Where To Now For The Freedom Movement?

Another General Election has been held in New Zealand. The special votes are yet to be counted, but one thing is already clear: the political establishment won the election, and the freedom movement lost. While we wait to see exactly which form of the political establishment will rule over us for the next three years, there’s an opportunity to take stock of where we are and where we’re going.

Let’s recount the history of the actual freedom movement.

In a New Zealand context the freedom movement truly began with the opposition to World War One. New Zealand introduced conscription in 1916. This meant the Government forced Kiwis to fight overseas to kill the enemies of the international bankers who rule the Anglo world. Naturally, sane people opposed this, leading to them becoming labelled as “conscientious objectors“.

Conscription is a major freedom issue. There are few more egregious examples of totalitarianism than forcing men to kill people they don’t know for reasons they don’t understand. The conscientious objectors to conscription in World Wars One and Two were therefore the first real freedom fighters in New Zealand. Archibald Baxter was a household name for this reason.

The battle against globalist military adventurism continued with the battles against compulsory military training, which didn’t end in New Zealand until 1972. The basic principle remained: freedom fighters oppose the Government forcing people to do things that aren’t in their interest.

When forced militarism ended in the wake of the end of the Vietnam War, the globalist control freaks opened up a new front against the peoples of the world in the form of the Drug War. Locking people up in prison for using medicinal substances or spiritual sacraments might not be as brutal as conscripting them into battle, but the callous sadism of it was enough to spark resistance.

The names of the freedom fighters who resisted the War on Drugs are numerous. Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, Terence McKenna, Jack Herer and many others fought for the freedom to explore our own minds free of government interference. Inspired by such people, the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party was founded in 1996.

After the 20th Century ended we got 9/11 and the Patriot Act. The Patriot Act introduced restrictions on civil liberties that were previously considered unthinkable. First and foremost, it allowed for widespread spying on and surveillance of American citizens by the American Government. Incredible volumes of information were collected on everyone in an effort to predict the next terrorist attack.

These measures were soon copied by other Anglo nations, leading to the Search and Surveillance Act in New Zealand. The end result was a new wave of freedom fighters. Julian Assange and Edward Snowden are among the best known of those who resisted the new totalitarianism, this being more like Big Brother than even Orwell had predicted.

Recently we have seen the Covid pandemic excuse a new suite of totalitarian measures from the authorities. Vaccine mandates outraged a large number of people and led to the Parliament Lawn protests in 2022. These protests were one of the major achievements of the freedom movement in New Zealand, and created another new wave of people who understood the value of freedom for its own sake.

Looking back at all of these battles, some patterns are evident.

First, the freedom movement is primarily a movement against government coercion. It’s not terrorism to understand that governments often have different interests to their citizens. When those interests clash, governments often use their monopoly on violence to force the citizens to do the governments’ bidding.

The freedom movement isn’t primarily a moral crusade. It isn’t primarily a temperance, chastity or Puritanical movement. It might contain elements of those things on occasion, but the number one enemy is government forcing the citizens to do things against their own interests (as determined by the citizens). The freedom movement is certainly not about using the power of government to coerce others to behave morally.

Second, the freedom movement is against the freedom to cause harm to others. We must observe Zechariah Chafee’s maxim that “Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man’s nose begins.” As such, no marital rapists, pedophiles, armed robbers, slavery advocates, hard drug traffickers, cheap labour importers or vaccine mandate supporters need be included.

These two points give us a much better idea of what we can agree freedom is, and therefore what the freedom movement is about.

Kelvyn Alp’s suggestion was to not worry about freedom so much, and to focus on truth instead. This means facts and evidence first and foremost. This makes sense as freedoms are usually downstream from perceptions of truth. Unfortunately there are many different ideas about what truth is, and many different ideas about how to determine truth from falsehood.

It seems that the freedom movement can’t make any progress until we develop a coherent fundamental philosophy. This will have to include the values and beliefs commonly agreed upon by those who genuinely desire freedom. Perhaps the model to follow is the American Constitutional Convention that took place after the American Revolution.

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Old Poverty vs. New Poverty

There is a popular distinction between Old Money and New Money.

Old Money is what everyone is familiar with. It’s what you have when you’re a prince or an aristocrat. It’s when you grow up learning how to manage an estate, rather than learning skills to trade for a wage. Old Money is when you have a pedigree. Most of your ancestors did well and most of your family are doing well. There are monuments/parks/buildings/roads named after your relations.

New Money is what you have when your parents escaped from the working class. Maybe one started a business and got rich, maybe one became a sports star, maybe one won the lottery. Maybe your parents are old enough that they could escape the working class by studying and working hard. Probably the rest of your family is poor, and you might have a lot of criminal cousins.

A behavioural difference is apparent. New Money is much flashier and ostentatious than Old Money. This is a function of New Money’s underlying insecurity – the inescapable suspicion that they achieved their position through luck, and that it won’t last. Being insecure, New Money is more likely to bully. It lacks grace, dignity, gravitas and the other qualities associated with good breeding.

Old Money is secure. Old Money knows that if it fucks up, some uncle or great-aunt will be there to provide a cushy job for a quick rebound. Even in cases where help from close relatives isn’t enough, it can usually rely on the reputation of the family name to seal a good deal. And if that doesn’t work, Old Money can always rely on the qualities of their breeding to see them through.

When the economy expands, the central struggle is Old Money vs. New Money. This occurs when the descending aristocracy, on the way down, meets the ascending merchantry. This is the same as what George Orwell called the High vs. the Middle. It’s a natural historical division that most people know about.

When the economy contracts, however, you have Old Poverty vs. New Poverty.

For example, I’m Old Poverty. I’m used to being poor. I was raised by a single mother on welfare, and although my grandparents were great people they were always broke. These grandparents brought me up on stories about the Great Depression, and how they learned to “make do”. Many of the stories began with “we didn’t have a…”

Old Poverty makes it easy to live on a Student Allowance or other benefit, as it usually isn’t much less money than you grew up on anyway. You naturally know how to make do when you’ve been raised by grandparents who were also poor. Poverty doesn’t cause as much anxiety when it’s the natural state, so is not resented as much. Actually having money, on the other hand, is seen as a bonus and is not taken for granted.

In coming years, we will see a lot more of a phenomenon that has hitherto been rare: New Poverty. This has never previously existed in any large number because the economy has kept expanding. But in coming decades, as we hit the limits of growth, we will have economic contractions.

New Poverty is when your parents were able to buy a house and raise a family on their wages – and you can’t. It’s when your parents keep asking you when you’re going to give them grandchildren, and you have to keep explaining that the maths doesn’t add up. It’s when you hit 40 and still haven’t paid off your student loan. It’s when you’re constantly asking yourself how things turned out so bad.

New Poverty is different to someone born into money who crashes out through their own bad decisions. New Poverty is when you do everything (or almost everything) right and still end up renting. You study hard, you don’t get a criminal record, you don’t do Class As, and you still find yourself making $60,000 a year and needing a $900,000 mortgage.

It remains to be seen how Western society deals with the phenomenon of widespread New Poverty.

One of the features of New Poverty is that it’s likely to lead to a massive increase in dissent. Not having expected to become poor, many of those falling from the middle class into New Poverty will become resentful about their miserable station. Already there is a widespread incel movement in the West comprised of men who demand the very best.

In the past, the coming of New Poverty portended revolution. Old Poverty can handle being poor, but New Poverty tends to become bitter. So in times when middle-class or upper-middle-class people are cast down into the working class, we can expect them to fight to get back to their original position. Here it’s worth recalling that many revolutionaries started out in the minor aristocracy.

If we don’t get revolution, we might get what Aldous Huxley predicted – a world where everyone is zombified by pharmaceuticals. Maybe the vast masses will be paralysed by a matrix of screen propaganda, prescription pills and long working hours, lacking the energy to revolt against the technologically-empowered ruling class.

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A System That We Can All Be Proud Of

In a fiery exchange between a mainstream media lackey and CounterSpin Media host Kelvyn Alp, Alp summarised the desire of the Wellington protesters and the freedom movement more generally: a system that we can all be proud of. In the absence of any better suggestion, this essay outlines what such a system might look like.

There is one big problem with the current New Zealand system: the vast majority of the benefits from all the work performed go to a very small number of people. Under our current economic arrangement, the benefits of labour don’t go to the labourer but to the owner of the land upon which the labour was performed. This is called capitalism, and if you don’t like it you’re responsible for tens of millions of deaths by starvation in Russia and China.

It’s an ugly system. It’s not much different to medieval feudalism, in which the vast majority of people were serfs beholden to a lord. The serfs worked all day, and then the lord came in and took their productivity away for his own purposes, leaving the serfs with barely enough to get through to the next tax day (if they were lucky).

Being a New Zealander is a constant humiliation.

Not only must one deal with the fact that one’s wages hardly go anywhere, but one must also deal with the pettiness of average New Zealanders. This pettiness follows from being a small, isolated country infested with the slave morality of Christianity. There’s nothing we love more than ripping our neighbours down once they make something of themselves. Anyone with any self-esteem has to be destroyed.

Nothing about the way our system is run engenders pride. We have to aim higher.

A system that we can all be proud of would entail change from the ground up. It would require a total paradigm shift from a mentality of profit before all, to a mentality of alleviating the suffering of the New Zealand nation. It would require raising solidarity between the various communities of New Zealand, rather than setting them against each other.

The first step in bringing this about is to restore basic dignity to the average worker by making it possible for them to get ahead.

As of right now, the average New Zealand worker has no chance of ever owning their own home. Wages are so low in comparison to house prices and rents that the average house now costs over 25,000 hours of labour at the average wage. This contrasts rudely with the average house price in 1992: 7,000 hours of labour at the average wage. Not only does the average worker have trouble buying a house, they have trouble saving at all.

It’s impossible for the average worker to be proud of a system that exploits them to such an extent. It’s like asking a plantation slave to be proud of the plantation system. Our economy must be completely redesigned, so that it once again becomes possible for the average worker to buy a house and raise a family on their wage.

To this end, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand ought to be given an entirely new remit: to alleviate the suffering of the New Zealand people. This new remit would replace the existing focus on inflation and unemployment. The problem with this existing focus is that it inclines the Reserve Bank to drop interest rates to the floor for the sake of encouraging borrowing (and thereby spending), but these low interest rates just lead to ballooning house prices.

Also to this end, the mass importation of cheap labour must stop immediately. There is nothing that has lowered the standard of living of the average Kiwi worker more than having been forced to compete with imported cheap labour. Increasing the supply of cheap labour inevitably lowers the price of that labour, and New Zealand’s historical addiction to it is one of the prime reasons why our wages are in the toilet. We have to go clean.

A final step is that tax incentives must be used to attract investment in productive capital. A land tax must be introduced to shift investment from land banking to business. New Zealand’s productivity is infamously low, the result of many things, but foremost among them is the lack of capital investment. Because New Zealand employers have historically always been able to import cheap labour, they have not been incentivised to invest in productive capital.

None of these suggestions require jingoism, supremacy or xenophobia. New Zealand doesn’t need to denigrate other nations in order to create a system that we can all be proud of. But we have to give our own people a fair deal. And this starts with giving the everyday Kiwi a fair standard of living for full-time work. That a full-time worker can afford a decent house that they can raise a family in could be the basis of a system that we could all be proud of.

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Learnings From The Truckers’ Convoy And Parliament Lawn Protests

Now that the Police have broken up the freedom protest in Wellington, it’s time to look back on the past month and determine what can be learned from the experience. In the opinion of this author, four important lessons are immediately evident.

1. Establish a clear leadership structure.

The freedom movement needs to have established leaders who can be relied upon to give accurate information to supporters about the state of affairs. The February convoys were beset by misinformation and rumour-mongering, some of it deliberately stirred up by Establishment lackeys, mainstream media hacks and other tools of authoritarianism.

Some detachments of the convoys were sent down wrong routes by trolls pretending to be organisers, and a grifter pretending to be part of the movement was able to trick people into making donations into his personal bank account. A clear leadership structure needs to be established to avoid these dangers. The masses must be told who these leaders are so that they know not to trust rumours being spread by others.

These national leaders must be unifying figures who have broad support among alternative thinkers. This means no Brian Tamakis or Derek Taits. A person like Outdoors Party Leader Sue Grey would be ideal. This person would have to be responsible for delegating responsibilities to other members of the leadership structure, and would therefore have to be available full time.

A goal might be to find a trusted representative from each leg of the route to stay in touch with the national leadership, as well as the Logistics Committee and Media and Public Relations Committee (see below). The ultimate goal would be a structure that protected the movement from false rumours, outside agitators, mainstream media lies and the machinations of Establishment politicians.

2. Establish a Logistics Committee.

At one point, rumour had it that the viability of the Parliament lawn campsite hinged on whether the protest organisers could arrange Portaloos for the protesters. This is an example of the logistical considerations that protest organisers need to consider. Next time, a Logistics Committee needs to take care of any issues relating to providing the basic needs of thousands of people.

As Kelvyn Alp mentioned on Counterspin the other night, the convoy participants were met along the way by people handing out bread and other food. A large number of people suddenly descending on a city will inevitably require large amounts of food and drink. A Logistics Committee is needed to help deal to this suddenly increased demand for basic needs. Arranging shelter is also vital work.

Logistics also includes the provision of a public address system. The PA system for the speakers outside Parliament was provided by a church group, which soon refused to let anyone else speak except for preachers. The freedom movement must try to supply everything needed for its purposes without relying on outsiders who may have other motives.

3. Establish a Media and Public Relations Committee.

The mainstream media’s coverage of the protests was little more than an effort to smear the protesters as white supremacists. All throughout, the mainsteam media spread rumours of neo-Nazi involvement, sexual assaults in the camp and violence against bystanders. The mainstream media is an arm of the control system and the enemy of the New Zealand people, and they need to be considered as such. Therefore, they must be dealt with intelligently.

To this end, the freedom movement needs a Media and Public Relations Committee to deal with media interactions.

One important part of this is to provide press releases to scoop.co.nz and to other journalistic sources. This will get the true message out about the motivations, intentions and aspirations of the movement and will pre-empt the authorities and the mainstream media from smearing us as racists and white supremacists. We must speak for ourselves so that our enemies are prevented from doing so.

These press releases must serve the imperative to win the propaganda war. Winning this war also involves getting the message out through channels other than the mainstream media, who will twist and spin things to serve their masters in the Establishment. Close liasons with alternative media must be maintained. Freedom movement leaders must get themselves interviewed by, and get their opinion pieces published by, the alternative media.

4. Keep the Christians and other fanatics out.

VJM Publishing has long made the argument that the freedom movement cannot include Christians for the simple reason that Christians do not support freedom, as evidenced by Christian opposition to cannabis law reform, prostitution law reform and homosexual law reform, and Christian support for the legal right to hit one’s children and to rape one’s wife.

These five strikes do not mean that Christians should be made to feel excluded, but it means that Christians cannot be allowed into influential positions within the movement. They will sabotage the movement to the benefit of their cult if any opportunity arises, and will always cause infighting as they inevitably seek to impose themselves upon and exclude non-Christians.

To this end, Destiny Church and Brian Tamaki have to be completely excluded. Destiny and Tamaki claim to be freedom fighters, but they recently campaigned for the New Zealand Government to destroy cannabis users in the 2020 cannabis referendum. Therefore, they do not understand freedom. They are simply grifters using the freedom movement to promote their cult, and need to be utterly shunned.

Any religious fundamentalist who has previously campaigned to take freedoms away from the New Zealand people must be excluded from the freedom movement. This means anti-cannabis fanatics like Tamaki, Elliot Ikilei and Leighton Baker. The freedom movement has to be smart enough to tell the difference between people who truly stand up for freedom and people who just say that they do.

This goes for all other fanatics. No Communists, no Nazis, no “you should be allowed to buy children on the free market” libertarians. Anyone who thinks they can decide for other people what’s right for them has to be excluded. They will only cause infighting.

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