Last week was an extremely serious tipping point for NZ

The events which unfolded last week in New Zealand around the speaking tour of UK women’s rights activist Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull (AKA Posie Parker), culminating in an act of mob violence at a peaceful public rally last Saturday, are an extremely serious wake up call for anyone who cares about maintaining a just and stable civil order in our country.

The problems began before Keen-Minshull had even arrived here, when the mainstream media launched an unmerited, poorly researched (if at all) character assassination campaign built on the false assertion that she was a white supremacist.

What promoted this media assault?

The uninvited and disavowed presence of a small group of neo-Nazi men who gatecrashed and began performing Nazi salutes at a peaceful women’s rights rally in Melbourne that Keen-Minshull had been invited to speak at.

Any editor or journalist with an ounce of journalistic ethics and professionalism would have done some basic factchecking before promoting the wild and extremely serious allegation that a women’s rights speaker was in league with actual Nazis.

Not only did such basic research not take place, but the NZ media then spent the following week adding to the falsehood by referring to Keen-Minshull as an ‘anti trans activist’, persisting with the use of this blatantly impartial and hyper politicised slur even when it was abundantly clear that it was also a lie.

Newshub plumbs the depths of gutter journalism…

The media coverage then took a vigorous nosedive into the cesspool of gutter journalism when Newshub engaged in one of the most repugnant and deranged acts of blatant lying I have ever seen from a media outlet in this country.

They did this by making the absurd and easily disprovable claim that Keen-Minshull was covertly sending out white supremacy hand gestures during a personal social media video, despite the fact it was clearly obvious that she was simply nervously fidgeting with the zipper on her jumper.

No sane person could have ever believed such a blatantly false lie, which is possibly why Newshub chose to blur the footage, thus making it impossible for their viewers to know that they were being deceived.

This simple act of doctoring the video footage saw one of our larger media outlets shift from simply making absurdly false claims, to actively hiding the truth from the New Zealand people about what the video really contained.

There are only two possible choices here - either Newshub reporters and editors are some of the most dangerously incompetent and unintelligent journalists in our country, or, they deliberately chose to engage in false propaganda to deceive the New Zealand people into believing that an innocent woman was actually a white supremacist.

Whichever is true, it paints a truly alarming picture about the decline of journalism in New Zealand, and the grave state of dysfunction that it has now fallen into.

The reality seems to be that key players in the mainstream media didn’t care whether the allegations of white supremacy were true or not. They were happy to promote such allegations ad nauseam because it was politically convenient for their tribe to do so in an age where progressives have normalised the act of calling anyone who challenges their ideological hegemony a Nazi.

Journalism or incitement?

I do not believe for one second that it is irrational or unfair to refer to the conduct of the New Zealand media last week as incitement.

They deliberately pushed false claims, partisan hackery, victim blaming, and one-sided platforming of trans extremists such as Shaneel Lal and Max Tweedie to such a degree, that come Saturday, the violence we saw was almost a forgone conclusion.

The uncritical media endorsement of Shaneel Lal deserves particular attention.

Not only did Lal openly celebrate last Saturday’s political violence, he also consistently engages in vile behaviours on Twitter.

Lal is not someone to be lauded, nor is he a role model. He is a broken and toxic individual.

Lal lacks integrity, is a dishonest bully, and it is only a matter of time before his flawed character will cause the collapse of the unwarranted celebrity that the media have crowned him with.

Serious failings from our political leaders…

What makes this all the more alarming is that it wasn’t just the media who inflamed this situation, our political leaders also failed in their most fundamental duty of care - to uphold the common good by maintaining a peaceful civil order in New Zealand.

The Green party engaged in some of the most socially irresponsible conduct I have seen from politicians in my lifetime, when they chose to make themselves the face of the inflammatory rhetoric and activism in the lead up to last Saturday’s violence.

One of their highest profile MPs even Tweeted to her 38K Twitter followers that she was “So ready to fight Nazis” shortly before the violence unfolded in Auckland.

If you are an MP who is incapable of understanding that what you say, and how you say it has the potential to cause great harm to peace and stability within your nation, then are almost certainly unqualified for office.

Just to prove this point, Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson decided to stoke the fires of racial division within our country by declaring on camera that “It is white cis men who cause violence in the world” as she was departing from the scene where Saturday’s violent chaos had been unleashed.

Leaving aside questions about the accuracy of this claim, and the fact that as Minister for the Prevention of Family and Sexual Violence she should have unequivocally stated “I condemn all violence”, this was an MP openly stirring up racial animosity.

What made the spectacle of the Green’s inflammatory behaviour all the more obscene, is that, just hours before the violent leftwing activists targeted peaceful women’s rights campaigners, Green Party co-leader James Shaw appeared in the media to declare that he was worried about the risk of political violence in New Zealand.

Perhaps I would be inclined to take him a little more seriously if his own party had not spent the entire previous week actively fanning the flames of social and political division with their poorly considered words and actions regarding the visit of Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull.

There needs to be some serious soul searching about the state of our political life when we have serving MPs inflaming tensions within our country to such a degree that violent actors on the political left clearly would have been left with the impression they had an official sanction to commit violence against peaceful women at a political gathering.

Governments are meant to serve all New Zealanders…

We must also consider the troubling fact that it wasn’t just the Greens who inflamed this situation.

What was needed very early last week was calm, democratic and non-partisan leadership from the Prime Minister and his senior Labour ministers.

Instead what we got was inflammatory equivocation and flirtation with undemocratic extremism from the Prime Minister and his Minister of Immigration.

Firstly, Prime Minister Chris Hipkins “condemned people who abused their right to freedom of speech to create division”.

How else could such a statement be read other than as an official declaration of condemnation, from the highest office in our land, against Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull’s right to peacefully express her views in New Zealand?

What makes this all the more concerning is that Hipkins was annunciating an absurdly impossible moral standard for a truly free and open society. There are times when speaking the truth can be one of the most divisive things to do in a community, but that doesn’t mean we should remain silently unified under a lie instead.

I also found myself asking where this supposed commitment to condemning people for using their speech to create division had disappeared to when it came time for the Prime Minister to address Marama Davidson’s racially divisive use of speech.

Perhaps Keen-Minshull should have proffered her involvement in a traffic related incident before coming to New Zealand if she had hoped for basic democratic courtesies from our Prime Minister?

The Minister of Immigration, Michael Wood, went even further in his divisive castigation, declaring that Keen-Minshull had “inflammatory, vile and incorrect world views”.

Incorrect worldviews?!

Last time I checked, New Zealand doesn’t have a Grand Inquisitor of Morals, Doctrines and Thought Policing.

Is it any wonder that violent leftwing extremists attacked a group of peaceful women last Saturday afternoon when our democratically elected leaders were playing poorly considered partisan politics instead of leading the nation?

The Prime Minister’s comments earlier this week, that he would have liked to have attended Saturday’s protest which quickly devolved into a violent mobbing of a peaceful women’s rights group, did nothing to assuage concerns that he does not understand the important first principles which are meant to govern the exercise of his office.

Progressives who love to use the term ‘dog whistle’ were strangely silent about these comments from Hipkins - comments that sound suspiciously like a downplaying of Saturday’s violent extremism and a wink and a nod to the people who participated in it.

Prime Minister Hipkins and Minister Wood seem to have completely forgotten that they aren’t simply representatives of a particular political ideology or demographic, they are the servants of all New Zealanders, and the guardians of a free democratic nation.

As such they should have led for the betterment of a just and stable civil order, placing themselves above the polemics by clearly and decisively annunciating that nothing less than peaceful disagreement will be tolerated in our nations public square. It also wouldn't have hurt for the Prime Minister to have challenged the mainstream media to ensure that their conduct also contributed to peace and stability.

Even the suggestion that an overseas women’s rights campaigner, who has no criminal record, should be subject to Government review before entering our country, simply because she holds views that some New Zealanders might struggle to process with civility and emotional maturity, is a damning indictment about the fragile state of our freedoms at this present moment in New Zealand.

We need to take stock and answer some tough questions…

I lost count of the number of times I heard politicians, commentators, and others making the immoral and frightening suggestion that perhaps Keen-Minshull should not have been allowed to speak in New Zealand if a group of local leftwing extremists were going to stir up social unrest in response.

Not only is this an egregious form of victim blaming, but it’s not how free societies work.

The thugs and extremists don’t get to decide what is verboten in our country, and whether people should be denied entry simply for refusing to profess belief in their ideological creeds.

Freedom of expression isn’t just about the rights of the speaker to speak, it’s also about the rights of the hearers who want to hear what the speaker has to say.

Keen-Minshull wasn't in New Zealand to promote obscenity, or for self-aggrandising vacuous frivolity, she was here to present ideas about one of the most pressing issues of our current age. The New Zealanders who came to Albert Park last weekend to hear and contemplate those ideas were also denied their rights by the violent mob.

If you are an adult who believes that you are trapped inside the wrong body, I genuinely feel for you and the psychological suffering you experience, but the rest of the community should not be expected to endorse your personal self-creation ideology, or become subjects to its edicts just because you demand that it be so.

You can’t have it both ways - if the individual subject is to be considered a free agent who can create themselves into whatever thing they so desire, according to their own subjective whims, you can’t then turn around and demand that all other individuals, and the very community itself must be subservient and shaped according to YOUR invented personal reality.

Women’s rights campaigners have the right to challenge any ideology or regime that would deprive them of their dignity.

This is exactly the outcome they are expected to suffer at the hands of an ideology which wants to allow biological men into their female-only spaces, dehumanise them with labels like ‘menstruators’ and ‘pregnant people’, rob them of their ability to compete in fairly contested sporting events, and encourage vulnerable young people to engage in medical interventions to altar their bodies and the natural trajectory of their normal biological flourishing.

What we witnessed last week wasn’t simply a group of ideologues who disagree with an eminently reasonable and humane vision for society, it was the frightening spectre of thuggish intimidation and silencing of women simply because they were peacefully seeking to make this case.

What made this violent silencing all the more alarming was the equivocation with extremism and the active enabling of it that was facilitated and incited by our politicians and media.

What’s worse is that we are now several days on from these events, and not only does there seem to very little appetite from our Government to strongly condemn, let alone actually hold anyone accountable, many of them are still equivocating or trying to justify the intolerant anti-democratic and socially destructive behaviours wrought upon our nation last weekend.

Serious questions must now be asked and answered about all of this, including questions about the operational decision making of the NZ Police last Saturday.

It also seems abundantly clear that more of us must urgently discover the courage to start vocally challenging and pushing back against the gender constructionist ideology to ensure that important truths are heard and much needed rational discourse and stability is restored to the public life of our country regarding this matter.