I feel like this word will continue to bleed through online media for months to come as we mourn the loss of life resulting from the horrific shootings at the two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. A white-supremacist shooter murdered innocents while they sat in peace, for what seems like a sick twisted plot that was dreamed up only to bait the media.
The shooter live-streamed the attack itself on Facebook, and the video was quickly shared across YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram. Before committing the act, he shouted, “Remember, lads, subscribe to PewDiePie,” a reference to Felix Kjellberg, who runs YouTube’s most subscribed-to channel. The phrase itself is a meme started by PewDiePie’s fans, and its goal is to be reprinted.
Social Media outlets are a mass shooter’s best friend, but this has nothing to do with PewDiePie, himself, and everything to do with playing into what the worst of the worst has become. Hateful, racist, intolerant jackass fuckwits who want nothing more than to incite rage and violence as a means of flexing their power over others, because of a twisted sense of loss of self due to their inability to be decent human beings. White Nationalism has no place in our world, and whatever these assholes want to rebrand it as, it is NOT OK.
But, 49 people are dead.
The only thing to blame is a need to feel power over someone outside your “ranks”, to feel more powerful than someone outside your social circle, this happens when you live inside your head and the only important things to you are how people perceive you. The Internet is a Pandora’s box that you didn’t even want to open; Videos autoplay immediately filling your head with undesirable content and GIFs are continually repeating their jabs, a vicious loop of mocking animated cartoon heads designed to poke at your childhood tendency to fear something you don’t understand.
There is a false sense of need built up by how important being “internet famous” and revered by one’s online peers has become. Many people are saying what he wrote was a joke. But that’s the rub. Of course it was. It was a 74-page joke for his 8chan friends. He lived and breathed hatred in these communities and they exist in far larger numbers than you’d imagine.
This is what happens when white supremacy is left unchecked, this is what happens when you turn the other cheek. T
Nothing else can be more clear right now other than our need to vehemently oppose fascism, racism, and xenophobia – AND FUCKING VACUUM UNDER THE COUCH OF EVERY PLACE THESE MOTHER FUCKERS EXIST.