This week, the world became Christchurch. And nothing Donald Trump says can prevent it from happening.
It’s a small city at the bottom of the globe, far away from the metropolises that normally are the targets of terrorism, in a nation that has never experienced a terrorist attack of any kind. Yet even there, it became not just possible but reality: Another angry young white man, ginned up on alt-right memes, pathological self-absorption, and visceral ethnic hatred, struck last Friday. Fifty lives were sacrificed on the altar of white supremacy.
Christchurch is a city with tragedy in its beautiful bones. Strolling its sometimes leafy and garden-like, sometimes barren and stricken streets late last August, I couldn’t help but fall in love with its remarkable resilience. Maybe it comes with being tucked away in the some of the most remote reaches of humanity on New Zealand’s southern half.
The quake-damaged ChristChurch Cathedral is scheduled for a multimillion-dollar restoration project.
Most of the world noticed in February 2011 when the city was rocked by a series of devastating earthquakes that killed 185 people. Among the buildings nearly destroyed in the temblors was the old stone cathedral that gives the city its name. It sits unrestored even to this day, but there are still dozens of sites in the city where the quake’s scars have not been covered back over.
The scars that will remain after the rampage of the Christchurch terrorist (who will henceforth go unnamed) will not be as visible, but they may be deeper. The country has now experienced its first terrorist attack. A city renowned for its courage and strength will have to find reserves it never fathomed it might need.
But in doing so, it may set an example for the world to follow, too.
I was in Christchurch at the invitation of the city’s annual writers festival, Word Christchurch, to talk about the rise of right-wing extremism, as explored in my book Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump. My lodging was less than a mile from the Al-Noor Mosque, on the other side of the city’s botanical gardens, and I noticed it on my strolls through the greenery, remarking on its pleasing aesthetic and cultural presence.
A wind sculpture in the Royal Botanical Gardens. Arts have played a key role in Christchurch’s recovery from the 2011 quakes.
It felt slightly incongruous, to be honest, because there are probably few places I have visited that seemed less likely to invite a terrorist attack than Christchurch. Its people are, in addition to their resilience and toughness, incredibly kind and generous and open-spirited. Yet it is those very attributes—the spirit of kia kaha, strength through community, the Maori phrase that became the city’s post-quake motto—that white supremacist terrorists seek to destroy more than any other thing.
Perhaps that is why, in defiance of the terrorist’s intent, the world has come to Christchurch’s door in support. Most people in the world see reflections of themselves and their own communities in this small city. We all can see the pain. And so there has been an outpouring of support and offers of help from around the globe, from communities of all colors, all backgrounds. Because we all can see the hate, too—and we know the time has come to take a stand against it.
Donald Trump, however, is not in that number. As always, this isn’t about community or terrorism or white supremacy, in his view. It’s about him.
Monday’s Tweet was a classic: “The Fake News Media is working overtime to blame me for the horrible attack in New Zealand. They will have to work very hard to prove that one. So Ridiculous!” The connection, however, is not terribly difficult to make: The terrorist, in fact, specifically praised the president as a source of inspiration: “'Trump is a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose,” he wrote in his online manifesto.
Trump, indeed, has had a symbiotic relationship with far-right extremists since at least 2015, one in which he has continually delivered wink-and-nudge signals such as “white genocide” and Pepe retweets, which white nationalists and other bigots have uniformly interpreted as encouragement and inspiration.
More to the point, those extremists have continued to march in Trump’s name: wearing bright-red MAGA hats to far-right street-fighting events, chanting “Hail Trump!” at Charlottesville in 2017, threatening civil war on his behalf to this day. Officials at the White House, as usual, adamantly denied that such a relationship exists after the Christchurch massacre: “The president is not a white supremacist,” said the acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, on Fox News. “I’m not sure how many times we have to say that.”
In reality, however, Trump’s denials are so anodyne and half-hearted and hollow that no one believes them—particularly not the white nationalists themselves. When Trump denounced white nationalists after Charlottesville, for example, movement leader Richard Spencer openly laughed at it: "Only a dumb person would take those lines seriously."
Trump continued his usual pattern—offering a routine condemnation, followed by a rationalization that seems to excuse the violence—after Christchurch on Friday, when he condemned the “horrible massacre” at the mosques, which the White House labeled a “vicious act of hate.” But when he was asked by a reporter whether he saw white nationalism as a rising threat around the world, Trump answered: “I don’t really. I think it’s a small group of people.”
In reality, of course, white supremacist hate groups have now reached an all-time zenith under Trump’s presidency, along with record levels of hate crimes, and a 181-percent increase in white supremacist propaganda incidents nationally. It is not at all surprising that we are also seeing an incoming tide of far-right domestic terrorism committed by white men.
That was the trend I was in Christchurch to talk about: how Trump himself was the nominal leader of a global resurgence in white supremacist organizing, facilitated by the online radicalization of young white men. You can listen to the hourlong conversation I had at Word Christchurch with journalist Paul Thomas here:
The nub of the conversation, really, came during questions and answers, when I explained that “alt-right” is basically a sort of umbrella term for an online movement that is increasingly moving into the real world, which had its origins with Gamergate, which was supposed to be a controversy over ethics in gaming journalism:
A lot of the early organizing of the alt-right came out of the computer gaming world. What it was was a lot of guys in this world were afraid that feminists were trying to destroy their preference for first-person shooter games. I’m serious. And they would then go on these message boards like 4chan and 8chan, and bitch and complain about women and feminists wanting to ruin their fun and change their world. And it grew into this belief that it was part of a larger plot to destroy Western white civilization.
This is where the white nationalists who also hung out on these message boards would chime in and say, “Well you know, there’s a reason for it—this is all part of a larger plot that’s called cultural Marxism.” What you should know, if you hear this term, is that it’s essentially a hoax, a conspiracy theory that’s a 21st-century version of old anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, such as the Protocols of the Seven Elders of Zion, which hold that there’s this secret cabal of Jews who are plotting to control the world and destroy Western civilization. … That gave these white nationalists this opening for recruiting these young white men.
At the time we discussed all this, I couldn’t really conceive that the threat I was describing would be one that people in Christchurch would be forced to confront in a horrifying way—rather, I was thinking of the families everywhere that are ripped asunder by their red-pilled kids, and perhaps some incidents of hate crimes. I was wrong about that.
Remarkably, however, even as the world turns its eyes to New Zealand in mourning, the little island nation down under is providing a world-class demonstration of exactly how to respond well to a white supremacist phenomenon that threatens all liberal democracies around the world, not to mention all nonwhite and non-authoritarian people of all backgrounds.
We have watched, with chills up our spines and tears in our eyes, the videos of Christchurch schoolchildren performing hakas in honor of the slain—Maori ceremonies that, as the Straits Times explains, are “an integral part of the Maori mourning process. Haka is used to show love and compassion. Haka is used to uplift the spirits of bereaved families.” We are able to see firsthand the power of kia kaha.
Perhaps as important, we’ve watched in wonder and frank envy as New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, has comforted the stricken communities, both Muslims and their friends and supporters who have been devastated by these attacks. We’ve observed her donning a hijab as a sign of respect as she does so. We’ve seen her embrace the vulnerable victims of the terrorism with warmth, sincerity, and grace. We’ve seen her announce immediate gun-ownership reforms. One hopes a program aimed at stoppering online radicalization and focused on white supremacist criminality will follow.
The contrast with our own president, who has plainly wished for the public to forget about Christchurch as soon as possible—not for the sake of healing, but for the sake of keeping it from contemplating too much the ongoing connections between his presidency and this violent and hateful movement—could not be more stark.
Memories can be short. But these are the kind that last. We can only pray that American voters keep them in their minds when they head to the polls in 2020.
