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.
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 about protecting speech. It's about weaponizing the concept of free speech to silence those who challenge structural inequalities in communicative processes—while providing cover, amplification, and sanctuary for racism, xenophobia, and violence directed at marginalized communities.
The Global Pattern
The FSU fits precisely within a transnational network of organizations that deploy "free speech" rhetoric strategically.
In the UK, Toby Young's Free Speech Union platforms Tommy Robinson—and notably, Young himself appears in the Epstein files, adding another layer to the troubling pattern of "free speech" advocates with connections to networks of exploitation. In Australia, the Institute of Public Affairs flirts with One Nation's xenophobic populism. In the United States, the so-called Intellectual Dark Web—figures like Steven Pinker, Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson—cloaks ethno-centrism and gender essentialism in the language of "rational debate" and "academic freedom."
What unites these formations is their selective application of free speech principles: vigorous defense of speech that denigrates Muslims, trans people, Indigenous rights, and migrant communities, coupled with aggressive campaigns to silence, delegitimize, and deplatform those who advocate for racial justice, decolonization, gender equity, and structural transformation. At the heart of this double game is the communicative inversion that frames communities and people with marginalized identities as terrorists, uncivil, and illiberal.
The pattern is consistent: invoke Enlightenment principles and liberal values to protect reactionary speech targeting downward at the marginalized, while framing any pushback—any assertion of dignity, any demand for accountability—as "censorship," "wokeness," "identity politics" "terrorism" run amok.
In Aotearoa, where Te Tiriti o Waitangi promises partnership and the Pacific's inclusive ethos shapes our national identity, the FSU has positioned itself as defender of "open dialogue" against "cancel culture." Yet their actions reveal a different architecture entirely.
The Epstein Connection and the Performance of Debate
On February 10, 2026, I raised critical questions about the FSU's platforming choices—specifically, their promotion of Steven Pinker, an academic with documented connections to Jeffrey Epstein's network (what Congressman Ro Khanna termed the "Epstein Class"), alongside their consistent amplification of anti-transgender rhetoric through board member Ani O'Brien.
This observation becomes even more significant when we recognize that the global "free speech" network shares these troubling connections—from Young's appearance in the Epstein files to Pinker's documented associations with Epstein's academic network. This isn't coincidence; it reveals something about who gets protected under the banner of "free speech" and what kind of power structures these organizations actually serve.
My critique wasn't a casual observation. It was a structural analysis of how the FSU selectively deploys "free speech" principles: platforming figures linked to networks of extreme exploitation while simultaneously weaponizing that platform against transgender communities. It exemplified precisely the pattern I've documented—vigorous protection of speech connected to power and privilege, aggressive targeting of those advocating for marginalized communities.
The FSU's response proved my analysis more comprehensively than I could have anticipated.
Rather than engaging the substance of my critique, O'Brien scripted a disinformation-based propaganda piece on Substack, replete with far-right tropes that manipulate critical arguments to construct a broader propaganda, and wrapped up by "extending" a podcast invitation, framed as a "respectful, good faith discussion" to address my "questions and concerns."
O'Brien's Substack focused entirely on defending against my supposed "disgrace" while studiously ignoring the critical question I raised about the FSU platforming an intellectual linked with Epstein. The piece exemplifies classic far-right propaganda techniques through systematic communicative inversion and deflection. It transforms structural critique into personal grievance, converting my institutional analysis of the FSU's platforming patterns into an alleged attack on "a lesbian woman." This identity weaponization—deploying marginalized status to shield organizational complicity—mirrors reactionary movements globally that selectively invoke progressive language to obstruct accountability.
The propaganda operates through strategic evasion: across the many words, O'Brien never substantively addresses why the FSU platforms Pinker despite his Epstein connections.
Instead, she deploys whataboutism (citing Foucault), false equivalence (comparing documented Epstein network participation to scholarly citation), and victimhood inversion (positioning herself as target while ignoring the racist harassment her organization cultivated). Her threat of defamation action performs classic SLAPP tactics—using legal intimidation to silence critique while claiming to defend "free speech." The piece's structure reveals propagandistic intent: lengthy personal narrative establishes sympathy, scattered accusations of hypocrisy create confusion, identity politics rhetoric ("the only lesbian woman") provides defensive shield, and the performative debate invitation frames refusal as cowardice. Notably absent: any engagement with the analysis of her tweet I offered as deflection from the FSU's platforming of Pinker. This is deflection masquerading as reasoned response.
The FSU tweet then magnified this, crafting a poster that featured our photos side-by-side, accumulating 372 likes, 65 reposts, and over 6,900 views.
This is the Charlie Kirk playbook, the Turning Point USA model, the tactic perfected by right-wing provocateurs globally: the performance of debate as recruitment tool and harassment vector. Such invitations aren't genuine attempts at dialogue—they're spectacles designed to mobilize a far-right base, generate shareable clips that can be stripped of context, reinforce predetermined narratives about "woke indoctrination," and—critically—expose targets to coordinated harassment while maintaining plausible deniability.
The organization gets to claim they "offered debate." The target gets buried in racist vitriol. The far-right ecosystem gets activated and energized. The infrastructure operates exactly as designed.
What followed in the replies—what always follows in such exchanges—revealed the FSU's hate infrastructure operating in plain sight.
Documenting the Hate Infrastructure
Across three interconnected FSU tweets, I documented 23 instances of overt racism among the replies and quote tweets. These weren't random trolls stumbling upon my critique—they were responses directly nested under the FSU's invitation, amplified by the organization's platform and reach, cultivated by their deliberate framing.
This is infrastructure, not accident. This is design, not negligence.
The patterns are instructive for understanding how far-right "free speech" organizations actually function.
@duck42137 erupted: "He needs to fuck off back to India scummy cunt." This isn't argumentation or counterpoint; it's erasure through deportation fantasy. Despite my decade in Aotearoa, my contributions to decolonizing communication studies, my work empowering Māori and Pasifika communities in health equity—all of it vanishes. I become merely revocable, my citizenship conditional, my belonging always provisional, my right to critique always contingent on the approval of those who claim nativity.
This is the free speech the FSU protects: the freedom to demand ethnic cleansing of those who challenge power structures.
This deportation fantasy dominated 62% of the documented racist posts. In a nation where Indian New Zealanders have grown 150% since 2010, now comprising 5% of the population, such rhetoric taps into deeper anxieties about demographic change, economic competition, and racial belonging—anxieties the far right deliberately cultivates and mobilizes.
@synacknz deployed what I'll describe as a portmanteau slur combining anti-Indian stereotypes with sexualized violence—a term layering gendered assault atop ethnic degradation. The reply concluded: "You dishonor your race and your homeland you cheap little sellout."
This reveals the perverse double-bind constructed for racialized academics who challenge white supremacy: succeed in Western institutions and you're a sellout to your heritage, complicit in your own oppression; struggle and you're proof of inherent inferiority. The model minority myth weaponized against itself, deployed to delegitimize any position from which we might speak. This is the free speech the FSU infrastructure enables: the freedom to sexually degrade and ethnically vilify those who advocate for decolonization.
@SFHFWill offered: "He's the product of generations of poo flingers." This scatological slur, inherited directly from British Raj propaganda stereotyping Indians as open defecators, reduces my ancestors—scholars, activists, partition survivors—to colonial caricature. That such language thrives in 2026, recycled from 4chan's digital sewers and Victorian imperial imaginaries, speaks to the persistence and deliberate revival of colonial racism within contemporary far-right movements.
This is the free speech the FSU protects: the freedom to deploy colonial-era dehumanization against postcolonial scholars.
The Violence Escalates
The FSU's follow-up tweet attempted moral high ground: "It is easy to call people 'racists' and 'pedophiles' online. It's harder to front up and have a discussion." With 24 likes and 16 reposts, it performed reasonableness while the replies it cultivated descended into explicit violence fantasies. This rhetorical move—positioning substantive critique as mere name-calling, framing the offer of "discussion" as brave confrontation—is central to far-right discourse. It inverts power relations, casting those who document racism as unreasonable accusers, while those who platform racists become courageous defenders of dialogue.
@MrsNFingers (Jane Ninefingers) wrote: "I'd rather skip to seeing him loaded into a trebuchet. Yeeet." This gleeful envisioning of medieval siege weaponry hurling me skyward—the "yeeet" transforming violence into viral meme—gamifies my potential murder. It dehumanizes me as refuse worthy of catapult disposal, as waste to be expelled from the body politic through spectacular violence.
In New Zealand's post-colonial context, such imagery resonates with the brutal histories of transportation and expulsion—the removal of indentured Indian laborers when they became inconvenient, the forcible displacement of Pacific communities, the ongoing dispossession of Māori from ancestral lands. Now these histories are meme-ified, made cute and shareable, repackaged as "edgy humor" for the FSU's "free speech" entertainment.
This is the free speech the FSU protects: the freedom to fantasize publicly about murdering critics.
@ErykMcRae contributed a single word in all capitals: "DEPORT!"
But McRae isn't some marginal voice shouting into the void. He's a verified "Nationalist. Social Commentator" with 6,500 followers, curating "Nationalist Alternative for NZ," a 143-member community explicitly organized for those "sick of our country being sold out." His profile features systematic anti-immigration screeds, attacks on Māori co-governance as "reverse racism," paeans to "European heritage under threat," and endorsements of international far-right figures like Lauren Southern.
When verified ethno-nationalist accounts amplify deportation calls under the FSU's X handle, when white nationalist organizers respond with calls to DEPORT in FSU comment sections, when the infrastructure of organized racism operates openly in spaces created by "free speech" organizations—we're witnessing not aberration but function.
This is exactly what the FSU's "free speech" infrastructure is designed to produce and protect.
The Structural Analysis
These 23 documented instances reveal clear patterns that illuminate how far-right "free speech" organizations operate:
Spatial Concentration: 75% were direct replies to FSU tweets, not scattered randomly across the platform. The hate clusters precisely where the FSU creates space for it.
Temporal Clustering: Incidents concentrated within 36 hours, peaking during evening hours when engagement is highest. This suggests coordination, shared networks, algorithmic amplification of the FSU's framing.
Strategic Amplification: Low individual engagement (average 1.2 likes per racist post) but high collective reach through the FSU's retweets and quote tweets. The organization's platform provides distribution that individual bigots couldn't achieve alone.
Thematic Consistency: Deportation fantasies (14 instances), ethnic slurs (9 instances), violence fantasies (3 instances). This isn't random toxicity—it's coordinated messaging around core far-right themes: expulsion of the non-white other, dehumanization through racialized slurs, intimidation through violence threats.
Verified Amplifiers: White nationalist organizers like McRae don't just participate—they're platformed, their deportation calls amplified to thousands, their networks mobilized.
The FSU's response to this documented hate infrastructure flourishing under their banner? Silence. No pinned disclaimers. No comment moderation. No disavowal of white nationalist participation. No accountability whatsoever.
This isn't negligence. This isn't an unfortunate side effect. This is the infrastructure operating exactly as designed.
The Free Speech Union's Ideological Architecture
Understanding the FSU requires situating it within global far-right movements that weaponize "free speech" discourse.
The FSU's founding in 2022 coincided with "cancel culture" moral panics across Western democracies—panics deliberately manufactured to reframe accountability as oppression, to cast consequences for bigotry as censorship, to position the maintenance of structural inequalities as brave defense of liberal values.
By 2023, the FSU was lobbying Parliament against hate speech reforms—reforms proposed after 51 lives were stolen in the Christchurch mosque attacks by a white supremacist terrorist who cited "replacement" anxieties, the same rhetoric now echoing in deportation demands targeting me. The FSU's arguments cited ACLU defenses of segregationist George Wallace: perhaps appropriate for 1960s Alabama, obscene amid fresh graves from white supremacist terror in Aotearoa.
The message was clear: protect white supremacist speech even after it produces mass murder.
In 2024, the FSU backed ACT Party MPs equating Māori rights advocacy with "racism," framing Te Tiriti implementations as "divisive," positioning Indigenous sovereignty as threat. This is the classic far-right move: invert power relations, claim the historically marginalized are the real oppressors, defend structural inequality as neutral principle.
By 2025, their demands for "anti-woke purges" at InternetNZ—targeting anyone advocating for digital equity, inclusive governance, or accountability mechanisms—cemented their status as culture warriors committed to maintaining existing hierarchies, not speech defenders committed to expanding democratic participation.
Throughout, the pattern remains consistent with global far-right formations: vigorous defense of speech targeting downward (at Muslims, trans people, Indigenous communities, migrants, racial justice advocates), aggressive opposition to speech advocating upward (challenging white supremacy, patriarchy, colonial legacies, structural inequalities).
Christchurch's Shadow and the Politics of Replacement
This infrastructure matters beyond my personal experience—it illuminates the ongoing threat of far-right violence in Aotearoa.
Brenton Tarrant's manifesto was saturated with "replacement" anxiety: the claim that white populations face extinction through immigration, that demographic change constitutes genocide, that violence is justified to preserve racial purity. This is core white nationalist ideology, the animating logic of global far-right movements.
The same rhetoric echoes throughout the FSU's ecosystem: McRae's rants about voting rights "sold out" to immigrants, the repeated deportation demands positioning my presence as illegitimate, the framing of Māori co-governance as "reverse racism" threatening the natural order, the construction of "woke culture" as existential threat to European heritage.
When the FSU opposed 2024's Online Harm Bill—legislation designed precisely to prevent the online radicalization pipelines that produced Christchurch—they chose to protect the infrastructure that enables white nationalist organizing over the safety of the communities such organizing targets.
When they platform figures from the Intellectual Dark Web who provide pseudoscientific justification for racial hierarchies, when they amplify anti-transgender rhetoric that constructs gender diverse people as predatory threats, when they create spaces where verified white nationalists mobilize their networks against critics—they're not defending abstract principles.
They're constructing and maintaining the infrastructure of far-right violence.
What "Free Speech" Really Means in This Framework
The culture-centered approach I've developed across two decades teaches us to examine whose voices are amplified, whose are erased, and what structural purposes these patterns serve.
The FSU doesn't defend free speech—it weaponizes the concept to:
Platform Power: Figures with troubling associations (Epstein network), pseudoscientific racism (race science advocates), anti-trans ideologues get vigorous defense and broad amplification. Their "academic freedom" is sacred, their "controversial ideas" must be heard.
Silence Resistance: Scholars advocating decolonization, activists organizing for racial justice, community organizers amplifying marginalized voices face coordinated harassment, bad-faith "debate" invitations designed to expose them to abuse, delegitimization as "woke" or "divisive."
Mobilize Networks: Each FSU post becomes an organizing opportunity, activating far-right audiences, providing verified white nationalists with platform and audience, creating spaces where racism flourishes while maintaining plausible deniability.
Obstruct Accountability: Systematic opposition to hate speech reform, online harm legislation, content moderation, institutional equity initiatives—any mechanism that might constrain white supremacist organizing gets framed as "censorship."
Erase Context: The violence targeting marginalized communities disappears. The structural inequalities that make such violence possible become invisible. History vanishes. We're left with abstract "principles" divorced from power relations.
When I critique these patterns, when I document the infrastructure operating in plain sight, the response isn't intellectual engagement—it's ethnic erasure. Deportation demands. Scatological slurs. Violence fantasies. Sexual degradation. The message is unmistakable: brown scholars who challenge power don't deserve debate—they deserve expulsion, dehumanization, elimination.
This is what "free speech" means in the FSU's framework: freedom for white supremacists to organize, freedom for misogynists to harass, freedom for transphobes to dehumanize, freedom for white nationalists to demand ethnic cleansing—while those of us committed to equity, decolonization, and structural transformation are systematically silenced through intimidation.
The Resistance and the Path Forward
Not all responses were hateful. Approximately 20% offered substantive pushback against the FSU's framework:
@plainjane130632 cut through the performance: "Why would he give a voice to racist bigots? Engaging with a bigot like Victim Ani would be a big waste of time."
@MarSButler named what was happening: "These nasty replies are disgusting."
@foundersam identified the FSU's actual function: Stop "trying to shut down academics" through bad-faith debate invitations.
@paul_wilson_nz recognized the nuance in my critique that the FSU deliberately obscured.
These voices demonstrate that resistance exists, that alternative frameworks are possible, that not everyone accepts the far-right's weaponization of free speech discourse.
But they're systematically drowned in the infrastructure of hate the FSU deliberately cultivates and protects.
The Choice Before Aotearoa
We stand at a crossroads, and the stakes extend far beyond academic debate or culture war skirmishes.
We can accept the FSU's framework, where "free speech" shields the infrastructure of white nationalism, where critique of structural inequality triggers ethnic cleansing rhetoric, where the language of debate masks organized hate, where Christchurch's lessons are deliberately unlearned.
Or we can insist on a different understanding of freedom—one that recognizes speech as always embedded in power relations, one that centers the voices of those historically silenced rather than amplifying those who seek to silence them, one that understands accountability as essential to democratic participation rather than antithetical to it.
The work of the culture-centered approach, holding power to account, amplifying the voices of the structurally marginalized—in health equity, in decolonial communication, in community organizing —threatens those invested in maintaining inequality. The FSU's hate infrastructure, now operating openly without pretense, reveals what "free speech" really means in far-right frameworks: not freedom for all to participate in democratic deliberation, but freedom for the powerful to silence dissent through racism, intimidation, and violence.
If we value Te Tiriti's promise of partnership, if we honor the 51 lives stolen at Christchurch, if we believe in the Pacific's inclusive ethos, if we're committed to building a genuinely multicultural democracy—we must name and dismantle these hate infrastructures masquerading as principled debate platforms.
This requires:
Documentation: Continue mapping the networks, tracking the patterns, making the infrastructure visible.
Accountability: Report accounts weaponizing violence. Demand platforms enforce their own policies. Insist organizations either moderate their spaces or accept responsibility for what they cultivate.
Alternative Frameworks: Build genuine spaces for democratic deliberation that center marginalized voices rather than amplifying those who target them.
Structural Analysis: Refuse to accept "free speech" rhetoric at face value. Always ask: whose speech is protected, whose is erased, what power relations are maintained or challenged.
The FSU and its global counterparts will continue claiming persecution, continue performing wounded innocence, continue insisting they're merely defending principles while their infrastructure produces exactly what it's designed to produce: the harassment, intimidation, and silencing of those who challenge structural inequalities.
Our task is to refuse their framework entirely. To insist that true freedom of expression requires protecting marginalized voices from coordinated harassment, not amplifying those who seek to silence us. To recognize that speech divorced from accountability isn't liberation—it's license for those with power to maintain it through violence.
In Aotearoa's multicultural democracy, true speech weaves diverse threads together. It doesn't sever them with slurs, doesn't hurl them with siege engines, doesn't demand their deportation, doesn't provide sanctuary for white nationalist organizing.
Only when we dismantle these far-right infrastructures hiding behind free speech rhetoric, only when we center voices committed to equity over those invested in erasure, can we begin to realize freedom's actual promise.
The FSU's response to my critique has performed an invaluable service: it has demonstrated, openly and undeniably, the infrastructure of hate operating beneath the veneer of principled debate.
We can no longer claim ignorance. The choice is ours.