Every week brings a new revelation about the Zizians: the craziest, saddest cult in recent American history. Eight deaths have been linked to them so far, including 80-year-old Curtis Lind, stabbed with a samurai sword, US border patrol agent David Maland, shot by the roadside in Vermont, and the elderly parents of another member, shot dead at home in Pennsylvania.
What’s gripping the American press is that the young Zizians seem to have been such nice kids once. The leader of the cult, Jack Amadeus LaSota, has a degree in computer science from Alaska University and a father who still teaches there. Another Zizian, Daniel Blank, was a straight-A student, fluent in three languages, whose bewildered father said he was a model son.
The Zizian murder trial is set to begin in October. Long investigative pieces have begun to appear, and interviews with parents and former teachers. I’ll eat my tinfoil hat if Netflix doesn’t have a Zizian true crime movie in the offing, whatever the outcome of the trial. But actually, I don’t think there’s a great mystery to solve here. More than any other cult I can think of, the Zizians seem to be a natural product of the culture we created, or let emerge around us. And what should scare us most about them is not how freaky the Zizians are, but how horribly inevitable.
Jack LaSota, awaiting trial in prison in Maryland on different charges, identifies as trans, meaning he thinks he’s female, His lady-name is ‘Ziz’, hence ‘Zizians’. Almost all known Zizians are transsexuals, young men dosed-up with oestrogen, role-playing as women: Felix ‘Ophelia’ Bauckholt; Alexander ‘Somni’ Leatham; Maximilian ‘Audere’ Snyder. It’s like a camp mafia movie.
Without exception, the Zizians are fanatical vegans too. Daniel Blank cut ties with his parents around Christmas two years ago, and by way of explanation sent them a video of a slaughterhouse with the message: ‘Look what you’ve done!’ As his belief system took shape, Jack/Ziz began to consider animals to be ‘people’ and meat-eaters evil murderers who deserved to die. ‘Trans vegan death cult!’ You don’t get clickbait of that calibre every day.
What should scare us most about the Zizians is not how freaky they are but how horribly inevitable
But what did we all expect? Many of the Zizians awaiting trial were once gawky, mathematically minded boys – probably on the autism spectrum, say their old classmates. A defining feature of autism is that you take people literally, and that’s what those kids did. They were taught in class, and perhaps at home too, that capitalism is corrupt, humans evil and that the world will soon boil up as a result of manmade global warming. It’s enough to make anyone apocalyptic. They believe not just that they have an internal ‘gender’ that can differ from their biological born sex, but that it is a significant and revolutionary thing to do to ‘change sex’. Of course they’re ‘trans’.
As it happens all the long and interesting pieces I’ve read on the Zizians exploring their origins and philosophy refer to trans women simply as ‘women’ and faithfully follow the female pronoun rule. Wired magazine managed an otherwise excellent in-depth investigation – ‘The Delirious, Violent, Impossible True Story of the Zizians’ – in which it was impossible to tell which Zizians were female and which male. If the western media kowtows to cultists, what hope do future generations have?
The Zizians first came together in tech-boy mecca Silicon Valley as part of what’s known as the ‘rationalist community’ in San Francisco’s Bay Area. The ‘rationalists’ are a group of earnest young men and women committed to the idea of leading considered, logical lives free from superstition. The big anxiety that preoccupies rationalists is that the world is soon to be destroyed by super-intelligent AI and Eliezer Yudkowsky, LaSota’s one-time mentor, has a book out in September: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All.
LaSota joined the rationalists sometime in 2010 but other Zizians had attended rationalist summer camps when they were younger in which they were encouraged to identify and eliminate their ‘cognitive biases’. I can’t think of much more guaranteed to drive a fragile youngster crackers than to ask them to obsess on the workings of their own minds and Jack Ziz LaSota seems to have cracked pretty comprehensively. He developed a theory that humans contain two warring selves, sealed off inside the two hemispheres of their brains and that these selves can be male or female, good or evil. He encouraged followers to sleep with only one half of their brain at a time. Reports vary, but there seem to be two known cases of suicide among the group that practised Zizian self-improvement.
By then LaSota was professing to follow the ‘Sith’ religion, which actively seeks conflict. ‘2016 was the year I made a “turn to the dark side”,’ he wrote on his blog. Other blog posts include titles such as ‘Punching Evil’ and ‘Self-Blackmail’.
Why did more parents not get involved? How did these young adults manage to break away so completely from their previous lives? Perhaps one answer is that for decades it’s been progressive orthodoxy that even loving parents can be toxic and that a chosen family can be far better and far healthier. ‘Why so many people are going “no contact” with their parents’ read a cheerful headline in the New Yorker last year.
The way to tell that Zizians often come from decent homes is the concern they show in court for their own wellbeing. ‘I need the jail to have a vegan diet. It’s more important than this hearing is,’ LaSota told judge Eric Bean at his bail hearing in Maryland earlier this year, though according to the San Francisco Chronicle his still-devoted mother has been making quite sure that her boy gets his fill of vegan food, even in prison.
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