Fabricated Consent
Uncovering what happens when Astroturfing Goes Local
Over the past few months, every time I venture into public, I have been asked if I would be covering this year’s local elections - and the short answer is yes. I’ve always been disappointed in local election turn out, the one of the most common bits of feedback I’ve been hearing for decades is that people just don’t know enough about the candidates to make an informed choice - and with the rise of the alt right in trying to take over Councils they want some help identifying candidates.
And once nominations close and we have the full list of candidates, an amazing team of volunteer researchers and myself will begin digging and be making content around which candidates in each local authority have shared those kind ideologies before.
But this year we have seen a proliferation of something different - we’ve seen the alt right and pseudo law groups start to create local astroturf groups en masse - fake grassroots groups designed to push the ideologies of the candidates they want to see elected. And I’ve put together a deep dive documentary on the topic.
These groups have a lot of cross over but don’t all see eye to eye - Voices for Freedom for example seem to be working to keep pseudo law group Challenging Councils at arms length but there is still cross over, like the Canterbury Concerned Ratepayers group which often shares content from Challenging Councils having a Voices for Freedom member as their spokesperson and ties with Wellington Voices for Freedom Regional Coordinator and candidate for Kapiti Coast, Dean Harris.
Harris actually stared a website called Concerned Ratepayers, and on it he suggest people check out other local groups, all of whom are run by Voices for Freedom coordinators.
But of course, none of these groups openly admit that - although they will share the latest content from sources like Reality Check Radio, The Platform, The Tax Payer's Union, the Free Speech Union and other voices within the far right media sphere. On the last day of editing I was given a link to a Whangarei group doing this
Last local election, Whangarei was a mess - NZCPR with their little astroturfing Democracy Northland, this time round VFF and NZCPR have teamed up to from C.R.O.W - Concerned Ratepayers Of Whangarei. Pity they uploaded their first meeting onto bitchute on the Voices for Freedom channel, with VFF member Tane Webster talking about their plan to get voters to connect the pain points from Council with the solutions their secret candidates were offering. It was removed quickly and they have denied there’s any link between CROW and VFF, but really, they’re not that smart and not that good at this.
Through extensive research, we’ve uncovered a huge number of these sort of localised astroturf groups, usually masquerading as Resident and Ratepayer organisations, although some use other names - Better Wellington which lead to Better Waipa and Better Hamilton after Andrew Bydder of Hamilton started collaborating with Ray Chung in Wellington for example. Bydder, of course, is best known for his derogatory comments using ableist slurs at Waipa Mayor Susan O’Regan because of a proposed planning change he equated to the 15 minute City conspiracy.
From Whangarei to Invercargill, these groups are everywhere - often sharing resources from the same sources and undertaking community outreach plans.
In Hamilton this includes local community pages with simplistic arguments against rates rises from people who attended a meeting to issue execution writs to Councillors, again over 15 minute cities. In Canterbury they pop up at local Markets. In Wellington they hire “opposition researchers” to dig for mud and pass it on as “community news”, sometimes they just plain make stuff up and start rumours and then onto specific media outlets that seem to give them a free pass on scrutiny.
Over the course of putting together this doco we’ve looked into dozens of these groups, sifted through video and audio footage, dived into archived data and spoken to people impacted by these groups and others who are waiting to be impacted.
And we’ve had some set backs - there’s a lot of messages left on read sent to elected members I was hoping to talk on the record with. A large number of “I’m sorry but these people are dangerous, I can’t risk the safety of my family” responses, at least one pre-emptive “do not come to me asking for help, I can’t do it” from a sitting Mayor and some of the groups we investigated getting wind of what was happening and trying to pre-empt the narrative.
And I get it, when it comes to wanting to be elected or re-elected. There is always a fine line you walk because while you’ll never please all of the people all of the time, it’s not wise to upset people and vilify potential voters, especially when there are concerns for people’s safety involved - which should be a serious concern. Exerting influence by making anyone feel unsafe is wrong.
What we’ve ended up with is a 40 minute exploration into the underground astroturfing plans of a number of groups - all with seemingly common goals, not all of them getting along, and not all with the exact same approach - VFF for example don’t actually want to or encoruage their followers to break any laws, but Challenging Councils doesn’t believe laws apply to them because they’re “real living persons, not a corporate entity”. And yet the founder of that pseudo law spreading group is joining the New Plymouth freedom group backing Murray Chong - the man who once claimed he was persecuted like Mandela and Lincoln for being a conservative - to get people out to vote this year and Chong still looks like a viable candidate to many of them. And these kind of affiliations keep happening in weird ways - in Kirikiriroa, Geoff Taylor, a far right Councillor who is a member of the Act Party posted about how he was endorsing conspiracy nutter Andrew Bydder. Normally I’d guess that anyone saying “let’s work with a man who stood in an audience and watched our co-workers get issued execution writs by sovereign citizens over a bug eating conspiracy” would be told by voters they aren’t keen on that kind of person around - but honestly, we live in weird times and I have no idea if Hamiltonians would see that as a negative, especially Hamiltonians who would vote for someone who openly supports Act - I don’t know where that line is anymore for them.
While Nominations open today (or back on Friday the 4th of July for anyone reading this after they open), we won’t know the full list of candidates for the races until early August, so after the nominations close, we’ll be looking at candidates region by region to see if they’re problematic. Just being a right wing local politician isn’t problematic, but being an alt right wing politician who believes in chemtrails and subjugating Maori, that’s a problem. Being so far right you see Tucker Carlson and Candice Owens as sane and reasonable, and believe that Obama is Hitler’s grandson - that’s absolutely a problem candidate (and one Upper Hutt will be dealing with this election).
Down at the bottom of the page is the doco itself - it’s taken months, it’s been mentally exhausting at times but I really hope it results on people looking at the local election and saying “holy fuck, I need to vote this year, cause if I don’t, we are fucked more than any of us realised”
And I promise, I am working on ways to also showcase great candidates, ones who genuinely want to improve and represent their communities - not stop them in their tracks.
And in the mean time, I’m taking a much needed holiday far far away for a couple of weeks, while I wait for the threats to settle down and nominations to flow in.
Check out the all new Election Hub at https://paultheotherone.com/lg25/
Thanks for this and exposing what’s really happening behind the scenes. I’m in Wellington and feel confident Andrew Little will be our next Mayor with support from Tory Whanau. But there’s a real right wing / conspiracy theorists group lurking in the background stirring up anti Labour and anti Green sentiment.