Cults, Culture & Coercion with Dr. Steve Hassan

MeidasTouch Network
MeidasTouch Network
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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.

  1. 3d ago

    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

    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-Resident Senior Fellow in the Program for Research on Religion at the University of Pennsylvania, where she specializes in constitutional law. Marci is an intellectual leader against extreme religious liberty. She is the founder of CHILD USA, a nonprofit academic think tank dedicated to protecting children from abuse and neglect, and a leading national expert on clergy sex abuse and child sex abuse statutes of limitation, which she ran for a decade. The core argument of God vs. the Gavel is one that sounds obvious until you see how hard it is to actually enforce: religious organizations, like every other institution, must obey the law. No mandatory exemption. No special carve-out because a leader claims divine authority. Marci put it plainly: the very first free exercise case in United States history established that belief is absolute, but conduct is not. Conduct can harm others, and a functioning democracy does not allow anyone to use religion as a shield against accountability for harm. The cases that matter, she told me, are always about harm. Psychological harm is real. You only need to sit with a child sex abuse survivor once to understand that. This is a most important conversation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

  2. Jul 13

    She Spent $115K in a Wellness MLM with Brandie Hadfield: A new mom, an autistic baby, and a decade lost to a commercial cult

    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 supplements for a wellness MLM before she understood she had been recruited into a commercial cult. Brandie was a new mother in 2011, isolated and exhausted, when the pitch found her. I invite you to notice how ordinary the entry point was, because the same machinery now drives coaching programs, prosperity preaching, and the speculative frenzy around cryptocurrency, which I consider a form of multi-level marketing. A small group sells the dream, recruits everyone else to buy in, and the people at the top profit while almost everyone below them loses money. Her recruitment began with a parenting book by a famous pediatrician and a home-based coaching certification. She paid for the courses, the workbooks, and the materials. Then a package arrived in the mail from the pediatrician’s daughter, inviting her into the MLM the family sat near the top of. Brandie saw it later for what it was. A funnel. She is intelligent, devoted, and the kind of employee who gives more than anyone asks. Recruiters prize those traits. Her ADHD, undiagnosed at the time, sharpened her focus into something the group put to use. “My kind of tunnel vision and focus and tenacity, which can be a beautiful aspect of having ADHD, was really exploited,” she told me. Brandie was a mother with undiagnosed ADHD raising a son later identified as autistic. Isolation, a hunger for belonging, and a tendency to commit fully to a mission left her exposed. Her graduate research examined narcissistic leadership in commercial cults and its impact on neurodivergent people, and it filled a gap she had felt firsthand. She wants to help others now. A fascinating interview. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

  3. Jul 6

    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

    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 (citationneeded.news), runs the ongoing tracker Web3 Is Going Just Great, and operates influence.citationneeded.news , which is being relaunched as Tech Influence Watch to cover both crypto and AI campaign spending.  The crypto industry emerged as a serious political force starting around 2024. Fairshake, the largest cryptocurrency super PAC, raised over $200 million in the 2024 election cycle, making it the top-funded super PAC in the country, surpassing even the MAGA super PAC (OpenSecrets data, via multiple sources including Axios and CoinDesk). As of early 2026, Fairshake has $193 million in cash on hand for the 2026 midterms. The industry’s goal was explicit: remove legislators viewed as threats to crypto interests, install legislators who would promote them. Over a dozen enforcement actions against cryptocurrency companies were dropped almost immediately after the 2024 election. Get a grasp on the issue of crypto with this illuminating interview. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

  4. Jun 29

    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

    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 do not. That is how it works. I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Lara on Cults, Culture & Coercion, and what she brought to this conversation is the kind of ground-level, decade-long investigative knowledge that is genuinely rare. Lara is a prominent Australian activist and whistleblower, a co-founder of the advocacy group Say Sorry (saysorry.org), and a former vice president of the Secular Association of New South Wales. For nine years she has provided testimony and submissions to governments, law enforcement, and royal commissions across approximately 10 countries, specifically concerning the Watchtower Society, theone of the legal names for the organization known publicly as the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Lara has made approximately 30 or more submissions to governments across roughly 10 countries around the globe. The allegations she has documented and reported fall into several categories, and she was careful throughout our conversation to frame these as allegations, as the matters are either under investigation or have not yet been adjudicated. They include: aiding and abetting child sexual abuse, high rates of domestic violence, intentional contract breaches, document forgery, evidence and records destruction, interference with members’ democratic rights, phoenixing of businesses (the deliberate voluntary dissolution of one company to restart another, shedding liabilities while preserving assets and customers), multi-billion-dollar global property liquidation she alleges constitutes financial fraud, modern slavery, and manipulation of privacy law, and perverting the course of justice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

  5. Jun 22

    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

    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 of The Wiretap, has spent more than four years reporting from Ukraine. He wakes up to drones and missiles, then opens his laptop to read online claims about the country he lives in describing a place he does not recognize. Few people are positioned to explain this gap with the precision he brings. He sorts Russian information into three streams: state propaganda, general pro-Kremlin bloggers, and military-security bloggers. The third stream sometimes fractures, and analysts who watch carefully see fissures open. Living in Ukraine has given Chris a daily lesson in cognitive dissonance, the discomfort a person feels when they hold two contradictory beliefs and resolve it by changing one of them. He walks through a Ukrainian city the morning after Russian drones strike it, then opens a feed full of Russian disinformation claiming the strikes never happened or accusing Ukrainians of staging them. The flood of falsehoods is the point. Putin and the KGB long ago refined what researchers call the firehose of falsehood, in which an overwhelming volume of contradictory claims exhausts your ability to sort signal from noise. He warned me about a newer escalation. Russia has been seeding pseudo-academic papers and propaganda articles into the training data of large language models. Ask one of the major AI tools a sincere question about the war or about the kidnapped Ukrainian children, and the model has been trained on material with Russian framing baked in. Chris named Kateryna Rashevska, a leading Ukrainian expert on the abducted children, as one of those raising the alarm about academic-looking papers planted to muddy the legal and historical record. This is active measures, the Russian intelligence tradition of psychological and information warfare, applied to a new generation of tools. The mechanism is brainwashing, the systematic use of deception, repetition, and emotional manipulation to shape what a person believes. The kidnapped children case is one of the most painful expressions of this doctrine.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

  6. Jun 15

    What Detransition Taught Me About Identity: Alexander Linkowski on his detransition journey, informed consent, and the illusion of self

    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 a single monolith with identical motivations, but rather four distinct groups with distinct sets of needs. Despite this emerging research, the Trump administration now attempts to justify banning care for everyone, a flagrant distortion of what the science shows we should do to support those who are both transgender and those who wish to detransition. During our discussions, MacKinnon recommended I speak with Alexander Linkowski, whom he described as a thoughtful voice from inside the detransition experience. Alexander is a 32-year-old philosopher, transhumanist, and YouTuber based in Norway. He lived as a trans woman for approximately three years before detransitioning and is currently completing a book on detransition and identity. He realized he was neurodiverse. Alexander’s story is not political ammunition for either side. It is one person’s vulnerable story, told with honesty and philosophical depth, and it deserves to be heard on its own terms. Alexander grew up in Poland, a deeply conservative Catholic country where 1950s ideals of masculinity and femininity shaped sex education. He described being bullied at school and told repeatedly he was “not a real man,” feeling profound discomfort in his body from early childhood, something he now understands as connected to his autism diagnosis, which he received as an adult. Living within a homophobic society, Alexander also described deep shame around his attraction to other males, buried for years. “Everything led me to believe that life would be easier, life would be better, if I lived socially as a woman.” He transitioned medically and socially at 19. Based on the DARE study, Alexander’s experience maps closely onto what MacKinnon describes as the first pathway to detransition. These are people who detransitioned with strong decisional regret, who often reported that their clinical care was not thorough enough, and fewer than half of whom felt they received adequate decision-making support before they began. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

  7. Jun 8

    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

    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 condemned as harmful and without scientific basis, now qualifies as “protected speech” under the First Amendment. The case, Chiles v. Salazar, centered on a Christian counselor in Colorado who argued that a state ban on the practice violated her right to speak freely with her clients. Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority, declared that the First Amendment “stands as a shield against any effort to enforce orthodoxy in thought or speech in this country.” Only Justice Jackson dissented, warning that the ruling “misreads our precedents, is unprincipled and unworkable.” This decision puts laws in 23 states and the District of Columbia at serious risk. It tells LGBTQ+ young people that any licensed therapist with a personal ideological or religious agenda now has the constitutional right to try to change who they are. It arrived on a day meant to celebrate trans lives. This ruling lands in the same moment that Professor Kinnon Ross MacKinnon, a trans researcher whose work I deeply respect, published in the New York Times that the Trump administration has been weaponizing detransition research to justify bans on gender-affirming care. At the same time, his guest essay outlines the complexities of gender fluidity that can occur after accessing medical treatments for gender dysphoria. Early studies from the 1970s through the 2000s found detransition rates of roughly 1 to 6 percent, primarily among adult transgender women who had full surgical transitions. New research focusing on younger populations, though, identifies that between 2-17% [GU1] of young LGBTQ+ people may experience a detransition process. The field of pediatric gender-affirming healthcare, when it was rapidly scaled up in the United States and Canada over the last 10-15 years, was not prepared for the question of detransition and how to care for these experiences. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

  8. Jun 1

    He Was Ordained by the Mormon Prophet: Former Mormon Bishop Ian Wilks on 37 years inside the LDS authoritarian cult

    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 apart, and trained him into that role.¹ For 37 years, Ian devoted his entire life to his church. He paid tithing on his gross income. He sealed his marriage in the London Temple. He conducted hundreds of worthiness interviews. He trained bishops. He stood at pulpits and at altars. He made sacred covenants in the temple to give all he had, including his own life if required, for the building up of the kingdom on earth. In a snowstorm, the cost of those 37 years lands all at once. The thing he wanted most to be true, he learned was untrue. I spoke with Ian on my podcast Cults, Culture & Coercion and in a recent livestream. He is the co-host of the Inside Out podcast with Jim Bennett, son of the late US Senator Bob Bennett. What he told me confirms what former members of the LDS Church have been describing to me since my first book was published in 1988. The Mormon Church meets every criterion of an authoritarian cult under my BITE Model of Authoritarian Control™ and sits on the destructive end of my Influence Continuum©. Ian himself took the BITE Model self-test based on his decades of experience and scored the church at roughly 85 to 90 percent across the four dimensions of behavior, information, thought, and emotion. This group is one of the wealthiest, most influential groups in politics and its believers are over represented (compared to all other faith groups) in our FBI, CIA, Homeland security and faithful people will follow the direction of the Prophet over the Constitution (even though they swear an oath to uphold the Constitution) which should make all Americans worry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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About

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.

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