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Marc Daalder is a senior political reporter based in Wellington who covers Covid-19, climate change, energy, primary industries, technology and the far-right. Twitter: @marcdaalder.
COMMENTS BY Steve Green, John Butt
‘Splintered realities’: How NZ convoy lost its way
Days of protesters’ chats reveal the inside story of how New Zealand’s convoy was hijacked by the far-right fringe, Marc Daalder reports
Special report: The convoy wasn’t supposed to end this way.
What organisers hoped would be a mass movement shutting down the nation’s capital until vaccine mandates were removed has devolved into a few hundred radical protesters scrapping with police, death threats against politicians which is keeping any MPs from turning out to speak with the aggrieved, and the hijacking of the event by a Trump-aligned alternative media outlet.
Analysis of posts on the chat app Telegram as well as more traditional social media platforms shows how the convoy went from a targeted protest of vaccine mandates to a vehicle for fringe and even violent extremist ideologies over the course of the event. Pleas from the original organisers on Thursday morning to abandon the camp went unheeded and more than 100 people were arrested. At the end of the day, however, protesters cheered when police gave up all of the ground they had gained through painstaking, inch-by-inch advances.
As the occupation stretches into its fifth day, it is now being seen in starkly different ways by extremists on the ground, by a more moderate anti-mandate minority and by the general New Zealand public.
“There’s something going on here that’s actually quite disturbing, in terms of splintered realities and lack of a shared narrative,” Sanjana Hattotuwa, who monitors extremism and misinformation in New Zealand for Te Pūnaha Matatini’s Disinformation Project, told Newsroom.
While police are now managing the physical event on the ground, the battles being fought over narrative online threaten to further fray New Zealand’s social fabric, he warned.
A viral moment
The speed at which the convoy went from an event in Canada to an online discussion in New Zealand to something that was actually happening is unprecedented in the country’s conspiracy scene.
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We now know that Canada’s convoy was not an organic uprising of truckers but the scheme of a QAnon conspiracy theorist. In New Zealand, there are no signs yet that the convoy movement was launched by any of the usual conspiracy theorist or extremist suspects.
“This was pretty organic. It came from nowhere,” Hattotuwa said. It received early support and amplification from the anti-lockdown, anti-vax group Voices for Freedom and then went truly viral on the conspiracy fringe when it got coverage from Counterspin Media.
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Counterspin is one of the largest platforms for conspiracy theories and far-right ideology in New Zealand. It airs on an online TV channel set up by former Donald Trump advisor and far-right extremist Steve Bannon and was started by Kelvyn Alp, an extremist known for agitating for armed resistance against the New Zealand government in the early 2000s.
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For their part, the convoy organisers tried to keep to a narrow message: They wanted the end of vaccine mandates, the repeal of Covid-19-related legislation and for anti-vaccination doctors suspended by the Medical Council to be reinstated. While Counterspin framed the event as the start of a “war” in which politicians would be arrested for the “crime” of promoting vaccination, the organisers asked that views not related to the mandates be shared privately.
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The decisive moment came on Wednesday afternoon. Four days prior, a conspiracy theorist by the name of Brett Power had lodged a civil complaint against Andrew Little in the High Court in New Plymouth, accusing the health minister of murder. Like many of the protesters and high-profile extremists like Alp, Power is a sovereign citizen who believes that the Government has no legal power to tax or detain him.
After filing his papers at the High Court, Power and others had attempted to storm the offices of the Taranaki Daily News. He joined the convoy and ended up in Wellington on Tuesday.
At 3.15pm on Wednesday, Power attempted to breach the police line at Parliament to enter the building and serve his legal papers to Little. The plan was then to citizens arrest the health minister – effectively, to kidnap him – and then put him on trial. The preordained punishment was to be execution.
As Power tried to push past the officers, protesters surged forward. At least one metal barricade was knocked over. The convoy’s original organisers called for calm on Zello, Counterspin pushed others to storm Parliament on the livestream and on Telegram and a new faction of protesters aligned with Brian Tamaki’s anti-vax Freedom and Rights Coalition (FRC) seized control of the PA system to also call for calm.
Read the rest here:
https://www.newsroom.co.nz/hijacked-the-inside-story-of-how-nzs-convoy-lost-its-rudder
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