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A presidential crypto pump-and-dump.

This may be rhetorical but here the question goes: did any of you invest in the $Libra memecoin endorsed and backed by Argentine president and darling of the global Right Javier Milei (who admitted to being paid a fee for his promotion of the token)? You know, the one that soared above $4 billion in worth after his Friday night announcement and then collapsed entirely within 24 hours after the original memecoin sponsors (3-4 in number on a cryptocurrency web site) cashed in their stake, leaving dozens of investors with unsecured million dollar losses in what was basically a crypto Ponzi scheme? Hmm.

When confronted Milei said that investment is about risk and people should have gauged the level of risk exposure that they could sustain. He would not say what his fee was or whether he was part of the original memecoin sponsor group (others in the know suggest that he was). He disavowed any responsibility for pumping up investor interest on Fridaay night via social media (you can imagine whose platform was used) before the token was dumped by the sponsors, in what is known in the crypto world as a rug-pull.

In his defence some have pointed to the fact that memecoins are like figurines or troll dolls: they have no intrinsic value and are purchased just for fun. But Milei pushed $Libra as a genuine investment, one that could presumably help small and medium sized Argentine businesses by allowing them to raise funds at low investment costs (the buy-in of $Libra started at USD$.1.00). Less than 12 hours later he deleted his original post on social media.

The fact that the sitting Argentine president was promoting a crypto currency of any sort–or any other financial asset or scheme–seems dodgy at the very least. That he was promoting a rug-pull pump-and-dump as a legitimate investment opportunity is Trump-level criminally audacious.

But maybe that was the play all along? Phrased differently and to pervert an honorable saying, the NZ Special Air Services (SAS) have as a motto “he who dares, wins.” Perhaps Trump, Musk and Miley have their own version of that. Does it not occur to anyone that the moral character of all of these people playing on the public trust is the same–that they are a kinship of immoral miscreant sociopaths? In NZ, is not David Seymour not the same?

Milei îs now being investigated for financial crimes and is facing the possibility of impeachment (juicio politico) over the scheme. But this is Argentina we are talking about so it is anyone’s guess how justice will be served.

When he said that he was going to take a chainsaw to public finances and remove “the caste” from politics perhaps he meant something a bit different than cleaning up the public sector under conditions of austerity. Maybe he just meant that the nature of official mendacity and corruption, and the beneficiaries of it, would simply change with him in office, not that it would go away entirely. I tend to believe, having been raised and socialized in that country, that the latter is the case.

You can read up on the scam details here.

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The limits of over-reach.

Here is a scenario, but first a broad brush-painted historical parallel.

Hitler and the Nazis could well have accomplished everything that they wanted to do within German borders, including exterminating Jews, so long as they confined their ambitious to Germany itself. After all, the world pretty much sat and watched as the Nazi pogroms unfolded in the late 1930s. But Hitler never intended to confine himself to Germany and decided to attack his neighbours simultaneously, on multiple fronts East, West, North and South. This came against the advice of his generals, who believed that his imperialistic war-mongering should happen sequentially and that Germany should not fight the USSR until it had conquered Europe first, replenished with pillaged resources, and then reorganised its forces for the move East. They also advised that Germany should also avoid tangling with the US, which had pro-Nazi sympathisers in high places (like Charles Lindbergh) and was leaning towards neutrality in spite of FDR’s support for the UK.

Hitler ignored the advice and attacked in every direction, got bogged down in the Soviet winter, drew in the US in by attacking US shipping ferrying supplies to the UK, and wound up stretching his forces in North Africa, the entire Eastern front into Ukraine and the North Mediterranean states, the Scandinavian Peninsula and the UK itself. In other words, he bit off too much in one chew and wound up paying the price for his over-reach.

Hitler did what he did because he could, thanks in part to the 1933 Enabling Law that superseded all other German laws and allowed him carte blanche to pursue his delusions. That proved to be his undoing because his ambition was not matched by his strategic acumen and resources when confronted by an armed alliance of adversaries.

A version of this may be what is unfolding in the US. Using the cover of broad Executive Powers, Musk, Trump and their minions are throwing everything at the kitchen wall in order to see what sticks. They are breaking domestic and international norms and conventions pursuant to the neo-reactionary “disruptor” and “chaos” theories propelling the US techno-authoritarian Right. They want to dismantle the US federal State, including the systems of checks and balances embodied in the three branches of government, subordinating all policy to the dictates of an uber-powerful Executive Branch. In this view the Legislature and Judiciary serve as rubber stamp legitimating devices for Executive rule. Many of those in the Musk-lead DOGE teams are subscribers to this ideology.

At the same time the new oligarchs want to re-make the International order as well as interfere in the domestic politics of other liberal democracies. Musk openly campaigns for the German far-Right AfD in this year’s elections, he and Trump both celebrate neo-fascists like Viktor Urban in Hungry and Javier Milei in Argentina, Trump utters delusional desires to “make” Canada the 51st State, forcibly regain control of the Panama Canal, annex Greenland, turn Gaza into a breach resort complex and eliminate international institutions like the World Trade Organization and even NATO if it does not do what he says. He imposes sanctions on the International Criminal Court, slaps sanctions on South Africa for land take-overs and because it took a case of genocide against Israel in the ICC, doubles down on his support for Netanyahu’s ethnic cleansing campaign against Palestinians and is poised to sell-out Ukraine by using the threat of an aid cut-off to force the Ukrainians to cede sovereignty to Russia over all of their territory east of the Donbas River (and Crimea). He even unilaterally renames the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America in a teenaged display of symbolic posturing that ignores the fact that renaming the Gulf has no standing in international law and “America” is a term that refers to the North, Central and South land masses of the Western Hemisphere–i.e., it is not exclusive to or propriety of the United States.

Trump wants to dismantle the globalised system of trade by using tariffs as a weapon as well as leverage, “punishing” nations for non-trade as well as trade issues because of their perceived dependence on the US market. This is evident in the tariffs (briefly) imposed on Canada, Mexico and Colombia over issues of immigration and re-patriation of US deportees.

In other words, Trump 2.0 is about redoing the world order in his preferred image, doing everything more or less at once. It as if Trump, Musk and their Project 2025 foot soldiers believe in a reinterpreted version of “shock and awe:” the audacity and speed of the multipronged attack on everything will cause opponents to be paralyzed by the move and therefore will be unable to resist it. That includes extending cultural wars by taking over the Kennedy Center for the Arts (a global institution) because he does not like the type of “culture” (read: African American) that is presented there and he wants to replace the Center’s repertoire with more “appropriate” (read: Anglo-Saxon) offerings. The assault on the liberal institutional order (at home and abroad), in other words, is holistic and universal in nature.

Trump’s advisors are even talking about ignoring court orders barring some of their actions, setting up a constitutional crisis scenario that they believe they will win in the current Supreme Court.

I am sure that Musk/Trump can get away with a fair few of these disruptions, but am not certain that they can get away with all of them. They may have more success on the domestic rather than the international front given the power dynamics in each arena. In any event they do not seem to have thought much about the ripple effect responses to their moves, specifically the blowback that might ensue.

This is where the Nazi analogy applies. It could be that Musk and Trump have also bitten more than they can chew. They may have Project 2025 as their road map, but even maps do not always get the weather right, or accurately predict the mood of locals encountered along the way to wherever one proposes to go. That could well be–and it is my hope that it is–the cause of their undoing. Overreach, egos, hubris and the unexpected detours around and obstacles presented by foreign and domestic actors just might upset their best laid plans.

That brings up another possibility. Trump’s remarks in recent weeks are descending into senescence and caducity. His dotage is on daily public display. Only his medications have changed. He is more subdued than during the campaign but no less mad. He leaves the ranting and raving to Musk, who only truly listens to the fairies in his ear.

But it is possible that there are ghost whisperers in Trump’s ear as well (Stephen Miller, perhaps), who deliberately plant preposterous ideas in his feeble head and egg him on to pursue them. In the measure that he does so and begins to approach the red-line of obvious derangement, then perhaps the stage is being set from within by Musk and other oligarchs for a 25th Amendment move to unseat him in favour of JD Vance, a far more dangerous member of the techbro puppet masters’ cabal. Remember that most of Trump’s cabinet are billionaires and millionaires and only Cabinet can invoke the 25th Amendment.

Vance has incentive to support this play because Trump (foolishly, IMO) has publicly stated that he does not see Vance as his successor and may even run for a third term. That is not want the techbro overlords wanted to hear, so they may have to move against Trump sooner rather than later if they want to impose their oligarchical vision on the US and world. An impeachment would be futile given Congress’s make-up and Trump’s two-time wins over his Congressional opponents. A third try is a non-starter and would take too long anyway. Short of death (that has been suggested) the 25th Amendment is the only way to remove him.

It at that point that I hope that things will start to unravel for them. It is hard to say what the MAGA-dominated Congress will do if laws are flouted on a wholesale basis and constituents begin to complain about the negative impact of DOGE cost-cutting on federal programs. But one thing is certain, chaos begets chaos (because chaos is not synonymous with techbro libertarians’ dreams of anarchy) and disruption for disruption’s sake may not result in an improved socio-economic and political order. Those are some of the “unknown unknowns” that the neo-con Donald Rumsfeld used to talk about.

In other words, vamos a ver–we shall see.

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Unserious People.

In past times a person was considered “unserious” or “not a serious” person if they failed to grasp, behave and speak according to the solemnity of the context in which they were located. For example a serious person does not audibly pass gas at Church, or yell “gun” at a playground, say “sorry, just kidding” at a marriage ceremony, yelling that ” the lid is moving” at a funeral internment, put a whoopee cushion on the Prime Minister’s seat or try to barge into a plane cockpit just for laughs or as a prank. That is for comedians and idiots to do.

“Serious” in this old-fashioned sense means that a person knows the context in which s/he is acting and takes that context, well, seriously when behaving and speaking within it. That includes considerations of decorum, audience impressions, immediate and future consequences, the weight of tradition and importance of standards of comportment. Sometimes are not the time for a piss-take. The gravity of the moment dictates the degree of seriousness that should be taken.

Fast forward to the Oval Office press conference held by Musk and Trump this week. Trump sat hunched over the Resolute Desk while Musk, wearing a MAGA baseball cap and a t-shirt and accompanied by his four year old (and restless) son, pontificated about DOGE finding all sorts of dodgy doings at various government agencies. He lectured on what he thinks democracy is, spoke of mandates and unelected bureaucrats, smeared judges as activists and questioned their independence, asked why spending taxpayer money on foreign aid is considered a good thing, and spouted assorted other rubbish like some pimply-faced high school Ann Rand-inspired debate geek. On the other side of the desk from where Musk stood was a map depicting the “Gulf of America” just in case the media (including foreign press) did not get the point of Trump’s unilateral name change of that particular body of water. For at least 20 minutes the assembled press sat and watched in silence at the spectacle of Musk pontificating and Trump interjecting, perhaps collectively wondering why Musk was giving a joint press conference in the Oval Office in the first place. Everything after that was circus side-show gravy.

His son puttered around and behind the Resolute Desk, including picking his nose and wiping his nose-picking finger on the Resolute Desk, squirmed at his father’s feet and got hoisted onto Musk’s shoulders, where he played with the hat. The kid, whose name is “X,” also told Trump that he was not the president and that he should “shut the f**k up” (this was picked up by a hot mike and has now gone viral). Make of that what you will.

Meanwhile, outside the Oval Office windows it snowed gently on the South Lawn in what was the only concession to seriousness, serenity and reflection in that moment.

This is why Musk and Trump are not serious people. They may be using their respective positions and powers to pursue their overlapping agendas and interests, but even those agendas–annex Greenland and Canada, ethnically cleanse Gaza in order to make it beachfront real estate, re-occupy the Panama Canal, scrub “woke” language and information from government websites, kill off entire agencies and fire thousands of public servants and yes, rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” (seriously?)–are not the acts of truly serious people.

These are the acts of delusional madmen intoxicated by their own egos and unconstrained by what should be the normal checks and balances of a stable and mature democracy, including the protections offered by the rule of law and US Constitution. Instead, if you add in the GOP-controlled two Houses of Congress, what you have is a three-ring political circus masquerading as a federal democratic Republic.

The tragedy may be that although they are not serious in the pure sense of that term, they are all the more dangerous because of it. The analogies about destruction done and chaos legacies left by these criminal bigots write themselves, but the consequences will be worn by serious and unserious people alike in the years, perhaps decades ahead.

Thank goodness my second son will spend his teenage years in Aotearoa, which is a place that, some exceptions and US influences notwithstanding, still takes governance and policy-making pretty darn seriously.

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A reminder about soft power.

Waste and fraud certainly exist in foreign aid programs, but rightwing celebration of USAID’s dismantling shows profound ignorance of the value of soft power (as opposed to hard power) in projecting US influence and interests abroad by non-military/coercive means (think of “hearts and minds,” “hugs, not bullets,” “honey versus vinegar,” etc.). Soft power is also a component of “smart power” and “sharp power” strategies in which a combination of foreign policy instruments are used in concert in pursuit of a variety of non-kinetic ends (i.e. objectives short of war).

This razor-gang approach is short-sighted at best and stupid at worst given that the humanitarian/developmental aid vacuum left by US withdrawal from such efforts opens up the field to potential inroads by US rivals. Add to that the fact that USAID pays US farmers around $2 Billion for surplus rice, soy, corn and other agricultural commodities that otherwise would not be grown or go to waste, and the MAGA/DOGE move against USAID is a double-sided own-goal.

The NZ government, which currently is under the sway of MAGA/DOGE-style public policy ideologies, might do good to remember this when it deals with soft power competition in the South Pacific. Waving a (thornless) stick (say, in the form of withdrawal of foreign aid) at Pacific Island Forum countries when they negotiate bilateral economic, diplomatic and developmental aid agreements with non-“traditional” (non-Western/colonial) partners is likely to elicit some blowback of its own.

After all, regardless of the specific compacts agreed to in the past, sovereign States, whatever powers and protections they may have ceded to “traditional” partners, ultimately are autonomous agents of their own destinies. Foreign aid is a good way to remind them that that may be true but destinies can often be intertwined for mutual benefit even if other parties come late to the table.

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On the DOGE data sweep.

Among the many other problems associated with Musk/DOGE sending a fleet of teenage and twenty-something cultists to remove, copy and appropriate federal records like social security, medicaid and other supposedly protected data is the fact that the youngsters doing the data-removal, copying and security protocol and filter code over-writing have not been properly security vetted and have at best been temporarily deputised into public service to do the retrieval tasks. They are loyal to Musk first, second and third and MAGA/Trump fourth. They are not loyal to the US public whose data they have now appropriated. This means that all that data collected is potentially being compromised or at risk of wider exposure and can even be data-mined, gifted or sold off to third parties for purposes other than public sector auditing or transparency.

That is pretty mind-boggling. As someone who held a S/TS/SCI clearance before leaving the US for a better life overseas, I had to undergo two polygraph and background checks conducted by the Defence Intelligence Agency before being granted the clearances, and upon leaving the security community I was placed under a 20 year gag order on what I had seen/done, with any material that I wanted to use after the 20 year gag window period ended subject to DoD censoring and editing (should I have decided to write or speak about topics that included using classified materials). I say this because I handled material that was just pertinent to my official duties, not wide swathes of data about everything under the sun, so the lack of security vetting of Musk’s minions is, again, astonishingly wrong.

This has the potential to end very badly, not just for the US government or what will be left of it after this reckless DOGE wrecking ball is done with it, but for the millions of people whose data can now be manipulated and used for untoward ends. We must remember that Musk is a dishonest and unscrupulous person, his cult minions and other “techbros” subscribe to variant of an anti-democratic and Social Darwinistic ideology known as “neoreactionism,” and MAGA acolytes like Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Pam Biondi and the authors of Project 2025 now installed in the corridors of power are all too happy to use any means to pursue the Trump/Musk agenda. Since all of these people are disreputable curs, none can be trusted to prevent misuse of personal confidential data for revenge, profit or other non-accountable purposes.

The questions then become: who benefits from the data-grabbing move? The GOP? Putin? The techbro oligarchy? What is the end game?

Whatever it is, it is a disaster in the making.

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The politics of cruelty.

What seems to be the common theme in the US, NZ, Argentina and places like Italy under their respective rightwing governments is what I think of as “the politics of cruelty.” Hate-mongering, callous indifference in social policy-making, corporate toadying, political bullying, intimidation and punching down on the most vulnerable with seemingly unrestrained glee seem to be a hallmark of their respective approaches to governance. The fact that they share ideological and organisational ties through entities like the Atlas Network and Heritage Foundation suggests that this common approach is orchestrated rather than spontaneous and comes from the top down from conservative elites rather as an expression of the desires of the voting grassroots.

To be clear, they all won open elections fairly, albeit not by as wide margins as they claim, so their “mandates’ are a bit more tenuous than they may appear at first glance. But it is not so much whether they have large electoral margins of victory that matters but how they have chosen to exercise power once having won. On that score the post-election moment is alarming and the trend is authoritarian. What fuels this trend is belief in the power of “chaos theory,” where “disruptors” smash the system as given in order to achieve social, economic and political break-throughs after a period of stagnation and decline. This has been an ontological pillar of modern neo-Right thought–out of chaos and disorder comes rebirth–but it requires the firm hand of a determined leadership to push through the needed changes against the wishes of a reluctant or opposed polity.

In addition, although they all have their own variants of rightwing approaches to policy-making, be they MAGA populism (US), anarcho-capitalism (Argentina), post-neoliberalism (NZ) or neofascism (Italy), every one of these governments has elements of the “neoreactionary” movement growing strength in global rightwing circles. That movement sees liberal democracy as terminally flawed because it allows less-intelligent people to vote, which in turn produces political societies dominated by inefficiency, waste and rent-seeking collusion between public bureaucrats, their clients and feckless and avaricious politicians. For the neoreactionary movement, rule by a “monarchy” of corporate technocrats (e.g., Musk and Thiel) is preferable even if not possible over the short term. The new ‘masters of the universe” come from Silicone Valley rather than Wall Street, and are supported by legions of so-called “groypers” (younger rightwing ideologues and trolls) who serve as the foot soldiers of the new political-technocratic order.

At a political level, given the impossibility of immediately dispensing with elections and installing direct rule by the technocratic elite (as the leading edge of capitalism, now replacing finance capital), the short term remedy is therefore to elect “strong” leaders who rule by decree, fast-track legislation and/or emergency powers in which a Blitzkrieg approach is applied to institutional reform without regard to legal niceties or constitutional norms. The idea is to throw policy reforms against the societal wall and see what sticks given economic, socio-political and legal conditions. And given the pervasive influence of what can be called the attention-seeking (as opposed to information-seeking) culture accelerated by social media, this aim-at-the-wall approach flies below the radar of scrutiny by a public and mass media obsessed with clicks, likes and selfies rather than the incremental slide into authoritarianism. Because of that campaigns can be based on lies, disinformation and primal scapegoating of designated “others” because the ends justify the means. Elections have no intrinsic worth other than as serving as another instrument by which power is attained, and the turn towards authoritarian cruelty is the manner in which the spoils of victory are shared by election winners.

Not surprisingly given the above, in all of these cases rammed-through reforms have stuck. It remains to be seen what the long term effect will be or whether successful challenges can be mounted against them, but the disruptor neoreactionaries are on the rise and disruption is at play with no effective counterweight yet in sight.

For the time being, it appears that an era of darkness has descended upon us.

***Thanks to Lorenzo Wachter Buchanan and Dr. Jeanne Guthrie for their insights on this subject.***

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Reader suggestions for “A View from Afar.”

My friend Selwyn Manning and I are wondering what to do with our podcast “A View from Afar.” Some readers will also have tuned into the podcast, which I regularly feature on KP as a media link. But we have some thinking to do about how to proceed, and it is for that reason that I am inviting KP reader feedback.

As readers may know, AVFA has no sponsors, advertisers, subscribers or crowd-sources and generates no revenue. To do the show Selwyn and I sit in our home offices and connect via video link since we live in different parts of NZ We have the occasional visiting guest but the usual format is Selwyn and I having a conversation about something of international interest, including NZ foreign policy when appropriate or pertinent. But most of our conversations are about global events and trends.

The show has been going for five years and gotten some decent recognition amongst those with an eye to geopolitics and strategic analysis from a South Pacific perspective, and has a dedicate core of viewers/listeners who follow the show. AVFA tends to average +/- 500 views on YouTube, which makes it a micro-niche podcast in a world of giants.

I would therefore be interested in reader suggestions as to what to do with AVFA. Selwyn and I will be talking soon about how to proceed, and any input is welcome. As things stand we can close shop and shut down, do an occasional “special edition” broadcast when significant global events happen, do a semi-regular or regular limited broadcast schedule (say, once a month), or try to do weekly or biweekly broadcasts. TBH, I believe that we do not have the resources to do anything more than once a month, as we do not have research assistance or external funding that would allow at least one of us to dedicate our time to the broadcast, and have other things to do in order to keep financially solvent. Selwyn does all of the technical work on top of his business ventures, and I have consultancy commitments that take me away from the more general-but-specific type of analysis that we offer on AVFA.

So the question is: from where to from here?

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The disinformation grift in NZ.

A while back I was engaged in an unpleasant exchange with a leader of the most well-known NZ anti-vax group and several like-minded trolls. I had responded to a racist meme on social media in which a rightwing podcaster in the US interviewed one of the leaders of the Proud Boys movement (in 2017) in which the Proud Boy made claims that 55 percent of UK Pakistanis were in-bred (“consanguineous” in their pseudo- scientific terminology) and that 50 percent of the births by women in such relationships were still-born. The IV was reposted late last year as a way to link the incidence of inbreeding to the “Pakistani gang rape networks” stories circulating in the UK and picked up by white supremacists the world over. The local anti-vax leader reposted the IV approvingly.

I made a comment on the thread about how if their data was true they should have nothing to worry about since a 50 percent stillborn rate pretty much is a path to extinction, especially when half of the surviving in-bred children would be too mentally incapacitated to do anything dangerous and pose a threat to the UK status quo (which was the implication in the IV). Because the Proud Boy leader showed photos of supposed official medical data charts to back up his views, I questioned if he had data on Mormons or Hasidic Jews in order to make cross-religious/ethnic comparisons. Instead, one of the trolls on the thread posted an official looking chart (but with no title, source or other information) listing a number of Muslim majority nations with their respective “consanguineous” birthrates. When I noted that the data presentation look cherry-picked because it only covered Muslim majority countries, the respondent insisted otherwise. So be it. The best response I got was that Pakistani Muslim in-breeding in the UK was a problem because they would burden the health care system. Fair enough but that was not the thrust of the discussion, which again was focused on social issues related to Muslim immigration in the UK. In any event, after that the argument descended into personal insults, ridiculous claims and, well, racism.

I have chosen not to identify the NZ anti-vax group or the referenced particular leader other than with generic “woke” pronouns because they are not worth the energy. People who follow the NZ anti-vax movement will know who the person is. So why expend oxygen on them and give them more attention, especially since that is what they crave? Also, when I refer to the “disinformation grift” I am not referring to the government-funded anti-extremism and radicalization entities that sprung up after the March 15, 2019 rightwing terrorist attacks in Christchurch, which have been falsely accused by rightwing mouthpieces of being opportunistic troughers pilfering from the public purse. I give no credence to those accusations and instead will focus on those who deliberately spread lies and falsehoods about vaccines, the nature of government health edicts, health indicator demographics and assorted other seditious claims among the tinfoil hat brigade.

The exchange with the anti-vaxxer and racists got me to thinking about how it appears that this NZ anti-vax leader has materially benefitted from arguing against government pandemic mitigation efforts, health authority mandates, “socialist” or “fascist” infringements on individual rights (of movement and assembly), forced introduction of foreign materials and nano-technologies into humans via the “jabs,” and imposition of quarantines and travel bans while vilifying Jacinda Ardern as being a modern day Hitler or Stalin with Ashley Bloomfield (and Dr. Anthony Fauci in the US) being her Dr. Mengele, among assorted other lunacies.

The twist is that I know this person because “they/it” live in my small community and was a teacher’s aide at the local primary school that my son attended. They/it was known in the community for their/it’s anti-vax views (for diseases like measles) well before the pandemic, but back then they/it took a relatively low profile and did not proselytize their/it’s views until Covid struck. This is not to say that these views were unknown, since they/it used personal social media accounts to post about their/it’s beliefs. These include a well-known antipathy towards large people, particularly those of colour, seemingly due to they/it’s healthy diet and “wellness” lifestyle (let’s just say that they/it does not like people who enjoy KFC).

Unfortunately, in the exchange following the racist IV post they/it accused me of stalking and being “weird and creepy” because I could see they/it’s comments even though I had blocked them a long time ago (that is actually part of the blocking policy on the social media platform that we were using). The resort to personal attacks is of course taken off the rightwing playbook where, as Steve Bannon recommended, “you flood the zone with crap” by hurling false accusations and smears at detractors, who you then accuse of censorship, de-platforming and attempting to shut down free speech rights. I told they/it to not flatter themselves thinking that they/it was worth my attention. Ultimately the whole thing turned into a circle-jerking waste of time so I blocked them again and left the discussion.

They/it’s move into rightwing racial politics reminded me of they/it’s past comments and those of other anti-vaxxers on the subject. In fact, if I remember correctly, members of this particular anti-vax group appeared at anti-mandate rallies alongside neo-Nazis like Kyle Chapman. In that light I continued to reflect on how they/it’s material fortunes seem to have improved since they/it founded their group and began soliciting funding for it (some which is allegedly from foreign–mainly US–sources), to the point that they/it now appears to have moved well beyond the knitting circles and reading to kids line of work that they/it had before the pandemic arrived. They/it was, unsurprisingly, part of the 2022 Parliament demonstrations but fled before the rioting began, and continues to agitate for their causes on social media and radio, including doing an interview with Infowars, the US-based conspiracy podcast website run by the attention-seeking cur known as Alex Jones.

They/it’s messages overlap with other “cookers” such as the now separated duo of lunatics at Counterspin Media and the seemingly deranged Liz Gunn, and their/it’s focus has evolved to include anti-Maori, anti-immigrant and the usual Deep State BS that gives rightwing extremists fever dreams. That is interesting because it appears that concerns about vaccines are not the only thing that they/it fears, which might explain their approvingly re-posting about Pakistani in-breeding in the UK and the general reproduction rates of Muslims world-wide. It seems replacement theory is on their radar, which is odd because one way to get ethnically replaced is to stop taking vaccines for previously common diseases while other groups follow the science of vaccinations. That is an irony lost on white reproduction-obsessed cookers.

Anyway, what struck me is that the entire anti-vax movement not only overlaps with other causes based on prejudice and “othering” of targeted scapegoats, but also is a source of grift for those who lead them. Gosh, who would have thought it? As that wretch Jones has proven, there is money to be made in disinformation if you are just dishonest and unethical enough to do so. From what I have discerned and without wanting to waste further time and energy on this sorry subject, here is how I see the disinformation grift progression as a crude flow-chart:

Prior anti-vax beliefs+general discontent with authority–> anti-vax disinformation riding on concerns about Covid mitigation efforts–>Deep State conspiracy theories (Ardern as Hitler/Stalin, bureaucrats trying to control everyone, etc.)–> Big Pharma/globalist machinations (dove-tailing with Jewish) conspiracies–> racism (anti-Muslim, anti-maori, anti-immigrant)–> homo- and transphobia–> climate change denialism–> defence of “free speech”–> pleas for money–> foreign funding–> realisation that fund-raising surpluses can be appropriated as personal rents= the disinformation grift.

The idea is to keep spreading lies and fomenting hate and division, make money off of the effort, put some money back into public information campaigns and pocket the rest. This could well be a lucrative business model for those so inclined. I do not know the tax status of this particular anti-vax group but would not be surprised if it claimed charitable status. As mentioned earlier, its sources of funding may include foreign donors as well as mum-and-pop subscribers/donors. But there does not appear to be any public auditing of the group’s accounts, including the remuneration of its directors and amounts spent on luxury items (as opposed to public information materials regarding the supposed dangerous of vaccinations).

As far as I can tell, no media investigations have been launched into the tax status, revenues and expenditures of this group or similar astroturf (as opposed to genuine grassroots) “interest group” cons like Counterspin, Groundswell or Brian Tamaki’s personal “church.” I shall leave aside for the moment alleged grifting at places like the Waipareira Trust simply because the Trust’s stated objectives are not based on abject lies and disinformation and they do deliver real tangible community services, so whatever grift that may be occurring there–and legitimate questions have been raised to that effect–is not a disinformation grift.

Presumably an OIA request might pry open some information about them from the IRD and other pertinent authorities, but that is beyond my forensic capabilities at the moment. Any investigative reporters willing to give it a go (if there are any left, other than Gordon Campbell, Nicky Hager and Matt Nippert)?

In the end, my suspicion is that even if there was legitimate vaccine skepticism before the pandemic arrived that carried over into some of the opposition to the Covid pandemic mitigation efforts in NZ and elsewhere, it has morphed into a broader-focused globally-networked rightwing money-making scheme based on the propagation of dis- and mis-information about health matters, social issues, culture, demography and identity. To make matters worse, the disinformation being peddled by “cookers” has crossed over into mainstream political discourse thanks to it being parroted and mainstreamed by some corporate media, most rightwing social media and ignorant and/or opportunistic politicians doing so for partisan gain.

None of this is good for democracy (the abuse of rights to free speech is part of the grift) or social cohesion. But that is the state of play as we begin the second quarter of the new century.

PS: Now that the Disinformation Project and the Violent Extremism Research Centre (sic) were defunded by NACT and have ceased to exist, is there any other dedicated research agency looking into the activities of group’s such as those mentioned above? Both of these entities had their flaws but at least kept their eyes on the ball when it came to political extremists in Aotearoa. But what exists now? Just curious.

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Xmas then and now.

I realise that this breaks my usual rule about not putting personal photos on KP, but the relief I feel compels me to do so. Please forgive the transgression. Without delving into details but in order to give readers a sense of the year that was, I thought I would offer the study in contrasts that are Xmas 2023 and Xmas 2024:

Xmas 2023 in Starship Children’s Hospital (after third of four surgeries).

Even opening presents was an exercise in pain management.

Xmas 2024

With cousins at the in-laws, a clean bill of health and his spirit intact.

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KP 2024 year end review.

KP continues to putt-putt along as a tiny niche blog that offers a NZ perspective on international affairs with a few observations about NZ domestic politics thrown in. In 2024 there was also some personal posts given that my son was in the last four months of a nine month medical odyssey that involved two major open chest surgeries (six hours each) and three keyhole surgeries, all involving a lot of time spent in Starship children’s hospital in Auckland (including Xmas) and more pain than any child deserves. The good news is that the boy is fully recovered and given a clean bill of health, so thanks to all who offered their good wishes.

I wrote 56 posts, an increase over 2023. The lowest monthly total was two (twice) and the highest was ten, with the average monthly output being +/- 5.5 posts. By far the most viewed post was the January 2024 post titled “The New Zealand Junta,” which even caught the negative attention of a cut and paste political commentator in Wellington who used it as evidence of “Luxon Derangement Syndrome” because in it I described the approach to governance of the Coalition of Chaos. As it turns out, I was pretty prescient about what was going to happen on the policy front, and I would rather be accused of having some sort of mythical syndrome that being known in fact for being a sycophantic boot-licker of the powers that be.

Other posts about Te Pati Maori and NZ identity took three of the top five viewed posts and NZ-focused posts occupied nine of the top ten viewed (including posts about boot camps and about the different media and legal treatment of former MP Golriz Ghahraman versus the still named-suppressed teen rapist former rightwing political party pakeha male president), so the audience bias in favour of NZ-focused essays is quite clear and follows a long-term trend of KP readers preferring to read about their domestic politics. After that, posts about NZ foreign and security policy, especially those about AUKUS Pillar 2, NZ security/intelligence and NZ support for Israel and the campaign against the Houthis in Yemen, garnered the most foreign affairs-based attention, followed by various international relations and security-intelligence-focused posts and posts about the US political scene. If KP views are any small measure of NZ political attention spans, then it is clear why foreign affairs, military relations and intelligence matters do not occupy much bandwidth on the local news. People just seem largely uninterested. That may be a small country syndrome, or a distance-from-the-fray syndrome or just a “could care less in this age of social media narcissism” syndrome, but as far as I can see on KP understanding of the impact of “global” (where global and local meet) and “intermestic” (where the international overlaps with the domestic) phenomena are the province of a very select few.

The posts that got the least attention tended to be the more theoretical and academic types. The excerpts from my long-dormant book project received close to no attention, with other more complex discussions, say, about the limits of realism as an analytic construct, voting as a multi-order process of choice and the misuse of the term “fascism” to describe any form of authoritarianism receiving only cursory treatment. Interestingly, the posts about my son’s medical journey had more views than the theoretical/academic discussions, and the links to the “A View from Afar” podcast series that I do with Selwyn Manning occupied the lower middle strata of views. Also in that general category was my post about being “honoured” by the Russian government by its banning me from stepping on Russian soil, presumably because of something that I have said or wrote. Luckily, I did not have to change my travel plans as a result of the ban.

Overall KP received 22.4 thousand views and 305 comments (a fair few of which were my replies and many others were return visitors) from 92 countries. This represents an increase over 2023. KP received the most views in February (3971) and the least in September (888). Overall, KP averaged around 40-50 views per day. Besides search engines, the most common referrers were Kiwiblog, The Standard and Twitter/X. The vast majority of KP viewers come from NZ, followed by the US, Australia, the PRC, UK and India. I see a healthy contingent from Singapore (presumably due to my past connections in that country) but very little from Latin America, where I grew up and about which I have researched, taught, written, consulted and served in relevant government policy-making positions over the last four decades (Argentina provided the most views from Latin America with just 37). Perhaps that is due to not writing that much about Latin America, the link to an external article about South America’s strategic situation notwithstanding.

The same general profile goes for commentators. NZ-based people replied the most, followed by Ozzies and Yanks, and some have become welcome interlocutors on these pages (the two Barbaras, Anne and Di Trower especially). As one might expect, most people from overseas comment on posts that address topics close to them, and a few of these are trolls who get blacklisted pretty quickly (most from the PRC but some from NZ as well). Although most readers seem to come from Left perspectives, we have at few who come from the Right as well, and if I might say so, a couple have treated me with considerable empathy and decorum during a trying year (you know who you are). So thanks for that.

All in all, it was a a status quo year at KP in spite of the personal dramas. I still wish that someone would join this team of one to write about issues that I am not competent to address, with former KP luminary Lew remaining as the gold standard when it comes to being a blogging colleague. KP could use a bit more diversity in topics addressed, although the social democratic or left-leaning perspective of the blog likely invites more trouble than it is worth because of the internecine arguments on the Left about what it is to be a “progressive” in the post-industrial, post-post-modern age.

For the time being I will continue plugging along since writing (even in this short form) provides a vehicle of release for me. By agreement amongst the original KP collective members (Anita, Peter, Lew and myself) back in 2008, the blog does not have advertising and does not actively seek sponsors or subscriptions. It has therefore become somewhat of a labor of love, or some might say vanity project for myself. Whatever it is, it provides me with an outlet so I willingly defray the costs of operating the site.

All that having been said, I wish all KP resides a healthy, happy and productive New Year. Un abrazo a todos!