BLACKLISTED For Having An Opinion! | Dr. Jon Mills
Canadian philosopher-psychoanalyst Dr. Jon Mills joins Stella, Mia and Bret to recount how a cancel campaign cost him his standing in a professional psychoanalytic organisation — and spurred his book critiquing woke social justice ideology. The conversation moves from his personal experience of being labelled a racist to a rigorous dissection of how ideological conformity captured the very disciplines built to champion independent thought. Essential listening for anyone trying to understand the machinery behind institutional capture.
Jon Mills has spent his career at the intersection of philosophy and psychoanalysis — a discipline that, in theory, prizes rigorous self-examination and the courage to sit with uncomfortable truths. What happens, then, when that same discipline turns its back on those values? That question sits at the heart of this conversation, and Mills is uniquely placed to answer it, having lived through a concerted campaign to have him removed from a professional psychoanalytic organisation on the grounds that he is a racist and a white supremacist. Those labels, Mills tells Stella, Mia and Bret, bear no relationship to anything he has written or said. They are, he argues, the predictable output of a machinery that has replaced intellectual engagement with ideological compliance — a machinery he traces in his edited volume Woke: A Critique of Social Justice Ideology. The book grew directly from his experience of being targeted, and the conversation unpacks how that process works: allegations circulated without evidence, institutions unwilling to push back, and colleagues too fearful to speak in his defence. The hosts press Mills on the deeper intellectual question: how did woke ideology achieve such a hold over psychoanalysis in particular? His answer draws on the history of critical theory — its migration from the academy into activist spaces, and the way that journey stripped it of analytical rigour while preserving, and amplifying, its rhetorical power. Where critical theory once questioned received ideas, woke activism, he suggests, simply replaces them with new ones, enforced with a fervour that forecloses further questioning. One of the most striking stretches of the conversation concerns what it means to subject claims about systemic racism to the same scrutiny one would apply to any other proposition. Mills is not dismissive — he takes the underlying concerns seriously. But he insists that assertion is not the same as evidence, and that a field built on careful examination of the unconscious should be especially resistant to taking political claims on faith. It is here that the Beyond Gender angle sharpens: the epistemological looseness the hosts have long identified in gender-identity discourse is, Mills argues, operating across a range of contested social questions by the same logic and the same enforcement mechanisms. The episode also ventures into what training now looks like for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists — the expectation that candidates demonstrate ideological alignment as a condition of professional advancement — and whether any of this is beginning to change. Mills detects tentative signs of a cultural shift, though he is measured about it. The university, he observes, was once the institution best equipped to resist groupthink; recovering that function, rather than surrendering it further, is the work that remains. For regular listeners who have followed Stella, Mia and Bret's scrutiny of how institutions lost their critical footing on gender, this conversation offers a wider frame — and the uncomfortable recognition that the pattern is far from unique.
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