Man Sets Himself on Fire Near Courthouse Where Trump Is on Trial
Man Sets Himself on Fire Near Courthouse Where Trump Is on Trial
Onlookers screamed as fire engulfed the young man, who had thrown pamphlets in the air before he set himself aflame. A police officer tried to extinguish the flames before the man was taken away in an ambulance.
Not much info at time of posting what prompted the man to do so
Nobody bothered to look at the pamphlets I suppose.
48CNN reporters on the scene observed one of the flyers, which said “NYU is a mob front” and “had various allegations of wrongdoings against the school.”
35Here's an image of one of the pamphlets.
18Yeah. Other have posted the links as well, but if you search on the title text you quickly come across this guy's substack and the actual manifesto.
The sad thing is that he seems to have started off as a fairly legit investigative researcher, or was trying to become one, but fell off the rails somewhere along the line.
I had to stop reading the manifesto when he alleged that covid was created by the government, but when he starts off with "an apocalyptic fascist world coup" is in the making, I'm not entirely certain he's wrong: even the most broken of clocks is right twice a day. Whether by design or by accident, we are on the brink of WWIII and total environmental collapse. For him to assert a conspiracy is not nearly as crazy as many will want to insist in days to come, not least because both fascism and apocalypse are nearer now than they have ever been in our lifetimes. What's so crazy about believing that some sociopaths in power looked at that and thought, hmm, we can make some coin here, and then did so?
I'm just sorry he had enough faith in humanity left to think that his self-immolation would change a goddamn thing, or even make anyone question the road we are collectively headed down. And I mean that. To write as he did and act as he did, his world was full of suffering -- and if he lives, it will be 100 times worse, and still not have accomplished what he would have wanted, or even come close. His life was, in itself, worth far more than the fiery altar he threw it upon today.
EDITED for spellin
11
Right?! Where the fuck is the journalism?
8It died once The Onion became our reality.
10In the past? I think? I dunno that might just be myth or legend.
7
For anyone else curious about the pamphlets here's his Instagram where he posted pictures of them.
3
He posted online to explain his reasoning for this action: https://open.substack.com/pub/theponzipapers/p/i-have-set-myself-on-fire-outside?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
35Tl;dr nutso crypto conspiracy bro
18Sure it sounds crazy, but goddamn have I been feeling like this whole country has been conned lately. Inflation keeps going up, we keep getting poorer, and the billionaires keep making record profits. Like what the actual fuck? This guy may not have gotten everything right, but the idea that we’ve been conned out of the America Dream by a kleptocracy (the billionaires) that actually rules this country and have been taught by media that we’re helpless in making any real change absolutely rings true.
21Cryptocurrency is our first planetary multi-trillion-dollar Ponzi scheme.
This actually makes a lot of sense if you've followed crypto for over a decade and look at the markets.
Ycombinator is where a lot of the technology that takes advantage of us begins. I think it's a stretch to say Bitcoin started as a conspiracy, but I would definitely believe that everything that followed could be the result of bad actors pulling the strings.
The strangest thing in crypto is how uniform the value of currencies are over time. They all go up at the same time. They all go down at the same time. And they do this with near-identical amounts.
This can only mean that it's the same people who are invested in multiple currencies.
Seeing how massive companies like "Red Bull" got popular paying influential people to shill their products, it wouldn't surprise me in the least that some investors are paying people to make and shill cryptocurrencies.
5Most braindead take.
Learn to read into a metaphor ffs.
0.
0
To my friends and family, witnesses and first responders, I deeply apologize for inflicting this pain upon you.
Huh.
10He had me until the Simpsons connection.
7That's weird, I was reading expecting to see some kind of simpson's quote or reference like they predicted 9/11. Instead, he mentions how "dozens of the writers of The Simpsons went to Harvard."
I think Simpsons is very interesting because so many people get the wrong things from it. A lot of people don't view Simpsons as satire (which it is); they view it as an excuse for their behavior. It's ok to be a lazy, ignorant, alcoholic because that's what Homer is. He still loves his family, right? And that makes it okay. (not)
I typed this out before reading further, and I'm glad he mentioned the Monorail episode because it's exactly what came to mind. However, that episode was clear satire. It doesn't make sense for the audience to think giving in to a conman is the correct thing to do, but that is what has happened to a lot of cities across the US.
It's weird because I think Simpsons has had the effect that he's talking about, it's just I'm torn on whether or not it was the real intention of the artists.
If it was, that's absolutely mind-boggling illuminati shit. I don't think it goes that deep, though.
5
Here's the main point of what he's saying:
Cryptocurrency is our first planetary multi-trillion-dollar Ponzi scheme. It was expressly created for this purpose by a laundry list of rich and powerful people out of Stanford/Silicon Valley and Harvard/Facebook.
The March 2023 bank failures were all intentional: the banks were used to move out stolen Ponzi money. This signals that they’re no longer dumping cash in to keep the cryptocurrency Ponzi afloat, and that it will soon go insolvent, as all Ponzis must.
When the Ponzi scheme goes insolvent, it will take down half the stock market with it: The perpetrators used their major companies to pipe into the blockchain so they could funnel money out from the crypto exchanges. This includes Google, Tesla, Apple, PayPal, Facebook, Disney, Walmart, Target, InBev, Zoom, and countless others.
So he isn't a for cryptocurrency but saying it's is a scam to rob society. It is indeed a conspiracy but conspiracies turn out to be true all the time. Epstein's pedo ring and America's gun and drug running to fund despots all started as conspiracy theories.
Settings yourself on fire doesn't mean you're right but it shows enough resolve that people could at least read the text before insulting him. He's clearly not a crypto bro.
3Stuck between mental illness, stupid fucking crypto bro type of sorts or both.
Either way, loaded with pop culture references and dumb as hell.
1Here's the main point of what he's saying:
Cryptocurrency is our first planetary multi-trillion-dollar Ponzi scheme. It was expressly created for this purpose by a laundry list of rich and powerful people out of Stanford/Silicon Valley and Harvard/Facebook.
The March 2023 bank failures were all intentional: the banks were used to move out stolen Ponzi money. This signals that they’re no longer dumping cash in to keep the cryptocurrency Ponzi afloat, and that it will soon go insolvent, as all Ponzis must.
When the Ponzi scheme goes insolvent, it will take down half the stock market with it: The perpetrators used their major companies to pipe into the blockchain so they could funnel money out from the crypto exchanges. This includes Google, Tesla, Apple, PayPal, Facebook, Disney, Walmart, Target, InBev, Zoom, and countless others.
So he isn't for cryptocurrency but saying it's a scam to rob society. It is indeed a conspiracy but conspiracies turn out to be true all the time. Epstein's pedo ring and America's gun and drug running to fund despots all started as conspiracy theories.
Settings yourself on fire doesn't mean you're right but it shows enough resolve that you could at least read the text before misrepresenting him. He's clearly not a crypto bro.
27
Couldn't get this working in archive.org so here's a different article without the paywall. https://abcnews.go.com/US/man-apparently-sets-fire-courthouse-trump-trial/story?id=109433903
26Should've used a gift link, my bad:
8Thanks!
5
Hey. It's a free country for at least another few months.
21My wife actually knew the guy from college. They were friends and she said that he was normal then. The last time they talked was back in 2019 when he had went to a baseball game in Florida and my wife wished she was there (we actually made it down there in 2022). The last thing he posted on social media before all of his, um, research was about his mom dying and we wonder if that might have triggered something. My wife was worried about him because he wasn't getting help and she worried that he would do something crazy, which was a worry that wasn't unfounded.
13That's really tragic :/
2
Should we expect a TempleOS 2.0 if he survives?
5Was it Trump?
4Found this, dunno if it’s legit but sounds like a plausible motivation from someone with some screws loose
4It's always sad when someone who clearly cares so much gives up or resorts to irrational methods to fight against what he perceived as an insurmountable threat.
The world has always been run by self-interested bastards who will gladly sacrifice thousands and millions of people to enrich themselves. This is nothing new to anyone who has studied any history.
6This was likely the product of brain chemistry imbalances, I wouldn’t characterize it as them giving up.
1
It seems disconnected from the report that the pamphlets he tossed around before self-immolating were about grievances against NYU. Not saying it couldn’t be real, I’d just expect a mention of NYU in there somewhere if what he chose to take with him was NYU-related.
Edit: if the thread is longer than that one post I can’t see it because I don’t use my twitter account anymore
3All of his various pamphlets, including the NYU one, can be found hyperlinked in the manifesto. It’s definitely him.
2
manifesto that crypto is a ponzi scheme and the world is run by kleptocrats
uh yeah dude did you think we didn't know that??
4"When we piece it all together, we understand the truth: We are in a totalitarian doomsday cult.
Why on earth would our elites do this? There are many reasons, but the simplest is because capitalism is unsustainable, and they knew it: Climate change and resource extraction would catch up eventually. So, they never intended to sustain it. They knew all along that they would gobble up all the wealth they could, and then yank the rug out from under us so they could pivot to a hellish fascist dystopia."
Christ. This guy is pretty overly conspiratorially minded in an "everyone's a secret fascist" kind of way, rather than kind of, more incentive-structure minded, right, or systems-minded, but like, god damn. It's a fusion of a pretty lucid assessment of some pretty common cultural undercurrents that have been slowly building in the american consciousness, and the associated despair that comes with those realizations, but characterized and attributed too much to overt malice, rather than idiocy, happenstance, or overarching incentive structures. Ironically, while I think the first part of this is the true part, it's the latter part, the extrapolation, which lets him believe that setting himself on fire is the correct course of action, that sending out schizo pamphlets is helpful, which is something that is pretty common, unfortunately, in these types of situations, I think probably because there's a kind of selection bias for it. It's the second part that's the evidence of the mental illness, there, I suppose is what I'm saying.
2Ive been noticing lots of incidents of people giving in to their dorker impulses over the last decade or so. Is it an evolutionary process, kinda like a thinning of the herd due to resource limitations?
0Probably a side effect of our hyper connected world. It might have happened at the same rate in the past and you didn't know about it. It's also a case of people copying other people they see online.
15That is an interesting theory. It might also be coupled with the size of the population. We have an ever increasing, massive number of people in the world, and the connectedness might just show us how little our individualized voices are heard without doing something as severe as lighting yourself on fire.
5
The call of the dork is ever present
6Yea verily
3
Florida Man Sets Himself on Fire Near Courthouse Where Trump Is on Trial
0Second person to set themselves on fire this year. It’s becoming the face tattoos of protesting.
-8It's your face and your tattoo, so if this is how you feel you need to express yourself I support it.
I owed Aaron Bushnell the time to listen to him and understand his message, even if I think I probably already agree with them.
Likewise, I think I ow this person the time to listen to them and understand their message, even if I think I probably don't agree with them.
Unlike many people who think they are on the left, I actually do believe and am fully committed to the principle of individual liberties being inviolable. That includes gay rights, trans rights, religious rights, political views, an most importantly, that your body and mind are your own and there is no authority that can remove that agency from you.
Look if this is a rightwing conspiracy theorist and they believe this passionately in a fiction, consider that half the time when these nut jobs go off they shoot up a school or a sporting event. This person did the most extreme form of protest imaginable. But they also decided that they didn't need to take others with them to make their point. We should try to understand why they made the conclusions they did, even if, especially if we don't agree with how they arrived at them.
14
If a Trump supporter, good, one less vote for him.
If against Trump, fuck you guy you just lost the good guys a vote.
-31Gross. You're gross.
8Why would a left-leaning person do such a thing?
1If it's a sentient being than my heart goes out to them.
-1“Good guys” damn propaganda works well on Americans.
-5"Lukewarm evil guys"
As opposed to the guy who is the supervolcano of evil
6