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Monday, March 31, 2025

Ian Wishart: Open Letter to NZ Media on Green MP Benjamin Doyle


Since Friday, social media has been burning up with discussion of the Benjamin Doyle child images scandal.

For those not reading social media, you’ve probably missed it because only two media outlets had published anything on it by Monday morning – the Centrist on Saturday and The Platform.

The rest of the legacy media, who each continually claim to be trusted keepers of editorial independence, have published nothing. Normally quick to explode at the sight of an overripe banana in a school lunch, or an MP from a party they don’t favour touching a staffer’s arm, or an off colour tweet that some National MP posted when they were, like, 10, the mainstream media have stayed silent this weekend as allegations of child abuse swirl around proudly queer Green MP Benjamin Doyle.

It’s not the first time the MSM have been crippled in the face of Green kryptonite: the James Shaw fake Bachelor’s degree and uncertain provenance of his Masters degree comes to mind. And legacy media had to be dragged kicking and screaming for about a week, by Philip Crump’s NewstalkZB Plus and Centrist in the media, and virtually all of social media, to run the story about Golriz Ghahraman’s big day out shopping.

Now, another weekend has gone by with our traditional media paralysed in fear because this is an actual real story, not the opening of an envelope at a protest event about some slight to sensitive millennial or Gen Z sensibilities.

Despite state broadcasters RNZ and TVNZ having huge staffs and budgets to match, with editorial mission statements up the wazoo, none of them or their so-called investigative teams were brave enough to cover a breaking story which, at best, proves that Doyle’s future is no longer tenable as a spokesperson for the Greens on Early Childhood Education and sex education in schools.

I say “at best” advisedly, because Doyle’s decision to post a photo of his son sitting in his lap, captioned “Bussy Galore” – gay male slang for “boy pussy” – indicates incredibly poor judgement for an MP holding those portfolios. As #MeToo’s Ali Mau probably says in her new book tomorrow, child sexual abuse is no joking matter.

As it stands, that’s the political story NZ’s media could have run since Saturday, following Centrist’s lead. But they didn’t. Media were met by a wall of silence from Doyle and the Greens – no comment to any journalist who asked. And to their credit, media did ask. It’s just that they are so badly trained they don’t appear to know how to research or write anything other than a news release handed to them.

Without a news release from the Greens, the media felt powerless to report. Even though they could plainly see the Greens were locking down Doyle’s social media accounts, deleting up to 90% of posts on some and making them all private.

“Nothing to see here, move on,” intoned the Greens, and the legacy media obediently did so.

Lions of Journalism, the lot of them. Not. After all, even the fact of a Green MP’s social media being wiped is newsworthy, in a Watergate kind of way. Sadly, I suspect 9 out of 10 Gen Z reporters, if asked, would believe Watergate is a pool complex near the end of Auckland’s northwestern motorway.

But I digress. That’s the angle the media could have safely run with over the weekend to buy themselves time and credibility. But they didn’t.

Over the weekend, however, I’ve investigated further and I believe Doyle has messed up so badly that there needs to be a formal investigation launched immediately by Police and Oranga Tamariki.

You see, I believe the evidence now in the public domain indicates that Doyle is dog-whistling pedophilia. At worst, I believe there is now sufficient reason for authorities to investigate the welfare of his child.

For the sake of clarity, I am not saying Doyle “is” anything more than a political buffoon whose social media posts make him unfit to hold child portfolios in my opinion. I’m not saying that Doyle “is” a pedophile. I am saying however that in my view the smoke threshold on this story has reached the point where you send in a fire crew to check.

Here’s why I believe that:

Doyle, touted as NZ’s first openly non-binary MP, maintained official social media accounts as a Green MP and spokesperson on Early Childhood Education, and also relationships and sexuality education in schools. But he also had a separate personal Instagram account under the name @BibleBeltBussy.

“Bussy”, according to Google AI, is a portmanteau of “boy” and “pussy”, in reference to anal sex. A Men’s Health survey of queer men found 70% knew the word meant “boy pussy”, while 15% thought “butt pussy”.

In October 2023 Doyle uploaded a photo of a young boy, believed to be his son, sitting in his lap. Nothing odd about that, except the photo caption: “Bussy Galore”.

Swap places and imagine a father with a young daughter in his lap, captioning it “Pussy Galore”. He’d be lucky not to have Oranga Tamariki knocking on his door that very night.

But that was just the first red flag. A second picture in 2020 shows Doyle kissing the boy on the lips in what seemed to be a more sexualised pose. Most parents don’t kiss their children on the lips, to avoid sending the wrong message about adult/child boundaries. For Doyle to do it, and have someone with a camera take it, and then post that photo online risks sending messages in the same way that posting pictures of your child naked in the bath is now avoided.

A third picture, appearing to show a child standing at the edge of a garden, is captioned by Doyle simply with the words “Swipe to see a [eggplant emoji]”.
 

Click to view

I shouldn’t need to tell you what the upright eggplant emoji is modern code for. So Doyle appears to be making the deliberate and provocative link between a child wearing pink crocs (decorated with rainbow and daisy Jibbitz) and emoji slang for an erect penis.

A fourth picture, dated October 2023 shows a child at the beach, and again the caption “Bussy Galore”.
 

Click to view

One can argue, with all these, that Doyle as a vocal queer activist is making a joke. If so, it’s in bad taste, as the sexual abuse of children is anything but funny, and it has backfired. Because when you combine it with some other disturbing elements, the whole thing reaches a threshold that I believe leaves no option but consideration of the child’s removal and a formal investigation, as happens to dozens of ordinary families every week.

Let’s look at those elements.

HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT?

Item One is Doyle’s pronoun emoji on social media before he cleaned it up. The emoji he chose was a blue spiral, the so-called cyclone emoji.
 


Global internet security company ActiveFence says the blue spiral in social media chat is used by pedophiles to signal themselves to like minds.
 
Click to view - Source: ActiveFence

ActiveFence makes the point that emoji code evolves as law enforcement catches up. An earlier version of a blue triangle spiral found by the FBI a decade ago became the cyclone spiral.
 

Click to view

To illustrate the point, if you type the spiral emoji into an Instagram search right now, you will get a warning that it may lead to illegal material.

Doyle’s supporters on the Left argue that analysis of emojis is just a witch hunt of unsubstantiated conspiracy theory, but in my view, they overlook the obvious: Doyle is an activist who communicates through carefully chosen emojis in his posts. Tagging a child photo with an eggplant emoji means something to Doyle.

In 2018, America’s Stop Abuse Campaign noted that most abuse takes place at the hands of someone the child trusts:

“We know that most child sexual abuse is committed by someone the child has a significant trusting relationship with, and that money rarely changes hands. In other words, child sex trafficking, which is the sexual access to a minor for money, is rare…

“So, where do the creepy cartoon symbols come in? Originally, in the early days of social media and chat rooms, they were supposedly used so that pedophiles could identify each other. This makes logical sense; pedophiles use social media to connect with other pedophiles, to provide mutual support for battling their attraction to children, and discuss ways to meet, “groom” children, subvert law enforcement, and exchange child pornography.”

Yet, as Wired magazine reported in 2020, much was hidden in plain sight:

“As technology giants, law enforcement and organisations such as the Internet Watch Foundation have become better at detecting abuse content and dismantling the networks behind it, the offenders have evolved their behaviour to avoid being caught. It’s a horrendous game of cat and mouse. To stay one step ahead, paedophiles have long-used secretive code words and phrases to disguise the conversations and sharing of abusive content. Without knowledge of this language, it was impossible to decipher much of its meaning from everyday chatter. Until now.”

That was in April 2020. By August 2020 thousands of pedophiles had been arrested globally after revelations they were using the Cheese and Pizza emojis to secretly communicate their interest in Child Porn to other like-minded collectors.

In Doyle’s case, a photo is posted of his young boy drawing a picture. Doyle includes cheese in the shot and in a throwaway line, invites his followers to “talk to us about cheese”.
 

Click to view

This may entirely be an unfortunate coincidence, and hopefully any formal investigation finds that and clears him, but as it stands on Monday morning, March 31st, the photos and sexually loaded captions and Doyle’s decision to use a blue spiral on his Instagram profile – an emoji linked to pedophile networks in the same way the Far Right dogwhistle “88” and other iconography (as the media repeatedly tell us) – means Doyle has dumped himself in the proverbial and has no option but to endure whatever investigation follows, in my view.

This is why I believe there is now sufficient evidence for authorities to immediately investigate, and why I believe you have a journalistic duty to tell the story as it stands, and a moral duty to act. There’s enough circumstantial evidence to generate a suspicion of fire warning.

My message to the mainstream media: grow a pair and do your bloody job. This is a legitimate public interest news story in either best case or worst case scenarios.

Tell it.

Ian Wishart is a multi-award winning investigative journalist and bestselling author of more than 20 books. This article was sourced HERE

21 comments:

Janine said...

The sad part about Ians article is that we, the New Zealand public, have no idea about how most of the parties we voted for would respond to this. To his credit, Winston has taken the moral high ground. This is a very serious matter and although the Green Party seems to be continually plumbing the depths, how much worse can they get than this?

Chuck Bird said...

There is now something in the Herald but almost takes the Green's side.

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/politics/green-mp-benjamin-doyle-faces-immense-death-threats-and-abuse-over-social-media-account/JGFVVTGZY5D5VBCX6YXGO52IJU/

Anonymous said...

"Swarbrick said this morning “members of any minority community, like our rainbow community, are accustomed to using and co-opting terms that may not be well understood by external groups, oftentimes with irreverence and absurdity”.

“The central conspiracy here is that the use of such a word on a private account by an MP, before they were an MP, is inherently suspicious,” she said."

So the jolly, 'irreverent', joshing terminology is irrelevant because the author was using a private account and, at that time, was not an MP? Good luck with that argument Chloe; yet another Green selection that fails the 'wtf' test. How many is it now?

Anonymous said...

Swarbrick looks way too complicit making statements like that.....

MH said...

Thanks Ian for reporting posts Kiwiblog was too scared to accommodate.

NZ voters need to see this MPs despicable behaviour. The

Anonymous said...

Just like Tamatha Paul situation this will be portrayed as victimising and will be angled with that slant by msm . It works to their potential voter base .

Anonymous said...

The Greens & their sycophants in the media are incomprehensibly morally & ethically repugnant.

For them to accept Chloe’s grotesque minimising of what is clearly predatory behaviour towards a child is proof they are not journalists, or even good people, they are just propagandists peddling a sick ideology that gives cover to criminals.

The IG handle is one thing — private lives are private lives, but there is no possible explanation for any adult to have a well-publicised, well-known pedophile symbol on their bio, & post photos of their child on that account, let alone with sexual innuendo.

This man is using the ever widening umbrella of the rainbow crowd to justify a sickness.

He needs to be fired from parliament immediately & investigated by the police & CYFs.

Anonymous said...

The only victim in all of this is the child who has been exploited at the very least for the sake of crude jokes and at the worst sexually abused by a man who shouldn't be allowed around children, nevermind speaking on their behalf as the green's early childhood spokesperson. At the very least the green party should've relieved him of his portfolio with immediate effect.

Madame Blavatsky said...

It's not to say that this specific behaviour is typical of homosexuals, but you'd have to be naive beyond belief to not understand that the ubiquitous "rainbow" that has been bastardised as the symbol of the "gay community" was purposely chosen to offset and conceal the dark behaviour that is rampant, and apparently excused, in that community.

glan011 said...

Thank you Ian Wishart. Clarification that shows how incompetent the media are, and how up with the play even an oldie like Winston is!!! This has to have action- police, child welfare whatever...

Anonymous said...

This is why groups like ‘gays against groomers’ exist.

The Greens call such people minor attracted persons.

Instead of trying to label us as bigots, the Greens et al should be focusing on the well-being of the child.

Their defence of such abhorrent posts does far more damage to the rainbow community - that is, LGB - than anything anyone else says.

Most of us recognise than a gay man isn’t a pedophile because he is gay, he is a pedophile because he’s sick. Further, that the majority of these sickos are in fact straight, & are only ever very rarely women.


Barend Vlaardingerbroek said...

The fact that time and energy are being spent discussing this fellow's sexual fetishes when that time should be spent on governing the country in the interests of its people speaks volumes in itself. Our priorities have become topsy-turvy!

Gaynor said...

Drag queens specifically target small children as well with their reading in libraries. Total perversion and decadence in morality .

ihcpcoro said...

I believe in the modern vernacular 'sick' is a positive thing. Not in mine.

Anonymous said...

@Barend encouraging others to ignore suspected child abuse is tantamount to approval of it. There is nothing more important than protecting the children who will one day lead this country.

Barend Vlaardingerbroek said...

I didn't for a moment suggest ignoring child abuse, Anon 849. I was pointing out that the fact that we are discussing sordid matters such as this in relation to a parliamentarian means that we have lost the plot - and nobody has lost the plot more than this sick joke for an MP.

glan011 said...

It ought not to be "discussed". He should be GONE from Parliament today as a fraudster/imposter...

The Jones Boy said...

Anything that Wishart says has to be placed on the following context:
1. He's been New Zealand's largest repeater of wacky conspiracy theories since at least 1975.
2. He's a born-again Christian.
3 He's a creationist.
All of which means he's incapable of making a rational argument and not to be taken seriously.

glan011 said...

There is no "wacky" conspiracy here. Its full-frontal "bussy wacky" in full view. Suspect Mr Jones you are in the same camp as the Greens.... now very muddy grey and wet.... and no credit to their founders.

Gaynor said...

That's entirely your opinion about Ian Wishart . Quite a significant proportion of the population , who are Christian are creationists and born again Christians . Historically a number of great Christians who were both have contributed greatly to to our society and were perfectly rational. I am thinking of Martin Luther King , Bonhoeffer and William Wilberforce , CS Lewis and many , many more of similar quality. Therefore what a ridiculous thing you are claiming , Jones Boy. The main alternative to creation is Darwinism which is now coming increasingly under attack ,from academics at prestigious Universities by people who are not even Christian , as being deficient as a scientific explanation in many areas . Incidentally It's about time propaganda claiming Darwinism is a fact , when it is a theory needs to corrected.

Much of this woke stuff is a determined reaction against Christian and conservative norms of behaviour and values like not sexualizing small children.

Barend Vlaardingerbroek said...

Ian Wishart is an investigative journalist and a very good one at that, as his publication record suggests. But he is out of his depth in commenting about scientific issues. His belief in spooks and magic does raise red flags about his intellectual integrity, but should not affect e.g. his evaluation of the Arthur Alan Thomas case.