Christchurch, March 15, 2019: 7 Years On
Tarrant, his influences, connections, and Christchurch's long shadow over fascist terror
7 years ago last Sunday on March 15, 2019, Australian man Brenton Tarrant livestreamed his mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 51 and injuring 89. The video, manifesto, and sheer scale of violence has made the 2019 Christchurch massacre what is arguably the most influential accelerationist fascist terror attack of the 21st century.
Tarrant, 28 at the time of the attack, started travelling around the world in 2014 using inheritance money he got from his late father’s life insurance policy. This was around the same time that the mid-2010s “nu-right” began to coalesce around growing Islamophobia & anti-immigrant sentiment in the West.
In 2015, the United Patriots Front (UPF) formed in Australia out of protests against plans to build a mosque in Bendigo. Its core leadership and associates have reformed multiple times to avoid legal bans over the subsequent years, but this network remains the key Australian fascist/white nationalist nexus.
While abroad, Tarrant followed this far-right scene closely. Tarrant donated to the UPF, among other Australian and international far-right groups & figures. Tarrant referred to UPF leader Blair Cottrell as “Emperor” in one of the roughly 30 comments he made in UPF Facebook groups. Another comment praised Cottrell following a TV appearance, reading “Never believed we would have a true leader of the nationalist movement in Australia, and especially not so early in the game. Would gladly stand behind you.”
Tarrant was also connected to Thomas Sewell, founder of UPF successor organisation the Lads Society (LS), and most recently leader of the National Socialist Network (NSN), disbanded in January this year following new Australian hate speech legislation. The Lads Society was formed in 2017 by UPF and some Antipodean Resistance (AR) members. Antipodean Resistance started on the Iron March forum, where Atomwaffen and the wider “skull mask network” formed, fusing Order of Nine Angles (ONA) Satanic fascism with “Siege culture” (inspired by American neo-Nazi James Mason’s book of the same name). Antipodean Resistance was coached by NZ ONA affiliate and propagandist Kerry Bolton.
The NSN, formed out of the Melbourne Lads Society chapter in 2020, has long had allegations of Satanist infiltration at high levels, not helped by prominent member Joel Davis’ Baphomet tattoo (pictured above). After the attack, Sewell claimed that in 2017 he invited Tarrant to join the Lads Society to help create a whites only “parallel society”, but Tarrant turned it down to move to New Zealand. Immediately following the shooting, Sewell commented on Facebook that Tarrant “had been in the scene for a while”.
As his travel funds started drying up, Tarrant moved to New Zealand in August 2017. He rented a house in Dunedin and began preparing for the attack. He began working out (aided by steroids), and acquired a gun license, buying 10 firearms in 5 months and practicing at a local range. In February 2018, Tarrant commented on a Lads Society Facebook group making thinly veiled threats against an Islamic school near his gym. “Them having seperate schools is something we should support. Plus it makes them all gather in one place....JK JK JK”.
Tarrant continued posting to 4chan during his time in Dunedin, including posting in two threads in 2018 that discussed immigrants in New Zealand. In reference to the spread of mosques, one user posted a box of matches, to which Tarrant replied “Soon”. He identified himself as living in Dunedin, and discussed mosques there, in Christchurch, and in Ashburton. When others egged him on to do something, he replied “I have a plan to stop it. Just hold on.”
In January 2018, Tarrant donated $2300 AUD to Austrian “identitarian” activist Martin Sellner, one of the figures responsible for popularising the term “remigration” in far-right circles. In subsequent emails, Tarrant expresses his adoration for Sellner, with Sellner replying “if you ever come to vienna we need to go for a café or a beer. ;)”. Tarrant replies “the same extends to you if you ever visit Australia or New Zealand” and to “contact Blair Cottrell … or Tom Sewell”.
According to Austrian media reports, their last email exchange was in July 2018. A day later, Tarrant apparently booked tickets to Austria along with a rental car, visiting in November for a week and a half on his last international trip before the attack. While there’s no direct evidence Sellner and Tarrant met, the timing is certainly interesting. Sellner wiped his emails 40 minutes before a police raid on his home in the days following the Christchurch attack, with Austrian media speculating he was tipped off by the SPÖ, a far-right party in the then-governing coalition with ties to the identitarian movement.
Regarding the attack itself, Tarrant’s biggest influence was Anders Breivik, the man behind the 2011 Norway attacks in downtown Oslo and at a Labour party youth camp on Utøya Island, killing 77 people. Breivik distributed an online manifesto before the attacks, being one of the first to do so, and (attempted to) send it to 8000 emails he found by trawling online far-right spaces. It was 1500 pages, mostly from other sources, including copy-pasted blogposts about white genocide and edited sections of the Unabomber manifesto. Throughout were calls for more far-right “lone wolf” attacks to accelerate a forthcoming race war between Christians and Muslims that would eventually reclaim Europe.
Breivik would later claim in court that the attack was simply one part of a larger propaganda operation to amplify his message and manifesto, something he exploited by leaning into the media frenzy and making a mockery out of the trial. Breivik had actually planned to film himself beheading the Norwegian PM on the island and upload the video to YouTube, but he was unable to acquire an iPhone in time and the PM left the island ahead of his arrival.
Although there were a number of white supremacist attacks in the years between Breivik and Tarrant, most notably the 2015 Charleston church shooting and the 2018 Pittsburgh Tree of Life attack, Tarrant was the first to study, replicate, and refine Breivik’s formula. A copy of Breivik’s manifesto was found on the SD card in the drone he used to surveil the mosques ahead of the attack. Tarrant cited Breivik as his “only ... true inspiration” in his own manifesto released before the attack (titled “The Great Replacement”), down to using Breivik’s directions for DIY petrol bombs (pictured below, however not used during the attack). Tarrant also tried to link himself to Breivik, claiming “brief contact” with him and that he had received a blessing from the “reborn Knights Templar” order that Breivik claimed membership of, though its existence is highly debated.
Most importantly though, Tarrant took Breivik’s formula and updated it to be as memetically impactful as possible. Both the Internet and the far-right scene had changed considerably in the 8 years since 2011, something Tarrant took advantage of. Instead of a rambling 1500 page manifesto, Tarrant’s was only 74. It combined red herrings that doubled as media headlines (”Candace Owens radicalised me”, “Fortnite trained me to be a killer”, the Navy Seal copypasta, etc.), alongside an “emotional” narrative of his radicalisation (largely fabricated when compared to the known timeline). Throughout the manifesto were very explicit calls for others to follow in his footsteps, with the second half being various justifications for committing far-right terror attacks.
The use of memetics extended to the aesthetics of the shooting, including painting various slogans & dog whistles onto his guns and donning black tactical gear (something now oft-replicated), starting his stream by saying “remember lads, subscribe to Pewdiepie”, and playing far-right meme songs like Serbia Strong. Of course, Tarrant’s biggest “innovation” was livestreaming the attack. While livestreamed crime had been seen before, Christchurch was the first time a terror attack was streamed in full, all from a “first person view” on a head mounted GoPro.
Tarrant first posted the stream and manifesto links on 8chan minutes before embarking on his attack. The original Facebook stream only received <200 viewers, and Tarrant would be arrested 19 minutes after he started shooting, preventing a planned attack on a third mosque in Ashburton. However, the wheels were already in motion. In his 8chan post, Tarrant requested people to “please do your part by spreading my message, making memes and shitposting as you usually do.” The video and manifesto soon spread rapidly and globally, with the livestream becoming both a viral shock video and example for fascists of someone putting words into action (as Tarrant said on 8chan, “a real life effort post”).
Those who went looking for the soon-taboo video might have run directly into the arms of Terrorgram, a network of Telegram channels that formed in the late 2010s to propagandise for the Iron March-derived “skull mask network”. They would have been not only greeted with the full video of someone executing dozens of people, but also a whole spread of propaganda and literature about why this was correct, and how to replicate it themselves.
Tarrant was quickly immortalised as a “saint” by Terrorgram and other accelerationist fascist groups that had begun to take root around the same time, the latter often using Terrorgram as their recruiting grounds. Tarrant’s manifesto was intentionally amorphous, claiming no allegiance to a specific sect or movement apart from general white nationalism and accelerationism, allowing many different groups to incorporate him into their cosmology as the key example of their ideology in action. It’s no wonder that Tarrant would subsequently inspire the most fascist accelerationist copycat attacks of the 21st century.
9 days after the attack: an arson attack on a California mosque, with graffiti referencing Christchurch found outside. A month later, John Earnest attacks a synagogue in California, killing one and injuring 3. He claimed responsibility for both attacks and praised Tarrant in a manifesto published on 8chan. He also unsuccessfully tried to livestream the attack on Facebook.
3 August 2019, 4 months later: Patrick Crusius shoots 23 people dead in a Texas Walmart, specifically targeting Mexicans. He publishes a manifesto on 8chan, praising Tarrant and highlighting Tarrant’s influence on his attack.
10 August 2019: a stabbing attack on a mosque in Norway, injuring one. The perpetrator, Philip Manshaus, unsuccessfully attempts to livestream it after killing his stepsister at home, and describes Tarrant as a “saint” online.
October 2019: German man Stephen Balliet streams himself on Twitch killing 2 people outside a synagogue, before giving an antisemitic speech denying the Holocaust to the camera.
January 2021: a 16-year-old Singaporean is arrested for plotting to attack two mosques on the two year anniversary of the Christchurch shooting. His manifesto described Tarrant as a “saint” and praised the shooting as the “justifiable killing of Muslims”.
August 2021: a 15-year-old Swedish student livestreams himself on Twitch stabbing a school staff member, wearing a head-mounted camera, body armour and skull face mask. His manifesto quotes and references Tarrant as inspiration. An online friend of his would commit a similar attack at his own school 6 months later, injuring two.
May 2022: Payton Gendron shoots 10 people in a Buffalo supermarket, targeting black people. He livestreams the attack on Twitch and publishes an accompanying manifesto that praises Tarrant, Crusius, and Earnest.
This is not meant to be an exhaustive list, but Tarrant’s influence on the methods, aesthetics and ideologies of subsequent far-right/accelerationist terror attacks is clear. One of the most recent was the January 2025 Antioch High School shooting, where 15-year-old Solomon Henderson livestreamed himself killing one student and injuring another before committing suicide. His manifesto included sections from Tarrant’s.
After initially pleading not guilty, Tarrant pled guilty to 51 counts of murder in March 2020, with the pandemic robbing him of his desired Breivik-style courtroom theatre. Earlier this year, Tarrant appeared in court for the first time since his sentencing, seeking to appeal his convictions and withdraw his guilty plea. He is claiming that a deteriorating mental state led to his decision to plead guilty, something he says he hid partly due to the “political movement I’m a part of”. Many, including victims’ families and survivors, have called the appeal an attempt to drag himself back into court and turn it into a spectacle.
Whether or not you think Tarrant was explicitly a “lone actor” who received no third-party assistance or encouragement, as the Christchurch Royal Commission concluded in 2020, he was undeniably at least deeply enmeshed in the online far-right ecosystem. The attack was inspired by burgeoning decentralised accelerationist networks and cells, and these networks were his intended audience.
Tarrant’s attack was fine tuned for the digital moment, and has arguably been the most impactful fascist terror attack of the 21st century, achieving the virality that Breivik originally sought back in 2011. 7 years on, his influence on the far right scene is now well entrenched. You can see this direct influence in the method/manner of subsequent attacks, from the use of manifestos, livestreams, and aesthetics.
More generally however, the Christchurch shooting had a snowball effect. Whether or not he is explicitly cited by perpetrators, Tarrant lit the fuse on a far-right scene that was growing increasingly radical, ready to claim martyrs for the cause and instruct those that would follow, unleashing cyclical waves of violence. While Tarrant will most likely rot in a cell for the rest of his life, that does not mean his actions have not had long-term ramifications. Post-Christchurch, far-right terrorism was and will never be the same. Tarrant pioneered the new playbook.
This was initially meant to be a short Twitter thread marking the 7 year anniversary that ballooned into something much larger. Christchurch has been an ongoing research topic of mine for a while now, and this is part of what me and a few others have been working on. We’re still waiting to put our more substantial findings together into one central piece. If you have any information or tips about Christchurch (or in general), you can reach me at smithkstead@protonmail.com.