Welcome to the Spiked Podcast. I'm Tom Slater, deputy editor at Spiked and today I'll be talking free speech,

Trump and PC with Brett Stevens. Spiked articles, essays, videos and podcasts are free. There's no paywall and no subscriptions.

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There are genuinely productive politically incorrect things to say about all manner of things, you know.

I wish Trump were politically incorrect.

Instead, he's just an asshole.

Sometimes it feels like America is divided by two warring authoritarianisms.

The election of Donald Trump was perceived by many as a backlash against political correctness and the speech policing of the left.

Finally he was a politician, his supporters said, who said what he fought and refused to be bound by polite society

etiquette and yet in his refusal to abide any criticism in his loathing of the

First Amendment and his love of libel laws the US president seems at least as thin-skinned

and as quick to censor as the so-called liberals he rails against.

Someone who has found himself in the middle of this new culture war is Brett Stevens,

the columnist and Never Trump Conservative, who has riled both the illiberal right and the illiberal left.

Last year he left the Wall Street Journal for the New York Times and has found himself the target of the

Twitter mobs of both the left and the right. I sat down with

Brett in the Times' offices to discuss the twin threats to free speech today.

So Brett, we're here to talk about the kind of challenges to liberal thought and particularly to free speech.

...