The Culting of America: From Children of God to the MAGA Playbook
Is America a cult? How can we help those trapped in cult-like thinking? Discussing her new book The Culting of America, Daniella Mestyanek Young, a US Army veteran, intelligence officer, and survivor of the notorious Children of God cult, joins Gaslit Nation to help us identify coercive control in our own lives, and in our White House.
Daniella breaks down the "sex cult math" of her upbringing, identifying the same tactics of coercive control now fueling the MAGA movement. Trump has pulled disparate groups into a singular cult of personality, where he is viewed as a "flawed vessel" of a “perfect God” delivering a Christian theocracy coming after our rights.
As a counter-terrorism expert, Daniella warns that the "arrogance" of Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s war of choice in Iran is a classic cult leader trap. Tyrants lose when they start "sampling their own Kool-Aid,” she points out. She also advises on how to help those in your life who have fallen down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole of cult-like thinking, to help them find their way to reality. This is an episode not to miss.
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Show Notes:
Yes, Some Government Conspiracies Are Real, like MKUltra: Welcome to The Church Committee Report https://www.gaslitnationpod.com/episodes-transcripts-20/2026/1/28/the-playbook-for-defeating-maga-the-church-committee-report?rq=The%20Playbook%20for%20Defeating%20MAGA%3A%20The%20Church%20Committee%20Report
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Andrea Chalupa (00:13):
Welcome to Gaslit Nation, a show about corruption in America and rising autocracy worldwide. I am your host, Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller, Mr. Jones -- the film The Kremlin doesn't want you to see, so be sure to watch it.
(00:29):
This week we are joined by Daniella Mestyanek Young, also known online as the knitting cult lady. So if you hear her metal sticks going at it, that is her knitting ferociously during our conversation on how to fight fascism so that the sound may pick up. Daniella is an author, cult survivor, US Army combat veteran and scholar. She was raised in the notorious sex cult, Children of God, which she escaped as a teenager and later served as an army intelligence officer and went on to write the bestselling memoir Uncultured. Her new book, The Culting of America, co-authored with Amy Reid, examines how cult-like dynamics can appear in everyday American institutions and communities.
(01:21):
And so obviously I want to get into your extraordinary story. Tell us what was the Children of God cult and how old were you when you first started to awaken to maybe the environment that you're being raised in that something was off?
Daniella Mestyanek Young (01:41):
So the Children of God cult is one of these many cults that popped up in the late 60s, early 70s, definitely as a reaction to the civil rights movements and all of the changes that were happening in America. The Children of God founder, David Berg, much like a cult leader running America right now, collected a bunch of already existing cults into his cult. He built this mega cult of 10,000 people. And the Children of God is most famous for using religious prostitution to gain followers and money, and then also for advocating pedophilia for God. You've probably heard of the Children of God because Joaquin and River Phoenix and Rose McGowan grew up in it. And one of the founding members of Fleetwood Mac joined the cult and used his name and his music skills to help support it for the last 50 years. My grandfather joined the Children of God in the 70s and moved up into the leadership as one of the financial managers, something he still does today.
(02:43):
And my mom was born in the early days. And by the time she was 15, I was born. She was impregnated by her dad's boss. So my father is a few years older than my grandfather, and I like to call that sex cult math.
(03:01):
I would say that I never believed in any of it, that I was just a little neurodivergent atheist born to religious extremists. But when you're isolated and that's all you know, that's just the waters that you're swimming in. But by the time I was six, I was experiencing some very bad abuse by Jeremy Spencer of Fleetwood Mac amongst other people. And I was just not having it anymore. And I made a deal with myself at the age of six that if you're going to go to hell because you grow up and become an apostate, well, then hell's going to suck. But it wasn't until September 11th, 2001, when I was watching live news on television for the first time in my life, watching this horrific stuff happening, but the people around me were praising God for his just judgment on evil America. And I heard the words religious extremists for the first time when they were talking about the terrorists.
(04:00):
And I had this very significant moment where I said, "Are we the religious extremists?" And I think it's pretty significant that a lot of times when people leave cults or they're struggling with cults, they think they're a bad fit. I thought I was a bad fit for this and I'm going to get out as soon as possible, but it wasn't until much later that I would realize like, "Oh, maybe this whole organization is not the good guys.
Andrea Chalupa (04:27):
What was that dawning like for you? Were they pressuring you to stay?
Daniella Mestyanek Young (04:35):
So I would say our entire lives was being pressured to stay. We were told from birth that this was the only thing to do was grow up and be a missionary in this organization, and that if you left and became a backslider, you were thrown out of the upper levels of heaven. I specifically after this realization when I was 14, I would go on to be trafficked through Mexico and lower Texas for the next two years, and I would kind of be mounting my rebellion and my ultimate ex-communication. So I very dramatically climbed over the commune walls and went to go fellowship with an outsider, which is hang out with a boyfriend and forgot to sneak back in one night. And so the jig was up. But interestingly enough, this is when I did start receiving some pressure because cults, they will threaten to throw you out into the unknown world that they have made you terrified of, but they'll always accept you back if you are willing to apologize, completely humble yourself and recommit to the organization.
(05:48):
And of course, I was terrified of leaving. I was 15 years old and I was being thrown out of pretty much everything I knew. And this would be when my mom would take me on a walk outside the commune and just be like, "Go." She was like, "Go. You're not happy here. I can see it in your eyes." She was still very dedicated at the time with her seven children in 14 years, but they had arranged for me to live with an older stepsister and she got me out at 15 and I'm very, very grateful for that.
Andrea Chalupa (06:20):
Oh, wow. That's amazing. And so then when you entered the US Army and you served as an intelligence officer, what was that experience like by comparison?
Daniella Mestyanek Young (06:32):
Yeah. So first I want to say going to high school was the craziest thing that ever happened to me. I go from never a day in school to 4,000 students in one of Houston's largest high schools and just being like, "I'm from another planet." And then I had to go through, I went through four years of high school and two, then I went through college where I worked four jobs and graduated valedictorian and I think I was so excited to go into the military, which would be a culture that I could understand where all I had to do was work hard and show up in the right uniform. And there was a rank and there was someone to tell you what to do next, a little bit easier to navigate the world. And definitely, definitely on my first day of basic training, this is where my memoir starts, we're holding a 50 pound duffel bag over our heads, getting yelled at.
(07:28):
And I kind of recognized the game and said, "Okay, I think I've joined another cult." And you know what? That didn't scare me. That was just my next thought was like, okay, I'm going to be better at it than the rest of these folks because I know how to do this. I know how to be a 100% group member and just not be an individual for however long it takes to play the game.
Andrea Chalupa (07:54):
And what drew you towards intelligence work and what were some of the areas that ... I mean, obviously the Iraq war and Afghanistan were happening at the time. Was that your main focus?
Daniella Mestyanek Young (08:05):
Yeah. I mean, I had gotten in a pretty toxic relationship and then gotten married in college. And it's a thing we call a one-one cult sometimes. And so have followed him into the military, but the only thing I wanted to do was intelligence, military intelligence. And I've always kind of understood that I'm very smart and my brain works like a computer and I would be good at looking at another culture from the outside, but trying to understand it. I actually researched what it was going to be and I said, "I think I'm good at this. I've already had to drop into a whole new world and learn everything about it. " So also looking back, I think sometimes as trauma survivors will go into jobs that have us confronting exactly growing up in fear and anxiety and soldier of God and all of this stuff, going into being an actual soldier where I was the expert on the enemy and everything scary, people came to me and I explained to them what it would likely look like, I think that was really kind of settling for my mind and emotions at the time.
Andrea Chalupa (09:20):
Oh, that's interesting. Okay. So you helped the US military understand the minds of the people that they were battling, like people in Iraq, ISIS?
Daniella Mestyanek Young (09:30):
Yeah. So the intelligence officer is simply the expert on the enemy. And so operations will come up with a plan to go take that village. And my job is to help bring everyone home alive. The best way to do that is not to go anywhere near the village, but that's a terrible way to take the village. So we kind of go back and forth. I deployed twice to Afghanistan in the war on terror. So I was specifically very highly trained by the US government in counter-terrorism. And this was the first parallel that I started seeing was with terrorist organizations and how devoted they were and how mission-based they were. And ultimately, even after I got out of the army, I decided, "You know what? I like being an expert on bad guys and bad leaders, so I'm going to keep doing that.
Andrea Chalupa (10:23):
"And now you're an expert on cults and you're in demand, I can see. So I wanted to take a quick segue because obviously Trump and Kushner with their disastrous war of choice in Iran and Israel basically running amuck thanks to them more than ever. We're also living in a time of ISIS coming back and homegrown terrorists coming back. What is your expertise, your spidey sense telling you now about that dynamic?
Daniella Mestyanek Young (10:53):
I mean, first of all, it's just a really stupid war. Part of my job was to do the war gaming, which is to go through and say, "Can we win this? " And we're playing the bad guys who are trying to stop you. And there has been absolutely zero, not one war game that says America wins against Iran. The Strait of Hormuz has been commonly referred to as the easiest checkmate on the globe is just to close the Strait of Hormuz. And it is not surprising at all that they are not able to get rations to soldiers. We've had the first successful flyover bombing of a US air base in decades, and it is going about as poorly as expected, which is why no other president of the five who have been asked by Israel to help them with this has decided to get involved.
(11:55):
And Trump has a very long history of not listening to his intelligence officers. The first Trump campaign, he didn't want the intelligence brief, so no one could wrap their heads around that. This is kind of good news because this is how cult leaders and tyrants always lose is because they think they're the ones that are going to do it.
Andrea Chalupa (12:19):
That's so funny. Yeah. When Hitler took over from his generals in World War II, that's when everything started turning against him. Go on.
Daniella Mestyanek Young (12:25):
Yes exactly. And I call this sampling the Kool-Aid. They all study each other and they learn the tactics and that's how they know what to do, but they really all think that they're going to be the one to solve it. I truly believe that Donald Trump thinks he is the best leader of all time and he knows how to do everything.
Andrea Chalupa (12:48):
So let's talk about the cults of Donald Trump. And I see it as cults within cults. You have the Christian nationalist cults who see Donald Trump as a perfect gods and imperfect vessel, and they're getting their wishlist through him, including trying to force women back into the home, take away their right to vote and all of that. They're working towards that with the Heritage Foundation. And then you have the crime cult, like all of his buddies from Brighton Beach who are just making a fortune, they don't care what the horrifying ripple effect of that will be across the planet. It's just like a massive money gab, money grab, they're looting right now.
Daniella Mestyanek Young (13:30):
Yep.
Andrea Chalupa (13:30):
And so, and then on top of that, you have the cult cult, which is Trump walking around at the emperor who has no clothes on except for like a giant adult diaper, allegedly everyone likes to tease him for. But it's like, so how many cults are at play here? How many cults do you see? And then I want to get, I know this is kind of going off in all directions. And then you and I are going to get to the ultimate cult, which is the founding of America, which set up these inequality booby traps that allowed someone like Donald Trump to come to power, even though our framers claimed to know better. So first start with the current cult crisis. How many do you see here?
Daniella Mestyanek Young (14:10):
So cults always pop up in times of social turmoil, and this is something that we see across nations. In America, it was the 60s and 70s, and then it moved over to parts of Europe and then Latin America in the 90s. And that's kind of the pattern that my family followed as well. And what Trump did is he just showed up and he pulled a bunch of these cults of idea into his cult. Now, it's important to understand that a cult can be led by an idea or a person. So what we are seeing now with Christian nationalism, this has been in the work since literally the 1930s with Amy Semple McPherson and the beginning of evangelical organizing through the 60s, of course, which had this huge outside effect on the fear that they could use that everything was changing. And then Reagan kind of brought it into politics, but nobody has done like Donald Trump has done.
(15:15):
And he was able to show up and pull them all into his cult with him as a figurehead. And I think what you said about Christian nationalism, that's very important, right? They see Donald Trump as their King David figure. He's a very flawed man, but it doesn't matter because he is the vessel that God is going to use to deliver their goal, which is a Christian theocracy. Good luck to them. They're failing pretty hard. They really are. And Donald Trump pulled them all into a cult of personality. So that's good news. There's many, many, many, right? Even in the Christian nationalism, there's five different, they literally call themselves the five families like they think they are. The mafia.
Andrea Chalupa (15:58):
Just like a mafia.
Daniella Mestyanek Young (15:58):
Which brings me to the corruption, right? And this is super important that cults are always organized crime. Cults are about labor. And I didn't really understand my life until I realized that, until I heard someone say that. And then I said, "Oh yeah, we were an army of 7,000 singing dancing children that were trafficked around the world to make millions of dollars for this organization." And I am glad that the Epstein list has brought this back into conversation. And one of the ways I've been talking about it to people is to say that when we see people who are appearing to participate willingly in their own exploitation, we call that a cult. So we think about organized crime and it's like the people at the top who are benefiting and everyone else is forced to be there. But in a cult, they have decided to participate in that, obviously, because they don't understand that they're being exploited.
(16:59):
And I do think that, I mean, it is going to take decades to find out all of the corruption and how much money has been stolen by the American people. This is the one area where I think they are being very, very successful, is the corruption and the looting that you have pointed out. There was one final piece.
Andrea Chalupa (17:21):
I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry that you experienced all that and people you loved and were close to were also suffering from that and how difficult that must have been for you and how the news, the Epstein Transnational Crime Network finally being exposed somewhat compared to what's out there, how difficult that must be for you. How has that been seeing that story come out?
Daniella Mestyanek Young (17:47):
I mean, it's pretty triggering. It's also, I guess, pretty interesting to see Americans being surprised and shocked because I've always been firmly aware since let's say the days of Thomas Jefferson that there have been pedophiles in the White House and the Children of God, which became a famous cult in the '70s and '80s, performed twice at the White House in the '90s.
Andrea Chalupa (18:14):
Under Clinton?
Daniella Mestyanek Young (18:16):
Under the first Bush. Yeah.
Andrea Chalupa (18:20):
Oh, George Bush.
Daniella Mestyanek Young (18:23):
A religious group and they liked their praise music, but I would in no way be surprised to find that the corruption went deeper the same way that we were involved in political corruption in Brazil and even in the Philippines. The Children of God wrote a marching song for Marcos of the Philippines that was played on the radio every hour on the hour.
Andrea Chalupa (18:48):
So Bush- I got to just pause it here. So Bush Sr's dad, Bush Sr's dad, who was the director of the CIA, who happened to be the one who covered up MK Ultra and how the government, the CIA, the FBI for decades were running human mind control experiments on unwitting subjects, including on college campuses using LSD in the pursuit of trying to control other human beings and coerce them into doing our bidding, whether that's brainwashing someone mind hacking someone into becoming an assassin, attempted assassin, right? So that was a massive, massive scandal that was finally exposed in the New York Times. The Washington Post, when the Washington Post existed, it no longer does anymore.
(19:38):
It's now just a Jeff Bezos vanity propaganda piece. But when it did, it was like a huge story. Americans were like, wait, they had these church committee hearings. It was must watch TV. It was exposed at the FBI killed Martin Luther King Jr. And then a court confirmed that when his family brought a case and then George Bush Sr. Comes along and says, "Let's move forward. There's nothing to see here." And now you're telling me in his one term that he served in the White House as president, he brought a pedophilia sex trafficking cult to perform twice in the White House and that ensured that it spread propaganda through interests of his administration.
Daniella Mestyanek Young (20:26):
And I hate conspiracy theories more than anyone, but nobody...
Andrea Chalupa (20:31):
But there are real conspiracies out there. Just imagine the church committee report shows them.
Daniella Mestyanek Young (20:36):
A full documentary or a full telling of the Children of God. It's always like it was this crazy thing, then they started raping children, and then we just stopped talking about it in the '90s. And I'm going to give you another piece here that ties in, which is when the United States government discovered brainwashing in the late '60s, which was when we got our prisoners back from Korea and the Koreans had discovered this kind of thing from China, which Mao's greatly forward that killed 51 million people, was sort of mass brainwashing a mass cult. And when the US government discovered this, they said, "Can we use it on our own soldiers?" And they hired four psychologists who studied cults and abusive relationships, which we call one one cults, and they put together modern day basic training. So when I tell you, I recognized it right from the beginning.
(21:39):
I was like, "This is a game we're playing. I know they went to school to learn how to do this, and they're doing brainwashing operations on soldiers."
Andrea Chalupa (21:49):
I have to tell you, the reason why the conversation we're having is difficult for people to believe and process is because it's a coping mechanism called normalcy bias.
(22:00):
You want to stay in the shallow end of the pool because it's safer. Your feet can touch the ground. And part of the reason why I'm acclimated to do this show and cover these topics is because I was normalized growing up in a family of horror stories of the government trying to kill you. My family escaped the Soviet Union. So for me, it was normal that the government was sadistic, was full of monsters and sadists that would torture you for fun. And I just understood that that can happen, that's real, and people will ... And part of the crime is that it'll be covered up, including by Western democracies who want to make money in the Soviet Union. And so I was running for this moment, I feel. So yeah, I'm with you.
Daniella Mestyanek Young (22:42):
Yeah. And I think this brings us nicely to the cult of America. And I get into this in my newest book, The Culting of America, which I say is a cult tactics book. It's like, here's 10 things that make a cult and here's how they do it in real cults quotes heavily there in the military and then in America. And one of the things we look at is the Puritans, right? We have been told that the Puritans came here in search of religious freedom, and it is not just not true. It's the literal opposite. The Puritans were angry at England for having too much religious freedom, and they came to find a place where they would be free to practice their religion and only their religion, and their religion said, "You're not free." And in fact, Roger Williams, who founded Providence, Rhode Island, is the one who kind of came up with the idea of religious freedom as he was being kicked out of Puritan society because he didn't think he was so religious that he didn't think religion should be forced, right?
(23:49):
He thought it should be them. And I always tell people, the Puritans coming here and Jim Jones going to Jonestown, those are the same exact things, just a couple hundred years apart. And so this was kind of a hard thing for me to learn being ... I, like you, it was raised with all of these horrors being normalized. And I was also told that America was evil. America's evil, babble on the whore has done all of these horrible things in the world. And then my crack in the brainwashing was on nine eleven. I come to America. It seems not evil at all. I serve in the military, which I thought was very honorable. And coming to find out as we live through these times and as I study more and more, that so much of what we have been sold about America is not true, including that whole war on terror that many of us fought in.
Andrea Chalupa (24:51):
In what way, specifically that war on terror?
Daniella Mestyanek Young (24:55):
I mean, I think that we all just did not question at all, especially those of us who went to Afghanistan. It was just like, this is what we're doing because you had such a huge terrorist attack on American soil, it just seemed like a given. We have to go in here and root out these terrorists.
Andrea Chalupa (25:14):
Even though they're all Saudis.
Daniella Mestyanek Young (25:18):
Especially even though most of them were foreign fighters coming in, yes. For a lot of us, especially me and my husband, it was when the withdrawal happened and when Kandahar and then Kabul fell in a week, and then we watched America just leave all of our allies, human beings that we had worked with, the translators, the workers, the people who fed us on base, all of whom were promised that we would take care of them and that we would get them out. And then we just left them behind to their pretty much certain deaths. It was very hard. And I think a lot of us now who fought in the war on terror for 20 years, two million of us deployed to fight in it feel very differently about it now than we did when we were going over there.
Andrea Chalupa (26:12):
No, of course. I'm grateful that I was in college at the time in Northern California. And so I was totally enmeshed and ... I was drinking that liberal and leftist indoctrination Kool-Aid and loving it. And I was doing anti-war marches and I'm grateful that that's where I was in that moment because it felt like the before and after, like the Pandora's box was opening and the apocalypse was coming in. And then out of that chaos came, rose a terrorist Russia and then ISIS and then Trump.
Daniella Mestyanek Young (26:45):
And sometimes I say that low-key, like Osama bin Laden won, he kind of destroyed the ... I think there was an America before nine eleven and America after nine eleven, and especially in the way that we just gave up privacy for the Department of Homeland Security. We just gave the president the AUMF, the authorized use of military force, right? With the president, with his strikes in Venezuela, with his strikes in Iran, none of those were technically illegal except the double tap on the boats because we've given the president just this very broad international strike authority and all of those things came out of this. But it's interesting too, because one of the things on my list of cults is having a mission, having this transcendent mission. And people don't think of it this way, but you have to convince service members to go to war, right?
(27:42):
You have to convince people to go to war and die for you. And it was very, very easy to convince us after nine eleven because such a real horrific thing had happened. But with this war in Iran, I keep saying, I don't think they're going to be able to get service members to be willing to go over there, boots on the ground and die in Iran because there's no mission. There's no, why are we there? Nobody can tell us. And even in Iraq, it was harder, much, much harder to convince soldiers to go over there than Afghanistan because of that mission. On the flip side, when there was a down pilot in Iran, I worked in aviation and I'm married to a special operations helicopter pilot and I guarantee you they were fighting for who was going to get to go fly those very dangerous missions and rescue those people.
(28:40):
So the mission is just extremely important. And this is good news too, by the way, because I think MAGA destroyed their own mission when Donald Trump has been promising his followers for a decade that he was going to drain the swamp, he was going to get to the bottom of corruption, root out the pedophiles, and reign political apocalypse on their democratic enemies. And when he came out very early on, I was like, "We're not giving you the Epstein list." I mean, I remember just going, "Whoa, they had to wait three more years for that. What is he doing so early?" And I think MAGA has been somewhat bleeding out since then because they don't really have a mission anymore.
Andrea Chalupa (29:25):
No, so do you see the cult falling apart? Do you think it's possible for these people to wake up and realize that they are in a cult and turn on him in such large numbers that no amount of election stealing Republican rat fucking can protect them in the midterms in 2028?
Daniella Mestyanek Young (29:43):
So yes and no. So I should say, we lived through this in the Children of God. In 2009, the Children of God told their 10,000 members that, "You know what? Maybe Jesus is not coming back in our lifetime anymore. Jesus told us he might not. " And they sort of blew up their mission and this group that had been a 10,000 person army for 50 years, everyone left and it dwindled to almost nothing, which my grandfather is still involved in today. But the cult I grew up in really doesn't exist anymore. And out of that, we, Children of God Survivors invented the term never lefters because when the cult falls apart around you, when you don't have that crack in the brainwashing moment, some people never wake up and they will often just go find another cult-like thing to be involved in. So yes, I see MAGA breaking up and obviously Donald Trump is going to die at some point and cults of personality almost never survive the death of that personality.
(30:52):
There's nobody that I really see who could take it over. So this one power structure and coalition I believe is going to blow up. I also think that's why there's nothing he can do that the Republican Congress members and other leaders are going to stop supporting him because they know that once he's removed, they're going to go down too. And so we often see this in the end game of cults with Hitler, with Jim Jones, where they're not even really functional at the end, but they're still not fungible because the whole thing is still sort of around them. However, that doesn't mean the Heritage Foundation is going to fall apart. The ideas, the hatred, the desire for the Christian deocracy, all of that is still going to be here. And Trump has given the model. So someone younger, smarter, better at being a tyrant is going to come along and try to use the same playbook.
(31:54):
And I think there are several candidates for that. Tucker Carlson maybe being kind of a pretty obvious one.
Andrea Chalupa (32:01):
A hundred percent. I've said on the show, he's going to run for president.
Daniella Mestyanek Young (32:05):
Yeah. And even when you leave a cult, it's not like your brain just knows. I always say leaving a cult is not like getting out of jail. It's not like I'm free. You're usually fighting against that being a cult. One of the things I put out with my new book is this workbook. And I specifically had XMAGA in mind. I was like, well, the next coming years, there's going to be a bunch of people that need to sort of understand the worldview that they were convinced to accept. And we call this deconstruction. And if you don't deconstruct and really go through your cult experience, you usually just end up in another one. And then that's the final part of your question that I wanted to address. Is there some line? Is there something that's going to wake everyone up? And the general answer is no. Lines in the sand don't exist.
(33:03):
Lines in the sand, you make one and it's gone tomorrow. So with cults, and in part because we buy into brainwashing, brainwashing is just the process that gets you to stop asking questions. There's nothing that a cult leader can do up to and including the death of people's own children that will just make everyone wake up. And we've already seen that with the kids who died of measles in Texas, not to mention school shootings and all of these kinds of things.
(33:32):
However, individuals wake up all the time. And I think we've seen tons of people waking up during this administration as he's given them nothing that he promised. So like Marjorie Taylor Green, crack in the Brainwashing, I think that was real. I don't think it makes her a good person. She still has all those ideas, but I do think people have been waking up in pretty big numbers and it just is happening more and more. So that's the good news.
Andrea Chalupa (34:05):
The most frequent question I get from my listeners is, "What do I do to help a loved one who has fallen down the rabbit hole of a conspiracy theory, a cult? There's no getting through to them." I've heard that the pieces of advice are don't isolate them if it's safe, stay around them and just sort of be an open place for them to go so they're not just completely enshrouded in that cult. And also you can't change their mind no matter what you say to them, if they're convinced, they're convinced. From your experience, your research, what advice would you give to people who want to help a loved one.
Daniella Mestyanek Young (34:45):
So it's interesting because brainwashing children gives you like a fifty fifty result. So if those children grow up and stay with that program, brainwashing adults is like 98% effective. And I believe that's because we buy in. In the children of God, there was nothing they could do to me and they tried to make me believe it. But when I joined the army, I was the first one every time something was silly. We literally used the term drink the Kool-Aid when we're going to do something really silly. And I was the first one to be like, "Daniella, you signed up for this. " So very much like an abusive relationship, you cannot wake people up until they want to wake up. And absolutely the thing to do is not say to them, "You're in a cult." That in and of itself operates like a thought-stopping cliche, like just slamming the door and the conversation will be over.
(35:37):
The only time I support using the word cult to someone is if your friend is about to join an MLM or is considering getting into Avon, some kind of multi-marketing level scheme, if you ask them, "Do you know that cult scholars call these commercial cults?" That might be helpful. But to your point, so one of the best ways to get people to recognize coercive control in their own lives is to get them to see it in other contexts. And that's why all the books that I wrote, like my memoir is, you can say to a friend, "Oh my gosh, I read this amazing book about this girl who grew up in one of the worst cults and then became a captain in the army." And since no one thinks they're in a cult, they don't think you're telling them they're in a cult, right? And then the book will do the work.
(36:33):
And by the same token, the research book I wrote wasn't like these groups are a cult and here's why. It's these tactics, right? So just identifying tactics of coercive control in completely different contexts. We have so many stories of people who wake up to their group being a cult because their group is talking about why another group is a cult and what the definition of cult is and the person hearing it goes, "Wait a second."
(37:03):
A very interesting thing with the Trump cult can be to give them a written transcript of a speech because there's this thing called trance talk that cult leaders do where they're modulating their voices to sound like preachers. This is the reason Trump loves evangelical preachers so much. He studies them even though he's not necessarily a Christian. Jumping from topic to topic, sounding smart, but really not saying anything.
(37:33):
Today's the first day of the rest of your life comes from a cult leader called Synanon. Sounds great, but it doesn't mean anything. And so giving them a written transcript can be helpful. But other than that, it is the things that you said, right? Try to keep a connection with your loved ones who you think you have lost to a cult. That doesn't mean you need to swim in their waters. That doesn't mean you need to hear all of the garbage that their leader is saying. In fact, I encourage nobody to listen to Donald Trump, but just keep that connection open so that if and when they do have the crack in the brainwashing, they will know that you're safe to reach out to. Because one of the hardest things for people who leave a cult is to go back to the people that they cut out of their lives or told were stupid or harmed with their vote and say, "I was wrong." And then the last thing is ask questions.
(38:29):
If you think maybe a person has had a crack, I like to say cracks are really great at letting the light in. So ask them a bunch of questions. This workbook that I made is full of questions. That's all it is on each topic, but just asking them to explain why they believe in what they believe in can be very useful when people have to put it into words for themselves, but they've already been kind of doubting or questioning. Because again, brainwashing is just getting you to stop the question before it completes itself. We saw this with the shootings of Renee Goode and Alex Pretti, and people were asking me, why was the government telling such obvious lies? It was obvious that they were lies. And my answer was they didn't need to be good lies. They just needed to be first. They just needed to get their version, their explanation first to their people.
(39:26):
And as soon as they said they're domestic terrorists, these people like my father-in-law and MAGA, they're just going to see no evil and hear no evil. They are just going to keep the party line in their minds. So getting people to actually have to explain out loud why they believe what they believe can be a very useful exercise in helping people to wake up. But there's no easy answer. If there was an answer, my grandfather would not be running the money for a cult anymore.
Andrea Chalupa (40:02):
In regards to the crime cult, occupying our White House, what troubling rhetoric, manipulation are you seeing? Are you tracking? For instance, I met with the source at the Pentagon, and the way they were talking, they kept casually mentioning, "We understand the American people aren't ready for this yet. We got to get the American people on board with this. They'll get used to this."
(40:26):
And then what he was saying over and over again was acclimation. "We will get the American people ready for the direction we want them to go. They'll be ready. We'll make them ready." And so I've been paying a lot of attention to how they're trying to get us ready for obviously the horrible stuff they have in mind. And since I met with the source, there was the war on Iran started, right? And one of the things the source said was, "Iran's going to fall any day now. It's on its back foot. It's going to collapse."
(40:57):
So the arrogance coming out of the Pentagon on the verge of this disastrous war, right? And so I just keep thinking, what are they getting us ready for ultimately? And then we have this statement coming out from Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel is the puppet master of JD Vance. JD Vance is a Peter Thiel creation. Peter Thiel's buddy, the head of Palantir, releases a statement basically saying George Orwell's Animal Farm, all animals are equal, some animals are more equal than others. He's full on saying that just some cultures are better than other cultures. And as someone who has studied genocide for decades ... all genocides, mass death starts with hate speech, dehumanizing others, prioritizing lives.
(41:41):
And so if the head of Palantir, a big brother's surveillance network that our DOJ became dependent on in Trump's first term, according to a DOJ prosecutor that I met with, who's told me that, he's like, "Yeah, we're totally dependent on Palantir now to track criminal networks." And now Palantir is spreading across the entire United States government and the head of Palantir just said, "Some lives are better than others. Some cultures are better than others." That looks like genocidal groundwork where you're basically saying some of you get to live, some of you get to die, just get used to it. We're in charge now.
Daniella Mestyanek Young (42:21):
So I mean, the Palantir thing is so interesting to me because it goes back to 20 years, right? It's not even the Trump administration. I am heavily trained on Palantir. That's what we used. It has been in our government for forever. And once again, I don't necessarily have anything good to say on that front. I think we gave up security for smartphones and we have just allowed this to happen. That being said, they're so focused on their mission that they don't realize it's not working. The thing about fascism is you have to get people to agree to be in a hierarchy. And if people simply do not agree to be in a hierarchy, which Americans are doing, it's not going to work. I feel this same thing about people saying Christian nationalism is going to take over America. How? How are you going to convince Americans to forcibly go back to 16th century Christianity?
(43:23):
And I think that with all of their studying of tyrants, they have forgotten that America's biggest strength is our diversity. In order for this kind of tyranny and oppression to work, you have to be able to promise this monoculture, right? We're going to get to this hierarchy of us being the best. And nobody's been able to deliver that in America. People have been trying to make America an all white monoculture nation for 400 years, and it just doesn't work. So yeah, it's really scary, but Peter Thiel continues to find over and over again that you cannot buy charisma and you cannot buy loyalty. And I do like to remind people because everyone is so focused on Germany that Germans are the most rule following people that have ever walked the planet and Americans are loud, colorful assholes with guns who don't do what we're told.
Andrea Chalupa (44:23):
Thank God.
Daniella Mestyanek Young (44:25):
Yeah. I mean, and we have had one of the most significant, if not the most significant pushback in this. And the final thing to remember is we had Palantir in Afghanistan and Iraq and we still lost. So there's no point at which it becomes too late for the American people to resist, right? America cannot be controlled by force. One thing we've got going for us, the reason we won the revolutionary war against the most technologically advanced empire in the world is because every American citizen, straight white men back then, had a gun. And that remains true today and something significant that I call weapons herd immunity, which is we have half a billion guns and nobody knows who has them. So you cannot make a military plan to go anywhere in America and not be met by hostility. And we have 18 million veterans and most of our area of expertise is how to beat the American military with low tech weapons.
(45:39):
So we taught them their jobs, we understand Palantir, and also it's really, really hard to violently force your will onto people. Even in countries where they have been much more used to dictatorship styles of government, I just do not see it working in America. And one of the differences I see between this administration and his first administration, his first administration, he was still kind of getting the cult together and it was scary because the cult had the government, but it didn't feel like we were all being forced to be in it. This time around, it feels like we have all been forced into this cult of America, cult of MAGA from day one. And I don't know a single cult or dictatorship that could survive with two thirds of its adult members not wanting to be there. So similar to you, all of the warning signs are there.
(46:41):
I'm writing a new book called An All American Fascism. I think we need to be scared and we need to be looking at all of this stuff, but I also think they lose. In the end, they lose.
Andrea Chalupa (46:58):
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