Religions can often be or appear to be cults, and of course, the root of the word “culture” is “cult.”

However, in modern parlance, cults are understood as something apart. They are characterized by a unique immunity to reason as well as an overt or covert hostility to outsiders and a tendency to engage in extreme behaviors. I can talk easily enough and share ideas with Jews, Muslims, Evangelicals, and others with different religious views. I can’t communicate meaningfully with Islamists because Islamists are in a death cult.

San Francisco–and by that I mean the prototypical San Franciscans, not all residents of the city–are in a cult. No amount of evidence that their catechism of DEI, radical “compassion,” and all the hokum they espouse as they keep reelecting the most insane leaders in the Western world is destroying a once-great city will convince them that their beliefs are at variance with the truth.

They believe what they believe, and even if every plan to eradicate homelessness simply increases its prevalence, they will continue until the city bankrupts itself or drowns in a sea of poop.

They are like the Heaven’s Gate cultists who are as convinced that declarations of utopian intent are as effective as Hale-Bopp was of bringing the apocalypse.

Watch that video, and you will see many of the indications of cultish behavior. The obsessive wearing of masks as a symbol of belief, the chanting in unison, and the ecstasy of religious fervor are all there on display.

Of course, these are not the typical San Franciscans, but they are the prototype for the city. They run things, if indirectly. The entire city bows down to their will.

Average people in San Francisco probably object to the poop, stepping over homeless people, and wish the city could look like Xi Jinping was visiting every day.

But they have agreed to be hostages to the cult because they like the views.

More places in America are submitting to the demands of the cult because it takes so much work to oppose them, and the result is that our country is becoming cultish. Our schools are filled with alphabet ideology, DEI is creeping into every aspect of our lives, and an entire political party and the bureaucrats they have installed–permanently–either belong to the cult or want the support of its members.

There is precedent for this kind of zealotry taking over a city. The Münster Rebellion in 1524 saw radical Anabaptists take over the city and essentially hold the citizens hostage. It was far more violent than San Francisco’s cultish takeover–we live in nicer times, mostly–but there are similarities. A demand for radical equality, an originally democratic takeover of the institutions of power, and a religious fervor in the adherents.

The Anabaptists were a cult who did their best to immanentize the eschaton, as Eric Voeglin or William F. Buckley would say. In other words, to create a utopia on earth.

Utopia literally means “no place,” because they can’t exist, and history shows that attempts to make them always end in disaster.

As will San Francisco.