14 ms·

Most of the news coverage I've seen of this story is omitting what some might consider a relevant detail: almost all the members of this group are trans. This

• icameron 2y ago
  Ngo certainly notes the trans aspect with some charged words. Calls them “leftist trans militants with alleged ties to a trans terror cell.”
• EA-3167 2y ago
  I don't think it's so much pushing an agenda, as it is avoiding a thermonuclear hot potato of modern life. If you start talking about gender identity, everyone has STRONG opinions they feel they must share. Worse, a subset of those opinions will be fairly extreme, and you're potentially exposing yourself to harassment or worse. If you sound like you're attacking trans people, that's going to end badly. If you sound like you're supporting them, especially as this new US administration takes off... that's going to end badly. So if you can tell the story without the possibly superfluous detail of the genders of the people involved, that's a pretty obvious angle to omit. Andy Ngo is obviously not doing this, but that's really only because he has a very clear agenda and in fact his entire interest in this story probably stems from that.
  • nkurz 2y ago
    Yes, that's a reasonable possibility as well. It's not proof of an agenda, and might be prudent, but I do think it's a form of bias. There's a thin line between skipping "possibly superfluous" details and skipping core parts of a story that might provide evidence for viewpoints one disagrees with. The result is still that readers need to realize that they are being presented with a consciously edited narrative and not an unbiased set of facts.
    • mindslight 2y ago
      It was quite easy to skim over some original source material from both sinceriously.fyi and zizians.info. By my quick reading, and taking a very high level view, the philosophy is responsible for the trans and also for the violence. But an article harping on the correlation as implied causation without focusing on the hidden variable behind them both is just trying to fuel the fire of the reactionary movement. In general, averaging two different flavors of extremist reporting is not a way for obtaining truth.
      • SuperNinKenDo 2y ago
        That seems like an argument for not ignoring the matter in media that wishes to avoid honing in on the sensitive issue. Now instead of reading an article that integrates but doesn't centre the trans issue, I have read one that doesn't mention it, which I now feel to be dishonest, and one which centres the trans issue above all else, which I view to be biased, but not dishonest. So well done to the authors of the OP, now I can't help but be convinced the trans factor is far more important than I might have otherwise.
        • mindslight 2y ago
          Myopic focus is itself a lie of omission (of the larger context), so they're both dishonest. It seems like you're trying to obtain some agency by sorting through political trash, but the best you can get from that is trash. Never wrestle with a pig and all that.
          • SuperNinKenDo 2y ago
            Yeah, I agree. I think my perception of the second article was coloured by prior knowledge I had from the first, because on review, it is rather myopic too, it doesn't give useful context that was in the first. That said, I do find its myopia less sinister because I am inclined to believe that "rationalism", while I'm quite negative on it, and it probably contributes to these people's superiority complexes, is less likely the root cause than things which are.... I'm trying to be delicate here.... more sensical in light of the trans angle. I disagree that you can't get anything useful out of trash though. Media literacy requires reading between the lines of what is written by multiple people with differing perspectives on a matter and sorting the wheat from the chaff. It's primarily trash, almost entirely trash, there is no choice but to go dumpster diving, or throw your hands up in despair and decide you're just not going to bother at all. The latter option is tenable in and of itself, but when I observe it in practice from people around me, it usually equates in practice to just lazily applying your prior biases to anything you hear about and being an obnoxious and uninteresting conversational partner.
  • searealist 2y ago
    > If you sound like you're attacking trans people, that's going to end badly. If you sound like you're supporting them, especially as this new US administration takes off... that's going to end badly. That’s not true: 99% percent of news outlets have absolutely no fear supporting trans activism. It’s trivial to find hundreds of such cases from sfgate with a google search.
    • codr7 2y ago
      No fear yet, that may change instantly, just like it did the other way.
      • searealist 2y ago
        I don’t agree, but that’s off-topic unless you believe sfgate is specifically afraid today.
        • codr7 2y ago
          Why wouldn't it change just as instantly the other way? They're like grass in the wind, always betting on the winning team.
          • searealist 2y ago
            I have no interest in engaging in an off-topic political discussion.
  • dinkumthinkum 2y ago
    No, that is omitting quite a significant detail. If apparently the majority of people have X characteristic that is a tiny percentage in the overall population there is some correlation or something newsworthy there,
    • llm_trw 2y ago
      To quote a hot potato of a previous age: all bankers may be Jews, but not all Jews are bankers. We know where that one took us.
      • dinkumthinkum 2y ago
        It's fashionable to invoke the baddies of Germany but let's zoom out a bit and just live in reality. Virtually no group on this planet that is not primarily about sexual characteristics or fetishes or whatever is almost entirely made up of people from this particular group and this death cult that is, presumably about "rationalist" mumbo jumbo, is primarily made up of this group. That is certainly newsworthy.
• zozbot234 2y ago
  > almost all the members of this group are trans. The Zizians.info site (linked by one of the HN posts re: this story) mentions that the Zizians did target people who identified as transgender for indoctrination, so this is not really surprising. People who are undergoing this kind of stress and marginalization may well be more vulnerable to such tactics.
  • adastra22 2y ago
    The Ziz method of indoctrination involves convincing his minions they are trapped inside a mental framework they need to break free of. Trans people already feel trapped in a body not aligned with who they are, and are naturally susceptible to this message (and therefore natural targets for recruitment).
    • watwut 2y ago
      They are also openly hated by general society and targeted for bullying by major political actors.
      • positus 2y ago
        Most people don't hate trans people, they just think they believe things that do not correspond to biological reality; ie. they have an illness that is negatively affecting their mind and they need compassion and help. Those same people want to minimize social exposure to provably contagious, harmful, and absurd ideas like gender fluidity.
        • thrance 2y ago
          People also rejected homosexuality because it was "unnatural". Indeed, gender dysphoria is an illness, and the only effective cure is transition, as shown by the countless meta-studies on the subject. Do you really believe Trump and his goons want to show "compassion and help" to trans people, by taking away their passports, their medicine, barring them from the military, accusing them of grooming children, etc.? The list goes on.
• deleted 2y ago
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• tsimionescu 2y ago
  In what way is this supposed to be a relevant detail? Unless you think that they are killing people because they are trans, why should you report that they are part of a marginalized group? If they were mostly blondes or had freckles, should that be part of the story too?
  • jdminhbg 2y ago
    Or what if they were rationalists? Would they include that in the headline?
  • fasthands9 2y ago
    It seems as if the group targeted trans member in their recruitment - and then used evidence of general marginalization to justify their crimes. If you look up old reddit threads about the murder of the landlord, you can see many people defending the crime as the landlord was transphobic. It's not just a random detail like freckles, it seems like the identity shaped the way this group interacted with the world.
  • loeg 2y ago
    They're over-represented by ~1000x compared to background population; that's relevant.
  • casey2 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • dang 2y ago
      Posting slurs like this will get you banned here. Please don't do it again. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      • jazzyjackson 2y ago
        What was the slur? Mental illness?
• duxup 2y ago
  Marginalized groups seem to be a target / susceptible to this kind of thing. I had a weird encounter on reddit with some users who expressed that "only X people understand how this character in the movie feels". Interestingly, there was no indication that the movie intended this interpenetration. But the idea wasn't unusual or all that out there so I didn't think much of it. But that group showed up again and again and eventually someone asked and their theory all but seemed to imply that nobody else could possibly have ... feelings and that lack of understanding made those people lesser and them greater. It seemed to come from some concept that their experience imparted some unique understanding that nobody else could have, and that just lead down a path that lead to zero empathy / understanding with anyone outside. Reddit encounters are always hard to understand IMO so I don't want to read too much into it, but that isolation that some people / groups feel seem to potentially lead to dark places very easily / quickly.
  • codr7 2y ago
    I see it mainly as a reaction to a dysfunctional and abusive system/culture, and not necessarily a constructive one. Fix the world and these problems don't exist.
    • akoboldfrying 2y ago
      >Fix the world and these problems don't exist. Hard disagree. Plenty of antisocial (or worse) behaviour has been promulgated by those indisputably at the top of the social food chain -- almost every war of conquest, for example. Did the British Empire expand throughout the world because the British felt marginalised? No, the rest of the world considered them to be a great power and many other cultures voluntarily adopted their styles of dress and other customs as a mark of "modernity". A sense of marginalisation (real or imagined) can certainly be a force that acts to reduce empathy and encourage violence, but it's by no means necessary.
      • skort 2y ago
        Okay, so maybe they still exist but maybe fewer people have a motive to seek violent solutions?
• almostdeadguy 2y ago
  Almost all are trans and all are rationalists. OK.
• nullc 2y ago
  I think the relevance of their transness is not very significant. The lesswrong apocalypse cult has been feeding people's mental illness for years. Their transness likely made them more outsiders to the cult proper, so e.g. they didn't get diverted off into becoming Big Yud's BSDM "math pets" like other women in the cult. I doubt they are significantly more mentally ill than other members of the cult they just had less support to channel their vulnerability into forms more beneficial to the cult leaders. Yudkowsky wrote an editorial in Time advocating for the use of nuclear weapons against civilians to prevent his imagined AI doomsday... and people are surprised that some of his followers didn't get the memo that think-pieces are for only for navel gazing. If not for the fact that the goal of cult leaders is generally to freeze their victims into inaction and compliance we probably would have seen more widespread murder as a result of Yud cult's violent rhetoric.
  • llm_trw 2y ago
    I shudder to ask, but what exactly is a math pet?
    • photonthug 2y ago
      Someone that you introduce to free group actions and the Cox-Zucker machine, hairy ball theorems, stuff like that
      • evanmoran 2y ago
        Have you seen it come up with bott periodicity and the onto ele in twister space?
        • deleted 2y ago
          [deleted]
    • CSMastermind 2y ago
      I was unacquainted with the term but after searching it seems that Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote several posts on a BDSM website where he fantasized about recruiting a harem of highly educated women to service him which he called "math pets".
• olalonde 2y ago
  There is a well-documented correlation between gender dysphoria, mental health conditions, and autism spectrum disorder. These overlapping factors may contribute to increased vulnerability to manipulative groups, such as cults.
• actuallyalys 2y ago
  The fact that many are transgender seems to be relevant because it’s a recruiting and manipulation tactic, not because of a connection to “trans activism.” I haven’t seen any evidence of that connection besides people involved being transgender.
  • red75prime 2y ago
    Why scare quotes? There are political organizations representing trans-people (and doing quite a bit of activity).
• nejsjsjsbsb 2y ago
  Thanks the pronouns were confusing me and making it hard for me to follow the complex story. I assumed I made a mistake when the article mentions a Jack and refers to them as Jack the whole way through but uses she at the end. Unfortunately the gendered language we use is also the mechanism to provide clues and content as you read the story. So if I can rely on that they need to call it out to help the reader. I'd rather the article mention it. Why are they not? Is this a chilling effect?
  • jl6 2y ago
    It goes unmentioned because there is an unwritten rule in progressive media that marginalized groups must never be perceived as doing wrong, because that will deepen their marginalization. In practice it creates a moral blind spot where the worst extremists get a pass, in the name of protecting the rest. Non-progressive media are all too happy to fill in the gap. Cue resentment, cue backlash, cue Trump. Way to go, guys!
    • xereeto 2y ago
      I think that’s a drastic oversimplification.
      • dgfitz 2y ago
        And yet trump is president.
        • smrq 2y ago
          Proving that oversimplification sells.
        • nejsjsjsbsb 2y ago
          Why Trump won is an interesting topic. There is a mixture of reasons but I think high up there was Biden pulling out last minute and Kamala being unpopular with little time to do a campaign. She also had the backfoot of having been in power while there was inflation and support for the Gaza genocide. Therefore Trump won less then Kamala lost. There is a subreddit dedicate to people both democrats who refused to vote, as well as Trump voters whose policies as promised would severely harm them and their family's interesf (severe as in life/death). Why did they vote against their interests. For example anyone on any kind of benefits, or whose mum and dad are, vets or if your cousin or uncle is one, Latino, even if you are from a long line of american citizens you may have friends who are 1st gen. More generally anyone not white, male and in the top 5-10% of wealth. Because tariffs won't be good for poor people. And poor is probably: under $1m assets. Google trends for tariffs surged after the election. People voted on feelings. Anger, despair or some sense of "Trump means them not me" or maybe "He is successful in business so he must be good". Unfortunately the rational thing to do often sucks eggs!
• stevenwoo 2y ago
  The local paper did a pretty fair job as far as I can tell. https://sfist.com/2025/01/29/suspect-and-possible-cult-member-makes-court-appearance-in-vallejo-killing-as-further-links-revealed-to-other-murders/ https://sfist.com/2025/01/29/suspect-and-possible-cult-membe...
• SequoiaHope 2y ago
  Andy Ngo is not a credible source of news about trans people. Media Matters describes him as a “right wing troll” who spread misinformation about this issue [1] and The Advocate points out that right wing media have repeatedly ignored the facts around supposed trans shooters and continued to spread misinformation on the subject. [2] [1] https://www.mediamatters.org/diversity-discrimination/apalachee-high-school-shooter-reportedly-complained-trans-people-are https://www.mediamatters.org/diversity-discrimination/apalac... [2] https://www.advocate.com/news/apalachee-school-shooter-transgender-misinformation https://www.advocate.com/news/apalachee-school-shooter-trans...
  • mightyham 2y ago
    Media matters is just as biased as Andy Ngo. They are the definition of a hit piece mill, and will find any reason possible to criticize popular figures with right wing beliefs.
• hn2liberal4me 2y ago
  [dead]
• sterlind 2y ago
  it's been an exhausting couple of weeks for me, as a trans person. one executive order after another, explicitly attacking us. scrambling to update all my documents, navigating a Kafkaesque bureaucracy with constantly shifting rules. now this. there are like six Zizians. there are millions of trans people. I'm sure that many of the Zizians being trans says something about the Ziz cult, but Ziz doesn't say anything about "trans activism." any evil one trans person does, is used to stain all trans people. recognize this tendency; don't let this become like blood libel.
  • all2 2y ago
    > any evil one trans person does, is used to stain all trans people. recognize this tendency; don't let this become like blood libel. As a Christian, I can empathize. The wrongs and hypocrisies of so many are heaped on those who have no relation to the actions.
    • gerdesj 2y ago
      I don't think that you need to be a Christian to empathise with anyone. The big geezer's (JC) teachings imply to me that keeping quiet about your faith and simply doing good (for a given value of good) is the Way. Declaring a religion might rile someone, before you have even engaged. I suggest that you simply proffer a hand. Empathise as best you can. Be careful. At best, with mentioning religion, you have declared your rightful intentions and at worst you have added yet another layer of tribalism to a ... debate. I'm pretty sure that at least the synoptic gospels and probably John too (for the full set) tell you to keep it quiet. There is no need to put your religious heart on your sleeve - that's between you and God.
      • skissane 2y ago
        > At best, with mentioning religion, you have declared your rightful intentions and at worst you have added yet another layer of tribalism to a ... debate. I don't think you understood what they were saying. They were saying that as a Christian, they've experienced being blamed for the misdeeds of other Christians which they personally had nothing to do with. The most important part of that statement isn't the word "Christian": you could replace "Christian" with Muslim or atheist or whatever and there'd be someone else who could truthfully say it.
• photochemsyn 2y ago
  Are people confusing transgender and transhumanism somehow? Looking up rationalist philosophy it seems to be about 'improving' the human species, human potential movement related, people becoming cyborgs and living forever as AI uploads, etc.? Vaguely eugenic in outlook, if more individualist. I suppose such a philosophy views gender as an irrelevant issue, so recruiting transgender people would be something they do? A good rule of thumb is that people who view philosophy as something other than an amusing pasttime are best avoided, especially when they're spending their time trying to recruit others into their cult.
• miltonlost 2y ago
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  • notjoemama 2y ago
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    • almostdeadguy 2y ago
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• Moru 2y ago
  I know something else that is over-represented in killings. Soldiers. And soldiers are mostly male. So male is the natural killing machine, right? But male humans are mostly selected to be soldiers by design. In some countries the only possible gender for soldiers. So mabe it could be that there is some other agenda at play here? Mabe it is not related to trans but to grooming a target group into becoming cult members? Why is it that we always have to think there is a /Big Conspiracy/ somewhere? Don't spread around fud that you have no clue about with words like "omitting something I consider relevant" without making damn sure it realy is relevant. You just feed the trolls if you keep doing this.
• spacebear 2y ago
  They’re also all software developers, right?
• tbrownaw 2y ago
  > omitting what some might consider a relevant detail This sounds weaselly enough to detract from the rest of the comment, even though you later say why it might be relevant.
• Zardoz89 2y ago
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• plastic-enjoyer 2y ago
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• wrsh07 2y ago
  I suspect the answer is closer to "one trans person preyed upon the trust and vulnerability of people in their circle" and that happened to include multiple other trans people (who were likely extremely vulnerable to the charismatic charms of a cult leader).
• plagiarist 2y ago
  [flagged]
• conradev 2y ago
  “Ziz seems to go out of her way to target transgender people.” https://zizians.info/ https://zizians.info/
• DrewRWx 2y ago
  The Post Millennial is a right-wing rag from an anticommunist sex cult and any assertion by Ngo should be discarded out of hand.
• aprilthird2021 2y ago
  I'm probably the furthest thing from an active supporter of trans (whatever you take it to mean, I'm old-fashioned about gender). But how does it matter to this story at all? You could take any group of people and find a crazed group of killers among them.... And people tend to stick to people like them, so again, how is it relevant?
• RIMR 2y ago
  I'm sorry, but Andy Ngo is beyond "biased" - he is deliberately derogatory towards the trans community whenever he has the opportunity. If the gender identities of the Zizians aren't being brought up in the mainstream press, it's likely because it isn't relevant to the story. Responsible reporting includes not bringing up details that could encourage moral panic or hate crimes if they aren't demonstrably relevant to the story. This kind of "well actually" response is really no different than the racist complaints people make in the comments of every crime story that failed to mention how black the accused was, when race wasn't a factor, and nobody ever cares when the accused is white. Most cults are filled with straight, cigender, white people. If every story about cult violence brought this up, its connection to the story would be rightfully mocked as contrived. Citing the guy who tries to dig up dirt on every trans person he can isn't exactly a revelation. It's exactly what I would expect Ngo to do, and only because it validates his neo-fascist peers' anti-trans views.
  • zozbot234 2y ago
    The fact that a death/murder cult might be deliberately targeting vulnerable trans folks for recruitment and indoctrination can certainly be relevant. I agree that merely talking about "a vegan trans" murder cult, as some media outlets did, would be something rather different however.
• jongjong 2y ago
  IMO, the media frenzy on the subject was part of a corporate plot to promote certain beliefs in order to silence contrarian ideas which could trigger a conversation around corporate negligence topics such as the increase of endocrine disruptors in our environment and their effects on our health. The plot worked for some extent. Hence, I cannot fully express myself here in clear language. We can see that health has become a central topic of American politics but we're still dancing around some of the more important issues, because implying certain connections is taboo. The first step to fixing a problem is acknowledging it. If not fixed, it will get worse until it becomes impossible to ignore.
• buckle8017 2y ago
  The main group is a sex cult and nobody wants to have sex with the trans people so they got kicked out or something.
• tptacek 2y ago
  I don't know, seems like if we're trying to do that kind of targeting, LessWrong is the better place to start. 100% of these people are LessWrong people, right?
  • hollerith 2y ago
    You think LessWrong is a better place to start probably because you've heard a lot about trans young people whereas you probably haven't heard much about and probably don't know much about Less Wrong, but I am confident that if you were to get to know us, you'll find that we are mostly good people and we have a healthy community.
    • tptacek 2y ago
      That is something I very definitely already believe, and my point is that trying to characterize large groups of people by the activities of a tiny number of crazy people is bogus; in this case though, if someone is going to try to deploy that kind of bogusity, fair is fair!
      • hollerith 2y ago
        OK somehow I missed that interpretation of your comment.
• eddieh 2y ago
  WARNING: The Post Millennial is an extremist website. I can’t believe that getting “news” about an extremist group from another extremist organization is a productive way to make sense of the world. Honestly, read whatever you want but just be aware that radical extremist exist and commit horrific crimes and other radical extremist will exploit that. It is radical extremism that’s dangerous in and of itself—not just a particular brand of radical extremism. Carry on.
  • refurb 2y ago
    * WARNING: The Post Millennial is an extremist website.* Ok, but is there anything false stated?
• csomar 2y ago
  > Bauckholt was a biological male who identified as trans and used feminine pronouns. He was an award-winning youth math genius who later graduated from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada ..... Around 2021, he was hired as a quantitative trader at Tower Research Capital in New York. Honestly, being trans is the least interesting thing about this dude (girl?). This is not some random angry person with uncontrolled emotions.