Ted Kaczynski, R.I.P.

Ted Kaczynski, whose sixteen homemade mail-delivered bombs killed three and injured twenty-three, died quietly in his cell this morning. He was 81 years old.

Ted Kaczynski – life and “career”

The New York Post has the earliest timestamped report, though the Associated Press has more details. Kaczynski originally had been in a maximum-security federal prison in Florence, Colorado. But in December 2021 authorities transferred him to the FMC Butler medical center in North Carolina. A guard found him unresponsive in his cell, and medical staff pronounced him dead at 8:00 a.m. EDT.

Ted Kaczynski earned the nickname “Unabomber” because all his targets were university faculty and staff. From 1978 to 1995, by his own admission, he made sixteen bombs and sent them through the mail. His targets were engineering and technology professors in various fields, according to Oxygen. Sometimes the targets alerted campus police, and the police officers took the risks, sometimes with tragic or near-tragic results. Such was the case with his first bomb, which a university police officer opened, injuring his left hand. That officer was lucky – many victims had hands blown off.

Nor did Kaczynski limit his targeting to professors; sometimes graduate students got the bombs. The second bomb targeted one such student.

The Unabomber’s most spectacular strike was probably sending a bomb to be loaded aboard a commercial airliner. It detonated at cruising altitude, filling the passenger cabin with smoke.

Attack followed attack, until in September 1995 he forced The New York Times and The Washington Post to publish his manifesto. This rambling 35,000-word document attacked technology generally and “industrial society” in particular. Brother David Kaczynski and his wife, recognizing his writing style, called the FBI.

Was he a patsy?

His prison doctors diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia, with delusions of persecution “by family members and modern society.” But Jack Posobiec of Human Events proposed another theory shortly after the story broke:

An hour later he retweeted this tweet with embedded video giving further evidence:

In reply someone shared this image of Paragraph 229 of his manifesto – which seems prophetic in its reflection of today.

Ted Kaczynski skipped two grades and was a very early matriculant at Harvard University in the 1950s. Allegedly he became an MK-ULTRA subject while there.

About the image

“The Kaczynski Kabin” by followsean is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .