Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

The anti-transgender activist Posie Parker in Aotearoa NZ An Industry Built on Inversion Anti-transgender hate is an industry. Not a movement, not a moral concern, not an organic uprising of worried parents — an industry, deliberately constructed, lavishly funded, and strategically deployed to protect the interests of the powerful men who finance it. And like most industries built on fear, it requires a credible monster. Transgender people — a community representing roughly one percent of the population, facing disproportionate rates of poverty, violence, suicide, and discrimination — have been selected for that role with remarkable precision. The 2025–2026 release of the Jeffrey Epstein files has made something newly visible that was always structurally present: the men who built the ideological infrastructure of anti-trans politics are, in many cases, the same men — or the direct intellectual descendants of the same men — who moved through the social world of a convicted child sex tr...

In February 2026, as Aotearoa New Zealand navigates intensifying debates about speech, equity, and national identity, the Free Speech Union NZ (FSU) invited Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker for a high-profile event in Auckland. Framed as "An Evening with Steven Pinker" at the Bruce Mason Centre on February 2, the gathering promised insights on reason, progress, and free speech—core tenets of Pinker's public brand. FSU's chief executive, Jillaine Heather, promoted it as a vital contribution to "the fight for free speech in New Zealand." At first glance, this appears unremarkable: an esteemed thinker engaging a public audience in a democratic society. Yet closer examination reveals this invitation as exemplifying a troubling pattern in contemporary "free speech" advocacy—one that selectively safeguards expression to protect influential figures with problematic associations, while simultaneously deploying "war on woke" rhetoric that fram...

  The evidence is overwhelming, documented in court filings, university investigations, and the massive tranches of Justice Department-released Epstein files—most recently the blockbuster drop of over three million documents, emails, photos, and videos in late January/early February 2026.  These files expose sustained, post-conviction ties between convicted child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and the professoriate at our most elite institutions. Dismissing these revelations as conspiracy mongering or overreach protects the powerful at the expense of victims and erodes the moral foundation of higher education itself. This culture isn't abstract or historical; it's active and ongoing. Epstein didn't merely donate money—he cultivated long-term relationships with star academics who continued corresponding, meeting, flying on his private jet, and even visiting his private island years after his 2008 conviction for procuring a minor for prostitution. These interactions often blu...

  The revelations emerging from the Jeffrey Epstein files in 2026 should shock us. Peter Mandelson, architect of New Labour and embodiment of its "modernizing" project, exchanging sensitive government information with a convicted sex trafficker. Tony Blair, the humanitarian interventionist, introduced to Epstein through Mandelson's networks. Birthday notes referring to Epstein as "best pal." Payments totaling $75,000. These aren't peripheral scandals involving minor party figures—they implicate the very core of the New Labour project, the men who redefined British social democracy for a generation. Yet perhaps the most disturbing aspect isn't the revelations themselves, but how unsurprising they feel. The Epstein connections don't contradict New Labour's legacy—they crystallize it. They reveal with stark clarity what "pragmatism" actually meant in practice: the subordination of ethical principles to elite networks, the conflation of ...

I had learned my analysis of propaganda, communication and imperialism by reading Chomsky. I was then sixteen years old. But I had also learned my analysis of power and control from Adivasi activists and organizers, articulating their theories of change from everyday observations in struggles at the global margins. The Epstein files and the Chomsky linkages show the impermanence of elite critiques from spaces of privilege, distanced from the voices and embodied struggles at the margins. Such critique often falls short, itself complicit in power. The other kind of critique, that emergent from within struggles is transformative, holding the potential to undo the very games that underlie imperial power. In February 2019, Chomsky wrote to Epstein dismissing what he called the "hysteria" around abuse of women. He characterized press coverage as "horrible" treatment—not of the victims, but of Epstein himself. The women who Julie Brown's reporting had finally centered...