Savage Minds

Aaron Kheriaty, a physician specialicing in psychiatry and author of The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State (2022), discusses the collateral harms of lockdown, vaccine mandates and the lack of public debate regarding these subjects. Reviewing his lawsuit against the University of California regarding the University’s vaccine mandate and the lack of informed consents, a central principle of medical ethics designed to prevent the kind of abuses that prevailed during Nazi Germany, Kheriaty discusses his refusal to take the vaccine after his former employer moved ahead with a vaccine mandate, violating ethical principles that he not only maintained professionally but which he also professed in the classroom. Kheriaty compares the social control of certain historical periods, criticising the “new paradigm of governance” under lockdown that went far beyond that of Italian fascism where citizens were made to follow strict rules, quarantines, social isolation, and relinquish freedoms not even seen during the bombing of London during the Second World War. Vituperating the government-sponsored smear campaigns of medical professionals who questioned the official government policies all the way through the vaccine mandates, Kheriaty argues that the truth must emerge from government agencies and institutions that need to take responsibility for the harms of lockdown policies, vaccine mandates, and the censorship regime that is now being evidenced through the Twitter files. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Siddharth Kara, Associate Professor of Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery at Nottingham University, discusses his latest book Cobalt Red (2023). Covering the historical developments that led to the European exploitation of the African continent, especially by Belgian King Leopold II in the Congo region, Kara describes the tragedy of Congo as having been the historical and contemporary site of extensive human and labour rights violations. Geographically located on a wealth of resources pivotal to both older and more recent automobile revolutions, Kara expounds how from 1888 onward this region was exploited for its rubber in order to supply tires for the First Automobile Revolution and then again from the 1990s to the present day where the Electric Vehicle Revolution, computers and smartphones necessitate cobalt to produce rechargeable batteries. Kara observes how Congo sits on some of the earth’s most valuable resources as he chronicles the region’s tragic history from the colonial period where all the Congo’s value was siphoned out to the world’s elite, especially King Leopold, only to have this exploitation replicated 130 years later with cobalt given that the Democratic Republic of the Congo has more cobalt reserves than the rest of the planet combined. Kara remarks, “Now instead of a king, it’s mega-tech companies and electric vehicle companies…generating immense profits while the people of the Congo eek out a subhuman existence on a few dollars a day.” Kara covers the myriad human rights violations as a result of cobalt mining from child slavery to the sexual exploitation of girls and women while sustaining that “the very legitimacy of our global economic order is put in perile if it’s built upon this kind of colonial age oppression, degradation, and exploitation of the poorest people in Africa.” Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Kate Coleman, founder and director of the criminal justice reform group Keep Prisons Single Sex, discusses her organisation’s advocacy for the sex-based rights of women throughout the criminal justice system and Scotland’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill. Expounding upon the importance of sex to risk, safeguarding, and data recording, Coleman elaborates the needed changes to current practices within prisons throughout the UK. Observing how Sturgeon pushed through the Gender Recognition Reform Bill with astounding rapidity, Coleman describes her participation at Stage 1 of this bill, having given testimony on a panel in Holyrood. She also elicits her horror during Stage 3 as Coleman witnessed discussions around approximately 150 significant amendments to this bill—from child protection and the safeguarding of vulnerable adults. Coleman recounts how these proposed amendments were arrogantly dismissed with jeers from SNP politicians and accusations of bigotry towards women asking for reasonable accommodations to not be imprisoned with men. Articulating how the transgender lobby has introduced the concept that sex is something “about which you can and should be able to keep private,” Coleman analyses how this, together with collapse of gender and sex, has piggybacked “gender identity” onto intersex medical conditions in order to give this project a veneer of a proper medical diagnosis while disappearing the reality of sex. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Aaron Moulton, a curator and anthropologist, discusses his project The Influencing Machine, a large-scale exhibition and publication examining the legacy of the Soros Center for Contemporary Arts (SCCA), a network of twenty Soros Centres for Contemporary Art that sprung up across Eastern Europe from the early to mid-1990s. Examining the mission of these centres, funded by Geroge Soros’ Open Society Institute (OSI), Moulton discusses how he first exposed his ideas at an online conference in 2020 where he elaborated how these networks pioneered forms of socially-engaged artistic practices that anticipated forms developed in Western art capitals while also serving as neoliberal social engineering projects. Critiquing how NGOs like the Open Society are supra-governmental forces that escape scrutiny while wielding a dangerous amount of power that approximates “a political party unto themselves,” Moulton observes how the fundamental failure of Soros’ project is that “it didn’t understand life without an opposition and how it would create a lot of hungry activists.” Moulton elaborates how The Influencing Machine is fundamentally an ethnography of the SCCA’s influence in the region where this NGO insinuated woke culture within curatorial practice as coercive philanthropy and corporations influenced creative practices that resulted in propaganda, not art. Noting how the SCCA created these museums of false consciousness throughout Eastern Europe, Moulton analyses the astroturfing of the art world at the hands of the Open Society Foundation and the tactics and strategies used to manipulate people into ideological obedience that has had enormous resonance throughout the west in recent years through identity politics’ tremendous ideological capture within western societies. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Jennifer Sharp, an award-winning filmmaker, discusses her latest film Andecdotals (2022), which she produced and directed after having an adverse reaction to the COVID vaccine and finding herself mandated out of polite society. Discussing her motivation for making her film, Sharp details a story of medical malfeasance, pharmacetical and scientific fraud, and documents the wider theatre where Big Pharma, the FDA and the CDC have failed to appropriately test, trial, and scientifically document these COVID-19 “vaccines” to include occluding the possibility for trial participants to document adverse reactions that were not included in a narrow list of choices. Discussing how the trails did not demonstrate a reduction of deaths, Sharp elaborates the medical and pharmaceutical fraud behind the pandemic’s mantra—“follow the science”—because much of the “science” was based on secret, unscientific data which companies like Pfizer tried unsuccessfully to bury for 75 years. Sharp evidences the many cases of adverse reactions and how many such cases were eclipsed within the trial literature with some cases being entirely misrepresented: “data” from the trials was gamed. Noting how governments around the planet protected Big Pharma by extending these companies total immunity from legal liability, Sharp vituperates a very sick and inbred system in the United States where there is frequent phenomenon of members of FDA who retire only to take up posh positions in Big Pharma in what she calls a “good ole’ boys club.” Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Stephen Bezruchka, faculty in the School of Public Health at the University of Washington in Seattle, discusses his latest book, Inequality Kills Us All: COVID-19's Health Lessons for the World (2022, Routledge), analysing some of the socio-medical terrain as to why the United States does so poorly in health measures. Discussing how the United States has by far the highest levels of inequality among wealthy countries, Bezruchka details how living in a society with entrenched hierarchies increases the negative effects of illnesses for everyone. Bezruchka covers how a fair system of taxation, maternal leave, support for child well-being, universal access to healthcare, are just some of the remedies that can reverse the downward trend in the health of the American population. Tracing his experiences in the field outside of western medicine, Bezruka frames how social issues like stress have worsened public health whereby social issues rarely figure into understanding public health. Observing how during the COVID-19 pandemic western societies leaned towards individualistic rather than collective solutions to the public health crisis, Bezruka notes that the United States has worse health outcomes than some 50 other nations despite spending almost half of the world's healthcare bill.  Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Tonje Gjevjon, Norwegian artist and filmmaker, and Christina Ellingsen, women's rights activist and publisher, discuss the current gender identity laws in Norway that affect women. Noting her cancellation from the Norwegian arts scene for her political stance on gender identity, Gjevjon considers how she potentially faces criminal charges and jail time for posting on Facebook that men cannot be lesbians. Gjevjon ellucidates how men LARPing (live-action role-playing) as lesbians are simply invigorating age-old homophobia directed at women that has taken a virutal format. Ellingsen discusses how she has been investigated for the past eight months for stating that sex is immutable, a biological truism. Although the case against her has been dropped, Ellingsen critiques how the ongoing case against Gjevjon demonstrates what is at stake today: that men claiming to be lesbians is the latest form of sexual harassment against lesbians. Ellingsen observes how this form of police and judiciary menace requires that women remain silent or risk their livelihoods and reputation in challenging the misogyny that has usurped public space over the past decade in Norway. Discussing the megalomania at the heart of gender identity politics today, Ellingsen picks apart the falsehood at the heart of this debate: that the technological control of nature is even possible. Both Gjevjon and Ellingsen vituperate the more horrific socio-political picture afoot: that of western societies foisting upon vulnerable individuals the lie of “sex change” as the mass sterilisation of this population is both encouraged and normalised. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Peter Phillips, a Professor Emeritus of Political Sociology at Sonoma State University and former Director of Project Censored (1996 to 2010), discusses his book, Giants: The Global Power Elite (2018), that focuses upon the concentration of wealth internationally whereby corporations and giant investment firms—multi-trillion dollar investment companies—have the money and power to restrict the parameters of what is possible for legacy news to cover. Elaborating how news is framed by the one-half of one per cent of the world’s population, Phillips notes how those who invest in big media (Comcast, Disney, Time Warner, 21st Century Fox, Bertelsmann, and Viacom/CBS) further protect their profits—to include these same shareholders’ investments in war—whereby news stories are modelled around the narrow parameters of these investors’ financial interests. Philipps considers the repression of news today by the collaborative efforts of intelligence agencies working to protect and expand capital (eg. governments’ “vital interests”) along with the military and political elite within every country. In this way, capital investments are shared among an international gobal elite whereby large companies like Hearst and The New York Times are primarily interested in protecting wealth as they hire public relations firms and adverising agencies—to include the Omnicom Group, WPP, and Interpublic Group—to package and release news whereby “managed news stories that are preempting objective new coverage.” Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Kellie-Jay Keen, aka Posie Parker, a British women's right campaigner, and Heather Brunskell-Evans, a feminist academic, discuss the class division within British feminism that has largely pivoted around and taken aim at Keen’s persona and activism. Giving historical perspective beginning with an event to which she had been invited at a Women’s Place UK event in Wales in the Spring 2018, Keen discusses how the manner in which she was disinvited was “libel-proof” where by WPUK effectively issued a statement that slated Keen as a racist without directly using these words. Noting that WPUK operates through “guilt by association,” Keen expatiates how this organisation weaponised the notion that guilt by association is “something that you can actually do to someone.” Keen discusses the events of January 2019 where she was accused of having “collaborated with the far-right” where in fact she and Julia Long undertook political activism to hold a political figure to account for having advocated the placement of a violent male prisoner in a woman’s prison and she had organised a public event for women to come and speak publicly. She observes, “If we start saying that free speech and the right to assemble and the right for free association…are something that the right do, then what does that say about the left? Because it’s not good.” Brunskell-Evans chronicles the purist policing within British feminism warning how this will leave a terrible legacy for future generations because the there is an attempt to frame the split in British feminism as merely “a bunch of women fighting with each other” which eschews what is actually going on. Elaborating how disagreement is part of any healthy liberal democracy, Brunskell-Evans expounds that these leftist feminists’ monstering of Keen has postured itself as disagreement when it is anything but. Brunskell-Evans details how these leftist feminists have engaged in policing and surveillance of thought together with ad hominem and defamatory attacks of Keen in what has been a uniquely authoritarian move in the guise of shutting down free speech and the grassroots movement that Keen facilitates. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Julie Ponesse, author of My Choice: The Ethical Case Against Covid-19 Vaccine Mandates (2021), discusses the field of ethics and role that fear played within the landscape of a global pandemic and how this stalls the ability of humans to understand and process new information, inclines us towards pessimism, and moves society towards a certain level of gullibity of official political narratives that claim to “save” society. In a sharp criticism of what has happened since March 2020, Ponesse analyses how those who supported lockdowns—who believed the official narrative of fear, as a result of which encouraged them to push the narrative, even at times cruelly within their own social and professional circles—are now confronted with the fact that everything they supported and enacted was all a lie, discussing this demographic’s compliance to draconian pandemic responses. Noting how internet culture has already trained a generation to locking themselves down with computers and mobile devices, Ponesse discusses the ways in which public opinion became controlled by big tech and major media across most of the planet manufacturing a homogeneous public health narrative without including any other scientific counterpoints, what Ponnes views as the signal that we were collectively being lied to. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe