Radical losers and lone wolves:
Growing white supremacist movement
‘Hope you enjoy shariah!’’ Those were the parting words delivered to New Zealanders by Canadian alt-Right provocateurs Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux at Auckland Airport in August 2018. Auckland had been a difficult stop during the pair’s international expedition to whip up resistance to multiculturalism and immigration, and to convince people of European descent that ‘‘it’s OK to be white’’.
Auckland Mayor Phil Goff banned them from Auckland Council venues. The owner of an alternative venue pulled their booking at the last minute, fearing ‘‘disruption’’. Meanwhile, a highprofile group of largely Right-wing New Zealanders formed the Free Speech Coalition to challenge Goff. The coalition has gone on to back a number of other Right-wing positions since.
It seemed an absurdity at the time. New Zealanders reassured themselves that Southern and Molyneux’s brand of intolerance was failing to take root here. Some thought it was an overreaction to talk about them or give them media oxygen.
Even the prime minister commented. ‘‘We are hostile to their views’’, Jacinda Ardern told reporters, and added that while there were no grounds to block the pair, that did not mean their views were welcome.
Ardern said: ‘‘I think you’ll find from the reaction they’ve had from New Zealanders that their views are not those that are shared by this country, and I’m quite proud of that.’’
In response, a defiant Southern called Ardern a virtue-signaller, and hopped on a plane to the next stop on the tour.
Southern and Molyneux present themselves, and others who think like them, as victimised and threatened, rather than relatively privileged. Sometimes this can seem comically over-dramatic, as in a recent video uploaded by Molyneux after he and Southern were again ‘‘de-platformed’’ by a venue, this time in Vancouver. ‘‘Out beyond this fragile, flickering firelight of civilisation, there are red-eyed wolves circling, sniffing, scratching for weakness, looking to snap at us,’’ Molyneux intoned in a video that inevitably included a link for online donations. There were more than 174,000 views on YouTube in four days.
The replacement theory
What did Southern mean when she made that quip about shariah at the airport? At the heart of alt-Right thinking, there is a fear that white people are being ‘‘replaced’’. They worry that birth rates among those of European descent are lower than for those of African and Middle Eastern descent, in particular. The mix of demographic trends and immigration convinces them that white people will soon become minorities. Islam will succeed Christianity in the West, and we will live under shariah law.
France has been a hotbed of this paranoid thinking, crystallised by Right-wing intellectual Renaud Camus in his 2012 book, The Great
Replacement. In the alleged Christchurch mosque shooter’s ‘‘manifesto’’, also titled The Great
Replacement, he describes being radicalised in Europe, where he saw large numbers of Muslims living in French towns.
Like Southern and Molyneux, Camus has not backed down from these views in the days after the Christchurch shooting, but has said he does not advocate violence.
Although he was born in Australia, the Christchurch accused’s time in Europe was central to his view of the imminent clash of civilisations. Like others on the alt-Right, he developed a nostalgia for a semi-imaginary medieval Europe of racial ‘‘purity’’ and heroism. He visited historical sites associated with the Crusades. His manifesto cites Pope Urban II, who launched the Crusades in 1095, and he claims that he received a blessing from a reborn ‘‘Knights Templar’’ movement linked to Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik.
The replacement theory has also taken hold in New Zealand, where it does not always wear the overt imagery of white supremacy. Dutch-born Dieuwe de Boer cofounded the website Right Minds in 2016, inspired by a view that Brexit in the United Kingdom and the election of Donald Trump in the United States meant there was finally some pushback against a world ‘‘drifting more leftward’’.
De Boer, who is 24, has read parts of the shooter’s manifesto and agrees there are points where it overlaps with his movement, despite his opposition to terrorism and violence.
‘‘The overlapping views obviously are that we favour nationalism and have an opposition to the United Nations,’’ de Boer says. ‘‘We want stronger controls on immigration. We haven’t talked much about replacement, but I would definitely highlight that Western nations in general have low birth rates.’’
Hence the need for the West to ‘‘import’’ workers from other cultures. ‘‘It’s partly responsible for the chaos we’re seeing across the western world,’’ de Boer says.
He knows that events in Christchurch and the public response will make the Right Minds position a harder sell. Until then, momentum had been slowly growing. Right Minds was strongly opposed to the United Nations Migration Pact and, with the group NZ Sovereignty, organised and promoted a national day of protest on February 2. About 100 people showed up at Aotea Square in Auckland to hear speeches and buy ‘‘Make New Zealand Great Again’’ mugs and hats. Mainstream political parties ACT and the New Conservative party also lent their support.
De Boer also helped to organise a free speech rally at Aotea Square after the Southern and Molyneux cancellation, and tried to find an alternative venue for the pair. He claims that there has been a ‘‘witch hunt’’ online against groups like his since the Christchurch events: ‘‘We got messages saying we had blood on our hands and this was our fault.’’
While he decries the ‘‘politicisation’’ of the tragedy in Christchurch, de Boer has continued to publish blogs critical of Islam and the prime minister’s inclusive response to the attack. He denounced a national broadcast of an Islamic call to prayer. ‘‘On Friday, for at least a moment, New Zealand will become an Islamic nation,’’ he warned.
‘‘I think you’ll find from the reaction [Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux] have had from New Zealanders that their views are not those that are shared by this country, and I’m quite proud of that.’’
Jacinda Ardern
Who belongs?
Auckland University’s Chris Wilson has gone through the alleged shooter’s manifesto and seen the all-too-familiar language.
‘‘The word ‘invaders’ was used so many times,’’ he says. ‘‘It’s nativist rhetoric that says the time has come to act now. ‘It’s almost too late. We’re being over-run by immigrants and we’re going to lose our culture, our traditions, our homeland. Look at their crime, their high birth rates.’ ‘‘
A senior lecturer in politics with a strong interest in terrorism and conflict, Wilson is writing a book about nativist violence. He explains that nativism goes back nearly 200 years to when white Americans resisted Irish Catholic immigration. As a malleable belief system about who belongs to a place and who does not, it has evolved to find new homes and new targets.
It comes with glaringly obvious ironies and contradictions. ‘‘You get this ridiculous idea of white people in settler societies believing they are the autochthons or original inhabitants of the land.’’
In Australia, this took the bizarre form of the Australian Natives’ Association, a 19thcentury party formed entirely of white men. On this side of the Tasman, nativism has never been as strong. Wilson says the Treaty of Waitangi is one means by which Pa¯ keha¯ are constantly reminded they are not the original owners of the land, whereas in Australia the myth of ‘‘terra nullius’’ – no-one’s land – told white people the country had no original owners.
‘‘Think about the difference between Waitangi Day and Australia Day.’’
Wilson would have expected the attack we saw in Christchurch to have happened in Australia, and not just because the alleged killer is Australian. The location was ‘‘part of the shock’’.
Beyond Australia and New Zealand, Wilson notes that nativist political sentiment is growing quickly and becoming mainstream. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban warns of the need to preserve ‘‘the Christian identity of
‘‘You get this ridiculous idea of white people in settler societies believing they are the autochthons or original inhabitants of the land.’’
Chris Wilson Auckland University
‘‘We want stronger controls on immigration. We haven’t talked much about replacement, but I would definitely highlight that Western nations in general have low birth rates.’’
Dieuwe de Boer Co-founder of the website Right Minds
Europe’’ and calls refugees ‘‘Muslim invaders’’. There are nativist parties with varying levels of support in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Austria. Wilson also cites Kotleba in Slovakia and Golden Dawn in Greece, along with One Nation in Australia and the Republican Party in the US.
Far from being fringe, the replacement theory is an idea at the heart of Europe’s politics, as the
Sydney Morning Herald put it this week.
Similarly, as Wilson notes, the replacement theory has inspired terrorists, such as Breivik in Norway and Alexandre Bissonnette in Canada. Robert Bowers, the suspect in the 2018 shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, reportedly complained that a Jewish group was bringing ‘‘invaders in that kill our people’’.
Trump’s election legitimised this view and helped those who agree with it feel less like outsiders, Wilson says. And while it strikes many as abhorrent, it has to be taken seriously as a genuinely held belief.
‘‘There are not too many things that get people as emotionally worked up as the idea of losing your homeland and traditions to another group,’’ Wilson says. ‘‘It’s foolish for us to pretend that people don’t actually believe this.’’
Losers and humour
In an explanation of the terrorist mindset published in 2006, German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger talked about ‘‘the radical loser’’. In a seemingly prosperous and successful society, the loser feels isolated and angry. He looks for someone to blame and, once he finds a group to belong to and be further radicalised by – ‘‘a collective of people like himself who welcome him, who need him’’ – then he will act.
That was in the context of Islamism’s Western terror cells. But, 13 years later, do the losers even need to join a real life group?
‘‘You probably don’t need local networks any more,’’ Wilson agrees.
As far as we know, the alleged Christchurch shooter’s radical community was online. Where were they geographically? Everywhere and nowhere. They spoke in an internet language of shared in-jokes, memes and coded references.
Canterbury University PhD student Ben Elley has been observing the online white supremacist community on websites like 4chan. For Elley, an alt-Right attack in his hometown ‘‘was like reading a book and then seeing it come to life in front of you’’.
He originally started researching Isis but found it hard to get good information. By contrast, the alt-Right were ‘‘so comfortable and unafraid of being observed that all of their discussion takes place in public’’. New Zealand was largely off their radar until after the 2017 election, when conspiracy theories started to circulate about the Labour Government letting in a flood of refugees.
He has become familiar with the strange mix of seriousness and dark humour that can be a trap for the unwary. If the alt-Right say terrible things in a jokey way, those who call them out risk looking stupid. It can be hard to get a handle on what is meant and what is not. Once you are in that community, the outside world is warped, and real life events turn into something that affirms their narrative.
‘‘There is a push towards doing more and more extreme things,’’ Elley says.
It is hard to describe or explain, but there is a peculiar way in which the alleged Christchurch shooter seemed to be both enacting a terrible atrocity in real life and also performing it for the online friends he directly addressed in the live-stream video. Until then, even they may not have known how serious he was.
The use of humour as a tactic to lure in the like-minded was exposed two years ago when the
Huffington Post published the leaked style guide of the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer.
It advised that ‘‘the tone of the site should be light’’ as ‘‘most people are not comfortable with material that comes across as vitriolic, raging, nonironic hatred’’.
Southern and Molyneux’s reliance on pranks, stunts and shareable video fits this pattern, as does the much more extreme sarcasm and antisocial posturing of altRight star Milo Yiannopoulos, who was banned from Australia after claiming that attacks like the one in Christchurch ‘‘happen because the establishment panders to and mollycoddles extremist leftism and barbaric, alien religious cultures’’.
This is not the old-fashioned Right. Irish writer Angela Nagle, author of Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the alt-Right,
argued that the transgressiveness and shock tactics once used by the avant-garde Left have been adopted instead by the Right. Young men have long admired moral transgressors, she wrote, but now those transgressive attitudes are in the service of conservative views about race, religion and sex.
The alleged Christchurch shooter parroted the Daily Stormer style guide when he wrote about using ‘‘edgy humour and memes in the vanguard stage’’ to attract a young following and appeal to ‘‘the anger and black comedic nature of the present’’. Memes have ‘‘done more for the ethnonationalist movement than any manifesto’’, he wrote, but there will come a time to take off the mask and revert to sounding more like a traditional fascist.
‘‘Eventually we will need to show the warmth and genuine love we have for our people,’’ he wrote.
Homeland and resistance
‘‘It’s just a classic alt-Right piece of garbage,’’ US writer David Neiwert says of the manifesto. ‘‘Nobody should bother actually reading it.’’
Neiwert has been reporting on white supremacy for decades, long before it found a home online. He also recognises the familiar language of homeland and violent
resistance. His 2017 book, AltAmerica: The Rise of the Radical
Right in the Age of Trump, showed how far-Right groups that had festered on the margins were legitimised by Trump’s election in 2016, but it was no overnight story. Conspiracy theorists, the Rightwing Tea Party movement and alternative media figures like Alex Jones helped to lay the foundations.
The book opened with a chilling coincidence. The day after Trump announced his campaign for the presidency in 2015, a young man named Dylann Roof walked into a church in Charleston, South Carolina, and shot nine people because they were black. Prosecutors said that he was ‘‘selfradicalised online’’, rather than through contact with existing hate groups.
Organisations such as the Southern Poverty Law Centre watch hate groups, but those who self-radicalise go under the radar. They are exposed to the belief systems and online material but never join a group. The alleged Christchurch shooter fitted that pattern, when he wrote that he has ‘‘read the writings of Dylann Roof and many others’’, although Breivik remained his ‘‘true inspiration’’.
‘‘This is very much a global movement, the white nationalist movement, particularly because it’s been spread online,’’ Neiwert says.
The Christchurch shootings were hard on Neiwert because he was in the city only last year, talking about his book at the city’s writers festival. ‘‘I couldn’t think of a town less likely to be dealing with it, of all the places I’ve visited, than Christchurch. I’m shocked that it happened in New Zealand at all.’’
Americans have been disturbed and horrified, but also impressed by how New Zealand ‘‘is giving Americans an object lesson in how to respond’’.
Taking a historical view, Neiwert sees the current phase of the alt-Right as similar to the 1980s, when white supremacists engaged in what they called leaderless resistance. They tried to organise people into small militia cells or as lone wolves.
There is some misunderstanding of the latter term, Neiwert adds: ‘‘It means terrorist actors who don’t have any affiliation with the larger ideological group, which is a way of protecting those groups from being harmed by the crimes those actors then go out and commit.’’
It does not mean that Roof or the alleged Christchurch shooter came up with the idea by themselves; it simply means that they followed existing blueprints.
And the replacement theory has spread further in the US since the election of Trump. Variations on the idea that ‘‘diversity equals white genocide’’ have taken hold. During a ‘‘Unite the Right’’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, white marchers carried torches and chanted ‘‘You will not replace us’’ and ‘‘Jews will not replace us’’. The rally led to the murder of protester Heather Heyer by Nazi sympathiser James Alex Fields Jr.
The thinking can only ever go in one direction, as Neiwert observes. ‘‘This kind of rhetoric is encouraging people to go out and kill.’’