Today is the 30th anniversary of the 1995 publication of the so-called “Unabomber manifesto.” According to the History Channel: “On September 19, 1995, a manifesto by the Unabomber, an anti-technology terrorist, is published by The New York Times and Washington Post in the hope that someone will recognize the person who, for 17 years, had been sending homemade bombs through the mail that had killed and maimed innocent people around the United States.”
Ted Kaczynski, a.k.a.: “the Unabomber” was captured as a result, spent the rest of his life in federal prisons, and died in June 2023.
His hostility to industrial progress did not die with him. Unabombers without bombs, a September 2019 report from the Capital Research Center, profiles Extinction Rebellion, an anti-energy, anti-technology movement that shares a lot of Ted’s ideology.
The first page of the report begins with this description:
In Industrial Society and Its Future (the so-called “Unabomber Manifesto”), anarchist serial killer Ted Kaczynski argued industrial capitalism is destroying humanity and that only a return to a pre-industrial state of nature will save us. If one accepts his “technology is inherently evil and enslaving” premise, then it isn’t a stretch to get sucked into his “ends justify the means” ethic of killing those who unwittingly feed the monster. However flawed, the Unabomber’s violent moral dilemma is so compelling that it is shared by the heroes of The Terminator film franchise that has raked in $1.8 billion.
Kaczynski is many unpleasant things, but insane isn’t one of them. Students at Alabama’s Huntingdon College found this out when he became their pen pal for a class project in 2010. After a series of back-and-forth letters, one undergrad grasped the frightening potential behind the man and his message: “If he were on the Internet, he would have millions of followers on Facebook.”
True enough. Had Kaczynski begun his attacks thirty years later, “Facebook Ted” may have put aside the violence of snail mail bombs and instead weaponized an army of social media followers to help him hobble the economy of a major city. This alternative is easy to imagine because it’s already happening in the form of a capitalism-hating, anarchist tribe born from the radical-left parentage of Occupy Wall Street and Earth First! Unlike the Unabomber, these activists preach non-violence, but their mostly identical desire to vandalize and ultimately obliterate the global economy is no less sincere.
By April of this year, Extinction Rebellion (“XR” for those adopting the trendy moniker) was already strong enough to deploy thousands of demonstrators onto the streets of London. In the process, they invaded a handful of major traffic thoroughfares, blocked them, and held them for eleven days. The uprising snarled traffic, required the deployment of 10,000 police officers, tallied up more than $45 million in lost economic and policing costs, and led to more than 1,100 arrests.
Early into the disturbance Extinction Rebellion announced its goal to “shut down London.” As its mobs began to demonstrate this lofty objective was attainable, the XR Twitter feed turned up the heat and called for reinforcements: “This movement is the best chance we have of bringing down capitalism. Get on board…” That last, perhaps too-revealing tweet was later deleted. But it wasn’t the only example of XR’s big picture planning for revolution against the free market. And they promised their April attack on the economy of London was just the beginning.
Another April entry from the XR Twitter account quotes an opinion piece from the Guardian: “Our choice comes down to this. Do we stop life to allow capitalism to continue, or stop capitalism to allow life to continue?”
And speaking to Amnesty International, Extinction Rebellion co-founder Roger Hallam sounded every bit the radical and inflexible revolutionary: “We are going to force the governments to act. And if they don’t we will bring them down and create a democracy fit for purpose. And yes, some may die in the process.”
Extinction Rebellion seeks to ramp up its efforts in the U.S., though (so far) its trans-Atlantic efforts haven’t escalated to the level of the London disruptions. On July 12 the Chronicle of Philanthropy reported Rory Kennedy (daughter of the late Robert F. Kennedy) and Aileen Getty (granddaughter of billionaire oilman J. Paul Getty) had already raised more than $600,000 to assist XR in paying for its disruptive tactics and legal fees, with plans to raise much more from U.S. philanthropic foundations. Two weeks later, 17 members of XR were arrested for blocking and gluing themselves to the doorways of tunnels leading from legislative offices to the U.S. Capitol building.
The remaining pages in this report can be found at the following links:
Part 2: Eco-Radicals
Part 3: The Plot to Shut Down Capitalism
Part 4: Escalation Strategy
An extensive InfluenceWatch profile of XR is also available here: Extinction Rebellion.
The Unabomber case is also covered in the InfluenceWatch profile of the FBI:
In May 1978, a mail bomb exploded in Chicago, the first of 16 such attacks perpetrated over the next 17 years by Theodore Kaczynski, a radical environmentalist and anti-technology zealot. The May 1978 explosion was meant for a Northwestern University professor, but injured a university security officer instead. The FBI’s Unabomber task force was established in 1979, and eventually grew to 150 investigators. The original codename for the task force, “UNABOMB,” referenced the terrorist’s early bombings against [UN]iversity and [A]irline targets.
In addition to university researchers and major airlines, Kaczynski’s targets included an aircraft manufacturer, retail computer stores, the head of a forestry-industry trade association, and an advertising executive. Kaczynski ultimately murdered three individuals and injured almost two dozen others in his attacks.
The last mail bomb killed the president of the California Forestry Association in April 1995. Shortly afterward, Kaczynski sent an ideological manifesto to the Bureau, with a promise to end his attacks if it were published in major newspapers. The task force persuaded the FBI director to release the document for media publication. In addition to apparently ending the bombings, Kaczynski’s brother recognized the writing and radical opinions in the manifesto and contacted the FBI.
The FBI captured Kaczynski at a rural cabin in Montana in April 1996. He pleaded guilty in January 1998 and was sentenced to an isolation cell at the ADX-Florence “Supermax” prison in Florence, Colorado.
