A member of the radical Zizians sect has been charged with murdering her own parents in their Pennsylvania home — and the establishment press can barely bring itself to explain what this group actually believes.
Michelle Zajko, 30, was charged Wednesday with murder, burglary, and conspiracy in the shooting deaths of Rita and Richard Zajko in Chester Heights on New Year's Eve 2022, Delaware County District Attorney Tanner Rouse announced. Rouse said Zajko did not act alone. The couple was killed hours after Rita Zajko texted her estranged daughter attempting to reconcile, according to the Boulder Daily Camera. A neighbor's doorbell camera captured a car pulling up, a voice shouting "Mom!" and another crying out, "Oh my God! Oh, God, God!"
Here is the stake: this is a group now linked to six deaths across the country — including the January 2025 shooting death of U.S. Border Patrol Agent David Maland in Vermont. Zajko herself is charged with providing the gun that killed him. Yet all three outlets covering this charge — the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Boulder Daily Camera, and WDIV ClickOnDetroit — bury the Zizians' ideology in a single passing clause, if they mention it at all.
What the Zizians actually believe matters. According to the Daily Camera and WDIV, the group consists of "young, highly intelligent computer scientists who appear to share radical beliefs about veganism, animal rights, gender identity and artificial intelligence." That one sentence is all you get from the mainstream press. No further exploration of the online radicalization pipeline that produced this sect. No examination of how extreme animal-rights ideology and gender-identity fixation fused into something lethal. No curiosity about the AI-obsessed worldview that apparently justifies killing your own parents on your birthday.
The group's leader, Jack "Ziz" LaSota — referred to with female pronouns by attorneys, consistent with the group's gender-identity radicalism — was arrested alongside Zajko and Daniel Blank in Maryland in February 2025 after a landowner complained about suspicious people parked in box trucks on his property. Police described them as having "ties with the Zizians Cult," the AJC reported. All three face state charges of trespassing and illegal gun and drug possession; LaSota faces an additional federal charge of illegal gun possession by a fugitive. A judge has granted a competency evaluation for LaSota in the federal case.
Zajko has denied any involvement in her parents' deaths. In court filings, she suggested her father killed her mother and then himself. "I didn't murder my parents," she wrote in an April 2025 "Open Letter to the World." She has also claimed authorities arrested the Maryland trio to prevent them from exonerating Teresa Youngblut, who has pleaded not guilty to murder in the Vermont Border Patrol shootout and could face the death penalty if convicted.
The body count tied to this online cult now stands at six: a California landlord killed after the group attacked him, one of their own killed during that attack, the Zajkos in Pennsylvania, and the Vermont shootout that killed Agent Maland and another Zizian. Yet the framing across all three outlets treats the ideology as an afterthought — a curiosity to be noted and then dropped.
The AJC, for its part, delivered the most garbled account, with portions of its text appearing reversed or corrupted — a fitting metaphor for how the establishment handles radicalism that doesn't fit the preferred narrative of right-wing extremism.
LaSota's attorneys say their client eschews the term "Zizian" and denies forming a cult. That is the defense's right. But the public has a right to understand what ideas produced six corpses and a dead federal agent — and the press has an obligation to explain it.
The question the outlets won't ask: if this cult's ideology centered on anything other than progressive-adjacent fixations — veganism, gender identity, AI — would the details still be this buried?
