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"Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry"

Aired on Thursday, November 26th.

Our guest is the noted psychiatrist and historian Robert Jay Lifton; he's written more than twenty books, including the National Book Award-winning "Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima" as well as "The Nazi Doctors." He joins us to discuss his new book, which is just out. It is "Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry." As was noted of this work by the author and journalist James Carroll: "For decades, Robert Jay Lifton's work on the sources and dangers of inhuman zealotry -- brainwashers, mass murderers, religious extremists, political cultists -- has been a bulwark of democratic liberalism, a touchstone of public sanity. Now, with this selection of classic passages, in urgent combination with fresh reflections, Lifton has given us precisely what we need to understand, resist, and survive the unmoored chaos of the age of Trump. Lifton's writing, a long-established treasure, has never mattered more."

Rich Fisher passed through KWGS about thirty years ago, and just never left. Today, he is the general manager of Public Radio Tulsa, and the host of KWGS’s public affairs program, StudioTulsa, which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in August 2012 . As host of StudioTulsa, Rich has conducted roughly four thousand long-form interviews with local, national, and international figures in the arts, humanities, sciences, and government. Very few interviews have gone smoothly. Despite this, he has been honored for his work by several organizations including the Governor's Arts Award for Media by the State Arts Council, a Harwelden Award from the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa, and was named one of the “99 Great Things About Oklahoma” in 2000 by Oklahoma Today magazine.
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