Man identified by police as Max Azzarello, from Florida, declared dead after incident outside lower Manhattan courthouse

A man has died after setting himself on fire outside the New York courthouse where Donald Trump’s hush-money trial is taking place.

The New York City police department said on Saturday the man had been declared dead by staff at an area hospital.

Officials had said earlier the man, who was in his late 30s, was in critical condition.

The New York police department said the man, who they identified as Max Azzarello of St Augustine, Florida, did not appear to be targeting Trump or others involved in the trial.

Witnesses said the man pulled pamphlets out of a backpack and threw them in the air before he doused himself with a liquid and set himself on fire on Friday. One of those pamphlets included references to “evil billionaires” but portions that were visible to a Reuters witness did not mention Trump.

    • NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      I was skeptical of the mental illness angle until I clicked on the link. This guy was deeply into conspiracy theories.

          • Wogi@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            Thich Quang Duc is the monk you’re referring to, this was during the build up to Vietnam, but to put it in context for you, John f Kennedy was still alive when this happened.

            He was not protesting the war, he was protesting the Catholic Church, which was the largest land owner in South Vietnam at the time. Buddhists were being marginalized and a ban on flying the Buddhist flag had been enacted, the Vatican flag flew over most buildings.

            Buddhists protesting the government has recently been victims of a massacre, government forces fired blindly in to a crowd and killed 9 people.

            Duc self immolated over religious inequality.

    • disguy_ovahea@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Lastly, we string these major discoveries together: Cryptocurrency is an economic doomsday device; our government is a secret kleptocracy; The Simpsons exists to brainwash us.

      • gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        I want to live in the timeline where he got the right treatment/producer to make a podcast or video series using Simpsons scenes to describe macroeconomic theories

      • PoliticalAgitator@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        It’s always heartbreaking when people grow skeptical of neoliberalism (and the greedy, self-serving people who push it), only to be preyed upon by groups like neo-nazis, conspiracy theorists and crypto bros.

        Anywhere you find people who are frustrated, depressed or paranoid, you’ll find extremists using that vulnerability to groom more extremists.

    • GiantFloppyCock@lemm.ee
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      8 months ago

      I mean, a lot of what crypto has become is pretty Ponzi-ish. But yeah, he’s a bit deeper off the conspiracy cliff than that.

      • antidote101@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        …and the two parties do seem to work together. Also, tech billionaires and their platforms do seem to promote and allow a lot of white supremacist propaganda on their websites.

        So a lot of what he writes about seems to have a basis in reality.

        • kent_eh@lemmy.ca
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          8 months ago

          It becomes more crazy looking the more he tries to connect everything he is suspicious of into some grand interlinked conspiracy with some grand unified masterplan.

          • grue@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            Yeah:

            • “Democrats and Republicans work together to screw over the public” — not crazy.
            • “Harvard-educated Simpsons writers are on a mission of propaganda” — crazy.
            • NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world
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              8 months ago

              Yeah, the first paragraph or so, I was like, yeah, this isn’t that out there. But by the second or third paragraph the conspiracies went off the deep end pretty quick.

              • Spiralvortexisalie@lemmy.world
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                8 months ago

                The vibe feels to be he was individually right about most things, but people can find one thing they personally disagree with and the media said he is crazy, so he must be crazy. The Simpsons point was somewhat more of a general sense of the media thats free to consume was paid for by somebody and probably not just the goodness of their heart decided to foot that bill. Arguably Simpsons was, is, and always has been paid for one by of the worst humans alive Rupert Murdoch (A literal Monty Burns), so you really do have to ask why?

              • Reyali@lemm.ee
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                8 months ago

                Yeah… this was the quote that jumped off the high dive for me.

                In order to explain the massive anomaly [massive stock growth and drop], our criminal government unleashed COVID on the world and told us these were the “stay at home stocks.”

            • antidote101@lemmy.world
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              8 months ago

              Aren’t we all pretty sure the wealthy classes seem to have different rules applied to them? Lighter sentences, less likelihood of being arrested, better treatment when they do get arrested.t Much shorter sentences in prisons which compare holiday resorts. I mean the first time Epstein was arrested for sex crimes he was allowed to leave the prison in daylight hours.

              … doesn’t that start to look like elites are in a criminal conspiracy? That other elites create these conditions for them? Eg. Wealthy elite schools producing unchecked criminality, and sharing the secrets of getting these better conditions?

              Like Harvard is a crime school?

            • kent_eh@lemmy.ca
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              8 months ago

              Claiming Democrats and Republicans work together on anything seems a pretty crazy suggestion these days.

              • grue@lemmy.world
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                8 months ago

                You should pay closer attention. There are plenty of party-line votes on “culture war” bullshit, but there are also plenty of times in which they engage in bipartisanship to screw us. For example, they just not only renewed but also expanded FISA spying.

          • antidote101@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            I had a realisation today I’ve never seen anywhere before: Voyager would have been greatly improved had Tom Paris “grown a beard”.

          • freebee@sh.itjust.works
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            8 months ago

            Well yeah, many of them do have nuggets of truth, it becomes “conspiracy theory” when linking it all together in one big plot against humanity organised by a few people.

            The “big” truth is often even scarier then any big conspiracy theory: we are ruled by things that come/happen together by accident. We are ruled by chaos. Some are powerful, but not a single few people are ever completely in control of everything.

    • SacralPlexus@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      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.

      Yeah I too think he was likely mentally ill. But damn if this didn’t resonate.