The New York Police Department confirmed the identity of the man who set himself ablaze outside the New York City courthouse where former President Donald Trump’s hush money trial is taking place on Friday.
Reporters at the scene found fliers that the man, identified as Max Azzarello, tossed into the air before committing the shocking act.
The fliers, one of which was found by Law360’s Rachel Scharf, read “The True History of the World” and contained a QR code that linked to a Substack account called “The Ponzi Papers.” Azzarello stated his name and occupation as an “investigative researcher.” An Instagram account belonging to Max Azzarello also included a link to the same Substack.
Mediaite contacted a source who was friends with a relative of the man who also confirmed Azzarello’s identity and described him as someone who had developed “mental health issues.”
“He was a really good kid who got really far down socialist rabbit holes,” said the source, who added that Azzarello had worked as a grassroots Democratic organizer. “He was just a really decent kid, like a really well meaning guy,” the source recalled, describing Azzarello’s political views when the source knew him as “very old school hippie.”
The Substack post published on Friday began with the statement: “I have set myself on fire outside the Trump Trial.”
From there, it makes several wild accusations about the United States government, prominent universities, U.S. presidents and other politicians, The Simpsons, COVID, Jeffrey Epstein, cryptocurrency, and more. The author is seemingly calling out any and all government officials from every part of the political spectrum.
Here are a few examples of the claims contained in the manifesto:
As it turns out, our elites are awash in Ponzi schemes. Stanford’s StartX.com investment fund and Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘Program for Evolutionary Dynamics’ he ran at Harvard are both fake-science Ponzi factories that these schools have invested billions in: They are filled with fraudulent companies that use smoke and mirrors to promise miraculous new technology, but always collapse while the perpetrators only get richer. …
To better understand our form of government, I will point you to one of the most astonishing pieces of stand-alone evidence I’ve found: Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton’s 1988 DNC speech where he nominated Mike Dukakis for president against George H.W. Bush. The speech is a vile, mean-spirited roast of Dukakis that makes no sense whatsoever: For Clinton to ruthlessly attack a member of his own party should have been political suicide, and he repeatedly mocks Dukakis’ noble and earnest qualities.
Notably, actor Rob Lowe, who was supporting Dukakis, was victim of a teen sex blackmail operation at the DNC that year. Since we know Clinton is a close associate with teen sex blackmail artist Jeffrey Epstein, we can suddenly make perfect sense of the nonsensical speech by applying this lens: Bill Clinton is a cocky mob boss who blackmailed Mike Dukakis because Dukakis thought his job was to help the public. He teases out the future public revelation that Kitty Dukakis drank rubbing alcohol, and offers a strange anecdote about the crack epidemic that reveals he is an exceedingly proud drug runner.
What does this revelation tell us? That our government is conning us completely. That Bill Clinton was secretly on (former CIA Director) George H.W. Bush’s side, and that the Democrat vs. Republican division has been entirely manufactured ever since: Clinton is with Bush; Gore is with Bush; Trump is with Hillary, and so on. When they present themselves in public, they are acting as characters that are against one another, practicing kayfabe as wrestlers do. …
One of the key findings of this research is that Harvard University is one of the largest organized crime fronts in history, which is how they churn out billionaires – it’s a major hub of this sprawling criminal network.
As it turns out, dozens of the writers of The Simpsons went to Harvard. So I asked myself the question: If The Simpsons served the interests of organized crime, how would it do so? …
Social media, owned by crypto criminals like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, is flooded with nonsense conspiracy theories and memes reminding us that we are hopeless, helpless, anxious, depressed, ironic, scared, apathetic, escapist, lonely, misguided, and jaded, telling us we can’t do anything but have a laugh at our circumstances.
Liberals mock the hypocrisy of conservatives; conservatives mock the hypocrisy of liberals, and our collective circumstances erode. The left shouts “All Cops Are Bastards,” which ensures they’ll be hated by the police and the public (and flies in the face of leftist theory). The public’s distrust of the government is at an all-time high, but so is the belief that we are helpless to do anything about it. …