IS WOKETEAROA A CULT?

A fair question concerning New Zealand’s endemic Critical Social Justice movement

Almost exactly a year ago – my how time flies! – I poked fun at New Zealand Wokery.

It’s hilarious and reassuring that The Disinformation Project - the baby of Kate Hannah, depicted above - has this month been aborted. But Woke has been no fun for those on the receiving end of its crazed finger-pointing, or for the New Zealand nation in general. It has lead directly to the dreadful societal division and economic doldrums that New Zealanders are now suffering.

What is a Cult?

A “cult” is a human grouping that demands unwavering devotion to a set of irrational beliefs and practices, almost always under a charismatic leader. A significant feature of a true cult is that it can turn rational people mad, and good people bad. Cults sacralize revered objects and societal groups.

The next Woke turf I wish to explore is whether Woke in New Zealand can legitimately be classified as a cult. Are we looking at a Woke Cult…WULT. It’s a confronting question. Could New Zealand’s Government and apparatus of State have indeed fallen under the spell of a cult?

Woke’s New Zealand incarnation

WokeNZ is predominantly a mindlessly imported belief system, but with significant home-grown racial elements…Māori Marvelousness and a sacred, talismanic document – the Treaty of Waitangi (“Te Tiriti”, to Woke Folk). Woke sacralizes anyone with a Māori ancestor, together with that Treaty. Such people, and that tattered document, hold the key to a much-anticipated Rapture of Woketearoan Nirvana.

Those without a Māori ancestor must claim to understand the invented unitary “Māori world view” but simultaneously admit that, bereft of a Maori identity, they can’t understand such a view, must admit their complicity in racist colonization and pledge to do better while confessing they cannot, must be an ally of people with a Māori ancestor knowing they can only betray that alliance...

In Woke World, “Trans” people, imbued with a mystical power to change their biological sex, are somehow special too. Kiddie fiddlers are not pedophiles, they’re Minor-Attracted Persons (MAPs). It’s all very strange, sinister, dishonest and fundamentally stupid. The Dunning-Kruger effect – the cognitive bias where people with limited competence overestimate their abilities – is in fully swing in WokeNZ, with screeds of pseudo-intellectual language, pontificating piffle and economic voodoo.

Like most religions, Woke harbors its own brand of apostasy (punishments for abandoning the Woke faith), with severe opprobrium and public cancellation for quitting the faith.

More recently I’ve postulated that Woketearoa is on the wane. I’m sticking with that hopeful prediction.

Cult Leader Ardern

Full-blown cults have a charismatic leader. WokeNZ’s charismatic cult leader was of course Dame Jacinda Ardern, the self-appointed Queen of Kindness. “Jacindamania” was very real…with no more die-hard Jacindamaniacs than poor little Patrick Gower - the pretend journalist guy who claims to have penned a book in fact written by his mate Eugene Bingham.

Ardern cult deputy leaders included paranoid Disinformation Project director Sanjana Hattotuwa. He’s the weirdo who alleges that Trans New Zealanders are being genocidally exterminated.

It’s no coincidence that Woketeraroa’s decline began when Ardern abandoned New Zealand. She’s now on the lucrative international speaking circuit.

I would personally pay good money not to have to endure another lecture from Ardern. (Curiously, attendees don’t have to pay to hear Ardern; Ardern’s speaking events are funded by corporates and think-tanks.) Ardern is about to publish a book and is still narcissistically addicted to her own feels…“I felt like there was no other way to tell the story of leadership than to share how it feels”. God help us.

Why might WokeNZ NOT be a cult?

Given WokeNZ ticks the basic boxes to qualify as a cult, is there any argument that WokeNZ is nevertheless Not Cult? 

The only argument I can think of against WokeNZ being a cult is that Wokesters are too common in New Zealand for WokeNZ to constitute a true cult. The argument would run that Wokery is too mainstream to be sufficiently deviant from societal norm to constitute a cult. To which the response is…just remember the last election, when Labour free-fell from 50% of the popular vote in the 2020 election to under 27% in the 2023 election. More than anything else, the result represented a profound, pervasive rejection of New Zealand Identitarianism and Critical Social Justice.

WokeNZ is therefore distinctly a minority sport, with many who purport to be Woke just part of the lucrative (but waning) Woke grift. Woke’s marginal status is why Woke is steadfastly and ardently anti-democratic and anti-universalism. Mercifully, Woke is getting caned at the ballot-box, worldwide.

In defence of Māori in general, people with Māori ancestors are probably less likely to be Woke than people without that ancestry. Māori race hustlers have mainly just pretended to be Woke, while Wokery was a path to power.

On thoughtful balance therefore, WokeNZ is sufficiently marginal to indeed qualify as a genuine cult.

Deprogramming Wokesters

New Zealand non-WULTs understandably dream that Woketearoans will be forever condemned and marginalised to a societal wilderness, for continually labelling us all RACIST and TRANSPHOBIC. But let’s do the decent thing and try to gently and gradually bring them back into the fold. Let’s let them all save some face and avoid abject disgrace for their lunacy and nastiness, for scaring our children with Climate Change and COVID, for trying to destroy our democracy, for their gullibility and snitching.

In order to deprogram Wokesters, once must of course first find them. So how might one easily identify a Wokester? Well, for starters, if you strike an unfortunate who flatly denies Woke exists (“What’s Woke anyway?”), you’re for all practical purposes looking at a Wokester…and that’s not witch-hunting Woke-smelling. It’s just the truth. And we must steer Wokesters towards the truth and away from their ideological lies. Wokeism colonizes the soul by requiring people to lie inwardly so they can accept the lies they must promote outwardly. 

We must also be truly kind - in an authentic, non-virtue projecting fashion - to the victims of Aoteawokery. It could’ve been you that got brainwashed and Wokeified. There but for the Grace of God go I…So let’s pity, without being patronizing.

Some Wokery comes with good, sincere – albeit misguided - intentions. We must therefore resist the urge to say, “We told you so”, and not indulge in the very same divisiveness and ostracism that’s so integral to Woke.

Let’s accept that ex-Wokesters are unlikely to feel ashamed for calling people racists for refusing to classify people by race. Let’s learn to live with the fact that personalities prone to succumbing to Wokery are more likely, with their own revisionist hindsight, to classify themselves as victims of Wokery than Woke perpetrators and propagandists.

Most importantly, let’s rekindle humor and irreverence, and learn to laugh again. For the arid, fanatical humorlessness of WokeNZ was as awful as any other aspect of the dystopian Cult of New Zealand Wokery.