Transcription
[Music] Are you a good witch or a bad witch?
>> A bad.
>> We stand trial today on Clea Dunn, accused of 17 counts of witchcraft. How do you plead?
>> Not guilty, your honor.
>> I I saw her turn into a puff of smoke.
>> She cast a spell on my wife and children.
>> Yeah, and she opened my pickle jar when I couldn't get it open. Witch.
>> That is cute. But the thing about witch trials is they're not funny.
>> You've been accused of a crime you did not commit. It's impossible to prove your innocence. If you insist that you're innocent anyway, you'll likely be found guilty and executed. But if you confess, apologize, and implicate others for good measure, you'll go free. Do you give a false confession or risk a public hanging?
This was the choice facing those accused of witchcraft in the village of Salem, Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. I've always been drawn to the story of Salem, and that's because it's a mirror. Every generation resurrects it to tell a story about itself.
In the leftist imagination, it's become a stage for our favorite morality tales. For the atheists, the witch trials have symbolized religious hysteria fashioned as proof of Christianity at its most backwards and irrational. For feminists, Salem became patriarchy incarnate, a tale of outspoken women silenced by men with Hester Prin from the Scarlet Letter held up as the archetype of the condemned woman forced to wear society's shame.
In the 20th century, Arthur Miller's The Crucible recasted as McCarthyism, making witch hunt shortorthhand for conservatives persecuting leftists. Because of this, most of us know that calling someone puritanical has become a kind of slur for a dogmatic finger wagging moralizer who irrationally persecutes others simply for living by a different set of values.
In his book, The New Puritans, Andrew Doyle breathes new life into the insults by turning the mirror back on the modern left, arguing that the woke embody the same spirit today. In his book, he says, quote, "Yet the analogy of the new Puritans is useful mostly because of what the concept of Puritanism has come to represent. Theirs is a belief in the perfectability of humankind. The objective is not to critique society as it is, but to engineer an entirely fresh pseudo reality through the imposition of limitations on language, thoughts, and perception. They seek to publicly shame those they consider dissident and condemn all those who stray from the righteous path. Every day on social media, there is a fresh Hester prin to force on the pillary steps. There are all sorts of ways in which lies gain currency. The hysteria of Salem is just one of the more evocative historical instances of people collectively fabricating a false reality and punishing those who failed to attest to its veracity. We are living through a period in which much like the days when religious convictions were generally uncontested, articles of faith are pedled as truths by those in positions of power. The new Puritans then are best understood as the clergy of a godless age, presiding over a dreamscape of their own making, rewriting our language and traditions as they go along."
And that is a striking comparison to the world we're living in now. But before we accept Doyle's metaphor as the new Puritans who whole cell, let's remember who the real Puritans were. Because of all of our overemphasis on what was wrong with the Puritans, we tend to forget all the good they did. They built the first public schools in New England, pushed for universal literacy, founded Harvard, and pioneered self-governance. They were essential figures in the American story, which makes the real question more pressing. How could a community like this collapse into the madness of Salem?
>> They start and end the book with Salem. And the reason for that is I find a lot of parallels between what happened in Salem, Massachusetts in the late 17th century and what we're happening what is occurring now with this ideology which I see as a kind of a form of hysteria. So it is an illusion to the Puritans of New England in that respect is that I think it is largely maintained I mean no one's getting hanged right but they are having their reputations ruined their jobs destroyed. You know there's a lot at stake uh because of accusations that are not evidence-based. So whereas the girls would shout would shout witch, a modern day equivalent would shout turf or racist, homophobe, fascist, Nazi, all of these slurs that we see endlessly bandied about. And we've reached a point where the accusation is taken as proof that's similar as to what happened in in Salem. Similarly, uh all of the prosecutions in Salem were secured on what they called spectral evidence. In other words, I the accuser see this thing and interpret it in this way and therefore that is evidence of what I am saying. We call that lived experience. You hear that phrase lived experience all the time. This is my lived experience. This is how I've perceived this event. I have perceived that the way that you have interacted with me comes from a homophobic stance and therefore that is sufficient evidence for something to occur as a result or for you to be penalized in some way. So I was trying to draw those sorts of comparisons. I think the reason why it bears and merit merits a sort of analogy is that Salem only really happened because of the people in authority, the magistrates and the ministers capitulating uh to what the girls were saying. So all of these screaming activists would go away. But they have somehow over the past 12 years maximum cultivated incredible clout within our society. uh they occupy major positions of influence in all of our major institutions. Uh civic institutions, public institutions, the law, the judiciary, the police, schools, certainly higher education, most definitely that's where a lot of it comes from. And and they can be vicious and they can seek to attack and demean anyone who desents from their point of view or more importantly anyone who challenges their worldview. And if the people in authority just said, "Come on, this is hysteria. we're not going along with it. I think it would dissipate, but they don't. And in Salem, the consequences of that were were 20 dead. Today, the consequences of that are uh a climate of generalized fear amongst the population about what should or should not be said or how things will be interpreted. Uh and what we call council culture, which you know, for all I hear that it doesn't exist. It has managed to pile up a hell of a lot of casualties. Uh which would suggest that it does. And that's exactly what we saw in Salem. What happened there mirrors the same psychological forces that drive cults. Unprovable assumptions treated as truth, fear replacing reason, rigid virtue cues, and coercive control running rampant. As moral certainty hardened into hysteria, ordinary people fell silent under the pressure of those claiming authority to define or redefine reality itself. That's the danger Andrew Doyle warns about in the New Puritans. It isn't that today's activists wear bonnets or quote scripture, although arguably they do their own version of all of this. But I digress.
>> Shame, shame, shame, shame. Our choice. It's that they've revived to the same moral machinery, the same belief in the perfectability of man, the same desire for control, the same faith for accusation, the same zeal for punishing heresy in the name of righteousness. Because when emotion overrides evidence, and conscience bows to conformity, the witch hunt never really ends. It just finds new sets of sinners to burn.
>> The experiment you'll be taking part in today involves the perception of lengths of lines. As you can see here, I have a number of cards and on each card, there are several lines. Your task is a very simple one. You're to look at the line on the left and determine which of the three lines on the right is equal to it in length. You'll give your answer.
>> Only one of the people in the group is a real subject, the fifth person with the white t-shirt.
>> The others are confederates of the experimentter and have been told to give wrong answers on some of the trials.
>> The experiment begins uneventfully as subjects give their judgments. to third.
>> But on the third trial, something happens. The subject denies the evidence of his own eyes and yields to group influence.
>> But he found through interviews that they went along with the group for different reasons.
>> One.
>> One.
>> They must be right. There are four of them and one of me.
>> One.
>> This subject's yielding is based on a distortion of his judgment. He genuinely believes that the group is correct. I know they're wrong, but why should I make waves?
>> Two.
>> In this case, the subject knows he is right, but goes along to avoid the discomfort of disagreeing with the group. The partnership variation shows that much of the power of the group came not merely from its numbers, but from the unonymity of its opposition. When that unonymity is punctured, the group's power is greatly reduced. Sometimes we go along with a group because what they say convinces us they are right. This is called informational conformity. But sometimes we conform because we are apprehensive that the group will disapprove if we are deviant. This is called normative conformity. The strength of the normative factor is shown in another variation carried out by Ash. Ash's experiment is a classic. It reveals how people will deny what they see and submit to group pressure. It allows us not only to observe conformity but to study the conditions that increase or reduce its occurrence.
What you just saw was Solomon Ash's famous conformity experiment from the 1950s, where most participants denied the evidence they saw with their own eyes and even lied to the person interviewing them just to agree with a group of strangers they knew were wrong. They weren't brainwashed or insane. They were simply human. That's how vulnerable we all are to social pressure. Add a few common factors like trauma, loneliness, unhealed wounds, exposure to smear campaigns or propaganda, and it's easy to see how ordinary people can get swept up into mass manipulation without even realizing it. Cults don't necessarily need magic or hypnosis to succeed. Just a good old dose of peer pressure and we can fold like a lawn chair.
This experiment showed us that even without much provocation, it's easy for us to start doubting our own perceptions just to stay in right standing with the collective. even when we don't know any of them and the stakes are low. In spite of the fact that Ash's experiment was clearly temporary, the mind still processed the dynamic in the same way. Belonging felt like reward and exile felt like a threat. Now imagine if the stakes were real. If the loss of your community, your reputation, or even your life were truly on the line for going against the crowd. That's the kind of fear that grips Salem. When acceptance or survival itself depends on conformity, even conformity to lies, truth becomes negotiable for the sake of self-p protection. When totally subjective evidence like dreams, feelings, or invisible crimes were accepted as fact. People learn to doubt their own eyes to protect themselves. The part that chills me most is realizing that this wasn't possession or madness. It was group think, the same psychological currents that can run through any cult or movement, even the ones that begin with good intentions.
It's tempting to paint history in broad strokes, to see the Puritans as villains, to flatten entire people into their worst moment. I mean, I almost did as I was writing this episode. But I realized, thanks to notes from a friend that when we do this, we miss something vital. This could have been us. Because that same impulse, denying reality to appease the group or even just to feed our own sense of self-righteousness still creeps into our time. Once we surrender discernment and truth for acceptance or a more explicit sense of safety, manipulation and exploitation don't have to force their way in. We open the door ourselves. And maybe that's the real warning in all this. The danger isn't just that history repeats, but that psychological patterns do. and they live in all of us. We've always known Salem is a mirror, but instead of projecting our own ideas onto it, maybe it's time to ask what it's been trying to reflect back to us. My fear is that in our effort to prove we're nothing like the villains of history, we've failed to see ourselves in them, and that's exactly how we will end up becoming them in a new story.
>> Excuse me. Are y'all with the cult?
>> We're not a cult. We're an organization that promotes love.
>> Yeah, this is it.
>> Since the death of God, there's been a vacancy open. You could fill that void. Here's how. Structure your cult like an onion with the most benign and helpful features on the outside and the most controlling, kooky, and evil parts at the secret inner core. Use deception. Don't tell them who you really are. Lie, leave out important information, or distort information.
>> Are you trying to recruit me?
>> No, I'm just trying to share something meaningful with you.
>> Establish front groups.
>> We're a meditation center.
>> We're a world peace organization. We're a personal development center.
>> Promise to fulfill their dreams.
>> Don't you want a world of unconditional love and brotherhood? We have the secrets to self-improvement. You can join us and be special. Join our elite mission to save the world. You can tell them time is running out and that they must make their decision now or it will be too late.
>> This is an issue of burning urgency.
>> Don't give them time to think.
Before we talk about whether the left has devolved into a cult or not, let's step back and ask a simple question. What's the difference between a cult and a religion? This is going to be a really important distinction as we continue this conversation even into future episodes. You hear the word cult thrown around all of the time, usually as an insult. But let's look at how two people from completely different worldviews, an atheist and a Christian, actually define it. Let's start with Hemond Ma. He's an atheist commentator and the creator of the atheist voice. You know, there's a saying that religion is an old cult and a cult is a new religion. But that's not exactly accurate. So really, what's the difference? Is it just about popularity? I mean, unpopular, newer religions or cults. There's not necessarily a set difference. But here's what you should look out for. A cult doesn't let you leave. A good religion, if we can call it that, lets you come and go without a problem. Sure, they want you to stay, but they're not going to come after you if you stop believing. A cult only lets you associate with other cult members. Do you have friends who aren't atheists or Christians or whatever you are? Good. A cult doesn't let that happen. And if you leave the faith, they are done with you. A cult may require you to live with other cult members, like in a single home or a commune. I mean, with religions, you live on your own, and you come together every so often to worship. Cults have singular leaders with all the power. I mean, he has special access to the truth, and no one else does. That's different from megaurch pastors who might love the spotlight, but even they won't say the road to salvation goes through them. Cults don't let you disagree. If you challenge the teachings or disagree with the theology, you should be able to have a discussion and debate about it. Most churches are okay with that. I mean, there are Christian apologists who run around trying to defend the faith from its critics, which is good because it means they're comfortable having that conversation. Questioning your beliefs is a good thing. I mean, if your religion can't handle your questions, then you should leave it.
>> So, notice what he describes here. Isolation, control, silencing dissent, shunning or punishing those who leave. If this same behavior showed up in intimate partner relationships, we'd call it abuse. It might seem obvious from the outside, but inside these relationships, it can be really hard to distinguish control from love. Similarly, inside the cult, this same behavior can be misconstrued as devotion. Now, let's hear from Brett Conungle. He's a Christian apologist and approaches this issue from the other side.
>> So, what's the difference between a religion and a cult? And how can you tell the difference? Well, let's first define religion. Uh a religion would be some kind of organized system of belief and practice that uh really tries to answer life's most fundamental and significant questions. What is real? Uh does God exist? What is the purpose of life? How should I live my life? Is there a particular God? And and how am I supposed to be devoted to him or follow him or it or her or whatever you think it is? And so that's what religion would be. And of course, it's hard to get a definition of religion that includes every single aspect. But we know that this would include the beliefs. It would include the rituals or the behaviors, the practices. It might include the traditions, the various holidays or feasts or all all of those different aspects. But there's some kind of organization to them. and those that the organization is centered around certain beliefs that we have about the ultimate about ultimate reality. But we can use the term cult in two distinct ways. First, there's what you might call a theological cult. The the the cultish behavior has to do with the theology or the beliefs. And so the cult will take will adopt the beliefs of that larger religion but will then change them in very fundamental ways. Now you also have the term cult used in a sociological sense, right? When we talk about sociology, this we're talking about the the study of society and cultural influences and that kind of thing. And so you have a so sociological definition of c cult where a cult might include you know some kind of authoritarian leader and there is blind allegiance to that leader and that leader gets to dictate kind of all of the rules and boundaries for that group and it's not merely a you know a sacred text like the Bible that you know has divine origins but this person speaks on behalf of God themselves and they authoritarian rule and followers then the adherence are supposed to you know follow strictly everything that this person says and if not then there's certain punishments that are in play for some control of the group from a completely different worldview he ends up describing almost the same thing now I know this can all seem so obvious people should be able to discern the difference between a culty environment and a healthy one right if it was so obvious how do we keep falling victim to it and is there any way for us to distinguish whether we've fallen into a cult or not.
The comments in the last episode were insane. More than 7,000 people joined the conversation, and I hope that you'll continue to do so in this episode. I'm sure people will have a lot of things to say about whether the left is in a cult or not, whether that's an appropriate use of the word cult. So, all of that being said, someone who commented on the last video said that I should check out the work of Steven Hassan. Steven is one of the leading experts on cult psychology and I think his bite model gives us a clear way to recognize high control systems. This is him explaining what it is and how it works. Take a listen.
>> So, one of the things that helped me get out of the moon cult back in 1976 was the work of Robert J. Lifton who was a military intelligence psychiatrist in the 50s studying Chinese communist brainwashing techniques and he wrote a landmark book called the thought thought reform and the psychology of totalism. And in this book he outlined eight criteria that any environment may be judged as a as a brainwashing or a thought reform uh environment. That book was critical and that model was critical to helping me understand what had happened to me. And based on his model, I developed the bite model of mind control. Uh the B stands for behavior control. Then there's information control, thought control, and emotional control. And essentially the bite model offers the my cutting edge approach for how anyone can evaluate whether or not they've been a victim of mind control. And in the new book, Freedom of Mind, I'm shifting away from the term mind control because it elicits the idea of somehow somebody with chips in your brain or some type of uh puppeteer holding it, which in some ways uh is the case psychologically. But we're moving towards the term undue influence which is a legal term which talks about how a discrepancy of power is used to undermine a person's ability to think for themselves and make good decisions for themselves. And so models have been developed. Now my friend Alan Shefflin, law professor at Santa Clara University for example, has developed a model where you take into account the predisposing vulnerabilities of a person as well as a sophisticated techniques of influence that an individual, a group are using to combine to basically create what we refer to in the mental health field as a dissociative disorder where a person is split from themselves and a new cult identity is created. ated to suppress their real identity. And so the question that people ask me often is, well, how how do you know if you're in under undue influence or mind control or that you've been brainwashed? And what I say is you wouldn't. That's part of the dilemma because your your operating system, your mind has been co-opted if you have been.
It's an excellent framework and one we'll use moving forward to distinguish cult environments from healthy ones. But before we do, I have to acknowledge that I completely disagree with the way that he applied the model to politics in his book, The Cult of Trump. In 2019, when the book was first published, Hassan interpreted Trump's popularity as evidence of undue influence and cultic manipulation. And fine, in 2019, many of us were actively organizing protests against Trump and thinking the same thing. But since that time, a lot has happened and many of us have adjusted our view based off of the new information that has come forward. So during research for this video, I wondered if Hassan had maybe shifted his stance and the answer is no. Absolutely not. He did not change his mind on this. In fact, in a recent interview with Jane Bordon, author of Cults Like Us, Hassan doubled down. Together, they argued that MAGA is a kind of apocalyptic doomsday cult, that Trump is essentially a cult leader, and that America's quote cult DNA goes way back to the Puritans. In their telling, the people who voted for Trump are a bunch of deluded followers clinging to failed prophecies. Here, take a listen for yourself. Um, I became very preoccupied with the division in this country that was laid bare by the 2016 election. Um, and I was wondering how can people who are really basically the same be so ideologically opposed? And uh, I started seeing this cult-like thinking I'd been researching showing up everywhere in American culture and pop culture and politics. And I just started pulling the thread and pulling the thread and traced it all the way back to the Puritans. One day I just kind of dawned on me like, "Oh, the Puritans look a lot like a cult." I think people today would call them a cult. Um, I call them a high control doomsday group. And of course, you know, the definitions can get specific. Um, >> right. >> But yeah, I I think their doomsday ideology did not go away. It just became the foundation of American culture. to add that we need to be careful not to have the doomsday thinking for those of us who oppose the the cult of Trump and and and and and the march to fascism. >> That's right. And they're they're being victimized. What we want is for a lot of these people to to kind of say, "Oh gosh, I fell for a con. I made a mistake." You know, I I also think it's important to acknowledge that not everyone in MAGA has fallen prey to cultlike thinking. Um, but I think a fair amount of people are being taken advantage of. >> Uh, so who who do you think isn't uh in the cult of Trump anymore in MAGA? >> Well, I do think a lot of people are leaving. Um, in fact, I it looks a lot like what happens following a failure of prophecy. Mhm.
This clip was so frustrating to me because this is what happens when conviction detaches from reality and when people surrender discernment for the party line. So, first of all, by bringing in the Puritans in this flippant way, they're repeating the same pattern we talked about earlier where left-leaning historians, commentators, or sociologists reduce complex history to fit their worldview. In doing this, they reshape the past to conform to present beliefs. That's dangerous because it blinds us to how easily any of us can fall into the same traps as the Puritans in Salem. And the problem with doing this is that the evidence shows the complete opposite of everything they just described in this clip. The failed doomsday prophecies came from the left. Claims that Trump would end democracy, that fascism was taking over, that America wouldn't survive his presidency. None of that materialized. So, let's take a look at the hard evidence, not this conjecture, and stack it up against Hassan's own bite model. I suspect that if Hassan actually applied his framework honestly, he'd see it maps almost perfectly onto the left's cultural dominance. Okay, so first step in the bite model is behavior control.
>> Isolate them from the rest of the world. Make them feel part of a special elite group with an important mission. Monuments and historical landmarks will someday be erected to commemorate us and our sacrifices. Tighten your group's bond by establishing scapegoats and enemies. Demonize outsiders as less than human, biased, corrupt, or conspiring against the group. Develop an us versus them mentality.
>> When you know someone voted that way, do you recommend just from a psychological standpoint being around them? We got the holidays coming up. Absolutely not. So if you are going into a situation where you have family members, where you have close friends who you know have voted in ways that are against you, like what you said, against your livelihood. And it's completely fine to not be around those people and to tell them why.
Here's how it applies. If you voted for Trump, were labeled MAGA, or held dissenting views on issues the left suddenly deemed untouchable, you were smeared as irredeemable, insane, or morally corrupt. Speech was heavily policed, even when it contradicted basic reality. Under cancel culture, something as small as using biologically accurate pronouns could cost you your job, friends, family, or your future. And of course, there's been the weaponization of prosecutions under lawfare targeting Trump and his affiliates. And this is not a comprehensive list of all of the ways that behavior was controlled. If you can think of others, please drop it in the comments. But this is just to get us started.
>> Start slowly. A good con man takes a little bit of truth and a lot of lies and pulls the wool over the eyes of the ignorant. Block out any information which is critical of the group. Encourage members to spy and report on one another. A week later, the first of what became known as the Twitter files reports came out. The original promise of the internet was that it might democratize the exchange of information globally. A free internet would overwhelm all attempts to control information flow, its very existence, a threat to anti-democratic forms of government everywhere. What we found in the files was a sweeping effort to reverse that promise and use machine learning and other tools to turn the internet into an instrument of censorship and social control. Unfortunately, our own government appears to be playing a lead role. We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation requests from every corner of government, from the FBI, the DHS, the HHS, DoD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA. For every government agency scanning Twitter, there were perhaps 20 quasi private entities doing the same thing, including Stanford's Election Integrity Partnership, NewsGuard, the Global Disinformation Index, and many others, many taxpayer funded. A focus of this fast growing network, as Mike noted, is making lists of people whose opinions, beliefs, associations, or sympathies are deemed misinformation, disinformation, or malinformation. That last term is just a euphemism for true but inconvenient. Undeniably, the making of such lists is a form of digital McCarthyism. Ordinary Americans are not just being reported to Twitter for deamplification or deplatforming, but to firms like PayPal, digital advertisers like Xander, and crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe. These companies can and do refuse service to law-abiding people and and businesses whose only crime is falling a foul of a distant, faceless, unaccountable algorithmic judge. As someone who grew up a traditional ACLU liberal, this mechanism for punishment and deprivation without due process is horrifying. Another troubling aspect is the role of the press, which should be the people's last line of defense in such cases. But instead of investigating these groups, journalists partnered with them. If Twitter declined to remove an account right away, government agencies and NOS's would call reporters for the New York Times, Washington Post, and other outlets, who in turn would call Twitter demanding to know why action had not yet been taken. Effectively, news media became an arm of a state sponsored thought policing system.
>> Next is information control. For years, intentional smears against Trump were elevated while dissenting stories were suppressed. Censorship became institutionalized with social platforms pressured by government actors to protect one political side. We've since seen the collapse of Russia collusion narratives, revelations of FBI and DOJ overreach to hinder Trump's campaign, and the coordinated suppression of stories like the Hunter Biden laptop story or questions about President Biden's cognition. None of this was accidental or coincidental. We now know from well doumented evidence that this was orchestrated and paid for by the Democrat party and its affiliates. I talk about this a lot more in the episode called the 10-year smear. That's going to be linked below if you want to deep dive. So, next up is thought control.
>> Control their thoughts.
>> Our ideology answers all questions to all problems.
>> Let our doctrine think for you.
>> Induce trans states and self-hypnosis by practicing thoughts stopping rituals and repetitive acts like chanting down. Snap out doubt.
>> Trans people belong here. We need trans people. We love trans people. Trans people belong here. We need trans people. We love trans people. Trans people belong here. We need trans people. We love trans people. You matter. You matter. And I am fighting for you. And I will not stop. I will not stop today. I will not stop tomorrow. You are loved. You matter. You belong here.
A few moments later.
>> We need trans people. We love trans people. Trans people belong here. We need trans people. We love trans people. Trans people belong here. We need trans people. We love trans people.
Other than all the brainwashing that was happening through propaganda in the media and social media, we also had this issue of simplified mantras replacing debate. Slogans like abolish the police and trans women are women are just two examples, but there are dozens and dozens of these. These simplistic ideological positions became moral absolutes overnight. Even though they all have the capacity to be deeply damaging to society, questioning them or merely disagreeing was treated as evidence of guilt and moral deprivity. Next up, we have emotional control. This is a big one.
>> Separate the recruit from himself by attacking the self and inducing a mental breakdown disguised as a spiritual awakening. When they start to freak out, have side effects, or hallucinate, tell them they are flushing out the bad stuff inside. When I was meditating, I felt an infinite emptiness. It was utterly terrifying.
>> No, this is good. You're transforming. Do it more.
>> Control their emotions. Induce guilt.
>> The United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. People are dying of starvation.
>> People are dying of starvation.
>> You are not living up to your potential.
>> I heard what you
>> You're doing it again. What you saying?
>> You're doing it again.
>> I don't care. You're doing it again.
>> It's wrong.
>> You're doing it again.
>> Persecuted her for standing out.
>> Persecuted him for standing out. The only change that ever happens is when people stand out and that
>> Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. Are you in any physical danger here? Are you in any physical danger here? Is that girl in any physical danger here? EMTT Till was hanged by his neck after he was beaten almost to death. I have made the point and we could stop there, but you have to nail it down. And so it goes on longer than some people think it should, but you have to nail it down.
>> The constant fear-mongering about the end of democracy, the reflexive branding of anyone who dissented as fascist, Nazi, evil, etc. the ritualized guilt over privileged or uh invisible racism or invisible transphobia, etc. And let's not forget the steady stream of victim narratives used to stoke outrage, division, and even justify political violence.
>> Fighting resistance. Tell them their critical thoughts are evidence that they have committed crimes against the group. Start investigating them and make up crimes.
>> I think I want to leave. You must be insane.
>> Make them feel guilty.
>> We're doing important work here.
>> You expect saving the world is easy.
>> We're all called upon to make some sacrifices for the cause.
>> Just when things get tough, you want to give up.
>> You're weak.
>> There must be something wrong with you. There must be something wrong with you. There must be something wrong with me. There must be something wrong with me.
>> Yes, there is.
>> Yes, there is.
>> When I was on the left, I had all my friends on the right. And they always talked to me. They always had conversations with me and that's all it was. And we were still friends. When I made my way over to the center right, all my friends on the left kicked me to the curb, call me all the names, call me all the slurs, call me self-hating black, self-hating gay, wrote me off, kick me out of friend groups. When I think about all When I think about all the death threats that I've ever gotten, when I think about all the the comments that I've been hurled and things people have said about me, um it's insane. It's insane. And it's all from the left. It always is. Yeah, there's some people leaving the right, but that's why you see this mass exit of people leaving the left. Look at this. Just be a lesson to all those other conservative freaks, those little weirdos with podcasts. Just know your necks are on the line. You're next. No, you're next. People are making list. People are talking about other people are next. Anyone that's more conservative and outspoken needs to be shut down. You need to be put on the list. need to be taken out. Have you really lost the plot? You're so far gone where you think it is justified to eliminate someone for thinking differently than you.
Contrary to Hassan and Bordon's conclusions, millions of Americans have walked away from the Democrat party. Since 2020, Democrats have lost about 2.1 million registered voters in states that track party affiliation, while Republicans have gained roughly 2.4 million voters. If anyone's watching prophecies collapse and followers scatter, it wouldn't be Trump's base. I don't think the signs could be any clearer than this. I mean, if there was a bite scorecard, the left would be batting a thousand. And remember, Hassan himself admits that the model comes straight from Robert J. Lifton's thought reform and the psychology of totalism, a study of mauist brainwashing in communist China. That's not MAGA. That sounds like the left's playbook. And either way, there's no hard feelings on my side of things. This is just a reminder that it's possible to value someone's work without agreeing with them on everything. Just because I feel Hassan gets it wrong here doesn't mean his broader insights into cult psychology aren't helpful. To me, it just shows how sticky this stuff is. How easy it is for anyone to let mass manipulation obscure reality and blind them to truth. It happens to all of us. As Hassan himself says, it's possible and even likely to be in a cult without even realizing it. And I hope that he's open to his own advice on how to prevent exactly this.
>> And so for me, the answer really is you need to take a time out from the environment that you're in and the people who are influencing you. You need to study models of mind control and undo influence. You need to deliberately seek out critical information about the leader, the doctrine, and the group. You want to find out for yourself and trust that you have the ability to know and to fact check whether or not things are true or not.
So if Assan is right that you can be in a cult without even knowing it and even he as an expert on cult psychology is unable to re-evaluate his own assessment of Trump even after evidence emerges, then I don't know. I sort of feel like we need to zoom out a little bit to get a fuller picture because for me something just isn't adding up still. When most people think of a cult, they picture a small compound with a single charismatic leader dictating every move. And that does exist. But the danger is in assuming that's the only form a cult can take. On much of the left, there isn't a clear commanding figurehead. Authority is spread across a thousand microphones. Activists, influencers, bureaucrats, HR trainers, journalists, all nudging the same talking points, all singing the same tune. The diffusion of influence makes the dynamic harder to see. That illusion of unonymity is often more dangerous than a lone tyrant because responsibility is untraceable and disscent looks like you're denying what everyone knows is truth and what everyone wants. I couldn't find a concise term that contained the nuance of all of this, so I came up with my own. I am sure some of you will disagree with me and maybe some of you know of a term that already exists that I couldn't find. Either way, post your comments down below and I definitely will check in with them. For now, we're going to stick with this term. The term is macro cult. So, macro cults have all of the same features of a regular cult. Total conformity, purity test, self-p policing, tightly controlled information, and the potential for destructive escalation. But it's decentralized and spread across millions of people. With horizontal or obscured leadership, the ideology itself becomes the unquestionable authority. Here's why we need to get better about identifying and understanding this idea of macro cults. A regular cult builds fences you can see. But a macro cult builds walls so wide and ceilings so high you don't even realize you're inside. That makes it harder to recognize, harder to escape, and far easier for entire societies to get trapped without even noticing. This is how entire nations can drift into totalitarianism. It doesn't have to happen through the rise of one single dictator at first. It can also happen through the slow, suffocating spread of a macro cult mistaken for moral progress. And I can't help but wonder if that's what happened with the modern left. A movement that once claimed to fight for freedom, now trapped in a macro cult of its own making. I mean, when I was on the left, we didn't march under one banner or follow one leader. We didn't have to. The ideology itself commanded obedience. Whispering through institutions, algorithms, and social rewards, it quietly moved the goalposts of what was acceptable to think, what to say, and how to be. The scariest part is that most of us inside weren't fanatics and didn't even know the tenants of what we were following. We were ordinary, well-intentioned people who absorbed its worldview without even realizing it. All we knew was that we were being kind and fighting on the side of good. And that's all that really mattered. We enforced its rules, repeated its slogans, and shamed its heretics, all while believing we were acting freely. But over time, we surrendered our grip on reality to the collective hive mind, trading discernment for belonging. Against our better judgment, we accepted the contradictions, excused the dysfunction, and told ourselves that nothing harmful could come from something so widely praised. That's why I don't fully buy Andrew Doyle's assertion that the new Puritans are the clergy of a godless age. I've realized people haven't stopped worshiping. We've just changed altars.
>> It's that simple. Now, don't you want to become a cult leader? Don't you want devoted followers who leave their families for you, give their money to you, give their bodies to you, give up their lives for you, and will kill for you. I will do what you say for the cause. I will leave my family for the cause. I will give you my money for the cause. I will give you my body for the cause. I will die for the cause. I will kill for the cause. I love you.
>> Okay, this is too much. I just need a break. This is all just a little too intense. Let me see what else is on.
>> We do now live in a country that has an authoritarian leader in charge.
>> Muslim.
>> We have a consolidating dictatorship in our country.
>> And it sounds melodramatic to say it.
>> I know. But just go with that for a minute. Right. Think think in melodramatic terms. Think in cinematic terms. Imagine the cartoon level caricature of what?
>> So what does this mean for us? Well, we are on the eve of an authoritarian administration. This is what 21st century fascism is starting to look like. [Applause] I can't hear you. [Applause]
>> Are you ready to fight?
>> I'm in this fight. I am fighting. I am fighting. Get in this fight. Get in this fight. Get in this fight. I am going to wake up every day and fight hard. I have been fighting. We're going to fight. We are going to fight. We're going to fight. We're going to fight. and I will fight.
>> Our ongoing fights a fight. We know how to fight. We like a good fight. We were born out of a fight. This is what is our fight right now. Claring us to fight and fight we will. Fight is a fight. And so when we fight the fight that we are in when we are fighting this fight, we fight this fight. The strength of who we are is we will fight. And it is a fight born out of patriotism. This is a fight. Fighting. I say fight on. Fight on. Fight on. Fight on.
>> They are fully believing that they are under a dictatorship and they are fighting fascist Nazis and they are the resistance. They are the rebellion. They've completely lost it and they're going to get themselves hurt really bad.
>> It will be a resistance. It will be that.
>> Um if you have a firearm, you have a weapon, bring that. You have to have the capacity for violence because if you do not someone, the likelihood is that they will you federal agents, ICE agents, do not let them take you anywhere. At this point in the coup, you really think they're going to let you out. So, it is up to them. We'll find a way. That's where I'll be. And only go there if you are fully 100% ready to commit your entire life, all of your time, your health, your energy, your entire mind, your soul, your heart, your body, your death to the cause. 750,000 people died during the American Civil War. If we have another war on our own soil, brother against brother, sister against sister, it will be absolutely devastating. And although I do not want this to happen, it has gotten to the point where if the people do not fight back and if they do not stop this now, today now we are in for we are in for catastrophe. I don't know how else to put that. And this comes down to white people because I know that black and brown people, they know what this [ __ ] is about. I don't have to tell them anything. This is about racism. This is about misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia. And white people, you are at the center. And you need to do something.
>> I don't know what it is.
>> But you are the privileged group in this country. You, me, we are the privileged group in this country. And we need to use that privilege to fight for those who cannot fight for themselves. This is our fault.
>> This is our fault.
>> I don't know who needs to hear this, but violence is the answer. Violence has always been the answer.
>> I mean, no one's getting hanged, right?
Authorities say the gunman fired multiple rounds from the top of that building into this ice facility a few hundred yards away.
>> Tonight, NBC News has learned the shooter is 29-year-old Joshua John. According to multiple senior law enforcement officials, police say the gunman killed one detainee and wounded two others before taking his own life. The FBI releasing this image of shell casings found near the shooter engraved with the words anti ice. NBC 10 there asking questions to the alleged arsonist of the Pennsylvania governor's residence, sticking his tongue out at reporters as he entered the courtroom. Bomber is the man authorities say climbed over the fence of the governor's residence in Harrisburg, broke a window, and threw two Molotov cocktails inside. The governor, his family, and their guests were all inside sleeping early Sunday after celebrating the Jewish holiday of Passover just hours before. These photos now show the charged scene left behind. According to a 911 call Bomber made after that attack, he says he quotes will not take part in Shapiro's plans for what he wants to do to the Palestinian people. He needs to stop having my friends killed. End quote.
>> Tonight are investigating why a shooter in his early 20s dressed in black, opened fire through the stained glass windows of the school's church, spraying bullets at children as they sat and prayed in pews. The shooter then turned the gun on himself. He wrote, "Kill Donald Trump on a rifle magazine." In another image, you see the words for the children. And in another, "Where is your God?"
>> Police say when Manion was arrested, he had a gun on him that investigators believed was used in last Wednesday's attack, as well as writings expressing anger at corporate America. Manhattan prosecutors have charged him with five counts and completely out of touch and insult the intelligence of the American people lived experience.
>> Similarly, uh all of the prosecutions in Salem were secured on what they called spectral evidence. We call that lived experience. You hear that phrase lived experience all the time. This is my lived experience. This is how I perceive this event. And therefore that is sufficient evidence for something to occur as a result or for you to be penalized in some way.
>> Which raises another question. If wokeism looks like a religion and acts like a cult, what god does it serve? In the next episode, we'll trace its lineage from the religion of Marxism to the modern chapels of academia and uncover how a movement that once promised liberation became a cult built on destruction. Don't worry. Don't worry. I'm not going to do what everyone thinks I'm going to do and flip out, man. All I want to know is who's coming with me? Who's coming, man? Who's coming with me? Huh? Who's coming with me, man? I will. Honestly, that scene is exactly how I felt when I was releasing these episodes. I knew that by taking this path, I would have to walk away from everything I had ever known. And it was really scary to know that pretty much nothing was going to be able to come with me. But seeing the views on this last video, more than 200,000, which is insane, and almost 10,000 subscribers out of nowhere, it's almost like I screamed, "Who's coming with me?" to the universe. And and literally thousands of you called back. I am. And I just really appreciate that. I'm not going to get emotional. And I'd like to say thank you to you because you like me right now. You like me. You like me. you really really like me. But but really it's it's touched me in ways that you can't even imagine. And I just hope that many of you stay along for the journey. Please subscribe if you haven't already. For those who have asked, there are ways to support the channel. If you're interested, I just set up a Patreon. The link is in the description. So that being said, thank you so much for your time, your support, and I hope to see you in the comments.