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I grew up in an authoritarian cult when I was younger. These past couple years have been extra difficult for me. Not only have we had to deal the rise of fascism and the alt right, but I’ve also lost a number of friends to groups, organizations, and activities that also model themselves off of cult behavior.

One of our big problems as a society, is we know how cults work and we’ve supercharged the harmful techniques to sell deodorant and solicit political donations.

Take a look at the BITE Model and other warning signs of cult behaviors. You’ll see it applies to almost everything these days. We’ve normalized cult behaviors and submission to multi-headed authoritarianism.

We have at least one former president as a cult figure head. We have at least one major social media company that has aggressively weaponized cult tactics. We have at least two political parties that behave like cultic organizations.

Where do we start to unpack all this and start to address it?

This isn’t exactly the first-time humans have encountered something like this and let’s just say it never ends with ice cream.

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