Ted Kaczynski

Kaczynski after his arrest in 1996

Born

Theodore John Kaczynski

May 22, 1942

Chicago, Illinois, U.S.

DiedJune 10, 2023 (aged 81)

Durham, North Carolina, U.S.

Other names

• Unabomber
• FC

Education

• Harvard University (BA)
• University of Michigan (MA, PhD)

OccupationMathematics professor Notable work*Industrial Society and Its Future* (1995) RelativesDavid Kaczynski (brother)

ConvictionsTransportation, mailing, and use of bombs (10 counts) First-degree murder (3 counts) Criminal penaltySeveral consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole[a] Details

Span of crimes

1978–1995 Killed3 Injured23

Date apprehended

April 3, 1996

Scientific career

FieldsComplex analysis Institutions

• University of Michigan
• University of California, Berkeley

ThesisBoundary Functions (1967) Doctoral advisorAllen Shields Other academic advisorsGeorge Piranian Signature

Theodore John Kaczynski ( kə-ZIN-skee; May 22, 1942 – June 10, 2023), also known as the Unabomber ( YOO-nə-bom-ər), was an American mathematician and domestic terrorist.[1][2] A mathematics prodigy, he abandoned his academic career in 1969 to pursue a reclusive primitive lifestyle and lone wolf terrorism campaign.

Kaczynski murdered 3 people and injured 23 others between 1978 and 1995 in a nationwide mail bombing campaign against people he believed to be advancing modern technology and the destruction of the natural environment. He authored a roughly 35,000-word manifesto and social critique, Industrial Society and Its Future (1995), which opposes all forms of technology, rejects leftism and fascism, advocates cultural primitivism, and ultimately suggests violent revolution.[3]

In 1971, Kaczynski moved to a remote cabin without electricity or running water near Lincoln, Montana, where he lived as a recluse while learning survival skills to become self-sufficient. After witnessing the destruction of the wilderness surrounding his cabin, he concluded that living in nature was becoming impossible and resolved to fight industrialization and its destruction of nature through terrorism. In 1979, Kaczynski became the subject of what was, by the time of his arrest in 1996, the longest and most expensive investigation in the history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The FBI used the case identifier UNABOM (University and Airline Bombing) before his identity was known, resulting in the media naming him the "Unabomber".

In 1995, Kaczynski sent a letter to The New York Times promising to "desist from terrorism" if the Times or The Washington Post published his manifesto, in which he argued that his bombings were extreme but necessary in attracting attention to the erosion of human freedom and dignity by modern technologies.[4] The FBI and U.S. attorney general Janet Reno pushed for the publication of the essay, which appeared in The Washington Post in September 1995. Upon reading it, Kaczynski’s brother, David, recognized the prose style and reported his suspicions to the FBI. After his arrest in 1996, Kaczynski—maintaining that he was sane—tried and failed to dismiss his court-appointed lawyers because they wished him to plead insanity to avoid the death penalty. He pleaded guilty to all charges in 1998 and was sentenced to several consecutive life terms in prison without the possibility of parole.[a] In 2021, he received a cancer diagnosis and stopped treatment in March 2023. Kaczynski hanged himself in prison in June 2023.[10][7][11]

Early life

Childhood

Kaczynski’s birth certificate and several of his driver’s licenses

Theodore John Kaczynski was born in Chicago on May 22, 1942, to working-class parents Wanda Theresa (née Dombek) and Theodore Richard Kaczynski, a sausage maker.[12] The two were Polish Americans who were raised as Roman Catholics but later became atheists.[13] They married on April 11, 1939.[13]

From first to fourth grade (ages six to nine), Kaczynski attended Sherman Elementary School in Chicago, where administrators described him as healthy and well-adjusted.[14] In 1952, three years after his brother David was born, the family moved to suburban Evergreen Park, Illinois, and Ted transferred to Evergreen Park Central Junior High School. After testing scored his IQ at 167,[15] he skipped the sixth grade. Kaczynski later described this as a pivotal event: previously he had socialized with his peers and was even seen as a leader, but after skipping ahead of them he felt he did not fit in with the older children, who bullied him.[16]

Neighbors in Evergreen Park later described the Kaczynski family as "civic-minded folks", one recalling the parents "sacrificed everything they had for their children".[13] Both Ted and David were intelligent, but Ted was exceptionally bright. Neighbors described him as a smart but lonely individual.[13][17]

High school

Kaczynski (bottom right) with other merit scholarship finalists from his high school

Kaczynski attended Evergreen Park Community High School, where he excelled academically. He played the trombone in the marching band and was a member of the mathematics, biology, coin, and German clubs.[18][19] In 1996, a former classmate said: "He was never really seen as a person, as an individual personality ... He was always regarded as a walking brain, so to speak."[13] During this period, Kaczynski became intensely interested in mathematics, spending hours studying and solving advanced problems. He became associated with a group of like-minded boys interested in science and mathematics, known as the "briefcase boys" due to their penchant for carrying briefcases.[19]

Throughout high school, Kaczynski was ahead of his classmates academically. Placed in a more advanced mathematics class, he soon mastered the material. He skipped the eleventh grade, and, by attending summer school, he graduated at age 15. Kaczynski was one of his school’s five National Merit finalists and was encouraged to apply to Harvard University.[18] While still at age 15, he was accepted to Harvard and entered the university on a scholarship in 1958 at age 16.[20] A high school classmate later said Kaczynski was emotionally unprepared: "They packed him up and sent him to Harvard before he was ready ... He didn’t even have a driver’s license."[13]

Harvard University

8 Prescott St, Kaczynski’s home during his first year at Harvard

Kaczynski matriculated at Harvard College as a mathematics prodigy. During his first year at the university, Kaczynski lived at 8 Prescott Street, which was intended to provide a small, intimate living space for the youngest, most precocious incoming students. For the following three years, he lived at Eliot House. His housemates and other students at Harvard described Kaczynski as a very intelligent but socially reserved person.[21] He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics from Harvard in 1962, finishing with a GPA of 3.12.[22][23][24]

Psychological study

In his second year at Harvard, Kaczynski participated in a study led by Harvard psychologist Henry Murray. Subjects were told they would debate personal philosophy with a fellow student and were asked to write essays detailing their personal beliefs and aspirations. The essays were given to an anonymous individual who would confront and belittle the subject in what Murray himself called "vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive" attacks, using the content of the essays as ammunition.[25] Kaczynski spent 200 hours as part of the study.[26][27]

Kaczynski’s lawyers later attributed his hostility towards mind control techniques to his participation in Murray’s study.[25] Kaczynski stated he resented Murray and his co-workers, primarily because of the invasion of his privacy he perceived as a result of their experiments. Nevertheless, he said he was "quite confident that [his] experiences with Professor Murray had no significant effect on the course of [his] life".[28]

Mathematics career

Kaczynski’s diplomas from Harvard University and the University of Michigan

In 1962, Kaczynski enrolled at the University of Michigan, where he earned his master’s and doctoral degrees in mathematics in 1964 and 1967, respectively. Michigan was not his first choice for postgraduate education; he had applied to the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago, both of which accepted him but offered him no teaching position or financial aid. Michigan offered him an annual grant of $2,310 (equivalent to $24,000 in 2024) and a teaching post.[24]

At Michigan, Kaczynski specialized in complex analysis, specifically geometric function theory. Professor Peter Duren said of Kaczynski, "He was an unusual person. He was not like the other graduate students. He was much more focused about his work. He had a drive to discover mathematical truth." George Piranian, another of his Michigan mathematics professors, said, "It is not enough to say he was smart."[29] Piranian taught Kaczynski function theory and recalled, "he was very persistent in his work. If a problem was hard, he worked harder. He was easily the top student, or one of the top".[13] Professor Allen Shields wrote about Kaczynski in a grade evaluation that he was the "best man I have seen".[30] Kaczynski received one F, five B’s and twelve A’s in his eighteen courses at the university. In 2006, he said he had unpleasant memories of Michigan and felt the university had low standards for grading, considering his relatively high grades.[24]

For a period of several weeks in 1966, Kaczynski experienced intense sexual fantasies of being female and decided to undergo gender transition. He arranged to meet with a psychiatrist but changed his mind in the waiting room and discussed other things instead, without disclosing his original reason for making the appointment. Afterward, enraged, he considered killing the psychiatrist and other people whom he hated. Kaczynski described this episode as a "major turning point" in his life.[31][32][33] He recalled: "I felt disgusted about what my uncontrolled sexual cravings had almost led me to do. And I felt humiliated, and I violently hated the psychiatrist. Just then there came a major turning point in my life. Like a Phoenix, I burst from the ashes of my despair to a glorious new hope."[34]

In 1967, Kaczynski’s dissertation, Boundary Functions,[35] won the Sumner B. Myers Prize for Michigan’s best mathematics dissertation of the year.[13] Allen Shields, his doctoral advisor, called it "the best I have ever directed",[24] and Maxwell Reade, a member of his dissertation committee, said, "I would guess that maybe 10 or 12 men in the country understood or appreciated it."[13][29]

Kaczynski as an assistant professor at UC Berkeley in 1968

In late 1967, the 25-year-old Kaczynski became an acting assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught mathematics. He assumed the position of the youngest assistant professor in the history of the university.[36] By September 1968, Kaczynski was formally appointed to an assistant professorship, a sign that he was on track for tenure.[13] His teaching evaluations suggested he was not well-liked by his students—he seemed uncomfortable teaching, taught straight from the textbook, and refused to answer questions.[13]

Without any explanation, Kaczynski resigned on June 30, 1969.[35] In a 1970 letter written by John W. Addison Jr., the chairman of the mathematics department, to Kaczynski’s doctoral advisor Shields, Addison referred to the resignation as "quite out of the blue".[37][38] He added that "Kaczynski seemed almost pathologically shy", and that, as far as he knew, Kaczynski made no close friends in the department, noting that efforts to bring him more into the "swing of things" had failed.[39][40]

In 1996, reporters for the Los Angeles Times interviewed mathematicians about Kaczynski’s work and concluded that Kaczynski’s subfield effectively ceased to exist after the 1960s, as most of its conjectures had been proven. According to mathematician Donald Rung, if Kaczynski had continued to work in mathematics, he "probably would have gone on to some other area".[35]

Life in Montana

Bible belonging to Kaczynski, found in his cabin

After resigning from Berkeley, Kaczynski moved to his parents’ home in Lombard, Illinois. Two years later, in 1971, he moved to a remote cabin he had built outside Lincoln, Montana, where he could live a simple life with little money and without electricity or running water,[41] working odd jobs and receiving significant financial support from his family.[13]

Kaczynski’s cabin, photographed in 1996

Kaczynski’s original goal was to become self-sufficient so he could live autonomously. He used an old bicycle to get to town, and a volunteer at the local library said he visited frequently to read classic works in their original languages. Other Lincoln residents said later that such a lifestyle was typical in the area.[42] Kaczynski’s cabin was described by a census taker in the 1990 census as containing a bed, two chairs, storage trunks, a gas stove, and lots of books.[18]

Starting in 1975, Kaczynski performed acts of sabotage including arson and booby trapping against developments near his cabin.[43] He also dedicated himself to reading about sociology and political philosophy, including the works of Jacques Ellul.[25] Kaczynski’s brother David later stated that Ellul’s book The Technological Society "became Ted’s Bible".[44] Kaczynski recounted in 1998, "When I read the book for the first time, I was delighted, because I thought, ‘Here is someone who is saying what I have already been thinking.’"[25]

In an interview after his arrest, Kaczynski recalled being shocked on a hike to one of his favorite wild spots:[45]

It’s kind of rolling country, not flat, and when you get to the edge of it you find these ravines that cut very steeply in to cliff-like drop-offs and there was even a waterfall there. It was about a two days’ hike from my cabin. That was the best spot until the summer of 1983. That summer there were too many people around my cabin so I decided I needed some peace. I went back to the plateau and when I got there I found they had put a road right through the middle of it ... You just can’t imagine how upset I was. It was from that point on I decided that, rather than trying to acquire further wilderness skills, I would work on getting back at the system. Revenge.

During the 1980s and 1990s, Kaczynski’s neighbors suspected him of attacking and poisoning their dogs on multiple occasions. After his arrest, the FBI found poisons in his cabin, and in later letters, he admitted to killing at least one dog.[46][47][48]

Kaczynski was visited multiple times in Montana by his father, who was impressed by Ted’s wilderness skills. Kaczynski’s father was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in 1990 and held a family meeting without Kaczynski later that year to map out their future.[18] On October 2, 1990, Kaczynski’s father shot and killed himself in his home.[49]

Bombings

Between 1978 and 1995, Kaczynski mailed or hand-delivered a series of increasingly sophisticated bombs that cumulatively killed three people and injured 23 others. Sixteen bombs were attributed to Kaczynski. While the bombing devices varied widely through the years, many contained the initials "FC", which Kaczynski later said stood for "Freedom Club",[50] inscribed on parts inside. He purposely left misleading clues in the devices and took extreme care in preparing them to avoid leaving fingerprints; fingerprints found on some of the devices did not match those found on letters attributed to Kaczynski.[51][b]

Initial bombings

Kaczynski’s first mail bomb was directed at Buckley Crist, a professor of materials engineering at Northwestern University. On May 25, 1978, a package bearing Crist’s return address was found in a parking lot at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The package was "returned" to Crist, who was suspicious because he had not sent it, so he contacted campus police. Officer Terry Marker opened the package, which exploded and caused minor injuries.[54] Kaczynski had returned to Chicago for the May 1978 bombing and stayed there for a time to work with his father and brother at a foam rubber factory. In August 1978, his brother fired him for writing insulting limericks about a female supervisor Ted had courted briefly.[55][56] The supervisor later recalled Kaczynski as intelligent and quiet but remembered little of their acquaintanceship and firmly denied they had had any romantic relationship.[57] Kaczynski’s second bomb was sent nearly one year after the first one, again to Northwestern University. The bomb, concealed inside a cigar box and left on a table, caused minor injuries to graduate student John Harris when he opened it.[54]

Airline bombing and clues

Driver’s license photo of Kaczynski from 1978, around the time the first bombs were mailed

In 1979, a bomb was placed in the cargo hold of American Airlines Flight 444, a Boeing 727 flying from Chicago to Washington, D.C. The bomb released smoke, which caused the pilots to carry out an emergency landing. Authorities said it had enough power to "obliterate the plane" had it exploded.[54] "Kaczynski had used a barometer-triggered device, and it had succeeded only in setting some mailbags on fire and forcing an emergency landing; in a letter written years later, the Unabomber expressed relief that the airline bomb had failed since its target had been too indiscriminate."[58] Kaczynski sent his next bomb to the president of United Airlines, Percy Wood. Wood received cuts and burns over most of his body.[59]

Kaczynski left false clues in most bombs, which he intentionally made hard to find to make them appear more legitimate. Clues included metal plates stamped with the initials "FC" hidden somewhere (usually in the pipe end cap) in bombs, a note left in a bomb that did not detonate reading "Wu—It works! I told you it would—RV," and the Eugene O’Neill one-dollar stamps often used as postage on his boxes.[51][60][61] He sent one bomb embedded in a copy of Sloan Wilson’s novel Ice Brothers.[54] The FBI theorized that Kaczynski’s crimes involved a theme of nature, trees, and wood. He often included bits of a tree branch and bark in his bombs; his selected targets included Percy Wood and Leroy Wood. The crime writer Robert Graysmith noted his "obsession with wood" was "a large factor" in the bombings.[62]

Later bombings

An FBI reproduction of one of Kaczynski’s bombs, once on display at the now defunct Newseum in Washington, D.C.

In 1981, a package bearing the return address of a Brigham Young University professor of electrical engineering, LeRoy Wood Bearnson, was discovered in a hallway at the University of Utah. It was brought to the campus police and was defused by a bomb squad.[63][54] The following May, a bomb was sent to Patrick C. Fischer, a professor of computer science at Vanderbilt University. The package exploded when Fischer’s secretary, Janet Smith, opened it, and Smith received injuries to her face and arms.[54][64]

Kaczynski’s next two bombs targeted people at the University of California, Berkeley. The first, in July 1982, caused serious injuries to engineering professor Diogenes Angelakos.[54] Nearly three years later, in May 1985, John Hauser, a graduate student and captain in the United States Air Force, lost four fingers and the vision in one eye.[65] Kaczynski handcrafted the bomb from wooden parts.[66] A bomb sent to the Boeing Company in Auburn, Washington, was defused by a bomb squad the following month.[65] In November 1985, Professor James V. McConnell and research assistant Nicklaus Suino were both severely injured after Suino opened a mail bomb addressed to McConnell.[65]

In late 1985, a nail-and-splinter-loaded bomb in the parking lot of a computer store in Sacramento, California killed the 38-year-old store owner, Hugh Scrutton. On February 20, 1987, a bomb disguised as a piece of lumber injured Gary Wright in the parking lot of a computer store in Salt Lake City, Utah; nerves in Wright’s left arm were severed, and at least 200 pieces of shrapnel entered his body. Kaczynski was spotted while planting the Salt Lake City bomb. This led to a widely distributed sketch of the suspect as a hooded man with a mustache and aviator sunglasses.[67][68]

In 1993, after a six-year break, Kaczynski mailed a bomb to the home of Charles Epstein from the University of California, San Francisco. Epstein lost several fingers upon opening the package. On the same weekend, Kaczynski mailed a bomb to David Gelernter, a computer science professor at Yale University. Gelernter lost sight in one eye, hearing in one ear, and a portion of his right hand.[69]

In 1994, Burson-Marsteller executive Thomas J. Mosser was killed after opening a mail bomb sent to his home in New Jersey. In a letter to The New York Times, Kaczynski wrote he had sent the bomb because of Mosser’s work repairing the public image of Exxon after the Exxon Valdez oil spill.[70] This was followed by the 1995 murder of Gilbert Brent Murray, president of the timber industry lobbying group California Forestry Association, by a mail bomb addressed to previous president William Dennison, who had retired. Geneticist Phillip Sharp at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology received a threatening letter shortly afterward.[69]

Diary and cipher

Theodore Kaczynski maintained extensive personal journals spanning more than 25 years, from approximately 1969 until his arrest in 1996.[71] These journals, totaling over 40,000 handwritten pages, documented his daily life, philosophical beliefs, emotional state, and detailed accounts of his criminal activities, including bomb-making experiments and the Unabomber attacks.[72] Some entries were written in plain text, while others were encrypted using two custom cipher systems Kaczynski developed to conceal sensitive information.[73] The journals were discovered during the FBI raid on his Montana cabin on April 3, 1996.[71] Kaczynski’s journals often mixed plain text with enciphered sections, particularly in notebooks where he recorded his crimes.[73] For instance, a 1979 journal entry written in plain text bragged about early acts of vandalism and sabotage, such as adding sugar to fuel tanks, breaking windows, and setting traps for motorcyclists, as part of his efforts to disrupt technological society.[74] In enciphered entries, he detailed his bombings, expressing frustration over non-lethal outcomes and satisfaction when devices caused fatalities.[75] He numbered his bomb-making experiments, such as "Experiment 97" which killed Hugh Scrutton in 1985, and "Experiment 244" which killed Thomas Mosser in 1994, noting technical details like chemical mixtures, weights, and modifications to enhance lethality.[75] Kaczynski wrote about his motives as personal revenge against technological society, without remorse, stating in a 1971 entry: "My motive for doing what I am going to do is simply personal revenge."[72]

Kaczynski created two elaborate cipher systems, referred to as Code #I and Code #II, to encrypt portions of his journals.[73] These systems used sequences of numbers as ciphertext, combined with a "List of Meanings" that mapped numbers to letters, words, or punctuation, and incorporated misdirections such as intentional errors, foreign words (e.g., German), misspellings, and random punctuation to complicate decryption.[76] Code #I, the more complex system, was documented in "Notebook X" and involved a 54x42 grid matrix to generate a long key sequence through four reading phases (horizontal, vertical, diagonal).[76] Decryption required modulo 90 addition of ciphertext numbers to the key, followed by substitution using the List of Meanings and manual corrections for misdirections.[73] Code #II functioned as a one-time pad, a type of potentially unbreakable encryption assuming the key is never compromised, using two notebooks (A for ciphertext, B for pad numbers) with modulo 100 subtraction before substitution.[76] Both systems were designed for personal use, making them highly complex but impractical for communication.[73] The ciphers were broken by the FBI after discovering the keys, grids, notebooks, and instructions in Kaczynski’s cabin.[77] FBI cryptanalyst Michael Birch decoded the journals, which served as key evidence in the case.[77] Without these materials, the ciphers would have been nearly impossible to crack due to their length and randomness.[76]

Manifesto

The handwritten draft of Industrial Society and Its Future

In 1995, Kaczynski mailed several letters[78] to media outlets outlining his goals and demanding a major newspaper print his 35,000-word essay Industrial Society and Its Future (dubbed the "Unabomber manifesto" by the FBI) verbatim.[79][80] He stated he would "desist from terrorism" if this demand was met.[4][81][82] There was controversy as to whether the essay should be published, but Attorney General Janet Reno and FBI director Louis Freeh recommended its publication out of concern for public safety and in the hope that a reader could identify the author. Bob Guccione of Penthouse volunteered to publish it. Kaczynski replied Penthouse was less "respectable" than The New York Times and The Washington Post, and said that, "to increase our chances of getting our stuff published in some ‘respectable’ periodical", he would "reserve the right to plant one (and only one) bomb intended to kill, after our manuscript has been published" if Penthouse published the document instead of The Times or The Post.[83] The Washington Post published the essay on September 19, 1995.[84][85]

Kaczynski used a typewriter to write his manuscript, capitalizing entire words for emphasis, in lieu of italics. He always referred to himself as either "we" or "FC" ("Freedom Club"), though there is no evidence that he worked with others. Donald Wayne Foster analyzed the writing at the request of Kaczynski’s defense team in 1996 and noted that it contained irregular spelling and hyphenation, along with other linguistic idiosyncrasies. This led him to conclude that Kaczynski was its author.[86]

Summary

Industrial Society and Its Future begins with Kaczynski’s assertion: "The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race."[87][88] He wrote that technology has had a destabilizing effect on society, has made life unfulfilling, and has caused widespread psychological suffering.[89] Kaczynski argued that most people spend their time engaged in ultimately unfulfilling pursuits because of technological advances; he called these "surrogate activities", wherein people strive toward artificial goals, including scientific work, consumption of entertainment, political activism, and following sports teams. He states people do "surrogate activities" to satisfy the "power process" in which people strive to be independent and to achieve power over themselves.[89] He predicted that technological advances would lead to extensive and ultimately oppressive forms of human control, including genetic engineering, and that human beings would be adjusted to meet the needs of social systems rather than vice versa.[89] Kaczynski stated that technological progress can be stopped, in contrast to the viewpoint of people who he said understand technology’s negative effects yet passively accept technology as inevitable.[90] He called for a revolution to force the collapse of the worldwide technological system,[91] and held a life close to nature, in particular primitivist lifestyles, as an ultimate ideal.[89] Kaczynski’s critiques of civilization bore some similarities to anarcho-primitivism, but he rejected and criticized anarcho-primitivist views.[92][93][94]

Kaczynski argued that the erosion of human freedom is a natural product of an industrial society because, in his words, "the system has to regulate human behavior closely in order to function", and that reform of the system is impossible.[95] He said that the system has not yet fully achieved control over all human behavior and is in the midst of a struggle to gain that control. Kaczynski predicted that the system would break down if it could not achieve significant control and that it is likely this issue would be resolved within the next 40 to 100 years.[95] He stated that the task of those who oppose industrial society is to promote stress within and upon the society and to propagate an anti-technology ideology, one that offers the counter-ideal of nature. Kaczynski added that a revolution would be possible only when industrial society is sufficiently unstable.[95]

A significant portion of the document is dedicated to discussing political leftism as a manifestation of related psychological types, with Kaczynski attributing the prevalence and intensity of leftism in society as both a negative symptom of psychological pressures induced by technological conditions as well as an obstacle to the formation of an effective anti-tech revolution.[95][96] He defined leftists as "mainly socialists, collectivists, ‘politically correct’ types, feminists, gay and disability activists, animal rights activists and the like".[97] He believed that over-socialization and feelings of inferiority are primary drivers of leftism,[89] and derided it as "one of the most widespread manifestations of the craziness of our world".[97] Kaczynski added that the type of movement he envisioned must be anti-leftist and refrain from collaboration with leftists as, in his view, "leftism is in the long run inconsistent with wild nature, with human freedom and with the elimination of modern technology".[87]

Although Kaczynski and his manifesto has been embraced by ecofascists,[98] he rejected fascism,[99] including those whom he referred to as "the ‘ecofascists’", describing ecofascism as "an aberrant branch of leftism".[100][101] In "Ecofascism: An Aberrant Branch of Leftism", he wrote: "The true anti-tech movement rejects every form of racism or ethnocentrism. This has nothing to do with ‘tolerance,’ ‘diversity,’ ‘pluralism,’ ‘multiculturalism,’ ‘equality,’ or ‘social justice.’ The rejection of racism and ethnocentrism is – purely and simply – a cardinal point of strategy."[100] Kaczynski wrote that he considered fascism a "kook ideology" and Nazism as "evil".[99] Kaczynski never tried to align himself with the far-right at any point before or after his arrest.[99] He also criticized conservatives, describing them as "fools who whine about the decay of traditional values, yet... enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth"—things he argues have led to this decay.[97]

Contemporary reception

James Q. Wilson, in a 1998 New York Times op-ed, wrote: "If it is the work of a madman, then the writings of many political philosophers—Jean Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Paine, Karl Marx—are scarcely more sane."[102] He added: "The Unabomber does not like socialization, technology, leftist political causes or conservative attitudes. Apart from his call for an (unspecified) revolution, his paper resembles something that a very good graduate student might have written."[103]

Alston Chase,