Cassandra Fairbanks, a right-wing activist and writer at the pro-Trump blog The Gateway Pundit, approvingly read passages from the Unabomber Manifesto last weekend in a late-night live video on Twitter, where she has hundreds of thousands of followers.
Fairbanks was an early networking node in the pro-Trump social media ecosystem that rose to prominence with the election of President Donald Trump in 2016. A close affiliate of Wikileak’s Julian Assange and of various prominent pro-Trump influencers, Fairbanks has in recent months veered into harder right-wing spaces, voicing support for so-called “groyper” white nationalist communities, and fraternizing with white nationalist activists including Nicholas Fuentes and Matthew Colligan, who attended the violent Unite the Right white supremacist gathering in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.
On May 3, at approximately 4 a.m. in Washington, where she resides, Fairbanks appeared on camera in a dimly lit room with an open, bound text containing the Unabomber Manifesto. Theodore J. Kaczynski—dubbed the Unabomber—is a domestic terrorist serving life in prison for sending mail bombs that killed and seriously wounded multiple people between 1978 and 1995. Kaczynski pleaded guilty to mailing bombs after his manifesto against the industrialized world was published in The Washington Post and he was identified as the Unabomber by his brother.
“I’m gonna read some Ted because I can’t sleep and there’s nothing else to do, and it’s really good and it applies to the [social media] mobs that we’ve seen today, especially, because there’s been quite a few,” Fairbanks said.
Fairbanks proceeds to read portions of Kaczynski’s manifesto that took aim at modern leftist and anti-racist activism, describing its participants as advancing “political correctness” out of self-hatred and insecurity. Kaczynski described leftists as feeling personally inferior and accused them of adopting a push against racism to express their own rage against society, often making things ultimately worse for the afflicted. Fairbanks recommended that viewers read the Unabomber manifesto.
“Everybody should read it and, yes, it’s the Unabomber, but we should be able to read things from people who have done not-so-great things,” Fairbanks said. “I don’t think that a bad act necessarily makes every thought or opinion or thing that a person has done also bad.”
When contacted by Right Wing Watch via Twitter direct message, Fairbanks said she did agree with Kacynzki’s critiques of leftists, but that she did not intend to bring up the race activism critiques.
“I wasn’t reading it because of race activism, specifically. I just read too far,” Fairbanks told Right Wing Watch. “My focus/the reason for it was the theory on oversocialization. It’s a really interesting manifesto. Highly recommend. The parts that aren’t about leftism are good too. He was a brilliant man, which unfortunately drove him mad and lead to him committing evil acts.”
Fairbanks alluded to her longstanding and public fascination with true crime “Murderabilia” as an explanation of why she read from Kaczynski’s manifesto. After our inquiry, Fairbanks posted on Twitter: “There’s some hit pieces incoming about me for this. I make no apologies and if anyone wants to sell me an original wapo copy please slide into my DMs. I was reading it because of how this part applies to online mobs. Nothing more.”
Fairbanks told Right Wing Watch she was going to do another Periscope about Kaczynski tonight “because I refuse to apologize for this.”
