Hasan Piker, the WHCA shooter, ‘social murder’ and the real McCoy 

There is much to dislike about the attempted mass murder at this year’s annual White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) dinner.

Aside from the whole terrorism thing, we never got our entrees. The Washington Hilton produces a pretty impressive beef course for a kitchen cooking for 2,500. On the plus side, it was over before 10 o’clock for a change.

Mostly, though, the whole affair was annoying. There’s something more than tedious about pampered journalists and influencers acting like they had survived the siege of Sevastopol. Please forgive them for recounting their ordeal to an audience that includes the many social workers, police officers and others who go to work every day knowing every day that today might be the day they meet their would-be killer. 

A nation filled with children who do active-shooter drills at school is not a nation that is likely to be impressed by the interruption of a black-tie dinner.

But worse than all that — worse than fillet interrupted, worse than the preening of media celebrities, worse even than having no signal to message your wife and children that everything is fine — was having to read the memo manifesto of the accused attacker. 

As manifestos go, it wasn’t that bad itself: short and without the Nietzchian flummery that the younger, male, aspiring mass murderer typically includes. Dare I say it is “breezy”? And it’s that breeziness that makes it unnerving. The tone is like a farewell email from an employee leaving a job. You expect him to close with “you’ve all got my Gmail address now, so stay in touch.”

More typically, a manifesto buries its author’s crimes beneath layers of pseudo-intellectual baloney. 

Not so with the purported work of Saturday’s alleged attacker. While he wrestles a bit with the morality........

© The Hill