NYT struggles with pronouns of the Zizian murder cult

The Times' paying subscribers don't want their sense of who are the Good Guys and who are the Bad Guys subverted by journalistic clarity.

Back on January 29, 2025, I wrote in Substack about the Zizians:

"Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil”

Is it a coincidence that the rise of AI has coincided with the return of Northern California cults like the murderous Ziz?

… But now there is a Northern California Ziz cult of transgender vegan animal rights effective altruist rationalist high IQ computer geeks who have apparently been involved in about four killings. For some reason, this isn’t a big story yet, perhaps because it’s ridiculously confusing.

Today, the word “Zizians” has finally appeared in the New York Times.

But what word crucial to understanding the Zizians is missing from the NYT?

Paywall here.

The sacred appellation of “transgender” is skipped over by the NYT. (Normally, the NYT is not reticent about the word “transgender,” having published it in 9,661 articles since 2013.)

Nor does the Times appear to want to commit itself early in its 1600 word article to the preferred pronouns of the numerous suspects, instead carefully constructing pronoun-free sentences:

Investigations Into 6 Killings Look to a Fringe Group Known as the Zizians

The violent deaths, including of a Border Patrol agent in Vermont, a landlord in California, and a couple in Pennsylvania, have led law enforcement to a group with obscure ideas.

By Remy Tumin and Kate Christobek
Feb. 22, 2025, Updated 10:01 a.m. ET

A series of violent confrontations across the United States believed to be linked to members of a fringe group known as the Zizians has left at least six people dead, including a Border Patrol agent shot in Vermont, a man stabbed in California and a couple shot in a double homicide in Pennsylvania.

Seven people are currently in custody in connection with the sprawling web of crimes, which came further into view this week after three people were arrested on trespassing charges in Maryland.

Law enforcement and news media reports have connected these individuals to the “Zizians,” a name for the followers of a person known as “Ziz,”

Other news outlets, such as the BBC, are identifying Ziz (a.k.a., Jack LaSota) as a “transgender woman” (i.e., an ex-man), but the NYT isn’t willing to commit itself, at least not at this point in the article when many of its subscribers might still be reading, about Ziz’s gender identity beyond that Ziz is a “person.”

You see, as we all know, transgender women are women and transgender women are good. A transgender woman is, by definition, a victim of bullying by Trump-supporting toxic males, so few of the (highly non-failing) New York Times’ 11,400,000 paid subscribers have ever even conceived of an ex-man who could be bad.

And the paying readers (and, no doubt, the marketing department) seem to want to keep it that way.

Subscribers don’t compensate the New York Times $325 per year to astonish them with new news presented for maximum eye-poppingness, the way Daily Mail tabloid readers like to see at least one jaw-dropping would-you-get-a-load-of-that? headline every day.

For example, here is a Daily Mail headline from 17 days ago regarding Ziz’s faked death:

No, NYT subscribers want, more than anything else, to be reassured daily that their worldview about who are the Good Guys and who are the Bad Guys is correct and unimpeachable.

Yet, this Ziz person appears to be not just not good, but Charles Manson-level bad …

So, therefore, Ziz can’t be a transgender woman, QED.

Eventually, deep in the article, the newspaper of record emits a couple of pronouns referring to Ziz, from which close readers can perhaps begin to get a sense that a dominant characteristic of the Zizians is transgenderism

Or maybe not.

who blogged about self-improvement, ethics and artificial intelligence. The group’s goals aren’t completely clear but online writings about their beliefs touch upon veganism, artificial intelligence and gender identity. …

Note from Marketing to Editorial: Let’s keep things vague as long as we can, shall we?

On Feb. 18, prosecutors said that Jack LaSota, also known as Ziz, “appears to be the leader of an extremist group known as Zizians,” which has been linked to multiple killings, The A.P. reported. James Elliott, the state’s attorney in Allegany County, noted in that hearing that LaSota had faked their own death.

So, in the 9th paragraph, the NYT finally uses a pronoun for one of the Zizians. If you read the phrase “faked their own death” carefully, you might come to assume that Ziz, logically, can only be a trans-identifying individual who obnoxiously uses plural pronouns. But lots of readers, assuming that many are still slogging through this turgid story, are going to blissfully skim over those implications.

Interestingly, the NYT appears to have intentionally degendered Ziz’s possessive pronoun from the “her” that he preferred, as reported in numerous other sites, to the more ambiguous and confusing “their.” Normally, the NYT would slavishly use the pronouns chosen by transgender or nonbinary individuals. But, Ziz is a murderous cult leader, so Ziz’s chosen gender identity makes transgenders look bad rather than good, so the Times isn’t going to make it easier for subscribers to decode what’s going on.

LaSota’s beliefs are centered around upending moral norms, practicing extreme veganism and accepting the concept of gendered brain hemispheres, according to Zizians.info, a website that is critical of the group. …

OK, “extreme veganism” is kind of left-coded, but the rest of the description of the Zizians could imply anything. For example, “upending moral norms” sounded leftist in 1969, but in the age of Trump and Musk’s attacks on DEI, that essence of today’s moral norms, it could be that the Zizians are racists.

In January, federal authorities arrested Teresa Youngblut in connection with a confrontation that led to the fatal shooting of a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Coventry, Vt.

The Border Patrol said that Youngblut drew a handgun and fired it at agents without warning during a routine traffic stop on Jan. 20. The agent, David Maland, 44, and Youngblut’s companion in the vehicle, Felix Bauckholt, died from gunshot wounds in the crossfire. …

A task force agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives later revealed that the firearms carried by the two on the day of the shooting had been purchased by a third person, Michelle Zajko, who was later arrested in Maryland. Zajko was also a “person of interest” in an investigation into a dual homicide on Dec. 31, 2022, in Delaware County, Pa., according to the A.T.F. complaint. The victims were Zajko’s parents. ….

Prosecutors also linked Teresa Youngblut to a fourth person, identified in police and court records cited in news reports as Maximilian Snyder, who has been arrested in connection to a killing in Vallejo, Calif….

Snyder is accused in the Jan. 17 fatal stabbing of Curtis Lind, 82, a landlord who was set to testify this spring against two former tenants, Suri Dao and Alexander Leatham, who have ties to the Zizians. …

Mr. Lind had survived a previous attempt on his life in November 2022,

The murder victim landlord gets a definitive pronoun, “his,” unlike the various Zizians.

when Dao, Leatham and their associate, Emma Borhanian, ambushed him and stabbed him multiple times, leaving him with a samurai sword impaled on his chest, according to a family account posted online and a news report in Open Vallejo. …

Borhanian, 31, was killed during that altercation, when Mr. Lind shot at the trio of attackers, according to media reports and court documents. …

Richard Zajko, 72, and Rita Zajko, 69, were found dead in January 2023 at their home in Chester Heights, Pa., according to the Pennsylvania State Police, after they were shot. Their child

Not their “daughter” or their “son,” but their “child.”

Finally, after more pronounless paragraphs, we get to another pronoun:

LaSota, who was in the hotel room when the police arrived to execute the warrant, turned limp, closed their eyes and refused to comply with police orders, the authorities said. …

Whether “their” is the cult leader’s pronoun of choice or that of the New York Times is left unexplained.

As I’ve been pointing out for a couple of decades, male-to-female transgenders tend to come in at least two varietals (and, I am told, more variants have emerged since the early 2000s, but I’m not keeping up): one is indeed what Nice White Ladies Who Read the NYT imagine all M-to-Fs to be: extremely effeminate little boys from an early age.

But the other type is much weirder and yet probably more influential in our society: rather that being the bullied, they tend to be the ones who bully. They tend to grow up to be masculine, heterosexual, strong-willed, selfish, and tend to have a high IQ and a low EQ. They are relatively numerous in high tech, the military, among science fiction fans, and so forth. Except for the transgender part of their ideology, they often lean to the right more than most would expect. They are often motivated by their autogynephilia sex fetish.

The Zizians seem to represent these tendencies taken to homicidal extremes.

Overall, these sometimes scary ex-men have managed to keep discussion of their true natures out of the mainstream media, so the vast majority of the 11,400,000 New York Times subscribers who look to the NYT for guidance on trans questions remain utterly clueless on the topic. And the New York Times’ marketing department appears to be in no hurry for intrepid reporters, if the NYT still has any, to wise their readers up.

This would all be a comic but minor matter, except that media miscoverage of the true nature of transgenderism — that many of the most influential ex-men are lying about having always felt like the opposite sex — has helped sett off a social contagion among underage girls and often their more naive parents, with disastrous effects on human happiness over the last decade.

By the way, if you are interested in learning more about the Zizians, the New York Times’ article today is much less coherent than the Daily Mail’s February 5th account:

Yet, each of these horror events lead back to a loosely-connected radical group of highly educated, vegan and mostly transgender women that's been described as a cult and dubbed by online observers as the 'Zizians'.