The news has been full of reports about the Zizians, America’s latest and greatest creepy new cult which shot to the top of the headlines after two of its members murdered a border patrol agent.

The group centers around Jack LaSota who renamed himself ‘Ziz’ and began claiming that different parts of the brain could have different genders. This led to a split with a ‘Rationalist’ movement best described as futurists interested in AI and applying ideas from computer science to human thinking.

Like a lot of internet rabbit holes, the two websites associated with the ‘Rationalist’ movement, Less Wrong and Slate Star Codex, seemed to have attracted their share of crazies. Most of these people are highly intelligent programmers, but some proved to be quite neurotic and transgenderism was apparently one fault line.

Another was militant veganism.

The ‘Zizians’ broke ties with their families, relocated to remote areas, and relied on mobile box trucks for living quarters, but like a lot of ‘van life’ folks found out that still required them to find land to live on. That led them to murder an 82-year-old man who had been providing space for them, and murder another elderly couple who were the parents of one of their members. The murder of a border patrol agent by a transgender member finally led to more immediate action against the group and ‘Jack’ or ‘Ziz’ was finally arrested.

Beyond fodder for true crime podcasts, what the story really tells us is that leftist culture is inherently extreme and violent. And the transgender movement is far more likely to victimize than to be the victims.