Jared Taylor, American Renaissance, March 18, 2019

On March 15, Brenton Tarrant killed 50 worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. This prompted a storm of indignation from people who vow that massacres of this kind must never happen again. I do not question their sincerity, but their actions and proposals make such killings more — not less — likely.

The media reaction to Brenton Tarrant can be roughly summarized as follows: He was a hate-filled white supremacist. His reasoning, therefore, is irrelevant. Although he wrote a 74-page explanation of his motives , this “manifesto” must be suppressed so as not to give him a platform. It should be read — if at all — only by “experts” who will explain it to the rest of us. Mr. Tarrant got his ideas from “cesspools of the internet” that are spreading “right-wing hate” to every corner of the globe. We must therefore redouble our efforts to purge the internet of “hate.”

This response is dangerous. Terrorists kill when they believe every non-violent alternative has been closed off. They reject politics because they think the system is rigged. Being silenced does not mean abandoning deeply held convictions; it means acting outside of politics.

Millions of people in the West who are revolted by Mr. Tarrant’s actions nevertheless sympathize with his stated goal: to ensure the survival of his people. They trust in the democratic process to give them a voice in determining policy, but people can lose faith in democracy when their sincere beliefs are dismissed as “hate,” when their views are censored, and when they are forced out of politics and public discourse.

Ideas shared by many people do not disappear just because they are driven underground. They reappear in unexpected and sickening ways.

It is a dangerous mistake is to ignore, caricature, or literally hide Mr. Tarrant’s motives. When someone who commits a high-profile massacre takes the trouble to write a detailed explanation of his motives, shouldn’t we have the option of reading it?

Many people think not. Buzzfeed searched the internet for news sites that had posted Mr. Tarrant’s statement and pestered them to take it down, bragging that it had got The Daily Mail to apologize: “A link was briefly carried to the gunman’s ‘manifesto’. This was an error and swiftly corrected.”

The New York Times worried that “new safeguards developed by tech companies over the last 18 months were not enough to stop the . . . statement from being widely posted,” and complained that “some people appeared to be using techniques to evade automated systems that find and delete content.”

Journalists themselves did not hesitate to tell us what to think of the statement. The Washington Post did this in a headline: “Boundless racism, zero remorse: A manifesto of hate,” adding that Mr. Tarrant’s views reflected “a desperate narcissism,” and “a cry for attention by someone whose life appeared to be without distinction or social success.”

In an editorial, the Post said the statement shows that Mr. Tarrant is “a white-nationalist bigot consumed by Islamophobia.” The Daily Mail called Mr. Tarrant a “Trump-supporting white supremacist,” a characterization so surprising that another media outlet wrote a whole article refuting it.

USA Today agreed that statements of this kind should be suppressed, but still told us what it was about. Not content to call it a “diatribe filled with hatred for minorities and immigrants,” the article explained that “the author feels marginalized and wronged because he is being denied advantages supposedly promised by virtue of his race.” Not one word in the statement suggests Mr. Tarrant thought in terms of “advantages” for whites. The USA Today author, James Alan Fox, is a professor of criminology, law, and public policy. If his views were applied to criminal procedure, the accused would not be allowed to speak and the prosecutor would testify in his place.

The Daily Beast also objected to the idea that Mr. Tarrant should speak for himself, noting, with apparent astonishment, “Rather than rely on the media to deduce his politics through the mass shooting and his social media profiles, the manifesto’s writer answered a series of questions on every shade of his political beliefs.” Mr. Tarrant was right to do so, since his explanation of his motives has been suppressed and caricatured.

Mr. Tarrant’s statement is called “The Great Replacement,” a phrase popularized by the French philosopher Reynaud Camus. Mr. Tarrant writes about many things, but his central concern is the survival of whites, whom he sees as facing two combined threats: “This crisis of mass immigration and sub-replacement fertility is an assault on the European people that, if not combated, will ultimately result in the complete racial and cultural replacement of the European people.”

He justified his attack on the mosques as an act of defensive war against non-white immigrants whom he sees as invaders:

I wish the different peoples of their world all the best regardless of their ethnicity, race, culture of faith and that they live in peace and prosperity, amongst their own people, practicing their own traditions, in their own nations. But, if those same people seek to come to my peoples lands, replace my people, subjugate my people, make war upon on my people, then I shall be forced to fight them, and hold nothing in reserve.

Does Mr. Tarrant “hate” non-Europeans? He wrote:

I spent many years travelling through many, many nations. Everywhere I travelled, barring a few small exceptions, I was treated wonderfully, often as a guest and even as a friend. The varied cultures of the world greeted me with warmth and compassion, and I very much enjoyed nearly every moment I spent with them.

Mr. Tarrant believes that whites have the right to remain a majority in their countries, a right they share with all other peoples. Media and government elites in the West disagree. As the Washington Post editorial board wrote after the Christchurch massacre, “ ‘replacement’ ideology is an unacceptable trope in civilized discourse.” It may be unacceptable for the Post, but for increasing numbers of whites, it is the vital question of our age. They want to know why our elites grant to Japanese or Turks or New Guineans the right to remain majorities in their own lands, but deny it to Frenchman or New Zealanders. Calling Mr. Tarrant a “bigot consumed by Islamophobia” is not an answer to that question.

Our media and government elites claim they want to stop what they call “hate” violence, but the measures they want to take — more censorship and oppression — will increase it. The Washington Post writes that Mr. Tarrant’s mind was poisoned because “he spent his days slinking through online cesspools” and that he got his ideas from “the fervid extremism that suffuses the Internet’s darkest crevices” (in fact, he wrote that he first felt the impact of the great replacement when he visited France).

The New York Times elaborates on this idea:

The internet is now the place where the seeds of extremism are planted and watered, where platform incentives guide creators toward the ideological poles, and where people with hateful and violent beliefs can find and feed off one another. . . . [W]e need to understand and address the poisonous pipeline of extremism that has emerged over the past several years.

The obvious next step is more censorship. There has already been a wide-spread and unprecedented internet campaign to silence those who oppose the great replacement or who even believes whites have legitimate group interests of any kind. In the wake of the Christchurch massacre, there will be more censorship, and it will make violence more likely.

It is not “hate,” and it is not immoral to want your people to survive. Every day’s news opens the eyes of yet more whites to the long-term crisis of survival they face. They will not quietly resign themselves to oblivion.

What would have prevented Mr. Tarrant’s murderous rampage? Not more repression, censorship, and demonization.

Let us instead imagine a different political environment. Let us imagine one in which there is open discussion about the demographic future. One in which it is not considered “hate” to ask: How many people should our country have? Do we need any immigrants? Do people of certain religions or races assimilate better than others? Why do people of different races consistently build different societies? Is diversity a strength or a weakness? Is it wrong for whites to prefer to live, marry, and work with other whites? Must whites become a minority?

I have been asking these questions, politely but pointedly, for nearly 30 years. I believe that the long-term solution to racial and ethnic conflict is not to force more “diversity” on people who never asked for it but to let them, if they wish, build separate communities. This can be achieved through the democratic process.

For this, I am called a “hater.” Twitter closed my account, Amazon banned my books, my organization lost its Facebook account, hotels will not rent meeting rooms to me, printers refuse my business, and payment processors have cut me off. Many other groups are harassed and silenced in exactly the same way. Any society that crushes opposing viewpoints is treating dissent as a crime. The entire West is rushing towards tyranny, and as we saw in Christchurch, tyranny has consequences. When even the most moderate views are outlawed, extremism — and worse — will flourish.

Mr. Tarrant lives in a world in which there is no political voice for whites who want to build homelands for their descendants. They are demonized and silenced, and their own explanations of their motives are suppressed or caricatured. Mr. Tarrant lives in a world that is developing a system of intolerance and oppression that will soon rival those from the Communist era.

Mr. Tarrant committed a horrible act of mass murder. Anyone who sincerely wants to prevent such murders should remember this: When people have a voice, they speak; when they don’t have a voice, they kill.

Editor’s note: The New Zealand government has since made possession of Mr. Tarrant’s statement a crime. Chief Censor David Shanks declared it “objectionable,” meaning it is worse than “hate speech.” It has the same status as child pornography. Reporters, researchers, and academics can apply for an exception to study it, but anyone else who “knowingly” possesses the document can be imprisoned for up to 10 years.