UnHerd with Freddie Sayers

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 all corners of the political spectrum. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 personallyIt doesn’t affect me at all, really, because I have no interests in China, either personal or professional. So for me, it’s not significant. But what this is, is an attempt to intimidate British business people, intimidate British politicians and, by the way, intimidate many other people around the world. This is an attempt to bully and I hope it will be seen for exactly what it is.These are Chinese rights, not Western rightsI think we need to stand up for human rights as set out by the UN Declaration of Human Rights, which is not a Western imposition. Those human rights were written by P.C. Chang, a Chinese diplomat. These are Chinese rights that we’re standing up for. And it’s quite something that the Chinese Communist Party is the organisation that is looking to condemn the Chinese citizenry to hardship and its non Chinese powers that are looking to stand up for the Chinese people.‘Guarding the guards’ over Covid restrictionsI know the government got extra powers, which allow it to go until six months time, but it needs to lift them the moment that that is reasonable to do so which I hope, according to the government’s own timelines will be around the 21st of June. So I think that, you know, there is certainly a job of guarding the guards for members of parliament today and powerful speeches by people like Charles Walker yesterday, and and indeed many others on all sides of the house were very important to listen to, but I don’t think it’s quite the same parallel.On personal harassment by the Chinese stateI’ve had letters sent to my home, which is a sort of a ‘we know where you live’ type of message by people in mainland China and friends of mine in agencies have been quite clear as to who they believe has done it. And I’ve had fake email addresses set up in my name and sent out messages to people like you often claiming all sorts of extraordinary and spurious claims… There’s absolutely no doubt that in a tyrannical state like China, these are not the actions of free citizens. These are the actions of the Chinese state. There’s no doubt about it at all. And speaking to internet providers, it’s absolutely clear, who has been doing it, there’s really no doubt at all.‘Minor irritation’The Chinese state has been doing this to its own people for 50 years — it’s hardly surprising that it’s now doing it to people it considers a nuisance overseas. The reality is that the Chinese government runs an extremely aggressive totalitarian regime with which it seeks to silence dissent. It has some of the largest numbers of people in prison, it has some of the highest capital punishment rates in the world, it executes in prisons in order to achieve its aims. And it intimidates in order to attempt to silence beforehand. And you know, the fact that I’m getting some minor irritation, it shouldn’t be here or there. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 by 2045, which would mean no more reproduction and no more babies.This is a worrying discovery, particularly as one of the central drivers of this trend is modernity itself; Swann argues that chemicals, ranging from ATM receipts to Tupperware plastic, in the modern environment are altering —and endangering — human sexual development, and is getting worse by the year.Even if you find this argument a little too extreme (as UnHerd columnist Tom Chivers does), Prof Swan is certainly worth listening to. Having devoted over 20 years of her career to the study of sperm, the epidemiologist is about as well-credentialed as they come and has made a fascinating contribution to the debate. We thank Prof Swan for her time and hope you enjoy the discussion. Key quotes below:On plummeting sperm count:What we found was that sperm count had to climb dramatically over the preceding 40 years, and was at a point where nearly half of men would be entering that range of sperm count, which is associated with sub-fertility at least. We didn’t see any indication that the slope of that line had levelled off, so that when we looked at the data restricting it to the past 30 years, 20 years, 10 years, you might hope that it would be flattening out. But we didn’t see any indication of that, which is alarming, because if it were to continue on its present course — that’s a difficult thing to project — but just mathematically, if you’ve extended the line, it does hit zero in 2045. So that’s the median sperm count, that means half of men would have no sperm.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 ‘digital health passports’. Innes argues that, by using a QR code on people’s phones that shows a tick or cross indicator, passports would make it easier to “manage the risk” of the virus in certain settings (pubs, stadiums, care homes etc).This, according to Silkie Carlo, Director of Big Brother Watch, a civil liberties group, is “alarming”. She warned that this kind of discrimination between the vaccinated and unvaccinated would lead to a “segregated surveillance society” that takes a big step towards mandatory vaccines. Given that Britain has administered 25 million doses, mostly to its vulnerable population, that should be a reason to liberalise — not clamp down on — society. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 to the realisation that “economic monster” that enveloped the world was too great to fight against. Instead, he channelled his energies into writing books, essays, novels and poetry, all of which have been hugely influential in the way we view our relationship with the modern world and its maladies.In his own life, he has tried to “secede from the system” as much as possible by living on his own farmstead out in western Ireland in county Galway. While he admits that it is impossible to fully withdraw from the world, small acts of resistance — whether they are using an unconnected compost loo or refusing to use a smartphone — allows him to “jump off the treadmill”. His recent conversion to Christianity came as a surprise, not least to Paul, and it gave him a deeper appreciation of the importance of limits and humility. Below are some excerpts from this enthralling interview: Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 that mystifies him; as he sees it, his views have always been mainstream liberal, and it is the world around that has changed.In the course of our conversation, the retired judge doesn’t hold back. He asserts that it is becoming morally acceptable to ignore Covid regulations, and even warns that a campaign of “civil disobedience” has already begun.You can read more about what he really thinks here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 published a book, Poverty Safari, detailing the rapper’s working class upbringing in Scotland and winning the Orwell Prize in the process. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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, and Sir Charles Walker, a prominent Conservative Party backbencher and vice chairman of the 1922 Committee, the all-important backbencher group. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 warning — before the law even came into effect.So where does this leave news providers and online sites Down Under? Earlier today, Freddie Sayers spoke to Quillette’s founding editor Claire Lehmann, who joined us from Sydney, to give us a clearer understanding of what this means for publications like hers. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 campaign for keeping certain restrictions in place permanently.One scientist who stands firmly against this proposal is Dr Michael Tildesley, an epidemiologist from the University of Warwick. Dr Tildesley is a formal advisor to the Government, on SPI-M or the “scientific pandemic influenza group on modelling”, which feeds into SAGE, the government scientific committee. While Dr Tildesley favours a slow and gradual loosening of restrictions, he is adamant that keeping restrictive measures in place forever is “very, very scary” and verging on “dystopian”.#Covid-19 #ZeroCovid #lockdown Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 fascinating interview, Ayaan discusses how the pandemic will effect the West’s view of immigration:'There’s a sense that when it comes to immigration, we were told, well, we can’t do this, because it’s going to violate our civil rights. We are liberal societies. And as liberal societies, there are things we can’t do you know, deportations, closing borders, this, that and the other. And now with COVID, what are we doing? We’re closing borders, we’re constraining our civil liberties. We’re having lockdown after lockdown. And so I think even after COVID has passed (us if it’s ever passed us), I think voters are going to think wait a second, you subjected us to all of these things. So you can’t make those arguments afterwards.'  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 how he wants church leaders and ex-police officers in his movement. His pitch, in short, is that philosophical conservatives should not be afraid to embrace radical environmentalism:'There’s a certain amount of cowardice amongst social conservatives, that they see this culture war, and they don’t want to make that step that I’m making today in talking to you. I want social conservatives to step forward and say, ‘Yes, I’m going to sit on an XR platform’. And as a social conservative, you know, as an ex-police officer, as a church leader, right? And say, ‘Yes, I don’t agree with your culture. But I agree with the moral imperative, that at this time in history, we have to start going above and beyond our sectional interest’. And I think that’s a key element of social conservatism at its best, which is to put the national interest, the interest of the whole of society above the sectional or cultural interest.'  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 School in northwest London. Miriam Cates MP, Conservative MP and former science teacher and Alex Gutentag, a public school teacher from Oakland in California.Each of them comes to a different conclusion but they agree on one thing: the impact on children of such an extended period of school closures is very grave.Many thanks to Katharine, Miriam and Alex for sharing their thoughts so candidly.https://unherd.com/thepost/special-report-is-closing-schools-immoral/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 of masculinity. But to Knowland and his supporters, whether the content was offensive or not was secondary to the video’s broader purpose: that these ideas, however provocative they may be, are fair game for discussion and debate.That this incident occurred at the world’s most prestigious school — home to over 20 British Prime Ministers (including the current one) and princes William and Harry — has only served to fuel the controversy further.The story caught our eye because it’s an intriguing case study of the nexus between elite institutions, competing visions of masculine virtue and the limits of acceptable ideas. It’s clear that Knowland sees himself as more than just a teacher looking to provoke his pupils but also a custodian of Eton’s traditions, which he sees as being under threat:'I felt that my duty to uphold Eton’s very long rich tradition of encouraging independent critical thoughts and having broad based debate was being called into question. Why should we stop boys from watching this even in their own time? People should be allowed to make up their own minds about it' - Will KnowlandKnowland believes that a liberal education, should create an environment in which a full range of ideas should be discussed, which he fears is slipping away:'I think, watching the way in which debate had been narrowed over the last five years or so, particularly on this topic at an all boys school struck me as slightly strange. And if you’re an all boys school, and you can’t have a rigorous open discussion of masculinity, as informed by anthropology, and psychology, I think something is going wrong. And if the reason for that is that it might upset a member of staff, then you’re heading in the safespace direction. And I think that if Eton can’t resist that, which is a threat, that is, I think it’s fair to say permeating the wider culture, if Eton, can’t resist that then I think very few places have got a chance of doing so' -  Will KnowlandBut was sacrificing a job that he held for nine years worth it?'Well, I knew I was taking a risk making a stand on a point of principle. But as far as I see it, it’s a point of principle that is essential to the identity of the college, and also essential to what a liberal education is all about. So there’s a sense in which, if I’d allowed that, my job already wouldn’t have been as valuable to me. I mean, there are people who might say, you stay in it just for the money, but any teacher who’s in teaching for the money is very easily bought. And I think that there are more important things than that. And there’s a sense in which I’d lost my job even before I was sacked' - Will KnowlandGiving up your job on principle might be one thing, but choosing to do so over a contentious and factually dubious YouTube lecture may be another. We’ll leave it to you to decide, but thanks to Will for his time.Watch the video version of the podcast here Watch Will Knowland's video 'The Patriarchy Paradox' here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 about the value of lives on television yesterday. In other words, he’s about as far from an ideological Right-winger as you’ll find in the British media.So it was especially sobering to hear him set out some of the things he is worried about from a legal and human rights perspective since the pandemic started around 12 months ago. He wondered aloud on Twitter whether, had the virus not originated in China and had the response not been set by their invention of lockdowns, this approach would ever have become the accepted sensible response in liberal Western democracies?He argues that, while he absolutely accepts that the virus constitutes a threat that justifies emergency action:Lockdowns have become a “received wisdom” and that, in due course, a proper inquiry into which components actually were effective, and whether each component passed the proportionality test, is essential.The emergency powers taken by the Government have been abused — they were not designed to be used over such a long period of time. He deplores the lack of oversight and due process for these measures that change everybody’s lives.The “Napoleonic” principle that everything is illegal unless you are explicitly allowed it is an inversion of the way the law has worked in this country throughout modern times. If you had told a human rights expert or public lawyer this would be the situation 12 months ago they would never have believed you.From a Human Rights perspective, balancing the right to life with the right to associate, and the right to a family life, is a precarious act and it is right to scrutinise every measure in that context and be sceptical of them to make sure they are not going too farOnce restrictions are taken for temporary emergencies, a look at history shows that they tend to become permanent (he cites the terrorism measures in response to 9/11 as an example).Many thanks to Adam for such an interesting conversation. And apologies for the temporary studio — we're refurbishing!Watch the video version here: https://unherd.com/thepost/adam-wagner-are-lockdowns-a-threat-to-human-rights/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 wise way for Democrats to respond? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 ‘foundations’ on which, according to moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, liberals and conservatives divide. In his bestseller 2012 book ‘The Righteous Mind’, the NYU professor made the argument that liberals tend to value the first two foundations over the others, harm and fairness, while conservatives value the others just as much.But have the past few years, particularly the last 12 months, changed everything? After Trump, Brexit and now a pandemic, global protests and a contested US election we were curious to find out from Jonathan how — or if — the characteristics of Left and Right have changed. Is the new Left not rather more interested in Authority and in-group loyalty than they used to be? And is the prevalence of cancel culture and online censorship now a hallmark of liberal purity? How do these divides map across different generations?We put these questions to Professor Haidt, and his answers were both unsettling and enlightening. Thanks to him for taking the time to talk to us. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 censorship against a platform that has brought us millions of views and over 110,000 followers, but could it be that heterodox channels like ours have found their way onto a blacklist of channels that should be ever so gently… suppressed?#Censorship #Pandemic #Democrats Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 historian Tom Holland, it’s been around a lot longer than that.“Anxiety about that is in itself a very Christian tradition,” he told me in our LockdownTV Christmas Special (complete with crackling fire and stockings). “By the time you get to the Reformation in England, the Puritans in particular are very anxious about the way in which they see the Roman Church as having failed to root up the brambles and nettles of Paganism… The Puritans are the first people to draw up this thesis that Christmas celebrations derive from the pagan.”The stereotype of Cromwell cancelling Christmas is not quite fair, says Tom, but the echoes were profound.“One of the fascinations of this strangest of Christmases is that actually it does bring you quite close to what the Puritans were worried about. Just as people now who want to really rein in Christmas are doing it for the best of reasons, because it they think that it will save lives and be for the good of society as a whole, that was exactly the motivation of the Puritans… They were anxious that celebrating Christmas in a pagan way would doom those who did it to eternal death. It’s about health in both cases, a desire to not needlessly see people lost to death.”But despite the Christian impulses behind many of the pandemic restrictions, the absence of the Church in playing a leading role in this pandemic has been new, and striking. Not only did they close their doors for the first time since the Interdict in the 13th century, church leaders have been remarkably absent from the discourse.“The risk for the churches is that they come to seem like an eccentric and not very important sub department of the welfare state. The role played by bishops, the messages that they were giving, were basically public health messages — but if the church is going to play a distinctive role, that is inadequate… The point of them must be to talk about the idea that there is a purpose to this, that there is a dimension that lies beyond the merely physical — all the stuff that traditionally churches have talked about but which they now seem slightly embarrassed about.”We covered his own faith, reflections on this particular Christmas, and the ongoing presence of the Christian influence in so much of this year’s events.Thanks to Tom for a great discussion. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 we can surmise that they are no longer on speed dial.Professor Elgh has been one of the most outspoken critics of the Swedish response to Covid-19, calling for more dramatic action as early as March 2nd in an op-ed in the main Swedish broadsheet. Since then, he has been shocked by what he sees as inaction by the Swedish government. “In the early days, the information was ‘this was nothing to worry about,’ week after week after week,” he says.From the start of the epidemic, there was no serious attempt to quarantine arrivals from infected areas in Europe — much of the Stockholm infection is thought to have arrived from returning skiers from the Alps in February — and even contacts of known cases were not required to isolate. As Professor Elgh puts it, “there was no will to stop this, no will to put people in quarantine that came from these places, no will even to put people in quarantine that had been in contact with people who came down with the disease, no will to stop pupils going to school who had come back from infected areas.”He targets Johan Giesecke and Anders Tegnell for particular criticism. “They have not really told us what the exact strategy was, but it must have been that it should sweep through the community rapidly,” he says. “I will say to the day that I die that this was a huge mistake.”Once the summer arrived and cases and deaths fell to a very low level, due to seasonal effects, he believes that the country should have been preparing for a second wave. “We could have prepared ourselves in a number of ways during the summer. I was really upset when it was like everything was over and we had done a fantastic job. That was not okay with me.”Professor Elgh says that right now, dramatic action is required. “What we have to do — we have to save lives. We have to save health. In Sweden, we need to save our health system because that is almost full… In a fortnight we will have a tremendous amount of cases in our hospitals.”“I would install a very tough lockdown for four weeks. First two weeks of lockdown so you get rid of the contagion from the streets and the shops and everywhere, then another two weeks to make sure that spread within families comes down to as near zero as possible.”I put it to him that what that practically means is on-off lockdowns all the way until the vaccine has been very widely distributed. “Yes, it might be like that. That’s probably what we are going to see in the other European countries… and we just have to do that… Look at our curve – where is it going? We cannot accept that… The current measures are not enough. If we go on like this, week after week, waiting for the curve to come down, we will be in a disastrous situation.”Our thanks to Professor Elgh for sharing his views. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 to Freddie Sayers how she rationalises her lifestyle. She believes that while some people get into sex work because they are already on the outskirts of society and it is the only choice they have to survive, others join the business because they “realise this is the best way to earn money for the least amount of work and are doing it strategically. A surprisingly high number of women in the rationality community have tried sex work.”Aella puts herself in both categories; on the one hand, she got into porn when she was desperate, but now believes that her highly analytical, high de-coupling mind meant that she was well-suited to this her line of work: “I think that my brain is different. I’ve noticed that since I was a kid, I’m just different in the way I process things”. Perhaps Aella’s success (she is among the top 0.3% of earners) can be at least partially attributed to her data-driven approach. She regularly conducts polls among her viewers and analyses the data to inform her content and grow her audience.She grew up in a ‘fundamentalist Christian’ household, and says that, rather than a rebellion against her upbringing, she believes it was oddly good training for belonging to a group that is very little understood by wider society.Does she not feel sex is sacred at all? Does she not worry that an example is being set for hundreds of thousands of girls for whom it would be very harmful? What about the men – what sort of men is a society with unlimited porn producing?She offers answers to all these difficult questions, and many more. Thanks to Aella for giving her time. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 replicates faster than earlier strains, which "likely" came out of China and through to Europe. "It's really quickly dominated all of the other strains that were seen in Europe at the time, it became the predominant strain that came into the Americas, spread throughout the United States and is now spread to pretty much every corner of the planet".In his own state, Engelthaler witnessed several of the early introductions to Arizona, coming from the Pacific coast straight from China, but fizzled out quickly, with less effective transmission. “And then all of a sudden we started having explosive outbreaks. When we go back and look genomically, the vast majority of those cases where we had very large outbreaks were being driven by the strains that were coming from the East Coast out of Europe, which all seemed to have this particular mutation in the spike protein.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 increasing threats to free speech and academic enquiry around politically sensitive topics.Cambridge has been in the news all year in this regard —rescinding the invitation of a visiting fellowship to Canadian academic Jordan Peterson, removing academic Noah Carl after his controversial study into race and intelligence and subjecting a college porter to a campaign to be removed after he voted a certain way on a trans issue as a Labour local councillor.Freddie Sayers spoke to Dr Arif Ahmed, a Philosophy tutor and fellow on Gonville and Caius college, who has raised concerns that the inclusion of a requirement to be ‘respectful’ of people’s opinions and identities, included in the proposed free speech policy, risks legitimising future censorship. He thinks it could have been used to justify excluding Jordan Peterson, on the grounds that he has not been sufficiently respectful of certain religions, or forbidding the inclusion of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons in a course about free speech. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 timely: just this week three of his fellow activists (including Joshua Wong) were arrested and sentenced to 10-13 months in prison.Nathan now lives in the UK, which took the unprecedented step earlier this year of offering residency to any holder of a British National overseas passport in Hong Kong. Up to three million Hongkongers are eligible for this residency, and according to Nathan, as many as 100,000 people could arrive in the first year. That is a substantial figure, and one that will present Boris Johnson’s government with a potentially difficult question on how to accommodate for such an influx.Nathan speaks fondly of his adopted home, and is hopeful that his presence here is not a sign of failure but a signal for change. He told Freddie Sayers that the West must be more aware of the threat from China and hold them accountable for human rights violations in Xinjiang and foreign interference in states like his own. He also spoke about his blue collar upbringing and his experience in moving from China to join his family in Hong Kong at a young age, which gave him a valuable insight into events today.We hope you enjoy the interview and thank you to Nathan for giving us the time. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 historian and sociologist of the Left Harvey Kaye, a former advisor and supporter of Bernie Sanders, who has subsequently become more critical. As a professor of Democracy and Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, he lives in one of America’s most politically competitive states, offering a front row seat at the rise of Donald Trump. His warning in this interview is clear: that it was exactly the kind of neoliberal policies that Biden seems likely to return to that got the billionaire into power.According to Professor Kaye, the only way for Biden to meet the challenges of today is by returning to the Rooseveltian tradition in the party. He argues that the last 45 years has seen a steady decline in the relationship between the Democrat Party and the American working class, which was perfectly encapsulated by the uninspiring cast of candidates in the Democratic primaries. Even Bernie Sanders drifted too close to the centre and should have done more to challenge his rivals on issues like free healthcare.It’s not often that you hear about Bernie Sanders not being radical enough, and it was interesting getting a different perspective from such a distinguished historian on the Left. We hope you agree! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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's biggest newspapers.Don't miss her full essay on UnHerd: https://unherd.com/2020/11/why-i-had-to-leave-the-guardian/Watch the full interview on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSVd36xEplY&feature=youtu.be Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 to fighting the pandemic earlier this year.The ZOE app made headlines recently for demonstrating quite conclusively that the number of daily infections was already levelling off and even coming down in some areas of England at the end of October, prior to the second national lockdown. It painted a very different picture from the apocalyptic scenarios described in the Prime Minister’s briefing.Professor Spector was refreshingly outspoken when I interviewed him yesterday. He saidHad the Government followed data from the ZOE app they would not have gone into a second lockdown, which he believes was unnecessaryThe Government is tilted too much in the direction of caution and has lost a balanced sense of proportionHe is worried that they will use the new vaccine news as a “carrot” to keep us locked down for the next three months, when he believes it will likely take most of the year to get enough people vaccinatedHe understands people’s concerns about such a new vaccine, and ZOE will be tracking any side effects from vaccinated people via its app Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From the archive, first published: 29 October 2020Since 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 feel like, and how it would eventually go wrong. Much of Fukuyama’s writing since – from The Great Disruption (1999), through to his most recent book, Identity(2018) — has focused on the inadequacy of bland technocratic globalism. It’s not primarily an economic analysis: he describes how the part of the human soul (thymos) that seeks dignity and recognition of differences was suppressed by the global unanimity and so the populist waves of 2016 and beyond were inevitable.And yet he remains highly critical of the populist governments that challenged that consensus, recently writing how the ejection of Donald Trump from office next week is the most important political event of the past two generations.I wanted explore that tension, and had a fascinating and enjoyable discussion from his home in Stanford, California.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 Coronavirus task force, he does not hold back. He tells us that he is disgusted and dismayed at the media and public policy establishment, sad that it has come to this, cynical about their intentions, and angry that lockdown policies have been allowed to go on so long.He won’t be rushing back to Stanford, where his colleagues have rounded on him, if the President loses in November. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From the archive, first published 15 October 2020Piers 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 was felt by government ministers earlier this year.He has, however, been criticised for the hostile nature of his interviews. No minister has appeared on his show for over 100 days, which has led many to question its efficacy of a style that cannot even attract guests. The Good Morning Britain host makes no apology for this, arguing that government officials deserve to be scrutinised — if they can’t deal with a heated interview, how can they be expected to cope in a global pandemic? Morgan expresses deep misgivings over No10’s handling of the Covid outbreak and even goes so far to suggest that, having voted for the Boris Johnson in the last election, he would now vote for Keir Starmer. But he also admits that he has gone too far in the past. Morgan “totally embraces” his own culpability in inflaming passions on either side of the debate, describing himself as a “work in progress”.We certainly saw a different, softer side to Piers in this interview. Whether his desire to be a “force for good in the world” will result in a wholesale change in his interviews remains to be seen, but it would be fair to say that stranger things have sprouted out of this pandemic. Enjoy.Buy Piers’s latest book ‘Wake Up’ here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 found ourselves rather mesmerised with the story he has to tell about the fungal world, its possibilities as well as its challenges to our politics and philosophical assumptions.We start with the basics, and get increasingly abstract – come minute 37 you might think differently about things! Enjoy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 race in such an intense way ultimately advances or hurts Martin Luther King’s vision of people being judged “not by the colour of their skin but but the content of their character.”Coleman Hughes is just 24 years old, but as a fellow of the Manhattan Institute and Contributing Editor of City Journal, has already established himself as a brave and distinctly level-headed voice during heated times.It was a pleasure to talk to him, and hear his measured and fair assessment of race relations in America, and the effect of the wider BLM movement. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.