Steven Hassan is a licensed mental health counselor in Massachusetts who has built a career on a single claim: that he can identify “destructive cults” using a diagnostic overarching highly simplistic completely subjective tool he created called the BITE model. He has applied this confirmation-bias laden model to the President of the United States, to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, to anti-vaccine movements, to January 6 participants, and to OneTaste, the meditation company whose leaders were convicted in June 2025 under the coercive control theory Hassan has promoted for decades.
Hassan is a former member of the Unification Church. He was recruited at age 19 while studying poetry at Queens College and spent two and a half years in the organization before his family arranged a deprogramming in 1976. He has spent the past 49 years since building a professional practice around the premise that he possesses unique expertise in identifying and treating “mind control.”
His credentials: a master’s degree in counseling psychology from Cambridge College (1985), a licensed mental health counselor certification in Massachusetts (1992), and a PhD from Fielding Graduate University’s School of Leadership Studies in Organizational Development and Change (2020). His doctoral dissertation is titled “The BITE Model of Authoritarian Control: Undue Influence, Thought Reform, Brainwashing, Mind Control, Trafficking and the Law.” He completed it simultaneously with writing The Cult of Trump — he took two terms off from Fielding to finish the book.
His dissertation mentor told him that “the best way to influence the legal system was for me to do quantitative research on my BITE model and publish it” and that “doing solid scientific research and participating in precedent-setting cases were the ways the legal system changes.” The dissertation and the book were parallel tracks in the same campaign: get the BITE model accepted as science, get it accepted in popular culture, get it accepted in federal court.
The BITE Model
BITE stands for Behavior, Information, Thought, and Emotional control. Each category contains a checklist of indicators. The model purports to identify “destructive cults” by measuring the degree of control exercised over members across these four domains.
The indicators include items like “discouraging individualism,” “using loaded language,” “instilling excessive fear,” “manipulating a victim’s range of feelings,” and “requiring internalization of doctrine as truth.”
The model’s academic standing is contested. Scott Lowe, reviewing The Cult of Trump for Nova Religio (University of California Press, May 2020), wrote that Hassan’s authority rests on “his purported expert knowledge of cults and deprogramming — not social psychology, political science, religious studies, or sociology.” Hassan’s definition of “cult” was so broad, Lowe observed, that it encompassed everything from the Chinese Communist Party to an abusive marriage, and therefore “the word explains very little.”
Publishers Weekly acknowledged that Hassan’s concept of mind control is “so promiscuous” that “virtually everything politicians normally do could qualify.”
In fact, Hassan wants the government to take control over who is allowed to run for the presidency. Publishers Weekly continues: “Recasting politics as psychopathology, Hassan offers tips on deprogramming Trump supporters and recommends that aspiring presidential candidates undergo ‘a full neuropsychiatric, forensic evaluation’ before being certified to run.” In other words, he wants the present government to control who runs for the office of the presidency, and it would be no great stretch to a slippery slope where anyone who runs for any office would have to pass a test based on Hassan’s idea for who and what may qualify. In short, he’s a dangerous man with dangerous ideas. He’d be laughed off the stage as a crank in intelligent society except that the FBI has apparently adopted him, as has the DOJ for their own weaponization ambitions.
Even Hassan’s Wikipedia entry notes that a friend stated he “has a tendency in some ways to see everything as undue influence because he’s primed to see it that way.”
Sociologists Anson Shupe and David Bromley, who have studied the anti-cult movement, characterized Hassan’s work as “a moral crusade” — because that is how he makes his living.
Hassan’s 2020 doctoral study, conducted with a Survey Monkey questionnaire, attempted to validate his BITE Model. Hassan surveyed self-described former members of “high-control groups” who believed they had been victims of undue influence and left their group. Because the sample was self-selected and lacked any valid comparison group, the result is a classic example of confirmation bias and circular reasoning. In other words, people who believe they left a cult, confirmed that Hassan’s “bad cult” BITE model comported with their unhappy experiences. This is akin to having a survey asking a barber if people should have more haircuts.
The Target List
Hassan has applied his BITE model to the following:
Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. In The Cult of Trump (2019, updated 2024), Hassan argues Trump is a cult leader identical in psychology to Jim Jones, David Koresh, and Sun Myung Moon. His biggest supporters are brainwashed. In a recorded interview, Hassan admitted his prior view of Trump: “As a New Yorker, I had been aware of Donald Trump as an a-hole who is a misogynist and a racist, et cetera.” His literary agent pushed him to write the book. The conclusion preceded the analysis.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Hassan has called the LDS Church a “destructive mind control cult,” called Joseph Smith “a liar and a pervert,” described the 10% tithe as “disgusting,” and runs paid “Recovery After Mormonism” workshops. He told an ex-Mormon audience: “Why are we funding these groups that lie and defraud people?” The LDS Church holds assets estimated at over $300 billion.
January 6 participants. Hassan has described them as “instruments of a violent cult” and collects former Trump supporters as cult-recovery clients.
Anti-vaccine skeptics. Hassan wrote in CNN that anti-vaxxers are under cult influence.
OneTaste. Hassan worked with former OneTaste participants as “recovery services” clients. Those clients became government witnesses in the federal prosecution. One admitted to fabricating evidence with a Netflix producer and was dropped weeks before trial.
Hassan has not applied his model to progressive political movements, liberal spiritual communities, or left-leaning organizations that exhibit identical group dynamics to those he identifies in his targets. On his own website, a Unitarian minister published a BITE model analysis of the Unitarian Universalist Association identifying authoritarian control patterns. Hassan has taken no action on it.
15 Years Inside Federal Law Enforcement
Hassan’s documented engagements with federal agencies:
2009: Plenary speaker, DOJ National Amber Alert Symposium.
2014: Human trafficking training, Joint Regional Intelligence Center (DHS/FBI).
2015: Invitation-only State Department program on countering ISIS, Aspen Institute.
2015: Cited in FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, “A Victim-Centered Approach to Sex Trafficking Cases.” The BITE model was formally published as an FBI diagnostic tool.
2017–2018: Multiple presentations to State Department’s Trafficking in Persons office and Countering Terrorism office.
2021: Presented “Exploring the ‘Coercion’ Element in Labor Trafficking” to DHS, FBI, and DOJ joint task force.
2021: Presentation to State Department Global Engagement Center.
2025: Presenter at VA Palo Alto CE Conference.
Paul Chang, Federal Human Trafficking Coordinator at the Department of Labor, has appeared on Hassan’s podcast and discussed adopting Hassan’s model in intra-agency trainings. Chang told audiences: “People don’t normally think that if you are being trafficked in a religious organization that you are potentially labor trafficked in many cases. But this is actually not unique, and it happens more often than you think.”
A federal law enforcement official is telling colleagues that religious organizations are potential labor trafficking operations. This is not a fringe podcast claim. It is federal training doctrine.
The man who created this training doctrine calls the president a child trafficker, compares him to Adolf Hitler, and has written a book arguing his supporters are brainwashed cult members.
That man’s BITE model is embedded in the FBI, the DOJ, DHS, and the Department of Labor. It just produced a federal conviction. And it is available to any state attorney general who wants to use it.
