UnHerd with Freddie Sayers

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.

Freddie Sayers chats with Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist and NYU professor known for his insights on moral psychology. They dive into the shifting political landscape, discussing how moral foundations like harm and fairness contrast with authority and loyalty amid recent upheavals. Haidt explores generational divides, noting older liberals' patriotism versus younger ones' focus on social justice. The conversation also tackles the growing polarization around trust in science and the future outlook for political discourse post-pandemic.

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.