Today in our conversations with great minds, we have Dr. Jack Brattich with us.

He's the associate professor at the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at the School

of Communication and Information with Rutgers University, Rutgers.academia.edu is that website.

His Twitter handle is J. Brattich, B-R-A-T-I-C-H, and Dr. Jack Brattich, welcome to the program,

and thanks so much for dropping by today and doing an hour long deep dive with us about this whole

QAnon cult and where it came from, where it's going, what it is, all that kind of thing. Can we start

out by defining terms? What is a cult and what is QAnon? Well, thanks for having me. I'm

glad it's a pleasure to be here. Yeah, well, a cult, I'm not an expert in cult, I tend to write

about conspiracy theories, but I will say that the difference between a cult and a religious

movement is often the way that the fervor or the fanaticism that's attached to either a single

figure or a way of believing in the world. That's how they often get called, but I would say that

I think QAnon and maybe we'll get into this somewhere a shade between a cult and something

that's fairly standard in a kind of religious movement too, but it's only the devotion of the

adherence is really at the core of a lot of that for a cult. Would it be just by way of

kind of coming up with a layman's definition here that a religious institution generally has

like the Catholic Church or the mainstream method is whatever the Judaism islam. The basic

purpose is to help individuals achieve some sort of union with God or some sort of higher understanding

of life. That it's focused on the people who are members of it as opposed to in a cult, the focus

tends to be on leadership, sometimes secret leadership, and the leadership issues,

Dictat, issues, commands about how one must think and how one must view the world. And I realize

that religions have catechisms too, but that this is shifting the power and the focus from the

people to the cult leaders. Is that you think that's a reasonable starting point?

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