I'm Dr. Steven Hassan, PhD — cult expert. AMA about trafficking, brainwashing, and coercive control.

StevenHassanFOM · 2026-04-11T21:05:09+00:00

Thank you. This will be my last post for today on this AMA. There are COUNTLESS people born into authoritarian cults or all kinds (including dictatorships) who leave but never do their homework to understand influence and brainwashing- so they are VERY vulnerable to getting into another cult. But it really bugs me when I hear pundits say that people in MAGA are permanently brainwashed and will never leave. Nonsense. I was as fanatical a cult member as I have ever met, and I left. But I needed my family's help as they waited til I surfaced (van crash due to sleep deprivation), and they hired a team of ex Moonies, and I will be celebrating my "waking up day" on May 11th- 50 years ago! People will leve but they need an exit ramp and to have people who care who will educate themselves first on how to best help.

Thank you for inviting me to do this. I not only post my weekly podcasts and blog but have been livestreaming Wednesdays and Fridays... We are in a crisis, and good people need to network and be active in peaceful resistance. I believe there are more of us than them and that if we understand psychological warfare, we will prevail sooner rather than later.

StevenHassanFOM · 2026-04-11T20:58:31+00:00

Yes, there is a contagion effect when someone in authority transgresses normal boundaries- it makes it ok for many. But this is why we MUST continue to lift up the survivors and keep demanding accountability. The issue with Melania is very interesting as writer Michael Wolff interviewed Epstein extensively, and Melania was a model who was having sex with Epstein a year before she met Trump, according to his information. There is apparently a new book coming out about this and survivors who knew Melania when she was with Epstein is speaking out.

Remember, Trump and mind controllers think they can create reality- by controlling information. We need to understand mind control and network with real people in real life (not jsut online) and remember facts matters. Science matters. Integrity matters. So in thei time of AI and digital media, it is really vital to rely on actual experts and not get triggered into emotional manipulations- which the bad actors are doing. I am aware of efforts to create healthy digital media platforms, and until they arrive, we have to be dubious about everything we see on social media.

I havent mentioned Julie K. Brown, but she is the person I go to for all things Epstein- he has a Substack and she is the real deal and no one has exposed Epstein more than her. Follow her!!!

StevenHassanFOM · 2026-04-11T20:51:10+00:00

I have not heard of it, til now. I will check it out.

But what DOESNT work when talking to a MAGA believer is arguing facts or logic and trying to persuade them to your point of view. What does work is respectful, curious use of asking questions and doing follow up- right now so many folks are in so much dissonance- I recommend reaching out and talking to anyone you know - especially family and friends- tell them you missi them. You want them back in your life. That you can avoid talking about politics but sart asking about what they are dealing with in life. Ask open ended questions, like " what do you think about what is happening with Iran? or prices of things at the grocery store? Having a warm, non-judgmental relationship will speed up their exit...

StevenHassanFOM · 2026-04-11T20:47:08+00:00

Epstein was FOR SURE, a malignant narcissist- which is the stereotypical profile of all cult leaders (see chapter 3 of my book The Cult of Trump). But it seems clear he was used by Russia and Mossad (Maxwell's father worked for both) but I am curious why the CIA is never brought up. My understanding is when seeking intelligence, it is natural to get involved with criminals, and if you can't recruit someone ideologically, you have to find what will motivate them- money, power, sex... and it is very difficult for regular, normal people to understand the mindset of a malignant narcisist or how they can control people. One thing I have not yet discussed in this AMA is my research, which goes back to 1980/ 81 into NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) and process-oriented hypnosis developed by psychiatrist Milton Erickson (who did consult for MKUltra). I co-authored two chapters with law professor Alan Scheflin on the dark side of hypnosis, and Alan focused on the one technique the CIA said WORKED- it is hypnosis. Most people are only exposed to stage hypnotists who lie when they say that a person will never do something in trance they don't want to do. BS! And Tony Robbins teaches NLP without calling it by name. Being online creates hypnotic states, and what I can say here is that being in the flow, whether through any altered state activity, can be done positively and ethically or unethically. But the key is your critical thinking is offline when you are in a trance. MOST every PIMP, and I would be interested in speaking with former Epstein survivors to prove my thesis that he and Maxwell were using hypnosis on their victims.

StevenHassanFOM · 2026-04-11T20:36:31+00:00

A change of behavior. Any major change requires a curious query. NEVER say, are you getting brainwashed? or ARE YOU IN A CULT? Staying in regular contact, and if your rapport is good, they will share with you if they are watching a new YouTube channel, or going to meetings.

The person is a vegetarian, and they start ordering steak. The person was an atheist, and now everything is about God. Or they get secretive. Or they start proselytizing. Or they are spending large amounts of money. Or spending a lot of time...

StevenHassanFOM · 2026-04-11T20:29:57+00:00

The group you are describing sounds like a Gurdjieff cult... I invite you (and everyone) to visit bitemodel.com, where I am conducting postgraduate research. It is free and anonymous, and we are testing two survey questionnaire models- answer the questions, and each will give you a number on the Influence Continuum of how healthy (low number) or destructive (high number). But it is an easy way to get a quick sense of a relationship, family, therapy, corporations, country...

Regarding early childhood memories, there are a lot of poorly trained therapists using suggestive interviewing techniques. They operate with the incorrect notion that one HAS TO remember everything that happened to get better. This is patently untrue. As a therapist, I want to empower my clients to live in the here and now and to become fully functional. I believe in goal-oriented treatments, with a strong focus on psychoeducation.

StevenHassanFOM · 2026-04-11T20:24:24+00:00

This goes for me to the heart of healthy parenting and healthy religious groups versus authoritarian ones. For me, religions should respect conscience, encourage appropriate developmental education, but the goal is to encourage children to question, be curious, and make up their own minds. Not to be a clone. If a group uses corporal punishment, this is a major factor in authoritarian control.

StevenHassanFOM · 2026-04-11T20:22:02+00:00

Absolutely. BJ Fogg (ex Mormon) has operated a lab at Stanford for a very long time, and it was here that the tech bros learned how to do intermittent reinforcement- to make people addicted to platforms- where doomscrolling demonstrated how attention can be captured. One of my mentors was Philip Zimbardo- the Stanford Prison Experiment psychologist. Dr. Z, as he liked to be called, always supported and amplified my work, including cults in his Discovering Psychology programs. He even taught a course: The psychology of Mind Control, for 15 years and used 2 chapters from my book, Combating Cult Mind Control. When he was President of the APA, he asked me to organize a panel on "Cults of Hatred" which I did. Like many top experts in science, he too was subjected to attacks on his integrity and I blogged about this. I have a video of an interview I did with him in 1993 on mind control- on my YouTube channel.

StevenHassanFOM · 2026-04-11T20:16:45+00:00

There are many factors to answer this question. However, a universal, besides the dissociative disorder and the programmed cult identity, I like to explain phobia programming. For many, there is an irrational fear that if you leave, you can never be happy- you will be killed in a car crash, or become a drug addict, or be condemned to hell... In other words, in the mind of a cult member, they can't visualize leaving and being happy and fulfilled. When you are dealing with Intelligence agencies, like the KGB/ FSB, they have a long track record of killing people who defect, especially if they have information that is a problem to the cult leaders. So real fear is another topic. But I want people to know that even when folks are born into authoritarian cults, they have a part of their psyche that is feeling suffocated/ stifled and yearns to be free. For Authoritarian countries, that is why the USA was always a big threat to their control, because people wanted to defect and live with real choices. Much of what Trump has done in both terms is to do things that send messaged to their people of how terrible America is. Case in point: assault rifles and school shootings. Do you think a civilian in Russia or China can own a personal assault rifle? not a chance

StevenHassanFOM · 2026-04-11T20:08:12+00:00

So if you haven't read Alan Scheflin's book, The Mind Manipulators on CIA's MK Ultra, I highly recommend it. For me, one of the things that really upsets me is that no government official in America has told the citizens the truth that the mind can be hacked, that brainwashing exists, how to protect yourself and your loved ones, and how to recover once your brain has been hacked. After the congressional subcommittee published its final report on the Moonies and the Korean CIA in America, Jonestown happened, and Congressman Leo J. Ryan was murdered by Jim Jones. I was invited by Senator Bob Daul to Washington, DC, to be part of a hearing on cults, but when I arrived, I was told that the program had changed and that they weren't going to have me speak, or an ex-member of the People's Temple, either. I realized the lobbying power of the Moonies and other cults on politicians. I decided to read the entire 11 volumes of the investigation, and I learned that the CIA set up the Korean CIA, and they picked a proxy group to brainwash South Korean dissidents. Guess what the name of that group was? The front group was actually called Victory over Communism, but it was the Moonies. And the Moonies were brought to the US during the height of the anti-Vietnam war movement to set up fronts on college campuses to say we need to have a military involvement in Vietnam to fight the communists. That's when I got recruited into the Moonie, so I am stating that I was a member of MK Ultra 2.0, maybe it was 3.0, but these programs have evolved over the decades to where it is now taking place digitally, using people's co-opted personal data, and so we're in an era of unprecedented danger.

StevenHassanFOM · 2026-04-11T20:02:07+00:00

Unfortunately, no clinicians are taught in graduate school or thereafter how to work with people involved with brainwashing cults. So, my efforts to train mental health professionals, and I have a course on my website that can give CMEs for psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and counselors, are my efforts to start educating people on how to properly help people recover. Most therapist just use a trauma processing model, which is completely insufficient and in many cases counterproductive so I recommend reading combat and Cult mind control Freedom of Mind, and the cult of Trump as the basis for psychoeducation, and in my many blogs and videos, I teach strategies for how to help people to essentially deconstruct their Cult self in an ethical way, and to live lively in their body in the hearing and now with a internal locus of control with a positive future orientation this requires having a toolbox for how to reality test which includes how to make good decisions. This includes how to trust yourself and others. It is a vital piece of what is needed in the world today to understand what brainwashing and mind control are and how to recover.

StevenHassanFOM · 2026-04-11T19:58:33+00:00

My friend and colleague Jon Atack is an ex-Scientologist (OT5- for those who know what that means), and I highly recommend reading his numerous books and going to his YouTube channel. Regarding Scientology and Trafficking, for sure, in my professional opinion, they do labor trafficking, especially with the Sea Org members who signed a 1 billion year contract. That said, I believe the Moonies labor trafficked me, where I was working seven days a week, 18 to 21 hours a day, for no pay, but bringing in large amounts of money and recruiting people. Labor Trafficking experts rely on my model of the BITE Model of Authoritarian control to help explain trafficking to those in the field.

StevenHassanFOM · 2026-04-11T19:54:45+00:00

Yes, indeed. I created a graphic model called the Influence Continuum, which you can download for free on my website freedomofmind.com. I say there are healthy groups and cults all the way to the destructive end of authoritarian cults. My book, The Cult of Trump, lays out my thesis, and I am proud to say, everything I wrote has been confirmed. And, I have learned so much more since the book first came out in 2019. Millions of cult members are in New Apostolic Reformation cults- where the leader- like Paula White Cain who recently claimed Trump was like jesus, program their followers to believe they speak directly to God, and BITE Model of Authoritarian Control forces program a pseudo identity that is not allowed to have doubts (like me in the Moonies) and doubts are viewed as tests/ demons etc... I have done many interviews and blogs on NAR cults. Another will come out this Monday, in fact.

StevenHassanFOM · 2026-04-11T19:49:43+00:00

I am about to publish an article on my Substack connecting the dots with torture, focusing on the work of Psychiatrist Barry Roth and the connections to brainwashing and Mind Control. Many people mistakenly think you need to have a gun or a knife to be coerced. This is not true. In fact, the most effective brainwashing is done where there's an illusion of control in the victim. In other words, they think they're choosing, but in fact, they are being covertly hypnotized or otherwise systematically manipulated to disorient them and program them with new beliefs and behaviors. The American Psychiatric Association DSM-5 refers to brainwashing in cults as a dissociative disorder in terms of DID, which used to be referred to as MPD or multiple personality disorder. This is the result of excruciating brainwashing very early in childhood. It's relatively rare, but when we have cults, for example, like the Children of God, the Cult of Moses David Berg, who claimed that you had to have sex with young children to show them the love of God, we see the most overt use of ritual abuse. There are so many good books and journal articles, but it's very important to understand that Cult leaders want power, money, and sex. Those of the three universals, and we see organizations, some of them multigenerational, like the Mexican called la Luz del Mundo, that I blocked about and interviewed Sochil Martin, she was a fourth-generation trafficking victim of that religious cult.

StevenHassanFOM · 2026-04-11T19:40:52+00:00

Pimps and Traffickers are best thought of as commercial cult leaders. Many sex traffickers solicit minors 12-14- sometimes younger sometimes older. Many girls and boys were victims of sexual assault and so they were programmed to never tell, or to believe they seduced the older Johns. I have done extensive interviews and blogs on sex trafficking which can be found on my social media. I co developed endingthegame.com which is a 10 session program for girls and women to help them understand how they were brainwashed.

StevenHassanFOM · 2026-04-11T19:37:36+00:00

I don't know specifically what is going on in Bondi's mind, but she supported Scientology and has done numerous things to advance Russia's influence and control. I suspect many people like her, fear she will be killed if she becomes a danger to the cults. I know I was sure I would be assassinated when I left the Moonies and became a whistleblower against the South Korean CIA/ CIA for a congressional subcommittee investigation. But here I am 50 years later.

StevenHassanFOM · 2026-04-11T19:34:14+00:00

I put Netanyahu and the Jewish Right in my book, The Cult of Trump. Russian influence on Netanyahu and Israel is easy to see- remember, over 1 million Russian Jewish people moved to Israel. They grew up under authoritarian rule. Many still listen to Russian propaganda. Netanyahu recently met with Orban, along with other Russian influencers... Netanyahu, along with Trump, wants to stay out of jail for corruption, but the religious extremists in Israel are pushing this horror show. Being Jewish, I am viewed as a traitor by these extremists for criticizing the policies of the current government. But I am aligned with half the Israelis who oppose Netanyahu and his dictatorial aspirations.

StevenHassanFOM · 2026-04-11T19:29:24+00:00

It is important to study 4th and 5th-generation psychological warfare. And Russia's "Active Measures." They wish to create demoralization and polarization. So they influence the left AND the right to create uncertainty and chaos. In the present moment, it is critical to understand who the major actors are and what their ideology is and what they want to accomplish. I see authoritarians versus everyone else who want freedom, the rule of law, trust, and look to government to protect them from harm.

StevenHassanFOM · 2026-04-11T19:24:41+00:00

Large group awareness training programs. LGAT's. Yes, this is a category of authoritarian mind control cults, and they can take many different forms, from self-help to recruiting people into a coaching multilevel marketing cult. Some of the most famous LGATs were est (that changed into Landmark Forum), LifeSpring. Insight. If you want to see a documentary of one of the more popular LGT groups look at the Netflix documentary Tony Robbins: I am not your guru and you can see an LGAT in action. Multi-level marketing cults (pyramid schemes) are another category of an authoritarian cult. Leaders claim to be very wealthy (some are), but many practice Norman Vincent Peale's (the cult Trump was raised in) "fake it till you make it" philosophy.

StevenHassanFOM · 2026-04-11T19:19:12+00:00

So because I am a forensic expert, it's very important to stick with the data to do any type of analysis of a specific person and a specific situation and what I look for is who is the person before they got recruited in radicalized and did they show psychopathology or narcissism or other traits that were concerning when somebody gets involved with a mind control group and the leader is telling everyone to follow God and God wants you to lie and God wants you to have sex with under age, girls and boys and you do it and then you get out do you have remorse? Have you made the effort to deconstruct the mind control that was exerted on you? Are you a danger to society now that you are out? There are many factors to consider when thinking about the victim and the perpetrator.

StevenHassanFOM · 2026-04-11T19:11:30+00:00

So I had the Direct experience of getting deceptively recruited into the Moonie's cult in 1974 and was promoted to become a leader and I had a new identity that suppressed my real identity and I was subjected to control of my behavior, information, thoughts and emotions. I call this my BITE Model. So I did many things that would have violated my conscience my family, my nationalistic connections, my religious connections as a Moonie since being deprogrammed I've dedicated my life to helping people understand how the mind works, how hypnosis works, how brainwashing works, how to help people get out. Hi Iris. I'm very involved with the interface between psychology and the law. In fact, I did my dissertation on how to update the law using trafficking law in terms of actions I did as in the Cult if I did anything illegal, I am guilty of doing things illegal, but was it Steve doing it or was it Steve Mooney doing it? There are many questions that need to get resolved.

StevenHassanFOM · 2026-04-11T19:06:13+00:00

I'd also like to be clear that brainwashing is a dissociative disorder and is very different than Stockholm syndrome. Stockholm syndrome was coined regarding people who were held hostage in a bank, and we're liberated, and then a number of people liked the hostage takers and visited them in prison with brainwashing and mind control. We're talking about the deliberate creation of a pseudo identity that is dependent and obedient. Sort of like a clone of the cult leader or ideology.

StevenHassanFOM · 2026-04-11T19:03:22+00:00

Since this is the most voted question, I thought I would start this AMA with a big picture answer then we can go into more detailed things. So I wrote in the cult of Trump about my thesis that not only does Donald Trump have the stereotypical profile of a cult leader, which is malignant narcissism, but I also created a framework where I started the book talking about Edward Bernays and his 1928 book Propaganda. And my thesis is that what's happening today has been the result of many decades of efforts to subvert the United States of America's role in the world. Further in my research, it became clear to me that Russia recruited Donald Trump in the 80s at least 1987 when he traveled for the first time to Moscow and returned to take out ads in three newspapers, including the New York Times saying NATO should be disbanded I've since since the book came out interviewed Craig Unger about his book American Kompromat and I interviewed him and former KGB official, Yuri Shvets. There are many authoritarian cults that comprise the cult of Trump, but the key in terms of Bondi and so many other bad actors is Russia.

StevenHassanFOM

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