156 episodes

Investigative reporting and social commentary on public culture, the arts, science, and politics.

savageminds.substack.com

Savage Minds Savage Minds

    • News

Investigative reporting and social commentary on public culture, the arts, science, and politics.

savageminds.substack.com

    Joti Brar

    Joti Brar

    Joti Brar, the Vice Chair of the Communist Party in Great Britain (CPGB-ML), discusses many of the mediatised and popular misconceptions regarding communism and the shifting political valences of the left and the right through neoliberalist discourse in recent years. Historicising how the term “communist” was used as an insult in the mid-19th century, even before the publication of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto (1848), Brar elaborates how the ruling class feared the working class, recognising communism as the leading militant edge of the working class and a threat to capitalist exploitation. The slur of “communist” then, as it is also being reinvigorated by the right today, attempts to demonise Marxism among the working class whereby people will shy away from the idea of communism before ever understanding what it actually is. Brar delves into the history of capitalism and its many violent confrontations within the labour landscape and the misery capitalism effected upon workers’ lives for the majority of its existence. Expounding upon the Keynesian consensus in the post-war era where the ruling classes agreed to make reforms to stave off communist revolution by implementing certain social measures such as nationalising certain services and creating the welfare state, Brar notes how capitalism exists in a constant state of crisis, harbouring a persistant fear of Marxism while projecting the ruling class’ degeneration and crimes onto its opponents. Noting how capitalist ideology served to destabilise communism since the 1950s, Brar elucidates the current era where the struggle for women’s rights and racism quickly became institutionalised within bourgeois academic disciplines thusly neutering all class criticism. As a result, feminism was not framed as a struggle between workers and capitalists for which the solution to the oppression of women was never the end of the exploitation societies, but rather women’s oppression was postured in terms of various enemies such as men and underwear. 


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    • 2 hrs 11 min
    Yaakov Shapiro

    Yaakov Shapiro

    Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro, a pulpit rabbi, author of The Empty Wagon: Zionism's Journey From Identity Crisis to Identity Theft (2020), and host of the Committing High Reason podcast, discusses Zionism and its relationship to current conflicts the state of Israel. Covering the birth of Zionism that responded to European’s stereotype of the “the Jew as bad,” “disgusting” and “retrogade,” Zionism offered up “the opposite of a Jew…in personality and character” where this stereotype, attempting to remodel Jewish identity that was based, created quite paradoxically, an anti-Semitic Jewish identity. Noting the anti-Jewish notes of Zionism, Shapiro highlights how religious Jews—orthodox and non-orthodox Jews alike—early on disassociated entirely from Zionists. Shapiro elaborates Theodor Herzl’s work in fomenting an ideology that politicised Jewish identity, while observing how Zionism was never a movement of self-determination of the Jewish people, but was a movement that critically attempted to nationalise the religion. Noting how Herzl effectively “gaslit the Jews” by politicising the “Holy Land” while conflating it with Judaism, Shapiro analyses how Zionism has created the current political crisis in Gaza today where horrors are effected in the name of an ideology that has absolutely nothing to do with Judaism whatsoever. Depsite the media and political machinery that attempts to push the fiction of Zionism in buttressing the creation of Israel as “the Jewish state” while conterminously demanding that all Jews be loyal to Israel, lest they be guilty of anti-Semitism as well, Shapiro criticises how Zionism has been curated in a way that falsely assumes that there is only one way to be Jewish or worse, that if you are against Zionism, you are necessarily an anti-Semite. Shapiro vituperates this position and inverts the polemic: “Instead of [asking] when does anti-Zionism cross the line into anti-Semitism, we need to start asking the queiston the other way: When does Zionism cross the line into anti-Semitism?”


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    • 2 hrs 7 min
    Anna Loutfi

    Anna Loutfi

    Anna Loutfi, an equality and human rights barrister, discusses her support of parents in bringing the group litigation against the Department for Education for failure to protect pupils against political ideology, including the promotion and encouragement of “gender transition.” Covering the subtle processes of indoctrination within British classrooms today where education functions to “protect” children from reality while concurrently telling them that health is a myth, Loutfi analyses how gender ideology has been brought into RSE (Relationships and Sex Education) teaching whereby puberty has been presented as embarrassing, dirty, and as something that can be completely avoided. Tracing the roots of this “unlearning” of the healthy body, Loutfi notes that health is quickly being marginalised as the state has become the site where the masses will go to “correct” their “sick” bodies. Loutfi also covers how law has been incorrectly rewritten into public policies by the diversity and inclusion industry whereby the mere process of identifying as something other, relies upon the “protected characteristic” of "gender reassignment" from the Gender Recognition Act (2004), even though this law, written specifically for adults, has been misapplied to children by virtue of any child “identifying as” the opposite sex. Loutfi underscores the importance of having public conversations as to why some men are castrating themselves and why so many public and private institutions have capitulated to a movement that has been given carte blanche to do nothing other than attack and disturb women and girls. 


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    • 1 hr 42 min
    Remi Adekoya

    Remi Adekoya

    Remi Adekoya, a politics lecturer at the University of York and former journalist, discusses his latest book, It's Not About Whiteness, It's About Wealth (2023), wherein he argues that the socioeconomic realities are sustaining racial hierarchies and not, as the left fashions, a moral, reactive evil. Discussing what financial power means in the Global South as well as within the west, for instance, Adekoya touches upon how what what matters in his childhood homeland of Nigeria is the need to address the material realities and not any racial narratives emanating from the west, noting how what the people want are neither pronouns nor EDI training, but want visas to go to the US or the UK to improve their lives. Demonstrating how money enables influence over society and culture, Adekoya explores the connections immigration, technology, media, group stereotypes, and status perceptions. He also demonstrates how wealth determines the key domains of modern life, elucidating its effects on racial dynamics across the globe. Noting how humans are hierarchal creatures, collectively orienteted around hierarchical thinking in all levels of society, he notes the paradox in conscious ellision of any discussions of economic hierarchies by government and media alike. Adekoya underscores how brown-skinned people are still the ones doing the menial jobs no matter how much we discuss racism, cultural differences, or how to “diversify curriculum,” pointing out how is “so much talk about the narratives around Africa and less and less and less about the realities of Africa.”


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    • 1 hr 33 min
    Jeff Gibbs

    Jeff Gibbs

    Jeff Gibbs, producer and co-producer some of the most important documentaries in recent decades, discusses his film covering the “fake green movement,” Planet of the Humans, produced by Michael Moore that was tarred by media and the green industry. Exploring the billions-dollar green industry which banks sells to us the narrative that technology is freeing us from carbon emissions and the fallacy of this sentiment, Gibbs confers the disappearance of animal species, questioning how global warming has shifted the focus to single idea (carbon emissions) without worrying about what is driving species to extinction. Studying the increase in natural disasters, from forest fires to floods, Gibbs focusses on the collapse of human civilisation and the comcommitant disintegrtation of nature and the need to focus on consumption and population. Investigating the political spectrum from left to right, Gibbs criticises the left in is missing some of the most important factors of climate change by hyper-focussing on carbon. Covering how his film became a wider target of a censorship campaign being condemned by climate scientists and activists, Gibbs deliberates the power of green industry which he describes as “trying to destroy” him and “shut down” all debate on this issue. Gibbs historicises the marriage between capitalism and the green movement while explaining why his film is considered a “full-frontal assault” on the environmental movement.


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    • 1 hr 3 min
    Brandon Showalter

    Brandon Showalter

    Brandon Showalter, journalist and podcaster who has covered the “gender identity” movement and transgender ideology, discusses his latest co-authored book, Exposing the Gender Lie: How to Protect Children and Teens from the Transgender Industry's False Ideology. Showalter discusses the how media standards and institutions of the corporate press like the Associated Press (AP) and their recommendations to use “preferred pronouns” and its latest topical guidance on the use of terms like “transgenderism” which make verboten the questioning of this movement as ideologically-based. Pointing to how legacy media uses highly-discredited references, Showalter discusses how the AP’s power over newsrooms and journalists flies in the face of basic journalistic ethis to reporting facts and questioning the information presented which thusly results is one-sided, ideologically-driven reporting. Showalter notes how mainstream media has never questioned the “scientific” pretenses of the gender lobby which has only empty language and zero scientific evidence for its claims. Discussing the importance of thinkers like Julia Long and other feminists, Showalter expounds upon the “gender lie” which in turn has been quickly institutionalised—all without any scientific basis— only later to become a legal reference, even being written into law. Showalter elaborates the necessity to resist this toxic ideology while exposing the lie driving it, citing Long’s words: “The word ‘trans’ has one function, and that is to falsify reality...as soon as you have a word that can institute the lie that a man is a woman, everything is reversed.”


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    • 1 hr 29 min

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