An ‘outlaw’ and 'a complete loser': New book demystifies the Christchurch terrorist

Saturday, 6 June 2026

The man who killed 51 people and injured 40 more at two Christchurch mosques in 2019 might be both the most influential far-right terrorist in history and “a complete loser”.

It’s an unlikely pair of conclusions, but just the start of the contradictions exposed in a new book about New Zealand’s deadliest shooting.

He Told Us, by Auckland academics Chris Wilson and Michal Dziwulski, examines the appalling crimes of Australian terrorist Brenton Tarrant, and what came before and after them. It interrogates the official narrative of what happened and finds it wanting. In particular, it takes aim at the milquetoast Royal Commission of Inquiry, which the authors conclude was at best limited and at worst incurious.

“[We] just end up with this very, very weak analysis and weak conclusions about something that’s so significant,” Dziwulski said.

At the heart of the book is the startling revelation that Wilson, Dziwulski and some research colleagues were able to identify hundreds of posts by Tarrant on extremist websites that our intelligence agencies apparently had not. These, they argue, present the clearest evidence of how an angry and terminally online young man became radicalised and why an official inquiry unaware of their existence was in no position to reason on that point. (A coronial inquiry, still ongoing, has ordered the pair to hand over all their research, Wilson said.)

The discovery was triggered by an initial scepticism of the commission’s findings. Particularly its apparent acceptance of Tarrant’s claim that he didn’t really use extreme right-wing websites, and was largely radicalised by watching YouTube videos.

“The Royal Commission took that at face value,” Wilson said. “That would be very unusual for somebody like him.”

So, after getting ethics approval from the University of Auckland (Wilson is an associate professor; Dziwulski a master’s student), the authors took known samples of the Tarrant’s writing and used characteristics ‒ language, style, spelling mistakes ‒ to identify archived posts on sites such as 4chan and 8chan. [An exclusive extract from their book, detailing how they did this, appears in today’s Press].

It turned out the terrorist had been a frequent contributor. “It was surprising to find him so easily, initially,” Dziwulski said. “That research was then the foundation of looking into all of the other elements of attack…[that’s] where the book broadened and looks at a much greater perspective of the whole event.”

That perspective offered some troubling conclusions about how little we know, and may ever know, about what led to the Christchurch terror attacks. The book reveals that most of the evidence the commission heard is permanently suppressed, and that its terms of reference were quietly narrowed before it convened, diverting its focus from what ‘could or should’ have been known about the terrorist.

“So there isn’t actually any impetus for the Royal Commission to take much stock into what there could have been,” Dziwulski said. “[Security agencies] can do a search on their databases and see what information they have about him. So then you’re setting up an inquiry for something that’s effectively already known.”

“And there’s a broader question in terms of how much he’s examined. It's not just the, ‘Let’s not use his name’, but it’s almost like, let’s not really ask, ‘Did the Royal Commission do a good job?’ Let’s not think about how the attack was able to happen. Let's not think about how he prepared and how he behaved…This was an inquiry that [supposedly] left no stone unturned into how the attack had occurred. We’ve demonstrated that it wasn’t.”

He Told Us doesn’t apportion blame (Wilson acknowledged that, even if all the information they discovered was known in advance, it still would have been “very difficult” to identify and intercept Tarrant before the attack). But it does look to dismantle some of the official narrative and ask questions there may be little appetite to answer.

“Somebody,” Wilson said, “And I’m not going to name their name, but somebody said to us during the project, ‘New Zealand doesn’t have a culture of inquiry’. We don’t really examine things in depth and people don’t put their heads up above the parapet. It’s almost as though people are slightly concerned about job security and, and everybody knows everybody, and so everything’s a little bit protected. And so we’re not really willing to learn the lessons that need to be learned.”

The dismantling extends to the terrorist himself. In particular, his odious claim that he was just a working-class Aussie bloke concerned about immigration who engaged in violence reluctantly and as a last resort.

“That was just a lie,” Wilson said. “That and all of these other lies were designed to gain sympathy from people who otherwise would find his violence abhorrent…And so for us, it was really, really crucial to be able to undermine that propaganda.”

That propaganda has succeeded more than we might like to admit, especially as the mainstream professes to forget about the terrorist, or even say his name. Towards the end of the book, Wilson and Dziwulski list a disturbing number of attacks that either mirrored Christchurch or outright name-checked Tarrant. There are more, like the mosque shooting in San Diego last month, that were too late for publication. Performative shunning can have unintended consequences.

“Ignoring him has platformed him more effectively than any number of interviews or dissection of why he did what he did,” Wilson said. “It’s left this vacuum of information within which he’s being sanctified and glorified and treated like this outlaw. It's been pretty counter-productive.

“He’s now the most influential far-right terrorist in history. What we’ve tried to do in the book is to show, through his posts…that he shouldn’t be somebody that you want to emulate.

“He’s actually just a loser.”