Savage Minds

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

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