The Franchise: How the Free Speech Union Brought Trump's War on the University to Māori Psychology

On 2 October, at Pipitea Marae in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, the two professional bodies of New Zealand psychology will apologise to Māori for the systemic racism of their discipline. The Free Speech Union has spent the winter trying to turn that apology into an indictment. Its 30 July media release asked whether Dr Arna Mitchell, a Māori clinical psychologist whose Viewpoint the College of Clinical Psychologists removed from its journal, was "the wrong kind of Māori." It called the removal tidying the file before the audit.

Look at who is speaking. The organisation was born in 2018 to fight for a speaking tour by two alt-right ethnonationalists. It has taken money from the Atlas Network, the Washington-based hub of free-market think tanks. Its international umbrella sits inside a Trump State Department funding package for "Maga-aligned" causes. That organisation now presents itself as the guardian of Māori voice and lectures a profession on Te Tiriti.

My research at CARE tracks how the far right enters the mainstream through policy. It travels through submissions, bills, complaints, audits and letters to vice-chancellors, the paperwork of governance. The far right in 2026 has little need for street marches. It needs a regulator to capture, a statute to amend, an employer to lean on and a borrowed vocabulary of liberty. The FSU works in exactly that register, and its campaign against Māori psychology shows every move in the playbook.

Four weeks, six universities

The sequence tells the story. On 29 June the FSU wrote to the journal's editorial board, co-signed by its Professional Membership Council for Healthcare and by the co-chair of its academic arm, the Inter-University Council on Academic Freedom (IUCAF). On 8 July it wrote to the vice-chancellors of AUT and Otago, naming staff who serve on the editorial board. On 13 July it wrote to four more, at Auckland, Waikato, Massey and Canterbury, naming staff on the College's governing Council. On 30 July it turned on the apology itself.

The letter to Massey, sent to my own vice-chancellor, names the College's Te Māngai Māori, the member of its National Executive who carries the Māori voice in its governance. The organisation accusing the College of silencing a Māori psychologist reported the College's designated Māori voice to her employer.

Each vice-chancellor was asked whether their staff member's conduct fits university policy, whether service through an external body must meet academic standards, and whether academics have an ethical duty to refrain from "censoring" other scholars. Anyone who has worked in a university knows what a letter to your vice-chancellor about your conduct is. It is the first page of a complaint file.

What the letters leave out

The Stuff reporting that broke the story carries details that no FSU letter mentions. Dr Mitchell's piece ran as a Viewpoint, a critique of the 2024 report by Working to End Racism and Oppression (WERO) on racism in New Zealand psychology. The College said its editors sought guidance after concerns from Māori and non-Māori members and sector partners, that factual inaccuracies had been corrected earlier, and that its journal is a professional publication of the College, distinct from an independent indexed academic journal. Two senior psychology academics told Stuff the piece read as an opinion essay resting on thin and dated evidence.

People can weigh those claims differently. A former editor, Dr Kumari Valentine, argued in the ODT that removal without a visible retraction notice departs from publishing norms. That criticism deserves an answer from the College, in the profession's own forums.

The FSU letters strip all of it out. Every letter calls the piece a "peer-reviewed article," drops its genre, drops the corrections, drops the members who raised concerns and drops the College's account of its own journal. The simplification has a job to do. Recast a professional college's governance decision as censorship inside the academy, and the university can be dragged into a dispute outside its walls and asked to discipline its staff.

The letters even concede that the journal falls outside the Education and Training Act. They demand answers from vice-chancellors anyway, because the journal borrows credibility from its editors' affiliations. By that logic, every academic's service to an iwi trust, a learned society or a professional college becomes answerable to their employer, with the FSU deciding which service warrants inquiry.

Academic freedom in New Zealand law belongs to academic staff. It protects their freedom to question received wisdom and state unpopular views, and it obliges institutions to shield that freedom from outside pressure. Editorial judgment is academic freedom in its most concrete form. The FSU recodes that judgment as censorship and recodes its own demand for employer scrutiny as liberty. I call this a communicative inversion: the vocabulary of a value is seized and turned against the people it exists to protect.

The principle bends to the FSU's side. On 22 September it wrote to Massey arguing that a complaint against Distinguished Professor Peter Schwerdtfeger, over opinion articles he co-authored, should never have reached a panel. A complaint against an academic whose views the FSU shares is an assault on freedom. Seven letters inviting employers to examine academics whose decisions it dislikes are freedom's defence.

The wrong kind of Māori

The 30 July release reveals the real target. The College's decision named Te Tiriti directly. The apology rests in part on the WERO report. The FSU's move is to lift one Māori practitioner who disagrees, set her against a collective commitment adopted by member vote, and ask "which voices?" as though the FSU were the arbiter of Māori authenticity.

Dr Mitchell has every right to her argument and to answer her critics in print. The FSU's use of her is a separate matter. Decades of kaupapa Māori psychology, built by Māori practitioners inside a discipline that pathologised their whānau, vanish from its account. The union that has campaigned against Tiriti provisions across public life now distributes her removed piece "on request." Finding the dissenting native, amplifying her, and using her to dissolve the collective claim is among the oldest techniques of colonial rule.

The attack on the apology follows a script written in Washington. The American Psychological Association made its own apology in 2021 for psychology's role in racism and eugenics. In March 2025 Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the purge of "divisive, race-centered ideology" from the Smithsonian, casting institutional reckonings with racism as ideological capture. The FSU's framing of the Pipitea apology as an "audit" does the same work in a Kiwi accent. An institution confronting its history becomes a bureaucracy covering its tracks.

Neutrality means removing the Treaty

Every FSU page on this case carries a banner urging readers to back the Regulated Professions Neutrality Bill. The FSU's first release on the case tied it directly to compulsory professional membership. In the Stuff coverage, a critic of the College went further and called for psychologists to be freed from College membership requirements for Crown contracts with ACC, Corrections, Justice and Health.

This campaign reaches well beyond psychology. The FSU has gone after the Medical Council for asking doctors to acknowledge colonisation's effect on Māori health, calling such expectations contested narratives drawn from "indigenous rights frameworks." Its chief executive has confirmed that Atlas Network money helped kick off its professional membership initiatives. The healthcare council that co-signed the 29 June letter grew out of a programme launched with funds from a Washington think-tank network. IUCAF, meanwhile, has pressed Otago on "institutional neutrality". The FSU told its members it played a "crucial role in drafting" the free speech provisions of the Education and Training Amendment Act 2025.

Set these beside the Trump administration's war on American universities and the grammar matches word for word. In April 2025 Trump's accreditation order went after the bodies that set professional standards, singling out medical and law school accreditors for their equity requirements. The same month, the administration's letter to Harvard demanded an external audit of faculty and students for "viewpoint diversity," department by department. In October the White House offered universities a Compact trading preferential funding for "institutional neutrality" and an employee gag on social and political speech. In each case, neutrality meant stripping out commitments to the marginalised, and free speech meant state and donor power over who may speak inside institutions. In the United States the target is DEI. In Aotearoa it is Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

The pipeline

The FSU arrived at this campaign through its own lineage. Its forerunner, the Free Speech Coalition, formed out of the Taxpayers' Union office in July 2018 and went to court to force Auckland Council to host Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux, promoters of white identity politics. It lost in the High Court and the Court of Appeal. The Taxpayers' Union is a publicly acknowledged Atlas partner. Eight months after that tour, a white supremacist murdered 51 people in two Christchurch mosques. The organisation that grew from that fight now lectures Māori about harm.

The British side of the family runs straight into Reform UK and MAGA. The UK Free Speech Union was founded by Toby Young, now a Conservative peer, who has shared the CPAC stage with Jacob Rees-Mogg. A US arm of the union, with Young on its board, took $97,930 from a sponsor run by the general counsel of Students for Life. James Orr, who has held roles at the Free Speech Union, is the Cambridge theologian JD Vance calls his "British sherpa." Orr became Reform UK's head of policy in February 2026, has praised the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025, told CPAC Hungary that Britain must think about reversing migration, and hosted Peter Thiel's Antichrist lectures at Cambridge. On 4 September he resigned after a Channel 4 sting appeared to show him discussing how to route polling paid for by a US donor into Reform.

Then the money. In July the Guardian reported, from US government documents, that Trump's State Department intends to allocate $5 million to Free Speech Union International. The same package included $7 million for 878, a new think tank devoted to "ending mass immigration." Former US officials described the scheme as a months-long effort by Trump-aligned staff to steer public money to Maga-aligned causes abroad. Toby Young called the story garbled, and in the same reply confirmed that Free Speech Union International is the umbrella for the unions in the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Even the libertarian magazine Reason asked why American taxpayers were funding right-wing groups overseas.

The Mitchell story ran along the same wires in reverse. American right-wing campus media picked it up under a headline about a paper skeptical of "white power" in psychology. Richard Dawkins called the removal "contemptible" on X. The FSU letters then cited that transatlantic noise as evidence of reputational damage and put it in front of six vice-chancellors.

Put the pieces together. An organisation founded to defend alt-right ethnonationalists, part-funded by Atlas, sheltered under an international umbrella that the Trump State Department plans to fund, tied through its British parent to Reform UK's policy machine and Vance's inner circle, runs a campaign to strip Te Tiriti commitments from professional bodies through a "neutrality" bill modelled on the language Trump uses against American universities. That is a far-right project. It works through policy because policy is where the far right now does its most effective work.

What universities should say

Most journals in Aotearoa are small, and their editors and councillors are volunteers. Every psychologist asked to serve on a board, and every Māori practitioner asked to carry the Māori voice in a professional body, will remember this winter. The chill runs one way: toward less kaupapa Māori scholarship, thinner Tiriti commitments, and silence wherever a letter to the vice-chancellor might follow.

Six vice-chancellors hold these letters. They should answer plainly. Service to external scholarly and professional bodies is protected academic activity. Universities will not act as instruments for third-party campaigns against named staff. Te Tiriti obligations bind universities under the same Act that protects academic freedom. Academics who lend their names to IUCAF should ask whose freedom, and whose funding stream, their signatures serve.

The FSU prints a Latin motto at the foot of every letter: audi alteram partem, hear the other side. On 2 October the other side will be standing at Pipitea Marae: Māori psychologists who spent careers building knowledge the discipline refused, and a profession finally naming what it did. Hearing them means answering in print and in open debate. The FSU spent the winter writing to their bosses.

Mohan J. Dutta is Dean's Chair in Communication at Massey University Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa and Director of the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE).