The alleged leader of a cultlike group linked to several killings made her first appearance in federal court Monday, denouncing the government and its case against her as a “genocide” against transgender people.
Ziz LaSota, who was originally charged under what her attorney referred to as her deadname, gave meandering answers at her initial appearance and arraignment in U.S. District Court in downtown Baltimore related to a Western Maryland gun arrest, which ended what had been a cross-country search.
(You know, when you’re facing federal weapons charges connected to a nationwide murder spree, being “deadnamed” probably isn’t the biggest issue you’re dealing with, and the Baltimore Banner’s use of “she/her” pronouns for LaSota is not deceiving anyone.)
[LaSota] refused to stand when the judge entered the courtroom, or when entering her plea of not guilty.
“Your government is currently going around scooping up brown people and disappearing them,” the 33-year-old LaSota said when asked by U.S. Magistrate Judge Douglas R. Miller if she understood the charges she faces. “I’m transgender, and the intentions of this regime towards transgender people are very clear: genocide.”
LaSota was being sought by law enforcement authorities in multiple states when she and two others were arrested in Frostburg on gun and trespassing charges in February. Federal prosecutors then obtained a grand jury indictment in June for a charge of possession of firearms and ammunition by a fugitive.
LaSota remains in custody in Allegany County, awaiting trial there.
The Zizians have been tied to the killing of a U.S. Border Patrol agent near the Canadian border in January and five other homicides in Vermont, Pennsylvania and California, though the exact role of LaSota, who faked her death in 2022, is unclear and she has not been charged in those deaths. She’s been seen at crime scenes, questioned by authorities and, in one instance, arrested on charges of obstructing police in Pennsylvania.
The Associated Press has reported that the Zizians are a group of young, highly intelligent computer scientists, most of them in their 20s and 30s, who met online, shared anarchist beliefs and became increasingly violent. Their online writings span topics from radical veganism to gender identity to artificial intelligence.
LaSota, the apparent leader and a former computer programmer, believes that the two hemispheres of the human brain can operate separately from one another, with one side holding different beliefs and existing as a different gender than the other, The Associated Press reported.
Alleged Zizian member Teresa Youngblut is charged with the murder of border agent David Maland in Vermont, and federal authorities have said they will seek the death penalty.
Shackled at the ankles during her court appearance on Monday, LaSota walked very slowly into the downtown Baltimore courtroom wearing an orange jail jumpsuit. Two Allegany County sheriff’s deputies sat in the second row.
As the judge asked basic questions such as whether she had read the indictment and understood the maximum possible penalties, LaSota chided the “mock proceedings” and said Miller was a “participant in an organized crime ring” led by the “states united in slavery.”
Miller struggled to get LaSota to answer basic questions. Please state your name for the record, the court clerk said.
“Justice,” she replied.
What is your age?
“Timeless.”
What year were you born?
“I have been born many times.”
LaSota’s trial in Allegany County, originally scheduled to begin next month, has been rescheduled for February.
At some point, the judge will probably have to order a mental competency hearing for LaSota and, while the psychiatrist may determine that the suspect is fit to stand trial, there can be no doubt he is bonkers, berserk, daft, demented, deranged, wacky, off his rocker, non compos mentis, nuttier than squirrel farts, a few fries short of a Happy Meal and cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. Must I repeat myself? Crazy People Are Dangerous.
The alleged Afghan terrorist accused of executing one National Guard soldier and critically wounding another just blocks from the White House should never have been allowed into the US, the CIA director said Thursday.
Rahmanullah Lakanwal and his family were welcomed into the US four years ago after serving in a CIA-backed elite Afghan commando “Zero Unit” that was accused of torture and the brutal murder of civilians.
After his war-torn country fell to barbaric Taliban rule, the 29-year-old was given a $2,000-per-month apartment in the quiet town of Bellingham, Washington, neighbors told The Post — along with, reportedly, a contracting gig at Amazon.
“This individual — and so many others — should have never been allowed to come here,” CIA director John Ratcliffe said in response to the shooting, revealing that Lakanwal previously worked for a unit tied to the spy agency.
“Our citizens and servicemembers deserve far better than to endure the ongoing fallout from the Biden Administration’s catastrophic failures. God bless our brave troops.”
Following the attack, the Department of Homeland Security announced it would stop processing immigration requests for Afghan nationals pending a review of security protocols and that “all” Biden-era asylum cases would be scrutinized. President Trump also directed a sweeping review of green card holders from 19 countries of concern.
Lakanwal served in the elite NDS-03 counterterrorism unit in Afghanistan, one of at least five paramilitary “Zero Units” that worked with the CIA, according to the nonprofit group #AfghanEvac.
Lakanwal was vetted by the CIA and checked through the National Counterterrorism Center, a senior US official told CNN. “He was clean on all checks,” the official said.
Asked how an Afghan cleared to work with the CIA could commit such a heinous attack in the United States, Trump replied: “He went cuckoo. I mean, he went nuts.”
Yes — Crazy People Are Dangerous., and when you’re shipping in tens of thousands of “refugees” from one of the most backward countries on the planet, you’re likely to get a few hundred lunatic killers in the bunch.
Joe got pulled over by a cop in Portage County, Wisconsin, and could have gotten off with a mere traffic ticket — or perhaps just a warning — but he was defiant, looking for trouble. If you’ve watched a lot of police body camera videos on YouTube (it’s a hobby of mine), you’ve become familiar with this scenario, the routine traffic stop that “escalates,” sometimes fatally. It often begins with a motorist’s refusal to give the officer a driver’s license, proceeding to the demand that the officer summon a supervisor, etc. Joe ended up in handcuffs in the back of a squad car, charged with assault and other crimes, adding to his already lengthy history of run-ins with the law.
What causes these unnecessary confrontations? In a word, equality — or, as I’ve previously pointed out, Equality, with a capital “E,” denoting the quasi-religious faith in Equality common among liberals. “All men are created equal,” as our Declaration of Independence famously proclaimed, and that simple five-word phrase has become the foundation of a dangerous cult, which threatens to wreck the very nation that the Declaration announced our ancestors’ intent to create.
Equality, as conceived by liberals, is not merely a political ideal, but a moral principle, so that any sort of inequality is to them a sort of sin. . . .
Remember this guy? On January 8, 2011, Jared Loughner used a Glock-19 with a 33-round magazine to kill six people and wound 13 others, including Democratic Rep. Gabby Giffords, at a political rally in Tucson, Arizona. In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, Democrats tried to blame the Tea Party movement generally, and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin in particular, for the shooting. These claims turned out to be false — as I will explain in a moment — but that 2011 shooting is back in the news because Giffords married Mark Kelly, now a Democratic senator from Arizona, and Kelly tried to leverage that fact to silence his critics:
Senator whose wife was shot fears for safety after Trump sedition accusation
Senator Mark Kelly — whose wife, Gabrielle Giffords, narrowly survived an attempted assassination while she was in Congress in 2011 — says he is worried about “increased threats” to his family’s safety after Donald Trump accused him and other Democratic lawmakers of “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH”.
“This kind of language is dangerous, and it’s wrong,” Kelly said on Friday on MS NOW’s Morning Joe . . .
“My family has suffered from political violence,” Kelly said on Morning Joe. “My wife … was nearly assassinated — shot in the head at a political event. We have rising political violence in this country, even the president — two assassination attempts. He should understand that.”
Leaving aside Trump’s bombastic rhetorical style, and Kelly’s role in the “Seditious Six” video, let me instead call your attention to the man who shot Gabby Giffords, and what we know about his motive.
The two-hour video is anti-Christian, anti-American and anti-capitalist, and Jared Lee Loughner became obsessed with it. Zeitgeist, a conspiracy-theory documentary released in 2007, has spawned its own cult following. According to Loughner’s friends, the accused Tucson gunman was one of the cult’s most zealous converts. And many of Loughner’s otherwise inexplicable obsessions — from his fascination with currency to his rantings against illiteracy to his paranoid fears of “mind control” — parallel ideas promoted in Zeitgeist. . . .
“I really think that this Zeitgeist documentary had a profound impact upon Jared Loughner’s mindset and how he views the world that he lives in,” Zach Osler, 22, told ABC’s Ashleigh Banfield. Osler’s father confirmed that influence in an interview published Sunday by the Arizona Republic. “He wanted to watch [Zeitgeist] all the time,” George Osler told the Phoenix newspaper. “It was cool at first. But then it got weird. It was all he wanted to do.” . . .
You can read the rest of that article I wrote for The American Spectator in January 2011. Doing a critical analysis of that fringe conspiracy-theory video struck me at the time as work that was above my pay grade. Given the nationwide media attention to the Tucson shooting, and the fact that ABC News had reported about Loughner’s Zeitgeist obsession, wouldn’t you expect that someone on the staff of the New York Times or the Washington Post would have done that work? But for some reason, none of them did, and the only journalists who spent any time researching Zeitgeist were me and Jesse Walker of Reason magazine.
Threats against public figures should be investigated and the persons responsible should be arrested and prosecuted, but what Kelly has done here — invoking his wife’s shooting as a way to deflect criticism — needs to be called out as the cheap trick it is. “This kind of language is dangerous,” Kelly says, after recording a video implying that the President of the United States is giving “illegal orders” to our troops. As if that kind of language is not dangerous? But none of this had anything to do with what Jared Lougher did in 2011. It was not “dangerous” political rhetoric that motivated Loughner, it was a weird conspiracy-theory video and, of course, his own psychotic condition: “After his arrest, two medical evaluations diagnosed Loughner with paranoid schizophrenia and ruled him incompetent to stand trial.” Crazy People Are Dangerous.
