Category: Vermont

Radical Vegan Transgender Cult Update: Maryland Trial Postponed Until June

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Left to right: Jack LaSota, Michelle Zajko, Daniel Blank

Monday was the one-year anniversary of the capture of three members of the “Zizian” cult, including the group’s leader Jack “Ziz” LaSota. The trio had been camping on private property near Frostburg, Maryland, when the property owner called police who arrested them on state charges, only to discover that they were subjects of a nationwide manhunt. LaSota and Michelle Zajko were both wanted in connection with various crimes to which the cult was believed to be connected, including the January 20, 2025, murder of a Border Patrol agent in a shootout in Vermont. The third member arrested in Frostburg was Daniel Blank, who had dropped out of UC-Berkeley and cut off contact with his family in California for two years prior to turning up in western Maryland.

On the anniversary of the Frostburg arrests, the Associated Press published an update on legal proceedings against the cult members:

CUMBERLAND, Md. (AP) — The violent deaths linked to the group known as Zizians stopped at six a year ago, after a U.S. border agent was killed and three members were arrested on trespassing and gun charges in the woods of western Maryland. Seven of the group’s members are jailed in three states, all awaiting trial.
Police in Maryland quickly connected Jack “Ziz” LaSota, Michelle Zajko and Daniel Blank to homicide investigations in California, Pennsylvania and Vermont after a landowner found them living in box trucks at the end of a snow covered dirt road last February, according to court documents and pre-trial testimony.
“All the suspects involved are to be questioned regarding other crimes that have occurred across the country and have ties with the Zizians Cult,” Maryland state Trooper Brandon Jeffries wrote after their Feb. 16, 2025 arrests. But their prosecutions have only inched along amid trial delays and little action in other cases.
Called “Zizians” by outsiders, the young, highly intelligent computer scientists appear to share radical beliefs about veganism, animal rights, gender identity and artificial intelligence. Since 2022, members have been tied to the death of one of their own during an attack on a California landlord, the landlord’s subsequent killing, the shooting deaths of Zajko’s parents in Pennsylvania, and a highway shootout in Vermont that left the border agent and another Zizian dead.
Jury selection was supposed to start this week in Cumberland, Maryland, where LaSota, Zajko and Blank are charged with possession of LSD and possession with intent to deliver LSD, multiple gun violations, trespassing and hindering a police officer.
The trial was delayed until June, however, after Zajko, who also is charged with resisting arrest, fired her attorney, briefly represented herself and hired a new lawyer.
In handwritten filings, she has made sprawling allegations of rights violations by snitches inside the Allegany County Detention Center and lies by police and prosecutors.
“In the interest of Hope, Justice and Truth, for the good of all people, and for the establishment of a true peace, the defense moves to dismiss this case,” Zajko declared in 20 pages of neat but almost indecipherably small handwriting.
Their lawyers and the lead prosecutor have all declined comment or not responded to interview requests.
Zajko also is accused of supplying the guns two other Zizians used in a fatal shootout in Vermont in January 2025, although her federal court docket starts and ends with the complaint charging her with lying to a Vermont gun dealer.
In that case, Teresa Youngblut is accused of opening fire on Border Patrol Agent David Maland during a traffic stop before another agent wounded her and killed her companion, Felix Bauckholt. The encounter happened just hours after President Donald Trump was sworn in for his second term, but in a Maryland court filing, Zajko sought to blame it on a culture of impunity she says is now evident in the administration’s mass deportation campaign.
“Renee Good is probably dead because the regime has so far been able to get away with murdering Ms. Bauckholt & framing Youngblut,” Zajko claimed. Good was fatally shot last month by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in Minneapolis. Neither ICE nor border patrol officials responded to messages seeking comment.
Zajko claimed authorities arrested the group to prevent them from exonerating Youngblut, who has pleaded not guilty in Vermont to murder and could face the death penalty if convicted.
“It is an act of obscene cruelty, despotism & the mark of a tyrannical regime to use a bad faith investigation & the threat of phony charges to conceal exculpatory evidence, threaten witnesses into silence, or threaten to put an innocent person to death, all to protect a murderous border patrol human,” wrote Zajko.
The judge in Youngblut’s case last week suspended deadlines for pretrial motions, citing the complexity of the capital case and noting that the exchange of evidence “will include material related to investigations into other individuals in multiple jurisdictions.”
Two other Zizians, Suri Dao and Alexander Leatham, are charged in a 2022 attack on a landlord in California that left another member, Emma Borhanian, dead, but their trial has been postponed multiple times. Another member, Maximilian Snyder, is charged with killing the landlord, Curtis Lind, three years later, just days before the Vermont shooting.
Dao’s attorney, Brian Ford, said proceedings are suspended for competency hearings and that his client is not guilty. Attorneys for the others, as well as family members of victims and those accused, either declined to comment or did not respond to messages.
LaSota, described by authorities as the apparent leader of the Zizians, has a May trial date in Baltimore federal court on a separate charge of being an armed fugitive — a charge she has asked to have dismissed, arguing it violates her Second Amendment rights.
Authorities allege LaSota faked her own death to evade charges after a 2019 protest in California and disappeared again after being accused of obstructing the investigation into the December 2022 shooting deaths of Zajko’s parents, Richard and Rita Zajko, in Chester Heights, Pennsylvania.
No one has been charged for killing the Zajkos, and the Delaware County district attorney’s office said only that it still is being investigated. Jeffries, the Maryland trooper, said in a report that “Blank is under investigation for a double homicide that occurred in Delaware County, PA.”
Authorities also have described Zajko as a person of interest in her parents’ death. She has denied any role. In her recent filing, she referred to them as “adoptive guardians” and suggested her father might have killed her mother and then himself. Richard Zajko’s sister-in-law, Rosanne Zajko, declined to comment on behalf of the family.
James Broadwater wasn’t sure what to make of the strangers dressed all in black who parked their trucks near his home in Eckhart Mines, outside Frostburg, Maryland. Then Jeffries, the state trooper, told him to Google “Zizians.”
Broadwater testified recently that he had encountered LaSota and Zajko about a half-mile uphill from his house. They asked to stay, but Broadwater gave them until the next morning to leave. After talking with his wife he called state police.
“He changed his mind because he was afraid what would happen if he asked you guys to leave,” Jeffries said when questioned by Zajko in court.
Jeffries testified that a dispatcher had told him about an Associated Press article on the Zizians, published the day before, reporting details about the six deaths. He said LaSota told him they were willing to leave but the three would not identify themselves.
Jeffries said his suspicions were heightened because of the news coverage, their tactical gear that included ammunition on gun belts, and how the trucks were parked with chains on their tires. “I wanted to make sure I identified them before they left,” he testified, and they made the arrests.
The Zizians in Maryland have been working on a joint defense while jailed, though Blank’s parents are pressing the judge to release their son on bail, and his lawyer has sought to distance him from the others. Blank “should not be detained because of the company in which he was arrested,” attorney Rebecca Lechliter wrote.

Quite a thorough summary of a complex tale, and the excerpts from Zajko’s court filings (when she was representing herself, before getting a new lawyer) make clear that she’s far gone into paranoia and the kind of grandiose thinking typical of manic-phase bipolar disorder.

The most important news here is that the trial on state charges in Cumberland will be postponed until June, and meanwhile LaSota faces a May federal trial in Baltimore. This means three or four months of waiting, and if I decide to make a road trip to cover either of those trials in person, at least I won’t be traveling in the ice and snow.

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Vegan Transgender Death Cult Update: Feds Seek Death Penalty in Vermont

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Accused Zizian cult killer Teresa Youngblut

The latest news from the New York Post:

The Justice Department said Thursday it will seek the death penalty against a member of the cultlike Zizians group accused of killing a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Vermont in the latest Trump administration push for more federal executions.
Teresa Youngblut, 21, of Washington state, is among a group of radical computer scientists focused on veganism, gender identity and artificial intelligence who have been linked to six killings in three states. She’s accused of fatally shooting agent David Maland on Jan. 20, the same day President Donald Trump was inaugurated and signed a sweeping executive order lifting the moratorium on federal executions.
Youngblut initially was charged with using a deadly weapon against law enforcement and discharging a firearm during an assault with a deadly weapon. But the Trump administration signaled early on that more serious charges were coming, and a new indictment released Thursday charged her with murder of a federal law enforcement agent and other crimes.
In February, Attorney General Pam Bondi mentioned Maland as an example when saying she expects federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty in cases involving the murder of law enforcement officers. And Youngblut’s attorneys recently said they had been given a July 28 deadline to offer preliminary evidence about why she should be spared such a punishment. They asked a judge last month to delay that deadline until January, but the judge declined.
At the time of the shooting, authorities had been watching Youngblut and her companion, Felix Bauckholt, for several days after a Vermont hotel employee reported seeing them carrying guns and wearing black tactical gear. She’s accused of opening fire on border agents who pulled the car over on Interstate 91. An agent fired back, killing Bauckholt and wounding Youngblut.
The pair were among the followers of Jack LaSota, a transgender woman also known as Ziz whose online writing attracted young, highly intelligent computer scientists who shared anarchist beliefs.
Members of the group have been tied to the death of one of their own during an attack on a California landlord in 2022, the landlord’s subsequent killing earlier this year, and the deaths of one of the members’ parents in Pennsylvania.

People have an uncanny knack of dying in the vicinity of this bizarre cult, and now the Zizian kook Teresa Youngblut is facing the federal death penalty because Trump won the election. Don’t know about you, but death penalties for crazy cult members? Yeah, I voted for that.

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‘Ziz’ Misgendered and Other Highlights of Tuesday’s Court Hearing for Cult Suspects

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Left to right: Jack LaSota, Michelle Zajko, Daniel Blank

Rebecca Francoeur-Breeden is an attorney with the public defender’s office in Allegany County, Maryland, who probably never expected she’d be representing three members of a nationally notorious Radical Vegan Transgender Death Cult, but who can predict such things?

So we’re all sitting there in District Court in Cumberland — me and about a half-dozen other reporters — listening as Judge Erich Bean conducts bail hearings by teleconference, which we can’t see, and the audio quality wasn’t ideal, either. The cases were called in alphabetical order by surname, and our three suspects spanned the entire range, Daniel Blank being the first case called and Michelle Zajko being the last, with reputed cult leader Jack “Ziz” LaSota in the middle. Interspersed between these three cases were several other strictly local crimes — child abuse, robbery, assault, drug possession, etc. — so the hearing that started at 11 a.m. went until 12:30 p.m. Because the “Zizian” cult is linked to no fewer than six homicides, including a Border Patrol agent who died in a January 20 shootout with two cultists, it must have been obvious to Ms. Francoeur-Breeden that her clients were going to be denied bail, but she was nonetheless under a professional obligation to try and present them in the most favorable light. This was probably why she made a point to list their academic credentials — each of them she described as “brilliant,” reciting their degrees and other accomplishments.

“Ziz” LaSota identifies as a transgender woman, despite being a male named Jack, and Judge Bean therefore referred to him as “she,” “her,” “ma’am,” and so forth. And there was a slightly comic moment when Ms. Francoeur-Breeden, doing her bit to hype up her genius clients, said of LaSota: “This is a brilliant young man — er, woman.”

This is not trivial, as I explained last month:

It must be understood that the cult around Jack Lasota (a/k/a”Ziz”) originated in his dispute with the leadership of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) and the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR), specifically Eliezer Yudkowsky and Anna Salamon. Lasota’s transgender identity was central to that conflict. “Anna discriminates against trans women in CFAR’s employment and inclusion in sponsored workshop events,” Ziz wrote in a flyer printed up for a 2019 protest against CFAR. In that flyer, Ziz labeled Salamon “a trans-exclusive radical feminist” (TERF).

Yudkowsky and Salamon are associated with what is called the “Rationalist” movement, which is very big among Silicon Valley tech types involved with artificial intelligence (AI). After graduating magna cum laude in computer engineering from the Fairbanks campus of the University of Alaska, LaSota moved to the San Francisco Bay area trying to find a spot on the fast track to tech success, and being accepted in MIRI/CFAR “Ratlionalist” circles was apparently part of that ambition. LaSota believed that he was blackballed by Salamon, accusing her of “transphobia,” and that was the motive for a 2019 protest where LaSota and three comrades showed up at a CFAR event dressed in “Sith” robes and wearing Guy Fawkes masks, and ended up getting arrested. Since that first arrest, the cult has been linked to at least six violent deaths:

Left to right: Amir “Emma” Borhanian, Rita and Richard Zajko
  • Amir “Emma” Borhanian — Cult member shot to death on November 15, 2022, by Curtis Lind, who was defending himself after being attacked by Borhanian and others. Lind had rented space on his property in Vallejo, California, to the “Zizians,” who were living in vans and box trucks. They were months behind on rent and, with Lind preparing to evict them, he was “allegedly impaled with a sword and blinded in one eye” during the attempted murder by the Zizians.
  • Rita and Richard Zajko — Parents of cult member Michelle Zajko, murdered on New Year’s Eve (December 31, 2022/January 1, 2023) in their Pennsylvania home. Michelle Zajko has been described as a “person of interest” in her parents’ deaths.
  • Curtis Lind — Murdered in California on January 17, 2025. Cult member Maximilian Snyder is charged with the murder. It is believed that Lind was killed to prevent him from testifying against two surviving cult members who were charged in the November 2022 attack.
  • David “Chris” Maland — U.S. Border Patrol agent shot to death in Vermont while making a traffic stop that turned into a shootout on January 20, 2025.
  • Felix “Ophelia” Bauckholt — Cult member from Germany, killed during the same Vermont shootout in which Maland died. Bauckholt’s accomplice, Teresa Youngblut, had taken out a marriage license with Snyder (the suspect in Lind’s murder). Youngblut survived the shootout and is now in federal custody.
Left to right: Curtis Lind, David “Chris” Maland, Felix “Ophelia” Bauckholt

Despite whatever jokes you might want to make about the “Zizians,” you see that they are quite deadly. And also pathetic. Sitting in the courtroom Tuesday, we heard Daniel Blank’s squeaky voice blabbering incomprensibly, then Ms. Francoeur-Breeden mentioned that Blank has mental health issues. She said Blank’s stepfather, who was willing to help Blank get some kind of local residence if he could be released, had flown in from California and was present in the courtroom. Judge Bean asked the stepfather to stand up and address the bench. He was a gray-haired man in a brown overcoat, obviously distraught, and said he would do whatever he could to help his stepson. Daniel Blank reportedly has dyslexia and is somewhere on the “spectrum” of autism. Yet, as Ms. Francoeur-Breeden told the court, he was unquestionably “brilliant”:

Daniel Blank was born in Berkeley, California and always excelled in school, earning straight A’s and praise from his teachers, his mother Nadia Blank told Open Vallejo. He competed on a science bowl team throughout middle and high school and was fluent in three languages, she said.
Blank, who became vegan in college, graduated a semester early from the University of California, Berkeley with a double major in bioengineering and computer science, according to a resume posted on his LinkedIn profile. As an undergraduate, he conducted research for two Berkeley professors and interned at Oracle and Daphnia Labs.
Blank’s mother said he accepted a high-paying corporate offer in Oakland following graduation.

Blank disappeared in 2022, and seeing his stepfather in court was emotionally jarring. Being a father myself, what must it be like to have your “brilliant” stepson disappear, end up in some kind of weird cult, and get arrested in connection with a nationwide crime spree?

As Ms. Francoeur-Breeden said of all three of her clients, Blank has no prior criminal convictions, but like the other two, he was ordered held without bond because of the circumstances surrounding the case, and the fact that they’re all considered “extreme” flight risks. And this, despite the fact that all the charges against them in Maryland are misdemeanors, which in almost any other case would get them released on very low bails.

It was near the intersection of Piney Mountain Road and Coon Club Road in Frostburg, Maryland, that the three “Zizians” were apprehended Sunday afternoon, as detailed in the police report:

Not long after 3:30 p.m. on Sunday, the Maryland State Police, Allegany County Sheriff’s Office and Maryland Natural Resources Police responded to a property on Piney Mountain Road off Coon Club Road in Frostburg after a man called and reported that two white box trucks with chains on the tires were trespassing on his property.
The man informed police that he told the three people who were wearing all black that they were not allowed on his property. They asked him if they could camp there for one month.
The property owner told law enforcement that the three people appeared suspicious and he wanted them removed from his property, police reported.
When Master Trooper Brandon Jeffries approached the vehicles, he alleges he saw a man sitting in the passenger seat of one of the trucks and ordered him to show his hands. That’s when Blank stated that he had a learning disability and did not understand, police reported.
Then, Jeffries asserts, he saw someone wipe the window in the other truck because it had fogged up.
Police reported that they found two people in that truck who were wearing gun belts that contained ammunition.
Next, Jeffries ordered them to get out of the vehicle. Michelle Zajko, he claims, cried and pleaded with him not to kill her.
Jeffries alleges that he told Zajko and Jack LaSota about the complaint that they were trespassing. The two agreed to leave, police reported, but they then refused to show their IDs.
As Jeffries looked through the back door of the truck, he asserts, he spotted a rifle and a handgun.
The three refused to give their names, police reported. Law enforcement arrested Blank and LaSota.
Police then took Zajko to the ground after they claim she refused to put her hands behind her back. Officers reported that they found a loaded handgun in her waistband.
The FBI identified Blank, LaSota and Zajko after looking at pictures.

Kind of peeved that I didn’t obtain a copy of that report myself, as I’d asked about the availability of such documents at the court clerk’s office. Meanwhile, the Vermont Digger has an excellent report about the federal firearms charges filed against Zajko, who apparently provided false information on her federal forms when she purchased four pistols in Vermont in 2024. Authorities say Zajko supplied the guns used by Youngblut and Bauckholt in the shootout that killed Chris Maland, which is a much more serious thing than the misdemeanor charges in Maryland.

The next court appearance for the three suspects is March 24, which gives investigators five weeks to gather more evidence. So far as I know, the only Zizian cultist whose whereabouts are unknown now is Jasper “Gwen” Danielson, but I’m sure the FBI has alerted law enforcement nationwide to be on the lookout for him/“her.” Hope they’re all locked up a long time, because as I keep telling y’all, Crazy People Are Dangerous.



 

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Real Murders, Fake Suicides: ‘Zizian’ Death Cult Fugitives Still at Large

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Jack ‘Ziz’ LaSota (left); Jasper ‘Gwen’ Danielson (right)

There are layers and layers to the story of the radical vegan transgender death cult known as “Zizians,” whose existence became newsworthy after two reputed associates of the cult, Teresa “Milo” Youngblut and Felix “Ophelia” Bauckholt, got into a shootout in Vermont that killed a Border Patrol agent on Jan. 20. In the first few days after the shootout, in which Bauckholt was also killed, the news accounts were mysterious. What were Youngblut, a Seattle native, and Bauckholt, a German citizen in the U.S. on a work visa, doing up in Vermont near the Canadian border?

Jessica Taylor (@jessi_cata), who knew Bauckholt in New York City circa 2022 and tried to warn him about the cult following of Jack “Ziz” LaSota, connected the dots early, but it was Andy Ngo who was the first journalist to follow up on Taylor’s information.

Note that it took Andy three days — from Friday, Jan. 24, to Monday, Jan. 27 — to get from his first X post about the case to having a full story at the Post Millennial. That’s a lot of work and, as I say, when I first saw Andy’s Jan. 27 headline, I was like, “You gotta be kidding me.” Here we are, five days later, and now the Zizian death cult story is making headlines in Canada’s National Post:

An already bizarre shootout that killed a U.S. Border Patrol agent and a suspect on a highway near the Canadian border is unfurling into a sprawling investigation encompassing four other killings allegedly linked to an odd cabal of young math and computer whizzes sharing a passion for artificial intelligence, veganism, fringe philosophy and gender fluidity.

You can read the whole thing, which is a pretty good summary of the case for those not yet acquainted with it. Now that more reporters are paying attention to the cult angle, we’re starting to get some of the holes in the story filled in, like how “Ziz” LaSota faked his own death in 2022:

According to [defense attorney Jerold] Friedman, he received a phone call in August 2022 from LaSota’s defense attorney in a separate criminal case. That attorney told Friedman that LaSota fell from a boat in San Francisco Bay and was likely dead. When Friedman reached out to LaSota’s mother, she also “confirmed that Jack LaSota died.”
Friedman obtained the U.S. Coast Guard report on LaSota’s apparent drowning, which was submitted in evidence to the court. According to the Coast Guard, LaSota went overboard at approximately 11 p.m. on Aug. 19, 2022. . . . Despite hours of searching — and calm seas, clear weather and a 60-degree night — no trace of LaSota was found. An obituary posted to Legacy.com appeared not long after . . .
Less than three months later, Friedman said he was forwarded an email from the Sonoma County District Attorney’s Office. “I just wanted to reach out and let you know that Jack Lasota was contacted by police in Vallejo this weekend,” it read. “Lasota was on scene, alive and well.”
Soon, LaSota would be confirmed alive by another police department. In early January 2023, Pennsylvania State Police troopers descended on the Candlewood Suites in Chester City. In hand, they had a search warrant for a room being occupied by Michelle Zajko, whose parents, Richard and Rita Zajko, had been shot and killed in their home on Dec. 31, 2022. One of the troopers testified in court that they believed the weapon in the killing, a 9 mm Smith and Wesson, was in Zajko’s possession.
During their search, the trooper said Zajko indicated she had companions in another hotel room. Upon searching that room, the trooper testified that they found LaSota, who was identified through fingerprints — 17 months after LaSota apparently died in San Francisco Bay. LaSota was charged with obstruction of justice and disorderly conduct and released from custody.

This is very important for three reasons, first, confirming that “Ziz” LaSota definitely had faked his own death, second, that he was in Vallejo at the time of the November 2022 attack on Curtis Lind, and third, that Ziz was associating with Zajko, whose parents had just been murdered — almost certainly not a coincidence. Andy Ngo has now followed up to report that a longtime associate of Ziz, known as “Gwen” Danielson, is a transgender Spokane native whose name was Jasper Danielson. “Gwen”/Jasper was one of those arrested along with Ziz at a 2019 protest against the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR). “In 2022, Danielson likely faked his death to avoid accountability in an ongoing criminal case in Sonoma County, Calif. . . . There is a bench warrant for Danielson’s arrest, like there is for ‘Ziz’ LaSota, who faked his death that same year.”

If you’re keeping score at home, that means there at least three fugitives — Ziz LaSota, Gwen Danielson and Michelle Zajko — currently at large and suspected in this interstate crime spree. Oh, and I neglected to mention this interesting sidenote earlier:

It’s a gigantic pancake stack of weirdness, covered in insanity syrup, and while the manhunt for these dangerous fugitives continues, I expect still further information about the Zizian death cult to emerge.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! This is my fourth post on this subject in five days, because how often in my career am I gonna get a chance to cover a RADICAL VEGAN TRANSGENDER DEATH CULT?

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Vegan Transgender Death Cult Update: Zizian ‘Anti-Law Enforcement Ideology’

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A “be-on-the-lookout” (BOLO) alert has been issued for Michelle Jacqueline Zajko, the 32-year-old “Zizian” who purchased the guns used in last week’s Vermont shootout that left a Border Patrol agent dead.

There have been several other developments in the radical vegan transgender death cult story, many of them covered in Andy Ngo’s exclusive story just published by the New York Post:

Killing of border patrol agent appears linked to ‘Zizian’ radical leftist trans cult

Well, we can forgive the New York Post editors for failing to get “vegan” in that headline, because what’s important is that this is the biggest media coverage so far to include the transgender aspect of the “Zizian” cult. This is not a trivial factor in their crime spree, which has already killed at least six people, including two members of the cult.

It must be understood that the cult around Jack Lasota (a/k/a”Ziz”) originated in his dispute with the leadership of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) and the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR), specifically Eliezer Yudkowsky and Anna Salamon. Lasota’s transgender identity was central to that conflict. “Anna discriminates against trans women in CFAR’s employment and inclusion in sponsored workshop events,” Ziz wrote in a flyer printed up for a 2019 protest against CFAR. In that flyer, Ziz labeled Salamon “a trans-exclusive radical feminist” (TERF). In a blog post, Ziz wrote:

A MIRI employee told me in a joint MIRICFAR staff meeting for AISFP [AI Summer Fellowship Program], that Anna said I should be disinvited, she had a bad feeling about me, when asked for details, saying I wore “black clothes, took supervillains as role models, and came up with dangerous plans.”

Andy Ngo perceives that the media are ignoring the transgender aspect of the “Zizian” cult because of political bias. My point is that transgenderism is fundamental to the whole thing. Were it not for Lasota/”Ziz” being transgender, and the accusation of transphobia against the CFAR director Anna Salamon, this bizarre splinter segment of the “rationalist” movement would not exist. A few excerpts from Andy’s article:

The murder of a US Border Patrol agent near the Canadian border appears to be linked to a radical leftist trans militant cult accused of killings across the country. . . .
Authorities now say the guns used by [Tersea “Milo”] Youngblut and [Felix “Ophelia”] Bauckholt are owned by a person of interest in other murders — and connected to a mysterious cult of transgender “geniuses” who follow a trans leader named Jack LaSota, also known by the alias “Ziz.”
Bauckholt was a biological male who identified as trans and used feminine pronouns. He was an award-winning youth math genius from Freiburg, Germany, who later graduated from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.
Around 2021, he was hired as a quantitative trader at Tower Research Capital in New York. It is believed Baukholt was in the US on an H-1B visa. . . .
Youngblut is a biological female who identifies as trans and lists having neo-pronouns as “xe/xem/xyrs” on social media. Youngblut was a University of Washington student studying computer science. . . .
In November 2024, Youngblut filed a marriage application with a 22-year-old fellow Lakeside alumnus named Maximilian Bentley Snyder.
Last week, Snyder, an “any pronouns” computer science whiz from a wealthy Seattle family, was arrested in Vallejo, Calif., for the murder of an elderly key witness set to testify in an upcoming attempted murder trial against alleged members of the trans extremist group.
That group, the “Zizians,” are highly-educated trans vegan “rationalists” who hold fringe, esoteric ideological beliefs about transhumanism and animal rights.
Their leader, Jack “Ziz” LaSota, is a biological male who identifies as a woman. He also used the name Andrea Phelps, and is accused of influencing followers to kill. LaSota’s archived prolific blog writings ramble about the use of violence and radical anarchist tactics to achieve various ends.
LaSota has a warrant for an arrest in Delaware County, Pa. after skipping out on court hearings on an open criminal case.
A source with knowledge says LaSota was living with Bauckholt and other members of the group in an AirBnb rental in Chapel Hill, N.C., since 2023.
A Jan. 27 motion by federal prosecutors to deny Youngblut bail strongly suggests links with the group.
“Her [Youngblut] associations with other individuals suspected of violent acts also warrants caution,” prosecutor Matthew Lasher wrote in a court filing.
“The individual who purchased the firearms the defendant and Bauckholt possessed on January 20, 2025, is a person of interest in a dual-homicide investigation in Delaware County, Pennsylvania.”
That person of interest is bioinformatics researcher Michelle Jacqueline Zajko, according to the ATF.

All of these “geniuses” were drawn into Ziz’s orbit because of his blogging about artificial intelligence (AI) and related topics. This includes Zajko, whose elderly parents were murdered at their Pennsylvania home in January 2023. At her blog, “Plum of Discord,” Zajko had written about suffering abusive treatment from her parents. Zajko also wrote a post, in February 2022, about being afraid that Ziz would murder her. At some point, Zajko purchased land in Vermont, not far from where the Border Patrol agent was shot. The Albany (N.Y.) Times-Union reports:

Police are searching for a 32-year-old woman suspected of purchasing the semiautomatic handguns used by two people involved in the shooting death of a U.S. Border Patrol agent last week in northern Vermont. She is also a person of interest in the 2023 murder of her parents in Pennsylvania.
Michelle J. Zajko, who has ties to Vermont, Pennsylvania and Boston, is considered armed and dangerous and also adheres to an “anti-law enforcement ideology,” according to police records obtained by the Times Union. Police agencies in multiple states were told to be on the lookout for Zajko on Jan. 22, two days after 44-year-old Border Patrol Agent David Maland was gunned down during a traffic stop in Coventry, Vt., not far from the northern border.
A day after the fatal shooting, federally licensed gun dealers received a bulletin from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives urging them to contact that agency’s office in Vermont if they had information about any firearms that have been sold to Zajko.
A multi-state police bulletin issued last week indicates Zajko is a “person of interest in a double homicide that occurred in Pennsylvania in 2023” and said she may be driving a green 2013 Subaru Outback with an expired Vermont registration. . . .
Zajko’s ties to the Border Patrol agent’s death are referenced in court documents filed in U.S. District Court in Vermont. The records do not implicate her directly to that incident but allege — without identifying her by name — that she may have provided at least two semiautomatic handguns to the man and woman who were involved in the shooting. Those semiautomatic handguns, a .40-caliber and a .380-caliber, had allegedly been purchased by Zajko in February 2024 from a gun store in Mount Tabor, Vt. . . .
Around 11 p.m. on Jan. 14, Youngblut and Bauckholt checked in to the Newport City Inn and Suites in Newport, Vt. . . . only a few miles from the U.S-Canadian border. . . .
Public records indicate Zajko owns property about 10 minutes away from the inn in Derby. Addresses associated with Zajko also include a home in Orleans, about 20 minutes away.

There are layers and layers to this story. What is this “anti-law enforcement ideology” to which Zajko allegedly adheres? Is she also likely to die in a police shootout? And while we’re asking questions: Where is Jack “Ziz” Lasota now? As the purported mastermind behind all this violence, shouldn’t there be a “BOLO” for him, too?

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Vegan Transgender Death Cult Update

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Y’all didn’t think I was going to let this story go with just one blog post, did you? How many times in my career am I going to get the chance to use “Vegan Transgender Death Cult” in a headline? In for a dime, in for a dollar — you’re gonna get in-depth coverage, my friends.

The “Zizian” plot continues to become more complicated:

A man accused of murder in California appears to have sought a marriage license with a woman charged in connection with the fatal shooting of a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Vermont.
The woman, Teresa Youngblut, 21, of Washington state, faces two weapons charges in connection with the Jan. 20 death of 44-year-old Border Patrol Agent David Maland.
A prosecution motion seeking Youngblut’s detention Monday says she was in frequent contact with someone who is a person of interest in a homicide investigation in Vallejo, California.
Court records show that Maximilian Snyder, 22, was arrested by Vallejo police on Friday. He was charged Monday with murder and has a court appearance scheduled Tuesday in California’s Solano County. An attorney was not listed for Snyder.
In November, individuals identified as Teresa Youngblut and Maximilian Snyder took out a marriage license, according to a records search in Washington state’s King County. . . .
According to the criminal complaint filed in Solano County, Snyder allegedly killed a person with a knife on Jan. 17. The complaint alleges the person, identified as “C.L.,” was a witness to a crime who was “intentionally killed for the purpose of preventing his testimony in a criminal proceeding” or to retaliate for his testimony.
A gofundme.com page for a Curtis Lind mentions he was attacked on his property in Vallejo on Jan. 17 and died.

Curtis Lind made the mistake of renting his property to three members of the Zizian cult — Emma Borhanian, 31, Alexander Jeffrey Leatham, 27, and Suri Dao, 21. All of them were transgender. Leatham goes by the alias “Somnulence ‘Somni’ Logencia.” In November 2022, the trio of Zizians attacked Lind with a samurai sword:

Lind’s family said he had been trying to evict a group a people who hadn’t been paying rent.
His son, Carl Lind, said, “A big part of this problem was this moratorium on rent, COVID. People took advantage of it.”
Patrick McMillan, who lives on the property in a motor home, said after the attack Lind came to him covered in blood.
McMillan said, “He had a samurai sword stuck to his back with about a foot of it sticking out in front, his face cut up all over.”
“After they attacked him he got his gun out and shot two of them, killed one of them. The other one had three shots to the chest,” McMillan said.

Emma Borhanian

Borhanian was killed, Leatham was severely wounded, and both Leatham and Dao were charged not only with attacking Lind, but also with the death of their accomplice, Borhanian. “Lind was set to testify against his alleged assailants as the sole eyewitness in a criminal trial scheduled for April,” so the murder motive was to prevent him from testifying.

Curtis Lind

Based on a post warning “the rationalist community” about the Zizians, “Suri Dao” also made bail, while Leatham/“Somni” is apparently still in custody. Meanwhile, the cult leader, Jack Lasota, a/k/a “Ziz,” was also arrested in connection with the January 2023 murder of Richard Zajko, 72, and his wife, Rita, 69, who were the parents of a Zizian cult member named Michelle “Jamie” Zajko. However, “Ziz”/Lasota was released on bail in June 2023, but not before Maximilian Snyder, a/k/a “Audere,” had tried to raise money for Ziz’s bail. Based on the latest news, then, it appears that the Vermont shooting suspect Youngblut (who identified as “Milo”) was married to Snyder/“Audere,” who is now accused of murdering Curtis Lind. That would be no fewer than five deaths — Borhanian, Lind, Richard and Rita Zajko, and now Border Patrol agent Chris Maland — connected to the Zizian cult.

AI Doomer Cool Kids Club

What must be understood about “Ziz”/Lasota and his followers is that all this craziness originates in the West Coast world of Artificial Intelligence (AI) research. If you thought this tale was convoluted and confusing so far, just buckle your seatbelts, because we’re about to dive headlong into an abyss of insanity. Ziz attended a workshop sponsored by the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) and an associated organization, the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR). “In 2000, Eliezer Yudkowsky founded” what was to become MIRI “with the purpose of accelerating the development of artificial intelligence”:

However, Yudkowsky began to be concerned that AI systems developed in the future could become superintelligent and pose risks to humanity, and in 2005 the institute moved to Silicon Valley and began to focus on ways to identify and manage those risks, which were at the time largely ignored by scientists in the field.
Starting in 2006, the Institute organized the Singularity Summit to discuss the future of AI including its risks, initially in cooperation with Stanford University and with funding from Peter Thiel. The San Francisco Chronicle described the first conference as a “Bay Area coming-out party for the tech-inspired philosophy called transhumanism.”

Following so far? Well, because of Yudkowsky’s idea that AI could “pose risks to humanity,” he spun off CFAR to promote “rationality,” as some sort of defense against this risk. In 2016, the New York Times did a feature story about CFAR, and this would have been no more than two or  three years before “Ziz”/Lasota attended a MIRI/CFAR workshop. It would appear that among nerds interested in AI research, being part of “the rationalist community” is like membership in the Cool Kids Club.

What I’ve shared with you so far is the briefest, most superficial summary of MIRI/CFAR that I could devise. This background is important because Lasota/“Ziz” first became notorious in 2019 when he and his followers staged a protest against CFAR that resulted in a police standoff.

Ziz accused Yudkowsky of sexually abusing minors and other malfeasances, but the accusations were expressed in a bunch of jargon that struck police as insane gibberish. And this is where I direct you to Nirit Weiss-Blatt’s article from September 2024, “When Effective Altruism Takes a Dark Turn.” Y’all remember that “Effective Altruism” (EA) was part of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX scam. There is a close connection between EA and the “rationality” promoted by CFAR.

The nexus of this is “AI Doomerism,” i.e., the belief that “the most pressing problem in the world is preventing an apocalypse where an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) exterminates humanity.” This is the organizing fear of the existential risk (“x-risk”) community, which concerns itself with probability of doom, “p(doom).”

Weiss-Blatt quotes AI researcher John Wentworth as saying that “some people are very predisposed to craziness spirals”:

“’AI is likely to kill us all’ is definitely a thing in response to which one can fall into a spiral-of-craziness, so we naturally end up ‘attracting’ a bunch of people who are behaviorally well-described as ‘looking for something to go crazy about.’” . . . “On that model,” he concluded, “insofar as EAs and rationalists sometimes turn crazy, it’s mostly a selection effect. ‘AI is likely to kill us all’ is a kind of metaphorical flypaper for people predisposed to craziness spirals.”

Is the point clear enough? The “rationalist community” originated with Yudkowsky, the Godfather of AI Doomerism, and it was logically predictable that this would attract a lot of crazy people, which is what ultimately explains how “Ziz”/Lasota became the leader of a vegan transgender death cult. Some further reading:

As you can see, this story is beginning to attract more widespread attention, although it is not yet a national media story. Eventually, I think it will be the subject of a documentary on Netflix, at the very least, and perhaps a segment on “60 Minutes.” In the meantime, I’ll keep updating you — got a lot of traffic Tueesday from a Reddit link — because how can I resist the temptation of writing more RADICAL VEGAN TRANSGENDER DEATH CULT headlines?

UPDATE: Vegan Transgender Death Cult Update: Zizian ‘Anti-Law Enforcement Ideology’



 

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Radical Vegan Transgender Cult Implicated in Border Agent’s Death
UPDATE: Landlord ‘Impaled With a Sword’ by ‘Vegan Sith’ Cult Members

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Jack Lasota, a/k/a “Ziz”

You’ve never heard of the “Zizians,” and neither had I until this afternoon, but you’re probably going to be hearing a lot more about them now that this weirdo California cult has been connected to the shootout in Vermont last week that left a Border Patrol agent dead. Credit to Andy Ngo for putting together the pieces of this bizarre puzzle. When the shootout went down in Vermont on January 20, the initial reports were very thin, but piece by piece, we’ve learned more about the two suspects, Teresa Youngblut, a 21-year-old from Seattle, and Felix Bauckholt, a math genius from Germany who had worked in the financial industry on an H1B visa. About seven months ago, Youngblut’s parents had reported her missing, saying she had cut off contact with them and they were concerned she might be in a coercive relationship. The police didn’t do anything, saying that as an adult, she couldn’t be considered a runaway.

Youngblut and Bauckholt showed up in Vermont a couple of weeks ago and attracted suspicion because they were wearing black “tactical” gear and Youngblut had a pistol in a visible holster. Eventually, this led to an attempted traffic stop on I-91 in which both Youngblut and Bauckholt pulled pistols. Bauckholt was killed in the resulting shootout, but Younglut survived and will face charges. This was mysterious. Why were they in Vermont? What were they doing with the tactical gear, an “arsenal” of weapons and even night-vision goggles? But then there’s this:

In court papers filed earlier Monday, federal prosecutors in Vermont said Youngblut and Bauckholt both possessed firearms purchased by a resident of the state in February 2024. That person, who was not identified, is a person of interest in a double homicide in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, prosecutors said.
Bauckholt flew into the U.S. in the hours before the Pennsylvania murders. Prosecutors also said that Youngblut has been in “frequent contact” with an individual who was detained during the investigation into the double homicide.
That individual is also a person of interest in a murder investigation in Vallejo, California, federal prosecutors said. No other details were provided.

That’s three other murders that this is connected to. And then, thanks to Andy Ngo (and @jessi_cata) we learned that both of the suspects in the Vermont shootout were transgender, Youngblut identifying as “Milo” and Bauckholt calling himself “Ophelia.” Furthermore, it appears that both of them were involved with the Zizians, whose leader Jack Lasota, a/k/a “Ziz,” became notorious for a 2019 protest against CFAR (Center for Applied Rationality). Among other things, the Zizians are radical vegans. The Pennsylvania double homicide was in January 2023 and the victims, Richard Zajko, 72, and his wife, Rita, 69, were the parents of a Zizian cult member named Michelle “Jamie” Zajko.

It appears these highly intelligent people lacked common sense. They got sucked into the vortex of radical vegan transgender craziness, despite being warned about this cult, and now Bauckholt is dead, as is a Border Patrol agent, while Youngblut is likely facing life in prison.

Have I mentioned lately that Crazy People Are Dangerous?

UPDATE: Thanks to Ms. EBL for pointing this out:

The theoretical basis for Zizian social conduct is Yudkowsky and Soare’s “functional decision theory”. “Functional decision theory” is designed as an answer to Newcomb-like problems where the actions of others are conditional on which decision theory an agent uses. In normal English, it’s about situations where the environment will change depending on who you are. . . .
In Zizian thought this concept is expanded to justify behavior that would make a Sovereign Citizen blush. Zizians do not think it is ever valid to surrender. The reasoning goes that if someone is trying to extract a surrender from you, giving in is choosing a strategy that gets coerced into surrender. If you fight bitterly you prevent the coercion in the first place by making it too costly to fight you.

As I remarked in the comments, the philosophical basis of Zizian belief is a lot of lunatic gibberish about “ethics” and “effective altruism.” Meanwhile, mainstream journalism catches up:

Two young people who applied in November for a marriage license in Washington have each been charged by authorities in separate January killings that claimed the lives of a Border Patrol agent in Vermont and an 82-year-old landlord in Vallejo, according to police and court records obtained by Open Vallejo.
Maximilian Snyder, a 22-year-old data scientist arrested in Northern California on Friday on suspicion of murder, and Teresa Youngblut, the 21-year-old computer science student charged last week in connection with the shooting death of U.S. Border Patrol Agent David Maland, appear to follow a fringe, self-described “vegan Sith” ideology that started in the Bay Area and has connections to violence . . .
Vallejo police arrested Snyder around 12:40 a.m. Friday in Redding, California, in connection with the Jan. 17 stabbing death of Curtis Lind . . .
In 2022, Lind was allegedly impaled with a sword and blinded in one eye during an attack by several young people who lived in box trucks on his Vallejo property and had stopped paying Lind during the pandemic-era rent moratorium. Court records obtained by Open Vallejo show that Lind was set to testify against his alleged assailants as the sole eyewitness in a criminal trial scheduled for April.

Latter-day Manson gang, a gigantic pancake stack of craziness.

UPDATE II: Vegan Transgender Death Cult Update.

UPDATE III: Linked at KiwiFarms, who took their sweet time about it.

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Suspect in Shooting of Palestinian Students ‘Struggled With Depression’

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In the immediate aftermath of the weekend shooting in Burlington, Vermont — wounding Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid, and Tahseen Aliahmad — I braced myself for an anticipated tsunami of reports about an “extremist” radicalized by Fox News and “far right” websites, because that’s obviously who must have done it, right?

Then the arrest of a suspect was announced Sunday, and I was still bracing myself for the expected media onslaught blaming a right-wing “climate of hate” for the Burlington gunman’s crime. But I waited, and waited, and waited some more, and even after the suspect was publicly identified as Jason Eaton, 48, the media horde failed to produce the “blame Republicans” headlines I had feared. This led me to wonder what the heck was going on, and then I found this story by the Daily Beast:

The suspect accused of shooting three Palestinian college students in Vermont on Saturday night has worked as a farm hand, a Harvard research assistant, and a former ski instructor, according to a resume reviewed by The Daily Beast.
Jason J. Eaton, 48, was arrested Sunday afternoon and charged with three counts of second-degree attempted murder in connection with the shooting. Police say the college students were walking along a Burlington street when the suspect opened fire with a handgun “without speaking.” Afterward, he fled. . . .
Eaton had previously struggled with depression and had Thanksgiving with his family just days earlier, his mother told The Daily Beast in an exclusive interview. “Jason has had a lot of struggles in his life but he is such a kind and loving person,” Mary Reed, his mother, said on Monday. “I am just shocked by the whole thing.” . . .

(This phrase — “struggled with depression” — could be used to describe tens of millions of Americans who never opened fire on three strangers for no discernible reason.)

Eaton’s resume states that he went to the University of Idaho for a bachelor’s in general studies in 2001, where he focused on natural resource ecology and conservation biology but was seven credits short of graduating. He also got a graduate certification at the University of Idaho in environmental education, which is pending his undergraduate completion, as well as a pro-professional forestry degree at Paul Smith’s College, according to the document. . . .

(“Environmental education”? Hmmm.)

According to NBC, Eaton appears to have a YouTube account that has playlists with videos that include “Expose Fauci,” long COVID, economics, and how to use brain crystals for “psychic powers.” An Instagram account that appears to belong to him also shows him on a farm and cooking.
In an X account that appeared to belong to Eaton, he describes himself as a “radical citizen…patrolling demockracy and crapitalism for oathcreepers.” A 2022 archived version of that same account, which contains the same photo, has a more subdued bio that describes him as a Vermont dad and part-time farmer. The archived X account also provides a link to a Substack, with the “wandering ramblings of a reformed broker on the ADHD/ASD spectrum.” . . .

(The hints of kookiness begin to proliferate.)

Reed said Eaton had previously suffered from depression and other mental health issues but had been “in such a good mood” when she saw him on Thanksgiving.
She said her son, who has bounced around different jobs and previously was an “assistant to a financial officer.” . . .
On Thanksgiving, Reed said, Eaton was “totally normal” and the family had a great holiday together. It was not immediately clear whether Eaton owned a gun. “It was the best Thanksgiving we had in years,” Eaton’s mother said. “We were all together.”
During the family dinner, Reed said that Eaton did not mention the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas. She added, however, that her son is a “very religious person” who connects with different religious figures and often reads the Bible.
“He, like all of us, thinks the world is a mess,” Reed said. “He is a spiritual person.”

Yeah, not much in the way of a specific motive there, but you get the idea that Eaton led a rather aimless and unsuccessful life — leaving college just seven credits shy of a diploma — and had some distinctly weird ideas bouncing around in his head (“other mental health issues”). As much as the media might want to depict Eaton as a “right-wing extremist,” his biography doesn’t lend itself to such a narrative. Unless and until further evidence sheds more light on Eaton’s motive, then, his crime doesn’t help the media’s pin-the-tail-on-the-Republicans game.

Have I mentioned lately that Crazy People Are Dangerous?