P Diddy

Current news certainly makes it seem like he was potentially worse than Jeffrey Epstein in terms of sex trafficking.

And that's before adding in the potential that he may be a criminal enterprise manager and alleged murderer.

Vince McMahon

The WWE is no stranger to scandals. In fact, its founding as the Western Wrestling Federation was mired in its own controversies. This is true of every incarnation as it grew and morphed.

However, the current accusations against McMahon, if true, make most of the other ones seem petty and unimportant. Sex-trafficking on the level of cults? Not a good look.

Jeffrey Epstein

There is evidence of a cover-up, for sure. I dunno that I believe he was assassinated so much as I believe the prison system is so broken that a man on suicide watch was able to hang himself simply because of how poorly prisons are run.

Princess Diana

The official narrative is that while fleeing from papparazzi who were aggressively following, her driver lost control and crashed, killing her.

Immediately people suspected murder, even though there is no evidence to support that theory.

Also, what motive would the royal family have? Just racism? Kinda thin, especially since the scandals of Prince Charles the philanderer  and Prince Andrew the child rapist were already much worse in in the public eye.

Waco/David Koresh

The ensuing anti-government sentiments of far-right conspiracy-theorists can forge a direct path between Waco and the January 6th attempts to overthrow the US government

Vaccine Skepticism

Former doctor Andrew Wakefield did a now-debunked and completely retracted study linking MMR to Autism. That study was later found faulty for a number of reasons, including fraudulent math and reports of abuse by test subjects. Wakefield then lost his license to practice medicine.

Current presidential candidate, and long-time anti-science crusader Robert Kennedy Jr has risen to fame recently because of his insistence that the original study was correct and that all the science showing safety for MMR is actually a conspiracy to cover up the link.

Princess Kate

While undergoing chemo for cancer, Princess Catherine of Wales left the public eye. But the Royal Family kept that a secret, so rumors of all kinds of weird shit proliferated.

Scientology

It's officially a religion in the UK, Australia, and Italy, and was only granted that status in the US in 1993.

Almost nowhere else in the world has allowed Scientology to be recognized. In fact, in places like Germany and France it is considered a dangerous cult. Because it is.

Hubbard created the religion both to protect himself from lawsuits because he was practicing medicine without a license, and to gain money from hapless rubes because he was an abject failure as a sci-fi writer.

Moon-landing skepticism

One area where my bias will be clear - people who believe the moon landing was fake are wrong. Just flat wrong.

Good News International

For all the people who thought Jonestown was a one-off, or that the Moonies or Aum Shinrikyo or the Children of God or the Order of the Solar Temple or... were one-offs

may I present to you

"Pastor" Paul Mackenzie?

Literally hundreds of followers, many of whom are/were children have been and are currently starving to death and buried in mass graves in the Kenyan wilderness.

Many of the dead were also strangled, beaten, or suffocated for resisting the starvation murder.

Hundreds more are still missing.

They STARTED with the children.

Jonestown

Until recently, this was the cult with the highest death total from a mass suicide

Order of the Solar Temple

Canadian mass suicide cult with pseudo-Christian beliefs

Like a number of smaller cults, it started with personal magnetism of a charismatic leader who then began to systematically abuse his followers.

Providence/JMS/

Christian Gospel Mission

Jung Myung-seok in South Korea preaches the divinity of Jung as the second coming of the Messiah.

Jung is a convicted rapist, and appears to be using his supposed divinity to have sex with young girls.

Children of God

This cult is famous mostly because some children who were raised in the cult are now Hollywood celebrities.

This started as a "youth group" by its founder David Berg, who seems to have used it, like Jung Myung-seok, to sexually assault children and get away with it.

Chemtrails

Airplanes leave behind something called a contrail, which is condensed water in the air that is forced into long clouds by the air pressure flowing over the wings of a plane.

This is now corrupted and people think jets are effectively crop-dusting all of humanity with chemicals to force compliance or control the weather or otherwise poison humanity.

Area 51 / UFO / UAP

David Grusch is not a credible source by any reasonable measure, and the organization he worked for was created by, staffed by, and paid by conspiracy theory people with an agenda. Despite claims to being open and honest, that particular group of people does not conduct actual science and relies entirely on eye-witness accounts, which are the single worst pieces of evidence in existence. Eye-witnesses are unreliable at best.

I recommend coming at this from a completely different direction.

MK-Ultra

The CIA's secret program to work on mind control, one of several secret CIA-sponsored programs conducting unscientific and technically illegal research on American subjects

There was a story called The Manchurian Candidate that involves brainwashing and mind control, and the CIA was worried that Communists were doing just that. This program was intended to counter Soviet "mind control."

Sarah Lawrence college

And other coverups of decades of sexual abuse

This is how conspiracies actually operate most of the time. Something is discovered by the people in power about a person or group that is well-liked, not believed by those people, and then evidence for that thing is ignored or denied. Over time this cover-up grows and morphs. This is how the Catholic Church was able to cover for priests, how the USA Olympics allowed a doctor to sexually assault gymnasts, and how local high school football teams can get away with assaulting their teammates.

Heaven's Gate

We talked about this last week a bit, but the cult leader believed that salvation came only when human bodies were willfully abandoned so they could join the lifeforms on a spaceship that was trailing the comet Hale-Bopp.

Christian Apocalyptic Fundamentalism meets UFOlogy and merges the two.

This is not the first, nor last, to suggest the connection. In fact, Scientology was created by mostly failed sci-fi writer whose stories of alien cultures formed the basis of his "religious" texts. Most Western countries have banned Scientology and refuse to recognize it as a religion.

AI Conspiracy Theories

Terminator and other IPs like it have created intense fears of robots run amok. This fear of automation goes back much further. Even Mary Shelley's Frankenstein sort of falls into this line of fear.

Deciphering truths from lies is already hard where humanity is concerned. Adding non-human intelligence into the mix only makes it worse.

Cult of Mother God

Very recent case that has its own documentary already out. The woman, Mother God, died and her body was carted around by believers, who used her as a venerated decoration.

They believe she is billions of years old and that she has been reincarnated throughout history. This is the same kind of messianic beliefs common to most cults.

The Family

Australian syncretic cult famous for kidnapping children and physically, chemically, and sexually abusing them, all in the name of a woman who claimed to be Jesus reincarnated.

(Anne Hamilton-Byrne, born Grace Edwards)

Lots of cult leaders who change their names, eh? In the end, the only punishment she got was a $5000 slap on the wrist. Gross.

MH370

Malaysia Airlines flight that disappeared.

Pieces of it have been found, but, crucially, none of the flight data or cockpit recorders, nor bodies of passengers or crew. Those parts and debris have spanned from Madagascar on the western edge of the Indian Ocean to Tasmania on the eastern edge. That's 800 miles long than Maine to Hawaii.

The Indian Ocean is 27,243,000 square miles, and so far only the most likely 46,000 square miles have been searched.

For comparison, that means that 27,197,000 square miles still remain unsearched, about 120,000 of which are the most likely places left, 3 times the size of where they've already searched, and increasingly further away from where they think it actually crashed.

Flat Earth

I almost cannot believe there are people out there who believe the Earth is flat. But there are.

Manson Family

Ultimately a cult of personality. 

STD Studies

Tuskegee Experiment in the US got a lot of press, but the bigger study was conducted on Guatemalan citizens forcibly given STD bacterial strains

Radium Girls

Radium luminesces and holds light when "charged." Older watches would use radium on the hands to allow night reading of the time. The painters, often young women, developed cancers from the radioactivity, which was covered up for decades by the Radium Dial Company.

Aum Shinrikyo

Japanese death cult that actually spread sarin gas in terror attacks on Japanese subways. Prosecutors are unsure about the motives, floating ideas like distraction or attempted assassination of police and judges.

As with a few of the other cults, the leader fancies himself a reincarnation of a savior/messiah.

David Koresh in Waco made similar claims, as have dozens if not hundreds of other cult leaders.