This is edition 2026/085 of the Ten@10 newsletter.
Hi all,
This is the Ten@10, where I collate and summarise ten news items you generally won't see in the mainstream media.
Enjoy!
1. AUT’s Little Manifesto of Hatred
Ani O’Brien
- 📰 AUT's student magazine Debate has published a poem by P. Walters calling for "Death to whiteness," "Death to Zionists," "Death to colonisers," and "Death to the Crown."
- ⚖️ Commentator Ani O'Brien argues "Death to Zionists" functions as a socially permissible proxy for "Death to Jews," granting the author plausible deniability through coded language.
- 🔍 O'Brien applies an asymmetry test: no New Zealand institution would tolerate repeated calls for "death to blackness" or "death to brownness," yet the same standard is not applied here.
- 👥 The poem places "Zionists" and "billionaires" alongside rapists and paedophiles, a deliberate guilt-by-association tactic O'Brien identifies as classic dehumanisation propaganda.
- ⚠️ O'Brien draws a direct parallel to the online glorification of Luigi Mangione, who murdered UnitedHealthcare executive Brian Thompson, noting the poem shares the same reductive dehumanisation of targets.
- 🔥 The poem's repeated "death to" structure is described as creating a psychological permission structure in which violent fantasy becomes framed as moral virtue.
- 🏛️ Birth certificates, laws, passports, contracts, diplomas, and written records are all framed in the poem as manifestations of "white supremacy culture."
- 📰 O'Brien describes the poem as aesthetically barren, talentless, and morally ugly, comparing it to activist Instagram slides emptied onto a page.
- 🌿 The poem invokes academics Audre Lorde and Tema Okun alongside Lady Gaga and Lana Del Rey lyrics, which O'Brien says function only as ideological badges rather than original thought.
- 👥 O'Brien notes the poem's author and similar activists typically emerge not from genuinely dispossessed classes but from highly educated, globally privileged strata of society.
- 🔥 "White supremacy culture" is treated throughout the poem as self-evident truth rather than a contested pseudo-academic concept, according to O'Brien's critique.
- ⚠️ O'Brien warns the poem follows one of the oldest mechanisms of political radicalisation: first dehumanise, then moralise the hatred.
- 📊 O'Brien characterises the poem's rage as reflecting resentment of the five percent toward the 0.1 percent, rather than genuine solidarity with the dispossessed.
