Tucker Carlson interviews journalist Andy Ngo about his investigation into the Zizians, a Silicon Valley-originated cult linked to multiple killings
Tucker Carlson interviews journalist and author Andy Ngo about his new book The Zizians, an eighteen-month investigation into a cult with roots in Silicon Valley's rationalist and effective altruist communities, alleged to be linked to eight violent deaths across the United States.
Summary
Andy Ngo describes how his investigation began on Inauguration Day, January 2025, when a US Border Patrol agent was shot dead in Vermont, and how connecting that incident to a series of prior violent events led him to uncover a small but highly intelligent cult known as the Zizians. The group was founded by Jack Loda, who later went by the name Ziz, a former engineering student who dropped out to join Silicon Valley's rationalist community, transitioned, and developed a radical ideology blending effective altruism, trans ideology, transhumanism, and anarchist politics. Ngo details the group's alleged crimes — including the near-fatal sword attack on an elderly California man, the execution-style murder of a cult member's parents in Pennsylvania, the eventual murder of that same elderly man, and the ambush killing of Border Patrol agent David Christopher Mullen — and argues that media malpractice, legal exploitation, and institutional protection of transgender-identified suspects have allowed the group to evade justice for years. He also situates the Zizians within a broader pattern of trans-identified individuals carrying out violent attacks that he says is being systematically obscured by legacy media and law enforcement.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction and the Vermont Shooting
Tucker Carlson: Andy, thank you for doing this. This is one of the most remarkable stories I've ever heard. I'd love to just start at the beginning. Congrats on the book. Who are the Zizians?
Andy Ngo: The Zizians are a cult that has its origins in Silicon Valley, California. I first started paying attention to what I then learned were parts of the story in January 2025. That was Inauguration Day. On Inauguration Day, I saw in the headlines that a US Border Patrol agent had been shot dead in Vermont.
Tucker Carlson: In Vermont, right by the Canadian border.
Andy Ngo: In Vermont, right by the Canadian border, very close to the Canadian border. Of course, with it being Inauguration Day, all of the international and national media coverage was on what was happening in DC, so it didn't get very much attention.
Tucker Carlson: It was actually not far from that border crossing that day, weirdly, in Vermont, which is not far from here.
Andy Ngo: It's a very rural area in the middle of nowhere. It was icy, cold, super freezing. And two people were dead — one being one of the alleged shooters. Another alleged shooter was injured but survived, and then the Border Patrol agent, David Christopher Mullen, was ambushed and killed there. So when I looked into that, there were very few details, but then once I found out the names and started digging further — and this is in the context of where I've learned that we should come to expect media malpractice when it comes to a lot of details about criminal matters, particularly involving gender and trans issues. So you can no longer take, for many years now, even names and details such as sex at face value when it's being reported. I learned this unfortunately through my reporting on leftist violence over the years — the media will use preferred names, preferred pronouns, preferred aliases for individuals they report on, and oftentimes even on criminal matters. So you can have all these stories where there are trans killers involved in violent cases and read the reporting and come out not even knowing that this woman who did this sex crime or did this brutal killing is not a woman but actually a man.
So with the names, I just kept digging further. Initially there was a lot of stuff going on in DC, and I found out that the surviving alleged attempted murderer in that shooting had applied for a marriage license in the Seattle area with a man in Seattle who had just been arrested for attempted murder of somebody who was an elderly key witness for an attempted murder trial in Solano County, California, which is in the Bay Area. And then I looked up that elderly man — several years earlier he had survived a brutal attack by trans suspects. He was impaled dozens of times. He had his eye gouged out in the attack. And after surviving that, he was assassinated by somebody who now has a connection to this person in Vermont. With all these things coming together, I was like, there's way more to the story.
Tucker Carlson: Yes.
Andy Ngo: And it's not just a simple case of an isolated homicide incident, but rather there appears to be a group involved here. And that was the start of my investigation.
Andy Ngo's Background and Path to This Story
But I want to back up a little bit. I have so much gratitude to you because five years ago you provided a book blurb for my first book, Unmasked: Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy. My path from reporting on Antifa to writing about trans violence now — on the surface might not seem like there's a connection, but it completely was the logical path.
At that time in 2020–2021, when there were so many riots going on after George Floyd died, one of my big projects was documenting those who were getting arrested in Portland, where I was living at the time. Every night, through public records, I got the booking photos, got the names, and looked them up systematically. I was seeing that there was a very odd pattern emerging at that time — disproportionately, the suspects were trans in some way. They could identify as male to female, female to male, non-binary, or some type of neo pronouns. This was six years ago, and I just put that thought in the back of my head as a question — this is kind of weird.
You might recall that in 2019 I was brutally beaten in downtown Portland reporting on Antifa. A lot of people are familiar with that case. I suffered a subarachnoid brain hemorrhage from that. The people who did it were dressed in black bloc with their faces covered, and the Portland police closed the case without arresting anybody. But I pursued a civil case against individuals I had alleged were party to that attack and also an attack that happened in 2021. I was attacked repeatedly in Portland, which is also part of the reason why I've been in exile abroad, living in England now for all these years. The individuals I was able to identify in my civil lawsuit — with the help of Harmeet Dhillon — three of the six individuals are trans-identifying. So at that time there was another data point of like, what's going on with all this trans violence?
In the years since, we've had atrocity after atrocity, shooting after shooting, not just in the United States but in other Western countries, where the shooters are trans. So it was within this context — now you see, now that I explain it, why when I initially found out the names of the individuals who are alleged to have been involved in that ambush shooting of the Vermont Border Patrol officer, I was like, I'm not taking it at face value that it was just a man and a woman who were allegedly involved. Everything requires further digging.
Once I found some of the puzzle pieces, I realized this is material for a book, not just an article, because there was so much I then learned. This is a cult that has its roots in effective altruism and rationalism. But then as they became radicalized, they pulled in bits and pieces of other beliefs — trans ideology, transhumanism, leftist anarchist politics. They were a cult that recruited in the Bay Area, and they are alleged to have been linked now to eight violent deaths in the United States and also in another country. So there's a trail of bodies. The Zizians is a year-and-a-half investigation into what I discovered — the secrets of the group, the ideology. And the more I kept digging in, it became more and more gruesome and disturbing.
I've seen a lot of very ugly, horrific things in my time reporting on the violent far-left. I've experienced it myself. I've seen people who have been maimed. I unfortunately was around deadly violence in Portland in 2020. So I thought I was prepared for what I would find. But this cult used human experimentation. They had hideouts across the US. They made their own labs in sort of medical environments in the hideouts where they administered their own hormones and medication. So The Zizians is really a story of what happens when rampant cross-sex hormone use, radical ideology, and protection from media and institutions all merge together and allow a cult to allegedly carry out deadly violence over the course of nearly a decade.
The Founder: Jack Loda, aka Ziz
Tucker Carlson: Where does it begin, and who led the cult?
Andy Ngo: I'll start with the person who ended up being the leader. On the cover, this picture is from the mugshot of Jack Loda. He was born in Fairbanks, Alaska, raised in a very liberal family. His father was and is involved in Democrat politics. But he otherwise had a somewhat normal upbringing. He had two younger sisters. He was very smart growing up and had an interest in Dungeons and Dragons and geeky stuff, Star Trek. He was very good at computer science — that's what he excelled at in school. He studied at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, graduated magna cum laude, and then was accepted into a graduate program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for their prestigious engineering program.
Jack, like many of the people who ended up joining the Zizians, can be described essentially as geniuses or very brilliant people who come from STEM-educated backgrounds and careers. They have degrees in engineering and bioinformatics. Their resumes include work stints at NASA and at Google. Some of them were making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in quantitative trading. So this was a highly selective, small group of people who ended up joining the Zizians.
But back to Ziz — or I should say Jack Loda, as he was known when he was a student. He became interested in rationalism and effective altruism. We're hearing about that a lot now. These are somewhat niche communities that are quite active in Silicon Valley. Rationalism is a modern philosophical movement — it has its origins from centuries ago from European thinkers, but in the modern form it's about using logic, reason, and evidence in the course of seeking and finding truth. And then a related movement within that is effective altruism, which is using rationalist thinking to maximize good.
So in the Bay Area, a lot of the people who work in tech and AI programming are involved in rationalism and effective altruism. They are atheists, and they believe that — they're highly educated — they believe that we can find the best ways to maximize good in society. But their whole moral system is different from, and in opposition to, let's say traditional Christian values or religious morals. So a lot of their debates were really kind of nonsensical in a way. For example, they spent and still spend a lot of time talking about the welfare of shrimp and prawns. They're thinking that if, let's say, 10% of them have some type of sentience, we're talking about billions and billions of shrimps that are being farmed and are needlessly suffering. These aren't Christians, so they view the life of an animal as equal to a human. These are the type of weird debates that were happening in the EA and rationalist community.
They were very active online. A lot of them are autistic. A lot of them have Asperger syndrome. There's a lot of research showing that for those who have Asperger's, it does correlate at the tail end with really high intelligence as well.
So for Jack Loda, his original research interest when he was at university was studying corona expulsions from the sun — that was the type of research he was doing at NASA. But he became involved in these online forums about rationalism and effective altruism. He was reading a lot. LessWrong is one of the main forums where there's a large community of people discussing all these things I just talked about, debating them endlessly and coming up with mathematical algorithms and models for how this could be the best outcome or that could be the best outcome. So he dropped out of his engineering program and moved to Silicon Valley and became involved in the rationalist community there. There were hundreds, around 2015 thousands, who had moved there specifically to get involved in the rationalist community.
In that backdrop, he met other rationalists who are also very intelligent, and he convinced at least one of them that that person was trans, and he started recruiting people to his particular beliefs. So eventually Ziz's ideology was more than just mainstream rationalism and effective altruism. He started pulling in aspects of trans ideology. He kept a very active blog online called "sin seriously" — a portmanteau of "sin" and "seriously" — and on there he wrote extensively about how he believed that trans people, particularly trans women, have special cognitive abilities.
We're hearing a lot about EA now because the AI engineers and researchers who worked for OpenAI or Anthropic who have spoken out quite recently and done a lot of media about existential AI risk — even though the public is just hearing about this now, this has been a debate that's been going on for over a decade in Silicon Valley. Those who believe that AI is going to become a superintelligent being and, if it's unaligned to human interests, is going to destroy the world and kill everybody. So Jack, later Ziz, winds up in Silicon Valley. He's dropped out of school. He's moved there to commune with other rationalists and effective altruists, and while there gets caught up in the debate about AI risk.
Tucker Carlson: The Bay Area has a long history of weird people going there. In fact, the Zizians are compared a lot to the Charles Manson cult. Charles Manson also had his journey moving to the Bay Area and his start in California before he gathered members to form a cult that murdered nine people. And Charles Manson himself — we learned through the trials long ago — didn't do the actual killing of anybody, but he influenced other members within his group to carry out these types of attacks. So if the allegations ultimately are true about Jack Loda, also known as Ziz, that's also similar to what he did.
Andy Ngo: So he went through quite a big transformation once he moved to the Bay Area. He transitioned, started taking cross-sex hormones and testosterone suppressors, met other trans people, and there were a lot of weird people. There was also an aspect —
Tucker Carlson: Can I ask you a question? Do we know why he did that? That's a big step.
Andy Ngo: Within the Zizian ideology, based on his writings on his blog, he believed that trans women in particular had certain special cognitive abilities, and he believed that all of the world was at an existential risk from AI destroying everything and that he thought he could be part of the vanguard of those who would save the world. That was his worldview. Those were his words.
Tucker Carlson: And he'd be more effective living as a woman doing that.
Andy Ngo: Yes. But he also had — and this is where the trans ideology comes in — in his writings, he believed that he was also born that way, that trans people were born that way within the brain. So he misused certain research on his blog about trans brains. I write about this in the book, where the research on it actually doesn't show that trans brains on average are different, because some of the research that was done which did actually measure some average differences was looking at males who were same-sex attracted, and I believe that's potentially what was being tracked in the differences that were being noted — very minor ones on average — rather than the fact that these were so-called trans women.
Tucker Carlson: Was he gay before he became trans?
Andy Ngo: He wrote about experiences that he had sexually with another man on his blog, but otherwise he described himself in quite asexual terms. He described how he viewed his penis as like an alien appendage, and that —
Tucker Carlson: I'm going to stop you right there, Andy, and say that's not a healthy worldview.
Andy Ngo: No, not at all. And he believed also — and this is what he wrote about — that going through puberty was like part of his soul dying. So you can see how there are elements within some of the statements that are kind of repeated in mainstream trans ideology: being born in the wrong body, being born this way. If you prevent, for example, a gender-confused boy or girl from going through puberty, you're setting that child up to a life of suffering because they're developing into a body that doesn't align with their gender ideology.
Ziz named himself after "Ziz," a fictional monster creature from an online fictional serial. And in that story, the monster influences people to become essentially walking time bombs that are destructive later. Looking back now, Loda picked the name almost a decade ago. I wonder, with the people that ended up dying around the group that he formed, if that name was actually quite intentional.
The Ideology: Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Radicalization
Tucker Carlson: So he starts living as a woman. Does he take hormones?
Andy Ngo: He wrote about taking cross-sex hormones and testosterone suppressors, and he met other trans people. There was an element also in the Bay Area then and now within some in Silicon Valley of trans as a social contagion — where just suddenly a whole bunch of people began transitioning at the same time amongst similar social and friendly circles.
So he was developing his own ideology in parallel and ultimately in opposition to a very well-known rationalist and effective altruist thinker, Eliezer Yudkowsky. Yudkowsky is really seen as like one of the big forefathers of modern-day contemporary rationalism. He has a very large following. Many people moved to the Bay Area particularly because he has established several nonprofits — MIRI, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, and CFAR — to research AI safety and rationalism. He's for many, many years been most well known as one of the big AI doomers. Earlier this year he met with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and others. So he's been very influential in his career.
Ziz was a follower of Yudkowsky but eventually believed that Yudkowsky wasn't doing enough to save the world. So Ziz then met another person who he recruited to his cause — Jasper Danielson, who used the name Gwen — and that was his first recruit. From there, the two of them really established the groundwork of the Zizians.
It's very big and complicated and hard to explain, but to summarize: their main theory is that the brain's two hemispheres correspond to different identities. One can be male, one can be female. They can be different sexes, they can be in opposition to one another, and one could be good or evil. Ziz in his writings described himself as being female in the brain and that both of his hemispheres were good — that he was one of the exceptionally rare people in the world born with this gift of being "double good." So he had a whole vocabulary around it. And then his goal was to find and recruit people to his ideology and cause who he believed had at least one good core of the brain.
So in their ideology, because the two hemispheres of the brain are linked, they believed that they needed to be separated and that they could do it through experimentation. This is like the early forming of the cult-like elements of the group. So people that they were recruiting — trans, so-called trans women, men who identify as women — they would introduce them to the ideology, let them know how they can be part of this world-saving mission and be part of this vanguard, but you need to go through these experimentations, you need to jailbreak yourselves. So Ziz particularly sought out other rationalists who are trans, and then from there the line of inquiry would be to try to find out if they were open to these types of experimentations.
Tucker Carlson: Would they separate the two hemispheres of your brain?
Andy Ngo: Yes. And the Zizians believed that they could do it through sleep deprivation. Ziz very intentionally kept the details of how these experimentations were done secretive. He alluded to some of the steps in his writings but never outlined it. And I believe that was part of the intrigue with the group — it would get people curious to inquire with him, and some did. Reading through some of the correspondence that I was able to gather as part of my investigation for this book, the experimentations involved various kinds of sleep deprivation and manipulating members into essentially a state of psychosis where they could be more easily manipulated through the extended sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation has been used by a lot of cults, by the way.
Tucker Carlson: Of course, and governments.
Andy Ngo: Exactly. So part of what makes the story quite unbelievable was the journey of the Zizians from Silicon Valley and then ultimately, many years later, being arrested in February 2025 in Allegany County, rural Maryland, in Appalachian Maryland.
The Zizians incorporated leftist anarchist politics. They did not want to submit themselves to the capitalist system, and part of that included coming up with really bizarre arrangements for how to live their lives as essentially a commune. So one of the first projects was establishing a "rat fleet" — rationalist fleet — literally buying old boats. The idea was to live on them so they didn't have to pay rent. There's lots of really crazy stuff that happened. For example, they bought an old World War II tugboat from Alaska and drove it all the way down to the Bay Area, but they didn't have any of the permits to be able to park at a dock in Half Moon Bay. They were allowed to go there on humanitarian grounds because they claimed they were running into difficulty, and then they became squatters for years and years. They stayed there. They recruited people. They bought more boats.
Tucker Carlson: Do we have any idea where their money was coming from?
Andy Ngo: Yes. Ziz himself was bouncing from programming job to programming job, and some of the other members were doing various other types of part-time employment as well. So they were pouring in their own money into these projects. They really thought that they could create this fleet of rationalists who would end up saving the world. And eventually, as you can imagine, that whole type of arrangement ended up collapsing. It's unrealistic.
So they moved — after gathering several members, including one who was a Google engineer, Amir Bohanian, who used the name Emma — at the end of 2019 they moved to Vallejo, California. There was a plot of land from an elderly man that they had befriended when they were in Half Moon Bay by the water. He was very kind to them. He helped them a lot — Curtis Lint. They lived on his land. And how they repaid his kindness was they used the laws under California Governor Gavin Newsom related to the pandemic to not pay rent for years. So they squatted on his land.
It was there that they did more of these experimentations. They lived in box trucks. They lived a really weird lifestyle that was completely isolated from mainstream society. They thought they could live completely autonomously. But in the meantime, two of the members who had joined their group and then left didn't actually end up escaping the group's influence, and they killed themselves in very brutal ways. The first victim jumped off a building in Poland, and then the other person ended his life very violently in Colorado — a shotgun through the mouth.
Tucker Carlson: So even early on, in the rationalist community at that time — this was before there were actually any murders — with these deaths, there were rumors that this Ziz and his group, there's something odd about it, among some of the rationalists.
The Attack on Curtis Lint
Andy Ngo: And there's a whole timeline. I'll just go through a brief timeline. There were, by the end, eight known victims. Two people who joined the group ended up taking their own lives. They had gone through the experimentation. The Zizians had a word for it — they called it "debucketing." They recruited more people onto this lot. There were at least six of them living on the property belonging to the elderly man. And eventually he took steps to try to evict them. They didn't pay rent for years. They had originally offered to pay $2,000 to rent a very large part of this land to park all their vans, where they were living out of. They were creating so-called tiny homes out of these vans, which they called "slack mobiles." They would put solar panels on them and try to make it completely autonomous living. They rejected everything about society.
But he took steps to evict them finally after years of non-payment. And in November 2022, several days before they were legally scheduled to vacate the property through an eviction, Curtis Lint — who at that time was 79 years old — was lured out to one of their trailers and was bashed on the head. His skull was smashed in. He actually regained consciousness, and this is according to his testimony and police reports. When he stood up and got a sense of what had just happened — so he's just had a serious brain injury at this point — he was surrounded by several of the Zizians and then was repeatedly stabbed with swords. He was impaled through the chest. They actually stuck a long sword all the way through, and he looked down. He described seeing the blade protruding through his chest. It had just very narrowly missed his vital organs. He had a gun for self-protection and he shot one of them dead, injured another one, and he ran out of ammo and the third one backed off. So he very narrowly survived that. He rushed to get help. He was taken to hospital. He ended up losing an eye. It was a miracle that Curtis survived that.
Tucker Carlson: They stabbed him in the face.
Andy Ngo: It was in the course of the attack on the ground that he was cut all over. So his eye was cut up and mutilated in that type of attack. This happened in November 2022. It got no attention, and it was just treated as a case of tenant-related violence in California. The reporting treated the arrested suspects as she/her people or they/them and used the aliases that they are known by. So that was like an escalation of the violence.
Tucker Carlson: But he killed one of them at that point.
Andy Ngo: He did. One of them, Amir Bohanian, was shot dead. And here's the very sick outcome of that. The family of Amir Bohanian started a GoFundMe and framed Bohanian as a victim of trans violence —
Tucker Carlson: Anti-trans violence.
Andy Ngo: Yeah. And they raised tens of thousands of dollars, and various trans organizations also eulogized Bohanian as a trans victim in this so-called trans genocide that's happening. And US Senate Democrats actually honored Bohanian amongst other names officially in the Capitol as well. So that was the false narrative at that time amongst trans activists.
Tucker Carlson: There was no evidence that he was shot because he was transgender. He was shot because he was stabbing an elderly man with a sword.
Andy Ngo: He was shot because there were people trying to kill Curtis Lint. He had a gun for self-protection. But of course, it's of no surprise to your audience that trans activists are able to frame every grievance as a very big slight and offense and attack on them.
Tucker Carlson: It's like passive aggression taken to its logical terminus. I tried to kill you, but I'm the victim.
Andy Ngo: Yes. And literally — talk about gaslighting — they say things like, "We are living through a trans genocide." And it's one thing if it was just radical rhetoric, but the Zizians and Zizian members wrote about their belief in the ongoing trans genocide. They would have been encouraging one another to take up firearms, stockpile firearms, and prepare for violence.
In fact, as we do this interview, it's just last week in Huntsville, Alabama, that three suspects, part of a Trantifa cell, were federally charged in connection with stockpiling and making 3D-printed firearms for the purpose of violence and murder against federal agents. Also in the same week, last week, there was a trans suspect out of Washington State, an American who was federally charged for allegedly helping the trans mass shooter that killed eight women and children in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, Canada. The suspect in that case, the American, is named James Melody Bryant.
So a lot of The Zizians is not just a meticulous detail of their history of violence and extremism. It's also an indictment against this media and institution context we're in where we are constantly lied to. Going back to what happened in Tumbler Ridge earlier this year in February, when a trans shooter killed eight women and children at a property including his home and then at a school, the Canadian authorities described the deceased gunman as a female in a dress with brown hair. That was how they reported it. And they didn't release any of the pictures that the American authorities released last week showing that on the guns used to kill women and children were trans pride symbols. So the people that were slaughtered in Canada were literally killed at the barrel of trans pride, and these were facts that the Canadian authorities omitted. It was only because an American allegedly helped in the planning and provided money that this type of information came through in the criminal complaint. But that is just emblematic of the lies that all of us are subjected to when it comes to hiding and obscuring the truth about trans violence.
Going back to the Zizians — they allegedly attempted murder on this man, and this is 2022. I'm speaking to you now in late 2025. None of the two suspects in that case have been convicted of anything, and the trial hasn't happened yet.
Tucker Carlson: The trial hasn't happened.
Andy Ngo: No, the trial hasn't happened.
Tucker Carlson: They ran the man through with a sword because they didn't want to pay rent, and no one's going on trial.
Andy Ngo: The Zizians are brilliant at learning the rules and using the rules against you. So they used every tactic they could think of to delay the case, year after year after year. Curtis Lint was 79 when he was attacked. So he's getting very old — by 2025, last year now, he's in his 80s at his property. Over the years he left the property, but then eventually he returned. People who live through traumatic experiences sometimes still kind of revert back to the environments where the violence had happened because they think enough time has passed, it's safe. The two suspects were still in custody at that time. He likely had no idea the extent of how this group was much larger than just the two people who were in custody.
Ziz Escapes Custody
So this is how easy it was for Ziz to escape. He was found by law enforcement responding to the shooting death of Bohanian as well as the attempted murder of Curtis Lint. They took him to the police station, and while Ziz was waiting to be questioned in the lobby area, he just pretended to be unconscious. He closed his eyes and collapsed in his chair. So these law enforcement officers, thinking there was a medical emergency, sent him off to hospital to be checked out. They didn't send a police officer with him. They didn't place him under formal arrest. So once he was in the hospital, he regained consciousness and just slipped out and then disappeared and became a fugitive completely. He was gone for years, and he would reemerge several years later in Pennsylvania. By that point the group had recruited more people.
Tucker Carlson: That wasn't the first time he faked a scenario that allowed him to escape.
Andy Ngo: Yes. So before that — and this is getting a bit into the weeds, but I bring it up just to show how insane the story was and how badly law enforcement messed up. Ziz had faked his death through pretending to have drowned in the waters in the Bay Area. In official court declarations — one written by Amir Bohanian, who at that time was still alive, and another one written by his sister Naomi Lassota — they declared officially that he had fallen off the boat that they were on. There was a huge air and water search effort involving all these different departments and agencies all across the Bay Area, all hands on deck to try to save him. They didn't find him, and so there was this belief that he had been dead and that the body hadn't been found yet.
Then he was found by law enforcement in Vallejo, California after this brutal attack. So there was already another pending felony case against him involving a Zizian protest in Westminster Woods where they allegedly, donning robes and masks, had created a hostage situation where children at the camp thought that there was an active shooter situation. So they were facing a whole bunch of charges related to that, and then Ziz faked his death. There was a warrant out for his arrest at that time. This is 2022. And then when he was found in Vallejo, apparently no police officer ran the record on him to see if there were any active warrants. So he wasn't arrested at that time. They just sent him off to the hospital, and of course he had a chance to escape.
The Pennsylvania Double Murder
And then when he would reemerge again, it was in the context of an investigation into a double murder that had happened in Delaware County, Pennsylvania on New Year's Eve at the very end of 2022, involving the parents of one of the members, Michelle Zajko. So the Zizian group — even though Ziz had escaped and left California — there was still active recruiting and the group was growing and people were joining across the US.
How and why was this couple killed? The parents of the Zizian member, on what is believed to be New Year's Eve 2022 — and this is according to the police report — a car pulled up at their home at night. An individual or individuals could be seen going in according to a neighbor's Ring camera footage, and there's some yelling that occurs inside the house, and then two figures are seen leaving the property, going to a car and driving off. Those individuals could not be definitively identified on that blurry Ring camera footage. Several days later, during a welfare check — because the elderly Richard and Rita were taking care of Rita's mother, who was very old at that time, and they weren't showing up to check in on her — somebody called for a welfare check. Pennsylvania State Police came to the property and found the two bodies in pools of blood in Michelle Zajko's former childhood bedroom. They had been shot execution-style in the head.
And that case — murders in 2022 — it was only just a few months ago that finally Michelle Zajko was charged with the murder of her parents. However, at the press conference, the prosecutor said that Michelle Zajko was not alone, but stopped short of saying who she was with. We do know there's video of two figures being seen leaving that property at the time it's believed that Richard and Rita were executed, but Ziz has never been charged with attempted murder.
After the double homicide, Michelle Zajko became a person of interest and then was questioned, not charged, let go, and disappeared. She was with another Zizian at that time, Daniel Blank.
Tucker Carlson: Is she trans too?
Andy Ngo: Yes. She is a biological woman who uses the name Jamie or Alex and at various times has used different pronouns, including they/them.
The Murder of Curtis Lint
Tucker Carlson: What happened to the elderly man who got the sword run through him?
Andy Ngo: I'm jumping through quite a large timeline now — a decade of all this — so it may get a little bit confusing as I'm describing it, because it's involving different geographic regions and many different characters at this point. What people need to know is that Curtis Lint had survived the attempted assassination. He was blinded in one eye, wore an eye patch, and eventually returned to his property. He had spent a long time away but, against the urging of his children, returned. He wanted to live out the final years on this property that he had bought. He lived in a trailer and he was used to it. He liked it. He missed it. He came back. It was a mistake.
In January 2025, somebody was waiting in the shadows for him outside that property. And when he pulled in, that person went up with a blade and repeatedly stabbed him, and according to witnesses pulled his head back and slit his throat, and he bled out. He died there on the spot. At that time he was 82.
Tucker Carlson: Was he ever able to testify against the original assailants?
Andy Ngo: The trial never happened. The state still hasn't happened.
Tucker Carlson: Was anyone arrested for his murder?
Andy Ngo: The person who was arrested days later, Maximilian Snyder, is the person who is in a relationship with the woman accused of the ambush shooting of the Vermont Border Patrol officer.
Tucker Carlson: Ziz was arrested.
Andy Ngo: Yes. And then after that — so in total now, all of that — that's a total of eight victims of this group. As of this interview, not a single one has been convicted. Ziz himself is in federal custody in Philadelphia. He's only charged with a federal crime of being a fugitive in possession of firearms.
So this story documents this whole process of what happened during the times they were fugitives, the bases that they had established across multiple states. And I traveled to where they had lived formally. I went to the Bay Area and I went to North Carolina, where their last established hideout base was, and I got to visit the property. And let me tell you — I'm not a spiritual or religious person — but when I was there and was let in, I felt really unsettled. There was what I would describe as an energy in that type of space, because you can see how they lived their lives. I found some of their clothes, and this is part of what makes the Zizians really scary — they were always dressed in black, very similar to the Antifa black bloc anarchists that I've encountered a lot. I found their clothes. I found their hair. And they had all these remnants of their so-called lab or workstations where they would be building things and doing things on one another.
Part of the big reveal in the book is a very large section of pictures that have never been revealed before of the hideout bases, pictures of the Zizians in their past. And part of the big investigation for me was making sure that every single person and associate is identified by their birth name.
Tucker Carlson: How hard is that to get their names?
Andy Ngo: It's easier once somebody's been charged with a crime, but there are lots of people in the Zizian circles who have never been formally accused of a crime. So they're only known by the aliases that they use online and in screenings and such. And this is actually part of a wider issue I encountered in my reporting on trans violence — a lot of times, in the absence of booking photos being released, and more and more police departments and agencies are not releasing mugshots, so you have the name but in most liberal jurisdictions they've adopted laws that make it extremely easy to change one's identity. It's literally just one document that you file in the court and you get a legal name change. And that process can really obscure, for example in my crime reporting, the criminal history of certain suspects because now they've adopted a new name, and simultaneously it's becoming harder to get their mugshots even as it becomes easier to change your name.
Tucker Carlson: Exactly. So we're seeing a theme here, which is a flight from physical reality. We don't want you to know what the physical reality of anything is.
Andy Ngo: Oregon was one of the states that actually did allow law enforcement to release mugshots. People might remember that I was releasing the Antifa mugshots back in 2020 from all the nights of rioting. It was true there that I was able to find out individuals who were trans, because then you know — a photo of the suspect, then you can link to, for example, their social media. If you only had a name, it's harder to identify that this is a person's social media.
Oregon Democrats, in reaction to my reporting — and actually those who testified at the state capital in Oregon in 2020 brought up my reporting and said that through my work they were subjected to alleged harassment and things like that after being identified — so then Oregon Democrats passed a law banning all law enforcement agencies in the state from releasing booking photos in the absence of a conviction. On paper that sounds okay — don't release your picture until they've been convicted. But in Oregon, where Democrats have had control for decades and influence on the courts, not very many criminal suspects, particularly those involved in political violence, ever end up getting convicted. Speaking as somebody who's been the victim of that violence.
Tucker Carlson: Well, this is the youth wing of their party, so they protect it assiduously. I remember those mugshots that you released very well six years ago, and the first thing I felt — after fear and revulsion — was sympathy, because there was something wrong with almost every person on their faces. They all looked defective in some way. They all looked like something was really wrong — these were not healthy people at all. They all looked crazy and unhealthy. I think you would have that same type of feeling if you look at the mugshots of the Zizians that I was able to see. There's a certain look — like, don't go outside, filled with weird chemicals. These are just not robust-looking specimens. They look like they're dying, actually.
Andy Ngo: I mean, the members — I dive into their biographical backgrounds, and some of them are alleged to have gone through some abuse. There's also confusion because all of them have alleged abuse as well. It's kind of a pattern by a lot of trans activists, particularly the Zizians — they would recast normal childhood experiences as extremely abusive situations involving their families and then use that to justify why their parents and families were evil and why they would do justice. The killing of one's parents was actually another part of the Zizian ideology that made them different from mainstream rationalism. They pulled in all these types of grievance politics. There's a thinker in the past who used the term "wound collecting," and that's what the Zizians did.
Tucker Carlson: Well, sure. And the more that you believe you're the victim, the less empathy you have for others. And that's true for nations as well as people. It's like classic narcissism — if you think you are the victim, you don't feel bad when you hurt other people.
How Ziz Was Finally Caught
Andy Ngo: Can I describe how Ziz himself was finally caught?
Tucker Carlson: Yeah.
Andy Ngo: So in their latter years — I talked about the double homicide of the parents in Pennsylvania, and then there was the throat-slitting and killing of Curtis Lint in the second attack on him, and then there was the shooting murder of the Border Patrol agent. So by that point, eight people were dead. Ziz, Michelle Zajko, and another member, Daniel Blank, were still on the run somewhere, and there was a multi-state search for them last year in January and February. And when they were finally found, they were found in a super rural area in Allegany County, western Maryland, in the middle of essentially a snowstorm. So they were hiding out in their box trucks.
In the videos when they're being arrested — the police body camera video — they keep saying, "I haven't done anything wrong." And I believe that really summarizes their belief. If it turns out that all the state and federal accusations against them are true — and that process is still playing out now, nobody's actually had justice yet — but if all the accusations are proven, the Zizians really do believe that they have done nothing wrong. Because in their worldview, this effective altruist view about maximizing good, it is for them the rational decision to take out this person, kill that person, murder that person if it gets in the way. They view themselves as really the vanguard of saving the world. Anybody who gets in their way, who tries to imprison them, who tries to extract money from them — take them out. They're due vengeance.
And what showed me that this is more than just an isolated case of a fringe group becoming violent is that with some of the actions that the group allegedly took — the murders and such — they received praise from mainstream leftists and trans activists who were sympathetic, for example, to the Border Patrol officer being murdered.
Tucker Carlson: So why was the Border Patrol officer murdered? I should have asked you that — my apologies.
Andy Ngo: So two Zizian members — Felix Baloult, who used the name Oilia, a German national, and Teresa Younglute, the youngest member at that time, 20 years old last year, from Seattle — they had been observed acting suspiciously in Vermont. For example, they pulled into a motel and they were dressed all in black and wearing tactical gear and had firearms with them. In context, in rural northeastern Vermont — the Northeast Kingdom, which is a really rural area — it's not unusual for people to carry a handgun. You're out in the woods, you're out in the country. But the fact that they were masked and in black and wearing tactical gear did make some of the hotel staff question what was going on, and they made the decision to call law enforcement. When federal law enforcement responded — because this is very close to the Canadian border where they were found — they were completely evasive. They were let go. They weren't accused of any crimes at that point.
They went to another motel, and when they were driving on the road very close to the Canadian border — it's unclear where they were going ultimately — they had packed up all their stuff and departed after they had been questioned. They were pulled over by US Border Patrol agent David Christopher Mullen. And according to the investigation, once he approached their vehicle and asked them to come out, he was fired upon and shot dead on the spot. He had backup. There was a shootout. Felix Baloult was shot dead. Teresa Younglute was injured in the arm but survived. And she is the only one who has been federally charged with murder.
The way the story concludes in my writing is bleak. You can say a lot about the Zizians, but one thing they're not is stupid. And they were very strategic with their decision-making. It took state prosecutors in Pennsylvania nearly four years to charge Michelle Zajko, and they at this point apparently don't have enough evidence to charge anybody else. Ziz himself has to date never been charged with murder or attempted murder. Even the felonies that he's facing in Maryland when they were finally found and arrested after the manhunt essentially amount to firearm possession offenses. And he doesn't have a criminal conviction history. He has a whole bunch of outstanding cases, no convictions. So we really could see an outcome where Ziz and the other Zizians are let out. In fact, the Maryland state case against Ziz, Michelle Zajko, and Daniel Blank was suspended recently for reasons that are unclear. So one of the Zizians, Daniel Blank, is completely out free right now. And there are people online who continue to be radicalized by Ziz and his writings.
The Appeal of the Cult
Tucker Carlson: So what's the appeal? Why would — if the pitch is "we're going to cut your brain in half and deprive you of sleep in order to do that" — it's hard to see who joins a group like that. What is the pitch that they're making?
Andy Ngo: For people who are drawn into the rationalist and effective altruist community, they're not normal people. They really view that all of the world is facing this existential risk of being completely destroyed by AI. We must do something. So under that sort of environment, with several other variables — such as many of the people who have been attracted to the Zizians being autistic, several of them with documented Asperger syndrome diagnoses — their thinking is not like normal people. It's much more systematic, ordered, and about using various mathematical models to map out decision-making and what they believe are the best outcomes.
So when you have that, combined with a grooming process by Ziz and his writings pulling in certain people, you do eventually get some people who are drawn in and believe they can be heroes. And if it takes killing one person to save the animals on Earth — the billions of life forms, the billions of shrimp that are out there — they're just using a calculation model. One life versus the life of billions. And the life of billions includes all these animals.
Tucker Carlson: All the prawns.
Andy Ngo: Yeah, exactly. So that's the type of people that have been drawn in, and you have to think of them within that context.
Tucker Carlson: The people who have been so damaged by modern technology that their brains don't work and they lack empathy toward people.
The Rise of Trans Violence
Andy Ngo: Yes. And another thing about the Zizians — stepping back and looking at the broader picture — I also write about this. There's a chapter in here called "The Rise of the Trans Killers." So the Zizians are one example of alleged trans killers carrying out a campaign of violence across the United States. But in the past decade, there have been so many others. And in fact, one difficulty was finding contemporaneous reporting at the time that even described some of them as trans, because it didn't — it would refer to them by preferred pronouns, preferred names. So you get this completely false impression that these incidents are not involving trans people when in fact they are.
As part of my research for this book, I went to Nashville, Tennessee, and I went to the church where there was the mass shooting attack by Audrey Hale, a trans shooter who used the name Hayden. The FBI released scans of the journals — the so-called manifesto — left behind by this shooter, and you can see how she was completely radicalized by this inability to accept the reality of who she was. And she took it out on children at the school.
Standing outside of there was important for me to do. I really wanted to go to some of these places where the trans violence actually happened — going to Vallejo, seeing the area on the ground where Curtis Lint died and bled out. The Zizians is about this whole — not just about the trans death cult and all their secrets, their human experimentation, their victims — but also what we're witnessing and experiencing across the world of rising trans violence that's being completely denied. Denied by institutions like in Canada, denied by law enforcement through them erroneously giving us the preferred names, preferred pronouns, even preferred sex of criminals and convicts through the courts. The Zizians were able to drag out their case for years until Curtis Lint was assassinated by making accusations in court filings and civil claims alleging that their civil rights as trans people were being violated.
Tucker Carlson: And they were backed up in this by organized trans groups.
Andy Ngo: They were backed up by trans groups and leftist attorneys. They were even soliciting for donations from people to pay for their legal fund.
Tucker Carlson: Did they get them?
Andy Ngo: I don't know how much money they were able to get, but they did get private retained legal representation, and that doesn't come cheap.
Tucker Carlson: Amazing. How are they seen in Silicon Valley? Does this seem to be sort of like a dirty secret that a lot of the rationalists and effective altruists in Silicon Valley don't want to talk about because it came from their community?
Andy Ngo: I of course need to caveat that the EA and effective altruist community and rationalist community is diverse in the sense that as belief systems it can be apolitical — it's not partisan. You can have those who are libertarian or maybe even conservative and then those who are on the radical left as well. And the Zizians' beliefs are not widely endorsed by the communities there. But at the same time, I wonder if there's any sort of introspection about what that type of environment produces.
I mean, you would think it would be in the interest of trans groups to distance themselves from trans murderers, but they haven't. Not only have they not, in fact some of them even celebrate and support the actions of convicted trans killers. For example, earlier this year, a man who uses the name Mia Bailey was convicted and sentenced in Utah for the killing of his parents. In the police interrogation video that was publicly released as part of that investigation, he talked about how he didn't believe that his mother was supportive enough of his transition, that she had allegedly contacted the hospital before he was supposed to have some type of trans surgery, informing them that her son was dealing with a lot of issues.
Tucker Carlson: Typically people show up for a self-castration — "dealing with a lot of issues." I think that's fair.
Andy Ngo: He shot his parents dead and attempted to kill his brother as well — shot through the door, but the rounds didn't hit his brother. So he was sentenced this year to decades in prison for that double murder. And as part of my research I track what leftist activists say online, and what I saw from a lot of trans activists — the trans Antifa-aligned type people, I call them "Trantifa," that's the term I use — they thought that what Mia Bailey did was justified and right. They believe that those who are not supportive of one's transgender identity should be eliminated. That's a lot of their view.
And with the ongoing criminal case against Tyler Robinson — according to investigators, he was motivated to assassinate Charlie Cook out of love and support for his trans furry partner — there are trans activists online who have been highly sympathetic to that. And so week after week there are cases of trans-identified individuals who are being arrested and charged, and it's getting really no media attention for a number of reasons. One, a lot of people aren't even aware that the suspect is trans. And two, in legacy media, there are people essentially trying to cover it up. If you read the AP style guide — that's the guidance for print journalists, I was trained in AP style — their recent style guides have all been updated to where you don't use terms like "biological female" or "biological male," you don't mention that somebody is transgender unless it's somehow really relevant to the story, you use their preferred name and their preferred pronoun.
Tucker Carlson: You pretend it's all real. You go along with a lie and mislead people.
Andy Ngo: So The Zizians is a very comprehensive telling of what that group did and the truth of who they are. If you read the legacy media reporting on the Zizians — and there hasn't been very much — it's referring to Ziz as she/her, and this woman who wanted to just save the world from AI risk, and somehow in the end they're now being accused of all this violence. Some of the reporting has been, not oddly but predictably, sympathetic to some of the Zizians. If you're concerned about AI risk, it's because you'd want people to be hurt by AI. Consider the irony of murdering people who were not even connected to the development of AI because you're worried about AI. It doesn't make any sense at all. And by the way, these are all people who directly or indirectly have contributed to the rise of AI because they work in Silicon Valley. So they're the perpetrators.
Tucker Carlson: There's sort of an adjacent analogy that I think maybe viewers might understand a bit more. Consider, for example, last year the death threats that Elon Musk got after there were various cuts to US aid. There was actually a significant number of leftists who were actively calling for his murder. And in their view, he should be murdered because his agenda with cuts in the federal government is causing people to die. So therefore he should be stopped, he should be killed. It's very simply this — in their calculation, and this is not a fringe belief amongst radical leftists — somebody who is harming our agenda should be taken out.
Andy Ngo: Are they all atheists? Do any of these people believe in a god of some kind?
Tucker Carlson: The Zizians and the rationalists and effective altruists are atheists. However, what I discovered in the course of my reporting and investigations is that the Zizians took on various occult-like elements such as cursing people with spells and hexes. That was a surprise to me. But the more I thought about it —
Andy Ngo: It's obviously witchcraft to me.
Tucker Carlson: Well, initially I was surprised when I found out evidence of this that had been documented. But then I thought about all the Antifa militants that I've reported on who profess to be radical anarchists and atheists and will embrace witchcraft and pagan beliefs as well. So there's this connection — well, they're being motivated by demons. So that's all real in my opinion.
I'm not surprised at all. I am surprised that two years into this administration, we still haven't seen a systematic attempt to understand what Antifa is and who pays for it. Where's that?
The Federal Response to Antifa
Andy Ngo: I actually think the administration has done a good job. I'll name out some of the things that have been taken by the federal government. A lot of people forget or don't remember what's happened. So in the autumn of last year, Donald Trump announced that his administration would be treating Antifa as domestic terrorists. There was a big executive order — and an executive order is just a statement. He had said something very similar in 2020 when the riots were happening and no action was taken at that time. But from there, the State Department prescribed bans for European Antifa groups, making them designated foreign terrorist organizations, meaning that if you provide support for them you can be criminally prosecuted in the United States. That was the first time an international Antifa group had ever been prescribed by the US government.
And then there was the White House Antifa roundtable, which I was very fortunate to be part of, where I spoke to the president and members of his cabinet about the threat of Antifa and left-wing violent extremism in the United States. And more recently there was an international summit held by the State Department in DC on the threat and rise of left-wing terrorism, and that had officials from dozens of countries around the world participate. The State Department then also prescribed some more Antifa-aligned groups — in particular an Italian one that provided the online infrastructure for dozens of Antifa websites where they post tactics and strategies for attacks, targets of attack, and claims of responsibility for terror attacks. So the federal government has done a lot. I think of course they can always do more.
Tucker Carlson: Has anyone been charged for sending money to Antifa? Because if I gave money to Hamas or Hezbollah, I'd get an FBI raid at my house.
Andy Ngo: What makes it difficult in the law is the fact that Antifa is a movement and ideology made up of organizations, groups, and cells. It's kind of like — think of it this way — you couldn't prosecute somebody for example for donating to a neo-Nazi cause. That's not a crime. But for example, if they donated to a group that was involved in criminal activity, you could be prosecuted.
Tucker Carlson: Well, but if you designated — I mean, I think the designation is the point. So all these foreign groups have been designated terror organizations and therefore anybody whose money winds up in their hands gets indicted. There have been a million indictments. It seems like you could do that for Antifa.
Andy Ngo: What's hard about Antifa in terms of the criminal prosecution side of it is that most of the groups in the American context are American and they operate entirely domestically. They might read materials from the European groups and learn tactics in terms of the radical material and text, but in terms of coordination on an international level — money, weapons trafficking, things like that — we don't really see that happen. That happens domestically at the US level.
So there have been particular groups that have been completely dismantled. There was a really big case actually earlier this year in Texas — a federal prosecution. It was the first time that accused Antifa members of the North Texas Antifa cell have been charged with providing material support to terrorism, attempted murder, and many other felonies. It was stemming from a shooting on an ICE facility in Alvarado, Texas on the 4th of July in 2024. So there were 16 people who were prosecuted — not only the cell but also those who were accused of providing aid, like helping the ringleader to escape from the scene of the attack. They were all federally charged, and seven of them pleaded guilty ahead of trial. Some of them flipped and provided testimony, and nine went to trial and all of them were convicted. Collectively they're facing around 500 years in prison. The ringleader of the group was sentenced to 100 years in prison, and they were convicted of providing material support to terrorism among other crimes.
This case really received not much media attention at all, but it was the first Antifa federal prosecution and convictions in US history. After that, there have been 15 in US history. It was the first time that individuals that the US government accused of being part of an Antifa group have been —
Tucker Carlson: After everything, all those people killed in 2020. This is the first time.
Andy Ngo: When the federal government is determined and also has popular support, you can see what the full force of the government really looks like. I do understand the feeling that we're not seeing those types of resources and tools being used to the same extent against far-left anti-government violent extremists. I understand that frustration. At the same time, with my speaking to individuals and travel to DC to talk about this stuff, the barriers that they face legally in terms of prosecuting Antifa militants is really different compared to some of these other cases where we've seen, for example, under the Biden administration, what that DOJ was able to do.
Texas wasn't the only one. There are still ongoing federal prosecutions now against those accused of being part of the Antifa cells in Minnesota that were involved in organizing the anti-government violence and attacks on federal agents and officials earlier this year against ICE. So there have been 15 who have been federally prosecuted and are accused in charging documents of being part of an Antifa network. So there are things being done. Of course we want to see more.
We've seen at least from the president talk about the truth of what he sees — the rise of trans violence — but with all the laws that are out there and the legal protections, the violent far-left really know how to exploit the laws to protect themselves. And I think it's a Sisyphean task for the federal government to really dismantle Antifa, because at the end of the day, even if they criminally prosecute the cells that exist from coast to coast — and there are a lot of them that are involved in criminal activity — it's very easy for new cells and autonomous groups to form because the ideology is spreading and growing and it has legitimacy from a lot of Democrats.
I was very reluctant to come to that view for a long time. I thought that maybe Democrats were just slightly misguided with their rhetorical and legal support for Antifa criminal suspects. But actually, I've had now 10 years of reporting on left-wing political violence in instances where suspects are carrying out violent attacks and still garner support of Democrats in power — like in Portland, for example, and many many other jurisdictions. My only conclusion is they are completely fine with using these militants as their foot soldiers.
So the Antifa ideology has a lot of support. There's a lot of money as well. It comes really through people who donate to what they call mutual aid causes, which is essentially a term for projects that provide support in one way or another — it can be in the form of housing or food, or most importantly legal defense. They have access to a lot of money from rich donors giving large amounts and large groups of people donating small amounts. The amount of money that was raised, for example, for the Texas Antifa defendants — they raised significant funds. They've had huge support in left-wing media, particularly after the convictions. There was all this reporting treating them as people who were sentenced to decades in prison based on ideology, when none of them were willing to report out the facts of what we learned at the trial — because of all the members who had flipped and provided evidence for the prosecution — the type of organization that happened, the planning, the training, the gathering of dozens of firearms where they met at the safe house before the shooting attack. That's just one particular anecdote, but it's emblematic of how left-wing violence and trans violence — at least four members of that Texas Antifa cell, by the way — are completely protected by many people with money and in positions of power who have the ability to influence.
Cross-Sex Hormones and Violence
Tucker Carlson: That's obvious. May I ask you one last question? Did you run across in your reporting any evidence that the use of cross-sex hormones inspires violence?
Andy Ngo: There's a whole chapter in my book looking at all the academic literature —
Tucker Carlson: The physiological effect of the —
Andy Ngo: — seeking to answer this particular question. I'm going to say that people who want to know what the academic literature says should read my book. But to summarize, there hasn't been enough research that's been done.
Tucker Carlson: It seems like it would scramble your eggs to have cross-sex hormones injected into your body.
Andy Ngo: I will say that some of the limited research that has been done has shown that in polling of people who have been prone to radicalization, one of the predictors of that — particularly violent radicalization — has been a transgender identity. And this was research that was done out of Canada. Very few people know about some of this academic peer-reviewed research, but it's very limited because, one, academics who seek to ask these types of research questions are not supported in their academic departments — it's all captured. Two, the funding for this type of research is not there. And three, those who dare in academia to transgress against transgender ideology get absolutely destroyed. Academic after academic after academic has been hounded out for asking some of these questions about this phenomenon of transgenderism. Just the fact that we're seeing a huge explosion in people in the last five to ten years suddenly identifying as trans, when the numbers before were tiny — what are the questions behind all of this? It needs academic research. It's not happening. There's been some, and I dive into that research.
Tucker Carlson: Hormone surges make you crazy. That's called the teenage years, or menopause, or any time — you know, a radical reduction in testosterone levels in men affects their thinking and behavior. So it just stands to reason that massive doses of the wrong hormones — who knows what that does to you.
Andy Ngo: There's been some research on the effects of mood through cross-sex hormone therapy in transgender-identifying individuals. You would not be surprised to hear that increased aggression is something that's been observed.
Tucker Carlson: Think about the physiological effects of all these chemicals. Ask anyone who's undergoing treatment for prostate cancer, where very often testosterone levels are lowered.
Andy Ngo: You're essentially chemically castrated as a man.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah. And for medical reasons — it's voluntary and it may be worth it — but talk to the guys who go through it. It totally changes you. So I think we should think about the physiological effects of all these chemicals.
Andy Ngo: And also ask questions about what happens when that is merged with an ideology that tells people to collect wounds and grievances.
Tucker Carlson: And to take up firearms to get revenge. Narcissism makes you violent. No doubt. Andy, thank you for this. Good luck. I'm sure you've thought through the security implications of writing this book. I'm sure they're real. So Godspeed.
Andy Ngo: Thank you.