Build-a-Cult

In 2014, Peter Thiel published Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. In it, he wrote: "The best startups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults. The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something important. People at a successful startup are fanatically right about something those outside it have missed."

Twelve years later, the private retreat Thiel co-founded has a session on its agenda called "Build-a-Cult."

According to WIRED's verified reporting, the session is moderated by Steve Gatena, co-founder and CEO of Pray.com — the world's largest Christian prayer and faith-based audio app. As noted by IBTimes UK, the title echoes Thiel's published philosophy about the relationship between fanatical dedication and organizational success. According to the leaked materials compiled by Rockolo, the session format is a small-group "Soapbox" discussion for 8–12 attendees, designed to encourage open, candid input.

This is the session that gave this website its name. They called it "Build-a-Cult." We took them up on it.

But before we can understand what it means for the most powerful people in the world to study cult mechanics at a $16,000 luxury retreat, we need to understand what a cult actually is — how it works, why it works, and what happens when its techniques are applied at political scale.

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The Mechanics

The foundational academic framework for understanding coercive groups comes from Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist who studied thought reform among American prisoners of war during the Korean War. His 1961 book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism identified eight criteria that characterize environments of psychological control.

These criteria, drawn from Lifton's work and widely cited in cult-recovery literature, are: milieu control (restricting what information reaches members); mystical manipulation (orchestrating experiences to appear spontaneous or divinely ordained); demand for purity (dividing the world into absolute good and absolute evil); the cult of confession (requiring disclosure of personal faults as a means of control); sacred science (treating the group's ideology as beyond questioning); loading the language (using thought-terminating clichés to shut down critical thinking); doctrine over person (subordinating individual experience to the group's narrative); and dispensing of existence (claiming the right to determine who deserves to exist within the community and who must be expelled).

Lifton's eight criteria were not designed to describe a specific organization. They describe a pattern — a set of structural features that, when combined, create an environment where independent thought is progressively replaced by group conformity. As Lifton wrote, any ideology may be carried in a totalistic direction, but it is most likely with those that are "most sweeping in their content and most ambitious or messianic in their claim."

The pattern has recurred across wildly different contexts. Jim Jones built Peoples Temple on the promise of racial justice and utopian community; the project ended in Guyana in 1978 with over 900 dead in a mass suicide-murder. Marshall Applewhite built Heaven's Gate on a theology of alien salvation; in 1997, 39 members killed themselves in coordinated fashion in a San Diego suburb. Keith Raniere built NXIVM on the language of executive coaching and self-improvement; the organization was exposed in 2017 as a system of coercion, forced labor, and sexual exploitation, and Raniere was sentenced to 120 years in prison.

Each of these groups was different in content. Each was structurally identical: a charismatic leader who claimed unique access to truth. A community organized around total commitment to that leader. Information control that isolated members from outside perspectives. Binary moral language that divided the world into insiders and enemies. And loyalty tests that escalated until questioning the leader became unthinkable.

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The Political Application

What happens when these mechanics appear not in a compound or commune, but in a political movement with 74 million voters?

Steven Hassan, a licensed mental health counselor and former member of the Unification Church who has studied coercive influence for nearly five decades, published The Cult of Trump in 2019, arguing that Trump functions as a cultic leader archetype — leveraging psychological manipulation to produce intense identity fusion, epistemic closure, and obedience in the face of contradictory evidence. Hassan's BITE Model (Behavior, Information, Thought, Emotion control) has been adopted by the FBI's Law Enforcement Bulletin and applied to multiple organizations. Robert Jay Lifton himself provided a blurb for Hassan's book, writing that Hassan helps us understand "our dangerously unfit President" and "the social forces behind him."

Hassan's analysis is not without critics. Some scholars argue that the BITE model's categories are so flexible they could characterize almost any organization, and that applying the label "cult" to a democratic political movement risks dehumanizing millions of voters by recasting political disagreement as psychological manipulation. These are serious objections. The term "cult," applied to a political movement, carries the risk of pathologizing legitimate political choice.

But the structural parallels documented by multiple researchers are difficult to dismiss.

A peer-reviewed study published in Political Psychology in 2024 by Goldsmith, Moen, and colleagues directly examined whether Trump's most loyal supporters share personality characteristics associated with cult-like followership. The researchers found that high levels of conscientiousness — specifically the facet of self-discipline — were statistically and substantively distinguishable from ordinary conservatism. Their analysis, robust across two independent surveys, concluded that some U.S. voters show what they characterized as extreme, cult-like loyalty to Trump rather than to a party or policies.

The study's framing was careful and academic. But its finding was stark: for the most loyal supporters, Trump's appeal appeared to be based more on psychological needs met by his leadership style than on policy preferences or ideology.

Daniella Mestyanek Young, author of The Culting of America and a former member of the Children of God cult, told Rolling Stone in May 2026 that the comparison is not hyperbolic. According to Young, as cited by Katie Couric's reporting, cults are "high-control systems" — environments that shape how people think, question, and interpret information, designed to direct loyalty and extract something in return.

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The Checklist

Consider Lifton's eight criteria applied — not as accusation, but as structural analysis — to the MAGA movement as it exists in 2026. Each criterion is followed by an observable political behavior.

Milieu control: the information environment. Trump has publicly and repeatedly described mainstream media as "the enemy of the people." According to reporting across multiple outlets over the past decade, a substantial portion of his base consumes media primarily from outlets that amplify his messaging and frame dissenting sources as hostile or fabricated.

Mystical manipulation: the orchestration of events to appear spontaneous or divinely ordained. At the 2016 Republican convention, Trump declared "I am your voice" and "I alone can fix it." Following the July 2024 assassination attempt, Trump and his supporters described his survival as evidence of divine protection — a narrative of messianic selection.

Demand for purity: binary moral framing. The political landscape, as presented by Trump and reinforced by his media ecosystem, divides cleanly into loyalists and enemies, patriots and traitors, real Americans and those who hate America.

Sacred science: ideology beyond questioning. The claim that the 2020 election was stolen — described by multiple courts, election officials, and Trump's own attorney general as unsupported by evidence — has become, for a significant segment of the base, an article of faith rather than a falsifiable proposition. Questioning it publicly within the movement carries social cost.

Loading the language: thought-terminating clichés. "Fake news." "Witch hunt." "Deep state." "Trump derangement syndrome." Each phrase functions to terminate critical analysis by recategorizing the analysis itself as a symptom of the disease it claims to diagnose.

Doctrine over person: personal experience subordinated to group narrative. Republican officials who publicly broke with Trump — Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Jeff Flake, Bob Corker — were expelled from the party's political life. The personal experience of elected representatives who witnessed January 6 firsthand was subordinated to the doctrinal claim that the event was either justified or misrepresented.

Dispensing of existence: the leader's claimed authority to determine who belongs. "RINO" — Republican In Name Only — is not just an insult. It is an excommunication. The label strips a person of their identity within the community and marks them for political destruction. Trump has applied it to sitting governors, senators, and former allies with consistent and measurable electoral consequences.

The cult of confession: public loyalty tests. The Republican primary process in 2024 functioned, according to multiple political analyses, less as a policy competition than as a series of public demonstrations of fealty. Candidates competed not to articulate an alternative vision but to demonstrate the most complete submission to Trump's authority. Those who failed the test — like Chris Christie, who directly challenged Trump — were eliminated not on policy but on loyalty.

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The Room Where They Study It

Now return to the Powerscourt Hotel.

The people in the "Build-a-Cult" session include, according to the leaked registration list, individuals who occupy senior positions in technology, politics, media, and finance. The session is moderated by the CEO of the world's largest prayer app — a man who has, by his own company's description, engineered daily engagement rituals, shared identity systems, and scalable digital tools layered on top of offline communities. These are, as multiple commentators have observed, textbook elements of strong group cohesion.

The session sits on an agenda alongside "Build-a-Party" — moderated by a former White House national security official. The line between a cult and a party is, in Thiel's own formulation, a question of whether the group is fanatically right or fanatically wrong. But from inside any given group, that distinction is invisible. Every cult believes it's a movement. Every movement worries it might be a cult.

And here is the point that the session title, taken in context, makes unavoidable:

Peter Thiel did not just write about the relationship between cults and successful organizations. He built one. The PayPal Mafia — his own term — is one of the most powerful informal networks in the history of American capitalism. Its members founded or funded YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Tesla, SpaceX, Palantir, Yelp, and Anduril. They share a common origin story, a common culture, and a common set of beliefs about technology, competition, and power. They maintain intense in-group loyalty. They have, over two decades, systematically extended their network's influence into government — culminating in the installation of a PayPal Mafia protégé as Vice President of the United States.

Thiel also co-founded Dialog — a private organization with no public website, no disclosed membership, off-the-record rules, assigned seating, ritual structures, a matchmaking service, and a participation guide that coaches members to avoid status signaling in a room where status is the only thing everyone has in common. An organization that has been meeting for twenty years. An organization that asks its members for their political leanings and promises never to share the data. An organization with 222 members who, according to WIRED, registered using personal email to avoid public records laws.

And at this organization's next retreat, the agenda includes a session called "Build-a-Cult."

The session title is not a joke. It's not ironic. It's a case study. The people in that room are not studying cult mechanics because they're curious. They're studying cult mechanics because they're practitioners.

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What They're Building

This is the question that the title of this session — and the title of this website — exists to pose.

When a group of people who already control the platforms where public opinion is formed, the AI systems where information is filtered, the defense infrastructure where wars are fought, and the venture capital networks where political careers are funded sit down to discuss how to build a cult — what are they building?

Maybe it's a seminar. Maybe it's intellectual play among wealthy people who enjoy provocative framing. Dialog's moderator guide stresses that the titles are deliberately edgy, designed to loosen candor. Maybe "Build-a-Cult" is just a conversation starter for people who find "Organizational Leadership Best Practices" insufficiently interesting over cocktails.

Or maybe it's a curriculum. A room full of people who have already built cults — of product, of personality, of political devotion — comparing notes on what works. How do you create loyalty that survives scandal? How do you build an information environment that makes your version of reality feel like the only one? How do you make questioning the leader feel like a personal betrayal rather than an intellectual exercise?

The techniques are not secret. Lifton published them in 1961. Hassan updated them in 2019. The academic literature is public. The historical case studies are well-documented. What's new is the audience.

When a prisoner-of-war researcher publishes criteria for thought reform, it's scholarship. When the co-founder of Palantir, the creator of the Vice President, and the CEO of the world's largest prayer app sit down to discuss those same mechanics at an off-the-record retreat with a NATO commander and two U.S. senators — it's something else.

They called the session "Build-a-Cult."

We called the website the same thing.

Because the cult is already built. It's been building for twenty years. And the only thing that changed on June 16, 2026, is that you can finally see who's in it.

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Sources

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This is original analysis published by Build a Cult. It is licensed under CC BY 4.0. The session title "Build-a-Cult" is drawn from Dialog's leaked 2026 retreat agenda, as reported by WIRED. The website name reclaims that title. Their session was about building influence networks for elites. Ours is about building a transparency movement for everyone.