Szego Unplugged Podcast

David Free is a critic (including for the Nine papers), novelist, and fellow-Stacker. In recent times, David, a non-Jew, has drawn attention for his lucid and brave essays on the anti-Jewish hostility that’s found a place in Australia’s literary scene. If you haven’t subscribed to his newsletter, you really must, and I suggest you start with this post, which we discuss at length here because in it David basically proves that the “woke”/intersectional/identity politics/regressive left brigade has a Jew problem. He rests his case on the 2018 book White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, who he exquisitely calls “the American grievance huckster.” I’m so taken with his theory that I read aloud the incriminating passage in full!We also yak about Clive James, George Orwell and the vicissitudes of this writing life. Listen, as they say, wherever you get your podcasts. Here’s the link to David’s Substack:Szego Unplugged is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit szegounplugged.substack.com/subscribe

I’ll explain the “accidental” gag soon — first, the important stuff. In this episode I pick the formidable brain of John Anderson, second-in-charge of Oz from 1999 to 2005 and these days a serious player in the world of long-form podcasting. He was an early adopter of the web-based interview, launching his “Conversations” series in 2017 to tackle the big geopolitical and philosophical questions with public intellectuals. As he tells me, he needed some convincing years ago to interview a psychologist he’d never heard of called Jordan Peterson. The rest is history. Anderson’s thirst for answers on how we should live led him to help found the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, a global organisation that aims to reaffirm Western values. The Alliance staged its inaugural conference in London in October 2023 with a rock star line-up. Back then, with many of us reeling from the outbreak of pro-Hamas sentiment on our streets and university campuses, the centre-right seemed to have the wind at its back. But things have since soured for the political right in parts of Europe, Canada and Australia: I ask Anderson what went wrong. Is it all Donald Trump’s fault?Before he became a heterodox media star, Anderson, a sixth-generation farmer, held several ministries in the Howard Government and was former leader of the National Party — to overseas readers, that’s a rural-based party that together with the Liberal Party comprises Australia’s conservative Coalition. The Coalition marriage broke down momentarily in the aftermath of the Liberals’ historic drubbing in May’s federal election; Anderson was one of several former leaders enlisted as marriage counsellor. Something obviously worked: the parties stitched things up, for how long only time will tell. Anderson airs his frustration with Labor’s election tactics and with what he (rightly) diagnoses as both parties’ desultory policy prescriptions. He also airs concerns about energy, Australia’s vulnerability in global supply chains, mounting government debt, a more aggressive China and the deteriorating mental health of young people in the digital age. And we moan about Donald Trump, a subject I pursued excessively, I reckon. There are many more conversations I’d like to have with Anderson on topics remote from the daily headlines. And now to my blonde moment, which I’ve left uncut in the interests of transparency, and also because it’s sort of funny. Later in our talk I say that before he entered politics Anderson had a brief stint as a reporter on a rural newspaper. I had written this down in my notes and raised it here, proud I’d done my homework. Turns out I was wrong. Anderson never worked as a rural reporter. He thinks I may have been reading about a different John Anderson, a person who, by coincidence, also moved among the Nationals in Canberra. I reckon Anderson would have been a fantastic rural reporter had he ever tried his hand at it, which, of course, he hadn’t. He’s also gracious when others embarrass themselves. I’d intended to read Anderson’s authorised biography before our conversation but an unexpected study trip to Israel (more on that another time) got in the way. The biography, Faith & Duty: The John Anderson Story by Paul Gallagher, charts a life marked by profound tragedy (I won’t go into details here) and extraordinary resilience. Anderson arrives at his Christian faith, and so much else, with great substance. We need more like him. Szego Unplugged is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit szegounplugged.substack.com/subscribe

In this podcast episode (click here for the video version or listen wherever you get your podcasts) I speak with Dr Alan Davison, President of the Free Speech Union Australia, the local chapter of an organisation established in the UK in 2019. As its name suggests, the FSU defends freedom of expression against cancel culture and the increasing trend of governments, particularly those left-of-centre, policing speech in the name of “social cohesion”.Here’s what I think: in an ideal world hate speech laws would muzzle racists and extremists. In the real world racists and extremists wield increasing cultural and political influence and invert the logic of human rights to further their repressive agenda. Anti-vilification laws are ineffective at best, dangerous at worst. In the episode, we explore the proposed new bans on “hate speech” currently under debate in the Victorian Parliament. (The Federal and NSW governments have also recently introduced tougher hate speech laws.) Despite its anodyne title the Justice Legislation Amendment (Anti-vilification and Social Cohesion) Bill 2024 has until recently been most fiercely championed by radical trans activists. At present, Victorian laws ban vilification based on race and religion: the new regime, comprising both civil and criminal penalties, would extend protection to other characteristics including sex, disability, sex characteristics, sexual orientation, personal association and — you guessed it — “gender identity”. Such laws expose critics of trans ideology — in other words, those who insist men can’t be women — to further repression from the state and harassment in the courts.I trust you folks will visit me in prison. Latterly, with the eruption in Jew-hatred, the State Government has sought to flog the Bill as the missing weapon in the fight against anti-Semitism. Jewish community leaders are also enthusiastic proponents of the Bill — a position that’s understandable but deeply misguided. I suggest we already have ample laws on the books empowering police to crack down on incitement. And Davison shares his fascinating analysis of why hate speech laws ultimately fuel anti-Semitism by deterring robust conversations about Islamist ideology. We look at the UK experience where some Muslim groups are effectively lobbying to re-introduce blasphemy laws under the banner of stamping out “Islamophobia”.This is an illuminating discussion (apart from one or two instances in which the audio drops out — apologies) in which I start by asking Davison, former dean of the faculty of arts and social sciences at the University of Technology Sydney, why universities have abandoned robust intellectual debate for groupthink. We also cover a barely-reported tribunal finding against Australia’s eSafety Commissioner — a.k.a “eKaren” — whose office had been running an “informal” censorship regime that sought to deprive ordinary citizens of their right to appeal bureaucratic decrees. One caveat: you’ll hear that I make reference to JD Vance’s speech last month to European leaders in which he warned that the biggest threat to the continent’s security came not from external bad actors but from “within”, and gave the suppression of unorthodox views as one example. (He cited, among other things, Sweden convicting an anti-Islam campaigner for burning the Koran in public). The Vice-President is right: suppressing free speech is a serious threat to democracy, as such measures diminish trust in public institutions and frequently inflame, rather than quell, racially-charged discord.But after Vance and Donald Trump’s extended takedown of Volodymyr Zelensky during which they regurgitated pro-Putin propaganda and the US’ subsequent pausing of military aid and intelligence sharing to embattled Ukraine, I’m left in no doubt about the biggest threat to democracy in Europe and elsewhere. It does indeed come from “within”: from Vance and his boss. Further reading: https://quillette.com/2024/08/07/disuniting-australia/Szego Unplugged is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit szegounplugged.substack.com/subscribe

If four years ago you would have told me that come the next US election we’d be confronting the prospect of Donald Trump: The Resurrection, I’d have suggested you get more fresh air. But here we are. And with his fascinating, if not inspired, choice of Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance as running mate, Trump redux sharpens his pitch to the embattled American working class. In this post I speak with journalist and author Batya Ungar-Sargon, a lefty after my own heart who nonetheless reckons the Trumpian right is offering American workers something genuinely new and transformational. Ungar-Sargon, an opinion editor at Newsweek, has written two books: Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy (you can see why I like her), and the recent and hugely relevant, Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women. For the latter Ungar-Sargon travelled around the US for a year interviewing non-college educated workers to get their sense of whether they had a shot at the American Dream — home ownership, upward mobility, a dignified retirement — and if not, what might make it more of a reality. Despite the interviewees’ diverse backgrounds and circumstances, she found strong consensus on some issues, chief among them the vexed issue of mass illegal immigration. Nowhere is the class divide as pronounced as it is here; as Ungar-Sargon sees it, while educated Americans view migrants with “patronising pity,” workers regard them as little different from themselves save for the fact of American citizenship, “and they think that should mean something.” “They (the working class) are frustrated when it seems like the opposite is true: immigrants are getting help they could desperately use and can’t access.”We discuss — and debate!— class warfare, the new Republicans and whether they really are that, Trump and whether he’s a threat to democracy, the Democrats’ decapitation of Joe Biden and why a party that takes its cues from George Clooney is a party in bad shape. Hope you enjoy this interview with a gutsy and iconoclastic commentator.Click here to watch the video version of this podcast or listen on Apple or Spotify.Szego Unplugged is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit szegounplugged.substack.com/subscribe

Over the past 20 years governments have poured billions into the education system, overhauled the national curriculum again and again, reformed the school funding model (or not — but never mind that for now), beefed up teacher training standards, and expounded on the history, maths and reading wars. But for all the frenetic activity on education policy, our kids keep getting dumber. How dumb? Well 20 years ago Australia’s 15 year-olds were ranked among the highest in the world in reading, maths and science — since then their performance has slipped so much it’s as if they have missed a year’s schooling. By some measures around 20 per cent of high school kids are functionally illiterate. It won’t surprise you to learn such trends hit disadvantaged students worst of all. In fact, these kids fall further and further behind their more advantaged peers as they move through high school. Hard to imagine a more damning indictment of our education system. Education expert Ben Jensen has a good idea of what’s gone wrong in our schools; and when I first encountered his diagnosis it had the force of a religious epiphany. Jensen, whose consultancy Learning First advises governments around the world on education reform, reckons the basic problem is we have no idea what’s actually being taught in classrooms. To make matters worse, Jensen says, educators have gone all in for well-intentioned but misguided philosophies such as “individualised learning,” and “meeting kids where they’re at.” In this podcast we grapple with these big themes writ small in classrooms. (I even sneak in a question about crazy US ideas such as “maths is racist.”) Can we turn things around in our schools? I believe we can; if Federal Education Minister Jason Clare takes heed of Jensen’s refreshingly blunt advice. Links: https://learningfirst.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Curriculum-and-inequality-July-2023.pdfhttps://learningfirst.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/To-lift-standards-we-must-reclaim-the-curriculum-October-2022.pdf (with Nicole Murnane)https://learningfirst.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Four-reforms-could-close-the-education-inequality-gap-September-2022.pdf (with Mailie Ross)https://learningfirst.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/A-lesson-on-how-to-reverse-two-decades-of-failed-education-reforms-August-2022.pdf (with Mailie Ross)https://grattan.edu.au/report/catching-up-learning-from-the-best-school-systems-in-east-asia/Szego Unplugged is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit szegounplugged.substack.com/subscribe

Amid a new Israel-Gaza war, the world reeling from unprecedented atrocities against Israeli civilians, former Age editor Michael Gawenda reflects on his life as a Jew — the title of his astonishing new book— and on what he sees as a troubling shift towards activist journalism. During the last Israel-Gaza war two years ago, more than 400 Australian journalists and writers petitioned the media to “do better on Palestine,” calling on editors to stop promoting “discredited” spokespersons, “tired narratives” and “both siderism” that “equates the victims of a military occupation with its instigators”. Gawenda says the events of recent days makes the petitioners’ stance, flawed to begin with, appear “even worse.” He thinks these journalists should publicly explain why they signed the petition. In this podcast interview we also discuss his time as editor at The Age and whether he’d be able to attain such a position if he were starting his career now as “the Jew I have become” — namely, a Jew deeply attached to Israel, one who refuses to denounce Zionism in order to gain admission to the political left. Other Jews are more willing to comply; Gawenda describes them as “anxious Jews”; Jews fundamentally anxious about being Jewish. (They’re hilariously depicted in Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question as self-declared “ASHamed Jews.”) One such “anxious Jew,” in Gawenda’s view, is Louise Adler, his long-time colleague, publisher and former friend. Adler signed the journalists’ petition. Earlier this year she came under fire as director of Adelaide Writers’ Week for inviting Palestinian writers to discuss their experiences of occupation and dispossession to the exclusion of any Israeli voices. Two of the featured writers were accused of peddling anti-Semitic tropes; one had referred to Ukraine’s (Jewish) president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as a “depraved Zionist.” Gawenda’s book opens with an account of his friendship with Adler ending “suddenly and fiercely” over Israel. We discuss why he took the extraordinary step of publicly airing this personal falling out. And we talk about Gawenda’s childhood as the son of Holocaust survivors, the influence of his socialist, non-Zionist youth movement and whether he sees hope of a reconciliation between the Jews and the left. On the latter, he’s optimistic. In the aftermath of one of the darkest days for the Jewish people since the Holocaust, I, for one, will take any hope on offer. Sources: My Life As A Jew, Michael Gawenda, published October 3 (Scribe)Szego Unplugged is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit szegounplugged.substack.com/subscribe