Behind the BastardsPart Four: The Zizian Murder Spree (or Exactly How Harry Potter Fanfic Killed A Border Patrol Agent)
Robert concludes the story of the Zizians with a spree of horrific violent crimes and deaths, culminating in a shoot out with the Border Patrol in Vermont of all places.
Also media We're back.
Oh my gosh, it's behind the Bastards, a podcast where Robert Evans ruined his life by reading too many blogs by internet poisoned nerd rationalist people. And I deeply regret everything I've done. How are you doing, David.
I'm good, I am. I am concerned for you. This is a difficult place for you to spend a week.
Yeah, I've had an This is an info hazard. They're not wrong to use that term, just not in the way they mean it.
Yeah, exactly, this whole.
Like I I've I'm half committed to like selling my house, putting my goats into like a big trailer and traveling around the country finding people who are going on online doom loops and like handing them a goat and just like play with this goat for twenty minutes, like it touch an animal, look into its weird little eyes.
Get off of your phone. That's Truely, you need to go go do.
Yeah, something has to be done. Wid Yeah again, folks, If you want to immunize your stuff to this, a great way to do it is to just like have friends who don't live in a boat with you, right.
Small boat?
Yeah, Yeah, let alone barely a boat.
And talk to like, you know, my neighbor's my neighbors, like a Mexican dude who loves gardening and has had a completely different life than me and knows nothing of the Internet. And I talk with them a couple of times a week, and it's always one of the best things for me, because I spend so much of the rest of my time with people like Garrison, who are all like the same things I've poisoned my brain with, Like, please go find people who don't know all of the weird Internet things you do and spend more time with them.
Aggressive on the people like Garrison.
Look, I love Garrison, but they also have started spending a lot of their time with people who aren't in the same weird Internet doom circles that we are, and it's been good for them. It's good for everyone. Truly, save yourself, Save yourself.
It doesn't have to be like this.
So when we left off, Ziz had kind of psychologically jail broken her friend into suicide and then created an info hazard named after her friend. Great Stuff, Healthy Community. Now a few things happen in quick succession. After this point. The rationalists start to blame passic suicide on Ziz. And this is really when a lot of folks in rationalist circles start breaking off and calling, like saying like, hey, this is what Ziz and Winner doing. They've made like a cult, right, And again I don't think they're really off base here, but also they tend to ignore all of the suicides in the rationalist community and d they are in a cult. Yeah, you know, it's more because cult is I think, like you get like they're in a there's a cultic milieu that rationalism forms, which is like the substrate, right, you know, if a cult is like a plant growing up from it, Like they're like, rationalism is this soil that is extremely optimized for growing cults. I think that might be closer, you know, although it's also one of those things where if you're just trying to explain the storm, you can just say it's a cult. You can say it's this weird Bay Area cult about science and AAI and shit like that's.
Probably close enough.
Yeah. A few things happen in quick succession after this point. One is that a story broke later in twenty eighteen, confirming Zizz's suspicion that the rationalism rationalist community was rife with abuse. Two people accused an influential rationalist who worked at Seafar, a guy named Brent Dill, of abuse while they were dating him. Both were nineteen and he was close to forty. The allations here remind me a little of the ones against Neil Gaman. You've got a very powerful man accused of coercing much younger women into extreme BDSM situations, implying them with drugs. Obviously, none of this is I don't think any of this has been litigated, so I will continue to refer to them as allegations. I don't know exactly what happened here, but this breaks right, and it's a big deal within the community. Rumors spread that c far had kind of tried to like hush the whole mess down in order to protect this guy. They conducted an internal investigation. We all know, like when the cops do an internal investigation, right, that's always reliable.
Trust us to figure it out.
We'll police ourselves, that's rational. This internal investigation exonerated Dil and included the line he is aligned with Seafar's goals and strategy and should be seen as an ally who embodies a rare kind of agency and a sense of heroic responsibility. There's those words again, agency, heroic responsibility. Dating a nineteen year old. When you're forty and giving your drugs good stuff, people respond with outrage. Se Far eventually eventually banned dil from future events.
They kind of.
Cave and Ziz would describe Dil later as a true negative. That's someone who both have haves of their brain. Are even yeah, double bad? Now at this point, she still thought yid Kowski and some other c FAR leaders might be double good, but she's really not sure about it. And she's especially not sure because none of them like embrace this terminology.
I was gonna say, at this point, has Yodkowski is he like? Is she still? Are they on good terms? Is he still acknowledging?
No, she's ever on close terms with Yidkowski.
She is.
She is speaking and communicating directly with Anna Salomon, who is like one of the Yadkowski's like top people quite a lot. I don't think she's super close to yed Kowski, Like, I'm sure they're at the same events and stuff several times, and she sees she definitely sees him speak. She definitely talks with him, but like, I don't think that they ever have been close, right.
Ok.
She does try to force a conversation with Anna Salomon outside of c FR HQ about this and other discovery she and Gwynn had made on their boats, and Ziz like writes in the blog post about it that like she felt it was going pretty good and Anna was listening to her. There are context clues that I don't think Ziz picks up on that, like, oh no, Anna immediately felt uncomfortable and like you were assaulting her, like coming up to her and just like kind of barraging her with all of this nonsense. And she did not want to have this conversation, and she kind of pretended that to be agree with you in order to in this because she's not sure if you're dangerous, which.
To be fair, you are. Yeah yeah, yeah yeah.
Soon later, at a CFAR board meeting, Anna recommended that Ziz be disinvited from joint Mary c Far events. And both of these are separate organizations, but basically like the membership overlaps or like a circle, right. Her reasoning for not wanting Zizz at events is that Ziz war quote black Clothes took super villains as role models and came up with dangerous plans.
Yeah, yeah, that's correct. I forgot that she was also wearing black roles.
She's also started dressing like a wizard. Yes, speaking of dangerous plans, the rationalist fleet or rat fleet was falling apart. By this point. Coast Guard in San Mateo Harbor District authorities had issued numerous warnings over the danger of this tug boat leaking poison into the bay. On several occasions, the calebar nearly hit other ships while drifting, like the anchor gets fucked up. I don't know that they they probably don't have to use it because like they're the navy guy he is, he still as gone, he is bounced.
He at least the judgment to cut his losses. So they don't even know how to work boats. They do Gwin is.
I think Gwin's actually reasonably competent with the right and she and and zis gets trained up. And these are both smart enough people that I suspect their competent with a sailboat, but like a twenty four foot sailboat and a ninety four foot tug boat very different. That's like I'm good with them driving my prius give me that fucking eighteen wheeler with two with two fucking storage containers on the back, shipping containers on the back. I could probably back that thing into a parking space, no problem. Like, they're just different, you know, damn authorities, right, And what's very funny these accounts of like boat cops getting on the Caleb and talking to Zizians. They're like, these people must be sovereign citizens, which is like a.
Totally different kind of thing. And to me, I'm like, you don't sound at.
All like But to them, it's like this mix because it's this mix of anarchist theory, right, because these people are anarchists, so they're telling these cops why they don't think the cops have any authority, but they're also like insulting them with these like logical arguments based on obscure rationalist doctrines.
And these people are heavy jargon, right, heavy.
These cops are just like, okay, so we got some sovereigns, sob sits here, all right, it's four now. Yeah, And again this is like the Bay Area. I think cops in the Barrier are a little especially since they're all white, more used to dealing with like people who are clearly like eccentric, right than maybe like if this had happened in another city. So nothing, there's not really a conflict yet. The cops are just being like, hey, guys, you're this But to be fair, the boat is leaking diesel into the bay. See it as a problem, right. That's In twenty nineteen, another scandal hits the rationalist community. The story broke that a former employee had blackmailed the company over a dispute and used donor funds to pay. This got stacked on top of the scandal that Dill had just created, and, as is in, many of her comrades saw it, the issue was not whether this employee had been mistreated, but that Miri hadn't made the proper, timeless decisions to ensure they couldn't be blackmailed. Per an article for the Rolling Stone quote and they're this not only represented bad decision theory, but called the organization's entire existence into question. In other words, it's not whatever happened with this employee, it's that you didn't make the timeless decisions to make it so that anyone would be scared to try to blackmail you, because they'd know that your response was, so would be so intense that proves you don't have what it takes to really save the world, because you're not ruthless enough to just jump to killing people like us.
You're not a psychopath.
You're not a psychopathy. They need psychopaths, which is good to save the world. We love psychopaths.
We're all we aspire to it.
And one of the big problems within the rationalist community is people talk about different mental health conditions as if they're like tools in a toolbox, Like you could go into a psychopathic mode and that's really good for accomplishing these things. So you could you can go eighth, you can make yourself autistic in this they talk this way, right, I'm not saying this is this is not how anything works. I'm not carrying autism and psychopathy. I'm just saying this is how they talk, right.
Yeah, they then save the world.
Right, No, that's that's not None of this is accurate to like the way vias are, Like, you can't just be like.
I'm gonna turn off by autism today, I got some shit.
No, that's not how we're And some of this is downstream from how I think online discourse has damaged the discussion of mental health because people sometimes do talk about it like pokemon, you know, very much like I think there's some issues there that that do anyway, and and a lot of this is yeah, it's just this soup is not exclusive to Ziz. So Ziz is banned now from Marie c Far events, and her whole crew is increasingly radicalized against the organizations they have. Also, you know, it's both where like c Far has good reason to not want Zizz around, but also all of Zizz most of Zizz's complaints about rationalists like fr and Mary are very valid, right, Like, h yeah, you're both right about each other. It's like how Elon Musk and Peter Teal would ship talk each other. It's like that you both do have each other's number.
Yes, everybody's got a point. Everybody's got a point.
I just kind of wish you would all go away. In November of twenty nineteen, SEEFAR held their annual alumni reunion out in a chunk of the California Redwoods down the stream from the street from the Bohemian Grove. The road that passes is literally the Bohemian Highway, right. This is like for an idea of how much money there is in mainstream rationalism. Right, they are having their big party next to Bohemian Grove. Ziz had sent an open letter and like a letteredy at Kowski a few days earlier or urging members of both organizations to quit in the interest of saving the world, basically saying these groups are so compromised they can no longer like add effectively to the things we're trying to do to our important work.
So you should all leave.
And kind of the subtext is and do what me and Gwynn are doing, you know, start ale. So on the day of this event, Zizz, Gwinn and two others in their circle drive up to this like this location out in the woods with a box truck, a shuttle bus, and a Prius and they block the entrances and exits of the venue with their vehicles and they jump out wearing black robes, guy fox masks and black gloves. Now, this is not a violent protest I have there's no evidence that they intended violence. They had walkie talkies, one person had a can of mace, but like you know, people carry mace, that's not suspicious. And all they're trying to do is distribute flyers lying out their case against CFAR and Miri. But they have blocked the entrances and exits and they talk like sith wizards, right so everything they say sounds cryptic and kind of threatening, and they're wearing guy fox masks. The police get called immediately, and as best as I can tell, it does. Maybe I'm wrong. It seems like the Seafar MIRI people like new because there's like send out an email saying hey, maybe don't come, or like if you do, just like being note that these weird people are here. But the venue owner, like the people running the venue, call the cops, is what it seems like happens. There are different allegations here. I don't precisely know, but for whatever the case, two false pieces of information are given to the cops when they get called. They are told the cops are told one person has a gun and another person has an axe. Right, So, and I think it's people who worked at the venue or make these allegations. It was definitely an employee at the venue who were alleged that he saw an axe a county sheriff who responded, or so it was a person at the venue who picked up an axe and someone saw them and reported that to the police too, right, because he was scared of these people. A county sheriff sheriff's deputy responds and immediately calls for major backup because he's told someone has a gun, and you know, as a cop with just kind of like a pop culture knowledge, you hear like a bunch of people in robes and masks with a gun outside of this big event where like there's children doing a ropes course next door. Like, his thought is, there's a mass shooting brewing, right, some people are going to do something fucked up, right, So he calls for a massive like swat response basically, you know, compared to the actual danger these people present, which is right now nil. The author that wired piece spoke to the sheriff's deputy who responded initially a guy named Parks, And this is that account. Quote in Parks's account which he related to me. In the fall of twenty twenty three, at a local Starbucks, the protesters were speaking in unison, just stuff I didn't really understand, but it was somewhat rehearsed.
He said. The group had printed.
Flyers outlining their complaints against Sefar and Miri. They alleged that Mary had paid out blackmail using donor funds to quash sexual misconduct allegations, and that Sefar's leader discriminates against trans women. Other allegations were more esoteric. Sephar does not appreciably develop novel rationality mental tech. The path to avoiding extinction, they wrote, involved escaping containment by society through mental autonomy and inter hemispheric game theory. So sore, some random sheriff's deputy is not going to understand what's going on here?
What the fuck are you talking about?
He and his men default to the thing that cops do when they get confused, which is they get violent. Right quote. He and Rix ordered the protesters to get on the ground. As they did, each one called out, demanding a same gender pack down, like one might request at an airport. All three were trans women, but Park says he couldn't discern their genders because of the robes and masks. Regardless that we're not going to get that luxury at that time, he told me, it's like, well, we don't know if you're a boy or a girl, and we got a handcuff you. Parks's deputy subdued the three and prone positions what Parks calls a high risk style takedown, requiring more force than a normal handcuffing style. So there's a several articles I've read will to refer to a discrepancy between how the Zizians and the cops describe these events. I've read both accounts. I really don't see a gap. What I see is the cops describing their violent into humanizing behavior as like this is the normal way to respond, and this describing it as to humanizing and traumatizing. The only question here is, like the moral quality you give to the cops tackling a bunch of people basically who don't have weapons because they got a phone call, right, which, like, if you're a cop, you're like, well, this is the only way to act. And if you're I think most people like you're like, well, probably could have just talked this situation down. I don't see where in arrested, like yeah. Gwinn later writes this about the experience. When we arrived, a staff member called the police and falsely told them we had a gun and that we were going into buildings, and that that we were too afraid to get off the phone, they were too afraid to get off the phone. Later report said there was an active shooter with a duffel bag. None of us had a duffel bag. Police arrived with their guns out and we were immediately arrested within about ten minutes of us arriving, after which we were sexually assaulted. In my case, I was groped and I had my pants pulled down and then sat on by an officer in a mounting position. They are mocked and derided like as their naked, cops are making comments about their bodies. It's like a really ugly situation, right, And I have no trouble believe that this is true because it comports with dozens of arrest stories I've heard in multiple states.
Yeah, it's part for the course.
Yeah, And it's also the fact that they are specifically the police are making fun of them for being trans is very much in line with what statistics say about trans people and police violence. A twenty thirteen report from the Anti Violence Project found that trans individuals are seven times likely or to experience violence while in interacting with the police than cisgender people. So I have no trouble believing Gwin's accounts.
Here, even though.
Again I treat her with proper scrutiny in most areas, this all seems like what cops do.
Now.
The other big discrepancy where the Zizzians are I think a little off base, is that they claim they are immediately dead named and misgendered by the newspapers covering their initial arrests. And they are dead named. But the newspapers don't really have an option here.
Right, right. They don't talk.
When they're arrested, right, which is a very normal thing for like a protest. They say absolutely nothing and they have no idea on them. So the police fingerprint them, which brings up their legal names, and that's what's given to the newspapers. So like the initial news articles aren't trying. This is just the only name available. But it escalates this situation, right, And it is worth noting that a number of outlets do continue to dead name them up to the present, but that initial reporting it's like, well that's just the only information that was available. But all of this is going to like there, this is this court case is going to where on they get charged initially with felonies. Baylis said it like fifty grand for Ziz and Gwynn. This is eventually reduced and they're reduced to misdemeanors, but it takes like four days for them to make bail. And there they will be finding because they're going to counter sue over these arrests, and both the trauma of the arrests, their anger over them, and the fact that there's the stress of this year's long court battle is going to have this extremely deleterious effect on everybody's mental health when they're already not doing well. Right, Arreth, that's great stuff. Yeah, around this time the rash the Zizzi ends move they stop doing their fleet thing right, they move out of the boats, and they kind of end things by leaving their tugboat adrift because there's nothing to do with a ninety four foot tug boat.
Nobody can handle a tug.
Boat, right, Like, it's too big to do much with and they they probably could have figured something out, but they decide the opportunity cost of figuring out how to dispose of this boat is it will it will distract from their important work, so it's okay for it to sink and cause like a modest environmental crisis by leaking diesel into the Bay. Basically, Ziz decides that the value of all the sea life that it kills is less than the value of them continuing their work, which at this point, if you're keeping track, is trying to figure out how to live out of box trucks. So that's what they're doing now. And this is where a guy named Curtis.
The living space. They've got a worse living space. They made it worse than boats.
Oh boy, I can't tell you how much of this story is just the result of Bay Area rent prices being unreasonable. Yeah, yeah, it's a really just like Superman one. So enter Curtis Linde Lynd is a guy. He was like a he made his career doing shipping. He lived in a boat in and around where Ziz and her friends were living at sea, and they met each other through that. He like sells them an anchor. But he's also like push an eighty and so he's got he's interested in like getting out of the boat life because it sucks. And he's got a plot of land that he he's he's got a house on and he's got extra space that he's interested in renting out. There's not like most there's not like full houses, but there's like some shipping containers and I think like some RVY go busted RV or whatever, and he's got like some power and water hookups. Here's how his son Carl described what his father wanted to do with this place. He just wanted this as a place to let artists or woodworkers, electricians to be able to come and live in a little trailer and have a container where they could work and put their two us and have a safe place. So again, depending on how you're looking, he's either trying to like have a cheap space where like, you know, artists and the like can afford to like survive and have little working spaces, or he's trying to be like a punk slum lord. Right, And I mean the line is thin, right, The line is thin.
The line is so thin.
Speaking of a thin line, the sponsors of this podcast are the thin line keeping society safe from me not having enough money to live in a boat, you know, or this is why I have enough money to live in a boat where I would go crazy, or a box truck or a.
Box truck to live in a box truck. The joy.
Yeah, we're we're talking about how good it is to live in a box truck.
Good stuff.
Is at this point, I think at any given time, there's between like six and nine people, you.
Know, okay, okay, so very small.
Very very small somewhere in that neighborhood. It fluctuates, and there's also there's a bunch of people who are like you could call them Zizians. They're in and out. They'll visit sometimes or they even live in other states, but they're always in contact with multiple members of the group through the Internet. This is a very like geographically decentralized group, although there is that like core inner circle who are all together on this land and for a while things are okay there the Zizians pay Rent ziz continues to write blog posts and run her followers through Uni hemispheric sleep sessions to upgrade them. And you know, it's also important for me to know they don't ever call themselves Zizians. That name first comes up around this period of time, right after that disastrous protest, when an anonymous rationalist publishes a paper called like Zizians dot info that first identifies them as a cult and describes like their union hemispheric sleep tactics, and it's it's written because this person is in the community and wants to stop other people from falling in with Ziz. And I think they have good intentions here. They like see the danger they also one of the issues with the document is I don't think they see some of the danger of other rationalists stuff. Yeah right, This is like why I say that it's like a cultic substrate rather than being a pure cult, because there are people in it who can recognize stuff like this and try to, you know, provide a degree of like accountability. Just like there are people who will like report on and they help. They hold seafar S feet to the fire when people get accused of abuse. So the document alleges that Ziz had started telling her followers she was the basically she's the only double good or intrinsically good person there and one of the only intrinsically good people on the planet.
Uhs.
Sessions tended to reveal that other people in the community are just single good and per Ziz's theories about the hero contract, they can only accomplish maximum good by feeding their energy and resources to the heroes.
Ziz.
Here's an example of the kind of things she sent people she saw as single good saying your single good is saying help, I have a yerk in my head. Did you ever read Anamorphs as a book?
David? Wow?
Yes, Oh that's a reference to is those worms that control your brain? And that's not right? Yeah, yeah, that's yes. I know, deep cut, deep cut?
Whoa not un luck to part of my brain that I have not used for right? Right?
A bunch of people are now like having like the severance moment, but like remembering every Scholastic book fair they ever went to is again.
Man oh man, all they gotta do is hit goosebumps to me.
I know, I know only so saying your single good is saying help, I have a yerk in my head. That's a merror image of me. I need you to surgically destroy it, even if I'm then crippled for life or might die in the process. Then kill me if I ever do one evil act for the rest of my life. That's better than being a slave again. That's her role is surgically destroying the evil brains of her half brains of her followers, and then she has to be willing to murder them if they ever do anything bad, because if they ever do anything bad, then it means that the evil side could take over and it could do like Megabad right, doom the world. She and she takes this on herself, yes, and also I mean she's gonna have other people do the killing basically, but like, yes, this is what she's saying is the stakes, and this is how she sees her role within the community. Right, And I think at this point that's pretty could leader, that's pretty good. I think we're probably crossed that KT boundary, right. Yeah. Yeah, saying you got to murder people because they're the devil the yurk inside their brain. Yeah, it might be a little bit of cult weather feels like a cult outside. So some Zizians, not implicated in any crimes, have attacked this piece, this Zizians dot info things being inaccurate and basically a rationalist hit job. And again there's there's some reason for suspicion here, but most of the claims made in it I have backed up through reading the individual sources. One of the issues of that a lot of people writing about this will credit ziz with all of the una hemispheric stuff, and that's mostly Gwynn. So there's a point worth making around this time, a woman named Jamie Zashko started living nearby with her girlfriend, Alice Monday. Both are rationalists that are interested in Zizz's ideas. Alice and Ziz have been in contact for years, and in fact, Alice, because she's an older and more established rationalist, when Ziz was kind of new to the community, had since Ziz an article on the Gervais principle for the first time, which had spawned her ideas about needing to jail break people into psychopathy, and at varying times, Ziz would claim Alice as a mentor. There are some I don't like, very vague accounts that Alice has done some problematic, abusive stuff in the community. I don't know trree any of that is, but this is what people talk about, and I think Ziz may have had a break with her over some sort of disagreement, because it looks it seems like from what I can tell, Jamie, who is dating Alice at the time, is in direct contact with Ziz and interested in her, but also is not communicating with Ziz under her real name. She is making a bunch of sock puppet accounts on her blog, and she is specifically commenting and trying to engage Zizz in different conversations, pretending to be multiple different people to quote unquote sabotage the whole. She believed another woman in the community, Emma Borhanian, had on Zizz and Borhanian is that former Google engineer. Okay, so this is you know, this is part of the messy thing, is that like these people are all influencing each other and trying to like their kind of go to is like mind games to fuck with each other's heads.
Yeah, not a lot of straight conversation. Huh.
No, Now, Imma Borhanian, who Jamie alleges his life girlfriend. No, Jamie's dating Alice Monday. I'm sorry, but Borhanian is this former Google engineer who has been with Ziz since the Rationalist Fleet days. And Jamie thinks that she's controlling Ziz and she has like this bad influence that's leading them in.
A bad direction.
And I've read Borhanian's blog too, because of course I had to. Emma is she was as long winded as Ziz, fewer pop culture references. She wrote a lot about narcissism, but unlike most of these people, she tended to use a or She's like, I don't know, I don't understand the kind of points she's trying to make about narcissist, but she's very interested in the idea of like how narcissists work. Jamie didn't like Emma, and she claims that because Emma and another member of the community had started shit talking Alice to Ziz and convinced her that Alice was double evil. So Jamie creates all these sock puppet accounts to argue with Ziz with the goal of fucking with her head and making her distrust Emma quote, I adopted a variety of different personas, many of whom claim to have beliefs I've never held her endorsed for the sake of determining how Ziz would react to these characters.
So this isn't what and then what?
Yes, exactly, There's never seems to be a plan behind fuck with each other's mental health constantly. It's like this is because they're always there's all these overlapping fields of influence between all of these mostly women, and everyone is fucking with each other's heads deliberately and also constantly trying to hack and upgrade each other. Is basically scientology in the form of a codependent friend group, right, Like, that's what that's what's happening. Wow, this is so bad for everybody.
It's oh man, it just they just dig deeper and deeper and deeper.
Yes, yes, that's what happens. Again if you don't this is the you know, the touch grasp has been turned online. People have some, as you said, some problematic ways of discussing it. But this is the importance of like turning out from your weird little subculture right now and again, and.
Like, yes, definitely, because the world. How often are they interacting with all the world, like in general.
Very rarely, And most of the people they do interact with are like these other people who are kind of on the edge of dropping out of society, living on this guy's property, this eighty year old dance and extracts.
Who. Yeah.
So, while Jamie and Zizz are fighting online, COVID hit and with it comes that eviction moratory in the state of California. So Ziz and her friends they stop paying rent to to lend, either because they're broke or just because they don't need to anymore. And more than a year goes by. In April of twenty twenty one, Ziz posts this to her blog. Housing in places like the Bay Area is a hierarchy of rent seekers and the rent seekers above landlords rule by rules, surplus, selective enforcement, fear, uncertainty, and doubt corruption. It's all a complex and it makes landlords incredibly vulnerable to blackmail from someone who can do even a little bit of investigative work. It's bad praxice to pay them rent.
So again, she get it. I get it.
But this is also going to lead you to a bad place. This is where we get to divergent stories. Curtis Lynde, the landlord's story is that he was very supportive of these people and of trans people in general, taking one Zizi and out to shop for her first bra. His friends and family say he was a decent guy. And I actually, when I started talking about writing these episodes on Blue Sky, someone chimed in to say they had known him too, and that he was a nice person. I don't know to ziz He was a landlord, and there are claims from the Zizians that he was verbally abusive and transphobic. By the end of twenty twenty one, after a year and a half of unpaid rent, Lynde had started working on the process of having police vic them. He and other residents claimed that the Zizzians had become aggressive, acting as if the property was theirs, now threatening other people, basically squatting on it, and like being violent at times, including like throwing rocks at Lynn's cabin and brandishing knives at other people.
Sore knives.
Yeah, yeah, they have taken to like threateningly playing with knives while talking about how they will not leave the property or pay rent, And you get the feeling like I'm not again, I'm not against the idea that this again ambitious slumlord may have done some problematic things, but it sounds like the Zizzi ends are being pretty deeply abusive to everyone around them right right, which is also they believe is praxis. Is like these other people who are not who don't who aren't double good, and who aren't aware of the great work they're not working towards the cause they're a causal is the term they're use. Their lives don't really have value if you're not working for the cost. Ziz earlier will decide.
It's not like they're doing outreach, right, It's not like they're trying to convert their neighbors or anything like that.
They're trying to convert rationalists, but they don't care about these weirdos living on the property with them, right right, and again, remember, like Ziz had earlier decided that it would be worth four human lives for her to like get a she would kill four people to get a shower before work, right, basically.
With the yeah, yeah, yeah, so that these people don't have a.
Lot of value for other people right now. The court case over the protest arrests dragged on, and in November of twenty twenty one, Ziz and her friends who'd been arrested filed a countersuit against Sonoma County, as well as several individuals associated with Sea Far and the venue. By the time twenty twenty two starts, the pressure is on for Ziz and the people living with her to figure out what they're going to do next. They do, at some point work at a deal with Curtis Will, who give them a little more time to fix their RV if they promise to bounce as soon as possible. Ziz is no longer actively adding to her blog, but she's still responding to comments and communicating with other sympathetic rationalists Regularly. She becomes much more focused in her writing in this period on vengeance, violence, and death, as do others in her community. Per Wired quote, Lesta and others wrote, a vengeance against the timeless decisions of others. If you truly irreconcilably disagree with someone's creative choice i e. Their choice extending arbitrarily, fallen far into the past and future, ultimately your only recourse is to kill them one, Lesoda ally wrote in a long blog post citing Zizz's philosophies. In the comments, Losoda wrote, I am so fucking glad to finally have an equal treat stuff. In spring of twenty twenty one, one of the Rationalist Fleet veterans close to Zizz, Jay Winterford, who went by the name Fluttershy, killed themselves. They had Winterford had written about seeing Zizz's techniques as a way to deal with his childhood trauma, and Lesoda wrote on her blog about her repeated attempts to fix and upgrade him. Now, Ziz wrote about this person and calls him a death knight, And as best as I can tell, a death knight is a Zizi in term for someone who snaps and murders a bunch of people. She calls Hitler a death knight, but she also uses the term for mass shooters, and she claims Winterford quote tried very hard to convince me and then us to join them in service of the Goddess of rape and death. Straight up declared intentions to kill us, did a bunch of horrible shit, like said they were going to do even more horrible shit. I spent about seven months, most of every day in a desperate and mutual mental battle trying to get in their head somehow how understand this death drive thing I couldn't simulate in my own mind that made no sense, and out predict them like all their lives in the world depended on it. And basically this person's talking about doing like a mass shooting or some other terrorist attack against the rationalist community in Ziz's name, and Ziz claims that she's like spent seven months trying to stop them from doing this, and then finally they just kill themselves rather than killing anybody else. And again they framed Ziz froms is like their heroic battle to stop this person from murdering other people and damaging the cause.
But like, I don't know.
Maybe maybe like this person needed professional help when they started talking about wanting to do a mass killing when it's running to murder a bunch of people, maybe they needed help, like not your help.
I don't know if anyone needs Zizz's help. No, No, Ziz does not even needs help. No.
And she weaves this person's death into this very this messianic hero's journey for herself posting this in the summer of time. Two since posting this, I have been tortured, survived seven assassination attempts, three more attempts to do me permanent bodily harm. Four people individually decided they had the sole rights to be my death love arch nemesis, as if they'd be alone. Accidentally exposed myself to a one hundredth of my hell, and one committed suicide. Others utterly mentally cracked. No one knows what she's talking about with these assassination attempts. There all just someone may have given her a mean look at a grocery store, and she's just right, like that's the mind STAPs out right.
Yeah.
Rationalists who had declared as a cult leader considered all of this further evidence that she was dangerous again. Rationalists also convinced people to kill themselves be alogic traps, but like, they're not wrong to point this out now. I brought up Jamie's Ashco and Alice Monday a little earlier. They had moved out of the Bay in late twenty twenty and headed to Vermont, where Jamie, who had some family money, bought land in a gun. In February of twenty two, she made a blog post with the subtitle I trolled Ziz and now she wants to murder me. In it, she claimed, she talks about how, like, yeah, she made all these fake accounts, and in late twenty twenty one, she and Ziz finally start talking under their real names, and Ziz talks about these trolling messages from the fake accounts Jamie had made, and like said that they really fucked with her head. And so Jamie, who's starting to view Zizz as a friend, comes out and admits what she did, and Ziz responds by saying, the only way you can make this right is to murder your like girlfriend ex girlfriends. A little unclear, Alice Monday, my old mentor like, you have to kill this person for me in order to make this right. Here's what Jamie writes. During her last phone call, Ziz informed me that the only way I could gain her trust and make up for what I did was to murder Alice, preferably sometime soon. Ziz helpfully suggested I use a gun with a potato as a makeshift suppressor, and that I might destroy the body with lie, and then told me that after I should video call Ziz and show her the body before I destroy it so she could get proof bositive that I'd really done it, and if I didn't do it, Ziz plan to drive across the entire entire continental United States to murder me.
Great, the di is cast, the die is cast. Now shit.
Jamie says that Ziz wants Alice dead because she thinks Alice is a mentor and she's got this whole Sith thing going on, so she's like, guess with the sith always kill their mentor. So I have to kill Alice or I can't get powerful enough to.
Save the world. Great, it's crazy.
I love philosophy, A story that has escalated so crazy it is wild to hear it, where it's like, okay, this is where, this is where it starts the wheel start to really this is where that border patrol officer's death becomes inevitable.
Yeah, because now you feel like us backed herself into a corner where someone's going to die. Yes, someone like talking about it. You're threatening it, seriously, you're telling it like, at this point, right is someone this is going to happen?
At this point if outside power comes in to disrupt these thought chains and decision chains, someone is going to die. And no one does come in, right, and several people die?
I mean, how could it someone rationally even? How could I? How could right? How could how could someone even get there? How do you think about.
You think about something like fifty one, fifty this this fluttershy person, right or fifty or fifties?
Is?
Does that make it better? Probably not?
Probably just makes them even more paranoid and angry and convince to do violence.
You're like eleventh assassination.
I don't know how you fix this at this point.
No, No, it's it's it might be is I think it might be too far gone?
Yeah, there's there's I'm sure there's some possible way that this could have been fixed, but it's not clear to.
Me, and who who would be the person, doesn't right, who would be the person to do it? Maybe get George Lucas in there. George yes, Oh my god, that's.
So so Ladies have taken your movies way too seriously. We need George sound and talk them out of committing murders.
This is gonna sound crazy. There's a bunch of people in a box truck wanting to kill in your name. Get Ricky Gervase.
Get Ricky Gervas and George Lucas on a fun chopper, get him in here on a black They gotta talk these people down.
Oh shit, fuck, oh man, it's so funny.
Just a week later, George Lucas is completely in the cult. He's wearing all black.
He's living no no, no, no. So he's writing. It's not even fan fiction. He's writing canonical.
Stars, writing canonical star wars. Ponder that and ponder these ads, my friends. We'll be back with more. So we're back now. Jamie is one of the few people who is like as good at manipulating zizz as zizz at other people in this community. And after zis is like, hey, look very high mana this is like, look, I'll have to kill you if you don't kill Alice, you know, and you know I'll do it because it's a timeless decision. Jamie counters in a very effective way by saying, like making a blog post saying Ziz said all this, I am not suicidal. If I die, it's her, and also letting Ziz know quote I have friends who will avenge me. Murdering Alice or me now is tantamount to committing suicide by proxy. So they have this like checkmate counter checkmate, chess match in blog posts that gets interrupted in March when Gwynn fakes her death, probably to escape the litigation, they're all.
Yeah, Gwinn, get out of here.
Gwinn does make the good decision because sometime after faking her death she bounces from this whole community. She does get out of there.
Okay, there was just.
No way this story was going to end without a deaf somebody faking their own death.
Oh yeah, Sophie, so excited for you. This story doesn't even end. This story like Late middles with two death fakings, because in September of twenty twenty two, Zizz fakes her death in a boding accident on the Black Signet. Emma calls the cops says that she fell overboard the Coastguard. They work so hard to try to find her and save her that they get fatigue waivers so they can work all night. But they find nothing because she's not dead.
On the block signal.
I don't know where she actually was, but she doesn't. She's not dead. Zizz is declared dead and her of her family prints an obituary. Like Gwinn's death, faking is a little less successful. Like their lawyer in court after they come in with legal evidence that Zizz is dead. Gwin's law here is like, I really don't think they're dead. I think they're faking it.
What an a lawyer.
These lawyers don't like they don't like their lawyers.
Well, now that's where they fucked up. You can't your lawyer has to ride for you.
Yeah that look l Ron, who knows what they're talking about? These people at this this is what's going on. The sanest decision one of them is made is to fake their death.
More lawyers in this story, maybe maybe a couple of lawyers. A digital could have fixed this.
So I don't know precisely the lawyer money. No, these are these are public defenders. So Gwynn clearly fakes their death just to clear themselves of their legal problems. I think does it for that, But also she and her closest friends are now plotting the murder of Curtis Lynde.
We don't really, Yeah, that's the la now.
They want to kill Curtis, Yes, yes, they want to kill Curtism.
They want to stay on the land? Is that the kind of the thought.
I think they want to stay on the land. I think they also their escalation logic is that if he is having the Cops evict us, that is a situation that could end in our deaths. So he's trying to murder us, so the logical thing for us to do is to kill him now to protect us both from him and from other people, and.
Then has sex with his body. I don't.
I don't think they're going to do that, but they are at least aware of that as an option.
So the team.
Yeah, So the reality of what happens next is a little bit in dispute. But what no one disagrees is that on November thirteenth, twenty twenty two, this is like right after midnight, Curtis Lynde is stabbed repeatedly and impaled with a samurai sword. He also, during the same altercation, shoots and kills Imma Borhanian and wounds another member of the group. And one Tumblr post, a Zizion with the username A Flower by another Name gives what I think is probably a representative example of how the Zizians want to depict what happened next. What happened here kurt quote, Curtis Lynde and his ex CIA best friend Patrick McMillan spent months threatening Emma and her friends. Unlike what the papers claim, Emma and her friends weren't squatters. They were tenants who were struggling to find jobs or a place that would least to them after Mierkan Seafar called a swat team on them in twenty nineteen.
Now, I don't know.
If McMillan was in the CIA, and I don't know if he and Curtis threatened these ladies, but I will say the preponderance of evidence suggests they were in fact squatting. This account blames them on not being able to make rent on their legal bills, but by this point they had been squatting for like two years in change. I don't know if Lynde was transphobic, I don't know.
You know.
They say he alienated them from their neighbors by telling them that they were in a cult. I don't know if that's true, or if they alienated their neighbors by being very off putting and aggressive. This Zizian account claims that other individuals started threatening to call the cops on the Zizians and thus quote it was an unending nightmare for them of terrifying, insane threats from every corner. Now, the author of this document says they weren't there themselves, but believes heard, like other members of the community, explain what happened, and they said that lynd made specific threats in the fall of twenty twenty two, which culminated in one member of the group buying a bulletproof veest and wearing it at all times. I don't trust this account, and among other things, it lies about the nature of their living situation. It lies by saying Emma had filed paperwork to take Curtis to court over the eviction. There was no court thing filed here. There's a very good comprehensive source on this by an individual who goes by Ken the Cowboy on Twitter, and he notes in this timeline of events, the last sentence is not true. There's no record of any lawsuit being filed in twenty twenty two with any of the Zizians as plaintiffs and with Curtis Lynde as a defendant. So they claim basically, this guy was aggressive and threatening us, and one day he attacked us, right quote. That morning he decided to stop them. He walked all the way from his trailer to their trucks while they were packing their things and opened fire. Lynde shot Emma point blank through her heart and lung. She collapsed to the ground and immediately her lung began filling with her heart's blood. She died within twenty seconds, violently coughing up chunks of her lung tissue and a feutal attempt to clear her airways. Soomny was shot six times rushing in a fetal attempt to save Emma's life. The vest saved her life, but she was still hit through the neck and stomach. She acted only in self defense. That's the Zizzian claim here, that he just walks in as they're getting ready to leave and starts shooting them, right, Yeah, that's stupid, now, that's their claim. This leaves out a very important fact, which is that Curtis Linde is stabbed fifty times.
Fifteen.
Yes, Lind's account is somewhat less sympathetic to these people. He claims that after getting successfully getting a judgment against them in a court, he moved to a vict and the sheriff agreed to do an eviction on November fifteenth. And this is what Lynn later said, quote so they're worried about where they were going to go and what they were going to do. And they had a meeting with me, and the meeting was about them staying for another two months and not paying I said, no, I can't do that. So one of them took out a knife. It was a folding knife. It was a fairly large folding knife. It started patting the blade in their hand like this and looking at me and smiling. And they don't specify who this was. I don't know, like you know entirely, like which person he's accusing here or whatever. But he says this is how his account of like the attack itself is that after this, after he gets threatened with a knife, he goes in he buys a pistol and he gets a license to carry, and then right before the sheriffs are supposed to show up to evict them, one of the Zizians named Surrey shows up and she tries to get him to like come help turn the water off and her trailer. So he goes over to there to turn the water off, and as he bins over to do that, he gets hit with something that shatters the right side of his skull quote And the next thing I remember is standing up with three of them right next to me, you know, or around me, And I was bleeding from numerous puncture wounds, I think around fifty. I couldn't see out of my right eye, had been punctured three times. The back of my neck had some severe cuts, like someone was trying to cut my head off. You know, I had no idea what was happening or when this had all happened. I was completely gone while this was happening. And how I stood back up or got to that spot, I have no idea. But I looked at all the blood coming out of me. Oh, and I had a sword, a long sword all the way through my chest right next to my heart, sticking out the other end, which I went to the hospital with. I was afraid to take it out, but anyway, at that time, I pulled out my pistol and started shooting. I killed the person to my right. And I gotta say, based on the physical evidence, I think Lind's account is the real one of what happens here. I think they ambush him and stab him repeatedly, and he shoots and kills one in self defense. Obvious, Like again, he has a samurai sword entirely through his bed.
We acknowledge that this meant took fifty to the chest eighty. Yeah, it don't make him like that anymore.
And it's one of those one of the doubting claims by the Zizians is that, like, he couldn't have survived being stabbed this many times. People survive getting stabbed a crazy amount of times all the time. It's all like, if you read about enough stabbing accounts, you will read about people who die because they get stabbed once, and you will read about people who live through getting like seventy stab wounds. It's nuts. Stabbings are very hard to predict.
Tricky, tricky, yeah, And also it's also so worrisome because now they've done it, right, They've crossed that line.
They've crossed that line, and one of them has died.
Right, Yes, some steaks are as high as they had always thought that they were.
And when the box trucks are cleaned out after they get arrested, the ones who had carried out the attack, because Ziz is on the property and I think Winn is too still at this point, but Ziz does not participate in the attack, and like cops recognize Ziz and know that she's faking her death and don't arrest her, which is one of like the weird things.
Like they're familiar enough to know that.
Yeah, I think this is that because like they've been called before. Yeah, I think that they're aware of who she is, but just don't do even after this mass stabbing shooting. Like again, the cops just don't do their jobs. Also, as part of this story, you know, it's a It's also worth noting that when they this after this arrest, when like their box trucktsure being cleaned out, they find tubes of containers of lie, which you know, Ziz had talked to Jamie about dissolving bodies and lie. That's probably what the plan was with Curtis. My guess is that's certainly what Curtis gets convinced of. Now my thinking and I can't this is not proven. I'm sure courts will try, will see how well they are able to do this in a court. My suspicion is that Ziz orchestrated this attack and convinced her friends to do it, or convinced them to convince themselves to do it, and justified it using the same escalatory logic that they used on everything else. On her blog, when discussing theoretical acts of deadly violence, Ziz referred to what she called Quirrel's algorithm from the Harry Potter Rationalist fan pick that these people all love, and she quoted this line from the book describing the mental state she believed was necessary to survive a life threatening situation, intent to kill, think purely of killing, grasp at any means to do so, censors off, do not flinch, kill.
Again. This Harry Potter book really now goes all the way back to that.
Yeah, be careful what you write, authors, You might get someone st impaled by a samurai. Sort of course they had, of course they had a samurai sword. I'm sure they bought them all from the Budkay catalog.
So Ziz had.
Also written in late twenty twenty one in a comment on her blog, I get so many people lining up to commit suicide by Ziz and then she hyperlinks to the wiki for suicide by cop and her meaning is that anyone acting in a way to like harm her or her goals is killing themselves because she has to kill them now.
Right.
And there's a good medium post by someone named Sepha Shapiro that traces around how this time, how around this time, this is online writing becomes increasingly obsessed with the idea of using deadly violence to make oneself less vulnerable, right, that you again, you have to always be ready to kill in order to protect yourself. So the police arrest two of her friends, Somny and Surrey Dow, who are the two surviving Zizians who'd taken part in the attack, and they take them to jail. Per a California law, these two are not just charged with trying to kill Curtis, but with the murder of their friend Emma. It's like if you know three people rob a liquor store and one of them kills someone, the other two will get charged with murder because someone died in the commission of a crime that they were involved in. Right, it's California state law. A lot of people get life sentences as a result of this, usually not in this exact scenario, but non.
Usually not.
Soomny was placed in a men's jail and complained dow after being a sign into a women's jail, demanded a men's jail. I think this is because they were trying to like make a case that they weren't in their right mind. But it's kind of unclear to me exactly why this happens. There's a lot in terms of these two and their interactions with the court system that I'm not gonna get into, right because it's it's just we simply can't go down all of those rabbit holes. But you should know that, like the like this is a factor, and everyone's thinking is, like their two friends are in prison, they're constantly sending these letters to the judge. They're like making these like weird rationalist arguments in their court cases, and like that's all going down while Zizz and the remainder of her inner circle kind of go on the run, right, because you know, now they've been involved in a murder, right, Gwynn seems to go go fully into hiding at this time. I don't know if that's because of the murder or just because she had finally had enough of Ziz and all of her talk about killing, but in any case, she goes to ground around this point. Now, well, all this is going on, I hate to keep bringing in new people, but there's a bunch of them. Jamie up in Vermont, I don't think is continuing to seeing Alice Monday anymore. Alice seems to have also made the wise decision to fucking bounce and go to ground. Jamie is living with another Ziz follower named Daniel Blank up in Vermont at this point, and Jamie has gotten increasingly into Ziz's ideas. Blank is one of the people we know. He delivers several documents to the court Onsomny's behalf during this whole, like after they go get charged with murder, and he is like a guy who has like a job and you know, stuff going on in his life. And then like a month after this shooting stabbing, he drops out of society, cuts ties with his family, and quits his job to go live with Jamie and like, it's kind of a little unclear of exactly what's happening, but my belief is basically Jamie and the people who are around her who are up in Vermont, who are Zizians, are being before Ziz gets They're told to prepare for Ziz because they want to get access to money and a private property, a compound right where they can both not be on the run, have a living space and continue to work on their ideas. That is what I think is happening. And Daniel blank is someone who has been following Ziz online, gets convinced to drop out of his life, cut ties with everybody move in with this person Jamie, and it looks like they're cient kind of working to like ready a situation for Ziz and the Zizzians in Vermont. And again there's a lot of this that has not been litigated yet, but what we know is that on December thirty first, twenty twenty two, Jamie's Ashco's parents, who are seventy two and sixty nine respectively, are murdered in their home.
Oh my god, I do on the property in Vermont.
They know they live in a separate state. They live in Pennsylvania. Right, But we don't know who committed this murder. No one has yet been charged for it. Unlike in the Lend stabbing, we do not have an obvious explanation. There is a ring that shows an unknown vehicle pulling into the driveway, followed by screams. Some investigators think they hear someone yell mom before another person yells oh my god, Oh my god. But other people who have viewed the recording say that it's unclear if that first word is mom. I have not seen this recording, so I can't tell you what's accurate. But Zashko's parents were worth several million dollars and had a sizeable estate to inherent.
Yeah, you said that she had bought the property initially off of family money.
Right, she's got some amount of access to it, right, and her last right before these people are murdered. Jamie's mom messages with Jamie earlier that same day about savings bonds that Zashco is due to receive. In blog posts from twenty twenty one, Zashco had written about her parents and repeatedly accused them of being abusers. One specific accusation she makes is that they snuck meat into her food and forced her to eat it after she expressed a desire to go vegan. So she has talked extensively online about her parents being fundamentally evil people. We know that at this point she lives with Daniel Blank, and that their phones go dark right around the time of the murder, as if they had like placed them in a faraday bag. Basically okay, right, but we don't know where they are on the day of the murder. Police visit them in Vermont shortly after the murder because obviously the daughter is someone that you're going to think of as a potential like, because one of the things about the murder is that whoever did it had some degree of knowledge of the property and an ability to get on it without forcing an entry. Right, So obviously the cops they're going to think, who's the next of Ken, Right, So police visit them on their property in Vermont and talk to Blank and Jamie Jamie. They ask if she has a gun. Jamie says yes, and she shows them a handgun that she owns that is the same caliber as the one used in the shootings. Now that doesn't necessarily mean much. It's a nine milimeter ton of nine.
Right.
There's one thing the cops will point out is that Zasco owned the same type of bullet, the same makeup bullet as those used in the shooting. But again, like I the bullets I use keeping my carry gun are hydroshocks, which is like what cops can because that's the safest thing in court if you're in a defensive shooting. You want to be like, I have the same bullets the cops have, right, because you don't want to have like the the man shredder, zombie rounds or some shit. So the fact that like a common defensive caliber would murdered these people was in the gun. That's not a smoking gun, if you'll forgive it. But it also is like that's not nothing either, right, you know, like that's not nothing.
Right. What means more.
Is that Jamie is now the full beneficiary of her parents' estate, and while she has not been charged, an attorney for Pennsylvania has filed a potential slayer statute issue, which is a law in Pennsylvania that you can't inherit someone's stuff if you kill them. Right, But again, they haven't been charged. There's a lot of suspicious shit about this. She also lies to a relatives claiming she couldn't have driven to Pennsylvania from Vermont because you didn't have a working car, and we know she did, so.
You know, yeah, it's it's very suspicious over it.
I don't think it's unlikely that she may have been basically tasked with killing her parents to get access to her money for the cause, their money for the cause, right, that's kind of my suspicion, you know. And she was partly told it was okay because they're abusive and so like, you maybe have to do this in order to protect yourself and other people from abusers, which is a kind of logic they have too. On January thirteenth, right after midnight, Pennsylvania State troopers raid a hotel near the Philadelphia Airport where Blank and Zashko are staying. A Vermont judge had issued a warrant for their home, but the police had not found the gun they believed was the murder weapon. They touched that weapon when they're in Vermont, but they don't have a warrant for it, right, so they don't get to take it. Zashko was detained and the only one and would have been the only one detained if she hadn't shouted to hotel staff as they're taking her away, tell Daniel in room one A Leffenheim being arrested, so that.
Damn smooth, smooth.
These rationalists and they're brilliant crimes oh obviously get interested in this. And they recognize Daniel's name and they find on surveillance footage that she has handed a bag to him outside of his room in the night before, right, And they recognize his name because they visited Zashkoh and Blank and the Vermont home. So they get a warrant for his hotel room and rate it. Like an hour or two later, Blank is found in the bathroom next to a blonde person dressed in black.
This is Ziz so.
Oh right, yeah uh. An article by the San Francisco Chronicle explains what happened next. Blank put his hands behind his back and walked out of the room, obeying police commands. But Ziz did not do any of that. He had his eyes closed. A trooper testified, using masculine pronouns. He would not speak. He was just laying almost unconscious or as if he was dead on the ground. He had to be carried out again. This is I don't know if it's intentional or if Ziz was like acting and like portraying themselves as masculine because they're on the run. You know, at this point in time, that's not actually clear to me. Whatever the case, Ziz is taken into custody and charged with disorderly conduct and interfering with a police investigation. A nine millimeter handgun was found in the room along with AMMO. Forty thousand dollars in cash is found in Zashko Subaru, and again, she doesn't get charged with murder. They let her out very soon and she just leaves. The cops are shot because sheet they have to give her back her car and the forty grand which she abandons. She and Blake just leave the car and forty thousand dollars in cash. I don't think they're making good decisions at this point, is my only explanation for you, David. How Maybe it's that they're thinking, like, well, they put a tracker in the money, they'll track the car.
It's not safe to have any of it.
I don't know why they're making this decision, but it's very weird right.
Now.
During this same time, several other Zisians are at least suspected to have been coming in and out of like Pennsylvania during the area around the murder. It is unclear how many people if they were If the Zizians killed this husband and wife, it's unclear how many of them were there. And again no one has been charged. But it's at this point that another Zizian enters the playing field. This person goes by the name Ophelia. They are a German citizen. They have like a legal residency in the US. Their last name is Bachholt. They used to work at James Street or Jane Street, which is where Sam Bankman Freed work. They're a quant trader, right, So this is someone functioning at a high level of the finance industry who like drops out of their career and life to go to Vermont hours like really like they fly in like right before the murders.
That's such a troubling theme about this whole thing, about how many of these people really do integrate in a major Like it's not just like fringe people.
No, these are people who are successful in their other lives, but they're lacking. I think a lot of this is just that desperation that is also core to like fascism's appeal to feel like a sense of heroism, like I am part of a heroic struggle. People are very vulnerable to that. And even if if you're making the money, if you're succeeding at a tech company or in finance, but it all feels empty to you because it kind of is if someone's like, you can save the cosmos. Yeah, here's maybe you'll give up your whole life in order to do that.
Right.
Yeah, So Blanke AND's ashcoh are released in short order, as I said, they get out of jail quickly, but Ziz stays in custody for a while, and Baylis said, I think at fifty thousand initially, are.
They aware of the fake death and everything it does?
Yes, they are where she has faked her death. California shows no interest in sending police app to get her, which is like it is a crime. This is the bail is set very high for two misdemeanors, and police justify it in like the court documents by saying Ziz had recklessly created a dangerous situation by making the police move her. Per that argument, that article and Wired quote behind these arguments and even the charges themselves lay a deeper motive. Unable to charge for the Zasco murders, but suspecting that Lesoda, Michelle Zashkoh that's Jamie and Danielle Blank and daniel Blank could be tied to them. Prosecutors were trying desperately to hold Lesoda while the police gathered evidence. Obviously, you realize we don't give a shit about this case. One local official familiar with it told me what they were interested in was Lesoda's involvement in the homicide. So the authorities here have recognized this is all centered around this person, but it's very difficult for us to hold them legally responsible.
At this stage.
We can't even arrest anyone for the murder yet we don't have enough, and you know it's it's I'm not gonna again pretend to know precisely what happened, but I think it's pretty clear Ziz probably gave the order to do this killing or everyone using her logic talk themselves into well, this is the only way to further our crucially important work. Is we need the money that these abusers are selfishly keeping to themselves. Jay Or Zizz's bail is eventually reduced. She winds up in the wind immediately, like the authorities are like, she's gotta immediately bounce and will lose her And that's exactly what happens. Zashkoh and Blank. It's kind of unclear exactly what they do initially after this, but we know Jamie reaches out to her aunt and begs for help, and her aunt is like, did you kill my sister? And Jamie says no and blames the murders on Less Wrong, which is a Liezer's like blog, so she's blaming the rationalist community. She claims that she's being targeted and that like Seafar had commit murdered her parents to like basically make Ziz look bad. A year or so goes by, right, Ziz misses a court date, she never shows back up. We really don't know what the fuck these people are doing for most of this period. In February of twenty twenty.
Three, she's no longer blogging either.
She's not no no, no, no no no.
But she's still said she had stopped. She was just responding to people.
Yeah, and she is communicating with people still, but I think it's primarily through more like direct means. In February of twenty twenty three, a community alert is posted by someone named Sepha Shapiro. It warns that quote over the past few years, Ziz has repeatedly called for the deaths of many different classes of people, and this this post lays out a lot of what I've described in these episodes. But there's still no public awareness of the Zizzians. Everything happening here is so weird. The circumstances around them, around the murderers are so murky that like most law enforcement kind of shrugs it off, and there's not like a public These people are so fringe. It's very difficult to even talk about.
Them right now. How do you qualify that on the nightly news?
Yes, exactly, Yeah, this is all going to change. In Jewory of twenty twenty four, Jamie's Ashco purchases three handguns I think from a Vermont gun store. A few months later, in May of twenty twenty four, a twenty year old woman named Teresa Youngblud disappears from her home in Seattle. Young Blood is one of the scattered community of people who still obsessively followed and interacted with Ziz and her inner circle's teachings. Her parents feared that she was in a controlling relationship with someone, and months after disappearing, she applies for a marriage license with another rationalist who's obsessed with Ziz, named Maximilian Snyder. Now, like most Zizians, Snyder has a very impressive academic record. He was a National Merit scholar who attended Oxford University. Then he starts posting on Less Wrong like all the others. He is initially a fan of Yadkowski, but at some point he gets convinced that Ziz's vegan sith radicalism is the true path. In the summer of twenty twenty three, just months earlier, he won eleven thousand dollars from an AI alignment contest, and he won that award under his legal name, but he also goes by Audere. It's kind of unclear to me what the situation is there. Around the same time, he tried to raise money for Ziz when she was briefly behind bars. I don't know if this guy Snyder this person. If Snyder marries young Blood because they're actually in love. They had gone to high school together. But I think there may have been some sort of weird legal reason that Ziz wanted them married again very unclear, but they don't stay together physically very long. By January of twenty twenty five, Teresa is in Vermont looking at rural properties for purchase alongside Ophelia. The German quant trader right well, Max Snyder is in like California and reading between some lines. I think because Ophelia and Teresa aren't involved in any of the court cases, Ziz is using them to help actually scout out and find an isolated compound where they can hide out right like they are doing the groundwork of figuring out a place for them to live. They are acting as the legal individuals who can kind of handle everything for the folks who are legally compromised. Later investigation would show that Bachholt and young Blood had been leaving living in Chapel Hill, Vermont, in a duplex, and neighbors say that several other people also lived with them. These people were always dressed in black and owned a box truck. It is unclear, but I think what happens is after she goes in the run, Zi starts reaching out to people she'd been in contact with around the world and says, hey, the time has now drop out of your lives and come devote yourselves to the cause, right, Okay, And that these these three are the ones who follow Backholt, young Blood and Snyder right, because they all cut ties with their families, cut you know, with their jobs, and leave home around the same time.
While they're looking.
For rural prop compounds, Backholt and young Blood right wind up in a hotel in Lyndenville, Vermont. An employee reports them to the police because they're wearing body armor and other tactical gear and at least one of them is openly carrying a pistol. Something is very weird here because they're approached not just by Virginia State Police, but by a Homeland Security Investigations officer. And there's evidence that Homeland Security spends like a week, is surveilling them for like a week before the shootout that happens. I don't know what Homeland Security thought was happening. They may have just seen we're on the border. Obviously shit's escalated there. This isn't a foreign citizen with an American citizen. They're wrapping their electronics in tenfoil, they've got guns, they're driving around being very suspicious and tactical gear maybe they just thought it was like some run of the mill terrorism bullshit.
It's worth checking out.
Right, So they are surveilling these people, and I think young Blood and Bachholt realize they're being surveilled, right, and that starts that escalatory loop in their head of zizi and logic, where well, if the police confront me, there's only one way to respond.
Yeah.
Two days later, prosecutors in California ask the judge and the Curtis Lind case to speed up the process of going to trial. He's in his eighties, he's got a bad memory, and he's the only witness of the attacks. They say, it's necessary, we need to do this quickly. So the next day, January seventeenth, before this can happen, before Lynd can go to trial, a masked assailant assaults Lynd near his property and slits his throat, killing him. Maximilian Snyder, young Blood's husband, will be arrested days later in Reading, California for the murder.
Fuck because they had been separate. Oh right, man, So there's like there's a possibility that says it's said.
Yeah, I don't see what now he did not he hasn't pled yet, at least as the time we record this. But he sent the letter in jail to Alisa Hitkowski trying to make him become a vegan.
He also priority is in order. Oh.
He also claimed quote, I am not one of Zizz's friends. Neither she nor her friends endorse me or my words, so far as I know, I speak only for myself as myself for the sake of everyone. Sure, yeah, okay, hey man, you just decided to kill this guy for no reason.
Who happened to happen to have a relationship with this very small group of people.
You wis this person? He has filed for a marriage license with young Blood. The day after Lynde gets assassinated, young Blood and Bockolt are heading back from a trip out target shooting when they get pulled over by Border patrol. Young Blood almost immediately draws her side arm. There's a shootout.
She killed or I think she kills.
Now, anytime there's a shootout and an officer dies, a decent amount of the time that officer is like killed by another cops bullet. I don't actually know for sure if it was young Blo or if they all start shooting and he just gets killed. In the crossfire. I don't fully know whose gun kills him, but she definitely starts shooting right right, and Border Patrol agent David Mallin dies Bocholt is killed in the immediate shootout before she can draw away. And both of the firearms used in this shooting were guns purchased by Zadji by Jamie in early twenty twenty four.
Right.
So again, all of these things are it's very easy to connect them if you like know all these people, it takes so long to trace out.
For all their talk of murder, the in practice, they're not very good at it.
Huh, No, I guess they. I mean, they didn't plan for this shooting to happen, right, It's just that their kind of escalatory logic made it inevitable. After all this, authorities finally start putting the whole story together. A man hunt is law launched in on February sixteenth of twenty twenty five. Ziz, Jamie, and Daniel Blank are finally caught. After the shootout, they seem to have started living in box trucks again, one of which was registered to young Blood.
Yeah, back to.
What you know, and again one of these is young Blood, like the box truck is registered in to her name. They pulled onto a property in Frostburg to camp, and the owner like spotted them and said, hey, get off my land, and like, Ziz tries to talk this person into letting them stay for a month, but he's like, no, I'm I'm gonna call the cops in a row m you look like a wizard. You don't need any of this. Ultimately, they all get arrested and charged with everything the cops could throw at them, which is like a legal possession, carrying a firearm, stuff like that. Right inside the other box trucks, state troopers found Jamie and Zizz, according to the charging documents, dressed all in black and wearing gun belts with ammunition. So yeah, and that's the situation where we are. Now, that's not the story's done. No, yeah, so this is basically where we are. Ziz asked for pre trial release, didn't get it. Not shocked about that quote speaking and this is from a Seattle PI article, speaking haltingly. She also requested a vegan diet and said that she was in a mild state of delirium due to lack of food. I have not done anything wrong, she told her, Judes, I might starve to death if you do not intervene. I need the jail to be ordered to have a vegan diet. It's more important than whatever this hearing is. So I don't think this whole court process is going to end super well for his No. But I also it's very hard to tell, like what do you what are you going to charge that? Like, I don't like I'm legitimately like very uh uh, Like I I'll be fascinated to see what the charges are here.
Yeah, it's excited to know that this we can see this play out real time.
I yeah, this was weird.
Yeah, hell yeah I was great anyway, Like.
I would like to know how things fucking shake up.
Yeah, well maybe we'll revisit this when my brain has healed. I need to go like read about Hitler some to calm down.
Yeah, you need to go talk to your neighbor. Yeah, I need to go talk to my name.
It's a better suggestion.
Yeah, not just keep reading my Hitler books and coming up with theories. That's how you get That's how you get double bad exactly.
That's how it happens.
You gotta go on a run, go talk to your day, brickle petigoat you know.
Everyone else, Go go talk to somebody, you know, pet an animal, walk you know, in the woods or something.
Maybe stay away from boats for a while, just to stay the fuck away from boats. Don't go live on a boat. Don't go live on a boat. Stay out of the water. I don't care about it. Rent to stand on the fucking water. Oh fuck wow. At the end of this, David, David, how you doing?
This is your first experience on our show What's Up?
I honestly don't know to tell you that. I don't know how I feel. I'm gonna have to I really gonna have to kick this around for a couple of day is But this is interesting. Yeah, interesting as hell.
Yeah, that's one way to describe it.
That's one way to describe it.
This is a wild time. David, you have any Do you have anything you want to plug for lot?
Yeah. I produced my own comedy special. It's available on my Patreon, Patreon dot com backslash David Bori gb O r I E. It's called Birth of a Nation spelled with a G because that's my last name and I think it's funny. But yeah, I have a podcast, my Mama told me I also have one called All Fantasy Everything, where we draft fantasy things that aren't sports. But yeah, check that stuff out.
Yes, ship, that sounds really cool.
It's a lot of fun.
That sounds so much better for you than everything we've talked about.
It.
It's different than this. It's different than this, and.
It reminded me I need I need to set my fantasy basketball line up. So thank you sir all the time.
It's time check it out, everybody. Uh, all right, that's uh, that's been the podcast. Don't don't do any of this, don't do any of the things in this in this episode, please bye bye.
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