The ACT Party and David Seymour are the darlings of the globalist mainstream media, but despite being soaked in positive coverage, they win little real support from the New Zealand public. Clearly a change in policy is needed. Numbers man Dan McGlashan, author of Understanding New Zealand, explains the considerations of the ACT Party staking a claim for the alt-right territory.
A number of parties larger than ACT have staked their claim for a part of the political landscape. Labour represents the old left and National represents the old right. The New Zealand First Party represents the opportunistic centre, that which seeks to play the old left off against the old right. Peters’s crew are, however, very much part of the Establishment themselves.
The Greens represent an alternative to this arrangement, as can be observed by their unusually young candidates. They are not shy about claiming to represent the left, which makes them the alt-left. Parties like The Opportunities Party and Sustainable New Zealand make up the alt-centre.
The ACT Party has struggled to find a place in this arrangement. For the duration of the Fifth National Government they were content to merely drift along in support in the belief that, no matter how badly National ran the country down, at least it was cheaper than if Labour was in charge.
Looking at the description above, one clear niche presents itself. If the Greens are the alt-left, then the ACT Party is the alt-right.
They have already made large strides in this direction by coming out in favour of laws entrenching our right to free speech. The right to free speech is something that the alt-left is notoriously weak on. They are so weak that this magazine has previously joked about them giving us a list of opinions that we’re allowed to express.
If the ACT Party would properly declare itself a right-wing alternative to the Establishment – i.e. an alt-right party – and adopt a mission statement of opposing the excesses of the left, they could gain a tremendous amount of support from the currently disenfranchised. Despite the television news readers breathlessly telling us how Jacinda Ardern is the most popular leader in world history, there are plenty of people who hate her for her authoritarian style and her commitment to the United Nations before New Zealand.
What ACT will need to achieve is to provide a genuine alternative to both the Establishment (in its form of Labour/National/NZF) and the new parties (in the form of Greens, TOP etc.). This will require that they take policy positions that explicitly repudiate positions that the Establishment has taken on – for example – gun control, free speech, the importation of cheap labour and drug law reform.
To some extent, ACT has done this already, but if they want 5% of the vote they need to go further.
This might require that the ACT Party acknowledges the truth in a number of alt-right talking points, such as some of what figureheads such as Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux have to say, particularly when it comes to their criticisms of globalism, the correlation between race and intelligence and the effect of mass immigration on social cohesion and working-class wages.
At this point, it has to be made clear that the ACT Party does not in any way have to align itself with the seedy and hateful side of alt-right culture. They do not have to campaign for a whites-only state and they don’t have to campaign for the release of Branton Tarrant. They don’t need to campaign to remove the Jews or to roll back women’s suffrage.
They just have to provide an alternative to the insanity of the left, and they can do this simply, by deploying what has become like kryptonite to leftists: cold, hard facts.
They may have to come out and state outright, for example, that mass immigration of Muslims and Africans to Europe has been a catastrophe, and that this was all but inevitable on account of their lower IQs, and that ACT opposes it. This doesn’t mean they have to support a white ethnostate – ACT could, for example, take a selectionist approach that would already be broadly in line with New Zealand’s current merit-based approach to immigration.
This synergises well with their pre-existing policies. For instance, ACT’s “Freedom to Earn” policy suggests a flat tax rate of 17.5%. This will certainly demand a sharp reduction in Government spending. Things like importing refugees to live on the benefit forever, as Europe has been doing, will be impossible if public spending is cut to the bone (assuming the ACT Party doesn’t want to start nativist riots).
However, if they did the exact opposite of this, and slashed the refugee quota on alt-right grounds, they could find themselves rewarded with much support. There are tens of thousands of Kiwis in precarious housing situations, and they have watched on bitterly as the Sixth Labour Government doubled the refugee quota and housed foreigners while they went cold. They might support ACT even if ACT did nothing more for them than to reduce competition for housing.
Of course, if ACT should decide to take this path, they will have to contend with a suddenly hostile media. The Establishment media is currently in the hands of the globalists, and for these globalists the more cheap labour the better, and the more pressure on housing the better. Since they own all the capital already, anything that increases the leverage of that capital is a good thing. An ACT shift to nationalism would lose them their current darling status in the eyes of the mainstream media.
However, if they did take a nationalist path, some other policies would become obvious, and they could pick up more votes by becoming more credible on these issues.
Cannabis law reform is perhaps the most obvious. Because cannabis use is an integral part of Kiwi culture, there is a strong overlap between those who want legal cannabis and those who have nationalist sentiments. If the ACT Party would shift to nationalism, they could emphasise this side of their policy more. This would help them make inroads into the large number of cannabis law reform supporters who do not vote.
Shifting the focus of ACT Party representation from globalism to nationalism would be a risky move. There is much to gain, but it risks losing favourable mainstream media coverage. Although the alt-media would step into that breach in such a case (indeed, the VJMP Reads column has already covered Seymour’s Own Your Future), there is no guarantee this would work better for ACT than the current cozy arrangement.
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