The man who set himself on fire on Friday outside of the Manhattan courthouse where former President Donald Trump is on trial has died, leaving behind a manifesto explaining his actions.
Max Azzarello, 37, died Friday night about nine hours after he doused himself and then set himself ablaze in a small park across the street from the courthouse, according to the New York Post.
“I was about 20 to 30 feet from him. I started yelling, ‘This guy’s doing something, he might be doing something!” witness Fred Gates said, according to the New York Daily News,
“When the fire [started] it was just disbelief. I never saw anything like this,” he said.
Azzarello had a police record in Florida based on three arrests in August, including one in which he was accused of throwing a wine glass at a framed photo of former President Bill Clinton, according to the New York Post.
Max Azzarello who set himself on fire outside Trump trial stuck tongue out in mugshot, was ‘suicidal’ when arrested: records https://t.co/SiFTJ1ZcXh pic.twitter.com/90F8AuEkCN
— New York Post (@nypost) April 19, 2024
At the time of his arrest, police believed he was suicidal, but he was eventually freed from jail in October and sentenced to 180 days of probation. Azzarello had traveled to New York City last week.
In a post on Substack, filed before he set himself on fire, he said he was “an investigative researcher who has set himself on fire outside of the Trump trial in Manhattan.”
Is mental illness on the rise in America?
“This extreme act of protest is to draw attention to an urgent and important discovery: We are victims of a totalitarian con, and our own government (along with many of their allies) is about to hit us with an apocalyptic fascist world coup,” he wrote.
He said the claims in his manifesto “sound like fantastical conspiracy theory, but they are not. They are proof of conspiracy,” adding, “Because these words are true, this is an act of revolution.”
Some of the points he made in his statement touched on various financial and political issues.
“Cryptocurrency is our first planetary multi-trillion-dollar Ponzi scheme. It was expressly created for this purpose by a laundry list of rich and powerful people out of Stanford/Silicon Valley and Harvard/Facebook,” he wrote, claiming COVID-19 was “unleashed” as part of the conspiracy.
The manifesto claimed, “Bill Clinton was secretly on (former CIA Director) George H.W. Bush’s side, and that the Democrat vs. Republican division has been entirely manufactured ever since: Clinton is with Bush; Gore is with Bush; Trump is with Hillary, and so on.”
Writing that “Harvard University is one of the largest organized crime fronts in history,” he added, “dozens of the writers of The Simpsons went to Harvard.”
“So I asked myself the question: If The Simpsons served the interests of organized crime, how would it do so? Well, it offers a dysfunctional family suffering from moral decay, a community incapable of solving its problems, a worker drone who slaves away for an evil billionaire, and cathartic laughs for our poor collective circumstances,” he wrote.
Azzarello summed up America since 1988 in part as “Institutions like healthcare and universities have become parasitic in their skyrocketing prices. News media tells us to be angry and tribalized. Daytime television warns us of moral decay. Local news tell us to fear our neighbors.”
Social media, he wrote, “is flooded with nonsense conspiracy theories and memes reminding us that we are hopeless, helpless, anxious, depressed, ironic, scared, apathetic, escapist, lonely, misguided, and jaded, telling us we can’t do anything but have a laugh at our circumstances.”
“Liberals mock the hypocrisy of conservatives; conservatives mock the hypocrisy of liberals, and our collective circumstances erode,” he wrote.
