Paranoia On The Left

The ruling obsession of the contemporary NZ Left is that political action undertaken further to the right than the liberal wing of the National Party should not only be condemned, but suppressed

WEB OF CHAOS, a “deep dive into the world of disinformation”, originally screened on Television New Zealand in November 2022. It was screened again last Sunday. (19/5/24) At the time of its first showing, the New Zealand Left was still reeling from the impact of the occupation of Parliament Grounds and its violent dissolution. Acutely aware that the electoral love of 2020 was fast evaporating, “progressives” were grappling with the first intimations of paranoid dread.

That paranoid dread has been thrown into overdrive by the reactionary policies of the victorious political parties of the 2023 general election. In the seven months that have elapsed since its electoral defeat, the Left’s intense fear of the unenlightened masses has grown to match the Right’s deep mistrust, bordering on hatred, of the highly-educated. TVNZ’s decision to re-screen Web of Chaos (WOC) confirms that the “woke” power structure’s core political fixation – the growing influence and power of digitally delivered “disinformation” – remains as strong as ever.

Slickly directed by Justin Pemberton, one of New Zealand’s leading documentary-makers, WOC nevertheless fails the test of the classic documentary feature by rigorously excluding from the discussion/debate all but the most active promoters of the proposition that digitally delivered disinformation constitutes an existential threat to human civilisation. No one whose testimony might tend to attenuate this core argument makes Pemberton’s final cut. Kindred Films and the Docufactory, the makers of WOC, were willing drivers down a one-way street.

The ideas and accusations of these digital disinformation doom-sayers are illustrated throughout the feature by a powerful and continuous series of disturbing images, augmented by a suitably menacing soundtrack. So much so that, in spite of being professionally produced, the documentary ends up having more than a little in common, visually and auditorily, with the fetid Far-Right propaganda videos it purports to deplore.

Had the project been commissioned in 2023, it is interesting to speculate whether dramatic developments in the disinformation debate would have persuaded Pemberton and his co-producer, Megan Jones, to deliver a very different documentary to TVNZ.

Since WOC’s completion in 2022, the revelations generally referred to as “The Twitter Files” (so-called because they were released to senior US journalists, including Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, by Elon Musk, following his takeover of the social-media company) have presented evidence that the extensive campaign against disinformation, born of the social-media chicanery that enabled both Brexit and Trump, and intensified by the social-media amplified pushback against the state’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, was initiated within the national security apparatus of the United States, and rapidly reproduced in the analogous state machinery of countries over which the US exercises decisive influence.

Certainly, this is the provenance of New Zealand’s own “Disinformation Project” (whose Director, Kate Hannah, was one of the principal contributors to WOC) which began in the Department of Prime Minister & Cabinet, was then given “cover” by the University of Auckland, and is now an “independent” entity funded by a person, or persons, or state institutions, unknown.

One can only hope that the Twitter Files would have prompted WOC’s producers’ to give considerably more attention, journalistically, to the role of the state in disseminating and suppressing disinformation. Or, at the very least, to have elicited a concession that it isn’t just the governments of Russia and China who tell lies and suppress free speech.

The events of 2023 might also have persuaded Pemberton and Jones that the spreading of disinformation and conspiratorial thinking is not restricted to Far Right incels (involuntary celibates) hunched over slimy keyboards in dank parental basements. The Left is every bit as capable as the Right of creating and disseminating conspiracy theories of its own. Capable, too, of believing its own disinformation.

The “Atlas Conspiracy”, for example, has taken so firm a hold of the New Zealand Left’s imagination that it is now being paraded as fact on “progressive” websites.

It all began when left-wing activists in Australia discovered that the Atlas Network – a sort of international clearing-house for, and advisor to, right-wing libertarian think tanks – may, at some point in the past, have influenced a number of the individuals and groups arguing for a “No” vote in Australia’s “Voice” referendum. In response to the Australian people’s decisive rejection of the proposal to sanction a constitutionally-recognised voice for indigenous Australians, disillusioned and angry Aussie “progressives” concocted an alarming tale of shadowy right-wing forces, orchestrated by the Atlas Network, conspiring to give the nay-sayers their dark victory.

To both forewarn and forearm opponents of Act leader David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill, Māori nationalists in this country were quick to spread the Atlas conspiracy theory, breathlessly pointing out that Seymour’s legislation also [cue scary music] involves holding a binding referendum.

That David Seymour, long before he became an Act MP, had worked for right-wing Canadian think-tanks linked (as just about all right-wing think-tanks are these days) to the Atlas Network, was offered up as the conspiracists’ “smoking gun”. That the information had been on the public record for years, and was not in the least surprising, given Seymour’s ideological leanings, counted for nought. Guilt by association, long the favoured workhorse of the Far Right, was shamelessly harnessed to the Left’s conspiratorial cart.

Would Pemberton and Jones have included the Atlas Conspiracy in their “deep dive into the world of disinformation” if they had been making their documentary in 2023-24? Certainly, an editorial decision to exclude such clear evidence of conspiratorial thinking not being an exclusively right-wing phenomenon would have been deeply regrettable.

Regrettable, but also inevitable, since the ruling obsession of the contemporary New Zealand Left, and indeed of left-wingers across the Western World, is that political action undertaken by individuals or groups further to the right than the liberal wings of mainstream conservative parties should not only be condemned, but suppressed.

That a group like the Atlas Network should be permitted to solicit the support of right-wing donors in its mission to spread the libertarian-capitalist gospel around the world – a perfectly legal activity BTW – is, from the perspective of the contemporary Left, intolerable. That the Koch Brothers, whose generosity to hundreds, if not thousands, of right-wing organisations is legendary, might be tangentially associated with the Act Party, through its leader, and his Canadian employers of decades ago, is all the Left’s propagandists’ need to portray the Atlas Network as a deadly spider sucking the life out of New Zealand’s democracy.

As a documentary, Web of Chaos would, arguably, be much improved by the inclusion of more voices than those belonging to the usual disinformation suspects – all of whom dutifully regurgitate the arguments developed by American bureaucrats anxious to deny social-media platforms to those who dare to take issue with their political masters’ policies. Only very briefly, did the original documentary make reference to disinformation’s Cold War origins. A great pity, since the proclivity of states to narrow the sluice-gates of political information is as old as history.

The Left was once well aware of where most of the truly dangerous political lies come from. That “progressives” no longer fear or condemn the state’s disinformation, to the point where they are now creating their own, is as troubling as it is depressing.

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Chris Trotter is New Zealand’s most provocative leftwing political commentator, with 30 years of experience writing professionally about New Zealand politics. He identifies as a “libertarian socialist” and now writes regularly for the Democracy Project, producing his column “From the Left”.

This article can be republished for free under a Creative Commons copyright-free license. Attributions should include a link to the Democracy Project (democracyproject.substack.com).