Remember Hyde Park?

It was called The Speakers Corner.

It was also called Crack Pot Corner.

Well, the internet has become Crack Pot Central.

I'm going to tell you a story about a podcast I was on yesterday with a crackpot who is telling

his listeners not to wear masks.

Oh my God! And we'll talk about presidential pardons on the first show.

As a young man I used to travel to

a few weeks at Cambridge. I

lectured at Oxford and I always made a point when I was in London to visit

the Hyde Park Speakers Corner, the personification of freedom of speech. Nobody needs a license, nobody

needs an approval. You just get up and say what you want. It had a nickname, it was called Crack Pot's Corner. You could go there on any given day,

you could hear people railing about the earth being flat, you could hear them railing about

the Jews controlling the world.

In fact, it was the first place and time,

as maybe a 25-year-old, I had ever heard explicitly

anti-Semitic views expressed with fervor and determination and conviction.

Oh, you know, the Jews with the horns on their head and the control of the world and all of

that.

It was fascinating just to listen listen people would just walk by you

not kind of shrug almost nobody would stay for more than a couple of minutes because

it was a place where crackpots could crack their pots harmlessly because nobody paid any attention to them.

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