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She’s one more neocommunist failure who ran her country aground.

“Stay local,” she said, a concerned Karen look on her face. “Do not congregate. Don’t talk to your neighbors. Please keep to your bubbles.”

by SCOTT MCKAY

https://spectator.org/bye-jacinda/

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announces her resignation (Bloomberg Markets and Finance/YouTube)

On Thursday, Dan Flynn reported the news in his daily must-read Spectator A.M. morning newsletter…

Jacinda Ardern, the control-freak prime minister of New Zealand who transformed one of the freest countries on the planet to an Orwellian one during the COVID crisis, announced on Wednesday her resignation effective sometime in the next few weeks. Her absence from the World Economic Forum to go around now makes sense.

Ardern has been a darling of the global socialist set for five-plus years since getting herself elected PM in New Zealand, which was predictable. She was a young, pretty, emotive leftist dripping with unrealistic idealism, and they latched onto her as though she was a white female Barack Obama from Down Under.

Which is why she graced the covers of Vogue and Time without ever really doing anything other than spouting progressive pieties and emoting charismatically for the cameras.

An insignificant, if breathtakingly beautiful nation like New Zealand was the perfect venue for the kind of heroine worship the international press loaded onto her; after all, New Zealand more or less runs itself, so it would be impossible for her to do damage sufficient to break the spell, right?

Wrong.

Ardern quit because the voters in New Zealand were increasingly enthusiastic about the prospect of firing her and her party is on the electoral ropes. And why?

If you think people here in America ran out of patience with the rough-and-tumble of Donald Trump’s time in office, it was nothing compared to the five years Ardern has run New Zealand.

There was a volcanic eruption on White Island, in the Bay of Plenty off the coast of the country’s north island in December of 2019, which killed 22 tourists and guides caught in the volcano’s crater when it blasted out a cloud of steam. Ardern’s government filed charges against 10 organizations and three people in the wake of those deaths, wiping out a popular tourism engine for the town of Whakatane probably forever. There’s a Netflix documentary about the eruption that is fairly hair-raising, but it obscures something that is a basic truth — anyone with a brain knows that walking into the crater of an active volcano is an incredibly dangerous thing to do and that’s what makes it so thrilling.

It’s a perfect case of “assumption of risk,” which is a long-standing tenet within the common law, but the emotive leftist Kiwi PM wasn’t having any of that. It’s more than three years later, and setting foot on the island still isn’t permitted.

Perhaps that reaction was defensible. But then there was Ardern’s reaction to the March 2019 atrocities in Christchurch, when a xenophobic loon shot up a couple of mosques in that town, killing 51 people and injuring another 40. Ardern showed up to comfort the victims, quickly donning a headscarf — not that doing so was over the top or anything — and called it a “spontaneous” gesture of respect for Islam.

And then immediately after, she pushed through an “assault weapons” ban, and then launched a campaign against online “hate speech.”

You might be starting to get the picture here. If it’s beginning to sound like Gretchen Whitmer on steroids, we’re just getting rolling.

I forgot to mention when Ardern really began tugging at the heartstrings of the global socialist media. That came in 2018, when she showed off her then-3-month-old baby at the United Nations. It turned out that she wasn’t married to the father of said child; something which was passed off as a perfectly normal circumstance for the leader of a country to be in. Ardern said that a marriage to her “partner” Clarke Gayford, a TV news anchor, was in the offing, but kept putting it off.

In fact, she closed her remarks at Wednesday’s resignation by telling Gayford, “Let’s finally get married!” How touching.

In fact, Ardern said she had to put off the wedding because of COVID. Everybody in New Zealand had to put their lives on hold because of COVID.

Let me rephrase that: Everybody in New Zealand had to put their lives on hold because of Jacinda Ardern’s insane overreaction to COVID.

She shut down the country’s borders in early 2020 when New Zealand had a grand total of 25 deaths among a population of five million. Those borders didn’t reopen until August of last year. She also instituted sweeping mask and vaccine mandates, locking the country down to such an onerous extent that the global media held her out as a model for international virus policy.

“Stay local,” she said, a concerned Karen look on her face. “Do not congregate. Don’t talk to your neighbors. Please keep to your bubbles.”

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