The Man Who Calls MAHA a Cult: Steven Hassan and the Machinery Behind the Attack on Health Freedom

By any measure, Steven Hassan is an unlikely figure in the war against health freedom. A former Unification Church member who got “deprogrammed” in 1976 and never looked back, Hassan has spent four decades turning his own cult experience into a career: first as an author, then as a therapist, then as a self-anointed “cult expert” with a framework he calls the BITE Model of Authoritarian Control. He’s applied it to dozens of groups — Scientology, Jehovah’s Witnesses, NXIVM, Opus Dei, the Unification Church itself. But in recent years he’s expanded his target list beyond religion and into public health, framing the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement and its champions as an authoritarian cult threatening American democracy — and seeking to kill people.

He calls MAHA “America’s New Wellness Cult.” He frames RFK Jr.’s health agenda as “pseudoscientific health movements entwined with political power in a way I find extremely dangerous.” He characterizes vaccine skepticism as “4th Generation psychological warfare: attacking experts, science, and democratic institutions.” And he’s applying that framework to characterize health freedom organizations as threats requiring government intervention.

Hassan did not start this attack. It had been running at full volume for four years when he published his first article on MAHA — out of the Biden White House, the federal health agencies, allied governments, and the largest media platforms in the country. What Hassan supplied was the method: a framework that turns the insult into something that looks like a diagnosis.

From COVID through the 2024 election, the attack against MAHA was led by the government itself. President Biden made the designation official: “This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated.” Then the threat: “We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us.” Then the forecast: “For unvaccinated, we are looking at a winter of severe illness and death — if you’re unvaccinated — for themselves, their families, and the hospitals they’ll soon overwhelm.” The Food and Drug Administration mocked them from its official account: “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.”

Allied governments went further. In September 2021, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada said of the unvaccinated: “They don’t believe in science or progress and are very often misogynistic and racist... This leads us, as a leader and as a country, to make a choice: Do we tolerate these people?” In January 2022, President Emmanuel Macron of France explained his policy of barring the unvaccinated from restaurants, cinemas, and public venues: “I really want to piss them off, and we’ll carry on doing this - to the end.”

Entertainment and media took it from there. Jimmy Kimmel, on ABC: “Vaccinated person having a heart attack? Yes, come right on in. We’ll take care of you. Unvaccinated guy who gobbled horse goo? Rest in peace, wheezy.” Howard Stern, on SiriusXM: “When are we gonna stop putting up with the idiots in this country and just say it’s mandatory to get vaccinated? Fuck ’em. Fuck their freedom. I want my freedom to live.” Canada’s largest newspaper put it on the front page: “I have no empathy left for the wilfully unvaccinated. Let them die.” Noam Chomsky said the unvaccinated “should have the decency to remove themselves from the community”; asked how they would then get food, he answered, “Well, that’s actually their problem.” Vaccine scientist Peter Hotez put a body count on it: “200,000 Americans” dead “because they refused COVID vaccines” — anti-vaccine activism, he said, “is a killing machine.”

By the 2024 election, the attack turned directly on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. When Trump nominated him to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, Georgetown public health law professor Lawrence Gostin delivered the “verdict”: “He’ll make America sick again.”

Hassan’s attack on MAHA extends his cult framework into public health, framing health freedom as a vector for authoritarian control.

He calls MAHA an authoritarian cult by name: “One might label aspects of the MAHA/wellness phenomenon as an authoritarian cult... the movement exhibits an authoritarian dynamic in elevating confident charismatic leaders (Kennedy, and by extension Trump) as infallible and demands ideological purity and obedience reminiscent of cult regimes. The Cult of Trump is merging with what might be dubbed a right-wing Cult of Wellness.” He applies the BITE model to it and finds “clear signs of cultic influence at play.” He calls for action against it: “We are witnessing the institutionalization of pseudoscience... Our task now is to turn down the volume on the false prophets before this peculiar wellness cult derails the health of the very nation it claims it wants to save.”

He frames the political alignment behind MAHA as a death wish: “The powers that are influencing Trump and MAGA, they want a lot of Americans to die.” From there, every disagreement becomes warfare: vaccine skepticism is “psychological warfare” whose goal is “to attack experts, science and democratic institutions to promote distrust” — “4th Generation psychological warfare,” he calls it in a separate piece on anti-vaccine ideology. And RFK’s dismantling of vaccine advisory panels becomes a threat to public health: “He’s dismantled the top scientists who are experts in vaccines and pandemics. And so why would they do that? It is no justification at all in terms of science and health care.”

Hassan has taken a political movement — one that includes millions of Americans who question vaccine mandates, support raw milk, oppose fluoride, and want more transparency in public health — and applied his cult framework to it. Not a movement with legitimate policy disagreements. A cult.

The BITE Model is deceptively simple. Behavior, Information, Thought, Emotional control. Any group that exercises control over these four domains can be classified as a cult. That is it. That is the whole test.

The problem is the test has no floor. Hassan himself says it: “Destructive mind control can be determined when the overall effect of these four components promotes dependency and obedience to some leader or cause; it is not necessary for every single item on the list to be present.” Not every item. Not even most items. A “few major behaviors under each of the four components” is enough. The evaluator — Hassan — decides which behaviors count and how many are sufficient. The framework doesn’t diagnose; it labels.

And the categories are broad enough to catch anything. Behavior control includes regulating what you eat, what you wear, how much money you give, and how you spend your time. Information control includes limiting outside sources and discouraging critical inquiry (where the evaluators decide what are good sources and what is good inquiry). Thought control includes strongly asserting a position that’s unpopular to the medical establishment. Emotional control casts concerns about what processed food does to children, vaccine risks, regulators’ pharma ties — and recasts them as “programming” children and others to their detriment. Any movement with a shared belief system, a leadership structure, a set of practices, and a concept of right and wrong fits the model. The framework doesn’t distinguish between a cult and a movement. It defines movement as cult.

Since 2021, Hassan has published at least eleven articles, podcast episodes, and newsletters framing MAHA, RFK Jr., vaccine skepticism, and the wellness industry as cult phenomena — anchored by a full-length article that applies his BITE model to MAHA by name.

He presented at the New England Complex Systems Institute’s COVID Community Action Summit in February 2021, offering pandemic researchers and policymakers “A Cult Expert’s Advice on Dealing with Anti-Vaxxers and General Vaccine Hesitancy” — treating vaccine hesitancy itself as a cult phenomenon to be managed. He has interviewed Brandie Hadfield, a registered psychotherapist who spent roughly ten years selling supplements for a wellness MLM before determining she had been recruited into a commercial cult.

The pattern is consistent: critics of mainstream health policy, framed as cult members, presented as evidence that health freedom is a threat. Hassan does not interview MAHA supporters or present the movement’s perspective.

COVID ended. The attack did not. It now runs through podcasts, journalists, academics, and misinformation-policing organizations as routine operations.

Direct attackers. The New Yorker explained: “Critics of the MAHA movement, and of wellness culture writ large, often compare it to a cult, and this kind of rhetoric suggests why. The leader should not be criticized; a vast conspiracy threatens the movement; triumph is ongoing.” Mother Jones was documenting the supposed pipeline from wellness mom-groups to conspiracy movements years before MAHA had a name. The podcast “Sounds Like A Cult” devoted a full episode to “The Cult of MAHA” (June 16, 2026) and gave it the show’s worst possible rating. The Conspirituality podcast — three hosts, hundreds of episodes, and a 2023 book subtitled “How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Public Health Threat” — built its entire brand on the claim that wellness culture breeds authoritarian extremism, and ran an episode on “The Monetization of MAHA.”

Academic legitimizers. Stephanie Alice Baker, a professor at City St George’s, University of London, leads research on what she calls “The Wellness to Far-Right Pipeline” and publishes on how “wellness culture and web culture have been weaponised to promote conspiracy theories and far-right extremism.” Marc-André Argentino, an extremism researcher, coined “Pastel QAnon” to describe how conspiracy ideology bleeds into wellness spaces and forms “new radicalisation pipelines.” With Queen’s University’s Amarnath Amarasingam, he has published the security framing for treating these communities as threats.

Institutional actors. The Center for Countering Digital Hate put RFK Jr. on its “Disinformation Dozen” list in March 2021, claiming twelve people produce up to 65% of anti-vaccine misinformation online — and the Biden White House cited the report within months as platforms moved against the named accounts. The Federation of State Medical Boards formally warned physicians that spreading COVID-19 vaccine “misinformation” risks “the suspension or revocation of their medical license.” NewsGuard runs a standing “RFK Jr. Healthcare Claims Depository” rating his statements false and feeding advertiser blacklists. A sitting U.S. senator’s office now maintains an “RFK Jr. Attacks Tracker” as congressional oversight.

What Hassan added is the piece the ecosystem lacked: a credentialed “cult expert” applying his model to the movement. The infrastructure that deplatforms, disciplines, and blacklists now has a framework that calls its target a cult.

None of this needs a courtroom. The designation system already punishes on its own: the people on the CCDH list lost their platforms, doctors were warned their licenses are at risk, blacklisted outlets lost their advertisers, and Senator Ed Markey’s office runs a public “RFK Jr. Attacks Tracker” on the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Each stage made the next one possible. The government named the target. The media made it acceptable to hate them. The infrastructure made the designation permanent. The “cult expert” supplied the framework. That is everything you would need to take a health freedom organization to court.

In the area of religious belief, there is a rising trend of civil and federal cases resting on Hassan’s model of “brainwashing” — 54 civil cases against religious institutions to date, 25 of them filed in the most recent year — where strong beliefs are recast as “indoctrination” that “brainwashes” individuals in violation of trafficking laws. While proponents of MAHA have yet to be targeted in this way, it seems to be only a matter of time before Hassan’s framework is used to argue that “brainwashing” by a “right wing wellness cult” has produced “serious harm,” within the meaning of that statute, especially under a future administration deeply hostile to MAHA’s aims of reinvigorating America’s health and weaning the country off the debilitating effects of prior health policy.