In the past, I’ve written and published ‘part 2’ of these articles shortly after publishing part 1. This one I held off for several reasons. Firstly, I’m still commissioning people in Gaza to write about their stories, and last month published Hannen’s. As an aside, due to the the cost of living crisis I haven’t been asking for paid subscriptions often, but with lapsed subscriptions it’s looking likely I won’t make enough to continue doing this without also using my ‘day job’ income, which I’m happy to do so long as it’s feasible. This means if you become a paying subscriber you’ll be financing this ongoing mutual aid project to assist people in Gaza financially while providing them another platform to share their stories.

Then the death of actor Chuck Norris presented an opportunity to write about the intersection of film, internet subcultures, and the geopolitics of my formative years, so I wrote that piece first. I also wanted to wait and see the outcome of the Hungarian election. In the final chapter of Fear I had quoted (now former) Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán who after winning his fourth term in power stated ‘We are sending Europe a message that this is not the past – this is the future.’ And speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in the USA 2022 had told the audience, with reference to upcoming congressional elections in the US and parliamentary elections in the European Union, he stated that ‘they will define the two fronts in the battle being fought for Western civilisation. Today, we hold neither of them. Yet we need both’.

Orbán’s regime collapsed at the April 12 election. The opposition Tisza Party won in a landslide, securing a super-majority that will allow them to overturn constitutional changes made in the Orbán era. Prime Minister elect Péter Magyar is no leftist, he is a centre-right conservative who a few years ago was in the same party or Orbán, nonetheless the victory of Tisza is significant. A €90 billion loan to Ukraine that Hungary had been blocking is now likely to go ahead. Hungary had also been vetoing EU sanctions on Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump have lost their closest ally in Europe, and the global far-right have lost their north star.

In 2021 Hungary introduced legislation banning the “promotion” of homosexuality or gender diversity to those under 18 on “child protection” grounds. Films and television shows that featured LGBT+ characters or themes were given the same age restrictions as horror, drugs, violence and other adult themes, and in 2025 a ban on Pride marches was introduced. While Peter Maygar has been quiet on the topic of LGBT+ rights, the change in government is likely to lead to progress in this area.

Another country to keep an eye on is the UK. In Part 1 I mentioned, without naming them, the meteoric growth of the Reform Party. Founded in 2018 as the Brexit Party, they received 14.7% of the vote in the 2024 election. Since then, Reform has risen in the polls to become the most popular party in the country. Every poll for the past year, with one notable exception, has them in the lead. I’d promised in Part 1 that Part 2 would include some hope, and in the UK the hope seems to be the Green Party.

In February, the Green candidate won a by-election in the north west of England, and while a more recent by-election in the area was won by the Reform candidate, the Green Party is climbing in the polls, and support for Reform, while still historically high, is falling.

It’s a situation that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago; when the UK goes to vote in 2029 the outcome may not be a Conservative or a Labour-led government, but a Reform or Green-led one. Of course, the UK still uses First Past the Post (FPP) for elections, meaning a party can win a majority of seats in parliament with a minority of the popular vote, so the outcome is difficult to predict.

Back home in Aotearoa New Zealand, we’re seeing a worrying trend. New Zealand First got back into parliament in 2023 by courting the “freedom movement” and cannibalising the vote of other extra-parliamentary parties. They were likely the reason for the collapse in support for the New Conservatives (NZ First had adopted many of their core policies). It’s possible that some of those former New Conservative voters switched their vote to the overtly Christian Nationalist New Zeal. Now, New Zeal has deregistered with the electoral commission, and their former leader is standing for New Zealand First. The party has built a coalition of anti-vaxxers, transphobes, and Christian nationalists (admittedly, that’s an overlapping Venn diagram) and they are ‘surging’ in the polls, recently surpassing the Greens as the third most popular party. This trend mirrors not just Reform in the UK, but also One Nation in Australia.

NZ First’s latest shot in the culture wars is a bill to define men and women in law, something leader Winson Peters says will “ensure our country moves away from the woke ideology that has crept in over the last few years, undermining the protection, progression and safety of women,”. The bill was influenced largely by a petition from conservative Christian advocacy group Family First.

In Chapter 22 of Fear, I wrote “An attempt at electoral gains through imported American culture wars is not a possibility we should be ruling out” It was in reference to the New Conservatives, but I feel like we’re there now with NZ First.

Polling shows the upcoming election as too-close-to-call, with the difference between who is in government and who is in opposition being within the margin of error. The result will come down to a very small percentage of voters, a situation that could allow that coalition of anti-vaxxers, transphobes, and Christian nationalists to have influence much greater than their actual levels of support.

Hungary defeated Orbán thanks to record voter turnout. For Aotearoa New Zealand to avoid a government where politicians promoting xenophobia, transphobia, Christian nationalism, and conspiracy theories are members of the government- possibly even ministers, we need to do the same.

Voter turnout is lower than average amongst young people, Māori, Pasifika, immigrants, and New Zealanders working overseas. There are many reasons for not voting, the voter and non-voter survey conducted after the 2023 election is informative. For a quarter of non-voters, their reasons were categorised as “Voting process” such as not being enrolled, not knowing how to vote, or not getting to a polling place on time. Changes made to electoral law by the current government, such as reducing the period you’ll be able to enroll, make that process more difficult. When other countries do things like this, we call it voter suppression.

It’s nothing on the scale of what Orbán did to try and remain in power, but that doesn’t mean we can be complacent. While I’m not endorsing a particular party, I’m very much endorsing helping your friends and whanau enroll to vote, offering them rides to polling booths during the advance voting period, and helping them become informed enough about the options on offer to feel confident in voting. If enough people do that, we can avoid falling to right-wing populism.

Chuck Norris, the action movie and later television star has died. He was 86. If you’re of a certain age, you knew Norris less as an actor and more as a meme. Chuck Norris counted to infinity--twice. Chuck Norris once won a game of Connect Four in 3 moves. Once a cobra bit Chuck Norris’ leg. After five days of excruciating pain, the cobra died.

‘Chuck Norris Facts’ which exaggerated the actors abilities to the point of absurdity, are the kind of ‘random’ internet humour that dominated the 2000s. KnowYourMeme credits the Something Awful forums with its origin (interestingly, it was originally Vin Diesel was credited with these amazing abilities) and dates it to 2005. It was that same year that the (now defunct) website chucknorrisfacts.com was launched, and Newgrounds released ‘The Ultimate Showdown’ an animated music video about a glorious battle fought by various pop culture characters, where at one point the high tempo music slows as Norris descends from the heavens accompanied by an ‘immaculate chorus’ of Angels before crushing the skull of Batman with his thighs. Random.

The internet at that time was, largely, a place populated by nerds, still transitioning into something mainstream. ‘Chuck Norris Facts’ was a meme that spread largely offline, in a warzone. In 2008 a Reuters journalist wrote “comments lauding the manliness and virility of the actor have been left on toilet walls across Iraq and even in neighbouring Kuwait, soldiers say.” A U.S. military helicopter hub in Baghdad featured a cardboard ‘shrine’ to the actor. In Falluja, soldiers would ask for photos with the ‘Iraqi Chuck Norris’, police trainer Mohammed Rasheed, whose moustache made him something of a Norris lookalike. “Truthfully, I didn’t know who he was.” Rasheed told Reuters. “I asked the Americans, and they said he was a great fighter, and that’s why they named me after him. They showed me a video, and it’s true, he’s a great fighter”

Another police trainer, Khaled Hussein, was more familiar with him “I’ve seen his videos, he’s a hero. He saves the city, he protects women and children and he fights crime wherever it is. We should all be like Chuck Norris,” Those videos were of course, works of fiction. Norris was however a martial arts expert off screen, and a former member of the US air force who had served in Korea. This, along with his Christian faith and his support for Republican party politicians, also made him popular with American servicemen, as did the model of masculinity he portrayed, an “antidote to the preening and moisturised metrosexual male” according to Reuters.

The characters Norris played were very deliberate. “I wanted to project a certain image on the screen of a hero.” He said in 1982. “I had seen a lot of anti-hero movies in which the lead was neither good nor bad. There was no one to root for,”. When he began acting, movies were already different from when he was a kid. Born in 1940, Norris’ childhood was an era of cinema shaped by the Hayes Code and the Hollywood blacklist, a time when—at least on screen— right and wrong was a simple binary, and the good guys always won. He had described western screen legend John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart (the first American movie star to enlist to fight in World War 2) as “surrogate fathers.”

Norris’ early films came out during the Vietnam War, a time when in contrast to WW2 American military adventures overseas were questioned as much—if not more— than they were praised. Norris, whose military service ended in 1962, would never have the impact on the armed forces that Jimmy Stewart did with his role in the allied propaganda film ‘Winning Your Wings’ which is credited with bringing 150,000 new recruits to the air force, but his action films appealed, according to his obituary in the New York Times, to “millions who enjoyed seeing America win — for a change, some would say — whether that meant rescuing captive G.I.s in Vietnam, saving the country from terrorists in “Invasion U.S.A.” or defeating skyjackers and drug kingpins in the “Delta Force” series.”

In his late 60s, he was lending his celebrity to the war on terror, at a time when others in entertainment were speaking out. In a famous (or infamous) 2003 Oscars speech, documentary film maker Michael Moore invited other documentary directors on stage with him. “They are here in solidarity because we like non-fiction.” He told the audience “We like non-fiction because we live in fictitious times. We live in a time where fictitious election results give us a fictitious president. We are now fighting a war for fictitious reasons.”

In 2005, a System of a Down track that screamed “why don’t presidents fight the war, why do they always send the poor?” and satirised the American adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq with the lyrics “dancing in the desert, blowing up the sunshine” topped the charts, enjoyed no doubt by many of the same young people laughing at ‘Chuck Norris Facts’ and the animated Norris in that ridiculous Newgrounds Flash cartoon.

The real Chuck Norris toured Iraq on multiple occasions, a visitor from a different, and, some would argue, better, time. A time before Oscars were given out to liberal documentary directors, before anti-war Nu-Metal bands and “preening metrosexuals”. The official website of the United States marines describes Norris’ appearance at Fallujah Surgical, where he gave a Marine Corps Martial Arts Program demonstration at the chapel alongside fellow actor Marshall Teague, with over the top reverence.

“The service members who attended the assembly at the chapel looked ecstatic when Norris and Teague arrived there, chanting “Chuck, Chuck, Chuck …” and the troops broke into an uproar when the living-legends entered the building.”

The military publication Stars and Stripes headlined a 2007 article with ‘Chuck Norris Fact: He’s in Iraq’ noting that he drew a bigger crowd of soldiers than a troop of professional cheerleaders. “I came over to let the troops know that the folks back home appreciate and love them and pray for them every day to come home safe,” Norris said. While there was no doubt truth to this statement, the war was by that time increasingly unpopular. A poll published just a few months prior had found 61% of Americans believed the country “should have stayed out” of Iraq.

Despite jokes that now Norris was in the country they could stop fighting, the aging actor was never going to roundhouse kick Saddam Hussein and end the quagmire that saw the deaths of thousands of American soldiers (and countless more Iraqis). No soldier ever really believed that was the case, just as they didn’t really believe he could do a wheelie on a unicycle, but it provided something of a morale boost to turn this man into a meme about strength and power, at a time when those qualities were fleeting. With Chuck Norris departing this world just weeks into the latest American excursion into the middle east, perhaps the world is going to have to find a new meme.

I have four children: Hazem, Hamza, Waseem, and Mohammed. Hazem is six years old and has a disability. Our life was simple but beautiful before the war. Although we faced many difficulties, we overcame them. My husband worked in agriculture, and we lived in safety. We had schools and universities, but unfortunately, the war has destroyed life in Gaza.

Before the war I used to take Hazem to a specialized physical therapy center so he could walk. After two years of treatment, he was almost able to walk, but unfortunately, the war came and the center was bombed, depriving him of the ability to walk. Now he is in a wheelchair and needs special care.

Hamza is five years old and has lived his childhood amidst the war. My twins, Waseem and Mohammed were born during the war, amidst fear, hunger, and bombing. They are seven months old and, unfortunately, have not been breastfed; they need formula. We also face difficulty providing for our needs due to the high cost of living. We light a fire every day to cook because there is no gas. We also travel long distances to get drinking water. All I want is to provide for our needs and give my children a better life.

We want to stay in Gaza, in order to rebuild homes, hospitals, and schools, and everything that the occupation destroyed. So that life can return once again and we can provide our children with a decent life and education in schools. We want everyone to know that we love life.

You can support Haneen and her family via GoFundMe

Planning this article I kept thinking of the first words in the famous monologue from the 1976 film Network. “I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad.” Unlike Peter Finch’s Howard Beale, I’m not going to exhort you to go to your window and yell about how you’re mad as hell, and not going to take it anymore. Speakers with a media platform encouraging their audiences to anger is, after all, a big part of how we got into this mess.

Writing Fear I was watching places that few others were (not no others- and the journalists I list in the acknowledgements deserve a lot of credit for their work.) I’d long been watching fringe online spaces and media, weird fascistic sects, and those oddball political parties that barely registered in polls, when suddenly the moment came where a book about those things was something people felt was important to read after people from that milieu occupied parliament grounds in opposition to vaccine mandates and a grab bag of other grievances.

I had, of course, plenty of critics. Among some audiences, I was seen as a paranoid conspiracy theorist seeing fascists around every corner. Some people felt that by writing about these groups I was giving them attention, when if I ignored them they would be no threat. I always pushed back on that one, as for one thing, far-right influencers on platforms like YouTube had much larger audiences than I did, and for another, ignoring the growth of the far-right online in the 2010s didn’t stop a radicalised terrorist from murdering 51 people in my home town.

That terrorist has been in the news lately as he tries to appeal his conviction, in what will almost certainly be a futile effort. In his high security prison cell, he receives little information about the outside world. I wonder sometimes, does he know that in the USA, a masked paramilitary force is arresting, detaining, and deporting non-white immigrants? Does he know that in the UK, polls suggest the next government will likely be led a party who plans to build “removal centres” in remote areas of the country in order to detain up to 24,000 people as they carry out the mass deportation of 600,000 people? (while promising to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, which would otherwise offer those people some protection)

Has he become aware, from the small amount of news material he is permitted to see, that far-right parties are surging across continental Europe. Does he have any inkling that the beliefs he outlined in his manifesto are no longer confined to seediest parts of the web but are now openly discussed and algorithmically promoted on a social media platform owned by the world’s richest man, fueling anti-migrant and anti-Muslim violence? Or that New Zealand politicians have begun dogwhistling to believers in the “great replacement” conspiracy theory from which his manifesto took its name?

In my ‘one year on’ and ‘two years on’ articles I went through chapter-by-chapter, condensing a few chapters in the ‘two years on’ article. This year I’ll instead group chapters thematically. I’m not updating anything on Action Zealandia (chapter 3) as the organisation appears to be moribund. The former branches are operating autonomously with names like ‘Canterbury Legion’ and while their [ex]members are unpleasant people (one former AZ member recently assaulted two people with his car) they’re not having any significant impact on the nation’s body politic.

I also feel there isn’t much I could add to what I think of as ‘the history chapters’ (18 and 19) looking at colonisation, the white New Zealand policy, and nostalgia for Rhodesia and apartheid era South Africa. All I’d say regarding the role of women in the modern far-right (chapter 20) is that the podcast series ‘Truely, Tradly, Deeply’ makes a subscription to Cursed Media worth the price.

#Gamergate, Qanon, Disinformation and online hate

(chapters 1,2,4,5, and 9)

I’ve, on numerous occasions now, spoken of a ‘perpetual gamergate’ the original campaign is gone, but the methods and tactics- harassing a critic until you push them out of public life- have become normalised. The same is increasingly true of Qanon. While the largely online movement associated with the initial ‘Q’ conspiracy theory scene seems dated, if ‘Qanon’ has disappeared it’s because, like gamergate before it, it’s become how politics is done. Last October, Art Jipson, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Dayton, wrote:

“Over time, what started as a baseless conspiracy on obscure platforms has migrated into the mainstream. It has influenced rhetoric and policy debates, and even reshaped the American political landscape.”

In Aotearoa New Zealand last year we saw the influence of the methods and discourses of both gamergate and qanon in the campaign to destroy the political career of Benjamin Doyle, the country’s first openly non-binary member of parliament.

Disinformation and hate moving from the fringes to being promoted by those in power isn’t new. In Fear I used the campaign against the UN global compact on safe, regular and orderly migration as a case study. This sort of thing is happening writ large in the United States. As a recent New York Times article put it

“The influencers behind some of the most pernicious digital lies, who once toiled in the dark corners of the internet, are now emboldened, promoted on major platforms and even mimicked by some of the most powerful people in the country.”

Local examples continue to be seen. The campaign against Doyle may have remained confined to the hateful nooks of X if not for the involvement of NZ First leader Winson Peters.

The religious right

(chapters 6,7, and 17)

In 2024 the Sons of the Most Holy Redeemer, the fringe Catholic sect whose Latin mass I attended while researching the book, were ordered by the bishop (on Vatican advice) to leave the Christchurch Catholic diocese. That order was later rescinded, but the Sons were forbidden from celebrating Mass or conducting any other “priestly ministry” for anyone outside their religious community. They refused to leave the city, and described the actions of Church leaders, including the late Pope Francis, a critic of the traditionalists in the Church, as “evil”. The Vatican is still keeping an eye on the group.

The latest front group for the overtly Christian Nationalist Destiny Church is called ‘True Patriots of NZ’. On Facebook, where they have nine thousand followers, they describe themselves as “Guardians of the Kiwi Way of Life.” and “Defenders of Faith, Flag & Family.” Encouraging followers to “Join the movement standing against globalism, mass immigration, and woke ideology.” The group has taken particular aim at Auckland’s sikh community, disrupting religious processions carrying a banner proclaiming “This is New Zealand not India”.

Indian New Zealanders now make up the country’s third largest ethnic group. While this makes them a target of xenophobia from groups like the True Patriots, there are various Indian diaspora organisations in Aotearoa New Zealand (namely, Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh New Zealand, the Hindu Council of New Zealand and Overseas Friends of BJP New Zealand) which operate to propagate the Hindutva project, a form of nationalism which has seen violence against Muslims, Christians and other minority groups in India.

There is, of course, an anti-Hindutva current among the diaspora here. Sneha Singh at the University of Auckland has been researching that movement. One prominent anti-Hindutva activist was stripped of her Overseas Citizen of India status last year, suggesting goings on in this part of the world are not unnoticed by the Modi regime.

Fringe parties

(chapters 8, 10, and 12)

Following the True Patriots protest Brian Tamaki urged followers to withhold their votes in this year’s election. Although at the time of writing, the Destiny Church affiliated Vision New Zealand Party is still registered to be on the ballot. The party formerly known as the New Conservatives, who saw their vote collapse in 2023 (likely because NZ First took on a number of their policies, candidates, and members) has dropped the ‘new’ prefix and will contest this year’s election as The Conservatives, giving an option to those who think NZ First is still just a bit too woke.

New Zeal, who probably contributed to the New Conservative collapse by appealing to the explicitly Christian Nationalist section of their supporters, appears to be standing again this year. As is the Outdoors and Freedom Party, giving an option for those still casting their vote based on misinformation about fifth generation mobile networks.

Alt-Media

(chapters 11, 13, and 14)

Earlier this year The Guardian published a three part series from Robert Topinka, a reader in digital media and rhetoric at Birkbeck, University of London. The final part, which is titled ‘How the left can win back the internet – and rise again’ includes this valuable insight into the situation we face

“The right has established its own parallel media universe. It eschews most real news and instead tells convincing tales about how the shadowy functionaries of the Cathedral, or the matrix, or cultural Marxism lie to you in the media and try to control your every action. The reactionary right is not just xenophobia, racism and misogyny. This online subculture also offers camaraderie, new diets, natural medicine, exercise regimes, all of which arrive in new communicative forms such as memes and live streams.”

The New Zealand based ‘Reality Check Radio’ (RCR), launched by Voices for Freedom in 2023, is a microcosm of that new global media environment. With a budget for extensive billboard advertising around the country. It was on RCR that New Zealand First launched their 2023 election campaign, and various MPs including government ministers appear as guests, now that association with a platform where the ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory is discussed as fact is no longer something that harms one’s political career.

Talanoa Sa’o, the Pacifika orientated show that switched to online only after accuracy complaints (one of them from myself) to the Broadcasting Standards Authority saw them lose their spot on broadcast television channel Apna TV, appears to be defunct. Although their Facebook page is active, sharing short form videos mostly from American sources with no obvious connection to Pacific Island related issues. Counterspin Media is still around, but a shadow of what it was during the pandemic.

Sovereign Citizens

(chapter 15)

In writing this article I’d almost forgotten about the sovereign citizens, but we shouldn’t forget them. Lets not forget for instance that last year in Australia two police officers were allegedly killed and another injured by a man who identified himself as a sovereign citizen. Just this week Macquarie University criminologist and former police officer Vincent Hurley was quoted on news.com.au saying “What started as a fringe annoyance has turned into a real national security problem in countries around the world,”. While thankfully we haven’t seen that kind of violence from sovereign citizens on this side of the Tasman, the movement that blossomed during the COVID-19 pandemic is still with us. Stephen Young wrote in a piece published in Newsroom last August:

“While we had hoped this movement would gradually lose steam when restrictions and mandates were lifted, it does not appear to have slackened as anticipated.

While precise figures are difficult to determine, researchers, lawyers, judges, Members of Parliament, local government and security agencies have noted an increase in pseudolegal activity.”

Rural Rebellion

(chapter 16)

My current research, for both the upcoming ‘Quit Paris?’ podcast and my masters thesis is looking at climate change disinformation. This means I could probably write at length about the ‘rural rebellion’ topic. The Agriculture Action Group (AAG) who were the basis for much of this chapter in Fear disappeared almost as quickly as they began, but the farmer group Groundswell, who had in the past distanced themselves from AAG and also from Voices for Freedom, has since become enmeshed with the same milieu, attempting to discredit the science on climate change and get New Zealand out of the Paris Climate Accords with more than a little assistance from RCR Media.

While when I began this research I’d envisioned it as moving on from the far-right to another topic, but looking overseas it’s clear that far-right parties in Europe have made common cause with protesting farmers across the continent. Those European protests were a massive influence on the protests organised by Groundswell, with slogans and talking points lifted directly from protests in France and The Netherlands in particular. So I haven’t quite pulled myself away, and this historian in me is increasingly thinking that when we look back at this decade with hindsight the farmer protests against climate policy will be seen as more significant than the protests against public health measures we saw during the pandemic.

The final three chapters of the book looked toward the future. I’ll make that the topic for part two of this article, and try to also include a bit of hope, because we all need it.

Today, I suffer from severe pain, inflammation, and strain in my lower vertebrae due to the pregnancy and fetching water from a distant source. I also need a corneal transplant, and the operation costs $3,000, which would cripple my life. I can barely afford food, let alone the surgery. My husband lost his job at the beginning of the war. You are the only ones who can help me. If I lose my sight, I will lose the last thing connecting me to my children’s lives. I write these words with a broken heart, asking for a chance at treatment just so I can still hold and care for them.

My eldest son, Muhammad, is 11 years old. He lost his entire childhood in the war and is still unable to access online schools because he doesn’t have a phone to study with his brother, Yassin. My son Yassin has been deprived of everything, even a peaceful night’s sleep. He suffers from mental health issues as a result of the continuous bombing.

And poor Ghaith cries whenever he sees anything, and I can’t provide for him. My children have gone days without eating. Sometimes they drink water and salt.

You can donate to support Noreen and her family here.

Gaza — a small strip of land that has grown unbearably narrow for its people — continues to produce human stories whose cruelty surpasses any political or military description. Among these stories is that of a young married couple, Ahmad and Samar, who find themselves surrounded on all sides: an ongoing Israeli war, a fragile and dangerous security reality, and a suffocating siege that deprives them of the most basic rights to life.

Only a few weeks ago, Ahmad and Samar decided to get married. The timing was far from ideal — it was harsh beyond measure. No stability, no safety, and no clear future. Yet they chose life. They chose to say “yes” amid the rubble, because in Gaza, love is not a luxury — it is a form of resistance.

Marriage Under Fire, Life Without Guarantees

Their wedding was not a traditional celebration, but a declaration of defiance against a reality that relentlessly tries to break the human spirit. They married despite power outages, fear, and an unknown tomorrow. They married because they believe that every human being deserves a chance at life, even in the harshest of places.

But what came after the wedding was even harder. Gaza today is not only a war zone; it is an open-air prison. The siege restricts movement, seals borders, and strangles dreams. Adding to this is the presence of local militias linked to Israel, further complicating and endangering daily life, tightening the grip around civilians and turning ordinary existence into a daily struggle for survival.

Their Dream Is Not a Luxury — It Is a Right

Ahmad and Samar are not asking for the impossible. They are not seeking comfort or a lavish lifestyle. All they ask for is the chance to leave Gaza — an opportunity to travel and start a new life in a place that offers safety, security, and freedom, the most basic human rights.

The cost required for travel ranges between $6,000 and $7,000, a figure that may seem modest in many parts of the world, but is nearly impossible to obtain in Gaza amid economic collapse and the absence of stable income.

Home Is Not Geography — It Is Safety

For Ahmad and Samar, a homeland is not merely the place where one is born. It is where one feels safe, where tomorrow is not feared, and where the simple desire to live is not punished. Home is dignity, freedom, and peace.

Their wish in life is painfully simple:

To live in peace. To sleep without fear. To plan for the future without the constant question: Will we survive?

Your Support — A Wedding Gift and a Lifeline

In a world that often turns its back on Gaza, humanity remains the last hope. Supporting Ahmad and Samar is not charity — it is a human stand. It is a true wedding gift, offered to a couple who chose to begin their life together despite everything.

Your support could be the difference between a life trapped under siege and a new life built on safety and peace. You could be the bridge that carries this couple from fear to life.

In Gaza, dreams do not die — they simply wait for someone to listen.

You can donate to support Ahmad and Samar here.

Kia ora kautau. I’m grateful to have the opportunity to speak to this gathering of faith leaders about the topic of Christian Nationalism. I’m going to begin by talking about another gathering of faith leaders that took place about a year and a half ago.

In June 2023, Pastor Peter Morlock of the City Impact Church, an evangelical congregation, held a ‘Christian Summit on the state of the nation’ to bring together the various Christian political parties, as well as a handful of current and former National Party MPs. In attendance were Brian and Hannah Tamaki, the leaders of Destiny Church and its political wing Vision New Zealand, former and current leaders of New Conservative Party, and the leaders of the overtly Christian ONE Party.

Following the summit, the ONE Party rebranded as NewZeal, with a new leader- former National Party MP (2011-2020) Alfred Ngaro. Speaking with John Cowan on Newstalk ZB following the announcement, Ngaro talked about how he believes the values of the National Party have moved away from the values he holds. He cites the ban on conversion therapy and “non-binary gender identity that came through the department of internal affairs” as examples. On ZB he described the NewZeal party as not just for Christians, but for all New Zealanders. Yet the way he speaks to audiences of evangelicals makes for a stark contrast.

“I’ll tell you this: We need to be a nation of believers that aren’t afraid” he told the crowd assembled at the Christian summit “are you willing to be broken and burnt? Because that’s the army that God is looking for.” He went on to speak about what is known as Seven Mountains Dominionism.

“You know we talk about seven mountains not as a theology, but as a strategy, but what are we doing there? How are we going to take those, right? It’s time now to preach that the space between the temple and the palace is not meant to be a divide. When Solomon was rebuilding it, he was doing it because God said, the place of governance, that Temple, is the place of worship, they’re not meant to be separated! So to the pastors and the Preachers and the theologians in our church, get your theology right!”

So what is seven mountains dominionism?

In 1975, Loren Cunningham, the founder of Youth With a Mission, and Bill Bright, the founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, proclaimed that God had given them a revelation, telling both men that there were seven “spheres,” or mountains, that were the foundations of every society: religion, family, education, government, media, arts and entertainment, and business. Whoever could take those mountains could take a nation.

“God’s plan has always been for us to have kingdom dominion and rule over every part of the world, so that His kingdom might fully inhabit the earth” writes Tommi Femrite, founding ‘apostle’ of GateKeepers International and Apostolic Intercessors Network in Invading the Seven Mountains with Intercession: How to Reclaim Society Through Prayer, published in 2012. “Yet when we look at the various areas of American society today, we must ask ourselves, Who is ruling? Sadly, it’s not us.”

She goes on to say that “the Lord has given us the “Seven Mountain Mandate” to take dominion; this is our authoritative order from God.”

For adherents of Seven Mountains Dominionism, having dominion over religion, family, education and government is only half the picture, Christians must also have dominion over business, media, arts and entertainment- areas Femrite believes are currently controlled by Jews. “American Jews—numbering a mere 1.7 percent of the US population (5.2 million out of 304 million)—have ruled the mountains of arts and entertainment, business, and media., To this day, they continue to prove one of the fundamental truths of the Seven Mountains: it only takes one person to reach a mountain’s summit and claim it as his.” She places great emphasis on the importance of culture.

“Christians have been working in Hollywood for decades trying to make a difference. I believe it has taken this long for those believers not on the Arts and Entertainment Mountain to wake up and realize the significance of this cultural sphere. Culture is not only reflected by its arts and entertainment, it is shaped by them”

This way of thinking is not dissimilar to the Breitbart doctrine – the idea that politics is ‘downstream’ from culture, and therefore you can influence politics by first changing culture. This was the strategy of Breitbart News under the leadership of Steve Bannon (later an adviser to Donald Trump), and locally is the strategy of the group Voices for Freedom and their online media network, RCR Media (initially called Reality Check Radio). Voices for Freedom began as an anti-vaccine group but have broadened to cover other conspiracy theories, they have emerged from the secular wing of the anti-government movement that grew out of the COVID-19 pandemic, and represent the beginnings of an infrastructure that can exist to influence culture and politics.

The religious wing of the anti-government movement largely emerged from Pentecostal Christians who believed the government was overstepping its authority by obstructing their right to worship (though vaccine mandates and limitations on gathering sizes). That wing already has an infrastructure in place, incorporating churches, publications, and a homeschooling curriculum. Christian Nationalism- the belief that New Zealand should be Christian nation- has the potential to become the dominant strain of the anti-government movement in the future.

To quote Ngaro again:

“Jesus Christ is now being challenged: you could no longer hide [your faith] as a nice thing to have. Everywhere you are now it’s being challenged, and what is God wanting? He’s wanting to Wake. Us. Up.” he spoke those words at the Elim Christian Centre in Porirua in March of 2023.

NewZeal has had no real success in elections, but government is only one of the seven mountains he plans to summit, and in shaping society through culture NewZeal is joined by a number of other social actors who may have differing theologies, or not theology at all, but find common ground in attitudes toward immigration, Islam, and public health measures such as vaccines.

The immediate aftermath of the Christchurch mosque shooting in 2019 saw an outpouring of interfaith solidarity. Many of you in the audience will have been part of that solidarity in some form. But you may also recall not all New Zealand’s Christian churches were enamoured with the support for the country’s Muslim community that followed the atrocity. For many of them, it was the broadcast of the adhan, the Islamic call to prayer, on RNZ that was the focal point of their anger.

Brain Tamaki, the self appointed Bishop of the evangelical Destiny Church tweeted “this is offensive to all true Christians ... our national identity is at stake”. In the aftermath of the shooting Facebook had removed a post from Tamaki that described Islam as a “fast creeping social invasion.” You may have seen that just recently, Tamaki travelled to the UK to speak at a rally organised by the British far-right activist Tommy Robinson.

“Those who drive Christianity out of society are paving the way for Islam,” Carl Bromley, pastor of the Christchurch based Life Connection Baptist Fellowship- which is not affiliated with New Zealand’s Baptist Association- wrote on Facebook after the Adhan broadcast. Bromley’s page was full of links to articles from what Stuff described “an anti-Muslim conspiracy blog” as well as distain for increased regulation of firearms, and opposition to calls to change the name of the Canterbury rugby team from ‘The Crusaders’ to something less invocative of a Christian holy war. Bromley believed that the government was using the tragedy to promote Islam.

Ross Smith, the founder of Jesus for NZ, a group advocating the restoration of Jesus to parliamentary prayer, was furious that Islamic prayers were now being said in parliament. “She’s already said there was no Christian foundation in this nation, which is rubbish” he said in reference to then Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.

New Zealand as a Christian country is a deeply held belief for many evangelical Christians. The book New Zealand’s Christian Heritage by Col Stringer, which was first published by his ministry in 2001, includes the words “It’s time to tell the world that this is a Christian country with a Christian heritage! This is not a Muslim country, it is not an atheistic, Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist or New Age country- New Zealand is a Christian country founded on Christian principles and governed by national laws that are founded on Biblical principles!” Among a subset of evangelicals, the nation’s Christian heritage has long been perceived to be under threat- and not just from Islam. A 2002 editorial in the evangelical publication Evidence claimed that this threat came from “[T]he academic purveyors of political correctness, the literary elite, the environmentalists, the feminists, the appeasement lobby, and the neo-Marxists, all of whom want also want to create a New Zealand in their own image”

Another evangelical magazine, Above Rubies, which is published by Colin and Nancy Campbell, who now reside in the USA but are originally from New Zealand, has promoted a view that sounds frighteningly similar to what we now call The Great Replacement theory. To quote from in an article first published in 2010:

“The result of the Christian acceptance of birth control is now measurable. Because our love of small families has consumed all of Western society, Europe and to a lesser extent America, are running out of indigenous people. And in the “nature abhors a vacuum” way of things, others are flooding in to fill the void. Most notably, Muslims who have not generally been swept up in the birth control tsunami, are handily populating every land they enter.”

Another article spoke of a “demographic winter” claiming that society- the subtext being specifically Western, Christian society, would die out. The Campbells, who on occasion tour New Zealand promoting their world view, were also part of the insurrection on January 6, 2021 where supporters of ousted president Donald Trump stormed the capitol building in Washington DC. Following that event Nancy Campbell wrote on Facebook that the violence “was staged with Antifa to make it look bad for President Trump.”

In the lead up to the 2020 election, Hannah Tamaki, who served as leader of Vision New Zealand, called for a 97% cut to immigration numbers, and suggested that rather than accepting refugees for resettlement New Zealand should pay them not to come here. She vowed to ban the construction of new “mosques, temples and other foreign buildings of worship”. Her husband Brain made a Facebook post that was sponsored to increase its reach, stating “we can not accept the proliferation of Islam in our country”. ONE, the party that would later become NewZeal, also advocated slashing the annual refugee intake; from 1500 to just 350.

ONE also had a policy that New Zealand establish an embassy in Jerusalem and apologise to Israel for New Zealand’s sponsoring of UN Resolution 2334, which states that Israel’s settlement activity in the occupied territories constitutes a “flagrant violation” of international law. These views were shared by the New Conservative Party, who list New Zealand - Israel relations as one of their eight policy pillars. Presumably in both cases the policy, and the priority given to it, results from the influence of Christian Zionism, a belief held by some Christians that the existence of the state of Israel is the fulfilment of part of Biblical prophecy, heralding the second coming of Christ.

This ideology began with 17th century puritans in England who believed that for prophecy to be fulfilled Jewish people needed to return to historical Israel.

Israeli historian Anita Shapira has suggested that in the nineteenth century this idea was spread from evangelical protestants to Jewish circles, so what we now call Christian Zionism may have actually influenced Jewish Zionism. More recent polling and academic research however suggests widespread distrust among Jews towards the motives of Evangelical Protestants.

The Christian Zionist movement grew its influence in the USA in the later part of the 20th century, promoted by Evangelical leaders such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson who became prominent during the rise of the Christian right in the US in the 1980s and 1990s. In his 1981 book The Fundamentalist Phenomenon Falwell stated “To stand against Israel is to stand against God. We believe that history and scripture prove that God deals with nations in relation to how they deal with Israel.”

In Aotearoa, evangelical Christianity doesn’t play the outsize role in politics it does in the US, but we have seen in the two years since the Hamas terror attack on October 7 2023 and Israel’s genocidal response, Destiny Church emerge as possibly the largest faction of Israel supporters in this country. There are more Israel-supporting evangelical Christians than there are Jewish people in Aotearoa, and of course a significant proportion of the Jewish population, represented by groups like Dayenu and Alternative Jewish Voices, are opposed to the occupation of Palestine.

At a protest he held outside parliament in December 2023, Brian Tamaki described himself as a “spiritual Jew” and Destiny Church Pastor Nigel Woodley, speaking at the same rally stated that “Israel’s right to defend itself includes the right to wage war until there is an unconditional surrender.” This was not Tamaki’s first protest in support of Israel, following previous protests he had appeared on Israeli television, now describing himself as “a bit of a star over there”.

There is also the lobby group ‘The Israel Institute’ which is a private company with three directors, only one of whom is Jewish, while the other two are Christian Zionists. Marilyn Garson, author of the recently released book Jewish, not Zionist. Has written that “The IINZ is not a Jewish institution although it does reflect Israel’s increasing Christian Zionist support.” The IINZ is occasionally used as a source by the media to give “balance” to coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict and New Zealand’s response, without it being made clear that this is a predominantly evangelical Christian organisation. We see here an example of this sector of society having an outsize influence on the wider public conversation.

As I touched on earlier, we also saw evangelical Christians playing a large role in the opposition to public health measures during the COVID-19 pandemic. City Impact Pastor Peter Mortlock promoted an anti-lockdown protest organised by Destiny Church front group The Freedom and Rights Coalition during a sermon, telling his congregation that it was their choice whether to attend or not, but concluding “I think sooner or later we are going to have to make a stand – a stand for our rights, the way our freedoms are being stripped away.” In another sermon he parroted a number of talking points from the conspiratorial anti-vaccine movement. “I don’t believe in the government right now, I don’t believe the media right now, and I’m sorry but I don’t trust Big Pharma either! Why is that? Well, if I mention the name Bill Gates or George Soros or Anthony Fauci – and it’s not about conspiracy, it’s just about plain facts, right?!”

Globally, Pentacoastal Christians, who number around half a billion, were active in opposing restrictions on gatherings in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, making it clear that they wouldn’t be closing their church doors for anything short of the second coming. Fraser MacDiononald, an anthropologist at the University of Waikato, sees the Pentecostal response to the pandemic as rooted in theology. Pentecostals more than any other denomination concern themselves with otherworldly power. The COVID-19 virus was demonised in a very literal sense of the word, but the protection against this evil is the power of the Holy Spirit, and any earthly rules that impeded a devout Pentecostal from having a life in the Spirit were considered suspect, and a government imposing lockdowns and vaccine mandates, was on the side of the devil.

The Pentecostal interpretation of the government as an entity carrying out an evil agenda, conspiring to suppress Christianity and open the doors for Islam, was an idea that dovetailed with the far right conspiracy theorists who had come to a similar conclusion by different means.

Dieuwe de Boer, previously the general secretary of the New Conservative Party and founder of the website Right Minds penned an article titled “Resistance to Tyranny”. With reference to the sixteenth century Presbyterian theologian John Knox, he claims that all authority is subservient to God, and tyranny is when an earthly authority rebels against God’s supreme authority, something he saw New Zealand’s government as doing. He claimed that the Director General of Health Ashley Bloomfield was presiding “over a technocratic machine with nigh unlimited power, which he wields directly against the Church” and that two scientists who had become prominently featured in the media during the pandemic, Shawn Hendy and Siouxsie Wiles, were both “involved in overt anti-Christian activism through deconstructing God’s creation of sexual dimorphism and support the demonic system known as “transgenderism.”

For de Boer, the fact that Churches were not considered essential during the COVID-19 lockdowns was an affront to God, as were any limits on gathering numbers or the requirement to have vaccine pass to attend a church service “If you have to show ID at the door, you are not entering a church of Jesus Christ. If people will be turned away from worship due to an arbitrary number being met, you are not entering a church of Jesus Christ.”

When police spoke to pastor Carl Bromley regarding his hosting of a church service in his home during a level 4 lockdown, he told the officer that he would not “bow down to any legislation that deprives me of my God-given right to worship”. In footage he posted to social media, Bromley referred to the police as totalitarian foot soldiers and claimed that they and members of the New Zealand public, who “endorse and tolerate this tyranny” should be ashamed. “I will die on this hill if need be, by the grace and provision of God,” For these evangelicals, noncompliance with the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act wasn’t just a political protest, but a stand against a government who were defying God and taking the side of evil.

Today Diewue de Boer hosts a show on Reality Check Radio, where he and his co-host regularly promote anti-immigration and anti-Islam talking points, as well as the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which is spoken about as fact.

Concurrently with this rise in a particularly protestant form of Christian Nationalism, recent years have also seen a growth in a form of traditionalist Catholicism linked to the political right, with high profile converts such as the Dutch far-right activist Eva Vlaardingerbroek and US vice president J.D Vance.

Christopher Lamb, the author of The Outsider: Pope Francis and His Battle to Reform the Church told an interviewer that “The populists and nationalists were looking for some kind of soul for their politics and they found it in some symbols of the faith,” David W. Lafferty, who writes about conspiracy theories for the Catholic website Where is Peter, described this as “Catholic LARPing,” (LARPing referring to live action role-playing) adopting the trappings of Catholicism but not the actual tenets of the faith.

In my research on New Zealand far-right, I am aware of two young men who had been part of a white supremacist organisation who gravitated to Catholicism. One of them had traveled to Ireland to be under the tutelage of Father Richard Williamson.

Williamson, who died earlier this year [2025], had been ordained as a priest by the French archbishop Marcel-François Lefebvre. Lefebvre had supported the pro-Nazi Vichy regime. He described France’s liberation from the Nazis as “the victory of Freemasonry against the Catholic order of Petain”. In 1970 he founded The Society of Saint Pius X and in 1974 he publicly denounced the Vatican II reforms that modernised the Church as heretical. When in 1988 Lefebvre defied the Vatican by consecrating four bishops, Pope John Paul II excommunicated him and all SSPX priests, and declared SSPX in formal schism with the church.

In 1989, Richard Williamson, at that time the rector of the SSPX’s main North American seminary in Wisconsin, spoke at a Canadian event where he decried the alleged persecution of Holocaust denier and neo-Nazi Ernst Zundel by the Canadian government, telling his audience “There was not one Jew killed in the gas chambers. It was all lies, lies, lies”. This resulted in the Canadian government banning all SSPX publications.

In 2009 Pope Benedict XVI reversed the 1988 excommunications of SSPX priests, including Williamson, in an attempt at reconciliation with the order. Three days earlier in an interview with Swedish journalist Ali Fegan, Williamson had repeated his claim that no Jews were killed in Nazi gas chambers. The Vatican claimed to be unaware of Williamson’s comments when the excommunication was reversed, but he was soon excommunicated again, following his conviction in a German court for Holocaust denial, making him a rare case of a priest excommunicated twice by two different Popes.

In 2012 Williamson was expelled from SSPX, allegedly for failing to show respect and obedience. He went on to found the breakaway SSPX Resistance. In 2020 he delivered a sermon where he blamed Jewish people for the COVID-19 pandemic and claimed they were manipulating the stock market in an effort to start a war, describing them as “master servants of the devil”.

The New Zealand man who was following Williamson took the name John Capistrano. Capistrano was a saint who led a crusade against Ottoman Turks at the Battle of Belgrade in 1456. Notable, as many on the far-right who adopt Catholicism do so at least in part because of a belief in a clash of civilisations between the Christian West and the Islamic East. Capistrano is also notable for sermons that motivated pogroms against European Jews.

The other New Zealander I’m aware of is the soldier recently sentenced for attempted espionage. He had been a founding member of the white supremacist group The Dominion Movement and later Action Zealandia. While his name is suppressed, researchers such as myself are aware of his identity, and a newsletter from the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit parish in Palmerston North lists him as receiving the sacrament of confirmation (the last stage of a conversion) a few months before he was arrested at Linton Military Camp.

I was previously a research associate of He Whenua Taurikura, the now disbanded centre for research excellence established after the royal commission inquiry into the 2019 Mosque shootings. At one of the organisation’s conferences, I spoke with an Iman who told me about how there are plans in place for de-radicalisation if someone who has been radicalised online starts attending a mosque. For radical Islamists, their extremism is negatively correlated with Mosque attendance, with radicalisation largely happening online.

We are beginning to see a phenomenon of radicalised Christians. I’ve spoken today largely about New Zealand but of course we live in a very globalised world when it comes to mass communication, and people are being influenced by ideas coming from Europe and North America. I ask you to consider, is there a de-radicialisation plan in place if someone joins your congregation expressing the idea that New Zealand is a Christian nation, and that justifies a hostility toward refugees and migrants of other faiths, or the LGBT community, or a view that the genocide in Gaza is not only justified but theologically necessary. Indeed, not just new arrivals but existing members of your congregations exposed to these ideas online may start expressing them.

Dear world,

Hello, my name is Stuart. I’m a Palestinian from Gaza, and I’m doing everything I can to get my family to safety.

My family includes:

• Kamal (my dad), 62 years old

• Summer (my mom), 51 years old

• Sahar, 24 years old

• Malak, 21 years old

• Mohammed, 8 years old

With a heart burdened by loss and pain, I reach out in desperate hope amid the unimaginable hardships we face in Gaza.

Our lives have been shattered—not just by the loss of our home, but by the very erosion of the security we once knew.

Every day, we grapple with the grim realities of displacement and constant danger.

My once cherished home, a sanctuary of warmth and safety, now lies in ruins under relentless destruction.

The bitter cold of winter and ceaseless rains have made our struggle even more unbearable, pushing us further into despair.

Basic necessities—food, clean water, and the simplest forms of shelter—have become distant dreams, out of reach in a world turned hostile.

My father, a man who has long battled high blood pressure and diabetes, and my beloved mother, whose frail health continues to deteriorate, now stand as symbols of our relentless suffering.

Without access to proper medical care or essential medicines, their fragile health hangs by a thread, echoing the collective pain of those who have lost everything. In these dire moments, I implore you to consider extending a lifeline.

Your generous support—whether through a donation or by simply sharing our story—has the power to bring us a glimmer of hope in this abyss of despair.

Every dollar raised through this campaign will go directly toward helping my displaced family in Gaza survive the harsh and deteriorating conditions they are facing. The funds will be used to secure essential needs such as food, clean water, medicine, and temporary shelter.

In addition, we will prioritize critical health support for my parents, whose medical conditions require constant attention and access to treatment.

Every contribution will be handled with transparency and care, ensuring that your support provides real, immediate relief—bringing us one step closer to safety, stability, and the hope of rebuilding what was lost. Your compassion, no matter how modest, is not just charity—it is a beacon of hope and a testament to our shared humanity.

In this battle for survival, every act of kindness brings us closer to reclaiming a sense of normalcy and hope for a better future.

Thank you for taking the time to listen to our plight and for considering any help you can provide during this darkest of times.

PAYPAL:

stuartgiddings@googlemail.com

SKRILL:

felg752@gmail.com

A nativity scene with baby Jesus among a large pile of rubble has been constructed outside Christchurch Transitional Cathedral, aiming to highlight the ongoing genocide of Palestinian communities in Gaza this Christmas.

The installation was placed there by Aotearoa Christians for Peace in Palestine (AC4PP), with the support of Sh’ma Koleinu – Alternative Jewish Voices NZ. It contains a ‘yahrtzeit’ memorial candle to mark the loss of loved ones, particularly following the recent terror attack on the Jewish community in Bondi, as well as a red candle as part of a global nonviolent movement for justice and peace in Palestine.

The scene mirrors an installation from December 2023 when Palestinian Pastor, Munther Isaac of the Christmas Lutheran Church in Bethlehem, laid baby Jesus in rubble – a pastoral act, declaring; “If Christ was born today, he would be born under the rubble in Gaza… Born among the occupied and oppressed as a sign of solidarity with those who are marginalised today.”

Dr Isaac, who this year published the book Christ in the Rubble, has been critical of Western churches for stopping short of condemning the ongoing genocide. “Calling for peace is a safe option. You don’t want to see people killed,” he told the Church Times in April. “You come across as holier-than-thou. War is wrong, and so on. Let’s love one another, and so on. But you’re not willing to call out war criminals and call for accountability, because that would create controversy, and you don’t want that.”

It’s a criticism shared by AC4PP “The display also acknowledges our own complicity” said Cole Martin, a Christchurch journalist who spend six months of this year living in Aida Refugee Camp in Bethlehem, documenting setter violence against Palestinians.

“For decades our churches, institutions, and faith community have blindly supported Israel’s campaign of domination and destruction across the Holy Land; manufacturing warped biblical justifications for violence and funding the machinery, technology, and weapons used to displace families, imprison children, demolish homes, and persecute entire communities. Today the church is crucifying Christ all over again.”

Many evangelical congregations, such as Aotearoa New Zealand’s Destiny Church, adhere to Christian Zionism, a belief that posits that for a Biblical prophecy to be fulfilled Jewish people needed to return to historical Israel. This world view in especially common in the United States.

“Some might feel this [nativity scene] takes away from the joy of Christmas, but this is precisely the meaning of Christmas. The birth of Jesus among us – not into wealth, safety, or power, but rather a difficult and messy birth in a cave of livestock under foreign military occupation, to an unmarried couple soon to become refugees fleeing a murderous political regime. Christmas is a very Palestinian story, and it gives hope that God turns up even in the most hopeless of places.”

Marilyn Garson, the co-founder of Alternative Jewish Voices who spent years working alongside communities in Gaza, commented; “Right now, we mark the hate-killing of Australian Jews at Bondi, but one grief does not blot out another. This week they are Jews. In Christchurch [March 2019], they were Muslim. None of us will ever be separately safe. We respond to Bondi, to Christchurch and to Gaza by refusing to be separate. We grieve every life lost and we protect whichever life is endangered. We stretch our hearts to hold them all.”

On December 14 two shooters, a father and son, killed 15 people attending a Hanukkah celebration, injuring dozens more in a terrorist attack inspired by Islamic State. The younger of the two shooters had been a follower of radical preacher and noted antisemite, Wissam Haddad, a man Sydney’s Muslim community had been warning police about for over a decade.

The 2019 terror attack in Christchurch was carried out by an Australian white supremacist inspired by the ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory, and took the lives of 51 people worshiping and the city’s two mosques. Six of those killed were Palestinians.

Leading human rights monitors have warned Israel’s killing of Palestinians has not ended, with over 390 people killed since the so-called ‘ceasefire’. Over 70,000 people are confirmed dead, and the survivors face widespread starvation, malnutrition, and a harsh winter compounded by ongoing food and medical shortages due to Israel’s blockade. Most of the population are displaced, with over half of Gaza inaccessible and the majority of buildings destroyed.

Rev’d Matt Maslin of the Bryndwr Anglican Parish described the nativity scene as; “the perfect time to show solidarity with those who are violently oppressed, displaced and dominated because, at the heart of advent is the story of a God that has shown solidarity with humanity. The story of Christmas is one where God enters into the difficulties of humanity, to both empathise with and transform its suffering. This is a story we are invited to meaningfully participate in as well.” AC4PP say Christ in the rubble

“challenges us to think beyond ourselves during the Christmas season; it invites us to see the image of Jesus in every child killed and pulled from under the rubble. In those facing starvation and genocide in Gaza; those held captive, displaced, and living under domination in the West Bank; those mourning their loved ones violently taken from them in Bondi; those facing famine and genocide in Sudan and Congo; vulnerable communities being trafficked and exploited across the world; our neighbours in the Pacific and elsewhere already suffering the effects of climate destruction; those without food, shelter, safety, freedom and dignity.”

A vigil is being held at the Christchurch Cathedral on Monday December 22. The installation will remain at the Cathedral over the Christmas period, as a space for people to grieve, reflect, and pray. All are welcome.

My name is Maha Mohammad Ahmad. I live in the south of Gaza, Khan Younis city. I am a mother of two sons, Hamza, who is 15 years old, and Qusai, who is 12. My husband’s name is Mahmoud Ahmad, and he used to work as a taxi driver. Before October 7th, I lived in a small, warm home filled with love, mercy, and peace. I worked as an English teacher, a profession I’ve been devoted to for over 15 years. During those years, I put in tremendous effort to build a safe and loving home for my family, a shelter from the hardships of life. I was passionate about my work and received many awards for excellence in education.

Every morning, my husband would leave to earn some money by driving his taxi, while our sons would head to school to learn, grow, and build a better future. Life was simple, kind, and full of gratitude. We never complained. We were always thankful to God for everything we had.

But everything changed after October 7th.

On the morning of October 7th, I was getting ready for work, my children were preparing for school, and my husband was getting ready to head out in his taxi. It was just an ordinary morning until suddenly, we were shaken by the sound of explosions and rockets everywhere. That was the beginning of the war.

On December 22nd, 2023, the building next to ours my uncles’ was bombed. That same night, our apartment was heavily damaged. By the grace of God, we survived, but we lost our warm, safe home. It was no longer livable.

Then, on January 22nd, 2024, the Israeli forces invaded western Khan Younis. Like the rest of the city, we were forced to flee to central Gaza. We returned to Khan Younis on May 13th, only to find our city reduced to a lifeless desert; flattened, buried under tons of rubble. A city completely destroyed.

Now, my children have no school, no home. I lost my job. My husband lost his taxi, which was his only source of income. We lost life as we knew it. We lost our freedom. We lost every human right. Everything was taken from us, for no reason.

My eldest son suffers from partial brain atrophy due to lack of oxygen during birth. Before the war, I used to buy him medication. Now, I can’t even afford food. How can I afford medicine?

Our life, our memories, even our future; wiped out. What color is left in our world? What future can we dream of? We have literally lost everything. And for what?

Maybe just because we are Palestinians.

We are not just numbers.

We are families, mothers, fathers, and children. People who once had dreams, jobs, schools, and homes.

Today, that home is gone.

Our city is destroyed.

My children have no school.

My husband has no work.

And I have no way to provide even the basic necessities for my family.

We are not asking for luxury, we are asking for survival.

We are asking for a chance to rebuild something from the ashes.This is my story, and the story of every mother in Gaza, the story of every woman in Gaza.

You can support Maha and her family via this link.

For more than two and a half years, Ahmad and Samar lived through complications and losses that could fill an entire book—stories of patience, pain, and survival.

In the heart of Gaza, under bombardment, destruction, and the constant absence of safety, they lost loved ones, were separated by circumstances, and watched life shrink around them.

And yet—despite everything—one thing remained stronger than war: love.

Ahmad and Samar did not give up.

They held onto their dream and waited for the day they could finally say:

“We are still here… still loving, still dreaming.”

Today, after a long journey of hardship and endurance, they stand at the doors of a moment they once believed might never come:

their wedding on Tuesday.

But the truth is clear: the war did not only destroy homes… it destroyed livelihoods and swept away every opportunity for them to start a stable life together.

For that reason—and with complete honesty and transparency—Ahmad and Samar say to the world:

We genuinely need every dollar, every bit of support, every hand that can stand with us. Our dream can only come true with your help.”

This wedding is not just a celebration.

It is a statement of victory—

a victory of life over death, of love over destruction, and of determination over despair.

Stand with their dream…

Every contribution—no matter how small—is a piece of a beautiful story being written right now, by those who believe that joy is a right, even in the hardest places.

You can support Ahmed and Samar via this link.

The NZ Far Right and the Right

I was asked by the Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa (CAFCA) to speak on the topic of the far-right and the right at their recent 50th anniversary event. CAFCA has, for half a century now, been drawing attention to issues related to privatisation and the buying up of Aotearoa’s resources by multinational corporations. Below is the text of the talk in full.

I was given the topic ‘the far-right and the right’ and what a timely topic that has turned out to be. I was writing an article recently about David Seymour’s response to the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk was the founder of Turning Point USA, a conservative organisation with branches on university campuses across the US. Originally something of an alternative to Campus Republican chapters, TPUSA were backers of Donald Trump, an outsider presidential candidate.

TPUSA utilised new media, creating content by Kirk touring campuses and challenging liberal and left-leaning students to debate him. Of course, the edited videos that appeared online always showed Kirk ‘winning’ the debate with his adversaries. In the article I was writing I described Kirk’s ‘debate me’ style as epitomising the methods of what we used to call the alternative right. When I wrote that sentence I released that we no longer call it the ‘alternative right’ as what was once an alternative was now the mainstream.

Trump is now in his second term, surrounded by people who share his ideology. Kirk’s TPUSA has become something of a media empire, and he died a multimillionaire.

So let’s take a step back and look at how things got to this point.

The term ‘alternative right’ was coined by the white nationalist Richard Spencer in 2010 and was something of a euphemism for ‘far-right’ with its connotations of racism and anti-semitism. Although Spencer himself has done little to distance himself from those beliefs, the phrase alternative right or ‘alt-right’ did catch on. Steve Bannon, later an advisor to Donald Trump but at the time the CEO of Breitbart News, described the news outlet as ‘the platform for the alt-right’.

Brietbart was also known for ‘the Brietbart doctrine’ the idea, as stated by founder Andrew Breitbart, that “politics is downstream from culture” and to change politics you first change the culture. It’s not an entirely original concept. Some of you may be familiar with the concept of hegemony, from the Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci. This is the idea that the ruling class in society maintains power though cultural and ideological leadership as well as through force.

Counter-hegemony, developing cultural and ideological leadership in opposition to those in power, is not just a strategy that can be used by Marxist readers of Gramsci however. Alain de Benoist, a founding member of the French novelle droite or ‘new right’ advocated for those in his movement to become “right-wing Gramscians”. In his 1977 work The View from the Right de Benoist wrote that the French Right
“Has not grasped the significance of Gramsci. It has not seen how cultural power threatens the apparatus of the state”. While de Benoist, who is still alive, doesn’t identify as part of the alternative right, his work has been an influence on the movement.

The term ‘alternative right’ also served as an alternative to the neoconservatism of the George W Bush years that defined politics in the US for most of the previous decade. While Bush and the Republican Party were electorally successful throughout the 2000s, the 2003 invasion of Iraq saw massive street protests around the globe, along with widespread opposition to the erosion of civil liberties. For my generation growing up in that time, listening to the politically charged lyrics of popular rock bands like Rise Against and System of a Down, being a conservative or right leaning young person would have been deeply uncool. You could say the left was at that time winning the culture war, although it didn’t actually translate to electoral success.

We can define that era of politics as bookended by the 9/11 attacks and the global financial crisis of 2008. Bush was succeeded by Barack Obama, who ran with the slogan of ‘hope’. But hope didn’t seem to last long as the Obama era saw little in the way of real political change. In 2011, a mass protest movement began and spread throughout the world. Beginning with unemployed and underemployed youth in North Africa in what was soon labeled the Arab Spring, spreading to Southern Europe with the indignados, or indignant ones, then to the English speaking world where the moniker ‘Occupy’ was used after the Canadian magazine Adbusters put out a call to ‘Occupy Wall Street’

When Donald Trump was elected president of the US in 2016, I commented that it will be the job of historians to answer the question of how in just five years we went from a massive populist movement highlighting the widening gap between rich and poor, to the election of a New York City real estate mogul. A decade on it doesn’t actually look like a difficult question any more.

While in North Africa the Arab Spring had toppled governments, in the West, Occupy had little in the way of successes. Much of the energy of Occupy was channeled into the campaigns of social democrats like Bernie Sanders in the US and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, campaigns arguably thwarted by the establishments of the Democrat and British Labour parties respectively.

Young people who had been born into an era of neoliberal restructuring and came of age during the global financial crisis, faced a future where they would be the first generation since the second world war to be economically worse off than their parents. This wasn’t true for everyone, if your parents were immigrants to the west, or they were African Americans born in an era where segregation still existed in much of the US, you might be doing better than them. But it was especially true for whites without a university degree, and many others were finding a degree wasn’t the ticket to the middle class they had thought it was.

Many millennial men in the 2010s had given up on hope, living with their parents well into adulthood and with precarious work if they had work at all, retreating into fantasy worlds of video games and pornography, spending most of their waking hours online.

The Internet has long been a haven for far-right ideology. While today the idea of “no platform for fascists” is seen as a censorious left-wing position, it was the policy of almost all print and broadcast media following the defeat of Fascism in the second world war. The early pioneers of the Internet however adhered to a libertarian ethos which has been dubbed ‘The Californian Ideology’ influenced in equal parts by the social movements of the nineteen sixties and the neoliberalism of the nineteen eighties, the utopian belief was that the global network of computers that made up the internet would bypass traditional media gatekeepers, there would be no censorship but the best ideas would win out in a virtual world where equal access would collapse traditional inequalities between class, race and gender.

The lack of gatekeeping meant that the far-right were early adopters of this new communication technology. The white supremacist forum Stormfront began in 1995, before many people knew what the internet was, and even before the world wide web there were dial up bulletin boards where a user could engage with holocaust denial and conspiracy theories. Stormfront connected people who already held far-right views but it was unlikely someone who didn’t already hold those views would end up there, so users encouraged each other to spread their views on the wider web.

The Californian Ideology was in the ether when Christopher Pool founded 4chan in 2004. A discussion board where users could post anonymously, threads with new engagement would be pushed to the front pages of forums, and when low engagement pushed them off the last page, they would disappear. Moderation was lax and little was censored. When a political discussion forum was started, Pool himself noted that it had essentially become a copy of Stormfront.

It was on 4chan, among these disenfranchised and extremely online young and predominantly white men, where the harassment campaign known as #Gamergate began. This campaign targeted women associated with video game journalism and in particular a woman who had a sizable following for a YouTube channel where she examined video games through a feminist lens. These men had taken on the belief that their lack of economic and also romantic success was not the consequence of neoliberal capitalism, but instead the result of social gains by historically marginalised groups such immigrants and the LGBT community, but more than anything else, the fault of feminism.

A woman subjecting video games to the same kind of feminist analysis that gets applied to film and other media was seen as an encroachment of feminism into one of the last remaining masculine spheres of life. The potential of these angry young men as a political force was recognised by people like Steve Bannon who told a biographer “You can activate that army. They come in through #gamergate or whatever, then they get turned on to politics and Trump”

Dale Beren’s book It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Memed Trump into Office is a great read on this topic.

The tactic of mass harassment coordinated online to push people, especially women, out of public life for advocating political ideas that the right objects to, has become common the world over. For local examples, think of what has happened to Golriz Gharamhan, Tory Whanau, and Benjamin Doyle to name just the most well known recent cases. Harassment campaigns are tacitly abetted by groups like the Free Speech Union who, rather than speaking out for the people whose speech is being silenced by harassment, oppose any legislative changes that would make social media platforms more responsible for providing the tools to coordinate these campaigns, and have even opposed updates to the Harmful Digital Communications Act that would give victims more redress against their harassers.

I’d encourage people to seek out the articles written by Cassandra Mudgeway, a senior law lecturer at Canterbury, if you’re wanting to know more about the issue of gendered violence facilitated by social media and the internet.

On the topic of social media, platforms like Facebook and YouTube bear some responsibility for the state of the world today. The development of algorithms designed to keep someone on a website for as long as possible, in order to expose them to more advertising, led to people being fed increasingly hateful or conspiratorial content that would elicit strong emotional responses and keep them watching.

It wasn’t a decision by these companies to promote the hard right, but an amoral drive for profit that many far-right political actors, like Charlie Kirk who I mentioned at the start of this talk, realised they could take advantage of. It also gave rise to the phenomenon of ‘masculinity influencers’ who could peddle self-help advice to the angry young men swept up in the right, people like Jordan Peterson who promoted reasonable advice like keeping your living space clean, with a deeply conservative worldview that postulates there is no structural oppression, only a natural and everlasting ‘dominance hierarchy’ that men should strive to reach the top of, stepping on whatever groups they need to on the way.

The younger generation of men are being exposed to even more extreme ideas through social media. The award winning British drama series Adolescence recently drew attention to this problem, and in this country we recently saw teachers unions raising the alarm about radicalised young men who they encounter in the classroom.

Social media also captured the advertising market that had previously sustained journalism. New Zealand has fewer professional journalists today than we did twenty years ago, despite our population growing by a million people in that time. Right-wing shock jocks and outright disinformation spreading outlets are increasingly filling the void, as critical journalists find themselves subject to #gamergate style harassment when they report on the far-right.

When Twitter took some responsibility for the harm their platform had facilitated, removing a large swathe of far-right accounts following the insurrection of January 6 2021 when supporters of ousted president Donald Trump disrupted the peaceful transfer of power, it began a chain of events that led to Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and a backer of not just Trump but far-right parties globally, including the Nigel Farage led Reform party in the UK and the AfD in Germany, purchasing the platform for $44 billion dollars.

Musk called himself a free speech absolutist, reinstated the banned users including Trump (who meanwhile had started his own social media platform), fired staff responsible for dealing with issues of disinformation and election integrity, and removed almost all content moderation policies. Within a year the value of the company was less than half of what Musk had paid for it, as advertisers did not want their marketing materials appearing alongside the increasingly commonplace racism and anti-semitism. It was a bad business investment, but Musk was not buying stock, he was buying hegemony. That said, the value of Twitter, which he has since renamed X, has actually crept back up to what he paid for it in 2022 as of earlier this year. Possibly reflecting that being associated with hateful views isn’t as damaging to a brand as it once was.

Stepping back a few years, it would be irresponsible to talk about the modern right without talking about the COVID-19 Pandemic. The lockdowns that accompanied the pandemic meant people were spending a lot more time online, susceptible to the COVID related disinformation spreading via those same social media algorithms that had spread far-right ideology. Indeed conspiracy theories from the far-right were cross-pollinating with conspiracy theories related to the virus and the vaccine, and bringing people interested in alternative medicine and wellness, ideas that we’d once perhaps have associated with the political left, into what Naomi Klein described as an alliance of “the far-right and the far-out”.

Commentators and others, including the World Health Organisation, have spoken of an “infodemic”, an outbreak of false and misleading information that spreads parallel to a disease outbreak. While the term is useful, and one I’ve used myself, it is somewhat contested. Claire Birchall and Peter Knight in their book Conspiracy Theories in the Time of Covid-19 write that rather than focusing only on the present conditions, “it is important to situate the so-called infodemic that accompanied Covid-19 within other, slower crises that concern attacks on equality, social democracy, the welfare state, democratic institutions and expertise.”

They cite journalist Jeremy Gilbert who suggests that the erosion of social welfare has led to a disbelief in the possibility that public institutions could be supportive or even merely benign. Gilbert sees this disbelief that the state can be anything other than conspiratorial as inevitable once its function has shifted from protecting people from the worst excesses of free market capitalism, to instead exposing people to them.

After four decades of living under a mode of rationality that minimises or denies the role of the state in providing some kind of social security, the financial and social packages offered by many governments as part of the response to the economic fallout from the pandemic put lie to the neoliberal insistence that “there is no alternative” to free markets, privatisation and individualism, raising suspicions about the state’s motives- suspicions fueled by the fact that such support was accompanied by the necessity for people to make sacrifices concerning certain freedoms.

So that’s the background to the modern far-right. In this country, we saw the disparate groups that this situation had birthed come together in the occupation of parliament grounds in the early months of 2022. Taking credit for half the people at that protest was Voices for Freedom, an anti-vaccine group founded by former candidates for Billy Te Kahika and Jami-Lee Ross’s Advance New Zealand Party.

After the protest Voices for Freedom, wholeheartedly embraced the Breitbart doctrine, launching not a political party but a media outlet, initially called Reality Check Radio and today usually referred to as RCR Media. Broadening in scope beyond anti-vaccine beliefs, RCR spreads climate change disinformation and on one show, hosted by the former general secretary of the New Conservative Party Diewue de Boer, even the ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory that posits there’s a plan to replace western populations with non-white, often muslin immigrants. This of course, is the theory the Christchurch shooter named his manifesto after.

The so-called ‘Freedom Movement’ formed a mutually beneficial relationship with New Zealand First, who had been ousted from parliament at the 2020 election but crossed the 5% threshold again in 2023, with a party list populated with prominent anti-vaccine activists and former members of the New Conservatives and other fringe parties. Winston Peters, the only prominent politician to meet with the protesters occupying parliament grounds, launched his 2023 election campaign on Reality Check Radio.

Dieuwe de Boer wrote that Peters had made a “masterstroke” by recruiting a “freedom movement star” referring to the anti-vaccine activist Kirsten Murfitt, who at number 11 on the list was within a stones throw of actually winning a seat. de Boer noted that “NZ First has always had a solid base of 2-3% who will vote for Winston no matter what, and so its path to victory only requires it to pick up an additional 2-3% of the votes” They found that 2-3% in the far-right.

Since the election, New Zealand First (and to some extent ACT, also influenced by the far-right’s counter-hegemony campaign) helped mainstream numerous political ideas that were once confined to the fringe. Following the signing of the coalition agreement between National, ACT, and New Zealand First, New Conservative Party leader Helen Houghton appeared on RCR Media and described the agreement, which made numerous New Conservative Party positions on LGBT issues government policy, as “like a Christmas present” telling the host she actually shed some tears of joy.

When interviewed by RCR Media at the party conference, NZ First deputy leader Shane Jones suggested trying to stop climate change was “woke folly” and last August echoed the Great Replacement conspiracy on X sharing a quote from himself suggesting that migrants are “coming from the third world to replace our own children and grandchildren”.

So we no longer speak of the ‘Alternative right’ because what was once alternative is quickly becoming the status quo.

I am Maram, a student from Gaza. Despite the pain and difficult circumstances we are living through, I am still fighting to continue my education in Executive Secretary studies through online learning a field that relies heavily on using a computer.

Unfortunately, I do not have a laptop, which puts enormous pressure on me in both my studies and practical assignments, and may prevent me from completing my education despite all my effort and determination.

This week, I have practical tasks and exams that cannot be done using a phone, so I am trying to raise funds to buy a simple laptop. The price of a basic laptop here ranges between $500–$1,000, depending on availability and local market conditions.

Recently, I’ve had to rely on others to complete my practical assignments, which has caused delays and a lot of emotional stress.

I kindly reach out to anyone who is able to help even with a small amount to be a reason I can continue my studies.

I am deeply grateful to every hand that offers support and to everyone who shares this post. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

For those who wish to help, donations can be made via PayPal: zeestermohar@gmail.com

Only $2,200 Left… the final step separating us from a new life outside Gaza — Be the one who gives us life and a new beginning

A few days ago, thanks to the kindness of people who stood with us, we succeeded in reaching our previous campaign goal. That support was the lifeline that kept us standing, allowing us to survive everything we were going through.

And today… we stand at the very last step.

We are not launching a new campaign, and we are not raising the goal.

We are simply continuing the same campaign, hoping to complete it today.

What remains is only $2,200 — the amount that will close this chapter completely and give us the chance to leave Gaza and begin a new life… a life we deserve, just like anyone else.

This final amount will cover:

1. Exit costs from Gaza

Procedures, fees, and crossings — the heaviest burden on any family trying to start over.

2. Plane tickets to the country where we will begin our new life

A single flight toward safety and stability.

3. One month of basic living expenses after arrival

Simple rent, food, transportation — just enough time to catch our breath before starting work immediately.

After this month…

we will not ask for any further support.

Everything after that will be entirely our responsibility.

Our practical plan after arrival

Samar: She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Translation and is ready to work immediately wherever her skills are needed.

I: I am a graduate in Information Technology and Communication, with experience in design and tech—fields where I can start working right away.

We are not seeking luxury, and we are not asking for a big or complicated life.

All we want is a stable beginning… a calm start without fear.

A place where we can think clearly, work hard, and build a simple future with our own hands.

A place that protects our future — and the future of our children one day.

$2,200… It may not be a big number, but for us, it is an entire future.

It may not change your day…

But it will change our whole life.

Be the one who reaches out…

Be the reason we begin again.

From our hearts,

Thank you to everyone who gives us a chance at life.

You can donate to Ahmed here.

I first met Tyler West when he interviewed me for this masters thesis on the extra-parliamentary left during the fifth labour government, a thesis that in his own words “critically evaluates the extra-parliamentary left; identifying the strengths, weaknesses, achievements, and failures of the most important groups, campaigns and movements.”

Tyler and I shared an understanding that documenting our social movements was an important thing to do. It was the same motivator I had for recording an oral history of the Occupy movement in Christchurch a few years before. When doing this kind of history, one finds people reluctant to be interviewed, seeing themselves as perhaps part of an important movement, but unimportant as individuals. A mix of New Zealand’s famous tall poppy syndrome and the tendency on the left to deemphasise our individual contributions in favour of the collective struggle. For that reason I wasn’t going to say no to an interview for this research.

We continued to have shared research interests. We both spoke on a panel on the far-right in Aotearoa New Zealand at the New Historians conference hosted by Victoria University in 2023. My book Fear had come out recently and Tyler had co-authored with Sebastian Potgieter a chapter on the topic ‘Southern Africa in the political imagination of New Zealand’s radical right’ published in Histories of Hate: The Radical Right in Aotearoa New Zealand that same year. We were joined on that panel by Mark Dunick, who also contributed a chapter. Tyler’s two part article ‘Outpost of Empire: The Origins of New Zealand’s Far Right’ (part 2) is another valuable contribution to this history.

Beyond academic interests, Tyler and I shared a love of heavy metal and horror movies. One of the several times he stayed at my house when passing through Christchurch, I gave him a flash drive full of MP3’s I’d ripped from the various demo disks and albums I’d picked up during the city’s thriving metal scene in the 2000s, I think a few tracks got some airplay on Haunting the Studio, the show he co-hosted on Dunedin’s Radio One.

Tyler was someone who could spend the afternoon reading Marx and Engels on The first Indian war of independence and then spend the evening listening to some Iron Maiden or watching an entry in the Friday the 13th series.

These interests were interlinked though. The Otago Socialist Society’s halloween week event this year, which in the circumstances had to be cancelled, was to feature Tyler in conversation with the media scholar Rosemary Overell on the topic ‘Anthems to the Estranged’ with the two of them “Discussing a wide range of topics orbiting around the core theme of social and political issues raised by/present in the heavy metal subculture”. It was advertised with a poster featuring Karl Marx wearing a Jason Voorhees style hockey mask, a fitting image to capture Tyler’s aesthetic.

The below, from his blog and reproduced in his funeral program, shows his attitude toward the music scene that gave respite from the day to day realities of capitalism.

“It is in moments of rapture, being tossed about by a roiling crowd, that I have a reaffirmation of my politics unlike that which anything else could induce. This is why I must do this. This moment of fulfilling connection which refuses the alienation of person to person. In the mass, I de-individualise for a moment, and in the aftermath of that moment I am refreshed with the feeling of being fully human. For a second, I would die without question for each and every person in the crowd. Of course, I return to straightforward thought by the time the song is over and the crowd calms down, but the impact lingers. It is for a chance to experience on a routine basis a life for which the impersonal alienation of market logic is abolished, and in which the reproduction of life is organised such that focus might be placed on the development of beautiful and worthwhile things, to which I make what contributions that I can.”

I last saw Tyler in person when he came to Christchurch to see the UK band Orange Goblin, in what turned out to be their last international tour. He and I wore the same t-shirt size, and I remember returning from the merch table noting there was no shortage of 2XL- “this is a band who knows the Doom Metal audience”. Band t-shirts were the semi-official dress code for his funeral, I wore a Pull Down the Sun shirt. I’d wanted to wear the Orange Goblin shirt, but somehow I lost it at some point in the past year. A real shame as typically I’d wear a t-shirt purchased during a tour until the printed graphic was full of cracks and the front was dotted with holes (Tyler, I understand, would wear them a little longer still). As disappointing as it may be to lose a gig t-shirt though, it’s a lot harder to lose a friend.

In December 2023, during the height of the war, my father, our only provider and the pillar of our family, was killed in an airstrike. A shell struck near our home, and shrapnel hit his chest right in front of our eyes. He was bleeding heavily for three hours, and we could do nothing to save him. The healthcare system had collapsed, and no one could reach us to help. I cannot forget that day my father died before our eyes, helpless, and I still see it in my mind every day. His death shattered our world and left us struggling to survive in every sense.

Only three months later, another tragedy struck when my beloved brother Ahmed, who had special needs, died from starvation and malnutrition. Losing him broke my heart in ways words cannot describe. He was gentle, loving, and dependent on us for everything but in Gaza, even the most basic necessities became impossible to access.

During the war, we suffered from extreme famine in northern Gaza. There were times when we had nothing to eat except animal feed, and we slept for nights hungry, barely surviving.

After these losses, our home was completely destroyed, leaving us with nothing but memories. Today, my mother, my three sisters, and my only remaining brother, and I live in a fragile tent made of cloth. Every day is a struggle against hunger, heat, and despair, and the tent itself causes skin diseases due to accumulated moisture and dirt, which worsens our suffering.

We have been displaced more than twenty times during this war, moving from north Gaza to the west and south, desperately seeking safety. Each time we moved, it cost us a lot of money. Transportation is expensive, food is scarce, and everything is overpriced. The constant displacement has exhausted us physically and mentally, leaving scars that may never heal.

My siblings face their own challenges. My sister Maram is attending university, and she needs financial support and reliable internet to continue her studies. My sister Amal is in school, and she urgently needs school supplies, clothes, and other essentials to keep learning and stay healthy.

For me, the suffering goes beyond daily survival. I have a serious vision problem, a worsening eye deviation that causes pain and threatens my ability to see. Before the war, I underwent surgery in Gaza to correct it, but the operation failed and made my condition worse. Doctors now say I urgently need another surgery outside Gaza to prevent permanent vision loss. But without income, a home, or medical access, it feels impossible.

We are raising £10,000 to give my family a chance to survive and rebuild:

Emergency Shelter and Essentials: Durable tents, blankets, and hygiene kits to protect my family from harsh weather and the skin diseases caused by fragile tents.

Food and Clean Water: Steady supplies of flour, canned food, and safe drinking water to fight hunger and malnutrition.

Education Support: Financial help for Maram’s university studies and Amal’s school needs, including internet, stationery, and clothes.

Life-Saving Eye Surgery: Medical treatment, travel costs, and post-surgery care for my vision.

Rebuilding and Recovery: To help us secure a small, safe place to live and start again once the war ends.

Every contribution, no matter how small, brings us closer to safety, healing, and hope. From the heart of Gaza, I thank you for listening to our story and for standing with us in our darkest time.

Donate here

WhatsApp contact

Edge of a new dream — a dream of peace, dignity, and the freedom they’ve been denied for more than a year.

Ahmad says:

“After our lives came to a complete halt because of the war, and after losing everything we had, all that remains for us is hope.

We just want to start again — to live like everyone else, in safety, dignity, and peace.”

Ahmad and Samar dream of leaving Gaza, to start a simple, quiet life filled with love and security — far away from fear and destruction.

But the path to that dream is full of obstacles, the greatest of which is the cost of travel and resettlement, amounting to around $6,500, which Ahmad is now trying to raise by all possible means.

He adds:

“We’re not asking for the impossible.

We just want to live.

To see the world from a different angle — one that isn’t war.

To rebuild our home in a place that protects us and gives us a fair chance to live like others.”

For Ahmad, this isn’t a plea for charity but a plea for life — a chance to begin again after years of struggle and loss.

For him, this journey represents a second birth, a beginning in a world guided by love, freedom, and peace.

You can donate to support Ahmad and Samar here

At the beginning of September, ACT announced their new climate policy: withdraw from the 2015 Paris Climate Accords, or push for “fundamental reform of the Paris framework.” New Zealand is not on track to meet its obligations under the 2015 agreement, which aims to keep global temperatures below 1.5 degrees more than pre-industrial levels.

ACT’s announcement was celebrated in some quarters. Farming advocacy group Groundswell announced “The Quit Paris campaign is working.”

Groundswell leader Bryce McKenzie, told Rural News back in July that he believes the Quit Paris campaign will become one of the major issues at the next general election, due to be held late next year. Speaking on Reality Check Radio (RCR) the platform of conspiracy theorist outfit Voices for Freedom a few weeks before, host Jaspreet Boparai (who is also a district councilor in Southland) praised McKenzie for having “managed to nudge the feds into action” referring to the more mainstream farmer advocacy group Federated Farmers, who had recently issued a statement that “dangerous” emissions reduction targets were being driven by “Flawed assumptions”.

“Hopefully people will start realising that this is just an absolute farce, the whole climate thing, it’s just that shocking, that disgusting.” Mckenzie stated, in a comment Boparai described as “music to my ears”.

When RCR sent a reporter to the New Zealand First party conference, Shane Jones, Minister for Oceans and Fisheries told him “we’ve just got to wake up and realise the notion that you can save the planet from New Zealand was woke folly”

Quitting the Paris Climate Accords is on the political agenda, thanks in large part to Groundswell and RCR Media.

How did that happen? It’s a story I want to investigate further, but to do so I need your help. I’m crowdfunding to raise money to produce a six episode podcast looking at the campaign to Quit Paris. The idea for the project comes partially from the research I’m doing for my masters degree in media and communications, and from seeing the discourses I recognised from fringe media now being present in more mainstream conversation. I want to look, in a thorough and in-depth way, at how these ideas made the jump from the fringe to the mainstream.

New Zealand has less than half the number of professional journalists we did 20 years ago. While outlets like RCR Media seem to have copious amounts of funding to spread conspiracy theories and disinformation, journalism has become a labour-of-love for most of us. Only 0.2% of subscribers to Feijoa Dispatch are paying subscribers- and I get it, we’re in a cost of living crisis and paywalled articles are a luxury. For those who can’t commit to a subscription, I’m asking for a one-off pledge of NZ$5 (for international readers, that’s about US$3.50 or €2.50) to make this project happen.

This will allow me to pay myself the equivalent of a ‘Jobseeker’ benefit for the four months I have between a ‘day job’ contract ending and the academic year starting (I’ve been studying part time, but with the scarcity of jobs right now, I plan to ride out the recession as a full time graduate student).

The good news? I’m almost at the goal already, as I’ve been promoting this campaign on social media for a couple of weeks. I’m hoping some of my readers can help push it over the line.

Contribute here. You will only be charged if the goal is met.

My name is Sabreen. I am a mother of three children: Osama and Jana, seven-year-old twins, and Khitam, who is five. I am also in my ninth month of pregnancy, waiting for another child to be born under the harshest conditions imaginable.

Before the war, our life was simple but full of love. My children went to school, played football in the street, and laughed with their cousins. Our house in Beit Lahia was small, but it was filled with safety and warmth. I could cook for my family, put them to bed with full stomachs, and dream of a better future for them. That life is gone.

The war destroyed everything. I lost my father and then my brother. Our home was reduced to rubble. Since then, my children and I have been displaced more than seven times. Every time we had to leave, it meant packing what little we had left, carrying the children through dangerous streets, and trying to find a place to survive. Each move brought more fear, more uncertainty, and more grief.

Now we are in the Al-Bureij refugee camp. I no longer dream of a house — I only dream of a tent to protect my children from the burning sun and the freezing nights. But even a tent is too expensive for us. We live on debts, and most nights my children go to bed hungry. They sometimes cry at night, asking me if there will be dinner tomorrow. I have no answer.

Throughout this pregnancy, I have suffered from severe malnutrition. Most days I ate only bread or tea, and often gave my share to the children. I was constantly afraid for my baby’s health. Now that the time to give birth is near, I am filled with fear: Will there be a hospital bed? Will there be a doctor or any medical care? Will I survive for my children, or will they be left without a mother?

A typical day for us is a struggle for the most basic needs. In the morning, I walk long distances with my children to try to get clean water. Sometimes we wait in line for hours just to fill a small container. Finding bread is another battle — the bakeries are often closed, and when they open, the lines stretch endlessly. Gas for cooking is impossible to find, so I try to cook over scraps of wood when I can.

The children have lost their childhood. They no longer play freely; they jump in fear at every loud sound. At night, they wake up screaming from nightmares of airstrikes. My twins ask me when they can go back to school, but there are no schools left standing for them. Instead of pencils and books, they carry memories of running from bombs.

My husband is unemployed, not because he does not want to work, but because there is no work left in Gaza. There is no income, no assistance, and no stability. We are surviving with the bare minimum, always one step away from disaster.

Still, I refuse to give up. I have launched a fundraising campaign to cover essential needs: food, medicine, clothing, and shelter for my children and for the baby who will soon arrive. I am not asking for much; I am only asking for a chance to keep my children alive — a chance for the new child who will otherwise know nothing but war, hardship, and pain.

Every donation, no matter how small, could mean a meal, a blanket, or medicine that could save our lives.

Please, if you are reading this, help us survive.

You can support Sabreem’s family via GoFundMe.

Deputy Prime Minister David Seymour recently took the unusual step of asking parliament to pass a motion noting the death of American political activist Charlie Kirk. It was “blocked” by the opposition parties, which on the surface could make them look uncaring, but there is no precedent for parliament to note the death of a foreign political figure, who didn’t hold office, and had no connection to New Zealand.

Many New Zealanders likely heard of Kirk for the first time seeing reports of his death. Outside of extremely online politics nerds, he was an unknown here. Seymour, though, has seen an opportunity to try and import US culture wars. “People who stupidly say free speech IS violence or makes them ‘unsafe’ should finally be able to see the difference”, he wrote on X. “May he rest in peace and our thoughts go out to his loved ones.”

Seymour has (back in 2022) spoken of being made unsafe by speech from Te Pati Māori MP Rawiri Waititi. Waititi had joked about poisoning Seymour with karaka berries. Seymour said in response that he was “genuinely concerned that the next step is that some slightly more radical person doesn’t think it’s a joke”, Suggesting that he does actually recognise that a link exists between speech and violence. He also called for the cancellation of an arts festival because of a poem he believed was racist against white people.

The exact motive behind the assassination of Kirk is still unclear, but given Kirk's prominence as the founder of Trump-aligned NGO Turning Point USA (TPUSA), many, including Donald Trump, were quick to blame the political left for the shooting. “We have radical left lunatics out there and we just have to beat the hell out of them", Trump told reporters.

It’s a comment illustrative of the increasingly violent political climate in the United States. When first campaigning in 2016, Trump famously offered to pay the legal fees of supporters who would “knock the crap out of” protesters. The violence associated with Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ campaign reached its zenith of January 6, 2021 when in an attempt to stop the peaceful transfer of power, supporters stormed the Capitol building in an insurrection connected to seven deaths.

In August of 2023, Reuters described political violence in the USA as at its worst since the 1970s. In contrast with the 1970s, it’s people rather the property being targeted, and violence was coming from the right. High profile incidents include the killing of Heather Hyer at the ‘Unite the Right’ rally in 2017, and numerous attacks on Democratic lawmakers and their spouses.

While violence from the left is not unheard of, it occurs far less often. When compared to individuals associated with a right-wing ideology, individuals adhering to a left-wing ideology had 68% lower odds of engaging in violent (vs. nonviolent) radical behavior (source).

Aotearoa New Zealand has, thankfully, not seen comparable levels of political violence. The one exception is the 2019 mosque shootings in Christchurch, where a white supremacist who believed there was a conspiracy to replace white populations with non-white Muslim ones, took the lives of 51 people. The event, unprecedented in New Zealand’s history, saw a Royal Commission investigation that made recommendations on legislative changes that could prevent further political violence. These changes were vehemently opposed by David Seymour.

When legislation was passed banning military style semi-automatic weapons and parts that could be used to make them, Seymour, at the time the only MP representing the ACT party, was the sole vote against it. Seymour and ACT have also opposed amendments to the human rights act that would give incitement of disharmony against religious groups the same status as inciting disharmony against a racial or ethnic group.

These stances won him support from the far-right, who, while not necessarily ideologically aligned with the libertarian ACT Party on all issues, believed Seymour would protect their right to incite violence against Muslims while owning assault rifles.

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