When "Extremism" Means Whoever You Disagree With
MINISTERIAL ON THE RESURGENCE OF POLITICAL TERRORISM: Marco Rubio just told the world what New Zealanders have been living for years
On July 16, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio convened a ministerial in Washington DC - the “Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism” - with representatives from over 60 countries, to confront what he called a resurgence of organised, violent far-left extremism. His core charge: legacy institutions - media, academia, government - have spent years treating organised left-wing violence “as a right-wing fever dream, or worse, as a dangerous fascist conspiracy,” while giving it cover. (Read more on Daily Wire).
New Zealand was there. Barely.
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A quiet RSVP
MFAT confirmed to the NZ Herald that New Zealand would be represented by Daniel Mellsop, deputy head of mission at the country's embassy in Washington DC - not a minister, not our ambassador, and not Winston Peters, our actual Foreign Minister, who has met Rubio in person multiple times this year (NZ Herald). (Mr Peters’ New Zealand First party convention is being held in Auckland this weekend).
Mellsop is a career diplomat, not an elected official - meaning New Zealand's presence at a summit directly relevant to domestic policy debates here carried zero decision-making weight in our Parliament. This was diplomatic attendance, not political engagement.
There’s no Beehive press release on this at all. A search of the Beehive site turns up nothing. The only original NZ coverage I could find is a single NZ Herald article. No RNZ, no Stuff, no 1News, no Newsroom. For a summit this significant to a country that just lived through the Christchurch mosque attacks and built an entire national counter-extremism strategy in response, that silence is itself a story.
I posted an article about the ‘Preventing And Countering Violent Extremism Fund’ earlier this week, and spoke with Sean Plunket on The Platform NZ earlier this morning…
The New Zealand mirror
Because here’s what I see: New Zealand already has its own version of exactly the pattern Rubio described - just running in the opposite direction.
In 2024, Gender Minorities Aotearoa published “Anti-Transgender Extremism,” a guide which is available on the NZ Police website, produced with support from the government’s own Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism (PCVE) Fund - a fund set up in 2022 under the Ardern government specifically as a counter-terrorism response to the Royal Commission’s recommendations following the Christchurch mosque attacks. I covered the funding trail in detail last year.
The booklet itself places “gender critical” women’s groups on the same page as white supremacists and “political parties supporting fascism.” It cites the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention’s claim that the gender-critical movement “seeks to eradicate [transgender identity] completely from society,” and invokes the Nazi deportation of trans people to concentration camps as historical context for where this “spectrum” leads. A counter-terrorism fund, built to stop the next Christchurch, ended up bankrolling language that places concerned mothers on a continuum with genocide.
And now it’s in NZ classrooms
The same inversion is showing up in schools. PPTA president Chris Abercrombie has told media the union is developing guidance for teachers dealing with students holding “extreme far-right” views - while Rangitoto College’s Paul Stevens told the PPTA’s own conference that students calling themselves “Trump boys” or writing “trad-wife” assignments represent a rising extremism threat (The Press, reported via multiple outlets). I was sent a Social Studies activity from a NZ high school asking students to “interpret” a cartoon of Donald Trump as a Ku Klux Klan leader (read about it here).
The irony writes itself: the US Department of Justice has indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center - the organisation whose “hate group” designations effectively wrote the vocabulary being used here - for allegedly funnelling more than $3 million to actual KKK, Aryan Nations and neo-Nazi figures between 2010 and 2023, while simultaneously branding mainstream conservative groups as hate groups (US DOJ). SPLC has pleaded not guilty; trial is set for October. But the case is real, and it lands squarely on Rubio’s point: institutions built to fight extremism have, in specific and now legally alleged instances, been funding it - while calling ordinary dissent “extreme.”
I’ve had my own small taste of where this leads. A NZ teacher recently replied to my recent article about the inversion of our education system (that featured the Trump as KKK) on social media to “f*#king die already”. My investigation into this teacher is underway.
A year ago I received this email, also from a NZ teacher, after I published a video about an event in a NZ high school called ‘Lil Gay Out’. She said:
“Well done you poisonous human.
You have created enough fear and loathing in people you don’t even know, for this year’s Lil Gay Out to be cancelled. You kicked off a social media fracas and doxxed professionals, the result of which meant your supporters made innocent people feel unsafe.
This is not your victory. This is yet more evidence of your wish to cause harm to others who have done NOTHING to affect your miserable life.
The sad thing is, that this will make you feel good.
Happy for you to hold your beliefs about what schools agendas supposedly are, but don’t spread your hate. It is hate. Pure and simple. It’s what you thrive on.
What goes around comes around and someday I hope your hatred and anger come back and visit you.
You sad, poisonous woman.”
Nga mihi
Raewyn Donnell
I mention these examples not to make this about me, but because they are a specific, current examples of the tone that circulates freely in these spaces while parents and students who ask ordinary questions get labelled the threat.
Why this matters
None of this made the news here. Not Rubio’s summit, not the extremism guide sitting on the Police website, not the PPTA’s own framing of who counts as “extreme.” New Zealanders deserve to know that while our government sent a mid-level diplomat to a summit on the resurgence of far-left political violence, it has spent years funding literature that calls people like the parents I work with genocidal fascists - and that our media, so far, hasn’t asked a single question about either.
Penny Marie
Penny Marie is an independent researcher and investigative reporter, and the Founder of Let Kids Be Kids NZ.