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Origin Story

Origin Story

By: Podmasters
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What are the real stories behind the most misunderstood and abused ideas in politics? From Conspiracy Theory to Woke to Centrism and beyond, Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey dig into the astonishing secret histories of concepts you thought you knew. Want to support us in making future seasons? There are now two ways you can help out: • Patreon – Get early episodes, live Zooms, merchandise and more from just £5 per month. • Apple Podcasts – Want everything in one place with one easy payment? Subscribe to our premium feed on Apple Podcasts for ad-free shows early and bonus editions too. From Podmasters, the makers of Oh God, What Now?, American Friction and The Bunker.Podmasters / Ian Dunt & Dorian Lynskey 2022 Politics & Government Social Sciences World
Episodes
  • Think Tanks – Part One – What’s the Big Idea?

    Think Tanks – Part One – What’s the Big Idea?
    Jun 17 2026
    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? • Support Origin Story on Patreon • Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory • Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube 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 ...
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    1 hr and 20 mins
  • Evangelicals – Part Two – Good News, Bad News

    Evangelicals – Part Two – Good News, Bad News
    Jun 9 2026
    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? • 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 ...
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    1 hr and 25 mins
  • Evangelicals – Part One – Altared States

    Evangelicals – Part One – Altared States
    Jun 3 2026
    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? • 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 ...
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    1 hr and 33 mins
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