Renowned deep-thinker Richard Dawkins wants to move to New Zealand to escape a post-Trump and post-brexit era. Photo / Supplied
Renowned deep-thinker Richard Dawkins wants to move to New Zealand to escape a post-Trump and post-brexit era. Photo / Supplied
Renowned deep-thinker Richard Dawkins wants to move to New Zealand to escape a post-Trump and post-Brexit era.
"I thought about half the population of America and half the population of Britain would love to go to a country where intellect might be appreciated.
"So I thought New Zealand might bean ideal country – low population. I would love to be invited to New Zealand and to live here, and for others to live here too," he told Three's The Project on Wednesday.
It is not the first time the author of The God Delusion has expressed his want to come to New Zealand.
In 2016 Dawkins said New Zealand could be the "Athens of the modern world" in a post-election love letter urging our country to gobble up the globe's brightest minds amid fallout from the US election and Brexit.
Writing for Scientific American, Dawkins wrote our "deeply civilised small nation" should try to lure top scientists from the UK and US eager to escape their countries.
Seriously, are there really people who think it’s funny (or “ironic” as they call it) that I’m speaking in Christchurch? Yes, I’m afraid there are. On Twitter, of course. Never mind, I’m looking forward to it. I love Christchurch. https://t.co/aKMXcwKob8
The UK ethologist wrote how "the two largest nations in the English-speaking world have just suffered catastrophes at the hands of voters - in both cases the uneducated, anti-intellectual portion of voters".
Science in both countries would be hit "extremely hard. In the one case, by the xenophobically inspired severing of painstakingly built-up relationships with European partners; in the other by the election of an unqualified, narcissistic, misogynistic sick joke.
"In neither case is the disaster going to be short-lived: in America because of the non-retirement rule of the Supreme Court; in Britain because Brexit is irreversible."
