In November 2019, LaSota, Emma Borhanian, 31, Gwen Danielson and Alexander Leatham, 29 were arrested at a protest outside a Northern California retreat center where a rationalist group was holding an event.
Jack LaSota, 34, of Berkeley, California, published a dark and sometimes violent blog under the name Ziz and, in one section, described her theory that the two hemispheres of the brain could hold separate values and genders and “often desire to kill each other.”.
The killing of U.S. Border Patrol Agent David Maland near the Canadian border last month and five other homicides in Vermont, Pennsylvania and California have been tied to a cultlike group.
In 2022, landlord Curtis Lind went to court to evict Borhanian, LaSota, Leatham and other tenants who had stopped paying rent at a Vallejo, California, property.
When LaSota left the rationalists behind, she took with her a group of “extremely vulnerable and isolated” followers, Anna Salamon, executive director of the Center for Applied Rationality, told the San Francisco Chronicle.
