Undue Influence
You may have seen this tweet by Dr. Steven Hassan, who has been helping people out of cults for 45 years. You should follow him on Twitter — @CultExpert.
Ginni Thomas was in a cult called Lifespring.
I got dragged unknowingly to one of their recruiting events as a teenager. It was frankly terrifying — a lot of intimidation and attempts to break down your defenses and brutal tactics to get you to sign up for a weekend course — interspersed with frantic cheering and chanting about how fucking happy they were. <shudder>
The follow up tweet is just as important. The people who helped “deprogram” Ginni Thomas may have… reprogrammed her. This makes the scenario that she is a true believer in the Big Lie more plausible which makes her proximity to one ninth of the Supreme Court even scarier.
Dr. Hassan is one of the world’s leading experts on undue influence aka brainwashing. I am not. However, I have learned enough to be able to describe how undue influence works and how QAnon created it in tens of millions of people through social media and traumatic content.
I did a podcast about it which I’m now opening up for everyone. I’ve had a few people tell me it was helpful. 💙
Jim or anyone familiar with research into Qanon: do you know of anyone who is specifically trying to compare Ron Watkins’s former Twitter thread content (not just his posts, but content in the comments/thraed) with the activities that we now know were happening in the White House between the election and January 6?
I know that Ron isn’t Q, however, I suspect Ron had at least one person close to Trump’s Team communicating with him about the activities and strategies going on in the White House so that Ron’s twitter thread narrative would align accordingly. So even though Ron isn’t Q, he may have been employed/recruited by Flynn, Pence, or someone else on Trump’s team to generate the Coup Narrative content. And I think that Ron and Flynn have attended some of the some Qanon events - roundups or road shows or rodeos or whatever they call their cult gatherings.
Also - I noticed a similarity between Ron’s Telegram chat “channel” and his former Twitter account. The similarity is that Ron oftentimes posts a short question that by itself doesn’t sound extremist. The extremist, violent rhetoric and Coup Narrative is oftentimes contained within the thread itself. An example would be Ron calling for “Patriots” to go to DC on January 6 to support Trump or asking a question like “should Trump cross the Rubicon.” The comments in the threads promote the themes of Christi-Fascism and the Coup Narrative.
Ron had over 400,000 twitter followers, and there were obviously many bots, sock puppet accounts, and probably troll farms helping to advance and amplify the Coup Narrative.
I look at “Patel Patriot” as taking over as the rebranded Coup Narrative (rebranded from Qanon to Devolution). I haven’t studied Patel Patriots rhetoric but see it mentioned in other right wing accounts.
To clarify, I am not asking anyone to take on this task of taking a fresh look on Ron’s former Twitter thread content - rather, I’m interested in knowing if anyone out there is specifically working on this.
Should I assume that Jim and Moby are revising their earlier hypotheses that Ginny T. was not a full on true believer in Q-Anon and in the Big Lie, to, in light of Hassan's video, it seems plausible she is?
(BTW, my understanding is that not everyone who takes a Lifespring course goes full on into a cult. My understanding was that Ginny T. got deeply involved in the organization, into the more advanced level courses. I guess this is how cults work, one step at a time, luring people in with the plausible at first to the undue influence/mind control later on.)