Populism is a response to the suppression of democracy and so people go into the street because they're being ignored and

democracy doesn't function. To physically get together every weekend on the

Chansi dais with all these strangers from all over France, They look absolutely thrilled to find each other.

Hello and welcome to the Brendan O'Neill show with me Brendan O'Neill.

This is a podcast in which an esteemed guest joins me to talk about the big ideas, the bad ideas, the problems, the controversies of life in the early 21st century.

In this episode I am delighted to be joined by John Rick MacArthur.

Rick is President and publisher of Harper's magazine.

He has worked as a reporter for numerous newspapers including the Wall Street Journal and the Chicago

Some Times.

He was also an assistant editor at United Press International.

He's the author of a number of books including Second Front, censorship and propaganda in

the 1991 Gulf War, and you can't be president the outrageous barriers to

democracy in America. He writes for the French language newspaper Le De Vois and

also for Harpers of course and he has developed a very strong reputation

as a writer and publisher who is willing to stand up for freedom of speech and other increasingly contested liberal values.

Rick, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

I want to start off with a broad question, if I may,

about the state of freedom of speech, speech because we there almost seems to be a

controversy every week about some article or some statement or some comment that

some person has made of course Harper's experienced it itself quite recently,

notably with Katie Royfe's piece on Twitter feminism,

...