The Zizian Cult Murders and the Edge of Reason.
How the existential threat of AI is driving people to madness.
[UPDATE: Since this piece was filed, Jack LaSota (“Ziz”) was arrested on February 18th in Maryland along with a couple of his followers/cohorts who feature in the story below - Michelle Zajko, 32, and Daniel Blank, 26.
They were all dressed in black and trespassing on a property, asking the residents if they could camp there for a month. Officers found two white box trucks parked at the end of the road where they found a long rifle in the back of a truck, and a handgun on the floorboard. Two of the suspects were wearing gun belts. They have been charged and held for further investigation.]
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Hands up who’s following this Zizian story? It’s pretty hard to resist.1 I mentioned in my first post that we were entering an age of cults and madness, and here it is, with bells on—a “murder cult” that is allegedly connected to at least six victims, across three states. Its members are computer scientists, mostly trans and vegan, and their (alleged) leader, Jack Amadeus LaSota, 34, is a trans woman who now goes by “Ziz”. (I’ll be referring to her interchangeably as Ziz and LaSota).
I’ll summarize what’s happened in a minute, but know that it is unhinged. The violence, the ‘vegan Sith’ philosophy, the use of swords. It’s the center not holding. It’s Yeats’ falcon that cannot hear the falconer, “turning and turning in the widening gyre”. And in a mocking irony, this madness grew out of a group that could scarcely sound more sensible, more tucked in—the Rationalist Community.
There’s been some great reporting already—the investigations on Open Vallejo, and this diagnosis by David Morris, which feels dead on: the existential threat of AI is driving people insane.
I’m going to take a ramble through all of this stuff. Join me.
The Crimes
On January 20th in Vermont a couple of Zizians were pulled over by Border Patrol—a pink-haired computer scientist named Teresa Youngblut and a German math wizard named Felix Bauckholt. Out of nowhere, Teresa Youngblut opened fire, killing the Border Agent before her arrest. Felix was also killed in the shootout. Three days earlier, on the opposite coast in Vallejo, Northern California, an 82 year old man named Curtis Lind was stabbed to death, and another Zizian was arrested—Maximilian Snyder, a 22 year old data scientist from Oxford University, who had applied for a marriage license with Youngblut last November. His motive seems straightforward. Lind was due to testify against a group of Zizians who had attacked him a couple of years earlier over an alleged rent dispute—they were said to be living in vans parked on his land. Lind fought back, shooting two of his attackers and killing one, but he was blinded in one eye with a samurai sword.
Meanwhile in Pennsylvania, just outside Philly, an elderly couple, the Zajkos, were murdered in January 2023 by—so it’s believed—another Zizian, potentially their own daughter Michelle, who’s apparently connected to the gun that Youngblut used in Vermont. LaSota, Ziz herself, was arrested in a nearby motel shortly afterwards, but soon released on bail. Until she was found that day hiding in the bathroom, it wasn’t clear that she was even alive, since she’d faked her death in the previous year. As of now, she’s at large and wanted in two states.
So, the ‘murder-cult’ branding seems fair enough.
