OPINION
Harry Palmer
Jacinda Ardern was one of 15 ‘iconic’ women selected to appear on the cover of the September 2019 issue of British Vogue. It was even thought by some that, following in the footsteps of her fellow lefty globalist Barack Obama, she might even be awarded the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts around the Christchurch mosque shootings. That was shortly before she rose to worldwide stardom on the back of her heroic (sarc) efforts to contain the Covid virus (a virus, by the way, that experts not on her Government’s payroll thought to be pretty harmless).
In 2020, she was listed by Prospect, a British current affairs magazine, as the second-greatest thinker for the Covid-19 era. In May 2021 Fortune magazine of New York made her top of their 50 greatest world leaders, while in 2022 Forbes had her among the 100 most powerful women in the world. In November 2020 Ardern took the bait of Harvard University’s 2020 Gleitsman (“Center for Public Leadership”) International Activist Award, who then reeled her in and, in May ’22, Harvard awarded her an honorary Doctor of Laws degree for contributions that “shape the world”. Subsequently piled on top of her existing ‘gifts’ from Harvard, and following her resignation as Prime Minister of New Zealand, were three Harvard ‘fellowships’:
Angelopoulos Global Public Leaders Fellow: Focuses on sharing experiences and insights with students and faculty.
Hauser Leader at HKS Center for Public Leadership: Similar to the above, with an emphasis on leadership development and dialogue.
Knight Tech Governance Leadership Fellow: Focuses on studying issues like technology governance, AI regulation and online extremism.
Good going, you would think, for someone with a Bachelor of Communication Studies in politics and public relations from the University of Waikato: the poor person’s equivalent to the more usual, but just as useless in real life, PPE (Philosophy, Politics, Economics) degree which comes with an almost cast-iron guarantee of a lifelong well-paying job at the expense of the taxpayer, wonderful private-health care, well-paying outside jobs and a ‘little pot of gold’ pension for when you retire.
On 4 April 2023 Ardern was announced as a trustee of the Earthshot Prize. She was selected for the post by Prince William, who stated that Ardern had a life-long (she’ll be 44 on 26 July 2024) commitment to supporting sustainable and environmental solutions.
The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University is thrilled to announce Jacinda Ardern as its first Knight Tech Governance Leadership Fellow. Ardern served as the 40th Prime Minister of New Zealand from 2017 to 2023. The fellowship begins this fall.
Berkman Klein Center
This announcement is dated 25 April 2023, three months after she resigned as PM. And still the pay-back and sycophancy piles up: Ardern was appointed a Dame Grand Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit (GNZM) for services to the state on 5 June 2023. Eat your heart out in your wee UN job Helen Clark!
You can’t tell me that Ardern earned all the eulogies and glittering prizes listed above for what she did for New Zealand. After all, didn’t she throw in the towel when she saw the writing on the wall (Book of Daniel, 5:5)? Jacinda obviously realised that the voters of New Zealand really didn’t like her and that both she and her Labour Party would be rejected at the forthcoming election. She calculated that she would lose her lustre for the likes of institutions like Harvard if she went down with the ship and became besmirched with the ‘loser’ tag, and so she jumped. Sure enough it came to pass and Chris Hipkins, Robin to her Batman, took over the job of Prime Minister of New Zealand on 25 January 2023. I submit that Ardern had, in fact, been working for others (rather than the citizens of New Zealand) – for global, supranational influencers who duly came up with that Aladdin’s cave of goodies in way of reward for her faithful service.
Harvard University has been down rated to fourth place in world rankings for the 2024 year. They have fluffy word-salad explanations for this, but it’s fairly obvious that ‘affirmative action’, which has morphed into the ideological ‘DEI’ or ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’ in recent times, is the biggest contributor to the the lowering of academic standards in many of the faculties and the university’s loss of reputation. Affirmative action and DEI are where the award of a university place depends more on the colour of your skin and degree of perceived ‘victimhood’, rather than on how academically good you are. If your skin is white, you are definitely persona non grata (unless mummy and daddy are donors to the university).
Harvard’s reputation has taken an even bigger hit in very recent times following the protests there that arose from Israel’s tough response to the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023. The resulting rioting and damage appears to have been condoned by one Claudine Gay, the 30th President of Harvard University, a black woman (am I even still allowed to say that?) of Haitian heritage with a political ‘science’ background, who has subsequently been accused of including work plagiarised from other authors in her PhD thesis. As you could probably guess, like those businessmen who are always wear a suit and a shaven head to convey their tough-guy approach and cover their penile inadequacy, Claudine also shaves her head and is a great fan of DEI policy. All of which the governing board of Harvard are apparently fully accepting of: they are currently backing Claudine to the hilt, even in the face of billionaire donors threatening to pull their funding, and warnings that they, the board, could be forced to resign.
So our Jacinda will feel pretty much at home in Harvard, especially with having Claudine as her boss. Her empathising so effectively with the families of those poor victims of the mosque shootings in Christchurch will no doubt be giving her street cred with the students who have it in for Israel.
Just three miles or so down the road from Harvard Square is the City of Boston with its Mayor Michelle Wu. Michelle is obviously a fan of DEI as well, because she threw an official party this last Christmas that quite specifically invited only people of colour and was paid for by the taxpayers of Boston, who are black and white and everything in between. And it looks like she’s got away with it, too.
It’s about 15 miles from Boston to Salem where, between 1692 and 1693, 19 people (14 women and five men) were executed after being accused of witchcraft in one of colonial America’s most notorious cases of mass hysteria. It looks pretty obvious to me that the seeds of mass hysteria still remain in the area of Massachusetts and that they sprout and bloom now and again as in those anti-Israel riots at Harvard. But no one seems to be up to dealing with their three resident witches – Claudine, Michelle and Jacinda – who are presumably up to no good.
Double, double, toil and trouble.