(The Epoch Times)—Police have identified the man who set himself on fire in a park outside the Manhattan courthouse where former President Donald Trump’s business record falsification trial was taking place, with officials reviewing whether to restrict access to Collect Pond Park following the incident.
Max Azzarello of St. Augustine, Florida, was identified by officials with the New York Police Department (NYPD) at an April 19 press conference as the man who entered the park, tossed what police said were some “conspiracy theory-type” pamphlets in the air, doused himself in a flammable liquid, and set himself ablaze.
Mr. Azzarello survived the inferno, which raged for about a minute before police arrived on the scene and put it out, NYPD said. Emergency responders rushed him to the hospital, where he remains in critical condition.
Police said a preliminary review of the pamphlets indicated that they were related to “Ponzi schemes, and the fact that some of our local educational institutions are fronts for the mob,” with NYPD officials adding that they don’t believe he was targeting any particular person or group with his shocking act.
“We just right now label his as sort of a conspiracy theorist, and we’re going from there, but the investigation will continue,” one of NYPD officials said.
Mr. Azzarello was photographed by a Reuters reporter one day earlier holding up a sign that says, “Trump is with Biden and they’re about to fascist coup us.” Photos from the scene shared on social media indicate he brought the sign with him on Friday to the scene of his self-immolation.
“We’re looking through his social media and what he did online prior and it appears that he did post something in regards to this event prior to the incident,” an NYPD official said at the presser.
The Epoch Times has uncovered what appears to be an online manifesto written by Mr. Azzarello entitled, “I have set myself on fire outside the Trump Trial,” which was the last of a series of posts apparently written by the self-identified “investigative researcher.” In the manifesto, he claimed to have stumbled upon an “urgent and important discovery” that he wanted to draw attention to in what he described as “an act of revolution.”
As more information comes to light about Mr. Azzarello and what motivated his actions, a picture emerges of an apparently psychologically distressed individual espousing far-left anarchistic ideas.
“Start a [expletive] revolution, start a [expletive] revolution, start a [expletive] revolution, you’ve got nothing to lose,” Mr. Azzarello sings in a video posted on social media, to the tune of Louis Armstrong’s “When The Saints Go Marching In.”
An apparent scraping of Mr. Azzarello’s Reddit history indicates he identified as an “Anarcho-Communist” and wrote that he’s a “huge proponent of left unity” and believed that “only the left has the power to build a united movement to enact meaningful change.”
Some of his writings reportedly included a rant against President Trump.
The Epoch Times has been unable to independently verify whether the posts were written by Mr. Azzarello, who allegedly drove a vehicle emblazoned with a phrase that repeatedly shows up in his writings—“fascist coup”—and featured the name of his Substack blog, “Ponzi Papers.”
‘Ponzi Papers’
Mr. Azzarello’s shocking self-immolation was captured on video, which showed him kneeling on the ground and holding his head with his hands as the flames engulfed him.
“My name is Max Azzarello, and I am an investigative researcher who has set himself on fire outside of the Trump trial in Manhattan,” he wrote in his manifesto.
He called his self-immolation an “extreme act of protest” meant to draw attention to an “urgent and important discovery.”
“We are victims of a totalitarian con, and our own government (along with many of their allies) is about to hit us with an apocalyptic fascist world coup,” he wrote.
“These claims sound like fantastical conspiracy theory, but they are not. They are proof of conspiracy. If you investigate this mountain of research, you will prove them too,” he claimed.
In a series of 27 posts that comprise his “Ponzi Papers,” Mr. Azzarello lays out a meandering, digressive, and often incoherent case for why he believes that a shadowy group of “international criminal billionaires” seeking money, power, and control are secretly plotting to carry out a “fascist coup” by way of the “largest criminal enterprise in history,” namely an elaborate Ponzi scheme involving various Big Tech-related platforms, projects, and people.
Stitching together disparate events and names into a labyrinthine and often logic-defying mosaic—from the Dot Com Bubble to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank to the death of Jeffrey Epstein—Mr. Azzarello eventually arrives at what he calls “The True History of The World (Haunted Carnival Edition),” a pamphlet that claims cryptocurrency is a multi-trillion dollar Ponzi scheme (“an economic doomsday device”) that will “shatter the world economy” when it collapses.
In the pamphlet—which apparently was the same one he tossed into the air before setting himself on fire—Mr. Azzarello elucidates his overarching aim, which is to abolish the government and replace it with a nebulous-sounding one that “serves all.”
Police confirmed at the press conference that, before he set himself on fire, Mr. Azzarello pulled out some pamphlets that an NYPD official described as propaganda-based, “almost like a conspiracy theory type pamphlet.”
“Some information in regards to Ponzi schemes, and the fact that some of our local educational institutions are fronts for the mob,” one of the investigators said at the presser.
“So a little bit of a conspiracy theory going on here,” the official added.
Mr. Azzarello’s family has been notified, police said, adding that the incident remains under investigation.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.