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A day after Kyle Rittenhouse opened fire on three people in a protest in Kenosha, another far-right extremist gunman was sentenced to life in prison. Brenton Tarrant, a white supremacist who shot and killed 51 people in mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, will die in prison.
He becomes the first person New Zealand has imprisoned without the possibility of release. The 29-year-old Australian white supremacist carried out the attack on March 15, 2019.
Prior to carrying out the attack, he posted a vitriolic and hateful manifesto to a website called 8chan. Disgustingly, the white supremacist murderer live-streamed the attack on Facebook for seventeen minutes before the stream was cut off.
In the case, Judge Cameron Mander called Tarrant “inhuman” and “brutal”.
New Zealand, unlike the US, is not accustomed to the specter of gun violence. Tarrant’s attack is far and away the deadliest mass shooting in the country’s history. Moreover, the specific targeting of people in mosques shocked the country.
Tarrant’s connection to online centers of white supremacist rhetoric like 8chan surprised many in New Zealand and Australia.
Tarrant’s behavior was consistent with the radicalization pipeline of online white supremacist death cults. In such communities, disaffected young white men are radicalized to believe that gun violence is the only answer to a “cultural invasion”.
Their rhetoric is pervasive on anonymous message boards like 8chan and 4chan. Judge Mander noted in his decision that Tarrant seemed unsympathetic.
“As far as I am able to gauge, you are empty of any empathy for your victims,” Mander told Tarrant. This informed Mander’s decision to lock Tarrant away for the rest of his days. New Zealand likely wanted to send a loud message: such attacks would be met only with life in prison for the perpetrator.
Meanwhile, New Zealand has mostly recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic. The country has had a relatively minor community spread of the disease in recent weeks.
While Americans wait for disinfectant wipes to be delivered, New Zealanders are going to the park and enjoying large group gatherings.
However, the way the country handled the pandemic was unique to their own demographic and location. New Zealand, as a smaller island nation, was able to lock down their borders and quarantine any arrivals to the country for two weeks.
This allowed the country to get the active case numbers close to zero. Meanwhile, many in the US look on enviously, wishing they had similar case numbers.
