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

Using Science to Find Mysterious Creatures

The idea is that many of the cryptids might be real animals with some human exaggeration. For instance, krakens are similar to giant squid, which we have now seen in the wild. Drones have captured large lizards that were once thought extinct.

Love Has Won

Amy Carlson "Mother God" who claimed to be a reincarnated version of multiple famous religious leaders (and some celebrities). Actively used social media to attract followers.

UFO enthusiast and believer in 9/11 conspiracy theories.

Church of Bible Understanding / Olde Good Things

The Olde Good Things store is a front that funds the COBU, a New Religious Movement, who some people accuse of being a cult. Tens of millions of dollars supposedly used to help orphaned children, particularly two orphanages in Haiti, were instead used by the founder of the church for his own personal living expenses.

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.

OneTaste - The Institute of OM (Orgasmic Meditation)

In June 2025, the Founder and Sales Director were convicted of forced labor in connection with sex trafficking of employees to "customers." All businesses in the US were shut down after FBI investigation uncovered evidence of prostitution and sex trafficking. Sentencing has not happened yet and both women remain in prison awaiting appeals/sentencing hearings.

Moon-landing skepticism

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

Devil Worship via Music

And not just the usual suspects (Ozzy, Marilyn Manson), but also classical composers (Franz Liszt) and 1930s/40s/50s era blues musicians, almost exclusively Black men and women, (Leadbelly, Ma Rainey, Muddy Watters)

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.

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.

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.

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.

Zizians

"New" cult made up of gender nonconforming anti-AI tech nerds with unclassifiable beliefs that broadly align with progressive values

Manson Family

Ultimately a cult of personality. 

Curse Labubu

This appears to be a manufactured moral panic, primarily of traditional Christian groups, particularly those who became aware of Mesopotamian Pazuzu (a completely unrelated, but "sound alike" entity) after its namechecking in movies like The Exorcist.

Labubu is in the same vein of a lot of Japanese monster creatures, like Pokemon, in particular. Pokemon is literally pocket monsters. That said, many of the same fundamentalist groups also think the whole Pokemon franchise is Satanic.

Spiritual Warfare - Are Pokemon Demons?

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.

Salem Witch Trials

Mass hysteria leads people to believe unsubstantiated claims. Under pressure, people will confess to crimes they did not commit, and point at other innocent people just to lessen the pressure on them.

Satanic Panic

Psychology was given a black eye by therapists who either intentionally or unintentionally convinced children of abuse that did not happen. This, like the Salem Witch panic, caused others to follow suit.

Moral Panic as Political Strategy 

Trying not to be expressly political, but the articles shared used MAGA and its concerted efforts to blame immigrants, the news media, non-Christians, anyone with left of center political views, and those not conforming to standard heterodox sexuality as being demonic or evil or unAmerican, so as to sow fear and distrust.

Cryptids as Explanations

The article suggested that, much like Greek gods as the reason for thunder and the like, cryptids served a purpose to explain otherwise unexplainable or misunderstood natural phenomena

Cults = New Religious Movements

Specifically calling attention to the word "cult" as a negative term that stigmatizes people whose faith doesn't conform to standardly accepted beliefs.

The specific sub criteria, in a clinical language sense, for a cult is a "New Religious Movement, High Control Group."

High Control Group is specifically related to the amount of social control exerted upon its members, usually by a charismatic leader. Some High Control Groups are not expressly religious, and some New Religious Movements are not expressly high control. There is some overlap/wiggle room. It's why I've personally chosen to continue to use the more loaded/archaic term "cult."