The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

  The money that never touches the party When undercover reporters set out to put foreign money into British politics, they did not wire cash to a party account. They paid a pollster. Channel 4 News and the investigative group Verbatim revealed this week that senior figures around Nigel Farage arranged for a company registered in the United States, controlled by the undercover team and presented as the vehicle of a wealthy American, to pay for polling that Reform UK had itself commissioned. The bill came to more than £30,000. The results ran in the Telegraph and the Times as independent research, and neither paper was told that the party had ordered the work. The benefit was never declared to the Electoral Commission. Reform UK's head of policy, James Orr, was filmed saying the party could "easily get away with it." Bob Posner, who once ran the Electoral Commission, told the programme that serious criminal offences may have been committed. The Liberal Democrats have wri...

  David Cumin, the Free Speech Union and the White Supremacist Pseudoscience The two hundred and sixty-ninth name, the Free Speech Union, and the machinery that arrived here from somewhere else Position two hundred and sixty-nine on the letter reads "Dr David Cumin, The University of Aucklamd." The typo belongs to the original, which tells you something about the speed at which these documents are assembled.  Figure 1: David Cumin's signature and the links to his ORCID and LinkedIn Profiles, linked from the Hyperlink on the name. The letter asks the rector of Ghent University to protect Nathan Cofnas from disciplinary consequence, and Cofnas describes himself as a race realist. He holds that genes account for a meaningful share of the gap in measured intelligence between racial groups, he wrote in 2024 that under a true meritocracy Black people would vanish from almost every high-profile position outside sport and entertainment, and he has published a defence of what he...

  The Doubt Industry Has Seventy-Six Followers Inside one account's feed, and the architecture of manufactured doubt it belongs to Mohan Dutta His name is wakeywakey. His avatar is a Himalayan cat with sapphire eyes, fur so pale it could pass for innocence. The bio beneath it reads like a manifesto compressed into two sentences: in the movies, rebels who fight an evil empire are heroes; in real life, when we expose government lies, they call us cookers and extremists. Seventy-six people follow him. He follows seven hundred and fifty-three. New Zealand, the location field says, nothing more specific than that, and joined October 2017, a year before I arrived in this country myself, stepping down from a Provost's Chair at the National University of Singapore into a much smaller university on the North Island because Aotearoa was attempting something I had not seen tried anywhere else at that scale: scholarship that took Te Tiriti o Waitangi as its starting proposition rathe...

  The Aryan Hinge Caste, race science, and the two Hindutva names on the Cofnas letter The letter is addressed to the rector of Ghent University. Among its five hundred and sixty-nine signatories are two scholars who have built careers on the proposition that caste is a fiction manufactured by Europeans, and the school of thought they draw from is named after Ghent. That coincidence is worth holding still for a moment, because it is not really a coincidence at all. The letter itself concerns Nathan Cofnas, a self-described race realist suspended by Ghent in August after his public statements about Jason Arday, and I have written elsewhere about the arithmetic of its signatures and the grammar of its four sentences. What interests me here is a smaller finding inside the larger one. The eighth name on the list is Prakash Shah, Reader in Culture and Law at Queen Mary University of London. Some way further down sits Ramesh N. Rao, Professor of Communication at Columbus State Univers...

  Five Hundred and Sixty-Nine On the petition as an instrument of legitimation A signature on an open letter is a transfer of credibility. The signatory lends a reputation assembled somewhere else, in a laboratory or an archive or thirty years of seminar rooms, to a proposition they did not draft, concerning a case they may have encountered only through a headline, and the lending is the whole engine of the genre. Petitions work because credibility is portable and because nobody audits the loan. Five hundred and sixty-nine scholars have now lent theirs to a document of fewer than two hundred words addressed to the rector of Ghent University, and that document does not contain the name of the man at the centre of it. I coded the list three times in one evening, which was an accident of timing rather than of method. It carried one hundred and sixty-two names when I opened it, four hundred and ninety-seven when I returned to the source to verify my transcription, and five hundred a...