Good evening and welcome to Critical Cult News, the weekly news program where we offer not only facts and events, but analysis of the cultic or coercive elements contained in them. After each story, I will pause and consider comments from you the viewers, or answer any questions I might be able to about the report. In our first two stories tonight, we’re going to highlight the recovery side of the cult experience. For our opening segment, we look at the world of conspiracy theories and the people who become wrapped up in them.
While there has been much ado over the facts, misinformation and completely outlandish claims that most conspiracy theorists embrace, when viewed through the lens of psychology, the world of conspiracy theorists becomes a landscape of stress, anxiety, depression and unresolved trauma being wound up tighter and tighter through the echo chamber effect, sometimes to the point of clinical delusion and paranoia. Like with groups such as Scientology, the public conversations about conspiracy theorists tend to focus on their oddball beliefs and how ridiculous, humorous and outlandish they are. However, and this really can’t be stressed enough, the underlying and often ignored danger of conspiratorial thinking is the long-lasting psychological impact they can have and the drastic effects this can have on people’s relationships and lives. People who begin down the path of 9/11 Truth, QAnon, anti-vaccination propaganda and even Flat Earth become less and less connected with objective reality and find themselves immersed in an alternative world where government leaders are not just corrupt individuals but represent lizard people from another dimension who drink blood and harvest adrenochrome from baby farms on remote islands where pedophiles roam free. Routine school lessons in geography, history and science are reimagined to be dark indoctrination of our children where conspiracists claim they are being fed a steady stream of vicious and knowing lies to warp their small brains into conformity and compliance with Big Brother’s authoritarian demands. The most telling indication that you are talking to a conspiracy theorist is when you attempt to debunk their claims. Any points of fact or evidence presented to a conspiracy theorist will simply be woven into the fabric of their paranoid narrative, turning you into either a sheeple or “part of the problem” in the process. There seems to be no winning these arguments and no way to change their minds. But is that really true?
According to a new article published this week in The Guardian, Brent Lee spent hours each day consuming ‘truther’ content online and this went on for 15 years. Like many in the conspiracy world, going down one rabbit hole of misinformation quickly led to others branching off into state-sponsored false-flag operations against their own citizens, secret societies, UFOs, a faked moon landing, satanism and, of course, the deeply anti-Semitic threads of the global elite who supposedly rule us all from on-high. For Lee, he spent many hours online discussing the satanic symbols in London’s 2012 Olympics opening ceremony. Yet, something changed in 2018 when his psychological hunger for the intrigue and groupthink slowly started turning over to disgust, finding the new wave of online conspiracies such as PizzaGate and the QAnon movement to be increasingly implausible. He said to the Guardian: “I was sick of it. I felt, I can’t deal with hearing this any more because it’s no longer what I believe, so I just logged off the internet.” When he talks about it now, he sheepishly admits, “I cringe at all this now.”
While conspiracy theorists have long been ridiculed and considered a sort of fringe element of society lurking in their basements and gathering in echo chambers on social media, recent polling indicates these ideas are not so fringe anymore and are, in fact, taking over the hearts and minds of far too many rational people who would otherwise similarly cringe at the idea of believing in aliens impregnating human women or vampires stalking city streets. A 2020 Ipsos poll found that 17% of Americans believed “a group of Satan-worshiping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media.” This and a seemingly infinite number of variations are put forth daily on the internet in the conspiracy chat forums, meetups and even real-world gatherings of the various brands of conspiracy theorists. In the US, the influence of QAnon has shifted from the fringes to the mainstream, and social media has been flooded with the group’s misinformation.
In 2003, Lee was a 24-year old musician working in a garage in Peterborough when he downloaded a series of videos that offered alternative perspectives on 9/11. He soon learned that the Sept 11, 2001 terrorist attack against the US was actually a false flag operation, meaning the US government had covertly planned and then executed the airplane hijackings and subsequent attacks, than blamed the whole thing on a group of innocent Islamic terrorists who would be convenient pattsies for the government’s crime. Why would the US government kills thousands of its own citizens this way? Because this would then justify a military invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. While this cart-before-the-horse-but-also-after-it kind of thinking is typical of most conspiracy theories, the illogical trail of information leading to these conclusions are rarely questioned by those who are driven emotionally to distrust authority and do not want war. From accepting this premise of a false flag operation, it was an easy sell to convince Lee that secret societies actually operate behind the scenes of governments and major corporations like puppet masters, pulling the strings of the rich and powerful and making the common man’s life a living hell of indentured servitude. Once you commit to believing that George Bush and John Kerry engaged in satanic rituals in the basement of their Yale University fraternity, you’re primed to believe just about anything. As Lee said, “Once you’ve been swayed by these arguments, it’s easy to just keep going down the rabbit hole, finding more dots to connect. Once you have such a skewed view of the world, you can be convinced of other stuff.”
Now Lee is trying to help other conspiracy theorists to question their worldview. He will address a conference in Poland on disinformation this month and has started a podcast about conspiracy theories, deconstructing why he held these beliefs so fervently and why he was so deluded. He says that education is key to preventing the spread of nonsense like QAnon, similarly to how vaccines are key to preventing illness. He said, “I wasn’t taught how to assess information or how to do research. I don’t think I lacked intelligence but I was very naive about politics and how the world actually works.” And that is an all-too-common thread throughout the conspiracy world, where individuals who have no real understanding of geopolitics or international finance, but think someone can easily explain these vastly complicated subjects to them in a few hours on YouTube.
Lee claimed he had a disrupted education. He grew up as an Air Force brat on a German military base with his English mother and American father, was expelled from a college in England for smoking weed and started playing in a band. He spent hours on music production on his computer and developed sophisticated internet skills, at a time when most people were barely online. This gave him early access to sites run by conspiracy theorists such as David Icke; soon he was spending nine hours at a stretch consuming truther content online. He tried to connect his family and friends with this information but they weren’t interested, so Lee dove further into the conspiracy world by spending more and more time online, engaging in the conspiracy echo chambers about how the Freemasons and Illuminati had invaded every level of government around the world.
When the 7/7 attacks took place in London in 2005, killing 52 people, Lee was online, searching with fellow truthers for evidence that the terror attack was orchestrated by the UK government. They examined footage of the attackers going to the train station in Luton and were made suspicious by the way railings appeared to slice through the leg of one of the attackers; they decided the image had been Photoshopped before being released by the police. Now he acknowledges that the glitches might simply have been the result of shaky CCTV technology rather than the work of cultist masterminds.
He spent months building an alternative explanation for the attacks and disseminating his theories through his blog. But what is often unclear to people outside the conspiracy community is how its members are often driven by a desire to do good in the world and change things for the better. As Lee sad,”I’m ashamed of putting so many lies out there. I didn’t mean to lie, I just had the wrong picture. I wanted to find the real people who had organized the attacks; I wanted justice for the victims. But I was wrong and it took away guilt from the real perpetrators, people who did something atrocious.”
While the causes of conspiracy thinking have been examined and categorized into many different reasons, such as emotional trauma, a lack of understanding of the complexities of modern life, and even postmodern academic theories, Naomi Klein suggests in a new book on the subject called Doppleganger that a conspiracies scratch an itch we all have related to injustice and the feelings of helplessness which accompany personal tragedies, disasters and complex human situations such as inflation and war. Conspiracists have a “fantasy of justice”, hoping that the evil-doing elites can be arrested and stopped. Klein writes: “Conspiracy theorists get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right. The feeling that every human misery is someone else’s profit…the feeling that important truths are being hidden.” She quotes digital journalism scholar Marcus Gilroy-Ware’s conclusion that: “Conspiracy theories are a misfiring of a healthy and justifiable political instinct: suspicion.”
As with membership in any destructive cult, the fervency of belief and the euphoria of new discovery can sooner or later become replaced by pessimism and doubt about what is being presented. For Lee, this began in 2012 when Alex Jones claimed the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax and that no one had actually died. Jones has since been sued for this claim by the families of the murdered children and lost, owing millions in as-yet-unpaid damages while Jones continues peddling his lies, nutritional supplements and prepper gear to the gullible who still believe in him. When Lee then heard that Justin Bieber and Eminem were Illuminati clones and that a pedophile ring involving people at the highest level of the Democratic party was operating out of a Washington pizza restaurant, he thought to himself “Well that’s just stupid.”
When Covid triggered a popularity surge for conspiracy theorists, Lee was already done with it, and simply noted that if there really was a global movement working to establish a new world order through the pandemic, they were going about it in a strikingly ill-coordinated and muddled manner. As Lee correctly observed, “The governments weren’t acting in lockstep with each other. There was no well-oiled machine; it was disorganized. No one was in charge.” But “Just like 9/11 brought people into conspiracies, Covid was another moment when people were scared and wanted answers, and they found conspiracy influencers saying: ‘Don’t worry about it, it’s not real.'” and that was the appeal in the first place.
Since leaving the conspiracy echo chambers behind, Lee has developed a sharp clarity about the self-interested financial motivations of conspiracists who work to monetise their online presence with increasingly wild, clickbaity dispatches. “It’s a big problem that’s getting much worse. People are being manipulated with misinformation,” he says. He was disturbed by the death in 2021 of Ashli Babbitt, the woman shot by a police officer during the 6 January riots inside the US Capitol. Her Twitter feed was full of references to QAnon conspiracies. “That could have been me or my partner,” he says of Babbitt. “She believed what we believed. That’s what made me think I should speak out, tell my story to help bring other conspiracists out, so they don’t become the next Ashli.”
Alexandre Alaphilippe, executive director of EU DisinfoLab, has invited Lee to speak to academics and regulators at a conference on tackling the spread of online misinformation. “Policy researchers sometimes forget the real impact on human lives. We’re no longer talking about minor fringe movements; radicalisation is spreading through a complex system of beliefs. It’s not something that should be taken lightly.”
As a former conspiracist, Lee hopes he can leverage his experience and understanding of the conspiracy mindset to help people still caught up in these beliefs. Rather than antagonizing them, he is able to take a more empathetic approach. “These ideas aren’t alien to me – they are second nature. Most conspiracists want a better world. They think something bad has happened, and they want to expose it. I think if you can lean into that with them, and say: ‘Yes, I understand why that would worry you, but perhaps it’s not actually what’s happening.’ I think that’s a better way to approach it.”
Lee understands at this point that it’s not an easy fix. Yelling and screaming and getting upset or laughing at conspiracy theorists is not how to deal with them. As Lee puts it “I usually tell friends and family members: ‘You are the best person to do it. They will trust and respect you more than any stranger who challenges them, so you are going to have to familiarize yourself with their beliefs. You also know how far you can push them before they get annoyed, don’t cross that line. Keep them close, be respectful and remind them that you value their concerns’.”
This doesn’t mean it’s easy to do, though, as Lee learned when he tried to deconvert his fellow online fanatics. That didn’t go over well and he found himself ostracized from that same community he used to be so deeply part of. “My first intention was just to bring my friends back out of the rabbit hole – that backfired on me. They have completely cut me off, treated me like a pariah.” But that doesn’t mean the work is useless or without reward. “There are friends and family of people caught up in this who contact me to say: ‘Thank you for sharing this: you really believed in all this craziness, you were super deep but you came out – and this gives us hope.'”
And indeed there is hope but not without challenge. Our complex modern world is sometimes just too much for some people to deal with and they would rather retreat into an easily understood fantasy than face that uncertainty. And that is why Lee and others who have come out of the conspiracy minded fog, like ex-cult members, often feel compelled to help their former fellows. We at CCN applaud this effort, as we are part of it ourselves in our daily work.
And now for our second story this evening, we go across the world to another story of cult survival, this time a Buddhist group in New Zealand.
According to reporting this week from ABC Australia, a Buddhist cult known as Jin-Gang-Dhyana has been practicing in Hobart for decades under the direction of Wang Xin De, better known as Master Wang. Operating a live-in compound, it took second generation member Richard Siu 25 years to finally escape, not because of physical barriers but because as a second generation member raised in the cult, Siu simply had no other life outside of the daily routine of the cult nor was he ever offered one.
He did not receive a formal education as a child, grew up with little contact with the broader community and spent part of his young adult life in effective isolation in a home owned by the group’s leader.
As Richard put it: “I feel like my first 25 years of my life have been robbed by the Buddhists, which I’ll never get back. But on the plus side, I just keep going forward.”
Master Wang is worshiped by his followers as a living Buddha. Its headquarters are in Hobart but the group has centers around the world. Originally born in Hong Kong, Richard was taken by his grandmother to one of the cult’s properties in New Zealand and raised there by her and gurus. What did his days consist of?
“Generally we get up pretty early in the morning, do some Buddhist rituals, and then we do martial arts, and then basically just either learn or copy the teachings from the master,” Richard said.
There was no formal education for Richard, nor even an effort to provide one despite the fact that it’s illegal in New Zealand to not enroll a child in school and have them attend. Now 34 years old, Richard lived in isolation for much of his youth. He would need written permission from Master Wang to do such simple things as go to the supermarket, but he was praised for improving view counts on the group’s YouTube channel by watching videos over and over again.
As with many cult escapees, Richard’s doubts started early but grew slowly. As he said to ABC News, “When you start looking at the outside world, you just start feeling like more and more things just don’t add up, but in the group you’re not allowed to question anything.
In his 20s, Richard moved to Hobart to help with a major Jin-Gang-Dhyana event and do maintenance on properties associated with the group’s $40 million asset portfolio.
Richard lived in a property owned by Mr Wang, where he said he was mostly alone without access to a mobile phone or entertainment beyond religious texts and a radio. He said gurus would regularly visit to check he was still in the property and collect his handwritten reflections and requests to his leader.
He alleged his diet was restricted as part of his spiritual practice.
“The master just said as part of your training you just eat bread, and that’s all I had for quite a few months,” Richard said.
In other words, Richard was in a prison without bars.
“They said it was part of your training because they always say in ancient times the Buddha was living a simple and kind of harsh life.”
Frustrated, bored and lonely, Richard longed to leave. There were no physical barriers stopping him from exiting the group, but without an education, social connections or money, he felt stuck.
“Technically you can go but it’s more like the mental, the psychological pressure that you’re not supposed to leave,” he said.
Richard is not the only one to have escaped from the Hobart compound and spoken out. In August, Camille Kwan of Hong Kong told ABC News her relationship with her adult son had been affected by restrictions placed on him by Master Wang after he moved to Hobart to live in a temple. For example, according to messages sent to Ms. Kwan by her son, he encouraged her to get Master Wang’s permission to see him while she visited Hobart.
“He keeps saying [they will] not allow him to go out this [temple] building, because the outside world hasn’t been blessed by master,” Camille said at the time.
The allegations of restrictions were denied by Philip and Mr Wang, both of whom accused Camille of “verbal violence”. Another Jin-Gang-Dhyana follower also accused the ABC of verbal violence after the story was published. Camille, who practised Jin-Gang-Dhyana Buddhism for decades, has consulted with Cult Information and Family Support president Tore Klevjer, who has labeled the group as “spiritually abusive”.
“The similarities that we see between domestic abuse […] or cult-like environments are quite similar,” Mr Klevjer said.
“There’s the love bombing and time when the person is the center of the universe, and then their own autonomy is gradually stripped away over a period of time, to the point where they’re completely reliant on the group and on the teachings of the leader.”
Richard eventually decided his prison without bars was something he didn’t want to stay trapped in and he began venturing out covertly. His first destination was a library within walking distance of his home. He left through his back window and made his way cross country rather than use the roads.
“It was kind of terrifying. Especially when you come back, you don’t know whether someone will be at the door. So it just kind of has to be pretty quick, and almost like trying to do something dodgy.”
Soon visiting the library became an almost daily occurrence. To avoid detection, Richard told the guru who checked on him that he was meditating each afternoon and couldn’t be disturbed. Finally, in July 2014, Richard did something drastic. He emailed Tasmania Police.
“I am writing to ask for advice on seeking the appropriate assistance so that I can leave a religious organization that has been abusing me since my early childhood,” the email started. “I am not allowed to leave the house or communicate with anyone ‘from the outside’, and someone randomly comes to check and make sure I do not leave the house. They have also confiscated (or stolen?) all of my ID documents, to ensure I cannot go anywhere or do anything.”
Police met with Richard at the Rosny Library within a week, but he did not want an investigation – he wanted support to leave. So he next turned to a neighbor, who gave him some money and drove him to temporary accommodation in New Norfolk, a town about an hour from Hobart.
Richard was afraid of punishment, especially shunning, due to his actions. As he described, “I remember going to sleep and thinking ‘oh, what have I done now’, because you’re in this same situation for like 25 years and now you’re in a totally different situation. And given I grew up with the Buddhist group my whole life, basically I’ve cut off everyone that I’ve ever known, and everyone from now on is people that I haven’t known before.”
Thankfully, it was at another library that Richard found the foundations for his new life while trying to write a job resume. A volunteer named Michelle Browning worked with him after finding out about his lack of education or work experience. Finding out that he had gotten away from the cult but was staying at a local hostel, she invited Richard to come stay with her and her husband, Tony. Richard became Tony’s caregiver while the former local footballer recovered from a hip replacement.
The Brownings’ intervention changed his life. Tony and Michelle helped Richard find a job and let him live with them rent-free for more than three years while he studied at TAFE and then the University of Tasmania.
Richard had to be taught basic life skills when he left the Jin-Gang-Dhyana group. They also helped him get basic vaccinations and taught him everyday life skills – like how to ride a bike and dress for events. “After 25 years in almost social isolation, I feel like they helped me a great deal by learning the ropes on how to socialize,” Richard said.
Richard now refers to Tony and Michelle Browning as his mum and dad, and Tony said the feeling was mutual.
“He’s part of the family, he comes to all the functions and things like that, and Christmas parties,” Tony said.
And now Richard works full-time, spends his weekends hiking and travels when he can. He runs a Facebook page dedicated to his photography and is in the process of building a house with his partner of two years.
“As most people know, Buddhism teaches kindness, patience, and being compassionate, and I feel like that is still instilled in me since a young age. The irony is that kind of helped me through being stuck in the Buddhist group as well. So there’s one positive thing, but on the downside, I will say, I’ll never get back 25 years of my life.”
We often see the victims of cults but this week we wanted to focus a little bit more on the other side – the recovery angle. Being imprisoned for doing nothing wrong, spending the most formative years of your life under the thumb of a cult leader who only sees you as valuable for what you can do for him, is a fate no one deserves. Wherever Richard’s parents and grandparents were, they were not there for Richard. For whatever selfish reason, they felt the young man could take care of himself while they attended to their own spiritual needs and took no responsibility whatsoever for the boy. This is no way to treat a child, especially your own, but that is the kind of behavior that destructive cults like Master Wang’s preach as moral and good. This is why we often refer to cults as a kind of opposite world where black is white, evil is good and children are only as valuable as they can serve the master. These groups hide in plain sight and are sometimes even lauded by the communities they are part of by people who can’t or won’t see what is really going on. We at CCN hope that by reporting on these stories, we can show that cults are not always exposed by front page news features and splashy headlines. Sometimes it is the quiet of an isolated retreat where members and their children are kept in enforced but quiet solitude, a kind of solitary confinement of the mind. This too is abuse and this too must stop.
And finally tonight, we go to the Philippines for a disturbing report of a cult leader under investigation for enforced child marriages.
And finally tonight, we go to the Philippines for a disturbing report of a cult leader under investigation for enforced child marriages.
Here’s what happened: On a remote island in war-torn southern Philippines, Jey Rence Quilario is considered the reincarnation of “Santo Nino,” meaning he is the reincarnated baby Jesus. He has led a group known as the Socorro Bayanihan Services Inc or SBSI. But a Senate investigation this week revealed a trail of sexual violence, child brides, paedophilia and drug trafficking that all leads back to this self-styled Messiah.
It started last week in Manilla, when a Senate panel cited Quilario in contempt along with three of his followers, for refusing to own up to allegations from four witnesses that they ordered child marriages in their island community in Socorro town.
Four witnesses, including a 15-year-old girl who said she was married off and raped last year, all told senators during a joint hearing that SBSI leaders require girls 12 and older to wed adult men under the threat of “going to hell.” This allegation was repeatedly denied by Quilario and his four followers.
The contempt charge led to detainment for the cult leader and his followers while the Senate hearings continued.
Children as young as 12 were married to adults, repeatedly raped, kept from school, forced to train as soldiers and physically punished by adults, all in a remote location under the leadership of Quilario, who is a self-named Messiah who likes to be called “Senior Agila.”
One 15-year old girl claimed Quilario “authorized” the rape of children in the organization, which need to be done three days after their marriage “or else we will go to hell.” This same treatment was given to underage boys in the group who were pressured into sleeping with the wives chosen for them by the group’s leaders, with final approval being given for all marriages by Quilario himself.
Members of a task force created by Socorro Mayor Riza Timcang to investigate the group’s activities said that they were able to confirm several allegations during a five-day investigation this year, ultimately leading to the Senate investigation now underway.
Just one day after the contempt charge, on September 29, the Philippines Department of Environment and Natural Resources suspended its agreement with the SBSI which allowed the group the use of over 300 hectares of protected area in Surigao del Norte. Environment Secretary Antonia Loyzaga issued the suspension, stating they were now looking into the “gross violations of the terms and conditions of the Protected Area Community-Based Resource Management Agreement.”
Senator Risa Hontiveros said “This is a harrowing story of rape, sexual violence, child abuse, forced marriage perpetrated on minors by a cult. This cult is armed and dangerous. We are talking about over a thousand young people in the hands of a deceitful, cruel and abusive cult.”
Mr Quilario, only 22 years old, is the leader of the quasi-religious group which has roots in Socorro, an island town in Surigao del Norte province with a population of just over 25,000. He is the son of a farmer and dropped out of secondary school, spending his teenage years as an apprentice to Rosalina Taruc, who founded SBSI as a civic organization in 1980. Ms Taruc designated Quilario as her successor in 2019. He also inherited from her ALT Entertainment, a multimedia production company that has its own radio station in Socorro.
After the hilltop settlement was wracked by a series of earthquakes in 2019, the SBSI started morphing into a cult. Quilario preached that the earthquakes were a sign of the Apocalypse and that he was the savior who could provide people with shelter in the mountains of Socorro.
The SBSI currently has 3,500 members, including some 1,600 children whom Ms Hontiveros and child rights activists are now trying to save.
Ms Hontiveros, who chairs the Senate committee on women, children, family relations and gender equality, opened an investigation into Mr Quilario after at least eight children managed to escape his mountain enclave in Socorro and provided harrowing accounts of what they allegedly went through.
Chloe, 15, said Mr Quilario forced her to marry a 21-year-old man when she was only 13. She said Mr Quilario then told her husband he “has the right to rape her” because they were already married. Chloe said she begged her parents to break up her marriage, but they refused, saying it was the will of “the Messiah.”
Ms Hontiveros said Mr Quilario himself would order some of the child brides to sleep with him to be “saved on the day of judgment”, and beat them up if they refused.
“(Cult leaders) would detain them for days inside what they called a ‘foxhole’. They would paddle them. They would force them to swim to what they called ‘aroma beach’, which is a dug-up area filled with feces and urine,” she said.
At a Senate hearing on Thursday, Jane said she was 14 when Mr Quilario forced her to marry an 18-year-old whom she had never met.
She said Mr Quilario would list down girls as young as 12 and boys aged 18 or older, and pick “pairs approved by God”. Mr Quilario treated his settlement like the biblical Noah’s Ark, said Jane. Everyone must enter in pairs, she said.
On top of the charges of sexual abuse of minors, Ms Hontiveros said Quilario sustains his cult via drug trafficking. He reportedly has a private army of some 150 men and children he calls “Agilas” (which means eagles), with himself being “Senior Agila.”
One of the victims testified: “I witnessed a situation where a girl tried to escape, and we, as part of the Agila Squad, chased after her and forcefully brought her back.”
The main way Quilario used his position to advantage was after the devastating earthquakes and social upheaval and chaos which followed in their wake. The natural disasters not only unhoused many families but strained the local government to the breaking point where they could not provide shelter and care for the thousands who needed it. The SBSI presented itself as a group which could help and then took control of the lives of those who reached for that help. The group then turned on civic leaders and officials and got in the way of recovery efforts.
One official stated the SBSI has been committing a “wanton extraction of resources” by chopping trees and damaging water pipes in the Mahambong watershed, an important source of water in Socorro town near the SBSI headquarters.
“SBSI members have been blocking the entry of Socorro water district officials, saying outright that the land does not belong to them but to their god.”
And so we see the opportunism and disaster that can quickly uproot societal norms and laws, especially in regions where resources and help are few and far between. Religious fanatics with guns and people to use them take control in regions where law and order have been lost. It can take years to rebuild even under the best of leadership and conditions. Socorro, unfortunately, is not the best of such conditions and it has taken years for these victims to find the help they need. This is but a microcosm of what can happen on much larger scales during times of social upheaval, making this story a cautionary tale we should all pay attention to.
Thank you for watching tonight. As always, we appreciate your viewership and support and hope you found this informative, educational and entertaining. Good night.
Sources:
Conspiracy theorists
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/oct/04/escape-from-the-rabbit-hole-the-conspiracy-theorist-who-abandoned-his-dangerous-beliefs
Buddhist cult escapee
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-02/jin-gang-dhyana-richard-siu-730-cult-buddhism/102917754
Socorro Phillipines cult
https://www.rappler.com/nation/mindanao/denr-suspends-socorro-bayanihan-services-agreement-protected-area-surigao-del-norte/
https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/1839485/4-members-of-surigao-cult-to-testify-vs-leader