Front Burner - How to read a manifesto

Episode Date: July 7, 2026

In the aftermath of an act of public violence, attention often turns to a document. Sometimes it’s a letter, a blog post, or a video, that gets referred to as a manifesto.Very quickly the public coalesces around these documents. Journalists struggle to consider what to print, authorities debate whether they should be released, and researchers scour them for clues.Following the recent incel attack in Montreal, we engage in these questions, and more. What ingredients make up a manifesto? What are they designed to accomplish? And what responsibility do the rest of us have when confronted with one?Today, we’re joined by J.M. Berger, author of several books including “Extremism.’ He’s also a senior research fellow for the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

You know that feeling when you reach the end of a really good true crime series? You want to know more, more about the people involved, where the case is now, and what it's like behind the scenes. I get that. I'm Kathleen Goldhar and on my podcast Crime Story, I speak with the leading storytellers of true crime to dig deeper into the cases we all just can't stop thinking about. Find crime story wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. A couple weeks ago after the horrible shooting in Montreal that left three people dead, including the shooter. A bunch of us who work on the show are talking about how we should handle the shooter's manifesto. Does dissecting it too much risk legitimizing its ideas? Does ignoring them blind us to what motivated the shooter? How do you strike that balance? It wasn't the first time that we've talked about the issue because sadly it is not the first time a horrible act of violence has come with some kind of document that purports to lend meaning to the act.

It's not just journalists who debate how to deal with a manifesto. Police will decide if and when to release them. Researchers scour them for clues. But long before they became associated with terrorism or mass shootings, manifestos belong to a very different political tradition. They were the literary form of revolutionaries, artists, intellectuals, and political movements attempting to announce entirely new visions of the world. So today, I want to flesh out that conversation that started around the office with J.M. Berger. He's the author of several books,

including Extremism and a Senior Research Fellow for the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. Mr. Berger, thank you so much for coming on to the show. Thank you for having me. So this conversation is obviously pegged in a loose way, to the Montreal shooting, which took place a few weeks ago. Quebec's coroner identified 25-year-old Seth Scott Hatfield as the likely perpetrator of the attack in Montreal. Hatfield is believed to have entered this hotel on Monday, where witnesses say someone was firing at a nearby office building.

He then allegedly went downstairs and shot two police officers who were responding to 911 calls. One officer died, another was injured, and a bystander was killed in the crossfire. I want to start with the fact that in the aftermath of nearly every major act of public violence today, attention eventually turns to a document that can be a blog post or a physical document, but is usually referred to as a manifesto. And just historically speaking, what is a manifesto? Where does it come from? And what is it designed to do? Well, manifestos are texts that seek to put an act of violence in common. context. So sometimes when people carry out violence, they want to make a statement about it. Sometimes

they don't. When they don't want to make a statement, you know, we go and we talk to the people that they talk to, the people in their lives, you know, look at what they're reading, look at what they're doing online. Sometimes people want to frame their act of violence in a specific way, and that's when they create a manifesto. People have always tried to, you know, explain their actions and people have written things to explain their actions. The concept of what we can loosely refer to as like a murder manifesto where you're trying to justify an act of violence goes to back to the Unabomber back in the 1990s who wrote a very lengthy justification of his mail bomb spree and had it published in the Washington Post in New York Times. The Unabomber said he would kill again if the newspapers

hadn't published his manifesto by Sunday. And today the publishers of both papers said they did at the request of the Attorney General and the FBI and because of concern for public safety. The 35,000 word manifesto stresses individualism, condemns liberalism, and is an anti-technology diatribe. In it, the Unabomber says the Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. Before the Unabomber, what historically did manifestos look like? Like, I'm thinking about revolutionaries here. Yeah, I mean, a manifesto in the very broadest, sense is just a, it's a statement of ideas, you know, so the communist manifesto probably being the most famous one. You know, we see them in religion, we see them in politics. It's just a, it's just a way of

putting out your ideas. And then, you know, it's only since the Unabomber that we started thinking about manifestos as more of this manifestation of violence. I want to turn to Montreal specifically with you for a few minutes. I know you've read through the shooters, 140. Page Manifesto, which in many ways kind of reads like a perverse academic capstone project. The document expresses extreme anti-government and misogynistic beliefs linked to the involuntary celibate or in-cell movement. The manifesto claims women's sole purpose is to reproduce and that modern society is marginalizing men. One of its central preoccupations is the idea of hypergamy, the belief that women increasingly seek partners of a higher percentage.

social or economic status, leaving many men behind. We did a whole show on this the other week, but given that you have spent years studying these kinds of writings, I'm just curious what immediately stood out to someone like you. I think when I looked at this, it really seemed to be an effort to do for in cells what Anders Breivik, the 2011 Norway killer, did for anti-Muslim sentiment. Anders Breivik, a far-right extremist, murdered seven 27 people in Norway. It's thought he's responsible for this document. It's called 2083, a European Declaration of Independence.

The 1,500 page manifesto and the included web video rail against multicultural Europe, Islam, and mainstream politics. So, you know, there are different styles in these manifestos, something that we've seen a lot recently since 2019 in the Christchurch shooting, is this kind of meme-filled, very internet jargon-laden documents that are written for a very small kind of niche audience. In total, 44 worshippers were killed by Brent and Tarrant at Al Nour. In an attack, he live-streamed on the internet.

He then moved on to his second target across town, the Linwood Mosque, where he killed a further seven people. He had uploaded a manifesto detailing his white supremacy beliefs, and his hate-apearlane. of Muslims and non-European immigrants. So what the Montreal Shooter did is he wrote something that is much more similar to Anders Breivik's 2011 Norway manifesto or the Unabombers manifesto in that it's really taking on the trappings of academia with footnotes and referencing papers and other sources. But I mean, it's interesting because it struck me, too, as a piece of. of writing that was written for mass consumption. This was a young man that seemed to desire

and expect like a large audience. And in it he writes that he overlooked traditional academic citation style so that the text would be more accessible to men who may not be familiar with academic writing. And he also requests that the document be translated into seven languages and proliferated in plain language. And I just, I've read experts refer to this kind of thing is something that was written to recruit, to radicalize, to change minds? And is that, is that, is that the ultimate purpose? I think that he had a worldview that he wanted to share. And yes, he is, there's an explicit call to action in here. You know, there's, he's explicitly urging readers to radicalize. You know, what we've seen in that sort of space after the Christchurch sitting,

where we've seen are a lot of these manifestos are really for an audience. that's already radicalized for people who are steeped in whatever particular internet subculture, usually kind of white supremacist or insult subculture, and trying to get those people to act on their beliefs, whereas this is more attempting to promote the beliefs. It's not a very effective effort to promote this belief, but that's what he's shooting for. He's shooting to be a Breivik or Kaczynski.

He wants to have a manifesto that has a, that kind of longer lifespan and has more broad impact. In the hours and days following an event like this, I often see this kind of race to prescribe a

belief system or clear ideology, like to an attack of this nature. And I mean, if you read this manifesto, you know, the overarching theme here is in-cell stuff, right? But

But it's also a bit messier. And many online frame this young man as anti-Semitic or leftist or anti-capitalist, among other things, because there's there's this stuff in it too, right? It's a bit of a soup. And I wonder what you make of this public desire to kind of race to map an ideology onto a shooter following an incident of public violence. You know, I think it's a natural that when you see somebody carry out an act of public violence that you want to understand why they did it. I think that we have gotten to, you know, kind of a dark place as a society that it's, it's kind of like a game now to figure out what they're trying to do and decode their their writings and their social media activity.

You know, people rush to try and identify the person's social media channels and see what that says and this says. And, you know, it's important to understand why people act, but it's, the same time, you know, we can really over-scribe this stuff. We can put this out there in a way that is such a simplifying explanation of why somebody does violence that it starts being useful or accurate. You know, as someone who spent years reading extremist writing, how do you actually read a manifesto? Are there any signs or things that you look for in these documents that can reveal particular things about the person responsible for them? Like, What are you looking for?

Yeah, I mean, they're definitely, you know, if somebody writes a piece, especially if it's a lengthy piece, you know, you're going to learn something about them from looking at it. What, you know, when I'm studying extremism, what I sort of look for are structural clues, like what we call an in-group and an out-group, you know, who is it for? Who are they writing to? Who do they think their audiences? And then who do they think, you know, violence needs to be directed at? I would say that this isn't completely clear about that. One thing we're seeing really, you know, over the last couple of years is that a lot of the extremist violence we see is what we would call accelerationist, where you're just trying to create chaos in society and accelerate this collapse of society without doing very targeted kinds of activities. So it's not very strategic.

It's more, you know, flood the zone kind of strategy. I'll just say also, you know, the other thing we look at is sort of what's the lineage of the manifesto. So what are the textual clues that help us to understand where this person is getting their information, where they're getting their socialization. So, you know, in the case of the post-Therent, for instance, post-Christ church manifestos, people would copy and paste, literally copy and paste from previous manifesto. So you know very clearly where they're hitting their influences from. Following these incidents, the people responsible for them are often cast as crazy, driven to madness, that they're kind of these rambling idiots on a violent soapbox whose words shouldn't really be examined by the broader public. And I wonder what you make of the narrative around mental health that often emerges. Yeah. So, I mean, the first thing I think it's important to understand is that, like, having a mental health problem and having,

having an extremist orientation or not mutually exclusive. So sometimes people can have both. Usually if you're doing this piece of violence, you either have to have that kind of ideological motivation or a mental health problem. They're assuming that you're not killing for profit, like doing a bank robbery or something. You know, you're looking for one of those things. Extremists, historically, like, terrorists,

when we think about groups like al-Qaeda and the clan and groups like that, generally what research has found is that there's a pretty low incidence of mental illness in those groups, in those larger sort of organized groups that are heavily socialized. And what we're seeing in the more recent years is that there's much more higher incidence of mental illness, that we see people who are clearly grappling with problems, whether they, you know, indicate that by writing something incoherent or how they interact with the world outside of the attack. So, you know, some of these more recent ideological groups and online groups have a higher incidence of mental illness than what we've seen in the past. Why do you think that is?

Probably you can attribute it, you know, not in a totally simplistic way to the presence of the Internet and social media in our lives. So when somebody who's having a mental health crisis 30, 40, 50 years ago, that could often be a very solitary thing. They're not associating with other people who have similar mental problems or who are putting out, you know, vibes that might justify violence. And, you know, that was just a selection process. It's a practical matter. An example I used to say is that if you were a radical jihadist living in Peoria, Illinois, and not, 1950, you might go your whole life without meeting somebody else shared reviews. So now it's much easier to find people who have similar problems, similar mental outlooks, and for those people

to reinforce. And all this stuff is our relationships with the world is socially connected, socially constructed and socially mediated. So when you are surrounded by people who are affirming the things you believe, whether their mental illness or otherwise or purely ideological, you're much more likely to stay with that belief and that behavior and do things that reinforce the social feedback you're getting. This week on two blocks from the White House. The Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement on Trade officially comes up for review on Canada Day. So we're asking what happens after that July 1st deadline?

Join me, Willie Lowry, and my fellow Washington correspondence, Paul Hunter and Peter Armstrong as we break down U.S. politics from a Canadian perspective. Find and follow two blocks from the White House wherever you get your podcasts. And watch us on YouTube. New episodes drop every Wednesday. I know when we're presented with these manifestos, there's often this debate about how we should engage with them as journalists, right? I just, I want to put a comparison to you in the way that Christchurch massacre was handled versus the way that the Unabomber was handled. And I know that following Christchurch, New Zealand's Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, went to great lengths

to censure the corresponding manifesto and severely discourage any mention of the shooter's name. And she was arguing that denying him an audience was itself a public good. The live stream video of the Christchurch terror attacks and the so-called manifesto, apparently written by the perpetrator, have been classified as objectionable. That means that distributing or even possessing copies of either of them is a crime under the law. He sought many things from his act of terror,

but one was notoriety. And that is why you will never hear me mention his name. By contrast, as I think you mentioned earlier in this conversation, figures like the Unabobber became widely read, published in newspapers, the writings circulated. and debated, and in some cases, even treated like serious political tax. And so which of these two prescriptions for the manifesto do you think leads to a more healthy civic and democratic life? So an important way that the Unabomber manifesto differs from what we're talking about is that

the Unabomber was, A, at large when he wrote it, like he was not captured or killed. And B, he's explicitly offered to suspend his bombing campaign if his manifesto was published. So the newspapers and the FBI, you know, at the time discussed the pros and cons of this. And it came to the conclusion that publishing the manifesto might help them get a lead in this case because they had been trying to find him for years. Washington Post publisher Donald Graham said neither paper would have printed this document for journalistic reasons. New York Times publisher Arthur Silsberger admitted, whether you like it or not, we're turning our pages over to a man who has murdered people. But I'm convinced we're making the right choice between two

bad options. And in fact, publishing manifesto did lead to his capture because his brother read the manifesto and realized that it was his brother who wrote it. And that's how they got him. So, you know, when an act of violence is done, when the perpetrator's dead or under arrest, There's a lot of different incentives there. You know, the problem with censorship, I think, is that, you know, those tools, once you take them out of the box, they stay out of the box, no matter who's running the government. And as we certainly have been seeing over the last couple of years, bad people can sometimes come in and take the tools that were designed by good people and turn them to bad uses. So, you know, that's my concern with censorship per se. Now, I do think that, you know, from a journalistic standpoint, I was a former journalist,

and, you know, I think it's better not to promote these texts, not to give people the reach that these ideas want. They're going to be out there. You can find them if you're determined you're going to find it. It doesn't take that much work to figure it out. But we don't necessarily have to promote it. And then, you know, just to touch on the name issue, some people who do these kinds of attacks have a fame-seeking motive. We don't really have a clear sense of how big that is and how much of a factor. But you can certainly see that some people want to know that there were new stories written about them and that they, you know, had their moment of glory.

And I don't see any harm in withholding the name. And it's not the name by itself is not a piece of information that is useful to. to 99% of an audience. And if it helps, then great. But, you know, it's not a silver bullet to solve this problem. One thing I've been thinking about is that these documents are written to justify violence and recruit readers. But they're also propaganda that derives their power from beginning with observations that feel kind of recognizable or emotionally resonant. before leading readers somewhere much more pernicious, right?

But the Montreal shooter, for example, has built an argument around young men in crisis, essentially that is built around a real and observable phenomenon. The leap, of course, is from those observations to misogyny and mass violence. But I wonder, how do you think we should think about that? Is there a danger in, like, dismissing these texts outright? And is there an equal danger in kind of treating

them as more straightforward political analysis just to build off your previous points. What I would say is that, you know, you get into this chicken and the egg problem where a couple of fringe people doing violence are able to cast a normal social problem as a crisis that requires huge interventions, whether for or against the ideology they're promoting. So male loneliness is often talked about in the context of this kind of activity, in the context of insoles, in the context of some of the really negative, you know, menosphere influencers. And the thing is, is that people generally, not just men, have always been lonely. There's always loneliness in the world. And, you know, arguably it might be worse now because of alienation. that comes from our technological society. On the other hand, our technological society might make it easier for you to connect with

like-minded people and feel less lonely. So I guess what I would say is, you know, taking a manifesto like this and concluding that young men are, you know, very special cases whose needs should be catered to, above all other demographics is not good. we can talk about I think it's good to understand you know what drives people into these movements

but you know the fact is is that a lot of people are lonely without turning into killers and you know people can be lonely without blaming you know women for their loneliness so

it's tricky and you know I think you want to take it seriously you want to look at where this is and who's taking part in it. And certainly, the in cell movement, while it's still very tiny fraction of most men or most people,

you know, there are hundreds of thousands of people probably globally who identify as in cells in one way or another. And that's a lot of people and they can create a lot of chaos. So we need to sort of know what's going on and pay attention to it, but I don't think, you know, we want to elevate the, talking points that people who have chosen to do mass murder want to sell it.

You know, another example of this, I think, can be found in Osama bin Laden's so-called letter to the American people, which is the essay published to justify and explain the September 11th attacks. In it, he says the attacks were a response to American foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, where he said that civilians were subject to wanton American violence. He cited U.S. support for Israel and Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories and demanded that the U.S. withdraw its military presence from Muslim countries. At the time, the document was widely censored in public, but today it remains this kind of widely read document by young people, especially particularly Gen Z, on places like TikTok. TikTok. TikTok pulling content off its platform

after videos promoting Osama bin Laden's letter to America started gaining momentum. I just read a letter to America. Go read it. Users at times reading the letter, while others noting how the letter resonated with them. I literally read it last night. Everything he said was valid. This man didn't care about it. And I wonder what you make of Bin Laden's letter and what some of the lessons contained in that moment were and then remain today.

Yeah, I think, you know, the first point that we have to sort of, look at is the historical significance of September 11th versus some of these mass shootings. September 11th was a massive global shock. It was a mass murder on a scale rarely seen in human history. And there's much more reason to try and understand why that happened, particularly because unlike, you know, the Montreal shooter, unlike even the unibomber or under Breivik, this is a 9-11 was a product

of a large group of people collaborating. Some people who were very explicitly agree with the things that bin Laden argued, other people who thought they were just supporting revolutionary movement didn't really necessarily want to see something like September 11th happened.

But it was a political movement with thousands of direct participants and many thousands more sympathize. And so, you know, obviously September 11th also led to war in Afghanistan and was used as a pretext for war in Iraq. So, you know, when we're talking about just, you know, massive social change and international conflict that's derived from what happened, I think that it makes a lot more sense that we should understand what the other side thinks. Something that's been really interesting and frightening, really, has been to watch the transformation of the manifesto in our new hyper-digital TikTok and now AI age. We produced an episode last year following the murder of Charlie Kirk titled The Era of the Mem Shooters is here.

And our guest referred to the shooting of Charlie Kirk itself as a kind of shit post. He talked about mass shootings as content or memes and how the bullet casings had all these esoteric memes and mess. messages on them, which were largely unintelligible to law enforcement, the media, and many who study extremist and violence as well, that many of these shootings today are carried out by these hyper-online young people who share in like a common language, which blends memes and an irony culture, and that it can be impenetrable to those outside its orbit. And I wonder how much of this you've observed in your own work and how those who study this world are working to better understand it as it changes so rapidly?

I think we've seen a lot of that kind of thing. I don't think the Montreal shooting is an example of that, although his views are clearly shaped by an online arena. But this is the 104-page document that he produced. Length isn't necessarily an indication of seriousness, but for better or for worse, this was an attempt to produce a serious document, as opposed to, you know, the Christchurch killer's 75-page manifesto, which was clearly a shitpost. Right.

So this was an attempt to really, you know, kind of dress them up. But we do see that. And, you know, what happens is you have these small, tight insular online communities where people share a lot of concept and reinforce a lot of views that lead to violence. And, you know, one of the manifestos we saw recently, Solomon Henderson, and then shot up a high school on Antioch, Tennessee last year. He had interactions with another shooter, direct interactions online. So, you know, a lot of this is the product of these, you know, enclosed social spaces that become pressure cookers because you're just, you're spending all your time talking to a small group of people who are all repeating the same ideas,

and those ideas are violent and extremists. Why is it, do you think that that violence is the end outcome in so many of these manifestes? They're animated by the belief that the violence itself can educate, that one sufficiently spectacular act of public violence has the capacity to wake society from its slumber and, I guess, reveal hidden truths or force history in a different direction. Where does that come from? Well, I think the first thing to consider is that, you know, this style of writing happens a lot. People write about their views and opinions all the time. And we never see those things.

So, you know, like a lot of people have, you know, long diatrives on their hard drives or, you know, in their notebooks that would never read because they don't kill a bunch of people. So the format itself is not necessarily the problem. The writing of a manifesto is an attempt to put a frame of meaning around the act of violence you're going to do. So, you know, there are different ways that society produces violent people. Sometimes people are violent because they have a profit motive or a pragmatic thing that they want that they can't get without. helping violence to someone or they think they can't get it. And so, you know, you rob somebody with a gun or carjacks somebody because you want something out of that.

What we're seeing what extremism is is the idea that you are part of a group of people who can't succeed or survive unless you're doing violence to another group of people. Violence or harm. It doesn't have to be violent necessarily. Extremism can include things. like harassment or, you know, discrimination, other forms of harm that are below the level of violence. We talk about the violent ones for obvious reasons. Those are the ones that, you know, have the most obvious and direct impact on things.

But nonviolent forms of extremism are pretty destructive as well. And we're seeing a lot of that right now in society. So ultimately, a lot of what motivates people to become extremists is uncertainty. They are living in a world where their role is clear, their place is not clear, they're struggling to understand who they are and how they fit into things. And in the course of figuring that out, they latch on to an identity group, typically an identity group that they're part of. So we see a white supremacist or we see a male supremacist, which is essentially what an and so viewpoint is.

And that gives them a sense of belonging. It gives them a sense of knowing what's expected of them and what they're supposed to do. And extremist type activities, hating people who are different from you or doing harm to those people, are known to reduce those feelings of uncertainty. They give people that sense of belonging and that. sense of attachment that they crave while at the same time creating more uncertainty. So, you know, if you do an act of terrorism, that creates uncertainty in society. So on the one hand, you're making yourself feel better.

On the other hand, you're creating more uncertainty and you have to go back for another fix. So, you know, there's a real spiraling kind of thing that can happen both for individuals and for larger social groups where this case. really get out of hand and you can see a lot of violence in a very short period of time. Right. Jaym. Berger, thank you very much for this. Thank you. All right. That is all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.

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