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The FBI Spent Two Years Investigating An Online Cult That Didn't Exist (muckrock.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the phantom-menace dept.

A two-year FBI investigation apparently centered on the satirical web site "GodHatesGoths". Long-time Slashdot reader v3rgEz writes: In 2005, the FBI launched an investigation into the "Church of the Hammer," a fundamentalist Christian sect which called for the wholesale slaughter of practitioners of the goth subculture. Two years later, the investigation was closed, on grounds that the Church didn't exist. The FBI's threat assessment detailed "an extremely right-wing Christian group that adheres to a Middle Ages Catholic text called the 'Malleus Malificarum.'" But MuckRock.com reports that "The Bureau's main source on the case was a goth who had engaged with members of the Church via their Yahoo Group...trying to dispel their misconceptions about the relationship between the subculture and Satanism." After two years of scouring through crime databases and making phone calls to the Salem police department, FBI investigators actually visited the GodHatesGoths web site -- which turned out to be a parody.

2 of 134 comments (clear)

  1. Perhaps the FBI should investigate real cults by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This is a Catholic text about witchcraft, after all. What better cult to investigate than Catholicism? If the leader of a cult like FLDS molest children, he rightly ends up on a most wanted list and eventually in prison. Warren Jeffs absolutely belongs in prison and all forms of LDS are creepy cults. But Catholicism seems to get a free pass, where clergy molest children and then are shielded by bishops or even by the Vatican. The clergy are shuffled around while allegations by victims are hushed. If the allegations get too loud, the clergy get recalled to the Vatican, where they can avoid foreign prosecution. Catholicism is a really big and really nasty cult that needs to be investigated and shut down. We'd solve a lot of the world's problems just by ridding ourselves of dangerous cults like Catholicism and Islam.

  2. Re:Next by LoztInSpace · · Score: 5, Interesting

    They can't investigate a legitimate religion

    Define legitimate religion...

    A religion is a large, popular cult. A cult is a small, unpopular religion.