Mary Lou Singleton, midwife, nurse practitioner and medical freedom activist, discusses the foundational myths buttressing Covid-19 virus mitigation—from the medical, public and political policies—in detailing what she witnessed in her practice. Singleton discusses the political underbelly that virus mitigation shares with the gender identity movement and the recent US Supreme Court decision which upended Roe v Wade while noting the misogyny that leaves women’s bodies expropriated by both political valences. Singleton elaborates how the right wants to restrict the women’s and girls’ freedom to somatic autonomy and reproductive healthcare and the left in unable to define what a women is while catering to regressive sexual stereotypes. Tracing the threads between the pseudo-science spun by legacy media during the past two-and-a-half years of the coronavirus pandemic and the propagation of similar medical hokum regarding gender ideology, Singleton addresses our current era’s most troubling reality where science has been repressed in the name of political decisions and medical totalitarianism. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Mickey Huff, director of Project Censored and president of the nonprofit Media Freedom Foundation, discusses the state of legacy media and the urgent need for critical media literacy today. Reviewing how corporate media covers the news filling its pages with junk food news stories that perpetuate stories of “billionaires in space” and Hollywood scandals, Huff notes how propaganda often thrives on censorship, noting that the best propaganda is largely true but is often missing certain crucial elements that would allow the public to analyse issues more in-depth. Huff elaborates how legacy media uses public concern for “disinformation” to regain control of the narrative by proclaiming anything that does not mirror establishment media as “fake news.” Huff states that this is a transparent twist on censorship and the curation of information. Reviewing the conflicts of interest within organisational alliances that inform legacy media content, Huff scrutinises the Disinformation Governance Board, chaired by co-author of the Patriot Act, Michael Chertoff, and Facebook’s official fact-checker, the Atlantic Council, a lobby arm of NATO. Huff surveys recent neoliberal political narratives that pretend that “fake news” was uniquely a problem during Donald Trump’s presidency while he vituperates the “reactionary control of the narrative” which he claims is “another form of propaganda that wants to get people to accept the notion that there is a form of censorship that’s good for us.”  Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Nolan Higdon, lecturer at Merrill College and the Education Department at University of California, discusses his latest book co-author with Mickey Huff, Let’s Agree to Disagree: A Critical Thinking Guide to Communication, Conflict Management, and Critical Media Literacy (Routledge, 2022). Covering the cultural performance of “social justice,” Higdon argues the need for critical thinking skills while noting how social media gives users a “delusion of power” whereby they believe themselves to be an authority on all topics such that when disagreement occurs, blocking has become the default means of interaction. Higdon focusses upon the importance of constructive communication and for individuals to learn how to have their ideas challenged and, at times, to being uncomfortable by fomenting productive relationships of communication instead of the present-day dumpster fire that social media encourages. Considering big tech’s hold over information, Higdon historicises the involvement of DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) in everything from mass surveillance tools to drones to the internet while noting how big tech is quite happy to do business with whomever is in power while trafficking in the “progression of neoliberal capitalism.” Higdon elaborates how major media and big tech have misrepresented working-class criticisms of the economic shutdown during the coronavirus pandemic by spinning the January 2021 demonstrators in Washington, DC as “white supremacists” and “gun nuts,” marginalising any discussion of class. All this while big tech silently removes social media accounts and certain information from the internet. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Kara Dansky, attorney and author of The Abolition of Sex: How the ‘Transgender’ Agenda Harms Women and Girls (2021), discusses Sarah Weddington, the architect of Roe v. Wade, who argued the case before the Supreme Court using the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment that guarantees Americans privacy. Addressing the leaked US Supreme Court draft opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito which indicates that the Supreme Court has voted to overturn the landmark decision, Dansky details possible strategies for American women to regain the right to abortion. The 1973 decision of Roe v. Wade guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights and was buttressed by a subsequent 1992 decision, Planned Parenthood v. Casey 505 U.S. 833 that largely maintained this right. Dansky analyses the various legal and constitutional avenues that would fare better than Roe v. Wade while outlining the dangers for women and girls for the impending overturn of this Supreme Court decision. Explaining how the late Justice Ruther Bader Ginsberg, principal author of the brief that carried Reed v. Reed 404 U.S. 71 (1971), argued that women were discriminated against under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, Dansky posits that the Equal Protection Clause would have granted women stronger federal constitutional protections of abortion rights over the Due Process Clause employed by Weddington. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Dennis Kavanagh, a former criminal barrister and one of the directors of the Gay Men's Network, discusses his recent article that analyses the case of barrister Allison Bailey against the UK charity, Stonewall, while historicising lesbian and gay rights in Britain since the 1980s. Noting the incredible irony of Britain’s most important gay and lesbian charity having changed course over its historic protection of gay and lesbian rights to swap out the political narrative of sex for gender, where being “same-sex attracted” has been carefully conflated with “gender dysphoria,” Kavanagh elaborates how gender ideology has become a subterfuge for Schrodinger’s medical condition whereby on the one hand, this ideology is framed as part of a larger civil rights movement that is not a medical condition while on the other hand, adherents to this ideology exact demands for medical care. Kavanagh lays out the “culture of silence” that permeates gender ideology whereby women are disproportinately silenced for stating that sex is real while this movement evidences an appallingly regressive discourse replete with misogyny, homophobia and racism. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Sharron Davies, an English former competitive swimmer who represented Great Britain in the Olympics, discusses how she became embroiled in the debate over men participating in women’s sports in 2019 as she foresaw problems where the inclusion of these men “has the potential to ruin women’s sport.” Having followed the science for many years on this issue, Davies shares her experiences of having had to compete against East German swimmers who were given testosterone to outperform their competitors in what can only be described as a full-blown state-run doping programme. Reviewing the science while arguing for fairness in sports, Davies details how today mediocre male athletes can shift categories and outperform top female Olympians. This obviously poses an existential threat to women’s sports in addition to robbing women of titles, careers, economic remuneration, scholarships and many high profile opportunities which serve these athletes throughout the prime of their careers and beyond retirement. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode, Christian Parenti, professor of economics at John Jay College (CUNY), discusses his recent article “How the Organized Left Got COVID Wrong, Learned to Love Lockdowns and Lost Its Mind: An Autopsy” elaborating on the power of the pharmaceutical industry that has dominated media discourse surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic along with the medical industry’s fixation on vaccines over treatment. Analysing how Covid became politicised by both parties in the US, Parenti discusses how social and medical policies were fomented based entirely upon politics leaving no room for any type of public rethinking of lockdown much less accommodating shifts in current policies as new facts regarding the virus emerged. Parenti explains how the left was caught in “Trump derangement syndrome” while Trump had lost control of his own Covid task force early on, such that there was hysteria being whipped up as the pandemic had been entirely politicised by April 2020 where “everybody with power is abusing it in the name of public safety.” Laying out how the left abandoned the working class during the pandemic, Parenti criticises the way class dynamics have been entirely elided noting how “a bunch of American oligarchs…have masked capitalist exploitation in this fog of woke identity politics.” Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Richard Hanania, President of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology and a Research Fellow at Defense Priorities, discusses the current Russian war in Ukraine and the intertwined western cultural war deeply embedded within this conflict’s narrative. Noting how the “white conservative Christians bad” forms the ideological core of neoliberal views of this conflict, Hanania explains how wokery has crept into current media and political discourses which show support through emotional readings of the current war in Ukraine without any concern for the humanitarian impact of neoliberal calls to punish Russia. Hanania describes the generational differences of older generations who suffer from Cold War nostalgia lending to their hostile views of Russia while giving detailing the links between television’s influence on the representation of the current conflict. Covering the business model of major media like CNN and MSNBC and the American foreign policy establishment and its policies, Hanania covers the current media bias from the right’s militaristic bent and the left’s focus on identity politics while outlining the dangers in how many intake media. Hanania presents the background of US involvement in Ukraine historically to include its involvement in the protests against Yanukovych and its form of “democracy promotion” which fundamentally amounts to regime change while also accounting for the historical role of NATO in the run-up to this conflict and the post-Soviet situation in relationship to US foreign policy. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Dora Moutot, journalist, Instagrammer (@tasjoui), and author of Mâle-baisées, talks about patriarchy and feminism today through a critique of the language of identity and queer politics being pushed by the left within France. Delving into the politics of medicine and the divide between how men and women are offere unequal access to medicine, Moutot chronicles how men who claim to be women will readily receive medical interventions while women suffering from conditions like endometriosis were only covered by the state one month ago with many other conditions falling outside state funding. Moutot also covers her views on the gender identity movement, political lesbianism, and how non-western cultures approach death while offering a window into how to understand the popular media messages and literature regarding women and feminism. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Sarah Haider, a Pakistani-American writer, public speaker, and political activist, discusses religious dissent and her exit from Islam while elaborating how girls’ and women’s rights under Islam are negatively effected. Noting the patterns and political effects of religion in the Arabo-Islamic world, Haider critiques how the left has consistently moved to any eschew criticism of this religion by pretending that any critique is necessarily a generalisation or a result of colonialism. Haider maintains that with such rationale, nothing would be analysable since scrutiny depends upon noticing patterns and specific paradigms. Discussing the parallels between the repression of women’s freedom in the Muslim world and women in west who are today hounded for pushing back on gender identity, Haider examines how women’s rights around the topic of material reality are being restricted in the west through the “derangement” and enforcement of gender ideology that “has the potential to undo some of the gains of feminists in the west.” Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe