I have been saying for years that cryptocurrency has the structure of a multi-level marketing scheme: a small number of people at the top make enormous sums, while large numbers of ordinary people are recruited to invest, almost always lose money, and then recruit more people. What I did not fully grasp until recently was the scale of the political operation running underneath it. I learned about Molly White’s crypto expertise on my friend Dave Troy Presents’ Podcast. I was so impressed, I invited her to Cults, Culture & Coercion to help everyone better understand it. She delivered one of the most illuminating conversations I have had on the show.

Molly is an independent researcher and writer who covers cryptocurrency and the broader technology industry. She writes the newsletter Citation Needed (citationneeded.news), runs the ongoing tracker Web3 Is Going Just Great, and operates influence.citationneeded.news, which is being relaunched as Tech Influence Watch to cover both crypto and AI campaign spending. She came to this work from a software background, driven by what she saw as a systematic failure of media coverage to report the harms happening daily inside the crypto sector while amplifying every promise. Her expertise is precise and her conclusions are well-sourced. I encourage you to follow her work.

What Cryptocurrency Actually Is

Molly started with the basics, because most people engaging with cryptocurrency, whether through a sports arena sponsorship, a television ad, or a family member’s enthusiasm, do not actually understand what they are being sold.

Cryptocurrency is a digital asset, a token you can buy and sell, something like a stock. Unlike a stock, there is no company behind it, no revenue being generated, no business. It is a digital representation of something people collectively believe has value. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana are all variations on this idea. People buy them hoping the price goes up. They are speculative assets, not functioning currencies, despite the name.

From that starting point, the sector has ballooned into what Molly calls a shadow version of the traditional financial system. Stablecoins are tokens meant to function like a dollar but backed by the issuer’s promise rather than government guarantee. Meme coins are even more stripped down: there is nothing behind them beyond a name and collective belief, which is how Donald Trump was able to issue a coin called Trump shortly before his inauguration and earn hundreds of millions of dollars from supporters who bought it. As Molly noted, virtually everyone who bought the Trump token has since lost money on it. His family, including his sons, has made well over a billion dollars from various cryptocurrency ventures (figures reported across multiple financial news outlets). The people who lost money were not the people running the scheme.

Ransomware, sanctions evasion, and other financial crimes now run almost entirely on cryptocurrency. Molly explained the reason clearly: blockchain transactions are public and technically traceable, but they are pseudonymous. No one looking at the blockchain can tell from the data alone that a specific wallet belongs to a specific person. If you can maintain that anonymity, crypto is very difficult to trace. If law enforcement can link a wallet to an identity, it becomes very traceable. The technology is simultaneously open and opaque, which is why it attracts both legitimate users and bad actors.

The Political Operation Most People Missed

This is the part of the conversation I want every reader to sit with.

The crypto industry emerged as a serious political force starting around 2024. Fairshake, the largest cryptocurrency super PAC, raised over $200 million in the 2024 election cycle, making it the top-funded super PAC in the country, surpassing even the MAGA super PAC (OpenSecrets data, via multiple sources including Axios and CoinDesk). As of early 2026, Fairshake has $193 million in cash on hand for the 2026 midterms. The industry’s goal was explicit: remove legislators viewed as threats to crypto interests, install legislators who would promote them. Over a dozen enforcement actions against cryptocurrency companies were dropped almost immediately after the 2024 election.

Molly was direct about the result: the SEC, which had been bringing serious enforcement cases against crypto companies, was effectively gutted. Pro-crypto commissioners were installed who reversed course on enforcement. That gutting now affects areas far beyond crypto. Elon Musk’s SpaceX has since made its public offering. The SEC has neither the capacity nor the interest to enforce its own rules. The deregulation purchased by the crypto industry has created openings for much broader financial misconduct.

There is also the question of foreign money. Stablecoins and crypto ventures have allowed people who are not US nationals, and therefore cannot legally contribute to political campaigns, to send money directly to Trump through personal cryptocurrency projects. The UAE and Saudi Arabia have put billions into Trump-related cryptocurrency ventures (reporting from multiple outlets). Those investments were followed by policy decisions: access to advanced AI chips for the UAE, a 15% stake in TikTok for parties involved in those discussions, and agreements on F-35 fighter jets for Saudi Arabia. Molly made clear she was drawing a correlation, not proving a legal case, but the pattern is visible and documented.

The Cult Dynamics of Crypto Belief

One of the most useful moments in our conversation came when Molly described what she sees among devoted cryptocurrency believers. She called it a cultish or almost religious belief system, where people are genuinely unwilling to examine their investment objectively. They see their chosen cryptocurrency less as a financial instrument and more as a cause, and the person running the project as something close to a savior. Criticism registers not as useful information but as betrayal or persecution.

I recognize this pattern exactly. It is what the BITE Model of Authoritarian Control™ identifies as Emotion manipulation to do Thought control: the installation of a belief system that filters all incoming information through the group’s framework, so that facts which should prompt reconsideration instead trigger defensiveness. In MLM communities, critics are called dream stealers. In crypto communities, they call skeptical information FUD, short for fear, uncertainty, and doubt, a term designed to dismiss any factual challenge before it can be evaluated. The mechanism is identical.

Molly noted that crypto’s boom-and-bust cycles are well-documented: 2017, 2020, 2022, 2024. Every time, it is not the executives or celebrities promoting the asset who absorb the losses. It is everyday people who were told this was their path to financial “freedom.” That framing, get out of the nine-to-five grind, be your own boss, achieve financial independence, is lifted word for word from the MLM playbook. When I heard her describe it that way, I told her: I know this playbook. I have spent decades helping people reality-test and reclaim their personal power.

What Is Coming Next

The AI industry is now running the same political operation that crypto ran in 2022 and 2024. Molly’s followthecrypto.org is relaunching as Tech Influence Watch precisely because AI companies are pouring tens of millions of dollars into campaign spending to preempt state-level consumer protections, write their own federal legislation, and lock in a regulatory environment favorable to them before any meaningful oversight is established. The goal is to make those changes permanent, so that even a future Congress or administration cannot easily reverse them.

The risk to ordinary people who never touch crypto is real. In 2022, when FTX collapsed, people who had no cryptocurrency and no account at FTX were unaffected. Molly’s concern, and I share it, is that this is no longer the case as crypto becomes embedded in index funds, retirement vehicles, and major financial institutions. She compared it to 2008: you did not need to be trading mortgage-backed securities to feel the consequences of that collapse. The more crypto is woven into the traditional financial system, the more a serious crypto downturn becomes everyone’s problem.

What You Can Do

Molly offered a straightforward answer: the primary tool right now is awareness. Most people do not know this is happening. A poll conducted by a crypto media outlet found that while most Americans said they disliked the idea of elected officials having personal financial stakes in the crypto sector, a majority also had no idea that Trump held those stakes. Knowing is the precondition for acting.

She also pointed to what happens when people do know. In the Illinois Senate Democratic primary, the crypto industry spent $10 million against Juliana Stratton. She named the spending campaign publicly, explained who was behind the attack ads, and won anyway. Information, when it reaches people, changes outcomes.

I want to add one thing from my own work. The undue influence tactics being used in the crypto space, the false urgency, the promise of exclusive insider knowledge, the framing of any skepticism as an attack on your freedom, are the same tactics I have documented in high-control groups for decades. The Influence Continuum© is very useful framework to discriminate healthy vs. unethical influence. When an industry spends $200 million to control who sits in Congress, removes regulators who enforce consumer protection laws, and deploys sophisticated psychological techniques to keep believers invested despite consistent losses, that is not a financial sector operating in good faith. It is a system designed to extract wealth from ordinary people and concentrate it at the top.

Follow Molly’s work at citationneeded.news. Check whether candidates in your district are funded by Fairshake or affiliated PACs at Tech Influence Watch. And share this conversation with anyone in your life who has been approached about cryptocurrency, because the first and most important protection is knowing what you are actually being sold.

Further Reading:

Talking MLMs with Douglas Brooks

Crypto Cults Are Scamming The Life Savings You Worked Years For

Why the Manosphere Sounds So Reasonable at First Andrew Tate pushes crypto

LuLaRoe and the World of Commercial Cults — A deep look at how MLM tactics, many of which Molly White identified in the crypto sector, are used to keep people invested despite mounting losses.

Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World’s Most Powerful Religion — Harvard and MIT Humanist Chaplain Greg Epstein on the cult-like belief systems forming around technology, including crypto, AI, and the broader tech billionaire ideology.

Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America With Christopher Leonard — The longer history of corporate money reshaping American politics, providing essential context for the crypto industry’s current playbook.

Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present — The Rising Tide of Online Authoritarian Influence With Ruth Ben-Ghiat — Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat on how authoritarian leaders use financial systems, media, and loyalty networks to consolidate power, a pattern directly relevant to what Molly White documents in the crypto-political complex.

You keep reaching for the word “toxic,” but it never quite fits what you are living. There is a slow narrowing of who you are allowed to see, and every problem somehow traces back to your failure to try harder, to be less sensitive, to want less. As the relationship progresses, you start to doubt your own read on reality, because someone keeps correcting it for you.

What you may be describing is not a bad relationship at all, but a cult with exactly one member. When people picture a cult, they imagine hundreds or thousands of followers gathered around one charismatic leader. However, authoritarian control takes many forms, and it certainly can involve just two people.

The absence of a group does not lessen the harm. In fact, in an intimate situation between two people, control can be more intense, not less, because the contact between the controller and the controlled is constant and direct. There is no one else in the room to dilute it, no fellow member who might one day quietly confirm to you that something here is wrong.

Many of the one-on-one survivors I have worked with were forced into near-total dependency, kept away from the family and friends who might have questioned the controlling partner, and made to believe that any problem in the relationship was entirely their own fault, fixable only by trying harder to please. It is the architecture of a cult, scaled down to fit a relationship.

This is also why “toxic” and “codependent,” while they may capture something real, miss the defining feature. What sets a cult of one apart from an unhealthy relationship is the systematic oppression of your authentic identity and its replacement with a false one.

Your authentic self is who you really are, usually, if you had a relatively healthy childhood and upbringing. You had a mature, stable sense of self. You knew your values, had a few good friends, and enough self-confidence to try new things and sense to stay safe. It is who you were before the relationship reorganized you, composed of your own values, perceptions, and judgment. The pseudo-self is the compliant identity your partner shaped to make you believe you needed to be to survive, the one that seeks conditional acceptance by pleasing the controller.

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It’s happening more often now: our loved ones who have been trapped in problematic belief systems, whether MAGA, MAHA, or anything else, are beginning to have doubts about the lies, the gaslighting, and the crazymaking rationalizations.

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One ordinary afternoon, in the middle of an ordinary conversation, it happens.

“I don’t know. Some of it doesn’t quite add up lately.”

Your heart leaps. Finally! In that instant, every instinct in your body wants to seize the opening and scream, Yes! Let me show you. I’ve been saving these articles about how it’s all a scam! I’ve read so much about this! Let me explain what I’ve been trying to tell you all along.

Unfortunately, that instinct is the single most common way families slam shut the very door they just saw open. The right way to hold this moment is almost the exact opposite of what feels natural.

Why This Moment Is Fragile

When someone is drawn deeply into a high-control group, their authentic self, the person you raised, married, or grew up with, is not erased.

The authentic self is suppressed beneath what I call the cult identity, a second identity built around the leader, the ideology, and the group’s rules. Your loved one is, in a real sense, at war with themselves, with two “identities” (or frames of mind) sharing one body with one of them “on duty” at a time.

A doubt surfacing means the authentic self has briefly stepped forward and taken the floor, which is great news. The hard news is that the cult identity is standing right behind it, conditioned to retake control the instant it senses an attack.

The doubt you just heard is genuine, but it is extremely vulnerable and frightening for the cult identity, and the authentic identity can be made to retreat as quickly as it appeared.

For this reason, when I work on cases, I spend much of my time teaching families that rapport and trust are the foundation for everything else. Without them, the person won’t tell you what’s really going on, won’t trust you, and won’t listen.

For instance, I once spoke with a woman whose husband had joined the Jehovah’s Witnesses. After reading my first book, she spent over two years gathering articles to discredit the group and pushing them on him. Each time she criticized, she injured their rapport a little more.

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Russian disinformation no longer feels like a foreign problem you read about in long articles. It shapes what you see when you open your phone, what your relatives believe about a war they have never visited, and what AI models tell you when you ask a sincere question about world events. My guest this week on Cults, Culture & Coercion, Chris Sampson, jo…

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One of the hardest challenges facing cult survivors is not just finding professional help, but finding someone who understands how to help. Too many survivors (including people on my own Freedom of Mind staff) report that they found they had to waste valuable therapy time teaching their therapist about cultic dy…

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Many of my clients have had the experience of working up the courage to sit in a therapist’s office to get some help with healing. It is often a great act of courage to even admit you need assistance and to risk trusting a stranger who might not understand at all. Most ex-members find themselves spending time trying to explain and teach what happened to them. This is certainly no easy task, given the societal stigma many cult survivors experience.

There they sat, bravely describing years inside a group that controlled where they lived, what they read, who they loved, and what they were permitted to think.

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Somewhere in the first session or two, they watched the misunderstanding settle across their therapy experience and within their clinician. The therapist asked about their mother or father. Some suggested they might have some sort of personality disorder that caused this. Some wondered whether they had simply made a poor choice and now needed to take responsibility for it. Others put an inaccurate label on it: bipolar, schizoid, complex PTSD, or something else. Some thought medication was needed when it wasn’t.

Unfortunately, the truth of the matter is that the therapists who failed these clients were most likely clinically competent in a generalized sense, kind, and genuinely trying to help. A therapist trained to look for internal causes of distress will go looking inside you for the source of your suffering.

A therapist working with ex-members must be trained to take a thorough history, ask non-threatening questions, and research the name of the group, its founder, and ex-members. Often, unless they do additional research and scour cult-watchers’ websites for information, they will miss key details. That is why I went to the effort of creating an online course that provides foundational information for psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and counselors and offers continuing education credit (CEs).

Cult trauma is simply not part of standard clinical training, and many, perhaps most, graduate programs devote no coursework to undue influence, thought reform, or the specific aftermath of leaving an authoritarian group.

This gap is so common that one survivor described the experience as being tired of paying her therapist to teach her about cults (a sentiment I’ve heard echoed by countless former members).

In these circumstances, the responsibility falls on the most vulnerable person in the room to educate the professional who is supposed to be helping them.

Recognize the Errors

Let me name the errors I have seen most often, both in my clinical practice and while supervising other clinicians, so you can recognize them quickly if they occur within your treatment. Fundamentally, I do not believe that it is your responsibility to train your therapist, but I do believe in an educated consumer.

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Detransitioning, a term for stopping, shifting, or reversing a gender transition, is a word that has been stripped of its human meaning by the political forces fighting over it. Last week, I shared my blog and conversation with Dr. Kinnon Ross MacKinnon, a trans researcher at York University whose landmark DARE study surveyed 957 people who had detransi…

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So you’ve gotten out of your cult. You’re educating yourself on the psychological manipulation that drew you in and kept you prisoner, possibly for many years. Or perhaps you were born in and are now separated from family and lifelong friends, all because you no longer believe in what you were taught is “the Truth.”

You’ve lost so much, but gained so muc…

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Trans healthcare is an evolving discussion, and the implications greatly affect those in the LGBTQ+ community. At its heart, this is a conversation about the science meant to inform transition-related healthcare, and what happens when politics deliberately distorts it.

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There comes a day when you meet someone kind and patient – they make you laugh and make you feel special in ways you didn’t know could be possible since exiting the cult.

This relationship is real, and so you open up, allowing yourself to feel vulnerable and honest for the first time in a long time. There is only one thing you don’t feel comfortable sharing, and you have put your cult experience in a closet and locked it shut.

Reflecting upon your days in the cult, whether it was religious or relational, you decide that your involvement says something about you that you want to bury. Why would telling them matter anyway? You’ve left the group, stepped cautiously back into the world, and fallen in love.

At times, the locked door rattles and reminds you of those days. Perhaps it is a holiday, when a family gathering with your in-laws provokes a silent panic attack, and you close up. To those who don’t know your past, it can appear cold and confusing, leaving your partner feeling shut out. They don’t understand and are entirely oblivious to the exhaustion and ache that comes with holding the door closed.

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Why the Door Often Stays Shut

Staying quiet about cult involvement often stems from a lack of doing the processing and healing necessary. It could also be a societal myth that only a certain “type” of person joins a cult. These stereotypes cut deep, muffling those who would otherwise feel free to tell their truth, while simultaneously concealing the actions of the cult and their effects on your life. Some former members have, in fact, lost their jobs because employers had a bias against ex-members.

Your cult involvement is not and will never be evidence of weakness, foolishness, gullibility, or any of the other ugly words and entirely untrue associations people attach to former members. Instead, cult involvement is evidence that you encountered a system of deception and undue influence, which I define as manipulation that clouds your judgment and erodes your autonomy without your informed consent.

Cults recruit and desire intelligent, idealistic, capable people, and they certainly do not advertise themselves as cults.

I wrote in Combating Cult Mind Control that when I first left the Moonies in 1976, I didn’t want anyone to know about my two years in the group. Thus, I understand the impulse to keep these parts of your autobiographical history hidden.

A common refrain for ex-cult members and survivors goes something like this,

If they knew, they would think less of me. They would see me as broken, as someone who couldn’t tell up from down, as a person who they don’t trust to make good decisions.

There exists an implicit cruel irony to this, in that the very groups that took advantage of you taught you that the only reasons people leave are weakness, insanity, temptation, or sin.

That programming – as much as we wish it would – does not immediately dissolve when we exit the high-control situation. In many cases, without specialized counseling, the albatross around your neck can stay heavy and speak in the voice of the cult, whispering that your past makes you unlovable. The shame keeping you quiet was and is, in a real sense, manufactured and maintained by the people who hurt you.

Later in 1976, after seeing other former members stand up and share their cult involvement, and with the audience very supportive, I gained courage. I started speaking publicly a couple of months later.

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When I met the people who lured me into the Moonies, it was face-to-face. I had to travel to a specific, separate location to begin my journey into becoming a True Believer of my cult.

Today, you don’t have to meet anyone or go anywhere; it is as easy as scrolling through your social media feed on your phone.

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A desperate man pulls his car onto a snow-buried shoulder in the Canadian Rocky Mountains.

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The ideology behind MAGA did not start with Trump, and it won’t end with him. The racism, the exceptionalism, the jingoism and the bigotry will sadly remain even after we have all departed. But what will happen when the cult of Trump loses its leader?

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Even Tucker Carlson, recently distancing himself from the Trump cult he defended nightly on cable news, reached for a word at odds with his own worldview. Asked what it felt like to spend a day in Donald Trump’s presence, the broadcaster called it a spell. Not metaphor. A literal spell, supernatural in nature, demonic in his framing.

My colleagues and I …

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A few weeks ago, I was asked to comment on the current viral trend on TikTok of “Scientology Speed Runs,” where people are entering Scientology organizations and creating havoc in the name of protesting. I wanted to reiterate my stance.

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Scientology recruitment rarely looks the way people imagine. There is no shadowy figure pulling you into a back room. The process is gradual, warm, and, for a curious young person, entirely easy to misinterpret. Amir Essalhi was 18 years old and studying film when he first walked into the Edinburgh organization in late 2022. He had never heard of L. Ron…

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Yesterday was a big day for me; it was the 50th anniversary of my “waking up” from the Moonies, and my 20th anniversary of being cured by modern medicine of cancer!

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