It was a frost-bitten day in late January this year. On the Interstate 91 in Vermont, some 15 kilometres from the Canadian border, US border agents pulled over a blue Toyota Prius.

Law enforcement had been tracking the Prius’s two occupants, 21-year-old Teresa ‘Milo’ Youngblut and 26-year-old Felix ‘Ophelia’ Bauckholt for a couple of days. A hotel employee had raised suspicions about the pair after seeing them both wearing black combat clothes and seeing Youngblut carrying a gun. But beyond that, the agents knew little more about them.

The Prius came to a stop. Youngblut stepped out of the car. And then all hell broke loose. Youngblut began shooting, while Bauckholt also reached for a gun. In the ensuing firefight, border agent David Maland was killed, as was Bauckholt. Youngblut herself was eventually arrested.

The police soon discovered that the bloody confrontation near the Canadian border was part of something bigger. They were holding only the outermost threads of a strange and bloody web involving a small, bizarre group known as the Zizians.

The Zizians – named after their unofficial founder, 34-year-old Jack Amadeus ‘Ziz’ LaSota – had already gained a degree of notoriety over two years earlier. In November 2022, at a trailer park in Vallejo, California, a resident received an early-morning knock on his door. It was his landlord, Curtis Lind. ‘I’m dying’, the 80-year-old Lind said as he collapsed through the door, a katana sword protruding from his body. He was missing an eye and blood was ‘squirting’ from multiple stab wounds. Lind’s tenant called the emergency services and, miraculously, he survived this attack.

Lind claimed he had been attacked by a group of youngish people – Alexander ‘Somni’ Leatham, Tessa ‘Suri Dao’ Berns and Amir ‘Emma’ Borhanian – living on one of Lind’s trailer lots since early 2020. Neighbours had long referred to the group as ‘the cult’, on account of their bizarre behaviour. They were all trans, strolled around the site naked, carried weapons and staunchly refused to eat anything non-vegan.

Lind claimed to have initially enjoyed a good relationship with some of the Zizians, even accompanying one man on a trip to buy his first bra. It was only when they stopped paying rent – following a statewide moratorium on evictions during the Covid-19 pandemic – and began occupying empty trailers meant for other tenants, that Lind began to feel afraid.

Despite the moratorium ending, they still refused to pay rent, so Lind issued them with an eviction notice. Two days prior to their eviction deadline, the group asked Lind to fix a leaky water tap. Lind headed to their lot to inspect it. As he bent down to have a look at the tap, he remembered being stabbed from multiple angles and little else, before blacking out.

In anticipation of trouble, Lind had actually bought himself a gun. On the day that Leatham, Berns and Borhanian allegedly attacked him, Lind managed to fire off several shots. Borhanian was killed. This was the first fatality to be linked to the Zizians in what has since become a trail of bloody mayhem.

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.

To an outsider, rationalism can sound slightly bizarre. So perhaps it is saying something that even members of the rationalist community were unnerved by LaSota. By the mid-2010s, he identified as a ‘Sith’ (a reference to followers of the Dark Side in Star Wars) and often wore Darth Vader-esque robes as ‘religious attire’.

‘I was viscerally afraid of LaSota in a way I’ve never been viscerally afraid of anybody’, says Anna Salamon, the director of the Centre for Applied Rationality. Jessica Taylor, a former research fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, met LaSota at a rationalist event around 2016. She claims the conversation was relatively normal, until LaSota started theorising about ‘conflict between their two brain hemispheres, only one of which is good’. LaSota’s good-brain, bad-brain hypothesis was to develop later into one of the Zizians’ core beliefs.

Perhaps the first ‘official’ member of the Zizians was ‘Gwen’ Danielson, who LaSota met while struggling to make ends meet in San Francisco. A fellow trans vegan, a then 23-year-old Danielson had abandoned a full academic scholarship at Rice University in Texas in order to join the rationalist bubble. He was beating the rent market by living on a boat – a move that impressed LaSota so much he decided to join him. While at first the pair bunked together in Danielson’s sailboat, this soon became unlivable, as LaSota had little room for his tech set-up. Eventually, LaSota bought his own boat. And so commenced the pair’s mission to assemble what they called the ‘rationalist fleet’.

It was while floating, from 2017 onwards, on his 94-foot tugboat, the Caleb, that LaSota was really able to flesh out his ‘good hemisphere, bad hemisphere’ theory. He decided that the mind of every person is split into two, with one side being wholly good, and the other, wholly bad. In most people, the bad side won out. Though exceedingly rare, the Zizians conceded that, on occasion, a person could be ‘double-good’ – that is to say, have two good hemispheres. Needless to say, LaSota considered himself one of these rare double-good individuals.

The handful of followers LaSota managed to gather together around his theories were either trans (male to female, in most cases) or nonbinary. They were also aggressively vegan, reportedly referring to those who ate animals as ‘flesh-eaters’. LaSota’s blog, entitled ‘Sinceriously’, described his personal doctrine as ‘a ruthlessly enforced altruism towards all living creatures, and to follow the principle that it’s never valid to surrender’.

By 2019, the Zizians were thoroughly estranged from, and antagonistic towards, mainstream rationalist groups. In November that year, they rocked up to a rationalist event put on by the Centre for Applied Rationality in Westminster Woods, California. They distributed fliers attacking the ‘transphobic’ leadership, and accused the centre of accelerating the AI apocalypse. Wearing black robes and V for Vendetta-style Guy Fawkes masks, they chanted unintelligible phrases and set about trying to disrupt the event. A SWAT team and a helicopter were called in when it was reported that one of their members was carrying a gun.

Though no weapons were actually found on any of the Zizians that day, news emerged that a group of terrified children on a rope-activity course had been among those trapped in by the mask-wearing protesters.

In August 2022, three months before the attack on Lind, it appeared that LaSota himself had also died. The coast guard at San Francisco Bay received a distress signal from a boat in August 2022, claiming that he had fallen overboard. Yet ensuing searches for his body turned up nothing. And the police later confirmed that they spoke to a very much alive LaSota at the scene of the attack on Lind later that November.

Just over a month later, the Zizians allegedly struck again, this time on the West Coast, in the suburbs of Philadelphia. It was near midnight on New Year’s Eve 2022 when neighbours of Richard and Rita Zajko pulled into their driveway next door, prompting the Ring doorbell to begin recording. Seconds later, the surveillance camera captured screaming from within the house, along with voices shouting, ‘Mom!’, and, ‘Oh my God! Oh, God, God!’.

Later, when friends of the family requested a welfare check, police found the Zajkos’ bodies. Both had died of a single gunshot wound to the back of the head. The firearm manufacturer traced a match for the bullets used in the murder to the handgun owned by the Zajkos’ only daughter, trans nonbinary Michelle ‘Jamie’ Zajko. Michelle was part of the Zizians.

In February this year, Michelle Zajko was finally arrested in Maryland – on misdemeanour charges – along with missing Berkeley man Daniel Blank and LaSota himself. LaSota had sequestered himself in the bathroom and, with the shower left running, flopped to the floor, where he lay motionless. He remained seemingly unresponsive even as he was transported to the police station – a police officer had to hold his head up off the floor for a mugshot.

Before these arrests, however, there had been another disturbing development. In January this year, Lind had been preparing to finally testify against his attackers in court. But before he could do so, he was stabbed to death outside his property. The chief suspect is Maximillion Snyder, a 22-year-old data scientist engaged to Teresa Youngblut – the same Youngblut who allegedly murdered agent David Maland in February.

As it stands, the Zizians are linked to at least six people’s deaths – Lind, the Zajkos, Maland and Zizian members Amir ‘Emma’ Borhanian and Felix ‘Ophelia’ Bauckholt. They all deny the various charges against them. LaSota, who is charged with trespassing, obstructing a law-enforcement officer and having a handgun in his vehicle, has gone to great pains to hire a vegan lawyer. ‘I might starve to death’, LaSota told a judge in February. ‘I need… I need the jail to have a vegan diet. It’s more important than this hearing is.’ Danielson – once LaSota’s right-hand ‘them’ – faked his own suicide and now, according to his father, lives in hiding.

The Zizians are certainly a lunatic bunch. Yet in some ways this vegan, trans death cult is only a very extreme expression of sentiments and attitudes that have been flourishing in elite, progressive circles for far too long. Indeed, the fact that the media has been determinedly using the Zizians’ preferred pronouns in the reporting of their alleged crimes shows just how seriously their wacky beliefs are taken.

Transgenderism is clearly a key part of the ideological waters the Zizians have been swimming in. Indeed, they turned battling ‘transphobia’ into a key justification for their actions. The two members standing trial for the attempted murder of Lind in 2022 have even been accusing the court of transphobia while on trial.

Little wonder that on the fringes of leftist social media, there is a fair bit of sympathy and even support for the Zizians. ‘A trans terrorist organisation who killed a US border guard’, muses one X poster. ‘Sounds pretty based.’ Another states: ‘This is to be expected. The more you force transwomen out of public life the more vulnerable to abuse they become’ – a sentiment that would have you believe a killing spree is an understandable response to men not being allowed in women’s toilets.

Some wonder how these young people, all of whom clearly had bright futures ahead of them, could have ended up packed like sardines on a squalid boat off the shore of San Francisco, muttering about ‘bad-brains’ and evil AI uprisings. They were all highly educated at prestigious universities, and had well-paying jobs or at least the prospect of one. But now they find themselves potentially facing long prison sentences or worse.

In some ways, the Zizians are precisely a product of their privileged backgrounds. They drank deep on narratives of trans victimhood, on the bigotry of mainstream society and on the need to ward off an apocalyptic future. Their view of the world is a Manichaean one, divided up into ‘good’ and ‘evil’ people, the latter of whom no doubt deserve to die. It is what their prep schools and universities had drilled into them since they were kids. They differed from their peers only in their arrogance, self-righteousness and literal-mindedness.

The Zizians tick all the same boxes as the cults of old – murder, intimidation and a messiah-like leader. But they come with some 21st-century updates. Trans, vegan and convinced of their own moral rectitude, they are very much a cult of our time.

Georgina Mumford is a spiked intern.