I wrote about this group/cult of trans "rationalists" last week. People connected to the group are suspected in a series of murders across the country, from Vallejo, California to a small town in Vermont. Today, the SF Chronicle published a story detailing the group's history starting with their plan to create a fleet of boats run by like-minded individuals. At the center of all of this was Jack Amadeus “Ziz” LaSota, a trans woman and a "rationalist" whose views gradually became more extreme, plus another trans woman named Gwen Danielson.

They were part of a Bay Area intellectual movement and subculture, called rationalism, whose followers coalesced, in online forums and at communal homes and gatherings in Berkeley, around their desire to improve human cognition and their fears about runaway artificial intelligence.

LaSota and Danielson were also transgender and vegan, factors that heavily influenced them; they believed trans women were intrinsically gifted. They dreamed of assembling a fleet of vessels like the Caleb to host a like-minded community of vegan and transgender rationalists living off the grid. They would call it the “Rationalist Fleet,” or “Rat Fleet.

Danielson owned a small sailboat and for a while they both lived on it but eventually developed the idea of the "Rat Fleet" and went to Alaska to buy an old WWII era tugboat called the Caleb.

“We both recognized housing as one of the most obvious problems with the Bay area rationalist community, and decided to start a federated fleet of boats in order to cause rationalists to have cheaper housing in order to improve the rate of work on AI safety,” Danielson wrote on her blog.

They ultimately set their sights on the Caleb, a tugboat in Ketchikan, Alaska, that was selling for a good price.

They got the boat cheap and sailed it back to California. But they had no place to keep it in the harbor so they anchored outside the harbor loaded with thousands of gallons of diesel. When the Coast Guard came aboard for an inspection, they found "“an imminent threat to the public health." But instead of doing something to mitigate the problem, Danielson and Ziz apparently bought two more boats. Meanwhile, the Caleb was too big to leave anchored at sea and drifted into a couple other boats in 2017. Locals referred to the group living on the boats as "feral humans."

“Feral humans we called them,” the employee said. “They’re just living, trying to get away with whatever they can under the wire. Most harbors have them, harbor rats that are just living the alternative lifestyle.”

Soon after they got tired of life at sea and decided what they needed were a fleet of RVs to live in. In the meantime they had befriended the only person at the harbor who had a bigger boat than the Caleb, a man named Curtis Lind. Lind retired and sold his boat and moved to Vallejo, CA where he owned some property. Ziz and the others made a deal to pay rent for two RVs and space to park several box trucks on Lind's property. The price was $2,000 a month. Not everyone liked the new tenants.

Lind’s friend, Patrick McMillan, was much more suspicious of members of the group, who would sometimes walk around the property nude. He testified later that Danielson was the “mouthpiece” of the group and, in their first conversation, asked McMillan to buy her a gun. “She said she was in some sort of litigation and she was having problems with it,” McMillan said.

A few months into their Vallejo stay, the group stopped paying rent, citing COVID laws preventing evictions.

Meanwhile, Ziz was in trouble over the Caleb. The county decided it was not seaworthy and ordered the owners to remove it but no one responded. A lawsuit was filed by the harbor district and in 2022 Danielson moved it to a work dock and left it there. The harbor wound up paying about six figures to have a salvage company remove hazardous waste from the Caleb. And this is when friends claimed Ziz had fallen off a boat at sea and drowned. It later turned out Ziz had faked his own death to avoid legal troubles involving the Caleb.

Back in Vallejo, Lind made plans to have the group evicted from his property but they learned of the plans a day or two before the police were to show up. Several members of the group attempted to murder Lind using knives and a samurai sword. He in turn shot two of them, killing one. But despite being run through with a sword, Lind survived and was set to testify in an attempted murder trial against his attackers. And then last month, just before he was set to testify, Lind was murdered at his property. 

The person being charged with that crime is Maximilian Snyder. Snyder had taken out a marriage license to marry Teresa Youngblut, though it seems they never married. Youngblut is one of two people who attacked a Border Patrol agent in Vermont. The agent had pulled over Youngblut and a trans activist named Felix Bauckholt, both of them were armed and opened fire. Prior to the shooting Bauckholt had reportedly been living in North Carolina with Ziz.

Jack "Ziz" LaSota, the leader of the trans terror cell linked to six known deaths, is at large.

I can exclusively report that LaSota was living with Felix "Ophelia" Bauckholt in Chapel Hill, N.C. for many months leading up to the now-deceased German male's involvement in the… pic.twitter.com/kznGf2qk86

— Andy Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) February 3, 2025

In all, people connected to the group are believed to be involved in as many as six murders. But "Ziz" and Danielson are still on the run from authorities.

As for the Caleb, the old hulk seems like a perfect metaphor for this entire group. It drifted out to sea and smashed on some rocks near Mavericks. Estimates are that it would cost $2 million to remove it.