Annie Elise

and how ideas in certain blog posts can just truly spill over into real life with very real consequences.

Because in the beginning, the Zizians just had shared some beliefs that they bonded over.

They hadn't even really been a real problem for anyone.

They weren't a thorn in anybody's side.

But that all started to change in 2019.

That year, Ziz got arrested at a protest outside a Northern California retreat center.

The center was holding an event for people who were involved in an organization called the Center for Applied Rationality.

And a few of Ziz's close friends were also there too, including a girl by the name of Emma and a guy, Alexander.

Now, according to Ziz and her friends, they were protesting what they claimed was sexual misconduct within the group at the retreat.

Basically, they felt like this group was against trans women.

But they ended up going too far in their protest for whatever reason, and they got arrested.

And it wasn't a huge story in the media at the time, but it was maybe the first moment that pushed Ziz's group out of the world of blog posts and into real-world disruption.

Now, as we all know, right around that time, COVID hit in 2020.

So that kind of threw a wrench into all of the court dates and everything else that was supposed to transpire after these Zizians were arrested.

So from the time it went down until 2021, there was kind of this super messy legal back and forth.

The cops claimed that the Zizians had weapons on them during that protest, but they all denied it.

Then, the Zizians filed a civil rights complaint saying that they were victims of excessive force.

They started blogging about it constantly, they started accusing the police of filing false reports, and it was just very, very messy.

Then, in 2021, when it finally came time for some actual court dates, the Zizians had turned against their own legal team.

And not long after that, their accusations of harassment and torture were completely tossed out.