John McLean
Citizen typist. Enthusiastic amateur.
I’ve just finished reading JACINDA THE UNTOLD STORIES, by David Cohen, with Rebecca Keillor.
The book is extremely well researched, compiled and written. The wordsmithing and content are sophisticated, but the book is still very readable. A wonderful wry humor runs throughout JACINDA.
But JACINDA is far more than a pleasant, amusing read. It’s also, deep down, a meditation on the nature of a human’s ‘identity’ and the nebulousness of humans’ perceptions of others.
It appears that Rebecca Keillor’s contribution to the book was mostly through research and interviews, and editorially, and that Cohen was the principal writer. I therefore, for simplicity, treat Cohen as the author. (Apologies, Rebecca, if I’ve got this wrong.)
The book comes to few conclusions about Jacinda Ardern. And this is entirely appropriate, because what the book captures, aptly and adroitly, is the real core of Ardern – that she exhibits little by way of discernible core (central ‘identity’) or enduring personal principles. It follows that, as a person, Jacinda Ardern is very hard to definitively analyse and impossible to come to absolute conclusions about.
The closest Cohen comes to reaching a conclusion on Ardern is that:
…there’s little evidence that she abandoned [Mormonism’s] broader belief system…[Joseph Smith] was both a prophet and a politician, and a compelling speaker, too. “Kindness”, Smith liked to say, “is our religion”.
Cohen doesn’t record that Mormon’s maker, Joseph Smith, was a self-serving confidence trickster.
I’ve previously speculated that Ardern is a religion recidivist, in the wider sense that she has adhered to a succession of belief systems that contain dogmatic articles of faith, stretch logic and are not firmly grounded in the real world (Mormonism-Communism-Wokery-Transhumanism...what’s next?).
SHE WHO SHALL NOT BE NAMEDJohn McLean 5 October 2023
There’s something decidedly chameleon about Ardern and the JACINDA book traces her transformation, throughout her time as prime minister. On ascending to the PM Throne after the 2017 election, she appeared pleasant enough and well intentioned – benignly vacuous, a student politician on steroids. But behind the Covid Podium, Ardern’s Altar of Truth, was an Altered Ardern, a relentless self-promoter with a Machiavellian/authoritarian streak and a penchant for producing commodious porkies whenever it suited her purposes.
JACINDA points out that Ardern has scarcely read a book. If the former prime minister is aligned with post-modernism and/or neo-Marxism, those terms are probably lost on her. She struggles to deal with complexity and nuance and, like a moth to the flame, is attracted to binary, simplistic ‘solutions’ – permanent eWadication of the CoWid Wirus, closed national borders, prolonged lockdowns, outright banning of oil and gas exploration, Carbon Zero, Road to Zero etc.
But although not a complex thinker, JACINDA correctly emphasizes that Ardern possesses a remarkably retentive mind, able to remember and fluently reproduce screeds of pre-prepared words – even if the screeds are typically word-salads.
Cohen nicely captures Ardern’s otherworldliness. Elfin in appearance, Ardern often appears to dwell in her own fantasy world. On her ascension to the prime ministership, Ardern decreed she would cure homelessly by having her administration construct multitudes of state houses. Completely lost on her (and, for that matter, her colleagues and administration) was that this lofty goal was only achievable with legislation to selectively suspend the application of New Zealand’s stultifying resource management laws.
Cohen subtly invites readers to ask themselves what sort of person cultivates an image of herself as one of the kindest humans on the planet. JACINDA questions the veracity of Ardern’s curated kindness, quoting from commentator Graham Adams:
One of the events that most damaged her reputation in that regard was the interview with NZ Herald’s Derek Cheng in 2021, where she agreed with a wide grin that she was creating two classes of people – the [Covid] vaccinated and the unvaccinated. Those who hadn’t been vaccinated would have restricted rights. Her kindness schtick was exposed for all to see in its hollowness.
Cohen ties Ardern’s debatable kindness with another less savory aspect of her character – her highly transactional control freakishness. JACINDA catalogues the former prime minister’s callous exploitation of Covid to try and control New Zealand’s media through the strings-attached Public Interest Journalism Fund and an exorbitant wall of pointless state-funded advertising on mainstream media outlets.
Likewise, the book records how the Christchurch Mosques Massacre was weaponized into Ardern’s “Christchurch Call”, a thinly disguised, globalized attempt to control social media channels and repress dissenting voices. JACINDA covers these disconcerting censorious Ardern activities with clear-eyed honesty.
The other distinctive characteristic of Ardern that emerges out of JACINDA is how diametrically differently she is perceived by different sections of society. Where Jacindamaniacs still sincerely see only an angelic, selfless paragon of a leader, Jacinda skeptics perceive a self-serving phony. With very few neutrals. JACINDA nicely captures Ardern’s peculiarly polarizing persona.
JACINDA reveals a choice selection of notable Jacindamaniacs. Fanatical Jacinda fangirls include:
- Margaret Motu, professor of Māori studies at the University of Auckland: “In her first speech, she acknowledged – she’s the first prime minister to do it – He Whakaputanga, the Declaration of Independence of 1835, and she acknowledged Te Tiriti as well…And I thought, oi, this is very good rhetoric.”
- Rob Campbell, self-avowed Marxist and plasticine careerist: “I think she actually was quite a uniting figure in her period in office until really right near the end.”
- Dr Siouxsie Wiles, pink-haired hypochondriac professor of microbiology at the University of Auckland: “…what New Zealand showed under Ardern’s leadership was that a country, a little country, could act in the best interests of more or less everybody, could act really fast and could do something quite dramatic for the collective good and really benefit from it”.
In the Prime Minister movie about Ardern, she’s repeatedly likened to explorer Ernest Shackleton. It’s a terribly strained attempt at congruence. Shackleton went back for his men. When the going got tough, Ardern simply sailed away from her native country for cushy little numbers in foreign lands. JACINDA explores these sorts of whacky narratives.
JACINDA will leave discerning readers with a firmer impression of Ardern as a woman who is excellent at politics, but not constructive leadership. Does she genuinely suffer the “imposter syndrome” she constantly claims? Can a person who genuinely feels like an imposter have a legitimate claim to global leadership? And is someone as suggestible, malleable and bulliable – remember the thuggery that the Labour Māori caucus inflicted on her – a credible candidate for global leadership?
In the end, JACINDA leaves a lingering impression of Ardern as an enigmatic product of strange times. A blank canvass repeatedly painted over. A person who’s more a performative actor (cosplay hijab wearer – she can be (Islamic) heroine, just for one day) than a serious leader. An individual who, for all her alleged charisma, is increasingly divorced from real people living in the real world.
In her recent appearance on the Graham Norton Show, Ardern announced she’d wanted to punch Simon Bridges in the face, while attributing her decline in popularity in New Zealand to a global shift to “more aggressive rhetoric”. The irony was lost on her.
In the final analysis, Ardern appears much more a pursuer of easy power and money that a genuine purveyor of her self-aggrandizing kindness. At the end of JACINDA, Cohen indicates he’s no particular fan of Ardern:
That religious creed, to “be kind”, became her watchwords in power. Yet that totemic kindness evaporated when faced with real dissent. The gap between those who believe “she saved us” in the pandemic, and those who say she destroyed their lives and faith in government, will never be bridged.
JACINDA THE UNTOLD STORIES is an insightful, at times delightful, read – for anyone who’s not just trying to forget all about her.
This article was originally published on the author’s Substack.
