UNITED STATES – Private Chelsea Elizabeth Manning, who was released from confinement on May 17th following seven years in a military prison, has expressed enthusiasm that she can now pursue her true calling as the most bullied person on the internet.
Manning was court-marshalled in 2010 for funnelling 750,000 pages of classified information to Wikileaks, but her confinement deprived her of the joy of instant trolling. “During my seven years in prison, I was only allowed to receive death threats by snail mail,” she posted on the prison networking site ClinkedIn, “which violated my basic human right to be insulted by people who put more research into their lunch selfies than their political commentary.”
Although Manning’s crimes make her easy prey for people who use technology they can’t spell, her diagnosis of gender dysphoria and subsequent decision to live as a woman have catapulted her to the Vegas-odds favourite for Twitter victim of the year. “I’m really lucky to have more than one troll-bait quality,” she says. “Transgender AND a whistleblower? This is every victim’s dream come true.”
Fans of Manning are bracing for the onslaught from self-identified grammar disrupters, but Manning is sympathetic to her detractors.
“Sure I was only disregarding my promise not to share America’s secrets because that agreement had already been violated by the government in making me morally culpable for the crimes it was hiding in a violation of the social contract upon which every healthy democracy depends,” she states. “But you have to understand their point too — it’s just so much easier to spell ‘bitch’.”
