Cults
America has produced more destructive cults than any other Western democracy. This section covers thirteen articles on seven groups — Jonestown Waco Heaven's Gate NXIVM and more — plus the mechanics of how cults control people.
Cults
Keith Raniere built a sex trafficking operation inside an Albany self-help company — branding women with his initials and sentenced to 120 years after a 2019 federal conviction.
Cults
Seven American cults — from Jonestown's 918 dead to NXIVM's branded women — reveal the same structural failure: a system that won't stop exploitation dressed as religion.
Cults
David Berg's Children of God cult operated in over 100 countries and built child sexual abuse into its doctrine — producing thousands of survivors still reckoning with the damage.
Cults
In 1984, Rajneeshee followers poisoned 751 people in The Dalles, Oregon — deliberately contaminating salad bars to swing a county election in the largest bioterror attack in U.S. history.
Cults
The 1993 Waco siege ended in fire — 76 dead inside Mount Carmel Center including 25 children — after a 51-day standoff between the FBI and David Koresh's Branch Davidians.
Cults
In March 1997, 39 members of Heaven's Gate died in a San Diego mansion — dressed in matching Nike sneakers, convinced a spacecraft was coming to collect them.
Cults
Charles Manson ordered the 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders from a ranch in the Santa Susana Pass — seven dead and a cultural myth that outlived the facts by decades.
Cults
On November 18, 1978, 918 Americans died in the Guyanese jungle — 304 of them children — in the largest deliberate mass death of U.S. civilians before 9/11.