ANDY NGO: Killing of border patrol agent appears linked to ‘Zizian’ radical leftist trans cult.
Authorities say the gun Youngblut used in the border patrol attack was bought by Michelle Jacqueline Zajko — the trans nonbinary adult child of Rita and Richard Zajko, who were found killed in mysterious and unsolved circumstances in Delaware County, Pa. in early 2023. Zajko, whose blog shows connections to the Ziz cult, has not been charged with a crime.
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. His supporters say he died in 2022, but that appears to be based on a fake online obituary to try to escape the law.
If you missed it yesterday, Freddie De Boer wrote: I Told You: Chaos is Coming.
I acknowledge upfront that the “Zizians” and the grimy-but-fascinating story of their alleged violence is not a big deal, in any real sense. They’re a group of former computer scientists and financial market types who appear to have latched onto the effective altruism/rationalist movement and taken the AI risk, veganism, and animal rights parts to a certain extreme; the group has been implicated in at least eight murders. But there appears to be only a handful of them, and they’re a fringe of a fringe. I don’t have any interest in implicating the rest of the rationalist sphere in this, though I do think David Z. Morris is fundamentally correct that the culture of “existential AI risk” obviously has the potential to inspire violence and extremism. As he says, “Apocalyptic predictions, asserted with a confidence buttressed by weaponized misuse of ‘Bayesian’ logic, is driving young people insane by convincing them that they must take extreme steps to halt an imagined doom.” But one shouldn’t nutpick, and anyway I’m not really interested in this group’s ideology. I’m interested in them as a test case of what I’ve been saying for some time: that violence is coming, and that people will find a way to package it with meaning. They want to. They need to. They have to believe that it comes from something other than themselves.
As Glenn wrote linking to De Boer’s Substack post, “There’s always ‘chaos’ when the left is unhappy. I don’t believe that it will be as easy for them this time as in the past.”