Olivia Guaraldo

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. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

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. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

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. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

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.” Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Miriam Grossman MD, board certified in child, adolescent and adult psychiatry, discusses her latest book Lost in Trans Nation: A Child Psychiatrist’s Guide Out of the Madness (2023) and the social epidemic that has hit Western countries—that of the medicalisation of gender, its impacts on children and adolescents across North America, and the wider landscape of gender ideology. Deconstructing the delusion of “gender-affirming care,” Grossman unapologetically critiques one of the greatest medical scandals of the past century that has taken hold of medical institutions across the United States and Canada. Pronouncing what was not so many years ago truisms, Grossman vituperates how there is no “third sex” and “no spectrum of sex” noting the crusade of misinformation that has shattered the lives of many of her teenage and young adult patients in recent years. Having witnessed the devastation that gender ideology has wrought, having shattered the lives of many of her own patients and that of their families, Grossman criticises how age-old stereotypes of gender have been allowed to take root and flourish through the perversion of language and the conterminous invention of a “gender identity,” an ideology which she traces back to John Money, a New Zealand American psychologist who founded the Gender Identity Clinic at Johns Hopkins University. Tracing how gender ideology has captured the medical profession today, Grossman details the medical fraud that has taken hold of our society and institutions and destroyed the somatic and psychological health of thousands putting these individuals at risk of an array of medical conditions due to the effects of synthetic cross-sex hormones. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Kevin Bardosh, Director and Head of Research at Collateral Global, discusses the pandemic response and the uniformity of viewpoint across the planet in what he calls a “totalising vision” of the COVID-19 pandemic response. Discussing his research that addresses both the conversations around the reaction and the social and political factors that fed into the public health response to the pandemic, Bardosh elaborates on the “industry of fear” where public health had a hand in the fearmongering that took place from 2020 onward. Discussing the need for a heterodox analysis, noting the experiences of many scientists who questioned the public policy at the time, Bardosh articulates how the public policy is tasked with making decisions based on making sense of competing interests while also taking decisions based on specific tradeoffs, a framework he maintains which was “completely tossed out the window” during the Covid-19 pandemic. Criticising the suspension of democratic norms, Bardosh observes that those who promoted lockdown policies despite their exaggeration of the dangers of the virus, their fabrications of modelled Covid deaths and who amplified the benefits of lockdown were almost all unilaterally promoted within their institutions while cementing institutional discourse on lockdown with little to no room for heterodox approaches. Bardosh carefully analyses the historical forces that buttressed institutional reactions to the pandemic, from cultural to political to philosophical notions of freedom, all while questioning what would happen were a pathogen with a higher death rate to emerge today. Focussing on his current research in “public health harm,” Bardosh elucidates how public health’s unintended consequences of disruption and harm were dramatic and drastic, classifying the reaction to the 2020 pandemic as an “overreaction.” Bardosh also addresses the quite common human train where individuals in positions of power are reluctant to admit where they got it wrong, referring to the Milgram experiment.  Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Kevin Gosztola, author of Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case Against Julian Assange, discusses the Julian Assange case in light of his recent guilty plea and subsequent release from custody. Noting how this directly impacts press freedom and government secrecy, Gosztola argues that the plea deal struck with Assange is not the primary problem threatening journalism. Instead, he postulates that the threat posed by the Assange case is that he should never have been prosecuted in the first place. Gosztola covers how Assange “pled guilty to journalism” in large part because of the Espionage Act (1917) which has been contemporarily used as a “firm hand of stern repression” (Woodrow Wilson) to go after whistleblowers. At one point in the discussion, Julian Vigo speculates as to whether Assange, had he been free this past decade, might have been able to break the stories on the “gender industry” and the “sterilisation of children” far earlier, given the many journalists and whistleblowers who have been sidelined from their own publications and institutions (eg. Suzanne Moore, David Bell, Sonia Appleby) over this very subject. From there [record scratch], the discussion shifts radically in focus and tenor. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Joti Brar, the Vice Chair of the Communist Party in Great Britain (CPGB-ML), discusses many of the mediatised and popular misconceptions regarding communism and the shifting political valences of the left and the right through neoliberalist discourse in recent years. Historicising how the term “communist” was used as an insult in the mid-19th century, even before the publication of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto (1848), Brar elaborates how the ruling class feared the working class, recognising communism as the leading militant edge of the working class and a threat to capitalist exploitation. The slur of “communist” then, as it is also being reinvigorated by the right today, attempts to demonise Marxism among the working class whereby people will shy away from the idea of communism before ever understanding what it actually is. Brar delves into the history of capitalism and its many violent confrontations within the labour landscape and the misery capitalism effected upon workers’ lives for the majority of its existence. Expounding upon the Keynesian consensus in the post-war era where the ruling classes agreed to make reforms to stave off communist revolution by implementing certain social measures such as nationalising certain services and creating the welfare state, Brar notes how capitalism exists in a constant state of crisis, harbouring a persistant fear of Marxism while projecting the ruling class’ degeneration and crimes onto its opponents. Noting how capitalist ideology served to destabilise communism since the 1950s, Brar elucidates the current era where the struggle for women’s rights and racism quickly became institutionalised within bourgeois academic disciplines thusly neutering all class criticism. As a result, feminism was not framed as a struggle between workers and capitalists for which the solution to the oppression of women was never the end of the exploitation societies, but rather women’s oppression was postured in terms of various enemies such as men and underwear.  Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro, a pulpit rabbi, author of The Empty Wagon: Zionism's Journey From Identity Crisis to Identity Theft (2020), and host of the Committing High Reason podcast, discusses Zionism and its relationship to current conflicts the state of Israel. Covering the birth of Zionism that responded to European’s stereotype of the “the Jew as bad,” “disgusting” and “retrogade,” Zionism offered up “the opposite of a Jew…in personality and character” where this stereotype, attempting to remodel Jewish identity that was based, created quite paradoxically, an anti-Semitic Jewish identity. Noting the anti-Jewish notes of Zionism, Shapiro highlights how religious Jews—orthodox and non-orthodox Jews alike—early on disassociated entirely from Zionists. Shapiro elaborates Theodor Herzl’s work in fomenting an ideology that politicised Jewish identity, while observing how Zionism was never a movement of self-determination of the Jewish people, but was a movement that critically attempted to nationalise the religion. Noting how Herzl effectively “gaslit the Jews” by politicising the “Holy Land” while conflating it with Judaism, Shapiro analyses how Zionism has created the current political crisis in Gaza today where horrors are effected in the name of an ideology that has absolutely nothing to do with Judaism whatsoever. Depsite the media and political machinery that attempts to push the fiction of Zionism in buttressing the creation of Israel as “the Jewish state” while conterminously demanding that all Jews be loyal to Israel, lest they be guilty of anti-Semitism as well, Shapiro criticises how Zionism has been curated in a way that falsely assumes that there is only one way to be Jewish or worse, that if you are against Zionism, you are necessarily an anti-Semite. Shapiro vituperates this position and inverts the polemic: “Instead of [asking] when does anti-Zionism cross the line into anti-Semitism, we need to start asking the queiston the other way: When does Zionism cross the line into anti-Semitism?” Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Anna Loutfi, an equality and human rights barrister, discusses her support of parents in bringing the group litigation against the Department for Education for failure to protect pupils against political ideology, including the promotion and encouragement of “gender transition.” Covering the subtle processes of indoctrination within British classrooms today where education functions to “protect” children from reality while concurrently telling them that health is a myth, Loutfi analyses how gender ideology has been brought into RSE (Relationships and Sex Education) teaching whereby puberty has been presented as embarrassing, dirty, and as something that can be completely avoided. Tracing the roots of this “unlearning” of the healthy body, Loutfi notes that health is quickly being marginalised as the state has become the site where the masses will go to “correct” their “sick” bodies. Loutfi also covers how law has been incorrectly rewritten into public policies by the diversity and inclusion industry whereby the mere process of identifying as something other, relies upon the “protected characteristic” of "gender reassignment" from the Gender Recognition Act (2004), even though this law, written specifically for adults, has been misapplied to children by virtue of any child “identifying as” the opposite sex. Loutfi underscores the importance of having public conversations as to why some men are castrating themselves and why so many public and private institutions have capitulated to a movement that has been given carte blanche to do nothing other than attack and disturb women and girls.  Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe