Newsletter: Big Tech, Free Speech & Hidden Agendas
What You Need to Know
This week’s episode of Cult Conversations: The Influence Continuum, “The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley,” takes its title from the recent book of my guest, Marietje Schaake, a Fellow at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center and Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. She also served as a member of the European Parliament from the Netherlands between 2009 and 2019 and was appointed to the United Nations High-Level Advisory Body on AI in 2023. We spoke about how free speech has become politicized and even weaponized by people like Elon Musk, and how Europe manages to protect the freedom of speech while still balancing it with protecting people from hate speech, incitement to violence, and exploitation. I think you’ll find it a provocative and informative talk. You can also listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Next week’s episode, “The Hidden Influence of Occult Beliefs on World Politics,” will feature an interview with my longtime friend and colleague, Joe Szimhart, an expert on occult beliefs and indoctrination. We discuss how political beliefs can be entangled with occult and spiritual beliefs to create the high-control, authoritarian movement that we see in MAGA today.
This Thursday and Friday, I will be speaking at Harvard Medical School’s conference, Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy: Navigating Complexity in Community, on March 6th and 7th. I’ll share insights on my Influence Continuum and BITE Model of Authoritarian Control. I’ll also be discussing the role of MDMA and Ketamine in therapeutic settings—two substances often used in this field despite not being classified as psychedelics. I’ll emphasize the critical importance of maintaining firm therapy boundaries to protect vulnerable clients from undue influence and ethical violations. Additionally, I’ll highlight the need for therapists to conduct thorough family-of-origin histories, ensuring that any past authoritarian or abusive environments are addressed before considering the use of psychedelics in treatment. I’m eager to continue learning from this rapidly evolving field.
This week’s livestream will be Wednesday, March 5, at 1-2 pm EST; I welcome everyone to tune in with questions and comments! Last week’s livestream was a great success; you can see the replay here if you missed it.
Have you had a chance to check out our BITE Model survey at bitemodel.com yet? We’d love your input—not just on high-control groups but also on healthy ones! If you’ve been part of a positive, ethical group, please share its name. You can submit multiple entries if you’ve experienced more than one. Feel free to spread the word on Reddit, Facebook, or anywhere ex-members connect—the more data we gather, the stronger our research becomes. Our goal is to build a comprehensive, evidence-based database of both authoritarian and healthy groups. Thank you for contributing!
On this episode of Cult Conversations: The Influence Continuum, I spoke with Schaake about her book published last year through Princeton University Press titled The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley. She explains that while Vance portrayed Europe’s protection of speech as a lack of freedoms, she feels it is a trap to narrowly view the debate about social media and its harms through the lens of free speech: “On the one hand, European countries have very far-reaching protections of freedom of expression. It’s slightly different from the First Amendment, but it’s definitely widely protected. The whole idea that free speech is not protected in European countries is nonsense.”
Read the blog post or listen to the podcast below:
How can you tell if that group your family member has joined is safe? Is your relationship hitting a “rough patch,” or is there actual cause for concern? With this anonymous, easy-to-use diagnostic tool, you can answer simple questions and determine if any group or relationship is beneficial or destructive, ethical or unethical, healthy or unhealthy. And now, you can share your results on your social media if you wish!
As always, please let us know what you think about these pieces or what you’d like to see us discuss in the future. Thanks so much!
Remember how ya felt when you became aware after reading Stolen Focus, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Glow kids, Hooked , Merchants of Doubt, Scary Smart, Solve for Happy, Weapons of Math Destruction, A Hacker’s Mind, The Coming Wave, The Battle for your Brain, How Data Happened and Survival of the Richest and Beyond Snowden? Well now add the Orange Administration on to it. That’s called Beyond Despair, or Double Depression. A famous quote from a movie “Open the pod bay doors Hal”