 This is history, it's here to help. The title of our show is the GOP Occult, but we're gonna talk more about cults than the GOP. And we have Jean Rosenfeld here with us to discuss it. And she is a professor of cults. Jean, give us a little about your background at UCLA. Okay, okay. All right, in graduate school, I first went to become an anthropologist. I got my MA and for various reasons stopped and had three kids. And then later I decided to go back to school because my brain was broad. And I took a degree in history, but a specific part of history that's a social science from Europe called history of religions. And it's like sociology of religion in the United States, but I like the way historians write better than sociologists. I like the reading more. Yeah, more facts in there. And sort of like sociologists of religion, but I'm really a historian. And my work, my sub-specialties have put me into the area of political science in a ways that I never expected to go into political science. So that's where I am now. I noticed, I mean, our discussions with you, they always start with anthropology, sociology, history, and they wind up in political science, kicking and screaming. We can't protect from that. It's inevitable in every discussion these days, because political science is really the game. That's what's happening. It's now, and it's the dynamic that will direct the future too. So I appreciate that. So today about cults. First, the scope of the show is the GOP of cult. But then if the GOP is a cult, what is going on with cults or cults elsewhere? Because you could easily make the argument that cults are popping up hither and yon. Maybe it's always been the case. It certainly seemed the case with Jim Jones and Jonestown in Guyana. But aside from that, I don't remember actually confronting a cult in my lifetime, Jean. But what should we know about cults? Is it part of the implicit quality of humanity? Well, I'm gonna query the word cult as we use it today. I think it is very unscholarly. And it does not have any compelling analytic power, no rigor of theory behind it. There are far better theories and far better data that explain what people experience as cults. And it can be very damaging to apply the cult label to any non-normative religious group because what could happen is what happened at wake up. And you could have a lot of dead people because you don't understand what you're dealing with. So that's how I got involved in the first place because people died at wake up. And we formed an interdisciplinary national now, international new field of study of new religious movements. Respecting the GOP and the question because that's a whole story for another time. Is the GOP a cult? That's the label we apply to a group that we don't like whose belief system and ideology we find repellent. It's a pejorative term. I can go with all of those things. They all work for me. Okay, good. Now to move on, what is it? It's a movement that has taken over a political party. And the movement, if you go back to 2015 when Trump was running for president in 2016, he never called, he never referred to the GOP or a party that he belonged to. He always referred to my movement. That was a tip-off. He is a charismatic leader. He did not come up through the ranks. He did not earn through experience his status. He achieved his status by virtue of a large group of people who saw him as a messiah type figure. There's a lot of work on messianism and millennialism and apocalypticism that now has entered our political scene. And I use those categories as far better explainers of what's happening to us. And I have from the very beginning. So he is a charismatic leader with a plurality of voters. A plurality is a large number. And he emerged into the mainstream. We've had any number of charismatic leaders of groups that were violent in recent years, including the signature group in 1985 called the Covenant the Sword in the Arm of the Lord, which was a Christian militant group separated themselves from society, went into the Ozark Mountains, eventually converted to fascism and Aryan nation and Christian identity religion. And they set up a whole training field for the coming apocalyptic war, again, and it's a racial war. And that's where the idea of bombing the federal building first came up is in that group. And they were led by a charismatic leader named Jim Ellison. Unfortunately, there was an important person in that group called Kerry Noble who was their propagandist. And after the group was confronted by the FBI and a very wise first leader of the hostage rescue team, Danny Coulson, he and Kerry worked together to dissolve this confrontation with the FBI over an heavily armed group, really bad and much worse than Waco. They did it in five days. Danny Coulson was amazing and so was Kerry Noble. Kerry Noble went on, this is a- Wait, wait, before you go past that, how did they do it in five days? What was the secret? Well, Kerry was at a very high level in the group. As I said, he was the chief propagandist who spewed out all these conspiracy theories and ideologies and he had his family. These were families there. And he did not want violence. He did not want a conflagration. So he met with, he met with Danny Coulson and they agreed that James Ellison was not quite with it enough to try to talk to. So he negotiated. He went back and forth between the community and the FBI and he got the job done. That's the important thing. He got the job done. And he tells us all about it and probably the most important book about any American so-called cult. And that is Tabernacle of Hate. And he wrote it all by himself. He'd never written a book before and it's a classic in my field. Interesting. So what was the secret? Was it a matter of listening? Was it a matter of interpreting? Was it a matter of some sort of psychological interaction? I was involved briefly. Well, not briefly, for quite a long time but I wasn't the only person involved. There's many, many people involved including fellow scholars with the Montana Freeman standoff which was the longest standoff between a religious group and the FBI 81 days. And we kept sending suggestions into the Department of Justice. But, and I wrote up a whole analysis of that after it was over. The way these things come down usually is through negotiation, not through threat. And to negotiate, you have to find the people who can talk to them. And this goes back to charismatic leadership. Why does a charismatic leader suddenly emerge? Somebody like David Kourish is a charismatic leader. And he was dyslexic and he had a high school education. What was it about him that attracted people with doctorates to come from the United Kingdom? He had a message they wanted to hear. He was expert in the way he propounded that message. When followers come to a charismatic leader they're getting something they want. It's a trade-off. The leader can communicate in their language to their basic concerns. Trump communicated to a very large group of millions of people who felt they'd been left behind in ignored in this country. And he did it brilliantly. He's no dummy. Yeah, well, but it's not an intellectual process for him. It's intuitive, right? He's a smart guy and his intuition tells him what he needs to do. It's worse than that. It's a personality type. It starts in childhood. If you read about the childhood of Hitler and you read the childhood of Trump, I don't have access to the childhood of Putin or Mussolini. It's similar. They're bullies. They're basically bullies, the bully type. Yeah. Okay, so charismatic leader. And we talked briefly before the show about what that is. And for me, the word charismatic has a positive overtone to it. But you pointed out that that's really not so. What is a charismatic leader? It can be used for good or ill. Jesus was a charismatic leader. And so was Napoleon. And that impressed Max Weber, the founding sociologist. And he looked into it and he wrote up a whole theory of charismatic leadership. And the guy comes from below. He doesn't come through the institutions. And he gains a followership that is very, very devoted. And they regard him as a fount of knowledge, a knowledge that they're yearning for, but they can't find anywhere else addressing their deepest concerns. So the deepest concern during Germany's time in the national socialist rise was the fact that the Weimar Republic wasn't working, that France had taken part of Germany, that the Versailles Treaty was not fair to them, but they were suffering from lack of pride and all sorts of things, humiliation. And Hitler spoke to that. And he spoke to German pride. If you look at Lenny Riefenstahl's film, Triumph of the Whale, about the Nuremberg conference that brought together the National Socialist Party before he achieved power, you will see that this is all positive for these people. It's very positive. It's an Elmer Bantry thing. I'm gonna bring you to salvation. I am going to bring you the light. I know, only I can fix it. I've heard that. I am you. You are me. Identification, see? Yeah. So sweet, so sweet, who? I am you, you are me. I'm in your head. I've heard that before too. As a matter of fact, there's a movie now about a right-wing group in Germany. It's called the Josui Karl. And at first I thought, oh, he's saying his name is Karl. No, he's not saying that. He's saying I am Karl. Karl was the leader of the group and that's what they chanted. I am Karl. So, you know, the problem is that the charismatic leader you describe who fills a gap in people, many, many people, is a dynamic. Let me throw a little of this on the fire and that is power, which you get by being a charismatic leader, corrupts and a lot of power corrupts a lot. And so Hitler's message might have been, I can help you deal with the failure of the Weimar Republic and help you deal with the loss of land to France and the bad treaty after the war. But somewhere along the line, it was dynamic. It changed, right? Isn't that part of the scenario we're talking about? Absolutely, you know, there's this whole argument about fascism. Is it the left or is it the right? Well, it's neither. It's more spiritual than political. It's more a religion than an ideology. It's, you know, they don't have a political ideology. Mussolini started out with women's rights in the labor movement. 10 years later, he wrote his Apology about fascism. He coined the term fascism. And he said, you know, I've been operating for 10 years and I really haven't thought about my politics. And he switched. He switched from being, you know, liberal to being extremely militaristic. And it also involves tightened male virility, symbols and procedures. If you remember Trump in that ridiculous video where he was wrestling literally with CNN, you know, the icon with CNN on it and where he was talking about Marco Rubio's size, that is typical of fascism. And I'm using the term not with the big F, you know, the big notion of I'm trying to score points or anything. I'm using the term as it really is and historically developed. And these guys have a lot in common. So it helps you identify whether this is guys a fascist or not a fascist. You can identify him by his symbols and the way he acts. So this means that you can have a fellow who develops a message that satisfies people and everybody's happy with that, but it doesn't stay in balance. That this individual is interested in enhancing his power. Forgive me for not using there, but I'll use the masculine that he's going to look to enhance his power and he's going to look to take action against anybody who would oppose. You know, it's the picture of the autocrat. So how close is this that we're talking about? The person who is a narcissistic charismatic leader and becoming a leader who who attempts to destroy any adversary, any opposition? Again, I don't want to use charismatic, which after all comes from the Greek word, keras, which means grace. I don't want to label it as always negative. Some of the great leaders in human history have been charismatic, of course, Buddha. That comes to mind, Muhammad, Jesus. These are all charismatic leaders. It's a dynamic, definitely. The dynamic always goes on. And to use my category of fascism, because that's what we're seeing today, we may in a fifth wave of international terrorism, which is basically fascistic. We haven't decided that yet. There's a yearning by the followers that is unsatisfied and unrecognized. The leader arises, he speaks to that yearning, he's got a fix for it. They buy into that, they support him. Then they regard him as superhuman and they expect him to work miracles. Well, no human being can work miracles. Italy was invaded and Mussolini was hanged. Hitler wound up in a bunker. It's a very fast rise and sometimes a very fast fall. And so based on that, I'm saying Trump lost from his peak of power. He did not actually do the miraculous thing. He didn't get reelected. That's why he's so focused on it. He knows that takes his power as a charismatic leader completely away. If the people recognize that he failed, he can't afford to fail. Because once he fails, all of his power is gone. So he's trying to create an alternative reality and a message that they will believe. And as long as they perceive and they buy into his perception, then he will continue to have support. But undoubtedly he's lost a lot of people too. Well, yeah, I wanted to ask, you know, we've seen how a quality fascist leader over the years and thankfully a lot of them did fail. And I'm thinking of the demagogue in Louisiana, U.E. Long. He was actually shot at the end of his reign. But I guess what I'm really interested in here is how the charisma fails. What are the indicators? I said, if you lose an election, you know, that's something. Maybe people speak out against you, that's something. So the reality that you're trying to deny catches up with you. And I suppose putting that on Trump just for a moment because we should talk about others too, but what are the indicators aside from the fact he lost an election and he's trying to create this alternative reality to hold on to his people. But what are the indicators that he is no longer as attractive and as magnetic to them? That they, and this is really the big question, that they see through him now. I mean, in the case of Jim Jones and Jonestown, there was a couple of dozen people. In the case of Trump, it's many tens of millions, arguably as many as 70 million people who were all taken in. What's the sociological process by which they leave the fold and therefore diminish his power? Well, there's a basic formula for that, but it plays out differently in every case. So there's, you know, historians never should predict anything. History always surprises. I know, but you're willing to do that with me, right, Jean? I'm only willing to discuss some of the formal categories and theories and ideas that may lead us to understand better what's going on and what might happen, what should happen. Okay, when he was president, he had the bully pole cut. He had Twitter, he had everything. Everybody's recognized that since then that's been taken away from him. So he doesn't have the megaphone, number one. So he's lost power there. Number two, he doesn't have the invulnerability that the presidency has. He may have a post-presidency invulnerability if the Department of Justice doesn't want to indict an ex-president instead of precedent. That would be wrong. And he also did not lose the people who do see through him, who are in the Senate and the legislature and the governors, a lot of them see through him, but they don't want to, they still wanna ride whatever coattails he has because the party's falling apart. They can't get enough followers in the usual way. So they're trying to, through legislation and through Trump's coattails to gain more supporters that they see through him. If they were to let go, he would fall further. Thirdly, charismatic leaders always face challengers. It's like a David and Goliath thing. It's like the gladiators. They're gladiators of the socio-political field. They always have to show their power by beating the challenger. This is why Trump took down all the candidates in the way that he did. He's skilled at it. He's done it for his whole life. That's what he focuses on. Even as president, he wasn't president. He would say to people, go do this, go do that while he held rallies. And we keep thinking, why is he holding rallies? Because he knows that power is where it's at and he's got to keep his followers. So he's gotta keep them revved up and involved. So the degree to which he loses followership, the degree to which a challenger comes up and successfully challenges him, the degree to which people see through him, which a lot of them do, his charisma fails. Now, why don't more people see through him? They're invested in what he stands for for them. They may not like him personally, but he is the only person they know of who can satisfy this itch that they have for knowledge and status that they can't achieve any other way, even though they may at the same time see through him. Isn't that just lazy? No, we do it all the time as humans, every single time. We use the word we put up with things, okay? Why do we put up with things? Because to some extent, we are still rational and we do a risk analysis. And if the benefit risk analysis, if our benefits are calculated higher than our risks, we'll take the risk. Oh, you're an expert in religion. I mean, the implications of religion and religion and its connection, for example, with terrorism. And so if we talked about that before, what's the connection? You've given us the architecture of how this works, this, let me call it, narcissism, fascism, charismatic, charismaticism, may I? What, where does religion fit in a little of that, Jane? Well, there's an analytic definition of religion. Everybody knows, they think what religion is and it's from their own perspective, you know? It's prayer, it's church, it's God, it's belief, but it isn't necessarily any of those things. In one case, it can be. One very large case, Christianity. However, what religion is is a set of beliefs that you consider more important than anything else in the world. And that belief system is so important to you that you're willing to die for it. You claim you're willing to die for it and you definitely feel you should be living by it. So you can have two kinds of Christianity that are polar opposites and people can be equally religious. Although one will say to the other, no, you're not religious and the other one will say, no, you're not religious. So it's kind of a shape-shifting animal, but again, the pattern is what you look for. And the way people behave is the way you look for. It's always in a group. Religion's always a group thing. Spirituality may be individual, but religion is group. I just, I hear you talk about these things and I think to myself that the whole thing is kind of a sine curve. What I mean is, if you look at the 30s, there was an awful lot of people that followed demagogues, however you define them. And they were in the millions. I remember father, what was his name? Father McLaughlin. Coughlin. Coughlin, yeah, in the Midwest in Chicago. And he was the leader. A lot of people followed him. The radio allowed propaganda and all of a sudden there were these huge crowds. I think the war, and of course, Hitler and Mussolini and there were others, Stalin, they had control of the thought process of millions and millions and millions of people. After the war changed that, it kind of democratized it. It sort of crumbled them into smaller groups maybe. And now after the war, we have the liberal order and we don't have big shot charismatic leaders like that anymore for a while. But now it seems to be increasing. And the Putin is an example, however he achieves it. Trump, although he's kind of hopefully on the way down. And others around Xi Jinping, these guys are very powerful and they have a lot of followers and they wouldn't be where they were without a lot of followers. So am I right to think this is this kind of sine curve? It comes and goes like a great big virus, a social virus around the world where sometimes you have despots, autocrats, dictators emerging more powerfully than before because of their charismatic characteristics and people's need to hear from them. And sometimes it's less so. What are your thoughts about that, Xi? Well, probably pretty unsatisfactory because this argument is an old argument and it's gonna go on forever and ever too and I'm not sure we're gonna figure that one out. I have a colleague who is a real encyclopedic mind and he has spent his career basically cataloging all of these movements in the world. That's a lot and he's a real expert at it. And when you say to him, well, don't we have more apocalyptic movements around the year 2000 because what it means in Christianity and in the Bible and all that? They'll say, no, it doesn't matter what's going on in society. Whether people are anxious or the world is breaking down or building up, you're always gonna have these groups. They're always there, they're the background noise. Now, let me make a very small analogy regarding your question about the waxing and waning of autocracy and autocratic leaders. You recall 9-11, we all recall 9-11. In the 1990s, most people in the United States may not know this because the media was asleep with the wheel. FBI was tearing its hair out because there were so many violent groups that were attacking policemen, that were murdering people, that were, there were bomb threats, there were robberies, it was all kinds of stuff. There was Aryan nation, there was the order. There was the Texas Republic, there were the freemen, there were, you go on and on and on, Johnstown, it just goes on and on. And we had a low level insurrectionary, auspicious movement at that time, but we didn't know about it. Then all of a sudden, around 9-11, it went underground, we didn't hear about it. It stopped, why? Did 9-11 have something to do with that? Must have. Did our consciousness just turn to other things? Like doctors say, no, this disease has always been there, but we've never really looked at it before. And now that we're counting it, yeah, the sign curve goes up. So is it something about our paying attention to it or, and it's always there, as my friend would say, or is it that there is some shocking episode or some historical thing that brings it about? Now, naturally, those who would say, okay, it must be 9-11, you could look at France. France was invaded by Germany. And then all of a sudden you had the maquis, you had the resistance movement. It wasn't there before. There were dozens and probably hundreds of groups. They weren't there before, they were only there because Hitler invaded. So yes, it's kind of an interaction between the two, I would say, Jay. My best guess is both that the conditions may be ripe for it. And it probably has a long pro-drone to build up to it. I think we go back to Oklahoma City. We go back to before Oklahoma City to 1985 in CSA. And we see the whole building up of this radical right movement here and all of the things that poured into it. There are many streams that go into it, which is why it's a movement. And it suddenly bursts out onto the mainstream. It can be that, it can be like endemic and then pandemic. And yes, the virus analogy is very good. I try to explain to people that a lot of the way I work and what I do is like virology. Yeah. Well, if you assume for a moment that there is a waxing and a waiting and a sine curve, sort of loose sine curve of sorts, my last question to you, Ching, is where are we on the sine curve? Oh, my, oh, my, I wish I knew. You always hope things are gonna get better and worse. Well, I think Trump's sine curve peak. That's my thing. The GOP, it's still going up. They're finding usefulness with his ideological preconceptions which are really Steve Bannon's, okay? So they're gonna use that. And also, David Rappaport is probably on the right track here in saying it's just now time for the fourth religious wave of terrorism to dissipate. And now what we've got is this new ultra-right wing of autocratic international wave of terrorism that's coming up. As to where we are right today, I'm afraid that we may be at world war three. I guess that does wrap around what Mr. Putin is doing. And I wonder, where does he fit in all of this? Is he an example of a larger change, a larger sea change, a metamorphosis of sorts? Sort of a larger part of that curve, a larger, more accelerated part of that curve. And is he catching? I don't know what Putin's real base of power among his people is today, but I do think he is charismatic leader. He did not come up through institutional ranks because the Soviet Union fell apart. Somebody needed to build a new order and he was one of the builders, maybe the major builder. And he has rewritten recent Russian history. If you read his speech very carefully, you see how he is repudiating Lenin and basically following Stalin's road. So that's where we are today with Putin. Yeah, well, we haven't even touched Xi Jinping, but some of the things you've said, say. He's not charismatic. He's bureaucratic leader. Yeah, maybe that's a good one. But the system is autocratic and he's come up through that system. Putin's different. He made himself. Yeah. Jean, I love these conversations. We're not done. We have miles to go. Thank you very much for joining us today, Jean Rosenfeld, right here at Treasure, right here in Hawaii with a whole lifetime of experience in scholarly work. Thank you so much for joining us today, Jean. Jay, thank you very much. Aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. 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