Well this is unfortunate. Two days before what is claimed will be the mother of all protests links between the Groundswell organisation and the Taxpayers Union have been discovered.
Groundswell has a website up and running to coordinate events and no doubt to harvest the details of individuals including those who truly believe that this Government wants to impose world Government on Aotearoa New Zealand and that there are microchips in the Covid vaccine.
The website is quite good. It is clean. It will harvest information about those people who are for some reason really upset with the Government.
It raises questions however. Who is behind the protest and what will happen to the personal information harvested by the website?
It appears that an urban based organisation that I consider is nothing more than an astroturf entity for the political right may be behind the new website.
There has been a really weak response.
But here is where it starts to get weird. Because suddenly the domain was registered to a different entity, a company called The Campaign Company Limited. This was not a piece of overt subterfuge, Jordan Williams is the Director and Shareholder of the Company. Although for a short period of time I contemplated an extraordinary deep into the rabbit hole sort of conspiracy because a company with the identical name but owned by Matt McCarten used to exist. I am sure using that Jordan using the exact same name for his company is a random unplanned event.
But this does cast doubts on the suggestion that Groundswell is a spontaneously generated entity with no links to the organised right.
As for the campaign with the greatest of respect Groundswell’s goals show how deeply mired in the 1950s the organisation’s thinking is.
Believing that land owners have some god given right to do what they want with the environment is exactly the sort of thinking that has got us into a global emergency that threatens humanity’s viability. Opposing the planting of forests because it will change your way of life is many degrees of selfishness. Opposing the clean car package is Trumpian in its logic and understanding. And opposing water reforms because things are fine shows how removed from reality their perception is.
The protest is on Sunday. The organisers are doing their best to hide the innate misogynist tendencies supporters have and have released a list of safe but very dull things people can have on their signs. Time will tell if all of their supporters can resist the urge to be dicks. I would not count on it.
But the movement is now tainted and there is a rather strong whiff that organised forces of the right are willing to put up with bizarre thinking, proposals that will wreck the environment and misogyny of the grossest kind just so they can take it to the Government.
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