Welcome to indoctrination, a weekly conversation series about protecting yourself from systems of control.

I'm your host, Rachel Bernstein.

Hi, everybody. Before I introduce my guest for this week, I just want to mention that last week we had on the show, Christopher Buckley,

who had been in the KKK, and he talked about how he got swept up into it, how hate became like

a drug, and how he was able to have it all unraveled,

and he could step away and step back kind of into his life

and how I think it was always supposed to be

without the induction and indoctrination of hatred.

What was compelling about his story, among other things,

is that it's his wife who planned the intervention to help him kind of come back to his senses.

And so because there was an overwhelming interest in that show where people were writing in saying that they found him to be so brave and they found the story to be so compelling and also inspirational.

I had a conversation with my team and we decided to reach back out to Christopher and see if he could come on with his wife.

And they could tell that part of the story more specifically about what she was noticing she was worried about, worried enough to plan an intervention and who was involved in it and how it was

orchestrated, what worked about it, all of it. People were very interested in that part and because of a

constraint of time, we didn't get to get into it. But now, Chris and his wife have agreed to come back on.

And so you'll get to hear them in a few weeks talk about that part of the story.

It's going to be fascinating to hear about how someone gets kind of pulled out of a situation

where they are so heavily influenced and so sure

that this is the answer.

And today, I am very excited to have Amanda Montel on the show.

She is a writer, language scholar, and podcast host from Baltimore originally, now lives in Los Angeles.

She's the author of Caltish, The Language of Fanaticism, about the language of cults from

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