This is a list of manifestos written by mass killers and attempted mass killers, explaining their motives for their actions.
A 2017 analysis found the following themes in the manifestos of mass murderers: ego survival and revenge; pseudocommando mindset: persecution, obliteration; envy; nihilism; entitlement; and heroic revenge fantasy. [1] Authors of terrorist manifestos, particularly ones that are "violent self-sacrificial" manifestos, often use language displaying identity fusion, where the identity as part of the group defines one's sense of self. [2]
The FBI conducted a study of 52 lone terrorists in 2019, which found that 96% produced either writings or videos intended to explain their beliefs to others; they found that in 88% of cases, perpetrators published their manifestos before the attack occurred, or "leakage," which is a valuable opportunity for intervention. [3]
Name of manifesto | Author | Language | Date published | Notes | Length | Sources |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Industrial Society and Its Future | Ted Kaczynski | English | 19 September 1995 | The manifesto was published in The Washington Post and The New York Times, after Kaczynski said he would end his bombing campaign if they did so. The manifesto contends that the Industrial Revolution began a harmful process of natural destruction brought about by technology, while forcing humans to adapt to machinery, creating a sociopolitical order that suppresses human freedom and potential. The 35,000-word manifesto formed the ideological foundation of Kaczynski's 1978–1995 mail bomb campaign, designed to protect wilderness by hastening the collapse of industrial society. | 35,000 words (~100 pages) | [4] [5] |
Communication From the Dead | Robert Flores | English | 28 October 2002 | Flores mailed a 22 page letter to the Arizona Daily Star, who later published it online, discussing his reasons for committing the shooting and giving a chronology of his life, stating that it was about "settling accounts". He then shot and killed three professors and himself at the University of Arizona School of Nursing. Two of his victims were named in the letter. | 22 pages | [6] |
Unnamed | Seung-Hui Cho | English | 16 April 2007 | The manifesto was mailed to NBC News an hour and a half after Cho had first opened fire. Upon receiving the package on April 18, 2007, NBC News contacted authorities and made the controversial decision to publicize Cho's communications by releasing a small fraction of what it received. The manifesto was described as "rambling" and "incoherent", with Cho criticizing "rich brats" and referring to the perpetrators of the Columbine High School massacre as martyrs. | 23 pages | [7] |
Natural Selector's Manifesto | Pekka-Eric Auvinen | English, Finnish | 7 November 2007 | Auvinen published a "media package" through RapidShare that he linked from his YouTube channel, containing 21 files including pictures of himself, his school, and guns, as well as several word files. The word files gave background on the attack, with Auvinen describing the attack as "political terrorism" and saying that he didn't want the attack to be called a "school shooting". | 3 pages | [8] [9] |
Unnamed | Jim Adkisson | English | 27 July 2008 | A four page manifesto found in his vehicle after the shooting attributed his motivation for the rampage as a hatred of liberals, Democrats, African Americans, and homosexuals. | 4 pages | [10] |
2083: A European Declaration of Independence | Anders Behring Breivik | English | 22 July 2011 | Breivik wrote a manifesto running to 1,518 pages and is credited to "Andrew Berwick" (an Anglicization of Breivik's name). It was emailed to over 1000 email contacts less than an hour and a half before his bomb went off. | 1,518 pages | [11] |
Manifest | Dmitry Vinogradov | Russian | 7 November 2012 | Posted on Vkontakte, expresses his hatred towards mankind, comparing humans to cancer. | 2 pages | [12] |
Unnamed | Christopher Dorner | English | 6 February 2013 | The manifesto cites anti-police sentiment as a reason for killings. | 11,000 words (~32 pages) | [13] |
Ragnarok | Alex Hribal | English | 6 April 2014 | Cites the Columbine shooters as inspiration and expresses moral nihilism. | 4 pages | [14] |
My Twisted World: The Story of Elliot Rodger | Elliot Rodger | English | 23 May 2014 | Rodger emailed his 107,000-word manifesto to 34 people, including his therapist, Charles Sophy, his parents and other family, former teachers, and childhood friends. | 107,000 words (~300 pages) | [15] |
rtf88 | Dylann Roof | English | 17 June 2015 | The manifesto was posted on Roof's website, The Last Rhodesian, which also contained several photos of himself. Roof claimed in the manifesto that he had been radicalized after looking up "black on white crime" and was led to white supremacist websites. His manifesto was described by an expert on extremism as not belonging to the "mainstream" of white supremacist ideology. | 2,444 words (~7 pages) | [16] [17] |
My Manifesto | Christopher Harper-Mercer | English | 1 October 2015 | The manifesto, carried on a USB drive, was given to a UCC student in Snyder Hall. It was later released by investigators. In the manifesto, Harper-Mercer wrote his actions were done to serve Satan, who, according to Harper-Mercer, would "reward" murderers in hell by turning them into "gods". A large portion of the manifesto was devoted to describing Mercer's hatred of black men. He also described having "kinship" with various other mass and serial murderers, including Ted Bundy, the Columbine shooters, and the Sandy Hook School shooter. | 6 pages | [18] [19] [20] |
The Great Replacement | Brenton Tarrant | English | 15 March 2019 | Tarrant wrote a 74-page manifesto, posted on 8chan and emailed to several politicians and newsrooms. It was titled The Great Replacement, a reference to the "Great Replacement" and "white genocide" conspiracy theories, which it largely focuses on, connecting it with elements of the Eurabia conspiracy theory. The manifesto has been noted to be less explicitly antisemitic than other white nationalist manifestos, instead blaming Muslims, but contains heavily antisemitic themes and euphemises Jews as "globalists"; Tarrant describes himself as a racist and fascist. | 74 pages | [21] [22] |
An Open Letter | John Earnest | English | 27 April 2019 | Earnest posted an anti-semitic and racist open letter on 8chan shortly before the shooting, and signed with his name. It was heavily focused on white genocide as an idea; the manifesto accused Jews of genociding the white race. He declared Tarrant his greatest inspiration, and takes credit for previously attempting to burn down a mosque. | 9 pages | [23] |
The Inconvenient Truth | Patrick Crusius | English | 3 August 2019 | Crusius posted a manifesto to 8chan shortly before the shooting, explicitly inspired by Christchurch. The manifesto's posting resulted in the shutdown of 8chan. | 2,300 words (~7 pages) | [21] |
Techno-Barbarism: A Spiritual Guide for Discontented White Men in the Current Year +4 | Stephan Balliet | English | 9 October 2019 | The manifesto was published on the imageboard Meguca. Structured in a similar way as the Christchurch manifesto, it has a list of "Achievements" alluding to first-person shooter games and contains numerous anime references. It discusses the weapons he planned to use in detail, with comparatively less focus on ideological elements. | 11 pages | [24] [25] [26] |
Unnamed | Mohammed Alshamrani | English | 6 December 2019 | Posted on Alshamrani's Twitter account, it condemned the United States as a "nation of evil" for their supposed crimes against Muslims and humanity. | 4 pages | [27] |
Skript mit Bilder | Tobias Rathjen | English, German | 19 February 2020 | Rathjen uploaded three videos to his personal website, as well as a 24 page "script" in both English and German. In the manifesto, Rathjen adhered to far-right terror narratives, as well as elements of niche online conspiracies. He claimed a secret service organization had surveilled him since his birth and that he could observe events from a distance through the power of his mind. | 24 pages | [28] |
A White Awakening | Nathaniel Veltman | English | 6 June 2021 | Inspired by the Christchurch terrorist's manifesto, the manifesto was found on a thumb drive inside of Veltman's residence. | 74 pages | [29] [30] |
manifest.txt | Hugo Jackson | English | 19 August 2021 | The manifesto was shared to users on the messaging app Discord by Jackson. He complains about Muslims immigrating into Sweden, liberal Swedish politicians and Black people. He also quotes the Christchurch mosques shooter and expresses his desire for people to join neo-nazi organizations, such as Atomwaffen Division. | 658 words (~2 pages) | [31] |
You Wait for a Signal While Your People Wait for You | Payton Gendron | English | 12 May 2022 | Titled after a quote from the Christchurch terrorist, the manifesto is focused on mass immigration and holds anti-Black views. The manifesto was originally posted on Google Docs two days before the attack and had not been modified since. The manifesto is largely plagiarized from The Great Replacement. | 180 pages | [32] [33] [34] |
The Downward Spiral of "Ethan Miller" | Ethan Miller | English | 28 August 2022 | Posted on Wattpad, the manifesto describes his isolation and solitude as well as his inspiration by the Columbine High School massacre. | 15 pages | [35] |
O pós modernismo e suas consequências na nossa nação, 'Post-modernism and Its Consequences for Our Nation' | Not released | Portuguese | 26 September 2022 | A few hours before committing a shooting at the Barreiras school, the perpetrator published a manifesto on his Twitter account. In his manifesto, the perpetrator claimed to be superior to others, in addition to containing speeches in favor of racial supremacy and hate speeches against different communities such as the LGBT community, the residents of Bahia and the school community itself, in addition to stating that his intentions were to murder as many people as possible so that they "felt divine wrath". | 29 pages | [36] [37] |
A Call to Arms | Juraj Krajčík | English | 12 October 2022 | Just a few hours before the attack, links to a 65-page long manifesto were posted on Twitter. In the document, the author does not provide their name, claiming it is not of importance and "will be known later anyway", but identifies himself as a man of Slovak origin born on July 28, 2003, who has decided to "execute an operation" against "the enemies of the white race". The manifesto blames Jews and LGBT people for "causing harm to white people" and celebrates mass murderers, including Breivik and the perpetrators of Christchurch mosque shootings and Poway synagogue shooting. | 65 pages | [38] [39] |
Unnamed | Aiden Hale | English | 27 March 2023 | Hale's manifesto was not originally released to the public pending a lawsuit for their release, but on November 6, 2023, 3 pages were leaked online by Steven Crowder followed by the Nashville MPD opening an investigation. The leaked manifesto included an extreme hatred for those Hale considered to have white privilege. The leaked pages also included the plan Hale would go through the day of the shooting, with the top of the page being adorned with the words "Death Day". | 90 pages | [40] [41] |
Unnamed | Connor Sturgeon | English | 10 April 2023 | Sturgeon's manifesto was detailed in a journal he kept, wherein he expressed frustration with the ease of access to firearms in the United States, intending for his shooting to bring about change in this regard. In addition, Sturgeon complained of corrupt politicians and a lack of action regarding mental health treatment. | 13 pages | [42] |
A White Boy Summer to Remember | Ryan Palmeter | English | 26 August 2023 | Palmeter had three letters, two of which were not released to the public. One of them was released by the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office. It contains sentiments of racism against African Americans and anti-semitism. He cited the perpetrator of the Christchurch shootings as his primary inspiration. | 26 pages | [43] [44] [45] |
Mass Cleaner El Kitabı, 'Mass Cleaner Manual' | Arda Küçükyetim | Turkish | 12 August 2024 | In the manifesto, Küçükyetim states his intent to target immigrants, Syrian children, and members of the LGBT community, as well as noting that he originally planned to attack the headquarters of the Communist Party of Turkey. | 17 pages | [46] |
The Order, also known as Silent Brotherhood, was a Neo-Nazi terrorist organization active in the United States between September 1983 and December 1984. The group raised funds via armed robbery. Ten members were tried and convicted for racketeering, and two for their role in the 1984 murder of radio talk show host Alan Berg.
"The Fourteen Words" is a reference to two slogans originated by David Eden Lane, one of nine founding members of the defunct white supremacist terrorist organization The Order, and are accompanied by Lane's "88 Precepts." The slogans have served as a rallying cry for militant white nationalists internationally.
Ecofascism is a term used to describe individuals and groups which combine environmentalism with fascism.
In the United States, domestic terrorism is defined as terrorist acts that were carried out within the United States by U.S. citizens and/or U.S. permanent residents. As of 2021, the United States government considers white supremacists to be the top domestic terrorism threat.
Right-wing terrorism, hard right terrorism, extreme right terrorism or far-right terrorism is terrorism that is motivated by a variety of different right-wing and far-right ideologies. It can be motivated by Ultranationalism, neo-Nazism, anti-communism, neo-fascism, ecofascism, ethnonationalism, religious nationalism, anti-immigration, anti-semitism, anti-government sentiment, patriot movements, sovereign citizen beliefs, and occasionally, it can be motivated by opposition to abortion, and homophobia. Modern right-wing terrorism largely emerged in Western Europe in the 1970s, and after the Revolutions of 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, it emerged in Eastern Europe and Russia.
Renaud Camus is a French novelist and conspiracy theorist. He is the inventor of the "Great Replacement", a far-right conspiracy theory that claims that a "global elite" is colluding against the white population of Europe to replace them with non-European peoples.
Counter-jihad, also known as the counter-jihad movement, is a self-titled political current loosely consisting of authors, bloggers, think tanks, street movements and so on linked by beliefs that view Islam not as a religion but as an ideology that constitutes an existential threat to Western civilization. Consequently, counter-jihadists consider all Muslims as a potential threat, especially when they are already living within Western boundaries. Western Muslims accordingly are portrayed as a "fifth column", collectively seeking to destabilize Western nations' identity and values for the benefit of an international Islamic movement intent on the establishment of a caliphate in Western countries. The counter-jihad movement has been variously described as anti-Islamic, Islamophobic, inciting hatred against Muslims, and far-right. Influential figures in the movement include the bloggers Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer in the US, and Geert Wilders and Tommy Robinson in Europe.
Accelerationism is a range of revolutionary and reactionary ideas in left-wing and right-wing ideologies that call for the drastic intensification of capitalist growth, technological change, infrastructure sabotage and other processes of social change to destabilize existing systems and create radical social transformations, otherwise referred to as "acceleration". It has been regarded as an ideological spectrum divided into mutually contradictory left-wing and right-wing variants, both of which support the indefinite intensification of capitalism and its structures as well as the conditions for a technological singularity, a hypothetical point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible.
The Atomwaffen Division, also known as the National Socialist Resistance Front, was an international far-right extremist and neo-Nazi terrorist network. Formed in 2013 and based in the Southern United States, it expanded across the United States and it had also expanded into the United Kingdom, Argentina, Canada, Germany, the Baltic states, and other European countries. The group was described as a part of the alt-right by some journalists, but it rejected the label and it was considered extreme even within that movement. Atomwaffen was described as "one of the most violent neo-Nazi movements in the 21st century". It was listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), and it was also designated as a terrorist group by multiple governments, including the United Kingdom and Canada.
The Great Replacement, also known as replacement theory or great replacement theory, is a white nationalist far-right conspiracy theory espoused by French author Renaud Camus. The original theory states that, with the complicity or cooperation of "replacist" elites, the ethnic French and white European populations at large are being demographically and culturally replaced by non-white peoples—especially from Muslim-majority countries—through mass migration, demographic growth and a drop in the birth rate of white Europeans. Since then, similar claims have been advanced in other national contexts, notably in the United States. Mainstream scholars have dismissed these claims of a conspiracy of "replacist" elites as rooted in a misunderstanding of demographic statistics and premised upon an unscientific, racist worldview. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, the Great Replacement "has been widely ridiculed for its blatant absurdity."
Incel is a term associated with an online subculture of people who define themselves as unable to find a romantic or sexual partner despite desiring one, and blame, objectify and denigrate women and girls as a result. The movement is strongly linked to misogyny. Originally coined as "invcel" around 1997 by a queer Canadian female student known as Alana, the spelling had shifted to "incel" by 1999, and the term later rose to prominence in the 2010s, following the influence of misogynistic terrorists Elliot Rodger and Alek Minassian.
On November 2, 2018, a mass shooting occurred at Tallahassee Hot Yoga, a yoga studio located in Tallahassee, Florida, United States. The gunman, identified as Scott Paul Beierle, shot six women, two of them fatally, and pistol-whipped a man before killing himself.
Two consecutive mass shootings took place in Christchurch, New Zealand, on 15 March 2019. They were committed by a single perpetrator during Friday prayer, first at the Al Noor Mosque in Riccarton, at 1:40 p.m. and almost immediately afterwards at the Linwood Islamic Centre at 1:52 p.m. Altogether, 51 people were killed and 89 others were injured; including 40 by gunfire.
On August 3, 2019, a mass shooting occurred at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, United States. The gunman, 21-year-old Patrick Wood Crusius, killed 23 people and injured 22 others. The Federal Bureau of Investigation investigated the shooting as an act of domestic terrorism and a hate crime. The shooting has been described as the deadliest attack on Latinos in modern American history.
The Hanau shootings occurred on 19 February 2020, when nine people were killed and five others wounded in a terrorist shooting spree by a far-right extremist targeting three bars and a kiosk in Hanau, near Frankfurt, Hesse, Germany. After the attacks, the gunman, identified as Tobias Rathjen, returned to his apartment, where he killed his mother and then committed suicide. The massacre was called an act of terrorism by the German Minister of Internal Affairs.
Misogynist terrorism is terrorism that is motivated by the desire to punish women. It is an extreme form of misogyny—the policing of women's compliance to patriarchal gender expectations. Misogynist terrorism uses mass indiscriminate violence in an attempt to avenge nonconformity with those expectations or to reinforce the perceived superiority of men.
On May 14, 2022, a mass shooting occurred in Buffalo, New York, United States, at a Tops Friendly Markets supermarket in the East Side neighborhood. Ten people, all of whom were African Americans, were murdered and three were injured. The shooter, identified as 18-year-old Payton S. Gendron, livestreamed part of the attack on Twitch, but the livestream was shut down by the service in under two minutes. Gendron was taken into custody and charged with first-degree murder. He formally entered a plea of "not guilty" on May 19, 2022. On November 28, 2022, Gendron pleaded guilty to all state charges in the shooting, including murder, domestic terrorism, and hate crimes. On February 15, 2023, Gendron was sentenced to 11 concurrent life sentences without the possibility of parole; as of that date, federal charges are still ongoing, and the federal prosecution also expressed their intention to seek the death penalty.
Terrorgram refers to a decentralized network of Telegram channels and accounts that subscribe to or promote militant accelerationism. Terrorgram channels are neo-fascist in ideology, and regularly share instructions and manuals on how to carry out acts of racially-motivated violence and anti-government terrorism. Terrorgram is a key communications forum for individuals and networks attached to Atomwaffen Division, The Base, and other explicit militant accelerationist groups.
On August 26, 2023, three people were fatally shot by a gunman in a mass shooting that took place at a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Florida. Authorities identified 21-year-old male Ryan Christopher Palmeter as the gunman. Palmeter shot and killed himself after he barricaded himself in an office. The incident has been described as a terrorist attack, was racially motivated, and is currently under investigation as a hate crime.