by Geoffrey Churchman

Although like many people I find him excruciating, I decided to make the effort to watch the ‘Patrick Gower on Hate’ presentation broadcast on TV3 last Tuesday, as it was undoubtedly timed to coincide with the present government’s promulgation of new ‘hate speech’ laws, or as many describe them, ‘laws against speech the Left Wing hate.’

Along with marijuana, cocaine, and crystal meth, so-called ‘hate speech’ is one of Gower’s favourite subjects and he is best known for making a fool of himself with an interview he did with Canadian ‘it’s all right to be white’ activists Laura Southern and Stefan Molyneux in 2018. This was on the occasion of a speaking tour they did, which caused Left Wing extremists to demand (clearly with serious threats of vandalism) that the owners of venues in Auckland they had booked cancel the bookings. One of the venues was owned by Auckland City and Auckland Mayor Phil Gough did cancel it — which resulted in the formation of the present Free Speech Union.  In Gower’s interview he must have expected the pair to be Archie Bunker type bigots, but instead they were well educated, articulate and gave Gower a trouncing.

On this episode of Gower’s long running theme, he came up with little that was new, instead he had to make do with recycling the Christchurch mosque attacks by a visiting lunatic in March 2019.  I lost count of the number of times he mentioned ‘right wing extremist’ ‘alt right’ and ‘white supremacist’.  But as in the three-part series he made that year, and which we analysed at the time, he did not manage to come up with any evidence to support his contention that there is a legion of Nazis out there willing to indulge in race riots.  The only thing he could cite was the police statement that they interrogated who they thought were ‘1700 potential extremists’ in the succeeding month.  Note the word ‘potential’. You could say that anybody is a potential anything.

Accompanying Gower was his good mate Professor Spoonley who has made almost a career out of the same proposition. Apparently what set the latter off was a protest march he witnessed through Lewisham, England, in 1978 by National Front members who’d had enough of muggings by immigrants there. Both clearly subscribe to the view that due to “systemic racism” and “white privilege,” the only race it’s acceptable to blame for the actions of one demented individual is Europeans.

Most of Gower’s latest episode recycled his presentations on the effect on the Christchurch mosque attendees who had family members killed or wounded, or those who had survived with physical and/or psychological scars — and these would have certainly been severe.

But yesterday we discovered that the police had been tailing a known ISIS supporter, a Sri Lankan national, for years in Auckland, for the last two months 24/7 and the man had appeared in court before on a knife attack plot. You can’t help wonder what the cost to taxpayers of that was. At least having been shot dead by police he is no longer a problem. Police were shown at the mosque the man attended, presumably to find out if anyone else there was radicalized.

What triggered the man’s partially successful attack that wounded 7 people, 3 critically? Did the Gower broadcast 3 days before on how allegedly most white persons secretly hate Muslims have anything to do with it? In a TV3 interview with an Indian woman who the terrorist bypassed, she said it seemed he was only interested in attacking whites. Hmm.

In her media announcement yesterday, Dear Leader responded to the Islamist’s terror attack by worrying about a “backlash” against Muslims. There was no such concern about the backlash she and her cabinet pursued against law-abiding gun owners, particularly if they were pale and conservative.