EJRkJKXYJbDiJ69cKu3ZIda Susser, distinguished professor of anthropology at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center, examines the Gilets jaunes (Yellow Vests) movement in France as a volatile yet transformative response to the deepening crises of neoliberalism, democratic erosion, and social fragmentation across the West. Drawing on years of ethnographic fieldwork in Paris, Saint-Denis, and provincial France, Susser argues that the movement disrupted conventional political binaries by creating forms of solidarity that exceeded traditional distinctions between left and right. Through concepts such as “commoning” and “thresholding,” she describes how precarious workers, retirees, migrants, and politically disillusioned citizens forged provisional alliances grounded less in ideology than in shared experiences of dispossession, police violence, economic exclusion, and social abandonment. Susser situates the movement within a broader historical trajectory of grassroots resistance, linking the Yellow Vests to Occupy Wall Street, the Indignados, Black Lives Matter, and earlier traditions of horizontalist organizing. She explores how the protests exposed the consequences of gentrification, rural decline, and the hollowing out of public life, while simultaneously generating new forms of mutual aid, including food collectives and neighborhood support networks during lockdown. The conversation also confronts the contradictions embedded within contemporary progressive politics, including disputes surrounding feminism, immigration, populism, and state authority, as Susser reflects on the increasingly unstable boundaries between emancipatory and reactionary movements. Framing the present moment as one marked by the resurgence of authoritarian tendencies and the normalization of state repression, she argues for the urgent construction of a new “historic bloc” capable of defending democratic space through collective struggle, civic participation, and radically inclusive visions of social justice.

Abby Martin, an investigative journalist and advocacy filmmaker, exposes the catastrophic environmental and human costs of US militarism, arguing that the Department of Defense represents a singular, yet intentionally obscured, force of global ecological destruction. Drawing on her reporting for The Empire Files and her latest film, Earth’s Greatest Enemy, Martin discusses the institutional mechanisms that allow the military to remain exempt from international climate agreements, effectively functioning as a “blind spot” in mainstream environmental discourse while operating as the world’s largest institutional polluter. She challenges the “bipartisan consensus” for US imperialism, criticizing a “media blackout” orchestrated by corporate journalists—or “empire babies”—who normalize systemic violence while placing the burden of environmental responsibility on individual consumers. Extending the discussion beyond carbon emissions, Martin examines the toxic legacy of military operations, from the generational radioactive contamination caused by depleted uranium to the domestic betrayal of service members at Camp Lejeune. She contends that the current global atmosphere of “manufactured amnesia” masks the reality of an empire in its “waning” stages, which increasingly relies on emergency powers and state-sponsored censorship to maintain its grip amid growing public dissent. Reflecting on the ongoing crisis in Gaza and the historical precedents of US interventionism, Martin suggests that anti-imperialism and climate justice are naturally interlinked, viewing her work as a “tool in the arsenal” for movement building aimed at reclaiming transparency and justice within a crumbling global order.

Peter McCullough, an internist, cardiologist, and epidemiologist, reflects on the political, medical, and social consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, arguing that the global response fundamentally altered public trust in science, medicine, and democratic institutions. Drawing on his background in cardiovascular medicine and public health, McCullough discusses studies he believes demonstrate links between mRNA vaccines and myocarditis, sudden cardiac arrest, and broader cardiovascular complications, while explaining the biological mechanisms behind troponin elevation and inflammatory damage within heart tissue. He challenges mainstream public health narratives surrounding vaccine safety, criticizing what he describes as the suppression of dissenting medical voices and the failure of institutions to adequately investigate adverse events associated with mass vaccination campaigns. Extending the discussion beyond medicine, McCullough examines the broader political and cultural atmosphere that emerged during lockdowns, including censorship, social compliance, economic devastation, and the normalization of emergency powers across Western democracies. He argues that public discourse during the pandemic was shaped by coordinated messaging between governments, media organizations, pharmaceutical companies, and global institutions, creating a climate in which skepticism toward official policy became socially and professionally dangerous. Reflecting on athlete deaths, VAERS reporting controversies, vaccine mandates, and unresolved questions surrounding the origins of COVID-19 and the Wuhan laboratory, McCullough contends that the pandemic exposed deep contradictions within modern liberal societies concerning bodily autonomy, transparency, and informed consent. Yet amid this, he points to growing public skepticism toward institutional authority, suggesting that the long-term legacy of the pandemic may ultimately be a broader reevaluation of the relationship between citizens, governments, and public health systems.

Nader Hashemi, Director of the Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University, reflects on how his experience of the 1979 Iranian Revolution shaped a lifelong inquiry into the fraught relationship between religion, secularism, and democracy. Hashemi situates his intellectual trajectory within the tension between a Western secular framework—often equated with progress—and its very different reception across the Middle East, where it has frequently been associated with authoritarianism and externally backed regimes. He challenges dominant Western narratives about Iran and the region, arguing that media and policy discourses systematically erase the historical context of colonial intervention, coups, and geopolitical interests that continue to structure contemporary conflicts. From the Green Movement of 2009 to the Women, Life, Freedom protests, Hashemi examines the internal struggle for democratic reform under conditions of repression, economic sanctions, and external pressure, emphasizing how these forces have eroded the social base necessary for sustained change. Extending the discussion to Gaza, Israel-Palestine, and broader regional dynamics, he highlights the stark double standards in Western foreign policy and the persistence of imperial logics beneath the language of human rights. Yet, amid this, Hashemi points to a generational shift: younger audiences, shaped by social media and alternative information flows, are increasingly able to challenge entrenched narratives and recognize the contradictions at the heart of the so-called rules-based order.

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.

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.

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.

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.