A ‘death cult’ on the run: The Bay Area fringe group terrorizing America
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Asprawling web of violence across America, which has left at least six dead, has been linked to a fringe group of radical Berkeley pseudo-intellectuals known as the Zizians. Investigators across the country are piecing together connections between the double homicide of a wealthy married couple in Pennsylvania, a deadly shootout in Vermont and two brutal knife attacks on a landlord in Vallejo. Four people who are allegedly Zizian cult members are in custody facing homicide charges, despite multiple escape attempts. Three members of the fringe group are missing and wanted, including the leader, Jack “Ziz” LaSota, who faked their death in the San Francisco Bay.
Around a dozen individuals appear to have in-person links to Ziz, some of whom worked at NASA and Google before the arrests began. Many of them advocate for veganism and identify as transgender. Some met through the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, a Berkeley nonprofit buoyed by Peter Thiel and Sam Bankman-Fried and associated with the rationalist movement; MIRI teaches scientific techniques to enhance human decision-making and warns about human destruction brought on by the rise in AI.
Here’s what we know about the group members and their current whereabouts.
Jack Amadeus “Ziz” LaSota is the namesake and most influential member of the fringe group of radical Bay Area rationalists connected to the recent spate of violence.
LaSota, who goes by the name “Ziz,” was born in Fairbanks, Alaska, in 1991. After studying computer science at the University of Fairbanks, where their father is currently employed, Ziz interned at NASA and moved to California in 2016. “I moved to the Bay Area for proximity to the tech industry which I considered sort of my destiny,” Ziz wrote in a 2019 blog post.
Content retrieved from: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/new-details-bay-area-zizians-death-cult-20165754.php.
