National MPs are baiting us and it’s working
Hey, Josh here with a depressing post! I hope that's enticing enough for you to read all the way to the end.
Feel free to skip to the comments if you read this already in your email!
Emily and I often send each other ideas for stories, and earlier today she popped this in our chat:
It's too long to screenshot but that message was followed by multiple chat bubbles that were just me ranting. This happens sometimes; I like to imagine that Emily just leaves her phone in a cupboard and does a little meditation while she tunes out the endless 'dings.' My rant was because the way right-wing organisations and people act on social media (and in general!) is one of my very sensitive buttons. In a sense, Emily is absolutely right. The graphic above is wildly misleading, and the comments are doubtless full of people explaining this in an endless variety of amusing ways to Hamilton East's nominatively-determined half-wit National MP, Ryan Hamilton. In this sense, National MPs are indeed very bad at social media.
But National aren't being bad at social media by accident. They are doing it on purpose. It is a well-established, deliberate tactic, one that the National Party and the agencies that act for them have been using to staggering success for many years.
Emily asked if I could write a piece about it. Happily, or rather, unhappily, I have already written it, for David Farrier's Webworm, more than two years ago.
David Farrier
I write a new version of this same post every several months or so, either in my head, or as a frantic reaction to some new quote-dunk on social media. No-one ever listens. But my special doom is to think that one day, someone might. So, thanks to David, here is an edited and updated version of the piece. Again.
Unfortunately, it's just as true today, or more so, than it was in April 2024. Here's what I wrote back then, lightly edited and updated.
It's time to learn about a company called Topham Guerin.
Topham Guerin is a PR company founded by two former Young Nat members, Sean Topham and Ben Guerin. For anyone blessed enough not to know about the Young Nats, it is the youth wing of the New Zealand National party, and it functions as a kind of combined club and asylum for the most cringeworthy young sociopaths in New Zealand. It was in this foetid stew that Topham and Guerin first learned their craft. Today, their well-paying job is to propel horrible people to power with boomer memes. Mockable conservative memes? Boris Johnson's oafishness? Christopher Luxon's cringe TikToks? It's all part of the strategy. They talk about it on their website.
Topham Guerin’s entire reason for existence is Doing A Bit.
You don’t have to take my word for it. Take Sean Topham’s. Here he is speaking at a nightmare conference called Friedman 19, put on by the Australian Taxpayer's Alliance, who are the Australian equivalent of the Taxpayer's (not a) Union. You probably don't need me to tell you that both organisations are members of the Atlas Network, because of course they are.
If you managed that entire video without having a rage-induced medical event, I salute you. I fear I suffered permanent psychic damage. But I lasted long enough to give you the juice: Topham Guerin's MO is to produce content at a truly alarming pace:
“In the peak point during the campaign we're posting 30 posts a day and more than 200 or 250 a week - that means you have to generate and publish a new piece of content every 20 minutes.”
If you assume this sort of run rate means they’re incapable of producing good content, you’d be right. Unfortunately, that’s the point.
They’re flooding the zone with shit.
The other agencies or internal party comms people that use Topham Guerin-like methods are all doing the same thing. And the shit they’re flooding the zone with is bait; calculated to resonate with their base and infuriate their online opponents. Examples are below, with a bonus picture of twerking MP David Seymour, who makes much more sense when you realise that a lot of the weird stuff he does is also a bit.
That’s probably enough about how these people and organisations are Doing A Bit. ]I want to try to explain why the Bit matters.
See that screenshot of petrol price graphs? (2026 edit: please someone update this meme with the new price under National!) They may look boring, but not so long ago they had New Zealand political Twitter all a-tizzy. The right-wing National party was firing them out, and online lefties were losing their minds because the presentation was so misleading. The axes, people pointed out repeatedly in quote tweets and replies, were all wrong. They were cherry-picking. It was all so unscientific, such an abuse of data, so counterfactual.
And when National saw fit to make graphics featuring the font Comic Sans, lefties lost their minds. How could the Right be so out of touch?
People were so busy pointing out the wrong that they failed to see that the wrongness — and their righteous reaction to it — was the point. National wasn’t just getting their message out; they were pissing off the right people. The always-online lefties annoyed at bad graph axes and uncool fonts were being co-opted as both messengers and a virtue signal for the normies National was targeting. If those people are annoyed, then National must be doing something right.
In the book The Dawn of Everything, about how the ideas of North American indigenous nations helped spark the Enlightenment, co-author David Graeber explains an anthropological puzzle: societies with markedly different, often contradictory, ideas about how to live would often be found right next to each other.
An egalitarian society that held all property in common and despised slavery could be found right next to a slave-keeping absolute monarchy. Graeber, following other anthropologists, suggests a mechanism that explains this: schismogenesis. A tribe would see what their hated rivals were doing, and deliberately set about doing the opposite. They defined themselves principally by being unlike their opposition.
Today, online personalities, political parties, and their PR handlers are invoking the same mechanism. It doesn’t matter if the Right has no new ideas and their politics are a multi-decade dirge of misery and failure; so long as they’re upsetting the annoyable, annoying Left, they must be doing something right — right?
Conveniently, this also keeps the left distracted, with would-be revolutionaries mired in the Twitter trenches of an endless culture war, constantly reacting to their ideological opponents and signal-boosting their intentional idiocy instead of advancing their own ideas. (I am personally a big fan of the radical leftist idea of not cooking the earth with climate change.)
I think there will be pushback to this piece, and in my mind, I imagine it coming from thoughtful, decent people who do things like paraphrasing The Art of War to explain that Twitter is a “battlefield” that they “refuse to cede to the enemy.”
(I have read arguments like this often enough to realise that the people making them are not Doing A Bit themselves, but are quite earnest.)
It’s my vain hope that this piece will dissuade them from acting this way. You are not on the battlefield; you are the battlefield. The people lining up to own the endless array of attention-whoring right-wing boogeymen are themselves being owned; every mean-tweet the politicians and their culture warriors get from opponents might as well be a crisp five-dollar bill.
It’s all a bit, a vastly profitable bit.
So don't take the bait.
Here we are again in the present day. National, ACT, and NZ First are once again posting misleading bullshit to their social media channels, and a newly minted army of always-online influencers are lining up to rip them.
I'm sure this feels gratifying. I, too, love being correct. But I fear that in the mist of this endless would-be debunking, leftists miss the fact that being correct is not winning.
Are we right about climate change? Unfortunately, yes! Have we seized power from the insane lackeys of the oil industry that will set the planet on fire just to tuck another trillion or two into their coffers? Oops, no we haven't!
The Right knows perfectly well that being correct is not the same is winning.They have to; they're nearly always at odds with scientific evidence. Reality really does have that pesky liberal bias.
This is why I think all the endless online screaming at right-wing figures must make them laugh themselves to sleep at night. They know they're hypocrites! They love it! It's a power-trip to them. Look at us, they say, lying to your faces. Dodging our taxes. Taking all these perks. Hoovering up all these donations. Making you unavoidably mad. We've hijacked an urge as primal as thirst or sex; the desire to dunk. Stop hitting yourself! Stop hitting yourself! Stop hitting yourself! Look, you can't stop! Ha-ha!
The new Right do not care if they're cringe, or hypocrites, or liars. They care about winning. And if they're winning in spite of - or because of - acts of dishonesty, they don't see that as morally compromised or evil. They're right, so anything they do and anything that upsets their opponents must be right by default.
To paraphrase the world's most successful proponent of this tactic: it doesn't make them stupid. It makes them smart.
Normally this is the bit where I'd leave a little "and here's how we counter this tactic and take the power back!" bit. Something to sweeten the couple of thousand bitter word-pills you've just swallowed.
I've got nothing.
I'd like to say "the Left must tell its own story, not carry water for the Right!" and you can imagine me with a forced, pained grin as I write that, because all I've seen for the last decade or two is the online Left being reactionary to whatever new bullshit the Right and its army of think-tanks has put up, and the issue slowly working its way to the cultural mainstream where it lodges like a piece of insufficiently chewed steak in our collective windpipe.
I've watched the likes of the Green Party politely suggest that we might not want to destroy the only place in the universe that can support human life, and instead adopt the top tax rates of the 1970s and technology that results in $15 power bills - only to get chewed to pieces for their audacity by the perpetually sneering media/lobbyist industrial complex.
It isn't working, folks. We need to figure out something else.
Emily here! While I understand Josh’s pessimism I do actually think what he’s done here is really helpful!
As a terminally online, easily baited leftist it helps me to know this is all intentional. It helps me to know that if I get itchy fingers and want to respond to the post that kicked this off with some variation on “Ginny Anderson! Tamatha Paul! You repugnant little imbecile!” that I’m playing into the hands of a bunch of grotesque, morally empty lobbyists.
Understanding how these people work is a first step. And it’s an important step.
Knowledge is power - and since these ethically bankrupt men have so much power we need to take ours wherever we can get it.
Thank you Josh and thank you - yes you reading this - for being here.