--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Luigi Mangione is supposed to be back in court on Friday, and court looks different when Luigi shows up.
--:-- Noel King: Luigi! The last time that I was in court with him, there were so many members of the public that wanted to be inside the courtroom, and so many of them were young women. Mangione has a fan club. People outside with signs, people inside lining up. I mean, sometimes for a really long time to just want to get into the courtroom to see him. It's just a different experience than the people that you are typically seeing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What'll be different this week is that it'd be the first time Mangione appeared since the federal government, the Justice Department, Pam Bondi, Donald Trump have said they would like to seek the death penalty in this case.
--:-- [Sound effects: Commercial break]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We're going to ask how that's going to go over in New York on Today Explained. An in-store stylist, or a visit to Saks.com, where they can show you just what you want to see. They say they'll even let you know when arrivals from your favorite designers are in or when something you've been eyeing is back in stock.
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--:-- Noel King: Made with real fruit, organic agave, and Himalayan pink salt, every sip is like a mini getaway. No fillers, no hangovers, just full flavor and a better buzz.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Find your flavor at senoritadrinks.com. Use code VOX20 for 20% off. Must be 21 and over. This product may cause intoxication. This product has not been evaluated or approved by the FDA. This product may contain up to 0.3% THC.
--:-- Noel King: Today Explains, Sean Rameswaram here with Samantha Max from Gothamist.
--:-- Samantha Max: Hi, thanks for having me.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Samantha, you've been covering Luigi Mangione since we found out about Luigi Mangione. He's scheduled to be in federal court tomorrow. What can you tell us about what we can expect from this hearing?
--:-- Samantha Max: Well, Mangione is facing a few different cases, two here in New York, also one in Pennsylvania where he was arrested. The 26-year-old faces five charges in Pennsylvania. Including forgery and possession of a gun without a license.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In New York, he has already been indicted in state court. Mangione was indicted on charges that included murder as an act of terrorism.
--:-- Samantha Max: The 26-year-old pleaded. In federal court, what's going to be happening is he has been charged, but he hasn't actually been indicted.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So the case would theoretically advance to another level where he could be indicted after a grand jury had considered the allegations against him. And then he actually has not entered a plea in his federal case.
--:-- Samantha Max: So he would be probably entering a plea if he were indicted. Why has he not yet been indicted federally? Do we know?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's a really good question that is not totally clear at this point, honestly.
--:-- Samantha Max: Every month for the last few months now, the government has asked for an extra 30 days to decide whether or not they're going to bring an indictment.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And we know Pam Bondi came out and said that Mangione will be facing the death penalty in this federal case.
--:-- Samantha Max: So she has directed prosecutors in New York City to seek the death penalty. Bondi calling the killing a premeditated, cold-blooded assassination and an act of political violence.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If there was ever a death case, this is one. This guy is charged with hunting down a CEO, a father of two, a married man, hunting him down and executing him.
--:-- Samantha Max: I mean, this whole case is a bit unprecedented. And as we have seen with several other federal cases since the Trump administration has taken office, that they're not exactly always following the typical protocols.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Mangione's attorneys have filed papers challenging this request to seek the death penalty, calling out Pam Bondi for putting out this press release where they said that, you know, she didn't make it clear enough that these are only allegations that he is presumed innocent.
--:-- Samantha Max: And actually, in the government's response, they were saying, well, it's way too early for the defense to be, you know, making a stink about the fact that there's this directive to seek the death penalty because we haven't even sought it yet.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We haven't even indicted him yet. But of course, none of that would have been happening if it weren't for the attorney general putting out this press release, also making an Instagram post saying that she wants the death penalty for Mangione.
--:-- Samantha Max: What was the Instagram post like? I'm afraid I missed it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's like a pull quote from, yeah, from the press release. But then she actually went on Fox News and she was saying, I was receiving death threats for seeking the death penalty on someone who is charged with an execution of a CEO.
--:-- Samantha Max: We're going to continue to do the right thing. We're not going to be deterred. The president's directive was very clear. We are to seek the death penalty when possible.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is the state of New York taking issue with the call for the death penalty? Because I believe in New York State, they do not execute prisoners anymore, yeah?
--:-- Samantha Max: Well, the state actually, I mean, they have no say really on what punishment the federal government does or doesn't seek.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, the federal government, they're going by federal law and they can do what they want.
--:-- Samantha Max: And even the crimes that Mangione is accused of are pretty different from one to the other.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In the state case, he's facing murder charges and actually terrorism charges.
--:-- Samantha Max: In the federal case, he facing stalking charges charges that he stalked this healthcare executive across state lines and killed him
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So it two different theories here New York state does not seek the death penalty anymore in its state cases
--:-- Samantha Max: The highest court in New York has found that it is against the state's constitution.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But in federal law, the death penalty is still allowed. It is still sought.
--:-- Samantha Max: I actually covered a federal death penalty case here in New City brought by the same prosecutor's office.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That was for a man named Saifilo Saipov a few years ago.
--:-- Samantha Max: At least eight people are dead and 11 more injured after that pickup truck plowed through a busy bicycle path along the West Side Highway.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Prosecutors say Saifilo Saipov smiled while talking to investigators and even asked to fly an ISIS flag in his hospital room after allegedly using his truck as a weapon to mow down people on a bike path in 2017.
--:-- Samantha Max: Allegedly telling investigators his goal was to kill as many people as possible in order to become a member of ISIS.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In that case, he was convicted, but there was this separate part of the trial where a jury then had to decide whether to give him the death penalty.
--:-- Samantha Max: And it has to be a unanimous decision.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's this whole long process. And in the end, they could not come to a unanimous decision to give him the death penalty.
--:-- Samantha Max: So he was instead sentenced to life in a federal prison.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And this was a mass murderer with fealty to ISIS that a jury could not decide to put to death.
--:-- Samantha Max: Does that mean it's not very likely that Luigi Mangione, an alleged murderer who killed allegedly one person who's received unprecedented amounts of letters and has a fan club showing up to court whenever he might be there, who's on the face of votive candles?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Does that make it much less likely that a New York jury is going to put him to death or does that remain to be seen?
--:-- Samantha Max: I mean, I think that's a really good question. And in Sayupov's case, that was an incredibly emotional trial.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You had the loved ones of people who had been killed testifying, talking about just the tragic loss of their family members and friends.
--:-- Samantha Max: You actually had surviving victims that were testifying about these horrible injuries and traumas that were lingering.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And even after all of that, that jury decided we are not going to put this person to death.
--:-- Samantha Max: So for someone like Mangione you know I could only imagine what it would be like for a jury to be making that type of decision as you've said he has garnered so much public support the Ivy League grad has received an outpouring of support and hundreds of thousands in donations to his legal fund.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The Manhattan DA called anybody who supports Luigi extreme activists and a lawless mob very strong words coming out of the Manhattan DA.
--:-- Samantha Max: Just because we're tired of being bullied by CEOs. Are we supposed to hate this guy? Just ask for a jury trial, Luigi. Ask for a jury trial.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's like everyone's behind you, bro. Except for the overlords, except for the CEOs, obviously.
--:-- Samantha Max: Though, of course, a few things. I mean, one, this is one of these cases where it's always the question of how much is what's on the internet real life.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And just because our perception of, you know, public opinion might be one thing because of how things are playing out on the Internet, we don't know what it would be like for a jury, which, first of all, juries aren't always totally representative of society.
--:-- Samantha Max: It's a very particular group of people that is available to come to jury service and able to sit on what would likely be a very lengthy trial.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But also, if this case does eventually go to trial, if there is eventually a death penalty phase, that will be a long time from now.
--:-- Samantha Max: These cases are very complex. They take a long time to get through all of the investigating, building the case, putting everything together.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So we don't know how public sentiment will change between then and now.
--:-- Samantha Max: You can follow my coverage of Luigi Mangione at Gothamist.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Last year, Mangione went on Goodreads to leave a review. He wrote, It's easy to quickly write this off as the manifesto of a lunatic in order to avoid facing some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies.
--:-- Samantha Max: But it's simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He was writing about the Unabomber's manifesto, and we are going to talk about the enduring influence of that text when we return on Today Explained.
--:-- [Sound effects: Commercial break]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for Today Explained comes from Chime. Nobody likes fees and complicated banking, says Chime. And Chime gets that, says Chime.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for the show today comes from Life Kit, the podcast from NPR.
--:-- Samantha Max: What in your life kit I asking They didn ask that Every day you have to make choices that might shape the direction of your life but you can flip to the back of the book to find an answer key instead you can listen to the life kit podcast from npr life kit offers real stories about common issues like relationships finances parenting and your career if you're looking to move with more intention or just need thoughtful guidance on living better life kit delivers strategies to help you make meaningful, sustainable change from fitness routines to mental resilience, navigating personal goals to tackling burnout.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Each episode is full of relevant insights and clear takeaways about things we all could use a little help with.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Enough from me. Go listen to the show, Life Kit.
--:-- Samantha Max: It's a podcast from NPR.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You're listening to today explained so I stumbled across it on this reading list and I put it aside to read on the weekend and I expected to be kind of perversely amused by the insane conspiratorial ravings of a madman like an anti-tech charles manson i suppose and then I read it and what struck me is how unconspiratorial it was.
--:-- Samantha Max: Kaczynski doesn't think there's an evil cabal of technocrats plotting to oppress us all.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: His entire worldview is evolutionary.
--:-- Samantha Max: And so I thought, this is interesting as political theory.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's extremely radical, and there's a lot I disagree with.
--:-- Samantha Max: But as a historian of political ideas, I thought it would make an interesting side project.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then it took on a life of its own.
--:-- Samantha Max: Sean Fleming is a research fellow at the University of Nottingham.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Lately, he's been doing research on industrial society and its future by one Theodore Kaczynski.
--:-- Samantha Max: He's better known as the Unabomber.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The text is better known as the Unabomber's Manifesto.
--:-- Samantha Max: We reached out to him to ask how it may have influenced Luigi Mangione.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, I guess I want to be careful what I say about the relationship between Mangione and Kaczynski.
--:-- Samantha Max: And also what I say about Mangione in general.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He hasn't been convicted of anything yet.
--:-- Samantha Max: And I haven't seen any hard evidence that Mangione was inspired by Kaczynski, but there are some interesting parallels.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So assassinating corporate executives to create a media spectacle is straight out of the Unabomber's playbook.
--:-- Samantha Max: The assassin of Brian Thompson also left some engravings on the shell casings, which reminds me of the engravings that Kaczynski left on the components of his bombs.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And more generally, Kaczynski and Mangione are both disaffected overachievers with backgrounds in STEM fields.
--:-- Samantha Max: So whether or not Mangione was actually inspired by Kaczynski, he's precisely the sort of person who's likely to find the Unabomber's ideology compelling.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: For those who don't remember, who was he? What did he do? And how did people come to know him?
--:-- Samantha Max: Ted Kaczynski was born in Chicago in 1942.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he started out as a child prodigy in mathematics.
--:-- Samantha Max: He went to Harvard at the age of 16.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then he went on to do a PhD in mathematics at the University of Michigan.
--:-- Samantha Max: And he was then hired as an assistant professor in math at Berkeley.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And at that time, he was the youngest in the institution's history.
--:-- Samantha Max: But after two years at Berkeley, he abruptly resigned.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And after a little while, he bought himself a piece of land outside Lincoln, Montana, where he built himself a one-room cabin, 10 feet by 12 feet, with no electricity or running water.
--:-- Samantha Max: And from there, he launched his one-man war against modern technology.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Another bombing is making the news tonight.
--:-- Samantha Max: The one-time mathematics prodigy played a deadly cat-and-mouse game with the FBI in a nationwide bombing campaign that stretched nearly two decades.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So the reason we're still talking about Kaczynski is that he managed to blackmail the media into publishing his writings.
--:-- Samantha Max: So in April 1995, he sent a letter to the New York Times promising that he would stop bombing if his 35,000 word essay titled Industrial Society and Its Future were published in the Times or some other major newspaper.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So the manifesto was published in the Washington Post on September 19th, 1995.
--:-- Samantha Max: Which I think is hard to imagine today, but hundreds of thousands of Americans were mailed a terrorist's manifesto.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yes, that's right. Without exaggeration, it might be one of the most read manifestos since the Communist Manifesto.
--:-- Samantha Max: It was soon after published in paperback.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It was also uploaded to Time Warner's Pathfinder platform.
--:-- Samantha Max: So it became what might be the first ever internet manifesto.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it's set the template for the manifestos that have become all too common in the aftermath of violent attacks.
--:-- Samantha Max: And it's very readable.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's got this sort of numbered format where the whole thing is broken down into categories with these sort of points made in every category.
--:-- Samantha Max: It's not the hardest read in the world.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Isn't the scrawlings of a madman.
--:-- Samantha Max: It's the ordered philosophy of a terrorist.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He writes that we aren't the first to mention that the world today seems to be going crazy.
--:-- Samantha Max: This sort of thing is not normal for human societies.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There is good reason to believe that primitive man suffered from less stress and frustration and was better satisfied with his way of life than modern man is.
--:-- Samantha Max: I think a lot of people could find some truth in that statement.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What was he trying to get across with this manifesto?
--:-- Samantha Max: In the passage you've just quoted, what he's arguing is basically that human beings are biologically maladapted to the modern world.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is a big claim from evolutionary psychology.
--:-- Samantha Max: The argument is that, biologically speaking, we're still Stone Age hunter-gatherers.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We evolved hunting large animals on the savannah.
--:-- Samantha Max: And in the span of just 10 years a blink in evolutionary time we constructed this world of concrete steel and screens
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So Kaczynski argues that because of this we suffer from depression anxiety eating disorders substance abuse and so many other psychological pathologies that so-called primitive human beings do not.
--:-- Samantha Max: And what's his solution? His solution is to destroy all modern technology and return ourselves to a more primitive condition, to crash out of the modern world.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So basically what he envisions is a group of anti-tech revolutionaries sabotaging the electric grid, blowing up the gas pipelines, attacking the nervous system, so to speak, of modern society and plunging us back into, if not the Stone Age, then something like small scale agriculture and a shepherd society.
--:-- Samantha Max: How was this manifesto received in the 90s when it was published by the Washington Post and delivered to front porches around the country?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, there was a lot of debate about it, but overall the reception of the manifesto was shockingly sympathetic.
--:-- Samantha Max: Many journalists treated Kaczynski as a serious intellectual, and many members of the public in letters to the editor and on talk radio shows hailed him as a folk hero.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Wow. He was often described as a modern-day Thoreau.
--:-- Samantha Max: So from 1995 through about 1997, he was hailed as this philosopher of the counterculture.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But then in 1998, during his legal proceedings, a psychiatrist labeled him a paranoid schizophrenic and portrayed his ideology as a sort of bundle of delusions.
--:-- Samantha Max: And the media took her word for it, and so did the public to a large extent.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So Kaczynski fell out of fashion from the late 90s until the early 2010s.
--:-- Samantha Max: But then he was rediscovered as concerns about climate change, artificial intelligence, and the consequences of digital immersion became so much more salient.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And his warnings about the negative consequences of modern technology began to seem prophetic to many people.
--:-- Samantha Max: So there's been a Unabomber revival.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So who are the types of people who are glomming on to this manifesto?
--:-- Samantha Max: This too has changed significantly over time.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So during the Unabomber mania of the mid-1990s, Kaczynski gained a following on the radical left, especially among green anarchists.
--:-- Samantha Max: But he's returned to cultural prominence with the opposite political valence.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So today he's seen more as a figure of the right.
--:-- Samantha Max: As you may have noticed, he spends the first 3,000 words of his manifesto railing against leftism.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And in the context of the culture war in the 2010s, conservatives rediscovered him and rehabilitated him and co-opted him onto their side in the culture war.
--:-- Samantha Max: So Kaczynski has now been appropriated by neo-Nazis, eco-fascists, far-right accelerationists, a ragbag of people on the right who are drawn to his critique of leftism.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Which is so interesting because Luigi Mangione has been hailed as something of a hero on the left, right?
--:-- Samantha Max: How is it that Kaczynski appeals to a figure like Mangione, but also neo-Nazis?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What makes Kaczynski appealing to so many different sorts of radicals is that he defies easy categorization.
--:-- Samantha Max: And this makes his ideology sort of like an a la carte menu of ideas.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So different radicals and reactionaries latch on to different aspects of his ideology.
--:-- Samantha Max: So for instance, green anarchists were enthralled with his critique of technology, while neo-Nazis, generally speaking, ignore the critique of technology and focus solely on the critique of leftism.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This man ultimately is advocating for murder, if not mass murder, to achieve his aims.
--:-- Samantha Max: Does he ever show any remorse for that?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: No, he doesn't. He doesn't show any remorse for the people he killed in his bombings.
--:-- Samantha Max: He says they're not innocent.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: At one point, he says the people who are responsible for the advancement of technology are worse than Stalin, worse than Hitler.
--:-- Samantha Max: What they're doing to humanity is even more grotesque, he says.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But he does acknowledge that his anti-tech revolution would kill millions, if not billions of people.
--:-- Samantha Max: This is an extremely apocalyptic vision.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And even though his vision is apocalyptic, It was hugely influential and continues to be significantly influential.
--:-- Samantha Max: Many people read the manifesto and think, well, that's a good point. That's an interesting insight.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But when he starts talking about revolution, it's so omnicidal that it's impossible for most of us to take seriously.
--:-- Samantha Max: Many people accept the argument up until the point where he suggests that we should blow up the electric grid and knock ourselves back to the stone age in other words many people accept parts of his diagnosis of the problems with with the modern world but they're completely unwilling to take his prescription seriously
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In the 90s, he looked like a one-off. He could easily be dismissed as an isolated crank with a sort of idiosyncratic ideology.
--:-- Samantha Max: But in the 2020s, it looks like the world's caught up with him.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I think as concerns about the negative consequences of modern technology become especially I think it will become increasingly likely that others will follow in Kaczynski's footsteps.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Sean Fleming, University of Nottingham, famous for its sheriff.
--:-- Samantha Max: Hadi Mawagdi made our show today.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Joey Myers edited.
--:-- Samantha Max: Laura Bullard fact-checked.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Patrick Boyd and Andrea Kristinsdottir mixed.
--:-- Samantha Max: This Today Explained.
