Massachusetts air national guardsman Jack Teixeira, 21, has been charged in a Boston court on two counts under the Espionage Act, and the question on everyone’s minds is why. Unlike with whistleblowers in the past such as Daniel Ellsberg (the Pentagon Papers) and Chelsea Manning (Wikileaks), neither ethics or politics seem to have been the motivation for Teixeira’s alleged leak of hundreds of pages of classified documents related to the war in Ukraine. He doesn’t appear to have been acting as an agent for a foreign government, according to his criminal complaint. So why is he allegedly behind one of the worst leaks of US intelligence in a decade, for which he now faces up to 15 years in prison?
Based on what we know so far, the answer may be that Teixeira did it, as they used to say, for the Vine – for social media clout. Sources say he wanted to impress a bunch of teenage boys and young men who were his acolytes in a Discord chat room of 20 to 30 gamers who referred to themselves as Thug Shaker Central – the most wannabe gangster name imaginable for a bunch of gamers whose leader (Teixeira) lived with his mother.
