UnHerd with Freddie Sayers

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  UnHerd  members event this week, Freddie Sayers was joined by mus...

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, wh...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 populati...

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”. Shortl...

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 especiall...

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 Behavio...

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 s...

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...

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 &...

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...

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 b...

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/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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.