Price controls, rationing, and war. I'm pretty sure Chris Trotter doesn't want those either!

UNFORTUNATELY CHRIS TROTTER, WHO OFTEN writes so well, can be found peddling another dangerous historic myth. This one, this time, about the Great Depression. (about which there are many, many myths, most of which would be destructive if believed.)

If were to be believed — if his recommendations were to be followed, on the back of his myth-making — it may well cause another.

Writing to advocate that the Luxon government be more spendthrift, Trotter says 

When the 1929 Wall Street Crash sent the economy of the United States into a tailspin, the experts of the day called upon the administration of Herbert Hoover to apply the accepted remedies. Accordingly, Hoover’s Treasury Secretary, Andrew Mellon, responded with his now infamous instruction to:

“Liquidate labour, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate. It will purge the rottenness out of the system.”

In following this advice, however, the Hoover Administration inflicted extreme hardship on millions of Americans, and in so-doing not only liquidated itself, but also came alarmingly close to liquidating the whole capitalist system. It took an American aristocrat, Franklin Roosevelt, with more intelligence and a bigger heart than Hoover and his conventional wisdom, to rescue American capitalism from itself.

Mutatis mutandis, the response of successive New Zealand governments to the Great Depression mirrored the conventional economic thinking of Mellon and his advisers. Saddled with obligations it could no longer afford, the Reform and United Parties cut, cut, cut, and cut again – unleashing massive deprivation and misery across the country. This time it was Labour that came to capitalism’s rescue.

He could not be more wrong.

And wrong in virtually every sentence.

LET'S START WITH MELLON'S alleged "instruction" to "liquidate labour, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate" —liquidate all monetary assets in summary, at whatever price may be gotten for them, in order to "purge the rottenness out of the system."

Fact is, it would have, if that programme were followed — as it had been following the much greater crash in 1921. (Sometimes called "the forgotten depression," or "the crash that cured itself.") But the “quote” was not Mellon's but Hoover’s, his president, and it was him contrasting the “liquidationist” programme of the type successfully followed in 1920 with the “interventionist programme” he intended to follow instead. 

It didn't work. 

The more Hoover tried to carry out his interventionist programme from 1929 to 1932— inflating wages, trying to raise falling prices, spending like a drunken merchant-man, adding enormous debt to a government all but crippled by the inability to pay it down — the more things spiralled down into the mire.

From 1929 to 1932 Hoover did the exact opposite of sitting on his hands as he should have done. Instead, he was virtually Keynes-Lite, as he himself boasted in his 1932 presidential campaign:

We might have done nothing [said Hoover]. That would have been utter ruin. Instead we met the situation with proposals to private business and to Congress of the most gigantic program of economic defense and counterattack ever evolved in the history of the Republic. We put it into action.... No government in Washington has hitherto considered that it held so broad a responsibility for leadership in such times.... For the first time in the history of depression, dividends, profits, and the cost of living, have been reduced before wages have suffered.... They were maintained until the cost of living had decreased and the profits had practically vanished. They are now the highest real wages in the world.
    Creating new jobs and giving to the whole system a new breath of life; nothing has ever been devised in our history which has done more for ... "the common run of men and women." Some of the reactionary economists urged that we should allow the liquidation to take its course until we had found bottom.... We determined that we would not follow the advice of the bitter-end liquidationists and see the whole body of debtors of the United States brought to bankruptcy and the savings of our people brought to destruction.

Featured in Hoover's plan were increased taxes, lowered interest rates, huge deficits, public dams, public works, restrictions on immigration and trade, and government regulation of banking, finance, industry and labour markets.

Hoover's heavily interventionist programme — doing everything to raise prices when demand had already collapsed — failed miserably. Unlike the solution found in 1921 (to lower prices to meet lower demand), which saw things turn around within eighteen months, things were still dire four years after the 1929 crash when Trotter's hero Franklin Roosevelt took over.

And then, with even less intelligence and much less honesty, Roosevelt doubled down. 

In the 1932 election campaign, Franklin Roosevelt accused Hoover (accurately) of “reckless and extravagant” spending, of thinking “that we ought to center control of everything in Washington as rapidly as possible,” and of presiding over “the greatest spending administration in peacetime in all of history.” 

And that was all true.All of it—all the spending, all the alleged “stimulus”—all an attempt to keep up wages and prices and keep the engine ticking over in the manner to which Trotter et al suggest we do today with far less reason, and much less room to manoeuvre. . 

And it had failed. It had failed spectacularly.

it failed just as monumentally when Roosevelt tried it.

By 1933, when Roosevelt took over in the States, nearly 13 million Americans were unemployed. Yet when the Second World War began, after eight years of further intervention by Mr Roosevelt (whose advisers conceded their New Deal was based on the “Hoover New Deal”), nearly 12 million were still unemployed (unemployment had never dropped below 20% for the whole of the decade) and Roosevelt was to embrace a world war as a way to get the unemployed out of his hair.

We do NOT want any sort of repetition of that!

BUT WHAT ABOUT TROTTER'S  argument that the Reform and United Parties here had followed the liquidationist programme and failed, and had to be rescued in 1932 by Michael Savage's Labour.

Well, Trotter has finally hit on the one fact in his screed in which he's right. Gordon Coates's and George Forbes's  Reform and United Parties did inadvertently follow a semi-liquidationist programme. Despite their own interventions, and despite the US's disastrous Smoot-Hawley tariffs, they did allow prices to fall, which (along with Australia and the UK adopting similar programmes) did eventually allow green shoots to appear here by 1932. So that by 1935 when Savage's Labour was elected ... well, things were already on the upswing.

It wasn't at all that "Labour that came to capitalism’s rescue," as Trotter alleges. 

It was, instead, that capitalism, even in the muted form allowed to it, allowed Labour to take the credit for a job already done, and to spend up heavily — helping poorly-informed writers like Trotter to confuse effect for cause.

Fat is: the First Labour Government simply reaped the benefits of the recovery that was already under way. As economic historian John Gould outlines:

From 1934 overseas prices were recovering and the country [New Zealand] could not help but be better off. The [Labour] Government benefited, too, from a balanced budget, a buoyant public revenue, and a healthy reserve in London, inherited from its predecessor. It made good use of these propitious circumstances. Its initial step was simply a Christmas bonus for the unemployed – a symbolic if small pledge of humanitarian readiness to cut corners. 

It went on, in the busy session of 1936, to restore wage and pension cuts, to bring in a basic wage, a 40-hour week, and a major programme of public works; it built up the unions by bringing back compulsory arbitration and adding to it compulsory membership of unions; it embarked upon a great housing construction programme; it brought in a price scheme for dairy products which guaranteed the farmer a reasonable income; it tried, without notable success, to encourage secondary industry so that there would be more jobs for wage earners. 

The Government's opponents never tired of inquiring, “Where will the money come from?”; the Government's answers were never explicit, but in fact a good deal of the money came from State credit created by the Reserve Bank. This institution, by an Act of 1936, had become a fully governmental body; where these expensive programmes could not be financed out of current revenue or overseas funds, the Government simply borrowed from its own bank. Neither the housing programme nor the guaranteed price could have been financed without such credit. Labour had collected most of the Social Crediter's votes in 1935, and this, which was far from their desires, was their reward, a policy a good deal more Keynesian than Douglasite, however.

The cornerstone was set in the arch in 1938. Already the government had shown its concern with public health and welfare; in 1938 the two were integrated into a “social security” system by which the State guaranteed medical advice, medicines, hospital services to all whatever their means, and a wide range of pensions to all likely to suffer hardship. In part the scheme was financed by special taxation, in part from general revenue. It was, among other things, a ready vote winner in 1938; its attractiveness, together with the Government's energetic record and the National opposition's general nervelessness, proved irresistible.

But the spending, while just as irresistible, proved too much. The Labour boom ended in another bust, confusing later writers who were less than careful at their economics. Because the Labour victory in 1938 came just in time ...

Hard on the heels of the victory came tribulation. Thanks in part to public works construction ... draining overseas reserves, in part to a flight of private capital from the country, scared by a government that still seemed “socialistic”, in part to a sag in prices for exports jeopardising the guaranteed price system, and in part to the unsympathetic attitude shown by London financiers to some £16 million of debt shortly falling due, things looked ominous in 1939. The debt was converted on rather stringent terms; exchange and import controls were applied. 

But the real saviour [for Labour] was the war that broke out in September. Once again farm exports were at a priority and the mobilisation of resources for the war effort permitted the introduction of more thorough controls than would have been tolerable in peacetime.[1]

From 1929 to 1935 the United/Reform programme was semi-liquidationist, and it semi-succeeded.

It succeeded to such an extent that from 1935 to 1938, Labour could take the credit, apportion blame elsewhere, and deliver profligacy as from a horn of plenty.

And then, as Margaret Thatcher observed so sagely many years later, like all socialists they began to run out of money.

What saved Labour however was price controls, rationing, and war. 

I do trust that Mr Trotter does not want any of that either.

---

[1] John Gould, ‘1935-49: The Labour Regime,’ in An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, ed. A.H McLintock, 1966

'A Day of American Infamy' [update 2]

"In August 1941, about four months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt met with Winston Churchill aboard warships in Newfoundland’s Placentia Bay and agreed to the Atlantic Charter, a joint declaration by the world’s leading democratic powers on 'common principles' for a postwar world. ...
    "The Charter, and the alliance that came of it [including the supply of military equipment to Britain by Lend-Lease] is a high point of American statesmanship. On Friday in the Oval Office, the world witnessed the opposite. Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s embattled democratic leader, came to Washington prepared to sign away anything he could offer President Trump except his nation’s freedom, security and common sense. For that, he was rewarded with a lecture on manners from the most mendacious vulgarian and ungracious host ever to inhabit the White House.
    "If Roosevelt had told Churchill to sue for peace on any terms with Adolf Hitler and to fork over Britain’s coal reserves to the United States in exchange for no American security guarantees, it might have approximated what Trump did to Zelensky. Whatever one might say about how Zelensky played his cards poorly — either by failing to behave with the degree of all-fours sycophancy that Trump demands or to maintain his composure in the face of JD Vance’s disingenuous provocations — this was a day of American infamy.
    "Where do we go from here?"

~ Bret Stephens from his editorial 'A Day of American Infamy 

PICS: Bottom, war leader Winston Churchill at the White House 3 January 1942, wearing his air-raid suit (Imperial War Museum); top, a war leader at the White House with two thugs (Getty Images) 

UPDATE 1: 

"What does seem clear is that Trump is putting an end to the foreign policy the United States has pursued since the end of World War II. Indeed, his worldview seems to rest on two assumptions that run directly counter to the way in which, for all the serious differences between them, every president since 1945 has thought about America’s role in the world.
    
"The first is that Trump has a fundamentally zero-sum view of the world. America’s relationship with allies like Japan or the United Kingdom has been based on the assumption that both sides would benefit from the partnership. In particular, America would provide its allies with a security guarantee; in return, it would enjoy international stability, reap the benefits of free trade, and have huge sway over the rules governing the world order. Even if the United States might be a net contributor in the short run, expending more for its military budget than its partners, these alliances would over the long run serve the country’s 'enlightened self-interest.'

"Trump, by contrast, seems to believe that every deal has a winner and a loser; since American allies in Europe or East Asia are not unhappy about the current arrangements, this must mean that it is his nation that’s the sucker. ...

"The second assumption shaping Trump’s foreign policy is his belief that spheres of influence are the natural, and perhaps even the morally appropriate, way to organise international relations. ... [and] that maintaining an alliance structure that ignores spheres of influence is naive, needlessly costly, and fundamentally sentimental. ...

"Panama and Greenland are in America’s sphere of influence, and so Trump believes that he is entitled to make outrageous demands on them. Conversely, he seems to regard Ukraine as falling into Russia’s natural sphere of influence ...

"If Trump gets his way, the world will become much more transactional. America’s erstwhile allies in the western hemisphere will either need to learn to stand on their own feet or to pay financial tribute to their protector. Those which happen to be located in the vicinity of the world’s most powerful authoritarian countries will need to accommodate themselves to the diktat of Beijing or Moscow ..."

~ Yascha Mounk from his post 'Help Me Understand... The New World Order'

UPDATE 2:

"In light of the events of the past week [which includes the US siding with Russia and North Korea on a UN resolution condemning Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and a three-ship Chinese naval circumnavigation of Australia], the Washington faction of NZ's Ministry of Foreign Affairs & Trade faces a new and major problem. ...

    "President Donald Trump’s affection for dictatorial regimes; the brutality of his transactional approach to international affairs; and his apparent repudiation of the 'rules-based international order' in favour of cold-eyed realpolitik; makes it difficult for America (and its increasingly apprehensive allies) to retain their footing on the moral high-ground.
    "It is difficult [therefore] to criticise the transactional elements of the relationships forged between China and the micro-states of the Pacific – the Cook Islands being only the latest in a succession of Chinese-initiated bilateral agreements negotiated in New Zealand’s 'back yard' – when the United States is demanding half of Ukraine’s rare earths in part-payment for the American munitions supplied to counter Russian aggression.
    "What those three Chinese warships have produced, however, is a much more compelling argument for aligning New Zealand’s defensive posture in general and its military procurement in particular with Australia’s. In the much colder and more brutal world that is fast emerging from the collapse of the 80-year-old Pax Americana, only the Australians can be relied upon to protect us – and only then if they are satisfied that the Kiwis are pulling their weight."

 ~Chris Trotter from his post 'What Are We Defending?'

"Seymour is only doing openly what Māori nationalists and their Pakeha allies have been doing, quietly, for the past 50 years."

"David Seymour is right. His bill might be killed at its Second Reading, but the issues he has raised will not die. ...
    "David Seymour’s great sin has been to offer an alternative to this covert effort to change the constitution of New Zealand by changing the Treaty’s historical meaning. Those who argue that the Treaty Principles Bill is a blatant attempt to re-write the Treaty are quite right. What they omit to say, however, is that Seymour is only doing openly what Māori nationalists and their Pakeha allies have been doing, quietly, in legal chambers, common-rooms, and public service offices for the past 50 years.
    "The critical difference, of course, is that Seymour was proposing to give the rest of us a vote on his version."

~ Chris Trotter from his post 'Beyond Question?'

"Does denying human equality and rejecting the principles of colour-blind citizenship place you among the baddies? Yes, I’m afraid it does."

"[T]he period of roughly five months between the election of Abraham Lincoln as President in November 1860, and his inauguration in March 1861 ... were the months in which, one after the other, the slaveholding states of the South voted to secede from the Union. ...
    "The most disconcerting feature ... are the many parallels between the America of then, and the New Zealand of now. ... 

"From a strictly ideological standpoint, it is the Decolonisers who match most closely the racially-obsessed identarian radicals who rampaged through the streets of the South in 1860-61, demanding secession and violently admonishing all those suspected of harbouring Northern sympathies. Likewise, it is the Indigenisers who preach a racially-bifurcated state in which the ethnic origin of the citizen is the most crucial determinant of his or her political rights and duties.
    "Certainly, in this country, the loudest clamour and the direst threats are directed at those who argue that New Zealand must remain a democratic state in which all citizens enjoy equal rights, irrespective of wealth, gender, or ethnic origin, and in which the property rights of all citizens are safeguarded by the Rule of Law.
    "These threats escalated alarmingly following the election of what soon became the National-Act-NZ First Coalition Government. ... The profoundly undemocratic nature of the fire-eaters’ opposition was illustrated by their vehement objections to the ACT Party’s policy of holding a binding referendum to entrench, or not, the 'principles' of the Treaty of Waitangi. Like the citizens of South Carolina, the first state to secede, the only votes they are willing to recognise are their own. ...

"Those New Zealanders who believe unquestioningly in the desirability of decolonisation and indigenisation argue passionately that they are part of the same great progressive tradition that inspired the American Abolitionists of 160 years ago. But are they?
    "Did the Black Abolitionist, and former slave, Frederick Douglass, embrace the racial essentialism of Moana Jackson? Or did he, rather, wage an unceasing struggle against those who insisted, to the point of unleashing a devastating civil war, that all human-beings are not created equal?
    "What is there that in any way advances the progressive cause about the casual repudiation of Dr Martin Luther King Jnr’s dream that: 'one day my four little children will be judged not by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character'? ...

"Does denying human equality and rejecting the principles of colour-blind citizenship place you among the baddies? Yes, I’m afraid it does."

~ Chris Trotter from his post 'Are We The Baddies?'

The State is not a good parent

"Reading the abuse in care reports, two questions requiring clear and compelling answers remain unanswered: Why? and How? Why were so many children and young people abused in such awful ways? How was it possible for so much and such appalling abuse to continue unchecked for so long? Without satisfactory responses to these two critical questions, the chances of history repeating itself must remain unacceptably high.
    "For some reason, however, the Why and How of Abuse in Care were not made the prime focus of the Royal Commission’s investigations. Its reports tell us the Who, When, Where and What of this horror story, but, those two key questions, Why? and How?, are not adequately addressed."

~ Chris Trotter from his post 'Report on the abuse of young people – two key questions have gone unanswered'

 

Climate: Revealed preference

"[A] very large number of voters have a great deal in common with those raised-in-the-faith Catholics who genuflect reflexively before the holy imagery of their religion without giving the gesture much, if any, thought. Like conservatives the world over, New Zealand’s Coalition Government is of the view that although, if asked, most ordinary voters will happily mouth environmental slogans, considerably fewer are willing to freeze in the dark for them.
    "Minister Jones’s wager is that if it’s a choice between watching Netflix, powering-up their cellphones, and snuggling-up in front of the heater, or, keeping the fossil fuels that power our extraordinary civilisation 'in the ground,' so that Freddie the Frog’s habitat can remain pristine and unmolested, then their response will be the same as the Minister’s: 'Bye, bye Freddie!' No matter what people may say; no matter how superficially sincere their genuflections to the 'crisis' of Climate Change; when the lights go out, all they really want is for them to come back on again. Crises far away, and crises in the future, cannot compete with crises at home – right here, right now.
   "The Transport Minister, Simeon Brown, knows how this works. Everyone supports public transport and cycle-ways, right up until the moment their holiday journey slows to a snail’s pace among endless lines of road cones, or a huge pothole wrecks their new car’s suspension.
    "Idealism versus realism: that’s the way the [parties of Luxon's Government] frame this issue; and they are betting their electoral future on the assumption that the realists outnumber the idealists. There may well have been 50,000 pairs of feet “Marching For Nature” down Auckland’s Queen Street [the previous] Saturday afternoon, but the figure that impresses the Coalition Government is the 1,450,000 pairs of Auckland feet that were somewhere else."

~ Chris Trotter from his post 'Numbers Game'

"By any measure, the 'School Strike for Climate' was a disaster" [update]

"On Friday, March 15 2019, an estimated 170,000 New Zealand secondary school students took to the nation’s streets. RNZ still ranks that turnout as the 'second-largest' protest in New Zealand history. ... [Last] Friday morning (5 April 2024) RNZ was carrying the School Strike for Climate protest organisers’ predictions of a turnout in excess of 100,000. Protest rallies were scheduled from Whangarei to Invercargill. ...
    "By the end of the day, however, it was clear that something very serious had gone wrong with the plan to unite the Left’s fragmented movements by, in effect, piggy-backing on the huge numbers formerly responsive to the SS4C’s summonses. Rather than a turnout in the range of 100,000: across the whole country, and by the most generous estimate, the organisers of the 'Strike' turned out a derisory 5,000 people.
    "By any measure, the 'Strike' was a disaster ...
    "Certainly, the dismal turnout must have given Green co-leader, Chloe Swarbrick, considerable pause. After all, she has staked a great deal of her political credibility on the proposition that she and her party can mobilise, electorally, the young, the alienated, and the disenfranchised. After Friday, however, transforming the 2026 general election into a people’s crusade would appear to be a much taller order.
    "Contrariwise, the failure of the 'Strike' offers Messers Luxon, Seymour and Peters considerable cause for celebration. Their coalition is described on the SS4C website as: 'the most conservative government in our history' – a claim that would doubtless bring a wry smile to the lips of Bill Massey, Sid Holland, and Rob Muldoon. Still, if Friday’s flop is the best the New Zealand Left can set against the Great Strike of 1913, the 1951 Waterfront Lockout, and the 1981 Springbok Tour protests, then our Coalition Government can breathe a huge sigh of relief."

~ Chris Trotter, from his post 'Something Important: The Curious Death of the School Strike 4 Climate Movement.'

UPDATE: This chimes with news from the States "that just 3% of 18-to-34-year-old voters named climate change as their top issue, with most citing the economy, inflation or immigration." (Not that the latter is anything about which to be concerned either.)

"Let’s not forget, [notes Jo Nova] all these surveys are done on people who never see a skeptical expert on TV or a real documentary ... They don’t hear that carbon dioxide was higher for most of the last half billion years, or that 'climate change' causes record grain yields, and saves 166,000 lives a year. Most of the 18 to 35 year olds have been fed the climate diatribe from school — but even they don’t believe it. ...

"So the good news that the young can see through this, despite the wall of propaganda.."

"Reputable historians do not present grown human beings as innocent children, or confused savages, incapable of understanding the political, economic and military realities of their time."

"History, like so many other subjects, has become a bitterly contested ideological ground. A discipline where angry partisans struggle for supremacy.
    "For the moment, at least, the upper hand [in NZ] lies where it has lain for the past 50 years – with the [Waitangi] Tribunal. For most of that time New Zealanders assumed that those weighing the evidence which claimants brought before the Tribunal were dispassionate professionals. Only relatively recently has it become clear that the Tribunal’s “history” is little more than compensatory fiction, composed by Māori and/or Māori-identifying “historians” to clear the way for the Crown’s acknowledgement of wrong-doing and, ultimately, to secure compensation for the manifold sins of our colonial fathers. ...
    "[The Tribunal is clearly in steadfast agreement with] Māori Treaty historians. Māori scholars, and their allies, [who] present colonisation as an unmitigated disaster: an historical catastrophe from which the indigenous people of New Zealand are only now beginning to recover. ...
    "Its reports are based on the testimony of the aggrieved, and upon their carefully curated historical grievances. Only to this 'evidence' does the Tribunal accord the status of unchallengeable truth. And only these, the Tribunal’s truths, are allowed to prevail over what is invariably characterised as the evil historical choices of the Crown.
    "That this Manichean historiography cannot help but infantilise Māori, turning them into trusting dupes of the wicked Pakeha, and denying them the dignity of effective historical agency, is deemed an acceptable price to pay by a Waitangi Tribunal determined to deliver to Māori claimants a browbeaten and guilt-ridden Crown. ...
    "Reputable historians do not present grown human beings as innocent children, or confused savages, incapable of understanding the political, economic and military realities of their time. Nor do they construct frankly ridiculous constitutional scenarios in which the British Government of 1840 was happy to share power ... Since 2014, the Waitangi Tribunal has been indulging in what might best be called 'Bridgerton History' – i.e. refashioning the realities of the past to meet the ideological specifications of the present."

~ Chris Trotter, from his column 'Contested Ground'

"A pro-censorship position could now be presented as a matter of national security."

"When people talk about disinformation today, it is almost always from within a left-wing narrative framework. The villains behind the disinformation tsunami allegedly inundating the civilised world are identified as white supremacists, misogynists, transphobes, anti-vaccination zealots, and fundamentalist Christians....
    "In normal circumstances, the pet hates of leftists don’t carry very much weight. Tragically, however, the life of the world stopped being normal in January 2020, as it became clear that a novel coronavirus – Covid-19 – was about to ignite a global pandemic. Fearful that the small but very vocal clusters of anti-vaccination zealots, located in just about all Western nations, would undermine the public health and immunological measures vital to fighting the virus, public servants began establishing anti-disinformation units to identify and counter the lies being spread about Covid-19....
    "[P]oliticians and activists moved swiftly to extend the brief of these disinformation units to encompass just about all of the Left’s pet hates. The situation was not improved by the intervention of national security agencies alarmed at the volume of Russian and Chinese disinformation pouring onto Western social media platforms.
    "From the perspective of the Left, this conflation of Far-Right disinformation with the disinformation emanating from authoritarian nation states would prove to be enormously helpful. A pro-censorship position ... could now be presented as a matter of national security. In New Zealand, willingness to buy into this aspect of the anti-disinformation project was aided by the still raw memories of the Christchurch Mosque Massacres. ...
    "What the New Zealand Left – notoriously ignorant of its own, and the international movement’s history – finds it almost impossible to accept is that disinformation (or, as it was once, more honestly, known: “propaganda”) was, and is, every bit as rampant on the revolutionary left, as it was, and is, on the reactionary right. ... Not that the state-subsidised Disinformation Project would ever acknowledge the fact..."

~ Chris Trotter, from his post 'Disinformation from the Left'

Chris Trotter: 'honest but deluded'

Political commentator Chris Trotter has always been at the 'honest but deluded' end of the socialist spectrum. That is, he honestly wants material wealth, human progress, free speech, and social freedoms, but he is yet to understand that socialism doesn't deliver any of that -- that the essential nature of socialism is not the "equality" it allegedly strives for, but the need for armed robbery to establish and maintain it. The impossibility of socialism's goals inspires the coercion needed to achieve them.

And he's slowly discovering that even many of his erstwhile allies have grown to like the coercion more than those goals.

The revelation makes good reading.

Writing yesterday on the blog of Martin Bradbury -- who for a while now has had his own eyes slowly opened about the increasingly "woke" joylessness of the controlling left -- Trotter explains that he's finally worked out "why writing about today’s version of 'progressive' politics leaves me feeling so depressed." 

It's not just about the duplicitous party politics of this particular election cycle. He rejects the Greens's "dominant ultra-progressive faction" who "favour sending those found guilty of uttering or publishing 'Hate Speech' to prison for three years"  as much as he spurns Labour's conscious deception over He Puapua -- insisting "that the report in no way represented a blueprint for New Zealand’s transformation into a bicultural state, when a steady stream of official policy decisions confirmed that’s exactly what it was?" ("It is precisely this sort of conscious deception, this deliberate 'fooling' of the voters, that has transformed progressive politics from what used to be a joyful affirmation of idealism into a joyless exercise in dishonesty").

Worse: 

If, by some miracle, Labour-Green wins the election [he writes], then none of the initiatives which both parties signed-up to over the past six years: radical ethnic nationalism, censorship, transgenderism; are going to be abandoned. What looms ahead of New Zealand if Labour-Green wins is grinding economic austerity and relentless cultural warfare. Thinner bread and bloody roses.

He has yet to recognise that it is precisely the lack of traction for Marx's call for conflict between collectives based on class warfare that inevitably saw it morph into conflict between collectives based first on race (easier for the braindead to identify) and now on (trans)gender. But for a collectivist, like him, who still genuinely wishes for progress, the results he sees are depressing: the politics, he say, "are joyless; because the logical end-point of the ideology they espouse is one of universal dissatisfaction and unending conflict. In other words, their direction-of-travel is dystopic."

Progressive politics [he writes] has moved beyond the idea of uplifting and overcoming; of building a society in which there are no masters, no servants; no rich, no poor. Envisaged now is what can only be described as a perpetual theatre of cruelty, in which those to whom evil has been done, are encouraged to do evil in return. Far from serving as the emancipating “vanguard” of the Proletariat, as Karl Marx hoped, the intelligentsia of the Twenty-First Century are claiming for themselves the role of Grand Inquisitor. They have made themselves the pitiless torturers of all those whose privileges cannot be overcome or abandoned, only confessed to and punished.

Marxist "class warfare," in other words, has bled inevitably into so-called "cultural Marxism," and the grim authoritarianism of a Maoist Cultural Revolution. 

Over the top? Barking mad? Grossly defamatory of activists who only want people to be free and equal? How I wish it were true! But one only has to visit the febrile world of social media to grasp the perverse enjoyment contemporary progressives derive from “flaming”, “de-platforming”, and “cancelling” – oh, what an ominous word that is – those who refuse to step forward and confess....

Those who were in Albert Park on 25 March 2023, and those who watched the many video recordings made at the scene, could not help but note the delirious hatred of the mob, and the brutal behaviour it spawned. Such is the praxis of the post-modern progressive: telling the news media that theirs was a gathering of peace and love – while punching a 70-year-old woman in the face.... Have a care when fighting monsters,” warned the German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, “lest ye become a monster yourself.” ...

That which Twentieth-Century progressives most feared, Twenty-First Century progressivism has become.

He's come a long way, Mr Trotter. 

When he realises one day that the only equality we need for human progress is equality before the law -- and that "the wealth of the rich is not the cause of the poverty of the poor, but rather of making the poor less poor, indeed, rich" -- then perhaps he will be ready to embrace the cause of true freedom. Without coercion.

"Labour is barking."

"As one of those Ancient Greeks put it: 'Those whom the Gods seek to destroy they first make mad.' And, right now, Labour is barking."

~ Chris Trotter, from his post 'Not In It For Them.'

"In any battle for excitement and attraction it would be most unwise to put your money on bureaucracy."

"WHICH DID MORE FOR DUNEDIN – the City Council’s public relations department, or the creators of the 'Dunedin Sound'? In any battle for excitement and attraction it would be most unwise to put your money on bureaucracy. Something all governments, and all Ministers for the Arts, would be wise to remember."

~ Chris Trotter, from his post 'Art for Our Sake'

"The leadership of James Shaw & Marama Davidson seems to embody constant compromise accompanied by a wholesale rejection of rationality itself"

"In sharp contrast to the leadership of Jeanette Fitzsimons and Rod Donald, who, respectively, embodied the movement’s fidelity to science and its duty to challenge the economic status quo, the leadership of James Shaw and Marama Davidson seems to embody constant compromise with the Powers That Be, accompanied by a wholesale rejection of rationality itself. As election day approaches, it is becoming increasingly difficult to construct a rationale for remaining loyal to the off-putting political force that the Greens are turning into."

~ Chris Trotter, from his post 'Is it 'Game Over' for the Greens?'

 

"The top-down Māori nationalist revolution is not yet complete – but it has, most certainly, begun."

"New Zealand is currently living through another top-down revolution. Though far from complete, it has already captured control of the commanding heights of the public service, the schools and universities, the funding mechanisms of cultural production, and big chunks of the mainstream news media.
    "The ideology driving this revolution is not neoliberalism, it’s ethno-nationalism. A potent amalgam of indigenous mysticism and neo-tribal capitalism has captured the imagination of the professional and managerial class and is relying on the latter’s administrative power and influence to drive through a revolutionary transformation of New Zealand society under the battle-flags of 'indigenisation' and 'decolonisation.' The glue which holds this alliance of Māori and Non-Māori elites together is Pakeha guilt....
    "The origins of the present ethno-nationalist revolution may be traced back to the early 1980s – specifically the 1981 Springbok Tour.... The [Māori] nationalist activists ... created a movement towards 'Māori Sovereignty' in which revolutionary Māori would lead, and guilty Pakeha would follow.... The Guilty Pakeha’s 'long march through the institutions' had begun.
    "Only one more strategic victory is required to complete the Māori nationalist revolution: Pakeha pride in their past and in their culture has to be undermined. The men and women once celebrated as nation-builders have to be recast as colonial oppressors. The country famed for being 'the social laboratory of the world' has to be re-presented as just another sordid collection of white supremacist, treaty-breaking, killers and thieves.
    "Māori, too, are in need of a complete makeover: from slave-owning warrior-cannibals, to peace-loving caretakers of Te Ao Māori – a world to which they are bound by deep and mystical bonds. Inheritors of a culture that sanctioned genocidal conquest and environmental destruction, how can the Pakeha hope to lead Aotearoa towards a just future? As in the 1980s, the Twenty-First Century journey requires revolutionary Māori to lead, and guilty Pakeha to follow. And those guilty Pakeha in a position to make it happen appear only too happy to oblige.

    "Which is why, in March 2023, New Zealand has an educational curriculum dedicated to condemning colonisation and uplifting the indigenous Māori. Why Māori cultural traditions and ways of knowing are elevated above the achievements of Western culture and science. Why representatives of local iwi and hapu wield decisive influence over private and public development plans, as well as the credo and content of media reporting and university courses.
    "The Māori nationalist revolution is not yet complete – but it has, most certainly, begun."

~ Chris Trotter, from his post 'The Revolution Has Begun'

"For far too many climate activists, mitigation has always been a Trojan Horse."

"[For] the true revolutionaries ... global warming has always been the most wonderful excuse for imposing the sort of regime to which nobody who believes in individual rights, private property, and the Rule of Law would ever willingly submit. In the grim summation of George Orwell: 'Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.' For far too many climate activists, mitigation has always been a Trojan Horse."

~ Chris Trotter, the "moderate revolutionary," from his post 'Adapting to Climate Change'

 

Co-governance?

"If co-governance denotes a political system in which an indigenous people and the descendants of the settlers who joined them wrestle together with the legacies of colonisation – as free and equal citizens – then we already have it."

~ Chris Trotter, from his post 'What is Co-Governance?'

"Nobody has yet come up with a credible case for amalgamating Radio New Zealand and Television New Zealand."

"Nobody has yet come up with a credible case for amalgamating Radio New Zealand and Television New Zealand. Even so, the merger proceeds apace, costing the taxpayer a ridiculous amount of money – to no good end. No one truly believes the quality of the broadcasting product will improve. The present audiences of both networks have longstanding gripes with the overall direction of their public broadcasters, but the response of those in charge has been to double-down on the very policies their audiences find most objectionable....
    "Citing the growing strength of the purveyors of misinformation and disinformation on social media, government mouthpieces have presented the new 'entity' as the place where New Zealanders anxious to learn what’s really going on can go to for 'the facts.' They are being encouraged to think of the new entity as a sort of beefed-up version of the Prime Minister’s infamous 'podium of truth' during Covid.
    "God save us!"
           ~ Chris Trotter from his post 'More Than One way to Skin A Cat'

Will the Coalition for Free Speech instead play a part in its muzzling?

In this guest post, Terry Verhoeven shares his concern that pending legal action in the name of free speech may instead cement in place legal precedents outlawing so-called "hate speech."

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After having spent the week seriously considering contributing to the Free Speech Coalition legal challenge, I want to share my reasons for not contributing. Given how some of the frontmen of the challenge are genuine free speech advocates and the name of the Coalition is advertising itself as being pro-free speech, the motivation to contribute and support the challenge has naturally been a strong one for me.

With Peter’s recent article, in my mind the case is now clear that the Coalition is not in the right. Equally important though, and what had already been weighing on my mind, is just what the legal ramifications of the Coalition's challenge are going to be, and what they would ultimately produce in terms of impacting free speech in New Zealand. I don't think the outcome will be good.

My thinking is as follows...

As far as I can see the Coalition's legal challenge is likely to end up becoming case law that supports the worst muzzling provisions of the (mis-named) Human Rights Act. My thinking goes like this: 

1. Goff will most likely argue that his and the Council's actions were intended to uphold the Human Rights Act rather than simply exercise their property right;
2. the judicial review will most likely find that the Human Rights Act trumps the Bill of Rights (which it does, but shouldn’t);
3. the likely result will be a ruling in Auckland Council’s/Goff’s favour, with councils and mayors everywhere having thereby obtained a legal precedent and sanction empowering officials to muzzle speech on public "property" everywhere, and to a much greater extent than they would ever exercise by merely acting as a prudent property owner in the interests of ratepayers and taxpayers. 

My concern then is that rightly-motivated folk might be being used to help make this happen: to essentially bringing a ban on so-called "hate speech" by the back door -- one to be exercised by  councils and mayors.

My concern is based simply on the way the law has been framed, as far as I can tell. If things do play out this way, then if the court finds in Auckland Council's favour here then the decisions of councils everywhere need no longer be based on the interests of the properties they are managing, nor of the ratepayers who fund them, but because (in their minds) they will be enforcing the muzzling provisions of the Human Rights Act.

This would then become the thin edge of the wedge leading to more and more cases of Human Rights Act violations on private property being prosecuted, and speech being shut down instead of celebrated. 

That is the way the law has been framed and it is where this case seems to be headed. If it is to be lost, this is how it may begin -- with, ironically, a Free Speech Coalition acting as midwife to its birth. 

So instead of the interests of free speech being advanced by the Coalitions's challenge, I fear it may instead give the Act that muzzles free speech more teeth.

Looking at the roster of names supporting the Free Speech Coalition, the name of Chris Trotter does seem to be a sort of odd one out. On the face of it, it pits him as an outlier against his "comrade(s)" at the Auckland Council -- as a face of the radical left being concerned with upholding the “rights” of the radical right. Why would he do this?

Putting on my cynical hat now: the scenario envisaged above (being the unspoken end-game of the recently empowered Left) may explain why Trotter, this most left of lefties, might put himself forward as a front-man for this legal challenge.  

This is not just an idle concern. Trotter has expressed support before for these muzzling provisions of the Human Rights Act, as have his leftist comrades internationally, which on its face makes him and them no champions of free-speech. Furthermore, in responding to a letter I had published in the NZ Herald he argued explicitly against property rights being the basis upon which free speech must ultimately be implemented, expressly supporting Peter Davis's idea that “limits on the rights to 'purchase' speech are justified to protect our democracy from money politics." 

Mr Trotter is no champion of free speech. 

And this legal action seems to advance the opposite of that cause.

So could it be that well-intentioned defenders of free speech have joined in and are supporting Mr Trotter and comrades' “struggle” unwitting of what their support will ultimately produce? I fear so. 

Just as I fear that the game plan all along was to yoke free-speech defenders to their virtue to the effect of their own demise. 

Why Ardern? Ask Trotter.

 

For reasons of their own, on the back of her underwhelming rejection by 79% of the Mt Albert electorate on Saturday, the commentariat have chosen all week to talk up Jacinda Ardern to be deputy Labour leader,

Since Chris Trotter’s motives are generally among the most transparent of the commentariat, I’ve scoured his latest Ardern hagiography to discover reasons why the young woman who’s achieved nothing in her short existence so far but a mouthful of teeth and a handful of magazine covers should be bumped up on the basis only of a lacklustre by-election. What have I been missing. What signal achievements have I overlooked that make her the obvious Next Big Thing. Because according to Chris (and for many of his colleagues), Labour's Future Has A Single Name – and that name is Ardern.

But why Chris, why? These are his reasons, such as they are

• Because her 21% result represents an “emphatic by-election victory”
• Because the name “Jacinda” has already acquired a winning ring. (Yes, he seriously said that.)
• Because if Andrew Little doesn’t promote her to deputy-leader, “then he’s a fool.” (Yes, he also said that. Seriously.)
• Because if he doesn’t, he “will only fuel suspicions that he lacks the fortitude to shake-up the delicate factional balance of Labour’s caucus.” (Yes, I know, but he’s writing this shit not I.)
• Because he quotes Oliver Cromwell. Twice. (Yes, really. It’s that important, apparently.)
• Because “Little now needs to reassure Auckland’s young urban professionals … that there is plenty of space on Labour’s pews for them.” (I should remind you that Mr Trotter gets paid to write columns like this.)
• Because “keeping Annette King where she is for fear of reactivating the ‘Anyone But Cunliffe’ brigade would not only flatter that waning faction’s significance, but also signal a serious loss of political momentum.”
• Because “she has now moved past [Grant] Robertson.” (In what respect, one wonders.)
• Because (in some dim way he never bothers to define) Ardern represents “the future,” and in choosing her Little “would also be moving decisively beyond Labour’s past.”

Seriously, this bathetic exercise in begging the question is Chris Trotter’s column for the week, distributed nationwide courtesy of the dying media that few people any more bother to read. (And they wonder why.)

I’m going back through Trotter’s list to discover anywhere, anywhere at all, where there is any reason to pick her for anything she has actually achieved or shown that she is capable of – apart from a lazy by-election victory in the country’s second-safest seat.

Because in the end his ‘reasons’ for promoting the young woman to Labour deputy amounts either to nothing more than “because I say so,” or the good old tried-and-true “bet the electorate would like a nice bit of skirt.”

The former is pretty much the only argument the rest of the media have raised to promote her; and the latter is probably what they’d like to say if their overwhelming political correctness hadn’t stopped them.

But is the electorate really that shallow? (Shall we stop here to debate how nice a piece of skirt we really think she is?)

Still, since the arguments in her favour are so slim, the Labour Party are bound to listen…

.

#TopTen | No. 9: Hobson’s Pledge: Racism?

 

This year so far I’ve written and posted 797 posts. (This is the 798th)

Of those, this from September  30th was the ninth most popular, wondering how it can be racist to demand the law be colour-blind – and how those making those charges make them stick. Or not …

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Hobson’s Pledge: Racism?

The commentariat is all aflame this week attacking the new “Hobson’s Pledge” movement, launched this week by Don Brash. Their vision for New Zealand, they say, “is a society in which all citizens are equal before the law, irrespective of when they or their ancestors arrived in this land.” Brash warns in particular of “iwi participation agreements” in proposed RMA amendments that “would virtually entrench co-governance and partnership obligations with some Maori into local government, creating an under-the-radar constitutional change”; and cites the ongoing farce of Maori seats in parliament and, increasingly, in local government that tribalises governance and decreases democracy and individual rights.

But “they’re racist!” says the commentariat in response. Which is odd, because the very foundation statement of the “Hobson’s Pledge” movement is that we should all be colour-blind before the law. (Hence, Hobson's Pledge, i.e., “He Iwi Tahi Tatou | We Are Now One People.”) And in calling the group things like "pale, male and stale," their opponents themselves reveal just a touch of the racism (and sexism) they claim so vehemently to oppose.

So how do we resolve this apparent contradiction? Let’s start by looking at how several alleged luminaries justify their claim that it’s racist to call for law and lawmakers to be colour-blind. How exactly do they square that circle?

Writing for Stuff, Laura McQuillan doesn’t even try to. “Is Don Brash's new Hobson's Pledge the support group that white people need?” she asks rhetorically in a piece that bizarrely references “Black Lives Matter,” the National Front and some skinhead group called Right Wing Resistance before pulling out and quoting entirely unrelated comments on a piece of clickbait she’d written the week before asking “Which is New Zealand’s whitest region?” all garnished with a quote she’d simply made up herself from a fellow she claims to be “leader” of 1Law4All. (He’s not.) But I bet she thinks she’s not the racist – and that making up quotes is probably “justified corruption.”

Talking out of his arse, Hone Harawira also simply asserts the moot. "Come on, absolutely this is racism and it's time somebody called it out," he says, offering no argument for his claim Brash is “a redneck or a racist.” Neither does professional Maori Willie Jackson, who litters his “debate” with Brash will claims that he’s old, that he’s talking rubbish, that everyone is against Maori, and that so-called “urban Maori” need more privileges from the government. Jackson, of course, represents (or claims to) so-called “urban Maori.”

Jackson, Harawira, Susan Devoy and others talk about the bad “outcomes” that confront Maori, young and old, but none bother to address the claim that the law is not colour-blind and should be, nor show that these bad outcomes can in any way be attributed to racism. (Indeed, a strong argument exists that it is Maori over-reliance on welfare and legal privilege that has all but guaranteed the bad outcomes they cite.)

But there’s more. Media darling Toby Manhire takes on the important topic of logos and where the Hobson’s Pledge website got that picture above. Answer: like most media pics these days (including those the luminaries themselves use, it’s from an American photo library.)

Tim Watkin too conflates the issue of privilege and legal privilege, as if they were one and the same. (No, Tim, they’re not.) But he at least acknowledges the existence of so-called “affirmative action,”  while asserting its effects have been positive – “what Brash calls 'Maori privilege.'” he says, “others call redressing the wrongs of history… an effort to tackle 150 years of race-based privilege [that] is helping avoid more unrest in this country.” (How Maori seats, Maori scholarships, Maori welfare, Maori educational tokenism, and iwi co-governance in local government “avoids unrest” we are not told however.) And he is big enough too to acknowledge “there are valid issues lurking among [what he calls] nonsense -

for example, the fact that settlements are based on where tribes happened to sit in a moment of history (1840), how far respect for Maori spirituality goes and how we manage Maori representation in local government. But it's all based on an intellectual foundation made of rubble and rubbish. The profound wisdom that we should all be equal before the law is twisted and imprisoned in what becomes an argument for privilege to be entrenched with a certain people (Pakeha) at a certain time in history (today).

If you can make sense of that last sentence, by the way, then you’re a better parser of them than I.

He argues constitutional law, and gets it wrong, saying:

They [the Hobson’s Pledge movement] show their failure to understand the most basic ideas of a constitution, by on one hand saying "The Treaty of Waitangi is not in any meaningful sense New Zealand’s constitution" and yet in the very next line saying that the Treaty did cede sovereignty, protect property rights and establish Maori as British subjects.
    Even given that slanted interpretation, it clearly acknowledges that the treaty deals with rights and power, which is, er, what a constitution is all about.

It’s certainly true that ceding sovereignty, protecting property rights, and establishing Maori as British subjects with all the rights and privileges thereof are the foundations for something that might become a constitution – something, importantly, that would elucidate what those rights and privileges are, and how a government would be constituted to protect them. That something would be a constitution. But it would need something much more comprehensive than the Treaty’s three spare clauses to become one.

And it would need much else excised from modern law …

I’ve been saving the best for last, since it’s both the most absurd and the most-passed around. In recent years Mihinirangi Forbes has become almost the patron saint of media types. Posted at the taxpayer-funded ivory tower of Radio NZ under the title of “Analysis,” RNZ’s “Māori Issues Correspondent” asks of Brash and co right off the bat ‘How Pākehā are you?’

So we’re already downhill skiiing from the outset, and the trajectory is just further down. It’s worth some fisking because it captures so many of the criticisms.

The group's website is emblazoned with the saying "He iwi tahi tātou - One People" - a phrase famously used by Governor William Hobson as he greeted Māori chiefs as they arrived to sign the Treaty of Waitangi, the country's founding document.
    It's a document guaranteeing iwi full, exclusive and undisturbed possession of their lands, forests and fisheries. That's not promoted on the lobby group's website.

Well, yes it is. Unfortunately, however, it’s promoted under the aegis of the conspiratorial “Littlewood Treaty” nonsense that talks about pieces of paper being discovered years later in drawers that, say the claimants, just happen to be the real Treaty.

The group nonetheless do acknowledge, and on the group’s very front page, that the Treaty did in fact guarantee to protect the property rights of all New Zealanders – those being the rights of both non-Maori and Maori over property they wish and desire to retain in their possession, to recognise all the relevant words of the document in question. And it’’s worth noting that Forbes and others fail themselves to promote the document’s guarantee that sovereignty was in fact ceded by the signatories.

Important point that.

Forbes continues:

It's also a document which grants Māori the same rights and privileges as Pākehā, but it's the word privilege which appears to have Hobson's Pledge members concerned. [Emphasis in the original.]

Forbes equivocation over the word “privilege” is of a piece with Watkins’s. The Treaty guaranteed all the rights and privileges of British citizens. Not more rights, or greater privileges. Not affirmative action or co-governance.

She continues, citing (as dishonest hacks will) the weaker arguments she can find from protagonists, before summing up in he r words the aim of the group:

Hobson's Pledgers are calling for a colourblind New Zealand, but one group featured prominently in spokesperson Dr Brash's interviews: Māori.
    Other members thought it important to question how Māori some Māori actually were.

A lot there buried in two sentences.

Yes, Hobson's Pledgers are calling for a colourblind New Zealand. That this means they are arguing against the committed programme of affirmative action in favour or Maori means that the ongoing programme of affirmative action in favour or Maori be mentioned. No mystery there.

Yet she’s right to note that an organisation talking about being colourblind needs to be rigorous in its own ocular hygiene, and how Maori some Maori actually are is and always should be wholly irrelevant to anyone truly colourblind. So she has a point.

Mr McVicker, Mike Butler and Mr Oakley seemed offended when asked how Pākehā they were. They all said the question was irrelevant, with Mr Butler calling it a "race-based question."
    But they had no difficulty talking about the percentage of Māori blood people might have, including myself [says Forbes].

She has a point. A point I’ve made to many of these people before, and one that Forbes to her credit has recognised that Brash avoids.

But she concludes with the same equivocation as many others, between legal and economic privilege.

What did the human beings think of Māori inequalities in health, education, life expectancy or incarceration?
    Mr Shirtcliffe offered a quick reply:
     "We are a very simple, single focused movement relating to the issue of equality in governance and
        property rights; other issues are not for us."

Almost the right response. But that issue must be “for them,” because if that equivocation remains unchallenged, this ship called Hobson’s Pledge will take on water as every other similar project has.

And it will only fuel the cries of “racism,” even where it doesn’t exist.

So how do the critics of the group defend their claim that the group is racist? Simple: they don’t try to. They don’t even define what they mean by it, since of course that would make their job harder: Racism being:

Assessing the worth of a person by his skin colour and ancestry. The lowest form of collectivism -- what author Ayn Rand calls a "barnyard" form of collectivism.

The Pledgers don’t help themselves with ridiculous talk of bloodlines in a discussion that’s supposed to be about being colourblind, but the commentators don’t even try to properly justify what should be a serious claim, because they’re never, ever called on their dysphasia  by their media colleagues, and nor do they expect to. They publish in the full expaction of being able to write nonsense because they’ve all been taught the doctrine of “multiculturalism”: that all races are equal except for the one they think is “in power.” (Racism, to the Marxist/multiculturalist not at all being about colourblind individualism but about “power structures” and who inhabits them. Racism in this sense then being very much about not being colourblind, but about being able to skewer the “pale,male and stale” wherever you may find them.) 

This is how the likes of McQuillan can write lightweight fluff and Jackson can rely on nothing more than barroom bluster – and Forbes as can ask “how pakeha are you?” without being racist -- because they can all be confident that (to paraphrase Saul Alinsky) any means are justified in carrying out a social-justice warrior’s ends.

It’s how they can acknowledge all the affirmative action in favour of a race, can watch a race-based party form and exploit race-based seats, can sit back and say nothing as a race-based elite lord it over the peons they claim to represent,  all because in their minds these people are not “part of the power structure” – yet will write up a hyperbolic fervour should anyone have the temerity to call for one law for all.

They’re out of their minds.

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RELATED POSTS:

• “You will have noticed that what used to be defined as racism has changed. It has changed because the old way of defining it was not proving politically useful. Racism, observes Robert Bidinotto, used to be defined objectively … now however it is defined politically.”
  How social-justice warriors are re-defining racism–& Hobson Pledgers can’t keep up – NOT PC
• “’Maori are legally privileged in New Zealand today,’ Whyte told Act’s annual conference in Hamilton, ‘just as the Aristocracy were legally privileged in pre-revolutionary France.’  Presumably, in making this bold comparison, our Cambridge graduate had some notion of what those aristocratic privileges included ….  Let’s list just a few of them…’”
  Chris Trotter’s questions to Jamie Whyte answered – NOT PC, 2014

 

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