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Speaker 1: Ever, duple cl.

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Speaker 2: Fudz swin Berner, who's a public health expert Reckons has

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Speaker 2: a different take on it to me, So weware which

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Speaker 2: had to him half the five o'clock and compare numbers

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Speaker 2: and see see what he's got to say about it.

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Speaker 2: Nine two nine two, by the way, is the text

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Speaker 2: number and standard text fees apply. Now there is a

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Speaker 2: new podcast by an Australian investigative journalist and it's questioning

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Speaker 2: whether the podcas the christ Church Mosque shooter should be

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Speaker 2: considered a lone wolf. Former Guardian and ABC journalist Joey

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Speaker 2: Watson's six part series Secrets We Keep Lone Wolf documents

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Speaker 2: Brenton Tarrance descent into Radicalization. Joey Watson is with us

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Speaker 2: right now.

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Speaker 3: Hey Joey, Hey, Heather, how are you going. Thanks so

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Speaker 3: much for having me on to talk about this important story.

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Speaker 2: More than welcome. Now, why do you think we shouldn't

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Speaker 2: be calling him a lone wolf?

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Speaker 3: Well, firstly, before I answer that, let me just establish

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Speaker 3: why I think he came to be seen as a

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Speaker 3: loan actor.

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Speaker 1: In the first place.

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Speaker 3: When the attack happened in March of twenty nineteen, it.

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Speaker 1: Sort of brought to the world stage.

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Speaker 3: This growing threat of fart extremism that we were vaguely

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Speaker 3: aware had been spiled across borders and all becoming more

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Speaker 3: organized in the period leading up to the attack, but

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Speaker 3: very much in Australia and perhaps in New Zealand, although

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Speaker 3: for slightly different reasons soon after it seemed to fade

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Speaker 3: away from public view. After the initial shock, War Off

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Speaker 3: anniversaries were never recognized. And part of the reason for

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Speaker 3: that is he had created a narrative around himself as

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Speaker 3: a guy that had kind of acted alone, and that

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Speaker 3: was very convenient for people who wanted to, you know,

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Speaker 3: not really have anything to do with it, to not

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Speaker 3: engage with it on a serious levels, but especially in Australia. Now,

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Speaker 3: what I've done is I've gone through all of the

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Speaker 3: ecosystems that he was operating in the years before the attack.

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Speaker 1: I've followed in his footsteps through Europe.

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Speaker 3: I've got a string of posts, you know, hundreds of

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Speaker 3: posts from different platforms now going back for four or

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Speaker 3: five years and lead up to the attack, and I

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Speaker 3: can see how he was in this interconnected world, how

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Speaker 3: he engaged with this world, how he forecasted his violence.

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Speaker 3: Of course, he was operationally alone. He carried out the

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Speaker 3: attack by himself, was self funded, but there were people

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Speaker 3: who who were targeting the platforms that he was operating in,

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Speaker 3: desensitizing users to violence, providing materials that would be helpful

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Speaker 3: in the planning of terrorism. And the closer I looked

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Speaker 3: at it, the more I came to see that based

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Speaker 3: on how these ecosystems operated in the years before the attack,

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Speaker 3: what happened in christ Church, it certainly wasn't inevitable, but

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Speaker 3: is tragically explainable.

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Speaker 2: Okay, So how explicit was he on these forums as

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Speaker 2: to what he was planning to do?

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Speaker 3: I mean we're talking about on at least two platforms,

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Speaker 3: one being the anonymous platform four chan, where we now

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Speaker 3: have a trove of his art posts going back four

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Speaker 3: years from researchers at the University of Auckland, and then

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Speaker 3: also in the posts that he'd made in those particular

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Speaker 3: posts he was anonymous, but then also in posts that

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Speaker 3: he'd made in Australian extremist groups where he wasn't anonymous,

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Speaker 3: where he was signaling direct threats against places of worship

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Speaker 3: in New Zealand in Dunedin where he was living. He

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Speaker 3: mentioned the fact that they're being mosques in two mosques

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Speaker 3: in christ Church. He mentioned the third mosque in Ashburton

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Speaker 3: in another post, which is where he was on his

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Speaker 3: way to after after he'd livestreamed the attack on the

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Speaker 3: first two on the day of March fifteen. And this

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Speaker 3: violence in these contexts was being encouraged, celebrated. He was

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Speaker 3: he was part of a process where everyone in those

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Speaker 3: communities were desensitizing each other. He was, in that way,

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Speaker 3: part of something that was much much bigger than himself.

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Speaker 1: And this was deliberate, right.

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Speaker 3: So you know on platforms like four Chan, you know,

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Speaker 3: which were invisible to most people in the lead up

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Speaker 3: to christ Church, which is part partly why maybe the

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Speaker 3: lone actor narrative seemed to fit so conveniently people.

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Speaker 1: Were aware of what was happening there.

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Speaker 3: But when you look closer, there were other websites around

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Speaker 3: four chan, you know, a place called Iron March, which

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Speaker 3: was this international fascist forum that was having a real

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Speaker 3: world impact.

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Speaker 1: Act on violence was spilling into the real world.

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Speaker 3: Their users were actively targeting four Chan places like four

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Speaker 3: chan and eight chan where the christ Church terrorist was

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Speaker 3: bringing users across and indoctrinating them into this radical ideology.

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Speaker 3: So it wasn't just sort of some random thing where

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Speaker 3: he had just snapped one day as he sort of

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Speaker 3: came to be seen. I mean, Australia had had a

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Speaker 3: model for that kind of mass shootter because that's what

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Speaker 3: had happened at Port Arthur in nineteen ninety six.

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Speaker 1: I was part of part of time asking before.

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Speaker 2: We run out of time, what's going on with this

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Speaker 2: migrant hunting in Bulgaria.

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Speaker 3: So a big one of the sort of biggest questions

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Speaker 3: that I had in the attack was what he was

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Speaker 3: doing on his travels, sorry in the podcast, rather as

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Speaker 3: what he was doing on his travels. And he'd done

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Speaker 3: two suspicious, suspicious trips to an area of Europe known

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Speaker 3: as the Balkans. The first one was in twenty sixteen

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Speaker 3: where he will the end of twenty sixteen, in early

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Speaker 3: twenty seventeen, where he'd been in Serbia and Bosnia. This

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Speaker 3: is a place where people had, you know, killed for

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Speaker 3: race and religion, where in the nineties bos Muslims had

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Speaker 3: been targeted.

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Speaker 1: And very much that history. No, no, that's that's not

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Speaker 1: the suggestion.

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Speaker 3: What I what I tried to find is particularly for

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Speaker 3: the second trip, where he'd done this kind of targeted

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Speaker 3: almost pilgrimage across nationalist sites in Bulgaria, and I'd wondered

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Speaker 3: sort of how this had been directed because it's, you know,

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Speaker 3: it seems so obscure to anything that we really talked

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Speaker 3: about in Australia or anything that had been present in

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Speaker 3: the Australian extremist groups in the lead up to the attack.

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Speaker 3: And what I found from speaking to people in Bulgarian

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Speaker 3: intelligence was there were actually these migrant hunter groups on

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Speaker 3: the Turkish Bulgarian border that were meeting with foreign with

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Speaker 3: foreigners that were putting out propaganda in English importantly, that

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Speaker 3: were targeting, you know, English beating extremists, and you know,

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Speaker 3: in the inverse, extremists from from you know, Western countries

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Speaker 3: were coming there and meeting with them, and that, according

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Speaker 3: to them, was that was, you know, a likely explanation

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Speaker 3: for why he might have become so obsessed with Bogaria

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Speaker 3: and that part of the world.

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Speaker 2: I see. Hey, Joey, thanks very much for talking us

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Speaker 2: through it. Really appreciated. Joey Watson investigative journalists and podcaster.

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Speaker 2: A podcast is called Secrets We Keep Lone Wolf.

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Speaker 3: For more from Hither Duplessy Allen Drive, Listen live to

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Speaker 3: news talks it'd be from four pm weekdays, or follow

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Speaker 3: the podcast on iHeartRadio