Savage Minds

Daniel Levy, a political commentator and president of the US Middle East Project, argues that Netanyahu did not stumble into this war—he engineered it. For decades, Levy notes, successive Israeli governments tried and failed to pull the United States into a military confrontation with Iran. He traces what finally made it possible under Trump not to any coherent American strategy but to its opposite: the systematic hollowing out of the interagency process, expertise sidelined, and a small ideological cohort elevated whose interests aligned perfectly with Israeli leadership. Tracing this logic to its conclusion, Levy contends the result is a war serving Israel's ambition for regional hegemony far more than any plausible American interest. Dismantling the claim that attacking Iran was about nuclear threat management, he points out that Israel itself is an undeclared nuclear state and that Iran's supreme leader had issued a fatwa against nuclear weapons. Looking beyond the conflict, Levy asserts that any durable solution requires a decolonisation 2.0—a reckoning with the inequities of the post-colonial order. With American empire visibly fraying and Marco Rubio offering imperialism 2.0 as the alternative, he sees the burden falling squarely on middle powers and non-Western states to chart a different course. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Daniela Danna, a sociologist and research fellow and lecturer at the University of Salento in Lecce, argues that gender identity legislation is not about protecting vulnerable people—it is about making biological sex legally invisible. Drawing on her analysis of the defeated Zan Bill in Italy and parallel legislation across the Anglophone world, Danna contends that the push to enshrine gender identity in law serves a dual purpose: it dismantles the legal foundations of women’s sex-based rights while opening a vast new market for pharmaceutical and medical industries that profit from lifelong hormonal dependency. She is particularly alarmed by the targeting of children, pointing to kindergartens in Germany already teaching gender fluidity and to Italy’s public gender clinics, which she argues are affirming rather than treating young people in distress. On surrogacy, Danna is equally unsparing: Meloni’s much-publicised ban, she suggests, is largely theatrical, with enforcement gaps so wide as to render it meaningless. Throughout, she traces a through-line between gender ideology, surrogacy, and capitalist logic—the reduction of bodies, and children, to commodities. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Fiona Girkin, researcher and specialist in female dark personality traits, discusses her PhD findings on female psychopathy, covert manipulation, and the structural silencing of victims—particularly men—who suffer at the hands of toxic women. Girkin argues that female psychopaths differ fundamentally from their male counterparts in their methods: rather than overt physical aggression, they deploy relational aggression—rumour, social sabotage, gaslighting, and the cultivation of protective "posses"—making their behaviour extraordinarily difficult to prove or challenge. She introduces the concept of the "sleeper cell" psychopath: charming, likeable individuals who remain dormant until their power is threatened, then turn ruthless overnight. Her research focused on the community services sector—therapists, social workers, psychologists—where she found far more psychopathic individuals than anticipated, drawn by the covert power that caring roles confer over vulnerable people's lives. Girkin also addresses the professional backlash she faced after speaking publicly about comparable rates of male and female domestic violence, including losing her university position teaching police. She argues that feminist organisations have systematically suppressed recognition of female-perpetrated violence, leaving male victims without resources, disbelieved by courts, and vulnerable to legal weaponisation through divorce and parental alienation. Things are changing, Girkin contends, as female violence becomes less covert and harder to ignore. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Richard D. Wolff, Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and co-founder of Democracy at Work, argues that the United States is living through the terminal phase of imperial overreach. Drawing on the history of empires from Persia and Rome to Britain, Wolff contends that no empire has ever escaped the arc of birth, expansion, and decline—and the US is no exception. Having emerged from World War II as the world’s undisputed economic hegemon, the US has spent decades in self-deluding arrogance, mistaking a historically anomalous post-war moment for permanent, God-given supremacy. The rot is now unmistakable: $35 trillion in debt, a proposed $1.5 trillion war budget, and a string of military defeats from Vietnam to Afghanistan. China, growing at two to three times the US rate for thirty consecutive years, has quietly displaced American economic dominance. The war on Iran—a civilisation far older than the Judaeo-Christian tradition attacking it—may prove the final overreach. With the Strait of Hormuz closed and NATO allies refusing to help, Wolff sees Trump as a latter-day Nero, fiddling while the empire burns. The solution, he insists, is redirecting military spending toward the American people. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, 30-year Army veteran, former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Senior Fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network, discusses the deep structural rot he believes is consuming American democracy and its military empire. Drawing on his experience from Vietnam through the Iraq WMD debacle, Wilkerson argues that the United States has become a force as much for evil as for good, and that the current war against Iran represents the most reckless and dangerous expression of that trajectory yet. He traces the unravelling of legitimate statecraft from the post-Cold War squandering of peace dividends, through 9/11 and the institutionalisation of torture under George W. Bush, to what he describes as the Caligula-like presidency of Donald Trump—whom he regards as history’s most brazen grifter and the architect of an illegal war of choice. Wilkerson raises urgent alarm about Pete Hegseth’s injection of Christian Zionist ideology into the Pentagon’s ranks, the militarisation of domestic law enforcement, the looming threat of cancelled midterm elections, and the very real spectre of a second American civil war. A searing, unflinching conversation with one of Washington’s most candid and consequential insiders. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Nolan Higdon, author and Disinfo Detox host, dismantles the "aberration" myth surrounding Jeffrey Epstein, exposing his deep ties to US/Israeli/Russian intelligence, insider trading, and elite blackmail networks spanning politics (Trump, Dershowitz), tech (Thiel, Palantir), academia (Chomsky, Summers), and media. Higdon reveals how partial Epstein file releases coincide suspiciously with Trump's Iran strikes—launched amid 30% approval and domestic scandals involving ICE—serving as potential distraction from scrutiny over unreleased files and foreign influence (Adelson/AIPAC). He contrasts US corporate media's sanitised narratives of regime changes (Venezuela's Maduro/Flores kidnapping echoing Panama 1989) with international reporting showing Iran's technological resilience and Israeli military setbacks. He critiques NATO's militarised "media literacy" weaponising education against disinformation while shielding Israel-led wars, Gaza genocide denial, and DARVO "self-defence" claims. Higdon warns of AI surveillance eroding youth cognition/social bonds, big tech's eugenics ideology (Yarvin/Thiel), economic fallout from oil spikes, Greenland piracy, and empire's dehumanising normalisation of child trafficking. Urging diverse sourcing beyond legacy media's Politburo-style control, he reveals 2026's fractures—war profiteering and unaccountable power elites. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Radhika Desai, professor of Political Studies and director of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group at the University of Manitoba, brings her historical materialist framework to bear on what she calls the “senile” or “moribund phase” of capitalism—marked by deindustrialisation, financialisation, speculative necromancy, ecological destruction, a precipitous decline in political leadership quality, and the imperial wars now ravaging Venezuela, Cuba and Iran. Desai traces the arc from Karl Marx’s monopoly phase thesis through the post-war golden age, the neoliberal turn and its miserly, punitive politics towards working people, to the present moment in which the US-Israeli war on Iran is accelerating the collapse of dollar hegemony and the everything bubble. She connects cultural neoliberalism—identity politics, DEI, pronoun politics—to a deliberate corporate strategy for generating a patina of progressivism while delivering nothing material to working people, with the professional managerial class administering this hypocritical regime. Desai addresses the BRICS question with characteristic nuance, distinguishing between countries that have genuinely rejected neoliberalism and those, like Modi’s India, whose multipolar rhetoric conceals a servile comprador relationship with Washington. Her analysis of the everything bubble, the Triffin dilemma and Iran-driven inflation carries a stark warning—when interest rates rise far enough to contain the oil shock, the dollar system will come down with them. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Olga Cherevko, spokesperson for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Gaza, draws on over twenty years of experience working in conflict zones across Liberia, Afghanistan, the Philippines, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen to bear witness to what she describes as a level of destruction without parallel in her career. Beginning with the physical transformation of Gaza since her first deployment there in 2014, Cherevko traces the systematic obliteration of water, sanitation, and healthcare infrastructure, explaining how humanitarian teams are reduced to improvising repairs with the wrong materials because the right ones are blocked at the crossing. Cherevko challenges the public perception that humanitarian assistance is simply about food parcels, arguing that it is fundamentally about restoring dignity, and identifies the dual-use classification system and NGO registration restrictions as among the most consequential obstacles to scaling up the response. Addressing the psychological dimension of the crisis—the dimension she argues receives the least attention—Cherevko describes children who no longer flinch at explosions, parents shattered beyond recovery, and a population whose light of hope she watched dim month by month. She warns that a ceasefire does not end suffering, noting that the moment the world looks away is often the moment conditions deteriorate further, and closes with an appeal to keep Gaza on the global conscience long after the guns fall silent. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Michael Fox, a multimedia journalist based in Latin America with two decades of on-the-ground experience, dissects US interventions across the hemisphere—from the Monroe Doctrine’s enduring legacy and Trump’s “Dunro Doctrine” to the January 3rd invasion of Venezuela, capture of Nicolás Maduro, and parallels with the 1989 Panama operation under the guise of drug wars masking oil grabs and geopolitical plays against Cuba, Colombia, and Mexico. As host and producer of podcasts like Brazil on Fire, Stories of Resistance, and season two of Under the Shadow, Fox exposes the weaponization of AI-generated misinformation—fake crowds cheering US troops, manipulated images of Maduro’s detention—and hybrid warfare tactics that erode sovereignty while regional leaders like Gustavo Petro invoke the jaguar awakening resistance amid rightward governmental shifts in Chile, Argentina, and Honduras. Critiquing the true costs of bombings in Caracas—100 dead, millions traumatized—he contrasts mainstream narratives of “clean” tech strikes with harrowing victim testimonies from affected neighborhoods, revealing how US policies fuel migration yet demonize migrants as a boogeyman. Fox draws direct lineages to historical regime changes, puppet installations, and resource colonialism, emphasizing grassroots protests chanting “Down with the Monroe Doctrine” and Caribbean nations’ vocal opposition to boat strikes in their waters. His reporting for NPR, The Intercept, and The Nation prioritizes ground truth over viral fakes, unpacking the human toll of empire’s revival in a multipolar world Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Katherine Sikkink, international relations scholar at the Harvard Kennedy School and leading constructivist theorist, argues that human rights are a social construction—not in the sense that violations are unreal, but that the legal frameworks protecting people from them were built through sustained struggle. Legally enforceable international human rights protections only came into existence with the covenants on civil, political, economic and social rights in 1976, and they continue to require active defence. On transitional justice, Sikkink draws on her landmark work The Justice Cascade (2011) and her ongoing research through the Transitional Justice Evaluation Team. Her comparative data across countries shows that nations which implement transitional justice—through prosecutions, truth commissions and reparations—experience fewer future human rights violations and a lower recurrence of war. Prosecutions that reach senior officials and heads of state produce the largest measurable impact. Sikkink traces the origins of transitional justice to Greece and Portugal after their dictatorships, followed by Argentina’s landmark 1985 junta trials. She highlights the creative legal strategies activists have used to overcome obstacles such as amnesty laws and statutes of limitations, including leveraging international treaty obligations that prohibit statutes of limitations for crimes against humanity. On the current era, Sikkink warns that the Trump administration’s reliance on what she calls “weaponised interdependence”—using hard economic and political power to coerce other states—may yield short-term compliance but it fundamentally erodes the trust and reputation that sustain long-term international relations. She also cautions that US democracy is under genuine threat, stressing that the upcoming midterm elections represent the single most important avenue for citizens to push back, urging American citizens abroad. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe