When New Zealand's Jacinda Ardern Censored Uncomfortable Truths

Meta's Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were instructed by Governments to censor truthful information. NZ Government also censored citizens directly.

This is a short article that is a throwback to Sept and Oct 2021. A time of Government overreach we should NEVER forget, imposed by people we should NEVER forgive. And our experiences then and now, still need explaining for those who still think it’s possible to ‘move on’.

Screenshot of this Radio New Zealand article including an interview with our then-PM about the imminent ‘Vaccine Passports’ (9 mins)

We can hardly believe that it’s approaching three years since New Zealand experienced enforced apartheid. After enjoying a long public holiday weekend away, it’s always a good opportunity to stop and reflect on the past and why we do what we do.

I wrote this post a couple of weeks ago about the Censorship Industrial Complex working at a local level with Facebook in our little New Zealand town:

And it reminded me of another Facebook-related incident, back in September 2021, when our then-Prime Minister, Jabcinda Ardern (or her PR team), posted this naive-sounding open question on her Facebook page (why?):

As Lynda Wharton from Health Forum NZ described back then on the Group’s Telegram Page:

“The post exploded into a hot sweat of angst, pain and anguish. Over 20,000 comments in the first 24 hours. [But] As fast as the stories of injury and death were typed, their comments were being censored and removed”

Tens of thousands - a friend reckons about 36,000 - of personal stories of grief and frustration were deleted because these were uncomfortable truths for the Government obsessed with power. For many of Jacinda’s then-fans, this may have been their first experience of censorship. Because if you don’t get censored, you don’t know it exists. They had likely already been gaslit, censored and defamed, by friends and family, GPs and colleagues - and were desperate to be heard. I screenshot three of these comments at the time (posted below). It breaks my heart to re-read these now and think of those who innocently tried to reach out for help that day, who perhaps genuinely believed the propaganda of the ‘safe and effective’? The image of Jacinda as a ‘caring and kind’ leader was broken. Many were confused or frustrated, some were understandably angry. These were a catalogue of multiple deaths and disabilities from a propagandized public:

At that time we were already watching the data from overseas in horror, which was spelling out how dangerous the injections were. Paradoxically they increased an individual’s chance of getting infections, and yet the Censorship Industrial Complex was systematically silencing any dissent - providing an illusion of consensus.

And as I described in my linked post above, the censorship continues today, in some areas, even more severely than before.

The Fake Fact Checkers that I wrote about here, were quick to get on the profitable band-wagon and reinforce the propaganda of the ‘safe and effective’ and to predictably label any counter-narratives as conspiracy theorists. (A particularly nauseating example is here.)

The following week after this PR disaster, Jacinda announced the ‘Vaccination Passports’ in New Zealand which as she declared proudly, would prevent many from accessing everyday things, like transport, dog parks, hairdressers, libraries, sport events, gyms and restaurants….

Many of us couldn’t believe this lightning-fast fall from our ‘normality’ into full-blown tyranny. And sure enough, one month later, the Vaccination Order was put in place, that mandated the injection for many employees. I have written extensively about that policy and how it impacted New Zealanders in many previous posts, including the challenges and corruption involved in applying for an exemption. One of my most popular articles about this is here:

I wrote about the Waikato Wellbeing Project where I saw Jacinda Ardern in person in 2019. But after her resignation, she didn’t stay in her home of Waikato. Amongst other roles, she has funding from The UK Royal’s Earthshot Prize and also Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society (BKCIS) as similar to Stanford’s Internet Observatory and Ardern is its first ‘Knight Tech Governance Leadership Fellow’ […] where she will focus on the study of online extremism. (That’s the newly-defined ‘extremism’ that rhymes with ‘conspiracy theorist’). BKCIS is a spin-off from the Christchurch Call - an initiative resulting of the 2019 Christchurch NZ Mosque shooting incident. I haven’t yet looked closely at this propaganda machinery, but the Legacy Media spells some predictable details:

“More than 50 countries joined the initiative, including the United States, Britain, Germany and South Korea, as well as technology companies like Facebook parent company Meta, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, YouTube, Zoom and Twitter.

“The [Harvard] Center has been an incredibly important partner as we’ve developed the Christchurch Call to action on addressing violent extremism online,” Ardern said, adding that the fellowship will be a chance not only to work collaboratively with the center’s research community, but also to work on the challenges around the growth of generative AI tools.”

Extract from a Reuters article about her leadership approach here.

Did Jacinda genuinely not anticipate that reaction to her Fb post about ‘vaccine hesitancy’ in Sept 2021? What conversations happened behind the scenes as the comments spelling out the death and disability caused by the injections were conveniently deleted? Does Jacinda oversee new ways of censoring views like those citizen’s comments she deleted? What will happen to Jacinda, and other WEF Young Global Leaders who led the Government overreach during the covid era?