The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

  Ani O'Brien, Hobson's Pledge, the Far Right and the Child Sentencing Petition A Free Speech Union councillor who manages Jordan Williams's political consultancy, a broadcaster whose primary affiliation is Hobson's Pledge, and a demand the Sensible Sentencing Trust put into circulation in 2021. "Equal Is Not Enough" reached 48,720 signatures without naming one of them. A woman stands on a deck in the late afternoon with the phone propped up in front of her. There is a fence behind her, a house, the ordinary light of somebody's back section. She talks to the camera for about fifty seconds. She says she is sick to death of opening the newspaper and reading about another child sex offender who has been given a slap on the wrist. Then she says four words and asks a question. "Home detention even. How is that possible?" It is a fair question, and it has an answer. The answer is the reason the petition she is asking the country to sign will not do...

   Nothing Was Hidden Oct 28, 2026  On a summer evening in January 2025 I walked the public boardwalk along the Auckland waterfront and stopped in front of a shopfront. The name sat on the glass at eye height, in letters a person could read from across the street. There was a doorbell. There was a small sign asking visitors to ring for attention. I took three photographs from the footpath and kept walking. The firm is The Campaign Company. It was incorporated on 4 November 2021 and classified in the companies register as a public affairs consultant service. Its registered office is Unit 6, 143 Quay Street. Jordan Williams founded it, ran it as chief executive, and was its sole director from incorporation until January of this year. He co-founded the New Zealand Taxpayers' Union in 2013 and remains its executive director, and he co-founded the Free Speech Union and sits on its council. The firm's clients have included two tobacco multinationals and a lobby organisa...

The address at the bottom of the billboard Mohan J. Dutta Advance voting opened on Monday morning. By the time the first people had queued at the booths, a billboard on a city corner was showing them three faces in a row, Chlöe Swarbrick, Marama Davidson and Chris Hipkins, lit against a red field running into green at the edge. Three words sat across the top in capitals. BACKING THE GANGS. Four more sat underneath in the lighter weight and lower case the Green Party uses on its own hoardings. For all of us. That last line belongs to the Greens. It is their campaign slogan, bought and placed and repeated across the country for months, and someone has taken it and installed an accusation inside it, so that a driver stopped at the lights receives a sentence in the party's own voice. It works at the speed a billboard gets read, which is the speed of a changing light. At the bottom of a board like that, in type sized for a reader standing still rather than one doing fifty, New Z...

  Thirteen Million Votes from the Northeast Piauí gave Lula 75.9 percent. Bahia gave him 71.3. Maranhão and Sergipe gave him 69.5 each, Pernambuco 69.2. These are the states that Brazilian elites have spent a century describing as backward, the sertão of drought and migration, the places whose young people board buses to São Paulo to work in kitchens and on construction sites and come home at Christmas with money for the family. On Sunday night the Northeast delivered Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva a net margin of around 13.6 million votes. His national margin over Flávio Bolsonaro was 4,429,907. Take the Northeast out of the count and Brazil wakes up this morning under a fascist president. That arithmetic turns over the story usually told about who rescues a democracy. It was not the educated middle class of the southeast. It was not the business press, which spent the campaign worrying about fiscal discipline. It was not the international institutions that had been issuing commu...

  The FSU Wouldn’t Know Peer Review If It Rejected Them It already did. The Free Speech Union wouldn’t know academe if you poked it with a ten foot barge pole, and it has built a campaign about academic freedom on exactly that. The Free Speech Union is at it again, peddling Peter Boghossian to New Zealand in the election season, and the sales pitch arrived in the shape of a parable. A philosopher at Portland State asks his colleagues what the evidence is for trigger warnings and microaggressions. He is told the question is itself an offence. So he goes away and exposes the rot by getting nonsense published in peer reviewed journals, and the whole racket only survives because a reporter at the Wall Street Journal came looking for one of his invented authors.  I replied that he is not a credible academic, that none of this is peer reviewed, and that we should stop importing failed American academics with their culture war grift.  Two hours later the Union answered. Tw...