Gareth Morgan has found his spiritual home

It’s clear from his recent comments that Gareth Morgan has now discovered his spiritual home: the slave state of North Korea.  Which fits with his growing enthusiasm for meddling in everything.

The news he was there came first from the slave state government’s own propaganda service, which knows how to make the most of a propaganda opportunity. (Just ask Dennis Rodman.) But the mushy thinking is all Gaweth’s. The West needs to "rethink" North Korea now, gushes Gareth. The people are poor, he understates, “but wonderfully engaged.” “That North Korea has achieved economically despite its lack of access to international money has been magnificent,” says this simpleton.  “Hopefully, with enormous interest from the world media, this trip will be the catalyst for … change,” says New Zealand’s most ego-driven communist sympathiser.

Gareth Morgan is a tool. A useful, easily-led tool.

Liberty Scott points out that all the very nice folk Gaweth meets in the slave state really are nice. They’re paid to be nice. Their good graces with the regime depend on them remaining nice. “They are privileged members of the elite painstakingly trying to make sure their country is seen in a good light.”  They’ll tell any lie necessary to fool the easily deluded. (Even about their great leader’s birthplace, allegedly pictured above, but in reality in Khabarovsk, Russia.)If Gareth believes anything he’s heard, says Scott--and he seems to--he has simply  become a propaganda tool for the child torturing fiefdom of the Kim family.

Oh, and the freedom of all those nice people? Unlike Gaweth, they’re not even free to leave. Because the place he is praising is a prison state from which even his hosts who treated him so well can’t leave.

Matt Nolan has questioned his wisdom here.
    I question his sanity.  
    Imagine if he had travelled through Pol Pot's Cambodia and did this, or Nazi Germany in 1938 talking about how misunderstood the proud German people were and they only want more living space and to be reunified with Germans in Czechoslovakia, and it isn't a prison camp, the stories about the Jews are lies, demonising them.
    Well Gareth - you kind of did that.
    Go get your head examined.

Eric Crampton wonders for a moment whether he’s “maybe playing the regime-supporting shill while there … so that he could have some chance at seeing what was going on.” But only for a moment. Because his post praising his former hosts and the country’s captors was posted after he’d left the regime.

I'd thought that he was going to come out claiming that starvation works wonders on reducing feral cat numbers; this is worse.
Maybe there was some case for the tour somehow facilitating better North-South talks. Unlikely, but not impossible. But that the West has a "beat-up" view of North Korea? They have freaking concentration camps! Morgan's next tour could perhaps hit a few of those off-piste highlights. Morgan found the North Koreans with whom he spoke wonderfully well-informed; it's problematic even asking what that means in a place where preference-falsification is a necessary survival characteristic…
    Even if Morgan was away from his handlers, everyone is a handler. That's the point of a totalitarian regime. Any disclosure can get you and your family sent to a concentration camp because somebody else will have purchased an indulgence by dobbing you in. And the safest course is making yourself believe the things you have to say.

Morgan is an easy dupe for the propaganda of a slave state led by a secular Messiah. Perhaps because he has a Messiah complex himself.