Here I talk to Drew Hutton, a man of the moment for all the wrong reasons. Alongside Bob Brown, Hutton co-founded the national Greens in the early 1990s. A week ago the party’s state council in Queensland affirmed an earlier decision to boot him out for refusing to delete “transphobic” comments from others on his Facebook post. He says the party he co-founded has been hijacked by a transgender and queer “cult.”

So I welcomed Drew to what’s becoming a very non-exclusive club of people cancelled for questioning trans ideology and its push to erase biological sex across society. We discussed his (kangaroo) trials with the Greens, when he first realised a cult had swallowed his beloved party and why the broader progressive movement is in danger of losing its way.

Click here to watch the video version of this podcast or listen on Apple or Spotify.

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I’ll explain the “accidental” gag soon — first, the important stuff.

In this episode I pick the formidable brain of John Anderson, second-in-charge of Oz from 1999 to 2005 and these days a serious player in the world of long-form podcasting. He was an early adopter of the web-based interview, launching his “Conversations” series in 2017 to tackle the big geopolitical and philosophical questions with public intellectuals. As he tells me, he needed some convincing years ago to interview a psychologist he’d never heard of called Jordan Peterson. The rest is history.

Anderson’s thirst for answers on how we should live led him to help found the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, a global organisation that aims to reaffirm Western values. The Alliance staged its inaugural conference in London in October 2023 with a rock star line-up. Back then, with many of us reeling from the outbreak of pro-Hamas sentiment on our streets and university campuses, the centre-right seemed to have the wind at its back. But things have since soured for the political right in parts of Europe, Canada and Australia: I ask Anderson what went wrong. Is it all Donald Trump’s fault?

Before he became a heterodox media star, Anderson, a sixth-generation farmer, held several ministries in the Howard Government and was former leader of the National Party — to overseas readers, that’s a rural-based party that together with the Liberal Party comprises Australia’s conservative Coalition. The Coalition marriage broke down momentarily in the aftermath of the Liberals’ historic drubbing in May’s federal election; Anderson was one of several former leaders enlisted as marriage counsellor. Something obviously worked: the parties stitched things up, for how long only time will tell.

Anderson airs his frustration with Labor’s election tactics and with what he (rightly) diagnoses as both parties’ desultory policy prescriptions. He also airs concerns about energy, Australia’s vulnerability in global supply chains, mounting government debt, a more aggressive China and the deteriorating mental health of young people in the digital age. And we moan about Donald Trump, a subject I pursued excessively, I reckon. There are many more conversations I’d like to have with Anderson on topics remote from the daily headlines.

And now to my blonde moment, which I’ve left uncut in the interests of transparency, and also because it’s sort of funny.

Later in our talk I say that before he entered politics Anderson had a brief stint as a reporter on a rural newspaper. I had written this down in my notes and raised it here, proud I’d done my homework. Turns out I was wrong. Anderson never worked as a rural reporter. He thinks I may have been reading about a different John Anderson, a person who, by coincidence, also moved among the Nationals in Canberra.

I reckon Anderson would have been a fantastic rural reporter had he ever tried his hand at it, which, of course, he hadn’t. He’s also gracious when others embarrass themselves. I’d intended to read Anderson’s authorised biography before our conversation but an unexpected study trip to Israel (more on that another time) got in the way.

The biography, Faith & Duty: The John Anderson Story by Paul Gallagher, charts a life marked by profound tragedy (I won’t go into details here) and extraordinary resilience. Anderson arrives at his Christian faith, and so much else, with great substance. We need more like him.

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In this podcast I speak with Indian filmmaker Vaishnavi Sundar, currently in Australia for screenings of her groundbreaking feature-length documentary, Behind the Looking Glass, which explores the lives of women whose male partners have “come out” as trans. (For details of screenings scroll to the end of this post.) These women are sometimes known as “trans widows.” Also joining us is Bronwyn Winter, a fellow Substacker, and scholar of politics.

I’ll say more about our conversation and Sundar’s taboo-busting film in a moment. But first — the topic of heterosexual men identifying as women is freakishly timely thanks to an incendiary four minute monologue of a fleeting character in this week’s episode of The White Lotus.

The monologue has set the anti-woke media ecosystem on fire. I reckon the scene has done more to undermine trans ideology than even Donald Trump’s edict declaring there are only two sexes. For while good progressive folk dismiss Trump’s executive order as cruel and indicative of today’s culture-war obsessed insurgent right, they can’t quite hurl the same accusation at the writers of the hugely popular streaming series, which, for the uninitiated, skewers the global elites through the travails of the guests and staff of a luxury resort chain in Maui, Sicily and in season three, Koh Samui.

The monologue in question came from “Frank” (Sam Rockwell) an old friend of main character “Rick” (Walton Goggins). Frank has been living in Thailand for years and the two catch up in a Bangkok bar. Rick asks Frank what he’s been up to, and Frank, a born-again Buddhist, answers .. frankly. He tells of spiralling into alcoholism and of his promiscuity with Asian women and then, without warning, reveals how all this led to a sexual fixation with the idea of being an Asian woman himself. He would invite men to sodomise him and hire an Asian woman to watch.

“I'd look in her eyes while some guy was f*****g me and think, I am her, and I'm f*****g me,” he said to Rick’s hilarious astonishment.

Those of us who’ve had the misfortune of falling down the trans debate rabbit hole immediately named Frank’s inclination as autogynephilia — “love of oneself as a woman,” in the Greek — but more importantly, so did Dr Ray Blanchard, the American-Canadian sexologist who coined the term in the 1980s to describe non-homosexual males whose desire to transition stemmed partly from sexual arousal at the thought of themselves as female.

Reposting The White Lotus scene on X, Blanchard remarked:

“Since 2003, political trans activists and their “allies” have done everything they could to prevent the word and the concept of autogynephilia from entering public awareness. And yet, with excruciating slowness but apparent inevitability, it is doing just that.”

It is not hard to see why trans activists do everything possible to suppress any mention of the word or concept of autogynephilia. There is a fear that acknowledging some men are motivated to transition for sexual reasons will lead to trans women being demonised as sexual deviants or perverts; indeed, too many feminists deploy vulgar tropes of this sort. But the main imperative, as I’ve written before, is ideological. The “gender identity” movement, to the extent that we can pin down something so fundamentally incoherent, seeks to negate or at least blur the biological reality of sex so as to enable the belief that a male can actually be a woman in some spiritual or pseudo-scientific sense.

This belief system is compelled to suppress the stark truth that for many men their feelings of alienation from their sexed bodies are themselves a symptom of their very male predilection for fetish and sexual obsession. (Again, that’s simply an observation on my part and not an accusation or moral judgment.) After all, it would be hard to argue that males who get off on thinking of themselves as women should be entitled to access women’s spaces.

So the “gender identity” narrative must remain intact if the recent dismantling of sex-based rights in Australia and across the West is to withstand scrutiny and legal challenge. I wrote about the airing of autogynephilia in recent court cases here. (Incidentally the Lesbian Action Group’s bid to exclude trans women — biological males — from their events failed in the tribunal on the grounds it constituted unlawful discrimination: the Group is raising funds for a Federal Court appeal.)

Meanwhile the erasure of autogynephilia in popular culture has given birth to a new kind of hero; the uber-masculine man, who after decades in the public eye as a soldier/Olympian/footballer/politician (I’m sure your mind is coughing up names and images so I don’t have to) is reborn as the authentic woman he’s been all along. A woman more womanly than any other — and hence deserving of “Woman of the Year” gongs — because she’s had to contend with the greatest tragedy a woman could conceivably face; to have been mistaken as male at birth.

The hero worship of trans women leaves no room to acknowledge that their “coming out” often inflicts a serious emotional cost on their female partners.

The progressive media will air stories about loving wives supportive of their partner’s transition now happily identifying as one part of a “lesbian” relationship. I’m not delegitimising these stories, but what of the wives unwilling to participate in their husband’s simulation of womanhood? The culture brands her as cruel and bigoted; her trauma invalidated, even when her male partner inflicts what can only be seen as extreme narcissistic abuse. How else to describe the male who decides to come out just as his wife is at her most vulnerable, breastfeeding a newborn? Which is one of the disturbing stories we encounter in Sundar’s latest film.

Behind the Looking Glass profiles trans widows from around the world, often with the help of striking animation. The women speak for themselves with courage and candour. This is not the first time Sundar has tackled gender identity ideology — to the usual pushback and cancellation. Through her company, Lime Soda Films, she explored the rise in women and girls seeking transition in her four-part documentary, Dysphoric.

In this podcast we discuss the impact of gender identity ideology in India — yes it’s arrived there too, and as always it’s the poorest women and most marginalised communities who pay the highest cost. This should exercise the minds of Australians given that exporting the ideology to the developing world is an explicit goal of the Albanese Government’s foreign policy. In February 2023 Foreign Minister Penny Wong launched the first dedicated fund to promote international “LGBTQ rights” in the Asia-Pacific, pledging to “listen to the voices, views and priorities of LGBTQIA+ human rights defenders and civil society.”

You’ll hear me talking about a screening of Behind the Looking Glass in Sydney: unfortunately that’s already happened. But it screens in Melbourne tomorrow, March 23: Contact: [email protected] $10 TLC members / $15 non members.

And you can follow the link to watch the film online here: https://x.com/vaishax/status/1837134170969317449?s=46

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In this podcast episode (click here for the video version or listen wherever you get your podcasts) I speak with Dr Alan Davison, President of the Free Speech Union Australia, the local chapter of an organisation established in the UK in 2019. As its name suggests, the FSU defends freedom of expression against cancel culture and the increasing trend of governments, particularly those left-of-centre, policing speech in the name of “social cohesion”.

Here’s what I think: in an ideal world hate speech laws would muzzle racists and extremists. In the real world racists and extremists wield increasing cultural and political influence and invert the logic of human rights to further their repressive agenda. Anti-vilification laws are ineffective at best, dangerous at worst.

In the episode, we explore the proposed new bans on “hate speech” currently under debate in the Victorian Parliament. (The Federal and NSW governments have also recently introduced tougher hate speech laws.) Despite its anodyne title the Justice Legislation Amendment (Anti-vilification and Social Cohesion) Bill 2024 has until recently been most fiercely championed by radical trans activists.

At present, Victorian laws ban vilification based on race and religion: the new regime, comprising both civil and criminal penalties, would extend protection to other characteristics including sex, disability, sex characteristics, sexual orientation, personal association and — you guessed it — “gender identity”. Such laws expose critics of trans ideology — in other words, those who insist men can’t be women — to further repression from the state and harassment in the courts.

I trust you folks will visit me in prison.

Latterly, with the eruption in Jew-hatred, the State Government has sought to flog the Bill as the missing weapon in the fight against anti-Semitism. Jewish community leaders are also enthusiastic proponents of the Bill — a position that’s understandable but deeply misguided.

I suggest we already have ample laws on the books empowering police to crack down on incitement. And Davison shares his fascinating analysis of why hate speech laws ultimately fuel anti-Semitism by deterring robust conversations about Islamist ideology. We look at the UK experience where some Muslim groups are effectively lobbying to re-introduce blasphemy laws under the banner of stamping out “Islamophobia”.

This is an illuminating discussion (apart from one or two instances in which the audio drops out — apologies) in which I start by asking Davison, former dean of the faculty of arts and social sciences at the University of Technology Sydney, why universities have abandoned robust intellectual debate for groupthink.

We also cover a barely-reported tribunal finding against Australia’s eSafety Commissioner — a.k.a “eKaren” — whose office had been running an “informal” censorship regime that sought to deprive ordinary citizens of their right to appeal bureaucratic decrees.

One caveat: you’ll hear that I make reference to JD Vance’s speech last month to European leaders in which he warned that the biggest threat to the continent’s security came not from external bad actors but from “within”, and gave the suppression of unorthodox views as one example. (He cited, among other things, Sweden convicting an anti-Islam campaigner for burning the Koran in public). The Vice-President is right: suppressing free speech is a serious threat to democracy, as such measures diminish trust in public institutions and frequently inflame, rather than quell, racially-charged discord.

But after Vance and Donald Trump’s extended takedown of Volodymyr Zelensky during which they regurgitated pro-Putin propaganda and the US’ subsequent pausing of military aid and intelligence sharing to embattled Ukraine, I’m left in no doubt about the biggest threat to democracy in Europe and elsewhere. It does indeed come from “within”: from Vance and his boss.

Further reading: https://quillette.com/2024/08/07/disuniting-australia/

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Can a believer and a non-believer find enough common ground to have a truly meaty conversation? I’ve always wondered about this. But my podcast guest Dr Paul Tyson, a philosopher, theologian, sociologist and fellow Substacker, reckons these days he finds it easier to talk meaningfully with atheists and feminists than with Christians, many of whom are as woke as the next person. While Tyson is un-woke, he is economically left and contributes to a “post-capitalist” think-tank alongside former Greece finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis.

Tyson is interested in knowledge and the role that science plays in our approach to truth (and its opposite) in the contemporary world. He has written books on theology and climate change, on Christian sociology, and on the “magic” of meaning. Recently he’s been doing a lot of writing on gender identity ideology — work he struggles to get published, even with Christian publishers.

So we discuss (OK, we criticise) the judgment in Tickle and Giggle. We also discuss: why contemporary Christians are squeamish about standing up for Christians and Christianity; October 7 and its fallout; anti-Semitism, the church and Islam, and current trends in philosophy. We talk about the pain and joy (but mostly the pain) of this writing life. Oh, and we talk about “queer theology”. It’s a thing, apparently.

Incidentally, you’ll hear Tyson refer to himself as a theologically “conservative” Christian. After our discussion he sent me a detailed explanation of what “conservative” means in theological terms. If you’re curious, here’s what he said:

“When it comes to what makes one a theologically conservative Christian, it is basically the preparedness to affirm two rationally impossible doctrines: the trinity and the incarnation (both are affirmed in the Nicaean Creed). Which is to say that the basic benchmark of orthodox Christian theology is its firm commitment to paradox (traditionally, Christian heresy has a long track record of resolving these paradoxes with clear thinking, but no faith).”

**

Original music and additional production and editing by Husky Gawenda and Gideon Preiss.

Listen here or, as they say, wherever you get your podcasts.

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If four years ago you would have told me that come the next US election we’d be confronting the prospect of Donald Trump: The Resurrection, I’d have suggested you get more fresh air. But here we are. And with his fascinating, if not inspired, choice of Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance as running mate, Trump redux sharpens his pitch to the embattled American working class.

In this post I speak with journalist and author Batya Ungar-Sargon, a lefty after my own heart who nonetheless reckons the Trumpian right is offering American workers something genuinely new and transformational. Ungar-Sargon, an opinion editor at Newsweek, has written two books: Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy (you can see why I like her), and the recent and hugely relevant, Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women.

For the latter Ungar-Sargon travelled around the US for a year interviewing non-college educated workers to get their sense of whether they had a shot at the American Dream — home ownership, upward mobility, a dignified retirement — and if not, what might make it more of a reality.

Despite the interviewees’ diverse backgrounds and circumstances, she found strong consensus on some issues, chief among them the vexed issue of mass illegal immigration. Nowhere is the class divide as pronounced as it is here; as Ungar-Sargon sees it, while educated Americans view migrants with “patronising pity,” workers regard them as little different from themselves save for the fact of American citizenship, “and they think that should mean something.” “They (the working class) are frustrated when it seems like the opposite is true: immigrants are getting help they could desperately use and can’t access.”

We discuss — and debate!— class warfare, the new Republicans and whether they really are that, Trump and whether he’s a threat to democracy, the Democrats’ decapitation of Joe Biden and why a party that takes its cues from George Clooney is a party in bad shape.

Hope you enjoy this interview with a gutsy and iconoclastic commentator.

Click here to watch the video version of this podcast or listen on Apple or Spotify.

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In this podcast I speak with journalist Bernard Lane, formerly at The Australian and now a fellow Substacker, whose newsletter Gender Clinic News — see the link below — covers the escalating debate over youth gender medicine at home and abroad. For many years Lane was effectively the only journalist doggedly covering what may yet emerge as one of the biggest medical scandals in history. It’s worth re-reading that last sentence. How on earth did we land here? Reporters are supposed to run towards a huge story, not away from it.

We talk about activism stifling journalism and activism having undue influence over science and medicine. Mostly we talk about the final report of England’s Cass Review, the independent inquiry into gender identity services for children and young people, carried out by renowned paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass. We cover her findings on the administration of puberty blockers (they should be banned as a routine intervention) and opposite sex hormones (extreme caution is recommended), and her overall conclusion that the current medicalised approach to treating gender-related distress in minors rests on “remarkably weak evidence.”

Being literary types we also dissect the report’s tone and posture starting with the throat-clearing opening line. And we gently tackle some of the elephants still lurking in this room called “the trans debate.”

https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-report/

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Over the past 20 years governments have poured billions into the education system, overhauled the national curriculum again and again, reformed the school funding model (or not — but never mind that for now), beefed up teacher training standards, and expounded on the history, maths and reading wars.

But for all the frenetic activity on education policy, our kids keep getting dumber.

How dumb? Well 20 years ago Australia’s 15 year-olds were ranked among the highest in the world in reading, maths and science — since then their performance has slipped so much it’s as if they have missed a year’s schooling. By some measures around 20 per cent of high school kids are functionally illiterate. It won’t surprise you to learn such trends hit disadvantaged students worst of all. In fact, these kids fall further and further behind their more advantaged peers as they move through high school. Hard to imagine a more damning indictment of our education system.

Education expert Ben Jensen has a good idea of what’s gone wrong in our schools; and when I first encountered his diagnosis it had the force of a religious epiphany. Jensen, whose consultancy Learning First advises governments around the world on education reform, reckons the basic problem is we have no idea what’s actually being taught in classrooms. To make matters worse, Jensen says, educators have gone all in for well-intentioned but misguided philosophies such as “individualised learning,” and “meeting kids where they’re at.”

In this podcast we grapple with these big themes writ small in classrooms. (I even sneak in a question about crazy US ideas such as “maths is racist.”) Can we turn things around in our schools? I believe we can; if Federal Education Minister Jason Clare takes heed of Jensen’s refreshingly blunt advice.

Links:

https://learningfirst.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Curriculum-and-inequality-July-2023.pdf

https://learningfirst.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/To-lift-standards-we-must-reclaim-the-curriculum-October-2022.pdf (with Nicole Murnane)

https://learningfirst.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Four-reforms-could-close-the-education-inequality-gap-September-2022.pdf (with Mailie Ross)

https://learningfirst.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/A-lesson-on-how-to-reverse-two-decades-of-failed-education-reforms-August-2022.pdf (with Mailie Ross)

https://grattan.edu.au/report/catching-up-learning-from-the-best-school-systems-in-east-asia/

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In this podcast I speak with distinguished historian Jeffrey Herf about the global wave of anti-Semitism unleashed in the aftermath of October 7. We discuss the Jew hatred of the right, the left and the Islamist movement — and how Hamas has seduced Western intellectuals into “magical thinking” about its true nature. We also ponder what the future holds for the increasingly fearful Jewish communities of the diaspora.

Alongside other notable historians such as Matthias Küntzel and Benny Morris, Herf is curating and featuring in a three-part webinar on The Origins and Ideology of Hamas. The webinar, which kicks off in the US on February 26, is the work of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, a body dedicated to preserving and studying the history and culture of East European Jewry.

YIVO’s chief Jonathan Brent explains: “Exploring the deep affiliations of radical Islamist Hamas with the anti-Semitic propaganda of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, this (webinar) series exposes a painful point of intersection between Eastern European Jewish history and contemporary events.”

You can register for Part 1 here (it’s free): yivo.org/IdeologySeries1

You can view information about the series here: yivo.org/IdeologySeries

The times are a bit punishing for Australians but all sessions will be recorded and available on YIVO’s YouTube channel.

Herf is Professor Emeritus of history at the University of Maryland, College Park. He’s published extensively on Nazism and the Holocaust and their aftermath in Europe and the Middle East. If you haven’t read his incisive post-October 7 commentary you should check out these links:

https://www.americanpurpose.com/articles/from-the-river-to-the-sea/

https://quillette.com/2023/10/10/the-ideology-of-mass-murder/

(With Norman J.W. Goda): https://quillette.com/2023/11/23/holocaust-historians-the-genocide-charge-and-gaza/

He’s recently published a collection of essays entitled, Three Faces of Antisemitism: Right, Left, and Islamist: https://www.routledge.com/Three-Faces-of-Antisemitism-Right-Left-and-Islamist/Herf/p/book/9781032583013

Our Zoom connection wasn’t the best so you’ll hear a wobble or two; hopefully it won’t detract from what I reckon is a powerful and illuminating conversation.

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Amid a new Israel-Gaza war, the world reeling from unprecedented atrocities against Israeli civilians, former Age editor Michael Gawenda reflects on his life as a Jew — the title of his astonishing new book— and on what he sees as a troubling shift towards activist journalism. During the last Israel-Gaza war two years ago, more than 400 Australian journalists and writers petitioned the media to “do better on Palestine,” calling on editors to stop promoting “discredited” spokespersons, “tired narratives” and “both siderism” that “equates the victims of a military occupation with its instigators”. Gawenda says the events of recent days makes the petitioners’ stance, flawed to begin with, appear “even worse.” He thinks these journalists should publicly explain why they signed the petition.

In this podcast interview we also discuss his time as editor at The Age and whether he’d be able to attain such a position if he were starting his career now as “the Jew I have become” — namely, a Jew deeply attached to Israel, one who refuses to denounce Zionism in order to gain admission to the political left. Other Jews are more willing to comply; Gawenda describes them as “anxious Jews”; Jews fundamentally anxious about being Jewish. (They’re hilariously depicted in Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question as self-declared “ASHamed Jews.”)

One such “anxious Jew,” in Gawenda’s view, is Louise Adler, his long-time colleague, publisher and former friend. Adler signed the journalists’ petition. Earlier this year she came under fire as director of Adelaide Writers’ Week for inviting Palestinian writers to discuss their experiences of occupation and dispossession to the exclusion of any Israeli voices. Two of the featured writers were accused of peddling anti-Semitic tropes; one had referred to Ukraine’s (Jewish) president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as a “depraved Zionist.” Gawenda’s book opens with an account of his friendship with Adler ending “suddenly and fiercely” over Israel. We discuss why he took the extraordinary step of publicly airing this personal falling out.

And we talk about Gawenda’s childhood as the son of Holocaust survivors, the influence of his socialist, non-Zionist youth movement and whether he sees hope of a reconciliation between the Jews and the left. On the latter, he’s optimistic.

In the aftermath of one of the darkest days for the Jewish people since the Holocaust, I, for one, will take any hope on offer.

Sources: My Life As A Jew, Michael Gawenda, published October 3 (Scribe)

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