UnHerd with Freddie Sayers

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...

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...