Reddit mentions of Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry

(continued)

On the other hand, an actual, real-life exit counselor who works with actual walkaways from actual cults has in fact pretty much formally declared MAGAts to be a coercive political cult of personality, using actual characteristics common across pro-Trump groups and comparing to evaluations of groups like Scientology and the Moonies. (It's worth noting here that said exit counselor actually has written one of the more thorough evaluation scales of the "cultiness" of a coercive group.)

And apparently he's not alone on this; the former head of psychological profiling at the CIA pretty much has completely separately identified MAGAtism as a classical political cult, and literally the person who defined the term "brainwashing" in English and wrote the very first book on coercive groups and thought reform tactics has in fact just written a book on political extremism that also in part defines MAGAtism in the exact same framework of being a coercive political cult as Maoists during the Cultural Revolution. (Considering Dr. Robert J. Lifton's initial studies were of persons involuntarily interned in Maoist "thought reform" camps during the Korean War up to the beginning of the Cultural Revolution...yes, as in the guy has literally written the books on the subject--methinks he'd know exactly what he's talking about when he's comparing MAGAts and Trump to the Cultural Revolution and Mao Zedong). Both Hassan and Lifton have also been contributors to a book that notes that Trump shows all the signs of being a malignant narcissist in the technical sense and which also include OTHER psychologists who have expressed concerns a personality cult exists around Trump (and feel strongly enough on it that they feel an ethical duty to warn a potential target of violence by a person, well, (pardon the expression) trumps the Goldwater Rule). Rick Alan Ross, another exit counselor, has likewise explicitly noted MAGAtism has all the characteristics of a coercive cult of personality--and Rick Alan Ross is actually a Republican (though very much in the "Never Trump" court).

(Pretty much the only major exit counselor that has NOT outright called out MAGAtism as a literal personality cult is Dr. Margaret Thaler Singer, and that's because she's dead.)

And we're just talking the redcaps posting MAGA and KAG memes on Twitter and Facebook--we're not talking members of Certain Subreddits Soon To Exhaust The Reddit Community Patience, or even sub-movements within (like QAnonsense--at this rate, pretty much almost universally regarded as a literal coercive New Religious Movement by every exit counselor that's evaluated it and which heavily cross-recruits with older cults like Ramtha--or the New Apostolic Reformation, which has heavily embraced QAnonsense and which (in a remarkable sea change from even fifteen years ago) is also pretty much universally regarded as an extremely coercive religious group within "Charismatic" Christianity).