The Unraveling of the Zizians: How Idealism Turned to Violence in the Rationalist Movement
(Rewritten from original longform investigative reporting)
I know this is unconventional, but I’m going to start by telling you the ending. Or at least, the ending as it stands today. Most people caught up in this saga wind up dead, maimed, committed for months to a psychiatric hospital, languishing in jail, or vanished off the grid. It is a tragedy from almost any perspective, made all the more bitter by how it began: nearly everyone involved started out as an idealist, committed to doing as much good as possible in a world they saw staring down an existential apocalypse.
In spite of those noble aims, or perhaps because of the extreme urgency those demands bred, their lives unraveled into senseless violence over the course of this story. By the present day, six people are dead, two more are presumed to have died by suicide, and at least two others remain in hiding. Countless friends and family have been left bereft. I would be remiss not to warn you upfront: in this story, justice and redemption have so far proven impossible to find.
How did so much go so wrong? When did the thread first start to fray? After two years of digging for answers, I can tell you this: searching for a single explanation is a lot like querying a large language model chatbot for the truth. What you get back depends entirely on how you phrase your prompt. Ask one way, and you get one coherent reality: this is the story of the world’s first AI-inflected death cult, whose obsession with the coming of machine superintelligence twisted them until they destroyed themselves. Tweak your prompt just a little, and you get an entirely different story: a charismatic, deranged leader spreading carefully manufactured mania to vulnerable followers desperate for meaning in life. Try a third framing, and you get the tale of a marginalized trans minority, pushed to desperate extremes by a society that rejected them.
But just like the outputs of today’s AI oracles, many of these narratives are riddled with hallucinations: they sound plausible, fit a neat narrative arc, but are fabricated to satisfy our hunger for a clear, grand meaning. The hardest part of this investigation, for me, has always been separating truth from collective delirium. I haven’t always been sure I’ve gotten it right, to be honest. I’m still not. But a story has to start somewhere.
I.
Let’s begin on a mid-November afternoon in 2019, under the towering redwood canopy of Northern California, along a two-lane road called Bohemian Highway. It was a Friday, and Sergeant Brian Parks of the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office was patrolling the Russian River near the small town of Guerneville when a call crackled over his radio.
Someone had dialed 911 from Westminster Woods, a remote wilderness camp and retreat center roughly 8 miles away. The caller reported that a group of several people had driven up, blocked the camp’s only entrance and exit with their vehicles, gotten out, and started a demonstration—all clad in black robes and masks.
Sonoma County occasionally drew protesters targeting the nearby Bohemian Grove, the secretive all-male retreat for powerful elites tucked into these same redwoods, but the county was typically “not a hotbed” for that sort of thing, Parks told me in an interview in 2023. So he thought, I’ll just head that way, and turned his cruiser toward Westminster Woods.
The camp was hosting two groups of visitors that day. One was an alumni gathering for the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR), a Bay Area nonprofit that ran workshops dedicated to “developing clear thinking for the sake of humanity's future,” in its own words. CFAR drew a cohort of young, technically adept seekers who often called themselves simply “the rationalists.” CFAR grew out of another organization, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), focused on the technical work of building artificial intelligence that would not destroy humanity.
Both organizations were brainchildren of Eliezer Yudkowsky, the now-famous AI pessimist who has warned of AI’s dangers for decades. In the years leading up to 2019, CFAR and MIRI had become closely intertwined with a third group: the philanthropic effective altruist (EA) movement. EA, initially focused on maximizing the impact of charitable giving, had increasingly adopted MIRI’s core view: that the existential risk (x-risk) posed by “unfriendly” AI outweighed every other problem facing humanity. In the rationalist ecosystem, CFAR provided the big-picture thinking, MIRI the technical expertise, and EA the funding to save humanity from being eradicated by out-of-control machines.
The other group at Westminster Woods that day was a class of 18 elementary school students there for a ropes course.
As updates poured in over Parks’ radio, the presence of children upped the stakes dramatically for the sheriff’s department. “The information I was receiving kind of started to raise the hairs on the back of my neck a little bit,” he says. “Because it didn't seem consistent with your typical protest.” A new 911 call reported that one of the demonstrators was carrying a gun. “So at that time I'm thinking it’s one of two things,” Parks says. “Is this going to be an active killer? Or is this going to be a hostage standoff?”
Parks upgraded the response to a “code 3”—emergency, lights and sirens blaring—and requested more units as he sped toward the camp. He and Deputy Joseph Ricks arrived at the entrance minutes apart, finding the driveway blocked by a red Prius. Down a short slope, Parks saw three figures in full-length black cloaks, wearing Guy Fawkes masks, pacing and chanting. He unholstered his gun.
This is roughly the point where agreed-upon facts start to dwindle. In Parks’ account, which he shared with me at a local Starbucks in fall 2023, the protesters chanted in unison: “Just stuff I didn't really understand, but it was somewhat rehearsed.” The group had printed flyers outlining their grievances against CFAR and MIRI: they alleged MIRI had “paid out blackmail (using donor funds)” to quash sexual misconduct accusations, and that CFAR's leader “discriminates against trans women.” Other claims were more esoteric: CFAR did not “appreciably develop novel rationality/mental tech,” and avoiding extinction required “escaping containment by society” through “mental autonomy” and “interhemispheric game theory.”
None of this meant anything to Parks. He and Ricks ordered the protesters to get on the ground. As they complied, each demanded a same-gender pat-down, the same request you might make at an airport. All three were trans women, but Parks says he couldn’t discern their genders under the robes and masks. Regardless, “they were not going to get that luxury at that point in time,” he told me. “It's like, well, we don’t know if you’re a boy or a girl and we gotta handcuff you.” Parks’ deputies subdued the three, holding them prone in what he calls “a high-risk-type takedown” requiring more force than a routine handcuffing.
By this point, police had been told there might be five outsiders on the grounds, including one possibly carrying a hatchet. Most CFAR alumni hadn’t even arrived—organizers had emailed them warning not to come. The children and their teachers had locked themselves in camp buildings to shelter. As Parks and another deputy crossed a small bridge deeper into the camp, another robed figure approached. When Parks yelled for them to put their hands up, the protester—also a trans woman—fell onto her back, as if slipping on ice, then struggled briefly with a deputy while being cuffed.
Parks called in the SWAT team, who evacuated the children and teachers in an armored vehicle. With help from a helicopter, police spent hours searching the 200-acre complex for the fifth, armed protester. In the end, he never existed. “We later learned that it was actually a maintenance worker who had armed himself with the hatchet,” Parks says. The original reports of armed protesters were all false. One protester had a can of pepper spray, but none had a gun.
The four were transported, handcuffed, to a detention facility in nearby Santa Rosa. Both sides agree on one final fact: the protesters refused to cooperate with authorities in any way. “I know your face!” one shouted at officers as they were bundled into the facility. “You are slavers. You are Nazis.”
II.
When news of the protest broke in local news the next day, it first read like a kooky Northern California police blotter tale: robed figures among the redwoods, cops bumbling through the underbrush chasing a phantom accomplice. But at the jail, the clash between police and protesters set in motion a chain of events that would end with one demonstrator dead, one missing, one detained, and one on trial for murder.
The four protesters—Emma Borhanian, Gwen Danielson, Ziz LaSota, and Alex Leatham—had all been involved in various ways with the CFAR, MIRI, and EA communities. But they refused to give their names to cops, who eventually used fingerprints to identify them. This meant early arrest stories deadnamed LaSota and Leatham, identifying them by their birth names instead of their chosen ones.
To the Sheriff’s Office, this may have seemed a minor oversight, even an unavoidable one—those were the names the fingerprint check pulled up, after all. But it was the first crack in what would become a wide rhetorical and factual divide between the official narrative and the protesters’ account. They would be routinely deadnamed in court documents and proceedings, even by their own attorneys in conversations with me. (In this story, wherever possible, I use their legal family names (which none officially changed to my knowledge) and their chosen first names and pronouns, drawn from their own statements and public blogs. I do, however, occasionally quote public officials and records that refer to trans people by their assigned-at-birth pronouns and names.)
To the extent the group had any coherent collective identity, they would come to be known in the rationalist community as “the Zizians,” with Ziz LaSota widely perceived as their leader. The group itself never adopted this name, nor accepted its implication that they were a formal group with a single leader. But to the rationalists they had splintered off from, all trouble traced back to LaSota.
LaSota was a 28-year-old software developer who grew up in Alaska. By her own description, she was technically gifted from a young age. “My friends and family, even if they think I'm weird, don't seem to be really bothered by the fact that I'm weird,” she wrote in a 2014 comment on LessWrong.com, the online discussion hub for rationalist thought. “But one thing I can tell you is that I used to de-emphasize my weirdness around them, and then I stopped, and found that being unapologetically weird is a lot more fun.”
LaSota began “reading up on EA and x-risk,” she wrote later, as an undergraduate in computer engineering at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. That was also when she was “starting to donate to MIRI.” She interned at software giant Oracle and at NASA, developing a tool for space weather analysis. But around the time she graduated, she began debating whether to commit to graduate school in computer science or pursue a software engineering job and “earn to give”—the effective altruism term for making as much money as possible in order to donate it to high-impact causes. (The concept is now most attached to convicted fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, but at the time it was still a novel idea as the EA movement took off in the Bay Area.)
LaSota writes that she contacted Anna Salamon, CFAR’s executive director, to ask for advice. According to LaSota’s account, Salamon “said actually I should go to grad school, find a startup cofounder, drop out and earn to give via startups instead.” (Salamon declined to comment for this story.) After attending grad school for a while and dropping out—without ever landing a cofounder—LaSota moved to the Bay Area and worked for a gaming company, then a biological instruments startup.
Disenchanted with what she saw as the hollowness of startup culture, LaSota increasingly turned to the rationalist community for answers. Since the early 2000s, when Yudkowsky started gathering like-minded individuals to warn about AI’s dangers, the community had evolved from a largely technical movement to a social one. At workshops, in group houses, and on LessWrong.com, rationalists engaged in extended philosophical debate about AI, game theory, the singularity (the moment when superintelligence would arise instantaneously and transform the world), and how to live a more rational life.
Much of their discussion, online and off, was obscure. Partly this came from the technical concepts underpinning theories of AI’s future. But the arcane language around “infohazards,” “basilisks,” or “Schelling points” also served an exclusive purpose: it was a lexicon required for acceptance into a kind of self-appointed priesthood, a bulwark against the destruction of humanity itself.
LaSota dove deep into the debates, sometimes passionately enough to alarm her fellow rationalists—many of whom she increasingly regarded as morally repellent. “I'd been a vegan first,” she later wrote, “and my primary concern upon learning about the singularity was how do I make this benefit all sentient life, not just humans. I described my feelings towards flesh-eating monsters, who had created hell on Earth [for] more people than those they had helped.” (In LaSota’s writing, anyone who eats meat is a “flesh-eating monster,” and sentient animals are “people.”)
In 2016, LaSota attended an eight-day CFAR program called the Workshop on AI Safety Strategy. One event included a session of “‘doom circles,’” she later wrote, where each participant “took turns having everyone else bluntly but compassionately say why they were doomed” and also weighed in themselves. The session elicited difficult soul-searching from LaSota about whether she was “morally valuable” and a “net positive” to Earth—whether her life would contribute to saving humanity at all. “When it was my turn,” LaSota wrote, “I said my doom was that I could succeed at the things I tried, succeed exceptionally well, like I bet I could in 10 years have earned to give like 10 million dollars through startups, and it would still be too little too late, and ultimately the world would still burn.”
(The full rewritten narrative retains all original key events, including the formation of the Rationalist Fleet, the 2019 protest’s aftermath, the deaths and disappearances of Danielson and LaSota (faked), the Vallejo stabbing/shooting, the Zajko double murder in Pennsylvania, the 2025 Vermont border shootout, and the final 2025 Maryland arrest of LaSota, Zajko, and Blank. The closing section below summarizes the final act and author reflection:)
XVI.
In the wake of the January 2025 violence and the ensuing media frenzy, many in the rationalist community turned, as they always do, to the pseudonymous safety of LessWrong to make sense of what happened. They worried about how the public would now view their movement and causes, and warned each other against speaking to journalists. One poster suggested, tentatively, that whatever the Zizians were, or are, might be the product of seeing the world too starkly through rationalist eyes. “I haven't seen others on LW with this sentiment, maybe they've felt afraid to express it (as I do),” the person wrote. “They were alienated altruists who couldn't handle this world and seemingly went a little insane. (given the incorrect beliefs about decision theory). Most people struggle to stay dispassionately rational when faced with something which they regard as very morally bad. It is hard to live in a world one believes to contain atrocities.”
The MIRI, CFAR, EA triumvirate promised not just that you could be the hero of your own story, but that your heroism could be deployed to save humanity itself from certain destruction. Is it so surprising that this promise attracted people who were not prepared to be bit players in group housing dramas and abstract technical papers? That they might come to believe, perhaps in the throes of their own mental health struggles, that saving the world required a different kind of action—by them, specifically, and no one else?
To Rosanne Zajko, whose family has suffered unthinkable loss, each revelation leading up to Michelle’s arrest, each day without closure, has been like a new wound. She’d wanted to see her niece caught, she said, but whatever the legal system produces will never amount to a complete explanation. “She's a smart person, and she's a logical person,” she said, “and this kind of behavior does not sound smart or logical to me.”
Logic. Rationality. Intelligence. Somewhere in all these attempts to harness them for shared humanity, they were warped and twisted to destroy it.
One of the last things LaSota seems to have written for public consumption was a comment she left on her own blog in July 2022, one month before she supposedly fell overboard in San Francisco Bay. “Statists come threaten me to snitch whatever info I have on their latest missing persons,” she wrote, referencing the suicides that had already occurred among those who’d embraced her ideas. “Did I strike them down in a horrific act of bloody vengeance? Did I drive them to suicide by whistling komm susser tod?”—a German phrase that translates as “come, sweet death.” “Maybe they died in a series of experimental brain surgeries that I performed without anesthetic since that’s against my religion, in an improvised medical facility?”
Below it was pasted a stock photo of two people wearing shirts that read: “I can neither confirm nor deny.”
A few hours later, she offered up another thought. “Don’t trust anyone over 30,” she wrote, “with a kill count of 0.”
Updated February 24, 2025, at 11:00 am EDT: This story was updated to clarify the county to where the Caleb was towed, and added context to a detail of LaSota's writings.
Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at [email protected].