A letter from Ted Kaczynski discussing the publishing of other people’s anti-tech writings

TED KACZYNSKI
to
[CENSORED]

Dear [CENSORED]

Thanks for your card & letter dated 12/24/15 ...

You write, [CENSORED] has "has asked me to seek out other authors involved in the anti-tech movement whose work he and I may publish." ...

One thing [CENSORED] could publish would be the history of environmentalism that I suggested to you some time ago. I now have a group of new people who are interested in taking up that project. [CENSORED] could also publish things that have no specific connection with anti-tech but may serve to undermine people's confidence in the system. For example, see the Senate report cited in Note 162 to Chapter 4 of Anti-Tech Revolution. This report most likely is not protected by copyright and could be republished freely. No doubt it contains a lot of tedious technical stuff that would be of no interest to the general reader, so you and Alex would have to edit out all of the tedious stuff to produce a greatly abridged version that would nevertheless reveal a lot of the slimy tricks that the system uses. Such a book would probably be of considerable interest to many people and might well be used in college classrooms. Another possible book for [CENSORED] to publish would be an expose of the utter dishonestly of our mass media -- about which more in a moment.

You ask how I'm doing. I'm OK except that I'm suffering from chronic exhaustion. Too much work, too many problems to struggle with. At the age of 73 I can't keep up the pace any longer. I have high hopes, though, that the new group I mentioned in the preceding paragraph may be able to take some of the burden off me.

Now your letter of 1/26/16. Yeah, I'm not surprised by the fact that Yahoo News is doing something like that. On 12/21/15 I received a letter dated 12/8/15 from a Holly Bailey who described herself as a reporter for Yahoo News. Holly implied that most journalists were dishonest but that [CENSORED] was one of the few remaining journalists who were honest and only wanted to report the truth. She said favorable things about my letters that she had found in the Labadie Collection, as if her article about me were going to be sympathetic. Of course, I wasn't taken in and I didn't answer her letter. Again and again I've received letters from journalists, and they all take the same line: "We're not like all those other journalists ...

Actually, in a way, the Yahoo articles about me could be considered a compliment. Stop and think — my trial was concluded 18 years ago, yet, year after year, right down to the present, the media keep bringing out these articles, TV programs, etc, that portray me as a madman, and a monster. The news about me should long since have gone stale, so why do they bother with it any more? I can think of only one explanation: They are afraid of the ideas and of the fact that more and more people keep finding merit in those ideas. So they want to portray the ideas as the ravings of a lunatic.

I think the best policy is to ignore all this crap, rather than dignify it with a response. One thing that does seriously irritate me, though, is that as you say they are publishing some of my correspondence.... I’m getting thoroughly tired of the fact that so many people just ignore my copyrights, so I will appreciate it if you will send [CENSORED] the relevant parts of those Yahoo articles ...

... Describing his experiences with the media in his book Drawing Life, Unabom victim David Gelernter wrote (p.51?): “It must be the very first thing you learn in journalism schools why do research when you can make things up?” ...

That's why I say that a book about the dishonesty of our media would be a good one for [CENSORED] to publish. But such a book would require a lot of very challenging research.

Please email a copy of this letter to [CENOSRED]. Mail pickup will be soon, so I have to close here. I hope that all continues to be well with you & your family.