Matua Kahurangi
Jun 08, 2025
It’s a cold day in hell when The New Yorker drops the performative liberal fangirling long enough to utter a hard truth. Their latest scathing review of Jacinda Ardern’s ghostwritten hugfest A Different Kind of Power doesn’t just pull punches, it finally lobs one square at the face of the myth. And thank God. It’s about time someone outside of New Zealand said what millions inside the country have been screaming for years: she didn’t “lead with kindness,” she led with cruelty wrapped in a smug smile.
For years, Ardern was rammed down the public’s throat as the face of “compassionate leadership.” In reality, she presided over a government of authoritarian overreach, economic vandalism, and Orwellian lockdowns that gutted our social fabric and shredded our rights. She spun it all in soft lighting and Instagram filters, but for those of us living through it, there was no “relentless positivity” - just relentless control.
And now, she’s off playing global celebrity from the comfort of her stateside hideaway, dodging her own people like a dodgem, because she knows the truth: she’s not welcome here anymore. Not on the streets, not on screens, not even in the pages of her own fantasy memoir. Ardern went from hero to pariah at record speed because the country finally woke up to the damage. And when people do speak to her now, it’s not hugs and high-fives, it’s “thanks for ruining the country,” seething from a stranger in an airport bathroom.
Her memoir? A 350-page ego-stroking therapy dump that conveniently skips the parts we actually care about - like the people locked out of their own country, or the families separated for years, or the thousands who lost jobs under her coercive mandates or the people who couldn’t attend the funeral of a loved one. Instead of addressing the catastrophic social fallout, she retreats into anecdotes about her childhood, her Mormon phase, and how she nearly puked during her swearing-in.
The New Yorker, for once, nailed it: the book doesn’t even try to explain the “confounding transformation” of a nation turned inward and boiling with resentment. Because she can’t. Because to do so would mean owning up to her role in creating the most divisive, distrusted, and loathed government this country has seen in modern history.
International sycophants like Obama may still praise her from afar, blinded by the myth they helped inflate, but here in New Zealand, the spell is broken. She’s not admired. She’s reviled. Not just disliked - but genuinely, viscerally hated by swathes of the population. For many Kiwis, she’s not a symbol of hope. She’s a cautionary tale. A masterclass in how narcissistic idealism can corrode democracy and fracture a nation.
Ardern took a hammer to our collective psyche and expects us to say thanks because the COVID death toll was lower. Sorry, but no. The price we paid in mental health, lost livelihoods, fractured families, and government overreach wasn’t “a win.” It was a trauma we’re still unpacking. And she has the gall to paint herself as the misunderstood savior?
No more PR puff pieces. No more nostalgic documentaries. No more moral lectures from a woman who can’t even walk down a Kiwi street without getting heckled. The world might still be waking up - but here, at home, the verdict is in: Jacinda Ardern is the most despised Prime Minister in New Zealand’s history.
She earned every bit of it.