The Left-wing conspiracy theorist who lit himself on fire outside a New York City courthouse on Friday where the criminal trial for former President Donald Trump was being held has died.
Max Azzarello, 37, doused 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.
First responders quickly extinguished the flames and rushed him into an ambulance on a stretcher. Photos of Azzarello showed that he suffered extreme burns from head-to-toe. Hours after being transported to a hospital burn unit, he was pronounced dead.
Azzarello, who claimed he worked for Democrat politicians, was “curious” about social justice, a friend of his told The New York Times. Another friend described him as a “good friend and person and cared about the world.”
His friends said that he changed after his mother died in April 2022 from pulmonary disease.
After he flagged one of his writings for a friend in March 2023, the friend reached out to him directly and “tried to intervene,” the report said.
While living in Florida, he had run ins with law enforcement that appear connected to his mental health challenges, including “standing outside [a] hotel in just his underwear, ranting and cursing into a bullhorn,” the report said.
In a nearly 3,000-word incoherent manifesto, Azzarello, who claimed that he was “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.”
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 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.