California’s Rationalist-Linked Death Cult
Have you heard about the Zizians? A string of recent killings has been linked to a Vallejo, California, death cult that’s connected to the rationalist scene. Sex worker/data scientist Aella has more. I’ll attempt an abbreviated summary, drawing from Aella’s reporting, a solid SFGate explainer, and an X user named @kenthecowboy_.
In 2022, Curtis Lind, a Vallejo landlord who had been letting folks live on his property in “trailers and containers” was stabbed—allegedly by tenants who had stopped paying rent—with a Samurai sword. Lind shot two of his attackers and killed one of them—31-year-old Emma Borhanian. Two weeks ago, Lind was stabbed to death on his property, just before he was scheduled to testify in the case. On Tuesday, 22-year-old Maximilian Snyder was charged with the murder.
This killing is linked to six other deaths across the country. The suspected killers—the tenants-turned-delinquents who had been living as a cult—are almost all transgender and part of the Berkeley-based rationalist community, following their leader, Jack LaSota (Ziz). Some of them are romantically linked to one another: Snyder, for example, applied for a marriage license in the state of Washington back in November along with girlfriend Teresa Youngblut, the suspect in a Vermont-Canadian border shootout that killed a U.S. Border Patrol agent.
Back in January 2023, 71-year-old Richard Zajko and his 69-year-old wife, Rita, a Pennsylvania couple suspected to be the parents of one of the cultists, were murdered. And all the way back in February 2018, a woman named Maia Pasek killed herself after being in heavy contact with Ziz, and seemingly under her influence (more on that in a second).
The purported cult leader, Ziz, had attended workshops at the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR). In 2019, CFAR reportedly banned both Ziz and another cult member, Gwen, from events; multiple followers started protesting the organization (even alleging transphobia). At an unclear time, possibly several years prior in 2016, Ziz started a blog, advocating “a ruthlessly enforced altruism towards all living creatures, and to follow the principle that it’s never valid to surrender” and promoting “the punishment of ‘non-good’ people, particularly those who are not vegans,” per Aella’s writeup. The group’s members claimed to have invented things like “unihemispheric sleep” (UHS), “a form of sleep where only one half of the brain rests at a time,” per a writer named Apollo Mojave. “Entering UHS requires the sleeper to be exhausted, it also has disorienting effects so they are not quite themselves. The Zizians exploit this state to convince the unwary that they are actually two people. Ziz believes themselves to be ‘double good’, and alm
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