The “Unabomber,” Ted Kaczynski’s brother, expressed his sorrow that his brother’s acts decades ago could inspire violence today and expressed his hope that the man suspected of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson did not see his brother as a “key model” on Tuesday.
Before being apprehended in the Montana wilderness in 1996, Ted Kaczynski carried out a deadly bombing spree for twenty years, killing three people and injuring twenty-three more. After one of the longest FBI manhunts in history, Kaczynski was captured after taunting agents with a convoluted diatribe.
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“It’s easy to quickly and thoughtlessly write this off as the manifesto of a lunatic, in order to avoid facing some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies,” wrote Luigi Mangione, an Ivy League tech graduate and suspect in Thompson’s murder, in a January review of Kaczynski’s “Industrial Society and Its Future,” also known as “The Unabomber Manifesto,” on the book review website Goodreads. However, it’s hard to deny how accurate many of his forecasts about contemporary society were.
David Kaczynski, however, stated that his brother, who committed suicide while in federal detention in 2023, shouldn’t be looked up to.
According to David Kaczynski, “His actions are like a virus,” during a phone interview. “Unless they realize that he was a really irate and disturbed man, they might be like a virus. Although his actions, in my opinion, are those of a madman, it does not follow that his thoughts are those of a crazy.
“To the extent that he may have attributed at all to sort of normalizing or recasting the violent acts as beneficial to humanity is a terrible mistake,” said David Kaczynski.
From 1978 until 1995, Ted Kaczynski, a mathematician with a Harvard education, planted homemade pipe bombs against American Airlines flights, universities, and other targets while railing against technology in his writings, according to federal authorities. A 35,000-word manifesto opposing the “industrial-technological system” was written by him with the hopes of bringing about a revolution in contemporary society.
According to the university, Mangione, 26, earned a graduate degree in computer and information science and an undergraduate degree in computer science with a mathematics minor from the University of Pennsylvania in 2020.
After a days-long manhunt after Thompson’s death last Wednesday, he was taken into custody Monday at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania. The NYPD describes the shooting death of the 50-year-old CEO in front of a hotel in New York City as a “premeditated, preplanned targeted attack.”
Mangione decided to oppose extradition to New York, where he would be charged with second-degree murder, among other offenses, during a hearing held in Pennsylvania on Tuesday afternoon. Bail was refused.
“It’s completely out of touch and an insult to the intelligence of the American people and their lived experience!” Mangione said at reporters as he made his way into the courthouse.
According to a handwritten memo that detectives discovered, NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch told reporters Monday that it “speaks to both his motivation and mindset.” According to NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny, Mangione seemed to have “ill will toward corporate America.” No more facts were disclosed.
Investigators are investigating if the attack was the result of the suspect’s apparent problems and list of complaints, including that the murder was a “symbolic takedown” in a battle against corporate “power games,” according to an NYPD early review of the killing.
Additionally, investigators suggested that he might have admired Kaczynski’s previous strikes and allegedly repeated his own worries about technology innovation.
According to Mangione’s Goodreads account, he has read 65 books covering everything from diets to Elon Musk. He gave Kaczynski’s book a four-star rating. He said that he found “a take” online that he described as “interesting.”
Part of the internet comment concerning Kaczynski said: “Violence is required to survive when all other means of expression are ineffective. Even if you disagree with his tactics, from his point of view, it’s war and revolution rather than terrorism.
David Kaczynski played a crucial role in his brother’s capture. Following the publication of “The Unabomber Manifesto” by The Washington Post in 1995, David Kaczynski collaborated with the FBI to apprehend his sibling after realizing he might be among their most wanted fugitives.
According to David Kaczynski, he is aware that people may still find resonance in his brother’s writings and his conviction that human freedom is being undermined by the rapid growth of technology. However, he added, change cannot come with bloodshed.
“I think we always have to remember that human motivation is extremely complicated,” David Kaczynski stated. “Many factors go into a person’s motivation that they drastically act like this, and I hope my brother wasn’t in a way a key model for him.”
Regarding the June 2023 death of his brother in prison, David Kaczynski chose not to speak. Ted Kaczynski died by suicide in his cell at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina, at the age of 81. He had been diagnosed with rectal cancer and was serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole. According to his autopsy, which NBC News was able to get in April, he was “depressed and sent for psychiatric evaluation” one month before he committed himself.
According to David Kaczynski, “acts of violence do the same thing, albeit in a very negative manner,” just as acts of love can send out waves of benefit to other people, to humanity at-large in ways we can see and ones we can’t see. The idea that my brother’s activities have even somewhat influenced a man like this to murder an innocent person hurts me very personally.
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