Sticking Plasters
I had some stickers printed up a few years ago. I’d dug up a decent quality image of the 1982 All Whites team that went to the FIFA World Cup that year and had them reprinted as polyvinyl stickers. I ordered 100. They sent me 1000. I mean, there’s only so many you can hand out to your friends.
They’ve come in handy. Whenever I travel, there’s usually some in my bag. I keep some in my work bag, a handful in my pocket, keep some in the car. They’re useful for covering up anti-vax or anti-trans stickers, they do a good job at obscuring neo-fascist stickers, and the facial hair and tiny shorts of the boys from ‘82 are a much more pleasant sight.
It wasn’t my first choice. I spent a summer afternoon scraping off those horrible white rose society stickers that were plastered over our local playground. Targeting mums, dads and kids is pretty low eh. The early versions of those stickers peeled quite neatly away, very easy to do. However, these ones were the high-stick, hard to scratch off. I had an industrious 20 minutes scraping the shit out of about 15 stickers so they were no longer legible. Then my husband, the intelligent one of our pairing, pointed out I did, in fact, have a lot of stickers that could be used.
I was thinking about these stickers this week, because they don’t do anything but cover up the problem. The person behind it, who spends their time propagandising for greater COVID-19 deaths, or the delegitimisation of trans people in public life, or for a white ethno-state. It doesn’t address the fact that they’re out there living what seems like a normal life, all the while seething about functioning medicine, foaming about someone else's genitals, furious that minorities exist. Those people are out there; the ute with the infowars sticker on it, the voices for freedom shirt that mum at the pool wears sometimes, the guy with the serious dedication to norse tattoos.
It’s also how reductive they are. The Vaccine Is Poison, Adult Human Female, Don’t Let Them Steal Your Country. I mean, a simple response to each claim is: No it isn’t, No that’s incorrect, and No, they aren’t. But let's dig a little bit deeper into each one, let's peel off the sticker and see exactly what the glue of these ideologies are made out of.
Burn In Hell Andrew Wakefield
At the heart of the anti-vaccine movement is one man, Andrew Wakefield. A liar, a charlatan and a fraud responsible for the likely deaths of many, many children from preventable illnesses. He falsified conclusions, conducted unethical and unnecessary medical interventions on children, paid kids at his son’s birthday party 5 quid each for blood samples. In the decade after publishing his incorrect article linking the MMR vaccine to autism, the anti-vaccine movement blossomed.
He was eventually struck off as a G.P, his work proven to be both paid-for by a lawyer, Richard Barr, and completely unreproducible due to the clinical negligence and stated intent of Barr and Wakefield to discredit the MMR vaccine. In Barr’s case, the aim was also to bring a lawsuit against the drug companies that manufactured the vaccine.
It’s turned into a misinformation hydra, a gargantuan conspiracy about Big Pharma (who, let's be honest, are bastards but NOT for the reasons anti-vaxxers claim) which reinforces itself by the constant evidence disproving it. Wakefield struck off? Yeah, because he knew The Truth. All the evidence? Well THEY would say that wouldn’t they. Massive deaths from COVID-19 in countries which let it rip in 2020 before the vaccine was ready? That’s not relevant, because the vaccine will eventually cause more deaths (this is entirely unsupported by evidence and is, in fact, cooked). This is seized upon by the far-right, who want to sow distrust in the government and the authorities and your doctors, because they benefit from a delegitimising of these groups and the radicalisation which legitimises their disturbing and dangerous echo chamber.
A Deliberately Stupid Question
When Sean Plunket asked “what is a woman” to the Prime Minister this week, someone in the gallery muttered “oh for fucks sa-” before their mic was cut off. Chris Hipkins answered with what is legislatively correct in Aotearoa New Zealand, that people self-identify their gender. I mean, that’s not just legislatively correct, it’s literally correct for everyone. I know I am a cis man, because that is who I am, how I present to the world, how the world perceives and treats me in return. It’s barely got anything to do with my rarely used passport, my driving license, or my foreign birth certificate. The “What is a woman? An adult human female” question and answer comes from recent passata victim Kelly-Jane Keen-Minshull, and as such is a tool of anti-transgender propagandising.
It seems simple, right? What is a woman. Except the answer demanded, Adult Human Female, immediately excludes trans women. This feeds into the anti-trans movement's insistence that trans women do not exist, that they are in fact just “men”. You’ve heard it from their movement, when they talk about “men in women’s spaces” they mean trans women.
If Chris Hipkins answered the question the way the anti-transgender movement want him to, then the consequences of drawing the trans-exclusionary line on womanhood is to provide firepower for attacks on the Human Rights Act, regulations that allow trans people to self-id on passports and driving licenses, and undo the BDMRR which has not even come into effect yet. In the UK this week, the Equality and Human Rights Commission has just recommended defining a woman like the anti-transgender movement want them to, purely on biology.
This would strip rights and protections from the trans community. That’s a long, horrible consequence of an ‘innocent’ question - and those who ask it absolutely don’t want you to think about it.
There’s also the conspiratorial angle, that it’s all Big Pharma or billionaires like George Soros funding trans rights - as advocated by Rachel Stewart in her last NZ Herald piece and Kelly-Jane Keen-Minshull on RNZ a few weeks ago. If this sounds familiar, yes it is almost exactly the same as the anti-vaxxer movement! There has to be a high-level conspiracy making people want to have protection against a global pandemic, and weirdly the same puppet-masters make people want trans people to have a presence in public life? We have to make sure the government doesn’t provide us with healthcare, we have to make sure life for trans people is as difficult as possible because they want that. You know. Them.
All You Fascists, Bound To Lose
Don’t Let Them Steal Your Country. Who is them, neo-fascists? I mean, in the case of anti-vaxxers its Big Pharma, Bill Gates, George Soros, Klaus Schwab. In the case of anti-transgender activists its Big Pharma, George Soros, The Trans Lobby and Klaus Schwab. But who is the Them to the really hardcore neo-fascists that pepper Aotearoa like white dogshit?
Oh, it’s Big Pharma, Bill Gates, George Soros, Klaus Schwab, The Trans Lobby and every single advocate for Māori or immigrant communities or refugee rights or women's rights. Oh, it’s also China, because they’re foreign and not white. These guys are the statue avatars on Twitter who are really mad we stopped building cathedrals over hundreds of years ago and instead put buildings up that are functional and don’t take centuries to complete.
Let me be clear, these guys are fucking losers. They hide their faces in their public images because they know being an actual fascist is a good pathway to being unemployable and given a good hiding by the people they attempt to terrorise. They claim to be religious, but get rejected by, famously liberal institution, the Catholic Church. They believe in white nationalism, they believe in exterminating minority groups, they believe in doctrine of discovery manifest destiny white pride neo-nazi bullshit. They scuttle around the country putting their stickers up or occasionally gutsing up enough to show up somewhere where they stand together in a group while everyone tells them to fuck off.
They rely on The Other. In their neo-fascist ideology, that’s literally anyone who isn’t like them. They’re going to “steal your country”. They’re convinced about white superiority, even if white superiority looks like Kyle Chapman or some guys with untanned legs in unwise cargo-shorts. They have to be right, because they’re white, right? It doesn’t matter that The Other to these guys includes about 99.999% of the people living in this country, because pretty much everyone is disgusted by them and their horrible little neo-fascist ways. If you are now thinking, wait how come the hardcore neo-fascists literally blame all the same people that the anti-vaxxers and the anti-transgender activists do?
In With The In Crowd
A group that defines who counts as a person based entirely on the make-up of that group, who actively organises against people who do not meet that criteria. Am I describing anti-vaxxers harassing doctors and scientists, anti-transgender activists harassing trans people, or white nationalists going after minority ethnic groups? Surprise, I’m describing all three groups.
If you believe that there are people who are less of a person because they’re vaccinated, you’re actually pretty far along the road towards delegitimising them as a person you’ll listen to. If you’ve ever run into them in the wild, you might have been called a “vaxtard” or something similar. Evidence is immaterial, because if you’re vaccinated then you’re “in on it”. In fact, doctors and health advocates deserve harassment for being part of the conspiracy. After all, they’re not real people like you and your unvaxxed friends. They’re actually criminals for forcing the vaccine on people. Someone should do something!
If you believe all trans women are men, and should be legislated out of public life, then you’re narrowly defining who is, and who is not, a woman. By painting all trans women as potential predators, you’re perpetrating a hateful smear on an entire marginalised community. It’d be like pointing at Myra Hindley and saying “every cis woman is a potential child murderer and must be excluded from public spaces”. You rely on “basic” (i.e incorrect) biology to justify dehumanising the people who don’t meet your criteria, and paint every cis woman or man who highlights how fucking cooked you are as an evil agent of “trans ideology”.
If you believe in white nationalism, that all other ethnic groups are somehow lesser and to be expelled or exterminated, then you’re clearly very narrowly defining who counts and who does not count as a person. By establishing a hierarchy of personhood based on race, ethnicity or culture, you are necessarily legitimising the oppression, violence and prejudice that your ideology requires to occur for you to establish and maintain your “white superiority”. You deliberately deny that this is what you’re doing, even as you’re literally doing it. Because you don’t have to justify yourself, you just need to keep your “enemy” busy disproving you.
All three groups rely on a hierarchy of personhood, it’s just that of the three groups, only one of them is absolutely explicit about it - and it’s one which is so rejected by society that its members have to hide their faces in public.
Conclusion
Underneath those stickers? The ideology of far-right and outright fascist thought. That’s why all three groups also rely on conspiratorial thinking, why all three movements have a shared gallery of People Who Are Responsible.
It’s no accident that anti-vaxxers blame George Soros, anti-transgender activists blame George Soros, white nationalists blame George Soros. The elderly Hungarian billionaire has given millions to human rights and LGBTQI+ causes, and that is the antithesis of the anti-vax and anti-transgender cause. Oh, he’s Jewish as well, so that explains the white nationalists, and why there’s a real undercurrent of anti-semitism that runs through anti-vax and anti-transgender activism.
The anti-vaxxers kayfabe is that they’re about giving people the choice to have the vaccine or not, which seems completely at odds with them churning out the sort of misinformation that owes its lineage to Andrew fucking Wakefield. They’re fully integrated into the far-right misinformation sphere, one that’s comfortably funded to start a news outlet like Counterspin, or Reality Check Radio. They’ll turn out to support the anti-transgender activists as well, and integrate the transhumanist antisemitic conspiracy theories of Jen Bilek into their own wild belief system.
The anti-transgender activists kayfabe is insisting this is about Women's Rights, which is demonstrated by their complete absence on the issues of abortion reform, womens healthcare, equal pay, discrimination in the workplace, viewing childcare as labour, sex workers rights. Instead they ask politicians to define a woman, and get angry when the answer doesn’t exclude trans women. They’re also in a suspiciously easy alliance with the Christian right, who are using anti-trans rhetoric to reintroduce anti-LGBTQI rhetoric and, inevitably, attacks on abortion and contraceptive access.
And the fascists, well, they’re actually fascists. They hate women who don’t conform to a 1950’s view of womanhood, but they hate the LGBTQI community a whole lot more. They hate the LGBTQI community, but they hate Jewish people even more than that. So it’s helpful to them that they have an acceptable route into mainstream discourse, as the anti-vaxxers blame (mostly Jewish) billionaires, Schwab and Big Pharma and the anti-trans activists blame (mostly Jewish) billionaires, Big Pharma and a spooky Trans Lobby.
It’s no surprise that anti-vaxxers and the far-right are synonymous, or that anti-transgender activists will cheer Sean Plunket and Matt King, two men with track records of anti-women's rights or pure misogynist action. Hell, after Melbourne last month there genuinely was the anti-trans argument “well at least Nazis know what a woman is”, which echoed the “at least the Taliban know what a woman is” from last year. Yet they can’t see it, or they refuse to, because of what it means.
It is time we started treating all three movements as positions on a continuum leading from the far-right into outright fascism, by accurately critiquing what they actually want as an outcome, rather than relying on their sticker-thin cover story. Otherwise we’re all going to be spending a lot of time scraping this shit off the whole country.
I am certain that this will provoke furious reactions from the anti-vax and anti-transgender movements, who absolutely despise it when people accurately diagnose their ideology and how it neatly dovetails with white nationalism and neo-fascism.
John Palethorpe is an educator and communications professional based in the South Island.