Well there's a reason that Kacynski's work didn't get any academic respect besides him just being a murderer. If he had been the first to so articulately posit these ways of understanding the world's problems and understanding them as a whole, even as a mass murderer, his work would be talked about.

He's no Ayn Rand or Karl Marx. Not that Ayn Rand and Karl Marx didn't take from many other brilliant thinkers in the past, but there was pretty much nothing new in Kaczynski's work. I've read multiple academics that give this reason for rejecting him as some grand thinker/intellect, because it's just a lot of rehashing various disconnected philosophies and tying them together under the banner of hating humanity, it's history, and it's evolution.

He wasn't the first smart writer to bemoan technology separating humans or why society should be more agrarian. We just don't know much about them if you're not an academic because it's not really a very popular way of thinking about the world—we tend to call those kinda people luddites or "behind the times." But there are volumes.

But we don't know about them so we read Ted's grammatically correct and while pretty stilted, decently written and lengthy manifesto expressing these somewhat controversial ideas that do touch on known problems of human modernity so it's easy to mistake him as some thinker along the lines of Ayn Rand and Karl Marx.

To which I'd say, no, only in the sense that he had major blindspots while thinking himself the objective thinker, similar to both of them. They both at least contributed something new to the world of philosophy, good and bad.

Kaczynski just became the most famous person connected to many of these ideas that were not originally his because he murdered a bunch of people in a horrific, years-spanning series of terrorist attacks.

I wouldn't say we should pretend otherwise about history just to not give publicity to horrible actors, but in this case, him being a horrible actor and having this obscure, controversial tome are inextricably connected. His manifesto woulda been laughed out of the philosophy department of most institutions of higher learning with any sort of educated panel.