Podcast
Savage Minds
Hosted by Savage Minds · EN
Investigative reporting and social commentary on public culture, the arts, science, and politics.
www.savageminds.co
www.savageminds.co
44episodes
Episodes
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Michael John-Hopkins
Feb 1302:54:31Tap to summarizeMichael John-Hopkins, a legal scholar and a senior lecturer in law, discusses the theory of international law and its practice—from its conceptual foundation to what international law promises (sovereignty, non-use of force, equality of states, the UN Charter, rule of law) versus how it is actually applied (power politics, selective enforcement). He delineates the historical context of US foreign policy in Latin America, including the Monroe Doctrine, to show its continuity with current events, explaining why certain actors fail to observe international law and what contributes to this failure. Querying if the recent US kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores is uniquely egregious under international law, John-Hopkins delves into the broader patterns within US foreign policy and the myriad historical examples throughout US history of its regime-change and resource-grab colonialism, now set within a modern context. Vituperating the use of economic boycotts and sanctions as a means of strong-arming democracy, he notes how such acts of hybrid warfare constitute violations of international law while also signalling the erosion of the rules-based order. John-Hopkins considers Israel’s repeated violations of international law from the inception of its statehood through the present, scrutinising Israel’s illegal military operations, settlement policies, responses to terrorism, and the genocide of Palestinians all of which demonstrate the gap between norms and practice globally. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe
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Sandra Walklate
Feb 801:12:48Tap to summarizeProfessor Sandra Walklate, Emeritus and honorary professor at the University of Liverpool, discusses her work in victimology and violence against women, including her work in the field of femicide. Drawing upon historical paradigms where the concept of feminicide has been previously employed, Walklate notes various examples from the Americas where femicide was used as a tool in drawing attention to the complicity of the state in hiding the numbers of women’s deaths at the hands of men, only then to be disappeared by the state “with no compunction on the part of the state to pursue why those lives were disappeared.” Noting how some scholars and writers have attempted to extend the definition of the way in which we count femicide into femininicide, she argues the merits of “slow femicide” and accounting for the number of women’s lives lost because of the illnesses that follow on from living with the stress of violence—from their propensity to commit suicide to the long-term effects of experiencing strangulation as a feature of that violence to the associated diseases. Conversely, Walklate questions whether creating a separate legal category for “femicide” in addition to related concepts like “coercive control” in cases of domestic violence truly benefits victims or simply expands the power of a system that has already failed these victims. Underscoring how the law cannot always offer respite to the victims of IPA (Intimate Partner Abuse) due to the reality that the number of people prosecuted for such crimes is infinitesimally small, Walklate observes how “the power of the advocacy voice over the reality of the evidence” has also affected the ways in which policing and the judiciary react towards specific types of violence. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe
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Alex Gordon
Feb 501:55:48Tap to summarizeAlex Gordon, Marxist and General Secretary of the Communist Party of Britain (CPB), discusses the current state of affairs regarding Britain’s participation in the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the normalisation of extreme violence meted out to black and brown people taking place through social media and mobile phone technology. Where Gordon states that we have a choice today between socialism or barbarism, he elaborates on the hypocrisy of European leaders who, while quick to disassociate themselves from any condemnation of the US kidnapping of Maduro and Flores, were inversely outraged about European nations’ sovereign rights and those of Denmark the moment Trump expressed his intent to take over Greenland. Highlighting the current wars—many of which are over rare earth minerals—he historicises the links between the military-industrial complex, Big Tech and capitalism, and the ways in which these powers maintain their hold on power. Gordon also touches upon political bipartisan control over electoral politics in many Western “democracies,” which he regards as in danger of being breached as political stability continued to rise with the decline of American jobs and the decline of American industry. Observing how the British government dispensed with the need for regulated labour, he covers the thorny issue of how working-class Britons have been set against migrants, since they had become a perpetual reservoir for cheaper labour while simultaneously serving to drive down wages for skilled trades. Gordon also remarks upon Re-Arm Europe’s rebranding to SAFE (Security Action for Europe) while vituperating Germany’s Merz, who has recently introduced a law, the Wehrdienstmodernisierungsgesetz (WDModG) reform, requiring all men upon reaching the age of 18 to register for military service, as Europe has ideologically prepared the masses for war. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe
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Charles LeBaron
Jun 30, 202501:18:06Tap to summarizeIn this episode, Charles LeBaron, a former Center for Disease Control (CDC) epidemiologist, discusses his recent book, Greed to Do Good: The Untold Story of CDC's Disastrous War on Opioids: A CDC Physician's Personal Account (Amplify Publishing, 2024). LeBaron discusses the nationwide opioid crisis which has left, over the past two decades, a million Americans dead from opioid overdoses while noting how each year there are now twice as many deaths from overdoses as from breast cancer or colon cancer and more deaths than from automobiles and firearms combined. Noting how the implementation of CDC interventions had the paradoxical effect of “turbocharging the opioid epidemic,” LeBaron carefully analyses what went wrong, the gross improprieties conducted by Big Pharmaceutical companies, and how bad policy led to the opioid crisis in America. A physician who has seen first-hand the impact of opioids on the poor populations he treated in Appalachia and in prison, LeBaron sheds light on the class and status discriminations that are part and parcel of the wrong-minded approach to drug addiction in the United States that has riddled the country’s history. Fundamentally, LeBaron argues for a better and more scientific approach to addressing the crisis while detailing the country’s dysfunctional system in handling the crisis and analysing some working models that might actually improve the situation. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe
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Olivia Guaraldo
May 1, 202500:59:56Tap to summarizeIn questa puntata, Olivia Guaraldo, professoressa ordinaria di filosofia politica presso il Dipartimento di Scienze Umane all’Università di Verona, discute il libro scritto in collaborazione con Adriana Cavarero, Donna si nasce (2024), che offre uno sguardo al femminismo e ai concetti di “donna” e “gender” da Simone de Beauvoir ai giorni nostri. Guaraldo storicizza concetti come “patriarcato” e “differenza sessuale”, soffermandosi su come queste valenze siano state mutuate dall’antropologia culturale, assorbite dal femminismo e poi complicate con l’introduzione dell’“identità di gender” nei paesi prevalentemente anglofoni. Analizzando il discorso dei “diritti” in Occidente a partire dalla Rivoluzione francese, Guaraldo discute di come il pensiero moderno sia stato plasmato da un orizzonte simbolico in cui i soggetti maschili erano di fatto soggetti di “liberazione”, mentre le donne venivano invariabilmente eclissate. Approfondendo il paradosso secondo cui i diritti “universali” concessi nel corso del XVIII e XIX secolo erano specificamente rivolti agli uomini, mai all’altra metà della popolazione umana, dove gli uomini erano “la misura dell’umano”, Guaraldo evidenzia anche alcune delle differenze tra il femminismo italiano e francese e il femminismo anglo-americano, dove il primo presenta un femminismo della differenza e il secondo un femminismo dell’“uguaglianza”, e dove i diritti conquistati sono invariabilmente pagati con il prezzo dell’“assimilazione” postulata all’interno di un “modello neutro” in cui i diritti della persona vengono assunti sul corpo (ad esempio, diritti riproduttivi, accesso all’aborto, ecc.) e dove le conquiste sono sempre parziali. Guaraldo sottolinea anche l’attuale paradosso socio-politico in cui il linguaggio della differenza e del gender, così come inscritto dal poststrutturalismo francese nella seconda metà del XX secolo, ha portato a un nuovo dogmatismo e a una rigidità sociale tale per cui le giovani generazioni di donne si stanno opponendo al definirsi “donne” a causa della deliberata diluizione del significato del linguaggio. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe
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Christian Parenti
Apr 6, 202501:09:49Tap to summarizeChristian Parenti, Professor of Economics at John Jay College, City University of New York and author of Radical Hamilton: Economic Lessons from a Misunderstood Founder (Verso, 2020), returns to the show with a searing analysis of the US political scene and various international theatres. Kicking off with an evaluation of the Trump v2.0 administration, Parenti reviews some of Trump’s pre-presidential promises, from the Jeffrey Epstein file dump that was vastly redacted to Trump’s enthralment with the Israeli lobby. Delving into the Israeli lobby, deeply entrenched within the US government, Parenti notes that this “lobby” is much more than simply monetary, and suggests that it is much more entrenched within the US political system. Parenti also develops a deeper examination of the war in Ukraine and the “demonology” of Russia within legacy media that has taken up the Cold War era model of anti-Communism by eliding the fact that some of Ukraine’s oblasts (Donetsk and Luhansk) are still occupied by Ukrainian Nazis. Observing how the domestic pressure upon Putin is coming from the Communists and the far-right parties, both highly critical of Putn’s longstanding abandonment of the Russian people who have been militarily occupied by Ukrainian forces wearing swastikas, Parentis evidences the machinations within the US proxy war against Russia from its provisions of munitions to Ukraine to the Ukrainian government’s banning the Russian language in 2019 and Law 5371 which denies unionisation, exempting workers in companies with fewer than 250 employees from the coverage of collective agreements. Parenti also discusses the situation of free speech in the United States that is currently being eroded, specifically regarding any criticism of both the Israeli government and Zionism, as he explores the broader questions of academic freedom and anti-war sentiment within American universities where today the managerial class of university administrators within these institutions outnumbers faculty while itinerant workers with PhDs, the adjunct class, provide approximately 78% of all university teaching. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe
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Ilan Pappé
Mar 29, 202501:11:39Tap to summarizeIlan Pappé, Israeli historian and professor of history at the University of Exeter, discusses the tragic situation of Palestinians who, for many decades, have been the circumstantial victims of a larger global coalition because their existence was “in the way” of other geo-political machinations. Giving a brief history of Zionism in Palestine, Pappé outlines the early alliances made between various groups, all composed of different members with entirely different motives—often contradictory reasons, to include the cooperation between secular nationalist and religious anti-Semites—who came together with one common goal: to see Palestine as a Jewish state and to expunge Palestinians from their land. Mapping out the various forces that wished to symbolically and/or physically disappear Palestinians, Pappé notes how Christian Zionists and British imperialists weaponised Zionism and Islamophobia to change the demographics of the region while later secular Jews understood the power of utilising anti-Semitism to seek similar ends. Pappé also forays into the paradox of language which has been used to cover up certain actions on behalf of the Israeli state while also providing a “comfort zone” for extending these same abuses of power into the future. Exposing how language has historically been employed to cover up war crimes, Pappé elucidates the current paradigm whereby it is no longer necessary for Israel to cover up its crimes against humanity analysing the shift in political discourse and the tragic reality that the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians has now been firmly placed on the table. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe
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Charles Piller
Mar 26, 202501:18:13Tap to summarizeCharles Piller, investigative journalist for Science magazine and author of The Fail-Safe Society (1991) and Gene Wars (1998), discusses his latest book Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimers (2025). Historicising Alzheimer’s research, Piller Piller situates how whistleblower, Vanderbilt professor Matthew Schrag, exposed a massive scandal involving a University of Minnesota lab led by a precocious young scientist (Sylvain Lesné) and a renowned director (Karen Ashe). Examining ego, professional aspirations together with the demands set upon researchers, Piller exposes how falsified data was at the heart of the leading hypothesis about the disease. Piller exposes Schrag's findings and this stunned not only the field of Alzheimer’s research, but the ripple effects this discovery had on research institution, the pharmaceutical industry, universities and the public. With the “amyloid hypothesis” now set within a web of scientific deceit, Piller elaborates how this hypothesis allowed a cause and effect, “an injection of hope and belief” whereby targetting these proteins became the dominanting thinking in the field for combatting Alzheimer’s disease. With the manipulation of data in plain sight, however, this necessarily put the future of Alzeiheimer’s research at risk where research diverging from amyloid focus had been side-lined or even actively deterred all in order to ensure the primacy of the amyloid hypothesis, which Piller terms the “amyloid mafia.” Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe
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Miriam Grossman
Mar 16, 202501:02:29Tap to summarizeMiriam Grossman MD, board certified in child, adolescent and adult psychiatry, discusses her latest book Lost in Trans Nation: A Child Psychiatrist’s Guide Out of the Madness (2023) and the social epidemic that has hit Western countries—that of the medicalisation of gender, its impacts on children and adolescents across North America, and the wider landscape of gender ideology. Deconstructing the delusion of “gender-affirming care,” Grossman unapologetically critiques one of the greatest medical scandals of the past century that has taken hold of medical institutions across the United States and Canada. Pronouncing what was not so many years ago truisms, Grossman vituperates how there is no “third sex” and “no spectrum of sex” noting the crusade of misinformation that has shattered the lives of many of her teenage and young adult patients in recent years. Having witnessed the devastation that gender ideology has wrought, having shattered the lives of many of her own patients and that of their families, Grossman criticises how age-old stereotypes of gender have been allowed to take root and flourish through the perversion of language and the conterminous invention of a “gender identity,” an ideology which she traces back to John Money, a New Zealand American psychologist who founded the Gender Identity Clinic at Johns Hopkins University. Tracing how gender ideology has captured the medical profession today, Grossman details the medical fraud that has taken hold of our society and institutions and destroyed the somatic and psychological health of thousands putting these individuals at risk of an array of medical conditions due to the effects of synthetic cross-sex hormones. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe
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Kevin Bardosh
Jan 22, 202500:58:38Tap to summarizeKevin Bardosh, Director and Head of Research at Collateral Global, discusses the pandemic response and the uniformity of viewpoint across the planet in what he calls a “totalising vision” of the COVID-19 pandemic response. Discussing his research that addresses both the conversations around the reaction and the social and political factors that fed into the public health response to the pandemic, Bardosh elaborates on the “industry of fear” where public health had a hand in the fearmongering that took place from 2020 onward. Discussing the need for a heterodox analysis, noting the experiences of many scientists who questioned the public policy at the time, Bardosh articulates how the public policy is tasked with making decisions based on making sense of competing interests while also taking decisions based on specific tradeoffs, a framework he maintains which was “completely tossed out the window” during the Covid-19 pandemic. Criticising the suspension of democratic norms, Bardosh observes that those who promoted lockdown policies despite their exaggeration of the dangers of the virus, their fabrications of modelled Covid deaths and who amplified the benefits of lockdown were almost all unilaterally promoted within their institutions while cementing institutional discourse on lockdown with little to no room for heterodox approaches. Bardosh carefully analyses the historical forces that buttressed institutional reactions to the pandemic, from cultural to political to philosophical notions of freedom, all while questioning what would happen were a pathogen with a higher death rate to emerge today. Focussing on his current research in “public health harm,” Bardosh elucidates how public health’s unintended consequences of disruption and harm were dramatic and drastic, classifying the reaction to the 2020 pandemic as an “overreaction.” Bardosh also addresses the quite common human train where individuals in positions of power are reluctant to admit where they got it wrong, referring to the Milgram experiment. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe
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