1984 Today!

John R. Carlos wants you to think about what it means to be human.

In 2020, after forty-two years as a Royal Australian Air Force Wing Commander, he retired and turned his hand to writing. He has just published Cryonic Dreams: Awakening, the first novel in a science fiction trilogy set in 2169 that explores humanity’s attempts to preserve meaning and agency in the face of tyranny, advanced technology, artificial intelligence, space colonisation, and the all-too-terrestrial struggles for wealth, power, and resources.

With a story set over a hundred and forty years in the future, John needed to envision in great detail how its world would function. He also had to understand how the dystopia he imagined had come into being organically, as a result of what is happening around us now. To do that he adopted a systems approach, mapping out dystopian trends to chart their trajectories and outcomes, a task that led him to have serious concerns about where civilisation is headed.

In this episode, he shares his creative process, his concerns about current socio-political trends, and his wish for humanity as it slouches towards a technologically intrusive, possibly totalitarian future.

You can find Cryonic Dreams: Awakening wherever books are sold and visit his website to explore the lore of the world he is creating.

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Daniele Bolelli is an Italian historian, professor, and author who also hosts the podcasts History On Fire and The Drunken Taoist. He grew up during the Years of Lead, a fraught pair of decades from the 1960s into the 1980s when extreme political violence was common in the Land of Caesar.

The story of the Years of Lead is rich in conspiracy fuel, involving Licio Gelli’s P2 Masonic lodge, NATO’s Operation Gladio, false flag attacks staged by the ‘right’ to discredit the ‘left’, political assassinations, running street battles, and a reductive “red or black” cultural discourse that still echoes in that sun-kissed Mediterranean nation today.

As a professor in California, Daniele sees parallels between Italy back then and what is happening in the United States today. Across the political spectrum, violence is increasingly a feature of American society.

A recent Politico poll found that 55% of Americans expect political violence to increase, with 50% of respondents saying they found it ‘very likely’ or ‘somewhat likely’ that “a political candidate gets assassinated in the next 5 years”.

There is also a generation gap when it comes to political violence, with “[m]ore than one in three Americans under the age of 45” agreeing that violence is justified versus only 7% of those over the age of 65.

In short, Daniele is onto something. Younger generations have a higher tolerance for and a higher expectation of political violence, while the partisanship of America’s two-party system has become supercharged, leading to wild pendulum swings in fear and discontent depending on who is in the White House.

When that is thrown into the mix with “the paranoid style in American politics”, the plate tectonics of economic inequality and catabolic collapse, historic racial wounds, elite nest-feathering, kakistocracy, and interference by foreign actors eager to see America tear itself apart, the result is a dynamic and highly flammable brew.

In this conversation, Daniele and I explore his experience of the Years of Lead, the similarities he sees in the American situation, the nihilism and myopia of cheering on divisive political violence, the decline of personal connection in the digital age, and the ways he stays motivated and positive.

For more, you can read Daniele’s description of the Years of Lead on his Substack, listen to the History On Fire episode about that period, follow him on X, and visit his website.

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Graham Linehan is a five-time BAFTA-winning comedian and writer who created Father Ted, Black Books, and The IT Crowd. He also wrote for The Fast Show, Harry Enfield & Chums, Brass Eye, The Day Today, and Blue Jam, all near-legendary British comedies.

Over the past decade, Graham’s life underwent a total transformation.

After making his views on gender identity public, his work in the UK dried up, colleagues and friends either stepped away from him or openly denounced him, his marriage ended, and he moved to the United States.

From being a pillar of Britain’s creative community, he became a pariah, unemployed and, in the eyes of many within the arts sector, unemployable.

He has described himself as “the most hated man on the internet” and he has been accused, like the Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, of sullying his body of work beloved by fans with an unnecessary, unhealthy, unhelpful focus on gender identity.

In September 2025, on returning to the UK for a trial related to an altercation with a gender identity activist, Graham was arrested at Heathrow Airport by armed police for three posts on X, formerly Twitter. The stress of the experience led to his hospitalisation; he wrote about it all on his Substack.

He joins me in this episode for a free-flowing conversation about how and why he became vocal on the issue of gender identity, the possible roots of his objections, how speech restrictions have affected him, and why limits to free speech sound a death knell for comedy.

For more, you can follow Graham on X and subscribe to his Substack, The Glinner Update.

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Feminists have a saying—we can’t fight sexism if we can’t say what sex is. And that is precisely where we are as a society today—we can’t say what sex is.

Kara Dansky is the author of The Abolition of Sex: How the ‘Transgender’ Agenda Harms Women and Girls and The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls, and she writes The TERF Report on Substack.

She is the former President of the U.S. chapter of Women’s Declaration International, which seeks to promote the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights, and she also served on the board of the Women’s Liberation Front from 2016 to 2020.

A lifelong Democrat and former ACLU lawyer, Kara writes in The Abolition of Sex that the discourse around gender identity presents “a unique challenge for feminists because while we support nonconformity with traditional sex-based stereotypes, we strongly object to the complete obliteration of biological sex.”

Her view, as argued in her book, is that “sex is being abolished as a legal, social and physical category of human beings”, that “the ‘gender identity industry’…is a key component of that effort”, and that this is “detrimental to everyone, but especially to women and girls (i.e., human females).”

In this episode, Kara talks through some examples of what she considers to be the movement to abolish biological sex, details the sources of funding for the gender identity industry, and shares her experiences at the ACLU and on the political left as they changed tack in a way that she felt abandoned her principles.

She sets out her reasoning with patience, good humour, and passion. Regardless of your feelings about gender identity, Kara is worth listening to, whether you agree with her or not.

You can follow Kara on X, read her on Substack, or visit her website.

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In her book The Privacy Pirates: How Your Privacy Is Being Stolen and What You Can Do About It, Dr Leslie Gruis describes the current situation in stark terms:

“If privacy were a patient, it would be in the intensive care unit. It’s not dead, but it is life-threateningly ill.”

Dr Gruis worked at the National Security Agency for thirty years, and her last two assignments were at US Cyber Command and the National Intelligence Council. She was the first president of the NSA’s Women in Mathematics Society, and is a prominent advocate of STEM education for girls.

She joins me in this episode for a conversation about how she started working in intelligence, why she is so concerned about the state of privacy in the United States, the fascinating history of privacy and transparency in American law, and the ongoing tug of war between private technology companies and government.

You can visit her website to find out more about her work, and for links to her books.

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On September 13, central London was taken over by competing gatherings. One, organised by Tommy Robinson, was billed as a free speech festival and national pride event called Unite The Kingdom. The other, March Against Fascism, was put together as a protest against the Robinson rally, with participation from Stand Up To Racism, backed by a coalition of Britain’s unions.

The Metropolitan Police estimate that 150,000 people attended Unite The Kingdom, with 5,000 taking part in the March Against Fascism. The police had planned for the two marches to be kept separate, but due to circumstances unknown at the time of writing, protesters ended up face to face, with unfortunate and predictable consequences.

1984 Today was there to speak with the participants of both events and ask about their reasons for attending. What emerged was a troubling picture of a country in which people of all political affiliations have lost faith, where the incumbent government is disliked equally on both sides of the police cordon, where communication across ideological boundaries is felt by many to be almost impossible.

What seemed to be agreed upon by nearly everyone we spoke with is that “the State is broken”, Prime Minister Keir Starmer is a focal point of discontent, and belief in the possibility of meaningful change is in short supply.

I left with the distinct impression that if only the people who were kind and open enough to speak with me could have the opportunity to speak to one another in the same way, some of the suspicion, division, and animus might be dispelled.

Here’s hoping…

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Michael Box and Patrick Hague are creative partners in EchoEterna Productions and have worked together for almost 20 years as musicians, writers, and filmmakers. They join me to talk about their feature film project SpeakEasy, set “in the near future, where creative freedom is monitored by an oppressive authority class.”

As a lover of cinema, dystopian fiction, and punk rock, it was a special pleasure to take a ride through their imaginations and explore the world-building they engaged in to realise a believable dystopian world for their protagonists, a band called The Riot Police. We also got into their impressions and experiences of present-day America, where living conditions could be encouraging the rise and acceptance of “an oppressive authority class”.

You can listen to a sample track by The Riot Police on Bandcamp, and buy it to support the fundraising for the film.

To help get a sense of the tone they had in mind, I asked Patrick and Michael to each name a punk rock song that gives a flavour of their dystopian world. Michael chose Rise Above by Black Flag, and Patrick chose Full Disclosure by Fugazi.

If you want to find out more about the film, you can follow them on Instagram or visit their website.

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Free speech dies, comedy dies. It’s that simple.

From 1952 to 2018, MAD Magazine published over five hundred regular editions as well as specials and books. In that time, it defined and shaped political satire and social commentary for generations of readers, becoming a cornerstone of American culture without ever taking itself seriously, a true achievement.

Gazing gap-toothed from MAD’s cover was almost always the grinning face of Alfred E. Neuman, whose catchphrase became embedded in American culture: “What, Me Worry?”

The “steady stream of pointed political satire and pure silliness” that MAD delivered to its fans was created by “The Usual Gang of Idiots”, the affectionate term for the writers and cartoonists who populated its office in New York City.

As early as 1959, “The Usual Gang of Idiots” were the subject of a minor diplomatic incident in which a British newspaper attempted to prevent the “highly undesirable” importation of MAD into the UK in a sniffy letter to the US Embassy because of a humorous depiction of the Royal Family.

“[E]very possible attempt should be made to stop this appearing in America no less than in Britain,” wrote Lee Howard, the editor of the Sunday Pictorial. The Department of State wisely advised the embassy in London that “making an issue out of the incident would likely add more grist to the mill”.

From its inception, MAD was at the front of the endlessly evolving and shifting arguments and legal wrangling over censorship, humour, and taste, questions that remain pressing, urgent, and at the centre of what it means to preserve a free society.

Now-former senior editor Joe Raiola worked at MAD “[f]or an embarrassing 33 years”, describing it as “the only place in America where if you mature, you get fired.” In that time, he was credited on over 100 articles and found Joan of Arc in a seafood bisque.

As well as “making funny noises in the hallway” at MAD, in 1993 Joe created and began touring a one-man show called The Joy of Censorship, which he has since performed in 44 states.

Describing himself as “a floundering comedian, comedy writer, speaker and producer”, Joe joins me in this episode to talk about his time at America’s greatest satirical magazine, the absolute necessity of free speech, and the ever-present danger of censorship to comedy and liberty.

It was great fun speaking with him. I hope you enjoy it.

You can experience more of the joy of Joe at joeraiola.com or by joining him on October 5 for “an evening of smart stupidity” at City Winery in New York City.

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Frank Sanazi is a unique comedy character, a tongue-in-cheek mashup of Adolf Hitler and Frank Sinatra described by his creator, the British singer and comedian Pete Cunningham, as “a satirical blitzkrieg blending dark humour, swing music and politically incorrect cabaret”.

The newspaper The Scotsman has called him “brilliantly stupid, fantastically wrong and ridiculously funny”. The comedy blog Chortle considers him “a pleasure uber alles”.

As well as doing solo shows, Frank also leads The Iraq Pack, a gang of crossover crooners including Dean Stalin, Saddami Davis Jr., Osama Bin Crosby, his daughter Nancy Sanazi, and, of course, Diva Braun. Frank has performed internationally, from Austria to Israel, and regularly features at Glastonbury and Bestival in the UK.

His act is a wild freewheeling thumb in the eye to the seriousness with which history’s lunatics and despots have been traditionally accorded, and it cannily highlights something often overlooked about Hitler: He was a performer.

“There’s no doubt about it,” the legendary comedian Mel Brooks told Der Spiegel in 2006. “Hitler worked in the same branch as we do: he created illusions.”

In the same interview, Brooks summed up why mocking the 20th century’s most infamous boogeyman was not only permissible, but necessary: “[B]y using the medium of comedy, we can try to rob Hitler of his posthumous power and myths.”

In this episode, Frank Sanazi joins me to talk about how he conceived and honed his character, how standup comedy has changed over the years he’s been working, and why satire and ridicule are essential tools against tyranny.

You can buy Frank’s albums Mein Way on a Steinway and Songs for Swinging Leaders here. Tickets for his one-hour show at the Edinburgh Fringe (August 1 through 23) are available here. You can also visit his website.

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It’s trite to point out that the internet is an increasingly weird and difficult space to explore. AI-generated ‘slop’ muddies search results and even ends up in published scientific papers. Bots roam social media freely, making it nearly impossible to know whether interactions are organic or automated. Your voice and face can be cloned and reproduced by AI, making security breaches and fraud much more likely.

The response from tech and government is to push for heightened identity verification and so-called “proof of humanity”, with one example being Sam Altman’s WorldCoin project and its iris-scanning Orb.

It didn’t used to be like this. Signing a legal agreement running into the thousands of pages in order to buy a pair of jeans is not normal. A business demanding that you install their app on your phone so it can track your location, spending habits, and browser data is not normal. Being forced into a surveillance dragnet to prove you aren’t a bot is definitely not normal.

Is there a way that technology can protect our civil liberties instead of eroding them?

Can we re-establish privacy as a default setting in the hands of the public or are we past the point of no return?

To examine these questions and more, I spoke with Shady El Damaty, co-founder of the Holonym Foundation, whose mission is the establishment and protection of “natural digital rights for privacy, security, and data ownership”.

One of their projects, Human.Tech, is developing “human-centric technology that fosters freedom, resilience, and opportunity in a connected, borderless digital world.”

Through applied cryptography, they believe they can provide the tools for “digital personhood” in a way that gives the individual control over what data is shared, how, and when.

In 2009, Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google at the time, told CNBC that “if you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.”

In 2006, security expert Bruce Schneier wrote that “[p]rivacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect.”

The tech sector has broadly been on Team Schmidt for a generation. It’s time to hear from Team Schneier before it’s too late.

You can visit human.tech to find out more about Holonym’s work.

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