The New StatesmanThe New Statesman

The rise of the Unabomber right

By Sohrab Ahmari

14 Jun 2023 · 4 min read

informed Summary

  1. The "Unabomber right" is a group of online far-right writers and commentators who share Ted Kaczynski's yearning for a return to nature and rejection of industrialism.

Pop quiz (and no googling allowed): who described modern life as akin to being trapped in a “large communal hall, serving as the social focal point for many cultures and peoples throughout the world that were typically more sedentary and agrarian”, whose inhabitants traded “privacy – and its attendant autonomy – for the modest comforts and security of collective living”, in the bargain surrendering their “ambition” and “the drive… to strike out for conquest and expansion”?

Was it a) Ted Kaczynski, the mathematician, technophobe and domestic terrorist known as the Unabomber, who killed himself aged 81 in a federal prison last weekend? Or was it b) the influential, anonymous right-wing scribe and publisher who goes by “L0m3z” online?

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