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A protestor wears a Donald Trump face mask during a Freedom and Rights Coalition protest at parliament on November 9 (Photo by Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)
A protestor wears a Donald Trump face mask during a Freedom and Rights Coalition protest at parliament on November 9 (Photo by Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)

OPINIONSocietyNovember 12, 2021

Nicky Hager: My message to friends who joined this week’s protest

A protestor wears a Donald Trump face mask during a Freedom and Rights Coalition protest at parliament on November 9 (Photo by Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)
A protestor wears a Donald Trump face mask during a Freedom and Rights Coalition protest at parliament on November 9 (Photo by Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)

Are these really the people you want to align yourself with?

Dear vaccine hesitant friends,

I know you feel worried about vaccines. I understand you feel picked on for not getting the vaccine. But I am feeling disturbed that quite a few good, principled people I know took part in the November 9 anti-vaccine march on parliament. It has impelled me to write.

When people I know march down the road with white supremacists, Trump supporters, fundamentalist Christians, people who are pro-guns, anti-UN, anti-immigrant and anti-Jewish, people who believe a powerful “them” want to kill millions and enslave the earth, things have got totally out of hand.

On Tuesday, this was what you were part of:

1. Many of the prominent people on the march were espousing exactly the same extreme and confused views before the Covid pandemic began. Their current campaigning is exploiting the vaccine issue to push those prior-existing beliefs. They were using your presence at their protest to promote dangerous, marginal ideas.

2. Another set of people in the protest came directly from the anti-1080 campaign, the sadly mistaken idea that Department of Conservation staff are recklessly poisoning human water supplies and trying to kill or mind-control the population. Notice how easily they transferred these ideas to a totally different context of a virus pandemic and vaccination. Remember that anti-1080 people have been willing to threaten other people’s lives if they disagreed with them.

3. Then there is a whole package of Trumpian ideas about the government and news media being enemies of ordinary people. It was in pro-Trump protests in the US that resistance to and denial of Covid were first used as a rallying point for far-right ideas. That is where the political model being seen here began. Do you feel comfortable being part of this?

4. The Trumpian politics have come with the US ideas about “freedom”, meaning freedom of the individual to do what they like and stuff everyone else. In New Zealand, the dominant values are much more about community and caring for each other. Freedom sounds good, but it’s a slogan for deeply conservative and unattractive ideas that deny or avoid the responsibility we have for others.

5. On top of all this, I strongly suspect the Covid resistance is being actively used by some on the right of New Zealand politics to try to destabilise Jacinda Ardern and the Labour Government. Already it has familiar fingerprints all over it. Notice how the recent farmer protests (on entirely different issues of environment policy) use the same extreme anti-Jacinda and anti-Labour script about communism and lies. There are strong signs of orchestration with the rural protests as well.

6. But the most the repellent part of the Covid protests is the constant hatred and violent, misogynist threats directed at Jacinda Ardern as a woman prime minister and at many other women in positions of authority. What on earth are liberal, enlightened people doing in the company of these violent, racist, anti-women people?

We’ve seen these elements in New Zealand before. But the current toxic brew is strong and brings all these parts together at once.

I hope all this will blow over. I hope that few years from now it will be hard to find any normal person who wants to admit they took part in this madness. But in the meantime, something ugly and dangerous is occurring and you should not be part of it.

As Toby Manhire wrote on Wednesday, “reasonable New Zealanders who wish to protest the vaccine mandates have an urgent responsibility today: to actively, vocally disavow and denounce the violent cheerleaders they find themselves marching alongside.”

This includes you, reasonable New Zealander friends: please actively, vocally disavow and denounce the violent cheerleaders. Please realise that your concerns are being exploited for other agendas. And never, ever join or support this kind of fascist protest again.

Related:

The protest that revealed a new, ugly, dangerous side to our country

‘Sharp increase’ in online disinformation since delta outbreak began

 

The Waihopai spybase. Photo: Schutz, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons; Additional design by Tina Tiller
The Waihopai spybase. Photo: Schutz, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons; Additional design by Tina Tiller

SocietyNovember 11, 2021

Twenty ways the GCSB could repurpose its creepy spyglobes

The Waihopai spybase. Photo: Schutz, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons; Additional design by Tina Tiller
The Waihopai spybase. Photo: Schutz, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons; Additional design by Tina Tiller

We can and should upcycle the Waihopai spy station, argues Catherine Woulfe. 

The great espionage puffballs of Waihopai Station are famous for being big and white and creepy as hell. The first one went up in 1989 and quietly, very quietly, got on with the job (of spying). The second one snuggled in beside it nine years later. 

Together, the two unblinking eyes have endured various indignities: recurring protests; annoying allegations of mass surveillance on a truly horrifying scale; Nicky Hager breaking in a couple times. In 2008 three activists slashed the kevlar of one ball with a sickle, leaving a deflated white sac hanging off the framework. 

The pieces were picked up, the damage smoothed over. They’re still good balls, barely middle-aged. Yet today, it was announced they are “obsolete” and “irrelevant” and will soon be dismantled. 

I petition the powers that be to consider the following alternative uses:

 

1  Stage for elaborate way-too-far pranks involving the afterlife / alien abductions

2  New home for the Wizard, having been deeply wounded by the pass-agg paycut in Christchurch

3  Influencer wedding venue

4  Post-lockdown retreat for the parents of Tāmaki Makaurau. One person per dome per day. Snacks, refreshments and silence provided. 

5  Same again but for essential workers

6  Readymade Bake Off tents

7  Shadow puppets extravaganza

8  Act party convention venue

9  Studio for photographers specialising in glamour shotz

10  Sanctuary / sanatorium for the last polar bear

11  Headquarters of the Fungal Network of New Zealand, which is a real and stupefyingly good name

12  Extreme velodrome

13  Time out space for Colin Craig. And Barry Soper. 

14  Illegal paddock doofs

15  En-masse permanent retreat for all writers who believe they are writing “the next great New Zealand novel”, and who have been drunk enough to say that out loud.

Or just for the poet who emailed last night after The Spinoff rejected his pitch: “A foregone conclusion this will not be reviewed in your quasi pages. I am published internationally […] and do not condone, nor do i support pretentious, hipster, mags. Bogus elitism is anathema to me. But now you know who I am. God save NZ.”

16  Installation at Gibbs Farm, the bonkers sculpture garden / zoo / millionaire’s folly north of Auckland, where they’d fit neatly either side of the oversize trumpet

17  Storage for the 400,000 books the National Library is sending to a digitising outfit offshore, aka “rehoming”, aka “junking”

18  Maintaining a habitable biosphere for the 0.001% when things go really bad

19  The Nicky Hager Truth & Justice Library

20  Screaming place