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.

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.

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.

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.