SHE WHO SHALL NOT BE NAMED

…or Shamed or Blamed (But got Damed)

New Zealanders don’t talk much these days about former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. There’s an uneasy silence about the self-anointed Queen of Kindness. For some, she is a national embarrassment.

Ardern has left New Zealand and taken up two sinecure fellowships at Harvard University, “studying” - according to the RNZ website - “ways to improve content standards and platform accountability for extremist content online, and examine artificial intelligence governance and algorithmic harms”, together with “principled leadership”.

Let’s be clear at the outset. Ardern is no She-devil and there’s nothing inherently untoward about the stratospheric Ardern Ambition. But neither is she remotely the paragon of virtue she’d have us believe she is. She’s hard to gauge, nigh on unfathomable, operating on such a level of scripted performance that it’s almost impossible to discern the Real Ardern. Perhaps the only time she has said anything in public that was brazenly sincere was when she called ACT Party Leader David Seymour an “arrogant prick”.

Three traits of Ardern are, however, tolerably clear.

Religious

While she claims to be agnostic, Ardern is - and will remain - deeply religious; “religious” in sense of being addicted to belief systems that necessitate blind faith and significant suspension of critical faculties.

Until the age of 25 Ardern was, like the rest of her immediate family, a practising Mormon. (Mormonism is the nut-job Christian sect founded by American conman Joseph Smith.)

After Mormonism Ardern swallowed the religion of Communism, including a two-year stint from 2008 (the year she was first elected to the New Zealand Parliament) as the president of the International Union of Socialist Youth (IUSY).

It was 2009, during her IUSY presidency, when she made her notorious “Comrades x 10” speech.

Nowadays Ardern has metamorphosed into a fanatical High Priestess of Woke, the reductive religion that categorizes every human by their racial/sexual/gender “identity” and blames pink skinned heterosexual men for all the ills of the world.

Who knows where Ardern’s religious impulses will take her next. Perhaps it’ll be the religion of Humanism, the dotty philosophy that humans (or at least the “chosen” ones) will become transcendent gods in a borderless Utopian world. (Think Nietzsche’s notion of the “death” of the Christian God, the collapse of Western civilization and the emergence of the sinless, guiltless and otherwise perfect or at least perfectible Superman/Übermensch.) In 2014 Ardern graduated from World Economic Forum’s Forum of Young Global Leaders; it’s a Bird, it’s a Dame, it’s…SuperDern!

Ardern is an archetypal sufferer of Messiah Complex, a state of mind in which the afflicted individual believes they are destined to be a savior. There’s a distinct whiff of cultivated cult about Ardernism, complete with a curious clubby linguistic affectation. Haven’t you noticed? Amongst Ardernites, the letter “t” loses out to “d”; DiversiDy, SustainabiliDy, SolidariDy, PoverDy, CommiDDee…eD ceDera.

Despite claiming to be a Republican, Ardern adores the British Monarchy, with all their enviable unaccountability and religious trappings.

Authoritarian

Ardern is innately and reflexively authoritarian. She favors centralization of political power and governmental control of public discourse and activity.

COVID-19 and the scope for her Labour Government to respond to that virus landed right up Ardern’s alley. From the cringingly choreographed Podium of Truth she gleefully proclaimed, “We will continue to be your single source of truth”/“unless you hear it from us, it is not the truth”.

Regrettably, as a privilege of cult leadership, Ardern is not above spreading her own “misinformation” when it suits her. So when her Government was slow to order COVID rapid antigen tests (RATs) and requisitioned RATs otherwise ordered by, and destined for, the private sector, Ardern was more than willing to lie and flatly deny the undeniable. (That happened to be my Ardern scales-fall-from-the-eyes moment. In a pandemic, when it is ought to be paramount, in order to preserve public confidence in those running the shop, for them to be straight as a die, Ardern brazenly lied in an attempt to mask her administration’s incompetence.)

Neither is Ardern above naked abuses of power. Being a self-styled DJ herself and always elfinly down with the Cool Kids, she orchestrated frictionless movements of her drum and base DJ idols across New Zealand’s border while everyone else was shut out and locked down. During Peak COVID Ardern and her precious daughter, Neve Te Aroha Ardern Gayford, were privileged to soak up The Wiggles - other performers who displayed mystical powers of border penetration.

As with all authoritarians, Ardern insists on being the Star of the Show. Think the Podium of Truth, the Dawn Raids Apology, the Mosques Massacre Hijab and Hugs, the Christchurch Call. Ardern is a pretend wall flower who’s really no shrinking violet. Behind her thin veneer of humility, Ardern is self-aggrandizing and vainglorious.

There was something cryptic about Ardern’s declaration in Parliament that she would never say the name of the Christchurch Mosques Massacre attacker: "Speak the names of those who were lost rather than the name of the man who took them...he will, when I speak, be nameless”. No-one ever suggests we shouldn’t name Adolf Hitler. Is it that Ardern doesn’t want Brenton Tarrant to steal any of her limelight? (“when I speak”!)

Ardern’s authoritarian impulse is to control and scare. She kept New Zealand, and Auckland in particular, in protracted COVID lock down, ignoring the medical advice of Director-General of Health Ashley Bloomfield while insisting all the while that her Government was simply following the science. With the help of her COVID lackeys, she sought to scare the population into submission. Just two years ago lavishly remunerated Ardern acolyte Shaun Hendy predicted that, even with high vaccination rates, New Zealand would see 7,000 deaths per year from COVID.

As with all aspiring depots, Ardern looks to divide to rule. Societal division fits nicely with both her Marxist and her Woke philosophies. She overtly relished the prospect of dividing New Zealand society into those who chose to vaccinate against COVID, and those who didn’t (“That is what it is”); between people with pink skin and those of darker complexions, rich and poor, property owners and renters, heterosexuals and others, climate change accepters and deniers…

Authoritarianism has a proud history of getting stuff done. Ardern’s brand of authoritarianism is, however, entirely performative. With absolute legislative power since the 2020 election and an adoring, compliant administration, for all practical purposes the Labour Party has done precisely…nothing.

Deranged

Jacinda Ardern is more than a little deranged, with a propensity for delusions of grandeur, garnished with paranoia.

It takes a certain type of person (one like Ardern) to hold herself out as capable of leading the charge on eradicating extreme on-line content without a skerrick of technological expertise.

Whatever one’s opinion of Ardern’s mentor Helen Clark, Clark was a durable and formidable politician with views and actions substantially grounded in logic and reality. Ardern, on the other hand, comes across as a fantasist and brittle flake.

There’s nothing working class or otherwise grounded about Ardern. She and her partner Clarke Gayford were introduced by mutual friend Colin Mathura-Jeffree. They move in odd, vacuous social circles populated by fantasists and self-promoting minor celebrities.

Ardern craves adoration and surrounds herself with sycophants. When a majority of New Zealanders came to see through her, she immediately quit. But while it’s tempting to conclude that Ardern is too loopy and dumb to know her limitations, she does exhibit an uncanny, reptilian knack of knowing exactly where her self-interest lies.

Ardern is a creature of our times, from her very own Outer Space.