UnHerd with Freddie Sayers

US General: Hegseth will be tried at The Hague

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 15:18:08 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers talks with retired Major General Randy Manner, a highly decorated veteran with over 35 years of service, who delivers a scathing analysis of the Trump administration's floated military objectives in the Persian Gulf, specifically examining the tactical viability and global economic risks of seizing Iran's Kharg Island oil depot and nuclear materials, while also exploring his deep-seated concerns regarding the qualifications of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and the potential strain on the military's constitutional fealty.

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Joe Kent: Why I resigned over Iran

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:42:46 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers speaks with Joe Kent, the former Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, in his first international interview since his resignation from the Trump administration. A highly decorated Green Beret and CIA veteran, Kent became the most senior official to step down in protest of the ongoing war in Iran, which he describes as a ‘quagmire’ driven by external pressure rather than national interest. In this wide-ranging conversation, Kent alleges that the U.S. was misled into the conflict by the Israel lobby, shares personal reflections on the death of his wife in a ‘manufactured’ war, and raises questions about the investigation into the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

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The age of drone warfare has begun

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 16:08:34 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers speaks with The Economist’s defence editor, Shashank Joshi, to dissect the frightening new reality of ‘democratised warfare’ in the Strait of Hormuz. As Iran utilises low-cost drones, ‘smart mines’, and autonomous suicide boats to threaten 20% of the world's oil supply, Joshi explains the shift from traditional naval battles to a war of economic attrition and investigates whether the price of entry for war has been permanently lowered - and what it means for the future of global stability.

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Was closing the Strait of Hormuz part of Trump’s plan?

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 16:36:30 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers speaks with Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge University, Helen Thompson, to dismantle the mainstream narrative surrounding the conflict in the Middle East. Moving beyond the idea that the U.S. is stumbling into war, Thompson reveals a possible strategic plan by the Trump administration to weaponise energy markets against China, while exploring how the closure of the Strait of Hormuz serves American interests in the global AI race, and how a reverse Suez moment is fundamentally redrawing the map of global power.

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Prof. Robert Pape: Is Iran winning the war?

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 18:37:13 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers speaks with Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, Robert Pape, to discuss the high-stakes ‘escalation trap’ unfolding between the United States and Iran - breaking down the tactical successes and failures of the US military campaign and analysing how Iran is leveraging its geographical position and control of the Strait of Hormuz through low-cost drone and missile harassment. As Professor Pape draws comparisons to the Vietnam War and 1973 oil crisis, has the Trump administration lost control of the conflict's trajectory, and are we moving toward a dangerous ground power dilemma that threatens the global economy and the stability of the Western alliance?

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The boom in British exorcisms

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 17:15:15 GMT

UnHerd’s Flo Read hosts an exploration into the global exorcism boom, investigating why demand for spiritual deliverance has tripled in the last decade and why Gen Z, in particular, is leading a resurgence in supernatural belief. A panel featuring historian Dr. Francis Young, Anglican deliverance minister Rev. Dr. Jason Bray, and legal expert Professor Helen Hall unpack the shift to a post-pandemic ‘spiritual marketplace’ where social media-fuelled occultism and ancient theology collide, and address the safeguarding risks and legal complexities of performing exorcisms in a multicultural society.

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What happens next inside Iran?

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 17:19:30 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers hosts a debate on the internal future of Iran featuring two clashing geopolitical perspectives: Professor Edward Luttwak - a strategist and expert on international diplomacy, who argues that the Trump administration is successfully pursuing a strategy to achieve regime change via surgical airstrikes; and Dr Arta Moeini - international political theorist and a realist thinker, who warns that the West is dangerously underestimating the resilience of Iran’s decentralised "total state”, and that direct attacks could fuel a civil war that accelerates a global shift toward a new world order dominated by China.

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War in Iran: How the Neocons won

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 20:23:56 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers and US editor Sohrab Ahmari unpick the ideological fracture within the Republican party following the escalatory US strikes against Iran. From the notable silence of JD Vance to the resurging influence of Lindsey Graham, they explore how Donald Trump’s "Peace Admin" shifted toward a hawk-like interventionism agenda reminiscent of the George W. Bush era, at a decisive moment in the battle for the soul of American foreign policy.

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Avi Loeb vs. Michael Shermer: The Aliens Debate

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 16:49:53 GMT

In the wake of Obama's on-air revelation that he believes in aliens and Trump's move to declassify government UFO documents, UnHerd invites two world experts to make the best case for hope and doubt about extraterrestrial life. Michael Shermer, Skeptic magazine founder and author of the new book Truth (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Truth-What-Find-Still-Matters/dp/142145372X), and Harvard astronomer Prof. Avi Loeb ask: are we alone in the universe?

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Michael Tracey: In defence of Prince Andrew

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 19:20:42 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers talks to journalist Michael Tracey about the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and what Tracey describes as a "moral panic" surrounding the Epstein scandal. Tracey challenges the mainstream narrative, arguing that the case against the former Prince relies on fictionalised accounts and inconsistent testimony from the late Virginia Giuffre, and by examining recently surfaced FBI memos and the charges of misconduct in public office, suggests that the current constitutional crisis is driven more by mass hysteria and media credulity than by unassailable legal evidence.

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Anton Jäger: The Far-Right's route to victory

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 16:08:17 GMT

UnHerd’s Jonny Ball meets historian, academic, and author Anton Jäger to discuss his new book ‘Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences’, charting the pronounced shift in engagement and death of political institutions since the 1980s via analysis of movements like Brexit, BLM, and the rise of the far-Right.

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Danish minister: Here's how we controlled immigration

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 18:16:12 GMT

UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers meets with former Danish Minister for Immigration and Integration, Kaare Dybvad Bek – fresh from his high-profile talk at the Policy Exchange - to explore how his centre-Left Social Democrats party successfully implemented hardline immigration policies to reduce asylum applications to their lowest in 40 years. He argues that by curbing uncontrolled migration, the Danish government has effectively neutralised the populist far-Right and maintained public trust in the welfare state, offering a blueprint for other European leaders - including Keir Starmer - on how to manage borders from a progressive, pro-labour perspective.

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Robby Soave on 'Epstein Derangement Syndrome'

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 16:12:17 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers talks with senior editor at Reason, Robby Soave, about the long-awaited release of the Epstein Files and the fallout following the disclosure. Has the dump of millions of unverified documents sparked a modern-day witch hunt, where gossip is mistaken for evidence and guilt by association replaces due process? They explore how both ends of the political spectrum have weaponised the files to smear opponents, the high cost of sacrificing privacy, and why the lone “no” vote in Congress may have been the most prescient voice of all.

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Can Reform win in Manchester?

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 18:40:51 GMT

UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers explores the upcoming high-stakes by-election of Gorton and Denton with a deep dive into the constituency and its localised microcosm of global populist trends. He is joined by Professor of Political Science at the University of Manchester, Rob Ford, founder and editor of the Manchester Mill, Joshi Herrmann, and councillors Allan Hopwood (Reform) and Shahbaz Sarwar (Workers Party) to analyse whether the Labour stronghold will crumble under pressure from a surging Green Party or a high-profile Reform UK campaign led by Matt Goodwin within a new landscape of sectarian identity politics and deepening public frustration with the UK’s traditional two-party system.

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Glenn Loury: Elon Musk’s apartheid politics

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 12:17:43 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers talks to eminent economist and social scientist Professor Glenn Loury about a troubling new shift in American discourse: the rise of Right-wing identity politics. Traditionally a critic of the woke Left, Loury turns his sights on the world’s wealthiest man, arguing that Elon Musk is making a "category mistake" by importing South African racial anxieties into the American context. By embracing white solidarity and racial essentialism, Loury argues, the Right is not defeating identity politics, but is instead adopting a politically destructive mirror image of the very ideology they claim to oppose.

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John Bew: The Davos world is over

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 12:45:58 GMT

In this exclusive interview, UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers speaks with Professor John Bew - leading historian and chief foreign policy advisor to the last four UK Prime Ministers – about the friction caused by the Trump administration's push to acquire Greenland and the resulting panic within the Western alliance. Set against the backdrop of the 2026 Davos summit, the conversation confronts the 'break glass' moment facing Western leaders and explores the uncomfortable reality of our current era: Will the UK shift from economic dependency toward restoring its own national power to navigate a scary new era of ‘bully powers’? Is the Western alliance truly over, or can a nuanced and multi-layered approach preserve the core security frameworks that have defined the last 80 years? How should middle powers respond when the United States - the traditional guarantor of global norms - begins to operate under a pre-1945 logic of annexation and unilateral tariffs? And could a new Northern European alliance provide the necessary leverage to protect sovereign interests in an increasingly bipolar world?

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The ICE debate: Sohrab Ahmari vs Jenin Younes

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 18:02:17 GMT

Freddie Sayers debates the killing of Renee Good by ICE Agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis with civil liberties attorney Jenin Younes and UnHerd’s US editor Sohrab Ahmari, examining the incident through the lens of the "Rashomon effect" where observers draw diametrically opposite conclusions from the same evidence. Was the shooting a catastrophic violation of civil liberties and potentially an illegal execution, or does the responsibility lie with Good for obstructing a lawful federal operation and “weaponising" her vehicle, a view echoed by the Trump administration's branding of the event as an act of domestic terrorism. The discussion concludes with YouGov’s David Montgomery, who reveals how the broader American public view the use of force, and what significant long-term political risks the incident may yield for the Republican project.

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Why Trump will get Greenland

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 20:10:07 GMT

UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers speaks with author and Cambridge professor Helen Thompson, economist Pippa Malmgren, and Danish MEP Henrik Dahl about the Trump administration's escalating rhetoric and strategic moves to acquire Greenland. Covering the historical legal underpinnings of Danish sovereignty while analysing modern geopolitical drivers such as the Monroe Doctrine, Arctic militarisation, and the essential role of the region in a new space race for strategic security dominance, they explore how the Greenland situation is symptomatic of a profound breakdown in trust between Washington and Western Europe, with the administration increasingly viewing European leadership as obstructive political rivals in a shifting global order.

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Yanis Varoufakis: The most deepfaked man on YouTube!

Tue, 30 Dec 2025 15:55:14 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers speaks with Yanis Varoufakis about the unsettling rise of AI-generated deepfakes, using Varoufakis’s own experience as one of the most synthesised figures on YouTube as a chilling case study. The conversation delves into the "techno-feudal" power structures of Big Tech, where algorithms prioritise engagement and "rent-seeking" over truth, allowing misinformation to spread rapidly while the victims struggle to reclaim their own digital identities.

Moving beyond the personal, they explore an imminent future in which audiovisual evidence can no longer be trusted, debating whether this will lead to a new era where arguments are judged solely on their merits, or a return to a medieval-like state where high-quality information becomes a luxury for the elite while the masses are left to navigate a sea of fabricated content.

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Prof. James Hankins: The return of Western civilisation

Fri, 26 Dec 2025 14:29:14 GMT

Order 'The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition' by Professor James Hankins here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Golden-Thread-Ancient-World-Christendom/dp/1641773995

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers talks with Professor James Hankins, a forty-year veteran of Harvard University, about the precarious state of the Western tradition and the burgeoning resistance movement in classical education. Moving through a 2,500-year narrative arc from the ancient Greek invention of reason to the modern-day "cult of innovation," Hankins warns that elite institutions are suffering from a dangerous cultural amnesia. But, despite the degradation of the canon, offers a defiant hope rooted in history, arguing that Western civilisation has survived near-extinction before and remains ripe for a new Renaissance.

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Greg Lukianoff: America's new free speech crisis

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 15:29:45 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers talks to Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), about a new report revealing that 2025 has officially surpassed 2020 as the worst year on record for campus censorship and scholar sanctions. Despite the Trump administration’s campaign promises to restore free expression, Lukianoff details a disturbing shift where the political right has adopted the very cancel culture tactics it once decried, led by government officials who are now directly intervening to investigate, defund, and even deport students for controversial speech. From the fallout of the Charlie Kirk assassination to the use of executive orders to ban student groups, they explore why the new wave of state-sponsored retaliation is creating a chilling effect across American universities.

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Ex-prisoner: The Islamist gangs inside our prisons

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 16:23:30 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers speaks with Steve Gallant, a convicted murderer who served 16 years in prison and became known as a hero during the 2019 London Bridge terror attack, where he famously helped subdue the attacker, Usman Khan, with a narwhal tusk on his first-ever day release.

Gallant recounts the dramatic events of that day, which led to a royal pardon and an early release, but the conversation delves deeper into the complex reality of rehabilitation and the growing threat of organised Islamist terror networks—or "the Brotherhood"—who are gaining authority and converting other inmates within the UK's high-security prisons. Gallant offers an urgent warning on the failures of the system to challenge radical ideology and reflects on the difficult question of whether true change is possible for long-term prisoners.

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The truth about net immigration

Tue, 02 Dec 2025 18:32:25 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers speaks with migration expert Dr. Madeleine Sumption to dissect the latest ONS figures which reveal a dramatic crash in UK net migration. Is this truly caused by an alarming "exodus of fed-up Brits," as some headlines suggest, or is the surge in people leaving the country, in fact, the long-overdue re-migration of earlier non-EU and EU immigrants—a data-driven truth that fundamentally upends how the media and public understand the entire politics of immigration?

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Prof. Sunetra Gupta: The lost lessons of lockdown

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 15:00:00 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers speaks with Oxford epidemiologist Professor Sunetra Gupta - one of the three primary authors of the Great Barrington Declaration - to uncover why the UK’s massive £200 million COVID inquiry has produced a conclusion she calls an "insult" to the public intelligence. With the report claiming that locking down just one week earlier would have saved 23,000 lives, Gupta dismantles the modelling behind the headline and ask the questions the inquiry refused to: Why was the clear counter-evidence of Sweden ignored? And did the scientific establishment betray its own duties by choosing the certain harm of lockdown over the uncertain control of a virus?

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Freddie Sayers: The Covid inquiry is a disgrace

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 17:43:02 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers gives his reaction to the UK’s £200 million COVID inquiry and the official narrative. After 800 pages, the report reaches the conclusion that Britain’s only mistake was not locking down sooner - but at what cost? From the missing chapter on Sweden’s success to the ignored collateral damage inflicted on a generation of children, was the lockdown experiment actually a civilisational error that the state is now too afraid to admit? And is the inquiry an establishment whitewash that sets the stage for future authoritarianism?

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Matthew Crawford: The truth about 'Smart Cities'

Wed, 19 Nov 2025 16:39:35 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers talks with writer and philosopher Matthew Crawford about the creeping tyranny of the "Smart City"—a vision of the future where urban life is optimised by data, and human unpredictability is treated as a "bug" to be fixed. But what is the spiritual cost of a "frictionless" existence? As tech giants begin to govern like nation-states and cars become subscription services that can be throttled from afar, Crawford asks the question: are we building paradise, or a "glorious, collisionless" prison? From the defiance of skateboarders to the ULEZ "Blade Runners" destroying cameras in London, they discuss the fight to reclaim the "unruly felicities" of a life truly worth living.

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Will Trump destroy the BBC?

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 10:51:22 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers dives into the legal and political firestorm surrounding President Trump's threatened lawsuit against the BBC. He is joined by three expert guests to unpack the case from every angle: Professor Burt Neuborne, founding legal director of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, analyses the US legal arguments and whether Trump can actually win; Joshua Rozenberg, legal journalist and the BBC's former legal correspondent, discusses the internal crisis at the BBC and its "perceived liberal bias"; and Seth Stern, director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, explores the wider "chilling effect" of such lawsuits on press freedom.

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Prof. Dieter Helm: The madness of our climate policy

Sun, 09 Nov 2025 15:55:40 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers talks with Professor of Economic Policy at the University of Oxford, Sir Dieter Helm, about the great climate "self-delusion." As global leaders, royals, and celebrities jet into Rio for the 30th UN Climate Summit (COP 30), Helm - one of the world's most respected climate economists - argues the entire Net Zero project, championed by the very elites at the summit, is built on smoke and mirrors, and reveals: why 30 years of COPs have been ineffective; the core deceit politicians have been telling the public for decades; how the West's green policies are actually helping China while leading to our own self-sabotage; and why the UK's "clean energy" dream is a fantasy that is leading to economic ruin. What is the real path forward, and is it too late to fix the mess we've made?

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Debate: Is there a migrant crimewave?

Wed, 05 Nov 2025 17:17:11 GMT

In the wake of the Huntingdon train stabbing and ensuing online reaction, UnHerd's Freddie Sayers sits down with journalist for The Times Fraser Nelson to analyse the growing perception of a violent, migrant-driven crimewave in the UK. Responding to disputed data from the Ministry of Justice that foreigners are convicted of up to 23% of sex crimes, as well the rise in low-level crime and isolated atrocities, Nelson argues against the narrative and details how violent crime, including knife attacks and murder, has actually been in a steep decline, reaching multi-decade lows even as immigration has doubled. Is the migrant crimewave real or is there a stark disconnect between the statistical reality and the public's fear?

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The Zohran Mamdani debate

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 16:47:16 GMT

If the polls are to be believed, Zohran Mamdani—a self-described democratic socialist—is poised to become the next mayor of New York City. His history as a police abolitionist, calls for wealth redistribution, and fierce criticisms of Israel have rankled the Big Apple’s old guard, while galvanizing many young Gothamites, including a majority of young Jews.

So: should we fear Mayor Mamdani?

Join UnHerd for an exclusive in-person debate at our Manhattan headquarters, featuring our columnist Ross Barkan and progressive activist and whistleblower Lindsey Boylan (in support of Mamdani) versus the New York Post’s Miranda Devine and National Review’s Caroline Downey (in opposition).

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Should Europe seize Russian assets? Is a crypto crisis looming?

Wed, 29 Oct 2025 15:09:38 GMT

In this first episode of The Econoclasts, Yanis Varoufakis and Wolfgang Munchau debunk two failed economic orthodoxies shaping our world. First, they dismantle the narrative that Europe is helping Ukraine - and striking a powerful blow against Russia - by raiding Russia’s frozen assets. More than this being legally questionable, is it also economically and geopolitically self-defeating? Next, they expose the "battle" between central banks and anti-establishment crypto rebels as a false choice, revealing it as a dangerous illusion that serves the powerful. Far from being revolutionary, are stablecoins turbo-charging financial instability for the next global crash?

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Helen Andrews on the Great Feminisation

Thu, 23 Oct 2025 14:28:51 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers speaks with Helen Andrews, former senior editor at The American Conservative and author of Boomers, to discuss her provocative and widely-debated article in Compact Magazine "The Great Feminization". They discuss: why female group dynamics (consensus-seeking, covert undermining, social ostracism) are the engine behind cancel culture; the threat a "feminised" legal system poses to the objective "rule of law," replacing evidence with emotional sympathy; and why this shift wasn't a meritocratic victory, but the result of "social engineering" that makes it "illegal for women to lose." Is this the unspoken truth behind our institutional collapse? Watch the full, explosive conversation with Helen Andrews.

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Can science prove that God exists?

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 09:21:01 GMT

In the age of reason and rationality, what room is there for the transcendent? Authors of the bestselling book God, the Science, the Evidence, Michel-Yves Bollore and Olivier Bonnassies, challenge the materialist consensus and argue that the origins of the universe could still be the work of a creator. They join UnHerd's Freddie Sayers to discuss their research and what it might reveal...

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Hitchens & Moore vs. Gove & Ibrahim: The Thatcher Debate

Fri, 17 Oct 2025 14:54:46 GMT

On what would have been her 100th birthday, Freddie Sayers chairs a spirited debate on Thatcherism and the Iron Lady’s place in Britain’s story. How should we understand her legacy in 2025? Did she transform the country for the better — or does she bear responsibility for many of today’s problems? In this all-star debate, journalists Peter Hitchens and Suzanne Moore go head-to-head with former Conservative politician and Spectator editor Michael Gove, and political analyst Reem Ibrahim, in a lively clash over the most divisive figure in modern British history.

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Deep dive: Is this the end of trans?

Wed, 15 Oct 2025 17:10:31 GMT

Freddie Sayers sits down with Professor of Politics at the University of Buckingham, Eric Kaufmann, to discuss his latest report on “The Decline of Trans and Queer Identity among Young Americans”, which reveals a significant and surprising shift in the landscape of gender and sexual identity among Generation Z. Professor Kaufmann explains his findings, which show a sharp drop in both trans and queer identification since 2023. Drawing on data from large-scale surveys of US undergraduates, he details how the share of trans-identified students has nearly halved in just two years. Their discussion explores the data, including trends in elite institutions, and delves into the potential reasons for this decline. Is it linked to changes in mental health, the growing distance from the pandemic and lockdowns, or the so-called “anti-woke” vibe shift?

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Steven Pinker: Questions that shouldn't be asked

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 16:59:31 GMT

Freddie Sayers sits down with renowned cognitive psychologist, author, and Harvard Professor of Psychology Steven Pinker to discuss his latest book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows... and explore how common knowledge shapes our social, political, and economic worlds.

Their conversation delves into the power and pitfalls of collective thinking, the dynamics of cancel culture and censorship, and the Trump administration’s clashes with academic institutions like Harvard. They also consider whether democracy is in decline, if society is losing its shared sense of reality, and whether there’s still reason to be optimistic about the future.

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Lord Maurice Glasman: Could Blue Labour stop Reform?

Thu, 02 Oct 2025 15:07:21 GMT

UnHerd’s Contributing Editor Jonny Ball (aka Despotic Inroad) sits down with Lord Maurice Glasman, the Labour peer and political theorist behind Blue Labour, at Labour party conference 2025 in Liverpool. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is under fire and polling as the least popular on record — Glasman argues that the party faces a battle for its very soul.

In this conversation, he traces the history of the movement he founded, Blue Labour, and its critique of the Labour party’s transformation into what he sees as metropolitan and liberal, detached from its working-class roots. Glasman highlights how the working class and young voters are drifting to Nigel Farage’s Reform, why the best predictor of whether you vote Labour is whether you went to private school, and what it would take to reverse Labour’s decline: a renewed focus on industrial strategy, job creation, and working-class empowerment.

Can Blue Labour stop Reform’s rise and save Labour? Could Reform actually replace Labour as the voice of working people? And what, if anything, should Labour learn from MAGA and Trump’s populist success?

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Paul Kingsnorth: How to fight the Machine

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 19:31:11 GMT

UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers welcomes Paul Kingsnorth to the UnHerd Club an exclusive interview about his new book Against the Machine.

Kingsnorth has spent decades charting the alienation and upheaval brought about by modernity. In this wide-ranging interview he sets out why he sees today’s technological order as inhuman, why AI may be the 'Antichrist', and why he believes the West must be allowed to die.

What does it mean to live as a dissident inside the Machine? And what lines must we draw if we are to remain human?

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James Lindsay: Beware Right-wing cancel culture

Wed, 17 Sep 2025 14:52:03 GMT

Has the political Right become what it once despised? In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk's assassination, a wave of firings and online campaigns has many asking if a "woke right" has finally arrived, adopting the very tactics of cancel culture it used to condemn. Freddie Sayers sits down with author and commentator James Lindsay for a conversation about this dangerous new chapter in the culture wars. As calls for "retribution" grow louder, what is the line between legitimate accountability for those in public trust and the illiberal, mob-like vengeance taking hold?

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Dr Martin Kulldorff: What I told RFK Jr about vaccines

Mon, 15 Sep 2025 13:58:24 GMT

Freddie Sayers speaks with Dr. Martin Kulldorff — co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration and newly appointed chair of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) — to discuss his and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s views on vaccines, the recent turmoil at the CDC that has seen senior officials resign or be removed, and his reflections on the global pandemic response, from Sweden’s no-lockdown strategy to the United States’ vaccine mandates.

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Thomas Chatterton Williams: The centre cannot hold

Fri, 12 Sep 2025 15:59:17 GMT

In the wake of Charlie Kirk's killing, what does this precarious moment mean for American politics? UnHerd's Freddie Sayers speaks to Thomas Chatterton Williams, author of 'Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse' about the eerie parallels between 2020 and 2025.

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Is Charlie Kirk's murder a tipping point?

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 18:41:20 GMT

Freddie Sayers is joined by Undercurrents host Emily Jashinsky, reporting from the White House, and UnHerd's US Editor Sohrab Ahmari to discuss the immediate aftermath of the assassination of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk. On the somber anniversary of September 11th, they analyse the profound and frightening fallout, including the sense that a "seal has been broken" in American politics, the potential for a J. Edgar Hoover-style crackdown on left-wing groups by an angered Trump administration, and the grim question of whether civil debate can survive in an era of escalating violence.

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Matt Taibbi: Has Elon Musk ruined politics?

Thu, 04 Sep 2025 14:29:03 GMT

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UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers speaks with journalist and author Matt Taibbi. A former Rolling Stone reporter and now publisher of Racket News, Taibbi was chosen by Elon Musk to help release the “Twitter Files,” exposing political and government influence on online speech.

In this conversation, he reflects on Musk’s promise to turn Twitter into a “digital town square,” the re-platforming of Trump and other controversial voices, and the mission creep that has left X accused of amplifying right-wing politics while throttling critics.

Has Musk delivered a freer public square? And how do these questions play out in Britain, where viral flashpoints like “Sophie of Dundee” and the arrest of writer Graham Linehan at Heathrow over X posts about trans issues have turned free speech into a front-line cultural battle?

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Lina Khan: How to break the monopoly machine

Sat, 30 Aug 2025 14:00:00 GMT

UnHerd’s US Editor Sohrab Ahmari interviews former Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan. As head of the Biden FTC, Khan shook up decades of corporate deference — suing Big Tech, targeting drug middlemen, and reviving antitrust enforcement.

In this conversation, she reflects on the collapse of the brief “post-neoliberal” consensus, warning that corporations now use both woke and anti-woke rhetoric to shield their power, while Trump’s return has revived old patterns of lobbyist capture and green-lit mega-mergers.

Can Democrats truly embrace economic populism? Was the populist moment just a mirage? And is antitrust still America’s frontline battle against monopoly power?

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Is this the Disenlightenment?

Wed, 27 Aug 2025 14:04:54 GMT

UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers brings together two leading voices on the decline of reading and the future of literacy: Times columnist and cultural critic, James Marriott, and YouTuber and philosopher, Jared Henderson.

Marriott has written extensively about what he calls the dawn of a “post-literate society.” For him, the slow death of English literature and the retreat from serious reading mark a cultural crisis, with far-reaching consequences for politics, education, and civic life. He argues that without books and deep reading, society risks becoming shallow, distracted, and dangerously unserious.

Henderson agrees and sees the problem through a different lens. On his YouTube channel he has chronicled the “male reading crisis” in American colleges, showing how boys and young men are abandoning reading altogether. But rather than mourning literature’s decline, he focuses on practical ways to reignite reading habits, from choosing the right books to rebuilding attention in an age of screens.

In this discussion, Freddie Sayers asks: Is literacy truly collapsing, or simply evolving into new forms? As AI, smartphones and digital media reshape our minds, is the future of reading one of decline — or reinvention?

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Ukraine: Realist vs Idealist

Tue, 19 Aug 2025 14:44:55 GMT

UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers brings together two starkly opposed voices on the Ukraine war and the future of world order: John Mearsheimer, University of Chicago professor and leading realist, and Matthew Syed, Sunday Times columnist, broadcaster and author.

Mearsheimer has long argued that NATO expansion and Western policy blunders set the stage for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. From a realist standpoint, he warns that Russia’s position is essentially non-negotiable and that Ukraine must cut a deal now if it is to avoid further devastation. For Mearsheimer, ignoring the hard facts of great-power politics and clinging to Western rhetoric risks only catastrophic escalation.

Syed sees things very differently. In a recent Sunday Times column, he criticised the West’s handling of Ukraine, from the failed Alaska summit. He accused Western governments of failing Ukraine and directly attacked Mearsheimer’s realist position as “morally deranged” and fatally weak. For Syed, only moral clarity and Western resolve — not accommodation with Putin — can change the course of the war.

In this debate, Freddie Sayers asks: Is realism just disguised defeatism? Is idealism dangerously naïve in the age of Trump, Putin and Xi? And, after the White House summit with Zelensky, does the West finally have a coherent strategy — or is Ukraine still being left to fight alone?

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Tim Cook: Genius or villain?

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 14:01:51 GMT

UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers speaks with journalist and author of new book Apple in China, Patrick McGee – who was the Financial Times’s principal Apple reporter from 2019 to 2023 – about the man at the centre of Apple’s China story: CEO Tim Cook.

On August 1st, Cook quietly became Apple’s longest-serving leader, overtaking Steve Jobs — a milestone that came days before a high-profile White House appearance in which he warmly praised Donald Trump. The move was widely seen as a calculated bid to secure political goodwill as US–China tensions threaten Apple’s business.

Before becoming CEO, Cook built Apple’s vast Chinese supply chain — training millions of workers and investing billions in infrastructure — giving the company unmatched manufacturing power but also a deep reliance on China’s authoritarian system. Now, McGee says, he is scrambling to shift production elsewhere while navigating Washington politics. His book, Apple in China, charts how Cook’s choices drove Apple’s rise — and its vulnerabilities — as speculation grows over his future and who might replace him.

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Richard Dawkins: Why men and women are different

Thu, 07 Aug 2025 13:49:14 GMT

UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers interviews renowned evolutionary biologist Professor Richard Dawkins about the enduring biological differences between men and women — and why recognising them remains essential in the face of growing ideological pressure. Dawkins lays out the evolutionary and genetic foundations that distinguish the sexes.

He addresses the growing influence of gender ideology and the way it has infiltrated scientific institutions, education, and public discourse. From the redefinition of sex to the silencing of researchers, Dawkins warns that a once-clear understanding of biology is being sacrificed to political orthodoxy — and makes the case for defending scientific truth against the encroachment of dogma.

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DEBATE: Is Israel’s war in Gaza moral?

Tue, 05 Aug 2025 14:40:05 GMT

Journalist Batya Ungar-Sargon and UnHerd US Editor Sohrab Ahmari discuss the MAGA pivot against Israel in recent weeks and the reasons for waning support for Netanyahu's war from the American Right.

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Kathleen Stock: Should we morally condemn Bonnie Blue?

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 14:37:32 GMT

Philosopher and UnHerd writer Kathleen Stock joins Freddie Sayers to discuss one of the strangest and most revealing cultural moments of the year: the rise of Bonnie Blue, the OnlyFans pornstar at the heart of a new documentary that's turning heads and raising questions about sexuality, morality, and the future of sex.

Stock — a former professor of philosophy, a leading critic of gender ideology, and a regular UnHerd contributor — agreed to watch the Bonnie Blue documentary at a screening and return with her reflections. In this wide-ranging conversation, she and Freddie delve into the deeper meaning behind the phenomenon: What does Bonnie Blue say about us? Is this just porn, or is it something more — a symptom of a culture in moral decline?

They explore the lasting wisdom of Roger Scruton, whose warnings about the separation of sex from beauty and meaning now feel prescient. They also consider the implications of the Online Safety Act, censorship, the state's role in regulating sexual content, and whether we’ve lost the language for intimacy, mystery, and erotic imagination.

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Lawrence Krauss: The new war on science

Tue, 29 Jul 2025 14:21:42 GMT

Freddie Sayers interviews renowned physicist and author Lawrence Krauss to explore how culture wars and ideological issues threaten science and his new book The War on Science—an anthology of essays from leading scientific thinkers including Jordan Peterson, Richard Dawkins, and Peter Boghossian, examining how academia and scientific institutions are increasingly under siege from within.

Krauss lays out how “woke” ideology, DEI policies, and campus cancel culture are eroding the foundations of open inquiry, with contributors offering alarming insights from across disciplines—from medicine and biology to physics and philosophy. He discusses high-profile incidents like the recent antisemitism scandals at Harvard, arguing they reflect a broader intellectual crisis gripping universities.

The conversation then shifts to the political backlash, particularly on the American right. With Donald Trump and other conservative figures now sceptical of academia altogether, Krauss raises concerns that the pendulum may be swinging too far the other way—threatening funding, trust in scientific institutions, and the space for real reform.

From ideological capture in the lecture hall to political overreach in Washington, Krauss and Sayers dissect what’s driving this war on science, why it matters, and what’s at stake if both sides keep escalating.

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Patrick Christys: Is Britain facing a 'summer of riots'?

Fri, 25 Jul 2025 07:16:29 GMT

Freddie Sayers, UnHerd’s Editor-in-Chief, sits down with Patrick Christys, GB News journalist, fresh from his reporting on the ground in the Calais migrant camps, to probe their volatile dynamics and the escalating UK migration crisis.

Christys recounts his experience posing as a migrant to expose how, reportedly, easy it is to contact people smugglers orchestrating illegal Channel crossings, revealing a hostile environment rife with confrontations, a charity he says is allegedly facilitating crossings, and the stark accessibility of trafficking networks, raising urgent concerns about French authorities’ inaction and the role of NGOs in this chaotic situation.

Turning to the UK, Christys unpacks the mounting tensions surrounding migrant hotels – with officials calling the situation a “powder keg” and government fearing of a “summer of riots”. With protests flaring, most recently in Epping and Canary Wharf, and public frustration growing over strained resources, he examines the deepening divide fuelled by polarised rhetoric and distrust in political leadership. From Calais camps to British streets, Christys highlights why the migration crisis risks sparking widespread unrest, what’s at stake if tensions erupt, and what can be done to stop it.

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Philosopher Todd McGowan: Can Superman save our dying culture?

Fri, 18 Jul 2025 14:55:31 GMT

UnHerd’s Florence Read sits down with Todd McGowan – philosopher, film theorist, and author of Pure Excess, Capitalism and the Commodity – to dissect the new Superman film and its deeper political, philosophical, and psychoanalytic currents.

As Hollywood leans heavily on superhero franchises, and remakes and adaptations of all sorts, they question whether Superman embodies a "stuck culture," where studios’ risk-averse, profit-driven strategies stifle cinematic innovation. Todd probes whether this trend signals a decline in bold, original art, contrasting it with the provocative visions of directors like David Lynch, Stanley Kubrick, Spike Lee, and Martin Scorsese, the latter of which criticised superhero films as “not cinema”, they explore if genres, like horror, have taken up the mantle, delivering the confrontational, cathartic experiences superhero films often lack.

Todd finds merit in the new Superman, praising its execution and thematic depth, and reveals why superhero films reflect broader cultural tensions, what’s at stake for cinema’s future, and whether bold auteurs can still break through the noise.

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Helen Thompson: Rare earths - the next war?

Thu, 17 Jul 2025 16:33:11 GMT

Freddie Sayers, UnHerd’s Editor-in-Chief, sits down with Helen Thompson – Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge University and author of Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century – to dive into the high-stakes geopolitics of rare earth elements.

As China tightens its grip on the global supply of these critical minerals—vital for everything from electric vehicles to military tech—the West scrambles to catch up. Helen unpacks how China’s dominance, built through strategic foresight and control of refining, has left the US and Europe vulnerable. From trade wars to green energy ambitions, they explore whether the West can break free from China’s chokehold or if a rare earths crisis is looming.

Helen reveals why rare earths are the hidden battleground of global power, what’s at stake if the West loses, and whether the moon holds the keys to the future.

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Michael Tracey: Jeffrey Epstein and the end of the conspiracies

Wed, 09 Jul 2025 17:34:37 GMT

Freddie Sayers, UnHerd’s Editor-in-Chief, interviews journalist Michael Tracey to unpack the recent Jeffrey Epstein files news, and the use and proliferation of conspiracy theories.

The Trump administration’s hyped-up promise of explosive Epstein revelations, including a “client list,” has fallen flat. The Department of Justice and FBI now confirm there is now list and Epstein’s death was indeed suicide, pushing back against years of wild speculation. Michael examines whether Trump, JD Vance, Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, and Dan Bongino, naively, or cynically, fuelled Epstein conspiracy theories – namely, that “Epstein didn’t kill himself”, and more – to rally their base, only to now face flak for either hiding the truth or admitting there was nothing to reveal.

Freddie and Michael draw parallels with the JFK files, where declassification also disappointed, offering little new insight. Touching on Israel, UFOs, the military industrial complex, they explore how Trump’s administration has leaned into conspiracies for political gain and now faces the fallout when the “truth” underwhelms.

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Grindr CEO: Are gays behaving more like straights?

Mon, 07 Jul 2025 14:06:31 GMT

Freddie Sayers, Editor-in-Chief of UnHerd, interviews George Arison, CEO of Grindr, tracing his remarkable journey from growing up in the Soviet Union to leading the world’s largest dating and hookup app for the LGBTQ+ community in the U.S. Openly gay, Arison shares insights into his personal life with his partner and family, reflecting on how his background shapes his leadership at Grindr. The conversation dives into Grindr’s pivotal role in transforming the hookup and dating scene for gay men, its ongoing evolution, and its future direction as it adapts to the changing needs of its users, particularly as gay relationships increasingly embrace traditional aspirations like marriage, partnership, and family life.

The interview explores the shifting dynamics of gay culture, questioning whether gay men are becoming more conservative in their life goals, seeking settled lives with husbands and children, and how Grindr is responding to these trends. Arison and Sayers also tackle the evolving politics of gay men, contrasting the U.S. and UK landscapes, with a focus on the surprising absence of openly gay Republican elected officials despite strong LGBTQ+ representation within the broader party and voter base. With a humorous nod to the alleged Grindr app crash during the Milwaukee RNC convention—prompting former presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg to quip, “Grindr is for Republicans”—they discuss the pro-gay stance of Donald Trump’s administration, potential threats to LGBTQ+ healthcare, and the broader representation of gay men in Western politics.

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Fiona Hill: The West must wake up

Fri, 27 Jun 2025 16:59:16 GMT

Freddie Sayers, Editor-in-Chief of UnHerd, interviews Dr Fiona Hill, renowned Russia expert and former Senior Director for European and Russian Affairs in the first Trump administration (2017–2019). A senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and Chancellor of Durham University, Dr Hill has advised three U.S. presidents (including George W. Bush and Barack Obama) on foreign policy, and recently guided UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, authoring the UK Strategic Defence Review 2025, shaping UK defence policy and supporting NATO’s increased spending commitments.

Dr Hill analyses the ‘12-day war’ between Israel and Iran in June 2025, ended by U.S. airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, resulting in a fragile ceasefire. She explores the risks of increasing global nuclear proliferation and the defence ties among China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, and debates NATO’s 2025 Hague Summit pledge to raise defence spending to 5% of GDP and Western military preparedness against these threats.

Dr Hill and Freddie Sayers examine whether foreign policy is turning more hawkish and realist, ask whether today’s volatile world of hybrid warfare and global instability brings us closer to World War III.

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Pentagon insider Dan Caldwell: How the hawks won

Sun, 22 Jun 2025 22:57:34 GMT

UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers interviews Dan Caldwell about the recent US strikes on Iranian nuclear sites - Dan is the former senior adviser to U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Iraq War veteran, and a leading voice in the “restrainer” faction skeptical of U.S. military overreach in the Middle East.

Caldwell’s extensive experience in the Trump administration, where he served as a key defense adviser until he was put on leave and then terminated following an investigation into Pentagon leaks after the ‘Signalgate’ scandal. His insights, recently articulated in his UnHerd article “How the War Could Spin Out of Control,” offer a critical lens on the recent U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites and their far-reaching implications.

In this in-depth conversation, Caldwell breaks down the motivations behind the U.S. strikes, questions whether they achieved their objectives, and evaluates their alignment with America’s interests. He explores the behind-the-scenes dynamics, the risk of escalation into a regional crisis or even World War III, and what Iran and the U.S. might do next—whether Iran will retaliate or seek de-escalation. Drawing on his Marine Corps service and Trump administration tenure, Caldwell provides a sobering analysis of the Middle East’s volatile trajectory and the potential for catastrophic blowback.

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Druid John Michael Greer: Trump, druidry and barbarian politics

Thu, 19 Jun 2025 14:01:01 GMT

UnHerd’s Florence Read sits down with John Michael Greer, prolific author of over 50 books, including The Druidry Handbook, The Long Descent, and The King in Orange, and former Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America. Greer explains what it means to be a Druid today, detailing the spiritual practices rooted in Celtic traditions, including rituals, meditation, and divination, and their connection to the living Earth.

They discuss Greer's perspective on the modern world, blending ecology, spirituality, and societal decline. He describes magic as "the politics of the excluded," revealing its role in history and power dynamics. Greer also shares his provocative views on contemporary politics, including speculation on Donald Trump's destiny, suggesting he might follow the path of other transformative U.S. Presidents who died in office.

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DEBATE: John Mearsheimer & Yoram Hazony on Israel vs. Iran

Tue, 17 Jun 2025 16:08:22 GMT

In this two-part UnHerd TV episode, Editor-in-Chief Freddie Sayers delves into the volatile Iran-Israel crisis, presenting contrasting, thought-provoking analyses from two intellectual heavyweights.

In Part 1, American International Relations realist theorist and renowned political scientist John Mearsheimer dissects Israel’s strategy as a risky and flawed endeavor, arguing it’s unlikely to succeed in curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions and warning that U.S. military involvement would be catastrophic, inadvertently strengthening Russia and China’s geopolitical positions.

In Part 2, Israeli-American philosopher and author of The Virtue of Nationalism Yoram Hazony, speaking from Jerusalem, passionately defends Israel’s imperative to decisively block Iran’s nuclear program, asserting it’s both realistic and essential for national survival, while carefully debating the benefits and risks of U.S. support.

Subscribe to UnHerd TV for this nuanced exploration of a deeply sensitive and intricate global issue.

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Iain McGilchrist & Philip Goff: Is the universe conscious?

Thu, 12 Jun 2025 14:52:35 GMT

In this captivating discussion, Iain and Philip ask what makes us who we are? Are we merely our brains, or does science only capture part of the human story? Is the universe conscious?

Dr. Iain McGilchrist, renowned psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher, philosopher, and author of the critically acclaimed The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, engages in a thought-provoking event at the UnHerd club with Professor Philip Goff, a leading panpsychist philosopher from Durham University and author of Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness.

McGilchrist and Goff dive into the intersections of neuroscience, philosophy, and consciousness, exploring the limits of reductionist science, the nature of the self, and the profound implications of their work for understanding the human mind and its place in the cosmos.

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Los Angeles: Is the US headed to civil war?

Tue, 10 Jun 2025 10:03:02 GMT

Freddie Sayers interviews reporter and documentary filmmaker Leighton Woodhouse for an on-the-ground account of the LA protests that followed ICE immigration raids. Woodhouse was in the thick of it—witnessing firsthand the violence, the escalation, and the crumbling of the “peaceful protest” narrative that dominated mainstream coverage. In this in-depth interview, he describes what it felt like to stand in the middle of what at times resembled “pre-civil war” more than a political demonstration. What began as outrage over immigration enforcement quickly spiralled into something much more chaotic. Leighton details the street-level reality: smashed windows, street fires, armed standoffs, and moments where the rule of law appeared to vanish. He challenges the media portrayal of events, questions the motives of protest leaders, and unpacks the deeper constitutional implications of what unfolded. Were these protests truly peaceful? Who was escalating the violence—and why? At what point does protest cross into insurrection? Is this unrest contained to Los Angeles and California, or will it spread, and become something more?

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Steve Bannon: Elon Musk should be deported

Fri, 06 Jun 2025 16:24:05 GMT

In this exclusive UnHerd interview, Steve Bannon, former Trump Chief Strategist, host of The War Room, and Elon Musk’s strongest critic, dissects the dramatic rift between President Donald Trump and Musk, sparked by disputes over Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill”—a tax-cut and spending package Musk slammed as a “disgusting abomination” for inflating the $36.2 trillion national debt.

Bannon brands Musk an “illegal alien”, possibly an agent of the CCP, and calls for his deportation and on Trump to seize SpaceX under the Defense Production Act, while defending Trump’s America First agenda against Musk’s fiscal critiques.

With Tesla’s stock dropping ~14% and Musk backpedalling on threats to decommission the Dragon spacecraft, the conversation probes whether this public feud signals the end of the Trump-Musk alliance, a potential MAGA “civil war,” and risks America’s space and economic future.

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Kyle Chan: Is this the ‘Chinese century’?

Wed, 04 Jun 2025 15:44:46 GMT

Is China poised to dominate the global economy? UnHerd's Editor-in-Chief, Freddie Sayers, speaks to Kyle Chan, a Princeton University expert on Chinese industrial policy, to unpack the seismic shifts reshaping the U.S.-China economic rivalry, as explored in Chan’s recent New York Times Op-Ed ‘In the Future, China Will Be Dominant. The U.S. Will Be Irrelevant.’

Together, they dive into China’s meteoric rise in high-tech sectors like AI, robotics, and electric vehicles, and dominance in manufacturing output, and aluminium, steel and battery production, and question whether U.S. policies—such as President Trump’s latest tariffs and cuts to research funding—are inadvertently paving the way for a 'Chinese Century'.

What are China’s next steps to counter U.S. policies and global trade isolation? Can the U.S. reverse its talent drain and supply chain disruptions to stay competitive? And is the 'Chinese Century' inevitable, or will demographic and economic headwinds derail Beijing’s ambitions?

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Crypto: What are the Trumps up to?

Thu, 29 May 2025 17:16:35 GMT

Is Donald Trump cashing in on the crypto craze—or crossing ethical lines?

UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers and CoinDesk’s Ben Schiller unpack the Trump family’s sudden crypto conversion and what it means for politics, finance, and ethics. Once a vocal crypto critic, Trump now calls himself a “big fan,” with his family and inner circle making major moves in the digital asset world.

Freddie and Ben look at the Trump family’s 60% stake in World Liberty Financial—a $2.2B crypto venture backed by high-profile investors like Justin Sun and Abu Dhabi—and the controversial launch of the $TRUMP memecoin ahead of the 2025 election. Add to that Trump Media’s $2.5B war chest reportedly aimed at a Bitcoin buying spree—are we witnessing smart strategy or something shadier?

At Bitcoin2025 in Las Vegas, VP JD Vance pushed pro-Bitcoin policy and stablecoin regulation under the GENIUS Act, while Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump promoted their new crypto platform—pitched as a response to being shut out by traditional banks.

With Bitcoin hitting $109K and political memecoins on the rise, is this a financial revolution or just another power grab?

From institutional growth to making America the “crypto capital,” what’s next for digital finance and the Trump administration’s role in it?

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Yanis Varoufakis & Wolfgang Münchau: The danger of Europe's East-West divide

Fri, 23 May 2025 14:25:16 GMT

Is the European Union heading for a slow-motion collapse? In this unfiltered conversation, economist Yanis Varoufakis and journalist Wolfgang Münchau join Freddie Sayers to dive deep into the political and economic forces reshaping Europe—from the rise of populism in Romania and Poland, to the EU's failure to offer a compelling future to Eastern member states.

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Ben Shapiro: The break-up of the Right

Wed, 21 May 2025 16:12:53 GMT

Ben Shapiro joins Freddie Sayers for a wide-ranging conversation on the future of the American Right. They discuss what Trump has got right — and wrong — in his current tenure, Shapiro’s public criticisms of the president, and his feud with Tucker Carlson.

Also on the table: the growing divide on the Right over foreign policy and “America First,” the rise of antisemitism, free speech double standards, and Candace Owens’ exit from The Daily Wire. One of the conservative movement’s most influential voices, Shapiro doesn’t hold back.

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Aris Roussinos: The view from Romania

Mon, 19 May 2025 14:00:09 GMT

Has the anti-populist backlash already begun? Contributing editor and war reporter Aris Roussinos joins UnHerd from Romania, where he has been witnessing the final stages of a closely fought election.

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Sohrab Ahmari: Pope Leo versus the populists

Thu, 15 May 2025 14:59:28 GMT

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Freddie Sayers, host of UnHerd, interviews UnHerd’s US Editor and practicing Catholic, Sohrab Ahmari, as they dive into the historic election of Pope Leo XIV, the first American Pope. In this in-depth discussion, Freddie and Sohrab explore who Pope Leo XIV (formerly Cardinal Robert Prevost) is, his political and religious background, and the potential global impact of his papacy.

They unpack his pre-papal social media posts, including tweets critiquing Donald Trump and JD Vance, and his public stances on key issues like economics, sexual morality, immigration, and climate change. The conversation delves into the significance of his dispute with JD Vance over ordo amoris (the theological concept of ordered love) and what it reveals about his worldview, as well as covering why he chose the name Leo, evoking the legacy of Pope Leo XIII, a pivotal figure in modern Catholic social teaching.

Is the new Pope Left or Right, or can he embody a unifying figure for both Liberals and Conservatives? Was he chosen to counter the Trump administration and rising populist movements? What will his papacy mean for the wider political and religious world?

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Peter Hitchens: The case for the death penalty

Tue, 13 May 2025 14:37:45 GMT

Is the death penalty justice or revenge?

With 2,474 people on US death row in 2025 and debates raging globally, UnHerd's Editor-in-Chief Freddie Sayers sits down with Peter in this latest episode, to go through his arguments, tackling such concerns like the risks of executing the innocent and the efficacy of deterrence, as well as how Peter - a committed Anglican - reconciles his position with his Christian faith.

In the UK, despite capital punishment being abolished in 1965, new polling shows younger generations now favour it (even above some older groups), perhaps spurred by rising crime and cases like Axel Rudakubana’s murder of three girls in Southport. But flaws in the criminal justice system continue to be exposed as news of the longest miscarriage of justice emerges with the freeing of Peter Sullivan, once convicted of the brutal 1986 murder of florist Diane Sindall, having served 38 years in prison.

The conversation around capital punishment resurfaces once again amid increasing calls for it to be reintroduced, and MPs, like Lee Anderson and Richard Tice, demanding national debate.

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Yanis Varoufakis and Wolfgang Munchau: Why Europe will lose the trade war

Fri, 09 May 2025 14:41:56 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers interviews renowned economist and former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis and Eurointelligence founder Wolfgang Münchau as they dissect the escalating trade war between Europe and the United States. With the US recently striking a so-called trade deal with the UK, and news of India signing a comprehensive agreement with the UK, tensions are soaring as Europe, China, and others threaten retaliation against President Trump’s aggressive tariffs. From economic fallout to geopolitical manoeuvering, they reveal why Europe risks losing ground and what’s at stake for the global economy in 2025.

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Can 'pronatalists' save the West?

Thu, 01 May 2025 16:33:36 GMT

UnHerd’s Florence Read interviews outspoken pronatalists, Malcolm and Simone Collins, to dive into the urgent issue of population collapse.

Is pronatalism the answer to demographic catastrophe, or does it skirt too close to eugenics and far-Right ideologies?

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Michael Ignatieff: Canada's election results aren't what they seem

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 11:23:45 GMT

Freddie Sayers hosts Michael Ignatieff, former Canadian Liberal leader, to dissect the 2025 Canadian election and Mark Carney’s leadership.

Ignatieff breaks down Carney’s global expertise, his strategy against Trump’s tariffs, and the possibility of a grand coalition with Canada's Conservatives.

While the Liberals narrowly edged out the Right, Ignatieff argues the results reflect a complex mix of liberal resilience, populist setbacks, and converging policies — hinting at a Canada craving change.

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Debating Renaud Camus on remigration

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 17:31:33 GMT

In this interview, UnHerd's Editor-in-Chief, Freddie Sayers, questions Right-wing French philosopher Renaud Camus on his controversial theories of remigration and the "Great Replacement".

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Julie Bindel: Grooming gangs are still in Britain

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 16:15:11 GMT

UnHerd’s Florence Read interviews feminist journalist Julie Bindel on the UK’s grooming gang crisis.

Bindel exposes the history of these crimes, society’s neglect and victim-shaming, and the political and cultural failures fuelling their persistence.

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Arrested for praying: The free speech row

Thu, 17 Apr 2025 13:41:31 GMT

Join Freddie Sayers for an exclusive deep dive with pro-life activists Adam Smith-Connor, Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, and Livia Tossici-Bolt, who share their experiences of being questioned and arrested for praying and holding signs near UK abortion clinics.

With the US State Department and the Trump administration closely monitoring Adam and Livia’s cases as critical tests of free speech, and Vice President JD Vance calling out Adam’s conviction in his 2025 Munich speech, these stories have ignited a transatlantic row over censorship and religious freedom.

Are these activists victims of a free speech crackdown, or is the UK justified in its actions?

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The JD Vance interview - explained

Wed, 16 Apr 2025 18:08:32 GMT

UnHerd’s US Editor sits down with Editor-in-Chief Freddie Sayers, about his exclusive interview with US Vice President JD Vance. The interview marked the VP’s first major interview with a European outlet since taking office and topped headlines across the Britain, Europe and America on Tuesday, sending the UK’s FTSE ‘surging’ on the VP’s remarks of a potential US-UK trade deal in the works, prompting a positive response from Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government.

In this reaction video, Sohrab and Freddie discuss the impact of the interview and the major news lines from the Vice President from his comments about Europe independence and ‘vassal state’ status to how he uses social media to break the inevitable bubble his office brings.

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Douglas Murray responds to Joe Rogan

Tue, 15 Apr 2025 13:10:28 GMT

In this captivating UnHerd interview, Freddie Sayers sits down with Douglas Murray to trace his remarkable evolution from a young Oxford scholar immersed in cultural and artistic pursuits to a global neoconservative commentator.

Murray reflects on his early days writing the acclaimed biography Bosie (2000), a deep dive into the life of Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde’s lover, and how his focus shifted quickly to fiery political debates on the world stage.

From his 2005 book Neoconservatism: Why We Need It to his later bestsellers like The Strange Death of Europe (2017) and his new book Democracies and Death Cults (2025), Murray has become a polarising voice defending Western values and interventionism, particularly on Israel.

The conversation also dives into Murray’s recent viral appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, where he sparked controversy by challenging the shapeshifting Right and the unchecked influence of podcasters.

Join Freddie Sayers as he uncovers what drives Douglas Murray, how his past shaped his present, and why he’s demanding more from today’s media giants. Don’t miss this in-depth look at one of the most provocative thinkers of our time.

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Slavoj Žižek: Trump is a liberal fetish

Wed, 09 Apr 2025 14:34:23 GMT

Dubbed “the most dangerous philosopher in the West”, Slovenian psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek has singlehandedly led a revolution in punk political theory. Now, in the shadow of Donald Trump 2.0, he asks why democracy fails, sex sells and how rock bottom could be the best place to start.

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Stock market meltdown: What happens next?

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 18:00:00 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers sits down with Wolfgang Munchau and Anatole Kaletsky.

UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers holds an emergency roundtable with economic commentator and director of the Eurointelligence blog, Wolfgang Munchau, and Gavekal’s chief economist, and author of Capitalism 4.0, Anatole Kaletsky.

Trump’s tariff trade war is impacting global stock markets. Has the economic world order been upended? Is UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer right that this marks the ‘end of globalisation’? Are governments teetering on the edge of a 2008-style recession, and what do they do next?

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Robert Zubrin: How humans will live on Mars

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 14:29:04 GMT

UnHerd's Flo Read meets Mars Society Founder, Robert Zubrin.

Renowned aerospace engineer and President of the Mars Society - which advocates for human exploration and colonisation of Mars - gives us his case for a manned mission to Mars, and all the challenges that getting to the Red Planet may entail. Is Elon Musk one of them?

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Claire Lehmann: The threat to free speech from the Right

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 15:26:20 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers speaks to Quillette Founder and Editor, Claire Lehmann.

Join Freddie Sayers on UnHerd as he sits down with Claire Lehmann, founder of Quillette, the Sydney-based magazine launched in 2015 that’s become a global force for reason and free expression.

With Trump powering through his first 100 days and Right-wing populism surging across the West, the free speech landscape is shifting. Are journalism and open debate now under threat from the Right? Has the Left’s 'woke' orthodoxy given way to a new 'woke Right' menace?

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Stephen Sackur: How the BBC killed HARDtalk

Wed, 26 Mar 2025 16:59:05 GMT

Join UnHerd's Freddie Sayers as he sits down with Stephen Sackur, the iconic host of BBC’s HARDtalk, to discuss the shocking closure of the long-running show after nearly three decades.

Sackur shares his personal story, reveals how the decision unfolded, and reflects on the highs and lows of his time grilling the world’s most powerful figures. From unforgettable moments to the toughest interviews, he opens up about the best and worst of HARDtalk. Plus, Sackur weighs in on the future of journalism and the BBC in a rapidly changing media landscape.

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Cancer, autism, and long covid: The "over-diagnosis" crisis

Thu, 20 Mar 2025 14:58:03 GMT

Award-winning author Dr. Suzanne O’Sullivan discusses her new book The Age of Diagnosis, and some curious cases of “over-diagnosis”.

1 in 10 in England now believe they have long Covid. The UK’s new Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, now says mental health is being “over-diagnosed”. Is Trump and RFK Jr’s aggressively sceptical approach to public health the way forward? Are trends in neurodivergent and autism identification becoming a problem? Are we living in The Age of Diagnosis?

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Peter Hitchens: Lockdowns, 5 years on

Mon, 17 Mar 2025 15:28:23 GMT

Journalist and author Peter Hitchens joins Freddie Sayers to reflect on the world 5 years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. As society grapples with the lasting impact of lockdowns, Hitchens questions whether those who advocated for severe restrictions should be forgiven.

Hitchens explores whether the fervour surrounding the pandemic has been replaced by a new wave of political and media hysteria, particularly with the war in Ukraine.

Is society moving from one crisis mentality to another? Are we learning from past mistakes, or doomed to repeat them?

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Elizabeth Oldfield & John Vervaeke: Can faith solve the meaning crisis?

Fri, 14 Mar 2025 15:12:18 GMT

Could a revival in Christianity reverse the West’s loss of confidence? Cognitive scientist John Vervaeke, who coined the term ‘meaning crisis’, debates host of The Sacred podcast Elizabeth Oldfield, live at the UnHerd Club.

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Reform civil war: Former Farage adviser on Rupert Lowe crisis

Thu, 13 Mar 2025 16:19:26 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers sits down with Nigel Farage's closest former adviser and fired Head of Press for Reform UK, Gawain Towler, to delve into the party’s internal strife.

Towler shares the inside story behind the dramatic fallout with Rupert Lowe, the escalating civil war within the party, and what these tensions mean for Reform UK's future.

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Carney VS. Trump: The battle for North America

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 16:46:47 GMT

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For years, Western politics has been dominated by a thematic drift to the populist right, as movements surged in Canada and beyond. But with Mark Carney’s victory as Trudeau’s successor, has the liberal establishment staged a dramatic comeback?

Are we witnessing a revenge of the globalists? Can Mark Carney beat Pierre Poilievre at the inevitable next election? Who is better placed to take on Trump?

Marshall Auerback joins UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers for a conversation about the possible return of liberal managerialism, Mark Carney’s vision, and the future of Canadian politics.

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Maurice Glasman: Labour’s MAGA Lord

Thu, 06 Mar 2025 17:07:18 GMT

Lord Maurice Glasman sits down with UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers to share insider insights on the Trump administration, the debate between isolationism and intervention in Ukraine, and the shifting dynamics of the Right and Left within ‘MAGA square.‘

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Katja Hoyer: How the AfD changed German politics

Mon, 24 Feb 2025 16:05:18 GMT

Author of 'Beyond the Wall' Katja Hoyer joins UnHerd's Freddie Sayers to break down the results of Germany's era-defining general election.

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Inside the DEI consultancy complex

Thu, 20 Feb 2025 16:50:56 GMT

From USAID to the FDA, Nathan Halberstadt reflects on his time at Boston Consulting Group and the DEI policies he helped impose on BCG's clients.

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N.S. Lyons: The return of strong gods

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 17:38:34 GMT

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With increasing Western reliance on Chinese manufacturing, technology and communications, is bipolarity just a relic of another era? Geopolitical analyst NS Lyons joins UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers to discuss the new world order and what it might bring for Britain and America.

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Valentine's Debate: Is romance dead?

Fri, 14 Feb 2025 16:57:56 GMT

Between incel culture, tradwifery, polyamory and online dating, what hope is there for modern romance? For a Saint Valentine’s Day special join writers Poppy Sowerby, Freya India and Sheehan Quirke aka The Cultural Tutor to debate the state of sex and love in 2025.

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Wolfgang Münchau: Why Trump would win a tariff war

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 15:14:09 GMT

Are tariffs the 'art of the deal' in action? Economist Wolfgang Münchau joins UnHerd's Freddie Sayers to discuss the true cost of a trade war and how Trump could use European division to his advantage.

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John Rapley & Philip Pilkington: Is a market crash coming?

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 20:06:56 GMT

Macroeconomists and market watchers John Rapley and Philip Pilkington join UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers to investigate the apparent market slump set off by Chinese AI app DeepSeek.

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Debate: This house welcomes the new Trump era

Tue, 21 Jan 2025 18:02:22 GMT

On inauguration day, UnHerd gathers outspoken critics and cheerleaders of the new US President to debate the promise and peril of Donald Trump 2.0. Will the 47th leader of the free world really make America great again? Join writer Mary Harrington, academic James Orr and journalists Aaron Bastani and Peter Hitchens for a live debate at the UnHerd Club.

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Will blackouts come to Britain?

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 17:17:07 GMT

Did the UK only narrowly avoid a blackout last week? Freddie Sayers is joined by energy analyst Kathryn Porter to break down the National Grid numbers and find out how Net Zero might cause blackouts by 2030.

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Trudeau out: Is the vibeshift complete?

Wed, 08 Jan 2025 23:39:16 GMT

The slow-burn collapse of Canada's Liberal party seems to mark the end of the Obama era. What will follow it? And what might this moment mean for the rest of the world? UnHerd's Freddie Sayers is joined by economics analyst and friend of the show Louis-Vincent Gave.

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Is Reform UK now inevitable?

Wed, 18 Dec 2024 18:51:41 GMT

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After meeting Elon Musk in Florida, Reform leader Nigel Farage has doubled down on his reputation as a Mar-a-Lago insider. Could this moment mark a shift in British politics? UnHerd's Political Editor Tom McTague joins Freddie Sayers in the studio to discuss the apparent rise of a MAGA-Reform alliance.

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Luigi Mangione: Anti-tech terrorist?

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 11:00:01 GMT

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UnHerd's Flo Read meets Katherine Dee.

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As more evidence comes to light in the killing of CEO Brian Thompson, UnHerd's Florence Read speaks to Katherine Dee about the digital footprint and folk-hero status of suspect Luigi Mangione.

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Kash Patel: Future chief of the FBI?

Tue, 03 Dec 2024 16:28:36 GMT

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UnHerd's Freddie Sayers and DC correspondent Emily Jashinsky discuss Donald Trump's nomination of Kash Patel for head of the FBI.

Watch it on the UnHerd website: https://unherd.com/watch-listen/kash-patel-future-chief-of-the-fbi/

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How did a former public defender hired by the Obama administration and ally of Steve Bannon become Trump's pick for FBI chief? UnHerd's DC Correspondent Emily Jashinsky explains the rise of Kash Patel.

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Kevin Roberts: The Second American REVOLUTION

Wed, 27 Nov 2024 16:53:58 GMT

What is Project 2025? Kevin Roberts is the President of the Heritage Foundation and author of the federal policy blueprint for a radical restructuring of the US government under Donald Trump. He joins UnHerd's Freddie Sayers to discuss his 'revolutionary' plot to overhaul American politics.

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Emily Jashinsky: Meet Trump's unconventional cabinet

Thu, 21 Nov 2024 17:53:08 GMT

Is Donald Trump assembling the most disruptive cabinet in recent memory? UnHerd’s Emily Jashinsky and Freddie Sayers debate the pitfalls and potential of the new MAGA recruits.

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Wolfgang Munchau: Will Germany be next?

Mon, 18 Nov 2024 16:30:46 GMT

Does the rapid rise of the populist AfD party and the inauguration of Donald Trump mark a perfect storm for Germany? Wolfgang Munchau, founder of Eurointelligence, joined UnHerd's Freddie Sayers to reflect on the upcoming German elections.

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Yanis Varoufakis: Overthrow the Big Tech tyrants

Fri, 15 Nov 2024 10:53:37 GMT

Former finance minister of Greece Yanis Varoufakis has dedicated his life to fighting crony capitalism. Now he faces a total rewiring of global power by the billionaires of Big Tech. How, he asks, did ‘the cloud’ kill capitalism and what has replaced it? The economist, politician and bestselling author of ‘Techno Feudalism’ joins UnHerd for an evening of conversation and Q&A.

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John Mearsheimer: We're all realists now

Fri, 01 Nov 2024 15:22:34 GMT

The 'realist' approach to international relations was not long ago considered a dangerous idea. But with increased Western interventionism in Ukraine, Israel and even China, thinkers that were once exiled from liberal academic circles have suddenly gained ground. Prof. John Mearsheimer, one of the earliest proponents of a 'realist' approach, joined UnHerd's Freddie Sayers for a conversation about war, peace and politics.

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Megyn Kelly: The Washington Post is doomed

Wed, 30 Oct 2024 16:34:29 GMT

Megyn Kelly joins Emily to preview Election Night on Undercurrents.

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Glenn Loury: Why black men are warming to Trump

Thu, 24 Oct 2024 14:14:58 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers meets Glenn Loury to discuss what the US could look like, post election.

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Mattias Desmet: Are you suffering from mass formation psychosis?

Thu, 17 Oct 2024 14:49:13 GMT

Professor of psychology and author Mattias Desmet is the world expert on mass formation psychosis, a condition he observed during the pandemic years. He joins UnHerd's Florence Read to unpack the links between herd mentality and totalitarianism.

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Rosie Duffield: Why I quit the Labour Party

Fri, 11 Oct 2024 16:47:07 GMT

Rosie Duffield quit the Labour Party less than 100 days after she was elected MP for Canterbury. She likened working under UK Prime Minister Kier Starmer to being in an “abusive relationship”. UnHerd's Freddie Sayers spoke to her in the aftermath of her ferocious condemnation of her former comrades.

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David Owen: A radical life

Fri, 04 Oct 2024 15:33:17 GMT

David Owen has spent the last 60 years at the heart of British politics. After becoming a Labour MP in 1966 and serving as foreign secretary under Jim Callaghan from 1977-1979, he became disillusioned with the direction of the increasingly Left-wing Labour Party. Owen co-founded the Social Democratic Party and went on to lead it twice. In the 1990s, he was an EU peace negotiator in the former Yugoslavia and co-authored the consequential Vance-Owen Peace Plan. He joined UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers live at the UnHerd Club, to talk about his life in politics, the ideological shifts of the recent decades and the future of the British Left.

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Robby Soave: "I'm sick of one-sided fact-checking"

Wed, 02 Oct 2024 16:07:52 GMT

Robby Soave joins Emily for a rapid response breakdown of the Oct. 1 vice presidential debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz hosted by CBS.

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Liz Truss: I think I was right

Tue, 10 Sep 2024 15:09:00 GMT

As arguably the most controversial Prime Minister in recent British history, Liz Truss has become the face of free market libertarianism and its discontents. She joins UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers to discuss her new book, ‘Ten Years to Save the West,’ and the lessons she learned from her turbulent time as a Conservative leader.

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Curtis Yarvin: Welcome to the Dark Enlightenment

Fri, 06 Sep 2024 15:57:11 GMT

UnHerd's Flo Read speaks to Curtis Yarvin at the Unherd Club. Curtis Yarvin is the philosophical godfather of the so-called ‘New Right’, a movement that defies simple categories and political expectations. His writing under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug explores everything from anti-democracy to accelerationism. He joined UnHerd for an evening of conversation and audience Q&A.

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Katja Hoyer & Thomas Fazi: Political earthquake in East Germany

Mon, 02 Sep 2024 11:31:35 GMT

Is a Right-Left horseshoe coming to Europe? Katja Hoyer and Thomas Fazi join Freddie Sayers to unpack this weekend’s populist surge in East Germany.

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Freddie Sayers and Emily Jashinsky: What’s Kamala up to?

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 15:05:36 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers and Emily Jashinsky discuss Kamala Harris' speech at the DNC...

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Who really blew up the Nord Stream pipeline?

Tue, 20 Aug 2024 16:34:18 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers meets Bojan Pancevski, to discuss who actually blew up the Nord Stream pipeline.

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Silkie Carlo: Get ready for the crackdown

Thu, 08 Aug 2024 14:18:41 GMT

Could Keir Starmer exploit the summer riots to curtail civil liberties? From the return of the Counter Disinformation Unit to the start of live facial recognition, Big Brother Watch's Silkie Carlo joins UnHerd to discuss the UK crackdown.

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Aris Roussinos: Ethnic conflict has come to Britain

Tue, 06 Aug 2024 19:40:33 GMT

Riots that began in Southport last week have since spread to London, Rotherham, Middlesbrough, Liverpool, Bolton and Northern Ireland. UnHerd columnist Aris Roussinos was on the ground in Belfast as a firsthand witness to what he calls the 'ethnic conflict' of our era. He spoke to Freddie Sayers about what he saw and how civil clashes might change the future of the UK.

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Olympic boxing scandal: Sex and the science of fair sport

Thu, 01 Aug 2024 17:45:30 GMT

This morning, Algerian boxer Imane Khelif won an Olympic boxing match by default after Italy's Angela Carini, abandoned the bout in protest. Why? Because Khelif, previously banned from the World Championships, has XY chromosomes. Sports scientist Tommy Lundberg joined UnHerd in the aftermath of the fight to discuss how the complex case could change Olympic history.

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Nina Power: Free speech on trial

Fri, 26 Jul 2024 15:29:42 GMT

After a years-long legal battle, philosopher Nina Power has found herself on the vanguard of a complex question: do artists have the responsibility to engage with dangerous ideas? She joined UnHerd's Freddie Sayers to discuss the trial, why she still reads controversial books and what her story can tell us about the culture wars.

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Emily Jashinsky: It was a new Donald Trump... for ten minutes!

Fri, 19 Jul 2024 08:26:45 GMT

As the Republican National Convention comes to a close, what has it told us about the future of the party? Fresh from watching Trump's headline speech in Milwaukee, DC Correspondent Emily Jashinsky joins UnHerd's Freddie Sayers to discuss the GOP gathering.

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Oren Cass: The philosophy of J.D. Vance

Tue, 16 Jul 2024 18:25:22 GMT

With J. D. Vance as Trump’s pick for VP, how are the masterminds of the New Right set to shape American politics? Policy strategist and founder of American Compass, Oren Cass, speaks to UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers.

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Donald Trump now seems invincible

Mon, 15 Jul 2024 19:06:55 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers talks to Emily Jashinsky about the recent assassination attempt on Donald Trump.

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Louis-Vincent Gave: Has populism been thwarted in France?

Mon, 08 Jul 2024 18:00:57 GMT

UnHerd's Florence Read talks to Louis-Vincent Gave about the shock surge in support for the left-wing coalition. Is this the end of populism in France or just the beginning?

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Labour's shallow victory

Fri, 05 Jul 2024 17:46:41 GMT

This morning, British headlines were about the Labour Party's landslide victory in the UK general election. But take a closer look at the numbers, and there's another story under the surface. UnHerd's Political Editor, Tom McTague, joins Freddie Sayers to dive into the data.

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Niall Ferguson: Are we the Soviets now?

Tue, 02 Jul 2024 14:55:08 GMT

With public calls to remove the sitting US President, a UK election set to unseat its government and the rightward swing in Europe, it’s all change on the Western front. Best-selling historian Sir Niall Ferguson joins UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers for a wide-lens tour of populism and its discontents.

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Peter Hitchens, Rod Liddle, Matt Goodwin, Flo Read, Rowenna Davis: the Alternative Election Hustings

Sat, 29 Jun 2024 14:00:26 GMT

Who should you vote for on the 4th of July? A week ahead of the general election, UnHerd's Freddie Sayers and Tom McTague host an alternative hustings to size up the competition. Our all-star cast includes Peter Hitchens arguing for the Tories (even though he wants to destroy them), Rod Liddle for the SDP, Rowenna Davis for Labour, Matt Goodwin for Reform and UnHerd's Florence Read for the Greens, plus more special guests to be announced soon.

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Emily Jashinsky: Will the Democrats ditch Joe Biden?

Fri, 28 Jun 2024 15:49:26 GMT

Emily Jashinsky, UnHerd’s DC Correspondent, joins Freddie Sayers to give a blow-by-blow of last night’s Trump v. Biden debate and a closer look at the media reaction as it happened.

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How global government pushes censorship

Fri, 21 Jun 2024 16:14:19 GMT

Paul Coleman is executive director of Alliance Defending Freedom and has been involved in more than 20 cases before the European Court of Human Rights. He is the author of Censored (2016), about the rise of European hate crime laws. He joins UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers to demystify the inner workings of the international censorship complex.

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Election deep dive: Europe turns Right

Mon, 10 Jun 2024 22:08:24 GMT

Is a rightward shift really hitting Europe? Regular UnHerd contributors Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, Thomas Fazi and Ralph Schoellhammer react to the breaking news of the European elections, with Freddie Sayers.

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Nellie Bowles: Ex-Reporter Exposes New York Times

Wed, 05 Jun 2024 14:00:00 GMT

When Nellie Bowles got her dream job as a reporter for the New York Times, she thought she'd never leave her job at the legacy paper. But what she witnessed behind the scenes gave her a very personal insight into the political capture of the American newsroom. She tells UnHerd's Freddie Sayers about the disinformation movement, mainstream media bias and finding herself outside the tribe...

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Richard Dawkins vs Ayaan Hirsi Ali: The God Debate

Mon, 03 Jun 2024 15:53:55 GMT

At the UnHerd-sponsored Dissident Dialogues Festival in New York, Richard Dawkins and Ayaan Hirsi Ali discussed her recent conversion to Christianity, and whether the whole ‘New Atheism’ movement of which they had both been key members had done more harm than good.

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Welcome to the UNIPARTY election

Fri, 31 May 2024 17:57:01 GMT

Are the British Conservative and Labour parties really so different? For many voters, it seems, the answer is no. At least on the most important questions of the day, whether it’s immigration, war or culture. With the general election looming, UnHerd columnists Aris Roussinos, Mary Harrington and Tom McTague join Freddie Sayers for a roundtable on election ennui and ask: what are we to do with the uniparty?

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Peter Singer: How to live a good life

Wed, 29 May 2024 14:46:30 GMT

World-famous utilitarian philosopher and Princeton Professor of Bioethics, Peter Singer, has spent his career asking (and answering) questions that make even the most radical thinkers uncomfortable. He joins UnHerd to discuss his maverick moral calculus and the struggle for telos in a culture both more isolated and more connected than ever before.

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Fmr Iran Ambassador: "Western idealism has been disastrous"

Thu, 23 May 2024 15:51:42 GMT

With the shocking death of Iran's president, Sir Richard Dalton, former British Ambassador to Iran, joins UnHerd's Freddie Sayers for a conversation on the future of the Middle East, Israel and Western interventionism.

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Lee Cain: A Carthaginian defeat is coming

Wed, 22 May 2024 20:56:33 GMT

As news breaks of a British general election, Former Director of Communications at 10 Downing Street Lee Cain and Political Editor of UnHerd Tom McTague join Freddie Sayers for an emergency roundtable.

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Glenn Greenwald: Are there limits to free speech?

Fri, 17 May 2024 14:00:41 GMT

Glenn Greenwald joins UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers to explore the nuances of free speech in today’s digital world. They discuss the challenges of protecting minority voices while upholding free expression, the dangers of corporate censorship, and the importance of critical thinking in navigating today’s complex information landscape.

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How to destroy the censorship complex

Thu, 09 May 2024 14:00:13 GMT

What's next for the censorship industrial complex? UnHerd's Freddie Sayers, Tablet's Jacob Siegel and Public's Michael Shellenberger sat down at Dissident Dialogues festival in New York City to discuss the growing disinformation industry and how to combat it...

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Dora Moutot: Why France is censoring my book

Wed, 01 May 2024 14:00:00 GMT

Dora Moutot is one of France’s most outspoken gender critical feminists. She joins UnHerd's Florence Read to discuss her provocative new book, ‘Transmania’, and how it came to be censored by the local government in Paris.

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Freddie Sayers on the 'disinformation movement'

Wed, 24 Apr 2024 16:58:18 GMT

Following an explosive investigation into the Global Disinformation Index, viewed 8 million times on X/Twitter, UnHerd has been contacted by dozens of lawmakers and activists raising concerns about rating agencies like the GDI. In this update podcast, Freddie Sayers addresses government officials on the chilling effect of censorship and makes a case to defund the 'disinformation industry'.

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Jonathan Haidt: PornHub and Instagram are killing childhood

Fri, 19 Apr 2024 14:48:49 GMT

UnHerd's Flo Read meets Jonathan Haidt to discuss the dangers of modern technology for younger generations.

Watch it on the UnHerd website:

Listen to the podcast: https://plnk.to/unherd?to=page

Since 2012, youth mental health across the West has steadily declined. Jonathan Haidt is an American social psychologist, co-author of bestseller The Coddling of the American Mind and author of the new book The Anxious Generation. His theory is simple: the introduction of smartphones to children around 2011 accelerated the crisis of social media addiction. He joins UnHerd's Florence Read to discuss parenting, porn and the age of anxiety.

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Inside the 'disinformation' industry

Tue, 16 Apr 2024 23:00:00 GMT

The verdicts of “ratings agencies” such as the GDI, within the complex machinery that serves online ads, are a little-understood mechanism for controlling the media conversation. In UnHerd’s case, the GDI verdict means that we only received between 2% and 6% of the ad revenue normally expected for an audience of our size. Meanwhile, neatly demonstrating the arbitrariness and subjectivity of these judgements, Newsguard, a rival ratings agency, gives UnHerd a 92.5% trust rating, just ahead of the New York Times at 87.5%.

So, what are these “ratings agencies” that could be the difference between life and death for a media company? How does their influence work? And who funds them? The answers are concerning and raise serious questions about the freedom of the press and the viability of a functioning democracy in the internet age.

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Sohrab Ahmari: How Israel divided the Right

Sun, 14 Apr 2024 15:51:59 GMT

Since October 7th, old divides between Right and Left on support for Israel were predictably resurfaced. Less expected, however, was a new civil war on the online Right. Compact founder and key figure in the so-called ‘New Right’ Sohrab Ahmari joined UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers to discuss it.

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers talks to Sohrab Ahmari

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Prof. Randall Kennedy: Stop forcing academics to support DEI

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 14:17:59 GMT

Law Professor Randall Kennedy has taught at Harvard University for 40 years and written hundreds of thousands of words on race politics and the legal system. He is a vocal defender of affirmative action, so why this week did he write an essay about the 'resentment' caused by compulsory diversity statements? He spoke to UnHerd's Freddie Sayers about DEI, meritocracy and how good intentions so often turn into social coercion.

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Dinosaurs vs. God The Original Culture War

Thu, 28 Mar 2024 15:00:00 GMT

UnHerd's Giles Fraser chats to author and historian Michael Taylor about his new book ‘Impossible Monsters’, and what the war between rationalism and religion have to tell us about our future...

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Abigail Shrier: How therapy culture creates victims

Tue, 19 Mar 2024 15:13:46 GMT

Could it be possible that the boom in therapy for young people is harming, not helping, the next generation? UnHerd's Florence Read spoke to the author of a new book 'Bad Therapy', Abigail Shrier, about mental health myths, gentle parenting and the medicalisation of American kids.

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Martin Kulldorff: Fired by Harvard for getting Covid right

Fri, 15 Mar 2024 17:15:55 GMT

After the Great Barrington Declaration was announced in 2020, Harvard Professor Martin Kulldorff suddenly emerged into the public consciousness as a controversial figure. Despite data showing his skepticism about lockdowns and vaccine mandates were ultimate legitimate, especially in his home country of Sweden, Professor Kulldorff was fired by Harvard. Why? UnHerd's Freddie Sayers spoke to him to find out.

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Rob Henderson: How Luxury Beliefs took over the elite

Wed, 13 Mar 2024 17:42:23 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers meets Rob Henderson

Why are the top 1% so politically correct? Rob Henderson coined the term ‘luxury beliefs’ to explain how affluent people signal high status with ‘woke’ ideas. In his new memoir ‘Troubled’, Henderson tells the story of a difficult childhood and how it opened his eyes to the hypocrisy of America’s elite. He joins UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers to discuss the concept of luxury beliefs and much more.

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UnHerd in Washington DC Trump vs Biden: Underpriced Scenarios

Thu, 07 Mar 2024 15:00:58 GMT

Freddie Sayers was joined in Washington DC by Ruy Teixeira, Robby Soave and Emily Jashinsky to ask: who will win in 2024?

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Why the American Right loves Viktor Orbán, with Gladden Pappin

Sat, 02 Mar 2024 09:49:38 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers was joined in the studio by Gladden Pappin to discuss why the American Right seem so enamoured with Viktor Orbán's political philosophy.

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Jonathan Sumption: The case for Shamima Begum

Fri, 23 Feb 2024 18:15:33 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers talks to Jonathan Sumption about the case in support of Shamima Begum.

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Freddie Sayers and Konstantin Kisin: What happened to Tucker Carlson?

Sat, 17 Feb 2024 17:15:00 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers and Triggernometry's Konstantin Kisin discuss Tucker Carlson, his interview with Putin, and what's to follow...

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The History Professor Sanctioned by Putin

Wed, 14 Feb 2024 15:49:14 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers meets historian David Abulafia.

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Ioan Grillo: The Real Story of the US/Mexico Border Crisis

Sun, 11 Feb 2024 17:00:00 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers talks to Ioan Grillo about the ongoing issue at the border between the US and Mexico.

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Lee Fang: My Warning to Congress on Censorship

Tue, 06 Feb 2024 22:24:00 GMT

UnHerd's Flo Read sits down with journalist Lee Fang to discuss his testimony to Congress on the risks of AI-powered censorship.

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Andrew Sullivan: What I Got Wrong About Trump

Fri, 02 Feb 2024 15:08:55 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers meets with Andrew Sullivan, to discuss what he got wrong about Donald Trump

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Will Europe Lose World War Three?

Wed, 31 Jan 2024 19:00:00 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers talks to Aris Roussinos, Elbridge Colby and Pippa Malmgren about the prospect of a World War Three.

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David Mamet: Why Trump Will Win 2024

Sun, 21 Jan 2024 17:00:01 GMT

UnHerd's Florence Read sits down with Pulitzer Prize winning playwright David Mamet to talk about the demise of Hollywood, and why Trump will win in 2024.

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Katherine Birbalsingh: My High Court Case to Ban Prayer in School

Fri, 19 Jan 2024 17:19:41 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers meets Katharine Birbalsingh, 'Britain's strictest headteacher'.

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Oleksiy Arestovych: Zelensky's Challenger

Sun, 14 Jan 2024 15:00:00 GMT

UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers meets Oleksiy Arestovych, who intends to challenge President Zelensky in Ukraine's next general election.

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The New War for the Red Sea

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 18:33:28 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers and Tom McTague discuss the new war in the Red Sea

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Former CIA officer: The age of America is coming to an end

Thu, 04 Jan 2024 15:00:00 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers sits down with former CIA officer, Mike Baker to talk about Israel, Ukraine and China.

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UnHerd's Best of 2023

Thu, 28 Dec 2023 15:00:29 GMT

Freddie Sayers and Flo Read look back at UnHerd's best moments from 2023, featuring Nick Cave, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Graham Linehan.

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John Vervaeke: Rituals are rational

Sun, 24 Dec 2023 15:00:02 GMT

UnHerd’s Flo Read and philosopher and cognitive scientist John Vervaeke sat down at the UnHerd Club to diagnose the alienation and anxiety that pervades our contemporary culture. Is a “meaning crisis” at the root of all the other crises we face – environmental, political, spiritual?

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John Mearsheimer: There is no two-state solution

Fri, 15 Dec 2023 15:00:00 GMT

UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers sits down with John Mearsheimer to discuss the Israel-Palestine conflict, the aftermath of the 7th October attack, and the state of the Ukraine-Russia war.

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Andy Cook: How lockdowns broke Britain

Tue, 12 Dec 2023 16:37:16 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers meets Andy Cook, chief executive of the Centre for Social Justice think tank, to discuss their new report on the real-world consequences of lockdowns.

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Busting the Bill Gates myth

Wed, 29 Nov 2023 16:06:34 GMT

UnHerd's Flo Read meets Tim Schwab to discuss Bill Gates and the myth of the good billionaire.

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Ayaan Hirsi Ali: From New Atheist to Christian convert

Wed, 22 Nov 2023 16:10:08 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers sits down with former New Atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali to discuss why she now considers herself to be Christian.

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How RFK Jr. could decide the 2024 election

Fri, 17 Nov 2023 16:10:08 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers meets pollster Joe Bedell to discuss the 2024 US election, Trump, and RFK Jr.

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Nick Bostrom: How AI will lead to tyranny

Fri, 10 Nov 2023 17:00:54 GMT

UnHerd's Flo Read meets Nick Bostrom.

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Why does the Left support Palestine?

Fri, 03 Nov 2023 15:58:28 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers sits down with professional troublemaker James Lindsay and Novara Media's Aaron Bastani to discuss the modern and historical relationship between the political Left and support of Palestine.

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Israeli Ambassador on the War on Gaza

Fri, 27 Oct 2023 18:00:00 GMT

UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers meets Tzipi Hotovely, Israeli Ambassador to the United Kingdom.

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Jonathan Sumption: War, Lockdowns and Lessons from the Past

Sat, 21 Oct 2023 18:00:43 GMT

Former Supreme Court judge, and celebrated historian of The Hundred Years War, Jonathan Sumption joins UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers to discuss continental entanglements past and present, and the disrupted civil and international order we face today.

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Kathleen Stock: Inside Britain’s new trans clinics

Thu, 19 Oct 2023 14:13:10 GMT

Since its closure was announced last July, Gids — the Gender Identity Development Service at the world-renowned Tavistock and Portman Trust — has become synonymous with mismanagement and medical scandal.It was supposed to be a haven for young people experiencing gender-related distress. Instead, following a string of complaints by whistle-blowers, an “inadequate” rating by the Care Quality Commission, a high-profile judicial review and, finally, a damning independent review, it was deemed unsafe.In its place, two new regional hubs were set to open, with several more centres to follow. For Gids’s long-standing critics, concerned about the distress its tumult was having on children, this came as a huge relief.The story, however, does not end here.Kathleen Stock has spent the past month speaking to a range of clinicians, NHS professionals and parents of dysphoric children — to find out whether Gids’s new service will be an improvement.The portrait she paints is stark: her findings suggest that the NHS gender services are yet to become a clinically safe space for children and teens, with senior figures still pushing an activist ideology. Only last week, NHS bosses internally announced that they are significantly delaying the launch of one of the hubs. And as she reveals in her investigation, it is unlikely to be the final twist in Gids’s new chapter…

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Yascha Mounk: Israel to America - escaping the identity trap

Fri, 13 Oct 2023 18:00:00 GMT

Whatever happened to universalism? Academic and author of The Identity Trap, Yascha Mounk, explores how a relatively obscure and marginal set of ideas about identity have come to dominate our social, cultural and political life – and makes the case for universal, humanist values.

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Special Investigation: How scientific is the ZOE app?

Wed, 11 Oct 2023 17:05:59 GMT

Professor Tim Spector was one of the “winners” of the Covid era: his ZOE symptom tracker app accrued millions of users during the pandemic

Now he has pivoted back to his true passion, gut health, and taken many of his followers with him. Endorsed by celebrities such as Davina McCall and Carrie Johnson, the new version of the ZOE app promises a personalised nutrition plan and comes with a glucose blood monitor usually used by diabetics. It is proving hugely popular, with over 100,000 subscribers paying up to £600 in their first year — and a further 300,000 on the waiting list.

It boasts all the hallmarks of a scientific endeavour, with endorsements by world-leading experts and numerous studies. But how convincing are its claims?

Deborah Cohen, Newsnight’s former Health Editor, and Margaret McCartney, a GP, undertook a forensic investigation for UnHerd and found that ZOE’s scientific foundations aren’t as strong as they would have you think…

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John Gray: Thoughts after liberalism

Sun, 08 Oct 2023 15:01:51 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers sits down with philosopher John Gray at the UnHerd Club.

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Yanis Varoufakis: Welcome to the age of technofeudalism

Thu, 05 Oct 2023 15:33:56 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers sits down with former Greek Minister of Finance Yanis Varoufakis.

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Matthew Crawford: The global war on motorists

Tue, 03 Oct 2023 15:17:02 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers meets Matthew Crawford in San Francisco.

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Michael Wolff: How Donald Trump beat Rupert Murdoch

Fri, 29 Sep 2023 17:35:18 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers sits down with journalist and author Michael Wolff.

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Climate scientist: I designed my research to sound catastrophic

Mon, 25 Sep 2023 15:12:04 GMT

Patrick Brown tells Freddie Sayers why he designed his research to sound catastrophic.

Read the post here.

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The Russell Brand divide: Could both sides be right?

Tue, 19 Sep 2023 16:45:17 GMT

UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers sits down with Mary Harrington to discuss the Russell Brand investigation and accusations.

Read the Post here

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Gad Saad: Postmodernism is making us miserable

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 16:45:41 GMT

UnHerd's Florence Read sits down with Gad Saad to talk about why the Western world is so depressed.

How can we be happy? This question has preoccupied thinkers from Aristotle to the present day, in various disciplines encompassing philosophy, science and religion. In his latest book, The Saad Truth about Happiness, the Canadian evolutionary behavioural scientist Dr. Gad Saad takes on the subject through a scientific and practical lens. He spoke to UnHerd’s Florence Read about how happiness correlates with our politics, our religious beliefs, and the importance we place on play.

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Wolfgang Münchau: Germany is in trouble

Fri, 25 Aug 2023 14:31:53 GMT

Freddie Sayers sits down with Wolfgang Münchau , former co-editor of FT Deutschland, and founder and co-director of the Eurointelligence blog, to talk about Germany, the new sick man of Europe.

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Special Report: Inside Tony Blair Inc

Sun, 06 Aug 2023 21:31:59 GMT

At the end of every week, Tony Blair receives his “box” to review over the weekend. It is no longer the tatty, old red briefcase of a Prime Minister, but a virtual one accessible from his laptop wherever he is in the world. Yet, the process remains much the same as when he was in Downing Street. Those who work for him must submit their papers before the box is closed for the weekend. Blair will then review the documents and add comments before meeting his team the following week. Only those really close to the former PM can email him papers directly.

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Countess Alexandra Tolstoy: Debanked for being Russian

Wed, 02 Aug 2023 15:14:21 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers meets Countess Alexandra Tolstoy.

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Edward Luttwak: Biden and Putin are ready to do a deal

Tue, 18 Jul 2023 14:58:25 GMT

US President Joe Biden and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin are ready to do a deal, according to the historian, military strategist and advisor to the US government Edward Luttwak. The comments were made in a discussion this week with UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers, during which Luttwak argued that “a shift in the overall situation” has resulted in both leaders being more willing to negotiate an end to the Ukraine war.

The author, who has worked inside and outside of the Pentagon and the US Department of State for decades, believes that channels between the CIA and the Kremlin are sufficiently open for peace talks to develop. Following the aborted Wagner Group uprising at the end of last month, CIA chief William Burns spoke directly to Sergey Naryshkin, the head of Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service, to reassure him there was no CIA involvement in the rebellion. For Luttwak, this implies “a certain overall attitude and willingness to communicate”, while Naryshkin’s very presence in the Kremlin is further evidence that the war could be coming to an end.

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Professor Ashok Swain: The strange disappearance of the anti-war movement

Wed, 12 Jul 2023 16:32:38 GMT

Joining UnHerd to talk about why so few voices in public life and the media have spoken out against the shipment of cluster bombs, and about the recession of anti-war sentiment more widely, is the academic and writer Ashok Swain. A professor of peace and conflict research at Uppsala University in Sweden, he is one of the world’s leading experts on conflict resolution. His nation of residence is now set to join Nato, and he sat down with Freddie Sayers to unpick how Sweden’s proposed membership goes against its history of neutrality.

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Tom Holland: Lessons from the Roman Empire

Fri, 07 Jul 2023 16:14:04 GMT

At its peak, the Roman Empire was perhaps the greatest civilisation in history. But like so many cultures before and after it, it declined and finally ended.

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Lee Fang: Did Pfizer sponsor vaccine mandates?

Fri, 07 Jul 2023 11:42:27 GMT

The pharmaceutical company Pfizer financed groups lobbying for Covid-19 vaccine mandates, the investigative reporter Lee Fang has claimed. Speaking to UnHerd’s Florence Read, Fang discussed a recent report he wrote in which he uncovered the Chicago Urban League’s acceptance of a special $100,000 donation from Pfizer that was not publicly disclosed. Fang suggested that such a lack of disclosure could have a particularly negative impact on African Americans, who have historically been victims of medical malpractice in the US.

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Retired US General: Why I think Putin will go nuclear

Wed, 28 Jun 2023 15:06:07 GMT

Kevin Ryan, a retired brigadier general from the US army, explains the possibilities of the Russian Army deploying nuclear weapons.

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Olympian Sharron Davies: Female Athletes are being Blackmailed

Wed, 21 Jun 2023 15:20:27 GMT

UnHerd's Florence Read sits down with ex-Olympian swimmer Sharron Davies to discuss her new book 'Unfair Play, and the fraught issue of trans participation in sport.

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Paul Kingsnorth: How to Resist the Machine

Sun, 11 Jun 2023 15:00:04 GMT

How can normal people resist the increasingly technocratic and soulless nature of human life? Freddie Sayers sits down with writer Paul Kingsnorth at the UnHerd Club to find out.

Read the Post here

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Prof. Richard Dawkins: I'm a Romantic Soul

Tue, 06 Jun 2023 13:55:42 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers sits down with Richard Dawkins to discuss God, vaccines and his poetic spirit.

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Ukrainian MP: Why victory is the only option

Thu, 01 Jun 2023 15:12:41 GMT

Ukrainian MP Inna Sovsun joins UnHerd live from Kyiv to explain her perspective on the war, and why victory is the only option.

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Kathleen Stock: Philosophical Knots

Tue, 30 May 2023 12:42:25 GMT

After being exiled from her teaching position at the University of Sussex, philosopher Kathleen Stock has become one of Britain's most radical voices of reason, celebrated for her incisive cultural theory. She joined us for an evening of conversation about the Western crisis of meaning and how to read the myths we tell ourselves, with UnHerd's Freddie Sayers.

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Edward Blum: The case against affirmative action

Fri, 26 May 2023 14:16:25 GMT

Edward Blum joins us to discuss affirmative action on the grounds of race, particularly with regard to the elite University and Colleges where it is currently a major part of the admission process.

Read the full article here

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Gérard Araud: Ukraine has revealed a new world order

Mon, 22 May 2023 23:30:19 GMT

Freddie Sayers is joined by former French Ambassador Gérard Araud to dive into the topic of whether the Western world is coming to an end and if we are seeing the appearance of a world of great powers.

Read the Post here

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Jaron Lanier: How humanity can defeat AI

Fri, 05 May 2023 16:10:04 GMT

Florence Read meets Jaron Lanier to discuss the development of Artificial Intelligence, where it is going, what we can expect and if it's humans or the machines which are the problem.

Read the full article here

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Coronation and power - These Times Ep #1

Thu, 04 May 2023 00:00:45 GMT

Freddie introduces UnHerd's brand new podcast, These Times.

These Times is the history of today’s politics with Tom McTague and Helen Thompson

Each week Tom and Helen explore the great forces and ideas that led us to where we are right now. It’s a politics podcast for those who want a deeper, historical understanding of the news, to understand what has really shaped our world and why.

Subscribe today searching 'These Times' in your preferred podcast app, or click here for a direct link to the show on all main podcast providers: https://unherd.com/these-times-with-tom-mctague-and-helen-thompson/

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Robert F Kennedy Jr: "We need a peaceful revolution"

Tue, 02 May 2023 17:54:47 GMT

Freddie sayers in conversation with Robert F Kennedy Jr discussing vaccines, the domination of the democratic governments by corporate power, NATO, the CIA and more.

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Iain McGilchrist: We are in a fully deluded world

Fri, 28 Apr 2023 15:20:08 GMT

From the left-brain right-brain divide to the metaphysics of magic, Dr Iain McGilchrist addresses the profound questions of living well. The esteemed thinker was in conversation with Freddie Sayers at the UnHerd Club on 20th April 2023.

Read the article here

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Anatol Lieven: The truth about Crimea

Tue, 25 Apr 2023 14:15:24 GMT

What the governments and media are saying in public is quite different to what they may be saying in private. Anatol Lieven, former war correspondent joins us to discuss the question of Crimea and how different the discussions in private are compared to what we hear in the public eye.

Read the Post here

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Martin Gurri: The Pentagon leak is only the beginning

Tue, 18 Apr 2023 14:35:39 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers meets former CIA Analyst Martin Gurri to discuss Jack Teixeira and the Pentagon leaks.

Read the Post here

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Nick Cave: Christ, the Devil and the duty to offend

Fri, 07 Apr 2023 18:37:05 GMT

Faith, Hope & Carnage: Join legendary musician and bestselling writer Nick Cave as he discusses his new book and beyond with UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers.

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Jacob Siegel: The great disinformation hoax

Wed, 05 Apr 2023 14:17:11 GMT

Is disinformation a little more than a buzzword? Is it part of a far bigger movement? Freddie Sayers is joined by Jacob Siegel to discuss disinformation and America's new censorship complex.

Read the Post here

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Former Trump advisor: China is the threat, not Russia

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 16:50:51 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers meets Elbridge Colby, former advisor to President Trump and author of the 2018 National Defense Strategy.

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Quinn Slobodian on crack-up capitalism

Thu, 30 Mar 2023 06:20:35 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers meets historian Quinn Slobodian to discuss capitalist extremism, states run by corporations and a future without democracy.

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Top Harvard astronomer: The evidence for extraterrestrial life

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 17:37:50 GMT

UnHerd's Flo Read meets Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb.

Read the article here:

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Philosopher Susan Neiman: The true Left is not woke

Sat, 18 Mar 2023 08:37:34 GMT

UnHerd's Flo Read meets philosopher Susan Neiman to discuss the meaning of the word 'woke' and why we use it.

Read the article here

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Lionel Shriver: Insensitivity Reader - Live at the UnHerd Club

Fri, 17 Mar 2023 09:58:59 GMT

If offence is against the rules, what hope is there for radical writing? Join world-famous author Lionel Shriver to discuss the decline of in-your-face fiction and the sinister rise of sensitivity readers.

Read the article here

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Matt Stoller: The case against the SVB rescue

Wed, 15 Mar 2023 18:06:06 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers meets Matt Stoller to discuss the case against the Silicon Valley Bank collapse.

Read the Post here

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Chris Miller: Get ready for the chip wars

Mon, 13 Mar 2023 17:57:11 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers meets Chris Miller, economic historian and author of Chip War.

Read the article

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David Sacks: Is the Silicon Valley Bank deal another bailout?

Mon, 13 Mar 2023 15:34:27 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers is joined by PayPal co-founder David Sacks to examine the fallout from the collapse of SVB Bank.

Read the Post here

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Mary Harrington: Feminism against progress

Fri, 10 Mar 2023 13:02:51 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers sits down with UnHerd contributor Mary Harrington to discuss her new book, Feminism Against Progress.

Read the Post here

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Isabel Oakeshott: The lesson of the Lockdown Files

Wed, 08 Mar 2023 18:52:32 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers meets journalist Isabel Oakeshott, who wrote the minute by minute lockdown discussions.

Read the Post here

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Marianne Williamson: America needs a philosopher king

Fri, 03 Mar 2023 15:02:38 GMT

Marianne Williamson, the bestselling self-help author and former Democratic primary candidate, is back in the race to become US President. She is due to announce officially tomorrow, which will make her the first Democrat to put their name in the ring for 2024, before even Joe Biden. In 2020, Williamson (a total political unknown at the time) vied for the progressive vote, but lost out to the better-known Senator Bernie Sanders. Yet since then she has grown a loyal following of young voters who call themselves the ‘Orb Gang’ in reference to her New Age spiritualism. Can a new generation of American voters take her to the White House? UnHerd's Flo Read spoke to her from the UnHerd studio to find out.

Read the Post here

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Fiona Hill: Absolute victory over Russia is not possible

Tue, 21 Feb 2023 17:45:03 GMT

Fiona Hill has been closely involved in matters to do with Russia and Ukraine advising American administrations for many years. We discuss NATO's "open door", negotiation with Putin, what would be different if Trump was still in office and much more.

Read the full article here

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Jeffrey Sachs: Who really blew up the Nord Stream 2 pipeline?

Wed, 15 Feb 2023 16:53:47 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers meets Jeffrey Sachs to debate who really blew up the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

Read the Post here

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Louis-Vincent Gave: China cancels lockdowns... where's the disaster?

Mon, 13 Feb 2023 16:17:45 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers and Louis-Vincent Gave discuss the current COVID situation in China.

Read the Post here

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Military analyst: Is the Ukraine war headed for stalemate?

Thu, 02 Feb 2023 16:01:18 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers meets Michael Kofman.

Michael Kofman is the Director of the Russia Studies Program at the Center for Naval Analyses and a Fellow of the Center for a New American Security. He joined UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers to give an update on the situation on the ground in Ukraine and debate the risks and benefits of pursuing an ‘all-out’ victory against Russia.

The military analyst on the risks and rewards of Western intervention

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Peter Hitchens: The Covid censors are moving on to Ukraine

Mon, 30 Jan 2023 17:28:20 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers speaks to journalist Peter Hitchens about a disturbing new Big Brother Watch report into UK government spying and censorship.

Read the Post here

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Matthew B. Crawford: The perpetual state of emergency

Tue, 17 Jan 2023 15:00:36 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers chats with American philosopher Matthew B. Crawford in the UnHerd studio.

Check out Matthew's Substack here

Read the Post here

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The scientific case against facemasks

Fri, 13 Jan 2023 15:01:34 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers meets Dr. Margery Smelkinson and Dr. Leslie Bienen to discuss the efficacy of facemasks.

Read the full Post article here:

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David Sacks: The tech reset has only just begun

Fri, 06 Jan 2023 21:43:35 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers meets PayPal co-founder David Sacks.

Read the full post here

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Brett Scott: Beware a cashless society

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 16:53:30 GMT

UnHerd's Flo Read mets Brett Scott, author of Cloud Money.

Read the Post here

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UnHerd Christmas Special: Christmas is a time for chaos

Fri, 23 Dec 2022 15:02:34 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers and Flo Read sit down with founder of The Idler magazine, Tom Hodgkinson, to discuss the fraught history of the winter festival and the moral good in having a merry Christmas.

Read the Post here

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Jay Bhattacharya: What I discovered at Twitter HQ

Fri, 16 Dec 2022 11:05:22 GMT

Freddie Sayers catches up with Dr Jay Bhattacharya about his recent meeting with Elon Musk at Twitter HQ, and what he discovered about the Twitter Files.

Read the full article here

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Freddie deBoer: We should forgive Kanye West

Fri, 09 Dec 2022 15:10:35 GMT

UnHerd's Florence Read meets American author Freddie deBoer to discuss the curious case of Kanye West.

In the space of a few months Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, has gone from world-famous rapper to appearing on Alex Jones’s InfoWars praising Hitler. It’s not clear if he will ever recover reputationally from the stigma of this episode.

What lessons can we take from the public's treatment of the rapper?

Read the Post here

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Vivek Ramaswamy: Elon Musk won't save us

Mon, 05 Dec 2022 15:38:48 GMT

Freddie Sayers meets Vivek Ramaswamy

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John Mearsheimer: The West is playing Russian roulette

Tue, 29 Nov 2022 18:17:27 GMT

Freddie Sayers meets political scientist John Mearsheimer, the world-famous proponent of realism in international relations.

Read the full article here

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Ex-Ambassador speaks out: How Qatar funds extremism in the West

Wed, 23 Nov 2022 15:40:30 GMT

Qatar, a previously small and little-known country in the Middle East, has come to much wider public attention as the host of this year's World Cup. Its critics have focused on human rights abuses and the treatment of migrant workers in the construction of tournament stadiums. Less talked about, but something much closer to home, is Qatar’s hand in promoting Islamist ideas in Western countries. A new report by think tank Policy Exchange investigates this very issue, and has come to some quite extraordinary conclusions. The lead author of the study, Sir John Jenkins, a former ambassador with a 35-year diplomatic career in the Middle East, joined Freddie Sayers in the studio to explain.

Read the Post here

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David Sacks: Ukraine is turning into Woke War III

Tue, 01 Nov 2022 15:09:33 GMT

Freddie Sayers meets David Sacks.

When Elon Musk unveiled his notorious Ukraine peace proposal on Twitter last month, it caused quite the stir. For simply outlining the potential contours of a negotiated settlement between Ukraine and Russia, the new Twitter CEO was derided as a dangerous Putin apologist (despite his company Starlink providing internet to Ukraine at a cost of $20 million a month). It happens that Musk is not the only Silicon Valley mogul who has come under fire for taking a realist line on the conflict.

In fact, a friend of Musk’s, David Sacks, wrote an article in which he alleged the West had entered into “Woke War III”. Over the course of the war, the woke Left and the neoconservative Right have been marching in lockstep, and using “woke cancellation tactics” to suppress any dissenting opinions.

Sacks, a multimillionaire venture capitalist and host of the hit podcast ‘All-In’ expands on his thinking in UnHerdTV’s latest interview, recorded 26th October 2022.

Read the Post here:

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John Gray Part II: Welcome to the era of tragic realism

Fri, 28 Oct 2022 13:59:34 GMT

Freddie Sayers meets John Gray in part two of a two-part interview.

Watch Part I: https://youtu.be/BvWczz1q0jU

Read the accompanying Part I article

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John Gray Part I: Revenge of the technocrats

Wed, 26 Oct 2022 16:32:06 GMT

Freddie Sayers meets philosopher John Gray.

John Gray was the prophet of the postliberal age, describing global capitalism as a false utopia as early as 1998. In his most recent writing, he has returned to geopolitics, and has described the populist moment, the pandemic, and the growing threat of superpower conflict as existential threats to the liberal, technocratic order.

Amid this chaos, Rishi Sunak — former Goldman Sachs banker — has become Britain’s new prime minister. Has the technocratic order of the 2010s returned? Or has the modern world moved beyond its reach?

Read the full article

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Ivar Arpi: Why did Sweden turn Right-wing?

Sat, 22 Oct 2022 16:38:33 GMT

Freddie Sayers meets Ivar Arpi.

Read the Post here

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Canada's euthanasia laws killed my brother

Mon, 17 Oct 2022 14:00:45 GMT

UnHerd's Flo Read meets Gary Nichols, whose brother, Alan Nichols, requested euthanasia and died by lethal injection in Canada in June 2019.

Read the article here

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Investigating the Florida vaccine study

Wed, 12 Oct 2022 14:10:47 GMT

Freddie Sayers meets Anders Hviid and Tracy Høeg.

Read the Post here

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Michael Gove: Do Conservatives have a philosophy?

Thu, 06 Oct 2022 15:12:59 GMT

Freddie Sayers live in Birmingham with Michael Gove.

Freddie Sayers sat down with Michael Gove in Birmingham during the Conservative Party Conference for a special UnHerd Live event, asking: What’s the big idea? …do Conservatives have a philosophy?

Read the Post here

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Jay Bhattacharya: The legal case against Anthony Fauci

Fri, 30 Sep 2022 14:01:18 GMT

Freddie Sayers discusses Jay Bhattacharya and Jenin Younes' lawsuit against the US federal government.

In October 2020, the Great Barrington Declaration was published by three academics - Jay Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta and Martin Kulldorff - who appeared on UnHerd to break the story. It marked a watershed moment in the pandemic, but the authors found their criticisms of COVID policy were increasingly censored on social media.

Now, Bhattacharya is taking his case to the courts to prove collusion between the Biden administration and Big Tech to silence skeptics like the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration. Talking to UnHerd's Freddie Sayers, he lays out the evidence that social media companies were instructed to quell scientific views which opposed government lockdown measures. Who was responsible for this infringement? According to the legal case, the conspiracy extends to the highest levels of power in Washington, and primarily at fault is the Chief Medical Advisor to the President, Anthony Fauci.

Read the Post here:

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Will the hard Right sweep Europe?

Mon, 26 Sep 2022 17:15:49 GMT

Freddie Sayers meets Ralph Schoellhammer.

The rise of the Christian, ultra-conservative candidate Giorgia Meloni in Italy marks a strange split in European politics. Post-Brexit Britain is now in the minority of countries that have not seen a recent Rightward populist uprising.

UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers sat down with Ralph Schoellhammer, Assistant Professor of Economics at Webster University, Vienna.

Read the Post here

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Cancelled for pro-peace street art

Thu, 22 Sep 2022 16:55:13 GMT

Florence Read meets cancelled street artist, Peter Seaton.

Earlier this month, a mural of two soldiers embracing, one Ukrainian and one Russian, appeared on the side of a building in Melbourne. It was the work of Peter Seaton, an Australian street artist known for large-scale graffiti. The title he gave the work was ‘Peace before Pieces’. He describes it as a ‘meditation on the dehumanisation of war’.

He joined UnHerd in the studio to answer the question: is pro-peace art the next victim of tribal thinking?

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The Charles III paradox: Anti-establishment King

Fri, 16 Sep 2022 14:05:44 GMT

Freddie Sayers in the studio with Ian Skelly

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Clint Ehrlich: What I got wrong about Ukraine

Wed, 14 Sep 2022 15:49:41 GMT

Freddie Sayers meets Clint Ehrlich

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The great excess deaths mystery

Wed, 07 Sep 2022 15:11:06 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers is joined by Stuart McDonald to discuss the curious case of the UK's excess deaths.

Read the Post here

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Thomas Fazi: Civil disobedience is coming

Thu, 01 Sep 2022 14:28:40 GMT

Freddie Sayers meets Thomas Fazi.

Faced with post-pandemic economic collapse, war in Ukraine and an unprecedented energy crisis, citizens of the UK and Europe are voicing their discontent. Via anti-government campaigns like ‘Don’t Pay’ and ‘Enough is Enough’, people previously unmotivated by radical politics are becoming more and more rebellious.

As a challenging winter approaches, is Europe about to see a mass movement of civil disobedience?

Writer and activist Thomas Fazi thinks so. He joined Freddie Sayers in the UnHerd studio to discuss citizen uprisings and how he would cure the West’s poly-crises.

Read the Post here

Read Thomas Fazi’s article on the rise in civil disobedience here

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Wolfgang Streeck: The end of the German empire

Fri, 26 Aug 2022 14:16:34 GMT

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers speaks to economic historian Prof. Wolfgang Streeck about the crisis in Germany and its implications for the future of Europe.

Read the Post here

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Lionel Shriver: We need to talk about Ezra Miller

Mon, 22 Aug 2022 14:18:36 GMT

Freddie Sayers meets Lionel Shriver.

When Lionel Shriver’s story of a troubled teenager, We Need to Talk About Kevin, was adapted for screen in 2011 it launched the career of young actor Ezra Miller.

In 2012 Miller came out as queer, saying “I don’t identify as a man, I don’t identify as a woman, I barely identify as a human.” And in the ensuing years, outlandish and expressive clothing came to typify the actor, who became somewhat of a standard bearer for queer identity.

But recently, Miller’s life has taken a strange turn. Throughout 2022 a string of bizarre allegations have hit the headlines, and last month the actor was arrested twice for assault and then only a few weeks ago for felony burglary. What went wrong for the promising young actor?

Miller’s troubles may just be another predictable story about the price of early fame, but it could also speak to something more troubling about contemporary culture. Shriver’s award winning novel asks how society and parenting shapes the minds of young people. It seems prescient now. Have our permissive mores and hyper-liberal culture driven young people to distraction?

Shriver joined Freddie Sayers to discuss these questions.

Read The Post here

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His wife's plea: The case for Julian Assange

Mon, 08 Aug 2022 13:57:41 GMT

Freddie Sayers meets Stella Moris, lawyer and wife of Julian Assange.

The case of Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder who published huge troves of sensitive government documents and classified military logs, has been going on for over a decade. During that time Assange has been under house arrest, hidden from extradition inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London and since 2019 has been held in Belmarsh prison. During that time, he has married and had two children with a lawyer called Stella Moris. Moris first met Assange as a young lawyer working on his case, but is now a campaigner for his acquittal and an activist for press freedom.

Will Assange be remembered as a pioneer of the free internet or as one of its victims? With his extradition case looming, UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers met Stella Moris to hear her case for her husband, Julian Assange.

Read the Post here:

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Slavoj Žižek: We are addicted to chaos

Thu, 04 Aug 2022 14:31:50 GMT

Florence Read meets Slavoj Žižek.

In his new book 'Surplus Enjoyment: A Guide for the Non-Perplexed', psychoanalyst and Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek argues that Western decadence has reached a point of no return. When it comes to the simultaneous crises of climate change, the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, he asserts, only a cooperative global effort will steer us away from catastrophe. But have the culture wars weakened the West too much to regain order in disordered times? Slavoj Žižek joined UnHerd's Florence Read, live from his home in Slovenia, to discuss the cure for chaos.

Read The Post here:

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David Fuller: What happened to Jordan Peterson?

Mon, 01 Aug 2022 14:03:26 GMT

Freddie Sayers meets David Fuller.

Followers of the clinical psychologist and now world-famous member of the ‘Intellectual Dark Web’, Jordan Peterson, have noted a radical change in his video style in recent weeks. For David Fuller, founder of Rebel Wisdom, these videos ‘signalled a watershed moment’ for Peterson, from truth-seeker and mediator between Left and Right to a blinkered tribalist. UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers sat down in the studio with Fuller to dig a little deeper into his reservations about Jordan Peterson and alternative media’s part in this story.

Read the Post here:

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Aella meets Louise Perry: Was the sexual revolution a mistake?

Thu, 28 Jul 2022 16:32:02 GMT

Was the sexual revolution a mistake? Did unfettered freedom help or harm women? Florence Read is joined by OnlyFans star Aella and the author of 'The Case Against the Sexual Revolution', Louise Perry, to find out.

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Lord Frost: Liz Truss is the change candidate

Fri, 22 Jul 2022 15:13:28 GMT

Boris Johnson's former Brexit negotiator Lord Frost has put his support behind Liz Truss. He sat down with Freddie Sayers to explain that decision, and whether today's Conservatives add up to a philosophy of government...

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Alex Jones documentary banned from social media

Fri, 15 Jul 2022 15:51:20 GMT

Florence Read meets with documentary filmmaker Alex Lee Moyer

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How the West brought economic disaster on itself

Mon, 11 Jul 2022 14:51:28 GMT

Freddie Sayers speaks to financial analyst Louis Gave about the West's self-made economic crisis.

Read the Post article here:

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What Boris Johnson's resignation really means

Fri, 08 Jul 2022 11:20:09 GMT

After the resignation of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and with a leadership election looming, UnHerd convened some regular contributors for an emergency roundtable.

Has the populist experiment run its course in the UK, or is it only just beginning?

Joining Freddie Sayers to see beyond the Westminster speculation and get to grips with this historical moment were non-affiliated life peer of the House of Lords Baroness Claire Fox and UnHerd writers Will Lloyd and Aris Roussinos.

Read the Post here:

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Martin Kulldorff: Lessons from Sweden for the next pandemic

Fri, 24 Jun 2022 15:07:38 GMT

When the COVID-19 pandemic began and most of the world went into lockdown, Scandinavia bucked the status-quo by keeping their society almost completely open. At the time, there was a sense that Sweden, Denmark and Norway would pay a dire price for their decision. But looking back now, with all the data on Covid deaths at hand, it seems that their pandemic policy was a success. Why did rest of the world get it so wrong?

Freddie Sayers sat down with Swedish biostatistician and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration Martin Kulldorff at the Frontline Club, to discuss the lessons the world should take from Sweden’s pandemic legacy.

Read the Post article here:

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Crypto CEO: My stand against woke workers

Tue, 21 Jun 2022 16:40:43 GMT

Freddie Sayers meets Jesse Powell.

Jesse Powell is the CEO of Kraken, one of the largest crypto currency exchanges in the world.

He has been in the headlines this week for publishing a decidedly libertarian memo about his company's working culture that challenged any workers claiming offence on topics such as pronoun policies or racial diversity targets to find work elsewhere.

Kraken's list of values includes the right to bear arms, bodily autonomy on vaccines and a moratorium on enquiring about or advertising gender pronouns in the workplace, amongst other 'anti-woke' measures.

He spoke exclusively to Freddie Sayers from San Francisco.

Read the Post here:

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Aris Roussinos: Inside the nationalist militia on Ukraine’s frontline

Fri, 17 Jun 2022 16:12:11 GMT

Freddie Sayers speaks to UnHerd’s Aris Roussinos, reporting from the frontline of the war in Ukraine.

Read the article here:

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Silkie Carlo: Chinese CCTV is watching you

Mon, 13 Jun 2022 16:29:30 GMT

Florence Read meets Silkie Carlo.

There are six million security cameras in use in the UK, one for every 11 people, and the majority are Chinese surveillance systems. London, where UnHerd has its offices, is the most surveilled city outside of China, and has more cameras per person than Beijing. So it has to be asked, are we being watched?

That is one claim made by a new report from Big Brother Watch on surveillance cameras made by Chinese companies. Silkie Carlo, one of the editors of the report, and the director of Big Brother Watch, joined Florence Read to investigate.

Read the post article

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Ilya Shapiro: Georgetown diversicrats forced me out of my job

Thu, 09 Jun 2022 13:56:57 GMT

Freddie Sayers meets Ilya Shapiro.

Ilya Shapiro was due to start his new job as senior lecturer and executive director of Georgetown's Law Centre for the Constitution. But this week, he quit. All because of a single Tweet.

Freddie Sayers invited Shapiro to the studio to understand how censorship under the guise of 'diversity and inclusion' at Georgetown had played a part in his resignation.

Read the Post article here:

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Bret Weinstein: I will be vindicated over Covid

Mon, 06 Jun 2022 15:40:18 GMT

Freddie Sayers sits down to discuss the pandemic response with Biologist, Bret Weinstein.

Before the pandemic, evolutionary biologist and former Evergreen professor Bret Weinstein was lauded by both sides of the political divide for his insights into the crisis on American campuses. As a member of the so-called 'intellectual dark web', Weinstein was expanding his audience and being profiled by legacy media like the New York Times.

Then the pandemic began and his heterodox perspective suddenly fell out of favour, even with many of his erstwhile allies.

Advocating for alternative treatments for Covid, questioning the efficacy of the global vaccine programme and challenging narratives of the pandemic came at a cost. Without warning, the Dark Horse podcast was demonetised on YouTube and Weinstein was forced to split from the views of his former friends and supporters.

So, how can we seek truth in such divided times? Freddie Sayers invited Bret into the UnHerd studio in London to try to understand what his views really are.

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Rejected from a London university for being Russian

Mon, 30 May 2022 16:14:13 GMT

UnHerd's Florence Read meets Elena Ledneva.

Elena Ledneva, a woman living with her husband and young child in the UK, applied for a Master's course in hospitality at the University of West London. Elena had years of experience in running events, including welcoming international delegates to the Sochi Winter Olympics, so on paper, she would seem to be the ideal candidate. But last week she was rejected due to 'the situation in Ukraine'. Was she really rejected for being Russian?

Elena joined Florence Read in the UnHerd studio to share her story.

Read the Post article here:

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WHO epidemiologist: The truth about monkeypox

Fri, 27 May 2022 15:40:31 GMT

Freddie Sayers meets David Heymann.

Will monkeypox be the next pandemic after COVID? To try to find an answer, Freddie Sayers invited Professor David Heymann to the UnHerd studio. Currently based at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Professor Heymann is one of the world’s most senior infectious disease epidemiologists. For 22 years he worked at the World Health Organisation in Geneva, as chief of the AIDS research programme and Assistant Director for Health Security. Before that he was in Africa for 13 years investigating the spread of monkeypox.

Read the Post article here:

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World expert Dr. Pavel Podvig: How likely is a nuclear war?

Fri, 20 May 2022 15:52:09 GMT

Freddie Sayers meets Pavel Podvig.

Since the invasion of Ukraine, the outcome that nobody has wanted to contemplate is that of Russian nuclear escalation. Threats that “mirror moves” would be made by the Kremlin if NATO expanded, as we heard in last week’s interview with UN representative for Russia Dmitry Polyanskiy, suggest that a strike might not be out of the question. With Finland and Sweden seeking to join NATO, is nuclear war more likely now that it was three months ago? By trying to push Vladimir Putin to the brink, is the West actually increasing the chance of a nuclear incident? What actually is the sequence of events that would lead to nuclear conflict?

To help us think through this difficult topic, UnHerd invited Dr. Pavel Podvig to the studio. Podvig is a senior researcher in the WMD programme at the Institute for Disarmament Research and a researcher with the programme on science and global security at Princeton University. He runs the world’s premier website dedicated to analysing Putin’s nuclear capability and edited the definitive encyclopedia of Russian nuclear forces. Dr. Podvig joined Freddie Sayers live from his office in Geneva.

Read the Post article:

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Prof. Michael Sandel: Why the elites don’t deserve their status

Mon, 16 May 2022 14:36:11 GMT

Freddie Sayers meets Michael Sandel.

Do we deserve what we have? Are the elites any better than the rest of us? Do the right people get to run the world?

One political philosopher who attempts to tackle these big questions is Professor Michael Sandel. A Harvard professor since the 1980s and world famous author of many bestselling books, including 'What Money Can't Buy', and most recently, 'The Tyranny of Merit', Sandel has made the case for overhauling Western neoliberalism. The alternative society Sandel suggests is more forgiving of failure and confers cultural status onto building community rather than capital.

In a wide-ranging conversation with Freddie Sayers, Sandel explores how elite institutions from the Ivy League to Wall Street have given us the wrong idea about who deserves power.

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Kremlin Spokesman: "There is no war in Ukraine"

Thu, 12 May 2022 14:22:37 GMT

Freddie Sayers meets Dmitriy Polyanskiy.

First Deputy Representative of Russia to the UN Dmitry Polyanskiy joins Freddie Sayers to discuss the nuclear threat against NATO members and possible conclusions to the conflict in Ukraine.

Read the Post article here:

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Curtis Yarvin: Why America should become a monarchy

Sun, 08 May 2022 14:00:12 GMT

Former computer programmer and political theorist Curtis Yarvin is considered by many to be a dangerous thinker. He has been named in the New York Times and Vanity Fair as a founding member of the burgeoning 'New Right' and caused a stir on Tucker Carlson.

His theories of power seem to have made their way from the fringe blogosphere into the mainstream media. Now, people are trying to make sense of some of what Yarvin wants for the Western nations he criticises and where his thinking might go next.

One particularly bold claim made by Yarvin is that America would be better run as a monarchy, rather than a democracy.

To dig deeper into this esoteric political philosophy, Freddie Sayers invited Curtis Yarvin to the UnHerd studio.

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Danish professor: mRNA vaccine study sends 'danger signals'

Tue, 03 May 2022 15:36:13 GMT

Freddie Sayers meets Professor Christine Stabell Benn.

A new Danish study reveals disparities in all-cause mortality between mRNA and adenovirus vaccines. The results raise some difficult questions about the unexpected effects of the most popular COVID vaccines. Freddie Sayers speaks to the study's author Prof. Christine Stabell-Benn, from the University of Southern Denmark, to find out more.

Read the full Post article here:

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Douglas Murray: The gullible Right has fallen for Putin

Mon, 25 Apr 2022 16:33:33 GMT

Freddie Sayers discusses the backlash against Western values with Douglas Murray

When Douglas Murray was writing his new book The War on the West, Putin had not yet launched an actual war on the edge of Europe. Now, two months after the invasion of Ukraine, has the battle of ideas he writes about been put into perspective?

Freddie Sayers speaks to Douglas Murray about the factions of the Right who have been fooled by Putin’s ‘woke West’ propaganda and why the war in Ukraine is not the wake-up call we might have expected.

Thanks to Douglas for returning to the channel. His new book, The War on the West, is out now.

Read the post article here: https://unherd.com/thepost/douglas-murray-t…fallen-for-putin/

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Michael Tracey: When does anti-war become pro-Putin?

Tue, 19 Apr 2022 14:18:48 GMT

Freddie Sayers meets Michael Tracey.

Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Western media has been overwhelmed with support for Zelensky's resistance and condemnation of Putin's invasion. Intervention from the US and Europe has now extended to supplying arms and sanctioning Russia. Some are demanding this support goes even further, suggesting 'no fly zones' or boots on the ground in Ukraine.

Journalist, Substacker and Twitter provocateur Michael Tracey takes a very different view. Despite initially condemning the invasion in February, he has since committed his time to exposing what he calls the 'proxy warmongering’ of Western powers.

Michael Tracey joins Freddie Sayers in the UnHerd studio to discuss why he is so critical of Western intervention in Ukraine and why he refuses to be labelled a Putin apologist.

Read the Post article here:

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Sergej Sumlenny: "Get ready for the break up of Russia"

Mon, 11 Apr 2022 14:10:40 GMT

Freddie Sayers meets Sergej Sumlenny.

As the war in Ukraine has become more entrenched, there has been much discussion of the small Eastern European states which might be annexed into the Russian Federation.

One political scientist and journalist has taken a different view. Sergej Sumlenny is Russian-born, but lives in Berlin. On Twitter he predicted that rather than expanding, Russia was due to dramatically contract. Might he be right? In principle, Sumlenny argues, Russia's many ethnic states are perfectly poised for secession, some with long histories of agitation and others with a newfound resentment of Moscow in light of the war.

To understand how this split could play out in practice Freddie Sayers invited him to talk UnHerd through the end of the Russian Federation and asks - what happens next?

Read the Post article here:

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Inside China's Zero Covid Camp

Thu, 07 Apr 2022 15:41:00 GMT

The biggest city in China is in complete lockdown, with no end date in sight. Cases are rising and the 26 million residents of Shanghai are not permitted to leave their homes at all — not even to buy groceries or walk the dog. Footage has emerged of eerily deserted streets, but reliable information about what is really going on inside the strictest “Zero Covid” regime in the world is hard to come by, owing to the Chinese Communist Party’s control of the media.

Now for the first time, UnHerd can reveal the reality of life inside the vast mandatory quarantine facility in Shanghai, erected within the Expo conference centre, to which infected individuals are sent.

Jane Polubotko is a Ukrainian national who has lived in Shanghai for 9 years, working for a Chinese music technology company as a marketing manager. On March 26th she felt slightly unwell, so went for a Covid test — a routine occurrence as her office is currently testing every two days. The next day she was contacted to say that the results were “abnormal,” and an emergency health vehicle appeared at her block of flats to pick her up. There was no paperwork and she didn’t know where she was going.

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Yanis Varoufakis: It's mad to think Ukraine can win

Tue, 05 Apr 2022 16:12:27 GMT

Commentators on the war in Ukraine seem to have come to a consensus: public figures have a moral responsibility not to challenge anything other than the Russian narrative.

This rejection of balance in favour of propaganda poses a problem for political thinkers like Yanis Varoufakis, who has been accused of 'Westsplaining' and being a Putin apologist in the last week alone.

To give this controversial conversation a chance, Varoufakis joined Freddie Sayers for a wide-ranging discussion about Western pressure on Russia and finding a space for debate in what feels like a binary moment.

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Sajid Javid: Zero Covid has been a disaster

Thu, 31 Mar 2022 16:16:14 GMT

Health Secretary Sajid Javid came into the UnHerd studio to talk to Freddie Sayers and look back at lessons learned from the Covid era.

Read the full post here:

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Francis Fukuyama: Can Putin's war rescue liberalism?

Thu, 24 Mar 2022 10:55:38 GMT

Freddie Sayers meets Francis Fukuyama.

Francis Fukuyama is a political scientist and public intellectual, most famous for his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man which has helped to define how we understand contemporary history. His new book is called Liberalism and its Discontents.

Freddie Sayers spoke to Dr. Fukuyama about the war in Ukraine, current trends in Western democracy, and how liberalism can better understand aspects of the human condition it has historically neglected.

Read the full article here:

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Bill Roggio: Who is really winning the war in Ukraine?

Mon, 21 Mar 2022 17:37:42 GMT

Getting an accurate picture of who is winning the war in Ukraine has become increasingly difficult in the information age. Log onto Twitter and there are images of burnt out Russian tanks being towed away by Ukrainian farmers and hostage-style videos featuring Russians POWs expressing regret over the invasion; meanwhile, Western news outlets are littered with tales of doughty Ukrainian protesters sending the Russian enemy into retreat and Kyivans discovering a newfound unity in the face of war.

But is this a fair depiction of what’s really occurring on the ground? Freddie Sayers sat down with Bill Roggio, a leading military analyst at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, to discuss.

Read the Post article here:

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Samo Burja: Russia Sanctions Will Divide Civilisation

Thu, 17 Mar 2022 15:38:43 GMT

Freddie Sayers meets with Samo Burja.

With Western powers increasingly united against Russia, we seem to be witnessing the end of the unipolar world. Financially, culturally and spiritually we have never been so bifurcated. Could this be the end of civilisation as we know it?

To find a way through the big issues at stake, Freddie Sayers sat down with Samo Burja, a sociologist and the founder of Bismarck Analysis.

Read the post article here

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The truth about Neo-Nazis in Ukraine

Tue, 15 Mar 2022 14:56:56 GMT

When Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine it was under the guise of ‘denazifying’ the country. But are there really any Nazis in Ukraine? Or is this just a story spun by the Kremlin? Aris Roussinos joins Freddie Sayers to unpick this contentious topic and seek some insight into Ukraine’s far-Right factions.

Read the article here:

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Investigating Aleksandr Dugin and the "soul of Russia"

Thu, 10 Mar 2022 16:25:32 GMT

Freddie Sayers meets Marlene Laruelle.

Aleksandr Dugin, the ultra-nationalist Russian philosopher and erstwhile organiser of the National Bolshevik Party, has been referred to as ‘Putin’s brain’. Professor Marlene Laruelle, the world’s leading expert on Dugin, says his influence is no longer direct. Dugin stated mission is to preserve the "Russian soul" and expand the Eurasian empire in defiance of the West. Today, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and increasingly isolated global position feels like some of these visions have become a dark reality. Freddie Sayers sat down with Laruelle to seek a deeper understanding of the oft-quoted concept of the "Russian soul", what Dugin wants and how Putin might be able to help him get it.

Read the Post article here:

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Leonid Ragozin: How I got Russia wrong

Tue, 08 Mar 2022 14:56:12 GMT

Freddie Sayers meets Leonid Ragozin.

Leonid Ragozin was reporting in Siberia when Putin began to send troops to the Ukrainian border at Belarus. Despite the menacing signs, he was quick to voice his skepticism about Russia’s intentions to invade. But when tanks rolled into Ukraine over a week ago, Ragozin was left, like many, wondering: why had he got it so wrong?

To try to answer this question Freddie Sayers met Ragozin to discuss Putin’s mysterious motivations and what the possible outcomes are for the war in Ukraine.

Read the Post here:

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Justin Bronk: Is the Russian war machine broken?

Wed, 02 Mar 2022 16:19:09 GMT

Freddie Sayers meets Justin Bronk.

It has been a week since the Russian invasion of Ukraine and one of many unanswered questions is why Russia has yet to launch the vast majority of its combat aircraft, despite having an advantage over the comparatively small Ukrainian air force. Could Putin be holding back the full might of his army for tactical or political reasons? Or is this failure to launch a symptom of poor planning by the Kremlin?

To seek out some technical expertise on this topic, Freddie Sayers spoke to Justin Bronk, Research Fellow for Military Airpower at the Royal United Services Institute.

Read the full article here:

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Andreas Umland: The real nuclear threat is not from weapons

Tue, 01 Mar 2022 17:40:21 GMT

Freddie Sayers meets Andreas Umland.

This week we are being inundated with information about what is going on in Ukraine. And the challenge just to get above the noise and find out what exactly is going on and where it might go next. To dig into some of these questions, Freddie Sayers sat down with Dr. Andreas Umland, an analyst for the Stockholm Centre for Eastern European studies and expert in contemporary Russian and Ukrainian politics.

Read the full article here:

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San Francisco parents: How we took back control of our schools

Fri, 25 Feb 2022 17:28:19 GMT

Flo Read meets Siva, Autumn, and Ann.

Public schools in San Francisco sent their students home for 18 months during the COVID pandemic, the longest school closure in the country. While children were falling behind at home, the city’s elected school board was tasked with handling the re-opening. But, it seemed, they were too busy trying to pander to progressive demands to get children back in the classroom. A group of parents, angry with the extended shutdown and dithering meetings, launched a campaign to recall three members of the school board. Last week, they won. Florence Read sat down with three parents involved in the recall, Autumn, Siva and Ann, to discuss why COVID has been such a disaster for San Francisco's schools.

Read the Post piece here:

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Konstantin Kisin: Has the media got Ukraine wrong?

Thu, 24 Feb 2022 19:14:27 GMT

Freddie Sayers meets Konstantin Kisin.

Following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by the Russian army, pundits from mainstream and alternative media platforms across the political spectrum have been left eating humble pie. Predictions of Russia’s next move as troops built up on the border have ranged from blaming hawkish Americans for hyping up a non-existent threat, to claims that Putin was using the standoff to make himself an international talking point. Now that it is clear that Putin is done with talking and intends to take action, we are left wondering: who can we trust on Ukraine? To puzzle out this question, Freddie Sayers sat down for an emergency episode with Konstantin Kisin, host of the Triggernometry podcast and YouTube channel.

Read the Post article here:

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What the Moderna share price reveals about vaccines

Tue, 15 Feb 2022 17:23:59 GMT

Freddie Sayers meets Louis-Vincent Gave.

Since the end of November 2021, Moderna's share price has been falling dramatically, from $368 to $147 at the time of writing.

Why might this be? And what does it tell us about the vaccines more generally?

Freddie Sayers sat down with Louis Gave, a financial analyst and co-founder of Gavekal, a financial services firm based in Hong Kong. Gave noted that the markets had been ahead of politicians and even epidemiologists on the Omicron variant in terms of its lethality, but also evidently they had determined that vaccines were not the ‘silver bullet’ solution they were initially sold as. What may be taboo to say in political circles is more bluntly put when people are betting their money on the outcome.

Read The Post here.

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Glenn Loury: Reject race politics and embrace humanity

Mon, 14 Feb 2022 17:07:01 GMT

Freddie Sayers meets Glenn Loury.

To get a handle on some of the race related news stories coming out of America, from Biden’s Supreme Court nomination to Joe Rogan’s cancellation, Freddie Sayers spoke to Glenn Loury, an economist and cultural critic. Loury was the first African American tenured professor of economics in the history of Harvard University and has set himself apart from his contemporaries by taking a sceptical view of the racialised rhetoric of American academia. In this wide-ranging conversation he discusses model minorities, Black Lives Matter and Whoopi Goldberg's alleged anti-semitism.

Read the full article here.

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UnHerd Live: Where does feminism go next?

Thu, 03 Feb 2022 16:20:09 GMT

Featuring: Mary Harrington, Julie Bindel, Hadley Freeman and Sally Chatterton.

It wasn’t long ago that feminism was a united movement resisting the patriarchal systems of old. Now, disputes between factions of feminists take up as much time as the fight for women’s liberation.

To dig a little deeper into the points of schism and solidarity in fourth wave feminism, UnHerd invited activist and author Julie Bindel and columnists Hadley Freeman and Mary Harrington to an evening at the Art Workers’ Guild.

The panel, chaired by UnHerd Editor Sally Chatterton, discussed their alliances and conflicts on the subjects of gender identity, sex work, surrogacy, motherhood and sexuality.

In our divided times, where does feminism go next?

Read The Post article here.

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Denmark's state modeller: Why we've ended ALL Covid laws

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 16:12:47 GMT

Freddie Sayers meets Dr Camilla Holten-Møller, chair of the Expert Group for Mathematical Modelling at Denmark’s public health agency ‘Statens Serum Institut’.

Holten-Møller was in charge of producing the models before Christmas that informed Danish policy, and her group’s updated advice in January led to the cancellation of all Danish Covid restrictions (even as case numbers continue to climb to all-time highs). She joins UnHerd to discuss Denmark's radical new policy, data modelling and why Omicron might be the end of the pandemic.

Read the Post article here.

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Kate Clanchy: "My life's work has been taken away"

Wed, 26 Jan 2022 16:09:35 GMT

Freddie Sayers meets Kate Clanchy.

Kate Clanchy is a writer, teacher, and editor. She has been a qualified and practicing teacher since she was 22. Her writing includes three prize-winning collections of poetry, the Costa First Novel Prize-shortlisted Meeting the English, and the Orwell Prize-winning memoir Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me.

Last summer her work came under sustained criticism for its purportedly insensitive depictions of her students. Picador, her publisher until last week, did not come to her defence. Instead her students, who feature in her memoir, and in collections of their wiring like England Poem from A School, that Clanchy edited, supported her alone.

Last September, at least 20 of them wrote an open letter to The Bookseller defending her. They said their personal experiences of Clanchy were of “unequivocal care and support for us… as poets and as people”. They said they wanted to push back against suggestions that they “may be victims in some capacity.” They said Clanchy’s support gave them confidence as poets.

The furore around Clanchy made headlines across the UK last summer. She came to the UnHerd studio to discuss her experiences — of teaching, writing, and cancel culture — for the first time with Freddie Sayers.

For more read The Post from UnHerd.

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Israeli vaccine advisor: "We have made mistakes"

Tue, 18 Jan 2022 15:23:39 GMT

In a wide-ranging and forthright interview with Freddie Sayers, Professor Cyrille Cohen, head of Immunology at Bar Ilan University and a member of the advisory committee for vaccines for the Israeli Government said:

- The Green Pass / vaccine passport concept was no longer relevant in the Omicron era and should be phased out (he expected it to be in short order in Israel)

- He and his colleagues were surprised and disappointed that the vaccines did not prevent transmission, as they had originally hoped

- The biggest mistake of the pandemic in Israel was closing schools and education – he apologised for that

- Widespread infection is now an inevitable part of future immunity — otherwise known as herd immunity

- Omicron has accelerated the pandemic into the endemic phase, in which Covid will be “like flu”

For more read The Post from UnHerd.

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Dr Steve James: I’m willing to lose my job over vaccine mandates

Wed, 12 Jan 2022 15:35:03 GMT

Steve James is a critical care consultant at King’s College Hospital in London. When Health Secretary Sajid Javid visited last Friday, he asked the NHS staff about what they thought of the forthcoming mandates that will make Covid vaccination a condition of deployment for NHS staff. Dr James spoke out, saying why he was against the mandate and why he hadn’t taken the vaccine himself.

It made headlines across the UK media, in particular coming from a Cambridge-educated NHS frontline doctor. Dr James came in to the UnHerd studio to explain his position in more detail to Freddie Sayers.

While he does not think of himself as ‘anti-vax’ (he dislikes the label), he argues that there’s nothing wrong with individuals preferring not to take vaccines if they so choose. Nevertheless, he accepts that vaccines have had an important effect on Covid hospitalisation rates. “Undoubtedly the vaccines have made a big difference,” he says.

But he objects to the simplistic messaging around vaccination, saying that because Covid is so much more dangerous to older people and vulnerable groups, the insistence on universal vaccination (including making examples of people who refuse) is inappropriate.

Dr James has had Covid (he doesn’t know when, but tests positive for antibodies). But he admits he hadn’t taken the vaccine even for the period of months before he tested for antibodies, because he preferred to wait a period to fully understand the extent of any side effects.

For more read The Post from UnHerd

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2021: Year in Review with Freddie Sayers, Aris Roussinos and Mary Harrington

Fri, 31 Dec 2021 11:01:47 GMT

UnHerd's contributors look back at a tumultuous year.

The year began with riots in Capitol Hill in Washington and the removal of Donald Trump from social media; in March Meghan and Harry gave their interview to Oprah from a Los Angeles mansion, and in April Prince Phillip passed away; Western troops departed Afghanistan, leaving chaotic scenes in the capital Kabul; Maya Forstater was judged by the courts to be legally entitled to her gender critical viewpoints — and Kathleen Stock was forced out of Sussex University; bitcoin became formal tender in its first nation state; and Covid dominated public policy for the second year running.

Freddie Sayers is joined by Aris Roussinos and Mary Harrington to look back on a tumultuous and consequential year.

For the full story check out The Post from UnHerd.

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Brian Pottinger: Why South Africans are refusing the vaccine

Wed, 22 Dec 2021 15:09:33 GMT

As new data about the Omicron variant is interpreted (and perhaps predictably, misinterpreted) by experts worldwide, South Africa has become a coronavirus case-study under global surveillance. Last week, UnHerd spoke to Pieter Streicher about the data coming out of Gauteng, but we now wanted to look at the bigger picture in that country.

To get a snapshot into the cultural and political reality on the ground, Freddie Sayers sat down with Brian Pottinger, former Editor of the South African Sunday Times. He joined UnHerd from his home on the KwaZulu Natal North Coast.

For the full story check out The Post from UnHerd

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South Africa data: Could Omicron be the end of the pandemic?

Wed, 15 Dec 2021 17:56:13 GMT

Since its discovery in the Gauteng province of South Africa in November, a new Covid variant has set off a spiral of harsh restrictions, travel bans and questions about the efficacy of the existing two-dose vaccines. Dr Angelique Coetzee, the scientist who first raised the alarm in Gauteng, has repeatedly assured the public that early observation of symptoms suggests that Omicron could be milder than the Delta variant. Despite some reassuring signs on the ground, reaction to the new variant has been dramatic, with Boris Johnson warning of a ‘tidal wave’ of cases in the UK and Joe Biden predicting an ‘explosion’ of cases in the US...

For the full story check out The Post from UnHerd.

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Inside Australia’s Covid internment camp

Thu, 02 Dec 2021 15:10:01 GMT

Hayley Hodgson, 26, moved to Darwin from Melbourne to escape the never-ending lockdowns — only to find herself locked up in a Covid Internment Camp without even having the virus.

She’s just returned from a 14-day detention at Howard Springs, the 2000-capacity Covid camp outside Darwin to which regional Covid cases are transported by the authorities. In an exclusive interview with Freddie Sayers, she recounted her experiences.

It all began when a friend of hers tested positive. She recounts how investigators came to her home shortly afterwards, having run the numberplate of her scooter to identify her as a ‘close contact’. They asked if she had done a Covid test, and in the moment she lied and said she had, when she in fact had not yet. This set in train an extraordinary series of events.

“So then the police officers blocked my driveway,” she says. “I walked out and I said, “what’s going on, are you guys testing me for COVID? What’s happening?” They said, “no, you’re getting taken away. And you have no choice. You’re going to Howard Springs. You either come with us now, and we’ll put you in the back of the divvy van. Or you can have a choice to get a ‘COVID cab’… I just said, “I don’t consent to this. I don’t understand why I can’t just self-isolate at home, like a lot of other people are doing.” And they just said, “we’ve just been told from higher up where to take you. And that’s all that there is.”

She was ordered to pack a bag and was told that she could be released once she tested negative. Collected in the back of a rented van, she was then transported to Howard Springs. On arrival, she was told that she would have to stay there for the full 14 days.

For the full story check out The Post from UnHerd.

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Paul Kingsnorth: why I changed sides in the vaccine wars

Tue, 30 Nov 2021 14:25:25 GMT

Paul Kingsnorth sees the vaccine wars as symptomatic of a bigger division between two fundamentally different world views: he calls them “thesis” and “antithesis.” When it comes to Covid, “thesis” is the establishment viewpoint: that lockdowns are needed to contain the virus, masks work, vaccines are safe, and people who question them are wrongheaded or worse. When Covid-19 first struck, Kingsnorth took the “thesis” viewpoint.

But over the last few months, his perspective changed. As he writes in today’s UnHerd, the crystallising moment arrived when he woke up to the news that the Austrian government had ‘interned an entire third of the population’. This move, he writes, sent a ‘chill down my spine’.

The “antithesis” view can be summed up as: lockdowns are not needed, masks do not work, the safety and efficacy of the vaccines are being oversold, vaccine passports will not only fail but further segregate society, and in the near future we can expect Giradian scapegoating of the unvaccinated. In other words, we are positioned on the precipice of a slippery slope that leads towards increasingly draconian biopolitical control measures, the grip of which is unlikely to release even once the pandemic is over.

In a conversation with Freddie Sayers on this week’s UnHerdTV, he explains this division and the bigger epistemological divides it reveals. “People are arguing about vaccines,” he says, “but they’re really under the surface arguing about what kind of person you are if you have taken these things, whether you’re a good or a bad person, or clean or unclean one”.

In Kingsnorth’s view, each of us has a line that cannot be crossed. And his has now been reached.

For more read The Post from UnHerd

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Freddie Sayers investigates Austria's lockdown of the unvaccinated

Wed, 17 Nov 2021 19:39:32 GMT

Freddie visits the Austrian capital Vienna on the day that the world's first lockdown for the unvaccinated was introduced, looking for answers. How do ordinary people feel about a third of their population being put in partial house arrest? How does it feel for the people stuck at home? And how did a liberal democracy come to this in 2021?

For more, read the Post from UnHerd.

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Asra Nomani: Mothers fight back against Critical Race Theory in schools

Thu, 11 Nov 2021 15:13:33 GMT

Florence Read talks to Asra Nomani.

Education policy rarely tips the electoral scales. But following Glenn Youngkin's shock win in the Virginia governor's race, where education was the top priority for 35% of his supporters, focus has turned towards the American curriculum as a new political battleground.

A group of parents, or 'Mama and Papa Bears', have been particularly vocal in protesting the changes they have witnessed in Virginia schools since the start of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020. Critical Race Theory, according to these concerned parents, is infiltrating the state system and being taught as fact to children as young as seven. To bring us closer to the views on the ground in Virginia, Florence Read spoke to Wall Street Journal reporter turned anti-CRT activist Asra Nomani.

In today's UnHerdTV, Asra describes the development of the parents' movement in Virginia, why she was dubbed a 'domestic terrorist' and her hopes for the future of American politics.

You can read The Post here.

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Covid doctor: No UK lockdown this Christmas

Mon, 08 Nov 2021 15:46:08 GMT

As we approach Winter, murmurs of another lockdown have slowly been entering the national conversation. Just yesterday Health Secretary Sajid Javid tweeted that it was a “national mission” to get jabbed so that we “can get through Winter and enjoy Christmas” while Deputy Chief Medical Officer Jonathan Vam-Tam last week threatened Plan B if people acted “like Covid was over”.

But is all this pessimism really warranted? After all, Covid infection rates in the UK have been falling for over two weeks and, compared to the rest of Europe (where cases are rising), it does not look in bad shape. To get a more balanced picture, Freddie Sayers spoke to Dr. Raghib Ali, a clinical epidemiologist from the University of Cambridge and a frontline doctor. Last month, he gained nationwide attention when he published ‘The Lockdown Myths that need challenging’, arguing (among other things) that it was incorrect to say that the UK’s high death rate was attributable to locking down late or that lives would have been saved if we lockdown earlier. In today’s UnHerdTV, he expanded on his thinking and explained why he didn’t think restrictions would be coming in before Christmas:

Most of the modellers think that cases, hospitalisations and deaths will fall over the coming months because of the very high levels of population immunity thanks to a combination of vaccination and natural immunity. And therefore it’s very unlikely — unless there is some new variant which we have seen before — that there will be a situation like last winter. Because of that, I don’t think we’re going to have any new restrictions between now and Christmas

For more read The Post from UnHerd

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Kathleen Stock: I won't be silenced

Wed, 03 Nov 2021 19:48:08 GMT

Kathleen Stock chats to UnHerd's Julie Bindel.

Kathleen Stock was forced to resign from Sussex University after an aggressive campaign of targeted harassment over her gender critical views.

The campaign to push Prof Stock out of Sussex began when she self-published a number blog posts critical of extreme transgender ideology. She was concerned that the majority of academics, including philosophers such as herself, were reluctant to criticise campaigns to introduce self-identification for transgender people.

Although Kathleen is understandably upset by the conduct of the small number of abusive students, she is adamant that many of them are taking a cue from the influential adults around them. “I don’t think they’ve actually read what I think. There’s a lot of enabling, or inciting, of individuals in this story,” she says.

Read the full article from Julie Bindel's here

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Bjorn Lomborg: Climate change is NOT the end of the world

Tue, 02 Nov 2021 15:08:21 GMT

As the COP26 summit meets over the next couple of weeks in Glasgow, we can all expect to be bombarded with disaster scenarios, replete with stories about our species’ imminent demise. Over the last couple of days, we have had Boris Johnson warning that it is “one minute to midnight” and Prince Charles claiming that this is “literally our last chance saloon”. And of course, Greta Thunberg has already made a few appearances of her own, accusing politicians of “pretending to take our future seriously” and saying that COP26 will “lead us nowhere”.

Bjorn Lomborg takes a different view. His latest book, ‘False Alarm: how climate change panic costs us trillions, hurts the poor, and fails to fix the planet’ sets out his argument that, although climate change is a real problem and is mostly man-made, the panic and alarmism is counter-productive.

For more read The Post from UnHerd

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Ayaan Hirsi Ali: wokeness is a gift to Islamism

Thu, 28 Oct 2021 15:13:18 GMT

Freddie Sayers speaks with Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

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Steven Pinker: How rational are YOU?

Wed, 27 Oct 2021 14:04:25 GMT

Do we live in a rational world? For all the advances humanity has made over the years and centuries, it is difficult to escape the feeling that we live in irrational times. Or so leading psychologist Steven Pinker argues in his new book ‘Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters’. From cancel culture to online conspiracy theories, the Harvard Professor argues that we are forgetting how to reason and think clearly — two vital tools for the flourishing of mankind.

But is being irrational necessarily a bad thing? Are there certain scenarios in which it might be permissible? Speaking at the Art Workers’ Guild in London, Prof Pinker joined Freddie Sayers to discuss rationality and its possible limits. Our thanks to Professor Pinker for an enlightening discussion.

For more read The Post from UnHerd

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Ash Sarkar: Left and Right must unite against Big Tech censorship

Tue, 26 Oct 2021 16:49:48 GMT

Earlier today, a YouTube channel with 167,000 subscribers and over 40 million view vanished. It was not a fringe channel that platforms cranks, conspiracists and extremists, but one of the UK’s leading Left-wing political website, which according to the outlet is ‘among the top 50 most watched news and politics channels in the UK’.

The channel was Novara Media, which was mysteriously reinstated by YouTube two hours later.

According to Novara’s senior editor Ash Sarkar, Novara had received no prior warning and one ‘strike’ (YouTube operates a ‘three strikes and you’re out’ policy) before the channel was removed.

For more read The Post from UnHerd

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The retreat of the West is a disaster - Bernard-Henri Lévy

Fri, 08 Oct 2021 13:50:41 GMT

Freddie Sayers speaks to Bernard-Henri Lévy.

Few have made the case for liberal interventionism more consistently than Bernard-Henri Lévy. Despite setbacks in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan, the French public intellectual’s worldview has remained largely unchanged.

But with the Taliban now in control of Afghanistan — and signs of resistance dwindling — is he still convinced the West was right to be there at all?

He joined Freddie Sayers in our London studio to discuss his new book, The Will to See.

Debate: are Conservatives doomed?

Wed, 06 Oct 2021 12:02:41 GMT

Are Conservatives doomed? Following a General Election that resulted in an 80-seat majority for the Conservative Party after 11 years of uninterrupted rule, this might seem like a rather strange question to ask.

But firstly, there may be long term challenges to the Tory coalition. By 2030, typically Left-leaning groups that tend to vote Labour — the young, renters, the childless, and the more urban people are not only growing in numbers but becoming increasingly liberal too.

More importantly, are the Tories even a Conservative party? Even if the British Tories have a talent for remaining in power, where does that leave true Conservatism?

At this week’s Conservative Party conference in Manchester, UnHerd gathered together some of the country’s most optimistic — and doomerist — conservative voices to get to the bottom of this question. In the pessimist corner sat writer Ed West who recently published a book ‘Small Men on the Wrong side of History’ and columnist Peter Hitchens, who has been calling for the destruction of the Conservative Party since 2010.

In the more optimistic corner: Miriam Cates, a Conservative who was elected as MP for Penistone and Stockbridge as part of the feted ‘Red Wall’ intake in 2019; and Matthew Goodwin, a contributor at UnHerd and professor of politics at Kent.

For more read The Post from UnHerd

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Louise Leach: my journey from secular to Orthodox

Sun, 26 Sep 2021 11:03:44 GMT

Over the last year, two big Netflix series have featured women in Orthodox Jewish communities. ‘Unorthodox’ told the fictional story of a young woman from a Hasidic community in Brooklyn, outside New York, who escapes to Europe to join her mother and pursue a career in music. ‘My Orthodox Life’, tracks a real life fashion entrepreneur who begins her life in the orthodox community but decides, rather like the heroine of Unorthodox, to leave the community behind.

In each case, the communities are presented as somewhat sexist, conformist, stifling — and the happy ending consists of the women leaving them behind and being liberated to pursue their dreams in the secular world outside.

But what about the opposite journey? It may not be featured in Netflix shows, but what about people who begin life in the secular modern world and choose to move into an orthodox community?

On this week’s UnHerdTV, Freddie Sayers meets Louise Leach, a former singer and star of the talent competition ‘Pop Stars’ who decided to join the Orthodox Jewish community after years of living what she describes as ‘the high life’.

She tells Freddie about her journey, what her commitments mean to her, and her hopes and fears for her five children growing up in the fast-paced, ultra secular city of London.

Thanks to Louise and we hope you enjoy.

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Anders Tegnell: Sweden won the argument on Covid

Thu, 23 Sep 2021 14:07:03 GMT

Of all the celebrities that have been created during the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, Swedish State Epidemiologist is perhaps the most surprising. A softly-spoken official within the Swedish Health Agency, he has quietly been going about his work monitoring infectious diseases for years.

But his decision, when Covid hit, to stick to his long-established plan and not recommend mandatory lockdowns, not close the schools, turned him into a lightning rod for competing views on the pandemic. Endless articles have been written about him in media across the world and some Swedes are known to have had tattoos made of him.

UnHerd spoke to him back in July 2020, when he defended the lack of mask mandates and was hopeful that widespread immunity would protect the Swedes from a bad winter wave — a hope that turned out to be overly optimistic. “Judge me in a year,” he said.

Just over a year later, on the eve of Sweden releasing almost all of its remaining Covid restrictions on September 29th, Freddie Sayers spoke to him again. His message? On the big questions — whether Covid was something we had to live with, whether schools should be shut — he believes he has been vindicated.

For more, read The Post from UnHerd

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Bari Weiss: Covid has exposed the hypocrisy of the elites

Fri, 17 Sep 2021 14:19:53 GMT

Fighting — or even participating in — a culture war is a dangerous business. It is especially so when that war is being fought behind enemy lines. So when Bari Weiss was hired by The New York Times as an opinion editor after Donald Trump’s election victory in 2016, it was a risky move.

A self-described classical liberal, Weiss was hired to bring more conservative and centrist voices to the paper, but she quickly found herself at odds with its hyper-progressive staff. Tensions reached a breaking point when NYT writers complained about Senator Tom Cotton’s op-ed calling for the troops to be sent in during the BLM protest — something Weiss had helped to commission and edit.

Weiss subsequently left the paper to launch her own Substack, but her experience at one of liberal America’s most hallowed institutions exposed her to the inner workings of the paper and its gilded readership. In a conversation with Freddie Sayers, Weiss suggests that the illiberal direction legacy publications like the NYT have moved towards is emblematic of a broader chasm between the “haves and have-nots” in America, as highlighted by this week’s MET Gala event.

For more read The Post from UnHerd

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'Nudge' author: is the Government manipulating us?

Thu, 02 Sep 2021 14:53:54 GMT

Despite its humble-sounding name, ‘Nudge’ may well be the most significant economic book of the the past thirty years. It has informed the thinking and policymaking of governments around the world, from David Cameron’s special ‘nudge unit’ in No. 10 to the WHO’s recently formed behavioural insight team, focusing on vaccines and masks.

Devised by Nobel Prize winner Richard H Thaler along with Cass Sunstein in their 2009 book ‘Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness’, the theory aims to influence the behaviour and decision-making of groups or individuals in subtle or discreet ways that do not involve outright coercion or legislation. Through “choice architecture” governments and businesses can achieve outcomes without overtly mandating them. The pair have now published an updated version of the book, replete with their own experiences in government as well as new research.

To its critics, nudge has become a byword for manipulation — a form of soft coercion that pushes people into making decisions they’d prefer to make for themselves.

For more read The Post from UnHerd

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Prof. Jay Battacharya: I stand by the Great Barrington Declaration

Tue, 24 Aug 2021 13:59:04 GMT

Professor Jay Bhattacharya is one of the famous voices to have emerged out of the pandemic. A vocal critic of lockdowns, his name became synonymous with the controversial Great Barrington Declaration, which called for an “alternative approach to the pandemic” that would entail no lockdowns. Along with co-signatories Sunetra Gupta and Martin Kulldforff, the trio argued that public health strategies should instead centre on the ‘focused protection’ of at-risk groups while keeping society as open as possible so the healthy parts of the population could build herd immunity.

The declaration triggered a huge global debate, with critics arguing that many more lives would have been lost on account of the difficulty of shielding all those who were vulnerable. During this week’s interview, Freddie Sayers challenged Prof Bhattacharya on what would have happened if his strategy was adopted, whether he has changed his mind in retrospect, and how his ‘focused protection’ have would worked with waning immunity and new variants?

For more, read The Post from UnHerd

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Clarissa Ward in Kabul: what the Taliban are really like

Wed, 18 Aug 2021 17:13:17 GMT

Clarissa Ward is the Chief International Correspondent at CNN – used to reporting from the front lines of conflict zones and global events. But in the past few days she found herself, more unusually, at the centre of a culture war. In a clip from one of her broadcasts, some Taliban fighters on a Kabul street were chanting ‘Death to America’ but she observed that “they seemed friendly enough at the same time. It’s utterly bizarre.”

Politicians right up to Senator Ted Cruz jumped on to social media to condemn her remarks as another example of CNN being unpatriotic and out of touch. “Is there an enemy of America for whom @CNN WON’T cheerlead?” he asked.

Freddie Sayers caught up with her earlier today from her compound in Kabul. It was an extraordinary conversation — we had no fewer than three powercuts during our 20 minute discussion — but she gave a vivid behind the scenes account of what is going on in the Afghan capital right now. Definitely not one to miss.

For more, read The Post from UnHerd.

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David Shor: College liberals have hijacked the Democratic party

Fri, 13 Aug 2021 15:20:06 GMT

David Shor is not afraid to say the unsayable. As a Democrat party strategist, this trait has at times got him into trouble; last year, he was fired from his job at a progressive think tank for tweeting out a study that showed that nonviolent demonstrations were more effective than riots at pushing voter behaviour in a Leftward direction in 1968.

But this has not stopped him from trying to deliver home truths to Democrats. For the past two years, he has made the case that the Party has lost touch with its working class base, and its relentless focus on identity issues has alienated moderate support. This is a near-heretical position to take in today’s Democratic circles, particularly from a self-described Leftist.

In his interview with UnHerd, Shor goes further, arguing that the Democrat Party has become hijacked by white liberal college-educated activists whose interests and beliefs represent a tiny fraction of the country as a whole.

For more, read The Post from UnHerd

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Winston Marshall: fightback in the Arts?

Thu, 29 Jul 2021 13:40:13 GMT

Do we currently enjoy free speech in the arts? In recent years the worlds of publishing, fine art, and music, have been engulfed in controversies over speech and manners. Several high-profile artists have been cancelled — removed from their positions for failing to go along with prevailing political orthodoxies.

At a live UnHerd members event this week, Freddie Sayers was joined by musician Winston Marshall, artists Jess de Wahls, and writer Sarah Ditum to ask: what is the state of free speech in the arts? Is there the beginnings of a return of freedom of thought? Each of them has experienced their own version of cancellation, and they shared their experiences and thoughts before a small audience at the Sekforde Arms in Clerkenwell.

Don’t miss this highlights video — and make sure to join UnHerd to be invited to our next event!

For more read The Post from UnHerd

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Trump Insider: Chances of 2024 run just went up to 2/3

Fri, 23 Jul 2021 14:07:14 GMT

Few people can claim to have as close access to “Trumpworld” — the circle of advisors around ex-President Trump — as Jason Miller. In fact, he spoke to Trump himself just yesterday.

Originally the chief campaign spokesman for the 2016 campaign, Miller was drafted back for the final months of the re-election campaign, in June 2020. He co-presented a podcast, The War Room, with Steve Bannon, which was removed from YouTube following the Capitol Hill violence on January 6th and is currently CEO of a new social media platform, Gettr.

My first question: how likely is it that Donald Trump will run for President again in 2024?

“You know, if you'd asked me when President Trump first left office, what the odds were of him running again in in 2024, I probably would have said 50-50. But I think in recent weeks, seeing him back out on the campaign trail, it's kind of the inverse effect, where the more that the media is attacking him and saying that he's politically finished, I think the more that he wants to go and run for office. I'd probably put it at two to one odds that that he does go and run in 2024. So that's making it more likely, in my estimation that he's going to run in 2024.”

Given Miller’s ringside seat on the final months of the Trump Presidency, I asked him about some of the key moments on the inside. As a key advisor to the campaign – why did he lose? When did it all go wrong?

#Trump2024 #censorship #USPolitics

For more, read The Post from UnHerd

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Wikipedia co-founder: I no longer trust the website I created

Wed, 14 Jul 2021 13:48:33 GMT

Chances are, if you’ve ever been on the internet, you’ve visited Wikipedia. It is the world’s fifth largest website, pulling in an estimated 6.1 billion followers per month and serves as a cheat sheet for almost any topic in the world. So great is the online encyclopaedia’s influence is so great that it is the biggest and “most read reference work in history”, with as many as 56 million editions.

But the truth about this supposedly neutral purveyor of information is a little more complex. Historically, Wikipedia has been written and monitored by a community of volunteers who collaborated and contested competing claims with one another. In the words of Wikipedia’s co-founder, Larry Sanger who spoke to Freddie Sayers on LockdownTV, these volunteers would “battle it out”.

This battle of ideas on Wikipedia’s platform formed a crucial part of the encyclopaedia’s commitment to neutrality, which according to Sanger, was abandoned after 2009. In the years since, on issues ranging from Covid to Joe Biden, it has become increasingly partisan, primarily espousing an establishment viewpoint that increasingly represents “propaganda”. This, says Sanger, is why he left the site in 2007, describing it as “broken beyond repair”.

For more, read The Post from UnHerd

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Rupert Sheldrake: Science does not tolerate dissent

Tue, 06 Jul 2021 13:40:45 GMT

The concept of scientism, the quasi-religious belief in science and scientists, has risen in prominence over the past year. It has been a theme in many UnHerd interviews, ranging from Matthew Crawford, who detailed the ways in which science has evolved from a mode of inquiry into a source of authority, to Richard Dawkins, who dismissed scientism as a “dirty word”.

To author and biologist Rupert Sheldrake, it means something different: “It is the idea that science can solve all the problems of the world,” he tells Freddie Sayers in today’s LockdownTV. “Where science becomes a religion and that it’s humanity’s salvation. The scientists are the saviours of the world.”

The religious fervour with which phrases like ‘following the science’ and ‘trust the experts’ have been uttered and adhered to over the course of the pandemic would seem to underscore Sheldrake’s point. But according to Sheldrake, who has spent his entire career researching controversial or ‘fringe’ areas of science, the phenomenon is “nothing new”. As he himself has experienced, the scientific community does not like entertaining radical or dissent opinion, and goes out of its way to snuff it out...

For more, read The Post from UnHerd

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Dr Mike Tildesley: what our Covid forecasts got wrong

Thu, 01 Jul 2021 14:07:46 GMT

SPI-M (the “Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling) is the government committee in charge of producing forecasts for the future direction of the pandemic in different circumstances. It was their report in early June, combining mathematical models from Imperial, Warwick and LSHTM, than persuaded Boris Johnson to delay the planned re-opening of society on 21st June to its current scheduled date of 19th July.

In the weeks since that report, two things have become clear: the raw case numbers have been rising very rapidly, but the hospital admissions have been much lower than predicted when the PM made his decision. As of today, 1st July, just over 250 people per day are being admitted into hospital with Covid, compared to over 600 by now as forecast by SPI-M.

Freddie Sayers spoke to Dr Mike Tildesley, an infectious disease modeller from the University of Warwick who sits on the committee and works on the models himself, about how his forecasts have performed against reality, and whether, knowing what we know now, the PM made the right decision.

For more, read The Post from UnHerd

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Kemi Badenoch: Britain is the best place in the world to be black

Mon, 28 Jun 2021 16:42:30 GMT

Is Britain a racist country? This is a question that sharply divides most Brits, but for one Government minister, the answer is an emphatic ‘no’. In an interview with UnHerd’s LockdownTV, Kemi Badenoch, exchequer secretary for the treasury and an Equalities Minister, tells Freddie Sayers that Britain is the “best place in the world to be black” and that an excessive focus on race alone can end up obscuring the debate.

Her comments follow on from an education report that came out last week which found that white working-class pupils had been failed by decades of neglect in England’s education system. It is examples like these, argues Badenoch, that highlight how phrases like ‘white privilege’ are not only divisive, but inaccurate too.

For more, read The Post from UnHerd

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UnHerd event: has lockdown changed us forever?

Fri, 25 Jun 2021 17:02:28 GMT

It is difficult to capture just how transformative an impact lockdown has had on us as individuals and as a society. For 15 months, we have been unable to gather in large groups, walk into a shop without a mask or even go to your local pub without having to scan a code from your phone. On a societal level, it is the first time in living memory that a western nations have locked down their populations and managed to do so with very little resistance. So as we go forth into our brave new world, what does this all mean? With less than a month to go until all restrictions are lifted (in theory), how has lockdown changed us — if at all? At UnHerd’s inaugural in-person event of the year, Freddie Sayers spoke to a panel of UnHerd contributors, who shared their thoughts.

For more, read The Post from UnHerd here

Make sure to join UnHerd to be invited to our next event!

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Jess de Wahls: Cancelled (and un-cancelled) by the Royal Academy

Wed, 23 Jun 2021 10:11:44 GMT

It all started with an Instagram post. Over the weekend, the Royal Academy thanked those “for bringing an item in the RA shop by an artist [Jess de Wahls] expressing transphobic views to our attention.” The item in question? A collection of floral embroidered patches that can be attached to clothing. Her crime? Writing a blog in 2019 in which she stated that “humans cannot change sex”.

Shortly thereafter came the now-familiar cycle of organisations bowing to social media pressure and seeking forgiveness. On the basis of eight complaints, RA decided to remove all of Jess’s work from its shop without prior warning to the artist. But then came something less predictable: just a few hours ago, the RA took an unprecedented step and apologised to de Wahls for “the way we have treated her”. The institution said that it had betrayed “our most important core value”, namely freedom of speech, and would re-open discussions about re-stocking her work. Shortly before this apology, we spoke to Jess about what it was like to be in the eye of the social media storm.

For more read The Post from UnHerd

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Richard Dawkins: 'Scientism' is a dirty word

Fri, 18 Jun 2021 14:32:03 GMT

We were really delighted that Richard Dawkins agreed to come on LockdownTV to discuss “Scientism” and his new anthology of writing about science literature, Books do furnish a Life.

It turns out that Mr Dawkins’ view of “Scientism” is that it is a “dirty word used by people who are critical of scientists” — so that was a relatively brief part of the conversation.

On Covid, he is not especially worried about the boundaries of politics and science becoming blurred, but feels that “science is the way to discover the right answer to anything about the real world — and that, of course, includes how to deal with a serious epidemic.” Vaccination and mask-wearing is “not a matter of a set of self interest” it is a “moral responsibility.”

Our thanks to Richard Dawkins for sharing his thoughts.

For more read The Post from UnHerd

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SAGE Prof Susan Michie: should we wear masks forever?

Mon, 14 Jun 2021 22:21:11 GMT

Professor Susan Michie, a behavioural psychologist who sits on the all-important Sage committee, made headlines last week by appearing to suggest that social distancing and wearing facemasks should remain in place “forever”.

The Professor of Health Psychology has been an outspoken advocate of strict lockdown measures, both serving on Sage’s Scientific Pandemic Insights group on Behaviour (SPI-B) and advising the World Health Organisation on Covid-19.

She spoke to UnHerd about whether lockdown will ever be lifted, why people are no longer obeying the restrictions, and she addresses criticism of her Communist politics.

Read the full article from UnHerd here

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Chris Bickerton: Welcome to the Technopopulist future

Sat, 12 Jun 2021 13:53:27 GMT

The pandemic has thrown traditional ideas about politics upside down. In a sense, it has been the ultimate triumph of the technocrats, with phrases like “following the science” and “trusting the experts” becoming commonplace; but notions like shutting national borders and moving governments onto a 'war footing' are more typically associated with the populist Right — it was Donald Trump who first shut the US borders, Modi in India implemented a swingeing lockdown early, and Boris Johnson's government is, at least in theory, a populist one.

Chris Bickerton, reader in Modern European Politics at Queen's College Cambridge and sometime star of the Talking Politics podcast, has a book out which sees a pattern in this fusion of technocracy and populism: it's called technopopulism. In this fascinating discussion tells Freddie Sayers all about it.

For more read The Post from UnHerd

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Maya Forstater: Today's judgment on trans is a landmark

Thu, 10 Jun 2021 15:42:07 GMT

When Maya Forstater first started expressing “gender critical” views in late 2018 (ie that biological sex is real and important), she was a researcher at a progressive think tank called the Centre for Global Development. Her views caught the attention of the bosses in Washington DC — and one dismissal, one tribunal verdict and an appeal judgement later, she now finds herself part of the history of gender laws in this country.

Today’s successful appeal establishes Ms Forstater’s views in law as a “philosophical belief” that must be protected from discrimination. This means that corporations, schools, government agencies or any other organisation cannot discriminate against people holding the mainstream view that men and women are different but equal, and that your sex doesn’t change even if you identify differently.

She joined Freddie Sayers on the latest episode of LockdownTV to tell us about her experience and what it means.

For more read The Post from UnHerd

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Ex press head: the UK media was not racist towards Meghan

Fri, 04 Jun 2021 10:39:13 GMT

When 49.1 million viewers tuned in to watch the Harry and Meghan interview on Oprah, the drama that unfolded left many victims — not all famous or royal — in their wake. One such casualty was Ian Murray, the head of the Society of Editors, who came out to defend the British press against the claim made by the Duke of Sussex that the industry was racist. According to a statement put out by Murray, such an “attack” was “not acceptable” without any evidence. Following the statement came a now-infamous interview with Victoria Derbyshire, in which Murray got into a heated row with the interviewer over whether certain headlines could be construed as racist.

In spite of a second statement issued by the Society of Editors, the damage was already done: over 160 journalists of colour and the editors of the Guardian, Financial Times and HuffPost wrote an open letter describing the SoE’s initial statement as “laughable” proof of “an institution and an industry in denial”. This left Murray in the strange predicament of being attacked by the people he was trying to defend. Meanwhile, an ITV presenter and editor of the Yorkshire Post both pulled out of the Society of Editors awards.

Effectively, the executive director was left with no choice but to resign from the organisation he helped to found some 22 years prior. In an exclusive interview with UnHerd, Murray finally speaks out and give his version of events: does he regret the statement? Is the British press racist? And what does it feel like when the mob comes for you? He discusses all this and more in today’s LockdownTV:

On why needed to leave:

When the mob turns, they need a target and it’s vicious — the phone calls, the hate, the threats of violence and worse, actually reaching me and my family in my home with phone calls and all kinds of things. I calculated that if I was going to save the Society of Editors, I needed to walk away.

- IAN MURRAY, UNHERD

Why did his statement cause such a furore:

One, it’s the Meghan and Harry ‘sparkledust’ coming down from Hollywood. Secondly, I was following in the wake of Piers Morgan, who had resigned a little earlier before I did… Thirdly, it was a classic witch trial, whereby someone stands up to defend someone who’s been accused of being a witch, must therefore be a witch.

- IAN MURRAY, UNHERD

On the show trial that followed:

What happens at the end of a show trial is when you’ve got your admission and your culprits, you must shame them publicly. You must make sure that everyone gets the message that “if you don’t agree with what we say, if you push back against anything that we say — then this is what we will do to you: we’ll come for your family, we’ll come for your career, your friends, anyone that associates with you. So don’t question. Don’t question”.

- IAN MURRAY, UNHERD

Does he stand by his statement?

Absolutely…It was a strong statement, but that was to counterbalance the fact there is no proof or no evidence that there is a general theme of racism or bigotry in the British media or that large sections of the media have got a racist agenda.

- IAN MURRAY, UNHERD

Why did the press turn on Meghan?

We [the British people] don’t like being preached to, by members of royalty in particular, especially when they appear hypocritical and do something completely different…They also made it plain that they didn’t particularly like the press. And, if you’re going to say, “look, we don’t like you”, parts of the media, we’re going to say, “well, we don’t like you either”.

- IAN MURRAY, UNHERD

On the health of the free press:

I think it is in a very worrying place. I can be annoyed with the Left of the media, who traduced and damaged me… But I’m not going to say that they should be silenced. I’m not going to say that they shouldn’t have a voice. Now that would be hugely hypocritical of me after all these years. I want them to continue to have a voice.

- IAN MURRAY, UNHERD

How does he feel?

Am I bitter and twisted about it? Yeah, I can be. I can be pretty annoyed about it. In the first stage, you’re obviously in shock from doing it. But you take an awful lot of comfort from the outpouring of support from people I know and people I’ve never met at all….But there is also disappointment with some others that I thought were friends or associates who ran for the hills. And it quickly dawns on you, that your reputation has been shredded in some ways, that it’s been tarnished.

- IAN MURRAY, UNHERD

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Peter Singer: Despite everything, I’m still a cosmopolitan

Wed, 02 Jun 2021 14:19:45 GMT

Any decent list of the most influential living philosophers will include Peter Singer. For nearly 50 years, the Australian ethicist has been at the forefront of progressive politics — his ideas about animal rights and effective altruism have shaped those debates ever since the 80s and his brand of utilitarian progressive thought continues to dominate.

More controversially, his writing against the sanctity of life and in favour of the morality of ending the lives of highly disabled infants have angered the Conservative Right as much as the disability lobby on the Left. He has been “cancelled” before the term even existed, with invitations to speak retracted multiple times over the years.

Now he is co-Editor of a new “Journal of Controversial Ideas” which seeks to provide anonymity and safe publication for philosophical essays that touch on topics that might otherwise get the authors “cancelled.”

I wanted to know whether the brand of ultra-utilitarian, universalist, progressive thought of which he is such a famous proponent has somehow got out of hand and come back to haunt him? Does he feel that defining virtue by our ability to overrule the natural order of things and care as much for faraway people as we do our loved ones in any way led to the populist backlash of 2016? Now that he is founding publications to protect against cancel culture, is he running from a monster that he helped create?

I put these questions to him, and and more (including a discussion about his new book ‘The Golden Ass‘), in a highly enjoyable conversation. Many thanks to Peter for sparing the time.

On the contemporary Left:

They see themselves as defending people who are underprivileged, marginalised, disadvantaged. They want to extend that defence, not just to improving their social and economic position and preventing discrimination against them, but also making sure that they’re not offended by remarks that are made. And that brings it into conflict with ideas of freedom of speech because if merely the fact that you might offend somebody is a grounds for preventing you speaking, there’s not a lot of freedom of speech left.

- PETER SINGER, UNHERD

Does he feel hoisted on his own petard?

No, I don’t think that because I’ve always been an advocate of freedom of speech. And in fact I think freedom of speech has been something that the Left traditionally has championed.

- PETER SINGER, UNHERD

On identity politics:

The idea that if you’re a white male, that somehow this discredits you… doesn’t seem to me at all a defensible view. I think we should look at what people say in terms of how well argued is this? Do the ideas hold up to critical scrutiny? Not in terms of what’s the race or ethnicity or sex of the person who was saying it?

- PETER SINGER, UNHERD

On critical race theory:

People who describe themselves as proponents of critical race theory make racism just so all-encompassing as an explanation and don’t really recognise the genuine and helpful efforts that have been made to make society less racist and to provide more opportunities for people, irrespective of their race.

- PETER SINGER, UNHERD

On open borders:

I’ve never been an advocate of open borders. Although in theory, I think a world with open borders would be great. But as a matter of political pragmatism, I’ve never thought we were ready for that.

- PETER SINGER, UNHERD

Is the failure to accept open borders a moral shortcoming or a fact of human nature?

It is both the fact of human nature and a moral shortcoming. I think it’s a fact of human nature that we should not celebrate, because it shows that we have an element of xenophobia: fear or hatred of strangers in our nature. And I accept that it’s part of our biological nature, I don’t deny that. And reason and ethical argument is not always powerful enough to overcome some of these facts of our nature.

- PETER SINGER, UNHERD

On pragmatic idealism:

In a democracy, you can’t get too far ahead of where people are, you have to bring people along with you. Sometimes people and political leaders should do more than they are doing to bring people along with them.

- PETER SINGER, UNHERD

On why he started the Journal of Controversial ideas:

We were worried about the fact that people, particularly more junior untenured, academics, would be intimidated against publishing something controversial, for fear that this could do harm to their career, or personally that they would get such abuse that they would not be able to handle it.

- PETER SINGER, UNHERD

On his new book, ‘The Golden Ass’:

It’s a Roman novel…which was written in the second century of the Common Era. Apuleius was born in the reign of the Emperor Hadrian and died probably in the reign of Marcus Aurelius. So it’s about a man who gets turned into a donkey because he dabbles in magic rather foolishly and has a bit of bad luck, and becomes a donkey and can’t get out of it for some time.

Apuleius had enough empathy with a donkey to describe various forms of cruel treatment that donkeys were enduring in the Roman Empire…There’s a lot of empathy with animals. And that was certainly what first attracted me to it.

- PETER SINGER, UNHERD

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Parent: Why I pulled my daughter out of antiracist school

Fri, 28 May 2021 13:45:41 GMT

Few books have had as great an impact on western society in the 21st century as Ibram X. Kendi’s ‘How to be an Antiracist‘. Published in 2019, the book argued that it was not enough to be neutral on racism: you had to be actively fighting it, otherwise you were on the side of the racists. Moderation meant complicity and silence equalled violence. Anyone who dared to challenge this mantra would be immediately cast as a racist.

Fast forward a year and now children as young as four-years-old are being conscripted into the fight. As part of the antiracist curriculum spreading through America’s schools, kindergarteners are being taught to draw their own skin tone correctly so that they are not labelled racist while others are taught to not hold the door open for disabled people because it could constitute a microaggression. These examples may sound so ridiculous as to borderline on fantasy, but the reality is all too real for parents like Andrew Gutmann, who recently pulled his daughter out of a prestigious $54,000 a year New York private school over its obsession with “woke” antiracist teaching.

Writing an open letter to the school, Mr Gutmann attacked the school for “insisting on the indoctrination of its students, and their families, to a single mindset, most reminiscent of the Chinese Cultural Revolution”. In an interview with Freddie Sayers on LockdownTV, he explains why he was left with no choice but to take the “extreme” option and take his daughter out of school.

For more, read The Post from UnHerd

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Sohrab Ahmari: Why conservatives need to fight

Mon, 24 May 2021 23:48:05 GMT

Sohrab Ahmari's new book makes a strong case for tradition — but ignores material reality, read the full review by Niall Gooch here on UnHerd: https://unherd.com/2021/05/what-conservatives-can-learn-from-marx/

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Nicholas Wade: the case for the Covid lab-leak theory

Thu, 20 May 2021 13:49:23 GMT

The so-called lab-leak hypothesis has been gaining more and more traction in recent months. Once dismissed as a crankish fringe theory, it has slowly been entering into mainstream scientific discussion ever since. Just this week, America’s CDC Director said that it was ‘possible’ that Covid could have leaked from a lab as ‘significant circumstantial evidence’ emerges.

One writer who has made a significant contribution to the debate is Nicholas Wade, a former reporter at the New York Times, who recently self-published a piece detailing how the lab-leak theory isn’t just a possibility, it’s the most likely explanation. Though there is no definitive evidence for either theory, Wade argues that the key details are easier to explain within the context of a lab leak origin.

For more, read The Post from UnHerd

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Fired Apple employee: a reckoning is underway

Tue, 18 May 2021 15:10:02 GMT

Last week, tech giant Apple made headlines for the summary dismissal of one of its employees. Following a petition signed by over 2,000 Apple employees, the company decided to fire Antonio García Martínez, a senior ads engineer who had only just started, over comments he made in his 2016 book Chaos Monkeys. According to the petitioners, García Martínez had a “history of publishing overtly racist and sexist remarks” which “directly oppose Apple’s commitment to Inclusion & Diversity”.

The quote from the book that is regularly cited as proof of García Martínez's apparent sexism is below:

"Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel."

But this quote has been taken out of context, which is crucial to understanding the deliberately over-the-top style of the passage. In the memoir, García Martínez writes about meeting a six foot tall British trader who is “an imposing, broad-shouldered presence, six feet tall in bare feet, and towering over me in heels,' who he compares favourably to other women in the Bay Area. But it is also a comparison with himself — a geeky tech engineer — which is why he was attracted to the strong British trader:

"British Trader, on the other hand, was the sort of woman who would end up a useful ally in that postapocalypse, doing whatever work—be it carpentry, animal husbandry, or a shotgun blast to someone’s back—required doing." In an interview with UnHerd, what García Martínez tells us what he finds so strange about his dismissal from Apple and why he believes that a reckoning is underway in Silicon Valley.

For more, read The Post from UnHerd

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Douglas Murray and Yanis Varoufakis: The EU is broken

Fri, 14 May 2021 15:05:29 GMT

As we approached the five year anniversary of the UK’s momentous vote to leave the European Union, UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers was joined by Yanis Varoufakis and Douglas Murray to assess whether the EU has done enough to deserve to survive. For more read The Post.

Our thanks to both Yanis and Douglas for a fascinating discussion. You can sign up HERE to make sure to attend the next members event.

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Amy Chua: Americans are now fearful of Asians

Thu, 13 May 2021 12:39:08 GMT

As the country’s ‘model-minority’, Asian-Americans have experienced different forms of discrimination compared to other ethnic groups, but the recent spate of Asian-American violence and rise in anti-China rhetoric has thrown this tension into sharper focus.

There is perhaps no public intellectual better equipped to give an insight into these issues than Amy Chua, a Law Professor at Yale and author of five books, including the famous book ‘Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother’, which advocated strict Chinese-style parenting. Chua is the child of two ethnically Chinese parents, who emigrated from the Philippines to the US when she was a baby. She has written extensively about her Confuscian upbringing at home (respect for elders, deference to authority) as well as her schooling in America, both of which gave her a deeper understanding of the values that underpin those two countries.

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Tory Mayor Ben Houchen: Red wall voters aren't nostalgic

Mon, 10 May 2021 18:41:27 GMT

Freddie Sayers meets Teesside's newly re-elected Conservative mayor, Ben Houchen.

There's a stereotype of England's North-Eastern cities as left-behind, backward-facing, clinging to a long-gone industrial past. Some Labour politicians have even tried to play up to this image too, but it could not, says Teeside's newly re-elected mayor Ben Houchen, be further from the truth. According to Houchen, who won 73% of the Teeside vote in last week's by-election, voters in Hartlepool and Teesside aren't nostalgic, they are looking to the future. He plans to turn Teesside into the Silicon Valley of the UK.

#RedWall #BorisJohnson #Conservatives

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Matthew B Crawford: science has become corrupted

Fri, 30 Apr 2021 14:04:25 GMT

Freddie Sayers meets Matthew B. Crawford.

‘Following the science’ is a phrase that we have heard a lot of this year, but what does it actually mean? Over the past year, science has shifted from a mode of inquiry to a form of authority that you are not allowed to question in fear of being labelled ‘anti-science’. To understand how and why this has occurred, we spoke to philosopher and writer Matthew B. Crawford, who has a full-length piece in UnHerd on this very subject.

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John McWhorter: white people should stand up to antiracist ideologues

Mon, 26 Apr 2021 14:01:36 GMT

When John McWhorter, professor of Linguistics and American Studies at Columbia, described antiracism as America’s ‘new flawed religion’ in 2015, few could have imagined just how prescient that description would prove to be. Just this week, the Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi thanked George Floyd for “sacrificing his life for justice” while CEOs, celebrities, and other politicians all made versions of the same promise: the work was not done.

McWhorter, author of the upcoming book ‘Nine Nasty Words’ does not count himself as a follower of this new religion. does not count himself as a follower of this new religion. In fact, the professor has become one of its fiercest critics, tirelessly deconstructing the latest example of ‘woke craziness’ to illustrate its incoherence. With that in mind, we thought it was essential to get John’s opinion on the Derek Chauvin verdict and his thoughts on race relations in America more generally. We really enjoyed speaking to John and thank him for his time.

On the Derek Chauvin conviction: 'There is a sense in America that what this verdict was about was black people being killed by the cops. I see it as a victory about people being killed by the cops. And if it has to be a black case that galvanises change under that misconception, well, life isn’t perfect. But I am very happy about what happened to that man. And I’m very sad about what happened to George Floyd. But I’m equally sad about what happened to Tony Timpa, which was very similar, and Tony Timpa was very white, and it was only four years ago, and no one heard about it.'

Did he get a fair trial?: 'If fairness requires a certain fear of the streets erupting — that’s not the way I would choreograph it — but maybe sometimes you have to break some eggs to make an omelette. The cop problem is real partly for a human, not race, reason….I think it’s a misperception that the cops are uniquely against black people, and that is the main obstacle to getting past race in the United States.'

Is antiracism a religion?: 'It’s a religion — any martial anthropologist would recognise it as such. One of the oddest things is to see mathematicians and philosophers who’ve made their way through Plato, Kant and Kierkegaard, and then all of a sudden when they’re reasoning about Black Lives Matter, they exhibit the reasoning power of roughly an orangutan. Suddenly that’s considered sophisticated.'

Giving up on the true believers: 'You can’t engage people like that… There is nothing you can do to talk somebody out of a religion. There’s no conversation to be had, it’s worthless. Some of them will say they want to have a conversation with you. But what they want is for you to learn from them. If there’s anything that they have to learn from you, it’s that they want to learn what your mental barriers are to understanding their truth.'

His advice to white people: 'A lot of people need to have a little bit more of a backbone, and understand that this person who’s sitting there looking over their copy of “How To Be An Anti-Racist” and telling you that you’re a racist, let them. And then walk on because the world will keep spinning and you will keep existing. I think some white people need to have the courage of their convictions even about this thing called the race thing. And just say, “No, I’m not a racist. Maybe you are. And let’s now talk about football”. That we need more of.'

On the elitism of antiracism: 'If you’re somebody who is more familiar with struggle or you have a kid in a bad school or you know what it’s like to live in a bad neighbourhood. In a way, this sort of thinking [antiracism] is going to be less congenial. And many people would say, “Well, it’s because you’re a racist”. No, it’s it’s not that. It’s that there is a certain luxury in thinking of black people in these abstractions.'

On Ta-Nehisi Coates: 'There is a certain kind of person who builds their sense of significance in society on a victim role. A person can do that of any colour. It’s a personality type. With black Americans, one way that you do that is to focus on your victimhood or your people’s victimhood, at the hands of whites. It’s not that there isn’t racism. But the idea that what makes you special is your victimhood status in comparison to whites, that can become who you are. Coates is a good writer, but Coates is that kind of person.'

On the n-word: 'I feel that it casts black people as hothouse flowers to a degree that I find condescending. And that’s not to say that people are supposed to run around using the word. But I think America had it about right as recently as about 1995. And since then, we’ve started to treat it in a way that I’m not sure was very productive. But that’s just me.'

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Church leaders: vaccine passports are un-Christian

Tue, 20 Apr 2021 14:00:20 GMT

Over the weekend, over 1,200 church leaders from a range of denominations sent an open letter to the Prime Minister. It warned that vaccine passports raised serious ethical concerns and risked creating a ‘surveillance state’ that would ‘bring about the end of liberal democracy as we know it’.

Earlier today, we spoke to two of the original signatories Dr. William Philip, of the Tron church in Glasgow, and Dr. Jamie Franklin, who is curator of St. George in the meadow in Nottingham. Both offered a scathing assessment of the vaccine passport plan and explained why they could not support it:

'When you say that there is a possibility that the government may try and force us to exclude people from churches on the basis of whether or not they’ve had a certain medical treatment, that crosses a line for lots and lots of sincere people.' - JAMIE FRANKLIN

'It’s impossible theologically for the Christian church to close its doors to those who have been branded by society as socially undesirable. It is absolutely anathema to the Christian gospel. It would be like the Lord Jesus Christ standing up and saying, ‘Well come to me all you who labour and are heavy laden, except those of you who are sick, blind, tax collectors and sinners — you’ve got to produce your passport’' - WILLIAM PHILIP

On the failures of the church:

'Many of us have been frustrated, both in the church and in society, with what we see is a considerable lack of Christian Leadership over the last 12 months. We feel that senior church leaders across all denominations have given an imprimatur to the dictates of the government and of the secular, unelected technocrats who appear to be running things at the moment. People are extremely frustrated with this.I’m a curate at the bottom of the food chain. I’ve only been ordained for less than two years. But there’s such a dearth of leadership that I felt like it was necessary for me to do something' - JAMIE FRANKLIN

'A Christian would never argue that physical health and protection is the ultimate thing. A Christian must say that eternal health is infinitely more important…And this is the problem: the message of the church collapsed into one of merely health and safety in a temporal way. It has entirely omitted speaking about hope and salvation. That is a catastrophic failure of the institutional church' - WILLIAM PHILIP

On the church’s hypocrisy:

'The Church of England bishops had absolutely no problem with denouncing Brexit in a very enthusiastic manner. So there is a justification for this, but it’s just an inconsistent justification…we’re not a thermometer simply telling the temperature of the culture but we’re a thermostat. We’re supposed to have an influence on the culture, not simply to follow the culture' - JAMIE FRANKLIN

On unvaccinated churchgoers:

'The crucial issue as far as Christian churches are concerned is: am I supposed to say no to somebody who doesn’t want a vaccine? Someone who is in obedience to their conscience? And, as they see it, in obedience to the commander, Jesus Christ? Am I to say to them, ‘Well, then you cannot come into the church of Jesus Christ, your obedience to Jesus prevents you from coming into worship?' - WILLIAM PHILIP

'As ministers of the gospel, our message is to not stay at home and stay safe. It is that the only salvation is Christ — he’s the only one who can save us from death. So if people want to take a vaccine because it will protect them and they feel it’s right for them, that’s great. But as ministers of the gospel, our message is that ultimately Jesus is our Saviour, and not a vaccine or indeed any medical treatment' - JAMIE FRANKLIN

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Jesse Singal on the American obsession with fad psychology

Tue, 20 Apr 2021 07:52:53 GMT

Hear Jesse Singal discuss his latest book with Freddie Sayers

Further reading: The empty promise of pop psychology

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Did Sweden get Covid wrong?

Fri, 16 Apr 2021 06:04:22 GMT

This time a year ago, something extraordinary happened. Johan Giesecke, advisor to the Director General of the WHO, former Chief Scientist of the EU Centre for Disease Control, and former state epidemiologist of Sweden came out forcefully against lockdowns. The world was shutting down and he was the first voice to speak out so bluntly early in the pandemic.

He contended that the difference in infection and death rates between countries would “come out in the wash”, regardless of their lockdown policies and promised to return in a year’s time to review the evidence.

With typical Swedish punctuality, he returns to UnHerd — a day early. He is similarly gruff, but notably more cautious this time around, after a year-long fight which had become, in Sweden, just as political and personal as it had in the UK and America. The Swedish media has not spared the retired professor any criticism...

To read the rest of the article and to see the accompanying graphs click here

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Bridget Phetasy: the power of Big Tech is chilling

Wed, 14 Apr 2021 14:36:25 GMT

Around the world, California is romanticised as a glamorous haven of luxury and sunshine. But the reality, as we have been finding out, is quite different: rubbish stacked in the streets, a homelessness crisis, and an exodus of disillusioned residents. One of these disillusioned residents is Bridget Phetasy, a comedian, writer, podcaster and YouTuber based in Los Angeles, who has grown increasingly frustrated with her home state. California is in a ‘premageddon’, she fears, and that’s not just because of Gavin Newsom’s (the California governor who is up for recall) poor Covid response:

It’s a process that’s been happening for some time and it’s been accelerated by the pandemic and the lockdowns. I’ve been describing it as ‘premageddon’…It’s a little bit pre-apocalyptic or dystopian: you’re seeing increasing homelessness, which is tragic. And it’s also filthy because there’s garbage everywhere. It’s definitely not the Los Angeles I moved to in 2007 when I came back.

On her vulnerability to Big Tech: 'I would rather be free than have to silo who I am, privately and publicly. But my biggest fear is when you see things like, for instance, what happened in the wake of the president being de-platformed from social media. He basically disappeared, almost like a technical mob hit…. That would be detrimental to me. I always joke that I’m just gonna keep talking until I can’t because I feel like you’re constantly avoiding like the Eye of Sauron.'

On identity: 'I don’t think it’s great that everybody is so invested in making their entire identity about these immutable characteristics, or, in some cases, mutable characteristics, which I can’t get my mind around. Your sex, your gender, your ethnicity — this is what you build your entire world around instead of what gives you meaning beyond the traits that you were just born with. It just feels like we’re going backwards.'

On the Left: 'The Left feels much more insidious to me than the Right, because it seems social… When I talk to people about why they’re self censoring, it’s because they feel like they can’t say certain things. And that’s not being enforced by the government yet, although we are headed in that direction in California. But it is being enforced socially…And then people are petrified of saying anything at work, and are being made to go to these kind of diversity and inclusion trainings, and they can’t say anything about whether or not they agree with the stuff.'

On vaccine passports: 'What’s so shocking to me is how many people are okay with this. I can’t figure out if it’s just because people like being told what to do, or need to be told what to do. And then there’s a sense of self righteousness that goes along with that. So you’re basically following the lead and then you get to be arrogant and take the moral high ground.'

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Sir Nicholas Soames: the values of Philip's generation are now far away

Fri, 09 Apr 2021 16:50:37 GMT

There are few families in Britain closer to the royal family than the family of wartime leader Sir Winston Churchill. His grandson, Sir Nicholas Soames, knew Prince Philip very well over a 60-year period and shared his thoughts on his passing in a special edition of LockdownTV.

“It’s a strange day, a day of reflection, and I hope people get him right," he told me. "The press, with that attention span for which they are famous, always talks about his ‘gaffes’ — his gaffes were that what you saw was what you got. He was an absolutely ram rod straight former naval officer, who didn’t have much time for sycophancy or bloody fools or anyone else, and spoke as he found. But he was essentially a man of great humour, he had tremendous wit and charm … and he held very strong views. This is not a mere figure.”

Sir Nicholas reflected on the values of the generation that the Duke of Edinburgh belonged to:

"One of the saddest things about Prince Philip dying — and about a lot of people who die of his generation — is that they are the last of a generation who people talk about slightly glibly, but they were the wartime generation. He did see active service, he knew what it was like to command in great difficulty and at hours of great danger... The values of his generation now feel quite far away. He wasn’t a sentimentalist, Prince Philip, but he was a tough egg... He was the epitome of the stiff upper lip. I mean that in the best sense of the word. It wasn’t that he didn’t share emotion in any way, but he was a great believer in picking yourself up and getting on with it.

I’ll tell you what I think we have lost, that his generation had — we’ve lost any sense of proportion about what goes on. Everything is bulled up into an enormous drama, but if you’ve lived in that generation you’ve lived through an era of profound upheaval. And you learned to distinguish between what was important and what wasn’t important. I think we’ve lost that now."

Sir Nicholas stressed that, as evidenced by Prince Philip's founding of St George's House centre for spiritual reflection at the chapel at Windsor Castle, "he was a thinker, and he was interested in the spiritual side of life."

But the reputation for straight talking was well-earned:

"He didn’t like bloody fools, and if he thought you were talking rubbish he told you… What you saw with Prince Philip was what you got. He was completely authentic as a human being. I think it must have been a great challenge when he first started as the Queen’s consort not to allow his own character to dominate. He was always in the Queen’s wake, and he supported her through thick and thin, through some terribly difficult times."

Sir Nicholas shared that Prince Philip would not have wanted a state funeral, even if Covid had not prevented one:

"I think people would have wanted in great numbers to come and show their respects to Prince Philip, and I think it’s very sad — and entirely correct and understandable — that there are going to have to be very special arrangements for the funeral, because after all the royal family will want to behave the same as anyone else. I understand the body will lie in state at Windsor before his burial and it is not going to be a great do… I know for a fact that Prince Philip did not want a state funeral, but there would have been an opportunity for the public to pay their respects, because he was greatly admired."

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Dave Rubin: why the ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ split up

Tue, 06 Apr 2021 14:59:21 GMT

The group of thinkers now known as the “Intellectual Dark Web” — Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Bret and Eric Weinstein, Ben Shapiro — were convened in Dave Rubin’s garage and on his YouTube channel, The Rubin Report. And yet he has always suffered the accusation that he wasn’t a ‘real’ intellectual.

“What I thought and believe now that I am good at is that I can sit with these people and take a lot of that stuff and distil it into something that the average person can understand enough of. I love that space,” he told Freddie Sayers in a wide-ranging and philosophical discussion on LockdownTV.

He sees the old IDW gang as divided now along a crucial ideological split. There are those who believe the tools of liberalism can still be deployed to persuade the Woke Left to change their mind (he includes Bari Weiss, Sam Harris, Bret Weinstein in this group); and then there are those, like him, who have decided that it simply isn’t possible, and they’re better off building bridges with the Right: 'They’ve made what to me seems to be a very obvious fatal mistake, that you can use any of the tools of Liberalism — of open inquiry, freedom of speech, respect for your fellow human beings, individual rights — that you can use any of these things to rationalise with the monster that is coming to burn your house down. And that’s why we’ve seen in effect the liberals have no defence over this, which is why all the liberal institutions are crumbling.What I’m seeing, and I would say this is more me, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, is that there’s all sorts of bridges to be built the other way. If you would have told me five years ago that I would consider Dennis Prager and Glenn Beck and Larry Elder and many other conservatives not only friends but the type of intellectual that I want to be — I would be shocked.'

His hope is on the Right, and the long-term vision is of building parallel institutions to those controlled by the liberal Left: 'Maybe we’re just going to build parallel societies. I think that that may start to be — woke culture will have its own TV, apps and all their institutions, and then the rest of us will have a whole bunch of other stuff. But my money is on those guys building the right thing.'

This vision of two parallel societies may come across as rather dispiriting for early fans of Rubin. After all, this was the host who brought together people of all different political stripes, namely the IDW, to talk things out on his show. Now he is advocating for the opposite. There was something genuinely counter-cultural about the way in which figures from the Reaganite Right all the way through to the progressive Left gathered under Dave’s roof to exchange and debate ideas, and it is a pity to see that disappear. Though Dave insists that there are “bridges to be built in the other way”, the gradual disintegration of the IDW feels like the end of an (albeit short-lived) era. Let’s hope the next one can provide us with something similar.

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Vermont Professor: I stand by my anti-whiteness video

Wed, 31 Mar 2021 14:38:28 GMT

Over the past year, the culture wars have been raging and one of the places where they have been fought most fiercely is on American college campuses. Efforts to ‘decolonise the curriculum’ and censor professors and students found to be deviating from progressive orthodoxy on identity issues have intensified, particularly on liberal college campuses.

Last week, another target was found, this time at the University of Vermont. After claiming to see ‘anti-whiteness’ spreading around campus, Professor Aaron Kindsvatter published a video denouncing the anti-racist agenda that reduced and discriminated against people on account of their skin colour. As a professor of counselling, Kindsvatter was especially concerned about the implementation of policy based on the work of Ibram X. Kendi, the author of ‘How to be an Antiracist’, into the counselling programme. Given that these students were training to be psycho-therapists, Kindsvatter notes, this “rigid” ideology would inform the basis of their work:

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Tim Pool on Joe Biden, Occupy and Big Tech

Mon, 29 Mar 2021 16:15:49 GMT

Online Lefty, liberal journalist, Right-wing podcaster and alt-Right adjacent. These are just some of the labels applied to Tim Pool, a YouTuber and citizen journalist who first rose to prominence in his coverage of the Occupy Movement nearly 10 years ago. That he’s been called all these different names is something of a badge of honour for Pool, whose heterodox opinions have led to criticism from all corners of the political spectrum.

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Tom Tugendhat: the Chinese Government sent letters to my home

Fri, 26 Mar 2021 12:01:48 GMT

Tom Tugendhat MP is Chair of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee and one of the five British MPs placed on a sanctions list yesterday by the Chinese Communist Party. He spoke to Freddie Sayers about what it means.

On the impact of sanctions on him personally

It doesn’t affect me at all, really, because I have no interests in China, either personal or professional. So for me, it’s not significant. But what this is, is an attempt to intimidate British business people, intimidate British politicians and, by the way, intimidate many other people around the world. This is an attempt to bully and I hope it will be seen for exactly what it is.

These are Chinese rights, not Western rights

I think we need to stand up for human rights as set out by the UN Declaration of Human Rights, which is not a Western imposition. Those human rights were written by P.C. Chang, a Chinese diplomat. These are Chinese rights that we’re standing up for. And it’s quite something that the Chinese Communist Party is the organisation that is looking to condemn the Chinese citizenry to hardship and its non Chinese powers that are looking to stand up for the Chinese people.

‘Guarding the guards’ over Covid restrictions

I know the government got extra powers, which allow it to go until six months time, but it needs to lift them the moment that that is reasonable to do so which I hope, according to the government’s own timelines will be around the 21st of June. So I think that, you know, there is certainly a job of guarding the guards for members of parliament today and powerful speeches by people like Charles Walker yesterday, and and indeed many others on all sides of the house were very important to listen to, but I don’t think it’s quite the same parallel.

On personal harassment by the Chinese state

I’ve had letters sent to my home, which is a sort of a ‘we know where you live’ type of message by people in mainland China and friends of mine in agencies have been quite clear as to who they believe has done it. And I’ve had fake email addresses set up in my name and sent out messages to people like you often claiming all sorts of extraordinary and spurious claims… There’s absolutely no doubt that in a tyrannical state like China, these are not the actions of free citizens. These are the actions of the Chinese state. There’s no doubt about it at all. And speaking to internet providers, it’s absolutely clear, who has been doing it, there’s really no doubt at all.

‘Minor irritation’

The Chinese state has been doing this to its own people for 50 years — it’s hardly surprising that it’s now doing it to people it considers a nuisance overseas. The reality is that the Chinese government runs an extremely aggressive totalitarian regime with which it seeks to silence dissent. It has some of the largest numbers of people in prison, it has some of the highest capital punishment rates in the world, it executes in prisons in order to achieve its aims. And it intimidates in order to attempt to silence beforehand. And you know, the fact that I’m getting some minor irritation, it shouldn’t be here or there.

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Spermageddon: are humans going extinct?

Thu, 25 Mar 2021 16:20:48 GMT

Is the human race on the verge of extinction? That’s the jaw-dropping claim made in Professor Shanna Swan’s new book ‘Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race’. According to the book, sperm counts have dropped almost 60% since 1973 and suggests that they could reach zero by 2045, which would mean no more reproduction and no more babies.

This is a worrying discovery, particularly as one of the central drivers of this trend is modernity itself; Swann argues that chemicals, ranging from ATM receipts to Tupperware plastic, in the modern environment are altering —and endangering — human sexual development, and is getting worse by the year.

Even if you find this argument a little too extreme (as UnHerd columnist Tom Chivers does), Prof Swan is certainly worth listening to. Having devoted over 20 years of her career to the study of sperm, the epidemiologist is about as well-credentialed as they come and has made a fascinating contribution to the debate. We thank Prof Swan for her time and hope you enjoy the discussion. Key quotes below:

On plummeting sperm count:

What we found was that sperm count had to climb dramatically over the preceding 40 years, and was at a point where nearly half of men would be entering that range of sperm count, which is associated with sub-fertility at least. We didn’t see any indication that the slope of that line had levelled off, so that when we looked at the data restricting it to the past 30 years, 20 years, 10 years, you might hope that it would be flattening out. But we didn’t see any indication of that, which is alarming, because if it were to continue on its present course — that’s a difficult thing to project — but just mathematically, if you’ve extended the line, it does hit zero in 2045. So that’s the median sperm count, that means half of men would have no sperm.

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Debate: are vaccine passports necessary?

Thu, 18 Mar 2021 16:12:13 GMT

Are vaccine passports the fastest way back to normality or do they bring us a step closer towards a dystopian checkpoint state?

On today’s LockdownTV, Freddie Sayers heard from both sides of the debate. Making the case for vaccine passports was Kirsty Innes, Head of Digital Government for the Tony Blair Institute, whose recent paper called for the implementation of what she called ‘digital health passports’. Innes argues that, by using a QR code on people’s phones that shows a tick or cross indicator, passports would make it easier to “manage the risk” of the virus in certain settings (pubs, stadiums, care homes etc).

This, according to Silkie Carlo, Director of Big Brother Watch, a civil liberties group, is “alarming”. She warned that this kind of discrimination between the vaccinated and unvaccinated would lead to a “segregated surveillance society” that takes a big step towards mandatory vaccines. Given that Britain has administered 25 million doses, mostly to its vulnerable population, that should be a reason to liberalise — not clamp down on — society.

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Paul Kingsnorth: science can never replace the mythic

Wed, 10 Mar 2021 15:45:31 GMT

Paul Kingsnorth doesn’t fit neatly into Left or Right — which is only one of the reasons we consider him one of the more interesting thinkers of our time. He has been talking and writing about nature for over 25 years, and during that period he has developed a his own self-reliant, localised form of environmentalism.

Formerly a climate activist, Paul grew disaffected with the movement when he came to the realisation that “economic monster” that enveloped the world was too great to fight against. Instead, he channelled his energies into writing books, essays, novels and poetry, all of which have been hugely influential in the way we view our relationship with the modern world and its maladies.

In his own life, he has tried to “secede from the system” as much as possible by living on his own farmstead out in western Ireland in county Galway. While he admits that it is impossible to fully withdraw from the world, small acts of resistance — whether they are using an unconnected compost loo or refusing to use a smartphone — allows him to “jump off the treadmill”. His recent conversion to Christianity came as a surprise, not least to Paul, and it gave him a deeper appreciation of the importance of limits and humility. Below are some excerpts from this enthralling interview:

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Lord Sumption: mass civil disobedience has begun

Thu, 04 Mar 2021 08:47:08 GMT

Jonathan Sumption was once the epitome of the Establishment — a brilliant barrister who represented the Government in the Hutton enquiry, Supreme Court Justice, supporter of the Remain campaign and esteemed historian of the Hundred Years’ War. But then Covid happened.

Over the past year, his unabashed criticism of lockdown policies has turned him into something of a renegade. It is a development that mystifies him; as he sees it, his views have always been mainstream liberal, and it is the world around that has changed.

In the course of our conversation, the retired judge doesn’t hold back. He asserts that it is becoming morally acceptable to ignore Covid regulations, and even warns that a campaign of “civil disobedience” has already begun.

You can read more about what he really thinks here.

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Darren McGarvey: Class, not identity, should drive politics

Fri, 26 Feb 2021 11:59:32 GMT

Class is a subject that, no matter how much we advance as a society, we seem unable to stop talking about — especially in the UK. Glasgow rapper Darren McGarvey, otherwise known as Loki, has been thinking a lot about it for a new documentary series on the BBC. Over the years, Loki has developed a reputation for scathing social commentaries through his music and writing; three years ago he published a book, Poverty Safari, detailing the rapper’s working class upbringing in Scotland and winning the Orwell Prize in the process.

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Politicians of Left and Right join forces to question lockdowns

Wed, 24 Feb 2021 11:53:48 GMT

One of the main features of the UK lockdowns has been the near-uniform consensus around them. As each one has gone by, cross-party support for lockdowns has only strengthened while fewer voices have been willing to offer anything in the way of dissent. There have been exceptions on both sides of the aisle: Lord (David) Blunkett, a famous figure of the New Labour era and former Home Secretary, and Sir Charles Walker, a prominent Conservative Party backbencher and vice chairman of the 1922 Committee, the all-important backbencher group.

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Claire Lehmann: Australia is the canary in the Facebook coal mine

Fri, 19 Feb 2021 13:29:42 GMT

Earlier this week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had a difficult decision to make. Incoming legislation in Australia meant that social media platforms like his were going to be forced to pay news providers to new content. How was he going to respond? Quite aggressively, it would seem. Not only did he instantly pull all news content from Facebook Australia, but he did so overnight — without any warning — before the law even came into effect.

So where does this leave news providers and online sites Down Under? Earlier today, Freddie Sayers spoke to Quillette’s founding editor Claire Lehmann, who joined us from Sydney, to give us a clearer understanding of what this means for publications like hers.

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Government scientist: dystopian talk of ‘new normal’ scares me

Tue, 16 Feb 2021 15:00:54 GMT

When is life going to go back to normal? That’s the question on everyone’s lips and one that Government ministers have — so far— been reluctant to answer. It was hoped that the advent of a vaccine would lead to a loosening of restrictions, but as things stand the country will be in full lockdown for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile there is a growing campaign among some parts of the ZeroCovid campaign for keeping certain restrictions in place permanently.

One scientist who stands firmly against this proposal is Dr Michael Tildesley, an epidemiologist from the University of Warwick. Dr Tildesley is a formal advisor to the Government, on SPI-M or the “scientific pandemic influenza group on modelling”, which feeds into SAGE, the government scientific committee. While Dr Tildesley favours a slow and gradual loosening of restrictions, he is adamant that keeping restrictive measures in place forever is “very, very scary” and verging on “dystopian”.

#Covid-19 #ZeroCovid #lockdown

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Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Covid will change the immigration question forever

Thu, 11 Feb 2021 16:25:47 GMT

It is hard to think of a more sensitive topic than the connection between sexual violence against women and the surge in immigration from Muslim countries into Europe since 2015. But then, it is hard to think of a more credible person to address it than Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who herself began life in Somalia and ended up claiming asylum in the Netherlands to escape a forced marriage.

In this fascinating interview, Ayaan discusses how the pandemic will effect the West’s view of immigration:

'There’s a sense that when it comes to immigration, we were told, well, we can’t do this, because it’s going to violate our civil rights. We are liberal societies. And as liberal societies, there are things we can’t do you know, deportations, closing borders, this, that and the other. And now with COVID, what are we doing? We’re closing borders, we’re constraining our civil liberties. We’re having lockdown after lockdown. And so I think even after COVID has passed (us if it’s ever passed us), I think voters are going to think wait a second, you subjected us to all of these things. So you can’t make those arguments afterwards.'

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Roger Hallam: the conservative case for Extinction Rebelllion

Wed, 03 Feb 2021 16:27:54 GMT

As the Conservative government prepares to host the COP26 climate summit, famous environmental campaigner and co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, Roger Hallam, has a message he wants people to hear: his movement is not just for woke students and the radical Left.

In an eye-opening interview, he tells Freddie Sayers about the importance of the nation-state, social conservatism, local community, and how he wants church leaders and ex-police officers in his movement. His pitch, in short, is that philosophical conservatives should not be afraid to embrace radical environmentalism:

'There’s a certain amount of cowardice amongst social conservatives, that they see this culture war, and they don’t want to make that step that I’m making today in talking to you. I want social conservatives to step forward and say, ‘Yes, I’m going to sit on an XR platform’. And as a social conservative, you know, as an ex-police officer, as a church leader, right? And say, ‘Yes, I don’t agree with your culture. But I agree with the moral imperative, that at this time in history, we have to start going above and beyond our sectional interest’. And I think that’s a key element of social conservatism at its best, which is to put the national interest, the interest of the whole of society above the sectional or cultural interest.'

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Teachers speak out: is closing schools immoral?

Fri, 29 Jan 2021 16:00:19 GMT

For much of the past year, across Europe and the wider world, schools have been closed. Was this a morally justifiable policy?

Freddie Sayers spoke to teachers and one former teacher, now MP, to find out: what is the reality on the ground? What is the impact on children’s lives? At the end of it do we think it was the right decision? Katharine Birbalsingh, Headmistress of the Michaela Community School in northwest London. Miriam Cates MP, Conservative MP and former science teacher and Alex Gutentag, a public school teacher from Oakland in California.

Each of them comes to a different conclusion but they agree on one thing: the impact on children of such an extended period of school closures is very grave.

Many thanks to Katharine, Miriam and Alex for sharing their thoughts so candidly.

https://unherd.com/thepost/special-report-is-closing-schools-immoral/

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Sacked Eton teacher: I stand by my Patriarchy lecture

Thu, 21 Jan 2021 10:58:04 GMT

When teacher Will Knowland was sacked by Eton for refusing to take down a lecture from his YouTube account, his departure sparked furious debate. The lecture, ‘The Patriarchy Paradox’, argued that the difference between the two sexes were not social constructions, but due to biological differences too.

To its critics, the video was deemed offensive and sexist for espousing such a retrograde view of masculinity. But to Knowland and his supporters, whether the content was offensive or not was secondary to the video’s broader purpose: that these ideas, however provocative they may be, are fair game for discussion and debate.

That this incident occurred at the world’s most prestigious school — home to over 20 British Prime Ministers (including the current one) and princes William and Harry — has only served to fuel the controversy further.

The story caught our eye because it’s an intriguing case study of the nexus between elite institutions, competing visions of masculine virtue and the limits of acceptable ideas. It’s clear that Knowland sees himself as more than just a teacher looking to provoke his pupils but also a custodian of Eton’s traditions, which he sees as being under threat:

'I felt that my duty to uphold Eton’s very long rich tradition of encouraging independent critical thoughts and having broad based debate was being called into question. Why should we stop boys from watching this even in their own time? People should be allowed to make up their own minds about it' - Will Knowland

Knowland believes that a liberal education, should create an environment in which a full range of ideas should be discussed, which he fears is slipping away:

'I think, watching the way in which debate had been narrowed over the last five years or so, particularly on this topic at an all boys school struck me as slightly strange. And if you’re an all boys school, and you can’t have a rigorous open discussion of masculinity, as informed by anthropology, and psychology, I think something is going wrong. And if the reason for that is that it might upset a member of staff, then you’re heading in the safespace direction. And I think that if Eton can’t resist that, which is a threat, that is, I think it’s fair to say permeating the wider culture, if Eton, can’t resist that then I think very few places have got a chance of doing so' - Will Knowland

But was sacrificing a job that he held for nine years worth it?

'Well, I knew I was taking a risk making a stand on a point of principle. But as far as I see it, it’s a point of principle that is essential to the identity of the college, and also essential to what a liberal education is all about. So there’s a sense in which, if I’d allowed that, my job already wouldn’t have been as valuable to me. I mean, there are people who might say, you stay in it just for the money, but any teacher who’s in teaching for the money is very easily bought. And I think that there are more important things than that. And there’s a sense in which I’d lost my job even before I was sacked' - Will Knowland

Giving up your job on principle might be one thing, but choosing to do so over a contentious and factually dubious YouTube lecture may be another. We’ll leave it to you to decide, but thanks to Will for his time.

Watch the video version of the podcast here

Watch Will Knowland's video 'The Patriarchy Paradox' here.

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Adam Wagner: are lockdowns against human rights?

Mon, 18 Jan 2021 10:07:31 GMT

Human rights lawyer Adam Wagner meets Freddie Sayers.

Adam Wagner is one of the UK’s highest-profile legal experts on human rights, citing Shami Chakrabati as one of his main influences in the field. He strongly distances himself from “covid deniers” whose attempt to minimise the threat of the virus he describes as “dangerous nonsense”, and expressed dismay at Lord Sumption’s insensitive phrasing about the value of lives on television yesterday. In other words, he’s about as far from an ideological Right-winger as you’ll find in the British media.

So it was especially sobering to hear him set out some of the things he is worried about from a legal and human rights perspective since the pandemic started around 12 months ago. He wondered aloud on Twitter whether, had the virus not originated in China and had the response not been set by their invention of lockdowns, this approach would ever have become the accepted sensible response in liberal Western democracies?

He argues that, while he absolutely accepts that the virus constitutes a threat that justifies emergency action:

Lockdowns have become a “received wisdom” and that, in due course, a proper inquiry into which components actually were effective, and whether each component passed the proportionality test, is essential.

The emergency powers taken by the Government have been abused — they were not designed to be used over such a long period of time. He deplores the lack of oversight and due process for these measures that change everybody’s lives.

The “Napoleonic” principle that everything is illegal unless you are explicitly allowed it is an inversion of the way the law has worked in this country throughout modern times. If you had told a human rights expert or public lawyer this would be the situation 12 months ago they would never have believed you.

From a Human Rights perspective, balancing the right to life with the right to associate, and the right to a family life, is a precarious act and it is right to scrutinise every measure in that context and be sceptical of them to make sure they are not going too far

Once restrictions are taken for temporary emergencies, a look at history shows that they tend to become permanent (he cites the terrorism measures in response to 9/11 as an example).

Many thanks to Adam for such an interesting conversation. And apologies for the temporary studio — we're refurbishing!

Watch the video version here: https://unherd.com/thepost/adam-wagner-are-lockdowns-a-threat-to-human-rights/

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Andrew Sullivan: I was right about Trump

Mon, 11 Jan 2021 18:18:41 GMT

Freddie Sayers speaks to writer and commentator Andrew Sullivan to help understand what's going on in America.

The images from the 6th January riots at the US Capitol will be with us for years — shocking, unnerving, and ultimately tragic for the five people who died. But was it “armed insurrection” or a failure of policing? How close did the President come to directly inciting violence? What is a wise way for Democrats to respond?

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Jonathan Haidt: the political chaos isn't over yet

Wed, 06 Jan 2021 15:54:18 GMT

Accompanying article here: https://unherd.com/thepost/jonathan-haidt-the-political-chaos-isnt-over-yet/

Freddie Sayers meets American social psychologist and NYU professor Jonathan Haidt to discuss how the Right and Left positions have evolved over the past few years.

(1) Harm/care,

(2) Fairness/reciprocity,

(3) In-group/loyalty,

(4) Authority/respect,

(5) Purity/sanctity.

Those are the five moral ‘foundations’ on which, according to moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, liberals and conservatives divide. In his bestseller 2012 book ‘The Righteous Mind’, the NYU professor made the argument that liberals tend to value the first two foundations over the others, harm and fairness, while conservatives value the others just as much.

But have the past few years, particularly the last 12 months, changed everything? After Trump, Brexit and now a pandemic, global protests and a contested US election we were curious to find out from Jonathan how — or if — the characteristics of Left and Right have changed. Is the new Left not rather more interested in Authority and in-group loyalty than they used to be? And is the prevalence of cancel culture and online censorship now a hallmark of liberal purity? How do these divides map across different generations?

We put these questions to Professor Haidt, and his answers were both unsettling and enlightening. Thanks to him for taking the time to talk to us.

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Glenn Greenwald: tech censorship of Covid discussion is dangerous

Mon, 28 Dec 2020 15:41:00 GMT

Recently, in the comments underneath our LockdownTV YouTube videos, people have been saying that our videos are being ‘downrated’ on YouTube search. Type in Aella, or Michael Levitt, for example, and videos come above ours in the search results that are much older, viewed much fewer times, and come from channels that have much smaller followings. It feels a bit rich to make accusations of censorship against a platform that has brought us millions of views and over 110,000 followers, but could it be that heterodox channels like ours have found their way onto a blacklist of channels that should be ever so gently… suppressed?

#Censorship #Pandemic #Democrats

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Tom Holland: is it Christian to cancel Christmas?

Wed, 23 Dec 2020 12:59:50 GMT

Historian Tom Holland, author of bestselling book Dominion, about the impact of Christianity on Western civilisation, sits down with Freddie Sayers for our Christmas special to talk about Christmas, and whether it is still a Christian festival even if it’s been cancelled.

Anxiety about Christmas being “cancelled” has been a staple in tabloid newspapers for decades — but according to writer and historian Tom Holland, it’s been around a lot longer than that.

“Anxiety about that is in itself a very Christian tradition,” he told me in our LockdownTV Christmas Special (complete with crackling fire and stockings). “By the time you get to the Reformation in England, the Puritans in particular are very anxious about the way in which they see the Roman Church as having failed to root up the brambles and nettles of Paganism… The Puritans are the first people to draw up this thesis that Christmas celebrations derive from the pagan.”

The stereotype of Cromwell cancelling Christmas is not quite fair, says Tom, but the echoes were profound.

“One of the fascinations of this strangest of Christmases is that actually it does bring you quite close to what the Puritans were worried about. Just as people now who want to really rein in Christmas are doing it for the best of reasons, because it they think that it will save lives and be for the good of society as a whole, that was exactly the motivation of the Puritans… They were anxious that celebrating Christmas in a pagan way would doom those who did it to eternal death. It’s about health in both cases, a desire to not needlessly see people lost to death.”

But despite the Christian impulses behind many of the pandemic restrictions, the absence of the Church in playing a leading role in this pandemic has been new, and striking. Not only did they close their doors for the first time since the Interdict in the 13th century, church leaders have been remarkably absent from the discourse.

“The risk for the churches is that they come to seem like an eccentric and not very important sub department of the welfare state. The role played by bishops, the messages that they were giving, were basically public health messages — but if the church is going to play a distinctive role, that is inadequate… The point of them must be to talk about the idea that there is a purpose to this, that there is a dimension that lies beyond the merely physical — all the stuff that traditionally churches have talked about but which they now seem slightly embarrassed about.”

We covered his own faith, reflections on this particular Christmas, and the ongoing presence of the Christian influence in so much of this year’s events.

Thanks to Tom for a great discussion.

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Swedish Professor: we are headed for disaster

Fri, 18 Dec 2020 11:52:00 GMT

The world of Swedish epidemiology is small. Fredrik Elgh is a Professor of Virology at Umeå University in Northern Sweden and a clinical physician, but earlier in his career, heading up a department at the Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control in Stockholm, a certain Anders Tegnell was in his staff, and Johan Giesecke was another department head. From our 45-minute conversation, I think we can surmise that they are no longer on speed dial.

Professor Elgh has been one of the most outspoken critics of the Swedish response to Covid-19, calling for more dramatic action as early as March 2nd in an op-ed in the main Swedish broadsheet. Since then, he has been shocked by what he sees as inaction by the Swedish government. “In the early days, the information was ‘this was nothing to worry about,’ week after week after week,” he says.

From the start of the epidemic, there was no serious attempt to quarantine arrivals from infected areas in Europe — much of the Stockholm infection is thought to have arrived from returning skiers from the Alps in February — and even contacts of known cases were not required to isolate. As Professor Elgh puts it, “there was no will to stop this, no will to put people in quarantine that came from these places, no will even to put people in quarantine that had been in contact with people who came down with the disease, no will to stop pupils going to school who had come back from infected areas.”

He targets Johan Giesecke and Anders Tegnell for particular criticism. “They have not really told us what the exact strategy was, but it must have been that it should sweep through the community rapidly,” he says. “I will say to the day that I die that this was a huge mistake.”

Once the summer arrived and cases and deaths fell to a very low level, due to seasonal effects, he believes that the country should have been preparing for a second wave. “We could have prepared ourselves in a number of ways during the summer. I was really upset when it was like everything was over and we had done a fantastic job. That was not okay with me.”

Professor Elgh says that right now, dramatic action is required. “What we have to do — we have to save lives. We have to save health. In Sweden, we need to save our health system because that is almost full… In a fortnight we will have a tremendous amount of cases in our hospitals.”

“I would install a very tough lockdown for four weeks. First two weeks of lockdown so you get rid of the contagion from the streets and the shops and everywhere, then another two weeks to make sure that spread within families comes down to as near zero as possible.”

I put it to him that what that practically means is on-off lockdowns all the way until the vaccine has been very widely distributed. “Yes, it might be like that. That’s probably what we are going to see in the other European countries… and we just have to do that… Look at our curve – where is it going? We cannot accept that… The current measures are not enough. If we go on like this, week after week, waiting for the curve to come down, we will be in a disastrous situation.”

Our thanks to Professor Elgh for sharing his views.

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Meet Aella: OnlyFans' intellectual porn star

Tue, 15 Dec 2020 15:36:39 GMT

OnlyFans, the self-publishing pornography app, has taken off during the course of 2020 with an average of 200,000 new users signing up each day. The platform allows creators to release photos and videos to paying subscribers; while the content published is entirely the choice of the creator, the most common genre is pornography.

In an extraordinarily candid conversation, Aella explains to Freddie Sayers how she rationalises her lifestyle. She believes that while some people get into sex work because they are already on the outskirts of society and it is the only choice they have to survive, others join the business because they “realise this is the best way to earn money for the least amount of work and are doing it strategically. A surprisingly high number of women in the rationality community have tried sex work.”

Aella puts herself in both categories; on the one hand, she got into porn when she was desperate, but now believes that her highly analytical, high de-coupling mind meant that she was well-suited to this her line of work: “I think that my brain is different. I’ve noticed that since I was a kid, I’m just different in the way I process things”. Perhaps Aella’s success (she is among the top 0.3% of earners) can be at least partially attributed to her data-driven approach. She regularly conducts polls among her viewers and analyses the data to inform her content and grow her audience.

She grew up in a ‘fundamentalist Christian’ household, and says that, rather than a rebellion against her upbringing, she believes it was oddly good training for belonging to a group that is very little understood by wider society.

Does she not feel sex is sacred at all? Does she not worry that an example is being set for hundreds of thousands of girls for whom it would be very harmful? What about the men – what sort of men is a society with unlimited porn producing?

She offers answers to all these difficult questions, and many more. Thanks to Aella for giving her time.

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Genomics expert: does Covid mutation explain the Asia exception?

Thu, 10 Dec 2020 11:57:56 GMT

Freddie Sayers meets David Engelthaler, co-director of the T-Gen Research Institute and former state epidemiologist of Arizona.

Earlier this week, Freddie Sayers spoke to David Engelthaler, co-director of the T-Gen Research Institute and former state epidemiologist of Arizona, who has been investigating this idea. His view is that there is now “really compelling evidence” that this strain replicates faster than earlier strains, which "likely" came out of China and through to Europe. "It's really quickly dominated all of the other strains that were seen in Europe at the time, it became the predominant strain that came into the Americas, spread throughout the United States and is now spread to pretty much every corner of the planet".

In his own state, Engelthaler witnessed several of the early introductions to Arizona, coming from the Pacific coast straight from China, but fizzled out quickly, with less effective transmission. “And then all of a sudden we started having explosive outbreaks. When we go back and look genomically, the vast majority of those cases where we had very large outbreaks were being driven by the strains that were coming from the East Coast out of Europe, which all seemed to have this particular mutation in the spike protein.”

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Tutor speaks out on Cambridge free speech battle

Mon, 07 Dec 2020 11:42:34 GMT

Over recent years, we’ve learned to pay attention to the intellectual trends and taboos on university campuses — they have a way of spilling out into mainstream corporate and political life.

Which is why the vote among the 7,000 faculty at Cambridge on a new 'free speech policy' matters. The results will be announced tomorrow at 5pm and will be an indication of the willingness to resist the increasing threats to free speech and academic enquiry around politically sensitive topics.

Cambridge has been in the news all year in this regard —rescinding the invitation of a visiting fellowship to Canadian academic Jordan Peterson, removing academic Noah Carl after his controversial study into race and intelligence and subjecting a college porter to a campaign to be removed after he voted a certain way on a trans issue as a Labour local councillor.

Freddie Sayers spoke to Dr Arif Ahmed, a Philosophy tutor and fellow on Gonville and Caius college, who has raised concerns that the inclusion of a requirement to be ‘respectful’ of people’s opinions and identities, included in the proposed free speech policy, risks legitimising future censorship. He thinks it could have been used to justify excluding Jordan Peterson, on the grounds that he has not been sufficiently respectful of certain religions, or forbidding the inclusion of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons in a course about free speech.

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Exiled Hong Kong dissident: why we should fear China

Thu, 03 Dec 2020 15:09:20 GMT

Arguably the most famous Hong Kong dissident alive today, Nathan Law has become one of the most recognisable faces of the pro-democracy movement in his homeland. Having been at the forefront of protests against the controversial Hong Kong national security law over the summer, the democracy activist was subsequently forced to flee Hong Kong over fears for his safety. The departure proved timely: just this week three of his fellow activists (including Joshua Wong) were arrested and sentenced to 10-13 months in prison.

Nathan now lives in the UK, which took the unprecedented step earlier this year of offering residency to any holder of a British National overseas passport in Hong Kong. Up to three million Hongkongers are eligible for this residency, and according to Nathan, as many as 100,000 people could arrive in the first year. That is a substantial figure, and one that will present Boris Johnson’s government with a potentially difficult question on how to accommodate for such an influx.

Nathan speaks fondly of his adopted home, and is hopeful that his presence here is not a sign of failure but a signal for change. He told Freddie Sayers that the West must be more aware of the threat from China and hold them accountable for human rights violations in Xinjiang and foreign interference in states like his own. He also spoke about his blue collar upbringing and his experience in moving from China to join his family in Hong Kong at a young age, which gave him a valuable insight into events today.

We hope you enjoy the interview and thank you to Nathan for giving us the time.

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Where next for the Bernie Sanders Left?

Tue, 01 Dec 2020 00:01:02 GMT

With less than two months two go until Joe Biden’s inauguration, the President-elect has been busy filling up cabinet posts with various Obama-era appointees. These appointments have been met with some criticism by those on the Left, who argue that — in the face of a global pandemic, a flagging economy and impending climate crisis — they are not nearly bold enough.

Freddie Sayers spoke to historian and sociologist of the Left Harvey Kaye, a former advisor and supporter of Bernie Sanders, who has subsequently become more critical. As a professor of Democracy and Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, he lives in one of America’s most politically competitive states, offering a front row seat at the rise of Donald Trump. His warning in this interview is clear: that it was exactly the kind of neoliberal policies that Biden seems likely to return to that got the billionaire into power.

According to Professor Kaye, the only way for Biden to meet the challenges of today is by returning to the Rooseveltian tradition in the party. He argues that the last 45 years has seen a steady decline in the relationship between the Democrat Party and the American working class, which was perfectly encapsulated by the uninspiring cast of candidates in the Democratic primaries. Even Bernie Sanders drifted too close to the centre and should have done more to challenge his rivals on issues like free healthcare.

It’s not often that you hear about Bernie Sanders not being radical enough, and it was interesting getting a different perspective from such a distinguished historian on the Left. We hope you agree!

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Suzanne Moore: Why I had to leave The Guardian

Wed, 25 Nov 2020 00:01:57 GMT

Suzanne Moore is one of the most famous columnists at the Guardian newspaper — or at least she was until she finally left last week, accused by colleagues of being a 'transphobe'.

For the first time, she talks about her experience to Freddie Sayers — what it felt like to be rounded on how she felt couldn't stay.

It's a sobering story of an attempt to shut down freedom of speech at one of the world's biggest newspapers.

Don't miss her full essay on UnHerd: https://unherd.com/2020/11/why-i-had-to-leave-the-guardian/

Watch the full interview on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSVd36xEplY&feature=youtu.be

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Prof Tim Spector: hopes of a vaccine will lead to more lockdowns

Sat, 14 Nov 2020 13:11:33 GMT

One of the most interesting sources of data for the progress of the Covid-19 pandemic has been the ZOE app — downloaded by over 4.3 million people, who input symptoms and test results every day.

Its founder is Professor Tim Spector, an epidemiologist from KCL, and the app is now funded by the Government and Number Ten receives daily data from it. He received an OBE for services to fighting the pandemic earlier this year.

The ZOE app made headlines recently for demonstrating quite conclusively that the number of daily infections was already levelling off and even coming down in some areas of England at the end of October, prior to the second national lockdown. It painted a very different picture from the apocalyptic scenarios described in the Prime Minister’s briefing.

Professor Spector was refreshingly outspoken when I interviewed him yesterday. He said

Had the Government followed data from the ZOE app they would not have gone into a second lockdown, which he believes was unnecessary
The Government is tilted too much in the direction of caution and has lost a balanced sense of proportion
He is worried that they will use the new vaccine news as a “carrot” to keep us locked down for the next three months, when he believes it will likely take most of the year to get enough people vaccinated
He understands people’s concerns about such a new vaccine, and ZOE will be tracking any side effects from vaccinated people via its app

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Francis Fukuyama: What Trump got right

Thu, 12 Nov 2020 18:27:52 GMT

From the archive, first published: 29 October 2020

Since Aris Roussinos’s fantastic essay on UnHerd earlier this month, “Why Fukuyama was right all along,” I’ve been getting to know the much-misunderstood thinker’s writing.

It turns out that, far from the triumphalist credo of 1990s liberalism, The End of History is a disquieting, and prescient, sketch of what the liberal era would feel like, and how it would eventually go wrong. Much of Fukuyama’s writing since – from The Great Disruption (1999), through to his most recent book, Identity(2018) — has focused on the inadequacy of bland technocratic globalism. It’s not primarily an economic analysis: he describes how the part of the human soul (thymos) that seeks dignity and recognition of differences was suppressed by the global unanimity and so the populist waves of 2016 and beyond were inevitable.

And yet he remains highly critical of the populist governments that challenged that consensus, recently writing how the ejection of Donald Trump from office next week is the most important political event of the past two generations.

I wanted explore that tension, and had a fascinating and enjoyable discussion from his home in Stanford, California.

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Scott Atlas: I’m disgusted and dismayed

Thu, 12 Nov 2020 18:25:11 GMT

From the archive, first published: 20 October 2020.

Freddie Sayers caught up with Scott Atlas, a healthcare policy academic from the Hoover Institute at Stanford, who has become the latest lightning rod for the controversy around Covid-19 policy and his support for a more targeted response.

Speaking from inside the White House, where he is now Senior advisor to the President and a member of the Coronavirus task force, he does not hold back. He tells us that he is disgusted and dismayed at the media and public policy establishment, sad that it has come to this, cynical about their intentions, and angry that lockdown policies have been allowed to go on so long.

He won’t be rushing back to Stanford, where his colleagues have rounded on him, if the President loses in November.

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Piers Morgan: I don’t want to be hated anymore

Thu, 12 Nov 2020 18:22:20 GMT

From the archive, first published 15 October 2020

Piers Morgan has made a career out of robust, forceful and — at times — abrasive interviews. Since the start of the pandemic, he has found himself an unlikely hero of the ‘pro-lockdowners’ (even being labelled by one columnist as ‘the hero Gotham didn’t know it wanted, but possibly needed’) for this confrontational style, the full force of which was felt by government ministers earlier this year.

He has, however, been criticised for the hostile nature of his interviews. No minister has appeared on his show for over 100 days, which has led many to question its efficacy of a style that cannot even attract guests. The Good Morning Britain host makes no apology for this, arguing that government officials deserve to be scrutinised — if they can’t deal with a heated interview, how can they be expected to cope in a global pandemic? Morgan expresses deep misgivings over No10’s handling of the Covid outbreak and even goes so far to suggest that, having voted for the Boris Johnson in the last election, he would now vote for Keir Starmer.

But he also admits that he has gone too far in the past. Morgan “totally embraces” his own culpability in inflaming passions on either side of the debate, describing himself as a “work in progress”.

We certainly saw a different, softer side to Piers in this interview. Whether his desire to be a “force for good in the world” will result in a wholesale change in his interviews remains to be seen, but it would be fair to say that stranger things have sprouted out of this pandemic. Enjoy.

Buy Piers’s latest book ‘Wake Up’ here.

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Merlin Sheldrake: the philosophy of fungi

Thu, 12 Nov 2020 18:20:36 GMT

From the archive, first published on 10 September 2020.

What have fungi got to do with politics, philosophy, Covid-19 or any of the great crises we face?

Well, potentially rather a lot.

Merlin Sheldrake is a biologist and expert on the mysterious world of fungi, and has just published a book on the subject, Entangled Life, that grabbed our attention.

He’s a fascinating character and we’ve all found ourselves rather mesmerised with the story he has to tell about the fungal world, its possibilities as well as its challenges to our politics and philosophical assumptions.

We start with the basics, and get increasingly abstract – come minute 37 you might think differently about things! Enjoy.

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Coleman Hughes: The moral case against Black Lives Matter

Thu, 12 Nov 2020 18:17:20 GMT

From the archive, first published 2 July 2020.

It’s easy to dismiss anyone querying the Black Lives Matter movement as either pointlessly contrarian or — worse — actually racist. After all, who could object to the truism contained within the movement’s name?

But there are important questions to ask about what the facts show about the scale of ‘systemic racism’, and whether drawing attention to race in such an intense way ultimately advances or hurts Martin Luther King’s vision of people being judged “not by the colour of their skin but but the content of their character.”

Coleman Hughes is just 24 years old, but as a fellow of the Manhattan Institute and Contributing Editor of City Journal, has already established himself as a brave and distinctly level-headed voice during heated times.

It was a pleasure to talk to him, and hear his measured and fair assessment of race relations in America, and the effect of the wider BLM movement.

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