Relying on members of the public to spend time dissecting, responding to, and being distracted by the memetic format of the message.Using memes to trick people into dismissing a message as “just a joke” and not serious.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. “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. “The entire manifesto is dotted, liberally, with references to memes and Internet in-jokes that only the extremely online would get,” Evans notes. 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. 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. 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. The New Zealand shooter’s manifesto shows how white nationalist rhetoric spreads 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. The shooter’s manifesto, titled “The Great Replacement,” repeats false propaganda about immigrants as “ invaders” and references a number of radicalizing ideological influences. Memes within the manifesto serve to draw attention and pique readers’ curiosity 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 attention, virality, and public debate surrounding the attack, and further spreading the manifesto within the mainstream.Īll 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. 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 choices he made - to post a manifesto to a known radical community, and to carry out the attack as if he were doing it “for the lulz” - are unlikely to have been made at random. The shooter appears to have been very familiar with extremist corners of the internet. The guns used in the attack were also decorated with memes, mostly insider white nationalist references. Then, right before the starting the attack - which he live-streamed to Facebook as if it were a first-person shooter video game - the shooter referenced the “subscribe to PewDiePie” meme. 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. The 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. The document rails against Muslims and immigrants and includes several references to memes and video games. 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 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.
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