ABSTRACT
This chapter zooms in on the link between violence and the discourses of La Nouvelle Droite, the identitarian movements and the American white nationalist media by analysing the manifestos of Dylann Roof and Brenton Tarrant from an intertextuality and cultural perspective. ‘Intertextuality refers to connections between texts over time as well as synchronically’. Studying the intertextual connections between texts, and especially between manifestos and the wider new right texts allows us to analyse the manifestos as social products. Adopting a cultural perspective makes visible that even though Roof and Tarrant have been socialized in quite different far-right niches operating on different scales within the global new right, they both started from a shared hegemonic notion within that niche: the idea that there is an undeclared war going on. That is why they saw their violence as necessary, not only to defend the ‘white race’, but also to create consciousness about that ongoing war. Both terrorist acts are emblematic of what I call metapolitical terrorism. Their killing sprees were not only executed to install fear, they were instruments in a cultural war to make ‘white people’ conscience about ‘the great replacement’ and to spur them to action.
