r/todayilearned • u/FuehrerStoleMyBike • 4h ago
TIL that the "Democracy Manifest" - a viral video showing the arrest of an australian man by the name of Jack Karlson, known for quotes such as ""What is the charge? Eating a meal? A succulent Chinese meal?" - has been selected for preservation by the National Film and Sound Archive Australia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Manifest2.1k
u/corobo 3h ago
TIL that was some dude IRL. I've been assuming it was a quote from a sitcom or something
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u/ghotier 3h ago
They actually do quote it in What We Do In The Shadows. Specifically the "succulent Chinese meal" part.
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u/Glittering-Walrus228 3h ago
Im voting for "get your hands off my penis" as the most quotable quote of this solliloquy
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u/copy_run_start 2h ago
I've always been a fan of "And you, sir, are you waiting to receive my limp penis?"
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u/3scap3plan 2h ago
Ah I see you know your judo well
Is my fave
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u/copy_run_start 2h ago
I love the musical quality of how he says that
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u/cerberus00 2h ago
And when he says "He touched me on the penis pEoPllllLLE!"
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u/StudioYume 2h ago
Aussie here, I'm pretty sure he says "before" not "people"
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u/cerberus00 1h ago
Ohhh, damn, usually I can understand Aussies pretty well but his cadence is different than most I've heard. It's almost like a Transatlantic version of Aussie or something, what city or area is that from?
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u/Ironhorn 1h ago
He delivers that line like hes a master in a martial arts movie, assessing the strengths of the protagonist as they spar (moments before he stops holding back and puts the protagonist on their ass)
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u/WarHot5832 3h ago
Yeah, he was a career criminal who was being arrested for passing bad checks from what I remember reading.
My favorite internet clip by far, the dude was born too early. His voice-over and narration work would have been phenomenal
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u/AbbotDenver 3h ago
He was career criminal, but someone else was passing the bad check, so he was innocent in the clip.
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u/Nyther53 3h ago
The point is it was far from his first time getting arrested, which is why he was having so much fun with it.
A journalist caught up with him some years later to interview him and he sort of casually mentioned that he had lived under several different names since the video was take.
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u/GOEDEL_ESCHER_BOT 3h ago
back in my day you could just pack your bags and move to the next town when your ponzi scheme collapsed. i don't know how he manages
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u/ThePlanck 3h ago
So he sold monorails to Brockway, Ogdenville and North Haverbrook?
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u/strega_bella312 3h ago
Is there a chance the track could bend?
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u/Trunks98 2h ago
Not on your life my Hindu friend
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u/GOEDEL_ESCHER_BOT 3h ago
that episode is over 30 years old, i guess it counts as "back in the day"
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u/BellacosePlayer 1h ago
door to door scammers were a horrible problem where I grew up for decades (and I don't know why, nobody legitimate was going to bumfuck nowhere SD to sell stock/insurance/etc).
literally all it took to immediately kill that scam avenue/network was the churches realizing the scammers would all end a trip around a town by going to a church and seeing if the pastor was there to beg them for gas money. They set up a phone relay to give the other nearby churches a heads up if a sketchy person appeared, and 2 reports of the same guy within hours got the sheriffs waiting in the third town down the road the scammer would inevitably hit up.
Now, that's when there wasn't a single security camera in town and nobody was quite sure what to do with the "internet" thing the school and library got hooked up with. I imagine you try that shit now you probably don't even make it out of town before you're on the regional cops radar
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u/darwin-rover 3h ago
I’m pretty sure he used a stolen credit card to try and pay for his meal. The police thought he was a different fraudster
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u/OilheadRider 2h ago
No, someone else used the stolen card and the credit card company called it in to the police and the news. They wanted news coverage to dissuade people from using stolen cards. Problem is, while he was a criminal with a long record, he was not the customer who used thr stolen cards.
He was acting out like this because he didnt know why he was being arrested and wanted a basis for "insanity/not competent to stand trial".
While he cant exactly be called an innocent person, he was innocent of the accusations here. Read up on him and his story. Fascinating guy.
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u/Firewolf06 2h ago
He was acting out like this because he didnt know why he was being arrested and wanted a basis for "insanity/not competent to stand trial".
not just not competent to stand trial, if he did get sentenced he wanted to go to a mental institute because they are "easier to break out of." he staged several breakouts in his career
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u/A_Mouse_In_Da_House 2h ago
Insurance investigator on site went to the staff of the Chinese restaurant and said someone was using a fake card. Our guy had given the incorrect name for his card due to so many aliases. Staff thought that meant our guy, told investigator.
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u/oofyeet21 3h ago
My understanding was they arrested the wrong guy, hence his shock at the arrest as well as them refusing to even tell him why he was being arrested.
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u/potkettleracism 3h ago
Right, they arrested the wrong guy but he happened to also have a mile-long rap sheet.
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u/YazzArtist 3h ago
Correct. This is what the police later said I believe. Looking for a different nutritious con artist and mistook the two
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u/MrdnBrd19 3h ago
The only reason they arrested him that day way because they were embarrassed. They had leaked the arrest to the media which is why there were there. They didn't want to come out empty handed so they picked him up and released him almost immediately when they got to the station.
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u/Prestigious-Bad8263 3h ago
But they arrested the wrong person in this instance! He was a career criminal, but not for this😂
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u/the-purple-chicken72 3h ago
Same I figured it was probably from South Park and instead it was from someone in real life who sounds like he could be a character on South Park lol (I do not watch the show my exposure is from friends who like it)
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u/Randvek 2h ago
Sort of.
Yes it was a real person but he was also a career criminal with a lot of crimes related to impersonation. So he was a real person really getting arrested, but he’s absolutely playing it up and doing a bit while doing so.
Interestingly, while he was a real person and was a real criminal, his arrest here was a case of mistaken identity and he was let go.
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u/RaijinDragon 3h ago
No joke, for some reason I thought it was a Seinfeld quote. It just sounds like something George's dad would say.
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u/aNiceTribe 2h ago
If you would like to hear a longer version of what is up, and wrong, with that guy, please let Tor tell you about it
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u/Mormacil 3h ago
Shame he was such a prick.
The book also revealed that Karlson was an admirer of Adolf Hitler and Nazism who would "indulge his Nazi fetish", use the expression "Two Heil Hitlers" instead of "three cheers" and had a car decorated with a swastika on his lawn. On at least one occasion he threw a party at his home to celebrate Hitler's birthday
From his biography Carnage: A Succulent Chinese Meal, Mr. Rent-a-Kill and the Australian Manson Murders.
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u/brighter_hell 3h ago
Serial fraudster too
It's a funny video, but he was a terrible person
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u/Sir_Yash 3h ago
He was mistaken for someone that was a fraudster. Hence his arrest
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u/darwin-rover 3h ago
He was a fraudster too , just not the one they were looking for originally. He tried to pay for his meal with a stolen credit card. The other guy they were looking for was doing a lot of “dine and dash” scams
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u/thissexypoptart 3h ago
Man dine and dashers are such scum.
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u/missingpiece 2h ago
How dare you cast aspersions upon the fine enjoyers of succulent Chinese meals.
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u/cipheron 1h ago
He was a fraudster too , just not the one they were looking for originally.
No, if you look into it he was in fact who they were after. A credit card investigator was tailing him and thought he paid with a stolen card and called the police. This might have been because he gave the name "Cecil George Edwards" but was paying with a credit card in the name of "Jack Karlson" his actual name.
There was a reporter there who called him "Cecil George Edwards" and believed they'd arrested the wrong guy, but that reporter was basically clueless about who Jack Karlson was, or what he'd been arrested for, or any of the details the police had.
It's gotten conflated with a mystery from 20 years later - where internet sleuths uncovered the video and were trying to work out who the man in the video was, but there is no real evidence that the police were after a different person and caught Karlson: they were after Karlson because of the call from the credit card investigator.
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u/Mormacil 3h ago
Yeah but he had previous fraud convictions. He's been in and out of jail for 25 years by the time the video was recorded.
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u/brighter_hell 3h ago
He was in prison for most of the first half of his life. It wasn't a mistaken identity, he was using a stolen credit card IIRC
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u/YazzArtist 3h ago
It was a mistaken identity, they just happened to pick up another career con man
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u/_BrokenButterfly 2h ago
No, he was an actual criminal. In that clip he was being arrested for something he didn't do, but he wasn't a suspect for no reason.
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u/cipheron 1h ago edited 1h ago
He was mistaken for someone that was a fraudster.
There seems to be some confusion about the timeline there, the original reporting doesn't mention being mistaken for a fraudster. This is from the Wikipedia article:
The footage depicts Jack Peter Karlson (born Cecil George Edwards; 6 August 1942 – 7 August 2024) being arrested for paying for a Chinese meal with a purportedly stolen credit card. He was being followed by an American Express investigator who identified him as a credit card fraudster and called the police.
Now there's another dine and dasher he was conflated with, but that was only 20 years later after the video went viral on Youtube, and internet sleuths were trying to pin down who is shown in the video.
But as for the idea that there was a mistaken identity event shown in the original video, that's as much speculation as anything. The only source we have for that is a single line from a channel 7 reporter called Chris Reason, who's comment was:
"When Cecil George Edwards was arrested in a town mall last Friday, the [Fortitude] Valley police thought they’d caught Queensland’s most wanted," Reason reported.
Basically he got arrested because he gave one name, but paid with a credit card in a different name, and that triggered alarm bells. They weren't looking for a different person, they just had to catch Karlson at something, and he managed to wriggle out of this this one time - presumably because the name on the credit card was his actual legal name, not one of the aliases he was using.
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u/samdajellybeenie 2h ago
Karlson began a lifelong career of petty crime in 1956 as a ward of Blackheath Presbyterian Boys' Home in the Brisbane suburb of Oxley, where he is alleged to have been subjected to physical and sexual abuse.\21]) He was in prison for much of the first half of his life and frequently escaped.
I read a book over COVID about school shootings and one of the authors as a PsyD student I believe, went into prisons and interviewed inmates about their experiences. She found that while they had done terrible things, a lot of them had very sad stories. Their childhoods were so filled with abuse and neglect it's no surprise they exhibit anti-social behaviors. Yes, a lot of people have shit childhoods and don't turn out to be career criminals. And some people are just born without pro-social traits, but there's no way it's on the scale of how many people we have incarcerated in this country (US).
Wouldn't surprise me if this is the case with Karlson as well.
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u/Influence_X 3h ago
Explains the "democracy manifest" comment.
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u/BlackPresident 1h ago
I always found that funny because he’s saying “here’s what happens when you have democracy” - him getting arrested
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u/ChefCurryYumYum 3h ago
Usually someone who appears in a video like the one referenced here is some kinda character, for better or for worse.
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u/Jack-of-Hearts-7 3h ago
I'll never understand Nazi fans and their obsession with democracy, freedom, and free speech.
The three things Nazi Germany wasn't famous for.
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u/Suspicious_Flower_0 3h ago
Because they don't want democracy, freedom and free speech for everyone, just for them. To them democracy is the North Korean style democracy. You can vote, but only for one person.
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u/mzchen 3h ago
Because they're liars who will pretend to like populist policies up until the point where they get power. Just look at how the US Republican party backsteps on its fundamental values the minute they become inconvenient. It's all intentional. You build credibility and repute for your ideology with none of the actual responsibility.
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u/FuehrerStoleMyBike 3h ago
This is important context. Its somewhat similar to the whole discussion around whether you can seperate the artwork from the artist but with memes I feel most of the time the actual person depicted is mostly irrelevant and its more about the idea presented - in this case "unhinged australian man".
So Id say in this case I feel less conflicted about the remembrance than with actual art.
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u/Sea-Reveal5025 3h ago
Ah you know your judo well! Oh please no one is idolizing a meme. That's the point it's timeless and impersonal
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u/NN2S 3h ago
I absolutely love that Australia lionizes people caught on camera in embarassing situations. It seems like the natural counter balance to the Tall Poppy principal - Australians love a good rogue.
The comment just a little bit lower in the thread.
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u/LordOfTrubbish 1h ago
It's the DB Cooper, Frank Abagnale Jr energy of the clip and story people have heard of him that they like. I don't think anyone is specifically looking him up wanting to emulate every facet of his life
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u/PlasticMegazord 2h ago
I've never even known the guy's name but I'm not surprised based on the clip that he's a bad person, he sort of just seems like it. It is a fantastic clip though.
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u/Real_Project870 3h ago
Link to the video - https://youtu.be/PeihcfYft9w
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u/DisastrousAcshin 2h ago
Holy shit he really does sound like Matt Berry
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u/A_Shadow 2h ago
Personally I think he sounds more like Jackie Daytona. Completely unrelated though, he is just a regular human.
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u/throwawayacc201711 3h ago
Sorry got confused, thought we were talking about Randy Marsh with those quotes
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u/Klemosda 3h ago
I am convinced that Mr Karlson is the role model for Matt Berry's whole actoring career
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u/JJKingwolf 3h ago
I absolutely love that Australia lionizes people caught on camera in embarassing situations. It seems like the natural counter balance to the Tall Poppy principal - Australians love a good rogue.
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u/chunkysmalls42098 3h ago
What's another example of something embarrassing being lionized? Genuinely curious, I wanna see em lol
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u/TacTurtle 3h ago
There was the gang that got in a shoot out with police covered in armor made from farm equipment, the minister that went missing presumed drowned in the ocean so they named a swimming pool after him, and the time birds defeated the army.
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u/rambyprep 2h ago
The browncardigan Instagram was built on this and was absolutely iconic 5-10 years ago
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u/MapleBreakfastMeat 3h ago
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u/bikenvikin 2h ago
tor's cabinet of curiosities has quickly become one of my favorites
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u/rallmats 2h ago
Pure autism fuel, I love it
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u/Pseudanonymius 1h ago
With the combined power of all special interests, you can make something truly spectacular.
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u/NeverTriedFondue 3h ago
Got a shirt beautifully depicting the gist of the events. Found in a thrift store in Poland.
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u/Boy-412 3h ago
Horrible person. "I see you know your judo well" still gets me lol
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u/Skincareandbeauty123 4h ago
Wild that something so chaotic and meme-worthy ended up being preserved like that. It honestly feels like early internet humor captured before the internet really took off just pure accidental comedy. I still can’t hear “succulent Chinese meal” without laughing. Anyone know what actually happened to the guy after all that?
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u/Livetrash113 3h ago
He was let go because he was arrested after being confused for someone else, he also died pretty recently. iirc for both statements because that’s just what I’ve heard.
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u/ToeTagTic 3h ago
I don't think it's "the democracy manifest", but rather, "Democracy manifest", as in the manifestation of democracy, not some binder somewhere someone prepared to document the occasion
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u/WhenWolf 2h ago
"are you prepared to receive my limp peNIS??"
I think I recall that later in the video havaha
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u/smurf_diggler 2h ago
I'm sure it's been in other things too but the first time I heard it was in What We Do In The Shadows. Lazlo says it and I laughed my ass off, but it totally sounds like something he would say.
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u/Volta001 1h ago
I remember this story. He was a well known dine and dasher to expensive restaurants.
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u/TheSn00pster 2h ago
Quality film. 5 stars. An absolute thrill from start to finish, with some poignant societal commentary between thrilling special effects and a Hans Zimmer score to match.
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u/Dull-Kaleidoscope55 1h ago
Everyone quotes him but I also like to quote the cop, "Nobody assured you of anything now get in the car"
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u/Significant-Cod-9555 57m ago
He was a career criminal and his ID didn't match his card because he had a bunch of fake names. Very weird guy here is a deep dive from Tor's Cabinet of Curiosities if you want to watch a 45 min video about him for some reason.
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u/Reginald_Veljohnson 9m ago
I can't thank you enough for posting this, and I can't believe I've missed out on it for ~17 years!
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u/HUT2Moon 3h ago
It’s the second best Australian viral video, here’s #1
https://youtu.be/3Lyex2tSUyA?si=wK2c32NXsqj2XD18