Entertainment Made By Cults 

This is such a gem of a channel. One of the best videos I’ve seen in a while and I’m gonna share it around. Great work dude

If you want to avoid cults look out for something called love bombing. It's a very common and effective recruitment tool, imagine having a tough year or whatever and you go to a meeting or whatever for the first time and absolutely everyone just gives you a big hug and overloading your brain with the love chemicals. It's a very powerful feeling but remember that is often the first step to getting your time and money.

Those horses did not consent to being depicted in Scientology propaganda.

People really need to understand that cults, especially the leaders, smell your personal weaknesses like the predators that they are. The world needs more educational videos like this one.

The slam poetry bit actually went kinda hard especially "I wish I had an animated bodyyy", I kinda wanna sample it into my music now lol

It's weird that in the West that the Sarin Gas Attacks are not wildly discussed; not compared to Heavens Gate anyway. But in Japan, this act of terror had such an affect on the country and its new fascination with cults. If you have enjoyed a piece of Japanese fiction about cults then it's very likely that the aesthics of the cult were inspired by these attacks. By aesthetics, what I mean is that in the West our cult media is very reliant on imagery of devil worship, kidnapping, brainwashing and a general sense of malevolence. However the sarin gas attacks were from a group mostly seen as a benign. Which for me is so much creepier and I think the Japanese see it like that too. This sense that this group you mostly laughed at or barely thought of; one day killed a bunch of people and injured hundreds. If you have read IQ84 you may understand what I mean.

You know, the curious thing about Aum Shinrikyo was, there were some "highly intelligent" people coming from one of the best universities in Japan that joined this cult. They managed to produce their own "factory" to make sarin gas. Talk about intelligence used for wrong reasons....and the most annoying thing is that they still exist (under a different name)!!

In a strange way, it's comforting to me that the Westboro Baptist Church apparently can't find good singers...

I'm really happy you pointed out the Aum Shrinrikyo game was satire, alot of RU-vidrs in this field go surface level and tell people it's made by the cult itself.

Remember: you are not immune to cults, you are not immune to propaganda. yes, I'm talking to you, the one reading this. There is no one too smart to get hooked in. Always check your assumptions and beliefs. Always ask who benefits from you believing something.

The fact that the family claims marilyn monroe as one of their spirit people becomes a lot more uncomfortable if you remember that marilyn was jewish. so like,, they were claiming a jewish woman for their chrisitan fundementalist cult

Elvis Presley was extremely Christian, actually. When people called him the king, he said "there's only one king, and that's Jesus Christ." So, yeah, he was pretty religious.

The Mario jump sound effect while he is "butt jumping" made me laugh so hard too fricking good. Absolute gold

Can't believe this video is only sitting at about 2k views right now, you've got a great personality and the editing and animation is top-notch. Definitely didn't feel like I was watching a 1-hour video.

25:52 I listened to the whole recording and the thing that is the most haunting is at a point you here a bunch of kids crying then after a while you don't.

In 2002 I met 3 kids from the Australian chapter of The Family. They had no emotional intelligence for others and very screwed up. Angel, the older sister, was obviously the victim of sexual abuse, and lots of it. The oldest son, treated any female as if she was they to serve his demands, which were always sexual in nature. They stayed in my house for a week, then I moved out. I have no idea if their parents went to prison, for their involvement of things I found out about?

Considering Rael has a harem of women called "angels" who are chosen for their beauty and have the honor of having sex with Rael (the phrase "sex cult" being applied to the group for multiple reasons), it is absolutely in line with his thinking to want women to go topless in public. I mean I can't disagree BUT...

As a freelance video editor, I can appreciate how well edited this video is. You deserve way more subs than you have now

You literally have 100x the subscribers you did when you made this. That's so cool, good for you!

Great video. In 30yrs working as an unpaid Priest, I have often been asked about cults. I have always told people that the dividing line between a Church and a cult lies in study and reading. If the enquirer is encouraged to do their own background reading and study, and ask questions, well and good. If questions are discouraged and everything is done to the leaders own script with no questions allowed then it is probably a cult and it is time to get out.

206k more subs, plus one. You've come a LONG way in two years and wholly deserve the success. You remind me, your style, humor, verbal mannerisms, of a guy I knew in college twenty years ago. He was weird to put it mildly... SO COOL that YT recommended this video to me today (took them long enough).

Yeah, the whole "flirty fishing" thing is sexual exploitation as a recruitment tactic.

I feel horrible for singing along to the “S.O.S, my signal of distress” song that the family put out, especially when it was followed by the story about the abuse Davidito suffered at the hands of his father

"Hey, this bops" -> Some unlived themselves because of that -> "Oh, the song doesn't bop as hard anymore."

Even worse than the whole flying thing is the Breathairians. Those people claim that the can live on air without having to eat or drink water ROFL!!

21:08 Those aren't even Jewish people! Those are Greek Orthodox priests, which, you guessed it, is another flavor of Christianity. Well, maybe not to these guys, if you think that the Catholicism that you split off from a couple of decades ago is heretical because of which direction they stand, any branch of Christianity that you split off from 2,000 years ago is going to be completely alien to you. I don't get antisemitism. If you don't want to pray with any Jews, I have some bad news about the big guy hanging on a cross on the wall of your church....

"...asshopping over the lake of fire..." is one of the funniest things I've ever heard.

K, I didn't know cargo cults were a thing, but after all the mass suicides and murders of the previous cults they come off as simply adorable. It looks like they're just having a good time and I can respect that.

21:14 those guys aren't even jews, they are Orthodox priest jesus christ

Nicely done I am a Christian. I appreciate the use of the term Christian cult, because it is accurate, and many exist; I view them as wavering from the word of God and unbalanced in their views.

the saddest part about peoples temple band was that they played music for leo ryan day before everything happened. Bonnie Nettles Loved The Sound Of Music. Bonnie’s daughter talked about how her mom made a replica of the curtain dress as a kid. This was all before Bonnie abandoned her family to travel with Applewhite

I'm surprised you didn't discuss the Caleb and Sofia animations put out by the Jehovah's Witnesses cult. I'm sure a lot of people have seen the one against gay marriage. It's one of the largest and most prolific cults in modern history that always manages to fly under the radar in regards to being considered a cult. It's definitely worth looking into because their practices, while tame compared to some of these cults, are still extremely toxic and abusive to their members.

The scariest thing of all. Is how easy it is for these psychopaths. To manipulate an influence, people's minds.

“Holy Hell” is hauntingly beautiful. I randomly found it on Netflix,it’s veeeeery hard to watch at times but must watch,10/10

wait? What about Neopets being owned by scientology? They ownership of the property and they kept trying to push the creators to put recruitment media into the game, which the developers fought tooth and nail to keep out of the game. It is just strange that you would talk about media from cults and not talk about that one which was famous with children for years

Re: the Rael section - the movement for women to be allowed to go topless exists outside of the weird Rael cultosphere. My mother has always been an outspoken proponent of changing the laws and critic of the double-standard and the negative consequences of current laws and general culture attitudes towards... uh how to de-gender this, boobed-folk! being topless, having their nipples visble etc. She spent her late teens and 20s happily (and quite safely) enjoying Venice Beach bare up-top and in the buff on nude beaches; conversely after having me and choosing to exclusively breast-feed, she experienced a lot trauma over the way she was treated in public spaces just for... needing to feed her kid. Like she was scum, degenerate, unclean, relegated to trying to get a stall in a public restroom (which wasn't a guarantee) to huddle in a closed (usually dirty) stall to do the deed, getting yelled at for taking too long, even in private homes being treated with disgust that she/I dared have this need at all leading to a lot of social exclusion (if you're out to dinner with friends/family but have to spend random jaunts just *gone* from the conversation, you're not included to the same degree and depending some folks treat you with annoyance). I was a quiet pleasant baby as long as 1) my diaper was changed ASAP as needed and 2) I got fed when needed, so there shouldn't have been any problem going out with me normally. But the level of hurdles imposed socially and societally made for an extremely isolating and demeaning experience. Even asking about a place *to* breastfeed often got her treated with disgust and outrage; even wearing something that kept the appendage and my head covered from view still elicited outrage, from being asked to leave a restaurant or being harassed by a cop while she was in her own car (again, with no part of her breast even visible!) I myself, an afab non-binary breastacles-haver, have been pretty vocal since childhood about equalization in this regard. Either "female-presenting nipples" (tumblr "joke") go legal, or "male-presenting nipples" should be subject to the same laws (although realistically, given the breastfeeding aspect, they still wouldn't be subject to the same psychological and social burdens). [I am trans, no one @ me for accidentally using a binary-essentialist word in here, I have tried and it is *rough* editing this on mobile - the whole "breasts must be covered" thing stank of bs before my mum ever talked about the topic with me as a kid and frankly feels like the weird "ankles are too sexy to be shown!" kinkery of past eras. Chests are chests, both far end of the physical sex spectrum have breast tissue ergo breasts are breasts, and nipples are nipples no matter who has them. Where once ankles were the societally imposed "kink," now exist breasts as the weird societally imposed "kink" (itself a weird historical anomaly if you go back in history NOT VERY FAR AT ALL OMG). Apologies what turned into a rant but at least it feeds the algo-(drums start up for way too long)-RYTHM? Also I'm pretty sure the weird spaceship "jesus" in the... also Rael??? video (memory, like time, is fake) looks to me like mideval-ish monk art. Those scribes were bored af and had some vivid and sometimes nightmare inducing imaginations desperate for any excuse for an outlet! (Also great video, just subscribed, loving the channel and your excellent work!)

I dunno for sure how I stumbled onto this video - it probably showed up on my timeline because I support & watch ex-Scientology/SPTV channels - but I'm so glad I did. A very worthwhile & entertaining use of an hour. Beautifully done, absolutely hilarious, and yet, as you suggest at the end, sobering when you consider the human cost of pain, suffering, and death these cults inflict on their... members? Congregations? Victims? Anyway, I believe that light & laughter are good disinfectants for the infection these cults disseminate. ❤

Fun fact about those Vatican reforms: One of the key changes was that they stopped claiming all Jews are guilty for the death of Jesus(which they had up until then.) and instead now claimed the people who had the biggest hand in letting the Romans find Jesus were Jewish. This was one of the key changes that lead to break offs of the catholic church from that point onward.

I thoroughly enjoyed that! When the Heaven's Gate thing happened I was living in Utah and had never heard of Rancho Santa Fe, but listening to KFI AM 640 at night I heard the bizarre tale of the mothership behind Hale-Bopp, and the "celebration of suicide". It got me thinking, wouldn't it be hilarious if "God" came back to earth to pick up the faithful in his custom van... er, I mean spaceship, and only 39 people showed up? it inspired me to write about them on my concept album, "Escape From Utopia". Fast forward almost 20 years and I found myself living in coastal North San Diego County, and one day while driving around exploring my new surroundings, I noticed a sign that said "Rancho Santa Fe". I thought this kind of a strange coincidence at first, that I'd end up living so close to the Heaven's Gate compound until it dawned on me that if you throw a dart at a map of southern California, you're gonna hit within 10 miles of either a doomsday or sex cult! I noticed you mentioned another alien cult in El Cajon, and of course, we have the Flintstones Museum - I mean "Creation Museum" in Santee, not to mention the Scientology re-education compound (or movie studio... whatever) just outside of Temecula. That's a lot of crazy in one convenient location! I shudder to think what it must be like to live in the South.

I watched this twice. Once on my husband's account, and on mine. Love this. Looking for more of your content. (Ever consider looking into the jehovahs witnesses and where some of their images come from? Then theres the whole kaleb and sofia stuff for kids...im an ex member, survived and escaped. Pure doomsday cult!)!

You only had 1.5k subs when you made this?! I’m so impressed & happy to see you’ve grown! Well deserved!!!! Ok now back to binge-ing

7:13 the scientology ads remind me of the mormon Lds ads

One of the greatest video i have seen recently

Idk what i was expecting but i really didnt think i was gonna see a drawing of jesus kissing a fish

Your enthusiasm for some of the animation and music really sets the right tone. Appreciating the art for what it is, and explaining the groups problems.

54:01 Oh shit, wait a second, this is an ENGLISH version of a Japanese video RedLetterMedia covered on Best of the Worst like a decade ago, holy hell this is wild

In the part about praying with Jewish people.. those are not Jews they are Greek Orthodox priests.

53:36 oh my gaaaaaawd it's the RedLetterMedia tape! Also, a bit of sad trivia about Heaven's Gate. One of the members that took part in unaliving themselves was Thomas Nicols. He was a brother of Nichelle Nichols, whom you might know from the 60's Star Trek show, playing Uhura. I guess she went to the fake space on the set, and her brother wanted to take it a step further...

im so happy that the family's music is all on spotify. These people were despicably evil but they can make a dangerously killer bop 😭 Also just for the record the Raelian Soundcloud playlist isn't their own original music. They basically downloaded a bunch of songs that they liked and uploaded it to Soundcloud with their branding attached to it. I'm genuinely so confused how they're allowed to do that.

13:18 Elohim is a plural word. It means 'Gods' in both biblical Hebrew and Ugaritic. saying 'Elohims' therefore, is like saying 'geeses' or 'dogses'. In other words, it is nonsense.

32:26 "it's unlikely that i'll even get more that 1k views anyway" while this video has more than 2,5mil views lmao

23:23, they "drank the Kool aid", that's where the saying comes from

BTW, MANY of these cults were covered by the Church of the Subgenius in their book Hight Weirdness By Mail, which might be one of the greatest/funniest examinations of cults and their literature, and how YOU TOO can obtain free copies of their printed works, and sometimes audio/visual creations too. Its too bad that it's a relic of the late 20th Century, as the Internetz has essentially "democratized" access to kooky cults (including very dangerous ones). But I highly recommend finding an old copy of this book, it's still an amazing companion piece to this fine YT video!!

Thanks to the algorithm you popped up on my feed today. I rarely last the whole way through an hour video but your content and presentation kept me riveted the whole way through. I am especially grateful that you avoided using clips from the events you covered. I look forward to seeing your other content.

This just turned me on to some bangers and made me realize if a cult has good enough music I might join

I love how much you focus on the music in this, seriously. I appreciate it. So many of these people were actually very talented musicians. 24:49 is beautiful

The John Frum Cargo Cult is kinda wholesome. I'm glad that they are still preserving their culture and their ancestors gratitude.

At 55:00, some 80's Japanese music was in English or had a lot of English to make it sound cooler, so it was definitely a tactic to get more people to listen

Your commentary is hysterical not to mention how you laugh. I enjoyed your movie even with the dreadful topic. Well done

This channel had like 1,000 subs when this video was released. And stayed that way for a long time. Then suddenly, it has over 200,000 overnight! Suspicious? I did the math. It was exactly six hundred and sixty six days from release to when it blew up. Suspicious? I downloaded and played some of the narration backwards in an audio program. You'll be SHOCKED at what you will hear. My ears were ringing! My IBS was flaring up! I mean, think about it...what better way to kickstart your cult discretely than by hiding in plain sight and pretending to oppose cultism? Clever clever boy. .....I'M JOINING!

The word "butt jump" sums up one of the cult leaders flying skill pretty well. So funny.

Synanon members also played the extras in Lucas' THX film back in the day

I'm so happy how entertaining this video is. Not everything needs to be hyper serious and I needed this. Thank you. Liked and subscriberino'd.

Wow, cults are dangerous. We should make a watch group, probably make it a small monthly fee to be a part, maybe $15. Hey we should have somewhere to meet once we have enough funds. And to help pay the rent, maybe put in a gift shop. I think we should also elect a leader to make choices for the group. We gotta protect ourselves from cults after all, and a leader can do that if they're persuasive enough. Be a shame if any of us joined a cult.

"Thank you for being too cheap to use an actual hitman to kill me, as an actual hitman would have succeeded." Is such a funny yet kind of badass quote that i think we all need to appreciate.

small correction about the cargo cults. there likely was no pilot called john frum, but severall pilots that that introduced themself as "john from America / Kansas / any other place". and because the word, the state of origin kept changing, only the "john from" stuck.

Rael didn't want to see women topless, he wanted to see men in bikinis.

I can't express how irritated I am by censorship of the word "suicide," especially as someone who grew up with suicidal ideation. Censoring the language around it is stigmatizing and isolating. We should be allowed to have frank, open discussions about suicide, cult-related or otherwise. FYI I'm irritated at the algorithm and the monetization bullshit, not Paper Will.

well, I was on the fence about joining a cult and now I'm overwhelmed with choices.

I love how Will is trying to make an organized video essay, but quickly dissolves into chaos over what he's seeing.

For a really long time, I thought the Scientology founder’s name was Elrond Hubbard. Turns out when you learn by listening and not reading you miss some things 😅

You dismissed Synanon too easily. A lot of children "schools" and camps for troubled kids followed their systems, even today. Thousands of teens and children have been victims of this, myself included. I spent a year and seven months in a wilderness camp following their system. Close to 30 years later I still wake up sweating from nightmares

Fun fact: One of my college professors would've been right at the center of the Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas attack but his wife went into labor as he was leaving for work so instead of getting gassed he was in the delivery room with her getting several fingers broken (not exaggerating, his wife has incredible grip strength).

Also, I’m not sure if you know, but Japanese universities (I’m not sure about all of them) provide their students, before they begin their schooling with a whole warning/ informational paper about cults and how to recognise them, because it’s still such a real and dangerous issue for Japanese college students. This is in particular reference to Sophia University Tokyo.

I was looking up s** cults one time, and google's auto complete was "in my area".

The pope "Praying with jews" when in fact the guys in the pic are orthodox christians killed me

"ass hopping over a lake of fire" I can't tell you how close I came to blacking out laughing so hard at that

This video is both hilarious and terrifying at the same time. Even some of the more light-hearted ones are somewhat disturbing. Great video. You deserved that shoutout from Brad, and you’ll make it big someday!

Now if I had a nickel for every time a cult leader tried to kill a critic by putting a snake in their mailbox, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but weird that it's happened twice.

My dad's boss in Durango Co in 72 was Micky Craig. A big ole cowboy family man and developer. A mutual friend flew him to Denver to see Applewhite. Thought it was a UFO symposium. He immediately gave all his assets to Heavens Gate, abandoned his family, and never came back. Died with the group.

it's upsetting that all these talented people in cults didn't pursue music instead. some of this stuff is legitimately amazing

Thank you, I've had the week from hell, my Sons father passed away, I've been absolutely broken and this actually made me laugh for the first time in days and days. Thanks muchly, Paper Will!

In a better parallel universe, L. Ron Hubbard is known as simply a famous musician who writes a little sci-fi in his spare time, and Tom Cruise is just really into jazz

"You don't wanna make a song about murdering, killing, crucifying, torturing, tearing apart or burning people." every death metal band ever: "Speak for yourself."

I am from the state of KS, would like to point out that majority of us here agree that Westboro is a cult and hate group that should be shut down.

My favorite fact about the L. Ron Hubbard jazz is that he "supposedly" charged the musicians for every wrong note played... In a jazz album let that sink in

I almost went to a raelian meeting a decade ago because my grandpa is a member of it for shits and giggles (he’s not a true member who believes in it), the only reason we never went inside for it is because the lady hosting it had a dog (he’s allergic to dogs)

I love how the guy at the beginning of the Scientology commercial quite literally said that anything you hear about Scientology, that isn’t coming directly from them, is a lie.

It's too bad we can't bring some of these cult leaders together in a single room and have them argue about who's right lol

The fact that staying monetized on RU-vid involves censoring basic, inoffensive words like "murder" is terrifying.

Cargo cults attract anthropologists, and anthropologists give gifts. Whoever filmed the clips of cargo cults in your videos probably gave them stuff.

In the 1980s, my sister was going to BU for a philosophy degree. The Scientologists used to have a building near the Common, and they used to solicit people to take 'a personality test.' They came up to her, and she agreed to give it a whirl. Three hours later they politely returned her to the sidewalk. Much to their (and others') dismay, there is no time limit on philosophical discussion with her

I actually looked up the Church of Euthanasia, after going through their website and watching the videos I'm almost entirely convinced that the CoE was created out of edgy irony until at some point where the irony was actually being taken seriously.

"The Family" were partly to blame for inspiring Ugandans to try and institute the death penalty for gay people. I will never let anyone forget that that happened

I think the vagueness of the Jim Jones cult is why as a teenager I was so against singing songs in church that were super vague. One of them, sorry cannot recall the title, sounded more like you were singing about wanting a woman rather than Jesus. My rule is if it makes you uncomfortable you shouldn’t do it.

As a society, we need to have a lot more compassion for cult members/ex members. Cult members are not stupid people, because why would a cult want someone like that? They wouldn't. Cults want smart, wealthy, well connected people that can help them expand their reach. They don't just prey on vulnerable people, they also prey on extremely smart people who they can then make vulnerable. There's a quote from an ex NXVIUM cult member that goes like this: "nobody joins a cult. You join a good thing. Nobody goes, 'yes, let me just join this thing that is going to fuck up my life and the lives of everyone I love'. You join a good thing, until it's not so good anymore". Cults don't start out as what they end up being, because then nobody would join. They start as churches, self-help groups, things that people really love and believe in. We have ALL been manipulated. All of us. Nobody is above becoming a cult member, because no cult member thinks that they are one. Those who join cults aren't stupid, they were joining something that they believed in and truly thought would make the world better. Isn't that what anyone wants?

YOOOOO! I actually grew up in The Family. All those corny music videos weren't seen as comedic to us, that's the shit we listened to EVERY day, unironically, (and we loved it). It's hilarious now, but yeah, that was the only entertainment we were allowed lol. Obviously, it wasn't a good environment, especially for kids, for so many reasons. Aside from general dumbshit ideology we were indoctrinated with (I seriously used to have a kneejerk reaction ANY time someone said "millions of years ago," in any context, because evolution was end-boss-evil), child abuse was rampant, and I'm one of the few who got out relatively unscathed, with only general neglect issues that arise from being raised with 20 other siblings. Oh, also, the bit about "how are we going to make money, we're out of literature" comes from one of the The Family's primary monitization schemes, which was "hand out preechy propaganda posters and beg for donations." We'd always say it was "for missionaries here and overseas"--it was part of our little speech we were taught to say before even knowing what "overseas" was, no joke--but that shit went straight to rent. "Postering" was a thing we'd do multiple times a week, starting pretty much as soon as you were able to carry on a conversation. We'd all get in the van, drive to Walmart, and try to pass them off to people putting their groceries away. Only the VERY young kids were accompanied by adults. The rest were just told to come back by X time. Ahh, good times. If you're dumb enough to join a cult, whatever, your life, but if you raise children in a cult you deserve the hell you peach.

Counterpoint- Raelism was created just to see men in bikini tops. Which I fully support.

Just discovered you from your recent upload about n. Korean entertainment and I have to say all your content is well done and gold!

I'm not sure if you left it out to stay monetized, but i think a really important piece of context around Aum Shinrikyo is that they were eating as much LSD as The Manson Family. The dancing, the (fortunate) incompetence of the attacks, the levitating, it all makes a lot more sense knowing they were completely fried.