Report: ‘Zizian’ Trans Cult Connected To Multiple Killings

As President Donald Trump was taking office earlier this month, a Border Patrol agent was shot and killed during a traffic stop in Northern Vermont. According to a report by Andy Ngo in the New York Post, this was just one killing in an intricate web of deaths across the nation connected to a violent transgender cult.

“Witnesses, contacts, and journalists trying to reveal who the members are and where they may be are at risk of violence,” Ngo told The Federalist. “I hope law enforcement does anything and everything it can to dismantle this terror group.”

Teresa “Milo” Conseulo Youngblut, a female student at the University of Washington who identifies as transgender, is accused in the shooting death of Border Patrol Agent David Maland, an Air Force veteran, on the side of a highway near the Canadian border on Jan. 20. Agents returned fire, killing Youngblut’s companion, German national Felix “Ophelia” Bauckholt, a man who identified as a woman. 

While investigating Youngblut and Bauckholt’s Toyota Prius, authorities found ammunition clips, a ballistic helmet, hollow-point ammo, lodging information, night-vision goggles, pistols, radios, and “a dozen electronic devices, some of which were wrapped in foil,” according to the New York Post. 

The vehicle had North Carolina plates. Youngblut and Bauckholt had previously lived in the same North Carolina neighborhood, according to KRON 4. “The thing that struck me the most was that there was a stretcher in the living room,” the owner of Bauckholt’s former unit told the local outlet. “The hair on the back of my neck is still up.”

The suspects’ guns had been purchased by a “person of interest” in unsolved murders — Michelle Jacqueline Zajko, who identifies as “trans” and “nonbinary,” according to the Post. Zajko’s parents, Rita and Richard, were mysteriously killed in Pennsylvania two years ago.

Zajko had purchased land in Vermont close to the deadly shooting, and has connections to a cult led by a man named Jack LaSota, who claims to be a woman and has gone by the nickname “Ziz” as well as the name Andrea Phelps. The Newport Dispatch, an independent local outlet, reported that Bauckholt became involved with the “Zizians” in 2023. Youngblut’s parents had reported her missing in May last year, telling police they lost contact and that she was in a controlling relationship.

Youngblut had filed a marriage application in November with 22-year-old Maximilian Bentley Snyder, who graduated from the same high school and went by “any pronouns,” according to The New York Post. According to ABC 7, police arrested him on Jan. 17 for murdering 82-year-old Curtis Lind in Vallejo, Calif. Lind was slated to testify against “Zizians” who allegedly attacked him in 2022, Ngo reported.

“Three young adults” had attacked Lind, on whose Vallejo property they were squatting, on Nov. 13, 2022, according to a GoFundMe set up for the victim’s family. Lind shot and killed one of the assailants. “He miraculously survived being stabbed multiple times, had a sword impaled through his chest and ultimately lost his right eye,” the GoFundMe post said. 

Lind’s attackers were reportedly followers of “Ziz,” and the elderly man was preparing to testify against them when Snyder allegedly slit his throat.

The “Zizians” are “highly educated trans vegan ‘rationalists’ who hold fringe, esoteric ideological beliefs about transhumanism and animal rights,” Ngo wrote in the New York Post. Leader Jack LaSota — “Ziz” — is “accused of influencing followers to kill.” 

According to the Post, LaSota has a warrant for his arrest out of Delaware County, Pa., the area where Zajko’s parents were found mysteriously dead. He apparently faked his own death in San Francisco Bay in 2022, in what Ngo reported was likely an attempt “to try to escape the law.”

Ngo, a journalist who exposes violent left-wing extremists, has been trying to sound the alarm since “multiple members of the cell are still at large,” he said on X, adding that he spoke with the FBI.

“I don’t know if the FBI has a grasp really of the seriousness of this case, because there are individuals who are at large who have access to weapons and may be potentially dangerous,” Ngo said in a video he posted to X.

Logan Washburn is a staff writer covering election integrity. He is a spring 2025 fellow of The College Fix. He graduated from Hillsdale College, served as Christopher Rufo’s editorial assistant, and has bylines in The Wall Street Journal, The Tennessean, and The Daily Caller. Logan is from Central Oregon but now lives in rural Michigan.