Rule 11: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it. Don’t try to attack abstract corporations or bureaucracies. Identify a responsible individual. Ignore attempts to shift or spread the blame.
Rules for Radicals https://www.citizenshandbook.org/rules.html
If you aren’t angry with the way the country is being run, you ought to be angry at the way twelve Kiwis and Kiwi organisations are being treated right now in 2022. Some New Zealanders’ lives are being attacked by a Labour Government, which is prying and snooping on its citizens’ lives and into their accounts.
Jacinda Ardern doesn’t have original ideas; she just copies other countries. She set up a Disinformation Project, employing people to search out individuals having a different point of view from the Government’s.
It has become obvious that this meddlesome spotlight is not simply to analyse what is being said on and offline and write a long report. Instead, it is designed to first identify people and groups and to then cancel them.
The ‘Aotearoa Dozen’ or the ‘dirty dozen’ are called “super spreaders”. The Disinformation Project have published their names, shamed and vilified them as disinformation conspirators. On a recent RNZ interview, Kate Hannah, the Disinformation Project director said:
“The key is they mustn’t be left unchecked as it could impact the election cycle.”
These people are not convicted murderers, like the characters in the Dirty Dozen movie, but are twelve very ordinary people or groups.
Many of us know them and are furious they are on such a list as they are decent and/or professional people.
Ardern wants them blocked, their accounts cancelled, and their public reputation trashed.
The twelve New Zealanders or groups named by the Disinformation Director are below, except they can’t even count! There isn’t a dozen, they have actually published thirteen names.
There are also twelve people in other countries who have been identified as ‘troublemakers. Ardern copies slogans of other world leaders such as “Build Back Better.” Here she echoes President Biden looking also for twelve sources of disinformation in his country. It is a remarkable coincidence that there are a dozen people here in New Zealand just like in the USA.
The USA ‘Disinformation Dozen.’ (At least they can count to 12.)
- Joseph Mercola
- Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
- Ty and Charlene Bollinger
- Sherri Tenpenny
- Rizza Islam
- Rashid Buttar
- Erin Elizabeth
- Sayer Ji
- Kelly Brogan
- Christiane Northrup
- Ben Tapper
- Kevin Jenkins
The NZ Disinformation Project started to work overtime around the time of the peaceful protest on Parliament’s lawn.
But the unprecedented surge in online traffic they observed around February’s anti-mandate convoy to Wellington, and the 24-day occupation that followed, surprised even them.
Across 140 Telegram channels and chat groups they track, subscriber numbers jumped from 243,341 at the start of the year, to 307,613 by February 11 – a few days after the convoy arrived at Parliament.
NZ Herald
The websites they focused on ranged from mainstream platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, to channels they claim are linked to the far-right, such as Telegram, Rumble, Odysee, Gab and Gettr.
“More people were watching disinformation accounts than were watching mainstream media,” lead author and Disinformation Project director Kate Hannah told Today FM.
“Twelve clusters or groups of individuals had become the superspreaders,” Hannah told Newshub.
Remarkably Sanjana Hattotuwa, a researcher at the Disinformation Project, compared the Wellington protests to the “storming” of the Capitol building, telling RNZ that he is seeing similar misinformation movements to those that helped spark the Capitol riots in the US in January 2021.
The anti-vax movement constantly spreads lies, rumors, and misinformation in an effort to scare people away from vaccination. I won’t repeat the lies here, because merely stating them gives them more credibility than they deserve. But the anti-vaxxers and the social media platforms that spread their messages must be stopped.
RNZ
This Labour Government is anxious about 12 or 13 effective content providers. Is it possible that it’s because these people and groups are right over the target and Ardern does not like it?
They should not be silenced; they should be debated. Isn’t sunlight the best disinfectant? If this Government is so sure that their narrative is the only correct one then why won’t they talk to these people or debate them in a public forum?
