Reflections on the Minds Festival of Ideas
A much-needed event for free speech in New York City
I attended the Minds Festival of Ideas on Saturday, June 25th in New York City. When I saw the list of speakers and found out that this event would be held at the historic Beacon Theatre on the Upper West Side, I knew that I had to make the trip over from Philadelphia. How could I miss sitting in this beautiful hall that has been graced by the likes of the Allman Brothers, the Grateful Dead, Sonny Rollins, Miles Davis, and Return to Forever, among others? But I digress.
I knew nothing about Minds, the group behind the event, before Saturday, save for the information provided on the event website. I learned that Minds is a social media platform focused on protecting user privacy and preventing censorship. While any kind of Twitter alternative will face difficulties competing with the Big Tech behemoth, it is promising to see Minds expand its platform with an in-person event featuring speakers from a wide range of political and ideological perspectives. Despite social media’s status as the proverbial “town square” of the twenty-first century, there is no substitute for face-to-face conversations. It’s promising that Minds understands this.
Speaking of face-to-face conversations, I was able to connect with one of the Festival of Ideas panelists, Maajid Nawaz, before the event in New York. I’d highly recommend Maajid’s Substack for insightful and timely commentary on topics including the covid mandates, international relations, and political realignments among the global elite. Maajid and I did a livestream together on Saturday before the event, which can be viewed here.
The program featured an introductory discussion on the future of social media followed by three panels with a palate cleanser of stand-up comedy inserted between each of them. The panels were entitled “Healing the Cultural Divide,” “Satire and Disinformation: Where’s the Line?” and “Media Manipulation: What’s the Real Source of the Problem?” and featured an interesting group of moderators ranging from Reason Magazine’s Nick Gillespie to bluesman-cum-activist Daryl Davis. On the satire and disinformation panel, moderated by British rapper Zuby, Maajid Nawaz and Black Agenda Report’s Margaret Kimberley locked horns with video game streamer and YouTube political commentator Steven Bonnell on the topic of Ukraine. This was an important debate to have publicly, since discussions of the war in Ukraine, the Azov Battalion, and America’s involvement in the ongoing conflict have occurred, at best, in hermetically sealed ideological echo chambers or, at worst, are bypassed altogether.
Nawaz and Kimberley pointed out the Biden Administration’s hypocrisy in sending billions of dollars to Ukraine, whose military has officially incorporated a self-identified Nazi battalion into its fold. Indeed, the Administration does this while, at the same time, supporting the censorship of so-called “domestic extremists” (anyone who opposes Biden’s “new world order”) in the United States in the name of fighting “white supremacy” and “fascism.” Bonnell retorted that the concerns surrounding Azov were exaggerations promoted by a motley crew of anti-establishment actors. Quite tellingly, he went on to assert that people are not motivated by the quest for truth in the first place, suggesting that any political analysis based on this assumption is bound to be incorrect. Bonnell’s comments clearly illustrated the liberal, pro-war stance on America’s foreign policy adventures and, perhaps more importantly, revealed the view of the human being and human behavior that underlies such a deeply cynical position.
On the same panel, the Babylon Bee’s Seth Dillon discussed the mainstream media’s farcical efforts to “fact check” his political satire. Kimberley went on to note how comedians used to be a leading force among political dissidents in America but have now, like Trevor Noah, substituted scripted criticism for substantive dissent. The death of humor in today’s America is itself the tragicomedy of an empire so absorbed in its own performance of guilt and virtue that it is unable to perceive the undeniable collapse of the society it rules. Minds attempted to counteract this trajectory by featuring dissident comedians prominently throughout the event, most of whom were, to my pleasant surprise, actually funny.
The Minds event, however, suffered from its own share of pompous political performance. The panel on media manipulation was dominated by a heated standoff between left-liberal professor and Jacobin magazine commentator, Ben Burgis, and conservative investigative journalist James O’Keefe of Project Veritas. The two exchanged insults on the topic of journalistic ethics and the role of unions while rehashing an argument they had backstage prior to the panel. This part of the event felt more staged than the others. It did succeed in showcasing the values of open disagreement and ideological diversity promoted by Minds. However, it didn’t take long to realize that the mere presence of opposing voices on the same stage does little to encourage productive discussion and debate. Good faith—something both Burgis and O’Keefe appeared to lack—is a prerequisite for serious political and ideological struggle, without which disagreement easily falls into the polemically predetermined corners of Trump-era political MMA, leaving little for the audience to do but cheer for their favorite fighter in the ring.
The highlight of the event for me was the discussion on race and black politics between radical philosopher Cornel West and young centrist icon Coleman Hughes. Beyond demonstrating two opposing approaches to black politics, this panel brought into sharp relief the epistemological and ontological gulf between West and Hughes and, in some sense, by extension, their respective generations. West’s angular oratorical improvisations struck an even more theological tone than usual. The category of the human, and the concept of human brokenness, ran throughout his commentary on reparations and the black experience. Hughes, on the other hand, advanced a measured and pragmatic approach to the race problem in America, with the stated goal of preventing an interracial society from devolving into a “war of all against all.” Both thinkers were deeply aware of the increasingly threadbare social fabric of 2020s America, yet provided starkly contrasting approaches on how to mend it: one grounded in the unapologetic quest for the truth about America’s past and the other based on an unabashedly pragmatic defense of state stability as the raison d'etre of all politics. The audience was left to reflect on the respective merits of these two visions for the future.
All in all, the Minds Festival of Ideas was an important step toward healing the ideological divides that have plagued American politics in recent years. Though some of these divides were uncritically reinforced by certain speakers, this, too, was an educational experience for the audience, which was given the opportunity to see figures with large online followings tasked with defending their positions in the context of an in-person public forum. The Festival of Ideas was most successful when its speakers approached it as a gathering to freely exchange ideas that might help understand and change the world, rather than as a platform to sell a pre-existing individual social media “brand.”
Sadly, Big Tech platforms like Twitter censored publicity of this event online, so it is safe to assume that the majority of attendees heard about it through alternative media outlets. This speaks to the power of alternative platforms in today’s media landscape, but also illustrates the ghettoization of dissident political discourse that so often accompanies the oppositional relationship between Big Tech and alternative media platforms. Americans fed a steady diet of mainstream social media likely had no idea that this event even happened and, therefore, missed an opportunity to engage with a host of compelling thinkers and conversations.
We need more events like this that put the principles of free speech and open dialogue into practice. These discussions will, hopefully, reach more and more Americans as the bankruptcy of mainstream media becomes clearer and clearer by the day. The more of us who wake up to the reality of this bankruptcy and the necessity of a truly alternative media sphere, the harder it will be for censors to control the flow of vital information about events like the Minds Festival of Ideas.