The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

  MOHAN J. DUTTA 5 November 2026 "Let's Knock on His Door Tonight" What a poster on a pole in Palmerston North tells us about this election The story of this poster is at the bottom of it. A sheet went up in the middle of my city in the last fortnight of this campaign, and along the foot of it run two marks. On the left, an X handle: @RemigrationNZ. On the right, a navy rectangle with a white chevron and a wordmark reading YOUNG NEW ZEALAND FIRST. Between them, where our electoral law requires the name of whoever paid for the thing, two words that are not a name: "Authorised 2026." The footer of the poster, magnified from the photograph. @RemigrationNZ at left, Young New Zealand First at right. The centre of the line, where the promoter's name belongs, gives a year. Remigration NZ is a far-right group that appeared on X in January this year, handed out fliers at an Auckland march reading "Not one more Third World immigrant. Remigration N...

  Bring It on, Bannon Mohan Dutta Steve Bannon is a convicted criminal and a far right actor. He served four months in a federal prison for refusing a congressional subpoena, pleaded guilty in a New York court over a fundraising operation that separated small donors from their money in the name of a border wall, and escaped the federal version of that case only because the president he served signed him a pardon on the way out the door. He is useful to anyone studying this movement for one reason. He says in plain words what its respectable end prefers to launder through a think tank paper and a panel on viewpoint diversity. Last week a lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School invited this man to address a class, and the only thing that kept him out of the room was a clash in his diary. He rang the Boston Globe from Texas, where he has been working turnout ahead of the midterms, to whinge that a year of frozen research grants, revoked visas, threats to Harvard's tax status an...

  Frame for Hire: crime, astroturf, and the far right's election cycle Oct 31, 2026  Days before New Zealanders finished voting, digital billboards carried the faces of Chris Hipkins, Chlöe Swarbrick and Marama Davidson under three capitalised words, BACKING THE GANGS, set above the Green Party's own campaign slogan.  The Sensible Sentencing Trust commissioned them and the Campaign Company, owned by Taxpayers' Union co-founder Jordan Williams, built them.  Two months earlier, in the Ipsos Issues Monitor , crime sat eighth on the list of problems New Zealanders named, at 15 percent, while inflation and the cost of living stood at 63 percent.  The gap between those two facts reveals how money seeks to set the public agenda, and the tagline "BACKING THE GANGS" is a frame. And a group with enough money to buy billboard advertising paid for it (Hint: Not the political parties whose leaders are plastered on the billboard). What the numbers say For a powerful capita...