NZ First anti-Green ads will backfire, but Kingi restaurant fiasco perfect ACT Party culture war propaganda – thedailyblog.co.nz

This is funny but totally ineffective

Election 2020: NZ First doubles down on attacks against Greens with mocking unicorns, pixies post

New Zealand First has doubled-down on its attacks against the Greens wealth tax policy with a mocking online post that features raining $100 bills, pixies, flying pigs, and a pink-maned unicorn.

But the image that was posted by New Zealand First on its official Facebook page on Thursday may have backfired.

It lampoons Green Party co-leaders James Shaw and Marama Davidson with the fairytale symbols, accompanied by a caption that says: But unfortunately money doesnt just fall from the sky

TDB Recommends NewzEngine.com

when you are using the Bad Boys of Brexit, you miss the cultural nuance.

All this advert does is make people nervous about a Labour Green Government vote Labour!

Its funny satire, where as NZ First voters require some spite and low grade ignorance in their political motivations. This just causes laughs and reminds the wider electorate to Party vote Labour to prevent the Greens having any real power.

ACT have played the culture war far better than any other Party this election. Track ACTs momentum from the Free Speech debacle last year where the Woke Left went on a deplatforming crusade that ended up benefitting ACT as David Seymour became the defender of Free Speech.

How the living Christ we on the Left have managed to lose our role as the protectors of Free Speech is a tad demoralising. The argument presented by the Identity Politics activists is that fragile intersectionalist snowflakes feel triggered and in an age of subjective rage where micro aggressions are on par with war crimes, hearing anything woke mantras are against is hate speech that causes great emotional harm.

Ugh.

ACT took this ammunition and returned fire with devastating accuracy and that has helped build them to the insane 5% they are now cruising at.

If NZ First wanted to cash in on the culture war wave ACT have crested, look no further than this joyless deplatforming of Kingi

Mori cultural appropriation, or simply a fish? Restaurateurs in stoush over kingi name

Two of Aucklands hippest restaurateurs have engaged in an online stoush over whether the name of a new restaurant, kingi, is a case of Mori cultural appropriation or merely a shortening for kingfish.

Owners of popular Auckland restaurant Orphans Kitchen, Tom Hishon and Josh Helm, are about to open a new seafood restaurant this October named kingi.

Hishon and Helm have always maintained the name is a colloquial shortening for kingfish used by fishermen the world over.

However this week, Hishon responded to some heated comments on Instagram from the founder of Auckland restaurant Cocos Cantina, Damaris Coulter, who accused him of appropriating the Mori word for King kngi.

I am a Mori woman who brought this concern to you and you have continued to ignore me, others who are also Mori have brought this concern to you, and you have continued to ignore them, Coulter said on Instagram.

Coulter said she and Hishon had lunch to discuss the sensitivities, but Hishon did not follow up on the meeting and there was no resolution to the concerns Coulter raised.

Speaking to the Herald on Sunday yesterday, Hishon said they had received endorsement from Mori advisers and mana whenua who they have been working closely with to help provide context to anyone who has concerns around the name.

Both Josh and I are keen fishermen so we just wanted to hero a bit of an icon [kingfish] in the fishing world and our love for fishing and the ocean, Hishon said.

That was where the thinking from the name came from.

It is a seafood restaurant and the kingi is referencing the fish. Were talking about an abbreviation of a word which you could call a colloquial term in New Zealand but its also around other parts of the word as a shortening for the fish.

If you search a hashtag with that spelling theres over 15,000 tags of a fish on there.

Hishon said they were very specific in making their restaurant name kingi be lower case, italicised, and have no macron on the first i as the Mori word does.

However, Coulter told the Herald on Sunday it would have been more appropriate to call a nickname for a kingfish Kingy.

For a number of reasons but mainly because I felt the i would be a Mori spelling of the sounding the word and the y would make more sense around the English abbreviation for kingfish, Coulter said.

The online back and forth was really me asking Tom, Josh his business partner, and Hotel Britomart, to respond to other peoples messages of concerns around the naming as people were messaging me and I didnt feel like it was my responsibility to unpack the guys thinking around it for them.

I just feel that we are in a time of decolonising and healing our beautiful Aotearoa, and the people who call it home, and we dont need new mamae [hurt] around things that can cause confusion or be contributing to reshaping parts of a language to make it look a certain way for personal use, Coulter said.

sweet Jesus isnt this just so delightful in its petty woke Gram insufferableness!

Its clearly a reference to the fucking fish.

They are a fish restaurant.

They like Kingfish.

I doubt they even had any idea that it could be construed as the Mori word for King.

These owners of Kingi are 30 seconds away from being accused on Twitter of being cross burning KKK members! The Woke are not known for their nuance when it comes to cancel culture.

This kind of micro aggression policing wokeness and its real world deplatforming impact is ripe for culture war exploitation by the Right and time and time and time again, the Woke just hand the ammunition over.

Social media is ubiquitous, many people feel self censored on it and recoil in fear of being called out by some woke mob. ACT understood that and played to it.

NZ Firsts current attempt to paint the Greens as away with the fairies is funny but will help drive votes towards Labour.

If you want to trigger culture war support the way ACT have, the target has to be far more threatening.

Being painted as racist, getting deplatformed on social media and losing your business all over the subjectivity of woke definition is pretty threatening.

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NZ First anti-Green ads will backfire, but Kingi restaurant fiasco perfect ACT Party culture war propaganda - thedailyblog.co.nz