The man who set himself on fire Friday afternoon outside the New York City courthouse where former President Donald Trump’s criminal trial was underway has been identified as a left-wing conspiracy theorist.
The New York Times reported that a high-ranking police official identified the man as 37-year-old Max Azzarello.
The man soaked himself with an accelerant around 1:35 p.m. EST right across the street from the courthouse in Collect Pond Park and reportedly “threw pamphlets into the air before” carrying out the act of self-immolation.
Photos taken of Azzarello after the incident showed that he was in dire condition as he was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance.
On a LinkedIn account that is believed to be his, he claimed that he worked for Democrat politicians in the past, but at some point appears to have become disillusioned by the entire political system.
In a nearly 3,000-word incoherent manifesto, Azzarello, who claims that he is “an investigative researcher,” said that he carried out the act 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 claimed. “These claims sound like fantastical conspiracy theory, but they are not. They are proof of conspiracy.”
He claimed that there was a vast “Ponzi scheme” underway involving cryptocurrency, billionaires, Stanford, Silicon Valley, Harvard, and Facebook. He claimed that bank failures “were all intentional” events “to move out stolen Ponzi money.”
He claimed that the “elites” funneled “trillions of dollars in stolen cash through the stock market[,] created the largest stock-market anomaly in history.” He claimed that the U.S. government unleashed the coronavirus pandemic to “explain the massive anomaly.”
He also claimed that the Ponzi schemes were “an economic doomsday device, intentionally made to shatter the world economy.”
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He repeatedly listed examples in his manifesto, and some of his other deranged writings online, politicians from both political parties whom he believed were involved in the stories that he concocted in his mind.
He also believed that the television show “The Simpsons” “served the interests of organized crime” and were part of a conspiracy used to by the elites “to brainwash us.”
On his social media accounts, he also posted incoherent messages and sang songs about starting a revolution. In a photo, he was pictured wearing a Bernie Sanders t-shirt.
He also posted a message supporting Hamas’ October 7 terrorist attack on Israel, and repeated false propaganda about Israel.