Have you heard about the Zizians? A string of recent killings has been linked to a Vallejo, California, death cult that's connected to the rationalist scene. Sex worker/data scientist Aella has more. I'll attempt an abbreviated summary, drawing from Aella's reporting, a solid SFGate explainer, and an X user named @kenthecowboy_.
In 2022, Curtis Lind, a Vallejo landlord who had been letting folks live on his property in "trailers and containers" was stabbed—allegedly by tenants who had stopped paying rent—with a Samurai sword. Lind shot two of his attackers and killed one of them—31-year-old Emma Borhanian. Two weeks ago, Lind was stabbed to death on his property, just before he was scheduled to testify in the case. On Tuesday, 22-year-old Maximilian Snyder was charged with the murder.
This killing is linked to six other deaths across the country. The suspected killers—the tenants-turned-delinquents who had been living as a cult—are almost all transgender and part of the Berkeley-based rationalist community, following their leader, Jack LaSota (Ziz). Some of them are romantically linked to one another: Snyder, for example, applied for a marriage license in the state of Washington back in November along with girlfriend Teresa Youngblut, the suspect in a Vermont-Canadian border shootout that killed a U.S. Border Patrol agent.
