Why Professor Kidman’s appointment to an Academy of Extremism is so problematic

ByMartyn Bradbury

We are entering a time of unparalleled domestic threats.

I am convinced there is a 50-50 chance of some type of political violence before or during the 2023 election.

Can you imagine for 30 seconds the horror and furious explosion within NZ culture if some feral Qanon Sheriff took a swing at the Prime Minister? The tinder dry political and cultural environment of this country would combust in a backlash that would border on civil war.

We are far closer to the precipice than we appreciate.

I think hate algorithms alongside the enormous mental harm caused by the forced isolation of this unique universal event is exploding in crime, domestic violence and self harm. I think the looming economic recession will be depression era levels of financial damage because of the supply side dynamics at play.

As bad as you think it is now, wait till we have a 10% inflation rate.

Desperate people are writhing in agony and going nuts.

That’s why it was so essential for NZ to NOT allow the Dumb Lives Matter fiasco on Parliament’s Lawns to metastasise into the dark treacle of hate that has oozed into the political subterranean.

That’s why it was so important to de-escalate because the bad faith actors who most certainly were there to recruit, were gifted a propaganda coup by Mallard’s spiteful childishness and stupid tactics.

What was the conclusion to the Parliament protests?

We radicalised 10 000 new recruits for the far right and as I have been predicting, this sudden blowback of previous actions is now being used by the SIS and GCSB for vast new powers and resources to come after the new enemies.

That’s why the appointment of someone like Professor Joanne Kidman to the National Centre of Research Excellence for Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism is so counterproductive and problematic.

This new Ministry of Truth will help the lidless Eye of Morder work out who the intelligence apparatus should focus on when it comes to domestic terrorism.

Professor Joanne Kidman is the public academic who has led crusades and social media Lynch mobs on great breaches of woke culture wars dogma.

There was her attack on the Listener 7 scientists…

…Then there was her fear a cat named by Auckland University was a hate crime…

…the good professor was also the one who called out and started the woke cancellation of Dress Maker Trelise Cooper for a dress called the ‘Trail of Tiers’ which Kidman argued was a play on the ‘Trial of Tears’, the genocidal forced march of 46,000 Native Americans between 1830 and 1850 by the United States federal government.

Hands up who thinks for one second that Trelise bloody Cooper had any idea whatsoever what the Trail of Tears was or intended to culturally appropriate a genocidal forced march?

Kidman wanted Cooper cancelled for a dress, that’s her threshold for hate and extremism, a dress maker who had no idea of an indigenous atrocity.

That’s the person in charge of an Academy on Extremism? Someone who is triggered by a dress and who used their platform to start a woke Lynch mob?

We need the National Centre of Research Excellence for Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism to advise the Eye of Mordor on whom to burn, we need surgical precision here, not someone who thinks a fucking dress is a hate crime!

When it came to spying on Muslims, Nicky Hager, Me, Greenpeace, Māori protesting oil drilling, environmentalists and the MANA Party, oh the State breached our civil liberties without blinking, but when it came to a white supremacist terrorist who used white supremacy keywords online, who was downloading extremist material online, who was generating complaints from other gun owners as to his behaviour on gun ranges and whom Police screwed up the gun licence of, when it came to all that, apparently our entire Intelligence Apparatus failed and didn’t have any idea whatsoever that a terror attack was being planned on our soil for two years.

How will this Extremism Academy succeed where they all failed?

This is the list of NZ security apparatus, many acronyms you’ve never heard of, who are supposed to keep us safe with mass surveillance powers from domestic terrorism…

  • The SIS (Secret Intelligence Services)
  • The GCSB (Government Communications Security Bureau)
  • The NSG (National Security Group)
  • The Police Intelligence Unit
  • The CNSN (Cabinet National Security Committee)
  • The ODESC (Officials’ Committee for Domestic and External Security Coordination)
  • The SIB (Security and Intelligence Board)
  • The CTCC (Counter-Terrorism Coordinating Committee)
  • The NICC ( National Intelligence Coordination Committee)
  • The IAD (Intelligence and Assessments Directorate)
  • The NRU (National Risk Unit)
  • The NSPD (National Security Policy Directorate)

…how about these agencies that cost us what, $200 million per year to stare into the abyss and ask ‘what if’, how about they start doing their fucking job and immediately identify the true threats to our political system rather than appoint virtue signals and pretend that’s a response.

This isn’t left wing or right wing anymore, this is about us! There is a rising tide of extremism and the conditions for making it worse are all collapsing in upon us. We don’t need the extreme force of the State brought on anyone other than real threats, in case we start radicalising those miss-targeted and speed up the process of extremism.

Once we start this rollercoaster you can’t stop it.

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30 Comments

  1. The appointment of Professor Kidman shows how out of touch and bizarre the likes of Andrew Little have become.

    I hear Andrew is a nice guy. Go home to your family Andrew. The job is doing your head in. We have a health staff crisis, the likes of which we have never seen and your re-structuring the health bureaucracy????? Stopped re-designing the restaurant menu man, the ship is sinking, deploy the life boats

  3. Reading her comments you have to wonder why Professor Kidman was chosen.

    Unprofessionalism and bullying seem to be represented by her public comments. “99% of university history professors need a curfew and ankle bracelet”. Don’t hold back, Joanne!

    Curfews and ankle bracelets?????? What to expect if the woke get there way – woke totalitarianism.

    And this is the leader of the new government woke terrorist woke task force.

    No wonder Natz are overtaking Labeen without having to do anything – Labeen have lost the plot this term and overloaded the country with these wokers.

    1. The new agency Whenua Taurikura (translates to a country at peace) is charged with promoting social cohesion and rooting out extremism. The appointment of a highly divisive extremist (Joanna Kidman) to run the show is bizarre/sinister. Her commitment to peace and cohesion? “Who am I as an Indigenous scholar; and, who are we as Native scholar-activists? Settler/Colonizer, we are your worst nightmare.”

      Not sure how much of a scholar or how indigenous she is but she sounds like someone agitating for civil war more than anything else. Make no mistake, these are committed activists with an agenda wholly at odds with their social cohesion claim; promoted and paid for by the the Prime Minister’s department. Thanks Jacinda.

      1. David George – Kidman’s quotes setting indigenous people aka Maori, in opposition to those she labels as Settler/ Coloniser is racial profiling, which is always inane, counter-productive, very divisive, and certainly far from scholarly.

        The PM’s radical advisers will know what Ms Kidman is like, and this may be part of the continuum which saw Trevor Mallard turning the hoses on parliamentary protestors, and Michal Whatshisname referring to them as a river of filth, i.e.the government complicit in turning people against each other, for whatever purpose.

        1. All factions within the colonial regime – National, ACT, Labour, Greens, Te Pati Maori – that is, all those who give their allegiance to the British Queen – perpetuate the damaging fiction that the defining feature of the nation is ethnic conflict between Maori and Pakeha, when in reality the conflict is between colonialism and rangatiratanga, with Maori and Pakeha on both sides, as they have been throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The nastiness will not go out of New Zealand politics until we have fully eradicated colonialism. Professor Kidman is doing nothing to bring forward that happy state of affairs, but neither are her critics.

      2. David George: “Not sure how much of a scholar or how indigenous she is…”

        She’s the daughter of Ian and Fiona Kidman. Her mother (well-known to my generation as a writer) is pakeha, her father was of Maori descent. As I understand things, Ian Kidman’s mother was Maori, his father pakeha. Ian Kidman was a remarkable person:
        https://i.stuff.co.nz/world/asia/98911733/champion-for-the-cambodian-community-ian-kidman-dies-85

        So: she’s indigenous, in the same sense as are all of the rest of us who were born here. I can’t attest to her being a scholar: judging by her tweets, she isn’t anything like as measured and careful with the use of language as were the academics who taught me in the uni system, many years ago.

        “….these are committed activists with an agenda wholly at odds with their social cohesion claim…”

        Yes. She comes across as a rabble-rouser. That’s what her intemperate language and complete absence of argument suggest. And in the present febrile climate, we need this sort of person in such a position like we need toothache.

        Reading her tweets, I’m reminded of Robert Mugabe. And everyone my age at least knows how that situation turned out.

    2. Pray tell me what the likes of Kirk Hope, Michael Barnet etc actually produce

    3. saveNZ: “…99% of university history professors need a curfew and ankle bracelet”.”

      Here’s the thing: isn’t she (or wasn’t she) partnered up with Vincent O’Malley? He’s a historian. I wonder how he feels when she comes out with that sort of hostile, unscholarly tosh? I wonder if it’s a case of a woman scorned. If you know what I mean….

  5. There is a scurrilous rumour doing the rounds that the good Doctor is related to Mr Ormsby- please say it ain’t so

  6. Here’s a 2021 tweet from the pseudo-academic in question (let’s be honest, she doesn’t pursue genuine scholarship) following Woke sociopaths in the US (recently critiqued by Glenn Greenwald) in deploying Critical Race Theory dogma & the resulting climate of fear & censorship to publicly attack close colleagues and hence entrench her own power & prospects (just a whiff of the self-serving motivation underlying many of the early 17C witch-hunts) …
    Prof Joanna Kidman tweet: “Wow, it never stops feeling painful when Pakeha colleagues erase your contribution to a project by removing everything you’ve written and putting their own words in place. How’s your morning going ?” … the highly manipulative performative martyrdom of the classic Vulnerable Narcissist … the kind of contrived melodrama much loved by her affluent Pakeha Woke allies, allowing them to indulge in yet another Purity Spiral.

    1. Swordfish. I think it’s possible that Kidman is just race-baiting, which seems to me to be a pejorative of her ethnic group, but denounced as racism if done by others. I have to say that it hasn’t been a norm within academia which has historically, theoretically, been open to new and different ideas and ideologies. The downgrading of the universities, plus New Zealand’s woeful anti-intellectualism and general dumbing down of the education system, probably produces sub-mediocre performances and the exiling of good brains. Ireland long ago did this to its poets and literati who survived to tell the tale, but here any direct import into government policy by mutilated thinkers does not augur well for us societally.

      I’m mentally running through our poets, and thinking thank God they survived, but there could be more book burning to come. Arnold Wall’s delightful 1912 “ A Century of New Zealand’s Praise”, a not-unkind poetical account of the probable prehistoric state of New Zealand, may now be my most dangerous possession.

      1. Snow White: “I think it’s possible that Kidman is just race-baiting…”

        That’s certainly possible. In my view, this sort of thing isn’t racism, no matter who does it. Racism is the preserve of governments. I’d describe what Kidman does as ethnic chauvinism. Still unlovely, of course, and reflects very poorly upon her.

        I must say, I’d be a bit surprised if she hasn’t been taken aside for a little chat, by the Dean of her department. If that hasn’t happened, maybe everyone is so intimidated by her that they don’t call her out for it? It’s undignified behaviour on the part of someone who purports to be an academic. As I said above, she puts me in mind of Robert Mugabe. And we all know how THAT situation turned out….

        “…denounced as racism if done by others.”

        Yes indeed. I think we’d be moderated out of the comment threads on this blogsite, were we to try it.

        At the time of the matauranga Maori frou-frou, I read a republished tweet from Dr Wiles (she of the pink hair who, mercifully, appears to have gone to ground), which was equally unscholarly, and also reflected very poorly upon her. So there’s a bit of it about, evidently.

    2. Yes, and the appointment of a chief witch smeller at all tells us the woke are completely blind to their own clergy filling the roles previously taken by old religion.

      1. Keepcalmcarryon. It’s worse than religion because religion has been on the ebb, generally, for the past 100 or so years, and in this country, officially a secular society, it has no political clout, unlike these woke extremists who have now infiltrated government.

        Where religion is not in retreat, it is the fundamentalist extremes in the ‘ Religions of the Book” – Judaism, Islam and Christianity – and possibly now in India, Hinduism, a historically tolerant religion, who are becoming political agitators, and all extremes, in my opinion, are bad news.

        The shooting down and labelling of those who differ, without engaging in dialogue about points of difference, or even identifying such points, looks to me like rabble rousing, and it should have no place in academia – or in politics.

  8. I still reckon that the unwanted music had a place but it was after offering to talk to short written questions and hold discussions that would have had to be run to time with one person speaking at a time.

    Before the talks you say if they are not able to be held and people be heard, we will play some of your unfavourite music. So let’s korero. There is an art in dealing with this sort of situation, put your fists in woolly gloves.

  9. A Professor using dickhead word in a communication? I don’t trust emotional street language trying to be thoughtful meaningful statements. No way can such a person be trusted to be balanced.

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