A corrective to Rachel Stewart's fantasy

Herewith, a postscript to my item a couple of days ago about Rachel Stewart.

A friend who’s on Twitter (I’m not – God forbid) alerted me to a series of tweets by Stewart striking back at me.

I have no desire to prolong a squabble that risks being characterised as two bald men fighting over a comb (Jorge Luis Borges’ great line about the Falklands War), but what Stewart has written is a complete fiction.

She says that when she asked Oskar Alley, then deputy editor of the Dominion Post, for a column slot, “he immediately sent the email to his retired mate Karl”.

Wrong on at least two counts - in fact, pure cock and bull.

First, a quick search of my emails this morning turned up only a handful from Alley. The most recent was in 2014, well before Stewart appeared on the scene, and none of them related to her – not surprisingly, since no one had heard of her then. They all related to a daily quiz that I provided to the paper in addition to my fortnightly column.

Second, I imagine Alley would be as insulted as I am by the suggestion that we were mates. I’ve never met him, never even spoken to him on the phone, and my few emails from him were notable for the absence of any pleasantries.

Stewart appears to have forgotten that it was she who went public, in a tweet in 2016, with the suggestion that the Dom Post would be better off with her as a columnist than me.

All this makes nonsense of the wounded tone in her tweets yesterday in which she complained of a “private and confidential conversation” with Alley being relayed to me. She went on to say I’ve "had it in for her ever since", but until Wednesday I’d mentioned her only twice – most recently in 2017.

She also made a disparaging remark about gossipy journalists, by implication including me. But then as now, I have almost zero contact with journalists and not the slightest interest in gossip.

Stewart appears to suffer from some sort of martyrdom complex. Consider this post, in which she complained that a review of a documentary film about dairying, in which she featured, attacked the film by attacking her. In fact the review mentioned her only in passing and towards the end.

She then suggested she was subsequently cut from the documentary because the producers were panicked by that one brief mention by an obscure critic, and she went on to pin the blame – without any apparent substantiation – on shadowy trans-gender activists. But the post served the purpose of placing Stewart front and centre, which seems a consistent factor in virtually everything she writes.

Right, now I’ll stop.

 

 

On Rachel Stewart and freedom of speech

I see that former New Zealand Herald columnist Rachel Stewart is positioning herself as a champion of free speech.

In a self-promoting column (that’s almost a tautology, since everything Stewart writes seems to be self-promoting), she draws attention to her recent appearance on The Platform’s Free Speech Friday and praises Sean Plunket’s online radio station – quite rightly – for holding out against the suppression of politically unfashionable opinions.

Fair enough. We should welcome and encourage anyone who’s genuinely committed to the principle that people should be able to write or say what they think, provided it doesn’t advocate violence or harm.

But I can’t help wondering when Stewart joined the cause, because in two posts several years ago I cited instances when she made it very clear that she didn’t think the right of free speech extended to people she disagreed with or disapproved of.

One of those people was me. Stewart couldn’t understand why the Dominion Post published a column by me when they could have one written by her. To be precise, she tweeted: “I read Karl du Fresne in the Dom and quite apart from the fact that I agree with him on nothing, I think to myself they could have me.”

Translated: “My opinions are superior, so why don’t they get rid of him?” – hardly a ringing defence of people’s right to say things she doesn’t like.

Okay, in this case I could be accused of being over-sensitive. But not so in the other instance, in which Stewart launched a full-on attack against an Otago Daily Times columnist who had criticised virtue-signalling broadcasters for showing off their mastery of te reo during Maori Language Week. Stewart wrote then that she believed in free speech “absolutely” but added that she struggled with what “basically amounts to gratuitous hate speech”.

Ah, the old, familiar “I believe in free speech, but …” line. Whenever I hear the words “I believe in free speech” followed immediately by a disclaimer excluding whatever opinion/s the speaker happens to object to, I file it under F for fake.

I suspect that what may have happened in Stewart’s case since then – her Road to Damascus experience, if you like – is that she’s found the walls closing in around her. Her own opinions once fell within the ideologically acceptable zone (she was in safe territory attacking dirty dairying and supposed racism), but the range of permissible opinions has narrowed to the point where even she feels threatened.

The ground has shifted under her. No one is safe now from woke vigilantes. The Herald's disgraceful refusal in 2019 to publish a restrained and rationally argued column in which Stewart supported the right of feminists to oppose the virulent trans-gender lobby would have been a wake-up moment.

To put it another way, my guess is that Stewart became a champion of free speech only when her own rights came under attack. But if that experience has made her a genuine advocate for freedom of expression rather than a Claytons one, that can be no bad thing.

Clarification: The original version of this post implied Stewart was sacked by the Herald. I've since learned that according to Stewart, she severed her relationship with the paper after it refused to publish her column criticising Massey University for cancelling a feminist meeting about transgenderism.

Freedom of speech, Rachel Stewart-style

New Zealand Herald columnist Rachel Stewart is a true champion of free speech. Except, that is, when someone wants to say something she doesn’t like.

In her column this week she savaged an occasional Otago Daily Times columnist named Dave Witherow. Witherow is guilty of the unpardonable sin of being (like me) an ageing, conservative male. In the eyes of the left-leaning bigots who have acquired almost total control of the public conversation in New Zealand, this automatically disqualifies him from having a valid opinion on anything.

What specifically pushed Stewart’s buttons is that Witherow wrote a column criticising Maori Language Week – or as he put it, “media apologists the length and breadth of the land prostrating themselves before the holy altar of te reo”.

He was especially critical of Radio New Zealand. “For the last couple of years,” Witherow wrote, “RNZ has been ahead of the pack in obsequiousness. Everything indigenous is sacrosanct, and even formerly redoubtable interviewers now shrink from the slightest demur when boring bigots drone on about the mana of all things native.”

Witherow used provocative language, as he’s entitled to do, and duly copped a barrage of self-righteous condemnation.

One of the more frenzied responses came from someone named Glenn McConnell, who was described as a Stuff reporter. That word “reporter” used to mean someone who reported, but that was before journalism training was politicised and new entrants to the profession were inculcated with the view that their mission was to correct the world’s iniquities. Many of them struggle to string three coherent words together, but they can spot sexism and racism a mile off and never hesitate to pass judgment. So McConnell had no compunction in labelling Witherow as a racist and accusing him of “casual bigotry”.

Hmmm. I wonder who the real bigots are here, but we’ll come back to that.

McConnell condescendingly allowed that most racists don’t know they’re racist. Ah, but he knows a racist when he sees one. Such are the superior moral insights conferred by modern journalism training.

Meanwhile, on the news website The Spinoff, Madeleine Chapman (no, I hadn’t heard of her, either) indulged in her own casual bigotry. She apologised for having to condemn yet another “bad column” (sigh – it’s just so tiresome having to constantly correct all these knuckle-dragging reactionaries) but justified it by saying she hoped it would be “the last goodbye to a generation of old men standing on their media platforms, yelling at clouds”.

You almost have to admire the conceit underlying that statement. Chapman seems to think the irresistible force of her argument will shock people like Witherow into silence. Good luck with that, as they say.

Another Spinoff contributor, Danyl Mclauchlan, categorised Witherow as representative of a “mostly older, mostly Pakeha subset of the population” whom he said were routinely provoked into outrage by Maori Language Week. Mclauchlan sneeringly referred to “drunken uncles at summer barbecues, bores holding forth in work tea-rooms and columnists and cartoonists on provincial papers”, all perpetuating their own ignorant versions of New Zealand history.  

(If I can slightly digress here, you can’t help but note a striking consistency in both Spinoff pieces. In an era when the Left is vigilant to the point of obsession in condemning stereotypes and prejudice, the one form of discrimination that’s not just tolerated but encouraged is the disparaging of older white males. The epithet “male, pale and stale” now serves as a coded synonym for someone who is misogynistic, racist, homophobic and stubbornly resistant to everything that’s progressive and enlightened. It’s a caricature, used to dismiss the legitimacy of anything that older white men might say or any opinions they might hold. So much for the Left’s supposed embrace of diversity.)

Witherow’s column also attracted the inevitable admonishment from Race Relations Commissioner Susan Devoy, who unfortunately has emulated her immediate predecessor, Joris De Bres, by morphing into a tedious, finger-wagging prig.  But the most poisonous attack, and I use the word deliberately, came from Stewart.

Stewart has the gall to say she believes in free speech – “absolutely” – before going on to say she “struggles with what basically amounts to gratuitous hate speech”. But she can’t have it both ways.

What she really wants is to deny Witherow a right that she claims for herself – that of free speech. She goes a step further by attacking the Otago Daily Times for publishing his column and therefore, in her eyes, being complicit in hate speech.

That’s why I describe her attack as poisonous. In a breathtaking display of moral and intellectual conceit, Stewart wants us to accept that her opinion is legitimate and noble while that of Witherow is hateful and contemptible. But she can’t exercise her own right of free speech while simultaneously seeking to deny it to others. A democratic society is built on the contestability of ideas. The moment any set of ideas is outlawed, democracy is diminished. Enlightened leftists (that is, those who can genuinely lay claim to the honourable term “liberal”) realise that. Stewart either can’t, or doesn’t want to.

In any case, who defines “hate speech”? Stewart doesn’t explain, so I’ll attempt it for her. Hate speech, in the eyes of some on the Left (not everyone, by any means), can essentially be defined as any opinion that runs counter to identity politics. This is the ideology that seeks to polarise society by breaking it down into supposedly oppressed minority groups, all pursuing their own divisive agendas, and which assesses everything in Western civilisation – art, literature, history, politics, the media – in terms of class, race and gender.

Playing the “hate speech” card is one of a range of tactics now routinely employed to marginalise any opinion the Left doesn’t like. Others include dismissing any expression of conservative opinion as a “rant”, thus implying it’s the product of a deranged mind, or caricaturing even moderately right-of-centre opinion as extreme, as New Zealand writer Ben Mack did in a hysterical, pants-wetting Washington Post column describing New Zealand First as a “far right” party and its involvement in the coalition government as “terrifying”. (The headline read: How the far right is poisoning New Zealand. Notwithstanding my own detestation of Winston Peters and his role in the shonky formation of the new government, I didn’t recognise the country portrayed in that headline and I don’t know any New Zealander who would.)

“Denier” and “denialist” (which are used in the context of the climate change debate to imply that global warming sceptics are on a par with Jew-hating Holocaust deniers) are part of this repertoire of attack too, along with the terms “racist”, “sexist”, “homophobe” and “misogynist” – all of which are used to portray the person so labelled as either stupid, evil or both, and thus to shame or intimidate them into silence. The ultimate objective of this strategy is to redefine the boundaries of public discourse so as to exclude anything that doesn’t conform to the neo-Marxist agenda.

But here’s the thing. Stewart’s entitled to fume all she likes about hate speech, just as long as she doesn’t attempt to shut other people down. I’m not in the habit of attacking other columnists and wouldn’t be criticising her here if she hadn’t stepped over that line. (Incidentally, I don’t know of any conservative group that argues people like her should be silenced. It’s always those on the Left who seek to stifle opinions that upset them.)

Now, back to McConnell, the Stuff columnist who accuses Witherow of bigotry. But who are the real bigots in this debate? My Oxford dictionary defines a bigot as an obstinate and intolerant believer in a religion or political theory. If that accusation is going to be hurled at Witherow, then it should be thrown right back at some of those attacking him. People should never make the mistake of equating bigotry with conservatism. Some of the most resolutely closed minds I’ve encountered have belonged to diehard lefties.

Fortunately there are left-leaning commentators who see the danger of the route people like Stewart would take us down. They are prepared to defend Witherow’s right to an opinion, and the ODT’s right to publish it, even if they don’t agree with what he says. On Pundit, for example, Tim Watkin described Witherow’s column as insulting and narrow-minded (fair enough), but drew the line “when criticism becomes an attack on civil debate and free speech”. And in the Herald, veteran writer Gordon McLachlan chided Stewart for thinking her own opinion sacrosanct. She should accept, he wrote, that she was not in command of ultimate truths.

Amen to that, but I suspect Stewart is so wrapped up in her own conceit, and so lacking in critical self-awareness, that reasoned criticism will fly straight over her head.

This debate still has some way to run. It’s likely to be revived tomorrow when Radio New Zealand’s Kim Hill interviews Don Brash, who endorsed Witherow’s column and posted a statement on Facebook saying he was “utterly sick” of hearing Te Reo Maori on RNZ. Brash identified Guyon Espiner of Morning Report as the worst offender and accused him of “virtue signalling”. (Good on Espiner for learning Maori, but he does give the impression that he enjoys showing off his fluency. And it’s hard to see the point of the increasingly frequent usage of Maori on Morning Report, unless it’s to make listeners feel that they’re not being good New Zealanders unless they learn it too. RNZ needs to understand that it’s not the function of the state broadcaster to inspire us to good works – we can go to church for that – or sign up to some idealistic vision of biculturalism.)

I can’t decide whether Brash is being foolhardy or courageous entering the lion’s den with Hill, since he has about as much chance of fair treatment as I have of being crowned Miss Universe. In my experience, the only time Hill interviews conservatives, it’s with the intention of trying to demolish them or make them look stupid. But good luck to him.

Who is Rachel Stewart and why is she saying these awful things about me?

Someone drew my attention a couple of days ago to a comment posted on Twitter by a newspaper columnist named Rachel Stewart.

I hadn’t consciously heard of Stewart but she knew about me. She tweeted: “I read Karl du Fresne in the Dom and, quite apart from the fact that I agree with him on nothing, I think to myself they could have me.”

The first thing that struck me about this desperate cry for attention was her stupendously inflated self-regard. A quick look at Stewart’s Twitter account reinforces the impression that she has an ego the size of Mt Taranaki.

I imagine it’s even more rampant now, since she advertises the fact that she was voted the top opinion writer in the recent Canon Media Awards. I, on the other hand, have never won any sort of award. I don’t enter awards because they don’t generally count for a hell of a lot, other than to the people who win them.

The judges who matter, ultimately, are the people who read the paper. And it’s just possible that one reason why I get published is that there’s an audience for the opinions I express. This may not have occurred to Stewart. Perhaps she’s so accustomed to bathing in the admiration of her Twitter followers – people for whom the 140-character limit is a blessing because it saves them from having to develop any coherent arguments – that she’s been deluded into assuming that everyone thinks just like her.

Well, they don’t. The angry left-wing wasps who swarm on Twitter are far less representative of mainstream opinion than I am. I suppose that’s why they’re so bitter. They’re frustrated, and they give vent to their frustration through infantile personal attacks on anyone whose opinions they dislike. Just ask Mike Hosking, who weathers a barrage of venomous abuse every day.

Same old, same old, you might say. But Stewart amps it up a notch when she suggests I should be sacked and replaced by her, presumably because she believes the public would be better served by reading her opinions. This is a novel position for a newspaper columnist to take. It suggests a very low tolerance of free speech, which ultimately is what all columnists – Stewart included – depend on.

Am I over-reacting? Probably. “Rise above it,” a wise friend said. But the Irish in me (du Fresne being a proud old Hibernian name) makes it hard for me to ignore a taunt. Besides, you get to a point where you feel the urge to strike back at the buzzing wasps.

Here’s something for Stewart to consider. I don’t object to her having a platform for her views and I expect the same in return. Indeed I don’t object to any left-wing commentator having a platform. I often read them and sometimes even nod in agreement. I have never believed that any “ism” has all the right answers.

I would go further and suggest Stewart should force herself to read my stuff, even if she has to hold her nose while she does it. Having to confront the unpalatable fact that other people have different opinions can only be good for her – that is, unless she really doesn’t like the idea of a pluralistic democracy, in which case things are worse than I thought.

And here’s something else for her to consider. There might actually be issues on which we agree – the environmental damage done by industrial-scale dairying, for starters. As far as I know, I was writing about this long before Stewart launched the public crusade against the dairy industry that made provincial headlines this week.

Trouble is, some people – and Stewart may well be one of them – are locked into a binary view of the world that requires people to be categorised as either bad or good, with no grey area in between.

I’ve noticed that one strange consequence of this mindset is that when I write something that lefties might be expected to agree with – an expression of support for trade unions, for example, or a condemnation of the historical treatment of Maori, or the aforementioned dirty dairying – they magically don’t see it. A mysterious fog comes over their eyes. It doesn’t register with them because it doesn’t fit the binary world view that people must be either totally right or totally wrong.

Put another way, they’re more comfortable seeing me as an unreconstructed right-wing dinosaur who couldn’t possibly have anything of value to say about anything. Nothing can be allowed to disturb settled assumptions.

It’s all a bit tiresome and infantile, but the consoling factor is that criticism of me by Stewart and the type of people who follow her on Twitter is arguably the highest form of flattery. If I wasn’t getting under their skin, they’d ignore me.