Unctuous righteousness: Jacinda Ardern
Sickly, fraudulent high-mindedness in New Zealand
Dalrymple writes that the children of the West seem to be increasingly
indoctrinated into a kind of magical thinking in which expressing a wish to do good is nine-tenths of doing good.
He notes that Jacinda Ardern,
the Pasionaria of New Zealand Islam, cannot wait to don fancy dress in her effort to proclaim her multicultural goodness.
The woman, with her saint act and her delusions of honesty,
exudes unctuous righteousness. She was born with Original Virtue.
Ardern
leaves a trail of moral slime behind her. It makes you want to wash afterwards.
Dalrymple says that he cannot bear to look at Ardern’s photograph for a second.
I turn over the page, or exit the website, as soon as I catch so much as a glimpse of her.
He observes that if we get smug leaders, it is because smugness
is a characteristic of a considerable part of the electorate, and being smug, they like smugness in others; or it is because people are tone-deaf to smugness, in the way that many people are tone-deaf to the fraudulence of TV evangelists such as Jimmy Swaggart. If you don’t see the fraudulence or the smugness straight away, you never see it; you don’t deduce it from other characteristics, you see it at once if you see it at all.
Intelligent people are especially vulnerable, being
frequently deceived by the fraudulent and the smug.
Intelligent people are the more dangerous when they are so deceived,
for they have more influence on and in society. I remember some years ago attending a conference in which a well-known Islamic preacher, said to be moderate, modernising, and reformist, spoke. I spotted at once that he was a crook and a liar, but several well-known intellectuals were completely taken in. There are none so blind as will not see.
