manifesto

By some accounts, he wanted a snack, but after briefly going into the store filled with Hispanic shoppers, he returned to his car, posted a vitriolic 2,400-word manifesto to the extremist social media site 8chan and got the gun.

In his manifesto, which he titled “The Inconvenient Truth” — a seeming nod to Al Gore’s documentary about the climate crisis — he wrote that “water sheds around the country, especially in agricultural areas, are being depleted.”

Crusius’ manifesto was striking because he considered the crushing squeeze of environmental degradation — the very changes that would be amplified by climate change — on communities, but from the opposite perspective.

Crusius’ manifesto, though, wasn’t just evidence of that shift.

The more I studied Crusius’ manifesto, the more I realized that I was also reading the imprints of a ghost, the ghost of John Tanton.