BLACKLISTED For Having An Opinion! | Dr. Jon Mills
23 July 2026
With Dr Jon Mills
Global
Canadian philosopher-psychoanalyst Dr Jon Mills was blacklisted from a professional organisation and smeared as a racist for questioning prevailing ideological orthodoxies. His experience illustrates a pattern the Cass Review also documented in the UK: dissent within clinical and academic institutions is increasingly met not with argument but with exclusion. The episode examines how ideological conformity is enforced inside the very professions meant to champion independent thought.
Dr Jon Mills is a Canadian philosopher and psychoanalyst whose academic output spans decades of work on consciousness, ontology and psychoanalytic theory. He is not a fringe figure; he is a prolific author with a serious scholarly record. Yet he found himself the target of a coordinated campaign within a psychoanalytic organisation, labelled a racist and white supremacist, and effectively barred from professional participation. The episode begins there, with Mills explaining how a body dedicated to the exploration of the unconscious proved capable of very conscious political enforcement. Mills's edited volume, Woke: A Critique of Social Justice Ideology, grew directly out of that experience. He describes the book not as a right-wing polemic but as an attempt to apply the same critical rigour that psychoanalysis applies to individual psychology to the ideological movements reshaping institutions. He traces the point at which psychoanalytic organisations began subordinating clinical and theoretical questions to activist priorities, and asks what it means for a discipline rooted in doubt and inquiry to demand ideological assent from its members. The conversation covers the mechanisms by which this enforcement operates. Mills discusses how training programmes have become sites of ideological compliance, where candidates learn quickly which views are professionally safe. This has direct relevance to the UK context. The Cass Review, published in April 2024, found that clinicians working in paediatric gender services faced similar pressures: staff who raised clinical concerns reported being marginalised, and a culture of unquestioning affirmation displaced the diagnostic curiosity that good practice requires. The parallel is not incidental. Both cases describe professional environments in which a particular ideological position has been insulated from challenge by social and institutional penalties. Mills draws a distinction between critical theory as an intellectual tradition and the activist politics that now trades under its name. Critical theory, he argues, was originally a method of questioning power and received wisdom; what replaced it in many institutions is a closed system that treats its own conclusions as axioms and its critics as enemies. The irony he identifies is sharp: the language of liberation is deployed to justify suppression. The episode's closing section on universities and free inquiry will resonate with anyone following the UK's Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, which was substantially commenced before being significantly weakened by the new government. The question of whether academic institutions can sustain genuine intellectual plurality is not abstract. When professional bodies in psychology and psychiatry model conformity, the downstream effects reach clinical practice, research culture, and ultimately patients. For those tracking the evidence base around gender medicine in the UK, this episode provides a wider lens. The conditions that allowed poor practice to persist in paediatric gender clinics for years were not accidental. They were the product of an institutional culture in which dissent was costly and consensus was enforced. Mills's account of what that looks like inside psychoanalysis, and what it costs individuals who refuse to comply, is a useful addition to that record.
