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Cults, Culture & Coercion with Dr. Steve Hassan

Cults, Culture & Coercion with Dr. Steve Hassan

By: MeidasTouch Network Dr. Steven Hassan
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Steven Hassan, PhD, is one of the leading experts on cults and undue influence in the world. A former member of the right-wing Moonie cult, Hassan was deprogrammed 45 years ago and has dedicated his life to helping people out of cults and destructive situations. Dr. Hassan is a licensed mental health professional and has written four books, including The Cult of Trump and the seminal book Combating Cult Mind Control. On this podcast, Steve will explain HOW mind-control works, and how to protect yourself from its grips. He will also address ethical influence as the podcast will address the entire Influence Continuum. He’ll interview the biggest names in this field.© 2023 Meidas Media Network, Dr. Steven Hassan Personal Development Personal Success Social Sciences
Episodes
  • What the Watchtower Doesn’t Want You to Know with Australian whistleblower Lara Kaput: Child labor, financial fraud, and eight types of modern slavery inside the Jehovah’s Witnesses

    What the Watchtower Doesn’t Want You to Know with Australian whistleblower Lara Kaput: Child labor, financial fraud, and eight types of modern slavery inside the Jehovah’s Witnesses
    Jun 29 2026
    When Lara Kaput was eight years old, she was required to clean bricks on Jehovah’s Witness building sites. She helped her father road-build on the church construction projects. She did cleaning, and gardening, and her childhood friends did this, and cleaning child-minding too. None of it paid, none very little of it optional. She did not recognize it as child labor at the time. Most children raised inside authoritarian groups do not. That is how it works. I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Lara on Cults, Culture & Coercion, and what she brought to this conversation is the kind of ground-level, decade-long investigative knowledge that is genuinely rare. Lara is a prominent Australian activist and whistleblower, a co-founder of the advocacy group Say Sorry (saysorry.org), and a former vice president of the Secular Association of New South Wales. For nine years she has provided testimony and submissions to governments, law enforcement, and royal commissions across approximately 10 countries, specifically concerning the Watchtower Society, theone of the legal names for the organization known publicly as the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Lara has made approximately 30 or more submissions to governments across roughly 10 countries around the globe. The allegations she has documented and reported fall into several categories, and she was careful throughout our conversation to frame these as allegations, as the matters are either under investigation or have not yet been adjudicated. They include: aiding and abetting child sexual abuse, high rates of domestic violence, intentional contract breaches, document forgery, evidence and records destruction, interference with members’ democratic rights, phoenixing of businesses (the deliberate voluntary dissolution of one company to restart another, shedding liabilities while preserving assets and customers), multi-billion-dollar global property liquidation she alleges constitutes financial fraud, modern slavery, and manipulation of privacy law, and perverting the course of justice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 9 mins
  • Russian Disinformation From the Ground in Ukraine With Journalist Chris Sampson: An American journalist in Ukraine on active measures, AI pollution, and bottom-up resistance

    Russian Disinformation From the Ground in Ukraine With Journalist Chris Sampson: An American journalist in Ukraine on active measures, AI pollution, and bottom-up resistance
    Jun 22 2026
    Russian disinformation no longer feels like a foreign problem you read about in long articles. It shapes what you see when you open your phone, what your relatives believe about a war they have never visited, and what large language models tell you when you ask a sincere question about world events. My guest this week on Cults, Culture & Coercion, Chris Sampson, journalist, terrorism analyst, and extremism researcher, publisher of The Wiretap, has spent more than four years reporting from Ukraine. He wakes up to drones and missiles, then opens his laptop to read online claims about the country he lives in describing a place he does not recognize. Few people are positioned to explain this gap with the precision he brings. He sorts Russian information into three streams: state propaganda, general pro-Kremlin bloggers, and military-security bloggers. The third stream sometimes fractures, and analysts who watch carefully see fissures open. Living in Ukraine has given Chris a daily lesson in cognitive dissonance, the discomfort a person feels when they hold two contradictory beliefs and resolve it by changing one of them. He walks through a Ukrainian city the morning after Russian drones strike it, then opens a feed full of Russian disinformation claiming the strikes never happened or accusing Ukrainians of staging them. The flood of falsehoods is the point. Putin and the KGB long ago refined what researchers call the firehose of falsehood, in which an overwhelming volume of contradictory claims exhausts your ability to sort signal from noise. He warned me about a newer escalation. Russia has been seeding pseudo-academic papers and propaganda articles into the training data of large language models. Ask one of the major AI tools a sincere question about the war or about the kidnapped Ukrainian children, and the model has been trained on material with Russian framing baked in. Chris named Kateryna Rashevska, a leading Ukrainian expert on the abducted children, as one of those raising the alarm about academic-looking papers planted to muddy the legal and historical record. This is active measures, the Russian intelligence tradition of psychological and information warfare, applied to a new generation of tools. The mechanism is brainwashing, the systematic use of deception, repetition, and emotional manipulation to shape what a person believes. The kidnapped children case is one of the most painful expressions of this doctrine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 9 mins
  • What Detransition Taught Me About Identity: Alexander Linkowski on his detransition journey, informed consent, and the illusion of self

    What Detransition Taught Me About Identity: Alexander Linkowski on his detransition journey, informed consent, and the illusion of self
    Jun 15 2026
    Detransitioning, a term for stopping, shifting, or reversing an initial gender transition, is a word that has been stripped of its human meaning by the political forces fighting over it. Last week, I shared my interview with Dr. Kinnon Ross MacKinnon, a trans researcher at York University whose landmark DARE study surveyed 957 people who had detransitioned. MacKinnon’s data show that the detransitioners he interviewed are not a single monolith with identical motivations, but rather four distinct groups with distinct sets of needs. Despite this emerging research, the Trump administration now attempts to justify banning care for everyone, a flagrant distortion of what the science shows we should do to support those who are both transgender and those who wish to detransition. During our discussions, MacKinnon recommended I speak with Alexander Linkowski, whom he described as a thoughtful voice from inside the detransition experience. Alexander is a 32-year-old philosopher, transhumanist, and YouTuber based in Norway. He lived as a trans woman for approximately three years before detransitioning and is currently completing a book on detransition and identity. He realized he was neurodiverse. Alexander’s story is not political ammunition for either side. It is one person’s vulnerable story, told with honesty and philosophical depth, and it deserves to be heard on its own terms. Alexander grew up in Poland, a deeply conservative Catholic country where 1950s ideals of masculinity and femininity shaped sex education. He described being bullied at school and told repeatedly he was “not a real man,” feeling profound discomfort in his body from early childhood, something he now understands as connected to his autism diagnosis, which he received as an adult. Living within a homophobic society, Alexander also described deep shame around his attraction to other males, buried for years. “Everything led me to believe that life would be easier, life would be better, if I lived socially as a woman.” He transitioned medically and socially at 19. Based on the DARE study, Alexander’s experience maps closely onto what MacKinnon describes as the first pathway to detransition. These are people who detransitioned with strong decisional regret, who often reported that their clinical care was not thorough enough, and fewer than half of whom felt they received adequate decision-making support before they began. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 10 mins
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