Of Prophets – True And False.

Billy Te Kahika Busted: In this age, the Internet has taken the place of God. And why not? It feels as powerful and omniscient as the Almighty, and seems to possess the same ability to reward the pious seeker with all manner of alarming insights and arcane knowledge. Jehovah is said to have communicated with Moses through a burning bush. Is a cellphone, laptop, or PC, any less preposterous as a vessel for the word of God?

WHAT DO THEY WANT? These motley collections of the angry and the ignorant in whose eyes the Covid-19 Pandemic is a “Scamdemic”. What do they hope to achieve? Some part of them, aware of their pitifully small numbers, must know that they have placed themselves beyond the comforting approbations of the tribe. How do they deal with such painful awareness? Human-beings are social animals: they draw strength and confidence from one another. So, to deliberately locate oneself outside the circle of the tribal firelight requires a motivating force of enormous power.

At the heart of their decision to step away lies an unshakeable conviction that they possess special knowledge. By “doing the research” they have discovered that the world is not as the Government and its “experts” would have them believe. They are convinced that these, the Powers-That-Be, mean them and their unenlightened fellow citizens harm. It is, therefore, their moral duty to call out these malign “mis-leaders”, and to bear steadfast witness to the “Truth” – no matter what.

This very old delusion (if ‘delusion’ is the right word) can lay claim to a surprisingly honourable cultural pedigree. For what else were the religious leaders and prophets of the past, if not a motley collection of individuals who believed fervently that they had been vouchsafed a vision of the Holy City, and had been chosen by God himself to rescue the sinful masses from themselves?

Nobody who has read the Old Testament will have the slightest difficulty in recognising the prophetic archetype: the outsider who descends upon the city from the wilderness: wild, unkempt, eyes ablaze with the certainty of God’s mandate; to stand before the King and rebuke him for his sinful failure to safeguard the welfare of the people.

In this age, the Internet has taken the place of God. And why not? It feels as powerful and omniscient as the Almighty, and seems to possess the same ability to reward the pious seeker with all manner of alarming insights and arcane knowledge. Jehovah is said to have communicated with Moses through a burning bush. Is a cellphone, laptop, or PC, any less preposterous as a vessel for the word of God?

Once the prophetic archetype is understood, it becomes much easier to comprehend why a group as tiny as the one which gathered outside the TVNZ studios in Auckland on Wednesday morning (18/8/21) did not feel in the least embarrassed. The prophetic narrative doesn’t work if the world around the prophet nods in enthusiastic agreement. The masses have to be so mired in sin and ignorance that they can no longer recognise the truth – even when it is laid bare before them. The evil mis-leaders, similarly, cannot slap their foreheads and cry ‘My God, you’re right! How could we have been so blind?’ They have to remain as steadfast in their vice as the prophets remain steadfast in their virtue.

An open confrontation with evil is critical to the prophetic narrative. One cannot be a true prophet in secret (or even online). It is crucial that the eyes of God, or, in this case, the cameras of TVNZ, witness his servant in action. Proof must be supplied of the prophet’s willingness to suffer for the Truth.

A man as well-versed in the Bible as the charismatic Billy Te Kahika knows that a true prophet goes Kanohi ki te Kanohi with the Devil, and that, in this fallen world, the Devil usually wins. Which is why, when the Police closed in upon him outside TVNZ he was at pains to calm his angry disciples, telling them that the officers were only doing their job. It wasn’t quite “Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do.” – But it was close.

The conundrum which presents itself to Billy TK – and to all others who aspire to be the mouthpieces of God – is how to differentiate the lies of the Devil from God’s truth. For the Devil is deceitful and delights in pretending to the wisdom and beneficence of the Almighty, while all the time leading the deluded down the primrose path to perdition. How can one know that what one believes to be the truth isn’t a big fat fib?

The greatest of all the biblical prophets, Jesus of Nazareth, wrestled with this question. This was his answer:

Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.

What manner of evil king – or queen – would encourage her “team of five million” to be kind and keep one another safe? What true prophet would feed evil fruits to his people? Only the Devil craves the chaos and division in which evil takes root. If your harvest is all thorns and thistles, Billy, then maybe you’re barking up the wrong tree.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 19 August 2021.

Getting Tough.

Not Mucking Around: With upwards of 800 dead from the virus’s resurgence in the Australian state of Victoria, leniency is not on Premier Daniel Andrews’ agenda. The Victorian Police are cracking down hard on the protesters the Australian press has labelled "Covidiots".

IMAGES OF POLICE, some in riot gear, others on horseback, charging into Victorian protesters have shocked a lot of Kiwis. We all realise that the second wave of Covid-19 has hit the Australian state of Victoria hard. So, when it comes to people deliberately flouting the rules of lockdown, we are not surprised that the patience of both the state government, and the overwhelming majority of its citizens, has run out. With upwards of 800 dead from the virus’s resurgence, leniency is not on Premier Daniel Andrews’ agenda.

How relieved our own Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, must be that she has not had to face anything like the death toll of her Labour counterpart across the Tasman. And, how thankful, that she and Police Commissioner, Andy Coster, have been excused the grim duty of cracking-down hard on illegal protests. At least until very recently, the New Zealand authorities have been able to secure public compliance exclusively through the power of moral suasion. Resort to force has, so far, been deemed unnecessary.

For how much longer, however, can this happy situation endure? After the mass rally which took place in Auckland’s Aotea Square on Saturday, 12 September, the Prime Minister, Director-General of Health and Police Commissioner must all be wondering.

Organised primarily by Advance New Zealand (Jami-Lee Ross) and the Public Party of New Zealand (Billy Te Kahika) the rally attracted somewhere between 1,500 and 5,000 protesters. In flouting the rules severely limiting the size of public gatherings under Level 2, their purpose was to demonstrate to the country their unwillingness to accept that the Covid-19 virus constitutes a threat of sufficient seriousness to justify either restricting personal liberty, or damaging the economy. These impositions, they insist, confirm the reality of a global conspiracy against our rights and freedoms. Evil elites are intent on enslaving us, they say. A tyrannical world government is planned. And, may God forgive them, leading New Zealand politicians are part of the plot.

The extraordinary danger posed by gatherings of such prodigious size, involving persons holding such extraordinary views, hardly requires spelling-out. The Saturday rally had the potential to act as a super-spreader of Covid-19. It may yet turn out to have been a catastrophe in the making.

What to do? Demanding Police action against political parties active in the current election campaign is a big ask. Especially so, given the official blind eye turned to the breaking of Level 2 rules by Black Lives Matter protesters across the country in early June.

The size of the ask grows even bigger when we consider whether provoking some form of Police intervention may not be part of Advance NZ’s and the Public Party’s election strategy. If your party’s claim is that the New Zealand Government has become tyrannical, then what better way of proving it than encouraging the ugly scenes unfolding in Victoria to be repeated in the parks and streets of New Zealand?

Commissioner Coster will also be wondering whether any such hard-line Police response can be assured of unflinching government support. After all, the historical precedents are not encouraging.

Confronted with a group of radicals and revolutionaries undergoing secret weapons training in Tuhoe country back in 2007, the New Zealand Police organised a raid on the tiny Bay of Plenty settlement of Ruatoki. The imagery of heavily-armed police officers, many of them kitted-out like soldiers, rounding-up women and children, generated a ferocious public backlash. In the weeks and months that followed the public relations disaster of the Ruatoki Raid, the Police found themselves politically and legally abandoned.

The purpose of the raid: apprehending potential guerrillas and terrorists; was forgotten. Assailed by the radical Left, Helen Clark’s government quietly distanced itself from the controversy. Many young journalists were content to relay the Left’s version of events uncritically. The Courts threw out key elements of the Prosecution’s case. The accused found themselves transformed into persecuted heroes, while the Police were portrayed as neo-colonial racists. The career of Howard Broad, the Police Commissioner of the time, and a strong advocate for integrating Treaty of Waitangi principles into New Zealand policing, was blighted by Ruatoki.

Commissioner Coster will not want to share his predecessor’s fate. If his officers are asked to enforce the rules keeping New Zealanders safe, then their Government must undertake to do no less for them.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 18 September 2020.

The Left's Lost Allies.

Rebels In A Wrong Cause: The truly frightening thing about Jami-Lee Ross’s and Billy Te Kahika’s success in persuading thousands of New Zealanders that Covid-19 is just another trick, just another way of stealing away their power, is realising just how many of them once marched at the Left’s side. Before recoiling in horror at where so many of their fellow citizens have ended up, and what they have found there, perhaps “progressive” New Zealanders should ask themselves how, and why, their former allies became so lost.

 

LET’S BE HONEST, last Saturday’s Advance NZ rally in Aotea Square was bloody impressive. If the Left had turned out a crowd that large they would have claimed at least 5,000 participants. Now, the last time I remember seeing that sort of number in the Square was when the CTU summoned its affiliates in support of a concerted national push for higher wages. It was a very well organised affair, with workers bussed-in from all over Auckland. By contrast, Jami-Lee Ross and Billy Te Kahika turned out 5,000+ of their people on the strength of not much more than a summons via Facebook and Instagram. It is now vitally important for the Left to understand what it is looking at: a large and potentially dangerous mass movement of the Right.

Such a thing has not been seen in New Zealand for a very long time. Perhaps the closest historical parallel is “Rob’s Mob”. This, too, was a populist phenomenon, whipped-up on the basis of lies and misinformation by an accomplished political demagogue. The huge difference, of course, is that “Rob’s Mob” was under the firm control and direction of the National Party and its leader, Robert Muldoon. It was a movement created out of whole cloth to challenge the Labour Party’s confident assumption that it remained the party of the people.

With the able assistance of the privately-owned news media – especially the right-wing tabloid “Truth” – conservative working-class voters were encouraged to look upon “Rob” Muldoon as their champion against the pointy-headed intellectuals and communists who were accused of taking-over the Labour Party. The result was a neat anticipation, in reverse, of what has happened with Jacinda. A substantial chunk of working-class voters were drawn across the political divide and into the camp of their traditional enemy. National mustered these defectors with the skill of a heading-dog. The crowds turning-out to Muldoon’s rallies numbered in the thousands. New Zealand had its own Trump when the man himself was still working for his dad!

What we’re looking at in the case of Jami-Lee Ross and Billy Te Kahika, however, is something quite distinct, ideologically and organisationally, from Rob’s Mob. Advance NZ and the Public Party are not under the control of any coherent political group. They are being mobilised by Te Kahika only in the sense that he is drawing together the loose threads of far-Right conspiracism – most them traceable back to Alt-Right social media platforms in the United States – and weaving them into a more-or-less coherent narrative of resistance to Jacinda Ardern’s government.

Once again, the historical parallels are uncanny. In 1974-75, the National Party was offered assistance (at whose instigation remains unclear) from Hanna Barbera – a studio dedicated to producing animated cartoon series for American television. The resulting animated sequences, cleverly embedded in National’s television advertising, burst upon the 1975 election campaign like a thunderclap. Their impact, especially the infamous “Dancing Cossacks” sequence, was devastating. Labour had nothing even remotely comparable with which to answer National’s devastating attack.

Forty-five years later, skilfully constructed media messages are, once again, making a forceful impression on the consciousness of groups who, historically, have identified strongly with the Labour Party. Sourced from the United States, these messages are not, like Hanna Barbera’s cartoons, the product of a shadowy collaboration between the National Party and American “friends” with a mutual interest in ridding New Zealand of a radical social-democratic government. Indeed, it is precisely against such “Deep State” machinations that the political messages of 2020 are directed.

The authors and repeaters of these conspiracy theories have no more interest in restoring the conventional Right to power than keeping the conventional Left in office. Their purpose is to disrupt the status-quo fundamentally: to bring the whole rotten edifice of elite power crashing down upon the heads of its corrupt political mis-leaders. Their loyalty is only to the Disrupter-in-Chief in the White House. But if, by helping Trump, they can also assist his New Zealand imitators and disciples, then where’s the harm?

Overlaying all these hymns of fear and loathing is, of course, the global Covid-19 Pandemic. Without the Pandemic, the febrile environment in which conspiracy theories can take root and thrive would – at least in New Zealand’s case – be lacking.

Interestingly, the formation of “Rob’s Mob”, and the populist campaign (National’s slogan in 1975 was “New Zealand the way YOU want it.”) which they did so much to propel forward, was enormously assisted by the fear and uncertainty created by the 1973 Oil Crisis. Massive increases in the price of crude oil had destabilised the hitherto booming economies of the Western powers. Ordinary people sensed that the whole post-war era of security and prosperity was coming to an end. Muldoon played upon these anxieties “like a piano”.

Now, many on the left will argue that Advance NZ’s 5,000 protesters pale into insignificance when compared to the 30,000 people who turned out against the TPPA, or the 50,000 who protested against the global lack of progress against Climate Change. This is true. Also true, however, is that a large number of the Maori who took part in the TPPA protest, seeing the free-trade agreement as yet another attempt to steal away of their power, were also at Saturday’s protest. Likewise, many of those who joined the climate change protests out of frustration at the lack of action from a prime minister who had promised to make the issue her generation’s “nuclear-free moment”. After so many broken promises – so many betrayals – it takes surprisingly little to convince people that the powers-that-be cannot be trusted. That all politicians lie.

The truly frightening thing about Jami-Lee Ross’s and Billy Te Kahika’s success in persuading thousands of New Zealanders that Covid-19 is just another trick, just another way of stealing away their power, is realising just how many of them once marched at the Left’s side. Before recoiling in horror at where so many of their fellow citizens have ended up, and what they have found there, perhaps “progressive” New Zealanders should ask themselves how, and why, their former allies became so lost.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 15 September 2020.

Is Billy TK Shouting “Fire” In A Crowded Theatre?

Fire-Starter? The claims advanced by BillyTe Kahika are false. The matter to be determined, therefore, is whether or not they are likely to cause panic. In ordinary times, the answer would be “No.” In ordinary times, the opinions of conspiracy theorists may be safely ignored. Indeed, in ordinary times, the state protects their opinions. Mr Te Kahika’s freedom of expression, as set forth in the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, would not be infringed – in ordinary times. But, these are not ordinary times.

 JUST OVER A CENTURY ago, an American socialist, Charles T Schenck, tested the boundaries of free speech. He and his fellow socialist, Elizabeth Baer, were convicted under the Espionage Act (1917) for distributing pamphlets opposing the conscription of young American men for service in World War I. The pair appealed their conviction to the US Supreme Court, citing the First Amendment to the US Constitution’s protection of Freedom of Speech, but their conviction was upheld. The celebrated American jurist and Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes, explained his decision in the following, famous, passage:

 “We admit that in many places and in ordinary times the defendants in saying all that was said in the circular would have been within their constitutional rights. But the character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done. The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting ‘Fire’ in a theatre and causing a panic… The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. It is question of proximity and degree.”

 The “theatre” Holmes refers to is, of course, the United States at war. Schenck’s arguments against conscription – by undermining the US war effort – were, in the unanimous judgement of the Supreme Court, a direct violation of the people’s will – as expressed in the US Congress’s declaration of war against the Central Powers. Context, argues Holmes, is everything.

 One hundred years later, and half a world away, the issue of free speech and the context in which it does, and does not, require the law’s protection is still very much alive.

 Earlier today (13 August 2020) in Whangarei the Leader of the New Zealand Public Party, Billy Te Kahika Jr, addressed a small crowd of people who had joined a protest against the Government’s latest efforts to control the community transmission of the Covid-19 virus. In the course of that address, Mr Te Kahika alleged that the Government’s actions were part of a preconceived plan to deprive ordinary New Zealanders of their rights. His speech reinforced arguments he had already voiced on Facebook earlier in the week. Patriotic New Zealanders, Mr Te Kahika advised his audience, were leaking information to him about the Government’s plans to deploy the armed forces against its own citizens. Very soon, he claimed, soldiers would be testing New Zealanders compulsorily for Covid-19.

 These are inflammatory claims, prompting the question as to whether or not Mr Te Kahika is guilty of “falsely shouting ‘Fire’ in a theatre and causing a panic”?

 Certainly, the claims advanced by Mr Te Kahika are false. The matter to be determined, therefore, is whether or not they are likely to cause panic. In ordinary times, the answer would be “No.” In ordinary times, the opinions of conspiracy theorists may be safely ignored. Indeed, in ordinary times, the state protects their opinions. Mr Te Kahika’s freedom of expression, as set forth in the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, would not be infringed – in ordinary times.

 But, these are not ordinary times.

 New Zealanders need only look across the Tasman Sea, to the State of Victoria, to understand the threat posed to society by an inadequate official response to any resurgence of the Covid-19 virus. Many people will become sick. Others will die. The local economy will be devastated. Any activity which threatens to facilitate and/or augment these evils must, therefore, be considered, in Holmes’s compelling phrase “a clear and present danger” to the common welfare.

 It is very difficult to interpret Mr Te Kahika’s activity as anything other than an attempt to impede, undermine and in every way frustrate the Government’s attempt to respond adequately to a proven resurgence of community transmission of Covid-19 in the city of Auckland and, quite possibly, across the rest of New Zealand. His unsubstantiated claims seem calculated to arouse fear, anger and hatred among those least equipped intellectually, emotionally and materially to challenge their veracity. When directed against those in authority, for expressly political purposes, such falsehoods have the power to cause immense harm.

 If Holmes’s important stipulation that “the character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done”, then Mr Te Kahika’s actions can only be described as extremely reckless and irresponsible. Conscious, that they could quite easily contribute to a significant lessening in the public’s willingness to comply with the Covid-19 regulations – and, hence, to the spread of the virus – the Government would be entitled to take all necessary measures to silence Mr Te Kahika and his  political lieutenants.

 

The only consideration militating against such a course of action is likely to be whether or not the silencing of Mr Te Kahika would be more, or less, likely to facilitate the very substantive evils it was intended to prevent. While the crowds he speaks to remain as small as Whangarei’s, it is probably not worth making a “free speech” martyr out of Mr Te Kahika – especially if such martyrdom constitutes an important part of his election campaign. The Government would, nevertheless, be wise to keep a close eye on the NZPP and its inflammatory leader, and both eyes on the size of the crowds they attract.

 My own principled attachment to free speech is well attested, and, just for the record, I believe the US Supreme Court was wrong to convict Schenck and Baer for opposing the draft. I do, however, concur entirely with Justice Holmes that freedom of speech gives no person the right to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theatre.

 Nor to undermine the efforts of our government to preserve New Zealanders’ lives in the face of a global pandemic.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 14 August 2020.