Liz Gunn vs the Fabians

Since the recent launch of Liz Gunn's new political party, NZ Loyal, I've been loyally watching all of her new party political videos, where she's been laying out her ideas for how she will run the country when she comes to power. They're extensive and disruptive, and although I'm not an expert I'd wager that they're totally unworkable. Her most recent video was the second of a two part series, where she talked about her idea of a 1% transaction tax that would allow the party to close down the Inland Revenue department. Although this video was full of ideas that deserve skeptical scrutiny, I want to have a brief look at the previous video, part 1 of Liz's economic vision for New Zealand, and a particular idea she has about a supposedly secret group who are, in tandem with others, running the world - the Fabian Society.

A quick primer: The Fabian Society is a group started in England in the late 1800s, with the aim of quietly and subtly influencing politics to steer it in a more liberal direction. That direction included both good ideas (voting for women, universal healthcare, minimum wage) and not so good ones (eugenics). Their name comes from a Roman general, Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus, who was famous for his military tactic of waging a war of attrition, slowly wearing the enemy down. Since its early days, the Fabians have influenced Labour party views in the UK, as well as branching out to other countries including New Zealand. The group acts as something of a think tank, and seems to move in and out of favour with successive UK Labour governments and leaders. Outside of the UK, the group seems to be relatively fringe.

However, Liz Gunn sees a very different society to the one I've just described:

In the video above, Liz says:

The UK Crown is a corporate entity known as a constitutional monarchy, which exists because of a formal contractual agreement between the UK Parliament and of all things the Anglican Church. This crown and Chancery had several corporate interests, among them was the attack on foreign Nations. Corporations were formed for just such ventures, one such being the British East India Company, which attacked India with the long-term corporate Fabian strategy; a sort of three-pronged trident of force, religion and legislation.

The power behind the crown is said to be controlled by an elite society, yet another one of them, called this time the Fabian socialists. Their logo will chill you, and their motto even more so. Their logo is a wolf in sheep's clothing; they know what they're doing. Their Creed, “oh that I could smash the world and recreate it closer to my heart's desire”, and, as for their motto, listen to this: “hammer stoutly, prey devoutly”. And when you look at those words you'll see that prey is spilled as p-r-e-y - prey on these countries - not p-r-a-y - pray to do the right thing.

Here's a screenshot that captures a couple of her claims:

Okay, well it appears that the first claim, that the Fabian strategy is a “three-pronged trident of force, religion and legislation”, really doesn't seem to fit with even the name of the society. They are named for their desire to wage a quiet war of attrition on politics, slowly introducing their policies. Force really isn't their thing. And the main criticisms mentioned on the Wikipedia page for the Fabians are those of the society being ineffective, even at their chosen method of subtle manipulation.

Okay, so now we have their logo, creed and motto. Liz says that their logo is a wolf in sheep's clothing, as can be seen in the screenshot above. Sounds pretty ominous! And yes, for this claim she's pretty much right. Here's the coat of arms that was used in the Society's early days, and is meant to be a symbol of the society's method of quietly influencing political policy (you can also see this in the stained-glass window image further down the page):

As well as the coat of arms, the Society also had a pretty bad-ass tortoise as its actual logo back in the day:

Okay, so next is the organisation's creed - “oh that I could smash the world and recreate it closer to my heart's desire”. A variation of the second half of this phrase - “remould it nearer to the heart's desire” - can be seen at the top of a famous stained-glass window the Fabians had designed for them by member George Bernard Shaw in 1910:

The first half, “oh that I could smash the world”, doesn't seem to appear here, and for the life of me I can't find it anywhere on the internet. It seems that this wording is an attempt to describe what is going on in the top right of the window above, but a Google search doesn't turn up anything relevant for me. The only two results I get searching for “fabian "smash the world"” that seem connected to Liz's claims are 1) a page on Liz Gunn's own website, for her NZ Loyal party, and 2) A 2010 post on a US evangelical Christian blog called the Seppi Blog (at melodys-notes.blogspot.com), which says:

“In 1910 Shaw confided to a friend that he wanted the Fabians to be "the Jesuits of socialism." He commissioned an artist to design and construct this stained-glass window for the society's headquarters. For thirty years the window was privately displayed to the socialist inner circle, for in the middle it was the Fabian coat-of-arms: a wolf in sheep's clothing. It also depicts George Bernard Shaw and Sidney Webb as blacksmiths about to smash the world with sledgehammers, beneath the inscription, Remold it nearer to the heart's desire."”

I've been wondering for a few weeks now, given Liz's rambling ideas, where she's been getting her conspiracy theories from - as they seem a little more fringe than the usual run of the mill nonsense. I wonder whether her, or members of her “team”, have been drinking the kool aid of small, strange blogs online, or whether there may be recent talk of these ideas in Telegram and other encrypted locations, where a simple google search won't turn up any results.

Anyway, on to the last one, the claim that the Fabians' motto is “hammer stoutly, prey devoutly”. We can zoom in on the shield in the centre left of the window image above, and when we do that this is what we see:

Not only did Liz get the order of the two parts wrong, but we can also see that her explosive claim that the Fabians publicly threaten to “prey devoutly” is patently wrong. This seems to be yet another one of those conspiracy ideas where, for some unfathomable reason, a secret society apparently decides to let everyone know of its secret mission through lightly-encoded messages in US banknotes, airport murals and details built into ancient monuments. Any secret society surely knows not to fall for hubris and make their real intent so blindingly obvious that even Liz Gunn can find it with a few minutes' googling.

I'm sure that in Liz's mind there'll be some reason why her claim is true. Maybe the version of their motto that they had added to the stained-glass window was only the sanitised version, and all the members are told what the real motto is. Or maybe when the sun shines through the window at 5pm on a solstice, the light on the floor spells “prey” rather than “pray”, due to some clever optical trick in the glass. Whatever is going on in her head, it certainly doesn't seem to match the facts in this case.

I'm looking forward to more revelations from Liz in the coming weeks. The more she lets us know about her view of the world, the more easily I can get a handle on where she's coming from, and where she's been fed these ideas from. She's obviously in a bad place at the moment, having fallen from the respectability of national TV to now ranting about secret societies running the world, but I hope that these ideas aren't making her life a paranoid hell - and I also hope she's not influencing too many other people with them. I'm pretty confident we're not going to see Prime Minister Gunn any time soon, so I'm not worried there, but I presume she'll still be having a negative effect on New Zealand to some degree - her videos are getting a few thousand views each on YouTube, and I suspect not everyone watching them is a skeptic like me, so at least some people are likely to be influenced by her ideas.