Savage Minds

Nick Cleveland-Stout, a Research Associate in the Democratizing Foreign Policy program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, discusses his research into Israel’s having hired a conservative-aligned firm, Clock Tower X LLC, led by former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale, to create websites and content designed to train AI models like ChatGPT with pro-Israel messaging aimed primarily at Gen Z audiences. Discussing how Israel is also paying a cohort of 14-18 social media influencers around $7,000 per post, Cleveland-State observes how none of these influencers are neither registering under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) nor are they marking their social media posts as being distributed on behalf of Israel. Cleveland-Stout assesses how Parscale, having previously engaged the services of the microtargeting firm Cambridge Analytica, is influencing how AI GPT models like ChatGPT are being trained to frame topics and respond to them on behalf of Israel. Cleveland-Stout considers how Larry Ellison is poised to establish a media dynasty with his recent purchase of CBS News, of which his son David has taken control, while Ellison is planning a bid for CNN’s parent company, as well as Trump having tapped him to purchase TikTok. All this in addition to Ellison having donated $16.6 million in 2017 to Friends of the IDF, which was the largest-ever donation to the organisation. Cleveland-Stout also details his research into how tens of millions of dollars have been flooding American think tanks directly from foreign governments and defence contractors, with the hope of influencing the analysis of these think tanks, which usually are rubber-stamped as “objective analysis” and who are frequently invited onto legacy media programmes to disseminate their research as “experts.”

Charles Derber, Professor of Sociology at Boston College, discusses his latest book Bonfire: American Sociocide, Broken Relations, and the Quest for Democracy (Routledge, 2025) and why sociocide is a most relevant and pressing societal issue facing our societies, what Derber views as a collective suicide of society by the “we” and the rise of the “me” superceding all social connections. Covering the disappearance of labour unions and their participation in the United States, Derber details the vanishing of vital social spaces, such as family and work, resulting in the breakdown of social relations and a conterminous increase in authoritarianism. Historicising the sociopathy of early American capitalism with the rise of the “robber barons” such as John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, and Andrew Carnegie, Derber notes how capitalism skewed society’s dominant values towards the antisocial, leading to the breakdown of society. Derber also notes how, despite the exploitative nature of employment throughout the 19th century, workers could count on a certain measure of continuity. With the rise of neoliberalism and Big Tech in the late twentieth century, Derber details how today’s worker exploitation by far surpasses the exploitation of previous eras, as the employment relationship today is now largely contingent, with workers burning out much more quickly whilst being paid less than survival wages, making the exploitation of the 19th century look almost desirable by comparison.

Gilbert Achcar, Emeritus Professor at SOAS, University of London, discusses his latest book, The Gaza Catastrophe: The Genocide in World-Historical Perspective (2025), while also analysing the violence and scope of Israel’s response to 7 October 2023, to include the clearly stated genocidal intention by Israeli leaders. Covering how the IDF (Israeli Defence Forces) started to flatten Gaza with 1-tonne bombs dropped on urban settings with the end goal of killing tens of thousands of people with no regard for civilian lives, Achcar notes how the Israeli government seized the opportunity of 7 October in order to effect its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Historicising the US-Israel relationship, Achcar chronicles how Israel did not always have a strategic alliance with the United States, but that this alliance grew sharply in the mid-1960s just as the US was losing ground in the Middle East due to the rise of Arab nationalism and Israel’s blow to Egypt and Syria during the Six-Day War. Achcar examines the deterioration of Israel’s image on the international stage from its invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the First Intifada in 1987, the Second Intifada in the 2000s, and 7 October 2023, while he elucidates how the Zionist movement has resorted to the instrumentalisation of the Holocaust and false accusations of antisemitism to deflect criticisms of its genocidal actions.

In this episode, Joti Brar, chair of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist–Leninist CPGB-ML), discusses the compassionless media coverage of the genocide in Gaza and the obfuscation of the horrors of the siege in Gaza, much less the fact that contrary to legacy media, the violence has gone on for far longer than two years. Similarly, workers of the world recognise the pervasiveness of similar propaganda within their own trade unions which are often complicit with the bourgeois propaganda of the ruling elite. As a result, workers today, Brar relates, feel powerless in the absence of strong leadership within their unions. Stressing the need for workers to start making demands of their unions and governments, Brar runs through a list of demands upon which we must all insist, from the breaking of links with the pseudo-leftist parties such as the Labour Party in the UK or the Democratic Party in the US, to refusing to allow the state to oversee the running and organisation of unions, and the building up of strike funds. Brar also notes how workers are increasingly disenfranchised and angry as governments promote culture wars and tribalism (eg. climate change, immigration, and gender ideology) in order to pivot workers against each other, while media and politicians collude with each other, promoting one side as wrong, the other as right, leading populations to bypass reason and to identify with the ruling class. Brar also chronicles the root problems of mass migration, a phenomenon primarily caused by wars and the follow-up looting process promoted by Western nations, all while the imperialist class benefits from paying the bare minimum in immigrant wages while driving a wedge between members of the domestic working class and the immigrant working class, creating an anti-migrant fear. Covering the positive influence of her father, Harpal Brar, on her political education, Brar historicises mid-twentieth century Marxist organisation within Britain in which both her father and mother participated.

Nina Power, writer and editor, discusses the collapse of the left-right divide that has characterised the contemporary era of political thought, along with the exhaustion of concepts that have plagued Western discourse. Analysing the “perpetual present” where hyperbole dominates mainstream discussions, such that “Nazi” and “fascist” are lazily involved to such a degree that these terms and their signified have become virtually meaningless, Power notes the political divide today, which is drawn between those who stand on principle and those who do not. In an era where asking certain questions will mark the subject, Power analyses the mechanisms within society today that have vested interests in repressing free speech, such that today approximately thirty people a day are arrested within the UK for their written words and even their thoughts (for praying outside abortion clinics). Power notes the current cultural focus upon semiotic violence that punishes the subject more severely than actual violence, while observing that this “semiotic psychosis” lends more weight to words than to reality and truth, fomenting a “conceptual, abstract terror.” Weighing in on those who have engaged in impassioned speech, such as the online post made by Lucy Connolly in the wake of the Southport killings which led to her imprisonment and an ensuing row over free speech in the UK, Power questions the lack of clemency for those who have been caught up in the legal clash between laws that ostensibly guarantee freedom of expression and opposing laws which denote certain speech as “hate speech.”

In this episode, Charles LeBaron, a former Center for Disease Control (CDC) epidemiologist, discusses his recent book, Greed to Do Good: The Untold Story of CDC's Disastrous War on Opioids: A CDC Physician's Personal Account (Amplify Publishing, 2024). LeBaron discusses the nationwide opioid crisis which has left, over the past two decades, a million Americans dead from opioid overdoses while noting how each year there are now twice as many deaths from overdoses as from breast cancer or colon cancer and more deaths than from automobiles and firearms combined. Noting how the implementation of CDC interventions had the paradoxical effect of “turbocharging the opioid epidemic,” LeBaron carefully analyses what went wrong, the gross improprieties conducted by Big Pharmaceutical companies, and how bad policy led to the opioid crisis in America. A physician who has seen first-hand the impact of opioids on the poor populations he treated in Appalachia and in prison, LeBaron sheds light on the class and status discriminations that are part and parcel of the wrong-minded approach to drug addiction in the United States that has riddled the country’s history. Fundamentally, LeBaron argues for a better and more scientific approach to addressing the crisis while detailing the country’s dysfunctional system in handling the crisis and analysing some working models that might actually improve the situation.

In questa puntata, Olivia Guaraldo, professoressa ordinaria di filosofia politica presso il Dipartimento di Scienze Umane all’Università di Verona, discute il libro scritto in collaborazione con Adriana Cavarero, Donna si nasce (2024), che offre uno sguardo al femminismo e ai concetti di “donna” e “gender” da Simone de Beauvoir ai giorni nostri. Guaraldo storicizza concetti come “patriarcato” e “differenza sessuale”, soffermandosi su come queste valenze siano state mutuate dall’antropologia culturale, assorbite dal femminismo e poi complicate con l’introduzione dell’“identità di gender” nei paesi prevalentemente anglofoni. Analizzando il discorso dei “diritti” in Occidente a partire dalla Rivoluzione francese, Guaraldo discute di come il pensiero moderno sia stato plasmato da un orizzonte simbolico in cui i soggetti maschili erano di fatto soggetti di “liberazione”, mentre le donne venivano invariabilmente eclissate. Approfondendo il paradosso secondo cui i diritti “universali” concessi nel corso del XVIII e XIX secolo erano specificamente rivolti agli uomini, mai all’altra metà della popolazione umana, dove gli uomini erano “la misura dell’umano”, Guaraldo evidenzia anche alcune delle differenze tra il femminismo italiano e francese e il femminismo anglo-americano, dove il primo presenta un femminismo della differenza e il secondo un femminismo dell’“uguaglianza”, e dove i diritti conquistati sono invariabilmente pagati con il prezzo dell’“assimilazione” postulata all’interno di un “modello neutro” in cui i diritti della persona vengono assunti sul corpo (ad esempio, diritti riproduttivi, accesso all’aborto, ecc.) e dove le conquiste sono sempre parziali. Guaraldo sottolinea anche l’attuale paradosso socio-politico in cui il linguaggio della differenza e del gender, così come inscritto dal poststrutturalismo francese nella seconda metà del XX secolo, ha portato a un nuovo dogmatismo e a una rigidità sociale tale per cui le giovani generazioni di donne si stanno opponendo al definirsi “donne” a causa della deliberata diluizione del significato del linguaggio.

Christian Parenti, Professor of Economics at John Jay College, City University of New York and author of Radical Hamilton: Economic Lessons from a Misunderstood Founder (Verso, 2020), returns to the show with a searing analysis of the US political scene and various international theatres. Kicking off with an evaluation of the Trump v2.0 administration, Parenti reviews some of Trump’s pre-presidential promises, from the Jeffrey Epstein file dump that was vastly redacted to Trump’s enthralment with the Israeli lobby. Delving into the Israeli lobby, deeply entrenched within the US government, Parenti notes that this “lobby” is much more than simply monetary, and suggests that it is much more entrenched within the US political system. Parenti also develops a deeper examination of the war in Ukraine and the “demonology” of Russia within legacy media that has taken up the Cold War era model of anti-Communism by eliding the fact that some of Ukraine’s oblasts (Donetsk and Luhansk) are still occupied by Ukrainian Nazis. Observing how the domestic pressure upon Putin is coming from the Communists and the far-right parties, both highly critical of Putn’s longstanding abandonment of the Russian people who have been militarily occupied by Ukrainian forces wearing swastikas, Parentis evidences the machinations within the US proxy war against Russia from its provisions of munitions to Ukraine to the Ukrainian government’s banning the Russian language in 2019 and Law 5371 which denies unionisation, exempting workers in companies with fewer than 250 employees from the coverage of collective agreements. Parenti also discusses the situation of free speech in the United States that is currently being eroded, specifically regarding any criticism of both the Israeli government and Zionism, as he explores the broader questions of academic freedom and anti-war sentiment within American universities where today the managerial class of university administrators within these institutions outnumbers faculty while itinerant workers with PhDs, the adjunct class, provide approximately 78% of all university teaching.

Ilan Pappé, Israeli historian and professor of history at the University of Exeter, discusses the tragic situation of Palestinians who, for many decades, have been the circumstantial victims of a larger global coalition because their existence was “in the way” of other geo-political machinations. Giving a brief history of Zionism in Palestine, Pappé outlines the early alliances made between various groups, all composed of different members with entirely different motives—often contradictory reasons, to include the cooperation between secular nationalist and religious anti-Semites—who came together with one common goal: to see Palestine as a Jewish state and to expunge Palestinians from their land. Mapping out the various forces that wished to symbolically and/or physically disappear Palestinians, Pappé notes how Christian Zionists and British imperialists weaponised Zionism and Islamophobia to change the demographics of the region while later secular Jews understood the power of utilising anti-Semitism to seek similar ends. Pappé also forays into the paradox of language which has been used to cover up certain actions on behalf of the Israeli state while also providing a “comfort zone” for extending these same abuses of power into the future. Exposing how language has historically been employed to cover up war crimes, Pappé elucidates the current paradigm whereby it is no longer necessary for Israel to cover up its crimes against humanity analysing the shift in political discourse and the tragic reality that the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians has now been firmly placed on the table.

Charles Piller, investigative journalist for Science magazine and author of The Fail-Safe Society (1991) and Gene Wars (1998), discusses his latest book Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimers (2025). Historicising Alzheimer’s research, Piller Piller situates how whistleblower, Vanderbilt professor Matthew Schrag, exposed a massive scandal involving a University of Minnesota lab led by a precocious young scientist (Sylvain Lesné) and a renowned director (Karen Ashe). Examining ego, professional aspirations together with the demands set upon researchers, Piller exposes how falsified data was at the heart of the leading hypothesis about the disease. Piller exposes Schrag's findings and this stunned not only the field of Alzheimer’s research, but the ripple effects this discovery had on research institution, the pharmaceutical industry, universities and the public. With the “amyloid hypothesis” now set within a web of scientific deceit, Piller elaborates how this hypothesis allowed a cause and effect, “an injection of hope and belief” whereby targetting these proteins became the dominanting thinking in the field for combatting Alzheimer’s disease. With the manipulation of data in plain sight, however, this necessarily put the future of Alzeiheimer’s research at risk where research diverging from amyloid focus had been side-lined or even actively deterred all in order to ensure the primacy of the amyloid hypothesis, which Piller terms the “amyloid mafia.”