John McLean: New Zealand left's extreme difficulty with violence

Radio New Zealand’s highly selective approach to violence

I’ve just listened to Radio New Zealand’s 6pm news. That news segment covered various items; flooding in Bali, the Maori Party disingenuously purporting to distance itself from Takuta Ferris’ brazen racism…other minor stuff.

What RNZ’s news bulletin studiously did not cover is the killing of a prominent American political and social commentator named Charlie Kirk, a decidedly newsworthy event in the Western world. Kirk has been shot dead within the last day.

Kirk’s killing will prompt widespread debate about free speech and could well lead to further violence and unrest in the United States of America. RNZ’s non-coverage of Kirk’s killing therefore cannot have been an inadvertent oversight. It must necessarily have been a deliberate choice by RNZ’s editorial staff.

Kirk was a conservative commentator and supporter of the USA’s Republican Party and President Trump. Many RNZ staff are undoubtedly pleased that Kirk is dead. Because Kirk was an anathema to RNZ’s radically Woke organizational culture. RNZ’s willful non-coverage of Kirk’s killing highlights Aotearoa Left’s uneasy and cryptic attitude to physical violence.

RNZ subscribes to the Woke ideology that words can constitute actual violence, and supports legal sanctioning of “hate speech”. At the same time, RNZ celebrates New Zealand’s ethnic gangs (Mongrel Mob, Black Power etc.), ignoring the atrocious violence that these gangs inflict on each other and other New Zealanders.

RNZ celebrated the United States’ Black Lives Matter “movement”, with all its mindless violence, vandalism, civic destruction and naked racism.

RNZ celebrated Shaneel Lal whipping his supporters into frenzied opposition to feminist Posie Parker’s March 25 2023 rally at Auckland’s Albert Park, a frenzy that resulted in Parker and other women being violently attacked and injured.

Not so sympathetic was RNZ’s coverage of the violence that characterized the end of the otherwise peaceful occupation of the grounds of New Zealand’s Parliament.

“Anti-fascist” ANTIFA, celebrated by the Wokerati, is an unspeakably violent Leftie activist movement.

RNZ has a real problem with the meaning of many words, including “violence”. I’ve covered this subject in a previous Substack:

WORDS ARE NOT VIOLENCE
John McLean
·
28 December 2023


It’s a central slogan of Illiberal Identitarianism that “Words are Violence”. To those uninitiated in the Whacky Ways of Woke, this mantra will come as a confounding and moronic oxymoron. When children claim that a fart is “silent but violent”, they’re not sincerely asserting a risk that the relevant effluvium could be physically harmful. Wokesters, how…
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Words can never be violent. The killing of Charlie Kirk was an atrocious, unforgiveable act of violence – not covered by RNZ because the perpetrator almost certainly harbors ideologies that exactly fit with RNZ’s.

Say what you like about Trump, he’s keener on peace and ending wars than any US President in living memory. But you won’t hear RNZ say that.

This is my shortest Substack ever. Because there’s nothing more to say. The Left’s reckoning with real violence is sadly a long way away.

John McLean is a citizen typist and enthusiastic amateur who blogs at John's Substack where this article was sourced.