About 15 years ago I sat around a campfire in the Olympic Peninsula with two members of a racist cult. They were neighbors of a friend of mine who lived in a large tent in the rainforest. They were brothers, and they lived in trailers on an adjacent piece of land that one of them owned. They talked about their cult, calmly describing their plans to take over the country and kill all the Jews, all the lawyers, and some other groups I can't remember. They said they'd give policemen a chance to repent and go home, in which case they wouldn't be killed.

They quoted the Old Testament in support of their program. My friend tried to debate them on scripture. He knew the Bible well, and had for years been studying the Septuagint and the Greek New Testament to analyze what he said was a complete record of astronomic data stored in the numeric value of the Greek letters of all the names. I could never understand his explanations of how that worked, but I don't doubt his sincerity or his sanity; in fact, he seemed like the sanest person I ever knew, and was very intelligent. He just happened to live near crazy people.

He didn't talk about astronomy to them. He talked about the religious message in the scriptures they quoted. But his arguments didn't faze them. They just smiled and restated their position. Through the whole conversation, they were very cheerful and genial. In a video with no sound they could just as well have been talking about a family vacation. They described the mass murder as if it was telling a child who had misbehaved to take a "time out." They knew it was unpleasant, but felt it was necessary. They said they weren't asking me to help. "We'll do it for you," they said. My astronomer friend had apparently debated them many times before. The rest of us mostly sat quietly, stunned, hoping it was all a bad dream.

Before that, I and another guest had been singing folk songs. They listened and seemed to enjoy it, but they didn't sing. At a certain point in the crazy-talk, they suddenly broke into a chant in unison, loudly but still smiling:
"KILL them ALL.
WIPE them OUT.
Let them KNOW our GOD."
The pitch was the same throughout, very low, except that it rose slightly on "know."