In Focus delivers deeper coverage of the political, cultural, and ideological issues shaping America. Published daily by senior writers and experts, these in-depth pieces go beyond the headlines to give readers the full picture. You can find our full list of In Focus pieces here.
When news broke about a transgender-anti-fascist death cult, dubbed “trantifa,” carrying out a cross-country killing spree, the story sounded too sensational to be true, fabricated fodder for the political Right.
But the so-called Zizians are, in fact, a very real, violent crime cell composed of revolutionary-left activists allegedly responsible for a string of slayings across several U.S. states, including the fatal shooting of a Border Patrol officer in Vermont, the stabbing death of a landlord in California, and the double murder of an elderly couple in Pennsylvania.
The cohort’s unconscionable crimes have gone vastly underreported in the press, despite four Zizian-connected criminal cases gradually progressing through various courts toward trial.
Of the legacy media outlets that did publish pieces on the murderous rampage, they took a rather sympathetic approach to their coverage, with Wired saying the Zizians are a ragtag team of gender-defying “idealists” initially “set out to save the world” and the New York Times decidedly honoring their preferred pronouns.
Are the Zizians simply a band of misunderstood misfits with homicidal tendencies? Is their fringe thinking truly to blame for the trail of bodies? The media entertains these questions, in an effort to intellectualize the ideologies underpinning the cult’s bloodlust. Stripped bare of the academic arguments, their beliefs are bestial and saturated in far-left philosophy.
Who are the Zizians and what do they believe in?
Led by ringleader Jack “Ziz” LaSota, a transgender 34-year-old blogger, the Zizians ascribe to an amalgamation of ideologies, such as anarchism, radical adherences to veganism, and transhumanism, the theory that the human race can evolve beyond corporeal limitations by means of advanced science.
LaSota’s followers, self-identified “vegan anarchotranshumanists,” are predominantly transgender or “non-binary,” believing that they transcend the gender binary, neither male nor female.
In that vein, LaSota teaches his disciples that the brain’s hemispheres have different genders and “desire to kill each other.” Human consciousness, however, can be severed between the two halves, LaSota claims.
To achieve this state of “liberation,” the Zizians practice unihemispheric sleep (UHS), a method of sleep deprivation intended to “jailbreak” the mind. This phenomenon of asymmetric slow-wave sleep, in which one side of the brain rests while the other remains awake, is observed in other species.
In 2018, a Zizian named Maia Pasek committed suicide after attempting UHS; LaSota later blogged about that member not performing the practice correctly in a 14,000-word post titled “Pasek’s Doom,” but pointed to the suicide as proof of the experiment’s effectiveness.
LaSota was obsessed with willpower and claimed to be able to control minds by channeling “mana.”
How did the cult form?
LaSota’s cult following is an offshoot of the Rationalist movement, or “rationalistphere,” a school of thought born out of the San Francisco Bay Area. Rationalists are a collective of chronically online techies largely native to the Silicon Valley scene. Like LaSota, a computer engineer from Fairbanks, Alaska, several Zizians worked or interned at technology behemoths, such as Google, Oracle, and NASA.
THE INTEGRATION ERA: HOW AI IS UPENDING OUR INSTITUTIONS
Zizians, a subset of rationalists, fear that artificial intelligence will take over the world. Armed with a hero complex, Zizians ideate apocalyptic scenarios involving an AI Armageddon, as posited in Roko’s basilisk, a rationalist-designed thought experiment theorizing that an artificial superintelligence will one day reign over humankind and torture those in its way. This doomsday mentality drives the Zizians to ideological violence under the banner of thwarting the threat of AI.
Eventually, the Zizians splintered from the San Francisco rationalist community, accusing them of anti-transgender discrimination. According to LaSota’s writings, “transgender women” are cognitively well-suited for conducting AI safety research.
LaSota’s disillusionment with mainstream rationalists led him and his fellow Zizians to stage a protest at a 2019 gathering hosted by the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR), a Berkeley-based think tank, resulting in their arrests. They disrupted the wooded retreat wearing Guy Fawkes masks and robes while distributing fliers claiming that the center “betrayed us.”
LaSota, whom authorities characterize as a modern-day Charles Manson, recruited “mostly autistic-ish trans women who were extremely vulnerable and isolated,” said a CFAR employee.
Often seen donning a black cape, LaSota religiously identifies as a Sith lord, part of an evil, fictional order in the Star Wars franchise devoted to the dark side of the “Force,” and avidly reads rationality-themed Harry Potter fanfiction. LaSota refers to himself as “Darth Ziz, interim de facto leader of the vegan Sith,” and addresses others as “Jedis.”
In accordance with their worldview on animal consumption, Zizians see humans as “flesh-eating monsters” and animals as “brothers and sisters.”
Vallejo, California: Curtis Lind stabbings
Dissatisfied with the high cost of housing, LaSota started recruiting a “Rationalist Fleet” of followers to form a seasteading commune, circa 2017. LaSota’s newly forged fleet lived aboard several sailboats, including an old World War II tugboat, called Caleb, that they sailed from Alaska to California.
Maintaining the tugboat became cumbersome, and three Zizian members opted to move into box trucks before squatting in a Bay Area trailer lot owned by Curtis Lind, then age 80, a former shipworker and grandfather of four. According to an eyewitness, the anti-AI squatters were typically spotted walking around Lind’s property “stark naked” and working intermittently with power tools.
On Nov. 15, 2022, a coordinated attack left Lind, who was lured in to repair a purported water leak, impaled by a samurai sword through the torso, stabbed approximately 50 times, and sliced severely on the back of his neck “like somebody was trying to cut my head off.”
During the altercation, Lind drew a gun and fired off shots, killing Emma Borhanian, one of the Zizians.
Two of Lind’s alleged attackers, Alexander Leatham and Suri Dao, were jointly charged with attempted murder, aggravated mayhem, and Borhanian’s murder, which prosecutors are arguing the pair precipitated by forcing Lind to act in self-defense.
Under California’s felony murder rule, a defendant can be charged with murder if a death occurs, regardless of intent to kill, during the commission of a felony-level crime. In addition, Leatham and Dao face charging enhancements, including inflicting “great bodily injury” on a victim 70 years or older.
Both were booked without bail into Solano County Jail. Their jury trial was recently rescheduled, moved five months from Oct. 21 to March 3.
Lind, set to testify as a star witness in the trial, was stabbed to death and had his throat slit on Jan. 17, 2025.
Prosecutors charged another Zizian, data scientist Maximilian Snyder, codename “Audere of the Library,” with Lind’s murder. Snyder, who has since penned a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle bragging about his Dungeons & Dragons skills, is awaiting trial separately at the Stanton Correctional Facility. He has a preliminary hearing scheduled on Oct. 27.
While in lock-up, Leatham has repeatedly claimed he is being discriminated against on the basis of his gender identity, as part of “a show trial to coordinate the genocide of transgender people.”
When a judge read their charges into the record, Leatham reportedly shouted, “I am surrounded by trans misogynists! Someone, please help me! They are torturing me for being transgender!”
Prosecutors said that Dao provided fake names to police upon apprehension, such as “Joshua of Nazareth,” and feigned a seizure in a failed escape attempt from jail. There are also documented doubts about Dao being the defendant’s real name.
According to investigative journalist Andy Ngo, Dao is actually Tessa Berns, a Chinese-born math whiz and former National Merit Scholar from Denver, Colorado, who was adopted by a well-to-do lesbian couple.
Chester Heights, Pennsylvania: Richard and Rita Zajko double homicide
On New Year’s Eve of 2022, the parents of Michelle Zajko, a Zizian associate, were shot to death in their Chester Heights home near Philadelphia.
During a welfare check on Jan. 2, 2023, Pennsylvania police discovered the bodies of Richard and Rita Zajko, aged 72 and 69, respectively, slain in Zajko’s childhood bedroom.
While their murders remain unsolved, Zajko has been named a person of interest in the double homicide, which coincided with her 30th birthday.
Coventry, Vermont: David Maland shooting death
On Jan. 20, 2025, three days following Lind’s killing, Zizian members Felix “Ophelia” Bauckholt and Teresa “Milo” Youngblut, who filed for a marriage license last year with Snyder, engaged in a fatal gunfight with U.S. Border Patrol agents at a traffic stop.
According to court documents, Youngblut opened fire on Border Patrol agent David C. Maland and other officers “without warning” during a deadly immigration inspection close to the Canadian border in Coventry, Vermont.
Bauckholt, a German national in the United States on a work visa, was killed by returning gunfire in a shootout with responding Border Patrol personnel. Agents arrested Youngblut while Maland was fatally wounded.
According to authorities, firearms found at the scene of the shooting had been bought by Zajko, who was living off-grid in Vermont at the time to escape “the rise of fascism,” the same month she inquired about her inheritance. Law enforcement also located ammunition, loaded magazines, night-vision goggles, tactical gear, walkie-talkies, and shooting-range targets in the couple’s car, as well as smartphones wrapped in aluminum foil, apparently to prevent geo-tracking.
Youngblut is federally indicted for murder, a capital crime, among other offenses.
TRUMP DOJ TESTS DEATH PENALTY POLICY IN ‘ZIZIAN’ BORDER PATROL MURDER CASE
On Aug. 14, prosecutors announced that they are seeking the death penalty against Youngblut after U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi lifted a Biden-era moratorium on federal executions and cited Maland’s murder as one such case in which capital punishment would be warranted.
Christine Lehmann, a senior capital attorney specializing in defending clients with mental illness and intellectual disabilities, is assisting Youngblut’s legal defense.
What happened to LaSota
On Aug. 19, 2022, LaSota faked his own death. The U.S. Coast Guard responded to a report that LaSota went overboard while sailing. Following a fruitless search-and-rescue effort involving multiple fire departments over a span of 30 hours, an obituary for LaSota appeared in The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, his hometown’s newspaper, saying he died in a boating accident.
On Jan. 13, 2023, Pennsylvania police stumbled upon LaSota while hunting down Zajko in the double homicide investigation.
When state troopers executed a search warrant at a motel where Zajko was staying, law enforcement found LaSota hiding in the bathroom of another room, laying still on the floor, his eyes closed, almost catatonic.
“He was just laying almost unconscious or as if he was dead on the ground,” a trooper testified to the court. Four state troopers had to carry LaSota, who is over six-feet tall, from the hotel room.
According to Delaware County court records, LaSota was charged with disorderly conduct and obstruction. Bail was set to $500,000 but dropped to $10,000, which LaSota posted.
LaSota, who had warrants out for his arrest for failing to appear in court, was apprehended again in rural Frostburg, Maryland, on Feb. 16, 2025. LaSota; Zajko, who was wanted for allegedly arming Maland’s murderers; and Daniel Blank, a third Zizian, were discovered holed up in box trucks, dressed in all black and heavily armed. They face a slew of charges, including trespassing on private property, obstructing a police officer, resisting arrest, and transporting firearms.
The three co-defendants, to be tried together, remain behind bars at Allegheny County Jail pending trial. In a superseding indictment, officials added drug charges against the trio for possession of LSD.
In June, a federal grand jury indicted LaSota, also known as “Andrea Phelps,” “Anne Grimes,” and “Canaris,” among other aliases, for being a fugitive from justice in possession of firearms and ammunition. According to the indictment, LaSota possessed a cache of weapons, including a sniper rifle, various handguns, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition.
It is unclear exactly how many Zizians are in existence. At least one known Zizian defector believed to have died by suicide is rumored to be alive and in hiding, lying low for fear of retaliation. Blank was previously a missing person.
