Why The Zizian Transgender Death Cult Could Be A Tipping Point
The story has everything we have learned to expect
A murderous group of too-online transgender vegan fanatics calling themselves “Zizians” is allegedly responsible for five murders across the country, including a Border Patrol agent who was killed on Inauguration Day.
Cult leader Jack Amadeus LaSota, known as “Ziz,” prefers she/her pronouns. Naturally, the San Francisco Chronicle obliged. So did SFist.com, a San Francisco news site. Confusion reigned, however, as California news site Open Vallejo and then Vermont news site VT Digger both used “they” to “misgender” LaSota. National Post, a Canadian news site, used both “he” and “they” referring to LaSota.
Maximilian Snyder, a group member charged with murdering a witness against the cult, prefers “any pronouns.” Reporters have dutifully used male pronouns for him. One of the five living cult members named in reporting, Theresa Youngblut, is female. Every outlet that has reported the story so far has used female pronouns for Youngblut.
I say “so far” because neither the Washington Post or the New York Times, America’s newspapers of record, have reported the story at all, yet, nor has any national TV news network. Arrests and prosecutions of the missing cult members will likely force them all to cover the sensational story, eventually.
They were all scooped by Andy Ngo, who first connected the shooting of Border Patrol Agent David Maland in Vermont with the Zizian cult last week. Ngo has consistently used correct sex pronouns in his coverage. By the time this case becomes a Netflix series, perhaps everyone will be following his lead. We can hope.
The affair has real “Manson Family” energy. It will likely end in an FBI tactical operation, with sensational charges filed against a dangerous cult leader who inspired devotion through fear and threats.
Ngo first reported the story at The Post Millennial and then The New York Post, where he noted that “Some trans activists online are pressuring people not to talk to authorities or journalists, and are cheering the killings.” LaSota, known to his followers as “Ziz,” clearly has a larger fandom than his seven named cult members known or suspected to be alive.
After it was announced that the elderly witness was murdered earlier this month, one X account that has expressed support of the Vallejo, Calif., trans defendants wrote: “Ladies and gentlemen, we got him.”
Two members of the cult, Felix “Ophelia” Bauckholt and Emma Borhanian, are already dead. Bauckholt was killed in the Vermont shootout with Border Patrol agents. Borhanian was shot and killed during the first, failed murder attempt on a California man named Curtis Lind in 2022.
Lind rented lot space to the cult, which lived in box trucks. When Lind tried to evict them for nonpayment of rent, members of the cult lured him into an ambush, struck him on the back of the head, and then stabbed him repeatedly with swords, destroying one of Lind’s eyes. Armed with a pistol, Lind shot Borhanian dead and badly wounded Alexander “Somni” Leatham.
Police responding to the scene found LaSota there, and even had him in handcuffs before releasing him. Strangely, LaSota was supposed to be dead at this time, having faked his demise. At least one other cultist, Gwen Danielson, has also allegedly faked his own death. Talk about deadnaming!
In a second assault, Lind was stabbed and murdered in January before he could testify in his own attempted murder trial. Snyder was arrested later and charged with the murder of Lind. Snyder and Youngblut had gotten a marriage license in the state of Washington, though it is unclear whether they followed through with a trans couple wedding or not. Perhaps LaSota was merely shipping them.
The gun Youngblut used to kill Agent David Maland is reportedly the same weapon used in the murders of Richard and Rita Zajko at their home in Chester Heights, Pennsylvania in 2023. Michelle “Jamie” Zajko, allegedly a member of the cult, is the transgender-identifying son of the murder victims. Bauckholt, Youngblut’s companion killed in the shootout, was a German national and math genius who had immigrated on an H1B visa to work as a “quant” on Wall Street.
No charges have been filed in the Zajko murders, but LaSota is believed by cult-watchers to have ordered Zajko’s parents killed so she would inherit their fortune. Presumably, LaSota’s super-genius master-plan involved Bauckholt turning the blood money into an investment vehicle that would secure the cult against all future rent demands from elderly landlords.
LaSota’s “Sinceriously” blog includes extensive excuses for his failure to find a job. Not only was he cursed by bad luck and rich parents, LaSota complicated every aspect of his life by prioritizing his gender transition. Accounts of LaSota’s behavior speak to deep autism — and a frightening, feverish intensity that likely repelled potential employers. Every violent gnostic cult leader hates to work for a living and blames the fallen world for their misfortunes. He seems no exception.
A spiritual biography of the Zizians cult begins with “an intellectual movement and subculture called rationalism that seeks to understand human cognition and is concerned that artificial intelligence could destroy humanity,” in the summation of the Chronicle. (Despite the wrong-sex pronouns, their coverage this weekend was the most detailed.)
But LaSota “splintered away” from the Berkeley-based Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) and led a 2019 “protest” of the organization at the Westminster Camp and Conference Center in Sonoma County. LaSota’s group organized a blockade of the exits from the event using multiple vehicles. People trapped inside reportedly saw the group, who wore Guy Fawkes masks and shouted about transphobia, as crazed religious zealots.
Along with three of his cult members, LaSota was arrested for felony conspiracy, misdemeanor obstruction, and false imprisonment. All the defendants used delaying tactics: demanding vegan attorneys, requesting a change of venue, accusing the judge of transphobia. Finally, LaSota faked his death through false reports of a fatal boating accident to escape the charges.
He has since been arrested twice, ducking justice each time by demanding hospitalization. Police released him after the attempted murder of Curtis Lind, allegedly because they did not want the headache of dealing with his request for an ER visit. LaSota was also arrested at a hotel with Michelle Zajko and a third associate, Daniel Blank, after the murder of Zajko’s parents in January 2023. However, LaSota escaped custody after he faked a health crisis and was taken to the hospital.
As we have seen in too many other criminal cases, these mens’ transgender identification has been a convenient means to abuse process, escape justice, and commit more felonies. Who even knows what other crimes LaSota has had them do on his behalf that may still be unknown?
LaSota’s blog has been archived online. It is focused on topics such as “machine learning, veganism, the importance of dual personalities and the natural gifts of transgender women,” per the Chronicle.
According to rationalists who monitored the group, LaSota teaches that the left and right hemispheres of the human brain are at war with one another to encourage multiple personality “splitting.” He also allegedly uses sleep deprivation to destabilize and manipulate his converts.
LaSota’s writing also reveals the extensive influence of esoteric self-help woo-woo. He adopted belief in reincarnation, practiced veganism, and tried out Silicon Valley “mind hacks” with friends, inventing his own theory of consciousness. In this scene, Hegel meets Japanese animation:
One of their ascended ontologies of the week that actually stuck around for a summer was an extension/rewrite of Val’s “bending types”. I was supposedly an airbender (about abstract ideas and dissociation) transitioning towards realmbender (about plans, goals something else I get). Maybe with some lightningbending in the form of PTSD from my old roommate making me on guard against physical threats (About rapidly responding to physical threats.). Jasper Gwenn was supposedly a smokebender (About moving toward an an answer around obstacles in all directions at once).
LaSota “also writes, painfully and at length, about withdrawing from [his] family as a teenager, coming out as trans, feeling [his] own genitalia as ‘alien parasites,’ and avoiding sex and most physical contact because of deep-held feelings and anxieties about sex, consent, orientation, and gender writ large,” Jay Barmann writes at SFist. He cites this paragraph, to which I have added emphasis.
I’ve got a strong impulse to self-immolate rather than have sex after having my values forcibly modified by some hypothetical collective decision like that, lending moral legitimacy by allowing the civilization that did that, the ability to say, 'look things aren’t that bad you’re enjoying it'.
Nothing here will feel unfamiliar to the reader who has examined transgender ideology through a critical lens. LaSota seems to have dissociated from his sexed body before 2016, the height of the Tumblr era, and developed a post-sex, transhumanist philosophy for the very-online autist. His concern that adherents should not “eat the flesh of the innocent,” even while taking innocent lives, is a moral inversion. It is justified by the supposed threat of artificial intelligence, a world-destroying demiurge that only the Zizians can possibly stop.
As Eliza Mondegreen has documented in detail, transgender subreddits mainly exist for the “community” to banish doubt, constantly reinforcing the belief in a gendered being that is incongruent with the body. Using the 21st century printing press, “Ziz” developed an echo chamber of believers, rather like many transgender TikTok influencers do, then used it to struggle and love-bomb his followers into submission. He took things much further, but the basic patterns of group behavior can be observed everywhere in online “trans” spaces.
Over the weekend, Mondegreen worried that executive orders signed by Donald Trump are worded too harshly, playing into the “phobia indoctrination” of a highly-radicalized population “that includes a lot of very vulnerable, psychologically unwell young people who've been told for years to expect a ‘trans genocide.’”
She has a point, but the Zizians were already acting out years ago. Just imagine what the next transgender death cult is getting up to, right now. Sooner or later, the legacy news media will be forced to report this story, or a story that is even worse, whereupon their audiences will at last confront the contradiction of preferred pronouns.
The 1969 Manson family murders were the definitive end of the Summer of Love, the moment when the sixties truly ended. Americans watched that trial, saw the crazed behavior of Manson’s “children,” and then increasingly lost patience with leftist absurdities over the decade that followed. Bell bottom trousers went out of style and so did “flower power.” History may be rhyming again.
