Andy Ngo: Cults, Human Experiments & Unsolved Murders Surrounding America’s Biggest Tech Oligarchs

The media have ignored the story of a transgender homicidal cult known as the Zizians. They’re linked to a number of violent murders across the country. Andy Ngo has the shocking details. (00:00) The Silicon Valley Zizian Cult and Trans Violence (18:45) Jack LaSota’s Transition (25:06) The Cult’s Ideology, Experiments, and Commune (31:33) The Cult’s First Victims (59:04) The Cult’s Next Victims Andy Ngo is a political journalist best known for covering street protests in Portland, Oregon. He has written for The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, National Review, and more, and is a New York Times bestselling author. Get Ngo’s book “The Zizians: Inside a Trans Death Cult” here: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/andy-ngo/the-zizians/9780316599030/ Paid partnerships with: Ethos: Protect your family with life insurance from Ethos. Get up to $3 million in coverage in as little as 10 minutes at https://ethos.com/TUCKER StopBox USA: Get firearm security redesigned and save 10% off @StopBoxUSA with code TUCKER at https://stopboxusa.com/TUCKER American Financing: NMLS 182334, nmlsconsumeraccess.org. Average savings based on borrowers who save over $199.99. Call 800-685-5696 or visit http://www. AmericanFinancing.net/Tucker. Mars Men: For a limited time, our listeners get 50% off FOR LIFE, free shipping, AND 3 free gifts at Mars Men at MenGoToMars.com Battalion Metals: Shop fair-priced gold and silver at https://battalionmetals.com/tucker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:34Speaker 01

  Andy, thank you for doing this. This is one of the most remarkable stories I've ever heard. And so I'd love to start at the beginning. Congrats on the book. Who are the Zizians?

• 0:47Speaker 02

  The Zizians are a cult that has its origins in Silicon Valley, California. I first started paying attention to what I then learnt were parts of the story in January 2025. There, that was inauguration day. On inauguration day, I saw in the headlines that a US Border Patrol agent had been shot dead.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  In Vermont.

• 1:16Speaker 02

  In Vermont, right by the Canadian border, very close to the Canadian border. Of course, with it being inauguration day, all of the international and national media coverage was on what was happening in DC. So it didn't get very much attention.

• 1:31Speaker 01

  I was actually not far from that border crossing that day, weirdly, in Vermont, which is not far from here.

• 1:37Speaker 02

  It's a very rural area in the middle of nowhere. It's icy, cold, super freezing. And two people were dead. One, the one being one of the alleged shooters. Another alleged shooter was injured but survived. And then the Border Patrol agent, David Christopher Marlin, was ambushed and killed there. So when I looked into that, I...

• 2:03Speaker 01

  So you're just reading about this?

• 2:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, there were very, very few details. But then, once I found out the names, and I started digging further, and this is in the context of where I've learnt that we should come to expect media malpractice when it comes to a lot of details about criminal matters, particularly involving gender and trans. So you can no longer take, for many years now, take even names and details such as sex at face value when it's being reported. I learnt this, unfortunately, through my reporting through on leftist violence over the years.

• 2:50Speaker 02

  It's that the media will use preferred names, preferred pronouns, preferred aliases for individuals they report on, and oftentimes even on criminal matters. And so you can have all these stories where there are trans killers involved in violent cases and read reporting and come out not even knowing that this woman who did this sex crime or did this brutal killing or did these acts of violence is not a woman, but actually a man. So with the names, I just kept digging further. Initially, there was a lot of stuff going on in DC. And I found out that, oh, huh,

• 3:34Speaker 02

  the surviving alleged attempted murderer in that shooting was, had a, applied for a marriage license in the Seattle area with a man in Seattle who had just been arrested for attempted murder, somebody who was an elderly key witness for a attempted murder trial in Solano County, California, which is in the Bay Area. And then I looked up, oh, that elderly man, several years earlier, has survived a brutal attack by trans suspects. He was impaled dozens of times.

• 4:17Speaker 02

  He had his eye gouged out in the attack. And after surviving that, he was assassinated by somebody now who has a connection to this person in Vermont. And with all these things coming close, coming together, I was like, there's way more to the story.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 4:34Speaker 02

  And it's not just a simple case of an isolated homicide incident, but rather, there appears to be a group involved here. And that was the start of my investigation. But I want to back up a little bit. You know, I have so much gratitude to you because five years ago, you provided a book blurb from my first book, Unmasked, Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy. And my path from reporting on Antifa to writing about trans violence now, on the surface, might not seem like this connection, but it completely was the logical path.

• 5:16Speaker 02

  At that time, in 2020, 2021, when there were so many riots going on after George Floyd died, one of my big projects was documenting those who were getting arrested. In Portland, where I was living at the time, I, every night, through public records, got the booking photos, got the names, and looked them up systematically. And I was seeing that there was a very odd pattern emerging at that time, which is disproportionately, the suspects were trans in some way, like they could identify as male to female, female to male, or non-binary, or some type of neo-pronouns. This was six years ago.

• 5:59Speaker 02

  And I just put that thought in the back of my head. It was a question, I was like, this is kind of weird. And you might recall that in 2019, I was brutally beaten in downtown Portland reporting on Antifa. And a lot of people are familiar with that case. I suffered a subarachnoid brain hemorrhage from that. And the people who did it were dressed in black block with their faces covered. And the Portland police closed the case without arresting anybody. But I pursued a civil case against individuals I alleged that were party to that attack and/or a attack that happened also in 2021.

• 6:42Speaker 02

  I was attacked repeatedly in Portland, which is also part of the reason why I've been in exile abroad, living in England now for all these years. The individuals I was able to identify in my civil lawsuit with the help of Harmeet Dhillon is, three of the six individuals are trans identifying. So at that time, there was like this other half. Exactly. Another point of like, what's going on with like all this trans violence? And in the years since, we've had atrocity after atrocity, shooting after shooting, not just in the United States, but other Western countries where the shooters are trans.

• 7:26Speaker 02

  And so it was within this context now. You see now that I explain it, why when I initially found out the names of the individuals who are alleged to have been involved in that ambush shooting in the Vermont border police officer, I was like, this is, I'm not taking it at face value that it was just a man and a woman who were allegedly involved. Everything requires further digging. And once I found some of the puzzle pieces, I realized this is material for a book, not just an article, because there was so much. I then learnt about, this is a cult now

• 8:09Speaker 02

  who has its roots in effective altruism, rationalism. But then they, as they became radicalized, they pulled in bits and pieces of other beliefs, like trans ideology, transhumanism, leftist anarchist politics. And they were a cult that recruited in the Bay Area. And they're alleged to have been linked now to eight violent deaths in the United States and also in another country. So there's a trail of bodies. And the Zizians is a two-year investigation, a year and a half investigation. The Zizians is a year and a half investigation

• 8:53Speaker 02

  into what I discovered, the secrets of the group, the ideology. And the more I kept digging in, it became more and more gruesome and disturbing. And I've seen a lot of very ugly, horrific things in my times reporting on the violent far left. I've experienced it myself. I've seen people who have been maimed. I, unfortunately, was around deadly violence in Portland in 2020. So I thought I was prepared for what I would find. But this cult used human experimentation. They had hideouts across the US. They made their own labs

• 9:37Speaker 02

  in sort of like medical environments in the hideouts where they had, they administered their own hormones and medication. So the Zizians is really a story of what happens when...

• 9:53Speaker 02

  Rampant cross-sex hormone use, radical ideology, protection from media and institutions, all these things merging together then allowed a cult to allegedly carry out deadly violence over a course of nearly a decade now.

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• 11:06Speaker 02

  Where does it begin? Who led the cult? I'll start with the person that ended up being the leader. So on the cover, this picture is from the mugshot of Jack Amadeus Lasota. He was born in Fairbanks, Alaska, raised in a very liberal family. His father was involved in, was and is involved in Democrat politics. But he otherwise had a somewhat normal upbringing. He had two younger sisters. He was very smart growing up and had an interest in Dungeons and Dragons and geeky stuff, Star Trek. He was very good at computer science. That's what he excelled at in school. And

• 11:51Speaker 02

  he studied at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and graduated magna cum laude, and then was accepted into a graduate program at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for their prestigious engineering program there. Jack, like many of the people who ended up joining the Zizians, they can be described essentially as geniuses or very brilliant people and who come from STEM educated backgrounds and or careers, those with degrees in engineering and bioinformatics.

• 12:36Speaker 02

  They include on their resumes workstons at NASA and at Google. Some of them were making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in quantitative trading. So this was a highly selective, small group of people and ended up joining the Zizians. But back to Ziz, or I should say Jack Lasota, as he was known. When he was a student, he became interested in rationalism, effective altruism. We're hearing about that a lot now. These are somewhat niche communities that are quite active in Silicon Valley. Rationalism is just a modern

• 13:20Speaker 02

  philosophical movement. It has its origins from centuries ago from European thinkers, but in the modern form, it's about, to simplify, using logic, reason, evidence, in the course of seeking and finding truths. And then a related movement within that is effective altruism, which is using rationalist thinking to maximize good. So in the Bay Area, a lot of the people who work in tech and AI programming are involved in rationalism, effective altruism.

• 14:03Speaker 02

  They are atheists and they believe that, and they're highly educated. They believe that we can find the best ways to maximize good in society. But their whole moral system is different than, it's in opposition to, let's say, traditional Christian values or religious morals. So a lot of their debates were really kind of nonsensical in a way with some of the effective altruists. For example, they spent and still spend a lot of time talking about the welfare of shrimp, prawns. You know, they're thinking that if,

• 14:44Speaker 02

  for example, if let's say 10% of them had some type of sentience, we're talking about billions and billions of shrimps that are being farmed and they're needlessly suffering. You know, these aren't Christians, so they view the life of an animal as equal to a human. So these are the type of a lot of these weird debates that were happening in the EA and rationalist community. They were very active online. A lot of them are autistic. A lot of them have Asperger's syndrome. There's a lot of research showing that for those who have Asperger's, this is, it does correlate at the tail end with really high intelligence

• 15:29Speaker 02

  as well. So for Jack Lasota, his original research interest when he was at university was studying corona expulsions from the sun. That was the type of research that he was doing at NASA. But he became involved in these online forums and about rationalism and effective altruism. He was reading it a lot, like a lot of people. Left Sprung is one of the main forums where there's a large community, people discussing all these things I just talked about, debating them endlessly and coming up with mathematical algorithms and models for how this could be the best outcome, that could be the best

• 16:09Speaker 02

  outcome. And so he dropped out of his engineering program and moved to Silicon Valley and became involved in the rationalist community there. There were hundreds of them, about around 2015, thousands that had moved there specifically so that they could get involved in the rationalist community. And in that backdrop, he met other rationalists who are also very intelligent. And he convinced at least one of them that that person was trans. And he started recruiting

• 16:48Speaker 02

  people to his particular beliefs. So eventually, Ziz's ideology was more than just mainstream rationalism and effective altruism. He started pulling in things like aspects of trans ideology. In fact, he kept a very active blog online called Sin Seriously, a portmanteau of sin and seriously. And on there, he wrote about extensively about how he believed that trans people, particularly trans women, have special cognitive abilities. And we're hearing a

• 17:29Speaker 02

  lot about EA now because there are the AI engineers and researchers who worked for OpenAI or Anthropic who have spoken out quite recently and done a lot of media about existential risk, AI existential risk. So even though the public now is just hearing about this, this has been a debate that's been going on for over a decade in Silicon Valley. Those who believe that AI is going to become a super intelligent being, and if it's unaligned to human interests, is going to destroy the world, kill everybody.

• 18:07Speaker 01

  So Jack, later Ziz, winds up in Silicon Valley. He's dropped out of school. He's moved there in order to commune with other rationalists and effective altruists. And while there, gets caught up in the debate about AI risk.

• 18:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, the Bay Area has a long history of weird people going there. And in fact, the Zizians are compared a lot to the Charles Manson cult. And decades ago, Charles Manson also had his journey moving to the Bay Area and his start in California before he gathered members to form a cult that murdered nine people. And Charles Manson himself, and we learned through the trials a long time ago, that he didn't do the actual killing of anybody, but he influenced other members within his group to carry out these types of attacks.

• 19:05Speaker 02

  So if the allegations ultimately are true about Jack Lasota, also known as Ziz, that's also similar to what he did. So he went through quite a big transformation once he moved to the Bay Area. He transitioned, started taking cross-sex hormones and testosterone suppressors, met other trans people. And there were a lot of weird people. And there was also an aspect-

• 19:35Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a question? Do we know why he did that? That's a big step.

• 19:40Speaker 02

  Within the Zizian ideology, based on his writings on his blog, he believed that trans women in particular had certain special cognitive abilities. And he believed that there, all of the world was at an existential risk from AI destroying everything. And that he thought he could be part of the vanguard of those who would save the world. That was his world. That was his worries.

• 20:08Speaker 01

  And he'd be more effective living as a woman doing that.

• 20:10Speaker 02

  Yes, but he also had this, this is where the trans ideology comes in. In his writings, he believed that he was also born that way, that trans people were born that way within the brain. So he misquoted and misused certain research on his blog about trans brains. And I write about in this book where the research on it actually doesn't show that trans brains on average are different because some of the research that was done, which did actually measure some average differences was looking at people who, males who were same-sex attracted. And I believe that's potentially what was being tracked in the differences that was

• 20:53Speaker 02

  being noted, very minor ones on average, rather than the fact that these were trans people, trans, so-called trans women.

• 21:01Speaker 01

  Was he gay before he became trans?

• 21:05Speaker 02

  He wrote about experiences that he had sexually with another man on his blog. But otherwise, he described himself in quite asexual terms. He described how he viewed his penis as like an alien appendage that, and that-

• 21:26Speaker 01

  I'm gonna stop right there, Andy, and say that's not a healthy worldview.

• 21:29Speaker 02

  No, no, not at all. And he believes also that, and this is what he wrote about, that going through puberty was like part of his soul dying. So you can see how there are elements within some of those statements that are kind of repeated in mainstream trans ideology, being born in the wrong body, being born this way. If you prevent, if you allow, for example, a gender-confused boy or girl to go through puberty, you're setting that child up to a life of suffering because they're developing into a body that doesn't align with the gender ideology.

• 22:14Speaker 02

  Ziz named himself after Ziz, a fictional monster creature from an online fictional serial. And in that story, the monster influences people to become essentially walking time bombs that are destructive later. Looking back now, I mean, he picked, Losota picked the name almost a decade ago. I wonder with the people that ended up dying around the group that he formed, if that name was actually quite intentional or not.

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• 25:16Speaker 01

  Right here on this show. So he starts living as a woman, does he take hormones?

• 25:22Speaker 02

  He wrote about taking cross-sex hormones and testosterone suppressors. And he met other trans people. There was an element also in the Bay Area then and now, within some in Silicon Valley of trans social, trans as a social contagion of like where just suddenly a whole bunch of people began transitioning at the same time amongst similar social and friendly circles. So he was developing his own ideology in parallel and ultimately in opposition to a very well-known rationalist and effective altruist thinker, Elitso Udozki.

• 26:04Speaker 02

  And Udozki is really seen as like one of the big forefathers for modern-day contemporary rationalism. He has a very large following. Many people moved to the Bay Area, particularly because he has established several, two nonprofits, Miri, Machine Intelligence Research Institute, and C-FAR to research AI safety and rationalism. He's for many, many years, most well-known as one of the big AI doomers. Earlier this year, he met with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and others. So he's been very influential in his career.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  Ziz was a follower of Udozki, but eventually believed that Udozki wasn't doing enough to save the world. So Ziz then met another person who he recruited to his cause, Jasper Danielson, who used the name Gwen. And that was his first recruit. From there, the two of them really established sort of the groundwork of the Zizians. And it's very big and complicated and hard to explain, but to summarize, their main theory is that the brain's two hemispheres correspond to different identities.

• 27:31Speaker 02

  One can be male, one can be female, it can be different sexes, it can be in opposition to one another, and one could, and they could be good or evil. Ziz, in his writings, described himself as being female in the brain and that both of his hemispheres were good, that he was one of the exceptionally rare people in the world born with this gift of being double good. So you had like a whole vocabulary around it. And then his goal then was to find and recruit people to his ideology and cause, who he believed had at least one good core of the brain.

• 28:14Speaker 02

  And so in their ideology, because the two hemispheres of the brain are linked, they believed that they needed to be separated and that they could do it through experimentations. And this is like the early formings of the cult-like elements of the group. So people that they were recruiting, trans, so-called trans women, men who identify as women, they would introduce them to the ideology, let them know how they can be part of this world-saving mission and being part of this vanguard, but you need to go through these experimentations, you need to jailbreak yourselves.

• 28:55Speaker 02

  So Ziz particularly sought out other rationalists who were trans. And then from there, the line of inquiry would be to try to find out if they were open to these types of experimentations. And so I document-

• 29:10Speaker 01

  Would they separate the two hemispheres of your brain?

• 29:12Speaker 02

  Yes, and the Zizians believed that they could do it through sleep deprivation. And Ziz very intentionally kept the details of how these experimentations were done secretive. He alluded to some of the steps in his writings, but never outlined it. And I believe that was part of sort of the intrigue with, with the group was, it would get people curious to inquire with him, and some did. Reading through some of the correspondence that I was able to gather as part of my investigation for this book, the experimentations was various kinds of sleep deprivation and, and manipulating

• 29:56Speaker 02

  members into essentially a state of psychosis where they could be more easily manipulated through the extended sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation's been used by a lot of cults, by the way.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  Of course, and governments.

• 30:09Speaker 02

  Exactly. So part of what makes like the story quite unbelievable was the journey of the Zizians from Silicon Valley and then ultimately many, many years later being arrested in February 2025 in Allegheny County, rural Maryland, in Appalachia, Maryland. The Zizians incorporated in leftist anarchist politics, so they did not want to submit themselves to the capitalist system. And part of that included then coming up with really bizarre arrangements for how to live their life as essentially a commune.

• 30:48Speaker 02

  So one of the first projects was establishing a rat fleet, rationalist fleet, literally buying old boats. And the goal, the idea was to live on them so they didn't have to pay rent. And there's lots of really crazy stuff that happened, for example-

• 31:09Speaker 02

  They bought a old World War II tugboat from Alaska and rode it all the way, drove it all the way down to the Bay Area, but they didn't have any of the permits to be able to park it at a dock in Half Moon Bay. But they, they were allowed to go there on humanitarian grounds because they claimed that they were running into difficulty. And then they became squatters for years and years. They stayed there, they recruited people, they bought more boats. And there were people then eventually who left the group. And

• 31:44Speaker 01

  Do we have any idea where their money was coming from?

• 31:48Speaker 02

  Yes. So Ziz himself was bouncing from programming job to programming job. And some of the other members were doing various other type of part-time employment things as well. So they were pouring in their own money into these projects. They really thought that they could create this fleet of rationalists who would end up saving the world. And eventually, as you can imagine, that whole type of arrangement ended up collapsing. It's unrealistic. And so they moved after gathering several members, including one who was a Google engineer,

• 32:25Speaker 02

  Amir Bohanian, he used the name Emma. In 2020, they, at the end of 2019, they moved to Vallejo, California. There was a plot of land from an elderly man that they befriended when they were in Half Moon Bay by the water. He was very kind to them. He helped them a lot. Curtis Lent. And they lived on his lot. And how they repaid his kindness was they used the laws under California Governor Gavin Newsom related to the pandemic to not pay rent

• 33:07Speaker 02

  for years. So they squatted on his land. And it was there that they did more of these experimentations. They lived in these box trucks. So they lived a really weird lifestyle that was completely isolated from mainstream society. And in the meantime, two of the members who had joined their group and then left, didn't actually end up escaping the group's influence. And they killed themselves in very brutal ways. The first victim jumped

• 33:44Speaker 02

  off a building in Poland. And then the other person ended his life very violently in Colorado.

• 33:54Speaker 01

  And

• 33:54Speaker 02

  Hell. A shotgun through the mouth. Yeah. So even early on, in the rationalist community at that time, this was before there were actually any murders with these deaths, there were rumors that this Ziz and his group, there's something odd about it among some of the rationalists.

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• 36:27Speaker 01

  There's one bunch of transgender guys living on a boat, squatting.

• 36:31Speaker 02

  And then living on a lot. And then people who had crossed paths with them dying suddenly, taking their own lives.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, those are all indications. It's not conventional. Yeah.

• 36:41Speaker 02

  And the story of violence through here, it just, it continues to escalate. I'll just go through a brief timeline. There were, by the end, eight known victims. So two people who joined the group ended up taking their own lives. They were, they had gone through the experimentation. Allegedly, their brain hemispheres were separated through these forms of sleep deprivation. The Zizians had a word for it. They called it de-bucketting. They recruited more people onto this lot. There were at least six of them that were living on the property belonging to the elderly man. And eventually, he took steps to try to evict

• 37:26Speaker 02

  them. They didn't pay rent for years. They originally offered, pay $2,000 to rent a very large part of this lot to park all their vans where they were living out of. And they were creating like so-called tiny homes out of these vans, which they called Slackmobiles. So they would put solar panels on them and try to make it like completely autonomous living. They rejected everything about society. So they, they thought they could really live autonomously completely. But he took steps to evict them finally after years of non-payment.

• 38:03Speaker 02

  And in 2022, November, several days before they were legally scheduled to vacate the property through an eviction, he, Curtis Lent, who at that time was 79 years old, was lured out to one of their trailers. And he was bashed on the head. His skull was smashed in. He actually regained consciousness. And this is according to his testimony and police reports. When he stood up, kind of got a sense of what just happened. So he just had a serious

• 38:45Speaker 02

  brain injury at this point. He was surrounded by several of the Zizians. And then he was repeatedly stabbed with swords. He was impaled through the chest. They actually stuck a long sword all the way through. And he looked down. He described about how seeing the blade was protruding through his chest. He had just very narrowly missed his vital organs. He had a gun for self-protection. And he shot one of them dead, injured another one, and he ran out of ammo. And the third one backed off. And so he very narrowly survived that.

• 39:27Speaker 02

  He rushed to get help. He was taken to hospital. He ended up losing an eye. Curtis Lent. It was a miracle that he survived.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  They stabbed him in the face?

• 39:37Speaker 02

  It was in the course of the attack on the ground that he was cut all over. So his eye was cut up and mutilated in that type of attack. So this, this happened in November 22, 2022. It got no attention. It was just treated as a case of like tenant-related violence in California. And the reporting treated the arrested suspects as she/her people or they/them, and used the aliases that they are known by. So that was like an escalation of the violence.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  But he killed a Zizian at that confrontation?

• 40:17Speaker 02

  He did. One of them. Amir Bohanian was shot dead. Oh. And here's the very sick outcome of that. So the family of Amir Bohanian started a GoFundMe and framed Bohanian as a victim of trans violence.

• 40:38Speaker 01

  Anti-trans violence?

• 40:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, they raised tens of thousands of dollars. And the various trans organizations also eulogized Bohanian as a trans victim in this so-called trans genocide that's happening. Yes. And US Senate Democrats actually honored Bohanian, amongst other names, officially in, in the Capitol as well. So that was sort of the, the false history that was the narrative at that time amongst trans activists.

• 41:14Speaker 01

  And there was no evidence that he was shot because he was transgender. He was shot because he was stabbing an elderly man with a sword?

• 41:22Speaker 02

  He was shot because there were people trying to kill Curtis Lent. He had a gun for self-protection. But of course, it's of no surprise to your audience that trans activists are able to frame

• 41:39Speaker 02

  Every grievance has a very, very big slight in offense and attack on them.

• 41:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like passive aggression taken to its logical terminus.

• 41:53Speaker 02

  And

• 41:53Speaker 01

  I tried and kill you, but I'm the victim. Yeah.

• 41:55Speaker 02

  Yes, that and literally where

• 42:00Speaker 02

  I mean, talk about gaslighting. They say things like we are living through a trans genocide. And you know, it's one thing if it was just radical rhetoric. They and also Zizians believe this. They're written Zizian members wrote about their belief in ongoing trans genocide. They would have been encouraging one another to take up firearms, stockpile firearms and prepare for violence. And in fact, as we do this interview, it was just last week in Huntsville, Alabama, that three suspects, part of a TranTifa cell, were federally charged in connection with stockpiling and making 3D printed firearms

• 42:44Speaker 02

  for the purpose of violence and murder against federal agents. Also, in the same week, last week, there was a trans suspect out of Washington State, an American, who was federally charged for allegedly helping the trans mass shooter that killed eight women and children in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, Canada. The suspect in that case, the American is named James Melody Bryant. So

• 43:23Speaker 02

  a lot of this is not just a meticulous detail of their history of a violence and extremism.

• 43:36Speaker 02

  It's also an indictment against this media and institution context where in where we are constantly lied to. So going back to what happened in Tumbler Ridge early this year in February, when a trans shooter killed eight women and children at a property, including his home and then at a school. The Canadian authorities described the deceased gunman as a female in a dress with brown hair. That was how they reported it. And

• 44:18Speaker 02

  they didn't release any of the pictures that the American authorities released last week, showing that on the guns that were used to kill women and children were trans pride symbols. So the people that were slaughtered in Canada were literally killed at the Barrow Trans Pride. And that were worth, and these were facts that the Canadian authorities omitted. And it was only because an American allegedly helped in the planning of that, provided money, that these types of this type of information came through in the criminal complaint. But that is just emblematic of

• 45:00Speaker 02

  the lies that all of us are subjected to when it comes to hiding and obscuring the truths about trans violence. So like going back to Zizians, they allegedly attempted murder on this man. And then this is 2022. I'm speaking to you now towards in late 2026. None of the two suspects in that case have been convicted of anything and trial hasn't happened yet.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  Trial hasn't happened?

• 45:29Speaker 02

  No, the trial hasn't

• 45:30Speaker 01

  They ran the man through with a sword because they didn't want to pay rent and no one's going on trial?

• 45:34Speaker 02

  So the Zizians are brilliant. One thing they're brilliant at is learning the rules and using the rules against you. So they used every tactic they could think of to delay the case, delay the case year after year after year. Curtis Lint was 79 when he was attacked. So he's getting very old by 2025, last year.

• 46:06Speaker 02

  Now he's in his eighties at his property. You know, over years, he left the property, but then eventually he returned, you know? People who lived through traumatic experiences sometimes still kind of revert back to the environments where maybe the violence had happened because they think enough time has passed to say, you know, the two suspects were still in custody at that time.

• 46:36Speaker 02

  He likely had no idea the extent of how this group was much larger than just the two people who were in custody. So this is how easy it was for Ziz to escape. He was found by law enforcement responding to the shooting death of Bohanian, as well as the attempted murder of Curtis Lint. They took him to the police station and while Ziz was waiting to be questioned in like the lobby area, he just pretended to be unconscious. He just closed his eye and collapsed in his chair. So these law enforcement officers thinking that there's medical emergency, send him off to hospital to be checked out.

• 47:19Speaker 02

  They didn't send a police officer with him. They didn't place him under formal arrest. So once he was in the hospital, he regained consciousness and just slipped out and then disappeared and then became a fugitive completely. He was gone for years and he was, he would reemerge several years later in Pennsylvania. And by that point, the group recruited more people.

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• 49:49Speaker 01

  So the elderly man is almost murdered, impaled on a sword, blinded in one eye.

• 49:59Speaker 01

  Ziz, the leader of the group, escapes from the hospital after faking a medical emergency. And what happened?

• 50:10Speaker 02

  Add to that. Yeah. So that wasn't the first time he faked a scenario that called, that allowed him to help escape. So there was, and this is getting a bit into the weeds, but I just, I bring it up just to show like how insane the story was and how badly law enforcement F'd up. So before that, Ziz had faked his death through pretending to have drowned in the waters in the Bay Area. In official court declarations, one written by Amir Emma Bohanian, who at that time was still alive, and another one written by his sister Naomi Lasota, they

• 50:54Speaker 02

  testified or they declared officially that he had fallen off the boat that they were on. And there was a huge air and water search effort involving all these different departments and agencies all across the Bay Area, like all hands on deck to try to save him. He didn't, they didn't find him. And, and so there was this belief that he had been dead and that the body hadn't been found yet. And then he, he was found by law enforcement in, in Vallejo, California, after this brutal attack. So there was already another pending felony cases against this involving a Zizian protest in Westminster Woods where they allegedly dawning

• 51:39Speaker 02

  robes and masks had created a hostage situation where

• 51:46Speaker 02

  children at the camp thought that there was an active shooter situation. So they were facing a whole bunch of charges related to that. And then Ziz faked his death. There's a warrant out for his arrest at that time. This is 2022. And then when he was found in Vallejo, apparently no police officer ran the record on him to see if they had any active warrants. So he wasn't arrested at that time. They just sent him off to the hospital. And of course he had a chance to escape. And then when he would reemerge again, it was in the context of an investigation into a double murder

• 52:28Speaker 02

  that had happened in Delaware County, Pennsylvania on New Year's Eve at the very end of 2022, involving the victims. There were the parents of one of the members, Michelle Zico. So the Zizian's groups were,

• 52:45Speaker 02

  even though he had, Ziz had escaped and left California, there was still active recruiting and the group was growing and people were joining across the U.S.

• 52:55Speaker 01

  How, how and why was this, this couple killed, the parents of the Zizian member?

• 53:04Speaker 02

  On what is believed to be New Year's Eve 2022, and this is according to the police report, a car pulled up at their home at night.

• 53:18Speaker 02

  Individual or individuals could be seen going in according to a neighbor's Ring camera footage. And there's some yelling that occurs inside the house. And then two figures are seen leaving the property, going to a car and driving off.

• 53:39Speaker 02

  Those individuals could not be definitively identified on that blurry Ring camera footage. Several days later, during a welfare check, because the elderly Richard and Rita were taking care of Rita's mother, who was very old at that time. And they weren't showing up to check in on her. So somebody called for a welfare check. And so state police, Pennsylvania State Police, came to the property, went up and found the two bodies in pools of blood in Michelle Zico's former childhood bedroom. They had me shot execution style

• 54:19Speaker 02

  in the head.

• 54:21Speaker 02

  And that case was from murders in 2022. It was only just a few months ago that finally Michelle Zico was charged with the murder of her parents. However, at the press conference, the prosecutor said that Michelle Zico was not alone. But he stopped short of saying who she was with. We do know that there's video of two figures being seen leaving that property on the time that's believed that Richard or Rita were executed. But Ziz has never been charged with attempted murder. After the double homicide, Michelle Zico became a person of interest.

• 55:06Speaker 02

  And then she was questioned, not charged, let go and disappeared. And she was with another Zizian at that time, Daniel Blank.

• 55:17Speaker 01

  Is she trans too?

• 55:20Speaker 02

  Yes, she is a woman who, biological woman, who uses the name Jamie or Alex. And at various times has used different pronouns, including they them.

• 55:35Speaker 01

  What happened to the elderly man who got the sword

• 55:39Speaker 01

  run through him?

• 55:40Speaker 02

  I'm jumping through quite a large timeline now, like a decade of all this. So it may get a little bit confusing as I'm describing because it's involving different geographic regions and many different characters at this point. What people need to know is that, so Curtis Lynn had survived the attempted assassination. He was blinded in one eye, wore an eye patch and eventually returned to his property. He had spent a long time away, but against the urging of his children, return. He wanted to live out the final years on this property that he bought. And he lived in trailer and he was used to it. He liked it. He missed it. He came back. It was a mistake. In January 2025,

• 56:23Speaker 02

  somebody was waiting in the shadows for him outside that property. And when he pulled in, that person went up with a blade and repeatedly stabbed him. And according to witnesses, pulled his head back and slit his throat. And he bled out. He died there on the spot. So at that time, he was 82.

• 56:46Speaker 01

  Was he ever able to testify against the original assailants?

• 56:50Speaker 02

  The trial never happened yet. To this day, still hasn't happened.

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• 58:48Speaker 02

  The person who was arrested days later, Maximilian Snyder, is the person who is in a relationship with the woman accused of the ambush shooting of Vermont Police, Vermont Border Patrol officers.

• 59:05Speaker 01

  So Zizian was arrested?

• 59:06Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 59:10Speaker 02

  And then after that, so in total now, all of that, that's total of eight victims of this group. Out of this interview, not a single one has been convicted. Ziz himself is in federal custody in Philadelphia. He's only charged with a federal crime of being a fugitive in possession of firearms. So this story kind of documents this whole process of how they were, what happened during the times they were fugitives, the bases that they had established across multiple states. And

• 59:53Speaker 02

  I traveled to where they had lived formerly. So I went to the Bay Area and I went to North Carolina, where their last established hideout base was. And I got to visit the property. And let me tell you, I'm not a spiritual religious person, but when I was there, I was Latin.

• 1:00:19Speaker 02

  I felt really unsettled, like there was, felt like there was, I would describe as an energy in that type of space. Because you can see how they lived their lives and

• 1:00:33Speaker 02

  I found, for example, some of their clothes. And this is part of what makes the Zizians really scary is that they were always dressed in black.

• 1:00:43Speaker 02

  Very similar to the Antifa black block anarchists that I've encountered a lot. I found their clothes. I found their hair.

• 1:00:54Speaker 02

  And they had all these, and I found remnants of their

• 1:01:01Speaker 02

  so-called lab or workstations where they were building things and doing things on one another. And in the book, part of the big reveal is a very large section in the book of pictures that have never been revealed before of the hideout bases, pictures of the Zizians in their past. And part of the big investigation here for me was making sure that every single person and associate is identified by their birth name.

• 1:01:32Speaker 01

  How hard is that to get their names?

• 1:01:36Speaker 02

  It's easier once somebody's been charged with a crime. But there's lots of people in Zizian circles who have never been formally accused of a crime. So they're only known by their aliases that they use online and screen names and such. And this is actually part of a wider issue encountered in my reporting on trans violence is that a lot of times it's in the absence of booking photos being released. And more and more police departments and agencies are not releasing mug shots. So you have the name, but in most liberal jurisdictions,

• 1:02:18Speaker 02

  they've adopted laws that make it extremely easy to change one's identity. It's literally just one document that you file in the court and you get a legal name change. And that process can really obscure, for example, in my crime reporting, the criminal history of certain suspects because now they have adopted a new name.

• 1:02:39Speaker 01

  And simultaneously making it harder, even as it becomes easier to change your name, to get their mugshots.

• 1:02:48Speaker 02

  Exactly. So back to Portland.

• 1:02:52Speaker 01

  So it's, it's, we're seeing a theme here, which is a flight from physical reality. We don't want you to know what the physical reality of anything is.

• 1:02:58Speaker 02

  So Oregon was one of the states that actually did, where law enforcement was allowed to release mugshots. So people might remember that I was releasing the Antifa mugshots back in 2020 from all the nights of rioting. And it's, that was, it was true there that I was able to find out individuals who were trans, because then, you know, a photo of the suspect, then you can link to like, for example, their social media. If you only had a name, it's kind of, it's harder to identify that this is a person's social media.

• 1:03:28Speaker 02

  Oregon Democrats, in reaction to my reporting, and actually those who testified at the state Capitol in Oregon in 2020, brought up my reporting, said that through my work, that they were subjected to alleged harassment and things like that after being identified. So then Oregon Democrats passed a law banning all law enforcement agencies in the state from releasing booking photos in the absence of a conviction, which on paper, sounds, okay, you know, don't release your picture until they've convicted. But in Oregon, where Democrats

• 1:04:08Speaker 02

  have had control for decades and influence on the courts, not very many criminal suspects, particularly those involved in political violence, ever end up getting convicted, speaking as somebody who's been the victim of that violence.

• 1:04:24Speaker 01

  Well, this is the youth wing of their party, so they protect it assiduously.

• 1:04:30Speaker 01

  I remember those mugshots that you released very well, six years ago. And the first thing I thought, well, the first thing I felt after like fear and avulsion was sympathy, because there was something wrong with almost every person was on their faces. They all looked defective in some way. They all looked like there was something really, these were not healthy people at all. They all looked like crazy and unhealthy.

• 1:04:51Speaker 02

  I think you would have that same type of feeling if you look at the mugshots of the Zizians and stuff that I was able to, there's a certain look.

• 1:04:59Speaker 01

  Like, don't go outside, like, filled with weird chemicals. These are just not robust looking specimens. They're, look like they're, they're dying, actually.

• 1:05:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I mean, the Zizians, the members, I dive into their auto, but I dive into their biographical backgrounds. And some of them are alleged to have gone through some abuse. There is also confusion, because all of them have alleged abuse as well. It's kind of, it's a pattern by a lot of trans activists, activists, and particularly the Zizians, they would recast normal childhood experiences as extremely abusive situations involving their families, and then use that to justify why their parents and families were evil and why they were due justice. The parasite, the killing of one's parents

• 1:05:54Speaker 02

  was actually another part of the Zizian ideology that made them different from mainstream rationality. They pulled in all these types of grievance politics. There's a thinker in the past who used the term wound collecting, and I forget his name, but that's what the Zizians did.

• 1:06:14Speaker 01

  Well, sure. And the more that you believe you're the victim left empathy you have for others, and that's true for nations as well as people. But if you, I mean, it's like, classic narcissism. Like, if you think you are the victim, you don't feel bad when you hurt other people.

• 1:06:32Speaker 02

  Can I describe how the Zizians were actually, how Ziz himself was finally caught?

• 1:06:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:38Speaker 02

  So

• 1:06:41Speaker 02

  in their latter years, so I just, I talked about the double homicide of the parents in Pennsylvania, and then there was the throat slitting and killing of Curtis Lynn, and the second attack on him. And then there was a shooting murder of the Border Patrol agent. So by that point, then, it was eight people who were dead. Ziz, Michelle Zico, and another member, Daniel Blank, were still on the run somewhere. And there was a multi-state search for them last year in January and February. And when they were finally found, they were found in a super rural area in Allegheny County, Western Maryland, in, in the middle, essentially, of a snowstorm. So they were hiding out in their box trucks.

• 1:07:27Speaker 02

  And in the videos, when they're being arrested, the body, police body camera video, they keep saying, I haven't done anything wrong. And I believe that that's really, that's kind of really summarizes the Zizians' belief. If it turns out that all the state and federal accusations against them are true, and that process is still playing out now, nobody's actually had justice yet. But if all the accusations are proven, the Zizians really do believe that they have done nothing wrong, because in their worldview, this effective

• 1:08:06Speaker 02

  altruist view about maximizing good, it is for them the rational decision to take out this person, kill that person, murder that person that gets in the way. I mean, they viewed themselves as really the vanguard of saving the world. Anybody who gets in their way, who tries to imprison them, who tries to extract money from them, take him out, take her out. They're due vengeance. And what was,

• 1:08:37Speaker 02

  what showed me that this is more than just an isolated case of a fringe group becoming violent, is that with some of the actions that the group allegedly took, the murder and such, they received praise from mainstream leftists and trans activists, who were sympathetic, for example, of the Border Patrol officer being murdered.

• 1:09:06Speaker 01

  So why was the Border Patrol, I should have asked you, my apologies, why was the Border Patrol officer murdered?

• 1:09:12Speaker 02

  So two Zizian members, Felix Baucholt, who used the name Ophelia, a German national, and

• 1:09:24Speaker 02

  and Teresa Young Blute, a, she was the youngest member at that time, 20 years old last year, from Seattle. They had been observed acting suspiciously in Vermont. For example, they pulled into a motel, and they were dressed all in black and wearing tactical gears and had firearms with them. So in, in context, in rural, in the northeastern kingdom, which is really, really rural area of Vermont, it's not unusual for people to carry a handgun. You're out in the woods, you're out in the country. But the fact that they were masked and in black and wearing tactical gear, that did make some of the hotel staff question

• 1:10:08Speaker 02

  what was going on, and made the decision to call law enforcement. And when law enforcement, federal law enforcement responded, because this is very close to the Canadian border where they were found, they were completely evasive. They were let go, they weren't accused of any crimes at that point. And they went to another motel. And when they were driving on the road, very close to the Canadian border, it's unclear where they were going ultimately, but they had packed up all their stuff again, and they departed after they had been questioned. They were pulled over by a US Border Patrol officer, David Christopher Marland. And according

• 1:10:51Speaker 02

  to the investigation, once he approached their vehicle and asked them to come out, he was fired upon and shot dead on the spot. He had backup, there was a shootout, Felix Baucholt was shot dead. Teresa Young Blute was injured in the arm, but she survived. And she is the only one who's been federally charged with murder.

• 1:11:21Speaker 02

  That, the way the story concludes in my writing is, is bleak. I mean,

• 1:11:29Speaker 02

  you can say a lot about the Zizians, but one thing they're not is stupid. And they were very strategic with their decision making. And it took state prosecutors in Pennsylvania nearly four years to charge Michelle Zico. And they, at this point, don't have apparently enough evidence to charge anybody else. Ziz himself has, to date, never been charged with murder or attempted murder. Even the felonies that he's facing in Maryland, when they were finally found and arrested after the manhunt, they essentially amount to firearm possession offenses. And he doesn't have a criminal conviction history. He has a whole

• 1:12:10Speaker 02

  bunch of outstanding cases, no convictions. So we really could see an outcome where he's, Ziz, and the other Zizians are let out. In fact, the Maryland state case against Ziz, Michelle Zico and Daniel Blank, was suspended recently for reasons that are unclear. So one of the Zizians, Daniel Blank, is completely out, free, right now. And there are people online who continue to be radicalized by Ziz and his writings.

• 1:12:49Speaker 01

  So what's the appeal? Why would, if the pitch is, we're gonna cut your brain in half and deprive you of sleep in order to do that, it's hard to see who joins a group like that. Like, what, what is the pitch that they're making?

• 1:13:05Speaker 02

  So for people who are drawn into the rationalist and effective altruist community, they're not normal people like you and I. They really view that

• 1:13:19Speaker 02

  All of the world is facing this existential risk of being completely destroyed by AI. We must do something. So, under that sort of environment, with several other variables, such as many of the people who have been attracted to the Zizians are autistic. Several of them are documented diagnosis Asperger's Syndrome. Their thinking is not like normal people. It's much more systematic, ordered, and about using various mathematical models to map out the decision-making and what they believe are the best outcomes.

• 1:14:00Speaker 02

  So when you have that with then sort of a grooming process by Ziz and Zizians in his writings of pulling in certain people, you do eventually get some people who are drawn in and believe they can be heroes. And if it takes killing one person to save the animals on Earth, the billions of life form, the billions of shrimp that are out there, they're just using a calculation model, one life versus the life of billions. And life of billions includes all these animals.

• 1:14:43Speaker 01

  All the prawns.

• 1:14:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. So that's the type of people that have been drawn in. You have to think of them within that context.

• 1:14:52Speaker 01

  They're people who have been so damaged by modern technology that their brains don't work and they lack empathy toward people.

• 1:15:02Speaker 02

  Yes, and another thing about the Zizians, like stepping back and looking at sort of the broader picture. I also write about, there's a chapter in here called "The Rise of the Trans Killers." So this Zizian is just one example of alleged trans killers carrying out a campaign of violence across the United States. But in the past decade, there have been so many others. And in fact, one difficulty was finding contemporaneous reporting at that time. They even described some of them as trans. And because it didn't, it would refer to them as, by the preferred pronouns, preferred names. So you get this completely false impression that these incidents are not involving trans people,

• 1:15:47Speaker 02

  when in fact, they are. And as part of my research for this book, I went to Nashville, Tennessee, and I went to the church where there was the mass shooting attack by Audrey Hale, a trans shooter who used the name Hayden, a trans shooter who used the name Hayden. And the FBI released scans of the journal's so-called manifesto left behind by this writer. And you can see how she was completely radicalized by this inability to accept the reality of who she was.

• 1:16:25Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:16:26Speaker 02

  And she took it out on children at the school. And so like standing outside of there, and it was important for me to go because I really, I wanted to go to some of these places where the trans violence actually happened. Going to Vallejo, seeing the area on the ground where Curtis Lynn died, bled out. It's, the Zizians is about this whole, not just about the trans death cult and all their secrets, their human experimentation, their victims, but also what we're witnessing and experiencing across the world

• 1:17:08Speaker 02

  of rising trans violence that's being completely denied, denied by institutions like in Canada, denied by law enforcement through them erroneously giving us the preferred names, preferred pronouns, even preferred sex of suspects and criminals and convicts through the courts. I mean, the Zizians were able to drag out their case for years until Curtis Lynn was assassinated by making accusations in court filings and civil claims alleging that their civil rights as trans people were being violated.

• 1:17:49Speaker 01

  And they were backed up in this by organized trans groups?

• 1:17:54Speaker 02

  They were backed up by trans groups, leftist attorneys. They were even soliciting for donations from people to pay for their legal fund. So there's this whole--

• 1:18:05Speaker 01

  Did they get them?

• 1:18:06Speaker 02

  I don't know how much money that they were able to get, but they did get legal representation, private retained legal representation, and that doesn't come cheap.

• 1:18:16Speaker 01

  Amazing. How are they seen in Silicon Valley?

• 1:18:22Speaker 02

  The Zizians seem to be sort of like a dirty secret that a lot of the rationalists and effective altruists in Silicon Valley don't want to talk about because it came from them, from their community. Of course, I need a caveat that the EA Effective Altruist community, rations community is diverse in the sense that as belief systems, it can be apolitical in the sense that it's not partisan. You can have those who are libertarian or maybe even conservative, and there's those who are on the radical left as well.

• 1:19:00Speaker 02

  And the Zizians' beliefs are not widely endorsed by the communities there. But at the same time, I wonder if there's any sort of introspection about what that type of environment produces.

• 1:19:19Speaker 01

  I mean, you would think it would be in the interest of trans groups to distance themselves from trans murderers, but they haven't.

• 1:19:32Speaker 02

  Not only have they not, in fact, they, some of them even celebrate and support the actions of convicted trans killers. For example, earlier this year, a man who uses the name Mia, a son named Bailey, Mia Bailey, was convicted and sentenced in Utah for the killing of his parents. And in the police interrogation video that was publicly released as part of that investigation, he talked about how he didn't believe that his mother was supportive enough of his transition,

• 1:20:15Speaker 02

  that she had allegedly contacted the hospital before he was supposed to have some type of trans surgery, informing them that her son was dealing with a lot of issues.

• 1:20:29Speaker 01

  Typically, people show up for a self-castration or, quote, "dealing with a lot of issues." I think that's fair.

• 1:20:34Speaker 02

  He saw his parents dead and attempted to kill his brother as well, shot through the door, but the rounds didn't hit his brother. So he was sentenced this year to decades in prison for that double murder. And I, as part of my research, I track what leftist activists say online and what I saw from a lot of trans activists, the trans Antifa-aligned type people. I call them "trans-ifa," that's the term I use. They thought that what Mia Bailey did was justified and right. They believe that those who are not supportive of one's transgender identity should be eliminated. That's a lot of their view.

• 1:21:18Speaker 02

  And with the ongoing criminal case against Tyler Robinson, and according to investigators, he was motivated to assassinate Charlie Kirk out of love and support for his transfery partner. There are trans activists online who have been highly sympathetic to that. And so, week after week, there's cases of trans-identified individuals who are being arrested and charged. And it's getting really no media attention for a number of reasons. One, a lot of people aren't even aware that the suspect is trans.

• 1:22:01Speaker 02

  And two, in legacy media, there's, people are essentially trained to cover up. I mean, if you read the AP Style Guide, and that's the guidance for print journalists, I was trained in AP Style. Their recent style guides have all been updated to where you don't use terms like biological female or biological male. You don't mention that somebody is transgender unless it's somehow really relevant to the story. You use their preferred name and their preferred pronouns.

• 1:22:35Speaker 01

  You pretend it's all real. You go along with a lie.

• 1:22:38Speaker 02

  And mislead people. And so, the Zizian is the very comprehensive telling of what that group did and the truth of who they are. If you read the legacy media reporting on the Zizians, and there hasn't been very many, but it's referring to Ziz, or she/her, and this woman who wanted to just save the world from AI risk. And somehow, in the end, they're now being accused of all this violence. Some of the reporting has been oddly, actually not oddly, it's predictable, sympathetic to some of the Zizians.

• 1:23:14Speaker 01

  If you're concerned about AI risk, it's because you don't want people to be hurt by AI. So, I mean, consider the irony of murdering people who were not even connected to the development of AI because you're worried about AI. It doesn't make any sense at all. And by the way, these are all people who directly or indirectly have contributed to the rise of AI because they work in Silicon Valley. So like, they're the perpetrators.

• 1:23:37Speaker 02

  There's sort of an adjacent analogy or anecdote that I can draw that I think maybe viewers might understand a bit more. So think about--

• 1:23:49Speaker 02

  Consider like last year, the, the death threats that Elon Musk got after there were various cuts to USAID. And that was actually quite, there was a significant number of leftists who were actively calling for his murder. And in their view, he should be murdered because his agenda with cuts in the federal government is causing people to die. So therefore, he should be stopped, he should be killed. So it's just very simply this sort of, this in their calculation, and this is not a fringe

• 1:24:29Speaker 02

  belief amongst radical leftists, is somebody who is harming our agenda should be taken out.

• 1:24:38Speaker 01

  Are they all atheists? Any of these people believe in a god of some kind?

• 1:24:44Speaker 02

  The Zizians and the rationalist and effective altruists are atheists. However, what I discovered in the course of my reporting investigations is that the Zizians took on various occult-like elements, such as cursing people with spells and hexes. That was, it surprised me, but the more I thought about-

• 1:25:08Speaker 01

  It's also obviously witchcraft to me.

• 1:25:11Speaker 02

  Well, initially, I was surprised when I found out evidence of this that had been documented, but then I thought about all the Antifa militants that I've reported on, who profess to be radical anarchists and atheists, will embrace witchcraft and pagan beliefs as well.

• 1:25:39Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 1:25:40Speaker 02

  So there's this, uh, this is connection between-

• 1:25:43Speaker 01

  Well, they're being motivated by demons, so that's all real, in my opinion. So I'm not surprised at all. I am surprised that two years into this administration, we still haven't seen a systematic attempt to understand what Antifa is and who pays for it. Where's that?

• 1:25:59Speaker 02

  I actually think the administration has done a good job. Uh, I'll name out sort of the, the things that have been taken by the federal government. A lot of people forget or don't remember what's happened. So in the autumn of last year, Donald Trump announced that his administration would be treating Antifa as domestic terrorists. It was a big executive order. An executive order is just a statement. He had said something very similar in 2020, when the riots were happening, and no action was taken at that time. But from there, then the State Department prescribed banned four European Antifa groups.

• 1:26:40Speaker 02

  So making, making them designated foreign terrorist organizations, meaning that if you provide support for them, you can be criminally prosecuted in the United States. That was the first time an international Antifa group had ever been prescribed by the US government. And then, um, there was the White House Antifa Roundtable, which I was very fortunate to be part of that, where I spoke to the president and members of his cabinet about the threat of Antifa and left-wing violent extremism in the United States. And more recently, there was a international summit held by the State Department in DC

• 1:27:22Speaker 02

  on the threat and rise of left-wing terrorism. And that had officials from dozens of countries around the world participate. And the State Department then also prescribed some more Antifa-aligned groups, in particular, an Italian one that provided the online infrastructure for dozens of Antifa websites, where they post tactics and strategies for attacks, targets of attack, claims of responsibility for terror attacks. So the, the federal government has done a lot, I think. Of course, they can always do more.

• 1:27:59Speaker 01

  Has anyone been charged for sending money to Antifa?

• 1:28:02Speaker 02

  For sending money? I'll tell you what they've been-

• 1:28:05Speaker 01

  Because if I gave money to Hamas or Hezbollah, I'd get an FBI raid at my house.

• 1:28:09Speaker 02

  What makes it difficult in the law is the fact that Antifa is a movement and ideology and is made up of organizations, groups, and cells. It's like all of the above. It's kind of like, think of it how you, you couldn't prosecute somebody, for example, for donating to a neo-Nazi cause, like that's not a crime. But for example, if they donated to a group that was involved in criminal activity, you could be prosecuted.

• 1:28:37Speaker 01

  Well, but if you designated, I mean, I think the designation is the point. So like, all these foreign groups have been designated terror organizations, and therefore, anybody whose money winds up in their hands gets indicted. There have been a million indictments. Seems like you could do that for Antifa.

• 1:28:55Speaker 02

  What's hard about Antifa in terms of the, the criminal prosecution side of it, is that most of the groups in the American context are American, and they operate entirely domestically. They might read materials from the European groups and read, read and learn tactics in terms of like the radical material and texts, but in terms of like coordination on an international level, like money, weapons trafficking, trafficking, things like that, we don't really see that happen. That happens domestically at the US level. So there have been particular groups whose, who have been completely dismantled.

• 1:29:35Speaker 02

  There was a really big case actually earlier this year in, in Texas, a federal prosecution. It was the first time that accused Antifa members of a North Texas Antifa cell had been charged with providing material support to terrorism, attempted murder, and other, many, many other felonies. And it was stemming from a shooting on a ICE facility in Alvarado, Texas, on the 4th of July in 2024. So there were 16 people who were prosecuted. So it was not, not only the cell, but also those who were accused of providing aid, like helping the ringleader to escape from the scene of the attack.

• 1:30:14Speaker 02

  They were all federally charged, and seven of them pleaded guilty ahead of trial, some of them flipped and provided testimony, and nine went to trial, and all of them were convicted. Collectively, they're facing around 500 years in prison for all of them. The, the ringleader of the group was sentenced to 100 years in prison, and they're charged with providing material, they were convicted of providing material support to terrorism, among other crimes. This case really received not much media attention at all, but it was the first Antifa federal prosecution and convictions in US history. After that, there have been 15-

• 1:30:52Speaker 01

  In US history?

• 1:30:53Speaker 02

  Yes. It was the first time that those, that individuals that the US government accused of being part of an Antifa group have been a-

• 1:31:00Speaker 01

  After everything, all those people killed in 2020, this is the first time?

• 1:31:04Speaker 02

  When the federal government is determined and also has popular support, you can see the, what the full force of the government really looks like. I do understand the feeling that we're not seeing those type of resources and, and tools being used to the same extent by far-left, anti-government violent extremists. I understand that frustration. At the same time, with my, um, speaking to individuals and travel to DC to talk about this stuff, I, the barriers that they face legally in terms of like prosecuting Antifa

• 1:31:47Speaker 02

  militants is really different compared to some of these other cases where we've seen, for example, under the Biden administration, what that DOJ was able to do. I think, you know, in, in the case of, um, Texas wasn't the only one, there are still ongoing federal prosecutions now against those accused of being part of the Antifa cells in Minnesota that were involved in organizing the anti-government violence and attacks on federal agents and officials, um, back, uh, earlier this year against ICE. So there, there have been 15 who have been federally prosecuted and are accused in charging documents of being part of an Antifa network. So there are things being done. Of course, we want to see more.

• 1:32:32Speaker 02

  We've seen, at least from the president, talk about, um, the truth of what he sees and what, if any of us as I sees, the rise of trans violence. And, but with all the laws that are out there and the legal protections, like, you know, the, the violent far left really know how to exploit the laws to protect themselves. And-

• 1:33:02Speaker 02

  I think it's a Sisyphean task for the federal government to really dismantle Antifa. Because at the end of the day, even if they criminally prosecute the cells that exist from coast to coast, and there are a lot of them that are involved in criminal activity, by the way, it's very easy for new cells in autonomous groups to form because the ideology is spreading, is growing, and it has legitimacy from a lot of Democrats. I was very reluctant to come to that view. For a long time, I thought that maybe Democrats were just slightly misguided with their rhetorical

• 1:33:45Speaker 02

  and legal support for Antifa criminal suspects. But actually, in many, we've had now, I've had now 10 years of reporting on left-wing political violence in instances where suspects are carrying out violent attacks and still garner the support of Democrats in power, like in Portland, for example, and many, many other jurisdictions. My only conclusion is, they are completely fine with using these militant cells or food soldiers. So, the Antifa ideology has a lot of support. There's a lot of money as well, you know, there's questions about money.

• 1:34:25Speaker 02

  It comes really through people who donate to what they call mutual aid causes, which is essentially terms for like, projects that provide support in one way or the other. It can be in the form of housing or food, or most importantly, legal defense. They have access to a lot of money from rich donors giving, and large groups of people donating small amounts. I mean, the amount of money that was raised, for example, the Texas Antifa, they raised significant funds. They've had huge support in left-wing media, particularly after the convictions. It was, all this reporting was treating them as people who were sentenced to decades

• 1:35:08Speaker 02

  in prison based on ideology, when none of them were willing to report out the facts of what we learned at the trial because of all the numbers who had flipped and provided evidence for the prosecution. The type of organization that happened, the planning, the training, the gathering of dozens of firearms, where they met at the safe house before the shooting attack. You know, and that's just one particular anecdote, but it's emblematic of how left-wing violence and trans violence, at least four members, by the way, of that Texas Antifa cell are trans. They are completely protected by many people with money and in positions of power, who have the ability to influence.

• 1:35:53Speaker 01

  That's obvious. May I ask you one last question? Is there, did you run across in your reporting, any evidence that the use of cross-sex hormones inspires violence?

• 1:36:03Speaker 02

  There's a whole chapter in my book looking at all the academic literature-

• 1:36:08Speaker 01

  The physiological effect of this stuff.

• 1:36:09Speaker 02

  -seeking to answer this particular question. I'm gonna say that people who want to know what the academic literature says, should read my book, but to summarize, there hasn't been enough research that's been done.

• 1:36:25Speaker 01

  Seems like it would scramble your eggs to have cross-sex hormones injected into your body, no?

• 1:36:30Speaker 02

  I will say that some of the limited research that has been done has shown that in polling of people who have been prone to radicalization, one of the predictors of that particularly violent radicalization has been a transgender identity. And this is research that was done out of Canada, by the way. Very few people know about some of this academic peer-reviewed research, but it's very limited because, one, academics who seek to ask these type of research questions are not supported in their academic departments. It's all captured, you're very familiar with the status of academe. Two, the funding for this type of research is not there.

• 1:37:14Speaker 02

  And three, those who dare, in academia, to transgress against transgender ideology get absolutely destroyed. Academic after academic after academic has been hounded out for asking some of these questions about this phenomenon of transgenderism. Just the fact that we're seeing a huge explosion in people in the last five to 10 years, suddenly identifying as trans when the numbers before were tiny. Like, what are the questions behind all of this? It needs academic research, it's not happening? There's been some, and I dive into that research, into this book.

• 1:37:55Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, hormone surges make you crazy. That's called the teenage years, or menopause, or, you know, any time, you know, radical reduction in testosterone levels in men affect their thinking and behavior. So you, it just stands to reason that like, massive doses of the wrong hormones, who knows what that does to you?

• 1:38:13Speaker 02

  There's been some research on the effects of mood through cross-sex hormone therapy in transgender identifying individuals. You would not be surprised to hear that increased aggression is something that's been observed.

• 1:38:30Speaker 01

  You think? Ask anyone who's undergoing treatment for prostate cancer, where very often testosterone levels are lowered.

• 1:38:39Speaker 02

  You're like, essentially chemically castrated as a man, yes.

• 1:38:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, and for medical reasons, I mean, it's voluntary, and it may be worth it, but like, talk to the guys who go through it, totally changes you. So like, I think we should think about the physiological effects of all these chemicals.

• 1:38:54Speaker 02

  And also ask questions about what happens when that is merged with an ideology that tells people to collect wounds and grievances-

• 1:39:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:06Speaker 02

  -and to take out firearms to get revenge.

• 1:39:09Speaker 01

  Narcissism makes you violent, no doubt. Andy, thank you for this. Good luck, I'm sure you've thought through the security implications of writing this book. I'm sure they're real, so, Godspeed.

• 1:39:20Speaker 02

  Thank you.