We gave ample commentary about it last May in this post, and there’s no need to add anything.

The year 2022 will be remembered as the year when the full Ugliness of the Jacinda regime was on full display, particularly its willingness to use violence and intimidation against protestors with the Coster Blueshirts; Mahuta and Jackson’s rapacious greed which even Zelensky must have admired, and the general hubris, ignorance and incompetence of the rest of her cabinet.

comments by Chris Trotter

As we watch the Chinese Government transition from its old, hardline, Covid-19 elimination strategy, characterised by long and uncompromising lockdowns, to a new, laissez-faire, wide open borders (and bugger the health system) strategy, uncannily like our own, we have confirmation that not even the totalitarian regime of Xi Jinping’s Communist Party can operate indefinitely without a social licence.

Not that our own government is returning the compliment by acknowledging the lack of genuine social licences for its own flagship policies – and changing them. There is more than a whiff of totalitarian indifference to public opinion in the Labour Caucus’s blunt refusal to change course on Nanaia Mahuta’s Three Waters project.

When the results of the local government elections made it painfully clear that whatever limited social licence central government might have claimed for Three Waters had been withdrawn, the Labour Government refused to flinch. The former National Party Cabinet Minister Nick Smith, now Nelson’s Mayor, implored the Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, to back away from the project. Failure to do so, he suggested, would indicate that her government had a “death wish”.

Undeterred, Labour doubled-down. Constitutional conventions became confetti. The co-governance provisions of Three Waters became stronger and their likely impact on Māori-Pakeha relations even more divisive.

And this situation looks set to be made ten-times worse the moment the public cottons-on to the fact that the cost of borrowing the billions required to “fix” their drinking-, storm- and waste-water systems is to be extracted from the pockets of the poor schmucks who “own” – but do not control – the four vast “entities” at the heart of the Three Waters project. A bitter realisation, that will hit home about the time they open their new-fangled water bills.

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About 30 minutes after the official sunset.

The big Canadian truckers Freedom Convoy to Ottawa inspired the Freedom Convoy to Wellington in Jacindaland, and while the convoy itself didn’t quite compare in scope to the Canadian one, the Freedom Village that was set up in and around Parliament was a huge event.

by Ezra Levant of Rebel News

Justin Trudeau has tried to kill Rebel News every year and so far, he’s failed. But he’s getting smarter about it.

I think he might actually do it this time. 

Back in 2019, Trudeau banned Rebel News reporters from attending the election debates. We went to the Federal Court and a judge ordered Trudeau to let us in. (He hated that.)

In 2020, Trudeau had Elections Canada officers interrogate me about my book, The Libranos, which exposed Trudeau’s corruption. They fined me thousands of dollars and claimed my book was illegal. (I refuse to pay — we’re appealing that ruling in court right now).

In 2021, Trudeau banned our reporters from the election debates again. And for a second time, the Federal Court overruled him. (That made him so angry.)

In 2022, Rebel News had the most-watched coverage in Canada of the trucker convoy. So Trudeau’s personal bodyguards roughed up our reporters Drea Humphrey and David Menzies and his police literally SHOT our reporter Alexa Lavoie. (We’re suing them in court.)

Trudeau did all of that and more to us, and yet Rebel News is still not dead. In fact, 2022 was our largest year by every measure.

Despite Trudeau’s efforts, 2022 was our biggest year. 

I made the above video summarizing the highlights of our amazing year.

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This reserve has been closed before (see this post) because of the risk of these overhanging plant clumps (astelias or ephiphytes) falling on to the tracks. These pics were taken about a week ago — we suggest that those who stroll through here look up and take note of where they could fall.

Twitter was a full-service censorship and propaganda shop for the U.S. government.

From Kit Klarenberg at thecradle.co:

The damning exposure of collusion between the Pentagon and Twitter raises further suspicions about Washington’s ongoing online operations in West Asia.

The Cradle has previously deconstructed the Pentagon’s online bot and troll operations targeting Iran. These wide-ranging efforts, over many years, sought to destabilize the Iranian government by disseminating and inciting negative sentiment against it, on a variety of social media platforms.

Their exposure led to the White House demanding an internal audit of all Department of Defense (DoD) “psychological operations online.” Ostensibly, this was triggered by high-level concerns that Washington’s “moral high ground” was potentially compromised by the “manipulation of audiences overseas.”

The audit was revealed in a Washington Post article, the details of which pointed to a very different rationale. One passage noted that representatives of Facebook and Twitter directly informed the Pentagon, repeatedly, over several years, that its psychological warfare efforts on their platforms had been had been detected and identified as such.

Weaponizing social media

Frustratingly, the focus wasn’t even that these operations were being conducted in the first place, but that the Pentagon got busted doing so.

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