The so-called lab-leak hypothesis has been gaining more and more traction in recent months. Once dismissed as a crankish fringe theory, it has slowly been entering into mainstream scientific discussion ever since. Just this week, America’s CDC Director said that it was ‘possible’ that Covid could have leaked from a lab as ‘significant circumstantial evidence’ emerges. One writer who has made a significant contribution to the debate is Nicholas Wade, a former reporter at the New York Times, who recently self-published a piece detailing how the lab-leak theory isn’t just a possibility, it’s the most likely explanation. Though there is no definitive evidence for either theory, Wade argues that the key details are easier to explain within the context of a lab leak origin.For more, read The Post from UnHerd Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Last week, tech giant Apple made headlines for the summary dismissal of one of its employees. Following a petition signed by over 2,000 Apple employees, the company decided to fire Antonio García Martínez, a senior ads engineer who had only just started, over comments he made in his 2016 book Chaos Monkeys. According to the petitioners, García Martínez had a “history of publishing overtly racist and sexist remarks” which “directly oppose Apple’s commitment to Inclusion & Diversity”. The quote from the book that is regularly cited as proof of García Martínez's apparent sexism is below: "Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel." But this quote has been taken out of context, which is crucial to understanding the deliberately over-the-top style of the passage. In the memoir, García Martínez writes about meeting a six foot tall British trader who is “an imposing, broad-shouldered presence, six feet tall in bare feet, and towering over me in heels,' who he compares favourably to other women in the Bay Area. But it is also a comparison with himself — a geeky tech engineer — which is why he was attracted to the strong British trader: "British Trader, on the other hand, was the sort of woman who would end up a useful ally in that postapocalypse, doing whatever work—be it carpentry, animal husbandry, or a shotgun blast to someone’s back—required doing." In an interview with UnHerd, what García Martínez tells us what he finds so strange about his dismissal from Apple and why he believes that a reckoning is underway in Silicon Valley. For more, read The Post from UnHerd Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

As we approached the five year anniversary of the UK’s momentous vote to leave the European Union, UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers was joined by Yanis Varoufakis and Douglas Murray to assess whether the EU has done enough to deserve to survive. For more read The Post.Our thanks to both Yanis and Douglas for a fascinating discussion. You can sign up HERE to make sure to attend the next members event. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

As the country’s ‘model-minority’, Asian-Americans have experienced different forms of discrimination compared to other ethnic groups, but the recent spate of Asian-American violence and rise in anti-China rhetoric has thrown this tension into sharper focus.There is perhaps no public intellectual better equipped to give an insight into these issues than Amy Chua, a Law Professor at Yale and author of five books, including the famous book ‘Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother’, which advocated strict Chinese-style parenting. Chua is the child of two ethnically Chinese parents, who emigrated from the Philippines to the US when she was a baby. She has written extensively about her Confuscian upbringing at home (respect for elders, deference to authority) as well as her schooling in America, both of which gave her a deeper understanding of the values that underpin those two countries. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Freddie Sayers meets Teesside's newly re-elected Conservative mayor, Ben Houchen.There's a stereotype of England's North-Eastern cities as left-behind, backward-facing, clinging to a long-gone industrial past. Some Labour politicians have even tried to play up to this image too, but it could not, says Teeside's newly re-elected mayor Ben Houchen, be further from the truth. According to Houchen, who won 73% of the Teeside vote in last week's by-election, voters in Hartlepool and Teesside aren't nostalgic, they are looking to the future. He plans to turn Teesside into the Silicon Valley of the UK.#RedWall #BorisJohnson #Conservatives Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Freddie Sayers meets Matthew B. Crawford.‘Following the science’ is a phrase that we have heard a lot of this year, but what does it actually mean? Over the past year, science has shifted from a mode of inquiry to a form of authority that you are not allowed to question in fear of being labelled ‘anti-science’. To understand how and why this has occurred, we spoke to philosopher and writer Matthew B. Crawford, who has a full-length piece in UnHerd on this very subject. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When John McWhorter, professor of Linguistics and American Studies at Columbia, described antiracism as America’s ‘new flawed religion’ in 2015, few could have imagined just how prescient that description would prove to be. Just this week, the Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi thanked George Floyd for “sacrificing his life for justice” while CEOs, celebrities, and other politicians all made versions of the same promise: the work was not done.McWhorter, author of the upcoming book ‘Nine Nasty Words’ does not count himself as a follower of this new religion. does not count himself as a follower of this new religion. In fact, the professor has become one of its fiercest critics, tirelessly deconstructing the latest example of ‘woke craziness’ to illustrate its incoherence. With that in mind, we thought it was essential to get John’s opinion on the Derek Chauvin verdict and his thoughts on race relations in America more generally. We really enjoyed speaking to John and thank him for his time.On the Derek Chauvin conviction: 'There is a sense in America that what this verdict was about was black people being killed by the cops. I see it as a victory about people being killed by the cops. And if it has to be a black case that galvanises change under that misconception, well, life isn’t perfect. But I am very happy about what happened to that man. And I’m very sad about what happened to George Floyd. But I’m equally sad about what happened to Tony Timpa, which was very similar, and Tony Timpa was very white, and it was only four years ago, and no one heard about it.' Did he get a fair trial?: 'If fairness requires a certain fear of the streets erupting — that’s not the way I would choreograph it — but maybe sometimes you have to break some eggs to make an omelette. The cop problem is real partly for a human, not race, reason….I think it’s a misperception that the cops are uniquely against black people, and that is the main obstacle to getting past race in the United States.' Is antiracism a religion?: 'It’s a religion — any martial anthropologist would recognise it as such. One of the oddest things is to see mathematicians and philosophers who’ve made their way through Plato, Kant and Kierkegaard, and then all of a sudden when they’re reasoning about Black Lives Matter, they exhibit the reasoning power of roughly an orangutan. Suddenly that’s considered sophisticated.' Giving up on the true believers: 'You can’t engage people like that… There is nothing you can do to talk somebody out of a religion. There’s no conversation to be had, it’s worthless. Some of them will say they want to have a conversation with you. But what they want is for you to learn from them. If there’s anything that they have to learn from you, it’s that they want to learn what your mental barriers are to understanding their truth.' His advice to white people: 'A lot of people need to have a little bit more of a backbone, and understand that this person who’s sitting there looking over their copy of “How To Be An Anti-Racist” and telling you that you’re a racist, let them. And then walk on because the world will keep spinning and you will keep existing. I think some white people need to have the courage of their convictions even about this thing called the race thing. And just say, “No, I’m not a racist. Maybe you are. And let’s now talk about football”. That we need more of.'  On the elitism of antiracism: 'If you’re somebody who is more familiar with struggle or you have a kid in a bad school or you know what it’s like to live in a bad neighbourhood. In a way, this sort of thinking [antiracism] is going to be less congenial. And many people would say, “Well, it’s because you’re a racist”. No, it’s it’s not that. It’s that there is a certain luxury in thinking of black people in these abstractions.' On Ta-Nehisi Coates: 'There is a certain kind of person who builds their sense of significance in society on a victim role. A person can do that of any colour. It’s a personality type. With black Americans, one way that you do that is to focus on your victimhood or your people’s victimhood, at the hands of whites. It’s not that there isn’t racism. But the idea that what makes you special is your victimhood status in comparison to whites, that can become who you are. Coates is a good writer, but Coates is that kind of person.' On the n-word: 'I feel that it casts black people as hothouse flowers to a degree that I find condescending. And that’s not to say that people are supposed to run around using the word. But I think America had it about right as recently as about 1995. And since then, we’ve started to treat it in a way that I’m not sure was very productive. But that’s just me.'  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Over the weekend, over 1,200 church leaders from a range of denominations sent an open letter to the Prime Minister. It warned that vaccine passports raised serious ethical concerns and risked creating a ‘surveillance state’ that would ‘bring about the end of liberal democracy as we know it’. Earlier today, we spoke to two of the original signatories Dr. William Philip, of the Tron church in Glasgow, and Dr. Jamie Franklin, who is curator of St. George in the meadow in Nottingham. Both offered a scathing assessment of the vaccine passport plan and explained why they could not support it:'When you say that there is a possibility that the government may try and force us to exclude people from churches on the basis of whether or not they’ve had a certain medical treatment, that crosses a line for lots and lots of sincere people.' - JAMIE FRANKLIN'It’s impossible theologically for the Christian church to close its doors to those who have been branded by society as socially undesirable. It is absolutely anathema to the Christian gospel. It would be like the Lord Jesus Christ standing up and saying, ‘Well come to me all you who labour and are heavy laden, except those of you who are sick, blind, tax collectors and sinners — you’ve got to produce your passport’' - WILLIAM PHILIPOn the failures of the church:'Many of us have been frustrated, both in the church and in society, with what we see is a considerable lack of Christian Leadership over the last 12 months. We feel that senior church leaders across all denominations have given an imprimatur to the dictates of the government and of the secular, unelected technocrats who appear to be running things at the moment. People are extremely frustrated with this.I’m a curate at the bottom of the food chain. I’ve only been ordained for less than two years. But there’s such a dearth of leadership that I felt like it was necessary for me to do something' - JAMIE FRANKLIN'A Christian would never argue that physical health and protection is the ultimate thing. A Christian must say that eternal health is infinitely more important…And this is the problem: the message of the church collapsed into one of merely health and safety in a temporal way. It has entirely omitted speaking about hope and salvation. That is a catastrophic failure of the institutional church' - WILLIAM PHILIPOn the church’s hypocrisy:'The Church of England bishops had absolutely no problem with denouncing Brexit in a very enthusiastic manner. So there is a justification for this, but it’s just an inconsistent justification…we’re not a thermometer simply telling the temperature of the culture but we’re a thermostat. We’re supposed to have an influence on the culture, not simply to follow the culture' - JAMIE FRANKLINOn unvaccinated churchgoers:'The crucial issue as far as Christian churches are concerned is: am I supposed to say no to somebody who doesn’t want a vaccine? Someone who is in obedience to their conscience? And, as they see it, in obedience to the commander, Jesus Christ? Am I to say to them, ‘Well, then you cannot come into the church of Jesus Christ, your obedience to Jesus prevents you from coming into worship?' - WILLIAM PHILIP'As ministers of the gospel, our message is to not stay at home and stay safe. It is that the only salvation is Christ — he’s the only one who can save us from death. So if people want to take a vaccine because it will protect them and they feel it’s right for them, that’s great. But as ministers of the gospel, our message is that ultimately Jesus is our Saviour, and not a vaccine or indeed any medical treatment' - JAMIE FRANKLIN  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hear Jesse Singal discuss his latest book with Freddie SayersFurther reading: The empty promise of pop psychology Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This time a year ago, something extraordinary happened. Johan Giesecke, advisor to the Director General of the WHO, former Chief Scientist of the EU Centre for Disease Control, and former state epidemiologist of Sweden came out forcefully against lockdowns. The world was shutting down and he was the first voice to speak out so bluntly early in the pandemic.He contended that the difference in infection and death rates between countries would “come out in the wash”, regardless of their lockdown policies and promised to return in a year’s time to review the evidence.With typical Swedish punctuality, he returns to UnHerd — a day early. He is similarly gruff, but notably more cautious this time around, after a year-long fight which had become, in Sweden, just as political and personal as it had in the UK and America. The Swedish media has not spared the retired professor any criticism...To read the rest of the article and to see the accompanying graphs click here Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.