Examining Ani O’Brien and the limits of free speech absolutism: Harm, victimhood and political inversion

Culture-Centered Approach – shared with permission
OPINION & ANALYSIS: In late March 2025, screenshots began moving across X. They showed fragments of a personal Instagram account belonging to Benjamin Doyle, a first-term Green list MP and the first openly non-binary member of the New Zealand Parliament. The fragments were stripped of context, stitched together with insinuation, and pushed outward by a network of accounts that had been shopping the material around for months without success.

Within days, the country’s political conversation was consumed by a campaign that Doyle would later describe as baseless and violent accusations, an onslaught of hate directed at them and their whānau.

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Image: Green MP Benjamin Doyle speaks publicly in wake of death threats over social media posts - New Zealand Herald (livestream Apr 9, 2025)

Within six months, Doyle was gone from Parliament.

I write this as a communication scholar who has spent three decades studying how hate is organised, how it moves through media infrastructures, and how it lands on bodies at the margins.

What happened to Benjamin Doyle was one of the clearest recent demonstrations in Aotearoa of a script the global far right has perfected: select a target whose identity sits at the margins, manufacture a moral panic around that identity, amplify it through high-follower accounts that launder the panic into respectable scrutiny, and then, when the costs are named, perform victimhood.

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Gender diverse people are among the far right’s favourite targets for this script, precisely because anti-gender politics has become the connective tissue of reactionary mobilisation worldwide. The scholarship on this is extensive, and I will return to it. But first, the record.

The amplification

One of the most visible amplifiers of the Doyle material was commentator Ani O’Brien, a longtime gender-critical campaigner who writes the Substack Thought Crimes and recently stepped down from the board of the Free Speech Union.

O’Brien did not originate the screenshots. Smaller accounts had circulated them earlier. What O’Brien supplied was reach, and a framing sharp enough to turn limited circulation into a national trend.

On 28 March 2025, O’Brien posted an extended justification for sharing a blurred screenshot from Doyle’s account, describing the content as seriously concerning, rejecting the explanation that the language belonged to queer community vernacular, and demanding that journalists “do your bloody jobs.”

The post drew well over a thousand likes, hundreds of reposts, and tens of thousands of views.

The same day, responding to criticism on Reddit, O’Brien escalated. She declared herself “quite comfortable being the bad guy” to those she accused of thinking the sexualisation of children was acceptable. Pause on the move being made in that sentence. Anyone who objected to the pile-on, anyone who pointed out that a non-binary parent’s family photos were being weaponised through deliberate miss-contextualisation, was recast as a defender of child abuse.

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This is the oldest and most lethal trope in the anti-queer arsenal, the groomer libel, and here it was doing its work in the New Zealand information ecosystem, dressed as safeguarding.

In the days that followed O’Brien attacked the Green Party’s response as disingenuous, insisted that invocations of homophobia and transphobia were themselves a form of gaslighting, and kept the story alive through her Substack and an NZ Herald opinion column.

When Doyle delivered their valedictory speech in October 2025, O’Brien was there again, amplifying criticism of the departing MP to another thousand-plus likes. The target had already been driven from public life. The account kept firing anyway.

The cost

The consequences were not rhetorical. Doyle received death threats.

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A security assessment warned of a real likelihood of violent or stalking behaviour toward them and their family. Police escorts, logged walking routes, safety plans at their child’s school, advice not to check the letterbox: this became daily life.

Winston Peters picked up the campaign and ran it into mainstream politics, with Green co-leader Marama Davidson accusing him of fanning the flames of hatred toward the rainbow community.

Reporting by Andrea Vance and Charlie Mitchell at The Post later traced the toxic online campaign to a businessman operating behind anonymous accounts, a reminder that these panics are organised productions rather than spontaneous public concern.

In September 2025, Doyle resigned. Their child had asked them to leave Parliament. Police confirmed they had investigated ten reported threats and had issued formal warnings to four individuals under the Harmful Digital Communications Act. In their valedictory speech, Doyle described the totality of it as a tsunami of hate and told the House that Parliament is a hostile place for anyone who is not a cis straight white man in a blue suit.

Hold that fact in view: the Harmful Digital Communications Act, the statute designed to address serious online harm, was invoked by police against participants in the campaign O’Brien had helped mainstream.

It matters for what comes next.

What the scholarship tells us

None of this is idiosyncratic to Aotearoa. The targeting of gender diverse people is a structural feature of contemporary far-right politics, documented across a substantial body of research.

Agnieszka Graff and Elżbieta Korolczuk’s Anti-Gender Politics in the Populist Moment shows how opposition to so-called gender ideology became the glue of right-wing populist mobilisation globally, an opportunistic synergy in which ultraconservative campaigners and reactionary parties feed one another. Ruth Pearce, Sonja Erikainen and Ben Vincent, in their landmark Sociological Review collection, trace how gender-critical campaigning carried far-right ideas into mainstream media, spreading fear about the supposed danger trans and non-binary people pose to women and children. Aurelien Mondon and Aaron Winter’s Reactionary Democracy maps the laundering process itself, the way illiberal racist and exclusionary politics gets mainstreamed through the language of liberal values, free speech chief among them.

And on victimhood, the far right’s signature affect, Mitch Berbrier’s classic study of the victim ideology of white supremacists remains the essential text. Berbrier showed how movements built on domination narrate themselves as the persecuted party: discriminated against, denied their rights, stigmatised for their pride, threatened with elimination. Grievance is the engine. The perpetrator claims the position of the victim, and the actual victims are recast as the aggressors, or as acceptable collateral in a righteous crusade.

In my own work I have called the broader communicative move an inversion: the appropriation of the language of harm, rights and freedom by precisely the formations that produce harm, strip rights and constrict freedom.

Read O’Brien’s Doyle campaign against this literature and the pattern snaps into focus. The groomer framing that positions a queer parent as a threat to children. The insistence that naming homophobia is itself the real gaslighting. The self-description as the persecuted truth-teller, the bad guy, the one the mob is against. The Substack, tellingly, is titled Thought Crimes, an entire brand built on the premise that its author is a dissident under siege.

This is grievance politics as subscription model.

Image: Ani O’Brien said she had been subjected to a “sustained and increasingly personal campaign” of what she described as defamatory and cruel harassment, which she said had harmed her mood and wellbeing, while maintaining that the Harmful Digital Communications Act she relied on was “deeply flawed” and in need of reform. (Ani O'Brien / Facebook)

The victim script, performed twice over

Which brings us to 2026, and to the most instructive turn in this story.

In August 2026, after weeks of speculation, name suppression was lifted in an Auckland District Court proceeding, and it was revealed that Ani O’Brien, now-former board member of the Free Speech Union, was the complainant who had taken the left-wing blogger Martyn Bradbury to court under the Harmful Digital Communications Act. Under interim orders, four Daily Blog posts were taken down, with a court finding on an interim basis that two communication principles had been breached. Bradbury, the editor of the country’s largest independent left-wing site and a regular commentator on Māori politics for Radio Waatea, replaced his censored headlines with the words “Legally censored – Redacted.” Even the Free Speech Union distanced itself from its own board member’s case, and a Conservative Party spokesman called it an extraordinary hypocrisy test for the organization. The substantive hearing is set for December.

Sit with the architecture of this. A commentator who built her platform on the absolutism of free speech, who sits on the board of an organisation whose entire brand is opposition to speech regulation, who spent 2025 insisting that the scrutiny of a non-binary MP’s family photographs was legitimate examination of published material whatever the human cost, went to Netsafe and then to court to have criticism of herself removed from the internet. In her own statement, O’Brien describes a sustained and increasingly personal campaign, defamatory and cruel harassment, harm to her mood and wellbeing. She simultaneously maintains that the Act she invoked is deeply flawed and needs reform.

I want to be careful here, because the point is a structural one rather than a personal one. O’Brien is entitled to seek the protection of the law, and the courts will determine the merits of her complaint. What I am naming is the asymmetry, because the asymmetry is the ideology.

When the Harmful Digital Communications Act is used by police to warn the harassers of a gender diverse MP hounded out of Parliament, it is censorship, wokeness, the fragility of people who cannot handle scrutiny. When the same Act is available to shield a Free Speech Union board member from a left-wing blogger’s ridicule, it is a shield worth invoking, even while denouncing the statute.

Speech absolutism, it turns out, was never a principle. It was a weapon, holstered or drawn depending on who is speaking and who is bleeding.

The same script runs whenever O’Brien’s own political alignments are documented. Researchers, journalists and community advocates who trace the circuits connecting gender-critical campaigning, the Free Speech Union’s networks, and the wider reactionary international are met with indignation, complaints, accusations of smearing and harassment. The analyst becomes the abuser. The amplifier becomes the victim. Berbrier described this move in white supremacist discourse a quarter century ago, and Graff and Korolczuk describe it in the anti-gender movement today: the crusade advances precisely by claiming to be under attack.

Image: Professor Mohan Dutta has received an international award recognising his leadership on academic freedom. (File. / Mohan Dutta / @mjdutt)

Whose voice, whose infrastructure

The culture-centered approach that anchors my work begins from a simple question: whose voices are erased, and what infrastructures do the erasing? Benjamin Doyle had a voice, a seat in the House of Representatives, and a mandate. What they did not have was an information infrastructure that would protect a takatāpui, non-binary parent from an organised campaign of miss-contextualisation amplified by accounts with six-figure reach.

The infrastructure worked exactly as it was built to work. It converted a family’s photographs into a moral panic, a moral panic into death threats, and death threats into a resignation, while the amplifiers collected engagement, subscribers and the warm glow of persecution.

Threats and harassment are never acceptable, directed at anyone, including at O’Brien. That principle is not in tension with anything I have written here. It is the ground I am standing on. The difference is that some of us hold the principle for everyone, and some deploy it selectively, loudly for themselves and their allies, never for the non-binary MP whose child asked them to come home.

Doyle told the country, before they left, that they refused to be disappeared by hate. They were disappeared anyway, from Parliament if never from the struggle. The people and networks that did the disappearing are still posting, still litigating, still performing their wounds. Reading their grievance against the record of what they amplified is the work this moment asks of us, and the record, as O’Brien herself likes to say, is public for anyone to read and judge.

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