UnHerd
Dave Rubin: the next Governor of California?
- Title
- Dave Rubin: the next Governor of California?
- Runtime
- 2:53
- Date posted
- 5 years ago
- Description
- Watch the full interview: https://youtu.be/bFC29RlH0L0
Freddie Sayers spoke to the YouTube star about a potential run...
At one moment during our fascinating conversation (interview out tomorrow 4pm UK time), I had a sudden realisation that YouTube star and interviewer Dave Rubin was sounding like a man with political ambitions. So I asked him outright. Does his answer add up to a declaration of intent?
#DaveRubin #USPolitics #California
- Title
- Vermont Professor: I stand by my anti-whiteness video
- Runtime
- 33:56
- Date posted
- 5 years ago
- Description
- Freddie Sayers meets Aaron Kindsvatter, professor of counselling at the University of Vermont.
Accompanying article here: https://unherd.com/thepost/vermont-professor-i-stand-by-my-anti-whiteness-video/
Listen to the podcast here: https://shows.acast.com/lockdowntv-with-freddie-sayers/college-professor-i-wont-back-down-over-anti-whiteness-video
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 at the University of Vermont. Claiming to see an ideology of 'anti-whiteness' spreading around the School of Education, Professor Aaron Kindsvatter published a video denouncing the anti-racist agenda f...
- Title
- Tim Pool on Big Tech's woke authoritarianism
- Runtime
- 41:29
- Date posted
- 5 years ago
- Description
- Accompanying article here: https://unherd.com/thepost/tim-pool-on-joe-biden-occupy-and-big-tech/
Listen to the podcast here: https://shows.acast.com/lockdowntv-with-freddie-sayers/tim-pool-on-joe-biden-occupy-and-big-tech
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.
Though he would broadly categorise himself as a Left-libertarian, he is no friend of the Democrat Party, describing it as the 'War Machine Party' and even voted for Trump in 2020. We were interested to learn more about Tim's rationale behind this move, which also seemed to reflect a broader realign...
- Title
- Hacked and sanctioned by the Chinese: Tom Tugendhat MP speaks out
- Runtime
- 15:30
- Date posted
- 5 years ago
- Description
- 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.
Listen to the podcast version here: https://shows.acast.com/lockdowntv-with-freddie-sayers/episodes/tom-tugendhat-the-chinese-government-sent-letters-to-my-home
Read the accompanying article here: https://unherd.com/thepost/tom-tugendhat-the-chinese-government-sent-letters-to-my-home/
// Key Quotes //
*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 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 ...
- Title
- Spermageddon: are humans going extinct?
- Runtime
- 29:00
- Date posted
- 5 years ago
- Description
- Freddie Sayers meets Prof Shanna Swan of Mount Sinai, New York.
Accompanying article here: https://unherd.com/thepost/spermageddon-are-humans-going-extinct/
Listen to the podcast here: https://shows.acast.com/lockdowntv-with-freddie-sayers/spermageddon-are-humans-going-extinct
Is the human race in danger 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.
Our Science Editor Tom Chivers wasn't overly convinced by the thesis, but we wanted to hear Dr Swan out. She argues that chemicals such as "Pthalates", to be found in everything from ATM receipts to Tupperware plastic,...
- Title
- Debate: are vaccine passports a necessary evil?
- Runtime
- 37:08
- Date posted
- 5 years ago
- Description
- Accompanying article here: https://unherd.com/thepost/debate-are-vaccine-passports-necessary/
Listen to the podcast here: https://shows.acast.com/lockdowntv-with-freddie-sayers/debate-are-vaccine-passports-necessary
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". Sh...
- Title
- Paul Kingsnorth: science doesn't have all the answers
- Runtime
- 50:07
- Date posted
- 5 years ago
- Description
- Accompanying article here: https://unherd.com/?post_type=thepost&p=76196&preview=true
Podcast: https://shows.acast.com/lockdowntv-with-freddie-sayers/paul-kingsnorth-science-can-never-replace-the-mythic
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 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 fr...
- Title
- Lord Sumption: Mass civil disobedience has begun
- Runtime
- 51:09
- Date posted
- 5 years ago
- Description
- Freddie Sayers meets Jonathan Sumption.
Read the full article: https://unherd.com/2021/03/lord-sumption-civil-disobedience-has-begun/
Listen to the podcast version: https://shows.acast.com/lockdowntv-with-freddie-sayers/lord-sumption-mass-civil-disobedience-has-begun
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 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...
- Title
- Headmaster: I refuse to make pupils wear masks in class
- Runtime
- 17:25
- Date posted
- 5 years ago
- Description
- David Perks is the founder and headteacher at the East London Science School, built on the principle of offering a strong foundation in science and maths and encouraging critical thinking.
When they come back on March 8th, he will not be following government guidance and requiring his pupils to wear facemasks in class.
Thanks to David for sharing his experience — we’ll be watching to see what other schools choose to do.
- Title
- Rapper Loki: Class, not identity, should drive politics
- Runtime
- 32:22
- Date posted
- 5 years ago
- Description
- Accompanying article here: https://unherd.com/thepost/rapper-loki-class-not-identity-should-drive-politics/
Listen to the podcast version: https://shows.acast.com/lockdowntv-with-freddie-sayers/rapper-loki-class-not-identity-should-drive-politics
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.
Thanks to Loki for sharing his thoughts on the corrosive effects of identity politics on society, his family's struggles with addiction and alcoholism, and the phoniness of woke cap...
- Title
- Politicians of Left and Right join forces to challenge lockdowns
- Runtime
- 26:09
- Date posted
- 5 years ago
- Description
- Accompanying article here: https://unherd.com/thepost/david-blunkett-and-charles-walker-join-forces-to-oppose-lockdowns/
Podcast link here: https://shows.acast.com/lockdowntv-with-freddie-sayers/lord-david-blunkett-and-sir-charles-walker-lockdown-must-end
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. Two notable exceptions, however, come from the British parliamentary system: Lord David Blunkett, a famous figure of the New Labour movement 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 that decides the leader of the party.
Coming from two very different political backgrounds, these unlikely bedfellows have joined forces to ...
- Title
- Claire Lehmann: Facebook has made a bad miscalculation
- Runtime
- 17:06
- Date posted
- 5 years ago
- Description
- Accompanying article here: https://unherd.com/thepost/claire-lehmann-australia-is-the-canary-in-the-facebook-coal-mine/
Podcast link: https://shows.acast.com/lockdowntv-with-freddie-sayers/claire-lehmann-australia-is-the-canary-in-the-facebook-coal-
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.<...
- Title
- Government scientist speaks out: we want the old normal back
- Runtime
- 28:03
- Date posted
- 5 years ago
- Description
- Accompanying article: https://unherd.com/thepost/government-scientist-dystopian-talk-of-new-normal-scares-me/
Podcast version: https://shows.acast.com/lockdowntv-with-freddie-sayers/mike-tildesley
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 ...
- Title
- Ayaan Hirsi Ali: virtue signalling on immigration, BLM and MeToo is dangerous
- Runtime
- 43:32
- Date posted
- 5 years ago
- Description
- Accompanying article here: https://unherd.com/thepost/ayaan-hirsi-ali-covid-has-changed-the-immigration-debate-forever/
Podcast link: https://shows.acast.com/lockdowntv-with-freddie-sayers/ayaan-hirsi-ali-virtue-signalling-about-immigration-hurts-wo
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.
#immigration #covid-19 #borders
- Title
- Extinction Rebellion founder: why right wingers should be radical environmentalists
- Runtime
- 30:34
- Date posted
- 5 years ago
- Description
- Accompanying article here: https://unherd.com/?post_type=thepost&p=55866&preview=true
Podcast link: https://shows.acast.com/lockdowntv-with-freddie-sayers/roger-hallam-the-conservative-case-for-extinction-rebelllion.
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.
#ExtinctionRebellion #COP26 #Environment
- Title
- Teachers speak out: school closures are a disaster
- Runtime
- 37:18
- Date posted
- 5 years ago
- Description
- Accompanying article here: https://unherd.com/thepost/special-report-is-closing-schools-immoral/
Podcast link here: https://shows.acast.com/lockdowntv-with-freddie-sayers/teachers-speak-out-is-closing-schools-immoral
For much of the past year, across Europe and the wider world, schools have been closed. Was this a morally justifiable policy?
We 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 t...
- Title
- Sacked Eton teacher: I stand by my patriarchy lecture
- Runtime
- 35:36
- Date posted
- 5 years ago
- Description
- Freddie Sayers meets Will Knowland to discuss his sacking from Eton College.
Accompanying article here: https://unherd.com/thepost/sacked-eton-teacher-i-stand-by-my-patriarchy-lecture/
Podcast link here: https://shows.acast.com/lockdowntv-with-freddie-sayers/sacked-eton-teacher-i-stand-by-my-lecture
Watch The Patriarchy Paradox here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTHgMxQEoPI
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 provocative lecture, ‘The Patriarchy Paradox’, argued that the idea of a repressive patriarchy throughout history is a myth, that men have had it harder than women, and that traditional gender roles are not social constructions but due to innate biological differences.
To its critics, the video was deemed offensive and sexist for espousing such a retrograde view of masculinity. But to Knowland and...
- Title
- Adam Wagner: are lockdowns a threat to human rights?
- Runtime
- 34:42
- Date posted
- 5 years ago
- Description
- Accompany article here: https://unherd.com/thepost/adam-wagner-are-lockdowns-a-threat-to-human-rights/
Podcast link here: https://shows.acast.com/lockdowntv-with-freddie-sayers/adam-wagner-are-lockdowns-against-human-rights
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 star...
- Title
- Andrew Sullivan: I was right about Donald Trump
- Runtime
- 49:02
- Date posted
- 5 years ago
- Description
- Freddie Sayers speaks to writer and commentator Andrew Sullivan to help understand what's going on in America.
Accompany article here: https://unherd.com/thepost/andrew-sullivan-i-was-right-about-trump/
Podcast link here: https://shows.acast.com/lockdowntv-with-freddie-sayers/andrew-sullivan-i-was-right-about-trump
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?
To help understand this significant moment, and what these final astonishing weeks of the Trump administration mean for the US and for the world, I spoke to writer and commentator Andrew Sullivan. He lives just a few blocks away from the Capitol and from the first moments of our interview you can see...
- Title
- Jonathan Haidt: the political chaos isn't over yet
- Runtime
- 43:24
- Date posted
- 5 years ago
- Description
- Accompanying article here: https://unherd.com/thepost/jonathan-haidt-have-left-and-right-changed-beyond-recognition/
Podcast here: https://open.acast.com/public/streams/5fad6d24bc034454b53fe011/episodes/5ff5bd02d11a3c56e442dc7f.mp3
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 f...
- Title
- Glenn Greenwald: Big Tech is censoring Covid debate
- Runtime
- 36:16
- Date posted
- 6 years ago
- Description
- Freddie Sayers meets Glenn Greenwald to discuss tech censorship during the pandemic.
Read article here: https://unherd.com/thepost/tech-censorship-how-paranoid-should-we-be/
Listen to the podcast version on:
Acast: https://shows.acast.com/lockdowntv-with-freddie-sayers/glenn-greenwald-tech-censorship-of-covid-discussion-is-dange
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/glenn-greenwald-tech-censorship-covid-discussion-is/id1540134798?i=1000503695626
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7bSXn9vjqrB4hfWLaZ2Pyr?si=jxuNhLrrQ_iKYBsbzbckWA
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. I hate the idea of being conspir...
- Title
- Christmas special with Tom Holland
- Runtime
- 30:52
- Date posted
- 6 years ago
- Description
- Tom Holland, historian and 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.
Listen to the podcast version on:
Acast: https://shows.acast.com/lockdowntv-with-freddie-sayers/episodes/tom-holland-is-it-christian-to-cancel-christmas
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/tom-holland-is-it-christian-to-cancel-christmas/id1540134798?i=1000503314886
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/18YRLvpTYd2tOfOva6kNwv?si=-vnNuTrpSAqplTUuYWeO4g
Anxiety about Christmas being “cancelled” has been a staple in tabloid newspapers for decades — but according to 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 (...
- Title
- Swedish Professor: we are headed for disaster
- Runtime
- 42:10
- Date posted
- 6 years ago
- Description
- Freddie Sayers speaks with Fredrik Elgh, a Professor of Virology at Umeå University in Northern Sweden and a clinical physician.
Listen to the podcast version of the interview on:
Acast: https://shows.acast.com/lockdowntv-with-freddie-sayers/episodes/swedish-professor-we-are-headed-for-disaster
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/swedish-professor-we-are-headed-for-disaster/id1540134798?i=1000502813386
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3UcCFBucoLcA4XtG7Ounkt?si=dD49cBeERyGmsnQYNRS4vA
Accompanying article:
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 ...
- Title
- OnlyFans star Aella on the ethics of pornography
- Runtime
- 48:42
- Date posted
- 6 years ago
- Description
- Freddie Sayers meets Aella.
Read the article here: https://unherd.com/thepost/meet-aella-the-intellectual-porn-star/
Listen to the podcast version: https://shows.acast.com/lockdowntv-with-freddie-sayers/meet-aella-the-intellectual-porn-star
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.
Freddie Sayers spoke to Aella, one of OnlyFans most successful and best-known creators, to discuss the morality of pornography and the reality of modern sex work.
Follow UnHerd on social media:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/unherd
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/unherd/
#OnlyFans #Pornography #Aella
- Title
- New virus strain means containing Covid-19 is impossible
- Runtime
- 31:10
- Date posted
- 6 years ago
- Description
- Freddie Sayers meets David Engelthaler, co-director of the T-Gen Research Institute and former state epidemiologist of Arizona.
Accompany article here: https://unherd.com/thepost/genomics-expert-new-covid-mutation-was-harder-to-control/
Listen to the podcast version of the interview on:
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/genomics-expert-does-covid-mutation-explain-asia-exception/id1540134798?i=1000501947094
Acast: https://shows.acast.com/lockdowntv-with-freddie-sayers/david-engelthaler
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/260Hzdh3yTA1aAiqdW9Ri3?si=-fzys0NnTPCTR9XaCAv-3w&context=spotify%3Ashow%3A13ZOVT9rEh2EvcsikrdPIq
The New York Times recently reported that, in the early months of the pandemic, a particular genetic strain of Covid-19 known as D14G was shown to be more prevalent in Italy than any Asian countries. This may have helped explain why the disease spread so fast in that country, and elsewhere in ...
- Title
- Cambridge tutor: don't force me to 'respect' your views
- Runtime
- 21:38
- Date posted
- 6 years ago
- Description
- Freddie Sayers meets Dr Arif Ahmed of Cambridge University.
For article and key quotes see here:
https://unherd.com/thepost/tutor-speaks-out-on-cambridge-free-speech-battle/
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 camp...
- Title
- Hong Kong dissident: 100,000 could move to Britain next year
- Runtime
- 28:01
- Date posted
- 6 years ago
- Description
- 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 ...
- Title
- Suzanne Moore: driven out of the Guardian by the trans row
- Runtime
- 44:51
- Date posted
- 6 years ago
- Description
- 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/
Listen to the podcast version of the interview on:
iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suzanne-moore-why-i-had-to-leave-the-guardian/id1540134798?i=1000500138699
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6xXNXUGRUJ9teA0DmDfSQn?si=WWYccHCVSjCve2EvK4IB8Q
Acast: https://shows.acast.com/lockdowntv-with-freddie-sayers/episodes/suzanne-moore
#SusanneMoore #TheGuardian #FreeSpeech
- Title
- Controversial mask study Professor: masks are still worthwhile
- Runtime
- 18:27
- Date posted
- 6 years ago
- Description
- The Danish ‘randomised control trial’ study into the protective effects of facemasks caused the predictable furore when it was published this week. Comparing a sample of 3000 people who were wearing masks and 3000 people who were not, 42 of the mask-wearers became infected with Covid-19 and 53 of the non-mask-wearers: a small, non-statistically-significant difference.
The self-appointed Defenders of Science were quick to move into attack mode. Oxford’s Trish Greenhalgh said it was not necessarily “high quality science” and made some technical objections to the study; science-activists like Vincent Rajkumar, Editor-in-Chief of the Blood Cancer Journal, announced: “Ignore the Danish study. Masks work. Wear a mask… Speaking as someone who has led 10 RCTs and knows when to ignore one”; a former CDC director lambasted the study in the same journal that published it.
To make it worse, there were rumours that the study had been squashed or censored, r...
- Title
- Prof Tim Spector: hopes of a vaccine will lead to more lockdowns
- Runtime
- 30:20
- Date posted
- 6 years ago
- Description
- 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 said:
- Had the Government followed data from the ZOE app they would not have -gone into a...
- Title
- Manchester student: they fenced us in like animals
- Runtime
- 11:26
- Date posted
- 6 years ago
- Description
- Freddie Sayers meets Izzy Smitheman, a fresher at Manchester University, who suddenly finds herself at the centre of a national controversy after having led a protest on campus last night against students being literally fenced in.
Her story is one of thousands of students who are having a nightmare first year at university nationwide.
She believes almost everyone she knows has had the virus at this point, and nobody she knows has had any serious symptoms.
The university has now taken down the fencing, after the students began pulling it down in anger.
She says the next stage of her political campaign will be to focus on fees — she has not even entered the university yet this year, has received no in person tuition, and feels that the experience is not worth the £9,000 a year it is costing her.
Thanks to Izzy for sharing her story.
- Title
- Robert Cahaly: how we got the polls right
- Runtime
- 22:17
- Date posted
- 6 years ago
- Description
- Whatever the final result, one thing is clear about this election: the pollsters were way off. Almost all of them showed Joe Biden taking most of the battleground states and winning comfortably.
Robert Cahaly of Trafalgar took a different view.
Here he is speaking to Freddie Sayers on Lockdown TV about Donald Trump's electoral prospects in September...
- Title
- Bret Weinstein: whatever happens today, the system is broken
- Runtime
- 46:27
- Date posted
- 6 years ago
- Description
- Just ahead of the election, Freddie Sayers speaks to Bret Weinstein — a leading member of what used to be called the Intellectual Dark Web, evolutionary biologist, writer and host of the Dark Horse podcast.
Over the course of 45 minutes they cover the danger of censorship by the big tech platforms, the possibility of a new political coalition and whether we’re more likely to be heading into a new Renaissance era or towards disaster.
Enjoy!
KEY QUOTES:
On tech censorship:
I have a model in which many of the things that feel conspiratorial are actually a combination of phenomena: one part is emergent and one part is conscious, and the two of them work together to create something quite Soviet and bureaucratic. There’s also another possibility, which is that if one wants to do arbitrary things, if one wants to silence certain kinds of speech, and amplify other kinds of speech because they are advancing a political agenda, the...
- Title
- Francis Fukuyama: Trumpism came from the soul
- Runtime
- 42:06
- Date posted
- 6 years ago
- Description
- Since Aris Roussinos’s fantastic essay on UnHerd earlier this month, “Why Fukuyama was right all along, (https://unherd.com/2020/09/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 forcefully critical of precisely those populist governments tha...
- Title
- Scott Atlas: I'm disgusted and dismayed
- Runtime
- 40:57
- Date posted
- 6 years ago
- Description
- 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.
KEY QUOTES
Why him?
I’m a healthcare policy person — I have a background in medical science, but my role really is to translate medial science into public policy. That’s very different from being an epide...
- Title
- Freddie Sayers challenges Piers Morgan on lockdown and liberalism
- Runtime
- 45:03
- Date posted
- 6 years ago
- Description
- Piers 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 t...
- Title
- Francois Balloux: climate of fear on Covid is dangerous
- Runtime
- 39:45
- Date posted
- 6 years ago
- Description
- Since the start of the pandemic, the debate over Covid restrictions has grown increasingly acrimonious. As both sides have dug their heels in, one person that has tried to keep himself above the fray is Prof Francois Balloux, Director of the UCL Genetics Institute and Professor of Computational Systems Biology at University College London.
He is typically grouped with the lockdown sceptics, but Prof Balloux has so far managed to retain the respect of both sides. Earlier this week, we caught up with Francois to discuss his thoughts on the pandemic, what kind of strategy he would like to see implemented, and why fear poses such a threat to society. Enjoy.
- Title
- Dissenting scientists issue Covid-19 herd immunity declaration
- Runtime
- 32:27
- Date posted
- 6 years ago
- Description
- Freddie Sayers talks to eminent epidemiologists Dr Sunetra Gupta, Dr Jay Bhattacharya and Dr. Martin Kulldorff, who met in Massachusetts to sign a declaration calling for a different global response to the pandemic.
Read the full declaration here: https://unherd.com/2020/10/covid-experts-there-is-another-way/
- Title
- James Lindsay: How Trump mainstreamed Critical Race Theory
- Runtime
- 50:44
- Date posted
- 6 years ago
- Description
- Read the accompanying article on UnHerd here: https://unherd.com/thepost/how-trump-mainstreamed-critical-race-theory/
Freddie Sayers spoke to James Lindsay about Critical Race Theory and what kind of threat the ideology poses.
It was was officially mainstreamed last month when President Donald Trump called the ideology in a speech last month a "Marxist doctrine" that was "inundating students across America". This week, it came up again in the presidential debate after Trump defended his decision to a memo condemning the federal funding of any training based on it.
One person who understands this subject better than most is James Lindsay (whose work, reportedly, influenced the content of the President's speech). Along with co-author, Helen Pluckrose, who has a piece in the magazine today, these two academics co-wrote a book called Cynical Theories, which provides the most comprehensive analysis of the rise of CRT to date.
- Title
- French expert: Covid has exposed the limits of the human species
- Runtime
- 30:10
- Date posted
- 6 years ago
- Description
- Interviewing Jean-Francois Toussaint often felt more like speaking to a philosopher than a physiologist. Coming from a professor of physiology at the University of Paris and director of IRMES, his emphasis on giving people back their "ability to taste and live" and rediscovering the joys of life might sound unusual, but this is why we found him so intriguing.
In Toussaint's view, the Covid-19 pandemic has exposed the "ceiling" of humanity, which is evidenced by the fact that some of the worst affected regions in the world are also the most developed. This, he says, has forced us to confront the limits of our species. As such, we should turn our attention to "filling" life rather than keeping ourselves "in a cave" (lockdown) for perpetuity.
Agree with him or not, the professor is certainly taking the Covid debate in a new direction. Have a watch above and let us know what you think!
On whether there is a second wave in France
It seem...
- Title
- Is Donald Trump secretly ahead... or is he toast?
- Runtime
- 47:06
- Date posted
- 6 years ago
- Description
- Featuring Nate Silver, Robert Cahaly and Doug Rivers
“Herd mentality” is never more real than during election season. In the bubble of opinion pollsters, pundits and the commentariat, a safe conventional wisdom usually forms about what is going to happen — and it is often wrong. Memories of 2016 haunt pundits, and there’s a high degree of emotion.
So what is the evidence about who is going to win, and which way is the “herd” facing? Currently the national polls show Biden ahead by 6-8 points; in the battleground states that will decide the election it’s closer, but he’s still solidly ahead. Are the polls and media narrative more likely to be underplaying, or overplaying the chances of a Trump re-election? To find out, I spoke to some of the world’s leading experts — as well as one notable dissenting voice.
Nate Silver runs FiveThirtyEight, perhaps the most famous polling website in the world; he faced a good deal of criticism a...
- Title
- Merlin Sheldrake: The philosophy of fungi
- Runtime
- 37:32
- Date posted
- 6 years ago
- Description
- Freddie Sayers meets Merlin Sheldrake.
Read the supporting article: https://unherd.com/thepost/merlin-sheldrake-the-politics-of-funghi/
Listen to the podcast version: https://shows.acast.com/lockdowntv-with-freddie-sayers/episodes/merlin-sheldrake-the-philosophy-of-fungi
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.
- Title
- Tyler Cowen on herd mentality and herd immunity
- Runtime
- 27:03
- Date posted
- 6 years ago
- Description
- Accompany article here: https://unherd.com/thepost/tyler-cowen-on-herd-mentality-and-herd-immunity/
Tyler Cowen is one of the most influential thinkers in America — economist, political philosopher and general polymath. Since the Covid-19 pandemic struck, he’s been paying close attention to the data and how different governments are reacting. I caught up with him to get his assessment of where we are.
One thing we like about Tyler is that he’s not tribal — in less than half an hour, he manages to take a pop at both the herd immunity crowd and the mainstream media that refused to talk about it, Devi Sridhar and Michael Levitt, Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Wherever you’re coming from, stand by to get your feathers ruffled!
But through it all you get the impression of a clear mind in pursuit of sensible answers — it’s a rare commodity these days and our thanks to Tyler for sharing his thoughts.
On 'Phantom Risk'
...
- Title
- Prof Michael Levitt: Covid panic will shorten lives
- Runtime
- 41:35
- Date posted
- 6 years ago
- Description
- Professor Michael Levitt, Nobel Prize winner and Professor of Structural Biology at Stanford, was one of our early interviews during the lockdown era. Partly due to that interview, which has been watched over 750,000 times on YouTube, he became a leading dissenting scientist, arguing that the trends of Covid-19 were revealed in the numbers, and that they were much less scary than most people thought.
At the end of July, he made a prediction that Covid-19 would be “done” by August 25th. It and was shared across Twitter. He agreed, back then, to come in to our new studio once the date had elapsed, to see how his prediction fared.
On his prediction:
“The prediction has fared less well than I hoped…There are 55,000 deaths in the USA every week approximately and right now it’s about 5,000 over that. So I think the details of that prediction have fared less well than I hope but it served as a milestone and what we mean by ‘over’. It highli...
- Title
- The ZeroCovid debate: can the disease be eliminated?
- Runtime
- 48:08
- Date posted
- 6 years ago
- Description
- Read the accompanying article on UnHerd here: https://unherd.com/2020/08/the-covidzero-debate-can-the-disease-be-eliminated/
Freddie Sayers interviews Professor Devi Sridhar, Chair of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh.
“When I look at people of the Swedish perspective that life can go on, we’re actually aligned on a lot of things,” says Devi Sridhar, the American public health professor currently Chair of Global Public health at Edinburgh and a leading figurehead of the “ZeroCovid” movement. “We’re both against lockdown, we both want social lives to continue, we both want schools back, but we want it done safely.”
In order to achieve these goals however, Prof Sridhar’s suggested strategy is the opposite of Sweden’s more laissez-faire approach. Instead of being more permissive, she is calling for governments to follow the Scottish lead and commit to a “ZeroCovid” strategy — ie that any level of Covid-19, ...
- Title
- Swedish Covid-19 chief Anders Tegnell: judge me in a year
- Runtime
- 28:14
- Date posted
- 6 years ago
- Description
- Accompanying article here: https://unherd.com/2020/07/swedens-anders-tegnell-judge-me-in-a-year/
In just a few short months Anders Tegnell, architect of Sweden’s unique response to the Covid-19 pandemic, has gone from unknown physician and technocrat to a household celebrity in Sweden and in countries around the world. He is beloved by some (people have even had tattoos made with his face) and intensely disliked by others. Today he is suntanned and relaxed, having just returned from his summer holiday, and wearing an open-necked polo shirt. Here is a summary of what he said:
- In terms of migrants, travel and urban areas Sweden is more similar to the Netherlands and the UK than Norway or Finland
- Lockdown may have made a difference, but closing schools and people being out of work is also bad for public health
- Numbers of new infections arriving at the same time seems to make a big difference, so Stockholm half-term travellers to...
- Title
- Philosopher John Gray: This moment is bigger than 1989
- Runtime
- 51:07
- Date posted
- 6 years ago
- Description
- Freddie Sayers meets John Gray.
Read the full article here: https://unherddev.wpengine.com/2020/07/what-the-woke-movement-shares-with-communism/
Freddie Sayers asks eminent philosopher John Gray whether we are living through a moment of great change, akin to 1989, 1968, 1917, 1848...
His answer? The changes across the world — and the retreat of the universalist ideal to reveal a world of competing civilizational zones, may be more significant for humankind than any of those previous moments. He touches on parallels between today's woke movement and medieval millenarianism, his break with the Right, and how the world is becoming more 'Game of Thrones'.
Don't miss this fascinating tour de force, steeped in knowledge and with a sweeping context, from one of the most important thinkers of the day.
Follow UnHerd on social media:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/unherd
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/unherd/...
- Title
- Oxford epidemiologists: suppression strategy is not viable
- Runtime
- 45:48
- Date posted
- 6 years ago
- Description
- Read the accompanying article on UnHerd here: https://unherd.com/thepost/oxford-epidemiologists-suppression-strategy-is-not-viable/
We wanted to learn more about the current state of the pandemic and the direction it was headed. Joining Freddie Sayers was Prof Heneghan and his Centre for Evidence Based Medicine colleague Tom Jefferson who shared their thoughts in this wide-ranging discussion. Have a watch above, key quotes below…
00:00 – Intro
2:55 – Masks
• Tom Jefferson: “Aside from people who are exposed on the frontlines, there is no evidence that masks make any difference, but what’s even more extraordinary is the uncertainty: we don’t know if these things make any difference…. We should have done randomised control trials in February, March and April but not anymore because viral circulation is low and we will need huge number of enrolees to show whether there was any difference”.
• Carl Heneghan: “By all me...
- Title
- Prof Carl Heneghan: can we trust Covid-19 death numbers?
- Runtime
- 16:13
- Date posted
- 6 years ago
- Description
- Accompanying article here: https://unherd.com/thepost/prof-carl-heneghan-can-we-trust-the-covid-19-death-numbers/
Professor Carl Heneghan is Director of the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine at Oxford University, and has been paying close attention to the Covid-19 statistics. In a post yesterday evening he revealed an extraordinary detail: the Public Health England daily death totals announced to the media include anyone who has ever tested positive for Covid-19 — even if they recovered completely.
Key quotes:
• There was “massive confusion” about different Covid data between England’s health bodies. “Public Health England figures are about double the ONS figures because PHE are reporting anybody who has had a positive Covid death in the past… This will get increasingly confusing as we go into the next Winter because there could be a new outbreak and new deaths while also still reporting on historical deaths… This is a problem for epidem...
- Title
- Swedish Doctor: T-cell immunity and the truth about Covid-19 in Sweden
- Runtime
- 18:46
- Date posted
- 6 years ago
- Description
- Freddie Sayers talks to Swedish doctor Soo Aleman about Covid-19.
We hear a lot about Sweden’s experience of Covid-19, with the New York Times declaring this week that that country is now “the world’s cautionary tale.”
But what’s it really like on the ground?
Dr Soo Aleman has been both on the front lines of the Covid-19 epidemic as a senior physician at Stockholm’s leading Karolinska hospital, and on the research side, as Assistant Professor at the Karolinska Institute and one of a group that last week published new data around T-cell immunity.
We talked to her about the findings of that study, and how it matches what she is seeing in her hospital.
Link to the Karolinska Institute T Cell study:
https://news.ki.se/immunity-to-covid-19-is-probably-higher-than-tests-have-shown
Key quotes:
“Intensive care units are getting empty, the wards are getting empty, we are really ...
