Winston Marshall

‘It can be done!’: David Goodhart on how to stop illegal immigration

From our UK edition

58 min listen

This week Winston speaks to David Goodhart, author of The British Dream: Successes And Failures Of Post-War Immigration, which celebrates its 10 year anniversary this year. On the podcast they discuss the state of immigration in the UK. Is home secretary Suella Braverman right to suggest that immigration an existential threat to the West? Has multiculturalism failed?

Save our cigars!

From our UK edition

There’s nothing new about Rishi Sunak’s reported proposals to phase out smoking in Britain. His plan has been borrowed from New Zealand’s former leader Jacinda Ardern, whose shamefully illiberal legacy includes the complete illegalisation of tobacco sales to those born after 1 January 2009.    There’s nothing progressive about it, either. The Anglosphere’s elite war on tobacco is at least 400 years old. It can be traced back to James I in 1604, and his A Counterblaste to Tobacco, a sanctimonious treatise in which he denounced the new-world leaf ‘blacke stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse.

The quest for an authentic bite of Americana

Finally I found an authentic bite of Americana. Or so I thought. The rodeo. A blaze of bucks and broncos, boots and bulls, shining golden in the dusk of the Teton mountain range. Jackson, Wyoming, far away from the raging culture wars and as unapologetically American as a bald eagle’s middle finger. A proud, if out-of-tune, “Star Spangled Banner” stirred me enough that for a moment I forgot I was English. The crackle and hollering, the stirrups and steers. This was real, I believed. Weeding through an air-conditioned continent of screens, plastic and corporate advertisements, I had found her at last: America. But then slipped the veneer. The rodeo barrelman — a ringmaster in clown maquillage — squawked at us down a dusty PA system. “Where are you from?...

authenticity

Oliver Anthony and the sorry state of Rolling Stone

I must confess, I often forget Rolling Stone magazine still exists. Once the zeitgeist-surfing Holy Writ of American counter-culture, it hosted the pioneering writers of the boomer generation: Tom Wolfe, Lester Bangs, P.J. O’Rourke, Hunter S. Thompson. Even as recently as 2020 the magazine boasted accomplished journalists such as Matt Taibbi. But over five decades, the magazine withdrew into the Establishment, just as their boomer readers did. And every now and then the Rolling Stone’s pale cadaver makes a misjudged groaning gasp for life, if only to remind us it’s not quite dead. The rag mustered one such gasp this weekend.

oliver anthony rolling stone counterculture

Laura Dodsworth: How to protect yourself from government propaganda

From our UK edition

53 min listen

Laura Dodsworth is a photographer, artist and author. In her most recent book Free Your Mind: The New World of Manipulation and How to Resist it, Laura draws on the Nudge Unit, behavioural psychology and fact checking services to analyse the range of ways in which our minds are manipulated. On the podcast, Laura talks about the government propaganda machine and how this all relates back to issues such as climate catastrophe, the pandemic and free speech.

Book bans, boomers & censorship

From our UK edition

Nick Gillespie is an American libertarian journalist and the editor-at-large for Reason magazine. He is also the author of The Declaration of Independence. On the show, Nick talks about censorship in America in the age of information; the recent trend of book banning and why he believes the debates around demographic collapse are actually a sign of improved quality of life.

Yeonmi Park: Escaping North Korea, surviving China and finding freedom in America

From our UK edition

70 min listen

Yeonmi Park is a North Korean defector who from fled home country through China where she was saved by Christian missionaries. She is the author of two books, In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom and While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector's Search for Freedom in America. Yeonmi now lives in the US, where she writes and campaigns for freedom of speech. She tells Winston about her astonishing journey to freedom, how China props up the Korea dictatorship and the impact of Jordan Peterson on her life.

Francis Fukuyama: Can liberalism and nationalism coexist?

From our UK edition

32 min listen

Francis Fukuyama is an American political scientist and international relations scholar known for his seminal book The End of History and The Last Man. Francis and Winston discuss the state of liberal democracy, whether nationalism and liberalism can be reconciled and the case for liberalism.

Lee Fang: Forced to apologise for reporting on BLM

From our UK edition

59 min listen

Lee Fang is an independent journalist formally at the Intercept. He discusses his forced apology for how he covered the 2020 BLM protests, how and why media and journalists collude as part of the censorship industrial complex, what he discovered during the Twitter Files investigations and FBI surveillance.

Michael Shellenberger: Exposing the censorship industrial complex

From our UK edition

80 min listen

Michael Shellenberger, Twitter Files journalist and founder of Public is in London to discuss the international censorship industrial complex. He explains to Winston how the complex web of government, big tech, intelligence and media collude to suppress speech in the UK, America and beyond. Michael will be continuing the debate on the censorship industrial complex with Russell Brand and Matt Taibbi on Thursday 22nd June at Central Hall, Westminster. Get tickets here: https://www.musicglue.

Tony Diver: Government’s secret censorship unit and the truth about the Lockdown Files

From our UK edition

36 min listen

Tony Diver is part of the investigations team at the Telegraph who exposed the Government Counter-Disinformation Unit. The unit operated during the pandemic to suppress speech deemed dangerous. Tony explains how and why the government operated with social media companies to silence dissenters on lockdown, masks and more. They also discuss the Lockdown Files and the upcoming Covid inquiry.

Niall Ferguson: Why AI won’t kill you and what Sam Altman got wrong

From our UK edition

33 min listen

Celebrated historian Niall Ferguson, author of 17 books including Civilisation, a biography of Kissinger, a biography of the Rothschild family and Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe comes into to discuss AI. He recently wrote that the AI doomsdayists, including those behind the petition for a six month moratorium on AI development, should be taken seriously. But some of them think humanity’s end is around the corner. Niall and Winston discuss whether or not they are correct.

Peter Boghossian: how the Academy got woke and why the ‘New Atheists’ are to blame

From our UK edition

67 min listen

Winston speaks to former Portland State University professor turned international philosopher, Peter Boghossian. Peter was a prominent new atheist author and expert on the Socratic method when he resigned his position at Portland over the percolation of ‘woke’ ideology into the university. In his resignation letter he described how the institution had become a ‘dogma factory’ which had ‘weaponized diversity, equity and inclusion’. Peter and Winston discuss progressive domination of the Academy, how woke spreads, DEI vs free speech, how to have constructive conversations and whether the new atheists led to woke culture.

Britain’s grooming gangs: is Rishi Sunak doing enough?

From our UK edition

50 min listen

For over forty years, tens of thousands of girls and young women have been abused, raped and some brutally murdered across Britain by grooming gangs. It is a scandal that should shame the nation, yet it is an issue that gets brushed aside by authorities, clouded out in the media by disputes over racist reporting, and largely ignored by politicians. All at the cost of justice for those young girls. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak last week announced policy to – finally – attempt to deal with this horrific issue.  To discuss the policy and the deeper story of the grooming gangs is journalist and documentary filmmaker Charlie Peters.

Posie Parker: New Zealand, Let Women Speak and standing against Labour

From our UK edition

45 min listen

Posie Parker, aka Kellie-Jay Keen, is back from her Let Women Speak tour of Australia and New Zealand, where she was mobbed and hounded by radical trans activists. She tells me what happened, why she went in the first place, the state of the gender wars down under and her plans to run against Keir Starmer at the next election. We also look back into her own history and how it is she became the lightning rod of the feminist movement today.