The Watchlist Comes to Takanini
A candidate for
Parliament, four posts about me, and the crowd that arrives afterwards.
Mohan J. Dutta — Palmerston North
On 12 September
2025 a man who wants a seat in the New Zealand Parliament took a clip of me
talking into a camera, put his own caption on it, and sent it to a hundred and
fifty thousand people.
The caption
read:
Leftist academic, Mohan Dutta, is Professor of Communication
at Massey University. Here he runs with Far Left narratives that are both
nonsensical and extreme:
Read the
punctuation. The sentence ends on a colon. It hands off. Everything after it is
me, cropped and captioned and stripped of what came before, and the reader is
invited to supply the verdict the writer has carefully declined to spell out.
12 September 2025. 720 likes, 126
reposts, 285 replies, 65 quote posts, 151,000+ views. Also pushed out as a
Facebook reel.
Charlie Kirk
had been shot two days earlier. I said what I had been saying about him for
years: that he built a career out of racialised provocation dressed up as
debate, and that the New Zealand Parliament had no business turning him into a
martyr. His family is owed grief. No political operator is owed canonisation,
least of all in a House ten thousand kilometres from the campuses he worked.
Elliot Ikilei
disagreed. He is entitled to disagree. What he did instead of disagreeing is
the subject of this essay.
A borrowed vocabulary
"Leftist
academic." Say it out loud in a New Zealand accent and listen to how badly
it sits. Nobody here talks like this. We have our own insults and they are
better. This one arrived by container ship from the United States, along with
"Far Left narratives," capital letters included.
It has a
specific return address. In November 2016 Turning Point USA launched Professor
Watchlist, a public register of university teachers the group judged to be
pushing leftist propaganda at their students. The organisation was Charlie
Kirk’s. The method was simple and it worked: name the professor, name the
institution, attach a clip, publish, and let the audience do the rest. The site
never had to threaten anyone. It only had to point.
Two days after
Kirk was killed, a candidate in South Auckland ran that protocol on a professor
in Palmerston North. The homage was the method.
Three posts, one technique
Two days after
the clip came the second post. I had reposted a stranger’s comment in a thread
about Kirk’s widow and the Christian conservative revival being announced in
his name. Ikilei screenshotted my repost and asked what my "subtle"
communication was.
14 September 2025. 6,791 views. The
evidence is a repost.
A repost is now
evidence. Evidence of nothing stated, which is the useful part, because an
implication cannot be corrected. The scare quotes around subtle carry
the whole post. He makes no claim about me. He invites several thousand other
people to make one, and the question mark is his alibi.
By 17 September
he had given up on argument altogether. A Dr Evil GIF, and a line about what he
does when I claim to understand ethics.
17 September 2025. 1,754 views, 78 likes.
No claim, no quote, no argument to answer.
You can answer
a man. You cannot answer a punchline. That is the use of ridicule here. It
leaves the position untouched and takes away the standing of the person holding
it, so that nothing he says afterwards needs a reply.
Then there is
the tag. @MasseyUni, sitting at the front of the sentence in the fourth
post. That is the operative act in all of this. These posts are not addressed
to me at all. They are addressed to my employer, in front of an audience primed
to write in. Anyone who has worked inside a university knows what a hundred
emails does to a Vice-Chancellor’s office, and knows how rarely anyone in that
office asks whether the emails are right.
What arrives afterwards
The first post
pulled 285 replies and 65 quote posts. I had a content analysis run across what
could be retrieved of them. It is a sample rather than a census, because the
platform does not hand over a whole thread, and the percentages below should be
read with that limit in front of them. The shape held across every sample
taken.
What came back
— Agreement and amplification — 30–35%
— Personal insult and disgust — 25–30%
— Racial and anti-migrant framing — 12–18%
— Demands that Massey act — 10–15%
— Calls to deport me — 8–12%
No death
threats and no sexual threats appeared in any sample taken. Categories overlap;
a reply can be counted twice.
Sit with that
last line. Between eight and twelve of every hundred visible replies turned an
argument about what a professor said on the internet into a question about
whether he gets to live in this country. Send him home. Deport him. He is not
fit for the privilege of residency. The European far right has a programme with
a name for this, and some of its local enthusiasts have already picked the word
up. Remigration. It came through the border without a passport.
The racial
material does not hide either. Brown supremacist. Agent of the Indian
diaspora’s radical intelligentsia. Anti-white papers. A foreigner who moved in
and dislikes Kiwis. My favourite is the one dropped in passing: many Indian
degrees are forged. A man who has never read a page I have written works out
that my qualifications are probably fake, on the strength of where he thinks I
come from, and then goes back to lecturing me about academic standards.
Note also what
the analysis did not find. No death threats in the sample. No sexual threats. I
want to be precise about that, because precision is most of my method, and
because the people who run these campaigns will seize on any overstatement and
use it for a year. The pile-on stayed inside the law. It never needed to leave
it.
The division of labour
Ikilei wrote
none of those replies. He does not have to. That is the arrangement, and it is
why this style of politics travels so easily across an ocean.
He supplies the
target, the name, the employer and the frame. The crowd supplies the language
that would end his candidacy if it came out of his own account. Ask him about
it and he will say, accurately, that he criticised a public academic’s public
statements. He will be telling the truth about his words and saying nothing
about what he built with them.
Six weeks on, still reading my timeline
On 27 October
he was still at it. I had told Bob McCoskrie that he was spreading hate.
McCoskrie had posted a news story about a couple who left Trump’s America for
New Zealand, under a jeer about the tolerant left sulking off to another
country. Ikilei’s contribution was that I had the wrong day for church and that
my sign-off was passive-aggressive. "Classy."
27 October 2025. Six weeks after the
first post. The employer is tagged first, before I am.
This is the
part people miss when they call these things pile-ons. A pile-on ends. What is
running here is a monitoring relationship: a candidate for Parliament reading a
professor’s timeline closely enough, six weeks on, to correct him on which day
a church service falls. And underneath his post sits the thing he chose to
amplify, a photograph of two men and their small boy, lifted off a news site
and handed to an audience as a joke about people who do not belong here.
That is the
ecosystem. I am just that day’s entry in it.
On free speech, briefly
Everyone in
this circuit talks constantly about free speech. I have written at length
elsewhere about how the lobby that carries that banner in Aotearoa actually
operates, and I will not repeat it here. One observation will do. A candidate
who tags a professor’s employer in front of a hundred and fifty thousand
followers is exercising his speech in the one manner specifically designed to
subtract mine. Nobody in that movement has ever been troubled by this. The door
swings one way.
The silence that makes it work
Massey said
nothing. It usually says nothing.
Every academic
who has been through one of these knows the pattern. The institution that puts
your research in its annual report when the work lands well goes quiet when the
crowd turns up, and waits for the weather to change. People read that silence
correctly, as an opening. The next person who tags the university knows the tag
costs him nothing and might work.
A university
that takes Te Tiriti seriously, that asks its staff to work on racism,
colonisation and power, owes those staff something concrete when the work draws
fire. A named person who picks up the phone. A stated position within
forty-eight hours. A published standard that says what the institution will and
will not do when a political candidate points his followers at an employee. A
statement of values will not cover it; a duty of care that staff can actually
invoke might.
Why I am writing this down
I learned to
argue before I learned most other things. I was nine the first time I stood at
a debating lectern, and I spent the next two decades on school, university and
regional circuits, and the years after that coaching teams and judging rounds.
I know the difference between someone taking my position apart and someone
pointing at me.
Not one of
these four posts contains an argument. Not one of them engages a sentence I
wrote or a claim I made. They contain a label, an insinuation, a GIF, and a
complaint about my manners, with my employer’s handle attached. The real text
is written underneath by other people, and it says: send him home.
So I am writing it down, with the receipts, where it can be
found.
The clip is
still up. The replies are still there. I will keep saying what I said about
Charlie Kirk, about the politics he practised, and about the people here who
picked up his tools while he was still being mourned.
I live in
Palmerston North with three generations of my family under one roof. The
kitchen is a few minutes from the room where I teach. This is my home, and I am
not going anywhere.
THE
POSTS AND SOURCES
Elliot Ikilei, 12
September 2025 — x.com/ElliotIkilei/status/1966414155537317910
Elliot Ikilei, 14
September 2025 — x.com/ElliotIkilei/status/1967031786434949607
Elliot Ikilei, 17
September 2025 — x.com/ElliotIkilei/status/1968241606768889923
Elliot Ikilei, 27
October 2025 — x.com/ElliotIkilei/status/1982731039090070005
Professor Watchlist,
launched by Turning Point USA, November 2016 —
snopes.com/news/2016/11/22/professor-watchlist-monitors-anti-american-leftist-educators/
Elliot Ikilei: New
Conservative deputy leader 2017–2020, party leader for six weeks in late 2020,
candidate for Manurewa (2017) and Takanini (2020), announced as a New Zealand
First candidate in June 2026 — en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliot_Ikilei