The Untold Stories: Unauthorized Biography
Different Matters | 3 December 2025 | 1h 14m | Listen Later 
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Podcasts | Spotify
Interview with David Cohen about his book Jacinda: The Untold Stories: Unauthorized Biography, co-authored with Rebecca Keillor. Draws on more than 100 interviews and extensive research to track the rise, fall and re-emergence of former NZ Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern onto the global stage. Explains her cultural Mormonism, exemplified by kindness, yet an intellectual aversion to nuance, favouring emotionalism. Her missionary zeal, evident in crises like the Christchurch mosque shootings and Covid-19, became a powerful, almost ecclesiastical, style, leading to brutal uniformity and suppression of dissent. Backgrounds the ideological capture of the Royal Commission of Enquiry into abuse in care, driven by moral panic, reflecting a broader societal shift towards binary, uncritical thinking, which Ardern adeptly capitalised upon.
