MURDER INC
Another Death, Another Manifesto
The angry teenagers’ view of life
I read the news on January 1, oh boy! It was about a former Green Beret who blew his mind out in a cyber car. I had seen the face, or rather the manifesto he left, before.
And I just had to grind my teeth and then chug a bottle of Thorazine to control my raging cognitive dissonance.
I took a look at the Las Vegas suicide bomber’s manifesto or more accurately Matthew Livelsberger’s grievance powerpoint. I recommend reading it for yourself.
One may ask how someone could come to the conclusion that to reign in the 1% who control everything, and do something about income inequality and processed foods — all mentioned in his demented teenage rant — that Donald Trump along with billionaire Musk would show us the way?
He doesn’t provide an answer in terms of policies. And for that matter, MAGA’s other rabid followers would be equally silent on the subject other than screaming at you to ‘do the research.’
What’s driving these disgruntled young men to issue deep proclamations before they go on their murderous sprees?
I decided to undertake the painful exercise of reading the last words of the El Paso murderer Patrick Crusius, the California synagogue murderer John Earnest, the German synagogue murderer Stephan Balliet, and finally the Christ Church mosque murderer Brenton Tarrant and his 84 page Hitler-esque rage against non-Europeans.
Anyone who’s ever had to deal with the teenage male mind — ask any high-school teacher friends — will instantly recognize in the ramblings of the aforementioned the toxic combination of grandiosity and vulnerability that usually marks the growing years, albeit on a far greater scale.
Members of this tribe have deranged confidence in their knowledge and powers, believing that they and only they are right and the rest of us are total idiots. And if they’re challenged and there’s a slight chance that they may look bad among their cohort, they’ll “go apeshit,” as the teens of my generation would say.
I’m convinced that there’s not much of a difference between a certain kind of male teen we all grew up with and the typical narcissistic and low-empathy psychopath. The real difference between the above killers and the more higher functioning psychopaths — I’m thinking about the serial killer and practicing architect arrested on Long Island about a year ago — is that the latter are able to navigate adult life and then resume their killing as a kind of side hustle.
Earnest, all of 19 years old, and Crusius, a mere 21, didn’t make it past college before they launched their attacks. Balliet and Tarrant got a a little further along.
I’m well aware that a few of these attackers were having documented mental health issues. In particular, Sergeant Livelsberger was a veteran of Afghanistan, suffering from PTSD, and was being treated for depression.
It’s the way they deal with their pain that’s unusual for people experiencing an emotional crisis — violence is not the norm!
These ultimatum documents — especially Balliet’s project plan for his attack — strikes me as how psychopathic personalities deal with emptiness and loss of a “mission statement”: people have to die for them to feel important.
I don’t think it’s an accident that Livelsberger, Balliet, and Tarrant all had stints in the military. You can summarize their regimented thinking as follows. If you’re a civilian and just enjoying life, you’re decadent. If you don’t go to church, you’re decadent. If you don’t do manly activities — kill people, hammer steel in factories — you’re weak, feminine, and anti-white. Finally, if you’re a non-white immigrant and happy, you’re a threat to Western Civilization and must be eliminated.
In another time and place, you could imagine all of them marching in goose step under banners of helmeted men pointing bayonets.
The other thread that connects them is their out in the open anti-capitalism. They hate corporations, they hate the 1%, they hate the political influence of the elites, and they’re angry at low wages. They’re also something of environmentalists to boot.
All sentiments I can get behind. But don’t you dare call them liberals, you commie bastards!
Their solution is not to support unions, or vote for candidates who will help overturn Citizen United or eliminate the Trump era tax cuts to the wealthy.
Instead, their root-cause analysis leads them to the obvious conclusion … that Jews are the real problem.
Jews are everywhere in Earnest and Balliet’s world view. There are no specific examples of their evilness, other than impersonal woke multinationals are destroying American life and the ZOG (Zionist Occupation Government) is rotting the foundations of the country. As anyone who’s read right-wing propaganda knows, a secret group of Jews control world-wide capitalism from an underground office complex in Tel Aviv.
Well, Texas-based Crusius doesn’t mention Jews directly, instead his rage is directed at Hispanics. They are taking jobs away from whites through the help of unpatriotic corporations and lowering wages for white American workers (who he admits don’t want these jobs anyway).
Tarrant’s barking mad word stew is filled with hate against anyone non-white. He makes specific mention of a life changing trip to France where he claims to have seen small French towns “invaded” by brown people with big happy families. Let’s just say the rest of us international travelers — I’m a frequent visitor to La France — have had reality-based life changing experiences, as in it’s just better there.
With the exception of Tarrant, the rest try to rationalize their racism by claiming that by eliminating non-whites, Jews, and Muslims, the environment will improve, salaries will go up, and world will be a more wholesome Christian place.
Well maybe there’ll be a few wogs left over to do the unpleasant work.
It’s a familiar and horrifying vision to anyone who’s studied mid-century history. Of course, the mouth-breathers don’t really care for the fake history in text books. Or as Tarrant put it, the Internet is the only place where you can find the truth. Yeah, he really said that.
These manifestos are the product of angry adolescent minds dealing with the unpleasant reality of American life.
I’m not disagreeing with some of the symptoms they diagnose.
But they’re in total denial about corporate life and how monopolies have decimated the middle class. I’ve had a bit more experience in the work world than these psychopathic basement dwelling pishers.
So I can say with assurances that all companies always try to underpay and scheme to get more work out of you for the same amount of salary. In the white collar world, you’re only as good as last quarter’s results.
And when you move up and start earning more, they’re always looking for ways to learn what you’re doing and replacing you with younger lower-paid white people.
By the by, none of the manifesto writers have any issues with whites taking jobs away from whites. But they’re still mad as hell and therefore someone non-white has to pay the price.
I’m probably most sympathetic — if those are the right words — to Livelsberger’s situation. Here’s the first part of his remarks:
We are crumbling because of a lack of self respect, morales, and respect for others. Greed and gluttony has consumed us. The top 1% decided long ago they weren’t going to bring everyone else with them. You are cattle to them.
We have strayed from family values and corrupted our minds and I am a prime example of having it all but it never being enough.
A lot of us are just sitting around waiting to die. No sunlight, no steps, no fresh air, no hope. Our children are addicted to screens by the age of two. We are filling our bodies with processed foods.
And then he’s off to the races, predicting wars with North Korea, Iran, and China. He forgot to add Greenland.
As I have written many times before (and has been noted by political scientists practically forever), fascism — white guys getting angry at society— is really anti-capitalism for the middle class.
For people like Livelsberger, it’s just too painful to admit that perhaps the liberal progressive types were right all along.
That things like the Affordable Care Act, the National Labor Relations Board, the Federal Trade Commission, the National Institute of Health and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau may be good things and not “the deep state.” All of them were created to at least try to help the middle class against the worst aspects of of American-style capitalism. By the way, the very white Germans are further along than we are in this kind of thing — do a Google search on “workers’ councils” when you have a chance.
But for Livelsberger and his peers to admit that, they’d have to vote for a weak Democrat metro-sexual, or god forbid a woman. And his logic circuits would melt. Instead, his testosterone steered him to a manly authoritarian type like Trump.
For the right-wing semi-socialist bros who voted for Trump, I’ll go out on a limb and say they won’t get any of their grievances addressed.
And they’ll lose their freedoms, except the one they love the most: freedom to stomp on anyone they don’t like.
