INSIDE THE TRANS, VEGAN DEATH CULT:
There may be a tendency to treat the Zizians as just another crazy cult in a long history of crazy cults. But what is interesting about this particular crazy cult is just how contemporary it is. Uniformly transgender or nonbinary, and convinced they can make the world a better place even if that involves violence, the Zizians could only exist in the present-day West.
The story of their key figure, Jack Amadeus ‘Ziz’ LaSota, is certainly very much of our time. Growing up in Alaska, LaSota and his two younger siblings were largely home-schooled by their middle-class parents. LaSota’s father taught instructional design at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. According to one of his later blogposts, LaSota said that as a pre-teen, he began to see puberty as an ‘evil’ imposition – a belief that would fuel his embrace of transgender ideology.
By all accounts, LaSota was a bright, if troubled youth. He graduated from Fairbanks with a computer-science degree, but dropped out of graduate school. He was offered placements at both Oracle and NASA, before moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2016 – ‘for proximity to the tech industry which I considered sort of my destiny’, as he put it in a 2019 blog post. His ‘destiny’ was a reference to the other credo alongside transgenderism to which LaSota desperately cleaved – namely, so-called rationalism.
Rationalism here refers not to a broad Enlightenment faith in the power of human reason, but to a very 21st-century belief system. Cliquey, elitist and Very Online, the rationalist movement insists that supposedly bias-free scientific thought and probabilistic reasoning can solve virtually any issue and make the world a better place. It is a technocratic, elitist creed beloved of tech geeks. It is also an apocalyptic movement, obsessively preoccupied with the threat of AI. A fair few rationalists live in perpetual fear that machines will one day subjugate humans if preventative steps are not taken now.
Read the whole thing.
Earlier, from Andy Ngo in January: Killing of border patrol agent appears linked to ‘Zizian’ radical leftist trans cult.
And from Stacy McCain in February: Real Murders, Fake Suicides: ‘Zizian’ Death Cult Fugitives Still at Large.
