Camp Freedom revisited

Where should the balance be struck between public safety and individual freedom? At what point should the latter be curtailed to protect the former? More than four years after the anti-vaccination encampment that ended in mayhem outside Parliament, the answer isn’t clear.

New Zealand in 2020 was threatened by a global pandemic. No one knew how serious it might be.

As it turned out, we escaped relatively lightly. The Royal Commission on Covid-19 cited statistics that showed case numbers here were much lower than in most comparable countries. Deaths per capita in New Zealand were among the lowest in the OECD.

Our geographical isolation may have had something to do with that, but defenders of the Ardern government argued that it was primarily the result of decisive official action to contain the spread of the disease. Those measures included lockdowns, draconian travel restrictions and vaccination mandates that had the effect of punishing people who refused to take “the jab” by excluding them from jobs and community activities such as sport and church.

These were actions that no free society would have contemplated in ordinary circumstances and they caused immense social and economic disruption, the impact of which is still being felt as retail and hospitality businesses struggle to recover.

To all intents and purposes, New Zealand became a police state where people’s daily lives and freedom of movement were subjected to strict controls. But by and large, the public accepted these as necessary because the government didn’t know what it was dealing with or how many might otherwise die.

A generous spoonful of sugar, in the form of reassuring words from the prime minister, helped the medicine go down. “Be strong and be kind” – but especially “be kind” – became Jacinda Ardern’s catchphrase. Urged on by her daily pep talks from the Beehive, the vast majority of New Zealanders fell into line notwithstanding abundant evidence of official dissembling and incompetence in the management of the pandemic. And the government, citing relatively low mortality figures, was able to claim vindication for its strategy.

But there was always a substantial body of opinion that pushed back. It wasn’t clear at the time how big that dissident group was, since its existence was largely unacknowledged by mainstream media that unquestioningly supported the government and treated the non-compliant minority as pariahs.

It wasn’t until the occupation of Parliament’s grounds in February 2022 that the country grasped the scale of this underground resistance. The protest seemed to come out of nowhere but had been gathering momentum for months out in the heartland.

I was in Wellington on the day the convoys of the non-compliant rolled into town from opposite ends of the country and remember being astonished at the unprecedented spectacle of the streets around Parliament choked by protest vehicles. Even the police seemed to be caught completely off guard.

If the scale of the protest was the first surprise, there was another to come. Most protests at Parliament last a few hours at most and then the participants drift away. This one was different. The protesters and their vehicles were still there the next day and the day after that, in steadily increasing numbers and with comprehensive resources (paid for by Russia, Trevor Mallard astonishingly claimed - with no elaboration - before a bemused audience at this year’s Featherston book festival) that suggested they were there for the long haul. They ended up staying for more than three weeks before being driven out in a violent police operation that trashed all their equipment.

A third surprise, for me, came with the release in September 2023 of the documentary film River of Freedom. This served as a powerful corrective to the overwhelmingly negative and often wildly inaccurate, if not dishonest, media coverage of the protest camp and the motives of the people who took part or otherwise supported it. In particular, River of Freedom presented a compellingly different narrative to that of the hysterically overwrought Stuff documentary Fire and Fury, which came out the previous year and framed the anti-vax protest as being masterminded by agents of the far Right.

I wrote at the time that for me, the most striking scenes in River of Freedom (the title was inspired by cabinet minister Michael Wood’s contemptuous characterisation of the protest camp as a “river of filth”) were not the ones showing the fiery climax of the occupation at Parliament. “Dramatic though those were,” I wrote, “we had seen them before. No, I was most struck by scenes we hadn’t seen; namely, the ones that showed enthusiastic crowds lining the protest routes all the way from Cape Reinga and Bluff to the capital.

“Even out in the countryside, boisterous supporters – too numerous by far to be dismissed as a mere rent-a-mob display – turned out in force to wave placards and cheer as the convoys rolled past. Motorway overbridges were shown jammed with well-wishers, even in foul weather.

“Clearly, something unprecedented was happening out in heartland New Zealand, but where were the mainstream media? Precious little of this was reported in the press or shown on the TV news. To all intents and purposes, the rolling protest was rendered invisible.”

River of Freedom reinforced a strange sense that there were now two New Zealands – one approved by the political, bureaucratic and media establishment, the other a rough-and-ready Kiwi equivalent of Hillary Clinton’s deplorables.

With no advance promotion other than word of mouth and social media, the film played to packed houses. My first attempt to see it was thwarted because screenings in Masterton were sold out. Stuff film critic Graeme Tuckett, who wrote an admirably fair review of the movie (but without straying too far from his employer’s pro-Ardern editorial line), struck the same problem in Wellington, where it took him a week to get a ticket. The movie ended up playing in 54 cinemas, mostly in the provinces, and in September 2023 became the most watched film in the country.

Now Gaylene Barnes, the director of River of Freedom, has collaborated with movie publicist Siân Clement to produce a follow-up book called Heart of the Protest. It’s a substantial piece of work: 423 pages, liberally illustrated and comprehensively footnoted with references to sources. It sets out how the protest came about, documents in detail the occupation of Parliament’s grounds and introduces the reader to key participants.

The book doesn’t pretend to be impartial. It's as relentlessly positive in its depiction of Camp Freedom as mainstream media coverage was dismissive and disparaging.  But like Barnes’ film, it serves as a valid and necessary counterpoint to the often grossly lopsided narrative presented by mainstream journalists and commentators who made no attempt to engage with the anti-vax protesters, preferring to portray them as, at best, a motley collection of oddballs and, at worst, dupes of shadowy malevolent alt-Right agitators and, bizarrely, white supremacists. (Did they not notice the number of brown faces and the distinctly Maori vibe of the protest? Probably not, since the closest most reporters got to the protest was looking down – literally and figuratively – with Mallard from the balcony of Parliament.)

Heart of the Protest manages to be less emotionally incontinent than Fire and Fury (which, it should be noted, was made with taxpayer funding via NZ on Air, and therefore had the greater obligation to be even-handed). Perhaps the book’s greatest fault is that in its desire to give a voice to a wide range of protesters, it becomes tediously repetitive.

And the range of protesters was wide, including people who had willingly been jabbed themselves but objected on principle to others being forced to accept vaccination and losing their jobs if they didn’t. And while the protesters included some who were named in the media as inciting anti-vax fervour for nefarious ends (which were never specified), the worst that most people in the book could be accused of – including the authors themselves – is sheer earnestness. Their distress at what they saw happening to friends and families as a result of lockdowns and vaccination mandates, to say nothing of their hippy-ish delight in the communal togetherness of the protest camp, was palpable and genuine. Arguably, the book should come with a publisher’s warning that it contains more hugging, tears and New Age-speak than some readers will be able to tolerate.

Heart of the Protest reminds us of some things that we might otherwise be tempted to forget, such as the complicity of journalists and opposition parties when what was sold to us as compassion morphed into coercion and authoritarianism. People whose function was to question, scrutinise and challenge those in power went missing in action.

My opinion, for what it’s worth, is that politicians emerged from the pandemic with less dishonour than the mainstream media. The government could claim justification for its actions on the basis that it was dealing with an unprecedented crisis. That, however, didn’t release the media from their duty to hold those in power to account. It was the media’s choice to function as the state’s PR apparatus and in doing so, they may well have contributed to the well-documented decline of public faith in journalism.

Parallels with other events in New Zealand history? The 1981 Springbok tour is an obvious reference point. On that occasion too, a determined minority took direct action over what they saw as a compelling moral cause and ended up in a head-on confrontation with the forces of authority. Robert Muldoon’s National Party government was rewarded with a narrow win in the subsequent general election.

Ardern’s government had no such luck. By the time the 2023 election rolled around, the mood of the country had changed. Ardern’s magic had lost its potency and perhaps sensing that, she had stepped down.

But a more striking point of comparison is the epic 1951 waterfront dispute, when the state exercised its power to force militant wharfies and their allies in other unions into submission, even to the extent of criminalising statements of support for the unionists and prohibiting gestures of help such as food donations to their families. On that occasion, a National government used emergency powers in the Public Safety Conservation Act to enforce media silence and minimise public resistance. National resoundingly won a subsequent snap election then, too.

Both events provided a lesson in how easily a society can be persuaded that the suspension of basic rights – freedom of speech in 1951, freedom of movement and the right to refuse medical treatment in 2021-2022 – is justified in the public interest, and how easily people who don’t fall into line can be “othered”. New Zealanders who opposed lockdowns and mandates were seen as letting the side down. In a New Zealand Herald opinion poll at the time, only 12 per cent of respondents supported the protest camp.

But the passage of time has a way of altering the public perception of such events. Seventy-five years on, the suspension of fundamental civil liberties during the waterfront dispute seems inconceivable by the standards of a modern liberal democracy, just as the harsh treatment of conscientious objectors during wartime – then regarded as uncontroversial – now strikes many people as shocking.

Then there was Bastion Point. Much of the country cheered (I admit I did) when the police ended Ngati Whatua’s occupation of their ancestral land in 1978, but the public today would probably take a much more sympathetic view of the iwi’s protest.

Whether the anti-vax movement will eventually be the subject of similar historical revisionism remains to be seen, but River of Freedom and now Heart of the Protest at least introduce a semblance of balance into what was previously an overwhelmingly one-sided narrative. They also provide an alternative perspective without which the question posed at the start of this article can’t properly be answered.

■ The authors of Heart of the Protest struck resistance from the book trade, so you may not find the book in mainstream book shops. However it’s available for $39 (plus postage) from the River of Freedom website, which also lists outlets that stock it.

Guest post: Stuff's 'Fire and Fury' documentary forsakes truth-seeking journalism for the predetermined story

By FORREST CHAMBERS*

All our arguments are about the Story.  What story do we believe? Who is doing right, and who is doing wrong? Where is the story going, and what should we do as participants in the story?

Stuff's Fire and Fury tells a story: some people in New Zealand have become sucked into dangerous right-wing political extremism, and the anti-Covid-vax and anti-mandate movements have really just been portals into far-Right darkness. Once we have had an anti-mandate protest, the story goes, we will have Trump-crazed rioters storming Parliament and killing politicians (cut to scenes of the January 6 Capitol riots).

It seems that Covid-19 and vaccination has now become a signifier for “what side are you on?” – that is, “What story do you believe?” If you don't trust Pfizer, that means you don't trust the government, so that means you must be extreme Right. Right? And vice-versa. This is a dangerous oversimplification.

I have watched the Covid phenomenon unfold and seen the unprecedented and outrageous clampdown on freedom of thought and belief.  When I see doctors, scientists and ordinary lay people with reasonably derived questions and opinions censored, de-platformed and suspended on social media, I can see there is something terribly wrong.

I would have thought Fire and Fury “journalist” Paula Penfold would be curious about the unfolding Covid story as the data emerges (for example, reports of adverse reactions, rising excess death rates, declining birth rates) rather than simply taking sides and describing any Pfizer injection sceptics merely as victims of misinformation and pawns of the far Right.  There are so many doctors now speaking out.  Dr Dave Cartland, a British GP, is just one example: https://metatron.substack.com/p/breaking-the-silence. He tells his story of going from accepting what he was told, getting vaccinated, then seeing a sharp rise in “unexplained” and unusual health conditions in his work; complete denial that vaccination could possibly be linked; censorship of free medical discussion; fear among colleagues; and eventually his decision to speak up, questioning the vaccine narrative (and losing his job). But rather than consider what he has to say, according to the logic of the story: if he is sceptical of the official Covid-19 vaccine strategy, he must be lumped in with the far-Right league of miscreants. Almost every day there are more doctors and public figures trying to “walk back” their initial support for the vaccines and lockdowns. Are they joining the far Right? No!

Yes, there are far-Right bad actors out there, fomenting hatred and violence, and they should be diminished.  I guess the question is: what is the best way to do that?

Perhaps we need to consider the question, what is their story? It is clear at this point in the global technological society that corporate media giants and other “powers that be” undeniably can and do exert social manipulation and control. (I guess the question is: just how much are we manipulated and controlled? The work of the eminent psychologist Dr Robert Epstein is very disturbing.) 

Most likely, politicians must co-operate, or they won’t be politicians for very long.  The way I’m hearing the “far-Right” ranting, it seems they are aware of manipulation and control and want to fight it.  Obviously, some of their theories about the “deep state” really go off the deep end (adrenochrome, anyone?), but their basic intuition is right: people are being manipulated and controlled.  Unfortunately, their response and tactics (take down the government) are completely wrong. 

Of course, the mainstream media are implicated in this story of manipulation and control.  I had family and friends at the mandate protest and closely watched the reporting which was so biased against it (with a few notable exceptions, like the political scientist Dr Bryce Edwards, who, after he gave sympathetic reportage, had to weather a social media pile-on).  I watched Chantelle Baker’s livestream of the police-induced riot and listened to RNZ at the same time. It was clear which one was most truthful (Chantelle’s). The MSM have their story to tell and will tell it, selecting “facts” and incidents to support it. That is why the people at the protest didn’t welcome MSM reporters.

Out of the thousands of people present at the protest, two were chosen for the so-called documentary who looked/sounded like gullible Kiwis who had swallowed Counterspin hype. They were chosen to fit the “story”.

At one point in Fire and Fury, the three Voices for Freedom (VFF) women leaders were equated with women of the “Nazi programme” because they were “wholesome” (gasp!). This would be laughable if it wasn’t so provocatively offensive and plainly wrong.  Would the VFF three have more credibility (i.e. be less like Nazis) if they were less wholesome? It seems they can't win either way. Too wholesome? Nazis! Unwholesome? Well, say no more... 

While on the topic of Nazis, let’s remember that the Nazis used “'modern medical science” to justify the separating out of Jews, putting them behind a wall in the early days of the Warsaw Ghetto. This was justified by the “scientific” belief (story) that Jews carried typhus, and the best way to protect the “innocent public” was through segregation. Just like the vaccine mandates, which decreed that our teenage daughters could not attend dance class because that would put everyone at risk (justified by modern medical science).  It is only a short step then to scapegoating and hating a group of people you have “blamed” and ostracised.  Sound familiar? This is what the mandate protest was about: division and hatred caused by a government policy.  Not far-Right nonsense (although I agree there were far-Right activists trying to capitalise on the collective disgust at government policy).

And if the “Nazi” accusations aren't convincing in a “documentary”, add a bit of spooky atmospheric music and high production values to sway the audience.  Just like ... oh yes, it was the Nazis who pioneered “state of the art” media and propaganda films to great effect (see Leni Riefenstahl). What else reminds us of Nazi tactics?  Monopolising and controlling all sources of information, quarantining'/segregating/scapegoating, denouncing and firing critics, government and big business working together, etc.  Unfortunately, accusations of being “Nazi” have a dangerous tendency to boomerang back.

A couple of last points: “personal anecdotes” (such as: “my uncle got sick after the injection”) were dismissed as just another kind of “fake information” designed to con people into the wrong beliefs. Which prompts the question: how can journalism proceed if anecdotes are now off-limits? Or how, indeed, can we make sense of the world without listening to anecdotes? 

A number of years ago, Fire and Fury presenter Paula Penfold was curious about anecdotes and investigated possible adverse reactions to Gardasil (a mass vaccination programme for teenage girls intended to reduce HPV and cervical cancer). But in this current climate, she would not be able to run a story on Covid vaccines as she did on Gardasil without becoming a victim of the “Covid vaccine sceptics are actually Right-wing puppets” story. Truth-seeking journalism has been sacrificed to the predetermined story.

It would take a truly courageous journalist to go beyond the “received and approved” story.  But they seem to be very rare birds these days. 

*Forrest Chambers is a prison chaplain who lives in Levin.

A few thoughts on Stuff's Fire and Fury documentary

I didn’t intend to watch Stuff’s video documentary Fire and Fury, but after reading Stuff columnist Jenny Nicholls’ gushing review (headlined “Fire and Fury documentary shows journalism at the peak of its powers”, and of course given great prominence on the Stuff website), I felt compelled to.

The one-hour doco, which describes itself as “an investigation into disinformation in Aotearoa New Zealand”, got a wholly uncritical tick from its in-house reviewer. But I watched it this morning and came to the conclusion that Fire and Fury (which, incidentally, brazenly pinches its title from a book by American author Michael Woolf about Donald Trump) is part of the very problem the makers purport to deplore.

Let’s start with the positives. Fire and Fury is unquestionably well made. The editing is slick, the photography is first-class (the riot on the last day of the Camp Freedom protest at Parliament has never been more graphically captured) and the music is suitably dark and ominous.

The makers have dug deep, unearthing a wealth of damning video footage and exposing a web of connections between various malignant “influencers” and conspiracy theorists who stand accused of poisoning the public conversation with misinformation and toxic rhetoric.

So it showcases formidable journalistic skills. But to say it’s well made isn’t necessarily, by itself, a ringing commendation. Leni Riefenstahl, the Nazi Party’s favourite film-maker, made impressive documentaries too.

As with many propaganda projects (which Fire and Fury is), the producers appear to have started out with a particular premise and set about gathering whatever information and images were necessary to substantiate it. But an equally skilled documentary maker might arguably approach the subject from the reverse direction and come up with something just as persuasive.

Here are some of my misgivings, in no particular order:

■ Fire and Fury paradoxically amplifies messages that the producers tell us are a threat to democracy and national wellbeing. It provides a platform for extremist fringe activists who I suspect will revel in the exposure. If there’s a common characteristic the main players seem to share, it’s that they are egoistical loudmouths and fantasists who are gratified by their notoriety – none more so, I suspect, than Damien De Ment and Kelvyn Alp, founder of the website Counterspin. Fire and Fury gives them more of the oxygen they crave. The documentary will also serve to reinforce their conviction, and that of their followers, that a corrupt mainstream media is deaf to legitimate grievances, has no interest in the truth and is determined to discredit them and suppress their messages. But more on that later.

■ Because the makers set out with a preconceived objective, there’s not even a token attempt at balance, and most notably no attempt to understand what drove the Camp Freedom protesters, many of whom gave the impression of being fairly normal, conservative, middle-class New Zealanders who had never before engaged in protest activity. It’s almost axiomatic in journalism that there are always two sides to a story, yet Fire and Fury makes no attempt to get to the bottom of whatever sense of discontent led an extraordinarily disparate group to converge spontaneously on Wellington from all over the country – an unprecedented phenomenon.

In that respect Fire and Fury is an epic fail because it gets us no closer to comprehending what happened outside Parliament six months ago, possibly because the producers didn’t want to know. Perhaps they convinced themselves that the protesters couldn’t possibly have a valid reason to think the way they do and so the question wasn’t worth asking.  The documentary makers preferred to get the truth, or at least their version of it, from approved voices of the left-wing establishment such as law academic Khylee Quince, Kate Hannah of the Disinformation Project (whose funding isn’t clear from its website, though I suspect we pay for it) and the Australian “misinformation expert” Ed Coper, whose LinkedIn profile indicates he’s well marinated in woke dogma. It goes without saying that none of these people could possibly be suspected of having an ideological agenda of their own – and if they do, we're expected to assume it’s an honourable and righteous one.

Again, this perpetuates the yawning them-and-us gap – no, let’s call it a chasm – and sense of alienation that generated such ill-will toward what was seen during the occupation as an elitist, hostile media. There was no more telling image than that of Trevor Mallard and a press gallery pack looking down on the protesters (that is, looking down both figuratively and literally) from the balcony of Parliament. It was predictably characterised as a Marie Antoinette moment.

■ The reporter and narrator of Fire and Fury, Paula Penfold, doesn't reveal whether she tried to confront any of the figures she identifies as the villains of the piece. She did, however, interrogate a genteel-looking elderly woman who's presented as some sort of public enemy after being caught on camera at the protest telling a media crew to “get out”.  Quite apart from the fact that Penfold chose the softest of targets, challenging the woman to justify herself when she had no obligation to do so (and this in her own home, months after the event) looked perilously close to bullying.  When an experienced TV journalist puts questions to a private citizen unaccustomed to being in the public eye, and has the power to edit the interview in such a way as to emphasise whatever message she wants to convey, there’s never any doubt which side the power is on.

■ Crucially, Fire and Fury doesn’t ask a central question that arises repeatedly: namely, why so many people no longer trust the media. It’s more convenient to leave that particular stone unturned.  Yet distrust of the media was a potent issue at Camp Freedom, as Penfold concedes when she comments: “Since they [the protesters] distrust journalists, they bypass the media entirely.” She goes on to say she and her colleagues have never encountered that level of hostility anywhere in the world. Well, there’s a rather big clue, right there. I deplore threats against anyone lawfully doing their job, but rather than sounding hard done by, Penfold might ask herself how things got to this point.

I have my own ideas about that. I believe the mainstream media in New Zealand have lost sight of what was previously their primary objective, which was to reflect society back to itself and report, as neutrally as possible, on matters of interest and concern to the communities they purported to serve. Instead they have positioned themselves in the front line of the culture wars and put themselves at odds with their diminishing audiences by haranguing them with an ideological agenda largely driven by disaffected minorities. The subjects of Fire and Fury just happen to be the wrong disaffected minorities.

To summarise: While purporting to be concerned about the potential harm done by wacko extremists (and some do have the appearance of being truly wacko), Stuff's big-statement documentary drives another wedge into an already dangerously fractured society. Oh, and by the way: did I mention that it was made with funding from the Public Interest Journalism Fund?

 

 

Does the right to say what we think still apply when we do it anonymously?

Oh dear. It seems I’ve let the side down.

A number of people, on this blog and elsewhere, appeared to like what I wrote about the Molesworth St protesters challenging the woke Left’s long-standing stranglehold on what these days is called public discourse.

But then they got to the footnote in which I said I neither whole-heartedly supported nor opposed the protesters, and at that point I lost them. It seems that if you’re not 100 percent behind Camp Freedom, you’re part of the conspiracy against them. How sad (and I don’t mean that ironically, as in It Ain’t Half Hot Mum).

Of course this is nothing new. It’s a familiar, if perverse, quirk of human nature.

I get along fine with old friends with whom I’m almost totally at odds politically. The people whose friendship is sometimes less dependable are those who, because we share the same opinions on most issues, develop the irrational expectation that we’ll agree all the time, and who behave as if it’s an act of betrayal when I don’t fall into line with their thinking.  To put it another way, their approval is conditional on me agreeing with them on just about everything.

The urge to pick fights with people who are basically on the same side is well documented. If reports are to be believed, it has happened – quite literally – at the Molesworth St encampment.

Countless political organisations have fallen apart because people who were passionately committed to the same causes fell out bitterly over what often seemed like relatively minor ideological sticking points. That’s the principal reason the far Left in New Zealand has historically been so ineffectual (that is, until the 2020 election, when they sneaked under the radar). They were so busy disembowelling each other that they lost sight of the common enemy. The deep schism that split New Zealand communists into pro-China and pro-Soviet camps was a case in point.

G K Chesterton called it the Irish disease. According to Chesterton, “This consists of the ability to find yourself 99 per cent in agreement with someone and then focus with ferocious, unforgiving intensity on the other one per cent.”

But of course it’s not confined to the Irish. I don’t believe the people having a whack at me all have Gaelic surnames.

The peevish tone of some comments in recent weeks (not all of them published) illustrates a wider phenomenon. The tone of public debate, as many commentators have noted, has become volatile and intolerant. The mood of the country is brittle and feverish. People are splitting into tribal camps. A woman I know who works in a local retail business told me yesterday of confrontations with aggressive men making irrational demands. This is not normal.

Some of this unpleasantness can be blamed on social tensions created, or at least brought to the surface, by Covid-19.  But it can also be attributed to government policies that are driving a wedge through what has historically been, at least by international standards, an admirably harmonious society. Some days New Zealand feels more like the Balkans.

Some of the comments rebuking me for not taking an emphatic position in support of the Molesworth St protest were polite and considered. Others were snarly and sneering. Some commenters write as if I have some sort of obligation always to faithfully reflect their views, and when I don’t I’ve somehow failed them. But if people expect me to confine myself to opinions that they happen to share, they’re reading the wrong blog. Whatever happened to the notion that a pluralistic, liberal democracy allows us to express honestly held opinions, regardless of whether others agree? When did we split into absolutist camps, intolerant of any deviation?

Now, another thing. A good friend and regular reader of this blog – one who certainly doesn’t share all my views – asked me recently why I permit anonymous opinions. I’m starting to wonder the same thing.

I admit one reason I'm having second thoughts is that it irritates me when people snipe at me from the cover of anonymity. They know who I am; my identity is out there for anyone to see. Why should they be able to have a whack at me, on my blog, without identifying themselves?

But there are other good reasons for reconsidering my tolerance of anonymity. For one thing, I’ve always believed that if a view is worth expressing, it’s worth putting your name to. There are occasions when people have valid reasons for withholding their identity (for example, when disclosing sensitive personal information), but they’re rare.

For another, it’s important that people on the conservative side of politics should have enough confidence in their convictions to declare themselves boldly. I sometimes wonder whether they’re intimidated by the overwhelming weight of left-wing opinion out there in the public arena, and particularly in the mainstream media. But the Left wins the moral battle by default when they are prepared to stand up in public and the Right isn’t.  It’s like a rugby match where the opposing side hasn’t shown up. We live in a free society and we should take full advantage of it.

Thirdly, I believe the quality of comment improves when people have to put their names to it. That was borne out when newspapers began insisting on letters to the editor being signed and accompanied by a verifiable address rather than written using a nom-de-plume. Most papers adopted that rule decades ago and it seems odd that blogs don’t do the same.

People are less likely to express extreme, petty, abusive or defamatory opinions when they have to sign them. Admittedly, I have no way of verifying that commenters are who they say they are; it would largely be on trust. Nonetheless I believe a requirement that people identify themselves would reduce the risk of the right to comment being abused.

Having said that, I don’t want to deter people from commenting and I certainly don’t intend to stifle comments critical of me. The comments section is a crucial component of this blog and I greatly value readers’ contributions, which are often thoughtful, provocative and erudite. In fact I’ll stick my neck out and say that I sometimes think there’s more value in the comments than in the blog posts that trigger them. I’m very grateful to the people who take the trouble to comment and I especially thank those who write under their own names.

In the spirit of participatory democracy, since I regard readers and commenters as having a stake in this blog, I welcome input before I make any change.

 

 

 

 

Why the woke Left is so rattled by Camp Freedom

[A technical glitch occurred with the original version of this post and I had to take it down. This version is the same except that it no longer contains links to the source material I refer to, which were the cause of the problem. Unfortunately, in taking down the post, I couldn't avoid deleting some thoughtful comments.  I apologise to those who posted those  comments and invite them to re-submit them.]

It’s been fascinating over the past couple of weeks to observe the intellectual contortions of people who forcefully uphold the right to protest, just as long as those ghastly lowlifes on the other side don’t do it.

Veteran old-school leftist Don Franks deftly skewered the hypocrites in a poem published on this blog, but it hasn’t deterred them from continuing to recoil in disgust at the sight of the “rabble” (a word suddenly much favoured by the illiberal Left, as opposed to those like Franks who believe in free speech) on the lawns outside Parliament.

There’s an unmistakeable note of panic in the posturing of the woke Left. They suddenly realise they no longer control the public debate and are wildly lashing out at the scruffy mob that usurped their right to make a nuisance of themselves.  How dare they!

Over the past few days we’ve seen a stream of desperate attempts to argue that the Freedom Convoy has no legitimacy; that the only "proper" protests are those endorsed by the leftist elite. By definition, no other protest can have any validity, least of all one mounted by a loose coalition of mostly working-class, provincial people driving utes and house trucks.

Camp Freedom is something new and threatening. In the eyes of its critics, it can only be explained by seeing it as an imported phenomenon – an ideological virus, smuggled in by the global far-Right, to which stupid and gullible New Zealanders have allowed themselves to be exposed.

The level of condescension and intellectual snobbery on display from people who think of themselves as liberal has been breathtaking. The tone has alternated between sneering at this supposedly feral underclass and alarm at their sudden, forceful presence on the national stage – a stage the wokeists are accustomed to hogging for themselves.

Mandy Hager – president of the Society of Authors, sister of Nicky and a fully paid-up member of the leftist cabal that normally dominates the public conversation – revealed the Left’s anxiety, hypocrisy and intellectual confusion in an opinion piece for Stuff last weekend.

As the author of a book entitled Protest! Shaping Aotearoa, Hager evidently regards herself as an authority – perhaps the authority – on New Zealand protest movements. But it was clear from her article that her definition of protest is a narrow and self-serving one which excludes any group that could be classified as conservative or right-wing.

She applauded historic protests in support of homosexual law reform, women’s suffrage, MMP and New Zealand’s anti-nuclear stance. Their end goals, she wrote, were “designed to strengthen our existing political frameworks, social cohesion and civil rights”. They were based on the values of the “greater good”.

Peaceful resistance and civil disobedience is fine in Hager’s eyes if it’s against the 1981 Springbok Tour or climate change, but she isn’t at all happy with what’s happening in Molesworth St. That’s different.

“For a start, there are many factions, and no one concrete outcome articulated” … “a disparate group awash with grievances, much of it stoked by insidious overseas interference” … “dubious scientific backing only from the fringes”.  In other words the Molesworth St protesters aren’t playing by the usual rules. And who sets the rules? Apparently, people like Hager.

She concludes: “This protest works against the overall needs and values of a healthy, cohesive, inclusive society.” Apparently that’s not allowed. And who decides what a healthy, cohesive, inclusive society looks like? Why, people like Hager, that’s who. As I said in a letter to The Dominion Post: “[Hager’s] article confirms the impression that the Left claims the right to protest exclusively for itself and its own favoured causes.” 

(Bizarrely, Hager also dived down a blind alley with the assertion: “Of course we’ve also seen the ugly side of protest here, a pick and mix of racist, anti-Maori/migrant/LGBTQIA+/Muslim/Jew/Asian/women and other prejudices given air.” Really? Apart from thankfully very rare offensive gestures against Jewry, which are presumably the work of a tiny, attention-seeking lunatic fringe, I can’t recall protests against any of these groups and suspect they are figments of Hager’s febrile imagination. Or perhaps she includes late-night talkback calls from angry old men in her definition of “protest”.)

On Tuesday morning it was the turn of someone named Byron C Clark, supposedly a “disinformation and conspiracy researcher” on Morning Report. The theme was that stupid people had allowed themselves to be indoctrinated. Ergo the protesters have been misled and their grievances should be disregarded.  

Obligingly fed a series of soft, leading questions by the Usual Suspect, aka Susie Ferguson, Clark sounded the alarm about the Freedom Campers being radicalised by sinister alien forces and global disinformation networks. Oddly enough, we never hear experts on Morning Report expressing alarm about people being radicalised by the extreme Left, although it’s been happening for decades and has succeeded in transforming New Zealand into a country that some of us barely recognise.

Similarly, we should conclude that ideological manipulation is a problem only if it’s practised on an ignorant lumpenproletariat, but not when it happens to gullible middle-class students in university lecture theatres, where it flourishes unchallenged.

Clark talked of nefarious far-right conspiracies and distrust of the government (you're kidding me) and media (no, surely not). It didn’t seem to have occurred to him that if New Zealanders have been driven into the arms of dodgy alternative news sources such as Counterspin, it might be because they have learned not to trust the mainstream media. (As it happens, I don't either.) 

Asked by Ferguson who might be bankrolling the protest, Clark mentioned the name of Steve Bannon. Donald Trump was also mentioned. You can see the irony here: a man who professes to investigate conspiracy theories was indulging in them himself.

Prior to this, I’d never heard of Clark, who described himself as an amateur, freelance conspiracy researcher. Despite his flimsy credentials, the interview was allowed to run for nearly 8 minutes – slightly more time than the woman who runs the country got on the same morning. Say no more.

The ubiquitous Morgan Godfery, whose column mugshot suggests an overweening self-regard, also chimed in again yesterday and made no attempt to conceal his contempt for the protesters, ridiculing them while at the same time acknowledging that “constructing an ‘us versus them’ situation isolates the protesters further, plunging them deeper into their personal paranoias and collective conspiracies”. So he recognises the danger of marginalising the protesters but goes ahead and does it anyway.

What we can infer from this barrage of anti-Camp Freedom propaganda is that the woke Left is terrified of losing the initiative in the culture wars. It’s desperate to reclaim its sole right to lecture the rest of us and wants to do so without the distraction of an unruly mob that has the effrontery to adopt the Left’s own tactics.

The irony here is that having spent most of their lives kicking against the establishment, the wokeists are the establishment. They have won the big ideological wars and are on the same side as all the institutions of power and influence: the government, the bureaucracy, the media, academia, the arts  and even the craven business sector.

The dissenters, disrupters and challengers of the status quo – in other words the people protesting outside Parliament – are the new radicals. This requires the moralisers of the left to recalibrate their political thinking, and I get the impression it’s more than some of them can cope with.

Footnote: For the record, I neither wholeheartedly support nor oppose the Molesworth St protesters. This may sound like a copout, but it’s hard to take a position because their causes are too disparate and there are too many rogue elements among them. What gets my back up is people who have long claimed the right to protest for themselves seeking to deny it to others for no better reason than that they don’t like what they’re saying.