Fire and Fury is just Fizzle and Fluff

Last night I watched Stuff’s ‘Fire and Fury’ documentary (a title unsubtly plagiarised from the 2018 book of the same name about Donald Trump), and it turned out to be just fizzle and fluff.

I went into this fully aware of two very important facts:

1) This is a Government-funded media project (from the $55million slush fund) which was going to allege that Kiwis who have criticised the Government and the media were dangerous violent extremists.

And:

2) Stuff admitted that they deliberately chose not to seek comment from the Kiwis they were going to accuse of being dangerous extremists in this project. I consider this to be morally questionable at best.

Not even asking the accused for comment about the accusations you are levelling at them simply results in a very powerful organisation ‘punching down’, and it gives credibility to claims that the media is more interested in agenda than truth.

(Stuff’s claim that interviewing these people would be dangerous, as it would be giving them a platform, simply does not hold any water. When you name people, and present lots of other footage of them speaking, you are already platforming them.)

Despite knowing these two important caveats before watching, even I was surprised by the lack of substance in what was supposed to be a cutting-edge documentary. Effectively this is just a rinse, cycle and repeat of previous allegations and agendas.

At the end of the day, they named a tiny handful of people with kooky ideas, overinflated their actual influence, and then tried to tar and feather every person who opposed wide-ranging mandates and other unhelpful Labour COVID policies as being either idiots or dangerous extremists - like I said: the same tired old narrative.

In a nutshell: Fire and Fury plays a lot like the conspiracy theories it sets out to debunk. It utilises constant and emotionally manipulative spooky music and imagery. It offers a selective presentation of facts. It tries to marry events together that aren’t directly connected. It leaves out important context, and it even presents false claims.

Basically, it does what conspiracy theorists do.

At one point, Kate Hannah (from The Disinformation Project), one of the Fire and Fury’s key expert talking heads, stated that people who believe in Uber-races reject modern medicine because Uber-races believe that they don’t need modern medicine. This is absurdly untrue. Nazi Germany not only boasted the most advanced medical practice of its era, but cutting-edge medical science was also a key tool utilised by the Nazis to try and build their Uber-race.

Later she tried to claim that being ‘anti-establishment’ is markedly different from being ‘anti-Government’ and ‘anti-state’ (probably because the left traditionally had an anti-establishment ethos, but now they are the establishment.)

(The irony of such factual inaccuracies coming from a group calling itself ‘The Disinformation Project’ was not lost).

There was lots of sensationalism, but not much substance, and, frustratingly, it was often propagandistic in nature. Ultimately all Fire and Fury does it reopen old wounds with all sorts of regurgitated and unhelpful alarmist claims and socially destructive othering of people.

They even tried to link all of this with the overturning of Roe v. Wade - exposing the clear political agenda in the Fire and Fury.

If we are going to be serious about understanding these issues, and reforming New Zealand society for the better, we need to move away from the false dichotomy and tribalism which would want us to be pitted against each other. This means we need to reject both the conspiracy theories of those frustrated by bad ideologies and policies, AND the propagandistic accusations of institutions seeking to justify those bad ideologies and policies.

If you are looking for cheap vilification, and even conspiracy theorising about Kiwis you disagree with about COVID policies (and certain woke stalking horses), Fire and Fury will satiate your appetite for such things. If you want genuine understanding, and dialogue without the unhelpful diatribe and derision, then you’ll definitely want to give this one a miss.