Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host Sarah Izger joined as always by

Steve Hayes, General Goldberg and David French. This podcast is brought to you by

the Dispatch. Visit the Dispatch.com. This year are a full slate of newsletters

and podcasts and subscribe so you never miss an episode. A little later we'll

hear from our sponsor keeps. But first today we'll be talking about the open

letter published in Harper's this week signed by over 150 public

intellectuals entitled a letter on justice and open debate and where the

conversation on free speech goes next. Are we out of the woods on coronavirus

or is the pandemic just picking up steam? And finally will this election be a

referendum on the president? Oh, and then I ask your dispatchers what they

thought they wanted to be when they grew up.

Let's dive right in. First I want to start with a letter on justice and open

debate published in Harper's this week. I'll just read one section from it. The

free exchange of information ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society is daily

becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical

right, since soreousness is also spreading more widely in our culture and

intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism and

the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues and a blinding moral certainty.

This letter was signed by a lot of well-known writers, authors,

journalists, musicians to name a few. Noam Chomsky, JK Rowling, Matt

Eglaceus, Winton Marcellus, choreographer Bill Jones, Gloria Steinem, Malcolm

Gladwell. I mean that the list can go on and on and you can look it up. It's

...