The brother of Ted Kaczynski, better known as the ‘Unabomber’ for his havoc-wreaking domestic terrorism, has broken his silence after Luigi Mangione posted about his manifesto on his Goodreads account.
Mangione, 26, was apprehended after visiting a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania on Monday and charged with murder for the December 4 shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
The accused killer had left notes and his opinion on Kaczynski’s lengthy ideas, which drove him to injure dozens and kill three people over two decades.
Many have drawn comparisons between the alleged murderer and Kaczynski – saying that Mangione may have been influenced by him based on his social media habits.
David Kaczynski, Ted’s brother, said the idea that the Unabomber could have motivated Mangione brings him great distress.
‘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,’ he told NBC News.
‘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.
Mangione praised the Unabomber in online posts reviewing his book, but David said his brother is not someone others should look up to.
Suspected UnitedHealthcare CEO shooter Luigi Mangione posted about the Unabomber’s manifesto on his Goodreads account
Ted Kaczynski, better known as the ‘Unabomber,’ engaged in a 17-year-long bombing campaign before he was caught
‘To the extent that he [the Unabomber] may have attributed at all to sort of normalizing or recasting the violent acts as beneficial to humanity is a terrible mistake,’ David Kaczynski said.
‘His actions are like a virus. They could be like a virus unless they understand he was a very angry and disturbed man. It doesn’t mean his ideas are ideas of a lunatic, but his behavior, I believe, is the behavior of a lunatic.’
Both Mangione and Kaczynski were described as highly intelligent, with Mangione serving as his $40,000-a-year prep school’s valedictorian before going on to study computer science and engineering at Ivy League University of Pennsylvania – and Kaczynski starting at Harvard at the age of 16.
The Unabomber – who engaged in a 17-year-long bombing campaign before he was caught – went on to study mathematics as a PhD student at the University of Michigan and took a professor position at University of California Berkeley in 1967.
Kaczynski eventually secluded himself from society in a cabin in Montana, where he wrote a 35,000-word essay saying he was trying to bring about a ‘revolution against the industrial system’ as he spoke out about the ills of modern society.
That manifesto was later published as a book – which seemed to have resonated with Mangione decades later.
He praised Kaczynski in posts on Goodreads as an ‘extreme political revolutionary,’ writing: ‘It’s simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out.’
‘When all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive,’ Mangione wrote. ‘You may not like his methods, but to see things from his perspective, it’s not terrorism, it’s war and revolution.’
David Kaczynski, Ted’s brother, said the idea that the Unabomber could have motivated Mangione brings him great distress
He even quoted Kaczynski on his page, with excerpts from his ramblings including: ‘Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness.’
‘The concept of “mental health” in our society is defined largely by the extent to which an individual behaves in accord with the needs of the system and does so without showing signs of stress,’ read another excerpt.
