I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'sha. I was a CIA officer stationed around the world in high threat posts in Europe, Russia, and in Asia.
And I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and in war zones. We sometimes created conspiracies to deceive our adversaries.
Now we're going to use our expertise to deconstruct conspiracy theories large and small.
Could they be true?
Or are we being manipulated?
This is mission implausible. Today's guest is Steve Hasten. He's an author and an expert on the issue of cults. His latest book is called The Cult of Trump. He's a former member of the Unification Church, associated with the Reverend Moon and escape the church and then created a group to help people leave the church and since then become a real expert on cults and helping people leave cults.
Welcome Steve, Thanks John, and I'm an admirer of yours and all you're speaking out of the many years since Trump's first election.
Yeah, I don't know how much good it does, but it's better than being complicit of.
That's what I say.
If you're an admirer of John, you've already sown some bad judgment here, Stave s.
But let's go back and start from the beginning. Tell us about your experience with the Unification Church in the movies.
I'm gonna just correct you and say, I don't think it's fair to call them the Unification Church, because when there was a Congressional subcommittee investigation into CACIA activities in the US, the investigation said, there are so many front groups of this group. Unification Church is one of hundreds. We think it's fairer to call them the moon Organization or the Moonees.
And they own one of our newspapers in Washington, d C.
Washington Times, which the founding editor was from the Council for National Policy, was put into place. But back to my story. When I got recruited, it was actually the same month Patty Hurst got abducted by the Simonese Liberation Army. It was February of nineteen seventy four. No one had
heard of the Moonies. I certainly didn't. I was a student at Queen's College and my situational vulnerability was my girlfriend dumped me abruptly and I was sitting in the cafeteria waiting for classes to start and three women started flirting with me. Later I learned it's called honey potting, but I was just naive. I asked them, are you students, yes, which was a lie.
Are you part of a religious group?
Oh?
No, not at all.
But within a few weeks, I was believing the Messiah was on the earth, that I was selected to help save the world from Satan. I was Jewish and I didn't believe in Satan a few weeks earlier, and I went in this rabbit hole of brainwashing. And I should say I came from a very stable, normal upbringing. My parents, ever divorced, didn't have affairs, they didn't drink, they didn't smoke.
We lived in the same house. I was an extra honor student, and my vulnerability was I thought I was too smart to ever fall for a scam or for a cult. And for whatever reason, they selected me, Maybe because I'm six feet tall and I was smart, I don't know, but they selected me to be an American leader, which meant I had no power. But I was a front person who could recruit and indoctrinate people and be
a good face for the cult. And I was in meetings with Moon personally, with the other leaders as he was saying, we're going to infiltrate the government, and God hates democracy. We're going to put a theocracy into place, and when we take power, we will amend the constitution and make it a capital offense if people don't accept
our rules around the mass weddings and the sexual things. Anyway, I was a true believer, and I was sent to Washington to fast for three days for Richard Nixon during Watergate, and I hated Nixon beforehand, but I was like, but God wants him to be president.
Dad.
But my story is I fell asleep at the wheel of a Moonie van.
I was sleeping three.
To four hours a night, normally seven days a week, but this occasion I fell asleep and woke up as I drove into the back of a tractor trailer truck at eighty miles an hour. And after getting Pride out of the wreckage, having two weeks away from the cult, sleeping and eating and nursing my wounds, I didn't.
Have any continuous indoctrination.
This was way before cell phones got created, but led to me calling my sister, which led to her telling my parents, which led to a deprogramming which I was sure I wasn't brainwashed and I wasn't in a cult. But my father cried and said, how would you feel if it was your son who I met a controversial group and disappeared from your life. Wouldn't you be worried? And I could see he genuinely cared about me. I
thought he was brainwashed by the Communist media. That was my mooney mind speaking, But I wanted to prove that I was thinking, so I agreed to talk to the ex members and learn about Chinese communist brainwashing, and it was that that started turning the lights back on in my mind. The following day was my wake up moment, where the ex members handed me one of Moon's speeches to congressmen and senators, and all they did was hand it to me and say, read this and tell us
what you think. And that formed the basis for forty nine years of my professional career. That said, the way to get people out of these groups is not trying to persuade them they're wrong, ask them what they think, feed them questions in a respectful way that's strategic, that gets them back to who they were before the group. Everything I believe was based on the presupposition he was the Messiah and he was going to save the planet
Earth from all the mess we're in. And once that bubble popped, I was like, what happened to my mind? So now you're meeting me having written four books.
And I have a PhD.
And how to use trafficking law to update and apply to the legal system because it's not a slippery slope. And my model that I did my dissertation on looks at behavior control, information control, thought control, and emotional control. I call it the Byte model of authoritarian control. I say you can control those four variables. You can control people's identities and make a pseudo identity that's dependent and obedient on any person or ideology.
We use words like culton religion, and there's the old saw that the difference between the culton and religion is an IRS ruling. Could you give us a working definition that we can news for what is a cult or a sect?
Say there are cults along the continuum from ethical religious groups, political groups, fan groups, whatever, all the way to authoritarian mind control cults. People laugh and say, I'm in a book called the Cult of Mac as a true believer, because I only have used Mac since nineteen eighty two, or I'm in the cult because I've done four teTeX talk, so I joke about that. But there are groups that are healthy and you can question them, you can leave
without fear or harassment. They're not remaking your conscience and your identity. My definition is that it's a pyramid structured authoritarian regime that uses deceptive recruitment, so no informed consent. Does it have to be religious correct In my model, it can be a one on one controlling relationship to a bad therapist who's making the person dependent on them, to a large group awareness training program, or a multi
level marketing. It applies to trafficking, sex trafficking, and labor trafficking, which I call commercial cults, political cults, as I refer to the cult of Trump, and I believe China is a mind control authoritarian cult, as is Russia.
Does it require a charismatic leader.
No, some of my colleagues say that it does, and that's not my experience. And there are many cults that are ideological cults. They're mimetic indoctrination things. And then there are cults that start with one person. They die and the group morphs and their beliefs change and their practices change, but you don't need a living leader. What I learned starting in nineteen eighty when I started studying hypnosis, and I should say during the MKO Trump days, I studied
NLP and then I learned Eric Sonian hypnosis. And that's what I'm seeing everywhere on the internet, and I talk about it in the book The Cult of Trump that it appears Tony Robbins has taught Donald Trump some NLP.
You mentioned mk ultra in the nineteen fifties when there was such concern that somehow the Soviets had mastered mind control because some soldiers were coming back from the Korean War and other places that were saying what we thought were crazy things and thought that they had been given drugs that controlled their minds. So the CIA got involved in experimenting with these things, looking to see if there was some sort of and it's actually a shameful period.
You can understand why it happened, but so could involve potentially drugs or some sort of thing like this as well.
Absolutely, I'm a human rights guy, I'm a license mental health counselor. So my leane is just I want people to be healthy, I want them to control their own minds. I want them to understand that it doesn't just happen a week stupid, uneducated people, that bright people can have their minds acted, and that we are wired as human beings to follow who we think are legitimate leaders, and we're wired as human beings to conform to people we
identify with. And we know this from the Ash Conformity Study, the Milgram obedient Study, the Zimbardo prison study. People are walking around thinking it can never happen to me. I'm too smart, and it happens to them. They're even more vulnerable. But on the other side of it is it's not permanent.
And even people born in these authoritarian regimes realize they're being lied to, they're being exploited, and when they're given an opportunity to have access to non members and leave and go somewhere else, they want to come to the US. They want to leave totalitarian regimes are they're born into these extremist, authoritarian religious cults, and they realize, I don't have to believe this. There are phobias that have been put in my mind to make me dependent and obedience.
But if you use their critical thinking, you can analyze this is a technique of emotional mind control.
We'll be right back in a moment. John and I when we were serving in the Agency, we've served in authoritarian countries with authoritarian governments. So I was in Zimbabwe and you would think when you were there that Mugabi at the time was incredibly popular. They built a cult around him, his family, his picture, his photograph was everywhere, the legends that he was involved in during the war of Independence from Rhodesia. And yet when Mugabi was dethroned
and eventually died, he was immediately forgotten about. And I were both in Eastern Europe when the Brillin Wall was starting to come down and people were leaving. So I was in West Berlin and we were looking at the East Germans and we would have sworn a month before the wall came down that the East Germans were loyal, that they believed in their leader. And yet really within days millions of people finally said, yeah, we've just been
faking it this whole time. Talking to them afterwards, they were saying no. At the time, we were sort of hit two points of two notions at the same time. We were both loyal and believed, but deep down in our brain we didn't. So what's your sense of Trump beside? But of political cults and when they're genuine and when they're sort of enforced time people.
You're describing the phenomenon that I have verified for forty nine years of practice with clients from all types of political and religious cults. And I should say my mentor who's helped me get out of the Moonies.
Robert J.
Lifton wrote a book called Thought Reform in the Psychology of Totalism in nineteen sixty one about his interviews with people coming out of mao's thought reform programs in the outlined eight criteria. He later wrote a book on the Nazi doctors, and he described what he called doubling. Before that book came out, I had described my subjective sense
is that there were two Steves. There was the real Steve, who was born of Flushing Queens, New York, and then the Steve, the Mooney, whose parents were moon and his wife.
And when I got out, it.
Was like a flip happened, like a switch happens, like I was still indoctrinated, but the real me took executive control, or like malware takes over your computer and then you put software in it and get rid of the malware. Oh, my operating systems back their key points. And for me as a human being doing this where people had to survive. So they had a public face because they didn't want to be turned into the regime, they didn't want to
get tortured, thrown into jail or worse. But then they had their private thoughts that was like this is bs or they said the opposite last week that they're saying today. And so there's what Lifton called the psychology of the pawn while you're still in the environment. But once the environment walls go away and you have access to non cult people, you start to realize, WHOA, there's a whole lot of colors. World is not black and white, and follow the regime or don't. It's oh, there were all
these other options and choices. And so with political cults, one of my theses in the Cult of Trump is not only does Trump display the stereotypical cult leader and I used Eric Frohm's definition malignant narcissist in chapter three, and I compared Trump with Jim Jones of the People's Temple and Moon, my former cult leader and Hubbard of scientology. It is a cult of personality that he has had his whole life, with his business and people he's work with.
And I should add Eric Frum came up with this trying to understand Hitler, so that this was not coming out of thin air. This was post World War two, and like, how could we describe the mindset of somebody like this?
But then when I.
Started researching it, I realized there were actual authoritarian cults that comprise the cult of Trump. I talk about a cult called the Family that's operated in DC for decades. They do the National Prayer breakfasts, and they like to recruit Democrats and Republicans to do their bidding. And then I talk about Opus Day and William Barr was a member of that. The Russians hacked our counter terrorist Anson I should add with Opus Day, he was an Opus
Stay member. But there are bigger groups like what is called the New Apostolic Reformation MEGAS. And these are the people who say they're Christian, but in terms of their practices, they claim to be a prophet or an apostle who can speak directly to God and God told them. Trump won the twenty twenty election and this is thirty to forty million Americans who think, because their leader said so, that Trump is being used by God. He's a king Cyrus figure.
I was just in Oklahoma and someone was telling me a story about a family member who saw a picture of Trump pulling someone from a flood, clearly a fake picture, and this person was saying, that's why we need to support him. He's such a good man and all this kind of stuff. So there are real believers of this fake stuff. But clearly these politicians that support him in Washington, they go to Yale and Harvard and JD. Vance and all of these guys, they are now saying, oh, the
twenty twenty election was stolen. In January sixth was a day of love. They know that not to be true. Can you be part of a cult when in fact you know you're lying?
The answer is, I'd have to study case by case, and most people in a mind control cult, or what I call fringe members, they really have no clue what is actually going on inside the group, much less at the leadership level. And so when people say, do you think everyone who voted for Trump isn't a cult?
It's like, how can.
I say that a lot of people just vote whatever party their parents voted, what they voted in the past.
But you know better than most.
You can turn someone ideologically, you can buy somebody off, you can blackmail somebody.
It's also in their interest. Ted Cruises and the jdvange even if whether they believe it or not, they benefit from it because they're at the top of that pyramid.
I was at the top of the pyramid. I didn't have power, but I was being promised my own mansions and security guards and all the rest. I was twenty years old, twenty one years old. It was crazy, but I really couldn't think negative thoughts. It was deemed evil spirits trying to invade me. So I was taught thought stopping techniques to shut down any negative thought. And is it possible that Elon Musk has been radicalized? I think
it is possible. Is it possible JD Vance has been radicalized? Yeah, I think it's possible.
I don't know. But my solution is to.
Teach everyone about the influence continuum, the bite model, let their family and friends who knew them before learn about it, and let them interact and ask questions in a respectful way to get at what's true and what's real.
Whether it's true or not. There's also the punishment model as well, so you know, cults obviously involved shunning or exclusion. Right, So even if you know something's wrong, you still sit there and think, if I say this and this goes for religion, and yeah, I'll actually back this up with Trump, even if you don't believe that the election was stolen or you see no evidence for it. But the very fact of you saying that out loud glued you because it is totally in or totally up, which for a
little bit of both sides. Rism isn't like that. On the other side, if you're a Democrat and you say, well, I don't think Biden did that greater job, it's not the end of you. But if you say I don't think Trump did a good job, or this is a failure, then you're out. It's an in or and out sort of thing.
It's a spot on and I interviewed David Weisman for the Cult of Trump, who is a self per first magatroll. He was an Army vet who would meet and be sent out to harass libtards and people who were in the Cult of sorrows, and he had an interaction with the comedian Sarah Silverman, who instead of just blocking him or calling him names, she said, I think it was on Twitter. Oh you are a veteran, thank you for your service. And he was like shocked that she even
recognized he existed. And he had been harassing her around gun control stuff because of school shootings, and so she asked him. She said, so you're a serviceman, what's your solution to the gun problem where kids are being shot up at school? And he realized he had never thought. He doesn't have his own ideas about what would solve it, but it changed his life because he started questioning it. And the reason I'm sharing this is to confirm your point, Jerry.
As soon as he started questioning it publicly, everybody turned on him in the Trump call, he was a pariah, he was evil, and that confirmed for him there was something wrong. Very recently, the humanist chaplain at MIT and Harvard, greb Epstein, just published a book called tech Agnostic, saying that big tech is now the new world religion and outing these billionaires' ideologies of transhumanism and long termism and accelerationism and crypto saying like they want to remake the world,
and I'm an agnostic. I don't believe that's like real, That's what we should live our lives to go to Mars and sacrifice humans for future ai androids that will populate all the galaxies. And I'm with him on.
That them on that job. So, based on your experience, what is the best way to help people who want to leave cults.
I'm going to first say what you shouldn't do, and almost everybody does. They try to argue with the person with fact and persuade them, and they attack the leader the doctrine or the policy which is guaranteed to reinforce the cult identity and make them feel like you're persecuting them. So that's what you'd never want to do.
Which is what we do on that Pope.
Yeah, it is, but this we can certainly tell you it is ineffective.
Yeah, it's effective for your base who want to listen to you, but it's not going to help the people that we're trying to rescue. And what we and what most people have done with their family and friends who've gotten into Mega world is block them. Er say, I never want to talk to you about politics, like we can meet for Thanksgiving, but we'll talk about sports or whatever. And for me, that's the biggest thing we could be doing is training people how to talk with people in
mind control cult respectfully, with curiosity, with active listening. But the most powerful technique is what was done with me, is to ask their a question that makes the think and then follow up with another question, but not from a I'm right, you're wrong, but I'm just curious how you make sense of this. Then you can ask them to go back in time to their first memory of Donald Trump and they'll say, Oh, I saw him on the Apprentice. What do you think I thought he was
an asshole. Oh that's interesting, you thought he was an asshole. So tell me walk me through slowly how you came to believe he should be president. Help identify in your journey, because I'd like to step into your shoes and understand it. But by asking it in a non threatening, non judgmental way, people feel like you care about them. And I felt like my father genuinely cared about me as much as
I didn't think he knew anything. That's what helped me reality tests my own experience because I can tell you Nobody wants to be in a cult. Nobody wants to be lied to, exploited, made to do things that are going to regret for the rest of their lives. And here's the other technique, talking about other groups, not the group, you're talking to the person. And what works best for MAGA is Chinese communist brainwashing and pimps and traffickers. They'll listen to that.
And a lot of times when we're dealing with people from authoritarian governments, the people who eventually end up working with us as agents. These are people who want to deprogram themselves from the societies that they're in. Is an example in North Korean who doesn't buy what everyone else is. You know, he's desperate for somebody to talk to who
doesn't do that. Quit the opposite, we're often looking for people who in austhoritarian governments who secretly don't buy into this and are desperate to get out.
They want to get out of their cult that they're already in.
Yeah, I know, I'm more like recognizing their proxy groups. The one that comes to mind, and I wrote about it in Combat and Cult Mind Control was an Iranian terrorist group called m e K that was based in Iraq and they were anti Iran, and.
We don't work with them. In fact, I think the Israelis do.
Though, you know, we get into this world of where the Rand Corporation said, yep, they're a mind control called but now we're not going to declassify them as a terrorist group because they're working helps a lot.
Of actually right wing Republicans like Rudy Giuliani and others paid by these guys to speak and things like that. The US government always said they were nuts and mind control and dangerous. However, some people with political ties, mostly Republicans, frankly, wish the government to take them off the list. Now they probably did, but the national security part of the government are the ones dead.
More of this after a quick break. What we want is for people to be invested in a system of government where they show up the vote and they learn what the issues are and they aren't just responding to a social media channel or Sinclair Media because they bought up the local free presses and such. Anyone who says you create your own reality, or if it's true for you, then it's true, it's like no, that's called the delusion
in mental health worlds. If you think you're Jesus. That doesn't make you Jesus.
What organizations that we don't normally consider cults nonetheless exhibit cult like practices. I know you got a list of what are things that are like, but perhaps maybe not all the way.
But let's not mention the Buffalo Bills fan clubs though those are Oh it.
Hurts today to the things sports fans are fanatical, but they are not being lied to, and they're not being forced to buy tickets or watch games.
And as they.
Are being lied to, I mean, we're the best team.
We're going to win the super Bowl. That's so funny.
Anyway, A lot of people are in Jehovah's Witnesses and they don't think of it as an authoritarian mind control cult. But my books have helped countless people exit and gratefully from that where they're told that they can't salute the flag and they can't go into another church because it's evil, or they can't get a blood transfusion, or they're told that they can't talk to their own children or family members. You were saying before, Jerry about shunning, it's more extreme.
I've done a lot of work with the Mormons and the Latter day Saints with John Delynn, who is excommunicated for speaking up for gay rights. He's a former sixth generation Mormon, and I understand that the Mormons are overrepresented in our intelligence agency, yes, very much, which is concerning for me because I would like everyone to learn about brainwashing and cults, and when you have a living profit, you may have a dual commitment of loyalty to your
profit and not necessarily to the Constitution. I would like people to learn more about Chinese communists, brainwashing and pimps and traffickers, sex trafficking and labor trafficking, because it's so present and people understand that it's wrong and that it's slavery, because the whole concept of brainwashing is you're creating slaves. But they say they're happy and they did it on their own when they didn't. Stevie is the next Mooney.
I found it really interesting how this church is split, and especially this one element of the church now the Rod of Iron Church.
These are guys with gold ear and crowns of bullets and violence, and yet they're also very much involved in politics. So I was wondering, can you bring us in and give us a sense of the Ander relationship or the overlap of the ven diagram between and then let's just run with the Rod of Iron group, which of course Mike Flynn is associated with, not in it, but he's.
They did this Rod of Iron Freedom Festival that Mike Flynn was a featured speaker at and some of his people.
Moon and tell us what the Rod of Iron Church is, and then how it interacts with Trump World.
Yeah. I kind of choke when you use the word church. But so the Moon organization has hundreds of different entities. When Onia mun died, the two sons who now live in Pennsylvania, Sean and Justin Moon, co opted I think a billion or two billion dollars from their mother who had the main organization, and she was the figure had taking it over. They battled it out in court and I guess they lost.
But there are these two brothers.
One as a gun factory making ear fifteens and car arms, pistols, et cetera. That's their company. And the other one, Sean Moon, has the Rod of Ironministries dot Org. He's called the King and he has on his website the new Constitution when they take over the United State, as if the
Christian nationalists are going to let them. And they have two training compounds, one in Tennessee one near Waco, Texas, using veterans to train people how to use assault rifles because they were expecting civil warn.
What's the connection with right wing political groups. Is it just this former anti communism thing right?
Oh, though the Moonies have been right wing anti communist major players for decades. They were involved with Irancontra and Colonel North. I should also say The Washington Times has been outed as the biggest purveyor of climate science denial. But the movies are very much involved with politics and wanting to make a theocracy, a one world, hierarchical authoritarian regime where people are either part of it or they're killed, basically.
And what was so crazy is in the room with moon when he talked about amending the Constitution and making it a capital offense, and I thought it made all the sense in the world because we would be taking people's physical bodies away from them, sending them to the spirit world, and we would save them later. Was the moony mindset.
My body's not is falling apart from me, So that might be appealing.
But it's I don't want your listeners to be just afraid. I want them to understand. I believe as actually actions we could be taking today to organize a resistance. But as soun Su said, know yourself and know your enemy
and understand who's doing what. And we need to create a strategy that's going to be more than one election cycle or two or three one that's going to take decades to rebuild what we want to rebuild and hopefully make a system where power is has checks and balances and where human rights and rule of law and the constitution matters.
Well. It's almost like biological organisms want to survive and continue right, they don't want to die out. And one way that they do that is they take over almost like pers sites, they take over political organizations. So in the eighties when I first came into the agency, there was this organization called the LaRouche Organization.
Lynday was behind the Cult of Suro saw the disinformation about it, and Roger Stone was involved with LaRue.
I didn't know that. And Laruche at the time was I think he raised over two hundred million dollars, which is a lot of money, and he was involved in four thousand political races mostly as a Democrat, but also as Republicans trying to take it over from the inside. But another thing they were doing was they were trying to get their followers into CIA so that they could generally but that their followers would then acquire information to
give to Lyndon LaRouche to build him up. I'm really concerned about trump Ism taking over, like the leadership of the US military, the cultish elements of it, and inside of CIA and FBI and Justice Department and some of those things. You say, well, you're not allowed to say what you think.
I was literally in the room and Moon said, we have to infiltrate the US government. We're going to send people to volunteer for congressmen and senators.
We're going to run our.
Own people for me. This is a fifty year playbook that I'm seeing implemented.
And we certainly have Tulsea Gibbert who's been involved.
Yeah, that's what I was going to bring up. Can you talk about her Science of Identity foundation this, Hari krishna O, Yes.
So my understanding is that her family grew up with Chris Butler, who had a cult, who then became subservient to Propo pod who started Ari Krishnas and then they left.
So you're saying the most important thing is people need to listen to this podcast and read your book and understand that there are tens of millions of ex cult members who are not sharing.
Their story because there's a stigma that people think you're stupid if you are in a cult. But I'm saying, share your story. I know there's a lot of very highly educated, successful people running businesses who have PhDs. Share your story. Let's normalize this and let's teach people how to tell the difference, how to ask questions, how to reality tests. It's not disinformation or critical thinking, it's teaching people how to reality test.
Thank you very much, Stephen for spending time with us fascinating stuff and obviously not just fascinating but critically important right now in our LISO show. Yeah, great to have you on.
Thank you for having me.
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'Shea, John Seipher, and Jonathan Sterner. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission Implausible It's a production of honorable mention and abominable pictures for iHeart podcasts
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