The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

  They Buy What They Cannot Build Nov 12, 2026 The indecency of the Trumpian far right: Trump, Musk, Mowbray, and the money that came for our elections Amy Acton is the governor-elect of Ohio, and Vivek Ramaswamy, who ran against her with the full machinery of Trumpian contempt, is going home. Elon Musk put an estimated $474 million behind Ken Paxton in Texas, some of it paying for AI-generated robocalls, and James Talarico won by more than a million votes while Gina Hinojosa took the governorship by seven hundred thousand. Keisha Lance Bottoms will be the first Black woman to govern an American state, Peggy Flanagan the first Native American woman in the Senate, Annie Andrews the first woman South Carolina has ever sent there. The richest man in the world spent more on one state than any donor in American history, lost it to people knocking on doors, and paid for a lesson that anyone can now read. The Trumpian far right sells the public humiliation of women who hold author...

  The  Māori Pronunciation Is Perfect: But Māori are Missing Nov 9, 2026 (This essay is developed as part of a broader collective of essays from our work at CARE on institutional racism. The writing is drawn on composites emergent from the fieldwork and is not intended to refer to any particular institutional structure in Aotearoa) The vowels are right. The senior leadership meeting opens with a mihi from a Pākehā deputy vice-chancellor who has done three years of evening classes and holds the long vowels with a care that would have been unthinkable in that room fifteen years ago. A whakataukī sits on the title slide, white text on the institutional blue. Item four of the agenda disestablishes two of the four Māori academic positions in the faculty, on the grounds that the programme they teach into has missed its enrolment target for two consecutive years. The meeting closes with a karakia. Nobody present experiences the morning as a contradiction, and in the terms the ins...

  The Rent Was Never Woke Nov 6, 2026 Tomorrow we vote. Somewhere in Palmerston North a woman will walk into a school hall with last week's supermarket docket still folded in her coat pocket, and she will know to the dollar what three years have done to her house. Butter. Power. The rent. The appointment she keeps moving because the practice wants the money up front and the next free slot is in March. That docket holds more about this country than every poll released this week, and it has been sitting in her pocket the whole time she was being told that her real problem was a Māori name on the front of a government building. The coalition came in promising to fix the economy. What it governed with was a culture war, photocopied in Washington, faxed to Wellington, the toner smudges still showing on the page. The words arrived before the policy. Woke. DEI. Critical race theory. Elite capture. A Marxist occupation of the universities, led by academics who cannot secure a car park, let...

  The Complaint Is the Story Nov 6, 2026 Jim Grenon. Director and largest shareholder of NZME, which owns the New Zealand Herald, Newstalk ZB and the Bay of Plenty Times. In July 2026 a judge ordered him to pay more than $230,000 in costs for secretly funding a failed defamation action against TVNZ and a researcher who had described the Stop Co-Governance campaigner Julian Batchelor's rhetoric as racist. Who owns the page On 3 July 2026 Judge David Clark of the Auckland District Court ordered Jim Grenon to pay $125,818.65 to TVNZ and $107,137 to the researcher Sanjana Hattotuwa. Grenon had been quietly paying for a defamation action against them, brought by Julian Batchelor, the evangelist who toured about sixty Stop Co-Governance meetings between February and September 2023 telling audiences that teaching children te reo Māori amounted to child abuse and likening the greeting Kia Ora to a Nazi salute. What Batchelor sued over was an August 2023 item on 1News in which H...