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 and other offenses, during a hearing held in Pennsylvania on Tuesday afternoon. Bail was refused.
Before he entered the courthouse, Mangione shouted toward reporters, “It’s completely out of touch and an insult to the intelligence of the American people and their lived experience!”
According to a handwritten memo that detectives discovered, NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch told reporters Monday that it “speaks to both his motivation and mindset.” Although no other information was disclosed, NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny stated that Mangione seemed to harbor “ill will toward corporate America.”
Investigators are investigating if the attack was the result of the suspect’s obvious problems and list of grievances, including the potential that the murder was a “symbolic takedown” in a struggle against corporate “power games,” according to an NYPD early review of the killing.
Investigators also suggested that he might have mirrored his own worries about technology advancement and perhaps even appreciated Kaczynski’s actions.
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. AfterThe Washington Post printed”The Unabomber Manifesto” in 1995, David Kaczynski realized his sibling could be one of the FBI’s most wanted fugitives and worked with the agency in his capture.
David Kaczynski said he understands that people, to this day, still may look at his brother’s writings and find connection with his belief that rapid technological advancement is eroding human freedom. But violence, he added, cannot accompany change.
“I think we always have to remember that human motivation is extremely complicated,” David Kaczynski said. “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.”
David Kaczynski declined to comment about his brother’s death in prison in June 2023. Ted Kaczynski was serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole and had been diagnosed with rectal cancer when he died by suicide at age 81 alone in his cell at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina. His autopsy,obtained by NBC Newsin April, noted he had been “depressed and sent for psychiatric evaluation” a month prior to killing himself.
“Just like acts of love can send out waves of benefit to other people, to humanity at-large in ways we can see and ways we can’t see,” David Kaczynski said, “acts of violence do the same thing, albeit in a very negative manner. It really gives me a great deal of personal pain to think my brother’s actions have in any way contributed to influencing a man like this to kill an innocent human being.”
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