Cults

Thursday

Mary Wakefield

The radical vegan ‘Zizians’ are the cult we deserve

From our UK edition

Every week brings a new revelation about the Zizians: the craziest, saddest cult in recent American history. Eight deaths have been linked to them so far, including 80-year-old Curtis Lind, stabbed with a samurai sword, US border patrol agent David Maland, shot by the roadside in Vermont, and the elderly parents of another member, shot dead at home in Pennsylvania. What’s gripping the American press is that the young Zizians seem to have been such nice kids once. The leader of the cult, Jack Amadeus LaSota, has a degree in computer science from Alaska University and a father who still teaches there. Another Zizian, Daniel Blank, was a straight-A student, fluent in three languages, whose bewildered father said he was a model son. The Zizian murder trial is set to begin in October.

Saturday

Emily Smith

Is the ‘OneTaste’ CEO a sex cult leader – or a high priestess of female pleasure?

I first met sex guru Nicole Daedone three years ago when she was performing orgasmic meditation on a colleague from her sexual wellness start-up, OneTaste. Daedone, was delicately touching Rachel Cherwitz, her head of sales, giving her multiple, and very vocal, sexual highs – for 15 straight minutes – in front of more than 100 riveted people in a studio in Manhattan’s Meatpacking district at 7pm on a weeknight. Naked from the waist down, Cherwitz was lying on a raised table with her legs open towards the audience. Cameras and microphones catching her every reaction. The crowd was that archetypal New York mix of wealthy investors, impeccably dressed-for-business single women, and the orgasm-curious of all ages.

OneTaste

Thursday

James Delingpole

How a TikTok dance craze turned into a brainwashing cult

From our UK edition

Because you don’t – I hope – use TikTok you will never have heard of the Wilking sisters. But back in the day (2020) they were huge, their homemade videos of dance routines performed at their suburban Michigan home attracting 127 million views. A year later, it all turned sour. Dancing for the Devil: The 7M TikTok Cult opens with one half of the sibling duo, Melanie, talking tearfully about her terrible loss. You think at first that Miranda has died. But no, it’s almost worse, for Miranda has become a living ghost – still present on social media, but dead to her family and friends, and unrecognisable from the girl-next-door she used to be. She has been sucked into a religious cult called the Shekinah Church.

Monday

Josie Cox

Joining the SoulCycle cult

"She’s in a cult,” my husband told our friends over dinner recently, eyebrows slightly arched, kind of — but not really — joking. I’m not, of course, but I’m oddly comfortable with the accusation. The day before, I’d done The Double. After dropping my daughter off at school and mumbling something about an urgent meeting to one of the mothers hoping for a chat, I caught the subway to the West Village and didn’t exhale until I stepped into the reception area, where the inoffensive grapefruit aroma of a $42 Jonathan Adler candle swaddled me like a mollified newborn. I was in.

cult

Thursday

Ben Sixsmith

The men who want to be castrated

Seven men were arrested in England last month on suspicion of involvement in a “castration cult.” Led by a man from London who apparently goes by the name “The Eunuch Maker”, the group is alleged to have castrated people and uploaded footage of the dangerous deeds to a pay-per-view platform. I suspect the use of the term “cult” is overheated. Certainly, castration has resulted from deranged theological or ideological tendencies. The Skopty sect in the Russian Empire believed in the removal of male genitals and female breasts on the basis that they represented the two halves of the forbidden fruit. (This must have made it remarkably difficult for the sect to grow.) Members of the Heaven’s Gate cult believed in castration as well, seeing it as a means of achieving ascetism.

castration

Sunday

Jessa Crispin

Crazed and confused

Perhaps you’ve noticed that America isn’t holding it together very well. Every airplane seems to have a middle-aged man throwing a temper tantrum about his facemask, every state house has some woman with artificial hair coloring and too much facial filler screaming about some imagined threat to “the children,” and every time I think I have found a normal person on Twitter it only takes twenty seconds of browsing their timeline to find a post that compares the Covid-19 vaccine to the Holocaust. It would be easy to dismiss this as just a particularly nasty lull in our collective sanity, but it’s time to be real. We have always been like this. Our nation wasn’t founded when the Mayflower arrived at Plymouth Rock, as they taught us in kindergarten.

hysteria