also a kind of nebulous meaningless term. And yet sociologists still use it, right? In fact, some of the defenders of brainwashing have said, "Well, if you people can talk about charisma, why can't I talk about brainwashing? " It's actually a fair point. So, we're used to thinking of charisma, especially if you've ever played Dungeons and Dragons, of just a score. Some people have a lot of charisma and little of it. Uh, but it works in every situation. And we know from studies of charisma that is not how charisma actually works at all. So, Barack Obama, very charismatic president. Donald Trump very charismatic president. Half the country hates these two people. Yeah. Right. So it's not about a high charisma score. It's about a special relationship that a charismatic leader has with their followers. And one thing that happens in um so-called cult violence is I think charismatic leaders are very aware of this. They say if I make one false move uh everybody will see I'm just some guy. — I'm just some guy yelling about the the Bible. I'm not actually a messiah. prophet or anything like this. And so certain leaders, and I would put David Kesh and Jim Jones in this category, will do literally anything to maintain their charisma, their charismatic authority to keep the followers from seeing them as just an ordinary person. And I think the reason that Jonestown happened, that this massacre happened, is um 20 members said that they wanted to go home with Leo Ryan's uh party. Congressman Leo Ryan came out to visit and was killed. 20 people out of a thousand is not very many. But I think as far as Jim Jones was concerned, he said, "Well, it's 20 day today, it's going to be 100 tomorrow. That's it. I've lost the community. And if I can't have this community, nobody will. " So, so to your comments, I think what happened in Jonestown happened not because Jim Jones had this iron grip of mind control over his followers. It was actually quite the opposite. It was because his grip was very tenuous and he knew that he could lose it at any moment. — Yeah. I suppose if he could actually control them, their every action, every thought, he could have just kept everybody alive. The fact that he did force people to go through this, you know, revolutionary suicide, he called it, was a symptom of his lack of control of them, — right? I mean, even had nothing happened at Jonestown, the community was never sustainable. Yeah. uh they they did not have enough able-bodied people to grow enough food to feed a thousand people. Uh they did not have enough money for this community to last. So it was going to end sometime soon. And the leaders knew this and the leaders had already discussed, you know, how are we going to end this on our own terms where this doesn't all feel uh like a massive defeat. But yes, if he had mind control over his followers uh when they said, I'm ready to leave. I want to go uh home with Leo Ryan, he could have just said, no, you don't want to leave. you like it here, right? Right. You want to stay here. It's because he doesn't have mind control that he can't do stuff like that and he has to resort to tactics like killing a congressman or making everyone commit revolutionary suicide. [snorts] — Okay. In your book, The Penguin Book of Cults, which I'll just say the only thing I didn't like about it is that it didn't have penguins in it. There were

### Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00) [5:00]

no penguins. Uh that's the publisher. But in your book, you talk about uh this thing called media mania. meomomania and this was from the late 19th century, right? Can you kind of take me into that chapter of the book? What's meomomania? — Sure. So, for this book, uh, a lot of the sources that we used had to be things that were in the public domain, uh, because of the way that Penguin Classics, uh, works. But one of the things I wanted to do was to show that long before this term brainwashing is coined in the 1950s, there was a long history of people medicalizing other people's religious choices and framing them not as a choice but as uh some kind of contagion or illness. Uh and so in the 19th century there was a lot of new religions were emerging in the United States. Things like um Mormonism, the Church of Latter-day Saints, uh and spiritualism. Spiritualism was um uh people holding seances and believing that they could talk to the dead. And this uh was a movement that in the 1800 was very closely tied with women's suffrage and other kind of progressive uh movements. And women had a lot of power to speak in spiritualist churches because it was believed that women were sort of naturally uh better mediums and better able to talk to the dead. So I found an article about this by a guy named Dr. Marvin, who was a professor of psychological medicine, and his take on why these women in the 1800s are not staying at home raising children and cooking dinner for their husbands, enjoying these weird new religions, uh, is because their womb has been tilted at a funny angle. [snorts] And if your womb gets tilted at a funny angle, it could cause you to become interested in socialism. um, interested in the Latter-day Saints. He says and for many women uh this is causing them to become mediums and he calls this medium mania. So he comes up with this kind of medicalized uh term for these um these experiences that women are having. And I think most people if they read Dr. Barn's treatis today would say well this is kind of misogynistic dre. This is not science. This is not medicine. Uh but I would argue that we're still kind of making the same moves today with new cultural trends that we don't like and we want to medicalize. There is a group that I find extremely concerning which plans to spread to every high school in my state of Texas and Governor Greg Abbott has announced that the state plans to partner with this group Turning Point USA to make this happen. About 50 sources have reported on this story and while right-leaning sources emphasized that Governor Abbott's announcement was major, centerleing sources emphasize that Abbott threatens state action against any school which resists the installation of a Turning Point chapter. Seeing that difference in coverage is a valuable insight into the story. I was able to see that disparity in coverage at a glance because I found this story on Ground News, an independent app and website I use every day in my real life, recommend to my friends in real life, and have partnered with for years now. Their platform organizes every published perspective on an issue in one place with data on each outlet's political bias, credibility, and financial incentives. I use their Vantage plan, and you can get 40% off that plan by going to ground. news/skeepic. Left-leaning outlets haven't covered this story much, but fortunately, Ground News has a great feature called their blind spot feed, which is dedicated to surfacing important stories that are being completely ignored by one side of the political spectrum or another. So, left-leaning ground news users like me stand a way better chance of seeing important stories like this than we would without ground news. So, get ground news to keep your news blind spot in check. Go to ground. news/skeepic or scan the QR code on your screen. There you can get the same Vantage plan I use every day for just $5 a month. Taking advantage of these tools is a great step to reading the news skeptically and staying properly informed. By signing up, you support my sponsor, which in turn supports my channel. So, thank you. Pathizing Devian goes back a very long way. There's a chapter in your book called the Orlion Heresy of I believe it's 1100 or so. Can you tell me about that story and how like pathizing or medicalizing devian plays into that? — Yeah, so this happened in France in uh 1100. Uh and by this point Europe was Catholic and other versions of Christianity were considered heresy. And this was the first case where heretics were actually burnt at the stake for heresy. And this was all recorded in Latin. I actually tapped my colleague Jacob Doss who's a medievalist to translate uh the Latin. So, we had an original translation for the book. Uh, but these two priests are involved in some deviant form of Christianity. We're not exactly sure what. Uh, possibly they were Cathars or something like this. Um, but they are basically their group is infiltrated. Uh, someone says that they want to join and then once he's heard enough, uh, reports them to the king and has them arrested and they are tortured.

### Segment 3 (10:00 - 15:00) [10:00]

And then they give these confessions where they say, "Well, actually, we're not just a different version of Christianity with different doctrines. We actually have sex with demons and we give birth to demon babies and we kill them and we burn the babies to ashes and then we're made to eat the ash. " And this is where it gets interesting is they say, uh, if you are fed this ash, you're just a heretic forever. You lose your free will. You can't be a proper Christian. You have to be a heretic. And if you put yourself in their position, it's pretty clear why they're telling a story. They're being tortured, right? They're looking for a way out. of saying, "Yes, I'm a heretic, but I'm not really responsible for this. " And these kinds of stories became fairly common in heresy trials. People saying, "The heretics have some kind of black magic, some of control they can use. " And that's why there are different religions in Europe, and that's why not all people are Catholic. It's not that anybody would willingly choose a religion uh other than uh the Catholic Church. So, it's not medicalization, but it's basically the same thing. In this case, it's magic instead of a an information disease. Uh but the enemy has some type of magic, some type of mind control, and that's the only reason why anybody would ever disagree with us about these things. In the documentation of this, isn't there a lot of terminology like uh the heretics vomited out heresy and they were infected with heresy rather than describing it in a more realistic way. These people came to think that this heresy was legitimate. — Yeah. So it's interesting. We don't think of 1100 as a century with a lot of you know medical science, right? Or a lot of hygiene. But it is telling that the language that they use, they are still comparing heresy to a disease and they're using the language of kind of bodily functions of excretion and revulsion and sickening uh to talk about what is really just a different idea about Jesus. Simply the nature of Jesus is framed in terms of a plague. The way that the folks in 1100 talked about this heresy actually does remind me a lot of how the CIA talked about GIS, you know, writing essays in favor of communism. They clearly could never have become anti- capitalists. They had to be infected with some kind of special germ or be uh manipulated with some kind of very elaborate and ancient uh dark magic or technique of psychological mind control brainwashing. Is it is it kind of the same thing? — Yeah. I think we see a straight line from I joined the wrong religion because I was fed magical demon ashes to this woman became a spiritualist because she was riding a horse or something and her womb got tilted slightly to the left and now she's a spiritualist to you've been infected with uh an information disease or you know Chinese communist mind control magic to you got the woke mind virus. Yeah, — I think it's a straight shot going for thousands of years. Something I noticed about the book is that there were a lot of instances of things that go back pretty far that are really familiar. Like one thing that you talked about was that early Christians were seen as consorting with kind of evil spirits doing dark rights maybe even underground using the blood of children to do nefarious things. being evil in ways that would creep anybody out. But then you talk about how later Christians themselves accused other Christians of doing all of the same things. And then even later than that, Christians in high church scenarios accused heretics of doing the same thing. And now I see people whether they're Christian or secular, a lot of them are accusing like LGBT people or Muslims or kind of anybody they don't like of doing a lot of the same things. Like how far back does it go to speak in the way that we do now about cults or they're doing evil stuff underground? They're using children's blood. Like why is this repeating? — Right. So the first incident that we cover in the book um goes back to the days of the Roman Republic. Uh and it's about the Bakanalia which were followers of Dianisis, the god of wine. And we don't know what the rights of this particular religion actually were. And at some point they certainly probably did involve orgies and possibly even, you know, hallucinogens or things like that. But if you look at what the Republic is saying about this group, they're saying they have bizarre uh sex orgies. They're killing children. They are corrupting the youth, especially the young Roman men who we need to serve in

### Segment 4 (15:00 - 20:00) [15:00]

our uh military. They're being corrupted with the vices and the seductions of of this group. And they have these giant underground catacombs full of prisoners that are equal in population to the size of Rome. And — I'm sorry, this just sounds like Qanon. — It sounds exactly like KQanon, right? And this is before the rise of Christianity. Uh and so the republic at this time was a very democratic organization. there wasn't a lot of centralized power and they said we have to give uh the Senate much more power to sanction religion and to control what kinds of religious rituals and groups and cults are allowed uh and we have to go and arrest people who are part of this kind of evil group. So most historians today would say um this was a power grab, right? whatever the the the Bakanalia was, it wasn't like it was just this hideous revelation as it's described that they had known about it for a long time. And there's sort of an idea of what can we do to kind of justify this power grab. Let's exaggerate the Bakania. Let's tell people this thing that they already think is kind of weird is way worse than it actually is. And so those tropes that you see there of evil rituals, hurting children, weird sex stuff, right? Those are the same things that we see uh Romans accusing the Christians about, that we see Christians accusing Jews and heretics and Satanists about, and they're the same things that Tom Hanks has been accused of and sort of modern Qanon conspiracy theories. So unfortunately, what this leads me to conclude is that we may be hardwired to tell these kinds of stories, to make up these claims that there's people who walk among us, they seem nice, they seem like everybody else, but actually in secret and very close to where we are at this moment, they're doing the worst things you could possibly ever imagine. — Yeah. H with the hard wiring of this. I mean, what does this make you think about this current moment where we're doing the same thing at the highest levels of power in the world? — It is a way of uh proposing that the way things are currently organized, that the social order as it currently exists is the only legitimate way that things could ever be. Because the argument is our enemies are so nightmarishly evil. The people trying to undermine us from within uh are so diametrically opposed to basic values such as for example we would save the life of a baby they would kill a baby. Right? If our enemies are that evil then we must be on the side of the angels. And the way that things are right now must be the only acceptable way for them to be. So throughout history, these kinds of conspiracy theories and claims about the other are a way of kind of cementing power and silencing disscent. You don't want to question me because then you're on the side of the cultists. I mean, is this kind of conspiracism overcome? Is the paranoia snuffed out at any point? I mean clearly we've had good periods of history since uh the Romans were persecuting people for the Bakanalia right how does this cycle stop so witch hunts always end right somehow uh somehow people kind of come to their uh senses I think what often happens though is in the wake of these things there is a kind of selective forgetting uh so the Salem witch trials for example did not last very long at all a little bit over a And afterwards there was a realization by this Puritan community that we made a mistake. And they said things like it felt at the time as if we were walking through clouds, which I think is very telling. So we have these purges, these moments where we get very excited about some group that we perceive as a threat. We often do terrible things to combat the challenge and then we very often we sort of uh forget that it ever happened, which is deeply disturbing. And I think this is why it's very important that historians pay attention to things like the satanic panic and witch hunting and so forth so that we can better understand the moment that we're in right now. — Now, I had never heard of this guy before, but there was something that you called the uh vegetarian messiah of what was this? — Oh boy. This was uh I think his name is William Dorl. And this was in I think western Massachusetts in New England. — Yeah. And the thing that struck me about this story is that this guy claimed to be invincible, impervious to any sort of harm. And let's just say the opposite was uh was illustrated rather decisively. Can you take me through that story? — Sure. So, this is a largely forgotten uh group uh from the 1700s in New England, but this guy uh William Doral

### Segment 5 (20:00 - 25:00) [20:00]

said that he was the messiah of his age. Uh he said that most of the Bible was actually wrong. That only he knew what the Bible actually meant. That everyone had to be vegetarian. Uh that you couldn't even use leather, that you had to have, you know, wooden shoes and things like this. And he started to acquire followers. And at one point he said, um, "Nothing can harm me. I'm invincible. I'm the Messiah. " And uh one kind of brrawy New Englander just walked up to the front of the service and just punched him in the face and then went down. He punched him again on the ground. The guy finally said, "Okay, I give up. I'm not invincible. " Right. — Oh, wow. — And so that was kind of the end of his group. This goes back to this concept of charisma, right? The followers said, "Wow, he just got beat up. Uh I guess he's not really the Messiah after all. " And that was kind of the end uh of his group. Uh and he lived a long time uh after that. And at one point he said, "Well, I actually really am the Messiah. " But he kind of went back and forth on was he just tricking people or was he uh serious about this. Uh but the way this was recorded by kind of local uh journalists in New England was kind of told as you know — you know hoay for the town bully basically beating up the the cult leader. But at the same time I think you know that's that can't be a practice that we have of just walking into the church of any religion you don't like and punching the leader in the face to see what happens. Uh, so it's an interesting kind of forgotten story that we were able to include. — I think the guy probably should have been like he probably should have left out that particular claim because the most famous Messiah claim is about a guy who was quite brutally killed. So it occurs to me that maybe it just would have been better for him to say, "Yeah, I'm the Messiah. Like, please don't kill this Messiah also. " Right. — Right. I mean, he also said that uh, you know, large parts of the Bible were wrong. So, maybe he felt that was one of the things that was an inaccuracy recorded in the Gospels. I I don't know. He may have also been illiterate. Some of the reports said that his wife was reading the Bible to him and that was where most of his biblical knowledge came from. — Interesting. Okay, let's talk about brainwashing. I was a bit surprised to read in the book that brainwashing itself may be a term of propaganda or is in this kind of cycle of demonizing the other. Can you tell me about the origins of the term brainwashing? — Sure. So, it comes from a term in Confucianism which originally had this sense of you cleansing your heart, right? sort of looking w within and trying to develop a better character and be a better person. And under the Mao regime in China, this term was used to kind of uh promote becoming more loyal to the state. All right? So, it was used for propaganda purposes and urging people to, you know, cleanse your heart of anything that makes you question your loyalty uh to the government and to the Chinese people. And then at one point they said, "Well, we shouldn't say cleanse your heart because that sounds kind of archaic and superstitious. We should say cleanse your brain, right? That's that's more up-to-date and scientific. " Uh, and so Edward Hunter of the CIA kind of took this term and ran with it and said brainwashing. They're brainwashing us. And he had an article in the Miami News kind of introducing this term uh to the world. Now, if you actually read the article, he's describing how he's talked to people who have escaped China and how they were being brainwashed. It's pretty clear that what is happening to them is just garden variety harassment, right? So, the government will come and say, "We need you to pay us this much money. " And they'll say, "Well, I don't have it. " And they'll say, "That's fine. " And they'll come back at 2 in the morning and say, "How about now? Don't you want to contribute the money now? Aren't you patriotic? " And eventually, uh the person will give in and say, "Yes. " That is not some kind of magical technique of mind control. That is simply coercion. And that's actually just presenting someone with a bad choice. Right? You want to pay us money or you want to be harassed for the rest of your life. Very often the things that we attribute to brainwashing are actually simple coercion. Uh people are using their free will to make a choice but they've been put in a situation where they don't have any good options uh uh left. Right? Uh but nevertheless, brainwashing became the framework through which uh America interpreted affiliation with weird religions, particularly because this was depicted in the film The Manurion Candidate. That film really introduced everybody to the concept of brainwashing. And then it became popular because if your family member was making a choice that you didn't agree with, — um it was very appealing to think, well, they actually never did make that choice. Someone else did this to my loved one. someone made them like this. — Yeah, I have to say I've experienced a bit of that. I won't go into to detail

### Segment 6 (25:00 - 30:00) [25:00]

but there was a long years long period of my life where I uh I very much thought that there was some kind of for lack of a better term almost like magic spell u or deep technology that was mysterious to me that was used on my own loved ones to get them to support something that ended up being quite nefarious and made them lose a lot of And uh it was really difficult for me to eventually come to realize that no my family was capable of making these decisions if placed in a circumstance where yeah I guess they didn't necessarily have better options you know and it's difficult to see your family like that as people who are capable of making choices that from the outside divorce first from the context seem crazy uh but nonetheless can be made by probably just about anybody if put in the right situation. Right? So it's you know it's not too hard to sort of put yourself in Elon Musk's head and imagine why he would prefer to think I don't have a transdaughter. I have a child who's been infected with this virus. Uh, and it's not so different from someone who says, "Well, my uncle didn't really want to ruin Thanksgiving by, you know, saying a bunch of racist slogans, right? He must have been brainwashed by Fox News. That's not my uncle. " And it's interesting. It's uh two different sides of the political spectrum, but it's both someone trying to say, — uh, my family member isn't really making choices that I disagree with, right? Something did this to them. — Yeah. There's some terms that people who criticize, for lack of a better term, cults online like to use. I just want to be upfront about this. I have used all of these terms and I now am trying to find a better way to talk about groups that I don't think are particularly good or healthy. So, I want to talk about a few terms that are like have a lot of uh cache in the online anti-cult space. The first one is undue influence. Is undue influence a scholarly or academic term? Like what do you think about this term? Because I know that I've used it a lot. — Yeah. In sociology and the study of new religious movements, this is not really a valid term. Undo influence uh to me just seems to be a new term for brainwashing. Uh so during the cult wars there were experts in brainwashing and you could say uh the Harry Krishna brainwashed my child and you could hire an expert who would get a big um a big consultant fee to come in and say yes I'm an expert on brainwashing and yes this person was the victim of brainwashing. Uh eventually the American Psychological Association said, "We do not recognize this as a thing, right? This is not scientific because this does not actually explain behavior. This simply is a label. " And so this was this huge defeat for the brainwashing argument in court. So now they've stopped calling it brainwashing. They started calling it other things. But what this really means is it is some kind of nefarious technique or secret to controlling people's brains uh that we don't quite know what it is, right? Uh but it has all of the problems uh that brainwashing has ever had of being imprecise. Uh not clear how it works or when it's even happening. Uh but delegitimizing somebody else's uh choices and behavior. — Okay. Cult. Is this even something that's used in academic uh environments to describe a group or is this just like a rhetorically powerful word? — Generally no. Okay. So, so cult it comes from um uh the Latin uh cultist which is related to our word cultivates, right? So, um I think Cicero talked about cultist Diorum, the care of the gods, right? So, originally cult just meant any sort of organized worship and occasionally is still used that way. So, like when Catholics talk about the cult of the saints, they don't mean we have brainwashed people into honoring the saints. They just mean we have these traditions. that's part of our our church uh uh culture, right? So, cult eventually it it came to mean just sort of religions that we don't like or religions that are bad. There are a few sociologists who do use the term cult, but they use it in a very precise way and they use it very differently from the way that most people use the word. So, for example, uh Rodney Stark said, "Uh, well, you have a church, a sect, and a cult. A church is mainstream. It's open to everybody. A

### Segment 7 (30:00 - 35:00) [30:00]

sect is not mainstream and most people are not going to be allowed to join. It's very kind of exclusive. Uh and a cult is open to everybody. They would like everybody to join, but they're not mainstream yet. They're still kind of marginalized. So, he would say, "When I'm doing a study, this group would be um a cult for the purpose of my study. This group would be a sect, and church. " Sociologists do this all the time. They break groups up into categories and they call them ideal types to emphasize. I'm not saying it actually is a cult. I'm treating it that way to set up a comparison, right? Um, but most sociologists today have said the word cult, it's just broken now, right? [clears throat] Regardless of what I mean by it, when people hear cult, they have these overwhelming negative associations with it and so we have to retire it. Kathy Wessinger is a colleague of mine and she's an expert on the Waco siege in which um you know dozens and dozens of people were killed including children and in hindsight it was pretty obvious that it was uh the government had overreached with Waco that they had used a level of force that was uh not necessary and uh got kids killed. Why did they do this? Kathy Wesners suggested that one reason is they kept referring to the Branch Devidians as the cultists and it's a dehumanizing term and that likely led to the FBI's tactical team to forget these are American women and children, right? These [clears throat] these are civilians. They came to see them as simply cultists. So Kathy Wessinger has been very um uh outspoken. The word cult actually gets people killed. It's a dangerous word to use. — Okay. What about high control group? I've heard this a lot, especially on the kind of anti-cult podcast, some of which I've been on, and I like those kinds of podcasts. I thought this was a more academic term. Uh, but I think that I've recently learned from some of your work that maybe not so much. — Yeah, I delved into this term high control group or sometimes it's called high demand group um or high control high demand group. Uh, and this goes through also this process of reification. So it actually begins in the 1970s with a sociologist uh saying I'm interested that the most growth I'm seeing right now in the 70s um in religion is not with these mainstream churches. It's with these new churches that uh expect a lot of time and buyin uh from uh other members. Why are those growing? Because you would think if you were shopping for religion, you would pick kind of a more relaxed one that's not asking as much from you, right? Um, and so he says, "So these groups I'm going to label as high control groups. By high control groups, I mean the following things, and these are examples of what I am talking about. " And he writes a book about why high control groups are more appealing to people in the 1970s. So he was using this term as an ideal type. Then it got reified. Uh, and Ted Patrick had a hand in this. So he did an interview where he was asked about high control groups. And so this came to be just used as a euphemism for the types of groups that Ted Patrick would go after. But after any group if parents of a member of the group were willing to hire him to go after it, right? And so it gradually becomes um just a replacement for the word cult. And I actually even found an article in the International Cultic Studies Association journal. cultic studies is sort of the mirror image to my field of new religious movements. So, we're interested in uh understanding the culture and history of these groups a bit better and they're interested in protecting people from abuse by religious groups. They need to be cults. And they actually said uh we can't go to people and tell them you're in a cult because then they won't leave. So, what's a better term that we could use? And they do a survey of this, right? uh and they say, "Well, we're not going to call them new religious movements because these things are just not religions, and that would honor them too much to use that that word, right? " Um, and so they end up saying, "Well, we're going to call them high control groups, right? That's the better term that we're going to use to replace the word cult. " But then especially in therapeutic context where people are talking about their religious trauma, uh the term mutates even further and it tends to be just any group that you don't like or that you felt traumatized by. So I found one example of somebody said, "Well, I was in a high control group because in my church they made me get baptized, right? " Well, okay. I mean, for that particular person, being baptized was not an experience that they feel good about. and they maybe discussed hellfire or other things like that. But generally speaking, if a church that requires its members to get baptized is a high control group, then they're all high control groups. So now this is a fairly meaningless uh uh term. And ironically, what I think we've finally started to get to is we have people finally saying, "Well, I think all religions are cults. "

### Segment 8 (35:00 - 40:00) [35:00]

And I think sociologists of religion would say, "Yes, exactly right. That's what we've been saying. You have to at least be consistent. — So, all religions are cults in the way of they're all groups of people, but not necessarily saying all religions are cults in the way that people often use the word cult to just say religion plus bad. Like, it's saying all religions are cults is not saying all religions are bad necessarily. — I think that people would say all religions are cults. There's two reasons you would say that, right? So, someone like Kathy Wessinger would say, "Yeah, cults are just religions. religions are cults or cults are baby religions. Yeah. — Right. All religions start out as cults until they make it into the mainstream. The other people now saying this I think would be saying well actually I think all religions are toxic uh social institutions, right? And I would say that is at least um consistent, right? that is at least a critique of the nature and function of religion in general as opposed to just saying well some religions are bad for reasons that I don't really care to uh articulate out loud. — What about the word delusion in the atheist world? The word delusion really started to be used very popularly after the 2006 Richard Dawkins book the God delusion. And uh I think it's continued to be somewhat popular from there to describe religious ideas that one thinks are bad. Although there are a lot of people who just say all religious ideas or all ideas that are not true are delusions. What do you think about the word? — Yeah, I think the term delusion is a particularly medicalized term, right? It's a term that we associate with the mentally ill and with the DSM. Um you Sigman Freud wrote a book about religion called the future of an illusion where he used the word illusion to basically signify the truth claims of religion are not true. There is no heaven. and there is no immortal soul, there's no God. But he didn't actually medicalize it in that way, right? And he did say this is sort of it's natural. It's understandable why human beings are sort of drawn to these types uh of ideas. The other thing I would say is there are lots of things that are important ideas that people live by that we don't have any scientific evidence for that we would probably not label as delusions. For example, human rights. You either believe there's such a thing as human rights or you don't. Um, at certain points the Chinese Communist Party have said, uh, the West just made up this whole human rights thing once our economy got good, right? What is the scientific evidence for these human rights that you speak of? They kind of have a point. I don't have a rebuttal to their demand for evidence that human rights exist. I simply accept that such a thing I exists. It's how I see the universe. Does that make it a delusion? I think most people would say not. So I think uh once again we use this term to medicalize ideas that we disagree with and ideas that we think are good. We give them a mulligan on it. — Yeah. All right. Mind control. This is a word that or a phrase that Steve Hassan uses a lot. I think the bite model is often even described as something or a tool to be used to combat cult mind control. What do you think? Yeah, I don't think mind control is real or at least not in the way that it's described. I think there are ways to control behavior certainly. Um we can't actually see thoughts and beliefs. So it's hard to know. Um and in fact people who have left groups like Jonestown have said um yeah I would be in church services and I would be um uh smiling and clapping and inside I would think I hate this. This is so horrible. So their mind isn't controlled, their behavior is controlled. And then later they would talk to people and they would say, "Yeah, I hated it too. " Right? But we were all doing it. So I do think we need models to understand these types of group uh dynamics and the kind of behavior. But to call it mind control is highly misleading and I think makes it harder for us to understand why things like Jonestown happen instead of easier. At the journal that I edited, I work with Rebecca Moore. Rebecca Moore's two sisters died at Jonestown and were involved in planning um the final events that that took place there. And she's written an essay saying uh my sisters were not mind controlled. They made choices. They had agency. And she proposes instead of thinking about this in terms of brainwashing and mind control um to look at uh conversion, conditioning, and coercion, the three C's. So coercion uh at Jonestown when people were being administered poison flavor aid was not Kool-Aid. Uh you know first of all they were lied to. They were said the CIA and mercenaries will be here any second they'll torture our children. Well simply lying to someone is not mind control. That's just tricking them. Also they were armed gunmen. Right. So there was they were led to believe if you do not cooperate with this you will simply be shot. And then there are reports that

### Segment 9 (40:00 - 45:00) [40:00]

many people did not drink this concoction at all, that they were forcibly injected with it. So that's that's coercion, right? Um and then you have conditioning. Uh so Jim Jones would often um give people drinks and then say, "I just poisoned you. You have minutes to live. " And then later say it was a test, right? Um so that is a way of kind it's not mind control. It is creating experiences that are going to affect the decisions that people make in in the future, right? And finally, conversion. Rebecca Moore points out sometimes people really do adopt a different view of the world. They really do join a new religion or a new political ideology. And we have to respect their autonomy as human beings enough to say sometimes that is simply the choice that they make. If you believe in free will, then you have to believe that sometimes people will make choices that you do not care for. Something that has struck me as I've dug more into religious studies and especially your book, The Penguin Book of Cults, is that really seemingly extreme and absurd behaviors can find their cause in very mundane circumstances or mundane means of coercion, of influence. And I think that I have had a view of I guess cult mind control for a long time that's just kind of made me feel more comfortable. You know, there's something really devious out there, something really extreme, something really extravagant, um extremely sophisticated techniques that can strip a person of their agency entirely and kind of reprogram them. And now I realize that it's maybe a little bit less comforting to realize that just the human mind, human culture is capable of an infinite diversity of rather absurd and wild things that can be done with that. But, uh, I think that is a conclusion that I hope I've come to for the better because to me it seems like not just, for lack of a better term, cults can be dangerous, but kind of cult hunting, anti-cult activities can be incredibly dangerous as well. — Yeah. I mean, that's the deep irony is that we often end up replicating all of the awful coercive things that the so-called cults are doing in the name of fighting the cults. And someone like Ted Patrick is the perfect example of that, right? To basically admit, well, I have to imprison these people and brainwash them because it's the only way to get them back to the way that they were uh uh before they are that they were brainwashed themselves. So, yeah, there's a constant danger of this. And I think this is also why we need to be very critical about diagnosing why these kinds of toxic social patterns uh emerge. And we need to have peer review. It's okay to have subjective experiences as a place to begin, but that's not how new knowledge is created. We have to actually have people kind of look at this stuff critically, see if it can be replicated, see if we can find um some kind of quantitative or statistical data to back it up and then we can begin to come up with actual explanations and then perhaps finally interventions that could be made. But I think that if we try to solve these things based on our gut and our gut instinct, uh, our gut instinct is coming from a place of fear and revulsion. And so it's unlikely that we're going to come up with solutions that actually make things better. I think it's more likely we'll make them worse. — This brings me to think about deprogrammers. I know that in the 70s there was a guy named Ted, what was his last name? — Ted Patrick. Ted Patrick who could be hired by I mean let's face it probably more wealthy parents to actually go and abduct kids out of the Hari Krishna or some other group uh bring them to a hotel or a basement like tie them up maybe and leave them for several days uh and interrogate them quite brutally at times. There are still deprogrammers around today that are kind of inspired by this approach, even if they might take it a little bit more softly than Ted did. What do you think about deprogramming? I mean, given that brainwashing maybe is not a very salient concept, is deprogramming at that point something that we need to look at with a lot of suspicion? — I mean, yes. I mean, the deprogramming movement was deeply ironic and that Ted Patrick's conclusion was this is brainwashing. This is exactly what the CIA warned us about. But his solution to this was more brainwashing, right? I'm going to brainwash them back to how they used to be. Uh, and of course, they often did not, you know, care to be brainwashed by Ted Patrick. So he would often have to uh physically abduct people and in fact he acquired the nickname black lightning

### Segment 10 (45:00 - 50:00) [45:00]

uh for uh sort of rushing into uh places like Harry Krishna ashrams uh finding uh an adolescent whose parents had commission the deprogramming and often doing things like you know and this is from his book uh karate kicking them in the groin and then putting handcuffs on them and throwing them in his trunk uh and then they would be taken to some place like a basement or a hotel room and often he would do things like physically restrain them, tie them to a chair for example and say um you know here is a picture of your guru from your ashum if you spit on it I'll untie one of your hands and give you a glass of water things like this and ironically these were exactly the same techniques that were used uh on American PS during the Korean War right an essay about the evils of communism and we'll give you a blanket in your cell. Uh — evils of capitalism. — Yes. Yeah. Write an essay about the evils of capitalism and the benefits of communism and we'll give you a blanket or we'll make you more uh uh comfortable. Right. Um and eventually courts ruled actually this is kidnapping. This is false imprisonment. These things are crimes. Uh but usually in sentencing, Ted Patrick would get a pretty light sentence because a judge would say, "You did break the law, but I understand why parents would commission these actions and we're trying to do the right thing. " Uh and so forth. So this went on for a long time. Today, deprogrammers are more likely to call themselves exit counselors and they're more likely to do things like interventions, assembling the family, and try to convince uh someone to leave a dangerous religion. That's not illegal. But there are still people who basically this is their um their occupation. They are basically still deprogrammers for hire. — Okay. I don't know if this is a particularly good question, but I got to ask. If you want somebody to leave a group that is controlling and potentially dangerous, uh what do you do? Is there like a morally um acceptable way to do this? And can it really even be done with some sort of formula of coercion like maybe the deprogrammers think? — Well, I have to have a disclaimer here, right? Which is this is not my my area of expertise. I'm trained to study culture and history. But I would start by saying you can't do anything illegal, right? The ends do not justify the means. You can't uh restrain people. you can't uh abduct them. Um beyond that though, I think that it is a good idea to uh maintain friendships with people who've made choices that you don't agree with, right? To say, you know, you've really gotten sucked into this thing and I kind of hate to see you like this, but just no, I'm always here, right? If you ever decide you want to you want out of this, come here. Because what we do a lot, I think, is we say, "Well, how could you be associated with this? I'm downing you. I'm unfriending you or I don't ever want to hear from you again and I don't want my friends to know that I I'm friends with somebody like you. Uh if you do that, you are reducing that person's options, right? You are creating a situation where they look around and they say, "Well, I'm in this toxic group. I've got nothing and nobody waiting for me outside the toxic group, so I guess I'll just stay here. " So, I think it is helpful to kind of be a bridge or a helping hand when they choose to take advantage of it. — Yeah. that I think dubtales pretty nicely into the way that I have talked about having conversations with people on the other side of things. There are some pretty scary political ideologies that are out there that have a lot of power and influence at the moment. And what I have said is instead of just trying to argue with these people all the time, instead of trying to debate them into a different position, I think it might be a better approach to build the kind of social and educational infrastructure necessary so that if a person decides to put one foot out of kind of a dangerous group or ideology, they have a place where they can actually put that foot. They can uh have a place to land, so to speak. If someone is in, let's just say they're deep into MAGA and they're really getting into QAnon stuff and I guess they love the old Margie Taylor Green, then they need to be able to see, okay, if I got out of this, then there would be a place that I could go where I could have social connections, where people would care about me a lot, where maybe there's some mutual aid that could be done instead of, you know, thinking of the place that they're in right now as the only place where they could possibly actually even get any social connection. So sure, have discussions and arguments and stuff with people that are in maybe more harmful

### Segment 11 (50:00 - 52:00) [50:00]

groups or ideologies that has to be done at some point. But if you're not creating a solid place for those people to land if they decide to agree with you post discussion, then what's the point? — Yeah. When I talk about the kinds of patterns that people often perceive as brainwashing, you know, with my students, one thing I talk about is when you join a gym, you can't just pay your gym dues every month. They have a contract so that you're locked in for a year, right? So, you have the freedom to not go to the gym anymore, but they've created a situation where your choices are now limited, right? There's this inertia to break away uh and just join uh some other gym. The kinds of control that you see in toxic groups is often more like that than some kind of brainwashing. Right? If you've been in uh a toxic controversial religious group for 20 years and you don't know anyone outside the group and your resume just says I was a cult member for 20 years, right? You don't have a lot of good options. So if you're trying to help these people, you need to always think of am I giving them a better option if they choose to leave or am I actually contributing to that dynamic where there's this tremendous inertia to leave because they don't know anybody uh on the outside or another way that their life could possibly be. — Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for watching. You can get the Penguin Book of Cults wherever books are sold. I recommend the audio book. It's great. And if you want more of this interview, there's a whole section on anti-cult psychologist Steve Hassan and Elon Musk's belief in the woke mind virus. It's available exclusively on my Patreon link in the description. Okay, a special thanks to my patrons for their constant love and support. And praise be unto our Lady River, my top patron and the official savior of this channel. If you want to support my work, subscribe and check out the religious studies courses I produce with Dr. Joseph Lake attached to the video below. As always, if you are an apostate in need, there are resources linked in the description to help you find community and mental health support. Remember to be kind to others in the comments. And until next time, stay skeptical.