John McLean: Last Bastions of Woke

As 2026 draws to a close, we can say with some confidence that New Zealand has passed Peak Woke, and that Woke is on the wane. So where are the die hard Woketearoans retreating to and holding out? Where are the Neanderthal Woketards making their last stands?

John Campbell, Monarch of Beta Male Wokery, has just about run out of road, having driven to that Citadel of Identitarianism, Radio New Zealand. Television New Zealand had clearly become sick and tired of Mr “Marvellous” and flicked him off to RNZ (with a glowing reference) where Campbell will co-host Morning Report. That role will come as a rude shock to John, because he’ll have to get up early and do a bit of work. They’re things he managed to avoid in his time as TVNZ’s Chief News Correspondent, where he did almost nothing except manifest his strange, infantile animus with Brian Tamaki and the Destiny Church.



Tova O’Brien is moving from chief political correspondent at Stuff(ed) and is also taking refuge in the public service, as TVNZ’s co-host of the Breakfast morning show, along with Chris Chang. Chris is the childish chap who in 2023 (along with Jenny-May Clarkson, whom Tova is replacing) shot a Trump doll with a bug spray gun, live on air, with Matty McLean (no relation) encouraging viewers to “Get a little Donald Trump doll and go hard.” As we well know, Wokesters have no problem with political violence.

For those who just want to forget the Ardern Era, it was Tova O’Brien who joined at the hip with Jessica Mutch McKay to form Ardern’s darling duo of sycophant “journalists”. Don’t expect to see Tova shooting Ardern dolls on Breakfast.

Anne Salmond, a High Priestess of Wokery, claims on her LinkedIn:

“ ‘Woke’ is a classic case of doublespeak”, adding “the term ‘woke’ has since been inverted to describe this alertness [to racism against black people in the United States] as an abuse against the rights and freedoms of white people”.

As with almost everything Dame Anne utters these days, it’s abundantly unclear what she means. But she’ll continue to burble away from her bounteous bubble as Distinguished Professor of Māori Studies and Anthropology at the University of Auckland.

New Zealand’s Anglican Church has become a sanctuary for waning Wokery, and no more so than for Anglican priest John Bluck. Yuck Bluck published his magnum opus, Becoming Pākehā: A work in progress, in 2022, a book riven with this sort of self-flagellating, lame race Identitarianism:

So when I come face to face with Māori who accuse me of being privileged for simply being who I am, I’m initially baffled and in denial, until I realise their accusation isn’t so much personal, though it is that, as systemic and historical.

We’ve been calling each other names ever since we first met. Māori warriors thought the first Pākehā sailors they saw were goblins, which was nothing compared with the new arrivals’ characterisation of as smelly, painted savages.

Sometimes the debate [between Māori and Pākehā] is akin to a description that a Jewish rabbi once gave me on a visit to Israel, to describe the confrontation with Palestinians and Jews. “It’s a collision,” he said, “between two traumatised peoples.”

Bluck is joined in Anglican Wokery by Archbishop Emeritus Sir David Moxon. Devout David is donkey deep into the concocted separatist notion of a “partnership” between the Government and a separate Māori nation – “Māori parishes and pastorates have consistently demonstrated Māori self-determination”. David Moxon is married to Dame Tureiti Moxon, the odious race hater and hustler who bags New Zealand whenever she can, all around the world, constantly cannibalizing the New Zealand Governmental hand that continues to feed her so generously.

No roll call of inveterate Wokesters would be complete without calling out Professor Paul Spoonley. Spoonley is a staunch supporter of maximum immigration into New Zealand in the interests of diversity and dilution of New Zealand’s founding Judeo-Christian Western values. He sees older white skinned people (like himself) as a dying breed, and embraces that vision, “We are getting to that tipping point where there’s rapid ageing, but it’s essentially the rapid ageing of Pākehā”.

Spoonley serves as an important warning – don’t be fooled by civility. The Spoonleys, Blucks, Moxons and Campbells of Woketearoa come across, superficially, as civil and polite. But the subversive cancel-culture Identitarianism they advocate for, over open Western universalism, is inherently and unavoidably divisive and retrograde.

We must continue to look carefully at who these types are associating with, and who’s paying them. Polite-enough Paul Spoonley, for example, co-directed the lavishly Government-funded Centre of Research Excellence for Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism (He Whenua Taurikura), with Professor Joanna Kidman of Victoria University. That Centre, created by Jacinda Ardern and only disbanded in December 2024, spent its time scouring New Zealand for non-existent neo-Nazis (but certainly not Islamists).

Kidman is a sub-human torrent of crazed Identitarian rhetoric, announcing on her Twitter account in March 2024, “I can only assume that this government hates children, most of whom will be poor and brown…Plus, it wants to snatch children’s lunches. Is this a government or a death cult?” Earlier, in 2020, Kidman had accused fashion designed Trelise Cooper of cultural appropriation and “colonial violence in floral polyester” for calling a clothing line of hers, “Trail of Tiers”.

Woke is a cult whose fanatical adherents are hard to deprogram and deeply embedded in certain sections of New Zealand society. Nasty Kidman remains a full, tenured professor at Victoria University.

We can only hope that 2026 will see further waning of the Wokerati’s institutional power and influence in New Zealand.

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