A sequel

This may make more sense if you read the previous post first. Thank you for being here and connecting with my mahi.

Maybe it was flippant, maybe it wasn’t. These days, you can’t tell.

In the Budget, Labour announced a new policy to get rid of prescription charges, starting July. National said they’d reverse this new policy, sticking with the policy we have right now. Asked if that would mean reinstating charges for contraception, National said yes.

Prescription charges are inequitable, for women and other groups. Keeping with the status quo, charging for prescriptions, would continue that inequity (something both parties have tolerated a long time). National articulated their stance poorly. But it was misleading to frame it as a targeted attack on women. Labour mocked National for being from the 1950s. And a Labour Minister responded to National with a Handmaid’s Tale meme. The meme was an inflammatory reaction to a stance I think is unfair, but which falls far short of the gruesome violence and tyranny against women - all of it based in fact - that Margaret Atwood narrates. I recoiled.

I figured out half the reason for my reaction at the time. The rest has come to me more slowly, as I’ve scrolled the news. A woman in some unspecified part of Aotearoa is campaigning against the Warehouse supporting Pride month. She sounds batshit to me - meeting with a store manager to confront them for stocking rainbow-coloured merchandise from Disney, a company ‘tied up with paedophilia’. Others like her are trying to organise a boycott of any kiwi business supporting Pride.

Yeah, batshit. Only overseas, this stuff is working. When Bud Light aired an ad featuring a transgender model, the reaction amongst some was outrage, so much that B-list celebrity Kid Rock filmed himself shooting up Bud cans with an assault weapon. I confidently predicted the backlash would fail. I was wrong: spectacularly wrong. Bud’s share price slumped. The boycotters have now turned their sights on Target, for stocking clothes for trans people. Target has withdrawn some of the clothing in response.

The Handmaid’s Tale has a sequel. I bought it almost as soon as it was released, downloaded it excitedly. That was September 2019, only months after the mosque attacks. I took in its electronic pages almost hungrily, pored over it on the train each day, to and from work. I’d read The Handmaid’s Tale years before, in much the same way. Both books are set in Gilead - a fictional place, fantastical-seeming, but all its horrors rooted in truth.

Gilead is a future version of the US, where democracy has collapsed. If the first book told me how it collapsed, I looked to the second book to tell me why.

The content that follows is taken from the Disinformation Project’s report, Transgressive transitions; Transphobia, community building, and community bridging within Aotearoa New Zealand’s disinformation ecologies March-April 2023. The report was released recently, and got a glimmer of coverage you might have seen in the news. The italicised comments below are quotes from the report, shared on social media by your fellow New Zealanders, who you live beside, you work with, and who share your democracy. Other content studied by the researchers was too violent to be included in their report.

Although the report focuses mostly on a short period this year - between Posie Parker’s 18 March anti-trans rally in Melbourne and her 26 March rally in Auckland, plus its immediate aftermath - the research behind it started much earlier, in February 2020. That, of course, was the beginning of the pandemic. We were uncertain, all of us, confused and scared. Researchers began studying social media for ‘ecologies’ of misinformation and disinformation, initially related to COVID denial.

What they found was troubling enough: but then something else started to happen.

In a phenomenon the researchers call ‘bridging’, ideas from the COVID denial and anti-vaccination mandate community became a kind of Trojan horse. Other views, associated with the far right, were being promulgated within the community. These views were anti-Māori. Anti-immigrant. Opposed to government, to science, to gun control. Intolerant of any family form other than the most traditional. Misogynistic. Hostile to rainbow people.

“When the NZ government is run by genocidal psychopathic homosexual communists and feminazis, they import cross dressing UN Baphomet faggots to attack and censor white women and femininity.”

Misinformation and disinformation continued to grow. In September 2021, a further development prompted a dangerous shift in the landscape. Over the course of two weeks, Aotearoa’s COVID denial/anti-mandate community shifted en masse from more mainstream social media platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, to Telegram. If the mainstream platforms had at that time some regulation or standards, at least in theory, Telegram was (and is) a dystopia, a sewer. Without constraints, dangerous speech had a whole new impetus.

“Christians beating the hell out of tranny gay women and soy by faggets. listen to that connection at 48 seconds, absolutely beautiful and then the scream afterwards”

Only months later, in February 2022 - about two years after the pandemic started - protesters descended on Parliament. Like many others, I watched them from my office window, streaming through the streets, and I thought, these people couldn’t organise a piss up in a brewery. I was wrong: spectacularly wrong. As they tore up the ground and burnt all that was upon it, the protest and the riot also built fortunes. The researchers saw a spike in followers of misinformation and disinformation on social media - with 15% of that upswing following Chantelle Baker’s Facebook page. Baker leveraged her popularity, pushing US alt-right talking points and generating an income stream through donations.

As the researchers report, they weren’t alone in noticing a surge in violent language, including calls for the targets of that language to be killed. In April 2022, Rebecca Kitteridge, Head of the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service, said, “What I can say is we are seeing an increase in violent language, and we are seeing the cherry-picking of a range of misogynist, racist, and xenophobic views being combined in a whole range of ways.” Kitteridge put it, “I am ... concerned to see how these trends that we might have thought were just offshore are being seen in New Zealand.” The challenge now, she explained, was figuring out who, in the torrent of hate, had the means to carry out their threats.

“violent animals & child groomers”

In August 2022, the Disinformation Project shared unpublished research with the Jewish community, about the activities of three far-right activists. The first activist, referred to as X, was involved with the COVID denial/anti-mandate community, and also with far-right networks in Christchurch. X is Islamophobic, and a sharer of dark web anti-Semitic content on Telegram. X connected with Y, the second activist, and Action Zealandia, the far-right group with which Y is associated. With their alliance formed, X then connected with Z, a Christchurch neo-Nazi, expanding the network further. X started using a Telegram channel established after the Parliament protest to normalise Action Zealandia as ‘fellow travellers’.

“A White man’s defiance against this system is the Hitler salute you will never take from us”

Towards the end of 2022, another change in social media caused the misinformation and disinformation landscape to shift again - this time with even more grave consequences. Elon Musk acquired Twitter. Banned accounts were reinstated. Musk himself was engaging with, and amplifying, racist and other hateful content. If such content had been relegated to Telegram, it returned with a vengeance, backed by stronger networks formed in the shadows, and now with greater reach across a range of platforms.

The COVID denial/anti-mandate community had offered its members a sense of belonging, a shared motivation. Now, the source of that belonging, that motivation, was changing. The community was starting to coalesce, more specifically, around hatred for a particular group. The researchers call this the ‘transphobic turn’.

“Destroy Paedo Freaks!!!”

British anti-trans activist Posie Parker bills herself as an advocate for women, although she’s been reported as saying, “Each and every one of you women who stand in my way… will be annihilated.” Her rally in Melbourne, held 18 March 2023, was attended by a group of Australian neo-Nazis led by one Thomas Sewell. Sewell is known in Aotearoa for trying to recruit the Christchurch mosque shooter to his organisation. Sewell and the other neo-Nazis performed Nazi salutes and held a banner that said ‘destroy paedo freaks’. Parker said she wasn’t associated with the neo-Nazis, but nor did not denounce them.

“In Melbourne, the right organised a rally against the transvestite, paedophile agenda that the treasonous Commonwealth government openly supports. Twenty Australian National Socialists mobilised to protect rally-goers from the hundreds of trannies, commies, piggies, and other assorted vermin, who were there to promote the sexual grooming of children.”

In the period between the Melbourne rally and the Auckland rally, social media posts by the Parliament protest figureheads - now fully enmeshed in the anti-trans cause - were generating 1.6 times more engagement than mainstream journalism. Across both mainstream and misinformation/disinformation pages with admins based in Aotearoa, including the page of a Christian lobby group, researchers witnessed an explosion of anger towards posts on trans people.

By the time Parker fronted the Auckland rally on 26 March, facing a sea of rainbow flags and colourful banners, hate had reached fever pitch. Her supporters included a small group wearing international far-right insignia, at least one Action Zealandia member, and others from various right-wing groups including the New Conservatives, Voices for Freedom, and Counterspin Media. What happened next has been extensively, if often inaccurately, reported. Yet, when Parker departed Aotearoa soon after, trailed by images of her retreat from the rally with tomato juice in her hair, things somehow got worse.

As she too left the rally, Greens co-leader Marama Davidson, who’d attended in support of the rainbow community, was struck by a Destiny Church anti-trans protester on a motorbike. She made a statement soon after, about the violence of cis white men, while being interviewed by Counterspin. Again, this much was reported; but not what really happened to her. The attack on Davidson on Telegram was so vicious, so vitriolic, it exceeded the two ugliest episodes seen by the researchers before: the first being Jacinda Ardern’s speech to the UN General Assembly in 2022, and the second being her resignation early this year. The threats on Davidson’s life were explicit, direct and public.

“sex with kids is NOT ok & you need a public hanging”

By 26 and 27 March, as Parker boarded a plane leaving this bedlam in her wake, the researchers observed that these words and phrases were dominant in social media posts: sick fuck, fucking bitch, Country is fucked, Fuck off home, Fucking freak, Fucking n*ggers, Who the fuck are these freaks?, fucking imports, pedo freaks, pedo filth, filthy c*nts, freak show, faggots.

It is difficult to know where this phenomenon of bridging will lead next. The researchers describe how Aotearoa-based Telegram channels are circulating footage, almost certainly from Russia, that purports to show the Christchurch mosque shooter training in Ukraine - and which claims that Ukraine is full of neo-Nazis. Apparently, this is called ‘accusation in the mirror’. It’s a malicious tactic, whereby the speaker blames his enemy for harbouring his very own intentions. And it seems to work. Hate makes demands for many things, but coherence isn’t one of them.

The researchers describe their subject matter in neutral terms. They’ve faced down what most of us could not stomach, and they’ve done it for more than three years. We owe them something: the turning of their pages, careful thought to match their words.

I occupy a particular position in this debate, although I hesitate to use that word, debate. It’s a bullshit tactic, to make out there is some moral equivalence here, a thing to be argued. I mean, sure, Nazism is bad. And assaulting a woman leader in broad daylight. Incitement to violence. Circulating videos of rape and beatings, now you mention it. And, yeah, death threats. But didn’t that protestor throw juice? Where’s the civility?

My older son is trans. He turns 22 this year. He’s doing great. He will graduate soon, into the gauntlet of the job market; but he’s got a thick skin. He’s also got a good heart. I’ve never seen him angry at anyone, even those who’ve levelled mockery or hate at him: somehow he always understands why people are how they are. He reads everything - there is hardly a topic that doesn’t interest him. He’s funny. He loves his partner and his little brother and his cat.

Atwood imagines horrific things, in her fictional-but-factual world, but I am a parent and I imagine worse; not because I want to, but because there is something about loving a child that opens a Pandora’s box of terrors in the spaces of your heart, in the constriction of your chest, in the lonesome quiet of 2am. There are things in this world it’s hard to reconcile yourself to. One of them is knowing that folks around you want to murder your child.

On Telegram, people fantasise about intimidating, beating, killing people like my son. Their fantasies are graphic. They share images. They organise and plan. They use the language of genocide. These, of course, are just the things they say publicly: we don’t know what they’re prepared to communicate in private. The last two pages of the report I just described show some of the memes they share. Some of those memes set out the methods they would use to execute my son. I felt physically ill as I looked, couldn’t finish the document. I slammed my laptop shut.

The thing is, I could keep my head down and be OK. Our family is privileged compared to many. My son is safe, or I hope so, and loved. And this too - this hatred of trans people - will pass, at least in its most extreme form. But it will pass because it moves on to someone else. And then some other mother, some other kid, will be afraid.

I can’t accept that. I’m a woman, a feminist, a mum. I’m a kiwi. I don’t want to keep my damn head down.

I’ve been wrong about many things: spectacularly wrong. This isn’t one of them.

But really, what’s all this got to do with anything?

It was just a meme. Sassy. Quick. Provocative, of course. Flippant, maybe; or maybe it wasn’t. That’s hard to say. But regardless, it was just a meme. And anyway, the news cycle has moved on, to different indignities and outcries, as the nation loses its shit over bilingual road signs. Why feel bothered?

Well, because it was just a meme.

It’s a serious issue: the inequities in our health system harm women and others, especially Māori, Pacific peoples and those on low incomes. Like most policy issues, it demands consideration, deliberation. The Handmaid’s Tale meme sought not to cultivate understanding or informed debate, but only to provoke the kneejerk sugar hit of anger, tit for tat.

It flirted with a politics in which reality is negotiable and a meme is close enough. Where a crude surge of feeling as you scroll, the angry face reaction you leave on a post, passes for democratic participation.

And this is not enough for me. It’s not enough for any of us.

There is the thinnest of lines between civility and chaos: a line made thinner by the determination of some to weaken it. That line must be defended, including through our political culture. We can be flippant about many things, but not this. Mostly, the defence will not be dramatic, invoke strong passions, or get on the news. It will mean instead a politics that’s careful and measured, that explains itself rather than shouts over top. It will mean civility, adherence to rules and good faith. If we can’t rely on our leaders, whatever their stripe, to hold that line - well, it troubles me. If we care about that line, then we’ve got to be all in, all of the time.

We think, perhaps, that line can’t be crossed here. We are too reasonable, too moderate, too sensible. And that’s how I read The Handmaid’s Tale twenty-something years ago: with concern, with distaste, but also with detachment. I’m safe, we’re safe. I was wrong: spectacularly wrong.

There is nothing you have that can’t be taken from you. Don’t get comfortable.

The sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale is called The Testaments. Much of the story is narrated from Canada, a place I have never been, but I imagine it is in some respects like Aotearoa. In both books, Canada represents how I feel about my own country, or I used to: a place of safety, of rules and civility and good faith. A place we can still talk, where others might shout - or might do much worse. Ultimately, Canada is Gilead’s downfall. The regime is brought down by truth, disseminated among people who care. By truth. That’s because it was disinformation that sustained it.

And it’s a satisfying ending - until you reflect that Gilead should never have been in the first place.

If you are rainbow or trans and reading this post - or you are of any other group under threat or intimidation for being who you are - please know that in this place, for all that it’s a tiny corner of the online world, you are valued, welcomed and loved.

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