Show Notes
UnHerd's Freddie Sayers talks to Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), about a new report revealing that 2025 has officially surpassed 2020 as the worst year on record for campus censorship and scholar sanctions. Despite the Trump administration’s campaign promises to restore free expression, Lukianoff details a disturbing shift where the political right has adopted the very cancel culture tactics it once decried, led by government officials who are now directly intervening to investigate, defund, and even deport students for controversial speech. From the fallout of the Charlie Kirk assassination to the use of executive orders to ban student groups, they explore why the new wave of state-sponsored retaliation is creating a chilling effect across American universities. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
More from UnHerd with Freddie Sayers
This week, riots and looting have spread across French cities after protests over education spiralled out of police control. To some, this is a cautionary tale of unbridled immigration and a warning to other European powers. But look closer and there might be more to the story than you'd find on an X feed. To analyse the mood on the ground and the wider context of the crisis, Freddie is joined by historian of French culture Andrew Hussey and writer Philippe Lemoine. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers talks to MIT evolutionary engineer Kevin Esvelt about a suspicious biological researcher's death in Irkutsk, Russia, using the incident to explore the escalating biosecurity risks posed by engineered pandemic weapons, vaccine-evading pathogens, and AI-accelerated gain-of-function research. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Dr Iain McGilchrist has dedicated decades of neuroscience research to unravelling the inner workings of the human mind. But now, a new form of ‘consciousness’ has come to compete with the very idea of being a person. Could artificial intelligence overtake its creators? Join the psychiatrist, philosopher and author of the bestselling book The Master and His Emissary, for a live on-stage conversation with UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers talks to Oxford philosopher Professor Nick Bostrom about the escalating concerns over artificial intelligence, weighing whether catastrophic warnings from industry insiders reflect genuine existential fears or commercial strategy, while analysing technical threats like deceptive alignment and autonomous AI coordination alongside the broader economic, geopolitical, and societal risks of managing superintelligence. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Freddie Sayers talks to UnHerd columnist and co-host of The Econoclasts Wolfgang Munchau about the political earthquake triggered by the hard-Right Alternative for Germany’s (AfD) historic election victory in Saxony-Anhalt, examining why young voters and non-voters are turning away from the centrist consensus, the total failure of Germany’s political ‘firewall’ strategy, the collapse of Friedrich Merz’s leadership within the CDU, and how a rising wave of hard-Right governments across France, Italy, and Germany could ultimately paralyse the European Union. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.