Savage Minds

Michael Conroy, secondary educator and founder of the training organisation Men At Work, examines the social construction of masculinity and its consequences for boys, men and wider society. Drawing on sixteen years in English secondary schools and work in youth mental health and suicide prevention, he argues that masculinity functions as a set of cultural codes that confer privilege while imposing emotional restriction, competitive aggression and hierarchical dominance. These codes, he contends, are neither natural nor beneficial to males themselves but serve to sustain patriarchal relations and stand in opposition to a fuller, shared humanity. Through structured dialogue with boys and young men, Conroy explores how expectations around clothing, emotional expression, sexuality, risk-taking and violence are absorbed from pornography, media, peers and family, often from a very young age. He links these patterns of socialisation to coercive behaviours, sexual entitlement and resistance to women’s hard-won rights, while insisting that preventive conversation can create space for boys to question inherited scripts and choose more respectful and authentic ways of being.

Joti Brar, political activist, editor, deputy leader of the Workers Party of Britain and co-author of Identity Politics and the Transgender Trend, discusses the links between imperialist endeavours and worker exploitation while historicising the tradeoffs made by the western political elites who granted temporary advances to workers during the post-war boom, to include free education and council housing. Explaining how we inhabit a rawer version of capitalism today with no care for the needs of the poor or workers, Brar compares this period to the Victorian era as workers’ rights are being rescinded, poverty is quickly augmenting and aggressions on the working class are heightening. She also chronicles the fragmentation of working class organisation brought on, in part, by identity politics whose reactionary discourse is dividing the disenfranchised while the corporate world is now taking charge of the mandate of “human liberation” in what Brar deems to be a massive inversion of reality where the ruling class is reversing who is oppressing whom with industry leaders today “preaching at the workers about oppression.” Indicting victim narratives prevalent in the west where “fragile egos” and the focus on language have perfectly driven away any rational and scientific discussion of actual suffering, Briar highlights the real-life dilemmas that women face around the planet who need genuine “safe spaces” for their survival.

Dawn Paley, journalist and author of Drug War Capitalism (2014) and Guerra neoliberal: Desaparición y búsqueda en el norte de México (2020), discusses her research in Latin America drawing parallels between the historical destruction of communities and the present-day environmental and social destruction amassed by Canadian mining companies in Argentina. Noting that the problems within the extractive industries were only part of the problem, Paley elucidates how transnational companies in Mexico and Colombia take advantage of the structural problems created by the drug war to amass their fortunes while dividing communities, polluting the ecology and taking control of communal land inhabited by indigenous people, peasants, and the urban poor. Paley brings into the discussion the grassroots organising within Mexico which is fighting against the phenomenon of disappearance in the city of Torreón, Coahuila underscoring how disappearance is both a material and semantic removal of life.

Mark Crispin Miller, Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University, discusses his current lawsuit against 19 of his academic colleagues for libel and the neoliberal machinery aiming to take down anyone who does not espouse certain political views within media, powerful institutions and universities alike. Detailing the recent history at New York University, where he experienced a “mobocracy” of various accusations over the course of 2020, Miller elaborates on how last fall he became the focus of an “expedited review” of his “conduct” for having asked his students in a course on propaganda to question the science behind COVID-19 mask mandates. Contending that we look beyond propaganda stating that “propaganda’s obverse is always censorship” with the ideal of dominating the subject’s “heart and mind completely” without argument, Miller analyses how the neoliberal left today only recognises propaganda when it epitomises a narrative with which it disagrees despite its reach going well beyond the political binaries. Taking aim at the censorious academic climate today, where the “hate speech” and “micro-aggressions and aggressions” of which he found himself accused, Miller elucidates how the left is couching disagreement as a quasi-criminal act as it carries out a Gleichscheltung in complete defiance of the basic principles of freedom of speech while advancing some extremely regressive notions of identity politics as “progressive.”

Author and human rights lawyer Dan Kovalik discusses his soon-to-be-released book Cancel This Book: The Progressive Case Against Cancel Culture while addressing the adjacent problems today within the left to include the ostensibly “progressive” policies around virus mitigation that dismiss the needs of survival for the poor and the working class. Citing longstanding problems within American politics, Kovalik analyses the Democratic party’s repudiation of the working class for several decades while noting its gravitation towards the wealthy and notes how lockdown perfectly materialises the class divide while sweeping aside all the economic issues of socialised healthcare. Devoting part of his discussion to the 1,000 strikes of workers across the United States last year, Kovalik notes how class is now a verboten topic both within the media and within the foremost socialist organisation in the country, which has focused its energies on identity politics in recent years.

In this episode, “ex-scientist” Andy Lewis discusses his Quackometer, originally an AI-like experiment to see if a machine could recognise pages on the internet that could differentiate between the uncritical acceptance and evidence-based evaluation. Describing his work in advancing scepticism, Lewis details the “trouble” he has created by examining Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy, homoeopathy and the gender debate. Lewis notes how much of the scientific hokum espoused by various movements means that ideas or treatments are wrapped up with the person (the practitioner), thus becoming part of a larger identity politics usually found within the privileged classes, as these “luxury beliefs” are part of business models that thrive on quackery. Lewis also discusses his work in libel law reform, elaborating how lawsuits claiming libel have been historically claimant-friendly in the UK and noting how such threats have resulted in the chilling of public debate even within the organised sceptical world.

Renée Gerlich is a writer and artist based in New Zealand who discusses her political activism around women’s rights and feminist politics today. Detailing the assimilation of the left by liberalism, Gerlich notes how liberal leftism is fundamentally a political vehicle of men who are not served by the right while underscoring how the rise of pornography is not coincidental to the neoliberal project of railroading of women’s voices and bodies. Gerlich notes the “land grab” by the neoliberal left which seeks to control women’s bodies through the medicalisation of gender by Big Pharma and the prostitution and pornography lobby, and she criticises the ethos of “individual freedom” that disregards the lives of the collective. Describing internal hierarchies within feminism, she discusses her having been cast out of a feminist group and the changes that she underwent as a result. Gerlich explains how the essence of transgender ideology has taken root through the isolation and punishment of women utilising social censure and corporeal punishment while analysing how this “seed” has taken root within some feminist groups that punish certain women who are not interested in curating the feelings of men and contending that women need to assert their boundaries uncompromisingly.

In this episode, columnist and writer Suzanne Moore discusses female desire, the prescriptive nature of gender today and the way in which we are required to submit to ideology that goes against materialist analyses and reality—to include the materiality of the female body. Moore situates the current ideological trend that requires the subject to abandon reason within the larger and theoretical landscape of Prince, Foucault, Freud, and Riviere while vituperating an ideology that was born from theories entirely unhinged from Marxism and historical materialism. Querying Butler’s work on gender, Moore asks, “If gender is a performance, why are we compelled to keep repeating that performance?” Moore also elaborates on her departure from The Guardian noting that many writers on the left are finding their journalistic “homes” in more conservative publications due to the ideological drive within the left. Offering glimpses of hope for the future, Moore notes how academia has been recycling the same theorists for decades as it is currently stuck within a discursive aporia while proposing that good journalism venture into difficult places and subjects.

Claire Fox, director of the Academy of Ideas and member of the House of Lords as Baroness Fox of Buckley, discusses her participation in the recent debate in the House of Lords regarding the absence of the word “women” in the Ministerial and other Maternity Allowances Act, addressing the double standards and hypocrisy in contemporary politics which is attempting to “nod through” legislation that erases all reference to biological reality. Fox also talks about how public discourse has become so beholden to trans ideology that local authorities and venues have been cancelling events and branding women with epithets. Analysing how leaders like Corbyn and Biden have not understood the significance of gender identity, suggesting that they have been badly advised on this issue, Fox contends that these leaders nodded through some regressive ideas presented to them as “progressive” by those behind the scenes who are “hanging on the coat-tails” of the left while not having to be minimally transparent about their political projects.

Joanna Williams, writer and founder of the think tank Cieo and director of the Freedom, Democracy and Victimhood Project at Civitas, examines the transformation of left-wing politics and higher education in Britain. She rejects the notion of a coordinated Gramscian long march through the institutions, arguing instead that traditional academic gatekeepers abandoned the defence of knowledge and scholarship, leaving the door open for identitarian ideologies. Williams contends that identity politics has enabled middle-class progressives to sideline the working class while claiming the mantle of oppression through race, gender and sexuality. Universities, she observes, now equip students with the latest terminological distinctions that serve as markers of social superiority and tools of divide-and-rule. Turning to the pandemic, she criticises the left’s framing of lockdown as a selfless act, which pathologised those facing economic hardship or demanding the right to work while elevating selected protests as morally pure. Williams highlights how public debate has become dominated by a narrow stratum of middle-class voices amplified by social media, calling for the recovery of broader democratic participation and the reintroduction of ordinary people’s experiences into political and cultural discussion.