Original subtitles

♪

Cults, 30 years ago,

were very different than they are now.

Right now, if we want to know about something,

we go online.

Ties to a cult may have led to a fatal shooting

in Monroe County. A woman is now in custody

for shooting her boyfriend in the head.

This went down because Sherry Shriner manipulated

Steve Mineo, and my ex-wife, Barbara.

She told them 24 times that this was an accident.

They simply refused to believe it.

[sighs] I swear, if Steve never met that girl, man,

he'd still be alive.

Stephen was angry and wanted to die because

he got kicked out of that cult.

Kelly's dead!

I think Sherry Shriner is a predator...

And, like, the epitome of evil.

What did she have to make otherwise nice and

normal people embrace this madness and paranoia?

I learned a lot from Sherry.

She put her life at stake to get this information out there.

The heresy that Sherry was

presenting on her websites, her podcast,

is 100% counter to the gospel.

When we are talking about the people who are joining cults,

there is this price of participation.

She generated over $774,000 over a 10-year period.

I think that she sees these tragedies as a way

to prove that she was right all along.

This is part of her ministry,

this is part of her business plan.

♪ [electronic]

♪ [electronic]

- [dog barking] - Hey, lay down...

You're alright... Shiloh.

♪

[laughs]

[barking]

♪

What is absolutely critical for Sherry is to

find ways to show that her life is

constantly under threat from Satan.

Everything's part of a larger conspiracy.

One time, her dog ran away.

But, Sherry's dog doesn't run away.

Sherry's dog gets kidnapped by the government,

or Sherry's dog gets run down by the MKUltra and,

it has a chip implanted in it.

So, if Sherry is constantly under attack,

that proves that...

Satan is out to get her,

and that proves how important she is.

[Sherry coughing]

[coughing & sighs]

[coughing]

[coughing]

Sherry wasn't in great health.

She'd had a couple heart attacks, she had...

general health issues. She smoked.

So, for her though, explaining her absences

couldn't be, "I had a physical ailment."

Her absences always had to be explained

in terms of her war with Lucifer.

And, her followers believed this in a real way.

They took it as proof that Sherry

was who she said she was because, otherwise,

why would she keep having these heart attacks?

Why would the devil constantly be trying

to kill her, if she wasn't special to God?

[coughing]

[coughing]

♪ [suspenseful]

[coughing fit]

♪

♪

I was genuinely disappointed to find out that

Sherry Shriner was dead.

Because, you know, I hoped to get to interview her,

to talk to her about all of this.

You know, you want to get a sense

whether she really believed what she said.

And, I, I feel like if I got to talk to her,

I'd at least know.

Ah, but of course, she, she did die.

She died of a, a heart attack

in early January of 2018.

♪

I love the myth building around Sherry Shriner's death.

I think it is absolutely fantastic.

God told her to...

to go up to her room and, to get ready for bed,

and so she did.

And, she was listening to her praise music...

And then, God took her.

♪

She didn't die, and that is critical.

If she died, that meant that the devil had

succeeded in killing her body.

So, instead of letting the devil kill her,

God took her soul before the devil could get to her.

It's so absurd, but they're building,

now they're building the myth that, you know,

Sherry will be back when Jesus comes back and...

and the myth that she didn't die so much as she was taken.

♪

Plenty of her followers, of course, are skeptical.

When somebody tells you for years and years that

every death is the result of a NATO hit squad or

some great conspiracy theory, of course,

people are gonna believe that when their leader passes.

I was speaking with one of her followers and

they thought Sherry was still alive,

and that just made me tantalized for so long,

longer than I should have been,

that Sherry might still be alive.

I wanted it to be true.

I wanted her to have bowed out, you know,

and just like take the money and run.

♪

Sherry wasn't alive.

It's absurd to think that she was,

but when you're dealing with all these conspiracy people,

right, then you become part of it. You're like,

"Well, how do I know? How do I know?"

And, it's so easy to get dragged into that because

once you start entertaining the absolutely absurd,

it just gets easier and easier to do it.

What's interesting is that her websites are still active,

and that the people who followed her,

they still seem to hold onto a lot of those beliefs.

Sherry's Facebook page is still active.

People still post on it.

Her followers still post on it.

They repost Sherry's old stories as if they were

prophecy and, the whole mechanism is still running.

You know, someone is still running it.

I joined her Patreon, they took my dollar.

I bought her book, they took my $10.

You know, that money got in the bank and,

that money got spent.

Someone's still running this.

This is a machine that is still happening.

Sherry being dead doesn't mean that

they can't still cash in on her ministry.

So, the question becomes...

who's running Sherry's ministry?

♪

♪

What really compelled me, early on, was...

what was Sherry's appeal?

What drew people to her?

How did she wield this kind of power

without ever leaving her house?

♪

She called herself this plain, country girl

in the backwoods of Ohio and,

there wasn't anything appealing about her.

It absolutely puzzled me how a woman like this...

got the reach and effect that she was able to get.

Sherry Shriner's cult was really a social media network.

She had podcasts, she had lots of YouTube videos,

she had, you know, regular radio show, websites,

Facebook pages that she aggressively moderated.

It was a digital world where people could go and

learn her views to the exclusion of everything else.

♪

My name is Samuel Woolley.

I'm an assistant professor at the School of Journalism

at the University of Texas at Austin.

♪

My research is mostly focused on the ways in which

new media technology, everything from

social media to virtual reality,

gets used in attempts to manipulate public opinions.

So, to change the way that people think and

feel about particular ideas. 20, 30 years ago,

Sherry Shriner would have been

laughed off the stage in any major venue because

her ideas are so preposterous and far out there.

But now, you have people like Sherry Shriner,

lots of people like her, who are online,

who have followings in the millions,

getting views and actually getting buy-in.

The rise of conspiracy theories lately

is certainly tied to the internet.

I mean, it's certainly facilitated

by the internet, but...

you know, the question is, why are people looking?

You know, what makes them feel like they have to give up

on the official story and find out what's really going on?

People are more likely to spread bad news or

false information because that stuff is sensational.

It sells, it's interesting.

And, because information spreads so fast online,

you'll see pick up of particular conspiracies or

particular ideas from country to country really quickly

in a way that you never would have seen it before.

And so, it's kind of like disinformation or

conspiracy on steroids today.

♪

Now, a huge proportion of Americans get their

journalism and their news from Facebook or Twitter.

Their perception is that this is a viable good place

to get information, and that's way different

than say, like, the tabloids of old, right, because...

social media is almost a melting pot

of good, bad, and ugly information.

And, the thing is, it's all dressed up,

often times in the veneer of, like,

quality or trustworthiness.

And, Sherry Shriner, in particular,

had the kind of amazing combination of being able

to put people into that trancelike state with

this just constant barrage of interesting, weird...

conspiratorial information, combined with the power of

social media and the reach that social media afforded her.

[gunshot]

In terms of who believes in conspiracy theories,

it's important to understand that it's

really potentially anybody.

When we first hear conspiracy theories,

we often think that they might sound very outlandish

and that they, you know, the person believing them

might be crazy.

And it's really clear that that's not the case.

I think we all have the potential to believe in

conspiracy theories. And so,

it's not necessarily about one type of person.

I think it more speaks to what's going on socially,

what other kinds of beliefs that we have that

might align with that conspiracy theory so,

probably, the best predictor of who believes in

conspiracy theories are people who are mistrustful

of authoritative accounts of information.

These kinds of ideas about lizard people or things,

while you might laugh at 'em, at first,

what you need to realize is there's people in

all levels of government, that there's people

who work for major news media organizations,

and that there's people just next to you on the street

that believe in QAnon, and believe in conspiracy

theories like the theories that Sherry was spreading.

These things have become pervasive.

Q is the best thing that has ever happened to you.

You know, I feel the Democrats are in, are in...

working with China.

How do you trust the media when they're only reporting

the side that they want you to hear?

President Trump is in charge of the federal reserve system,

which was set up and established...

by Satan in 1913,

by killing all those who oppose it on the Titanic.

I think it's more of...

mainstream science.

Now it is, is God sitting there?

Is he listening to the interview between

you and the devil?

[Sherry] Oh, yeah.

[crickets chirping]

I can see how people got

drawn in to the train wreck

that was Sherry Shriner's Facebook page.

And, it's often just, this is a piece of news and

this is a blatant misinterpretation of it.

But if you're not an informed person,

if you, if you have no idea about how the world works,

then, I guess that makes sense to you.

Well, guess what, I'm not a damn clone and I ain't in hell.

And you know what...

I really don't give a hell what y'all think.

She's got witches getting together,

she's got voodoo.

Dedicated to Orgone Warriors.

Not "worriers", but warriors,

around the globe.

But I can't see how people

could get past the reptile thing.

Once she starts talking about the reptiles...

[slithering]

I'm shocked.

Today, right now, still absolutely shocked that

she doesn't lose anybody, everybody,

at reptiles.

Watching this, like, one of the things that

you start to realize really quick,

that what Sherry's doing here is exhibiting

what we call a cheap fake.

So, in the picture where she's saying,

"Look at her palm, look at her fingers," you can also

see that the rest of the video is completely blurry, right,

and it's not, like, actually that, that

she is any different.

It's that the whole picture is blurry because

she's paused it at a particular moment.

And then, you have all these pictures of Barbara,

here, where Sherry's saying, "Look,

it's a much younger woman."

The lighting is like drastically different

in all of these images.

You're talking about selfies that someone's taken of

them self at their own home versus a mugshot.

It's like being a magician, right, like sleight of hand.

Like, you try to get people to look at one thing and

they're not looking at everything else.

It's like pseudo investigation,

and it's, it's not surprising that

it's convincing to people because, like,

people don't really look at the whole context.

They're willing to believe what you want them to

believe and that's why magic works.

It's why a lot of snake oil sales work.

Thank you, $1!

There's a perception that, like, people like Sherry...

or, other conspiracy theorists online,

are consigned to, like, this,

this very small portion of the internet,

they don't matter, that their behavior...

are not really a widespread phenomenon,

they're not really important.

That's incorrect.

♪ [bird cawing]

♪

This is something that's really, really important.

The more people that watch, the more eyeballs

on the screen, the more ads that get consumed,

the more money YouTube makes.

And, remember that people share bad information more

than good information and conspiratorial information

more than factual information...

what's gonna make you more money there?

♪

♪

♪

[ticking]

I don't think people are getting more paranoid,

but I think they're getting more comfortable

with paranoid ideas.

They can exist in an echo chamber where

they think that everyone thinks like them.

And we all feel like we're the reasonable people,

and then there are people who are less reasonable than us

and people who are crazier than us.

You are being reactive and not listening!

No! 'Cause they're wrong!

The internet gives us the ability to reinforce that

in ways that only cults used to have.

The kind of content that you saw coming out of Sherry's

YouTube channel and that continues to come out

after her death, is really indicative of a,

of a larger kind of cultural moment we're experiencing

in America. Yes, the religious right

has been growing for a long time,

but there's also been a fragmentation of

people's perspectives in the last 10, 20, 30 years.

Sherry was very much a part of that.

I think there's good evidence that mistrust is at

a peak or, I guess you could also say that trust is

at a low point in American history,

at least when we go back looking 50 or 60 years.

There's actually good evidence that this

rising tide of mistrust and distrust of experts

is really a worldwide event.

And politically, it's really something that's often

associated with populist movements.

And right now in history, we're seeing a lot of

populist political movements on the rise,

including here in the US.

♪

Do you still believe the world is flat, Mr. Voliva?

- Yes, sir, I do. - Ah, why?

You know, I think the challenge with the internet is

just how it evolves from this point on.

Right now, I think there's a lot of attention to the

fact that belief in misinformation is running

rampant because of the internet.

Social media companies are sort of playing

whack-a-mole right now.

They're seeing what the issue of the day is.

Journalists are mad about...

certain white supremacist groups.

Okay, we'll take those groups offline.

But they don't really address the core issue,

which is groups recommending other groups

that will promote these extreme views.

So, they're responding in some respects,

but it's sort of...

you know, they're trying not to get sued.

There's a lot of defensiveness when you talk to people

that work at social media firms or major

technology firms about the ways in which their,

their tools get used.

And so, when people get upset and say,

"We're just the platform," it really frustrates me.

You make billions of dollars off of these people,

and you also direct them about

what they should view and when.

And so, when people end up viewing Sherry's content and...

murders get committed...

someone's to blame there. And certainly,

the person that held the murder weapon holds culpability.

But, the platforms, themselves,

also have some culpability there because they allowed

these people to become famous.

Not only did they allow them, passively,

they like, pushed their content to all kinds of

people and made it widespread.

♪

[Sherry's voice echoes]

♪

[dog barking]

After Sherry's death,

I was watching how her Facebook page

developed and, it was clear that

there was someone still running things.

Her Facebook page keeps getting posted to.

And I know that Mariane Meloy was very involved

with Sherry's ministry and, at least in supporting it.

And the same with Beverly Nelson.

There's this person, Ronda Z,

who was really prominent.

And of course, her daughter Melanie.

As far as I can tell, the hierarchy is Sherry,

and then her daughter, Melanie.

And then the lieutenants would be

Mariane Meloy and Beverly Nelson.

I know Melanie, her daughter,

is responding from the social accounts so,

I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that

she's at least doing the administrative stuff...

if not also going back and finding the appropriate

prophecy for the day, or for the time,

to put out on Sherry's behalf.

It looks very much like what we've heard about,

you know, in Christianity.

Trying to keep the message alive until the boss comes back.

I think we're seeing a massive rise in online cults.

There's tons of them, and they have followers

in the millions online,

subscribers on YouTube that, that...

equal some of the most popular celebrities that,

you know, Hollywood has produced.

You have cult leaders who function the exact same way.

They reach audiences in the hundreds of thousands,

if not millions.

So, there is a sort of concern here.

Sherry Shriner's beliefs seem really fringe,

and it seems like how could anybody believe in that?

Or, if they believed in that,

what's the use in reaching out to them?

But these beliefs really alienate people from

the rest of the world.

It separates them from their families,

from their jobs, from really interacting

normally in society.

And I think that's, it's incredibly sad.

♪

After Sherry died, there's a resurgence of other cults

that have picked up a lot of the same messaging

Sherry Shriner had.

So, the idea of the reptilian aliens,

the idea of the Illuminati, the idea that, you know,

the world's religions are corrupt and

the tool of Satan, you see that continuing.

You see the messages that Sherry promoted continuing to...

develop and continuing to adapt to the changing

political climate, and the changing social climate.

Sherry is dead and buried.

But the ideas that she promotes are alive and well.

♪

♪

We see these conspiratorial beliefs increase

in moments of uncertainty.

And, there are a lot of corresponding conspiracy

theories and paranoias emerging right now.

Those have real, tangible effects.

♪

People are going on inter-state man hunts

because they believe in...

satanic child sex trafficking.

People are avoiding vaccinations and basic

public health measures because they believe that

COVID-19 is made in a government lab.

Deaths and serious harm from conspiracy theories

is an increasing risk right now.

So, this is a very real and I think

ballooning issue in this moment.

And of course, Sherry still lives.

I mean, her physical body is gone,

but her words are with us, right?

She still is on Facebook.

She still is on YouTube.

People are still listening to her

Blog Talk Radio show.

And so, it's out there.

But... the fact that it's out there

is again, it's not as...

worrisome as the fact that people are looking for it.

♪

[birds chirping]

♪

Drop it. [whistles]

Drop it, no, drop it. Drop it, drop it. Stop.

♪

I wanted to speak to you guys because

Barbara's not some kind of monster.

She got sucked into something that

was way above her head.

And, it's terrible, and I want people to

understand that she's not a monster.

My kids' mom really is just a very timid person

that's very mixed up and she needs help.

♪

Sherry's teaching and the way she ran her ministry

had real world effects.

♪

We're not just talking about people locked in

their houses afraid of the reptiles.

People died.

People stopped talking to their families.

They...

isolated themselves from relationships.

That's the hardest part.

It's the hardest part about this whole thing.

She was there, she was, she was online.

She wasn't with me. She was around.

And I still held out hope that, you know,

we would have a good relationship someday, but...

now it's over. There isn't any hope

and she's gonna be in jail for a long time.

Stephen lost his life. Kelly lost her life.

And, Barbara lost her freedom.

Sherry facilitated...

Off-screen: Bye, Barbara.

...if not directly caused,

the absolute destruction of lives.

This isn't just something that got made up

on the internet.

I think the painful thing is, like, I'm forgetting.

Like, you guys are asking me these questions and

I have to try really hard to pull it back up.

I don't want to forget, but I'm forgetting.

And, that's what's painful.

- That's super cute. - My favorite.

I definitely want people to know that Kelly wasn't just

like some crazy cult worshipper or some

Satan worshipper or anything like that.

She was just a nice woman.

She was a nice young woman who wanted to help people.

That's how I knew her and

that's how I want people to know her.

I knew Kelly for 8 years,

and she's been gone for 8 years.

And sometimes, it doesn't feel like it's been that long.

And...

Yeah, I miss her every day.

♪

♪

I think we all have to ask ourselves how

we've been implicated by Sherry Shriner.

Or how we've been implicated by fake news culture.

I think we have to ask ourselves,

what do we do to perpetuate it?

♪

I worry that we don't ask ourselves often enough,

how are we at fault?

How are we the problem?

Sherry Shriner isn't reflective of what we are like,

but she's an indication of how awful we can be.

The fact that any of these conspiracy people get the

kind of traction they get is a symptom that

we're not paying attention to.

And the symptom is that we don't have

people in charge that we can trust.

Conspiracy theorists, in that light,

are more like just an early warning bell.

There's bad things coming and...

we need to deal with it.

I don't know, I don't love our odds.

But, before we just dismiss this as crazy people

killing crazy people...

they are an alarm bell going off.

And, we ignore it at our own peril.

♪

♪

If I were you and I were here at that time,

I would be loading up on guns and ammo.

I would be getting out of the cities.

I would be fortifying...

whatever tent or house, or trailer you have

in, in the country, and defending it.

And it is your right as a believer in the most high

to defend yourself against these wicked, evil,

Satanist, murderous thugs who want to

kill you and your family.

Anyways, folks...

'til next week, everybody.

Yah bless."

♪

♪