Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

I have long argued that the Free Speech Union New Zealand is part of a much broader global far-right movement organized around the far-right construction of free speech—one mobilized to protect and safeguard one particular kind of speech (largely white supremacist, misogynist, patriarchal speech that targets down on minorities) while framing women, gender diverse communities, migrants, Indigenous peoples, and Black communities as threats.  This movement constructs the narrative of "woke culture" as existential danger while systematically erasing the discursive registers for those at the margins.  Free speech is constructed as a feature of Western civilization and migrants, women, gender diverse communities are constructed as perennial threats to this rhetorical construction of free speech. The FSU's recent response to my critique, and the toxic ecosystem it cultivated in reply, demonstrates this far-right infrastructure operating openly, without pretense. This isn't a...

The Epstein Class, the War on Accountability, and the War on Woke The recently released Epstein files reveal something more chilling than the crimes of one man. They expose the communicative infrastructure of a class formation—what Ro Khanna has termed the "Epstein Class"—and document in real time how this formation mobilized to defend itself against the greatest threat it had faced in decades: the MeToo movement. These aren't just the private musings of a disgraced financier. They're a window into how power protects power, how sexual violence gets defended through coordinated media strategy, and how the "war on woke" emerged as counter-insurgency against accountability, with star academics and intellectuals providing its intellectual architecture. In August 2018, as MeToo transformed from hashtag to institutional reckoning, publicist Peggy Siegal wrote to Epstein from a sailboat in Greece. A Page Six story had referred to Epstein as a "reviled billio...

  When Ani O'Brien, council member of New Zealand's Free Speech Union, responded to my critique of her organization's platforming of Steven Pinker , she inadvertently provided a masterclass in what the culture-centered approach identifies as communicative inversion —the systematic reversal of structural power relations through discourse that recasts institutional authority as victimhood while erasing the voices and material experiences of those at the margins. Her February 9, 2026 social media post demonstrates not merely rhetorical deflection but the fundamental architecture through which dominant structures maintain themselves: by controlling who speaks, what can be said, and whose voices remain systematically unheard. The culture-centered approach reveals that power operates through three interrelated dimensions : structure (the material configurations that distribute resources and vulnerability unequally), culture (the meaning-making practices that legitimize or contes...