Sensory overload, like sensory deprivation, can also effectively disrupt a person’s balance and make them more open to suggestion. A person can be bombarded by emotionally laden material at a rate faster than they can digest it. The result is a feeling of being overwhelmed. The mind snaps into neutral and ceases to evaluate the material pouring in. The newcomer may think this is happening spontaneously within themselves, but it has been intentionally structured that way.
Other hypnotic techniques, such as double binds13—in which a person receives two or more contradictory pieces of information—can also be used to help unfreeze a person’s sense of reality. The goal is to get a person to do what the controller wants while giving an illusion of choice. For example, cults will often tell a person that they are free to leave whenever they wish but that they will regret it for the rest of their lives. A double bind commonly used by controlling people is to tell a person that they are free to go but that they will never find anyone who will love them as much as they do. In short, they will be miserable. An example of a hypnotic double bind—one that Keith Raniere reportedly used—is “you will remember to forget everything that just happened.” Whether the person believes or doubts the controller, confusion and emotional distress often ensue.
Once a person is unfrozen, they are ready for the next phase.
CHANGING
Changing consists of creating a new personal identity—a new set of behaviors, thoughts, and emotions—often through the use of role models. Indoctrination of this new identity takes place both formally—through meetings, seminars, and rituals (or at Trump rallies)—and informally—by spending time with members, recruiting, studying, and self-indoctrination through the internet (watching Trump videos, communicating on social media with Trump supporters). Many of the same techniques used during unfreezing are also repeated in this phase.
Repetition and rhythm create the lulling hypnotic cadences with which the formal indoctrination can be delivered. The material is repeated over and over (and Trump is a master of repetition). If the lecturers are sophisticated, they will vary their talks somewhat in an attempt to hold interest, but the message remains the same. The goal is programming and indoctrination, not real learning. Often recruits are told how bad the world is and that the unenlightened have no idea how to fix it. Ordinary people lack the understanding that only the leader can provide (a common theme for Trump: the world is a mess that only he can fix). Recruits are told that their old self is what’s keeping them from fully experiencing the new truth: “Your old concepts are what drag you down. Your rational mind is holding you back from fantastic progress. Surrender. Let go. Have faith.”
Behaviors are shaped often subtly at first, then more forcefully. The information that will make up the new identity is doled out gradually, piece by piece, only as fast as the person is deemed ready to assimilate it. The rule of thumb is to tell the new member only enough that they can swallow. When I was a lecturer in the Moonies, I remember discussing this policy with others involved in recruiting. I was taught this analogy: “You wouldn’t feed an infant thick pieces of steak, would you? You have to feed a baby something it can digest, like formula. Well, these people [potential converts] are spiritual babies. Don’t tell them more than they can handle, or they will choke and die.”
Perhaps the most powerful persuasion is exerted by other cult members. For the average person, talking with an indoctrinated cultist is quite an experience. You’ll probably never meet anyone else who is so absolutely convinced that they know what is best for you. A devoted cult member also does not take no for an answer because they have been indoctrinated to believe that if you don’t join, they have failed to save you. Often, members are told that if they do not get converts, they are to blame. This creates a lot of pressure to succeed.
Human beings have an incredible capacity to adapt to new environments. Charismatic cult leaders know how to exploit this strength. By controlling a person’s environment, using behavior modification to reward some behaviors and suppress others, and by inducing hypnotic states, they may reprogram a person’s identity.
Once a person has been fully broken down through the process of changing, they are ready for the next step.
REFREEZING
The recruit’s identity must now be solidified, or refrozen, as a “new man” or “new woman.” They are given a new purpose in life and new activities that will enable their new identity to become dominant and suppress the old one.
Many of the techniques from the first two stages are carried over into the refreezing phase. The first and most important task is to denigrate their previous “sinful self” and avoid anything that activates that old self. During this phase, an individual’s memory becomes distorted, minimizing the good things in the past and maximizing their failings, hurts, and guilt. Special talents, interests, hobbies, friends, and family usually must be abandoned—preferably through dramatic public statements and actions—especially if they compete with a person’s commitment to the cause.
During the refreezing phase, the primary method for passing on new information is modeling. New members are paired with older members who are assigned to show them the ropes. The “spiritual child” is instructed to imitate the “spiritual parent” in all ways. This technique serves several purposes. It keeps the older member on their best behavior while gratifying their ego. At the same time, it whets the new member’s appetite to become a respected model so they can train junior members of their own.
After a novice spends enough time with older members, the day finally comes when they can be trusted to recruit and train other newcomers by themselves. They are taken out with a senior member and encouraged to enlist new members. Thus the victim becomes a victimizer, perpetuating the destructive system.
The group now forms the member’s “true” family; any other is considered their outmoded “physical” family. In my own case, I ceased to be Steve Hassan, son of Milton and Estelle Hassan, and became Steve Hassan, son of Sun Myung Moon and Hak Ja Han, the “True Parents” of all creation. In every waking moment, I endeavored to be a small Sun Myung Moon, the greatest person in human history. As my cult identity was put into place, I was told to think, feel, and act like him. This is not unique to my cult. When faced with a problem, Scientologists are encouraged to ask, “What would Ron [Hubbard] do?”
In an interview with CBS News, Republican Ron DeSantis—who won the Florida governor’s race with Trump’s help—claimed that Trump was a role model for his own children. “We all have our faults and what-not,” DeSantis said. “But even [Trump’s] worst critics would say he is someone who is determined to keep his word.”14 At the time of the interview, Trump had been on record as having made well over six thousand false or misleading claims.
BITE MODEL
Trump has had extensive experience helping to create environments that regulate people’s behavior, information, thoughts, and emotions. On The Apprentice, the show he worked on for fourteen seasons, contestants lived communally, in a highly controlled environment where their actions were tightly circumscribed. (Interestingly, show creator Mark Burnett had significant military training, having served in the British army in the Falklands and Northern Ireland in the early 1980s.) Contestants tried to please a harsh mercurial leader (Trump), who would punish failure with banishment and exile. Those who remained might be rewarded lavishly, but the fear of failure was omnipresent, and trust toward fellow members practically absent. The artificial nature of reality TV does not make it any less of a window into the fundamental levers of mind control. If anything, reality TV brings to the fore mind control’s power—how else could people do such crazy things if they were not in an environment that systematically manipulated them?
Mind control is not an ambiguous, mystical process but instead a concrete and specific set of methods and techniques. The BITE model, which I briefly outlined in chapter 1, identifies the main techniques cult leaders use to control behavior, information, thoughts, and emotions—all in
an effort to make followers dependent and obedient. It is not necessary for every single item on the list to be present for a group to be judged destructive. In fact, only a few items under each of the four components need be present to raise red flags about an organization or leader. For reference, I have identified in boldface aspects of the BITE model that people—including former Apprentice contestant and promoter Omarosa Manigault Newman—have described in association with Trump.
Behavior Control
Regulate an individual’s physical reality
Dictate where, how, and with whom the member lives and associates or isolates
Dictate when, how, and with whom the member has sex
Control types of clothing and hairstyles
Regulate diet—food and drink, hunger, and/or fasting
Manipulate and limit sleep
Financial exploitation, manipulation, or dependence
Restrict leisure, entertainment, vacation time
Major time spent with group indoctrination and rituals and/or self-indoctrination, including the internet
Require permission for major decisions
Report thoughts, feelings, and activities (of self and others) to superiors
Use rewards and punishments to modify behaviors, both positive and negative
Discourage individualism, encourage groupthink
Impose rigid rules and regulations
Encourage and engage in corporal punishment
Punish disobedience. Extreme examples done by pimps are beating, torture, burning, cutting, rape, or tattooing/branding
Threaten harm to family or friends (by cutting off family/friends)
Force individual to rape or be raped
Instill dependency and obedience
Information Control
Deception Deliberately withhold information
Distort information to make it more acceptable
Systematically lie to the cult member
Minimize or discourage access to noncult sources of information, including: Internet, TV, radio, books, articles, newspapers, magazines, other media
Critical information
Former members
Keep members busy so they don’t have time to think and investigate
Exert control through a cell phone with texting, calls, and internet tracking
Compartmentalize information into Outsider versus Insider doctrines
Ensure that information is not easily accessible
Control information at different levels and missions within the group
Allow only leadership to decide who needs to know what and when
Encourage spying on other members
Impose a buddy system to monitor and control member
Report deviant thoughts, feelings, and actions to leadership
Ensure that individual behavior is monitored by the group
Extensive use of cult-generated information and propaganda, including: Newsletters, magazines, journals, audiotapes, videotapes, YouTube, movies, and other media
Misquoting statements or using them out of context from noncult sources
Unethical use of confession
Use information about “sins” to disrupt and/or dissolve identity boundaries
Withhold forgiveness or absolution
Manipulate memory, possibly implanting false memories
Thought Control
Require members to internalize the group’s doctrine as truth
Adopt the group’s “map of reality” as reality
Instill black and white thinking
Decide between good versus evil
Organize people into us versus them (insiders versus outsiders)
Change a person’s name and identity
Use loaded language and clichés to constrict knowledge, stop critical thoughts, and reduce complexities into platitudinous buzzwords
Encourage only “good and proper” thoughts
Use hypnotic techniques to alter mental states, undermine critical thinking, and even to age-regress the member to childhood states
Manipulate memories to create false ones
Teach thought stopping techniques that shut down reality testing by stopping negative thoughts and allowing only positive thoughts. These techniques include: Denial, rationalization, justification, wishful thinking
Chanting
Meditating
Praying
Speaking in tongues
Singing or humming
Reject rational analysis, critical thinking, constructive criticism
Forbid critical questions about leader, doctrine, or policy
Label alternative belief systems as illegitimate, evil, or not useful
Instill new “map of reality”
Emotional Control
Manipulate and narrow the range of feelings—some emotions and/or needs are deemed as evil, wrong, or selfish
Teach emotion stopping techniques to block feelings of hopelessness, anger, or doubt
Make the person feel that problems are always their own fault, never the leader’s or the group’s fault
Promote feelings of guilt or unworthiness, such as: Identity guilt
You are not living up to your potential
Your family is deficient
Your past is suspect
Your affiliations are unwise
Your thoughts, feelings, actions are irrelevant or selfish
Social guilt
Historical guilt
Instill fear, such as fear of: Thinking independently
The outside world
Enemies
Losing one’s salvation
Leaving
Orchestrate emotional highs and lows through love bombing and by offering praise one moment, and then declaring a person is a horrible sinner
Ritualistic and sometimes public confession of sins
Phobia indoctrination: inculcate irrational fears about leaving the group or questioning the leader’s authority No happiness or fulfillment possible outside the group
Terrible consequences if you leave: hell, demon possession, incurable diseases, accidents, suicide, insanity, 10,000 reincarnations, etc.
Shun those who leave and inspire fear of being rejected by friends and family
Never a legitimate reason to leave; those who leave are weak, undisciplined, unspiritual, worldly, brainwashed by family or counselor, or seduced by money, sex, or rock and roll
Threaten harm to ex-member and family (threats of cutting off friends/family)
As the BITE model shows, mind control isn’t the thuggish, coercive activity portrayed in film—of being locked up in a dark room and tortured, though that is possible. Instead, it is a much more subtle and sophisticated process. Often, a person may regard their controller as a friend or peer, and will unwittingly cooperate with them, for example by giving them private and personal information that they do not realize may later be used against them.
Mind control may involve little or no overt physical coercion, though obviously there is psychological abuse. There may be physical and sexual abuse as well. On their own, hypnotic processes—especially when combined with group dynamics—can create a potent indoctrination effect. A person is deceived and manipulated, though not directly threatened, into making prescribed choices and may even appear to respond positively, at least in the beginning. Manigault Newman enjoyed the “spoils of success” first as a contestant on The Apprentice and later as part of the Trump Organization and then the White House, only later to wake up to the systematic deception and indoctrination she had experienced. Though hers is a prominent case, I believe it is happening all over America. Trump, with the aid of the greater media machine, is using mind control techniques to recruit, indoctrinate, and maintain his base, speaking to them through tweets and at rallies but also through his executive orders, judicial appointments, and policy decisions, which are essentially call-outs, or political dog whistles, to his followers—“I did this for you, I expect loyalty in return�
��—all the while drawing them deeper into his cult of personality.
THE REAL WORLD
Okay, you may be saying to yourself, I see these points. But aren’t cults usually relatively small fringe groups? How might the Cult of Trump exert control over tens of millions of Americans?
Let’s look at the media that we consume today. I have already mentioned the documentary The Brainwashing of My Dad, in which Jen Senko shows how her father, Frank, was transformed from a Democrat to an ultraconservative Republican by being exposed to hours of right-wing media, in particular Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. She found many others who had loved ones in similar situations and uses their personal stories, along with interviews with experts, to educate the public about how conservative media uses social influence techniques to manipulate their consumers.
One such expert is Frank Luntz. A PR consultant and author of the book Words That Work, Luntz spells out how propaganda techniques used by right-wing media bypass critical thinking and hit people emotionally, especially through the use of fear. (A longtime Republican advisor, Luntz openly criticized Trump during the 2016 campaign but is now working in the White House, advising Trump on messaging.)15 On Fox News, everything is created to maximize patriotic feelings. The settings are glitzy and compelling, with red, white and blue colors, and attractive female and male hosts who espouse their conservative views, often with passion but little evidence. “Fox trades in stories about the venality of big government, liberal overreach and little-guy heroes of the heartland. A large share of Fox stories deftly push emotional buttons,” writes William Poundstone in Forbes magazine.16 Their segments often promote views that play on tribal tendencies that ratchet up a kind of fear and hatred of “out-groups,” such as immigrants, Democrats, and ethnic groups such as blacks, Latinos, and Muslims. And then there is the hypnotic scroll of the news ticker and general graphic excess, which can leave people feeling overwhelmed but addicted to finding out what comes next—in the same way that they look at their Instagram, Twitter, or other social media to assuage their fear of missing out.
The Cult of Trump Page 10
