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
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.
“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.
Apparently everyone is really digging the Radical Transgender Vegan Death Cult News.
It was a bad week to be at RFK if you were a Senators fan. We lost two out of three to the Cubs and then got swept by the A’s, which means we’re siting at 13-19…but we’re just four games behind division-leading Boston. Maybe we’ll pick up some wins against the Twins this Tuesday.
Thanks to everyone who bought stuff through my Amazon links this month. I appreciate all of you. Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.
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.
I can confirm that the German migrant who was the accomplice to a shooting resulting in a border agent in Vermont being killed on Inauguration Day is a trans activist.
Other trans activists have been pressuring people who knew German trans person Felix Baukholt, who died in the…
Teresa Youngblut (a/k/a Milo) “is a biological female who identifies as trans and lists her neo-pronouns as ‘xe/xem/xyrs’ on social media.”https://t.co/xwoT7VQezs
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.”
Ngo investigates: Here is a profile of another trans member of the trans terror cult that is linked to six deaths. “Gwen” Danielson had close associations to someone who says he’s an air traffic controller for the FAA @FAANews.
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:
Michelle Zajko was the illustrator for a series of children’s books about “Turbo the Flying Dog,” the first published in 2014, with sequels in 2015 and 2016. pic.twitter.com/4n29Inrg3g
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?
Usual weekend deadlines for the usual weekend posts. We’ll see if I can do them in a timely manner to kick off February.
Book 16 of Ralts Bloodthorne’s Behold! Humanity! epic, The War In Heaven, is out. Highly recommended. Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.
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:
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.”
OK, here is a copy of the 2018 post by Ziz (“Intersex Brains and Conceptual Warfare”) based on attending a MIRI/CFAR workshop and then deciding to “declare war” on CFAR director Anna Salamon.
cc @DrTechlash@davidzmorrishttps://t.co/gSogRZKUsj
Because of Ziz’s transgender identification, Anna Salamon’s criticism was interpreted as transphobia. Basically: “Anna is a TERF!”https://t.co/p7Tb47124n
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?
