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(Archives:
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6)
There’s others if you scroll back far enough (not too hard to scroll all the way through the CynnamonTV account, it’s not that long), but they’re just random Bible verses so I’m not gonna archive. Now, admittedly, this just looks like regular Christian faggotry, but the mention of dreidels & the specificity of the Bible study being done are weird. Plus these, though I can’t work out if they’re for a regular job or just coded shit about cult stuff (archive
1 &
2):
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Things we know about the cult: they're
white nationalists/ethnostate advocates and creationists, they’re
Zionists, they maybe
dislike Mormons (first image calls them a “pseudo-Christian cult”), they use
baptismal names, and they control people’s lives/appearance.
There’s
this retweet, which mentions “The Cult of the Shining City”, but very little shows up on google for them, and certainly not a specific cult.
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I
think it’s being used more generically, as a shorthand for “
bunch of right-wingers who want to MAGA”, rather than naming a specific cult.
This article (“At the time, I had no idea that I was being raised in a nationalist, white-identity, Neo-Confederate cult that worshipped power, white supremacy, and hypercapitalism. I’ve come to call this massive and dangerous sect the Cult of the Shining City.”) by the same guy as the original tweet supports my theory. There’s also the Nort Texas Church of Freethought in Arlington (vaguely near Dallas, but not Dallas suburbs), who have
an online sermon from 1999 that mentions “the shining city”, but honestly I love myself too much to read all of that shit, so. They’re also not even a real church and don’t believe in any gods, so I doubt they’re Hailey’s cult.
His parents were apparently
pretty powerful/high-up in this cult, and either
they or the cult itself were apparently buddy-buddy with the govenor of Texas and had some sway in the media. Hailey makes it sound like
he's still actively hiding from them – though whining about them and his family in some detail on social media would a) make that seem unlikely, or b) make him look like a retard who has no idea how to hide from people. Both options are plausible
@Marshal Mannerheim made a punt at the cult being some kind of Christian Identity group, which seems to make sense. I’ve done some digging, and couldn’t find any terribly likedly candidates or named groups, even on places like SPLC, in Texas.
However-
this article from 2016 mentions a Bill Patterson from Texas who likes to talk about Fake Jews and Satan:
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And then
this obituary places a highly Christian Bill Patterson in Texas (died in 2021), with strong links to the notoriously rich and powerful megachurch in Dallas called
the First Baptist Church. FBC, according to its Wikipedia page, hates the usual suspects (Islam, homosexuality, black people), the less usual suspects (Roman Catholics, businesses that don’t have Christmas celebrations), and the suspects oddly specific to Wedge’s account (Mormons, whom they refer to as “a cult”). They also own two Christian colleges (though Texas is apparently full of them), so potential tick for Wedge’s six years at college if my other guess is wrong.
It’s all super circumstantial (there’s also
this article that puts a Mr. Bill Patterson/Dual Seed as living in Livingston in 2018, where he claims there’s “no church, just a website), but my best guess is that Wedge’s family are a) high-up in the First Baptist Church, and possibly b) part of a sub-church/circle
within the FBC that have some more hardcore fringe cult shit going on. That’s the only way I can reconcile “cult so small and niche it doesn’t seem to exist on anyone’s radar” with “my parents and the cult are uber powerful. It’s still a pretty crap guess, though, so I wouldn’t lean too hard on it.
Weirdly, though, his parents seem to
have been into DnD, that noted favourite of the Christian right…
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. If we assume that his family was okay with DnD, that would rule out many Evangelical groups and Protestant denominations. His mentioning of some sort of Confession practice, while sounding like a cult-like ritual, is a very common practice in the Catholic Church. The Church also doesn't consider Mormons to be Christian, and the University of Dallas is a Catholic school.
