Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

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...

  The evidence is overwhelming, documented in court filings, university investigations, and the massive tranches of Justice Department-released Epstein files—most recently the blockbuster drop of over three million documents, emails, photos, and videos in late January/early February 2026.  These files expose sustained, post-conviction ties between convicted child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and the professoriate at our most elite institutions. Dismissing these revelations as conspiracy mongering or overreach protects the powerful at the expense of victims and erodes the moral foundation of higher education itself. This culture isn't abstract or historical; it's active and ongoing. Epstein didn't merely donate money—he cultivated long-term relationships with star academics who continued corresponding, meeting, flying on his private jet, and even visiting his private island years after his 2008 conviction for procuring a minor for prostitution. These interactions often blu...

  The revelations emerging from the Jeffrey Epstein files in 2026 should shock us. Peter Mandelson, architect of New Labour and embodiment of its "modernizing" project, exchanging sensitive government information with a convicted sex trafficker. Tony Blair, the humanitarian interventionist, introduced to Epstein through Mandelson's networks. Birthday notes referring to Epstein as "best pal." Payments totaling $75,000. These aren't peripheral scandals involving minor party figures—they implicate the very core of the New Labour project, the men who redefined British social democracy for a generation. Yet perhaps the most disturbing aspect isn't the revelations themselves, but how unsurprising they feel. The Epstein connections don't contradict New Labour's legacy—they crystallize it. They reveal with stark clarity what "pragmatism" actually meant in practice: the subordination of ethical principles to elite networks, the conflation of ...