The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

The address at the bottom of the billboard Mohan J. Dutta Advance voting opened on Monday morning. By the time the first people had queued at the booths, a billboard on a city corner was showing them three faces in a row, Chlöe Swarbrick, Marama Davidson and Chris Hipkins, lit against a red field running into green at the edge. Three words sat across the top in capitals. BACKING THE GANGS. Four more sat underneath in the lighter weight and lower case the Green Party uses on its own hoardings. For all of us. That last line belongs to the Greens. It is their campaign slogan, bought and placed and repeated across the country for months, and someone has taken it and installed an accusation inside it, so that a driver stopped at the lights receives a sentence in the party's own voice. It works at the speed a billboard gets read, which is the speed of a changing light. At the bottom of a board like that, in type sized for a reader standing still rather than one doing fifty, New Z...

  Thirteen Million Votes from the Northeast Piauí gave Lula 75.9 percent. Bahia gave him 71.3. Maranhão and Sergipe gave him 69.5 each, Pernambuco 69.2. These are the states that Brazilian elites have spent a century describing as backward, the sertão of drought and migration, the places whose young people board buses to São Paulo to work in kitchens and on construction sites and come home at Christmas with money for the family. On Sunday night the Northeast delivered Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva a net margin of around 13.6 million votes. His national margin over Flávio Bolsonaro was 4,429,907. Take the Northeast out of the count and Brazil wakes up this morning under a fascist president. That arithmetic turns over the story usually told about who rescues a democracy. It was not the educated middle class of the southeast. It was not the business press, which spent the campaign worrying about fiscal discipline. It was not the international institutions that had been issuing commu...

  The FSU Wouldn’t Know Peer Review If It Rejected Them It already did. The Free Speech Union wouldn’t know academe if you poked it with a ten foot barge pole, and it has built a campaign about academic freedom on exactly that. The Free Speech Union is at it again, peddling Peter Boghossian to New Zealand in the election season, and the sales pitch arrived in the shape of a parable. A philosopher at Portland State asks his colleagues what the evidence is for trigger warnings and microaggressions. He is told the question is itself an offence. So he goes away and exposes the rot by getting nonsense published in peer reviewed journals, and the whole racket only survives because a reporter at the Wall Street Journal came looking for one of his invented authors.  I replied that he is not a credible academic, that none of this is peer reviewed, and that we should stop importing failed American academics with their culture war grift.  Two hours later the Union answered. Tw...

  Your Power Bill Went Up. They Gave You Gangs. 24 Oct 2026 A media owned by the capitalist class manufactured a gang panic in the last fortnight of the campaign, punched down on the poorest people in the country, and buried the cost of living, power prices, housing and healthcare out of this election. Your power bill went up while wholesale electricity prices were falling. Two chains decide what you pay for cheese. You waited months for a specialist. You have been telling pollsters this for three years, and in the final fortnight of the campaign, with early voting open and the largest audience of the entire cycle watching, the newsrooms of this country handed you a video of a Māori woman asking her relatives to enrol to vote. By Friday they had her candidacy. That was the news you were given in the week you began casting your vote. I wrote last week about the press destruction of Kerrin Leoni as a settler colonial mechanism, a way of removing a wāhine Māori candidate that required...

  The Lynching Takes Forty Eight Hours 23 Oct 2026   Whiteness, the New Zealand press, and the destruction of wāhine Māori candidates Count the hands the footage passed through. Whakaata Māori reported the video first. RNZ said it had independently obtained the same material. Newsroom published a still photograph from the event showing people in Mongrel Mob regalia making hand signs. The Post added that the gathering had been advertised online as a fundraiser for a Mob chapter, a claim Chris Hipkins said he had been reassured was wrong, and which by then had already done its work. The New Zealand Herald put a Labour minister on camera to answer for it. On Wednesday Kerrin Leoni was a candidate defending her seat in an electorate debate. By Friday morning she was finished, with her name still on the ballot because nominations had closed and there was no mechanism left to remove it. Forty eight hours is about how long this takes now. The machinery runs without anyone in it makin...