No More Manifestos
America had another shooting. For the sixth time this year, the millionth in recent American history, some non-commissioned dipshit got mad enough to kill in the name of his favorite dumbfuck internet ideology.
Every time this happens, whenever some political extremist fails so hard at transmitting their argument through text and thinks maybe it’ll be better spread through blood, the American media engine tries its damnedest to expedite the process for them.
Just hearing “manifesto” uttered makes us salivate. The word lends credence and reputability to what would otherwise (correctly) be labeled the imparsable screed of a Rumpelstiltskin-tier fuckbag whose hyperfocusing on a dumb idea led him to prostrate himself in obeisance to the worst flavor of fanfiction. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels together outlined communism in twenty-three pages. If you can’t detail your nightmare about Black people banding together to take over Wilmington, Delaware in fewer than a hundred, your ideas are doodoo.
We justify our media and self-led inspections into these characters and their tomes of gastroenteritic diarrhea-vomit in the name of explanation. We need to know what it was that led these otherwise normal (we all spend 48 hours straight shitposting on 8chan sometimes) people to commit acts of horror. In doing so, we afford them far more attention than our enemies beyond our own borders, for whom “hating our freedom” is sufficient.
It’s natural to want to know why people do bad things. It’s not wrong to look into it. But publicizing a manifesto isn’t going to do that. These basement-dwellers live in a self-imposed cognitive loop where their limited synaptic firings are repeated over and over, each neural impulse powered by rabbit hole doom communities that cherry-pick hate. We don’t need six hundred paragraphs of justification. Knowing that the ideas came from late night /pol/ binges suffices. When our most reliable forge of intranational extremism comes from imageboards as well-known for child porn as they are for political discourse, maybe we should begin to consider not labeling their acolytes alternative philosophers and better recognize them as losers with access to daddy’s gun safe.
In this week’s example, our failed fuckboy who couldn’t hack it doing anything but shooting people trying to buy vegetables claimed adherence to a wack conspiracy theory that claims Black people and other minority groups are conspiring to replace white people. Incensed by his flawless perception of racial history and race dynamics, our dumbest fellow countryman drove 200 miles to find the nearest city with a sizable Black population. The whole journey, this brave defender of the white race neglected to consider the idea that having to drive for three hours to find a group of Black people may indicate that they don’t pose a significant threat to you and yours in Nowhereville.
I’m not going to spend more time on the literary dogshit produced by a kid whose inability to hack it in college led him to take up the most time-cultivated form of punching down. My point is that you shouldn’t either. According to the Khalifa Ihler Institute, 28% of it was lifted word-for-word from the hate rag manifestos that came before. If you can’t paraphrase your elite, racially superior ideas well enough to fool Turnitin.com, they don’t bear repeating in national media.
This should be enough for all of us. Another kid got tired of using his brain and figured he’d let 4chan take the reins. It ended poorly. Fucking obviously. Where we go from here is open-ended. There are discussions to be had about mental health care in America, about the outsized influence of these loser chic-hate warrior pipelines, about our culture of violence and rage. We have recourse. What we don’t need to do is let media figures hock another donkey scrotum “manifesto“.
Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe segment remains disgustingly, disappointingly relevant, because we’ve proven ourselves incapable of doing a single thing right.
No more manifestos. Dummy.