Reddit reviews Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist

It's really not speculation, it seems to be a fairly established piece of Kazynsky's biography.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0393020029?pc_redir=1411812263&robot_redir=1#productDescription_secondary_view_pageState_1412248037494

<And there is a considerable overlap between van-dwellers and “preppers”—people who fear (or hope) that modern society will fall into ruin>

I have found this to be true as well. I think a lot of people become vandwellers because they are not at all happy with modern society, especially the feeling that one is being "herded" into a typical middle-class lifestyle that is stifling and stultifying, and that is designed and intended to channel wealth to the wealthiest 1% of society. People who are unhappy with "the way the world is" often look for a reasonable explanation for why the world is so screwed up. Once you start looking into it, you start discovering some very disturbing facts.

My personal favorite was the realization that during the Cold War, the U.S. government set off 139 NUCLEAR WEAPONS above ground (a total of 330+ altogether) at the Nevada Test Site. The radioactive fallout from those weapons blew all over the United States, clear to New York City, but especially contaminated Utah and Arizona. This resulted in horrific cancer rates, tumors, birth defects, and all manner of early deaths for people and animals in those states in the 1950's and '60s. Thousands of sheep died in Utah, and the sheep herders developed cancer. Horrible. My wife and her family are "Downwinders", and lived east of the Hanford Nuclear Research Facility in Hanford, Washington. (The prevailing winds blow eastwards.) This is where they developed the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan in WWII. Thirteen people on her parents' block died of cancer. My mother-in-law died of non-Hodgkins lymphoma.

reference: American Ground Zero: The Secret Nuclear War by Carole Gallagher, Random House, New York, 1993.

https://www.amazon.com/American-Ground-Zero-Secret-Nuclear/dp/0262071460

https://www.amazon.com/Day-We-Bombed-Utah-Americas/dp/B000P1J1T0/ref=pd_sim_14_1?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B000P1J1T0&pd_rd_r=BC2YND7101ETRA7MQAW1&pd_rd_w=yXCec&pd_rd_wg=XixQV&psc=1&refRID=BC2YND7101ETRA7MQAW1

Another one is the secret CIA program in the 1960's, MK-ULTRA. It's too involved to go into here, but one of MK-ULTRA's test subjects was Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, whose mental illness was exacerbated by his experiences in the CIA testing during his college years at Harvard, if not entirely responsible for it. The CIA did some horrific things back then, and probably still does.

reference: Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist by Alston Chase.

https://www.amazon.com/Harvard-Unabomber-Education-American-Terrorist/dp/0393020029

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra

People don't want to know the truth, and I don't blame them. The truth is horrifying.

His brother and a lot of other people smarter than me think it was.

http://blog.timesunion.com/kaczynski/ted-and-the-cia-part-1/271/


There's a great book about it by Alston Chase as well. http://www.identitytheory.com/alston-chase/

http://amzn.com/0393020029

It was on RadioLab a while back and there's a book about it, too: http://www.amazon.com/Harvard-Unabomber-Education-American-Terrorist/dp/0393020029/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1293051065&sr=1-5