UnHerd with Freddie Sayers

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 Fr...

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...

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 c...

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 c...

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 usi...

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...

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 contempo...

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 autho...

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...

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 criti...

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: - 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) - He and his colleagues w...

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 headl...

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...

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 politica...

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 mi...

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, s...

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, Kingsnort...

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. Hosted on Acast. See...

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...

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”...

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...

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 alrea...

Freddie Sayers speaks with Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 forge...

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...