Welcome everybody to this Brexit and Beyond podcast.

Today it's my privilege and my pleasure to introduce Kass Muda.

You will have heard of Kass if you have ever looked into the subject of populism.

He is one of the foremost authorities on that subject,

not just in an academic sense, but also in the sense of broadening out, I guess,

the understanding of populism within the academy to the wider world.

Kass also writes for The Guardian, among very many other publications.

He's also got his own podcast, so we'll talk about that a little bit later.

And one of the reason we wanted to talk to him was because he is one of those scholars who, I think, has enormous respect in the academy,

but also has this much further reaching reputation as a kind of go-to person to discuss a particular concept,

in this case, populism, but someone who also writes very interestingly,

not just about European politics, and that's where he started out, but also American politics as well.

So welcome Kaz to podcast. Your PhD research was on right-wing

extremism. What got you into that particular subject? Well, when you grew up in the Netherlands

in the 1970s and 1980s, I started university in 1986. The far right was all over the place, even though we had a very

tiny far right party, which entered parliament in 1982. There were massive demonstrations,

and this argument that fascism was back and whatever was very big. And I never really fully understood

that. But I was fascinated by that debate,

as I had always been fascinated by kind of the skittish debate about the Second World War and the

role of the Netherlands in it. And so that played a role. My professor Yope for Holstam,

it's very interesting in that too. And then it was just an avenue, right? Because again, it took me six and a half

years to do my undergraduate degree. I had a very good final thesis, but overall I wasn't remarkable.

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