The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

  Your Power Bill Went Up. They Gave You Gangs. 24 Oct 2026 A media owned by the capitalist class manufactured a gang panic in the last fortnight of the campaign, punched down on the poorest people in the country, and buried the cost of living, power prices, housing and healthcare out of this election. Your power bill went up while wholesale electricity prices were falling. Two chains decide what you pay for cheese. You waited months for a specialist. You have been telling pollsters this for three years, and in the final fortnight of the campaign, with early voting open and the largest audience of the entire cycle watching, the newsrooms of this country handed you a video of a Māori woman asking her relatives to enrol to vote. By Friday they had her candidacy. That was the news you were given in the week you began casting your vote. I wrote last week about the press destruction of Kerrin Leoni as a settler colonial mechanism, a way of removing a wāhine Māori candidate that required...

  The Lynching Takes Forty Eight Hours 23 Oct 2026   Whiteness, the New Zealand press, and the destruction of wāhine Māori candidates Count the hands the footage passed through. Whakaata Māori reported the video first. RNZ said it had independently obtained the same material. Newsroom published a still photograph from the event showing people in Mongrel Mob regalia making hand signs. The Post added that the gathering had been advertised online as a fundraiser for a Mob chapter, a claim Chris Hipkins said he had been reassured was wrong, and which by then had already done its work. The New Zealand Herald put a Labour minister on camera to answer for it. On Wednesday Kerrin Leoni was a candidate defending her seat in an electorate debate. By Friday morning she was finished, with her name still on the ballot because nominations had closed and there was no mechanism left to remove it. Forty eight hours is about how long this takes now. The machinery runs without anyone in it makin...

  Proof of Distance 23 Oct 2026 A video from a gathering in early October shows Kerrin Leoni in a Labour Party jacket, speaking to a room that includes patched members of the Mongrel Mob. Before she speaks, a patched member tells the room the gangs should stop fighting each other and turn their attention to the government. Then Leoni addresses the room. Some of the people they know are not enrolled, she says, and those people have the power to change this government. By Friday morning she had resigned as Labour's candidate for Tāmaki Makaurau. Nominations have closed, so her name stays on the ballot without the party behind it. Hold the content of that footage still for a moment, because the speed of the pile-on depends on nobody doing so. A Māori woman stood in a room of Māori men, most of them locked out of formal politics by every measure we have, and told them to enrol and vote. She did not promise them a policy. She did not take their money. She asked them to join the electora...

  The Licensed Lie Vivek Ramaswamy, Hindutva, and the permission to deceive A woman sits in a chair and faces a camera. She gives her name as Donna Arthur. She says she loves her daughter, that it is not easy for a mother to say this, and that her daughter has a serious problem. She says her daughter is a liar who lies about her past. She asks the people of Ohio not to let that daughter become their governor. The daughter is Amy Acton, the Democratic candidate for governor, a physician who ran the state health department through the first year of the pandemic. The woman in the chair lost custody of her when Acton was twelve, after Acton's stepfather was indicted on a charge of raping the child. Acton has described abuse and neglect that ran from the age of three until the state took her out of that house. Her brother, Philip Stearns, said what needed saying on the day the video appeared: Vivek Ramaswamy had taken the sexual abuse his sister survived at twelve and made it a poli...

  The Hand on the Shoulder Oct 19, 2026  During the arati, when the dhak gets loud enough to move the floor under the folding chairs, a boy of about six broke away from his mother and ran the length of the hall with his arms out, weaving between the rows, laughing at nothing in particular. An uncle caught him by the shoulder, turned him around and bent to his ear with his face arranged into that expression the diaspora keeps ready for its children, the one that means you are embarrassing us. The boy's arms came down. He walked back and sat. The dhak carried on, the smoke carried on, the queue for bhog carried on, and nobody in that hall thought anything had happened. Something had. The most important thing that happened in the pandal that evening was the hand on that shoulder, and every adult in the room missed it because we were all busy watching the idol. The hall had taken two months to put together. The booking, the sponsorship banners along the side wall, the WhatsA...