Welcome back to the Lincoln Project. I'm your host, Reed Gale. Today I'm joined by Dr.

Steven Hass, a cults and undue influence expert and mental health professional who's been

working in the field of relationship, group, and political cults for over 40 years. He is

the founding director of the Freedom of Mind Resource Center and has published an array

of papers, articles, and books on the subject of cults and undue influence, including

his most recent book, The Cult of Trump. Dr. Hassan, Steve, thanks for joining me today.

Oh, it's an honor. Thanks, Reed. So when you and I spoke, you explained to me your own

personal story with a cult, the moonies, and how you went from someone who was an otherwise

normal individual to one who was standing on the Capitol steps willing to do just about

anything that these people told you. So talk to us about that because I think sometimes

there's a misunderstanding about who can be recruited, how it happens, and what that's really

like. Sure. So first I'll start out by saying I grew up in

Flushing, Queens, New York, 1.3 miles from Donald Trump, in fact, and I was recruited through

a front group at Queens College in February of 1974. Right? After my girlfriend dumped

me by three smiling women flirting with me who are pretending to be students. And what

I've come to learn after my two and a half years in the moonies and a radical personality

change in 45 years of helping other people get out of all types of undue influence and

mind control cults is that people get deceptively recruited versus join knowingly what they're

getting involved with. And like pimps and traffickers will groom a potential victim by being

nice to them, finding out all about them, and incrementally indoctrinating them until

they're prime and ready to go. I had no idea what was going to happen to me. And I was

raised in a conservative Jewish family and I came to believe that the Holocaust was

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