What the manifesto of the Christchurch attacker tells us.

Before launching his attack, the 28-year-old gunman who killed at least 49 people in two mosques in New Zealand on Friday issued a detailed manifesto explaining his motives. The document is replete with rhetoric and popular themes among online white nationalist communities that gather on electronic bulletin boards such as 8chan, where he announced his last minutes before he begins. The document is largely focused on the notion of "white genocide" – the idea that people of European descent all over the world have too few children and are therefore replaced in their own country by foreign "invaders", especially Muslims. He claims to have been deeply inspired by Anders Breivik, the anti-Islam fanatic who murdered 77 people during a 2011 terrorist attack in Norway.

The manifesto was also confusing to the extent that excerpts circulated around Twitter, partly because of some peculiarities of the ideology it describes, and partly because of some passages that read like ironic shitposting . Neither one nor the other should confuse the main lesson learned from the attack and the manifesto: we find ourselves in front of a global movement of white hate, a movement that has inserted far too much of his tendrils in the firmament of a respectable policy.

Part of this perplexity comes from the shooter's description of himself as an "eco-fascist" and his concern about global warming, which is not a concern that traditional readers associate with generally to racist reactionaries. But the eco-fascists are actually an established, albeit obscure, brand of neo-Nazis. As Sarah Manavis wrote last year to the New Statesman, "they think that living in the original areas where a race is native is supposed to have originated and fleeing multiculturalism is the only way to save the planet that they favor above all else. "

The manifesto is also difficult because it is clearly written for the other shooter's chants; Like all the conversations you'll find in the cursed swamps of Reddit or 8Chan, it includes directional errors and trollish memes, which makes it a bit difficult, at times, to tell exactly where the irony ends and where the l sincere racist ideology. In a small example, he launches a popular passage known as Copypasta by Navy SEAL, which makes a mockery of people who claim to be ex-snipers or special forces on the Internet. In a question and answer section, he suggests that he was radicalized by Candace Owens, 29-year-old director of communications at Turning Point USA, the conservative campus group run by Charlie Kirk:

Is there someone who has radicalized you the most?

Yes, the person who has influenced me the most is Candace Owens. Whenever she spoke, her astonishing ideas and her own opinions pushed me more and more into the conviction that violence prevailed over meekness. Although I will have to deny some of her beliefs, the extreme actions that she calls are too much, even for my tastes.

Read in the context of the manifesto, this is obviously not serious. Owens, now a young pro-Trump black woman, has recently begun to immerse herself in European ethno-nationalism. in a clumsy appearance, she launched a bizarre half defense of Hitler (the only problem with him was apparently that he "had dreams out of Germany") and she took how the fall in the birth rate in France could soon turn it into a majority Muslim country. The shooter, too, devotes much of his manifesto to the obsession with demographic change in France (he says he is radicalized as he crisscrossed the reduced and increasingly diverse cities of the country). But he also writes that he began planning his attack at least two years ago, before Owens was visible. And to put it bluntly, it's pretty clear that a mass murderer would not consider his calls for action to be "extreme." It sounds like a joke about Owens trying to follow the nationalist movement.

Choosing parts of a killer's screed that are meant to be fun can be uncomfortable. But it is also necessary to select the basic material that tells us about the global and white racist ideology that is gradually metastasizing online and produces a new breed of terrorists. The Christchurch killer said he took his "real inspiration" from Breivik, who wrote his own 1,500-page hate manifesto. (He even suggests that he had a "brief contact" with Breivik, currently in jail, but it is unclear if that is true or not.) The shooter also claims to have read the l & # 3939; writing by Dylann Roof, who perpetrated a massacre of black. Charleston, South Carolina, with the hope that it would trigger a racial war. The Christchurch shooter claims to have equally grandiose ambitions (in a new twist, he suggests he used firearms, as opposed to other weapons, to reinforce the political conflict around guns and second amendment in the United States). It is inspired by a growing online ecosystem and literature on white radicalization and contributes to it.

In the United States, this ecosystem has given us the slaughter of the Tree of Life and the terrible supremacist gathering of whites in Charleston, both motivated – at least in part – by the fear that Whites are being demographically more numerous and replaced. From where the songs in Charlottesville, Virginia, from "The Jews will not replace us!" Blacks will not replace us! Immigrants will not replace us! ". And yes, American politicians and experts are also feeding this ecosystem. When Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham talk about the Fox attempts of the Democrats to "replace" white voters with immigrants, they are integrating his rhetoric. When Rep. Steve King said, "We can not restore our civilization with the babies of someone else," he integrates his rhetoric. It is almost certain that Candace Owens inspires no one to kill, but she guides them to the type of online discussions that lead to dark and dangerous places. And here is our president himself. As the shooter of Christchurch wrote in his Q & A:

Were you / are you a supporter of Donald Trump?

As a symbol of a renewed white identity and a common goal? Sure. As a decision maker and leader? Dear god no.

Not a chef, but a useful symbol. Maybe it was just more shit, too. But I guess not.