This is Spectator Radio and you're listening to The Americano podcast with Freddie Gray.

Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics

and the Trump presidency for the New Spectator USA website. I'm joined today by John Rick

MacArthur, who is publisher of Harper's

magazine in New York, and we're going to be talking about the resignation slash firing of

Ian Baruma, the editor of the New York Review of Books. So Rick, just to start with, I'll just

sort of lay out how I think the story works, and you can correct me if I'm getting it wrong.

In the forthcoming edition of the New York Review of Books, Ian Broomer published a piece by Gian Gamesi, who is a kind of Canadian celebrity, sort of Harvey Weinstein before Harvey Weinstein, if you like, he was accused of

terrible sexual misdemeanors, was not convicted, and he wrote a piece about what it's like

to be seen as a monster in the media, and it was a sort of, I thought, rather self-serving

winy piece, but nonetheless quite an interesting read.

Anyway, it caused a huge uproar.

It has already caused a huge uproar, and it is already forced Ian Buruma to resign.

Is that a fair summation of what's happened?

Yes, there's been a Twitter storm, a kind of trial by Twitter, which is what we, I refer to as extra judicial justice,

where Baruma has been ejected from his job, as editor of New York Review, because a mob decided that he's not fit to edit the New York Review because he published a piece by one of these awful, supposedly allegedly awful male predators. Now, we published at Harper's Magazine. We're always

first, I'm exaggerating, but we're ahead of them with a piece by John Hockenberry, who was another

national public radio personality and journalist in the United States, who is similarly accused

of horrible predatory practices, except that Hockenberry is in a wheelchair.

He's paraplegic. So I have been trying to remind

people that this is a good example of proportion and disproportionate response to bad behavior,

which both men admit to that the lumping together of Harvey Weinstein with John Gamesh or John Hockenberry

...