Unbeknownst to the rest of the world, an unwritten rule exists in the realm of New Zealand’s mainstream media: Whatever you do, don’t criticise Jacinda Ardern.
Although she may give you ample opportunity to do so, any such criticism should come with a warning label.
The label reads:
Jacinda Ardern is a woman.
Therefore she can do no wrong. Any criticism or mocking of her at anytime during her premiership — no matter how badly she performs — will be considered misogynistic bigotry and/or terrorism.
Interestingly, the label wasn’t written by anyone inside the Labour Party itself (although many inside it would surely agree), but by her many matey minions in the prevailing pressrooms, that Ardern’s government helps fund.
This, the standard of ‘journalistic’ discourse one should predominantly expect, today, in this faraway fiefdom of the long white cloud.
But make no mistake: Ardern’s star power, however she tries to deceive with public relations recons to LA’s ‘Late Night’ talkshow studios, Harvard commencement speeches, and Capitol Hill photo ops with troupes of infinitely-deceptive US senators, is fading.
The most recent 1News Kantar Public Poll, for instance, puts the Labour Party in second place with 35 per cent of the vote (their worst ever) behind their main rivals, the National Party, who lie in first with 39 per cent.
Quite close, it is true, and surely nothing to worry about especially when one considers the fact that Ardern remains top of the list when it comes to people’s ‘Preferred PM’, a secondary question of the poll.
Here, she garners 33 per cent of the vote, while National’s leader, Christopher Luxon, remains on a steady 25 per cent.
Crisis? What crisis?
Well, take a trip with me back to May 2020, approximately two months into the Covid pandemic, and, importantly, following her first no-questions-asked ‘Alert Level 4’ lockdown.
Then, a 1News Colmar Brunton Poll seemingly highlighted mass adoration toward her initial handling of the so-called Coronavirus threat, so much so, that it was record-breaking.
Placing Labour on 59 per cent of the vote (30 points ahead of National) and giving Ardern 63 per cent of ‘Preferred PM’ status (the highest ever received for a sitting prime minister), the future did, indeed, look rosy red.
But after two years of her government’s destructive Covid policies, regulations, mandates, and more recently, brazen public gaslighting about ‘disinformation’ (this from a government, in true Orwellian style, that once anointed itself as a single source of truth), the foundational fabric and trust of the country itself has been left in tatters.
Indeed, since having lost her party 24 points in two years, and losing 30 personal points as most-desired PM, Ardern’s public perception is at an all-time low.
It should come as no surprise, then, that she has found fresh sanctuary in an ongoing tour of the US, navigating the country’s most stringently ‘liberal’ — socialist — states where more adulating (and uninformed) crowds exist, jumping between Los Angeles, New York and Washington DC, where she’s soon due to meet with President Joe Biden at the White House, so long as one of his staffers remembers to fetch him from the basement.
Fawned upon as a ‘voice of reason’ for gun control, present as she was following the mass shooting at a Texas elementary school, Ardern nevertheless finds herself away from home at a time when her own country’s mass violence problem has spiralled out of control over the past few weeks where, in Auckland — the nation’s most populated metropolis — the city has had to endure both a sharp rise in targeted ‘ram-raid’ burglaries, and rival gang-perpetrated gun crime.
So daily has criminal activity become that the government has had to establish a $6 million ‘support package’ to help local business owners who’ve come under direct assault.
In a shock admission whilst speaking to popular radio show host, Mike Hosking, NZ’s top Police Commissioner, Andrew Coster, revealed that the majority of ram-raid assailants were ‘under the age of 15’, pointing, perhaps, to the complete lack of social cohesion Labour themselves have helped manifest.
No, children, it appears, at least to Jacinda Ardern, a self-appointed Minister for Child Poverty Reduction, merely a loose afterthought, highlighted no better this week by Julie Chapman, CEO and founder of KidsCan, New Zealand’s leading charity dedicated to helping Kiwi kids stuck in poverty, who claimed that the rate of child poverty is at its ‘worst level in 18 years’ because of poor housing opportunities (another flagship Labour policy), despite a celebratory press release from February declaring otherwise.
Similarly, just days after Ardern gave her commencement speech at Harvard University titled — if you can believe the gall — ‘Democracy, Disinformation and Kindness’, her Health Minister, Andrew Little, announced that children’s mental health services are ‘in crisis’, later stating that ‘our mental health service has been underfunded and run down for a long, long time.’
But whilst it’s true that Labour has been in power for five years, time enough to surely make some kind of positive impact, and while division and anger, quite justifiably, have reached boiling point as the trickle-down effects of discriminatory and disproportionate Covid policies national newsrooms across the land propagated, never forget that whatever you do, don’t criticise Jacinda Ardern, or else face the frenzy of their very own fourth-wave feminist factions.
So said Suze Wilson, a senior lecturer at Massey University, who once opined in aftermath of National pulling ahead in the polls back in March, that,
‘Referring to Ardern as “Cindy”, for example, infantilises her. Calling her a “pretty communist” not only reflects the sexist and misogynist view that a woman’s worth is measured by her appearance, but also suggests her looks disguise her real aims.’
Nicknames, ridicule, humour, irony, and satire, you see, simply signs that we all hold — men and women — an innate sexist bias that informs our political judgements, and not, as is usually the case, our informed judgements of her brand of politics.
Not to feel outdone, Eva Corlett, a Wellington-based journalist writing for The Guardian just last month, singled out the ‘few firsts for women in politics’ Ardern has helped ‘tick off’, including the birth of her first-born child while sitting as PM (heaven forbid we nearly missed out on that one), but also her appointment of Nanaia Mahuta as the country’s first female minister of foreign affairs.
Mahuta, it should be noted, currently finds herself embroiled in scandal, revealed exclusively by new digital site, The Platform, when, as a former ‘Associate Minister’ in the Ministry for the Environment office, roughly $90,000 was paid in government contracts to her husband and other family members.
But hey, what does government corruption matter when we got to experience the fanfare of a child being born?
Have something to say about it? Shh. Best to keep quiet or else, as Ms Corlett later speculates, you must be a ‘troll’ with machinations of becoming a ‘far-right terrorist’ in the same vein as Thomas Mair, the killer of UK Labour MP, Jo Cox.
And so the theme continued. Not one day after Corlett’s article was published, another popped up on Stuff online with the headline,
Why escalating misogynistic abuse of Jacinda Ardern is a national security issue
Once more, despicably, using the seven-year-old murder of Jo Cox to promote an actual conspiracy theory that those who lean to the ‘political right’ are on the verge of committing female-only genocide, author Michelle Duff, seemed to use her piece as a vehicle of catharsis, venting much of her own pent-up hatred in due course,
‘Two years into the pandemic, there is talk about the new normal.
Here’s what that looks like.
It is open misogyny, visible on every platform and supported and promoted by upvotes on Reddit, laughing emojis on Facebook, comments about “that woman” on LinkedIn, and someone who looks like your Aunty referring to the PM as “Cindy” and calling her a “c…”’.
Forgive me for asking, but does anyone else wonder why so many ‘journalists’ seem to despise free speech, because in New Zealand, at least, that’s exactly where we seem to have arrived? Oh, you like free speech, do you? You sexist pig. You like using laughing emojis, huh? Whatever you say, Timothy McVeigh.
Reaching risibly laughable heights just a few days ago, again for Stuff online, this time by Kirsty Johnston, the narrative toward laying the foundations for future online censorship through the doors of ‘misogynistic abuse’ couldn’t be clearer.
Taking time to interview Green MP, Golriz Ghahraman (the US version of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and UK version of Zarah Sultana), to get her perspectives on ‘social media abuse’, the article begins by tackling an online rumour about both her and Jacinda Ardern in which the assertion was made that they are, in fact, male men posing as females.
Pinch of salt stuff, no? The internet is hardly a coherent arena.
Ghahraman goes on,
‘The misogyny has gone so full circle that it’s come back to like, these aren’t even women…People were trying to prove we were men with close-ups of our necks to look for Adam’s apples and stuff. They were trying to prove that we were secretly men.’
What makes her comment all the more ludicrous, however, is that Ghahraman, herself, doesn’t appear to recognise what a woman actually is, yet remains happy to receive the attention to defend herself as one.
Like every good ‘leftist’ earning their ‘virtue-signalling’ stripes, Ghahraman couldn’t help but hitch a lift on the back of the recent Roe vs Wade US Supreme Court leaked draft opinion bandwagon, as she retweeted an ‘abortion rights’ post by notorious ‘trans rights feminist’, Laurie Penny, ending her retort with a warning to ‘stay vigilant’ where women’s liberties were concerned.
Challenging her known support for trans activism (no doubt a soon-to-be outlawed crime), I posited the thought that in her championing the notion that biological men can be identified not only as ‘trans women’ but ‘women’, she is simply nullifying her cause for the rights of born-females, who, as we know, now find themselves striving to win back their own sports and spaces from unfair intrusion.
Her reply said it all:
‘Pregnant people’; ‘trans people women and men who can in fact become pregnant’.
Call me crazy but the whole ‘taking a stand against misogyny in an interview’ thing doesn’t quite hold true when one’s own view aligns with validating a man’s right to inherit the history of womanhood because he says so.
‘Democracy can be fragile’, Ardern said at her commencement speech. ‘For years it feels as though we have assumed that the fragility of democracy was determined by duration…It ignores what happens, when regardless of how long your democracy has been tried and tested — when facts are turned into fiction, and fiction turned into fact, you stop debating ideas and you start debating conspiracy.’
Pray tell, what could be more ‘fiction turned into fact’ than believing men are women?
Gaslighting until the very end, Labour’s leader finished,
‘We are the richer for our difference, and poorer for our division.
Through genuine debate and dialogue, through rebuilding trust in information and one another, through empathy — let us reclaim the space in between.
After all, there are some things in life that make the world feel small and connected, let kindness be one of them.’
An undeniably assured finale.
Which makes it all the more reprehensible that these same intrinsic western values — choice, debate, compassion — became, just 24 months ago, the very first victims of Jacinda Ardern’s core Covid policy, backed to the hilt and emboldened by a now-apoplectic mainstream press.
It is their actions that have hurt a lot louder than our words. And we will be heard.