10 Quotes by Steven Hassan

At a 1937 conference of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, Stalin’s people applauded him for eleven consecutive minutes, fearing that the first to stop would be killed or sent to prison. Finally, one man stopped, the director of a paper factory. “To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down,” writes Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago. That same night the director of the paper factory was arrested and sent to prison for ten years.

[Cult] members learn a new vocabulary that is designed to constrict their thinking into absolute, black-and-white, thought-stopping clichés that conform to group ideology. (“Lock her up” and “Build the Wall” are Trumpian examples. Even his put-downs and nicknames—Crooked Hillary, Pocahontas for Elizabeth Warren—function to block other thoughts. Terms like “deep state” and “globalist” also act as triggers. They rouse emotion and direct attention.)

At the time, casting Trump as host was seen as a huge gamble. He had been labeled a “D-lister”—someone who lost all his money, a clownlike figure who couldn’t be taken seriously. Supervising editor of The Apprentice Jonathon Braun told the New Yorker, “We knew Trump was a fake… but we made him out to be the most important person in the world, making the court jester the king.

Members are indoctrinated to believe that the Training Routines will help them be more effective in their lives—earn more money, be better communicators, get better jobs. Later they are told that by performing these routines they will help clear the planet of poverty, crime, disease—indeed, of all of humanity’s problems. At the highest level, members are told that they can control matter, energy, space, and time. The truth is, they are the ones being controlled.

A lie once told remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth,” the infamous Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels memorably claimed.

The Republican party is almost like a religious cult surrounding an organized crime family.

As New York Times columnist Charles Blow observed, “Trump’s magical mixture is to make being afraid feel like fun. His rallies are a hybrid of concert revelry and combat prep. Trump tells his followers about all the things of which they should be afraid, or shouldn’t trust or should hate, and then positions himself as the greatest defense against those things. His supporters roar their approval at their white knight.

Members are indoctrinated to believe that the Training Routines will help them be more effective in their lives – earn more money, be better communicators, get better jobs. Later they are told that by performing these routines they will help clear the planet of poverty, crime, disease – indeed, of all of humanity’s problems. At the highest level, members are told that they can control matter, energy, space, and time. The truth is, they are the ones being controlled.

A person’s right to believe, however, does not grant them an automatic license to act indiscriminately on those beliefs.