Sounds Like A Cult - The Cult of Conservative Youth Activism

Episode Date: July 30, 2024

Oops a politically flavored episode of Sounds Like A Cult!!!!! Would you believe it if we told you we recorded this nearly SIX MONTHS AGO and just crossed our fingers it would resonate whenever it ended up going live??? This week, host Amanda is joined by Puck reporter and former MAGA youth recruit, Tina Nguyen, author of the 2024 memoir The MAGA Diaries, who’s here to shed light on the culty modern movement that is conservative youth activism: why it exists, how it works, and why there’s no left-wing analog. Culty times people!!! Intrigued how this episode will land with you culties 👀😵‍💫✌️ Follow us on IG @soundslikeacultpod @amanda_montell To order Amanda's new book, The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality, click here. To subscribe to Amanda's new Magical Overthinkers podcast and/or watch full episodes on YouTube, click here :) Thank you to our sponsors, who make this show possible! Get 20% off your first order of Liquid I.V. when you go to LiquidIV.com and use code CULT at checkout Head to Squarespace.com for a free trial, and when you’re ready to launch, go to https://www.squarespace.com/CULT to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Go to stopscooping.com/SLAC and enter promocode SLAC to save an EXTRA $50 on any Litter-Robot bundle.  

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Indulge in hydration this summer with Liquid IV. Get 20% off your first order of Liquid IV when you go to liquidiv.com and use code CULT at checkout. That's 20% off your first order when you shop better hydration today using promo code CULT at liquidiv.com. They say that robots are taking over the world and in one context, I am completely fine with that. Culties meet the litter robot. As a special offer to listeners of the show, go to StopScooping.com slash SLAC and enter promo code SLAC to save an extra $50 on any Litter-Robot bundle.

That's an extra $50 off any Litter-Robot bundle at StopScooping.com slash SLAC and enter promo code SLAC at checkout. StopScooping.com slash SLAC and enter promo code SLAC at checkout. The views expressed on this episode, as with all episodes of Sounds Like a Cult, are solely host opinions and quoted allegations. The content here should not be taken as indisputable fact. This podcast is for entertainment purposes only. If you are talking about a highly organized group of people with a coherent plan to execute a vision of the future that looks very specific and makes absolutely no sense to a broader community other than people inside this movement.

It's pretty culty. The only difference between the conservative youth movement and like a real cult is that everyone likes the Founding Fathers. Like you can't say that liking the Founding Fathers like a real cult is that everyone likes the founding fathers. Like you can't say that liking the founding fathers is weird and culty. I think you can. This is Sounds Like a Cult, a show about the modern day cults we all follow. I'm your host Amanda Montell, author of the books Cultish and The Age of Magical Overthinking. Every week on the show, you're going to hear about a different fanatical fringe group from

the cult-troll zeitgeist. This week, we're talking about the cult of political conservative youth activism. Something a little different for the pod. To try and answer the big question, this group sounds like a cult, but is it really? And if so, which of our cult categories does this group fall into? Is it a live-to-life, a watch your back, or a get-the-fuck-out-level cult? After all, cultishness is everywhere in 2024. It's in our social media feeds, it's in our fitness studios, it's in the ways that we discuss politics. Not me singing out of discomfort, because I know that bringing a political flavor to Sounds

Like a Cult is not the typical tone, not the typical energy. Of course, this show has a political perspective, but I've kind of avoided confronting it head on. I do in my book, in cultish, I definitely make some comparisons between the oratory stylings of one Donald Trump and other notorious populist cult leaders from history. They all really have a way with us-versus-them labels and zingy mantras and thought-terminating cliches. Also,

quick disclaimer up here at the top of the episode. I am recording this episode in February of 2024 and at this moment I don't know exactly when it will be released. I don't know what the political landscape will be like at that time. So, hello, future people, I hope you're okay. And I hope the tone of this episode lands amid whatever's going on. I do also want to say really quick for any listeners who might be new to the show or maybe not even new to the show, that civil critique is a part of democracy. And you know, if you're scandalized by me calling conservative youth activism a cult, just note that as a part of the show I also called Trader Joe's a cult. So we can all relax. This is all kind of a bit, but also kind of not a bit. The word cult is oftentimes very sensational,

but also subjective and context dependent. And if you can handle all of that, cool. This is the podcast for you. It's a tonally lighthearted show about cultish influence in everyday life. And normally I keep it fairly relaxed by talking about the real housewives and Starbucks and shit. But today we're talking about

the cult of conservative youth activism. And I'm gonna be speaking to the cult of conservative youth activism, and I'm going to be speaking to the author of a book that really blew the lid off the conservative recruiting machine. Stick around because my special guest host today is Tina Wynn. She's a national correspondent for the publication Puck, where she covers the world of Donald Trump and the American right. Previously, Wynn was a White House reporter for Politico, a staff reporter for Vanity Fair Hive, and an editor at Mediate. I actually did an interview with Mediate not too long ago, specifically

analyzing the ways that Donald Trump used cultish language to attract and maintain a following. I mean, in the work I do on cult language outside of this podcast, I tend to bring like a less silly attitude, as you can imagine, especially when we're talking about politics, because it's not always silly. Although Donald Trump's particular cult leader status is quite silly. The consequences aren't silly, but his energy is, it's a caricature. It's quite troll-like. He is a reality TV star, and he likes to use what makes good reality TV as a political tool to whip up his flock.

Anyway, Tina Nguyen wrote this book called The Maga Diaries, My Surreal Adventures Inside the Right Wing and How I Got Out. And this book is basically this fascinating, quite shocking first person account chronicling the rise of the MAGA movement from the perspective of this journalist who began her career and her education on the ground levels of this conservative recruitment cult.

Her very first job was working for a then little known journalist named Tucker Carlson. She rubbed elbows with Breitbart writers. She seriously contemplated COVID-19 denier conspiracy theories. She visited the apocalyptic Patriot church deep in the woods of the Pacific Northwest. To quote Tina Wynn, the right is now a MAGA cult. And Tina says that she was raised by it back before it wasn't this cult-like machine that recruits young people and turns them into cogs in this apparatus. So the title of this episode is conservative youth activism because there really isn't a left-wing equivalent of this machine. And don't worry, we'll get into why the right and the left attract their followers for different reasons

and using different means. And this youth recruitment machine is just something that exists in this very purposeful institutionalized way on the right for reasons that we'll get into. So let me explain a little bit more of what I'm talking about. Because Tina Nguyen and I, we actually, we share a publisher, The Age of Magical Overthinking and The Maga Diaries came from the same imprint of Simon and Schuster.

And when I saw that her book was coming out, I reached out and we got on a call. We were discussing what of her experience might be a good fit for the show. We were talking through some of the experiences that she'd had and it felt like too on the nose really, just to do like the MagaCult, that's not like a unique perspective. That's something I feel like I read about all the time and have for the past six years.

And it's something that I've written about from a linguistics perspective, et cetera. But when she brought up this right wing pipeline that lures in aspiring journalists who may not even hold conservative values and turns them into mouthpieces for the MAGA movement, I was like, damn, that's pretty fucking interesting. I'd really like to explore that.

So a little bit more about it. Youth have been active in American politics in some way, shape, or form for a very long time. But the true catalyst for this new political landscape filled with a youngins was the founding of the Students for a Democratic Society in 1960. This is according to a piece from The Nation titled, Republicans have spent millions on youth outreach and it's working. And by the way, when I'm referring to youth throughout this episode, I'm really talking about college-aged kids slash slightly post-college, but there are groups that specifically target high schoolers. So taking a page out of the cult playbook that says capture the kids, you know,

get those kids nice and early. So these conservative youth outreach programs are really showing up on college campuses and they're targeting young people with tactics that I'll explain in a bit, including young people that like might not even be interested in conservative politics. After all, you know, college campuses tend to be pretty liberal spaces. So these institutions have to do the kind of cult-like work of converting someone to a different religion and then conditioning and coercing, conversion, conditioning, coercing. These are the three Cs. I talk about them in my book. I learned about them from a religious scholar named Rebecca Moore. I often talk about them as an alternative to the term brainwashing, but that is the

work that these groups are doing. Back to the 1960s. So by 1964, Students for a Democratic Society was sprawled throughout the United States. There were hundreds of active chapters. This group was left-wing and it really represented the New Left or this political movement that emerged from the very culty countercultural movement of the 1960s and 70s. That stood for many of the social issues that were coming to the fore during that time. Feminism, LGBTQ plus rights, a sort of neo-Marxism, drug policy reform, and a rejection of traditional gender roles and what are called, you know, traditional American family values or these very, you know, oppressive nuclear family

right-wing values. These students were confrontational in their tactics and, according to Lewis Menon writing for the New Yorker, quote, the movement inspired young people to believe that they could transform themselves and America, which might not sound radical now, but it was for the time. So this organization was kind of unrivaled by Republican youth. That is until Barry Goldwater's undeniably embarrassing loss to Lyndon B. Johnson, who won the largest share of the popular vote for the Democratic

Party in history. That was in 1964. So Goldwater, he was a Republican, his youngest delegate, this guy named Morton Blackwell, who later would become the youth director for Ronald Reagan, he would realize that to quote this publication in the Nation, it wasn't enough to get young people already interested in right-wing causes to vote. They had to be trained. And from there, the beating heart of right-wing political youth activism, this machine that would eventually go on to pump out

these sort of like cookie cutter, conservative, mostly white dudes with bad haircuts who love hashtag owning the libs. That's how this machine was really born. And it is at least partially responsible for every major inflammatory conservative figurehead that's been churned out over the past four years. So what are the major institutions in this machine? One is called the Leadership Institute. The Leadership Institute is this nonprofit whose mission, according to them, is to increase

the number and effectiveness of conservative activists and leaders in the public policy process. So this basically translates to funneling right-wing students from campus groups into the conservative machine. They offer over 50 variations of trainings, workshops, seminars, internships, the list goes on, and they have quote unquote trained some 200,000 conservative youth. So some star alumni of the Leadership Institute include the likes of Mike Pence, Mitch McConnell, James O'Keefe of Project Veritas and more. So these guys are everywhere

and the Leadership Institute has trained elected officials in all 50 doggone states. As of 2020, this Institute's revenue was roughly $23.5 million so that could buy him more than a few oat milk lattes, the bisexual left-wing nectar of the devil. Now while the Leadership Institute and LOL, I love how all of these conservative institutions all have these like really vague, classic sounding names as if they have been here since

the beginning of time and that this institute is not for conservative leadership, it is just for leadership period and that right-wing ideology is basically like the only form of leadership worth embodying. It's very interesting how they name their institutions using this format. So anyway, while the Leadership Institute may be the most, you know, sort of decorated, infamous example of conservative youth political activism, it is not alone. There's also this alt-right youth-centered political activist group that some listeners might be familiar with.

It's Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA, or TPUSA for short, which is fucking hilarious because it could also mean toilet paper USA, LM fucking AO. So TPUSA's pretty militant sounding mission statement is to quote, identify, educate, train, and organize students to promote freedom, okay? And this organization hosts events, leadership retreats, things like that. Again, just so many bad little haircuts, so many boys. Literally because they have branches that work exclusively with high schoolers. Back in 2016, TPUSA made $4 million in revenue, in 2020 they made $40 million. So we're growing. Allegedly they have a presence on over 3,500 campuses. So yeah, turning point. TP Toilet Paper USA.

Approaching in like a venereal disease. So how have these groups grown so quickly and become so powerful in a way that's like invisible to many that aren't involved with them. Like herein lies the cultiness. It has been theorized that these new alt-right youth targeting programs like TPUSA and PragerU — don't worry, I'll explain what that is shortly — are experiencing exponential growth for the same reasons they did in 1964, that peak cult era. It's really a retaliation against the left.

1964 to Lyndon B. Johnson is basically 2008 to Barack Obama. We're talking about a hip social media savvy president who knew how to use the internet to his advantage. Much like the Leadership Institute provides a path to a career in conservative politics or conservative punditry, it seems now that groups like PragerU and TPUSA can promise a path to conservative influencer stardom, which is now a career in its own right. And they use more than one classic cult tactic to achieve this. So the right is really

starting to figure out how to identify these charismatic political figureheads who can tap into whatever issues are hottest at the time. Charlie Kirk, this super right-wing political talk show host, internet personality demon, whatever you want to call him, when he first hit the scene, he spoke mostly about economic issues, student debt, international trade. But nowadays, Kirk's content is this, you know, sort of optimized for virality, super combative series of cheap shots at stereotypical liberals.

So, you know, it's these really boring, like, pronoun jokes, anti-vax type commentary, just YouTube candy for MAGA youth. Former alt-right follower Aidan Scully said that misogyny is hugely used as, quote, a vehicle and prerequisite for radicalization. So it's giving in cell. They also really weaponize isolation. So they isolate supporters by framing conservatives as these kind of enlightened victims. Basically groups like TPUSA attract college age men

by offering them this narrative that seems to really resonate. That conservative young men like themselves are victims, that they're being silenced and oppressed by the left. And then they conveniently offer them a platform to transcend that oppression. So to make a much more lighthearted comparison, it's like when the cult of the skincare industry, we did that episode, tells you in the same breath that your wrinkles and your cellulite and all these things you didn't even know to scrutinize about yourself are a problem. And then, oh, how convenient.

Here's a solution, right? Right there. In the exact same 150 word paragraph. The same type of providing the problem and solution in the same breath strategy is happening in a much higher stakes context here. So, you know, think election denial, COVID vaccine refusal. People think that being victimized sort of allows them to get out of jail free card to do things

like invade the US Capitol. And it's incredibly effective to create this us versus them mentality specifically when you're using language to do it online, because it drives people into even more deeply conservative ideology. They're not sort of like in the real world, breaking bread with people who might not agree, who might have like a different perspective. They're just, again, being whipped up by this extreme populist rhetoric online by organizations that are very strategically trying to get them to do that.

It creates a cultish echo chamber. And again, this is not to say that echo chambers don't exist on the left 100%. They do. Of course they do. But this is an episode on this youth activism pipeline, which again, you will learn from Tina later, doesn't really exist in the same way on the left. This former conservative Scully added, quote, I figured discussing it with my friends was a non-starter. After all, in my mind, they had fallen victim to the machinations of the radical left. I was the enlightened one. He said the alt-right only knows and therefore only teaches two emotions,

anger and fear. Both of these are generalized and are used to target broadly the unknown. Anything the alt-right does does not understand, like or benefit from it views as inherently dangerous." So, I mean, you can find so, so, so, so many comparisons in classic cults from history. Jim Jones, but I don't always find it productive to compare contemporary cult-like movements to Jonestown. That was an unprecedented and unrepeated, you know, very unique tragedy. However, a lot of these indoctrination tactics are very familiar. Jim Jones was incredibly

good at suggesting that the media and the US government was coming to threaten them, that they stood for peace, that they stood for freedom, for a sense of enlightenment outside of the fascist pigs that were their version of the elites, the sheeple in the United States. Jonestown was a very left-wing movement. This is a very right-wing movement, but the horseshoe theory connects them at this cultish place. Also, actually, what a lot of conservative,

charismatic figureheads do have in common with Jim Jones is actually their sense of showmanship. So conservative youth political activists function rhetorically a lot like the popular Republican politicians they idolize. You can imagine a teenage boy or an early 20-something boy performing almost this preacher-like right-wing ideology with lots of flair, loud anger, extreme statements and opinions. That is the sort of dialect, the register of this movement. In an interview with Catherine Jace for a salon piece titled How Youth Activists Energized the Right and Drove Politics into Madness, this, Kyle Spencer, who wrote Raising Them Right, said that what happens with right-wing activists

is they often have to be a lot louder, more radical, more creative. When progressives or Democrats are activating on college campuses, they're really registering people to vote. They're saying, we know most of you agree with us, so we just need to get you involved. But Republicans and conservative activists

need to change hearts and minds. They do that by being really in your face with mockery, inducing rage, and loud aggressive efforts. So it might almost even create the sense of like, if I can't beat them, these aggressive people who are in my face, join them. So even if you've never seen conservative youth recruiters on college campuses, you may have seen their antics online. There is this online platform called PragerU, I mentioned it earlier, where this guy named Dennis Prager basically created this like online university that's meant to do... it's not a university. It's called PragerU, it's not a university. It's trying to make itself seem like one.

And they make this content that ranges from almost reasonable, like if it shows up in your algorithm, to like full blown super far right conspiratorial, and it's aimed at youth. Throughout the research that I've done into various like cult like political corners, PragerU has shown up in like cult-like political corners. PragerU has shown up in like my YouTube shorts and stuff,

the way more light, almost reasonable gateway type ones. And it's been really fascinating to like go down that rabbit hole from an anthropological standpoint. But this guy Dennis Prager claims that quote, just take a deep breath, get ready for this quote, conservative speakers on campus can undo in just 90 minutes much of the woke indoctrination students have received in all their time at college. So he's basically making the very hypocritical point that colleges very insidiously indoctrinate these impressionable students how horrible, but actually how very clever, and I'm going to do the

same thing. Again, you may have seen some of these aggressive tactics on social media. There's the ever popular sort of man on the street style Q&A, where students on any given campus will do these like extremely confrontational political Q&As with people just passing by on the street. Sometimes these take the form of actual events. Toilet Paper USA's 2017 Affirmative Action Bake Sale is this monstrous event where baked goods are sold at prices that vary according to the buyer's race with white buyers paying the most in an effort to arouse anger within and thus enlist the support of white conservative students surrounding the notion that nowadays the financial and emotional cost of going to college is higher

for white students. Again, it's really whipping them up into this state of like, oh my God, I've been victimized, I will not be replaced, et cetera. Now we certainly do not have the space in this episode to get into a nuanced discussion of the nitty gritty of identity politics on college campuses in this country. That issue is one of many that require nuance. What I will say for now though, definitively, is that balanced dialogue is the enemy of political extremes, right?

Like political cultishness in 2024 is powered by catastrophizing in a way that is optimized for online virality and youth recruitment. So this guy, Aidan Scully, to quote him again, he wrote about his fall down the alt-right pipeline as a teenager for the publication Harvard Politics. He said, their assertions were straightforward enough for me to understand, and having next to no frame of reference with which to refute it, I did the only thing I thought epistemically sound except it as true. So this has been my little political explanation.

Oh my god, a little something different for sounds like a cult. If you would like to hear more about what's similar between Trump's oratory stylings and other cult-y populist leaders from history, I do talk about that more in cultish. I don't have time to fully get into it here, but I will link an interview that I did recently that is a little bit more political in flavor

on Jon Favreau's podcast offline. If any fans of Pod Save America are listening, I will link that in our show notes. I got to go on Jon's show and talk about Trump rhetoric and celebrity cults and cognitive biases. It was awesome. Something to listen to later. And so, yeah, thank you for listening to this. And without further ado, I am very excited to introduce our interview with my guest host, author and reporter and conservative youth activism survivor, Tina Nguyen. Let's go. Let's talk about cults.

Hell yeah. I love that enthusiasm. Before we do though, could you please introduce yourself and your work to our listeners? Hi guys. My name is Tina Nguyen, national correspondent and founding partner at Puck, which is the best media site out there. Read it, love it, subscribe to it. And I'm also the author of the MAGA Diaries, which is a memoir that came out pretty recently about my weird journey over the past 14 plus years as someone who was part of the right wing, then left the right

wing, then started covering the right wing. And it was weird. And I wrote a book about it. And people have found it both terrifying and really funny. You've lived a lot of life, my friend. You know, you are one of my favorite sort of categories of guests to have on Sounds Like a Cult, someone who defected from a cultish environment, so to speak, saw the light and is now not necessarily like flipped to the other side in a cultish way, because that is definitely something that we also see when someone gets like equally fundamentalist on the polar opposite side. I think you definitely have a sense of humor and a sense

of self-awareness about your experiences. And I was so delighted to talk to you on the phone as we were kind of discussing how we wanted to cover your story on this podcast, because it kind of felt too close to a topic you would find on a classic cult podcast to just like talk about the Maga-Cult. You were telling me how people always are asking you is Maga a cult? Is Maga a cult? Is Maga a cult? And people ask me that question all the time about various communities along the cultish spectrum. And the answer is kind of like, it's irrelevant, you know, like everyone thinks that something they don't like is a cult and are quick to label it that in order to critique it though You have to look a little bit more closely and be a little bit more specific. Oh my god

Yeah, I imagine that people are gonna immediately click on this episode going like she's finally saying it. Well, yeah No, that's the thing is like people so badly just want folks like us to definitively say like, oh, yes That's a cult But the funny thing is that as we were talking on the phone about your story, I was personally less intrigued by the idea of sitting around calling MAGA a cult for an hour. I was much more intrigued by what you mentioned at first, just in passing about this conservative youth activism world, how you went to like conservative journalists summer camp, so to speak. So today we are here specifically to talk about how the right has created this whole subculture.

We're going to learn about what conservative youth activism is from you and your experience of it. First off, though, when I say the cult of conservative youth activism, what does that mean to you exactly? I think all cults are and like you are obviously the cult expert here so I defer to you but let me give a stab at it coming from my angle and area of expertise which is if you are talking about a highly organized group of people with a coherent plan to execute a vision of the future that it looks very

Specific and makes absolutely no sense to a broader Community other than people inside this movement It's pretty culty the only difference between the conservative youth movement and like a real cult is that Everyone likes the founding fathers like you can't say that liking the Founding Fathers is weird and culty. I think you can. I mean yes you can. I have been full scale in the world of people really loving the Founding Fathers a little too much, but if you were to say like hey I want to like promote and protect the ideals

that the Founding Fathers laid out for us in the Constitution that were built over years of laws, that sounds like nerd shit, right? Like that's your pedantic government nerd from college just like trying to write a good paper. That doesn't really sound culty at all. You just sound boring. You know, that is such an interesting point. And one that I don't think has come up on the show before is that I would actually argue

that a cult kind of tells on itself if it's too exciting. Like, I think some of the most insidious cult organizations and movements in our country right now are actually predicated on something that looks really boring so that people can operate in secret. Not to sound too conspiratorial, but we all know that it's culty to gather on a compound, to wear a weird robe, to say a weird chant, to dance in a circle. We don't need to talk about that too much. It already looks culty. It's the boring sort of play by the rules to fuck up the rules behavior that we need to pay more attention to. Like, okay, this is an extreme example, but you know how half of Hitler's rise to power involved actually getting let in the door by the establishment instead of just overthrowing it? I feel like

the most terrifying, powerful cult leaders know how to be boring and mainstream when they need to be. Oh yeah. So just a little bit of background on the conservative movement for people who are coming in and feeling like, wow, this is some boring shit. So back in the 1950s and 60s, the conservative movement kind of came into being as a reaction to the excesses of the Kennedy administration and the Johnson administration in using the federal government to implement a whole bunch of social policies that they did not like. And everyone within this movement had their own very gut emotional reaction towards it. Some people were racist, some people were like,

we don't like how they're using the federal infrastructures to do XYZ. But ultimately, they kind of coalesce around this idea of we want to make sure society does not go forward too quickly because we have seen it in communist countries lead to the absolute ruination of society. Families are being torn apart, intellectuals are being paraded in the street

and their faces are being smashed in, all for the sake of equity, this freaks us out. So what they decide to do is that they put together all of these institutions and newspapers, magazines, little training camps that not only try to change public opinion, but then also try to engineer and grow the next generation of activists and politicians who will be able to like get into the federal government somehow, whether by being elected or becoming a like staffer even or going into the judiciary or law or whatever civic institution you can think

of. They'll go in there, they'll be taught very young just like basic things like how to write a resume and how to send a job interview but like also here's the intellectual training that you need in order to succeed once you get into the workplace to put forth the ideas of liberty and it's more of a like actual network and community than people realize because this sounds like really boring nerd shit right but like the best example I can point to of how successful this movement is is... Think of Mitch McConnell. No, thank you.

You know how he is a very old man? Do I ever? Well, he has been a member of this movement since he was 20. He was one of the first graduates of the Leadership Institute, which literally is an institute for finding young conservatives who really like liberty and being like, Hey, do you want to do a summer camp and learn how to like run for office? Here you go. He went through a bunch of those programs.

So what I'm hearing is that this is an organized complex system that was actually kind of like a politically motivated satanic panic style reaction to fears about progressivism, taking over traditional American values that was just like able to get on its feet and kind of create a conservative indoctrination machine. So how did you get involved with it? involved with it. Well, there's a machine aspect of it, which is sort of where I came through. The reason I got into the right in the first place was one, I really loved the Founding Fathers, and two, I wanted to be a journalist. And this program comes along my path going like, hey, do you want to pay internship in journalism for the summer of 2009?

It's paid. Also, you have to write this essay about why you love liberty a lot. Yeah, that sounds quite alluring and not super threatening whatsoever, which is how the pitch always sounds when joining all kinds of cults. But why did you love the founding father so much? I mean, I grew up in Boston. My parents were refugees. There wasn't really much of a sense of my own connection with my family's

heritage because they were from Vietnam and they would rather have forgotten all of that. But when you grow up in Boston and you live close to the Freedom Trail, really close to John Adams' old estate, Peace Field, and every single one of your field trips is to, like the Boston Tea Party ship, a chapel where Paul Revere hung his lamps, or the battlefields where the shot heard around the world happened underneath your feet. And you start learning about what the founding fathers wanted to do and how they wanted to build a government out of nothing that tried. Even back then, the concept of having equal rights and the life to life liberty

and property that wasn't given to you through God or a king was like insane. And it wasn't just that, it was also the fact that they somehow put together this government that could evolve and that people were able to make evolve and to open up those rights to more and more people over time. And it was hard and it was bloody, but the government still continued. And the ideals that were in that document expanded more and more and more over time. And I thought, I think that's worth being a part of. You're really selling me on these founding fathers here.

Okay, but what I'm hearing is like, it was very much the culture of Boston to take an interest in this origin story. The same way it's the culture in Los Angeles, where I live, to take an interest in our founding father, Gwyneth Paltrow, from a young age. So they got you by offering you this amazing opportunity to enter this journalism program. Can you talk a little bit more about this recruitment process? Like, what brought you in and where did it go from there?

Sure. The reason I got to the internship in the first place was because one of the reasons I went to the college I went to, Claremont McKenna, is because they had a research institute there called the Salvatore Center for the Study of Individual Freedom in the modern world. And it was like, hey, I can put this on my resume as like a research position at a prestigious university. Also, I get to study individual freedom. Two for one, man, let's go. Turns out that that institution was linked to the Claremont Institute, like very informally. The Claremont Institute, for people who don't know, is a conservative think tank out in California that I think serves as sort of the intellectual engine of Trumpism and takes whatever he is trying to put forward and like make it appeal to a broader, smarter audience, primarily by like leaning on the mission that they had since the 70s to like preserve the ideals of the American founding. And the thing with the conservative movement as a network

is that it's not insular. Like the barrier to entry is definitely, do you not like liberals? But the opportunities you get for growth and to be able to do what you wanna do is less formal indoctrination processes that force you to believe a certain thing and more like, Hey, I know a

guy who knows a guy. Did you want to do this? I know that thing's happening over there. Like, what if you took the Ivy league and turned it into kind of an ideological call? Fine. Let's use the word cult in this context. Well, I mean, look, sometimes it is this actually very useful sort of mnemonic that we can use to reference some kind of organization that has weird rituals and possibly nefarious aims.

And of course, the word cult is not always enough information to communicate exactly what is dangerous about such and such a group. That's like one of the themes that this podcast aims to address. But it's like, yeah, use the word cult, think about the context, take it with a grain of salt. I mean, it's a useful word, that's why it's in use. But whatever you wanna call it, a cult, a brotherhood, a network of veins and capillaries, whatever,

what was your experience from that initial recruitment that was just like, hey, come be a journalist and love liberty always? Yeah, that was when I went to right wing journalism summer camp. When you get the internship, the internship requires you to go to this mandatory seminar before it starts and you go to a college campus

with a whole bunch of other people who got the internship as well. But then a whole bunch of other people who got the internship as well, but then a whole bunch of other people who didn't get the internship, but seemed like they were down with the cause, and you go there and you would learn not just basic journalism skills, but then you start going into media criticism and ideas of like what makes up the journalism industry. Why is it that the journalism industry reports on this thing a certain way, why is it that they're really into bank bailouts guys? Aren't bank bailouts bad? This was like summer of 2009, so right after Obama was elected during the like

financial crisis. And that part was fun, I guess, but the more important part was what happened afterwards, when all the kids who were attending and all the speakers and professors and all of these older figures were there with you to teach you about getting into the industry and you're just hanging out with friends who are super smart and into the same things that you're into and you stay up really late into the night discussing these ideas or just having fun and talking about whatever is happening in pop culture at the time, those friendships become super organic, and you all bonded because you had this connection to a network and place that wanted you to

be of service to a greater ideal than yourself, which was free speech. And it could have ended there for me after I did my internship, but when I completed it, I got another invite from the program that invited me to the mentorship program. And the mentorship program was specifically for promising people in the journalism program who had a bright future ahead of them. And I got an official mentor, the guy who ran the program, and he was like, I will help you write your epithet. I will help you write your resumes, I'll look over your cover letters, I'll alert you if I hear of someone who's trying to make a hire, if this person wants to talk to you, I can prep you in advance for what that conversation is

gonna look like. Like, he was a mentor and it didn't really ping my mind that maybe it was weird that it was coming from a journalism program that was ideological. I thought this was normal. I really thought this was just like how people got jobs in the first place. Well, that's why it's so important to target the youth, right? Like, whether you're a political predator or a spiritual predator, you have to go after someone young because they have nothing to compare it to and it's harder to notice the red flags. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace.

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Okay, Literal Robot is one of my absolute favorite sounds like a Colt sponsors to talk about because I used it, loved it, lived by it, bragged about it, tried to get people in the cult of Litter-Robot long before they were ever a sponsor of the show. Someone actually commented on an Instagram Reels that I posted the other day of me recording an episode that had cat hair all over my microphone.

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that I actually have one behind me right now. And if it were to go off, this microphone wouldn't pick up the sound. It's truly amazing. I don't even remember life before it. And as a special offer to listeners of the show, go to stopscooping.com slash SLAC and enter promo code SLAC to save an extra $50

on any Litter-Robot bundle. That's an extra $50 off any Litter-Robot bundle at stopscooping.com slash SLAC and enter promo code SLAC at checkout. Stopscooping.com slash SLAC A C and enter promo code S L A C at checkout. Stop scooping.com slash S L A C and enter promo code S L A C. So how is this summer camp set up? Like, is it all for aspiring journalists or are they providing opportunities for just kind of anyone who wants to advance the conservative cause? Oh, it's really targeted. So the summer camp I went to specifically

was for people who wanted to enter journalism, whether it was reporting or opinion or whatever. The Institute for Humane Studies, though, had other programs for academics, for instance, who wanted to go into the university system and study philosophy or political philosophy or what have you, and would like actually pay stipends for you while in your master's or PhD program. Then there are like summer camps for people who

want to get into political organizing, who want to learn how to run campaigns, who want to go into elected office. There's this one group called the American Legislative Exchange Council that actually, like if you are a Republican who gets elected to a state legislature, you are invited to a camp with all of the other people in your area who just became state legislators and maybe some other people from other states and you hang out with them and you're like, oh my god, you're a Republican state legislator too. This is fantastic. Let's all get together and write the same types of legislation and then bring it back to our own states. Wow. Very organized. It's giving reverse Illuminati,

like Bohemian Grove, but for conservatives. But the journalism stuff is like the juiciest of all. And it's something that outsiders are familiar with. Like who among us doesn't know about the power and influence and horrors of Fox News and the right has harnessed journalism in a way that is undeniably cultish and in many ways very impressive. So can I ask why is there no analog on the political left for this? Because that's something that you mentioned to me on our initial call before this interview. And I want to know like, yeah, why is there no equivalent on the political left for the system? Not to sound like a right-wing talking head, but it's because the left has all the other institutions.

So like, you don't necessarily. I see. Yeah. So when I applied for this journalism internship, the pitch was not, you can be on Fox News or work for the New York Post. It was, people in this program have gone on to places for the New York Post. It was people in this program have gone on to places like the New York Times, MSNBC, Bloomberg, all

of these like super legit places and there were people who did. It's just that those guys were eventually not considered for the official mentorship program. But as someone who did end up working in the super elite tiers of mainstream media, Vanity Fair, I was there for like four years, you start realizing who is it that can get through the doors of these extremely exclusive organizations, especially since like local news and regional news is constantly dying. And the answer is inevitably people with expensive degrees. People with expensive

degrees who live in coastal blue areas, who through no fault of their own have grown up with a very, very narrow viewpoint of what the country is. But that is just sort of the mentality that sticks around and you just can't break it. So the conservative world has spent decades and decades and decades trying to build analogs to the institutions generally that they have pinpointed as being run primarily by liberals and progressives. So weirdly enough, there was never really that much emphasis on training people to enter the federal bureaucracy because that's a very Democrat liberal thing to do. But after the Trump administration, the conservative movement realized that they were running into all of this resistance inside the bureaucracy, because these were people who'd been there for ages and were like, no, this is not how things are done. So the moment that Trump left office, someone at the Heritage Foundation was like, all right, let's put together a training program for people who want to enter the federal bureaucracy.

Wow. The motivation for that being... So let's take the migrant ban for a second. So back in 2017, Trump out of nowhere decides to just like ban Muslims from entering the country. And there's literally no legal backing for him to be able to do it. However, that is because a whole bunch of people in the Department of Justice said that, and maybe a whole bunch of people in DHS were like, this is irrational, you can't do this. There are a whole bunch of constitutional lawyers

that was like, you can't do this because of XYZ laws. The Heritage Foundation, through this thing called Project 2025, as well as this other organization, AFPI, whatever, were like, hmm, okay, the only thing that was preventing Trump from executing what he wanted were all of these like pesky bureaucrats who knew how the system worked. And we don't because we've never invested in that. It's time to invest in that. Okay, so the way that like fundamentalist evangelical anti-abortion protesters will train their children to like learn every counter

argument you could possibly ever need to use when getting into a debate with a pro-choice person. You know, you have to learn what the other side is going to argue in order to effectively combat them. And that is something that I think is harnessed by the socio-political right clearly very effectively, the right learning how to navigate and thus manipulate bureaucracy to accomplish things like immigration bans. Sounds like just another example of that. Can you tell me about your sort of trajectory after the mentorship program and how it led you to be in the orbits of Breitbart and Tucker Carlson and yeah, just from there. Yeah, totally.

It's really all just a matter of like, I knew a guy who knew a guy. Like whenever people ask me like, why I was in that world to begin with and if I like deliberately wanted to do right wing stuff, I'm like, no, that's not how it works. Literally the mentor hooked me up with a guy who's trying to help The Daily Caller

hire someone for their site and it was just like a tech reporter job, but I was like I can do it, I can say all the right libertarian things, and so I got the job. But at that point I started noticing this like bizarre chain of events where I entered the conservative world to be a journalist, but that always was predicated on I have to get the facts and report things as the facts dictate. And not only was I being discouraged against that by people who I thought were my editors, they ultimately were like going against me whenever I was saying, wait no, the facts say one thing, and they're like, wait no, you can't report that because we need to hit the Democrat more than the Republican because like

imagine if we were the Washington Post we would be hitting the Republican all the time because that's what they do and that was just gospel and personally that never happened with me and Tucker Carlson I have to like be very clear about that my editor at the Daily Caller was actually a guy outside the company which was a very weird thing when I discovered that. But this happened more than once, and it was always through jobs set up by that mentor. And by the third or fourth time, I had an interview with someone and that was the direction things started to go, and I was like, I can't do this anymore. You know what? Screw it. I am just gonna

forget this ever happened and I'm gonna move to New York. You know what? Screw it. I am just going to forget this ever happened and I'm going to move to New York. I'm 22. That's what I do. Got it. So that was a sort of early culty red flag, so to speak, that you were being told, no, you're a journalist, you're a journalist, you're a journalist, but you have to obey this dogma that is actually not journalistically very ethical. Exactly. And my understanding is that this was all a sort of answer to the somewhat cultish chip on the conservative shoulder of the left has all the institutions, the left has academia,

the left has prestige journalism. Like we need to be an answer to that, which is a motivation for a lot of cultish communities, for better and for worse, when there is something deeply, deeply wrong with the system that, which is a motivation for a lot of cultish communities for better and for worse when there is something deeply, deeply wrong with the system or when they perceive something to be deeply wrong with the system. We need a counterpoint to that. The problem is that the counterpoint often goes way too far and becomes dogmatic.

What were some of the seeds of MAGA fanaticism that you saw planted before Trump even came around. So there were two things. First, when I entered the conservative movement, it was still very like buttoned up and everyone was wearing bow ties and one person was like, yeah they sit around at home and play on their harpsichords. But they always took for granted that there was a Republican anti-democrat base that would do whatever it was they said. And when I entered the movement, there were these small indications that that wasn't the case. So for instance, I sort of entered in the period where everyone was still reading National

Review, which is this very fussy old magazine that's been around since the 60s, but then people were starting to switch to blogs, to Breitbart, to like the Drudge Report as the arbiter of like what was and was not the talking point. And the problem that the network always has is that they don't really have good control of the people they let in, especially once the internet came around. So there were a whole bunch of guys I knew back then who were very internet troll type people who would do giant attention grabbing stunts and were rewarded for it because they seemed to horrify liberals.

So like James O'Keefe from Project Veritas is like the prime example of that. He literally like wore a pimp coat, pretended that he was a pimp and that this woman with him was a prostitute and they tried to scam a nice old lady into like signing over a government loan and they're like oh my god acorns bad and i i think the democrats had to roll that program back because of that video and so the republican conservative donor base was like oh my god that was so effective we don't care that your strategies were this like outrageous in order to get this goal keep doing what you're doing and it was all about like what can we do in order to be back liberals and we will fund that and maybe you're going to be a

little too outrageous but this is fine we'll go along with it and justify the means exactly so watching that be acceptable in the conservative movement it sort of hinted to me that like if trump got powerful not just the Republican Party, but the conservative movement would not stand in his way. It's one thing for a party to think in terms of like, will this person help us get other people elected, but for a movement that wants to make sure that the country looks a certain way and will do whatever it takes to get there, having someone like Trump on your side

and the base that he's cultivated is a massive asset. Absolutely. And again, what I'm hearing is that the right is just so effective at harnessing who people on the left just kind of are, like their values in order to serve their own cause. And when you combine that bait, that like liberal bait that Trump is with algorithmic news feeds on Facebook, you know, like all

social media companies are incentivized not necessarily to share factual headlines and articles, but to share the most engaging articles that will keep you on the platform the longest and what's more engaging than outrage. It just sounds like the perfect storm. Everything the conservative youth journalism movement had been set up for was now given this highly problematic but amazing figurehead. How could they not embrace him in a way? I mean, they weren't excited for it. I think for years there was definitely resistance to what Trump represented because it's like you enter the movement believing that you're trying to work for one cause.. I think for years there was definitely resistance to what Trump represented because like you enter the movement believing that you're trying to work for one cause and I think in my case growing up it was limited government freedom of speech free trade weirdly

but then Trump comes in and he's nativist and he's pulling America out of trade deals left and right. He is expanding the power of the federal government and using executive authority and executive actions to kind of do things that you find unjustifiable. But then you also realize that he is not a Democrat and that's good enough. Okay, maybe not good enough, but it like, it lessens the sting. Right, right.

Which also reminds me of a key dogma that I perceive on the political right, which is like, a lot of the things that they do and believe in are in service of hating those on the left, rather than being driven by something, they're driven, you know, away from something. Yeah, definitely. No, that's the core of the conservative movement. Alert, alert, more nerd shit coming through. One of the original philosophers that the conservative movement drew on when they established themselves was Edmund Burke, who was this Enlightenment era philosopher from the late 1700s. And while he was

pretty sympathetic to the founding fathers and their cause, he lived in the United Kingdom, but he was also observing what the French were doing during the Reign of Terror, and in their quest for liberty and equality and a more equitable society, they were like burning cities to the ground and chopping off people's heads and turning themselves into like an authoritarian police state in order to do so. So the lesson that Burke drew from this was, look, it is noble that people want to change the world and make things better for everyone, but if you want to move society forward too quickly, it will result in a lot of social upheaval and chaos. And if that were the choice, I would rather choose upholding institutions that are regressive but stable rather than trying to move forward

too quickly and break something that could end in like absolute disaster. When the conservatives came around in the 1960s that was sort of their touchpoint as well. Like we're seeing this happen in Russia, we're seeing this happen in China, we're seeing this happening in Cuba and Vietnam and whatever socialist communist state is rising up, like, we do not want this to happen here. Let's do whatever we can to stop it. It's a weird dynamic. Like, whenever I cover the Republican Party and the right overall, I find that there's

this weird tension and internal conflict between the structure that has been established over the past six, seven decades, it's people's social networks, it's people's livelihoods, it's the thing that has gotten them out of bed in the morning ever since they were like 20, and the ideals from the populist right that are coming up either through the outside or from people on the inside who are like, let's take advantage of this network that exists and use them to push our ideas out. Holy shit, I gotta bring this back around to that mentor.

Cause you wanna know what my mentor was actually doing the entire goddamn time? Please tell me. He was a white nationalist recruiting white nationalist journalists and trying to put them into the mainstream media. Holy shit. Okay, I'm so glad you brought it back to that

because I wanted to ask a couple more questions. First, who would you say are the leaders of the conservative youth movement right now? Ooh, here's the thing. Define leader because if you're talking about someone who is like the signal of the future who is most likely to be the next president or big figurehead doesn't particularly exist right now. Closest I would say is Matt Gaetz, but the thing is is that one of the weaknesses of the MAGA movement is that everyone really wants to get one up over other people. I think it's just kind of endemic because look people who came of age in the MAGA movement are playing on the same platform that Trump was. He was a guy with a massive social media following and celebrity. People in the MAGA movement are trying to achieve that same level of power

in order to get influence. And if it's a matter of who has more followers or who's listening to who at any given moment, that really kind of goes up and down depending on the times. It's hard to build a permanent base of supporters if that's your end goal. Right, so then it might be hard to identify like a Keith Raniere analog in the form of a conservative figurehead at the top,

but then who's maybe like the Alison Mack? Like who's doing the legwork? Who's doing the recruiting? Yeah. Ooh, probably the influencers. Like, who's doing the legwork? Oh, who's doing the recruiting? Yeah. Probably the influencers, and I really think it's just social media algorithms who are just pushing content in the right kids' faces. It's not even an individual person on campus anymore standing next to a table.

That is some boomership right there. But if you're just kind of scrolling around and someone's put a targeted ad up that is some boomership right there. But if you're just kind of scrolling around and someone's put a targeted ad up that is like, hey do you like xyz things? What if I started getting content in front of you that was slightly more, hey don't you think you're being treated unfairly because of your race or your gender or your socioeconomic status or whatever? And like they're just better at nudging and nudging and nudging and nudging people further and further into the right. And maybe, I don't know how soon this new tactic is going to yield people who can run for office or put together a legislative package or think in the long term, but it is certainly going to get more people to vote Republican. Which is ultimately the angle, right? Totally. Actually, which is ultimately the end goal, right?

Totally. Actually, now that you bring it up, conservative youth movements have even tried to target me. I think because of all the clicking around that I do, due to the research that I do for this podcast, PragerU is like, what? It's like TED Talk for conservatives. So PragerU started serving me hella content on YouTube shorts. I think just because a whole bunch of my clicking around the Internet has to do with problematizing everyday subcultures, which is what this podcast is all about. And if I start problematizing a certain liberal dominated space, I think the algorithm is like, oh, this person might be

interested in exploring slightly right wing ideas, which is not the case, at least not in earnest. So recently, Father Algorithm started serving me PragerU videos. And the wild thing is that the first videos that they served me, the sort of like gateway videos, I could kind of agree with. And I didn't know what PragerU was, but those first videos were a little more reasonable. And then it started serving me more and more and more radicalized ideas. And finally, I was like, okay, this has left the land of reasonableness. And finally I Googled it. Like, what the fuck is this site that keeps serving me this content? And lo

and behold, I found what it was. But I could so easily see how someone who's curious about criticizing their own political beliefs even lightly, you know, even in the way that we should all be criticizing our own political dogma could be so quickly targeted and sent down the conservative youth movements rabbit hole. It's nuts. Yeah, it's a weird place to be in. One of the last questions I want to ask is just how did you end up getting out from this

quote unquote cult that you had put so much time into and so much of yourself into? Literally, I did the very cliched thing of running off to New York and forgetting that I ever did this and starting over, I became a food blogger. The thing is, is that like I did ask Tucker Carlson to write me a recommendation because he offered one after I left the collar and he did. And that was sort of the like friend of a friend favor that helped me establish myself in New York.

And then I think, I guess being a food blogger in mainstream media, less suspicious of your intentions. So I only started going back to covering right-wing stuff in 2016 because Trump was going to be the nominee. And this incident happened in the news of a Breitbart reporter being shoved by Trump's campaign manager. And all of a sudden this giant right wing campaign was happening against her. And I was like, wait, I literally know everyone who is involved in this story. Like I remember him, I remember him. I've definitely hung out with him.

What are you doing here, Steve Bannon? And my boss was like, wait, how do you know all these people? Can you write about this? And ever since then, I have literally just been covering the right as its own institution. And it sounds like you are well qualified to do so. Can I just go back and ask what Tucker Carlson is like? Because he has a cult following in his own right. Oh, for sure.

Tucker is really, really fun to hang out with. Like, he is so charming and very witty and super funny. And he has this ability to come up with. Like, he is so charming and very witty and super funny and he has this ability to come up with the most, like, cutting, brutal nicknames for people. He doesn't like you. The weird thing about Tucker's current status right now, though, is that in person he's very magnetic and he also has the ability to hold a grudge forever. Yikes. Yeah, literally the first thing we ever talked about when I interviewed with him, I was 22, mind you, and this is a grown ass man. He sits down, learns where I went to college, and learns where I went to high school, and then goes on this rant about how he hated my

high school principal because they went to high school together and the principal tried to steal his girlfriend. Who he married! Wow. Oh my God. He's like a savant for enemies. Yes, exactly. And I thought this was hilarious at the time. And I was like, oh my God, you're so funny. Ha ha ha ha ha. And then like 12 years later, I had a long conversation with him.

And like 20% of the time, he was just ranting about various people he hated for reasons unbeknownst to me. Revenge is very corrosive. Like that type of bitterness will eat you alive. I can't imagine it feels very comfortable to be in his body or mind. That's my guess.

Right, but the thing is with Tucker is that he was like very engaging on television for sure. As someone who got quote unquote canceled by Fox, his audience share is definitely smaller and they are way more attached to him because of it. Because he can point to being persecuted by Fox and not only is that good for a following, it's a good brand. Okay, so then I guess my last question before we play a little game is just what is your advice for young people who are navigating these incredibly fraught, ideologically driven political waters right now?

Ahhhhh! Oof oof oof. Um, man, the question is do you want to change the world or do you want to survive into adulthood? Oh my god. What a great one-liner. Because let me tell you, nothing makes you more susceptible to cult-like influence than wanting to change the world.

Yeah, change the world or protect the world that you once knew. That's the key difference, I think, for the conservative movement, is that there is no vision of the future they're driving towards. They just don't want the world to change from what it used to be.

Yes, that is such a more succinct way of putting what I was trying to ask you before. Actually, I do have a chapter in my new book about how dangerous nostalgia can be as a political tool. You know, it's like make America great again. When was America great? According to whom and why? Like there's a reason why nostalgia is thriving

so hardcore right now, whether we're talking about insidious political dogma or the friends reunion, you know? Like when the present feels painful, we romanticize the past and that can be either a beautiful coping mechanism or a very, very dangerous political weapon. It just sucks to be driven by something that never existed.

Okay, we're gonna play a little game now. that never existed. Okay, we're gonna play a little game now. It's a classic, sounds like a cult game that I think is perfectly suited to this episode. It's called culty quotes. So I'm going to read you a series of quotes and you're gonna guess whether the quote was said by either a conservative political pundit or a notorious cult leader from history.

All right, let's go. All right, quote number one, humans can be noble. The question is, will we put forth what is necessary? Notorious cult leader because I don't think a politician would ever refer to the general we as humans. That is hysterical and you are correct. Right, humans almost has like a new agey woo woo energy to it, not the vernacular of politics.

Very good. Forensic linguist over here. Love that. That was a Keith Raniere quote. Okay. The second one is one area of liberal phenomenon. I support is female bisexuality. I would say a very certain type of politician.

Do you have a guess? It might not be a politician, it could just be a pundit. Why do I think it's Joe Rogan? That is a very good guess. It's actually Tucker Carlson. Well, there you go, yeah. There you go. I mean, listen, he has said a lot of shit

Yeah, the moment that you said this could be a pun and I was like, oh no, this is definitely a dude. Haha 100% Okay, the next quote goes I'm not the chosen one. I'm just one of many who have been given gifts. Ooh Stab in the dark might be a cult leader It was Bill O'Reilly. Oh my God. Okay. All right. Thanks Bill.

It's a surprising quote, right? Like the chosen one. It's like, relax William. Okay. The next quote is, we do in all honesty, hate this world. That's a cult leader. That's someone who wants to like transcend someplace.

You are so 100% correct. That was Marshall Applewhite, the leader of the 90s millenarian UFO called Heaven's Gate. Oh, that's the first cult I remember actually. Me too. My vividest media memories of the 90s were of the coverage of the Heaven's Gate suicides in 1998. I was six and I was hooked, which should have been telling. Okay, the next quote is, any politician who wants to run for president will come to me in a few years.

Ooh, pundit? That is Reverend Moon, the leader of the Unification Church, aka the Moonies. Oh, okay, yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. That cult is big. It is. It is. It has sunk its teeth into places you don't even want to imagine. Okay, one more quote. The quote is, I don't know why people like being oppressed. Oh my God, why am I thinking it's Trump? Close enough, it's Candace Owens. Okay. Oh, that makes sense.

That's her entire shtick. Tina, I want to pose to you the ultimate question that we ask at the end of every episode of Sounds Like a Cult, and it goes like this. Out of our three cult categories, live your life, watch your back, and get the fuck out. Which category do you think the cult of conservative youth activism falls into? into. I think it was category two. I worry it's going to be category three. You still don't think it's made its way into category three? No, because I think it's like there's still so much dissension inside the conservative movement, especially at the youth levels. There's

so much infighting. There's the occasional war between the young Republicans and the turning point kids and like the Nikki Haley types and the Trump types and what's happening in the Senate right now versus what's happening in the House. It is really all dependent on if one unified idea wins out. And this was something that's never happened in the conservative movement before, which was why it was always kind of chilling under the radar. But the moment that they're like, hey, by the way, we've got this big, powerful network that was put in place to protect conservative ideals.

But now it's like really Trumpy. We got to burn everything down. Will you do it or not? That I think is when it gets culty. I mean, isn't the purpose of a cult to be like, you cannot live without the thing at the center of it. I love that summary of it. I mean, everyone has a slightly different interpretation of what a cult truly, truly is. But I love that summary. Yeah. Like they do want to instill in every follower that on some level you can't live without this. Yeah. That's not the overwhelming

sentiment inside the movement yet. I don't know if it will. I don't know if it'll get away from that. I don't know what factors will take it away from full-blown cult territory. And that's the very interesting place I find my coverage today. Wow. Well, thank you so much for the measure

and the candor that you brought to this episode. On my most generous day, I think, yes, maybe I would say it's a heavy watcher back, but I gotta call it a get the fuck out. It scares me. I'm calling it a category three, but that's just my little opinion. Allegedly, allegedly, this is an opinion podcast. Thank you so much for joining me as my guest on this episode, Tina.

Very unique episode of Sounds Like a Call. If folks wanna keep up with you and your writing and find your book, where can they do that? Sure. So you can subscribe to Puck at puck.news slash Tina Nguyen. And basically it's a subscription only service for all of the hottest inside gossip and everything that involves people in power with money. So there's me who does

right-wing Trump stuff, but then you also have Matt Bellany in Hollywood who's breaking all of the news about why Taylor Swift is making a bajillion dollars and which companies are going to have what lawsuits. It's very juicy on his end. We've got everything. And then the MAGA Diaries, you can buy pretty much wherever bookstores sell books. If you also liked listening to me,

apparently the audiobook version of the MAGA Diaries is way more fun. We do have some audio girlies in the audience, no doubt about it. Amazing. Well, that's our show. Thanks so much for listening. Stick around for a new cult next week, but in the meantime, stay culty, but not too culty. Sounds Like a Cult is hosted and produced by Amanda Montell and edited by Jordan Moore of

the PodCabin. Our theme music is by Casey Cole. This episode was made with production help from Katie Epperson and Rhys Oliver. Thank you as well to our partner, All Things Comedy. And if you like the show, please feel free to check out my books, Word Slut, A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language, Cultish, The Language of Fanaticism, and The Age of Magical Overthinking, Notes on Modern Irrationality. If you're a fan of Sounds Like a Cult, I would really appreciate it if you leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.