UnHerd with Freddie Sayers

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...

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 Sc...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 censorsh...

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 his...

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...

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...

Freddie Sayers meets David Engelthaler, co-director of the T-Gen Research Institute and former state epidemiologist of Arizona. Earlier this week, Freddie Sayers spoke to David Engelthaler, co-director of the T-Gen Research Institute and former state epidemiologist of Arizona, who has been investigating this idea. His view is that there is now “really compelling evidence” that this strain replicat...

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 increa...

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 time...

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 historia...

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...

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...

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 f...

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 Co...

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 wa...

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 foun...

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 rac...