The Cult of NatureBoy
In 2016, a rising social media star named Eligio Bishop, also known as “NatureBoy,” used his platforms to recruit followers into a group he called Carbon Nation, encouraging them to abandon their families and join his vision of a self-proclaimed Black utopia. What began as an alternative lifestyle community quickly evolved into something far more sinister.
NotTHEVampyr@NotTHEVampyr
While I didn't feel this series was particularly groundbreaking (another cult doing cult stuff), this is the first docuseries about a cult I've seen that affected (mostly) the Black community. I appreciate this series being made for awareness and representation, sometimes we think we'd never get tangled up in a cult but the reality is gurus can inject themselves into any community (not just lost, hippie white people), especially when there is tremendous suffering going on in the world. We all want to believe in something bigger than us, as was with these individuals. We think our own communities are hypervigilant enough, like when people state they would have left at the first sign of trouble when watching a scary movie or seeing someone else's situation on social media, but it's much more complicated when it's happening to you. I think many of us have this notion cults are something that affected vulnerable people in the 80s or 90s, surely because the lack of access to the internet and its endless wisdom "back then", when in actuality cults never left. They just got more tech savvy. Thanks to the rapid churning of video social media, connection to these cults are easier to fall into. This docuseries highlights this and how they used it to ask people for donations.