Welcome to the Quillette podcast, hosted on alternate weeks by me, Jonathan Kay, and by Iona Italia.

Quillette is where Freethought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

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This week on the Quillette podcast, I'll be interviewing the director of Speechless, which

is a great new two-part documentary film about free speech that

just appeared on the CBC and BBC. Yes, you heard that right. The CBC and the BBC are now

airing Coillette-approved liberal takes on free speech. Crazy times, right? To make sense of what

you're about to see and hear, depending on whether you're listening to me on Spotify or watching me on YouTube,

let me give you some personal backstory to this episode.

So as I sometimes mention, I live in a fairly left liberal neighborhood in Toronto.

There are lots of media types and university professors,

and we all basically get along fairly well, especially if we have dogs, because no one wants

to get into a heated political debate when they're out walking their mutt, which is the context

in which I have most of my neighborhood conversations. Now, one of these neighborhood dog owners is my guest today, Rick Esther Bienstock,

who it turns out is a pretty famous Canadian documentary filmmaker.

Anyway, about eight years ago, about the time I was starting to work at Quillette,

Rick tells me that she's working on a documentary about

free speech on campus. Every time I see her, she's talking about it. She even floated the idea

of me participating in the project. And finally, I said, Rick, let's just talk about dogs. I get

enough of this cancel culture of free speech stuff when I'm at my desk doing my Quillette day job.

And to be honest, I thought Rick's project was doomed to failure anyway.

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