BLOGWATCH: Green Party Candidate attacks Peter Leitch – we will hit over 100 hours of news cycle!

By
Martyn Bradbury
-
9
26

It’s all on folks, after suggesting that we could now hit 96 hours of ‘Sir-Peter-Leitch-is-a-racist- butcher-and-we-should-hunt-down-his-family-because-a-23-year-old-cried-on-social-media-gate’ – a Green Party candidate has come out with even more explosive claims that Peter was a nasty vicious racist who wouldn’t keep employing her Dad because of his  gambling habit…

That’s because you are known for your ‘generosity’. You are known for being the guy who cultivates friendship and favour by making big donations, whether in cash or kind to the cause. And you and I both know that when my dad’s compulsive gambling habit had taken over his life (to the point where when he had no job and his second “coconut” wife had left him – yes I remember you calling her that – and he was bankrupt, again), you were one of the few people that gave him a job. Selling meat out of the back of his car for you. I remember that. I remember traipsing around Auckland with dad in his bomb and him pulling over to sell frozen meat to people. Hoping they might buy some so he could pay you back. I don’t know if the arrangement was under the table, but I suspect it was.

…how this is now playing out to voters in an election year who identify with Leitch and being told he’s a racist and his generosity is actually self serving and vicious could start become as culturally alienating as Brexit or Trump.

I think identity politics and the power to exert that message via social media was always the real fuel to this all along and having candidates of political parties jumping in this 100 hours of ‘Sir-Peter-Leitch-is-a-racist- butcher-and-we-should-hunt-down-his-family-because-a-23-year-old-cried-on-social-media-gate’ could stretch mercilessly through to the bloody Mt Albert by-election.

Next stop is demanding positions from Jacinda and Julie Anne Genter on this.

Come on NZ – I’ve hideously underestimated the ability of social media to lead the lazy summer news rooms of the corporate mainstream media, this could roll on until February!

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

9 COMMENTS

  2. This is not the sort of behaviour I would expect from a politician. The US showed us that people got sick of identity politics and personal attacks – this type of outburst could lose the Greens votes.

  3. “Identity Politics” is the terminal phase of Capitalist Alienation, in which workers are so completely isolated and impotent that they are finally and fully objectified and reduced to mere “labels” and “identities”.

    In this phase, all political action is constrained to three caricatured roles;

    1) “The Infantalised Victim”
    2) “The Evil Nazi Aggressor”
    3) “The Outraged Moralising Avenger”

    This little Punch and Judy Show is pretty much all that is left of Liberal political discourse in the major Western Democracies.

    Each of the political actors performing in this drama (even the “Nazi”, who is almost never an actual Nazi) are acting their part without any real understanding of how or why they are so unaccountably infuriated. Because unbeknownst even to themselves, they are actually raging not against the circumstances at hand, but against the hopelessness of their own condition.

    Being alienated from productive society, and being utterly powerless to influence anything in it, the only thing left that they can control absolutely; thoughts and words. And since their actual oppressors are so far removed as to be invisible, almost theoretical, and entirely inaccessible, they must rage at what is near to hand; their fellow workers and the occasional hapless Elite that stupidly crosses paths with them.

    In this ever shrinking political sphere, Words assume enormous importance, to the point where words are conflated with violence, called “micro-aggressions”, and even minor disagreements are fought as if they were existential struggles.

    Sadly, lacking any Class Consciousness, no amount of “avenging” on their part can ever assuage the resentments they feel.

    “Identity Politics” does not resolve any social tensions whatsoever. It explains nothing. If anything, it further exacerbates, enrages and inflames. When Identity Politics finally fails, it will degenerate into endless mob violence, met with equal force by the Right of politics, which is on its own parallel downward trajectory.

    The only way to arrest the frightening descent into this moralistic death-spiral is to restore Class Struggle at the centre of political consciousness.

  4. Oh come on Martyn. She didn’t write this as a Green party candidate. You are fueling the flame yourself.
    Leilani Tamu is a poet, historian, former diplomat and social commentator. That’s how she describes herself.

    • This aspiring politician is naive if she thinks she can say something and not have it affect her chances with the electorate because she is a poet. The public don’t distinguish between different personas – what she says will have an effect on how many votes she gets – a lesson she has yet to learn, it appears. Clinton found this out the hard way.

  6. I never liked Peter Leitch, the Mad Butcher, simply because his meat was not all that great, and his ads on radio, where he still is heard yelling, they turn me off.

    But while being successful and perhaps comparatively rich, he has at least helped a fair few people, he has made many donations all over the show, and actually tries to be fair and show some heart.

    Where would a Graeme Hart fit in, or a Robert Jones, I ask, where is their social do good example, where are their donations going, have they made any, and for what purpose, I ask?

    Yes, “Sir Peter” may have been a silly, perhaps a bit intoxitated, old man, saying the wrong things, for “banter”, but this now seems like a witch hunt to me.

    This will not serve the interests of those chasing after Peter Leitch, it will serve nobody, get back to business, dear Green Party pollies, this country needs urgent action, the world needs urgent action, no side shows for publicity and attention. Go back to your founding principles, and forget trying to get the better off voting for you, those that drive nice SUVs and keep living as if there is no such thing as climate change.

    There is a kind of BS element that has settled in, about environmentalism, it is becoming a marketing exercise, full of toke gestures, and to bend down to the market and commerce, that will not serve the Greens at all.

    So that is what I think of this, maybe Sir Peter Leitch has faults, but why go on about it now, why was this not written about earlier?

Comments are closed.