Educational tool only. All groups exist on a spectrum of control. Individual experiences vary. Based on publicly available reports, ex-member accounts, court records, and expert analyses — not medical or legal advice.
5 posts on CLCI Hub. See all posts.
Financial extraction is one of the most reliable signals across the entire CLCI spectrum — religious cults, MLMs, personal-growth programmes, and online gurus. This post covers the recurring extraction mechanisms, the FTC and IRS regulatory landscape, the precedent-setting prosecutions of the last decade (NXIVM, OneTaste, Herbalife, FLDS), and the gap that still remains.
The CLCI maxes out at 40. That ceiling forces qualitatively different harms — financial extraction, mass-casualty violence, systematic child abuse — into the same numeric band. Here is how to read the 31–40 entries without confusing the score with the lived consequence.
Every group on CLCI Hub is rated High, Medium, or Low confidence. The label measures the density of the public record, not the credibility of the patterns described. Here is how to read it.
Robert Jay Lifton's 1961 Eight Criteria of Thought Reform and Steven Hassan's 1988 BITE Model describe the same phenomenon at different resolutions. This guide explains where they overlap, where they diverge, and why CLCI Hub uses BITE as its scoring scaffold while surfacing Lifton's criteria as a secondary annotation.
The word 'cult' is emotionally loaded and often misleading. This article explains why the CLCI avoids binary labels and instead places all groups — mainstream and fringe — on a continuous scale of member autonomy.