Who Are the Zizians: Why 6 Killings Are Linked to Alleged Vegan Techie “Cult”
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It turned out Jack “Ziz” LaSota wasn’t dead.
Not on Aug. 19, 2022, when the U.S. Coast Guard responded to a call about a person falling off a boat in San Francisco Bay but were unable to locate a body. And not on Jan. 13, 2023, when Pennsylvania state troopers raided a hotel room while investigating a murder and, according to a trooper’s court testimony, found LaSota lying on the floor.
Rather, the computer programmer, who was born Jack Amadeus LaSota before she began blogging as Ziz and adopted feminine pronouns, was very much alive.
Authorities have since linked devotees of Ziz theory—dubbed Zizians by observers who consider LaSota to be their leader—to six deaths in three states, including the killing of a U.S. Border Patrol agent near the Vermont-Canada border in January.
After the hotel raid, LaSota was jailed on misdemeanor charges of obstruction and disorderly conduct in Pennsylvania, according to NBC News. She posted bail in June 2023, but a bench warrant was issued for her arrest after she failed to show up for a court hearing.
And LaSota’s whereabouts remained unknown until she was arrested with two others on Feb. 16, 2025, in Frostburg, Md.
LaSota, 34, Michelle Zajko, 32, and Daniel Blank, 26, were initially booked on charges of obstructing and hindering an investigation, trespassing and illegal handgun possession, according to their online booking sheets, plus Zajko was charged with resisting arrest.
All three are being held without bail, per the booking sheets. They were scheduled to appear in Allegany County District Court March 24 but Maryland prosecutors charged them with additional misdemeanors, including carrying concealed and loaded handguns, bringing LaSota’s charge count to nine, Zajko’s to 14 and Blank’s to 12. The trio are now due in circuit court April 8.
They have not yet entered any pleas on the charges. E! News has reached out to LaSota’s attorney Daniel McGarrigle for comment but has not yet heard back. He confirmed to NBC Philadelphia he was representing LaSota but wouldn’t speak to the details of her case.
Attorney information for Zajko and Blank wasn’t immediately available. Blank’s father told NBC Bay Area that his UC Berkeley graduate son was the victim of a cult and he didn’t believe him to be involved in any serious crime.
It was Zajko who was the target of a Jan. 13, 2023, hotel search, during which troopers found her in one room and LaSota and Blank in another, according to a law enforcement affidavit obtained by NBC News. Zajko’s parents Richard Zajko, 71, and Rita Zajko, 68, had been found shot to death in their Chester, Pa., home on Jan. 2.
Zajko was taken to state police barracks for questioning at the time but refused to cooperate and was allowed to leave, per the affidavit. But instead of waiting in the lobby for troopers to return her vehicle, the document continued, she just left.
Also noted in the affidavit: Authorities found $40,000 in cash in the car Zajko left behind.
Zajko’s name then came up in connection with another case before her arrest last month: Per VTDigger, the U.S. Bureau of Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives sent an alert to licensed firearms dealers in Vermont requesting assistance “in identifying any firearms purchases made by Michelle Jacqueline Zajko, a person of interest in the shooting of a Customs and Border Protection Officer on Jan. 20, 2025.”
To date, no one has been charged in the murder of Zajko’s parents. But the Maryland prosecutor who successfully requested last month that LaSota, Zajko and Blank be held without bail said in court Feb. 18, per NBC News, that the trio were “tied to multiple homicides that have occurred across the United States.”
Keep reading for more on LaSota, the Zizians, why they’ve been called a cult and how they ended up connected to six deaths:
Jack Amadeus LaSota was born in Alaska and earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science from University of Alaska Fairbanks before moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2016.
She started Sinseriously.blog toward the end of the year, writing under the name Ziz and identifying herself as a transgender woman, as well as a strict vegan.
For awhile she lived in a house in Berkeley with others who were affiliated with rationalism, an AI-wary movement that believes reason and scientific knowledge trump religion and emotions when it comes to how human beings should operate in the world. But her takes became increasingly extreme, according to people familiar with LaSota’s theories and her own writings, per the Chronicle.
“Ziz theory is combining these things like rationalism, timeless decision theory, transgender related ideas, brain hemispheres and left-anarchism,” former Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) fellow Jessica Taylor—whose rationalist group became a target of LaSota’s ire—told the San Francisco Chronicle in January. “A lot of these ideas on their own are normal.”
The Zizians, she added, are “just very intense.”
While participating in an apprentice program run by MIRI and the Center for Applied Rationality in the summer of 2018, per the Chronicle, LaSota started expounding on a theory that the right and left side of a person’s brain can hold opposing values and gender identities. And, she wrote on her blog, the respective hemispheres are “often the primary obstacle to each other thinking” and “often desire to kill each other.”
MIRI and CFAR rejected LaSota’s suggestion to adopt this belief as a qualification for future hires, according to CFAR executive director Anna Salamon.
“I came to the Bay Area because all the smartest people I knew said there was a global emergency in the neglect of ethics and even care for the future by AI researchers,” LaSota said in a later court declaration, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Instead, her declaration continued, she found “corruption.”
LaSota also seemed to only want to associate with other vegans, writing on her blog, “I described my feelings towards flesh-eating monsters, who had created hell on Earth far [sic] more people than those they had helped.”
The people drawn to LaSota’s theories, Salamon told the Chronicle, were “smart, mostly autistic-ish transwomen who were extremely vulnerable and isolated.”
CFAR had high ideals, according to Salamon, but she admittedly didn’t realize how open to manipulation some of their adherents were.
“We saw AI as something that was really, really important that we needed to get really, really right or it would be really, really bad,” Salamon told NBC News last month. “We didn’t know this at the time, but in hindsight we were creating conditions for a cult.”
Content retrieved from: https://www.eonline.com/news/1415050/who-are-the-zizians-6-deaths-linked-to-alleged-vegan-cult.
