The practice by which Our Honest Media™ keeps certain events from the peasantry to assure that we don’t get confused goes back a long way. In the mid-70s, something amounting to a civil war occurred among California leftists featuring kidnappings, purge trials, and executions carried out in lonely spots in the mountains. This went completely unmentioned in the media of the day, due largely, no doubt, to the participation of members of the protected classes (A number of them were ex-Black Panthers). If you’re familiar with the story of the pathetic Sarah Jane Moore, the would-be assassin of Jerry Ford, then you may have heard about this — otherwise it’s unlikely.
A similar train of events has unfolded in recent months, much of it in roughly the same area, also involving a protected class, and also largely overlooked by media. A gang of transgenders has carried out a string of murders across the country, beginning in northern California and culminating in the shooting of a border patrolman in Vermont.
We’ve seen perfunctory coverage of the crimes, but, as is often the case with stories coming out of Cali, there’s a lot more to it. The only in-depth coverage has come from Christopher Rufo and the fearless independent journalist Andy Ngo.
Unsurprisingly, considering the milieu, it involves a cult. The key man in this cult was Jack Amadeus LaSota, who was born in Alaska in 1991. His father was an AI researcher at the state university, and LaSota earned a BA in computer science, doing well enough to intern with NASA.
In 2016 he moved to the Bay area. He began running with a group of “rationalists” operating out of Berkeley, becoming an apprentice at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute of the Center for Applied Rationality (CAR). At the same time, he began publishing a blog expressing his ideas on gender, AI, transhumanism, and related topics.
LaSota believed that each hemisphere of the brain possessed a different gender, with the hemispheres attempting to kill each other as a result. You can see how this could be a problem. LaSota’s solution was “mindhacking” — reconfiguring the brain utilizing game theory and decision theory.
He also believed that AI represented a potentially deadly threat to humanity, which begs the question as to why he was working on it at all, but there you go.
LaSota’s “reconfiguring” led him into transsexualism, which involved creating an entirely new identity based on the premise that transgender “women” embodied a superior form of humanity. He began calling himself “Ziz,” which went on to become the name of the cult.
At the same time, he started collecting followers. One of the first was Gwen Danielson, another transgender, who met Ziz in 2016.
In the summer of 2017, Ziz LaSota returned to Alaska. At Ketchikan he and several followers purchased a nearly derelict tugboat, which they sailed to California. Considering how unseaworthy the boat was, it’s surprising they ever got there, but on July 7, they arrived at Half Moon Bay, where the tug broke down in the harbor. This led to a lengthy conflict with local authorities along with the Coast Guard, a conflict that was never resolved. The cult, which had planned to live on the boat, instead decamped to trucks in a local parking lot until the heat got too intense and they left for greener pastures.
Those belonged to Curtis Lind, an aged owner of a trailer yard in Vallejo, who allowed them to live in RVs parked in the yard at a stiff rent.
Ziz had maintained his ties to CAR, and in November 2019 attended a retreat at a rural site called Westminster Woods along with several followers including Gwen Danielson, Alexander Leathem, and Emma Horhannian. For obscure reasons, the Zizians fell out with the rest of the attendees and attempted to take control of the event, seizing the gate to the grounds and allowing no one to leave. When local police arrived, the Zizians resisted and were placed under arrest — except, oddly enough, Ziz himself.
Court proceedings were delayed while the Zizians attempted to find defense lawyers who were also vegans – not a real challenge, you’d think, in California. The group also filed its own lawsuit against both the police and Westminster Woods.
Things must have been getting hot for Ziz, because he decided to disappear by “falling off a boat.” But the Coast Guard found no body, and the only obit appeared in Ziz’s hometown paper. (Danielson later pulled a similar trick.)
Things continued to unravel for the Zizians. In November 2022, they attacked landlord Curtis Lind with swords and knives. Although the attack cost him an eye, Lind shot Emma Horhannian and Alexander Leathem, killing Horhannian. Leathem and Surrey Dayo were arrested for attempted murder in the case of Lind and murder in the case of Emma Horhannian. It seems that Ziz was actually present, although he vanished before authorities arrived.
Vermont traffic stop by Border Patrol officers devolved into an open gunfight. Teresa Youngblut and Felix Bauckholt were stopped while driving a Prius. They were both dressed in black tac clothing and had been acting suspiciously. Bauckholdt, who had a high-end job in New York finance and was described as a “mathematical genius,” opened fire on the officers, killing Officer David Maland. Return fire killed Bauckholdt and wounded Youngblut.
After Youngblut was booked on charges including assault with a deadly weapon, it was discovered that the guns had been bought by the poor orphan Michelle Zajko, who was still running around loose.
Ziz and Zajko were at last picked up in Maryland on Feb. 16 after alarming local residents and booked on the relatively tame charges of trespassing, obstructing, and illegal firearms possession. It also developed that Curtis Lind’s killer Maximilian Snyder had taken out a marriage license naming Teresa Youngblut, tying things into a tidy little package.
These arrests appear to have brought an end to the Zizian killing spree. Were there other murders? It’s possible, even likely. The one thing that can be said for certain is that it’ll be a long time before this one is wound up.
The Zizian murders delivered body blows to no less than three ideological constructs: rationalism, transhumanism, and transgenderism.
A glance at their website reveals that the Center for Applied Rationality is not itself any kind of nutcult but is instead a sincere public-interest group established to promote rational thinking about the use of technology in hopes of avoiding the kind of mistakes made in the past. According to their mission statement:
Compare the best and the worst that a single human could accomplish with the resources available in the year 1018 to the best and the worst that a single human could accomplish in 1918, or to the best and the worst that could be accomplished in 2008.
This could almost serve as Ziz LaSota’s mission statement. So how did these “rationalists” become entangled with a pack of murderous mutts like the Zizians? I suspect that the answer can be found in the California ethos of “tolerance” as an overriding imperative. No doubt all the old clichés were trotted out: “they have a right to be heard… They have important things to say… We have no right to judge…” While the Center for Applied Rationality carries no blame for events, they haven’t particularly covered themselves in glory either.
Transhumanism is a tech-based parareligion promoted by, among others, Raymond Kurzweil and Hans Moravec in which human beings, through application of cybernetics, biotechnology, and nanotechnology, might achieve superhuman status sometime in the very near future – on the order of twenty-five years (though they’ve been promoting this for about forty years), in an event called the “Singularity,” in which technological progress would attain a pace in which human knowledge would be doubling within hours or even minutes. Among the benefits promised by Transhumanism are immortality (through “uploading” the mind into a computer), vast increases in intelligence (Kurzweil spoke of IQs “in the trillions”), and changes in human morphology. Some of these are distinctly unappealing. Moravec, for instance, postulated that humans would eventually evolve into “robot bushes,” grotesque constructs that remain rooted in one spot, interacting with the world remotely. (David Lynch featured his own conception of these in one of the later episodes of “Twin Peaks.”)
In recent years, transsexualism has achieved prominent status in transhumanism, influenced by transhumanists such as Martine Rothblatt, a promoter of mind uploading and founder of the transhumanist Terasem Movement. Rothblatt, who transitioned in 1994, argues that transsexualism serves a gateway to accelerated human development as envisioned in the Singularity paradigm, acting as the first step toward achieving transhuman status. It appears that Ziz stumbled over this concept and was preaching a wildly distorted version of it to his transgender followers.
Which brings us to the matter of transgenderism itself. Transgenderism as an ideology has been promoted alternately as a necessary corrective to what amounts to a birth defect — on the order of fitting a prosthetic to someone born without a leg — or else as a harmless and in fact desirable expansion of human development. Experience shows it to be neither, but instead simply a new way of expressing pathological, antisocial urges. There’s a clear record demonstrating this fact: Snochia Moseley shot up an Aberdeen, Maryland Rite Aid facility; Alex McKinney killed one and wounded eight at a Denver school; Anderson Lee Aldrich murdered five at a gay club in Colorado Springs; and Audrey Elizabeth Hale killed six children at a Christian school in Nashville. There are no doubt many others in which the transgender identity of the killer has been hidden. The Zizian killing spree is simply the latest of these spasms.
There’s much similarity here to the 1969 Manson killings: California. A messianic cult consisting of disaffected young people. Elderly property owners dragged in through no fault of their own. A well-to-do couple murdered for no rational reason. A cult leader who directed the crimes while taking an actual role in none of them.
It may well mark a watershed moment in the transgender craze. As the Manson murders foreshadowed the end of the hippie dream, so this bloodbath could put a period to the transgender nightmare.
Jesus Christ is King
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