UnHerd with Freddie Sayers: Recent Episodes
UnHerd
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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UnHerd's Freddie Sayers talks to Jonathan Sumption about the case in support of Shamima Begum.
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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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UnHerd's Freddie Sayers meets historian David Abulafia.
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UnHerd's Freddie Sayers talks to Ioan Grillo about the ongoing issue at the border between the US and Mexico.
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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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UnHerd's Freddie Sayers meets with Andrew Sullivan, to discuss what he got wrong about Donald Trump
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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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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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UnHerd's Freddie Sayers meets Katharine Birbalsingh, 'Britain's strictest headteacher'.
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UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers meets Oleksiy Arestovych, who intends to challenge President Zelensky in Ukraine's next general election.
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UnHerd's Freddie Sayers and Tom McTague discuss the new war in the Red Sea
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UnHerd's Freddie Sayers sits down with former CIA officer, Mike Baker to talk about Israel, Ukraine and China.
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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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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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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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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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Florence Read and Freddie Sayers took a film crew (and an armed security guard) into the Tenderloin district to find out the truth for themselves. This special report includes remarkable interviews with city supervisor Dean Preston and Michael Shellenberger, author of San Fransicko, as well as drug users, locals and activists across the West.
Visit https://unherd.com/2023/12/the-battle-for-san-francisco/ to watch.
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UnHerd's Flo Read meets Tim Schwab to discuss Bill Gates and the myth of the good billionaire.
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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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UnHerd's Freddie Sayers meets pollster Joe Bedell to discuss the 2024 US election, Trump, and RFK Jr.
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UnHerd's Flo Read meets Nick Bostrom.
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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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UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers meets Tzipi Hotovely, Israeli Ambassador to the United Kingdom.
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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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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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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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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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UnHerd's Freddie Sayers sits down with philosopher John Gray at the UnHerd Club.
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UnHerd's Freddie Sayers sits down with former Greek Minister of Finance Yanis Varoufakis.
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UnHerd's Freddie Sayers meets Matthew Crawford in San Francisco.
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UnHerd's Freddie Sayers sits down with journalist and author Michael Wolff.
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Patrick Brown tells Freddie Sayers why he designed his research to sound catastrophic.
Read the post here.
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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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UnHerd's Florence Read sits down with Gad Saad to talk about why the Western world is so depressed.
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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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Freddie Sayers sits down with UnHerd's political editor Tom McTague to explore Tom's new report into the inner workings of the Tony Blair Institute.
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UnHerd's Freddie Sayers meets Countess Alexandra Tolstoy.
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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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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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Immerse yourself into the mind of luminary writer Paul Kingsnorth, join us for a Sunday seminar on the theme of reconstruction. In dialogue with UnHerd’s Mary Harrington, we will ask: when there’s nothing left to conserve, what is the point of conservatism?
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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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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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UnHerd's Freddie Sayers meets retired US Army General Kevin Ryan.
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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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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
UnHerd's Freddie Sayers sits down with Richard Dawkins to discuss God, covid and the trans debate.
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Freddie Sayers talks to Ukrainian MP Inna Sovsun about the road to victory in Ukraine and its potential costs.
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Freddie Sayers chats with Kathleen Stock at the UnHerd Club, ahead of her much-publicised Oxford Union address.
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UnHerd's Freddie Sayers meets Edward Blum to discuss affirmative action and his career-long crusade against it.
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Florence Read meets Jaron Lanier.
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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/
Freddie Sayers meets Robert F Kennedy Jr.
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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.
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UnHerd's Freddie Sayers meets former CIA Analyst Martin Gurri to discuss Jack Teixeira and the Pentagon leaks.
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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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UnHerd's Freddie Sayers meets Elbridge Colby, former advisor to President Trump and author of the 2018 National Defense Strategy.
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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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UnHerd's Flo Read meets Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb.
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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.
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UnHerd's Freddie Sayers meets Chris Miller, economic historian and author of Chip War.
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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
UnHerd's Freddie Sayers sits down with UnHerd contributor Mary Harrington to discuss her new book, Feminism Against Progress.
Read the Post here
UnHerd's Freddie Sayers meets journalist Isabel Oakeshott to discuss the Lockdown Files.
Read the Post here
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? I spoke to her from the UnHerd studio to find out.
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In the final months of 2022, China lurched suddenly from a policy of Zero Covid to a rapid re-opening of its economy. At the time, Western media went into overdrive, arguing that the end of restrictions in China had resulted in a bloodbath, with hospitals and crematoriums overflowing. Many predicted a million or more would die from Covid in China following the policy relaxation. But how did these claims match up to reality?
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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
UnHerd's Freddie Sayers speaks to journalist Peter Hitchens about a disturbing new Big Brother Watch report into UK government spying and censorship.
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UnHerd's Freddie Sayers chats with American philosopher Matthew B. Crawford in the UnHerd studio.
Check out Matthew's Substack here
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UnHerd's Freddie Sayers meets Dr. Margery Smelkinson and Dr. Leslie Bienen to discuss the efficacy of facemasks.
Read the full Post article here:
UnHerd's Freddie Sayers meets PayPal Co founder David Sacks.
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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
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.
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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?
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Freddie Sayers meets Vivek Ramaswamy
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Freddie Sayers meets political scientist John Mearsheimer, the world-famous proponent of realism in international relations.
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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.
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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.
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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
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?
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UnHerd's Flo Read meets Gary Nichols, whose brother, Alan Nichols, requested euthanasia and died by lethal injection in Canada in June 2019.
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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?
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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:
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
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?
Freddie Sayers in the studio with Ian Skelly
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Freddie Sayers meets Clint Ehrlich
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UnHerd's Freddie Sayers is joined by Stuart McDonald to discuss the curious case of the UK's excess deaths.
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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.
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Read Thomas Fazi’s article on the rise in civil disobedience here
UnHerd's Freddie Sayers speaks to economic historian Prof. Wolfgang Streeck about the crisis in Germany and its implications for the future of Europe.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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Florence Read meets with documentary filmmaker Alex Lee Moyer
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Freddie Sayers speaks to financial analyst Louis Gave about the West's self-made economic crisis.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Freddie Sayers speaks to UnHerd’s Aris Roussinos, reporting from the frontline of the war in Ukraine.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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/
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.
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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?
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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.
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.
Health Secretary Sajid Javid came into the UnHerd studio to talk to Freddie Sayers and look back at lessons learned from the Covid era.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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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:
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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)
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He and his colleagues were surprised and disappointed that the vaccines did not prevent transmission, as they had originally hoped
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The biggest mistake of the pandemic in Israel was closing schools and education – he apologised for that
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Widespread infection is now an inevitable part of future immunity — otherwise known as herd immunity
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Omicron has accelerated the pandemic into the endemic phase, in which Covid will be “like flu”
For more read The Post from UnHerd.
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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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.
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
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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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 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 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.
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.
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 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
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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Freddie Sayers speaks with Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
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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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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
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.
Read more at unherd.com
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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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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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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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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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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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
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 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
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 UnHerdmembers 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
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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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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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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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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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
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
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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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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
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
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
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
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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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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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'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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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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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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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.
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.
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
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.
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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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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Hear Jesse Singal discuss his latest book with Freddie Sayers
Further reading: The empty promise of pop psychology
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
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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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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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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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:
I’m really afraid that the next generations of students, who will be mental health practitioners, are going to be taught that [Ibram X.] Kendi’s version of anti-racism is something that they should take into their psychotherapy sessions with them. Then they will take this teaching into the school as school counsellors to teach the children and that is what is particularly frightening.Because the habits of mind that inform works like Kendi’s and the D’Angelo’s are based on a rigidity and a set of distortions that are likely to lead to a great deal of unhappiness, both in interpersonal relationships and on happiness with one’s sense of self worth.
Shortly after the publication of the video, a familiar pattern emerged: a petition demanding the resignation of Kindsvatter started and a mealy-mouthed apology from the university to the students followed. Kindsvatter is still at the university, but for how long is anyone’s guess. Though he is tenured, he still feels insecure about his position at the school:
'I don’t think one can ever feel too secure in an environment where people are monitoring one so carefully… When the administration is sort of giving the okay to students and faculty to start a change.org petition to get me fired? That does not leave me feeling particularly secure.'
On the parallels between anti-racism and an abusive relationship:
'One thing that happens in abusive relationships is one person will try to control another by suggesting that there’s something deeply wrong with the first, but will never be specific about what that is. So I might say to you, ‘I really feel like I could love you if you would just try to change some things about yourself, and I accept you and I appreciate you and yet I feel like you’ve got some work to do’. But you’re never told precisely what that work is. And then I’ll say something like ‘the work is is never done and don’t expect concrete results’.Because the work is never done, it places this person in a state of uncertainty and anxiety, where they are now encouraged to give their moral compass to somebody else and to check in on somebody else as to whether they are doing the right thing or not. They’re doing what the other person wants them to do. And that’s that is what happens almost word for word in abusive relationships.'
On anti-racism:
'This is kind of a secular religion, what I would call fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is a thought system that does not allow examination of or reflection on the suppositions that inform it. It’s just good in the eyes of the fundamentalist thinkers. And there is fundamentalism, that has broken out in the College of Education, and in the graduate counselling programme, and these ideas are taken to be almost sacred. And their suppositions cannot be critiqued. Because that is almost considered to be a moral violation to critique those suppositions.'
On anti-whiteness:
'The whiteness dialogue more generally has morphed into an idea where all of society’s social ills are based on the dominance of a particular race of people. White people. Which is an incredibly scary way of thinking… When you start attributing either good or bad traits to a person’s race, you have now started an incredibly contagious dialogue that is deeply racist.'
On dissenting students:
'If you don’t buy into this ideology, you tend to be on the outgroup. So those forces are sort of working against the wellness of students who are not buying into this.'
On those fighting the anti-racist agenda:
'They feel dehumanised because they, because they’re not, if they don’t go along with the, with the proper narrative, that they’re told that they’re the wrong and evil. And by the way, you don’t have to be white to feel this.'
On being the ‘racist professor’:
'As other people become the racist professor in the College of Education, people will slowly begin to see that the College of Education is going out of its way to hire people who share this [anti-racist] ideology. But what’s happening is they’re becoming increasingly ideologically isolated. So they have no diversity of thought, and there’s no one in the room to stand up and say maybe a teaching… about negative attributes to persons of a particular race is not a good idea.'
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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.
Though he would broadly categorise himself as a Left-libertarian, he is no friend of the Democrat Party, describing it as the ‘War Machine Party’ and even voted for Trump in 2020. We were interested to learn more about Tim’s rationale behind this move, which also seemed to reflect a broader realignment in American life. Then years since the Occupy Movement, in which anti-corporate, anti-capitalist protesters used social media to advance their cause, they have become, according to Pool, the biggest advocates for censorship:
Somehow now, the Left today that opposed major corporations are the ones primarily saying private companies have a right to regulate speech…So there’s been this strange realignment which shows that many of these people from Occupy Wall Street and from these past protest movements were more interested in tribal victory than they were in the actual cause.
On the global reach of Big Tech:
One of the problems with centralised Big Tech social media is that Twitter’s interests are going to be heavily influenced by American politics. And that’s going to affect a bunch of other countries, creating this weird kind of progressive American cultural supremacy… It makes no sense that Twitter would impose its American values on other countries around the world. That’s essentially America spreading its influence, forcing these companies to use their platforms, either through sanctions or more importantly, Apple and Android can just ban you if you oppose them. They’re making sure that their technological systems are the only systems other countries can use.
On ideological CEOs:
You’ve got a very strong, very fringe but growing political ideology in the US. And this is a worldview held by people like Jack Dorsey…The ideas they hold are held by a very small minority of people in the world; their worldview, about say, critical gender theory is not held by a majority of anyone in any country….It’s particularly strange when they’re literally protesting in Europe over the death of Mike Brown, as if the protests in Europe can influence American policy. They can’t. But that’s the power of social media. And that’s what happens when you have ideological CEOs that only enforce rules based on a fringe subset of political beliefs.
On disliking Joe Biden:
Joe Biden was the Vice President under the Obama administration, where they escalated this massive drone programme and bolstered the US presence in the Middle East. Barack Obama signed the National Defence Authorization Act with the indefinite detention provision, which is one of the most horrifyingly draconian things we’ve ever seen… Barack Obama also authorised the extrajudicial assassinations of American citizens. I look at that with Joe Biden and I’m never gonna support that.
On why he voted for Donald Trump:
He passed an executive order banning critical race theory in the government and companies they are contracted to. Donald Trump also favoured school choice, meaning that people in low income communities could choose to go to better schools. I thought that was very important. And Donald Trump oversaw the Abraham accords bringing historical peace agreements in the Middle East.
On China:
I thought the threat posed by China and their human rights abuses would be a unifying factor in the United States. But now we’re seeing a bunch of articles emerge from outlets like the Washington Post where they say that criticising China is sinophobic and that leads to violence against Asians… It’s also creating this rhetoric that being critical of China is hysterical, and we can’t do it. That’s coming from the woke and the critical theorists. So it feels like even when we have a bigger threat — they’re actually putting Muslims in concentration camps — there are still tribalists who don’t want to admit that we have a common crisis. They just want to be tribalist.
On Gen z attitudes towards authoritarianism:
Gen Z is entering a non-existent dystopian reality. So it’s no surprise that they don’t care about what’s going on. They’ve not lived in a world outside of this crisis. So to them, if you’re at rock bottom, why should you care about what the government is doing? Why should you care about freedoms that you’ve not been able to experience? These are kids who were young during the financial crisis, and now, they’re finally old enough to get into work and to vote. And once again, we have another major crisis. So as far as they’re concerned, just let the government do it.
On a brighter future:
I’m hoping that while we may go through very severe hardship in the next several years, maybe 10 years from now, we’re all going to be very well off and everything will just be in a new booming period, which we’ll see another 60 years of prosperity
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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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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.
On declining population figures:
It is true that the being below replacement, the value of 2.1 children per couple is more common in Western countries. And in Asian countries, that’s where it’s most severe. The lowest point I believe, has been reached at 1.0 children in Korea, just recently. But, that’s the rate of decline. Since 1960, of the most populous countries has been greatest, they are also declining, and declining faster. So it’s going on everywhere and it’s a problem.
On phthalates (a group of chemicals):
Phthalates are interesting because they have the ability to lower testosterone. They’re called anti-androgens: they lower the androgens and testosterone is one of those. And so if the pregnant woman is exposed to phthalates in early pregnancy, these phthalates can reduce foetal testosterone at a critical time for male genital sexual development. This was first shown in rodents, and it was so striking that it was named the phthalate syndrome.
On where these chemicals are found:
These chemicals affect the body’s hormones. Phthalates affect androgens, and bisphenols, which makes plastic hard and line tin cans — they are oestrogenic, which also affects reproductive function. There are other chemicals; for instance, we showed in our study that men with exposure higher levels of pesticides, in mid Missouri had much poor semen quality. Other chemicals set in flame retardants in your Teflon pan, in lots of things in your home, your wall coverings and floor coverings. And food is a really major source.
On transitioning:
It feels like there’s an increase, but we don’t have that data. So in the past it could have been there and completely unrecognised and un-talked about. What we do say is that disorders of sexual development, the actual alterations in the genitals — those are caused by environmental chemicals. And there’s many examples of that in rodents, fish, and frogs. So many species have, for example, ovaries and testicles in the same organism, right? So there’s no question that chemicals can change and make these developments atypical, but what the animals would prefer, what gender they would choose, if they could — how would we know that?
On how to limit chemical exposure:
You could choose products that are stored in glass. And I would recommend that you not store them in your home in plastics. And certainly you do not heat them in plastics. Heat and plastic is a really bad no, no.
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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.
So is testing a possible solution? Carlo argued that the example of mass testing in schools serves as a cautionary example. Infection rates are low and there is a 0.1% false positive rate with the lateral tests being used, which means that some schoolchildren are being unfairly excluded.
Innes insisted that her plan would be to integrate testing status with the health pass so that everybody can use them. In other words, if someone did not want to take a vaccine, they could get tested before going to an event or establishment to prove that they did not have the virus. This may be expensive, but Innes stressed that tests are going to be a feature of our lifetime and will only get cheaper and more accurate. Ultimately, it is a price we have to pay for lifting restrictions and getting out of lockdown.
The concept that vaccine passports were a “route out of” lockdown is a false one, said Carlo. It is the “narrative of authoritarianism” in which people are presented with a choice of living under house arrest or living on tag. She argued that this “authoritarian dream where the population are treated like cattle” is driven by ideological and commercial reasons. Under the guise of biometrics, companies try to sell ‘silver-bullet solutions’ that trick people into believing that more surveillance will make their lives easier, much like vaccine passports.
In spite of Innes’s claim that the passports would be temporary and regulated, Carlo pointed out that, if we have learnt anything from the 9/11 years, it should be to not make extreme and reactive policies that change the way that we live.
Carlo also argued that vaccine passports will have a negative psychological impact on the population too: if the passports are seen as a kind of freedom pass to live safely, that, if taken away, would be a major source of anxiety for the population.
“Having a tool available and putting it to use are two separate things” said Innes. Britain is a parliamentary democracy with strong liberal values and we as a society would not allow Government abuse these emergency measures. And as for daily life, Innes says that it won’t feel like anything more than a contactless payment and would only be restricted to certain environments.
But to Carlo’s mind, the passports’ seemingly innocent beginnings in certain environments would inevitably spill into other environments. In turn, this “health surveillance theatre ” would create a ratcheting effect across society.
So whose side are the great British public on? Innes quoted a study showing that only 20% of the population are opposed to health passes showing that there is broad acceptance of the idea. Carlo admitted that the past year has been a “rocky road” for liberties, but she maintained her faith in the rationalism of the public.
Innes conceded that, though she supports passports for children, she would propose implement them for babies. Meanwhile, Carlo says there is already an expectation for people in healthcare roles to take vaccines that does not need to be mandatory. Similarly people who are vulnerable to the virus and other diseases should be strongly expected.
Whether vaccine passports leave you with an uplifting vision of the post-pandemic world or a dystopian future, we hope you enjoyed the discussion and we thank Silkie and Kirsty for their time.
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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:
On the culture wars:
The more modern and the more westernised the world is, the more lost people seem… It seems to me that both sides in this horrible toxic culture battle that’s going on are talking about identity as if it’s something that’s under threat for them and something that they’ve lost and something they feel attached to and something that the other side wants to take away from them.
On rationalist versus mystic modes of thought:
So you’ve got sort of mythos versus logos…. So we have a very rationalistic, very secularistic, scientific, mathematical way of looking at the world, which is useful, obviously… But we also have something which is deeper and to some degree truer than that, which is the mythic way of looking, which is where true poetry comes from, it’s where art comes from. But it’s also where I think our deep love of nature comes from, and it’s where religion comes from. That stuff flows through absolutely every human being and every human culture always at all times.I think liberal modernity and neoliberal capitalism as well have operated on the false assumption that the mythic way of seeing will be ultimately superseded by the rational way, by the logoic way of seeing if you like, because obviously, myth was just a silly thing we believed in before we had science, that we don’t need anymore. That’s not what’s happening.
On giving up climate activism:
What you end up seeing if you are an activist for long enough is that we have built this enormous, unsustainable economic monster that now envelops the world, which requires endless growth to keep it going. It isn’t possible to feed it with enough natural resources to power that endless growth, the fossil fuels that it uses to power that endless growth is changing the climate. So we all know these terrible stories: we’ve kicked off a mass extinction event, the climate is changing, all of these kinds of horrors. So you end up having to try and turn this around, and you end up campaigning to stop climate change. And after many, many years of doing that, I was unable to avoid the reality, as it seemed to me and it still does — it actually isn’t possible to do it in the way that we wanted to do it.
On the capitalist system:
We’re not citizens, we’re not people rooted in a culture, we’re not individuals who have a sort of wider sense of worth. We’re primarily consumers and producers for that machine. We measure everything in terms of economic growth, we measure that in a material sense, rather than in any other sense. We’ve become a kind of a society of merchants and those consumer values have infiltrated everything, absolutely every aspect of our lives…I think that’s a tragedy. It’s a cultural tragedy, and it’s an ecological tragedy too.
On Covid:
Covid is interesting in the sense that we’ve all been acting like science is going to solve this using the algorithms and the mathematical formula and the rest of it. But there’s also something very mythic about this virus isn’t there? It’s very apocalyptic, I think, in the original sense of the word. The word apocalypsis is Greek for unveiling, it means revelation.
On Bill Gates:
It’s an interesting one this, because you’ve got all the crazy conspiracies about how Bill Gates is going to inject you with microchips and all this stuff. But there’s a basis for this. Bill Gates is a very powerful man and he’s using his money to change the world in particular ways. He’s using his money to fund newspapers. He’s using his money to promote development in places like Africa in a very particular pattern. He’s doing certainly all sorts of things. And the same is true of Soros, who’s always the centre of conspiracy theories as well. So although the conspiracies themselves are crazy and often dangerous and unpleasant, the sense of powerlessness that fuels them is real. I think that these conspiracies come about when people try to join dots that they don’t understand, because we don’t really know how it’s working anymore.
On China ‘lifting a hundred million’ people out of poverty:
China has made, for example, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people landless through the construction of dams; through the construction of giant cities. Obviously, the state in China is all-powerful, and so people are just moved. And then they’re put into cities. And often if you take people who’ve been living on their own land, in a subsistence economy where they have enough and you put them into a city, where they then are earning wages, but very low wages; they’ve lost any sense of control through that process of enclosure that we talked about earlier. Then you can stick that on your balance sheet and you can say look at these people we’ve lifted out of poverty. Maybe some of them wanted to be but were they?
On his conversion to Christianity:
I’ve been on a sort of spiritual search for 10 years or so. Because actually, so much of what we’ve been talking about seems to me to be at root, a spiritual question in the broadest sense of that slightly horrible word. That it’s actually about what we value. And so much of our destructive nature, it seems to me, comes from our sense of self-worship. So once you believe that there’s nothing above you, once you believe that there’s nothing sacred about the world, that the world is simply a material object, a giant resource that you can harvest, then you can become quite tyrannical.
On Jesus’ teaching:
It’s very interesting to go back to the teachings of Jesus 2000 years ago, and see him basically addressing the same flaws in human nature that we have now. And of course, that’s not just true of Christianity. So there’s a there’s a lesson in radical humility that you can get from it, which I hadn’t realised until I started to look at it properly. And that’s still working its way through me. It’s quite a radical and exciting thing to be happening in a way.
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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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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.
On identity politics:
'Identity politics is a public relations disaster, because it emerges on Ivy League campuses from young idealistic middle class students who have no idea about the intersection between their very exclusive way of thinking and talking about reality, and working class communities, where a lot of this language just rouses scepticism, and resentment because it’s the language of officialdom, it’s the language of authority. It’s just another generation of people who don’t want to listen to working class experiences, and don’t want to hear it and people will be dismissed for being aggressive, people will be dismissed for this.'
On class division:
'One of the great successes of capitalism is that as well as leading to generally higher quality of life for broader numbers of people, access to information technology, innovation, and things of that nature, it also has created parallel societies which have completely different social experiences. They have completely different cultural aspirations. And they have a different sense of identity. Some have an ascribed identity, some have an achieved identity. And so what that does is it puts our democracy and our system under increasing strain. Because as you create parallel societies that don’t have to interact with one another, except for basic economic transactions, then people have to come to all sorts of conclusions about the intentions of the people on the other side of the ravine.'
On the term working class:
'Imagine your house burnt down, but you couldn’t use the word fire to describe it. Sometimes we need to use the language of class because it helps us to more clearly articulate some of the trends that we see in society along the lines of employment, education, health and political exclusion. With all this emphasis on social mobility, it’s become a sort of a shameful thing that people don’t want to describe themselves as.'
On his upbringing:
'The only people that are harder on working class people than the ruling classes, are other working class people. We regiment one another so strictly in terms of dress, in terms of the range of topics that we’re allowed to be interested in and discuss, even in terms of things like nutrition, which is changing a little now, but back then, if you were talking about hummus, and couscous, and all of these other things, that sort of marked you out as somebody who thought they were a little bit better than everyone else. And back then everything that fell out of our frame of reference was just labelled with a synonym “gay”, which just described everything.'
On woke capitalism:
'Look at how the identity politics has found expression within the capitalist system, ultimately it’s led to the Democratic Party and Costa Coffee, and Pret a Manger and all of these, selling cups with rainbow flags on them, while at the same time largely being complicit in a system that economically disadvantages people of all races, of all backgrounds, based on their social class, not on their race, not on their gender. Now, I have to caveat that by saying, there are very specific ways in which people of colour and women and LGBT people and people with disabilities are disadvantaged by our system, both economically and culturally. And these are obvious, and I don’t think most people would dispute that fact. But if you do not have the class analysis, that imposed over the other analysis of identity, then what happens is you create quotas that lead to middle class people of colour, middle class people with disabilities, middle class women and LGBT people moving into positions of authority. And while that does represent progress, and I’m not saying that it doesn’t, it doesn’t address the fundamental inequalities that we say that we’re all fighting for.'
On the concept of privilege:
'Privilege itself is a word that could maybe have been thought through a little better before academics and before activists and students ran onto Facebook, telling everybody, you can’t deny my experience, but I can deny your experience. It’s not worked out very well. But again, I will say that that’s not the Left. That’s a product of liberalism. That’s almost a product of capitalism in and of itself.'
Thanks to Loki for sharing his thoughts on the corrosive effects of identity politics on society, his family’s struggles with addiction and alcoholism, and the phoniness of woke capitalism.
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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.
Coming from two very different political backgrounds, these unlikely bedfellows have joined forces to draw attention to the pitfalls of the UK’s ongoing lockdown policy:
- They agree that a different solution could have been found, with a greater emphasis on personal agency
- They are particularly worried about the impact on mental health and the economy
- They would like a faster timetable out of lockdown
- They call for a public enquiry, and for people to be held to account
- They share strong messages for each of their party leaders
I’m very strongly in favour of both free speech and defending the newspapers when it was unpopular, including the fact that they’d been extremely unpleasant to me 15 years ago. And in favour of free thought and free expression. But I’m not a libertarian. In other words, I’m not someone I’m not a hedonist. I don’t believe that anything goes so I’m a bit of a contradiction in small C, conservative social attitudes, but a very strong commitment to a democracy being participative. Not taking the word from the top down. And I think that when we get out of this in the summer… we’ll need to reset the the political dialogue, because otherwise we’ll become used to being told what to do from above. That’s bad for all of us, but it’s particularly bad for democracy.
People are frightened. The political class and the media and the scientists on stage have been very, very good at frightening people. We’ve had these amazing television campaigns, which basically say, you’re going to kill people if you leave your home because the government wanted to keep infection rates down and it wanted to keep deaths down. I’m afraid the legacy of that, as I said in Parliament yesterday, is going to be a very long tale of mental health problems… We’ve got people who were so terrified, they won’t leave their homes. We’ve got children who won’t go outside because they’re frightened, if they catch something and bring it back they’ll kill their parents, we’ve got adolescents self harming. We have just done in my view, a terrible, terrible thing, and we will regret it for a long time to come.
On returning to normality:
Readjusting to any kind of normality is going to be a massive challenge, it will have an impact on productivity on our life and wellbeing for some time to come. There should be a recovery programme geared to that the psychology. In terms of those daily press conferences, they should be turned into something positive, if we’re going to recover, not just economically in terms of restoring growth, and getting people into meaningful jobs. But also getting back the kind of life that we want to lead and the way in which people can get up in the morning and get themselves to work.
On SAGE:
I think you can be a SAGE scientist and advise the government, or you can be a scientist that goes on the airwaves, TV and radio, but it has been so damaging to have these various scientists from SAGE beating each other up on the airwaves, creating huge concern. It is pretty disgraceful when they’re introduced as X, Y and Z, and Professor X, Y and Z is a SAGE scientist, but is here in his or her own capacity. They’re not there in their own capacity. They are there as a SAGE scientist, and of course, they’ve never been more in demand. They’ve never been more intellectually engaged. But having these various scientists on our airwaves and in our newspapers day after day after day after day, beating each other up IS scaring constituents. Some of my constituents have just been debilitated. Again, I’m sorry, if I sound emotional but this has been utterly disgraceful. I hope there’s a public inquiry and I help hope people are held to account I’ll be held to account at the ballot box.
On China:
I went to China first in 1983. I wouldn’t want to live in China, I wouldn’t like to live under that particular regime, and particularly the one that’s in place at the moment. And I wouldn’t want anybody to actually have to transfer that particular command and control both socially and economically, to this country. I would fight very hard against that. So the answer is that the Chinese have developed an understanding of the way in which they comply, not just the communist era from 1949, but long, long before that. We wouldn’t want to put up with it for one moment. We should be very wary of everything we do. On the economic front, we should be extremely robust, not just as a nation, but internationally with the Chinese. But they are the second largest economy now in the world. And we need to learn how to deal with them. And dealing with them needs a bit of good statecraft and clever political operation, and not just a head in the wall.
Read The Post here
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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.
On Mark Zuckerberg:
It’s pretty clear that there’s no regard for the platform — it’s a communications platform — there’s no regard for how community pages are set up and what impact this might have on local communities. Essential health services were impacted. Even mental health helplines had their pages wiped, and domestic violence hotlines had their pages removed because they share a lot of news content. It’s a big F-you to the Australian user of Facebook. And my perception is that only a company with monopoly power would treat its users in this way. I can’t think of another company that would just give the finger to its users in an entire country, and expect there to be no serious consequences.
On bipartisan distrust of Facebook:
It used to be that after the election of Trump, you know, the Left hated Facebook for allowing Trump to become elected, and for mining people’s data out to Cambridge Analytica, and so on and so forth. But now, the distrust of the platform is definitely bipartisan. Conservatives dislike and distrust Facebook. And in Australia after this shock tactic of this instant ban, we had politicians from the Greens Party, the Labour Party, Liberal Party, all of our politicians were lining up and saying that this is outrageous behaviour. So he’s united the polity here in Australia. And I think he’s definitely miscalculated this move.
On Mark Zuckerberg:
It’s a sign of an immature leader, to be honest…Zuckerberg is interesting, because he’s an outlier in the tech industry, in that he’s both CEO of Facebook and the Chairman of the board. So he really has no accountability to anyone, not even the board members or not even his shareholders, so he basically can do what he likes. And I think that’s one reason why Facebook hasn’t navigated through various controversies very well. And its brand is tarnished.
On algorithms as a censorship tool:
What I notice as a user of Facebook is that censorship is done in an extremely blunt fashion. Their censorship is done first and foremost, by algorithms. And the algorithms do not know how to differentiate between a literary essay, and a violent screed. Having robotic moderators might be cheap but ultimately, it just leads to a dumbed down kind of information ecosystem, which I think Facebook is. And I think it’s really unfortunate that so much of their service is just automated algorithms. I imagine that it’s completely unrealistic for them to employ more people to do content moderation. But, I think it’s another indication that they don’t really take public interest that seriously when everything is automated, and they make something like $37 billion in profit a year. It’s a $500 billion company, and they can’t invest a little bit more in having humans moderate content to make sure that censorship is not such a blunt tool.
On reforming Big Tech:
In an ideal world there would be more competition in the market. We could pick up our identity, our social media page that we’ve built on Facebook, we could pick up all that data and we would own it, because we would have digital property rights. And then we could take that data over to a new platform that we could enter into without much friction, and have a new social media experience. But because of the nature of network effects, and because Facebook is a monopoly power it is the predominant social media platform. I think the only real way forward is the antitrust action in the United States to break up WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook — there’s that avenue. And then the other avenue is building open source decentralised social media platforms where users own their own digital identity much like Bitcoin, but for social media, or an encrypted social media platform.
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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
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.'
On how the centre-Right and centre-Left’s unwillingness to discuss immigration has galvanised extremist movements, and the effect this has had on Western countries:
'I make it very clear in my book that the anti Islam sentiment in society is very strong and it’s getting stronger because these extreme right wing parties, populist parties are cropping up all over Europe and getting so many voters. But the reason that’s happening is because they’re the only ones willing to tackle these issues. And then you also have the Islamist movements. These are the ones luring young men and persuading them to become extremists. And when you take it to the very extreme, persuading them to become actual terrorists, and then you have the fashion trolls, and agencies who are trying to destabilise society. So if you want to empower these extreme fringes, the thing to do is to be silent, or place a taboo on these controversial issues. And I was motivated to say, well, we the establishment, we people in the centre, centre, left centre, right, we should be talking about these issues.'
On what she found in her research:
'What is going on is that we are having a large surge of young men coming from Muslim majority countries where they’re not used to treating women as equals. And we have seen an increase in sexual violence and that sexual violence varies from very relatively mild verbal, from the cat calls, obscene invitations to touching and groping and harassing — all of it unwanted — to rapes and gang rapes. And in extreme situations, things that lead to homicide. And these incidents that were very, very rare in many of these European countries have now become, in some countries, in some neighbourhoods, commonplace to the point where you are going to find neighbourhoods in many European countries that have taken these immigrants, women free.'
On David Cameron’s response to the refugee crisis:
'Cameron was the most responsive, I thought of the European leaders at the time. What he was trying to say, we have to be compassionate and open and help others out. But at the time, he was also responsive in doing what he was elected to do, which is be the leader of the British people. So in trying to balance all of these things, if we had built on where he had started, then, you know, we could have avoided that 2015 issue. But his hands were tied, on the one hand, nationally, and on the other hand the EU stuff, so. And I’m not saying that, you know, I’m not judging Angela Merkel, as a bad woman was a bad person was a thoughtless person. I’m just saying what the different European leaders have failed to do is to work together. And ultimately, then you get such phenomena as Brexit. A nation state saying, we can’t work together, and if we can’t work together, then we’re going to work alone.'
On Black Lives Matter:
'If Black Lives Matter really wanted to help black people in America, they would fight for education, like charter schools, but the kind of school systems that actually lift people out of poverty. That’s not what they’re fighting for. They would fight for the nuclear family — they’re actually stating that they’re against the nuclear family. What they’re saying is that they want a redistribution of resources, where you take away from the rich and give to the poor, but then that they are in charge of it, and all sorts of other crazy stuff. That in no way addresses the situation of poor black people. Or they talk about police violence against black people, but they don’t talk about black and black violence. And a lot of black mothers in black neighbourhoods, for instance, in Chicago, New York, they’re saying, we don’t want to give up the police, we don’t want to refund the police. It’s the police that are fighting for us. So you dig deep into what some of these organisations are saying it’s fairly, they have very selfish, very narrow interests.'
On #MeToo:
'I think the #MeToo movement started out with something very strong, very powerful, very good, that I approve of as a woman. Which is the proposition that women should be safe in the workplace. And I still support that. And I hoped very much that it would become universal. But it stopped with what I would say is the preoccupation of middle class women. Once we had to then address misconduct by immigrant men, men of colour in large numbers, it sort of came to a screeching halt. And women of low income — for instance, the victims of the grooming gangs in the United Kingdom, or the women that I’m discussing, who are bearing the burden of the unintended consequences of immigration in working class neighbourhoods. #MeToo hasn’t said a word about them or done anything for them. And that’s unfortunate.'
On the cynicism of virtue signalling:
'I think first of all, you dig down into what the person or group or company or political party that is virtue signalling is saying, and what is it that their true interest is. And there you will find a number of contradictions and then I think you have to confront them with what do you want, really? When you talk to Ben and Jerry’s: do you want to make a profit? Or do you want to stand with Black Lives Matter? They are making a profit. And what have they done for blacks and black people? Once you start asking these questions, once you write a book like this and you say so you’ve been virtue signalling about women’s rights all this time to feminists, you want to shatter the glass ceiling and sitting board members and become CEOs and so on. But here’s what’s happening to women on the streets, victims of grooming gangs, victims of this type of thing — what have you said and done about that? And then you get the glaring absence of morality and virtue. And I don’t know where that leaves them.'
Thank you to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, for her time.
Read The Post here
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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.'
On the ideological diversity of the XTR membership:
A lot of people that have come to London have been from what you might call the Celtic fringe, you know, Cornwall, Wales, the north of England. I mean, yes, there’s been a lot of the usual suspects, as it were, urban students and that sort of thing. But lots of people, for instance, are over 50. And they have a pre-Thatcherite culture, as you might say. Their culture is more: there’s a right and wrong in the world. We’re moderate people, but we don’t go about destroying the next generation. We have a connection to the land. We have a connection to traditional small town politics.'
On the failings of the ‘Davos elite’:
'I think the global strategy, which is being pursued by the western liberal class has catastrophically failed. Carbon emissions have gone up by 60% since 1990. And how many conferences have there been? 30? 40? We’ve got another one coming up. And we’ve got this narrative that the professional classes and the global liberal class and the bureaucrats and the diplomats and all the rest of that area are going to sort this out. And we all remember in the 1990s and early 2000s, that feeling that there’s climate change out there and yes, it was serious, and these men in suits were saying they will go and sort it out. It has a sort of emperor-without-clothes feeling about it now, which is they’re still saying the same thing.'
On why nationalism is the best approach:
'National identity at the end of the day trumps internationalism when you’re faced with annihilation. Now, I want to make clear that that does not mean the chauvinistic nationalism that a lot of left wing people associate nationalism with, for good reason, of course. But as we all know, there’s many different shades of patriotism and nationalism. And it’s silly really to weaponise it. What we’re looking at is a nationalism or patriotism which is rooted in a love of one’s country, a love of one’s tradition, and a love of one’s political traditions.'
On the moral law:
'We need to understand we have obligations to those that came before us, particularly those that sacrificed their lives in the 20th century in order to protect the liberty of this country. And the other idea, which is related of course, is the notion of legacy. The notion that we’re not just here to enjoy ourselves, right? That’s the new liberal, individualist, consumerist idea, that people on the left, from where I come from, and also social conservatives are critical of for lots of reasons. But the point here is that the essence of the immorality of continuing to put carbon into the atmosphere is the transgression of the moral law, the moral law being you don’t do unto others what you wouldn’t have them do to yourself. In other words, you don’t shit on your children.'
On the tactics of Extinction Rebellion:
'We can see that Left and Right wing groups engage in civil disobedience or forms of disruption, and leaving aside the violence issue, sometimes it goes into that. But the idea that disruption in itself is anti conservative isn’t sustainable. I think I would turn it around and say that just because the majority of the people in a society believe something, does not make it right. And that’s a core conservative idea. It’s not just that that superficial idea of democracy, which is a poll saying, everyone agrees with something.'
On the media portrayal of the movement:
'The media they tend to juxtapose the secular and the religious. It’s like one minute you’re technocratic scientists, and the next minute, we’re mediaeval child saints. I mean, dare I say it, there’s a little bit of middle ground. So what’s happening with Extinction Rebellion, what’s happening with the broad immobilisation around the world, is you’re exactly right. We moving from a reductive scientific technocratic orientation on the climate to something that’s deeper. But that doesn’t mean we’re rushing off to some millenarian cult sort of religious situation. What we’re doing is we’re starting to reconnect with a deeper sense of humanity, in various different cultural manifestations. And if you want to call that spiritual then so be it. But it’s certainly a deeper sense of self and a deeper sense of community, which has religious connotations.'
Read The Post here
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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/
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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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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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?
To help understand this significant moment, and what these final astonishing weeks of the Trump administration mean for the US and for the world, I spoke to writer and commentator Andrew Sullivan. He lives just a few blocks away from the Capitol and from the first moments of our interview you can see how traumatised he has been by the events of the past few years, culminating (so far) in the events of last week:
"Do not minimise this, for God’s sake. This is what conservatives have been doing from the get go, which is attempting not to see what is in front of your face. They planned it. They wanted to take over. They had ties to hold people hostage. They were calling for people to be killed… They had a plan — maybe not one that could have succeeded, but you only need one gun."
Sullivan is worried that it is not over yet. Many of his friends in Washington DC are planning to leave the city for the inauguration on 20th January on the grounds that it is not safe: “We don't know what's going to happen now. There are a lot of arms in the country. And Inauguration Day is going to be another stress test of whether this place is going to survive civil conflict.”
He sees the “tyrannical” streak in Donald Trump’s character as constituting the tragic part of this epoch, because he has now prevented the overlooked and important issues that got him elected from being properly addressed: "This is the tragedy of it. He brought attention to subjects and issues that really the elites had completely ignored, because they could: the question of the implosion of the middle class economy, the question of immigration and trade, and indeed, the swift demographic change that really destabilises the entire idea of a coherent nation state. Equally, what happened last summer, when people let the cities of the United States burn, because of another large conspiracy theory that white supremacy which was operating on the Left — as often happens, the radicalisation of one side radicalises the other. I think Trumpism and an adjustment of conservatism towards the needs of the working class is, is a great move, but you just can't separate the two, unfortunately, you can't. He is so uniquely dangerous and irrational, that there was never a way."
As a result, he fears that any attempt to challenge “wokery” is now fatally undermined. An illiberal Left, closely coupled with the might of Big Tech, will now seek a revenge that may be unassailable:
"It's possible that the Republican Party really is over, that it will fracture, and it has to fracture so that the rump, know-nothing part of it will be in permanent exile. And that Trump's legacy will be a kind of Left-liberal orthodoxy in America that will never loosen its grip."
Responding to the challenge by some of President Trump’s defenders that he didn’t, in fact, directly incite violence, and that the social media bans are therefore unfair, Sullivan counters:
"If you want to play legal scholar on that, you can. Okay, go ahead. But at what point are these conservatives gonna recognise what's in front of them and stop excusing this stuff? It's insane that people will find any excuse for this person. I'm sorry, I am exhausted. There is no fucking way to justify this person in any fashion of any way, whatever the cause. This is an unbelievable breach in American history. And in the West. It's a huge blow beneath the waterline of Western democracy, fomented by this person, and people are asking me to prove it. I mean, text and verse, look at the last four years. Has he ever tried to hold the system together? Has he ever not tried to blow it further apart? Has he done anything which isn't about him, rather than the country as a whole?"
At the end, he confessed that he is wracked with emotion about the whole topic: "People say I have Trump Derangement Syndrome or whatever. But I love this country. And he’s taken a flame thrower to it. There comes a point at which you have to say, I don’t care. Get rid of him. Get him out of here… He’s driven me crazy".
It’s a powerful nearly hour-long discussion that I won’t forget. Deep thanks to Andrew for his sharing his time and thoughts.
Watch the video version of this episode here: https://unherd.com/thepost/andrew-sullivan-i-was-right-about-trump/
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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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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?
This was one of the questions Freddie Sayers put to Glenn Greenwald — perhaps one of the most famous free speech and civil liberties advocates in the world. Talking from his home in the mountains outside Rio di Janeiro, his answer was unsettling: “You don’t need to be a conspiracist to believe any of that. They acknowledge that they are doing all the things that you just described.”
The pandemic has brought this issue to the fore even more visibly, with channels and videos regularly being taken down having been judged as dangerous to public health, and the YouTube CEO announcing earlier in the year that anything that fell foul of WHO guidelines would be removed (notwithstanding that organisation's patchy, to say the least, record during this pandemic).
“It’s incredibly dangerous,” says Greenwald. “What competency do tech giants have to arbitrate over science and health policy? … How did they get into a position of some sort of philosopher-king to be able to sit in judgement as overlords of our discourse and decree not only what is permissible but what is true and false when it comes to highly complex questions such as how to manage a pandemic, or whether vaccines are safe and effective, or whether the balances of a lockdown are justified by their cost? These are incredibly complicated decisions that a society ought to be debating.”
It becomes even more sinister when it dovetails with party politics. Greenwald sees the merger of the Democratic Party and the tech platforms as a serious threat to free speech:
“You can look at every metric and it all leads to the same conclusion. There is a union that includes the establishment wing of the Democratic Party, Wall Street and Silicon Valley. One way you can see that is that Silicon Valley overwhelmingly poured its money into the campaign coffers of the Democratic Party… Their employees are overwhelmingly progressive, overwhelmingly liberal, overwhelmingly Democrat and whenever there is agitation within these companies for greater censorship, it is almost always on the grounds that Right-wing or conservative voices ought to be censored.
To me, that censorship episode involving the Hunter Biden reporting in the weeks leading up to an election was one of the most alarming and significant events to take place in politics in years. That one of the primary means that citizens have to communicate with one another was simply manipulated to prevent incriminating reporting about the candidate that the employees and executives and shareholders of those means of communication wanted to win the election. It was pure brute censorship of the most toxic and damaging kind.”
The prognosis, according to Greenwald, is not good. Instead of being magnanimous in victory, the Democrats are likely to use their influence to further shut down discourse they find unacceptable.
“It’s like a tide that keeps coming in. You hope that it doesn’t get to you. As long as it doesn’t you feel free on the beach, but you see the water inching ever closer.”
Censorship #Pandemic #Democrats
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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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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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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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Freddie Sayers meets David Engelthaler, co-director of the T-Gen Research Institute and former state epidemiologist of Arizona.
There are many different theories as to why the western world, namely the US and Europe, was hit so much harder by the Covid pandemic than Asia. Some studies have found evidence of ancient genetic adaptation specific to East Asian populations, while others suggest that this region may have some degree of cross-immunity due to other coronaviruses in circulation. But another interesting theory posits that the difference is not caused by the people, but by the virus; in the early months of the pandemic, a particular genetic strain of Covid-19 known as D14G was shown to be more prevalent in Italy than any Asian countries, which may have helped explain why the disease spread so fast in that country, and elsewhere in Europe and America.
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.”
This doesn’t mean that the mutation is more deadly, simply that it may be more faster at transmitting, and therefore it harder to "get our arms around the virus". As such, Engelthaler argues that trying to eliminate the virus was not the right approach and instead we should have been trying to slow its spread: "What we're really seeing is a SARS-like infection that spreads like the common cold. And with there's no way that we could put in mitigation strategies to stop the common cold".
So were uniform national lockdowns the right solution? "As an epidemiologist I think they have has just been devastating in a way that we haven't even properly appropriately characterised yet". He says that the "vast majority" of at-risk people "could have been prevented if the focus was on protecting them, rather than on trying to prevent any spread of this virus, which is pretty much is un-containable".
Engelthaler is also one of the few epidemiologists to have publicly spoken out against school closures, for which there is "no scientific evidence". "Privately, behind closed doors, there's definitely been a lot of discussion from the very beginning that there's no scientific evidence that shutting down schools actually helps to stop a pandemic...Epidemiologists knew that from the beginning, but that was not a popular opinion to take publicly and seems to have been kind of left to the side".
But ultimately, human agency in the midst of a pandemic is overemphasised: "I do think that one thing that does seem to get lost in all of this is that there's a really important factor in this pandemic, and it's the virus, it's not just people's policies and people's behaviours". That is especially true when there are "different strains that are acting differently in different parts of the world, leading to different outcomes, at least in some part because of that virus, not just based off of public policies in response, no matter what you do".
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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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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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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 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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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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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.
KEY QUOTES
ON THE COMING ELECTION
It’s an extremely important that Biden wins this election. I think a resounding rejection of Trump and Trumpism is going to be necessary to heal the divisions and terrible problems that have emerged in this country as a result of the last four years.
ON A PRESIDENT BIDEN
If Democrats don’t take control of the Senate, Biden is going to face the same problems Obama faced in the last few years of his presidency where he can’t get anything done because the Republicans will try to resist everything legislatively. Even if he takes the Senate, he still won’t have the kind of majority needed to pass really difficult legislation. There’s also a big gap opening between the Left-wing of the Democrat party and centrists like Biden. That’s a fight that has been kept under wraps because everybody is so interested in getting Trump out of power.
ON THE SHORTCOMINGS OF GLOBALISM
As globalisation progressed many people did not see their situations improve. They lost jobs and men in traditional manufacturing jobs in relatively low skilled parts of the economy saw their jobs go to China. When you lose a job, it’s also a loss of status. When you have a job it’s a sign that society values you enough to pay you a certain salary. If you’re unemployed for a prolonged period, you feel worthless and it provokes an intense feeling of anger that someone is doing this to you and I feel this is one of the triggers for populism. It’s very easy to blame this on foreigners and immigrants who are taking this from you and the most important thing they’re taking is not resources but it’s also dignity.
ON THE SHORTCOMINGS OF THE EU
In a sense the EU succeeded a little too well. It was created because of all the bloody nationalism that consumed Europe for the first half of the twentieth century. It was designed to replace nationalistic aspiration with economic wellbeing, which it succeeded in doing. But that wasn’t sufficient to satisfy people’s aspirations because they really do want to be recognised for higher causes than job security.
ON THE SHORTCOMINGS OF TECHNOCRATIC LIBERALISM
The problem with old technocratic liberalism, is that it’s very heavily into what’s now called neoliberalism. That is to say, this very pro-market anti state ideology that grew up under Reagan and Thatcher that pushed both parties in the United States, and I would say in Britain as well, towards a kind of consensus on this very free market version of capitalism that had a lot of destructive effects. We need to rethink that in a really serious way.
This is something I’ve been trying to wrestle with: whether you can dethrone some of the ideas that have become so dominant — like the best outcome for everybody is just aggregate growth that privileges producers over consumers — there’s many things that I think need to be fundamentally rethought.
If you reconstruct a centrist, liberal politics — it wouldn’t be a return to the technocratic elites that brought you China going into the WTO and this massive out-flux of jobs. It would really be a really different set of economic policies. On the cultural front, it would involve a renewed defence of classical liberalism where we really want to protect diversity but we don’t want to use that protection to reduce the rights of people who don’t agree with a certain identitarian consensus.
ON HOW WE SHOULD NOT RETURN TO A PRE-TRUMP ORDER
A lot of these rebellions were driven by legitimate resentments that people have about the way that the old liberal — both national and international — order was structured. I don’t think that anyone wants to go back to the heyday of globalisation, where a company would outsource jobs for the tiniest efficiency advantage, even if it ended up screwing a lot of their workers. That’s something that needs to be rethought.
Similarly, the cultural imperialism of a lot of the elites is something that needs to be investigated. I think that people are more aware of that gap between elites and ordinary people than they were before the rise of Donald Trump. That’s all to the good.
ON IMMIGRATION
I think a policy that would take into account these resentments would say: we like immigrants and the profit we make from them, we support diversity in itself, but the government ought to be in control, and able to make a decision on who gets to come into the country. That ought to satisfy the legitimate grievances of people who can see that the government is not in control, but it would not cater to forms of xenophobia prejudice that parts of the population expresses.
I can only explain the current Democratic stance on immigration as a result of interest group politics within the party. There are well organised pro-immigrant lobbies that are really opposed to stronger enforcement of immigration laws.
ON THE IMPORTANCE OF A NATIONAL IDENTITY
Every modern democracy needs a national identity. You have to be committed to membership in a national community that the nation still remains a basic building block of politics because that’s where the power is located. So the European Union doesn’t have an army, it doesn’t have police, power is still held at the nation state level. That’s a good thing. Nations can co-operate and delegate certain powers to transnational bodies but ultimately they are the basic democratic building blocks of modern politics and as long as that is true you need to have a national identity. But that identity cannot be based on a partial identity based on race or ethnicity or religion because our modern societies are too de facto diverse for that — so they have to be built around ideas.
Nation is important and you need to have loyalty that is to some extent irrational — you have to love the basic founding ideas of your political system for that system to really work— that’s what I think has been really missing on the Left. A lot of people on the Left have a universalist belief in equality and so it doesn’t stop at national borders. That’s fine but the fact of the matter is power really stops at national borders and therefore it’s important to think about power in those national terms.
ON WHAT IDENTITY POLITICS SHARES WITH WHITE NATIONALISM
In America, there has been a rise in overt white nationalism which I did not think would be possible after the Civil Rights era. This feeds off Left-wing identity politics. The Left has lost its connection to class. In the 20th century, the Left-wing agenda was all about the proletariat, which in nearly every European country was majority white. But that agenda has shifted over the last couple of generations: since the 1960s, inequality is not understood as a general class phenomenon but injustices that are done to specific groups.
This is something that gave me a lot of pushback in my last book Identity, because I said there is a connection between left and right wing forms of identity politics. I think this definition of injustice as predominantly being done to these specific groups that didn’t seem to include white people is a cause of resentment. You hear this a lot in the rhetoric of the left where’s there’s talk of structural racism and the intrinsic racism of whiteness as an inevitable accompaniment to simply the skin colour you’re born with, which is deeply offensive to white people who are not racist. So you have this interplay between Right and Left wing forms of identity politics which I think is very unhealthy for democracy.
ON RESISTING THE WOKE LEFT
I would say that my current position has moved reasonably far Left on economic issues. To tackle inequality you do need higher taxation on rich people, you need strengthening of social protections, including healthcare. Obamacare needs to be fixed. On cultural issues, I think I will be spending the next few years, if the Democrats win, fighting woke progressivism. I think that’s an area where things can easily get carried too far, in terms of restrictions on free speech. The people who believe that stuff do have anti-liberal tendencies.
ON WHAT TRUMP GOT RIGHT
There’s all sorts of things that I feel very badly that because Donald Trump has articulated something that I believe is basically true, it discredits that position and it becomes much harder to say it. For example, he talks about the importance of borders, and I actually do think borders are important. I think that critical race theory is very deeply flawed — and I’m really sorry that he launched this official attack on the teaching of critical race theory because now everybody on the Left side feels like they have to defend it because Trump has attacked it.
If that same position had been taken by someone that had much better credibility, that wasn’t associated with all these extremist positions, then you might have had a shift in the right direction. So I think it’s going to take a long time to undo that damage.
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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.
KEY QUOTES
Why him?
“I’m a healthcare policy person — I have a background in medical science, but my role really is to translate medial science into public policy. That’s very different from being an epidemiologist or a virologist with a single, limited view on things.”
Dr Fauci
“He’s just one person on the task force — there are several people on the task force. His background is virology, immunology and infectious disease. It’s a very different background, it’s a more limited approach, and I don’t speak for him.”
Herd immunity policy?
“No. It’s a repeated distortion, lie, or whatever you want to call it… What they mean by ‘herd immunity strategy’ is survival of the fittest, let the infection spread through the community and develop a population immunity. That’s never been the policy that I have advised. It’s never even been discussed inside the White House, not even for a single minute. And that’s never been the policy of the President of the United States or anybody else here. I’ve said that many many times… and yet it persists like so many other things, hence the term that the President is fond of using called fake news.”
On herd immunity
“Population immunity is a biological phenomenon that occurs. It’s sort of like if you’re building something in your basement: it’s down on the ground because gravity puts it there. It’s not a ‘strategy’ to say that herd immunity exists — it is obtained when a certain percentage of the population becomes resistant or immune to an infection, whether that is by getting infected or getting a vaccine or by a combination of both. In fact, if you don’t that believe herd immunity exists as a way to block the pathways to the vulnerable in an infection, then you would never advocate or believe in giving widespread vaccination — that’s the whole point of it… I’ve explained it to people who seemingly didn’t understand it; I’ve mentioned this radioactive word called herd immunity. But that’s not a strategy that anyone is pursuing.”
What is his policy?
“My advice is exactly this. It’s a three-pronged strategy. Number one: aggressive protection of high risk individuals and the vulnerable (typically the elderly and those with co-morbidities). Number two: allocate resources so that we prevent hospital overcrowding, so that people can be treated for this virus and get the other serious medical care that is needed. Number three: open schools, society and businesses because keeping them closed is enormously harmful — in fact it kills people.”
Has the policy changed?
“It is the White House policy on Coronavirus, but it always was. The President started this with an observation that was overlooked by most people in the world: he said in the third week of March that the cure cannot be worse than the disease… In April the White House released a formal ‘opening up America’ document, which included extreme protection of the vulnerable and opening up society… It’s not been a shift.”
Effect of lockdowns
“We must open up because we’re killing people. In the US, 46% of the six most common cancers were not diagnosed during the shutdown… These are people who will present to the hospital or their doctor with later stage disease — many of these people will die. 650,000 Americans are on chemotherapy — half of them didn’t come in for their chemo because they were afraid. Two-thirds of screenings for cancer were not done; half of childhood immunisations did not get done; 85% of living organ transplants did not get done. And then we see the other harms: 200,000 cases plus of child abuse in the US during the two months of spring school closures were not reported because schools are the number one agency where abuse is noticed; we have one out of four American young adults, college age, who thought of killing themselves in the month of June…
All of these harms are massive for the working class and the lower socioeconomic groups. The people who are upper class, who can work from home, the people who can sip their latte and complain that their children are underfoot or that they have to come up with extra money to hire a tutor privately — these are people who are not impacted by the lockdowns.
This is the topic, this is why you open up. A secondary gain might be population immunity, but this is the reason to open up.”
On short-term immunity
“We don’t know how long someone’s immunity lasts to this, but this is a coronavirus, this is not a completely novel disease… Coronavirus exposure typically has a year, or even a few years, of immunity — we can make a first guess that probably there’s a good chance that will happen… Yes, we know that antibodies disappear… but that’s true for every infection, that’s a typical scenario and not a cause for panic. Why? Because we know there is resistance to infection that seems to be coming out in the literature that is not purely due to antibodies, there are other components of the immune system. Suffice to say this: do we know that people have immunity? You don’t need to be a scientist to understand that when you hundreds of millions of cases… do you know how many cases of reinfection there are? At the most, five in the world… It is not true that there is no immunity to this, that would be a bizarre conclusion.”
Climate of fear
“This is one of the biggest failures of the voices of public health in the United States and in the world — they specifically instilled fear with their proclamations and statements… And the models that were put forward that were worst case scenarios and were just hideously wrong, and the media that has hyped up these rare exceptions like multi-system inflammation in children even though we know the overwhelming evidence is that this disease is absolutely not high risk for children. All the hyperbole, the sensationalising and the failure of public health officials to articulate what we know instead of what we don’t know… The fear is due to what was said by the so-called experts, by the media and by a failure to understand or care that they were instilling hear… I just heard a famous epidemiologist from Harvard the other day say that to have the idea of herd immunity even being discussed is ‘mass murder’ — these kinds of statements are hideously outrageous.
It’s never appropriate to have fear. There is no such thing as a government leader who is competent who instils fear.”
How to protect old people
“We have not been perfect at it, there’s no question — it’s very challenging. The first is to educate people: put forward the guidelines. I think our society has learned — no-one knew what social distancing meant… that was a foreign concept and we now understand that — but there are more specific measures. We have shipped every single nursing home point of care rapid testing — we have mandated weekly testing of every staff that enters a nursing home, but when there is community increase we recommend going up to… four times a week.
We cannot guarantee that we can protect everybody — there is not such thing as zero risk in life…”
But
“I have a 93 year old mother in law, and she said to me 2 months ago, “I’m not interested in being confined in my home. I am not interested in living if that’s the life… I’m old enough to take a risk, I understand social distancing. I’m going to function, otherwise there’s no reason to live.” This sort of bizarre, maybe well-intentioned but misguided idea that we are going to eliminate all risk from life, we are going to stop people from taking any risk that they are well aware of, we’re going to close down businesses, we’re going to stop schools — these are inappropriate and destructive policies.
There are between 30,000 and 90,000 people a year that die — that are high risk elderly — in the United States every flu season. We don’t shut down schools in response to that…”
Is it politics?
“I see that there is a different philosophy in life. In my own family we have different views on things. But we need to start by looking at the data.
One thing that’s been really shocking to me is that in the US and I think all over the world, we have a really contaminated media. Their politics has really distorted truth… I think that has now contaminated public policy and science. There’s been a massive distortion — a complete almost disregard for objectivity, including in some of what were the world’s best journals like Lancet, New England Journal, Nature, Science: these people feel compelled to be politically visible, and that’s contaminated the discussion.”
On test and trace
“Now, there are 7 million registered cases in the US but even the CDC says that it’s probably tenfold that, that’s 70 million people at least; if we look at the world’s cases, maybe 40 million cases but we know that it’s probably 10 to 20 times that. So it’s not possible to do things like contact tracing and isolating asymptomatic people.
A lot of these people who have very fancy CVs have engaged in very sloppy thinking. And now, partly because it’s a political year in the US with a massively polarised electorate, the politics have entered the scene and there’s a massive amount of digging in to the original beliefs even though they are completely wrong…”
On his own reputation
“My position here is not political — zero politics. My motivation was that the President of the United States asked me, a public health policy person who understands medical science, to help in the biggest healthcare crisis of the century. There would be something wrong with you if you would say no to that, no matter what your politics…
When I did that though, I knew I would be vilified, because in the US there are a lot of people who think that this President is radioactive, so there is a massive destruction that ensues immediately when you associate with this President. It’s a very sad statement on America, on American culture, on the world — these people are blinded, even scientists, to the data because they despise the political side of this. And they have a massive ego, and can’t admit they’re wrong. Ok I’m a contrarian, I’m used to being a contrarian, I’m proud to be an outlier when the inliers are wrong.
I’ve gone through various levels of being angry. I’m not angry but I’m sort of disgusted and dismayed at the state of things… It’s just sad to me. I’m cynical about the state we’re in right now and the future… I’m disturbed. I have children of my own who are in their twenties, and I wonder what the future is if we have lost truth in the media, to a great extent, and we are now starting to lose truth in science…
I am angry at the people who were wrong and who insist on prolonging these policies that are killing people, particularly people who are not in their socioeconomic class. It’s no problem for a person who has a high level job in government, or an academic job, to sit there and pontificate when the average guy is being destroyed. That I am angry about and I think history will record these people very harshly — it is an epic failure of massive proportion that they have abandoned regular people here with their own hubris and political agenda. In that sense – yeah I’m angry.”
On masks
“Things like universal mask wearing — honestly that is contrary to the science as well as common sense, to think that you need to wear a mask when you’re in the middle of the desert, when you’re in the car on your own, when you’re bicycling through St James’s Park. This kind of stuff is nonsense. There is no science to support universal masking.
You can look at LA County, Miami-Dade county, many states in the US, the Philippines, Spain, France, the UK, all over the world mandating masks does not stop for the population does not stop cases. That is just super naïve, wrong, and that’s just garbage science really. The WHO does not recommend widespread mandatory masks, the NIH does not recommend that, the CDC data itself shows that that doesn’t work. That’s bordering on wearing a copper bracelet as far as I am concerned.
I do think masks have a role… in medicine we wear masks for surgical procedures. The reason you wear a mask is when you’re very close to somebody, or a sterile environment like an open incision, you want to stop a cough or droplets from getting in there and infecting something. That’s very different from breathing… If you’re socially distanced, there’s no reason to wear a mask.”
On the Stanford letter
“They expose themselves for who they were when they wrote that letter… It’s preposterous what was said. But I have a lot of support inside Hoover Institution, a lot of support in faculty… I certainly have lost some friends, there’s no question about that — would I do it again? Absolutely. It’s the most important thing I’ve ever done.
I’m disgusted by politics – completely disgusted — and it’s a sad statement. People were exposed when someone came into power who they didn’t agree with it they were exposed for who they were. That’s a gross embarrassment, and its sad.. There’s a tremendous amount of emotion rather than rational thought.”
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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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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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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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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. 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’.
Enjoy! And don't forget to rate, like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.