Transcript
Amanda Montell (0:00)
This episode of Sounds Like a Cult is ever so proudly sponsored by Quince. It's a brand that makes high quality wardrobe staples from premium fabrics, including 100% European linen, 100% silk and organic cotton poplin. Imagine that. Every single last piece I've ever gotten from Quince has become a go to a uniform, if you will. From the cashmere sweaters I've procured from Quince, to my little white booties that I'm always talking about all the time, to this one little silk skirt that I have, I am genuinely in the cult of quints.
Tina Nguyen (0:33)
Why?
Amanda Montell (0:34)
Because a they have the most amazing prices. It's a wonder that anyone patronizes any other brand in this economy. And also, Quint works directly with safe, ethical factories and cuts out the middleman, which is why you don't pay for brand markup. You just pay for high quality. So stop loading up on ruddy fast fashion that you know you'll throw away. You just need a couple of solid staples. And for that I recommend quints right now. Go to quince.com SLAC for free shipping and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. Don't keep settling for clothes that don't last. Go to q U-I-N c e.com/ for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.comslac 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.
Tina Nguyen (1:30)
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 is weird and culty.
Amanda Montell (2:03)
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 Montel, 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 cultural zeitgeist. This week we're talking about the Cult of MAGA youth, specifically conservative activists who are recruited strategically from a very young age 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 your life, a watch your back, or a get the out level cult? After all, cultishness is everywhere. It's in our social media feeds, it's in our fitness studios. It's in the ways that we discuss politics. Now, this episode that you're about to hear is actually a re Air from 2024. It was originally recorded in February of that year and it has been so chilling to revisit this episode. Kind of like when I rewatched Lily Allen and David Harbor's Architectural D Digest home tour after West End Girl came out. Truly spooky. So even if you've already heard this episode, please do stick around because listening to it through a 2026 lens is truly fascinating in the most haunted of ways. 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 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. And if you can handle all of that, cool, this is the podcast for you. It's a tonally light hearted 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 going to be speaking to the author of a book that really blew the lid off the the Conservative Recruiting Machine. Stick around, because my special guest host today is Tina Nguyen. She's a national correspondent for the publication Puck, where she covers the world of Donald Trump and the American right. Previously, Win 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 Winn, 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 in. So let, 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, you know, 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 MAGA cult. You know, that's something I feel like I read about all the time and have for the 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 you think 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 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, like, 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 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, you know, bad haircuts. Who love hashtag owning the libs. That's how this was really born. And it is at least partially responsible for every major inflammatory conservative figurehead that's been churned out over the past 40 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 you 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 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, it's very interesting how they, 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 TP USA for short, which is fucking hilarious because it could also mean toilet paper USA. LM fucking AO. So TPUSAs 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. Encroaching 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 culture 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, you know, a hip, media savvy president who knew how to use the Internet to his advantage. You know, 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. Hi, Amanda from the future here. Wow. So since we first recorded this episode and covered the conservative youth activism industrial complex in 2024, there have been some crucial updates that I think are really worth mentioning. First and foremost, that Turning Point USA has only grown louder, larger and more politically charged. A trajectory that sharply accelerated after Charlie Kirk's death in 2025. Among the reasons his killing sucked is that it became a sort of galvanizing moment for this movement, catapulting TPUSA and similar groups into a far brighter national spotlight, driving spikes in student chapter inquiries, media coverage, and donor enthusiasm. What had already been a well funded campus organization took on the tone of a martyrdom driven political cause in a big, big way. Grief was transformed into mobilization. And Since Kirk's death, TPUSA's messaging and recruitment efforts have become somehow even more explicitly ideological and combative, positioning this cult in general, that being conservative youth activism, as even more of a cultural identity, even more of an urgent political mission, and pulling people already involved with these groups, as well as newer recruits further along the live your life, watch your back, get the fuck out spectrum. Okay, let's go back to the past now, 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 Aiden Scully said that misogyny is hugely used as quote, a vehicle and prerequisite for radicalization. So it's giving incel. 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 a 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 a hundred percent. 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 dangero. So I mean you can find so, so, so, so many comparisons and 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, that the media and the U.S. 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. Also actually what a lot of conservative charismatic figureheads do have in common with Jim Jones is their sense of showmanship. So conservative youth political activists dysfunction rhetorically a lot like the popular Republican politicians they idolize. You can imagine a teenage boy or an early twenties 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 J. Spring for a salon piece titled How Youth Activists Energized the Right and Drove Politics into Madness, this author, 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 hard 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 this 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, that's meant to do. It's not a university. It's, 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, and it's aimed at youth. Throughout the research that I've done into various like cult like political corners, Prager U 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 and 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, 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, Aiden Scully, to quote him again, he wrote about his fall down the alt right pipeline. 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 culty 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 John'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 with my guest host, author and reporter and conservative youth activism survivor Tina Nguyen. This episode of Sounds Like a Cult is ever so proudly sponsored by Quince. It's a brand that makes high quality wardrobe staples from premium fabrics including 100% European linen, 100% silk and organic cotton poplin. Imagine that. Every single last piece I've ever gotten from Quince has become a go to a uniform if you will. From the cashmere sweaters I've procured from quints to my little white booties that I'm always talking about all the time, to this one little silk skirt that I have, I am genuinely in the cult of Quints.