For 24-hour mental health crisis support, please call Lifeline on 13 11 14.
Hours before Australian-born gunman Brenton Tarrant killed 49 people and injured dozens more in what was New Zealand’s biggest mass shooting in history, he posted a 37-page manifesto onto his Facebook and Twitter accounts.
Among the incoherent and hate-filled ramblings, Tarrant credits a woman named Candace Owens as the person who “influenced [him] above all”.
“Each time she spoke I was stunned by her insights and her own views helped me push further and further into the belief of violence over meekness,” he wrote of the US-based, pro Trump, conservative political commentator.
“Though I will have to disavow some of her beliefs, the extreme actions she calls for me are too much, even for my tastes.”
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The Quicky
Top Comments
"Although she can be no way held responsible for what Tarrant allegedly chose to do on March 15"
She publicly and explicitly condoned the actions of Adolf Hitler. Tarrant literally said she inspired him to use violence.
She definitely holds some level of responsibility.
Stop pretending that there isn't a perfect correlation between extreme far-right rhetoric and far-right extremism.
Are radical Islamic preachers not partly responsible for Islamic terrorism? This double standard needs to end now.
So you're not going to publish the gunmans manifesto, yet you don't mind giving everyone your views and self-righteous drivel when most people don't know what the gunman said.
Well, no matter, his manifesto is available on-line from many sources.
If you are going to cover a story, you should include all the facts.
Who cares what a mass murderering terrorist said, he wants attention, and they don't want to give it to him. But you said it yourself, it's online.
If you don't read it, then how do you think you know what is in it? Do you believe what the media tell you all the time?
Let's get it straight. I do not agree with anything this easily brainwashed idiot wrote or did either, but to come to some conclusion without reading his manifesto and going on what the mass media tells you is not how it's done. Get all the facts first, then you will see perhaps what sent this nutcase over the edge.
Well, it's too late to worry about what he has said, but he certainly got a bit of attention, that's for sure.
Back in the days before the internet, the public would not have been permitted to see his manifesto. Then again, without the internet, maybe this madman wouldn't have been conditioned to go on a shooting rampage. It has been said he played a lot of video games, so that may be the link.
Martin Bryant is said to have an IQ of 60.
Would be interesting to know what this gunmans reading is.