How Best to Explain Zizian-linked Violence?
Research on why religious groups go off-kilter could shed light on multiple high-profile crimes.
A January 20th shootout in Vermont quickly uncovered further violent acts connected to a small and highly peculiar group often labeled the “Zizians.”
Born as Jack LaSota but later transitioning and changing name, the comp sci-type who became Ziz hailed from Alaska, left grad work incomplete at the University of Illinois, and arrived in the Bay Area by the mid-2010s. There, Ziz floated from more-traditional housing to improvised houseboats to tricked-out box trucks eventually parked in Vallejo. Out of a concern with AI and mental optimization, she also joined and then broke with the Berkeley-based Rationalist movement, spearheading a strange and legally troublesome 2019 protest and subsequently even staging her death. As others entered her orbit, so did violence, including a 2022 attack on their Vallejo landlord; the late 2022 murders of an associate’s parents at their Pennsylvania home; and finally, within four days this past January, both the Vermont shootout and the brutal slaying of the Vallejo landlord.
Even as reporting continues about this so-called “trans vegan death cult,” however, all that violence still remains puzzling.
How best to explain it?
To start, it cannot be emphasized enough that multiple court cases and investigations are ongoing and our knowledge is evolving. For example, Zizian presence is relatively indisputable in the Vermont and Vallejo conflicts. But, a landlord harassment narrative exists for Vallejo. The Pennsylvania couple’s murders are also currently uncharged, with their bereaved child unequivocally stating “I didn’t murder my parents.” Whatever our suspicions and working theories, new evidence can and should change our minds.
That said, onlookers can still ask: if so-called Zizians did commit some or all of this violence, why?
Here, perhaps our best resource is scholarly thinking on why new religious movements turn violent.
Deriving from examination of everything from Peoples Temple to the Branch Davidians, research highlights a confluence of millennialism and totalism with charismatic leadership.
Helpfully, these three factors allow us to organize current knowledge, process further information, and formulate questions and potential scenarios.
First, millennialism is when people self-conceive as special end-times world-changers.
Two aspects of Zizian ideology could qualify as such “sacred mandates.” Intense veganism characterized the group; conceptually, animals were “people” and outsiders like spurned parents were “flesh-eating monsters.” Furthermore, per historic discussions and recent reporting on two associates’ views, humans should be acting now so that impending all-mighty artificial intelligence accepts and enforces vegan morality. Likewise, Zizian evangelism has included unconventional brain hemisphere theories and related fringe therapies that purportedly unlock human potential. Given Ziz’s explicit interest in “trying to save the world” and the many laptops found in Vallejo, autodidactic “research” efforts on such fronts may have occupied Zizians during their isolation.
Zizians also have sought to scale up. Ziz once envisioned a “Rationalist Fleet” uniting many like-minded people – a dream premised on solving housing affordability issues. If connected, the late 2022 Pennsylvania murders of an associate’s moneyed parents could constitute inheritance designs to help fund mission, prior to the late 2023 affiliation of the high-earning German national later killed in Vermont.
Conversely, perceived threats to mission can cause violence. Vallejo rent problems and ensuing legal fallout could have jeopardized their work. Also present were fears around “trans genocide” and law enforcement; “Nazis” and “slavers,” one Zizian reportedly called cops, back at that 2019 protest. Accordingly, Zizians may have been primed to view that fateful Vermont traffic stop on Inauguration Day as mission endangerment.
Second, totalism is 24/7 environments that more easily permit non-standard behavior to grow.
That’s easily boatlife or the Vallejo colony or the cloistered North Carolina rental or the roving box trucks found in Maryland. Important is if and when people entered such totalism – for example, the Vallejo murder suspect is not yet really linked to that apart from a relatively isolated existence and an increasingly claustrophobic relationship, while the Vermont shootout participants seem relatively recent entrants.
Membership loss can also severely destabilize such groups, since leavers often form sensible counterweights to escalating behavior. A 2019 protest member now fearfully living underground likely represents this, as could another member’s mysterious ex-companion who resided with her for a while in Vermont. Membership in the Vallejo colony may have reached as high as twenty-two people, as well. So, how many people exited or dissociated from this fluid group, when, and why?
Particularly troubling is when totalism spawns customs that create deep-seated group vulnerability and group volatility – for example, Zizian rent non-payment and acquisition of weaponry.
Third, charismatic leadership is when a group-revered authority without formal office must continually ensure their primacy and so can foster unhealthy situations.
Advertising her rare “double good” brain, Ziz apparently leveraged that advantage to originate and encourage millennialism and totalism, This group-formation likely included increasing member dependency by reducing external relationships and fostering geographic mobility. Boundary-reordering sexuality evident with two associates may have also been present among group participants writ large: oblique references to beatings and a conscripted human sex-toy in a Bay Area “guilty house” may indicate influences from sadomasochism, while reports of lingerie and semi-public nudity in California and group hand-holding in the North Carolina woods may indicate multi-person relationships. Renaming also mattered – Ziz became Ziz, a model for others like murder suspect “Suri Dao” to re-forge identity.
A charismatic leader can also foster conflict. Allegedly, Ziz prized sociopathy and requested murder as a loyalty test. This could connect to the Vallejo attack; one charged Zizian had apparently harbored fantasies of knife-slaughter as revenge. This could also connect to the mysterious Pennsylvania killings; there, one affiliate’s parents were reportedly killed in her childhood bedroom, on her birthday. At a minimum, these reports suggest leader approval of threatening and illegal behavior.
Relatedly, one major early warning signal for later religious violence is when a leader begins disregarding the law. And, Zizians did abandon a tugboat and create an expensive environmental hazard in order to move into permit-circumventing trucks, while a staged death extricated Ziz from legal proceedings. Did all this foreshadow worse to come?
In any case, reality should always drive theory, not vice-versa. Any or all of these informed speculations could be proven wrong by new evidence. But, nevertheless, these important lines of analysis should be remembered, as more information becomes available.
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David Mihalyfy has a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of Chicago and has researched, written about, and taught on new religious movements (aka “cults”). His article on the use of U.S. racketeering laws to target new religious movements and “cults” is forthcoming in Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions.
Interested readers are strongly encouraged to read David G. Bromley’s “Deciphering the NRM-Violence Connection” and the closing reflections of James R. Lewis, in the edited volume Violence and New Religious Movements (Oxford University Press, 2011).
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