Can You Be Brainwashed Without Knowing It? The Psychological Tactics Behind MAGA

 

Is Donald Trump leading a political cult? How do propaganda, AI, and coercive information shape belief, identity, and reality? In this episode of Cults, Culture, & Coercion, Steven Hassan interviews journalist and cultural critic Virginia Heffernan on cult dynamics, mind control, Trumpism, media manipulation, and the psychology of belief.

Virginia Heffernan is a writer for The New Republic, host of the Omnishambles Podcast, and author of Magic and Loss. Drawing on her reporting, cultural analysis, and her personal experiences intersecting with elite networks like Jeffrey Epstein’s social circle, Heffernan explores how intelligent, educated individuals can still fall under the control of powerful systems of influence.

In this wide-ranging conversation, Dr. Hassan and Heffernan examine:

• How cult dynamics help explain the rise of Trump and political extremism
• Why even intelligent people can fall into coercive belief systems
• The role of propaganda, Fox News, and information bubbles in shaping reality
• How AI, social media, and “doomscrolling” create trance-like states and psychological influence
• The concept of dissociation and dual identity formation in cult involvement
• How authoritarian leaders use neurolinguistic programming (NLP) and emotional manipulation to cause identity confusion
• The connection between psychological warfare, demoralization, and foreign influence campaigns
• Why belief systems persist even after people physically leave a cult
• The importance of empathy, relationships, and non-confrontational dialogue in helping people exit high-control groups

The episode explores how cult-like influence has scaled and swelled to massive numbers due to social media proliferation, enabling dangerous political movements like MAGA.

This conversation is essential viewing for anyone trying to understand cult psychology, Trumpism, propaganda, AI influence, and how ordinary people can become caught in systems of coercion, and how to help them get out.

Handala’s Most Wanted: 69 Israeli Navy Officers Exposed After Attack on Sumud Flotilla

 

69 Criminals of “Zahar al-Fasad fi al-Bahr” Now Wanted by Handala

Handala announces:

The full names and details of 69 Israeli Navy officers who recently attacked the Global Sumud Flotilla have now been revealed and are available for public viewing. As a decisive act of Resistance, a $100,000 bounty is set for each of these individuals.

We are the thunder and lightning after which you must always expect a rain of retribution.

These are the very individuals who embody “Zahar al-Fasad fi al-Bahr”, those who spread corruption and devastation across the seas and the earth, leaving no refuge for the innocent.

Handala explicitly declares its solidarity and unwavering support for the Sumud Flotilla and all the mujahideen of the sea, pledging to stand by them until the very end.

This is our promise,

“اللهم اجعلنی من انصاره و اعوانه و الذابین عنه و المسارعین الیه فی قضاء حوائجه و الممتثلین لاوامره و المحامین عنه و السابقین الى ارادته و المستشهدین بین یدیه”

Handala, until the advent of the True Avenger, will defend the blood of the innocent and the rights of the oppressed.

And this is a direct message to Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s Minister of National Security:

Know that no crime, on land or at sea, will go unanswered.

You and all the corrupt and bloodthirsty in this cabinet will be pursued by the shadows of the Resistance everywhere. After every thunder, expect a rainstorm of our wrath.  (more...)

Handala’s Most Wanted: 69 Israeli Navy Officers Exposed After Attack on Sumud Flotilla

Demand That UofT Revoke Its Sponsorship of the Weapons Conference CANSEC

 

🚨URGENT ACTION 🚨 

Go to the link in @torontostudentsforpalestine bio to send an email TODAY to U of T to demand that they revoke their sponsorship of the weapons conference CANSEC. 

CANSEC is a weapons trade show that hosts numerous weapons manufacturers and governments accused of war crimes and human rights abuses. A few of the weapons manufactures exhibiting at CANSEC that are complicit in war crimes and/or human rights violations include Elbit Systems, Roshel and Lockheed Martin.

This year U of T became the first university to ever sponsor CANSEC.

On May 12th U of T students, workers and faculty published an open letter demanding that the University of Toronto revoke its sponsorship of CANSEC. This letter was signed by 20 U of T student, worker and faculty groups and unions, but has so far been ignored by U of T administration. Additionally, on May 13th the U of T denied a student the opportunity to express concerns about the sponsorship of CANSEC at the University of Toronto Governing Council meeting despite the student following all proper procedures to speak.

These actions are in direct violation of U of T’s mission statement that commits to the “vigilant protection for individual human rights, and a resolute commitment to the principles of equal opportunity, equity and justice”.

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Israel Abuses Flotilla Activists

 

Israeli lawmakers were only upset because Ben-Gvir exposed them to the world. The emperor has no clothes.

Russian Duma Members Warn of Possible 'European Reich March to the East'

 

The sharp warnings coming from Russian political leaders about the growth of 1930s-style revanchism in Germany, and the EU in general, did not begin with their response to the May 22 drone attack on the Starobelsk trade school, which killed 18 youth.

Back on May 7, Dmitry Medvedev, Deputy Chairman of the Security Council, wrote a lengthy, widely-discussed article headlined “Germany’s new militarization: Revival of the spirit or blatant revanchism?”.

The newspaper Vzglyad questioned a number of Russian Duma members about their response to Medvedev’s article.

Yevgeny Popov, Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy, stated: “We see industrial growth in Germany: civilian conglomerates that once manufactured automobiles are once again shifting onto a wartime footing. We see massive investments in weaponry, an expansion of the army, and active recruitment efforts. And most importantly—the current German government makes no secret of its plans to wage war against Russia… We must ensure that a revanchist Germany is never again able to rear its head and threaten our country and our people,” the deputy concluded.  (more...)

Russian Duma Members Warn of Possible 'European Reich March to the East'

Operation Geschäftsfreund: How West Germany Paid for Israel’s Nuclear Bomb

 

In March 2026, an investigation in Haaretz argued that West Germany may have “secretly financed” much of Israel’s Dimona nuclear project through off‑the‑books loans worth roughly 2 billion Deutschmarks, funneled under the cover of “Negev development.” Historical clues indicate that Germany secretly funded Israel’s nuclear program and raise the questions about how much Dimona cost, who really paid for it, and what that says about Germany’s postwar “moral responsibility”.

This article picks up where that story stops. It goes back to Bundestag files, development‑bank records and declassified intelligence histories to show, in considerably sharper detail, how Bonn built a secret credit machine for Israel, who ran it, and how it locked Germany into a nuclear order it still refuses to name.

Germany did not just look away while Israel built the bomb. It helped pay for it, hid the money off the books, and then spent decades pretending that nothing of the sort had ever happened. Today, the same state that secretly bankrolled Dimona presents itself as a guardian of non‑proliferation and lectures Iran on the dangers of nuclear ambiguity.

Germany never tires of preaching its “historical responsibility” to Israel. Reparations. Moral duty, and postwar atonement, even though the archives expose a different reality. What actually happened was a cold-blooded, decade-long secret cash pipeline, codenamed Operation Geschäftsfreund  (Business Friend)— that funnelled nearly two billion Deutsche Marks into Israel under the cover of “development” projects while Bonn kept parliament, the public and much of its own bureaucracy in the dark.

The key paper trail runs through the Bundestag’s own 2012 reply, Drucksache 17/10482. There the government finally acknowledged that Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion struck a confidential understanding at the Waldorf Astoria in New York on 14 March 1960: a special 2 billion DM credit line, paid out over roughly a decade and shielded from public scrutiny for “foreign-policy reasons.” The arrangement was implemented through the state development bank KfW and booked as bilateral capital aid for Israel’s economy, formally “development assistance,” in practice something far more sensitive.  (more...)

Operation Geschäftsfreund: How West Germany Paid for Israel’s Nuclear Bomb

Will World War III Begin on German Soil?

 

It is arguably the case that the spark that could unleash nuclear World War III between NATO and Russia (and China) will not come from the war against Iran or even Ukraine—dangerous though those crises continue to be—but from Germany.

On a widely watched TV talk show on ZDF, Germany’s second public television channel, a highly-respected retired brigadier general who was Military Policy Adviser to former Chancellor Angela Merkel from 2006-2013, Erich Vad, finally gave voice to what many Germans have been scared to say out loud. “Your rhetoric is driving us into a war!” he told CDU security expert Roderich Kiesewetter, a well-known war hawk. If the anti-Russian war mobilization of Germany by the Merz government continues; if they insist on bringing Ukraine into the EU on an expedited basis; and if Germany and other NATO countries keep producing and guiding the drones that are raining havoc on Russia, “You will have Russian missile strikes on our country!” Vad warned.

Vad didn’t mince his words: “The day will come when they [the Russians] carry out retaliatory strikes against Europe, against Germany. First conventionally, and if necessary, they’ll go one level higher. Russia is the world’s strongest nuclear power. If we bring Ukraine into Europe, we will bring the war with Russia into Europe!”

Vad was not overstating the problem.

The Russian government is placing the blame squarely on the nations of NATO and the EU for what they call the “barbaric” May 22 attack on the Starobelsk trade school in the Lugansk People’s Republic, in which Ukrainian drones killed 18 adolescents (at last count) and wounded dozens more as they slept in their dormitories. “This constitutes a manifestation of neo-Nazism,” President Vladimir Putin charged.  (more...)

Will World War III Begin on German Soil?