Savage Minds

Dora Moutot, journalist, Instagrammer (@tasjoui), and author of Mâle-baisées, talks about patriarchy and feminism today through a critique of the language of identity and queer politics being pushed by the left within France. Delving into the politics of medicine and the divide between how men and women are offered unequal access to medicine, Moutot chronicles how men who claim to be women will readily receive medical interventions, while women suffering from conditions like endometriosis were only covered by the state one month ago, with many other conditions falling outside state funding. Moutot also covers her views on the gender identity movement, political lesbianism, and how non-Western cultures approach death while offering a window into how to understand the popular media messages and literature regarding women and feminism.

Sarah Haider, a Pakistani-American writer, public speaker, and political activist, discusses religious dissent and her exit from Islam while elaborating on how girls’ and women’s rights under Islam are negatively affected. Noting the patterns and political effects of religion in the Arabo-Islamic world, Haider critiques how the left has consistently moved to any eschew criticism of this religion by pretending that any critique is necessarily a generalisation or a result of colonialism. Haider maintains that with such rationale, nothing would be analysable since scrutiny depends upon noticing patterns and specific paradigms. Discussing the parallels between the repression of women’s freedom in the Muslim world and women in the West who are today hounded for pushing back on gender identity, Haider examines how women’s rights around the topic of material reality are being restricted in the West through the “derangement” and enforcement of gender ideology that “has the potential to undo some of the gains of feminists in the West.”

Jenni Swayne, a former teacher, discusses her work as a women’s rights activist and her recent arrest for stickering in Newport, Gwent (Wales). Elaborating on how the police arrested her on suspicion of having committed a “hate crime” (a public order offence), after which time she was held in a cell for ten hours, Swayne details the treatment by the police, including the police interrogation and the limitations put upon her until the bail is over in a month’s time when she will learn if she will be charged or cautioned or if the case will be dropped entirely. One of the stickers she posted reads, “No child is born in the wrong body: humans never change sex.” Another found by the police, who searched her house, removing several sheets of stickers, reads: “3+ women killed by men each week: Domestic violence kills.” As Harry Miller puts it, Swayne is being put through a system where “the process becomes the punishment.”

Batya Ungar-Sargon, deputy opinion editor of Newsweek, discusses her latest book, Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy (2021) outlines how long before “fake news” became the calling card of the right, Americans had already lost faith in their news media. Noting how during the 20th century journalists used to live among the working class, Ungar-Sargon reveals how American journalism has undergone a status revolution over the twentieth century—from a blue-collar trade to an elite profession today firmly cemented within the well-rewarded and often high-profile knowledge-industry labour sector. Covering the conterminous rise of the Internet, the implosion of local news, and the nationalisation of America’s elite news media, Ungar-Sargon notes how journalists became both affluent and ideological, which contributed to their ability to de-platform working-class voices through the employment of obscure academic language and identity politics. She highlights how the working class has been rendered untouchable while the pressures of the digital media landscape align corporate incentives with newsroom crusades of wokery while the poor flounder under the goals of neoliberalism and meritocracy. Vigourously opposing the moral panic around racism, Ungar-Sargon elaborates on how neoliberal media covers up the economic interests of the elite with a “patina of social justice” while abandoning the American descendants of slaves.

John McWhorter, associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University discusses his latest book, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America (2021). Examining how “anti-racism” has become a religion in all but name that treats black Americans as simpletons despite being billed as “anti-racist,” McWhorter states that “what started out as a socio-political orientation has become a foundation of people’s identity…and something of an obsession,” pointing out that this religion demands that the masses suspend logic while it also pushes a narrative of moral purity. McWhorter notes that this religion commands the subject to pretend that nothing has changed all that much for black Americans, something McWhorter deems “anti-empirical” noting that today “it’s racially progressive to pretend that no real progress ever happens” which is anathema to reality.

Jeffrey A. Tucker, founder of the Brownstone Institute, discusses pandemic mitigation measures in the US and around the planet that he has previously termed “central planning in the 21st century.” Detailing how governments and the media have failed to transmit accurate information regarding at-risk demographic groups for COVID-19 while failing to address how pathogens are part of our biological world, Tucker delineates how lockdowns “only prolong the pain at best.” Highlighting the current social segregation within many countries where vaccine passports have been rolled out and virus mandates brought in, Tucker analyses the political theatre set up to make the public believe that they are “safer” when in reality there is no data to demonstrate that masks or Plexiglas dividers have served any function in virus mitigation. Maintaining that these devices, among other virus mitigation measures, exist as liturgies to demonstrate the citizen’s willingness to participate in what he calls an “obedience test,” Tucker argues that our humanity has been taken away from us and that our task is now to take it back.

Sophie Scott, CBE, Director of the Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London and a leading researcher on the neurobiology of human vocal communication, examines the deepening crisis of public trust in science amid rising individualism that renders group-level biological findings increasingly unpalatable. She argues that science has always unsettled people by revealing unwelcome truths, yet the exponential growth of research has strained peer review to breaking point, making it harder to secure rigorous evaluation and prompting the recent practice of paying reviewers. Scott notes that social media has empowered non-experts to demand absolute certainty while treating themselves as authorities, a stance fundamentally at odds with science as a provisional, self-correcting process that is always unfinished. Drawing a parallel with religion, she observes humanity’s enduring need for clear boundaries and authoritative answers when traditional sources of meaning recede. Against this backdrop Scott explores her own research on laughter, treating it as an ancient play signal found across species, a low-cost mechanism for rapid social bonding and group cohesion, and a behaviour whose contagious quality marks in-group status. She examines how children slowly acquire the complex social rules distinguishing laughter that includes from laughter that ridicules, how laughter can erupt in moments of extreme stress or shock as an attempt to reframe threat as play, and why the historically ambiguous figure of the jester or trickster makes comedy a perennial lightning rod for offense. In the current climate, she suggests, the targeting of humour reflects both the amplification of individual grievance through social media and a renewed willingness to police voices, particularly women’s, that refuse to conform.

Mattias Desmet, Professor of Clinical Psychology in the Department of Psychology and Educational Sciences of Ghent University, discusses how the handling of the coronavirus pandemic has lacked a rational approach such that measures used to mitigate the transmission of the virus may potentially claim more victims than the virus itself. Examining how mass formation functions within the current socio-political situation of a global pandemic whereby the political “solutions” offered up result in people being unable to take any critical distance from what is happening, Desmet elaborates on the current atomisation of the individual upon which totalitarian power relies and notes how mass formation emerges from the “belly of the population”. Desmet analyses how large-scale mass formation emerges in society when specific conditions are met—social isolation, the lack of meaning in life, free-floating anxiety, and frustration and aggression—all interacting to create a situation whereby society is extremely vulnerable to the rise of a totalitarian state. Desmet details mass formation, describing how a narrative is circulated about an anxiety (e.g., a virus) while also providing a strategy (e.g., lockdowns) for dealing with the collective anxiety over a global pandemic such that the previous free-floating anxieties of the masses permit the subject to connect to the collective object of anxiety, the virus. In this way populations are willing to participate in the strategy of the pandemic such that their free-floating anxieties and frustrations find grounding in a real anxiety, thus creating a new—if not problematic—social bond and meaning-making where the aggressions and frustrations are now directed at those who refuse to participate in this mass formation. Desmet compares this process to hypnosis, whereby all of society’s psychological energy is directed at the pandemic while the masses are uniquely focused upon the victims that the virus might claim while they are not at all concerned with the potentially greater collateral damage of the measures they support.

Arun Dohle, Director of Adoptee Rights Council and Against Child Trafficking, discusses how adoption is never conducted in the best interests of children but instead protects the interests of adoption agencies, adoptive parents and other vested organisations. Covering some of the legal quagmires between international conventions like the Hague Adoption Convention and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, national laws, and inter-country adoption, Dohle vituperates the practice of adoption, considering it a form of child trafficking, replete with human rights abuses to both the adoptee and parents as the state, private organisations, and western agents take it upon themselves to offer their economic advantage as the “better life” for the impoverished child from situations—both familial and national—perceived to be perennially “in need” of adoption.

Joachim Allgaier, Professor of Communication and Digital Society at Fulda University of Applied Sciences in Germany, discusses his research on communication and cooperation in the digital society, including disinformation and conspiracy theories in online media. Beginning with his 2019 study, “Science and Environmental Communication on YouTube,” Allgaier explains his research project wherein he analysed 200 YouTube videos related to climate change, concluding that videos peddling conspiracy theories received the highest number of views. Discussing conspiracy videos from migration to COVID, Allgaier discusses how the various algorithms from YouTube to search engines navigate the user through their system, giving the illusion that the user alone controls her own journey through online sites. Discussing the spread of misinformation within social media, Allgaier chimes in on how the pandemic has affected the proliferation of conspiracy theories and videos on platforms whose existence depends upon peddling addictive visual input, such as TikTok, where younger generations find life offline as “exotic” and where binge-watching is now a social norm, something he categorises as both interesting and worrying.