At our heart, Beacon of Speech is a Free Speech website. Unfortunately, today, we have to talk about manifestos.
Hidden on a secret page, deep in my own website:
Freedom of Speech is under attack today in America from two places that's very hard to fight:
From the Left in the form of Political Correctness.
From the Right in the form of Corporate Uniformity.
Let's be clear, this is not a Manifesto. I'm not allowed to write Manifestos or else my wife says no more Beacon of Speech. Think of the previous statement as my...promulgation.
Just because the Messenger is Wrong
Doesn't mean the Message is Wrong
Now that's not much of a manifesto, more of a mission statement, but I believe that statement more now than when I hid it in the archives in 2016.
Back in the year 2019, a domestic terrorist walked into a Wal-Mart in El Paso, Texas and killed 20 people, mostly Hispanics.
That gunman had posted a Manifesto on 8chan and it caught fire on the dark web. Within days, the Drudge Report published a mostly intact link to that missive on their website. Why did Drudge post the link to the Manifesto? I don't believe he has ever stated the reason on the record, but this is why I SPECULATE that he did it.
2019 was close to the 2020 Election, and many in the mainstream media were trying to tie the Manifesto to Donald Trump. We have stated this many times before, Donald Trump is a populist. He has no literary work that guides his hand. Many of the quotes Donald Trump are most known for have come from his former career as a Reality Show Personality or from his vague-ghostwritten books about business. Remember, when Donald Trump lit up Twitter? Those thoughts were usually reactionary and restricted to a 280-character limit. Drudge wanted to show that the El Paso gunman's Manifesto fell in line with the French Great Replacement Theory and not with anything Donald Trump had said or written, as it had been rumored. In America, the Great Replacement Theory is scorned, in France, some polls have found that up to 60% of Frenchmen agree with its premise. But Trump being officially tied with the French right-wing theory would have been a political disaster.
The most famous Manifesto in my lifetime was Ted Kaczynski's Industrial Society and its Future. For almost 20 years, Kaczynski perpetrated an almost undetectable mail bombing scheme. The FBI couldn't even come close to catching the notorious 'Unabomber,' but in 1995 the Feds got their big break, a man mailed a manifesto to the New York Times and promised to stop bombing things if they printed it. The New York Times initially resisted, but relented when consulting with the government-
Editor's Note: Now the commercial blog was, coincidentally, also founded in 1995. Kaczynski was an Ivy League Graduate and could have started his own barely-read blog. Of course he would have had to have bought a computer. (And had electricity installed.) Then haters would have screamed that he was railing about technology....on technology.
But I digress.
The point is, Kaczynski wouldn't have been caught if the manifesto wasn't printed. It was a classic no-win situation. Kaczynski was only caught because his brother and sister-in-law thought that they recognized his writing style. After Kaczynski's suicide, I noticed that you could buy his books on the internet.
His ultimate goal of moving his message into the public discourse succeeded, even if it meant his capture, jailing, and death in incarceration.
A manifesto in itself, is often a call to violence to upend the status quo.
But what if the status quo exists in moral gray areas? Earlier this week, young Luigi Mangione assassinated the CEO of United Health Care, Brian Thompson. As one of America's largest health insurance companies, Thompson had received death threats for the perception that United Health Care put profits ahead of patient care.
You want to read Luigi Mangione's own words? Okay:
“To the Feds, I'll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn't working with anyone. This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and To Do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there. I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it. Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”
Now, according to Ken Klippenstein, the New York Times, CNN, NBC, and the Washington Post all have the Manifesto, but refused to publish it. I also believe that the Drudge Report has the Manifesto but refused to publish it for a different reason.
In the case of multi-national news agencies like CNN, I think that the call to arms against CEOs with questionable moral centers hit too close to home.
Whereas with the Drudge Report, I think that they were gun shy, trying to verify if the Fake Manifesto "The Allopathic Complex and its Consequences" was real or not. But the Drudge Report has published manifestos in the past without having to be strong-armed into it.
If the Feds have the three page "real" Manifesto, what else did Mangione have to say besides the one page (in gray highlight) that has already been reported above?
In the internet age, you can go back and read manifestos from the start of civilization.
I was reading 1776's Common Sense by Thomas Payne within 10 seconds of googling it. Thomas Payne called for an armed rebellion against the oppressors (England.) Because we live in America, we celebrate that specific Manifesto. Marx's Communist Manifesto, which is roundly scorned in America, was also available within 10 seconds of googling it.
Governments fight to amplify or suppress speech based on content to this very day. In 2024, Russia murdered dissident Alexei Navalny, but you can go to your local bookstore in America and buy Navalny's book. In Russia, they are desperately trying to erase any trace of his existence. It remains to be seen if Navalny's vision will eventually impact Russia.
Which circles us back to Luigi Mangione. The same year that Americans have re-elected Billionaire Donald Trump, who is being heavily influenced by the Richest Man in the World, Billionaire Elon Musk, Mangione's scribe seems extra dangerous to a newly elected government that is just stacked with billionaires-
Editor's Note II: Beacon of Speech believes that you can become a millionaire in America through hard work and a little luck. For example, if you're really good at football, you can make millions of dollars through hard work. If you're really good at indoor soccer, you can make thousands of dollars through hard work. You were lucky to play a sport that paid well.
On the other hand, no billionaire has made that money without screwing someone. Not one.
In America, the gap between the rich and middle class continues to widen, as does the gap between the rich and the poor. As the common man becomes more aware of these trends, they will continue to question how the rich got so rich in greater numbers. The rich, who are in charge, will not be forthcoming in calls for their transparency.
Compared to most nations in the world though, America still has it pretty good. # 1 in health care spending, but 42nd in life expectancy sounds less like a call for revolution, than a call for accountability. But I want you to think about this though, in a country of 300 million+, are more people getting ahead? Or are more people getting screwed?
That's a very important delineation to make. I went over to Vice Magazine and author Michael Crumplar called Mangione's actions and Manifesto nothing more than an American Revenge Fantasy. Yet if you head on over to Michael Moore's Substack, he added this gem: "Our Democratic leaders all chimed in to say, “In America, we don’t solve our problems and our ideological disputes with violence!” and that there’s “no place for political violence” in America. No place for political violence? America’s entire history is defined by political violence."
Michael Moore's response to Mangione was titled: A Manifesto Against For-Profit Health Care Insurance Companies. A double-down Manifesto in support of the original Manifesto + violence? Moore also went on to promote his own movie Sicko-
Editor's Note III: Of course he did.
Michael Moore thinks that Mangione's scribe is a call to action.
But what is that action? Do you write an angry letter to your congressperson? Or.....
Back in 1971, William Powell wrote The Anarchist Cookbook. The cookbook wasn't really a manifesto, but more of a how-to manual as how to put your manifesto into action. A homemade guide as how to make weapons and drugs at home. Why do you need the cookbook? According to the publisher: "Radical groups don't need this book. They already know everything that's in here. If the real people of America, the silent majority, are going to survive, they must educate themselves. That is the purpose of this book."
To my knowledge, there are no written words of Jesus.
Jesus was a real person, and he was a prophet. Many would argue that he is the son of God.
The entire Bible is based on his teachings, but there is no Jesus Manifesto, even though many in the Roman Empire during Jesus' day were able to read and write.
Jesus' teachings weren't in support of the Roman Empire or the Jewish Leadership at the time. As a matter of fact, much of the Bible subverted the Roman Government, the richest government on Earth at the time. Remember, Jesus was executed not for his actions, but for his spoken words.
Two thousand years later, the Bible is still banned in a dozen or so Muslim countries. 50 years ago, the Bible was banned in most Communist countries. Even in some Western Countries, today, portions of the Bible are considered "hate speech."
What exactly would Jesus say about Millionaires who made money by denying health care services to the poor?
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