Two merchants of menace
It seems I’m as Aryan as you can get, with a DNA test to prove it, but I’m less thrilled about it than Lauren Southern, the suitably blonde agitator who wasn’t allowed to speak at the Auckland Council’s Bruce Mason Centre. The 23-year-old self-described journalist calls to mind an inane pop song once banned by the BBC, Jump Up and Down and Wave Your Knickers in the Air. She’s white and proud and wants to kick arse about the accident of her birth, for which she has no more reason to preen than the rest of us whiteys. But boy, is she shrill, is she self-righteous, and is she in-your-face provocative.
I’ve taken a dislike to her. In case you wondered. Southern and fellow Canadian Stefan Molyneux are internet identities with a far-Right agenda that would have appalled Bruce Mason, a leading Kiwi playwright and sensible liberal. Like so many female Kiwi authors, whose names are plastered on granny farms around the country, he had no say in having his name on the building, and yes, I knew him.
The Free Speech Coalition is threatening legal action against Regional Facilities Auckland for cancelling the pair’s proposed gig on health and safety grounds, a decision approved by Auckland’s mayor, Phil Goff. I can see how those grounds would have supporters squeal political correctness, but the odds were against a peaceful gathering, and I doubt they’d be prepared to fund a police presence to protect the wind-up merchants.
It seems a bit pathetic that a group of intelligent people would band together to raise money – they’re not short of a bob, as opposed to your average refugee – to hire a costly QC to demand a review of the ban. The two Canadians could try their luck appearing elsewhere in town, surely, to stir up white arrogance under the name of pride. What stood in their way? Has Don Brash no living room to lend the cause?
Brash, Michael Bassett, Chris Trotter, Paul Moon, Lindsay Perigo and Stephen Franks belong to the coalition. You won’t see many female names linked to it, which rather suggests a cabal of old white men steeped in the privilege of their gender and skin colour, fearing a future in which their descendants have to level-foot it with people with browner skin and different beliefs.
Brash, who seems unable to help himself, says people have a right to air their racist views. His son Alan says otherwise, calling their legal bid ‘‘a terrible idea and an appalling waste of time and money’’. It is both.
What’s happening here is an attempt to defy history, to ignore the fact that mass migrations of people have been a constant in the world. It is based on fear of change, which is inevitable, and of radical Islam, aligned with longing for a past when the white man ruled in undisputed wisdom over the heathen. And women.
The would-be speakers are also anti-feminist. Southern, their poster girl, is hardly subtle. She was banned from entering the UK after displaying flyers reading, ‘‘Allah is a Gay God’’, and ‘‘Allah is Trans’’, a stunt she claimed proved Islam was homophobic when it had the predictable effect. Does this really impress a sharp mind like Franks’?
Molyneux argues that race is tied to IQ, a longdiscredited claim that’s disproved right there, and has said women are to blame for violent men because, as mothers, they’re responsible for dysfunctional early childhoods. Really.
Both are anti-immigration, and rather than being martyrs to free speech, they’re all over the internet. The Free Speech Coalition is wasting its money. You couldn’t shut them up if you tried.