Replacement anxiety: White supremacist terrorism

Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, John Prudhoe, standing in for Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. A property tycoon in China is setting up a string of private museums with 8 million objects. They're commemorating daily life and attracting plenty of visitors. But they're also pushing the boundaries of what the party would like to be remembered and forgotten. And then San Francisco, a town whose entrepreneurial culture has also spawned a relentless pursuit of free stuff. We look at how to eat, sleep and be driven around in the Bay Area without paying a cent. But first, New Zealand has spent the weekend mourning 50 people who were killed when a white supremacist gunman opened fire at two mosques during Friday prayers. Dozens more are still in a critical condition in hospital.

Cabinet Tenay made in principle decisions around the reform of our gun laws.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern spoke to journalists today after meeting with Cabinet to discuss changing gun control laws.

This ultimately means that within 10 days of this horrific act of terrorism, we will have announced reforms which will I believe, make our community safer.

Almost all weapons, about 94% of New Zealand's weapons aren't registered.

Eleanor Whitehead is reporting from New Zealand for the Economist.

That makes it an outlier kind of almost anywhere in the western world apart from the United States. So it means that you can kind of stockpile weapons. Brenton Tarrant had a license. He wasn't a prior offender, he wasn't on police watch list, so he was able to get a gun license and he owned semi automatic weapons that he was able to procure legally. So, you know, the question was clearly raised, did he pick New Zealand, not Australia, because of the more permissive environment, because it was easier for him to procure the weapons?

But the atrocities also put a spotlight on white supremacists. As the Prime Minister acknowledged on Friday. The attack threw up questions about how security agencies had failed to spot a man who had written extensively online about his beliefs and his intentions.

Intelligence community and police are focused on extremism of every kind. Given global indicators around far right extremism, our intelligence community has been stepping up their investigations in this area. The individual charged with murder had not come to the attention of the intelligence community nor the police for extremism.

The man accused of the shooting, a 28 year old named Brenton Harrison Tarrant, appeared in court on Saturday. He's Australian. The judge read out one murder charge and said more would likely follow. Meanwhile, people gathered across New Zealand to remember the Victims.

Just a kind of massive outpouring of public grief and sympathy. So you've had vigils being held here and across the country. I was in Christchurch today where there was a vigil organized by some school children, secondary school children, outside the larger of the two mosques that was attacked, the one where most of the casualties were sustained. The people that I'm speaking to are just saying where the attacker, you know, had clearly wanted to drive a wedge between the Muslim community and the white community of New Zealand. He's kind of achieved exactly the opposite of that.

Before this shooting, Nell, did people think that Australia and New Zealand had a problem with white supremacism?

Yeah, look, in New Zealand, I think less so. People are sort of saying again and again that they are surprised. There are some members of the Muslim community who say, you know, yes, the undertones of Islamophobia and racism have been rising, but for the most part they say, you know what, this is actually a very tolerant, very harmonious, almost a uniquely harmonious society, but Australia, very different. And I think that those tones of racism and Islamophobia have become much more prevalent in public culture over the last two decades. I mean, the most. The most obvious one is Pauline Hanson, who's a senator belonging to One Nation, which is a populist party in Australia, and she's kind of complaining constantly about attacks on Western civilization, about anti white racism, you know, kind of clearly invoking this sort of nationalist white supremacist kind of language. She moved a motion in the Parliament last year which stated that it's okay to be white. There's another senator, an independent, who called in his maiden speech in Parliament for a final solution to immigration.

So, Nell, there's some pretty extreme anti immigrant rhetoric in Australia and politics, but there's a big difference between that and going and shooting up a mosque.

Yeah, there is indeed. But those people studying the far right say that they believe what's happening is essentially these fringe groups. And there's a diffuse number of kind of neo Nazi, ethno nationalist white supremacist groups in Australia which do remain fringe, but they have been legitimized to a degree by this kind of discourse and by the discourse in some of the conservative media.

What's the next step in the police investigation and then presumably trial.

So Brenton Tarrant has been charged with one count of murder. He's going to appear again before court in April.

April.

Where he faces. Well, where the question is, I suppose, what other charges will be brought against him? Because they will, theoretically he could face 50 counts of murder. I mean, because that is the death toll at the moment, 50, although it could still rise. He could also be charged with acts of terrorism. Clearly, any of those could carry life sentences.

Eleanor, thank you.

Thanks, John.

The long screed against immigrants posted by the gunman online before the attack, part of which was live streamed to view, underlines the importance of social networks in radicalizing people and spreading hateful ideas.

Violent white extremists used to be distributed among small fringe white supremacist groups that were actually organized fringe political organizations.

Matt Steinglass is reporting on far right extremism for the Economist.

More recently, white supremacist violent ideology is more a matter of diffuse chat rooms on the Internet and people getting interested in ideas, and it's less a matter of actual organized groups that can be clearly tracked by law enforcement.

Matt, can you tell us a bit about the manifesto the shooter published and also the medium it was published on? I mean, on the one hand, you don't want to give too much publicity to this stuff. On the other hand, it's kind of hard to understand his motivation without looking at it.

I think it's exactly right that you don't want to do the terrorist job for him by repeating his manifesto, but the ideas that are in it are so central to the current white supremacist movement that you really need to understand something about them to understand why he engaged in the terrorism he engaged in. He titled his manifesto the Great Replacement. And that is an idea that's been kicking around since the 1970s, but has gained a lot of currency recently. That immigration to Europe and to white Western countries by people from non Western backgrounds isn't just a matter of people immigrating for their own reasons, for economic reasons, but as part of a giant plot to replace white people with people of other races. It's a very panicky, paranoid, conspiratorial way of viewing the world. And it gives white supremacists an excuse to engage in violence because it allows them to picture people of other races who are moving to Western countries as invaders who need to be stopped.

I haven't read all 74 pages of the manifesto, but the bits I have read remind me quite a lot of the manifesto. Dylann Roof, the shooter in South Carolina in 2015 who shot worshipers at the Mother Emanuel Church, boasted very similar ideas about whites being replaced.

Yeah, there are a lot of similarities between what the New Zealand shooter wrote and what Dylann Roof wrote, and also what Anders Breivik in Norway wrote. And that coherence is possibly the most troubling thing about the ideas behind this attack, that there's a common playbook available now to everybody in the global white supremacist movement. And these ideas are just at hand for anybody who wants an excuse to pick up a gun and engage in political violence.

Is it possible to say anything meaningful about how widespread this problem is from almost from a policing point of view? I mean, on the one hand, presumably the number of people who are prepared to take up arms and shoot total strangers for some crackpot theory, is relatively small. But on the other hand, this shooter seems to have spent a lot of time on web forums where these kind of ideas are discussed, where there are a lot of people.

The scale of violent right wing extremism is smaller than the scale of Islamist extremism. But the unpredictable nature of those attacks, as you say, is what's troubling. There's a terrorism expert in Germany who has come up with an idea, a guy named Daniel Kohler who's come up with an idea called Hive terrorism, which is the sense that there are people lurking on chat groups, and you never know which of them is suddenly going to get it into his head that he ought to stop just saying nasty things on the Internet and go out and take action, unquote. Which is exactly the way this played out. If you look at the chats that were going on on 8chan, this board that he was frequenting, he characterized it as the moment to stop talking and start doing something. And I think there's a sense among security experts that the problem with this current type of white supremacist terrorism is you can't really predict who is just out there saying obnoxious nonsense on the Internet and who might eventually actually go out and do something about it.

Matt Steink, thank you.

Thanks a lot, John.

Taking on an unpleasant past can be a challenge, particularly if those in control would like it to be forgotten. Jason Palmer looks into a network of museums in China that are trying to record the country's history.

The architecture of these buildings is unmistakably subversive.

Nearly 20 years after he left China, David Renney has returned there as Chaguan, the Economist's China columnist. One of the first places he visited was a collection of museums near the city of Chengdu.

So one of the most interesting museums is called the Museum of the Red Age. It's basically a museum of the Cultural Revolution, but that's not a name you could give any museum in China. And as you walk in, you have this entrance hall which is very high ceilinged, very narrow, very claustrophobic entrance hall made of concrete. And the only illumination is these floor panels which have blood red sort of uplights in them with the years of the 10 years of the most extreme political violence from 1966 to 1976. And at the end of this very claustrophobic high ceilings, narrow walled, red lit concrete corridor, there's a black and white projection of newsreel of Chairman Mao being greeted by hysterical, screaming, loyal communist followers waving Chairman Mao's saying's little red book. And it's an incredibly creepy experience that is clearly meant to make you think this is nuts. But there's not a word of explicit criticism of Chairman Mao. It's a very, very clever and interesting experience, but very creepy.

In a country where the government wants to control everything, history is no exception. But these museums are allowing ordinary Chinese people to connect with the violent realities of their past, including the Cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s in which at least 2 million people died. And for that reason, the museums may be testing the limits of the Communist Party's tolerance.

So these are private sector museums, basically built by one man who made a Fortune in the 1990s as a property tycoon. And he is also fascinated by history. Fan Zhengshuan is one of the most interesting people I've interviewed in my years in China. He is a kind of force of nature in the flesh. When I met him, we had lunch in his new museum that he's built in the city of Chongqing. He is bald headed like a monk, he's built like a wrestler. He was eating this incredibly spicy Sichuan food, but kind of messily, kind of grabbing the food and shoving it in his face. And he is in love with the idea of the authentic of real objects he's collected from China's recent past. I think 8 million objects. And he uses these 8 million objects to allow ordinary Chinese to come to museum and say, oh my goodness, look kids, that's what your grandmother used to make my trousers with that sewing machine. Oh, look at how poor we were. Look at how little stuff there is on the shelves of these shops. This is what my childhood was like. Or you get grandchildren being taken by their grandfathers to look at some more painful memories. Like when their grandfather was sent instead of going to university, he had to go and work on some very poor farm and sort of shovel pig manure. Fan Jianchuan, this amazing private sector collector, his view is kind of show, don't tell you just lay out these authentic objects, and you let people come and relive their past for themselves. And in the west, that's a relatively uncontroversial idea, but that's a very unusual thing to do in China.

And what were his own recollections of the time of the Cultural Revolution?

So this is personal for him. So although he doesn't talk about it, his own father was one of many, many senior officials who was purged, attacked, beaten up. He was sent down to the countryside. There's this phenomenon where a lot of city kids were sent down to work on the poorest farms in the worst areas. You know, he is a loyal Communist who says that the Communist Party have, on balance, done wonders for China. And he thanks them for doing wonders for China. And he's a Communist member, and he's not. He's not a dissident. But what is unusual is that he also thinks that a confident modern country can talk about its entire past. To allow people to remember for themselves, you know, where the country took a wrong turn, because if you don't remember some of the mistakes that you made, you're in danger of repeating them. Again, a relatively uncontroversial thought in the west, but in China, very, very unusual to hear from someone like him.

And so who is it then that's going to these museums? Is it the people who have these memories directly? Is it young people who want to explore that period in Chinese history?

It's a fascinating m. When I went there, I spent two days wandering around. You have school parties. You had a school party being taken around one museum where they were being encouraged to thank soldiers of the People Liberation army for rescuing babies from a very nasty earthquake that happened nearby in 2008. But you also had some people who, when you can, oppress them, grandparents with grandchildren. They were bringing their grandchildren to see things that had happened to them that are not taught in schools. And I had an experience where there was one pair of grandparents, just a couple with one grandson. And I asked why they were there. The grandmother wanted this conversation to end. She was saying, this is not convenient to talk about this at all. She was waving me away. And so I said to the grandfather who stuck around, you know, why are you doing this? And he said, for his education. For his education. They don't study this at school. And then he wouldn't say anymore. But this was deep in them.

Do you get the feeling this is kind of a little. An allowed social experiment?

The interesting thing is he doesn't in any way challenge how history is explained by the Communist Party. It's more that he, I think, tests the boundaries of what may be remembered, because the Chinese Communist Party has a very selective choice of its memories. So I think he survives fine because these are very patriotic museums that spend a lot of time talking about resistance to the Japanese. But he then does increase the scope and broaden it out.

David, this is not your first reporting stint in China. You were there around the turn of the millennium for a while. Does this feel sort of, I don't know, counter current? You mentioned that the government is sort of tightening the screws, and yet there seems to be also this sort of opening of minds towards a broader, fuller. How does it feel coming back sort of 20 years later?

It's much tighter. There's much less latitude for talking about mistakes that the Communist Party made in the 60s and 70s. There's much more of a sense that all of it is supposed to be glorious. And the current Communist Party leader, Xi Jinping, talks nostalgically about his memories of being sent down to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, which is against the memories of 17 million Chinese people who were sent down and who don't have particularly nostalgic memories. But there's a kind of an official history that is now being crammed down people's throats much, much more vigorously.

David, thanks very much.

Thank you.

The economist Alexandra Sewage Bass grew up in San Francisco. When she moved back as an adult, she saw how the techies, venture capital, and unicorns had changed city life. For her first column on Silicon Valley Culture for 1843, our sister magazine, she looked into how far people would go for a free lunch or a free mattress.

So I was having dinner with a couple of friends at a restaurant in San Francisco, in Soma, which is a part of San Francisco where a lot of techies work and live. And one of my friends mentioned to me just offhandedly, they he was very proud of himself for exploiting some free offers for mattresses. And he had been living in the Bay Area for years, but never paid for a mattress. And he did this by kind of researching all the mattress companies that he could find and their return policy. And he would order a mattress and then return it before the trial period expired. And I thought that this was an extreme example of a trend that I'd heard a lot about, which I call the freeconomy in the Bay Area.

I'm not quite sure whether I'm unbelievably impressed by the levels of organization it would require to pull off something like that or slightly horrified that he thought this was a good use of his time. How common is this relentless focus on free stuff in Silicon Valley?

Fairly common, although this was an extreme example. A lot of startups are well funded in the Bay Area, and in order to get customers, they've given away free trials or promotions. And so people will, for example, establish a couple of email addresses and then sign up from multiple accounts trying to game the system. So it's something that I've observed both in my friends and then living in the Bay Area, you come up with these hacks yourself. So it's something I've done.

I was going to ask whether you've got into it yourself. Perhaps not at the mattress extreme end of the spectrum. It's something you put into practice yourself a little bit.

It is. The Bay Area now has the highest cost of living in America, and so people rejoice in figuring out where they can have savings.

Have you come across other extreme examples of this behavior in addition to the mattress swapping scheme?

So after I spoke with my mattress scheming friend, I wanted to know how extreme this could get. A lot of companies offer referral codes, so if you recommend a service to a friend, you would get $10 off that service. One person I spoke to, Felix, who's a founder of a startup, figured out how to hack the system. So he spent $600 on Google Ads advertising Uber rides, and they performed so well on Google that people actually clicked through to the ads more often than they did uberzone. When users would click through to his ad, he would get a credit, and he managed to amass $30,000 in Uber credit. So he rode around for free for a year, and perhaps even more impressively, eat for free for a year with Uber Eats, the meal delivery service. So he got three meals for free because of his hack.

That is impressive. You almost managed to make me feel sorry for Silicon Valley unicorns. I mean, how do the companies feel about this behavior on the part of their customers?

Pity the unicorns. So they're aware of it and they try and disincentivize people from doing it. That's why they've come up with this scheme, for example, unique referral codes. But other companies want traction, and so they're willing to kind of turn a blind eye to it to show user growth. And so you allow it.

Is this just about everyone loving a free lunch or do you think it goes further than that?

I think that people are reveling in the fact that they can actually take back control. We've seen a lot of companies such as Facebook and Google make fortunes off of users by collecting their data and monetizing it. As one of the freeconomy participants told me, this is about David versus Goliath and sticking up for the individual over the company.

Thank you, Alexandra.

Thank you, John.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. You can subscribe to the economist@exterator.com radio. Offer 12 issues for $12 or 12 pounds. See you back here tomorrow.

Sam.