On the darkness behind the PM’s departure.

Over the weekend I was interviewed by a media outlet about the threats that Jacinda Ardern and her family have received while she has been PM and what can be expected now that she has resigned. I noted that the level of threat she has been exposed to is unprecedented in NZ history, something that is due not as much as to the content of her policies (especially but not exclusively the pandemic mitigation measures and 3 Waters initiative), but to the social media megaphoning of (often foreign imported) conspiracy theories and anti-government sentiment that used her policies as an excuse to engage in extremely misogynistic and violent verbal attacks and physical threats against her. The 2022 Parliamentary Protests represented the NZ January 6 moment in terms of crystallising the focused hatred of the assortment of seditionists assembled in one place (including Nazi imagery superimposed on the PMs face and nooses hung with placards calling for her and other politician’s executions), but their threats will not go away just because she has left office.

The original story got picked up by other outlets that include overseas media platforms. The response has been mixed. Although commentary has often sided with my view that the hatred directed at Ms. Ardern is unprecedented in NZ, a large number of pundits have proved my point by repeating the threats as well as justifications for them (“she reaps what she sowed,” “she deserves it,” “the penalty for treason is death,” “she created a two tier society,” “what is good for the goose is good for the gander,” “she is a Satanist globalist freemason Big Pharma puppet intent on destroying the Kiwi way of life” and so much more along such lines. The authors of these nuggets of brilliance walk amongst us.

I decided to throw together a couple of tweets on the business account to note two points of interest. They are “If Jacinda Ardern’s resignation sparks a national discussion about gendered abuse and violence in Aotearoa in general and against females/women in positions of authority in particular (political as well as elsewhere), then it will have been a fitting parting gesture on her part. But that will not be the end of it for her.” (I added the term “women” here because some po-mo people objected to the term “female” in the original post).

And (on the issue of the threat environment she must confront): “One measure of the threat landscape that Jacinda Ardern has had to traverse is the personal security detail she and her family will need after she leaves public life. Our reckon is that it will be significant, at least over the short term.” That brought a number of responses, some of which questioned how things got to this point and whether I was exaggerating what could be just foreign threats or blowhard ranting here at home. My response:

“When threat assessing, there are perpetrators, accomplices, enablers, subjects and objects. NZ is full of media (social and corporate) accomplices and enablers when it comes to subjecting Ardern to violent intimidation by a dangerous local fringe (the object). The danger is here.” To elaborate: threat assessment is about establishing a hierarchy of actors and their potential for action, then determining what action they are likely to take and how realistic and imminent is the possibility/probability of their turning words into action. In the case of Jacinta Ardern, I do not believe that the threats to her and her family will go away just because she has stepped down. And given that the Police have eight active investigations into individuals who have made such threats and because I believe that they are just the tip of a threat pyramid that is real and imminent, I continue to stand by these statements.

I could go on to elaborate on what I said in the original interview and follow ups but the story is now viral and can be better accessed by search for the coverage itself.

Suffice to say, this not a good moment for the former PM but also for the country as a political society, and that has nothing to do with her policies or behaviour in office but all to do with those who began and those who then facilitated the mainstreaming of extremist discourse into corporate media narratives and coverage of her government’s policies. Between social media networked nastiness and corporate media megaphoning and legitimating of previously fringe views untethered to reality, the moment is, to paraphrase Gramsci,” delicate and dangerous.”

In this election year more than any other time, especially because of the delicacy of the moment, that is a syndrome that must be remembered and confronted.

The misogyny of the alt-Right.

Comments about Green MP Golriz Ghahraman by ACT MP David Seymour on a reactionary radio talk show, and the threats that followed and which the Police deemed serious enough to merit a security detail for her, got me to thinking about how grotesquely disturbed the Right is in its present form. Seymour, supposedly a Libertarian, calls Ghahraman an “menace to freedom” because she wants to tighten legislation on hate speech (which, unlike protected offensive speech involves the incitement to or support for violence against others). His smear is a deliberate incitement to the alt-Right extreme and an implicit call for censorship, an irony lost on him.

The radio host that he was talking to, Sean Plunket, is a man with serious issues when it comes to women. His track record on gender matters is wretched, so Seymour’s comments gave him room to vent more generally on the subject using Ms. Ghahraman as a foil. What is disturbing is that, as readers may know, violent extremists are surrounded by enablers and accomplices, that is, those who simply look the other way when perpetrators plan and prepare for violence or those who in one form or another, passively or actively help perpetrators in the lead up to the commission of acts of violence.

In that conversation Plunket played the role of enabler while Seymour moved from enabler to accomplice because his dog whistle did in fact, provoke the alt-Right scum to crawl out from under their keyboards in order to heap vicious, often violently sexualised misogynist abuse on the Green MP. Seymour has denied being responsible for the threats made against her, which is akin to Donald Trump saying that he has nothing to do with Russia or the rise in attacks by white supremacists since he took office.

That got me to thinking about a core belief structure of the alt-Right and their white supremacist kin: misogyny. Now, I am no psychologist, psychiatrist or psychotherapist, but one thing is pretty clear: this crowd hates women.

In the case of people like Seymour, it seems that this hatred is born of unrequited lust. Ms. Ghahraman is attractive, smart, and self-assured to the point of being “stroppy” (or as a senior male professor once said to my wife when assessing her suitability for an academic career, “precocious”). But she would never be seen in the company, much less succumb to the courting, of the likes of David Seymour because he is simply a loser who has risen above his proper station in life, one who’s social interaction skills are on a par with the greesy-palmed and pimply 14 year olds that inhabit private schools and believe Ann Rand is “hot.” Boys like these like to bully girls who deep down inside they really, really like but from whom they cannot attract a sideways glance. That is why they get mean. For his part, Plunket projects the image of a guy who has been through a bad divorce or two and/or who has been turned down more than few times in spite of his relative fame and wealth. He is pissed off with women in general, and particularly the mouthy ones who disagree with him yet get to make decisions that affect us all.

We should remember that the misogynist streak pervades the alt-Right, here and elsewhere. It has led to the rise of the so-called “Incel” (involuntarily celibate) culture that has produced several murders of women by blue-balled freaks who think that all of their frustrations and disappointments in life are due to the fact that women will not recognise their genius and consent to having sex with them. Some do not even care about consent but still cannot get laid. This leads them to believe that women are the root of all evil and responsible for the decline of traditional culture, at least when”traditional” refers to a patriarchical white male hierarchy calling the shots over everyone else and enjoying the benefits of their status as Alpha males. These are the type of people to whom Seymour was whistling and for whom Plunket provides a space in which to be safe and comfortable in their views.

If one looks at the common denominators amongst the alt-Right, neo-Nazis, Klansmen, white nationalists and assorted other denizens of forums like 8Chan and 4Chan (which, incidentally, as of yesterday are still viewable in NZ and which continue to have long threads about the “accelerant” characteristics of the Christchurch killer’s actions), there is more than racism, bigotry and xenophobia at play. There is also an unmistakable hatred of women and loathing of what they supposedly represent. Terms like “pussy,” “cuck” (as in cuckold), “wench,” “slut,” “bitch” etc. compete for space with homophobic slurs in the alt-Right discourse. In fact, I am surprised that Seymour and Plunket were able to control their urges to indulge in a few sexist slurs of their own with regard to the Green MP.

It is not just the alt-Right/white extremist extremes that voice such views. Perusal of the comments pages of supposedly Right-Centre blogs regularly turns up variations on misogynist themes in spite of attempts at “moderation,” and Plunket is not the only prominent media commentator who gets to indulge, even if in “wink-wink, nudge-nudge” fashion, a few jabs at females in order to make a point about weakness versus strength (which almost inevitably such opinionating comes down to).

Of course, many if not most women in positions of authority are the subject of misogynist attacks. Equivocators for Seymour like Paula Bennett (now calling for the names of the Parliamentary rapists apparently mentioned in the report on Parliament’s toxic work environment) will try to draw false equivalences by saying that they too were the subject of sexualised attacks, conveniently forgetting that people like Bennett are attacked because of their hypocrisy and nasty policy positions more so than being female per se, and are not in need of security protection an any event. Fellows like Seymour and Plunket will claim that they have (had) plenty of female friends and partners so they cannot possibly be misogynists. This omits one basic thing: the attacks on Ms. Ghahraman are based on who/what she is more so than anything that she does, so regardless of the marital status or physiology of the critic, such attacks are gendered at their core. Even Judith Collins knows that much.

The real issue is that deep inside the abuse of Ms. Ghahraman lies male insecurity–that of sexual rejection and a loss of masculinity. People like Seymour hate women like Ghahraman because they cannot have her and never will, which they fear is a public sign of weakness on their part. This frustrates them immensely, and because they have neither the intellect, looks or social skills to attract such women, that frustration has no place to go other than onanistic rage. Beneath the smirks and the boy’s banter is a deep abiding fear of not measuring up.

That, more than any ideological difference, is what is at play here. So the next time that you hear or read attacks on Ms. Ghahraman and women like her, take a moment to reflect on why, exactly, critics take issue with them.

More sexist headlines.

So this was the headline that greeted me when I opened the Herald on line:  “Chris Cairn’s wife accuses Marc Ellis of harassment.” Now, I am not a fan of either Chris Cairn Cairns or Marc Ellis, so wish a pox on both of them. But what galls me about this particular headline is that, once again, some fool copy or sub editor has decided that the female who is the subject of the story should be reduced to the status of someone’s wife. In the article she complains of being mistreated as a senior business woman in Ellis’s ad agency, so it is not as if she is some teeny bopper that Cairns hooked up with in order to bolster his self-image. But in the eyes of the Herald editorial staff, she is just the female appendage of a dodgy ex-jock filing court papers against another ex-jock celebrity. Surely they can do better.

The really sad part of this particular episode is that it seems to be reflective of the casual sexism and misogyny that permeates NZ.  For all the women who have achieved high positions in politics, academia, arts and law (not so much the corporate world), there appears to be this ingrained backward gender weirdness on the part of a significant number of the male population. Come to think of it, sexism and misogyny are the flip side of the coin known as bloke culture–the latter cannot exist without the former.

One interesting aspect of the story is that she was appointed by Ellis to work for his ad agency in the first place. How did that happen? Was she the best qualified person for the job or did the hire have something to do with the fact that she IS Mrs. Cairns? That would add another layer of provincial small mindedness to the equation. The article also mentions that Ellis is the director and sole shareholder of the ad agency, which has as its client Toyota.

Toyota? How did one of the largest vehicle manufacturers on earth happen to award a contract to what is by all appearances a boutique ad firm with no proven track record? Was it because Ellis is seen as representative of the NZ sales demographic that Toyota is targeting? And is that demographic the blokes? That is the only explanation that makes sense to me, but if that is the case then Toyota needs to think harder about that target demographic because Ellis is certainly not representative of it (after all, his blokey larrikin ute-driving days supposedly ended a while ago and he is now portrayed as a responsible businessman, although Mrs. Cairns complaint would suggest otherwise). And if it is the blokes that Toyota is sales targeting, has it not paused to think of the female role in bloke culture? Or does it assume that all women associated with blokes are content with their status as appendages or side kicks to the alpha individual and share his tastes and interests? If so, it has not done enough due diligence with its market research (as well as on Mr. Ellis).

In any event, the headline sucks even though the sexism, nepotism, cronyism, harassment and dubious business practice implicit in the story may well prove true.

A Day in the Life.

On a recent day in New Zealand we were treated to the following news.

A group of rapists who openly bragged about having pack sex with drugged or drunk underage girls on social media were outed by a news outlet, which led to revelations that the police, who have an institutional history of rape of their own, refused to prosecute the rapists even though their identities were well-known (one is the son of a police officer) and four girls complained about the assaults long before the media broke the story. The police apparently questioned the first complainant about her manner of dress and was told that what she wore invited the attack. The cops now argue that there was insufficient evidence to bring charges.

The police initially said that no complaints were laid and that the social media sites were only recently opened by the rapists, then closed. Both of those claims have now been proven to be untrue, so either the police spokesmen were lying (and that includes a senior detective and a district commander), or they were misled by their subordinates for reasons yet to be determined. The police also say that the fact that one of the rapists was the son of a sworn officer was immaterial to the (as of yet nonexistent) case.

That may or may not be true. What is undeniable is that a number of underage females were sexually assaulted by men over the age of consent who made public their exploits (including why they stupefied the girls and why they only engaged in pack assaults on them) and identified the victims as a form of public shaming. The cops listened to four complaints about these assaults, decided that there was no merit to them (or no evidence to substantiate them even though four different girls essentially described enduring the same thing done by the same men), then stood by, watched the social media coverage provided by the perpetrators and did nothing.

At the same time this story unfolded a convicted spouse abuser who claimed in defense that he was provoked by his victim was promoted to the most listened radio sports program in the country, having worked his way back into that format less than a year after his conviction and having had the Prime Minister subsequently grace his studio to exchange banter about laddish things (including Elizabeth Hurley’s “assets”).

Not to be outdone on the victim-bashing front, a few other prominent male radio talkback hosts (two of them Maori) ridiculed and insulted rape victims when discussing the case of the underage girls, essentially telling callers that drinking and wearing provocative clothing was primarily to blame for what happened.

Coincidentally, a misogynist bigot was brought back from foreign television exile after a series of gaffes and embarrassments to host a prime time news show at one of the highest salaries offered to a television host in New Zealand. His forte is adolescent potty jokes, particularly those directed at women.

Rightwing smear merchants and other retrogrades blame the rape club’s actions on liberal society and the pernicious effect of modern popular culture (when not Len Brown, for his adulterous behavior, as if that were comparable to rape). There may be some truth in such views (save the Len Brown example), but  there is the small problem that all the other instances cited above involve men of older generations working in venerable public institutions.

Let’s be clear on this: all of the instances cited other than the social media rape club members are not delinquents but well-established members of New Zealand’s institutional elite, and there are plenty of others who share their predilections and positions of esteem (I have chosen only a handful of notorious examples to illustrate the point).

Some of these apologists/pundits keep on calling the rapists “boys” even though the age of consent in New Zealand is 16 (the rapists were and are 17 to 19). That is worth noting because they also argue that at least some of the pack sex with 13 and 14 year old girls may have been consensual, which indicates they have no clue what “age of consent” means in theory or in practice.

Let me put it more crudely: How is it that a 17 year old is a “boy,” and hence acting impulsively and irrationally when sexually engaging a deliberately stupefied 13 year old female, yet that same female is supposedly capable of consenting rationally, as a woman, to pack sex under the heavy influence of soporific?

Are females who are underage, impressionable, alone, unconscious and/or delirious equally responsible for the acts of male adults behaving soberly, collectively, calculatingly and deliberately when using intoxicants for the purpose of sexual conquest as motive for and product of their behaviour towards said females?

There is a more general point to this reflection. What does this series of coincidental snapshots tell us about New Zealand today? Are these aberrations of the Kiwi male character that somehow have gone unpunished and in fact rewarded in violation of accepted norms, or is Aotearoa not a safe place to be female?

 

Master-race baiting

[Updated 10 July 2011 to account for Don Brash’s statements in response to John Ansell, and Ansell’s resignation from ACT.]

Many have remarked on the appropriateness of the website of the ACT Party Parliamentary leader’s press-secretary, SOLOpassion, and many have made jokes about the sound of one hand clapping, or fapping, as it were. It is therefore entirely appropriate that ACT should become the butt of these same jokes, since they appear to have swallowed (implication most definitely intended) Lindsay Perigo’s paranoiac auto-stimulatory tendencies whole. His hand-work is evident in the party’s ever more deranged press releases, speeches, and most recently in this morning’s advertisement in the New Zealand Herald, titled “Fed up with pandering to Maori radicals?” and strategically timed for the end of Te Wiki O Te Reo Māori. The advertisement is worth reading; the image below is stolen from The Dim-Post. Read the comment thread over there; it’s magnificent.

There’s an awful lot wrong with this, but aside from the warlike verbiage, none of it is much different from ACT’s or Brash’s prior form, and since I’ve been over most of the arguments before I will spare you the full repetition. You can trawl through the Take Māori section of this blog if you want the detail. But just a couple of obvious things: the reasoning privileges Article III of the Treaty; that is, the article which gives the Crown a colonial payday, while neglecting Articles I and II, upon which the consideration of Article III rests. In terms of a contract, which is a way of thinking about the Treaty that ACToids might be expected to understand, Brash’s reasoning emphasises the payment for services rendered, while materially ignoring the requirement to actually render those services. (More on this theme here). Secondly, it’s more of the same selective history we’ve come to expect: our history as Pākehā matters and has value; theirs, as Māori, doesn’t — except for the bits Pākehā can turn to their advantage, like the decontextualised appeal to Ngāta.

But there is a broader point that this development illuminates. Race relations in Aotearoa has changed enormously in the past seven years. In the winter of 2004, the country was in the throes of Orewa madness. The māori party had just been formed, promising to deliver “an independent voice for Māori” in parliament. Eight years ago tomorrow Tariana Turia won her by-election, seeking to deliver on that promise. Don Brash was the leader of a resurgent National party who held a strong lead in the polls, and whose race-relations platform dominated the policy agenda. Now, Turia leads a hollowed-out party whose mandate and credibility are under severe threat from one of their own. Don Brash, having been ejected from the National leadership disgrace, now leads a party with less than one-twentieth of the electoral support he once commanded; a party he was only able to colonise after it was fatally weakened by a series of appalling political scandals, and then only by the narrowest of margins.

Under Brash National’s popularity stemmed from the fear of a brown nation that emerged from the foreshore and seabed debate and the māori party’s formation. As far as the general electorate of Aotearoa is concerned, those fears were not realised. As far as Māori are concerned, the māori party’s results have been disappointing to say the least. As far as the established political power blocs are concerned, the māori party has proven a very dependable agent their political agendas; even while disagreeing with many of their positions, both National and Labour recognise that the māori party are invested in constructive collaboration with the Pākehā mainstream, not in its destruction. I’ve long argued that the initial purpose of the māori party wasn’t to effect sweeping policy change, but to create cultural and political space for kaupapa Māori politics, and to establish the credibility of same. For all their policy failures, they have succeeded at this task in spades; perhaps they could have afforded to succeed at this task a little less. But largely as a consequence of the sky not falling after the passage of the Foreshore and Seabed Act and the emergence of the māori party as a credible political force, neither National nor Labour have any truck with ACT’s vitriol. Don Brash, his “one law for all” rhetoric, and his scaremongering are firmly on the outer.

Even further out on that slender but flexible branch is the architect of Brash’s Iwi/Kiwi campaign, probably the best campaign of its type in our recent political history and certainly one of the most memorable: John Ansell. Ansell’s rhetoric had become distasteful enough by the time of the last election that even the ACT party — then under the leadership of Rodney Hide — refused to use much of his best work. Thereafter he was picked up by the Coastal Coalition. A less credible gang of fringe loonies it’s hard to imagine; one of its principals, Muriel Newman (who, shamefully, was invited by Radio New Zealand to speak as an authoritative expert on the WAI262 Treaty claim) believes that pre-Tasman Aotearoa was settled not only by Polynesians but by “people of Celtic and Chinese ancestry as well as Greek, French, Portuguese, Spanish and others“. Ansell’s own views on race are similarly bizarre; Māori, he reckons, are “not a race, but a religion“.

Ansell is now reduced to ranting in Kiwiblog comments, and is as critical of ACT as he is of everyone else. Even there, though, his views hardly find great favour, with more people objecting that his campaign is distracting from the “real issues” than supporting him. His contribution to the thread about the Brash advertisement — it’s not clear whether he was involved in the ad’s production or not — is a magisterial display of racist, misogynist essentialism, and I think it really gets to the heart of the paranoiac auto-stimulatory tendencies to which I referred earlier. I quote his initial comment in full:

The problem with New Zealand is it’s full of white cowards who are too frightened of being called names to stand up for the truth.

(And that’s just the ACT Party.)

And the truth (if we are honest enough to admit it) is: for the last quarter-century, our country has been brownwashed by a bunch of scammers (aided and abetted by legions of white ‘useful idiots’) into feeling guilty for the supposed sins of our British great-great-grandparents.

A sober reading of the facts reveals that some of these sins were actual (though far less sinful than the crimes perpetrated by Maori on Maori). Many others were highly exaggerated and delivered with lashings of emotional blackmail, for the purposes of extorting compensation.

But of course we are New Zealanders and we are not allowed to tell our truth (as Alasdair Thompson recently found out to his cost).

We are not allowed to speak out about state suffocation, Maorification, feminazism, National socialism, teacher unionism or any of the other evils that are dragging our country into the third world.

Those who do have the guts to tell the truth are called nasty names like racists in the hope that, like snails, one light contact with politically-correct criticism will be enough to make them shrink back into their shells.

And of course it works a treat.

There are plenty of parties for pessimists, backward-looking Maori and white bedwetters. But there’s only one for optimists, achievement-oriented people and forward-looking Maori.

ACT will not succeed until it champions the latter and tells the dishonest others to go to Hell.

In short, their catchment is men and women who think like men. Not men and women who think like women. ACT is the party of the strong father, not the soft mother.

(By strong father I include strong women like Rand, Richardson and Thatcher, and by soft mother I include weak men like Key.)

I hope you people will think about that.

[Update: A NZ Herald article titled Act ad man blasts ‘apartheid’ contains more such statements from John Ansell, who is ACT’s creative director; and in it Don Brash distances himself from them, saying “I don’t want to associate myself with those kind of views at all”. He may not want to, but he is. His own press release issued in conjunction with the advertisement above calls any form of “preferential treatment” — such as concessions granted under Article II of the Treaty, which ACT apparently does not recognise — “a form of apartheid”. Perigo is fond of the term, and also of referring to Māori, Muslims and anyone else who doesn’t quack like an Aryan duck as “savages”. Moreover the prospective MP for Epsom, John Banks — who represents the kinder, gentler face of the ACT party — also has form on this issue, having previously referred to Māori TV as “Apartheid Television”, and holding views generally very comparable with those of Ansell and, in some cases, with Perigo. So Brash’s will to not be associated with such views really raises a question: will he, in order to dissociate ACT from these views, fire his creative director, the press secretary for his Parliamentary leader, and the only MP likely to win an electorate? I rather doubt it, but I believe Aotearoa deserves answers.]

[Update 2: Ansell is gone. One down; how many to go?]

As Russell Brown said, Ansell’s comment is “essentially an incitement to race war“, and I don’t believe Ansell himself would deny that. But it’s more than that; it’s also an incitement to sex war. It’s easy enough to dismiss as the usual sort of dark mutterings, but hang on a minute: this fool is claiming to speak for me, and if you’re a man (or a woman who thinks like a man, whatever that is), he’s claiming to speak for you too. But he doesn’t speak for me. To head off the inevitable speculation, I’m hardly what you’d call a feminised liberal pantywaist; I have a beard, I hunt, I fish, I provide for a family; I like whisky and brew my own beer; I like rugby and rock’n’roll and Rachmaninov, and breaking things to see how they work; I’ve spent years studying martial arts and I’m trained to do or have done most of the things on Heinlein’s list. I wear a Swanndri to work in an office on Victoria Street, for crying out loud.

But in my world, masculinity isn’t measured by warrior prowess or the vulgar ability to force one’s will upon others, whether by physical, social or legislative means. Those things, as anyone who’s studied totalitarianism will tell you, only garner a mean and hollow sort of respect; the sort which dissipates as soon as the heel is lifted from the throat of the oppressed. No, in my world, masculinity is judged by honest work, truth and wise counsel, respect and tolerance, forbearance and understanding, accommodation and partnership; from love and support, and strength of a kind which intersects with but is not eclipsed by that to which Ansell appeals. As I have argued before, that sort of view — the dictator’s view that power comes from the barrel of a gun, that only the whims of the mighty matter — is a bare and miserly sort of humanity. And if that’s how Aotearoa actually is, then I say: come the feminised, Māorified revolution, because we desperately need it.

Of course, it’s not. Ansell no more represents Aotearoa’s men than Muriel Newman does its women, Lindsay Perigo its homosexuals or Don Brash does Pākehā. Their methods have become unsound. As Conor Roberts put it, “if you gaze for long into the sub-5 percent abyss, the sub-5 percent abyss gazes also into you.” Let’s see how long they can keep gazing.

L