Voters are being gaslit all the way to next year’s election campaign
In her first clash with Finance Minister Grant Robertson, National’s newly-franked finance spokeswoman Nicola Willis accused the Government of gaslighting the public.
The turn of phrase was judged out of order by Speaker Trevor Mallard.
But it couldn’t be more relevant to the difference between lived reality and official rhetoric.
Voters are being gaslit all the way to next year’s election campaign. And the fault lies on all sides.
It is a pattern of disjunction seen across Government pronouncements, most recently that ballooning household expenses are not a ‘cost of living crisis.’ They also denied obvious complacency over the vaccine roll-out, and prioritised debt reduction while claiming to be improving well-being.
The line between fact and fiction has become thin. In their second term, Labour has become adept at downplaying their mistakes, discrediting those who criticise, encouraging misinformation and diverting attention from bad news, while wrapping themselves in meaningless cultural signals.
Look, Andrea Vance is completely right to point out the utter lack of real progress on the big issues that Labour promised to be transformational about, hell, that’s what The Daily Blog has been doing for the last 5 years!
To be fair to all the tribal Labour who are now wanting to cancel her on Twitter, Vance does point this attempt to mislead the voters is also being done by National.
B-U-T does anyone else gasp when Vance is attacking gaslighting and cultural virtue signals?
This coming from a journalist on a woke media platform that is all about culture virtue signals and gaslighting.
Remember Martin Devlin and how Stuff goaded him into a suicide attempt and cost him his job because Stuff lied and insinuated he had been involved in questionable sexist behaviour that never happened?
Remember the unofficial Stuff editorial policy is the Holy Trinity of woke Dogma.
In the name of the non-binary Mother, the non-binary Daughter and the monthly ghost, ALL white people are irredeemable cross burning racists (except Middle Class Marxists in Wellington), ALL men are rapists (except Middle Class Marxist Gelded Males in Wellington), and anyone supporting free speech is a uniform wearing Nazi (especially those smelly Lumpenproletariat who protested on Parliament’s lawns).
That’s Stuff’s unofficial editorial policy so Vance lecturing on self interested intellectual smugness is a tad on the nose is it not?
Vance is one of the best political columnists in NZ, but watching her accuse Labour of sins that Stuff publish every day of the fucking week is an audacity that sucks so much oxygen out of the room it can kill Covid!
Stuff lecturing on culture virtue signals and gaslighting is like Putin giving a sermon on Ukrainian Independence.
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Excellent read. Bang on.
Good work Martyn.
like Putin giving a sermon on Ukrainian Independence.
Which he does, here: https://theweek.com/russia/1011510/putin-quotes-jesus-to-justify-invasion-of-ukraine
It’s a good thing prostitution is now legal. There’s never the perfect media ‘platform’.
Journalists we admire have a living to earn and like other volk opt for employment wherever they see their best prospects.
I gave up my subscription to Newsroom Pro when Hickey and Fonseka left, and I’m fucked if I’m going to try and rank which media ‘platform’ I’ll throw my trinkets at next.
They’ve all got mortgages to pay. kids to feed, cravats to buy, mates to impress, the political and senior public service class to lobby, lives to survive, judicial muppetry and bullshit to navigate.
Apparently we’re about to be saved though. Kamahl Santamaria is on his way home, Jesus Christ is considering his future (mid life crisis no doubt), and the various media and journalist schools are tipping them out like flies and butterflies in various livery
tim, fine if they admit they’re just jobbing contractors of words who do anything for a buck…but when they pull the ‘media are special’ it makes me vom hard.
A wee correction Martyn, if you don’t mind…..it should be in the name of the non-binary chest feeder, the non-binary person who menstrurates.
…..just saying….
Agree Martyn and Vance has virtual signalled along with the rest of them. All these journalist sycophants are having their come to Jesus moments now that the polls signal it is time to whip up some more drama.
The crisis is not being able to turn crises into language miracles.
If the Key Government could turn a housing crisis into a “comprehensive housing plan” for years that only became a housing crisis with a change of government, can’t some backroom bullshitter turn a poverty crisis, a mental health crisis, a cost of living crisis, a not-enough-hands-to-do-the- work crisis into some magical wonderful things? As they say, ‘sex them up.’