As the mob that would storm Congress began to assemble, Missouri Senator Josh Hawley—a former editor of the Yale Law Journal and supreme court law clerk—saluted them with a raised fist.
There’s a discussion out there about how some people knew that Wednesday was going to be violent and unprecedented, while others remained clueless. Here’s an explanation: anyone who understands that Trumpism is a full-fledged CULT were never in doubt that January 6th would be a an historic day in the life of this nation! There were red flags EVERYWHERE (coming from Trump’s own words, the activity on social media, as well as numerous stories being reported in the media) that were signaling that not only would violence erupt—but that it would be directed at Congress in an unprecedented manner.
What those who understand cult behavior have observed time and time again is that as soon as a cult leader sends strong signals to his followers that the time has come for them to act in defense of their dear leader (think Manson and Jim Jones), they will follow their leader’s orders just like a robot follows their programmer’s commands—even if it requires sacrificing their lives.
This behavior is exactly what people mean when they describe Trump cult members as brainwashed. Trump utilized the classic steps that authoritarians routinely use to rewired aspects of their followers’ neural networks. Those steps ultimately restrict one’s access to their own reasoning and critical thinking skills in a manner that prohibits them from believing anything other than what their leader tells them is true. The most dangerous cults are those that end in murder, mass suicide or an authoritarian style abuse by the leader towards his followers and/or his enemies.
Because other lack the typical characteristics of cult leaders, I don’t believe that Hawley and Cruz are more dangerous than Trump. Neither one of them has Trump’s ability to follow, to the letter, every single strategy outlined in the authoritarian playbook. Also, in order to become a cult leader, one must possess a very particular combination of traits, most notably, the ability to soothe a very deep-seated sense of inadequacy in the guts of their staunch followers. It’s that gift of elevated self-esteem that creates the undying loyalty of cult followers towards their leader. Trump was so successful at brainwashing his followers because his own anger at having been deemed unworthy by the elites is truly authentic and deeply felt; like many of his staunchest followers, his vengeance is rooted in his low self-esteem. That authenticity is a prerequisite that both Cruz and Hawley lack; they could never make that sort of connection with Trump’s base!
Thank you, Ms. Topol, for intelligently opening the crypt of CULT involvement, a territory that so few individuals have intelligently entered. My wife and I were in a cult and have direct experience in this field, and I wrote a book about our 5-years of charged experience. One of the conclusions of this work is that understanding cults is perhaps the key knowledge that a citizen of the 21st century can own. Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, in his book "Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of Brainwashing in China" cites eight tactics that every cult employs.
One reason that I appreciate your contribution to the Trump-cult conversation is that there are many deeply relevant inputs--from psychiatrists, most notably--that do not receive adequate appreciation because they are not comments offered by elected officials. Yet, we see--more clearly now via the January 6th Capitol insurrection--that elected officials, unless they are morally and ethically objective servants beyond party loyalties, their allegiances may well be to financial contributors and their sights set on re-election above country and the human beings they represent.
May it be noted that those who can best predict what cultists and their leader will do next are those who understand the psychology of cultishness. Thus, it is obvious that such totally ego-driven narcissists will--unless they are named, their base devotions made known, their double-talk and conspiratorial beliefs overridden by the facts of election outcomes, and the power-hungry and cosmically selfish focus of their fearless leader made common knowledge--only continue to step over red line after red line, regardless of whoever might be imperiled.
Finally, therefore, the need for unity--which every two-faced Trumpeter is now trumpeting, so that our nation's attention will again be deflected away from precise culpabilities--needs to be preceded by national purification. The disease must be diagnosed, remedied to the point of being surgically cut out of the body politic. The tactics used by insurrection-bound anti-facters will try to muddle the rising national clarity, slow the river of backlash and dilute the antidotes to the poison that has been the substrata of at least one-third of the American psyche.
Most all Americans, and not just Whites, have been consciously or unconsciously swept up in the constant, racially biased, dehumanizing rhetorics that the Civil War had to acknowledge...but did not destroy, that allowed thousands of KKK members to march through our nation's capital during the 1920s...that saw Sen. Joseph McCarthy climb on his high horse to put communism above constitution...and that allowed most of the Grand Old Party to inhumanely badger our first Black President for eight long years. Trump has tried to build on that avenue of hatred by playing, as you perceptively put it, "on the deep-seated sense of inadequacy in the guts of...staunch followers." As Voltaire put it: "Those who can be led by absurdity can be made to commit atrocity."
How deeply we look into...and humbly take responsibility for...this remarkably representative Capitol invasion (and likely those that will soon follow)--whereby we each mark our own complicity--will determine how fully or partially America heals and how long that healing will take. With so little understanding of cult mentality and actuality in the general public and even in our elected officials, I cannot look ahead with great hope to the healing for which our new president longs. The cultish devotees of White supremacy have a longer lineage than most of our citizenry are prepared to realize.
Thanks for your thoughtful response. I agree that as much as we would all like the country to heal, unity and bipartisanship are not a viable option at the moment. Democrats hoping to repair and restore our democratic institutions cannot possibly work in a bipartisan fashion with those who have chosen to align themselves with anti-Democratic cultists and bigots.
You have a remarkably attenuated notion of courage.
Mitt Romney is a grotesquely wealthy man in good health. He has thriving business, a loving or at least polite family, fine places to live, and armed guards, and he'll never go hungry or cold. The episode last week is likely the first time he's ever been in real danger of his life that he hasn't invited himself through expensive sports. The only thing he risked, voting to impeach, was a Senate seat. He risked a job he liked but certainly does not need. That is not courage. There he was, trembling, because he was afraid some other very wealthy men wouldn't like him anymore. In a word: Aw.
I'm a single mother. I've been raped twice, attacked outside a gym and had my nose broken and got away by fighting, had my house broken into twice, had a nice ex-husband who eventually turned violent and did his best to persuade people that I was nuts (fortunately, people saw him coming). Because of how work and custody are structured in this country, I spent ten years pulling all-nighters twice a week, sleeping on average four hours a week, working freelance on tight deadlines for $15-60/hr, no benefits, tight deadlines, working at night after my daughter was asleep and during the day when she was at daycare and school. I never had any idea how I'd pay the mortgage three months ahead, but knew that if I didn't, she'd grow up in poverty and instability, because I wouldn't be able to get a mortgage again till most of her childhood had passed, and we'd fall victim to rising rents. So I just kept beating the bushes for those freelance jobs till she was old enough to be home alone for an hour or so at a time after school, when I could get a better job. I had no benefits, and, when the Great Recession rolled around and my clients shut down, no unemployment insurance. No one helped. My family is small, old, and far away. You know how people tell you to ask for help? Go to your "faith community", go to friends, ask for help? I want you to consider how many single mothers you help out routinely: that's how many single mothers everyone helps out routinely. I found -- as many Jewish poor and single mothers find -- that Jews in particular don't want to hear that you haven't got money, which is why, after getting my daughter past her bat mitzvah, I've made no effort to go back to the Community of Comfortably Wealthy Organized Jews and all the delightful talk there about ethics and community. And the society around wanted me to shut up and accept poverty and hardship, dangerous living conditions, and a bad education for my daughter: I did not.
Who had courage? I did. I've put myself, all 5'1" of me, between aggressive men and women they were victimizing, bodily, and shamed standing-around men into intervening. I've taken on aggrieved men and fielded physical threats in many situations. I've thrown men out of stores and apartments, taken them to court. I've dealt with unstable tenants and students, some armed. I've fought with her lying father about covid and invited a lawsuit by keeping her here rather than expose her to his household's carelessness.
Here on the other side of 50 I'm still robbed for my labor, and yet I'm the only one making sure this child goes to college without getting a debt millstone hung around her neck. She's got men all around talking a beautiful game and making excuses to her about why there isn't money from them.
I am not scared of these jackasses at the Capitol because, like so many women, I've lived under too much physical and existential threat from "I AM VERY ANGRY" men to find them all that scary anymore. They're lethally brutal? Okay, how's that different from an abusive boyfriend, or the guy at work who snaps? The random guy in the street or the bar who's catcalling you or sucking his teeth at you, the guy you turn down? They shout a lot and throw shit everywhere? Please, let me introduce you to legions of "good guy" husbands, fathers, boyfriends. They're stupid and want to destroy the order under which your life flourishes? Wonderful, let me tell you the story of every single mother alive, and a lot of the married ones. We have spent so much time picking up and restoring lives after men rampage through and do violence to them that honest to god, man, I'm not scared anymore. Not scared of poverty, not scared of sleeplessness, not scared of showy violence, not scared of laws turning to disadvantage us, not scared. It's all burnt out, we have too much experience with it from you guys already.
But you are. You're scared of them. And you think gajillionaire Mitt's brave because he voted to impeach, but to do it, he had to hide behind God's skirts. Boy, that was some long God story he told about how God was commanding him to do it. Now that is courage indeed.
What worried me in the rioting wasn't that a bunch of politicians turned out to be scared and a bunch of cops turned out to be bought. Those are things you can expect. What worried me is that this went on for hours and, in the midst of a highly populated American area, regular people sat around waiting to be rescued. Just sat. There weren't people pouring into the streets and up to the Capitol with whatever they had handy to go dispatch the threat themselves. If they had, they'd have put that thing down within 45 minutes. But they didn't. That's the part that worries me.
*four hours a night. I got four hours a night of sleep on average, not four a week. The difference between stoned with sleep deprivation and dead, I guess. I will say it felt like a pretty porous border at the time.
There’s a discussion out there about how some people knew that Wednesday was going to be violent and unprecedented, while others remained clueless. Here’s an explanation: anyone who understands that Trumpism is a full-fledged CULT were never in doubt that January 6th would be a an historic day in the life of this nation! There were red flags EVERYWHERE (coming from Trump’s own words, the activity on social media, as well as numerous stories being reported in the media) that were signaling that not only would violence erupt—but that it would be directed at Congress in an unprecedented manner.
What those who understand cult behavior have observed time and time again is that as soon as a cult leader sends strong signals to his followers that the time has come for them to act in defense of their dear leader (think Manson and Jim Jones), they will follow their leader’s orders just like a robot follows their programmer’s commands—even if it requires sacrificing their lives.
This behavior is exactly what people mean when they describe Trump cult members as brainwashed. Trump utilized the classic steps that authoritarians routinely use to rewired aspects of their followers’ neural networks. Those steps ultimately restrict one’s access to their own reasoning and critical thinking skills in a manner that prohibits them from believing anything other than what their leader tells them is true. The most dangerous cults are those that end in murder, mass suicide or an authoritarian style abuse by the leader towards his followers and/or his enemies.
Because other lack the typical characteristics of cult leaders, I don’t believe that Hawley and Cruz are more dangerous than Trump. Neither one of them has Trump’s ability to follow, to the letter, every single strategy outlined in the authoritarian playbook. Also, in order to become a cult leader, one must possess a very particular combination of traits, most notably, the ability to soothe a very deep-seated sense of inadequacy in the guts of their staunch followers. It’s that gift of elevated self-esteem that creates the undying loyalty of cult followers towards their leader. Trump was so successful at brainwashing his followers because his own anger at having been deemed unworthy by the elites is truly authentic and deeply felt; like many of his staunchest followers, his vengeance is rooted in his low self-esteem. That authenticity is a prerequisite that both Cruz and Hawley lack; they could never make that sort of connection with Trump’s base!
Thank you, Ms. Topol, for intelligently opening the crypt of CULT involvement, a territory that so few individuals have intelligently entered. My wife and I were in a cult and have direct experience in this field, and I wrote a book about our 5-years of charged experience. One of the conclusions of this work is that understanding cults is perhaps the key knowledge that a citizen of the 21st century can own. Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, in his book "Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of Brainwashing in China" cites eight tactics that every cult employs.
One reason that I appreciate your contribution to the Trump-cult conversation is that there are many deeply relevant inputs--from psychiatrists, most notably--that do not receive adequate appreciation because they are not comments offered by elected officials. Yet, we see--more clearly now via the January 6th Capitol insurrection--that elected officials, unless they are morally and ethically objective servants beyond party loyalties, their allegiances may well be to financial contributors and their sights set on re-election above country and the human beings they represent.
May it be noted that those who can best predict what cultists and their leader will do next are those who understand the psychology of cultishness. Thus, it is obvious that such totally ego-driven narcissists will--unless they are named, their base devotions made known, their double-talk and conspiratorial beliefs overridden by the facts of election outcomes, and the power-hungry and cosmically selfish focus of their fearless leader made common knowledge--only continue to step over red line after red line, regardless of whoever might be imperiled.
Finally, therefore, the need for unity--which every two-faced Trumpeter is now trumpeting, so that our nation's attention will again be deflected away from precise culpabilities--needs to be preceded by national purification. The disease must be diagnosed, remedied to the point of being surgically cut out of the body politic. The tactics used by insurrection-bound anti-facters will try to muddle the rising national clarity, slow the river of backlash and dilute the antidotes to the poison that has been the substrata of at least one-third of the American psyche.
Most all Americans, and not just Whites, have been consciously or unconsciously swept up in the constant, racially biased, dehumanizing rhetorics that the Civil War had to acknowledge...but did not destroy, that allowed thousands of KKK members to march through our nation's capital during the 1920s...that saw Sen. Joseph McCarthy climb on his high horse to put communism above constitution...and that allowed most of the Grand Old Party to inhumanely badger our first Black President for eight long years. Trump has tried to build on that avenue of hatred by playing, as you perceptively put it, "on the deep-seated sense of inadequacy in the guts of...staunch followers." As Voltaire put it: "Those who can be led by absurdity can be made to commit atrocity."
How deeply we look into...and humbly take responsibility for...this remarkably representative Capitol invasion (and likely those that will soon follow)--whereby we each mark our own complicity--will determine how fully or partially America heals and how long that healing will take. With so little understanding of cult mentality and actuality in the general public and even in our elected officials, I cannot look ahead with great hope to the healing for which our new president longs. The cultish devotees of White supremacy have a longer lineage than most of our citizenry are prepared to realize.
Thanks for your thoughtful response. I agree that as much as we would all like the country to heal, unity and bipartisanship are not a viable option at the moment. Democrats hoping to repair and restore our democratic institutions cannot possibly work in a bipartisan fashion with those who have chosen to align themselves with anti-Democratic cultists and bigots.
You have a remarkably attenuated notion of courage.
Mitt Romney is a grotesquely wealthy man in good health. He has thriving business, a loving or at least polite family, fine places to live, and armed guards, and he'll never go hungry or cold. The episode last week is likely the first time he's ever been in real danger of his life that he hasn't invited himself through expensive sports. The only thing he risked, voting to impeach, was a Senate seat. He risked a job he liked but certainly does not need. That is not courage. There he was, trembling, because he was afraid some other very wealthy men wouldn't like him anymore. In a word: Aw.
I'm a single mother. I've been raped twice, attacked outside a gym and had my nose broken and got away by fighting, had my house broken into twice, had a nice ex-husband who eventually turned violent and did his best to persuade people that I was nuts (fortunately, people saw him coming). Because of how work and custody are structured in this country, I spent ten years pulling all-nighters twice a week, sleeping on average four hours a week, working freelance on tight deadlines for $15-60/hr, no benefits, tight deadlines, working at night after my daughter was asleep and during the day when she was at daycare and school. I never had any idea how I'd pay the mortgage three months ahead, but knew that if I didn't, she'd grow up in poverty and instability, because I wouldn't be able to get a mortgage again till most of her childhood had passed, and we'd fall victim to rising rents. So I just kept beating the bushes for those freelance jobs till she was old enough to be home alone for an hour or so at a time after school, when I could get a better job. I had no benefits, and, when the Great Recession rolled around and my clients shut down, no unemployment insurance. No one helped. My family is small, old, and far away. You know how people tell you to ask for help? Go to your "faith community", go to friends, ask for help? I want you to consider how many single mothers you help out routinely: that's how many single mothers everyone helps out routinely. I found -- as many Jewish poor and single mothers find -- that Jews in particular don't want to hear that you haven't got money, which is why, after getting my daughter past her bat mitzvah, I've made no effort to go back to the Community of Comfortably Wealthy Organized Jews and all the delightful talk there about ethics and community. And the society around wanted me to shut up and accept poverty and hardship, dangerous living conditions, and a bad education for my daughter: I did not.
Who had courage? I did. I've put myself, all 5'1" of me, between aggressive men and women they were victimizing, bodily, and shamed standing-around men into intervening. I've taken on aggrieved men and fielded physical threats in many situations. I've thrown men out of stores and apartments, taken them to court. I've dealt with unstable tenants and students, some armed. I've fought with her lying father about covid and invited a lawsuit by keeping her here rather than expose her to his household's carelessness.
Here on the other side of 50 I'm still robbed for my labor, and yet I'm the only one making sure this child goes to college without getting a debt millstone hung around her neck. She's got men all around talking a beautiful game and making excuses to her about why there isn't money from them.
I am not scared of these jackasses at the Capitol because, like so many women, I've lived under too much physical and existential threat from "I AM VERY ANGRY" men to find them all that scary anymore. They're lethally brutal? Okay, how's that different from an abusive boyfriend, or the guy at work who snaps? The random guy in the street or the bar who's catcalling you or sucking his teeth at you, the guy you turn down? They shout a lot and throw shit everywhere? Please, let me introduce you to legions of "good guy" husbands, fathers, boyfriends. They're stupid and want to destroy the order under which your life flourishes? Wonderful, let me tell you the story of every single mother alive, and a lot of the married ones. We have spent so much time picking up and restoring lives after men rampage through and do violence to them that honest to god, man, I'm not scared anymore. Not scared of poverty, not scared of sleeplessness, not scared of showy violence, not scared of laws turning to disadvantage us, not scared. It's all burnt out, we have too much experience with it from you guys already.
But you are. You're scared of them. And you think gajillionaire Mitt's brave because he voted to impeach, but to do it, he had to hide behind God's skirts. Boy, that was some long God story he told about how God was commanding him to do it. Now that is courage indeed.
What worried me in the rioting wasn't that a bunch of politicians turned out to be scared and a bunch of cops turned out to be bought. Those are things you can expect. What worried me is that this went on for hours and, in the midst of a highly populated American area, regular people sat around waiting to be rescued. Just sat. There weren't people pouring into the streets and up to the Capitol with whatever they had handy to go dispatch the threat themselves. If they had, they'd have put that thing down within 45 minutes. But they didn't. That's the part that worries me.
*four hours a night. I got four hours a night of sleep on average, not four a week. The difference between stoned with sleep deprivation and dead, I guess. I will say it felt like a pretty porous border at the time.
Farron Balanced (on youtube) has the same opinion about the ''McHartyan'' bet of senators Cruz & Hawley