Your Daily Ten@10 - 2026/197

This is edition 2026/197 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. The Most Important Boring Election

Simon O’Connor - On Point

• 🥱 O’Connor watched the leaders’ and minor party debates and found them dull, rehearsed and full of talking points.
• 🗳️ Yet he knows how close this election is and how much rides on it. He calls that a strange paradox.
• 👔 His diagnosis is managerial politics. Leaders manage perceptions instead of arguing for what they believe.
• 🥗 Ask today’s lot a hard question and you get “a never-ending word salad that does anything but clearly state a position.”
• 😩 He reckons voters are worn out. Cost of living has dragged on so long that people doubt either side can fix it, so the coalition’s wins in education, law and order and RMA reform get ignored.
• 🤯 The idea that Hipkins and the old Labour crew are the answer “boggles my mind”, three short years after they were last in.
• 📱 Debates are now staged for TikTok clips. You can almost hear the leaders working out which answer will look best in a reel.
• 🐕 And the Greens and Te Pāti Māori? He says they did their best to derail their own campaigns by visiting the Mongrel Mob’s pad, then doubled down. O’Connor says both “frame almost every issue through a lens of grievance and victimhood.”

2. A Story Is Not Enough

Gary Judd KC - Thoughts from the North

• 📜 Judd starts with retired judge David Harvey’s piece on tour guides: one who can prove what he says, and one who says believe me.
• 🔍 Harvey’s verdict on stories you can’t check: “It is authority without accountability. We would dismiss it in any other field.”
• ⚖️ Judd holds that up against the Statement of Tikanga attached to the Supreme Court’s Ellis judgment. It says tikanga is passed down through wānanga, oratory, songs, chants and stories.
• 🤫 That statement also says some tikanga is tapu and kept to certain experts. Judd says that makes it even harder to verify.
• 🏛️ Yet Supreme Court judges, the Council of Legal Education and law academics want it treated as part of New Zealand law. He asks whether they have disqualified themselves from being taken seriously.
• 🚕 Then the Balkans. A Montenegrin student driving her dad’s taxi heard most Kiwis follow no religion and said: “You mean, you do witchcraft.”
• 🌊 Judd thinks she wasn’t far off. Councils now say rivers are ancestors, and Parliament has given legal personality to rivers and mountains.
• 🪄 His closing line: “Perhaps our taxi driver got it right when she asked whether we ‘do witchcraft.’”

3. RODNEY HIDE - Election Campaign Fact Check: Genocide

Rodney Hide - Brash and Mitchell

• 🗣️ Chris Hipkins says there is “an unfolding genocide” in Gaza. Hide runs the numbers.
• 📉 Europe’s Jews: 9.5 million in 1939. By 1945, 3.5 million were left alive.
• 📈 Gaza’s population was 1.35 million in 2005 and 2.2 million in 2023.
• 🏥 Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry says 74,494 have died since. Hide puts that at about one in thirty, and the count includes fighters.
• 🕊️ He says plainly that every death is a tragedy.
• 🧮 But a population that grew by two thirds and lost one in thirty, in a war it started, is not what genocide looks like.
• 🎯 Hide’s last word: “Hipkins should know the difference.”
• 🔪 My take? He would, if he wanted to.

4. RODNEY HIDE: I asked AI to find Winston Peters’ worldview

Rodney Hide - Brash and Mitchell

• 🤖 The last of Hide’s series. His AI assistant went through Winston’s maiden speech, big speeches, House answers and interviews, with every quote sourced.
• 🚜 Born 1945, sixth of 11, raised on a small farm at Whananaki. The Spinoff says he did his homework in an upturned water tank to keep out of the rain.
• ⚖️ His first win was for Ngāti Wai in 1975, stopping Labour turning coastal Māori land into reserves. He got into Parliament in 1979 by winning an electoral petition over Hunua.
• 💼 The 1979 maiden speech reads like a classical liberal: “we are our brothers’ keepers, not our bludgers’ keepers.”
• 🏭 Then the turn. Sacked by Bolger over Ruth Richardson’s Budget, NZ First in 1993, the winebox in 1994. This year he called the Douglas and Richardson reforms “a massive disaster”.
• 🇳🇿 The AI sums up his creed as “one people, one law, one flag, and all equal under it. We believe in a colourblind state.”
• 🏡 Its verdict: a Muldoon era economic nationalist whose worldview comes down to three words. Don’t sell the farm.
• 🎤 Hide’s own take is generous: “His best speech was his first.” A third of today’s MPs weren’t even born when he gave it.

5. France on fire: the nihilists against the normies

Brendan O’Neill - spiked

• 🗡️ In Toulouse the mob climbed the monument to Joan of Arc, put a hijab on her and stuck a Palestine flag under her arm.
• 🔥 O’Neill says that one scene sums up who is wrecking France: guilt-ridden rich kids, banlieue delinquents and Islamists.
• 🎒 The French call it the ‘boho-banlieue alliance’. Privileged leftists who think border controls are fascism, plus unassimilated kids from the estates.
• 🧑‍🎓 He sees a division of labour. Sorbonne students supply the excuses, banlieue youths supply the muscle, Islamists supply the holy war.
• 😡 He describes white kids rapping in praise of Mohammed Merah, who murdered a rabbi and three Jewish children in Toulouse in 2012.
• 📺 The BBC called the protests ‘mostly peaceful’. O’Neill calls the mob “the militant wing of insufferable entitlement.”
• 🇬🇧 Same story in Britain and the US, he says. The left has swapped the working class for anyone with a grievance.
• ✊ His warning about ordinary people: “They’re mostly quiet now. They won’t be for long.”

6. Left-wing violence

The Spectator Australia - leader

• 🇺🇸 The Spectator Australia picks up Marco Rubio’s warning about a ‘blind spot’ on left-wing violence.
• 🗯️ Rubio: “Far-left political terrorism is not a recent-day modern novelty. It is not a fiction manufactured by conservative politicians.”
• 📺 The BBC used ‘mostly peaceful’ for BLM in 2020. Last week it used the same words about the riots in Paris.
• 🎯 The leader lists the attacks on Trump, the murder of Brian Thompson and the assassination of Charlie Kirk. It says the killings got tacit approval from the chattering classes, even in Australia.
• 🏛️ It says the Albanese government obsesses over a shadowy far-right network while the violence Australia has actually seen is “almost entirely of the left”.
• 🇵🇸 The Palestinian flag is now at every leftist march, and the leader says it is turning up alongside the First Nations flag.
• 🩸 Independent MP Helen Haines has lost both legs in a horrific attack. A man has been charged and his motives aren’t known.
• 🐟 Then news that a dirt file on Haines apparently came from the PM’s own office. The leader’s line: “the fish rots from the head”.

7. Australia Wants the World to Follow Its Online Censorship Blueprint

Cindy Harper - Reclaim The Net

• 🌏 Australia’s Communications Minister Anika Wells wants a global coalition of governments to lean on tech companies.
• 🇳🇿 She has already held talks with Malaysia, the Philippines, Canada, Sweden and New Zealand. Worth asking what was said.
• 📜 Her model is Australia’s Digital Duty of Care Bill. It isn’t law yet, and it may not pass.
• 🗣️ Wells insists: “This is not about what people say on the internet. It’s about what platforms do on the internet.”
• 💸 The bill says “The cost of the action or measures must not be taken into account.” Fines go up to A$109.2 million.
• 🪪 Keeping under-16s off feeds means checking everyone’s age, and eSafety gets to run fake “sock puppet” accounts.
• 🤐 The 90-page bill never mentions free speech or freedom of expression.
• 🇺🇸 The Trump administration warns it “risks becoming a mechanism for viewpoint-based censorship”. Nationals leader Matt Canavan says no politician should decide what lawful speech is harmful.

8. A frenzied assault on French civilisation

Frank Furedi - spiked

• 🔥 Furedi says France’s riots are being wilfully misread as protests about schools or the cost of living.
• 🎭 Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the Islamo-leftist LFI has even compared them to May 1968.
• 🏛️ The targets give it away. Schools, police stations and city halls, including Limoges’ 19th-century city hall, gutted by fire.
• 🗿 In Marseille, masked gangs threw the bust of Marianne to the floor. Furedi calls it “a ritual of giving France a good kicking.”
• 🚩 The tricolore has gone missing. Rioters wave Palestinian flags, and one video shows students trashing a school draped in Moroccan flags.
• 🧭 He blames elites who, through their celebration of diversity and multiculturalism, “have forgotten what it means to be French.”
• 🏫 Schools and culture teach the young that France’s past is shameful, so many grow up less and less French.
• ⚠️ His warning: France “is in danger of losing many of its youth to a cause that is hostile to its very existence.”

9. Australia’s Social Media Age Verification Law Demands Aren’t Working, So It’s Going to Court

Ken Macon - Reclaim The Net

• ⚖️ Australia is preparing to sue Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube for failing to keep under-16s off.
• 🗣️ Anika Wells insists “The law is not failing”. Her line is that “platforms are failing to comply with the law”.
• 💰 The maximum fine started at A$49.5 million. Six months in, the government doubled it to A$109.2 million.
• 🔨 Since 12 September the eSafety Commissioner can summon people and examine them on oath. Refuse to answer and it’s 12 months in prison.
• 📵 In June the government said more than 5 million under-16 accounts had been removed, deactivated or restricted. Meta even uses AI to scan posts for birthday parties and school grades.
• 🧒 Kids are still on. Around 7 in 10 parents say their child still has an account, and a University of Chicago paper puts it at about 73% of 14 and 15-year-olds.
• 🏛️ Reddit and the Digital Freedom Project are challenging the law in the High Court in November.
• 🪪 Reclaim The Net’s point: the only way to enforce it properly is to check every Australian adult too.

10. This is DEFINITELY worth $2 trillion

Alex Berenson - Unreported Truths

• 💰 Anthropic is heading for a share float that could value it at up to $2 trillion. Berenson wants AI slowed down.
• 📐 His ninth-grade daughter Lucy asked its chatbot Claude to check a simple geometry problem.
• ✅ The answer is x = 20 and y = 15. Claude got x right and insisted y was 21.
• 👀 It decided angle 3 was 105 degrees, not 75. Berenson: “Anyone with eyes can see that angle 3 is in exactly the same spot as angles 1 and 2”.
• 🙅 Lucy corrected it. Claude politely replied “I’m keeping y = 21.” Then it ran “a sanity check” and doubled down.
• 🏳️ Only when she made it look straight at angle 3 did it fold: “Your original reasoning was right, and I’m sorry for the back-and-forth.”
• 🗺️ He adds that a map of downtown Philadelphia Lucy got from ChatGPT a couple of months ago was laughably wrong.
• 🎯 His last word to the AI giants: “They should start by proving their products actually work.”

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