A woman from Washington state was charged last week with two federal counts, including the use of a deadly weapon in an assault on a border agent during a traffic stop that occurred on Inauguration Day. During the incident, a border patrol agent was shot and killed. Teresa Youngblut's companion, a German national named Felix Bauckholt, was also killed after he drew his gun.
Youngblut, 21, was wounded during the firefight, while her companion, Bauckholt, was killed. Bauckholt didn't get off a shot, and Youngblut has not as yet been charged in the murder of border agent David C. Maland.
The gun used in the killing of Agent Maland was owned by a person of interest in other homicides in Pennsylvania and California, Maximilian Snyder. Both Youngblut and Snyder may have been members of a violent, radical fringe group described as a "murder gang" by police. Social media posts describe the group as “vegan Sith” according to police records and an interview with people with knowledge of the group, reports the independent news outlet Open Vallejo.
Snyder was previously detained but not charged in connection with a double homicide in Pennsylvania. He was arrested around 12:40 a.m. Friday in Redding, Calif., in connection with the Jan. 17 stabbing death of Curtis Lind, Snyder's former landlord. Lind had been brutally attacked in 2022 by a group believed to be connected to the "vegan Siths" who were living on his property and refused to pay rent. Lind was going to testify in April against members of the group, and it's believed Snyder killed him to prevent his testimony.
Youngblut had been "in frequent contact" with someone in Vallejo, Calif., according to court documents. A records search by VTDigger discovered an application for a marriage license in California for Youngblut and Snyder, although there's no record the two ever got married.
Youngblut and Bauckholt had been under surveillance for several days after a motel clerk called authorities about how the couple was dressed. They were both attired in black tactical gear and "visibly armed," according to court documents. When police questioned them, they said they were in town to look at some property.
They checked out of the motel shortly after the visit by police. After the shootout, federal authorities seized several items, including a ballistic vest, night-vision goggles, a tactical belt with holster, 48 rounds of .380-caliber jacketed hollow-point ammunition, and two hand-held two-way radios, the court records stated. Police also recovered what they described as a "journal" that contained rantings by Youngblut about her acid trips.
The rabbit hole goes even deeper.
The "vegan Sith's" formal name is "Zizians."
Posts in various online forums attributed the attack to a group known as the “Zizians.” Called a cult by some, the group is a radical offshoot of the Rationalist movement, an ideology centered on using scientific techniques to enhance human decision-making. A post warning about the group on Rationalist forum website LessWrong.com named Dao, Leatham and Borhanian as associates of the group’s namesake “Ziz,” whose legal name is Jack LaSota.
LaSota was not arrested in connection with the 2022 attack on Lind, although records obtained by Open Vallejo show they lived at the Lemon Street property. LaSota does not appear in any official records related to Lind’s death or the Vermont shooting. They did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
LaSota, Leatham, Borhanian, and another person were arrested in Sonoma County in 2019 while protesting an alumni reunion of the Center for Applied Rationality, a Rationalist nonprofit based in Berkeley. The group allegedly blocked the exits of the Westminster Camp and Conference Center with multiple vehicles and wore robes and Guy Fawkes masks popularized by the film “V for Vendetta” and, later, the hacker collective Anonymous.
"The Zizians also apparently believe that because there are two hemispheres in the brain, individuals can split their consciousness between two personalities by waking one side at a time," according to Jessica Taylor, a friend of Bauckholt. She said Bauckholt flew in from Germany last week, intimating that there is an international angle to this story. A U.S. Department of Homeland Security database indicated that Youngblut had traveled internationally in 2022, 2023, and 2024.
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Snyder and Youngblut both attended a prestigious prep school in Northern California and both were computer science majors. Snyder appears to have been something of a genius. He studied computer science and philosophy at the University of Oxford and in 2023 won $11,000 in an AI alignment awards research contest.
How did he and Youngblut go off the rails?
“There’s this whole literature and decision theory about this kind of thing. So there’s some amount of legitness behind this,” Taylor said of the Zizians. “But they take it in all these weird directions where they’re talking about, like, ‘Oh, maybe if I make this decision, I will, like, burn the entire timeline.’ And so it gets really weird.”
We haven't heard the last of this story, I guarantee it.
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