Posted on 11/27/2021 1:24:33 PM PST by Oldeconomybuyer
… As New Zealand shifts to a policy of “living with the virus,” residents accustomed to living virtually Covid-free for most of the pandemic are being confronted by rising case numbers and widening vaccine mandates. Opposition to vaccination as well as frustration with ongoing pandemic restrictions is fueling a small but vocal protest movement inspired in part by American politics.
In a working paper published in November, a team of researchers in New Zealand said there had been a “sharp increase in the popularity and intensity” of disinformation around Covid-19 since August.
The researchers said the disinformation was “being used as a kind of Trojan horse” to coax New Zealanders from vaccine hesitancy to vaccine resistance, and then to the embrace of far-right ideologies like white supremacy and extreme misogyny. Some of the most extreme content, they said, comes from overseas, particularly Australia and the United States.
At anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine protests in cities like Wellington and Christchurch, “Make America Great Again” hats and flags from the QAnon conspiracy theory movement are visible among the crowds. Sam Brett, a student at the University of Canterbury who attended recent protests for his doctoral research, said they felt like a “miniature, New Zealand version of a Trump rally.”
The protests often feature “powerful, charismatic speakers,” Brett said, who cast the government as “maliciously trying to take away people’s rights.”
Paul Buchanan, an Auckland-based security analyst and former consultant to U.S. intelligence services, said he was concerned by the “importation of U.S.-style populist rhetoric” into New Zealand’s anti-vaccination movement, characterizing it as “tinged with violence and vulgar, dehumanizing disrespect for political and social opponents.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nbcnews.com ...
They’re gaslighting. They are the ones spouting disinformation.
@ post 11. Good observation.
In a working paper published in November, a team of researchers in New Zealand said there had been a “sharp increase in the popularity and intensity” of disinformation around Covid-19 since August.
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Spiking at about the same time it was discovered the vaccines didn’t live up to their initial hype.
The protests often feature “powerful, charismatic speakers,” Brett said, who cast the government as “maliciously trying to take away people’s rights.”
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Brett must be a real bright bulb if he doesn’t think the endless lockdowns and forced vaccinations are not taking away peoples’ rights.
<< The researchers said the disinformation was “being used as a kind of Trojan horse” to coax New Zealanders from vaccine hesitancy to vaccine resistance, and then to the embrace of far-right ideologies like white supremacy... >>
Lol. American blacks have the highest rate of vaccine resistance of any group. Little do they know they’re all White supremacists in training!
“If you don’t take the vaccine, next step is wife beating, then gassing Jews...”
That’s pretty much the way the left looks at the world. If you don’t readily and eagerly comply with their edicts, you’re “literally worse than hitler.”
In other words the good people of New Zealand are starting to come to the realization that the whole vaccine mandate bullshit is just another Marxist assault on their civil liberties. What a surprise.
It’s not just vaccine stuff as well - I’m very concerned that a lot of Americans have apparently been convinced Australia has turned into some sort of fascist dictatorship - it hasn’t.
Yeah, We Americans will just buy any load of crap huh?
You think concerns about the “vaccines” and all the extremist quasi-dictatorship measures the various governments have been implementing is misinformation? Report to your local antifa recruiting office immediately.
Oh, there have certainly been problems in Australia recently - especially in my state of Victoria where the state government has gone very dictatorial.
But there is a huge difference between what a state government has been doing and what the country as a whole is like.
Australia is not any sort of dictatorship - Victoria, specifically, arguably could be said to be flirting along those lines.
As for why there have been large protests in Australia - that's a lot more complicated than you probably know.
The propagandists in both China and the West are by now well aware that the average guilt-ridden white fool is so frightened of being thought of as a racist / white supremacist that they’ll do pretty much anything to keep that from happening. Boosters every few months in perpetuity? Submitting to any govt shutdown / mandate, no matter how outrageous? Kneeling to BLM? Calling up, down, and down, up? Voting Democrat? No problem on all. ANYTHING to keep from being thought of as as a pitchfork-wielding klansman.
Yes, there have been some issues in my state of Victoria - the state government imposed ridiculous restrictions that violated people's basic human rights for months at a time.
That problem though is largely confined to Victoria and is an artifact of some very specific issues that don't apply in other states.
But from outside Australia, those distinctions seem beyond people understanding, and so people have been applying a specific problem in one state to events in other states which are driven by completely different situations, and to Australia as a whole which really doesn't make much sense at all.
And even though we've had real problems here, they've often been grossly exaggerated and lied about and still are being exaggerated and lied about overseas - including here on Freerepublic.
I'm talking about claims about Australia being under martial law - totally untrue. I'm talking about claims about concentration camps in Australia - grossly exaggerated misrepresentations with a seed of truth - but the most effective propaganda always includes a seed of truth. Claims people have been killed by police that just aren't true. Claims there are mobile vaccination squads hunting people down and forcibly vaccinating them - utter bull. All of this, I've seen here, and in US media. It's garbage, it's nonsense, it's propaganda.
And goes well beyond 'a whiff of dictatorship'.
There have been some real serious issues here, and some of them are still having some effect. But it's been turned into something it's not, and that's a huge problem, and I don't believe it's happening accidentally. It's being done deliberately to mislead and create non-existent problems on top of the real ones.
That may well be, they do check all the boxes
THE WORLDS ELITE NEED TO BE PUT DOWN LIKE A RABID DOG
While allowing for a generous amount of exaggeration, what I read about what is going on in Australia is extremely concerning.
America is based on freedom, and freedom isn’t a system where every last possible action a person can encounter has been codified. If enough people buy into the conspiracy theories and refuse to take reasonable precautions that they are in a position to take (unlike severely immune compromised people, or folks with emphysema), every possible thing is going to end up codified, to the fascists delight.
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