OPINION
The most remarkable of the retiring leader’s staff is surely her comms team. There’s a large number of them, to be fair, but they still warrant credit for their efficiency in manipulating the messaging around her every doing, or undoing, and for their ability to disinfect, or poison, the narrative as necessary.
They’re in full fight presently, massaging misogyny as one of the underlying reasons for her retirement. It’s piffle, of course, to claim ‘unprecedented’ vitriol towards the lady: perhaps one of our mighty media might like to ask Judith Collins about that, or Ruth Richardson, or Paula Bennett for that matter. James Shaw was punched in the face for being James Shaw, likewise Rob Muldoon. Norman Kirk reputedly kept a pistol in his prime-ministerial desk drawer, such was his anxiety about his safety. Politics is personal, and some people are unhinged; there can be eruptions, but painting the current office-holder as a victim somehow, a special case, is not misogyny: it’s disingenuous. Deliberately so.
The truth is she likes to play victim; getting up close and personal enough sometimes to suck the attention away from real victims, if it has suited her brand. Claiming in the New York Times, no less, of “inadvertently” being exposed to footage of the mosque murders: “It was on autoplay.” The poor thing claimed that 8000 New Zealanders had not only seen the footage, but in the space of one single week had called the Mental Healthline requiring counselling over the contents. Our media never questioned those claims, extremely whiffy as they are. How come? Why the PM’s comms team of course.
Another example of their reach was in the week following the same incident when Stuff ran a story associating Ardern with the despicable murderer’s ability to get his hands on killing devices: Changes to gun law overseen by Jacinda Ardern described as ‘crazy’ the headline said, time-stamped 14:20, Mar 21 2019, but by 16:40, Mar 21 2019, just two hours and twenty minutes later, the headline had miraculously disappeared:
I told you they were good: they need to be, because she’s as fake as manufactured misogyny.