Last September, when Tommy Robinson drew fellow travellers to a rally in London, they might not have been expecting a haka led by a Christian nationalist Māori.
“I was invited by Tommy because he saw my stands and loved my courage,” said Brian Tamaki, who led the haka, which he says was seen by a million people. He’s a Māori pastor in his self-created Destiny Church. He says his haka followers are the “new breed, the pure breed” of Christian Māori.
What white nationalists and indigenous Christian nationalists share is a fixation with the great replacement theory, the idea that white Europeans – and in the New Zealand case Māori – are being deliberately turned into minorities by immigration.
That story is having tragic results. In 2019, an Australian-born loner live-streamed himself slaughtering 51 Muslim worshippers in two mosques in the New Zealand South Island city of Christchurch. The terrorist was a proponent of the great replacement theory who released a manifesto (now illegal to possess in New Zealand) warning of a globalist plan to replace white-majority nations. The sweeping document was based on research and meetings in Europe with extremists.
New Zealand recoiled from the Christchurch mosque attacks. Jacinda Ardern, then prime minister, declared of the Muslim victims: “They are us.” Tough gun laws were imposed. Ardern and Emmanuel Macron created the “Christchurch Call” with the backing of Facebook and other platforms to combat hateful use of the platforms.
Six years later that initiative is dead. Ardern is gone and in virtual exile from New Zealand, where she faces misogynist attacks and worse linked to Covid lockdowns and vaccinations that saved thousands of lives. The Christchurch murderer has appealed, alleging police coerced him to confess.
The great replacement theory is common currency on X. Immigration from India, and especially from Muslim countries, is a hot topic gaining ground in New Zealand.
“I want New Zealand to remain New Zealand. I don’t want it to be India,” said Tamaki. “I don’t want it to be China. Kiwis are unique… Why do we take away the identity of our nations or give it away … to people who want to wreck it and completely decimate our unique sovereignty and our values as a country?”
Several of the most effective right wing politicians have a Māori heritage, or whakapapa. Yet they make political capital by rejecting a 50-year-old process in which a treaty signed in 1840 was revived and incorporated into law.
Five decades of land returns, promotion of Māori rights, recognition of different health and life outcomes between Māori and European New Zealanders, and wider usage of Māori language have provoked a backlash, especially since Ardern led a poorly explained shift to “co-governance” in which Māori claims to land, water, and resources were recognised.
Free speech absolutism, anti-Māori and Covid-related anti-establishment ideas led to strange bedfellows. Now, anti-immigration campaigners ally with Māori Christian nationalists, and pro-Israel campaigners with antisemites against Muslim immigration.
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Politicians who tap into that grievance mixture tread a dangerous line, says Sanjana Hattotuwa, a Sri Lankan academic who worked for a now-disbanded project that tracked the spread of violent ideology online.
“It is getting worse. Across all of the public social media I study, over 2025 there’s been not an incremental, but an exponential increase in violative content production,” Hattotuwa said.
The NZ Security Intelligence Service, in its annual threat assessment, warned: “Grievances and polarising issues in the online information space are almost certainly driving support for a range of violent extremist ideologies within New Zealand. No one ideology stands out as presenting a greater threat.”
William McGimpsey, a Christian nationalist, sees New Zealand as a white Christian and Māori country whose identity is at risk from immigration, especially of non-Christian, non-whites.
A former government adviser, McGimpsey posts on X under his own name, has a Substack blog and a show on a right wing internet radio station.
“If you keep importing people just from anywhere and everywhere, who… don’t share at least some aspects of the ethno-cultural character of the societies they’re coming into, you risk extinguishing that ethno-cultural entity,” he said. “No one actually has to be killed, but you’ve achieved goals similar to genocide in the end, right?”
An element of the Christchurch killer’s manifesto was an attack on Sadiq Khan and the idea a Muslim could lead a world city like London.
“I would share that view to a certain extent,” McGimpsey said. “There is something alienating about … having your public officials being foreign people who don’t share your basic culture and values in many ways.”
“I’ve read that damn manifesto… quite a few times,” said Hattotuwa, “because I’ve had to. What is now being platformed or signalled by [politicians and influencers] boggles the mind.”
Peter Bale is a journalist and the launch editor of WikiTribune
