Read merely as a true crime book, The Zizians: Inside A Trans Death Cult would still be an achievement. Journalist Andy Ngo has authored a coherent narrative with a large cast of characters despite the deliberate obfuscation and endless legal maneuvers of the principal actors. Ngo cuts through most of the weeds by simply refusing to use the ‘preferred pronouns’ of any suspect.
“This style choice is not personal, nor is it a partisan statement. There is no clear way to report on the Zizians without grounding the narrative in verifiable facts about who they are and were”, he writes. Systematically ‘deadnaming’ everyone, this book is uncompromising on matters of identity. To be this easy to read, and still tell the whole story of an ideological extremist group, it must consistently ignore all pretensions.
The book therefore represents an evolution for Ngo, who used to receive some criticism for reporting on suspects with ‘preferred pronouns’. “I was not always rigid on this issue, but I came to believe that ceding language to ideology ultimately means ceding clarity and, with it, the truth.”
To make his case for the subtitle, Trans Death Cult, Ngo presents the evidence of a toxic cocktail of ideology. The Zizians mixed a transgender hormone hangover with sleep deprivation “experiments” and militant veganism, all according to the bespoke theories of Jack LaSota, aka “Ziz”. Noted for wearing black robes and affecting the image of a “Sith” from Star Wars, LaSota is now linked to eight deaths.
Transgenderism was foundational to the cult. LaSota convinced his acolytes that the two hemispheres of the brain contain different personalities, each having potentially any gender, and each being good or evil, usually evil. Somehow, LaSota remained alone among the group by having two “good” brain hemispheres that were both female.
Others did not fare so well in his analysis. Krzysztof Pasek, who seems to have been convinced that he was entirely bad, eventually took his own life after enduring the “experiments”. So did Jacob Pekarik aka “Jay Winterford”, another victim of these “debucketing” exercises. Ngo describes a program of mental torture aimed at deliberately splitting the mind of a subject to create internal conflict, and connects it to the mental spiral that preceded these first two deaths.
LaSota met Jasper Ryan Danielson, his first acolyte, in October 2016. Both transgender, they bonded immediately over hormones. Ngo reports they had started recruiting others in the rationalist community by October 2017, one year later. Like the ‘effective altruists’ behind AI companies like Anthropic, the Zizians are terrified that artificial intelligence will destroy the world. Such beliefs were common in the Bay Area rationalist community.
Most of us were supposed to suffer in this AI-powered future. The Zizians treat eating animals as an original sin of mankind. Danielson called meat-eaters “flesh eating monsters”. This ideation was intensely violent, an attitude that became general to the group.
Danielson was also “fixated on defeating death”, according to LaSota, who “believed death itself could be overcome by helping create a superintelligent artificial intelligence (AI) that would upload only ‘good’ souls like his own into an eternal ‘simulation’”, according to Ngo.
Eternal life is not a new idea, it is the original religious idea. Despite their avowed rationalism and rejection of religion, the Zizians were reinventing religious belief from first principles. After all, they were planning to run the world, one day, after the singularity arrives to grant them power over mankind. They needed a control software for the planet.
As if to drive the point themselves, Danielson and LaSota even enacted death and resurrection after being arrested in 2019. LaSota’s sister and his paramour, Amir Dayyan Borhanian, filed a false report with the Coast Guard in 2022. Danielson simply disappeared, and it appears that a member of the group told his lawyer he had committed suicide.
Borhanian was an active believer and recruiter. He lived with Michelle Jacqueline Zajko, maintained a polyamorous relationship with her, and appears to have introduced her to Zizian thought. Alexander Jeffrey Leatham, who “functioned as a central node connecting the current and future Zizians on Tumblr”, was also partnered with two other members of the group, including the deceased Pekarek. He appears to have recruited Tessa Berns, aka Suri Dao, to the Bay Area when she was 18 and becoming sexually active.
Polyamory emerges from the book as another radical Bay Area culture that shaped the group. Maximillian Snyder allegedly killed the Zizians’ former landlord, Curtis Lind, with a knife in 2025. Snyder was romantic partner to Teresa Consuelo Youngblut, who is accused of killing officer David Maland of the Border Patrol in a shootout on 20 January 2024. Felix Bauckholt, who disappeared from his Wall Street job and first reappears on the record visiting Leatham in jail, was also killed in the shootout.
All three individuals seem to have been drawn to the Zizians online and sex played a role in cementing group bonds. Andy Ngo has not analyzed the Zizians cult as a cult. He is a journalist, not a scholar of religion. Nevertheless, his book describes many familiar hallmarks of a radical ideological sect: a group vocabulary, a shared sense of grievance against the world, a totalizing politics of everything. He justifiably compares them to the Manson ‘family’.
The call to radical violence was always explicit. “Borhanian … suggested that what is called ‘psychopathy’ is actually ‘psychological freedom.’ He believed ‘retribution,’ or revenge, was merely self-defense”, Ngo explains. Of course, ‘retribution’ includes all the horrible things the Zizians want to do to meat-eaters after the glorious singularity arrives.
Also, they were keen to kill their landlords. The Zizians schemed out ways to stop paying rent, so that they could focus their limited finances on managing the AI future of humanity to achieve the most altruistic effects, from their extreme perspective. They eventually decided that killing Curtis Lind and disposing of his corpse was the easiest way to stop paying rent for his lot space.
By this time, they were living in customized box trucks they called “slackmobiles”, having failed at boat ownership. Ngo untangles the story of the Caleb, a World War II tugboat that Danielson and LaSota tried to convert into a free floating residence, and provides a helpful timeline of their transition to box truck living. Danielson was the first to propose the idea.
Berns, the youngest person charged with a crime, cut off her family after participating in the LaSota “experiments”. “Though she had expressed skepticism about Ziz’s ideas as late as May 2020, by September that year, her writing sounded no different than that of the group’s committed followers”, Ngo observes. Zajko also changed from skeptic to fanatic.
This is another common pattern in cult formation: Martin Harris challenged Joseph Smith’s abilities and became a devout Mormon; Dr. William Samuel Sadler debunked countless spirit-mediums before becoming convinced that Wilfred Kellogg was really channeling aliens from other planets. Prophets who seem to pass tests gain believers, and of course LaSota passed every test.