# Saint Culture "Saint culture" names the practice, originating on 8chan's /pol/ board and adjacent channels after the [[Christchurch Mosque Shootings]], of venerating far-right mass shooters as "Saints" — ranking them by body count ("high scores"), producing memes and "edits" celebrating them, and treating their manifestos and livestreams as a canonical, imitable corpus. It is the social machinery that turned the manifesto-plus-livestream template into a self-replicating genre, and the clearest contemporary illustration of [[Stochastic Terrorism]]: no organization issues orders ([[Leaderless Resistance]]), yet a recognizable script reliably produces new attackers. ## The lineage The chain of explicit copycats demonstrates the pattern more clearly than any single attack: - **Christchurch (March 2019)** — [[Brenton Tarrant]] establishes the template: short trolling manifesto ([[The Great Replacement (Tarrant Manifesto)]]), livestream, chan upload, [[Great Replacement Theory]] core, [[Accelerationism (White Nationalist)]] aims. Tarrant himself name-checked earlier attackers, building on [[Anders Behring Breivik]]. - **Poway, California (April 2019)** — John Earnest attacks a synagogue, killing one, posting an open letter explicitly crediting Tarrant as inspiration. - **El Paso, Texas (August 2019)** — Patrick Crusius murders 23 at a Walmart targeting Latinos, posting a manifesto ("The Inconvenient Truth") that opens by expressing support for the Christchurch attacker and invokes a "Hispanic invasion of Texas" in replacement terms. - **Buffalo, New York (May 2022)** — Payton Gendron murders 10 Black shoppers at a supermarket, livestreaming on Twitch and circulating a ~180-page document large parts of which are copied directly from Tarrant's, with the target swapped to Black Americans and an antisemitic "replacement" framing. Each attacker copied the form and swapped the target — Muslims, Jews, Latinos, Black Americans — which is the genre's defining feature: a modular [[Great Replacement Theory]] worldview portable across victims, assembled from prior manifestos. ## After Buffalo The genre did not stop with the four canonical attacks. The 2022–24 wave of "Terrorgram" prosecutions in the United States and Britain — the [[Telegram]] channels that compiled the manifestos into a shared library, ranked the "Saints" and issued explicit calls for the next one — was the first time the *distribution* layer was charged as terrorism rather than the shooters alone; the U.S. designated the Terrorgram Collective a terrorist organization in January 2025. The pattern the vault tracks is that each prosecution moves the archive to a new platform and the vocabulary into more mainstream registers: "high score" and "Saint" are now jokes on ordinary gaming boards, which is how a subculture's liturgy becomes a generation's slang. See [[Stochastic Terrorism]] for the mechanism and [[Accelerationism (White Nationalist)]] for the aim. ## The incel parallel Saint culture was not only a white-nationalist invention. GNET researchers Lewis, Molloy and Macklin (2023) note that the incel community began referring to mass murderers as "Saints" at about the same time, with [[Elliot Rodger]] ("Saint Elliot") at the head of its canon. Two subcultures with different enemies arrived at the same reward for the same act, and attackers since have drawn on both. That convergence is mapped at [[Blackpill Accelerationism]]. ## Why it matters for the KB Saint culture is where this vault's manifesto cluster, [[Stochastic Terrorism]], [[Accelerationism (White Nationalist)]], and online-radicalization material converge. It explains *how* texts like [[The Great Replacement (Tarrant Manifesto)]] and [[2083 A European Declaration of Independence]] function once published: not as arguments to be evaluated but as scripts to be performed and one-upped. It also reframes the platform-governance debate — the reason New Zealand criminalized possession of Tarrant's video and document was precisely to disrupt the veneration-and-imitation loop this page describes. [[Manifestos and Founding Documents Hub]]