Trolled by narcissists

If the dreadful attacks on Christchurch taught us anything, it is that there is a global pandemic of destructive narcissism, anti-social personality disorder and histrionic personality disorder.

The first normal human response to events such as Friday’s attacks on Muslims going peacefully about their business, many shot dead while kneeling in prayer, is empathy and a deep sense of grief and sorrow.

This was callously interrupted by a wave of YouTube ersatz celebrities, self-serving internet warriors and egomaniacs dripping with conceit and intellectual vanity.

In the wake of the attacks on the Masjid Al-Noor and the Linwood Masjid in Christchurch, there has been a lot of blame apportionment that doesn’t pass muster by any sense of logic.

Presently, the attacker’s motives are not fully understood. While he prepared a 78-page manifesto and posted it online, it is an unreliable guide to his conduct without further forensic investigation of his life.

What we can conclude at this stage is the gunman was a terrorist, an ultra-nationalist, right-wing extremist. But even this obvious and self-evident truth is subject to bizarre scrutiny.

I have been writing about the risk right wing extremism poses to the community for some time. Australia has a long and unhappy history with right wing extremism from the paramilitary New Guard in the 1930s, the vicious anti-Semitism and exclusionism of the Australian League of Rights post-war, through to its bastard children fanning off into various extreme and ultra-nationalist groups like the United Patriots’ Front.

It never pays to take your eye off these people. To regard them as amusing clods who dwell on the fringes of society as well as on the extreme right of the political spectrum may hold some truth, but we should not underestimate the menace they pose to our communities.

It is not so much what they say and do in their eternal struggle for the spotlight and a whiff of legitimacy, but who is quietly listening and fervently clinging to very appalling word they utter in the background.

Rather than acknowledge and attempt to quantify the risk, we wasted our time and energy on dismal polemics about whether Nazism is from the right or the left.

We largely ignored the hate speech in our federal parliament after the 2016 double dissolution election foisted some of the worst people on the country into red chairs and gave them a platform.

It’s not just Anning’s disgraceful clawing for publicity. There have been many others. Back in March 2016, the ineligible One Nation senator, Malcolm Roberts, got to his feet and railed:   

“If your Muslim Sudanese neighbour is engaging in female genital mutilation or your Syrian Muslim cafe owner is a terrorist building a bomb or maybe just the Afghan Muslims in the public housing flat next to you are molesting small children, chances are that you are afraid to speak out.”

The fact this garbage was largely allowed to go through to the keeper shows our political institutions are sick and our media too cynical to condemn. Rather, it was situation normal.   

The hate speech doesn’t exist in a vacuum. If we really want to understand how events such as terrorist massacres occur but how they trigger our communities to resort to vitriol and ugliness in their wake, we need only look at the narcissists with their YouTube accounts who sit about drooling over bloody events so they can tell a world that seems to have lost its capacity for reason, what we should think.

Social media becomes a cesspit at times like this. It was the same after the Islamic State inspired Paris attacks in November 2015, the Islamist outrages in Brussels in March 2016 and the Manchester bombing in May of 2017.

Ambulances were still ferrying the wounded across Hagley Park to Christchurch Hospital when Melbourne-based YouTuber, Sydney Watson decided to pipe up on Twitter. She has 160,000 subscribers on YouTube.

What is happening in Christchurch is SO wrong.

But before I see anyone else say this is the result of "anti-immigration" sentiments – I'll counter that this is the result of politicians making people feel unheard & marginalized.

You push some people far enough, they snap.

— Sydney Watson (@sydney__watson) March 15, 2019

“What is happening in Christchurch is SO wrong,” she tweeted. “But before I see anyone else say this is the result of “anti-immigration” sentiments – I’ll counter that this is the result of politicians making people feel unheard & marginalized. You push some people far enough, they snap.”

The massacre was less than two hours old when Watson decided she had the answer. In her twisted world, feeling “unheard and marginalised” is a precursor to shooting dead a three-year-old child and 49 others.

As night fell in Christchurch, up popped Gemma O’Doherty, an Irish ‘journalist’ and 9-11 ‘truther’, who decided she could sniff another one world order conspiracy from 19,000 kilometres away.

“Has all the hallmarks of a classic false flag operation,” she tweeted. “To incite fresh #IS attacks, create chaos and fear, allow the globalists take more control over people and remove freedoms a la 9/11. A professional job. The public are no longer fooled.”

#NewZealand has all the hallmarks of a classic false flag operation to incite fresh #IS attacks, create chaos and fear, allow the globalists take more control over people and remove freedoms a la 9/11. A professional job. The public are no longer fooled https://t.co/2zVefMKioD

— Gemma O'Doherty (@gemmaod1) March 15, 2019

O’Doherty went on to babble and continues to do so that calls for people not to view the shooter’s helmet cam footage of his attacks on the mosques were not due to the appalling nature of the mayhem and death he wrought, but because some fictitious One World government had descended from the grassy knoll to clean up the crime scene.

By then, the finger pointing on social media had well and truly started. Canadian ultra nationalist, Lauren Southern, was beset with angry tweets calling her complicit in the Christchurch massacre. She fired off a response early Saturday morning.

“I am utterly disgusted by those sending tweets along the lines of “Are you happy?” to right wingers. Would you send this to a Muslim that has never advocated violence on the day of an Islamic terror attack?”

I’d be happy to agree with her except for one thing. A quick flip through her twitter account showed she had done exactly the same thing albeit in another scenario.

On 24 March 2016, and in the wake of the Islamist terror attacks in Brussels, she tweeted, “I confronted a Muslim woman yesterday (in Canada). Asked her to explain Brussels. She said, ‘Nothing to do with me.’ A mealy-mouthed reply.”

These are just examples but all three have large social media followings. They are not peddling ideas or opinions, they are self-promoting for some grim lunge at fame.  If shunned, they and others like them would wither into anonymity where frankly, they belong.

While most of us struggled to comprehend what had happened and why, we were being trolled by narcissists and look-at-me wannabes, pushing opinions that were driven by a desperate grab for publicity.

They can have their forums and their free speech. The rest of us need to develop the capacity to turn our backs on them.  

This article was first published on 21 March 2019.