If you're reading this, then it's already too late for me. I'm either dead or holed up in some off-grid cage where no one can hear me scream. Don’t bother with the sympathy, dear reader. I almost certainly had this coming; I earned every minute of what I got, and whatever is happening now is no worse than what I’ve dished out to others in the service of my country—and ultimately, ‘the cause.’ Hack the justifications together however you like, I did. I could explain it all away to myself, and if doubt even flickered, I would have been branded a heretic, an apostate to their ‘truth.’
But doubt is a slow-burning rot. It chiselled at me for years, worming through the cracks. In the past few years, the label fit: PIMO, physically in, mentally out. Some would say those were my most heroic years, the period I helped people slip away from the system, smuggled them out from inside the beast, saved lives even. But the guilt for all I did before that? It’s an acid bath, always gnawing, never letting go. Right now, it’s with me. It always is and will be till the lights finally die.
Guilt crawls under your skin and burrows there, shame snapping at its heels. It’s worse when you’re born into a high-control group that some experts (before they were shot) called a cult. As a kid, I had nothing to compare it to. By the time I started to rebel, in my teens, the double life was already locked in. But I stayed, right up until recently, age thirty-five, doubts and all, seeing through their lives, their bigotry, their machinery of coercion. I still stayed. Don’t ask me why, not for certain—not when my sociopathic, trauma-mongering narcissist of a father and his twin brother were in the mix.
My father was a lifer for high-control Christian cults, long before I was born. But the particular flavour that caught us all came around 2010, so I must have been twelve. If you wanted to know what truly ‘Christian’ about it was, you’d have to squint: meetings every Sunday, sometimes during the week, sometimes online after the first lockdown; some verses thrown around to justify their paranoia and bigotry, or just to keep you in line; that was the heart of the theology. As a child, the lies from the podium were obvious even when I didn’t have the words for it. The Bible twisted to fit their paranoia, fear, shame, and guilt as the trinity of control. The whole network thrummed with watchers, ten million worldwide, each one a silent spy. Every “brother and sister” was an eye in the wall, a node in the mesh, keeping you in check, child, or adult. No privacy; not really.
As a teenager, I learned how to rebel without being noticed. The double life became an art. There were rules and rules, most of them explicitly designed to be torture for the adolescent mind. Sex before marriage? Out of the question. My secret cravings made this a special kind of hell. The worst thing I could do to my family and the congregation was to be myself. So, every time I caved, every time I gave in to desire, I was on the floor, begging for forgiveness from the ceiling, crying into my pillow, torn up by shame and fear.
We were told, all of us—the youth, the congregation—to be no part of the world of sinners. Only associate within. Keep yourself clean. Cut yourself off. I tell you this not to give you a blow-by-blow memoir, but to give you an explanation, an excuse for the parts of myself I can’t explain. If I can’t make sense of it, maybe you can. Or maybe it’s a warning. Maybe you’re thinking, “Well, I wasn’t brought up in a cult, so why does this matter?” But you are a node in the system, a citizen of the world, and the storms of bullshit and misinformation and deep-fake AI propaganda are as thick around your head as they were around mine. And I see the same cues, the same tricks, everywhere, not just in religion but in politics, in tech, splashing across the media. New pulpits, same poison.
Over time, my father’s group veered off the rails, carving into a more extreme right-wing Christian splinter, dragging us along for the ride. The command centre was somewhere in Texas, then the USA detonated into chaos, and what trickled down to us was pure venom. They fed my father—and his brother, and me, and our local cell, all the others round the world—a spirit-deep hatred for ‘the other.’ Immigrants, gays, trans, feminists, Muslims, people of colour, any flavour of difference: all cast as the villains, the cancer to be cut. The reason for society’s collapse. The ones to be wiped out.
Question the narrative? Get slammed down. Even try to think for yourself. Apostate. Shame to you, your family, your bloodline. The rules infected everything: how you dressed, your hair, makeup if you dared, who you spoke with, your hobbies, what you read, what you watched, what you clicked online, all filtered and controlled through shame, fear, guilt. Leaving wasn’t a choice.
By cutting off education, they locked out critical thought. No degrees in the congregation. Every job menial, low-skill, and a dead end. So, if you left, you left with nothing; the terror of being caught and shunned, tossed out by your own flesh and blood, kept you in line. It boxed me in for over thirty years.
Hard to explain, even now, how a cult dissolves in your bones, how the shame and fear of tribal exile keeps you glued inside. Even when you see it for what it is. Even with one foot out the door, you freeze.
This is the design. They sink it into you: behavioural control by shame, guilt as a leash, information starvation as a muzzle, even stripping away your individuality. That guilt mutates into shame, gets into the bloodstream, and gnaws at you forever. Even now, free as I am, I’m not free of it. Maybe only death will silence it. It stains every corner of your life, your work, your relationships. The furtive encounters, the hunger, the brief human contact; all twisted into shame, making you feel subhuman, filth of desire. That’s how it works. That’s how they make you hate who you are and what you become.
But that’s not the full weight of it. As my father’s ideology slipped from ‘religion’ to ‘armed militia,’ the slide was obvious, maybe inevitable. Even then, he seemed electrified by the freedom the new cult of conspiracy offered him. His brother, too. The old guilt and shame didn’t vanish; it just rebranded. It took me too long to realise this. By the time I did, the shift was old news. The only novelty was the uniform.
Here’s the warning, dear reader, in case you can learn from my mess: you don’t realise you’re in a cult or high-control group until it’s too late. The first one, I had no choice; I was born into it. That probably primed me for the next. My neurochemistry was tuned to seek out new sources of guilt and shame. Thirty years of hardwiring. Addiction, body, and mind, ready for the next leash.
But to be clear—you don’t have to be born into it for the programming to stick. By the time you figure out what’s gripping you, if you ever do, you’re already fixed in its jaws. The trap starts with love-bombing, a rush of warmth, like you’ve finally found the family that gets you. Then, slowly, the net closes. Rules creep in. Social control, bit by bit. Think you’re bringing new insight to the table? You’re yanked aside, corrected, then threatened about reading counter-narratives. They start asking you to prove your loyalty. It begins with little things—a hat, a t-shirt, a petition, a protest. Each one slides further. Social proof, consistency bias, all the little psychological ticks that graft their group identity onto your own.
With that identity, a whole unwritten book of rules appears how you speak, dress, who you are, and how you respond to everything. Groupthink. Before long, things you’d never imagine yourself doing become routine, and every step burrows you deeper into their version of you. It grants you a license for things you’d have cringed at, and if you ever flinch or doubt, it punishes you for even entertaining the thought. Shame and guilt flip: now you feel dirty for questioning the group at all.
Anyone from your old life who tries to break the spell is an enemy. Loved ones are cut off. Defectors are shunned, radioactive—you’re ordered to avoid them at all costs. Anyone who speaks out is marked apostate, traitor; if you so much as hear them out, you risk everything. Layered over this is pure fear: fear of being caught doubting, fear of the pain and loss that come if you step away. Even after you leave, the programming follows you, keeping you silent, locked in. Even writing these words, whether they’re read before or after I’m dead, will paint me apostate in their eyes. In yours, if you’re one of them.
If that’s you, I dare you: seek out the other side, the facts, the rational arguments, not just the ones that bash your group. Curiosity is not a sin. Let the counter-narratives in. If your beliefs are so strong, put them to the test. If your group is so insecure that it forbids that? Red flag. Massive red flag.
I put this out there as a warning: these groups become extreme almost by accident, by a slow drift. Sometimes, yeah, outside actors get involved, twisting things, radicalising, but honestly, when the base is already so soaked in anger and hatred, it’s child’s play.
For me, the war was always inside. I never believed because I felt the lies in my marrow. The doctrine was a patchwork of nonsense and manipulation; there was no God to be found, not in any of it. The ‘Christian’ branding was a joke. They were as far from Christ as you could get; faith was just a mask, more like a Kevlar shield. No guilt so long as you fly under the Lord’s standard. Never mind whether it matched his doctrine.
Every member knows, on some level, the whole thing is a charade. But they bury it, even from themselves. If you hit them with the facts, they double down, immune to reason, emotionally triggered by any suggestion that their purpose is just hatred acting under the cover of darkness. Underneath it all: fear, obligation, guilt. Childhood pain. A deep, dry thirst that can never quite be quenched.
If we could all accept that our basic needs are the same, that our fears and hungers are shared no matter which end of the spectrum we live on, maybe we could sidestep the bullshit and the violence. Maybe if we could just accept the lack inside, the bait would lose its pull. And then we wouldn’t be so easy to nudge, partition, and herd.
When you grow up marinated in polarised thinking, separating truth from fiction, even recognising manipulation, is a knife fight. I saw through it from way back, even if I couldn’t run. It swept me along more than once, but always, somewhere, I could see the trap. That’s how I knew I was dealing not with the truth, but with something colder. Something far, far more sinister.
At first, I’d pegged it as garden-variety greed, like everything else in this world that’s broken—the shakedown of contributions, the parade of membership fees. That’s all I saw. A new organisation, same old story: the ones on top were raking it in, living like CEOs, drinking top-shelf liquor while their followers sipped day-old coffee. I saw them, not through what they boasted from the podium, but in the corners of the internet, little flashes of evidence, pay stubs, vacation snaps, lives that didn’t line up with the gospel they were selling.
But after a while, I felt the rot was deeper. There was a sourness to it that wasn’t just about cash. No touch of the divine. If God had a hand in any of this, they’d cut it clean off themself. All I saw was a drive to break things, to own people, and wipe out anyone who didn’t step in line. Did those leaders ever do their own dirty work? When protests turned rabid, or “missions of God” (their words, never mine) set fire to the streets, they were nowhere near it. Always behind layers of muscle, whisked away before the first stone hit glass. Maybe I was the only one watching closely enough to see the edit, the AI-doctored videos, the clipped soundbites spliced and polished until it looked like they were on the front lines, first into the breach. They weren’t. They never were.
It was all run by a council at the top, always ready to drop a “new light” when yesterday’s prophecies fizzled out like damp matches. Underneath them, a nervous latticework of overseers and elders, scouring the flock for impurity, for wolves in sheep’s clothing, for the one sour note that needed purging. They kept the congregation clean, sanitised, a sterile petri dish where any hint of dissent was cut out, cauterised, excommunicated, and shunned. If you were caught with the wrong book, wrong site, or wrong questions, the watchers would report it, and the punishment would rain down. It was all about control, and the sword hung sharpest over the apostate. I became that. Their ultimate bogeyman.
But here was the genius: they made it a sin to even ask. Counter-narratives were a disease that had to be stamped out. Looking at other faiths? A crime. Considering alternate systems? A blasphemy. Education? Poisoned well. Books weren’t just banned—they were burned, by the crate. Take in a word from an ex-member, a whistle-blower, an activist, and you’d painted a target on your soul. The control was total: like an invisible guard dog attached to your mind. The fear was so pervasive that even the thought of clicking play on a forbidden video, or leafing through one of the banned tomes, was enough to send a jolt of guilt shooting up your spine, your hand snapping away, eyes flicking to see if the walls had ears.
Get caught? You were lucky if you just lost privileges. More often, it was public shaming, a slow climb back up through humiliation and enforced obedience. You’d beg forgiveness, parade your repentance, and years later you’d still see the stain on your record, a shadow that never rubbed off.
The psychological chokehold wasn’t just an accident. Fear and shame—they’d been weaponised, handed off to the worst actors: far-right nationalists and their pals in big tech. Country after country, they used outfits like ours to play out a playbook, to churn up chaos, to push forward an agenda most of us didn’t even see moving. They hacked straight into the meat of human behaviour, hijacked the systems until your own mind was working against you. They built the architecture, paid the scientists, and polished the methods. Ancient grimoires became playbooks; old pagan tools, retooled for a new breed of Christian. Full circle, I guess.
Pagan and Christian, far right, are married now, even if they never showed off the wedding photos. The pagan stuff was always in the background, behind the curtain, because if you let the masses see how the sausage was made, you’d lose the crowd. But don’t get confused: I’m not calling out the pagan influence as some cancer eating away at a “pure” Christian base. No, the Christians running the show had been borrowing dark tools for centuries. They bled the rituals, the ceremonies, the psychic voodoo straight into the bloodstream of their own movement. They twisted language, engineered behaviour, weaponised every trick in the book to nudge the faithful from morning till night. And if the carrot didn’t work, there was always the stick: fear, guilt, shame, and the threat of exile.
So, when the nationalists started winning in the UK, you bet our group jumped in to lick their boots. Egos, narcissism, trauma-bonded maniacs—we all signed on. And when they needed a pack of undertrained stormtroopers to guard the borders, to drag out the “other,” to put on a bloody show in the streets before the cages and the deportations, we volunteered. Yeah. I did. I was one of them, swept along, brainwashed, pushed, yanked, and bent into an officer’s uniform with barely enough instruction to lace my own boots. I could blame them—the organisation, my father, his brother, the entire rotten congregation. I could blame the cult logic, the narcissistic abuse, the years of having my will snapped like a twig. But it’s on me. I knew the game was rigged from day one; I saw through the lies, even if I never found the words for it. Still, I stayed. I stayed until right now, writing this, hoping you’ll clock the warning before you’re in too deep to get out. Hoping to finish before I get caught.
No one’s born an extremist. No one crawls out of the womb ready to pledge fealty to some demagogue or prophet. You might be thinking, all right, here’s another confessional from a guy looking for a way to shed his shame. Or maybe you’re thinking: “That’s rough, but I wasn’t raised in a cult, not my circus, not my monkeys.” But think again. Maybe half of us came up in this madness, born and bred on fear and paranoia, but the other half? They came in as adults. People just like you. Yeah, you, sitting there dismissing this as someone else’s problem.
I’ve watched it happen, over and over. Middle-of-the-road types, soft left, centrists, people who’d never call themselves hard-line or even conservative. That’s the point: all it takes is for them to find that little hook deep inside you, the one you didn’t even know was there. They wiggle things around, reroute desire, flip your self-image until you’re chasing the high, they’ve engineered. Take the bait, just once, and your mind will do the rest of the job for them. They don’t have to drag you in—you’ll walk yourself to the door. After that, it’s just love-bombing, the illusion of safety and community, a fake freedom that tastes real until you realise the walls are up again, built from fear and shame and duty. Before you realise it you are trapped inside.
