Last Monday night I attended a local talk given by National Party leader Chris Luxon, along with Tim and Alexander, who have written articles for this week's newsletter. This meeting wasn't the main attraction, it was just a prelude to the big event of the week on Tuesday.
Anyway, the Monday night meeting was fairly sedate, with a decidedly ageing crowd - I'd imagine the average age might have been 65. After Luxon had spoken for a while the floor was opened to questions, and at one point climate change was mentioned. From memory, the question involved either denial or minimising of the problem. I have to say that I was impressed to see Luxon shut down the conversation immediately, telling the audience that as far as he was concerned climate change is real, it's human caused, and it's a pressing problem. He then went on to say that Labour and National might disagree on how to tackle climate change, but that they agree at least that it needs to be tackled.
Through the questions I was struck by the similarity to a talk I'd seen given in Petone by anti-fluoride activist Dr Paul Connett a few years ago, where the nuance of Paul's (admittedly unscientific) arguments against community water fluoridation clashed with the brazenness and ignorance of the audience's questions. The one question that sticks in my mind was about the Nazis using fluoride for mind control, and it was interesting to see Dr Connett squirm as he tried to answer the question without insulting or upsetting the audience member who asked it. After the presentation, I took the opportunity to go over and chat with Dr Connett, keeping up the pretence of being anti-fluoride myself. Within a couple of minutes he had told me of his concerns about plastic from water bottles leaching into the water and causing him health issues, and told me how impressed he was that Petone has an unfluoridated artesian well as a water source, which meant that he was able to avoid bottled water at the local restaurants and drink the tap water.
Anyway, the night after seeing Chris Luxon, four of us (myself, Tim, Alexander and Bronwyn) visited Linden Village in Kapiti for Julian Batchelor's Stop Co-Governance tour. We hit a couple of snags - firstly, Bronwyn didn't manage to make it in time for the meeting, and chose to join the crowd of protestors outside the venue. And secondly, I was accompanied by Tim, who looks a lot younger than he is, as well as Alexander, who does a very good job of living up to the stereotype of being a liberal university professor with long hair and a somewhat “distinctive” fashion sense.
As you'll hear from Tim, because neither he nor Alexander really look like the type to be attending an event popular with old racist men, we had a minor issue gaining entry, but it was resolved as soon as the organisers laid eyes on me. It turns out that with my white skin, shaved head and advanced age, I kind of look like a stereotypical racist old man. I'm not sure I'm totally comfortable with that fact, but for the purposes of this event I was happy to take it as a win.
When we entered, the audience demographic looked strikingly similar to the previous night's meeting - mainly white and old. There were a few young people in the audience, but as we found out through the evening, most of them appeared to be there to protest - and maybe every 5 minutes or so for the first half an hour of the meeting, one of these younger people would stand up, shout about their displeasure with Julian's talk, and either be man-handled out of the building by Julian's “security” or insist on being taken away by the Police, who were waiting outside. As well as those who were removed, one person was told to stop filming the event on their phone, and another was forced to delete photos they had taken on their phone before they were removed from the building. Despite these efforts to stop people, I imagine it would have been easy for someone to make an audio recording of the event, simply by using the recording app on their phone, for example ;).
Three long hours later, when the meeting finally came to an end, we left and attempted to find Bronwyn among the protestors. On the way out, someone threw a rock at my car as we were driving, protestors took our pictures (presumably we've been added to a database of fascists somewhere), and we were angrily shouted at (I think I was called “racist scum”). I can't help but think that this might have been a more appropriate car for them to throw rocks at:
A reporter waved my car down and attempted to interview me, but I'm guessing he wasn't really prepared for the answers I gave - he would have been expecting to be talking with someone sympathetic to Julian's views, but instead ended up with a skeptic who said that the event was “abysmal” and that Julian appeared to know and understand very little of anything.
This week, as well as articles from Tim, Alexander and Bronwyn about our eventful visit to see Julian, I've also written the mildly thrilling conclusion to my time in Eastern Lightning. Tim has done a great job writing two articles this week. As well as his article about Julian, he's also managed to look into the tactics Eastern Lightning uses to pull people away from other churches and into their clutches.
I've now written a second and third article about my look into the Global Flourishing movement, although I think this newsletter's a little long to include them so they'll have to appear in my next two issues.