Savage Minds Podcast

Hala Shoman, a Palestinian PhD researcher in Sociology at Newcastle University, discusses her life in Gaza before 7 October 2023, the conditions under which Gazans have been living since, and the physical and political realities on the ground for Palestinians today. Shoman elaborates how Israel’s violence since 2023 has left Palestinian society shattered, since the aggressions are so vast and prof...

Rebecca Ruth Gould, Distinguished Professor of Comparative Poetics and Global Politics, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and author of E rasing Palestine: Free Speech and Palestinian Freedom (Verso, 2020), discusses the political reframing of “antisemitism” by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) which tailored a new definition designed specifically to silence criti...

Dario Guarascio, Associate Professor of Economic Policy at the Department of Economics and Law at the Sapienza University of Rome, discusses two articles he co-authored with Andrea Coveri and Claudio Cozza, “ Big Tech and the US Digital-Military-Industrial Complex ” and “ Monopoly Capital in the time of digital platforms: A radical approach to the Amazon case .” Coveri examines the power of digita...

Penny Arcade—poet, actress, essayist, spoken word, video and theatre maker—discusses her trajectory from an immigrant family, originally from Basilicata, Italy, to her upbringing in a working-class Connecticut town to her entry into the art world of New York’s East Village. Looking back on her life as a homeless teen in the Village, her discovery by Jamie Andrews who introduced her to John Vaccaro...

Catherine Liu, Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Irvine, discusses her forthcoming book, Traumatized: The New Politics of Suffering (Verso, 2026), wherein she elucidates the emergence of trauma culture, tracing it back to psychoanalysis and the reification of mental health in post-war America. Analysing the fetishisation and recognition of feelings, Liu historicises the explosion of psycho...

Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation and Research Professor at the Fletcher School, Tufts University, historicises the way “famine” in the postcolonial era was an extremely emotional word for which, fifty years ago, there were no appropriate structures nor any objective scientific metric for understanding where or when famine was occurring. By 1984-1985, however, the neol...

Celine-Marie Pascale, professor emerita of sociology at American University, discusses her book Living on the Edge (2021), wherein she details her research into the struggling communities across the United States—from Appalachia to the Standing Rock and Wind River reservations to Oakland, California—who face the hardships of stagnant wages and rising costs of living. Analysing the experiences of p...

Heather Brunskell-Evans, philosopher of politics, author, and academic, speaks about her experience of having protested against the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, whereby she held a placard upon which she wrote “I oppose genocide” and “I support Palestine Action.” After holding up her sign, within seconds, Brunskell-Evans was arrested under the Terrorism Act 2000 and was swiftly detaine...

David Abdulah, a Trinidad and Tobago trade unionist, economist and politician and the current leader of the Movement for Social Justice, speaks about the vigil for peace in Woodford Square, Port of Spain, which is one of many popular efforts by the citizens of his country to ask that the United States government stop its strikes on vessels from the region. Analysing how the Prime Minister of Trini...

Omer Bartov, an Israeli-American scholar and Dean’s Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, reviews the definition of genocide as established within the Genocide Convention of 1948 as he analyses the trajectory of events in Gaza from 7 October 2023 to the Spring 2024 when the IDF moved into Rafah and proceeded systematically destroy Gaza with the goal of making it unhinhab...

Haim Bresheeth, filmmaker and historian, discusses the growing trend in Britain and the West to curtail free speech concerning criticisms of Israel and Zionism as he details his arrest in London for protesting against the genocide in Gaza. Declaring that the freedom of expression, ostensibly guaranteed in Western democracies, no longer exists, Bresheeth observes how criticism of Gaza is being sile...

Reem Alsalem, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls, joins Heather Brunskell-Evans and Julian Vigo to discuss her mission as United Nations Special Rapporteur and the consequences, changing dimensions, and the greater challenges of her role. Responding to the criticism she has received for her views on gender ideology, on the one hand, and criticisms by feminist...

Amit Singh, a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Social Studies (CES) at the University of Coimbra, discusses Hindutva, a political ideology encompassing the cultural justification of Hindu nationalism and the belief in establishing Hindu hegemony within India, as well as the dangers it poses to religious minorities today. Covering Narendra Modi’s trajectory from Gujarat’s Chief Minister fr...

Ori Goldberg , an independent analyst and specialist in Middle Eastern Studies, analyses the profound militarisation within his country, Israel, that involves the “desensitivisation as to the very existence of Palestinians as human beings” such that Israelis themselves know nothing about Palestinians, resulting in the only permissible history of Israel being that of the Jewish narrative. Covering...

Isla MacGregor, a free speech and whistleblower advocate in Tasmania, Australia, relates the blowback she has experienced by gender-critical feminists for her criticism of the Israeli genocide in Gaza that is reminiscent of the very same type of behaviour enacted by the gender ideologues whom these feminists had heretofore criticised . Observing how the slurs and slogans that have been used by tho...

Boaventura de Sousa ​Santos, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Coimbra, discusses his professional training from law, to the philosophy of law and then to sociology, covering his time studying in Cold War Berlin, then Yale in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and his eventual involvement with the World Social Forum and his efforts to densify class struggle. Bouncing off his recent...

Ramzy Baroud, journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle , discusses being born and raised in Gaza while also covering the greater history of Palestine: from British colonialism, the rise of Zionism and the decision that someone made to mythologise Palestine as “a land with no people,” a historical exchange to rewrite, rename, and reinvent the land of Palestine to belong to someo...

Zahi Zalloua, Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature and Director of Indigeneity, Race, and Ethnicity Studies at Whitman College, discusses the relevance of Edward’s Orientalism in the face of the current genocide in Gaza as he addresses the challenge of our times in “unlearning Zionism in fascist times,” which necessitates an “ontological upheaval.” Zalloua discusses the racial logi...

Thomas Fazi, independent researcher, writer and journalist, discusses the current situation of the war in Ukraine and how the European elite have utilised this conflict to continue waging economic warfare on their own people, which he explains, together with the sanctions imposed, is a tale of self-sabotage. Detailing how Western nations assumed that their sanctions would “cripple the Russian econ...

David Miller, sociologist, writer and investigative researcher, discusses how his 2019 lecture on Zionism encourages Islamophobia at the University of Bristol resulted in allegations of antisemitism by students against Miller for which there was an investigation, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism was suddenly adopted by the university, and his comme...

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 primari...

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 t...

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-t...

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 sim...

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...