Madness Madness!

This week’s matchup hops the pond to England, where we get a look at a couple of longstanding social ensembles: The Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes and the Women’s Institute. One has hats and theater people; one has women who work in the home and get shit DONE. Also the segments are relatively short so there are a lot of pleasant digressions, from soap operas to Jesus’s visit to Glastonbury, which did not necessarily cause the later death of Michael Jackson during the storied music festival in 2009, but also nobody can be 100% sure. After last week’s Hoo-Hoo Explosion we honestly weren’t sure there’d be any serious competitors in the pipeline, but listen, there’s a lot to work with this week. Join us, won’t you?

This week it's Mankind United, a cult whose story includes a startling refutation of Chekhov's Tiny Man With a Metal Head rule; and EST, whose story includes reinforcement of Chekhov's Confused Boomers Entering the '70s Rule. Join us as we sniff through these grifts, overturning numerous tidbits of knowledge like so many cult-researching truffle pigs.

France! Australia! Oy! Hon hon! Today we go deep—down under, even—into the Raelians, France and French Canada's clone-happy UFO booster club, and see if it's a better fit for us than Kenja, Australia's sorta home-grown, sorta ripped off from Scientology cash vacuum. Raelism (not realism) is, at the very least, a cult where you're less likely to be burned to death for the knights templar than France's other entry into the series. Kenja, meanwhile, may have out-Scientologied Scientology in a few key respects. Join us for bad accents, at least one suppressive person, and the gripping origin story of Corn Thins.

Stadiumwide mass weddings! Questionable claims about organ harvesting! Richard Nixon! Al Haig! SHEN YUN!!! This episode's got it all, folks. The Rev. Sun Myung Moon and his absolutely third-grade-boy ideas about gay people fight for the elite eight against Falun Going, a relative newcomer with an omnipresent troupe of acrobats and a massive compound in the U.S. that you are not invited to. Also we would like to go on record as saying that this matchup was 100% picked by the automatic bracket creator, and that we didn't just throw the two Asian cults in a ring to duke it out.

Have we all, every one of us, stared at a small humanlike doll and thought to ourselves, "What would it be like if this doll were like 35+ dudes and I starved them for six months in the University of Minnesota football stadium?" Of course we have; there's no need to even phrase it as a question. A notable fellow of science thought the same thing during World War II, and the results were the Minnesota Starvation Experiments, in which at least one dude just went full raccoon and started wandering around campus at night eating garbage. None of that is made up.
Meanwhile in northeastern Oklahoma, the Duke Boys were watching, helpless, as Ole Boss Hogg stole a bunch of American Indian land AGAIN, dug a bafflingly high number of lead mines, abandoned them when they stopped making money, and left countless piles of lead and rock dust hundreds of feet high next to stagnant pools of acidic lead water sitting on top of gigantic underground man-made caverns that were supported only by old boards! Don't worry though—the Dukes never put two and two together to pin it on Boss Hogg, as they'd been severely lead poisoned by the air and water of Picher, Oklahoma, one of our nation's very worst Superfund sites that's uninhabitable to this very day. Ladies and gentlemen, it's Tar Creek, one of the more perfect examples of Oklahoma fellating businesses while said businesses burns the entire state down and puts on a fake nose and big glasses when it's time to foot the cleanup bill! Join us, won't you?