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AR 30:28 - The mainstream "purest definition of cult" falls apart
In this issue:
CULTISM - how a pejorative previously applied to Seventh-day Adventists has become shorthand for sinister "devotion, loyalty and obsession"
CULTURE - the porn crisis is traumatizing our children, with vast generational implications
Apologia Report 30:28 (1,717)
July 31, 2025
CULTISM
"Is Donald Trump's movement really a 'cult'? Well, I ought to know" by Jonathan Hirsch (Salon, May 23 '25) -- As a teenager, Hirsch's parents became "the personal acupuncturists" of Franklin Jones, founder of the 1970s' group, Adidam. <www.tinyurl.com/3cknjwru>
Hirsch tells his story by way of comparison with other movements of the time, which includes the related changes of use for the term "cult" since then - leading to: "Somewhere along the line, 'cult' has come to mean so many things that I'm no longer sure it means anything at all."
The word "cult" was "originally used simply to describe small, fringe religious movements - groups that were offbeat and outside the mainstream, but not necessarily sinister. In fact, many groups that were once considered cults, such as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (better known as the Mormons) or the Seventh-day Adventist Church, are now widely regarded as mainstream religions. ... Meanwhile, alternative religious movements were flourishing. There was the rebirth of evangelical Christianity known as the 'Jesus movement,' the Hindu sect that became the Hare Krishnas and dozens more gurus and spiritual guides, churches and communes. ...
"Then, of course, came Jonestown" (and Charles Manson). Next a "wave of anti-cult activism followed. Families claimed their loved ones had been 'brainwashed,' and groups like the Cult Awareness Network emerged to fight back. Suddenly, any religious movement that deviated from the mainstream risked being labeled a cult." Trump's movement also receives mild comparison which fades in intensity toward the end.
"We've made 'cult' into a kind of aesthetic. It's no longer only, or even primarily, about control and coercion. Now we use 'cult' as a kind of metaphor to describe anything with an intense following. Just search the word on Etsy and you'll find dozens of pithy phrases on cute stickers and T-shirts that minimize or contradict the word's original import. And of course there's also a mountain of product equating Trump and the MAGA movement with cultism: 'If you're not outraged, you're in a cult.'
"Seeing these ideas permeate the culture over the years has left me confused and frustrated. As someone raised in a group that went from a polite hippie-ish spiritual community to an isolated entity with its own cosmology, I think we've lost the thread. We joke about 'cult favorite' beauty products and 'cult status' movies, it's a shorthand for devotion, loyalty and obsession. And when people talk about MAGA as a cult, it seems to exist in that hazy liminal space between a negative attribution of a fan group and something more sinister."
Hirsch opines that the definition of cult that makes the most sense to him "is the one that tells us what a cult does, rather than what it is." Insights by "Robert Jay Lifton, <robertjaylifton.com> one of the first scholars to explore what cults are and are not" follow, with an emphasis on three main characteristics: A charismatic leader, a process, and abuse. Hirsch observes that at the third stage one reaches the point where "the purest definition of a cult starts to fall apart, and it becomes another culturally expedient term used to describe our complex political moment."
Conclusion: "Trump's worldview may be informed by an outsized ideology, and he is clearly energized by the vigor and purity of his believers. ... A cult, however, is a group singularly directed by a sociopathic narcissist who seeks to control their followers to do their bidding and move in whatever direction they, alone, choose. For now, we still have a choice." <www.tinyurl.com/4bk9amyu>
As a counterpoint to Hirsch, consider: "The Real Reason We Want to See MAGA as a Cult" by Poulomi Saha (The New Republic, Jun 2 '25) <www.tinyurl.com/4ht45hna> and the broader context from historian Molly Worthen's new book, Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump <www.tinyurl.com/5n8ca6ss> which is the subject of her July 25 RNS interview here: <www.tinyurl.com/37k934wa>
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CULTURE
"The Mass Trauma of Porn: What have we done?" by Freya India (After Babel Substack, Jun 4 '25) -- "Modern porn is unlike anything else in history. Children are learning about sex for the first time from social media algorithms designed to drag them toward ever-more degrading content. They are also learning from sites like Pornhub, which use addictive tactics like infinite scrolling, variable rewards, autoplay features and subscription services to unlock more. This is the gamification of graphic porn. These platforms also use data mining to track people and provide endless, personalized videos. Users are categorized by their fantasies and fetishes; 'See more like this' suggestions can escalate from incest to violence to 'barely legal' content; viewing habits get leaked to third parties for targeted ads; rape and assault videos can be 'Recommended For You.' And what we would immediately see as abuse for an individual child, we choose to ignore en masse. We pretend it has always been this way, because it is too painful to accept that it hasn't.
"This type of porn can traumatize children. Several studies have found that the earlier they are exposed to online porn, the more likely they are to view violent content, and have lower self-esteem. Later in life, porn use has also been linked to lower relationship satisfaction, and a higher likelihood of infidelity.
"The impact is not only on individual children; this is doing something to our societies. What does growing up with limitless online porn do to our ability to love, to form lasting relationships? To our desire to start families? To our capacity to see people as people, instead of objects? My generation was taught to see each other not only as content to consume, and products to shop through, but as categories, sex objects, things to get pleasure from. We grew up watching what were often sex trafficking victims, likely seeing rape and abuse - and are somehow expected to file that away, to fall in love in the real world, to have romantic experiences just the same as previous generations did, to be tender and gentle and loyal, to know how.
As India <www.tinyurl.com/AR-on-F-India> sees it: "This is exactly what is happening to children today when we hand them a smartphone. But instead of one stranger introducing them to porn, it is a billion-dollar industry, profiting from their trauma. ...
"The impact is not only on individual children; this is doing something to our societies. ...
"We learned the wrong things about love. We girls learned that sex is brutal, that men are predatory and insatiable, that the only way to be loved is to become a better object. ... We worry that young women have learned to accept violence and being hurt. We don't worry enough that they never learned how to accept being loved. ...
"I'm talking about the entire online porn industry. The whole thing: seeing people as sex categories, getting bored and swiping onto something more depraved, betraying partners behind backs. ... This is liberation, though. This is what we call progress, having everything except our humanity. Having intimate access to anything we want, except each other. ...
"Girls like me grew up being told that this is completely normal; healthy, even. Pornhub is a right; it's good for relationships. It's not cheating; it stops men from cheating! It's like food and water! Every guy watches it, you can't expect him not to! You're overthinking it; maybe you have anxiety?
"And so we thought the problem was us. Boys who realized this was harming them got gaslit and ridiculed; girls were made to feel insecure and broken. And for those in Gen Z who didn't grow up religious, who aren't from more conservative families, we had no words to express how this made us feel. There was no language left. We couldn't talk about morality, couldn't talk about loyalty, couldn't articulate any sort of spiritual degradation. That's all reactionary and backward. We were convinced by a two decades-old billion-dollar online industry that their services are a natural need, and anyone who didn't accept this was the problem. Until the only words we had left were their sales strategies. ...
"But there is hope now; a backlash is beginning. ... There are confessions, everywhere: stories from children of porn addicts, from men in their twenties who wasted their potential, from girls who grew up watching simulated incest and gang-bangs since age ten. On one Reddit thread, hundreds of Gen Zers are finally opening up about when they first saw porn, with some as young as six. There are movements growing, wounded young men and women waking up to what has happened, and refusing to allow the same to happen to their children. ...
"To young women like me, who have always seen themselves as sensitive and insecure, I say your voice is more important now than ever. It's time to use it. To young men who don't want to degrade themselves anymore, who believe there has to be more to life and love and themselves than this, who want to be dignified and dependable, now is the time to be different. Because I'm beginning to see that all along, against all this cultural messaging - the marketing strategies, the trivialization, the gaslighting - the bravest among us were those 'insecure' enough to insist that this is not okay. Those who had every reason to resign themselves, but refused. ...
"For the next generation, for their childhood, [simply] for their chances at love, we have to find our voice. We have to process the horror of pre-teens watching hardcore porn, acknowledge the scale of what is happening, confront what we have done and its consequences. Only by facing it will we find some words of our own. I hope we aren't afraid to use them." <www.tinyurl.com/yzs8cfr4>
What can be done?
1) Admit this has happened "on our watch" in a sleepy global Church.
2) Check out the interview with former NFL quarterback Tim Tebow by Shawn Ryan regarding Tebow's trail-blazing anti-sex-trafficking ministry. <www.tinyurl.com/385t4dhu>
3) Also see <www.traffickinghub.com> ("Traffickinghub is a decentralized global movement of individuals, survivors, organizations and advocates from across a broad spectrum of ... backgrounds, all uniting together for the single purpose of shutting down Pornhub and holding its executives accountable for enabling, distributing and profiting from rape, child abuse, sex trafficking and criminal image-based sexual abuse.")
4) Dare we admit, "I've done nothing about it?"
Will it be said that "I thought nothing of it?"
Last, on a broad, public-policy level, see "Outlaw Pornography. Now.” by Brent Leatherwood (Gospel Coalition, May 27 '25): <www.tinyurl.com/438p3xfj>
(Note: Some of the content included in the sources noted above may be extremely disturbing.)
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POSTSCRIPT, Aug 1 '25: "A.I. is a Religious Cult with Karen Hao" from Adam Conover. 892K subscribers
189,913 views May 28, 2025
"Silicon Valley has started treating AI like a religion. Literally. This week, Adam sits down with Karen Hao, author of EMPIRE OF AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI to talk about what it means for all of us when tech bros with infinite money think they’re inventing god." Find Karen's book at <factuallypod.com/books>
And:
Efforts to protect children online are being used to fast-track poorly-planned sweeping censorship measures: "The UK's censorship catastrophe is just the beginning" from Taylor Lorenz (User Mag Substack, Aug 1 '25) <www.tinyurl.com/34u8apke> which links to: "Age Verification Will Kill Free Speech Online" from Lorenz as well <www.tinyurl.com/576v8fvs>
POSTSCRIPT, Aug 27 '25: Update to Lorenz immediately above.
"All across the internet, parents and lawmakers are calling for tech companies to verify users' ages online. They frame these efforts as a smart, reasonable, and harmless way to keep kids safe. But that's not what age verification does!!!
Age verification efforts are a major threat to privacy, freedom, and the very idea of an open web. No one knows this better than Eric Goldman. He is the associate dean for research at Santa Clara University School of Law and co-Director of the High Tech Law Institute.
He recently wrote a fantastic paper on age verification, [noted below] in the Stanford Technology Law Review. Today he's joining me for Free Speech Friday to talk about how age verification works online and how it's all ultimately a trojan horse for government control surveillance, and censorship.
The “Segregate-and-Suppress” Approach to Regulating Child Safety Online
Eric Goldman**
28 STAN. TECH. L. REV. 173 (2025)
ABSTRACT
In an effort to protect children online, regulators around the country and the world are enacting laws that compel Internet publishers to age-authenticate every reader (minors and adults alike) and then require publishers to restrict minors’ access to online content or resources. This Article calls these measures “segregate-and-suppress” laws.
Legally mandating differential treatment between minors and adults superficially sounds like common sense, but implementing this principle online leads to surprising and counterproductive outcomes. Requiring readers to authenticate their age exposes minors (and adults) to significant privacy and security risks, and it dramatically reshapes the Internet’s functioning to the detriment of almost everyone. Further, due to the inherent tradeoffs involved, segregate-and-suppress laws inevitably harm some minors.
In other words, segregate-and-suppress laws seek to protect minors online by harming minors online. To avoid this paradox, regulators should deprioritize segregate-and-suppress laws and, instead, develop a wider and more thoughtful toolkit of online child safety measures.
* Editors’ Note: This Article was written and edited prior to the publication of the Supreme Court’s opinion in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, 606 U.S. ___ (2025). The policy arguments set forth in the Article are largely unaffected by the decision and remain relevant to this area of law.
** Associate Dean for Research, Professor of Law, Co-Director of the High Tech Law Institute, and Co-Supervisor of the Privacy Law Certificate, Santa Clara University School of Law. Website: http://www.ericgoldman.org.
POSTSCRIPT (Sep 19 '25): "Political Control and Pedophilia: A 2025 Update, by Catherine Austin Fitts (Solari Report, July 28, 2025) -- "However unpalatable, it is a fact that some elites in our society consider access to children—to use sexually or for testing pharmaceutical products or harvesting body parts—as not just a privilege but a right. ...
"Fundamentally, these matters are at the very heart of why we cannot allow programmable money....
"[In my 2017 commentary, I also commented:] It is important to connect the dots between my interview with Jon and the U.S. ban on immigration from targeted countries. After a country is targeted by war and/or disaster capitalism, the natural resources are harvested and the population is culled. The best and brightest go to Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and Wall Street, while the orphans of the poor are trafficked to pedophilia networks."
Fitts includes significant resource recommendations, including: "Movie: The Finders
"Tracy Lucca of Lucca Films gave the Solari Report permission to publish her powerful 2016 movie, which is based on the true story of the U.S. child trafficking network called The Finders. ... The Finders create control files on politicians and people in high places using children." <www.tinyurl.com/yc35h6hy>
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