UnHerd with Freddie Sayers

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.

Around the world, California is romanticised as a glamorous haven of luxury and sunshine. But the reality, as we have been finding out, is quite different: rubbish stacked in the streets, a homelessness crisis, and an exodus of disillusioned residents. One of these disillusioned residents is Bridget Phetasy, a comedian, writer, podcaster and YouTuber based in Los Angeles, who has grown increasingly frustrated with her home state. California is in a ‘premageddon’, she fears, and that’s not just because of Gavin Newsom’s (the California governor who is up for recall) poor Covid response:It’s a process that’s been happening for some time and it’s been accelerated by the pandemic and the lockdowns. I’ve been describing it as ‘premageddon’…It’s a little bit pre-apocalyptic or dystopian: you’re seeing increasing homelessness, which is tragic. And it’s also filthy because there’s garbage everywhere. It’s definitely not the Los Angeles I moved to in 2007 when I came back. On her vulnerability to Big Tech: 'I would rather be free than have to silo who I am, privately and publicly. But my biggest fear is when you see things like, for instance, what happened in the wake of the president being de-platformed from social media. He basically disappeared, almost like a technical mob hit…. That would be detrimental to me. I always joke that I’m just gonna keep talking until I can’t because I feel like you’re constantly avoiding like the Eye of Sauron.' On identity: 'I don’t think it’s great that everybody is so invested in making their entire identity about these immutable characteristics, or, in some cases, mutable characteristics, which I can’t get my mind around. Your sex, your gender, your ethnicity — this is what you build your entire world around instead of what gives you meaning beyond the traits that you were just born with. It just feels like we’re going backwards.' On the Left: 'The Left feels much more insidious to me than the Right, because it seems social… When I talk to people about why they’re self censoring, it’s because they feel like they can’t say certain things. And that’s not being enforced by the government yet, although we are headed in that direction in California. But it is being enforced socially…And then people are petrified of saying anything at work, and are being made to go to these kind of diversity and inclusion trainings, and they can’t say anything about whether or not they agree with the stuff.' On vaccine passports: 'What’s so shocking to me is how many people are okay with this. I can’t figure out if it’s just because people like being told what to do, or need to be told what to do. And then there’s a sense of self righteousness that goes along with that. So you’re basically following the lead and then you get to be arrogant and take the moral high ground.'  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There are few families in Britain closer to the royal family than the family of wartime leader Sir Winston Churchill. His grandson, Sir Nicholas Soames, knew Prince Philip very well over a 60-year period and shared his thoughts on his passing in a special edition of LockdownTV.“It’s a strange day, a day of reflection, and I hope people get him right," he told me. "The press, with that attention span for which they are famous, always talks about his ‘gaffes’ — his gaffes were that what you saw was what you got. He was an absolutely ram rod straight former naval officer, who didn’t have much time for sycophancy or bloody fools or anyone else, and spoke as he found. But he was essentially a man of great humour, he had tremendous wit and charm … and he held very strong views. This is not a mere figure.”Sir Nicholas reflected on the values of the generation that the Duke of Edinburgh belonged to:"One of the saddest things about Prince Philip dying — and about a lot of people who die of his generation — is that they are the last of a generation who people talk about slightly glibly, but they were the wartime generation. He did see active service, he knew what it was like to command in great difficulty and at hours of great danger... The values of his generation now feel quite far away. He wasn’t a sentimentalist, Prince Philip, but he was a tough egg... He was the epitome of the stiff upper lip. I mean that in the best sense of the word. It wasn’t that he didn’t share emotion in any way, but he was a great believer in picking yourself up and getting on with it.I’ll tell you what I think we have lost, that his generation had — we’ve lost any sense of proportion about what goes on. Everything is bulled up into an enormous drama, but if you’ve lived in that generation you’ve lived through an era of profound upheaval. And you learned to distinguish between what was important and what wasn’t important. I think we’ve lost that now."Sir Nicholas stressed that, as evidenced by Prince Philip's founding of St George's House centre for spiritual reflection at the chapel at Windsor Castle, "he was a thinker, and he was interested in the spiritual side of life."But the reputation for straight talking was well-earned:"He didn’t like bloody fools, and if he thought you were talking rubbish he told you… What you saw with Prince Philip was what you got. He was completely authentic as a human being. I think it must have been a great challenge when he first started as the Queen’s consort not to allow his own character to dominate. He was always in the Queen’s wake, and he supported her through thick and thin, through some terribly difficult times."Sir Nicholas shared that Prince Philip would not have wanted a state funeral, even if Covid had not prevented one:"I think people would have wanted in great numbers to come and show their respects to Prince Philip, and I think it’s very sad — and entirely correct and understandable — that there are going to have to be very special arrangements for the funeral, because after all the royal family will want to behave the same as anyone else. I understand the body will lie in state at Windsor before his burial and it is not going to be a great do… I know for a fact that Prince Philip did not want a state funeral, but there would have been an opportunity for the public to pay their respects, because he was greatly admired." Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The group of thinkers now known as the “Intellectual Dark Web” — Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Bret and Eric Weinstein, Ben Shapiro — were convened in Dave Rubin’s garage and on his YouTube channel, The Rubin Report. And yet he has always suffered the accusation that he wasn’t a ‘real’ intellectual.“What I thought and believe now that I am good at is that I can sit with these people and take a lot of that stuff and distil it into something that the average person can understand enough of. I love that space,” he told Freddie Sayers in a wide-ranging and philosophical discussion on LockdownTV.He sees the old IDW gang as divided now along a crucial ideological split. There are those who believe the tools of liberalism can still be deployed to persuade the Woke Left to change their mind (he includes Bari Weiss, Sam Harris, Bret Weinstein in this group); and then there are those, like him, who have decided that it simply isn’t possible, and they’re better off building bridges with the Right: 'They’ve made what to me seems to be a very obvious fatal mistake, that you can use any of the tools of Liberalism — of open inquiry, freedom of speech, respect for your fellow human beings, individual rights — that you can use any of these things to rationalise with the monster that is coming to burn your house down. And that’s why we’ve seen in effect the liberals have no defence over this, which is why all the liberal institutions are crumbling.What I’m seeing, and I would say this is more me, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, is that there’s all sorts of bridges to be built the other way. If you would have told me five years ago that I would consider Dennis Prager and Glenn Beck and Larry Elder and many other conservatives not only friends but the type of intellectual that I want to be — I would be shocked.'His hope is on the Right, and the long-term vision is of building parallel institutions to those controlled by the liberal Left: 'Maybe we’re just going to build parallel societies. I think that that may start to be — woke culture will have its own TV, apps and all their institutions, and then the rest of us will have a whole bunch of other stuff. But my money is on those guys building the right thing.' This vision of two parallel societies may come across as rather dispiriting for early fans of Rubin. After all, this was the host who brought together people of all different political stripes, namely the IDW, to talk things out on his show. Now he is advocating for the opposite. There was something genuinely counter-cultural about the way in which figures from the Reaganite Right all the way through to the progressive Left gathered under Dave’s roof to exchange and debate ideas, and it is a pity to see that disappear. Though Dave insists that there are “bridges to be built in the other way”, the gradual disintegration of the IDW feels like the end of an (albeit short-lived) era. Let’s hope the next one can provide us with something similar. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. After claiming to see ‘anti-whiteness’ spreading around campus, Professor Aaron Kindsvatter published a video denouncing the anti-racist agenda that reduced and discriminated against people on account of their skin colour. As a professor of counselling, Kindsvatter was especially concerned about the implementation of policy based on the work of Ibram X. Kendi, the author of ‘How to be an Antiracist’, into the counselling programme. Given that these students were training to be psycho-therapists, Kindsvatter notes, this “rigid” ideology would inform the basis of their work: Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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.