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 rather
than its footnote.
wakeywakey's profile,
screenshotted August 2026.
I found him the
way I find most of what unsettles me now, at an hour a reasonable man would
already be asleep, following a chain of screenshots a colleague forwarded
without comment. Scroll down his timeline and eventually you reach a post I
wrote years ago on my personal Facebook page, twelve lines on how whiteness
moves as unearned currency through university hiring committees, written in the
middle of a discipline reckoning, at last, with a history of racism that had
spent decades closing the pathways diverse scholars needed to enter it and stay
in it. Someone lifted the post whole and rehosted it on an anonymous conspiracy
website built to look like my own, my photograph borrowed for the header, my
name folded into the domain, so that a reader arriving cold would believe they
were watching me indict my own university rather than reading a private post
repurposed by a stranger. The caption above it announces, Yes, you are reading
Facebook posts from a Dean in Massey University, filed under a reply thread titled,
with no apparent awareness of the irony, Politics of Hate.
A private Facebook post,
rehosted under a domain built to look like the author's own.
A few posts
along, in a longer thread, a different register altogether. A man writes that
his daughter has just been accepted to university for 2027, Massey among the
contenders for her course, and that she is going to Auckland instead, purely
because of Dutta. I went to Massey, he adds, but no one in my family ever will
again.
A father's account of his
daughter's choice, offered without anything to verify it.
There is no way
to confirm any of this: no daughter, no accepted place, no enrolment cycle that
named Massey as a contender and then didn't. Whether it is true is not a
question I can settle from here, and it is worth noticing that the truth of it
was never really the point. A stranger with seventy-six followers understood
something about how universities get targeted that took me longer to learn than
it should have. The aggrieved parent, real or performed, is one of the most
reliable instruments in the current campaign against higher education. It
converts an ideological objection into a parental one, trading a critique of
what a professor teaches for an account of what a child lost by encountering
it, and the second is harder to argue with in public and easier to escalate in
private. It gives a complaint a human face to attach to a vice-chancellor's
inbox, an ombudsman's file, a minister's electorate meeting, a talkback
segment. It supplies the occasion, whenever one is needed, for demanding that
an academic be investigated, disciplined, or removed, and it does all of this
without ever requiring proof, because the appearance of harm, a lost place, a
broken family loyalty to an alma mater, does the persuasive work regardless of
whether the harm occurred. I have tracked this pattern across enough complaint
files and open letters now to recognise it on sight: the concerned parent, the
worried alumnus, the anonymous student who cannot come forward, deployed as a
structure more than a witness, built to be hard to cross-examine and impossible
to falsify. Whether or not this particular daughter exists, whether or not
Auckland was ever the real alternative, the post has already finished its work.
It has been screenshotted, forwarded, cited as proof that the professor's own
community is turning against him, and filed away as evidence for whatever
complaint it is eventually needed to support. I do not know this man's name,
and he does not know mine beyond the surname a screenshot gave him. An economy
that runs on unverifiable grievance does not need either of us to be known. It
only needs the grievance to keep moving.
⁂
Scroll further
into wakeywakey's feed and the curriculum thickens.
A small group of
rich Jewish bankers, headquartered at the City of London, secretly fund wars
for profit and control, he explains in August, and the real question is whether
Donald Trump is actually removing them from power or only appears to be. It is
a claim with a genealogy considerably longer than the account repeating it. The
fantasy of a hidden, ethnically marked financial cabal pulling the strings
behind wars and elections is at least a century old, and every regime that
organised itself around that fantasy ended in mass graves. wakeywakey is not
writing history. He is reciting liturgy, and liturgy needs no footnotes, only
repetition.
wakeywakey on who funds
wars, August 2026.
The same liturgy
resurfaces, dressed differently, in a reply he leaves under a thread about
migrant boats crossing the Mediterranean. The governments don't want to stop
this happening, he writes. It's all paid for by Soros, and he has the ability
to kill their economies if they don't comply. See what he did to the Bank of
England in 1992. Soros, the elderly Hungarian-American financier, performs here
exactly the function the Rothschilds performed a century earlier, and the
function financiers with other surnames performed a century before that: a
single proper name standing in for an entire people, doing the explanatory work
an argument would otherwise have to do on its own. War, poverty, and a warming
planet produce migration. In one sentence it becomes something a rich Jew is
doing to you.
The Soros explanation,
offered mid-thread, July 2026.
The feed's other
preoccupation runs the same panic through a different register. Ban fireworks
and stop all our meat being processed halal, wakeywakey suggests in November,
that will help the immigration issue, an equation in which a certification
label on a packet of chicken stands in for an entire policy debate. Six months
later he reaches back seven centuries for a cleaner metaphor. The Reconquista,
Spain's seven-hundred-year campaign to reclaim the Iberian peninsula from
Muslim rule, he writes, concluding only with a question mark and an ellipsis:
sounds to me like something like this has happened before?! He never finishes
the sentence, because the sentence is built to finish itself inside the
reader's head. This is the Great Replacement theory wearing a costume borrowed
from a first-year history lecture, phrased as a question so that no one, least
of all its author, has to answer for the claim sitting underneath it: that a
Muslim family living in a European country represents, in this telling, a war's
opening move rather than a fact of migration.
Halal certification recast
as an immigration policy, November 2025.
The Reconquista,
redeployed, May 2025.
Then, in March, a
fossil. wakeywakey reposts a photograph of a battered skull, fracture lines
picked out in red paint, captioned by an Australian account as one of the most
important fossils ever found on that continent, taken to an undisclosed
location, put in a hole, and covered with dirt. Kept from scientific review
because it proves Aboriginals weren't first in Australia, wakeywakey adds, and
then, almost as an afterthought, sounds similar to some kiwi archeological
finds. I have spent nine years in this country building a research programme
anchored in a single proposition: that tino rangatiratanga, Māori authority
over Māori knowledge, is a legal and moral fact that predates the settler state
and does not depend on its permission. The myth wakeywakey is gesturing toward
here, dressed up as suppressed Australian archaeology, has an Aotearoa cousin
with its own long history: the fantasy of a prior, non-Māori population,
resurrected every decade or so by people who need Indigenous claims to rest on
having arrived first rather than on being here now, on a relationship to whenua
that predates and exceeds any settler ledger. The fossil in the photograph is
Australian. The doubt it has been made to manufacture does not carry a
passport.
A skull, repurposed as an
argument against Indigenous priority, March 2025.
Some of what runs
through this feed needs no historical costume at all. Turkeys voting for
Christmas, wakeywakey writes in November, or black people voting for slavery,
five words that accuse an entire electorate of choosing its own subjugation
while announcing, in the same breath, that their choices do not merit being
taken seriously as choices. There is no argument here to rebut, only a reflex:
when people organise politically as a majority, an account built entirely
around refusing the majority's account of itself reaches for whichever metaphor
most efficiently empties that organising of intelligence.
November 2025.
By July he has
moved on to pandemics that have not yet been declared. This was the conference
they held in 2024, he writes beneath a photograph of a gloved hand pressing a
needle into a bare shoulder, they speak of a mass vaccination response, birds,
cattle, pets, people, the noun order alone doing the work of suggesting a
rollout that treats a human body as one more livestock category on a checklist.
It is the anti-vaccine movement of a few years earlier, wearing next season's
costume, aimed at a pathogen that has not yet arrived, because manufactured
doubt does not need a present crisis to attach itself to. It only needs a
future one to pre-load.
A conference from 2024,
reintroduced as evidence, July 2026.
Underneath all of
it sits a theory of New Zealand politics that wakeywakey once rendered,
unnervingly, as a nursery rhyme. Roses are red, National is blue, Labour was
bad, but they're traitors too, he wrote in February, a jaunty quatrain folding
jabs on demand, GMOs inbound, and apartheid laws to keep us bound into a single
indictment. Apartheid here does not describe the system South Africa spent a
century building and forty years dismantling. It names something close to the
opposite: anti-discrimination law, public health guidance, the ordinary
regulatory machinery of a modern state, wearing the name of the thing it exists
to prevent. Same Marxist ruin, just a new name, the poem concludes. It is a
strange kind of consistency. Whichever party governs, the account has already
decided what governing means, and the answer is always betrayal by design.
A campaign poem, February
2025.
⁂
None of this is
unique to wakeywakey. The seventy-six followers matter more than they look like
they should. He does not appear to be employed by anyone to write this.
Seventy-six followers does not describe a career. Elsewhere in the same
ecosystem, an account calling itself NZ patriot, run by someone who states
plainly that he hates globalist pricks that want to remove our rights, retweets
a complaint, translated from German, about Dutch farmer protests the mainstream
media supposedly refuse to cover, a piece of European agricultural politics
landing in a New Zealand feed with no more friction than a weather report.
A neighbouring account in
the same ecosystem, August 2026.
This is what the
political economy of the doubt industry actually looks like from the inside,
and it is not the boardroom most people picture. Funded operations do exist. I
have written elsewhere about the money behind the Free Speech Union and its
counterparts overseas, the think tanks, the donor networks, the professional
media strategy. The larger and cheaper infrastructure runs on something else
entirely: unpaid labour, content that costs nothing to copy, and a platform
whose only business model is holding a stranger's thumb still for one extra
second. A tweet about a coming purge in wakeywakey's feed does not even link to
a site that announces itself as conspiracy content. It links to
theoutdoorphonestore.com, a domain built to sell phone cases, quietly
repurposed to host whatever draws the click. Outrage is the cheapest fuel
available anywhere. A cat avatar and a phone are the only capital the business
requires.
A purge tweet, linking to a
hijacked phone-case retailer, November 2025.
What the
university offers this infrastructure is a specific kind of target, and a
generous one. A university's entire claim on public money and public trust
rests on the proposition that some knowledge is more rigorously verified than
other knowledge: that a fossil's age is a matter for carbon dating and peer
review, not for whoever paints the fracture lines red first; that a checklist
about how whiteness moves through a hiring committee is sociology, arrived at
through years of fieldwork, and not slander improvised on a lunch break. Doubt
aimed at a university does not need to win that argument. It only needs to make
holding the position expensive: a colleague who thinks twice before publishing
anything that might end up screenshotted, a department budgeting more each year
for security than for the seminars the security exists to protect, a father,
real or performed, telling his daughter to apply somewhere else because of a
name he read in a stranger's feed. The model runs on attrition rather than
persuasion, purchased one refreshed timeline at a time, by people who owe
nothing to anyone and answer to no editor.
wakeywakey will
keep posting tonight, and tomorrow, and the seventy-six followers will become
however many the platform decides to lend him next. A university that measures
its worth by whether it survives him has already lost an argument he was never
actually making. The work in front of us is not to answer him. It is to keep
building the room he is afraid of: one where a checklist about whiteness gets
discussed on its evidence rather than screenshotted as a verdict, where a
lecture on Te Tiriti starts on time whether or not his daughter's application
ever arrives, where a fossil gets dated by a laboratory and not by a stranger
with a pot of red paint. That room is not his to cancel. Not yet.