This is edition 2026/190 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. RODNEY HIDE: I asked AI to find Chlöe Swarbrick's worldview
Rodney Hide - Brash & Mitchell
- 🤖 After running Christopher Luxon’s worldview through his AI research assistant, Hide gave it the same job on Green co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick: her maiden speech, columns and interviews, quoted exactly.
- 🧠 Its finding: she has named her own philosophy. In 2017 she told the Herald: “I’m particularly interested in critical theory which is looking at the structures of society, figuring out if they’re unjust and seeking to recalibrate them.”
- ⚙️ In her view, systems explain behaviour. In 2018 she wrote: “Choice, and its sibling individual responsibility, are scapegoats for systemic political action.”
- 💰 Her economics has hardened, from business “privatising profit and socialising cost” in 2018 to this month: “Anything other than material redistribution is tokenism.” The programme is a wealth tax, public ownership and a state-owned supermarket.
- 🌿 Even her cannabis reform case rests on harm reduction and evidence, wanting “legal regulation to enable intervention”, rather than liberty or self-ownership.
- ⚖️ The tensions: she dismisses opponents’ “dogmatic moral judgment”, though calling things “not fair” is a moral judgment too, and ordinary people’s choices are blamed on the system while the rich are held fully responsible for theirs.
- 🌊 Her maiden speech line “Politics is water” means, in Hide’s reading, critical theory in one line: nothing is neutral, everything is power.
- 👑 Unlike Luxon, she knows what she believes and says so, which Hide says makes her easier to argue with and more dangerous. He calls her kind “the modern day Philosopher Kings”.
- 🔤 A postscript on the dots: placed over the “o”, they read like a German umlaut. Swarbrick told Vice in 2017 she put them there as a child learning to write.
- 💡 Takeaway: the day he finished, she announced the Greens would regulate AI. “My AI could have written her press release.”
2. RICHARD PREBBLE: Erica mania?
Richard Prebble - Brash & Mitchell
- 📱 Prebble says the real election campaign is taking place on social media, and those on the other side of the digital divide do not even know it is happening.
- 🎯 Even regular scrollers miss campaigns reaching tens of thousands of voters, because algorithms select posts we will like. He is sure they have him profiled.
- 🎥 With that warning, the best campaign posts he has seen are Erica Stanford’s.
- 🗣️ Talking straight to a camera and being authentic is difficult, and explaining a complex message is harder still. Stanford does both, he says.
- 💡 Takeaway: had the National caucus accepted Christopher Luxon’s challenge to replace him and chosen Stanford, “would we now be seeing Erica mania?”
3. The bourgeois war of annihilation against Israel
Brendan O'Neill - spiked
- 🕯️ New York mayor Zohran Mamdani attended an Israelis for Peace vigil on the third anniversary of 7 October and was heckled by radical leftists chanting “Zohran you can’t hide / We charge you with genocide!”
- 🚩 Some in the crowd waved the Hamas flag and hollered “We support Hamas”. Others chased him, screaming “Traitor!”
- 🪞 O’Neill says the mob was a monster of Mamdani’s own making: he refuses to call Hamas terrorists, and his anniversary statement spent a few lines on Hamas’s “crimes” before raging at length against Israel.
- 🌍 Across the West there were similar scenes: “Long live 7 October” in Amsterdam, “Glory to our martyrs” in Edinburgh, inverted-triangle salutes in London, and an Italian mob hailing the day as Palestinian resistance.
- 🟢 The Green Party of England and Wales voted for a proposal he describes as backing the annihilation of the Jewish homeland, put forward by a member exposed as a one-time “good friend” of a convicted Heathrow bomb plotter.
- 🛡️ With Hamas to the south, Hezbollah to the north and Iran to the east, he argues that agitating to dismantle Israel is agitating for the mass expulsion and murder of Jews.
- 📜 He accuses Owen Jones of erasing Jewish history by citing 1917 without mentioning centuries of expulsions or the Fifth Aliyah of 1929 to 1939, when Jews were fleeing the Nazis.
- 🏛️ He calls Israel “a wholly anti-colonial enterprise” and quotes Hannah Arendt’s warning that anti-Semitism opens the doors to totalitarian movements.
- 💡 Takeaway: the “pro-Palestine” movement, he says, is devoted less to the liberation of Palestinians than to the annihilation of Israel, and last week the mask slipped.
4. Niall Ferguson: Why Europe Is Burning
Niall Ferguson - The Free Press
- 🔥 French schools are burning, set ablaze by high schoolers who say they want more investment in education, while they fill the streets with burning garbage, wave Palestinian flags and clash with police.
- 🇫🇷 Ferguson notes the French anthem contains “Aux armes, citoyens!” and a cynical friend’s line: the first manifestation is to a young Parisian what first Communion is to a young Catholic.
- 🏠 It is not just France. Young people are in the streets of Madrid over housing, and in Brussels over government budget cuts.
- 📉 He does not see Eurozone Crisis 2.0, though the protests coincide with a French debt crisis that threatens to spread.
- 🏦 The ECB learned from 2011 to 2012 to stand ready “to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro”, and has the tools to step in if French bond yields rise another 100 basis points.
- 🧓 The subtitle sets out his argument: young Europeans should be protesting a system rigged for their grandparents.
- 🔒 Takeaway: the rest of the essay is for paid subscribers only.
5. Marco Rubio’s West First foreign policy
Jacob Reynolds - spiked
- 🏛️ With the Acropolis as backdrop, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio cast the West as a place of “fierce individuality and relentless ambition; daring exploration and invention; a yearning for discovery, for adventure, risk and glory”.
- 😨 Building on his Munich speech in February, he attacked safetyism and “a world of perfect safety, devoid of risk or failure”, calling European elites “polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline”.
- 🔥 Reynolds finds it resonant: timidity is among the West’s most significant challenges, and even billionaires who talk of the stars are often found begging for protection from their own AI.
- 🤔 The puzzle: American leaders since the founders have usually invoked Rome. Why Greece?
- 🧬 The answer, he argues, is the new right’s campaign against liberal universalism. Rubio said Western ideals are not universal: “they are the product of a distinct character.”
- 🗺️ That fits the 2025 National Security Strategy, which called the goal of “permanent American domination of the entire world” a mistake, leaving America leader of a particular civilisation.
- ⚖️ Rome is bound up with universalism and international law, so Rubio quietly relabels law, citizenship and Aquinas as a Greek inheritance, alongside “the unapologetic pursuit of national power”.
- ❓ Open questions: can a Christian country turn away from Rome, and can the West, a collection of states, become a civilisation-state?
- 💡 Takeaway: Arendt noted Greek glory also drove the swift decline of the city-state. The harder task is to give it “the Roman gift of permanence, without the universal empire that came with it.”
6. The only product the public had to prove unsafe
Tony Nikolic - The Spectator Australia
- ⚖️ Everywhere else in law the seller must show a product is safe, Nikolic says. During the pandemic Australia reversed that burden for one product: the Covid vaccine.
- 🇺🇸 On 1 October 2026 Florida’s Attorney General sued Pfizer and Albert Bourla under the state’s deceptive trade practices law, alleging it knew of a heart-inflammation signal in males under 18 and never tested whether the vaccine stopped transmission.
- 👷 Workers under mandates did not choose the product, could not read the supply contract and could not know who would pay if it went wrong.
- 🏛️ In Kassam v Hazzard the Court said vaccine effectiveness was not its function, then accepted the State expert’s evidence wherever experts differed. None of the plaintiffs’ experts was cross-examined. Nikolic acted in those cases.
- 🔬 The State’s own expert accepted vaccination “does not provide absolute protection against infection or transmission to others”, and the word “precautionary” appears nowhere in the 297-paragraph judgment.
- 📊 By 31 December 2025 the TGA held 1,052 fatal-outcome reports after Covid vaccination and has assessed 14 deaths as linked. A Drug Safety review put median under-reporting at 94 per cent.
- 👶 ATAGI now says “Not recommended” for healthy children aged six months to 17 years.
- 🔒 The Commonwealth indemnified manufacturers under contracts never released, and a 2021 Senate committee report on withheld documents got a response almost five years late.
- 💸 The Covid Vaccine Claims Scheme stopped taking claims on 30 September 2024 after receiving 4,735 claims and paying 396.
- 💡 Takeaway: he wants mandatory disclosure, a permanent no-fault injury scheme funded by those who profit, and the burden of proof to follow the mandate.
7. RODNEY HIDE: James Christmas delivers an early turkey
Rodney Hide - Brash & Mitchell
- 🎬 Act’s Tāmaki candidate James Christmas posted a 25-second clip telling Winston Peters to take “your socially conservative rebrand elsewhere but don’t bother doing it here in Tāmaki.”
- 🚫 Hide says the message was that no social conservative is welcome, a nasty comment from someone who would represent everyone in the electorate.
- ⚖️ Act was once split fairly evenly between libertarians and conservatives, a healthy tension over abortion, euthanasia, drugs and shop trading. He says it is now a strictly urban liberal party.
- 📚 He cites Alasdair MacIntyre’s Dependent Rational Animals: moral philosophy forgets the dependent are ourselves “as we have been, sometimes are now and may well be in the future.”
- 🧩 Murray Rothbard was at least consistent, Hide says, following his rule of no force but no duty of help all the way to “a flourishing free market in children.”
- 👶 Figures obtained by Family First’s Bob McCoskrie under the OIA show about 80 babies born alive after attempted abortions since the start of 2020, at 20 to 30 weeks, were not given life-sustaining care.
- 🏥 Todd Stephenson’s member’s bill would drop the six-month rule for assisted dying and let doctors be the first to raise it.
- 📊 About 52,000 people saw the clip, 55 liked it, and Hide found four supporters among about 125 replies. Peters’ reply got half the views and eight times the likes.
- 💡 Takeaway: Christmas co-wrote a book with Chris Finlayson on giving a river legal personhood. “The baby born alive after a botched abortion gets nobody.”
8. My “Dirty Work” Mention
Peter Williams - Peter’s Substack
- 📚 Williams could not find a copy of Nicky Hager’s Dirty Work in Cromwell, Wanaka, Queenstown Airport or Auckland domestic terminal, so a friend emailed him the chapter that mentions him.
- 😠 In Chapter Three, “Using Racism as a Political Tool”, Hager reports a 2022 Taxpayers’ Union speech in Invercargill and says Williams spoke “without any factual basis”.
- ✏️ The quote is wrong, he says. He asked why iwi and Māori deserve a “cut” of every litre of water, not a “cup”.
- 🤝 He has never met Gary Judd KC, but quoted his writing that Three Waters would confer on iwi and Māori “a direct attribute of ownership”.
- 🏗️ Three Waters would have folded assets from 67 councils into four entities with iwi-based boundaries, governed through half-iwi Regional Representation Groups, with no mention of financial or engineering skills for directors.
- 📄 His factual basis was He Puapua, which suggested funding rangatiratanga through “levies on resource use where Maori have a clear interest if not a strong claim to ownership, such as water.”
- ⚖️ He says that is unfair in a land where Article Three of the Treaty makes all equal, and that explaining it “is not racism.”
- 💧 New Zealand uses less than five percent of its annual rainfall. It is never short of water, he says, only of better ways to capture and share it.
- 💡 Takeaway: Three Waters and He Puapua were abandoned, and “We have to ensure no politicians ever try it on again.”
9. Elon Musk’s Enemies Make His Best Case
Liel Leibovitz - The Free Press
- 🎬 Alex Gibney’s new documentary Musk, released on Friday, runs three hours and 55 minutes.
- 💬 When Gibney asked for an interview in 2023, Musk told his 241.5 million followers on X: “Gibney is a douche.”
- 🤖 Refused an interview, Gibney built an animated AI Elon fed only lines Musk had said in public, and interviewed that instead.
- 🦹 Leibovitz says the result is a cartoonish Bond villain in a gaming chair, spitting decontextualised snippets to support the thesis that Musk will destroy the world unless stopped.
- 🌍 The poster shows Musk atop a globe he has cut in half with a chainsaw, and the film opens with the earth exploding in slow motion. “And that’s just the first five minutes.”
- 🚀 The subtitle sets out his argument: the film is so determined to expose Musk’s failings that it showcases the achievements that made him a titan.
- 🔒 Takeaway: the rest of the review is for paid subscribers only.
10. ERIC NESS: The climate emergency was declared. Now show us the bill
Eric Ness - Brash & Mitchell
- 🌡️ The World Climate Research Programme’s new scenarios lower the upper end of plausible fossil-fuel growth, with a preliminary high scenario of around 3.5°C by 2100 and no plausible path staying below 1.5°C.
- 📑 Treasury OIA documents show it was uneasy when James Shaw and the Ministry for the Environment suggested councils plan using only RCP8.5. Cabinet settled on RCP4.5 and RCP8.5.
- 💸 The Climate Emergency Response Fund began with $4.5 billion, which Treasury called a “down payment”. The Clean Car Discount paid $617.2 million in about 192,100 rebates.
- ⚫ Huntly burned about 870,446 tonnes of coal in 2024, around 85 percent imported from Indonesia, and its stockpile reached 1.16 million tonnes by the end of 2025.
- ⛽ Marsden Point supplied 65 to 70 percent of refined fuel before closing in 2022. Our need for petroleum did not disappear: “The refining just happened somewhere else.”
- ⚡ Chlöe Swarbrick wants to “electrify everything”, while MBIE models electricity demand rising 35.3 to 82 percent by 2050.
- 🔌 The Greens’ package totals about $3.1 billion over four years, including about $980 million for Kiwipower, but leaves out generation, transmission, lines upgrades and chargers.
- ❓ Ness wants the actual national energy plan: how much power, how much firm capacity in a dry year, and what replaces Huntly.
- 💡 Takeaway: Swarbrick says “Hope is not a plan.” Ness agrees, and says the answer comes with “engineering, timeframes and money.”
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