Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

  When Ani O'Brien, council member of New Zealand's Free Speech Union, responded to my critique of her organization's platforming of Steven Pinker , she inadvertently provided a masterclass in what the culture-centered approach identifies as communicative inversion —the systematic reversal of structural power relations through discourse that recasts institutional authority as victimhood while erasing the voices and material experiences of those at the margins. Her February 9, 2026 social media post demonstrates not merely rhetorical deflection but the fundamental architecture through which dominant structures maintain themselves: by controlling who speaks, what can be said, and whose voices remain systematically unheard. The culture-centered approach reveals that power operates through three interrelated dimensions : structure (the material configurations that distribute resources and vulnerability unequally), culture (the meaning-making practices that legitimize or contes...

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...