Cults as Attention Markets: Racketeering, Actorless Threats, and Identity Polarization

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2026/02/11

Amos N. Guiora is an Israeli-American law professor at the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law. A scholar of national security, human rights, and institutional complicity, he examines bystanders, enablers, and accountability in abuse and modern conflict, and is the author of influential books on complicity and ethics. 

Matthew Pearce is a sociologist and researcher studying globalization, higher education, organizations, and the social informatics of the internet. With quantitative and machine-learning interests, he analyzes how information ecosystems shape behaviour and power. His work bridges academic research and practical systems thinking, including models of attention, identity, and network dynamics. 

Neal Rauhauser is a veteran network engineer and OSINT researcher who tracks online influence, netwar dynamics, and emerging “actorless” network threats. He writes the Netwar Irregulars Bulletin and analyzes how automation, social media, and identity markets shape movements and manipulation, combining technical infrastructure experience with investigative, data-driven, ongoing global commentary. 

Irina Tsukerman is a New York–based human rights and national security lawyer, geopolitical analyst, and president of Scarab Rising. She writes on strategy, MENA security, disinformation, energy politics, and emerging threats, bringing rigorous legal expertise to policy analysis and media commentary, with work published widely across domestic and international outlets.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen convenes Matthew Pearce, Irina Tsukerman, Neal Rauhauser, and Amos N. Guiora to update “cult” analysis beyond NXIVM. Pearce proposes an economic model: attention, polarization, operating costs, and identity clarity explain why cult-like behavior now permeates politics, crypto, and media. He treats members as victims of distorted incentive markets, while leaders function as racketeering enterprises. Tsukerman links cult practice to intelligence, geopolitics, and prevention needs, while Rauhauser adds OSINT experience with automation, actorless threats, and network movements like Anonymous and QAnon. Guiora presses on motive, leaders, and falsifiable criteria.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: This is a continuation of conversations on cults. We focused extensively on NXIVM and the figure Keith Raniere (Vanguard) last time, given some of Lindsay’s expertise. A documentary series called The Vow concentrates on that particular cult and premiered on HBO (and HBO Max). There are many of them. Matt, when you think of a cult, to bring you into this flow, what comes to mind, e.g., people, personalities, or organizations?

Matthew Pearce: From my observations, it is a closed group with a fixed identity and minimal outside communication. The first one that comes to mind is Lyndon LaRouche, mainly because he was the first one I came across. What they are now is that I have started developing an economic theory that explains how they work and why they arise.

How they work, and how to get people out of them. It is an interesting set of equations. I have managed to whittle down a cult to a couple of equations.

I have them on the whiteboard because I was talking to someone from the UK government about it as well. You probably cannot see it. It is based on attention, operating costs, polarization, and identity.

When I say identity, I mean clarity of identity. How clear is the identity of the cult? The more clarity you get, the more cult-like it becomes.

I have noticed that they started to scale in the mid-20th century in the USA, alongside mass media and then television, and you can trace their historical development from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s through to the 1990s. Then the internet kicks in.

It is like someone lit rocket fuel underneath cult-like behaviour. Now it is hard to distinguish between cults as we understood them and normal social media. That is where my framework works.

It takes the emotion out of it, and you can see the mechanics. There are no cults anymore. Political parties now adopt cult-like behaviour, as do football teams and soccer teams.

It is the way that social media has reduced friction between groups, and monetization has become important as well. You will see the cult leaders now. We can name them.

We can say Donald Trump. We can say Vladimir Putin. We can say Nigel Farage. We can say RFK Jr., all these people are running what I would now call cults.

It is a closed identity market. That is how I see it now: they are competing for money from the internet for attention.

Before, people like Lyndon LaRouche and David Icke faced a massive cost of entry into that market. PayPal, donations, and Twitter have reduced that friction. They are becoming indistinguishable from everyday life.

When I think of it in that way, everything clicks. From a historical perspective, you can trace the evolution of these dynamics through broadcasting and journalism.

You can see how each new technology has made it easier to transmit strange or distinct identities that become cults.

That is the work I have been involved in for about five years now. I have a lot of evidence, including financial records and leaked data, that supports the theory.

It is crossing the line between a criminal racketeer and an enterprise. Lyndon LaRouche was convicted in 1988 and sentenced in 1989 to 15 years in federal prison, though he was released on parole after serving about five years. These figures are on that line now. It is interesting.

If you want to talk about it as a journalist, please do. I have fascinating information.

Irina Tsukerman: I wanted to ask: at what point would you say scale takes a cult, in our traditional understanding, from a cult to a larger racketeering enterprise that uses cult-like practices primarily for financial gain?

Pearce: Lyndon LaRouche and David Icke represent the last period of what we would recognize as traditional cult-like behaviour. People copy them now because it reduces operating costs. There is no need to invent new cults.

In the 1960s and 1970s, people encountered strange cults, including extreme religious movements, often in places like India. Now there is no need, because so much competition in the identity market means people reuse existing ideas. David Icke is still active, although “strong” is probably the wrong word.

If you look at it in terms of market value—the only way I can look at it now—these people are making money on the internet. 

Jacobsen: If there is no need to reinvent the organizational wheel for these newer so-called cults, there is also no reason to invent new enemies. When we see upticks in certain types of hatred, bigotry, or prejudice, that correlates with the amplificatory effects of these systems. 

Pearce: It absolutely does. Many of the cults—or cult-like meme systems—are antisemitic in nature. They reuse themes derived from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Lyndon LaRouche and David Icke do this for the same reason: they did not want to invent anything new. They just changed the language—calling people lizards or similar terms—but the structure remains the same. But it is a copy. It refers to a shadowy group of people, specifically Jewish people. That is what it means. That framing originates in early antisemitic conspiracy theories.

When people complain about “globalists,” “bankers,” shadowy cabals, the WEF, or Davos, this rhetoric often maps onto the same antisemitic narrative of a hidden group controlling the world. It is a recycled model used to make money.

I have evidence suggesting that this is intentional. In private chat groups, participants discuss cryptocurrency and explicitly state that targeting particular groups with specific messaging will generate revenue. That is what they say in private. 

Jacobsen: Is there any moral concern or hesitation?

Pearce: When asked whether there is any hesitation or moral concern expressed internally, the answer is none.

Within one such chat group, there is a high-level individual based in the UK who is linked to a high-profile charity in the United States. He treats this purely as a method for extracting money from young conservative men.

They openly admit that this is the purpose. The structure involves two groups: a governing “council” that oversees the crypto scheme, and a broader community that functions in a cult-like way.

The community has a conservative, anti-woke cult aesthetic. Young men are encouraged toward aggression, hostility, and the promotion of racist and sexist views. The messages are extreme and disturbing.

In the council, they discuss the monetary side of things. They openly talk about investing around half a million dollars and then discuss how they will pump it up to seven million.

These crypto meme coins are essentially the new cults. What they are doing is taking money from young men—young men who think they can get rich through crypto. That is the audience they see. They see these identities online, and the reason they exist is to allow others to extract money from them.

Jacobsen: How much money is in that specific ecosystem? 

Pearce: In that specific branch, they were talking about taking half a million dollars up to seven million dollars simply by targeting young men. That was a small one. There are many larger ones that I know of.

I have some wallet addresses that work at scale. You are talking about amounts reaching into the billions. It is poisoning a large section of society, and it tends to grow around religious charities, particularly in the United States, and around conservative communities.

From an economic point of view, it is quite interesting. 

Dr. Amos Guiora: Matt, I am curious—two things, if I may. Charles Manson and Tucker Carlson. What was Charles Manson?

Pearce: He was a cult leader, but without a financial motive.

Guiora: What about sex?

Pearce: He was still extracting value rather than money. Value—however you define it. The idea is to extract value, in whatever form it takes. Nowadays, that value appears to be power and money, although some cults still genuinely believe in their own ideology. 

Guiora: What about Tucker Carlson?

Pearce: I have developed a theory around what I call “retailers.” These are vendors—retail politicians and retail journalists—who do not act as journalists or politicians in the traditional sense. They exist to sell an idea, the identity of a group or cult, or the means itself.

Pearce: By themselves?

Jacobsen: Yes, for their own value. If the ideas of that particular cult align with their interests, that is a bonus. If they are conservative and can extract value while polarizing conservative groups, they will take that path.

I also know of people who run cult-like groups who were once left-wing and have since moved into a horseshoe position.

Guiora: One quick follow-up on Carlson, and then I will turn it over to René. Tucker Carlson comes from significant wealth and has substantial resources of his own. Is he driven by money, according to your theory? Does antisemitism drive him? Is he drawn into this relationship with Nick (Fuentes), or is this a merge and meld?

Pearce: I have taken an economic view of it. I deliberately remove intent and belief from the analysis. My model does not address why they do it.

What I observe is that they assign value to the work they are doing and then extract that value. To extract more value, they increase polarization and intensify identity formation.

Why they are doing it becomes irrelevant. You look at outcomes. The outcomes are increased polarization and stronger identities. Once you make that analytical shift and stop making moral judgments, you see that most people are operating inside distorted incentive markets.

Most cult members are victims. The people at the top are criminals. From that perspective, a RICO-style framework makes more sense. Racketeering is the more accurate lens.

Everyone else is probably a victim. Punishing members of these groups is like punishing a victim of credit card fraud. We need to stop judging people in these groups.

Judge the people who are running it. Judge the people who are extracting value. But the others should be seen as victims. They are not acting deliberately; they are operating within a distorted worldview driven by perverse incentives.

This affects everyone to some degree, though some more than others. It is a valuable framework if you want to avoid imposing moral judgments or assumptions about intent, and instead explain behaviour and outcomes without that layer of judgment.

Tsukerman: A couple of points. First, we are seeing a convergence of cult-like sex and power dynamics used as a cover, or as an addendum, to racketeering and geopolitical convergence. The Epstein network is one example.

Much of the focus has been on sex trafficking, and the women who were exploited or manipulated, but less attention has been paid to the fact that many of the same individuals were also engaged together in activities unrelated to sex—activities tied to power, intelligence networks, business interests, and influence.

The second point is that understanding motivation still matters. While governments can disrupt these networks using financial evidence alone, prevention and preemption require understanding both the neo-cult leaders and their victims—how people are drawn in and how operators pursue their agendas.

Pearce: I have been writing a short piece on the UK’s PREVENT framework. I modelled it using my framework, and it appears to worsen radicalization, make it harder to leave, and produce no positive outcomes.

What it does is formalize the punishment of the victims rather than targeting the people doing the radicalizing. If you treat this as an economic crime—and at the top level, that is what it is—the reason these structures exist is to allow people at the top to extract money or other forms of value.

Once you reach a certain point, the cost of leaving a cult becomes enormous. In that context, PREVENT-style interventions can ruin lives by increasing exit costs rather than lowering them.

What is actually needed is support that helps people leave by replacing the extracted value with alternative, socially beneficial value in lower-attention environments. That includes supporting families of those affected.

This applies to QAnon. It applies to MAGA, which is another value-extraction movement. By allowing people to exchange those identities for more constructive forms of value, you make it easier for them to leave.

If you only offer workshops or counselling, you often make things worse by implicitly telling people they are wrong. Once you frame belief as intent, radicalization intensifies. You can see this in the UK, where PREVENT has at times functioned in ways that further radicalize young Muslim men.

It is counterintuitive, but when you look at the models—the graphs and equations—that is what happens. It makes things worse.

You need to support victims at the lower levels and punish those extracting value at the top through racketeering and economic sanctions. That is the only effective way to address modern forms of these systems.

I would also impose levies on social media and on sports sponsorships, because they drive polarization. You see this in Formula One and football, where ethically problematic states sponsor culturally significant teams or stadiums.

The reason is to capture attention and legitimize polarizing views.

Guiora: Matt, are you a sports fan? I am a sports junkie. Let me pause on what you just noted. If you follow professional golf—or even if you do not—you know about Saudi Arabia’s large-scale investment in it. You see similar patterns with Qatar, the UAE, and others sponsoring major football clubs, the World Cup, the NBA, and more. I had not thought about it in quite that way before. Do you view that in the same context?

Pearce: Yes, I do. It is about driving attention and extracting value from it for unethical purposes—reshaping or polarizing views about particular countries, identities, or political narratives.

It relies on Western cultural institutions that are deeply embedded in everyday life. If you have supported Newcastle your entire life and then Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund acquires the club, you immediately—whether you want to or not—become part of that identity structure.

You see it constantly. You see it every weekend. You see it when you watch Newcastle content online. It becomes ambient.

The same goes for Formula One. You see cars racing—Ferraris, brands associated with prestige, technology, and aspiration—circulating in countries with deeply troubling human rights records. I struggle with that.

We banned sports teams from advertising cigarettes, yet sports sponsorships now prominently feature state-linked brands and airlines. 

Guiora: I watched the NBA recently, and Emirates branding appeared repeatedly during play.

Pearce: Anything that polarizes core identity should be regulated. You see people—farmers, truckers—becoming angry about disparate issues: vaccines, which relate to health; food systems; claims that institutions like the WEF or Davos will force people to eat insects; immigration framed as people “taking your house”; domestic security; refugees framed as foreign threats.

All of these target the core of personal identity. Transgender issues are also used this way. Many of the most extreme narratives around gender are politically constructed and amplified through transnational ideological networks. Some of these narratives can be traced to Russian and Iranian information operations and associated media ecosystems operating in Western countries.

Anything that targets core identity can be used to polarize. Once polarized, value can be extracted. It does not matter whether the framing is right-wing, left-wing, pro, anti, yes, or no. Value is extracted from identity through polarization. That is how it works in economic terms.

Intent is irrelevant to me. The structure looks the same. The outcomes are the same. You end up with victims and extremely wealthy individuals at the top.

That represents a misallocation of resources in that market. The way to address it is to increase penalties and increase costs, preventing people from entering markets that cause social harm. It is analogous to smoking, gambling, or alcohol. You tax them until they become unprofitable.

That is what I told the UK government earlier today.

Jacobsen: One thing I think is important is how we expand our definition of violence. In policy and law, violence has expanded from physical and sexual harm to include emotional and financial damage. What this framework potentially adds—depending on how rigorously it is institutionalized and validated—is another lens for analyzing cult emergence and behaviour within an economic framework.

What I am hearing is that when you charge racketeering, a single charismatic figure may head it, but not necessarily. It could be a group of people behind a crypto coin targeting right-wing young men.

Pearce: Yes, exactly. You should not view it as an individual. You should view it as a criminal enterprise. This should be treated like organized crime in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s.

Tsukerman: Very quickly, from a law-enforcement perspective, RICO statutes are well-suited to this kind of activity because they address racketeering as a system. In the United States, they have proven to be an effective prosecutorial tool when appropriately applied.

Pearce: Yes. Imposing levies on sports sponsorships and social media, and extending racketeering frameworks to attention-based extraction models, are the directions this needs to take.

Jacobsen: Neil, did you want to add anything, perhaps a different angle on Matt’s economic framework for understanding cults?

Rauhauser: For Matt’s economic theory, I find it very interesting. I started participating in social movements around 2009, spending time with the Coffee Party, Occupy, Anonymous, and Black Lives Matter. Over that period, I have watched human influence increasingly get swamped by automation.

What Matt is saying about what rises and what sinks intuitively fits my experience over the past decade and a half. I also have extensive personal experience with what could reasonably be described as cult-like activity.

Jacobsen: One point that stands out is that Matt noted a rise in cult-like structures beginning in the mid-20th century with the spread of mass media.

Traditionally, thinkers like Steven Hassan define cults as having a central charismatic leader. Matt reframes this economically, suggesting that responsibility lies with those at the top—whether or not there is a single charismatic figure—and that they should be treated as racketeering enterprises.

That is a different analytical frame. He is arguing that there are more cults than ever, but under a broader definition. Interestingly, people working within traditional cult studies also say that cult prevalence has increased.

Given your involvement in movements like Black Lives Matter and Occupy, and your observation of automation shaping influence, do you see social movements sometimes shifting toward cult-like behaviour that could be analyzed within Matt’s framework?

Rauhauser: The term you are looking for is “actorless threats.” This is a concept increasingly discussed in foreign policy and security studies. The idea is that there is no single actor you can target or remove to disrupt the threat.

Related to that, you see notions like leaderless resistance in right-wing extremist movements, including the Phineas Priesthood ideology. These movements may have promoters or ideologues, but not centralized leaders in the traditional sense.

With Anonymous, you see something similar. That culture actively resists charismatic leadership. Attempts at leadership tend to be attacked and dismantled by the group itself. That dynamic worked for a time and later fed into decentralized movements like QAnon.

A lot is going on there. It is complex, but analytically fascinating.

Pearce: That is helpful, because this was one of my corner cases. In my paper—which I am happy to share—I describe what I call a “devotionist.” This is someone for whom attention itself becomes the primary source of value. In those cases, the equation collapses to attention minus any legal penalties. There are no meaningful operating costs. There is no concern for sustainability. The only thing that matters is the value extracted from attention itself.

What I am saying—and what Neil is pointing out—is that you do not need a leader for this to function. You can have groups of people organized around an identity, whatever that identity happens to be. It can be QAnon. You then have sets of people extracting value from that identity.

That fits my framework exactly. I treat this as a pure case where polarization is so extreme that there is no leader, and everyone involved is focused solely on extracting value from the identity itself.

From Neil’s experience, you do not get a single leader because the polarization is so intense and the identity so rigid. Any deviation from perceived purity is punished. Those individuals either splinter off and form something new or are pushed out. A leaderless structure is the extreme case of this model.

Rauhauser: Another term from foreign policy and counterinsurgency is “network threat.” These entities function as network threats.

If you look at Anonymous and how it formed, you see this dynamic clearly, beginning with early shock-content communities of the 2000s. We can return to that if helpful.

Jacobsen: That would be useful. Matt, there is one thing I want to ask, since you are proposing a model. What would disconfirm this model? What would falsify it?

Jacobsen: A falsification would be a successful post-2016 leader who reduces polarization and does not optimize for attention.

Rauhauser: That is one alternative. You are asking how to disprove the model by counterexample. I need time to think about that. I am not sure you can fully falsify it. There may be alternatives, as the one Matt described, but I need more time to assess how to invalidate the underlying concepts.

Jacobsen: From a scientific standpoint, proposing a falsification criterion is essential.

Tsukerman: There is a great deal to unpack here. It would be invaluable for Matt to circulate his paper to everyone. With that background, we could have a more detailed follow-up discussion and delve deeper into the specifics.

Pearce: Irina directed me toward sports sponsorship, which I had not previously considered in my framework. The more I think about it, the more it seems a socially harmful and dangerous direction. It fits squarely within identity monetization, and I had not treated it as a case before. That is an important addition.

Rauhauser: What I can contribute is qualitative insight from lived experience—examples of how these dynamics unfold over time.

Jacobsen: Many of these movements get hijacked.

Rauhauser: Exactly. I am currently dealing with a civil rights case in Michigan in which a leaderless movement was hijacked and drawn into QAnon.

Tsukerman: That would be an excellent topic to explore in more depth in a follow-up conversation.

Jacobsen: Thank you very much for the opportunity and your time, everyone.

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