As Zizian ‘cult’ leader is arrested, here’s what the vegan transgender group believes — and other disturbing deaths members are linked to
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Mysterious alleged Zizian cult leader Jack Lasota was arrested alongside an accomplice in Maryland on Monday.
The elusive head of the largely transgender, vegan group had gone as far as to apparently fake his own death in 2022 to avoid scrutiny. However, at the time of Lasota’s arrest he was wanted in both California and Pennsylvania.
Taken into custody alongside Lasota were alleged followers Daniel Blank, 26, and Michelle Zajko, 32, a person of interest in the double murder of her parents – both fatally shot in their heads at their home on New Year’s Eve 2022.
Their deaths are two of four linked to the cult – which is based around LaSota, 34, who previously went by Ziz online – alongside an elderly landowner in California and a border patrol agent killed in a shootout with another member of the group in Vermont on Jan. 20.
Police say members of the Zizian group could number as high as 30 and they appear to be mainly young trans women who are math and computer whizzes, who previously worked at NASA, Google and on Wall Street.
They gather around Ziz, who was born male but now identifies as female and grew up in Alaska before moving to the Bay Area. There he gathered acolytes who believe in the same eccentric and arcane blend of Silicon Valley-driven Rationalist movement theories and animal rights.
Both investigators and people who know the Zizians told The Post many of them have been estranged from their parents, some are thought to be on the autism spectrum and that they are an anti-sex group who take hormones for their gender transitions.
The Zizians are involved in esoteric practices like “unihemispheric sleep”— a practice not dissimilar to hypnosis where adherents are told to sleep with one eye open in a state of chronic exhaustion.
The practice is meant to prove the two hemispheres of the brain are distinct identities, with one side thought to be female and one male, one side thought to be good and the other evil. They two sides “often desire to kill each other,” according to Lasota’s blog.
“They talk as if they really believe they have supernatural powers and they believe movies like ‘The Matrix’ are real and they can manipulate reality,” an investigator familiar with the Zizians told The Post.
“They talk about the Nazis and the Holocaust a lot. They’ve made it very difficult and confusing to catch them. They all have so many aliases and move around a lot. We think a lot of what’s happened can be traced back to Ziz.”
Because many of the group use numerous different names and a variety of pronouns and have been linked to California, Vermont, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, it makes them more difficult to track according to police sources.
Jessica Taylor, 32, of Berkeley, Calif., first became friendly with at least four Zizians beginning around 2015 when she met them at the Center for Applied Rationality, an organization in the city which hosts
workshops on cognitive science and “de-biasing” with a mission to “develop clear thinking for the sake of humanity’s future,” according to its website.
She said Ziz appeared normal at first and they had discussions about “self”. But by 2019, Taylor said Ziz had started to strike her as “creepy” – especially when he gave a “strange description” of the suicide of a mutual connection, which seemed to link to the group’s theory on brain function.
Content retrieved from: https://nypost.com/2025/02/18/us-news/as-zizian-cult-leader-is-arrested-heres-what-they-believe/.
