Anatomy of the Near Murder of Kellie-Jay Keen

How Legacy Media and Purity Feminists Created the Blueprint for the Auckland Mobs

Kellie-Jay Keen and others being attacked during the Let Women Speak event in Auckland, New Zealand on 25 March. Photo still of video by New Zealand Herald

Women’s rights campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen, who also goes by the name Posie Parker, attended her Let Woman Speak event in Auckland, New Zealand last Saturday morning to find that the Auckland police were notably absent.  However, a baying and vicious mob of about two thousand people were in attendance, ready and salivating to attack her. And attack they did. Keen, five-foot two inches, was doused from a close distance with tomato soup and eggs and then almost crushed to death as the throngs attempted to physically stop her event from taking place. The video footage and images are shocking and should, in and of themselves, be cause for an internal police review as to why a series of violent acts—all organised and announced in anticipation—were allowed to take place.

Later that day, British broadcaster India Willoughby posted this tweet: “‘I never lose.’ #PosieParker Bit of a reality check for Poundland Eva Braun.” He later added that “The anti-Posie crowd is 80% women. Thousands of them.” While Willoughby is a bit off on the statistics, his words realise the edifice of what many of the woke leftist feminists have long crafted throughout their years-long campaign of defamation and hatred against Kellie-Jay Keen. While Saturday’s violence in Auckland, New Zealand was not the direct fault of several elite British feminists, it certainly was the partial result of their collective blueprint which they have helped to cobble over the past five years throughout their campaigns of defamation of Keen. And they are in good company—their partner in crime, woke media, operates its clickbait through similar misrepresentations that lean into the cultural collateral of woke politics of clickbait.

It must be said that, whilst women are never responsible for the actions of violent men, they are wholly responsible for the lies, distortions and mischaracterisations they have broadcast on all frequencies. Is it any wonder that the gender activists and media have received these signals?

In 2018, Keen was originally defamed for directly addressing the problem of grooming gangs in the UK, pointing to how woke culture led to the execution of hundreds of rapes of girls in northern England. She also stated that these crimes went un-investigated by police forces and were similarly elided by media cue to a fear of accusations of racism. Also around this time, Keen was subtly labelled a “racist” by Women’s Place UK as they pulled off a linguistic sleight of hand to ensure that Keen’s reputation would be forever associated with anti-Muslim sentiment and racism after she criticised the mandatory use of hijab by Muslim girls in the UK. WPUK wrote: “We felt it important to distance ourselves from these stated views that conflict with our campaign principles of antiracism and opposition to all forms of discrimination.” WPUK avoided legal action by linguistically calling Keen a racist without explicitly stating as much. The messaging was clear, however, and thousands of women immediately took to social media to heckle and defame Keen. This attempt to defame through innuendo would not be the last time that Keen would be subject to this cowardly, sneering derision.

Clearly Willoughby and thousands of others from Auckland to New York City got the message and the fact remains that none of what WPUK asserted or hinted at was factual or evidenced in reality. Given that WPUK postures itself as leftist organisation with a stated focus on “issues of material concern to women,” it became quickly evident that this organisation had failed its own purity test by eschewing material reality, or any form of evidence, for their defamatory claims.

On the heels of the calumniatory comments made by WPUK were the claims of many elite feminists who went on to trash the reputation of Keen—from journalists to self-proclaimed feminists to academics. Heather Brunskell-Evans has written beautifully about these defamatory attacks undertaken since 2018 by elite British feminists in her essay, “Policing Adult Human Females,” in which she documents how self-proclaimed feminists such as Sarah Ditum, Jeni Harvey, and Julie Bindel all went after Keen through a campaign of defamation lasting years. In her conclusion, Brunskell-Evans asks that these and other women extend what ostensible feminist solidarity they claim for themselves to Keen:

They deny Keen a similar right to navigate the complex terrain of how to speak out against the misogyny and sexism of gender identity ideology and politics. I suggest that out of common human decency, if not sisterly solidarity, feminists should cease attacking Keen who, like them, fights for the protection of women's sex-based rights, agency, and bodily autonomy. Not only are the optics bad concerning the stereotypes of women in-fighting (to the delight of sexist men of both the right and left), but this is a trifling matter with regard to the much larger ethical issues at stake. In the interests of justice for women and children, it behoves gender-critical feminists to reject the proposition that a left/right division between gender-critical women is “good.”

Since the WPUK defamation of Keen in 2018, a small group of leftist feminists, some of whom are known as socfems (socialist feminists), have fashioned and weaponised their rhetoric against Keen so perfectly that their messaging was readily picked up by legacy media and gender ideology activists alike. Former Tory, Jean Hatchet, is one of the women who initiated the fake association with the far-right when in January 2019, Keen went to Washington with Venice Allan and feminist scholar Julia Long. In her blog post on the events that Keen and other women organised and attended, Hatchet made a series of factually inaccurate claims about the events while insinuating that Keen was allying herself with a “right wing religious group” and the Heritage Foundation. Hatchet’s post is devoid of facts throughout.

Indeed, Hatchet’s blog post reads more of a list of personal gripes set within a wider—albeit thinly-veiled—attempt to malign Keen by virtue of flimsy, equally-misinformed characterisations of other women and organisations to which she lily-hopped. Given the sheer number of misrepresentations, it’s rather surprising how far afield and how quickly these myths about Keen spread.

I spoke with Kara Dansky, feminist lawyer, author, and president of the US chapter of Women's Declaration International, who took part in the Washington DC event and who is mentioned in Hatchet’s blog post. She corrects many of Hatchet’s mischaracterisations and inaccuracies, stating, “I did not personally ‘seek and gain’ $15,000 from Alliance Defending Freedom. WoLF did, as an organisation, for a very specific reason. To the best of my knowledge, WoLF hasn't received any money from the ADF since 2016.”

Dansky addresses Hatchet’s aspersions, stating, “She refers to ‘right wing links.’ But up until that point, all she is referring to is a one-time grant from ADF in 2016. And no one has ever been able to prove that WoLF has compromised any of its positions on anything (including abortion) because of that one $15K grant, because it never did.” Hatchet also claims that Keen was to speak on a Heritage Foundation panel. This is simply untrue and yet this lie was massively repeated throughout socfem social media feeds for years. Keen attended an event that was hosted at the Heritage Foundation and held a separate event at the Washington DC Public Library. Dansky also refers to the alleged “meeting” to which Hatchet refers, clarifying, “There was never any ‘meeting’ at the Heritage Foundation. It was a panel event and you can see it here,” adding, “The only ‘meeting’ was a gathering of parents whose kids were struggling with ‘trans’. No laws or policies were discussed. The parents (mostly mothers) were thrilled to meet Keen. It was very moving.”

In what is one of the most defamatory statements made by Hatchet and which has been widely repeated by many of the ostensibly leftist feminists, was her reference to Keen’s having appeared on the Feminist Current podcast with Meghan Murphy (24 January 2019), writing: “I might have stayed quiet about all this. If it wasn't for the Feminist Current podcast that appeared this morning. The one where, amongst other things, Posie Parker discusses Tommy Robinson. She dismisses the work of feminist women who fought to expose grooming gangs and the cover up a few years ago as ineffective.” Completely confounding Keen’s criticism about the mechanism of how defamation works from mass media to social media—as Keen herself had experienced—Hatchet mischaracterises Keen’s analysis from top to bottom. What Keen clearly elaborates to Murphy is how media creates public opinion—an idea that Herman and Chomsky have also advanced—creating a class of readers and listeners who automatically believe claims of any one person’s bigotry. Keen notes how she has been victimised by these same mechanisms where the smearing by feminists has resulted in media printing these smears, creating an assembly line of defamation all around from which nobody is allowed to question the veracity of any of it, lest they too be labelled bigots.

Keen’s observations about these media mechanisms and social responses are astute, yet Hatchet completely fails to grasp the gravitas of Keen’s query. Indeed, Keen’s observations are anything but right-wing and fit neatly into the wider left-wing criticism of media and power that has captivated the left since the 1960s. Ironically, by defaming Keen, Hatchet’s followers and purity feminists seeking to score easy Twitter likes were exemplifying Keen’s shrewd criticism about how social media and mass media function. Keen explains to Murphy:

I raised a question and I…said, “According to the mainstream media, I’m a hateful bigot. So, we have to ask questions around the narratives of people and who they serve… Why is this insignificant man being given such significance. It doesn’t make any sense? He’s just like a micey yob…Why is he able to be blamed for loads of stuff going on?” I was raising a question because the scales were falling from my eyes about the left. I am questioning everything.

The reference to Tommy Robinson, just days later, became a standard go-to for Bindel who persisted in her claim that Keen “had a photograph of Tommy Robinson as her avatar on Facebook for some time.” Many women are still waiting for Bindel to provide evidence of her claim. There has never been a single piece of evidence ever produced to evidence this claim and yet it is often cited by left-wing activists and TRAs alike. Hatchet’s misrepresentation of Keen’s words together with Bindel’s maligning of Keen as a Tommy Robinson fan created a divide within the gender-critical movement that permeates through the present day as Keen was tarred by misrepresentations that these women had alone devised. If you listen to what Keen said in the podcast about the grooming gangs, it is clear that her critique is anything but far-right with Murphy noting how leftist activists find unacceptable the idea that anyone should fact-check what we read online to include—and especially— allegations against a public figure who is accused of being a “white supremacist” or “racist” before writing that person off. Here is Keen’s response to Murphy:

The reason why [Tommy Robinson]….is of any note….—and I am assured by women on the ground...where grooming gangs existed….there were women fighting it, right. However, it didn’t make it to the mainstream media until massive, great big ruptures. And so, what that did—and there was a culture of “Let’s not be racist”... and also “These girls are losers” and “they probably want to be prostitutes at 15”—all of those things tied in together left a gaping hole for someone to come in and say, “Well, 90% of all the men that….we’ve arrested for grooming are Pakistani or Muslim or Somali...They’re all Muslims, so let’s talk about Muslim grooming gangs”...If you can’t talk about these things, you leave them open for people with ill motives to talk about them and make it their cause. And that is exactly what happened. So, I’ve just continued to...say... it’s the fault of the left. If the police force had dealt with those grooming gangs..., there would be no room for anyone to capitalise that void.

What is notable about these attacks is how Keen here and elsewhere makes what are effectively critiques of racism within the left. Noting how the police failed to investigate grooming gangs in the north of England for fear of being labelled racist, Keen noted this form of racism within the left is at odds with women’s and girls’ rights.

More intriguing, the ideas that Keen advances in this interview were later proven to be entirely correct as ascertained by two separate reports. The Home Office report, “Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation: Characteristics of Offending” (December 2020), states: “A number of studies have indicated an over-representation of Asian and Black offenders in group-based CSE. Most of the same studies show that the majority of offenders are White.” This is the “hole” that Keen stated would be filled by extremists if child sexual exploitation were not addressed fully and openly.  Then in  October 2022, “The Report of the Independent Inquiry Into Child Sexual Abuse” confirms that even among minority communities, professionals fear being accused of “racism” thus prioritising their worries about their reputation over the safety of children:

Other victims and survivors suggested that professionals feared allegations of racism and that this was prioritised over their safety. Prisha said that professionals were so afraid of being called racist that they dismissed her allegations of sexual abuse as “cultural differences” when she was a child.

Hatchet’s and purity feminists’ failure to understand Keen’s criticism of racism on the left is pervasive among those who call themselves “leftist” today. It’s practically a litmus test at this point that women must denounce Keen as a racist if they dare to call themselves socialist feminists. There is much reason, however, to view these leftist feminists as the epicentre of a burgeoning field of racism within the left where lies are accepted as factual and spun out of control all in the interest of “optics.”

By refusing to criticise the predation on lower-class white girls in England, the woke mechanisms of identity politics ensured that these crimes would not only be overlooked for investigation, but that the reactionary forces on the right would take up these overlooked cases and spin the most vulgar and racist political narratives around them, just as Keen had vituperated. From the high-profile grooming gang cases in Telford, Rochdale, and Rotherham, authorities repeatedly failed to address grooming gangs and, as Keen pointed out, it’s no wonder that Robinson and others on the right took up the void for their own divisive ends.

Hatchet’s misrepresentations within her blog—along with WPUK’s claims the year before— form the backbone to the propaganda steadily disseminated and circulated by many gender-critical feminists on the left who alleged and parroted the lie that Keen was in any way allied with or supportive of the political right. After Keen’s trip to Washington DC in 2019, she became the favourite punching bag of so-called leftist feminists—so-called because there was very little leftism or feminism about any of what transpired.

These falsehoods have diminished in recent months and are mostly limited to many socfem groups and writings, given that the tide has vastly shifted against the disinformation campaign launched against Keen by purity feminists whose technique of screaming “racist” has simply fallen flat. Still, it is important to join the dots between these defamation campaigns and their reverberation within the gender lobby and legacy media. These feminists’ defamatory comments regarding Keen were quickly shared on social media and were just as readily repeated by members of the transgender lobby and legacy media who used socfems’ words to cull their criticisms of Keen, often pointing to their screen-capped disapproval and insults emanating from within the leftist feminist community.

Take Willoughby’s reference to “Poundland Eva Braun.” He was merely parroting British feminist campaigner Julie Bindel who categorised Keen and her followers as “pound shop [E]va Brauns” on 4 July 2022. And this was again recycled later that year by Sarah Ditum who called Keen a “Poundshop Marie Le Pen.” Who knew leftist feminists could harbour such linguistic contempt for the very poor women who actually need to frequent the pound shop? Another important question to pose here is likening Kellie Jay Keen to Hitler’s wife while also diminishing the Holocaust and the suffering of those under the horrors of the authoritarianism in Nazi Germany. Invoking Nazi Germany and the Holocaust is rightly often seen as a desperate tactic in argument, and it is a sign that the side doing the invoking is losing the argument too, as per Godwin’s Law.

WPUK co-founder Ruth Serwotka called Keen a “domesticated zombie” and another leftist feminist called Keen a “Nazi Barbie,”  a slur which made its way over to the Australian Parliament. The language employed by these women is important because amidst the hoards clamouring for a piece of Keen’s life were signs which often reflected these defamatory remarks made over the years. The arguments quickly moved from Keen being a collaborator with the far-right to simple claims that she was no feminist, an identity Keen has always avoided. Scottish writer, Claire Heuchan wrote in 2020, “I’d choose standing by a steaming pile of dogshit over getting anywhere near P*s*e P*rk*r” and that same year called Keen a “White Supremacist Barbie.” Heuchan is now a trustee of FiLiA which has yet to put out a single statement about the violence enacted against Keen and others last week.

Even the feminist publication “committed to the materialist analysis of sex-based oppression,” The Radical Notion, took aim at Keen earlier this year in what can only be described as the biggest own-goal of the century on many levels. Beginning with the fact that this publication has always been paywalled, as socialists do, its editor, Jane Clare Jones, suddenly decided to un-paywall its last edition, “Gender Critical Disputes,” which devoted several articles to continuing the unsubstantiated smears against Keen. In so doing, this publication lost many subscribers, one of whom  characterised the misrepresentations of Keen as “Alice in [W]onderland level of crazy,” while another who unsubscribed describes how this issue inadvertently pushed her and other women towards Keen: “Standing for Women appeals to me more as it's easily accessible, straightforward and there are ways to be a part of it….[Jane Clare Jones] feels the opposite. The Head Girl stuff is really boring now and honestly it's getting a bit desperate. If Posie is winning—and I think she is—where does it leave them?”

Just as the gender-critical socfems circulated these and other aspersions of Keen’s character that quickly became re-articulated within the official narrative of the trans lobby, so too did mainstream media within the UK that picked up these fairytales and further disseminated them over the past five years.

Unsurprisingly, media within Australia and New Zealand piggybacked on this rhetoric to create the toxic, slanderous, and ultimately physically treacherous climate into which Keen was put in Auckland last Saturday. Legacy media ritually misreported Keen’s persona and politics, brandishing her as a “racist” and a “threat” to the country. It became abundantly clear that much of the reporting lazily tore a page from the socfem social media feed in simply repeating a lie, just as Willoughby and many others before him had.

Eliana Rubashkyn, the violent man who splashed a litre of tomato soup on Kellie-Jay Keen and whose social media presence is populated with the word “slay” (directed at women), was given uncritical coverage in New Zealand’s TVNZ 1 while Keen was called an “anti-trans activist.” This was repeated even before Keen touched down in New Zealand with ABC News brandishing her as an “anti-trans rights campaigner” and The Guardian not only called her an “anti-trans activist” but through some astonishingly unethically low journalistic standard, it ran a piece which falsely coordinated the appearance of a neo-Nazi group with Keen: “Last weekend, a group performed the Nazi salute on the steps of Victoria’s state parliament in Melbourne in support of British anti-trans activist Kellie-Jay Keen.” The words “in support of” are meaningless here given that Guardian journalists Cait Kelly and Mostafa Rachwani evidenced no journalism.

British Media like Pink News has readily committed to similar acts of defamation of Keen, linking her to neo-Nazis, just as many socfems have done for years. Similar to the media hacks who attempted to associate Keen with neo-Nazis, Australian MP Moira Deeming who attended Keen’s even was also slurred by a like form of journalistic laziness. On 19 March, neo-Nazis crashed Keen’s Let Women Speak event in Melbourne and despite video footage clearly demonstrating that the men clad in black were a separate group from those who attended the Standing for Women event, Deeming was targeted by Australia’s Liberal Party which threatened to expel her.  The misrepresentations flourished within Australian media as ABC News used Keen’s peaceful, women-focussed campaign making it out to be a thorn in the side of the Labor Party rather than properly covering what appears to be a patently clear case of misogyny within that and other political parties.

There is no shortage of sloppy journalism in the region that covered Keen’s events given that every single article about this subject plays a form of journalistic DARVO where Keen and the very peaceful women who attend her events are narrated as a pack of mad, violent, and bigoted aggressors, while the transgender lobbyists are painted as peaceful, hippy-esque protestors who simply come with a message of love and solidarity. The ostensible peace-loving posture of these activists is easily contradicted by many of the photos accompanying the articles and shared on social media where it is painfully clear that it is women who are the victims of aggression, the trans activists being the aggressors. It’s also no coincidence that all quotes and interviews are offered uniquely to the gender lobby of this debate tarring Keen with unsubstantiated claims while Keen and other women’s rights activists are never interviewed. Here is an incomplete survey of recent media reports on Keen:

The West Australian glosses over Keen’s mission to include women’s safety and child protection and she  is instead misrepresented as someone who “campaigns against transgender rights.”

The Saturday Paper published  a piece that carries through British socfems messaging. “TERF wars and neo-Nazis” is a ream of disinformation that maligns Keen and states that her “mission” in Australia is to ally with “conservative Christian anti-LGBTQIA+ groups.” It’s remarkable that the author of this screed has a day job given that Sam Elkin’s reporting relies on unsubstantiated fictions and emotional manipulation as Elkin references the “already disadvantaged community that suffers from higher rates of poverty, housing insecurity and suicidal ideation due to stigma and discrimination.”

• In Crikey, one article mocks Keen’s references to the historical  infiltration of activist groups by the police while Keen criticises the neo-Nazis who gate-crashed her event. The piece then goes on to vituperate Victorian Liberal MP Moira Deeming who voiced her suspicions that the neo-Nazis might have been either LGBTQIA+ protesters or anti-fascist activists as Deeming observed the cordiality between the two groups: “It was as if they were saying hello.”

• In what has to be the most cringeworthy of interviews, Keen’s attacker, a man by the name of Eliana Rubashkyn, went entirely unchallenged when he claimed that Keen and other women were “killing our people” and instead of asking Rubashkyn to explain how words are murder yet his throwing soup on Keen was peaceful, the interviewer asks him how he felt.

• This article from RNZ claims that Keen “had to be escorted away from her Auckland event as hundreds of protestors outnumbered her supporters” without mentioning that she was hardly escorted out of the park--this was a quasi-military operation where many men, visible from the aerial video, were beaten up in their attempts to protect Keen from being killed.

• On 1News is a show where the host outrightly lied saying that “Nazi supporters joined her Melbourne rallies” inviting  “queer activist” Shaneel Lal who went on the show to say that Keen would “embolden people to act on hate speech” and that her presence “normalises hatred towards queer people” stating that “queer hatred is at an all-time high” referencing protests against “dragtime story hour.” Lal goes on to lie about Keen ostensibly fighting against abortion rights (Keen is adamantly pro-choice) and this man is clearly ill-informed about what Keen and other women are arguing while eliding the very aggressive, violent mob with which he aligns himself.

• Tasmanian Times ran a piece that stated “Fake feminists who play footsies with nazis to gather on parliament lawns”

• The New Zealand Herald ran this story parroting WPUK’s defamatory statements about Keen, while  another story in the same paper treats Keen as if a state terrorist with Michael Wood, Minister for Immigration, falsely associating neo-Nazis who showed up in Melbourne to Keen stating, “I find many of her views repugnant, and am concerned by the way in which she courts some of the most vile people and groups around, including white supremacists.” While these are completely fictional dots being drawn by Wood, he sadly reverses whose welfare is at risk in New Zealand, “As we look towards her events for this coming weekend, the welfare and safety of our transgender community is front of mind.” Similarly, Stuff ran an article citing Wood who condemned Keen’s alleged, “inflammatory, vile and incorrect world views” with zero coverage of the concerns of women or the reasons for Keen’s event.

And in what is nothing other than DARVO squared, the media takes the trans activists’ fabricated fears of violence and projects them onto the very women whom these activists attacked! 1News is one of the most dishonest media outlets I have come across in my years working in journalism given that it serves as a proxy press office for the transgender lobby. In it’s coverage of Auckland Pride's executive director, Max Tweedie, who expressed hopes that Keen would be barred from entering the country, 1News gave Tweedie carte blanche to scare monger and effectively lie:

“We are moving quickly,” he said. “We're really hopeful that an interim order will be placed and she won't be allowed to enter the country. That's the best hope. Otherwise, we will be out there peacefully protesting.”…“We believe that there's quite a case based on what we've seen in Melbourne in terms of the neo-Nazi showing up in support of her rally, but also the general anti-trans hatred that she is spreading, that there are grounds for risk of public order.”

Then Tweedie referred to a Sydney event earlier that week at a church where protesters were attacked. This protest had nothing to do with Keen or feminists.  Tweedie went on to say that “trans” rights counter-protests would be “loud" suggesting that the “potential” for violence was from supporters of Keen despite the fact that the historic evidence of violence has always been in the direction of women from trans protestors. “We are on the precipice of violence here towards rainbow communities and trans communities in particular,” he stated, adding “We're really concerned that that will happen here, and we believe because that is a real likelihood that she shouldn't be allowed to enter the country.” Of course, the media never checked back with Tweedie after it was clear that the violence emanated from his camp. Not one paper ironised the fact that Tweedie had only days earlier claimed that trans rights counter-protests would be “loud” suggesting the “potential” for violence would uniquely emanate from Keen’s supporters.

Instead of expulsion from her party last week, Deeming is now suspended from the Liberal Party for nine months and is being closely surveilled. Then on Monday, John Pesutto, the Victorian Liberals leader lied, claiming that Deeming submitted a 15-page dossier wherein she had condemned comments made by Keen, event organiser Angie Jones, and Katherine Deves, an Australian lawyer who ran as a Liberal candidate in the 2022 Australian federal election. Deeming hit back on Twitter clarifying that Pesutto had not told the truth, responding to Jones stating, “Don’t worry, I never condemned you, or KD or KJ.” She is now being re-disciplined quite condescendingly as Pesutto, embarrassed his lie was exposed, told ABC TV, “Moira is not off to a good start.”

Even the Australian Jewish Association defended the organisers; while condemning the neo-Nazis who gatecrashed the Let Women Speak event,  the AJA recognised  that Keen and other women were powerless to prevent neo-Nazis from entering public spaces, and noted  that these neo-Nazis “saw an opportunity to hijack the event for their own publicity.” Such a response might have been afforded by Britain’s socfems last autumn at Keen’s Brighton event when similar accusations were made about a group from the far-right which filmed her event. On the one hand these leftist feminists claim  that women are oppressed and disempowered by male violence, while  on the other, where Keen is concerned, these same women have feebly sought to create straw-men arguments whereby she is suddenly responsible for the presence of right-wing individuals in a public park. The hypocrisy and sheer idiocy of these arguments are enough to cause one whiplash.

New Zealand’s Newshub called Keen a “white supremacist,” a claim that originated within Britain’s feminist community and directly replicates the original WPUK statement on Keen wherein she is implicitly characterised as a racist. Indeed, Newshub had only to join the dots long propagated by socfems who have accused Keen of being in cahoots with “white supremacists,” “neo-Nazis,” and the Heritage Foundation despite this accusation coming from self-proclaimed leftists who fail to understand that public parks and private citizens’ movements are simply not within the remit of any organisation—or government—to control. The leaps that Newshub made from Keen’s pro-woman and child safeguarding activism to associating her with  neo-Nazis merely continued the execution of a draught already established from 2018 where socfems have made similar accusations.

Then in a Newshub report on Keen’s appearance in Melbourne on 18 March, Newshub misrepresents Keen as an “anti-trans activist” and claims that she threatened the New Zealand Prime Minister (she made no such threats). In what is a hallucinogenic reversal of who is threatening and who is being threatened, these two new anchors shamelessly lied throughout their report, decontextualising sound bytes and juxtaposing completely separate video clips of neo-Nazi groups calling them “her neo-Nazi supporters performing the Hitler salute.” Such journalistic negligence should be investigated because just as the babbling of socfems with too much time on their hands on social media. Newshub is just one of many media outlets that put a target on Keen’s head for her trip to Auckland.

Newshub is certainly not alone as most legacy media slate Keen as “anti-trans” while conveniently eliding an accurate description of what Keen is: a woman’s rights campaigner. The irony of media obscuring the word “woman” from their tendentious coverage of Keen is not lost on those of us who have witnessed Keen’s longstanding campaign to publicise the definition of the word “woman” resulting in the removal of this word from billboards and then late last year, Helloprint, a company which has been printing stickers and t-shirts with this definition for Keen, suddenly and after fulfilling over £75,000 of orders for Keen, announced that it would cease creating these products deeming them “offensive material.” Yet, instead of noting the hypocrisy of a company raking in money from Keen’s organisation only to purity posture when it chooses to, the media uses this sudden change of heart to highlight Keen’s “anti-trans bigotry.” This proves, once again, that it’s not just the woke mobs and private companies who recoil at the sight of the word “woman,” apparently legacy media has an even greater problem with this word.

Robbie Travers, a political adviser based in London, analyses the landscape of hypocrisy he has observed since being involved in the gender-critical movement:

You had a bunch of rabid anti-fascists in Melbourne, these are the individuals who claim that they despise and would actively punch any Nazis—they claim they will take physical aggression to anyone—and then when the neo-Nazis actually come to Melbourne, they focussed their attention on Keen, not the neo-Nazis. They let the neo-Nazis walk on by without even daring to throw even a paper aeroplane. If Keen had engaged the neo-Nazis in any way to include a bunch of middle-aged woman, many of whom may be disabled or elderly, how was that actually going to end? Do these critics of Keen forget suddenly sex differences when they think that middle aged women would have been able to stand up to aggressive, fascistic, strong and young able bodied men? The question then is asked: are they really there to attack Nazis or really there to attack women?

Travers notes how Keen has left the safety of her keyboard to take to the streets and public spaces to actively recruit women “who might never have touched a feminist text and who wouldn’t have known they were interested in the subject.” She moves from parks into the halls of US and British government and back onto the streets with the very women who don’t give a toss about what “ontology” means or what de Beauvoir penned. The working class women of the world recognise that if you can’t define the word “woman,” then you most certainly cannot defend women’s rights.

Travers continues to clarify why Keen’s popularity is rising quickly, namely because she reaches the working classes and mothers who generally are left outside the discussion and public debates:

Posie told women that they would fight this one issue together—it’s existential to fight for the definition of women without which you cannot fight for women’s rights. She reached out to women who have never been in a professional or academic environment. She also reached out to mothers and was able to show women that women can care about their sons and fight for women’s rights making them far more aware of women’s rights. These women demonise her claiming she is cruel towards de-transitioners when it is precisely the inverse. With de-transitioners, Posie is one of the kindest people towards de-transitioners who constantly shows kindness and listens to them. She gave many female de-transitioners a voice at Speaker’s Corner when many others wouldn’t touch them.

Media reports abound as to how Keen was virtually unknown in Australia and New Zealand before she headed to the region earlier this month. These journalists attempt to paint Keen as an insignificant factor within the international political scene of women’s rights. Similarly, woke feminists in the UK attempt to paint Keen as an ineffective outlier to their purest of pure feminism. Strangely, both these feminists and legacy media pundits know, when push comes to shove, which woman to attack. While transactivism is the most glaring form of misogyny today in the west, our worst enemies are legacy media and those very women who claim to be on our side—be they the women who smile and laugh as their male cohorts douse Keen with tomato soup, be they the women who launch a tirade of defamation and false accusations of right-wing affiliations, or be they journalists who dishonestly slate Keen as having any affiliation with the far-right. The end result is the same.

Kara Dansky also commented upon the socfem criticisms of Keen because she too has fallen prey to their mischaracterisations due to her advocacy reaching across the political aisle:

I understand that some British women like to criticise those of us, including me, Kellie-Jay Keen, and WDI USA, who do not shy away from doing strategic cross-partisan work in our efforts to remove “gender identity” from law and policy. But the picture they often paint of me is very far removed from the reality of the advocacy that I do. If WPUK were to invite me to participate on a panel, I would be happy to have a public conversation about both why their characterisations of me are so far off-base and why our strategies are working.

The good news is that women have been waking up to the defamatory tactics used by socfems and legacy media. A WPUK event at Filia last autumn stirred major dissent from women who, though not Keen fans, understood that one of the panels was uniquely established to trash Keen while avoiding naming her specifically. One woman who has voted Labour since 1979 wrote on Mumsnet:

I attended the WPUK event at Filia yesterday and came out feeling disturbed by what struck me as a very heavy-handed event designed to avoid talking about the elephant in the room...Put briefly, we had 90 minutes of: Feminism=socialism and if you're not a socialist you can't be a feminist and if you're not a feminist-socialist you’re the enemy.

This woman went on to describe the messaging of this event, where certain ideas were laid out:

The right is sly and will lie and try to draw you in (illustrated with a video from the US about the right-wing origins of many apparently liberal groups, including the Heritage Foundation) and you must resist any temptation to get involved with them. The way to do it is to join unions and change them from within, hold socialist women's salons to recruit and inform and get involved at grass roots level. There were also regular warnings about racism, which seemed odd and extraneous because WPUK is all about gender ideology.

And then the penny dropped. Though her name was never mentioned, I suddenly realised that the whole tightly-managed event (no talking unless you're holding the microphone) was a warning not to fraternise with Posie Parker.

The attempts to tar Keen as a racist, neo-Nazi, white supremacist, and even a homophobe have blown up in these women’s faces. After the 24 October 2022 WPUK event, many observed how women on the left “are being turned off WPUK by their recent actions and general holier than thou attitude.” Since this event many women have distanced themselves from WPUK and other “nice feminist” projects and have joined forces with Keen’s project that is invested in protecting children and women’s rights. Women have had it with what I call the “optics feminists” who invariably are out for a power grab and who have proven themselves capable of defaming women for the sake of their vested interests in power.

Keen is winning over women by the droves because she speaks clearly to material reality without needing to intellectualise and condescend to her base. She also asserts women’s rights irrespective of political purity tests that extol or demand leftism as a baseline. Still many of the feminists who have slighted Keen over the years have been reticent to support her after last week’s attack even as jump on the media attention over Auckland as a means of making that violence about themselves albeit never mentioning Keen. It’s as if feminists who have adamantly refused to support, much less utter her name, prefer to relegate Keen to the status of Lord Voldemort, She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, whilst pretending that it’s only been men telling Keen to shut up.

In a recent article which resulted in cognitive whiplash for many women, Bindel piggybacked onto the media response to last week’s violence in New Zealand only to make it all about her. This, after years that she and others repeatedly accused Keen of allying with the far right and lambasted her  for speaking to right-wing media. Nothing is said, of course, when Bindel publishes this and many other pieces in the Telegraph—what many leftists call the Torygraph. Of course, Bindel knows—as do all journalists writing on this subject—that left-wing media simply won’t publish any articles critical of the gender lobby or its ideology. Yet, none of Bindel’s acolytes criticise her right-wing “tendencies” as she sits on panels for the Battle of Ideas (last autumn) with Christians who may or may not be anti-abortion. Nothing is said of Bindel’s double-standards and thusly she is exempt from being seen as part of the witch hunt which invariably makes Keen accountable for everything while Bindel remains absolved from any judgment by the same standards.

Some legacy media, however, are  waking up to the massive misrepresentations on this issue and are not conducting their reporting from the social media feed of purity leftist feminists or gender ideology advocates. Peta Credlin of Sky News Australia is one of the few journalists to have covered this issue coherently and fairly. It is time that the rest of mainstream media start to follow in Credlin’s steps, though I won’t hold my breath.

It’s not hard to objectively cover this story where there is a struggle for the rights of women, children as well as lesbians and gay men who are firmly pushing back on gender ideology. For legacy media and socfems who worry about the optics, here’s a thought: why not let women step up to a microphone and express their lived experiences on this topic. Little does it matter what side of the political aisle these women are on, even if large swathes are women disgusted with the left’s misogyny. We are living in the postmodern age of Salem witch trials gone amok where men, performing womanface for the crowds, accumulate social and political worth for the baying hoards who demand that another woman be silenced, hurt, and even murdered.

While the media and these socfems are most definitely not responsible for the violence committed against  Keen and others at her event last Saturday, these two groups most definitely contributed to the baying mobs feeling authorised to behave so violently, even engendering these mobs to feel justified in their “righteous”  attacks against her. Keen has faced many angry mobs and attacks over the past year from her US tour to this more recent foray into Australia and New Zealand. Between the fake news reporting by legacy media and the years of defamatory gossip on social media, the ideological backdrop for this violence established the justification for a rinse cycle of mischaracterisations and aggressive acts against Keen to include anyone who dare attend her Let Women Speak events.

The ultimate paradox about Keen’s Let Women Speak events is that these forums function to highlight who won’t let women speak. Keen was almost killed by the mobs in Auckland and Deeming is now bullied from speaking by her own party about the violence women face by mobs. Women are watching this. So are men. And they see precisely who is using this political theatre to their advantage as the gender lobby crowd plays DARVO on a global scale.

While legacy media creates a stream of inaccurate clickbait about gender ideology and its implication for women, woke leftist feminists feed these media flames of misogyny through the recycling of falsehoods in the name of optics. Jeni Harvey, another optic feminist, recently wrote that Keen had it coming because “optics matter” and that women “bear some responsibility for our own political reputations.” Easy to say when one’s part-time profession is destroying the political reputations of women like Keen through logical incoherences lobbed atop defamation. Another optic feminist and member of the Facebook group Actual Gender Critical Left where posts flourish blaming Keen for the violence enacted towards her (one now deleted) wrote: “Associating with far right groups and not loudly condemning the Nazi presence at these events is a hard line for me. I truly believe this is EXACTLY the kind of incident she was hoping for because it's great for marketing purposes.” And I truly believe that putting “truly” in a sentence or using capital letters does not make one’s conviction true when lobbed amidst a pile of steaming, hot, er...lies.

Until the purity feminists of the left cease maligning Keen and other women who do not present the “right optic” or political class and until self-appointed dictators stop emerging from within feminist circles, women’s rights will never get a fair shake in legacy media. Why should they when even the optic feminists know that media outlets are not truly interested in fairly representing women’s rights? In this day and age where investigative journalism has all but disappeared among mainstream media and where reporting today consists of scanning and copying the most divisive social media feed in its service to stoking hatred, it’s a no-brainer that media will always veer towards representing the women who put other women in their place. Purity feminists of today merely replace the patriarchy of old with their own preeminence as they dictate to the common woman that while she can speak, she’s just not doing it right.

Keen set up Let Women Speak, she told me last year, in order to demonstrate that when women speak, there are always men who don’t let women speak. Yet, the “optics feminists” clearly don’t want Keen to speak either. And this dynamic feeds the media misrepresentations across the political spectrum.

Keen’s project demonstrates that women don’t want or need Patriarchy v2.0 and it’s high time for the self-appointed landlords of feminism to relinquish their arrogant hold on power. Perhaps the greatest irony of all in this debate is that Keen, who adamantly refuses the monicker of “feminist” and “leftist,” has outmanoeuvred the feminist left by showing them through actions how to stand up for all women while paradoxically proving herself to be more feminist and leftist than those who criticise her, through engaging in direct political actions that empower all women to speak.