So the NYPD planted the fake IDs, wrote a manifesto, and snatched this random guy, who had a clear motivation based on his own posting history? A guy who just happened to go off grid for several months before getting randomly picked up by the cops at a McDonald’s? A guy that friends were worried about because he stopped communicating with them? Just got this incredible golden goose right out of the clear blue sky, and reported by a guy working at the McDonalds. Was the McDonalds worker actually an undercover NYPD officer or something?

The NYPD is either highly militarized, trained by the IDF in both surveillance and urban combat, operate outside the law using unconstitutional technology and techniques, are the 8th largest standing army in the world, operate in a city with the highest number of CCTV cameras in the US, or they are all the Springfield Police Department operated by Chief Wiggum and his band of merry men.

The reality is, whether you like it or not, is that A) the public aided in capturing this guy and only the terminally online were projecting themselves onto him, and B) The NYPD is more capable than you would like to admit, which frankly is a bad assumption to make.

Listen, I get that we all want a new John Brown for a modern age, but this guy isn’t him. You can have a good plan that has no long-term exit strategy. You can have a long-term exit strategy that falls apart after trying to come to terms with what you just did. If anything, playing up the idea that this guy was some methodical mastermind only plays into the NYPDs position that he is a methodical mastermind. It is very likely the NYPD will attempt to plant evidence on him to make him live up to the larger than life image the country and media projected onto him because it only makes the NYPD look better. The nation couldn’t track down Ted Kaczynski for months in the 90s, and here is the brave and violent NYPD catching Kaczynski’s disciple in just over a week.

Ultimately, he performed the most brazen act of propaganda of the deed in well over 100 years in this country. He exposed a commonality that crosses the ideological borders of the left, and right within the working class, even if accidentally. Recent history shows us that rightists are far more likely to take direct action against a perceived enemy than leftists. This guy is clearly a center right liberal with a real personal grudge against the medical industry. His reading intake was nothing but descriptions of symptoms with no real conclusions. The book referenced by the casings is not an anti-capitalist book, and it explicitly states it’s not anti-insurance either. It’s a manifesto for more federal regulations, ignoring all contradictions that exist outside the industry that leads to it operating the way it does. It has no actual concrete plan on “what you can do about it”, despite the subtitle. Unless “you” are some regulatory golden goose who can live outside the contradictions of capitalism. It summarizes perfectly this guy’s center right liberal perspective. It’s like killing a CEO and writing “Disappointment”, “Interest”, and “Money” on the shell casings as a reference to John Keynes.