Quillette Cetera

Danielle Haas spent almost 14 years as a senior editor at Human Rights Watch, overseeing the organisation’s thematic and geographic research. In November 2023, she left—and in an exit email to colleagues, she set out her concerns about the rigour of the organisation’s work on Israel. Since then, dozens of current and former staff from across the sector have come forward with similar accounts. Together they founded EiGHT, an insider-led initiative pushing for accountability in the human rights and humanitarian world, which this year published a report drawing on testimony from more than 70 people across nine major organisations.

Danielle joins Zoe Sankey to discuss how NGO reports actually get made, who reviews them before they go out, what happens to staff who don’t toe the ideological line, and why she believes the sector needs independent outside scrutiny. For more from Danielle, read her recent Quillette essay, “J.K. Rowling vs. Amnesty.”

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Zineb Riboua is a research fellow at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East and founder of its China in MENA Project. She joins Zoe Sankey to discuss Iran, the Houthis, Israel, Turkey, Islamism, China’s influence in the Middle East, and the growing ideological divide between the West and its opponents.

Why is Iran escalating from a position of weakness? What do the Houthis actually want? And how does the ideology of third-worldism connect Islamists with parts of the Western left?

Riboua explains Iran’s strategy of “buying time”, the impact of sanctions and the naval blockade, China’s role as a source of support for Tehran, and the Houthis’ search for new patrons—including their growing interest in al-Shabaab. She also discusses Morocco-Israel normalisation, the changing balance of power in the Middle East, Turkey and Erdoğan’s ambitions, and the prospects for Syria-Israel normalisation.

The conversation then turns to Europe and the West: why some young North African men become radicalised after migrating to Europe, the spread of Islamist and anti-Western ideas, and the rise of third-worldism as a political framework.

Finally, Riboua discusses the rise of AI doomerism, China’s role in the debate, the politics of degrowth and environmentalism, declining fertility in the Middle East, and what demographic change means for the future of the region and the West.

Zineb Riboua: https://zinebriboua.com

Read Quillette: https://quillette.com

00:00 Introduction to Zineb Riboua and the geopolitical context

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Richard Hanania is a political scientist and president of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology. He spent about a decade as one of the most influential voices on the online right — first writing pseudonymously in the alt-right, later as one of the intellectual influences on the Silicon Valley tech right. Then he watched his own ideas take power, and changed his mind.

His new book is Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster. Kakistocracy is Greek for rule by the worst. The argument inside it is one very few people are willing to make right now: that Western elites are not overrated but underrated, and that our institutions work far better than we give them credit for.

Zoe and Richard get into Australia's populist surge, what actually makes someone an elite, the backlash against skilled immigration and the H-1B fight in the States, whether Sydney's housing crisis is really about immigration, and what frightens him most — which turns out to have a lot to do with fertility.

Also: is Zoe an elite? Are you? There's a test.

00:00 Who is Richard Hanania

02:27 The case that elites are underrated

04:50 What actually makes someone an elite

07:04 Do people care about the truth?

08:45 When federal bureaucrats became shitposters

09:38 Populism as rule by the id

11:33 Australia's populist surge

15:57 The awkward part: immigration

18:45 Australian vs American assimilation

21:46 Is Pauline Hanson a serious person?

23:33 Getting elites to take immigration seriously

26:06 Cofnas, Arday and academic gatekeeping

30:03 The H-1B backlash explained

32:58 Zero immigration and the fertility problem

34:05 Anti-Indian sentiment in Australia

35:40 Is Sydney's housing crisis about immigration?

38:30 The chapter Zoe couldn't finish

39:12 Are you an elite? Take the test

41:28 The Manosphere, and what a "chud" is

44:14 Nine-fifty in the morning in Sydney

46:32 The thinkers behind the book

48:15 AI, fertility, and what frightens him most

50:50 Why nobody's pairing up

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Author David Maywald joins Zoe Sankey to discuss the female wage premium among young Australians, the collapse of male rites of passage, and why boys are told from primary school that masculinity is a problem to be managed.

His essay for Quillette: https://quillette.com/2026/05/05/the-emerging-female-wage-premium/ The Relentless War on Masculinity: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1764339703?tag=quillette-20

00:00 Young women are out-earning young men

04:48 Why boys never got the same lift

11:14 The post-war family was the anomaly

15:12 Childlessness and a stake in the next generation

22:03 The rites of passage boys no longer have

28:49 Why it's rites, plural

36:58 100 of the Best Books for Men

45:21 Where the bias against boys begins

48:20 Why only 17% of primary teachers are men

55:19 What young men actually think

1:00:01 Abbie Chatfield and the podcast that started this one

1:10:12 Male psychology: the next frontier

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Zoe Sankey sits down with Crémieux (the pen name of researcher Jordan Lasker), the formerly anonymous X writer-researcher whose data threads on genetics, demographics and metabolic drugs have drawn a following of more than 260,000 — including some very prominent readers.

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Rachel Moiselle is a PhD candidate at Trinity College Dublin and one of Ireland's most visible activists against antisemitism. In this episode of Quillette Cetera, she joins Zoe Sankey to discuss what it's like to defend a community of roughly 3,000 Jews in a country that largely denies it has an antisemitism problem at all.

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Rachel Moiselle is a PhD candidate at Trinity College Dublin and one of Ireland's most visible activists against antisemitism. In this episode of Quillette Cetera, she joins Zoe Sankey to discuss what it's like to defend a community of roughly 3,000 Jews in a country that largely denies it has an antisemitism problem at all.

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NGOs have a great deal of influence over our lives. This episode uncovers the hidden power structures behind the world's most powerful non-governmental organisations — and why they deserve far more scrutiny than they get.

Zoe Sankey sits down with Gerald Steinberg — founder of NGO Monitor and professor emeritus of political science at Bar-Ilan University — to discuss the evolution of NGOs from altruistic civil society groups into political powerhouses, the funding sources and transparency issues within organisations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and how they've come to shape the UN and international policy on Israel.

"Ken Roth is hugely powerful as an individual." "Their reports often lack substantive verification." Gerald pulls back the curtain on how civil society was hijacked by political and ideological agendas, case studies of NGOs with alleged ties to governments and terrorist organisations, the UN accreditation process and what it really takes to get a seat at the table, and the power dynamics inside these organisations' leadership.

00:00 Introduction to Gerald Steinberg and His Work

02:56 Understanding NGOs: Definitions and Historical Context

06:07 The Evolution and Influence of NGOs

09:06 The Political Landscape of NGOs

12:05 NGO Monitor: Purpose and Function

15:00 The Power Dynamics within NGOs

18:06 Whistleblowers and Internal Critiques

20:52 The Future of NGOs and Their Impact

31:46 The Influence of NGOs on Global Politics

35:14 The Halo Effect: Media and NGO Relationships

40:27 The Writing and Impact of NGO Reports

50:12 The Future of NGOs and the UN

57:49 Zionism: Misunderstood and Maligned

Read Gerald Steinberg's full body of work at Quillette:

👉 https://quillette.com/author/gerald-steinberg/

Resources:

— NGO Monitor: https://www.ngo-monitor.org

— UN Watch: https://www.unwatch.org

— The War of Return by Einat Wilf: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1594039624?tag=quillette-20

Follow NGO Monitor:

— Twitter/X: https://x.com/NGOMonitor

— Website: https://www.ngo-monitor.org

Subscribe to Quillette Cetera for more fearless conversations wherever you get your podcasts, and head to Quillette.com for the stories mainstream media won't touch.

#NGO #HumanRights #Amnesty #UnitedNations #Israel #Quillette

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What does it mean for a civilisation to turn against itself? In this episode, Quillette's Zoe Sankey speaks with philosopher and author Benedict Beckeld — whose 2019 Quillette essay on oikophobia remains one of our site's most popular pieces — about the recurring historical phenomenon he has spent his career documenting: the tendency of successful Western societies to denigrate their own culture, institutions, and inheritance.

Drawing on his book Oikophobia: Our Western Self-Hatred, published by Cornell University Press, Beckeld traces the pattern from ancient Athens and Imperial Rome to contemporary Europe and the Anglosphere, arguing that cultural self-repudiation is not a modern aberration but a predictable feature of prosperous, secure civilisations. The conversation ranges widely: the assimilability of Islam, the distinction between monoethnicity and monoculturalism, the demographic significance of Israel, the theological differences between the three Abrahamic religions, and the question of whether the West can recover its civilisational confidence before external pressures force the issue.

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Hava Mendelle defies easy categorisation. Openly gay and proudly Jewish, she is a fifteen-year Australian Army veteran, emergency department nurse, published author, and co-founder of Minority Impact — a coalition of Australian minorities united in their opposition to Islamic radicalism and far-left extremism. She writes for The Spectator Australia, The Times of Israel, and The Jewish Independent, and has been making waves on social media for her unflinching commentary on antisemitism, the activist left, and the slow erosion of Australian national identity.In this conversation with Quillette's Zoe Sankey, Hava traces a remarkable personal journey — from an orthodox Jewish childhood and boarding school in Israel, to climate activism and Marxist study groups at university, to her current role as one of Australia's most clear-eyed critics of the movements she once moved in. They discuss the red-green alliance, the activists behind the Gaza flotilla, the radicalisation of the Australian Greens, why the United Nations deserves far more scepticism than it receives, and what October 7th changed — for Hava personally, and for Jewish Australians more broadly

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