US

Transgender Leader Of Bizarre Radical Vegan Cult Tied To Multiple Murders Across America Jailed Until Trial

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Members of a cult-like group tied to a Border Patrol agent’s murder will be held until their trial for a separate criminal case, a Maryland judge ruled Tuesday.

Judge Erich Bean ordered Tuesday that Jack LaSota, Michelle Zajko and Daniel Blank remain in custody after police arrested them Sunday on charges of trespassing, illegal gun possession and resisting officers, court records show. LaSota, nicknamed “Ziz,” leads a group called “Zizians” that authorities have linked to a web of violence across the country.

LaSota is a man who identifies as a transgender woman and once wrote a violent, erratic blog ranting about, among other things, “gender identity” and the potential dangers of artificial intelligence to humans. In various posts, he described himself as someone whose “gender doesn’t match their chromosomes or something like that,” argued that “punching Nazis” is justified and told morbid stories about suicide and rape. He also called himself vegan and described people who eat meat as “carnists.”

The Department of Justice (DOJ) charged a woman tied to the movement in the Jan. 20 killing of a Border Patrol agent that has fueled a nationwide law enforcement investigation.

The court scheduled the three defendants’ trials for late March. Court records do not list an attorney for the three defendants.

Charging documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation describe an encounter with “several units” of local and state police who found them with weapons Sunday.

Police say a homeowner called to report the defendants sitting on his property without permission in “two white box trucks with chains on the tires” and “dressed in all black.” The resident said “the subjects then asked if they could camp at the location for a month,” according to the police reports.

Officers found two of them in one of the trucks “with gun belts on and ammo in the belt” and a rifle and handgun in the other, the records say.

The reports said said the trio refused to offer their names when asked, and Zajko, described as “the female,” began “crying saying not to kill her” just before they were arrested.

Officers planned to question all three “regarding other crimes that have occurred across the country,” the documents show.

Media reports show LaSota was arrested while protesting the think tank Center for Applied Rationality in Berkeley, California in 2019 before he was wrongly reported dead in a boat accident off San Francisco Bay in 2022. Authorities arrested him again in Pennsylvania in 2023 for allegedly trying to stop police from investigating Zajko in relation to the murder of her parents. The Pennsylvania case against LaSota is still pending, while Zajko was not charged.

Further arrests of the Zizians came after the death of Border David Maland during a shootout in Vermont, where agents pulled over a driver named Teresa Youngblut to question her male passenger’s immigration status. Youngblut, who is charged with starting the gunfire, had received two guns from Zajko and had alarmed a hotel employee by wearing tactical gear while armed, according to prosecutors.

Maximillian Snyder was also charged in January with the murder of a California landlord who tried to evict LaSota and others from his property for camping out in box trucks and vans, the Associated Press reported. Snyder and Youngblut had plans to get married before their arrests.

In his blog, LaSota described wanting to be a computer programmer. He said he used to work remotely for NASA and once applied for a job at Google.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and FBI did not respond to a request for comment on the scope of the Zizians’ activities nationwide.