Police identified Max Azzarello, a conspiracy theorist, as the man who set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former President Donald Trump was being tried in his hush money case.
Azzarello resides in St. Augustine, Florida, and traveled to New York, without his family knowing, in the last week, police said in a press conference. Around 1:30 p.m. Friday, he walked to an area near where Trump supporters were protesting, threw pamphlets from his backpack, doused himself in an accelerant, and lit himself on fire.
The fire burned for roughly two minutes before he was sprayed with fire extinguishers. He was taken away on a stretcher and rushed to the hospital. He died after succumbing to his injures, the New York Post reported early Saturday morning.
Azzarello was active on Instagram, posting a message saying “I love you” repeatedly shortly before he lit himself on fire. A survey of his account, with posts as early as 2013, shows a marked change in tone after the death of his mother in April 2022. He quickly shifted to posting about wide-ranging conspiracy theories, warning of a “global fascist takeover” and cryptocurrency.
Posts on Azzarello’s Instagram showed he brought stacks of pamphlets on his New York City trip, titled “NYU is a Mob Front,” accusing the school of “Political Revenge Killings,” “Criminal Propaganda,” and other misdeeds.
The Washington Examiner spoke with a Columbia student who met Azzarello earlier in the week when he traveled to New York University’s campus. The student, who asked to remain anonymous, described Azzarello’s disposition as “open and friendly,” adding that he “clearly wanted people to engage with him.”
The student was part of a small group that gathered around Azzarello, who was holding a sign saying, “NYU is a Mob Front.”
“I don’t remember the specifics of what he was saying — I was struggling to follow his theory — but he handed me two pamphlets, which he said could ‘start a revolution’ if people knew about the information contained. I also asked him what he thought of Columbia, which he said was also a mob front,” the student said.
The pamphlet was different than the manifesto distributed at the site where he lit himself on fire Friday. The manifesto, posted online and distributed at the scene, was titled, The True History of the World (Haunted Carnival Edition).
Former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden were both named just once in the manifesto, described as “characters playing pretend, just like professional wrestlers.”
In his recount of world history, beginning at World War II, Azzarello claimed the United States government and CIA orchestrated the counterculture movement of the 1960s-70s, the Manson Family murders, punk and metal music, daytime talk shows, reality TV, the dot-com bubble, the Great Recession, and most of all, the creation and prominence of cryptocurrency and nonfungible tokens.
The stated goal of the manifesto and his actions was to “Abolish our criminal government.”
Cryptocurrency played a central role in his wide-ranging conspiracy theory, claiming it was an “economic doomsday device” intended to implement an “apocalyptic global fascist coup.”
In a separate manifesto published to his Substack, Azzarello justified lighting himself on fire.
“This extreme act of protest is to draw attention to an urgent and important discovery: We are victims of a totalitarian con, and our own government (along with many of their allies) is about to hit us with an apocalyptic fascist world coup,” he wrote.
Azzarello previously filed a lawsuit in April 2023, titled Azzarello v. Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation et al. In it, he sued dozens of people and organizations, including the Clintons, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, billionaire Mark Cuban, former Scottish National Party leader Nicola Sturgeon, entrepreneur Peter Thiel, and former cryptocurrency mogul Sam Bankman-Fried.
Elsewhere on his Instagram account, Azzarello frequently referred to those in power and several popular artists as being in a “doomsday death cult.” He also frequently denounced capitalism.
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Azzarello touched on some current events as well — last month, he said the Baltimore Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse was “domestic terrorism in service of a military coup.”
