The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

  An Emmy & The Rage of the Few I learned of it before the house had woken. Autumn comes early to Palmerston North, and at that hour the light is the colour of weak tea, sliding low across the Manawatū. The dogs had not stirred. I was holding a phone, which is a foolish way to receive good news, and there it was. Prime Minister , the documentary about Dame the Rt. Hon. Jacinda Ardern, had taken the Emmy for best documentary. I have watched the film three times. It breaks me in the same place each time, and each time I let it, because some things are worth being broken by. I came to this country in 2018. When I was head hunted in 2017, I was Provost Chair Professor and Head of Communications and New Media at the esteemed National University of Singapore, and there were other offers in front of me, the kind that arrive on heavy letterhead and measure a man by his salary band and his citation count. I turned them down for a cluster of islands at the bottom of the world. I did it ...

  The Language of Balance: How the Far Right Hollows Out Democracy from Within There is a particular kind of political theatre playing out across the democratic world, and it requires a careful eye to read. Watch what the far right says, and then watch what it does. The two will rarely be the same. A movement that has spent decades organising against the very idea of pluralism now speaks fluent democracy. A movement whose foot soldiers march in the streets calling for the cleansing of the nation now legislates from cabinet rooms, draped in the vocabulary of fairness, balance, and freedom. The extremism has not gone anywhere. It has merely learned the password. This is the communicative inversion at the heart of the contemporary far-right project, and it is the secret of its success. The street-level violence of the Proud Boys, the dogwhistles of Hindutva cadres, the muttered grievances of settler colonial nostalgists in Aotearoa New Zealand — these have not been disavowed by the ...

  David Cumin of the Israel Institute of New Zealand, a key driving force in the targeting of academics critical of Israel Zionist Extremism and the Threat to Academic Freedom in Aotearoa New Zealand In the landscape of Aotearoa New Zealand's higher education, the university is legally mandated to serve as the "critic and conscience" of society. This role is not merely a professional privilege; it is a democratic necessity. However, this mandate is increasingly under siege by external political actors who seek to weaponize inflammatory rhetoric to police the boundaries of scholarly inquiry. A recent public statement by David Cumin of the Israel Institute of New Zealand—calling me a "terror justifier" and demanding an apology for my appointment to the National Counter Extremism Research Centre—offers a visceral case study in what I consider to be the rise of Zionist extremism as a direct threat to academic freedom. The Context: Why This Centre Exists and Why My A...

  The U.S. MAGA  far right's playbook enters New Zealand politics out in the open. When I made a straightforward fact-based statement that Charlie Kirk is a white supremacist far-right activist, I did not anticipate it being the target of an organized disinformation campaign. But what followed revealed something quite sinister about how far-right tactics have entered New Zealand's mainstream politics. Let me set clearly what actually happened—and why it concerns us all. In the rest of the post, I will analyze the anatomy of far-right disinformation and its networks of travel from the Trump MAGA ecosystem to Aotearoa New Zealand. What I Actually Said My initial tweet was straightforward: "Charlie Kirk is a white supremacist far right figure" and that attempting to pay homage to him in New Zealand's Parliament revealed "who is backing the far right in NZ mainstream politics." This was not hyperbole. This was based on documented fact from such trusted sourc...