Man identified by police as Max Azzarello, from Florida, declared dead after incident outside lower Manhattan courthouse
A man has died after setting himself on fire outside the New York courthouse where Donald Trump’s hush-money trial is taking place.
The New York City police department said on Saturday the man had been declared dead by staff at an area hospital.
Officials had said earlier the man, who was in his late 30s, was in critical condition.
The New York police department said the man, who they identified as Max Azzarello of St Augustine, Florida, did not appear to be targeting Trump or others involved in the trial.
Witnesses said the man pulled pamphlets out of a backpack and threw them in the air before he doused himself with a liquid and set himself on fire on Friday. One of those pamphlets included references to “evil billionaires” but portions that were visible to a Reuters witness did not mention Trump.
I feel bad for this guy. I mean, he felt passionate enough about his cause to feel that the only way to draw attention to it was to self-immolate. But his cause is… what, exactly? I’ve read a few articles and couldn’t really figure it out.
It seems to me he was a bright guy who believed what he read on the Internet, and when his mother passed he lost any moderating influence in his life, so that he had no one to pull him out of the conspiracy theories. It was the lack of critical thinking that killed him in the end.
His manifesto is at https://theponzipapers.substack.com/p/i-have-set-myself-on-fire-outside
He was clearly mentally ill.
I was skeptical of the mental illness angle until I clicked on the link. This guy was deeply into conspiracy theories.
It’s not often well adjusted people set themselves on fire.
It does happen though. Was a form of protest during the Vietnam war. I believe the monk on the cover of a Rage Against the Machine album was friends with the famous Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh.
And unfortunately because this guy was so deep into his paranoia the world is going to dismiss it. Though the alarm that he is sounding is real. Like, we wouldn’t have mentally ill people setting themselves on fire in the first place if we took better care of people right.
Thich Quang Duc is the monk you’re referring to, this was during the build up to Vietnam, but to put it in context for you, John f Kennedy was still alive when this happened.
He was not protesting the war, he was protesting the Catholic Church, which was the largest land owner in South Vietnam at the time. Buddhists were being marginalized and a ban on flying the Buddhist flag had been enacted, the Vatican flag flew over most buildings.
Buddhists protesting the government has recently been victims of a massacre, government forces fired blindly in to a crowd and killed 9 people.
Duc self immolated over religious inequality.
I know some other practitioners did self immolate during the war. And religious inequality is putting it lightly considering nine people were killed. I doubt the guy killed himself over the flag in other words.
I want to live in the timeline where he got the right treatment/producer to make a podcast or video series using Simpsons scenes to describe macroeconomic theories
It’s always heartbreaking when people grow skeptical of neoliberalism (and the greedy, self-serving people who push it), only to be preyed upon by groups like neo-nazis, conspiracy theorists and crypto bros.
Anywhere you find people who are frustrated, depressed or paranoid, you’ll find extremists using that vulnerability to groom more extremists.
I mean, a lot of what crypto has become is pretty Ponzi-ish. But yeah, he’s a bit deeper off the conspiracy cliff than that.
Yeah I too think he was likely mentally ill. But damn if this didn’t resonate.
A nutter with a good point is still a nutter.
It should be noted that for-profit media companies will play dumb on any protest critical of the types of people that own and run for-profit media companies.
During the “occupy” protests, it was common to see reporters staring into the camera and asking “but what are these protests about?” in front signs stating exactly what the protests were about. They knew if they fairly reported on the movement, their audience might start agreeing with the protesters. So both “left wing” and “right wing” media companies held hands and united to undermine it.
But without that reporting, fuck knows. If he’s posting on reddit conspiracy subs, they’ve become a place for extremists to recruit the stupid and the clinically paranoid.
Whatever society might look like on the other side of beating the billionaires, for-profit news surely won’t be a part of it.
This. It’s hard to not realize what this guy was protesting about, we all feel it but the media wants us to buy a new iphone to be happy instead.
His Instagram tells a really sad story. He was an infrequent poster of perfectly ordinary content. No sign of any mental illness: pictures of his sisters wedding, some jokes, nothing concerning.
Then, some posts about the death of his mother and almost right after, his sharp decline in mental health becomes apparent.
He was apparently active on Reddit and posted semi-often in the /r/conspiracy subreddit
I also think he was a frequent /r/True_Anon poster, if I remember right
Removed by mod
TL;DR: The guy is a nutter.
That’s not how claims work, buddy.
Wait, I thought we were supposed to use that all throughout, not at the very end!?
TL;DR Yeah, the guy clearly had a screw loose. Jumping from unfounded (conspiracy) theory to another. At least he was not a Nazi, I guess - he hated everyone* equally.
* everyone being “the government”, “Crypo-anything”, even a few billionaires!