"I Need to Hang": Wāhine Māori MPs Testify of Extremist Violence at the Waitangi Tribunal. The Free Speech Union's Council Member Calls Them Buffoons.

Mohan J Dutta Dean's Chair Professor of Communication · Director, Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) Massey University · Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa · Aotearoa New Zealand

15 May 2026

I. The juxtaposition

I want to place two things side by side this week, because I think the juxtaposition does most of the work the analysis needs to do.

On one side, the evidence given to the Waitangi Tribunal's Mana Wāhine Kaupapa Inquiry over the past five days by wāhine Māori in political leadership. Three news pieces document what was said. RNZ's Pokere Paewai, under the headline "'The violence that I experience is not casual': Māori women tell Waitangi Tribunal of abuse," reported the testimony of Green MP Tamatha Paul. The Post, under the headline "'Ripping you to shreds': MP outlines wave of abuse aimed at wāhine Māori in politics," documented the same testimony. Stuff, under the headline "'I need to hang': Tamatha Paul wants more protection for female MPs against hate speech," reported on Paul's call for institutional protection.

On the other side, two posts from the morning of 15 May 2026, the day after Paul gave her Tribunal evidence, by Dane Giraud — sitting Council member of the Free Speech Union. The first post invented a fictional category, "the marginalised and less articulate," and asked rhetorically what "channel for anger" such people should be permitted "against politicians like" Paul. The second called Paul "a buffoon" who "should expect ridicule," called Tory Whanau "clearly out of her depth," and accused the "pro-censorship Left" of being "antithetical to democratic accountability" for asking that wāhine Māori MPs be protected from sustained hate.

I'm going to walk through the actual content of the testimony first — because the testimony itself is the most powerful thing I can put on this page — and then I'll explain why Mr Giraud's same-week response to that testimony tells us something definitive about the Free Speech Union, about its operating principle, and about who its Council members actually are.

II. What Tamatha Paul told the Waitangi Tribunal

These are her words, on the public record, given as sworn evidence to a standing commission of the Crown on Thursday 14 May 2026, reported in full by RNZ:

"My partner picks me up and drops me off to everything because he doesn't trust that someone won't be waiting for me outside of my workplace because of everything that's happened to me and it's a tremendous sacrifice that he makes."

"The nature of the violence that I experience is not casual, it's not someone being mean to me because they don't like what I say and they don't like my views. These are people who have fallen victim to extremist ideologies about women and about Māori."

"I've had messages from a person who showed up to one of my public events and told me that he was waiting by the bathrooms for me, [for] that whole event for me to go to the bathroom."

"What happens in these situations — and they're not just one, they are many — is that these people are referred on by Parliamentary Services to the Fixated Threat Assessment Centre."

Read those four passages carefully. This is a sitting Member of Parliament, the elected representative for Wellington Central, telling the Tribunal that her partner functions as her personal security detail because she does not consider her workplace safe; that the violence directed at her is rooted in extremist ideologies about women and about Māori; that an unknown man waited outside a public bathroom at one of her events to confront her in a space where she would be alone; and that the cases of fixated threat against her — plural, "they are many" — are routed by Parliamentary Services to the Fixated Threat Assessment Centre, the New Zealand interagency body established specifically to manage individuals whose obsessive fixations have crossed the threshold from "concerning" to "credible risk."

The Post's coverage of Paul's evidence framed it under the phrase "ripping you to shreds" — Paul's own description of how the abuse pattern operates against wāhine Māori politicians. Stuff's coverage, under the headline "I need to hang," reported her testimony that wāhine Māori MPs need institutional protection — that the existing structures of hate-speech regulation in this country are not protecting elected officials whose Māori womanhood makes them the explicit target of organised abuse.

These are not abstract claims. They are evidence given to the Tribunal, under the Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975, with full public-record status.

III. What Tory Whanau told the Waitangi Tribunal

Earlier in the same week, former Wellington Mayor Tory Whanau — the capital's first wahine Māori mayor — testified that the sustained racist, misogynistic, and sexualised abuse she endured during her term drove her out of politics and out of the country. Her precise words to the Tribunal:

"The purpose and effect of this behaviour was dehumanisation. It attempted to reduce a sitting Mayor to racist caricatures rather than engage with policy, governance, or leadership."

"When wāhine Māori are subjected to sustained racism and misogyny without meaningful protection, leadership stops being equitable. Participation stops being equitable, and this becomes a democratic failure."

"I do not believe a Pākehā male mayor would be subjected to the same level of humiliation, sexualisation and dehumanising scrutiny."

Whanau cited the academic research of Dr Sanjana Hattotuwa, Tina Ngata, and Dr Cassandra Mudgway — research that documents the abuse directed at wāhine Māori in leadership as patterned technology-facilitated gender-based violence, organised around recurring racist and misogynistic tropes, amplified for political purposes, and structurally distinct from ordinary political criticism. Hattotuwa's rapid assessment of the abuse directed at Tamatha Paul — which Whanau cited at the Tribunal — concluded that the discourse showed "deeply entrenched patterns of misogyny, racism and dehumanisation, with commenters frequently employing violent rhetoric, questioning Paul's intelligence and legitimacy, and using her Māori identity as a basis for criticism."

Te Ao News reported that Whanau also referenced parallel patterns of abuse directed at Marama Davidson, Metiria Turei, and Tamatha Paul herself. The Tribunal also heard from Federation of Māori Authorities chair Traci Houpapa, who placed the contemporary pattern within a longer institutional history: "The issues that confronted wahine Māori then — the exclusion from governance and leadership, institutional racism and sexism, cultural bias and the questioning of Māori women's authority — sadly continue today."

This is the documentary architecture, on the public record, of what wāhine Māori political leaders said this week, before a standing commission of the Crown, under oath.

IV. What Dane Giraud said in response

The day after Paul gave her evidence — on the morning of Friday 15 May 2026 — Dane Giraud, sitting Council member of the Free Speech Union, posted this on his verified-blue X account to his audience:

"Jacinda Ardern did face abuse. But she rendered swathes of New Zealanders unemployed. That's going to prompt angry responses. Tamatha Paul uses being called a *racist pig* as abuse - but considering her leaders refused to call Hamas terrorists a day after the Oct 7 pogrom is this insult or opinion? Politicians can quite literally destroy lives with their policies. What channel for anger should the marginalised and less articulate be allowed? Take their words away, and what's left? #FreeSpeech"

A few hours later, a second post:

"I like Tory Whanau personally. She's a sweet person one-on-one and didn't deserve that sort of abuse. But she was also clearly out of her depth and many Wellingtonians view her tenure as unsuccessful. Tamatha Paul - on the other hand - is a buffoon and should expect ridicule in my humble opinion. We can't and shouldn't protect any politician from criticism: this is fundamental to a democracy. And we can't necessarily trust the pro-censorship Left when they say they need protections considering how antithetical many are to democratic accountability #FreeSpeech"

The journalist Philip Matthews replied immediately: "There is no excuse at all for calling someone a 'racist pig' and a 'Māori slut' (among other things), or to make threats of violence." He then wrote: "I think the @NZFreeSpeech needs to consider having a word about posts like these from Giraud. They could be seen as stochastic terrorism."

Matthews is correct, and I want to explain — at length, with reference to the testimony and to the established analytical literature — why he is.

V. The juxtaposition, named

A sitting MP, in sworn evidence to a Tribunal of the Crown, on Thursday 14 May:

"These are people who have fallen victim to extremist ideologies about women and about Māori."

A sitting Council member of the Free Speech Union, on his verified X account, on Friday 15 May:

"What channel for anger should the marginalised and less articulate be allowed?"

The structural relationship between these two utterances is the entire substance of this blog post. Paul names the abusers as people who "have fallen victim to extremist ideologies" — adherents of organised ideological movements that dehumanise Māori women as a category. Mr Giraud rebrands those same abusers as "the marginalised and less articulate" — the real victims of the encounter, deprived of their "channel for anger" by a "pro-censorship Left" whose proposed protection of wāhine Māori MPs against extremist harassment is recast as a threat to "democratic accountability."

This is the textbook operation of communicative inversion — the rhetorical move by which the actor enacting structural violence reframes the target of that violence as the aggressor, and reframes the abusers as the marginalised speakers being silenced. The inversion is the rhetorical pre-condition for the violence; it makes the violence sayable, repeatable, and legible to the audience as legitimate political anger rather than what Paul named it under oath: extremist ideological violence against women and against Māori.

The literature on this rhetorical operation in the contemporary far-right context is now substantial. The peer-reviewed work on stochastic terrorism, the RAND Europe analysis commissioned by the Dutch National Coordinator for Counterterrorism and Security, and the Max Planck Institute's standing research programme all describe the three-part architecture: an originator with platform access, amplifying forces (mass media, social media), and ultimate receivers who internalise the dehumanising framing and act on it without direct coordination with the originator. The originator does not issue calls to violence. The originator characterises the targets in ways that license contempt, ridicule, and contempt-driven anger — and the receivers do the rest. "Buffoon" who "should expect ridicule" is the operation in compact form: it is not, on its own, a call to harassment, but it tells the audience that the target's harassment is what she deserves.

The connection between originator → receivers is the connection that the Fixated Threat Assessment Centre exists to manage. Paul told the Tribunal that her cases are "not one, they are many." The man waiting by the bathroom did not arrive in a vacuum. He arrived because somewhere in his information diet, sustained voices have characterised wahine Māori MPs in ways that made his fixation feel reasonable to him. The institutional question — the question the Tribunal is examining and the question the Free Speech Union ought to be examining — is what role Council members of self-described civil-liberties organisations play in producing that information diet.

VI. The October 7 instrumentalisation, again

I want to mark a specific feature of Mr Giraud's 15 May post, because it is the same feature I have documented at length in my previous analyses of his rhetorical practice.

The sentence is: "Tamatha Paul uses being called a *racist pig* as abuse — but considering her leaders refused to call Hamas terrorists a day after the Oct 7 pogrom is this insult or opinion?"

The move is the same move he ran against me in October 2023, which I documented in "Disinformation, Zionist propaganda, and free speech: Far right cancel culture". October 7 is the rhetorical solvent. Any critic who can be associated, by however many degrees of removal, with insufficient denunciation of Hamas, becomes — in the move — a legitimate target of dehumanising public abuse. The MP's party leaders are alleged not to have used the precise terminology Mr Giraud preferred, in the timeframe he preferred, and therefore the MP herself is not a real victim when she is called a "racist pig," and therefore the abuse directed at her is reframed as "insult or opinion."

This is not principled commentary on the Israel/Palestine question. It is the deployment of October 7 as an all-purpose rhetorical solvent for dissolving the moral standing of brown and Māori women critics of the political order Mr Giraud aligns with. It is the same operation he ran against my decolonial scholarship in October 2023. It is the same operation the Israel Institute of New Zealand and the wider Zionist commentary infrastructure in Aotearoa has now run against multiple academics of colour. The application of the operation to a sitting wahine Māori MP, the day after she testified to a Crown commission about the extremist violence directed at her, is its newest iteration.

The pattern tells us what the operation is for. It is not a free-speech principle; it is a targeting tactic, and the tactic operates on women of colour, brown academics, decolonial scholars, and pro-Palestinian voices, in that order of preference.

VII. The Whanau "concession" and what it actually does

The structurally most telling sentence in Mr Giraud's second post is this one: "I like Tory Whanau personally. She's a sweet person one-on-one and didn't deserve that sort of abuse. But she was also clearly out of her depth and many Wellingtonians view her tenure as unsuccessful."

I want to walk through what this sentence does.

The first clause — "I like Tory Whanau personally" — establishes the speaker's good faith. The second — "she's a sweet person one-on-one" — diminishes Whanau through the patronising vocabulary of the colonial encounter (a "sweet person," a personal acquaintance, the kind of gentle compliment one offers about a child or a junior employee). The third — "didn't deserve that sort of abuse" — concedes that the abuse occurred and was undeserved, performing the gesture of generosity. The fourth — "but she was also clearly out of her depth" — withdraws the concession, retroactively recoding Whanau's mayoral tenure as a failure rooted in her own incapacity rather than in the "sustained and highly sexualised disinformation campaigns running from 2023 through to the end of her term" that Whanau testified about under oath. The fifth — "many Wellingtonians view her tenure as unsuccessful" — laundres the speaker's personal demotion of Whanau through an unnamed Wellington public, the same rhetorical move by which racist commentary across the Anglosphere routinely launders private disdain through the appeal to anonymous common sense.

The full sentence performs what Sara Ahmed names as the politics of grievance of the structurally dominant — the rhetorical operation by which the dominant actor appears to make a concession ("didn't deserve abuse") while actually reinforcing the framework that produced the abuse ("out of her depth," "tenure as unsuccessful"). Whanau told the Tribunal that her "tenure as unsuccessful" perception was itself substantially the product of the sexualised disinformation campaigns about her, including the fabricated rumour of a video that never existed. Mr Giraud's "concession" reinscribes the framework of the disinformation campaign as established Wellington opinion.

The "concession," in other words, is not a concession. It is the disinformation campaign continuing under different vocabulary.

VIII. "Buffoon" and the licensing of ridicule

The treatment of Tamatha Paul in the same post is different in structure and worse in implication. Mr Giraud does not extend Paul the perfunctory courtesy he extends Whanau. He calls her, on his verified X account, "a buffoon" who "should expect ridicule."

Read what this sentence does in the specific timeline. Paul has told a Crown Tribunal, under oath, the day before, that:

her partner drives her to and from work because of stalking risk
a man waited outside the bathroom at one of her events
the violence is rooted in extremist ideologies about women and about Māori
her cases are routed to the Fixated Threat Assessment Centre
the cases are not one but many

A sitting Council member of an organisation calling itself the Free Speech Union — with a verified-blue audience of thousands, including, demonstrably, the very networks of accounts whose conduct produces the threat referrals — responds to this evidence by characterising the MP as "a buffoon" who "should expect ridicule."

Ridicule of a public figure with FTAC referrals from the same network that produces the referrals is not commentary. It is signal. The signal says: this is the appropriate register in which to discuss this person. The signal says: she has earned what is coming. The signal travels through the originator–amplifier–receiver chain that the stochastic terrorism literature describes, and produces the next case routed to the FTAC, and the next, and the next. "They're not one, they are many."

The Free Speech Union's institutional silence on this conduct — across years now, across multiple iterations of Mr Giraud's similar conduct against me, against Whanau, against Paul, against Maiki Sherman, against Anjum Rahman — is itself an institutional act. The silence is the FSU's standing answer. The answer is that this is acceptable to the institution.

IX. "Take their words away, and what's left?"

I want to give particular attention to the closing sentence of Mr Giraud's first 15 May post: "Take their words away, and what's left?"

The sentence assumes that the "marginalised and less articulate" — Mr Giraud's name for the abusers, the network of accounts that direct "racist pig" and "Māori slut" and worse at sitting MPs — would lose their "words" if any institutional protection were extended to those MPs. The premise is that the words being used are legitimate political speech, the loss of which would impoverish democracy.

This is the structural sleight of hand on which the entire FSU brand depends. The slogan "free speech for all" is mobilised in such a way that the abusive speech of the dominant — the racist epithet, the misogynistic slur, the sexualised disinformation, the threat — is treated as the speech that requires institutional defence; while the speech of the marginalised target who points out the pattern is treated as the speech that needs to be controlled, suppressed, or sanctioned through institutional pressure (employer-tagging, parliamentary petitions, smear campaigns).

The actual answer to Mr Giraud's question — "Take their words away, and what's left?" — is the answer Philip Matthews gave him in the reply chain: "They can vote." Citizens in a democracy who disagree with their elected representatives have an electoral remedy. They are not entitled to a private vocabulary of dehumanising racialised-gendered slurs as the necessary "channel for anger" without which their democratic participation would be impossible. The framing that they are so entitled is not free-speech principle; it is the licensing of harassment dressed as principle.

The FSU brand requires this licensing to operate. Without it, the FSU has very little to defend. The reading list of cases the FSU has spent institutional capital championing — including the platforming of Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern whose ideology the Royal Commission of Inquiry found the Christchurch terrorist watched and donated to — tells you with precision whose "words" the institution exists to defend. They are not, characteristically, the words of wāhine Māori MPs. They are not the words of decolonial scholars of colour. They are not the words of the Muslim community after Christchurch. They are the words of the network whose ideology produces, with depressing regularity, the FTAC referrals against wāhine Māori politicians.

X. What this tells us about the Free Speech Union

I want to close with a precise observation, because the case for the institutional accountability of the FSU is now overwhelming and on the public record.

That Dane Giraud is a sitting Council member of the Free Speech Union — that the FSU has, across multiple years and multiple iterations of his identifiable rhetorical pattern, chosen not to discipline him, not to distance itself from his conduct, not to repudiate his characterisation of wāhine Māori MPs as "buffoons" deserving of ridicule, not to respond to the November 2025 Newsroom investigation documenting that the FSU disproportionately amplifies voices that "marginalise already vulnerable parts of society," and not to comment in the days since the explicit "hung untill death" eliminationist post directed at me on 13 May 2026 — tells us what the FSU is.

The FSU's institutional silence is its institutional answer. The silence ratifies the conduct of its Council member. The silence says: this is acceptable to us; this represents our values; this is what our organisation exists to defend. The slogan "free speech" is, in the FSU's actual operative practice, a delivery vehicle for the licensing of misogynistic, racist, and Islamophobic harassment of the marginalised by the structurally dominant. The Newsroom investigation documented this empirically. The Tribunal testimony this week corroborates it from the side of the targets. Mr Giraud's same-week conduct demonstrates it in real time.

I want to mark this as carefully as I can. The Tribunal hearings this week were a public good. Wāhine Māori political leaders, at considerable personal cost, gave evidence to a standing Crown commission about the violence directed at them. The evidence is now on the public record. The proper democratic response from civil society organisations purporting to defend speech in this country would be — at the absolute minimum — to receive the testimony with the gravity it deserves; to acknowledge the documented architecture of harm; to support the Fixated Threat Assessment Centre's resourcing as Paul recommended; and to interrogate the conduct of their own Council members where it has demonstrably contributed to the climate the witnesses described.

The FSU has done none of this. On the contrary, one of its sitting Council members has, this week, in real time, in plain English, performed the very ridicule and dehumanisation the witnesses testified about. The FSU has neither corrected nor distanced itself from him. That is the diagnosis. That tells you what the FSU is.

XI. The line drawn

Tamatha Paul said it in her sworn evidence: "the violence that I experience is not casual"; the abusers "have fallen victim to extremist ideologies about women and about Māori"; the threats are "not one, they are many."

Tory Whanau named the cost: leadership has "stopped being equitable" for wāhine Māori in this country, and the result "is a democratic failure."

The Stuff headline summarised what is now required, in Paul's own framing: institutional protection that does not currently exist. The Post headline named what the abuse pattern looks like from inside it: "ripping you to shreds." The RNZ headline named the lived condition: the violence is not casual.

The Free Speech Union, through its sitting Council member, responded the next morning by calling the women who gave that testimony "out of [their] depth" and "a buffoon" who "should expect ridicule," and by asking what "channel for anger" the "marginalised and less articulate" should be permitted against them.

That sequence — Tribunal testimony on one side, FSU Council member's published response on the other, separated by less than 24 hours — is the public-record demonstration of what the Free Speech Union is in 2026 Aotearoa New Zealand. It is not a defender of speech. It is the institutional vehicle for the very harassment infrastructure the Tribunal was hearing evidence about. The witnesses described an ecosystem of extremist ideology directed at women and at Māori. The FSU's Council member, the next morning, performed a textbook iteration of that ecosystem and called it free speech.

The Tribunal will make its recommendations on the Mana Wāhine Inquiry in due course. The Office of the Clerk of the House, the Human Rights Commission, the New Zealand Police, and Parliamentary Services will have to decide whether the protections wāhine Māori MPs are demanding for themselves — to do the job they were elected to do without being driven from the country or being routed weekly to the Fixated Threat Assessment Centre — will be put in place. The international academic-freedom and women's-rights infrastructure — including UN Women, the Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, and the CEDAW Committee — has standing to engage with the documented pattern. The civil society community of Aotearoa New Zealand has standing to ask whether an organisation calling itself the Free Speech Union has any legitimate claim to that name while its sitting Council members are openly participating in the harassment ecosystem documented this week before a standing Crown commission.

I will say what I said before, and I will say it again, because the line needs to be drawn and held: I will not be silenced. And neither, I am certain, will Tamatha Paul, Tory Whanau, Marama Davidson, Maiki Sherman, or any of the wāhine Māori in political and journalistic leadership this country is currently failing to protect.

The Tribunal evidence is the line. The FSU's response is the diagnosis. The institutional reckoning is overdue.

Mohan J Dutta is Dean's Chair Professor of Communication and Director of the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) at Massey University, Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa, Aotearoa New Zealand. He chaired the National Communication Association Task Force on Academic Freedom and Tenure (final report, 2025). This piece is the third in a current series on Dane Giraud, the Free Speech Union, and the architecture of targeted harassment in Aotearoa New Zealand; the previous pieces in the series are linked at culture-centered.blogspot.com.

Tribunal coverage cited:

— Paewai, P. (2026, May 15). 'The violence that I experience is not casual': Māori women tell Waitangi Tribunal of abuse. RNZ News.

— The Post. (2026, May). 'Ripping you to shreds': MP outlines wave of abuse aimed at wāhine Māori in politics.

— Stuff. (2026, May). 'I need to hang': Tamatha Paul wants more protection for female MPs against hate speech.

— Fisher, D. (2026, May 11). Tory Whanau testifies at Waitangi Tribunal: Racism, sexism and women-hating abuse drove me out of the country. NZ Herald.

— Te Ao News. (2026, May 11). Tribunal hears wāhine Māori subjected to "dehumanising" racism, misogyny and harassment in leadership.

— Hattotuwa, S. (2025, April 8). The targeting of MP Tamatha Paul: Rapid assessment of hate, and harms.

— Waitangi Tribunal. Mana Wahine Kaupapa Inquiry.

— Newsroom. (2025, November 6). Who benefits? The rise and rise of the Free Speech Union.

— Angove, J.M. (2024). Stochastic terrorism: critical reflections on an emerging concept. Critical Studies on Terrorism.