This is edition 2026/136 of the Ten@10 newsletter.
Hi all,
This is the Ten@10, where I collate and summarise ten news items you generally won't see in the mainstream media.
Enjoy!
1. Kindness Is Free: The Mocker’s Cut-Price Version of Jacinda Ardern’s Sermon
The Mocker — The Australian
- 💸 Canberra agencies spent ~$80k sending public servants to Ardern’s women’s-leadership love-in: Defence ~$13k, ASD nearly $30k — “feelings, not facts” on the taxpayer tab.
- 🎥 The Mocker’s free version: kindness branding since 2018 — hired a three-person taxpayer-funded film crew in NY for the empathy pics; Clarke’s five years of “unplanned” kitchen footage became the ‘Prime Minister’ doco.
- 👑 Proud socialist-republican accepts a damehood because refusing “would have been unkind.” Kindness: the non-negotiable principle, conveniently aligned with the brand.
- 📉 Hosking on A Different Kind of Power: “made an astonishing hash… quit, bailed out, now collecting money for retelling.” Five years left NZ with nothing in the tank, but the failure always blamed on nefarious forces/misogyny.
- 🎯 Takeaway: kindness may cost nothing for her — it cost NZ a great deal. And now Australian taxpayers are footing the latest invoice.
2. Is Te Reo Māori Being Saved — or Slowly Embalmed?
Dane Giraud (with historian Paul Moon) — The Many Ways I Let You Down / NZ Free Speech Union podcast
- 📉 Moon (Killing Te Reo Māori): the reassuring revival story may be part of the problem — honesty, not annual celebrations, is what a taonga deserves.
- 🧒 Kōhanga reo = real transmission success, run “on the smell of an oily rag” while politicians sprinkle speech te reo and applause instead of funding.
- 🌍 English is the global apex predator: films, music, gaming, social — adult second-language learners rarely pass it to kids unless it’s also the surrounding culture.
- 🏫 Compulsion hasn’t saved Irish or Welsh; forced school lessons won’t save te reo either; pronunciation-policing can frighten off anxious beginners.
- 🎯 Takeaway: necessity drove survival before; symbolic mandates, signage week and four ineffective policies bundled together still aren’t transmission.
3. The Green Party’s Election Reset
Grant Duncan — Politics Happens
- 🔄 Co-leaders at AGM signal “For All of Us”: away from shrill identity politics, back to material needs — “affordable lives, healthy nature, honest politics.”
- 📉 Polls below 10% early 2026 (as low as 7%), climbing back above 10% in June–July despite Opportunity pressure; must defend 3 electorates (2 renamed/reboundaried) + beat 11.6%.
- 🤝 Swarbrick: “We have to talk not just to each other, but to those we’ve never talked to before” — healthy post-polarisation instinct, if practised; Mamdani-style “affordability” borrowed.
- ⚠️ Still Labour’s captive partner: rule out National → zero post-election leverage; “bloodsport” ends except when Davidson “shames” Luxon — and NZ First is eating the anti-neoliberal critique from the right.
- 🎯 Takeaway: self-examination done, turnaround unproven; “all of us” vs four departed MPs’ ethics baggage is the live test. (Free portion.)
4. My Vote Needs a Home
Peter Allan Williams
- 💰 $60m to Fletcher’s Golden Bay Cement (ETS-driven losses) instead of ditching the ETS; Luxon swears Net Zero 2050 is still achievable against the Commission’s own numbers (78 → 20 Mt CO2-e).
- 🍼 Willis subsidising childcare for families earning up to $229,000 — welfare even Ardern/Robertson would struggle to match — plus parental leave to 30 weeks, keep the extra holiday + 10 sick days.
- 🛒 Finance Minister musing supermarket interference when Woolworths NZ runs <5% EBIT (~2.5c/$ vs F&P Healthcare’s ~20% NPAT) — structural separation is the silly idea.
- 🗳️ Fifteen weeks out: National = social democrats in disguise; NZ First buying banks/Super teams is crazy; ACT lost on life issues; a six-party menu with nothing worth ordering.
- 🎯 Takeaway: the redistributive “Marxists” were supposed to be the ones Luxon ruled out — at this rate, check the mirror.
5. Will the “Fat Lady” Finally Sing?
James Howard Kunstler — Clusterfuck Nation
- 📅 Fauci subpoenaed to the Rand Paul–chaired Senate HSGAC, Wed Jul 29; “Biden” pre-emptive pardon means no Fifth to hide behind — cue the world champ of can’t-recall at 85.
- 🧪 Central question: lab-made chimera vs pangolin jump; DNI Gabbard’s email paper-trail shows Fauci circle scrambling cover; Daszak/EcoHealth & the nullified Lancet letter.
- 🗣️ Apr 23, 2020 (per Fauci’s own email): Trump yelling at Birx — “You and Fauci have destroyed the country and the economy….”
- 🏥 The medical establishment went along with lockdowns, mRNA, vents/remdesivir, $35k-per-Covid-death incentives, ivermectin sneers — “first, do no harm” broken at scale.
- 🎯 Takeaway: only Morens indicted so far; the real open question is why Trump still hasn’t denounced the whole operation himself. (El Gato Malo: Fauci “monologues like a Scooby Doo villain.”)
6. Anthony Fauci’s Private Diary and Emails Show He Knew Lockdowns Failed, As Well As Pushed Masks With Zero Evidence
Ian Miller — Unmasked
- 📔 Rand Paul released diary entries/emails: the “objective, infallible” expert’s own notes cut the other way on lockdown failure and CDC masking “based on nothing.”
- 🎭 The Pope-ornament, CNN-glow myth of Fauci vs the narcissistic “I am the science” reality — critics were more right than even they thought.
- 🔗 Tied to Miller’s prior work showing mask mandates didn’t reduce COVID hospitalisations; consensus research money followed the approved narrative.
- 🎯 Takeaway: the receipts are now in his own handwriting — the shrine-building era is officially over. (Full text paywalled; free preview only.)
7. The Fauci Diaries
The Editors — The Free Press
- 📖 The private musings of the former top U.S. science adviser: a fame-obsessed official, with a mainstream media complicit in his untruths.
- ❌ Lockdowns and school closures — wrong. “Extremely unlikely” vaccinated transmit — wrong. Masks for 2-year-olds — wrong. “Wet market” natural origin with lab-leak criticism shut down — wrong.
- 🏛️ Paul subpoenaed him for Wednesday: the man who said critics “are really criticizing science because I represent science” now answers under the diary.
- 🎯 Takeaway: lab-leak is no longer heresy; the only question left is who pays for the record. (Free portion.)
8. Media Warn Of “Far Right” As Left Attacks Journalists And Democracy In Germany
Michael Shellenberger — Public
- 🥊 Jul 4 Erfurt: Apollo News reporters Aston & Marx hunted and beaten near the AfD congress after a 30k-protest, 2k violence-ready blockade; assailants remain free — imagine the coverage if the shoe was on the right.
- 🚫 Bundestag member Sichert barred from county-mayor race: committee cited his successful 2025 candidacy and use of his mandate — first-ever political ban, SPD/Green enabling law + 22-minute hearing, court fight to Lüneburg ahead.
- 🧠 Designation “substantial significance”/“proven right-wing extremist” by contested admin judgment — not a court-party ban (only Constitutional Court can do that) — yet it licences the mob (“new NSDAP”) to beat and block.
- 📰 NYT/WaPo/AP covered the protests, not the violence; Reuters photo without the story; public broadcasters cursory.
- 🎯 Takeaway: the “Trump effect” is real — candidate bans helped drive AfD to a record ~29%. Censorship, meet electoral math.
9. Parens Patriae — A Critique of Cecilia Robinson’s Phone and Social Media Ban Call
A Halfling’s View (David Harvey)
- ⚖️ B416’s “do both” (ban phones and social media) rests on unstated causation evidence — then immediately switches to precautionary prior restraint; you can have proof or doubt, not both.
- 🔁 Her substitutability point (a phone-less kid still finds TikTok) cuts against her own account-age rule just the same; early peer-reviewed Australian evaluation found no substantial under-16 effect.
- 🥅 Goalposts moved: “did it work?” becomes norms/pathways — unfalsifiable claims where circumvention = tighten enforcement and stagnation = give norms longer.
- 🧩 Unasked objection: age-gating every social user means an identity/biometric layer over the whole internet for adults too; French DSA friction and earlier consent-law technical failures omitted.
- 🎯 Takeaway: parens patriae is for the unprotected child, not a warrant for the State to out-parent every Kiwi parent on an assertion, an emotion and a roll-call of foreign legislatures.
10. The Inside Story of How Democrats Lost the Working Class
Evan Barker — The Free Press (excerpt from “Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative”)
- 🗳️ Lifelong Kansas City operative who once canvassed 40h/week for Obama: “On Tuesday, I voted for Donald Trump… the biggest middle finger I’ve ever raised to the party I’d supported for most of my adult life.”
- 🏥 Childhood with primary ciliary dyskinesia — hospitals as the rhythm of life — made healthcare her line; the same working class she fought for got left behind by the coalition it once anchored.
- 📊 Book out Tuesday; midterms approach as the progressive wing ascends — the drift she reported in Nov 2024 is now the electoral map.
- 🎯 Takeaway: when the party of “the middle-class family” starts governing for everyone except the middle class, operatives eventually defect for the reason voters did — with receipts. (Free portion.)
What our members are saying about Ten@10
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