Ayaan Hirsi Ali: wokeness is a gift to Islamism
Freddie Sayers speaks with Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Oct 28, 2021•34 min
UnHerd with Freddie Sayers
Freddie Sayers from online magazine UnHerd seeks out top scientists, writers, politicians and thinkers for in-depth interviews to try and help us work out what’s really going on. What started as an inquiry into the pandemic has broadened into a fascinating look at free speech, science, meaning and the ideas shaping our world.
Due to popular demand here is a podcast version of our YouTube — available to watch, for free here or by searching ‘LockdownTV’.
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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Episodes
Steven Pinker: How rational are YOU?
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...
Oct 27, 2021•1 hr 1 min
Ash Sarkar: Left and Right must unite against Big Tech censorship
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 pri...
Oct 26, 2021•22 min
The retreat of the West is a disaster - Bernard-Henri Lévy
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....
Oct 08, 2021•43 min
Debate: are Conservatives doomed?
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, ar...
Oct 06, 2021•1 hr 5 min
Louise Leach: my journey from secular to Orthodox
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 ...
Sep 26, 2021•25 min
Anders Tegnell: Sweden won the argument on Covid
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. Endl...
Sep 23, 2021•21 min
Bari Weiss: Covid has exposed the hypocrisy of the elites
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 ...
Sep 17, 2021•28 min
'Nudge' author: is the Government manipulating us?
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 th...
Sep 02, 2021•46 min
Prof. Jay Battacharya: I stand by the Great Barrington Declaration
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 a...
Aug 24, 2021•53 min
Clarissa Ward in Kabul: what the Taliban are really like
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 medi...
Aug 18, 2021•19 min
David Shor: College liberals have hijacked the Democratic party
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 touc...
Aug 13, 2021•38 min
Winston Marshall: fightback in the Arts?
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 i...
Jul 29, 2021•1 hr 23 min
Trump Insider: Chances of 2024 run just went up to 2/3
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...
Jul 23, 2021•44 min
Wikipedia co-founder: I no longer trust the website I created
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. Histo...
Jul 14, 2021•32 min
Rupert Sheldrake: Science does not tolerate dissent
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 th...
Jul 06, 2021•41 min
Dr Mike Tildesley: what our Covid forecasts got wrong
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 numbe...
Jul 01, 2021•24 min
Kemi Badenoch: Britain is the best place in the world to be black
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 ...
Jun 28, 2021•21 min
UnHerd event: has lockdown changed us forever?
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, wh...
Jun 25, 2021•1 hr 4 min
Jess de Wahls: Cancelled (and un-cancelled) by the Royal Academy
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 for...
Jun 23, 2021•28 min
Richard Dawkins: 'Scientism' is a dirty word
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 w...
Jun 18, 2021•29 min
SAGE Prof Susan Michie: should we wear masks forever?
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 wi...
Jun 14, 2021•40 min
Chris Bickerton: Welcome to the Technopopulist future
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 govern...
Jun 12, 2021•42 min
Maya Forstater: Today's judgment on trans is a landmark
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...
Jun 10, 2021•29 min
Ex press head: the UK media was not racist towards Meghan
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-infam...
Jun 04, 2021•35 min
Peter Singer: Despite everything, I’m still a cosmopolitan
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 a...
Jun 02, 2021•42 min
Parent: Why I pulled my daughter out of antiracist school
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 ...
May 28, 2021•31 min
Sohrab Ahmari: Why conservatives need to fight
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/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
May 24, 2021•32 min
Nicholas Wade: the case for the Covid lab-leak theory
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 ...
May 20, 2021•34 min
Fired Apple employee: a reckoning is underway
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 quot...
May 18, 2021•18 min
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