Christchurch and Clownworld

Written in March, 2019.

This is about the Christchurch shooting event and how it relates to bigger issues. I won’t bother to go over the details of the shooting, because either you already know about it, or you can look it up for yourself. The killer was Brenton Tarrant, an Australian living in New Zealand. At last count, he killed 50 people.

I heard about the shooting on Twitter, shortly after it happened, so I was able to see the shooter’s head-cam video and read his manifesto before they were scrubbed from the internet. When I watched the video, I immediately thought “This is performance art”. The whole thing was carefully (you might say autistically) scripted. It was designed to deliver a memetic payload.

Tarrant had three different messages, aimed at different targets.

As he exited his vehicle, he said “Remember lads, subscribe to pewdiepie”. That was a little in-joke, directed at his perceived in-group: the dissident memers of the far right. He had other little jokes in his manifesto for that audience, such as the gorilla copypasta, and saying that his biggest influence was Candace Owens. Those were for the in-group to laugh at, and for the media and normies to puzzle over. He was signaling to his ideological tribe, and to the community of internet nerds in general, even to those who might disagree with him. He was saying “I’m one of you”. By doing this, he was also signaling a rejection of the normies and the establishment. In his first court appearance, he was still performing by flashing the okay sign — the ironic symbol of white supremacy. The trial will be a continuation of the performance. He has dedicated his entire life to this work of art.

He was also sending a message to Muslims, a serious message. The message was: “Get out of the West”. That message was very simple and direct. He had the names of victims of Muslim terrorism written on his weapons, such as Ebba Ackerlund, an 11-year-old girl who was killed in a terror attack in Sweden. To some extent, it was an act of revenge, but that was not the primary motivation.

The third message was for white people. This is my summary of it:

Wake up. You are being replaced. This is bad. Fight against it.

That was the main message of his performance. His manifesto is mostly about that message. In the manifesto, he explains his position, justifies it, and goes into great detail about what should be done to save and restore the West.

The manifesto is titled “The Great Replacement”. That’s an existing phrase that accurately, if somewhat controversially, describes the replacement of the white population in Western societies. It has a lot of memetic power, because it is concise, memorable and essentially true.

The manifesto begins with the Dylan Thomas poem Do not go gentle into that good night, which ends with:

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Tarrant’s primary motivation was not revenge, nor was it larping. He was raging against the death of the West and the white race. He believed that mass murder was a rational and proportionate response. By his action, he was telling others to also rage against the great replacement.

After the poem, the manifesto proper begins. The first lines are:

It’s the birthrates.

It’s the birthrates.

It’s the birthrates.

Those lines deliver an uncomfortable truth about the West and modernity. Our modern way of life is self-erasing. It does not reproduce itself. And the future is determined by who reproduces. When almost all children live to adulthood, the future is almost entirely determined by fertility. The genes and memes that cause the highest fertility will “win” in this contest, regardless of whether they contributed anything to creating modernity.

The reality of the great replacement can be seen by anyone who walks down the street of a Western city. The white population has low fertility, so it is decreasing. Mass immigration is increasing the non-white population, and some non-whites (such as Muslims) have higher fertility, so they increase by reproduction as well. Even if there is no great catastrophe because of this, even if life goes on more or less as before, the white race will disappear. It will decline in numbers, and those who remain will blend and merge with the immigrant populations to form a new mixed race or multiple new races. There will still be white people here and there, but they will be anomalous in the way that red hair is anomalous in Britain.

Of course, many will say that this doesn’t matter, because everyone is the same. But everyone is not the same, and that is another obvious truth. Replacing the population of the West will end Western civilization as we know it. Will it produce something better? I don’t think so.

Is the great replacement a war? Are immigrants invaders? Literally no, but metaphorically yes. Although we seem to have forgotten this, war is usually about the replacement of one population by another.

I don’t agree with Tarrant’s ideology or his proposals, but I don’t disagree with everything that he says either. He begins with certain important heretical truths. However, he is also deeply immersed in a fantasy world, as most mass murderers are. Mass murder is almost always a kind of larping. On the other hand, his manifesto was more coherent and easier to read than Mein Kampf, so I’ll give him credit for that.

Knowing a heretical truth can drive you crazy. When you have a heretical belief, and you know that you are right, then you lose faith in your culture, because you know that it can’t be trusted. That leaves you free to develop your own beliefs, but few people are capable of doing that. So, when people lose faith in the dominant culture, they become susceptible to ideologies and conspiracy theories. If the dominant culture can’t be trusted, people will form alternative subcultures, which might be equally divorced from reality.

The media are portraying this event as “white supremacist terrorism”. That is typical. The media fit every event into a pre-existing narrative, rather than trying to understand it. Yes, it was terrorism, but no, Tarrant was not a white supremacist. The establishment is stuck in the past. They haven’t come to grips with the reality of the 21st century. Tarrant was a white preservationist, not a white supremacist. He wanted to save the white race, not rule over other races.

Tarrant was not just “filled with hate”, as the standard narrative goes. He was filled with both hate and love. He valued something in the real world: his race and his civilization. He wanted to save them from destruction. It is dishonest to dismiss his motive as simply “hate”.

One of our culture’s big lies is that problems are caused by hate, and we can overcome hate with love, and live happily ever after in some kind of hate-free utopia. Hate is natural when you perceive that something threatens you, or threatens what you love. Hate will never go away. It is an essential part of life. Everybody hates.

It is not surprising that some people will kill and die to save their race or civilization. Some people care about things bigger than themselves, things that they invest their identity in.

And if free speech is shut down, violence is the only means of political expression. Anti-immigration views are not permitted in public discourse, even if they are polite and rational. So, we can’t have a real discussion about immigration and its consequences. Instead, there is relentless propaganda and censorship.

Tarrant wanted his actions to inspire others. That was the point of his performance. He wanted to create a violent revolution. And that’s where he was most divorced from reality. There is not going to be some mass awakening of white racial consciousness because of this event. It would be nice if it led to an honest, rational dialogue about the problems with our civilization, but I don’t think that will happen either. Instead, it will probably lead to more censorship, which will further increase the frustration and division without solving anything.

I don’t know how to wrap this up. I will just say that there’s not much point raging against the dying of the light. If our civilization is morally committed to its own death, then we might have to let it die.