[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] There have been eight deaths—six alleged killings and at least two suicides—linked to a radical group known as the Zizians.

Investigative journalist Andy Ngo, who has been at the forefront of studying far-left violence, reveals how an extreme version of Silicon Valley rationalist philosophy and effective altruism gave rise to an apparent death cult.

His latest book is titled “The Zizians: Inside a Trans Death Cult.”

Ngo believes there’s a “clustering” effect at the most extreme fringes of transgender ideology, where psychiatric vulnerabilities, easy access to cross-sex hormones, and a persistent activist narrative of a “trans genocide” have combined to create a deadly feedback loop.

In this episode, Ngo unpacks a disturbing landscape. How can online networks recruit and radicalize vulnerable youths? How did the Zizians form, and what have they done across the United States? And why have there been no trials?

Producer’s Note: Six alleged Zizians are currently in custody. None have been convicted. The claims discussed in this interview remain allegations.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:

Andy Ngo, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Andy Ngo:

Thank you for having me on.

Mr. Jekielek:

So you recently posted something. The Zizians have this in common with Antifa and Trantifa. They believe it is self-defense to take acts of preemptive violence against their targets. The Zizians call it vengeance. So unpack this for me. Who are the Zizians? Explain to me their use of violence.

Mr. Ngo:

So, most people are aware of my journalism through my many years of reporting on Antifa. I’ve been on this platform, and have spoken with you many times over the years about that reporting. And going back to 2020 was really the first time that I started paying attention that there was a gender ideology component to the violent extremism I was witnessing on the streets of Portland, Oregon, where I used to live. But back then, I was still learning a lot about Antifa and documenting their tactics of domestic terrorism across the United States and beyond. 

And during the BLM [Black Lives Matter] Antifa riots of 2020, when I was gathering the arrest records of violent suspects night after night after night in Portland and also other jurisdictions, there was an interesting pattern that emerged, which is that a disproportionate number of those suspects don’t identify with their biological sex. Some of them identify as male to female, or female to male, or non-binary, or some other gender diverse identity. So it was a question mark in the back of my mind. I was like, this is interesting, it’s odd. 

At that time, six years ago, very few of us were aware of transgender ideology or its movements or its agenda or its aims. And I myself was one of those people who was ignorant. I was attacked a number of times, a victim of violence, and people are probably aware of that. I’ve discussed it a lot. People have seen the pictures and videos. And I’ve been living in exile now for six years because of that violence from violent Antifa and the extremist far-Left. 

I was unable to get justice through law enforcement in the criminal justice system in Portland. So I tried to pursue justice through the civil courts and I sued a number of individuals, many alleging that they were part of these attacks. And there was also another interesting pattern that emerged there, which was that half of them are trans identifying.

Mr. Jekielek:

But you didn’t intentionally pick them that way. These were just people that you knew to have been alleged, we'll use the term allegedly.

Mr. Ngo:

There was no intention at all of picking people who were so-called gender diverse. It was just something that I realized after I was able to uncover the identities of some of these massed militants and violent extremists. And then, whilst living abroad, there have been a number of atrocities, killings, and attempted killings committed by trans-identifying individuals—a number of brutal attacks and killings on some of the most vulnerable, including children, by trans shooters and killers. All of that was building up to me being very attuned to the phenomenon going on here that isn’t being discussed much.

Transgenderism is a big political issue, yes. It’s been discussed many times by activists, politicians, and intellectuals from many different angles. We’ve heard a lot about its effect on women’s rights, children’s rights, and the medical consequences of medicalizing and transitioning minors and developing children. That’s been written about by very brilliant people.I think one area of discussion and research that hasn’t been talked about enough, if at all, is what’s behind the rise of trans violence.

So, a year-and-a-half ago, when I learned about the ambush and killing of a U.S. Border Patrol agent in rural Vermont, I found out that the two individuals who are alleged to have been involved in that murder are trans-identifying. Then I found out they have links to other trans-identifying people on the West Coast, one of whom had just been arrested for the murder of an elderly key witness in an upcoming murder and attempted murder trial. So I was drawing all these links, and I kept digging more and more. Then I said, this is more than isolated acts of deadly violence where people just happen to be trans. 

They know one another, they have communicated with one another, and they even live together. And their writing seemed to indicate that they function not merely as a group, a group of friends, or even comrades in the sense of how Antifa used it, but actually, they’re a cult. They had specific beliefs about how they could be part of the vanguard to save the world, but in their ideology, saving the world means killing humanity, killing humans.

So you started off this interview asking, who are the Zizians? To make sense of that tweet that you read out that I posted, the Zizians are a violent transgender cult with links in Silicon Valley. Its origins are about a decade old. They’re called the Zizians because the cult leader, whose real name is Jack LaSota, adopted the alias Ziz. Hence, his followers have been dubbed the Zizians.

Mr. Jekielek:

And just if I may, Ziz actually comes from something else, like it’s some sort of bizarre creature. Can you just explain that too?

Mr. Ngo:

All of the actions of the Zizians, the members, even the ones that on the surface look coincidental, are not coincidental. Almost 10 years ago, Jack LaSota picked the name Ziz, which is a monster female character from a pretty obscure online fantasy serial that nerds and geeks like to read. But the thing about that character in the story is that it’s able to cause catastrophic damage and mass death by turning people into walking time bombs. So it’s not outright a monster killing victims that it crawls past, but is able to affect people where later on, without anybody knowing, they turn deadly. 

And if the criminal accusations against Mr. Jack LaSota are true, he appears to have done that to those in his group. Because the legacy of the Zizians is that there are at least eight known violent deaths and suicides across the U.S. and also abroad. And so I brought up in the post about one thread that does run between the Zizians and Trantifa and Antifa: grievance ideology that turns violent.

The Zizians pulled from many different beliefs. They started off as rationalists and ineffective altruists, but then they also developed very esoteric beliefs about gender and the brain. They’re made up of members who are primarily male geeks and nerds with very impressive backgrounds in STEM [science, technology, engineering, mathematics]. Jack LaSota himself comes from an engineering background; he had worked for NASA [National Aeronautics and Space Administration] at one point. He was a graduate student in engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign before dropping out and moving to Silicon Valley to join the rationalist and effective altruist groups. 

At that time and today, these groups draw a certain type of person, primarily male, young, smart, likely autistic, who are atheists and are interested in using their skills in math and reasoning to come up with complicated models and algorithms as if they could solve some of the biggest problems of the world through computations. So, when I describe this movement of really brilliant geeks and nerds in Silicon Valley using complicated mathematical models to answer very big and deep questions—problems that they thought could be solved—it might sound a little bit weird and odd to people who are watching and listening. 

But we’re actually hearing a lot about this community now, not in regards to the Zizians, but those who were former developers and engineers at Anthropic and OpenAI who identify as effective altruists, and they’re warning about the existential risks from AI. This is not a new debate, not a new concern. It’s been going on for over a decade.

Mr. Jack LaSota, when he moved to Silicon Valley, was very deeply interested in those questions about what do we do when AI becomes a superintelligence? Without the proper safeguards in place in the modeling development of that superintelligent AI, it could wreak havoc on the world. That’s a very legitimate concern. 

But a lot of the other things that many of the effective altruists and rationalists were focused on, because they were using utilitarian calculations to decide where to put their energy, time, and money, in addition to the debates about AI safety, they also focus endlessly on things such as the welfare of shrimps, prawns, and insects. And as atheists, you know, there’s no real moral grounding for them that a human life is more valuable than some other sentient life, whether it be some type of animal that we eat or that humans kill for resources. 

So for them, using math models, you can see how they can come to this conclusion that even if a very small percentage of shrimps have sentience, the fact that there are billions and billions and billions of them being killed or at the risk of dying because of climate change.There’s more of them than there are of humans. So, in order to maximize good, which was the guiding agenda for the effective altruists, that’s what they were focused on.

So, in the early years—I'll call him by his alias—you could view that it was a bit harmless, but because radical ideas were embraced, therefore radicalism was also welcomed. And for Jack LaSota, he thought that there wasn’t enough actually being done about the existential risks from AI. And his concern wasn’t about saving humanity, or the risks that an unaligned AI could do to human life. For him, it was about how it could destroy the environment, perhaps, or create a way where animals die. And Ziz was a very radical vegan. 

And so he met some other people whom he eventually recruited into his group. And he is looking for a few traits. In his writings, he left behind essentially a manifesto online that is now backed up in archives by other people and is still radicalizing individuals out there. But he explains his beliefs and how he got to his ideas. And he actually doesn’t really explain how transgenderism became very important to him at some point. 

The Zizians believed that they needed to find and create this vanguard of these individuals, very small, tiny numbers of people in the world who were naturally born gifted with a good brain, where at least one of the hemispheres of the brain is good, better if both sides are good. So they have very strange beliefs and hypotheses about the brain that they do draw from scientific literature, some aspects of it. A human brain has two hemispheres.The Zizians believe that for most of humanity both sides are evil and those are the people that should be killed and should die off.

Mr. Jekielek:

Hence, you are describing it as a death cult.

Mr. Ngo:

Exactly. Death is very central to the group’s goals. They believed that a very small percentage of people would have one good brain, but because the hemispheres are linked through very many nerves, they needed to come up with a way that the two hemispheres could be separated. So they started doing human experimentation. It involved different types of sleep deprivation. 

They developed very certain hypotheses about certain ways of sleeping, covering certain eyes that would essentially leave an individual who went through these tests to disassociate. Some of their early recruits went through the experiments. These were trans-identifying individuals. They destabilized, may have become, entered states of psychosis, and several of them killed themselves. 

And Ziz viewed their deaths as merely part of his data gathering. As a cult leader, Ziz was quite unapologetically sociopathic in that he never even feigned having any compassion for other people or any semblance of grief if somebody he had crossed paths with, who was his friend, who followed his tests in his experiments, killed himself. There was no grief at all for that.

Mr. Jekielek:

And, you know, I want to jump in here because something that was incredibly disturbing to me from what you wrote was that it seemed like he, what didn’t necessarily start off psychopathic, but he decided this is actually a good way to be, or something like that.

Mr. Ngo:

Exactly. Perhaps one of his most well-known essays is called, My Journey to the Dark Side. And in it, he literally said to reject morality. And by that, he means, embrace sociopathy. So he believes that people are conditioned not to be rational, right? Either through a religious worldview or through social norms, whatever. And for people that he was seeking to recruit to be part of this vanguard, he was seeking out sociopaths. 

As the group became more radical, eventually they were too radical for the Bay Area rationalist community. They weren’t welcome at many of the meetups and gatherings in intellectual spaces anymore.  But at that point, this would have been around 2018, 2019, Ziz didn’t feel like he needed those people anymore. He was able to, at that point, already recruit a handful of individuals that he believed possessed the correct traits to become part of this vanguard to save the world. 

And so they began living on communes, first on boats in very poor condition at sea, and then eventually in trailers and box trucks. And they cut off ties to their families and the rationalist community and the outside world. Eventually, as they had time to really form their own beliefs and develop them further, the transgender grievance ideology became one of the main pillars in the sense that they believe that all the woes they were having, either through the criminal justice system at that point, this is before they are alleged to have been involved in any murderous violence, by the way, but they were in some legal trouble. 

This would have been around 2022. They believed that the reason why they were rejected by other rationalists, why others were seeking to disrupt their activities, or that law enforcement and courts were seeking to oppress them was because they were trans. So their sense of misanthropic hatred really intensified with this sense of what they believed was a transphobic world that was persecuting them, which they have in common actually not with extremist trans activists, but the mainstream trans community. If you look at what mainstream trans organizations say, they say there’s an ongoing trans genocide. 

They highlight events such as the Transgender Day of Remembrance, which, removing context about the deaths of various few trans people who are murdered in the United States each year, they always frame it around this accusation that transphobia is all around us, just like how other leftists say that there’s white supremacy all around us and there’s fascism all around us. For the Zizians and also for some trans individuals, it leads some of them to stockpile and acquire deadly firearms and take up action. One of the Zizian members who joined later on, Michelle Zyko, in her own writings, sounded very much like the Trantifa that I’ve reported on before. 

By the way, Trantifa, I’ve been using that word and I realize a lot of people might not have heard of it. It’s a term I coined, it’s a portmanteau of trans and Antifa, describing the transgender-identifying individuals whose militancy on the violent far-Left in anarchist politics is merged. It’s a phenomenon we do see that I’ve reported on a lot, and I think there needs to be a term for it. 

So, one of the Zizian members talked about how other trans people, other queer people need to form their own affinity groups, which is the anarchist language, the radical left language for forming the cell. And some of the criminal accusations against her, which are slowly being adjudicated now, are that she was one of the main people to stockpile and acquire the firearms that she and other Zizian members allegedly used to murder people. So the Zizians were finally captured just last year. None of them have been convicted. There’s a whole string of murders and deaths behind them. 

And they’re not an isolated group in the sense that they do fit into a broader pattern, which is why this book is very important because not everyone is into true crime. I’m not a true crime writer, even though this book fits into that genre. But it’s different in that I explain how the Zizians are part of a pattern of growing trans violence, how there are all these variables in place to create alleged killers like the Zizians, would-be killers, and actual killers who are trans-identifying. Many people have questions about what are the effects of cross-sex hormones on this small population. 

This small population, who by the way is documented as having higher rates of autism, higher rates of mental health comorbidities, higher rates of mood and personality disorders. And then you also introduce in this propaganda from the trans activists that there’s an ongoing trans genocide. And the fact that in the United States, individuals can very easily acquire firearms. I do think that all of these variables coming together is creating a feedback loop, a very deadly feedback loop, one that has resulted in children being massacred, women being killed, and parents being killed. 

We hear a lot from trans activists, very mainstream ones, and their supporters, who say if you don’t accept them, welcome them into the women’s changing rooms, welcome them in girls’ sports, welcome that a three or four-year-old or two-year-old can identify as trans, if you don’t accept all of that, you might end up with them killing themselves.That’s what they say, but I wonder now if the truth actually is that they actually might kill you.

Mr. Jekielek:

You’ve painted a very dark picture here.

Mr. Ngo:

Yes, this book is dark. I’m traumatized by writing it, to be honest. I’ve covered a lot of very ugly, disgusting, cruel things over the years. What I report on is not nice at all. I’ve experienced nearly dying myself by those who sought to kill me and bloodied me and bashed in my head and face. And I’ve also reported on people in Portland who have been maimed, including a person who was murdered by Antifa before. But I was really not prepared for this.

With that being said, I would still urge that people give this book a chance. It’s not a feel-good book, I’m sorry. It’s not. The world is very ugly. This phenomenon that we’re dealing with in this country, but also other places like Canada, it’s not going away. In fact, it’s getting worse because the propaganda is not just supported by media institutions in the Democrat Party; there’s a lot of money behind it as well. 

We’re fed so many lies about trans. We are manipulated into using the fake language, which in this book, I was very intentional. And I explain it kind of like a guide to reading this book that everybody is referred to by their legal birth names and also their biological sex. With a lot of trans individuals, and the Zizians are no exception, they adopt multiple different identities through the years to cover up who they actually really are. 

I’ve reported on many trans-identifying violent criminal sex criminals and pedophiles who, under a name like Ashley Marie or Amber Jennifer, these types of names where, oh, there’s nothing tied to anybody with this name in history, until you look at the court records and find out through a lot of digging, which the normal person cannot do as easily. Oh, no, they had a prior name. Under that name, there were accusations against them, criminal accusations, or posts under the former name on their old social media that show very disturbing types of content and sick posts. 

So we’re pressured to use the inaccurate language, we’re pressured to reject science and their various claims that there are infinite sexes and genders in the mammalian species, humans in particular. We are told that if we don’t accept them, they will kill themselves. And this is a lie that I address head-on in the book. 

The evidence shows that suicides don’t lower after people who are trans-identifying go through a medical transition. They don’t. In fact, there’s a lot of research in many different countries, very large studies and research papers that have found that there’s actually an increase in reports of mental health distress from individuals after they transition.

So, with all the lies that we’re told about trans and the lies about the Zizians as well, if people Google this story now and look what Wikipedia or AI pulls up, or read any of the articles, you’re going to come up with this sense that this is a group of women who were interested in AI safety and now they’re accused of or are linked to deaths. And in none of that will you see any mention of the trans ideology, which is very important to this cult, and how they’re linked to a bigger ecosystem. 

So this book was very disturbing to research and uncover, and it was dangerous as well because in the early stages of it, they were still fugitives, and I was quite the face of really exposing this group from the beginning. But for people who have children and want to know more about this phenomenon from this other unexplored angle, which is the violence angle, give this book a chance, please.

Mr. Jekielek:

Now, and just for the record, you’re not equating this group to trans people specifically. You’re just saying that in this particular group, being trans is a central feature, right?

Mr. Ngo:

I’m really glad you say that, and thank you for saying that because I should have initiated comments like that. I am not suggesting through this book or in my writings and reports that all trans people are violent or extreme or at risk of becoming killers. What I am saying, though, and some of the evidence appears to back this up, is that there’s a clustering effect that’s happening at the very tail end of this small population, where you have all of these variables coming together. 

We’re seeing now a new rise of trans killers, something we haven’t seen before. There were no mass, trans mass shooters eight, nine, ten years ago, a decade ago. It was just an unheard-of phenomenon.But there actually is a thread of trans violence that is documented and goes back much further, and people aren’t really connecting the dots. I do in this book. 

For example, in the academic literature, there’s been a documented disproportionate representation of cross-dressing, or what trans activists would say now, transgender women, and these are biological males who either dress as women part-time or full-time. They’re documented in the literature as being overrepresented in violent sex crimes as well, particularly ones that lead to the murder of women.

And so there is a history of trans violence that people aren’t really connecting to what’s happening now, but I do think it’s linked, and it’s becoming more dangerous because now we’re having such easy access to cross-sex hormones for some of the most vulnerable young populations. I write in this book, for example, one of the final Zizian members who joined, and now she’s currently in federal custody, accused of murder, by the way, is Teresa Youngblut from Seattle, Washington. 

When she was 20-years-old, she ran away from home, and she wrote on her blog and her social media that she was able to immediately start cross-sex hormones. It takes nothing to just have an appointment with either a Planned Parenthood or a local clinic in a very Democrat-run jurisdiction like King County in Washington State to come in and come out with these hormones. And the Zizians were using like cocktails of drugs. They were cycling between different kinds of hormones because, and why not, in the sense that, in this world of what we’re told about accepting transgender identifying people, the drugs that they use are life-saving medication. 

So that’s also another way that we’re misled and lied to, and I worry about what the future will bring to all of us if this continues. Because as some Republican-led states have passed legislation to try to roll back the medical transitioning of minors, and that’s also being done at the federal level under the current administration, we’re seeing the radicalism increase in the rhetoric of the trans activists who point to all of this, and some of the Zizian members did too, saying that this is evidence of the genocide against us. And so when you have that belief amongst individuals who are disturbed and unwell, some of them, not all of them, are going to take action. And if you look at the manifestos of some of the trans mass shooters, they reference how disturbed they became because of their obsession with their gender. 

Audrey Hale, the young woman who identified as a male who killed children at the Covenant School in Nashville, her writings, which I quote in this book, her manifesto was released by the FBI, so the public can go and take a look at it. And you can see how many times she mentions her struggles with the fact that she’s trans; she wished that she transitioned earlier. 

The trans mass shooter in Minneapolis who killed children at the Catholic school during mass, he also left behind a manifesto. In fact, what was really curious about that case is that before he carried out the massacre, he also seemed to realize that he had been sold a particular lie about the transition.But for him, it was too late for him to change. And so he felt he needed to go out and go out not alone, but killing other people, children, before that. 

And in his manifesto, one of the final pages on his journal, which by the way had a trans pride sticker on it, he draws an illustration of what looks to be him staring into a mirror. And in the reflection is a demon. So, man, we’re dealing with a lot of things here that are happening all at once and are producing this. And so, I hope that this book can help inform the public that we’re not talking about tolerance and diversity here.

Mr. Jekielek:

Let me pull from some of the things you said, and maybe you can sort of complete the picture for me. But you’re talking about a situation where you have very vulnerable people.We have this policy approach, if you will, of just affirming instantly and offering access to various drugs that affect people dramatically and their moods and everything. So, on the one hand, they’re vulnerable in many cases. They have, as you mentioned, psychiatric comorbidities. 

They get access, they get affirmed fully in the context of this rhetoric that there is some kind of trans genocide, that there’s this active, huge action against this group, and that’s, you know, frankly, pushed in a lot of media. Then you get access to these drugs. And then when it comes to actually, you know, intervening, when people seem to be starting to go off the rails or something like that, it’s very difficult because then you get accused of basically being a transphobe, and so on.

Mr. Ngo:

A transphobe, a genocider. So with the Zizians, one thing that will likely frustrate people as they read the book and are learning the facts is how the members were able to get away with so much from place to place, and how easy it was for them. They knew exactly when, for example, in the Bay Area in California, when they had their first criminal legal issues. They were charged with a number of felonies over one of their direct actions. 

How they were able to draw up that case through frivolous accusations of transphobia against the court, against the sheriff’s deputies, against the judge, and then filing all these motions to try to get another judge alleging that their civil rights had been violated. They were able to get support from Left-wing attorneys and activist groups in one of their civil lawsuits that they filed, alleging that all of these institutions and agencies had violated their civil rights because they’re transgender and they were persecuted for that. 

Meanwhile, all of this bought them time to plan.And Ziz and one of the other Zizians faked their deaths and disappeared. And then, when they emerged on the East Coast, when Ziz was finally found again, he was a person of interest then at that point in a double murder investigation, and he was taken into custody. And they were able to use the same tricks again to buy them time. And a judge lowered the bail from $500,000 to an unsecured bond, which means that the defendant doesn’t have to put down any cash. And his mother appeared at the court and said, I'll make sure that my son goes to all the court hearings. 

One pattern you'll see in this book is how the parents just kept doing everything in their minds to support their children and support their transition, support them in their legal issues, and just provide help. And then Ziz disappeared. When he was finally arrested last year, years after the Pennsylvania thing, he had two warrants for his arrest in several different states. And by that point, there were more deaths. And so there are a lot of people who are trying to create not tolerance and diversity, but really changes in the law and also our norms to allow for trans people to not just have equal rights, but actually to have supra rights, like they’re above us. 

For example, I’m speaking to you now as a hulking tall male who’s trans identifying at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. He was recorded on video saying that he hopes that Republicans get shot in the street, and then after that, he allegedly violently attacked a college Republican student. All these left-wing groups and activist organizations and trans groups have come out and said that the trans person who’s accused and has been criminally cited over that incident, that violent attack, is the one who is the victim. 

And even that suspect, who has released a statement to the media, said that, framing himself as somebody who is a victim of transphobic rhetoric. So there’s a lot of factors here and forces that are really trying to create the conditions for where trans individuals feel that any action they take, such as assault, maiming, or killing, is an act of self-defense. 

So this circles back to your first question. One thing that I learned very early on in my reporting on Antifa is that when they, for example, preemptively bash somebody in the back of the head with some type of melee weapon or ambush somebody and shoot them dead, they don’t argue that that is an act of aggression. What they say is that this is self-defense. If you are a fascist, which is the label they use for people that they want to kill, then by virtue of having those views, by us killing you, we’re protecting ourselves. 

Trans activists are saying that as well now. If you don’t accept our demands, don’t accept our ideology, you’re part of the genocide. You’re creating the conditions for genocide. You’re providing legitimacy to the genocide. Any actions we take against you is self-defense. 

For the Zizians, in their own writings, one of them wrote that vengeance is the act of self-defense. We’re dealing with a lot of violent trans individuals in this country, way beyond the Zizians. The Zizians are just, through my investigation, I was able to reveal all the ways that institutions, law enforcement, courts, have just failed to hold people accountable and are being played by those who know exactly how to exploit sensibilities about transphobia and accusations of bigotry.

At its peak, the Zizians, as a group that was living together in various factions or together as one group, numbered about a dozen, but there are more of them. There are those whom I would call members who didn’t necessarily physically join them full-time on a commune but may have visited them or stayed with them for a stint. There are six of them right now who are in custody in multiple states: Vermont, Pennsylvania, California, and Maryland—four different states. 

This is probably not really a spoiler for the book, but there’s no happy ending to this. There’s no, by the end of the final chapter, everyone’s convicted, everyone’s sentenced, you know, justice was met. No. The status of the cases now is that there hasn’t been a single trial. In one of the murder and attempted murder cases, the only witness to that violent attack was assassinated last year. That was eighty-two-year-old Curtis Lind. 

This was somebody who was a landlord to the Zizians, who treated them very well when nobody else would. So he had his throat slit last year. And this is somebody, by the way, who had survived three years earlier an attempted assassination where he was attacked with knives and a sword and was impaled through the chest and had his eye cut out and was slashed and cut over fifty times across his body. So he made a miraculous recovery. The Zizians disappeared.

Out of nowhere, three years later, one of them waited in the shadows for him in Vallejo, California, and finished the job. Curtis Lynn bled out outside of his property in Vallejo, California. He didn’t survive a second attack. The assassin made sure that he would not be able to testify in court against those who tried to kill him before. 

There’s been a person who was arrested for that assassination, the alleged killer, who is in custody; no trial date yet. And the only other witness to that case, who wasn’t a witness to the actual attack but the aftermath, he’s in his early 80s now and is suffering from multiple strokes.  So the cases have been drawn out repeatedly, and I'll document this book through competency hearings because either through act or through how they actually present, their defense counsel is arguing that my client is not competent to stand trial. It would ultimately lead to being able to make that argument at a trial. 

But competency hearings take months and months. They’re sent to facilities far away for medical testing and evaluation and treatment. One of the Zizians has wasted a lot of court time by refusing simply to eat, to the point where she became anorexic and catatonic. And there have been, with one of the Zizians, at least three attempted escapes from jail. So I went to a court hearing to see some of the Zizians. You know what stood out to me there? 

It wasn’t just the fact that one of the defendants stood up and began screaming about transgenocide and that this was a show trial and that the judge was gently asking him, Ms. Leatham, please stop. This is a six-foot-two, 200-and-something-pound man who required two sheriff’s deputies to get in control. There were supporters in the gallery, Zizian supporters, trans-extremists who were coming in to support their comrades for these hearings.

Mr. Jekielek:

I recently had Sebastian Gorka, the head of counterterrorism at the National Security Council, on the show, and one of the things he talked about was a newfound focus on Left-wing extremism and terrorism. And I’m just curious what your thoughts are about those efforts.

Mr. Ngo:

I think the current administration has done a good job in recognizing that this is a threat that needs to be addressed at a federal government level. Leaving it to local states, often we see that extremism that leads to this type of deadly violence empowered by state institutions. So, the fact that the State Department recently hosted a conference where representatives from dozens of countries around the world went to the U.S. Capitol to have discussions about what their respective countries, as well as what the U.S., was doing to address the rise of Left-wing domestic terrorism, is a problem here. 

One of the big barriers to it has been just the denial that it even exists. But there have been so many politically motivated attacks and killings on the violent Left, and many of those are not prosecuted at the federal level, and many of them are not treated as terrorism crimes in federal prosecutions. I think that’s been a shortcoming in the past. 

However, in the current administration, for example, out of Texas, the federal prosecutors there were able to convict 16 people who were part of an Antifa cell, who were involved in a shooting of a local police officer during an attack on an ICE [U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] facility last year. Sixteen people were federally charged with crimes, including providing material support to terrorism, which had never been done for any Antifa members before. 

Federal prosecutors were able to convict all of them. Seven of them took plea deals. Many of them flipped and testified at the trial against the other nine who wouldn’t plead guilty, and those nine were convicted by a jury. Collectively, all of them are doing over 560 years in federal prison. One of them, the ringleader, was sentenced to 100 years in federal prison. 

These types of sentences and convictions, like terrorism convictions for Antifa members, we haven’t had before. It was historic. There was basically no media at that federal trial, and the only media coverage after was outrage that they were convicted at all. This was despite dozens of witnesses who were called to testify at the trial, and all the evidence that came out from the recovered Signal messages showing that there was a lot of planning that went into this attack: the stockpiling of firearms, the forming of the cell, where they met, where they trained to shoot, and the tactical equipment that they got for the night they carried out the attack. 

But the media coverage is that this is an authoritarian move to suppress political dissent and protests. So, the trans issue we face, it’s not propaganda from the media; it’s lies. That’s what it is. With this administration, there are people in it that really get that this is a problem, and they have a limited amount of time to do something, and they are doing something. 

So, in regards to Antifa and the fact that just a few days ago, actually, one of the programs in the Department of Justice is now soliciting research grant applicants from scholars who are going to research the links between gender dysphoria and violence. They’re seeking to provide significant funding for that. We haven’t seen this before, ever, in any administration. So, they understand it. 

There has to be more research. A lot of this phenomenon that we’re observing is so new that there hasn’t been any research on it. And then, two, that research cannot happen because academic institutions are not going to allow that to happen. So it’s great that the federal government is stepping in and said, we'll provide the funding for it, if you’re not able to get that funding in your academic department, which you won’t, by the way. This government gets it.

Mr. Jekielek:

What do you think young, bright individuals that might happen to watch this interview should watch out for when these are the people that are ending up caught up in all this stuff?

Mr. Ngo:

I’ve gone on some podcasts where a sizable audience in those shows are parents, and so I get asked a variation of this question, and it’s actually one of the most difficult questions because I don’t know what you can do. You know, a parent can try his or her best to really limit social media use or to not allow it for a child, but at some point, even if they go to university, they’re on their own now, and this content and the platforms where there are a lot of predators online are all there, and there are plenty of them, not just on social media. People are aware of Discord, and the Zizians were on Discord. Many sex offenders and sex criminals use Roblox and Minecraft to seek out child victims.

There are other cult-like groups out there as well that are seeking to groom victims, such as the 764 cult, which has had several convictions, including at the federal level recently, of a trans-identifying member of that group, who uses children to produce sexual abuse content that is shared amongst the members, gets them to create violent occult blood rituals on video and on photo, which is disseminated amongst the members, and then to kill themselves in murder-suicide attacks and shootings at schools. 

I’m originally from Oregon. There were two school attacks this year, including at my former high school, Benson High School. There was a 15-year-old boy who released deadly chemicals and severely injured himself but didn’t kill anybody, but did injure others. He’s charged at the state level with domestic terrorism, and federal investigators believe that he had been groomed by the 764 Cult. 

There was recently a deadly shooting at a primary school in Bend, Oregon. Federal investigators also believe that the individual was groomed by this group. A few years ago, there was a 15-year-old girl, Natalie Rutno. I did reporting on this. I spoke to somebody at the school, who was there during the shooting, in Madison, Wisconsin, who shot up a Christian school, her school, killing people, injuring people, and then killing herself. It’s believed that she was groomed by this cult. 

So there are all these groups out there that are seeking people to groom. My little part in maybe trying to address some of these issues is just for readers to become more informed. I often see parents, as busy and tired as they are, particularly if they have younger children, just giving them tablets and phones and letting them do whatever on it, not aware of who’s on the other side.

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, one thing that just struck me as an answer, right, is just keep your kids offline and limit screen time as much as possible, not just because of the addictive nature of the screens themselves, which in itself is a problem, but because of this kind of content, I just have to have that kind of an approach, especially when they’re forming their identity and so forth, because it strikes me from what you’re talking about that this is what these types of people prey on, like the Ziz-type people, that they'll sort of for people that are struggling with that question and trying to develop it, they offer them this as a solution.

Mr. Ngo:

I think what we’re seeing is that people are being recruited into extremist ideologies from every stratum, like age.They can be children, or they can also be adults. The people who became radicalized into the Zizian cult were adults, but many of them were neurodivergent and were genuinely curious and were led to believe that Ziz, being a brilliant and charismatic individual, really was able to come up with an idea on how they could do something really good for this world. But it’s divorced completely from morals; like literally, they’re literally amoral. And ethics, you can see sort of the consequences of their belief system. 

And what I have observed is that type of extremism is not limited to just radical cults. You see it in mainstream society more and more. More and more people feel very comfortable stating openly on the record that they supported the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and they'll celebrate it with costumes or song and dance or poetry. And you know, that actually has a very serious effect on society because it provides the permission for those who will take action to go ahead and move forward, knowing that they will be supported.

Mr. Jekielek:

Andy, a final thought as we finish?

Mr. Ngo:

My book and my reporting are dark and disturbing and unpleasant. But there’s also a message of hope in the fact that you can learn the ways that you are being misled and lied to, and you can do something about it. Very few of us can go out there and become activists and make big changes. We’re working, we’re parents, we have many obligations. But you can put your foot forward and speak the truth. 

The book is not about despair, like these terrible things have happened, and there’s nothing we can do. It’s not that. There is something we can do. I do this type of work, by the way, so that people are informed; informed not just of the fact that there are all of these conditions that can create groups like the Zizians, but that people can also push back on some of the big things that are creating the feedback loops. 

A big problem actually with the trans ideology is the fact that a very small minority of the population with radical beliefs is able to now set their gender for everybody. In the polling, we’ve seen on things such as support for some of the more radical claims of the trans activists, such as, for example, the sporting issue of boys on girls’ teams or men competing professionally against women, a majority of the population is not on board with that.The majority or almost all of the liberal institutions and organs of the left are completely only on one side. And I think a lot of that happens because people stay quiet or they’re not necessarily even aware that they’re being misled or lied to. 

I do believe that a lot of the families who go through with their children’s transition and support it, including many of the family members of the Zizians, they’re believing that, they believe the lies that we’re told that it will, if we don’t, they'll kill themselves, if we don’t, we’re being bigoted, if we don’t, we’re being anti-science, and not everyone recognizes that this is like we’ve been systematically brainwashed. So, there are tools in here actually through what you learn to be able to push back in your own small way.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, Andy Ngo, it’s such a pleasure to have you on.

Mr. Ngo:

Thank you.

This interview was partially edited for clarity and brevity.