While the rest of the world mourned the 50 lives lost in the March 15 attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, the far right and its trolls were celebrating. From Breitbart News to Infowars to the sewers of 4chan, 8chan, and the Daily Stormer, extremists were unequivocal in reveling in the massacre.
“This is a good start,” wrote one commenter at Breitbart, beneath a headlined story detailing the mass murders. “That man is a goddam hero,” wrote another, as E.J. Gibney documented on Twitter. “a real feel good story!” added yet another.
Someone writing as “White Pride” chimed in: “payback is a bitch! Gun control and bans are futile!!! He is giving them another taste of their own medicine by fighting fire with fire! An eye for an eye, Tit for Tat, quid pro quo!!!”
“Armed Infidel” chimed in: “The rag heads could easily avoid this by not infesting the rest of the world with their presence.” Another commenter added: “I’ve thought about it and decided … I don’t care. It’s not as though there was any humans involved.”
Stewart Rhodes, leader of the neo-militia organization Oath Keepers, went on Alex Jones’ Infowars program and told listeners that the terrorist’s motives were legitimate:
When a guy who’s worried about or concerned about mass immigration of Muslims into Europe goes crazy and kills people, then they’re gonna blame all the rest of us who have the same concern. That’s how it’s gonna be used. And this is why we have to just fight back and say, ‘You know what, that doesn’t erase the fact that this is a problem. This is what drove this guy over the edge.’
Conspiracy theorist Matt Bracken also went on Jones’ show and appeared to urge others to follow in the terrorist’s footsteps. “The globalists want to keep the borders open and keep flooding America and the West with unassimilable Third-Worlders for as long as they can before there’s a rupture,” Bracken told Jones. “What the guy … did in New Zealand was try to speed it up so that the cataclysm happens sooner rather than later.”
Infowars host David Knight used the massacre as a chance to step up the demonization of Muslims: “Bringing in massive numbers of people all at once, of a different culture, different religion, that do not like your culture, do not like your religion, will not assimilate, are not coming here because they want the values and the culture of America, but simply because they want America,” he said. “They want our stuff. They want free stuff. They don’t want freedom.”
At 8chan, the message board where the terrorist himself posted frequently—including a warning post he published just before the massacre—the other “shitposters” were full of admiration for his rampage: “OP fucking delivered I saw him kill so many fucking hajis,” scribbled one, while another hailed him as “the next [Anders] Breivik” (the Norwegian terrorist who killed 87 people in a rampage aimed at liberals in 2011).
Similar sentiments were easy to find at Reddit message boards discussing the massacre. “If anything, many of us would help him. True hero,” wrote one. In contrast to other boards, however, Reddit moderators aggressively removed many such comments.
At explicitly white-supremacist and neo-Nazi websites such as the Daily Stormer, the celebration of the violence was more open and explicit. Its initial headline on the breaking story read: “New Zealand: Shitposter Massacres Mosques, Personally Radicalized by Candace Owens.” It later called the terrorist’s manifesto “smart” and his livestream video of the massacre “slick,” and later opined: “If You Were Unfazed Watching Brenton Tarrant Take Revenge, You’re Not Evil—You’re Normal.”
“This dude is already a folk hero to so many, and we have to agree that what he did was indisputably heroic in the classical sense,” Anglin wrote. “It is not an uncommon thing for heroes to act foolishly. The odds are people are going to crowdfund statues and memorials in honor of this guy. This dude is funny and joking around, which makes him seem far more funny and personable than the death cult invaders that he is slaughtering.”
Other white nationalists whined that the attacks made them look bad. “Can you imagine always being blamed for things that you have absolutely no control over? Can you imagine always being asked to apologize for these things?” noted anti-Semite Mike Peinovich wrote on Twitter. “Can you imagine being hated whether or not you do apologize? This is what being a White person in America today feels like.”
Somewhat predictably, the New Zealand terrorist appears already to be inspiring imitators elsewhere, though so far without any lethal consequences. In Escondido, California, someone set fire to a local mosque, and left behind graffiti referencing Christchurch and the shooter.
“The purpose of this kind of act is to create fear so you don’t go to your place of worship,” Mohammad Molla, a member of the Islamic Society of North County, told he Washington Post. “But you can’t live in fear,” he said. “If you do, the terrorists have won.”