Ziz / Jack Amadeus LaSota / Zizians / sinceriously.fyi - Vegan AI Singularity Doomsday Cult turned Tranny Manson Family. Implicated in at least 6 deaths.

[Hog Grease]

What an insane read, godspeed OP!

 

[Mussolini’s Merkin]

Fantastic first post OP. I had heard about some of this from other stories being featured, but seeing it all laid out like this is insane, I’m getting some real Manson family vibes from this.

 

[pikachudidnothingwrong]

Fantastic first post OP. I had heard about some of this from other stories being featured, but seeing it all laid out like this is insane, I’m getting some real Manson family vibes from this.

The Manson family is exactly what i was thinking about with this. It really does.

 

[The Cheese Aisle]

2021
August 2021: Ziz advocates for "airlocking" (a sci-fi term for killing) various people in blog comments and claims many people seek "suicide by Ziz." Ziz runs a blog which appears to be the primary attractor for this community. They claim that people have two hemispheres, and are either non-good, single-good, or double-good (very rare, which Ziz herself is). Ziz advocates for a ruthlessly enforced altruism towards all living creatures, and to follow the principle that it’s never valid to surrender. She promotes the punishment of “non-good” people, particularly those who are not vegans.

Why do they talk like this it's so fucking tedious

2022
April 2022: Gwen Danielson, one of the protestors, stops appearing for court hearings, and their lawyer suggests they have died.
August 2022: Ziz fakes her own death in a boating accident and stops showing up to court hearings. The Coast Guard conducts a search for her, but finds no body. An obituary is released. 2023 January 2, 2023: Richard and Rita Zajko are found dead from homicide in their Pennsylvania home from gunshot wounds. Their daughter Jamie Zajko was associated with Ziz, and we suspect the homicide was an attempt to gain money (several million dollars) from inheritance. Police also suspect Ziz is involved in the murder. Police also suspect Daniel Blank, an associate of Ziz, is involved in the murder. Blank has not been seen since and we suspect he’s dead. January 13, 2023: Ziz is arrested in Pennsylvania for "obstructing administration of law" and "disorderly conduct." Ziz eventually makes bail (in June) and stops showing up to court. We suspect that the arrest was indirectly related the murders, and that the police didn't have enough evidence to make a full charge.

Holy shit I'm just relaizing the dates on some of these- is it that easy to fake your own death and do a double homicide?!

 

[Purestrain Gold]

I'm not sure if they're specifically associated with Rational Wiki and David Gerard, but they have more or less the same worldview.

David Gerard (/u/dgerard) is a mod on /r/sneerclub

Aella just dropped her summary (ghostarchive):

This would make a fascinating true crime documentary, although the fact all the perps are troons would be politically difficult - perhaps not any more.

 

[Markass the Worst]

Rationalists are too verbose and autistic. Here is a 4 hour podcast some guy and a tranny did about the Zizians. It's so large that I have to break it into two parts to even do an audio only archive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-siR07uD3A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69-VU0IZVI8 (fixed audio version, I archived this)
Part 1:

Part 2:

 

[dick brain]

Please God let a murderous tranny death cult come to widespread attention the day after the POTUS shuts down tranny ideology, it would be the nail in the coffin for this stupid psyop.

 

[Coo Coo Bird]

Fantastic first post OP. I had heard about some of this from other stories being featured, but seeing it all laid out like this is insane, I’m getting some real Manson family vibes from this.

It's uncanny, really.

Both have affiliations with Berkeley (Ziz lived there, Manson got his first cult member there), both recruited in San Francisco (Manson went for hippy chicks, Ziz went for tech troons), both had delusions of fame and fortune (Manson with being a musician and part of the Hollywood in-crowd, Ziz with being a tech-bro and an AI philosopher), and both had ridiculous fantasies ripped from pop culture (Manson with Helter Skelter from Beatles albums, Ziz with his 'dual hemispheres' that access 'both sides of the force').

Charles Manson got to jam with Dennis Wilson and his cult had a higher body count, so I guess bipolar disorder/psychopathy is stronger than autism/psychopathy.

 

[LOWERCASE LETTERS]

Hopefully the remaining members of these creeps that are at large are gunned down while resisting arrest

 

[duckling]

It’s like an upgraded Tranch but instead of killing alpacas they’re killing people. Ziz is what Penny could only aspire to be.

 

[Markass the Worst]

Hopefully the remaining members of these creeps that are at large are gunned down while resisting arrest

Police won't shoot for merely resisting arrest. They only do it in self-defense when the perp pulls a gun out for example. They might kill the perp but they could also die too, which happened in the border patrol shootout (both the tranny and the cop died).

 

[CervixHammer]

Forgot where I got these (either LessWrong or Sneer Club while googling their names), but supposedly this is the "manifesto" or flyers they had when they disrupted the CFAR retreat in 2019:

 

[OrangeJuliusEvola]

Fantastic first post OP. I had heard about some of this from other stories being featured, but seeing it all laid out like this is insane, I’m getting some real Manson family vibes from this.

The Manson family is exactly what i was thinking about with this. It really does.

The Transon Family Murders.
*Please credit me with the headline pun when you finally notice this, Daily Mail*

 

[ita]

They claim that people have two hemispheres, and are either non-good, single-good, or double-good (very rare, which Ziz herself is).

This is just Gnosticism’s hylics, psychics, and pneumatics again. I dunno about you all but frankly I like to see a bit more originality in my vegan AI tranny death cult ideologies.

 

[jertzog]

Exactly who in the group is currently at large?

 

[Treatlerite]

I just can't physically imagine being this absolutely deranged and mentally disabled yet somehow affording to live in these big Californian tech cities. Reading the OP felt like a sketch parody.

 

[Coo Coo Bird]

Exactly who in the group is currently at large?

Ziz / Jack LaSota (I'm torn whether to call him Ziz or LaSota. Ziz is easier to type, but it feels like disrespecting Zyzz) is at large, Michelle Zajko is at large, Jasper Danielson might have faked his death, and while Alexander Leatham is in prison, it's not for a lack of trying:

https://archive.ph/rmHLK

Resist / Obstruct / Delay Peace Officer
Conspiracy To Commit A Crime
Wear Mask For Unlawful Purpose
Murder
Aggravated Mayhem
False Imprisonment By Violence
Cruelty To Child By Inflicting Injury
Escape Jail/Detention
Trespass: Posted Land
Attempt/Escape From Jail / Prison / Industrial Road Camp

And I think he kidnapped a kid, if I'm reading these charges right?
EDIT Details of Leatham, and also Dao's escape attempt(s):

Meanwhile, the two people who were facing trial over the 2022 incident, Dao and Leatham, fought with investigators at every step, records show.

Two weeks after being arrested, Leatham, identified in records as a transgender woman, attempted to escape from North Bay Hospital in Vacaville, according to court records. Leatham pretended to fall asleep and, when a deputy went to wash his hands in a bathroom, allegedly fled out an emergency exit door. The deputy ran Leatham down outside.

In February 2023, Leatham tried to escape again, prosecutors said. When deputies took her to a Vallejo courthouse for a hearing, Leatham requested a wheelchair. As the deputy went to get one, Leatham allegedly ran out of the transport truck but got caught at a cyclone fence.

In July 2023, Dao tried to escape a jail cell, records show. Prosecutors said Dao pretended to be choking and having a seizure; after officers determined the prisoner was fine and left the cell, Dao ran toward the door. The closing door pinched Dao’s hand, officials said, requiring hospital treatment.

Both Dao and Leatham have undergone mental health evaluations, according to court records. On July 16, 2023, Leatham wrote a letter to a judge claiming: “I am rational. I do not have a ‘mental illness’ and I do not need ‘treatment’.”

Leatham told a judge she would like to represent herself in court. She said that her belief in uncommon ideas like reincarnation did not render her incompetent to participate in her defense. “I feel like the psychologists are saying that unless I believe some specific things about the world I won’t be able to rationally relate to anyone and that’s not true,” she wrote.

Later, Leatham, a vegan like others in the fringe group, countered what prosecutors called her “delusions” in another letter to a judge. “Is it my belief that financially supporting death camps and consuming the corpses of their victims is wrong and those who do so are monsters?” she asked.

A judge ruled Leatham was competent and, in October 2024, that there was enough evidence to move to a jury trial this April. It’s unclear now how that trial will proceed considering Lind’s death. Records show prosecutors had, due to Lind’s age, recorded his testimony during the case’s preliminary hearing.

Witnesses describe shocking stabbing of Bay Area landlord now linked to five other deaths (Archive)
Also has a good picture of Snyder:

I just can't physically imagine being this absolutely deranged and mentally disabled yet somehow affording to live in these big Californian tech cities. Reading the OP felt like a sketch parody.

But they couldn't afford to live there, is the thing. Some of them lived in a boat offshore to try to live cheaply, others were squatting in an RV camp and tried to murder the guy who owned when he tried to evict them because they didn't pay rent. Make no mistake, these are feral tranny hobos who think they're going to be reincarnated as gods after the AI Singularity.

 

[daffodils]

Scott Alexander post from Less Wrong where he talks about the Zizians being a splinter group of yet another rationalist cult, the Vassarites.

Archive/Link

Spoiler

I want to add some context I think is important to this.
Jessica was (I don't know if she still is) part of a group centered around a person named Vassar, informally dubbed "the Vassarites". Their philosophy is complicated, but they basically have a kind of gnostic stance where regular society is infinitely corrupt and conformist and traumatizing and you need to "jailbreak" yourself from it (I'm using a term I found on Ziz's discussion of her conversations with Vassar; I don't know if Vassar uses it himself). Jailbreaking involves a lot of tough conversations, breaking down of self, and (at least sometimes) lots of psychedelic drugs.
Vassar ran MIRI a very long time ago, but either quit or got fired, and has since been saying that MIRI/CFAR is also infinitely corrupt and conformist and traumatizing (I don't think he thinks they're worse than everyone else, but I think he thinks they had a chance to be better, they wasted it, and so it's especially galling that they're just as bad). Since then, he's tried to "jailbreak" a lot of people associated with MIRI and CFAR - again, this involves making them paranoid about MIRI/CFAR and convincing them to take lots of drugs. The combination of drugs and paranoia caused a lot of borderline psychosis, which the Vassarites mostly interpreted as success ("these people have been jailbroken out of the complacent/conformist world, and are now correctly paranoid and weird"). Occasionally it would also cause full-blown psychosis, which they would discourage people from seeking treatment for, because they thought psychiatrists were especially evil and corrupt and traumatizing and unable to understand that psychosis is just breaking mental shackles.
(I am a psychiatrist and obviously biased here)
Jessica talks about a cluster of psychoses from 2017 - 2019 which she blames on MIRI/CFAR. She admits that not all the people involved worked for MIRI or CFAR, but kind of equivocates around this and says they were "in the social circle" in some way. The actual connection is that most (maybe all?) of these people were involved with the Vassarites or the Zizians (the latter being IMO a Vassarite splinter group, though I think both groups would deny this characterization). The main connection to MIRI/CFAR is that the Vassarites recruited from the MIRI/CFAR social network.
I don't have hard evidence of all these points, but I think Jessica's text kind of obliquely confirms some of them. She writes:

"Psychosis" doesn't have to be a bad thing, even if it usually is in our society; it can be an exploration of perceptions and possibilities not before imagined, in a supportive environment that helps the subject to navigate reality in a new way; some of R.D. Liang's work is relevant here, describing psychotic mental states as a result of ontological insecurity following from an internal division of the self at a previous time. Despite the witch hunts and so on, the Leverage environment seems more supportive than what I had access to. The people at Leverage I talk to, who have had some of these unusual experiences, often have a highly exploratory attitude to the subtle mental realm, having gained access to a new cognitive domain through the experience, even if it was traumatizing.

RD Laing was a 1960s pseudoscientist who claimed that schizophrenia is how "the light [begins] to break through the cracks in our all-too-closed minds". He opposed schizophrenics taking medication, and advocated treatments like "rebirthing therapy" where people role-play fetuses going through the birth canal - for which he was stripped of his medical license. The Vassarites like him, because he is on their side in the whole "actually psychosis is just people being enlightened as to the true nature of society" thing. I think Laing was wrong, psychosis is actually bad, and that the "actually psychosis is good sometimes" mindset is extremely related to the Vassarites causing all of these cases of psychosis.

Unless there were psychiatric institutionalizations or jail time resulting from the Leverage psychosis, I infer that Leverage overall handled their metaphysical weirdness better than the MIRI/CFAR adjacent community. While in Leverage the possibility of subtle psychological influence between people was discussed relatively openly, around MIRI/CFAR it was discussed covertly, with people being told they were crazy for believing it might be possible. (I noted at the time that there might be a sense in which different people have "auras" in a way that is not less inherently rigorous than the way in which different people have "charisma", and I feared this type of comment would cause people to say I was crazy.) As a consequence, the people most mentally concerned with strange social metaphysics were marginalized, and had more severe psychoses with less community support, hence requiring normal psychiatric hospitalization.

Jessica is accusing MIRI of being insufficiently supportive to her by not taking her talk about demons and auras seriously when she was borderline psychotic, and comparing this to Leverage, who she thinks did a better job by promoting an environment where people accepted these ideas. I think MIRI was correct to be concerned and (reading between the lines) telling her to seek normal medical treatment, instead of telling her that demons were real and she was right to worry about them, and I think her disagreement with this is coming from a belief that psychosis is potentially a form of useful creative learning. While I don't want to assert that I am 100% sure this can never be true, I think it's true rarely enough, and with enough downside risk, that treating it as a psychiatric emergency is warranted.
On the two cases of suicide, Jessica writes:

Both these cases are associated with a subgroup splitting off of the CFAR-centric rationality community due to its perceived corruption, centered around Ziz. (I also thought CFAR was pretty corrupt at the time, and I also attempted to split off another group when attempts at communication with CFAR failed; I don't think this judgment was in error, though many of the following actions were; the splinter group seems to have selected for high scrupulosity and not attenuated its mental impact.)

Ziz tried to create an anti-CFAR/MIRI splinter group whose members had mental breakdowns. Jessica also tried to create an anti-CFAR/MIRI splinter group and had a mental breakdown. This isn't a coincidence - Vassar tried his jailbreaking thing on both of them, and it tended to reliably produce people who started crusades against MIRI/CFAR, and who had mental breakdowns. Here's an excerpt from Ziz's blog on her experience (edited heavily for length, and slightly to protect the innocent):

When I first met Vassar, it was a random encounter in an experimental group call organized by some small-brand rationalist. He talked for about an hour, and automatically became the center of conversation, I typed notes as fast as I could, thinking, “if this stuff is true it changes everything; it’s the [crux] of my life.” (It true, but I did not realize it immediately.) Randomly, another person found the link, came in and said, “hi”. [Vassar] said “hi”, she said “hi” again, apparently for humor. [Vassar] said something terse I forget “well if this is what …”, apparently giving up on the venue, and disconnected without further comment. One by one, the other ~10 people including besides her, including me disconnected disappointedly, wordlessly or just about right after. A wizard was gracing us with his wisdom and she fucked it up. And in my probably-representative case that was just about the only way I could communicate how frustrated I was at her for that.

[Vassar explained how] across society, the forces of gaslighting were attacking people’s basic ability to think and to a justice as a Schelling point until only the built-in Schelling points of gender and race remained, Vassar listed fronts in the war on gaslighting, disputes in the community, and included [local community member ZD] [...] ZD said Vassar broke them out of a mental hospital. I didn’t ask them how. But I considered that both badass and heroic. From what I hear, ZD was, probably as with most, imprisoned for no good reason, in some despicable act of, “get that unsightly person not playing along with the [heavily DRM’d] game we’ve called sanity out of my free world”.

I heard [local community member AM] was Vassar’s former “apprentice”. And I had started picking up jailbroken wisdom from them secondhand without knowing where it was from. But Vassar did it better. After Rationalist Fleet, I concluded I was probably worth Vassar’s time to talk to a bit, and I emailed him, carefully briefly stating my qualifications, in terms of ability to take ideas seriously and learn from him, so that he could get maximally dense VOI on whether to talk to me. A long conversation ensued. And I got a lot from it. [...]

Vassar has had, I think about 6, transfems gravitate to him, join his projects, go on his quests, that I’ve heard. Including Olivia, and Jessica, and I think Devi. Devi had a mental breakdown and detransitioned IIHC. Jessica had a mental breakdown and didn’t detransition. Olivia became an agent of mental breakdown, compulsively breaking others via drug trips because they went through gates they shouldn’t’ve. And didn’t detransition. This all created an awful tension in me. The rationality community was kind of compromised as a rallying point for truthseeking. This was desperately bad for the world. [Vassar] was at the center of, largely the creator of a “no actually for real” rallying point for the jailbroken reality-not-social-reality version of this.

Ziz is describing the same cluster of psychoses Jessica is (including Jessica's own), but I think doing so more accurately, by describing how it was a Vassar-related phenomenon. I would add Ziz herself to the list of trans women who got negative mental effects from Vassar, although I think (not sure) Ziz would not endorse my description of her as having these.
What was the community's response to this? I have heard rumors that Vassar was fired from MIRI a long time ago for doing some very early version of this, although I don't know if it's true. He was banned from REACH (and implicitly rationalist social events) for somewhat unrelated reasons. I banned him from SSC meetups for a combination of reasons including these. For reasons I don't fully understand and which might or might not be related to this, he left the Bay Area. This was around the time COVID happened, so everything's kind of been frozen in place since then.
I want to clarify that I don't dislike Vassar, he's actually been extremely nice to me, I continue to be in cordial and productive communication with him, and his overall influence on my life personally has been positive. He's also been surprisingly gracious about the fact that I go around accusing him of causing a bunch of cases of psychosis. I don't think he does the psychosis thing on purpose, I think he is honest in his belief that the world is corrupt and traumatizing (which at the margin, shades into values of "the world is corrupt and traumatizing" which everyone agrees are true) and I believe he is honest in his belief that he needs to figure out ways to help people do better. There are many smart people who work with him and support him who have not gone psychotic at all. I don't think we need to blame/ostracize/cancel him and his group, except maybe from especially sensitive situations full of especially vulnerable people. My main advice is that if he or someone related to him asks you if you want to take a bunch of drugs and hear his pitch for why the world is corrupt, you say no.
EDIT/UPDATE: I got a chance to talk to Vassar, who disagrees with my assessment above. We're still trying to figure out the details, but so far, we agree that there was a cluster of related psychoses around 2017, all of which were in the same broad part of the rationalist social graph. Features of that part were - it contained a lot of trans women, a lot of math-y people, and some people who had been influenced by Vassar, although Vassar himself may not have been a central member. We are still trying to trace the exact chain of who had problems first and how those problems spread. I still suspect that Vassar unwittingly came up with some ideas that other people then spread through the graph. Vassar still denies this and is going to try to explain a more complete story to me when I have more time.

From today: a bit more about the CFAR protest and Scott's encounter with Ziz.
Link

 

[JesusChristDenton]

Great first thread OP. Though I can't help but shake the feeling that by the time this thread leaves Prospering Grounds, it's already gonna be in Lolcows of History.

Ziz definitely has the potential to be the next Audrey Hale in terms of waking up normalfags to how genuinely insane troons can be.

 

[ghjoigcbn]

Thanksfor putting this together.
Small correction, Roko’s basilisk was invented by Less Wrong user and contributor Roko. It was removed by EY because he considered it an infohazard. This webpage is supposed to have a copy of the original post https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko's_basilisk/Original_post