Learning from years of online right-wing extremism, the shooter made his manifesto a weaponized shitpost.
The man who allegedly shot and killed 49 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand framed the attack as a real-life escalation of meme-based internet culture.
Police are currently investigating a sprawling 74-page manifesto that the 28-year-old suspect allegedly wrote and posted on social media shortly before the attack. The document rails against Muslims and immigrants and includes several references to memes and video games.
The alleged shooter posted the manifesto, along with a link to the forthcoming live stream of the promised attack, on 8chan, one of the main online homes of meme-loving right-wing extremists. In the post, he wrote that it was “time to stop shitposting and time to make a real life effort” — meaning, essentially, that it was time to stop fooling around on the internet and turn his extremist views into real-world action.
Then, right before the starting the attack — which he live-streamed to Facebook as if it were a first-person shooter video game — the alleged shooter referenced the “subscribe to PewDiePie” meme. Additionally, the guns used in the attack were decorated with memes, mostly insider white nationalist references.
The shooter appears to have been extremely familiar with extremist corners of the internet. The choices he made — to post a manifesto to a known radical community, and to carry out the attack as if he was doing it “for the lulz” — are unlikely to have been made at random.
Instead, they were most likely designed to entertain his fellow extremists, and above all, to help them see him as someone to admire and even copy. The memetic elements of the manifesto were also most likely designed to provoke the media and the public into sharing it and debating the shooter’s actions — thereby increasing the amount of attention, virality, and public debate surrounding the attack, and further spreading the manifesto within the mainstream.
All of this is important to understand, not only to keep public attention focused on the shooter’s unthinkable actions instead of memes, but because using memes to normalize unconscionable beliefs and behavior has become an established messaging tool for the far right.
The shooter’s alleged manifesto, titled “The Great Replacement,” repeats false propaganda about immigrants as “invaders” and references a number of radicalizing ideological influences. It also follows a standard method for spreading extremist ideology online, by framing its hateful rhetoric as a joke in an attempt to normalize it and make it appear more acceptable.
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It mixes references to memes, shitposts — an internet term for pointless posts intended to derail or distract readers, the baffling nature of which can often approach Dadaist nonsense art — and other bits of benign internet culture with serious ideological dogma. For instance, it randomly includes a well-known piece of copypasta (large blocks of text that get passed around in meme form), for what appears to be satire’s sake.
Journalist Robert Evans wrote a blog post shortly after the shooting in which he convincingly argues that the entire manifesto is an example of what it’s imitating — that is, it’s a giant shitpost meant to simultaneously draw attention to and distract from the white nationalist rationale that motivated the shooter.
“The entire manifesto is dotted, liberally, with references to memes and Internet in-jokes that only the extremely online would get,” Evans notes. “They are meant to distract attention from his more honest points, and to draw the attention of his real intended audience.” In other words, the shooter wanted to keep the general public guessing about which parts of the manifesto are serious, while he catered to and essentially directly addressed his core audience of fellow white supremacists.
How does this work? There are three main parts to this process, and they each function toward obscuring reality with the intention of spreading the extremist rhetoric contained within.
One of the most significant and pernicious ways that right-wing extremists use trolling, shitposting, and memes is to distort what their actual message is, so they can claim plausible deniability that their message is harmful or bad. That way, even when their extremism is clearly shown to be sincere, the irony surrounding the message clouds the truth. The shooter’s alleged manifesto is a textbook example of this.
And to break down why, we have to briefly pay as much attention to the memes, and the artifice around them, as we do to the abhorrent racism they’re meant to spread.
