Matthew sits down, across 9,000 miles of mostly ocean, with journalist Anke Richter and reporter and Māori rights activist Joe Trinder to discuss the mind-bending rise of Māori MAGA in the COVID-free sanctuary of Aoteoroa, aka New Zealand. Led by former blues musician Billy Te Kahika, conspirituality has seeped from music and cultural festivals and straight into national politics, where white supremacists manipulate Māori post-colonial distrust of settler governments to boost vaccine hesitancy and milk paranoia.In the Ticker this week, Derek dunks on Deepak Chopra’s “Lovetuner” penny-whistle, which will change your DNA for $58 and a few toots. Julian reports on Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying as they drift farther into conspiratorial pseudoscience and advocate for whiz-bang COVID cure-alls over vaccines.Show NotesExploring the Actual Science Behind Why Music Makes Us Feel GoodAnke Richter bioAnke Richter on cultsAnke Richter on conspiracy theories in New ZealandHow alternative festivals became platforms for conspiracy theoristsLuminate Festival organisers criticised for promoting far-right conspiracy theoristsAnti-conspiracist campaigners take aim at ‘Mothers for Freedom’ eventThe self-proclaimed ‘political prisoners’ in managed isolationAnti-lockdown group of academics criticised for promoting conspiracy theoristsThe scientist and the rabbit hole: How epidemiologist Simon Thornley became an outcast of his professionE-Tangata The rise of Māori MAGABilly TK: False ProfitSue Grey
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Conspiratuality 54, Maori Maga with Joe Trinder and Anka Richter.
Matthew sits down across 9,000 miles of mostly ocean with journalist Anka Richter and reporter and Maori rights activist Joe Trinder to discuss the mind-bending rise of Maori Maga in the COVID-free sanctuary of Aotearoa, aka New Zealand, led by former blues musician Billy Takahika.
Conspiratuality has seeped from music and cultural festivals straight into national politics, where white supremacists manipulate Maori post-colonial distrust of settler governments to boost vaccine hesitancy and milk paranoia.
In the ticker this week, Derek dunks on Deepak Chopra's love tuner penny whistle, which will change your DNA for $58 and a few toots.
I'll be reporting on Bret Weinstein and Heather Haying as they drift farther into conspiratorial pseudoscience and advocate for whiz-bang COVID cure-alls over vaccines.
This is the Conspirituality Ticker, a weekly bullet point rundown on the ongoing pandemic of messianic influencers who spread medical misinformation and sell disaster spirituality.
Okay, let's talk about Deepak.
So Facebook recently served me up another Deepak Chopra ad.
This one caught my attention because it's even more ridiculous than the usual grift for a meditation app or lately psychedelics Which, let me say that Chopra has been promoting psychedelics for a long time.
I found it as far back as 15 years ago.
So his recent partnership with MindMed isn't as opportunistic as other deals, and I'm actually happy when he speaks out on things like that.
But this particular deal I'm discussing is with Love Tuner, which is a 2-inch flute that apparently emits a frequency of 528 Hz.
Now, the concept that 528 resonates, a powerful frequency, is not new.
My musician friends have joked about this for decades, and they've even changed their songs to 528 in order to see if it would increase its chances of becoming a hit.
It didn't.
But 528 is known as the love frequency.
And just to be clear, a frequency is effectively the rate per second of a vibration constituting a sound wave.
So it's not pitch.
It's not something to do with tone.
It's something that you can't really hear, actually.
Perhaps musicians with perfect pitch or who are really tuned in may be able to.
I listen, as I'll say in a moment, I listen to binaural beats and I can't tell discernible differences in frequencies, but that doesn't mean that it's not effective.
I actually believe in both sound and music therapy.
For example, music therapy has shown incredible results in helping people deal with Parkinson's and diseases of dementia.
And music is very popular in hospice care.
Research on binaural beats, as I just mentioned, has been found to help roughly half of the populations who have tried it focus.
And I'm one of those people.
When I used to meditate to binaural beats, I really got Deep into focus much quicker.
So, you know, and there are there's a whole category of 528 hertz playlist for binaural beats.
But the Love Tuner is different than all of that.
Now, according to the site, here are a few purported benefits of this $58 flute on a necklace.
Reduces stress, relieves anxiety, prevents burnout, strengthens your immune system, increases your lung volume, improves your health, find inner peace through repetitive breathing, and arrive in the here and now.
So I'm not sure how you will arrive at the latter two at all.
Where were you before?
The claims don't end there.
So I did some research.
They don't end there.
I mean, that's just about everything, right?
No, here we go.
So going down into the 528 hertz rabbit hole, it also alters your DNA, of which there is no proof.
I thought that was a bad thing.
I know, incredible, right?
It's so amazing how certain DNA alterations are bad and others are good.
I guess it's just what you can make money on.
Another claim, good vibrations phase lock with the heart of sunshine, chlorophyll, and oxygen at 5.
They got it from Pink Floyd.
Set the controls for the heart of the sun.
in from Zach Bush.
Wait, can we just pause here?
Good vibrations phase lock with the heart of...
I don't understand this language here.
It's Pink Floyd.
They got it from Pink Floyd.
Set the controls for the heart of the sun.
This is a proven benefit that I found on a big promoter of 528.
Okay.
All right.
Also, your human immunity is boosted 100% by enhancing antioxidant activity when you listen to 528.
It is the same love energy generated by Jesus' healing miracles.
Which I believe led Jesus to say, it's only two inches, but it's how you use it.
And it also protects the central nervous system of alcoholics by 20%.
Amazing.
And that claim jumped out at me so much I had to look into it and it comes from a University of Tehran study published in 2017.
But as we've covered in the past, the journal it was published in, Journal of Addiction Research and Therapy, features a 21-day rapid review process with international peer review standards.
So this particular study was accepted within two weeks Which is kind of incredible to think about a scientific research study that is conducted on alcoholics being done that quickly and reviewed.
But it wasn't done on alcoholics, was it?
It was conducted on cell cultures.
And if that brings to mind the thought affects water research, yes, it is related to that.
And the same advocates go for that.
Were the cell cultures alcoholic though?
That's the big question.
Were the researchers drinking is the real question.
They were using ethanol for this particular research.
No, they really were.
And forgive me, forgive me if I'm wrong here, but 21 day rapid review process with international peer review standards sounds like an oxymoron.
Well, exactly.
It's a pay-to-play journal.
It's a pay-to-play journal.
That's what I'm getting to.
The entire conclusion of the paper, I'm going to quote the entire conclusion and we'll see if we can make sense of this.
The common wavelengths existed in the human environment aside from creating the psychological sense by changing the intracellular reactions will play an important role in the response of cells to environmental factors such as drugs and alcohol.
Oh, that's nothing.
That says nothing.
Therefore, the use of these sound waves can be useful to reduce the toxic effects of ethanol on astrocytes' cells' culture.
That is what is being used to say that 528 Hz can help cure alcoholism by 20%.
Well, protect the central nervous system.
Protect, yes.
Of alcoholics.
Of alcoholics.
I guess they stay, they remain alcoholic, but their nervous system is more protected by 20%.
Yes, I'm being very unscientific.
I apologize.
Because of the flute.
Okay.
This Love Tuner was created by Austrian entrepreneur Sigmar Berg, whose company is based in Malibu because that's exactly where such a company would find success with such a ridiculous, bougie product.
Berg's other company produces high-end sunglasses that retail for around $300, as well as $2,000 leather jackets and $900 tote bags.
Now, here's Berg's mission statement for Love Tuner.
When we talk about healing and spirituality and mastering our lives, it comes down to one thing.
To become a master, you first, you have to first master yourself.
On your journey to master your life, the love tuner is your secret key to unlock your full potential.
But he got it wrong.
It should be the love tuner, your secret key is to unlock your full potential.
Right, exactly.
So let's hear what Deepak has to say about this magical flute.
I'm Dr. Deepak Chopra.
A lot of people say, I don't have the time to meditate.
A lot of people say, I don't even have time to take a breathing break.
I don't know how to be in the present moment.
This is a device that helps you do all that.
This can be done either before meditation or after meditation or independent of meditation.
In fact, it can even replace meditation if you don't have the time.
You're inviting love in your life.
You're coming to the present moment.
You're taking a breathing break.
You are increasing your lung capacity and you're increasing the coherence of your biofield around you.
And if we are a lot of people together, we can do it together.
And change the biofield of the surroundings.
Oh man.
That's fantastic.
So I know Matthew probably has some comments on the biofield.
It's kind of like, I don't know, it made me think of Warp Drive in Star Trek isn't actually about adding more sort of energy to the engines of the Enterprise, is it?
It's about changing the subspace field so that somehow, without any friction at all, the ship just zips from one place to another.
Beyond the speed of light or something like that.
Is that what Deepak is talking about?
Like him and Picard are going to play the flutes?
He might be, he might be.
You know, I have to tell you guys, I was walking the dog yesterday and I saw a young family with a little girl about 10 years old, she was blowing really big bubbles and her dad was running up next to the bubbles and waving his hands really quickly in opposite directions on either side of the bubbles and making them spin very quickly.
I think it's kind of like that.
He changed the biofield of the bubbles.
Right.
Now, tracking with Chopra's recent talk that we covered with Sadhguru, I found a March 2020 video on Love Tuner's Instagram feed in which Berg says, there is no virus.
The only virus to spread is love.
March 2020, of course, being the beginning of the pandemic.
And then he tells people to assemble in small and large groups to tune together, which is something that Chopra just alluded to as well in his endorsement of his Flute.
He Berg also tells everyone to tune at 528 for ultimate frequencies, which is odd since he's Austrian and that would be 1728.
But he doesn't want to confuse the Malibu Yogi's.
I believe you're so intolerant.
Now, lastly, the concept of 528 Hz is based on the solfeggio, which is the basis of the Western musical notation system.
I just recently read Michael Spitzer's book, The Musical Human, where he talks about the Chinese scale system, which is based on bells and not strings, and it's a far more advanced notation system.
In fact, many Westerners find Asian, Indian, and Middle Eastern music jarring because of their use of octaves that sit between the accepted frequencies of the pentatonic scale, which led Spitzer to note that one vehicle for white supremacy throughout the centuries has been the West's insistence that their notation system properly represents and defines music.
I've introduced a lot of people to QALY music, which is one of my favorite forms, who have been like, I can't listen to that.
It sounds like they're in pain.
But it's because the octaves are between the notes that they're used to.
Music is a communication system, after all.
And when you demand that love resonates in a system that you are familiar and comfortable with, You risk ostracizing others who see the world a bit differently than you.
But that's a little too complex for a catchy advertising campaign.
Love frequency is seductive and easy, and if there's anything I've learned about many yogis on the West Coast in America, it's that they need to think as little as possible about as much as possible.
You know, it's interesting, even more than Cavalli would be like Chinese opera, right?
In terms of... Which I have a trouble with.
Chinese opera is very hard for me.
Yeah, so the dissonant, we have a very low tolerance for dissonance in terms of what we're used to from the diatonic scale, Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Ti, Do.
So much so that, you know, jazz, which is bending those rules to a certain extent, but not as far as some of these other cultures do, to a lot of people is hard to listen to.
There's an amazing young man, for anyone who doesn't know him, Jacob Collier.
Have you guys come across him?
Yes, he is incredible.
Jacob Collier is an absolute genius.
I think he's kind of the musical genius of our time, at least on a popular level.
And he will tune Away from 440 to like 436 or something and he'll, he demonstrates and he can do it just singing to you how, how different chords sound depending on where you make your home base like that.
And he talks about the difference in brightness or darkness of these different, uh, frequency relative kind of frequency organizations.
It's amazing stuff.
And he's doing it with perfect pitch, just unaccompanied.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Just sitting at, just sitting at his home studio.
He can sit and talk to you about it and demonstrate.
It's like, yeah, yeah.
I knew somebody like that when I grew up.
He became a radio personality.
I haven't seen him in a long time.
His name is Andrew Craig here in Toronto and he works for the CBC.
He walked into the St.
Michael's Choir School where I was learning music with Perfect Pitch and the ability to improvise and sort of do vocal jazz riffs.
And it was like nothing I'd ever heard before.
And it opened a world of music to me that was so far beyond the staves that I had grown up with.
There's one other part of this I want to flag that I didn't write in my notes, but I mentioned recently I'm training for more endurance work in cycling.
And so a Along with that, I'm reading a book about breathing for endurance training.
When I hear them say that blowing on their flute will increase your lung capacity, it's It's absurd without training because the book I'm reading talks about the breathing muscles around your midsection and training the actual diaphragmatic muscles that you need in order to actually increase your lung capacity because most people who don't train their breath breathe very shallowly up near the top of their chest and their collarbones.
And so to actually increase your lung capacity, the bulk of where that happens is in your diaphragmatic muscles.
And I'm just pointing this out because for them to say that Blowing on this flute will increase your lung capacity without actually telling you the trend.
I searched their whole site.
There's no diaphragmatic training or videos or anything about that.
It's just, again, it's one of those things that really pisses me off about the wellness grift because they're just taking something and because you're blowing, they're like, okay, yeah, your lungs will get stronger, which is patently absurd.
Yeah, so the claims about breathing are clearly unscientific, but the DNA stuff, I think, you know, sounds legit.
Well, Love Tuner doesn't say the DNA, so let's be clear.
They do not make that claim, but that is something I found in the larger world of 528 hertz.
Do you think Dr. Chopra pulled back from that?
Do you think the PR guys served him up the DNA and he said, oh, no, we're not going to go that far.
No, I think he just couldn't remember it because he was like, it will do this and that.
The blending of Lung volume, immune system, and then arrive in the here and now.
It's just, this is why I hate Los Angeles and the Malibu sect, or at least the presentation so much, because they'll find one obscure study that was probably pay to play, and they'll be like, here's proof, and then we'll just throw all this other shit at it, and be like, well, we have this one study that doesn't mean anything in the larger scope of it, and they just pile on from there.
I also just want to say that the actual object really just does look like a child's toy, right?
Yes, absolutely.
And so there's a sort of magical web that's woven around it as well that it really does remind me of the four or five year old who will say, well it does all of these things.
Yeah, it can make me invisible.
It can make me invisible, it can make you go and get this, give me more cookies, get something from the room.
No, seriously, I mean, that's how that stuff works, is that it becomes a talisman of, you know, your ability to reverse power with the parental figure or with whoever's in charge.
Because somehow, I don't know, It would just overturn the natural order of things.
It has to be simple, too, right?
It has to be something that the child can feel in their bodies as, oh, this is just what I would do.
Yeah, it's sympathetic magic, right, I think is the term.
We're all Gen X, and I love the idea of remaining youthful as you age.
When you meet someone in their 80s and 90s and they're still youthful, that's amazing.
But Gen X has this particular term that they've created, which is adulting.
And what you're talking about just reminds me of that.
It's just like, I'm really a child, but look, I'm playing the role of adult, and the wellness industry is so full of that.
So on one hand, you're talking about this ultimate spiritual enlightenment you're going for, and yet you just want to play with toys all day.
It's not even a paradox to me.
It's just annoying.
Yeah, and the pseudoscience stuff that you're flagging here has been so frustrating for me because in the early 2000s, early to mid 2000s, before 2010, I was really obsessed with everything that was coming out of neuroscience and the relationship with somatic psychology and the nervous system and how that had applications for yoga and meditation.
It was so fascinating and rich and interesting to me.
There was a brief period where I could talk about it in a workshop setting and have good conversation and then at a certain point around 2011-2012, all of that stuff had been co-opted into like, oh, this is an explanation for magical thinking.
I remember we had a guest teacher come to our teacher training and they explained that neuroplasticity means that everyone has paranormal abilities.
Man!
And I remember debriefing with my group of teacher trainees, like, no, actually, that's not what neuroplasticity is about at all.
But that's what it sort of turned into.
Or the telomeres, how they've taken a little bit of research and just run with it, and it's just showing, you know, anti-aging, at least the protocols being developed, are probably not going to be because of telomere lengthening.
Do you know, that's an interesting moment that you refer to, Julian, where you have
Found something that is of value in this, you know, sort of unregulated industry and you're going to bring it to the table and there's all kinds of, you know, benefits that you can imagine accruing to it and then you can see it flip into commodification because, and that kind of exposes what the industry is to begin with, right?
It's like suddenly the veil, the curtain is drawn back and you can see that new material isn't really about service or education, it's about extending the workshop circuit or creating another level of training or something like that.
Next up, Brett and Heather's excellent science adventure.
On May 24th, Brett Weinstein boldly swallowed the anti-parasite drug ivermectin live on the Dark Horse podcast, as you do.
I clipped a few choice moments for us from this piece of vaccine-contrarian theatre.
But let me set the stage for you before we roll these.
If you've never seen the Dark Horse podcast, Brett and his wife Heather sit in what almost looks like it might have been formerly a sauna, but now resembles the half kitchen of a holiday cabin in the woods rental they've converted into their studio.
Every visible surface is made of the same light-colored wood, which contrasts quite beautifully with the black horse head logo lit up in fluorescent yellow that sits between them on the screen, kind of mounted in a little nook under the wooden counter.
They sit at a small round table, elbow to elbow, each with a sizable podcasting microphone in front of them.
We have to talk about the predicament that we are in on YouTube with respect to ivermectin, which is mentioned specifically in their community guidelines.
YouTube has community guidelines.
You really want to start before you even say what the thing is.
It's like a radio play.
It's so good.
Because we are scientists who are about to talk about scientific evidence.
That scientific evidence may have implications for what we collectively ought to be doing and what you individually might think.
We are not going to make any recommendations as to what you should do and we are not going to say anything conclusive about what the data say because the data are not themselves conclusive.
However, it doesn't mean the data don't imply things and, you know, I think YouTube ought to think very carefully about whether it wants to confront two people who have the proper credentials, have demonstrated a willingness to be responsible about evaluating heterodox scientific um uh processes uh
and in this case are have just been through a circumstance where a hypothesis that they were suggesting needed to be investigated is now understood to be necessary to be investigated so convoluted you know in science oh i'm sorry i had to stop that but is youtube a person They need to really seriously consider.
No, just coming out of me, this is the second time I'm listening to it, but it's just like, this is how they're setting up the enemy.
And here it is, they're personifying it.
It's just incredible.
And you ripped this from YouTube, right?
Okay, right.
Etc.
So that's the context.
I feel endangered because we have not been vaccinated, because we have fears, as we have discussed at length on this podcast.
I feel like I should be on it because as much as no drug is perfectly safe, I feel the danger of COVID in the world is much greater than the danger that comes from taking this stuff.
There's your argument for the vaccine, buddy.
Among other things.
Very cheap, but it's also, it doesn't have to be taken frequently.
You take it two doses, 48 hours apart, and then I think it's weekly.
So how many, that looks like a large dose.
No, it's not.
Look, I'm splitting this because my dose and your dose are, these are six milligram.
Now let's see.
Now he goes to get something to split, and he also gets safety goggles.
There is no telling.
I want to use the same standard of safety that the AP uses.
And the fact is, if I split one of these pills, anything could happen.
It could explode into shards that could destroy everything.
I mean, frankly... So for those listening at home, he's got safety glasses on now.
I have safety glasses on because... You're looking at the world through safety color glasses.
It's just so crazy.
Like, this is why I call it vaccine contrarian theater.
Like, let's get the glasses.
Let's split this.
It could explode.
Anything could happen when I split this pill in half.
You're right.
It does sound like one of those radio shows from the 30s.
They definitely have that vibe.
So, while it's usually used for infestations like head lice, scabies, and river blindness in humans, as well as worms and mites in dogs and horses, I think I'm seeing a connection here with the dark horse podcast.
There's research showing that in vitro, so only in the lab, right, not in actual live humans.
Ivermectin has some efficacy against SARS-CoV-2, but that's at very high doses and the high dose required for an antiviral effect in humans is considered by the FDA to be toxic and is therefore not recommended.
They also cite in a report that I'll include in the show notes that self-medication with Ivermectin has led to hospitalization due to dangerous interactions with prescription medications that you've been told to take by a professional.
No, Julian, he's self-prescribed this.
He got it not over the counter, I imagine.
It's not clear where he got it from.
But he has it and he's calculating the dose himself and splitting it with a butter knife.
He's taken it.
Alright.
Yeah, he takes it live.
On March 2nd, the Scientist magazine reported that a paper on ivermectin's use for COVID-19 that was provisionally accepted by the journal Frontiers in Pharmacology was later taken down.
The reasons for its removal were that it included Studies with insufficient statistical significance, as well as studies without control groups, and also that the paper inappropriately promoted the author's own ivermectin-based treatments.
Of course, cries of censorship and conspiracy ensued, especially from one Pierre Corrie and his organization, the FLCCC, who we will get to in a minute.
Now we covered, as I'm sure you guys remember, the Brett and Heather's January appearance on Bill Maher's HBO show, where they raised their fears about the mRNA vaccines and wagered that AstraZeneca would be safer.
And though, of course, all three are incredibly safe and effective, they got that prediction completely wrong, right?
Because it was AstraZeneca that turned out to have the issues and not the mRNA vaccines.
But we'll just keep going in true conspiracy theorist fashion.
We'll throw out predictions and the ones that don't land, we'll pretend we never said anything.
They also spent some time on Bill Maher's show promoting their belief that COVID was created in the Wuhan lab.
Now, this is Super controversial and topical right now.
The lab leak hypothesis has gained more traction in recent weeks.
We'll see what the latest investigations show.
Even Anthony Fauci as early as this morning was saying, you know, we don't know.
We need to keep looking at it.
The consensus view amongst most scientists remains that the lab leak is significantly less likely than a zoonotic I want to point out that right after that happened, the day that it was announced that the Biden administration was going to be looking into it, I had some vax-hesitant and anti-vax people reach out to me saying, like, see?
Smoking gun.
And my reply was like, good, let them investigate.
I was always bothered by the WHO partnering with China.
There's nothing wrong with the investigation, but now that the way that it's happening, two things.
First of all, conflating the lab leak hypothesis with anti-vaccination is what they're doing, and I don't understand how that's even possible because they're two completely different things.
And secondly, If the Biden administration, we already know that if they say, okay, you know what, it wasn't a lab leak, that the anti-vaxxers are going to be like, it's a conspiracy.
It's a conspiracy.
And then if they do actually find that it was, which we should be open to, if it, that's what happens, then it's going to be further, it's going to be used to further promote the anti-vax agenda.
And this conflation of all of these things is really troublesome when you're thinking about public health.
Yeah, I recently have thought that it's kind of like the al dente conspiracy method, right?
Where you throw as much pasta at the wall and see what sticks.
And then when something sticks, you go, victory!
See, I was right about everything, right?
There's a trend going on here that I want to track.
As I was writing this on Tuesday, the Dark Horse podcast featured Pierre Corey for this YouTube live stream that they called, they titled the live stream, COVID-19, Ivermectin, and the Crime of the Century.
Now, Corey is a pulmonary and critical care doctor who's a founding member of the renegade Frontline COVID Critical Care Alliance.
And in the same hijacked May 2020 session in Congress, actually, I'm sorry, the Homeland Security Committee that included hydroxychloroquine claims, he testified before the Senate that Ivermectin was miraculous, And a wonder drug.
Claims that have since been refuted by scientists and regulatory bodies who pointed out the dangers of people accepting or adopting off-label use.
But this hasn't slowed down Corey at all, nor in the years since then has he provided any good evidence, right?
His Twitter bio describes him as the advocate developer of the most effective evidence-slash-expertise-based COVID prescription protocols.
And his appearance here marks a climactic moment, I want to suggest, in the escalation of conspiracy sensationalism that characterizes Brett and Heather as the very brave and important truth-tellers, seemingly willing to overlook ethical responsibility, scientific rigor, and intellectual contradictions.
The narrative of this particular stream is that Big Pharma has not only been suppressing the data on ivermectin because it would eat into their profits, but that it has also been actively excluded from the entire process of developing and testing COVID vaccines, because if the efficacy of the vaccines were compared to ivermectin, their results would supposedly crater.
And that's the word that they use.
This is quite a piece of sleight of hand.
I mean, we could easily claim that anything from ibuprofen to cinnamon extract has not been included as a comparative treatment and cry foul.
You know, there's no way that the vaccines are as effective as they are because you didn't compare them to my folk remedy.
What about turmeric?
Exactly.
Exactly.
Well, it's Sayer G's turmeric, actually.
Yeah, it's the special.
It's the turmeric that he's blown his two inch flute over.
So to speak.
Oh dear.
I mean, this does, this does sound like hydroxychloroquine all over again.
You know, there's already a cure.
It's amazing.
It's a wonder drug.
It's cheap.
And there's, and back then there was a group called the America's Frontline Doctors who were bucking the system to save the world.
Now we have Pierre Corey, whose group is called Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, banging the same kind of drum about ivermectin.
Except the website's global networking machinery is much more sophisticated this time.
And even though they're downloadable for free, the protocols are very effectively branded.
They have names that sound oddly like Steve Jobs may have been involved, like iMask and iRecover and MathPlus.
So I don't know what's up with that.
Is that Common Core curriculum?
What is that?
They're branded in ways that seem designed to paint the doctors involved as pioneering heroes who've crafted the cutting edge standard of care.
And Brett, of course, is cast as the one who is breaking this news to the world.
Now, before I play some choice moments from this almost two and a half hour live stream, I wanted to do a brief survey of the Dark Horse Podcast Clips channel just to show how they got here.
So the channel goes back 11 months.
And in amongst videos looking at various topics through the lens of evolutionary biology, which is after all their lane, right?
Things like, are yawns contagious amongst animals?
Or, why do humans like birdsong?
Superstition in animals, teenage antidepressant use, and can awe unite us?
Oh jeez, I would actually like to watch those.
These are some good videos.
Those just sound like really great topics.
Hold on, Matthew.
Don't go there because we also find many videos about topics like the Portland Chaz.
Now, they live in Portland and their problems with woke activism and scientific perspectives on the politics of sex and gender, which every three or four videos, you're going to have one of those.
Their early videos on the pandemic, though, include an appeal to lockdown the U.S.
for six full weeks so as to stop the spread, which, you know, at the time seemed like a like a bold suggestion.
And then they tracked what they referred to as the botched lockdown leading to the second wave.
They spoke in favor of masks and against comparing COVID to the flu.
And they also pointed out in June 2020 that being unmasked outdoors seemed like it might be safe.
There were also early adopters of the lab leak hypothesis starting in August of 2020.
They do like to make bold predictions, which might be what bootstraps their content into increasingly conspiratorial positions.
Now, they took Trump's big lie of the stolen election seriously, a move which incidentally caused Sam Harris to distance himself and say he was turning in his imaginary membership card to the imaginary intellectual dark web.
Then, in early January, they started raising alarms about the COVID vaccines and ended up getting massive exposure by being interviewed on Bill Maher.
I see this as a real turning point.
It's noteworthy here that their main concerns are the unknown long-term effects, new technology, safety fears, and there just not being enough science on the vaccines.
Over the next few months, there are videos on the lab leak hypothesis increasing frequency as it seems to become a possibility that more scientists are looking into, which they take as vindication.
And videos on the dangers of the COVID vaccines increase as well.
But in amongst them, how saffron might be a cure for depression and how acupuncture and chiropractic may be generally useful modalities.
And I could tell they were pretty new to these concepts because Heather referred to it as chiropractic.
And of course, that these modalities have been suppressed by mainstream medical science.
Chiropractic?
You mean which every insurance company has covered for 30 years has been suppressed by mainstream science?
Wow.
Absolutely.
But we hit peak conspiracy crossover with the May 6th appearance of Gerd van den Borsche on the podcast.
I just wanted to pronounce his name again.
We covered him on the jab in March and he's the non-researcher with a background in veterinary medicine, which seems like another theme here in terms of these alternative experts.
who has held administrative positions in vaccine research organizations, and he had written a letter to the WHO, which he then shared on Twitter and LinkedIn, where all the good scientific research gets dropped, about how the mass vaccination for COVID was going to lead to an absolute global calamity.
And then three days after hosting Wandenbosche, they started talking about ivermectin, and by May 23rd's live stream, they were all in for this moment of theater.
Okay so Vandenbosche does veterinary medicine.
Are there more prescriptions written for ivermectin in the world for animals than for humans?
I think that is the case perhaps in the United States and other countries perhaps in Europe.
I think throughout Africa It's written a lot for things like malaria and scabies and river blindness.
Right.
Yeah, and Vannebosche, you know, did work for vaccine development companies in an administrative capacity, which makes him some kind of expert, apparently, on vaccines and immunology.
Now, with regard to ivermectin, the rationale seems primarily based on published studies showing that in African countries where ivermectin is used as a prophylactic for other conditions, the incidence of COVID appears to have inadvertently been lowered.
And Brett and Heather continue their excellent adventure in PubMed by reviewing a completely unrelated observational study on how safe ivermectin is when used for infants and children as a treatment for scabies.
And this video includes the clip of Brett with the safety goggles swallowing ivermectin on camera after chopping it up like he's in some kind of drug movie.
Trust the science people!
This same stream asserts that corrupt big pharma is suppressing the drug and how ignoring both ivermectin and the lab leak hypothesis is the crime of the century.
That becomes the title for Tuesday's live stream with Pierre Kory, the new truth-telling medical sheriff in town who's going to solve the crime of the century.
We actually are coming up with a new protocol and this is fabulous, this is fascinating.
But this protocol is actually not evidence-based in the sense that we don't have trials to show that we know it works.
But, ivermectin is proving immensely helpful at long-haul syndrome.
And so we have a protocol which Paul calls iRecover.
We actually collaborated with a group of other clinicians and experts outside the FLCCC, kind of close kin, you know, cousins because we're all fighting the good fight, all good doctors.
And we did a very collaborative approach and we have a protocol now really centered on ivermectin and it's doing phenomenally.
You have no idea the testimonials.
The testimonials, because that's the shit, right?
Suffering from disabling symptoms, literally can't go back to work because myriad syndromes, they take ivermectin.
And some of the testimonials are like within one day, they felt better.
And so I think for your listeners, anyone suffering from long haul, come to our website.
We're hoping it'll be up within a week because we're just kind of tweaking the diagrams and the dosing right now.
And then I also should mention that we have now, we're gaining increasing experience with post-vaccine syndromes that are really responding to ivermectin.
So one doctor is a retired physician who is a phenomenally bright guy.
And he was telling me his experiences with ivermectin and so he started telling me that some of his patients were coming to him with these terribly prolonged inflammatory syndromes after the vaccine like myalgias and pains and really felt terrible headaches, fatigue.
Responded tremendously to Ivermectin.
Yeah, I mean, this is the thing, right?
So superlatives and branded names for protocols somehow makes up for there being no evidence.
Well, he says that right off the top.
This isn't evidenced base, but we have lots of testimonials.
That's incredible.
So does that just float past Brett and Heather?
That's fine?
They seem to just go along with it.
I mean, they even have a conversation in this general area of the episode about how if you are using a certain medicine, he says, if you have three people get better after you've given them the medicine.
That's it.
You're done.
You don't need trials.
You don't need a control group.
You use it and it works and you know that it works and you're off to the races.
So come to our website.
And by the way, did I mention the website name yet?
He was born in New York.
I knew it.
I knew the accent.
That's my, you know, from Jersey, that accent.
That's just the ultimate grifter.
Everything about the way he was talking and presenting information is so embedded in my consciousness.
It's tremendous.
Phenomenal.
There's a slight pause in between words to really get you into what they're saying.
It's funny, I had a mentor from Brooklyn who I later broke with because he was very much in this same kind of vein, this sort of snake oil salesman vein with that cadence and that hyperbole.
It's the cadence, but it's the way of just like, hey, I'm your buddy and I'm going to tell you something that, you know, I'm going to tell you because you're family.
We're going to let you in on this right here because those other people, they don't, they don't want you to know about this, but I got you.
I got you.
So come, you know, it's, oh man.
I want to mention how well, um, That Chris Cavanaugh and Matt Brown at Decoding the Gurus go over some of Brett and Heather's material.
I can't remember the episode, so I'll look it up and put it into the show notes.
But one of the things that they focus on is how slick they are at seeming to provide a Kind of rationale for individual action.
They're not going to they say they're not going to recommend anything.
They're not giving advice.
They seem to be limiting their claim to credentials, but then they'll prop them up in other areas.
They're really good at giving sort of false disclaimers.
While also, you know, opening up a medication on air and taking it in front of their audience, which must number in the tens of thousands.
So there's a real sophistication at this level of conspiratorial thinking, and it makes me think that I don't know, I don't think we've really looked at any kind of typology of conspiracy theorists, but I just took some notes here, and it seems like, with regard to COVID, there's about four categories that, you know, you can You can, in a conspiratorial manner, deny that COVID exists at all.
That would be number one.
You could, in a second category, you could accept that it exists but then downplay its impacts.
You could say that it's not a problem or that the numbers are inflated or, you know, we've seen those arguments.
But then there's two other categories that get a little bit more sophisticated.
So COVID is a real problem, but it's opportunistically being used by governments and health agencies and big pharma to sell product or for, you know, social control.
And then the related fourth category I think is, you know, COVID is a very dangerous problem and it possibly is a bioweapon and along with the vaccine protocol, you know, the population is being subdued.
So, I don't know, they're somewhere in between three and four there.
And I think what's really compelling about them both is that they both really acknowledge that this is a dangerous disease.
But then they are much more interested in this kind of contrarian set of possible solutions to it than they are in actually, you know, trying to figure out how People with real credentials are looking at some sort of consensus process.
And what's interesting about that with regards to Ivermectin is the contradiction is on both ends of the rationale, right?
So the anti-vaccine rationale is that there's not enough data on it.
With Ivermectin, I feel scared because I haven't been vaccinated and I need something to protect me.
I need something to protect me and so I'm going to take Ivermectin.
Why does he feel scared?
Because he hasn't been vaccinated.
I thought that was, I thought that was, I mean, but the reason why I don't, I can't recommend that you take the vaccine and why I haven't got vaccinated is I don't think there's enough science.
So here's this drug that has had no control group, no double blind studies, no large, large, uh, you know, science done on, on big groups of people at whatsoever.
But I'm going to take that in front of you.
And that is, A really sort of key moment.
It makes me think of, I'm not seeing this so much anymore on social media, but did you both come across the posts from anti-vax activists that were complaining about the people who had been vaccinated posting their vaccination shots.
Yes, I've seen those.
Right.
And so the caption would generally be, it wouldn't be a caption, it would be, you know, stop rubbing your ignorance in our faces or stop, you know, what, what, what, can you remember some of the rationale like, Because I found it very interesting.
Because obviously it wasn't about personal autonomy.
They had veered away from that argument to actually indulge a kind of shame.
Like, you're showing me that you've done something that I don't want to do and I don't like it, so I'm going to say this.
Yeah, most of them from my perspective, at least on my feeds, were about that, about just, you know, you're a sheeple, you're a follower, or you're going to die in 9 to 12 months.
There was a couple of those.
I didn't really see the sovereignty or autonomy arguments particular to that.
There was a real sense of being insulted, though, that the person was showing off, showing something off.
And I think it occurs to me, listening to this story of Brett taking this horse pill,
You know live is that is that what's I think what must be very compelling to his following is that he's actually doing something like he's doing his version of take of being vaccinated in a visible sense and I think part of the those reaction posts to people getting vaccinated the complaints like don't show me that
is that if you're in this, one of these categories of COVID denialism, what are you going to do?
Like how, I mean, you can make a video where you say, you know, you're getting your vitamin D in the sunshine and you're doing your exercise and your yoga and stuff like that.
But I think when you are confronted with somebody who's being vaccinated and they are happy and grateful to be receiving this public health benefit, The response seems to be, I don't know, kind of like... It's like a mixed envy, resentment.
It is, it is.
And so when, if Brett is able to say, well, here, I'm actually doing something, there's a material There's a material ritual at play that allows him, I think, to look like he is not simply refusing a medication, which is what the sort of... If he stopped at, you know, I can't recommend the vaccine for myself or anybody else and I'm not going to be vaccinated, we're kind of left in limbo.
But if he actually engages a kind of fork in the road alternative universe He can show that he's done something.
And then there's a story to follow up on, which is, well, how did the ivermectin go?
Like, are your scabies gone?
Did you, you know, did you, did you, did you, um, you know.
Stop naying.
I think I'm rethinking this though.
I think he just remembers the Tide Pod Challenge and wants to go viral.
Well, and it's also striking a blow against Big Pharma, right?
It is.
Because this is the cheap drug that's been used for a long time, that we believe is totally safe, that seems to maybe be helping people, and the only reason why it's not being used widely is that Big Pharma can't make the same amount of money they can make on these vaccines.
And the interesting thing, based on the categories you were describing there, Matthew, There are several moments in that live stream with Corey where he uses this metaphor.
He says there is some source of very dark gravity that we can feel, but we don't know where it's coming from.
It's very interesting.
There's an interesting paranoid kind of creativity about this metaphor.
That he has this intuitive sense that there's an invisible source of gravity, that all of this is organized around, including the lab leak hypothesis, now ivermectin being suppressed, the vaccines actually not being safe, right?
That there's some, somehow it's all going to end up making sense in terms of a strange attractor, right?
Some kind of black hole at the center of it all.
I mean, but it sounds like a very dressed up New World Order, right?
I guess.
I guess.
I mean, I think he would say, he would say, don't try and lump me in with some batshit crazy conspiracy theory.
I'm talking about how some things just don't add up.
Right.
And I have a PhD and I have really good language.
Yeah.
And, and I can, I can pull it off.
Yeah.
And I can talk in a, I can, I can use 50 words to say something that I could have said with eight words in order to sound somehow right.
Obscurely articulate.
You know, I wanted to just add, we've probably played this out now, but the definition of scientific hipsterism that the Decoding the Gurus guys have come up with is so apropos here, so I'll just read it.
It is necessary that the orthodoxy, the establishment, the mainstream media, and the expert consensus are always wrong, or at least blinkered and limited Can you say it with a Northern Irish accent please?
of grappling with the real issues.
In the rare occasions when they are right, they are described by the gurus as being right for reasons other than they think.
Kavanaugh has coined the term science hipsterism, which captures this tendency quite nicely.
Can you say it with a Northern Irish accent, please?
No, I can't.
A guru can seldom agree with the establishment because it is crucial to their appeal that they are offering unique insight, a fresh hot take that is not available elsewhere and may be repressed or taboo.
The guru's popularity will obviously benefit if this iconoclastic view happens to coincide with their prejudices or intuitions of their lay followers.
Thus, gurus are naturally drawn to topics where there is a split between the expert consensus and public opinion.
Alright, so climate change, GMOs, vaccinations, lockdowns.
After all, if a guru is merely agreeing with an expert consensus on a topic such as COVID, then there is less reason to listen to the guru rather than the relevant experts.
Thus, the guru is highly motivated to undertake epistemic sabotage.
To disparage authoritative and institutional sources of knowledge, there is a trade-off where the more the guru's followers distrust standard sources of knowledge, such as that emanating from universities, the greater the perceived value that the guru provides.
This tendency is at odds with the guru's natural tendency towards self-aggrandizement, which may involve emphasizing or inflating their even-limited academic intellectual recognition, which results in some amusing contradictions.
They will also strategically utilize ambiguity and uncertainty within their criticisms, providing themselves with the means to walk back claims that prove wrong or attract criticism, or to enable them to highlight disclaimers.
This dynamic of sabotaging other sources of wisdom is also evident in their fractious relationships with other gurus, with whom they may often have alliances of convenience, but are also strongly incentivized It's brilliant analysis of something, a lot of which I would speculate happens on the fly, based on the typology and the dynamics, right?
Right.
I mean, it's a muscle that's being flexed.
It's been developed over a long time.
I'm extremely honored to present this interview with Maori journalist and activist Joe Trinder and journalist Anka Richter, who joined me via video link from Aotearoa, otherwise known as New Zealand.
And as you'll hear, they threw me, and probably they'll throw many of you, into the deep end of New Zealand history, culture, and recent politics.
They told a few haka stories as well.
So we are providing extensive links in the show notes to catch you up with characters like Billy Te Kaheka, Sue Gray, and the greasy Kyle Chapman, long known as a white supremacist, but who's now taken to flying the Maori flag in his social media.
So what is that about?
So I hope you take advantage of the show notes.
And to all of our listeners in Aotaroa, we see you, we're jealous of your COVID-free Green Islands, but we also hope you stay safe as the borders inevitably open up again.
Except for billionaire tech bros who think they're entitled to farmland there to wait out the apocalypse, you should definitely keep those guys out.
And kia ora.
Joe Trinder and Anka Richter, welcome to Conspiratuality Podcast.
Thank you, Matthew.
It's great to be here.
Kia ora.
Some basic pronunciation translation guidelines for myself and other settler types.
So, kia ora?
Am I saying that well?
That's correct, yeah.
Okay, and then, what does it mean?
It's just hello.
Just hello, okay.
And then, I practice this all day.
Aotearoa.
Yeah, that's pretty good for a Canadian.
All right.
Now, Joe, you're the editor of the Mana News.
You're an indigenous rights activist and founder of Love Aotearoa, Hate Racism.
Now, I'm imagining that the mana in Mana News is not a place name.
I think this is a special word in Māori.
What does it mean?
It's a word in English like authority, like someone is a leader or an authority.
Yeah.
Anka is a foreign correspondent.
We've known each other for many years through our shared fascination with cults.
She's done amazing cult journalism in many different areas.
She's a columnist based in Christchurch.
You've covered earthquakes, you've covered the 2019 mosque shootings, and you're an international observer of cults, as it says in your bio, so welcome to you both.
I think for most listeners, the COVID response and conditions in New Zealand, Aotearoa, seem sane, if not idyllic in comparison to the rest of the world.
As I write these questions today, it's the 27th, and I think you have, with a population of 5 million, one new case for the day.
21 active in the country, and then zero active community cases.
26 deaths in total.
Whereas here in Ontario, 14.5 million, so three times the size roughly.
We should have three daily cases, I imagine, if we were doing that well, but we're at 1,800, almost 8,700 deaths.
And it seems that your land has been able to isolate effectively.
Under the strong leadership of somebody who appears to be a global progressive celebrity, really, Jacinda Ardern.
But not everyone is on the same page, of course.
We've covered some QAnon material coming out of New Zealand.
A while back we covered the lonely lingerie story.
Where the owners of this very successful body positive clothing company just blew up their entire organization with red-pilled content.
And today we'll be talking about Billy TK, a Maori blues musician who led a very red-pilled political run in the 2020 general.
But as we speak, we were madly emailing before signing on here, and Anka, you were telling me that right now there is a January 6th-style storming of Parliament going on, and Billy Yeah, it's Saturday here already in New Zealand.
We're a little bit ahead of time and there are a few marches planned across the country and also in Australia from what we know.
It's a storming off the capital modelled in Wellington.
I doubt that there will be more than a few dozen.
Turnout.
Right Joe?
What's your prediction?
So what's happened is Billy Te Kahaka and Vinnie Eastwood have just done a Facebook Live where they've announced they're turning up to the New Zealand Parliament.
And to quote Vinny, he said, this might be the last chance that we've got to overthrow this tyranny before they become so powerful that they can simply single us out and make us disappear.
Oh boy.
Well, that sounds familiar.
You know, Anka, we got in touch for this episode when you sent me an article that you wrote for the spinoff, and you published it about a month ago.
You wrote about an autumn equinox party.
Back in March, it's called Earthbeat, and Five Day Affair.
Now, one of the headliner performers, Macho Tehuke, he's a Maori singer, he's a haka facilitator.
He surprised a lot of people.
He threw caution to the wind on, I guess, the prime slot on Saturday night.
By giving an anti-vax speech from the main stage.
And so you wrote about that.
You said that some people in the crowd responded to his passionate warnings about poisoning our bodies in a pandemic with cheers and clapping.
Others were appalled.
How many people were in attendance?
Well, the whole festival has about 3,000 attendants, so probably on a Saturday night could have been 1,000 or so.
And also, don't forget, people are in a heightened state.
They're all loved up.
They might be on, you know, various intoxicants.
And then there's their idol, and they're dancing.
And Mathieu is a very... He has a great following, actually.
And a lot of people really love him and love his music.
So for someone like him in a space like this to suddenly between sets come up with this passionate anti-vax speech, that's, I mean, I think it's even more damaging or dangerous or influential than someone setting up a stall where you kind of know that if you approach them, they're going to give you that kind of information or someone leaving a,
A leaflet in your letterbox or even just announcing something on Facebook, which actually Matthew has been done for a whole year.
He's just putting out Facebook posts after Facebook posts about his QAnon beliefs.
But then you can choose to tune out from there.
But if you're actually just dancing and you're just there to listen to his music and you didn't come because he was booked for an anti-vaxx speech, that's where I think it's really crossing a line.
And this is why I thought, and it wasn't just me, because I'm part of this group, Fight Against Conspiracy Theories, where we actually thought, well, this needs to be addressed.
This needs to be addressed.
If festivals become these platforms, maybe unwittingly, for people so passionate to spread conspiracy theories, yeah, someone's got to speak up.
In your article, you mentioned that these larger, well, even larger music and cultural festivals are dealing with the same type of crossover between, you know, arts and culture and conspiracy theorizing.
Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Yeah, there's a bit of a history to that now.
I mean, it all started last year.
So, one of the biggest sort of spiritual music festivals we have here is Luminate in Golden Bay.
And Mindy Golden Bay is sort of like the big hippie alternative organic community area where, by the way, a lot of people who were formerly greenies and maybe leftist, greenest liberals have become followers of Billie TK over last year, which is an interesting phenomenon in itself. greenest liberals have become followers of Billie TK over last But so Luminate is their big festival there and a lot of big New Zealand music acts go there.
And the organizers of this festival all through the pandemic, the organizers of the festival on their Facebook posts, on their pages, have been absolutely openly pushing anti-lockdown, on their pages, have been absolutely openly pushing anti-lockdown, COVID denial staffs.
So it didn't come as a big surprise, but still it was quite appalling that when they put out their festival program for the end, which was supposed to, when they put this out last year, late last year, it almost looked as if they had all these speakers, which of course people like David Icke couldn't come to New Zealand because, you know, our borders were closed, but it looked like they had all these big speakers, like Pete Evans, who's this,
Paleo Chef from Australia, who you probably know.
I think you've had him on there.
You've featured him on there.
Yes, we have spoken of Pete before, yeah.
One of your favorites, right?
And, of course, David Icke, one of the grandfather of all, you know, the grandfather of all big anti-Semitic conspiracies.
And they were very clever because they made it look as if these people were speaking.
So some people who were following these conspiracy theorists were probably even buying tickets because of that.
But they put them up as seeds, crystal seeds of inspiration, and they're linked up to all of their websites.
And poor Naom Chomsky was also named on there.
He was next to David Icke.
Would have been a bore if he'd known what bad company he was in.
So David Icke was on this website.
David Ferrier, who is a really great kite reporter and filmmaker from New Zealand and has a blog, he actually called the festival out and called them the QAnon Festival of New Zealand.
And that got the ball rolling.
And then a group of People, and I was involved with that as well as their media linchpin, wrote an open letter to Luminaid.
And one of them was a DJ, another one was a music video maker.
And this open letter, which went public on the biggest news website, was signed by over 60 artists and musicians and so on.
And some of them are even international names like Marlon Williams, if you've heard of him.
So that made quite a splash in New Zealand.
And I think it really sent shockwaves through Golden Bay.
And it led to some very half-assed apologies from the festival, where they were basically saying, oh, I'm sorry if you feel that we've said something of that sort.
And then in the end, they made a A statement, and they actually took David Icke off their website, and their festival was a much, much smaller affair than before, and they were quite careful not to be seen to put anything too conspiratorial out, even though I know that at least one of the organizers is still very much in their camp.
So that was the story of Luminate, which led then to just more awareness around, oh, wow, this is what festivals can become, these platforms.
And this is when our group, FACT, heard about Earthbeater and that Machu has been doing this Zantivax speech, which he already did.
New Year's at Resolution, another festival.
And he just did recently actually at a Contra-Sexuality Festival.
So it's not that he's really given up on that.
Yeah, and this is when we thought, well, actually, it's time to somehow speak up about this.
Yeah, it really seems that the festival New Age circuit is like an organizing core for anti-vax, anti-lockdown activism, really.
Joe, so when I come into this story and I see that Mr. Tohuki is at the front of it, and then I knew from before a little bit about Billy TK, I'm quite mystified.
And I guess I just want to walk back a little bit and ask if you can give a general overview of how Maori communities have responded to the COVID crisis in general.
How has that gone?
So a lot of disinformation is being put out by many of our own people.
So there was a YouTube video that Billy Te Kahaka put out maybe a year ago, and it was full of
Disinformation around Agenda 21, that it was a communist takeover of Aotearoa, there was like a lizard Illuminati, he just got a bunch of conspiracy theories around 5G, whole vast, 1080, whole vast amount of conspiracies, bunched them all together and then did this one hour rant In his video.
So what happened as a result of that, because he already had a fan base due to his music, his content started to go viral and more people started to, he started to recruit a lot of people, especially in my circles.
So a lot of it, many of us started to see that the information that Billy was disseminating, it was actually Anti-indigenous.
It was sourced from white supremacy.
And we tried to point this out to Billy.
Many of us were calling him out, especially me.
I had no problems calling him out to say, look, the information you're spreading, there is no communist takeover.
It's not really happening.
So they use a lot of communist paranoia to scare people That there's this sinister takeover of our government.
And the Cold War's over.
Communism isn't taking over.
Really.
It just really isn't.
You said that you were able to personally call him out.
I mean, do you know Billy personally?
So what I would do is I have a camera and stuff and I'll go along to some of his protests.
And then I'd edit some of the content and then I'd also go on my own platform and I'd start to discuss some of the issues that Billy's putting out as public.
So one of the things I called Billy out on was he claimed that the Central Intelligence Agency had sent A hitman here to Aotearoa New Zealand.
They managed to cross our borders without going into lockdown protocols.
So they can just come straight in the nation.
And he had some guys with them who were with the New Zealand Special Air Service, which is our tier one special forces with the New Zealand Army.
And they were protecting Billy, and evidently they followed the hitman from Queenstown to Christchurch Airport to Queenstown.
And the whole story just, it blew up bigger than Tarzan.
And so, I honestly, I do not think that the Central Intelligence Agency are trying to assassinate Billy Takahagi.
And given what that story is tied to, I think the credibility is very difficult.
When he and people who are buying into his message are confronted with, hey, you know, the QAnon material is filled with racist elements, it's anti-Semitic, it has white supremacist leanings, how does that go over?
Does it resonate?
One of the problems we've got here in Aotearoa with our indigenous people is those who have become leaders within the conspiracy theory, leaders within Māoridom, like say Billy, And also people like Karleen Heriota.
They've actually started to align themselves with people who are blatantly white supremacists.
So recently we had a national incident with a gentleman called Lee Williams, who is a social media influencer.
And what he did is he got on YouTube and he mocked a member of Parliament, Rawiri Waititi, who was He's a cousin of the famous filmmaker, what's his name?
Taika Waititi.
Yeah, Taika Waititi.
So what happened is Lee Williams was Was mocking him, mocking Māori culture.
It was just pure racism.
And so as a result of that, many Māori people got him ostracised from his employment.
They went after him publicly, petitions, and he's actually having to leave Aotearoa and go back to his homeland, Britain, because he's a British migrant.
So, as a result of this, him absolutely ridiculing Māori culture, Billy Te Kahaka, a conspiracy theorist, has come in to defend Lee over his right to express his freedom of speech.
At no stage is Billy going, oh, you know, look, what are you doing slamming our people like this?
Why are you ridiculing our culture?
No defence of Māoridom, Billy Te Kahaka, at all.
How do we account for that?
What's the shared goal there?
I mean, there might be a freedom of speech issue where they can align themselves, I suppose, but I'm just trying to wrap my head around the The sources for a potential alliance between Maori influencers and white supremacists.
What do they have to overlook or buy into or betray in order to do that?
So, I'll give you another example.
There's a lady called Karleen Heriota and she is also a conspiracy theorist.
She's more QAnon in that she believes that there is this secret There's an Illuminati that is kidnapping children in the thousands and taking them to a secret tunnel under our Parliament House and sending them to South Africa.
The conspiracy is vast.
She went down to Christchurch and she got in photos with a man called Kyle Chapman.
Now, Kyle Chapman is an outright Nazi.
This guy is a fascist.
He wears the Nazi emblem, worships Adolf Hitler, a total white supremacist, and quite proud of it.
And so here you have a Māori woman and a white supremacist, and they're collaborating over this issue.
And so a lot of us are really concerned about the indigenous conspiracy theorists.
Like, where's your self-respect?
What are you doing working with these people that would just as soon exterminate your race?
Yeah, I had a similar disbelief How that could be possible when I covered the sentencing of the mosque shooter, the white supremacist terrorist here in Christchurch last year.
And outside of the court building, during this week, while I sat inside and, you know, listening to all these victim impact statements, 91 of them, and outside, there was a protest by our local Q faction.
And with their local twist of a conspiracy that the Moss shooting was actually, had been staged by Jacinda Ardern, our Prime Minister.
So just so she could stay, change the gun laws.
And so there was also Kyle Chapman, who Joe just mentioned, the white supremacist, he showed up there.
Then you had a few Maori with flags for Maori sovereignty.
So that was all an interesting crossover that Joe just spoke about.
And then the main conspiracy rapper there, he was actually a guy who broke into rap and did this sort of And what the government's doing to us kind of rap.
He is the son of one of the victims of the mosque shooting.
So this goes to show that even someone who is the victim of a white supremacist killer can end up aligning with The deeply racist, white supremacist, QAnon chapter of New Zealand.
I read an article by Tina Nagata.
Is that, am I saying her name right?
Oh, it's Nata.
Nata.
All right.
So, all right.
And her article is called The Rise of Maori Maga, quite provocatively.
She writes, these theories aren't a big stretch for a group who've had 180 years of the state riding roughshod over their rights.
And then further in the article, she writes, given our history and more recent behavior from our government targeting Maori for surveillance and persecution, it's not too difficult to convince Maori that the state is out to kill us.
Does that sound reasonable, Jo?
What a lot of the mistrust is for many of our Māori communities is they've suffered greatly through colonisation.
And then when someone like Billy comes out and speaks against the Government, and they will never have trust for the Crown, the New Zealand Government, because of 180 years of abuse and failures to honour the Treaty of Waitangi.
So, It's really, a lot of it is the blame of the New Zealand government for the abuse of Māori New Zealanders and its failures to appropriate land back or do Waitangi tribunal settlements.
They've caused that mistrust.
And so that's where a lot of it comes in.
And about a decade ago, the New Zealand police ran surveillance on one of our tribes, or what we call an iwi called Tuhoi, in the Uruweta forest.
And they went in there with full tactical gear and raided them, and it was a travesty.
Now, here in Canada, the last residential school for First Nations children closed only in 1996.
And now residential schooling is widely understood to have embodied and extended genocidal policies that date back over centuries ago.
In fact, just breaking news today in Canada, a mass grave was found in British Columbia.
So this is a very open wound.
Now, these stories are filled with accounts of child abuse, and there hasn't been any solid reporting in Canada yet on how QAnon or conspiracy theories have appealed to people living with this history.
Anecdotally, I can say that there have been some inroads made there with some First Nations young people being quite taken by the global conspiracy around pedophiles and so on.
So, are there overtones of that in what you're seeing, Joe, in the conspiracy theorists of the Maori communities?
Here in Aotearoa New Zealand, we've managed to push back a lot of those assimilation policies.
So now we actually have indigenous schools.
Like my mother used to be beaten by nuns at school for accidentally spitting out a Te Reo Maori word.
So a lot of that stopped and we've managed to actually integrate a lot of A lot of it is actually people are kicking up because it's going the opposite way where we're having a combined multicultural society and some people don't appreciate that.
Anka, do you have any thoughts on that?
Yeah, when it comes to uplifting babies, for instance, this has been a big topic in New Zealand by state authorities that they've been accused of having a bias towards uplifting babies from mothers or care from parents where they see them unfit.
And so there's quite a strong pushback also from Yeah, from people within the social worker world, that that needs to be fair and not racist and so on.
So there's definitely sensitivity around this sort of snatching of babies, if you want to say, which again feeds into the Yeah, the whole save our children, pedophile, satanic, panic, QAnon stuff.
And then, of course, we have a Royal Commission.
The reports just came out over the last weeks and months of all the abuse, the horrific, Systemic abuse in all these institutions here in Aotearoa with Māori, mainly Māori kids and youth in institutions.
And again, I mean, it's not surprising that there is a huge mistrust in authorities and health systems.
And I mean, there's lots of evidence that Until recently, really, our whole health system has been skewed against Maori and not really in support of them.
And so all these issues, of course, now backfire when you want, especially a Maori Pacifica population to take up the vaccine that's on offer, because that's the next problem.
It's not just Like anywhere in the world, you know?
It's not just, oh, people have fallen down the rabbit hole and believe in QAnon and they want to storm our beehive and whatnot and have mental health problems because of what they are now sucked into.
it's the next problem that we're facing is that we're at the cusp of this big vaccine rollout that started and that especially Māori and Pasifika communities are more vulnerable when it comes to COVID.
Actually, their risk of dying of a COVID infection is twice as high as of Pākehā, but that's the name for the white European New Zealanders.
So it's all of that, you know, how to overcome the barrier that is there for very understandable reasons to trust what a government or a doctor or the system is telling you to do.
Now, when we talk about how somebody like Billy TK goes on his journey, when I look at some of his material, the conspiracism is jumbled.
It's also fairly standard in a global sense.
So, 5G, electromagnets, weaponized viruses, vaccines that will enslave humanity.
Is there a particular New Zealander or Maori spin on this material, or is it just kind of downloaded and transplanted from the ethers?
I wonder about the extent to which, you know, there's this intersection between So conspiracism that is globally available and instantly available, and then local and indigenous grievances that are waiting for something to grab onto.
What's your sense of that?
Well, I think what's happened with Billy Takahaka is his algorithm got out of control and he started to get fed some stuff during lockdown, in the early parts of lockdown, with just some really bizarre information.
And then it kind of indoctrinated him into these really weird beliefs.
So I'll give you some background with what's happened with Billy.
Last year we had the New Zealand elections and six months beforehand Billy started to get political and started to become an influencer on conspiracy theories.
Then what happened is he formed a political party called the New Zealand Public Party and they based all their policies around 5G network, also 1080, which is a pest control that we use here in New Zealand in our forest to contain harmful mammals that attack our native birds.
Also fluoride, a vast amount of conspiracy theories, right?
And he packed this into a political party and then he created policies on it.
Then what happened, there was another politician that had been ostracised from the National Party called Jamie Lee Ross.
And so Billy and Jamie Lee decided to join together in a new political party called Advanced New Zealand.
So then all of the conspiracy theorist people all flocked to this new political movement And then what happened is the elections came around and they managed to get a very poor outcome in the elections of 0.9% of the vote.
So they really flopped in the elections and as do all New political parties in our new political system.
We've got a political system called MMP, or Mixed Member Proportional, where it's just, it's not first past the post where there's an opposition and there's a government.
We involve other political parties into it, like the Māori Party, the Greens Act.
So Billy only needed to reach a threshold of around about 5% of the vote before he could go into Parliament and then become a member of Parliament.
And I was really concerned that we're going to have this QAnon member of parliament who would actually have control and could create policy within our nation.
And for me, that was really concerning.
How's he polling currently?
I mean, he's storming the Capitol right now, I suppose.
But how are his numbers and what's going on with advance?
So after the epic failure, what happened is New Zealand Public Party had poured a whole lot of money, put all their money into the Advance Party with Billy, with Jamie Lee Ross.
And so Billy announced after the elections that he was pulling out of politics and that he no longer wanted to have anything to do with it.
and then he was pulling out of advance.
But what he didn't do is get the money off Jamie Lee Ross.
So last week he had to go into the New Zealand police and answer some questions about where a lot of the campaign funds went to.
And so at the moment, Billy is not a politician or wanting to be in a political party.
He's more of a conspiracy theorist activist where he's got this movement where they could potentially today, they could storm our parliamentary building, the Beehive.
That's the potential.
Yeah, I think he's more of a grifter these days than anything else.
I don't think there are many people really anymore, unless they're really on the very radicalised fringe, who take him seriously.
He had a big fall from grace last year, not just through the election, but also when he was exposed by our biggest media organisation here, with a lot of fraudulent stuff he's been up to in the past as a music manager.
And also his Christian values that he always promotes.
He has an evangelical background that didn't quite stack up with the reality of his promiscuous lifestyle and all these things really backfired on him.
So I think he's seen as more of a caricature these days.
And so you know in his Facebook Lives, he prides himself on not wearing a mask on New Zealand flights where that's mandatory.
And somehow he has a get out card for that.
And he's a bit of a provocateur.
But, you know, there are more venues these days.
I just know of a cafe here in Christchurch that actually send him away when he wants to organize talks there or something.
So there is actually quite an awareness around, you know, that we don't want to host this guy.
And so, because we've talked so much about Billie TK now, I'd like to introduce another big puppet on the conspiracy theme of Aotearoa.
That's actually Sue Gray.
And she's the white counterpart with a lot more credibility because she's a lawyer and she actually still has a party.
She's the co-founder of the Outdoors Party.
And she just recently tried to sue our government for the vaccine rollout.
And so I think she has actually been under-reported, whereas a lot of people have looked at Billy Decay and, you know, done their exposés on him.
And he's easy to mock and to see for what he is, whereas I think Sue Gray actually gets away with Just the same stuff, but in a Trojan horse of looking like she's a credible lawyer, especially also because she is actually a campaigner for medical cannabis, which is a very worthy cause, at least where I sit.
And she has sued the government to to to halt or to delay the vaccine rollout.
Is that her point?
Yeah, well, there is a there was a there was a loophole, which through her lawsuit has actually been, you know, it's actually in a way maybe that that was beneficial, that that loophole has been closed to which it was an acquaintance and an old
Well, basically to roll out the vaccines as fast as they do here at the moment, the government had to go through an act that wasn't, oh my God, I'm probably out of my depth trying to explain the lawsuit to you.
The long and short of it is that It didn't lead to the government stopping the vaccine rollout, but that's what she wanted.
But it did expose that there is a loophole and that that needs to be fixed so that, in general, maybe how legislation for medication goes about should be done differently.
But she's on a mission, this woman, that's for sure.
In thinking about returning to this unlikely alliance between Maori influencers and white supremacists, the one tie-in I can think of brings me back to my own understanding of
Early 20th century European fascism and its appeals to all things natural and of the earth and, you know, German's fascination with purity of the land and its capacity to heal the folk.
Is that a possible crossover that in some ways white supremacists are continually appealing to the power of their connection with wherever they feel they belong and the ability of the earth to support them?
Do they find common cause or are they at least willing to use indigenous sentiments and affiliations that way?
In my view, I think white supremacists like Kyle Chapman, I think what their objective is, is to kill as many people of colour by getting them to suicide themselves through avoiding taking The Pfizer vaccine.
So I think his objective is to convince enough Māori people by working with Māori that the Pfizer vaccine is a nanobot kind of takeover of your body where Bill Gates will control you.
Yeah, I'm fascinated by something, and again I'm probably out of my
My depth here because I only know so much about Maori spirituality, but for instance what I've seen lately in a bigger sort of spiritual festival community here was a, she called herself a Maori medicine woman and she was posting something that sounded totally conspiratorial about certain symbolisms she's seen and I was trying to make sense of it and I was wondering and maybe
Joe knows more about this.
I was wondering, because spirituality is such a big part of Maori culture and of our culture in New Zealand, it's not that separate.
It's not just there for the esoteric seekers.
Or your yoga mom doing her mindfulness meditation.
Spirituality is a treasure of our culture here, of our indigenous culture, and this is why we have The greetings, the ceremonies, the celebrations we have, like Matariki, which is our Māori New Year, which is happening soon again.
All these things have a spiritual meaning and background and it's cherished.
So I wonder if that also means that certain Conspirituality, that conspirituality content can just maybe land easier, or also from a pākehā, a white person's perspective, it's maybe not as easy to detect because we go, oh yeah, now that's Māori spirituality, but maybe it's not.
Maybe it's actually more QAnon in a Māori disguise.
I don't know, Jo, what do you think?
One of the words for medicine in our language, te reo Māori, in the Māori language, is rongoa.
And so what a lot of our people have been saying is, I won't be taking the Pfizer vaccine, what I'll do is I'll use ancient rongoa.
And so there's a real There's a real anti-science mentality towards this.
And also what the likes of Carleen and also Billy do is they weaponise colonial religion.
So they will always start off with, I need to thank the Lord.
They portray themselves of having strong Christian values.
And so this is why people, their faith makes them attracted to the likes of Billy and Carlene, because they are weaponizing their colonial Christianity to convince people of Just a demographic question.
I understand that 16% of the population is Maori, according to the census that I looked at.
But how many identify as Christian?
The signing of our founding national document, the Treaty of Waitangi, or Te Tiriti o Waitangi, basically the entire 100% conversion of Māori to Christianity.
In fact, our own faiths, they had government policies to eradicate our own faiths.
So there was the Tonga Suppression Act.
So a Tonga is like a In English, an English would be like a wizard or a spiritual kind of person.
And so what the government did is they hunted these people down and imprisoned them and And outlawed their practices so that Christianity could be dominant in this nation.
So basically it was around about 100%.
And also there are old monotheistic gods that are part of Māori folklore that those faiths have been eradicated.
And you're talking about the middle of the 19th century.
From 1840 up until 1900 AD, the Tongue Expression Act was early 20th century.
So when contemporary Māori say, I'm going to rely on ancient medicine, is there a strong or continuous lineage that they're appealing to?
As in many cases, have Maori had to reconstruct something that for over a hundred years now has been suppressed?
Yeah, so assimilation policies were very strong in Aotearoa.
So there was maybe a generation of two to three of Māori that simply could not speak their own language, they lost their own culture, they basically became brown British people in the South Pacific.
So the reclaiming and the regaining of those skills was an incredible cultural feat, it must have been.
Yeah, it's only happening in the 21st century, so there's a rejuvenation of te reo Māori language and also culture, and so people are starting to understand these new ways.
- Yeah, and that's really interesting because, so here we don't just, in New Zealand, we don't just have the white wellness world like everywhere in the Western world.
And we also have an alternative wellness spectrum and that's Maori healing.
And like Joe just said, you know, it's been a real struggle and battle to have that established and legalized and recognized and all of that.
So again, it becomes really tricky because on the one hand, to say, hey, let's stick with school medicine here and this is the right approach and this is what we need to do.
On the other hand, not to suppress these alternative forms of feeling that don't just come, you I mean, some people might still see them as very woo-woo or not based on science, but there is a tradition there that needs to be honored, and it's almost a political issue to honor that.
So, again, it's a very multifaceted problem.
And I just wanted to add also with Christianity, Matthew, that, yeah, we're one of the most secular countries in the world, and then we have You know, 16% Maori, but we also have a large Pacifica community and population, so people whose ancestors or who've come from all the Pacific Islands.
And they are, I would say, predominantly very Christian, often Evangelical Christians, and some of them or new churches.
And a lot of these groups, Yeah, one of them, for instance, Destiny Church.
Actually, Māori leader, right, Joe?
Yeah?
Destiny Church.
Brian Tamaki.
Brian Tamaki, yeah, Māori.
So that's one of them.
But then there are just lots of, like, Baptist church groups and so on.
Some of them broke lockdown rules.
So again, you have that, you have a I'm leaning towards listening to what your Christian domination tells you what to do with medicine or with lockdowns or in general, and that's really strong often in Pacifica communities.
Coming back to, just for a moment, to Machu Tehuke, it seems like he is mobilizing the persona of the wellness provider and he is representing the spirituality of Maori.
He's teaching Haka in a way that suggests that it has physical healing powers.
And I'm wondering if this is part of the ancient medicine that is playing a role in Well, here's an alternative way to approach COVID.
And if so, is that a strong Indigenous understanding?
And how far will people like Tahuki take it?
So the Haka is a traditional war dance that was invented in Aotearoa well before colonisation.
My grandfather used to do it as a kind of a psychological A psychological pre-battle thing in North Africa during World War II.
It really gives you an advantage over your opponents.
An example of that is the New Zealand All Black rugby team.
They are the most successful sports team, professional sports team, in history of all sports.
And so the haka gives them a psychological Kind of advantage over their opponents.
And it also terrifies their opponents.
It doesn't terrify the Australian rugby team anymore.
They've seen it for a hundred years.
But other teams like the Welsh and the Canadians, it can seem intimidating.
So I don't know where this chap has got A link between that would give you immunity to COVID-19 and when it actually is a psychological war dance to prepare you for battle.
Yeah.
From what I know about Matthieu's Haka workshops, I know people who've done them and they said they were absolutely amazing and transformative and very healing in terms of the masculine and feminine elements.
My understanding is that they're probably a mix of Neo-Tantra principles and the Haka.
But hey, I've got an amazing Haka story to share here.
Joe, yeah, and Matthew.
That was a story I did last year when I found out that a German anti-COVID protester from Germany, they call themselves Querdenker over there, which means against thinkers, and it's become a really strong movement.
That's my home country and I'm really worried about it.
And one of their prominent Querdenkers Truth is, did a haka at one of the protests in Germany.
So he's also, he has been posting white supremacist and Islamophobic stuff on his Facebook page before.
He's been called out on that.
He's been in the media as having very right-wing tendencies and so on.
So, I mean, it's just, can you get your head around that, that white,
Right-wing leaning German COVID denier misappropriates the ritual of the indigenous culture of the country that hasn't only successfully battled COVID better than any other country in the world, pretty much, but also where our indigenous population here is at a much bigger risk, like any indigenous populations in any country, same as Brazil, so to actually die of COVID.
So, yeah.
Great haka story.
And I can tell you, Jo, that I spoke to a few people here who were not happy about someone misappropriating the haka like that.
I also have a haka story as well.
My grandfather, who went over to North Africa to fight against Germany in North Africa, he was part of this famous battalion in the New Zealand Army called the 28th Māori Battalion.
And what they did is they did the haka in front of the In front of the German army, and it terrified many of the Wehrmacht, is that what I call it?
Wehrmacht, Wehrmacht, yeah.
Yeah, Wehrmacht.
So they did the Hacker in front of them, and a lot of these young soldiers just downed weapons and ran away.
They did not want to mess with these guys, they didn't want to challenge them, they didn't want to fight against them.
It terrified them so much seeing this This bravery by these men that they knew that they didn't want to fight them.
Yeah, it's a powerful ritual and it's sad that it's being used in spiritual, New Agey, esoterical circles around the world now to propagate an anti-mask, anti-lockdown, anti-vax message.
I think that's just so wrong on so many levels.
I do remember in 2019, the stream of video pouring out of Auckland and Christchurch, and other places I suppose, of young people especially doing haka in mourning and grief.
And after the shooting.
And so it seems to have this incredible potential for cultural bonding.
But I guess at this point, you've got to wonder why the given haka performer is doing it.
I mean, it seems like it can be put to many different uses.
Yeah.
I mean, I wouldn't call Mathieu a Haka performer.
I think he's, I think it's more like a, yeah, a workshop facilitator.
But yeah, I kind of wonder also how, you know, people are doing a workshop and it's transformative.
Again, you know, does he, does he put his messages, his message about, You know, his conspiratorial thinking, does that influence people in that way there as well?
Are they more open to it because they've just had an amazing workshop with him?
In some ways that's even more Damaging or causing more damage than just saying it on a stage and people can walk away if they're not happy with it and just say, oh my God, what is he saying?
But if you're actually locked into a workshop with someone for a day or two or however long that take, and I don't know if he does do that in that space.
I don't know.
And also, I just want to say, because we've spoken about him quite a bit here, it's He's someone, and there are many, many of them everywhere in the world, where it's kind of hard to tell, is this person a victim of QAnon spreading?
When does the victim become the perpetrator and the influencer?
And yes, Mathieu has his output on Facebook, and he puts out his videos.
They don't get a lot of likes.
Really?
I think a lot of his fans have actually turned away from him because of that.
No one's asked to cancel him, by the way.
It's not like our group, when we spoke up about him or when I wrote my article, it's not like we said, don't listen to his music and burn your CDs or something.
No, we're just saying don't use your concerts.
For anti-vax messages.
Just like when you go and see your doctor, you don't expect him to play you his latest guitar songs.
Stick with what you're good at.
Well, rounding up, I have a short-term question and a long-term question.
The short-term is that I've been reading that community spread of COVID in Melbourne is going up and other places in Australia, and I think this has prompted a pause on the Australia-New Zealand travel bubbling.
Also, Anca, you mentioned that anti-vax activists, you know, I think you, this is Sue Gray, is trying to manipulate this outdated medicine approval system.
But in general, what do you think?
Is New Zealand going to remain a largely COVID-free or COVID-safe refuge?
Well, it is a COVID-free refuge.
It's incredible.
And I sometimes have to pinch myself and remind myself that I even have to be sensitive about what I put up on Facebook, about which festival or event I went to, because it's easy to forget that this is not the norm for the rest of the world, how we mix and mingle.
And this is also why it's kind of ironic that some of these festivals have become Platforms for conspiracy spreading, and not just by, you know, someone like Machi, but also there have been other examples of that.
Just lately at the New Zealand Spirit Festival, where their main act, Bruce Lipton, an epigenetist, is that what you call him, actually used the last five minutes of his talk to basically say, Don't get the vaccine, just prop up your immune system with supplements.
Don't trust the numbers that are out there.
And this was the week where India was just turning into the absolute worst.
So I'm just saying, the irony of the festivals.
We can actually gather here, thousands of us, and there have been so many festivals over the summer in New Zealand.
I can't even count them all.
I think there have been 10 at least, or 15 or so.
We can gather here in those large numbers without masks, totally legal, totally safe, and then to use these festivals to spread these messages.
Yeah, that's kind of ironic.
Are we going to stay Well, that's a really good question.
Who knows?
It all depends on how can we open our borders safely?
How long does it take for everyone here to be vaccinated?
And what will be the uptake of the vaccines?
And then how can we manage that?
And like you just said, with the travel bubble, Australia, boom, all of a sudden things change again.
So it's still kind of a fragile safety that we have here.
And if you look at some other countries that have managed it super well, like Taiwan, right, things have suddenly changed there.
So that's a bit of a reminder, a bit of a wake-up call that we can't become complacent.
So what we do here in New Zealand is we all have Tracer apps.
So we all scan ourselves in when we go into shops or events or whatever.
And that's actually been a really good uptake of these apps.
So it's been a really good uptake of those apps.
But then again, in some of these areas that I mentioned before, like Golden Bay or so, there are cafes and there are shops.
That actually explicitly say you do not have to scan in here.
Yes, we have to put this up, but you're not forced to scan.
And I just heard yesterday that a shop in Nelson, which is a bit of an alternative Mecca as well here in the top of the South Island.
There's a shop and they have a sign saying if you have been vaccinated recently, you can't enter.
So, I know, Matthew, you're familiar with the latest twist that we become a public health risk if we are vaccinated to others.
So, we've actually seen this here in New Zealand.
I just heard this morning that there's actually a shop having that on their front door.
But I also know of a wellness spa.
It's called the Back Door Spa in Christchurch.
So, they do colonics and whatnot.
And they had that as a policy.
Wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
Yeah, I know.
You're going to love it.
It's the backdoor spa and they do colonics.
I kid you not.
You want to take the backdoor, they get out as fast as you can.
So they won't let you in if you've had a vaccine for four weeks, for whatever reason, because they're probably not safe.
Joe, I have the same question for you, but I want to return to the moment where I realized I was stunned when you said that you believed that the goal of the white supremacists was to convince enough Maori to not take the vaccine so that they would die, and I think that stopped me in my tracks.
I just want to follow up on that and ask, are they being disingenuous in the sense that they themselves are going to be vaccinated, but they're not going to let their Maori Colleagues, no.
I think that that is part of Kyle Chapman's agenda.
So I checked his Facebook page before we came on today, and this is a guy that torched a marae.
And what a marae is, it's a Māori meeting house.
It's an ancient Māori meeting house.
So when he was a full skinhead white supremacist, he went and torched a marae and he was oppressing Māori people.
And so now I checked his Facebook page and he has a picture of what we call the Tino Rangatiratanga flag on his Facebook page, the Māori flag.
So this is a guy that has tried to exterminate our people, adores Adolf Hitler, was a fully blown Nazi and now he's got On his own Facebook page, he's got our flag there, and he's protesting alongside Māori people.
It just doesn't add up to me.
How can you go from flipping from being a neo-Nazi to a pretend indigenous rights activist?
So there just must be subterfuge there.
He must, I mean, he's rebranded, but how could the message possibly be any different?
Yeah, so we have a group in New Zealand called Paparoa and what they do is they investigate right-wing people.
They've actually stopped the last three terrorist attacks happening where our special intelligence service have failed to detect it.
And they are quite aware that Kyle Chapman is still involved in his white supremacist friends.
But now he's going to protest alongside indigenous rights activists.
So I don't believe that his intent is to save New Zealanders from tyranny and all this.
I think that he's got an ulterior motive of killing off as many Māori people by self-suiciding them as he possibly can.
Wow, that's new to me as well, Jo.
I was thinking as a cult researcher myself, whether you could look at it as cult hopping, what he's doing, because he was involved in a white supremacist group before he was with the National Front here in Christchurch in New Zealand, and now he's with the conspiracy chapter.
So, in some ways, you could see it as he's left that one group and he's gone into the other group.
Yeah, like people who leave cuts and then they end up in the next one.
Maybe I'll end with this question, Jo.
What do you hope for the Maori people and for New Zealand more generally?
So at the moment Aotearoa doesn't have any community transmissions.
So we're practically safe.
I'm quite blessed.
I'm fully vaccinated and I don't even know anyone who's being infected at all.
I don't know any many people on earth that don't have any friends or anyone they could talk to that they don't know.
And so We've only had about a thousand cases out of a population of about five million people.
And so what my fear is, is that we have to open the borders.
We can't keep a closed border for our economy.
It's just unsustainable.
So what my fear is, is these conspiracy theorists, they're going to create vaccine hesitancy.
And when we open the borders, it starts to come in.
The majority of us will have Herd immunity.
But the people that subscribe to conspiracy theories, I fear they're going to suffer.
Anca and Joe, thank you so much for your time today.
