Man Sets Himself on Fire Near Courthouse Where Trump Is on Trial

He posted online to explain his reasoning for this action: https://open.substack.com/pub/theponzipapers/p/i-have-set-myself-on-fire-outside?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Tl;dr nutso crypto conspiracy bro
- Sure it sounds crazy, but goddamn have I been feeling like this whole country has been conned lately. Inflation keeps going up, we keep getting poorer, and the billionaires keep making record profits. Like what the actual fuck? This guy may not have gotten everything right, but the idea that we’ve been conned out of the America Dream by a kleptocracy (the billionaires) that actually rules this country and have been taught by media that we’re helpless in making any real change absolutely rings true.
He had me until the Simpsons connection.
Stuck between mental illness, stupid fucking crypto bro type of sorts or both.
Either way, loaded with pop culture references and dumb as hell.
- Here's the main point of what he's saying:
  Cryptocurrency is our first planetary multi-trillion-dollar Ponzi scheme. It was expressly created for this purpose by a laundry list of rich and powerful people out of Stanford/Silicon Valley and Harvard/Facebook.
  The March 2023 bank failures were all intentional: the banks were used to move out stolen Ponzi money. This signals that they’re no longer dumping cash in to keep the cryptocurrency Ponzi afloat, and that it will soon go insolvent, as all Ponzis must.
  When the Ponzi scheme goes insolvent, it will take down half the stock market with it: The perpetrators used their major companies to pipe into the blockchain so they could funnel money out from the crypto exchanges. This includes Google, Tesla, Apple, PayPal, Facebook, Disney, Walmart, Target, InBev, Zoom, and countless others.
  So he isn't for cryptocurrency but saying it's a scam to rob society. It is indeed a conspiracy but conspiracies turn out to be true all the time. Epstein's pedo ring and America's gun and drug running to fund despots all started as conspiracy theories.
  Settings yourself on fire doesn't mean you're right but it shows enough resolve that you could at least read the text before misrepresenting him. He's clearly not a crypto bro.

Couldn't get this working in archive.org so here's a different article without the paywall. https://abcnews.go.com/US/man-apparently-sets-fire-courthouse-trump-trial/story?id=109433903

Should've used a gift link, my bad:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/19/nyregion/man-on-fire-trump.html?unlocked_article_code=1.lk0.IPBi.-buV5zpSC3fh

Here's an image of one of the pamphlets.
- deleted by creator
CNN reporters on the scene observed one of the flyers, which said “NYU is a mob front” and “had various allegations of wrongdoings against the school.”
- So this had nothing to do with Trump it sounds like.

Ive been noticing lots of incidents of people giving in to their dorker impulses over the last decade or so. Is it an evolutionary process, kinda like a thinning of the herd due to resource limitations?

Probably a side effect of our hyper connected world. It might have happened at the same rate in the past and you didn't know about it. It's also a case of people copying other people they see online.
- That is an interesting theory. It might also be coupled with the size of the population. We have an ever increasing, massive number of people in the world, and the connectedness might just show us how little our individualized voices are heard without doing something as severe as lighting yourself on fire.

Second person to set themselves on fire this year. It’s becoming the face tattoos of protesting.

It's your face and your tattoo, so if this is how you feel you need to express yourself I support it.
I owed Aaron Bushnell the time to listen to him and understand his message, even if I think I probably already agree with them.
Likewise, I think I ow this person the time to listen to them and understand their message, even if I think I probably don't agree with them.
Unlike many people who think they are on the left, I actually do believe and am fully committed to the principle of individual liberties being inviolable. That includes gay rights, trans rights, religious rights, political views, an most importantly, that your body and mind are your own and there is no authority that can remove that agency from you.
Look if this is a rightwing conspiracy theorist and they believe this passionately in a fiction, consider that half the time when these nut jobs go off they shoot up a school or a sporting event. This person did the most extreme form of protest imaginable. But they also decided that they didn't need to take others with them to make their point. We should try to understand why they made the conclusions they did, even if, especially if we don't agree with how they arrived at them.
- yeah, it's called mental illness. they have all the right in the world to do what they did. more power to them, but it's definitely not healthy behavior and I would question their state of mind and beliefs to react in such an extreme manner.