The Douchebag Manifesto

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Portrait of the hacker as a young douchebag.

“The hypocrisy of ‘law and order’ and the injustices caused by capitalism cannot be cured by institutional reform but through civil disobedience and direct action.”
— Jeremy Hammond, Nov. 15, 2013

“I gotta be me, as the douchebag credo goes.”
— Ace of Spades, Nov. 20, 2012

Where do they come from, these douchebags? Suburbia, mainly. You can read a thousand articles telling you Jeremy Hammond was from Chicago, but in point of fact he was from Glendale Heights, a DuPage County suburb about 30 miles west of Chicago.

It won’t surprise you to learn that Jeremy Hammond’s parents were divorced. Nearly all of these left-wing fringe types come from what used to be called “broken homes” back in the old days, before we were taught politically correct euphemisms for social dysfunction.

They’re angry, see, and their anger becomes the organizing principle of their lives, so they must act out in some way. Lashing out at scapegoats, they externalize their inner pain, believing that whatever object they make a target of their anger deserves to be hated.

Costuming their personal grievances in the rhetorical wardrobe of politics, the seek out others like themselves as a sort of support group, engaging in protests as performance with history as the imagined audience, basking in the warm glow of the admiration they strive to deserve by acting on behalf of “social justice” or some other cause.

Lee Harvey Oswald, Jeremy Hammond — they differed in method more than they did in basic personality structure.

Ace has been on a riff lately against “millennials” — following on Kurt Schlicter’s sarcastic #caring attitude — and talking about the entitled narcissism of the Special Snowflake™ generation. Of course, narcissism isn’t anything new, but what is new (or, at least recent) is the relative ease with which these cravers of admiration can find an audience in the Information Age. Kids turn on the TV and watch “reality” shows where pseudo-celebrities with no talent play-act their scripted dramas. Then they switch on their video game systems for some competitive play-acting in multi-player environments. Then they hop on the Internet where everybody’s got a YouTube channel and a social-media presence. Everything is play-acting and everyone is (potentially) a star.

We’re about 20 years into the World Wide Web era, and no one under 30 really has any useful memory of the world that existed before the Internet, Playstation and 140 channels on cable TV. Are we therefore actually surprised that young people have become self-absorbed and have trouble understanding politics as something different from other media-generated celebrity image-making?

So when I saw Anonymous hacker Jeremy Hammond’s courtroom statement, my reaction was a shrug of resignation: Of course he blames Bush. Of course his “political” rationalizations are a bunch of empty clichés about “racism” and “imperialism.”

As an aside, do none of these punks bother reading books? Do they not realize that their protest dramas are just re-enactments of previous protest dramas, all of which ended in disappointment (and sometimes death) for the deluded idealists?

More than six decades ago, Eric Hoffer published The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. The copy on my desk is 177 pages, including endnotes. Any reasonably literate person could finish reading this book in a single day and be forever inoculated against the True Believer delusion. Why, then, do young kooks continue replicating the errors Hoffer so clearly described?

Or how about Peter Collier and David Horowitz’s Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts on the Sixties? It would be impossible, I think, for anyone who had read that book to sign on for the whole hippy-dippy peace-and-love bullshit agenda. So why isn’t that book on the syllabus in high-school advance placement civics classes?

Oh, wait . . . Never mind. It just dawned on me that our public education system is dominated by leftists who very much want kids to sign up for the whole hippy-dippy peace-and-love bullshit agenda.

Few of these kids, thank God, take up the radical cause with the kind of dramatic seriousness that leads them to federal prison:

Jeremy Hammond was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison Friday for his role in the December 2011 hacking of Strategic Forecasting (StratFor) and a number of other websites targeted by members of the so-called “hacktivist” group known as Anonymous. The feds had more than enough evidence to convict Hammond. He had a prior conviction on a similar crime and was potentially facing more than 30 years this time, so the best he could do was cop a plea deal. Before he was sentenced Friday by U.S. District Judge Loretta A. Preska, however, the 28-year-old hacker once known as “Anarchaos” had a political statement to share with the world, a statement that could be summarized in two words: Blame Bush.
Although he was only 15 when George W. Bush was elected president, Hammond declared in federal court in Manhattan, this was a traumatizing experience for him. “My introduction to politics was when George W. Bush stole the Presidential election in 2000, then took advantage of the waves of racism and patriotism after 9/11 to launch unprovoked imperialist wars against Iraq and Afghanistan,” Hammond declared in his manifesto. “I took to the streets in protest naively believing our voices would be heard in Washington and we could stop the war. Instead, we were labeled as traitors, beaten, and arrested.” Hammond added that he had “been arrested for numerous acts of civil disobedience on the streets of Chicago.”
Ah, yes, “civil disobedience,” otherwise known as crime. . . .

Read the whole thing at The American Spectator and, please, you stupid kids: How about reading a book once in a while?

 

 

50 comments

  2. Well, I’m 27, and this is the sort of contemporary who makes me think the vast majority of young Americans aren’t worth a damn as potential recruits.

  3. Hope that anti-Bush rant was satisfying. His crime spree – which mainly amounted to high-tech theft and vandalism on a grand scale – and plea deal means he’s got a cot for the next 8+ years under federal minimum sentencing guidelines.

    Mommy’s Very Special Snowflake™ indeed!

  5. “Douchebag”, indeed. He is the very definition of the word.

    Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing…

  6. There’s a place in the world for the angry young man, with his working class ties and his radical plans…
    -Billy Joel

  7. From suburbia and from homes where they lived a life free from worry about the basics. Where their every want and desire was catered to and appeased by an adoring family with more money than sense.

    Those days are pretty much gone now so perhaps the populace will improve.

  8. A quote from Robert Downey, Jr.:
    “I have a really interesting political point of view, and it’s not always something I say too loud at dinner tables here, but you can’t go from a $2,000-a-night suite at La Mirage to a penitentiary and really understand it and come out a liberal. You can’t. I wouldn’t wish that experience on anyone else, but it was very, very, very educational for me and has informed my proclivities and politics every since.”
    Maybe Hammond will become a Republican.

  10. We saw this same type in the Punk Music scene in the late 70’s / early 80’s.

    There was one group that got rather famous in Boston and their image was as these gritty, anti-Establishment, near-Anarchist punk rockers. Turns out, they all came from comfortable middle-class homes in a suburb and the daddy of the leader of the group bought them their band van.

    Man, we hated those wankers.

  11. Can we get the Cliff Notes for that? #askingforafriend

    /sarc

    If they had any knowledge of history they wouldn’t be liberals.

  12. That “Blame Bush” statement has absolutely no substance. It’s literally nothing but very tired cliches, leftist talking points and emotion.

    Do these guys EVER have an original thought?

  18. In the late 80’s, visiting London, I encountered a trio of street punks. Of the sort summering in London as someone’s mother was a professor and teaching there…

  19. Yeah, protesting injustice is really just a projection of self-hatred! YOU ARE A FUCKING IDIOT! How do you even have the balls to write something so fucking stupid? Get your head checked, moron.

  20. He’ll get the opportunity to read now. Do federal inmates get internet privileges? Force him to read books.

  21. As of my release on 04Jan2010 they didn’t. The only access we had was via email (prisoners charged .10 per email sent or received) through the BOP servers wherein all (incoming or outgoing) emails are read and censored by BOP staff.

  22. Intelligent protesting of actual injustice to those actually responsible is a good thing. What this assclown (and by extension, all assclowns supporting him) has been doing is accurately described herein. (Neutral Objective Facts are your friends, learn to embrace them).

  23. Lol you idiots. The only thing Hammond and Oswald have in common is they were both scapegoats of a corrupt system.

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