Good old-fashioned journalism

Kirsty Johnston quoted me in her article 'White Rage finds outlet in alt-right', which she published yesterday in the New Zealand Herald alongside a much longer piece called 'How New Zealand's alt-right movement plans to influence the election'.

I talked with Johnston on the phone when she was preparing her articles, and was impressed by the depth and duration of her research into New Zealand's far right. She created a fake social media profile, infiltrated the fora where white nationalists lurk and chat and share jejune and anti-semitic memes, and later interviewed a series of self-proclaimed admirers of Nazi Germany in the cafes of Auckland. When I learned that two of her interlocutors were Chinese I remembered the multi-ethnic Nazis who struggled through the mud at Ardmore airport a couple of years ago, as well as mixed race fascists who tried to seize Samoa at the beginning of World War Two.