A media archive

Most of the substantive first-person material on ISTA is spoken rather than written — roughly seven hours of it, spread across podcasts, a conference panel, and evidence to an Australian parliamentary inquiry. That is a lot to sit through when you are trying to answer one question.

The new media archive summarises all seven recordings and timestamps the specific moments, so you can go to the two minutes you need instead of the two hours you don’t. It covers Dr. Steven Hassan’s statement, both parts of the A Little Bit Culty interview with Cara Cordoni and “Lina”, Anke Richter’s evidence to the Victorian Parliament inquiry, the Decult 2024 panel on ISTA and Highden, Rachel Bernstein’s IndoctriNation interview, and Chris Shelton’s Speaking of Cults discussion.

The summaries are our own, and we have deliberately kept direct quotation to a minimum. The only publicly available transcripts for most of these recordings are machine-generated captions, which are unreliable on names and exact wording. We would rather point you at the moment in the recording than put approximate words in someone’s mouth. Every recording stays with its original publisher — please watch it there.

Transcripts for the video exhibits

All four video exhibits now have written transcripts on the page.

Three of them are spoken in Hebrew and carry English subtitles burned into the video; for those, the transcript reproduces the on-screen subtitles. The English-language clip has a transcript prepared from its audio and also ships captions in the player, so the content is now available to screen readers and to anyone who would rather read than watch.

One point of substance. The on-screen subtitles on the clip about ISTA’s founder do not caption every sentence, and one of the uncaptioned remarks is favourable to him. We have included it in the notes underneath. Leaving out a sympathetic line while keeping the critical ones would misrepresent the recording, and this site is not useful to anyone if it does that.

Four corrections

While sourcing the above we checked our own details against the originals and found four wrong:

• Dr. Steven Hassan’s video statement is 6 minutes 54 seconds, not the 14 minutes we had stated on two pages.
• The Decult 2024 panel is 58 minutes, not 32.
• Anke Richter’s ISTA section begins at 2:08, not 2:28. Five pages linked to the later timestamp.
• Several items were missing publication dates, which have been added.

None of these change any substantive claim, but they were wrong and they are ours, so they are worth naming. If you find anything else that is inaccurate, please tell us — corrections are the point of publishing a standing invitation for them.