NZ First scandal – it is the culture backlash that’ll get you in politics now

Remember when feminist journalists and right wing pundits speculated wildly with insinuations that our Prime Minister, after everything you have seen of her since gaining power, not only knew about a  serious sexual assault, but also covered it up?

Remember how everyone shut up and quietly ignored that narrative?

This gotcha politics tends to happen during the 3 months of the election campaign.

It’s starting early this season.

Currently we have breathless claims NZ First has broken the law over donations.

Here’s what might happen.

NZ First will be investigated, it will be found that while the spirit of the law has been shat all over, everything is legal under the current legislation with its purposely designed enormous loop holes you can drive truck loads of cash through.

Winston will take this ruling and hold it above him as the great vindication of NZ First, it re-establishes his outsider status, triggers victimised older voters and helps him with a double digit election result.

Increasingly it is the backlash to over egged accusations that creates a cultural backlash rooted in the lived experience of others being overly offended to garden variety petty bigotries.

Our micro aggression policing has led to a culture ready to take a higher level of offence than the person accusing you of offence.

It’s like a one-up-manship of being more offended than the other. In the age of subjective rage, nothing is more important than your personal offence.

NZ First is apparently receiving an enormous surge of internal support in the wake of these claims they’ve broken the law.

In a culture triggered by ‘Ok Boomer’, the wider issues of who is funding our politics and what vested interest in policy that renders aren’t even part of the debate.