Jenni Swayne, a former teacher, discusses her work as a women’s rights activist her recent arrest for stickering in Newport, Gwent (Wales). Elaborating how the police arrested her on suspicion of having committed a “hate crime” (a public order offence) after which time she was held in a cell for ten hours, Swayne details the treatment by the police to in include the police interrogation and the limitations put upon her until the bail is over in in a month’s time when she will learn if she will be charged, cautioned or if the case will be dropped entirely. One of the stickers she posted reads: “No child is born in the wrong body: Humans never change sex.” Another found by the police who searched her house removing several sheets of stickers reads: “3+ women killed by men each week: Domestic violence kills.” As Harry Miller puts it, Swayne is being put through a system where “the process becomes the punishment.” Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Batya Ungar-Sargon, deputy opinion editor of Newsweek, discusses her latest book, Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy (2021) outlining how long before “fake news” became the calling card of the right, Americans had already lost faith in their news media. Noting how during the 20th century journalists used to live among the working class, Ungar-Sargon reveals how American journalism has undergone a status revolution over the twentieth century—from a blue-collar trade to an elite profession today firmly cemented within the well-rewarded and often high-profile knowledge-industry labour sector. Covering the conterminous to the rise of the Internet, the implosion of local news, and the nationalisation of America’s elite news media, Ungar-Sargon notes how journalists became both affluent and ideological which contributed to their ability to de-platform working class voices through the employment of obscure academic language and identity politics. She highlights how the working class has been rendered untouchable while the pressures of the digital media landscape align corporate incentives with newsroom crusades of wokery while the poor flounder under the goals of neoliberalism and meritocracy. Vituperating against the moral panic around racism, Ungar-Sargon elaborates how neoliberal media covers up the economic interests of the elite with a “patina of social justice” while abandoning the American descendants of slaves. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

John McWhorter, associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University discusses his latest book, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America (2021). Examining how “anti-racism” has become a religion in all but name that treats black Americans as simpletons despite being billed as “anti-racist,” McWhorter states that “what started out as a socio-political orientation has become a foundation of people’s identity…and something of an obsession,” pointing out that this religion demands that the masses suspend logic while it also pushes a narrative of moral purity. McWhorter notes that this religion commands the subject to pretend that nothing has changed all that much for black Americans, something McWhorter deems “anti-empirical” noting that today “it’s racially progressive to pretend that no real progress ever happens” which is anathema to reality. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Jeffrey A. Tucker, founder of the Brownstone Institute, discusses pandemic mitigation measures in the US and around the planet that he has previously termed “central planning in the 21st century.” Detailing how governments and the media have failed to transmit accurate information regarding at-risk demographic groups for COVID-19 while failing to address how pathogens are part our biological world, Tucker delineates how lockdowns “only prolong the pain at best.” Highlighting the current social segregation within many countries where vaccine passports have been rolled out and virus mandates brought in, Tucker analyses the political theatre set up to make the public believe that they are are “safer” when in reality there is no data to demonstrate that masks or plexiglass dividers have served any function in virus mitigation. Maintaining that these devices, among other virus mitigation measures, exist as liturgies to demonstrate the citizen’s willingness to participate in what he calls an “obedience test,” Tucker argues that our humanity has been taken away from us and that our task is now to take it back. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Sophie Scott CBE, British neuroscientist and Director of the Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, discusses the neurobiology of human vocal communication, specifically that of laughter and crying and how these non-verbal vocalisations share similarities from the involuntary communicative repertoire to their more specific uses as communication, produced in similar ways while informing our identity as humans. Touching upon the ongoing culture war, Scott frames the prevalent quasi-religious pushback against rationality and science by those who seek to confirm their beliefs through the politicisation of science and the search of identity. Discussing how science is the accumulation of the direction of knowledge—not about what is right or wrong—Scott elaborates the field of science as a “movement of understanding the world” and not a journey with a determined end. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Mattias Desmet, Professor of Clinical Psychology in the Department of Psychology and Educational Sciences of Ghent University, discusses how the handling of the coronavirus pandemic has lacked a rational approach such that measures used to mitigate the transmission of the virus may potentially claim more victims than the virus itself. Examining how mass formation functions within the current socio-political situation of a global pandemic whereby the political “solutions” offered up result in people being unable to take any critical distance from what is happening, Desmet elaborates the current atomisation of the individual upon which totalitarian power relies and notes how mass formation emerges from the “belly of the population.” Desmet analyses how large-scale mass formation emerges in society when specific conditions are met—social isolation, the lack of meaning in life, free-floating anxiety, and frustration and aggression—all interacting to create a situation whereby society is extremely vulnerable to the rise of a totalitarian state. Desmet details mass formation describing how a narrative is circulated about an anxiety (eg. a virus) while also providing a strategy (eg. lockdowns) for dealing with the collective anxiety over a global pandemic such that the previous free-floating anxieties of the masses permit the subject to connect to the collective object of anxiety, the virus. In this way populations are willing to participate in the strategy of the pandemic such that their free-floating anxieties and frustrations find grounding in a real anxiety, thus creating a new—if not problematic—social bond and meaning-making where the aggressions and frustrations are now directed at those who refuse to participate in this mass formation. Desmet compares this process to hypnosis whereby all of society’s psychological energy is directed at the pandemic while the masses are uniquely focussed upon the victims that the virus might claim while they are not at all concerned with the potentially greater collateral damage of the measures they support. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Arun Dohle, Director of Adoptee Rights Council and Against Child Trafficking, discusses how adoption is never conducted in the best interests of children, but instead protects the interests of adoption agencies, adoptive parents and other vested organisations. Covering some of the legal quagmires between international conventions like the Hague Adoption Convention and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, national laws, and inter-country adoption, Dohle vituperates the practice of adoption, considering it a form of child trafficking, replete with human rights abuses to both the adoptee and parents as the state, private organisations and western agents take it upon themselves to offer their economic advantage as the “better life” for the impoverished child from situations—both familial and national—perceived to be perennially “in need” of adoption. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Joachim Allgaier, Professor of Communication and Digital Society at Fulda University of Applied Sciences in Germany, discusses his research on communication and cooperation in the digital society to include disinformation and conspiracy theories in online media. Beginning with his 2019 study, “Science and Environmental Communication on YouTube,” Allgaier explains his research project wherein he analysed 200 YouTube videos related to climate change concluding that videos peddling conspiracy theories received the highest number of views. Discussing conspiracy videos from migration to COVID, Allgaier discusses how the various algorithms from YouTube to search engines navigate the user through its system giving the illusion that the user alone controls her own journey through online sites. Discussing the spread of misinformation within social media, Allgaier chimes in on how the pandemic has affected the proliferation of conspiracy theories and videos on platforms whose existence depends upon peddling addictive visual input such as TikTok where younger generations find life offline as “exotic” and where binge-watching is now a social norm, something he categorises as both interesting and worrying. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Dr Petra Bueskens, psychotherapist, writer and Honorary Fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne, discusses her op-ed last year on JK Rowling which which went viral opening up a debate within the Australian Sociological Association and led to a minority of members denouncing her as a “transphobe.” Lending a sociological perspective, Bueskens discusses the Balkanisation of cultural and political debates around this issue into “silos of unreason” which do not follow the pre-digital rules of debate. Jumping from the Jarod Lanier who has been outspoken about the destruction wrought by social media where outrage results in more online engagement, Bueskens discusses how online culture has resulted in social groups that are almost entirely based upon an identification with oppression noting how both sides of this debate are “limbically hijacked.” Turning to a class criticism within identity politics, Bueskens analyses the betrayal of the working class by the left which has taken over the institutional managerial class composed of baby boomers who sold out the left as careerists and the younger generation who lack the tools to critique this discourse. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Karen Davis, host of the Youtube channel “You're Kiddin', Right?” discusses her recent episode where she addresses those within the gender-critical movement who undermine the credibility of their own arguments whereby, on the one hand, they insist that gender is harmful to women and that sex-based language is vital to for women’s rights and, on the other, they reinforce the delusions of “mentally ill people” while treating the category of woman as an “honorific” that reduces women to a fantasy or an aspiration. Analysing the questions that Julia Long posed at a recent conference in the UK, Davis observes the elitism that has authorised certain gender-critics to recreate a privileged class of their “true trans” friends, while insisting that others obey these women’s exceptions, further exacerbating the class and intellectual divide. Davis demonstrates how calling any men “women” is a losing strategy for those who fundamentally don’t believe in the strength of their own arguments as they claim that certain men are not women, but others are. Explaining that it is simply not possible to “be kind” as some of the more privileged gender-critics believe themselves to be while also transmitting a coherent argument that humans simply cannot change sex. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe