The piece argues some modern attackers aren’t expressing a prior ideology but trying to manufacture one through spectacle—wrapping incoherent motives in symbols to create a pseudo‑religion. Meaninglessness in digital culture becomes the motive force; violence is the attempted cure.
— This reframes how we diagnose and deter political violence—away from ideology policing and toward addressing meaning deficits and media amplification that reward symbolic carnage.
Rod Dreher
2026.01.15
88% relevant
Dreher (via the NY Magazine report) frames the assassination as a spectacle intended to manufacture a political meaning and to catalyze a movement; this closely matches the existing idea that some modern attackers aim to 'manufacture' ideology via spectacle rather than express a prior coherent doctrine.
eugyppius
2026.01.10
90% relevant
The article argues activists are performing spectacular, symbolic acts (blocking ICE vehicles) that risk producing real violence and then attempt to convert any enforcement into moral proof; this matches the 'cargo‑cult' idea that some attackers/actors manufacture spectacle to create ideology or meaning, here manifest as road‑blocking rehearsals that can escalate fatally (Renée Good shooting).
Steve Gallant
2025.12.02
75% relevant
Both pieces diagnose a phenomenon where violent or extremist action is sustained and reproduced by social dynamics and symbolic logics rather than by straightforward instrumental aims; the article’s description of a prison brotherhood that transmits ideology and enforces loyalty maps onto the cargo‑cult account of violence being manufactured and ritualized rather than purely ideological or opportunistic.
Isegoria
2025.10.06
100% relevant
Freddie DeBoer: 'they are engaged in cargo cult meaning‑making... acts we have grown to see as expressions of meaning are in fact childish attempts to will meaning into being through violence.'