Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

  In a revealing social media post dated February 9, 2026, Free Speech Union council member Ani O'Brien responded to my blog post "The Free Speech Facade: Inviting Steven Pinker and the Hypocritical War on 'Woke' as Strategy for Protecting Powerful White Men." Her response, posted to X (formerly Twitter), demonstrates precisely the rhetorical strategies I critiqued in the original piece: the inversion of victimhood, the deployment of personal grievance to deflect structural analysis, and the mobilization of outrage to obscure complicity in systems that shield powerful men while targeting marginalized communities. The Response: A Close Reading O'Brien's post begins with an interesting framing: "Interesting to see that Saviour of Women Professor Mohan Dutta has written (a prompt for ChatGPT) that attacks the Free Speech Union for supposedly propping up misogynists because a guest we hosted showed up in the Epstein Files." Several rhetorical mov...

The anti-transgender activist Posie Parker in Aotearoa NZ An Industry Built on Inversion Anti-transgender hate is an industry. Not a movement, not a moral concern, not an organic uprising of worried parents — an industry, deliberately constructed, lavishly funded, and strategically deployed to protect the interests of the powerful men who finance it. And like most industries built on fear, it requires a credible monster. Transgender people — a community representing roughly one percent of the population, facing disproportionate rates of poverty, violence, suicide, and discrimination — have been selected for that role with remarkable precision. The 2025–2026 release of the Jeffrey Epstein files has made something newly visible that was always structurally present: the men who built the ideological infrastructure of anti-trans politics are, in many cases, the same men — or the direct intellectual descendants of the same men — who moved through the social world of a convicted child sex tr...

In the summer of 2026, as New Zealand navigates its own intensifying culture wars, the Free Speech Union NZ (FSU) invited Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker for a high-profile event in Auckland. Framed as "An Evening with Steven Pinker" at the Bruce Mason Centre on February 2, the gathering promised insights on reason, progress, and free speech—core tenets of Pinker's brand. FSU's chief executive, Jillaine Heather, touts it as a vital strike in the "fight for free speech in New Zealand." At first glance, this appears benign: an esteemed thinker engaging a public audience in a free society. Yet, delve deeper, and the invitation exposes a profound hypocrisy. It underscores how purported free speech advocates selectively safeguard expression to protect influential, often tarnished figures, while orchestrating a "war on woke" that vilifies marginalized communities as dire threats to liberty. More alarmingly, it sustains a culture where white supremacis...