Scott Siskind Didn’t Start the Fire: Rationalism, NY Times and the Zizians
Posted on | February 2, 2025 | Comments Off on Scott Siskind Didn’t Start the Fire: Rationalism, NY Times and the Zizians

Scott Siskind
Many readers will recall how the New York Times decided to dox the blogger Scott Alexander, whose Slate Star Codex was enormously popular. He responded by deleting his blog (some archives still exist) and publicly outing himself as San Francisco Bay area psychiatrist Dr. Scott Suskind (who comes from a family of many eminent physicians).
You may wonder, what does this have to do with the Radical Vegan Transgender Death Cult that I’ve been blogging about for the past week? Well, a guy known as @KenTheCowboy has compiled a “Zizian Facts” document that is quite useful to anyone following this saga.
Thanks to Ken for creating and repeatedly updating this very helpful resource about the Zizian cult. https://t.co/wsUQF7YW37
— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) February 1, 2025
Overnight, I watched (or more accurately, listened to) a YouTube interview that Ken did with Jessica Taylor, who was the first person to make the connection between the Zizians and the January 20 shootout in Vermont that killed a Border Patrol agent. Taylor actually knew Felix “Ophelia” Bauckholt, and also knew Jack “Ziz” LaSota because of her former employment as a staffer at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI). Taylor warned Bauckholt about the Zizians, but obviously the warning was not heeded. Now Bauckholt’s dead, and his companion Teresa “Milo” Youngblut is being held without bail, as is Maximillian “Audere” Snyder. Ziz is a fugitive from justice, whereabouts unknown, as are his reputed followers, Jasper “Gwen” Danielson and Michelle “Jamie” Zajko (all of whom should be considered armed and dangerous, I hasten to add). Toward the end of the interview with Taylor, Ken mentions that he got a shoutout from Reason magazine, and when I went to check this out (lead item in Liz Wolfe’s Morning Roundup on Friday), I noted a reference to the Zizians being part of “the rationalist scene” and decided to see what else Reason might have on this topic.
Among the results — using “rationalist” as the keyword in the search window on Reason‘s site — was Robby Soave’s 2021 article, “What The New York Times’ Hit Piece on Slate Star Codex Says About Media Gatekeeping.” In the second paragraph of the NYT “hit piece,” Slate Star Codex is referred to as “the epicenter of a community called the Rationalists.” These dots are starting to connect, you see.
“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like ‘I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive….’ And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. . . .”
— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Tempted as I am to jump into my wife’s Mazda and drive to Vermont — nothing’s stopping you from hitting the tip jar — I’ll probably resist that reckless impulse at least for now, but my point is that if ever a story needed the Gonzo method of journalism, Radical Vegan Transgender Death Cult is certainly that story. Yet sitting here in my home office, there was a distinct mental click when I saw Robbie’s article about what the NYT did to Slate Star Codex. Why did they dox a blogger? Because, with its open discussion of issues, including philosophical questions surrounding artificial intelligence (AI), Scott Siskind’s blog was becoming influential among certain Silicon Valley bigwigs, and the NYT was worried that this discussion might be pushing the Big Tech barons in a right-wing direction — and this could not be permitted.
Somewhat ironically, Siskind had pushed back against the “rationalist” label for his blog (“Saying ‘rationalist community’ when you mean ‘SSC comments section’ or vice versa will leave everybody pretty confused”), and he himself is certainly not a right-winger. He voted for Elizabeth Warren (!!!) in the 2020 Democratic primary, and voted for Joe Biden in the subsequent election. But it is nowadays “right wing” to defend free speech against censorship, and that was apparently Siskind’s great sin.
How does this connect to the Zizian cult? Well, after graduating from the Fairbanks campus of the University of Alaska with a computer engineering degree in 2013, Jack “Ziz” LaSota next enrolled in a master’s degree program at the University of Illinois, but subsequently dropped out and headed to Berkeley, California:
It is unclear when exactly LaSota arrived in the Bay Area, but according to the Center for Applied Rationality co-founder Anna Salamon, they [sic] attended a 5-day residency workshop organized by the nonprofit in July 2014. Salamon said the purpose of the workshop was to teach critical thinking skills and techniques to enhance and understand human decision-making — key aspects of the Rationalist movement.
CFAR is a spinoff of MIRI, and “the Rationalist movement” originated with MIRI founder Eliezer Yudkowsky’s concern that AI could pose an “existential threat” to humanity: “Over the years, Yudkowsky found that people struggled to think clearly about A.I. risk and were often dismissive of it. In 2011, Salamon, who had been working at MIRI since 2008, volunteered to figure out how to overcome that problem.” Salamon became director of CFAR, which operates programs to promote “rationalism” and, as I explained on Tuesday, these programs have become kind of an “AI Doomer Cool Kids Club.” Any ambitious young person in the West Coast tech world wants to get into the MIRI/CFAR network, which is seen as a pathway to their Big Tech dream job.
The influence of the “Rationalist movement” in Silicon Valley not only explains why the New York Times decided to dox Scott Siskind (for fear that Slate Star Codex was pushing Big Tech rightward), but also explains why Jack “Ziz” LaSota became enraged when Anna Salamon rejected him for a fellowship in the MIRI/CFAR summer AI program. He believed he had been blacklisted because of his transgender identity, and organized a bizarre protest against CFAR in November 2019. With flyers that accused Salamon of being a “trans-exclusive radical feminist” (TERF), Ziz and three associates — Amir “Emma” Borhanian, Jasper “Gwen” Danielson and Alexander “Somni” Leatham — donned hooded black “Sith” robes and Guy Fawkes masks and took over a Sonoma County campground that was hosting a CFAR alumni reunion. This led to a confrontation with law enforcement and felony charges. If Ziz hadn’t been blacklisted before that protest, certainly he was blacklisted afterwards, which no doubt partly explains why this cult ended up living in box trucks on the property of Curtis Lind in Vallejo. The COVID-19 pandemic led to a moratorium on evictions, so the Zizians stopped paying rent. When the moratorium was finally lifted in 2022, Lind was getting ready to evict these freaks if they didn’t pay up on more than $60,000 in back rent they owed him.

Curtis Lind
In November 2022, the Zizians then ambushed Lind, impaling him with a samurai sword among other injuries. Lind defended himself with a pistol, wounding Leatham and killing Borhanian. Leatham was arrested, along with a third participant in the attack, Suri Dao, but for some reason Ziz — who was reported by police to be at the scene, despite having faked his own death three months earlier, and still facing the Sonoma County charges from 2019 — was not taken into custody. Two months later, Zajko’s elderly parents were murdered in Pennsylvania and, when police served a search warrant at a motel where Zajko was staying, they learned that her Vermont roommate, Daniel Blank, was staying in another room. They searched that room and found not only Blank, but also “Ziz” LaSota — yet LaSota was again released from custody. Then in January of this year, police say, Lind was stabbed to death by Snyder, to prevent Lind from testifying against the Zizians who had attacked him. Three days after Lind’s murder, the Vermont shootout happened.
All of this deadly craziness, you understand, came out of the “Rationalist” movement, and perhaps I’m not the only one who smiles at this grim irony. Scott Siskind is not to blame, but he’s a psychiatrist, which is why I’m sure he’ll agree with my conclusion: Crazy People Are Dangerous.
PREVIOUSLY:
- January 27: Radical Vegan Transgender Cult Implicated in Border Agent’s Death
- January 28: Vegan Transgender Death Cult Update
- January 30: Vegan Transgender Death Cult Update: Zizian ‘Anti-Law Enforcement Ideology’
- February 1: Real Murders, Fake Suicides: ‘Zizian’ Death Cult Fugitives Still at Large
Save on Groceries and Everyday Essentials