Premium Episode 109: The Christchurch Inquiry & The Great Replacement with Annie Kelly (Sample)
How can the Christchurch shooting in New Zealand help us understand broader conspiracy theories like "the great replacement" and the role of the media and social media ecosystems in accelerating them? Annie Kelly has read the 800-page Christchurch Inquiry and explains.
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Sources:
https://christchurchattack.royalcommission.nz/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/08/brutalised-but-defiant-christchurch-massacre-survivors-one-year-on
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/24/i-dont-have-hate-i-dont-have-revenge-stricken-mother-of-christchurch-massacre-victim-forgives-killer
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/audio/2020/dec/21/life-after-christchurch-one-survivors-journey-of-recovery-and-reckoning
Welcome, listener, to the 108th premium chapter of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Christchurch Inquiry and the Great Replacement episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Annie Kelly, Julian Field, and Travis View.
A very Happy New Year to you all, listeners.
It's been a while since I sat down to chat with you.
You may have heard on the news a little of what's been happening in the United Kingdom with us developing mutant strains of Covid faster than you can say Boris bungled Brexit.
Well, it's all true.
I've been stuck in Tier 4 lockdown, where residents are recommended to stay at home at all times and when leaving the house for emergency supplies, not look anyone in the eye and always carry a passport and a knife in their sock.
Living on Plague Island has been stressful, but having had a warlock cast a powerful protection spell on my microphone, it is finally safe to listen to me transmitting across the airwaves without a mask.
This is going to be a slightly different kind of episode than the kind I usually do, because there's a couple of things I want to talk about, but it's a very serious subject matter and I do want to do the topic justice.
We're going to cover the Christchurch Report, an 800-page report into the terrorist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, which was published by the New Zealand Royal Commission of Inquiry last month.
The Christchurch attack happened on the 15th of March, two years ago, when a gunman entered the Al-Noor Mosque and Linwood Islamic Centre in the city and opened fire.
...murdering 51 people and injuring countless others.
The gunman live-streamed the massacre to Facebook using a GoPro camera attached to his helmet.
The link distributed to 8chan to ensure it was spread to as many different social media platforms as possible.
He also sent out a copy of his manifesto, which was filled with racist alt-right memes and 4chan slang.
It was, in the words of Kevin Roos for the New York Times, a mass murder of and for the internet.
The Manifesto revealed that the murderer was motivated by a conspiracy theory popular in white supremacist circles known as the Great Replacement.
This theory, sometimes also known as White Genocide, holds that white people are being generationally replaced in the West by immigrants, usually, but not always, Muslims.
Since there's a white supremacist theory usually found on neo-Nazi forums, I'm sure I don't need to tell you who its proponents believe is behind all this, but top marks if you guessed the Jews.
This was the motivation given for the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting in the United States where seven people were murdered, as well as the El Paso shooting in Texas just months after Christchurch, which likely was inspired by it.
This episode was going to be a straightforward deep dive in what we've learned from the Christchurch Inquiry Report, which is an incredible piece of research with more detail into the gunman's life and motives than I've ever seen before.
But then, just before Christmas, something happened on LBC, a British radio talk station that made me switch tracks.
Sir Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour Party here, went on the Nick Ferrari at Breakfast Show shortly after fans of Millwall, a notorious football club, booed their own players for taking a knee in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Starmer was confronted by a caller who called herself Gemma, who said that her husband had been at the game and began saying something a little odd about white people becoming a minority.
Here's a clip of the conversation that followed.
Players and the referees very often take the knee and I think that's why it's symbolic.
Even Les Ferdinand, who you'll probably know just from My My Lester's, was a very successful footballer, happens to be a black fellow himself.
He's now the first black man to be a director of football.
He's with the Championship, Queen's Park Rangers, and he says it is hollow.
It's like a fancy hashtag or a lapel.
It's his achieving nothing.
Well, I don't think that's right.
I think the counter...
He's a black man who played football for England.
I mean, he's in a position of knowledge, isn't he?
Oh, he is, of course, and I respect his view, of course.
It doesn't mean I agree with it.
I think that what's happened over the many years, this is the counter-argument, it's
quite a powerful one, is that there is racial inequality, there is injustice, and from time
to time it becomes an issue.
It's looked at for a few weeks and then it goes away.
And this is an attempt to keep the focus on it until things really change.
Hasn't the Round now focused just on taking the knee?
And the important issue of getting black managers, black directors of football, black chairmen or chairwomen of clubs.
I mean, that's been lost because we just take the knee.
No, I don't think it's one or the other.
I think you can do both and it's a way of drawing attention to it.
You know, in the end it's for each individual to decide how they want to tackle injustice.
Gemma, why did your husband, sorry you didn't quite explain, if I may go there again, why did he choose to boo?
Because if anything, the racial inequality is now against the indigenous people of Britain because we are set to become a minority by 2066.
And taking the knee, bringing the political sphere into the football arena, and we just have to look across to the Middle East.
You know, Israel has a state law that they are the only people in that country to have self-determination.
Well, why can't I, as a white British female, have that same right?
Final point to you on this, Zakir.
But Gemma, we all have those rights.
This is about recognising some injustice has gone on for a very, very long time.
And I think people were genuinely moved I mean, I would hope to think that American anchors would handle that a little bit differently.
I think it's just because we have a little bit different racial history and that minorities were, you know, brought here indigenously and brought here by force.
They would just have Richard Spencer as the actual guest.
Yeah, right, right.
By the time the conversation had made its way to Twitter, something which should have been obvious to LBC was made apparent.
There was no Gemma whose husband had been at the Millwall game.
She was a plant from the British neo-Nazi group Patriotic Alternative, engaged in a practice called groiping, basically where you use the format of call-in shows or live internet streams to spread alt-right propaganda.
There's been, naturally, a lot said about what Starmer said, or should have said, or shouldn't have said, but I have to say, hearing that interview at the same time as reading, in sometimes harrowing detail, about the 51 people who died in Christchurch and the countless more injured, bereaved or traumatised, It struck me just how lightly my country seems to take the threat of the far-right and the murderous Great Replacement lie.
Groping, like Gemma managed to do, wouldn't work if it wasn't enabled by a media that just doesn't think of far-right radicalisation as that big of a problem.
After all, as was later uncovered by Red Flare, an anti-fascist research group, Gemma claimed to have literally been contacted and invited on the show to confront Starmer.
Even if we accept that they thought she was just going to make a still racist but slightly more normal racist statement about booing black football players, why would you still let her carry on about a genocidal conspiracy theory that's been responsible for such enormous loss of life around the world?
So, before we get into the Christchurch inquiry, let me just switch tracks for a little minute.
Although I doubt very much that any listeners of this podcast need to hear why The Great Replacement is a lie, I do want to say it anyway, if only just so that it exists somewhere in this cursed media landscape.
Believers in The Great Replacement believe in an essential fiction of a few discreet and exclusive human races.
The fact that it's a fiction can be easily proven by just how long white supremacists themselves spend arguing amongst themselves as who counts as actually white.
Pretty much the entirety of human history has been the story of groups of people moving places.
This is how it's always been, even before long distance travel was as easy as it is now.
In my own country, this has been the case since written records began.
Roman geographer Ptolemy described at least 27 tribes in Britain, all with different beliefs and customs.
After the Romans, the Saxons, Vikings and Normans came to the country.
None of these people replaced one another.
And nobody today seems to suggest that they did, because we now think of them all as one race.
Even if it's unlikely that that's ever how they conceived of each other.
Going closer to home, if you look at your own family history, wherever you are, the chances are your ancestors came from somewhere different than where you live now.
In my case, three of my four grandparents weren't from England, which is why I'm so cool.
But you and I didn't replace any hypothetical baby when we were born.
We were just born.
So yes, The Great Replacement is fake.
A lurid white nationalist conspiracy theory which, like most of their claims, doesn't hold up to any kind of scrutiny.
But it's not only that, it's evil because it keeps killing people.
I think part of the reason it's so powerful is because it speaks to the deepest-seated psychological fear of all.
The knowledge that we're all going to die one day.
If we want to get existential, the only thing that eventually replaces us all is time.
Damn.
Oh shit, that's not good.
This is not good.
I'm having a good one.
Sorry to blow your minds there, guys.
This is a troubling fact to deal with, and so many of us simply just try not to think about it at all.
But if you're white, living in a majority white country, you do handily get a different, second option, which is to focus all that existential fear of mortality and channel it into something a little easier to grapple with psychologically, which is of course blaming immigrants and ethnic minorities.
Through the Christchurch Report, we finally get one of the clearest case studies of how this process works.
How a young man can fall so under the grip of this hatred that he ends up taking countless innocent lives and injuring and traumatising so many more.
I'm going to go through that report with you today and pick out the parts that I think give us the clearest sense of how white supremacist radicalisation works online.
One of the most impressive recognitions of the Christchurch Report is that far-right terrorism doesn't emerge in a vacuum.
In fact, as it takes pains to point out, many of the Christchurch shooters' beliefs were not inculcated in dark, niche corners of the internet, but by relatively mainstream digital sources, particularly on YouTube, which I'll get into in more detail a little later.
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