The El Paso Manifesto

Has anyone actually read it?

He seems to be an ecoterrorist. But among many other things, that’s inconvenient to The Narrative.

[Update a while later]

Now the owner of 8-Chan says that the shooter wasn’t the one who uploaded the manifesto. So that means it’s likely that he didn’t even write it.

But at least, unlike the Dayton fascist, we have him to question.

[Update late morning]

Sorry, first link was missing. Fixed now.

[Afternoon update]

“In a sense, we were lucky with the terrorists from faraway places. We weren’t with the ones from the suburbs of Dallas, and the traditional tools of intelligence and organized-crime investigation probably are not going to prove effective in dealing with these. None of the major gun-control measures under discussion would do much to prevent these acts, either, and many of them would do nothing at all. (We should understand that for the gun-control lobby, these horrifying crimes are only convenient pretexts; they want to prevent the legal sale and use of firearms irrespective of any effect on mass shootings or ordinary crime; their motivation is almost purely cultural and tribal — Icky rednecks and their icky guns.) That so many self-proclaimed do-gooders turn first and instinctively to gutting the Bill of Rights and suspending due process for socially marginal types and purported subversives tells us only that political power must be kept from those who desire it most. When the Democrats propose new constraints on Americans’ constitutional rights — and not only the right to keep and bear arms — and when it is clear that those constraints would do nothing at all to prevent massacres like the one in El Paso, it is fair to ask what their real motives are and why they apparently are unable to be honest about them with the public.”

12 thoughts on “The El Paso Manifesto”

  1. I can’t say I have, because I don’t find murdering people as good marketing material for one’s manifesto. However, I understand that many news organizations disagreed and published the manifesto. I know a few people that then decided to give it a go and they had the same conclusion as you, Rand.

    It seems the shooters animosity against immigrants was that they were using up America’s natural resources. He seems rather Malthusian, which isn’t how I would describe Trump and his supporters.

  2. I think people need to disregard these things. Any intelligent shooter will realize that they won’t be celebrated as a hero after their heinous crime. Whatever they celebrate in their manifesto will attract global scorn so they are uniquely positioned for a false flag attack. Maybe they aren’t intelligent and its what they actually believe. But either way it is not a good information carrier in my opinion.

    Ultimately this applies to everything in the day of cherry picking random weirdos and plastering them all over the news. The most effective way to support X is not to get on TV and say how good X is, but to pretend to be an anti-Xer and spout absolute nonsense and make a fool of oneself. By far. I’d imagine it is at least 100x more impactful.

    1. “Whatever they celebrate in their manifesto will attract global scorn so they are uniquely positioned for a false flag attack. ”

      Yes, that’s the other thing. Who knows whether any of it is true, or just set up to blame a group for the murderer’s actions?

  3. Skimmed part of it. Just looked like a bunch of claptrap cut-and-pasted from the Internet.

    The only interesting part was where he said it was nothing to do with Trump but the Fake News would blame him anyway. Well, duh.

    Oh, and that he was inspired by the New Zealand asshat. Who he would probably never have heard of if the media hadn’t splashed his murders all over the world to push their anti-gun agenda.

    The media has more and more blood on its hands, and blames anyone but itself.

  4. Despite the 8chan founder’s denial that the manifesto is the shooters, I still think it is because it was reportedly posted shortly prior to the shooting and discusses both the target and goes into detail on his choice of weapon, which couldn’t be anticipated beforehand. He also discusses using a particular type of load to compensate for the rifle’s shortcomings at close range, which is something law enforcement will be able to confirm or deny.

    The audience for all these manifestos seems to be subsequent copy-cats and like-minded crazed individuals that they hope to inspire, not really the public at large. There’s a chain of them citing each other going back at least to the Norway shooter, who touched on just about anything prior. There are some differences in focus from one to another, but also a few consistent themes and elements.

    They’re all saving the world and their own culture, drawing on left’s overwrought warnings of environmental catastrophe and the right’s worries about demographics shifts and trends, blended into a nasty hairball of bad things headed our way. To be mankind’s savior in your own narcissistic fantasy, the world has to need saving.

    They’re all playing defense, just like the majority of jihadists who say they’re defending Islam, even if they’re travelling half way around the world to blow up people in a non-Muslim country. Defense provides a much easier moral justification than offense, and the West currently lacks any philosophical or religious reason to be conquering or converting other nations or cultures.

    Even the ones that become radicalized abroad, like the Christchurch shooter, take action either at home or on the border (El Paso), because they think they’re defending their own home and culture.

    Though they think they’re defending their culture or nation, they view their current society and government as being either blind, impotent, hamstrung, or traitorous for not reacting to the dire threat they find so blindingly obvious as they sit in their basement surfing the Internet. But if the government was addressing the threat they perceive, they wouldn’t have a reason to take action on their own. So the shooters will be self-selected from people who don’t think the government is on top of their pet issue. However, that doesn’t mean some nut might be looking for whatever issue the government isn’t handling so they’ll have a reason to go postal.

    They all think their actions will draw attention to the dire problem and turn the tide of history, enshrining them in the pantheon of prophets, sages, and men of action. If they didn’t think that they probably wouldn’t have left their basement. It takes a pretty big pros for someone to do something with that many cons. Saving Western civilization, all of humanity, and the entire planet is one of those things that help complete their savior-martyr fantasy.

    Their philosophy, such as it is, draws from both the left and the right, both mainstream and fringe, to come up with all the required elements required to self-justify their actions. The right’s stances aren’t sufficient because nobody is going to commit mass murder over the capital gains tax rate or mortgage interest deduction. The left’s stances aren’t sufficient because, although the planet face’s imminent collapse, the left’s solution is joining hands, singing kumbaya, coming together as one, and hitting the “donate” button. There is no army-of-one philosophy on the left because they’re collectivists and mass-movement types.

    So they have a mix of nationalism, socialism, environmentalism, and a few isms that when blended, look a whole lot like straight up National Socialism, but now with even more +3 dire apocalypse. I’ve debated some who say such a crazy mix is impossible, and that these manifestos must be some kind of ironic hipster trolling. I argue that if you’re staring at half-eaten Reese cups, it’s hard to claim that no sane person would ever mix peanut butter and chocolate. It’s apparently a thing, at least in some sliver of the extremely online community where lost young men are picking and choosing ideas from a smorgasbord of stupid, though not the same smorgasbord as the likely response, which will probably be a ban on bayonet lugs, ladies nights, and more Doxxing of BBQ restaurant owners.

    1. Good analysis George. I’d add an additional item, one that appears so often (Islamic nutjobs partially excluded) that it’s really amazing the media have been so successful at squirreling it: lack of good father figures.
      (See the comment here by Geary_Johansen2020)

    2. I’m partial to the theory that this guy and the one in NZ picked their cross spectrum issues in order for any side to latch onto something to blame the other side with. The purpose isn’t to save the planet or keep the immigrants out, it is to get everyone fighting with each other. We have to be very skeptical of what was in their manifestos as being their actual beliefs.

      The Joker from the Dark Knight movies seems more like their ideological progenitor.

  5. I read the manifesto because it is important to see if the media is lying to the public. The media didn’t tell the truth.

    We shouldn’t have to fact check every piece of content the media puts out, especially on events like this, but the media can’t be trusted. The damage our media is doing to our country is incalculable and will last many generations.

  6. None of the major gun-control measures under discussion would do much to prevent these acts, either,

    They aren’t intended to. They are intended to punish people who stand in the way of Democrats getting what they want and not just on guns. They view gun owners as opponents on other issues and will use every opportunity to internationally punish groups.

    So that means it’s likely that he didn’t even write it.

    Clarification, the guy said it was on instagram first but that someone reposted it onto 8chan. He said he had no idea who wrote it. In this sense 8chan functioned much like a member of the news media. And we all know why instagram wont be punished like 8chan was but instagram also doesn’t need any prodding to censor people either.

  7. I’ve lost the article, which was published in the past couple of days.
    An NRA member wanted to write something about mass shootings and their possible causes, and took the unusual step of first researching their history. What he found – and, perhaps more importantly, what he didn’t – surprised him greatly.

    First, the incidence of mass shootings has been independent of the type of gun laws a country has. Countries in which citizens are effectively disarmed, or are by statute required to be armed (Switzerland), or have little or no restrictions on gun ownership and use (pre-1934 United States), mass shootings were never a problem. Even in post-1934 United States, with the advent of the blatantly unconstitutional Firearms Act of 1934, things didn’t change. The one and only outlier prior to 1999 was the Texas Tower massacre of August 1, 1966 (where 18 were killed, including the sniper).

    The author was dumbfounded, and concluded that no one actually knows if there is a single cause of the recent phenomenon of mass shooting. But, he added, anyone serious about the problem should get busy and figure out what the cause or causes may be.

    Last night, my wife observed that something fundamental has changed in the United States circa 1999, when the first actual school mass shooting (Columbine) occurred. Since then, the frequency of such shootings has skyrocketed. Skeptical, I did some research and found that she was right.

    Her conjecture is that antidepressants and other psychoactive drugs are responsible. Prozac was introduced in 1986, and eventually became the 29th most prescribed drug in the United States. It also became known for bringing out suicidal tendencies in young people. 23 million Americans currently take it.

    A panoply of drugs which alter conscious function have since been mainstreamed, from treatments for ADHD (mostly amphetamines) to anti-depressant seratonin re-uptake inhibitors (Prozac, Wellbutrin, and a whole lot of others) have not only become widely prescribed, they are prescribed at the drop of a hat for young people without the kind of clinical data on side-effects the FDA usually imposes on pharmaceuticals.

    I don’t know if that’s the problem. But I agree with the NRA writer that something has changed, and if we wish to do something about it, we need to convene teams of experts to figure it out.

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