My Top Ten Wokesters of 2022

Guest Author: Macky.

Competition is stiff for Wokesters in the Weird & Woeful World of Wokery. Nonetheless, I’ve worked out my top ten Wokesters for ’22.

But first..

What is Woke?

“Woke” is an amorphous term. Interestingly, no-one these days describes themselves as “Woke” (people used to). For me, the main characteristics of today’s Woke are:

  • An ostensible and broadcasted, but not necessarily sincere, concern for the marginalised and disadvantaged in society
  • A belief that members of certain societal groups, regardless of their particular personal circumstances, are innately oppressed – women, people with dark skin, anyone with any sexual persuasion other than male heterosexual. In this regard, WokeDom is a distinctly and inherently divisive philosophy, which puts labels on people regardless of how they actually conduct themselves and their personal characteristics. Martin Luther King’s famous entreaty that people should be judged on the quality of their character (rather than skin colour) is tossed out the window
  • Everyone has an innate racial/sexual/gender “identity” that defines one’s position in the societal pecking order and is more important than any other aspect of one’s life (e.g. job). “Identity” is regarded as key. However, in reality “identity” is a flimsy and indefensible notion; a kind of secular version of the overtly religious notion of a personal soul
  • Woke is inclined against capitalism and towards totalitarian controls on personal actions, freedoms of association, speech and attitudes, and societal means of production
  • Wokesters tend to loath productive business activity and businesspeople
  • In the Woke World, words expressed by people you don’t even know can constitute harmful violence against you. There’s a potent anti-free speech thread in this regard. But the Woke will themselves happily call for people who say things they disagree with to have their whole livelihoods taken from them for throwaway remarks, often deliberately taken out of context
  • The Woke are earnest to the point of humorlessness
  • The Woke don’t like debating subtleties and complexities. Their whole human word is divided into goodies and baddies
  • There are distinct witch-hunt qualities about Wokeism. A male Caucasian either admits he’s a racist or proves he’s a racist by denying he’s a racist
  • Wokesters will claim to be progressive in all respects, bravely making the world a better place by calling out social justice transgressions. But the selective illiberalism and intolerance that lie at the heart of Wokeism are far from progressive
  • Wokeism is not an approach to life shared by many common working-class people. It’s a distinctly bourgeois Western indulgence
  • Wokemons are ahistorical and tend to think that all societal change that they advocate for is universally positive, such that the radical (albeit amorphously defined) reconfiguration of society that some Woke advocate for must necessarily be positive
  • No apprehension of what task-orientated work really is (Woke is performative, all about signalling virtue and generating “acceptable” publicised personal narratives). In this sense, and because Woke philosophies are damaging overall for society, Woke Is Not Working.

 

The Top 10

Ayesha Verrall

Verily I say unto you…Minister of Health Ayesha Verrall is a classic of our times in the land now known as Aotearoa.

In 1997 Verrall was a member of the New Zealand Youth Parliament. She was president of the Otago Medical Students’ Association in 2001 and came into Parliament on the Labour Party list in the 2020 election.

Her Parliamentary career kicked off shortly after she conveniently found, having been commissioned by the Ministry of Health, that New Zealand’s national COVID-19 tracing programme was good. This was a curious finding indeed given the programme had in fact not been rolled out (it never really was), but it worked for Verrall. Verrall’s audit report was delivered in April 2020 and in June 2020 Labour was delighted to insert her at 17th on their party list, guaranteeing her entry into Parliament.

Verrall has been powerfully outspoken on a number of “progressive” health issues.

She cried at the prospect that COVID-19 may somehow jeopardise her dream that by 2025 no one in New Zealand will smoke tobacco.

Verrall became especially animated about monkeypox, a rare disease that virtually never kills but which almost exclusively affects men who enjoy promiscuous and/or group sex with other men. Accordingly, Verrall concluded that monkeypox “discriminates” against such men and must therefore be eliminated from this fair land. She also concluded that the term “monkeypox” is itself discriminatory (against monkeys or people with it or some other group; it’s not clear) and renamed the affliction “mpox”. Verrall secured smallpox vaccinations for treating mpox. There now appear to be no New Zealand cases of mpox.

(In apparent suggestion that male homosexuals are inclined towards bestiality, the Ministry of Health website states “anyone who is a probable or confirmed mpox case should avoid close contact with animals”.)

Continuing her multi-pronged assault on discrimination, in July 2022 Verrall powerfully tweeted “Thrilled to announce our ambition to eliminate HIV transmission in Aotearoa and ensure that all people with HIV enjoy a long life free from discrimination. We can do this.” Exactly how people with HIV are discriminated against remains unclear.

Verrall these days seems unconcerned about tuberculosis (TB), despite about 300 cases of TB being diagnosed in New Zealand every year and Verrall having completed her PhD in TB epidemiology. Worldwide, 1.6 million people died of PB in 2021 and 1.2 million children contracted TB.

Verrall is proudly gay, posting on Facebook in 2021 “Excited to celebrate Pride at Big Gay Out today. We’ve made some progress when it comes to rainbow health, but we’ve still got a long way to go”.

Adrian Orr

It takes a certain type of man to personally suck multi-millions of dollars out of the public coffers for over 15 years and then demand wage restraint from the masses, in tough economic times he himself has created. Adrian Orr is exactly that type of man.

With no hard economic or financial qualifications, Orr emerged from a role as chief economist at Westpac New Zealand (whoop-dee-doo) to become the chief executive of the New Zealand Superannuation Fund in 2007. Riding a prolonged bull market, his income in his final full year there (2015/16) was over a million dollars, an increase of 36% over the previous year.

Within his inevitable annual bonuses, Orr has never received less than $1 million from the Reserve Bank since he inveigled his way into the Governorship in 2018.

A drinking enthusiast to say the least, he loves to imbibe with his chardonnay socialist soulmate and Finance Minister Grant Robertson, who in late 2021 gleefully re-appointed Orr for a further five-year term – the maximum available. Not for Orr that old-fashioned notion that a Reserve Bank Governor should be politically independent. Quite the opposite. Starting with the Treaty of Waitangi, everything’s a “partnership” these days.

When COVID struck, Orr had not a clue about money-printing money (or he would’ve got onto it earlier). But he caught wind of the notion of magical money creation, obtained confirmation from a former Reserve Bank employee that money-printing is indeed a “thing”, and proceeded to print every dollar the New Zealand Government wanted. He has now increased New Zealand’s national debt by $60 billion in the last three years, from $90 billion in early 2020 to $150 billion now.

While Orr is bereft of fiscal nous in how to properly serve our plucky nation, he exhibits an instinctive sense of how to exploit the Zeitgeist to self-aggrandize.

He has fastened onto and incessantly broadcasts his Cook Island heritage. He has had the Reserve Bank adopt the Māori mystical god Tāne Mahuta in the following terms:

Orr spent more than $400,000 of Reserve Bank money on an art installation for the foyer of the Reserve Bank’s lobby, celebrating, you guessed it, Tāne Mahuta.

Orr, with his ancient Woke wisdom, brave free-thinking and self-serving political partisanship, has ripped up the traditional Reserve Bank Governor play book, and bankrupted New Zealand.

Grant Robertson

Grant Robertson is Adrian Orr’s partner in financial crime and catastrophe. Actually, he’s not strictly a financial criminal, unlike his accountant father who was jailed in 1991 for stealing from his employer.

Like his Labour Party brethren, Grant has never had a job outside of Government and cut his political teeth in student politics. Despite being Minister of Finance, he has no financial credentials or useful life experience.

In 2020 Robertson was announced as New Zealand’s first openly gay deputy prime minister but, to his credit, Robertson admirably – and heretically – eschews a central gay “identity”.

Despite this stance, Robertson still qualifies as a Wokester. His special political tactic comes straight from the Critical Social Justice Playbook; to cheerfully assert that black is white. He brazenly asserts that household “balance sheets” are in good shape and that New Zealand’s financial position under his stewardship is eminently sound. That’s his personal belief, his “lived experience”, which is enough in WokeDom. Perhaps he really believes money grows on trees.

Robertson certainly considers he can create national wealth by running the money-printing presses full-bore, full-time.

Robertson was the subject of the best public quotation of 2022 when, after having had a lamington thrown at him, David Seymour masterfully uttered “I would have thought that Grant Robertson would be a much bigger threat to lamingtons than lamingtons would be a threat to Grant Robertson.” His subjects may be struggling, but Robertson is not starving.

Paul Hunt

Paul Hunt has proved to be one of the most damaging single animal intrusions New Zealand has suffered. In 1992 he arrived from England and became a senior lecturer at that hot bed of tertiary educational mediocrity, Waikato University. He’s remained a good friend of unreconstructed communist, anti-Semite and former head of the British Labour Party, Andrew Corban.

A slow burner to start with in New Zealand, Hunt’s big break came when he was appointed Human Rights Commissioner in 2019. He distinguished himself early in his tenure by getting desperately confused about the Mongrel Mob, the gang with skinhead origins; hence the British Bulldog mascot.

Having convinced himself that the Mongies are a definitively Māori organisation (rather than the multi-racial criminal organisation that they are), Hunt gratefully accepted an invitation issued by Waikato Mongrel Mob public relations liaison officer Louise Hutchinson to present to the Mob and kicked it off by providing $200 cash (not his own) as koha.

Defending his presentation, Hunt fell back on that old Critical Social Justice chestnut, the primacy of lived experiences (over stark realities), stating “I attended the hui to speak, listen and discuss the experiences raised by the Waikato Mongrel Mob Kingdom, acknowledging that these experiences are part of a wider conversation about the importance of social inclusion and belonging in Aotearoa.” Hunt didn’t touch on the lived experiences of the Mob’s multitudes of Aotearoan victims.

Hunt is one of those human rights zealots who believes that one simply has to assert rights to make lives better: declare a right to a house, and houses will magically sprout from the ground; declare a right not to be poor and poverty will be solved (“Poverty is simply a human rights issue. We need to start viewing poverty as an intolerable injustice.”) And so on. Hunt, eminent High Priest of Human Rights Horseshit.

Meng Foon

Meng Foon sprang to minor prominence when he was elected Mayor of Gisborne in 2001, a position he held until 2019 when he became Race Relations Commissioner, shortly after Paul Hunt had become Human Rights Commissioner.

In 2001, just before he became Gisborne Major, Foon allegedly got up to mischief in relation to Meng’s Place, a nasty pokie bar that Foon owned and operated in the deprived Gisborne suburb of Kaiti. The allegation was that Foon asked for a kick back in return for his support for a community group’s application for grant from pokie machine proceeds. The Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) took no action on the allegation at the time and fought like a rabid dog in 2020 to avoid releasing information about the allegation in response to an Official Information Act request. By the time the Ombudsman intervened, and DIA was forced to release information, multiple documents had gone missing. Look it all up with Dr Google if you like. The Leftie Legions look after their own.

Foon has muddled along as Race Relations Commissioner, waxing and waning, accusing and retracting, deflecting and prevaricating, not much “getting” issues of race, about as useless as his predecessor Susan Devoy who regarded criticism of Islam (a religion) as racist.

Foon’s current shambling is to studiously ignore myriad complaints about Tusiata Avia’s poem 250th anniversary of James Cook’s arrival in New Zealand

Foon merrily labels anything that doesn’t accord with his personal views of appropriate stances on race as racist. Any suggestion that New Zealand is not two separate nations, one Māori and one non-Māori, is racist. Not for Foon Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character”.  Skin colour for Foon is far more than skin deep. Quite how is unclear.

Siouxsie Wiles

British-born Siouxsie (born Susanna) Wiles describes herself as a microbiologist and “science communicator”. What the pink-haired porker doesn’t describe herself as is a compulsive attention seeker and self-appointed social media canceller.

A veritable Queen of Wokedom, it goes without saying that Siouxsie is a Member of the NZ Order of Merit and was 2021 New Zealander of the Year, hot on the heels of the stratospherically smug actor, “intimacy coordinator” and purported te reo Māori speaker Jennifer Ward-Lealand.

It goes without saying that Siouxsie co-signed a letter objecting to a letter published in the Listener from seven proper academics (the “Listener Seven”) arguing that Matauranga Māori (Māori indigenous knowledge) is incompatible with science and shouldn’t be included in the school science curriculum.

A classic cry bully, Siouxsie (together with Shaun Hendy – see below) complained to the Employment Relations Authority that Auckland University was not protecting her from people being mean to her about aspects of her incessant public announcements on COVID. In a rare example of a New Zealand university acting sensibly, Auckland University told her (and Hendy) to reduce their public commentary and social media interaction. The New Zealand Media Council found to be false Siouxsie’s claim, published by Stuff, that the Listener Seven had intimidated junior staff with lawyers’ letters.

Siouxsie loves to play with Lego, despite being an outspoken critic of what she describes as gender bias in Lego minifigures. Siouxsie has yet to admit that she’s culturally appropriated her adopted first name, deriving as it does from the Sioux confederacy of Native American tribes.

Shaun Hendy

Joined at the hip with Siouxsie Wiles, Shaun Hendy was a co-signatory to the Listener Seven objection letter as well, as indicated, of co-cry bullying to Auckland University about people being mean to him over COVID.

He has been vastly more successful than Siouxsie in monetizing COVID, with his firm paid multiple millions by the Government (in an uncontested process) to make predictions about COVID infections and deaths. When his predictions transpired to be frightfully over-the-top and scaremongering, Shaun later claimed that they were better regarded as “scenarios”.

Hendy is a climate change warrior. Despite winging his way all over the world to attend any conferences he can find, he’s a fierce crusader for taking personal responsibility to reduce climate change.

Clearly a big fan of “open letters”, he has co-signed a letter objecting to a proposal for a new Central Otago (Tarra) airport, despite the incontrovertible scientific evidence that climate change is a global phenomenon and that another New Zealand airport won’t make one iota of difference.

Like Siouxsie, Shaun appears not to be starving.

Andrew Coster

Andrew Coster is New Zealand’s first overtly and shamelessly Woke Police Commissioner. He’s the youngest ever Police Commissioner and spends more time on his hair than any of his predecessors.

Coster has adopted the novel approach to policing of denying that crime actually exists much at all and that such criminals as do exist are exclusively alt-right.

Coster is heavily politically aligned to the Labour Government and looks to tell that Government exactly what he thinks they want to hear.

Faced with convincing first-hand accounts of lawlessness in the Hawke’s Bay in the wake of Cyclone Gabrielle, including an incident of guns being pointed at roadworkers, Coster – ever eager to please his political puppet-masters – initially reported to Prime Minister Hipkins that post-Gabrielle Hawke’s Bay crime was below average and that the gun-pointing incident simply hadn’t occurred. With Hipkins unable to sustain that preposterous and untenable “nothing-to-see-here” narrative, Coster publicly apologised for his false report.

Rod Carr

Rod Carr chairs New Zealand’s Climate Change Commission.

Unfortunately for him, he is legally blind. And most unfortunately for all New Zealanders, Carr is figuratively blind on multiple climate change fronts. His main climate change blind spots are as follows:

  • He sincerely believes that New Zealand can materially reduce global human-induced climate change by reducing its own emissions of greenhouse gases, despite the fact that New Zealand’s emissions are 0.09% of global emissions i.e. less than 1/1000th.
  • He believes that, if New Zealand reduces his omissions, other major emitters will follow New Zealand’s example. Fat chance of that.
  • He believes that if New Zealand farmers do not “clean up their practices”, other countries will not buy New Zealand’s agricultural products. Again, fat chance of that.
  • He advocates for massive reductions in farm animal numbers and animal farming, and the permanent planting of productive New Zealand agricultural land in pinus radiata (pine trees), and that such actions will increase New Zealand’s prosperity.

Carr’s crazy religious zeal extends to his looks. He sports a beard like a Muslim Iman…and now has the ego and critical faculties to match. He of course sports a greenstone/pounamu pendant. He nonetheless publicly expressed excitement that his air travel on Climate Change Commission business has given him gold status for NZ New Zealand frequent flying. His Climate Change salary is not public.

Jacinda Ardern

It’s hard to know what to think of ex-Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern or to imagine how she will be remembered. Aotearoa is still – to coin the current infantile vernacular – “processing” her.

The Queen of Kindness, who turned out not to be extraordinarily kind. A person who stopped pronouncing the letter “T” (DiversiDY, SustainabiliDY, CommiDDee) and who spawned a legion of acolytes who speak the same. A person who displayed delusions of world grandeur, only to retreat from the mainstream media into a life of social media coverage of herself and her daughter, Neve Te Aroha. Someone prone to preposterous promises: that she would solve child poverty and New Zealand’s social housing crisis, that Aotearoa will compensate anyone who loses their coastal property to erosion, that on her watch Labour would never introduce a capital gains tax, that the “Road to Zero” is literally achievable.

A darling of the Left whose instincts turned out to be little about old-fashion socialism and big-time about authoritarianism. Who got owned by Nanaia Mahuta and didn’t have the guts to axe Mahuta when her Minister of Local Government directly contradicted Ardern on whether Ardern knew that the Three Waters legislation contained an entrenchment clause. Whose idea of a day’s work was simply creating more script for her political theatre.

In the end, a bewildered and bewildering cipher of a woman who rendered the form of Labour Party she had fostered unelectable, and for her efforts was de-throned by her own Party. Hell’s Bells was she Woke….or what?!

One Response

  1. Bloody funny ! I especially liked ” … pink haired porker. “Despite the hilarity this is an accurate assessment of the top ten offenders.

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