The Zizians

The Zizians are a small ideological group that formed around the computer programmer Jack LaSota, who wrote under the persona "Ziz," as a splinter of the Bay Area Rationalist Community in the late 2010s. The group fused a borrowed rationalist decision theory with an original theory of brain hemispheres, militant veganism, anarchism, and transhumanism, and several of its members acted on the doctrine with lethal violence. Between 2022 and 2025 the group was tied to six deaths across California, Pennsylvania, and Vermont, including the January 2025 killing of U.S. Border Patrol agent David Maland, which produced the first federal death-penalty prosecution brought under the second Trump administration. The members were recruited almost entirely from the rationalist and Effective Altruism milieu around the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) and the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR), most of them young, highly educated, transgender, and preoccupied with the danger of artificial intelligence.¹²³

Origins in the Rationalist Movement

LaSota, born and raised in Fairbanks, Alaska, studied computer science at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, briefly pursued postgraduate work at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and interned at NASA before relocating to the San Francisco Bay Area around 2013 to involve herself with MIRI and CFAR. She had been an avid reader of Eliezer Yudkowsky's writing and entered the community as an acolyte before turning into one of its sharpest critics, accusing MIRI and CFAR of "ethical hypocrisy" and of failing to live up to the moral demands of their own rationalist doctrine. By the mid-2010s she had begun publishing dense blog posts that extended rationalist decision theory into claims about gender, cognition, and morality.¹²⁴

LaSota began blogging under the persona "Ziz" around 2016, debating AI safety and logical paradoxes on LessWrong before moving to her own site with longer posts on technology, gender identity, and cognition. CFAR co-founder Anna Salamon later characterized LaSota as someone who "wanted to feel special" but felt outshone in a Bay Area scene crowded with technical talent, and described the circle's turn toward extremity as an attempt to become "main characters" by other means. The formal split came in 2018, when rationalist organizations rejected the hemisphere theory and LaSota broke with the community that had drawn her west.²¹⁷¹⁸

The Rationalist Fleet

By 2017 LaSota had gathered a small circle of followers, largely transgender and gender-nonconforming rationalists, to establish what they called the "Rationalist Fleet," a floating intentional community organized around anarchic self-sufficiency, cognitive liberation, and total veganism. The group acquired a repurposed World War II tugboat, the Caleb (formerly the Panameta), and sailed it from Alaska to California. When the vessel's upkeep collapsed, members moved into trailers and converted box trucks along the California coast, the living arrangement that later brought them to the Vallejo property of Curtis Lind.²⁵

The fleet was conceived as a way to live outside the conventional economy while devoting full attention to averting an AI catastrophe, and members pooled funds to keep the boats running. The scheme placed a cluster of people with no maritime experience aboard aging vessels that demanded constant maintenance, and the financial and physical strain pushed the group ashore within a few years. The truck-and-trailer encampments that followed kept the community mobile and off conventional leases, a pattern that recurred through the Vallejo lot in 2022 and the box trucks parked near Frostburg, Maryland, where members were arrested in 2025.²⁵

Ideology

LaSota's central theory held that the brain's two hemispheres house separate personalities with their own genders and moral alignments, a "domineering, analytic" masculine left and an "empathetic, intuitive" feminine right, and that each hemisphere could be independently good or evil. She sorted people's mental "cores" into categories of "nongood," "single good," and "double good" according to how completely they aligned with her moral system. She counted very few people, herself among them, as "double good"; the associate Gwen Danielson was rated only "single good," which in the group's terms meant she could not be fully trusted and had to be watched.¹⁶

The group practiced "unihemispheric sleep," an attempt to rest one brain hemisphere while keeping the other awake, which LaSota described as a way to "jailbreak" the mind and deepen a member's commitment to the cause. Members also practiced "debucketing," the deliberate unlearning of inherited social categories in order to reach what LaSota framed as unmediated moral insight. The moral framework took the concept of "heroic responsibility" from Yudkowsky's fiction and combined it with the timeless-decision-theory argument that one should act on universal principles rather than causal pragmatism, so that ordinary ethical compromises became, in the group's account, existential betrayals. LaSota wore black robes and described herself as "Sith," after the malevolent order in the Star Wars films, framing a self-consciously adversarial morality against a world the group held to be irredeemably complicit in animal killing and on the verge of collapse through artificial-intelligence misalignment.¹²⁶

In February 2018 a follower, Maia Pasek, who used the name "Squirrel," died by suicide after intense involvement with LaSota and the group's psychological practices. Outside observers attributed the death to the sleep-deprivation experiments; LaSota instead presented it as evidence of the transformative power of the method.²

LaSota's account folded the death into the hemisphere doctrine, holding that Pasek's two hemispheres had reached opposing moral verdicts and that one had killed the other, a framing that recast a suicide as a logical outcome of the practice rather than a casualty of it. The group treated the experiments as a kind of moral and cognitive boot camp, and the willingness to read a member's death as confirmation rather than refutation became a feature of how the circle processed later violence and casualties among its own.²⁶

The 2019 CFAR Break and the Name

In November 2019 LaSota, Emma Borhanian, Alexander Leatham (who used the name "Somni"), and Danielson, among others, appeared in Guy Fawkes masks and black robes to protest a CFAR alumni retreat at Occidental in Sonoma County, blocking the entrances and accusing the organization of covering up misconduct. Four people were arrested. CFAR had already barred LaSota and Danielson from its events that year, and the wider rationalist movement publicly distanced itself from the circle. The label "Zizians" was coined by online commentators warning the rationalist scene about LaSota; the group never adopted the name itself. One participant in the standoff was still being sentenced for it as late as April 2026.¹³⁷

The protest framed CFAR as having concealed sexual misconduct within rationalist organizations, the same grievance of institutional hypocrisy that had driven LaSota's earlier break, now escalated into a masked physical blockade. The arrests gave the group its first criminal exposure and tied several of the people later central to the killings, Borhanian, Leatham, and Danielson, into a single documented incident years before the violence. The slow pace of the prosecution, with a defendant still facing sentencing in 2026 for conduct in 2019, kept the standoff procedurally alive across the entire arc of the later cases.¹⁷

The Faked Deaths

Disappearance and feigned death recur in the group's history. Danielson stopped appearing for court hearings in April 2019, and a lawyer later suggested she might be dead. In August 2022 LaSota staged her own death, leaving the impression that she had drowned after going off a boat in the San Francisco Bay, and remained at large under that cover before resurfacing in Philadelphia in 2023. She was wanted in two states by the time she was arrested in 2025.⁵⁸

The 2022 disappearance followed a specific script: the U.S. Coast Guard responded to a report that LaSota had fallen from a boat in the bay, no body was recovered, and an obituary was published, leaving an official record of a drowning that let her drop out of pending Vallejo proceedings. The recruitment pattern that fed the group depended on similar severances on the members' side. Several younger recruits cut contact with their families before joining, sending final messages and changing phone numbers, so that the group absorbed people who had already vanished from their previous lives, a dynamic that surfaced again in the 2024 disappearance of Teresa Youngblut.³⁸

The Vallejo Killings

By autumn 2022 LaSota and several followers were living in vehicles on a Vallejo lot owned by Curtis Lind, an octogenarian landlord who rented them space. On November 15, 2022, a dispute over unpaid rent escalated when members attacked Lind with a sword, impaling him and costing him an eye; Lind drew a handgun and shot and killed Emma Borhanian, a longtime LaSota collaborator. Leatham and Suri Dao were charged with Borhanian's murder and the attempted murder of Lind; Leatham later attempted to escape custody twice.²⁹

On January 17, 2025, Lind was killed near the site of the 2022 attack, stabbed with his throat cut, shortly before he was due to testify against the members charged in that case. Maximilian Snyder, a former University of Oxford student connected to the group, was charged by Solano County prosecutors with Lind's murder, which prosecutors alleged was meant to prevent his testimony.⁹¹⁰

The Pennsylvania Killings

On December 31, 2022, Richard Zajko and Rita Zajko were shot to death in their home in Chester Heights, Pennsylvania. They were the parents of Michelle Zajko, a member of the group; Michelle was questioned and treated as a person of interest but was not charged in the killings, and she has publicly denied involvement. Investigators have linked a firearm tied to Michelle Zajko to subsequent incidents involving the group.³¹¹

The couple, ages 72 and 69, were not found until a January 2, 2023 welfare check; Rita Zajko had been shot in the back of the head and Richard in the temple by a round that first passed through his hand, and two 9mm shell casings were left at the scene with no weapon recovered. A neighbor's doorbell camera captured audio of a voice shouting "Mom!" Pennsylvania investigators determined that ammunition matching the scene had been purchased by Michelle Zajko, who acknowledged owning a 9mm semiautomatic handgun, and in early 2023 LaSota was charged with obstructing the homicide investigation and disorderly conduct. The case remained unsolved into 2026, with the WHYY and AP timelines noting that no one had been charged in the deaths themselves.¹¹¹⁶¹⁹

The Vermont Killing

On January 20, 2025, Border Patrol agents stopped a vehicle on Interstate 91 in Coventry, Vermont, near the Canadian border, carrying Teresa Youngblut and Felix Bauckholt, a German national and quantitative trader who used the name "Ophelia." A shootout followed in which Agent David Maland was killed and Bauckholt was shot dead; Youngblut was wounded. Federal prosecutors allege Youngblut fired the shot that killed Maland. The killing drew national attention to the group and set off the arrests that followed.³¹²

The pair had drawn law enforcement attention days earlier: a hotel employee in Lyndonville reported that they had checked in around January 14 wearing all-black tactical clothing and protective gear, including a holstered firearm, which prompted periodic surveillance, and investigators observed them in tactical dress in downtown Newport on January 19. According to the FBI affidavit, Youngblut got out of the vehicle during the stop and fired at agents without warning, using a .40-caliber Glock 23, while Bauckholt attempted to draw a weapon before being shot. A search of the vehicle turned up multiple firearms, .380-caliber jacketed hollow-point rounds, a ballistic helmet, night-vision goggles, a tactical belt with holster, handheld radios, and roughly a dozen electronic devices, several wrapped in aluminum foil. Maland died at North Country Hospital and Youngblut was treated at Dartmouth Hitchcock.¹²²⁰

Arrests and Prosecutions

On February 16, 2025, LaSota was arrested with Michelle Zajko and Daniel Blank in Allegany County, Maryland, after a property owner near Frostburg reported that the three were living in two white box trucks on his land and refused to leave; investigators found LaSota in possession of a GM6 Lynx .50-caliber rifle, an HS Produkt Hellcat 9mm handgun, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, and the three were ordered held without bail. A federal grand jury in Maryland indicted LaSota on June 20, 2025 as a fugitive in possession of firearms and ammunition, a charge carrying up to fifteen years.¹³²¹

On March 12, 2026, U.S. District Judge James K. Bredar granted a competency evaluation for LaSota after defense attorney Gary Proctor reported that she had refused to speak with a doctor brought to the jail and had told a prior hearing that the judge led an "organized crime ring," answering a question about her age with "Timeless." LaSota's lawyers separately rejected the "Zizian" and "cult" labels in court filings and accused the Department of Justice of misgendering their client by using her former name and male pronouns. She remained held at the Allegany County Detention Center pending the evaluation.¹⁴²²

Youngblut was charged in federal court in Vermont; a superseding indictment in August 2025 added the murder of Maland and the assault of two other agents, and the Department of Justice filed notice that it would seek the death penalty, the first such pursuit of the second Trump administration. She pleaded not guilty in September 2025, and proceedings continued into 2026. Snyder was charged by Solano County with Lind's murder, and Leatham and Dao with the 2022 killing of Borhanian and the attempted murder of Lind. By early 2026 at least seven people associated with the group were fighting charges across California, Pennsylvania, and Vermont. The six deaths attributed to the group are Borhanian and Lind in California, Richard and Rita Zajko in Pennsylvania, and Maland and Bauckholt in Vermont.³¹⁵¹⁶