UnHerd with Freddie Sayers

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...

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 t...

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 urba...

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, rath...

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 manda...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...