by Rachel Stewart

Back when I was a columnist for mainstream media I was essentially left to my own devices to write whatever I wanted to write. That is until I wrote one column in 2018 about the sneaky self-ID laws that were coming in by stealth. The one where you now can go down to the courthouse and pay a minimal amount to call yourself whatever sex you feel like on the day. I wanted to warn people of the consequences.

The shit hit the fan. The trans activists went berserk, they mobilised and bombarded the NZ Herald bosses with email after email about what a bigot, transphobe, Nazi I was. The bosses, of course, freaked out. My column was the first trans cab off the rank, so the Herald boys didn’t know what they didn’t know, and just how fraught even discussing trans issues was. They effectively sided with the trans cult without tacitly spelling that out to me.

I knew it would cause ructions, but nothing prepared me for the vitriol, death threats, and pure cancellation that ensued. I left Twitter for a year. I stayed on at the Herald for one more year, but the editors started censoring me whenever I touched on anything they deemed remotely upsetting to the left, so I quit.

After that year passed I went back on Twitter – thinking naively that I was all healed up – only to find that the trans activists still had it in for me. They sat in wait in the shadows until one day in 2021 I posted a satirical tweet – but not to him – about a trans activist who’d been hassling women that they then proceeded to wilfully take out of context and hundreds of them ran off to an online Police complaints website that I was a threat to trans gender people because I own guns. They knew I had them because I’ve never publicly shied away from the fact that rural life often requires them for animal husbandry and pest control. I’ve had a gun licence since I was eighteen.

Six weeks later on a frosty and incredibly early winter’s morning two policemen put their feet in my door and told me they were there to collect my guns and my gun licence. They handed me a paper claiming that, because of that tweet, I now had to prove I was a fit and proper person to hold a firearms licence or forfeit it.

I got a lawyer and a bunch of solid referees and $15K later I got my guns back. I was prepared to go all the way if I didn’t get them back and my legal team conveyed that fact very well to them. I don’t think the NZ Police wanted things to go quite that far – I believe they would have looked even stupider than they already did – so my licence and guns are now safely tucked away with me once again.

A person extremely close to me told me a week ago – on the day that Charlie Kirk was murdered – that I’d changed. I’m not entirely sure in what context she meant it, but I denied that I had. But upon more reflection I realised she was right. The events I’ve just described to you had a profound effect on me. Those events were beyond unfair and unjust. They were life changing.

Coupled with all of the Covid hysteria, any vestige of warmth towards the left totally disappeared. I now see them as tyrannical, inhumane, and cognitively dense. Their actions back then towards me personally have now become fully merged in my mind with what we are seeing in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder. Their public gloating, their hatred, their mental unwellness is stark and staggering.

I have steadily become more at home around conservatives – who at least regularly display manners and decency – and my politics have changed accordingly. And this is true for so many. I know I am far from alone and it’s been quite the journey.

But if we thought the disharmony in NZ (and the world) was pretty dire before Charlie Kirk, I think we’re in for a massive wake up call. And this week has been hard. No doubt about it. How to wrap your head around the realisation that there are large swathes of people who would rather dance on your grave than hear an opinion they don’t agree with.

I’ve spent some time this week looking over old columns of mine I’d written between 2010 – 2018 and I now despise them. While I have managed to extricate myself from sliding into the ‘woke’ cult, I can certainly see that had I continued writing and believing certain things I would have contributed to this messed up heaviness that feels beyond rough right now.

Somebody I massively respect emailed me the other day and said, “there's been a huge shift, and it is going to be quite something to witness how things play out. It feels like we're being compelled to look into our hearts and souls, to cut the crap, and stand stronger than ever for what we believe is true and right.”

She is bang on, and here are those very columns disappearing into the dustbin of time. In a different era I thought I meant every word I said – we have the luxury of delusion when things are good – but things are now decidedly not good, and those columns need to vanish into the ether.

More than that, because the mainstream media is now so dire and dangerous in everything they do, here goes my 2016 Canon Media Award for ‘Opinion Writer of the Year’ as well. It is utterly meaningless. In fact, it is offensive. That a group of mainstream left-wing journalists deigned to judge my work to be the best that year has morphed into something of no consequence to me now and is best forgotten.

And there’s something about throwing all this crap away that feels cathartic. And I’m going with that.

R.I.P Charlie Kirk.

Watch the full video here.