A thirty-seven-year-old Floridian, Max Azzarello, doused himself with flammable liquid and set himself on fire in front of the court where Donald Trump’s criminal trial is underway. It happened shortly after 1.30pm (7.30pm in Italy) in the park in front of the New York courthouse, in Lower Manhattan. The man, described as a conspiracy theorist, soon found himself engulfed in flames. Dozens of officers, who patrol the area, intervened and put out the fire. The man was taken away by ambulance.
Azzarello, who presented himself on the web as an “investigative researcher”, appeared outside the court showing a sign indicating the Substack account where he published a series of his speeches. One of them reads: “Ready to set myself on fire outside the Trump trial.”
“This extreme act of protest – he writes – is to draw attention to an important and urgent discovery: we are victims of a totalitarian swindler and our government will hit us all with an apocalyptic and fascist global coup”. “This – he continues – may seem like a fanciful conspiracy theory but it is not. There is proof of the conspiracy.” Azzarello adds that “our life is a lie” and refers to a link to discover the “rotten truth of post-truth America”.
“You will learn the stupidest and scariest stories in the history of the world, and you will realize that we are all in a desperate emergency situation, which requires your action. To my friends – he concludes in the message – and to the family, to the witnesses and to the rescue people, my apologies for the pain I inflict on you. But I assure you that it is only a drop compared to what our government intends to inflict on us. Since these words are true, this is an act of revolution.”