Voices for Freedom co-founder endorses Great Replacement Theory
You could call it a 'mask off' moment, although VFF have never been keen on masks
On April 28, Alia Bland, a co-founder of Voices for Freedom (the anti-vaccine group that claimed responsibility for recruiting over half of the protestors at the 2022 Parliament Occupation), who uses the pseudonym Alia Bee on social media, shared a speech made by Dutch far-right activist Eva Vlaardingerbroek. This was not the first time someone associated with Voices for Freedom (VFF) had promoted Vlaadingerbroek. A few weeks earlier the VFF Instagram account shared a video of her discussing the supposed plan by the World Economic Forum to impose a personal carbon allowance on individuals (something the WEF would not actually have the power to do).
Vlaardingerbroek has many commonalities with Voices for Freedom: she was a critic of public health measures adopted during the height of the COVID pandemic and vocally sceptical about the vaccine. However, her recent speech, made at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Hungary was about something else altogether:
“I know one thing for sure, and that is that if nothing changes, if we don’t start to seriously fight for our continent, for our religion, for our people, our countries, then this time will go down in history as the time when Western nations no longer had to get invaded by hostile armies in order to be conquered, this time will then go down in history as the period in which the invader was actively invited in by a corrupt elite. And not only did this corrupt elite invite the enemy in, they made the native population pay for it too. Everyone who has eyes can set it. The native, white, Christian population is being replaced at an ever accelerating rate”
“The native, white, Christian population is being replaced at an ever accelerating rate.” This, of course, is the Great Replacement Theory–the very conspiracy theory after which the Christchurch terrorist named his manifesto. “The Great Replacement Theory is no longer a theory,” Vlaardingerbroek told the audience in Budapest. It’s a reality”.
Tellingly, Bland was defensive even in her promotion of this speech, adding the caveat:
“Now, before everyone screams, "Far-right racist!", consider this. In New Zealand, there is much chatter about colonisation and the loss of Māori culture, language, sovereignty, etc. Extraordinary effort and financial resources are devoted to promoting and preserving all things Māori.
One would expect that those responsible for the anti-colonisation movement in NZ might recognise the parallels European cultures are experiencing now with the colonisation underway in their countries. At the core, it's the same thing, right?
Don't be silly.
We cannot transfer those arguments to white cultures!
Clearly, patriotic Europeans are racist for pointing out the real-time erosion of their culture and their privilege to pay for it to happen.
Even having the discussion should qualify for cancellation, eh @factaotearoa?”
“[t]he parallels European cultures are experiencing now with the colonisation underway in their countries. At the core, it's the same thing, right?”
Wrong. There are no parallels with the colonisation of Aotearoa and immigration into Europe. British colonisers believed that the Māori population would die out upon contact with a “superior” race, and when they didn’t, the colonisers suppressed Māori language and culture through laws such as the 1907 Tohunga Suppression Act and the ban on speaking te reo Māori in schools. You would be hard pressed to name anything comparable going on in present day Europe.
European culture is not being eroded. Colonisation has spread European culture across the planet. While there are today approximately 179,000 Māori speakers, English is spoken by 1 in 5 people on Earth, some 1.46 billion people. (There are also half a billion Spanish speakers and 320 million French speakers, the languages of two other prominent colonial countries). Christianity is not at risk either–it remains the world's largest religion with some 2.4 billion adherents- also, in large part, due to colonisation.
We can even leave aside, for the moment, the implication that that resources should not be spent preserving a unique culture that only exists on this small whenua, one which colonisers were explicit in their intentions to wipe out (which is cultural genocide, by definition).
Simply put, Bland’s claims about massive funding imbalances are not supported by evidence. She may claim “Extraordinary effort and financial resources are devoted to promoting and preserving all things Māori,” but that omits the fact that significant government funding and resources are, in fact, devoted to preserving European culture in this country. Te Matatini (a Māori performing arts festival) had a funding boost last year to $34 million over two years, but in 2022 their funding was just $2.9 million. By contrast, that same year, funding for Symphony Orchestra was nearly $20m and the Royal New Zealand Ballet received $8m.
European culture is, of course, also supported in Europe. Migration is not the same as colonisation, and understanding the crucial difference between the two is important to debunking these types of conspiracy theorists. Immigrants have always influenced the cultures in their new homes (as ‘culture’ is not fixed in time but constantly changing), and it is not benign to imply that some cultures are a “threat” to society while others should be protected and preserved. European culture is not at risk and is not being suppressed. It is simply existing alongside and in development with new cultural influences from around the globe.
Vlaardingerbroek is not really talking about culture, though. She is talking about race, and she is happy to name it.
“By now I think we all know what they mean with the word diversity, it means less white people, less of you…our establishment claims that white people are evil and that our history is somehow fundamentally different from that of others, consciously or unconsciously they have sucked up the lies of the neo-Marxist critical race theory”
She ends the speech saying that the elites have declared war, and white, Christian Europeans need to “put on the full armour of God, fight back, and win.”
The language of the crusaders and colonisers since the 12th century is alive and well in the European far right rhetoric of today.
Of course, we are well past the point where a Voices for Freedom co-founder sharing a speech like this should be surprising. The organisation initially portrayed itself as a group of mothers with concerns about the safety and efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine, garnering them sympathetic media coverage. However, the Voices for Freedom outlet Reality Check Radio (RCR), launched just over a year ago and currently on hiatus while they fundraise to continue, has already become more vocally extreme, regularly platforming far-right and white nationalist guests.
On his show The Dialogue, former secretary of the New Conservative Party Diewue de Boer has hosted Martin Sellner of the Identartarian movement- a man the Christchurch shooter donated to, the white nationalist bodybuilder Marcus Follin, and VDARE founder Peter Brimelow, who once said that the way to prevent further attacks like the massacre in Christchurch is “ending mass Third World immigration, [but] Western elites just won’t do it. They prefer repressing the white host nations.”
In a video posted to the Reality Check Radio Twitter account, de Boer teased more “forbidden dialogue that they don’t want discussed”. These guests were “just the tip of the iceberg,” and if people donated to the current fundraiser, RCR would be able to “deliver more content that shifts the Overton window even further.” The Overton Window, named for American policy analyst Joseph Overton, is an idea in political science that there is a window of policies acceptable to the population at any given time.
One of RCR’s goals is to expand this range of acceptable policies, by platforming voices excluded from “mainstream media”.
Reality Check Radio is an entity that would have seemed strange a decade ago. Among many other shows in addition to de Boer’s is ‘Up Your Brave’ hosted by Natalie Cuttler-Welsh, whose website describes her as a “speaker, author, super connector and visibility coach” and offers forest retreats and essential oils for sale. Cuttler-Welsh stood as a candidate for the Green Party in 2005, a party whose politics are a far cry from those being promoted elsewhere on the RCR platform. This is the nature of the modern conspiracist movement. In her recent book Doppelganger, Naomi Klien describes it as an alliance between the far-right and the ‘far-out’, the latter being ideologies that were once associated with the green left, but that don’t actually fit easily onto a one dimensional political spectrum.
“These formations bring together many disparate political and cultural strains: the traditional right; the QAnon conspiratorial hard right; alternative health subcultures usually associated with the green left; a smattering of neo-Nazis; parents (mainly white mothers) angry about a range of things happening and not happening in schools (masks, jabs, all-gender bathrooms, anti-racist books); small-business owners enraged by the often-devastating impacts of Covid controls on their bottom lines, which gave way to rage at everything from inflation to induction stove tops.”
Voices for Freedom emerged out of Advance New Zealand, one of several populist parties that contested the 2020 election on similar platforms. Its leaders have decided that the path to political change is not another party that will get 1% of the vote, but rather lies in influencing the population, to make fringe ideas more normalised, so that their policies will then be implemented by more mainstream parties in government. Media scholars have suggested the term “cultural partisans” to describe this approach.
RCR host Maree Buscke and New Conservative Party leader Helen Houghton reminded listeners of this strategy when they celebrated on air as it was announced that a New Conservative Party policy- the removal of guidelines around relationship and sexuality education from the school curriculum, would be implemented as part of the coalition agreement between National and New Zealand First. Their strategy appears to be working.
Reality Check Radio is currently fundraising toward a goal of nearly half a million dollars to fund their continued existence. With donations being matched by big donors they only need half of that from their followers, making it a goal they are likely to meet. It looks like New Zealand’s biggest disinformation platform is going to be around for quite some time, and will continue to have an influence on politics and society.
This is not to say that those who care about media transparency and political speech in Aotearoa have no way to respond to these threats on civil society. Perhaps the strategies that will disrupt the flow of disinformation can be tested by the force which VFF is already pushing back on attempts to regulate online media. A DIA proposal for a media regulation model and codes of practice for online media was flooded with oppositional submissions from Voices for Freedom and the Free Speech Union. The base has not gone anywhere, VFF continues to organise, and this issue will not be leaving our politics any time soon. Any attempts to regulate online media will face an uphill battle as long as its opponents can continue to successfully frame any standards or rules as an “attack” on the ideals of “free expression.”