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Modernized Manson Murder Cult (With More Money & Degrees) If you have been following the news the way a responsible adult is supposed to follow the news—Federal Reserve minutes, the price of eggs, whatever the president said before lunch—you have missed the best American story since the Manson family discovered Topanga Canyon and a guitar. It involves vegan computer prodigies, a border-agent shootout on a Vermont interstate, a landlord with a samurai sword in his back, a million-dollar Pennsylvania house with two bodies in the bedroom, box trucks in the snow, and a blogger who once tried to fake her own drowning so the universe would leave her alone. The universe declined. Commentators such as Andy Ngo call it a “trans death cult.” The Associated Press prefers “cultlike group.” The defendants prefer “we are not a group, we are not a cult, and also the judge is hormonally detransitioning me.” All three descriptions can be true at once. That is the modern condition. The remarkable part is not that six people are dead and a pile of very bright young people are in jail. America produces that product line every fiscal quarter. The remarkable part is who they are, what they believed, and how long the rest of the country managed not to notice that the collision of AI eschatology, social media, transgender ideology, Big Tech salaries, and too much disposable IQ had produced a roadshow. The Talent Pool, If the Talent Pool Lived in a U-Haul These were not the usual suspects from the parking lot behind the pawn shop. They were the kids who won the math contest and then decided the moral emergency of the century was factory-farmed chickens and a hypothetical superintelligence that might paperclip humanity. Felix “Ophelia” Bauckholt: German, University of Waterloo mathematics, informatics-Olympiad medal, a Jane Street internship, later a quantitative trader at shops that pay grown-ups like professional athletes. Died in a Prius on I-91 in northern Vermont after a Border Patrol stop went kinetic. Teresa Youngblut of Seattle was driving. Youngblut now faces a federal death-penalty case. Vermont does not have the death penalty. The United States government, unburdened by local manners, does. Alexander Leatham: UCLA and Berkeley, comfortable San Diego family, the sort of résumé that used to get you a condo in SoMa and a standing reservation at the place with the $18 green juice. Maximilian Snyder: elite Seattle prep school, data scientist, Kirkland address—Microsoft-adjacent zip code, the American dream with a hoodie. Michelle Zajko: bioinformatician; parents in a Chester Heights house the tabloids later priced like a country-club initiation. Jack “Ziz” LaSota: computer engineering at the University of Alaska, NASA internship, unfinished master’s at Illinois, then the Bay Area, where unfinished master’s degrees and NASA internships are the native wildflowers. They had the test scores to work at the firms that are currently teaching machines to write sonnets and fire middle managers. Instead they lived in converted box trucks, sometimes nude, on a Vallejo lot that looked like a storage-unit foreclosure, and later at the end of a snow-choked dirt road in Frostburg, Maryland, which is a sentence no career counselor has ever put on a vision board. That is the joke, and it is not a small joke. American meritocracy spent twenty years telling gifted, awkward, online teenagers that they were the elect—that their specialness was a moral category. Then the elect discovered blogs, estrogen, Roko’s basilisk, and the ethical necessity of never eating cheese. The rest of us were busy arguing about grocery inflation. The Church of the Left Hemisphere The subculture is a garage band that formed in the ruins of “rationalism,” the Bay Area creed that said you could think your way out of being human. Effective altruism, AI safety, CFAR workshops, MIRI white papers, people who use the word “prior” in civilian conversation. LaSota started as one more philosophically inflamed tech aspirant and became a confessional blogger with a following of isolated, extremely online, mostly transgender computer people who thought mainstream rationalists were cowards about animals, gender, and the end of the world. The theology, if we are going to dignify it, was a smoothie of anarchism, veganism, transhumanism, and decision theory so “timeless” it could justify almost any present-tense tantrum. Brain hemispheres, they decided, might have different genders and want to kill each other. Sleep could be hacked by resting one half of the brain at a time, a practice with all the medical charm of licking a wall socket. There were earlier suicides in the orbit. An anonymous rationalist website started calling them Zizians and warning that this was a cult. LaSota called it a smear site. In 2019 they put on black robes and Guy Fawkes masks and blockaded a CFAR retreat in Sonoma County until the SWAT team arrived, which is how you know the seminar on friendliness had been a success. They bought a WWII-era tugboat, named it Caleb, tried to found a “Rationalist Fleet,” and then the tugboat sank. Of course it sank. If your plan to save sentient life from a vengeful algorithm begins with a rust-bucket and a manifesto, the harbor is going to file the minority report. After that it was trailers and box trucks and the open road, which in this country has always been where the religions go when the landlords get tired. “Trans Death Cult” Is Rude on Purpose Ngo’s phrase is a brick through the window. Polite media will give you “cultlike,” “enigmatic network,” “radical vegans haunted by an AI apocalypse,” which is the same furniture with the slipcover on. Ngo’s further claim is that once the arrests started, the defendants discovered that gender identity is not merely a soul-condition but a procedural weapon: competency delays, accusations that jail is “state-sponsored conversion therapy,” courtroom sermons about hormones, the suggestion that any firmness from the bench is bigotry in a robe. The dockets do show years of competency fights, hunger strikes, catatonia, shouted waivers of a speedy trial, and judges moving trial dates the way cities move pothole repairs. Whether that is “enabled by identity” or merely enabled by American criminal procedure—which can postpone a parking ticket until the heat death of the universe—is a fight you can have after you finish the body count. The delays are not imaginary. The Multi-State Farewell Tour Vallejo, November 2022 Landlord Curtis Lind, then pushing eighty, wanted his tenants off the lot. Prosecutors say Leatham, Tessa Berns (in court as Suri Dao), and Emma Borhanian arrived with the energy of a collection agency and the cutlery of a Renaissance fair. Lind was stabbed, blinded in one eye, and run through with a sword. He shot Borhanian dead and wounded Leatham. California, being California, then charged the surviving attackers with Borhanian’s murder on a felony-murder theory: you start the raid, you own the corpse. Lind lived. That was his first mistake. Chester Heights, New Year’s Eve 2022 Richard and Rita Zajko were shot in the head in their own home, on their daughter Michelle’s thirtieth birthday. A doorbell camera, shell casings, a handgun purchase, phone records, a neighbor’s fragment of someone yelling “Mom!” The case sat in the fridge for three and a half years while Michelle was a “person of interest,” which is police Latin for “we think we know and we cannot yet say it in a charging document.” She has denied it with the sincerity of a person who has had a long time to draft the denial. The district attorney now says she did not act alone. The co-star has not been billed. Vallejo Again, January 17, 2025 Lind, one-eyed and eighty-two and scheduled to be the state’s walking memory in the 2022 trial, was stabbed to death outside the same property, throat cut, in what prosecutors call a witness-silencing. Snyder, the Kirkland data scientist, is charged with special-circumstances murder: lying in wait, killing a witness. He hummed in court. If you are looking for the collision of Big Tech affect and Bronze Age methods, start there. Coventry, Vermont, January 20, 2025 Three days later. A blue Prius, a Border Patrol stop, a Homeland Security database that may have been wrong about a visa, and then gunfire on I-91. Agent David “Chris” Maland—Air Force veteran, the sort of American who still thinks a uniform means something—was killed. Bauckholt was killed. Youngblut lived, was indicted, and now has the Attorney General’s office in the death-penalty business. The defense has begun to argue that the official story of the stop is a tidy little fiction. The government has begun to argue that a federal officer is dead and the people in the Prius were armed. Prosecutors say a firearm Zajko purchased later showed up in the Vermont mess. The supply chain of this subculture is not only ideological. It is ballistic. Frostburg, Maryland, February 16, 2025 A landowner finds three people in box trucks at the end of a dirt road in the snow, which in Allegany County is how you get the state police instead of a fruit basket. LaSota, Zajko, and Daniel Blank. Rifles, a handgun on the floorboard, later LSD charges, the full American sampler platter. Troopers wrote down that the occupants had “ties with the Zizians Cult” and should be asked about crimes in other states. For once the police report and the magazine feature were working from the same map. That is a crime spree with frequent-flyer miles. California, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Maryland—coast to coast, with a German quant in the passenger seat and a NASA intern in the lead truck. If this had been a motorcycle club, cable news would have given it a logo and a theme song. Because it was a transgender vegan AI-safety book club with Bay Area SAT scores, it stayed, for a startlingly long time, a local-news curiosity that leaked into the national press only after a Border Patrol agent was in a flag-draped casket. The Prosecutions, or: How to Postpone the Apocalypse Nobody has been convicted of the homicides. That sentence should be in neon. What we have is a traveling circus of pretrial motions. In Solano County, the 2022 case against Leatham and Berns has been in year five of “almost.” Competency in, competency out, a defendant who would not eat, a defendant who treated arraignment like open-mic night, a dead eyewitness, a tentative trial date that has now slithered toward January 2027. Lind’s preliminary-hearing testimony still exists on tape, which is the state’s consolation prize for losing the man. Snyder’s preliminary hearing for the 2025 stabbing has been playing calendar hopscotch; special circumstances mean death or life if a jury ever gets to vote. In Burlington, Youngblut’s federal case is the one with real voltage. Death-penalty notice filed. No trial date. Summer 2026 was spent fighting over whether agents’ phones will be forensically pickled and whether the government rushed the capital decision so hard the Constitution got motion sickness. A hearing on the evidence fight was pointed at September. This is the case that finally made official Washington look up from its phone. In Delaware County, Pennsylvania, Zajko was charged on June 24, 2026—two counts of first-degree murder, conspiracy, burglary—and as of late August was still cooling her heels in Maryland waiting to be extradited and arraigned. Three years of “person of interest,” then a press conference. American justice: first the glacier, then the avalanche. In Cumberland, the small Maryland case—guns, LSD, trespass, hindering—was parked on inactive status in mid-August 2026, trial dates canceled, reasons not offered to the public. Blank, already sprung on an unsecured $15,000 bond, is done with the ankle bracelet. LaSota went into federal custody in Philadelphia on a fugitive-with-firearms indictment; a judge had already ordered a competency exam. Zajko stays locked because Pennsylvania wants her for the parents. The local jail is rid of a two-year circus and the taxpayers may now resume funding potholes. Ngo will tell you this is what happens when a defendant can turn every status conference into a seminar on oppression. Defense lawyers will tell you this is what happens when the state piles four jurisdictions, a dead witness, a capital notice, and a psychiatric file onto people who were already not well. Both can collect their speaking fees. The facts on the ground are simpler: the bodies are buried, the geniuses are mostly still defendants, and the trials keep backing up like a freeway at rush hour. Why You Were Not Told This at the Faculty Mixer For most of the country this subculture is sonar-invisible. It does not look like the crime shows. It looks like the intern who corrected your slide deck. It talks like a LessWrong comment section that escaped the lab. It cares about factory farms and unaligned AI with the same sweaty intensity your uncle reserves for the Federal Reserve. It is downstream of the richest, most self-admiring industry on earth—the industry that built the platforms these people used to find one another, date one another, radicalize one another, and then buy plane tickets and pistols. That is the collision. Big Tech minted a class of young people with more cognitive horsepower than social ballast. Social media sorted them into a greenhouse. Trans ideology, in the form it took in that greenhouse, was not a privacy request; it was a total theory of the self, complete with enemies list. AI safety supplied the Book of Revelation: a god that has not been born yet but might torture you for eternity if you fail the alignment exam. Money—quant bonuses, family houses, cash pulled from a New Hampshire bank and later found in a Subaru—supplied the float. Veganism supplied the purity test. Box trucks supplied the monastery. And when the monastery needed a landlord gone, or a witness gone, or a traffic stop to become a last stand, the purity tests turned out to be compatible with steel. You do not need Ngo’s branding to see the shape of it. You do need to stop pretending that a high SAT score is a moral disinfectant. The twentieth century already ran that experiment with better stationery. The Zizians did not invent American violence. They invented a more embarrassing soundtrack for it: the end of the world, explained in a blog post, financed by the knowledge economy, acted out by people who could have been writing the software that runs your hospital, and prosecuted, very slowly, in four states that cannot agree on a calendar. If that is not a death cult, it is at least a group project. The teacher should have collected the knives before the presentations began.