BLACKLISTED For Having An Opinion! | Dr. Jon Mills
23 July 2026
With Jon Mills
culture-and-ideology
When a psychoanalytic organisation blacklisted Dr. Jon Mills for questioning prevailing ideology, it demonstrated something that recurs across every field these conversations touch: professional bodies are now enforcing ideological compliance rather than upholding intellectual standards. Mills, a Canadian philosopher-psychoanalyst, turned that experience into a book-length critique of social-justice ideology. His account here examines how an entire profession traded analytical rigour for political conformity — and what that tells us about the broader institutional transformation reshaping therapy, academia and public life.
Professions regulate themselves through membership and reputation — and that power can be turned against dissent. Dr. Jon Mills is a Canadian philosopher and psychoanalyst with a long academic career, and his encounter with ideological enforcement inside the psychoanalytic world became the starting point for a broader intellectual reckoning. In this episode he describes being accused of racism and white supremacy, labels that circulated through professional networks and eventually led to his exclusion from a psychoanalytic organisation. He did not respond by retreating; he responded by writing. The resulting book, a critical examination of social-justice ideology, grew out of that experience. Mills draws a distinction that the conversation returns to repeatedly: the difference between the legitimate aims of fairness and inclusion, and the rigid ideological system that has been constructed around those aims. Where genuine ethical concern invites argument, the ideology he describes tends to foreclose it — treating questioning as evidence of the very prejudice being questioned. A significant portion of the conversation focuses on how psychoanalysis specifically has been affected. A discipline that once prided itself on the careful, often uncomfortable examination of unconscious motivation has, in Mills's account, exchanged that commitment for political conformity. Training environments now carry expectations of ideological agreement that sit uneasily with the open-ended inquiry psychoanalysis requires. The result is a profession that may be less well equipped, not more, to understand the human mind. The episode also addresses claims about systemic racism — not to dismiss the reality of structural disadvantage, but to scrutinise what specific claims actually assert and whether evidence supports them. That kind of careful differentiation is exactly what ideological climates tend to punish, which is part of what Mills's own story illustrates. The accusation preceded any serious engagement with his work; the label did the job that argument was supposed to do. Towards the end of the conversation the question of whether this cultural moment is passing comes into view. Mills is cautious. Universities remain under pressure, and the mechanisms that drove his blacklisting have not disappeared. What has shifted, perhaps, is the willingness of people to say so publicly — a small but meaningful change in the conditions for honest inquiry. The connection to debates about gender ideology should not need spelling out. The same institutional dynamics — professional bodies enforcing orthodoxy, training environments that demand ideological compliance, accusations deployed instead of arguments — appear across every domain where these questions arise. What Mills offers is a philosophical vocabulary for naming what is happening and a reminder that the problem is not unique to any single field. It is a feature of how ideologies behave when they capture institutions.
