On Paramilitaries

The world's changing and we have to change with it

Five weeks ago, a blackshirt paramilitary group attacked a drag king story hour in Aotearoa New Zealand. The group, Destiny Church’s “Man Up” brigade, stormed Auckland’s Te Atatū library on church leader Brian Tamaki’s orders. They concussed one teenager, injured library workers, and forced 30 parents and toddlers to barricade themselves inside. They then pounded on the walls in an attempt to lynch the drag performer inside. This represents a notable escalation in right-wing paramilitary violence in New Zealand. The country is going to be different moving forward.

Our white supremacist and Christian fundamentalist prime minister, Christopher Luxon, made it clear he won’t do anything about Destiny Church. New Zealand journalist David Farrier then revealed that every megachurch in the country quietly supports Destiny Church’s attack. It’s a frightening time to be queer, to be Māori, and to be working-class in this country. Israel and America opened the door for right-wing forces to be genocidal across the world and those forces are advancing in every country where they’ve established beachheads.

In the four weeks following Destiny Church’s attack, the group I’m secretary of, People Against Prisons Aotearoa, put on three events: a 1200-person rally, a speaking event at the Auckland Pride festival, and a town hall. The goal was to pressure the government to strip Destiny Church of its charity status, costing them millions of dollars, and to sway people into direct left-wing action that doesn’t appeal to useless liberals to protect us.

I think we’ve made headway. Members of parliament are now pushing our initiatives, and we’ve gained more members dedicated to protecting themselves and each other. I’m tired, though. These past few weeks have strained my health, my personal relationships, and made me angry that I once again have to live in a world where white supremacist government officials let paramilitaries organise to kill me and the people I love.

This isn’t my first time at the rodeo. In 2023, I wrote for New Zealand socialist website 1of200 that in America, “I risked my life multiple times for antifascist political causes… Police maced, tear gassed, and beat me with batons at Black Lives Matter protests. Cops shot people’s eyes out, kidnapped people, and threw them in vans in front of me. White supremacist militiamen threatened to shoot me with automatic weapons, revved their cars at me during street protests, and made it explicitly clear they wanted to paint the concrete with mine and others’ blood.” In that essay, I described leaving notes for friends and family on the kitchen table before every protest in case a Kyle Rittenhouse-type gunned me down. Now, four years after moving to New Zealand, that same paramilitary violence has followed me here.

Before every political event I organise now, I prepare for the possibility someone might show up with a knife, a gun, or try to drive a car through it. I was one of the first on the scene to Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue massacre in 2018, and I know what can happen if they catch you unprepared. I saw a lot of dead people in the States, and I thought I could briefly get away from that here. Now, that time’s up and we have to prepare.

I hate living like this. I hate having to worry about my own safety, I hate having to worry about the safety of people I love, and I hate the government officials who let these people prey on us in exchange for votes. I feel my body physically changing in response to it: my cortisol pumping, my heart valves tightening, and my capacity for reverie interrupted. I hate that this is just how things are now, until we win or they do. I already miss the life I lived before they attacked. But they did, and now we have to prepare to defend ourselves in the future.

I made the decision to move to New Zealand in 2020, shortly after Joe Biden won the presidential election. Covid was in full swing, I was working a remote job in Pittsburgh, and liberals around me rejoiced as I felt quiet and alienated. I’d been working for a Texas magazine near the U.S.-Mexico border prior to the election and I knew, in my heart, that Biden was a vile white supremacist and things were only going to get worse. No amount of American liberal delusion could quell what I saw in Texas, at mass shooting sites, and at police shooting sites around the country. I had a New Zealand passport and thought I’d move back to a country where I could enjoy a few more years of normalcy. From 2021 to 2025, I did.

That normalcy’s over. The future’s here and there’s no going back. We have to politically organize or the door to hell that America opened will swallow us all. If you live in New Zealand, believe in queer rights, and think colonialism’s bad, join People Against Prisons Aotearoa. We can beat these fascists but we need your help. If we don’t organise, they’ll win and kill us. It’s communism or barbarism from here on out. I know which side I’m on.

Tāmaki (Auckland) Events

• The Capitol Cinema Film Club is playing Ted Kotcheff's Australian classic Wake In Fright on Wednesday, March 26 at 8pm at The Capitol Cinema in Mt. Eden. In the film Englishman Gary Bond plays John Grant, a schoolteacher, who loses his mind in alarming fashion in a remote township in the sun-scorched and barren Outback.
  
  In his 1972 review for The New York Times, critic Roger Greenspun praised Wake In Fright for its atmosphere "of general foreboding that crystalizes often enough into particular terror” and describes it as similar to certain science fiction films “in which some evil alien presence has taken over a community that to all outward appearances remains normal—with only the slightest most fugitive hint that something somehow is hideously wrong." If you like movies about Australian settler-colonials doing fucked-up shit, you should come along.

• Auckland’s underground fashion week, Te Wiki Āhua O Aotearoa, is starting next week on Monday, March 24 and I strongly recommend going. Āhua replaced New Zealand’s official fashion week last year when they decided not to do it annually, and it’s much better. Official fashion week was boring, staid, and bloodless, and Āhua was tight, well put-together, and coursing with life. They’re doing five shows from Monday, March 24 to Friday, March 28. You can get tickets here if you’re interested.

Recommended Reading

• I liked this interview in The Creative Independent with writer Haley Mlotek about her book about divorce. Mlotek’s work is particularly good – her essay about a long-distance affair helped me get over a devastating breakup a few years ago – and I’m excited to read her book.

• I liked this essay by Patrick Redford about what public lands are actually for and the opportunities they provide to expand the mind and soul. He also writes about the fact they’re stolen from Native Americans and the tension that creates within them.