Human nature is an amazing thing. Every time that I think that I’ve heard the strangest or most absurd story involving a firearm, shortly thereafter something new comes down the pike to prove me wrong.
And that happened again today.
In fact, this sordid story involves murder and a cult.
Of course, just the word “cult” stirs up the imagination, and when people think of cults, they often think of things like Marshall Applewhite‘s Heaven’s Gate cult, which, if you’ll remember, organized a mass suicide of cult members so that they could “ascend” to the ship in the Comet Hale-Bopp.
Well, no comets are involved in today’s story, but it involves what is certainly one of the more “unorthodox” sets of religious beliefs that I’ve come across. Candace Hathaway writes,
The fatal shooting of a Vermont Border Patrol agent on Inauguration Day has been tied to a radical leftist cult whose members claim to identify as transgender.
Border Patrol agent David “Chris” Maland, 44, was tragically shot and killed while performing a traffic stop on Interstate 91 in Coventry, Vermont, on January 20.
Teresa “Milo” Youngblut, a 21-year-old Washington state resident and the driver of the vehicle, is accused of fatally shooting Maland. She currently faces two charges of assault with a deadly weapon and an additional charge of resisting or impeding federal law enforcement.
Felix “Ophelia” Bauckholt, a German national, was a passenger in Youngblut’s vehicle and was shot and killed during the altercation.
Yes, you read that right. The cult members identify as transgender. All of them? It certainly sounds like it.
That, in and of itself, would exclude most of the population from the cult. Yet, this group, which is known as the “Zizians,” gets even more unusual.
[Journalist Andy] Ngo reported that the militant group’s members are all highly educated and “hold fringe, esoteric ideological beliefs about transhumanism and animal rights.”
The leader of the group, Jack LaSota, who also goes by “Ziz” and Andrea Phelps, is a male who identifies as a female. LaSota is accused of influencing his followers to commit murders.
So, vegan transhumanist transexuals with a bent towards murdering other people.
I have to admit that I didn’t have a morbid variation on The Rocky Horror Picture Show on my bingo card for this year.
And, remember, these people are armed.
Frankly, reading about this story does something rare to me: it leaves me rather speechless.
What do you say about such as unexpected combination of beliefs that are, then, linked together into a cult that advocates for murdering other people?
What a time to be alive.