AT THE CENTRE OF THE STORM
“ I’ve had to watch a lot of propaganda, monitoring Isis, looking at beheadings, torture scenes.”
‘My heart is racing and I feel sick as I leave the office,” terrorism and extremism researcher Julia Ebner writes in her new book about some very alarming people, Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists. She’s talking about what happened in Christchurch on March 15, 2019. What she has to say is confronting. “From the beginning to the end, [it] was orchestrated to entertain a specific audience: the 8chan shitposters,” she claims. She describes being unable to stop seeing the victims fall or to stop hearing the gunshots. “I should not have watched the livestream of the mosque attacks.”
It’s her job. “Of course, I’ve had to watch a lot of propaganda, monitoring Isis, looking at beheadings, executions, torture scenes and war scenes,” she says, calmly reeling off horrors. She’s in a noisy cafe when I call. She steps outside. It’s evening, February in London. Is she okay out there? “I like to walk while I talk on the phone.”
In her line of work, it pays to keep moving. Going Dark recounts her covert trips down ideological wormholes to sinister parallel universes. There are encounters online and face-to-face with extremist groups from jihadi brides and trad wives to the alt-right planning the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally. Nothing prepared her for what she saw from Christchurch.
“To be
