Welcome to Beg to Differ, The Bullworks Weekly Roundtable discussion, featuring civil conversation

across the political spectrum, from center left to center right.

I'm Mona Charon, syndicated columnist and policy editor at the Bulwark, and I am joined

by our regulars Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution in the Wall Street Journal,

Damon Linker of the Week,

and Linda Chavez of the Niskanin Center.

Our special guest this week is Jonathan Rauch,

senior fellow at the Brookings Institution,

and author of a new book, The Constitution of Knowledge.

Welcome back to Damon.

Welcome back also to Jonathan, who was a guest of ours back in the days when we used to do this in person.

It's good to be back even if I can't see you.

Yes, like it's great to have you. Well, as you know, I really devoured this book. I loved it. So I'm not going to pretend to objectivity about it. I think it's a really important contribution on a subject that is really

One of the most urgent concerns that we have namely the the search for truth and and how to deal with the

attacks on knowledge and truth in our time so So you framed it as analogizing the Constitution of

knowledge to the US Constitution. So if we could let's start there with that comparison

Every society well first of all thank you. It's great to be here and and the admiration is mutual. I so admire and respect what you and the bulwark doing and trying to start and trying to hold firm to reality, which is not easy to do in these times.

So every society... is not easy to do in these times.

So every society, culture, for that matter, tribe,

or group has to settle some important differences

of opinion about what's fact and what's nonsense, what's truth, and what's false, at least for

public purposes.

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