Interlude
 
1. Mass Murder as Shitposting
 
Interlude
 
2. Mass Murder as Meme
 
Interlude
 
3. Mass Murder as Larp
 
Interlude
 
4. Mass Murder as Hoax

 
 
 

Interlude

 

I was not yet a teenager when I first saw someone die. The internet had spaces so vast that one would think that they were open to the air; it also had grubby corridors caked, frankly, in filth. For all that it was a labyrinth, and I found myself in places that were not intended for me.  In one of them, as a reply by one poster to another (the specifics are lost, a sparse forum, yellow font on black, no discernible purpose) I saw a video of a man shooting himself with a shotgun.

Death is the moment of carnage. A man speaks, perhaps in Russian. There is a white wall, a doorway, a sofa, a gun. The violence does not announce itself; it does not follow the niceties of narrative. Seconds into the video the man is dead. The video does not end. It is indifferent

It had been posted to shock, to scare, to sear and scald, and it did. I panicked and closed the window, and waited in fear as though I had erred, as though someone would come find me, but no one did.

Life went on, leaving death behind, but bearing its knowledge. I was awash in shame after watching it, as though I had been marked, and I did not seek such videos again (though there are those who do not feel this way; there are those who go on looking). My idea of the visible, the filmable, the conceivable, had warped. The veil had parted for a moment and past it I saw gore.

 

Mass Murder as Shitposting

 

On 15 March 2019, at 00:28:41, a white nationalist terrorist posted a thread titled *ahem* on 8chan a few minutes before embarking on a massacre targeting Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand. “Well lads,” he began, “it’s time to stop shitposting and time to make a real life effort post. I will carry out and attack against the invaders, and will even live stream the attack via facebook. The facebook link is below, by the time you read this I should be going live.” In the half hour between the beginning of his livestream and his apprehension by the police, the murderer killed fifty-one people and injured eighty-nine others.^[1]

The livestream begins with the shooter picking up a camera and saying “Let’s get this party started.” There is the inside of a car, several guns covered in white writing on the passenger seat, hundreds of rounds of ammunition in magazines also covered in white writing loosely held in the front pockets of his armored vest. He straps the camera jerkily to his helmet. “Remember lads,” he says, “subscribe to PewDiePie.”^[2] Then he begins to drive to the first mosque he has targeted.

This was terrorism as livestreamed spectacle, the terrorist as shitposter. The unspeakable violence suffered by the Muslim community of Christchurch was not the only end. The Christchurch shooting became a potent symbol in the online radical right, one which exemplifies a modular approach to terrorism. In such an approach, mass murder becomes a spectacular means for an attacker to air their grievances against society and place their carnage in the service of a larger political or spiritual movement. Even so there are some in the right who claim that the shooter was not an “organic” radical but rather an agent of a larger conspiracy acting under a false flag. There are even theories that the video has been faked, using a combination of CGI and crisis actors, which are fed by the choppy framerate and low resolution of most available copies. Some posters would say that this proves that one could not have unambiguous evidence of an attack without 60fps 4K video, and even then, who knows? In such places trust is thin on the ground. The shooting becomes a profoundly destabilizing act, whose truth or falsity is decided by the context into which each individual places it. And there is of course an explosion of context, vertiginous swells of context, context become a wedge by which reality can be split between the real and unreal.

This was not, I believe, a shooting with any actionable political goals, because the stated goals are politically incoherent. However, it did have memetic, symbolic goals.^[3] For instance, in his manifesto the shooter declared himself a Nazi and claimed that the attack was aimed at reversing the immigration into New Zealand, instigating civil war in the USA, and drawing attention to what he called the great replacement, or white genocide. The shooter also claimed that he expected to be released from prison as a hero in twenty-seven years, just as Nelson Mandela was. These professed aims are worse understood as reasonable extrapolations of political reality; they are better understood as an attempt at sick prophecy, at providing to the future a historiography in which the killer and others like him are beatified. Yet it must be noted that this decipherment, or indeed any decipherment of the attack made by someone who is outside of or opposed to the interpretive community it creates, cannot precisely follow an insider’s logic. In other words, what I call political incoherence or disingenuousness may be part of an initiatic or radicalizing path promised by such politics.

The killer constructed this memetic violence by overloading the thread, livestream, and manifesto with visual referents, a strategy that anticipates and invites overinterpretation and overreading. If mass murder is treated as spectacle, then all the smithereens scattered by it, be they images or text or video, are part of the spectacle. We may see this even in the choice of outfit used by the killer. Every inch of his guns and magazines were covered in white writing: runes, names of right-wing militants, dates of decisive battles between Christian and Muslim states, and taunts such as “REFUGEES WELCOME TO HELL,” “14 words”, “TURKOFAGOS.”     ^[4] He also bore on the frontispiece of his manifesto and on his person the symbol of the Sonnenrad or the Black Sun, a symbol that was used by the esoteric order of the SS. The shooter appears to thus place his action in spiritual warfare rather than merely temporal, intending to guide any inspired viewers to subterranean currents such as esoteric Hitlerism. All this points to a desire for everything to signify: a fear of under-signification, an attempt to over-encode the event so as to orient its aftermath in what the shooter sees as a desirable political direction.

 

 

The attack was immediately championed by an (apparently) organic community of the online radical right, while others bemoaned the optics of shooting defenseless people and denounced the event as a false flag. Initial attempts by governments and private corporations to make the manifesto and the video inaccessible were unsuccessful.^[5] The manifesto was rehosted countless times and read aloud by several YouTube users. Endlessly proliferating versions of the video were uploaded: mirrored, distorted, or with watermarks to evade algorithmic reason. Both remain easy to find. A dispersed effort soon began on 8chan and 4chan to translate the manifesto—by the end of March 2019 it had been translated into nine languages with work underway on nineteen others. The posts organizing the translation ended with the quote ARBEIT MACHT FREI, the words at the entrance of Auschwitz.

 

 

I remember learning of the attack on the same day, reading the first media reports. One of them mentioned that the shooter had been enticed to white nationalism and murder by the video games Spyro the Dragon 3 and Fortnite. Someone on twitter claimed that the shooter had trained as a Navy Seal, with hundreds of confirmed kills. It takes great cruelty to cover cruelty with farce. I felt a sense of ethical urgency as I watched the news agencies snarled in the traps that had been laid for it, due to their lack of understanding of the grammar and the iconography of the killing. I, too, had not known that someone could have conceived mass murder as shitposting, until I did. Another veil parted.

 

Interlude

 

Do you know the horrors your screen is capable of? Only a series of clicks and the right address stand between you (as you read this) and documents of this crime and many others. The video (and even edits with timestamps and amateur fascist iconography) remains suspiciously easy to find.

Reading an account of cruelty is very different from watching a recording of it. The indifference of the camera to horror, the attention taken without asking, the brutality of testimony. The gore I had seen in my younger days I had found without ever looking for it, but it remained in me as a knowledge, as a sickening pulse in the dark of the world. Looking for the video of the shooting was different, because it was a choice. I was compelled (dangerous word) to seek it so I would understand something of the world we now live in. I found the video (easily) in 2019 in an unmarked webm; I found the video (easily) in 2025 on a website where snuff films are uploaded and upvoted on, where a gif of a dancing Lola Bunny periodically pops up on screen. Years from now I do not expect it to be much harder to find.

When a film is made of someone’s death, they do not die only once. Every viewer becomes a participant in the endless re-murdering; everyone who does not see it will still be shaped by the world where such things have come to pass. I suspect that maintaining one’s mental hygiene and passing over such things without seeing them cannot save one from complicity either. How does one engage with the testimony of the event, especially when that testimony aims to enable others to follow in its footsteps? A muddle of iconography has been placed around the horror in the center, the horror of the murder of innocents. When blood fills the eyes, you cannot see.

 

Mass Murder as Meme

 

All a joke asks you is whether you are in on it. Do you know what it means? Do you understand? Why exactly do you understand it? Undergirding the terror of the physical violence is the terror even of understanding the joke, worrying that by being in on it one can become complicit. In his manifesto, the killer says: “Create memes, post memes, and spread memes. Memes have done more for the ethno-nationalist movement than any manifesto.” We must remember that the radicalization that made this attack possible involved memes intimately, and also that memes were used as perverse recruiting tools by the shooter. The attack had been planned along vectors beyond the physical; the multimedia rollout of livestream video and manifesto was placed as an incendiary in many media ecosystems, drawing more right-wing extremists to its spectacular explosion. In the video, the barrel of a gun juts in from the bottom of the frame, resembling nothing more than a first- person shooter.^[6]  It invited a target audience of disaffected young white men to insert themselves into it, to imagine themselves capable of such violence, to sympathize.

The shooter courts sympathy through his attempts at humor. When he drives to his second planned target, he does so to a playlist with songs such as “Karadžić, Lead Your Serbs” (also called “Serbia Stronk” or “Remove Kebab,” used by white supremacists to refer to the ethnic cleansing of Muslims), and a theme from the 90s racing anime Initial D,^[7] all while stopping to kill people by the side of the road. The cruelty, in the coupling of atrocity and insouciance, is the point. Humor attempts to make the violence conceivable, or even palatable; by studding his terroristic act with jokes, the perpetrator attempts to hold the door open for others, to show a target audience of disaffected white men that not very much separates the act of chuckling at a racist joke from killing Muslims. The shooter claims that Spyro the Dragon made him a white nationalist, anticipating the mockery of the journalists who have to consider these outlandish claims seriously; the viewer who understands the joke already has a foot in the door.

The meme-rich language of the manifesto was undecipherable to anyone who was not familiar with the online subculture, and thus would snarl up an unwitting commentator. This linguistic barrier was reported by news outlets as a reason to see it as an elaborate troll not to be shared or discussed. The New York Times “initially decided to handle the manifesto by assigning two reporters to annotate sections of it. After closely reading the material, however, the reporters realized they couldn’t annotate it without playing into the hands of the attacker.”^[8] The language of the manifesto, with several memes and copypastas, was made immediately legible to the online audience, while “[tricking] all journalists into writing inaccurate and stupid copy.”^[9] There would be no way to engage with what had happened without furthering its political goals.

Memes do not proceed from reality; they are constitutive of reality. This understanding may be called “hyperstition,” which may be defined as a “fictions capable of turning themselves into reality.”^[10] A portmanteau of “hyper” and “superstition,” hyperstition refers to prophecies that bring with them the conditions of their fulfilment. In his manifesto the shooter says he did not carry out the attack for fame, but that “the aftershock from [his] actions will ripple for years to come, driving political and social discourse, creating the atmosphere or fear and change that is required.”^[11] Thus the shooter’s unworkable political goals, thus his fantasy that he shall be released and feted as a just warrior in decades to come. What remains at the center of memetic warfare is the terrorist as the revolutionary sent back in time to bring the future into being—destroying the current world to forge from its ashes an order that renders every violence just. In this scheme there may be an incipient terrorist-in-you in every disaffected white man, who only has to be called upon to be activated.

When I write about this, I find myself thinking about vernaculars, about legibility, about finding signals in the noise. Even today one may find in Nazi meme threads on 4chan images of Saint Tarrant of Christchurch, complete with a spinning Black Sun, celebrating him as a savior of white people. In response one may find images of the shooter in the garb of a Hasidic Jew, chastising Mossad for their “sloppy job” with the false flag. Irony and sincerity follow each other, faster and faster, until the blurring between them forms a third, more terrifying thing.

 

Interlude

 

When I tell people I am studying this they look at me with concern. I tell myself that I do not spend too long on it, but perhaps any amount of time is too much. No one, however, is immune. Snuff films have aerosolized, they have diffused into the visual culture. There has never been more shaky footage from mass shootings, from the dash- and body-cams of killers, from bystanders to missiles that scream from above and turn homes and people into rubble and corpses coated in grey dust. The livestream of the attack does not feel as inconceivable as it once did, not even in its flippancy in the face of mass murder. Every day that I have been writing this, I have seen pictures of genocide and starvation in Gaza, some taken by gleeful and unrepentant perpetrators. Following these pictures are reams of comments calling mangled infants wax mannequins, calling the starving and the dying paid actors, calling the grinning killers heroes. Bots rail at each other; unreal images crowd out the rest, the waters of reality seem too thin to keep us afloat. We all suffer the warping violence of a world that bombards some of us with terror and death and bombards the rest of us with their images.

In April 2025 the President of the United States posted a video taken from a drone, showing grainy greyscale footage from above of dozens of figures standing in a loose rectangle. The crosshair drifts to the center, and a flash of white blows out the image. There is an explosion, billows of smoke shot through with fire, swells of dust. When it clears, there is no longer anything there but a crater. There are not even corpses.

“Oops, there will be no attack by these Houthis!” says the President.

 

Mass Murder as Larp

 

Right wing extremists do not spring up from nothing. An entire ecosystem dedicated to shock and horror, geared towards incitement to violence, was needed to turn a normal racist white boy into someone capable of mass murder. Loosely moderated imageboards often have ‘rekt’ threads, where one may share gifs and videos of people dying in accidents or being murdered.  8chan’s /pol/ board, where the terrorist posted the manifesto and livestream links, is dedicated to cruel and repugnant right wing ideology, where posters can anonymously bemoan what they see as the decline of Western civilization. There are many strains of conservatism and right wing radicalism represented — from Republicans to esoteric Hitlerists. This loose confederation of right-wing causes provides a kind of “big tent” approach to terrorism where people who are not totally ideologically aligned cooperate anyway, as fellow travelers.

Many dream of violence, few carry it out. Even some of the early posters on the 8chan thread, before the massacre started, were derisive. Twenty-one minutes after the original post, an anon wondered whether the post was a larp, not knowing that it was a very grim “real life effort post.” Two minutes later, another anon wondered “Will OP deliver?” Someone who had seen the livestream replied “not larp, actually happening. delete this thread now or its gonna be the end of 8pol.” This question of whether or not something is a larp, to what extent something is a larp, is at the core of memetic terrorism.

Larping is playing pretend. It comes from “live action roleplay,” meaning a circumscribed activity where people take on roles and act them out according to certain predetermined rules. Cops and robbers, Renaissance faires. Online radicals accuse each other of being larpers all the time: “You are no Aryan-Hyperborean-Esoteric-Hitlerist, you are a tfw-no-gf-beta-cuck living in a fantasyland.” The typical response is a scramble to assert one’s own credentials, followed by a counter-accusation. This tracks; this makes sense; most shitposting is only larping that rarely transcends the virtual. Links between larping and violent extremism have been noted by law enforcement: for example, the FBI notes that “some groups of like-minded individuals have organized into formalized self-styled militias or informal clubs. Meetings may entail impassioned rhetoric and rehearsal of tactical operations for the ultimate future apocalypse when citizens will overtake the government or institute their own community policing.” The article notes that apprehended suspects of criminal conspiracies have attempted to use the defense that “they were merely LARPing and not intending to follow through with an attack.”^[12] Such defenses are used in a tongue-in-cheek way by edgy posters of all stripes; e.g. “We should kill Elon Musk… IN A VIDEOGAME.” Wink wink.

This sort of larping is apparent in the affective claims of the manifesto, where the dominant theme is one of a sudden coming-to-consciousness. The manifesto presents a narrative where the shooter came to recontextualize his entire life in light of the coming conflagration, to answer the call to arms to end immigration into what he calls historically European lands. He describes his travels around the world, meeting organized far-right groups, even getting a blessing from Anders Breivik. The manifesto also claims that the Western countries are full of those sympathetic to white nationalism: “People from every walk of life, in every place of employment and field, but disproportionately employed in military services and law enforcement.” This is a performative presentation of white supremacy as a decentralized international movement, which from time to time will erupt in terroristic violence, and almost certainly exaggerates its power to create a state of panic about the impotence of Western democracies and lend greater visibility to fascist ideas.

Larping is also apparent in the lineages in which the shooter places his actions. Just as referring to PewDiePie before committing murder puts the shooter in the context of irony-poisoned online shitposters, using “[t]he enigmatic symbol of the Black Sun indicates the faraway ideals of Thule, an alternative world in total opposition to a multiracial Europe.”^[13] His use of runes and dates of battles between Christians and Muslims, and his promise to meet his fellow travelers in Valhalla, indicates that his struggle is that of an esoteric white nationalist warrior in the vanguard of an ongoing crusade. For a radical white nationalist these are rabbit holes that they may follow to more recondite forms of forbidden or ignored knowledge, larping dreams of Hyperborean ancestry and Nazi UFOs. What appears to take form for a stumbling reader is a grand syncretic underbelly of knowledge that pushes them further and further from consensus reality. The use of such esoteric symbolism may have done much to endear the shooter to Wotanists, Neopagans, Esoteric Hitlerists, and others who see contemporary life as a working-out of a cosmic battle, while simultaneously obscuring this dimension to a mainstream observer. All this is done as if in a fraternal fashion that welcomes people who would sympathize with him or follow in his footsteps. One may easily imagine other shooters following this example, constructing and adhering to their own ideologies of white warrior virility for themselves. This is a do-it-yourself terrorism, where one may self-insert as the protagonist of a massacre, shitposting one’s way into race war.

In October 2019 there was another attempted attack on a synagogue in Halle, Germany, which was explicitly inspired by the Christchurch shooter.^[14] Here also the shooter posted a link to a livestream, and to three files. The first, “A short pre-action report,” contained pictures of his arsenal, mostly jury-rigged to demonstrate the effectiveness of homemade weapons.^[15] Also in this file were his nervous musings about his unpreparedness and a list of achievements, like those one earns after completing optional tasks in a videogame. The titles were meant to be comedic: “No Way Back,” earned for uploading this pdf, “Chosen to die” for killing a Jew, and “Crusty Kebab” for burning down a mosque. Another file^[16] contained a cryptic reference to an 8ch user named Mark, thanking him for 0.1 btc^[17] and calling him a “filthy jew”. The third^[18] is a manifesto of four pages and barely any text, described thus:

• page 1: Techno-Barbarism [in Gothic letters] / A Spiritual Guide for discontent White Men in the current year +4 / Dedomesticate yourself / and / Kill all Jews [in large letters, bold, italics and underlined]
• page 2: Mudsl*mes, christk*kes, commies, n*****s and traitors too.
• page 3: thanks for reading [in very small letters]
• page 4: Become a / techno-barbarian / today / and get a / free* / Cat-girl [The * leads to a fine print reading] Disclaimer: You need to kill at least one jew to qualify. / Alternatives include Fox-Girls and normal Waifus. / She will always be loyal, so treat her good.
• On page 4 we find a picture of a typical anime cat-girl in a box on which it is printed in Gothic letters: “Strategic Cat Girl Supplies”]^[19]

The attack did not go as planned. The bomb failed to penetrate the door to the synagogue, the weapons jammed, and the shooter shot at random bystanders. He then began to panic, apologize, and berate himself on the livestream. The attacker was mocked as a larper, and the comparison to the more destructive Christchurch shooting fed theories about Christchurch having been a false flag carried out by a trained agent. For example, a poster on 4chan stated that “you can see the difference between a mossad trained shooter and a basement autist with a home made gun”.^[20] The paranoia is large enough to make the truth undecidable. Can we trust a killer to tell us the truth? Is the trap set for us in doubting the story, or accepting it?

 

Interlude

 

Email from the editor:

First, we’re especially excited by your opportunity to look at ekphrasis as a way of OVER-reading, of looking at body language and meme contexts for clues, hunting for easter eggs in visual media (as your conceptual framing with paranoia illuminates). And since you’re talking about interpreting videos with videos, we think it might serve you well to do some definitional ground-clearing around how you use the word “ekphrasis” (since everyone uses it a little differently)—what is visual, what is verbal, what is written text, and how do translations and interpretations move those meanings around? I like that you noted that he made his manifesto “legible” to an online audience, as opposed to recognizable or decipherable—does the process of reading manifestos, in this context, produce knowledge differently than seeing a meme would? How do those mechanisms work?

 

Email to the editor:

Your point about overreading is wonderful—it’s an overreading that is anticipated by the text, because of which it must make itself immediately decipherable. To what extent can one’s fluency in the visual codes of an online subculture mark you as one of them rather than an impostor? What is the place of the critic or the unsympathetic observer in all this—can one ever claim authority in being able to separate the real from the troll?  If such codes exist, is it not simplicity itself to ape them and pretend to be an insider rather than an infiltrator? How would a white nationalist know, in essence, that any person posting on the forum is a “genuine Nazi” and not an imposter? The answer is undecidable but political reality moves along by splitting along the faultlines of the answer to that question. Keeping in mind that the boundaries of the visual is needful, I also wonder at your last question about producing knowledge through memes versus manifestos, and how they differ. Do elaborate; I’d like to hammer out a bit of a direction, whether archaeological (excavating the threads and manifestos) or paranoiac (what a world we live in where nothing has a bottom to it.)

 

Email from the editor:

But you are in a bind, as you say in the piece: to go down these rabbit holes is to follow the shooter’s wishes. On the other hand, to treat him as unexplainable is to re-mystify him, which also gives him what he wants—he becomes a shadowy figure threatening resurrected violence from the corners like some kind of trickster god. Your elegant turns of phrase about the shooter at times seem to magnify his presence, so that while you refrain from using his name (a decision I quite like), his name can also seem taboo. I also wonder if the essay needs an outside perspective that would deflate some of the shooter’s grand theories and give us some purchase on a social order outside this small online world. […] As you’ll see in some of my comments, I’m curious about the work those interludes are doing to establish your own positionality: someone adjacent to these online spaces but not of them, horrified by them but nonetheless coming into contact with them multiple times. I think you might double down on that first-person perspective (using “I” instead of “one” as the subject who’s investigating, for instance). As a reader, it’s difficult for me to extrapolate from your experience of the internet to my own—I have never been on these forums, never seen a snuff film, never recognized a Nazi (maybe just because I didn’t know what to look for).

 

Mass Murder as Hoax

 

The shooter is reported to have asked his mother not to refer to him as a Nazi in her messages to him, worrying that this would place him under surveillance. However, “[w]hen interviewed, he said there was an element of “play-acting” in his comments, and it was common for those on the far-right to believe they were under surveillance.”^[21] In the manifesto we can see clearly that such an ambiguous relationship to the apparent and the true reality of the shooting was anticipated. When asking himself “Are you a Fed/shill/mossad agent/false flag/patsy/infiltrator/antifa/glow in the dark etc?”, he replies “No, but the next person to attack could be, so a healthy scepticism is a good thing. Just do not allow your scepticism to turn to paranoia and keep you from supporting those that want the best for you.” Hence the comedic style of the manifesto and the livestream, hence the memes and jokes and copypastas. The shooter’s facility in the language of 8chan’s culture served as a shibboleth, absolutely essential to his message—it is this facility that would make it possible for him to be taken as a “genuine” shooter rather than a CIA or Mossad plant.

It is common for posters on 4chan or 8chan to accuse each other of being feds or spies. Indeed, atop the original 8chan post we can see a helpfully pinned link titled “The Gentleperson’s Guide to Forum Spies,” which alerts readers to the fact that members of intelligence agencies use boards such as 8chan to pose as extremist figures, then identify, groom, and entrap other posters. Posters in threads that plan or champion extremist violence are referred to as radioactive, or “glowing,” and there is a wariness towards anything that may cross from speech into action. Rather than feeding a cohesive movement, such operations would be geared towards inspiring individual mass shooters, a totally dispersed and self-identifying group — obviously easy to manipulate. This is the most pressing inducement to paranoia—an extremist can never be sure whether a fellow poster is truly a fellow poster, and they can never know whether they are being surveilled.

We find ourselves here in the covert sphere,^[22] in that shadowy realm where the adjacency to espionage and government secrecy makes it impossible to tell truth from fiction. In this gray zone, the official narrative is discarded as misleading, and even the most terrible claims by conspiracy theorists may be hiding yet more terrible truths. No one may be trusted, the task for every paranoiac is to construct an alternative and stigmatized learning. After all this kind of truth is only thinkable as hypertext; as the shooter says, “From where did you receive/research/develop your beliefs? / The internet, of course. You will not find the truth anywhere else.” Rather than a network of knowledge by which reliable truth can be reached, the internet reveals itself as one or several diaphanous frames by which reality can be seen otherwise. Shitposting, trolling, larping, hoaxing, are all rolled up with each other, and with “real life effort posts.”

Certainty is fragile, and it falls away from our frame. Yet one thing, I think, can be certain—unless we know what we are looking for, we will not know what we are looking at. When a meme is a cognitive bomb, thrown up from deep politics to which we have no access, every interpretation may reveal itself to be a layer of obfuscation. A system of veils surrounds us. There is no furthest position, no vantage that we may rest at to surveil the whole, without suspecting that this vantage has also been prepared for us, and that it covers another more dangerous truth in obscurity.

 

Interlude

 

At one time I was learning German and so I joined a worldwide German learning discord server, where a random selection of German learners would, at all hours of the day, be in the voice chat. A discord is no place for strife; one is only supposed to say Wie geht es ihnen? Ich bin so und so, and then falter. When the conversation would chafe at the limits of our language, we would default to our many Englishes instead.

One day one of the people in the voice chat was a user whose profile picture was a Black Sun. I spoke to him, already knowing the answer.

—What is that in your profile picture?

—Do you know what it is?

—I know what it is.

—Then you know what it is.

The veil parted for a moment. Knowledge had cursed me, because I knew what I was looking at. In moments I had already recognized an anonymous online fascist, and by recognizing him in this way he would believe I was a kindred. Without any prompting he began to tell me that he was a Brazilian follower of a pagan Nordic religion named Asatru, that he would soon be going into the forest during the full moon for a religious ceremony, that even though Bolsonaro was cucked he had loosened the gun laws, and this would help with the combat to come.

A befuddled participant of the voice chat piped up. —Are you talking about videogames? 

The man with the Black Sun laughed, left and did not return. A larper, certainly a larper. But who really knows?
 

---

 

^[1] For more background information on the attack, see Jade Hutchinson, “Far-Right Terrorism: The Christchurch Attack and Potential Implications on the Asia Pacific Landscape” Counter Terrorist Trends and Analyses 11.6 (2019): 19-28.

^[2] A gaming vlogger, known for his edgy humor, who was at the time of the shooting the most-subscribed channel on YouTube.

^[3] MemeAnalysis, “The Influence of Memes on the New Zealand Mosque Shooting,” YouTube, March 16, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvwNOmmmpdg.

^[4] For a detailed list of names and other writings on the weapons, see: Chris Pleasance, “New Zealand killer scrawled ‘inspiration’ for his shooting spree on his guns – from far-right murderers and historical figures to sex scandals linked to Muslims,” Daily Mail, March 15, 2017, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6812729/New-Zealand-killer-scrawled-inspiration-shooting-spree-guns.html.

^[5] Maura Conway, Ryan Scrivens, and Logan Macnair, “Right-Wing Extremists’ Persistent Online Presence: History and Contemporary Trends.” (2019): 1-24. International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, The Hague, October 2019, https://icct.nl/publication/right-wing-extremists-persistent-online-presence-history-and-contemporary-trends

^[6] Commentators have noted the resemblance to the “No Russian” sequence in Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, where one plays as part of a group of terrorists who open fire on unarmed civilians at an airport.

^[7] TellMAMA. “Brenton Tarrant: How the Media Helped Turn the ‘Shitposting’ Terrorist into a Meme,” TellMAMA UK, March 15, 2019, https://tellmamauk.org/brenton-tarrant-how-the-media-helped-turn-the-shitposting-terrorist-into-a-meme/

^[8] Hanna Ingber, “The New Zealand Attack Posed New Challenges for Journalists. Here Are the Decisions The Times Made,” New York Times, March 19, 2019,

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/19/reader-center/new-zealand-media-coverage.html

^[9] Eliot Higgins, “Information Disorder: Year in Review,” First Draft, December 26, 2019, https://firstdraftnews.org/articles/year-in-review-the-biggest-threat-is-failing-to-address-the-reality-of-online-alternative-media-ecosystems/

^[10] Reza Negarestani, China Miéville. “Outlines for a Science Fiction of the Earth as Narrated from a Nethermost Point of View.” World Literature Today, Vol. 84, No. 3 (MAY/JUNE 2010), pp. 12-13

^[11] Brenton Tarrant, “The Great Replacement: Towards a New Society,” 2019.

^[12] Reid Meloy, Ph.D., Molly Amman, J.D., and Phil Saragoza, M.D., “LARPing and Violent Extremism,” FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, April 5, 2023,

https://leb.fbi.gov/articles/featured-articles/larping-and-violent-extremism

^[13] Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity (NYU Press: 2002), 150.

^[14] This attack, along with the El Paso shooting in August 2019, were apparently inspired by the Christchurch shooting. https://www.isdglobal.org/digital_dispatches/five-years-on-from-christchurch-assessing-the-evolution-of-the-threat-landscape-and-policy-response/

^[15] Filename DoKumentation.pdf

^[16] Filename READ THIS FIRST.pdf

^[17] 0.1 bitcoin was worth approximately 800$ in October 2019.

^[18] Filename マニフェスト.pdf. This is Manifesto in Japanese.

^[19] A catgirl is an anime girl who is also a cat, and in this context is probably construed as a sexual partner for a martyred warrior in paradise. The description of the manifesto is from Andreas Önnerfors, “The Germany Synagogue Terrorist’s Manifesto Highlights Threat Of Neo-Nazism,” International Relations blog. October 13, 2019, https://internationallarelationer.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-womb-it-crawled-from-is-still-going.html

^[20] https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/229277907/#229284126

^[21] Sam Sherwood, “How Australian Terrorist Spent His Final Months before Christchurch Attack,” 9 News Australia, December 8, 2020, https://www.9news.com.au/world/brenton-tarrant-how-christchurch-terrorist-spent-final-months-before-attack/ca366435-03c8-4981-b382-051abec79f56

^[22] Timothy Melley, The covert sphere: Secrecy, fiction, and the national security state (Cornell University Press: 2012).