Hello listeners. This week’s episode is an audio recording of our live show at the Union Chapel in London on 1 September 2026. This time we did something different and made a live show out of a classic Origin Story narrative. It’s the story of how the Daily Telegraph’s deterioration from grey citadel of High Toryism to feral troll farm mirrors the cognitive decline of conservatism in Britain.

In part one we tell the story of the Telegraph. Founded in 1855 by a crank army colonel to pursue an obscure vendetta, it was soon bought by the Levy-Lawson family, who turned into Britain’s liveliest newspaper and the world’s largest. During the 20th century, it became the heart of British conservatism: solidly — sometimes alarmingly — right-wing yet respectable and conscientious. It was proud to be boring: a safe harbour in a changing world. “Was, is, and will be,” its masthead boasted.

The Telegraph took a strange turn after 2004, with its acquisition by the Barclay brothers and the rise of online journalism. Drawing more of its editors and energy from the Daily Mail, it began platforming more extreme voices in the hunt for clicks. By the time of Brexit in 2016, the viciousness and paranoia that characterised its online output had colonised the newspaper itself. Could its recent purchase by Germany’s Axel Springer trigger a return to normality?

In part two we play headline tennis with some of the Telegraph’s barmiest articles, dig into the feverish, apocalyptic world view of columnist-editor Allister Heath, and explore what the paper’s decline says about the crumbling of the Tory mind. Then we take questions from the audience. Hope you enjoy listening to it as much as we enjoyed doing the show. 

Reading list

Books

Lord Burnham – Peterborough Court: The Story of The Daily Telegraph (1955)

Colin Coote – Editorial: The Memoirs of Colin R. Coote (1965)

W. F. Deedes – Dear Bill: A Memoir (2005)

Duff Hart-Davis – The House The Berrys Built: Inside The Telegraph (1990)

Max Hastings – Editor: A Memoir (2002)

Jane Martinson – You May Never See Us Again: The Barclay Dynasty: A Story of Survival, Secrecy and Succession (2023)

Peregrine Worsthorne – Tricks of Memory: An Autobiography (1993)

Articles

Stephen Bates – ‘Sir Peregrine Worsthorne obituary’, Guardian (5 October 2020)

Jason Cowley – ‘The lost magic of England’, New Statesman (11 February 2016)

Bryan Curtis – ‘Paper Tiger’, Slate (25 October 2006)

Allister Heath – ‘Vast forces are mobilising to stop Britain’s only real chance of survival’,

Telegraph (18 February 2026)

Allister Heath – ‘The Fall of Britain: A tragedy in three horrifying acts’, Telegraph (19 April 2026)

Liz Truss – ‘Trump has been proven right about pretty much everything’, Telegraph (14 April 2025)

Jim Waterson – ‘“Toxic” Telegraph made me feel nauseous, says Graham Norton’, Guardian (7 October 2019)

Peregrine Worsthorne – ‘The “Daily Telegraph”: No other British institution has been so badly degraded’, Independent (21 November 2005)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

www.podmasters.co.uk

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Hello and welcome to a bonus episode of Origin Story. This time we tell the story of Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988, the legislation that prohibited local councils from funding the “promotion” of homosexuality and cast a chilling shadow over the lives of gay men and lesbians in the UK for the next 15 years. How did it come about, what were the consequences, and is something similar happening to trans people today?

The 1980s were a decade of rampant homophobia, fed by conservative anxieties about progressive education, “loony left” councils and the emergence of HIV/AIDS. One book (Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin) and one London council (Haringey) became the focus of a moral panic that spread like wildfire through the right-wing press and Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government, with all the hysteria, bigotry and misinformation you would expect. Opposition to children learning about homosexuality in any way featured in the 1987 election campaign and led to the amendment that became Section 28: local authorities were forbidden to “intentionally promote homosexuality,” whatever that meant.

While nobody was ever prosecuted under Section 28, these few vague and provocative lines created a climate of fear and self-censorship, from schools to broadcasters, and effectively legitimised homophobia. But the campaign against it mobilised gay men and lesbians like never before. Figures such as Ian McKellen, Michael Cashman and Peter Tatchell initiated a new era of activism, including the foundation of Stonewall, to ensure that something like this never happened again.

Tony Blair’s Labour government finally repealed Section 28 in 2003, amid a slew of progressive reforms, and multiple Tory leaders apologised for ever supporting it. Now, though, government guidelines on the teaching of gender identity are echoing the intolerant logic of Section 28 and the media’s moral panic around trans people feels grimly familiar.

How did a single copy of a Danish picture book lead to the most homophobic legislation in a century? Was the newspapers’ vicious campaign against the “loony left” Britain’s first experience of an “anti-woke” culture war? Who were the politicians, many of them still around today, who supported and opposed Section 28? How did the battle over it give birth to modern LGBTQ activism? How did Section 28 damage ordinary lives and why did it take so long to repeal? And why are some of the people who fought so hard against Section 28 now supporting its transphobic equivalent?
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Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Chris Jones. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production 

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Books and articles

Paul Baker – Outrageous! The Story of Section 28 and Britain’s Battle for LGBT Education (2022)

Susanne Bosche – ‘Jenny, Eric, Martin… and Me’, Guardian (31 January 2000)

Faye Brown – ‘Claims of oral sex and choking lessons prompt government review into sex education critic says is “politically motivated”’, Sky News (8 March 2023)

Michael Cashman – One of Them: From Albert Square to Parliament Square (2020)

Colin Clews – Gay in the 80s: From Fighting for Our Rights to Fighting for Our Lives (2017)

James Curran, Ivor Gaber and Julian Petley – Culture Wars: The Media & the British Left (2005)

Ryan Gilbey – It Used to Be Witches: Under the Spell of Queer Cinema (Faber, 2025)

Audrey Gillan – ‘Section 28 gone… but not forgotten’, Guardian (17 November 2003)

Chris Godfrey – Section 28 protesters 30 years on: ‘We were arrested and put in a cell up by Big Ben’, Guardian (27 May 2018)

Ian Lucas – OutRage! An Oral History (1998)

Kelly Ann Cecilia McGhee – ‘The Destruction Caused by Clause 28’, Glasgow Women’s Library

Adam Mars-Jones – ‘The book that launched Clause 28’, Index on Censorship, Vol. 17, Issue 8 (September 1988)

Michelle O’Toole – ‘I’m a trans woman who grew up under section 28 — I worry it could make a comeback’, the i Paper (11 May 2020)

Ruth Pearce – ‘Labour’s Section 28 is here — act now’, ruthpearce.net (14 February 2026)

‘Relationships Education, Relationships and Sex education (RSE)’

Peter Tatchell – The Battle for Bermondsey (1983)

Jamie Wareham – ‘“Section 28 2.0”: New “transphobic” curriculum restricts teachers from teaching Trans+ pupils to understand their identity’, QueerAF (19 July 2025)

Nicholas Watt – ‘David Cameron apologises to gay people for section 28’, Guardian (2 July 2009)

Ian Youngs – ‘Blue Jean: the lesbian teachers who inspired film about Section 28’, BBC (10 February 2023)

Radio and film

Archive on 4: Section 28: Right to Be Gay, Radio 4 (22 March 2025)

Blue Jean, written and directed by Georgia Oakley (2022)

The Reunion: Stonewall, Radio 4 (20 September 2009)

Parliamentary debates

Schools: Investment in Education and Science, Hansard (7 May 1986)

Education Bill HL, Hansard (20 May 1986)

Local Government Act 1986 (Amendment) Bill HL, Hansard (18 December 1986)

Amendment of Local Government Act 1986, Hansard (8 May 1987)

Prohibition on Promoting Homosexuality by Teaching or by Publishing Material, Hansard (15 December 1987)

Local Government Bill, Hansard (1 February 1988)

Local Government Bill, Hansard (16 February 1988)

Clause 28, Hansard (9 March 1988)

Repeal of Section 2A of Local Government Act 1986 (10 March 2003)

Engagements, Hansard (18 March 2023)

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Welcome to another bonus episode of Origin Story, where we look at the short and extraordinary life of the Duke of Buckingham (1592–1628). It's a bizarre, tragic tale which weaves together queer history, courtly romance, unending war and the early resistance of parliament against royal power.  

More than anything, it is the story of the Favourite, that strange underdiscussed role of the leader's key ally. In our modern era, we've seen figures like Dominic Cummings and Morgan McSweeney take this position – operating as the prime minister's chief loyalist and then being used as a sacrificial pawn to placate their critics. We see a very similar arrangement in the 17th Century, albeit in a significantly more sexy way.  

As Sir Francis Bacon said: The favourite is a "shadow" who can be "offered as a sacrifice to appease the multitude". Come with us back to an era where the modern world is slowly being formed, and see how exuberant, unpredictable, emotional and dramatic the early days of the English parliament truly were.  

Books  

Lucy Hughes-Hallett – The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham (4th Estate, 2024)  

Roger Lockyer - Buckingham: The Life and Political Career of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham 1592-1628 (Routledge, 1981) 

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• ⁠See Origin Story live at the Union Chapel⁠, London on September the 1st 

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Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Chris Jones. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production 

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Tickets are flying out of the door for Ian and Dorian’s biggest live show yet at the stunning Union Chapel in London’s sophisticated Islington on Tue 1 Sept.

A spectacular Gothic Revival church on Upper Street, the Union Chapel is a breathtaking venue just a few moments’ stroll from Highbury & Islington Tube – and therefore close to Euston and King’s Cross for the Not-London crowd. As well as the Victoria Line, it’s on the Mildmay Overground so whether you’re in leafy West London or sourdough-and-cold-drip-coffee East London you can be there and home with ease.You can buy tickets here, or Patreon supporters get exclusive discount, so now is as good a time as any to sign up: https://www.patreon.com/c/originstorypod

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Welcome to a bonus episode of Origin Story. For the first time, we’re revisiting an earlier episode to ask what we got right and what we got wrong about the subject. Just before the July 2024 election we profiled Labour’s PM-in-waiting Keir Starmer and made some cautiously optimistic guesses as to what his government might look like — the promise and the pitfalls. Well, it turned out to be mostly pitfalls. As Starmer steps down and Andy Burnham steps up, we perform the autopsy.

Did Starmer have fundamental personal weaknesses that doomed him to failure? What happened to the moral principles and managerial competence that defined his career before he became Labour leader? What mistakes did he make and what opportunities did he miss? Has Starmer killed the theory that a boring technocrat is the antidote to right-wing populism? How did he become so hated? What legacy has he bequeathed to Burnham (it wasn’t all bad news)? How much of this can we blame on Morgan McSweeney? And is it fair to call Keir Starmer the worst Labour prime minister ever? The ghost of Ramsay MacDonald certainly hopes so.

Join us for an in-depth reflection on what went wrong for Starmer and the lessons we can learn about what it takes to be a successful prime minister in the 2020s.

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Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Welcome to the finale of season nine of Origin Story. We’re wrapping up the season by telling the thrilling, misunderstood story of the Luddites and how their name became an insult synonymous with ignorance, reaction and fear of progress. You can’t get much more Origin Story than that.

It was November 1811 when textile workers in Nottinghamshire first began breaking machinery in the name of a mysterious figure called Ned Ludd. The movement spread through neighbouring counties and reached its dramatic peak in Yorkshire, as these secretive activists waged guerrilla warfare against the factory owners who were destroying their livelihoods.

Soon, England was in a frenzy over the Luddite threat. Led by Tory prime minister Spencer Perceval and the decadent Prince Regent, the ruling classes feared a French-style revolution. As Luddite violence escalated from machine-breaking to arson, food riots and assassination attempts, the state responded with spies, torture and show trials. Swathes of industrial England fell under military occupation. In the midst of all this, Perceval himself was shot dead in the House of Commons. Yet by February 1813 the Luddite fire had burned out and the bosses appeared to have won.

It was only in the 1950s that “Luddite” was turned into a general insult, even as revisionist historians of the English working classes started to tell a different story about the motives of the machine-breakers. Amid rising hostility towards Big Tech and AI, the legacy of the Luddite rebellion feels surprisingly relevant more than 200 years later.

Who were the Luddites? What was going wrong in England in 1811 to inspire such a viral rebellion? Were the Luddites targeting the machines, or the industrialists, or the state itself? Was their uprising really a failure or did it pave the way for fairer industrial relations? What does it mean to be a neo-Luddite today? And can the true history of the Luddites ever prevail over the crude stereotype created by their enemies?

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• See Origin Story live at the Union Chapel, London on September the 1st

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Reading list

Books

• Kyle Chayka – ‘Rethinking the Luddites in the Age of A.I.’, New Yorker (26 September 2023)

• Kyle Chayka – ‘The Age-Old Urge to Destroy Technology’, New Yorker (8 April 2026)

• F.O. Darvall – Popular Disturbances and Public Order in Regency England (1934)

• Carl J. Griffin – ‘Luddism, Machine-Breaking and the Swing Riots’, Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique (2025)

• J.L. Hammond and Barbara Hammond – The Skilled Labourer, 1760-1832 (1919)

• Eric Hobsbawm – ‘The Machine Breakers’, Past & Present (February 1952)

• Brian Merchant – Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech (2023)

• Kirkpatrick Sale – Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War Against the Industrial Revolution: Lessons for the Computer Age (1995)

• Tech Won’t Save Us: The Real History of the Luddites, presented by Paris Marx (28 September, 2023)

• Malcolm I. Thomis – The Luddites: Machine-Breaking in Regency England (1970)

• E.P. Thompson – The Making of the English Working Class (1963)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

www.podmasters.co.uk

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Welcome to Origin Story. This week we’re doing something different: the history of paranormal investigations and what it says about the relationship between evidence and belief.

In 1848, two sisters in Hydesville, New York claimed to be contacting the spirit world. Within a couple of years spiritualism was a popular craze on both sides of the Atlantic, with seances attracting luminaries from Queen Victoria to Charles Darwin. But could it be proven beyond doubt? In 1883, a group of scientists and intellectuals launched the Society for Psychical Research to find out, but from its inception there was tension between the genuine sceptics and the instinctive believers. However many hoaxers they debunked, even the sceptics encountered things they could not rationally explain.

The mass grief of the First World War created a new appetite for spiritualism, spearheaded by the world-famous author Arthur Conan Doyle. Meanwhile in North Carolina, J.B. and Louisa Rhine proposed that these uncanny goings on were not evidence of ghosts but of untapped powers in the human brain: Extra-Sensory Perception. Concepts like telepathy and telekinesis swept through popular culture while scientists explored their potential as weapons in the Cold War.

In the 1970s, Connecticut couple Ed and Lorraine Warren became the world’s star investigators. In the era of Carrie, The Exorcist and spoon-bending celebrity Uri Geller, there was a huge audience for this kind of thing, bringing money and fame to the most prominent spook-hunters. Events such as the Amityville Horror and the Enfield Poltergeist still inspire fascination today, despite the investigators’ extremely dubious methods. Was the truth-seeking mission of the Society for Psychical Research destined to end up as a license for grifters?

How did spiritualism bewitch the Victorian era, including some of its most eminent scientists? Are psychic powers any more credible than ghosts? Why was the creator of the ultra-rational Sherlock Holmes so boundlessly credulous about the spirit world? What can the field of the unexplained teach us about cognitive biases and conspiracy theories? Is it really possible to apply scientific rigour to paranormal phenomena? And why, when almost 150 years of investigations have produced no solid evidence or theoretical basis for them, do so many people still want to believe?

This is a thrilling story of faith, doubt and fraud, featuring Harry Houdini, George Eliot, Marie Curie, Carl Jung, Helena Blavatsky, W.B. Yeats, Winston Churchill and (possibly) the Devil himself. Don’t have nightmares.

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• See Origin Story live at the Union Chapel, London on September the 1st.

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Reading list

Books

• Edward T. Bennett — The Society for Psychical Research: Its Rise and Progress and a Sketch of Its Work (1903)

• Ruth Brandon – The Spiritualists: The Passion for the Occult in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1983)

• Edmund Gurney, Frederic W.H. Myers and Frank Podmore – Phantasms of the Living (1886)

• Renée Haynes – The Society for Psychical Research 1882-1982: A History (1982)

• Oliver Lodge – Raymond; or, Life and Death (1916)

• Roger Luckhurst – The Invention of Telepathy 1870-1901 (2002)

• Ben Machell – Chasing the Dark: Encounters with the Supernatural (2025)

• Janet Oppenheim – The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850-1914 (1985)

• Guy Lyon Playfair – This House Is Haunted: The Amazing Inside Story of the Enfield Poltergeist (1980)

• Harry Price – The Most Haunted House in England: Ten Years’ Investigation of Borley Rectory (1940)

• J.B. Rhine – Extra-Sensory Perception (1934)

• Michael Shermer – The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies: How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (2011)

• Upton Sinclair – Mental Radio (1930)

Articles

• A.P. – ‘“Amityville Horror” amplified over bottles of wine, — lawyer’, Lakeland Ledger (27 July 1979)

• Angie Barry – ‘The Warren Case Files: Fact or Fiction?’, Criminal Element (31 October 2017)

• Stefan Beck – ‘A Night with The Conjuring’s Ed & Lorraine Warren’, Daily Beast (18 August 2013)

• Paul Byrnes – ‘The Devil Among Us’, Sydney Morning Herald (12 July 2013)

• Casey Cep – ‘Why Did So Many Victorians Try to Speak with the Dead?’, New Yorker (24 May 2021)

• Kevin Dolak – ‘The Slippery Truth About “The Conjuring: Last Rites” and Ed and Lorraine Warren’, Hollywood Reporter (10 September 2025)

• Neil Genzlinger – ‘Lorraine Warren, Paranormal Investigator Portrayed in ‘The Conjuring’, Dies at 92, New York Times (19 April 2019)

• Kim Masters and Ashley Cullins – ‘War Over ‘The Conjuring’: The Disturbing Claims Behind a Billion-Dollar Franchise’, Hollywood Reporter (13 December 2017)

• Sean Thomas – ‘What’s Happened to Weird?’, Guardian (14 June 2004)

• Neda Ulaby – ‘The demons in “The Conjuring” movies may not be real — but the family tragedies are, NPR (5 September 2025)

• Neda Ulaby – ‘Who Were the Real Ed and Lorraine Warren of “The Copnjuring” Franchise?’, NPR (9 September 2025)

• Laura Zornosa, ‘The True Story Behind the Netflix Documentary The Devil on Trial’, Time (18 October, 2023)

Films

• Carrie, written by Lawrence D. Cohen and directed by Brian Da Palma (1976)

• The Conjuring: Last Rites, written by Ian Goldberg et al and directed by Michael Chaves (2025)

• The Devil on Trial, written by Chris Holt and directed by Charvi Bajaj (2023)

• The Exorcist, written by William Peter Blatty and directed by William Friedkin (1973)

• Ghostbusters, written by Dan Ackroyd and Harold Ramis and directed by Ivan Reitman (1984)

• Late Night with the Devil, written and directed by Colin and Cameron Cairnes (2023)

• Panorama: The Enfield Poltergeist, BBC (13 November 1977)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

www.podmasters.co.uk

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Welcome to Origin Story and part two of the story of think tanks. Last time we traced the history of two very different varieties: the non-partisan centre for research and policy development and the handsomely-funded vehicle for a political ideology. Now we explain how they shape politics today.

In the first half of the show we follow the partisan think tanks into the 21st century with the Koch network’s war on Obama, the Heritage Foundation’s MAGA makeover, the IEA’s role in the Liz Truss catastrophe and the depressing devolution of centre-right think tanks. At the centre of the British story is 55 Tufton Street, the notorious building where climate change deniers cross paths with Eurosceptics and the distinction between think tanks and lobby groups all but collapses. Nice work if you can get it.

Then we explain how the more independent-minded think tanks make an essential contribution to developing and analysing policies, keeping alive the original ideal of politically neutral expertise. So what do we talk about when we talk about think tanks?

What’s the deal with Tufton Street and why are its denizens always on TV? Where is the money coming from? How has Trump transformed the balance of power among US think tanks? What role have these groups played in the radicalisation of conservatism over the past decade? How do the independent think tanks — more important but far less discussed — try to make politicians better informed and more effective? Ultimately, how influential are think tanks really?

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• See Origin Story live at the Union Chapel, London on September the 1st

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Reading list

Books

• Richard Cockett – Thinking the Unthinkable: Think-Tanks and the Economic Counter- Revolution 1931-1983 (1994)

• Paul Dickson – Think Tanks (1972)

• Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi – The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War (2005)

• F.A. Hayek – The Road to Serfdom (Reader’s Digest abridged version) (1945)

• Jane Mayer – Dark Money: How a Secretive Group of Billionaires Is Trying to Buy Political Control in the US (2016)

• Thomas Medvetz – Think Tanks in America (2014)

• Madsen Pirie – Think Tank: The Story of the Adam Smith Institute (2012)

• James A. Smith – The Idea Brokers: Think Tanks and the Rise of the New Policy Elite (1991)

Articles

• Dr James Barham – ‘Top Influential Think Tanks Ranked for 2024’, Academic Influence (16

October 2023)

• Tom Bawden – ‘The address where Eurosceptics and climate change sceptics rub shoulders’, Independent (10 February 2016)

• Chloe Farand – ‘Mapped: Whistleblower Accuses Nine Organisations of Colluding Over Hard Brexit’, DeSmog (23 July 2018)

• Richard Fink – ‘Structure of Social Change’, Philanthropy Magazine (Winter 1996)

• F. A. Hayek – ‘The Intellectuals and Socialism’, University of Chicago Law Review (Spring 1949)

• Richard Kostelanetz – ‘One-Man Think Tank’, New York Times (1 December 1968)

• Jane Mayer – ‘Covert Operations’, New Yorker (23 August 2010)

• Jane Mayer – ‘Is IKEA the New Model for the Conservative Movement?’, New Yorker (15 November 2013)

• James G. McGann, ‘2020 Global Go To Think Tank Index Report’, University of Pennsylvania, Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program (28 January 2021)

• Louis Menand – ‘Fat Man’, New Yorker (20 June 2005)

• George Monbiot – ‘Number 10 and the secretly funded lobby groups intent on undermining democracy’, Guardian (1 September 2020)

• New York Times staff – ‘49 Scholars Hold Man Up to Mirror’, New York Times (21 September 1958)

• David Perlman – ‘Man’s Actions Challenge a Braintrust’, San Francisco Chronicle (23 March 1958)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

www.podmasters.co.uk

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Welcome to Origin Story. This week we explore the world of think tanks, a term that has developed two very different meanings. To many people, it suggests deceptively named and opaquely funded vehicles for the political agendas of right-wing billionaires — think Tufton Street. Yet most of the world’s leading think tanks still cleave to the original intention of producing conscientious research and bold new ideas, independent of political parties. How and when did these paths diverge?

The first think tank, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was born in 1910 during a period when governments were increasingly interested in using data and expertise to generate more rational policy-making. Accelerated by the calamitous irrationality of the First World War, this mission produced such influential bodies as Chatham House and the Brookings Institution.

The so-called eggheads proved their worth in a crisis, from the New Deal to the Second World War. As the Cold War began, the quintessential think tank (a term coined in 1958) was the RAND Corporation and the industry’s first celebrity was nuclear strategist Herman Kahn, a charismatic provocateur who boasted about “thinking about the unthinkable”.

In the UK, however, a new kind of think tank was being born. In 1955, chicken farmer Antony Fisher founded the Institute of Economic Affairs as a power base from which the pioneers of neoliberalism could wage their long war against the Keynesian consensus, following Friedrich Hayek’s theory of political change. Their patience paid off. Along with the Centre for Policy Studies and the Adam Smith Institute, the IEA built the framework for

Thatcherism in the 1970s. Likewise in the US, the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute furnished Ronald Reagan with an armada of policies and advisers. The neoliberal revolution was incubated in these new-model think tanks. The centre-left was losing this war of ideas.

By the 1980s, then, think tanks had acquired a more controversial reputation, using their charitable tax status to funnel money from billionaires like Richard Mellon Scaife and the Koch brothers into a vast network of organisations, books, journals, university programs and media operators, serving not just their ideological agendas but their financial interests. It was very far from the original notion of think tanks as a non-partisan “bridge between knowledge and power”.

What do the first think tanks tell us about the dream of government based on facts and expertise? Who were the tycoons and intellectuals who joined forces to launch a new wave of think tanks? How did Hayek’s followers build from scratch an infrastructure that made Thatcherism and Reaganism possible? How is that nakedly ideological projects can present themselves as philanthropy and anonymous, tax-free donations can shape our politics so profoundly? And why are the names of think tanks so interchangeably boring?

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Reading list

Books

• Richard Cockett – Thinking the Unthinkable: Think-Tanks and the Economic Counter- Revolution 1931-1983 (1994)

• Paul Dickson – Think Tanks (1972)

• Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi – The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War (2005)

• F.A. Hayek – The Road to Serfdom (Reader’s Digest abridged version) (1945)

• Jane Mayer – Dark Money: How a Secretive Group of Billionaires Is Trying to Buy Political Control in the US (2016)

• Thomas Medvetz – Think Tanks in America (2014)

• Madsen Pirie – Think Tank: The Story of the Adam Smith Institute (2012)

• James A. Smith – The Idea Brokers: Think Tanks and the Rise of the New Policy Elite (1991)

Articles

• Dr James Barham – ‘Top Influential Think Tanks Ranked for 2024’, Academic Influence (16

October 2023)

• Tom Bawden – ‘The address where Eurosceptics and climate change sceptics rub shoulders’, Independent (10 February 2016)

• Chloe Farand – ‘Mapped: Whistleblower Accuses Nine Organisations of Colluding Over Hard Brexit’, DeSmog (23 July 2018)

• Richard Fink – ‘Structure of Social Change’, Philanthropy Magazine (Winter 1996)

• F. A. Hayek – ‘The Intellectuals and Socialism’, University of Chicago Law Review (Spring 1949)

• Richard Kostelanetz – ‘One-Man Think Tank’, New York Times (1 December 1968)

• Jane Mayer – ‘Covert Operations’, New Yorker (23 August 2010)

• Jane Mayer – ‘Is IKEA the New Model for the Conservative Movement?’, New Yorker (15 November 2013)

• James G. McGann, ‘2020 Global Go To Think Tank Index Report’, University of Pennsylvania, Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program (28 January 2021)

• Louis Menand – ‘Fat Man’, New Yorker (20 June 2005)

• George Monbiot – ‘Number 10 and the secretly funded lobby groups intent on undermining democracy’, Guardian (1 September 2020)

• New York Times staff – ‘49 Scholars Hold Man Up to Mirror’, New York Times (21 September 1958)

• David Perlman – ‘Man’s Actions Challenge a Braintrust’, San Francisco Chronicle (23 March 1958)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

www.podmasters.co.uk

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ever since the birth of evangelical Christianity in the 1730s, believers have disagreed over whether to dedicate themselves to changing society as well as converting individuals. For most of that time, the most activist American Protestants were politically progressive but that all changed in the 1970s thanks to two activist entrepreneurs: Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.

Falwell and Robertson turned televangelism, or the “electric church”, into a lucrative industry, producing celebrity preachers like Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. They also had unprecedented political ambitions. Beginning with Falwell’s Moral Majority in 1979 and expanding with Robertson’s Christian Coalition in the 1990s, their crusade sought to put social conservatism at the heart of the Republican Party and wage a culture war against so-called “secular humanism”. What Darwinism was to the original fundamentalists of the 1920s, abortion and homosexuality were to the new religious right.

Evangelicals gave Republicans their votes in return for policies but this quid pro quo was complicated by broken promises, overreach and scandal. The movement and the party developed a symbiotic relationship that proved mutually corrupting. Once evangelicals threw themselves behind the strikingly ungodly Donald Trump, conservatism seemed to overtake Christianity. Even as evangelical churches boom in Asia, Africa and Latin America, the American movement is losing support and influence, turning off young people with its intolerant dogma. Perhaps evangelicals were right to keep politics at arm’s length.

How responsible are Falwell and Robertson for our present era of conspiracy theories and culture wars? Did the fundamentalist tradition ultimately prevail or is this something else? What place is there now for liberal evangelicals? What happened to the big-tent message of Billy Graham and has evangelicalism today betrayed its roots in its quest for political power? And what influence is it having on politics in the UK?

• ⁠⁠See Origin Story live⁠⁠ at the Union Chapel, London on 1st Sept 2026. Tickets selling fast!

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

• Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory 

• Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube

Reading list

• Robert Ajemian – ‘Jerry Falwell Spreads the Word’, Time (2 September 1985)

• Anonymous – ‘Billy Graham: A New Kind of Evangelist’, Time (25 October 1954)

• D.W. Bebbington – Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to

the 1980s (1989)

• Paul S. Boyer – When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (1992)

• Peter J. Boyer – ‘The Big Tent’, New Yorker (15 August 2005)

• Isaac Chotiner – ‘How Donald Trump Is Teaching Christians to Abandon Empathy’, New Yorker (1 April 2025)

• Whitney Cross – The Burned-Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York 1800-1850 (1950)

• Jerry Falwell – Listen, America!: The Conservative Blueprint for America’s Moral Rebirth (1980)

• ‘The Gospel According to Ralph Reed’, Time (15 May 1995)

• Frances Fitzgerald – The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America (2017)

• Harry Emerson Fosdick – ‘Shall the Fundamentalists Win?’ (21 May 1922)

• Richard Hofstadter – Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963)

• Hal Lindsey – The Late Great Planet Earth (1970)

• Michael Luo – ‘How Billy Graham’s Movement Lost Its Way’, New Yorker (21 February 2018)

• Michael Luo – ‘The Wasting of the Evangelical Mind’, New Yorker (4 March 2021)

• Michael Luo – ‘How Christian Fundamentalism Was Born Again’, New Yorker (29 July 2024)

• Dorian Lynskey – Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World (2024)

• George M. Marsden – Fundamentalism and American Culture: Second Edition (2006)

• Pat Robertson – The New World Order (1991)

• Damian Thompson – The End of Time: Faith and Fear in the Shadow of the Millennium (1996)

• Kenneth L. Woodward, John Barnes and Laurie Lisle – ‘Born Again: The Year of the Evangelicals’, Newsweek (25 October 1976)

Films and podcasts

• The Eyes of Tammy Faye, directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato (2000)

• The Eyes of Tammy Faye, written by Abe Sylvia and directed by Michael Showalter (2021)

• Inherit the Wind, written by Nedrick Young and Harold Jacob Smith and directed by Stanley Kramer (1960)

• The Testament of Ann Lee, written by Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet and directed by Mona Fastvold (2025)

• Things Fell Apart: 1000 Dolls, presented by Jon Ronson, Radio 4 (9 November 2021)

• Things Fell Apart: Dirty Books, presented by Jon Ronson, Radio 4 (16 November 2021)

• Things Fell Apart: A Miracle, presented by Jon Ronson, Radio 4 (23 November 2021)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Videographer: Connor Newson. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

www.podmasters.co.uk

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to Origin Story, the show about why we are where we are. This week we begin the story of evangelical Christianity and its influence on politics.

Starting in the 1730s, Protestants in colonial America replaced the dour strictures of the Puritans with an ecstatic, empowering new creed that promised salvation through conversion: the word evangelical means spreading the good news. Over the next 150 years it swept the country through waves of revivalism, as star preachers like Charles Finney and Dwight Moody professionalised the business of soul-saving. The movement changed Britain, too. 

Evangelicalism cut across all the major Protestant denominations but believers disagreed over the timing of the prophesied Millennium and therefore whether they should focus on converting individuals or reforming society. Activist followers of the Social Gospel were at the forefront of the fight to end evils like slavery and child labour. It was slavery that caused the formation of a more conservative Southern church.

By the early twentieth century, factional conflicts were piling up: over social reform, Biblical scholarship, the theory of evolution. Some evangelicals felt that there were effectively two religions, with liberals (or modernists) pitted against conservatives (or fundamentalists). The fundamentalists were gathering force until 1925, when Tennessee prosecuted a teacher named John Scopes for teaching Darwinism. A national media event, the trial made fundamentalism appear intolerant, ignorant and absurd, leading to decades of retreat and quiet rebuilding.

America’s post-war evangelical megastar was Billy Graham, whose canny big-tent messaging and horror of controversy chimed with President Eisenhower’s tolerant civic religion. But through radio, television and bestselling books, the new fundamentalists were laying the ground for a culture war. A string of controversies in the 1970s revealed a much more militant and aggressive form of Christianity that was determined to transform not just evangelicalism but all of America.

Why did evangelicalism become the dominant American religion and what part did British thinkers play? Who were the charismatic men and women who spread the word? Why did the battle between modernists and fundamentalists become so bitter, and how did the fundamentalists recover from the humiliation of the Scopes trial? How does the ambition to reform society complicate the task of conversion? And how did Martin Luther King inadvertently inspire the fundamentalists to finally become a political force?

• ⁠⁠See Origin Story live⁠⁠ at the Union Chapel, London on 1st Sept 2026. Tickets selling fast!

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

• Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory 

• Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube

Reading list

• Robert Ajemian – ‘Jerry Falwell Spreads the Word’, Time (2 September 1985)

• Anonymous – ‘Billy Graham: A New Kind of Evangelist’, Time (25 October 1954)

• D.W. Bebbington – Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to

the 1980s (1989)

• Paul S. Boyer – When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (1992)

• Peter J. Boyer – ‘The Big Tent’, New Yorker (15 August 2005)

• Isaac Chotiner – ‘How Donald Trump Is Teaching Christians to Abandon Empathy’, New Yorker (1 April 2025)

• Whitney Cross – The Burned-Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York 1800-1850 (1950)

• Jerry Falwell – Listen, America!: The Conservative Blueprint for America’s Moral Rebirth (1980)

• ‘The Gospel According to Ralph Reed’, Time (15 May 1995)

• Frances Fitzgerald – The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America (2017)

• Harry Emerson Fosdick – ‘Shall the Fundamentalists Win?’ (21 May 1922)

• Richard Hofstadter – Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963)

• Hal Lindsey – The Late Great Planet Earth (1970)

• Michael Luo – ‘How Billy Graham’s Movement Lost Its Way’, New Yorker (21 February 2018)

• Michael Luo – ‘The Wasting of the Evangelical Mind’, New Yorker (4 March 2021)

• Michael Luo – ‘How Christian Fundamentalism Was Born Again’, New Yorker (29 July 2024)

• Dorian Lynskey – Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World (2024)

• George M. Marsden – Fundamentalism and American Culture: Second Edition (2006)

• Pat Robertson – The New World Order (1991)

• Damian Thompson – The End of Time: Faith and Fear in the Shadow of the Millennium (1996)

• Kenneth L. Woodward, John Barnes and Laurie Lisle – ‘Born Again: The Year of the Evangelicals’, Newsweek (25 October 1976)

Films and podcasts

• The Eyes of Tammy Faye, directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato (2000)

... Reading list continues on Patreon

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Videographer: Connor Newson. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

www.podmasters.co.uk

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices