Ansell / In Hell

So it turns out John Ansell - the marketer whose racially rank Iwi/Kiwi billboards almost made Don Brash Prime Minister - is now one of the luminaries of the anti-Vaxx movement.

Here he is, saying about how he would like to see elected representatives killed:

You are killing people ... you are killing people ... and it is not misinformation, it is missing information that we want.  You are participating in a genocide.  The question is, what should be the punishment?  Some say, as per Nuremburg, it should be hanging.  I don't, I respectfully disagree with that.  I think it should be lethal injection.

Just savour that for a moment.

I heard a discussion the other day about how we should not talk about the 'anti-vaxx rabbit hole' because that makes it sould innocent and fluffy.  But the term comes from Lewis Carrol's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Alice goes down the rabbit hole to a place where the normal rules don't apply, where nothing makes sense and everyone is mad.  So I think it has merit.

We're expected to take seriously someone who thinks a vaccine that may have killed one person (after five million odd doses) is 'genocide'; who would rather we did not use it in the face of a virus that will soon have killed 1 in 300 citizens of the USA.

There have been 47 million cases of COVID in the USA.  There have been 750,000 deaths.  That's a shocking 1.6% death rate, or 1 in every 62 cases resulting in death.  World wide, it is worse - about 1 death per 50 cases.  If there is a 'genocide' happening it isn't in New Zealand, but less fortunate parts of the world.  That's the sort of information you are missing, John.

It's said people drift to the right as they age, abandoning youthful idealism as they confront the harsh realities of life.  But it would seem if you start on the right you perform the same drift, and end up somewhere very strange and troubling indeed, deep down the rabbit hole.

You have to wonder how someone like Ansell, or Sue Grey, or Simon Thornley ends up where they are.  Given Ansell's past associations you can see a pathway from the libertarian fringe to where he is now - lockdowns, state over reach and now compelling people to have vaccines at risk of losing their jobs.  But it is a hard, long path, and you'd have to really, really want to get there - or be driven there by your own inner demons.

Listening to Ansell fulminating about genocide I don't feel fear (though I might if it was me he was advocating being executed); nor do I feel hate, or even contempt.  I feel something like pity, because whatever made him walk all that way clearly wasn't something good; and it hasn't brought him any happiness or peace.