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The populist right of today (Trump, Orban, Milei etc) are not the rebels of neoliberalism. They are just carriers of a new mutation of it. They are neoliberalism’s bastard offspring, Quin Slobodian says. He calls it the new fusionist movement. “ Many supposed disruptors of the status quo are agents less of a backlash against global capitalism than a frontlash within it. Slobodian's Hayek's Bastards is like a novel of neoliberalism. He has a cast of characters, old and new thinkers from Murray Rothbard to Argentina's Milei, which he follows throughout the book from the early days of neoliberalism to the present day, tracing how their ideas echoed and mutated.  This tale begins at the end of the Cold War, where Slobodian says that neoliberals, instead of rejoicing in the victory of communism, were in fact anxious. They felt communism had not left but disguised itself in the new leftism movements of environmentalism, civil rights, feminism and the influence of supranational institutions such as the EU and the UN etc. The fight was far from over. “ Having fought back a red tide, we are now in danger of being engulfed by a green one” One enemy was the left and their goal of egalitarianism which wanted to reduce inequality. So, what did the neoliberals do? Slobodian shows that they turned to science and biology. Creating the neoliberal market society was a task greater than economics: they needed to return to understanding human nature.  They challenged the fundamental principle of egalitarianism by using biology to argue that we are not all equal due to differences of race and IQ. Some of us - you can guess who- had the advantageous features to survive in market society and others, the less evolved societies, did not. Therefore the left's mission to address inequality was pointless. In 1994, Murray and co-author Richard Herrnstein published The Bell Curve, which argued there was a link between “race” and “intelligence”. A more recent example with similar ideas that Slobodian gives is Thilo Sarrazin’s book Germany Abolishes Itself published in 2015 at the height of the refugee crisis. His ideas are very close to those of the AFD and the Austrian Freedom Party today. Alongside this, many began to argue that “cultural homogeneity is a precondition for social stability, and thus the peaceful conduct of market exchange and enjoyment of private property”. They demanded what Slobodian calls an ethno-economy. Thus, some people, of certain ethnicities, they argued, are just not meant to prosper and the perfect and balanced market society must exclude them.  And how to protect this cultural homogeneity? Closed borders. Free movement for capital and goods but not for all people. The anti-immigration rhetoric of today's populist leaders certainly echoes this. The third set of characters Slobodian focuses on are the ‘goldbugs’ in love with hard money. Slobodian says these catastrophe libertarians’ predicted an impending collapse and potched it as survivalism: you need to secure your hard assets and precious metals. The end of the gold standard was resented by many neoliberals and one if them called it the descent into “monetary socialism” as paper notes meant no restriction on welfare state expenditure. The fake fiat paper money was just designed by political elites to purchase votes and power. But the collapse is a question of when not if. This apocalyptic narrative planted the seeds for a deep mistrust of public authority.  ‘Fun’ fact: in 2014, the AfD opened an online gold shop to collect revenue for party financing. Gold, they said, is ‘crisis-proof and future orientated”. Steven Bannon, a prominent MAGA figure, shares a similar message on his podcast: the world will end, the markets will crash, be prepared. At the same time, Bannon makes a business opportunity out of this, telling his listeners to ‘Buy Birch Gold’, a metals firm he partners with. Naomi Klein & Astra Taylor also warn of this phenomenon in their essay in the Guardian: “The governing ideology of the far right in our age of escalating disasters has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism”. She explains how the elites of today embrace a belief that the apocalypse is coming: a trend not alien to fascism which Umberto Eco named in his essay as the “Armageddon complex” which is a fantasy of defeating enemies in a final battle. The difference, Klein says, is that today fascism doesn’t have a “future horizon”. Instead, they prepare by building bunkers, planning escapes to Mars and fortressed, free economic zones where the rules of democracy, government oversight and due process do not apply. The best example of this is Prospera in the Honduras which is a semi-autonomous charter city and Special Economic Zone (ZEDE), founded by a U.S corporation that has raised $120 million in investments, including from venture-capital funds backed by well-known Silicon Valley billionaires like Peter Thiel, Sam Altman and Marc Andreessen.  I would also argue that Trump’s push for American autarky draws from the same end times fantasy and survivalism. His threats to annex Canada, Greenland, take the Panama canal or Ukraine’s critical resources are elements of a vision to build the fortressed nation that can endure the coming shocks by securing land and stockpiling critical resources. This is accompanied by the extreme, alarmist rhetoric of immigration and ‘wokism’ as the existential threat to America. As the panic and chaos grow, so does his control. Slobodian says the ‘new fusionists’ have 3 core ideas: ‘hardwired human nature, hard borders, and hard money’. I don't disagree that there is overlap with today's populist right on the topics of hard borders and race-inspired nationalism. But hard money? Human nature? These I find harder to link as directly. Trump’s protectionism and rejection of globalisation is more than just hard borders for people, it's hard borders for capital: a notion that traditional neoliberals would disagree with. One can also question his attempt to link the cast of characters he introduces as the fusionists and paleo-Libertarians as the true offspring of Hayek’s ideas. Slobodian himself says that many of Hayek's students, inspired by him, actually ended up with ideas contradicting those of their founder. It seems to me that Trump is neoliberalism’s moody, rebellious teenager. It can break the rules but it still lives under the roof of neoliberalism.

Books: Grace Blakely ‘Vulture Capitalism' and Rousseau ‘The Social Contract’ Rousseau said that democracy is only for the Gods. Mark Fisher said imagining the end of the world is easier than imagining the end of capitalism. Economics and politics are and have been inseparable. Capital brings power and power decides capital. Therefore, if we want to understand these systems and why they are failing us- particularly, the versions of them that exist today- perhaps it would serve to look at them as two sides of the same coin. The Myth of the Free Market Is our economic system really a free market? Or is the invisible hand a marionette? And if so, who is really pulling the strings? Neoliberalism claims to be the golden child of the free market, embracing deregulation, financialization and laissez-faire. But I beg to question if it has lived up to these promises. The financial crash of 2008 was one of the first but not the last indicators that something was going wrong, or indeed, maybe it was working just as designed. Financial corporations received their public funds and bailouts as the storm of economic recession upturned the lives of ordinary working class citizens. In 2025, the consequences of this could not be more obvious. Income inequality has reached drastic levels. Rising inflation plunges many into a cost of living crisis. The explanation is this: the free market was a convenient myth. The reality of neoliberalism’s capitalism is a state-planned economy by the elites and for the elites. The reality is a monopoly capitalism that lowers productivity, decreases private investment, destroys small businesses, undercuts public tax revenue, hinders innovation and generates lower wages and higher inflation.  This is the argument that Grace Blakeley makes in her book ‘Vulture Capitalism’. One of the examples she uses is the Boeing 737 Max disasters. Boeing prioritized cost-cutting and profit maximization over safety, leading to the introduction of a faulty software system (MCAS) that ended up causing fatal crashes. After the Disasters, however, Boeing received a significant bailout from the U.S. government. Blakeley's core argument is that capitalism was never about the free market. Moreover, what distinguishes capitalism from socialism is not the size of state and the level of intervenention: it is where power lies. She thus defines capitalism through a Marxist class distinction where power lies with the capitalists. In socialism, the difference is that power lies with the working class. Monopoly Consumes Democracy  Clearly, the consequences of this are not just economic, but also political.  As capital concentrates at the top, power follows. Therefore, elites and big corporations can whisper in the ear of politicians to push the economic decisions that suit their interests. Where does that leave us? Oligarchy. It follows that what is needed is a democratisation of the economy. An economy for the people and by the people where the citizens’ demands and concerns are the focus of policy.  What could this look like? Instead of producing more yachts, basic goods -which are currently in shortages- could be provided such as food, healthcare or the clean energy needed to save our planet.  Instead of endless economic growth, we could choose to create a fairer distribution of income and resources. Instead of depleting finite resources for profit, we could opt for a sustainable model of economics that strives to protect the lives of future generations and not to increase GDP. Instead of measuring solely profit, we could place more value on human wellbeing and happiness. This would also require a dramatic restricting of our society. One that would not be a society of consumers but of citizens. Instead of promoting the overcompetitive, individualistic figure, we could build communities centred on empathy and humility. Instead of prioritising private interest, we promote the common good.  Instead of a nationalism that preaches exclusion and superiority, we could have a patriotism that teaches us to understand ourselves as citizens sharing a mutual project.  Democracy of Citizens, not Consumers Is that not what citizenship really means? An obligation to your fellow other. Rousseau tells us this : as soon as the citizens “come to prefer to serve the state with the purse rather than their person, the state is already close to ruin ”. He continues: “ Thanks to laziness and money, they end up with soldiers to enslave the country and deputies to sell it.”  “As soon as the Members of Parliament are elected, the people is enslaved.” Unfortunately, I conclude that today, the general will, the voice of the citizens, has been silenced. The death of the body politic is real.  Rousseau warned us. “ The legislative power (the general will) is the heart of the state, the executive power is thr brain. A man can be an imbecile and survive, but as soon as his heart stops functioning, the creature is dead.” But this does not have to be the case. If we so much as dare to imagine it, the alternative appears. Deliberative democracy. People's assemblies. An economic and political system where the citizens are empowered and heard. Then, as Rousseau envisioned, we would not be subjects, but sovereigns.  ( Do you agree? Do you have anything to add? What do you believe about the way our economic and political systems should work?  Share your ideas on our ‘Discuss’ page or send us an email at admin@speakup-standup.com   if you have an article you want to publish on our site)

Reading Byung-Chul Han’s ‘Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power’ and ‘Burnout Society’ felt like witnessing a surgical analysis of society itself. His diagnosis is that neoliberalism has created a crisis of freedom: in his words, we have simultaneously become victim and perpetrator, master and slave. To me/ According to Han,This is the greatest societal issue we face today. Han shows that the crisis of mental health and individualism are also symptoms of this issue. In Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power , Han recycles and revises Foucault’s ideas of the disciplinary society and biopolitics to fit our contemporary situation. Firstly, where Foucault's biopolitics was concerned with the corporal and managed populations through statistics and demographic control, psychopolitic s today penetrates deeper layers - our desires and our very sense of self.  Furthermore, the “docile body” no longer complies with immaterial forms of production. Second to his argument is that Foucault’s disciplinary society  operated on negativity, repression and prohibition whereas the modern neoliberal order is one of “positivity” and excess. It is, in his words, a “friendly big Brother” where needs are stimulated, consumption encouraged and desires fulfilled through an illusion of freedom. Though we never feel we are being watched or under threat, this is simply a more efficient method of control and surveillance. The digital sphere plays a primary role in this operation as “Big Data” can now observe, record and influence not just our actions but our very psyche. Here, his analogy of a digital panopticon excited me: he says it is an ‘aperspectival’ system, with no blind spots unlike Bentham’s and thus it can “peer into the human soul itself”. Even more importantly, we, the inmates, collaborate in the digital panopticon’s operation through voluntary self-exposure: “smartphones have been substituted for torture chambers”. Every like or retweet reveals to them our desires, some of which we may not even be conscious of ourselves, so that emotions can be exploited at a pre-reflexive level to “steer” behaviour or even voting decisions through micro-targeting. Unfortunately, our auto-exploitation and auto-surveillance also takes another form which he describes in The Burnout Society. He argues that neoliberalism has transformed the discipline society into an achievement society where we are no longer obedience-subjects, but “projects” and entrepreneurs of ourselves. What could be a more efficient kind of subjugation? We become our own panopticon. We chase self-optimization so that the coercive ‘should’ is replaced by an unlimited, positive ‘can’: this is the notorious violence of positivity. At the same time, every failure leads to self-reproach as aggression is turned inwards. Han recognises two important symptoms that result from this. Firstly, the atomization of society:  the neoliberal subject has no capacity for friendship with others that might be free of purpose. Secondly, today’s mental health crisis of neurological illnesses like depression, anxiety and exhaustion. As the issue of economic inequality also increases, I suspect that the symptoms Han describes will only worsen. Upon reflection, I would also add to Han’s analysis that the rise of populism and authoritarianism is yet another symptom of the neoliberal crisis of freedom. In an individualistic, burnt out and polarised society, people are even more vulnerable to the appeal of a populist narrative that promises belonging and the authoritarian promise of security and control. Han’s work has fundamentally changed my understanding of freedom by showing me how deeply and broadly power operates in society today. I see that it extends its reach beyond sovereigns, institutions or coercion to penetrate even psychology and identity.

Two months ago, I launched this platform dedicated to youth political and social discourse. I had no idea how quickly it would reveal something I suspected but couldn't quite articulate: young people are starving for meaningful conversation. Within weeks, our community exploded with participants from across the globe, all eager to dive into questions that matter. Questions like "What is your vision of an ideal world? What global issue is the most important to you? What do you think is the place of youth in politics today?”and "What does democracy mean to you?”.  Mask of Apathy I started this project because I kept witnessing something troubling: political apathy spreading through our generation like a quiet epidemic. But the more I observed, the more I concluded that perhaps this wasn’t apathy at all. This is disillusionment wearing a mask. Youth and citizens in general are not on the whole uninterested in politics and social issues - they just feel powerless to influence them. How could we be indifferent when it is our future that is at stake? Unfortunately though, "Why bother speaking up when no one listens?" has become a common refrain. When you feel like your elected officials don't represent you, when the political system seems designed to exclude rather than include your voice, disappointment becomes inevitable. And that disappointment can take two paths: explosive anger or resigned withdrawal. Neither of these paths serves us well.  Age of Atomization There's another dimension to this crisis that runs even deeper: we're becoming strangers to each other.  Hannah Arendt, writing in the shadow of totalitarianism's rise, identified this atomization as  one of democracy's greatest threats. Our disengagement from public spaces and common concerns is a big red flag and one that should be taken seriously. This atomization and ‘rootlessness’ makes us even more vulnerable to manipulation as we embrace ideologies that promise belonging but instead end up delivering division. This atomization creates a dangerous cycle. People feel isolated, turn inward, and when they do encounter differing viewpoints, they approach them as threats rather than opportunities for understanding. We end up fighting not because we're enemies, but because we're strangers. John Stuart Mill's concept of the "marketplace of ideas" offers a powerful antidote to this problem. Mill argued that truth emerges through the free exchange of ideas, where different perspectives compete and complement each other in open dialogue. This website is a miniature experiment in creating a marketplace of ideas. But this marketplace only functions when people are willing to engage genuinely with viewpoints that challenge their own - something that's nearly impossible when we've lost the foundation of mutual respect and curiosity. The purpose of these discussions is not to win; it's about collective discovery. It requires us to approach disagreement not as warfare but as collaboration in the pursuit of better solutions through finding areas of common ground. My final message Every new member of this community represents another young person who refuses to accept that their voice doesn't matter, another individual choosing engagement over withdrawal. That should give us all hope We must not be afraid to have opinions or to express them. But we must be brave enough to hold those opinions lightly - ready to refine them through encounters with different perspectives - and we must do so with respect for the humanity in those who disagree with us. This isn't naïve optimism; it is necessity. The challenges we face—climate change, inequality, social division—are complex.They require collective wisdom and cooperation. This platform is called "Speak Up, Stand Up" because that's exactly what our generation must do. Not shout down, not shut out, but speak up with courage and stand up with integrity. We educate each other through discussion. We find solutions through collaboration. We build the future through connection.

When you read a headline like "Protesters Clash with Police," what image forms in your mind? Now consider the same event phrased as "Police Confront Demonstrators." Feel the difference? This isn't just journalism—it's linguistic manipulation at work, and it's happening every time you scroll through your news feed. The word "manipulation" comes from the Latin manipulus, meaning "handful"—quite fitting when we consider how media outlets shape our perceptions like a puppeteer handling marionettes. But unlike the obvious strings attached to marionettes, modern manipulation operates through something far more subtle: language itself. An Anatomy of Manipulation What makes manipulation so insidious is its intentional, deceptive nature. It always serves the interests of the manipulator while systematically undermining the autonomy of the victim. It takes away our ability to form independent thoughts and make genuine choices.  Modern media manipulation employs a sophisticated toolkit. There's the overwhelm strategy—bombarding us with facts and statistics to confuse us and make our critical thinking shut down. Think about the endless, rapid-fire news alerts flooding your phone.  Manipulation succeeds by using our emotions and targeting our vulnerabilities. Every headline is designed to invoke an immediate emotional response, giving you no time to process or question. Every wording choice is a deliberate thread in a polarising narrative of ‘us’ versus ‘them’. The fear is already there, living amongst us - the media just spots this vulnerability and magnified it. In an atomised and thoughtless society - exactly what Hannah arendt warned us of - we are even more vulnerable to the power of narratives. The Blank Spaces Matter Most Here's what's particularly troubling. We might think we know all about “fake news” and how to spot obvious bias, but we have become blind to a more sophisticated form of manipulation—the art of strategic silence.  What outlets choose not to report, which contexts they omit, which questions they never ask—these absences shape our understanding as powerfully as any headline. This creates what I call the "media mirage"  The appearance of impartiality masks the reality of distortion. Take climate change coverage, for instance. Media outlets flood us with urgent reports about rising temperatures, extreme weather, and catastrophic tipping points. The "what" is everywhere—but where's the "why"? Why do fossil fuel emissions continue to rise despite decades of climate summits and corporate sustainability pledges? Media fails in its fundamental mission to hold power accountable by rarely asking the uncomfortable question: could it be that governments, institutions, and corporations simply don't want to stop because fossil fuels remain enormously profitable? This silence isn't accidental—it's strategic omission that keeps us focused on symptoms while the root causes remain conveniently unexamined. Fighting Back in the Information War So how do we combat this?  Manipulation thrives in power imbalances. So the answer is simple: we need to take back our power. We need our media to be truly representative and diverse. We need the media to inform the citizens not blind them to serve the interests of power. The traditional advice—"check multiple sources"—is necessary but in the current times, insufficient. We need to develop what I call "fill in the blanks literacy"—the ability to see what's missing from the story. This means asking not just "What is this article telling me?" but "What isn't it telling me? What perspectives are absent? What context has been stripped away?" This approach requires more work from us as consumers. We must become active participants rather than passive recipients, taking responsibility for filling in the gaps that the media deliberately leaves blank. It means questioning not just biased sources but also those that appear most objective. The question isn't whether we're being manipulated—we are. The question is whether we wish to stay ignorant and misinformed.  Are you ready to start filling in the gaps?

I have been putting off writing this for quite some time just because I am afraid I will not truly do it justice. But the more I read, the more I felt the need to talk about it. So here are some scattered ideas (at best) about the first chapter of Frantz Fanon’s “Wretched of the Earth”.   A passionate writer, an incredible thinker, Fanon writes about colonialism. As a psychologist, he offers some valuable insight into th e psychological impact of oppression on the colonised but also as someone who joined the fight for Algeria’s independence, he is able to understand and talk about decolonization and revolution. As he wrote this, he was suffering from leukemia, but he manages to squeeze a lot of powerful ideas in this book. So, without further ado, let’s get into it. “Decolonization is always a violent phenomenon”. That is the first thing Fanon says to us. And this is one of the main questions he raises in this book: how necessary is violence in the fight for decolonization? He does not offer a moral justification for violence. In fact, working himself as a psychiatrist in Algeria during the war, he has seen firsthand how severely violence can affect one’s mental-health and well-being (chapter 5 is a real case-by-case description of this). But, he argues that colonization in itself is a violent and dehumanizing process. He makes an interesting, and true, distinction that: “In the colonial countries,.. the policeman and the soldier..maintain contact with the native and advise him by means of rifle butts and napalm not to budge.”  The policeman and soldier, Fanon says, are the intermediaries and spokesmen for the settlers and “speak the language of pure force”, meaning colonisation can not work or be maintained without violence. (In western countries the ‘policing’ of the exploited person he says is done more through “an atmosphere of submission and inhibition.”)  And this is where his argument becomes clearer: that the coloniser is “the bringer of violence into the home and into the mind of the native” (who came first the chicken or the egg?) . But colonisation is not just violent, it is cruel. It dehumanises the native, and divides the world into two different “species”. Fanon, beautifully puts it in this quote: “They (the natives) are born there, it matters little where or how; they die there, it matters not where, nor how.” The life of the colonised is one of hunger, poverty, pain and humiliation and so,  “the colonized man is an envious man” when he looks at how the coloniser lives. But he is only able to regain his humanity through liberation. Decolonization, Fanon says, is “the veritable creation of new men”. Another one of Fanon’s metaphors, also explored in his book ‘Black Skin, White Masks’, is that “the colonial world is a Manichean world”: it is black or white, one or the other. The colonised and coloniser can never reconcile, and decolonization is “the meeting of two forces, opposed to each other by their very nature” so that liberation for one must mean the complete destruction, “burial in the depths of the earth or its expulsion from the country.” For some, this is a controversial assertion by Fanon that quite simply reconciliation is and ought to be impossible and peaceful co-existence cannot occur . He talks in particular about a common theme to the narrative of colonisation, which is the civilizing mission . The colonizer declares the native to be “the enemy of values”, “absolute evil”, the barbarian, the uncivilised that must be civilised, the animal that must be tamed. “It is not enough for the settler to delimit physically the place of the native”, what is required is a complete replacement of the native with the colonizers’ values . Values that the “colonized masses mock, insult them, and vomit them up.”  So the native, knowing that “he is not an animal…it is precisely at the moment he realizes his humanity that he begins to sharpen the weapons with which he will secure its victory ” (p.g 43), bringing us back to Fanon's point on violence. Now this resonates particularly in the contemporary world in the way that the civilising mission continuese to be perpetrated. Albeit more subtle, it hides behind the mask of racism in all its forms. But Fanon also makes a crucial point about culture. Colonisation does not just colonise the land, the wealth, the people. It aims to eradicate the culture and the mind and that makes it dangerously powerful.

A perhaps not-so-radical critique of the education system. Freire critiques the ‘banking model’ of education: a system where children are empty vessels to be filled with knowledge. Knowledge that is in itself also empty, devoid of true value. To us, this looks like memorising and regurgitating useless numbers, dates and information - a struggle I am sure we have all endured at least once. It may also look like a long and seemingly endless lesson of copying down slide after slide in silence. Freire empathises with us there too. Putting it more eloquently, he says:  “the teacher teaches and the students are taught  the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing the teacher thinks and the students are thought about the teacher talks and the students listen—meekly the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply the teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher the teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it” Sound familiar? The more we are filled with empty narration, the more hollow we become. Critical consciousness - conscientização as Freire puts it in Portuguese - is never achieved. In essence, thinking is domesticated or eradicated completely, so that it no longer becomes ‘critical’ thinking. It is no longer a process, an action, or a questioning, it is simply a retrieval of information. Here, I believe that debate and discussion can play a critical role in teaching us to engage with knowledge but also teaching us to 'agree disagreeably'. But it is not a retrieval of any information; the information chosen that is considered ‘correct’, so that it aligns with the systems of authority. For any students here that do TOK (bare with me), think about the relationship between power and knowledge. However, Freire extends his analysis a bit further. He analyses the relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed. He frames oppression, whatever form it may take, as a process of dehumanization . One that stops one reaching their full potential and discovering one’s humanity and identity. Oppression limits expression, restricts autonomy and prohibits liberation. However, in his opinion , it is not just the oppressed that is dehumanized, it is also the oppressor . By oppressing others, they themselves lose their own humanity. Meanwhile, the oppressed strive to become the oppressors by falling prey to the false illusion that it will give them back their humanity when actually, they are striving to be free. Sounds like an evil game to play but one that we have seen play out in history many times before. “The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom.” “No one can be authentically human while he prevents others from being so.” What does humanity mean to you? What does freedom mean, and are we ever truly free? For Freire, liberation is composed of two stages. The first being reflection, realising how the systems of oppression operate, and the second being concrete action to dismantle them. He proposes an alternative: the ‘problem-posing model’ of education . Humanity, for Freire, is the starting point and from there, he reimagines education. The roles of student and teacher being eradicated, both can now teach and be taught and engage in truly open dialogue.  A question for you now: what do you think of the education system as it is and would you like to experience Freire's model of education?