Thread by @TrashRadio_

Theodore Kaczynski: a thread

Theodore Kaczynski, PhD was no poser. He wasn't one of those fake Luddites, who only claim to hate modern technology but can't go three days without internet access. Ted practiced what he preached. You have to give him that

He was a brilliant mathematician who published several noteworthy papers on the boundary property of continuous functions, and the boundary functions and sets of curvilinear convergence for continuous functions

He then abandoned the tenure track at Harvard to live a hermit's life in a remote cabin in the woods of Montana, where he constructed his infamous mail bombs that killed three people and injured 22 others

Ted was a true believer. He cranked out that diatribe in a one-room, 10-by-12 plywood shack situated on 1.4 acres of Montana forest. The cabin had no electricity or plumbing. He used a manual typewriter

It took the FBI 𝟭𝟳 𝘆𝗲𝗮𝗿𝘀 to track the guy down, and they never would have caught him if his brother hadn't recognized Ted's writing and squealed. And that couldn't have happened if Ted hadn't insisted on publishing that manifesto. So really this is Ted's own damn fault

But he felt compelled to write his essay, which won kudos from the establishment it attacked. One professor at the University of Wisconsin praised the Unabomber's masterful grammar and punctuation. "It's good prose. The sentences flow well into one another, the paragraphs are

coherent. The Unabomber even knows how to punctuate, and that's a very rare gift." (That's right, people: he said gift.)

When it appeared initially that neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post were willing to publish the manifesto in full, Penthouse magazine publisher

When it appeared initially that neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post were willing to publish the manifesto in full, Penthouse magazine publisher Bob Guccione stepped forward

Guccione bought a full page in the New York Times. He offered a monthly magazine column

which reaches far into the corridors of power: "Penthouse is one of the biggest and most quoted magazines in the history of our industry. For 25 years it was and continues to be the single, biggest selling magazine in the Pentagon. If it's attention you want, you'd be hard-

pressed to do better." he went further, saying "I am still your only friend in the media."

He made contact with Bob a couple of times, via mail and phone, but drifted apart after the newspapers finally complied and printed "Industrial Society and Its Future" in unexpurgated form

His brother David Kaczynski read the thing and got a sinking feeling. David's wife contacted a childhood friend of hers working as a detective at Investigative Group International, the same agency that smeared tobacco industry whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand. The detective lined up

some writing analysis experts, and then they went to the FBI.

In jail awaiting trial, Ted attempted to hang himself with his underwear to avoid submitting to a psychiatric evaluation. Well, he got one anyway. The court appointed Sally Johnson, M.D. to determine whether Ted was

too nuts to stand trial. This is the same doctor who examined John Hinckley and Jim Bakker.

Her report included a biographical sketch of her subject. Ted was your ordinary 16-year-old Harvard freshman. He went through all the typical traumas, such as suffering through severe

depression and "acute sexual starvation," ultimately culminating in what the doctor described as "several weeks of intense, persistent sexual excitement involving fantasies of being a female. During that time period he became convinced that he should undergo sex change surgery."

Ted scheduled an appointment with a campus shrink to get the ball rolling but chickened out in the waiting room and settled on telling the doctor that he was just afraid of getting drafted. When we walked out the door, Ted's outlook suddenly zigzagged, as described in his diary:

"As I walked away from the building afterwards, I felt disgusted about what my uncontrolled sexual cravings had almost led me to do and I felt humiliated, and I violently hated the psychiatrist. Just then there came a major turning point in my life. Like a Phoenix, I burst from

the ashes of my despair to a glorious new hope. I thought I wanted to kill that psychiatrist because the future looked utterly empty to me. I felt I wouldn't care if I died. And so I said to myself why not really kill the psychiatrist and anyone else whom I hate. What is

important is not the words that ran through my mind but the way I felt about them. What was entirely new was the fact that I really felt I could kill someone. My very hopelessness had liberated me because I no longer cared about death. I no longer cared about consequences and I

said to myself that I really could break out of my rut in life an do things that were daring, irresponsible or criminal."

Ted made the decision to keep a diary in the first place primarily because he was worried that people might believe that he was mentally ill:

I intend to start killing people. If I am successful at this, it is possible that, when I am caught (not alive, I fervently hope!) there will be some speculation in the news media as to my motives for killing (As in the case of Charles Whitman, who killed some 13 people in Texas

in the '60s). If such speculation occurs, they are bound to make me out to be a sickie, and to ascribe to me motives of a sordid or "sick" type.

At his sentencing hearing, Ted told the judge: "I ask that people reserve their judgment about me."

Four life sentences, no parole.

After he wound up in a federal supermax in Florence, CO, Ted built a friendship with fellow inmate Timothy McVeigh. During their shared one-hour-per-day exercise period, Ted and Tim would talk. "On a personal level I like McVeigh and I imagine most people would like him."

Some details like bombings themselves often fall by the wayside. There are other details, like when in 1960 Ted Kaczynski volunteered for psychological experiments of Dr. Henry Murray, former OSS official. Many people speculate its MKULTRA, and how could they not?

Hardly anyone ever discusses his choice of targets, which is a reminder that this guy really did practice what he preached - for better and for worse

In 1980 the FBI determined that these package-bombing attacks are the work of one person. Their code-name for the case is UNABOM: UN stands for "university," A for "airline," and BOM for the obvious. Once the media starts hearing this code-name, the spelling got corrupted

May 25th 1978 - A package is found in a parking lot at the University of Illinois in Chicago and is taken to Northwestern University in Evanston because of the return address. It explodes when it is opened on May 26, injuring Terry Marker, a security guard

May 9th 1979 - Graduate student John Harris is injured by a bomb at Northwestern University

November 15th 1979 - Twelve people suffer smoke inhalation when a bomb explodes in a 727's cargo hold during an American Airlines flight, forcing an emergency landing at Dulles International Airport near Washington

June 10th 1980 - United Airlines President Percy Wood is injured at his home in the Chicago area

October 8th 1981 - A bomb is found in a business classroom at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. No one is injured

May 5th 1982 - Janet Smith, a secretary, is injured by a bomb at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. The package was addressed to computer science Professor Patrick Fischer

July 2nd 1982 - Diogenes Angelakos, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science, is injured in a faculty lounge at the University of California at Berkeley

May 15th 1985 - Graduate student John Hauser is injured by a bomb in a computer lab at the University of California at Berkeley

June 13th 1985 - A package-bomb mailed to Boeing Co. in Auburn, WA, on 8 May is discovered and disarmed

November 15th 1985 - A package-bomb mailed to University of Michigan psychology Professor James McConnell injures his assistant, Nicklaus Suino. McConnell, standing nearby in his Ann Arbor home, isn't hurt

December 11th 1985 - Hugh Scrutton, 38, is killed by a bomb near his computer rental store in Sacramento

February 20th 1987 - Gary Wright is injured by a bomb left behind a computer store in Salt Lake City, UT

June 22nd 1993 - Charles Epstein, a geneticist at UC San Francisco is injured by a bomb sent to his home

June 24th 1993 - Computer scientist Daved Gelernter of Yale University in New Haven, CT, is injured in his office

December 30th 1993 - The FBI sets up a page on its website, devoted to catching the UNABOM assailant. At this point, the FBI has no server of its own, so a NASA computer in Moffett Field, CA, is volunteered for hosting

May 7th 1995, NASA takes down the UNABOM site, citing safety concerns for NASA employees

April 24th 1995 - California Forestry Association President Gilbert Murray, 47, is killed opening a mail bomb in the group's Sacramento headquarters

June 24th 1995 - An airliner threat is mailed to the San Francisco Chronicle

April 3rd 1996 - investigators arrested Kaczynski and combed his cabin. There, they found a wealth of bomb components; 40,000 handwritten journal pages that included bomb-making experiments and descriptions of Unabomber crimes; and one live bomb, ready for mailing

While in prison, Ted kept up to date with the outside world and corresponded with people via mail

Its floating around somewhere online but a few letters detail his displeasure with anarcho-primitivists who flock to his work and how he felt they were a lost cause out the gate

"𝗕𝘂𝘁 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗳𝗶𝗿𝘀𝘁 𝗺𝗼𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗺𝗲 𝘄𝗮𝘀𝗻'𝘁 𝗮𝗻𝘆𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗜 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱. 𝗜 𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗴𝗼𝘁 𝗺𝗮𝗱 𝘀𝗲𝗲𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗺𝗮𝗰𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀 𝗿𝗶𝗽𝗽𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘂𝗽 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘄𝗼𝗼𝗱𝘀"

Its impressive how it's 𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘭𝘭 a mystery to people why his writings have resonated with people and continue to do so long after it they were published and made public

Any of these quotes would be on merchandise and parroted endlessly if from anyone else living or dead

Part of the reason I was compelled to write this thread was @oliverjai1014 squealing like a hysterical and neurotic pig at anyone who disagreed with him, and later compared 3 dead by Ted K. to 9/11 in the exchange I had with him

https://twitter.com/OliverJia1014/status/1667608516587290624

And at no point did I ever defend him, but in his desperate attempt to continue his shrill pigmy "I no liek ting cuz is bad hurr durr" song and dance he has to double down like the insipid IQ-of-a-cinder-block-with-down-syndrome homunculus he is

Then came his disgusting and fetid sack of shit followers who chimed in with gems like this when pointing out how cripplingly stupid Oliver's constant kneejerk appeals to emotion like intellectually stunted child in a man's body he is

https://twitter.com/Slucchiurbanite/status/1667626639985979394

Realistically speaking, anyone with such an emotional reaction - especially @OliverJia1014's particularly effeminate, and bitchy quote tweets that put any brothel of menstruating ladies of the evening with their periods synced up to shame - just makes people want to know more

Why would anyone do such a thing? What would motivate someone to live on the edge of civilized society while working towards a seemingly impossible aim? What makes so many people people come around to his writings?

Some people answer with "i no leik cuz bad an u bad boo hoo"

Theodore John Kaczynski

May 22nd 1942 - June 10th 2023