Jane Borden - Cults Like Us: Puritans, Demagogues, and America’s Doomsday Obsession

Trust Me: Cults, Extreme Belief, and Manipulation

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True Crime, Talk Radio, Comedy, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 10 September 2025

⏱️ 62 minutes

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Summary

Journalist Jane Borden joins the girls to discuss her book Cults Like Us, a gripping investigation into how cultic thinking is woven into the fabric of American life. Jane delves into the radical roots of early Protestant settlers, how the deep-rooted American mythology of a strong rebel cowboy who can save us from the bad guys makes us more susceptible to demagogues and authoritarians, and why pronatalism is just another form of doomsdayism.
They talk about how fear of the end of the world, fear of not being good enough, and fear of “the other” influence us. They discuss everything from the bootstraps myth to mass marketing to self-help empires, and how the promise of salvation has shaped the American psyche more than we like to admit.

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Jane Borden
Cults Like Us: Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is exactly right.
0:07.7	Trust me. Do you trust me?
0:10.8	Would I ever lead you astray?
0:12.4	Trust me.
0:13.3	This is the truth.
0:14.5	The only truth.
0:15.8	If anybody ever tells you to just trust them, don't.
0:19.5	Welcome to Trust Me, the podcast about cult's extreme belief
0:23.1	and manipulation from two former cult members who've actually experienced it. I am Lola Blanc.
0:28.8	And I'm Megan Elizabeth. And today our guest is Jane Borden, author of Colts Like Us, Why Dumesday
0:34.4	Thinking Drives America. Today, Jane's going to talk to us about why the Puritans
0:38.8	were actually a high-control group, how the ethos that working was a sign of righteousness
0:43.5	informs our current American belief that having a lot of money is a sign of goodness, and how
0:48.9	pronatalism and the idea that the correct people should be having more babies is not only
0:53.5	incredibly dangerous,
0:54.6	but also another form of doomsdayism. We'll talk about the American monomet and why it makes us
0:59.7	interested in authoritarian-style leadership, how the book of Revelation is not quite what we think
1:05.3	it is, how all this black and white thinking is just a way to make sense of the chaos,
1:10.2	and how self-help
1:11.5	and marketing are their own forms of cultic thinking.
1:15.1	Before we get to our guest, Megan, what is the cultiest thing of the week for you?
1:19.9	My cultiest thing of the week is just learning more about Lori Bello. Do you remember her?
	...

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