The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe

 

"A thousand little chips" at Te Tiriti: Dane Giraud, the far-right outrage machine, and the white supremacist ecosystem he amplifies

By Mohan J Dutta

Exhibit 1: Tweet by Dane Giraud

On 27 October 2025, in response to a tweet from one James Rossiter — an account that declares its Catholicism, declares its allegiance to Nick Fuentes, and declares its intention to "take over New Zealand" while telling me, an Indian-origin academic, to "go home" — I wrote:

"Te Tiriti gives us the right to send white supremacists packing to their European backwaters! That is the beauty of Te Tiriti, and the reason why white supremacists target it so hard."

Dane Giraud, Council Member of the Free Speech Union (FSU) and host of its Free To Speak podcast, six months later, ripped that sentence out of the thread, screenshotted only my post, and re-broadcast it to his audience with sarcastic flourish: "This must be based on more world-class research by the esteemed professor. I had absolutely no idea that the Treaty of Waitangi had a remigration clause for quarrelsome local folk of European descent."

Within hours: 143 likes. 29 retweets. 2.7K views. The far-right outrage machine, on cue.

This piece is about what Giraud did, what he refused to show, the white supremacist account I was actually responding to, and what it tells us about the political ecosystem the FSU is comfortable inhabiting — an ecosystem that, in 2026, runs continuously through Nick Fuentes, the Groypers, Catholic integralist white nationalism, and Aotearoa New Zealand's own homegrown reactionaries.

What Giraud erased

Giraud's screenshot is a textbook example of what I have called, in earlier writing on the FSU, the "communicative inversion" — a technique central to far-right propaganda where the actual referents of speech are stripped away and the speech is then circulated as evidence of the speaker's irrationality, hatred, or unfitness.

Here is what Giraud's audience did not see, because Giraud chose not to show them:

1. My tweet was a reply to @Jamesrs2025, an account whose pinned tweet (8 May) reads: "All races have equal inherent human dignity and there are plenty of non-Whites better than Whites. I love everyone. The West should be majority White, but it is more important to be Catholic than it is to be White. These statements only contradict each other if you are low IQ." The pinned post is a video of Nick Fuentes. The author's bio carries Catholic and Vatican iconography alongside the New Zealand flag.

2. Rossiter had explicitly told me, in the tweet I was replying to: "Yes. Like @NickJFuentes, @feelsguy2003 & @realspeckzo, I am a Catholic. I make @bobmccoskrienz look like a liberal. I'm taking over New Zealand. Time to go home Dutta."

3. My short prior reply to him was: "Very catholic hey?" — a one-line gesture at the obvious distance between the Catholic social teaching of human dignity and the Fuentes-Groyper appropriation of Catholicism for white nationalist Christian integralism.

4. The tweet Giraud weaponised was followed in the very same thread by: "He he he, dream on! Tell that to tangata whenua, and go back to whatever primitive European backwaters you came from. This is Aotearoa and there's no room for your white supremacy here."\

Exhibit 2: My original tweet

The "remigration clause" line is Giraud's invention. The actual referent of my tweet was a Fuentes-citing account that had openly threatened to "take over New Zealand" and ordered me — a brown academic — to "go home." Giraud screenshotted out the white supremacist threat, kept only the response, and handed it to his followers as evidence of Massey University's racist professor.

This is not analysis. It is laundering. It is what Sarah Sobieraj and others have documented as the standard playbook of organised online harassment against scholars of colour and women of colour in particular: pluck a sentence, strip the context, hand it to the outrage market.

Figure 1: The communicative inversion pipeline of the FSU

Who James Rossiter is — and what Giraud is amplifying

Look carefully at the rest of @Jamesrs2025's feed, which Giraud's audience is being routed away from:

Exhibit 3: James Rossiter and the amplification of the US far right hate ecosystem

• A pinned post promoting Nick Fuentes, a man the Anti-Defamation League calls "an unapologetic antisemite" and "white supremacist" who has praised Hitler from the stage ("I love you, and I love Hitler"), called for a holy war against Jews, denied the Holocaust, and rallied his Groyper army through January 6.

Exhibit 4: James Rossiter and the amplification of the US far right hate ecosystem

• Reposted Fuentes clips, including the now-notorious "I am the movement / NONE OF THESE [N-word] HAVE MOTION EXCEPT FOR ME" video — an open performance of anti-Black racism shared without comment as endorsement.

Exhibit 5a: James Rossiter and the amplification of the far right hate ecosystem

Exhibit 5b: James Rossiter and the amplification of the far right hate ecosystem

• A repost of a "Matthaeus" account declaring: "I'm white and I want my country and all white countries to be white" and "We Catholics are the true heirs of Greco-Roman and pre-Reformation European Civilisation." This is the classic blood-and-soil Catholic integralism that the Baptist News Global has identified as the theological face of the Fuentes-Carlson axis of contemporary American ethno-nationalism.

Exhibit 6: James Rossiter and the amplification of the far right hate ecosystem

• Rossiter's own posts: "Women being allowed to vote and hold political office is actually insane" (34 minutes before Giraud's screenshot circulated). "Most people are stupid, and most people are even more stupid than that. @NickJFuentes is the movement, political genius who follows the one true faith."

This is not a "quarrelsome local folk of European descent," as Giraud archly described him. This is a self-declared Groyper. Fuentes' followers are described by the ADL as "a loose network of alt-right figures who are vocal supporters of white supremacist and 'America First' podcaster" Fuentes. The Combat Antisemitism Movement has documented how Groypers strategically anticipated and exploited Musk's takeover of Twitter to disseminate their hate at scale. The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism has tracked Fuentes' rapid mainstreaming through Tucker Carlson, Russell Brand, and Patrick Bet-David, and the resignation of Robert P. George from the Heritage Foundation board over Heritage President Kevin Roberts' refusal to disavow Carlson's platforming of Fuentes.

This is the political universe Giraud chose to shield from his audience's view when he reframed Rossiter as a quirky neighbour and me as the threat. That is not a mistake. That is the work.

Te Tiriti as anchor — and why white supremacists target it so hard

Now let me return to the actual substance of my tweet, which Giraud was at pains to ridicule but at no pains to engage.

Te Tiriti o Waitangi is the founding constitutional document of Aotearoa New Zealand. Signed at Waitangi on 6 February 1840 between Te Tiriti rangatira and the Crown, it affirmed — in the Māori text, which is the text the overwhelming majority of rangatira signed — tino rangatiratanga (absolute chieftainship/sovereignty) of hapū over their lands, villages, and taonga. It granted the Crown kāwanatanga (governance) over its own settler population. It was, in other words, an agreement that the Crown would govern its own people, under the continuing sovereignty of Māori.

What Te Tiriti is not, contra the white supremacist imaginary that Giraud's tweet helps to feed: it is not a deed of cession. It is not a charter for unitary Crown sovereignty. It is not a grant of permanent settlement rights to anyone who arrives carrying Christian nationalist, "the West must be white" politics in their luggage. The Waitangi Tribunal has consistently held that Māori did not cede sovereignty in 1840.

Pākehā scholars working in Tiriti-based anti-racism praxis — Heather Came, Tim McCreanor, Avril Bell, and others — have for decades demonstrated that Te Tiriti is the ethical mechanism by which non-Māori access this whenua, and that this access is conditional on honouring the terms under which it was extended. The right of any settler to be here is mediated by Te Tiriti. Te Tiriti, as Came and Tudor argue, "is not a historic document; rather it has ongoing relevance as, amongst other things, a statement of intent to direct Pākehā relationships with Māori."

What follows from this is the point my tweet was making, however polemically: Te Tiriti is fundamentally incompatible with white supremacy. A political project that declares Aotearoa must be a "white country" — whether voiced by Nick Fuentes from Chicago, by Rossiter from his X account, or by the domestic ecosystem of Hindutva, Christian nationalism, and the Free Speech Union's "war on woke" — is in direct violation of the constitutional foundation of this country. It violates the tino rangatiratanga of hapū. It violates the dignity of tangata whenua. It violates the obligations the Crown took on in exchange for the right of settlers to be here at all.

That is why white supremacists "target it so hard." Te Tiriti is the legal and ethical instrument by which a settler society in Aotearoa can name and refuse the entitlements of whiteness. It is precisely the anchor for an anti-racist politics that includes — and must include — challenging Fuentes-style ethno-nationalism, the Groyper recruitment of Catholic young men into white identitarianism, Hindutva's parallel ethno-religious project, and the local infrastructure that sanitises all of this through the rhetoric of "free speech."

When I write that Te Tiriti gives us the right to send white supremacists packing, this is not a "remigration clause." It is the principled claim that someone who comes to Aotearoa explicitly to "take over New Zealand" for a white Catholic ethno-state has, by their own declaration, repudiated the basis on which they are here. Te Tiriti is the anti-fascist document of this country. White supremacists know this. So do the people doing the work of Te Tiriti-based anti-racism. Giraud, apparently, does not — or does, and prefers his audience not to think about it.

The Free Speech Union problem

This is where the institutional question gets sharp. Dane Giraud is not a free agent on X. He is a Council Member of the Free Speech Union and host of its podcast. The FSU has spent years positioning itself as the principled defender of robust debate in Aotearoa. As I have argued in extended analyses of the FSU's actual operations, this framing is not borne out by its practice.

The FSU's practice is a selective mobilisation of "free speech" against decolonising scholarship, against Tiriti-based pedagogy, against critiques of Zionist settler colonialism, and against academics of colour — and, simultaneously, a protective mobilisation around figures and movements aligned with its political sympathies. Giraud himself, in the FSU's own published blog post, recounted that his first instinct on encountering my writing on decolonisation was to tag Massey University and try to get me sacked — an instinct he then dressed up, in retrospect, as a principled defence of free speech. The "principled defence" has not stopped him, two and a half years later, from selectively screenshotting me to amplify a Groyper.

That a Council member of an organisation that markets itself as the guarantor of free expression in Aotearoa is now functioning as a routing mechanism for outrage from a Fuentes-adjacent account back into the mainstream NZ political discourse should give every member, donor, and journalistic ally of the FSU pause. Because what Giraud is doing on his X account is not separable from the institutional brand. He hosts the FSU podcast. He is one of the public faces of the organisation. The organisation has not — to my knowledge, and despite many opportunities — disavowed his amplification practices.

A free speech organisation that is comfortable having its Council members function as an amplifier for Groyper content is not a free speech organisation. It is something else. The "something else" is what I have been writing about for years.

The pattern — and the stakes

The pattern is by now familiar. It looks like this:

1. A white supremacist or far-right account attacks an academic of colour, often deploying ethno-nationalist and "go home" tropes.
2. The academic responds, often robustly.
3. A more "respectable" figure — an FSU Council member, a sympathetic columnist, a Pinker-style intellectual — extracts the response, strips the context, and broadcasts it to a much wider audience as evidence of the academic's unreasonableness, racism against white people, or unfitness for the university.
4. The academic's employer is tagged. Demands for institutional discipline follow.
5. The original white supremacist account melts back into the noise, having been laundered through the respectability machine.

I have lived this cycle many times. With Hindutva trolls in 2021. With the FSU's targeting of my work on decolonisation in 2023. With the coordinated attack around Charlie Kirk in 2025. And now with Giraud's October 2025 / May 2026 selective screenshot.

The cumulative effect is what David Seymour's interference with RNZ trades on, what I described elsewhere as "a thousand little chips" at the institutional and constitutional fabric of this country. Each chip looks small. Each chip looks like a single tweet, a single screenshot, a single op-ed. The cumulative effect is the steady normalisation of a politics in which the FSU's Council member can broadcast a Groyper-adjacent narrative to thousands without consequence, while the academic who responds to that Groyper is constructed as the extremist.

This is the work of the far-right outrage machine. It is global — running from Fuentes in Chicago to the Hindutva ecosystem in India to the FSU and its podcast network in Aotearoa. And it is local — running through specific individuals, specific institutional roles, specific selective screenshots.

Closing

So: yes, Te Tiriti gives us the right to send white supremacists packing to their European backwaters. That is, as I wrote, the beauty of Te Tiriti. It is also the reason white supremacists target it so hard, and the reason their respectability-laundering allies — Dane Giraud included — work so hard to caricature anyone who states the obvious.

Aotearoa is not Nick Fuentes' Christian ethno-state. It is not the white Catholic civilisation that Rossiter and "Matthaeus" imagine. It is a country whose constitutional foundation is a Tiriti relationship between hapū and the Crown, and whose anti-racist tradition runs from philo-Māori settler dissenters in the 1860s to today's Tiriti-based anti-racism praxis of Pākehā, Māori, and tauiwi scholars and activists.

That is the politics Giraud's selective screenshot is designed to obscure. It is the politics I will continue to write, teach, and defend.

The next time the FSU sends out a fundraising email about principled free speech, members may want to ask why their Council member's X feed reads, in practice, like a content-laundering service for Groypers. The answer to that question is the most honest account of what the FSU actually is.

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Mohan J Dutta is Dean's Chair Professor of Communication at Massey University and Director of the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE). He blogs at culture-centered.blogspot.com.