Op-Ed
By Christine Rosen
Commentary
March 14, 2025
Late last year, when Luigi Mangione was arrested and charged with the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, something unexpected happened: A lot of people praised him for his actions, elevating Mangione to the status of secular saint for gunning down a man in cold blood. Both on social-media platforms, where he was hailed as a folk hero, and in person outside the New York City courthouse where dozens if not hundreds of supporters waved “Free Luigi” signs, a disturbingly large number of people seemed to be in agreement with Mangione’s claim, in the three-page manifesto found among his belongings, that “frankly, these parasites simply had it coming.”
Mangione’s views aren’t simply run-of-the-mill anti-capitalist rantings. They are grounded in part in the principles of the so-called Rationalist movement. Like many Rationalist (also called Gray Tribe) enthusiasts, Mangione is from a wealthy family, has an advanced degree, and has worked in the tech industry. He shares with the Gray Tribe an obsession with AI and some of ideas that the progression of artificial intelligence has brought to the fore.
These include metacognition—the effort to understand the functioning of one’s own brain with the goal of enhancing it—and the Singularity. This is the idea that at some point in the near future, the bodies of people will merge with mechanisms and programs designed to improve us, and humankind will evolve into something new. Mangione was embedded in online communities that shared his interests, another key feature of the Rationalist movement. But these are not the techno-optimists that have dominated the conversations around these subjects for the past two decades. Quite the opposite.
The Rationalist movement initially grew out of a blog called LessWrong (which began publishing in 2009). It gained adherents, particularly in the Bay Area, through organizations such as the Center for Applied Rationality, whose mission is to “develop clear thinking for the sake of humanity’s future” while promoting pricey workshops on applied-rationality principles such as “de-biasing” one’s thinking. The movement’s acolytes are not averse to radical ideas: Machine learning researcher and Rationalist godfather Eliezer Yudkowsky argued in Time magazine in 2023 that AI posed such a threat to humanity that the data centers powering it should be destroyed by any means necessary.
The Rationalist movement has also spawned violent offshoots, most recently the “Zizians.” Some adherents to Zizianism are believed to be responsible for a murder in California, the killing of a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Vermont, and a double homicide in Pennsylvania. The Zizians take their name from the group’s leader, Jack Amadeus LaSota, a computer scientist who renamed himself Ziz when he started taking female hormones and living as a woman. LaSota also faked his own drowning to avoid arrest, skipped out on many court dates, and is currently being held in connection to the murders that the group’s members have been charged with committing.
Like Mangione, many of the Zizians are highly educated, with degrees in bioinformatics and philosophy from Ivy League universities and the University of Oxford; one worked for Google as an engineer, and another interned at NASA. Like Mangione, they also succumbed to grandiose visions of their role in the world and its likely apocalyptic end.
Many have taken to calling the Zizians a cult, and they do share qualities with cults throughout modern American history. These include Charles Manson and the Manson Family, with their murder spree that claimed 5 lives in the summer of 1969; Jim Jones and his People’s Temple, whose members were led into a mass suicide in Guyana in 1978; the apocalyptic Branch Davidians and their leader David Koresh, who were destroyed in a federal raid gone nightmarishly wrong when it took 76 lives in 1993; and the Heaven’s Gate cult, which ended in 1997 after 39 of its members took their own lives, having timed their death with the passing of the Hale-Bopp comet and the alien space ship they believed was traveling to earth behind it.
Like the cults that came before them, Zizians and other Rationalist-type believers are reflective of our current moment. Mangione and his supporters attack certain individuals as symbols of larger things they believe should be destroyed. In doing so, they think they are giving voice to a broader dissatisfaction with bureaucracies, institutions, and opaque systems that are viewed as exercising a great deal of control over people’s lives without accountability.
Mangione is alleged to have killed a corporate CEO, and online and elsewhere, there have been calls for further violence against other heads of corporations. Recently, a man who goes by the name Lucy Grace Nelson was caught trying to blow up a Tesla dealership in Colorado, evidently to protest Elon Musk. In early February, at a protest against DOGE cuts to the federal government in Washington, D.C., a protester held a sign that read, “Elon, Don, Luigi Says: Deny, Defend, Depose.” Those last three words were what Mangione wrote on bullet casings found near Brian Thompson’s body.
These extreme groups also throw into high relief some of the ideas that have fractured society and undermined our sense of shared reality. Consider the Zizians: Most of them are transgender and obsessed with the idea of identity as entirely fluid and self-created. As one person who knows the Zizians told the New York Post, they believe that taking estrogen led to “clearer thinking.”
The Zizians also engage in extreme versions of some of the stranger physical rituals embraced by Silicon Valley life-extension enthusiasts, such as sleep-deprivation exercises and radically restrictive diets. In classic cult fashion, they cut themselves off from their families and former friends. A reporter for the Guardian noted how an old Tumblr account of one Zizian “contains dense discussions of left-wing political ethics, and expresses anger at parents (‘almost all parents are evil in intent’), schooling and psychiatry.”
No wonder they live much of their lives online, adopting multiple identities both in chat rooms and in the real world, frequently changing their names. They seem adrift and deeply unhappy, textbook cases of what Émile Durkheim described as anomie, cut off from any remotely traditional kind of community and full of rage at minor cultural phenomena they blow out of all proportion. On social media, Mangione promoted a post that read, “Netflix, DoorDash, and true crime podcasts have stolen more dreams than failure ever will.” As one investigator told the New York Post about the Zizians, “They talk as if they really believe they have supernatural powers and they believe movies like The Matrix are real and they can manipulate reality.”
What they all share is a disordered sense of self and a mistrust of reality itself. They believe that what they are seeing and hearing isn’t real and that another existing world, obscured from our view, is where all the rules are being made. They have escaped that world by breaking free of definably human qualities—like gender—and the ingrained moral sense that they must have, otherwise they would not labor so fiercely and proudly to overcome it through “Rationalism.”
While it might be easy to dismiss the Zizians and Mangione as people on the fringe, they are emblematic of a broader cultural sickness. It is not too long a journey from our current state of polarized politics—playing out on digital platforms controlled by a handful of companies, exemplified by low trust in institutions, and shot through with a general cultural malaise—to the belief that the “system” is out to destroy you and that leaders in that system are fair game.
Similarly, a culture that embraces the idea that anything is fluid—even one’s own physical body or biological sex or even one’s reality—has a hard time making the case for limits. What comes to take the place of that case is an understanding of the world that says a man can become a hero for fatally shooting someone he doesn’t even know on a New York City street corner. Right now, it may go by the name of Rationalism, but it’s something older and deeper and more terrifying.
Christine Rosen
Christine Rosen