UnHerd with Freddie Sayers

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...

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 a...

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 member...

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 autho...

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, w...

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 Matthe...

When John McWhorter, professor of Linguistics and American Studies at Columbia,  described  antiracism as America’s ‘new flawed religion’ in 2015, few could have imagined just how prescient that description would prove to be. Just this week, the Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi thanked George Floyd for “sacrificing his life for justice” while  CEO s,  celebrities , and other&n...

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 Tr...

Hear Jesse Singal discuss his latest book with Freddie Sayers Further reading: The empty promise of pop psychology Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 infe...

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...

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 atten...

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 tak...

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...

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...

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 si...

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...

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 ‘dig...

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...

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 t...

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 publishe...

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,...

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 warn...

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 cam...

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 fascinatin...