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Rodney Hide
Rodney Hide is former ACT Party leader and minister in the National-ACT Government from 2008 to 2011.
The difficulty of politics now is that the left have detached from reality. They believe:
- Trans women are women
- We have 10 years to save the planet
- That Māori didn’t cede sovereignty
- That we should trust the science
- That the river is a person
And so on.
The untruths get repeated without contest until accepted as truth. Propaganda works.
The untruths serve to consolidate power, divide the nation, and gaslight all opposition.
We also have identity politics. The left believe that what you think and say is dictated by your group. You can’t escape the group but you can be chucked out. We see that most commonly with Māori: a Māori supporting ‘one-law’ is oxymoronic and can’t be Māori.
Part and parcel of group identity is the victim-oppressor hierarchy. The exact order is difficult to discern but definitely white, old, men are chief oppressors. Their very language and argument keeps everyone else down and oppressed. Their very success proves they are oppressors. For the left, prosperity is zero sum: your wealth is at everyone else’s expense.
To soften the accusation of oppressor the word privilege may be used. You are still an oppressor but are made conscious of your privilege. That requires a modern day struggle session where you mentally bend your knee to your hitherto victim now your oppressor.
In the interests of justice, fairness, equity, kindness, etc., oppressors must be silenced. It is a time for victims to speak. That means the poor white truck driver must shut up. The Māori, female professor speaks. She Is the oppressed; he her oppressor. The individual circumstances don’t matter. Group identity determines everything.
The oppressed get to speak their truth. This is important. Their truth is personal to them. It is true to them. It cannot be contested. To debate is to perpetuate oppression.
We then have hate speech. Hate speech is what old white men say. Hate speech threatens the oppressed’s Health and Safety, and Safety always trumps freedom and so speech must be controlled either by the law or more efficiently by strict social norms. A career can be over in two minutes simply by stating what was an obvious truth just five years ago.
There is also misinformation and disinformation. Those with the wrong ideas threaten Health and Safety. Wrong information is a contagion causing people to make wrong decisions or to think wrong and hurtful thoughts. Once again, speech must be controlled, especially in public forums. Indeed, public forums must be rigorously policed.
This left is awash with paradox and hypocrisy. The intellectual leaders are old white men. The cult leaders are white and privileged. But none of that matters. The anointed only need to announce an untruth for it to be acclaimed.
The left’s detachment from reality has made astonishing inroads to control political discourse, legacy media, social media (bar X), universities and schools, the bureaucracy and the courts.
The takeover has been swift and total. The key has been the ruthless squashing of dissent. Dissenters are publicly denounced and destroyed with their heads displayed on spikes. That could be you is the threat. To speak out is to lose your job, your career, your business, your social standing.
There are modern day Red Guards sprinkled through key institutions ready to pounce and denounce. That leaves the members of all our key institutions either brainwashed themselves or scared.
For the moment, we have a centre-right government but to no great advantage. We look across their rank and file and ask: brainwashed or scared?
We are in a dark and dangerous time. Woke is too soft a word to describe the tyranny that rules us. Jacobin or Red Guard are closer. We have not hit bottom. The unreason has further to descend and the resulting tyranny is set to get more violent.
I say more violent because the suppression of speech is already violent. So too the enforcement of racial preferences. We have seen that violence at Albert Park with Let Women Speak. And there is a menace from Māori leaders and protestors on the ground.
But this is only the start. Once free speech and rational argument are surrendered, the next stop is physical violence. How else do political differences get resolved and how else is the exercise of power to be decided once free debate is lost?
For the moment we can still speak out through alternate platforms. We have X and sites such as this one. We just have to be prepared for the consequences. As the tyrants chillingly declare, free speech is not free of consequence.
We can also see the start of the tyrants wanting to control and dictate to alternate platforms. The main social media platforms such as Facebook and YouTube are lost.
We need to keep talking. Keep debating. You need to be telling me where I am wrong. And why. I welcome that. And enjoy that. It means we can still debate and discuss and learn.
But these are testing times. We need to decide what price we are prepared to pay to defend what we once took for granted: our freedom, our ability to think and to reason and to speak and to say that one plus one equals two.
We must be brave and support bravery in others in our small corners of the internet such as this one. We need to do so in our small groups in real life and online. We need to revel in our debate and disagreement. As incredible as it seems, we are tasked with keeping the values of the Enlightenment alive.
This article was originally published by Bassett, Brash and Hide.
