A question on cult deprogramming

[matt819]

Re trump, the elections, and QAnon.

It'll never happen, of course, but what do you think the impact would be if somebody from the RWNJ side of the aisle were to go public with trump is evil and/or trump lost the election and/or the QAnon conspiracy is just plain nuts.

I don't know. Maybe Pence. Or a group of them, like Murkowski, Cheney. Maybe some former proud boys or 3 percenters or oathkeepers.

Or would it make no difference, so why even entertain this idiotic notion?

I'm thinking that someone's got to make the start at trying to reintroduce these terrorists to reality. Somehow.

Or do we just arrest as many of them as possible and destroy their organizations?

[lapfog_1]

1. much like ex-Scientologists

the remaining cult members will never listen to them

[lagomorph777]

2. The only realistic option is to arrest as many as possible, and sow division among the rest.

For example, make them believe that many of their members are spies, or are actually part of the cabal that is cooking babies to make pizza.

[Irish_Dem]

3. I think it might peel off some of the cult members, but not all.

Some are very hard core. Will take much more to get them to face reality.

[lindysalsagal]

4. If you read rw social media, they are catching on that it was all bs. Many have turned on frump, man

many more have turned on the party and faux. I think the numbers are greatly reduced, already, because their promise that frump would retain the potus failed quite publicly.

My guess is that nothing short of family shunning works, and sometimes, that doesn't even work.

The remaining nutjobs may in fact drop their obsession w frump only to transfer it to someone else like him who hates the people they blame for "all the world's problems."

Hopefully it's enough to force the gop and their donors to abandon the scorched earth policies and expect normal society to persist.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

5. The problem with cults is that it takes more than a former cult member

just announcing that the cult is nuts. The more you criticize a cult the more strongly the members support the cult; the critical former member will be considered a traitor and will not be believed. People become members of cults because the cult offers them some kind of emotional and psychological reward, and you can't deprogram them unless you can find a way to give them an emotional connection to something else, as by reminding them of people, organizations and activities they valued before they got involved in the cult.

[Hortensis]

7. This.

[Mike 03]

6. It's a really hard nut to crack. Cult expert Steven Hassan writes in

The Cult of Trump that one of the only hopes is to gradually get a member of a cult to have an epiphany that they have been lied to and that they have come to believe things that are not true. If they realize this themselves, it has much more power than someone else telling them. And he writes that it can take a very long time. I remember, after reading that book I basically gave up hope about the practicality of deprogramming all these people. It also requires incredible, almost unlimited patience on the part of the cult members' loved ones, because they bear the brunt of this process. It's a one-on-one process, sort of like going through psychotherapy.

The most important element is that at the conclusion of this process, the individual believes he or she has come to these new realizations on their own, rather than that they were pressured into abandoning their beliefs.

But I'm not at all against what you are proposing. It can't hurt, and it might knock a few of the "loosely affiliated" or new recruits to their senses.

[Best_man23]

8. Often, it requires the leader of the cult doing something

And that "something" directly and negatively impacts the cult member.

I'm sure there are great examples out there of when tRump did something that ended up hurting one of his followers. Those are the folks (the ones that aren't dead from Covid) that need to be in PSAs targeting the tRump cultists.