Who controls what you know? Ashley Rindsberg on the capture of Wikipedia and public knowledge

Who controls what you know? Ashley Rindsberg on the capture of Wikipedia and public knowledge

Ashley Rindsberg has uncovered how a small group of powerful online actors can twist the facts we trust, reshape public reality at global scale, and quietly influence what millions of people believe they know. Search engines, encyclopaedias, artificial intelligence models and social platforms now form the infrastructure of public knowledge. They shape what citizens believe, what institutions repeat, what journalists trust, and what political actors can smuggle into respectable discourse. The deepest battles of the internet age are fought through language, sourcing, rankings, edits and definitions. This is a full scale battle for your mind. In this conversation, Jonathan Sacerdoti speaks with Ashley Rindsberg about Wikipedia, propaganda, information warfare, and the collapsing distinction between knowledge and power. At stake is the machinery by which ideas acquire legitimacy. Donate to support these conversations. [https://jonathansacerdoti.com/donate] 👁‍🗨 Watch if you want to understand how information warfare now operates through the institutions we trust most, and why the struggle over facts has become a struggle over political legitimacy, historical memory and civilisational confidence. 💬 We Discuss: 🧠 Why the internet has become the primary power centre for politics, culture, ideology and public belief 📚 How Wikipedia’s claim to neutrality can become a vehicle for narrative control 🌍 Why the battle over Israel, Palestinians and Jews on Wikipedia carries serious geopolitical consequences 🕵️ How anonymous editors can influence material with profound political, economic and human significance 🤖 Why artificial intelligence systems relying on Wikipedia may amplify contested narratives at scale 🧾 How information laundering works when sources, citations and institutional trust reinforce one another ⚖️ Why “neutral point of view” can fail when moral and political conflicts are embedded in the sources themselves 🏛️ How trusted knowledge infrastructure affects journalism, education, policy and public memory 🔥 Why modern propaganda often appears through respectable systems rather than crude slogans 🧩 What this reveals about Western institutions, technological dependence and the fragility of shared reality 🔔 Subscribe for more serious and unflinching conversations about information warfare, free speech, Israel, antisemitism, media power and the institutions shaping the West. 📲 Follow Jonathan On X [https://x.com/jonsac] On Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/jonathansacerdoti/] On Substack [https://jonsac.substack.com] 👇 Comment below — who should be trusted to guard public knowledge when the platforms shaping reality are anonymous, ideological and structurally unaccountable?

What happens when you question everything about who you are – Bellamy Bellucci breaks every identity rule, and neither side likes it

Jonathan Sacerdoti speaks with Bellamy Bellucci, a South African-born, American trans-woman who converted to Judaism and now lives between worlds that rarely tolerate one another. Bellamy's identity is often challenged and questions by the very groups that you might expected to affirm it. Public language increasingly celebrates identity while losing any stable account of meaning. Categories multiply, recognition becomes currency, and institutions struggle to distinguish between self-description and truth. In that confusion, questions that once belonged to philosophy or theology now play out through politics, culture, and personal testimony. DONATE TO SUPPORT THESE INTERVIEWS: https://jonathansacerdoti.com/donate Bellamy describes a life shaped by displacement, violence, and reinvention. From apartheid-era South Africa to the United States, from homelessness to religious conversion, and from gender dysphoria to public advocacy for Israel, Bellamy's trajectory cuts across the categories that dominate 21st century Western discourse. 👁‍🗨 Watch if you want to understand how identity, belief, and political ideology collide in a single life shaped by conflict, conviction, and resistance. 💬 We Discuss: 🧭 How personal identity becomes a battleground for wider civilisational conflicts 🔥 Why conversion to Judaism is described as easier than living openly as a Jew 🧠 The distinction between psychological identity and physical reality in gender dysphoria 🌍 How Western institutions reward victimhood and reshape identity into political capital ⚔️ Why October 7 acted as a moment of collective activation for Jews worldwide 🧩 The tension between internal truth and external recognition in modern identity politics 🏛️ How ideological movements adopt minority identities as instruments of power 📉 The erosion of cultural confidence in the West and its consequences for social cohesion 🕯️ The role of faith, resilience, and suffering in shaping Jewish identity across generations 🧱 Why assimilation, belonging, and national identity remain unresolved in Western societies 🤔 Can you be addicted to transition? 🔔 Subscribe for more serious and unflinching conversations about identity, power, and the future of Western societies. 📲 Follow Jonathan On X [https://x.com/jonsac] On Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/jonathansacerdoti] On Substack [https://jonsac.substack.com] 👇 Comment below — can a society sustain itself if it cannot define truth, identity, or belonging with any shared clarity?

The warning we ignored: Holocaust survivor Martin Stern on THE HUMAN CAPACTIY FOR EVIL

This Yom Hashoah special episode features Holocaust survivor Martin Stern, who shares his story and reflects on his fears for the world today. Martin Stern survived arrest, deportation, and life in camps as a young child, his survival dependent on individuals who chose courage over conformity at moments of real danger. His life since has been shaped by that experience, through decades of reflection and education, including his work teaching younger generations about the Holocaust and other genocides. In this challenging conversation, Martin It examines how ordinary people come to adopt ideas they have not properly interrogated, how crowds form around moral language that has lost its substance, and how institutions fail to cultivate independent thought. What emerges is not simply memory, but a warning about how societies drift, how certainty replaces judgement, and how easily moral language can be detached from reality. 👁‍🗨 Watch if you want to understand how Holocaust testimony exposes the deeper failures shaping the present 💬 We Discuss: • 🕯 Why Yom Hashoah demands moral seriousness rather than symbolic remembrance • 🧠 How a five-year-old child experienced arrest, interrogation, and deportation under Nazi rule • 🚂 What the camps revealed about ordinary people carrying out extraordinary evil without reflection • 🧭 How individual acts of courage, like those which saved Martin and his sister, illuminate moral choice under pressure • 🏛 How modern institutions and media environments fail to cultivate independent moral judgement • 🗣 Why large groups adopt identical slogans without genuine understanding or inquiry • ⚖ The role of conformity, social approval, and intellectual laziness in shaping belief systems • 🔥 How contemporary hostility toward Jews reflects deeper ideological and civilisational tensions • 🧩 The convergence of identity politics and inherited prejudice as a destabilising force • 📉 Why “never again” has not held, and what that reveals about human nature • 🧑‍🏫 The collapse of education as a system for teaching ethical reasoning and responsibility • 🌍 What it means to live in an era where truth is contested and moral certainty is performative 🔔 Subscribe for more serious and unflinching conversations about history, power, and the moral challenges shaping our world 📲 Follow Jonathan On X: https://x.com/jonsac On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jonathansacerdoti/ On Substack: https://jonsac.substack.com 👇 Comment below — what does it take for a society to turn memory into judgement, rather than ritual? #JonathanSacerdoti #MartinStern #YomHashoah #HolocaustSurvivor #HolocaustMemory #Antisemitism #WesternValues #EducationCrisis #MoralResponsibility

The end of a system that once held the world together – Danny Orbach on what comes after the collapse of the global order and the rules-based system

The language of international law is being stretched to breaking point. Terms once defined with precision are now deployed as instruments of moral accusation, detached from the evidentiary standards that once gave them force. In that shift, something deeper is revealed about the condition of Western institutions. Authority no longer rests securely on method, but on consensus, amplification, and the emotional force of accusation. What presents itself as a defence of human rights increasingly operates through blurred definitions, institutional capture, and self-reinforcing narratives. The result is a system that struggles to distinguish between war, crime, and rhetoric, while insisting on moral certainty. Danny Orbach is an associate professor for history and Asian studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He specialises in military history, political assassinations and coups, military adventurism, illegal orders, dynamics of military atrocities and the history of intelligence and espionage. In this conversation with Jonathan Sacerdoti he challenges the widespread use of the term “genocide” in relation to Gaza, examines how international institutions, media, and academia reinforce one another in elevating contested claims into accepted truth, and how evidentiary standards are displaced by moral framing. He explores the blurring and expansion of legal definitions, the role of NGOs and the UN in shaping narratives, and the way political and intellectual pressures shape judicial and scholarly consensus. He also addresses how immigration and shifting notions of national and cultural identity are placing new strain on Western democracies, challenging their ability to define boundaries, maintain cohesion, and sustain legitimacy. 👁‍🗨 Watch if you want to understand how legal language, institutional authority, and political incentives are reshaping truth, justice, and democracy in the modern world. 🙏🏻 DONATE TO SUPPORT THESE INTERVIEWS: https://jonathansacerdoti.com/donate 💬 We Discuss: ⚖️ Why the legal definition of genocide requires specific intent and why that threshold matters 🧠 How moral intuition is increasingly replacing evidentiary standards in public discourse 🌐 The rise of “junctions of reliability” across the UN, NGOs, academia, and media 📊 How the shift from quantitative to interpretive standards enables political manipulation 🔁 The feedback loop between institutions that amplifies unverified claims into accepted truth 🏛️ Why international courts may be influenced by social and intellectual pressure 🧩 The gradual expansion and blurring of legal definitions in the laws of war 🗳️ How modern political incentives prioritise signalling over compromise in democracies 🧱 The “barnacle effect” of accumulating laws and regulations slowing institutional function 🌍 Why the post-World War II rules-based order is fracturing into a more unstable system ⚠️ The growing gap between liberal elites and democratic legitimacy 🧭 Whether liberal democracy can reform itself before more radical alternatives emerge 🔔 Subscribe for more serious and unflinching conversations about geopolitics, law, and the future of Western civilisation. 📲 Follow Jonathan On X: https://x.com/jonsac On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jonathansacerdoti/ On Substack: https://jonsac.substack.com 👇 Comment below — can institutions recover their authority once definitions, evidence, and trust begin to erode, or does that loss become irreversible?

Science vs Religion – does God exist? Michel-Yves Bolloré explains how the debate is shifting, and why some scientists now question the idea of a self-explaining universe

Does God exist, and can we prove it?Donate [https://jonathansacerdoti.com/donate] to support these interviews.There is a growing assumption in modern Western life that science has settled the question of God. That belief rests less on settled knowledge than on cultural habit, reinforced over generations of intellectual fashion and institutional authority. What once presented itself as liberation from superstition has, in many cases, hardened into a new orthodoxy, one that treats materialism as neutral and belief as deviation.Yet the scientific story itself has not remained static. Developments in cosmology, physics, and biology have introduced new tensions into that confidence. Questions of origin, order, and fine tuning continue to resist reduction to simple mechanism. The deeper the inquiry goes, the more the underlying assumptions begin to matter.In this conversation, Jonathan Sacerdoti speaks with Michel-Yves Bolloré, co-author of God, the Science, the Evidence, a book that has reached a wide audience across Europe and now enters the English-speaking world. Bolloré approaches the question not as a theologian, but as a proponent of a cumulative case built from scientific and philosophical developments over the past century. His argument rests on the claim that the balance of evidence has shifted, and that materialism now requires greater leaps of faith than it once did.The discussion moves between first principles and contested conclusions. Bolloré distinguishes sharply between the existence of a creator and the claims of organised religion, treating the former as a question of reason rather than revelation. At the same time, he extends the argument into moral philosophy and history, suggesting that questions of good and evil, as well as the endurance of certain civilisations, cannot be understood within a purely material framework.What emerges is a live dispute about the nature of explanation itself. Scientific models, philosophical commitments, and human intuitions about meaning are all in play. The conversation exposes the fault line between competing accounts of reality, each claiming rational authority, each carrying profound implications.👁‍🗨 Watch if you want to understand how modern science is being used to challenge materialism and reopen the question of God’s existence.💬 We Discuss:🔬 Why recent developments in cosmology and physics are being interpreted as evidence for a creator rather than a self-contained universe🧠 How materialism functions as a belief system with its own assumptions, rather than a neutral scientific default🌌 The implications of the Big Bang and why a universe with a beginning raises deeper questions about causation⚖️ The distinction between probability and proof, and how scientific reasoning is applied to metaphysical questions🧩 Fine tuning and whether the precision of physical constants points to design or coincidence🧪 The unresolved problem of how life emerges from non-life and why this remains a critical gap in scientific explanation📚 The relationship between science, philosophy, and religion, and whether they can coherently point in the same direction🧭 The argument that morality requires a source beyond human preference and legal convention📖 The role of historical continuity, including the survival of the Jewish people, in arguments about divine intention🧍 Human freedom, suffering, and the persistent question of evil in a world that may or may not be created with purpose🔔 Subscribe for more serious, unflinching conversations about belief, power, and the foundations of modern civilisation.📲 Follow Jonathan On X [https://x.com/jonsac] On Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/jonathansacerdoti/] On Substack [https://jonsac.substack.com]👇 Comment below — does the accumulation of scientific evidence strengthen belief, or does it simply expose the limits of what science can explain?