Dear NZ Left – we will lose 2023 election if we allow woke activists to drag us into a culture war
Watching so many I respect on the Left tie themselves in knots trying to justify the violence at the protest on Saturday is disappointing and beneath the collective mana of the Left.
Woke activists claim Saturday showed, and I quote, ‘Pure Trans Joy’.
The rest of the nation however saw fanatics literally assault and chase a woman from the public square.
Let me be as clear as I can be to my fellow comrades of the Left, if we allow woke activists and woke politicians to drag us into a culture war, we on the left will lose the election!
Here’s why.
Social media proxification – hell is other people’s social media feed – Sartre
Social media algorithms have allowed for a toxicity of debate that is easily manipulated. A symphony of sweaty truths all screaming for attention and no one listening. Woke Identity Politics activists have seized the joy of having no gatekeepers to express how much they hate white men while alt right Incel Nazi’s have seized upon the joy of having no gatekeepers to express how much they hate everyone else.
Millennial woke culture sees macro violence coming from micro aggressions and piously police those micro aggressions with virtue signalling purity mantras.
Alt Right Incel Nazis see white persecution and create some bullshit replacement narrative to justify their powerlessness and feed that resentment online.
Most people are on social media and most people have a woke activist or Qanon fanatic in their social media feed screaming their feverish truths. While these activists certainly think they are speaking truth to power by endlessly calling people out for breaches of woke mantra or fake news anti Trump lies, to everyone else they are simply toxic.
People stop seeing the political party and only see the activist and in the end proxification means the activist becomes the proxy representation of the Party, and seeing as people have negative feelings towards the proxy, they turn from the Party.
Voters aren’t voting on policy, they are voting on who made them feel resentful on social media!
The political is the personal now means what hurts me personally becomes political.
Before social media activists could only face each other off at protests or through letters to the editor or talkback radio. There were constraints of interaction but with social media there are none and it turns out the freedom to insult and dehumanise others is more addictive than nicotine, alcohol and meth combined.
Wokeness has become a puritanical religion with none of the beauty – it’s not so much the personal virtue signal, we are all dicks at times, it’s the weaponization by algorithms that make it so dangerous and damaging.
The danger of identity politics is that it locks people intellectually into only defining the world through their skin colour, genitalia or sexual orientation – it also becomes toxically subjective and tribal where the only solidarity is with other people who share the skin colour or genitalia or sexual orientation- without shared truths and values, the 1% and their 9% enablers continue to divide the rest of us 90%.
The Left has lurched into woke ‘Social Justice’ territory which alienates more than it attracts.
Economic Justice does more than banning Gay Conversion, criminalising speech or gerrymandering the legal system to ensure anyone accused is found guilty, it redistributes wealth and makes direct provision to the cost of every day living. Beneficiaries and working class people care less about pronouns and the correct pronunciation of te Reo than they do about how to pay next weeks rent and power bill!
Pure temple doctrine divides & alienates. Broadchurch universals build solidarity.
I’m not interested in social justice wokedom any more, it is a minefield of competing schisms throwing vitriol at one another.
Twitter outrage is woke righteousness porn for the middle classes. A puritanical razoring where the self elected morality police publicly shame and cancel anyone for not using the language protocols of the conclave.
I am interested in Economic Justice and the immediate welfare of the poorest amongst us while providing immediate life condition upgrades.
Media proxification is leading to a fascist kaleidoscope of climate crisis entropy triggered by Covid, woke supremacy & ok Karen QAnon echo chambers.
In the end we will scream and beg for a leader who can save us from ourselves!
Comrades – Your enemy isn’t a woman who says stupid shit about Trans people in a public park, your enemy are the Banks, Oil Companies, Billionaires and Property Speculators who continue to pillage this country while we are bickering over the narcissism of petty difference!
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If you want economic justice, because it’s actually of the Left, you will not find it in the woke middle class Green Party, Bomber.
I’m not likely to vote for the Greens this election after being a member and even an official for a decade or more. A friend feels the same way, and another friend told me he has three or for people saying they are not like to support the Green Party anymore.
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In just one weekend, Green MPs managed to peeve off a huge number of potential white heterosexual male voters as well as a lot of women. It might be healthy for the party to spend an election cycle out of Parliament so it can have a good think about where it is going.
Same .Never an official , but paid up member and active supporter, donor ,doorknocker etc.Never again .It would be like the turkey voting for xmas if I voted green .
I and others quit the Greens with Davidson’s divisive anti- white diatribe at the Auckland vigil for shocked grieving and bereaved members of the Muslim community following the tragic murders in Christchurch. Will never return.
A lot of people are feeling alienated by the Greens and I don’t blame them, given the ruthless, post-truth dogmatism epitomized by Marama Davidson’s outburst. But the question is where else to go? Labour was handed a majority government in 2020 and they pissed it up against a wall. So if not the Greens, who’s a radical leftist to give a strategic vote to? Te Pāti Māori? TOP?
Danyl Strype Maybe TOP; I’d hoped the Maori Party for environmental issues but they’re too idiosyncratic; suddenly Winston Peters is looking one of the sanest politicians in the country; the implosion of the Greens and possibly Labour could provide the genesis of a new party. If voting was compulsory today, I’d consider mutilating my voting paper. It’s depressing, but Hipkins should nip the Alphabet issues in the bud pronto, apologise to all New Zealand women for being a twerp – apparently he said he’d have been joining the counter-protestors in Auckland if he’d had the time- to stop Keen and other women from having voices.
Violence? Was there violence? How many dead & injured? And who was fighting their way through the crowd of peaceful protesters? Ms P & her hired black shirts. They brought any violence that was present. They should have stayed home.
The only way out of this is a new party, supported by new allied press outlets.
There are no left-wing political parties, or left-wing press. It is either demagogy from Wall Street social-liberals (who are actually all to the right of Eisenhower), or same-old Wall Street conservatives (with the Trumpers being the more moderate ones).
The circus one sees at such small rallies and on the Internet is just that: a manipulated spectacle, involving tiny numbers of people.
None of the major parties have any kind of durable mass following. They are all widely hated. Eventually, they will all be gone.
Woke activism won’t lose the election for the left, but falling for the bought and paid for right wing media messaging attacking our brothers, sisters and those in between probably will.
And why knot tying justification for the violence? If anti trans supporters want to turn out and spread their hatred and bigotry without fear of physical opposition, they just have to turn out 10 times more people to make it a 50/50 fair fight.
I doubt the agitating Posie construct will be back any time soon, but get someone else and ask for a do over, just bring your people if you think you have the numbers.
Can you please provide some concrete examples to substantiate the following assertions:
1. The bought and paid for “right wing media”; and
2. The “hatred and bigotry” of the anti-trans supporters.
I don’t have to substantiate eff all, but I will nonchalantly counter with…
1. All of it, a common complaint from the left for decades. Is that not a thing now?
2. All over this blog, the standard, and the puddles of dribble at your feet.
OK. So you just made those claims up. Thanks for confirming my suspicions.
“Suspicions amongst thoughts, are like bats amongst birds, they ever fly by twilight. Certainly they are to be repressed, or at least well guarded: for they cloud the mind; they leese friends; and they check with business, whereby business cannot go on currently and constantly. They dispose kings to tyranny, husbands to jealousy, wise men to irresolution and melancholy. They are defects, not in the heart, but in the brain; for they take place in the stoutest natures.“ Francis Bacon
You write as if there is still a chance for the left.
That ship sailed years ago mate.
I defy you to give me a good reason not to vote ACT to sink the bloody Greens…
Long live the class war!
Adults, do what you want as long as you’re not hurting other people.
But – have you got school age children, Martyn? The inmates are already running the education asylum. The culture war within the Ministry of Education has been won and now their edicts are being implemented. The new relationships curriculum (which I have read cover to cover) includes all the trans madness, and it encourages the inclusion of its material outside specific health/relationships classes.
Our kids are at a state integrated Christian school until year 8 but from Year 9 in this provincial town, our options are limited. There’s nowhere to hide outside the religious bubble, and even within it you have to be careful. I pity the people who care about this and are anti-religion, they’ve got no choice but homeschooling!
Of the people we know with teenagers, half of them have either girls who identify as some variety of queer or boys who have dropped out of school to sit at home in front of an Xbox. Girls presenting as boys at their posh private religious schools, with the parents not being told what’s happening. This seems to be more a Wellington than provincial thing.
If adults want to go and identify as whatever, OK.
If they want to indoctrinate my kids … that’s a current workstream within MinEdu.
I’m a lefty from way back and … on this issue I don’t know who to vote for. Not the Greens, any more. Not Labour, anymore. The right aren’t compatible with my “lefty from way back” economic views. Who’s left – Winston?
” Our kids are at a state integrated Christian school until year 8 but from Year 9 in this provincial town, our options are limited. There’s nowhere to hide outside the religious bubble, and even within it you have to be careful. ”
Where will your kids work after they’ve graduated from the “religious bubble”?
Garnered from National MP Simon O’Connor’s remark in Parliament, (that he’s now apologised for) he might be sympathetic.
But as did all the Right in 2021, Simon too voted YES in a unanimous decision to pass the amendments of ” Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationship Registration Bill ” supporting LGBTQIA+ human rights.
Stop blaming the Left.
The Right are stoking this culture war.
The overwhelming majority of your “Woke” are simply wanting to quietly get on with seeing the implementation of long overdue social reforms to eliminate systemic bigotry.
The vast majority of these reforms only have positive consequences for the current sufferers at the sharp end of bigotry. They shouldn’t affect others, even you have personally recognised that.
The outrage is invariably unreasonable and illustrates the bigotry that is root cause of the problem. The louder the unreasonable outrage the louder the push for reform.
Martyn, if you have a problem with the actual effort to address bigotry, then speak up against that, it appears you just want business as usual so that no precious boat is rocked. A bit like Trotter, loud on advocacy but who invariably pulls his punches whenever anything transformational is proposed.
They are not left – they are woke liberals at best.