The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

  Proof of Distance 23 Oct 2026 A video from a gathering in early October shows Kerrin Leoni in a Labour Party jacket, speaking to a room that includes patched members of the Mongrel Mob. Before she speaks, a patched member tells the room the gangs should stop fighting each other and turn their attention to the government. Then Leoni addresses the room. Some of the people they know are not enrolled, she says, and those people have the power to change this government. By Friday morning she had resigned as Labour's candidate for Tāmaki Makaurau. Nominations have closed, so her name stays on the ballot without the party behind it. Hold the content of that footage still for a moment, because the speed of the pile-on depends on nobody doing so. A Māori woman stood in a room of Māori men, most of them locked out of formal politics by every measure we have, and told them to enrol and vote. She did not promise them a policy. She did not take their money. She asked them to join the electora...

  The Licensed Lie Vivek Ramaswamy, Hindutva, and the permission to deceive A woman sits in a chair and faces a camera. She gives her name as Donna Arthur. She says she loves her daughter, that it is not easy for a mother to say this, and that her daughter has a serious problem. She says her daughter is a liar who lies about her past. She asks the people of Ohio not to let that daughter become their governor. The daughter is Amy Acton, the Democratic candidate for governor, a physician who ran the state health department through the first year of the pandemic. The woman in the chair lost custody of her when Acton was twelve, after Acton's stepfather was indicted on a charge of raping the child. Acton has described abuse and neglect that ran from the age of three until the state took her out of that house. Her brother, Philip Stearns, said what needed saying on the day the video appeared: Vivek Ramaswamy had taken the sexual abuse his sister survived at twelve and made it a poli...

  The Hand on the Shoulder Oct 19, 2026  During the arati, when the dhak gets loud enough to move the floor under the folding chairs, a boy of about six broke away from his mother and ran the length of the hall with his arms out, weaving between the rows, laughing at nothing in particular. An uncle caught him by the shoulder, turned him around and bent to his ear with his face arranged into that expression the diaspora keeps ready for its children, the one that means you are embarrassing us. The boy's arms came down. He walked back and sat. The dhak carried on, the smoke carried on, the queue for bhog carried on, and nobody in that hall thought anything had happened. Something had. The most important thing that happened in the pandal that evening was the hand on that shoulder, and every adult in the room missed it because we were all busy watching the idol. The hall had taken two months to put together. The booking, the sponsorship banners along the side wall, the WhatsA...

  The Whiteness of So-Called Progressivism Oct 11, 2026  Progressive Foreign Policy and the 2026 Election, hosted by Te Kuaka and the New Zealand Fabian Society, Auckland, October 2026. The panel: Teanau Tuiono (Green Party), Vanushi Walters (Labour), Daniel Eb (The Opportunities Party). Source: NZ Fabian Society recording. On a Friday evening in October 2026, four candidates from the parties of the progressive opposition spent three hours in Auckland building a principled foreign policy for Aotearoa. India is never mentioned. Neither is Hindutva, Modi, the BJP, the RSS, caste, Kashmir, Indian Muslims, Islamophobia, nor the free trade agreement with India that came into force eleven days later. That same week Indian police were detaining protesters in their thousands, cutting mobile internet in central Delhi, sealing Jantar Mantar and hauling in opposition chief ministers and journalists, against a youth movement demanding the resignation of a Chief Election Commission...