John Campbell is twice wrong.
He was first wrong when he claimed no one on the Left criticised news that there are now 480 families living in cars.
Less than a hour after Bernard Hickey posted, The Daily Blog had this as a headline…
480 families living in cars in 2023 compared to 102 in 2017
…and followed it up with…
…with The Daily Blog now relegated to the dirty alt-Left, we probably don’t appear on John’s privileged echo chamber reading list.
We are a fart at a Spinoff dinner party these days, so we’ll forgive John ignoring our criticism of Labour.
John is wrong a second time by claiming the rough beast of Bethlehem has only just arrived and destroyed the centre, because we again pointed out that the rough beast of Bethlehem arrived on Parliament’s lawns 2 years ago!
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
In the same week the protest on Parliament’s lawn was happening the Salvation Army released a report on dire poverty while house affordability rose to another obscene level while Covid assistance mostly went to the rich…
Wealthy nearly $1 trillion richer since Covid began – Hickey
An economic and political commentator says since the Covid-19 pandemic reached Aotearoa, the rich have become richer and the poor have become poorer – in part due to the Government’s policies.
…the Parliament protest may not be working class politics, but it was working class misery that was manipulated by the far right on the lawns of Parliament!
This is the Left’s fault!
Imagine if Labour and the Greens had done something meaningful over the last 6 years for the lumpenproletariat so that there wasn’t this rage to exploit by the far right in the first place?
What did Labour do? Pour billions into the pockets of property speculators and allowed unregulated capitalism to empower the duopolies, monopolies and oligopolies while giving their Professional Managerial Class Consultant matess free range to pass anything for their corporate masters.
The Middle Class Marxists want a revolution that knows its pronouns! It doesn’t want the smelly lumpenproletariat spoiling the aesthetics of their dinner party activism!
“Let the ruling classes tremble at Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of all countries, unite! Except in Wellington. Those Lumpenproletariat Nazis can go fuck themselves”
The focus of the political left over the last 6 years has been on worthy woke virtue signals as opposed to actual policy.
We have allowed Labour and the Greens off the hook for transformative change for too long, and yet act surprised when those most punished by the mandates rebelled.
Let me be as clear as I can be – I supported Jacinda and Labour for their magnificent Covid response! I salute the courage and skill to have navigated us through this most horrific of tempests and believe the mandates were the best way forward.
I believe NZ having some of the lowest death and hospitalisation rates is a public health victory of extraordinary magnitude.
Yes as a post-marxist anarchist environmental socialist I detested the State up in my grills as much as the next free individual, but I agreed with this curtailing of my civil liberties for the public good.
B-U-T we on the Left have failed to challenge the neoliberal economic hegemony that continues to devour so many lonely lives and fills them with such hopelessness that they are bait for Facebook hate algorithms.
To then go a step further and have middle class woke Twitter paint them all as Nazis seems a tad self conflated even for Wellington.
Let me be clear, I have zero truck with these feral lunatic’s arguments, I called it the ‘Dumb Lives Matter’ protest, hell I was attempting to goad them into voting me in their Nuremberg hanging list, but as citizens in . liberal progressive democracy, they have a right to protest and their rage has been manufactured by the Left’s lack of transformative change.
I have yet to see one interview with a protestor that after a terrible & painful personal mandate experience – that truly pulls at your heart strings – that then doesn’t veer off into some crazy demented conspiracy theory – there is no doubt this misery is being manipulated by far right propagandists with malicious intent.
If we didn’t want so many angry, frightened and hurt working class people turning to the Nazi’s, maybe do something meaningful about their anger, hurt and fear first?
This is all apparently news to John Campbell and his middle class chums.
Does anyone believe this protest on Parliament would have been as huge as it is if Labour had done something 6 years ago on being transformative on housing, poverty and inequality?
After every major pandemic, there is social unrest…
“So when our Sickness, and our Poverty Had greater wants than we could well supply; Strict Orders did but more enrage our grief, And hinder in accomplishing relief.”
That’s how the British poet George Wither explained a spreading rebellion against social-distancing rules. Seeing quarantines and lockdowns as unfair and tyrannical punishments, people were taking to the streets. The year was 1625, the place was London, the disease was plague.
…The peasant revolt in the 1300s, the civil unrest in the 1600s and the civil disobedience in the 1900s. The strict measures required to snuff out pandemics always makes the lives of the poorest unliveable, we are seeing the economic whiplash of Covid, especially amongst small business owners and those who were already vulnerable.
We now have the latest dishonesty from RNZ attempting to win a bullshit journalism award with their new middle class docudrama using all the same wailing voices from the Disinformation Project and Spin-off and the numerous anonymous Twitter wokies all refusing to acknowledge their own role in whipping up this cacophony of hate.
The RNZ middle class docudrama opens with lies. They claim the man who hit James Shaw was a conspiracy theorist when he was an anti abortionist, they are purposely misleading you so they can sell their podcast without acknowledging their own role in fermenting it!
The Wellington woke called for the military to be sent in because everyone was a ‘Nazi’.
The Wellington woke believe they are the vanguard for progress and that all their alienating Trans issues, all men are rapists claims and culture war on heteronormative white cis males makes them the goodies rather than the accelerant towards oblivion.
Feelings are the only currency now in our age of subjective rage and this election will be fought by the Hateful Right against the Unforgiving Woke to try and woo voters over.
The Hateful Right will vomit up racist rhetoric while the Unforgiving Woke will banish everyone who disagrees with their dogma.
If the Left want to win, our activist base need to shut up and stop driving voters into the arms of the hateful right.
Labour: Needs to push for a big policy vision that has an impact on resetting the social fabric: free dental, Nationalise ECE, free after school care, extend maternity leave. Something big.
Greens: Must dump the identity politics shit and just focus on their Wealth Tax and something visionary for the environment (solar panels on every school).
Māori Party: I think the 3 bottom lines in return for their Supply and Confidence vote should be broad universal policies that make an immediate material difference to the poorest amongst us.
1 – Remove GST from food.
2 – Tax the Banks with a financial transaction tax
3 – Follow Commerce Commission recommendations to set up new supermarket option using Iwi in the same way as 2Degrees was created as the owners with a focus to lower cost to consumers, raise wages and conditions for staff and pay more to suppliers.
Removing GST from food, taxing the rich with a financial transaction tax and creating a new supermarket chain around Iwi would build the Māori Party legacy status.
NZ First: We also now have NZFirst who are bringing Hobson Pledge fascists into power with anti-vax drs!
To the Right we have a National and ACT Government with a cavalcade of political circus freak reactive policies that knee-jerk so hard, that their reign of power would amount to nothing more than endlessly kicking ourselves in the face for 3 years!
To the Left we have a Māori Party more concerned with political theatre, a Green Party that has declared a culture war on heteronormative white cis males and a Labour Party you could give a red van to, call Pat and they still couldn’t deliver!
No one is actually looking at the real issues in front of us!
Nationals 3 biggest donors (Hart, Mowbray and Bolton) have a combined net worth of 15 billion!
The Bottom 50% of NZ has $23 billion.
The top 5% of NZers own roughly 50% of NZs wealth, while the bottom 50% of NZers own a miserable 5%!
IRD proved NZ Capitalism is rigged for the rich and Bernard Hickey calculates that if we had a basic capital gains tax in place over the last decade, we would have earned $200billion in tax revenue.
$200billion would have ensured our public infrastructure wouldn’t be in such an underfunded ruin right now!
There are 14 Billionaires in NZ + 3118 ultra-high net worth individuals with over $50million each, why not start start with them, then move onto the Banks, then the Property Speculators, the Climate Change polluters and big industry to pay their fair share before making workers pay more tax!
Culture War fights make all the noise, but poor people aren’t sitting around the kitchen table cancelling people for misusing pronouns, they are trying to work out how to pay the bills!
Bread and Butter cost of living pressures are what the electorate want answers to, and that’s where the Left need to step up and push universal policy that lifts that cost from the people.
The Commerce Commission is clear that the Supermarket Duopoly should be broken up and the State should step in and provide that competition.
We need year long maternity leave.
We need a nationalised Early Education Sector that provides free childcare for children under 5.
We need free public transport.
We need free breakfast and lunches in schools.
We need free dental.
We need 50 000 new State Houses.
We need more hospitals, more schools and a Teachers aid in every class room.
We need climate change adaptation and a resilient rebuilt infrastructure.
We need all these things and we need to fund them by taxing the rich who the IRD clearly showed were rigging the system.
That requires political courage and there is none!
No one is willing to fight for tomorrow, they merely want to pacify the present!
Tired, bruised and post Covid bitter Voters want solutions and someone to punch.
The Unforgiving Woke need to be quiet until after the election so that voters aren’t reminded what condescending pricks they are.
Thanks to intersectionism and woke activists, we have allowed feelings to become the only currency as objectivity and truth are but tools of oppression used by heteronormative white cis males.
Apparently this is all news to John Campbell and his gentrified audiences.
The good news is that the catastrophe speeding towards us from climate change will force us to work together whether we like each other or not.
Fortress Aotearoa is our only future. The inevitability of it by 2030 will demand co-operation amongst ourselves whether we want to or not.
We are now in the age of consequences, and those consequences don’t give a fuck about your feelings.
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