A Goodreads user who appears to be Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old who was arrested and charged with murder and other felonies in connection with the fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City. gave a 4-star rating to the manifesto of Theodore Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber.
The review from January 2024 was written by a user with the profile name “Luigi (lnmangione)” and the same photo that Mangione used in other social media profiles.
Kaczynski, convicted of a series of mail bombings between 1978 and 1995 that killed 3 and injured 23, was a “mathematics prodigy” begins the 8-paragraph review of the manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future.”
The review concludes with a 4-paragraph quote the reviewer said he’d found online that ends: “’Violence never solved anything’ is a statement uttered by cowards and predators.”
The review said Kaczynski’s manifesto examined “the question of 21st century quality of life.”
“It’s easy to quickly and thoughtless write this off as the manifesto of a lunatic, in order to avoid facing some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies. But it’s simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out,” the reviewer says.
“He was a violent individual − rightfully imprisoned − who maimed innocent people,” Mangione wrote. “While these actions tend to be characterized as those of a crazy luddite, however, they are more accurately seen as those of an extreme political revolutionary.”
The four-paragraph passage the reviewer says he found “online” includes the following: “When all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive. You may not like his methods, but to see things from his perspective, it’s not terrorism, it’s war and revolution.”
New York Police Department Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said Monday that Mangione had been detained by police in Altoona, Pennsylvania, carrying a 3D-printed gun, a silencer, and documents indicating “some ill will toward corporate America.”
According to a Reddit post, a person with the username “Bosspotatoness” wrote the quotes in a post on Jan. 22, 2023, in response to a question from a now-deleted user. The user — whose name has now been deleted from the original post — shared a YouTube video and asked if anyone in the Reddit group r/climate had read anything on Kaczynski and what their thoughts were. The video has also now been deleted.
On Monday, “Bosspotatoness” edited the January 2023 post to add that the quotes had come up Monday in news stories about Mangione: “Guess if I wasn’t on a watchlist before I sure am now. Last thing I expected to see on my lunch break but I’m flattered!”
USA TODAY has reached out to the user for comment.
The unnamed writer quoted in Mangione’s review of The Unabomber Manifesto had antipathy to spare.
“Peaceful protest is outright ignored, economic protest isn’t possible in the current system, so how long until we recognize that violence against those who lead us to such destruction is justified as self-defense,” the passage reads.
“These companies don’t care about you, or your kids, or your grandkids,” the quote continued. “They have zero qualms about burning down the planet for a buck, so why should we have any qualms about burning them down to survive?”
