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Freddy Gray speaks to Spectator writer Paul Wood about his piece this the latest edition of Spectator World on AI and whether it will soon have rights. This first came about when Paul went to live in Rome and discovered some of the work the Vatican has been doing in AI.
28 min listen
Trump has said he’s “very, very unhappy” with Russia, and threatened severe tariffs against them if there’s no deal on Ukraine within 50 days. He’s also sending more weapons to Ukraine in coordination with NATO. What’s behind his change of heart on foreign policy, and how’s his MAGA base responding? Freddy Gray is joined by deputy US editor Kate Andrews, and Sergey Radchenko, professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. You can watch this episode here.
20 min listen
Freddy Gray is joined by editor-at-large of The Spectator World, Ben Domenech. They discuss why Hollywood productions are being drawn away from California to states like Texas, and what this could mean for the future of filmmaking in America. Ben writes about this in the new edition of Spectator World, and you can subscribe to the print magazine here: https://thespectator.com/subscribe
Manhattan The Friday before New York’s Democratic mayoral primary election, the 33-year-old candidate Zohran Mamdani walked the entire length of the city. ‘We’re outside,’ he told his videographer as they began their trek at Inwood Hill Park, ‘because New Yorkers deserve a mayor they can see, they can hear, they can even yell at!’ Like any good millennial, he documented every step. In his collared shirt and sneakers, he greeted and hugged supporters, who chanted his name. The celebrating was premature but justified. Four days later, Mamdani won 43.5 per cent of the vote in the first round, defying almost every pollster’s prediction. Within hours, the self-declared ‘democratic socialist’ was
Victor Davis Hanson, classicist, historian, and author of The End of Everything, joins Freddy Gray to discuss Zohran Mamdani’s shock candidacy win, the future of the Democratic Party, and rising class tensions in American politics. They also explore third-party prospects, Trump’s economic policies, and shifting global dynamics.
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Jeff Bezos is getting married in Venice – but not everyone is celebrating. Venetians have staged small protests, accusing the billionaire of symbolising the city’s takeover by the ultra-rich. But is this anything new? Associate editor Owen Matthews joins Freddy Gray to discuss.
23 min listen
Billionaire Elon Musk and US President Donald Trump have had a very public falling out. Musk, whose time running the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) came to an end last month, publicly criticised Trump’s spending bill (the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill Act’). The row then erupted onto social media with Trump expressing his disappointment with Musk, Musk accusing Trump of ‘ingratitude’ – and even making insinuations about Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Tesla’s stock has taken a hit, Trump and Musk are yet to speak and there could be implications for the government contracts that Musk’s companies have, but the full consequences are yet to be understood. What do this
36 min listen
From the decline of meritocracy to the rise of anti-Western ideology, author Heather Mac Donald joins Freddy Gray to discuss race, merit, and victim hierarchy. Why is the West so desperate to self-cancel? And is now a moment of reckoning considering we’re five years on from the BLM protests?
Polls occasionally appear which reveal the extent to which people trust – or rather don’t trust – journalists. In one last year, something called the Edelman Trust Barometer found that just 31 per cent of the British public said they trust the media, a fall of 6 per cent in a year. This puts the media class at a level of trust somewhere between politicians and burglars in the public’s eyes. Still, any British hacks reading this can console themselves with one thing: at least most of our media does not cloak itself in the mantle of the utmost righteousness and hold itself out as some sort of priestly class.
Although Republicans and Democrats have few things in common, there’s one American universal: we don’t like when you mess with our money. After Donald Trump’s erratic tariff tantrums have sent markets lurching, who knows how much stocks will have spiked or tanked between the typing of this paragraph and it seeing print. Some 62 per cent of Americans own stock; unsurprisingly, I do, too. A believer in the joys of denial, I’ve refused to even peek at my portfolio since the President’s ‘Liberation Day’. I guess not worrying my pretty head about my finances constitutes liberation of a kind. While never a Trumpster, I found the initial weeks of the
29 min listen
President Donald Trump has announced sweeping new tariffs, including a 10 per cent duty on all UK exports to the United States, as part of his ‘Reciprocal Tariffs’ plan aimed at addressing trade imbalances and bolstering American manufacturing. This move is expected to impact approximately £60 billion worth of UK exports, with sectors such as automotive and Scotch whisky facing significant challenges. The UK government, while relieved to have avoided higher tariffs imposed on other nations, is now navigating the potential economic repercussions and exploring avenues for negotiation. Freddy Gray speaks with William Clouston, leader of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), to analyse the implications of Trump’s tariff announcement
27 min listen
Jeffrey Goldberg’s story in the Atlantic is so mind-blowing it’s hard to know what to say in response. It defies belief that Donald Trump’s National Security Adviser, Mike Waltz, appears to have accidentally added a top journalist to a Signal messaging group with senior government officials – including the Vice President, Secretary of State, Defence Secretary and the Director of National Intelligence – to discuss top-secret military action. It boggles the brain that the people running the most powerful country on the planet, the Principals Committee of US national security no less, use childish emojis to discuss a bombing campaign which they helped co-ordinate in order to kill 53 people.
The new administration in Washington has somewhat startled its critics by issuing a blizzard of executive orders during its opening weeks in office. So far the reaction from the American left might be summed up by the sentiment: ‘That’s not fair – it’s only us that are allowed to do things when we are in power.’ The American left are in a particular funk about the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) – as though railing against the proposed reduction of federal spending and reduction of the American deficit is a natural vote-winner. But good news does just keep on coming. On Monday, Elon Musk said that President Donald Trump had
22 min listen
This week, a Chinese-made AI model called DeepSeek shot to the top of the Apple Store downloads – it stunned investors and sunk some tech stock. DeepSeek claims it was built at a fraction of the cost of American leading models. Chip-making giant Nvidia shed almost £482bn of its market value as a result. What is DeepSeek, and what does it have to do with US-China relations? Freddy Gray is joined by Joe Weisenthal to explain exactly what’s happened with the AI platform DeepSeek, why it has sparked chaos in the US markets, and how it raises questions about the future of AI globally.
33 min listen
Colombia has agreed to accept military aircraft carrying deported migrants from the US – avoiding a trade war between the two countries. Donald Trump had threatened sanctions on Colombia to punish it for initially refusing military flights following a rapid immigration crackdown. What are the challenges of deportation flights, and what’s Trump’s vision for Latin America? Freddy Gray is joined by Todd Bensman, Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, and author of ‘Overrun’.
Isis are back. In fact, to borrow Gerry Adams’s remark about the IRA, they never went away. Now, they are regaining some of their previous strength in Syria and Iraq, and moving into fresh territory in Africa. Of most importance to the West, the Afghan branch of Isis – Isis Khorasan – is said to be plotting more direct attacks on the ‘far enemy’, as well as pumping out propaganda to create so-called ‘lone wolves’. But with the stakes rising, it seems the United States may have found a new ally in the battle against Isis: the Taliban. The enemy of my enemy… Intelligence also flows the other way, with
Welcome to the United States of Disruption. From his ‘Winter White House’ in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, Donald Trump has been busy lobbing hand-grenade cabinet appointments in the direction of Washington and watching on happily as each one blows up in a variety of stunning ways. Explosiveness is the point. ‘Personnel is policy,’ Trump’s transition team like to tell reporters with a wink. What they mean is that the second administration is setting itself up to be even more radical and incendiary than the first. The outsiders are in, the insiders are out, and the old world is driving itself mad trying to figure out what’s going on. It’s a mistake to
For the past decade, Donald Trump has been the most famous and influential man on the planet. But he had too many failures and electoral defeats to his name to be able to claim he dominated a whole political era. That changed on Tuesday night. Trump will be remembered as both the 45th and the 47th President of the United States. At the time of going to press, he is very likely to win full control of Congress. He is even likely to win the popular vote – making him the first Republican to do so in 20 years. All of this will allow him to impose his will on
In an ideal world, I wouldn’t have chosen an election year for my American book tour. It’s not that I dislike elections generally. And – praise be – a population of 300 million Americans has managed to raise one presidential candidate who is not a convicted felon awaiting sentence. No, my problem with American elections – and it viscerally distresses me every four years – is the affront to democracy called the electoral college. I’ve done the maths. The electoral college can hand you the presidency even if your opponent receives three-quarters of the popular vote. Of course that’s a hypothetical extreme. The familiar reality is that campaigns ignore all
Are homosexuals and transgendered people more at risk from natural disasters than the rest of the population? I dare say there is a robust tranche of right-of-centre opinion which holds that they are indeed more at risk and that by and large this is a very good thing. Natural disasters are sometimes called ‘acts of God’ and those of a deeply conservative disposition may be inclined to see them as a punishment from the Almighty for grave transgressions of a sexual or gender nature. It is God doing what God does best – a spot of appropriate smiting. When organisations talk about equity, they mean privileging one group over another