Judge Calls for Law Change to Stymie Political Dissent
Judge Calls for Law Change to Stymie Political Dissent while Setting a Legal Precedent for Attention Touching that Deflects Attention from Police Brutality
JUN 08, 2024
Overview: The strange trial of a seasoned independent media duo reached its narrative climax on May 21 2024, at the Manukau District Court in South Auckland, New Zealand, following their spectacular arrests in 2023.
The prize of the case was an outcast media personality, former TVNZ news anchor, Liz Gunn (64), who had been brutally assaulted by a senior constable stationed at Auckland Airport.
Yet, it was Gunn who was found guilty by Judge Janey Forrest for ‘assaulting’ an Airport security worker.
Gunn, and her co-accused camerman, Jonathan Clark, who once worked for CNN and the Wall Street Journal, had also faced resisting arrest charges, after the judge dismissed two charges of trespass.
Previously, on ‘Court Soap’, it was revealed the media duo were arrested in 18 seconds flat by Police, who were sent to eject them from the arrivals lounge inside the International Airport, in the early evening of Saturday February 25 2023.
In this heretical dispatch, former Māori Television news, and current affairs editor, Steve Snoopman, proves with a snoop technique he calls ‘verdict vivisection’ that a red herring trial occurred.
He shows how four functions of ideology — distortion, legitimation, social integration and activation — that are essential for successful propaganda to brainwash a population, were present in the the trial proceedings, and were, in effect, ratified by ‘Forrest Law’. Thus, the ‘Red Herring Gunn Trial’ set a legal precedent.
In short, an attention-getting touch was turned into an attention-deflecting assault to distract from the Police brutality.
Drawing upon Professor T. Edward Damer’s classic book, Attacking Faulty Reasoning: A Practical Guide to Fallacy-Free Arguments, the Snoopman reveals numerous logical fallacies that were presented by Team Police Prosecution and accepted by Judge Forrest — who got ‘lost’ in the illogical legal woods.
By design, the trial was primarily aimed to save face for the Police, with a secondary motive to protect the reputation of Auckland International Airport Limited, and a thirdly, derivative objective to protect the Crown.
It was obvious to anyone in Court that the Police took a course to prosecute Gunn for assault, since she had been injured by an Airport Station Senior Constable, Erich Postlewaight, while his accomplice, Constable Robett Luong, injured Mr Clark. After all, a red herring logical fallacy occurs in an attempt to hide the weakness of a position by drawing attention away from the real issue to a side issue.
Once Gunn’s arrest became news, the Police doubled-down to protect the institution’s patchy reputation, as well as that of the Auckland Airport Company, and also of the defunct-Ardern Government.
Forrest laid down the law that a touch to get attention is assault in a hostile exchange. However, to pull off this logically fallacious argument, the authoritarian judge exercised judicial gymnastics to cast all the blame on the defendant — despite the obvious red herring tactic in play.
This adventure in judicial gymnastics hinged on the character assassination of the key defendant, who was cast by Police for a drawn-out scape-goating to resolve a potential crisis, since a Senior Constable assaulting a 63 year-old woman looked bad — no matter how many layers of lipstick a pig’s puckered lips may take.
The independent media duo had been waiting to film the arrival of a Tokelauan family, who had come to live in New Zealand following a cruel house arrest for refusing to be ‘vaccinated’ on the watch of Tokelau’s highest official, Ross Ardern, the father of Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s prime minister at the time.
To cast all blame on Gunn, Forrest ignored or denied the counter-evidence, after letting the case proceed despite finding that neither Airport SkyGate Security Coordinator, Anna Kolodesnaya, nor the two police constables, had adequately warned the pair that they would be trespassed. And although Postlewaight requested Gunn and Clark to leave, both Police escalated the calm scene into a fracas within seconds.
Moreover, Forrest let the case proceed despite the fact that Kolodesnaya conveyed the vague view to Gunn that the Airport Arrivals Lounge was “private area”. Kolodesnaya explained to the Court her incorrect comprehension that the Airport was privately owned. However, according to Auckland International Airport Limited’s filings with the New Zealand Companies Office register, at least 22% of the Airport Company’s stocks are owned by local and central government entities. In effect, this means the legs of the public can walk the Airport’s public areas exercising their freedoms protected by the Bill of Rights.
But, by this legal precedent, the bipedal public can only remain upstanding if they obey authority —even when those vested with authority are wrong. Indeed, Forrest conveyed this authoritarian view toward the trial’s end after the defence pulled the ‘keystone’ from the ‘archway’ of the New Zealand Crown’s case against a former TVNZ news anchor and a former CNN cameraman. Judge Forrest dismissed th trespass charges after a short recess, evidently to figure out (or consult about) the implications.
Forrest essentially took the cue of the lawyer for the prosecution, Jerome Beveridge, who clutched at legal straws.
In his summing up, Beveridge argued that the Police can’t be held criminally liable for their actions, if in the course of their duty they believe are right. With this telling faux pa, Beveridge’s overt plea was the logically fallacious argument of special pleading. The two police constables were not on trial for assault.
Special pleading — which Professor Damer located within the within the category of missing evidence — fallacies, occurs by ”[a]pplying principles, rules, or criteria to another person while failing or refusing to apply them to oneself or to a situation that is of personal interest, without providing sufficient evidence to support such an exception.” The ‘trunk’ of Police Prosecution’s ‘case tree’ was special pleading wood.
The dispute arose over the nature of the filming at the Airport. Kolodesnaya and other Airport staff, and the two Constables, had made the error of assuming a big camera equated with commercial filming, which required a permit, unless the enterprise is an accredited media organization. Neither the Police or the Airport SkyGate Security established what Gunn’s media entity was called, nor that it was a non-profit donation funded enterprise. Despite the accusing parties drawing the wrong conclusion, Forrest performed a neat trick to allow the resisting arrests charges to stand, while she dismissed the trespass charges.
Lawyer for the defence, Matthew Hague, had petitioned Judge Forrest that there was no way to separate the charges for trespass from the charges for resisting arrest, since the Police had neither allowed adequate time for the defendants to leave, nor to comprehend that they were under arrest.
Both defendants were off their legs at the point they were shouted at at that they were under arrest.
By allowing the resisting arrest charges to stand, Forrest could construe there was still a case to answer. Otherwise, if she had dismissed the resisting arrest charges on the first trial day — as she had with the trespass charges — the bad optics would have been obvious to anyone reading about the case in the newspapers, as it was to anyone in Court. Except, Kolodesnaya, whose sanctimonious ignorance the Judge doth entertained, when the Skygate Security official explained that people usually backed down when the police were called. Ergo, Gunn deserved a beating for asserting her rights.
Indeed, the authoritarian Judge Forrest ‘failed’ to ask herself critical counter-questions, which would have cut through the ‘wild mangled undergrowth’ served up by the Police Prosecution. If the Police subsequently found after the arrest, that they had reeled in Amnesty International filming incognito, would their counsel have advised proceeding to prosecution? Or, if the former TVNZ news anchor in question was Judie Bailey, would the Police Counsel have pursued the prosecution? Or, what if it was Lorde — who’d realized she had duped into lending her support to the Vaxathon — and who showed up with a big camera and microphone in support of Gunn’s call to greet the Patelesio’s at the Airport Arrivals hall?
In other words, because Liz Gunn had used her public profile in October 2021 to take a public stance against the Ardern Government’s draconian vaccine mandates to blackmail New Zealanders into taking Pfizer’s mRNA-LNP platform injecticides — the outcast media personality could be scape-goated.
The news media doth dutifully supplied the obligatory stigmatizing headlines to frame Gunn as an anti-vaxxer campaigner or anti-vaccine activist to cue their audiences that another of the nation’s common enemy was unhinged. Despite the media’s marketed image that newsrooms rigorously hold power to account, the ‘Fourth Estate’ of the so-called Western liberal democracies — are enmeshed with a global media cartel — and acts ‘intuitively’ as the peripheral nervous system to protect the other three estates — the legislature, the administration, and the judiciary; especially in election year.
It follows that a parallel construction of evidence occurred to cover up the culpability of Police, especially since one of the victims of Police brutality had a public profile and whose arrest had made headlines. Parallel construction is a fraudulent law enforcement process of building a parallel — or separate — evidentiary basis for a criminal investigation in order to conceal how an investigation actually began.
I contend the real investigation began following news that the media duo were booked, and the Police Counsel realized the Constabulary’s vulnerability, since the Police assaults started within 10 to 18 seconds of the greeting the defendants. Ergo, a parallel body of evidence was constructed to support a red herring trial.
Therefore, in this third installment of courtroom theatre, “SkyGate”, Snoopman shows how this retarded ‘case tree’ did not grow from a natural seed; but rather from a ‘red herring cutting’, from which grew a ‘special pleading stem’ into a ‘special pleading trunk’, that sprouted logically fallacious branches to sustain a brazen argument that could weather a budget courtroom’s fluorescent light.
These loudest and proudest logically fallacious branches were: drawing the wrong conclusion, using the wrong reasons, arguing from ignorance, omission of key evidence, misuse of a vague expression, manipulation of emotions, abusive ad hominem, and two wrongs; topped with a poisoning the well crown.
Yet, it is apparent that this retarded ‘case tree’ had grown poorly in arid soil watered with fallacies of missing evidence, since it seems it was disingenuous for the Police to only supply video from just two CCTV cameras. By stalling with the video evidence, the trial could delayed long enough to have it occur around election time. Or, as it turned out, later. Either way, to mount a counter case against Police, whether criminal or civil, or both, would require funds since even modest lawyers have bills.
This retarded ‘case tree’ also grew from the roots of the scapegoat archetype that is so ancient, it features in mythology; a fact that is an embarrassing indictment not only of New Zealand’s civilization within Western Civilization. But, also of humanity. Indeed, the ‘Forrest Law’ laid down with this verdict, in effect, endorses an evolutionary branch that might be called homo retardus.
Snoopman traces the origins of the scape-goating that occurred during the ‘Great Corona Hostage Crisis’ to the pandemic exercises scripted, designed and hosted by Johns Hopkins University. He shows how a pandemic simulation called Event 201 — that took place on October 18 2019, while the Wuhan outbreak was occurring — featured rhetoric about prosecuting people for producing ‘fake news’.
As Robert F. Kennedy Jr, found while writing his book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, there were 17 pandemic exercises before ‘Great Corona Hostage Crisis’ that involved hundreds of thousands of people, who were programmed to work like automated parts of a machine once a global pandemic was declared. Kennedy stated that all 17 pandemic exercises favored mass vaccinations as the primary solution. He also observed that border shutdowns, business closures and quarantining of the healthy were frequent pandemic script elements.
The scenarios, Kennedy said, discounted the efficacy of existing therapeutics, avoided mention of the value of exercise, sunshine and healthy diet, or ignored the effectiveness of immunity boosting supplements.
The calculus underpinning this ‘Red Herring Gunn Trial’ was that the Police assaults on Gunn and Clark could only be dealt with in a separate trial. Conspicuously, neither of the two TV networks covered the trial, since to do so would have exposed the Constabulary to large audiences. To cast Gunn as an anti-vaxxer on trial for assault would have been embarrassing for the Crown-owned Television New Zealand.
The prospect of the obligatory voice-over with Gunn as a former TVNZ news reader being aired on 1News would have required dialling up all the news filters described by the Propaganda Model developed by Noam Chomsky. A TVNZ would have drawn heavy flak if its newsroom had presented coverage of the trial in full scape-goating mode. Especially, since the nation would have had to be shown the CCTV footage of a momentary light touch, contrasted with both defendants being assaulted on their way to the Arrivals Lounge floor in 18 seconds flat.
All the while, the assaults by the police — who had escalated their encounter with the defendants in accordance with an unspecified ‘game plan’ to remove the media duo from the airport — were the ever-present subtext recorded on the court tapes, that are only released if the case is appealed.
Thus, it would appear conversations were had with the gate-keepers at TVNZ and Newshub to ensure they were both a no-show at the Manukau District Court during the ‘Red Herring Gunn Trial’.
In the aftermath of Forrest‘s ‘guilty Gunn‘ verdict, former Police Senior Constable, Daniel Picknell said on Reality Check Radio, it was important to stick up for people in the Freedom Community when they get picked on. Picknell believes the trial was politically motivated.
Indeed, Forrest appeared to read the runes in the Police Prosecution's malicious projection of scape-goating blame on Gunn with her suggestion in footnote 6 of her verdict, that a review of the Airport Bylaws might be required to ensure a repeat of the situation did not reoccur. The District Court judge — who was seconded from Wellington to South Auckland in May 2022 two weeks before Mr Ardern was replaced as Tokelau's Administrator — surmised the nature of the intended filming was definitely political.
The sentencing proceeding of Gunn is set down for September 6 at 11:45am.
ACCORDING TO THE LAW laid down by Judge Janey Louise Forrest — on Tuesday 21 May 2024 at the Manukau District Court in South Auckland — a touch to get attention is now a common assault in the New Zealand Realm.
This verdict arose out of a case that was designed to save face for the Police, Auckland Airport, and former New Zealand Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern. The prize of the case was an outcast media personality, who had been brutally assaulted by a senior constable stationed at Auckland Airport.
Ergo, the focus of the case was the assault charge against a former TVNZ news anchor, Liz Gunn.
Yet, this bogus focus was actually a red herring charge — as any private investigator who has read T. Edward Damer’s classic book, Attacking Faulty Reasoning: A Practical Guide to Fallacy-Free Arguments, would readily detect. As Professor Damer defined it, a red herring logical fallacy occurs when an arguer is, “[a]ttempting to hide the weakness of a position by drawing attention away from the real issue to a side issue.”
Professor Damer — whose book resulted from over a quarter of century workshops, debates, and lectures — explained that a red herring fallacy is used in an argument to deflect attention from the real point of the conflict to a different, perhaps, related point. Damer added, the red herring fallacy is deployed as a tactic to construct the appearance that the related issue is relevant to the argument at hand, as a means to avoid confronting the main point of criticism. My analysis of the logical fallacies proves a red herring trial occurred.
Forrest’s strange verdict in the strange trial of a seasoned independent media duo — some 15 moons after their spectacular arrests on February 25 2023, shocked most of the 45 mortals in the public gallery.
Gunn and her camerman, Jonathan Clark, who once worked for CNN and the Wall Street Journal, had faced charges for trespass, and resisting arrest. Gunn (64) was found guilty of assault in the ‘judge-alone’ trial.
The charges of trespass were dismissed on the trial’s first day, before 4pm, by Judge Forrest.
In her verdict, Judge Forrest — formerly of Wellington and appointed to the bench two years prior — found both defendants not guilty of resisting arrest. On these two charges, the public gallery cheered.
But, when Forrest announced she found Gunn guilty of assault, the remaining words of the judge’s statement about the conviction were lost in the cussing ‘woods’, as the gallery expressed their instant dissenting opinion in colorful language worthy of graphic political-thriller novel speech bubbles.
The loudest, politest dissenting opinion from the public gallery — comprising 45 humans — found the judge to be “corrupt”, and called out “what a joke”, “disgusting”, “shame” and the universal show-stopper, “boo”, as she left with her bipedal legs intact.
My eyes drifted across to where the jury would have otherwise been sitting if the charges amounted to two years jail time for either of the co-accused. The exiled magical creatures from the Shrek Universe were gone; evidently miffed that Snoopman paid them no mention in his coverage of the trial’s day 2 ‘sequel’.
Ironically, the ‘elephant in the courtroom‘ — who lacked such showy egoism — had been joined by Caroline Williams of the newspaper chain that fittingly goes by the bland brand-name Stuff; as well as George Block of the New Zealand Herald, which was founded by Freemason Bro. William Chrisholm Wilson to further the masonic conspiracy to wrest the fertile Waikato region from the rebellious natives; and also by the Herald’s sardonic court-beat reporter Steve Braunias, who is better known as a satirist — but still less known than Montana‘s Governor. Standing next to them was Stuff photographer, Lawrence Smith, with a big camera.
The Herald and Stuff framed Gunn as an “anti-vaccine campaigner” and an “anti-vaccine activist”, respectively.
The media’s framing elements — such as headlines, images and potent scape-goating labels — produce emotional contagions of fear, frustration, impatience, intolerance, anxiety and anger-programmed neuropeptides via their audiences’ hypothalamus organs, which is located deep in the human brain above the pituitary gland and links the hormonal endocrine system to the nervous system. To uncritically consume the media cartel’s product is to miss the deeper meaning that underpins news events.
Such stigmatizing treatments produce scapegoats — whether they are persons, groups or organizations — that become targets on which to project blame, animosity and fear, as P.J. Schackner found while researching his study, “The Archetype of the Scapegoat” at San Francisco’s Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center.
In the drama of the telling, stigmatizing treatments, as well as valorizing treatments that fawn at the status of the in-group, tend to be very effective at obscuring the causes of news events, as I pointed out in my groundbreaking masters thesis on the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) — “It’s the financial oligarchy, stupid” — to figure out the means, modus operandi and motives of the Anglo-American Oligarchy.
Forrest opted to not to read out her 12-page judgment. Mr Braunias claimed Forrest skipped reading her decision to avoid a riot. The ”old Pākehā mob” in the public gallery wasn’t the 30 he guessed, and there were at least two Māori.
In his contrarian article, Braunias agreed with Forrest’s description that Gunn’s touch was a “hostile act”, although he also felt it was just that the charges for resisting arrest were dropped since both defendants were informed they were under arrest once the two constables applied “maximum force.” Indeed, on May 7, Senior Constable Erich Postlewaight revealed to the Court they had a game plan to remove them from the airport.
In spite of defence lawyer, Matthew Hague, unbraiding all three witnesses for the prosecution, to the extent that the judge was compelled to dismiss the trespass and resistance charges, Forrest clung to a legal twig that she retrieved from a ‘new growth’ limb, when she rebutted the defence’s case citation, Thompson v Police [2012]. The Judge asserted, in essence, that even a light touch — equivalent to a cat paw on the owner’s sleeping eyelid — can still be regarded as common assault if the exchange is hostile, and therefore lacking in consent.
But, to justify the exchange as ”hostile” that took place between Liz Gunn and Anna Kolodeznaya, a security officer at Auckland Airport — Judge Forrest cast all blame on the defendant, who the Airport’s SkyGate security official identified as a ”reporter”. Yet, Forrest failed to ask the prosecution’s lawyer, Jerome Beveridge, if this case would occur at all, if the defendants had been filming for Amnesty International, incognito?
In pointing her finger of blame at Gunn, the judge enjoined herself in the activation of the scape-goat archetype that had been in train since Kolodeznaya radioed to have Gunn and Clark trespassed. This archetypal scape-goat mechanism was carried on by the Police, and by Team Prosecution, all the way to the Court. Kolodesnaya did not radio that she had been assaulted because she did not regard the touch as an assault.
One supporter of the Patelesio family — who was at the Arrivals Lounge was Dr René De Monchy MD — moved into help Ms Gunn. The psychiatrist and former physician had been standing nearby when the fracas with Police occurred. The former medical doctor said he was about one and a half to two metres away from Gunn, when he called out to Postlewaight, “You can’t do that.” Postlewaight had her arm up behind her back at the level of her shoulder blade, which would be very painful, he said.
“I can’t do my own bra up,” the former TVNZ Late Edition One News anchor told the Court on May 7.
In response to Dr De Monchy rebuking the Senior Constable while he was evidentially assaulting Gunn, Postlewaight replied, “You’ll be arrested if you stay.” Section 48 of the Crimes Act 1961, allows for the defence of another during crimes of assault.
The Auckland Airport’s SkyGate Security Team Coordinator, Anna Kolodeznaya, who was standing nearby in a hi-vis vest, led Dr De Monchy away to some seats, rather than help Gunn, then aged 63.
The Police Prosecution, who were slow to release the two CCTV videos, as well as to return to Clark his camera card, presented a case that tried to ignore or deny or downplay the counter-evidence. It was obvious to everyone in court that the Police Prosecution’s three witnesses were on the back foot when confronted with CCTV footage that had been synchronized with Mr Clark’s sound recording.
Previously, on Tuesday 7 May 2024, the defence had pulled the ‘keystone’ from the ‘archway’ of the New Zealand Crown’s case against a former TVNZ news anchor and a former CNN cameraman. That keystone was two counts of trespass against reporter, Liz Gunn, and her cameraman, Jonathan Clark, who were placed under arrest with spectacular speed in just 18 seconds at Auckland International Airport last year.
Senior Constable Erich Postlewaight told the Court that the call-out occurred because the Airport Company wanted individuals removed from the premises since they had been trying to interview staff and had assaulted a staff member. Postlewaight — who had swaggered into Court after lunching with the other Police witness, Constable Robett Luong — said they talked to Airport security. But, he couldn’t remember the discussion exactly, adding the “game-plan” was to remove them from the airport.
Evidently, Postlewaight didn’t have time to refresh his memory with a Police report or his affidavit prior to his court appearance. Perhaps he was too busy practicing his swaggering walk; he seemed to have been inspired to personify the inversion of Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry character, by picking on a lady past 60.
In the witness box, Postlewaight watched the Airport CCTV video, which revealed at 18 seconds after the Senior Constable greeted them, both defendants were down on the Arrivals Lounge floor and told they were under arrest.
In part 2 of her series about Gunn and Clark’s coverage of the Patelesio family and the media duo’s own ordeal at the Airport, headlined, “Is New Zealand Hovering on the Brink of a Police State?”, Marry Hobbs, recounted how the former TVNZ host repeatedly asked Senior Constable Postlewaight about the legality of requesting that they needed to leave the Arrivals Lounge. Hobbs reported that Gunn first asked Postlewaight by what law he was acting under, upon his request for them to leave.
And she asked two more times, amid being contorted by the thuggish constable. On her third repetition of the question, Hobbs reported Postlewaight say, “I don’t have to tell you.” And Gunn asked, “Since when, do you not have to tell me the Law that you’re acting under?” Hobbs stated, that “Liz reports that he said, ‘Since forever.’”
Snoopman heard Gunn’s recount this ordeal in a podcast, shortly after it occurred. He remembers listening to it while doing domestic chores and looking at his phone upon hearing the ‘Since forever’ line, and laughing out loud. “The cop sounds like a minor villain in a corny graphic novel,“ read Snoopman’s thunking bubble as he swept the kitchen floor.
Lawyer for the defence, Matthew Hague, metaphorically slugged his client’s chief accuser in the guts, when he stated for the Court, “Liz Gunn pulled away from you, because she was in pain.”
“I don’t know, I can’t know that,” the entitled blue-uniformed thug replied.
A palpable murmur of scorn could be heard from the public gallery. Postlewaight’s accomplice was of the same authoritarian mind.
Snoopman contends this disingenuous claim was a willful avoidance consistent with a structure of contrived ignorance, to support the prosecution’s ‘case tree’, which had grown poorly in arid soil watered with fallacies of missing evidence.
Disturbingly, Constable Robett Luong, who spoke with the wooden-ness of a non-player character in a video game, said “Considering all my options, I considered empty hand tactics reasonable at the time.” Contradicting himself, Luong claimed he didn’t know what caused Clark to fall to the floor after telling the court he applied a force of “5 out 10” with both hands to each of Clark’s shoulders. Clark said he was swung-tackled to the floor.
The Court found on May 7 that Airport SkyGate security staff and the Police failed in their due diligence to establish the purpose of the filming, and therefore whether the media duo’s activities were legally permissible.
At the afternoon session, beginning 3:40pm, defence lawyer, Matthew Hague, again applied for all charges to be dismissed, claiming the Police evidence failed to satisfy section 147 of the Criminal Procedures Act 2011; therefore there was no case to answer. Judge Forrest had called a 15 minute recess.
The recess turned into 25 minutes.
When she returned, Forrest dismissed the trespass charges, but she continued the ‘Muppet Show’, keeping two charges for resisting arrest and the one charge of assault in play in the court theatre.
The scapegoat is stigmatized, while the dominant “in-group” that society identifies with is framed as noble and guiltless. Social unity is promoted through projecting existential anxiety on to a chosen object blame, as Schackner stated in his master thesis, “The Archetype of the Scapegoat“.
The logic of the mob acts in unity with the mimetic logic of scape-goating, since to stigmatize is inherently a learned behavioural mimicry that belies human monkeys whose personal evolution has stagnated.
The calculus underpinning this ‘Red Herring Gunn Trial’ was that the Police assaults on Gunn and Clark could only be dealt with in a separate trial. By stalling with the video evidence, the trial could delayed long enough to have it occur around election time, or as it turned out, later. Either way, to mount a counter case against Police, whether criminal or civil, or both, would require funds since even modest lawyers have bills.
All the while, the assaults by the police — who had escalated their encounter with the defendants in accordance with an unspecified ‘game plan’ to remove the media duo from the Airport — was the ever-present subtext in the court tapes, that are only released if the case is appealed.
Judge Forrest ‘failed’ to ask herself critical counter-questions, which would have cut through the ‘wild mangled undergrowth’ served up by the Police Prosecution.
What if the Police subsequently found after the arrest, that they had reeled in Amnesty International filming incognito, would their counsel have advised proceeding to prosecution?
Or, what if it was Lorde — who’d realized she had duped into lending her support to the Vaxathon — who showed up with a big camera and microphone in support of Gunn’s call to greet the Patelesio’s at the Airport Arrivals hall?
Or what if the former TVNZ news anchor in question had been Judie Bailey, would the Police Counsel have pursued the prosecution?
In other words, because Liz Gunn had used her public profile in October 2021 to take a public stance against the Ardern Government’s draconian vaccine mandates to blackmail New Zealanders into taking Pfizer’s experimental mRNA-LNP platform injecticides — the outcast media personality could be scape-goated.
The limited coverage of the news media heightened the sense of drama with fear frames that served to obscure the internal inconsistencies of a ‘rescue’ master frame. Master frames work as over-arching mechanisms to gain support for specific political goals and to undermine opposition.
The ‘rescue’ master frame’s strictures require the obfuscation of in-depth reportage. The status quo was rescued, and the Establishment breathed easy. The scape-goating of another dissident public voice was certified as blameworthy.
Prosecution’s ‘Case Tree’ Grew with Special Pleading
In her 2007 book, The End of America, Naomi Wolf laid out 10 steps or features to create an authoritarian police state, or a totalitarian society. Of these 10, the most obvious element in the Gunn and Clark Case is Step 6: Arbitrary Detention and Release of Citizens. More subtly, since Gunn is a low-hanging fruit in the dissident media-scape, Step 7: Target Key Individuals, and Step 8: Restrict and Control the Press — are apparent in this case; and is on a continuum of scape-goating cases since the Great Corona Hostage Crisis commenced.
As we have seen, Judge Forrest made no criticism of Airport Security, including Ms Kolodeznaya — who had been in the job for 12 years — for failing to establish whether or not it was a commercial enterprise, or what exactly was the purpose of the filming, and why exactly they felt the media duo were in breach of the Auckland International Airport By-laws Approval Order 1989. Indeed, Forrest got thoroughly ‘lost’ in the logically flawed woods when she blamed Gunn for Kolodeznaya’s obstinate avoidance to answer variations of the same simple question that ‘the reporter’ kept repeating: what is the law you are applying?
Yet, Forrest transferred blame from a public-private official (and other watching Airport security staff) onto two New Zealand-born citizens — who were standing their ground. That Forrest was ‘lost’ in the legal woods, was of no surprise to Snoopman, since a structure of contrived ignorance that had been set with cement had hardened in the weeks before the first hearing of March 23 2023 had occurred.
Forrest ‘failed‘ to see to the Airport security staff, including Kolodeznaya, had made a commonplace logically fallacious decision, that of drawing the wrong conclusion — as any jurist possessing a copy of Professor T. Edward Damer’s book, Attacking Faulty Reasoning: A Practical Guide to Fallacy-Free Arguments, would know.
According to Professor Damer’s definition, drawing the wrong conclusion, is drawing a conclusion other than the one supported by the evidence presented in the argument. This is a fallacy of irrelevant premise.
Since Kolodesnaya, and other Airport security staff, assumed a big video camera equated with commercial filming, and since Gunn said she didn’t need a permit when Kolodesnaya queried her about whether the media duo had permission — because they were filming friends as a voluntary activity — security drew the wrong conclusion.
Indeed, Kolodeznaya presented accusations based on special pleading from the moment she radioed for support to have Gunn and Clark ejected for trespass — as any newsroom possessing a copy of Professor T. Edward Damer’s book, Attacking Faulty Reasoning, could readily identify. Indeed, the prosecution’s entire ‘case tree’ grew with additions to the ‘special pleading trunk’, like fake branches seeking carbon neutral lighting.
Damer defined special pleading within the category of missing evidence fallacies, as:
”Applying principles, rules, or criteria to another person while failing or refusing to apply them to oneself or to a situation that is of personal interest, without providing sufficient evidence to support such an exception.”
— T. Edward Damer (2009). Attacking Faulty Reasoning: A Practical Guide to Fallacy-Free Arguments
Despite her 12 years in the job, Kolodeznaya failed to establish, accept, or believe Gunn’s explanation that their enterprise, FreeNZ Media, was a donation-funded non-profit venture, which meant the media duo did not require special permission to film. Ms Kolodeznaya also could not separate her personal interest about not being photographed, or filmed or recorded, from her paid role as a security official.
Yet, Kolodeznaya used her authority to radio to have the pair ejected for trespass — and not assault.
Moreover, Kolodeznaya admitted in Court that the Airport security have no authority to request people’s names, nor their identity. Ergo, in this Catch-22 situation, she could not properly establish the legality of ejecting the media duo, yet she escalated the problem to the Police — without regard to the Bill of Rights Act 1990.
In these circumstances, Gunn was declared guilty of common assault in fallacious red herring proceedings.
The passion of the gallery was palpable. Clark had remained in the dock with Gunn, despite being free to go, while Forrest went through various procedural matters that reminded Snoopman of the phrase about the ‘banality of evil’.
They’d held hands throughout the verdict, but perhaps sweat made it awkward as the judge brokered arrangements for Gunn’s fate. As George Block for the NZ Herald reported in an article headlined, ”Liz Gunn assault trial: Judge finds anti-vaccination campaigner guilty of assault, releases damning judgment”:
“Hague indicated he intended to seek a discharge without conviction at sentencing. Common assault in the Summary Offences Act carries a maximum term of imprisonment of six months or a fine of up to $4000.”Hague — whose hi-definition digital pixel make-up-less poker-face was beamed in from the Wellington Political Economy — could be seen checking his diary to affirm he could make the September 6 sentencing date.
Reporter Caroline Williams wrote “in her full judgment released to Stuff, Judge Forrest said it was accepted that Gunn had touched airport security worker Anna Kolodeznaya on the arm with the purpose of attracting her attention.”
Gunn’s action was “entirely self-serving and for the purposes of engaging in an ongoing verbal confrontation with the complainant while capturing the encounter on camera,” wrote Forrest — in her final judgment released to Snoopman News (by the Manukau District Court, 72 hours after it had been xeroxed for the Herald/Stuff duopoly of New Zealand’s market-dominating media cartel.
Ironically, any media crew would have done the same. The number one rule for field filming is: record encounters, never give up your gear and let the lawyers duke it out. Judge Forrest ‘failed’ to ask herself counter questions.
Would the exchange have been as hostile if Clark were dressed as a priest and Gunn as a nun? Since Kolodeznaya perceived the pair’s filming was commercial, she believed she had jurisdictional authority to eject them, despite her refusal to cite the Auckland Airport Bylaw. Religion is all about belief — and relies on donations too.
In footnote 6, the judge claimed she was not obligated to determine whether the filming and recording breached the Airport’s Bylaws. Forrest added, “On the face of it, because the filming was not “commercial” it would appear not to be prohibited.” Ergo, she could avoid having to deal with Kolodeznaya’s special pleading, and, in effect, enjoined her pretentiously courtly self in the obvious conspiracy to frame Gunn, as I show.
Such enjoining is known in the literature as furtherance of conspiracy — as any newsroom with a copy of Neal Katyal’s Yale Law Journal paper, “Conspiracy Theory” will know.
The judge proceeded to say the filming was “clearly for a political purpose and included interviews.”
Yet, Forrest opined that the bylaws might need “reviewing to avoid a similar situation in the future.”
This suggestion for a law review is intriguing, particularly since the lawyer for Team Police Prosecution, Jerome Beveridge, insisted that the Patelesio family’s plight was irrelevant to the Gunn & Clark case. Because — the case tree’s ‘special pleading trunk’ did not grow from a natural seed; but rather from a ‘red herring cutting’.
Thus, in a footnote — that the duopoly newspaper chains of New Zealand’s media cartel ‘failed’ to report — the scape-goating logic inherent to the ‘case tree’ was advanced towards its logically flawed conclusive capitalization: a law change.
Gunn had told the SkyGate security officer they were there to film the arrival of friends they’d “helped get off of an island”. The Patelesio family, who were emigrating to New Zealand, had been persecuted in Tokelau and placed under house arrest for 13 months, amid a ‘vaccination’ drive on the watch of Jacinda Ardern’s father, David Ross Ardern, who was Administrator (2018-2022, for 10 of those cruel moons.
Thus, on the watch of Tokelau’s highest official, who had participated in the infamous Dawn Raids that targeted Pacific Islanders for ‘overstaying’ in the 1970s, the Prime Minister’s father had overseen the vaccine mandates. And on Jacinda Ardern’s watch, the HMNZS Wellington deployed the Pfizer shots to Tokelau and other islands, like it were a psy-op to condition New Zealanders. The same day that Jacinda Ardern apologized for the Dawn Raids — without mentioning her father’s involvement — the house arrest of the Patelesio family began: August 3 2021.
Such parallel timing in chess moves is consistent with the application of game theory, whereby key players perform ’hostage exchange’ rituals to covertly communicate they are advancing a strategic program. Failure to ’post hostages’ can result in defections on the next move, with swift punishments.
America’s development of game theory occurred during the Cold War to stabilize the power structures of the Russian Empire and the American Empire by mitigating the chances that the world’s two superpowers would engage in nuclear war. Subsequently, game theory migrated to the corporate world, including banking.
According to Investopedia, game theory has wide application, including the fields of evolutionary biology, psychology, economics, commerce, politics, and war. Ergo, the scape-goating of defectors was modernized.
Ironically, Forrest had been seconded from Wellington, the capital city of New Zealand, for her appointment as a Manukau District Court judge on May 12 2022. This appointment by the Attorney General occurred two weeks before Ross Ardern was replaced with a new Tokelau Administrator.
Ironically, the Patelesio family had been helped by a volunteer team of lawyers, whose efforts were publicized by Gunn’s voluntary, donation-funded FreeNZ Media. Ross Ardern was also reportedly involved in meetings with the Patelesio family, and had evidently used colourful language to tell them they were putting others at risk, instead of sticking up for their human rights as Tokelau’s top official, said lawyer Darin Cassidy in a podcast.
Forrest described the interaction between Kolodeznaya and Gunn as “confrontational and hostile” on Gunn’s part, continued Ms Williams for the newspaper blandly branded like it advertises hoarders’ clutter.
“This is not a situation,” the decision stated, “where one person is simply politely attempting to get the attention of another.”
“The interaction that had and continued to take place between the Ms Gunn and Ms Kolodeznaya could only be described as confrontational and hostile (on the part of Ms Gunn),” typed J. L. Forrest. This judgment adds to the mounting pile of evidence concerning police state formation, that may inspire a sequel to Sleeping Dogs.
“In summary, Ms Gunn was arrogant, rude, overbearing, and offensive in her manner in dealing with the complainant. The touch of the complainant’s arm in those circumstances, and where Ms Gunn was trying to divert the complainant’s attention from her co-defendant (who continued to film the interaction) was a hostile act.” — Judge Jane Forest, Manukau District Court 21 May 2024
Forrest described Gunn’s touch of Kolodeznaya’s arm as “a hostile act” — albeit at a “very low level” — “done without consent, which caused her to flinch and pull away.”
The Judge went on to say:
“In the above circumstances, Ms Gunn cannot have had an honest belief that there was implied consent for the touch, and to suggest that she did is, in my view, disingenuous. My view is further confirmed by the fact that notwithstanding the complainant had clearly stated “do not touch me’, Ms Gunn then touched her again a second time a short time later in the interaction.””I do not accept that Ms Gunn had an honest belief that there was implied consent for the assault. To the contrary, she acted with complete and total disregard for social norms and for Ms Kolodeznaya.”
Yet, the same could be said of Ms Kolodeznaya. The SkyGate Security official was arrogant, rude and hostile by not only telling the media duo to stop doing, in essence, their valid work as volunteer rebels with a cause. She also told off a bystander, or supporter, for taking a picture of her, saying she didn’t give him permission. Judge Forrest failed (or avoided) to ask(ing) the SkyGate Security Officer why she thought she was entitled to ask the bystander/supporter to see his phone and ask him to delete the photo(s).
After all, she is a security officer at an airport that has a public-facing Arrivals Hall, where anyone with a cellphone can shoot video in 4K resolution. Moreover, her employer, Auckland International Airport Limited, boasted in 2019 to the NZ Herald that with its 1000 CCTV cameras, the Airport Company can track any passenger’s movements through the airport.
Furthermore, the Airport Company ’privacy policy’ is a euphemistic declaration for mass surveillance of any mortals who step into the Airport’s spidery web. Ironically, Auckland Airport claims the right to record conversations and imagery of visitors to the Airport. Yet, SkyGate security official, Ms Kolodeznaya, bemoaned her person being filmed, photographed and her voice being recorded by FreeNZMedia and a bystander.
Forrest neither asked the SkyGate Security Officer, nor the prosecution, to provide an explanation about why there had only been footage provided from two CCTV cameras for the case. Forrest failed to use her query power on this point throughout the case, since there was no close profile angle that could have settled the matter of who was in who’s personal space. By avoiding to call out this obvious element of missing evidence, Judge Forrest ironically allowed the prosecution to present a case on the basis of arguing from ignorance.
The apparently suppressed profile angles of the CCTV footage would also likely have shown the extent of the Police violence meted out on Clark and Gunn. Of the two, the injuries sustained by Gunn were the worst.
If Judge Janey Forrest had a copy of Professor T. Edward Damer’s Attacking Faulty Reasoning: A Practical Guide to Fallacy-Free Arguments, she ‘might’ have realized the logic underpinning this possible missing CCTV evidence. Oddly, Forrest claimed it was unusual the incident was captured with CCTV. This apparent missing footage exemplified the flawed reasoning of arguing from ignorance, which Professor Damer defined:
“Arguing from ignorance is a logically fallacious position where either the opponents fail to supply counter-evidence due to their own inability, or because those who control the institutional resources refuse to supply the counter-evidence.” — T. Edward Damer. (2009). Attacking Faulty Reasoning.
In other words, it would appear the Team Police Prosecution refused to supply the most damning CCTV evidence that would likely have otherwise assisted the defence’s rebuttals with valuable counter-evidence.
This apparent omission of key evidence went curiously unquestioned by Forrest, despite both defendants raising the issue during their testimony — since their character was under very, very, very, very, very public attack. It would appear Team Police withheld other CCTV camera footage — lest their red herring case collapsed.
Such behaviour potentially exposes the Police involved to prosecution if they presented a fraud before the courts on this point, since it would be a breach of section 240 of the Crimes Act 1961, which deals with crimes of deceit. This particular issue may also expose the Crown Law Office to prosecution for allowing such a possible fraud to proceed to prosecution, since it is illegal for Crown employees to lie to the Courts.
The apparent refusal to supply all of the relevant camera footage worked as a ‘screening action’ to set-up the subsequent intended ‘unwitting misdeeds’ of two independent media being convicted.
Snoopman refers the ‘N.Z. Court of Informed Public Opinion’ to the work of a US litigator, David Luban, who has written about how to detect structures of contrived ignorance; he describes screening actions and unwitting misdeeds.
Screening actions work very effectively to sponsor subsequent ‘unwitting misdeeds’, as David Luban discussed more generally in his 2007 book, Legal Ethics and Human Dignity, and modelled for his paper “Contrived Ignorance”, published in the Georgetown Law Journal in 1999.
Luban argued the case for modelling the “Structure of Contrived Ignorance” by viewing screening actions and so-called unwitting misdeeds as a unitary whole rather than separated by time-frames. He proposed viewing the version of the self that wittingly performed screening actions to preserve her own oblivion as the principle actor, while the agent is the later self at the time of the unwitting misdeed, who effectively ratifies the earlier self’s choice to compartmentalize, or screen off, potential knowledge of wrongdoing.
In making his point that, “in criminal law, wilful ignorance is grounds for conviction, rather than acquittal,” Luban was in essence, laying out the gaps in catching and convicting group enterprises that contrive ignorance. A quote he drew from a U.S. trial seems apt for this case study of airport authoritarianism and police brutality:
“Ostriches … are not merely careless birds.”
— United States v. Giovannetti, 919 F.2d 1223, 1228 (7th Cir. 1990). As cited in: David Luban (1999). “Contrived Ignorance”, Georgetown University Law Center.
Judge Janey Forrest stated she was not obligated to determine whether the filming and recording breached the Airport’s Bylaws. This occurred because once the trespass charges fell away, she did not need to satisfy herself about the validity, or otherwise, of the accusation that the filming was commercial.
Yet, in characterizing the exchange as hostile as her benchmark for assault, Judge Forrest had blamed Liz Gunn entirely, to essentially lobby for a law review to stymie political dissent in public facing spaces of Airports.
By pointing her finger of blame at Gunn, Forrest had continued the activation of the scapegoat mechanism in play since the moment that Gunn’s arrest became nationwide news fodder. Because, on the point of Forrest’s determination that Gunn was the one who was being antagonistic, the judge made the fallacy of using the wrong reasons — as any jury with a copy Damer’s book, Attacking Faulty Reasoning, could’ve seen.
Professor Damer defined using the wrong reasons as attempting to support a claim with reasons other than the reasons appropriate to the claim.
In justifying her decision that Gunn’s attention-getting touch was in the context of a hostile exchange, and that this hostility was all authored by Gunn, Forrest drew upon the wrong reasons to arrive at her guilty verdict.
Forrest had to decide if the charge of assault was intended as a constructive social gesture to keep Kolodesnaya communicating with Gunn, or whether Gunn was simply being aggressive. But, Forrest ignored the correct evidence. Gunn continued to bring back Kolodesnaya back to the circumstance of the the filming, and the need to nip bullying authoritarianism in the bud, and the same question: what law was being applied?
“The law is private area,” answered Kolodesnaya. She didn’t elaborate either because she was stubborn, did not know or could not recall it, or because her training stipulated to avoid answering such questions. Whatever the reason, Forrest avoided this glaring point because otherwise she would have to attribute at least a considerable portion of blame to Kolodesnaya, SkyGate Security, the Shift Manager and the Airport Company.
If Kolodesnaya had said she was applying section 6 of the Auckland International Airport Approval Order 1989, pertaining to commercial filming, this might have furthered the discussion about the nature of the filming.
The SkyGate Security Coordinator’s answer was, in fact, a logically fallacious misuse of a vague expression, because the Airport is at least 22% owned by central and local government institutions. Moreover, Kolodesnaya showed no regard for the Bill of Rights. Furthermore, she immediately sought to challenge a bystander for allegedly taking her image, thereby continuing her stance that she could make a scene.
Moreover, Forrest ignored the evidence of the SkyGate Security Coordinator’s bossiness in her attempts to get Jonathan Clark to stop filming, as well as a bystander to delete the photo, or recording, of her person.
The Judge avoided the jurisdictional issue of the overbearing Airport official, since the evidence did not reflect well on the Auckland International Airport Company. Although Kolodesnaya might not like her image being taken, and as a private citizen or resident, she could reasonably request people to not photograph or film her, she was not acting as a private person — even in the eyes on the one-eyed law.
Indeed, security staff forfeit that right everytime they are on duty for an Airport Company, that also conducts mass surveillance. Ergo, Kolodesnaya’s protesting was in fact the logically flawed argument of special pleading.
This bullying as special pleading, deflected her attention from critically thinking about the answers given to her, which could have cleared up the fact that Kolodesnaya had zero evidence to support her drawing the wrong conclusion about the nature of the filming. Sanctimoniously, Kolodesnaya claimed she felt intimidated by Gunn, and asserted that Gunn was in her face. Yet, it was Kolodesnaya who approached Gunn and therefore decided at what distance the two would interact. Gunn claimed Kolodesnaya had got in her space.
Furthermore, Forrest avoided referring to the Bill of Rights that Hague had mentioned — which neither Kolodesnaya nor any of the Airport staff had any apparent regard for — because if the judge had, she would have been compelled to explain the harassment of two private citizens, who were treated like self-serving liars.
Snoopman contends that Forrest’s remark in footnote 6 — that the filming was clearly of a political nature — gave the game away about the purpose of the case. And Forrest’s prejudice about the political cause, and about how political dissent needed to be confined actually unveiled her authoritarian ideology, since she had said that people needed to obey authority even when those in authority are wrong, during the lawyers’ summations.
Ergo, if Judge Forrest had opted to read out her 12-page logically flawed decision, the media would’ve been compelled to report the howls from the public gallery — especially when she arrived at footnote 6.
Thus, to cover for the incompetence, or stubbornness, or obfuscation of Kolodesnaya, and the malice of Airport Security, the Police constables and the Police top brass for all blowing a touch out of proportion into a nationally-publicized alleged assault, Judge Forrest did not set aside her prejudices — as she claimed.
On the face of it, Kolodesnaya assumed the filming was for a commercial purpose, and didn’t comprehend the backstory, and evidently had no knowledge of the political nature of the filming.
The importance of capturing the scene of the Patelesio family was important to Gunn and Clark, and their audience, as well as their rights to freedom of expression, association and assembly etcetera. That is why they stood their ground until they were forced to the floor. Forrest’s dismissive attitude toward their legitimately firm and fair defence of their rights was essential to her logically flawed framing of Gunn as “arrogant, rude, overbearing and offensive.” Kermit la Frog would have sighed at this muppetly illogical reasoning.
Indeed, Forrest ignored the evidence supporting the incompetence, or stubbornness, or obfuscation of the Airport’s SkyGate security official (and other Airport staff), that led Gunn to touch Kolodesnaya’s arm to get her attention.
Therefore, the judge sided with Team Police Prosecution’s ad hominem fallacy of abusive ad hominem, while adding her own fallacy in footnote 6, poisoning the well. An abusive ad hominem is defined by Professor T. Edward Damer as one where the arguer is found to be, “Attacking one’s opponent in a personal or abusive way as a means of ignoring or discrediting his or her criticism or argument.”
The lawyer for the Police Prosecution, Mr Beveridge, had honed in on Gunn referring to Kolodesnaya as a ”real Nazi” after the SkyGate Security Coordinator had radioed to have the media duo trespassed and had walked off get the Trespass Book, while Police were called by other Airport security staff.
In effect, Gunn had presented a ‘slippery slope’ argument to Kolodesnaya, by referencing how freedoms were lost incrementally in Germany. Beveridge was angling at Gunn being antagonistic. He accused her of escalating the situation when she spoke to another security officer at the Help Desk after Kolodesnaya said with sanctimonious exacerbation, “I’m stepping back”, before walking away. Gunn referenced Nazi Germany within earshot of Kolodesnaya, who was standing nearby, as she laid out her position for filming at the Airport.
In this way, Beveridge personalised the Prosecution’s argument to deflect attention from the evidence. In doing so, the lawyer for the prosecution presented a two wrongs fallacy, which Damer defines as, “[r]ejecting a criticism of one’s argument or actions by accusing one’s critic or others of thinking or acting in a similar way.”
Beveridge committed this two wrongs fallacy to deflect attention from the fact that Airport Security Staff, and Ms Kolodesnaya, had drawn the wrong conclusion by equating a camera’s size with commercial photography.
The Manukau District Court judge ‘failed’ to reject, or avoided rejecting, the Prosecution’s argument since it was Kolodesnaya, and possibly other Airport Security Staff, who were being authoritarian at the moment that the alleged assault had taken place, and had run-roughshod over the Bill of Rights Act 1990.
Judge Forrest also ignored Ms Kolodesnaya’s voluntary admission to the Court that she did not know they were a volunteer group, filming a family associated covid anti-vaccine content. This remark — which drew scoffing laughter from the public gallery — not only revealed that the SkyGate Security Officer believed the authoritarian narrative that high-uptake of mass vaccinations across U.N. member nations were the pathway for citizenries to ‘win back’ freedoms. But, it also was an admission that she had not done her job properly.
Forrest essentially took the cue of the lawyer for the prosecution, Jerome Beveridge, who clutched at legal straws.
In his summing up, Beveridge argued that the Police can’t be held criminally liable for their actions, if in the course of their duty they believe are right. With this telling faux pa, Beveridge’s overt plea was the logically fallacious argument of special pleading. The two police constables were not on trial for assault.The give-away to the authoritarian judge’s hidden agenda came with her suggestion in footnote 6 that a review of the Airport Bylaws may be needed. Forrest remarked that the nature of the filming was political.
By this observation, she inferred that it might be prudent to rewrite the bylaw so that non-commercial filming with a political focus could be restricted by stipulating a permit or license, for non-accredited media. Thus, in effect, Forrest was suggesting that repeats of the situation could be avoided in the future by further activating Step 8: Restrict and Control the Press, as identified by Naomi Wolf, to advance police state formation.
In making her remark that the nature of the filming was political, and adding that a law review may be required to avoid a similar situation occurring in the future, Forrest committed the ad hominem fallacy of poisoning the well. As any public gallery sharing a copy of the seminal book, Attacking Faulty Reasoning, could readily see, Professor Damer defined poisoning the well as, “Rejecting a criticism or argument presented by another person because of his or her personal circumstances or improper motives.”
After all, Forrest opined in her judgy decision that Gunn’s behaviour during the encounter with Kolodesnaya was “self-serving” because the reporter held the lapel microphone at about neck or chin level to capture clear sound of the verbal exchange. Yet, people have a right to record the conversations they are in, just as the press have a right to record the encounters they have, particularly when they those invested with authority, or power, don’t or won’t do their jobs properly and can’t or won’t respect human rights.
Ironically, the audio recording of the encounter became admissible evidence in court, and proved the trespass and resisting arrest charges were not only unwarranted.
But also, that neither the Airport’s SkyGate Security nor the Police had followed their own protocols, nor the Airport Bylaw, while they trashed the Bill of Rights. Thus, Judge Forrest decided in favour of the prosecution’s special pleading on the point that an independent reporter going about her lawful business should obey authority even when they are wrong. According to the ‘Forrest Law’, Gunn should’ve submissively stopped the filming, stop recording sound, and given up the right to capture the verbal exchange, while Forrest also used the evidentiary fact of that audio recording as a reason to claim Gunn, in her role as a reporter, was being entirely self-serving and therefore provocative — in spite of finding the audio recording critical in proving the trespass and resisting arrest charges were invalid. Ironically, with this ‘Forrest Law’, the judge got lost in the Fallacy Woods since she ‘failed’ to see the entire ‘case tree‘ had metaphorically grown with a ‘Special Pleading Trunk‘.In this way, because the ‘Forrest Law’ in essence advised in footnote 6 that un-permitted political filming was a problem and the judge in effect suggested a law review to stymie such political dissent, she was in fact practicing in accordance with her detectable authoritarian ideology. Thus, the ‘Forrest Decision’ has set down in common law, arrived at the Manukau District Court, to carry on the loss of freedoms by incrementalism, particularly since March 2020, that have been observed by those New Zealanders who’ve gone through political puberty by growing their political balls or political ovaries (as the case may be).
This is the very point that Gunn was making to Kolodesnaya about how Nazi regime began with taking away rights.
Thus, I believe it is clear that Judge Forrest avoided questioning the three Police Prosecution witnesses about what consideration, if any, they gave to the Bill of Rights. This avoidance, I contend was a screening action to set-up the subsequent unwitting misdeed that Gunn would be found guilty of assault.
I contend the Auckland Airport Company and the New Zealand Police breached: section 14, Freedom of Expression; 16, Freedom of Peaceful Assembly; 17, Freedom of Association; 18, Freedom of Movement; 19, Freedom from Discrimination; 20, Rights of Minorities; 21, Unreasonable Search and Seizure; 22, Liberty of Person.
If Judge Forrest had acknowledged these rights, she could not have concluded that the “hostile exchange” was all Gunn’s fault, and therefore she would have been unable to construe the threshold for burden of proof had been met, regarding the touch to be an assault — rather than a communication norm to re-center the encounter. Instead of Forrest rebuking Kolodeznaya and other Airport SkyGate security staff in her 12-page decision for failing, or avoiding, to establish the nature of the media enterprise, as well as stating on what legal grounds the Airport Company believed they had a right over-ride the Bill of Rights Act 1990, Judge Forrest has in effect ratified the unlawful norm of Police backing up the bullying, overbearing practice of ejecting humans for filming at locations that the legal occupiers take umbrage with.
Because, although the the judge dismissed the trespass charges on the first day, and found both defendants not guilty of resisting arrest on judgment day, her ‘Forrest Law’ upheld Team Police Prosecution’s ‘case tree’ that grew not from a natural seed; but rather from a malignant ‘red herring cutting’.
For their part, the Police screened off from knowing with certainty that FreeNZ Media is a non-profit, donation-funded in order to avoid having to call out Anna Kolodeznaya and other Airport Security staff for failing to establish the media enterprise did not fall within their purview by exercising skilled communications. The Constabulary advanced a ‘case tree’ featuring a brazen ‘special pleading trunk’ due to the politically expedient need to distract the focus of the events away from the central issue, which was the violent assault by two policeman as a result of their ‘meeting of minds’ to pursue a game-plan to eject the defendants.
Lowering the Bar: In characterizing the exchange as hostile as her benchmark for assault, Judge Jane (Janey) Forrest had blamed Liz Gunn entirely, to essentially lobby for a law review to stymie political dissent in public facing spaces.
Forrest’s ’screening action’ meant she was the author of her own subsequent unwitting misdeeds, such as failing to call-out Anna Kolodeznaya and other Airport Security staff, and the Police, for running roughshod over the Bill of Rights. Gunn and Clark had every right to stick up for their rights, since Kolodeznaya behaved like a muppet bulldog. Her attitude, complicated by the corporate barrier, that the media duo could be trespassed by Police, indicates the Airport Company’s security staff have operated with an authoritarian approach that fosters the false belief that the property is entirely privately owned, and that their training over-rides the Bill of Rights. The behaviour, attitude and testimony of Erich Postlewaight and Robett Luong — who behaved like muppet mongrels — also indicates a false belief that since the property owner requested the pair to be trespassed, and that the Police claimed the security officer had said she had been assaulted, that such legal obligations over-ride their training, police policy and also the Bill of Rights and the Crimes Act.
When Kolodeznaya radioed to have the media duo trespassed, she did not say she had been assaulted.
Moreover, Constable Luong stated to the Court that he arrested Mr Clark for disorderly behaviour, while Senior Constable Postlewaight arrested Gunn for trespass. Neither were warned they would be arrested until they assaulted by Police. Furthermore, neither the recordings of Airport Security calling the Police, nor of Police radioing Postlewaight were played for the Court to hear, to establish whether or not Postlewaight’s claim that an Airport Security staff member had been assaulted. This point was crucial to establish.
For it is clear that a parallel construction of evidence occurred to cover up the culpability of Police, especially since one of the victims of Police brutality had a public profile and whose arrest had made headlines. Parallel construction is a fraudulent law enforcement process of building a parallel — or separate — evidentiary basis for a criminal investigation in order to conceal how an investigation actually began.
I contend the real investigation began following news that the media duo were booked, and the Police Counsel realized the Constabulary’s vulnerability, since the Police assaults started within 10 to 18 seconds of the greeting the defendants. Ergo, a parallel body of evidence was constructed to support a red herring trial.
Such evidence laundering can be determined by establishing the inconsistencies, irregularities, and idiosyncrasies in the documentary records, such as incident reports, affidavits, testimonies, recordings, staff schedules, minutes, emails, charge sheets, prosecution documents and the timeline of clustered events.
In his scholarly 2002 article entitled, “Conspiracy Theory”, published in the Yale Law Journal, Neal Katyal refers briefly to Luban’s work (footnote 75), when describing crimes of diffusion, where specialization affords the responsibility for a single crime to be spread over many persons. “In general, those insulated will be leaders, who orchestrate actions to maintain plausible deniability,” wrote Katyal.
Katyal emphasizes that conspiracies may appear legal, particularly in their elemental parts, but because case law recognizes the dangerous harms that colluding criminal groups can pose to society, the threshold for adding witting participants to a criminal investigation is lowered once a conspiracy is identified.
Therefore, Justice Forrest ‘failed’ to see the continuity in Kolodeznaya’s behaviour since she asked three humans of Auckland Airport’s Arrivals Hall to stop taking pictures. In other words, Gunn mirrored Kolodeznaya, and her two fleeting gentle touches were cues; the first to pay attention to Gunn.
Kolodeznaya was being cued to answer the simple question as a spring-board to civil discussion about the legal grounds based in reality, rather than the synthetic perception that has come to swirl in the hegemonic authoritarian headspace of the uniformed uninformed across the West — especially since 2020.
Such an answer likely would have established what underpinned the hi-vis vest-wearing SkyGate Security Officer’s bossy attitude toward the public. It also likely would have yielded Kolodeznaya’s perception that her employer Auckland International Airport Limited was a private company and therefore had the power to define permissible activities on the fly. Aside from the governing Bylaw and subsection 6 that specifies permissible photography, recording and filming, there is also the awkward fact that Auckland International Airport Limited is at least 22% owned by public entities, and 47% owned by four transnational banks.
The top stockholding banks are: HSBC (23.5%), JPMorgan (10.5%), Citibank (5.4%), and BNP Paribas (7.8%) — according the NZ Companies Office register.
Ironically, the Neo-Feudal Siege of New Zealand that occurred from 1984 to 1994 was an economic warfare reset inflicted to transform the archipelago into a ‘Switzerland of the South Pacific’ Utopia for centimillionaires, billionaires and transnational corporations to exploit its strategic resources, as well as undermine Kiwis economic autonomy and to replace democratic institutions with technocratic governance to forge a techno-feudalist police state. The eventual goal of this techno-feudalist trajectory is the privatization of government.
Bill of Rights becomes ‘Landfill’ for Airport
The special pleading that pervades this case went beyond ‘twinking out’ sections of the Auckland International Airport Approval Order 1989, restricting commercial filming, and the Crimes Act’s limitations on the use of force.
Furthermore, there is also the embarrassing fact that Anna Kolodeznaya and other SkyGate Security staff, along with the Airport Company’s shift manager and Monitoring Team, and the Police, including Senior Constable Erich Postlewaight and Constable Robett Luong — all participated in consigning the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 as metaphorical landfill for an imperial runway extension project.
For her part, Judge Forrest appears to have gotten lost in the weedy muddy mangrove woods while rushing to draft her logically flawed 12-page decision. After all, she seems to have forgotten that the lawyer for the defence, Matthew Hague, had stated to her judgy person that the Police actions breached NZ’s Bill of Rights.
The gallery had cheered on May 10 at The Hague’s mention of the Bill of Rights, like it was a heroic masculine figure shackled to a wall in the damp dungeon deep beneath the courthouse — withering for want of un-fluoridated water, warm food and the love of a good woman to be his love interest, who’d smuggle in a woolly sheepy onesie, dynamite and a flame-making thingy to blow his way out.
In his summing up the trial, lawyer for the defence, Matthew Hague, said the two Policemen escalated a calm scene into a fracas in a matter of seconds. The day after the trial, FreeNZ Media released the CCTV footage.
The footage shows they were told, once, to leave by Police, who acted on the story fed to them by Airport SkyGate Security that the pair were filming without permission and the Police allege they were told a security staff member had been assaulted. Without blushing, Senior Constable Erich Postlewaight admitted to the Court that he and Constable Robett Luong, had a “game-plan” to eject the pair.
Due to this un-described “game-plan”, Postlewaight and Luong ‘failed’ to follow police procedure to establish the accused’s viewpoint, and with such due diligence, find a way to calmly resolve the matter.
Yet, Policemen’s viewpoint was also hearsay, since by their own admission the cops hadn’t viewed the CCTV video, nor gathered bystander statements, and nor had they established the accused’s identities, which could have yielded their non-profit entity.
Their ‘neglect’ to do this due diligence — to attempt to establish the facts by effective communication with both sides, which requires active listening — actually meant both Police acted on hearsay. And Judge Forrest accepted their testimony without specifically pointing out to both un-gentlemen, they partially presented hearsay.
As well as incorrect grounds for trespass regarding the non-commercial filming.
Gunn’s and Clark’s lawyer responded that the Police did not state their intention to arrest for disorder, filming or trespass. He said they acted on what they were told by the Airport staff, that they were breaching bylaws.
The Police claimed they were acting in their duty, but they didn’t have reasonable grounds to trespass the defendants, Hague said.
In their evidence, the Police said the factor to justify their use of force was the filming, not the alleged assault. There is no lawful use of force to stop filming in the Airport Bylaw, the founder of Frontline Law said.
In his oral and written submission submitted to Judge Forrest, Hague also referred to section 39 of the Crimes Act 1961, stating the Constables’ use of force was not lawful.
A former Senior Constable, Ray Cobb, said section 39 was there in the Crimes Act “to stop excess use of force”.
“All parties were calm before the Police decided to use force,” Matthew Hague stated.
The defendant’s use of low-level force in defence against assault is permitted by section 48 of the Crimes Act 1961, the Frontline Law attorney and defence barrister argued.
Force in defence against assault is permitted by section 48 of the Crimes Act 1961.
Crucially, in her unsigned judgment — which was released with neither the Court’s Seal, nor the Department of Justice’s Coat of Arms — Forrest failed to rebuke both Auckland International Airport Limited and the New Zealand Police for only supplying footage from two cameras.
Unlike the French Republic’s magistrates, New Zealand’s judiciary are not empowered or resourced to order their own teams to investigate the claims that come before the adversarial theatre known as the Court.
Thus, NZ’s judiciary maintains a perennial structure of contrived ignorance that favors state and corporate power. In this strange ‘Court Soap’ case, it would have taken little effort to drive to Auckland International Airport to sight what surveillance cameras are in the arrivals lounge, request the Airport Security and/or Monitoring Team for documentation about the cameras, and subpoena their presence to testify to clarify claims by Gunn and Clark that the Police had withheld footage from other surveillance cameras.
Forrest has also failed to rise above her prissy prejudices, antiquated attitudes and deluded grandeur to disabuse the Manukau District Court of power over-reach temptations, by mortals gifted with hi-vis vests, black Department of Corrections security, or blue uniforms with matching masonic checkered blue hats and caps, or even the black courtly gowns that have long symbolized a brotherhood who hide daggers inside cloaks.
For there is a reasonable justification for lightly touching children in grown-ups’ bodies who do not know how, or who refuse to, perform their jobs, roles or functions to a standard above the threshold of muppets.
In this logically fallacious way, Gunn, who was named in court documents as Elizabeth Jane Cooney, was convicted for a touch — that lasted about one second — to get a security officer’s attention.
A Muppet Show with Human Guests: Gunn & Clark
Recall, the dispute was over whether or not the media duo were allowed to film at the Airport?
Kolodeznaya had received a radio call-out to confront the pair about their videography and recording of interviews. Airport security said they’d assumed their professional camera meant their media enterprise was a commercial venture. If that were the case, they would have needed to gain permission, since they were not an accredited media organization such as 1News, of the Crown-owned TVNZ that had conspicuously avoided covering the trial — in spite of Gunn once being one their news anchors.
In the security footage, matched with the sound recorded by Clark’s camera, it is clear that Kolodeznaya — who had been in the job 12 years — not only did not believe Gunn’s explanation that they were not a commercial media enterprise. But also, it is clear Kolodeznaya requested Clark to stop filming her. It is at that point that Gunn gently touches Kolodeznaya for approximately one second to get the Security Coordinator’s attention. Gunn told the Court, Kolodeznaya was ignoring her, which was true.
Kolodeznaya told the Court the media duo were using a professional camera and that the reporter was not listening to “my point of view.” Kolodesnaya testified the Airport Company was privately-owned.
Near the end of her testimony, Kolodeznaya was asked about getting the Police involved. Kolodeznaya said when the people see the Police they say “we apologise that we crossed the line and we’re leaving.” Kolodeznaya claimed it was a “safe precaution,” to call for the police. Judge Forrest ‘seemed’ unaware Kolodeznaya had set in train special pleading locomotive from the moment she radioed for support to have Gunn and Clark ejected for trespass — as any newsroom possessing a copy of Professor T. Edward Damer’s book, Attacking Faulty Reasoning, could readily identify.
When Mr Hague pointed out to her that the Airport Bylaw only restricts commercial filming, and also that force cannot be used to eject someone for trespass, the Airport Security official of 12 years experience meekly deferred to the training advice. Despite establishing on the trial’s first morning that Kolodeznaya had drawn the wrong conclusion, and conceded she didn’t know Gunn and Clark were a volunteer group, filming a family associated covid anti-vaccine content — Judge Forrest failed to request evidence to establish whether or not FreeNZ Media were a commercial media enterprise before she dropped the trespass charges.
The footage shows the touch lasted about one second [see timer in linked video].
Gunn placed her hand gently on the upper arm-shoulder area of the Auckland Airport’s SkyGate Security Coordinator, Anna Kolodeznaya, who shrugs with a shuffle to her left, saying “Don’t touch me.”
Kolodeznaya told the Court the pain she felt was a “5 out of 10” on the pain scale. The immediate scoffing from the gallery indicated the SkyGate Security Coordinator’s credibility rating in their minds, plummeted below zero.
No evidence was offered in Court to support Kolodeznaya’s claim it was the sight of an old injury. The touch was so light that it appeared her pain claim was disingenuous. As such, it would seem the Airport’s SkyGate Security Coordinator was coached. This apparent manipulation of emotions, sometimes called playing the gallery, occurs when the arguer is, “attempting to persuade others to accept a position by exploiting their emotions, instead of presenting evidence for the position,” as Damer defined the term.
As Kolodeznaya radioed to have the pair trespassed without warning them they would be, Gunn said, “What law are you operating under? You’re not answering us.”
Gunn reacted with the comment, “Now you’re going to call the police. The bully.” The talking past one another continued.
Conspicuosly, Mr Beveridge wasn’t interested in the fact that the independent media crew were waiting to film the arrival of a Tokelauan family, who had come to live in New Zealand following a cruel house arrest for refusing to be ‘vaccinated’. The fact touched upon the sensitive matter of the Ardern Connection, as previously mentioned.
Kolodeznaya put up her hands in the air, saying “I’m stepping back,” and as she started to walk off, Gunn briefly touched her near her elbow, as a social cue to stay. With the video evidence of the touches, Team Police Prosecution built their case for red herring trial featuring special pleading with other fallacious arguments.
Dr René De Monchy told the Court he said he rebuked Senior Constable Erich Postlewaight because he saw it as his citizen’s duty and as a doctor, to call out a policeman for the completely unprovoked violence. Gunn told the court that the Senior Constable fractured her wrist, and tore ligaments in her shoulder and arm.
The Police compounded Kolodeznaya’s failure to establish that the duo’s FreeNZ Media was a non-profit, donation-funded entity and therefore did not require either accreditation, nor permission.
Mr Cobb testified that the Police escalated the situation, and he added it could’ve been resolved in a few minutes. Forrest consigned his testimony to a footnote. She also rebuked him for communicating via a letter after his court appearance and before the verdict. The Monopoly Board’s extensive rules must be followed by Team Defence, while Team Prosecution can party with the make-up artists.
Let’s not forget Gunn’s and Clark’s spectacular arrests within 18 seconds of the Police greeting them, meant the constabulary duo skipped the crucial step of due diligence to establish their viewpoint. The pair were assaulted by Police, who used force out of proportion to the calm scene they found and that they swiftly escalated — as the footage laid bare.
Kolodeznaya’s accusation that she was assaulted might’ve been intended to gain a swift response. Yet, Kolodeznaya admitted Gunn touched her to get her attention. So, perhaps the assault accusation came later, when cooler heads in the Police realised they needed to pursue a parallel construction of evidence to deflect attention from the Police brutality. After-all, Gunn was not initially charged with assault, but with trespass.Moreover, near the end of her testimony on May 7, Kolodeznaya was asked about getting the Police involved. Kolodeznaya said the people say: “we apologise that we crossed the line and we’re leaving.” Kolodeznaya claimed it was a “safe precaution,” to call for the police.
Yet in her judgment, Forrest typed, “In summary, Ms Gunn was arrogant, rude, overbearing and offensive in her manner in dealing with the complainant.”
Ironically, the New Zealand Courts own webpage states in bold type: “The Crown must prove each element of the offence. That is called the burden of proof. The Crown carries that burden.”
But, Team Police Prosecution didn’t prove that Gunn was hostile. Being assertive, sticking up for your rights and insisting that those with authority observe the Bill of Rights Act 1990 (whether implicitly or explicitly) doesn’t amount to be hostile. It is to act in the principle of grace, which means to act with integrity, in an honourable measured way. Grace is not merely about being a great dinner party host.
Grace is the principled wise ethos that trumps authority when leaders are undeserving of respect. With grace, humans can stand firm when fear and hope are operationalized for emotional hijacking. The quality of grace is also fierce when the land, community and household are threatened by tricksters, whether they be travelling puppet governors, psychopathic predatory philanthropists or plane-loads of jet-setting technocratic totalitarians.
Instead of rebuking Kolodeznaya for being incompetent at her job after 12 years, and failing to establish the legality of the filming by stubborn avoidance, and then apparently snivelling like an upset butterfly about being ‘assaulted’ to Police, Judge Forrest extended her woody-army-limbs into the Victorian Era Universe.
From this portal, Forrest wrenched out its awkward social norms to save face for the New Zealand Police, the public-private Auckland Airport Company and the South Pacific archipelago’s media cartel, especially TVNZ.
Team Defence — comprised of humans, Gunn, Clark, Cobb, De Monchy, and Hague — tried their best against a ‘meeting of minds’ between the muppets of Team Prosecution, that became transparent with footnote 6.
Ironically, Judge Forrest failed to recuse herself for being an authoritarian. She had remarked during the lawyers’ final oral submissions that people should obey authority even when they are wrong, as I’ve said.
A dangerous legal precedent was set by the decision, since getting the attention of an official who doesn’t do their job properly — with a gentle touch isn’t a hostile act. It’s a social cue to a muppet to do their one job.
The ‘Forrest Law’ that found a 63 year-old woman guilty of assault was produced with the logical fallacy of drawing a wrong conclusion to construct the propaganda trial’s climatic moment — as any newsroom possessing a copy of Professor T. Edward Damer’s book, Attacking Faulty Reasoning, could readily recognize.
“Ostriches … are not merely careless birds.”
As I mentioned previously, the Propaganda Model can be applied to all institutions of power, which infers all such entities have an ‘institutional voice’ that is ideological. The work of French philosopher Paul Riceouer (1913–2005) — who identified the functions of ideology — is invaluable to recognizing the presence of propaganda not only in the media, advertising and communications during the over-hyped pandemic by the New Zealand Government. These four functions, distortion, legitimation, social integration and activation were all present in the ‘institutional voices’ across the public and private sectors during the Great Corona Hostage Crisis. Those ‘institutional voices’ still echo into the present across the new social chasm. And all four functions of ideology were present in the ‘Red Herring Gunn Trial’ — as I shall show.
Forrest’s guilty verdict — which served as the propaganda trial’s intended climatic moment — was a distortion consistent with the internal logic of the trial’s fallacious red herring framing around its key targeted subject, who was branded with a criminal assault charge. This red herring framing required judicial legitimation — to accommodate the special pleading — by setting aside the attacks on the dissident media duo at the hands of two moderately-thuggish constables, following their “game-plan” decision to, in effect, trash the Bill of Rights to remove the accused independent media duo from the Airport.
Distortion, which creates a warped copy of reality when found in news, advertising and other communications is, in fact, the application of the first of four ideological functions that are essential for a successful propaganda campaign to brainwash a population. This red herring trial was successful propaganda.
The judge’s refusal, twice, in the first afternoon to drop the entire case — despite watching and listening to a calm scene escalate into a fracas within seconds (because the Constabulary enacted their illegal brutish ‘game-plan’) — fulfilled the second ideological function, legitimation, to support the power of authority by masking over the cracks in the narrative myth-making. The red herring trial — which would never have come to be, if the judiciary insisted on viewing the video evidence in pre-trial proceedings — was legitimated by the farcical judgment, which was the logical climatic conclusion to a logically fallacious proposition.
The third ideological function of social integration was served primarily by the brazen gas-lighting to vilify a 64 year-old woman for a brief, light attention-getting touch — while deepening the normalization of Police assault. The acceptance of the prosecution’s one-eyed official witnesses’ opinion fulfilled this social integration, to socialize a new norm — that a long-standing social cue to someone who isn’t listening, to pay attention — can be construed as common assault. But, only if all blame is cast on the defendant. The official witnesses: SkyGate Security Coordinator, Anna Kolodesnaya; Senior Constable Erich Postlewaight; Constable Robett Luong were essentially cast as authoritative objective ‘witnesses’ in the Red Herring Gunn Trial.**** In essence, the lawyer for the Police prosecution, Jerome Beveridge, won best supporting muppet actor.
The fourth ideological function of activation (against a common enemy) was deployed with the charges of Gunn and Clark, which were altered from disorderly behaviour to trespass and resisting arrest for Mr Clark, and from merely trespass to trespass and assault for Gunn. These charges were amplified with the predictable complicity of the news media, who failed in the 15 months prior to the trial to do any digging, despite their considerable resources. The activation function essentially went live at the red herring trial, and was advanced with the verdict decision, and the blame-casting and the character assassination rhetoric, to essentially recruit the public to unite against the country’s newest common enemy: Elizabeth Jane Gunn.
In his book, Spinfluence: The Hardcore Propaganda Manual, Wellington-born advertising illustrator Nick McFarlane, defined character assassination as:
“[T]he intentional attempt to portray a particular person in a manner which will cause others to perceive him or her in a negative light. By targeting a person’s reputation and firing misleading innuendoes at their character it is possible to inflict a fatal blow.” — Nick McFarlane, Spinfluence: The Hardcore Propaganda Manual
In such ways, the scapegoat is stigmatized, while the dominant “in-group” that society identifies with is framed as noble and guiltless. The objective behind this character assassination was to identify the threat of a common enemy, to save face for Police since beating up a 60-plus year-old woman at an Airport was bad optics, not matter how much lipstick you drew on a swaggering Senior Constable’s puckered lips.
Yet, this threat was constructed with distortions in the trial that the two newspaper chains ran with by framing Gunn as an anti-vaxxer campaigner/activist. The framing of the common enemy, according to ‘Forrest Law’, as “arrogant, rude, overbearing, and offensive,” worked to climax the scape-goating started by Airport Security, escalated by the Constabulary, continued by Police Brass, carried on by Police Counsel and predictably blown out of proportion by the media cartel — as the propaganda model and game theory predicts.
As I have shown, this retarded ‘case tree’ did not grow from a natural seed; but rather from a ‘red herring cutting’, from which grew a ‘special pleading stem’ into a ‘special pleading trunk’, that sprouted logically fallacious branches to sustain a brazen argument that could weather a budget courtroom’s fluorescent light.
These loudest and proudest logically fallacious branches were: drawing the wrong conclusion, using the wrong reasons, arguing from ignorance, omission of key evidence, misuse of a vague expression, manipulation of emotions, abusive ad hominem, and two wrongs; topped with a poisoning the well crown.
Yet, it is apparent that this retarded ‘case tree’ had grown poorly in arid soil watered with fallacies of missing evidence, since it seems to me it was disingenuous for the Police to supply video from just two CCTV cameras.
This retarded ‘case tree’ also grew from the roots of the scapegoat archetype that is so ancient, it features in mythology; a fact that is an embarrassing indictment not only of New Zealand’s civilization, but also of humanity.
For ‘the news’ is rife with scape-goating because it works as an effective mechanism to resolve the perennial problems, scandals and crises of the ruling classes the world-over, since the planet’s Overlords and their loyal elites — who control the dominant institutional resources — can deflect attention from the root causes.
In short, an attention-getting touch was turned into an attention-deflecting assault to distract from the Police brutality.
“Ostriches … are not merely careless birds.”
Judge Forrest asserted it was disingenuous of the defence to claim that Gunn had an honest belief that there was implied consent for the touch. A more ready contender for a disingenuous claim in this Red Herring Trial came from Senior Constable Postlewaight, who asserted that when he lunched with Constable Luong, they did not discuss the case.
Conveniently, Postlewaight could not be located when he was called as a witness. After a one hour and 45 minute lunch break, Postlewaight had swaggered into Court like he’d taken on the inverted persona of Clint Eastwood’s ’Dirty Harry’ character, as if he was confident that he’d get away with beating up a lady of retirement age.
Thus, my border-line super-hero alter-ego, Snoopman, has proven by ‘verdict vivisection’ that the Gunn and Clark trial was primarily aimed to save face for the institution of the Police, with a secondary motive to protect the reputation of Auckland International Airport Limited, and a derivative objective to protect the Crown.After all, underlying the news of Gunn’s arrest was a fracas fraught with bad optics for the Constabulary, the Airport Company, and the Government, since it is the story of a media duo attempting to film the arrival of an ’anti-vaxxer’ Tokelauan family, who were persecuted with 13 cruel months of house arrest.
And within this bubble-wrapped story, was the politically embarrassing fact that for 10 of those 13 gruelling moons, the ‘ring-fencing’ of the Patelesio family occurred on the watch of Ross Ardern, N.Z.’s Prime Minister’s father.
Not so proudly, Mr Ardern’s formative years in policing involved dawn raids on the Pacific Island community, who were targetted for ’over-staying’ their welcome to booster economic prosperity — for the ’Pālangi Landlords’. Therefore, it would have been bad optics if the hobbits of New Zealand learned via the six o’clock news with Simon Dallow and Wendy Petrie at the Crown-owned TVNZ, that when Jacinda Ardern apologized for the dawn raids — without mentioning the familial connection with her father — that he was embroiled in a cruel house arrest that began the very same day, as if by coordinated chess moves.
As such, the gooey sap of this ’case tree’ was state propaganda, carried on by N.Z.’s media cartel, who shared a gong for best script. But, since this muppet show was so obvious, the trial story was not aired by either major broadcaster. To have done so, would’ve required their hobbit audiences to suspend their disbelief as audiences do, to be carried along watching Tom Cruise defeat the villains in a Mission Impossible flick.
Propaganda does not seek to persuade with a reasonable argument, but rather the propagandist pushes or jolts people with almost neurological manipulations, stated Mark Crispin Miller, a former Professor of Media Studies at New York University. Propagandists cannot tolerate disagreement, dissent or counter-narrative, and they always impose censorship and vilify, condemn and blackout skepticism, oppositional voices, and reasoned argument, Professor Miller said in the documentary, The Real Anthony Fauci.
I contend an airing of the footage on the six o’clock news would’ve have backfired and the gate-keepers knew it.
“Ostriches … are not merely careless birds.”
We New Zealanders aren’t as stupid as the ruling class would like us to be, despite the chasm created in 2020. Too much counter-narrative would have slipped through in the event of broadcasting the trial as TV news.
Just as a ship floats by its design to displace water, the ‘ship of state’ can only stay bouyant with a well-designed system of propaganda. Because Mainstream Media (MSM) newsrooms portray themselves as objective, neutral, unbiased practitioners of journalism, they lead their audiences to believe they bravely hold power to account. Yet, the media, as the ‘Fourth Estate’ of the so-called liberal democracies — are enmeshed with a global media cartel — and acts ‘intuitively’ as the peripheral nervous system to protect the other three estates — the legislature, the administration, and the judiciary; especially in election year.
Across Western Civilization — where Westminster-style parliaments have colonized like fast-food franchises to ensure the ‘common people’ do not bother super-rich oligarchs — the ‘Four Estates’ that replaced the estates of the ancien régime comprising a First Estate of clergy, a Second Estate of titled nobles, and a Third Estate of all other subjects (both peasants and bourgeoisie).
Broadly, the condition for allowing representative, or limited democracy, is that the democratic society does not bother the super-rich oligarchies, who use their enormous wealth to steer the political trajectory of whole societies — as Professor Jeffrey Winters stated in his 2011 book, Oligarchy.
Such organized brainwashing maintains conformity through cult formation of its target pawns, as well as its knights, bishops, rooks, queens and kings — metaphorically speaking — while the world’s chess masters duke it out to win the international contest of world domination, in accordance with the diabolical philosophy of oligarchism.
Yet, newsroom investigations into wrongdoing are supposed to perform a journalistic task that cannot or will not be undertaken by law enforcement authorities, as David Randall wrote in book, The Universal Journalist.
Victorian Era Norms Get a Judicial Make-Over to Save Face
The authoritarian judge accused Gunn of being racist in her encounter with Airport’s SkyGate Security Team Coordinator, whose nationality was never established before the Court. Gunn had asked where she was from, since Kolodeznaya had a Russian-sounding accent and her English appeared to have been an impediment.
Moreover, it is a world phenomenon that the global élite cause de-stabilizations to drive immigration to displace domestic populations from resources, and to feed economic growth, and to force down the global price of labour. The aim is to forge global cities such as Auckland; the policy ‘failures’ are deliberate.
Amid the engineered sabotage of public sector commercial trading entities, infrastructure and services — as well as businesses and households — Auckland was stealthily drawn into a ‘World Cities Movement’.* By 2015, Auckland was ranked in 37th place between Dubai and Shanghai in the Top 40 Global Cities, as a safe-haven for 557 Ultra High Net-Worth Individuals with investible wealth of at least $30m.
The world cities idea is to create large pools of excess labour with migrants. Because new immigrants don’t have any roots in the places they settle, they can be exploited to accept less in terms of pay, while often unwittingly assisting the ruling class elite in accumulating more wealth, power and control, because they are unfamiliar with the customs, norms and laws — as Naomi Klein observed in No Logo, about the export processing zones in South East Asia. Auckland was cast for a world cities make-over during the corporate siege of the economy from 1984 to 1994; to achieve that goal, cuts to services in the provinces were inflicted.
Brazenly, Lange Labour Government Finance Minister Roger Douglas — who was widely credited with being the ‘architect’ of the economic shock therapies, dubbed ‘Rogernomics’ — bragged in a private dinner conversation in December 1986 that the idea behind the ‘free market’ reforms was to transform New Zealand into a Switzerland of the South Pacific. Douglas said a top strata of wealthy would rule the country and in 25 years time, most New Zealanders would not be able to afford to live in N.Z.**
Gunn had referred to Kolodeznaya, as a “real Nazi” after she’d left to get the Trespass Book at the Help Desk counter in the Arrivals Hall at Auckland’s International Airport, located on the Ihumātao Peninsula — which was gained by brutal a conquest plot during the New Zealand Masonic Revolutionary War of 1860-72.
On Friday 10 May, outside the court-house, Gunn had recalled when her father was 20, he was cycling through Germany with his friend, Dan. They witnessed Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler and other key Nazi Party officials speaking on stage in Nuremberg long before World War II.
Gunn said her dad once quipped, “God, if I had a gun at 20 years old, I could have stopped the whole Second World War from happening.” She added her father and his mate were surrounded by the thuggish ‘Brown Shirts’ who tried to intimidate them into standing up to honour the entrance of Nazi officials onto the stage. They refused to get to their feet, she said.
Snoopman had a fore-boding feeling all day before the verdict session at 3:45pm. When the Court was told to rise for the entrance of the authoritarian judge, Snoopman lent forward pretending to lay his notebook on the floor to faff about while the servile formality passed. With his head between his legs, he noticed Barry Young — the Newcastle-born vaccine-data whistleblower — remained seated behind him.
Snoopman grinned.
In John Miller’s dry 1958 book, Early Victorian New Zealand: A Study of Racial Tension and Social Attitudes, 1839-1852, the Waikato University professor’s description of New Zealand in its formative years was unflattering. The acceptable conversations were limited to reporting their afternoon walks, bragging about their children, gossiping on the worthiness of particular relationships as they pertained to class stratification, the entertainment on offer, and news from England, clothes, horses, and cases of outraged conventionalism — as Professor Miller observed after reading miles of tedious diaries, letters and biographies.
Amid rigid class distinction, wrote Professor Miller, the “pleasures of social vivisection” was a constant feature that involved minute scrutiny of conduct. While the little “prickly colonial society” would welcome strangers, this ‘welcome’ was highly conditional on the newcomer possessing some useful or agreeable quality.
Any newcomers who deviated an expected sense of duty or propriety by some indiscretion, a show of temper, or false pretense or flamboyance would find they were leveled downward in the social strata.
As with then, the newcomers now are also expected to help enforce the bland conformity, the endorsed activities, and the passionless social norms established long ago when bipedal mortals kept still for photographs — as former advertising guru John Ansell alluded to in his commentary after the ‘shock’ decision.
Ergo, a ‘don’t rock the boat’ sentiment pervades the archipelago that the Snoopman considers a psychological disorder, which he terms Small Island Spectrum Syndrome Impairment (SISSI). Because it is endemic to New Zealand, a hyphen followed by an E may be added on the end of the acronym to render: SISSI-E.***
For those old enough to remember 2020, the old bland social norms were morphed with the ‘new normal’ cult behaviours that were drummed into scared, gullible and vulnerable communities across the remote archipelago, that Freemason Bro. Captain James Cook had described in his log as an ideal base for the empire in the South Pacific.
With his characteristic sardonic humor, outside court Mr Ansell described Liz Gunn as “New Zealand’s most dangerous arm tapper.” Gunn had left courtroom 7 and made for the lavatories down the corridor with Tim Laffey, before the ‘media jury panel’ could exit. The reporters briefly interviewed some supporters before collecting their copies of the ‘Forrest Decision’. Meanwhile, the former TVNZ news anchor walked straight up to Ansell, who described Kiwis as ‘the passionless people’, a reference to Gordon McLauchlan’s scathing 1976 book that tapped into the national psyche, and its 2012 sequel.
Gunn spoke with palpable emotion:
“This is beyond corrupt. When I was standing there [in the dock], and I felt the presence of the person I felt at the airport when I was being bashed up. I felt my father. I raised him in that first message I did to all New Zealanders, I said, ’I’m doing this because my father went to war for a free New Zealand, and one where we can communicate. And we must honour what those soldiers did.’ And I could feel him in the court today. And what I felt was his soul or essence say, ’This cannot be the country I went to war for. This cannot be what our generation sacrificed so much for, for my daughter to be abused by the court system.’ And that’s all I want to say, New Zealanders, we must, you must stand up now cause I’m the first. But, you’ll be next if you don’t. And I want to honour all who have come to the court today and all the support around the country.”
— Liz Gunn, outside Manukau District Court, 21 May 2024
But, because Gunn isn’t reading ‘the news’ anymore, hardly anyone was listening. New Zealanders — like so many Western populations — are conditioned to form their opinions based on what the people from Tele Land say.
Snoopboy made this observation at age eleven when he had an epiphany, that all of the grown-ups in his life repeated what the Tele Land people said — as if the noises they made with their mouths were their own thoughts. He’d realized grown-ups deluded themselves that politicians would deliver on their big promises in a similar way that children wished Santa Claus would go beyond their parents’ credit limit.
Both cohorts face the problem of incomplete disclosure due to structural power, trickery and propaganda.
Propaganda is the mass deployment of persuasive techniques by dominant coalitions in order to gain society’s acquiescence, and always omits, ignores, or downplays key evidence to keep the underlying objectives, or known or likely harms, or power linkages — hidden. In their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman presented five news filtering mechanisms of their Propaganda Model that work as a powerful arbitrator for unofficial censorship across so-called ‘liberal democracies’. The model has application for all institutions.
The Propaganda Model is comprised of five structural news filters through which news is processed for mass consumption: [1] size, ownership and profit orientation; [2] advertising; [3] expert sources; [4] flak and the enforcers; and [5] ideology. Among these filters, the third news filtering mechanism, sources, is particularly noteworthy, since experts, officials and trusted institutions were afforded a status of presumptive accuracy. The third news filter accounts for how journalists and news outlets stay safely within the boundaries of a consensus frame by maintaining a bureaucratic affinity to expert sources, who essentially “subsidise the news” by providing ready-made copy that is assumed to be true.
There is also an instrumental filtering mechanism that involves collusion or conspiracy, which was not specifically designed into Herman and Chomsky’s Propaganda Model. For my study of the Global Financial Crisis entitled, “It’s the Financial Oligarchy, Stupid”, I found it necessary to add a new sixth filter — “buying out” — which had been suggested by Professor Oliver Boyd Barrett in his critique, “Judith Miller, The New York Times, and the propaganda model” following the controversies over reporting of the build-up to the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003 by The New York Times. Judith Miller amped up the case for the aerial assault on Baghdad in March 2003 and the justification for an escalation of the conflict into a ground invasion. This “buying out” example is entwined with the backstory of how the Great Corona Hostage Crisis was workshopped by key players, institutions and vested interests to weaponize ‘the news’.
In part 3 of my series, Corona World Games, I showed how Judith Miller, a New York Times journalist and author of Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War, was one of at least four players, who took aspects of a Johns Hopkins’ University pandemic exercise called ‘Dark Winter’ from the tabletop simulation to the real world after the 9/11 Coup D’état of 2001. ‘Dark Winter’ included a sub-script scenario that insinuated Saddam Hussein’s Iraq threatening to release a weaponized anthrax virus and speculated Iraq was involved in providing technology for the biological attacks to terrorist groups based in Afghanistan.
Miller’s Germs book was released on October 2 2001 — in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks — asserted that the U.S. faced an unprecedented bio-terrorism threat from terrorist groups like Al Qaeda. Curiously, on the day Germs was launched, the health of the first post-9/11 anthrax victim in America, began to rapidly deteriorate. In her expose, All Roads Lead to Dark Winter, Webb wrote that Miller and other New York Times journalists wrote a total of 27 articles specifically about anthrax and its potential use as a bio-weapon between September 12, 2001 and the day before the first anthrax victim, photojournalist Bob Stevens was diagnosed with anthrax poisoning.
Another Dark Winter participant was James Woolsey, who was a former CIA Director from 1993 to 1995.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, military-grade anthrax outbreaks were inflicted upon Florida and New York. Woolsey flew to London to “firm up” the ‘evidence’ that Iraq was involved in 9/11, as The Guardian newspaper reported in “Iraq ‘behind anthrax outbreaks’ ” on 14 October 2001.
In other words, Woolsey, who played the Director of Central Intelligence, mimicked his real life stint as CIA Director and, in effect, took the anthrax narrative beyond the confines of simulation and made it a ‘live exercise’.
Crucially, in the aftermath of the post-9/11 anthrax attacks, Johns Hopkins University Center for Public Health and Georgetown University’s Center for Public Law drafted the Medical State Emergency Health Powers Act in December 2001. This Act — which was written for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) — and was subsequently adopted by 40 American states to isolate or quarantine amid declared health emergencies, to implement mass vaccination programs and enter public and private properties.
Critically, the record shows that Johns Hopkins University lacked the capacity to be circumspect about its casting of players following its very first pandemic exercise, Dark Winter, especially since at least four of its players, took aspects of the pre-9/11 bio-terrorist scenario ‘live’ — as the Snoopman showed in part 3 of his series, Corona World Games, entitled, “All Techno-Feudalist Roads Lead to ‘Dark Winter’ Amid World’s Third Hundred Years’ War”.
Indeed, the pattern underpinning all four pre-coronavirus pandemic preparedness exercises that were designed, scripted and hosted by Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security — Dark Winter of June 2001, Atlantic Storm of January 2005, Clade X of May 2018 and Event 201 of October 2019 — belie an over-arching strategy to transform newsrooms into vectorized environments to globally spread emotional contagions. As such, the subversive pandemic scenarios were performed as penetration rituals to set-up the capture of public health, destabilize liberal democracies and weaponize ‘the news’.
Johns Hopkins University was founded with a fortune bequeathed by a wealthy Baltimore merchant, Johns Hopkins. The original trustees were drawn from a pool of connected friends in Baltimore, and they selected Bonesman Daniel Coit Gilman as First President of Johns Hopkins University (1875-1901) — following his stint as the First President of the University of California.
The Gilman family were one of 20-30 key wealthy Skull and Bones families named by Professor Anthony Sutton in his 1983 book America’s Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones.
In studying an eight inch parcel of documents about Yale University’s most infamous fraternity, Skull and Bones, Sutton realised their game was to spearhead institutions, initiatives and intrigues in order to inflict a ‘managed conflict’ paradigm. Sutton found that Hegelian social engineering was the dominant philosophical driver stealthily deployed to pit communism against capitalism and dumb-down education systems to undermine Western Civilization. By causing clashes between two opposing ideologically-driven forces, a ‘synthesis’, or a desired final solution, is created. Bonesman spearheaded laboratories to school educators to infiltrate, influence and indoctrinate to sanitize history, corporatize science and sever politics from economics.
In his book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, found 16 pandemic exercises since the Johns Hopkins University scripted ‘Dark Winter’ simulation of June 2001, that involved hundreds of thousands of people, who were programmed to work like automated parts of a machine once a global pandemic was declared.
Kennedy stated that all 17 pandemic exercises favored mass vaccinations as the primary solution. He also observed that border shutdowns, business closures and quarantining of the healthy were frequent pandemic script elements. The scenarios, Kennedy said, discounted the efficacy of existing therapeutics, avoided mention of the value of exercise, sunshine and healthy diet, or ignored the effectiveness of immunity boosting supplements.
At the onset of the covid period, numerous jurisdictions across the United Nations system treated the outbreak as a ‘live exercise’. The meta-data of Covid cases, death tolls and key associated events of the Covid-19 Pandemic were encoded with numbers, especially 33, between January 22 and August 30, 2020, before a crucial cut-off date set by the U.N.’s Global Preparedness Monitoring Board.
This board, which was stacked with members whose conflicts of interest were writ large, issued a directive for all member states to participate in at least two global pandemic exercises by September 2020, with at least one to include a scenario that featured the deliberate release of a lethal respiratory pathogen. The coordinated moves were in keeping with the findings of Robert F. Kennedy Jr in his book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.
Therefore, the plight of the Patelesio family in the New Zealand dependency of Tokelau — on the watch of Jacinda Ardern’s father, Ross Ardern — had occurred as a consequence of the programming by American Deep State actors connected to Johns Hopkins University.
Critically, the international criminal elite group who were responsible for the architecture underpinning the draconian ‘pandemic’ measures during the ‘Great Corona Hostage Crisis’ included key players linked to the World Economic Forum, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, the World Health Organization, and the U.N.’s Global Preparedness Monitoring Board, who called for at least two global pandemic exercises to occur by September 2020.
It is critical to note, therefore, in light of this ‘Red Herring Gunn Trial’ that the targetting of dissidents during pandemics was actually scripted into a pandemic exercise that took place in New York around the time that coronavirus outbreak was alleged to have been underway in Wuhan. During the tabletop pandemic simulation called, Event 201, one player from Singapore’s Monetary Authority speaks on the ‘need’ to place such “bad actors” before the courts for producing counter-narratives deemed to be “fake news”.
Outside the Courthouse, where free range humans of the New Zealand Realm were allowed to video, film and photograph, Gunn’s co-defendant Jonathan Clark said the whole case was a shocking farce. He said those scumbags in the Beehive protect themselves with a barrier, and they can knock down any person on the outside. Clark — whose visible emotion subsided as he interacted with more supporters — mentioned the 12-page decision by Judge Forrest, who was appointed by Attorney-General David Parker on 12 May 2022.
Clark said, “There’s 12 pages of notes over a touch, that she’s written.” With his characteristic dry wit, Snoopman quipped, “That’s a lot of writing. That must be the most documented touch in history.”
“It confirms for me the court system and the police do not serve the people. They serve the government,” Mr Clark said.
He likened the justice system to a human resources department of the Government, and as like with the HR department of a big company, he said you might expect HR works to protect your interests. But, Clark added, HR are on the bosses’ side.
The Herald’s court-beat reporter, Mr Braunias, interviewed several people outside the courthouse. The article he turned in — which was only published behind a premium paywall — read like a hit-piece for the Public Relations Department of His Majesty’s Government, with ambitions to grow into a corny airport bookshop pulp novel.
Braunias threaded his political hit-piece with a mocking Deep State motif, to essentially imply that the Gunn’s supporters were misguided paranoid nutters, who should’ve stayed informed with a premium subscription. The article he turned in to the New Zealand Herald was an exhibition in the fallacies of diversion, particularly by mocking Gunn, Clark and their supporters. Yet, as anyone who has watched The New Normal documentary by the Happen Network, Gunn, Clark & Associates are on solid ground regarding the over-reach by authoritarian officials from the public and private sectors across Western Civilization.
Professor Damer defines the resort to humour or ridicule fallacy as one where the arguer constructs an discourse by “injecting humour or ridicule into an argument in an effort to cover up an inability or unwillingness to respond appropriately to an opponent’s criticism or counterargument.”
Despite typing that the physical contact was actually a “very, very, very, very, very slight” touch, Braunias viewed the judgment of assault as “fair enough”. Team Police Prosecution’s 15 months of propaganda became a court-sanctioned victory, and gained endorsement by the Herald’s court-beat reporter.
Ergo, the former TVNZ news anchor was now an unhinged “conspiracy hobbyist”, who would’ve remained a well-hinged news host if she hadn’t walked out the Death Star’s door (the nickname for the station’s HQ) many moons ago.
If the same situation happened to reporter Caroline Williams, and photographer, Lawrence Smith, with his big camera, and they neglected to say they were Stuff people — as Gunn and Clark had neglected to say they were FreeNZ Media — they would be unlikely to have a crowd of supporters beyond some family and a few friends, because no one cares about Stuff people, or any media matrix characters that much.
Gunn’s supporters are drawn from the Freedom Community, who know humanity is in the metaphorical ’firing line’ for a future with biomedical upgrades, carbon restrictions and a digital prison — in a world where the debt-enslavement system is being steadily replaced with an identity-enslavement system.
Mr Braunias asked me what I was concerned about. I replied that there is the danger of establishing a legal precedent, which can be used by lawyers around the world to claim a touch to get attention is a common assault. The broader story is a contest between the censorship that was set like cement when a pandemic was declared and the body of counter-evidence about what has really occurred, Snoopman told Braunias. That censorship protocol was present in the pandemic exercises that took place before 2020, I added. He nodded agreeably.
The court-beat reporter asked me if I thought the verdict will make Gunn into a martyr. I countered, saying Liz isn’t trying to be a martyr. Braunias replied he understood that and what he meant was, would the result back-fire on those who sought to punish her. Any forbearance he had outside court, withered while he wrote.
I’d offered the scenario that either there were people who’d been watching Gunn’s posts and made sure that it was the bulldogs who were sent rather than security staff and police that would resolve the situation. Or, that once the higher-ups found their underlings had reeled in an outcast media figure, they doubled-down to exploit the situation for career advancement, ego enjoyment, and institutional power accumulation. He appeared to think the latter scenario was more plausible. The Braunias quotation of Snoopman ran:
“Once the train of institutional momentum starts up, it’s hard to stop. And it didn’t stop today. It just ploughed on through the station, and took Liz with it.”
Snoopman actually said,
“Once the train of institutional momentum starts up, it’s hard to stop. And it didn’t stop today. When it passed through the station, Liz Gunn was thrown a guilty verdict ticket by the conductor and it kept going.”
Braunais had started looking elsewhere for somewhere else to interview as I finished saying the above quote that he scratched in his notebook like an old skool reporter seeking to accurately portray the scene.
Yet, despite Braunias having the benefit of a copy of the Forrest Law, he omitted footnote 6. It’s not like Braunias ran out of space, since his sardonic 2500 word political hit-piece was not published in the Herald’s print edition. (Editor's note: Snoopman tiresomely checked). “The punishment of Liz Gunn after Auckland Airport assault trial” was only published on the website, albeit behind a premium paywall.
Snoopman also gave Braunias a hypothetical scenario of a news reporter who is sent to ask a critical question of a narcissist politician, who is under the gun on allegations of corruption.
Every other reporter, Snoopman narrated, has asked their questions as he comes off the plane, and she touched his arm to get his attention because she can’t go back to the newsroom without asking the critical question no one else will ask: who helped him? He is caught off guard and everyone saw the moment. The politician’s diplomatic protection squad, that is, the police, react immediately to have her arrested for assault.
Braunias admitted to me that he thought the case was “bullshit“, adding that he covers murder cases, as a way to say that bringing a case of assault against Gunn was farcical because the alleged harm paled in comparison.
Yet, he supported Forrest’s decision on the assault verdict and then mocked everyone, including Gunn.
Previously, when Braunias had reported on the trial, headlined “The Presecution of Liz Gunn”, he was forced by the circumstances to admit the case itself was hanging by a thread at the end of the first day.
The version in print — headlined “Is this really breaking a butterfly on a wheel?” — was an unflattering framing for Team Police Prosecution. The headline referenced a famous line from Alexander Pope’s 1735 poem. It alludes to “breaking on the wheel”, a form of torture in which victims had their long bones broken by an iron bar while tied to a Catherine wheel.
The metaphor of ‘breaking a butterfly on a wheel’ described the extreme lengths that authorities sometimes go to, to crush the spirit of a minor irritant. His placement of an anecdote from the day, about the controversy over how much voter support New Zealand Loyal, the party founded by Liz Gunn, last year garnered — suggested that Braunias had a Political Calculus App inside his intellectual human-monkey brain.
In the grand tradition of New Zealand MMP politics, new-comer minor parties get a ‘SISSI-E bashing’ in election year.
In spite of his view that the trial was a case of breaking a butterfly on a wheel, Braunias appears to have internalized the news filters described by the Chomsky’s Propaganda Model.
The Propaganda Model’s first filter — size, ownership and profit orientation — points to the expense of establishing, maintaining and expanding mass media organizations. Therefore, the institutional linkages between state, corporate and foundation entities can be detected in board directorships, indicating influence over ‘the news’ in exchange for capital, credit lines and philanthropic funding.
It turns out, NZME, the owner of the New Zealand Herald, Bay of Plenty Times, Rotorua Daily Post, Hawke's Bay Today, Northern Advocate and the Whanganui Chronicle, as well as Newstalk ZB, shares among its top ten owners, the same four transnational banks — HSBC, JPMorgan, Citibank, and BNP Paribas — as Auckland International Airport Limited. These four global banks were among the financial institutions deemed ‘too big to fail‘ in 2008 and received public insurance bailouts, or welfare, amid the Global Financial Crisis.
Not surprisingly, Vanguard Group Inc., BlackRock Inc. and State Street Corp are among the top institutional stockholders of JP Morgan and Citibank. Meanwhile, BlackRock is ranked the top owner of BNP Paribas, and is also the second biggest shareholder of HSBC, which was founded in 1865 as Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation to be a money-laundering funnel between the two Chinese port cities and the British East India Company following the Second Opium War, as readers of Dope, Inc.: Britain‘s Opium War Against the World will remember. The drug trade lubricates the wheels of empire with cash.
Moreover, because Pfizer’s top owners — BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street — are top shareholders of the parent companies that own numerous New Zealand newsrooms, their newspapers, bulletins and magazines became easy vectors for selling the pharmaceutical manufacturer’s legalized drug merchandise to their news audiences. As I showed in Pimp My Shot, BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street (among others) who also are the ultimate top three owners of the soon to retire news brand Newshub, as well as The Nation, The Project (defunct) and Channel Three are all owned Discovery New Zealand, that is a subsidiary of the media corporation, Discovery Inc., and which is owned by the parent corporation, AT&T.
The three biggest owners of AT&T, are Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street.
Moreover, during the Great Corona Hostage Crisis, the Ardern Government selected one of Omnicom Media Group’s (OMG), advertising agencies, Clemenger BBDO, to create its emotionally manipulative advertising campaign. This bandwagon ‘Unite Against Covid-19’ drive, contained the four functions of ideology that are essential for successful propaganda to brainwash a population. As with all propaganda, essential counter-evidence was omitted, such as the fact that Omnicom Media Group’s top three owners reveal the ‘BlackRock-Vanguard-State Street Connection’ to Pfizer, since the top three institutional stockholders of the pharmaceutical manufacturer are also BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, as I showed in Spy My Media.
Therefore, the New Zealand Herald — for it’s inglorious part — performed as news filter one of Propaganda Model predicts, to protect the institutional linkages to its owners, credit lines and directorships.
Meanwhile, the ownership of the newspaper chain, Stuff, which includes The Dominion Post, The Press, Waikato Times and the Sunday Star-Times, is not publicly known. After company CEO, Sinead Boucher famously bought Stuff off Nine Entertainment for $1 in 2020, it is no longer a publicly listed company on the stock market, and is therefore no longer required to make its financial performance public. Crucially, the New Zealand Herald described the bargain appearance of the deal as a misnomer, since Stuff’s liabilities sat at $73.9m in June 2019. Therefore, it is possible that Stuff owes money to financial creditors that may in turn influence editorial decisions over news and current affairs content.
For their part, the Crown-owned TVNZ and the Discovery-owned Newshub were both conspicuously absent from the Gunn and Clark trial. This meant their mainstream audiences were denied the chance to view the CCTV surveillance footage matched with the sound from Mr Clark’s belatedly released camera card.
In the 2015 documentary, Requiem for an American Dream, Professor Noam Chomsky explains 10 principles of concentration of wealth and power; the ninth being about manufacturing the consent of the governed through propaganda. Each controversy reported in ‘the news’ has to pass through the news filters, which means the story elements stay within acceptable bounds of public discourse to steer audiences to submit to the favoured solutions of the ruling class establishment and their overlords.
Because transmitting CCTV footage shown at the trial to a combined audience of about one million hobbits, it seems there was a ‘meeting of minds’ between the two newsrooms’ producers, or their boards, to avoid the Gunn trial like the plague. Otherwise, playing CCTV footage would have required dialling down all five news filters of the Propaganda Model, which the networks obviously were unwilling to do.
And airing of news about Liz Gunn at the trial would also have required obligatory shots of the former TVNZ news anchor presenting the late news, or perhaps even the midday news announcing the suspicious death of Princess Diana — the ditched wife of the present monarch, King Charles III.
Moreover, Braunias was also dismissive about the presence of Barry Young, the whistle-blowing data administrator at New Zealand’s Ministry of Health, who supplied the inventor of the optical mouse with one third of the remote island nation’s ‘vaccination’ records. Gunn and Clark had scooped the story on November 30 of 2023. Clark had suggested to Braunias that the circumstances of how he met Young would be worth reporting, likening it to Edward Snowden secretly meeting journalists in a Hong Kong hotel.
In the context of his hit-piece, Braunias inferred that Young’s claim about the Pfizer shots being a “killer”, was just the self-delusional viewpoint of a data thief who gained notoriety via a conspiracy hobbyist found guilty of assault.
Twenty days prior to the trial, Gunn was threatened with imprisonment, a hefty fine and property seizure by a swanky law firm, Simpson Grierson, if she failed to comply with an Order from NZ’s Employment Relations Authority demanding that she take down media content to satisfy their client, Health NZ.
This Censorship Order pertained to content posted across FreeNZ Media’s platforms, publicizing their ballsy scoop of whistleblower, Barry Young, who leaked Ministry of Health data showing deaths following various doses of Pfizer’s gene-hacking serum, that had been marketed as the Comirnaty ’vaccine’.
Snoopman’s subsequent exposé shows Pfizer’s shots kill at a shocking rate of 1 person per 1100 doses.
In a podcast with CEO of Rumble, following the New Zealand’s health authority sending the video platform a takedown request to remove FreeNZ Media entirely from the platform, Chris Pavlovski compared the treatment of Barry Young to Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked classified U.S. Department of Defense documents, known as the ‘Pentagon Papers’. Ellsberg was also accused of stealing classified documents and the New York Times won a case in the Supreme Court to protect its 1st Amendment right to publish.
The podcaster, Matt Kim, opined that the spate of censorship notices, crackdowns on dissidents and the attempts to get censorship laws passed across the West, belied an outsourced approach to whittle away at human rights — that appears to be covertly led by the U.S. Government to achieve a tyrannical strategy.
In the aftermath of Forrest‘s ‘guilty Gunn‘ verdict, former Police Senior Constable, Daniel Picknell said on Reality Check Radio, it was crucial that the Freedom Community, including key people, get past their differences and see that each group, or media entity, are run by good people who are doing their best to report or confront the problems. Picknell also said in the interview with Paul Brennan, it was important to stick up for people in the Freedom Community when they get picked on. Picknell believes the trial was politically motivated.
Indeed, the Freedom Community is not immune to the pervasive cultural impairment of living on a remote archipelago, neighbouring the land down under where women glow and men plunder: Small Island Spectrum Syndrome Impairment (SISSI). This small island cultural impairment shuns even moderate doses of critical thinking in social settings, workplaces, domestic environs and in political forums particularly if the discourse is deemed ‘wrongthink‘ because the ideas challenge the accepted problem framing, or the boundaries of discussion, or the desired solutions of the ‘in-group‘ people.
Yet, studies don‘t show this mental disorder that is endemic to New Zealand, despite its traceable origins to the Victorian Era — perhaps because it is so embarrassing. Too many tow the line, and it is this code of silence that maintains the old boys‘ network‘s cartelized industries, as a closed shop. It outwardly appears competitive, but in reality is corrupt, controlled and criminally colluding with local and central government, as well as with a coterie of non-profit private organizations, and international billionaire-funded foundations.
Because everyone is etching out a living on a small island archipelago, the small-minded nit-picking is a constant feature of New Zealand life, against a backdrop of bigger issues for grown-ups to problem solve.
This cerebral impairment, I contend, makes Kiwis susceptible as a people to remain divided, deluded and dispirited. Our continued ignorance of its pervasiveness in our cultural psyche, means we are vulnerable to continuing exploitation as test subjects, since our remote developed English-speaking small population is an ideal laboratory.
The ocean-moated South Pacific archipelago has long been used as the world’s premiere test facility for new technologies, political strategies and social engineering. ‘New Zealand has more pilot studies than pilots’, a retired joke claimed. The country is practically run in accordance to political strategies, policy frameworks, and technocratic tactics shaped in unseen processes by political strategists, polling companies, think-tanks, law-firms and accountancy agencies, ratings agencies and P.R. agents.
This test facility casting essentially positions New Zealand in a parallel universe-cum-redux version of Ground Hog Day.
Except, Kiwis don’t get to restart the day over until they win over their desired love interest.
Instead, Kiwis are recast as ‘Carrot Landers’, who are expected to behave like cheerful bright orange bags of export-quality carrots — unblemished, perfectly formed and too polite to challenge the toxic regime.
Kiwis are marketed like tourism industry extras. This outward cheerfulness is what McLauchlan was alluding to in 1976, when he described Kiwis as passionless, conformist, anti-intellectual zombies, while there was an underlying toxicity such as racism toward Pacific Islanders for ‘overstaying’ their stint as migrant workers.
New Zealand’s perennial role as a location to field-test political strategies, social engineering pilot studies and technology innovations has not simply been predicated on the idea that the guinea pigs will not find out they are test subjects — as the Bilderberg Group mouthpiece magazine, The Economist, reported in 2015. The assumption in-built into the experiments is that the South Pacific test-lab’s isolated location affords the experimenters the capacity to shutdown any contagion of truth from spreading around the world — should an experiment go badly wrong, or if its dark secrets are decoded.
In the course of writing this Carrot Land dispatch, I had a ‘snoop-dream’ to decode.
In the dream, I was an audio-visual techie at a regal event featuring a red-carpeted cathedral setting.
New Zealand had undergone a political change; it now had a Queen who was of mixed Māori and Pākehā heritage. Her role was as a wise counsel, with no power to order but with the mana of the people — even though she lacked good looks — to appeal to reason. It seemed it was a compromise between the republicans and the rebellious on the one hand, and the royalists and other retarded folk, on the other hand.
It was considered a trail-blazing political experiment, so the Queen wanted to impress.
The event in the dream was soon to start, and most of the guests had taken their places. I was making my way to do something other than my one job. The Queen saw me and with a regal calmness, appealed to my better self to stay focussed even though I’d impulsively thought there was time to do something else.
We knew one another well enough. I read her micro-expressions of nervousness, because my humble role was actually pivotal to the event reaching the nation and the wider world. She saw I was having a ‘muppet moment’, but she had grace in spades and broached the matter more tactfully. I touched her upper arm as I walked by, to indicate I would go back to my station for the live-feed of the event.
I woke from the snoop-dream.The metaphor of the gentle touch works both ways. A person can recognize they are being a muppet and can even gesture to ‘royalty’ — without fear of being decked by New Zealand’s equivalent of the ‘Scottish Guard’.
Given the foregoing, Snoopman wondered how different the world the would be if humans of Earth weren’t simply educated to be just smart enough to become plumbers, plasterers, painters, porters, package handlers, police officers, parole officers, peace officers, payroll clerks, pianists, photographers, painters, pilots, pathologists, pharmacists, physicians, physicists, politicians, and professors.
Because — the ‘Forrest Law’ endorses an extinction-bound evolutionary branch that might be called homo retardus.
Meanwhile, ‘political’ podcast producers are under the gun.
The core challenge, it seems to Snoopman, is that everyone needs to find their purpose, which can be expressed more conceptually this way: go be the best version of yourself ’cause the planet’s Overlords can’t continue to rule the world if we are authentic everyday. That way, homo retardus can wither with the ‘Forrest Law’.
Notes
* World-cities are serviced by public debt-funded infrastructure, techno-feudal institutions favouring high capital mobility, and large pools of excess labour to support the huge geographically dispersed transnational corporations that seek to accumulate capital faster and faster. Structural pressures are intensified to construct huge cities in a techno-feudal system — where fast capital flows and systemic unemployment are in-built. Such structural pressures serve the aggressive logic of yield-seeking capital that drives wealth accumulators to keep zombie capital ‘alive’ with new growth opportunities. Consequently, NZ is a crisis-ridden society beset with a ‘Shock Doctrine’ economic warfare framework.
** This Neo-Feudal Cliqué intended to replace most of the domestic population — including Māori — with vulnerable working class immigrants, and a wealthier imported professional service class, and a domestic-foreign capitalist class mixture. In the 1996 documentary series, Revolution, Douglas said he had hoped the Labour Government would be in power for 15 years.***Because New Zealand is island nation, in which every industry is small, with a thin elite at the top, and it is dominated by market monopolizing cartels, New Zealanders are afraid to ‘rock the boat’. This makes Kiwis scared to whistle-blow, and it causes the media to pull their punches, and also it results in the public or privately-funded watch-dog organizations to be soft in their over-sight, investigations and punishments. Hence, SISSI-E.
****The social integration function was also served in part by the attempts of the judge and court security to establish ground rules, to admonish the public gallery, and to warn of expulsion for breaking boring rules that were about limits on freedom of expression such as heckling, recording and hat-wearing.
Also I note the irony of Chomsky's "#9 manufacture consent" when he is pro vax. I was surprised that he appeared not to see behind the veil and still seems that way. Guess they manufactured his consent...
Thanks for the comprehensive overview. Sad for your country to have stooped so far.