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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
May 14, 2021•53 min
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...
May 13, 2021•40 min
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 ...
May 10, 2021•29 min
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. Hosted on Acast. See acas...
Apr 30, 2021•41 min
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 CEO s, celebrities , and other politicians all made versions of the same promise: the work was not done. McWhorter, author of the upcoming book ‘Nine Nasty ...
Apr 26, 2021•36 min
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...
Apr 20, 2021•24 min
Hear Jesse Singal discuss his latest book with Freddie Sayers Further reading: The empty promise of pop psychology Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Apr 20, 2021•36 min
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 p...
Apr 16, 2021•41 min
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 b...
Apr 14, 2021•41 min
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 w...
Apr 09, 2021•16 min
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 lov...
Apr 06, 2021•44 min
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, Profes...
Mar 31, 2021•34 min
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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Mar 29, 2021•42 min
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...
Mar 26, 2021•16 min
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...
Mar 25, 2021•30 min
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 indi...
Mar 18, 2021•38 min
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....
Mar 10, 2021•51 min
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...
Mar 04, 2021•52 min
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 th...
Feb 26, 2021•33 min
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 Committ...
Feb 24, 2021•26 min
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...
Feb 19, 2021•18 min
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...
Feb 16, 2021•28 min
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...
Feb 11, 2021•44 min
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 ph...
Feb 03, 2021•31 min
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 Guten...
Jan 29, 2021•38 min
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 se...
Jan 21, 2021•37 min
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 ideologi...
Jan 18, 2021•40 min
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? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Jan 11, 2021•49 min
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 ...
Jan 06, 2021•44 min
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...
Dec 28, 2020•37 min
