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
Newest firstAll episodes
Kevin Gosztola
Jul 7, 202401:02:24Tap to summarizeKevin Gosztola, author of Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case Against Julian Assange, discusses the Julian Assange case in light of his recent guilty plea and subsequent release from custody. Noting how this directly impacts press freedom and government secrecy, Gosztola argues that the plea deal struck with Assange is not the primary problem threatening journalism. Instead, he postulates that the threat posed by the Assange case is that he should never have been prosecuted in the first place. Gosztola covers how Assange “pled guilty to journalism” in large part because of the Espionage Act (1917) which has been contemporarily used as a “firm hand of stern repression” (Woodrow Wilson) to go after whistleblowers. At one point in the discussion, Julian Vigo speculates as to whether Assange, had he been free this past decade, might have been able to break the stories on the “gender industry” and the “sterilisation of children” far earlier, given the many journalists and whistleblowers who have been sidelined from their own publications and institutions (eg. Suzanne Moore, David Bell, Sonia Appleby) over this very subject. From there [record scratch], the discussion shifts radically in focus and tenor. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe
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Joti Brar
Jun 19, 202402:11:18Tap to summarizeJoti 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. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe
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Yaakov Shapiro
Jan 18, 202402:07:26Tap to summarizeRabbi 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?” Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe
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Heather Heying
Feb 10, 2021Tap to summarizeHeather Heying is an evolutionary biologist, educator, and author who co-hosts a popular weekly livestream with husband Bret Weinstein on the DarkHorse podcast. In this episode, Heying discusses with Julian Vigo the political political malaise of identity politics, sequential hermaphroditism, current denial science denialism, and our physical disconnection with other humans as she offers solutions to the current era of political intolerance. Get full access to Savage Minds at www.savageminds.co/subscribe
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