Unabomber for President was a political campaign with the overt aim of electing the "Unabomber" as a write-in candidate in the 1996 presidential election. [1] The campaign's slogan was the Shermanesque statement "if elected, he will not serve."
The campaign was launched in Boston in September 1995 by Lydia Eccles – a Boston artist who had long harbored concerns about "totalitarian tendencies in technology" – and antinatalist Chris Korda. [2] It took the overt form of a political action committee, Unabomber Political Action Committee (UNAPACK). [2] Influenced initially by ideas of the Situationist International, [3] the group included anarchists, hardcore punks, 1960s counter-culturalists, eco-socialists, pacifists, militants and primitivists. [1] Its supporters included decentralized anarchist collective CrimethInc. and the Church of Euthanasia. [4]
The campaign received national publicity, and attempts by news organizations to portray it as frivolous were resisted by UNAPACK, who insisted that the issues raised by Kaczynski were portentous, concerning "the fate of mankind". [1] In the words of the Phoenix New Times , the campaign was "an effort designed to cast votes in protest of the existing hierarchy and its potential replacement." [5] The Maoist Internationalist Movement criticized the campaign as typifying "life-style politics anarchism" and as encouraging protest votes instead of seizing political power from the upper class. [6]
As Bill Brown, director of the campaign's New York City office, said at the time: "Most of the media are unable to deal with the campaign...[t]here is no way for people to understand why you would say 'Unabomber for President' and that gives us a tactical opportunity to explain ourselves." [3] The intended symbolism of the campaign was not that it was a joke, but that the political system was a joke. [3]
The 1996 United States presidential election was the 53rd quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 5, 1996. Incumbent Democratic President Bill Clinton and his running mate, incumbent Democratic Vice President Al Gore were re-elected to a second and final term, defeating the Republican ticket of former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole and former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Jack Kemp and the Reform ticket of businessman Ross Perot and economist Pat Choate.
Harvey LeRoy "Lee" Atwater was an American political consultant and strategist for the Republican Party. He was an adviser to Republican U.S. presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush and chairman of the Republican National Committee. Atwater aroused controversy through his aggressive campaign tactics, especially the Southern strategy.
CrimethInc., also known as CWC, which stands for either "CrimethInc. Ex-Workers Collective" or "CrimethInc Ex-Workers Ex-Collective", is a decentralized anarchist collective of autonomous cells. CrimethInc. emerged in the mid-1990s, initially as the hardcore zine Inside Front, and began operating as a collective in 1996. It has since published widely read articles and zines for the anarchist movement and distributed posters and books of its own publication.
Anarchism in Africa refers both to purported anarchic political organisation of some traditional African societies and to modern anarchist movements in Africa.
Chris Korda is an American artist, electronic musician, software developer, and environmental activist, best known as the leader of the Church of Euthanasia. Korda's work combines provocative performance art with political and environmental activism, challenging societal norms and advocating for sustainable living.
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David Richard Kaczynski is an American charity worker. He is the younger brother of the domestic terrorist and mathematician Ted Kaczynski (1942–2023), also known as the Unabomber.
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Theodore John Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber, was an American mathematician and domestic terrorist. He was a mathematics prodigy, but abandoned his academic career in 1969 to pursue a reclusive primitive lifestyle.
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