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The Ōtautahi/Christchurch Mosque Shooting
36 Plays5 years ago
In this week's episode we talk (and only talk) about the various conspiracy theories which purport to *really* explain the March 15th shootings at Al-Noor Mosque and the Linwood Islamic Centre in Ōtautahi/Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand.
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Episode Context
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, welcome. Kia ora tato and a salaam alaikum. This is the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy with me, Josh Edison, Dr. M. Denteth. And obviously there is only one thing we're going to be talking about this week. There really isn't any other topic that could even come close.
00:00:19
Speaker
And also because we often have a kind of light-hearted look at the news, it's fairly hard to be light-hearted about this week's topic.
Focus on Christchurch Mosque Shootings
00:00:27
Speaker
So for those of you who aren't listening to this in real time, let's say listening in a few months time or a few years time, we'll be talking about the Ototahi or Christchurch mosque shootings that occurred on the 15th of March 2019.
00:00:41
Speaker
in our country. In our country, yes. So this episode is not going to be a barrel of laughs, so I can warn you right now. We're recording on the 21st of March, so tomorrow will be the one-week anniversary of it. Happened basically the day last week's episode went up, I think.
00:00:56
Speaker
Around about 155 was when the news started to come out on the media and of course what made it particularly depressing apart from the fact that 50 people were killed by a terrorist walking into two mosques was that was a day of the climate strikes where students across the country were striking to show that there is increased interest by the youth for fixing the climate
00:01:20
Speaker
And of course, what should have been a day of good news, celebrating the fact that we need to do something about climate change, turned out to be a day where we're talking about white supremacism and white nationalism, all due to the actions of a terrorist whose name we will not be using in this episode. Indeed. I think we'll just stick with the killer terrorist or white supremacist, white supremacist, wank stain, I'm quite fond of, shit stick.
00:01:48
Speaker
silly bundle of fuck pudding.
00:01:52
Speaker
Yeah. Cheese eating. I could come up with epithets for a good 30 minutes or so, but that might not be the most constructive use of our time.
Exploration of Conspiracy Theories
00:02:02
Speaker
Now, of course, this is the podcasters guide to the conspiracy. There are lots and lots of things that could be said, have been said and will be said about this event. But for our purposes, we want to look at the conspiracy theories around it, which sprang up pretty much immediately. Yes, in fact, as someone who studies these things and knows where to look,
00:02:21
Speaker
So I got the news at 155 and actually after checking in with people, so one of our friends was down in Christchurch, Nick was down in Christchurch. So my initial
00:02:34
Speaker
timeline for this was seeing breaking news on Twitter, a shooting in Christchurch, which I assume was going to be a farmer because most gun violence goes around farms, particularly in the South Island. And then our friend texted me to say I'm two kilometres away from the mosque where the shootings occurred. And that was the point where I went. Oh, dear. Yeah. And after having a little bit of rage,
00:03:00
Speaker
I then went online and looked in the usual places, read it, said it and the like. And the conspiracy theories, mostly false flag theories, were already in abundance. Yes. So I think there are probably two angles to look at from this perspective. First of all, the usual false flag stuff that seems to be just the way things go whenever there's any sort of a mass shooting anywhere these days. But also, of course, the killer himself
00:03:27
Speaker
was subscribed to numerous sort of white supremacist conspiracy theories, some of which we've talked about in previous episodes. But should we start with the false flaggy business? Yes, there are quite a lot of them.
00:03:43
Speaker
Let's just start with the opinion of one Rush Limbaugh. Rush Limbaugh, that's a name that sounds familiar. So he's a paleoconservative commentator in the US. He actually made the news several years ago for railing against drug users in the US.
00:04:03
Speaker
and then turning out to have an opioid addiction and actually being one of the class of people he was railing against which somehow should have caused his media career to collapse due to the blatant hypocrisy in what he was saying versus what he was doing
00:04:19
Speaker
and yet somehow made him more popular. But as a paleo-conservative he was quick off the mark to pass commentary on the shootings down in Ototahé and said
00:04:36
Speaker
There's an ongoing theory that the shooter himself may in fact be a leftist who writes the manifesto and then goes out and performs the deed purposely to smear his political enemies, knowing he's going to get shot in the process. You know, you just can't, you can't immediately discount this. The left is insane. They are this crazy. And then if that's exactly what the guy is trying to do, then he's hit a home run because right on Fox News, shooter is admitted white nationalist who hates immigrants.
00:05:06
Speaker
Now, Limba is saying this on no evidence whatsoever, other than the fact he hates people on the left. And so because he hates people on the left, Ipso facto, it's quite possible that they engineer the shooting. No evidence, just the suspicion that, well, left wingers are evil, Ipso facto, they have faked the shooting, or they did
00:05:27
Speaker
themselves yes so all he's going on is the headline the shooter is an admitted white nationalist who hates immigrants which is consistent with a left-wing false flag theory it's also consistent with the shooter being an admitted white nationalist who hates immigrants there's no
00:05:43
Speaker
There's nothing about it that could get you running that line in this, as you say. He's already predisposed to believe it. Lefty's done it. That's one false flag theory, but there are a bunch more. Would you believe Joshua was the Jews? I personally would not believe it was the Jews, but I would certainly believe that people would say that it was the Jews.
00:06:05
Speaker
So we're talking here about two articles on Veterans Today, a website we've mentioned many times in the past. Veterans Today is kind of the more extremist version of InfoWarsInPrisonPlanet.com, which is saying something. And two of the major editors on Veterans Today are Kevin Barrett, who we've talked about in the past, and Gordon Duff, who I don't think we've talked about as much. And they've both written articles claiming
00:06:34
Speaker
It was the Zionists or Mossad or the Israelis, but basically it's a Jewish plot. Now I'm going to give you a quote from the second article here, and this basically kind of sums up the argumentative base they're working from.
00:06:50
Speaker
Whether or not Zionists directly orchestrated the New Zealand massacre, they are still responsible for it. Maybe they hypnotized the neo-Nazi killers, MK Ultra style, and unleashed him. Or maybe they just let the 9-11 mass hypnosis operation do its work in planting intergenerational Islamophobia into the Western unconscious. Either way, they did it.
00:07:18
Speaker
all capitals in they did it, it should be said, just in case the tone of unhinged craziness wasn't entirely obvious. So this is an example of an unfalsifiable clap. Yes. Whether or not the Zionist orchestrated it directly, they indirectly orchestrated it, ipso-thacto, they orchestrated it.
00:07:39
Speaker
Another time I would be interested to go into the 9-11 mass hypnosis operation and what that's all about. And also the claim of intergenerational Islamophobia. Now 9-11 was... That was 2001, wasn't it? Yes. And it's now 2019. So it's possible there were people born around then who had children early and their children would be young now.
00:08:06
Speaker
So we're talking about 17-year-olds, basically. Intergenerational, yes. Not really time. No. It feels like 9-11 was a very long time ago, in part because a lot of world history seems to have occurred between now and then.
00:08:25
Speaker
2001, which I should say 2019 minus 2001. It's not even September. So it's not even 18 years. I think you've blown this open. What really doesn't fit about this theory of MKUltra programmed assassins and 9-11 missed hypnosis is the fact that the dates just don't line up.
00:08:48
Speaker
But the other editors, I think the quote this gave is the Kevin Barrett piece, we're now going on to the Gordon Duff piece. So the Gordon Duff piece is slightly more measured. Yeah, but also really, really weird. So he claims the terrorist is actually 42 and not 28 or 29.
00:09:16
Speaker
for no particular reason other than he must be lying about his age and also because he wants to try and fit the shooter as being an immigrant from Israel into Australia so for those of you who aren't aware the terrorist in question is Australian by birth
00:09:39
Speaker
but has spent the last wee while living down in Christchurch. So Gordon Duff wants to basically try and make the shooter's timeline fit his own personal timeline of the terrorist parents being Jewish and from Israel from a particular point in time. So as to move the age of the shooter up to 42, and I have to say he's a pretty good looking 42 year old,
00:10:07
Speaker
Yes. Actually, I wouldn't know really. The only photos that have been in the New Zealand press have had the person's face completely obscured. Yeah, so has I been. You've been looking at international. Yeah, where the pictures are, not pixelated. Although, you know, cameras can do wonders to wipe a job. So he claims, what we really have here is a trained assassin, 42 years old from a Jewish family who traveled against Palestinians. I don't know what he means by traveled against Palestinians.
00:10:36
Speaker
That makes more sense. It turns out I can't read. And served in southern Syria and in Iblub with Al-Qaeda, transiting in and out of Turkey. Now the source for these particular claims are anonymous members of the Russian military. And this... I mean, I don't know. What's going on here is a guy
00:11:01
Speaker
saying well here's a mess shooting it must be a false flag so i'm just going to make a bunch of crap up about it or is it like
00:11:10
Speaker
does he have a direct line to people who will immediately start making up crap about it? Or is it the voices in his head? So Veterans Today has a long history of presenting what appears to be in retrospect made up rubbish as coming from anonymous sources. So
00:11:31
Speaker
whenever they make particular claims of anonymous sources that really does have to be taken with a pinch of salt I mean we've talked about the problem with anonymous sources in the past so famous American journalist who has recently been writing on WikiLeaks and Russian collusion stuff but was famous for the I would say the Taiping massacre but that's not the right thing Eli Seymour Hirsch
00:11:56
Speaker
Now of course he has a long history of relying on anonymous sources and of course
00:12:02
Speaker
He's been proven right in some cases, but there's big questions about his sources in the particular cases he's writing on at the moment. So there are always issues if your source is anonymous. You really want verification from a non-anonymous source. But the problem with veterans today is that whenever they talk about anonymous sources, it's almost entirely, I made up this fact and I now need to justify it by saying blah.
00:12:28
Speaker
Now, he does raise some interesting questions.
Gun Laws and Changes Post-Shootings
00:12:32
Speaker
Where did the shooter get his weapons from? Which wasn't particularly clear at the time of the initial reports.
00:12:40
Speaker
But he also makes the mistake of assuming that the shooter got his weapons in Australia, his home country, and brought them to this country, either because Gordon is unaware that we have weapons in this country. And it turns out that we have, or at least had, up until this afternoon, shockingly lax gun control. Yeah, well. Or gun laws. I mean, what we've now got is a gun control regime, but we actually had a shockingly lax
00:13:08
Speaker
gun law. Yes, I mean not US style legs, but it actually appeared to us earlier. But it actually appeared to us very close to the US when it came to semi-automatic rifles, and the purchasing and ownership of them.
00:13:20
Speaker
At the time we record this in the evening of March the 21st, the afternoon of this day, the government has announced that straight away they're banning the sale, aren't they? They are. And in the coming days, they're going to be working through the legislation to control these weapons. And there'll be certain ones which you just aren't allowed at all unless you have a Class E license, which requires police vetting and all sorts of stuff.
00:13:46
Speaker
they sort of, you know, acknowledge that yes, sometimes these kinds of weapons do actually have a use in terms of like, you know, culling herds of animals and stuff, but generally no one should have a reason to get them, so they're going to control those fairly severely. But before that, yeah, I mean, we've sort of been comparing ourselves to the Australian model, where of course Australia, after the Port Arthur massacre in the late 90s, tightened up the air gun laws quite substantially and had a big buyback of guns, which our government is now talking about doing as well.
00:14:16
Speaker
So of course immediately...
00:14:19
Speaker
immediately following the events there was talk that is the government going to start introducing Stronger gun control laws which caused a whole bunch of people to go out and start buying guns while they stood still could Which was disturbing? Yes, and also kind of silly because they're not going to be allowed to keep Yes, and by law if you buy a gun you that purchase has to be registered so
00:14:46
Speaker
the police are going to know who bought the guns and there's an amnesty at the moment if you want to hand your guns in but that amnesty will eventually run out and then the police will have a list of so this person bought five guns and they haven't handed any of them in
00:15:05
Speaker
It's now serious crime to have these guns. Let's go a knocking. Yes, yes, I will see how that works out. But now I suppose that this this leads into one thing. Perhaps, of course, there are these false flags. There are a couple more ones we should get into in a second. But
00:15:21
Speaker
So far, they haven't really talked about motive. It's just been the assumption. It just seems to be the script now. There is a mass shooting somewhere. It was a false flag. Let's find evidence that it was a false flag without even really talking about why you would want to do a false flag. Why would you want such a false flag operation in the first place?
00:15:42
Speaker
But generally when such a motive is brought up, it's usually because they're trying to scare up gun control and possibly, you know, so they can then disarm the masses so that they can enact their new world order, population control, workiness.
00:16:01
Speaker
In the US at least, this always seems weird because nothing ever happens. So all these false flag events over there that are supposedly designed to bring about a change in gun laws don't. Here though, they have. So has that had...
00:16:16
Speaker
So I had a quick look at Reddit and said it, I decided not to have a look at 4chan because it just leads me into depression and 8chan not even going to touch that at this particular moment in time and there are pre-existing threads on Reddit r slash conspiracy and said it about how we were once number one for liberty but now they're taking away our gun rights but there's nothing particularly new or striking. What is interesting
00:16:45
Speaker
is that
00:16:47
Speaker
Basically, all of the hunting organizations and federated farmers, which effectively is the union of farmers in this country, have come out on side of the government saying, yeah, we can just use bolt rifles for the kind of culling we need to do. We actually don't need something that spits out seven bullets in quick succession. So by and large, even the people that you'd expect to be somewhat hesitant and the people who in the past
00:17:16
Speaker
have been stridently against some form of gun control, have gone, yeah, this event kind of has changed everything that we thought. So we're on board with the government and we just use slower guns for the practical purposes we need them to be used for. And definitely we don't have a Second Amendment culture here.
00:17:36
Speaker
Yes. It's always kind of been, it's a privilege to own a gun, not a right in Aotearoa, New Zealand. And it seems that that's come home to roost. People going, yeah, well that privilege kind of gets taken away when you get an event like this. It's been abused, yeah. I mean, personally, I don't think... Oh, no, hang on. I was going to say, I don't think I've ever seen a gun with my own two eyes in this country. It wasn't until I traveled around Europe and stuff that I saw people carrying weapons. But I think
00:18:06
Speaker
I have vague memories of skeet shooting at an uncle's farm one time, so I think that might be the only time I was actually in the presence of firearms in this country. See, by it she grew up with a gun in the house. My father had a gun. Well, he was...
00:18:20
Speaker
Was he Navy or did he just? Yeah, but merchant. Yeah, Navy. He wanted to train Navy SEAL. No, he had a gun and it was registered and it was kept in different parts of the house. So the ammunition was in one location, the gun was in a completely different location as it's kind of required. So yes, I always knew there was a gun in the house and I've used guns.
00:18:47
Speaker
But nevertheless, quite a different culture here to say the United States, which we find. I remember my brother went overseas. He lived with friends in upstate New York for a short while while he was around there. So it wasn't not New York City, but sort of out of it far enough that the people there actually did go hunting and would, you know,
00:19:07
Speaker
kill a deer at the start of the season and eat that for the next however many months. But the family there apparently did, they slept with handguns by their bed at night and if they got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom or something would take their guns with them which
00:19:26
Speaker
to them was just a sensible precaution to us just seemed utterly bizarre and my brother was like lived in fear that he was going to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and get mistaken for a for an intruder I mean I'd be I'd be concerned given sleepy going to the bathroom things just shooting myself in the bathroom was I thought it was actually wiping my bottom well yes you never know but now now sorry returning to your list of false flag theories the next one the list says
00:19:50
Speaker
Us. Is that us in capital letters or is that the US? I want to point out there's actually one more on the list. Oh, one more on Designism1. Which is basically, and this is just a bizarre one. So this comes from intellectualobserver.com and there's a kind of motto in the internet, you have to describe yourself as being an intellectual on the internet, you're probably not. And it's simply a claim that there was a fifth suspect who's fled from Christchurch to Jerusalem.
00:20:18
Speaker
and based on nothing there's no they don't give any evidence of there being
Bravery and Confrontation of Shooter
00:20:24
Speaker
a fifth suspect they simply say there was a fifth suspect who is fled to Jerusalem now we might get into this a bit as well
00:20:33
Speaker
In terms of one of the things that provides ammunition, I guess, for false flag theories is that in the initial hours and days after an event like this, the news will change. Things that were reported initially turn out to be the results of bad information or people being mistaken and things like that. Eyewitnesses being confused.
00:20:56
Speaker
Now, one thing that was known is that initially four people were arrested. Now, that has been borne out, although it's turned out that there was actually only one shooter. Yeah, two of the people were heading into the cordoned area and one had grabbed a firearm. So they're basically going in to do some kind of defensive shooting thing.
00:21:18
Speaker
That's the old truck truck. Trying to be the good guy with the gun. And the fourth person was arrested for sharing the live stream. Yeah. So it turns out that only one person was arrested with respect to the crime, the terrorist act. One person was arrested for an associated crime, sharing objectionable material. We'll talk about that in a minute as well. And two people were let go for basically being a bit foolish, rushing into a crime scene.
00:21:48
Speaker
or an active area of investigation with guns. Indeed, and there was also of course, speaking of good guys with guns, there has been the story, details have come out that one man did actually picked up a
00:22:03
Speaker
Everybody's calling it a credit card machine. Is that just because people don't know what F-poss is? Yeah, no one knows what F-poss is overseas. Yeah, a credit card machine, threw it at the guy. And now that the details have come out, we've found that he picked up the guy's spent weapon, which had no ammunition in it. I think would have shot the guy if it had ammunition, but it didn't. So he ended up bashing in the guy's windscreen after he retreated to his car and sort of saw the guy off and quite possibly saved a lot of lives.
00:22:33
Speaker
Yeah, because I think he only shot about six people at the Linwood Islamic Center because of this brave individual running at him with an ATM machine. With the thing that was close to hand. Yeah. So definite heroic actions, but initially I first heard that someone had fired shots at the guy's car as he was retreating. That was published in the news briefly.
00:22:56
Speaker
And so it had gone around. The NRA predictably started talking about, oh, look, a good guy with a gun saved the day. That's what we're talking about. And at last I checked has not actually corrected themselves, even though they've had dozens of people say, no, that's not true. That didn't happen at all. But again, initial reports sometimes get things wrong, which means the news changes, which is sometimes jumped on by people as being somewhat suspicious.
00:23:24
Speaker
And it seems that the shooting at the car as it drove away factoid actually came from the fact that we now have surveillance footage that shows that the terrorist, aside from going to mosques and shooting people, also engaged in random shooting out of the car window as he was driving. Fortunately didn't hit anyone doing that. Yeah.
00:23:46
Speaker
But yes, let's move on to the US. So this comes from William Craddock, who had a Twitter thread about this, but also a link in that thread to a post he had written, which was claiming that the real perpetrators of this false flight action was in fact the US. And the reason why it was the US was because it resembles slightly
00:24:11
Speaker
The US infiltration of the North Korean embassy in Spain in January of this year. How so? Well they both involved people. Right, and gunfire I assume. No, the CIA infiltration in North Korea was an intelligence operation, no weapons were used. Right, then I'm really not following.
00:24:32
Speaker
And in fact, almost every single person on Twitter and the comments on the web page itself was going, normally really like your work bill, but you do seem to be stretching here in comparing a CIA operation in Spain to a series of shootings in mosques down in Christchurch. And that basically is the only evidence. But it's also one of the sources for the claim that the response time
00:24:58
Speaker
for the New Zealand police arriving on the scene was over 30 minutes when in fact it actually was about six. Yes, yeah I think within 20, 21 minutes or something they actually had from the time from the police getting the call to taking the guy into custody was 20 something minutes and they were on the scene
00:25:16
Speaker
although that was another one, the two officers who were there first ran to the guy's car off the road and arrested him, had been at some sort of training at the time. Is it that convenient? The conspiracy theorists of particular stripes say.
00:25:34
Speaker
They were at an unused floor of a nearby hospital, I think, training in like room-clearing exercises, which had nothing, in no way was anything like what they ended up actually doing at the time, and yet that's a trope of false flags that all there's always, there was a training thing for just this sort of situation occurred just beforehand. Although it's important to note, one of the rationales as to why that training may have occurred, and I don't know this for sure, but it seems likely given the available evidence,
00:26:03
Speaker
About a week, two weeks ago, there was a live shooting incident down in Christchurch. And that meant that for the first time in a long time, the New Zealand police in that region actually went out armed for a day. So normally, our police have access to guns usually locked in the back of a car.
00:26:26
Speaker
but they don't carry guns on the hip because we come from the tradition of conversational policing trying to talk to a suspect and not resorting to shooting them which tends to work quite well and
00:26:40
Speaker
because of this particular event police went out armed for a day and then people were going why are you armed because you're not trained to be out with guns all the time which of course had led to questions the police need to do more firearms training if events of this kind of what rogue shooting are about to occur and so it's quite possible
00:27:01
Speaker
the reason why they were doing training on that particular day was in fact due to they would have been out with guns recently, the public are a bit concerned, we probably need to up our skills. Yes, so it's uh and then I mean there was a bit more of the usual suspects, some people thought maybe it was a Muslim false flag thing. Alex Jones thought that. So Alex Jones who was doing kind of breaking news
00:27:26
Speaker
on it did news that maybe it was the Muslims doing a false fake against themselves Freemasons the gays because some people don't like and it turns out actually homosexuals get blamed for
00:27:43
Speaker
Events in Christchurch all the time. And actually the Freemasons got blamed for the earthquakes as well. This is a footnote in something I wrote ages ago. So one of the very, very, very late game, the earthquakes were caused by Power X conspiracy theories for the 2011 Christchurch earthquakes, was the fact that one of the epicenters for the second major quake
00:28:09
Speaker
was actually very close to a Freemasonic lodge. Now Christchurch has basically two bodies of Freemasonry. So I think they've got the Scottish Rite and the Revised English Rite. Apparently they don't like each other. So some enterprising soul went, oh look, the epicent is really close to one of the lodges. It must have been a Freemasonic attack against their Freemason enemies.
00:28:39
Speaker
Ooh, makes perfect sense. So these Freemasons and the gays get blamed for a lot of things that go on down in Christchurch. I assume gay Freemasons must have a particularly hard time. If there are any. I have met gay Freemasons. There we go.
Analysis of Terrorist's Manifesto
00:28:55
Speaker
But not in Christchurch. Did they cause any earthquakes that you know of?
00:28:59
Speaker
only in my heart. Right, well that's okay. So we've talked about the false flags, I mean you have given us about, what is it, seven pages worth of notes here? Yeah. Certainly doing your due diligence, which you probably won't get through the lot of it, but maybe it's time to turn to the other sort, because now you did go and read the guy's manifesto. I did. Now I should point out that there are two artifacts of this shooting, which
00:29:27
Speaker
were released. The Manifesto was released before the terrorist attack. The terrorist also live streamed the first 16 minutes of the attack.
00:29:39
Speaker
The less said about the snuff film that he made, the better. Some of the false flag theories do rely on either seeing or not seeing the video to talk about things which are or aren't in it. So there are theories that the attacks must have been staged because there's ammunition lying on the ground at a particular point, which he picks up, which indicates it was planted, despite the fact that the video is actually quite clear it was dropped at an earlier point and he comes back to it.
00:30:08
Speaker
claims that you can't see the bullet casings flying out of the gun, despite the fact that it's a low frame rate, badly compressed video, so small details like that are just going to be completely invisible, things like that. There are claims like people relying on people not having seen it to say things like, if you could see the video, you could see how fake it is. There's also a claim that it looks like a computer game,
00:30:36
Speaker
And I have to say, people who claim it looks like a computer game have never played a first-person shooter. Because first-person shooters, when you shoot a target, you have to shoot them a lot to make them fall down. And let's just say, this video reflects people being shot in a much more accurate crumple to the ground way. Yes, yes.
00:30:56
Speaker
I see YouTubers claiming the reason why they can't auto-detect it as it looks too much, like a computer game. And once again, I have to question that kind of rationale. Yes. But let's talk about the manifesto. The manifesto, yes. So this was emailed out to various people in our government and the media, I believe just before the attack, but not
00:31:20
Speaker
I think he does name the two mosques a ways down in the manifesto, but in the email just says, you know, it was in reference to the attacks as though they had already happened, although it was sent out just beforehand, but certainly the emails wouldn't have given anyone time to react to it in advance. Although again, that was something people jumped on a little bit.
00:31:45
Speaker
So out of a sense of duty for which you must be commended, you hadn't actually read through the entire, what is it, 72 pages? 74 pages? I've read it several times now, so not just once. I have not read any of it, because I don't have to, and I don't want to.
00:32:05
Speaker
Basically, the media here have kind of agreed that they're never going to quote it directly. Yes, the guy wants it for me, the guy wants to be known, so we've decided here, no, he's not gonna get any of that. So basically, this is going to be a discussion paraphrasing things in the manifesto. There are some direct quotes in the actual.
00:32:24
Speaker
text we've got here for our use to try and make sense of it but we won't actually be reading any of the manifesto out. The manifesto I believe has now been classified as objectionable material so like the video there are legal consequences for sharing the manifesto or the video online and even having possession of it so the copy I had no longer exists it's just and
00:32:51
Speaker
I don't really need to have it, having read it several times. And on one level, the manifesto is exactly what you'd expect it to be. Just all the stereotypical conspiracy theories and and ranting of a white supremacist. Yeah, I mean, what makes it chilling is A, it's so frank and B,
00:33:10
Speaker
I've kind of read things like this before, but they're from people who haven't actually decided to go out and do anything. And of course, this is actually what makes a lot of talking about the terrorist rather interesting. So he had a Twitter account, which was basically set up in about 2011, but only became active a few days before, it's not active anymore, so you won't be able to find it. But it was only active for a few days prior to the shooting.
00:33:40
Speaker
and it's kind of chilling to read because once you know who's behind it
00:33:45
Speaker
suddenly all of the racism in it seems a lot more sinister than the same stuff you find by people who haven't gone out and killed people suddenly the reframing of that twitter account by this person is killed 50 people with a gun as opposed to this person's just a racist really is quite frightening i have heard that it's it's it's a manifesto for the internet age that it's a bit sort of meme and refers to
00:34:15
Speaker
Yeah, and we will get onto that because the manifesto can't be read as one straight document because there are elements of it which are quite deliberately designed to trigger the lips. Right, in what way?
00:34:31
Speaker
Well, let's go through it. So the manifesto is called the Great Replacement and that's because the central tenet of the terrorist theory is the Great Replacement Hypothesis. The white genocide.
00:34:47
Speaker
birth rates in the west are declining so whites are disappearing and our countries are being invaded by non-white people, non-European people. I'm saying non-white non-European here because there's a whole racist thing which exists in the whole white supremacist movement as to whether people like Italians or the Irish actually count as being properly white.
00:35:12
Speaker
So even within European nationalism there are certain nationalities that the white nationalists go all the yes but not those white people. They're a little bit too, either too white if they're Irish or a bit swarthy if they're Italian.
00:35:29
Speaker
You could almost make the argument that the white genocide possibly is happening, but only because white supremacists are so ridiculously narrow in their definition of what white people are, that the numbers are dwindling just by their
00:35:43
Speaker
they're increasingly strict definitions. But anyway, but there's a whole bunch of talking about the invasion of countries by non-white people coming to them. Now, should be pointed out that the white genocide or great replacement thesis with respect to this country, Aotearoa, New Zealand, is of course a tricky thing to argue for, given that we are a colonised nation where the white people came in and invaded and replaced the indigenous people.
00:36:13
Speaker
But the whole point of the terrorist act is actually not to incite change in this country, but to incite change in the US, because his actual hope is that by gun control being enacted in the US, the white people will rise up, replace the government, and we will then have a nice fascist utopia. Right. A little bit like the old Charles Manson thing, where he wanted a race war, which he thought
00:36:43
Speaker
He thought there was going to be a race war between black people and white people that he wanted to trigger, which he thought that the black people would win. But then he would rule over the black people because whites are superior to blacks, even though blacks would beat them in a war or something. Strangely enough, you'll be surprised to learn Marilyn Manson's theory. Charles Manson. Did you? Sorry. Got a shoe in a pop culture reference at some point. The Ghost movie with Billy Zane?
00:37:10
Speaker
Oh! Where he mistakes Marilyn Manson for Charles Manson and is corrected and is like, oh, that's worse! Anyway, go and see that movie. And watch Curfew, which has Billy Zane in it. And it's the most perfect Billy Zane role of all. I've never seen that. It was a bog-standard horror ghost movie that gets turned into a comedy by the force of Billy Zane's personality alone. Anyway, Charles Manson, full of shit, much like the killer here. You'll be surprised.
00:37:37
Speaker
Now, because he's Australian, he does spend a large chunk of the manifesto about how Australians and New Zealanders are essentially Europeans. And then has a really, really big go against Turkey.
00:37:54
Speaker
So now this is one thing, he has travelled a bit beforehand, hasn't he? He went through Hungary and Romania. And there's history there against the Turks. So what are the really interesting things from my perspective? I have to get the name here. So the terrorist painted a whole bunch of
00:38:18
Speaker
phrases and names on the magazines and guns he used to enact these attacks. And one of the names on there is Serban Kantakuzio.
00:38:32
Speaker
who is a 17th century prince of Wallachia which is the southern part of Romania which as a friend pointed out is a really really deep cut. Even most historically literate Romanians have no idea who this person is. Now this person is famous
00:38:52
Speaker
for basically betraying the Ottomans, and basically ending the Ottoman Empire. So he was meant to be a vessel prince of the Ottomans, but in the Battle of Vienna, he was secretly passing information on to the Austrians, which then meant the Ottoman Empire got defeated, and Sorban basically got promoted by the Austrians. So he's a famous anti-Turk figure,
00:39:22
Speaker
but a really, really deep cut. And it seems that the time the terrorists spent in Hungary apparently researching anti-Turkish figures was really quite profitable. I mean, is that just white supremacist Europe good, not Europe bad? Well, it's because he wants to say the split between
00:39:47
Speaker
Europe and non-Europe to the east is the Bosphorus Straits. And basically is telling Turkey you need to get on your side of that river because the
00:40:02
Speaker
west of Istanbul basically belongs to the west and you need to move out of there. So the focus on his Islamophobia is also very much focused on Turkey as a nation state.
00:40:19
Speaker
Now, people have made issue of the fact that he mentions President Trump, he mentions PewDiePie, I believe, or doesn't he start the video by saying, remember, subscribe, subscribe to PewDiePie? He doesn't mention PewDiePie in the manifest, so he does mention Candace Owens. Now, yeah, this is, who is Candace Owens? We've talked about her on the podcast. We must have talked about Candace Owens before. She was the turning, she was the, we had a whole discussion about she was the one who kind of defended Hitler.
00:40:47
Speaker
No, I'm lost. She was the one who gave a speech saying, you know, if only Hitler had stuck to doing what he was doing. Oh, that one, right. Okay. Okay. And case of view, if you kind of, if you're saying that, you're kind of saying if only he'd just killed off the Jews in the nation state of Germany, it would have been fine. So he makes a comment in the manifesto that he admires Candace
00:41:11
Speaker
Ken does, I can't say her last name, Owens, but finds her means to extreme, which is kind of ironic if anything goes and shoots for two people, because he's trolling.
00:41:24
Speaker
He's basically name checking someone to trigger the libs. I've got air quotes up there for people who are listening at home and joking about, oh, she's too extreme. I'd never follow her path, which has led to a lot of discussion about the people he mentioned because he mentioned Candace Owens as a inspirational figure. He mentioned the English fascist leader, Oswald Mosley as an inspirational figure. He,
00:41:53
Speaker
claims to admire Trump but also not like Trump. So he thinks that Trump is a great figurehead for white nationalism but thinks he's a bad politician. Which essentially he's saying look you could be doing more to do white nationalist stuff. You're a great figurehead for our organisation but you're failing to actually do anything for us.
00:42:15
Speaker
But a lot of this stuff has meta contextual stuff. You need to be able to go through and sort out when is he being sincere and when is he in it for the lols. Because this is a 4-chan or 8-chan style manifesto.
00:42:32
Speaker
I mean, there's one particular bit where he's going through a list of objections he might have to you objecting to what he's doing. And he does the 4chan Navy Seal Screed. I'm a trained killer. Blah, blah, blah, blah. And so there's a half page screed about I'm a Navy Seal. I'll kill your family. I'll track you down. Of course, he's not a Navy Seal. That's a standard response that people give on 4chan. But it's in the map.
00:42:59
Speaker
It's in the manifesto. Yeah, I mean some people have pointed out that the, sort of the trolley nature of it, that there's a lot of attention-grabbing. Certainly, I mean the PewDiePie reference means that now the PewDiePie, if you're our age you might not know who he is, despite being, he's still the biggest YouTube channel. He is indeed, yep.
00:43:21
Speaker
More subscribers than anyone else on YouTube. He's basically a guy who screams himself playing video games, but has gotten hot water in the past for saying stupid racist anti-Semitic things. And also hosting members of the alt-right on his webshow.
00:43:38
Speaker
But by mentioning him, that means PewDiePie is going to come out and say in front of his tens of millions of audiences, hey, that guy in New Zealand, I'm nothing to do with him, I totally disavow him. Which suddenly gets him a very large audience, because fans of PewDiePie are very fanish about PewDiePie. There's a reason why he has such a large subscriber base, which is very active. So it's a very good way of getting his message out.
00:44:07
Speaker
One thing which is odd to lighten the mood ever so slightly or it's going to get dark again very quickly. He does claim he asked the reborn Knight Templar for a blessing before the attack. Right. Did they exist? Well, so this is, and this is why it's going to get dark again. This is a reference to Anders Breivik. Right. The guy who shot, well not actually,
00:44:33
Speaker
He killed 70-something people, but there was a bomb involved as well, wasn't there? Yeah, there was a bomb in Oslo, and then the shooting on the island. I've heard the incident in Christchurch referred to as the worst mass shooting ever. Yeah, that's just above Orlando, which is the second.
00:44:50
Speaker
Go us. Anders Breivik, when he was defending himself in Norway against the charges of being a terrorist, despite the fact that he admitted that he had shot a bunch of people, was trying to make the claim that he was doing a good thing because the Labour Party members who shot were actually bad, bad people, claimed that he was a Knight Justica,
00:45:15
Speaker
of the PCCTS or the Knights Templar of Europe which he defined as a resistance movement to battle Islam in Europe and at the time of his trial the prosecutors basically believed he was making this up that he was making up some kind of justification that there was another organization in the background supporting him
00:45:39
Speaker
when there was no evidence of it. Now the terrorist in this particular respect claims to have asked for a blessing before the attack and tried to get the blessing of Knight Justikar Breivik and his Breivik wasn't able to get through to him but got a blessing from another member of the organization and
00:46:04
Speaker
If we assume that these reborn Knights Templar don't exist, then this is simply a way for the terrorist to link himself to Anders Breivik and his similar manifesto. And if the Knights Templar reborn do exist, then we have a serious problem. It turns out there's a secret organization with members doing terrorist acts around the world.
00:46:25
Speaker
But I suspect at this stage, this once again is for the lols to trigger the libs to make people think there's some bigger thing going on here. Is there any QAnon stuff? No, actually. Although I mean there are QAnon theories about this, but there's no reference to QAnon in it. In fact,
00:46:46
Speaker
Here's a big, big, long thing about conservatism in the US. I think it's fair to say that QAnon is kind of associated with conservative political philosophy as being dead and a completely useless thing. He wants us to engage in eco-fascism. Which is? Well, people like Paul Joseph Watson of Infowars.com would say that eco-fascism is basically the kind of left wing extremism we get with environmentalism.
00:47:15
Speaker
But if we take it that he's being sincere, this is the terrorist, not Paul Joseph Watson, never assume he's being sincere, if we take it the terrorist is being sincere about being a fan of Oswald Mosley, the kind of inventor of English fascism in the 1930s,
00:47:38
Speaker
Mostly his kind of thetism also fits in with the thesis of pastoralism, the idea of going back and living in small village-like communities with people who look and think just like you.
00:47:53
Speaker
and returning back to a early modern lifestyle without much technology. So as long as the terrorist is actually advocating environmentalism, what the terrorist wants is for people to live in small isolated village communities going back to nature. That's what he means by eco-fascism. Although being such an internet social media sort of technologically literate manifesto, once again a little bit hard to believe.
00:48:22
Speaker
All right, so I gave a, well, I didn't give a talk. I was invited to a meeting at a equity club at Selwyn College earlier today, and someone actually asked that same question. If that's what he's advocating for, why livestream the attacks? Why have a manifesto online? Why do all the social media stuff? Okay, so sometimes people do believe that you can do a bad thing to get a good thing.
00:48:49
Speaker
You want to get your message out there. Your message is shut it all down, but you will actually use the mechanisms you've got. So sometimes there's a kind of willing hypocrisy, which people engage in even politically if they think the ends justify the means.
00:49:05
Speaker
Yes, no, that's probably true. It's been interesting to see immediately, I noticed on Twitter, the reaction from the alt-right seemed to be quite universally, whenever anyone criticized a sort of an alt-right figure of any kind and said, this is what your kind of talk ultimately leads to.
00:49:27
Speaker
It's been, no, no, don't attack me. Haven't you read the guy's manifesto? He wants division. He wants us fighting amongst ourselves. You're giving him exactly what he wants by criticising the alt-right people who he seems to like and admire. It mostly just struck me how consistent that line was as a response to, hey, see we your shitty talk can lead.
00:49:49
Speaker
All the other response we're finding from a lot of conservative Christian nations are what about the 120 peak Christians killed in Nigeria? Why isn't the media picking up on that? And the answer is A,
00:50:04
Speaker
It has been reported. B, that wasn't actually Muslims killing Christians. That was a political fight where it turns out you've got farmers who are Christians and herders who are Muslims. And there's a resource resource fight going on there. So it's only accidentally a religious conflict with actually an economic one as well. And also in this country, we're kind of allowed to talk about an event which actually happened here. Yes, yes, we are.
00:50:35
Speaker
Another, one little point. When the guy appeared in court here, he stood there and he did the white power okay. Yeah, which we were told two years ago is not a white power symbol, they're just trolling us. And yet it's amazing how often people in the white supremacist, white nationalist movement now use it to signal their white nationalists or white supremacists to other white supremacists. We need to retire that symbol.
00:51:02
Speaker
It's a really interesting example, possibly even more so than the stuff from his manifesto. It sort of symbolizes the kind of trolley sort of strategy of doing horrible stuff, but sort of trying to build in deniability by saying it's all just jokes. So especially with that symbol,
00:51:24
Speaker
It was deliberately started sort of as a joke, but the fact that it got a whole bunch of white people using it as a white power, people using it as a symbol to sort of mean white power means that it effectively now is a white power symbol. And yet you can't bring that up without people either posting photos of left wing Barack Obama and
00:51:44
Speaker
and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and whatever, all doing that symbol to the camera and saying, haha, look, or indeed just posting screenshots of the original Reddit post saying, hey, let's make a joke out of this. So it sort of, it builds in its own, its own sort of difference. Which is precisely the point. I mean, there's a lot of discussion about the way the alt-right operate in this kind of propagandistic notion, which is you kind of want
00:52:09
Speaker
vague statements that you can then easily go, no, no, no, but actually, I mean, so I think this is how the whole Jordan Peterson thing works. He will make a vague statement with a clear implication.
00:52:24
Speaker
but because he never actually makes the implication explicit, when you say, what do you mean by that, is it? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, there's another interpretation here, and he'll find a way to then divert discussion into an interpretation which actually makes no sense in the context of everything else he says, but in the isolated moment, in case, no, no, no, you can read this another way, and if we read it that way, well...
00:52:49
Speaker
Now, we should probably start wrapping up soon, so this episode doesn't go too much past time.
Critique of Intelligence Services
00:52:56
Speaker
There is still the issue now, if we can change topics a little bit, why this guide didn't get picked up by our internal security services. There's been a lot of sort of sideway glancing at the New Zealand SAS and the GCSB, who spent a lot of time
00:53:12
Speaker
monitoring environmentalists and Maori radicals and sort of lefty people that seem to have no idea that there is this simmering threat of white supremacist white supremacism in our country.
00:53:26
Speaker
And the reason why, as NZ SIS and the GCSB, so our various security services admitted, they have not surveilled any white supremacists or white nationalists in 10 years. They have been surveilling left-wing activist groups, environmental groups and MALDI groups in that time.
00:53:45
Speaker
but they haven't actually surveilled any white supremacists. Was it Jane Clifton who was the reporter who went through 10 years worth of their releases and apart from one passing mention basically found no actual reference to white supremacists as any kind of threat in this country. Yeah and
00:54:05
Speaker
To a large extent, this is because our security services suffer from the same malaise as their British counterpart, who over the 20th century thought the only real threat to British society were socialists.
00:54:20
Speaker
So basically, if you were on the right, you were pro the establishment and thus you weren't a threat to the nation state, socialists were the anti-establishment groups. So we keep an eye on the anti-establishment groups, except it turns out that, as we've seen in recent years, a lot of the acts of terror within Western nations have been committed by groups with conservative leanings.
00:54:47
Speaker
Yes, I don't know the stats in New Zealand about any events like this, but I've seen the American one where it was like 74% of attacks over the last few years have been from right-aligned white supremacists. Yeah. And I mean, we had the Uruwera raids back in 2011.
00:55:07
Speaker
And there was no move at that time against white nationalists who were running paramilitary training camps in the South Island.
00:55:19
Speaker
What's that? Tuhoe. Yeah. Up in Tuhoe country, they were... But you had a bunch of guys basically playing silly buggers with guns in the woods. Like, I don't have a lot of respect for what they were doing. Nevertheless, they were the ones who got jumped on, whereas other groups did not. And indeed, I've seen stories that supposedly people have reported the gun club that the killer belonged to. In Christchurch, people have reported saying... The Bruce Rifle Club. Saying these guys, there is, you know,
00:55:47
Speaker
A lot of camo on people who have no need to be wearing camouflage gear. It was sort of one of those. They were very much not at all military trained, but like playing soldier boy sort of stuff. And people apparently said, you know, these these guys could be trouble. But you really got picked up. And then there's the story by Anjan Raman.
00:56:09
Speaker
who I have met before and is a lovely human being who's spoken and talked about how she is, I don't have the notes, the Muslim organisation that she belongs to had gone to our security organisations here and said, hey, look, we think there is a problem here. They'd sort of got time with them, sat down and talked about it with them and then seen nothing come up. Yeah, and actually a lot of reports of that type of, I gave them evidence of
00:56:34
Speaker
I mean, in defense of what happened up in the Oodweeras, it was basically an activist training program. There was some gunplay being engaged there. In part, it was a kind of exercise for training people to
00:56:52
Speaker
to be able to move under threats. It wasn't because they were training to kill anyone, they were just doing military drills as a kind of coordination exercise. But because the police were intercepting them because of the threat of terrorism, they then interpreted things such as an assassination attempt against George W Bush, which was to build a catapult that would launch a bus onto the former president's head.
00:57:19
Speaker
Which is quite obviously an example of drunk talk. Okay, so how would you kill President Bush? Oh, build a catapult? Yeah, what would you fire? A bus? Pretty big catapult. Oh, yeah, he's a pretty big president, eh?
00:57:34
Speaker
So yeah, so that interception was going on, but the white supremacist, not so much. Now, immediately after the attack, NZ-SIS made murmurs that maybe the intelligence failure was due to underfunding, although as Felix Malo, former journalist now working for the civil service, pointed out,
00:58:01
Speaker
NZ SIS did not spend its full appropriation in the last financial year so they had an appropriation of around about 89 million dollars NZ and they spent 63 so if they're underfunded you kind of expect being underfunded you spend right up to the line as opposed to underfunded we're going to spend even less money that's not how things work no so yeah there's
00:58:30
Speaker
There's a couple of organisations in this country who have definitely got some explaining to do. And there is going to be a commission of inquiry as to exactly what occurred. There are questions as to whether the heads of those organisations should offer their resignations as a matter of course. It's kind of expected in the UK a failure of this type would lead to a
00:58:52
Speaker
to authors of resignation whether they're accepted as another matter entirely but there are going to be inquiries as to why this was not picked up and also why other members of the Five Eyes network that we belong to did not pick this up because he traveled through Five Eyes countries so surely flags should have been should have been risen about him does that make sense?
00:59:18
Speaker
Flags raised about him and they obviously weren't They were none of the information ever got back here Yes, and and even even the police who there is no doubt definitely did the job and did it well on the day but they were quite happy to raid Nicky Hager's house when he was merely a witness in a case like he wasn't even accused of anything but but a well-known sort of left-wing activist type and
00:59:45
Speaker
and the roofing installation company in Christchurch which
00:59:52
Speaker
advertise inflation at $14.88 a meter. And had a particular symbol with a Nazi heritage as its current logo as well. They were apparently driving their van around Christchurch for years. Did you see that the owner of that company has been arrested for sharing the video as well? Yes, so now they're paying attention to white nationalists and white supremacists in this country. A little bit too late.
01:00:20
Speaker
So, probably about time to wrap things up. A dark day for New Zealand all around, that much is sure. But an interesting, and maybe sort of 10 years from now or something when there's a bit of distance, this will make a very interesting case study into
01:00:37
Speaker
conspiracies and false flags and all of that sort of business. Yeah, I mean I've written one public article for the spin-off on this and having made seven pages of notes at some point I'm probably going to write something more academic about this, mate, although not right now because it's all an emerging story and some of these conspiracy theories will
01:01:01
Speaker
grow or change with time. This will be quite interesting to see which ones completely disappear and which ones either survive, which ones mutate into various versions. But it's kind of suddenly become a personal story because suddenly we have a false flag in our backyard in a nation which
01:01:19
Speaker
isn't really used to this kind of thing or at least not used to this kind of thing in recent history we are a nation built on racist violence towards our indigenous people including massacres of those indigenous peoples when we wanted their land but we kind of
01:01:35
Speaker
We made sure we kept all that bad stuff to a while ago. I mean there's been land ceases in intervening years and of course systemic racism denying people the vote for long periods of time but the actual killing of indigenous people we've tried to keep that to a minimum for the last century and this has kind of woken up a whole bunch of stuff in our country including we need to deal with our racism problem. Yep. But
01:02:03
Speaker
for the immediate context. That's about us for now. We're going to do a Patreon exclusive bonus thingy now as well, although we may end up releasing it a bit.
01:02:14
Speaker
Yeah, so we have the ability through Patreon to basically silo an episode to patrons for a short amount of time and then make it available to everyone. And I think in this particular case, and I doubt our patrons are going to disagree with this,
01:02:34
Speaker
the bonus content is something we'll make available in a week's time. And that bonus content is going to be looking at a list of apparently eight unique features that show this is a false flag according to New Zealand's premier conspiracy theorist, not conspiracy theory theorist, it would be me, Vinny Eastwood, who is now convinced that this was a false flag for 18 reasons which
01:03:04
Speaker
I don't think are very convincing. But we'll explain why in the bonus episode, which patrons can listen to immediately and the rest of you can have in a week's time. So until then, if you're in this country and indeed if you're not in this country, look after yourselves and indeed your mental health in a time such as this.
01:03:25
Speaker
Hopefully next week we can talk about something a little bit more cherry that would that would certainly be nice It looks as hope there actually aren't any other events. Well, yes. Yes, that would be good. Yes, I certainly I'm keeping tabs on the The guy who shot the head of the Gambino mafia family in America flashing Q anon signs at his court appearance. There's a
01:03:49
Speaker
It's a murder, but there is some comedy there. Yeah, so we'll see What we need is simply a single death. A funnier murder would be nice. A single death. I mean you can have fun with a single death, but with this death it's just too hard. So yes, we'll see what we can come up with next week, but until then Goodbye to you all and good night. And remember sometimes all you've got is gallows humour. Mm-hmm