By José Niño
A transgender vegan cult implicated in the killing of multiple people across the United States is on the verge of being dismantled by law enforcement. The arrest of Jack “Ziz” LaSota, the 34-year-old founder of the “Zizians” cult on Feb. 16. 2023, in Frostburg, Md. has put law enforcement much closer to rolling up this radical organization.
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Two additional alleged members of the Zizians were also arrested that day—32-year-old Michelle Zajko and 26-year-old Daniel Blank. They are facing multiple charges including trespassing and possession of guns. A judge ordered LaSota to be held without bail, alluding to concerns about the transgender individual posing a potential flight risk and a danger to public safety.
LaSota, a male who uses female pronouns, founded the Zizians in 2019. The group is mainly made up of computer scientists in their 20s and 30s who previously worked for Google and NASA. Most of these members identify as “transgender” or “non-binary,” meaning they view themselves as outside accepted gender norms of both man and woman.
The Zizian’s worldview is a hodgepodge of ideologies that consists of anarchism, radical veganism, concerns about artificial intelligence, and rationalism. According to a report from the San Francisco Chronicle, LaSota recruited “smart, mostly autistic-ish transwomen who were extremely vulnerable and isolated.”
This “vulnerable” cult, however, has been connected to a series of deaths. In November 2022, several suspected Zizian members attacked and impaled landlord Curtis Lind with a sword during a dispute over rent. Lind retaliated and shot suspected Zizian member Emma Borhanian dead in self-defense.
Lind was subsequently expected to give testimony about the attack but was found dead in an apparent stabbing incident in January 2025. Zizian member Maximilian Snyder, a 22-year-old graduate of Oxford and a data scientist, was arrested for the murder of Lind.
The Zizians were also suspected of being involved in the murder of Michelle Zajko’s parents, Richard and Rita Zajko, in December 2022.
The Zizians also claimed another victim on Jan. 20, 2025, when they killed U.S. border patrol agent David Maland in a shoot-out after he pulled over a car in Coventry, Vt.—a town roughly 20 miles away from the Canadian border.
The 21-year-old Teresa Youngblut, another individual alleged to be a member of the Zizians, was arrested and charged with assault on a federal law enforcement officer and other federal firearms violations. Youngblut was accompanied by Felix Bauckholt. Bauckholt, a 26-year-old German national who went by the female name of Ophelia, was killed in the shootout with Maland.
In a report for The Telegraph, Jessica Taylor claims to have met Bauckholt at an event in New York. She described the Zizians as a group of “highly intelligent, transgender, vegans,” though she likened them to a “death cult.”
In an interview with NBC News, Taylor observed that Bauckholt had not seemed worried by several of the group’s extreme views such as the “importance of retribution under some circumstances.”
LaSota, the alleged cult leader, used the pen name Ziz to publish several disturbing posts at a blog titled “Sinceriously.” One post put forward a theory that the hemispheres of the human brain could hold different values and genders and “often desire to kill each other.” On top of that, LaSota said he lived in a society of “flesh-eating monsters.”
According to individuals who were close to LaSota, he was described as a frightening figure who had extremist views. During his time in California, LaSota and some of his colleagues participated in events that Anna Salamon, one of the co-founders of the non-profit organization Center for Applied Rationality, organized.
In hindsight, Salamon argued that LaSota and company had been “creating conditions for a cult. I was viscerally afraid of LaSota in a way I’ve never been viscerally afraid of anybody,” Salamon said to NBC News.
For example, in 2019. LaSota and three other members of his group attended an event hosted by the Center for Applied Rationality donning robes and Guy Fawkes masks, blocking the entrances of the premises. They were then arrested and charged with criminal conspiracy and five misdemeanors that included false imprisonment.
While the Zizians are being brought to justice for their grisly actions, this bizarre episode of leftist violence could perhaps be a sneak preview of future upheavals from militant groups. At the start of his presidency, President Donald Trump made his opposition to the transgender movement abundantly clear. In his first month in office, Trump issued executive orders to have the federal government only recognize male and female sexes, prohibit federal funding for gender-affirming medical treatments for Americans under the age of 19, instruct the Defense Department to ban transgender individuals from openly serving in the military, and ban males—who use the cloak of transgenderism—from competing in female sports at schools that receive federal funds.
For the time being, the transgender ideology appears to be on the back foot. In light of the Trump administrations’ measures to undermine the transgender agenda, radical members of the transgender movement may feel like their backs are against the wall. In response, they may use violence to express their opposition to any efforts to roll back the benefits they have received from preceding presidential administrations.
While the Zizians are being put away, their acts of violence could portend a return of political violence akin to the Days of Rage in the late 1960s and other forms of left-wing revolutionary violence that continued into the early 1970s.
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