Chris Penk’s Hate Parade

What Chris Penk has granted holocaust-denier and equal-opportunity-bigot Candace Owens is not “freedom of speech”. It’s not even really freedom of movement, though that technically is the right she has been granted.

What he has given her is permission to perform.

Freedom of Speech

In New Zealand, the right to freedom of speech is balanced with all other rights. The right to life. To safety. The freedom from discrimination. And while not so explicitly acknowledged — freedom from hate and fear and oppression. All these are rights we believe New Zealanders should have, things we believe are important to our civil society.

We do believe in freedom of speech, but not unconditionally. There are many, many limitations we put on freedom of speech in New Zealand, from limitations on inciting violence (much of what Candace Owens might say in NZ is actually not protected speech, and she can be prosecuted for it) to restrictions put in place by our Chief Censor. These reasonable limits on speech we have deemed necessary for a free and just society.

For example, the Chief Censor has made it illegal to possess or distribute Brendan Tarrant’s manifesto detailing why he committed the massacres at the two Christchurch mosques on March 15th, a manifesto that names Candice Owens as an inspiration for his act.

This sort of censorship is a regular part of how we moderate and regulate society.

But recently, this conversation has become warped.

The influence of the Free Speech Union and their partisan emphasis on freedom of speech in some particular contexts over others has given the nation a very misguided understanding of what makes speech ‘free’. Trans rights, for example, are a matter of speech at its most basic level — freedom of expression includes things like how you dress and present yourself. But that is not the “side” of the argument the Free Speech Union ever take, and they very deliberately avoid championing any causes that might cause an increase in support for such “left wing” ideas and movements.

Instead they select controversial speakers likely to receive pushback from the public, invite them here to give presentations under the guise of “conversation”, and then kick up a stink about their rights being infringed on when venues don’t want to host them, or when their visas are denied as part of a routine vetting process. It’s been fantastic advertising for them, and has resulted in their recent rise in popularity and support.

This is what they did with Graham Linehan, who last year was flown here by the FSU and paid to perform a series of speaking gigs up and down the country. It’s off the back of this success that speakers like Candace Owens come here now. Before Linehan, the most prominent FSU-backed speaker to visit us was Posie Parker, who faced so much public pushback she herself had to cancel her final speaking gig. She also had soup thrown on her, and a woman in the crowd was assaulted. This made New Zealand and Australia an unwelcoming place for far-right speakers to visit, (she faced similar hostility in Hobart), and so the FSU decided that a statement needed to be made. They hired the second most well-known “cancelled” writer on the planet (the first, JK Rowling, being well outside of their budget) to do a press tour for his book about how he’s not a writer anymore.

Graham Linehan’s visit to our shores, thanks to the facilitation of the FSU, was much more ordered than Posie Parkers. There was tight security at each venue, a guest list, and his speaking tour was managed by the FSU themselves, who paraded him around as a bastion for free speech — the writer that TV shows just wouldn’t work with anymore because his views were so controversial they had become a public liability.

Once we used to call that “taste”.

If you can appreciate the irony of someone being invited to the other side of the world to be paid to give a talk about how people won’t listen to him anymore, this is hilarious. If you are concerned for the safety and welfare of trans people or the veracity of information that has been swallowed hook line and sinker by the fawning public, much of which was not just anti-trans but anti-science and conspiratorial disinformation in general, this is much less funny.

---

Candice Owens, trendsetter

New Zealand has a precedent for denying holocaust-deniers entry to New Zealand, refusing David Irving entry in 2004 on similar grounds.

I remember this event only very vaguely, as I was nine. I would see it each night on the news, and can recall grappling then with the concept of “free speech” vs “no hate speech” and feeling pleased with the outcome that eventuated, feeling like they made the right decision, an important decision that would be better for New Zealand. I wasn’t very certain of that back then, because I was nine, but it shaped my understanding of these complicated democratic matters going forward.

Ironically, it would be Graham Linehan himself and his antics on Twitter in the early 2010s, that would firm up my stance on “platforming hate always allows hate to spread”. (I was unfortunately a very large fan of his).

Chris Penk and the FSU are playing a very careful game with their decision on Candace Owens’ visa and how they frame it for the public. No one except for Jonathan Ayling, the brains of the everyday operation of the FSU (and an excellent lawyer who knows exactly how to frame these arguments so they’re both legally correct and publicly appealing), will give interviews, and that is because they are avoiding saying some quite specific things.

They are avoiding implying that this case is about Candice Owen’s freedom of speech. This is because she is a foreign national and has none — something they openly acknowledge and in fact draw attention to, justifying their intervention in her case as being about the freedom of speech “of New Zealanders” — their right to hear her speech.

This is the political equivalent of a magician waving his wand with one hand while performing sleight of hand with the other.

Chris Penk is not granting her the right to speak in a general sense — that was never really in doubt. Her views and materials are not censored here in any way, and she is perfectly capable of giving a web seminar or livestream or using any other method of disseminating her views to New Zealanders as she sees fit from outside the country.

What he is granting her is the right to enter the country, something to which she does not have any sort of inherent entitlement. Freedom of movement is a freedom granted within New Zealand, but it does not exist in a global sense, and in fact is one of most limited rights worldwide, largely because of countries like us who are very restrictive about the people we allow in and how.

Chris Penk’s visa approval is the act that grants her all other rights in New Zealand, rights that become… not inalienable, exactly, but are protected and procedural and a legal matter to later limit, and at a much higher bar. This is precisely why visas are granted on a person-by-person basis; countries must be selective in who they allow into their country, and not just for reasons of terrorism or physical danger posed or potential for lawbreaking. This has been loosened in a world of globalism, but is by no means lost.

It is the lesser equivalent of being selective in who we grant citizenship to, because the granting of citizenship includes the state accepting a great deal of responsibility over, and a great deal of rights to, that naturalised citizen.

In other words, once she is here, she is here, and there’s not a damn thing we can do about her.

And we do know exactly what she is here to do. That is also what Chris Penk has approved in the specific. This is where he has given consideration to the rights of New Zealanders to hear her views vs our rights to not be exposed to them.

The decision Immigration New Zealand made, the decision that Penk overrode, was that the rights of New Zealanders to exist in a free and just society, to be safe, to life liberty and security of the persons, to their own religion, and to be free from discrimination, were greater than our rights to hear Owens speak. This is not just for Jewish peoples’ protection on the grounds of race and religion, but for people with disabilities (she denies Nazi experimentation, claims COVID is a scam which is very dangerous for those with weakened immune systems), for Māori (her anti-BLM stance has serious implications around policing and its lethal impact on minorities), for gender and sexual minorities (promotes scientific disinformation around gender and sexuality), for ethnic minorities in general (promotes white supremacy), and for the rights of all New Zealanders to not have the health of the nation, our collective security or the integrity of our information undermined by her rhetoric.

This is the section of BORA Penk must consider in regards to New Zealander’s right to hear Owens give her performance.

Everyone has the right to freedom of expression, including the freedom to seek, receive and impart information and opinions of any kind in any form.

This is very broad right, but the right that he must consider for Owens’ entry specifically is much narrower. What he would be denying, what immigration denied, was her right to impart her “information” and opinions in that particular form. Or rather, our right to hear it in that exact form.

20 years ago, before social media and covid and zoom, we decided that the form of “live performance” was not a justification for spreading the kind of antisemitic, racist, conspiracist views that Candice Owens will be expressing. It is a limitation on speech, on her speech (which she has very little entitlement to) and on the speech of New Zealanders who are entitled to seek and receive her views. But because of the very narrow way in which her speech is being limited, and the grossly disproportionate weighting of harm that we know comes from the spread of views such as Owens and Irving, it is a common understanding across borders and throughout history that the declining of entry for extremist views for specific live performance is a very valid reason to limit freedom of expression.

In a world where there are more means of disseminating thoughts and facilitating performances than ever, there is no excuse for reversing this standard — barring ignorance brought on by the way the Free Speech Union’s incessant propaganda that has skewed the national conversation around the “rights” of free speech so it has become elevated above all other rights (for no particular reason other than a sudden desire to spread and legitimise disinformation).

If this is a decision made out of ignorance at the behest of voters who have been urged to express their opinions on such matters by the stirrings of the FSU, that is perfectly forgivable, and Chris Penk can and should reverse his decision and explain to the nation why he has done so.

To take this course off his own back and not from later invention should this issue spiral would not only be an act of great integrity, it would facilitate the democratic conversation around what free speech is, how it interacts with other human rights, and would work to correct some of the imbalance and infighting the Free Speech Union has caused.

I doubt this will be the outcome. The Free Speech Union’s efforts to destabilise the national conversation have been particularly beneficial to National and the wider right, so it would be especially surprising for them to break from them now. But this decision is a bad one, and Penk’s decision does not change the standards to which Owens will be held to while she is here. Hate speech was not successfully made illegal in New Zealand after the Mosque Shootings (which again, the shooter attributed to Owens and her views) but incitement to violence still is.

Australia, who granted Posie Parker a visa and saw considerably less trouble about it, have not been so heavily impacted by the influence of their branch of the FSU, and they declined Owens entry based on her views and the high likelihood it would be harmful to others and cause civil unrest.

Penk, in all his wisdom, has seen to fit to overturn the decision New Zealand Immigration made based on that decision.

I hope he realises not just the implications of his decision and how much it goes against historical precedent, but how much responsibility he’ll bear in the eyes of the public for it should something go wrong.

---

An accounting of Candice Owens views

[Excerpt]

On August 18, Owens held a live broadcast on X titled “The Truth About Zionism” with the Tate brothers, Dan Bilzerian, a poker player and social media influencer who has made antisemitic remarks, Dave Smith, a comedian, and Andrew Meyer, an independent journalist.

In the broadcast, which Owens claimed received over a million views, she began by presumably talking about Jews, declaring: “There is ...a group of people in this country who can just keep lying on people …trying to ruin people’s lives and there’s just no accountability, because then you just get to flip it and say oh, it’s antisemitism.”

She then turned her focus on Israel. “It's the fact that when things happen on our soil and we find out that there is potentially Israeli involvement we are basically hushed up, called crazy,” she added, going on to promote antisemitic conspiracy theories about the destruction of the USS Liberty, an American warship mistakenly struck by Israel during the 1967 Six Day War, and Israel having advance knowledge about the 9/11 attacks. 

Owens also promoted the “blood libel” conspiracy, the false charge that Jews used the blood of Christian children for ritual purposes, which in past centuries led to Jews’ being violently attacked. She claimed that the family of Leo Frank (a Jewish man lynched in 1913 by a mob in Georgia after being wrongfully accused of murdering a young girl who worked at his factory) believed in pedophilia and incest “as the sacramental rites and they would commit these acts, things that would normally be termed blood libel were actually happening.”

In a July 2024 podcast episode, Owens engaged in Holocaust distortion and denial,and faced significant backlash to which she responded: “The reason why this particular episode is so detrimental to Zionism is because they have polluted American minds to believe that we must defend Israel out of morality and the evils of the Holocaust.”

In June 2024, Owens criticized the Antisemitism Awareness Act that was passed by the House a month before, which she said violated individuals’ First Amendment rights and claimed, “If you even accuse someone who is Jewish of having more allegiance to Israel than they do to America, you are going to be in trouble.” Owens added that Christians “better be very careful if you're going to talk about how the Jews played any sort of role in [Jesus’] persecution,” which she said was part of Christian doctrine.

Owens’ attacks on Israel and promotion of conspiracy theories about Jews reportedly led to discord between her and Ben Shapiro, the co-founder of the Daily Wire. Owens then left the media outlet in March 2024, after being employed there since late 2020.

Before embracing virulent antisemitic views after the events of October 7, Owens had made several disturbing remarks regarding the Jewish community.

Prior to 2023, Owens did not publicly express blatantly antisemitic views, but her comments offered a preview of what was to come. In October 2022, she initially defended Kanye West after he made several antisemitic comments and a threatening remark about Jews. After Jewish friends expressed disappointment with Owens’ support of West, she acknowledged he had hurt Jews with his escalating antisemitic rhetoric. But a month later, in November 2022, Owens retweeted a post by anti-Israel blogger Max Blumenthal who downplayed antisemitism and said that “White American Jews are living through a golden age of power, affluence and safety, “and that this “welcome reality threatens the entire Zionist enterprise.” 

In October 2021, while speaking to Tucker Carlson on "Tucker Carlson Tonight,"  Owens promoted an antisemitic trope about Jewish philanthropist George Soros, claiming that he helped fund the Black Lives Matter Movement to destabilize America. 

An early example of Owens’ offensive comments came to light in February 2019, when she appeared to defend Adolf Hitlerwhile she was the communications director for Turning Point USA (TPUSA), a conservative student organization.

---

For the next week, I have 75% off subscriptions (forever). This brings the price down to from about $2 a month, I think. If you’d like to support me, the koha is always greatly appreciated.

Thank you for reading!