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- [00:01]
A
Chime understands that every dollar counts. That's why when you set up direct deposit through Chime, you get access to fee free features like free overdraft coverage, getting paid up to two days early with direct deposit and more. You can learn more@chime.com infamous Chime is banking done right with qualifying direct deposits. You're eligible for free overdraft up to $200 on debit card purchases and cash withdrawals. And do you hate paying ATM fees? I I hate paying ATM fees. But with Chime you get access to over 47,000 fee free ATMs. That's more than the top three national banks combined. Work on your financial goals through Chime today. Open an account in 2 minutes@chime.com infamous that's chime.com infamous Chime feels like progress. Chime is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services and debit card provided by the Bancor Bank NA or Stride Bank NA members, FDIC Spot and E eligibility requirements and overdraft limits apply. Timing depends on submission of payment file. Fees apply at out of network ATMs. Bank ranking and number of ATMs according to US News and World Report 20 checking account required Campsite Media.
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B
Hi everyone, Natalie here and welcome back to Infamous, a show from Sony Music Entertainment and Campside Media. This week I'm very excited to share with you that I've got a new show coming out. It's called Allison after nxivm and it's an exclusive look at Alison Mack, the Smallville star turned nxivm top recruit who went to prison for her role in the infamous sex cult run by Keith Ranieri. I spent a year and a half working on this show and I'm really excited to share it with you. It's a fascinating examination of how one woman who seemingly had it all ended up in a cult and did terrible things in it. Allison After NXIVM launches on November 10th. Wherever you get your podcasts, stay tuned at the end of this episode for a sneak peek. But for now, we wanted to bring you a different conversation about cults. I've had so many questions about cults, how people end up in them, and why there seem to be so many in America in particular. So this week we're talking to Jane Borden, an author and journalist who wrote the recent book Cults like why Doomsday Thinking Drives America. Here's that conversation.
- [02:32]
C
My name is Jane Borden. I'm an author and journalist. My latest book is called Cults Like Us why Doomsday Thinking Drives America, obviously.
- [02:41]
B
Here at Infamous, we've covered cults a lot, from NXIVM to even Ruby Franke and Jody Hildebrandt, who I would argue were having some cult like thinking in their therapy groups. Why are there so many cults in America?
- [02:57]
C
I believe that America was founded by a cult. I mean, technically I call the Puritans a high control doomsday group. But most people, if they looked at the Puritans today, they would say that's a cult. And their radical ideas didn't go away. They became the foundation of American culture and they undergird every vote, prejudice, social media post. I mean, they affect the kinds of stories we tell on screen, our approach to foreign policy. They're literally in the DNA of the United States. And so I think we are all, to a certain degree, latently indoctrinated in the cult ideology of our founders.
- [03:39]
B
So I, as like most listeners know, I did not grow up in the US So I don't know an awful lot about the Puritans. But why do you argue that they were a cult? Like in what ways were they cult like?
- [03:52]
C
Well, I mean, just the buckled shoes, Natalie, come on. No, actually, and the buckled shoes is a myth. They didn't wear those.
- [03:58]
B
Okay, okay, Interesting.
- [04:00]
C
A few reasons. First and foremost, they were a doomsday group. They believed the end of the world was imminent. There was going to be a big battle, Jesus was going to return, everyone would be judged, and the chosen, which presumably included them, would go to heaven, and then they would watch everyone else burn in the lake of fire for eternity. And to some degree, you could argue they wanted this to happen. They wanted to see it and they wanted to be with God. And so in many ways they were kind of preparing the way for Jesus's return. They were also a high control group, which means they controlled belief behavior and information intake. And the whole idea was conformity to get people to conform. They were also a culture of punishment, pretty brutal punishment at times. People could have their ears clipped, their tongues clipped, people got branded with letters for whatever transgression had occurred. And there were some kind of extreme approaches to relationships. So the Puritans believed you weren't supposed to love anyone, any earthly creature, as much as you loved God. And so, for example, if you look at diaries after someone has experienced the death of a loved one, they suddenly become terrified by how sad they are. Oh no, did I love my spouse inordinately? Did I love my spouse too much? Am I going to hell for that? And this also affected child Rearing. So children were taken out of the homes, sometimes as young as age 8, and sent to live with other people in the community. And yes, this was a practice that existed at the time in England, the idea was to learn a trade, but in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, this was happening even when there wasn't a trade to be learned. And it was happening with girls as well as boys, even though girls could presumably have learned homemaking just as well from their mothers.
- [05:49]
B
So in this formation, God is almost the charismatic leader, is that.
- [05:54]
C
Well, yeah, I mean, if you're looking at the definition of a cult, and the one we rely on today comes from a psychologist named Robert J. Lifton. There's three criteria. There's a leader who's worshipped, there's undue influence, thought control, and there's actual harm being done to the community. And so the Puritans definitely meet the second two criteria. And just as an example of harm done to the community, the effects of all these high control tactics that we just discussed on children was profound. And again, we see this in diaries. So when historians have looked at the diaries, particularly of the second and third generation, which is often where you see the most hardship in cults and destructive groups, they find evidence of melancholy, pathological abnormalities, nervous disorders, suicide. And so these are some of the effects of again, the extreme control and punishment and fear based indoctrination. So then the one missing element would be that first one. Is there a charismatic leader? Is there a leader who's worshiped? And that's why I don't technically call the Puritans a cult, because Jesus was their charismatic leader. But of course he'd been gone for 1600 years at that. That point.
- [07:06]
B
Right, right. A small problem. There have been so many different cult documentaries and podcasts, and I've certainly played a part in getting those stories out there, as have you, that I think we are sort of familiar with the end result, right, where it's people who've experienced these very, very dramatic things and often a lot of hardship or a violent end. And, you know, I think the thing that I always think about is like nobody sets out trying to join a cult. You know, it doesn't start as a cult. Right. It starts as something else. So I'm curious, in your research, could you help me lay out the life cycle of a cult? You know, because you sort of argue that they always kind of tend to end up in one place, which is violence, whether that's Waco or Jonestown Massacre or what have you, but they don't always Start there.
- [07:59]
C
They usually start out looking like a pretty great party.
- [08:02]
B
Okay. Okay. That's a good selling point.
- [08:05]
C
Well, there's always the first episode of any cult documentary. You know, you're watching it going, that looks great. I would join. What's the problem here? You know, totally. Just a bunch of like attractive young people doing drugs and dancing. Sounds great.
- [08:18]
B
Having a good time?
- [08:19]
C
Yes. Or, you know, most of the cults today tend to be around self help, human potential type stuff. And again, it's like, oh, it's a cool workshop.
- [08:31]
B
Who doesn't want to be a better person?
- [08:33]
C
Yeah, everyone's expanding their horizons. Or look at them growing. The problem is the search for power. So a cult becomes a cult when a leader, sometimes charismatic, sometimes people are like, where's the charisma? Why do people want to play volleyball with this guy at night? But Keith Ranieri.
- [08:51]
B
Yes.
- [08:51]
C
Yeah. But a leader, when a leader gets total control and there's no one to check that person's power. Power path is different in women than it is in men, according to my research. So the problem comes when power goes unchecked. And the path for power is always the same. Power is insatiable. It only wants more of itself. And a person experiencing any kind of power, especially unchecked power, undergoes psychological changes which have been studied. So power causes a person to focus more on himself. And this is a problem because attention is a limited resource. So if you're focusing more on yourself, you're necessarily focusing less on other people. And that diminishes empathy. So this is part of how power corrupts. It literally mitigates our ability to empathize. Another effect of power is that it expands the spectrum of what a person considers to be acceptable behavior. And of course, when no one's checking that person's power, no one's saying no. Right. A person surrounded by sycophants, then that spectrum just continues to grow wider and wider. And a person gives in to his impulses. And that's where the sex stuff comes in. So first, the kind of exploitation we see in cults is typically financial and sexual. The financial exploitation is typically there from the jump because cults are businesses first and foremost. They are ways for a person to make money fraudulently. Yes. But at the end of the day, that's what's happening. As power corrupts, that's where we start to see the sexual exploitation come in. And it only grows more and more perverse over time as that spectrum of considered acceptable behavior grows wider and wider and the leader gives into more and more impulses now where the violence happens. Well, sexual exploitation is violence. But what I want to talk about now is the effects of isolation. So eventually part of the path of power is paranoia. A leader believes that everyone outside of the group is out to get him, whether that's the government or the neighbors, whatever it is. And so the leader will isolate the group. It's a classic move. We see it all the time. And it even happens today in social media groups.
- [11:07]
A
Right.
- [11:07]
C
These people are isolated, they're cut off from their loved ones. Even if they're not all living on a compound together, it's the same thing, it's isolation. So isolation affects the way groups develop. The same way isolation would affect a person. People tend to over exaggerate their own abilities and underestimate the abilities of people outside of the groups. That also leads to violence. This belief that they can overtake their neighbors. And of course the paranoia leads to a kind of violence amplification loop with outside forces, which of course we saw in Waco being maybe the biggest example there and in Jonestown because that violence was prompted by the visitation by the US Senator. So it's important to know that most groups do not end in violence. They kind of fizzle out before then, or the leader dies or gets arrested. But when they are allowed to reach their natural end, I consider that kind of violence the natural end of one of these groups because that's the path of power. It wants control over everything and the ultimate control is over life and death. It's very Lord of the Rings.
- [12:13]
B
Like it's very the One. It's very the One, the One ring. It's so interesting hearing all of that. I can't help but think of nxivm, which is, I think a lot of people are familiar with what kind of started and purportedly as a self help group by this guy, Keith Ranieri, and his sort of second in command, his prefect was Nancy Salzman. And you know, on the surface it started as these sort of human potential movement esque self help seminars where it was all about introspection, it was all about looking inward. And from there things did get more extreme where people ended up moving to Albany and isolating in this one specific neighborhood, Clifton Park. And Keith had a lot of power and that power just kept growing and growing and growing. And then the sexual exploitation began. 58 year old Keith Ranieri, the former leader of the upstate New York City sex cult Nexium, was found guilty on.
- [13:13]
C
All counts, guilty of racketeering, guilty of conspiracy, wire fraud and Sex trafficking.
- [13:19]
B
It didn't start out with women getting branded, but it ended up there. And I've often wondered what would have happened had there not been the New York Times expose and had the FBI not picked up the case. You know, it is sort of like a interesting thought exercise. Would they have ended up in a bunker with a ton of guns?
- [13:38]
C
I think probably so. You know, and it's difficult to police these groups, but I mean, I think of the distinction between the preventative medicine and the so called sick care system. It's like, why wait to treat your body until you already have cancer? Like, we need to find a way to look at these groups before they get a bunch of weapons and are in a bunker raping kids. Right, right.
- [14:02]
B
Absolutely. Absolutely.
- [14:04]
C
And it's challenging, and I understand that it's challenging because people have first amendment. But the more we understand undue influence and coercive control, the closer we can get to policing these groups.
- [14:18]
B
Yeah, I mean, and I thought this was, this is just a little note, but in your book, I thought it was interesting. You framed the Salem witch trials, 1692 and 93 as kind of the puritans cult like violent end. I thought that was an interesting little footnote.
- [14:32]
C
Yeah, I mean, it's not a coincidence in my opinion, because they were an isolated, high control group with high conformity and groups tend to violence right around the end. And the Puritan experiment was kind of flaming out right around that time. And the charges of witchery came from the least powerful within the group, children and servants. And the supposition by historians and sociologists is that this was in direct response to the strict patriarchal structures that were leading to the experience of powerlessness among these groups. Now, of course, the violence was executed by the power structure. The 19 were hanged and one guy was pressed to death under stones and five people died in custody. That, to me, sounds like the path of power.
- [15:36]
A
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- [17:22]
C
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A
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- [17:42]
B
There seem to be times in history when cults arise, and I'm kind of curious if you think we're in one now, but I mean, what. What is it in a society that gives rise to a proliferation of cults? They all seem to be in the 60s and 70s in California. What was going on?
- [18:00]
C
Oh, the story of California. That's an interesting. We could do a whole episode on that. Totally. So the short answer is crisis. We see an increase in cults and in societal level cult like thinking during times of crisis. And so sociologists point to technological revolution, social upheaval, and then general crisis. And so we're experiencing all of those things right now. Social media and AI have completely changed the way we communicate and engage with the world with social upheaval. I mean, the MeToo movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, America's gonna be minority majority in the next decade. So these are huge upheavals. And then of course, the biggest crisis Americans are currently facing, besides the one everyone's facing, climate change, is the fact that most Americans are chronically under resourced. And there is nothing that causes your world to wobble more than a lack of resources.
- [19:00]
B
Right. Like most Americans can't afford a $400 unexpected expense. Right? Correct. That's sort of the most cited statistic. So that's what you're saying, when people are under resourced, it's like they just don't have money?
- [19:12]
C
No. Between 1975 and 2020, $50 trillion moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. And if you take that study and estimate to today it's more like 60 trillion. And as a result, those 90% of Americans have blown through their savings, they've taken on debt, they've picked up extra jobs. And all of this is a form of crisis. And I see the current flares in societal level cult like thinking as a direct result of this financial crisis being experienced by most Americans of income inequality basically. And I think the healthcare crisis is also part of it. People turn to cults when they're looking for salvation. Disease is the number one thing people want to be saved from historically ever. These are the kinds of crises Americans are facing now. There are other interesting things to explore when we're talking about times when cult like thinking increases. I got really interested in this theory around surplus population. So the idea is that whenever there are more people in a society than there are opportunities in that society, that those people will turn toward cult like organizations or communities or cult like thinking. The idea is that they don't have anywhere to go. They can't, there aren't jobs for them. Maybe they can't find mates. This happened in China following the one child policy. There were a lot more male babies born than female babies born because you know, a lot of Chinese people preferred boys. So a sad reality. At any rate, as this generation came of age, they couldn't find enough girlfriends and women to date. And we saw increases in crime in China. So there's a lot of interesting studies around surplus populations. We see that happening in the 60s and 70s when the baby boomers came of age. We saw that in the 1620s England was bursting at it seems when the Puritans and Pilgrims fled to America. And we see that today. Now the populations becoming redundant today are more economically as a result of AI mechanization before AI, now AI manufacturing moving overseas. And so people can't find jobs. So this leads to grievance narratives. It makes people susceptible to someone manufacturing a threat and saying, hey, the reason you don't have a job is because of Fill in the blank right now. It's often immigrants.
- [21:39]
B
This is so I was going to say as you were talking, I was like, a lot of this sort of sounds like being a millennial where you graduated and there's so many of you graduates and just not enough jobs. And then even if you get a job, you can't really seem to save money. And I'm sure, you know, look, millennials aren't the only generation. I just speak to that because that's the generation that I'm in. But yeah, I mean, I really wanted to ask you about QAnon, which if we're talking about cults or cult like thinking come out of division. I mean, is QAnon a cult or just a conspiracy theory? And like, what led to that?
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C
QAnon is fascinating to me because it is a conspiracy theory on its own. QAnon started as a LARP live action roleplay in 2017 on 4chan, when someone or perhaps multiple people over the timeline. There's some supposition that there have been several qanons started pretending to be a collection of high ranking civilian and military personnel who were working closely with Trump. So the claim is that Trump had instructed them to start leaking information anonymously about his plans to take down this cabal of Satan worshiping, sex trafficking pedophiles within the government and the media. Supposedly there was this ring we're told to like trust the plan, enjoy the show. It's all going to happen. Can't wait, can't wait to see all these people taken down violently. So there's undue influence and thought control. QAnon, whoever was posting this stuff was fond of thought terminating cliches and all these other cult tactics that we associate with coercive control and undue influence. There was definitely actual harm being done to members in the group and outside of the group. Biggest example of that being January 6th, which again, violent end to a culture. QAnon has been petering out since then.
- [23:42]
B
People who are really deep into QAnon are isolated or have isolated themselves in this isolation bubble online. And I mean, that's something that's so interesting to me is like, it really strikes me that QAnon and also the mother God, love has one group which I want to talk about really spread and proliferated online. So tell me about Love Has One. I'm sure a lot of our listeners watched the documentary Mother God. Amy Carlson, they called her Mother God.
- [24:12]
C
She is the leader of an organization called Love Has Won. She has a divine plan to help humanity.
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A
19 billion years old, reincarnated Jesus.
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C
She was Joan of Arc, Cleopatra.
- [24:26]
B
She's God. You actually spoke to somebody who was mother God's ex boyfriend, am I right?
- [24:33]
C
Yes. Andrew Profaci. Just a lovely human being. So Love Has One is a group that was led by Amy Carlson. Although you could argue, and as I do, it was actually kind of led by the followers. That's what makes this group so interesting to me is it doesn't fit the typical case study. Amy Carlson started this group more the way a cult follower does. She fell down Internet rabbit holes. She got indoctrinated into all these ideas about angels and past lives and fell in with this one guy and then fled. Left her family, left her children and her job. She was a manager at a McDonald's. She was, I think, dissatisfied with her life and got radicalized online, as many people do. And so she went to live with this guy. They created all this cosmology. He was the father God, she was the mother God. But then they split up. She went off on her own and developed even more cosmology. She was 19 billion years old, supposedly, and she had the ability to heal.
- [25:44]
B
She has taken colloidal silver for many, many, many years.
- [25:48]
C
It is one of the main reasons.
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B
She is still alive, because it is the one thing that has kept her body going through all of the transforming of energy. When did the colloidal silver come in? So she taking colloidal silver and she kind of turned blue.
- [26:03]
C
That's what I remember. Yes. She started ingesting colloidal silver. So this was mostly happening in the 2000 teens. She left home in 2007. She died in 2021. Her group believed that colloidal silver was a panacea of of sorts. And this is common on the Internet. You can find this. People are selling it, claiming it cures all sorts of things. It does not. And also it's very dangerous to ingest silver. The short answer is do not drink silver. One of the effects of colloidal silver ingestion is argyria, which you see visually when the skin turns kind of purplish, grayish purplish. And that was the color of her corpse when it was found by police. They thought she had been painted because she'd also been decorated. There were Christmas lights around her. And I've gotten ahead of myself.
- [26:54]
B
No. Yes.
- [26:55]
C
She died in a hotel in Oregon. And then they drove her body across five state lines. I mean, it gets from the outside, it looks wackadoodle from the inside. All of this made perfect sense. To them.
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B
Right. And she was talking to the spirit of Robin Williams.
- [27:13]
C
Yes. So there were all these spirits that she was talking to that were guiding her.
- [27:17]
B
This is the galactic A team. So those were Mom's main ambassadors. They were with her all the time.
- [27:24]
C
That's obviously Robin Williams.
- [27:27]
B
Every person in this picture is no longer alive, but they're on Mom's etheric team.
- [27:34]
C
Robin Williams joined the group shortly after he died. I asked Andrew about this. You know, where did the Robin Williams thing come from? And he said she was a big fan. So they kept the chat rooms going all night, and sometimes after everyone went to sleep, they would just put on a Robin Williams album. She was just a fan. And then when he died, I think, if I'm remembering this correctly, I think they were all tripping on mushrooms at the time, which was often, so it's a good guess. And she learned the news, and she was kind of like, oh, wait, wait, I'm getting something. Someone's coming into the field. It's Robin Williams. And so from then on out, he was one of their guides, and apparently he was advising them about how much she could weigh in order to be light enough to be lifted up by the spaceship that was coming to collect her. And this, of course, fed into her anorexia. So the cause of death was threefold anorexia, alcoholism, and the ingestion of colloidal silver. She weighed 75 pounds when she died at the age of 45. It's very tragic. It's very heartbreaking. There were times when she seems to have wanted to go to the hospital and her followers wouldn't let her because of this cosmology she had created that said that the 3D world was evil. Hospitals were dangerous. She was a true healer. They were not. Worse yet, if she was in a hospital, potentially the evil forces could take over the body of a nurse or whomever.
- [29:10]
B
You said earlier, something like, the power path for women is different. And I'm curious about that. In what ways are the ways that female cult leaders come to power different?
- [29:20]
C
The biggest difference for me that I see is that there just tends to be less sexual exploitation in groups led by women. That's not to say there isn't a lot of sex happening. Mother God had a lot of boyfriends. They were all called Father God, and there were many of them. She loved to party. My supposition is simply that when a person gives way to their impulses as a result of feeling powerful, that impulses differ a little bit among the genders. In the beginning Amy Carlson was described as being this very gentle and sweet and kind of life of the party person. Andrew said. She had manners, which I thought was cute, and he genuinely loved her. They did develop a relationship together and he tried to convince her several times that she was not God. And he says he was able to convince her that she would say, oh, you're right. No, you're right, you're right. And then the next day her other followers would kind of reel her back. But toward the end of that group, she had become I don't know that violent is the right word, but certainly some displays of violence. Screaming fits, certainly unkind. That's probably due in some part to the addiction and the alcohol abuse totally. But you know, again, power corrupts.
- [30:47]
A
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- [32:55]
B
One thing that's interesting to me is it's like as as we're talking there seems to be at least one cult for every decade. We had so many of these documentaries like the Vow, Wildwall, Country, Mother God. Are cults over or not?
- [33:16]
C
Never. Is true crime waning? Possibly. Participation in cults and subscription to cult like thinking is never going to go away in part because we evolved toward it. And I get into some evolutionary science in the last third of my book about how we evolved to fall for us versus them thinking. And also into the work of this guy Joseph Henrich and his team who looked at kin based societies and our sense departure from them. And so modern western culture is very individualistic. It's a trust based, market based economy. And that's not at all how things used to be. We used to live in kin based organizations where there was like, you know, a king type figure who had a lot of partners and then all the men at the bottom didn't have partners. And that often led to violence sidetracked. But at any rate they looked a lot like cults, these kin based societies. And we have spent almost all of human history living in them. Modern society, Weird societies. Weird is an acronym they coined for Western educated, industrialized, rich and democratic. Weird societies are brand new and they're not even covering the whole globe. It's just western. And so I believe that part of the reason. Just back to your first question. Another reason why cults are so widespread currently in America is because America is the apotheosis of these weird societies. The pendulum has swung so far that during times of crisis we swing back toward something that feels more, I don't want to say natural, but at least historic. I mean it's literally in our DNA to be in these groups. And from the outside the hierarchy can look like a kind of control. When you're lacking control and the world feels chaotic.
- [35:20]
B
You had some figures in the book, like there are an estimated 10,000 cult like groups in America, about twice as many now as, you know, the estimate from the early aughts, I mean, which is pretty alarming to me actually that was a pretty alarming number and that does seem like more than other places in the world. Is that fair?
- [35:38]
C
It's hard to say. Europe Also, I think 10,000 is the number for across all of Europe. So cults are everywhere. They're a human phenomenon for some of the reasons I just explained. The difference in America is that we tolerate them. You know, these groups get shut down in other parts of the world. Is that a good thing? I don't know. I mean, I like the first amendment right. I do think that people should be able to worship however they want. The problem, of course, is when those people become exploited by a narcissistic megalomaniac who gets absolute power.
- [36:16]
B
Final question. Why do you think we're even having this conversation? Like, why do you think we're so interested in stories about cults? Is it to fend off it ever happening to us? Is it to think that we're better than these people who fell for it? Like, why are we so obsessed with learning about this? Or why am I so obsessed with learning about this? Maybe you can tell me.
- [36:37]
C
I think we're trying to protect ourselves. I think we're trying to inoculate ourselves. I think America is wondering what's attacking us, and is it going to happen to me? How can I keep it from happening to me? I mean, that's what rubbernecking is. When we're rubbernecking, it's the mind unconsciously saying there's a threat. I need to pay attention to this in case it's coming for me. And so I think that's what's happening. You know, the whole idea of. Of schadenfreude, people talk about that. I don't know that that's it. Or at least I don't want to believe that that's it. You know, there have certainly been people, especially in the past, who want to look at cult members as crazy or kooky or look at these idiots. They deserve what they got themselves into. I would never do that. Blah, blah, blah. That's changing. People are beginning to understand that cult participants are victims, that they did not willingly join a cult, and that by the time they might have realized they were in a destructive group, you know, it was too late. They had already been. You know, if you want to say the word brainwashed, people don't like that word anymore. But I don't know. It's. It's got a lot of punch. So I'm happy that things are starting to change in that regard. And yet we're still just as obsessed with them as we ever were. And so that's why I like to think that it's not schadenfreude. But they are titillating stories.
- [38:05]
B
Do you think you'd ever end up in a cult?
- [38:08]
C
I hope I won't, but I. But I will be the first to admit that I certainly could. Anyone could. It just depends on how desperate you are. You know, people often join after the death of a loved one or loss of a community. They've moved somewhere new. They don't have any friends. This is why cults recruit on college campuses.
- [38:27]
B
Okay, everyone, you've been warned.
- [38:30]
C
Also, you know, I think we all subscribe to the cult like ideologies of our nation's founders. I think we all experience some knee jerk anti authoritarianism, anti intellectualism. That's culty. That comes from the Puritans. Our tendency to equate the number in a person's bank account with their moral character. The idea that work can fix all your problems and idleness is a sin. And if you're poor, it's because you're a sinner. You're not working hard enough. This is all cult like thinking that comes from our Puritan founders. Our obsession with self help and self investigation that fueled the me decade and the human potential movement to which we've alluded. That all comes from the Puritans.
- [39:15]
B
Tell everyone where they can find your book and where they can find you.
- [39:19]
C
I'm@JaneBorden.com, you can find the book there or anywhere books are sold.
- [39:24]
B
The book is cults like us and you can find it wherever you get your books. And Jane, thanks for, thanks for joining us.
- [39:30]
C
Thanks so much for having me.
- [39:33]
B
Alison After NXIVM is available November 10th wherever you get your podcasts. So if you just search for Allison after nxivm, you'll find it. For now, here's a sneak peek. Nxivm was one of the most insidious cults of modern times. Marketed as a self help group, it drew in ambitious women with the promises of growth and empowerment, only to trap them in a system of control, manipulation and abuse. Some were even branded with the initials of its founder, Keith Ranieri.
- [40:06]
C
And the person should ask to be branded. So does it seem like they're being coerced?
- [40:11]
B
But Keith didn't act on these twisted fantasies alone. He had help from lots of people, including his most famous recruitment, Smallville star, Allison Mack.
- [40:21]
A
He said, in order for me to help you with that, we're gonna have to be physically intimate.
- [40:26]
B
Alison helped push forward Keith's vision. And when it all came crashing down, a judge sentenced her to three years in prison. He said You.
- [40:35]
C
You capitalized on your celebrity. Yeah.
- [40:38]
B
Do you think that's fair? I'm Natalie Robomed. I'm a journalist, and I've gotten exclusive access to Alice since she was released from prison. For the first time, she's telling her side of the NXIVM story. And I've been haunted by how much her story blurs the lines between victim and perpetrator, how you feel about intimacy.
- [41:01]
A
Elicit their discomfort around that and be.
- [41:04]
B
Like, okay, so I have an assignment.
- [41:05]
A
That'S gonna push you through that. You're gonna seduce somebody.
- [41:08]
B
Like, you're gonna seduce Keith. I talk to the people in around Allison.
- [41:13]
A
I mean, he messed with her brain. She doesn't know what's going on.
- [41:18]
B
People don't understand what it's like when you get stuck in something like that.
- [41:23]
C
It's hard to get out.
- [41:25]
B
And I interviewed another top ranking Nexia member who's never spoken publicly. My mom met Keith Thanksgiving my senior.
- [41:32]
C
Year in college, and basically was fully.
- [41:34]
B
Indoctrinated and committed to him by spring break. I've been piecing together what really happened and the truth, well, you can decide for yourself what you believe.
- [41:45]
C
People assume that I'm, like, this pervert, and I'm like, okay. Like, at a certain point, you just stop defending yourself.
- [41:55]
B
This is Allison after NXIVM from CBC's Uncover. Available now. Wherever you get your podcasts, that's it for Infamous. If you enjoy the show, please leave us a rating and review and tell your friends. If you want to follow me on Instagram, you can find me at Natrobe. That's N A T R O B E. And if you want to support Vanessa's work, you can buy her book, Blurred Lines. Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus. See you next week.