It ain’t easy being Green – Heteronornative white cis male James Shaw finally quits leaving hollow legacy

James Shaw resigns as Green Party co-leader

James Shaw has announced he will be stepping down as Green Party co-leader in March.

“It has been the privilege of my lifetime to serve as New Zealand’s Climate Change Minister for the last six years and as Green Party co-leader for nearly nine,” Shaw said in a statement on Tuesday.

“I’m very proud of what the Green Party has achieved over the last eight years.”

He said he would remain in Parliament to support his Members Bill, which would insert a new clause into the Bill of Rights Act stating that everyone has a right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment. The bill was introduced to Parliament in December and is yet to have its first reading.

He said the Greens had become party of government, with ministers, for the first time and had made political history by increasing its support at the end of each of our two terms – “a feat no other government support partner had achieved”.

It was especially gratifying that the Zero Carbon Act which passed with unanimous support across Parliament had survived its first change of government, he said.

James Shaw has gone.

He was blamed by activists tricked by Matthew Hooton into committing a vegan Bay of Pigs leadership challenge for being too incremental and while he can hold up some legislative achievements that have borne fruit and lowered our emissions, the tiny steps he made here were never up to the challenge that catastrophic climate change will cause.

If you thought being carbon neutral by 2050 was the solution, then you are part of the problem.

As a former Greenwash consultant at Coke-Cola during his time at PricewaterhouseCoopers and HSCB, James desire to sit down with groups that hated him to pass incremental change was dealt its cruelest blow when the agricultural polluters tricked him and shut down any real emission reduction in their industry.

His decision to go into power with Labour when they didn’t need him was foolish. The Greens gained little from being in power with Jacinda in 2020 and could have by staying outside Labour attacked their incrementalism and earned 15% at the election, the fact they only went up 4 points while Labour lost 24 points highlights how alienating the Greens under James had became.

In 2019, the climate strikes brought 170,000 people to the streets.

What did they bring in 2022?

Thousands of students take part in school strike for climate: ‘We want a future on the planet’

…and…

Photos: Hundreds turn out for climate strikes across NZ

…hundreds AND thousands.

Not hundreds of thousands.

What the hell happened?

As the planet continues to melt in a heatwave that is crippling economies and triggering unprecedented catastrophic weather events, our climate crisis movement has gone backwards partly because of the trauma of Covid, but also partly because of the vicious idealogical knife fights that are now being waged privately inside the leadership movements of these protests where woke activists are cancelling protest movements for crimes against middle class dogma.

In 2021, the School Strike 4 Climate Auckland Organisation jaw droopingly cancelled themselves!

This level of extraordinary idealogical purity currently gutting protest movements as the Green Professional Management Class interests merge with Green middle class identitarians have muted and culled off real popular support for almost all protest.

There is of course a fundamental problem with relying on young people to solve the climate crisis on their own! If we can’t as adults find ways to change things, how on earth can kids?

Additionally, if we as adults can’t force back woke identitarians from ruining the public debate, how on earth can the kids resist them?

We went from 170 000 on the streets to hundreds and thousands.

It’s reminiscent of the woke coup inside the Pride parade where that went from 30 000 participants to a couple of thousand, and the woke called that a victory!

The Right look for recruits, the Left look for traitors and right now for middle class identitarians, everyone less mentally ill than them are privileged and everyone more mentally ill than them is toxic.

There ain’t much to recruit in that.

That has been the cultural dynamic inside the Greens since 2016 when secret Facebook chat session screenshots are still floating around the internet to highlight how vicious those collusion purges were.  The coup attempt that saw Dr Kerekere pushed up the rankings was driven by a clique who considered Marama not woke enough!

The Greens under James were excellent at organising ‘Free-The-Nipple’ protests with militant cyclist vegan Mummy Bloggers, but were shit when it came to actually challenging the neoliberal hegemonic structure.

The Greens have all the offensive capacity of slow growing moss, but misgender someone, suggest female comedians aren’t funny or claim heteronormative sex might be pleasurable, and they’ll tie you to a chair, cut off your eyelids and then live stream your torture to your children.

Their pronouns are ‘I’ and ‘Me’.

Beyond woke virtue signals however, the Greens couldn’t get laid in a monkey brothel wearing banana costumes.

They’ve shot themselves so many time in the foot they don’t have a leg to stand on.

James was a decent man, probably too decent for NZ politics and it was abhorrent that he was attacked in public,  but he and his Green Party strategists caused more problems than they ever solved.

Don’t weep for James, I’m sure he’ll get a great greenwashing consultancy somewhere, weep for the Planet that has no real environmental leadership in New Zealand at a time catastrophic climate change is here.

Meanwhile the planet burns.

I’ll look at who the possible leadership replacements for James could be on Monday.

 

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