According to reports, Mineo handed Rogers a. The truth of this account remains in dispute—the sole corroborating witness, after all, is dead—and his admitted killer reportedly changed her story several times afterward. On March 29, she was convicted of murder in the third degree. What is certain is this: Rogers and Mineo were, at one time, in love. Their relationship was bound up with an online community of radical Christian eschatologists, digitally native harbingers of the end times who infused their fire-and-brimstone faith with elements of nearly every contemporary conspiracy theory popularized on the web.
If that sounds kooky, well, it is. Like other internet giants, YouTube has struggled to differentiate between fact and fiction, between legitimate media outlets and manic peddlers of disinformation—and there are few reasons to believe that it will resolve any of these first-order problems of basic online legitimacy any time soon.
Shriner of Carrollton, Ohio. Though Shriner died less than a year after Mineo—by natural causes, according to a spokesperson for the Ohio Department of Health—her digital legacy persists.
It contains videos, published as far back as 11 years ago. All are variations on the same format: a few frames of almost-charmingly antiquated graphic design reflecting a broader Y2K-style paranoid aesthetic accompanied by rapid-fire voiceover. With a pronounced rasp, Shriner relays an array of feverish plots native to underground conspiracy-theory media, often combined with a near-encyclopedic knowledge of Old Testament scripture.
Public tragedies, such as mass shootings or a spate of hurricanes, are dismissed as false-flag operations conducted by NATO, the Illuminati, or the Democratic Party—all tools of the Satanic reptilian order. Whether out of paranoia or more garden-variety self-consciousness, Shriner never appears on screen in any of her videos and rarely posted photos of herself on Facebook. Everybody you see on TV, about 90 percent, is a clone or a synthetic robotoid.
Like many other members of the fringe-theory community, Shriner espouses horrific bigotries. Nearly every reptilian plot is scaffolded by homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, misogyny, or some combination thereof. And reptilian conspiracy theories are fundamentally about invaders.
Together, her videos have garnered more than three million views, and more than 20, subscribers. When she died, it was where devotees came to mourn. Where is the death certificate or obituary[?
The schism that sundered Shriner and Rogers also had its roots on Facebook. The beef between them was both literal and figurative. In April , Rogers posted to Facebook a seemingly benign appreciation of steak tartare. Shriner took this to mean Rogers was not human, but a reptilian occultist. Shriner possibly levied this bizarre accusation against Rogers because, by her own admission, she did not approve of her relationship with Mineo.
According to his friend Laurie Alexander, he began to question certain points of Shrinerite theology. Orgone is a pseudoscientific concept of universal life force, introduced by twentieth-century Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. Reich died in while serving a federal prison sentence for criminal contempt. Shriner sold her own version of the orgone shooter, available for purchase through one of her websites.
She claimed the hunks of what appear to be oven-melted plastic and glitter would repel demons and kill aliens. Alexander believes the raw-meat controversy was pretext for expelling Rogers from the ministry.
Shriner perhaps believed that Mineo would return to the fold with Rogers out of the picture. Siding with Rogers, Mineo produced a series of since-deleted videos for his own YouTube channel in which he condemned Shriner as a fraud, according to The Daily Beast. Or did Rogers murder her boyfriend in cold blood?
It indicates that the jury struggled to understand precisely what occurred. Over the course of a nine-hour deliberation, they peppered the judge with questions—about the meaning of intent, first- versus third-degree murder, and guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Such confusion is understandable, considering the bizarre nature of the crime.
When a killer blames her act on a cult of YouTube addicts, who believe a race of aliens are psychically subjugating humanity, questions of criminal capacity and soundness of mind inevitably rise.
Joe Pierre, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles, says mental-health practitioners have struggled to understand what fuels belief in conspiracy theories. One way to define a delusion is an individually held, falsifiable belief. To classify belief in the reptilian insurgency as delusional, because it is shared by multitudes, would necessarily capture other shared-belief systems, like major religions.
The seemingly senseless deaths of iconic figures, like Princess Diana of Wales, can be triggers, Pierre says. Sure enough, Shriner was a Diana conspiracy theorist. She told her friends They were lizards. He decided Worthington weighed all the factors necessary to impose a prison sentence that was just. There was evidence that this group was, in fact, more like a cult and that Shriner had immense control over the majority of her devotees, including Mineo. Shriner, the founder of the on-line doomsday cult linked to the Rogers case, died several months after Mineo.
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