chapotraphouse

Here's a primer on the zizians, which you can read if you'd like your eyebrows to get stuck one tick higher for the rest of the day.

The tl;dr is that they're a cult orbiting around an offshoot of the SF Bay area "rationalist" scene. The SF Bay is a brutally alienating grifter hellscape. The rationalist scene is a disorganized counterculture highly concerned with morality*. This naturally attracts confused young adults who are in weird places in their life; that's just what a moral counterculture does. Ziz targeted particularly vulnerable people from this pool, particularly trans people, with a cluster of techniques out of the usual cult playbook, notably including a novel type of sleep deprivation.

* Whether these ideas are right or wrong are irrelevant, but if you want my take: a stopped clock is right twice a day, but a clock that's spinning around really really fast is right way more often.