Better Government

‘PC’, ‘Woke’ Orwellian censorship – 1984, official lies, media lies, ‘socialism’, death of freedom

Many from the ‘Left’, progressives, Cultural Marxists and activists keep trying to stymie democracy and the individual with their shrill, often illogical, Orwellian and ideological views and variations of mind control.  Orwell’s 1984 Ministry of Truth is alive and well. The following articles provide evidence.

Links to more articles follow the four below

NZ Prime Minister leading NZ to extreme socialism

NZ Prime Minister leading NZ to extreme socialism  By Muriel Newman, NZCPR, 23 December 2021

Without a doubt, 2021 has been a very disturbing year as we faced the reality that our Prime Minister is leading New Zealand down a pathway of extreme socialism.

Many people are now realising that Jacinda Ardern is not the benevolent caring soul she portrays, but instead is heavily influenced by the extreme socialist thinking of the United Nations and the World Economic Forum.

We now know she is introducing the UN’s Agenda 2030 into our everyday lives – not because she told us she was doing so, but because she revealed her plans to an elite audience overseas.

Particularly troubling is her implementation of He Puapua, the agenda of her Maori caucus for iwi control of the country. It was not disclosed during the 2020 general election campaign and Jacinda Ardern has no mandate to impose this radical plan to replace one of the world’s oldest democracies with tribal rule by 2040. Exposing He Puapua has been a turning point and we are pleased the NZCPR was able to play such a pivotal role.

Under the guise of implementing the UN’s Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the Prime Minister is orchestrating a massive transfer of power – an effective takeover of New Zealand’s democratic system of government by iwi leaders. Using the façade of “co-governance” a powerful tribal minority is being given 50 percent control and veto rights over all other New Zealanders. The ultimate goal is to establish an elite tribal aristocracy, that bestows privilege on those of Maori descent, relegating everyone else to second-class status.

While the PM deliberately kept He Puapua hidden throughout 2020, once she realised she had the power to govern alone, the agenda for Maori supremacy is being fast-tracked.

Nothing is safe. Our language is being corrupted with Maori words and phrases replacing English in communications, place names, and even the name of the country. History is being re-written and school children are being indoctrinated with a Maori World View. Tribal custom (tikanga) is replacing the common law in the legal system. Our democratic right to oppose Maori wards on councils has been abolished opening the door for the tribal control of local government. Under the Pae Ora Bill, our community-based District Health Boards are being replaced with new centralised agencies controlled by Maori which will prioritise race over clinical need. And now under Three Waters, billions of dollars of ratepayer funded council infrastructure and assets will be confiscated and transferred to agencies controlled by the tribal elite.

Iwi are attempting to take over policing – through roadblocks and other public access bans, they want control of child protection services to prevent abused Maori children from being cared for by non-Maori families, they want ownership of the Conservation Estate, and influence over Resource Management Act decision-making.

The rationale for this extraordinary takeover is that Maori are Treaty partners with the Crown and so should have 50 percent of control of the country. But even though it is constitutionally impossible for the Crown to enter into a partnership with her subjects, the PM not only continues to promote this fiction as the truth, but she has prevented the media from investigating it, by making the promotion of the Treaty ‘partnership’ a condition of access to her $55 million Public Interest Journalism Fund.

This fund is a shocking pay-off that has turned the mainstream media into a mouthpiece for government propaganda – a situation that is completely unacceptable in a modern democracy which relies on the media to hold the government to account.

Jacinda Ardern is proud of ‘capturing’ the media, as she explained to an international audience of world leaders at a virtual Summit for Democracy hosted by US President Joe Biden on December 10: “In New Zealand we saw that Covid-19 was affecting traditional media models, already under pressure. We’ve also seen the spread of misinformation on Covid-19 particularly through social media. We had to act, so we made it a priority to establish a Public Interest Journalism Fund to help our media to continue to produce stories that keep New Zealanders informed. Underpinning this action is a recognition that a vibrant and trusted media sector is a vital component of a healthy democracy especially during times of crisis.”

The PM does not seem to realise that through her actions, she has almost single-handedly destroyed the credibility of New Zealand’s once great Fourth Estate, by offering government handouts that require the promotion of propaganda as a condition of acceptance. In some countries, what is going on here would be regarded as corruption and those orchestrating it would be indicted.

In fact, never in the history of New Zealand have once-popular media outlets become so despised by the public as they are now.

The key themes of President Biden’s summit included strengthening democracy against authoritarianism, and promoting respect for human rights.

Anyone listening to Jacinda Ardern telling world leaders that “democracy underpinned by human rights is essential to our identity as a nation”, would imagine her to be a true champion of democracy and human rights.

But her actions tell a different story.

The Prime Minister is attempting to replace democracy with authoritarian tribal rule, as she delivers control of our country to the unelected and unaccountable representatives of multi-million dollar private sector iwi corporations, one co-governance deal at a time.

Not only that, but her management of Covid-19 has crushed human rights in an unprecedented manner never experienced in New Zealand before. Her harsh lockdowns have cost lives and livelihoods, and her vaccine mandates – coming on top of an election promise not to make vaccination compulsory – has had a devastating impact on families and businesses, and all for no good reason, since testing and the use of protective equipment could have been required instead.

That Jacinda Ardern can ignore the devastation caused by her decisions, and gloat on the world stage about how great her achievements are, demonstrates the essential truth of the saying, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”.

Fortunately, New Zealanders collectively are fighting back, and thank you so much to all of our NZCPR readers for your wonderful efforts in joining in the campaigns and helping to spread the message. In just one year support for Labour has fallen in the polls from 50 percent on election night to around 36 percent. Opposition parties are now within striking distance of gaining a majority, and it seems highly unlikely that Labour would ever again be able to govern alone.

Looking ahead, there is a lot of water to go under the bridge before the next election, and we will face massive challenges as Labour presses ahead with its extremist agenda and makes the most of having majority rule.

One such challenge will be an implementation plan for He Puapua, developed by iwi leaders at the behest of the Government.

To achieve Maori sovereignty by 2040, He Puapua not only requires the recognition of Treaty partnerships, but two other major constitutional changes are also needed: the first is to introduce ‘tikanga’ into our law, and the second is to include the Treaty of Waitangi in a new written constitution.

Through one of our campaigns, the NZCPR is challenging a High Court ruling that tikanga trumps the common law to the Court of Appeal, and while the case relates to the coastal claims process, it has wider implications for the Rule of Law.

Furthermore, in 2011, the NZCPR led a successful campaign against the Maori Party’s attempt to introduce a new Treaty-based constitution for New Zealand. It was a battle that we could not afford to lose, since such a new written constitution would put Judges in charge of law-making and entrench and prioritise Maori rights above all others, with any challenge to that status deemed unconstitutional and ruled out.

Since a working group of iwi leaders has already developed a draft Treaty-based constitution for New Zealand, it is possible that they may try to use He Puapua and Labour’s majority rule to force it through. If that is indeed their plan for next year, then another major campaign will be needed!

It is in this climate of increasing oppression, that the NZCPR enters our sixteenth year of operation, driven by a philosophy so eloquently expressed by former US President Thomas Jefferson: “An informed citizenry is at the heart of a dynamic democracy”.

As you know, to retain our independence, the NZCPR is funded solely by donations from readers and Christmas is a make-or-break time for us – it’s when we find out whether our readers will back us for another year so we can continue producing our weekly newsletters and running our important campaigns. With no other sources of funding, our future is in your hands.

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Another example of the Western system of justice: The execution of Julian Assange

Another example of the Western system of justice. The execution of Julian Assange  By Chris Hedges, RT, 14 December 2021

 Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and host of RT’s On Contact, a weekly interview series on US foreign policy, economic realities and civil liberties in American society. He’s the author of 14 books, including several New York Times best-sellers.

He exposed empire as a criminal enterprise. He documented its lies, its callous disregard for human life, its rampant corruption, and its innumerable war crimes. But, as history shows, empires kill those who inflict deep wounds.

Let us name Julian Assange’s executioners. Joe Biden. Boris Johnson. Scott Morrison. Theresa May. Lenin Moreno. Donald Trump. Barack Obama. Mike Pompeo. Hillary Clinton. Lord Chief Justice Ian Burnett and Lord Justice Timothy Victor Holroyde. Crown Prosecutors James Lewis QC, Clair Dobbin QC and Joel Smith. District Judge Vanessa Baraitser. Assistant US Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia Gordon Kromberg. William Burns, the director of the CIA. Ken McCallum, the director general of MI5.

Let us acknowledge that the goal of these executioners, who discussed kidnapping and assassinating Assange, has always been his annihilation. That Assange, who is in precarious physical and psychological health, and who suffered a stroke during court video proceedings on October 27, has been condemned to death should not come as a surprise. The 10 years he has been detained, seven in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and nearly three in the high-security Belmarsh prison, were accompanied by a lack of sunlight and exercise, and unrelenting threats, pressure, anxiety and stress. “His eyes were out of sync, his right eyelid would not close, his memory was blurry,” his fiancée Stella Moris said of the stroke.

His steady deterioration has led to hallucinations and depression. He takes antidepressant medication and the antipsychotic quetiapine. He has been observed pacing his cell until he collapses, punching himself in the face and banging his head against the wall. He has spent weeks in the medical wing of Belmarsh. Prison authorities found “half of a razor blade” hidden under his socks. He has repeatedly called the suicide hotline run by the Samaritans because he has thought about killing himself “hundreds of times a day.” The executioners have not yet completed their grim work.

Toussaint L’Ouverture, who led the Haitian independence movement, the only successful slave revolt in human history, was physically destroyed in the same manner, locked by the French in an unheated and cramped prison cell and left to die of exhaustion, malnutrition, apoplexy, pneumonia and probably tuberculosis.

Assange committed empire’s greatest sin. He exposed it as a criminal enterprise. He documented its lies, callous disregard for human life, rampant corruption and innumerable war crimes. Republican or Democrat. Conservative or Labour. Trump or Biden. It does not matter. The goons who oversee the empire sing from the same Satanic songbook. Empires always kill those who inflict deep and serious wounds.

Rome’s long persecution of the Carthaginian general Hannibal, forcing him in the end to commit suicide, and the razing of Carthage repeats itself in epic after epic. Crazy Horse. Patrice Lumumba. Malcolm X. Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Sukarno. Ngo Dinh Diem. Fred Hampton. Salvador Allende. If you cannot be bought off, if you will not be intimidated into silence, you will be killed.

The obsessive CIA attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, which, because none succeeded, have a Keystone Cop incompetence to them, included contracting Sam Giancana, Al Capone’s successor in Chicago, along with Miami mobster Santo Trafficante Jr., to kill the Cuban leader, attempting to poison Castro’s cigars with a botulinum toxin, providing Castro with a tubercle bacilli-infected scuba-diving suit, booby-trapping a conch shell on the sea floor where he often dived, slipping botulism-toxin pills in one of his drinks, and using a pen outfitted with a hypodermic needle to poison him.

The current cabal of assassins hides behind a judicial burlesque overseen in London by portly judges in gowns and white horse-hair wigs mouthing legal Alice-in-Wonderland absurdities. It is a dark reprise of Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘Mikado’, with the Lord High Executioner drawing up lists of people “who would not be missed.”

I watched the latest instalment of the Assange show trial via video link on Friday. I listened to the reading of the ruling granting the appeal by the United States to extradite him. Assange’s lawyers have two weeks to appeal to the Supreme Court, which they are expected to do. I am not optimistic.

Friday’s ruling was devoid of legal analysis. It fully accepted the conclusions of the lower-court judge about increased risk of suicide and inhumane prison conditions in the United States. But the ruling argued that US Diplomatic Note no. 74, given to the court on February 5, 2021, which offered “assurances” that Assange would be well treated, overrode the lower court’s conclusions. It was a remarkable legal non sequitur. The ruling would not have gotten a passing grade in a first-semester law school course. But legal erudition is not the point. The judicial railroading of Assange, which has eviscerated one legal norm after another, has, as Franz Kafka wrote, turned “lying into a universal principle.”

 Chris Hedges: The Assange case is the most important battle for press freedom in our time

The decision to grant the extradition was based on four “assurances” given to the court by the US government. The two-judge appellate panel ruled that the “assurances” “entirely answer the concerns which caused the judge [in the lower court] to discharge Mr. Assange.” The “assurances” promise that Assange will not be subject to special administrative measures (SAMs), which keep prisoners in extreme isolation and allow the government to monitor conversations with lawyers, overruling attorney-client privilege; can, if the government in his native Australia agrees, serve out his sentence there; will receive adequate clinical and psychological care; and, pre-trial and post trial, will not be held in the administrative maximum facility (ADX) in Florence, Colorado.

“There is no reason why this court should not accept the assurances as meaning what they say,” the judges wrote. “There is no basis for assuming that the USA has not given the assurances in good faith.” And, with these rhetorical feints, the judges signed Assange’s death warrant.

None of the “assurances” offered by Biden’s Department of Justice (DoJ) are worth the paper they’re written on. All come with escape clauses. None are legally binding. Should Assange do “something subsequent to the offering of these assurances that meets the tests for the imposition of SAMs or designation to ADX,” he will be subject to these coercive measures. And you can be assured that any incident, no matter how trivial, will be used, if Assange is extradited, as an excuse to toss him into the mouth of the dragon.

Should Australia, which has marched in lockstep with the US in the persecution of their citizen, not agree to his transfer, he will remain for the rest of his life in a US prison. But so what? If Australia does not request a transfer it “cannot be a cause for criticism of the USA, or a reason for regarding the assurances as inadequate to meet the judge’s concerns,” the ruling read. And even if that were not the case, it would take Assange 10 to 15 years to appeal his sentence all the way up to the Supreme Court, which would be more than enough time for the state assassins to finish him off.

I’m not sure how to respond to assurance number four, stating that Assange will not be held pre-trial in ADX Florence. No one is held pre-trial in ADX Florence. But it sounds reassuring, so I guess those in the Biden DoJ who crafted the diplomatic note added it.

ADX Florence is not the only supermax prison in the United States that might house Assange, of course. He could be shipped out to one of our other Guantanamo-like facilities. Daniel Hale, the former US Air Force intelligence analyst currently imprisoned for releasing top-secret documents that exposed widespread civilian casualties caused by US drone strikes, has been held since October in a communications management unit (CMU) at USP Marion, a federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois. CMUs are highly restrictive cells that replicate the near-total isolation imposed by SAMs.

READ MORE: Assange suffered stroke in UK prison – fiancee

Ironically, the High Court ruling came as Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced at the virtual Summit for Democracy that the Biden administration would provide new funding to protect reporters targeted because of their work and support independent international journalism. Blinken’s “assurances” that the Biden administration would defend a free press, at the very moment the administration was demanding Assange’s extradition, is a glaring example of the rank hypocrisy and mendacity that makes the Democrats, as journalist Glen Ford used to say, “not the lesser evil, but the more effective evil.”

Assange is charged in the US under 17 counts of the Espionage Act and one count of hacking into a government computer. The charges could see him sentenced to 175 years in prison, even though he is not a US citizen and WikiLeaks is not a US-based publication. If he is found guilty, it will effectively criminalize the investigative work of all journalists and publishers, anywhere in the world and of any nationality, who possess classified documents to shine a light on the inner workings of power. This mortal assault on the press will have been orchestrated, we must not forget, by a Democratic administration. It will set a legal precedent that will delight other totalitarian regimes and autocrats who, emboldened by the United States, will gleefully seize journalists and publishers, no matter where they are located, who publish inconvenient truths.

There is no legal basis to hold Assange in prison. There is no legal basis to try him, a foreign national, under the Espionage Act. The CIA spied on him while he was in the Ecuadorian Embassy through a Spanish company, UC Global, contracted to provide embassy security. This spying included recording the privileged conversations between Assange and his lawyers. This fact alone invalidates any future trial.

After seven years in a cramped room without sunlight in the embassy, Assange has been held for nearly three years in a high-security prison in London. As UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer has testified, that’s so the state can continue the relentless abuse and torture it knows will lead to his psychological and physical disintegration. The persecution of Assange is designed to send a message to anyone who might consider exposing the corruption, dishonesty and depravity that defines the black heart of our global elites.

Dean Yates can tell you what US “assurances” are worth. He was the Reuters bureau chief in Baghdad on the morning of July 12, 2007 when his Iraqi colleagues Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh were killed, along with nine other men, by US Army Apache gunships. Two children were seriously wounded. The US government spent three years lying to Yates, Reuters, and the rest of the world about the killings, although the army had video evidence of the massacre taken by the Apaches during the attack. The video, known as the Collateral Murder video, was leaked in 2010 by Chelsea Manning to Assange. For the first time, here was proof that those killed were not, as the army had repeatedly insisted, engaged in a firefight. It exposed the lies spun by the US that it could not locate the video footage and had never attempted to cover up the killings.

Watch my full interview with Yates here:

The Spanish courts can tell you what US “assurances” are worth. Spain was given an assurance that its citizen David Mendoza Herrarte, if extradited to the US to face trial on drug trafficking charges, could serve his prison sentence in his homeland. But, for six years, the DoJ repeatedly refused Spanish transfer requests, relenting only when the Spanish Supreme Court intervened.

The people in Afghanistan can tell you what US “assurances” are worth. US military, intelligence, and diplomatic officials knew for 18 years that the war in Afghanistan was a quagmire, yet they publicly stated, over and over, that the military intervention was making steady progress.

The people in Iraq can tell you what US “assurances” are worth. They were invaded and subject to a brutal war based on fabricated evidence about weapons of mass destruction.

The people of Iran can tell you what US “assurances” are worth. The United States, in the 1981 Algiers Accords, promised not to interfere in Iran’s internal affairs and then funded and backed the People’s Mujahedin Organization of Iran, a terrorist group based in Iraq and dedicated to overthrowing the Iranian regime.

The thousands of people tortured in US global black sites can tell you what US “assurances” are worth. CIA officers, when questioned by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence about the widespread use of torture, secretly destroyed video tapes of interrogations while insisting there had been no “destruction of evidence.”

The numbers of treaties, agreements, deals, promises, and “assurances” made by the US around the globe and subsequently violated are too numerous to list. Hundreds of treaties signed with Native American tribes, alone, have been ignored by the US government.

Assange, at tremendous personal cost, warned us. He gave us the truth. Now the ruling class is crucifying him for this truth. And with his crucifixion, the dim lights of our democracy go dark.

This article was first published on Scheerpost

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The UN’s COP26 is a grotesque and decadent spectacle

The UN COP26 is a grotesque and decadent spectacle  By Barry Brill, 18 November 2021

Editor’s note: Click on link above to view graphics in the original article.

We are witnessing Versailles levels of extravagance and hypocrisy. From every corner of the globe, the super-rich, the powerful and the full of puffed-up virtue are gathered in Glasgow to pontificate to the rest of us about how much we are harming the planet with all our waste and hubris.

They’ve arrived in their fleets of private jets to bemoan the scourge of air-industry emissions. They are tucking in to five-star meals in between wondering out loud if the little people should eat less meat. They’ll rest their weary, virtuous heads on plump, silk pillows after long days of discussing how to rein in the material aspirations of the masses.

It is perhaps the most nauseating display of oligarchical conceit of recent times.

The foregoing is unapologetically uplifted from a recent thundering editorial in Spiked. Brendan O’Neill captures the odious dishonesty of the world’s privileged and powerful as they strut their virtue in a groupthink orgy of piety. I recommend that you read it all.

One by one these elitists are competing to heighten the hysteria … “one minute to midnight” … “code red for the planet”… “an existential threat to humanity”… “greatest moral challenge of our time” … “last best hope for the world” … and on … and on … and on.

Hundreds of highly-paid PR flacks in dozens of countries have sweated out these histrionic phrases. The world’s billionaires and high potentates have then humbly volunteered to deliver the gold-plated words personally to Glasgow by private jet and chauffeured limousine.  And to be seen there.

But why are 400 private jets parked at airports serving Glasgow? Honestly? Why not deliver the words by email – or even by video if the media need visuals?  What do they achieve by their swaggering  physical presence? After all, everybody knows that this entire convention is a pretentious charade.

Nobody at the convention hall in Glasgow really needs to be convinced that climate action is a good thing. The hall is an echo-chamber of like-minded enthusiasts.

A committee of 25,000 is never going to make any worthwhile decision that was not pre-approved long before the convention began.

It is all theatre. But it is a very expensive performance, and – with Scotland reporting 400 new infections each day – it is a potentially dangerous performance for over 100 countries. All attendees are exempted from Scotland’s vaccine passport scheme. (“All animals are equal but some are more equal than others” – Orwell).

The private jets alone will blast 13,000 tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere, and their ostentatious presence has  been branded “rank climate hypocrisy” and the “nadir of carbon inequality”. But they are no more than the visible tip of an iceberg. Many of their mega-rich owners – Bloomberg, Bejos, Fink, Gates, Soros, Schwab, the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds – are pouring many more billions into lobbying governments everywhere for their favoured climate policies.

There are literally tens of thousands of professional climate activists working on a full-time basis and drawing wages funded by these “philanthropists”. They make up the bulk of the non-delegates at the Glasgow convention. What hope does common sense or moderation have in the face of such an army of propagandists?

Francis Menton believes that, on balance, it’s a good thing we have these annual COPs, saying:

“I can think of no other comparable activities that put on such dramatic and widely-viewed display the immeasurable foolishness and hubris of our political overlords.“

Menton points out that no less than 25 COPs have previously ordered the world to reduce its omissions. They succeeded in delivering the dismal track record shown in this graph:

While every smug and sanctimonious member of the climate elite can readily churn out 10,000 words about the benefits of “net zero carbon by 2050”, none ever seem to mention the costs. Or who is to pay those costs. [Clue: it’s not them.]

Both New Zealand and UK governments have released modelling as to the likely costs. While admitting that “nobody knows”, the models suggest a figure of about US$11,000 per household per year. Contrast this with the 68% of Americans who tell opinion surveyors that they are not prepared to pay more than $10 per month to ameliorate climate change.

Where is the self-awareness of elites who instruct us to “do what we say not what we do”:

  • Al Gore, who predicts 20-foot rises in sea levels has bought a 9-bathroom beach front villa in Montecito, California;
  • Barack Obama, who declared “the moment when the rise of the oceans beganto slow” has acquired a waterfront mansion on Martha’s Vineyard;
  • When John Kerry recently flew in his family’s private jetto Obama’s 60th birthday party, it was the 16th private-jet jaunt his family has taken this year
  • The Prime Minister of the Maldives, who mimed an underwater cabinet meeting, built an international airport less than 2 metres above mean sea level;
  • In the knowledge that limiting population is a key tenet of climate alarmists, Boris Johnson is about to have his seventh child;
  • Jeff Bezos flew into Glasgow in his Gulfstream jet after attending Bill Gates 66th birthday party in the Mediterranean. At the party50 guests were choppered from private yachts to a beach;
  • The Cop26climate summit president Alok Sharma drives a diesel car. His spokeswoman, Allegra Stratton said she did not “fancy” an electric car “just yet”;

Closer to home, the New Zealand Green Party MPs fly more kilometres than the MPs of any other party. Minister James Shaw flew no less than 14 bureaucrats to Glasgow (in business class) for no known benefits to taxpayers – shouldering aside hapless MIQ applicants who have been queueing for months to return to their homeland.

I conclude as I began with Spiked:

This is a movement that allows the descendants of incredibly wealthy banking families to tell the rest of us to wear a cardie rather than turn on the central heating and which invites literal princes to make sad faces about all the flying and meat-eating the oiks are engaging in.

I said it was a modern version of Versailles, but actually it’s worse than that. At least daft bint Marie Antoinette wanted the lower orders to eat cake (she just didn’t realise they didn’t have any). This new lot actively campaigns against the consumption of the 21st-century equivalent of cake – meat, heat, easy travel. ‘Don’t let them eat cake’ is the cry of the eco-aristocrat.

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Climate Derangement Syndrome At COP26

Climate Derangement Syndrome At COP26  By spiked-online.com, 12  November 2021

It’s not any change in our climate that poses the greatest threat to humanity, it is the hysteria surrounding it that does.

Climate change is going to be worse than the Holocaust. It will give rise to a global epidemic of gang rape. There’ll be murder, war, slaughter. Your friends will die. Your children, too. The carbon-fuelled heating of the planet will bring ‘human life as we know it’ crashing to a violent, fiery end. It will be nothing less than doomsday.

These are just some of the hysterical claims that have been made in the discussion around COP26. As world leaders private-jetted their way to Glasgow for the latest UN gabfest on how to save the planet from mankind’s dirt, hubris and avarice, there was a severe outbreak of Climate Derangement Syndrome.

Prime ministers, bishops, princes and noisy greens all tried to outdo each other with their apocalyptic warnings. It has been a grim competition of catastrophes, an orgy of hyperbolic prophecies that wouldn’t look out of place in the Book of Revelation.

It all kicked off months before COP26 opened. When the IPCC published its latest report in August, delirious scribes across the Western world were reaching for their thesauruses in order that they might drive home to dim readers just how nightmarish the future promises to be. It’s ‘code red!’ for humanity, they all insisted, uniformly.

If we don’t get a handle on carbon emissions soon, ‘our future climate could well become some kind of hell on Earth’, said Tim Palmer of Oxford University. The planet is on fire and it’s our fault – we’re ‘guilty as hell’, declared the Guardian, coming off like a crackpot millenarian preacher.

Every unpleasant weather event was laid at the feet of dastardly mankind. ‘With raging wildfires, floods and pandemics, it seems like End Times – and it’s our own damned fault’, said one writer.

This feverish holding-up of the IPCC report as some kind of God-like indictment of mankind set the stage for the derangement we have seen around COP26. The Archbishop of Canterbury, the supposed moral anchor of the nation, set the tone with his perverse insistence that the consequences of climate change will overshadow even the greatest crime in history – the Holocaust.

It will be a genocide ‘on an infinitely greater scale’, he said. He has since apologised for this shameful marshalling of the horrors of the Holocaust to the moany middle-class cause of going green.

Boris Johnson, who just a few years ago was writing newspaper columns slamming eco-hysteria, says climate change is a doomsday clock counting down to a ‘detonation that will end human life as we know it’. If we don’t cut carbon emissions, it will soon be ‘too late for our children’, he said, the clear implication being that climate change will gift the next generation a Mad Max-style wasteland in which life will barely be worth living.

‘It’s one minute to midnight’, said Boris. Actually, chirped the Archbishop of Canterbury, ‘the clock has run out’. Make your minds up – is it apocalypse now or apocalypse very soon?

Time has ‘quite literally run out’, said Prince Charles. He says we need to take a ‘war-like footing’ on climate change. Climate change is ‘another form of wartime’ and we may soon have to ration things like air travel, said famed globe-trotter Joanna Lumley. If COP26 fails, it will be a ‘death sentence’ for humankind, said UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres. ‘We’re digging our own graves’, he warned.

Of course it fell to the middle-class death cult Extinction Rebellion to spell out what the globalist elites largely only hint at. Cameron Ford, the viral spokesperson for XR-offshoot Insulate Britain, said in an interview with Owen Jones that climate change will mean running out of food and ‘societal collapse’.

And then? ‘You’ll see slaughter. You’ll see rape. You’ll see murder.’ It gets worse, believe it or not. ‘[Our] friends and our siblings and our children – we will lose everything we love.’ Shorter version: everyone will die.

Owen Jones made no pushback whatsoever against these lunatic, utterly unscientific claims.

Then it was revealed that XR’s very own Nostradamus – its famously batty co-founder Roger Hallam – has been feverishly predicting the descent of humanity into a barbarous living hell. An unearthed document he wrote last year while he was in jail on suspicion of conspiracy to commit criminal damage, cheerily titled ‘Advice to Young People, as you Face Annihilation’, painted a picture of the future that would give John the Elder a run for his money.

We will see ‘the collapse of our society’, says Hallam. And like all the best mad prophets, he knows exactly what will happen next. ‘A gang of boys will break into your house demanding food. They will see your mother, your sister, your girlfriend, and they will gang rape her on the kitchen table. They will force you to watch, laughing at you. At the end, they will accuse you of enjoying it. They’ll take a cigarette and burn out your eyes with it. You will not be able to see anything again. This is the reality of climate change.’

You have been warned. You’d better start recycling.

It might feel tempting to write off Hallam’s demented prophesising as just another outburst from a man so odd that even the eco-loons of XR have distanced themselves from him.

But in truth he is only adding flesh to the bones of the elites’ own Climate Derangement Syndrome. When people like Hallam and Ford foretell slaughter and rape and the burning out of eyes in a future world ravaged to dust by carbon emissions, they’re merely putting pornographic colour to the elite consensus that climate change will be a Holocaust-level event in which millions will die.

There isn’t a cigarette paper’s difference between the Archbishop of Canterbury’s prophecy of a climate calamity worse than the Holocaust and Cameron Ford’s millenarian intonements about slaughter, rape and murder. Show me a meaningful distinction between Professor Tim Palmer’s prediction of ‘hell on Earth’ and Roger Hallam’s prison visions of hell on Earth.

We need to talk about this. We need to talk about Climate Derangement Syndrome and how frankly batshit crazy it has become. More to the point, we need to talk about how dangerous this way of thinking is to reason, freedom and the future prosperity of humankind.

Indeed, it isn’t climate change that threatens to undo the great gains of human civilisation – it’s the hysteria about climate change.

The first thing to note about Climate Derangement Syndrome, whether it’s coming from the posh road-blockers of Insulate Britain, Clarence House or the Church of England, is that it has nothing whatsoever to do with science.

This eco-hysteria single-handedly shatters the myth that contemporary environmentalism is a science-driven movement, merely concerned with acting upon the warnings contained in graphs and models drawn up by climatologists.

Show me the piece of scientific research that says a gang of boys will rape your mother if we don’t achieve Net Zero by 2030. Where’s the peer-reviewed study that pinpoints the moment when slaughter, rape and genocide will occur if our governments fail to cut back on fossil fuels?

Of course no such studies exist.

These malarial visions of future horrors spring from the realm of fantasy, not science.

They are the misanthropic prejudices of the depressed middle classes, not scientific projections. They emerge from the well of existential dread in which the contemporary elites wallow, not from cool, calm modelling. And the truth is that this has long been the case with climate-change alarmism.

‘Science’ is the garb thrown on what in reality is the End Times foreboding of this new millennium’s morally at-sea elites. ‘Climate change’ is the all-encompassing idea of doom through which the Western bourgeoisie expresses its sense of moral, political and economic exhaustion.

All the recent talk of doomsday and genocide captures the extent to which the issue of climate change has been catastrophised to an extraordinary degree, how it has been transformed from a perfectly manageable problem into an apocalypse modernity brought upon itself; from a scientific theory about mankind’s impact on the planet into certain, unquestionable proof of the folly of the industrial era; from one challenge among many facing humankind in the 21st century into an indictment of the entire human species.

In short, from a technical conundrum into a God-like revelation of the wickedness of greedy, industrious mankind.

Climate Derangement Syndrome is at root a revolt against modernity.

It is a reactionary, romantic, nostalgic cry of angst against the incredible world of production and consumption mankind has created over the past 200 years.

This is why some at COP26 openly denounced the Industrial Revolution. First came Greta Thunberg, the prophetess of doom of contemporary environmentalism.

She angrily denounced the British government as ‘climate villains’. The UK, she said, is largely responsible for the horrors of climate change – this ‘more or less… started in the UK since that’s where the Industrial Revolution started, [where] we started to burn coal’.

Shamefully, Boris Johnson echoed Greta’s regressive brickbats against the Industrial Revolution. In his COP speech he pointed out that Glasgow was the place where the steam engine, ‘produced by burning coal’, was born. That, he said, was ‘the doomsday machine’ that led us to the dire predicament we find ourselves in now.

This sneering at the Industrial Revolution is without question the most offensive and ridiculous thing Boris has ever said.

To hear the elected leader of the UK describe the UK’s extraordinary contributions to industrialisation as the first stirrings of ‘doomsday’ feels genuinely depressing.

Brits should not feel ashamed of the Industrial Revolution, as Boris and Greta and eco-hairshirts suggest we should.

We should feel immense pride at this radical overhaul of the processes of production and transportation.

The Industrial Revolution was arguably the most important event in human history.

Its positive impact on life expectancy, knowledge, liberty and equality, not only in the UK but also around the world, is almost incalculable.

It was the Industrial Revolution that dragged the populace away from the brutal, back-breaking serfdom of the land into the mad, teeming cities of London, Manchester, Sheffield, Glasgow. It revolutionised how we worked, how we lived, how we conceived of ourselves.

It was the cradle of solidarity and struggle and demands for voting rights, employment rights, educational rights. It is not a coincidence that life expectancy was depressingly short for all of human history until the Industrial Revolution, when it started its stunning and steady rise.

Without this revolution, most of us would still be tied to the land, never venturing further than the farm fence, unable to read, dead by 35.

That’s the idyll eco-regressives fantasise about? These people are as historically illiterate as they are pseudo-scientific.

The COP26 mockery of the Industrial Revolution – more than that, the depiction of that revolution as the starting pistol of the coming climatic genocide – shines a harsh light on what is motoring today’s green hysteria. Not steam or coal, that’s for sure. No, it’s the elites’ loss of faith in modernity and in the human project more broadly.

This is why climate-change hysteria is a far larger problem for humankind than climate change itself. As Bjorn Lomborg recently explained on spiked, climate change is a ‘middling problem’. It is the derangement over climate change, the painting of it as an End Times event we probably deserve, that truly disrupts and undermines our civilisation.

With its misanthropic disdain for human behaviour and aspirations, with its revisionist treatment of the birth of modernity as essentially a crime against Mother Earth, with its incessant demands for reining in economic growth, and with its censorious branding of anyone who questions any part of the regressive green agenda as a ‘climate-change denier’, climate-change alarmism is an express menace to growth, democracy, freedom of speech and the right to dream of an even more prosperous future for all.

Prince Charles is right that we need to get on a ‘war footing’. Not against climate change, though.

Rather, against this ceaseless diminishment of humanity’s achievements and the baleful, untrue claim that modern man is a plague on the planet.

This manmade apocalypticism threatens to upend the remarkable civilisation we have created far more than a bit of carbon does.

See more here: spiked-online.com

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Dr Peter Ridd Reflects On Aussie High Court Freedom Of Speech Defeat

Dr Peter Ridd Reflects On Aussie High Court Freedom Of Speech Defeat  By John O’Sullivan, principia-scientific.com,  16 October 2021

Sky News Australia reported (October 13, 2021) that “The High Court’s ruling against former James Cook University professor Peter Ridd is a blow to every Australian who values freedom of expression.” Peter Ridd gives his response below.

In 2018 Professor Ridd was fired by his university after criticising the work of a colleague studying the Great Barrier Reef. In an email to a journalist, he said the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority “is grossly misusing some scientific ‘data’ to make the case that the Great [B]arrier Reef is greatly damaged”.

This led to a protracted and extremely expensive court battle that ultimately went the way of the employer and against Ridd and the concept of free speech.

Peter writes:

It is with a heavy heart that I inform you that we have lost the appeal in the High Court. We lost, in my opinion, because JCU’s work contract, under which I was employed, effectively kills academic freedom of speech – and the contract is effectively the law.

So, JCU actions were technically legal. But it was, in my opinion, never right, proper, decent, moral or in line with public expectations of how a university should behave.

I often ask myself, if I knew what was going to happen, would I have handled that fateful interview with Alan Jones and Peta Credlin in 2017 differently. Would I still say that, due to systemic quality assurance problems, work from a couple of Great Barrier Reef science institutions was “untrustworthy”?

It has cost me my job, my career, over $300K in legal fees, and more than a few grey hairs.

All I can say is that I hope I would do it again – because overall it was worth the battle, and having the battle is, in this case, more important than the result.

This is just a small battle in a much bigger war. It was a battle which we had to have and, in retrospect, lose. JCU’s and almost every other university in Australia and the western world are behaving badly. We have shown how badly.

Decent people and governments can see the immense problem we have. The universities are not our friends. Only when the problem is recognised will public pressure force a solution.

The failure of our legal action, and JCU’s determination to effectively destroy academic freedom of speech, demonstrates that further legislation is required to force universities to behave properly – especially if they are to receive any public funding. The Commonwealth government introduced excellent legislation in parliament early this year, partly in response to our legal case, to bolster academic freedom of speech. It is an excellent step in the right direction. If my case had been fought under this legislation, I would have had a better chance of winning. But it would still have been far from certain. There would still have been a clash between the new legislation and the work agreement.

There needs to be major punishment against universities for infringement of academic freedom of speech, such as fines or losing their accreditation. There needs to be active policing and investigations of the universities to make sure they comply and do not threaten academics with expensive legal action to stop the university’s behaviour becoming public. Universities must be told that they cannot spy on academic’s email communications (this should only be done by the police) or use secrecy directives to silence and intimidate staff. And all this protection for academics MUST be written into the work contracts to put the matter beyond legal doubt.

I am very mindful that I asked for, and received, donations of about $1,500,000 (in two GoFundMe campaigns of around $750k#) for the legal battle – from over 10,000 people. And I lost. Some of those donations were from people who have very slender financial resources. All I can say is that it weighs heavily on my conscience, but I hope they agree that it was still worth the battle.

A last thank you

I would like to express, one last time, my thanks to Stuart Wood AM QC, Ben Jellis, Ben Kidston, Colette Mintz, Mitchell Downes, Amelia Hasson and the rest of the team. They were fabulous. They did everything that was possible.

Thanks also to John Roskam, Gideon Rozner, Evan Mulholland, Morgan Begg and the Institute of Public Affairs. They backed me when things got tough. They are one of the few institutions in the country that will fight on issues of freedom of speech. I’d like to make a special mention of the IPA’s Jennifer Marohasy. She has been a great support over many years and played a crucial role in the critical early days of this fight.

Thanks to the National Tertiary Education Union. They supported the cause in court, even though my views on the Reef may well be opposed to the views of many of their members.

There are many politicians who have gone into bat on my behalf such as Matt Canavan, George Christensen, Pauline Hanson, Bob Katter, Gerard Rennick, Malcolm Roberts, Dan Tehan, and Alan Tudge (in alphabetical order). They obviously could not interfere with the legal proceedings, but were instrumental in bringing in the new academic freedom legislation.

There are many journalists and bloggers who helped spread the word, but I would particularly like to thanks Graham Lloyd from The Australian, Jo Nova, and Anthony Watts (WUWT).

There are also many other people, far too many to list, that I am thankful to. They will know who they are.

And finally, thanks to my family, and especially Cheryl.

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The Pro-China Firebrand at the ‘Lancet’

The Pro-China Firebrand at the ‘Lancet’  By Stewart Justman, Quadrant Magazine, 11 October 2021

“A dangerous myth has been cloaked around the young body of global health. It is a myth that hides uncomfortable truths about inequalities of power. It is a deception that erases important histories, marginalises already neglected peoples, and prevents accurate understanding of why progress towards sustainable health improvements in some of the most resource-poor settings is so slow and erratic.” Is the author perhaps a junior professor of sociology or English trying to master the use of academic conjuring words like “marginalise” and “sustainable”? No, the author is Richard Horton, editor of one of the world’s foremost medical journals, the Lancet, discussing “Frantz Fanon and the Origins of Global Health”.

Do not be surprised if you find in the Lancet these days an editorial framed in the standard idiom of social justice. In the example at hand, Horton dismisses the “dangerous myth” that the ideal of global health traces back to anything other than the struggle against colonialism, identifies “forces inimical to health”, and finally eulogises the author of “the first manifestoes” on the topic of the health of the world’s people: the psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. While Horton decries oppression and honours Fanon as a founder of the concept of global health, he doesn’t mention Fanon’s celebrated theory that the exercise of violence is itself profoundly healthful for the oppressed. “At the individual level,” declares Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth, “violence is a cleansing force. It rids the colonised of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude. It emboldens them and restores their self-confidence.” Evidently the editor of the Lancet was reluctant to indulge his hatred of colonialism and his love of provocation to the point of romanticising the act of killing.

In general, Horton finds no conflict between incendiarism and editing a medical journal. As he has made clear in interviews, he believes the two go hand in hand and takes pride in offending those who think otherwise. “I feel very strongly that we should be using the Lancet as a platform for advocacy,” he said recently. “There’s not much point in publishing science unless you do something with it.” Of course, by advocacy Horton doesn’t mean the advocacy of just anything, and by doing something he doesn’t mean doing just anything. He means crusading on behalf of a new world order overseen by persons like himself. Possessed of a neo-Marxist mentality, he deals in accusation and prophecy, and looks forward to the day when history transcends and overcomes the sovereignty of Western nations. In the meantime he mounts his soapbox to extol one of the founders of global health while muting this figure’s famous idealisation of violence as an instrument of health.

In the midst of the Covid crisis, Horton issued a diatribe similar in spirit to his eulogy of Fanon, now focused on the pandemic and expanded to the length of a short book: The COVID-19 Catastrophe: What’s Gone Wrong and How to Stop it Happening Again. While Covid’s differential impact on the poor and minorities supports his indictment of inequality, the emphasis of the book falls not so much on the human costs of the pandemic as on its mismanagement by the authorities in Western democracies—a tale of all but criminal irresponsibility, in his telling. According to Horton, Covid became a catastrophe not because of the pathogen’s lethality per se but because of the denial of its lethality by persons in high places, the unpreparedness of Western states, and their neglect and betrayal of the ideal (or as he puts it at one point, the “story”) of globalism. Only after bitterly indicting Western authorities for their mishandling of Covid does Horton make clear just how much about the virus remained unknown as he penned the indictment itself.

In all, Horton believes the West’s bumbling response to Covid compares shamefully with the swift, effectual measures taken in China—a record of honour marred only by the muzzling and humiliation of the ophthalmologist in Wuhan who first reported the new virus. When Horton quotes approvingly the claim that Covid has undermined trust in “governments” and exposed their “impotence”, he tacitly but emphatically excludes the government of China from this damning assessment. And while he does print in full a desperate appeal from an anonymous Chinese correspondent on behalf of those badly hurt by anti-Covid measures imposed from above, he follows it with his own shining endorsement of Chinese “policymakers”.

Western democracy not only looks bad in Horton’s pages, it seems to lose its very legitimacy. Astonishingly, Horton agrees in passing with the description of life in an affluent democratic society as “servitude” and exhorts his readers one and all to “work hard to cultivate our sensibility for intolerance”, an imperative that cannot be reconciled with democracy. But China receives Horton’s heartfelt affirmation. He quotes in all seriousness the World Health Organisation’s fulsome praise of “the deep commitment of the Chinese people to collective action in the face of this common threat [of COVID-19]”.

“The deep commitment of the Chinese people”: here is the authentic voice of propaganda. As everyone knows or ought to know, the containment measures adopted in China in response to COVID-19 were mandated by the Communist Party, exercising its formidable police powers. At this point in his polemic, Horton, fearless speaker of truth to power, becomes an apologist for a one-party state. Why does he seem to have a soft spot for China? Perhaps because China, like Fanon’s Africa, was once subjected to colonial power. Putting himself “in the position of Chinese policymakers”, he notes that “after a century of humiliation at the hands of a colonially minded West, China, proud of its 5000-year-old civilisation, finally achieved independence in 1949. The country grew erratically and with terrifying mistakes under Mao Zedong, but he at least succeeded in establishing secure national borders.” Just as Horton’s tone of accusation disappears before the concerted power of the Chinese Communist Party, so his explicit disdain of the nation-state and his proclamation that “sovereignty is dead” give way to a defence of the nation of China, secure within its borders.

In Horton’s view, it seems China as a whole underwent a Fanonian transformation as it passed from colonial subjection to the self-confidence of a nation that knows its own power. China too has overcome its historical inferiority complex and found its strength and voice. What explains its emergence? In Horton’s telling, China’s rise to power is predicated squarely on “the territorial independence and integrity won by Mao”. Thus, the very sovereignty that Horton judges a fallacy and a danger in Western nations constitutes in China an asset so precious that it offsets, somehow, “terrifying mistakes”. Note that while Horton may or may not impute the “mistakes” of the Mao era to Mao, he does credit Mao with a historic achievement that seems to mitigate them, whatever they are.

What are they? Presumably the mistakes include Mao’s imposition on China of a murderous famine, under the name of the Great Leap Forward (1958 to 1962), that ranks among the darkest episodes in human history. Whereas the salubrious nature of violence works “at the individual level” to transform the oppressed into self-confident agents according to Horton’s hero Fanon, the cataclysm of the Great Leap Forward represents, so Horton implies, a sort of by-product of the process that enabled a once-backward China to become the power it now is: one confident enough to act with dispatch when COVID-19 made its appearance, thus preventing a potential catastrophe from blowing up into an actual one. In particular, Horton’s China is now confident enough to learn from its own mismanagement of the SARS outbreak of 2003 and avoid the same missteps the second time around—not that it lost legitimacy in Horton’s eyes by bungling its response to SARS. But if the Chinese policy of suppressing information about SARS in 2003 constitutes a mistake, who would put orchestrating a massive famine in the same category?

Bear in mind the magnitude of the “terrifying mistakes” Horton does not specify. The fact is that while no one can say with any certainty how many died at Mao’s hands, the total appears to be about 40 million (mostly but not exclusively during the Great Leap Forward), making him one of a sanguinary century’s worst butchers. If, as Horton argues, Donald Trump should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity for shutting off US funding of the WHO, then what about a man responsible for the murder—knowing and intentional, not inadvertent—of tens of millions of his fellows? Why is Trump’s action a crime but a famine authored by Mao a misstep?

Just as Horton plays with fire by making a hero of Fanon, he floats the opinion that we are all communists now but not that kind of communist, that we must strive to become more intolerant but only in the most humane sense, that Mao enabled the rise of China despite certain “mistakes” made “under” him. This sort of incendiary play with words clearly does not comport with the ethos of medicine. Horton’s use of Covid to delegitimise Western democracies (because they failed their first responsibility), even as he paints a one-party state as a model of civic responsibility, represents an act of great hubris.

Perhaps the root of the problem is that Horton as an editorialist thinks not like a doctor but an ideologue, reiterating fixed ideas, glorifying on the one hand and vilifying on the other, gravitating towards utopia like a Marxist of old predicting or decreeing the future. At all times he uses his medical identity to accredit political judgments, as if disputing the latter were tantamount to denying medical knowledge. The shoemaker was told to stick to his last. Maybe it would be better for all concerned if Horton resigned his position as prosecutor of the Western world and stuck to medicine.

Stewart Justman lives in Montana. A prolific writer, he is the author of The Nocebo Effect: Overdiagnosis and Its Costs (2015).

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The Great Forces within the Individual

The Great Forces within the Individual  By Jon Rappoport, 21 July 2021

From my notes for The Underground: “Whatever the core problem of The Individual might be, DATA is not the answer. A system is not the answer. Neutral sanitized language is not the answer. These modern affectations eat away at the electric forces of the soul…”

THE POWER OF THE INDIVIDUAL, BEYOND ANY MODERN DESCRIPTION…

This is not a power that never existed before. This is not new for the individual. This is what has been sidelined and lost and forgotten and buried miles below the surface.

I’m talking about towering creative power, not “doily power” or “Easter egg decorating power.”

In Jonathan Swift’s novel, Gulliver’s Travels, Gulliver is captured by a tiny race of Lilliputians. In modern society, Gulliver voluntarily shrinks himself down to the size of a Lilliputian.

Contrary to the weak flaccid and madhouse principles of modern psychology, ACTUAL psychology would deal with two towering impulses within the individual:

Creation and destruction. The impulse to create and the impulse to destroy.

Modern civilization has the hidden goal of wiping out both of these impulses; instead, substituting top-down control. CONTROL.

The individual today is viewed by The Manipulators as a social construct, to be profiled, grouped, poked, tested, subjected to stimuli like a dog in a lab, re-engineered.

Indeed, many abject individuals see themselves as cogs in a social apparatus, and approve of the arrangement.

The preeminently successful hundred-year-plus program for embedding control is medical. I have exposed the details of the program for the past 40 years. You could sum it up as toxification and pacification and technological chaining of the body and brain.

CONTROL is the elite solution to the twin impulses of creating and destroying. Wipe them both out. Bury them. “They resist organization. They’re wild cards. They cut through all the rules and regulations of society.”

If you want pictures of creation and destruction in action, above the level of ordinary civilization, look to the stories co-opted by religions; the battles among the ancient Greek gods, the Egyptian gods, the Norse gods, and so on. This is creative and destructive power unleashed, on a grand scale, and at some point it became unacceptable. Instead…

Modern civilization developed. Modern society. Modern culture. Modern behavior. Modern organization.

Submission. Freedom granted by governments as “liberty,” meaning limited freedom within the context and constraints enacted by “the people’s representatives.” A whole host of fictions arose. “Worship the god we tell you to worship.” “Believe only in power that exists ELSEWHERE.”

Consciousness is a placid lake, some theorists claim. Lie on your back, float in the collective infinite. As if THIS would erase the twin towers of creation and destruction in the individual psyche. Pathetic.

Two things are now happening across the whole world. The expansion of top-down brutal control, and the emergence of the destructive impulse coming to the fore like a common currency.

The creative impulse is buried so deep in most individuals, they wouldn’t recognize it if you put it on a plate and served it for supper. They wouldn’t know what you were talking about. They certainly wouldn’t understand that a creative renaissance was absolutely necessary to offset what is happening in the world now.

If you referred them to giants like Michelangelo or Da Vinci or Beethoven or Mahler or Melville or Whitman or Goya or Stravinsky or Charlie Parker, they would think you were reciting the names of creatures from another planet. They might suspect you were trying to tear down God from his throne (the very God organized religions tell you is the True One).

Here is a clue. The most successful entertainment organization in the world, Disney/Marvel, has been producing one epic after another featuring mythological characters come to life as super-heroes and villains engaging in planetary and galactic battles of creation-and-destruction; millions of people watch these special-effect tales on screens, mesmerized and energized by the scale of the conflicts (very much like the Olympic gods at war with one another).

It’s no accident that humans crave these movies. They reflect (however cartoonishly) what is going on in the human psyche; the impulses of creation and destruction. The movies unearth what has been buried.

Under hundreds of layers of conditioning, the real psychology of the individual has everything to do with how these two towering impulses are dealt with BY the individual himself.

“Oh no, I’m not involved with those…impulses. I’m a card-carrying member of society. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m small, I’m trying to fit in, unless I’m against fitting in, in which case I’m dedicated to rejecting the proposal to install a traffic light at the corner of Main and Broadway…”

SMALLNESS is the overriding proposition. Every problem and solution has to be defined and worked out within a shrunken strangulating context.

Therefore, you can see all sorts of grotesquely played-out melodramas that unconsciously give vent to creative-destructive- impulse leaks from the individual.

The bloviating businessman who peddles cheap crap for a living parades around as if he were a living pillar of charity in his community, while he turns the screws on his employees by paying them a bare living wage and, privately, delights in their misfortune. Small stage play of creation and destruction.

Ditto for the grifter-politician who swears dedication to the groups he’s creating for the betterment of his people, knowing these causes will lead to further impoverishment and crime and, ultimately, submission and surrender. Create and destroy.

I could name and describe hundreds of small accommodations and expressions which attempt to mediate between the creating and destroying impulses within the individual.

Their smallness is just a cover for the Niagara-forces these impulses actually embody.

“If I shrink myself down, my impulses will shrink, too.”

It doesn’t work that way.

The impulses never shrink.

This is the problem. The titanic trying to become tiny.

Creation and destruction make up an existential situation within the individual and his psyche. How will he approach the situation? Not with easy answers, I can assure you. Not with a quick 10-minute fix—the favorite remedy-style of the modern age. Not with a pill. Not with grass-fed beef. Not with a medical mask. Not with a fear of germs. Not with meditation. Not with a group. Not with algorithms. Not with computers. Not with a brain-machine interface or nanoparticles or organized human anthills of the 21st century. Not with churches.

With CONTROL taking center stage in new forms, and on the march, the first great undertaking is the recognition that CREATIVE POWER has always existed within the individual. And that power needs expression. On a scale that reflects its magnitude.

Impossible?

Fortunately, in the work of artists I mentioned above, and in the work of many others of the same size, there are worlds to explore. These artists are not dead. Their work isn’t dead…

You want to know the beginning?

You’re sitting on top of a grassy mountain

And you know you could build a city in the valley

You could destroy a city in the valley

You could do both

You know it…like a boiling pepper in the mind, like an ice cube in the liver, like a steamroller, a traitor on trial, a saint in a cave, a god with his sword, a tiger pacing in his cage

You’re going to approach these two forces inside you

You’re going to walk around them and through them and sniff titanic waves and sink to the bottom of lost ships and come up out of the foam

You’re not going to run away into a little box and read the law for the next thousand years and join the society of obedient babbling idiots wearing thin lips

You’re going to burn away the strangulating false fronts

You’re going to know you can invent a city or destroy one

You’re going to come to grips with that

You’re not going to automatically jump ahead and say you’re a citizen of the realm

You’re not going to say there is nothing you want to destroy

You’re not going to remain two-dimensional for the next thousand years

Coming to grips with, and seeing the impulse to destroy within yourself is completely different from giving vent to, and enacting that impulse. The people who go around destroying are not coming to grips with anything.

On the other hand, imagine an innovative architect who is designing buildings no one has ever seen before. In his sketches, in his plans, he creates and destroys. He looks at his work in progress, and he decisively obliterates whole sections that don’t fit his vision and his instincts. He creates new wings of a building in his drawings and wipes some of them out. By the alive process of creating and destroying he arrives at what he wants to make real in the world.

I’ve known many aspiring artists who stall at the gate and never get off the ground, because they’re afraid that, if they put words on the page or shapes on the canvas, those words and shapes will have to remain there forever. To put it another way, they can’t conceive of destroying what they create. They believe “destruction is bad.” So they never create anything.

I’ve known painters who look at what they’ve put on the canvas for days and months; they keep looking; they’re not satisfied; but they’re afraid to wipe out a whole section. They’re afraid because they don’t realize they can create endlessly. They don’t realize that destroying half of a painting will lead to a new painting.

Civilization and society have always tried to define the limits of the creative process, as in: REDUCTION. Boil it down. Make it less. Make it smaller. Hem it in. Summarize it. Claim the individual creator should, first and foremost, be a citizen. A creature inside the system. This is a sick joke. And every artist of reality has rejected the joke with a mere dismissive glance.

The prescribed default position of the modern individual is: “I neither create nor destroy; I’m neutral; I adjust; whatever real power is, it resides outside myself; there is no larger context in which I can conceive of ACTION; if I feel deficient, I join a group.”

And people wonder why they have problems they can’t quite put their finger on. They wonder why their energies seem to be diminishing.

Consider the case of Nikola Tesla. The popularized story has it that he could see, in his imagination, all the complex moving parts of the energy devices he was inventing before he even made a preliminary sketch, much less a working prototype. It was all there in his mind. Magic. Genius.

I guarantee that was the not the whole story. Whether in his mind, on paper, or in prototype, he created and destroyed many models, before he arrived at one he believed would work to unleash and harness awesome amounts of force and energy.

He didn’t have an iota of worry about destroying what was unworkable. He wasn’t looking for a compromise or a shoddy but sellable piece of goods. He was focused on the far shore. Nothing less than the redirecting and transforming of Nature’s Flow.

And with each progressive step, there were spontaneous unexplainable insights that allowed him to move forward. His vision was Promethean. He wasn’t “neutral” or “objectively scientific” like some mechanical-minded little lab researcher trying to squeeze out a tiny extension of what was already known in order to publish a paper and secure a job.

The irony is, if Tesla had produced a working prototype that tapped into the Earth’s power and brought energy to every person on the planet, how many people would have said, “I want to operate and EXPRESS the great forces I have, as Tesla did,” versus…

“Thank you, Nikola, for the free energy. Now I can receive these gifts and sit back and enjoy them…I don’t have to look inside myself and see what is there…”

“I’m a Gulliver who is opting to be a Lilliputian.”

“Does anybody have a drug I can use to forget what I really am? A drug like Alice took to shrink down, outside the little door to Wonderland?”

Yes. It’s called modern civilization. You can go through the Clockwork Orange door. The DARPA mind control door. The medical-drug and vaccine door. The street drug door. The education system door. The media door. The good behavior gold star on the blackboard door…

(The link to this article posted on my blog is here.)

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A slow-moving coup in New Zealand towards apartheid

A slow-moving coup in New Zealand towards apartheid  By Muriel Newman, nzcpr.com, 26 June 2021

A slow-moving coup is underway in New Zealand. Unlike most coups, the transfer of power through non-democratic means that’s taking place is being orchestrated by the Prime Minister.

Under the guise of implementing the United Nations Declaration of Indigenous Peoples, Jacinda Ardern is planning to replace democracy with Maori tribal rule by 2040.

This objective is clearly set out in He Puapua, the report that the PM commissioned in 2019 and then deliberately kept hidden from her then coalition partner New Zealand First.

The former Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters confirmed this in a speech he gave last Sunday: “This Government is enabling a wave of rights-based activism in-and-outside of government. Everything in 2021 is now rights-based, or indigenous rights demanding co-governance. In 2019 a report called ‘He Puapua‘ came to Government but was never shown to one NZ First Cabinet Minister. This report was deliberately suppressed. In short, this report is a recipe for Maori separatism, they knew it and that’s why they suppressed it till after the election in the full knowledge that NZ First is for one flag, one country, one law. It was a gesture of ingratitude and bad faith.”

It’s not just NZ First that would have opposed the plan. Had the Labour Party revealed its intentions before the election, it may not have gained an absolute majority, and NZ First may have retained its place in Parliament.

The reality is that a majority of New Zealanders do not want to be divided by race. Their opposition to separatism is evident in the polls over the years that have rejected Maori seats on councils.

Widespread opposition to separatism is why He Puapua is being rolled out in secret.

Labour’s ‘official’ justification for the introduction of tribal rule is that a ‘partnership’ exists between ‘Maori’ and the Crown. While democratic power in a representative democracy like New Zealand is proportional – based on one person one vote – separatists claim the existence of a Treaty ‘partnership’ entitles the 15 percent of New Zealanders who declare ‘Maori’ heritage, to 50 percent of the right to govern.

Canterbury University law lecturer David Round has outlined the danger: “The Treaty is now regularly interpreted to mean a partnership of equals. Maori are not to be subject to the Crown, but are to be its partner. This partnership is a fundamental subversion of democracy. Special reserved Maori seats on local bodies, and even in parliament itself, are just the start. Maori are claiming their involvement in decision making should not be on the basis of one person one vote, but instead on 50:50 representation.  Some are already clamouring for a separate Maori house of parliament whose consent would be required for any laws. They seem to be united in expecting representation well in excess of what their proportion of the population would entitle them to. That is what they are demanding in proposals for ‘co-governance’ ~ equal numbers to all other interests combined. That is what they will be seeking everywhere; and once they have this 50:50 representation, then they will form an unassailable voting bloc. Then we will be forever at their mercy.”

As David says, the claim of a Treaty partnership is a fundamental subversion of democracy, since it is constitutionally impossible for the Crown to enter into a partnership with her subjects. By definition, the Crown is supreme, and the people are subject to her laws.

Furthermore, if 15 percent of the population are given the right to wield 50 percent of government power – including the right of veto, they would gain a disproportionately greater representation than all other New Zealanders. Since this would result in a significant dilution of the democratic representation of the 85 percent majority, the partnership concept is fundamentally discriminatory and in breach of New Zealand’s Bill of Rights.

To ensure the public don’t find out that the Treaty partnership concept is a fraud, Jacinda Ardern is now using taxpayer funding to ‘buy’ media cooperation. The recently announced $55 million Public Interest Journalism Fund requires participants to not only accept the partnership lie, but to ‘actively’ promote it.

To qualify for the Fund three objectives must be met by recipients, the third of which requires them to: “Actively promote the principles of Partnership, Participation and Active Protection under Te Tiriti o Waitangi acknowledging Maori as a Te Tiriti partner.”

Using public money to require New Zealand’s so-called independent Fourth Estate to support a radical political agenda to replace New Zealand democracy with tribal rule – is a scandal.

Attempts to undermine the authority of the Crown can be described as sedition – is this what the media are now being paid to engage in?

To achieve Maori sovereignty by 2040, He Puapua not only requires the recognition of Treaty partnerships, but two other major constitutional changes are needed: the first is to introduce ‘tikanga’, or Maori customary practice, into our law, and the second is to include the Treaty of Waitangi in a new written constitution.

The tikanga question is especially relevant since a High Court Judge has just ruled that tikanga trumps the Common Law in a claim lodged under the Marine and Coastal Area Act. The Edwards judgment is expected to not only set a precedent for the 200 other claims lodged in the High Court, and 350 claims lodged with the Crown for direct negotiation, but it has far wider implication for New Zealand law.

By prioritising tikanga values over the common law test of ‘exclusive’ use and occupation set out in the Act, Justice Churchman has opened the door for tribal control of virtually the entire coastline.

This is not what Parliament intended when the Marine and Coastal Area Act was introduced 2011. At that time New Zealanders were assured that if customary title existed at all, it would only be in remote areas of the coast.

That’s why the Churchman decision has now been referred to the Court of Appeal – in the hope that the stringent common law tests set out in the Act will, as intended, become requirements that must be satisfied if customary title is to be awarded. If you would like to support our Court of Appeal fundraiser, please click HERE.

This week’s NZCPR Guest Commentator, Dr John Robinson, a research scientist and historian, who has written extensively about the danger of incorporating tikanga into our legal system, has examined the judgement of Peter Churchman in the Edwards case, and is deeply concerned:

“This is just one of many recent examples of the increasing division of New Zealand society, governance, law, and much more based on ‘tikanga’ and ‘matauranga Maori’ (Maori culture, ‘Maori concepts, knowledge, values and perspectives’), where features of pre-contact Maori society have been written into law.

“What is this ‘tikanga’?  The meaning today is deliberately confused, with no clarity as to whether traditional Maori ways are implied (which would include inter-tribal warfare, cannibalism, slavery and other primitive customs) or whether it is a modern version, transformed around 1840 by the widespread shift to Christianity and further cultural development since. Further confusion comes from the recent rewriting of history and the invention of new meanings to words. The resulting confusion allows Maori authorities to claim that they alone can interpret and explain New Zealand common law; we are required to sit silently on the side-line and accept whatever they pronounce: the meaning of the law belongs to this minority alone.”

Dr Robinson points out the danger of introducing into our legal system a concept that can mean whatever those promoting it want it to mean, and he outlines five core values identified in the Churchman judgment as underpinning tikanga: whanaungatanga – the obligations of kinship; kaitiakitanga – the obligation to care for one’s own; mana – the obligations of leadership; tapu – social control; and utu – reciprocity.

He then warns of the danger of incorporating tikanga into our law: “The coupled whanaungatanga and kaitiakitanga permit, indeed instruct, priority to members of an extended family. This, the granting of favours to friends, is corruption, henceforth to be sanctioned in central government, local government and in the civil service. The insistence that tikanga is a guide to behaviour in the public sphere is an open invitation to nepotism, practically a directive.

“Remember, this is law for the governing of society. The centrality of family, whanau, both present and previous, opens the way to inherited position and rights determined by ancestry. We cannot be equal when those in power base their judgements in part on extended family links. Yet this is intended to be a core feature of New Zealand law.”

This raises questions about our expectations of elected representatives – should Members of Parliament and local body councillors, for example, recuse themselves when dealing with laws that would enrich their extended family. Such conflict-of-interest concerns are a key reason local communities oppose the appointment of tribal representatives onto council committees with full voting rights. Not only do they totally undermine the democratic representation of local councils, but unless these nominees recuse themselves from decisions relating to their tribal interests, they will be able to influence the vote in their own favour.

Preventing the “corruption” Dr Robinson warns about is a critical issue that needs to be addressed when considering the control of New Zealand’s fresh water supplies, given that iwi groups are already claiming ‘partnership’ rights to co-govern decision-making in Labour’s planned reforms.

In his judgment, Justice Churchman makes the distinction between the traditional approach to the law, which sets the rules of law on the one hand, and the underlying values on the other – and tikanga: “In tikanga Maori, the real challenge is to understand the values because it is these values which provide the primary guide to behaviour and not necessarily any ‘rules’ which may be derived from them.”

But as Dr Robinson warns, “The values of traditional Maori society led to widespread killing and a complete collapse before the British were called upon to provide law. The values of the tikanga of today are totally unclear and conflict with those of civilised society. Only a fool would accept these prescriptions.”

If the He Puapua goal of embedding tikanga into the legal system is achieved, the implications – as the Churchman judgement shows – are so destabilising that it is difficult to see how the Common Law can survive.

Finally, when it comes to the question of whether New Zealand needs a new constitution, the Churchman decision highlights the danger.

Under our present ‘unwritten’ constitution Parliament is supreme – if the government get things wrong, they can be held accountable and voted out. But if New Zealand were to introduce a new ‘written’ constitution – as proposed in He Puapua – the judiciary, not Parliament, would be supreme. And if Judges got things wrong, there would be nothing anyone could do.

In 2013, a $4 million attempt by the Maori Party to introduce a Treaty of Waitangi constitution – which would have delivered a perpetual supply of wealth and power to the tribal elite – failed. The NZCPR led the opposition through our Independent Constitutional Review Panel – you can read our final report A House Divided HERE.

I will leave the last word to David Round, who was the Chairman: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The Treaty industry is now the self-perpetuating vehicle by which a small greedy and power-hungry clique practises a gigantic con-job on the people of New Zealand. It is time ~ it is long past time ~ that we shake ourselves free from the baleful spell the Treaty industry has cast upon our nation, and calmly and clearly assess the good and ill it has actually done. Our country stands now at a crossroads. To introduce the Treaty into our constitution, with all its inevitable consequences, would be to commit ourselves irrevocably to the path of racial discrimination and hatred, social disruption, poverty and civil strife.”

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NEW ZEALAND PM GIVES A MASTERCLASS IN PROPAGANDA

NEW ZEALAND PM GIVES A MASTERCLASS IN PROPAGANDA  By Dr Muriel Newman, 11 June 2021

“It is true that you may fool all of the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”
– President Abraham Lincoln

When Jacinda Ardern took office in 2017, she promised her government would be the most open and transparent New Zealand had seen.

In her first formal speech to Parliament she pledged: “This government will foster a more open and democratic society. It will strengthen transparency around official information.”

Since that time, the Government’s “iron grip” on the control of information has tightened and it is harder now than ever to get information.

This is the view of one of New Zealand’s most experienced political journalists, Stuff’s Andrea Vance, who last weekend explained, “In my 20-year plus time as a journalist, this Government is one of the most thin-skinned and secretive I have experienced. Many of my colleagues say the same… It’s now very difficult for journalists to get to the heart and the truth of a story. We are up against an army of well-paid spin doctors. At every level, the Government manipulates the flow of information… Even squeezing basic facts out of an agency is a frustrating, torturous and often futile exercise.”

She explains that since “the current Government took office, the number of communications specialists have ballooned. Each minister has at least two press secretaries. Ardern has four.”

The team assisting the Prime Minister to shape her public image is headed by her chief press secretary, Andrew Campbell, with former Stuff business editor Ellen Read as his deputy. Essentially, they handle incoming questions for the prime minister, help with speech writing, set up interviews and press conferences, and accompany the PM through media engagements.

In addition, the prime minister’s office not only controls what other members of the Cabinet are saying, but they go to great lengths to “make sure their audience is captured, starting the week and cementing the agenda with a conference call with political editors”.

It is not just politicians that have press secretaries – so too do government departments, and under our PR-savvy Prime Minister, the number is skyrocketing.

In the year Labour took office, the Ministry for the Environment had 10 PR staff – they now have 18. The Ministry for Foreign Affairs and Trade more than doubled their staff – up to 25. MBIE blew out from 48 staff to 64, with the New Zealand Transport Agency, which had 26 communications staff five years ago, now employing a staggering 72!

With this PR army promoting an image of government benevolence and attempting to block unwanted scrutiny, even basic requests for information are now being denied.

Andrea Vance describes how attempts by two senior journalists to interview Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta, at a time of intense interest in the China-Australia-New-Zealand relationship, were refused – not because of geo-political sensitivities, nor a diary clash, but because “the paranoid and hyper-sensitive minister objected to taking questions from two journalists at once.”

That same Minister, with her local government hat on, had released radical proposals for ‘three waters’ reforms that would essentially centralise the management of drinking water, wastewater, and storm water operations from local councils to mega-agencies, with 50 percent control allocated to private sector tribal corporations. Yet, she “refused to answer detailed questions about the proposed changes”, agreeing to only one interview – with a ‘friendly’ state broadcaster. The whole debacle represented “a serious blow to accountability”.

It turns out that journalists who ask hard questions and challenge the Government’s spin are increasingly being side lined – refused interviews, excluded from press conferences, and ignored at media stand-ups.

Government departments are also being obstructive, refusing to answer Official Information Requests unless ordered to do so by the Ombudsman. As a result, queries that should have been responded to within 20 working days are taking months to answer with much of the information, when it is eventually released, heavily redacted.

These are not the actions of the open and transparent government promised by Jacinda Ardern, but of an increasingly totalitarian regime.

In her article Andrea Vance asks why the difficulties faced by journalists should matter to the public: “Why should you care?”

She then explains, “Because the public’s impression of this government is the very opposite. They see a prime minister that has captivated the world with her ‘authentic’ communication style, intimate social media postings, daily Covid briefings and proactive releases of Cabinet papers. It is an artfully-crafted mirage, because the reality is very different. This is a Government that is only generous with the information that it chooses to share.”

Jacinda Ardern is, of course, a public relations graduate, with a Bachelor of Communication Studies in Public Relations and Political Science from Waikato University.

As a result, when faced with a pandemic and an election in 2020, Prime Minister Ardern’s confidence in the power of PR led her to employ an army of communications experts to help her win the Covid-PR war and the election.

As George Orwell said, if you control the language, you can control the mind, and that is certainly how it all played out. Using carefully crafted lines like “the team of 5 million”, Jacinda Ardern was able to persuade the nation that she was saving lives – and deserved to be re-elected.

Official information revealed that by the end of May 2020, the cost of the PM’s public relations campaign – which had built a formidable propaganda machine involving 28 advertising, marketing and communications contractors – was a staggering $16 million dollars: “The majority was to two firms who are listed as communications directors by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. Clemenger BBDO was paid $3m for its role, which involved the clear and concise messaging such as ‘stay home, save lives’. But the biggest earner OMD, a multinational advertising firm… was paid $12m for its role in the response.”

It turns out that everything from “go hard, go early” to the “be kind to each other” messaging was carefully planned, tested, and executed by experts.

At the time, Newstalk ZB’s Mike Hosking was scathing that so much money was being spent on ‘spin’: “Extraordinary, isn’t it? It shows just how much we got played by a government that was as desperate to score points as it was to actually address a health crisis. Is communication important? Of course. But do you need to pay $16 million for it? No. This wasn’t simple instruction that any government can come up with, this was clearly a highly planned, seriously worked over piece of strategy designed for maximum political impact.

“And the irony is, from the advertising agencies point of view, it worked. We got sucked in, followed orders and came out hailing the Prime Minister with a 59 percent share in a poll. Value for money then? Or a master piece of fantastically expensive spin? Again, we were played like a fiddle.”

Stuff’s Political Editor Luke Malpass agreed: “The Ardern Government has been delivering a masterclass in propaganda since Covid began. It has presented the plan that it formulated as the only feasible option, set up rules and language to prosecute that agenda and rhetorically crushed all opposition. That was buttressed over the months by the fact that the Government’s plan was sound, effectively carried out and delivered comparatively very good results. Labour won a crushing election victory off the back of it.”

Indeed, the $16 million of taxpayers’ money bought Labour a masterly election campaign – by keeping the country’s focus on the virus, and constantly repeating the mantra that it was our team of 5 million that defeated it, they communicated a powerful party line: by sticking together we won the Covid battle and by staying with Labour we will win the battle to rebuild our nation.

Labour’s regular election year focus group polling would have told them that to win over ‘soft’ National voters they needed to shift into the political centre ground and temper their socialist ambitions. As a result, Labour based their election manifesto on their 2017 agenda, and used conservative slogans such as a ‘strong and stable’ government and a ‘steady pair of hands’.

Their PR machine was evident on the campaign trail as political commentator Richard Harman explained at the time: “On the road with Ardern, they had a much more experienced and substantial team. They had two press secretaries with the Prime Minister; National had one. Labour had a professional video crew for social media; National had a staffer with an iPhone. Labour had its former party president and Minister, Ruth Dyson, as its advance person carefully setting up events that Ardern was going to and checking them out to avoid pitfalls. There was little evidence of any advance work [by National].”

After the election, Jacinda Ardern acknowledged that her support had come from across the political spectrum, “To those amongst you who may not have supported Labour before… I say thank you. We will not take your support for granted. And I can promise you, we will be a party that governs for every New Zealander.”

In a media conference the next day, she specifically reassured New Zealanders about the agenda she intended to roll out, saying, “None of it will be new, because we laid the foundations for these next three years in the previous three years.”

But the truth is that much of what Jacinda Ardern has done since the election is new to the public. Not only was her He Puapua report – which provides a blueprint for Maori sovereignty over New Zealand by 2040 – not disclosed to the voters during the campaign, but it’s public release was deliberately delayed until after the election.

It is in this politically-charged environment, that this week’s NZCPR Guest Commentator, journalist Graham Adams outlines the difficulties in holding a Prime Minister to account, who is PR-driven and, it seems, is prepared to ‘bend the truth beyond breaking point’:

“Jacinda Ardern has offered herself as a hostage to fortune by repeatedly denying that the doctrine of ‘white privilege’ is being taught in schools, or that the teaching curriculum mentions it anywhere, or that it is part of her ‘government’s agenda’.

“She has conceded that white privilege… might have been taught by a teacher somewhere at some time in some school but insists it isn’t official policy.

“In denying that discussing white privilege is an approved part of teaching in schools, evidence shows she may have been bending the truth beyond breaking point. The official education document Te Hurihanganui mentions ‘white privilege’ in its opening paragraphs. The government has funded the programme to the tune of $42 million. Launched in October 2020, it has now been established in numerous schools in Nelson, Te Puke, Porirua and Southland, with more to come.”

Graham points out “For someone who prides herself on mastering the details of her government’s policies, it’s impossible to believe Ardern is simply ill informed or forgetful about Te Hurihanganui’s existence or what it recommends.”

He wonders whether the motivation for the PM’s repeated denials – that leave her open to charges of lying – could be that Labour’s polling is showing a high degree of public disquiet over anti-racism programmes in schools and the imposition of the He Puapua plan for tribal rule.

Perhaps this means the Ardern Government’s “artfully-crafted mirage” that Andrea Vance so eloquently describes, is finally starting to fracture.

Certainly, the fact that the Government is rolling out the radical He Puapua in secret, instead of openly, indicates that even Labour supporters are becoming concerned. If they really understood the truth – the serious threat to democracy that the PM’s separatist agenda represents and the deeply divided society it would create – their opposition and sense of betrayal would intensify.

On this issue, we the majority have the mandate – Jacinda Ardern does not.

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Capitalism Is A Misanthropic, Dystopian Religion

Capitalism Is A Misanthropic, Dystopian Religion  By Caitlin Johnstone, 11 May 2021

Capitalism is a misanthropic, dystopian religion. By “capitalism” I mean this or any other possible system wherein mass-scale human behaviour is driven by the pursuit of capital. By “religion” I mean organized collective faith-based belief system.

In times past the dominant religions had names like “Christianity” or “Islam”, which were used to promote doctrines that shaped societies, dominated civilizations, and built entire empires. Theocratic institutions laboured on behalf of the powerful to bend entire continents to their will, using narratives about beneficent invisible deities as cover. Nowadays the dominant religion is called capitalism, and the theocratic institutions are called governments, and the beneficent deity is called the invisible hand of the market.

In the old religions, people would gather once a week in a building to be indoctrinated by clergymen. In the new religion the clergymen come to indoctrinate you right in the comfort of your own home on screens showing news, TV shows, and Hollywood movies.

And capitalism, like most other religions, has a very bleak view of humanity. Its most vocal zealots talk a lot about “human nature”, which they insist is greedy, self-centred, and competitive.

This belief, like other religious beliefs, is based entirely on blind faith, and it is false. The belief that humans are inherently greedy, self-centred and competitive only feels true to someone who is greedy, self-centred and competitive. As EW Howe said, a thief believes everybody steals.

They claim to be describing “human nature”, but in reality they are only describing their own nature.

The Problem Isn’t Human Nature, The Problem Is A Few Manipulative Sociopaths

“This is an important distinction, because it means we’re not up against some intrinsic aspect of our being here.”

Human nature is not inherently greedy, self-centred and competitive. I look within myself and find an abundance of kindness, caring, and an eagerness to collaborate, and the same is true for many of us. The problem is that some people are greedy, self-centred and competitive, and the very worst of them have succeeded in indoctrinating the rest of us into a religion which upholds these things as virtues instead of severe character flaws. You’re not an exploitative predator, you’re an industrious job creator. You’re not a manipulative sociopath, you’re a senior fellow at an esteemed Washington think tank.

So this religious belief about “human nature” is false. But it’s also a self-fulfilling prophecy which creates the world it describes.

Because capitalist doctrine insists that humans are inherently greedy, self-centred and competitive, its believers cannot imagine any solution to our problems that isn’t driven by greed, selfishness and competition. The idea that we can transcend our propagandized conditioning, our cultural mind viruses and our egoic thought patterns enough to move from our competition-based system into a collaboration-based one looks ridiculous to them, because they believe our nature can only ever be at war. At war with each other, and at war with our ecosystem.

To a thoroughly capitalism-indoctrinated mind, the idea that we can transcend our self-destructive, exploitative, ecocidal patterning and move into collaboration with each other and with our ecosystem to create a healthy, harmonious world looks like childish nonsense. So instead they promote the far more mature and realistic idea that our world will be saved by greedy, union-busting tech oligarchs like Elon Musk.

The Unspoken Premise Of Modern Capitalism Is That The World Will Be Saved By Greedy Tech Oligarchs

“The plutocratic class are not good custodians of our world. They are not good people. They are not wise. They are not even particularly intelligent.”

So now here we are, with the dominant narratives of our age driving us toward nuclear war and climate collapse via the self-fulfilling prophecy that to do otherwise is impossible. The paranoid, misanthropic, eat-or-be-eaten worldview that the capitalist religion has indoctrinated us into espousing has us scrambling over each other for table scraps, stepping on our neighbour’s head to keep our own head above water, saying “If I don’t steal it, someone else will,” and killing the ecosystem we depend on for survival just to make a few bucks, instead of escaping this dystopian death cult and moving toward health.

They are lying to us when they tell us it needs to be this way. The economists are lying. The pundits are lying. The TV shows are lying. The Hollywood movies are lying. Lord of the Flies was lying.

Lord of the Flies came out in 1954, smack-dab in the middle of probably the most culturally dead decade in living memory, a work of fiction which insisted that even innocent children would terrorize and murder each other if left uncommanded by civilizing adult discipline. In 1965 a group of British schoolboys were marooned for 15 months on an island considered uninhabitable, and by the time they were discovered “the boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination.” The fiction could not have been more different from the reality.

It does not need to be this way. We do not need to remain locked in this vicious, competition-driven model until we kill ourselves off praying that Daddy Elon will save us and send us to Mars. The rules are all made up, and we can change them whenever we want if enough of us decide that a better world is possible. Money is a conceptual construct. Governments only exist to the extent that we all collectively agree they do. Our entire society is made of narrative. Our world is the product of human imagination.

And we are free to re-imagine it if we want to.

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Port Arthur, Australia – correcting the official narrative of lies

Port Arthur, Australia – correcting the official narrative of lies  By Gil May, posted by CairnsNews.com, 28 April 2021

This letter to the editor was sent to The Courier Mail, News Corp, but not known if it was published: In response to the article by Ellen Whinnett, Courier Mail, on Port Arthur 17 April 2021 “Port Arthur Facts Released By Deeply Concerned Members Of The Tasmanian Bureaucracy”

I always enjoy your articles written by Ellen Whinnett but must comment on Pt Arthur, there is so much more to this story.

I had a chance meeting with a lady in a café years ago. Her name was (the late) Wendy Scurr, she was a tour guide at Pt Arthur on the day of the shooting, she was having refreshment in the kitchen of the Broad Arrow café when the shooting started.

She looked over the counter to see what was happening, she did not recognise the shooter who was shooting from the hip pointing the gun and shooting and not with the gun at his shoulder where you look along the barrel to sight it.  She knows Martin Bryant and said it was not him, she was not allowed to give evidence, the police told her she was not needed that they had more than enough evidence already?

She and the others working in the kitchen hid behind the counters.  At that time there was a local resident and retired police detective with his wife and another couple who were their guests seated at a table in the corner, they put two tables up as a barricade and hid behind them — the detective knew Martin very well and said unequivocally that it was not him as the shooter had a deeply pock marked face, he also noted the gun being fired from the hip and killing people without sighting it.  The Police refused to let him give evidence?

We all commented at the time that PM Howard and the press were in breach of law stating Bryant was definitely guilty, guilt can only be determined by a court — those words led to the condemnation of him in everyone’s eyes.  There should have been charges laid over that issue, but it was ignored as many issues are to protect others.  Bryant was guilty and may he rot in Hell was universally accepted, long before any Court or Inquest procedure.

At all times understand he is intellectually disabled with a mind of about a 11-year-old. The law requires that he must have a guardian with him at all times, that never occurred and other serious breaches occurred, but as he was already declared guilty, application of law, procedures and requirements did not matter.

Whether Martin Bryant is guilty or not he should have been afforded due legal process as mandated by the Constitution and a full coronial inquiry should have been held, which on the finding of the limited inquiry held in Tasmania may well have uncovered a great deal more evidence of frightening consequence to the people — so was blocked.

Two Victorian politicians who were family friends of long standing told me their inquiry identified the serial number of AR15 used in the shooting was traced back to the 1987 Melbourne gun amnesty , the firearm originally owned by (Bill Drysdale from Yae, Victoria–Ed ) was acquired by the Victoria S.O.G’s which is not unusual, they get to keep certain firearms and use them for police work, the part that is not okay is the firearm ending up in Port Arthur nine years later. They said it was common knowledge governments were involved — they (politicians) were told they would face police and ATO investigation into every aspect of their lives and lose their seat in Parliament if they spoke out?

The question we all must ask is how did an 11-year-old organise and carry out the incidents — what incidents you ask. So, I identify just a few hereunder that I found of extreme concern with all pointing to a very, very, well planned, and organised incident.   After reading them, check them out for authenticity, satisfy your own analytical thinking to make sure that I am not misleading you.

Maybe I should tell you what aroused my interest: In the press reports at the time were too many giving widely conflicting information and facts — logic is they should have all been very similar as they all reported the same incident, but there were many factual variances — in such cases as still occurs in reporting I take the view of ‘watch this space and be very observant’ for more information will eventually arise — as it always does and the press try to hide the original stuff-ups and false writings.

The commonwealth bank employee that was in the cafe recognized the gunman and stood up and yelled “not in here” before the gunman shot and killed him (he was also an ex ASIO agent)

22 body refrigerated mortuary truck parked near Port Arthur prior to the incident

Investigations that do not answer all base questions on how an issue originated cannot get a correct answer.  Highly suspicious individual sections must be examined in minute detail and those involved tested under oath. Indelible evidentiary material fully identifies prior planning for the delivery of an Embalming Box and equipment to be on sight: and for the purchase and special construction of a Yellow Chevrolet 350 V8 truck with 22-body refrigerated Mortuary – the only one in Australia. The orders for these items the ‘Embalming Box and equipment’ and the ‘22-body refrigerated Mortuary  Truck’ would have had to be placed months before the event for them to have been on-site waiting for the Port Arthur massacre to occur.  Read more on this truck [HERE]

FACT 1. Those who placed the orders knew of the planned event.

  • Why have AFP, Government and Press NOT demanded a Royal Commission and STEPHEN SHANE PARRY put under oath to explain his apparent prior knowledge to order and have on site an embalming machine box and a special large equipment case to be manufactured ready for the incident?
  • Stephen Parry former President of the Senate wrote within: –

AFDA National Embalming Team – Detailed Report appears on pages 104 to 119 of said book. On the top of page 104, the name Stephen Parry as Team Leader wrote on Page 112. “I was particularly impressed by the quick response and initiatives by some of the team members in packaging and collecting equipment. The response time and the amount of equipment quickly relocated was fantastic. One firm in particular, Nelson Brothers, had organized for an embalming machine box and a special large equipment case to be manufactured ready for the incident. These two containers were the envy of all embalmers and worked extremely well. I would suggest that design specifications may be available from this firm for any future considerations by other firms.”

He says that the funeral services company Nelson Brothers had: “organized for an embalming machine box and a special large equipment case to be manufactured ready for the incident.” There is no uncertainty in his words. Said equipment was large, possessed significant design specifications, and was made prior to and for the incident at Port Arthur, Tasmania. He knew this in 1997. He possibly knew these facts in 1996 at the time he worked as the leader of a team responsible for embalming bodies (c.25) of the victims of the Port Arthur shooting incident.

Q.2. Why did the Tasmanian Government order in June 1995 and have specially built a 22-body refrigerated Mortuary Truck the only one in Australia, ten months before the Port Arthur massacre; and was placed on sale in September 1999? Why has no one been put under oath to explain why this was ordered and delivered prior to the event, who ordered and paid for it?

Mortuary truck for sale

The actual advertisement and photograph:

22-BODY VEHICLE FOR SALE

Genuine Enquiries Only

Vehicle for Sale. Genuine Enquiries only.  Yellow Chevrolet 350 V8 truck with refrigerated body, holds 22, this vehicle was primarily used as the disaster vehicle in the Port Arthur Massacre. This vehicle is currently for sale and all reasonable offers will be considered. The vehicle has value as not only a refrigerated unit for body removal, it is the only one of its kind in the entire country. The memorabilia value of it for anyone making a movie/series or writing a book on Port Arthur is limitless. Not only would the purchaser be getting the disaster vehicle, but the whole Port Arthur Story would be given as well.

This vehicle is currently for sale and all REASONABLE OFFERS will be considered.

FACT.2.

The Mortuary Truck was ordered ten months beforehand — who placed the order and who paid for it, and who got the money from the sale of it?

Ellen, now some heavy thinking for you — How did an intellectually handicapped boy with a low IQ organise the following.

  1.      Nelson Brothers in Victoria had special big-job embalming equipment “manufactured ready for the incident.” Why did the government specially order such beforehand?
  2.      Martin Bryant organised for senior Port Arthur staff to go away on a Work Seminar so they wouldn’t get hurt.
  3.      He managed to get Royal Hobart Hospital to have their Emergency Plan in place two days before the massacre so things would run smoothly.
  4.      He managed to get Hobart Hospital to have a Trauma Seminar timed to end at the exact moment he started shooting so they could patch up all the wounded quickly.
  5.      He arranged for helicopter pilots – usually unavailable – to be available that Sunday.
  6.      He managed to kill the Martins of Seascape with a firearm when he was at a service station 57 kilometres away.
  7.      He decoyed the local police to be at the opposite end of the peninsula at the exact moment the shooting began.
  8.      He managed to fool staff at the Historic Site into believing he arrived at 1.15pm when in fact he was there at 12.45pm.
  9.      He managed not to look like himself – as if wearing a woman’s wig – when being filmed in the car park by tourists.
  10.  He wore a face mask making his face look pockmarked when shooting in the cafe.
  11.  He arranged for a suspect black van to appear outside the Broad Arrow Cafe afterwards so people wouldn’t think it was him who did it.
  12.  He managed to get Sally Martin to run around Seascape naked that afternoon and make it appear she had been killed that morning.
  13.  He managed to shoot a rifle from upstairs at Seascape when he was downstairs talking to police on the phone.
  14.  He had infrared night vision eyes.
  15.  He managed to shoot from two Seascape buildings at once during the night of the siege.
  16.  He managed to stay in a heavily burning building shooting and yelling at police and get severe burns only on his back.
  17.  He managed to have the world press to have a convention in Hobart on the 30th April so there were plenty of reporters on hand so he would get better than usual media coverage.
  18.  He managed to make it appear ASIO was behind the incident.
  19.  He managed to make it appear Tasmania Police had fabricated and tampered with evidence.
  20.  He managed to get the Tasmanian DPP to lie to the Court about his activities.
  21.  He arranged for the media nationwide to display his photo to witnesses to influence them; and to print false stories about him and get Channel Nine To fabricate a video – all while in custody.
  22.  He fired two shots at 6.30pm at Port Arthur while he was under siege by police at Seascape.
  23.  If you believe the official version, his marksmanship was fantastic – twenty head shots, from the right hip, in 90 seconds!  A movement of 3 degrees would have missed at 3 -4 meters.
  24.  There are only about 100 shooters that good (better than Olympians) in the world.
  25.  US news TV published a film of Bryant running between the buildings — in the background was a large blue boat: That blue boat had left two days beforehand.
  26. All done by an intellectually handicapped young man with an IQ of 66 and the mental age of an eleven-year-old boy.

Everyone knows Bryant was guilty including you, but all you know is what the media printed, as they did not have access to the full files that were kept hidden they could NOT have printed all the facts.

The overwhelming disgust of people within the Tasmanian bureaucracy to the deliberate cover-up withholding crucial evidence from the Court to pervert the course of justice, was so great they progressively released files to Dr Keith Noble who compiled the facts for us to read. As YOU DO NOT KNOW the facts as they were hidden, and the Tasmanian government went in to panic mode of what would happen if the public ever knew hurriedly placed a 30-year secrecy ban.

Researcher Dr Keith Noble On Why Martin Bryant Could Not Have Carried Out 1996 Port Arthur Massacre!   Verrrrrry Interesting indeed.

A Royal Commission is obviously required to get these answers – only when these questions are answered and included can the investigation reach a correct verdict of honesty to the victims’ families and the Australian people.

Sincerely

Gil May

Forestdale

EDITORIAL COMMENTS:

Royal Commissions are government controlled kangaroo courts where the outcome is defined first, then the appointment of a controlled government commissioner. The terms of reference exclude any embarrassing exposure or harmful evidenced being submitted and finally prepare guidelines for the commissioner’s findings and report. This formula has been applied to all Royal Commission but in any case governments are not obligated to act on the findings which make the whole exercise futile.

A Coronial Inquiry should be started immediately.

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THE DARKENING CLOUDS OF TOTALITARIANISM IN NZ


 THE DARKENING CLOUDS OF TOTALITARIANISM IN NZ  By Dr Muriel Newman, NZCPR, 22 April 2021

“Totalitarianism: form of government that theoretically permits no individual freedom and that seeks to subordinate all aspects of individual life to the authority of the state.”
– Encyclopaedia Britannica

Under Jacinda Ardern’s stewardship, New Zealand is becoming a totalitarian state.

Another giant leap down that path was announced last week in the form of a Cabinet paper outlining plans to criminalise free speech. But before we examine the detail, let’s remind ourselves of two other significant expansions of State authority that are already underway.

The first involves State control of the entire economy under the guise of ‘climate change’.

As a result of the Prime Minister imposing the harshest carbon restrictions in the world onto New Zealand, the Climate Commission is foreshadowing the need for nation-wide central planning, if the country is to meet our obligations under the United Nations Paris Agreement.

But the question is, why is our Prime Minister sacrificing our economy and living standards, when most other countries are doing nothing? Surely it can’t just be to look good when standing before the United Nations – or can it?

Shouldn’t the PM be held accountable, not to the UN, but to New Zealanders, for the economic damage she is inflicting onto our country?

The second area of totalitarian control involves the undermining of democracy itself. The Ardern Government has already abolished our democratic right to prevent local councils from introducing Maori wards. Now they are replacing democracy with separatist rule.

According to their He Puapua report, the UN’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples will be enacted by 2040. To achieve that goal, our constitution will be replaced with one that elevates the Treaty of Waitangi into supreme law, Maori tikanga will replace the common law, and the country will be governed through a 50:50 Crown-Maori ‘partnership’. Under what will, in effect, become a tribal dictatorship, democracy will cease to exist.

It’s time to say “No”! To defend democracy and equal rights we have launched a “Declaration of Equality” – to find out more, please click HERE.

The Prime Minister is now embarking on an even more threatening assault on our freedom – this time on our freedom of speech.

New Zealanders’ right to free speech is enshrined in section 14 of the 1990 Bill of Rights Act: “Everyone has the right to freedom of expression, including the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and opinions of any kind in any form.”

That freedom is limited by the 1993 Human Rights Act. Section 61 makes it a civil offence to express “threatening, abusive, or insulting” opinions that are likely “to excite hostility against or bring into contempt any group of persons… on the ground of colour, race, or ethnic or national origins.”

Under Section 131 intentionally inciting hostility is a criminal offence that can result in imprisonment of up to three months or a fine of up to $7,000. However, as a public safeguard, such prosecutions need the approval of the Attorney-General.

According to the Human Rights Commission New Zealanders’ right to make controversial or offensive remarks is not undermined by these laws – they only restrict those who are inciting serious ethnic tension or unrest: “Only where there is the potential for significant detriment to society can the right to freedom of expression be limited.”

While prosecutions have been rare, many other constraints on free speech also exist.

The regulators dealing with complaints about published material are the Broadcasting Standards Authority, the Advertising Standards Authority, and the New Zealand Press Council.

The Harmful Digital Communications Act covers complaints about texts, emails, social media, and website content, with offenders facing up to two years in prison or fines of up to $50,000.

Threats of physical violence or harm are covered by the Crimes Act. Section 307A stipulates that threats made against people or property that cause “significant disruption of the activities of the civilian population” are an offence with a penalty of up to seven years in prison.

In 2019, following the Christchurch tragedy, then Minister of Justice Andrew Little announced a review “to examine whether our laws properly balance the issues of freedom of speech and hate speech. The process should not be rushed, and I expect a report for public comment towards the end of the year… Protecting our crucially important right to freedom of speech, while testing whether the balance is right regarding ‘hate speech’, needs a robust public discussion from all quarters. This way we will ensure that all of our citizens’ rights are protected, and every person can express their humanity without fear.”

The promised public consultation never eventuated. Instead of an open and transparent process,  secret discussions were held with groups campaigning for harsher laws.

The Ministry of Justice chief executive Andrew Kibblewhite claimed hate speech was a “tricky thing” to navigate. They wanted to keep discussions “away from the political fray”, to prevent them being “derailed” and to “avoid protests”.

In the end, New Zealand First refused to support any restrictions of New Zealanders’ right to free speech. As a result, Labour promised a law change in their 2020 election manifesto: “Labour will extend legal protections for groups that experience hate speech, including for reasons of religion, gender, disability or sexual orientation, by ensuring that we prohibit speech that is likely to incite others to feel hostility or contempt towards these groups under the Human Rights Act.”

Their plan was to use the Human Rights Act to provide statutory protection to groups based not only on ‘race’, but on religion, gender, disability and sexual orientation as well.

Just after the election, the Royal Commission into the Christchurch shootings released its report including proposals to strengthen hate speech laws.

They recommended criminalising anyone deliberately inciting hostility by inserting section 131 of the Human Rights Act into the Crimes Act, increasing the penalties from three months in jail to at least two years, including ‘religion’ as a protected characteristic alongside ‘race’, and broadening the scope of ‘hate speech’ from an intent to ‘incite’ hostility to an intent to ‘stir’ it up.

But this week’s NZCPR Guest Contributor political commentator Chris Trotter is questioning the Government’s plan to enact Royal Commission recommendations to restrict our freedom, when nothing could have stopped the ‘lone wolf’ attack:

“Though bitterly contested by those firmly convinced that the Christchurch Mosque Shootings represent something more than the crime of a Lone Wolf terrorist, the Royal Commission’s finding that no state agency could have prevented Tarrant from carrying out his deadly intent – except by chance – is correct. He understood that, for his ‘mission’ to succeed, he must do nothing to draw the attention of the authorities – and, God help us all, he didn’t.

“Against such careful and pitiless premeditation, all the laws on our statute books are powerless. The state can punish Lone Wolves, but it cannot stop them. In attempting to minimise the terrorist threat, however, the state can eliminate our freedoms.”

Chris warns: “When Governments extend the state’s power to monitor their citizens’ ideas and activities, we should all be on our guard. Even when such extensions are introduced in response to a terrorist atrocity, we need to ask ourselves: would these new powers have prevented it?”

And that’s precisely what should be in our mind as we examine the proposed restrictions on free speech outlined by the new Minister of Justice Kris Faafoi in his Cabinet paper.

First of all, he wants all free speech breaches criminalised – not just the deliberate calls to incite hostility recommended by the Royal Commission, but the unintentional ones as well.

Second, he wants to adopt the Royal Commission’s proposal for the law to be widened to include an intent to “stir up” hatred.

Third, he wants the penalties strengthened from three months in jail to three years – even though the Royal Commission recommended two years – with fines increased from $7,000 to $50,000.

Fourth, while the Royal Commission recommended increasing the legal protection from groups based on ‘race’ to include ‘religion’ as well, the Minister wants it expanded to include “all groups listed under the prohibited grounds of discrimination in section 21 of the Human Rights Act”.

That means that under Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Government, you will not only have to mind your Ps and Qs when it comes to discussing race and religion, but also sex, marital status, ethical belief, disability, age, political opinion, employment status, family status, and sexual orientation as well.

In fact, it seems the only group that will not be protected by Minister Faafoi’s new law will be white able-bodied working age males!

But it gets worse.

It appears the Ardern Government is planning on using these law changes to massively expand the concept of ‘incitement to discriminate’. The Minister explained his intention as follows: “Examples of inciting discrimination of a group include encouraging their exclusion or unfavourable treatment in the provision of goods and services, rental housing, or employment. In my view, as it is unlawful to discriminate against population groups, it should also be unlawful to incite others to discriminate against these groups.”

Landlords and employers should beware – if someone alleges unfavourable treatment it appears the Police may well come knocking!

Many other changes are proposed by Minister Faafoi, including some that are being withheld from the public. One in particular deals with the complaints process – paragraph 51 of the Cabinet paper ends with, “Groups spoken with also expressed their desire to address discrimination and hate speech in society more broadly than just through the incitement process”; but how that is to be put into effect in paragraph 52, is fully redacted.

With the chilling effect these proposed changes would have on society plain to see, and George Orwell’s warning, “If you control the language, you control the mind” ringing out loud and clear, is paragraph 52 proposing a new department of Thought Police?

In Jacinda Ardern’s totalitarian State, few New Zealanders will speak their mind for fear of a criminal prosecution. It will be a very ominous day for New Zealand when the Police are given the power to become the enforcement unit of politicians and activists against those expressing contrary opinions.

Through the imposition of State authority over the economy using carbon regulations, over democracy through separatist rule, and over free speech using hate speech laws, New Zealand is becoming a shadow of the vibrant and free society it used to be.

Let’s be absolutely clear – these changes herald the most dramatic expansion of the influence of government in New Zealand’s history, and it’s happening at an extraordinary pace while Jacinda Ardern’s socialist government has a three year window of unbridled control. It is also happening with very limited scrutiny given the lack of independence in the media and a lack of transparency from the government itself.

While all of these changes are seismic, the threat to the freedom of expression is the most ominous. Free speech is essence of a free society. It is the very oxygen of a democracy and individuality. Free speech is how knowledge is developed and shared, and it remains the most effective bulwark against tyranny.

As the former Minister of Justice Andrew Little explained, “Protecting freedom of speech is vital to hold those in authority to account, challenge the socially and culturally dominant, and enable society to progress. Freedom of speech can give force to new ideas, but also cause discomfort and offence. It is usually the first right to be lost under oppressive regimes, and among the first to be restored, at least in name, after revolutionary change.”

With these proposals having been approved by Cabinet, it is clear that under Jacinda Ardern’s controlling regime, she is planning to not only take away our right to criticise others, but also our right to criticise her and her Party. Including ‘political opinion’ as a protected characteristic in hate speech laws puts New Zealand on a course to become the North Korea of Oceania.

 

====================

Previous articles

    • the-snobbish-nastiness-and-division-perpetuated-by-gender-studies-experts  By Janet Albrechtsen, The Australian, 16 November 2016
    • at-last-the-pontificating-media-elites-are-trumped  By Nick Cater, The Australian, 15 November 2016
    • trigger-warning-freedom-of-speech-not-welcome  Editorial, The Australian, 8 October
    • lies-and-propaganda-of-the-supranational-elites  By Jennifer Oriel, The Australian, 31 October 2016
    • taxpayer-funded-activism-undermining-the-nation  The Australian editorial, 24 October 2016
    • the-war-on-free-speech-has-just-begun  By Mark Steyn, The Australian, 19 October
    • cultural-totalitarianism-of-the-postmodern-era-did-the-impossible-it-changed-the-very-nature-of-man-and-woman  By Alexander Maistrovoy, 17  October 2016
    • offended-left-claims-exclusive-right-to-freedom-of-expression  By Gerard Henderson, The Australian, 15 October 2016
    • road-to-tyranny-is-paved-with-leftie-assumptions  By Maurice Newman, The Australian, 27 September 2016
    • protecting-americas-children-from-police-state-goons-bureaucratic-idiots-mercenary-creeps  By John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute, 22 September 2016
    • free-speech-inimical-to-lefts-stifling-orthodoxies  By Janet Albrechtsen, The Australian, 21 September 2016
    • swamped-by-outdated-multicultural-model  By Nick Cater, The Australian, 20 September 2016
    • egressive-left-puts-bigotry-and-militant-islam-on-a-pedestal  By Peter Baldwin, previously a minister in the Hawke and Keating Labor governments.  The Australian, 17 September 2016
    • pauling-hansons-first-speech-in-the-senate-14-september-2016
    • Parents allowed tough love  By Julian Tomlinson, Cairns Post, 1 September 2016
    • George Soros evil influence on Western politics  By Jennifer Oriel, The Australian, 22 August 2016
    • What Became of the Left  Paul Craig Roberts, Institute for Political Economy, 20 August 2016
    • 21st-century Left waging new war on free speech  By Jennifer Oriel, The Australian, 15 August 2015
    • Denial of speech is one step towards totalitarianism  By Nick Cater, The Australian, 25 July 2016
    • Generation Snowflake  By Julian Tomlinson, Cairns Post, 21 July 2016
    • A march against democracy  By Tom Slater, Spikes Online, 10 July 2016
    • Australia’s unprotected rebel against the political elites  By Grace Collier, The Australian, 9 July 2016
    • Australia’s politics in disarray  By Maurice Newman, The Australian, 7 July 2016
    • Censorship is not education  By Julian Tomlinson – the Cairns Post, 30 June 2016
    • Brexit, this is what democracy feels like  By Brendan O’Neill, Spiked Online, 25 June
    • No offence – but harden up!  By Julian Tomlinson – the Cairns Post, 23 June 2016
    • The Brazen Left’s Bid to Kill Quadrant By Jeremy Sammut, Quadrant Online, 1 June
    • How to raise boys and avoid PC nonsense  By Julian Tomlinson – the Cairns Post, 26 May 2016
    • The Greens, sirens of socialism  By Nick Cater, The Australian, 3 May 2016
    • Leftists for the EU, the radical wing of the oligarchy  By Brendon O”Neill, Spiked Online, 23 April 2016
    • A new authoritarianism has descended  By Neil Brown, The Spectator, 11 April 2016
    • Don’t fear the freedom police By Julian Tomlinson, Deputy Editor, Cairns Post, 7 April
    • Australia’s Marxist-LGBTI engineers  By Merv Bendle, Quadrant Online, 2 March 2016
    • Authenticity, the answer to PC pundits  By Janet Albrechtsen, The Australian, 17 February 2016
    • Progressivism’s clash with reality – by Merv Bendle, Quadrant Online 8 February 2016
    • gloriously-unhinged-by-president-trump  By Daryl McCann, Quadrant Online, 20 November 2016
    • cairns-post-editorial-201016  Laws of diminishing returns as the ‘nanny state’ takes over control of our freedom, By Julian Tomlinson, Cairns Post, 20 October 2016
    • The Truth Behind Revolutions  By Alexander Light, HumansAreFree.com; 27 August 2016
    • The counter-revolution against the Deep State  From Inner Circle, 26 August 2016
    • The welfare state fails Aboriginals yet again  By Gary Johns, The Australian, 25 August 2016
  • I quit, the bureaucrats had beaten me By Charles Hugh-Smith, 13 August 2015