By David Futrelle
At least two shooters– apparently working with others — have gunned down multiple victims at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, leaving 49 dead.
One of the shooters livestreamed his attack on Facebook and left behind a white supremacist manifesto railing against foreign “invaders” and declaring himself — using language popular on 4chan and alt-right sites — a “kebab removalist.” The attackers apparently also had explosives. Four people are in custody.; it’s not known if there are still others out there.
Please post any reliable information you have at this situation develops.
Find ongoing coverage at Stuff.co.nz here CNN here, and the Guardian here.
More coverage from Stuff, Vox.
Oh Lord. Rest in peace.
If you go to the TVNZ site, there’s video and they’ll stream any news conferences and stand-ups from the police.
Not something we expected to happen here, and I’m so sad and horrified for those affected, especially those who have come to New Zealand from war zones, to be confronted with extreme violence again.
My heart goes out to the victims and their families.
As for information, apparently Candace Owens is mentioned in the manifesto. https://twitter.com/nickmon1112/status/1106384270107574272?s=19
Thanks for the open thread David.
I live in NZ, and this has dominated NZ media all afternoon (it’s 6pm now). We are absolutely shell-shocked. Nothing like this has ever happened here before. The closest thing I can think of is the Aramoana shooting of 1990 where a lone gunman with mental health issues shot 13 people. Automatic weapons were banned after that.
@Wannabikkit
hugs
Best wishes to you and your people.
@Ooglyboggles
Thank you
Oh dear sweet Goddess!
?
The horrible thought just came to mind that the “false flag/crisis actors!” crowd will really be able to rant about this. After all it took place in New Zealand, a place isolated from North America. The fact the shooter is Australian, and the event took place in a country with very restrictive by American standards gun control, will also be used as “evidence.”
Shooter was obviously steeped in 4chan and similar shit. The Candace Owens thing seems like trolling on his part, a total red herring. These assholes don’t just want to terrorize; they want to spread maximum amounts of disinformation to create chaos and undermine news reporting and I think that’s what this is. He apparently also mentioned pewdiepie, same thing.
Christchurch is a sort of centre of white nationalism in this country but to say this level of violence is unprecedented would be a huge understatement.
@tim: Yup. Can’t wait to hear the cries of “gun control doesn’t work!” And “This could have been prevented with more guns!”
Eh. He titled his manifesto “The Great Replacement” and Owens has been hawking that shit hard. I’m reading through it now and Owens being an inspirational figure for this drivel seems absolutely plausible.
In the immediate shock of the event, I’m struck less by the actual human toll and more by the black irony of a white man trying to drive “invaders” from New Zealand. Pro tip, white nationalists, if you want to drive invaders from various “ethnic homelands”, it might be helpful not to stage your terrorism in a place where white people are objectively the invaders, you absolute festering eschar on the asshole of humanity.
I’ve seen “subscribe to PewDiePie” (which he said before he began shooting) used to harass prominent antifa Twitter accounts for months. One of those things that targets understand as a threat, but it’s too vague and seemingly nonsensical for anyone not familiar with the subculture to take seriously.
He also said (allegedly – I’m not reading that thing) that Fortnite “taught” him to shoot. I worry the media is going to absolutely fuck up coverage of this asshole’s manifesto.
Right before he begins his murder, he says “Remember lads subscribe to pewdiepie”
fucking christ
currently 4 people are in custody, rumours of multiple (up to six?) Mosques hit. They also disarmed a bunch of carbombs and IEDs.
The shooters were covered in white supremacist symbols and language.
The number of dead is unconfirmed at the moment, but the earliest number I saw was 27, and it almost surely will climb. A witness from one of the Mosques said the shooting continued for 15-20 minutes.
He livestreamed it on Facebook.
He had an 8chan thread to invite people to watch and celebrate, and possibly plan.
@Paradoxical Intention: The “more guns” cries have already started. There’s something about a local Muslim man having allegedly shot at the attackers as they fled (after they murdered people), which is instead being spun by the Daily Wire, and probably others, as having stopped the shooting. (The entire thing involving a local man even shooting at the attackers is a bit vague, and potentially inaccurately reported, too.)
On the entire manifesto issue… I guess I have two immediate take-aways. First, actions, specifically the choice of who they murdered and where, speak louder than their words here, as to what sort of radicalized they were. Alt right. White nationalists. Neo-nazis.
Second, the “memes” and “lulz” culture that it seems to have been steeped in strongly suggests that they extensively hung around sites that have been used as alt-right and neo-Nazi recruiting grounds for years. Maybe 4chan. Definitely 8chan. Probably the Gamergate parts of Reddit.
So, regardless of what they specifically say in the manifesto, their tone gives a good indication of where and how they were radicalized, without needing to take any of the words themselves at face value.
(Also, hi everybody. Fairly long-time reader, first time commenter. What a post to finally feel like I have something vaguely useful to contribute. I’m just going to go hug my cat and try to sleep now.)
One of the shooters has been identified as an Australian.
27 dead so far.
Christ in a bucket this is awful.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has confimed 40 dead and has now described it as a terrorist attack.
https://www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/new-zealand/mass-shooting-christchurch-mosque-many-feared-hit
There’s now a Wikipedia page up – https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Christchurch_mosque_shootings
Scribd have taken his “manifesto” down.
He says: “Kill Angela Merkel. Kill Erdogan. Kill Sadiq Khan”. Clearly he was hoping to touch off an international wave of violence.
Wait, weren’t the MRAs planning to invade New Zealand a while back, to secure it for white people? There was a WHTM post about that within the past few years… (ETA: Ah, right, here we are: https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2015/07/02/red-pill-redditors-prepared-to-take-new-zealand-by-force-using-skills-gained-from-call-of-duty/)
Anyhow, the most touching thing I’ve seen about this:
The fact the cops would say that is, well, telling.
Meanwhile, I notice that Orange Cheeto hasn’t said anything. Ha. I wonder what Fox & Friends will tell him to say.
I mean, it’s the middle of the night in the US. I don’t expect anything good from this President, but I don’t think it’s protocol to wake the President in the middle of the night because terrorists have hit someplace on the other side of the world. Could be wrong.
Skimming through the manifesto; mostly very earnest anti-immigrant rhetoric, talk of “white genocide,” etc., interspersed with sarcastic and trollish remarks. He claims to have been influenced most by Anders Brievik as well as by Oswald Mosley and Dylaan Roof. (His comments about Candace Owens seem trolly; he suggests she’s much more of an extremist than him, for example.)
I watched about 5 seconds of his livestreamed attack and that was a huge mistake. It’s unbelievably horrible; it looks exactly like a first-person shooter but with real deaths.
Well, not waking him proves he has terrible advisors. It would be the perfect opportunity to claim he’s not an Islamophobe. Hell, they wouldn’t even need to wake him. Just steal his phone for five minutes.
So…It’s about on par with Norway’s Utöya massacre in intent and outcome, but better organized, and better scripted for asshole entertainment value.
Sigh.
And livestreamed on Facebook, to make it look as much like an FPS as possible. At least most places have taken it down…