When the word “manifesto” appears in a headline, it carries an aura of historical gravity. The word belongs to a recognizable genre of public argument. Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto is the canonical example, but the family is broader than revolutionary socialism. Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism and Ambris and Marinetti’s Fascist Manifesto were manifestos too, however pernicious or absurd their ambitions. A more commonplace example, the British Conservative Party’s 2019 election document, Get Brexit Done: Unleash Britain’s Potential, was unmistakably a manifesto in the ordinary parliamentary sense: a public statement of priorities submitted to voters. Manifestos are public, programmatic writing. The common element is not virtue. It is audience, purpose, and design: a manifesto sets out a creed or agenda before the public and seeks to persuade, rally, or mobilize. That distinction matters for more than mere classification. Misusing the word can cause at least three kinds of harm: it can clothe misery or depravity in dignity, distort the public’s understanding of motive, and blur the line between pathology, ideology, and moral corruption.
“Manifesto” is a descriptive category, not an honorific. Evil causes can have manifestos. Wicked people can write them. The Communist and Fascist Manifestos, whatever else they were, were written for publication and intended to advance an argument before a broad audience. They were not diaries. Their depravity neither defines nor dissolves the genre. One reason to preserve the word’s meaning is precisely so that we can identify genuine manifestos even when they are monstrous.
Equally important is that not every hateful text written by a murderer becomes a manifesto merely because a murderer wrote it. A private notebook found in a bedroom, a packet of handwritten grievances tucked among personal effects, or a diary entry never intended for circulation are not manifestos. They are journals, rants, screeds, letters, or notes. Bloodshed does not retroactively convert a private document into a public one. Atrocity does not convert a private rant into a manifesto.
This is the line journalists and public servants too often blur. When reporters describe private writings discovered after an atrocity as a “manifesto,” they do more than reach for a vivid synonym. They smuggle in assumptions of coherence and historical weight. The label suggests that the author was entering public debate, presenting a platform, and perhaps even summoning followers. Frequently that is not what the writing is doing at all. And the damage begins once the label is attached: the author is elevated, the text is implicitly flattered, and the public is invited to mistake private ugliness for public argument.
In some cases, such texts appear to be evidence of mental disintegration. They can contain paranoia, grandiosity, disordered associations, delusions of significance, or the repetitive bitterness of someone coming apart. Had family, friends, or authorities seen them earlier, they might have read as signs of crisis rather than as quasi-political texts. In those cases, the proper interpretation is not manifesto but warning sign.
But we should not overpathologize. Not every violent person who writes hateful things is psychotic, manic, or otherwise mentally ill in a clinically meaningful sense. Some people are not confused but committed; not delusional but malignant; not chemically unbalanced but morally corrupt. They know what they are doing. They consciously choose evil. Their writings may reflect ideological fanaticism, cold hatred, vanity, resentment, or simple depravity. To insist on reading every violent text as a symptom of mental illness is to confuse pathology with culpability and to evade the older, sterner vocabulary of moral responsibility.
That distinction sharpens the need for precision. Whether a private text is the product of psychosis or of settled malice, “manifesto” may still be the wrong word. The decisive question is not whether the author was sane, but whether the document was public, programmatic, and addressed to an audience beyond the self. Was it written to mobilize, persuade, or recruit? Does it set forth a doctrine or agenda? Was it meant to circulate? If the answer is no, then the writing does not become a manifesto merely because it is ugly, hateful, or prophetic of violence.
This is why categorizing everything from the alleged writings of a bullied preteen to someone planning to murder a healthcare insurer’s CEO as a “manifesto” should not become a journalistic reflex. The category mistake remains even after bracketing the mental illness question. If a document was handwritten, kept among personal belongings, not offered to the public as a statement of overarching principles, and contains no rallying cry, it is hard to see why journalists or politicians should dignify it with the title of manifesto. One need not decide whether its author was mad, bad, or both in order to reject the label.
The costs of imprecision matter. First, the word manifesto confers a spurious dignity. It bestows majesty on baseness. It suggests that what may be no more than a feverish or vicious set of grievances belongs on the same shelf, in formal terms, as texts written to sway parties, populations, or movements. That rhetorical inflation can be perversely attractive to the fame-hungry. If private ravings are advertised as manifestos after mass violence, other mentally ill or malignant people may conclude that atrocity is a route to publication.
Second, the label distorts public understanding of motive. If the writing is in fact symptomatic of mental collapse, calling it a manifesto mistakes crisis for doctrine. If the writing reflects lucid wickedness rather than psychosis, calling it a manifesto can still overstate its coherence and flatter the author’s pretensions. In either case, the word often does exactly what a murderer would want: it implies scale, significance, and an audience. Journalists and those in public office should not supply those characteristics gratuitously.
Third, sloppy language impedes moral clarity. A society that cannot distinguish among mental disorder, ideological conviction, and ordinary evil will struggle to respond appropriately. Some cases call urgently for prevention and psychiatric intervention. Some call for closer attention to extremist recruitment and propaganda. Some call for moral condemnation. Many cases will contain elements of more than one category. But collapsing it all into the glamour of the “manifesto” obscures rather than clarifies these distinctions.
A more disciplined vocabulary is readily available. If a text is private, call it private: a diary, notebook, rant, grievance list, rambling letter, or personal screed. If it is public and programmatic, then call it what it is, even if it is monstrous: a tract, a declaration, a statement, a call to action, or, yes, even a manifesto. The point is not to ban a word, but to use it accurately.
The broader point is worth reiterating. The problem is not that the mentally ill or evildoers can never produce manifestos. History has shown that they can. The problem is that current usage defaults to treating a killer’s often posthumously discovered scribble as though it were a coherent work of public argument. It almost never is. Private diaries are not manifestos. Private evidence of mental collapse is not a manifesto. Private evidence of chosen wickedness is not a manifesto either.
Words shape judgment. If we want less mythologizing of murderers and more honest thinking about responsibility, motive, and prevention, we should stop lending them grandeur.