gizmodo.com
The alleged ringleader of what has been called a Bay Area murder cult was arrested this weekend, along with a number of other supposed members of the dark and mysterious group. Jack LaSota, a 34-year-old blogger and Berkeley native, was taken into custody in Maryland on Sunday. LaSota, who is transgender, and identifies as a woman, is better known by her online moniker Ziz. For years, LaSota has been associated with a loose-knit group that stresses a bizarre form of techno-fundamentalism and has been linked to multiple slayings. Ziz has now been charged with trespassing, obstructing and hindering, and possession of a handgun, the Associated Press reports. Taken into custody alongside LaSota were two other apparent members of the group, Michelle Zajko, 32, of Media, Pennsylvania, and Daniel Blank, 26, of Sacramento, California. These are only the most recent arrests in the case, which spans multiple states, and is believed to be connected to at least six murders. The previously arrested include Maximilian Snyderwho has been accused of stabbing an 82-year-old California landlord to deathand 21-year-old Teresa Youngblutwho is implicated in the shooting death of a Border Patrol officer in Vermont. Weirdly, Synder and Youngblut have also been connected via a marriage license, though it is unclear if they are actually married. Another alleged member of the group, a German citizen and apparent quantitative trader named Felix Ophelia Bauckholt, was killed during the Vermont shootout. Meanwhile, the parents of Zajkowho was recently arrestedwere found murdered in her Pennsylvania home in 2022, and police think those unsolved homicides may be related to the recent string of deaths.Quite bizarrely, LaSota was previously thought to be dead. AP writes that, in the summer of 2022, the U.S. Coast Guard responded to reports that LaSota had fallen into the San Francisco Bay. Subsequently, an obituary for him was published and his mother also seemed to confirm he had died, AP writes. However, LaSota subsequently popped back up in Vallejo and was said to have been contacted by police at the site of yet another crime. Thus, it has been reported that he faked his own death. The Zizians have been called a death cult and a murder gang though, in many ways, the connections between all of the groups alleged members arent totally clear yet. A number of them seem to have lived and traveled together. Some group members lived on a property in Vallejo, California, that was owned by Curtis Lind, the 82-year-old landlord who was recently stabbed to deathallegedly by Snyder. Animosities between the group members and Lind allegedly stemmed from their failure to pay rent during the pandemic, which led Lind to take them to court for back payments. Prior to his death, Lind was also stabbed with a samurai sword by one of the members of the group. During that same altercation, Lind fatally shot another one of the groups members. At the time of his death, Lind was set to testify against some of the groups members over this previous violent incident.The groups broader mission is also something of a mystery, though they appear to have a distinct ideology, some of which has been laid out on the popular e-forum LessWrong. Reading through the online posts made by Zizian members is an exercise in sanity testing. It has been claimed that the group is primarily associated with veganism, AI doomerism, and the rationalist movement. In a bizarre screed that was dictated to journalists at The San Francisco Chronicle, murder suspect Snyder addressed a prominent member of the rationalist movement, Eliezer Yudkowsky. Yudowsky is the founder of LessWrong, where many of the Zizians have posted their thoughts. I am not one of Zizs friends, and neither she nor her friends endorse me or my words so far as I know, Snyder said, in the dictated statement. I speak only for myself, as myself, for the sake of everyone. This I swear on my Laws, he said, before going on an extended rant about how Yudkowsky needed to have a crisis of faith over his beliefs.
