Musa al-Gharbi is an assistant professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University. He was the Communications Director at Heterodox Academy from 2016 to 2020. I talked to Musa about growing up in a military family, being cancelled by Fox News, who 'symbolic capitalists' are, the extent to which Donald Trump is comparable to an alligator, and what the future holds for universities. Musa's book: https://www.thenile.co.nz/books/musa-al-gharbi/we-have-never-been-...
Henare Parata is a teacher of te reo and mātauranga Māori. He has also been involved with The Opportunities Party (TOP), and is a well-known presence on X as @TeHenare. We talked to him about mātauranga Māori and science, what pre-colonial Māori society was really like, and where his favourite marae is.
Alan Davison is Academic Lead at the Governance and Public Affairs Centre at the Australian Catholic University, and was until recently Dean of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney. He co-founded the Permission to Think series on Josh Szeps' Uncomfortable Conversations podcast. He is also President of the Australian Free Speech Union. We talked to Alan about post-modernism, the evolution of (bad) ideas, and what to do about our universities. Alan's paper 'A Darwinia...
Dr Peter Boghossian is a freelance philosopher and former academic. He was jointly responsible for the 'Sokal squared' hoax, as a result of which he was investigated by his then-employer, Portland State University, for research misconduct. He later left the university and now travels the world engaging bystanders in 'street epistemology' - open, reasonable conversations on a range of topics. We talked to him about whether there are moral facts, what people think about in prison, whethe...
Nigel Biggar is an emeritus professor at Oxford University, where he was Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology. He is also an Anglican priest. His most recent book is Colonialism. A Moral Reckoning (2023). We talked to Prof. Biggar about the how to assess the British Empire and about the roots of our universities' ongoing travails. Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Colonialism-Moral-Reckoning-Nigel-Biggar/dp/0008511632
Only a few days after its Senate voted down the University of Auckland's 'academic freedom' policy, Victoria University of Wellington has come out with a similar policy of its own. Here to discuss VUW's policy with us is Steph Martin from the Free Speech Union. We also discuss Steph's work to help protect New Zealanders' speech rights on a variety of fronts.
Toby Young is the founder of the Free Speech Union and The Daily Sceptic, an associate editor of The Spectator, and a former associate editor at Quillette. We talked to him about the prospects for free speech and academic freedom in the Anglosphere, why he left Quillette and founded The Daily Sceptic, and what his experience of free (or charter) schools has been. https://freespeechunion.org/ https://dailysceptic.org/
Peter Ridd was formerly head of the Physics Programme and the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University in Queensland. We asked him how and why he was forced out of JCU, as well as about the Great Barrier Reef and climate change in the Pacific. An article by Peter calling for greater quality assurance in 'policy-science': https://www.sciencedirect.com/science...
Jonathan Rauch is a US writer whose books include The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50 (2018); Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America (2004); Government's End: Why Washington Stopped Working (2000); and Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought (1993). We talked to him about his latest book, The Constitution of Knowledge, and how to get our institutional settings right for a society which is free and, at the same time, or...
A conversation about Victoria University of Wellington Vice-Chancellor Nic Smith's decision to postpone his original panel on free speech and about the two new panels he's now announced. Topics we discuss include: Is the new panel more balanced or representative? Is Michael right-wing? And is Nic Smith going to be able to force his institution to respect people's basic expressive rights - or is reform from the outside required? Wilkinson and Jeram's NZI report on inequality: https://nzinitia...
The topic of our third Free Kiwis! book club was Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay's book Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity - And Why this Harms Everybody. We talked about its account of post-modernism and 'grievance studies,' and considered how much this has affected academia and the free speech crisis in New Zealand. Panellists: Dr James Kierstead, NZ Initiative Dr Michael Johnston, NZ Initiative Dr Matthew Birchall, NZ Initi...
Graham Linehan is the co-creator of Father Ted and other popular UK comedy series. We talked to him about Ted's origins, comedy in a time of censorship, and trans issues. Graham's time in NZ was hosted by the Free Speech Union: https://www.fsu.nz/ Mia Hughes' report on 'the WPATH files': https://environmentalprogress.org/big... Graham's X: / glinner Free Kiwis!' X: / freekiwis
Eric Kaufmann is Professor of Politics at the University of Buckingham. He talked to Michael about whether the Amish will inherit the earth, whether wokeness is a religion-substitute, and how we can protect liberal science and civilization. Eric's book on religious groups and population growth: https://www.amazon.com/Shall-Religiou... Eric's course on wokeness: https://www.buckingham.ac.uk/courses/...
Iona Italia is Managing Editor of Quillette and a former Editor-in-Chief of Areo. We talked to her about her life and career; the virtues of letter-writing; and her work with heterodox online publications like Areo and, now, Quillette. Iona' Substack: https://www.drionaitalia.com/ Jamie Palmer's long-read on the lab-leak hypothesis: https://quillette.com/2023/08/19/the-lab-leak-illusion/ Iona's writing for Quillette: https://quillette.com/author/iona/ James' writing for Quillette: https://...
Lord Sumption is a historian and jurist who served on the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom between 2012 and 2018. He is also a widely-respected commentator. We talked to him about our current free speech predicament in English-speaking countries, what led to it, and how to re-build a truly liberal culture. We are grateful to the NZ Free Speech Union for hosting Lord Sumption in NZ. You can support the work of the Free Speech Union here: https://www.fsu.nz/donation
Dr. Melissa Derby is Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Waikato, where she teaches at the Tauranga campus. We talked to her about why she prefers not to be introduced as a 'Māori academic'; whether the concept of 'inter-generational trauma' can bear the weight that's been placed on it; and what the future holds for the New Zealand Free Speech Union. 'Literacy is not a Maori Thing': https://openinquiry.nz/literacy-is-no... Inter-generational trauma: https://www.tekaharoa.com/in...
Rodney Hide entered parliament in 1996, was elected leader of the ACT party in 2004, and was appointed Minister for Local government in 2008 in the fifth National government. He retired from the ACT leadership and from parliament in 2011. Rodney has studied zoology and botany, worked on an oil rig, and is a keen proponent of yellow jackets. Real Talk with Rodney Hide: https://realitycheck.radio/host/rodne... Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies and its Enemies: https://press.prince...
Prof. Te Maire Tau is Pou Whakarae at the Ngāi Tahu Centre at the University of Canterbury. We talked to him about Māori traditional knowledge and (Western) science; local traditions and New Zealand democracy; and whether Polynesians discovered Antarctica. Papers by Te Maire Tau and others that we discussed: The Death of Knowledge: https://www.nzjh.auckland.ac.nz/docs/... Mātauranga Māori as an epistemology: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper... A Short Scan of Māori Journeys to Antarctic...
Nadine Strossen is Professor Emerita at the New York Law School, a past national President of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and a member of the advisory boards of the ACLU, the Academic Freedom Alliance, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), Heterodox Academy, and the National Coalition Against Censorship. We had a wide-ranging conversation with her on free speech and its limits; free speech and 'hate speech' legislation in the US and beyond; and how we can ...
Recent events in Auckland have reminded us that a tiny minority of radical activists are determined to shut down the speech of so-called TERFs ('Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists') and stop trans issues being openly discussed. So we invited leading feminist thinker Kathleen Stock on the podcast to have a wide-ranging discussion of trans rights, women's rights, and related issues. Kathleen was a professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex until 2021, when she was driven out by a c...