I have always said this – I am not telling you WHAT to THINK. I just want YOU to THINK. Don’t let others think for you. You are not alone -Call or text the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988
The word cult didn’t start off as something sinister. Its root comes from the Latin cultus, meaning “worship,” “cultivation,” or “care.” In ancient Rome, it was used to describe religious practice—the rituals and devotion associated with a particular deity. There was no negative connotation; it simply described one’s spiritual alignment or sacred observance. Over time, however, as dominant religious institutions competed for control over the hearts and minds of the masses, cult gradually took on a darker hue. It came to be used as a pejorative by dominant belief systems to delegitimize minority groups, spiritual outliers, and those practicing what the mainstream couldn’t co-opt.
By the 20th century, especially in post-WWII America, cult became a fear trigger—a word loaded with danger, moral panic, and psychological instability. But this wasn’t accidental. Just like the term conspiracy theorist—which was weaponized by the CIA in a 1967 dispatch to silence critics of the Warren Commission—cult was deliberately rebranded to discredit any group or movement that stepped outside of state-sanctioned ideological boundaries. It became a thought-stopper. A tool of containment. If you questioned organized religion but found meaning in spiritual community? Cult. If you rejected corporate psychology and found growth in unlicensed healing circles? Cult. The word did the job: it painted the thinker as dangerous and their followers as brainwashed. After all, it is a cult state.
The intelligence community, particularly the CIA, observed how groups organized around alternative thought systems—political, spiritual, psychological—could challenge dominant narratives. They also saw how labeling those groups as cults made public scrutiny easy and mass rejection effortless. COINTELPRO and other psyops exploited this reflex, planting seeds of suspicion, pushing media narratives, and framing charismatic figures as manipulative leaders—regardless of truth. The goal wasn’t accuracy. It was isolation, disruption, and perception control.
So today, when someone throws around the word cult, pause. Ask who taught them that term. Ask what emotional button it’s meant to press. Because while real cults do exist—and they are dangerous—it’s also true that the word itself has been hijacked to suppress sovereign thought and to fracture communities that are too coherent, too united, or too difficult to program.
In the end, cult isn’t a dirty word. It’s just a frequency. And the louder someone screams “cult,” the more likely they are transmitting on one they don’t even realize they’re part of.
Once you realize that what you call “your reality” is actually a kind of cult—one shaped not by your own organic thought, but by what you were told to believe, what was emotionally reinforced, what earned you love, safety, or attention—you start to see how deeply programmed most people are. It’s not a question of if you’re in a cult. The only question is: whose cult is it?
And here’s the part most people miss: the system doesn’t collapse when someone wakes up. It adapts. It reabsorbs them. It uses their unhealed pain, their righteous anger, their trauma-soaked worldview as fuel to keep the machine running. The people who “see through the lies” but don’t do the hard, soul-level work to heal and unhook themselves from the emotional conditioning? They don’t become free—they become tools. Their signal is scrambled. They’re stuck between truth and injury, swinging wildly from paranoia to certainty, always warning others, never realizing they are the ones now spreading fear on the system’s behalf.
And so the trap tightens: the self-proclaimed “cult survivor” becomes the perfect cult handler. Not because they’re evil. Because they’re wounded, unintegrated, and now weaponized.
Survivors of high-control groups, whether religious, spiritual, or political, emerge from those systems with what psychologists now recognize as a form of Complex PTSD—a prolonged exposure to psychological stress that alters not only emotion but perception. These individuals often lose the ability to discern the present from the past. They don’t remember so much as they relive. Their nervous systems are recalibrated for war, and so peace becomes suspicious. They misread social cues, mapping old authority onto new figures. They accuse with fervor, not because they are malicious, but because they have been programmed to fear any signal that even faintly resembles the one that once entrapped them.
Today, this practice has evolved. Survivors of modern cults like NXIVM, or of traumatic political movements, often become public figures in their own right—self-declared “cult exposers” on social media. But when their signals are still warped by unresolved trauma, they may become amplifiers of confusion, accusing any impassioned teacher, organizer, or influencer of cult-like behavior. These accusations, though presented as virtuous, become informational cluster bombs—devastating reputations, dismantling coherence, and sowing paranoia. The intelligence community does not need to create these figures—they simply feed them.
This is where the simulation becomes self-sustaining: a survivor with unhealed trauma becomes emotionally compelling, and therefore attempt through sympathy like struggling with drug abuse, alcohol abuse or other forms abuse to become socially influential. Their audience, composed of similarly wounded individuals, forms around them like iron filings to a magnet. This dynamic mirrors cult structure: one charismatic leader, validated by suffering, followed by emotionally bonded believers. What emerges is not a break from the old cult—but its inversion. The projection flips polarity. Instead of worshiping a manipulator, they now hunt for them everywhere. But the net effect is identical: the loss of discernment, the enforcement of purity, the fracturing of community.
HOW TO EASILY IDENTIFY SUCH HADNLERS AND OPERATIONS?
Fixation is the nervous system’s giveaway. When someone is locked into a subject, a person, a narrative, or a set of emotionally charged memories and they return to it compulsively—whether with obsessive love, obsessive rage, or obsessive surveillance—it’s not just a personality quirk. It’s a trauma flag. Fixation is the residue of an unresolved psychic injury that has looped into identity. It marks the point in someone’s psychological timeline where they stopped evolving and started defending. And that fixation—left untreated—becomes the gravitational center of their worldview.
People who operate from this state often become accidental handlers. They don’t need clearance or training. They are psychologically wired to carry out the system’s goals without ever realizing it. Their energy becomes magnetic to others with similar wounds. When they speak—whether online, in a self-help room, or in spiritual spaces—they project from that injury with such force that others mistake it for strength. They confuse passion with clarity, and pain with prophecy. And so the cult reforms itself—not around doctrine, but around frequency.
This is how a traumatized individual—still cycling through unresolved abandonment, betrayal, or degradation—can build a following by simply broadcasting their fixation. Whether it’s the ex they can’t stop talking about, the group they escaped from, the ideology they now hate, or the person they’ve decided to “expose,” everything begins to orbit that one psychic rupture. And the people who gather around them—those who feel seen by that fixation—bond over shared emotional volatility. Not shared truth. Shared dysregulation. It becomes a frequency loop. And the louder it gets, the more convincing it becomes.
Love bombing and rage projection are two sides of the same coin. The love bomber floods you with affirmation, spiritual language, and empathy—but it’s weaponized empathy, saturated in the need to control. The rage projector cloaks hostility in righteousness, claiming moral duty while broadcasting instability. Both operate from trauma. Both recruit from desperation. Both fixate not because they have clarity—but because fixation is all they have left. They anchor others in low-frequency states like shame, helplessness, or paranoia—and call it awakening.
And let’s get very clear here: you cannot claim to be a loving, kind, high-vibrational human while consuming gore, glorifying death, or reveling in other people’s downfall. That’s not shadow work. That’s shadow possession. You cannot call yourself conscious while gossiping like it’s sport, shaming strangers online, or posting “accountability” exposés driven by bitterness and blame. These are not acts of healing. These are rituals of resonance—designed to keep everyone vibrating at the level of the trauma that remains unspoken.
People trapped in fixation become signal jammers. They interrupt the natural flow of discernment. They create feedback loops of emotion where everything must be interpreted through the lens of a wound. And in doing so, they serve the system better than any paid operative ever could. They don’t need to be told what to do. Their trauma gives them the script.
If you want to find these people, look for those who speak only of enemies. Those who post obsessively about the “bad guys,” but never talk about healing, reconciliation, or integration. Look for those who perform empathy while punishing dissent. Who call disagreement “gaslighting.” Who promote liberation but live in resentment. Their cult is not organized. It’s entrained. It spreads not through doctrine, but through emotional mimicry.
And yes, the people they pull in are usually just like them—fixated, desperate, traumatized. They resonate with the same rage, the same suspicion, the same low hum of hopelessness. What they call community is often just a shared inability to let go.
Fixation is not discernment. Rage is not clarity. Cruelty is not resistance. And recruiting others to resonate at that frequency—under the guise of truth, activism, or spiritual justice—is not healing. It is maintenance of the cage.
We don’t transcend the system by echoing its dysfunction. We rise above it when we stop feeding it.
OPERATION ARITCHOKE
One of the most insidious and successful psychological experimentation projects I am well-versed in is rarely spoken about: Operation ARTICHOKE was a covert program run by the CIA in the early 1950s focused on behavioral modification, mind control, and interrogation techniques—an eerie precursor to the more infamous MKUltra program. While MKUltra became the face of CIA psychological experimentation, ARTICHOKE was its darker, more targeted predecessor, and in many ways even more disturbing.
Launched officially in 1951 under the CIA’s Security Office and Technical Services Division, Operation ARTICHOKE sought to investigate whether it was possible to create hypnotically controlled assassins, erase or implant memories, and manipulate human behavior using drugs, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, and psychological torture. One of its guiding questions, according to now-declassified documents, was: “Can we get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature such as self-preservation?”
The program operated under multiple layers of secrecy and involved cooperation with military intelligence, the FBI, and foreign intelligence services. Most of its experiments were carried out without informed consent, often on vulnerable or expendable individuals: prisoners, refugees, mental patients, and U.S. military personnel. Some subjects were drugged with LSD or sodium pentothal and interrogated under hypnosis. Others were subjected to intense physical and psychological stress, including sleep deprivation, isolation, and prolonged interrogation in foreign “black sites” the CIA used to test the limits of consciousness and control.
A disturbing element of ARTICHOKE was its use of “terminal experiments”—a euphemism for tests in which the subject would not survive or would be left permanently damaged. While hard evidence is scarce due to systematic document destruction, scattered files and whistleblower testimony suggest that some subjects were “disappeared” or left psychologically broken. ARTICHOKE researchers were particularly obsessed with amnesia induction and determining whether a subject could be programmed to carry out actions and later forget them—essentially trying to engineer Manchurian Candidates.
Operation ARTICHOKE exemplifies the systematic study of trauma as a control mechanism—the extraction of human pain, dissociation, and psychic fracture as tools for power. Survivors of such tactics—whether through official experiments or similarly patterned abuse in cults or ideological movements—often carry within them the blueprint of their handlers. Left unhealed, they don’t just carry trauma. They carry a signal structure designed to replicate.
OPERATION ARTICHOKE wasn’t just a covert experiment. It was a template for entrainment—for mapping the psyche’s weak points, refining control protocols, and engineering dissociation as a tool of influence. The fact that its techniques echo in cult behavior, manipulation tactics, and even influencer culture today isn’t accidental. It’s the continuation of a signal designed long ago.
Consider the women who form intense romantic bonds with prisoners, murderers, or social media stars painted as heroes. These are not mere outliers of affection. They are living case studies in psychological susceptibility. Often survivors of abuse or neglect themselves, these women gravitate toward men who exhibit power, transgression, or “truth-telling” against the state. In the infamous case of the “QAnon Shaman,” Jacob Chansley, there were dozens of women on forums and message boards expressing admiration, love, and even spiritual devotion to him. Some left families. Some left careers. They felt seen, validated, and chosen. But in the end, the figure they revered was neither revolutionary nor prophet. He became an instrument of spectacle—a handler for the vulnerable, a mirror for the disoriented. This pattern is repeating globally. Men with dubious authority, often mentally unstable themselves, attract broken minds like moths to a false light. And when that light goes out—when the hero is exposed as a fraud—the collapse is personal, psychic, sometimes terminal.
The endgame of these digital cults isn’t community. It isn’t healing, liberation, or even awareness. The endgame is self-elimination—psychological, social, and often literal. And when that doesn’t work, the system reroutes the signal. The same unhealed minds, the same trauma-bonded followers, the same emotionally reactive voices become candidates for something more useful: covert operations. The system doesn’t waste energy. It reassigns it.
Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed from one form to another.
These aren’t cults in the traditional sense. They don’t wear robes or chant in compounds. These are frequency-based collectives, built online and weaponized emotionally. They are led by unhealed survivors, false prophets, or influencer-personas whose trauma becomes their leadership currency. Their entire architecture is reactive: they run on outrage, projection, paranoia, and misdirected truth. The energy is real—but it’s hijacked. And once it burns out, the collapse is either inward or operational.
For some, the collapse means suicide. This is the unspoken epidemic—devotees of false liberation movements who, upon discovering they’ve been duped yet again, implode. They wake up and realize they’ve destroyed their families, abandoned their children, quit their jobs, isolated themselves from real-world community—all for a belief system that fed off their pain. The emotional fallout becomes unbearable. And the system counts on this. They call it data loss.
For others, the collapse is harnessed. The person becomes useful. A broken, volatile mind that still believes they are on a mission is the perfect tool for asymmetric warfare. These are the ones who are nudged—ever so subtly—into radicalization. They are fed stories. Fed images. Fed scenarios that reinforce a narrative of heroism through destruction. They don’t even need to be directly contacted. The simulation is ambient. The handlers are embedded in the algorithm. Sometimes they believe God is telling them what to do. Sometimes it’s a movement, a patriot call, or a spiritual war. Sometimes it’s just a whisper in the feed. The outcome is the same.
We’ve seen this before.
We saw it with Myron May, a successful attorney turned targeted individual, who shot three people at Florida State University in 2014 before killing himself. He believed he was being gangstalked by government operatives and said he was “no longer afraid to die.” We saw it with QAnon followers, who moved from digital decoding to real-world violence—kidnapping plots, shootings, and attacks on public officials. We saw it with James Holmes, the Aurora shooter, whose descent into fantasy mirrored disassociative programming. And we saw it most explicitly in the countless “lone wolf” actors—whose online behavior eerily resembles digital cult conditioning before they carried out assassinations, bombings, or acts of domestic terrorism.
The pattern is clear: isolate, emotionally charge, radicalize, unleash. It’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s a playbook. One that was written in COINTELPRO, refined in MKUltra, and now plays out in real time on TikTok, X, and encrypted group chats worldwide.
The real purpose of these cults is not belief. It’s destabilization. They don’t need to produce truth—they only need to keep their followers vibrating at a frequency that makes them malleable. When they become too unstable to be controlled socially, they are discarded. When they can be used for political violence, they are activated.
I got into depth about this in Volume IV of my series. The simulation doesn’t just use data. It uses human wreckage—minds fractured by unresolved trauma and programmed belief, driven to the edge under the illusion that they’re waking up.
That is the terminal phase of digital entrainment: either implode, or explode. Either destroy yourself, or destroy someone else.
And if you think you’re immune, ask yourself: Who’s writing your story?
And what frequency is it operating on?
The suicide rate among disillusioned followers of these digital cults is a growing epidemic. Untracked, unspoken, unclaimed. The connection between ideology, betrayal, and death is rarely made in public discourse, but it is real. Those who awaken to the realization that they have once again submitted their sovereignty to another false prophet often spiral into self-erasure. The intelligence community knows this. It has studied it for decades. In Operation ARTICHOKE, MKUltra, and its sub-project Midnight Climax, human susceptibility was quantified. How many exposures to fear does it take to collapse identity? How much charisma is needed to override moral cognition? What happens when you strip someone of belief, and then give them a false one? These weren’t just studies—they were architectural blueprints.
If you are feeling overwhelmed, hopeless, or like you’re nearing a breaking point, please know this: you are not alone, and you do not have to carry the weight by yourself. The pain you’re experiencing is real—but it doesn’t define your future. There are people—strangers who care, professionals who understand, and survivors who made it through—who are ready to listen, support you, and help you rediscover your center. If you’re in the U.S., you can call or text the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988—24/7, free, and confidential. Outside the U.S., there are crisis lines and resources available in most countries. Your story is not over. The fact that you’re here, reading this, means you’re still fighting. And that means there’s still time to turn it around. Reach out. You are needed. You are loved. You are not beyond repair. I am living breathing example of that.
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Digital Dominion Series is now on Amazon: VOLUME I, VOLUME II, and Volume III – and Pre-order for Digital Dominion Volume IV is now on sale.
