Savage Minds

Paul Kingsnorth discusses the current debate within western culture where the postmodern and classical views of the world are at odds—those who believe in objective truth are pit against those who believe reality is a social construction. Discussing the west’s embrace of gender ideology, Kingsnorth notes the resistance to material reality conterminous to the embrace of technology while criticising the crisis of modernity where many believe humans can “remake” themselves while contending that any critique of this pretence over nature is itself a form of oppression. Examining the transgender movement on a wider spectrum where transhumanism and artificial intelligence also coexist, Kingsnorth observes how all these movements challenge biology, nature, and objective truth while positioning modern humanity in a “godlike way” that pretends we are can all be genderless, posthuman, and permeant, seizing the postmodern claim that “we can effectively become gods.” Kingsnorth criticises how the discourses around technology today attempt to view embodiment as a form of oppression, while noting that those who defend nature or objective truth are viewed as oppressors. Analysing the scale of institutional capture, Kingsnorth discerns how in addition to gender ideology, the language of race and white supremacy, all transplants from the United States, are being weaponised today across Europe to divide people into racial groups, setting people against each other while creating a war against the human body, human relationships, and the family. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Nick Cruse, citizen journalist and cofounder of Revolutionary Blackout Network, discusses the political terrain in the United States today and how legacy media participated in the political framing and exaggeration of the events of the 6 January 2021 protests at the Capitol in Washington, DC. Vituperating the “frauds that cosplay as Socialists and leftists” like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cruse elaborates how this neoliberal class has made a mockery of itself pretending that the unarmed protestors at the Capitol formed an insurgency, while in reality these same actors supported US government-back insurgencies in other countries such as the 2018 assassination attempt on the life of Nicolas Maduro whom they labelled a “tyrant and a thug.” Noting how Bernie Sanders shifted the left radically to the right by siphoning leftists to the Democratic Party, Cruse criticises how legacy media has abetted politics through disinformation to include the attempt to bury the Hunter Biden laptop story as “Russian disinformation” asking: “What are the chances that our media always had the same exact narrative?” Cruse demonstrates how journalism is failing the public remarking how media today collaborates with the state by creating fake news to divert the public from current events as journalists are censorsed or killed. Analysing the Biden administration’s collaboration with the Israeli government in covering up the murder of veteran Al Jazeera journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, Cruse scrutinises how White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre refuses to take media questions regarding her murder or the torture and imprisonment of journalist and publisher, Julian Assange. Cruse observes that even if Assange were to be freed today, the lesson of terrorising journalists into compliance, into silence, has already been learned. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Exulansic discusses her series, I am Jazz’s Waking Nightmare, wherein she offers social and political commentary on Jazz Jennings’ reality TV show, I am Jazz. Analysing gender ideology’s infiltration in mainstream media, Exulansic delves into the postmodern condition of the Jennings family’s pathological grooming of Jazz Jennings. Analysing the production of I am Jazz, Exulansic examines the reality show and how all reality has been edited out or caught accidentally on camera while Jazz’s persona, crafted for television audiences as he is coached to demonstrate the happy “transgender” subject, morphs between the scripted lines and unscripted moments that allow for the reality and horror of his life to materialise. Historicising how the audience witnesses Jazz being coached for the show’s production and by his own family, Exulansic ironises how despite his ad-libbed performances we still get glimpses of Jazz’s real self through accidental admissions that are not edited out. Demystifying the rhetoric throughout this show’s history—how sic “transgender” people will always be oppressed, Exulansic studies how this show has become a marketing platform for ideological dissemination while locating the mother, Jeanette Jennings, as the primary perpetrator of her son whom she sexually abuses and shatters his psychological development through the pseudo-medical hokum and dangerous medical experimentation, all executed in the name of transgender ideology.  Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Dr David Bell, a former staff governor at the Tavistock & Portman NHS Trust, discusses the fallout from the circumstances of his 2018 report, highly critical of the Tavistock Gender Development Service (GIDS), along with the criticisms by his colleagues from the Tavistock, that led to the growing public concern about GIDS, the Judicial Review, and the decision by NHS England, following the Cass Review, to close the service. Bell explores the complex terrain where the pro-medicalisation push within this demographic is at odds with the anti-pathology proponents, describing the paradox of a peculiar “double narrative” around gender dysphoria: those who claim they have a psychiatric disorder in order to covered by the NHS or by private insurance to be treated quickly and then the second group that claims they don’t have an illness, so they don’t need treatment. Bell also queries the politicisation of the treatments around gender dysphoria, stating, “Gender disorder…is a kind of ticket” where its adherents claim “that they know what the treatment is that they need.” Analysing the changes in the cultural context of gender dysphoria such as the co-morbidities associated with girls who identify as having “gender dysphoria” (eg. autism), Bell observes how current data on the decline of anorexia and bulemia cases suggests that girls who identify as transgender have much in common with the previous generations of anorexia and bulemia. Highlighting the complex and difficult relationship these girls have with their sexual body, Bell maps out the various ways these sorts of manifestations have changed according to cultural shifts: in Freud’s day it was “hysteria” to anorexia and bulemia in the twentieth century to this century’s manifestation of gender dysphoria. Noting how among young people in the UK presenting with gender dysphoria that 80% are girls, Bell ascribes this condition’s undercurrent as stemming from neoliberalism and misogyny. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Kevin Gosztola, journalist and editor of Shadowproof, discusses his latest book, Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case Against Julian Assange (2023) detailing the profound injustice of the case against Julian Assange. Historicising the political background to the case against Assange, Gosztola covers the fundamentally undemocratic nature of the Espionage Act (1918) which works against free speech principles and freedom of the press while this act also protects entrenched corruption. Gosztola elaborates the abuses the US government has enacted upon journalists and whistleblowers who have told the truth while public officials have gotten away, unpunished, for their criminal acts and policies such that Assange has been held accountable as a publisher of war crimes while those who have enacted these war crimes have not faced justice. Gosztola analyses how both Democratic and Republican administrations, mainstream news outlets, the CIA, the FBI, the Justice Department, and other powerful forces have all conspired to condemn Assange in retaliation for exposing the extent of US torture, rendition, and war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan while evidencing how Assange was intentially made to “look like a bum” by major media as Assange was marched in front of the cameras in a dishevelled state in order to posture him as looking like he belongs in prison. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Lexi Ellingsworth, co-founder of Stop Surrogacy Now UK, discusses the state of surrogacy within Britain in the run-up to this week’s report jointly published by the Law Commission of England and Wales and the Scottish Law Commission that outlines recommendations for law reform around surrogacy. Ellingsworth outlines the finer points of commercial surrogacy, currently illegal in the UK that are being subtly eroded through “altruistic surrogacy,” demonstrating how this system is a fudge on the commercial model because there are hidden aspects of remuneration in addition to powerful social returns. Ellingsworth vituperates how altruistic surrogacy, in some ways similar to the “sex work” model, is largely based on neoliberal notions of “choice” where pregnancy is a service and a baby the product all under the auspices of helping others create a family. Discussing how the ethical lines that are quickly creating a breeder class of woman to service the elite—be they infertile couples of the professional class or gay men—Ellingsworth outlines how the pro-surrogacy lobby is astroturfed to influence democratic debate while pushing the commercial model even to the exclusion of women’s voices up until the public consultation. Ellingsworth frames all forms of surrogacy within the larger legal spectrum of human trafficking noting that while we accept that women can do what they like with their bodies, “Do we also say that she can do what she likes with her children and if she wants to sell them, she can?” noting that laws which currently prohibit the sale of children who are two-years old, paradoxically in many countries uphold the sale of “brand new” children.  Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Toby Green and Thomas Fazi discuss their recent book, The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (2023) and the wider landscape of the regressive effects of lockdown policies. Historicising the pandemic response to the anti-democratic push of neoliberalism, Fazi observes how during the financial crisis, a new class of economists was ushered forth to justify devastating economic policies, falsely claiming the inevitability of austerity in order to save the planet from another financial collapse. Fazi notes how this same model of “econocracy” was brought in and used during the pandemic as hand-picked scientists played a similar role of the economists during the financial crisis in order to side-step democratic debate. Elaborating how the Trusted News Initiative (TNI), formed in 2019, brought together the most powerful media organisations in the world to include the BBC, Reuters, The Hindu, and The Guardian, among many other media outlets, Green analyses how by 2020 the TNI became a type of clearinghouse for received opinion on COVID-19 as it curated the media landscape around the pandemic creating long-lasting implications for democracy as accuracy was sacrificed for misinformation. Green and Fazi characterise the political and biomedical response to COVID-19 lockdowns as criminal, as they map out the negative effects on education, mental health, child protection, suicides, obesity, alcohol consumption, gun violence, and an increase in the marriages of adolescent girls by families desperate for economice relief in India.  Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Stacy Malkan, co-founder and managing editor of U.S. Right to Know, discusses a report she recently co-authored, Merchants of Poison: How Monsanto Sold the World on a Toxic Pesticide (2022) which uncovers astroturfing operations that Monsanto has exacted around the planet to embolden its hold over the agro-chemical industry. Malkan expounds on how Monsanto uses its wealth to saturate its agenda through universities, Nobel laureate scientists, professors, lawyers, and journalists in what she classifies as a “lockstep army.” Discussing California’s Proposition 37, a 2012 ballot measure that would have required the labeling of genetically engineered food, Malkan notes how Monsanto threw $45 million in the space of one month in order to saturate media with its propaganda, reversing public support against this measure for which there had previously been 70% public support in favour. Detailing how Monsanto orchestrates its astroturf operations—fake grassroots groups that are intended to look real but which are in reality managed by third-party PR firms to give the veneer of independence—Malkan elaborates how Freedom to Farm was one such operation that emerged in the European Union in the aftermath of the 2015 International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) ruling that classified glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen. Malkan fleshes out how how this astroturf operation was the creation of the PR firm FleishmanHillard whereby it employed 90 people across the EU “to recruit or look like or create the impression” that Freedom to Farm was a genuine grassroots effort led by farmers who warned of the “threat to farming” posed by restricting the use of glyphosate, when in fact this was all a massive PR theatre. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Canadian researcher Dr. Jessica Rose discusses her work around myriad facets of the COVID-19 pandemic—from the virus mitigation measures to the vaccine. Covering her research on the descriptive analysis of the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) data surrounding the Covid-19 “vaccine,” Rose notes how propaganda was established an early-on during the pandemic where the politicisation of the coronvirus put science far behind the various political agendas being spun. Rose also discusses her November 2021 paper, co-authored with Peter A. McCullough MD, MPH, “A Report on Myocarditis Adverse Events in the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) in Association with COVID-19 Injectable Biological Products” discussing how the highest reporting of myocarditis was among 15-year-old males after the second dose of the Covid-19 “vaccine.” Despite this paper having been peer-reviewed with no reported issues as to the content of the paper’s data or accuracy, it was withdrawn, a move which Rose deems politically motivated. Detailing the misuse of science from the beginning of the pandemic in what she characterises a “pandemic of testing,” Rose explains how the widespread use of PCR tests—instead of the more accurate antibody tests—functioned to inflate case numbers while instilling fear within a public that was subjected to unecessarily invasive procedures while being subjected to campaigns of false information by government agencies and legacy media that led people to believe that the PCR test was diagnostic when in fact it was anything but. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Janja Lalich, PhD, Professor Emerita of Sociology, an international authority on cults and coercion and author of Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships discusses her theoretical and practical work in the field of cults. Distinguishing cults from religious organisations and mass social formations, Lalich thrashes out the historical facts surrounding cults and their contemporary manifestations. Covering the “self-sealing system” of cults, Lalich forays into this world of cults within the west to include the penetration of Indian guru culture within the USA beginning in the 1960s. Delving into the current maelstrom of gender ideology within the west, Lalich observes the current upheaval over this ideology, comparing this with other ideological movements like QAnon, where it is difficult to have rational conversations with the adherents of these ideologies. Characterising the discourse around gender ideology as a “cult mindset,” Lalich notes that the real harm of gender ideology is how it is gaining vast social acceptance while isolating those voices who speak against this orthodoxy, comparing this ideology to McCarthyism during the 1950s where a tremendous political backlash similarly caused people to lose their families, careers, communities, and lives.  Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe