[00:00:04] Hi, my name is Brendan Malone and you're listening to the dispatches, the podcast that strives to cut through all the noise in order to challenge the popular narratives of the day with some good old fashioned contrarian thinking. You might not always agree, but at least you'll be taking a deeper look at the world around you.
[00:00:22] Hi everybody. Welcome along to another episode of the Dispatchers podcast. My name is Brendan Malone. It is great to be back with you again. And today's topic of conversation is what was the point of the disinformation project? Before we get into that, though, just a quick reminder. If you're not already a Patron and you want to get a daily episode of the Dispatches podcast every single day of the week from Monday through to Friday, go to patreon.com leftfootmedia and become a dollar five monthly patron. And if you want to try before you buy, you can even sign up for a free one week trial membership just to check out the content and see what you might be missing out on. That's patreon.com leftfootmedia. The link is in today's show notes and a huge thank you to all of our patrons. It's thanks to you that today's episode is made possible. Alrighty, so today's topic of conversation what was the point of the disinformation project in 1925? In his poem the Hollow Men, TS Eliot concluded with the following four lines, this is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper, which is prose that could well have been written about the New Zealand Disinformation project, which just a few days ago came to an end not with a bang, but with a whimper on Thursday the 3 October 2024, when it published a relatively typical and brief statement announcing to anyone still listening to them that they would now be shutting up shop for good. It would take almost another ten days before word even really got around that it was all over for one of the most divisive political entities ever established in New Zealand. And that's really saying something when you consider the speed with which news about even the smallest of developments tends to take off on social media these days. The strange thing is that in their final farewell post, they make the audacious claim that in 2024 it's clear that the disinformation networks established or expanded during the pandemic are deeply connected to far right neo nazi and accelerationist networks and actors, both domestic and foreign. Disinformation has become both more mainstream and more connected to wider issues of political and social division, violence, extremism and national security. And also this challenges to social harmony, democracy and the maintenance of a shared reality in Aotearoa, New Zealand require urgent, meaningful responses. Which leaves me asking, if this is true, then why are you shutting down now? Then I no answer is given. In their official final statement, some have surmised that all of their funding has dried up, particularly now that their previous progressive backers have been ousted from government. Others have speculated that perhaps the fact that they were threatened with litigation for claims that Kate Hanna, founder and director of the disinformation Project made about citizen journalist Chantelle Baker actually brought about their demise. You see, Baker threatened to sue both Hannah and the New Zealand Herald for publishing unsubstantiated allegations against her. The Herald newspaper would subsequently admit that the publishing of these unfounded allegations had caused real damage, and would make a formal apology to Chantal Baker, retract the false statements, and also pay her a confidential amount of money as a settlement. Now at this point, it could be tempting to think that this was just a one off incident, but the sad truth is that the majority of mainstream media outlets in our country uncritically treated the utterances of Kate Hanna and the rest of the disinformation project as if they were infallible expert proclamations beyond any and all reproach. In reality, though, the disinformation project should have been treated with scepticism right from day one by the mainstream media if they had been truly committed to public accountability and non partisan truth telling. I cant help but suspect the reason this didnt happen was because there was a mutual quid pro quo in the always unhealthy relationship between the media and the disinformation project. You see, Kate Hanna and her team desperately needed people to accuse of witchcraft in order to justify their existence. After all, theres not much point in paying for a witch finder generals office if the moral panic about witches in the village isnt actually true. And for their part, the mainstream media desperately wanted Baker cut down to size after she exposed their duplicity and serious inadequacies during the period of the parliamentary protest. This is not to say that Chantelle Baker was without fault, just that her accusers and their media enablers were not as pure and reliable as they consistently presented themselves to be.
[00:05:32] Im actually of the belief that one of the major contributing factors to the massive loss of public trust in the mainstream media over recent years, among other things, was the fact that so many media outlets hitched themselves to the disinformation project and then widely platformed and protected them, along with other dubious characters like unqualified YouTube activist Byron Clarke, during the time of frenzied disinformation, fanaticism and fear mongering a few years ago. So what are we to make of an organisation which claimed to exist to promote the betterment of social cohesion, while at the same time engaging in high profile acts of social divisiveness, and which ceased its operations at the very same time it was claiming that misinformation and disinformation is worse than it has ever been. Was it all just a grift? Was it a failed attempt to establish a state funded propaganda ministry? I actually think it's much more tragically mundane than any great and widespread conspiracy theory. In a nutshell, this was a case of technocratic hubris meets original sin. Fallible human actors in a time of widespread, disproportionate and largely state manufactured fear fell under the spell of a tiny group of unqualified technocrat activists, people who didn't know enough to realise that they didn't know enough, who were using pseudo scientific jargon which seemed to offer a compelling narrative that freed the mainstream media of all culpability, while scapegoating a group of political lepers and offering all who fell under the spell of these technocrats the alluring promise of secret scientific gnosis about why the world was shaping up the way that it was. And the media were more than happy to eat that fruit when the serpent offered it to them. This was the conspiracy theory group for people who claimed that conspiracy theory groups were for simpletons who were too unintelligent to see just how wonderful the theocratic liberal state really is. Like I said earlier, though, if the media truly was committed to public accountability and unvarnished truth telling, they would have treated the disinformation project in a far more judicious way right from day one, when the disinformation project was launched over four years ago, and as the tsunami of pandemic panic was starting to break, any thinking person could see that this organisation was far too intimately intertwined with the Ardern regime, and as such, serious scrutiny would need to be applied to the claims it was making. But sadly, this never happened. The disinformation project effectively began as a Covid ministry of truth, with a mandate to diagnose and demonise those who didnt go along with the official state narrative during a time of great fear and uncertainty. Were there unhinged conspiracy theorists. Of course there were, there always are in times of great panic. But the idea that they posed any meaningful threat, or that in the rare case they did, that such threats couldnt have been more capably handled by far more qualified entities, or that these fringe conspiracists were the reason why so many kiwis were becoming increasingly frustrated with the growing and seemingly boundless authoritarian overreach by the Ardern labor government, or were expressing concerns about the COVID vaccines and mandates, etcetera was always nonsense. The mere fact that none of the alarmist claims of the disinformation project ever actually amounted to anything, despite their almost five years of peddling them, should be proof enough that they were always tilting at windmills. But not just any old windmills. These were ones that suspiciously always seemed to be vocally opposed to the progressive politics and public relations schemes of Jacinda Ardern and her ruling regime.
[00:09:30] The thoroughly unreliable nature of this thinly veiled partisan propaganda machine became even more apparent once they began to morph from a purely Covid focused entity into one that was now targeting any and all enemies of the liberal politics du jour. When Covid began to die down, the disinformation project didn't, unfortunately. Instead they began going after people who opposed the trans agenda, people who are pro life, people who didn't enthusiastically support the us proxy war in Ukraine, those who favoured Trump, people who questioned the central claims of the liberal ideology and political project, people who disagreed with the three waters proposal and labor's brand of co governance, people who were critical of mainstream media conduct and my personal favourite, people who were openly critical of Jacinda Ardern. Things became so manic and absurd that even for the most qualified of people, it was hard to actually keep up. And in the final days of their unfettered public platforming, it was starting to look like there was almost no one left in New Zealand for the disinformation project to accuse of being far right alt right white supremacist or far right adjacent perpetrators and purveyors of stochastic terrorism. For those who don't know, stochastic terrorism is the kind of terrorism that's so vague you don't even realize you've just been the victim of a terror attack. Thank goodness we had the experts at the disinformation project with their stochastic pke meters to let us know that these invisible, undetectable and previously totally unknown terrorists were freely roaming about the countryside committing acts of unfelt terrorism. I don't know about you, but I certainly felt a lot safer. In a nutshell, at their apex, the disinformation project had become the living embodiment of the meme. Everyone who disagrees with me is Hitler, but this emperor always had no clothes on. Its just that those who relied on them for power and control were unwilling to accept just how naked the disinformation project really was the whole time. And there just isnt any escaping the cold hard reality that far too many members of our liberal elite classes were far too gullible in all of this. Here's just a small number of some of the many false and hysterical claims that came from the disinformation project. In August 2022, Kate Hanna made the easily disprovable false claim that the Nazis rejected modern medicine because quote unquote if you believe you are an Uber race, you don't need modern medicine. In reality, Germany at that time actually boasted the most advanced medical practice of that era, with people often travelling from all over the world to become trained under the german system of medicine. Medical professionals also joined the nazi party voluntarily, at a disproportionately higher rate than any other profession, and the Nazis used cutting edge medical science and technology for eugenics and other activities aimed at advancing their master race. And when I publicly pointed out her falsehoods regarding this point, her disinformation project colleague Sanjana Hatotua reposted my tweet exposing her untruths, along with a meme and a brief statement of his own mocking me for pointing out the lie. So much for their commitment to upholding social cohesion and ending misinformation. Then, in August 2022, during a mainstream media interview, Sanjana Hatotua decided to join the party and claimed that there was a threat of anti democratic extremists, including neo Nazi Nazis, taking seats at our October 2022 local body elections. Obviously this never happened. In November 2022, Kate Hanna claimed that quote unquote they white supremacists use pinterest and Instagram to draw in other women who are interested in interior design, children's clothing, knitting, healthy food for children, and it does draw people in towards a set of white nationalist ideas. I mean its relatively easy to see if you see a very beautiful fair skinned, blonde or red haired child with beautiful braiding in her hair and some flowers. Just step back a little bit. When I first watched that now infamous moment in a supposedly serious mainstream media documentary and you could tell that it was serious journalism because of the narrator's constant use of stern and pensive facial expressions and the scary musical score in the background. All I wanted to do was to ask, are the frau and fraulein in the room with us right now? Kate? Then in March 2023, Sanjano Hatotua took up the banner again and claimed that New Zealand democracy is in danger from targeted political adverts on Facebook, and he said that they should be banned. Not only were his claims rejected by far more qualified New Zealand academics, but his proposed ban on targeted Facebook adverts would actually make it harder for smaller parties who don't have the large advertising budgets needed to pay for traditional offline advertising to actually reach potential New Zealand voters. So, ironically, his proposal would actually threaten minority representation in New Zealand democracy. Then, in April 2023, Sanjano Hato Tua made the absurd and insulting claim that online behaviors in New Zealand have reached quote unquote genocidal levels. Meanwhile, the New Zealand SIS, our security intelligence service, actually dropped the New Zealand terror level threat the previous November in 2022 from medium where it had previously been to now being low. All of this and many other things that were emanating from the disinformation project should have been setting off alarm bells at media hq, but instead they turned a blind eye and just kept giving them seemingly endless amounts of air time. Meanwhile, the disinformation project's various published work lacked rigor, even becoming unserious and farcical at times. This work was consistently marked by unsubstantiated claims, gross generalizations, unsound conclusions, simplistic assumptions, and lots and lots of meaningless technocratic jargon and word salads, which gave the false impression that some sort of serious science underpinned all of their wild and conspiratorial claims. Most ironic of all was their own promotion of a grand conspiracy theory about a complex web of international players and disparate political groups and causes, all working together to destabilise New Zealand and the very foundations of the liberal political project in the west. If the media had just been a little bit more discerning about all of this, they would have quickly realised that it never really made any sense. Just take one of their oft repeated claims of russian interference. Did none of the big brains at mainstream Media Inc. Ever bother to stop and ask themselves why Russia would even be remotely interested in targeting a small island nation thousands of miles away at the bottom of the world that offered them no political or economic gain and whose presence has no meaningful impact on global affairs with a highly orchestrated political destabilization campaign? The reason they never asked such obvious questions or had such prudent reservations was because despite all of its many glaring flaws and absurdities, the disinformation project was never an objective enterprise and it only ever targeted one side of the political discourse. If the disinformation project had actually started publicly challenging the misinformation and conspiracy theorising on the progressive side of politics with the same outlandish and poorly crafted critiques, the media might have actually woken up and realised that the whole thing was a farce. Probably most importantly of all, the disinformation project never once fact checked the mainstream media. Instead, they touted them as the bastions of infallible truth. If they had ever dared to highlight the many instances of media misinformation, it would have almost certainly brought an ignominious end to the free ride that a compliant media was more than happy to provide them. But that never happened because the disinformation project was never objective and as such it served a useful purpose as the propaganda machine for liberalism and the used car salesman for a dilapidated, broken down and beat up mainstream media. I for 01:00 a.m. grateful that one of this country's most damaging think tanks, if you could call it that, which waged an almost five years long socially destructive and dishonest campaign tarted up in a pretentious imitation of science and scholarship, has finally come to a whimpering end. Maybe now we can ask how this was ever allowed to happen and then carry on for so long without any meaningful accountability in the first place. If only there was a way to demand greater public accountability for this type of fiasco. If only there was some organisation which would probe and ask the hard questions on the public stage and in the New Zealand public square. Perhaps then we could ask pertinent questions like where did the funding for the disinformation project come from? And why was it cloaked in so much secrecy? Why did they only target one side of the political discourse? And even more salaciously, was it ever appropriate for the disinformation project to be holding secret briefings in the months leading up to a general election to advise the media on misinformation and disinformation, when that very same mainstream media was uncritically and perpetually promoting them to the public as an independent and objective authority on so called misinformation and disinformation, a Yde brand new political tool that they were the sole purveyors of. I wont be holding my breath while I wait for answers, but you never know. Maybe the demise of the disinformation project will break the spell they cast over the mainstream media, and some long overdue transparency will come to fruition as a result. In the meantime, though, lets raise a glass to their whimpering end and to the first rays of a brand new dawn without the disinformation project. Thanks for tuning in. Don't forget live by goodness, truth and beauty, not by lies. And I'll see you next time on the dispatches.
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