Savage Minds Podcast

Lexi Ellingsworth, co-founder of  Stop Surrogacy Now UK , discusses the state of surrogacy within Britain in the run-up to this week’s  report  jointly published by the Law Commission of England and Wales and the Scottish Law Commission that outlines recommendations for law reform around surrogacy. Ellingsworth outlines the finer points of commercial surrogacy, currently illegal in the UK that are...

Toby Green and Thomas Fazi discuss their recent book,   The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left   (2023) and the wider landscape of the regressive effects of lockdown policies. Historicising the pandemic response to the anti-democratic push of neoliberalism, Fazi observes how during the financial crisis, a new class of economists was ushered forth...

Stacy Malkan, co-founder and managing editor of U.S. Right to Know, discusses a report she recently co-authored, Merchants of Poison: How Monsanto Sold the World on a Toxic Pesticide (2022) which uncovers astroturfing operations that Monsanto has exacted around the planet to embolden its hold over the agro-chemical industry. Malkan expounds on how Monsanto uses its wealth to saturate its agenda th...

Canadian researcher Dr. Jessica Rose discusses her work around myriad facets of the COVID-19 pandemic—from the virus mitigation measures to the vaccine. Covering her research on the descriptive analysis of the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) data surrounding the Covid-19 “vaccine,” Rose notes how propaganda was established an early-on during the pandemic where the politicisation of...

Janja Lalich , PhD, Professor Emerita of Sociology, an international authority on cults and coercion and author of  Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships  discusses her theoretical and practical work in the field of cults. Distinguishing cults from religious organisations and mass social formations, Lalich thrashes out the historical facts surrounding cults and their...

Aaron Kheriaty, a physician specialicing in psychiatry and author of  The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State  (2022), discusses the collateral harms of lockdown,  vaccine mandates  and the lack of public debate regarding these subjects. Reviewing his lawsuit against the University of California regarding the University’s vaccine mandate and the lack of informed consents, a cen...

Siddharth Kara, Associate Professor of Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery at Nottingham University, discusses his latest book  Cobalt Red  (2023). Covering the historical developments that led to the European exploitation of the African continent, especially by Belgian King Leopold II in the Congo region, Kara describes the tragedy of Congo as having been the historical and contemporary site of...

Kate Coleman, founder and director of the criminal justice reform group Keep Prisons Single Sex , discusses her organisation’s advocacy for the sex-based rights of women throughout the criminal justice system and Scotland’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill. Expounding upon the importance of sex to risk, safeguarding, and data recording, Coleman elaborates the needed changes to current practices with...

Aaron Moulton, a curator and anthropologist, discusses his project   The Influencing Machine , a large-scale exhibition and publication examining the legacy of the Soros Center for Contemporary Arts (SCCA), a network of twenty Soros Centres for Contemporary Art that sprung up across Eastern Europe from the early to mid-1990s. Examining the mission of these centres, funded by Geroge Soros’ Open Soc...

Jennifer Sharp, an award-winning filmmaker, discusses her latest film Andecdotals (2022), which she produced and directed after having an adverse reaction to the COVID vaccine and finding herself mandated out of polite society. Discussing her motivation for making her film, Sharp details a story of medical malfeasance, pharmacetical and scientific fraud, and documents the wider theatre where Big P...

Stephen Bezruchka, faculty in the School of Public Health at the University of Washington in Seattle, discusses his latest book, Inequality Kills Us All: COVID-19's Health Lessons for the World (2022, Routledge), analysing some of the socio-medical terrain as to why the United States does so poorly in health measures. Discussing how the United States has by far the highest levels of inequality amo...

Tonje Gjevjon , Norwegian artist and filmmaker, and  Christina Ellingsen , women's rights activist and publisher, discuss the current gender identity laws in Norway that affect women. Noting her cancellation from the Norwegian arts scene for her political stance on gender identity, Gjevjon considers how she potentially faces criminal charges and jail time for posting on Facebook that men cannot be...

Peter Phillips, a Professor Emeritus of Political Sociology at Sonoma State University and former Director of Project Censored (1996 to 2010), discusses his book, Giants: The Global Power Elite (2018), that focuses upon the concentration of wealth internationally whereby corporations and giant investment firms—multi-trillion dollar investment companies—have the money and power to restrict the para...

Kellie-Jay Keen, aka Posie Parker, a British women's right campaigner, and Heather Brunskell-Evans, a feminist academic, discuss the class division within British feminism that has largely pivoted around and taken aim at Keen’s persona and activism. Giving historical perspective beginning with an event to which she had been invited at a Women’s Place UK event in Wales in the Spring 2018, Keen disc...

Julie Ponesse, author of My Choice: The Ethical Case Against Covid-19 Vaccine Mandates (2021), discusses the field of ethics and role that fear played within the landscape of a global pandemic and how this stalls the ability of humans to understand and process new information, inclines us towards pessimism, and moves society towards a certain level of gullibity of official political narratives tha...

Sall Grover, the founder and CEO of the female-only social networking app Giggle , discusses the Tickle v Giggle federal court case which opened up the conversation in Australia about the right to female-only spaces. Considering how she was legally pursued for making business decisions based on biological reality, Grover elaborates how the Giggle court case perfectly illustrates the larger global...

Dr Phillip Altman, a retired Pharmacologist with expertise in the areas of clinical medical research and pharmaceutical drug regulatory affairs in Australia, discusses his  10 September 2022 lecture  to the Australian Medical Professional Society (AMPS) wherein he criticises the science during the COVID pandemic, announcing, “We, the Australian people, have been deceived—we have been lied to.” Alt...

Katherine Deves, an Australian lawyer who ran as a Liberal candidate for the seat of Warringah in the 2022 Australian federal election, discsusses how her campaign was in part derailed by her views on gender identity. Framing this ideology as a religon where the god is the “curated identity” of the self, Deves like the gender identity cult to “Revenge of the Losers” where people who never had frie...

Michael Biggs, professor of sociology at the University of Oxford, examines the scientific, historical, and political foundations of contemporary gender identity ideology, arguing that the rapid expansion of gender-affirming care for minors has outpaced the quality of evidence supporting it while becoming increasingly resistant to critical scrutiny. Drawing on decades of research into gender dysph...

Leor Sapir, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, discusses two of his articles on the gender debate—“ The ‘T’ Piggybacking on the ‘LGB’ ” and “ Transgender Confusions ”—covering the policies around public policy, law, and Supreme Court rulings. Beginning with issues such as “bathroom bill” and prisons, Sapir criticises the central tenet of this movement:  no debate . Claiming that we are in the th...

Norman Finkelstein discusses his forthcoming book,  I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It: Politically Incorrect Thoughts on Cancel Culture and Academic Freedom  (2022, Sublation Media) and the current dilemma within academia today of identity politics. Covering historical examples of people who have been punished by authority for their beliefs, Finkelstein contextualises cancel culture from McCa...

Pioneering ecological artist Aviva Rahmani discusses her latest book Divining Chaos: The Autobiography of an Idea (New Village Press, 2022) outlining her political and artistic coming of age in the 1960s in downtown New York, her development as a feminist, and her evolution into an ecoartist who employs a multi-disciplinary approach to take on the current ecological crises. Having worked at the cu...

Douglas Kellner, Distinguished Research Professor of Education at UCLA and an early theorist in the field of media literacy, discusses the current state of media today and the need for consumers of news media to think critically and to question everything they intake. Critiquing major media’s non-stop coverage of the death and funeral of Queen Elizabeth II in recent weeks, Kellner analyses media's...

Fred Sargeant, a 74-year-old disabled French-American gay rights activist, veteran of the 1969 Stonewall riots, and a co-founder and organizer of the first Gay Pride march, discusses having been attacked at a recent Pride event in Burlington, Vermont. Tracing his involvement within the gay rights movement from the 1960s to the present, Sargeant criticises the transgender movement’s wholesale captu...

Jim Fouratt, former actor, gay rights activist, and one of the founding members of the Gay Liberation Front which was formed on the third night of the Stonewall Riots (also called the Stonewall Uprising), discusses what happened on 28 June 1969, leading to six days of protests and violent clashes with law enforcement outside the bar on Christopher Street. Speakng to the many fictions that have cir...