Your Daily Ten@10 - 2026/160

This is edition 2026/160 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. Haters and Wreckers.

Chris Trotter - Chris Trotter

• 🤝 The alliance between the Maori elites and New Zealand's professional-managerial class, Trotter says, grows stronger every year. Judiciary and tangata whenua are reshaping the law in ways that will be hard to unravel.
• 🏛 The Public Service's determination to decolonise and indigenise "Aotearoa" has so far withstood the National-Act-NZ First coalition's best efforts to reimpose administrative neutrality.
• 🎓 In schools and universities the political gravity of te Tiriti has become all but irresistible.
• 📰 New Zealanders alarmed at a concerted push for unmandated constitutional change will search the mainstream media in vain for a critical analysis of this Maori-PMC alliance.
• 🍾 Journalists, like their colleagues in law, medicine and a host of other professions, have "gulped down the 'progressive' Kool Aid by the cupful."
• 🛡 The effort to insulate the Treaty of Waitangi and the settlement process from what Sir Geoffrey Palmer loftily dismisses as "the ravages of extreme opinion" has been extraordinarily successful.
• 🔒 Paid after those two paragraphs. About 1,530 words. No named leftover headings on the free page. Do not invent the wrecking.
• 🎯 Takeaway: the free cut names the alliance. How it knocks the country down is behind the paywall.

2. DON BRASH: Janet Dickson to lose her license

Don Brash - Brash & Mitchell

• 📢 Breaking, Brash writes as a Hobson's Pledge trustee: Janet Dickson will lose her real estate licence. The Real Estate Agents Disciplinary Tribunal rubber-stamped the Registrar's refusal of an exemption.
• 🏠 Not incompetence, dishonesty or disregard of clients. She has sold homes for more than 30 years. Not a failure to keep up with compulsory law and practice training either. She did that.
• 🚫 The offence: she would not sit Te Kakano, a mandatory Maori-culture course. Associate Justice Minister Nicole McKee has said publicly that it lacks relevance to real estate.
• 📜 Brash: Te Kakano is compulsion to listen to political propaganda on the Treaty. A singular view of history. He likens it to the left's old struggle sessions.
• ⚖ The Tribunal agreed her moral and religious objections were an "exceptional circumstance". Then it said she could just sit through and not accept the learning internally. Turn up, listen, pretend.
• 🏆 Former REINZ Salesperson of the Year. Recently lost her husband. Nearing the end of her working life. Stripped over a 90-minute ideological mandate, while agents guilty of "seriously negligent" real estate work keep their licences.
• 🛡 Hobson's Pledge may take it to the High Court. They are also backing Far North councillor Davina Smolders, kicked off a committee for asking hard questions, and a Regulated Professions Neutrality Bill.
• 🎯 Takeaway: a regulator can end a 30-year career over a course even the Minister says is irrelevant. Brash: no hard-working professional is safe.

3. Universities - and how brainy people get duped

Grant Duncan - Politics Happens

• 🏫 Britain is having a George Floyd moment, Duncan says, except this time the media rather than the police are accused of brutality. Cambridge has damaged its own reputation. Professor Jason Arday, formerly of Cambridge, was found dead, apparently by suicide.
• 📝 A Turnitin report: plagiarism in his PhD. Plagiarised qualitative data in a journal article too. Cambridge had cited his claim that he could not speak until 11, or read or write until 18. Three autism and speech experts told the New York Times that rapid development has no precedent in the clinical literature.
• 🏃 Ultra-marathons, six in six days, and as much as 5.5 million pounds raised for charity: stories that appear exaggerated. The Guardian could not verify numerous claims. An embellished life helped make him Cambridge's celebrated youngest black professor.
• 📰 Newscord counted 249 articles in the 22 days between the allegations going mainstream and 14 August, the day he was found dead. Coverage intensified after he resigned on 5 August, having said he had reached the limits of what any person should reasonably be expected to endure.
• 💭 Two readings. A media lynching, even "institutional murder", a racist feeding frenzy in the words of Cambridge's Chancellor. Or liberal guilt: a DEI hire promoted far above his academic abilities, then exposed. Allegations of racism have been used to explain both the rise and the fall.
• 🏥 Duncan sets Arday beside Paolo Macchiarini, the Karolinska trachea surgeon. Seven of eight patients died. KI dismissed a 2015 misconduct report and extended his contract. Lesson: people believe the lies they want to believe. The fabulist ticks boxes the institution needs.
• 🎓 For Cambridge, Arday double-ticked. Diversity hire and an academic expert on diversity itself. Mild, non-confrontational talk on racism and decolonising science. He performed a reputational service.
• 📚 Duncan heard him. Talented, but not that talented. The PhD should have been sent back for overlapping sentences. DEI did not so much supplant academic talent as elevate diversity into a form of talent, reframed as "lived experience".
• 🎯 Takeaway: universities chase income and reputation. They compromised the values they ought to stand for. A crumbling institution needed a story. A man died inside it.

4. MURIEL NEWMAN: Gaming the election

Muriel Newman - Brash & Mitchell

• 🗳 The election, Newman writes, is on a knife edge. One side: lower taxes, less regulation, growth, more freedom. The other: parties that want to penalise success.
• 💰 Labour's 28 percent CGT is sold as hitting only investment property, including baches. History, she says, says the rules get tweaked. David Lange: the sort of tax you introduce if you want to lose not just one election but the next three.
• 🌱 Greens: Tax the Rich. Top rate 45 percent, 2.5 percent wealth tax, 33 percent inheritance tax, bright-line from 2 years to 10, company tax to 33 percent, 5 percent withholding on offshore profits. Maori Party: top rate 48, wealth tax, land-banking tax, bach tax, stamp duty. TOP: a land tax and a universal benefit.
• 🏠 The family home is not only under threat from tax. The Maori Party and the Greens have indicated they want private land opened for a new round of Treaty settlements.
• 🎭 The rort: Te Pati Maori wants supporters to split. Electorate votes to their candidates, party votes to Labour or the Greens. Aim: an overhang of six or seven seats to swing a Labour-led government.
• 📣 Rawiri Waititi is already claiming it. If TPM wins the seven Maori seats, the Greens hold 12-13 percent and Labour 34 percent, "we've got a change in government." The Maori roll, he says, will determine the next prime minister.
• 📝 Liam Hehir: all electoral systems can be gamed. This is a serious escalation, asking supporters not to give TPM the party vote. If extra MPs prop up a Labour government that otherwise fell short, the likelier sequel is abolition of the reserved Maori electorates.
• 📊 Maori now 27 percent of MPs against 17 percent of the population. Strip the seven reserved seats and they would still be 21 percent. The 1986 Royal Commission warned MMP plus Maori seats would distort proportionality and recommended abolition. Philip Joseph KC in 2008: anachronistic, separatist, reverse discrimination, overhang.
• 🎯 Takeaway: Newman wants the Coalition, if re-elected, to put the Maori seats to a referendum. TPM is campaigning not to get the party vote. The overhang is the point.

5. When did normal become 'far-right'?

Daryl Mather - The Spectator Australia

• 🧔 Mather is older Gen X, raised in the shadow of the Holocaust. The far-right, as he remembers it, was antisemites, buzz cuts, one of about five tattoos. People you looked away from in the pub.
• 🎤 Today, far-right is apparently anybody who disagrees with the Prime Minister. Raise migration, ethnicity or religion and you are not answered. You are treated as someone on a conveyor belt to extremism.
• 🚨 England and Wales: recorded rape from the low thousands in the early 2000s to over 70,000 in recent years. Grooming gangs, young English girls, groups overwhelmingly of Pakistani heritage, alleged institutional cover-ups for fear of offending communities.
• 📊 Sweden records the ethnicity of perpetrators. An army of apologists says it is not as bad as it looks. Mather: it is, even counting #MeToo, higher recording and changes in the law. Discussing this, he says, is not far-right. It is a reasonable concern of normal people.
• 🇦🇺 After the Bondi massacre of Jews, Home Affairs still lists Pakistan as a top-ten source for skilled and family visas, Afghanistan and Syria under the humanitarian stream. Official hate-crime counts: 47 for 2025. Executive Council of Australian Jewry: 1,654.
• ⚖ Albanese has piled sanctions on Israel, on Cabinet ministers, on West Bank settlers. Australia broke with the United States at the UN and still funds UNRWA after Israel identified more than 1,400 staff as Hamas or Islamic Jihad. No such action against Nigeria over violence targeting Christians.
• 🛡 Through YouTube and X, Australians can see the UK: two-tier policing, Rupert Lowe's Rape Gang Inquiry, the death of Henry Nowak, an attempted beheading in Northern Ireland allegedly by a 30-year-old Sudanese asylum seeker. Australia has no recall elections, no citizen-initiated referendums, no Bill of Rights.
• 🎯 Takeaway: a party on 32.58 percent of the primary vote, he writes, can drag a country to the brink of being permanently divided by race. Asking why is now far-right.

6. Andrew Tate's Secret Class To Blackmail Elites Gets Exposed

Drew Berkemeyer - The Daily Wire

• 🔐 A leaked War Room course, "Penetrating the Elite" or PTE, allegedly taught members to infiltrate the circles of the wealthy, exploit their vulnerabilities, and use compromising information to blackmail them.
• 💾 A security researcher passed more than 12 terabytes to Straight Arrow News and DDoSecrets. Not a hack, the researcher said: publicly accessible source code and files Tate's infrastructure had left exposed.
• 🕵 A slide: think of yourself as an intelligence officer, recruiting ultra-high net worth individuals instead of embassy staff. The objective, elsewhere: "Penetrate them, get paid."
• 🚨 Identify compromising sexual behaviour. Women as a common weakness. Taboo activities to establish trust. The material claims the techniques were used on a major Hollywood director, a famous UFC fighter, an Arab billionaire and a Fortune 500 CEO.
• 🚖 Andrew and Tristan Tate are in the Federal Detention Center in Miami, fighting extradition to the United Kingdom. Combined 59 charges alleged, including rape, sexual assault, trafficking and offences involving indecent images of children. Both deny wrongdoing and call it political persecution.
• 🛡 Code identified 235 privileged War Room accounts across seven access levels. Another course, "Operator", teaches bribing foreign officials, resisting interrogation and detecting surveillance.
• 🚫 The leak also describes controlling women: complete control of daily routine, clothing, friends and diet, and punishment for breaking the rules. A "Date Magnet System" categorises "exploitable types".
• 🏎 Court filings: the luxury cars and yachts on social media were rented, borrowed or promotional. Attorneys: they are playing a role. War Room now costs US$2,400 a year, down from as much as US$8,000. Separate proceedings continue in Romania.
• 🎯 Takeaway: the course sold blackmail as personal development. The leak did the exposing for free.

7. Everybody wants to go to heaven (but nobody wants to die)

Chris Trotter - interest.co.nz

• 🎵 An old saying from the American South, later a Loretta Lynn bluegrass standard. Trotter used it a quarter-century ago, when Peter Dunne charmed the worm. Fiscal, not religious: New Zealanders wanted the welfare state's core services, and not the tax to fund them.
• 🗣 The contradiction has only grown. Any party that tries to pay for improvements by raising tax is howled down. National, he says, is the first and most apt pupil in how to win a New Zealand election without really trying. Dancing Cossacks to John Key's "Show me the money!"
• 💸 Catch-all charge: Labour and the smaller left-wing parties know only one solution, "Tax and Spend". Never mind that taxing and spending is pretty much all governments do. The accusation never fails to draw electoral blood.
• 📈 Two generations have grown up believing 39 percent is about as high as income tax should go. They have no memory of 66 percent, or of tertiary education that cost next to nothing. They emerge with a student loan and deductions only the highest-paid used to face.
• 🏥 Depression and wartime austerity once made the bargain obvious. High taxes bought full employment, housing, health, education and infrastructure. Universalism told Jack he was as good as his master. The rich were not getting a free ride.
• 🛢 Vietnam, the oil shock, inflation and fiscal drag did for that faith. Free marketeers vowed to unleash animal spirits and slash taxes. The top rate fell from 66 cents to 33. The state was put on a bread-and-water diet.
• 🏔 Every politician knows that without new revenue New Zealand becomes "Fiji with ski fields". They know it. If they belong to National or Labour, they cannot say it. National cannot drop "No New Taxes". Labour keeps its fiscal promises as weak as possible.
• 🚶 Voters are trapped too. Crushed by living costs, they cannot afford the tax required to repair hospitals and support an ageing population. Luxon, Trotter writes, has no option but to play the Devil's henchman. Hipkins has no option but to let him.
• 🎯 Takeaway: everybody still wants the social-democratic heaven. Nobody wants to die for it.

8. Students aren't being told the truth about the British Empire

Bill Rammell - spiked

• 🗺 The empire debate is now one of the most polarising in British education. One side: parliamentary institutions, the rule of law, global trade, modernity. The other: violence, exploitation, and a long shadow over inequality.
• 🎭 What is striking is not that those views exist. Arguments about empire now sit inside disputes about national identity, race, belonging and how Britain understands its past. Students are asked to understand one of the most complex forces in world history, then urged to present it as a single story.
• 📖 Rammell, a former Labour minister, is CEO of Parallel Histories. The charity is launching an eBook series on the empire. Contested history, he says, should be taught as contested. Not a morality tale. Not a ledger of benefits against harms. Competing claims, tested against evidence.
• 🌍 The empire was never one thing. Continents, centuries, millions of people, competing motives. To reduce it to a celebration or an indictment is to flatten the past into propaganda. Students deserve better.
• 📜 From the imperial British side: a civilising mission, a commercial enterprise, a strategic necessity, national pride. From the colonised: dispossession, racial hierarchy, exploitation, cultural suppression, and also collaboration, adaptation, resistance and new identities under pressure.
• ⚖ Teach only the positive, and students cannot understand why the empire remains a source of pain. Teach only the negative, and they cannot understand why it was supported at home and abroad, or why its legacy is still defended. A single story creates fragility. Parallel stories create intellectual resilience.
• 📝 The method: competing narratives, each grounded in primary sources. Argue from one position, then switch. British politicians defending expansion as a moral duty beside Indian nationalists describing economic devastation. African leaders between collaboration and resistance. Caribbean voices on slavery, emancipation and identity.
• 🎯 Takeaway: the question is not whether the British Empire was good or bad. It is whether we trust students enough to let them decide.

9. USAID And UN Poured Billions Into Nepal For "Nature-Based Solutions" And "Gender Inclusion", Not The Sensors And Sirens It Needed

Michael Shellenberger - Public

• 🌊 A flood in Nepal killed at least 903 and perhaps as many as 5,000. NPR: "A melting glacier contributed to the deadly Nepal floods." "We can expect more like this." Twila Moon of the National Snow and Ice Data Center: no question climate change made it more likely.
• 📰 NBC: the collapse "was linked to climate change, scientists say." Glaciologist Jakob Steiner told CBS it was "the new normal" and that it is going to get worse.
• 🚨 Experts had warned of this disaster for years. The same river had flooded a year earlier. A cheap technical fix that was not in place, Shellenberger writes, would have saved most lives.
• 🔔 Sensors and sirens should have told people to walk uphill. Last week's flood came with no alert at all. Same as a disaster in 2025.
• 🇧🇩 Bangladesh evacuated nearly one million people ahead of a 2022 cyclone with mobile alerts, loudspeakers and concrete shelters, and lost fewer than 40. A cyclone of similar size in 1970 had killed 300,000 to 500,000. Nepal could have done the same. It did not.
• 🔒 Paid after the Bangladesh comparison. About 1,691 words. No named leftover headings on the free page. The public headline blames USAID and the UN for pouring billions into "nature-based solutions" and "gender inclusion" instead of sensors. The free cut does not show those spending figures. Do not invent them.
• 🎯 Takeaway: the free cut is the missing sirens. The billions in the headline are behind the paywall.

10. The Ali G haters are the dumbest people alive

Brendan O'Neill - spiked

• 🎬 Sacha Baron Cohen is bringing Ali G back in Ali G: Who Iz I?, a faux-documentary with dreadlocks, a rastacap, and Morgana Robinson as the knocked-up girlfriend. The trailer is being "slammed as racist."
• 🧑‍🦱 Ali G is Alistair Leslie Graham, a white bloke from Staines who says "Iz it coz I iz black?" O'Neill: it is a pisstake of tragic white men, not of black men. The trailer targets are white.
• 📧 Nearly 40,000 emails to cinemas begging them not to show it. X is full of people calling it blackface. The same crowd, he says, watches Blazing Saddles and asks if it is racist.
• 🎭 The old gag was always liberal guilt. Establishment stiffs so scared of looking uncool or bigoted they would nod along to any gibberish rather than call out an "urban" kid.
• 📺 Gen Z clip: horrified by Little Britain's Marjorie Dawes missing the Indian woman in the sari. They think it mocks Indian women. It mocks a tone-deaf middle-class woman. "Rarely have I despaired more over the state of our education system."
• 👗 Hypocrisy: a 6'2" man in a frock is "literally a woman" and you are Hitler if you say otherwise. "Blackface bad, womanface good." Radical Muslims rage at the fancy dress. O'Neill: sackface is a larger problem than blackface.
• ✡ Then the last ingredient: anti-Semitism. Green ink on Cohen the "scummy Zionist," maybe Mossad, a Muslim-hater because all Zio-Nazis are. "Scratch an Israelophobe, find a fascist."
• 🎯 Takeaway: reports of woke's death were exaggerated. Go see Ali G. Laugh with the Jew who makes prigs and bigots lose their shit. Booyakasha.

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